The Recruitment Hackers Podcast

How do you implement the VERA framework across different countries while ensuring compliance and localization?In this final episode of Build with Sam, we break down how to bring the Voice-Enabled Recruitment Automation (VERA) framework to life. From navigating GDPR and CCPA to adapting language and cultural nuances, this episode gives you the blueprint to make VERA work for your organization—no matter where you hire.What you'll learn:How to navigate global compliance frameworks like GDPR and CCPAWhy localization goes beyond translation—and how to get it rightReal-world success stories of companies using VERA to speed up hiring, improve candidate engagement, and simplify complianceIf you're in recruitment, HR, or tech, this is the episode that ties it all together. Ready to implement VERA the right way? Hit play and find out how.

Build or Buy? The Ultimate Recruitment AI ShowdownShould you build your own custom voice AI for hiring, or is it smarter to buy a pre-built solution like Sam, the AI Recruiter? This episode of Build With Sam dives deep into the pros and cons of both strategies.What you'll learn:The real cost (and hidden challenges) of building from scratchWhy buying a platform like Sam could save time and headachesHow the VERA framework makes AI-powered hiring seamlessThe biggest mistakes companies make when choosing their AI approachWhether you're a TA leader, recruiter, or tech enthusiast, this episode is packed with insights to help you make the best call for your team.Listen now and stay ahead in the AI hiring revolution.

Can AI and recruiters work together? In this episode of Build with Sam, we explore Convert, the stage of the VERA framework, where AI and human recruiters collaborate to move candidates through the hiring process more efficiently. Learn how voice automation, real-time insights, and data-driven decision-making are reshaping recruitment.Tune in to learn:How VERA enhances ATS systems with real-time engagementThe secret to making data-driven hiring decisions without biasHow recruiters can save hours on scheduling, follow-ups, and candidate progressionWhether you're a recruiter, HR leader, or just curious about AI in hiring, this episode is packed with insights you won't want to miss.

Engage Part 2: Mastering Candidate Queries & Call DurationsUnlock the secret to smoother, more engaging candidate interactions with AI! In this episode, we reveal:Effective Question Handling: How to use a robust knowledge base for clear, personalized responses.Seamless Interruptions: Tactics to keep the conversation natural and on track.Real-World Examples: Practical tips to make every call count.Ask yourself: How can a data-driven approach enhance your candidate journey? Hit play now and transform your recruitment process!

Hiring the right candidates starts with asking the right questions—and getting the right answers. In Episode 3A of the VERA Podcast, we break down how AI-powered voice interviews are changing the way recruiters collect and analyze candidate information. You'll learn how structured AI conversations ensure consistency, how intelligent probing uncovers deeper insights, and how real-time analysis helps hiring teams make smarter decisions. Whether you're looking to improve efficiency, enhance the candidate experience, or reduce bias in hiring, this episode will give you actionable strategies to implement AI-driven recruitment solutions. Tune in to discover how voice AI can help you hire faster, better, and more fairly—at any scale.

A conversation with Zac Engler, Manon Rimbaud, Max Armbruster & Shiran DanochIn this episode, listeners will hear a measured, up-to-date conversation on psychometric assessments and AI, featuring insights from Dr. Shiran Danoch, Zac Engler, Manon Rimbaud, and Max Armbruster. Together, they explore the promise and potential pitfalls of popular hiring tools, explaining how to separate scientifically grounded methods from hollow hype. You'll learn how to identify reliable vendors, uncover ways to reduce bias, and discover practical strategies for integrating AI in an ethical, data-driven manner. If you're looking for clear guidance on designing or selecting assessments—and want to future-proof your talent acquisition process—this episode offers a straightforward, expert-led roadmap.

In this episode, listeners will gain a cutting-edge look at how to pick and implement today's most effective hiring tools. Drawing on the expert insights of Dr. Shiran Dano, this episode dissects the three core pillars for modern recruitment—accuracy, fairness, and efficiency—and explains why each is essential for successful, data-driven hiring. Listeners will learn how to evaluate assessment vendors, uncover best practices for structuring interviews, and discover practical ways to measure a tool's true predictive power. If you're looking to avoid common pitfalls in selecting or designing assessments, this episode is a must-hear. 

In this must-watch episode of the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, Max Armbruster welcomes Tim Sackett, President of HRU Technical Resources and the mastermind behind the Tim Sackett Project newsletter. But this isn't your typical interview—Tim goes head-to-head with Sam, Talkpush's cutting-edge AI voice recruiter, in a hilarious and insightful mock job interview for none other than the LA Lakers head coach position.

This episode of "The Recruitment Hackers" features Hilke Schellmann, an award-winning journalist and recent author of "The Algorithm." The discussion delves into AI's impact on talent acquisition, addressing critical concerns about the scientific validity of AI tools, biases in algorithms, and the overall effectiveness and fairness of AI in high-stakes employment decisions. Key points include the need for more stringent validation, transparency in AI-driven recruitment, and the necessity of establishing industry standards and regulations in light of AI's growing role in human resources.https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke-schellmann/the-algorithm/9780306827341/?lens=hachette-books)

Interview of Maya Huber from Tatio.io , an expert in recruiting and staffing with a PhD in the future of work and job analysis, discusses the changes in the workforce. She emphasizes the importance of light industrial workers and their role in driving the workforce. Maya explains that while robots may change certain aspects of these jobs, new approaches should be implemented to improve efficiency. Max Armbruster asks Maya about her predictions regarding job changes due to technological advancements, to which she responds that everything happened faster than expected. She mentions that career paths are becoming less linear and more project-based, particularly in light industrial spaces where people switch between jobs frequently.Maya highlights that companies with high automation levels still require human operators for certain tasks. The demand for positions within the light industrial space is changing as well. TaTiO's solution replaces traditional selection processes for job candidates with visual job simulations, creating a more engaging experience and improving hiring decisions. Maya explains how this approach helps candidates understand what a job requires within minutes instead of reading multiple similar job descriptions.They further discuss why "gamification" is not a suitable design mantra when building a job application process, as applying for a job is serious business rather than playful or easy.Maya suggests going back to a more personalized and hands-on approach in the hiring process. She emphasizes the importance of making meaningful connections with candidates and avoiding solely relying on technology. Maya also shares her hiring mistake of trusting her gut instinct without proper assessment, highlighting the need for simulations to evaluate skills before hiring.

Graham Thornton, the founder and CEO of ChangeState, joins Max Armbruster on the Recruitment Hackers podcast. They discuss how to adapt recruitment marketing and career websites to high volume recruitment, particularly for early career individuals. Graham emphasizes the importance of making the application process easy and straightforward for candidates in different roles. He suggests creating content pages that provide relevant information about the organization and allow for quick data capture to screen potential applicants effectively.Graham Thornton emphasizes the importance of creating content pages that are relevant to the target audience and drive traffic to increase conversions. He explains that advertising outlets prefer ads that lead to clear and relevant landing pages, rather than individual job listings in an ATS. Graham also discusses the flexibility of job feeds and suggests creative ways to showcase job opportunities on career sites. Max Armbruster expresses his newfound understanding of content pages as a more effective form of marketing compared to traditional career sites. They discuss the challenges faced by enterprise buyers who already have existing systems in place and how demonstrating improved conversions can justify investing in new solutions. The conversation concludes with Graham sharing his hiring mistake, highlighting the value of seeking diverse skill sets within a team.Graham Thornton discusses the importance of building a broad team and learning from hiring mistakes. He emphasizes the need to move quickly on candidates and the potential bottleneck caused by lengthy interview processes. Max Armbruster mentions that Talkpush has reduced time to fill positions through aggressive recruiting efforts. They also discuss the dominance of Google for job searches and the increasing importance of paid ads in search engine traffic. Graham mentions that TikTok is an area they need to explore further as many customers are interested in using it for advertising purposes.

In this episode, Cristina Junio, Head of Sales and Operations at Resource Solutions, gives an overview of the talent crunch in the Philippines,  with the rising demand driven by the BPO industry and the availability of gig work online. A new generation of talent has arrived, more autonomous, tech-savvy, and flexible than its predecessors. Employers must rewrite their playbooks and hire talent straight out of university to meet the rising demand.

Matt Lerner is the CEO of a consulting business named SYSTM, which helps early-stage startups grow. In this episode, we explore how fast-paced environments like startups can find the right talent and what pitfalls to avoid. Max Armbruster, the host of the Recruitment Hackers podcast, interviews Matt Lerner. Matt previously supported Max and his company Talkpush through an investment with 500 startups. Matt has since transitioned to be the CEO of a consulting business named SYSTM, which helps early-stage startups grow. Matt's recent activity on LinkedIn has centered around recruiting for fast-paced environments and startups.In their discussion, Max is keen to explore how startups can find the right talent and what pitfalls to avoid. One particular focus is on "defensive candidates." Matt emphasizes that defensiveness in a startup environment can be detrimental. He mentions that he has seen teams become unproductive due to individuals who are not open to feedback or reconsidering their strategies.Matt also speaks about the difference between hiring from big-name brands versus hiring based on skillsets and fit for the startup environment. He advises caution when hiring based solely on the prestige of a company listed on a candidate's resume. Matt believes that while individuals might excel in a corporate environment, they may not necessarily thrive or bring value in a startup setting.Toward the end, Matt shares his favorite interview question which centers around understanding a candidate's mindset, openness to feedback, and willingness to admit and learn from mistakes.

In this special episode of the Recruitment Hackers Podcast, our host Max conducts an insightful conversation with his sister, Rafaela Armbruster, who works as an Admissions Coordinator at UCL. The unique angle of this episode revolves around the parallels drawn between job recruitment and student admissions, both involving evaluating young talents.The discussion extends to personal growth, bias checks during recruitment, and the impact of AI on the admission process. A memorable story narrates an unusual applicant's experience, highlighting the importance of personal bias checks in admissions or recruitment. Finally, the episode emphasizes the need to understand young talents beyond their brief resumes, demonstrating the intersectionality of both fields. This heartening family affair episode presents unique perspectives, making it a must-listen.

In this episode, Max Armbruster, CEO of Talkpush, interviews Sudeepta Parasar, CEO and Co-founder of Refersecout, a platform that simplifies and gamifies employee referral programs. They discuss the benefits of employee referrals, the challenges of managing a referral program, and the various stages of program sophistication. Sudeepta shares his insights on using gamification to engage employees, reward participation, and increase the success rate of referrals. They also explore the role of technology in streamlining referral processes and improving employee engagement. Tune in to learn about how Refersecout is transforming the way companies approach referral programs and the value of incorporating gamification in your hiring process.Here are 7 actionable insights from the interview:  Importance of employee engagement: For a successful referral program, it is crucial to keep employees engaged and motivated to participate. Ensuring that employees are invested in the process will lead to better referrals and increased hiring success rates. Reward participation: Even if a referral doesn't result in a hire, consider rewarding employees for their participation to encourage continuous involvement. Offering incentives can drive employees to actively participate in the referral program. Gamification of the referral process: Introducing a point-based system or leaderboard can make the referral program more engaging and fun. Employees can earn points for participating and for their referrals' progress in the hiring process, which can later be redeemed for rewards. Use technology to streamline the process: Utilizing technology like Refersecout can help automate and manage referral programs more efficiently. This can free up time for HR professionals and improve the overall experience for employees participating in the program. Offer both monetary and non-monetary rewards: Combining monetary rewards with non-monetary incentives like vacation time or giveaways can create a more attractive and motivating referral program for employees. Continuously update and refine your referral program: Regularly evaluate your referral program's performance and make adjustments as needed. This will help you maintain a well-defined program that yields the best results. Monitor referral quality: Be mindful of the quality of referrals, and consider awarding more points for higher-quality candidates who progress further in the hiring process. This encourages employees to submit well-suited referrals, increasing the likelihood of successful hires.

In this riveting episode, Max Armbruster, the host of Talkpush Podcast, engages in a deep conversation with Dror Gurevich, the CEO of Velocity Network Foundation, a non-profit building the Internet of Careers™. The discussion delves into the transformative potential of blockchain in the world of recruitment, career verification, and how this new technology can shape the future of work.Dror introduces the Velocity Network Foundation, an organization that aspires to democratize and decentralize career credential verification, enabling individuals to have complete ownership of their career records. He elaborates on the network's commitment to privacy, user control, and transparency, discussing the importance of having a shared, trusted infrastructure for both individuals and organizations.Gurevich discusses the inherent issues in the traditional methods of career verification, including the time-consuming process of background checks and the challenge of obtaining accurate information. Blockchain, as he argues, offers a solution by allowing immediate, verifiable access to employment records, educational certificates, and other crucial career credentials.The conversation also explores the promising concept of a Career Wallet, where people can store, manage and share their professional credentials, giving them control over their own data. This would eliminate the need for third-party verification, making hiring processes more efficient and reliable.Max and Dror also touch on the potential of this technology in developing regions and emerging markets, such as Africa, where formal employment records might not exist. The ability to formally record and verify employment history can potentially uplift these economies by enhancing employability and job security.In the latter part of the podcast, Gurevich opens up about a past hiring mistake he made due to inadequate data and verification, reinforcing the need for the solutions that Velocity Network Foundation aims to offer. He emphasizes the emotional and energy cost of hiring the wrong person, highlighting the potential of blockchain technology to minimize these errors.This episode underscores the potential of blockchain technology to revolutionize the recruitment industry by enabling secure, efficient, and self-sovereign verification of career credentials. Listen in to learn how Velocity Network Foundation is leading this change, and how it might redefine the future of careers.

In this podcast episode, Max and Daniel Callaghan of Veremark explore the world of background screening for employment and how blockchain is making the process more secure and cost-effective for both job seekers and employers. They also highlight the problems facing the background screening industry and why background checks are important for employment in various sectors.

In this podcast episode, Max Armbruster interviews Robert Cohen, Talent Acquisition Ecosystem Manager at Philip Morris International. The conversation focused on the need for companies to rethink early talent acquisition by looking beyond traditional qualifications and focusing more on motivation and potential. Their conversation also highlights the need for technological solutions that can help recruiters screen candidates for potential and eliminate human bias. Such solutions can also help recruiters manage the recruitment process more efficiently, particularly for global organizations.

MaxHello, everybody. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And for my first guest of 2023 I'm delighted to welcome Gustavo Serbia who is the head of talent - correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, I got that. Head of talent at Haircuttery, one of the leading salons. I mean, beauty and hairstyling salons nationwide. Please -  Actually I'll let Gustavo introduce what the group does but they do a lot of haircuts; I know that much yet. And so we're gonna get into the art of hiring stylists and understanding the art of recruiting hairstylists and stylists in general. What can you do to attract this particular audience and to avoid making hiring mistakes? And talk about how that practice may be disrupted by technology, of course. Gustavo, thanks for joining. And - yeah, please; what did I get wrong? In my intro?GustavoWell, I'm the head of HR for Haircuttery. And I oversee the entire HR function, including recruiting. I have a wonderful team that works day in and day out to try to find a stylist. Yes, we are a salon chain. It's a privately owned salon chain in the US - 500 salons in 10 states and about 5000 employees as a whole. And, you know, I like to also give a little bit of framework that while we're in the business of finding stylists, some of the audience may not necessarily find that relatable because they're not looking for stylists, because it's so specialized. But we're really in high volume. So we are in the high volume business of hiring. We just happen to be hiring - 99% of our hires are really stylists that are working at the salon, cutting hair, colouring hair, etc. And as you can see, hair is not required to work in the company. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.MaxFor those audio listeners here, Gustavo has a very shiny cranium.GustavoYep, yeah.Max Probably set up the lights just so you have a third eye.GustavoExactly. Yeah. So it looks like a halo effect.Max Right? Well. So, to put us in the mindset of what a hairstylist is, and does, I mean, we are talking about somebody who is holding a knife next to someone's face for 8/10 hours a day chatting… And so it has to be - I mean, these are skills that are sort of interpersonal communication skills, character skills that are very hard to capture in the written form, right? So a resume is not going to tell you that much. So what are you looking for? Exactly?Gustavo Yep. So it's a combination of number one, you got to have a license, if you don't have a license, we can't consider  you. You have to be licensed in order to perform what we need. And number two, we're looking for personality, we know that they're going to be behind the chair interacting with a guest, so they have to have personality that allows them to connect with the with the with a guest. Give me a second. Give me a second hold on the recording. Got it? Go ahead. Okay,Maxso he asked me the question. Yeah. So you said you're looking. So I'm gonna ask the question again. We'll take it from the top. Yeah. So yeah. So hiring hairstylist, who we looking for? I imagine that the skills necessary you remember the question, I asked her the question about blah, blah, blah. It's not something you can get on paper. And then you started your answer. And we'll start over again from there. So I don't have to ask the question again. Are you looking for scanning now?GustavoYeah, so number one thing we look, obviously you got to have a license. In the US, you have to be licensed in order to cut hair. So that's number one thing. You don't have a license, it's going to be hard for us to consider you. After that -Max Hold on; if I'm a - if I wanna be a hairstylist and get the license, how long is that process? Is that something you can just apply online or how does that work?GustavoNo, you have to go to school. You have to go to cosmetology school. There are a number of hours that have to be completed depending on the state. Some states have 1000 hours, others have 1500 hours. Yeah, and they have to pay.Max  It's a higher bar than getting a driving license.GustavoYes, yes, definitely. Well, you know, obviously, we want to protect the consumer. But each state does it slightly differently on how they go about it. Like there's not a consistent application across all 50 states. So we have to understand what the requirements are in some states versus others. So, once you have a license, or if you're in school, and you're going to graduate, let's say, within 90 days, you're going to obtain your license, we want to talk to you. And then the second thing is personality, right? You know, a lot of the stylists that go into the industry, some of them do it because they're exploring what they want to do. Others like the whole idea of the creative process. But regardless, if you're the creative kind, or the one that is looking for a job, or the one that is exploring what to do in the future, you're going to be talking to people. And because you're going to be talking to people, we give you commissions, in our case, but in the industry, it's very common for you to get commissions out of product sales, you have to have the ability to interact with the client.Max Yeah, it must be the nicest people in the world who want to work in that profession. Because, you know, as you said, like you're interacting nonstop, although, I mean, you have to be able to read the room, sometimes I go get a haircut, and I really don't want to talk to somebody, but they still chat me up.GustavoYes, we tell our stylist, you gotta read what the guests want, right? Some, this is a very intimate interaction, if you think about it, I'm in your space for at least 20 to 30 minutes, perhaps longer. I'm touching you. So you have to be conscious of the space, you have to be conscious of the body language that the person is giving you. But it's also a relationship that can be lasting years, because you may decide to go to the same stylist; my mother went to the same stylist, I mean, since I was nine years old, until a couple of years ago when her stylist passed away. That's the type of relationship that we're hoping our stylists are going to create with a guest. So that guest comes back to us instead of going somewhere else. But outside of that; obviously, we'll look at availability, where can you work? Because you know, we need to accommodate when the guest is there. We don't look at work, where have you worked, to make a decision. It's really irrelevant for us, your work history, from the standpoint of: you have a license, you have the capability? Let's put you behind the chair.MaxYeah, see if that works. And are there some - you talked about character being important. So I gather from that, that you don't want a hardcore introvert for a job like this. You want somebody who's able, who enjoys interacting. What are some other sort of personality traits that you'd be particularly on the lookout for? And follow-up question, how would you measure for those in a systematic way?GustavoYep. So the measuring part is the hard part. And collaboration would be one. Right now, because of the talent market being what it is, we've eliminated any type of assessment to look for those traits. It's so competitive to find stylists, that the more barriers we put - while it may give us exactly what we're looking for - the challenge is finding the number of stylists that we need to satisfy the guests' demand, but collaboration -MaxYou tried that in the past, you tried the assessment thing in the past, and it would eliminate a chunk of your talent pool that you just can't afford to eliminate anymore. And -GustavoIt's a catch-22 because you want that profile. But what we've done is we've extended and said look, we have to extend the profile. Now, the hiring managers ultimately make the last decision as to whom to hire. So they have to assess those individuals and say, you know, I can live with the, let's say, the lack of training that this person has, because they're a recent graduate, or this person is very well established, has a book of business that they can bring to us. But I may have to work a little bit with the self-centeredness that this person may have because they're established and they have a book, right? Versus automatically saying this person does not display this collaborative nature. Therefore eliminate them. No, we have to work within certain boundaries, but we've expanded those boundaries simply because there's a shortage out there. Now some people are going to argue they're not a shortage of talent. It's just how you treat - no, there is a shortage of talent in addition to the fact that you may have a shortage, because of how you treat people. The reality is that the demand for hair stylists is much higher than the supply is out there right now.MaxIn most franchise operations, the final hiring decision is left to the franchisee, so that - because they want to have that ultimate control over the quality of the service delivered. And you know, they're there on the ground. So they can see with their own eyes who they're hiring, so it makes sense. They can give them the contract in person. But, of course, for the consistency of service and of the brands at a global level, it would make more sense to have everybody basically be - all the hiring decisions be centralized. And for the franchise to receive - You know, the tickets they are - by the way, this guy is coming to work with you on Monday. And you've never spoken to him before. But he's approved by corporate so let's go ahead. Yeah, so where does Hair Cuttery stand on that sort of spectrum? And what are your thoughts on where the industry is going?GustavoSo for us, because all of these salons are privately owned by the company, we really allow the hiring manager to make the decision. Meaning the recruiter finds the talent, presents the talent to the hiring manager, the hiring manager conducts the interview, the hiring manager makes the decision. If there's a disagreement between the recruiter and the hiring manager as to why this person is not being hired, they discuss it and use that information for the next potential hire. Right? Now, it really - now we have processes in place to try to achieve as much consistency as possible. You know, if you think of Chick-fil-A, Chick-fil-A may have that level of control. I don't know if they have the control at the corporate level. But they have very rigorous requirements that regardless of the Chick Fil A - the food but they're also known for the service. So in order for you to hire the quality of people that you want, they may have -  it'd be likely to have a much more structural approach to the hiring. MaxAre you a Chick-fil-A guy? GustavoI like it. I'm not a huge fan. I used to be - I loved the milkshakes, but I don't go as often anymore, because I'm getting older. You gotta watch out for that.MaxI've never tried it. So maybe I'll take down an action bar after this call. Yeah. So yeah, I'm imagining like, the, in popular culture, the hair salon is a real place for the community to hang out. And as we were saying, you have to be friendly, with your customers, of course, you also have to be friendly with your colleagues, who you're gonna have to spend a lot of time with. So it must be an environment where the human bias is hard at work, where you know, the salon, the hiring manager like you said, he's gonna have a mental picture - he or she is gonna have a mental picture of who they want to hire. So it must be hard to fight that, particularly in a very litigious environment such as the US. But it's, I guess it's part of the magic, right, because you want to have a team that gets along. And, you know, if the hiring manager is stripped away from their decision, on who they can work with, they're not going to be quite as happy to come to work. So Hiring is, it works on both ends, you have to make the candidate happy, but you also have to make the hiring manager happy.GustavoYeah, it's no different than any other industry in that regard. If somebody wants to, if somebody is saying we have to collaborate, right, and we have to be good stewards of each other's needs, then you have to have a conversation about it, you have to get parameters; you know, in our case, we talked about the values of real, respect, responsible and we always use them as a triad. You cannot be real, without being respectful. You cannot be real without being responsible. So you have to use all three. So when somebody goes outside of that parameter, let's say they're just being disrespectful in the process, then we have a conversation in the context of that, not necessarily in the context of the decision. It's how you went about the decision, not the decision itself, because the decision may be valid, but you were a little bit of an ass in the process. So you can't do that. Having said that - it is not a perfect process, because the moment you insert humans, we have biases, or tendencies or preferences, and we want those to be heard and known by others. And now you may have a push/pull - I describe to my team all the time, we are going to always have a push/pull relationship with our operation counterparts, because we have a need to hire, but they also have a need to retain. So how do you create a balance between the two? I'm not saying that we're right and they're wrong; it's simply saying we have to do both “and”; rather than saying it's one or the other, because if you're hiring left and right, but you're losing them out the door, on the other end, at some point, your hiring is going to be affected. So we talk about the fact that it is okay to have a push/pull, where it's not one side winning and the other one losing, but rather saying, what are your needs? What are my needs? And how do we compromise to achieve the common goal? It sounds utopian, but the reality is that the alternative is an infighting that at the end of the day is not going to get you the hire that you need or retain that person if you end up hiring them.MaxYeah, it's - you're talking about infighting as a negative, but you also say that that conflict, that friction is necessary. So, it's a fine line, because in Sales - Sales will always complain that Marketing isn't delivering enough leads, and Marketing will always complain that Sales is not converting them well enough. And if you don't have, if you don't have both sides having an argument at some - you know, maybe there's a better word for it, but a discussion, or fight - one of them - if there's no conflict, then there's no tension there, then they're not doing their job, like, I mean, they stopped caring about, achieving maximum performance. So it makes sense that there would be, yeah, there'd be tension there. And that your job would be to make sure it just doesn't get bloody. Nobody bruises their knuckles.GustavoRight, put some parameters around it, but you have to let that play out. Because the alternative is indifference, lack of interest. Then I just go through the motions and try to, you know, quiet quit, I guess, quiet quit behind, you know, behind closed doors, because I don't want to bother anybody else because I feel that nobody listens. There have to be those discussions. Now they're not comfortable all the time but they got to take place.Max Going back to the more - the technical, the not soft skills, but the hard skills of stylists, the certification, you said is really the main criteria. But then does it ever get to, you know, sort of field testing? Or, you know, here's a bunch of hair, cut them for us. How do you validate this in the field?GustavoYep. So we do a tech - what we call a technical interview, which is really bringing you into the salon. And you can either bring a model, which means that you bring somebody whose hair you're going to cut, or we provide a mannequin, which is actually an actual head, or a skin, it's called a skin, which is actually something that you wrap around a head that has hair, and then you can kind of cut it. So we evaluate your ability at that technical interview, primarily with the idea of where you're at. If you've been in the business for a while, we may have a discussion of what about that technical; we ask you questions to ensure that you understand what is required to let's say, apply colour, or do certain haircuts. Because there's very - that's an area I mean - you can mess people's hair. So people need to know the technical aspects of, for example, mixing colouring chemicals, which is ultimately what they are. So we evaluate that, but what we've been working on is evaluating that in the context of how can we train you up. Versus how can we eliminate you from the process, right? Again, that's a harder conversation. Because that means somebody has to be training these individuals then. If Max comes in, and Max is not good, let's say, at cutting men's hair and needs some training. How do you protect the brand to ensure that Max is not botching people's hair by cutting them poorly? But how do you also elevate Max to be able to cut men's hair? So we also have ongoing education that we do on a regular basis. Because that's the way you grow. Once you get the license, it's not like you go back to the same school to learn more. You really learn by doing within the salons; by the education that you get from the company that you're working for.MaxYou mentioned that you hire some professionals who go there because they want to have an artistic mode of expression. They like styling, and they have - yeah, it's a form of expression. So, it's hard I imagine, to codify, you know, how to style properly? If you have some artistic vision in conflict? Take - Have you had some instances where it's just easier to hire somebody a bit younger? Because then you can show them the way you want it done here. Whereas somebody who has been at it for 30 years would be like, no, no, I'm going to use that much hydroxide on all the hair. And that's just the way I do it.GustavoYeah, we actually have not encountered those instances. You know, more experienced stylists may decide that they would prefer on their own. Yep. But in the instances where we've attracted, experienced stylists, they still abide, by the requirements - the fact that they're dealing with chemicals. Now, some may be a little bit more liberal than others, but they all know the consequences of, you know, burning somebody's hair, for example. But you would think that if I am that experienced, and I just want to do it my way or the highway in its totality, chances are that you would prefer to go somewhere else where you can actually do that on your own. But, we do encounter some of that; particularly our high producers - high producers that are producing because they have a book of business. We - Our main requirement is that you can't do anything that is illegal, you can't do that. And you have to be a good co-worker. And from time to time, there're still challenges because there's egos in the process. I have not heard in the two and a half years that I've been here, of instances where somebody was such a prima donna, that they wanted to do it the way they wanted to do it without consideration for the well-being of the individual, meaning of the guest. Yes, there's always the oh, I can go on my own and make more money, or I don't want to abide by your dress code - we always have those. But it has never been in the context of, oh, I can get away with just not following chemical protocol and be okay.MaxThat no, no, no, it's more “personal expression; and I can make more money elsewhere.” I get it.Gustavo Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.MaxOkay. Yeah. So that sounds like a pretty traditional interaction with - from any employer-employee kind of context.GustavoAny employee-employer. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. No different.Max All right, great. Well, I'd say good luck with the prima donnas. You know, I'm sure that we live in an age where the prima donnas, who want to start their own salons and their own home practice could find employment on the internet and find their clientele, but you said something that really caught my interest when you talked about people coming with their own book. So it's - there's a process for that. If somebody has been in the industry for 5/10 years, and that's kind of like - it's not; they don't have a resume, but they have 100 clients that always come to them, and they can bring that to your organization, and then they get a commission on that. Is that how it works?GustavoYep. Well, because you know - Yeah, in our compensation model is based on commissions. So they get a commission and the more experience you have, the higher your commission percentage. So when you have a book, which is basically a conversation between the hiring manager and a prospective stylist, what is that book of business? And what can that translate in income for the individual? Because at the end of the day, compensation still rules, meaning I gotta be making money. If I'm not making money, I'm going to be looking, where else can I go and make money, particularly when you are an experienced stylist? So that book translates into X amount of dollars. And because we are commissions based, we can know exactly how much they will be making. And then they can make a decision if that is something that aligns with what they want to be making. Keep in mind that, contrary to being on your own, as you know, you started your own business, it's not as easy as people sometimes think it is. So when you go on your own, be it on a private salon or a salon booth. Now you're responsible for all the financials, you know, the overhead, the legal processes. With us - You gotta buy product, inventory, all of that. With us, we provide you everything. So when you come to us, all you have to do is show up, cut hair, and bring more guests. So people have to consider that as part of the equation.MaxYeah, sorry, I sorry for the interruption. I'm saying I have a friend who is my internet was a little bit down. Can you hear me clearer now?Gustavo Yep, I can hear you.Max Sorry, I had a small small lag here. No, I have a friend who works in a hedge fund, who has the same kind of arrangement where she's a trader, but she doesn't want to have to do all the license work and get a Bloomberg terminal and get an office and whatnot. So she's a trader inside a bigger hedge fund inside a bigger organization. And, and she feels like she's got her autonomy. So you know, it works at different levels in different industries.GustavoYep, yeah, yep. Yep. I think it's not unique to our industry, I think it's just individual choice of what your preference might be.MaxFor these skilled workers - it's kind of like doctors, lawyers, stylists, they all have their book of clients. So you gotta manage those. All right, well, final question, I asked this to all my guests. Recruiting is fraught with mistakes. And we are all full of biases, as we discussed. So sometimes we make terrible mistakes. Not to - this is not a confessional. And this is - I'm not a Catholic priest. I just want to know, if you could share with our audience something wrong you did in the recruitment space, and what we can learn, a mis-hire you have done in the past.GustavoYeah, I can give you a few. But the one that I can think of is I was working in a different industry. And we were hiring manager-level employees to oversee regions. And we flew a candidate in who on paper had all the - but there was something about the interaction that was just not working. And we could see it. The CEO could see it; because the CEO was involved. I could see it. And the recruiter manager could see it. Yet, we were so desperate, that we decided to move forward.MaxYou could see it, but you couldn't describe it?GustavoNo, no, we all could describe it. But we convinced ourselves that we still needed to proceed because we were desperate. And before this person started, we kind of realized, this is a mistake. But now we have to withdraw the offer. The person has resigned the other job. And the person went - online presence just started. I mean, lambasted us and rightly so. Right. And what I learned at that time is it's, it's one thing for me to say no. And for you to say yes. But when there's three of us say no. And we still proceed. Desperation cannot be the reason why. And I know it's hard for people to process that. Because when you when you're in that, when you're bogged down by doing the work of others because you have that vacancy open and you see somebody that can come in, you need anything, oh, I can now turn it over to this person - doesn't work that way. It takes time. And I tell you from that moment, anytime that I've had the instinct; because most of it is gut instinct. One thing for me to have my gut instinct, but when two other people or at least another person have the same, we have to be very careful that we're not proceeding out of desperation, and really make a decision that we're not going to regret. There will always be bad decisions. Right? But if you're seeing it, others are seeing it and your only reason to hire the person is well, but we need someone right away.MaxThis person can do it on paper. Yeah.Gustavo Yeah, yeah. MaxOh, good. Yeah, sounds painful. And of course, one should doubt his own instinct, but if your instinct and the instinct of a couple of other people are coming at work, then Mother Nature is telling you something; run away.Gustavo I always say it is okay. If you're doubting your instincts. I start with the premise that I know I'm biased. I have my tendencies, my preferences, my way of seeing things and that doesn't make me right. It simply makes me believe something that I have to question to keep it in check. Not a sense of insecurity, but our sense of understanding that In order to work in the environments that I work; I have to work with others. So just because I see it one way doesn't necessarily make me right. Although I may pursue that anyways. But when others are involved, don't go that route, because now you're all in alignment, that you shouldn't do it and you still decide to do it, that - it was stupid. I mean, transparently speaking, it was stupid. We paid for it. It was a pain to deal with it. It didn't get legal too much. But I mean, social media, she put us out there. Internally created a little bit of discomfort. And it was all out of desperation.MaxOkay. Well, I'm sorry you revisited that for us but maybe it'll save someone from experiencing your pain sometime in the future so thanks Gustavo for opening up and for your insights on that unique industry. Really appreciate you coming on to the Recruitment Hackers podcast.GustavoAbsolutely. Thank you for the invite, Max.Max That was Gustavo Serbia from Hair Cuttery giving us a peek into the world of recruiting for hair stylists, a world where you have to sometimes put hair on a mannequin to test technical skills. And where you have to manage the sort of chemistry that works within each salon, where the hiring manager needs to get along well with the team, while at the same time trying to build a uniform standard for hiring. So an interesting balance there at work. Hope you enjoyed it, and that if you're interested in the beautiful world of high-volume recruiting and automation, you'll be back for more, please subscribe and share with other practitioners.

Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, inviting to the show for the first time, Mr Martyn Redstone, who is an Uber geek, and an analyst of the TA tech world and who has been working in the world of recruitment chatbots and conversational AI, for as long as the industry is, which is only about five or six years but has been consistent in his interest of finding ways to connect with candidates faster through the use of technology. And so today's discussion will be about that exactly; like how - what's the next step for talent acquisition in terms of treating candidates, like customers and getting a little bit closer to them? And what can we learn from the world of consumer marketing? So that we can - because usually, recruitment is a little bit behind consumer marketing. Recruitment marketing is usually a few years behind consumer marketing. So what can we learn from the leading technologies in that space and the best practices in consumer marketing? Notably, because Martyn has recently spent some time working with Hootsuite, which is a company which specializes in omnichannel marketing and delivering messages to different channels like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. So there's a - yeah, there's probably some good parallels that can be drawn from there, or that's what we're hoping for. And finally, Martyn, for your introduction. Martyn is also the founder of Bot Jobs, which is a job board for people who little bit - who are in love with bots, and who prefer to talk to bots than to talk to humans. So they can go to that job board and they can find other - they can find opportunities for people like them. Is that a fair summary? Martyn?I think so. I think so. Yeah. And, just for the benefit of everyone else, I did give Max permission to call me an Uber geek. So it's not a derogatory term. Very proud of that, actually. But yeah, no, thanks for the introduction. Yeah. So, Bot Jobs, just to clarify is a job board for conversational AI professionals. So everything from Conversation Designers through to Engineers, Software Developers, Marketers, Salespeople, anything to do with that conversational AI ecosystem. It's a bit of fun, but it's enjoyable. Great to see the trends and keep my toes dipped into the world of recruitment as well. So when we look at the kind of conversational AI world, hiring, still going like the clappers. In the - on the tech vendor side of things, we're still seeing hiring in kind of the smaller and medium-sized tech businesses, the ones that have already gone through, they're kind of their seeds, their seed rounds, their series A's, you know, they're still got cash, they're still growing. And some of them are doing exceptionally well from a growth perspective. And they're still hiring like the clappers. What we're also seeing, quite interestingly is large corporates that are now realizing that conversational AI has to be part of their strategy, their business strategy, and so they're starting to hire internal conversational AI teams to run that customer experience, customer context strategy. So that's very, very interesting. But to go back on your, on your point about job creators and job destroyers, I think that's a, I think that's something that I've been dealing with for the last five or six years that you've mentioned, I've been in this world where people say, oh, you know, chatbots, you know, and automation, it's just, it's just going to replace people, it's just going to take over people's jobs. And that's what you're out for, you're out to kind of replace recruiters with bots. Now, interestingly, over the last five or six years, I've never actually really seen that. I've never seen - And we've seen examples where chatbots in the retail world or in the recruitment world have automated up to like 85% of all conversations that happen. And yet, we haven't seen 85% of recruiters or 85% of customer service people being laid off because of that. And a great example is a global sports retailer who were able to literally turn off their customer service telephones because their conversational AI solution was so strong, they were able to turn off all their phone lines and deal with every single inbound inquiry. Over - actually, Facebook Messenger was where most of their conversations happened. But actually, what that meant was they realigned their customer service team into providing higher - providing service into higher value conversation. So conversations where they can upsell where somebody is then transferred to a person to say, you know, I - wondering if this is in stock, or something that the conversational AI couldn't cope with, where they had the ability to actually increase the revenue coming into the business through customer service. So a lot of businesses now are seeing customer service as a revenue centre, rather than a cost centre, because they're able to actually concentrate now on higher-value conversations rather than the just - the mundane stuff that can be automated. I see that happening in talent acquisition as well, where we're going to find that we're when we start taking away some of the more mundane repetitive stuff from recruiters that they're able to become more high-value partners to the business and to the hiring managers and to their candidates as well. Which I think is going to happen. I don't see it as a race to replace people.Yeah, yeah I mean, I would say that there is some truth to automation, killing some jobs. But of course, recruiters have the EQ and the experience who reinvent themselves and be relevant in a more automated world, because certain things will not be automated. So yeah, that's the projected outcome for us is that they'll still be there. Recruiters will still be there to sell the job. They'll still be there to get people excited. They may not be needed for the repetitive you know, data collection piece of it. You mentioned the - some layoffs at Alexa and Salesforce Einstein products, but that generally, bots are doing well. The corporate world is buying more. I'm, wondering about, you know, the Hootsuite experience, if that's not too confidential, if you can share - what's been the adoption of Heyday, you said it was their conversational product and what - why did they decide to step you know, or slow down there?Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, if you appreciate some things, I can talk about something. Yeah. But yeah, ultimately, Heyday was focused on e-commerce and retailers. So it was a very niche product. But the uptake was always great, you know, every single retailer, especially during the pandemic, what what was, what was obvious was that every brick and mortar retailer that had shops couldn't have their shops anymore because of lockdowns and things like that. So every retailer became an E-commerce business. And so they need to do more with less which we know that everyone tries to do in times of economic shock. So obviously a conversational AI tool that's focused on e-commerce and can do things like not only, not only answering FAQs, all those kinds of standard things, but also being able to sell things from within chat, so adding things to your basket doing checkouts, but also keeping people updated on their order status, as you know, I think if you speak to most retailers, is 70 to 80% of all of their customer service inquiries are going to be where's my order? So being able to just do it, you can automate that is a very, very powerful - creates a very powerful business case. So absolutely, you know, the adoption was there. The challenge that, and I think I can talk generically about most tech businesses that have been going through these reductions and transformations is that most tech businesses didn't see - didn't predict the change in the market would happen post-pandemic. And I think that a lot of businesses have been caught by that.  Yeah, because they had a crazy, they had a crazy boom. And it's slowed down because, well, consumer spending slowed down, everything slowed down a little bit. So yeah, they couldn't repeat 2021. Now, so it's more contextual than then technology. But the technology is still valid. And the most popular question for the bots was where's my order? So what can we learn from that? On the recruitment side? How do we apply this experience? From E-commerce to recruitment? What's the equivalent of where's my order?Do you know what? I think that I was only at HootSuite for a short time. And I've been in the recruitment industry for 17 years, and I only had a four-month break of going into kind of the retail/e-commerce sector. But the amount that I was able to understand and pick up around the expectation of a consumer was quite interesting. So not only the whole “where's my order thing”, but also channels as well. So I think we're, I think as an industry, we've always been quite - I say this in the nicest possible way - arrogant around us knowing what our candidates expect from us. And I think that we're the ones that tell candidates what they need to expect from us rather than the other way around. So, you know, I mentioned Facebook Messenger, earlier with the global sports brand, but you know, the multitude of channels that candidates or consumers want to interact with businesses on whether it's WhatsApp, whether it's Facebook Messenger, whether it's Twitter, Instagram, Tik Tok, you know, there's a massive boom of Commerce on Tik Tok, as well. And that just shows the change in generations and the changing consumer behaviour, but I think it's important to make sure that you give the person that you're engaging with as a business, that agency to say, you can talk to us on any channel that you'd like to at any time of the day or night. And that's where that kind of conversational automation comes into it. So, so the first thing is the channels and thinking about where your people are, that you're interacting with, what's the door to your business. What's your - What channel are they coming in on; where are they? And that changes all over the world, as you know, you know, wherever you are in the world, people's behaviour in terms of the technology they use to communicate with changes. But the other interest is, like you said, the whole kind of where's my order thing? You know, it. And I think if we'd have gone into a business and said, right, you know, we're automating your FAQs, we're automating “do you have this, these pair of trousers in white and a size, in a medium size in stock in my local store”, would it have gone: “this is exactly what you want”?. Because you know, this is where we think everybody's going. But actually, when you talk to the business and say, Okay, tell us, your 80% of all of your, of all of your conversations coming into your customer service team. Tell us what those 80% are. And, you know, the massive chunk of that is where's my order? And then there's a little bit of what's your returns policy? Or what's your opening times on your stores, things like that?Yeah,it's about understanding business. SoI totally know what you mean. And I just want to rephrase it for our listeners. So a lot of time in the Chatbot world. A lot of investments will be spent on the initial engagement, where a candidate would come in and would come in asking questions like, What kind of jobs do you have? What is the right career path for me? And that has attracted investments, as well as marketing pitches, and a lot of companies have been focusing on that. But actually, candidates never really asked for a new place to search jobs because they already have websites and job listings and things like that, what they want is connectivity. They - what they want is also the where's my order afterwards. So if you start your research from the moment that they have placed an order or in Job parlons, they've applied for a job. And then you figure out how to use NLP and conversational AI to take care of them from that moment on, you're gonna get more benefit - a lot more benefit for a lot less investment, basically, did I? Is that a good rephrase? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that, and I really didn't want to mention this today. But I think that's what, that's what I'm excited about with chat GPT, there's not much that I'm actually excited about it with. But what I'm excited about it, what excites me about chat GPT is the realization that people are having, that a conversational tool isn't just transactional. And it can be a true assistant, basically. And that's the long tail kind of plan for most of these assistants that we work with. And I can't really say them out loud for the benefit of everyone's got them on their desks everywhere, not really trigger everybody's technology in the room. But you know, the little pucks that people have on their desks and what have you, you know, the whole point of that is, eventually there'll be a complete conversational assistant. And that's what, that's what people come to expect now from a brand you know, so if you're, if you're doing a, an application via WhatsApp, let's say, just think about how you deal with a WhatsApp message from your friends or from your family, you know, you pick it up, you open WhatsApp, and you send a message and you expect a response at some point, that's the same expectation they have with the brand. So somebody's applying for your job. By WhatsApp, they've got that message still on there on their phone, they're going to pick it up, and they can message it and say, hey, just wondering what's going on with my application. That's a natural instinct for somebody nowadays to have. So thinking of it as a conversational tool as a conversational assistant, to your application process, and your interaction with business, not just a transactional, “I've uploaded my resume, here's my link to my LinkedIn profile, off you go”. You know, it's, it no longer should be looked at as transactional, it should be looked at as a, as a long term, relationship based conversational journey.I'm thinking we should start as well. Flagging if candidates are using chat TBT to answer interview questions, because we, you know, we asked millions of interview questions every month, and we do evaluate the quality of their answers. And Chad GPT seems like it does a pretty good job. So but there there there are tools now to determine when or whether there's a high likelihood that this was generated by Chat GPT. So if somebody if a candidate did use it, should we eliminate them from consideration or maybe even bump up their application to the top of the pile because, you know, their use of technology?I heard a great analogy this morning about Chat GPT, and it got - and I'll probably get it totally wrong because I'm on the spot here. But, it went something like this, you know, several 1000 years ago, when, when people started building things with wood, you know, they probably had a rudimentary nail that they were slamming him with a rock or something. And not once, yeah. And finally, an apprentice built something called a hammer and start hitting a nail in with a hammer. Not once, did anyone say how they use that hammer to do something more efficiently? They thought, What a great idea. It's giving you a helping hand to speed up your, your process to get things done better. And so do we now think that we should be chastising people for Chat GPT because it's merely a tool to do something more efficiently? So a lot of people now have, you know, challenges, you know, not even now, a lot of people have challenges in how to answer something. And so the whole point of chat GPT is to give that person a helping hand because a lot of the stuff that spurts out is, is hallucinogenic. But, ultimately, because of the way it works, it can't always give you something that's factual. And I won't bother going into the technicalities behind it. But it won't be ever 100% factual.So it gets its wisdom from the internet. Sowell, it's not even about where it gets, okay, I'm gonna say it. So it's, it's not even about where it gets its wisdom from but the whole point of the GPT model is it's an algorithm for under - for predicting which word comes next in it. A string of text. So, that's the way it works. It's not even just about it goes off into its model, find some information regurgitates it. That's how it learns, it learns on the information, it learns on the patterns of words and all those kinds of things. What it's actually doing is using that learning to understand the subject, but then to predict each word that comes next in the sentence or a string of text. And so that's why it's very, very good at predicting it. But it's not always going to be 100% correct. And that's why it becomes quite, I call it hallucinogenic. Because it feels like sometimes it's hallucinating. I've run various tests on it, and various experiments, and it's it, you can't rely on it to be factual. But ultimately, what you can rely on it to do is to string those words together. And so it's a great place to start. If you're struggling on how to start off your response to an interview question, start off your blog, start off your LinkedIn posts, all those kinds of things, because you should be using it to generate ideas and easy-to-generate structure, then go in and make it your own. So I go back to my original point, do we chastise people for using chat GPT to give them a helping hand in doing their job properly, or applying for a job? Or do we see it as a bad thing? I think - I'm still open to ideas on this. But I like to put it out there as a thought.Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, Oscar Pistorius was not allowed to run that race with his enhanced leg. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing his name correctly, and candidates are being evaluated on their communication skills and written ability. You know, of course, it feels like, it feels like they're being they're cheating, or, you know, it's cheating, but I get your point. It would be a better employer, who would ask the candidates, you know, please, please ask an intelligent prompt to chat GPT to solve this problem.And ultimately, as professionals in the world of talent acquisition, we and kind of people-related stuff, we need to understand that the world is changing, and it's changing very, very rapidly. You know, two years ago, you would never have heard of a job title called a prompt engineer. And yeah, I know, you know, I personally know Prompt Engineers. Exactly.Do they have prompt engineers on your job board already?Not yet. No. Coming soon, there is talk about kind of adding some generative AI stuff onto there in terms of jobs, but I'm very focused on conversational AI, which is a slightly different kind of realm of artificial intelligence. But, you know, talk about conversational AI. You know, 5-6-7 years ago, nobody was talking about conversation designers as a job. And yet, you know, that's one of the hottest jobs in the world right now. Is a conversation designer, and people, you know, 18 months, two years ago, three years ago, when I talked about the fact that I trained as a conversation designer, people were just laughing at me thinking, you're off your rocker, you're on a different planet. What the hell is a conversation designer?I used to make that joke to my team because we had our conversation in 2016 by 2018, you know, they were getting so many looks on LinkedIn, you know, who they were, you know, it was impossible to keep them basically. I should have kept their job titles like Technical Support Engineer.Yeah. But it just goes to show; so in 5-10 years time, are we expecting copywriters? Are we expecting marketers to come up with their own original content and their own original ideas? Or are we expecting them to utilize the tools that are available to them to generate ideas and allow them then to take those and move them forward into something amazing?Yeah, I think that's a rhetorical question. So I'm gonna ask you, what is my final question on everyone of -for every one of my guests come to the podcast, which is to talk about a recruitment mistake that you made in the past. And I don't know if you've hired anyone recently, but it can be, you know, recent or the long, long ago past may be a memory that you've managed to silence because make a wrong hire. But Trent, if somebody's listening right now, maybe they can avoid to make a terrible mistake based on your experience. So does that experience you have one in mind that comes to mind - a miss hire you made?That's a really good question. I would say quite the opposite. I know this sounds terrible.But I think one of the biggest mistakes So I probably made in my, in my career when it came to hiring and people was I once took over a team. And actually, I was actually I was promoted from within that team to, to head it up, which is always a difficult situation anyway, because you're when you're young and you're full of energy, and you're quite new into the world of work and you think, great, this is my first opportunity in a kind of a leadership position, you don't really understand some of the complexities of people and what have you. And so, I think that one of my, one of my biggest mistakes, I don't think was about hiring people. I think it sounds terrible, what to say out loud about people keeping people Yeah. And so, you know, the challenge I had was, because I spent some time working as part of that team. I knew that there was some of them that weren't, they weren't up to the job and weren't able to perform as well as other people. And I, in the most humanitarian way I should have, should have let them go as quick as I could do. But because of that relationship that you have with those people, and because you want to, you don't want to come across as like the ogre that's taken over and chopped everyone away. You keep people on for the sake of keeping people on and sometimes you have to make a brave decision, that that has to be made. And that's part of having a leadership responsibility that sometimes you have to make decisions that aren't comfortable for you or for other people.Grow up people, you know, if you're a manager, you're gonna have to, you're gonna have to hire sometimes, and sometimes, you know, recruiting is of course, fraught with dangers, and you can make a lot of mistakes, but it's better hiring somebody and risking hiring the right person rather than being 100% sure you're keeping the wrong one?Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, and that was a long time ago, I had hair and I didn't have any grey in my beard. So yeah, so that was a long time ago. And I've learned a lot since then. But I think if I look back on my career, that was probably one of my first kind of major learning curves was kind of my first real entrance into the world of leadership and management.Max  27:25  It's such a common mistake that people make to delay hiring because they're emotionally invested with an underperformer. And so yeah, sometimes recruiting is exactly what the doctor ordered. Even if you do make mistakes. So takes take risks to take bold risks, especially in this market. Absolutely, totally agree.There's a lot of great talent out there and go to Bot Jobs.Absolutely. For any conversational AI people that you want to hire, Bot-jobs.com Bot hyphen jobs.com.Great. How else can people get a hold of you, Martyn?LinkedIn is always the easiest way. I'm on that thing. 24/7 So so if you want to contact me, it's linkedin.com/in/lastname is Redstone just the way like it's pronouncedspelt like it's pronounced yet. AndLinkedIn, read Martyn's. LinkedIn feed is pretty geeky indeed. So you'reAbsolutely if you want to be immersed into my world of conversational AI and other lovely things then, then connect with me. And yeah, that's the best place to get hold of me.Awesome. Thanks. Thanks for coming on.Thanks for inviting me, Max. Been pleasure.That was Martyn Redstone founder of Bot Jobs, who went on to have a conversation with me about how every big brand is continuously investing in conversational AI and making that connection easier for people to get answers to their question on the most pressing question, which in the consumer space, as he said is, "where is my order" in the recruitment space? What is the status of my application? Hope you got something from that conversation. I certainly did. 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[00:00:00]Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to The Recruitment Hackers Podcast. And I am delighted to welcome on the show today, Quincy Valencia, formerly known as the Queen of bots. Today, the VP and Research Director for Ventana Research, and previously working at AMS, at CLO and ADP and a long, long career in recruitment and talent acquisition technology. And so I'm really happy that Quincy agreed to come to our show, to talk about some of the trends from the year that's ending now; 2022, for those listeners who are listening to this podcast in the future, and where we might be, we said we would talk about a few trends. [00:00:49]So expect a conversation on hyper-personalization of the candidate experience, consolidation of the tech vendors, TA tech vendors, and what it means for the market and for the candidates. And perhaps we'll talk a little bit about the bots and conversational AI from its origin, or let's say the recent history of the last five or six years, and what the near future may look like. So, Quincy, welcome to the show.[00:01:26]  Quincy: Thank you so much for having me, Max, I really appreciate it. I love these kinds of conversations, especially with people in the industry that I respect and admire. And that would be you, you fall in that category. So thank you.[00:01:37] Max: Well, you're too kind. It's an honor to be in that industry. And it's great that we live in a world where you're in South Carolina, I'm in Ireland, and we can talk to our global audience about stuff that nobody cares about.[00:01:51]Quincy: Somebody cares about it, you and I care about it. So if nothing else, we can go back ourselves and listen to ourselves talk to each other and be very excited about it.[00:02:00] Max: Okay, a deal. So, well, before we get started, perhaps a word about Ventana Research. What's this organization that you joined earlier this year? And what kind of services do you deliver? Who should be coming to talk to you? In what situation?[00:02:20]Quincy: Yeah, so Ventana research is celebrating its 20th year in business as of this year, it's a boutique technology analyst firm, and the primary focus is tech. And we have several coverage areas including, not just HCM tech, which I own and lead that practice, but data analytics, digital innovation, CX, so we kind of span the board there with different areas of technology that we cover. And we do primary research, we do thought leadership, consulting, advisory, so on and so forth, all the things you would expect of an analyst firm. And it's an exciting place to be. It's a fun, interesting time to be in this industry as well.[00:03:05] Max: Are your services called upon when somebody does a big RFP? And they want somebody to write the RFP?[00:03:13]  Quincy: No, we don't write RFP, but we do…. Yeah, sorry. We will help people evaluate those RFPs and responses. And, you know, our clientele are the vendors, certainly, but also end users that will be using products too. So we have a great mix, we just recently verticalized our entire product offerings, and now we're looking at specific verticals like healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and retail and several others that we have expertise in within our organization. So it's just another lens to look at the products and services that we deliver into the market.[00:03:54]Max: I think I'm gonna latch on to this as a segue to our first industry topic. What was the word? Verticalization.[00:04:03]Quincy: Verticalization, yeah.[00:04:04]Max: So verticalization of talent acquisition, I think is a real thing. It's not just a bunch of syllables. I think it's happening.[00:04:12]Quincy: That's an actual thing. I agree with you. Now, you never have to say the word again.[00:04:17] Max: We agree about the thing. So I first noticed it a few years ago, and I saw some ATSs pop up specialized in hiring drivers, of all things.[00:04:28] Quincy: Yeah. [00:04:28]Max: But now it seems like there are ATSs for healthcare companies, for retail specialists and others. Yeah. What are you seeing in the market and how verticalized is the industry now?[00:04:44]Quincy: So I see the exact same things that you have. But if you look at what the issues are in recruitment for some of those industries, they're parallel. And so you don't necessarily need one TA tech for just healthcare or one just for retailer, or one just for hospitality. You look at what are the issues that arise within those industries that are the same. So if it's high volume, low barrier to entry, high volume of transaction, those are the types of things that you want to look for when you're looking for technology. And so in some cases, once you may have started out just as, hey, we're going to start in quick service restaurants, or we're going to start in retail, or we're going to start in whatever, they're quickly bringing in different industries into their organization that they're marketing to because they can support those just as well. [00:05:38]I think the only one that I would say probably deserves its own is drivers, because that's an interesting beast, the way you market to them and sell to them and contact them and the way they can come back to you and what you need, and the regulations and documentation and all of the verifications that you need is a little bit different. But, I can see why there was a need, you know, for some of the players in the market, but I think a lot of it continuing the trend is a little bit of consolidation, because, again, you can start marketing to, hey, I'm just going to do hospitality. And you see that you have the opportunity to expand your reach by bringing in other verticals into that same business that operate similarly.[00:06:19]Max: Yeah, I mean, from a vendor's perspective, our perspective, we knew there were some little bits and pieces missing, for us to be relevant in some industries, and you add them progressively as you go. And, of course, you know, it's a go-to-market strategy. Initially, it makes sense to keep talking to the same people over and over again, until you've established a good position in that market. But, at the same time, considering that recruitment platforms are becoming integrated with assessment vendors, and, you know, assessment vendors are more specialized. So, that makes a stronger case for saying, you need a recruitment software that just does healthcare, just does, you know, logistics, for example.[00:07:10]  Quincy: I don't know. I mean, I think it depends on the type of assessment that they're crawling into bed with, for lack of a better term. Because if you look at the trends in the market, switching back to, you know, skills-first hiring, for example, we're not talking about skills, like, do you know Excel? Or, you know, are you a phlebotomist? Can you do that; talking about capability, and potential, and demeanour. And so in that way, their organizations are opening themselves up to be able to screen in candidates that they may not have considered previously, because really, so much of what we do until you get to a certain level, or if you're in a certain speciality, I mean, you're not going to hire a financial analyst that doesn't know Excel, right? I mean, that there are certain things you've got to do. [00:07:56]But if you look at what makes people really successful in a role, a lot of it, you're learning anyway. I mean, I went to school for, my Bachelor's degree in International Finance and Marketing. That has absolutely nothing to do with what I do today for a living; what I do today for living, I didn't even know existed and RPO, I don't think existed when I was in college. So there's so much of what you learned that, hey, I can do this because I've done that. [00:08:21]Max: Yeah.[00:08:21]Quincy: And because I have the adaptability, and so on and so forth to do it, that type of assessment is becoming much more popular to screen in on the front end for that talent that is difficult to find. As opposed to being the skills like, can you type? You know, can you speak English, like we were just talking about, it's a different type of skill, also equally important for certain things, but the trend is to kind of start looking in the other direction.[00:08:51] Max: Yeah, yeah, I see your point. From a job seeker's perspective, you should be doing the bulk of your ATS integrate -  interaction in the first 10 years of your career. After a while, you should be kind of on track; you've picked your industry, your picture, you've got your expertise, you've got your network, and you're going to be less dependent on proving yourself to a machine or to an assessment company or to an interviewer. And that's where most of the value of these technologies ought to be, is at the early career stage when people are more potential than, you know, achievements?[00:09:36]Quincy: I don't know about that. I don't know. And I think in some cases, that's totally true. But just to take a contrarian point of view for fun because that's what I do. There - if you have been in, I'm going to use parallel industries just because it makes it easier, but I've been in sales my entire life and I'm a sales professional and sales sales sales you'd like and I'm so sick of having a quota. Can I not move into Marketing potentially? Do I have the, it's a parallel sort of industry? Do I have the skills? Nobody would necessarily consider me for marketing. Because I'm a closer, right? But this isn't me, by the way, I've never worked in sales. So I'm not really touched the hypothetical me. [00:10:15]But do I have the capability and potential and demeanour and aptitude to then transfer what I already know, into a new line of business? That doesn't happen too often when you're going company to company? Certainly, that's applicable for internal mobility. But I think we're going to see more and more of that, I think it's going to be a slow adoption because it's hard to switch what you've done for, you know, your entire career -  the mindset. If I'm a hiring manager, I want somebody who's in sales. But maybe I shouldn't be in sales. Maybe I'm a mediocre salesperson. But I'd be an extraordinary sales leader because I have a propensity for leadership,[00:10:55]Max: And then the machine will be able to establish commonalities between candidates that would have been completely different piles before then.[00:11:07]Quincy: Yes, that's exactly - I never would have considered me for that role, because I was mediocre as a salesperson. And I need a sales leader, but maybe I'm fabulous at leading a team and driving consensus or, you know, whatever those things are that you need to do to be a leader in an organization.[00:11:24] Max: Whatever those things are.[00:11:26]Quincy: Whatever those things are. Right.[00:11:28]  Max: Yeah, who knows? Well, okay. So, this trend of consolidation? Do you think we reached the apex and for the listeners, maybe go back to what's been happening over the last 12 to 18 months to the industry? And are we have we reached peak consolidation yet?[00:11:58]Quincy: I mean, I think we have to have. There's no one who's left to acquire almost, I mean. I mean, over the past, I don't know how many months, 24 months, maybe the level of acquisition, that's happening, consolidation in the industry has been literally unprecedented. The money from investment firms that's gone into TA and TA Tech has been literally unprecedented. And there's been just an extraordinary amount of consolidation in the market. So if you'd look back several years, the strategy of most organizations had gone to, you know, if I'm building my tech stack, as an organization, the strategy is let's get best of breed at each step of the process from, you know, candidate attraction through the end of the employee lifecycle. [00:12:45]And there's merit to that for certain organizations, for certain types of company. For certain complexity of organization, there's certainly merit in that strategy, I've always actually been quite a fan of it; there's also risks. And so as we looked at organizations over the past couple of years, during the pandemic era that were having to do more with less, I mean, I remember talking to one company who had gone from a recruiting team of 198 to two, and now all of a sudden, the world opens up, and you have to hire these people back, that's not scalable if you're depending upon just human beings to do it. So you have to have technology there. [00:13:19]And they were desperate and didn't have time to do RFPs for, you know, 77 different products in the stack. So let me go with XYZ big player because they can take care of us kind of across that lifecycle. And meanwhile, those big players had gobbled up so many of the small players. And now you have a platform instead of a point solution. So have we reached the peak? I think so. Again, there's just so much consolidation that has already gone on. I do think that we've plateaued a bit, not that there won't be others.[00:13:54]Max: Definitely. Yeah, it's gonna continue. Just from - The economics are such that, you know, the valuations came down.[00:14:02] Quincy: We had to. I mean, how many unicorns did we see in two years? Give me a break,[00:14:05]Max: Fundraise - Yeah, the amount of funds being deployed to late-stage venture companies is lower so they're gonna have to find, you know, sort of acceptable exit. Anybody who's past series A is gonna find it much harder to finance series being on so. So that'll be happening. But I was thinking more in terms of the narrative. Yeah, sort of like the narrative of it's going to be an easier solution for the customer to have one vendor that does it all. Whether the market and the buyers are going to become wise to the shallowness of that promise. Because, like you said, like, it's just a bunch of things that are glued together that aren't really talking to each other.[00:14:56]Quincy: Right. I mean, that's the issue. Right? So you have some - I think that those who have built natively will come out shinier in the end, because if they are all built in the same architecture, it's going to be easier. Everything that's trying to bolt on their issues and struggles; you and I both know trying to bolt on this and bolt on that and bolt on this. And then somebody messes up a single line of code. And all of a sudden, these things don't talk to each other anymore, then there's a problem, that'll start coming out more and more. And then as things do, the pendulum over the next, you know, several years, eight or so years, I'm thinking of contract length terms. So 6, 7, 8 years, the pendulum will swing back to the other way, I think.[00:15:36]Max: By then the market will be much bigger because eight years of the market growing and automation taking on its steady course means it'll be two, three times bigger. So there'll be more room for point solutions as well like you can build a bigger company with a smaller product.[00:15:52]  Quincy: You definitely can. And like innovation is not stopping. I mean, everybody that I know who's created product is still creating product. They still, you know, inherently see gaps; there're always going to be gaps in the market, there's always new technology that comes along, that's going to fill that space. So it's not going to stop. To me, it's exciting and will continue to be so. I think for now, in many cases, platform players have an advantage for now. Will that stay that way? No. Only because that's just the nature of the beast, everything is cyclical, it will go back. And while during this time, some of the best technologists are taking the opportunity to add more and become more innovative and just upgrade what their offerings are into the market. So there's room for everyone, I think.[00:16:43]  Max: We've been chatting for almost 20 minutes, and we haven't spoken about bots much. So bad, so rude. To the Queen of bots, I must ask you; how are the bots doing in 2022? And what's exciting in the near future for the world of conversational AI? Has there been a fall from grace from the early days?[00:17:08]Quincy: No, I don't think it's a fall from grace at all. I think it's just become more of a standard. I think that, you know, a few years ago, everybody was looking to try one of these new bot things and how could it help. And then organisations started adopting them and they would use them in a very limited way. So let's just use it to answer benefits questions for existing employees, or let's just use it in the very front end of the recruiting process. And now, you know, technologists being technologists have continued to develop capability and deepen the capability. [00:17:40]And so now, you know, a lot of the organizations already have it. And it's just a matter of extending the use and how do we use it in more points of the process and extend it along the entire, you know, candidate to employee journey, because it's an interface that our candidates and employees are comfortable with and know and understand. And so they just continue deepening and bringing in more use cases. So I don't think there's a fall from anything, I just think it's just what people do now. I don't know. Do you disagree with that?[00:18:14]Max: Yes, I disagree with that in the sense that I still think that the main use case is at the front of the funnel. I think that's still 90% of the value because that's where there are just too many candidates to talk to.[00:18:33]  Quincy: Well, depending on the industry. So it's certainly the industries that you focus on. I think that's 100% true. Absolutely.[00:18:39]Max: So we agree after pretending to disagree. And then I think that to go from the 90, you know, to eliminate 90% of the candidates and then continue the conversation, then you would need to have - then you're going to need to really level up the technology because the front of the funnel is hard enough to build, then you've got to think about all those scenarios for candidates that have gone past the first level screen and decide what are the follow-up questions you want to ask them. And some of them are obvious, like, I don't know, how much money do you want to make or stuff like that, but then some of them are not so obvious. [00:19:23]It's like, well, we're like 60, 70% sure that this person is good at you know, sales. How do we solidify that confidence? How do we go from 60% confidence to 90% confidence? Am I going to ask him a couple of follow-up questions or then do an assessment? These are not decisions that are automated today. And to be able to automate the follow-up intelligently, and automatically. Well, that's not a bot anymore, right? So that's why I was telling you earlier - where I think that for conversational AI to get to the next stage, it needs to have an incredibly powerful back end that kind of recommends, where do you dig? How is the conversation, moving organically towards where it needs to go to get to the answer[00:20:15]Quincy: Which is why I'm so excited about GPT3 technology that will soon be 4. I mean, the level I was in - I've been in there, I've been in OpenAI system. I don't know if you've taken the opportunity, but you can go there now and play around.[00:20:32]Max: I spoke to the bot.[00:20:34] Quincy: The level of, depth of complexity that the system can handle is pretty remarkable to me. And it's only a couple of years old, it's gotten better since it started, and it will continue to develop. But to me, it's just taking the functionality of a bot on the front, which I think is extremely valuable for many things. It's speeding up productivity and automation and efficiency and so many things that I think is great for candidates and for recruiters or candidates and any back-end user. But this I think will be the next big evolution as organizations look to build their bots, or evolve their bots using different tech.[00:21:20]Max: Yeah. Do you think this is going to be applied next year? And what will be the first application by a major industry player of this technology? If you had to bet,[00:21:35]Quincy: That's great. I think the first step, maybe writing job ads. I mean, I think that could be a good one. I just, it was funny. I asked it to write a job ad for a podcast host. And it was pretty cool. I asked it I said, write, all I said was write a job ad for a technology industry analyst. And I was like, that's pretty good. It'll have to be tweaked. But I think that's one that could be good. I mean, there's always a starting spot, and then you start to take that application somewhere else; that's probably a good place to start.[00:22:05]Max: Awesome. That's a good idea. And there was a company, of course, that was specialized in writing job ads automatically. I think it's still around. X two[00:22:15]Quincy: Well, perhaps. Yeah,[00:22:16]Quincy: Yeah. But again, it's different tech. So are the results different? I don't know. Yeah. I mean, to me, that's the possibility. So no, I don't think there's been a downfall of the bot. I think it's not all the chat and all the rage anymore. Because it's been widely - people just recognize they're beneficial. That doesn't mean everyone's bought it. That doesn't mean everybody's using it. But I think people know. I think the second reason that if there's been any negativity about it, it's been the way that they've been configured and deployed in ways that worker and candidate expectations are not being met, [00:22:51]meaning the shift has been to just mass personalization of the process, all processes of all engagement and all interaction. And perhaps the way that some bots have been again, configured and deployed, it feels very bot-ty feels very impersonal. And so that's not good, either. So I think that it may behove some companies to look at those, how they're deploying them and where they're deploying them, and does it enhance the experience. Or does it detract from it?[00:23:22]Max: When it really goes to the next level, too, which is after pre-screening, you know, to the sort of follow-up digging, and the next step, that's when you might want to interact, you're a little bit more careful about your interaction, because then as a candidate, you don't think of this as just a gatekeeper. You get past this thing. And then you can talk to a human, which is how bots normally are thought of. But really, this is it. This is what's going to decide whether I'm going to get hired or not. So I better bring in my A game. [00:23:57]Quincy: Exactly. [00:23:59]Max: Yeah. I think we're a couple of years away from that.[00:24:01]Quincy: Oh, yeah, it's not gonna happen tomorrow. But time flies, so you don't know. We'll see.[00:24:05]Max: I mean, I'll still be around. I hope.[00:24:07]Quincy: You and me both. I've been around for 107 years. I think another two isn't going to[00:24:14]Max: Amazing.[00:24:17]Quincy: I look great for being 127 years.[00:24:20]Max: You've got some great nanobots looking after your skin. We could go on for a while but I like to stick to my timelines. So I'm gonna ask you my final interview question, which is always the same one. I asked people to think back about a mistake they made in hiring and to walk us through that mistake. You know, what was the origin of it without giving any names and so that our listeners can, you know, can reflect on how to avoid that mistake in their own job.[00:25:01]Quincy: Yeah. So some time ago, I was hiring for a team. And I was down to two finalists, candidates. And at the time, I was relatively new to my role. And so it was really important to me to bring someone in who could sort of hit the ground running and maybe wouldn't need as much of my time and training because I was trying to learn my own jobs, too. And so I selected the person who had what I thought was relevant, similar experience, instead of the person who didn't, who was also an excellent candidate who ended up being hired somewhere else on that organization. And then fast forward. Well, fast forward, that was the wrong decision because I did not consider interest, I did not consider desire of the candidates, I did not properly consider what their potential was, what the capability was, how much ability they had to develop and execute on their own thoughts and ideas versus you know, what I would have to sit there and handhold through because they didn't want to do it wrong, based on how they used to do it. It was the wrong choice.[00:26:13]Max: If you could go back in time, probably, you'd be like, sit on that decision for a little while, if you're unsure. You seem - you come off as somebody who's like prone to action; you came in, you wanted to show I can hire fast.[00:26:27]Quincy: It wasn't that I needed to hire you know, I needed you know, you're building a team, you've got to get your people on board. And I was like, yeah, so you wanted to make the decision, I would have sat on the decision, I would have considered it and really considered one of the benefits to having someone who's fresh and maybe non-jaded and not afraid of making mistakes. As much as somebody who you think has the exact work history experience that you need. Just why I'm kind of a fan of assessment now at the higher level and not just the lower because I believe that had they been assessed, that would have come out pretty clearly in the beginning. So I think looking at potential and capability is really important. More so than just the exact job titles people have had.[00:27:12]Max: Okay, word of warning from Quincy Valencia, if you're stepping into a new industry, don't default to hiring the old hands just to make up for your weaknesses because that's always going to be a secondary factor towards whether someone is a good fit, long run and is excited about the job and so on. And so a mistake to avoid. Thanks, Quincy for sharing that moment in any recruiters life where, you know, you make an oopsie[00:27:46]Quincy: Yeah, it happens. Live and learn.[00:27:50]Max: Great. Thanks for joining, and where can people get a hold of you?[00:27:54]Quincy: Thanks. I really appreciate it. Well, certainly at www.ventanaresearch.com. Or if you just want to contact me directly, connect on LinkedIn, or shoot me an email at quincy.valencia@ventanaresearch.com.[00:28:11]Max: Those will be in the cliff notes and thanks for listening. Bye byeOutroMax: That was Quincy Valencia, who on top of her 107 years of industry experience that she says, was able to give me a little bit of perspective on the fact that while the buzz may go up and down on certain technology, technology marches forward, the market gets bigger. And if you have a vision for what you want to build, whether you're a practitioner or a vendor, like me, you know, time will work for you and you will eventually get there. It's only just a matter of time. So a good lesson to take the big view and the long view on how technology transforms the industry. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did and that you'll be back for more. Remember to share, and to subscribe.

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: YesMax: -- 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: YeahMax: 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: Like the 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.

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 rightVanessa: 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.

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 youSteven: 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 rememberSteven: 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 ofMax: 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 hiredMax: 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 assessmentMax: 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 beenSteven: 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 usMax: 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.

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.

00:00:01.860Max: 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. 00:00:56.220Tim: Thanks for having me, Max. It's great to be here from a very sunny afternoon in Sydney. 00:01:01.890Max: 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? 00:01:26.820Tim: 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. 00:02:44.100Max: 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?00:03:18.660Tim: 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. 00:03:58.800Max: 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. 00:04:34.950Tim: 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. 00:06:10.230Max: 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. 00:06:54.600Tim: 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. 00:08:40.170Max: 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? 00:09:40.620Tim: 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. 00:11:12.990Max: 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. 00:11:28.440Tim: 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… 00:11:46.290Max: … I made that mistake. 00:11:51.600Tim: Speaking from bitter experience, then. 00:11:53.430Max: 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?  00:12:35.220Tim: 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… 00:14:43.920Max: …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. 00:15:02.100Tim: Yeah, exactly. 00:15:03.840Max: 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? 00:15:34.590Tim: 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. 00:15:44.880Max: 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. 00:15:55.770Tim: Yes. 00:15:56.280Max: 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? 00:16:12.930Tim: 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. 00:18:24.240Max: 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? 00:19:31.590Tim: 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. 00:20:46.950Max: 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? 00:21:09.030Tim: 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. 00:21:34.680Max: 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. 00:22:09.120Tim: Yeah! That's a great question. Let me contemplate on like… 00:22:13.710Max: Are you seeing some ghosts flash before your eyes? 00:22:17.850Tim: 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. 00:24:02.760Max: 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. 00:24:43.200Tim: 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. 00:25:13.980Max: 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. 00:25:43.770Tim: Awesome! Thanks for having me Max. It's been a great afternoon. ***Nothing follows*** 

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.

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.

100:00:01.530 --> 00:00:09.719Max 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 and200:00:09.840 --> 00:00:10.889Max Armbruster: how do you do that 300:00:10.950 --> 00:00:33.570Max 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.400:00:34.800 --> 00:00:46.230Max 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.500:00:47.370 --> 00:00:48.120Liam Martin: That is true.600:00:48.690 --> 00:00:57.780Max 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.700:00:58.710 --> 00:01:00.330Liam Martin: Yeah thanks for having me.800:01:00.390 --> 00:01:08.550Liam 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 the900:01:08.880 --> 00:01:23.190Liam 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.1000:01:23.580 --> 00:01:28.650Max Armbruster: Yeah yeah then then last year, the big theme was the great resignation.1100:01:29.250 --> 00:01:36.270Max 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 saying1200:01:36.660 --> 00:01:44.220Max 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.1300:01:45.120 --> 00:01:49.530Liam 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 to1400:01:49.620 --> 00:02:00.090Liam 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,1500:02:00.570 --> 00:02:08.730Liam 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,1600:02:09.300 --> 00:02:14.100Liam Martin: it all ties back to remote work, undoubtedly, it is fundamentally easier1700:02:14.790 --> 00:02:28.020Liam 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.1800:02:29.370 --> 00:02:35.580Liam Martin: A little bit more of a complicated process. Yeah hiring the right people you know I got some counterintuitive perspectives towards that.1900:02:35.940 --> 00:02:48.810Max 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.2000:02:49.920 --> 00:02:56.400Liam Martin: Sure, so time doctors, a time tracking tool for remote teams that company's been in operation for 10, 112100:02:56.400 --> 00:02:56.970Liam Martin: years.2200:02:57.510 --> 00:03:08.730Liam 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.2300:03:09.090 --> 00:03:18.000Liam 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,2400:03:18.450 --> 00:03:23.460Liam Martin: which was born out of basically our core mission statement which is trying to help2500:03:23.880 --> 00:03:38.790Liam 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?2600:03:39.120 --> 00:03:40.800Max Armbruster: yeah yeah.2700:03:40.860 --> 00:03:42.390Max Armbruster: Great great fun.2800:03:43.200 --> 00:03:51.240Liam 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.2900:03:52.500 --> 00:03:57.660Liam Martin: The issue that we had was there was so much information on how to hire a virtual assistant.3000:03:57.930 --> 00:04:06.150Liam 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.3100:04:06.480 --> 00:04:13.950Liam Martin: As a remote first organization, a lot of remote companies and since you've been remote from the inception, you probably know this.3200:04:14.400 --> 00:04:19.860Liam Martin: They have a bit of a chip on their shoulder where they're kind of seen is like lifestyle businesses right like oh,3300:04:20.190 --> 00:04:27.000Liam 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.3400:04:27.210 --> 00:04:34.980Liam Martin: The incredibly fast growing segment of the market that I think it is today, I actually think promote first organizations3500:04:35.250 --> 00:04:48.720Liam 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.3600:04:49.590 --> 00:04:57.210Liam 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, which3700:04:57.600 --> 00:04:58.710Liam Martin: we are finally going3800:04:58.710 --> 00:05:08.910Liam 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.3900:05:09.240 --> 00:05:16.290Liam 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 COVID4000:05:16.740 --> 00:05:24.510Liam 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. 4100:05:25.200 --> 00:05:34.650Max 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 on4200:05:34.950 --> 00:05:36.000Max Armbruster: on how to run remote.4300:05:36.540 --> 00:05:38.850Liam Martin: So I completely agree on that.4400:05:38.880 --> 00:05:48.450Liam 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.4500:05:48.900 --> 00:05:57.750Liam Martin: You know before it like basically if someone is legit to me it was did I know about them pre-COVID?4600:05:58.440 --> 00:06:11.250Liam 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.4700:06:11.520 --> 00:06:14.250Max Armbruster: And then I talked to the county data and they're like three months old.4800:06:14.370 --> 00:06:16.350Max Armbruster: Right, and it's gonna you're gonna miss.4900:06:16.770 --> 00:06:36.810Max 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.5000:06:37.950 --> 00:06:48.060Max 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.5100:06:49.080 --> 00:06:54.810Max Armbruster: Could you expand on that and see how and discuss how that applies to candidates as customers.5200:06:55.560 --> 00:07:14.880Liam 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,5300:07:14.910 --> 00:07:17.490Liam Martin: a lot of money, not in the hyperinflation days of today.5400:07:19.110 --> 00:07:25.230Liam Martin: And he said no, I'll never build a $1,000 notebook because none of our customers5500:07:25.860 --> 00:07:32.700Liam Martin: are selling $1,000 notebook people, like we only target people that can afford a $1,000 plus notebook.5600:07:33.060 --> 00:07:40.230Liam 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.5700:07:40.980 --> 00:07:51.450Liam 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,5800:07:51.840 --> 00:07:54.000Liam Martin: not our customer. What are we interested in?5900:07:54.240 --> 00:07:55.560Liam Martin: We're interested in people that are6000:07:55.830 --> 00:08:06.810Liam 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.6100:08:07.170 --> 00:08:09.330Max Armbruster: As that applies to people.6200:08:09.600 --> 00:08:17.220Liam 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 love6300:08:17.790 --> 00:08:25.080Liam 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.6400:08:25.920 --> 00:08:36.810Liam 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.6500:08:37.470 --> 00:08:44.070Liam Martin: The sociological definition of culture is, what are the unique activities that you do, that other groups do not.6600:08:44.580 --> 00:08:58.950Liam 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,6700:08:59.340 --> 00:09:05.280Liam 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.6800:09:06.210 --> 00:09:13.140Liam 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.6900:09:14.010 --> 00:09:26.160Liam 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.7000:09:27.270 --> 00:09:40.590Max 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 the7100:09:40.890 --> 00:09:53.130Max 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.7200:09:54.780 --> 00:10:02.340Max 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. 7300:10:03.570 --> 00:10:04.140Liam Martin: So.7400:10:04.560 --> 00:10:13.800Liam Martin: We generally uhm… and I took this leadership from Shopify actually, where they don't…  so the candidates that are brought in,7500:10:14.340 --> 00:10:24.810Liam 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.7600:10:25.560 --> 00:10:37.170Liam 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,7700:10:37.650 --> 00:10:46.320Liam 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.7800:10:46.770 --> 00:10:57.630Liam 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.7900:10:57.900 --> 00:11:09.300Liam 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.8000:11:12.390 --> 00:11:23.250Max Armbruster: Right. And and so in Running Remote, you you you you've written about the best practices to put in place for8100:11:23.280 --> 00:11:24.390Max Armbruster: for hiring remotely.8200:11:25.380 --> 00:11:38.250Max 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?8300:11:38.880 --> 00:11:49.020Liam Martin: Well, so even from a psychosomatic or psychometrics perspective, there's there's some interesting data as well. Remote work really is8400:11:50.850 --> 00:11:53.280Liam Martin: is very friendly towards introverted people.8500:11:54.480 --> 00:12:04.440Liam 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?8600:12:05.040 --> 00:12:11.190Liam Martin: Remote first organizations, if you're extroverted, your chance of quitting goes up, and we think it's simply because people get lonely.8700:12:11.490 --> 00:12:19.200Liam 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,8800:12:19.890 --> 00:12:23.880Liam Martin: which is going to a coworking space. You know sending them to coffee shops.8900:12:24.450 --> 00:12:40.440Liam 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.9000:12:41.760 --> 00:12:45.240Max Armbruster: When…when I'm going through the people in my company in9100:12:45.240 --> 00:12:46.680Max Armbruster: my head and thinking.9200:12:46.920 --> 00:12:56.790Max 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 are9300:12:57.240 --> 00:13:08.130Max 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,9400:13:08.850 --> 00:13:22.200Max 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, but9500:13:23.580 --> 00:13:32.040Max 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.9600:13:32.700 --> 00:13:40.200Liam 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.9700:13:40.650 --> 00:13:54.720Liam 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.9800:13:56.340 --> 00:14:08.070Liam 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 like9900:14:08.910 --> 00:14:19.050Liam 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.10000:14:19.800 --> 00:14:34.560Liam 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,10100:14:35.220 --> 00:14:45.600Liam 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 succeed10200:14:45.930 --> 00:14:52.740Liam Martin: from a hiring perspective, from a working perspective which, and I think the actual, the most important one is10300:14:53.310 --> 00:15:06.150Liam 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.10400:15:07.050 --> 00:15:17.310Liam 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.10500:15:17.820 --> 00:15:28.620Liam 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…10600:15:28.680 --> 00:15:31.200Max Armbruster: Like an organization, you have more people reporting to you.10700:15:31.860 --> 00:15:36.420Liam Martin: Well, there are more people doing work and there are less people telling people what to do.10800:15:36.870 --> 00:15:48.300Liam 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 can10900:15:48.420 --> 00:15:51.090Liam Martin: you can tighten up at managerial layer.11000:15:51.750 --> 00:15:59.070Liam 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,11100:15:59.790 --> 00:16:04.920Liam Martin: which is asynchronous management, the ability to be able to say listen, I don't need11200:16:05.430 --> 00:16:14.940Liam 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.11300:16:15.450 --> 00:16:22.230Liam 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 and11400:16:22.440 --> 00:16:33.660Liam 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,11500:16:34.350 --> 00:16:42.810Liam Martin: you automatically make better decisions up and down the org chart but, more importantly, when the difficult decisions need to be made,11600:16:43.350 --> 00:16:50.190Liam 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.11700:16:50.460 --> 00:17:00.900Liam 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.11800:17:02.850 --> 00:17:13.140Max Armbruster: And uhm… the percentage of of those big companies that are you know going for hundreds or thousands of employees11900:17:13.740 --> 00:17:25.740Max 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.12000:17:26.610 --> 00:17:33.990Liam Martin: for…Absolutely. That's something that I think is changing. Companies like ourselves. Get Lab,12100:17:35.070 --> 00:17:41.040Liam Martin: you know, Get Lab hires everywhere on Planet Earth. Companies like Todoist, they have…they hire everywhere on Planet Earth.12200:17:42.570 --> 00:17:45.030Liam Martin: Buffer hires everywhere on Planet Earth but,12300:17:45.030 --> 00:17:50.940Liam Martin: They're actually very small companies. Zapier as well, but they actually have a lot of their employees located in North America.12400:17:51.750 --> 00:18:03.240Liam 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 successful12500:18:03.900 --> 00:18:07.410Liam Martin: have basically just built their businesses with this one core assumption, which is12600:18:08.430 --> 00:18:25.560Liam 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.12700:18:25.950 --> 00:18:27.210Liam Martin: What the heck do we do?12800:18:27.330 --> 00:18:36.540Liam 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 towards12900:18:36.960 --> 00:18:44.940Liam Martin: problems. I'm currently seeing a huge conflict between Russia and Ukraine right now. Conflict…a war between Russia and Ukraine right now.13000:18:45.420 --> 00:19:01.230Liam 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.13100:19:03.690 --> 00:19:10.200Max Armbruster: Uhm…one question that I, I always go back to is13200:19:10.410 --> 00:19:11.670Max Armbruster: is hiring mistakes.13300:19:12.270 --> 00:19:15.570Max Armbruster: And in the context of remote hiring,13400:19:17.460 --> 00:19:29.400Max 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.13500:19:30.870 --> 00:19:38.610Max Armbruster: But when you know, when you when you think back on your your personal journey as an employer, as a recruiter,13600:19:39.150 --> 00:19:53.730Max 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.13700:19:54.690 --> 00:20:01.830Max 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.13800:20:02.220 --> 00:20:15.990Liam 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.13900:20:17.160 --> 00:20:35.820Liam 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 events14000:20:37.020 --> 00:20:44.850Liam 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.14100:20:46.020 --> 00:20:47.910Liam Martin: In terms of the reasons.14200:20:48.960 --> 00:21:02.250Liam 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.14300:21:03.180 --> 00:21:13.890Liam 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.14400:21:14.970 --> 00:21:27.930Liam 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.14500:21:29.340 --> 00:21:32.400Liam Martin: As I go, what do you mean? What do you mean you don't believe in remote work?14600:21:33.600 --> 00:21:39.570Liam 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.14700:21:40.140 --> 00:21:55.350Liam 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.14800:21:56.550 --> 00:22:01.350Max Armbruster: I mean in hindsight, is, I need to get out of here right now, like you need to get off the bus14900:22:01.560 --> 00:22:13.950Liam 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 actually15000:22:14.970 --> 00:22:17.940Liam Martin: long term. We're very… I mean we're relatively competitive,15100:22:18.390 --> 00:22:30.810Liam 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 behind15200:22:31.260 --> 00:22:48.480Liam 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,15300:22:50.130 --> 00:22:54.270Liam Martin: would you…what part of the job would you do for free? Would you do any of this job for free? 15400:22:54.450 --> 00:22:55.830Max Armbruster: That's a good question.Liam Martin: And if the answer is yes,15500:22:56.550 --> 00:23:00.390Liam Martin: and that's someone who I would keep for an extended amount of time. 15600:23:00.450 --> 00:23:03.930Max Armbruster: Did you hire the salesperson, Liam? Did you hire the salesperson you were15700:23:03.930 --> 00:23:05.430Max Armbruster: talking about in your example?15800:23:05.490 --> 00:23:07.380Liam Martin: No, we got rid of him immediately, like that was…15900:23:07.440 --> 00:23:14.730Max 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 accountable16000:23:14.970 --> 00:23:20.400Max Armbruster: because you dodged my question. The question was: a hiring mistake that you made.16100:23:21.180 --> 00:23:21.570and16200:23:22.590 --> 00:23:28.050Liam 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…16300:23:29.370 --> 00:23:32.550Liam Martin: If I tell a personal story, it might… I might16400:23:32.730 --> 00:23:37.380Liam Martin: identify something…Max Armbruster: I think you might get caughtLiam Martin: Well we just don't want to do that, we want to make sure that everyone…16500:23:37.620 --> 00:23:45.720Liam 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 decision16600:23:46.920 --> 00:23:49.860Liam Martin: that was made, and that they've left on good terms.16700:23:51.210 --> 00:24:00.570Liam 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 identify16800:24:02.910 --> 00:24:05.820Liam Martin: with what we were as a company?16900:24:06.840 --> 00:24:12.420Liam Martin: I can tell you actually right now, one of the conflicts that we've had just recently was17000:24:13.500 --> 00:24:22.410Liam Martin: COVID really grew everything in remote work, so we had extraordinary growth during COVID, and17100:24:23.100 --> 00:24:30.690Liam 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 were17200:24:31.140 --> 00:24:42.030Liam Martin: really really experienced people that could scale venture backed companies, and we came up against some of that resistance and we basically discovered,17300:24:42.750 --> 00:25:00.330Liam 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.17400:25:01.350 --> 00:25:02.880Liam Martin: And thinking a little bit.17500:25:03.990 --> 00:25:10.050Liam Martin: Maybe too much before making some… some tactical or strategic decisions in terms of spend.17600:25:10.530 --> 00:25:25.380Liam 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.17700:25:25.860 --> 00:25:26.130Max Armbruster: So.17800:25:26.460 --> 00:25:36.450Liam 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.17900:25:37.110 --> 00:25:47.070Liam 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 if18000:25:47.820 --> 00:26:01.320Liam 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 but18100:26:02.550 --> 00:26:11.790Liam 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.18200:26:13.350 --> 00:26:15.210Max Armbruster: If… if you're building…18300:26:16.410 --> 00:26:26.160Max Armbruster: A key takeaway here is, if you built a unique culture around in bootstrapping but it's a form of hustle and and18400:26:26.940 --> 00:26:34.590Max Armbruster: you know, can do attitude with with limited need sometimes, you don't… you don't want to dilute that culture, even if18500:26:35.100 --> 00:26:50.370Max 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?18600:26:51.060 --> 00:27:07.980Liam 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.18700:27:08.040 --> 00:27:09.810Max Armbruster: It's not in the metaverse?18800:27:10.920 --> 00:27:13.560Liam Martin: So…you know what?18900:27:14.700 --> 00:27:17.640Liam Martin: You actually have to come to the conference to get the answer to that one.19000:27:18.720 --> 00:27:19.530Liam Martin: That's all I'll say.19100:27:19.950 --> 00:27:24.810Max Armbruster: It's the portal, it's the portal inside Montreal that takes you to the next dimension.19200:27:25.590 --> 00:27:28.230Liam Martin: I'm pretty excited about it, but you have to come to the conference. I'm not gonna19300:27:28.860 --> 00:27:36.810Liam 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.19400:27:37.320 --> 00:27:51.600Liam 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.19500:27:55.080 --> 00:27:55.350Max Armbruster: Thanks, Liam. 19600:27:56.670 --> 00:27:57.120Liam Martin: Thank you.

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 isMax 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 programsJulia 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 advocateJulia 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 someJulia 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 notJulia 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 toMax 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 importantJulia DeBari: is like are those meetings planned? And like they're on your calendar like a week or two in advance? Or is it likeJulia DeBari: fire? You know emergency. Okay, we throw like an hour long meeting on the calendar and five minutes, so that you know we canJulia 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 andJulia 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 sortMax Armbruster: of tribal instinct thatMax Armbruster: kicks in where we think: Oh you're an outlook person? Gross.Max Armbruster: You know.Julia DeBari: Exactly. So I seeJulia 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.60Max 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 andJulia 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 singleJulia 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 seeJulia 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 ofJulia 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'tMax 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 andJulia 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, butJulia 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 likeJulia 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 byMax 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'sJulia 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, andMax 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, andJulia 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 theMax 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, andJulia 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 likeJulia 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 recruitersMax 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 thinkMax 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, whichJulia 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 mediaMax 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, butJulia 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 likeJulia 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.

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.

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. 

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, MaxMax: 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.

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 experienceMax: 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.

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 capitalThad: 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.

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 pleaseEverett: 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. 

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 processMax: 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.

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 SavvyMax: 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.

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 theMax: 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 thereTim: 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.

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. YeahAlison: 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. 

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.  

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 isAdam: 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. SoMax: 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.

 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. YeahMax: 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. 

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 sceneDorothy: 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 colleaguesMax: Okay. Okay. I'm glad I was able to elicit a strong reaction from youDorothy: 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 paternalisticDorothy: 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 acquisitionMax: 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 showDorothy: 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 talentMax: 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 LinkedInDorothy: 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.

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.

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.

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.Please share and post with friends.Thank you.

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. 

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.