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Lien pour participer à notre évènement en présentiel : https://bit.ly/3VGfv3G Notre partenaire Acomba GO : https://www.acomba.com/ Notre partenaire Hellodarwin : https://hellodarwin.com/ Notre partenaire Groupe Plante : https://www.groupeplante.ca/fr/ Pour écouter l'épisode en format vidéo : https://youtu.be/RVFIKvWtvsI Chapitres; 00:00 - Intro 02:07 - Présentation 06:23 - Patrice Gilbert: PDG de Petal 11:20 - Parcours 17:55 - Création de Petal 21:38 - Pourquoi le domaine de la santé ? 35:48 - Création de valeur pour les investisseurs 40:49 - Création de valeur dans la société et propriété intellectuelle 46:38 - Stratégies d'acquisition pour accélérer la croissance 53:42 - L'innovation comme moteur de changement 56:18 - Vision future 12/24/36 Mois 01:00:02 - Podcasts, Livres et la Routine Bienvenue à tous au 319e épisode du podcast Hypercroissance! Cette semaine, c'est Patrice Gilbert, CEO et fondateur de l'entreprise Petal qui est avec nous. Patrice qui a fondé l'organisation en 2009 après un passage de 6 ans chez Taleo, s'efforce depuis à améliorer le volet administratif du domaine de la santé. Depuis, Petal a grandi et on parle maintenant d'une organisation de plus de 350 employés qui arrive à impacter positivement l'expérience de plus de 9 millions de patients. Dans la discussion, Patrice et moi abordons également le volet de croissance par acquisition et de comment on peut bâtir une GRANDE entreprise. Sans plus attendre, ma discussion avec Patrice Gilbert. Pour en savoir plus sur Patrice : https://www.linkedin.com/in/patricegilbert/ Pour en savoir plus sur Petal : https://www.petal-health.com/ Pour participer à notre évènement "Panels d'hypercroissance" : https://bit.ly/3VGfv3G Pour discuter avec moi sur Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoine-gagn%C3%A9-69a94366/ Notre podcast Social Scaling : https://www.j7media.com/fr/social-selling Notre podcast Commerce Élite : https://www.purecommerce.co/fr/podcast-commerce-elite Notre podcast No Pay No Play : https://podcasts.apple.com/es/podcast/facebook-ads-on-parle-de-g%C3%A9n%C3%A9ration-de-leads/id1447812708?i=1000607648614 Suivez-nous sur les médias sociaux : Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/podcast-d-hypercroissance/ Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/podcastHypercroissance Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/podcasthypercroissance/
Pastor Joel's message from Resurrection Sunday "TALEO (It Is Finished)" March 31, 2024
This episode is a rare and honest window into the world of international leadership. Eva Lundahl, an international HR leader specialising in talent acquisition, joins me for an initial conversation about her career journey, achievements, her motivation and the challenges along the way as well as her approach to managing team members and helping them to achieve their potential and their place in the team. In the second half, she talks to the current challenges in 2022/3: recruitment and retention in international organisations and the need to adjust to the cultural shift we're seeing after COVID and communicate the wider benefits to joining a company to the market. Eva is both visionary and pragmatic: tune in to be inspired and get her precious advice! About Eva:Eva is a Swedish national with 25+ years of experience in HR across multiple industries such as pharma biotech, IT/Telecom, Outsourcing/Consulting Services, Mining, Automotive and most recently in the Energy Sector at GE Renewables. Throughout her career she has been a variety of roles, although mainly in HR with a specialization in Recruitment, she's also managed the change connected to large HR & TA system implementations such as SAP, Taleo, Cornerstone & WD. She's built and managed recruitment teams and models varying from in-house, outsourced, off-shored and hybrid in large multi-national organisations both regionally & globally. Her motivation lies in being able to leverage her experience and help organisations build and adapt their TA models to the needs and context of the business. There is no one best model, but a multitude of variations to be considered to support business growth. Enabling her team to have access to the right number and level of resources, tools & slick processes are elements she looks at when considering the set-up. Supporting her team, helping them to develop and identify their strengths and weaknesses to complement each other on their journey is what keeps her going.Connect with Eva on LinkedInIf you'd like to find out more about coaching for yourself or for your organisation, contact us to arrange a call at ann@anncollinscoaching.com or click here.We love reviews and hearing your feed back, so please go to Apple Podcasts to rate, review, subscribe and share this podcast!To find out more:website: www.anncollinscoaching.comFollow Ann:LinkedIn: annridleycollinsInstagram: @anncollinscoachYouTube: Ann Collins Coaching
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.
The Innovative Accountant Podcast | Integrated Advisory by WealthCo
On this episode Tim is joined by VP of Portfolio Management at Taleo, Laurel Sim. Laurel is also co-host on the Mission Driven Leader Podcast that focuses on helping leaders clarify and accomplish their missions by giving them the tools, tips and resources they need to succeed. Co-host with a past guest on this podcast, Ed Hoffman, former Chief Knowledge Officer of NASA. Outside of her work with Taleo, Laurel volunteers a great deal of her time helping to further educate others through speaking engagements, mentorship, and workshops. To recharge Laurel spends her free time at her family's farm, playing sports, running with her dog Goose, and travelling. Learn more about Taleo Here: https://taleoconnects.com Listen to the Mission Driven Leader Here: https://anchor.fm/the-mission-driven-leader
The Innovative Accountant Podcast | Integrated Advisory by WealthCo
On this episode Tim is joined by VP of Portfolio Management at Taleo, Laurel Sim. Laurel is also co-host on the Mission Driven Leader Podcast that focuses on helping leaders clarify and accomplish their missions by giving them the tools, tips and resources they need to succeed. Co-host with a past guest on this podcast, Ed Hoffman, former Chief Knowledge Officer of NASA. Outside of her work with Taleo, Laurel volunteers a great deal of her time helping to further educate others through speaking engagements, mentorship, and workshops. To recharge Laurel spends her free time at her family's farm, playing sports, running with her dog Goose, and travelling. Learn more about Taleo Here: https://taleoconnects.com Listen to the Mission Driven Leader Here: https://anchor.fm/the-mission-driven-leader
The Shrimp Tank Podcast Seattle - The Best Entrepreneur Podcast In The Country
Jenn LeBlanc / CEO & Founder of ThinkResults, Founder of Changing Tides Movement As CEO and founder of ThinkResults, Jenn works with CEOs, CMOs and change agents to drive results. For two decades, she has been launching companies and delivering leads and revenue growth for companies of all sizes including Microsoft, Intel, PeopleSoft, SAP, Taleo, Nektar Therapeutics and hundreds of life sciences and tech startups. To date, her work has delivered over $2B in new revenue to clients. She is also the founder of Changing Tides Movement, a community organization that is dedicated to driving massive amounts of capital into the hands of women. To date, the community has grown over 300%, and Changing Tides members have raised over $20M in the last year and been featured in publications such as TechCrunch and Forbes. Jenn is known as an inspirational keynote speaker and workshop facilitator. She is the author of the #1 Amazon bestsellers Launching for Revenue: How to Launch Your Product, Service or Company for Maximum Growth and Changing Tides: Powerful Strategies for Female Founders. https://youtu.be/gieN2QaPaHI Dan Weedin / First Underwriters Insurance Brokers (Host) Linda Popky / Leverage2Market Associates (Co-Host) Jenn LeBlanc / ThinkResults, Changing Tides Movement (Guest)
Louis Têtu, one of Quebec's most prominent tech leaders. He co-Founded HR software company Taleo, later sold to Oracle, and is now CEO of Coveo, an AI-powered platform for digital experiences. It just went public a few weeks ago.
Louis Têtu, one of Quebec's most prominent tech leaders. He co-Founded HR software company Taleo, later sold to Oracle, and is now CEO of Coveo, an AI-powered platform for digital experiences. It just went public a few weeks ago.
Would you like to learn more about Oracle Recruiting Cloud, its latest innovations, and what to expect in the coming years? Join us on Cloud HCM Talk Radio to hear Nagaraj Nadendla, Oracle Senior Vice President & General Manager, Oracle Recruiting Cloud & Taleo talk about the latest product investment and business updates on Oracle Recruiting Cloud, a key pillar of the Oracle Cloud HCM suite.
Je suis très fier aujourd'hui de finalement franchir la barre des 100 épisodes pour le podcast. Depuis près de 18 mois maintenant, on s'efforce de livrer un balado qui sort à chaque semaine et j'ai l'honneur aujourd'hui de vous annoncer qu'on va accélérer la cadence! Dès cette semaine vous pourrez retrouver un deuxième épisode hebdomadaire qui sortira les jeudis matins. Une nouvelle approche intitulée Panel d'affaires va s'intégrer doucement mais surement à chaque jeudi. La fréquence ne sera pas doublée dès le départ, mais déjà dans les prochaines semaines vous risquez de recevoir des notifications comme quoi un nouvel épisode de Hypercroissance est disponible autre que le lundi. On revient à notre épisode du jour et qui dit 100e épisode dit également invité spécial. J'ai l'immense honneur aujourd'hui d'interviewer l'entrepreneur qui selon moi a connu le plus de succès au Québec lors des 20 dernières années. Louis Têtu, président de Coveo, une entreprise d'intelligence artificielle qui affiche une valorisation à plus d'un milliard de dollars est avec nous aujourd'hui afin de nous raconter son parcours qui est tout à fait remarquable. En plus de Coveo, M. Têtu a également bâti une autre entreprise ayant une valorisation passant les 10 chiffres! De 1999 à 2012, son équipe et lui ont amené l'organisation Taleo publique avant de vendre l'entité pour près de 2 milliards de dollars au groupe Oracle. C'est donc pas une mais deux histoires d'entreprises en Hypercroissance que Louis va nous décrire aujourd'hui. Pour en apprendre plus sur Coveo : https://www.coveo.com/fr Mon compte Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/in/antoine-gagn%C3%A9-69a94366/ Suivez-nous sur les médias sociaux : Linkedin : https://www.linkedin.com/company/podcast-d-hypercroissance/ Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/podcastHypercroissance Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/podcasthypercroissance/
Before Spreadsheet.com, Matt Robinson was founder and CEO of Rollbase, a low-code rapid application development platform acquired by Progress Software, and Recruitforce.com, a SaaS applicant tracking system acquired by Taleo, now known as Oracle Taleo Business Edition. He has a BS in Mathematics from Bates College and an MS in Management from Stanford University. Offer: Free Premium level access to Spreadsheet.com until Oct 17, 2021
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.
Before Spreadsheet.com, Matt Robinson was founder and CEO of Rollbase, a low-code rapid application development platform acquired by Progress Software, and Recruitforce.com, a SaaS applicant tracking system acquired by Taleo, now known as Oracle Taleo Business Edition. He has a BS in Mathematics from Bates College and an MS in Management from Stanford University. Offer: Free Premium level access to Spreadsheet.com until Oct 17, 2021
Hear the secrets to success from the visionary marketer who led the charge at four companies acquired by Oracle: PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Taleo and Eloqua. Discover how Heidi Melin built award-winning marketing teams, drove measurable growth for top technology brands, and established a reputation as a thought leader. Legends of Sales and Marketing is produced by People.ai.
This week we welcome Raghav Singh to the podcast. Raghav's career in talent acquisition spans more than 30 years, including chapters at Taleo (where he served as Product Manager from 2000-2004), UnitedHealthGroup, KornFerry, and Salesforce, where he currently serves as Director of Product leading a team building HR and talent acquisition products. Raghav also regularly appears as an author in noted industry publications, including ERE, where he's written extensively about the pre- and post-pandemic labor market.Topics include: the advent and evolution of the ATS as a SaaS product, the commoditization of HR technologies, the record high numbers of job openings in the US, the impact of government incentives on hiring, how lack of quality childcare and eldercare has forced women out of the workforce, the persistent bias against the resume “gap”, Baby Boomers and “forced” early retirements, the challenges of skills mismatches between recent college graduates and available jobs, the difference between American and European approaches to addressing unemployment, the long-term implications of birthrate falling below replacement levels, the outlook for immigrant workers entering the job market, and the effects of remote work on talent pools and wages.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), love 'em or hate 'em they're the core technology of life as a Talent Acquisition and Recruiting professional. The diversification of different ATS brand visions are finally taking us past the days of tech debt heavy dinosaurs like Taleo and VirtualEdge. Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research shares information from newly published research entitled Talent Acquisition Systems Mapping a New Path. In this episode we dig into areas many ATS vendors have never gone like: - Is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion just fluff in an ATS? - AI matching technology become priority - All CRM's are NOT created equal - Getting serious about "Candidate Communication" - Why is Internal Mobility still an unknown?
Welcome to 3Sixty Insights' latest #HRTechChat. Alex Smith, CHRO of the City of Memphis and member of the 3Sixty Insights Global Executive Advisory Council, joined us earlier in the week to discuss her department's decision to implement and deploy Oracle HCM Cloud, along with Taleo-derived functionality for application tracking. Beyond technology, however, Alex's experience is an uplifting tale of lasting business and cultural transformation in the public sector. Illustrative of the vision forward-thinking HR leaders embrace, the City's journey is everything the profession aspires to inspire. Here's a glimpse into what we discussed during the videochat, as well as the contents of an accompanying, in-depth case study: Leading a municipality as a business—a new mayor of Memphis wanted to bring a business mindset to the city via CHRO-style leadership and moving to a C-suite model and mentality Introducing much-needed efficiencies—this came from not-insignificant task of replacing an on-premises Oracle installation in favor of Oracle HCM Cloud (and, for recruiting, Taleo) Reaching accord—despite the undeniable benefits of moving to the cloud, careful consideration of several departments' and other stakeholders' needs ultimately drove the decision Improving morale municipality-wide—now absent the previously heavy administrative load, and with positive leadership in place, HR turned its attention to workforce morale, with greater employee engagement and a much-improved Glassdoor rating being the eventual results Acknowledging diversity & inclusion—Alex was ahead of the curve in tackling diversity D&I in Memphis, establishing a focus on it in 2016, when she joined the municipality, ultimately increasing the representation of women and minorities in the municipality's workforce There's much more—updating and improving retirement programs, acknowledging civil rights–era staff, drastically decreasing time-to-hire, significantly increasing retention and upping pay in the all-important police and fire departments. The list goes on, and the gist of the success at the City of Memphis HR department and municipality-wide is this: Technology is the necessary tool, but leadership is the essential ingredient.
Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome. George LaRocque who is SVP of insights for unleashed. Welcome to the show, George. George: Thanks Max. Thanks for having me.Max: Pleasure. George and I met in the real world, a real world event with real people you can touch and feel, right? Well you're not supposed to touch him, but that was in 2018, I think. And, back then unleashed was, I think the leading events company in an HR and TA tech, or one of the leading ones. Anyway, I mentioned you've had a pretty, shocking year. George: Yeah. That's to say the least, and I'm sure everybody who's receiving this podcast will nod in agreement. When we met, I think I was partnering with unleash, and my involvement has increased over the last couple of years. So I actually jumped on board in the middle of this craziness, as unleashes moved the business to the media, given that we get to your point, we can't get together physically at the moment.Max: Right, right. And can you tell us, for the audience, a little bit about your bio, how you ended up being a voice of TA tech? For many of us knowing. Are you a practitioner basically? George: Yeah, I've been in this market. It's just over 30 years now, which is crazy. I spent the first 10 as a practitioner, I came out of the staffing world. Like many people make their transition. I moved from the agency side, where I was working in tech just at the end of the eighties, early nineties, and then moved over 10 years, moved on to what would have been the client side, into the employer side. Then started a consulting firm. What would have been now called an RPO in the Boston area, focused on internet startups and our customers were all involved... Customer was called the monster board. We did all their hiring in the Boston area for sales. ThreeComma, a Datacom company in the US back at the beginning of like, you know, TCP, IP and networking protocols.And we did engineering for them, but through that, I jumped onto the tech side. So I spent 10 years in HR technology and I was employee number 10 or 11 at a company called Brass Ring and took them through to 50 million. I had a couple of good runs and another one people might recognize, I ran global sales for Bull Horn, through their first big VC ramp. Yep. And then I was a general manager at telemetry, which actually was Higher Desk and turned into telemetry and now they are part of Jobvite. And, 10 years ago I started in this advisory and analyst world. And that's what brings us here, it's been an evolution, up to date. And so that's where I am. Max: It sounds like you've had some pretty stressful jobs. You were well-prepared for 2020, for a stressful year. Because you were there when beating salesmen Bullhorn was going through its rapid growth phase, I guess from 10 to 100 or 10 to 50, maybe. George: That's about right. And you know, to go from, you know, zero customers at brass ring to 50 million in a few years. Right? Yeah. And then to watch the bubble burst in 2000 and be right in the, you know, like sitting on the bubble when it burst then the financial crisis of 2008. I would say the thing that prepares you just in a general sense is stress, but also you get instincts for a down market, you know, that's the part that we've seen before. But even that's different here. It's spotty, like your people are either drowning in. You know, overwhelmed with business, or they can't find it. And there's very little in between. So this is unusual, but yeah, I would say, it didn't make me any more confident than the next person, but I felt like I had some instincts to fall back on.Max: Yeah. Yeah. I guess, in March and April, I was trying to, yeah. Some up those memories from 2008 because I was a business owner back then already. And I remember the bad news just kinda following each other. It was bad news like for six months straight.You just never see the end of it. And so 2020. I think most people knew if I head back into March that, okay, this isn't going to be a bad year. It's going to stay with us for a while. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly if we're out of this yet, but it teaches you to be more conservative. I'm sure people have had enough of the gloom. I hear about those businesses that can't keep up with demand. You mentioned some companies are doing super well right now. What are they focused on? George: I would say, well in the HR tech space, there are two types of companies that have done well. One, would be those tech providers who were really exclusively marketing into a really large enterprise, and had an established brand, established product. The larger employers have while they may have furloughed or had a reduction in force, you know, within recruiting or HR, some percentage of their workforce. They've also invested in some digital transformation. So we're seeing that, and that's just a fancy way of saying they're upgrading their systems, in some cases. Max: So the guy from the eighties, it's coming back. George: There you go. Yup. They've crossed the chasm. So there was definitely a tapping of the brakes, you know, April, May. Big companies weren't buying software at that time for a moment. And then, I think as we moved into later in the spring, early summer, some of the vendors that are in that segment had some of their best quarters, deals were accelerated or deals came back to life.The other type, even where you would expect companies that were marketing into the SMB or middle market would have been hit hard. And that's true. If they were focused with customers, if they were lucky enough to have companies in industries that were, let's say a grocery or a healthcare, or logistics or tech, they did better than they should. There were some vendors who cut staff and then grew at a rate greater than they expected,. and which is, you know, it's been such a difficult time for everyone but a lot of folks, a lot of vendors we're really at an early stage, they didn't have any momentum, maybe the product wasn't mature, the point solution. There were some really, tough tales to tell that came out of... There's just bad timing, for them, they weren't able to get out into the market and get that momentum, to sustain. Max: You kind of have to be past that certain level of maturity to survive a crisis like this. You are a young team perhaps, and I don't mean like literally more than 12 years old. I mean like, you know, to a point where you have a solid base of customers.George: Yeah, absolutely. Max: And we've seen, in the industry, a lot of consolidation, I guess not everybody in my audience is going to geek out on TA tech news and find out who gets bought by who. But that's your world and, maybe you can tell us, what are some of the negative trends we're seeing. On my side, I saw that there was a lot of movement from companies that were doing video. Video used to be a category. But I think now video is more of a feature that everybody has. That was my main takeaway. George: Yep. I'd agree with that. I think the reason I tell practitioners or leaders in talent acquisition, they should watch both, what's happening in investment and with consolidation is to have a sense of what's coming their way. So if you're looking for the emerging technology, I'm not even talking about the specific vendors but, you get a sense over the period of, you know, a few quarters as to where investments are going on emerging tech, emerging solutions. It might not be emerging tech. It might not be that it doesn't have the bells and whistles, like something conversational, but you may see that, for example, right now there's a lot going into analytics and process management around recruiting.You might see not a lot is going into job boards anymore at the moment, or marketplaces which surprisingly have led the category for years. You'd see a lot going into internal mobility and matching and those areas. So you get a sense of what's coming at the same time for consolidation if you're using point solutions and platforms, you particularly get a sense of what those capabilities are at a platform level. So if you're using an ATS, what moves are these vendors making? And if you're thinking about your tech stack in the next one - three years, I think it's a good Indicator for trends and you need to solve the problems that you have and seize the opportunities that you need to seize and look for the Cape. And it's not one size fits all out there, but these are things that I think are helpful. In that way.Max: A lot of the practitioners got into recruitment for the same reasons you did probably. To be on the sell side and busy dealing with people. And, you know, buying tech came as an add on, not the main thing and a bit of a chore. And, I think last year, people were still. They had a little fun budget that they can spend on where they can try a few initiatives every year. And then some of those customers would sign on because they needed to show initiative. They needed to show I'm going to try something different this year and it looks good on my resume. And this year, maybe that's not so important anymore. It's more about doing more with less and asking more from your existing vendors. George: Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Another good reason to keep your eye on tech and what's happening, in our market and outside of our market, you know, what's happening in the world of technology? And I'm not one to ever recommend that you would modify, let's say a solution from outside of recruiting, into recruiting. That never goes well, it never scaled. But yeah doing more with less is something that as I mentioned, you know, there have been a lot of layoffs. There are probably fewer recruiters in any given company and those recruiters are asked to do more and, having a sense of what's available to help accomplish that goal is a good thing. And it tends to look like, I think companies are either forced to address the need to automate tasks and what would be administrative to get the recruiters and the leaders in TA focused, you know, where they need to be. On with candidates, candidate engagement, working within the organization, with managers, working the process you know, they're forced to do it because they're doing more with less, or they're taking that step back.I think a lot of larger organizations that are investing in technology right now, it's, it's a way to justify some of the headcount that they're keeping they're implementing these technologies, evaluating these technologies but at the end of the day it's the same goal, which is, you know, how do we get to where freeing up the recruiters, the operators, to be on that process and driving that process and not drowning in it. Max: Yeah. I can say from my experience, on our side, that the volume of candidates and leads process for the recruiter has tripled over the last six months. And obviously you just can't do this same thing you did before if you have three times the volume you did before. You have to change a little bit, the way you do things, because you adapt to your environment.You were saying job boards, the big hits, I think most suppliers there and with the compounding effects of Facebook and Google driving also traffic, at least in the high volume space, the driving traffic, a lot of those traffic is free. I imagined, 2021 is probably not going to be an amazing year for indeed, and zip and those guys. Yes, there'll be some recovery. Right. I saw that Zip had some recovery in Australia in Q4. But I want to go back to, you're telling us about your early story. You're not in Boston anymore. Are you? Geroge: No I'm in New Jersey. Like most people in New Jersey, I'm, you know, 40 minutes out of New York city. Yeah. Max: Boston, for those who don't come from Boston, it's not necessarily seen as a tech hub, but I found out over the years that there was kind of the TA tech hub of the world 20 years ago. And I guess still today. Can you tell us about how'd that happen and give us a little bit of the history?George: Sure. So it really, back in those days, you know, Silicon Valley's was always the hub, right? It was always where it all sort of exploded, but there used to be maps that had, it was a map of the US and it had Boston and they shrunk the rest of the country. And then it had Silicon Valley. And you had your tech belt. It was the highways that went around, the two highways, one 28 and four 95 that went around Boston and all the different tech shops that were either in... Cambridge was a hub for a lot of startups. MIT is in Cambridge, Harvard's in Cambridge.And then out toward the suburbs, you had a lot of larger campuses for tech shops and a couple of the larger, employment advertising shops were out. Emerging shops, innovative shops were out of Boston. And I would say that the first one to really explode and drive traction around HR tech was Adyen, the founder of Adyen was Jeff Taylor who started Monster. And so, I was at that point running a consulting shop. We had about 60 people all around Boston. And, we were dealing with some really some of the first e-commerce shops. And, I mentioned three common others, and Jeff Taylor would show up with a salesperson. Carol McCarthy was her name and they would offer us, you know, we partnered with them and we would bring free postings to our customers. And we would argue with them at the time about you've gotta be on the internet. You've gotta be on the web. And they wouldn't. It was a really fun time because we took employers to the web.We created their career sites and we. Hook them up with, places like what was called the monster board back then. and at that time, the ATS market was run by a couple of shops called Resumex and Rex Track. They own the large enterprise and larger middle market on-premise software and you had a brass ring, which came out of the Boston area. It grew out of a resume processing company. So all the job fairs, all the resumes that came into employers were on paper. And you had these systems like Resumex and Rex Track and others. You would literally go through a factory process that gets scanned optical character recognition turned into data, uploaded in a total QC process.And then, as the web was emerging or able to take applications to the web. That's where the Brass Ring emerged. And there were some other shops on the West coast that emerged, but didn't, you know, Taleo, which was recruitment software, came out of Canada and then came down. I want to say through Chicago to, ultimately to Silicon Valley, but it was, yeah, the Boston area was teaming with, you know, early job boards early recruitment technology, this was 97, 98 to 2000.Max: It sounds like Monster had a key role to play in that. George: They really did you know, like any success story. It was a combination of vision. so they could see where the market was going and how this was going to evolve before really anybody was seeing it. And timing, they were there, and hard work. Right. And they had some good ideas. Where do they end up going? And that's a brand people love to hate on and that's fine. But they were a major player and they really helped create the space.Max: They got big and then other problems appeared. But I mean, at the time in the late nineties, They picked that weird grand, they called themselves Monster. Everybody had a much more corporate sounding name back then. The internet was just getting started, all those dotcoms and, I think they did it a little bit on purpose to say, you know either you're with us, the incident folks or you're against us, you're part of the old guard. And we don't need you as a customer. It was a bit of a, you know, the boldness, the choice of brand. George: Yeah, we would do all their sales hiring. They were on the, their first office was, the second floor over a Chinese takeout restaurant. And you know, we'd go on site, spend an hour. A couple of hours with them, with the consultants we had there, you'd leave. And you'd just smell like Chinese food from being in the office. And then as he started to grow, I remember, telling people that they would have to, you know, don't worry they're expanding. They're going to have a facility, but there are two trailers in the parking lot for now. And then just those, you know, these sorts of things that, I'm sure there are people out there somewhere that worked in those trailers. Well we put them there. Max: Yeah. And so with the universities and then maybe circumstance having this gentleman's at Taylor and starting this company in Boston for no other reason than he was there. And then, many of the alumni that moved on to start their own companies. And today I think there are a number of companies that are there, including your old employer of Bullhorn. I think phenom people are quoted there. And then a number of other companies. Was SmashFly as well in Boston?George: Yep. They were founded there. In fact the original founder of SmashFly, Mike Hennessy, was probably employee number three or four at Brass Ring. And so we worked closely together for several years and, you know, like any of those shops. And there are still people that when I've...Back in those days when we could go to events, Brass Ring is now part of IBM. And, if I go by the IBM booth, I see old friends and they've really never left. They've just gone from Brass Ring that connects to IBM. But we used to joke and say there are probably, you know, 300 people that are like the core of the industry. And they just move around and a lot of other people sort of come and go, but there are a lot more than that now, I think.Max: That's true. You do see that. And we hear that in your story is that these companies don't just die, they just merge and they move from one animal to the next. And this is sort of a Darwinian experience. Right. So it's see how it evolves. And they changed names. Like Hot Jobs do you remember that one? George: Yeah. HotJobs got acquired by Yahoo. Max: Oh, yes. George: And, you know, it was Yahoo hot jobs and Dan Finnegan, who was the founder of Jobvite, I know, was involved with Yahoo hot jobs and I believe the founder of, Avature came out of one of those groups. You know, early on, when you look at Brass Ring, it had, newspapers behind it.So the newspapers were, they had Excel partners out of Silicon Valley, very small stake, but over a hundred million came in from the Washington post, the Tribune companies can net newspapers, which is USA today. So newspapers were hedging, their bets against, you know, the classified business was starting to dwindle.They were looking at how that was going to go online. They also created an advertising network, which Knight Ridder became a part of. Which is where career builder grew out of, which is also where, Dan Finnegan came out of that Knight, Ridder group. So you've got different camps from the late nineties like the Post's Tribune camp and then the night Ritter camp, and then a few big brands that came out of that, that were all different. In some cases, the same newspapers in different investing groups that were putting their chips on the table, sort of hedging their bets based on what they were expecting to see with changes, and impact on their classified ad revenue. They didn't do any of it fast enough or go hard enough as we've all seen. But that's an interesting subplot to the whole, the whole thing as well.Max: With your unique perspective of seeing people moving from place to place and companies evolving, it makes sense that you would be working in automation now. Which is, you know, a great networker and a place where the industry meets.And I think your story is one that can serve as inspiration for people who end up in recruitments and say that I don't want to be interviewing people for the rest of my life, or I don't want to be doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah you can move into technology. You can move into sales, you can move into media, and touch a lot of things and it prepares you for a rich career. And, and if you stick around long enough, then you can see the same faces over and over again. George: Good, good point. You know what? I used to think that, but it was just my great timing. You know and of course there was some of that, I entered the space and the internet was emerging and the web emerged and on demand, you know, cloud-based technologies emerged and I'm passionate about technology. So I was in the right place at the right timeAnd the other thing that's true is that I think the profession has evolved and emerged. What technology has done and what, you know, changes that all businesses have experienced is it really demonstrates how I think recruiting can really have a massive impact.And I think if you look beyond the matches that you're making and the interviews that you're scheduling and if you sort of step back and think about the impact you can have on the business. And if you pursue that internally in your current role or in your career, moving to the next role, there are a lot of places to go with that.If you can see the impact that recruiting and recruitment technology and talent acquisition can have on the market and on any given employer. I think that's another thing that I was, there to see was sort of how this all, you know, has unfolded and I've been lucky to watch.Max: It's so important to go back to that feeling of I'm helping people get a job and, you know, a good year, a bad year, and you know, God knows 2020 wasn't a great year, but it's still up to this, you know the industry and our people to think: I'm going to help somebody get their next game.George: Yeah.Max: I guess that's why when you go network with people who've been in the industry for 20 years they're nice folks to be around because they have that purpose in their career. And I hope for the listeners who are in the early stages of their career they can see that, it's not that easy to find purpose that once you have it and you sort of hold onto it, George: Yeah good point.Max: To wrap it up, I'd like to give you a chance to maybe promote some of your upcoming events perhaps with Unleash or tell people how to get a hold of you. George: Well, you can find unleash at unleashgroup.io, and you'll find me there. And the HR winds was my previous brand. It's still there. There's still content there, reports there, unleash is really, for the foreseeable future. It's all about media and content. So everything's there. So the. content about recruiting, about recruiting technology and the rest of the employee experience and HR spectrum, is there as well. So I would encourage people to go take a look and I'm sure they'll find something interesting if they're listening to this podcast.Max: Absolutely. I go there myself. George interviews some of the industry leaders and has unique data on how the market is changing. So if you want to be ahead of the curve and know what's going to hit you a year or so now that's the place to go and check it out. Thanks so much, George, for joining us and for reminiscing on the old days. I am actually quite happy to know that there's now a record of those souvenirs about the Boston era that has, you know, foundational importance to the world of TA tech saved on our blog.George: Excellent. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun.I hope you enjoyed my interview with George as much as I did. George is a real historian of the talent acquisition tech space and from the evolution and meanderings of the industry, we can all get inspiration to constantly reinvent ourselves and renew our industry. If you enjoyed it and you're up for more subscribe to our podcast and please share with friends.
My next guest is a seasoned talent acquisition, human resources and marketing executive. She has developed and successfully executed talent acquisition, human capital and organizational developments strategies, marketing plans, and budgets for operations in North America, Europe, APAC, and Latin America and currently heads up talent acquisition marketing for TTEC. TOPICS Tell everyone what TTEC does and what you typically hire for? How many people will you hire in the 4th quarter for this year? Recruiting machine... Going remote: you moved 39,000 ppl from the office to remote work...what was that like? How do you hire that many people? (give high level overview of your rec mktg strategy) million plus applicants, b2c marketing tactics Social media - you told me you get 30% of your applicants from sites like Facebook...can you break down how you do that? cadence Do you know what your conversion rate is for clicks to apply? Tech stack: Taleo is your ATS, Ascendify is your career site and you also use Jobsync, can you just touch on each of these in terms of how you use them? TTEC has been partnering with LivePerson to support contact tracing for organizations and companies And how we are releasing a module on our own AI driven training product called RealPlay to support our employees on having difficult conversation about diversity and inclusion. Where can people go to learn more about careers at TTEC and see your careers website?
Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platforms. Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today I'm welcoming Zac Engler, who is the head of talent acquisition for a company called PaR Systems, which he'll tell us all about. Zac, welcome to the show. Zac: Hey Max, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.Max: It's a pleasure. When I saw that you moved into this new company I thought that was a real good match between the kind of recruiter that you are, a tinker, somebody who likes to play with tours and the kind of business that PaR System does. But for those who don't know you, perhaps, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you come from? How did you get into recruitment? and then we'll talk about your business next.Zac: Yeah. So, thank you. I started off with a career in more of an HR generalist capacity at Target headquarters. Transitioned over through to, more of a retail leadership slash talent development and recruitment person while in my time at Apple. And that's really where I got my taste of full-on recruiting. And from there I just realized that it needed to be a hundred percent of my job. I landed an opportunity at Amplifon, the world's largest provider of hearing care solutions, and I oversaw the build-out of their North American talent acquisition team. And from there, you know, was really on a great pace in terms of exploring new technologies and bringing new capabilities to recruitment.When PaR Systems came along with really the dream job for me, as you said, I'm a tinkerer. I love all things nerdy when it comes to space flight. When it comes to nuclear reactors, when it comes to nuclear energy, when it comes to robotics and automation, and PaR does all of those things. So it just was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that I got to capitalize on, and they're slated from some tremendous growth over the next few years. So they brought me on as a head of talent acquisition to really help grow out that capability and scale the team. Max: I believe this company has a few hundred people today. Zac: Yeah, we have 450 people. We have locations here in Minnesota, in the Minneapolis area. We have another large location in Brunswick, Georgia, and then we have satellite offices around the world. Some of the locations are in the United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Japan, but overall, the biggest locations are Minnesota. Max: Minnesota and Georgia. Okay. And PaR Systems, hires a lot of engineers then, and finds what it's looking for in Minnesota. Zac: Yeah. 75% of our staff is either engineers or highly technical positions, a lot of the projects and products that we design and build are one of a kind or first of a kind solutions. The robotic crane system currently tearing apart Chernobyl is one example of something that had never been done before. That we designed and built. But yeah, as far as the engineering talent that we're looking for, a lot of that is based here in Minnesota, whether it's applications engineers, controls engineers, systems engineers, mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, you know, we are looking for them all And so getting into those work streams has been a unique challenge for me as well. Max: Yeah. I think you're the man for the job but, these roles seem like perhaps you would find them in the sort of fundamental research university sector, find these kinds of profiles, because if you said it's first of a kind, you're not going to find people who have, you know, nuclear crane on their resume much. I'm sorry if I'm misquoting your example. Is your funnel focused on more general traits? And then, you know, you need a solid engineering background and then general traits of the tinker? Or you know, can you learn on the job kind of thing?Zac: Yes, our team full heartedly believes in, in training and development and mentorship. A lot of the people that come into our organization in a junior position are given a mentor almost immediately, and are set on a path for development. And one of the nice things about joining the PaR team is that, you know, if you would go join a larger organization, you might be assigned as an engineer to work on a piece of the widget that's a bigger part of the project for the next two years. Whereas at PaR, you get assigned projects almost immediately that you get to own, you're giving guidance and support as you work through those projects. But you can almost think of us like McKinsey or Deloitte in a way where we're not the company always necessarily turning out the product. We're the ones helping other companies design, then build the things that will go out and make their products. So it's really fun to be at that very leading edge of the production line.Max: I see. And working on the production line, so from design to production and then figuring out how to optimize there. Zac: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Max: Cool. So as part of their recruitment process for you, when you were being considered for this job, did they ask you to show the toys you've been building? I remember you were one of the first people to experiment with chatbots for the world of recruitments, was this part of the selection process?Zac: I think it helped my case. But yeah, in the 10 interviews I went through, it was definitely a great exposure to the organization to learn all the different quadrants that we work within, whether it's material handling, crane and nuclear work, whether it's military, marine. Whether it's aerospace and aeronautics or alive sciences automation, those four areas. I got a chance to work with those folks and share my story of how we streamlined candidate workflow through automation to allow us to actually connect with the person behind the resume, and get to the best candidates more quickly, if we're on the sourcing side of the candidate funnel. So there was definitely a lot of hope and positivity around that aspect of the work that I'd done in the past. Max: Well in North America, in 2020 people are complaining about the fact that in spite of the highest unemployment rates in the history of the country, practically, it's still hard to find people. It's still hard to find enough talent to go work. And even entry-level jobs like retail and call centers. In your space, I suppose the impact has been lesser, both for the talent and the employer, because engineering keeps on engineering. There hasn't been a massive impact. So two part question, first, hoping my assumptions are correct. And secondly, what can you do to expand your town pool if it is, you know, the ongoing hustle that it has been to find enough engineers? Zac: Yeah, for sure. So I think your assumptions are spot on. You know, with the baby boomer generation moving in towards that retirement age. You know, we have 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day for the next nine years here in the US, and as they vacate these skilled positions, they're leading openings that we won't necessarily have the talent to backfill. And I think one of the unique things that we're challenged with at PaR, is figuring out what are some of those pathways from skilled trade to STEM, right?How can we bring in people who maybe don't have a four year degree in an area, but have an associates degree. And train them up, and train them into those other types of roles and positions within the organization. And this doesn't have to be just engineering. This could be, in my prior world of hearing care, in pharmaceuticals and nursing, for example, right?Zac: There's a lot of entry points to those other types of businesses where you can enter in, as a pharmacy tech, as a nursing assistant. And go through schooling and get support as you then train yourself up to those higher levels within those businesses. It's getting those tracks in place and making that easier for companies to do, that I think will definitely be helpful.There's a local organization here called Make It MSP or Greater MSP that is focused on drawing talent to the Minneapolis and Minnesota region, and some of the work that they're doing is focused on just that. How do we create more visibility and opportunity for a diverse candidate set that did not always have the privilege of going to university, for example?Max: Yeah. And so explain to me how that imaginary perfect candidate would look like? Are we talking about a technician who was doing mechanical repair work on, I don't know, air conditioning units? Because he needs to, you know, put food on the table, feed his family, his or her.Although I have never met a female air conditioning technician, I'm sure there are plenty of them. And, so I had a mental picture. So this person would have the intellectual curiosity and the ambition to move into the engineering space. And then start to receive more fundamental training into these, let's say, into the nuclear field, does that kind of transition can happen?Zac: In certain instances. Absolutely. And you know, I think women are now a bigger part of the collegiate population in general, in the United States anyway. So, targeting, empowering and creating visibility to these types of opportunities, I think it's one area that businesses in STEM fields would benefit from. Right? Because a lot of times we're just running into this situation of, It's not top of mind for students, whether it's high school or college students, they don't know that they can become a shop floor technician with only a two year degree, that pays $50,000 a year, right out of school. They don't know that they could become a pharmacist or tech or a hearing care professional right out of school, with minimal training and certification and so creating that type of awareness for students. I think it is a cultural shift as well for us to get through it, because I think that the baby boomers did a great job of, you know, propagating college and saying college college college. Whatever you do. Just go to college. It doesn't matter. Just go! Max: They got away from the real work. Zac: Right. And we shifted and pivoted from college being the emphasis, to now I think we need to just figure out where are the priorities for economic success and how do we align that with people's passions and desires?Max: No, I totally get that. Now that we've put the blame on the boomers, I totally get it. Zac and I are both. I believe gen X. Zac: Not at all. Max: No?Zac: I'm an elder millennial, we'll say. Max: Okay. So, elder millennials and young fresh gen X-ers like myself. There's a very high chance that we were raised in a family where our parents did not work in industrial work, right? Because, our parents' generation, they're the ones who... Well the industrial work turned South for most of Western economies. And so, I guess, yeah, you've to start from scratch to show a new generation of people, that there is this kind of work available.Zac: Exactly. I think organizations can also, you know, work harder to create that visibility for those opportunities. And even if you just look at some of the technology that's in place that a lot of major corporations, you know, the ATS can either be a great tool for companies to use, or it could be the bane of everybody's hiring experience, right?Like there's still sadly, so many companies. That just let the ATS be this never-ending pool of people applying and getting responses. There's also some really great examples of companies diving in and creating those personal connections. Those career networks and giving people, support mechanisms after they're rejected, like what a concept that we would, even though we're saying no to you, we would help you out and give you thoughts and advice and areas to investigate that might be better aligned with your skillset.Max: Yeah. I think the ATS stronghold is also because in North America in particular, there's a legal concern of compliance for EEO, OFCCP, FCRA guidelines. And, for a tinkerer like yourself, maybe I can ask you, is there a way to be compliance with these guidelines without using the ATS? Are our town's acquisition people making a big thing out of something that doesn't need to be?Zac: I think that the ATS definitely has its place in the recruitment process and in the talent acquisition process. I don't know that we're able to get past that, per se, but it's like anything, how you use it should be the focus of every business, and using it just like we're focusing on diversity and inclusion, just like we're focusing on championing women leadership capabilities. We should be focused on creating a highly engaged, personal process for every candidate. Max: Yeah, I feel like you're dodging the question a little bit. The question I'm trying to get at is, can we do compliance without asking the candidates to go through the ATS? And I think the answer is yes, but I'm happy to hear your opinion on this topic. If you think I'm wrong. Zac: If we're able to get to the information we need to know to be compliant, then my answer would be yes. Maybe there is a chat tool out there that could help people get to that spot within the process to streamline that candidate flow. The thing I would caution there is just, are you still gonna ask the same question that you would, when people are clicking through the 15 Taleo steps, right? Only just now, they're having to do it on SMS with their thumbs. Not to throw them under the bus, but they're an easy target. Max: Right. Yeah, the question it's still gotta be there, if I understand your comments on the chat, you obviously know which angle I'm coming from. I am not an advocate for chats interface all the time, for everybody. And if we're talking about a long checklist of tick marks you have to fill in, I do think that an actual forum UI is more appropriate than a chat. But I also think it's a shame. If what you're trying to build is trust, if you're trying to build engagements to get all of this compliance and all these checklists done at the front of the funnel. Might dilute your message. And you might miss out on some good candidates. You can take them from cold to lukewarm or very warm before you have to go through the compliance stuff.Zac: Yeah. I think that's where automation can definitely step in. How are you finding the best fit for your organization quickly? And how are you teaming that person up with another person as quickly as possible? Because I am a little bias that a recruiter who's looking at a job holistically from start to finish, will be a great, what I like to call a talent liaison, for the company and for that candidate, so that you can build trust with them throughout the recruitment process, so that you can have a true rapport and understanding of...Even if this particular role doesn't work out, there may be other opportunities that align in the future. and that person will be more likely to participate as well because they had a confidant at the organization teamed up with them, rather than a siloed experience where they got passed off from person to person, or had they continuously apply through this, you know, stale old process, to not get any results or traction with their application, even though they might be a huge promoter of the brand. Max: And, when somebody changes jobs and moves into a new company like yourself, like you did a few, a couple of months ago, it's usually an opportunity for the new company to like pick their brains and get the best ideas from, from the new, the new person. What are some of the early initiatives that you've been able to implement coming into the new role that you can share with us?Zac: Yeah, one of the first areas we're tackling is our job posts, actually. To this point, we are just copy pasting job descriptions onto our careers page, and as you may have heard me say in the past, too many bullets kill people. So let's say, if people aren't going to read the full thing or you're only going to pick out a couple bullets that are relevant and then apply anyways, that doesn't help anybody in the process. Right? It doesn't help the company or the candidate. So we're trying to, pilot and pivot to a performance-based job posting. Methodology, which will tell a story about the role. It'll give you a sense of what your first 90 days or first year are going to look like. It'll also tell you what you're going to get out of joining our organization and not just say like, you will do this for us, but here's what you'll get out of that experience.And, it's our goal to use that as a lever, to set us apart from the competition. Looking at 30 or so different competitors that we have in our industry. Maybe one or two of them is taking a similar approach. If that. But it'll also help us increase our diversity inclusion efforts as well. Because as you know, some job descriptions can be inherently biased and that can shy people away from the application process.Max: All right. And helping get a visual around that. We're talking about, you said, I guess less bullet points and more of a journey. So does it look like a slide deck where you move through a few images of this is what your job would look like. This is what you'd be doing. Is it like a slide deck or am I being a management consulting nerd?Zac: No, no, no. You're just fast forwarding from what I want to implement in the next six months. But, it starts off with storytelling and really, if you check out Lou Adler, he's got some great... He's really been the pioneer in this space, that I've molded our approach off, both at Amplifon and now here at PaR.So it really is that storytelling approach to encourage people to self select out. Once they start reading and understanding that this isn't a fit for them, and to really accelerate the interest of somebody who it is a fit for. And then yeah, down the road, having those more interactive and engaging job posts, video job posts or video advertisements around virtual job descriptions is on my roadmap for next year.Max: Well, one thing that, sourcing teams, challenge, you know, are challenged with. Is “Oh, that sounds great”, you know, what you just described, but we don't have enough leads. So we don't have time to build more information and more screens you have to go through in order to get to the applicant stage.So I was thinking. You know, the salvation may come from changing the main metric from cost per lead or number of leads to a more complex metric where you would only measure a lead if it's qualified, it's interested, it's shown where the first 90 days are on the job, and after all of that, it says yes. Have you had to change a little bit the way you track and you measure effectiveness and TA, or is that part of the plan?Zac: That'll be a part of the plan. So we're on month two and establishing a core set of KPIs and metrics that will be happening here as well. And I think having that ability to capture the candidate where they live is an ideal place for us in the future. So that somebody, browsing Facebook, browsing, LinkedIn, or just browsing the web. And they come across an ad from us, and they're engaged in our brand either via a chat system, or via an interactive job posting that is more likely to draw their attention than just the standard boiler plate. Right? Max: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of Zach Angler's school of talent acquisition and tinkering. Congrats on the new role. And thank you for joining me on the podcast and sharing your insights with our viewers. Where can people get a hold of you?Zac: Absolutely Max, thanks for having me on. If people want to learn more, they can visit, zacengler.com for a little bit more about myself. Some of the radical ideas I have around AI, as well as the children's books that I've been working on. And people could visit par.com to learn more about our organization. Max: Children book as well? Did I hear that right? Zac: Yes. Yes. there is a children's book I've been working on for the last decade. If you have little ones, check it out, it'll bring a smile to hopefully anybody from Age 9 to 92. Max: You'd been working on it for a decade. Wow. Zac: Yeah. It's about a family of dung beetles. Max: Dung beetles. Okay. Well zacengler.com we'll go check it out. Thanks again for being on the show.Zac: Absolutely. Max. Thank you. Max: That was Zac Engler from PaR Systems, who I've always known to be a tinkerer and an insatiable mind. Very curious. and isn't it great to see him find a company where he gets to work in robotics. And nuclear technology and other, I think there are very few areas, functional areas, like talent acquisition that allow for people to go into these fields and an opportunity to learn about the areas that they're passionate about, without having to have formal training in this domain. So, I'm sure Zac will make the most of it and be an inspiration for us to always look for the company that aligns most with our values. Hope you enjoyed this interview and that, you'll come back for more at the recruitment hackers podcast. Thank you.
Enough with the hollow argument about why your ATS sucks, Serge and Shelley get to the heart of the matter. Survey says…. Jobvite & iCIMS are eating Taleo's lunch. Maybe it's time to take their toys and go home? Arm wrestle over the difference between the CRM function in Talent Acquisition VS Sales. Shelley had to bow to Serge - maybe he's right?!? Serge and Shelley talk about the evolution of the ATS Lastly, why gaming the ATS doesnt work.
How can you create a career that works for you and your ideal lifestyle? How has the changing world of work impacted recruiting? In this episode, Nick Livingston of Honeit joins me to discuss how hiring can become more efficient & equitable and how he has gotten to where he is today. Nick enjoys helping companies recruit, hire and scale. Honeit turns interviews into talent insights. As the Head of Talent Acquisition at TubeMogul (now Adobe), Nick and team scaled from 60 to 360 employees through IPO ($TUBE) in just 26 months. In the same two years, he received his MBA from UC Berkeley (evenings/weekends), started a family (three daughters) and co-founded Honeit Software. At MTV Networks (Viacom) in New York City, he was the Director of Talent Acquisition responsible for global digital media, interactive technology and product management recruitment. He’s worked at two HR Technology companies (Taleo, NextSource) and started his career as a tech headhunter in NYC. MBA from UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business. BS in Applied Mathematics Find him at honeit.com or nick@honeit.com Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/shake-the-cosmos-empower-your-vision/donations
Welcome to the Recruitment hackers podcast show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Okay. Hello everybody. And welcome to the recruiter hackers podcast by Max Armbruster. And today I'm pleased to welcome on the show the global talent acquisition capability leader at Accenture, Jason Roberts. Welcome Jason. Jason: Thank you. And thank you for saying all of the words in that title. I know it's a lot. Max: Can we mix them around? We can move them.Jason: You got it exactly right and t's a bunch though. We were just talking and it's a whole lot of words. I'm not sure that it says anything. So, What that means is that I have a pretty fun gig and that I'm responsible for processes and technologies and how we do recruiting for Accenture's customers. And we will do that for large organizations where we hire several hundred thousand people per year.So we get to try out lots of technologies. We have a pretty nice clean standard process that we work from. And I get to, to be a part of that and work with smart people every day. It's good.Max: Yeah. Fantastic. You said a few hundred thousand people every year. And I guess that number is getting bigger than ever now where the industry is kind of figuring out how we're going to get these 30 plus million people back to work in North America and I don't know, it must be hundreds of millions worldwide. So the pressure is on to, to deliver you know, I'm gonna say a good, maybe a decent experience for most of them. Jason: Well, what's interesting is what I worry about with, with COVID is that candidate experience will stop being a priority because candidate experience is a big deal when you've got 3% unemployment and it's necessary in order to, to achieve the hires that you need to achieve. But when there's 25% unemployment or 20% unemployment, you don't need candidate experience, people just need jobs. So it's, it's one of those things where if I'm worried that we might lose ground in the candidate experience side of things. I think we all want to be in a position where we treat people well, and we had started seeing real improvements in that space. And it was because companies were making investments in the right things in order to make it happen. I'm hoping we get to continue that, but there's a, I think there's a real risk that we'll take a step backwards in that space. Max: Yeah. I've definitely noticed that people are not getting back to candidates as fast as they should be and positions are being kept open even though they're not real. And so it's kinda like candidates sending beautiful offer letters and resumes and hearing nothing back, hearing crickets.On the plus side, the candidate experience is improved by the fact that companies are not defaulting to asking people to come physically in person. And when you consider how time consuming that can be and demanding, that can be, well.. We were meeting in person. It was a lot of work for me. I mean, I had to take a plane to come and meet you. Jason: Well, no, you didn't have to. I was always great with being on video if you want to do that. I found that suppliers really wanted to meet in person. And I've worked remotely for over a decade, probably 13 years now, something like that, that I've worked remotely. And I was completely good being on phone and people would just would want and meet, man. Okay, well, I'll meet with you. You know I actually had an office for the sole purpose of meeting with suppliers when they came into town. That's the only time I went to the office when I met with somebody that came in town to meet me.Max: I remember that office. It was, it was a, We Work Jason: It was a We Work, We Work, right. That's why I only went there every once in a while. I just, I would reserve a conference room. And I think you, you came back to the actual inner sanctum. You saw the actual office. Yeah. Max: Yeah. Well I know you have a very cool job with Accenture today and you had a very cool job with Randstad before. Can you tell for our listeners, give us a quick overview of, where you come from and how you got into this space? Jason: Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I started recruiting, my age will show for sure. 1997. Was my first, my first piece of recruiting work.I was, I had a person, a friend that I knew... The internet was still pretty new. Right. So, like I got email for the first time in 1994, I think. So it was, it was still relatively new and a friend of mine said, Hey, I'm a recruiter. And I, hear you can find things on this internet thing. Can you help me with that? I said, well, yeah, I can help you search the internet. So I became an early sourcer and it was with a staffing firm and, that sort of, I progressed over a period of time so that, so that ultimately, I, I worked for the staffing firm full time then, did some consulting then I spent about seven years with Cisco systems and started out as a recruiter. I recruited Sales and sales engineers for them. Ultimately we built our own applicant tracking system back then there were no web based ATS everything was client server. So we thought, okay, well we're the backbone of the internet we should probably have something that's a web based deal. So we built our own and it was my job to be sort of the functional expert on that. And I worked in HR IT for a little while, built my own ATS with Cisco. And that was fun. Max: 2003 ish around that. Jason: Yeah. That's about right before Taleo showed up.Max: Yeah, it must have been frustrating to see the startup Taleo pick up all this business thinking... Jason: Yeah you know what, we built my module and of course dot com bubble burst along the way. And things slowed down a little bit in recruiting. And we built the module that was basically how we take job orders and approve things and we hadn't built a lot of the candidates stuff yet. And Taleo came out and with a few other things there and and we were like, Oh, these things are way better. Let's not build the rest. Let's just find a way to connect to these other deals. And that's what we did. We never finished, we just did the sort of requisition piece. It was called cafe rec, was the tweaks that..Max: Back then recruiting happened mostly in Starbucks. Jason: Well, apparently that's how it worked. It was a good thing. And, I learned a lot. Along the way, I became a certified project manager and it was great and then I had a boss that told me, you know, I'd become the operations leader for Cisco. And my boss said, you can either have my job, which I don't plan on leaving anytime soon. Or go to a place that does recruiting for a living. And I said, Oh, that's not a bad idea. And I'd outsourced our recruiting along the way. And I was responsible for the relationship between outsource company and Cisco and I played that sort of client side role. So the company that went through the RFP process, they actually told me no, they said, yeah, I don't think we can help you much. What you're trying to do is, is really not exactly the right thing.And there were a hundred percent, right. Like it was the, the worst conceived RFP and a terribly conceived sort of a model that we had designed and the only company that came back and said, this is a bad idea, we're going to bow out. We wish you luck and we'll help you with something else the next time. It was Accenture.I thought, man, that took a lot of integrity to do that. So, when I went to look for a job, they were the first people that I called. And, they made a job for me. So I went to work for Accenture, loved that, did that for six years in various roles. And then went to Randstand Source Right. And I loved Randstand Source Right. That was a good time. I, I went over to lead operations for them. And I did that for a number of years, uh, moved on to the, Senior Vice President of Strategy. Uh, it was Strategy and Standardization because a big part of the strategy was to standardize. Um, so that was that. And then, um, ultimately I ended my run there as Head of Technology and Analytics, uh, around the globe and, uh, Accenture is a funny place, man. It, uh, it calls you back at some point. There's lots of us that are boomerang. So we've come back. That's the role I'm in now I really, um, I really like. I remember the guy who had the role when I was here before and, uh, I loved what he was doing and we where he got to spend his time.So I, when that was open, I said, all right, let's do it. I came back back to Accenture. Max: Now, if you could go, you know, you go back 15 years. Um, um, would you do what I'm doing and start, uh, an ATS company. I started one in 2008, 2009. I was, I think, a few years too late, uh, on my first run. Jason: You know what? I do look back and think, um, I wish I had been a founder. I have a lot of respect for the founders that I know. And I look back, I think that quite a bit, um, I was, I had a family very, very young, uh, so, uh, we had our first child. I was in that spot. So the gamble wasn't my gamble. It was the whole family's gamble. So I, I never did it. And if I knew, then what I know now I might have, like, I understand the venture capital space. I understand how that all works. And I did, I was just so clueless back then. I had no idea. Um, but, uh, who knows? I have an idea. Maybe one of these days, I'll get to try it out. I do have and idea.Max: Oh, don't do it. Don't do it, Jason. It's the worst, worst thing that can happen to you. No money. Uh, no, uh, I don't recommend it. Jason: Ok, that's good to know! My other founder friends are like do it, do it today! I'm gonna wait until we're not in a, you know, a crisis.Max: Apparently recessions of the best time to start a business. Jason: Well, you know what a bunch of people that did that, did well doing that. Max: Yeah. Um, it, it sounds like, uh, throughout your career, while you were not an entrepreneur, you were able to tinker and build things and build toys. Um, and I picked up on the job title you shared with us. You said it was a Standardization in it. That doesn't sound too sexy, but there were also, um, some more creative exercises that you were involved in. Um, you were telling me before we started the video that you, learned about the limits of automation and where the humans were needed in an experiment that you ran a year or two years ago. Um, could, um, could you elaborate on that? Jason: Yeah. Well, we're actually experimenting with that right now, even. Um, so the technology exists to fully automate the recruiting process, especially at the, in the lower level jobs. So think retail, uh, warehouse workers, things where you're not making big decisions on the skills and capabilities, but it's more processing someone through with a very low threshold of qualification. So we call those high volume, low skill. And so for those roles, it's possible to fully automate. There's not a lot of discernment involved that needs to be made, a human doesn't need to make that decision on “Do we hire this person or not?” Everyone is qualified if they hit some basic knockout questions, like, can you lift 50 pounds? Literally, “can you have work boots on your first day?” Um, those are the sorts of things you have to, you have to ask them. So when that happens, uh, I remember I went to one, one interview center for massive distribution, uh, site, uh, one of the biggest in the world, I think. And, um, There's a building for interviews.And I sat down with a lady who had been interviewing in that building, interviewing candidates every day. Um, for, uh, I think it was six years. She had interviewed candidates every single day. And I said, well, how often do you say no to a candidate? And this lady said, “Oh, I've never said no.”She had never said no. She had interviewed for six years and never said no. So when that's the case, that you don't need the interview anymore, right. That discern was done necessary. So we tried this with a fully automated process. And what we learned is these sorts of roles. You always, you have dropout rates at certain points. You know, you're going to have a certain percent that fail the drug screen, way more than you would think if you do white collar work. You hear the failure rate, it would surprise you if that's all you've ever done. Um, But there's a failure rate of drug screen, you know, you're going to have, and then there's a certain number of people that just won't ever show up for the job.And, um, what we learned when we fully automated is we could get people all the way through the process up until the day they're supposed to start and they just didn't show up. They didn't think it was real. Some of them would get nervous when filling out the background, check paperwork, thinking it might be a scam because they're asked for, you know, personal information, social security, and so forth, even though it was from a reputable company, they're worried that it's a scam. So in order to ground the position, we are experimenting with the right place to insert a human contact. So where do you insert a phone call to ground this, to be that it's a real position, a real job for someone? Not because you need to say yes or no, but because they need human contact to feel good about the job.Max: Well, that's what the lady was doing for six years, right? It was, uh, she wasn't saying no, but she was saying here's, here's a human contact. Jason: That's it exactly right. That's what she was doing all the time. Max: Uh, yeah, I I'd like to insert more video in the process where you know, that human contact could be, Hey, check it out You know, here's the, the warehouse where you'll be working. You know, do a little phon, recording, and say, we can't wait to see you on Monday. And that, little video can be, it can feel personal, but it could be actually general, you know, you could send it to everybody. Jason: Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're exactly right. And we're seeing more of that. In fact, we're seeing, um, seeing a shift to video interviews for certain, um, a lot of companies are just using zoom or Skype or not Skype, but Microsoft teams, the Skype, Skype got replaced, uh, Google meets for some, but they're, they're using sort of their conferencing platforms to do that instead of, uh, instead of the the formal sort of modern, higher and higher and things. But it's a little bit broken, right? When they do that, because they don't have the formal scoring, they don't have, they don't have the staff, the they're not able to what's happening like the candidate, your platform. Um, they it's, it's not as strong of a solution.Um, so I was talking at one point with, uh, With one of the founders of another one of these companies. And they said, they said we're running into companies that have sort of the scrappy solution. And they're using zoom. And then the ones that are, that were prepared for something like this, um, the adoption rate just skyrocketed.So people, cause video, I always had trouble getting people to use it and getting people to actually lean into it because you still have to review the videos. But once we, um, once we hit this pandemic, everybody seems way more comfortable or, you know, it's become a necessity in their world at least.And they're accustomed to it. Max: Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've done a lot of zoom and team integrations and then, um, have the live video call asynchronous video. Um, I still, I'm still a luxury for, a lot of positions they're more interested in getting people through binary, you know, outcomes or multiple choice questions and getting them to move to a human interview through a phone call. Um, and also still a lot of markets where asking people to log in for a zoom call would be too, um, demanding on the bandwidth. So they do phone calls instead. And, uh, you know. Jason: Well you're, in markets that where that's a significant challenge. Right? But you guys have WhatsApp integration, correct? Max: Yes. Yes. WhatsApp integration allows for collecting video, but asynchronously, you wouldn't be able to do a live video call connected through the business API. You can do it person to person, in the consumer market, but it's not yet supported for businesses. Unfortunately. Uh, same way that, uh, Facebook picture, you know, otherwise. Yeah. I mean, all those companies, whether you're, you're an ATS and CRM, um, uh, social media or a communication platform, you all have video now and everybody has it and everybody can switch it on and it's relatively cost free. So I don't understand how the Highervues of the world are going to stay in business if their story is we're good on video. So is everybody else.Jason: Yeah, that's true. No, it's true. Max: Yeah. Um, Very commoditized. Jason:I thought they needed to do something different. Um, but yeah, we're we are seeing more video. Um, SMS is big for us in the US um, of course, different mediums elsewhere as well. So, uh, we're seeing a lot of that shift as well.Max: The, um, uh, continuing on what we were talking about, the lady, um, that says yes. Um, um, do you think her job will still be around in, uh, in 10 years time? Or do you think that, uh, eventually, you know, um, we can go to a full automated process with no human contact. Jason: Um, I think probably not. I think probably her role probably doesn't exist the way it is. What I think we'll end up with is, you know, instead of a 40 minute actually interview candidates were scheduled for an hour, an hour time slot to come in and do your interview. I think we're going to have 10 minutes, um, basically, uh, uh, Welcome calls. They're their introductions. We're welcoming them to the company. “Oh yeah we're ready to make you this offer. It's already been sent to you. Welcome to the welcome home. And here's your, here's all the stuff you need to know. Here's where you show up what you do” but it's a 10 minute make somebody feel good call, um, and not an interview. Max: Yeah, that's a big productivity gain potentially there.Um, and I've seen, uh, for, uh, some people doing group interviews as well. Because then you have that human factor, uh, you know, you were saying, is it real? Well I mean, there's 10 other people logging into the call and I can see their faces and it's probably real. Jason: Yeah, I saw I was, um, there's, uh, uh, one of the big online retailers, uh, they were doing this thing where they would do a drug swab. This was years ago. This is before I came back to Accenture. Um, they were doing a drug swab. Yeah, as a part of their interview process. So they would have these massive hiring events. They still do it right now, I think. And, um, basically you go, you sit down, you watch a video about working at this, at this place.If you're good with it, um, they have like a long Q-tip. You swab your cheek, it's a drug test. You put it back in the package, you seal it up. You sign an offer letter and you're done, like, that's it. That is the whole, that is the whole process you've been processed and the way that they were paying their suppliers was based on the number of return offer letters and, uh, drug screens that they got.Max: Wow. Well, I mean, I just had to do my first swab, uh, coming into Hong Kong to check, they were checking for my coronavirus. Uh, yeah. Um, but that uh, sounds brutal. And I guess these drug tests have had to, I mean, those are private enterprises can ask whatever they want. Right. it's they can decide what drug tests they ask. There's no, restrictions on state law or anything like that. Jason: No, it's strange. You'll have more stringent drug screening requirements for Businesses than the States in which people live. Yeah. So there might be a state where marijuana is legalized, for example, but it's not legal for the drug screen.Well, tell that to the, you know, 18 year old warehouse worker that they're interviewing for those warehouse job, you know, they're really just picking up boxes. They've been moving them from point A to point B. And I'm not sure that whether or not they smoked it makes much difference in that, but that's there oftentimes there's rules that say, yeah, you can't hire themMax: After a stressful day of carrying boxes.Jason: It may be, I don't know, but it's, there are these more stringent things, but if it's legal in your state is if it's legal where you are, I guess nine, 18 year old, usually usual is 21. So 21 year old warehouse worker, I guess she could have a problem. You could, you, it's not as big of a deal in my mind, but the 18 year old, shame on them, they should wait till 21 based on that wall.Max: It should be the other way around. Absolutely. We should have a world where it's illegal in the state, but it's legal as soon as you come inside the company. You know, Basically an office where we only accept people here who smoke cigarettes all day long. Jason: So you joke, but, um, one of the big tobacco companies I did work with years and years and years ago, um, And the first time I walked in there, I saw the ashtrays on the desks, the whole thing.So, yeah, I don't know if they still do that, but this was way back when. But yeah, it's the only company I ever walked into with ashtrays on the desk, because that had sort of gone by the time I made it into this line of work. Max: Yeah. Well uh, I've experienced that as well. I've had business meetings with cigarettes, um, in Asia. So it does feel, uh, like you're, traveling in time when that happens. Jason: Well, I've had business meetings with cigars. That's a different story. Max: Yes. Yes. I don't get invited to those then. Okay. Um, before we wrap it up, Jason: Max I'm pretty sure that i invited you to one at some point along the way.Max: With cigars? Jason: Yeah. I'm pretty sure along the way. Maybe when we were in San Francisco, but I don't know. Max: Oh, I missed it. Well, okay. Talking about the, uh, the current events and where you see the market going a few months ago when, uh, the world uh, was collapsing. You, told me that the RPO industry had rebounded strongly in 2008 and 2009 and had its best run right afterwards and gave me some hope for your industry, our industry. Uh, coming out of the coronavirus pandemic, um, um, has your, um, yeah. Are you on track with your predictions or, um, or you, uh, surprised with, uh, the pace of the slowness of the recovery, I guess, um, how do you anticipate the next few months will pan out for people in staffing and in the RPO world in particular?Jason: Um, so yeah, uh, I don't know what the starting point of the sort of rebound is. Right? So coming out of the 2008 slowdown, um, 2009, when companies started bringing you back. Uh, employees, um, the recruiters came back first, right. And, uh, when the recruiters came back, the ramp began very quickly. And a lot of times they said, okay, well, let's bring people back, but via outsourcing. That's why outsourcing grew so much at that time. What's difficult about this one is we're not yet at the place where I think we're ready for the rebound. I think um, we're still sort of in the low point. Uh, and we're, nobody's really sure when, we sort of swing out of this thing, I'm confident that we will, right?I'm confident that yeah. Eventually everybody gets to take off their mask and go back to their jobs. And there are some hurdles that have to be reached along the way for that to happen. So I'm confident that the world will go back to what we were accustomed to one day. Um, but it's not something that happens, you know, in three months or four months, it's something that happens, uh, over a long period of time.Max: There's a cycle to recruitment. And normally, you know, end of the summer, everybody gets ready for the big shopping push towards the end of the year. Jason: October. Yeah. Max: Yeah. So now is when people need to, normally when they start ramping up and start you know, setting up the machine. You're saying well, maybe it's taken a little longer this time.Jason: Well, what's funny is the online machine is ramping like you wouldn't believe. So the people who do your online shopping through, and then who fulfill those orders on the back end. Yeah. That that's going strong. It hasn't slowed down. In fact, um, It's where we're seeing the most competition for workers, uh, warehouse workers are right now.Like it's like a software developers and Silicon Valley in the early two thousands. Max: No, I don't know if I want to go into a, you know, carrying boxes or data science. Jason: Seriously. What I think is going to happen is those wages are going to start increasing really significantly. Much to the chagrin of my customer base, but they, I think that, um, you know, we're, we're being asked in some cases to monitor, um, uh, to monitor salaries or offers like what the, the offer that people are making to candidates on a daily basis. Because Amazon, when you drive past has billboards that say I'm offering X number of dollars per hour and they change. And sometimes they'll change uh, there'll be a different number when you go into the office from versus when you come back and yeah. Yeah. If that's how fast this, this thing is moving and it's not going down, it's all going up. Uh, and the reason that we think that is that, um, These jobs used to be the jobs that were, you know, the next level, they were the good paying jobs. If you didn't have an education necessarily, um, but uh, you wanted something that could actually pay your bills. Um, it's sort of the, the first job that was able to do that most of the time, um, you know, just above you would see the grocery stores and things paid just above minimum wage. And these jobs were always several dollars per hour or more.What's happened is Target, Amazon, even Walmart now have pushed that based salary up to, you know, if anyone wages somewhere in the eight or $9 range, they've pushed to 13 or 14, a minimum wage, the California minimum wage, I think through the end of this year, end of next year. Uh, it will be $14, right? Max: So they as high as high as, as a logistics or, yeah.Jason: Right. So it's, it's now you can, you can either, you can either work in a really, uh, challenging environment in a warehouse where you're lifting things a bunch and you're, um, it may, it's probably climate controlled. They've all added climate control, but there's these big Bay doors. So where the trucks have to pull in. So, uh, it's you can't get that completely cool or, uh, completely warm in the winter time. Um, so you've always got to deal with the weather to some degree when that, when that happens, you can't have total climate control. So you've got those jobs that are uncomfortable and require more physical activity versus, you know, the, the grocery store chain, the, uh, big box retailer, those, those other ones paying the same amount of money. So all those people that have to work with your packages from the Amazon people who have to load them to the, uh, delivery drivers, to the, uh, uh, you know, the UPS guy, whoever, um, all of those, workers, um, they're in great demand. Cause there's more, we need more of them, but their salaries are deeply compressed because of what's happened with all of the retail salaries. Yeah. Max: Yeah. Well I'm, um, you know, from an economic standpoint, I think increasing minimal wages, does uh, accelerate the pace of automation and ultimately, um, force companies to automate more. Uh, so that's probably the response as well as, you know, um, in the short term an increase in, uh, and paper hour, but we know that, um, it's going to drive more automation and will eventually, potentially cost a few jobs. Uh, but if those are the hard jobs, um, that may not be such a bad outcome, it's just that, as you were saying if you have no education, um, and you need to pay the bill, those jobs are very precious. So I don't know. Um, I'm not, uh, a policy guy, but, uh, um, it sounds like you're in the right market. Even though you're fighting some, uh, difficult trends. Jason: It's fascinating, right. If it were easy, the clients wouldn't call us to help. Right? They'd be able to do this themselves. Max: So many times after eight hours in front of my webcam I'm like, Oh man, I wish I was outside doing physical work and I always thought that that would be like a good employee branding employer value proposition. Come in to work in our warehouse and check out, our guns, you know?Jason: You know what you need to do? You need to go, and I don't know about tha EVP, but the next time you feel that way, go dig a ditch and see how you feel afterwards. Because one time I at one was hiring people who would bury the lines for the phone company and they literally were ditch diggers and I could not think of a worst gig. And they, uh, so every time I, when I look at this, I think. I could be doing that job. That would be terrible. Yeah, it's exhausting by the way. Max: I, uh, when I was, uh, 16 years old, I had a chance to go work in, um, an, a modeling agency to just to do intern work. But then my mother insisted, I go instead, go work in our plastic factory so that I would understand the cost of physical labor. And so I did end up going to school afterwards and pursuing an education. Jason: Wow, How old were you when you could go to the modeling agency? Max: 16. Yeah, peak of my purity. Jason: At that age. I think, I think your mom might not have done the right thing. Max: Um, I'm pretty sure she will not be listening to our conversation, but, uh, if you are, I'm still so grateful for, uh, for your choice, mom, and I'm very grateful for your time, Jason. Today and in previous conversations, helping, helping me understand the macro trends and the limits of automation. Uh, thank you very much for joining us today, uh, on this podcast and looking forward to our next chat. Jason: Happy to do it. Thanks. Max: A treat talking to Jason Roberts from Accenture and, and learning about the new dynamics of the marketplace currently shaping, uh, North America with the pickers and the people working in logistics in higher demand than the engineers of the Silicon Valley.Who would have guessed? And if, uh, if you liked this interview, please subscribe for more on recruitment hackers, podcast, and share with your friends. Hope to see you here again soon.
Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello everybody. This is Max for another episode of the Recruitment Hacks from Max and today on our show, we have a personal friend of mine who I've known for over a decade, Mr. Darcy Lalonde. Darcy, welcome to the party. Darcy: Thanks max. Good to chat. Max: Good to chat and I'm sure people will appreciate that from one entrepreneur to another entrepreneur, we have a lot of different hats to wear, but today I'm going to ask you to wear the hats of you as your Recruiter in Chief for most of your companies, even though your responsibilities have been much broader and wider than that. And we're talking about more than 20 years of experience in HR related roles, human capital, human capital technology and HR tech, and oftentimes in a leadership role at either the foundation, the start of a new company, or when that company was scaling, going from a few hundred to a few thousand people.And so we'll try to find out how you build those engines to understand, for somebody who also wants to scale up, you know, maybe find some tricks and ideas on how to attract more and better talent. So, there's a lot to cover in that 20 year history, but perhaps tell us a little bit about what you are to now… and yeah, let's go back a little bit in time. Tell us about how you, how you started in HR and HR tech. Darcy: Well, it's interesting coming from a former ice hockey player, who became an accountant, got into IT and somehow got into human capital management, which I guess is a lesson learned for many of us, is that as a small child growing up, I had dreams of playing ice hockey. I never had dreams of being an executive in Human Capital. But it's funny how the different roads and I think one of the things that sport taught me was the importance of team, the importance of people, and one of the interesting things is that I've always found it to, you know, to often be the captain of the team and things like this as a kid.But, what really makes things, I think rewarding is the people around you. And, I think that was one of the things as I got into my career, that the people and the teams and the folks that work with you are so important. I've been I must say, over the last 20, 30 years started up a number of companies of which, you know, I'm very proud to say from a lot of the people that have actually joined those companies after another but have been the times of our lives.You know, I think that's part of creating the culture of your business and your ecosystem. Is that you know, you do have fun. You have a passion, you work hard, you play hard. You create loyalty. and you know, just one of the things that I very much enjoyed was the people aspect.And you know, I came through as an accountant and ended up in IT. And I guess it was interesting that I used to be very critical of human capital and HR professionals as being relatively non-effective. Not at the board. Max: I'm thinking about your introduction. This is very nice. And telling us about your story where you're talking about the competitive edge and your background in sports. And I guess the perception from the outside world is you know, HR and Talent Acquisition, Human Capital, all of that's not really for the competitive. Yeah. You know it's more of a support function where it's more about you know, making sure that everybody's taken care of as opposed to going out to win, is that what you're referring to when you were saying, I didn't think I'd end up in that space? Darcy: Yeah. I guess, you know, one of my challenges that I've given many HR professionals over the last 20 years since you know, is really getting in the HR space in 2001, when I joined Arinso, you know, I'm a supply chain guy. I'm a finance guy. you know, we have supply chains and value chains and activity based costing and all these things that drive and show, you know, qualified and quantified benefits. HR people, they go for coffee. They chat with people, you know, and I'm being a little bit facetious here obviously, but I do believe that…Max: That's the perception for sure.Darcy: It is the perception. And I don't think it needs to be, I think in today's world more than any time, the HR professionals have the opportunity to step up and really drive business and drive business benefits. Drive, you know, people, because you know, again— and I've been around a long time and, you know, people are our most important asset. That's been on everybody's webpage for about 10, 20 years now.But, do you really have an executive at your boardroom table who is strategically driving the benefits that your people can bring to your business? And can you as an accountant quantify that? Can you actually show the benefits? And at the end of the day, the financial impacts on the bottom line, top line and ultimately sharing.And I will say that's one of the things that I'm very, very big on is sharing the rewards of the company back to the employee. So that there's a direct correlation that says I make profit. I share it with you. I don't make them up. I can share it with you. Max: This challenge you say, more important now than ever. I think that some of that is because we're looking for people who are competitive in a world where maybe there's a generational shift where people often criticize millennials as being… Asking too much and giving too little. At the risk of sounding very old, what do you think about this generational shift, do you think that it's true? Do you think that it becomes harder to find people who are willing to, you know, go to battle with you in this environment?Darcy: Yeah. I guess I'm the edge of the baby boomers.Max: I thought you were gen X. Darcy: No, no, I just caught the end , but you know, it was interesting because I came into the business world when we were moving from mainframes to files, server computing, and I remember when I first came in as the young buck, they all found me very abrasive, very pushy, very millennial. I would say, you know, these crazy people that are going to work with, you know, local area networks and email and Microsoft products. You know I think at times it is a little bit oversold, the whole millennial concept and again, coming back max to recruiting and you really need a personal touch now to grab people, I mean, the attention span and the ability to be very smart and have access to Google. My kids are smarter than me. Right. And they're 12 years old because they out-Google me. That's I think one of the things that you have to now be able to digitally connect to your people. And is that some of your first time points are reaching out digitally, but then you're trying to bring them in and get that, a little bit, that you are special, you are somebody that I'm actually targeting and focusing with. And I still believe people have the same inherent, you know, behaviors and needs Max: It's overblown. Basically. We think people make too much of a big deal of the generational gap. I tend to agree, but I also think that somehow, one of the reasons why you've been successful for 20 plus years is because you have found a way to attract a more competitive, more hungry group of professionals. You know, people who are just like in a hockey team they want to win. So, is that something that is built into the culture post on-boarding, or is that something that you figured out a way to do at the recruitment stage. Darcy: Yeah. Well, I, you know, I think the first meeting is that first touch, that first moment is a very important moment. And I guess I've hired people that ended up being some of my most successful executives over the phone. Didn't see them. All I heard was a voice and this was, you know, we didn't have zoom back 10, 15 years ago. You know, and I would have somebody fly in from Sydney flying to Manila show up for their first day.And it was really about, you know, having that feeling and just having somebody passionate and you know, talk about things. Like, look, I need somebody who just wants to get on a plane, do whatever it takes, but I'll tell you, when this thing takes off, then we're all going to have a heck of a rocket ship ride.And frankly, that was, in Asia, which was my second company Arinso. Starting up SAP, HR, in Southeast Asia in the year 1999 sounded like the craziest thing in the world to me. SAP, very expensive, you know, Southeast Asia, particularly not investing in certainly human capital solutions, they were more focused on at that point, supply chain, finance, procurement things like that.And, you know, just going in and, having, my partner at the time, Josh ended up doing very well in life with our exit of Arinso. I guess it was 12 years later. But coming in to AsiaMax: So from, from zero to a 50 million revenue plus business, something like that.Darcy: Yeah. I mean, it was funny because I was a Canadian living in Asia and between Singapore and Manila. And I say, this fondly, this crazy Belgian guy Josh Slice, kept phoning me up and saying, look, we need somebody to start up this, you know, Asia. And he called it the far East. We need this far East group to be started.Max: For people who don't work in Asia, there is no such thing as the far East. It's not a real region, right?Darcy: No, I was still looking for the far East.Max: Yeah. We're talking about like 12 countries that speak 12 different languages with 12 different regulations and laws and so on. Starting North gate Arinso in Hong Kong and then into the Philippines, you had to hire across the far East as they call it in different countries. Recruitment was very different in different parts of Asia? Did you have to adapt your process or was it more, you know, company culture trumps everything and we'll worry about localizing later?Darcy: Yeah I think back then it was really sponsored by SAP coming into the region, so I had very good connections with the SAP community and there's a guy by the name of Les Hayman. Who's the head of SAP APJ. And Les is no longer with us, but it was just a fantastic man. And again, a great leader and an inspirational leader. And I guess my point is that I do believe that kind of leadership is something that, you create.I guess this was back when I had really long hair and I was even a bit more eccentric than I was even today. I went to Asia and got introduced to a few people and hired people. Frankly, those people still work for my companies today, a lot of them.So, but I think in those days you could really, word of mouth, it was a bit less of a mature market, so the competition was less. And I would say SAP HCM professionals in Asia, pretty well, every single person I almost see with, with 10 years of experience have worked for one of my companies. So it's something I'm very proud of, but also very proud of that management group that I've created that, some of my best friends in the region. But I think it really was word of mouth and less digital. And this was 20 years ago. Now on the recruiting front, we were doing things like Taleo and you know, some of the big, enterprise stuff with Arinso. So that was really the infancy of it was the late 90s was really that whole targeted recruiting stuff was just coming in. Max: It sounds like a lot of that is relationship based and, word of mouth and that perhaps even though you are a technologist and you did sell these technology platforms that in your case, you know, what really drove recruitment marketing and talent attraction, was more around executive hiring and more around finding people who are passionate and the human factor. Would you say that still holds true today that people, you know, we have vendors like Talkpush and others that make a big deal of the candidate experience, but the human elements is still King. Darcy: Yeah. I mean certainly think you have to frame a storyboard that, you know, brings an edginess to it. Again, the millennials are looking for that maybe more than they were in my generation. You know, my kids will say, dad, you met Richard Branson. Yeah, I did meet Richard Branson. I mean, stuff like this, people want to work for some of these types of people andMax: Right, you could put a picture of Richard Branson on your website and get a few more candidates perhaps.Darcy: Yeah. Well, I have pictures beside Bill McDermott and Jen Morgan and all these kinds of people, I think Les Hayman over the days, Hasso Plattner... I've been very blessed to…Max: I kind of know those names, but I don't think that millennials will care so much.I mean, it might help you attract a couple of executives. But, thinking about your time at Shore Solutions, where you went from 200 to 2000 call center agents in a period of two years. Those names would not have meant anything to those guys.Tell us about that strategy, how you did the ramp up there and the cool factor that you were able to build in order, to multiply the size of your business by 10 and in a short period of time.Darcy: Yeah. And I guess that's an example too, of having moved from professional services with SAP and consulting and, exiting that business. And then really I lived in Manila. So, if you're in Manila and you need something to do, you know what makes sense to do? Well, you do a call center. so that was you know, one of my objectives. And again, I think in terms of focus and target, obviously the call center industry is another completely different industry. I think it was very, really interesting for myself from a Human Capital Management Executive who had all the answers to all the best practices and processes. And now to take that from a more enterprise view into a contact center or BPO. Which is all your recruiting particularly highly competitive market. Everybody's stealing from everybody and very much again, how do you create that vibe that creates the loyalty? You know, and, to be honest, I guess my people formula is what I like to call more of a waterfall, which is, getting those top managers in your leadership team, they have to be also the ones that create that vibe down to the next level and the next level and the next level.And, you know, we were, I think lucky enough, in the short that, you know, had a kind of, and I think I've framed him. He's this big Australian guy, John L. Smith, and kind of a rugby, big guy. So you got him and me and the hockey…Max: They sounds scary. Yeah, it sounds like they would scare the candidates away, not attract them.Darcy: Well, you'd be surprised. There's this we're gonna, hang with these guys. And I shouldn't say guys, cause I, you know, Shore was another one of the companies where I created I think one of my strongest management teams and I think you've met many of them, you know, the Tanya's and Lenny's and, and Jerry. We had just a phenomenal group of people and not only were we hugely successful, but we had a ton of fun. We did stuff that, you know, and again, Shore was also, you know, I think one of the best blends, cause it was two years, 200 to 2000. Max: So the fact that he had a ton of fun, for our audience, mainly Talent Acquisition people. Were you able to put that into words or images in a way that it would attract people, how do you convey the message? You put pictures of your parties on the wall?Darcy: Yeah. I mean, I think we did have you know Tanya, who was my marketing lady at the time, did a great job of creating these sound bytes and clips. But it's also again, when they have those interviews and they have those touch points that you've got the right lead in, that, you know, you grab them quickly. Reputation then quickly takes over. And the reality is I don't like to overpay people, but I certainly like to pay people what they're worth. So it's another concept where, you know, I want people to have good lives, so I don't want to have the lowest salaries in the business. I want to have people that can build and grow and certainly the Philippines. Again, that's one of the most rewarding aspects. I think of being an executive there is, now with my 20 years of being there, I can count thousands of people that have changed their lives. And some of them from the poorest situations, They work hard, they got passion. It's not always about which college they're from. I liked the underdog. I liked the people that never got a chance. Yeah, and again, I think maybe from a sporting side, but what you want to do is maximize people's strengths, minimize their weaknesses, build on… You know, a team can't have all superstars.you need to respect the plotting accounts payable clerk, you know, it's okay to be a plotting accounts.. Max: Give everybody some love, pay them well, hope that the word of mouth and the positive sort of company culture resonates. And that generates some positive word of mouth, some referrals, and it sounds pretty simple when you say like that.Darcy: Yeah, it does. Max: There's no secret sauce. I feel the same way that it's better to pay a little bit over market rates and reduce attrition. And, then focus on everything else. And well, you don't have to promise the moon to anybody, you just build a good environment and hope that positive word of mouth carries you. Because really, if you get 20 or 30% of your hires through referrals, employer referral, that means you're doing a good job, right? Darcy: Yeah. Absolutely. And, again, the call center, you know, human capital market is you know, again, I think where you do need to some degree focus on the nicheness of the marketplace. So you can't have one style fits all. When I'm recruiting an executive, it's going to be different than a volume recruitment. But, I guess the story should still be the same, right? The vibe of the company, because that's, you know, again, I think the challenge of trying to get it and you know, back 20 years ago I was much more involved with the operational side.So I was at the parties. I was at the coffee. I was at the lunches. I was in the middle of it… as I guess I've taken on more entrepreneurial and chairman roles and less operational, I need my team to be able to take that passion and, it can't be that you know, we're all disappointed because Darcy didn't come to the meeting. You can build that out in, and that could perhaps be a, you know, there's a certain size of business that I frankly don't enjoy as much as you know, I, I love them when we've got 10 people. A hundred people, a thousand people, when you get to 10,000, somebody else should buy my business and take it. And they should really get rid of me because I'm unmanageable. It's time to move to the next level. And, and, you know, I don't think I guess I don't take offense to that whole concept. I'm a bit proud of it. I guess that's my rebel side that says, you know, I'm good to a certain point. And then I can let some of these big, more corporate enterprise folks who are much smarter than me, take it over and take it to the next level. Max: Well, there's so many different definitions to intelligence. I don't know if they're smarter than you, but maybe they're a little bit more political. Talking about the ideal number for a team. I've been doing some research on, you know, what would be happy. And I think that 2000 is already way beyond where I could foresee myself in the sense that I can not remember 2000 people's names. There was research done on the cognitive limits on the number of people that one can remember and be friends with in the community it's called Dunbar's number and numbers like around 150 to 200. I could see myself, you know, working with that, but it's different for everybody, for sure.But I think, some great advice there Darcy about enabling each of your leaders to become the engine for recruitment, rather than try to put it into a formula. Every team needs to have an inspiring leader that wants to create a fun environment in each o their teams and it's something that everybody can take away from our conversation. What's in store for you in the future? I'm going to continue to, by the way for the listeners, Darcy was kind enough to give us a chance because he loves the outsiders so much that he decided to be my first customer at Talkpush some six years ago. And will continue to advise Talkpush in its next phase of growth.What are you working on next? What are you working on now? Darcy: Well, I guess as you know, Max, I, was sure we had a small SAP group, which when I sold that to an Australian company and then we took the SAP piece, that share piece into something called Synchrony, which was again a company that about a year ago I sold to Rising, which is a big U.S partner. So, you know, put in a good year. I had a nice transition. I'm very proud to see that, you know, we became number one in Asia for SAP success factor partners. Within 12 months, we were named the number one partner in the region, which I couldn't be more proud of. And now they will become and they are probably the biggest global partner in the world. And that's what I set out to do. And I'm happy that you know, Rising will take it to the next level. So I guess I'm settling in the whole Corona thing, I guess COVID stuff is... Certainly created a challenge for all of us, which is just another challenge on the road. It's a tough one and when we go back max to the millennial discussions and things that, you know, I think we could argue, this generation was fairly entitled with very little resistance to their success. I think now ...Max: Think this will teach them a few lessons?Darcy: Well, I think I didn't have World War II. I didn't have a lot of the tough stuff that you know, our generations before us had. And boy, now we've got our World War III, literally, that we're going to have to deal with, I'm looking forward to as we go through ….Max: So Darcy, thank you for sharing these cool insights and to wrap up our conversation, would you have any practical tips for employers today on how to stand out in a crowded group? You were competing for talent in some of the most crowded markets for talent across the BPO sector in particular in the Philippines and in Asia.How did you manage to stand out? And what tips do you have for talent acquisition professionals to build a different brand that doesn't look and sound like everyone else?Darcy: Well, I think number one from my perspective is to have a passion, love what you do, have the passion, the drive. I think, you know, again in today's world, you have to digitize that. So again, it's to create the edge, you know. I build businesses, I start businesses. One of the things that I have learned over the last 10 years, particularly , and that was a great example was Shore was that you have to digitize that cool factor. And you know, as an entrepreneur, I think that is really the, absolute key is to lead by example, have the passion have the drive, bring in people that share that, then be able to digitize that because that is really how you can scale yourself and move yourself.And get the attention that, you know, in the old days might've been, you could do that in events and whatnot. You know, frankly now you do this digitally. But , you know, one of the things, is a warning that I have is don't digital spam. Because I see companies right now. Gosh if, If I see another one of their LinkedIns they're spamming everywhere.Max: LinkedIn is the worst. It is the absolute worst when it comes to spam. I mean, I don't know how they manage to do that, but it is mayhem out there. Absolutely. So, digitalization, we didn't spend too much time on, but obviously that's been a core theme running through your career is first build a great management team that's going to communicate the employer value proposition and then digitize it so that you're not overly dependent on individuals, I guess, to get the message out.Dacy: Yup. Yup. I think in today's world again you know, I've always been able to manage multiple countries without being in them. At one time I managed 15 countries with the Arinso Middle East, Asia, Canada, delivery centers, and you know, I used to call it management by email. Because I, you know, again, that was the digital side 10 to 20 years ago. If you've got the right on the ground, what I always found was that at least with an email, the same message came at the same time to the same people.I'm not a big believer on conference calls and having calls for the sake of calls, because I've often found that my management team went away and they all took a different message out of it. Somehow. Probably tailored a little bit to their own benefit to a certain degree.Max: Yeah, you pick and choose. When it's black and white, there's less room for confusion. Saves a lot of time with calls. I've been trying to do more written asynchronous communication, which is another fancy way of saying email and spending less time on calls myself. That's a very powerful. Yeah. Alright, well, we're about done on time. Thank you Darcy for spending this time with me and with our listeners and looking forward to seeing what's next in store for you for the next entrepreneurial adventure.And thanks for all your advice throughout the years. Darcy: Okay, thanks max. And looking forward to seeing Talkpugh get to that next level. Keep up the good work buddy.That was Darcy Lalonde, friend of Talkpush, serial entrepreneur, who told us about how important it is to build a core executive team that's going to help to drive recruitment and share the fun of your company culture. Thank you, Darcy. Hope you enjoyed the interview. If you want to hear more about recruitment and how it drives business, please listen to some of our other episodes.If you liked it, leave us a review and subscribe to this channel. Hope to see you soon.
Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose. These are words and concepts cited by Leonid Igolnik as he shares his thoughts on attracting, building, and nurturing world-class engineering teams as an engineering executive at leading SaaS providers Taleo and SignalFx, who was acquired by Splunk in August 2019 for $1B. "I've been personally successful at attracting top talent because in order to win, you don't necessarily need to be better, but you do need to be different. The good engineers get hundreds of job solicitations every week. What do you or your company offer that makes you different?" - Leonid Igolnik
The Episode in 60 Seconds What can a brand new CMO do to grow a company in the first six months? Caroline Japic, CMO of Kenna Security, faced this challenge head-on with energy and drive. This interview covers: How Kenna reduced the size of their MarTech stack and cut their annual cost in half How to build a team that works and works together The marketing efforts that have changed and those that have stayed steady Five pieces of advice to new CMOs Our Guests Caroline Japic brings 12 years of senior marketing executive experience to Kenna Security as CMO. Kenna is a vulnerability management scanner that searches for threats to your organization, infrastructure, applications then delivers it in a cloud platform by user reducing friction between security and IT. She has also served as CMO at Pramata and Tidemark and was a senior marketing executive for HP, Bunchball, Taleo, and Polycom. Caroline has been commended throughout her career for building winning teams and moving marketing programs ahead quickly. Jeremy Middleton is Caroline's trusted right hand. Their paths have crossed before at Pramata and HP. Jeremy understands how to uncover, use, and analyze data to support and tweak marketing efforts. He's a proven manager and marketing tactician. Show Notes What does it take to transform and grow a marketing program? Team Building Caroline came in and analyzed the team, found the holes (and filled them), and realigned the team to be more efficient. Listen at 5:00 minutes to discover the biggest changes she made and 7:00 for the qualities she looks for in marketing experts. Message Building What are we telling the world about Kenna? Does it make sense? Is it concise? - Caroline Japic Overhauling the Marketing Stack Jeremy cut the MarTech tools from twenty down to seven and cut their budget in half. Find out what tools they are using at 13:00. We have a simpler set of tools which means less raw data which results in less noise. We can more easily make sense out of the information we have. - Jeremy Middleton What is Old is New Again Kenna Security developed a physical direct mail package and have received a 10% meeting schedule rate. Listen throughout the episode to find out how and why it works plus a measuring stick of how effective it really is. Understanding Your Customer More Deeply than Ever Caroline is passionate about knowing and learning more about Kenna's customers. Find out how she builds her empathetic understanding at 20:00. The Fundamental Underpinnings We explore what Caroline and Jeremy see as the basic building blocks for their marketing program. (23:00) Technology doesn't solve problems Do you really know who you're targeting? How accurate is your data? Can you stop what isn't helping? Maintaining High Standards While Motivating the Team Caroline has built a loyal and high-performing team. She breaks down some of her thought process of management at 30:00. What has changed in marketing Metrics are much more sophisticated and tell a greater story. CMOs must feel like and act like they own the entire funnel from lead to close... and beyond. Sometimes, it is "arts and crafts marketing." We say, "This would be fun. Let's do this thing." Afterward, we ask, "Well, did it work?" We don't know. We ask, "Did everyone like it?" - Caroline Japic Advice for New CMOs You need a big win fast Build your dashboard first Talk to your sales leader every single day Put a framework in place. You need a written plan. Market the marketing Build relationships and maintain alignment
Today, we’re going to talk about Jobscan. This is a good episode to introduce you to the tool if you haven’t heard about it already. And I’m going to offer you my take on what some potential benefits and drawbacks may be of the tool. What we'll cover:What are applicant tracking systems?Applicant tracking systems are a tool used by companies to keep track of applicants. And if you’re a larger company, it probably makes sense that you are using a tool like this because you’re probably attracting a large number of applicants. Well that’s exactly what applicant tracking systems do for companies -- they organize and sort through a large pool of applicants so as to save them time. What are keywords?Keywords in an application and on a resume are what make most of that sorting possible. Since these systems can sort through your resume look for relevant keywords, it would behoove you to optimize your resume for keywords, which has been past advice on this podcast. What is Jobscan? Jobscan is a tool that will scan your resume and give you an percentage score on a scale of 1-100 of how well your resume does based on some job postings that you submit for. Jobscan recommends hitting that 80% mark in order to optimize your resume for Applicant Tracking Systems. Now it does a match rate based on these priorities in order:1. Hard skills2. Education level (only when an advanced degree is included in the job description)3. Job title4. Soft skills Heart of the Podcast:BenefitsSound metrics: After reviewing it, the things that it looks for are very sound (compelling accomplishments, having a decent word count, relevant skills that are a match for the position). Great interface: The interface is just beautiful. I could look at that thing all day, and it makes it really easy to understand what the tool is trying to communicate with me and how to use it. All you have to do is copy and paste and you have a score you can work with from the start. Drawbacks Sensitivity to job posting accuracy: You are only as good as the job postings you give it. Which means if I give some job postings that are not truly representative, then I am just going to mislead myself as I write my resume. This is really a guessing game: The biggest thing: not all applicant tracking systems -- and not all recruiters are the same. I will go back to what I’ve said from the start -- it is a guessing game. And the score you get using one system may not be the same for Bullhorn as it is for Taleo. And most importantly, it may not be the same for Taleo in 2020 in the spring as it is for Taleo in 2020 winter. algorithms are constantly evolving. The verdict: it’s okay and probably useful to work with Jobscan if applying mostly online. But please take it with a grain of salt. Don’t let this guide your resume strategy, but use it as a supplemental tool to gain insights and boost your creativity. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
A conversation with Jerome Ternynck, the CEO of applicant tracking tool SmartRecruiters. Sponsored by Emissary.ai and Workhere.com FULL TRANSCRIPT Chris Russell: The RecTech Podcast is sponsored in part by our friends at Emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. Your next superstar is in demand and on the move. Emissary is the easiest way to connect with them faster and more effectively wherever they are. So if you haven't embedded texting into your recruiting process yet, what are you waiting for? It's definitely something that's as a channel, today's employers need to communicate more effectively with there candidates and prospects. Go to emissary.ai and schedule a demo today. Chris Russell: We're also sponsored by our friends at WorkHere.com, the hyper-local candidate delivery tool through geo-fencing app platform. You can reach more people through their online ads with pinpoint precision where they live, work and shop. WorkHere will advertise your jobs on the screens candidates use the most, their mobile phone. And messaging is then delivered into the social mobile apps they use most often. Head over to WorkHere.com and be sure to tell them heard it the RecTech podcast. Chris Russell: All right, so today's audio is an interview with Jerome Ternyck, CEO of SmartRecruiters, one of my favorite ATS's out there. The first one I ever used actually as a recruiter. I sat down for him at their San Francisco offices for a 30 minute conversation, and I think you're really going to enjoy this one. He was very open and honest and authentic as he always is and enjoy the audio. Chris Russell: Okay. I'm here with Jerome Ternyck, CEO of SmartRecruiters in their San Francisco offices on Bush Street and had a chance to come down here after the TA week events and come see Jerome. He's always been inviting me out here and finally got a chance to make it to San Fran and SmartRecruiter. So Jerome, first of all, it's great to see you again and how's life today? Jerome Ternyck: Likewise. Thanks for having me on the show. And yeah, life is good. Life is good. You're actually catching me today on January the 30th which is exactly 24 hours before the end of our fiscal year so we're busy signing deals left and right, rushing into the end of the year preparing budgets. And I think on Friday evening everybody will be resting for weekend. But just for the weekend, because we have our Hiring Success conference coming up in two weeks on Feb 11 and 12. When we'll have a thousand people coming here and so we're excited. It's busy time here. Chris Russell: Yeah, definitely. Quick history lesson for people who know me. SmartRecruiters was the very first ATS I ever used as it recruited back in 2014-ish around there. I picked them because they seemed to be a modern platform back then, and they still are. They had an app and things like that at the time, which were pretty new. I've always kind of admired SmartRecruiters from afar anyway, and also as a user in that time. But just give the audience a sense of where you guys are now in terms of customer base and employee-wise and things like that. Just give us a quick overview. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. So we started the company in 2011. We spent four years in R&D and really what we were building, what we aimed [inaudible 00:00:03:36]. Okay, what is a generational successor to applicant tracking systems? Applicant tracking systems were born out of we need to automate the file cabinet. Resumes were paper based; the internet arrived. Oh my God, candidates can fill in forms, and I can track them in a system. But this whole idea that people are actually tracked as applicants in a system like even the name is wrong. Applicant tracking system doesn't say hire amazing people system. Jerome Ternyck: And having build myself an ATS between 2000 and 2010 when I started SmartRecruiters, I was like, okay, really getting ready. Take a blank sheet of paper and what do we want to get out here? And so we landed on three core things that are talent acquisition suite should do. One, it should help me attract candidates. That speaks to marketing and how you attract candidates and advertising and referrals and good website and good candidate experience. And there's a whole lot of things that need to be done in the area of CRM and marketing and so on. Jerome Ternyck: Second, we said managers have to use it and we have to double down on collaboration because recruiters cannot be successful if the managers aren't playing with them in their system. And so we focused on collaboration, hiring manager engagement, scorecard scheduling, making more that process like super smooth and efficient. And third, it's about recruiter and recruiter productivity. And recruiters nowadays, they're being asked to move mountains, but they have tools and technologies from decades ago. Chris Russell: They're being held back. Jerome Ternyck: And they're completely held back, absolutely. So giving recruiters all of their data processes and suppliers in one system where they can be in control and compliance. And so those three things, recruiter productivity, hiring manager engagement, and candidate experience is what we designed to spend ... we spent almost four and a half years just developing the product. We launched it in 2015 so that's five years ago now. And we've now since then signed just shy of a thousand enterprise customers. We have several thousand smaller companies using our platform on various capacity, but really the enterprise segment a thousand customers, this is where we actually make our money. Our revenue are made there. Jerome Ternyck: Some big names, we have companies like Visa, Bosch, which has like 400,000 employees. Even LinkedIn uses us now as their [inaudible 00:05:56] as they're implementing Twitter. So really large progressive companies that are using SmartRecruiters. We have 300 employees worldwide. We raised $100 million of equity money from various investors, Salesforce being one of our investors. So we're really looking at hey, recruiting is not this administrative automated function as we thought in the past. It's actually a fairly sales and marketing oriented function. It's a competitive advantage to companies would do it well. What's the platform that does that? And this is what we deliver. Chris Russell: Excellent. What do you think of the overall activity happening in the market itself as far as HR tech goes, all the mergers and acquisitions you're seeing bigger players group up smaller players to be an all encompassing platform. What's your overall sense of where we are now in HR tech? Jerome Ternyck: I think we're in a very, very exciting time of HR tech. And that is on two counts. On the core HR, there's a replacement cycle happening with enormous efficiency gains and automation opportunities and that charge is led by Workday in core HR and there's much more happening there. And I think there we're really seeing a very classic replacement cycle of old school HR systems. Jerome Ternyck: On the recruiting side, we're actually seeing a real shift of market because we are going away from, Hey you apply, you are screened and then maybe you get the job. We're going into this is a full scale sales and marketing function and TA leaders are becoming marketers, marketers in campaigns, in nurturing, in sourcing, in referrals, in how they organize it. It's more collaborative. So there's a whole set of a new generation of TA leaders that are actually emerging. Jerome Ternyck: And it's interesting because in HR tech, the world here divides between two types of tier leaders. Those who are going to be swallowed inside the HR system. And it's basically oh you use Taleo, I know this recruiting system from work there. SAP is not better, but you've been on Taleo for ages. Just shut up and keep, keep your life. And that's basically saying recruiting is an admin process. I don't care about winning the best talent, I'm just processing resume here and filling seats. Jerome Ternyck: The other generation of tier leaders are like, no actually guys, if you invest in recruiting, I can deliver better candidates and if you have better people than your competitor, we're going to win as a company. And so how do we actually take recruiting and make this a competitive advantage, which then justifies a proper talent acquisition suite that focuses on how you attract, select, and hire amazing talent at scale. And when you go to the CEO and you say, would you like to have hiring success? Would you like to be able to hire amazing talent on demand? Like you see the eyes are becoming really excited here because yes, every CEO in the world would like to be able to hire amazing talent on demand. They just don't know how to do it. And when it gets gobbled into HR and into processes and back office functions, it's a race to the bottom. It's faster, cheaper. Chris Russell: I can't tell you how many TA leaders I've met who say I'm just stuck with this ATS, usually it's Taleo, let's be honest. And they're paralyzed. They're afraid of that change, and many times they just don't want to do it. They don't want to make that plunge. And those are the ones who are going to get swallowed, right? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. They definitely are getting swallowed, but it's worse fighting for it because well, I had the example this morning actually. I was on a phone with a TA leader of a 95,000 employee company. And they've been on Taleo forever. A company, very decentralized, not a lot of power in corporate HR, and this one person went on a war to say, I want to replace Taleo and I actually want to put a proper system. The CIO started by saying, over my dead body. We're on [inaudible 00:10:19] shop. We're staying there over my dead body. He got the CHR to approve the project. The CEO said fine. The CIO went behind to the CEO and canceled the project. Chris Russell: Oh my gosh. Jerome Ternyck: This went on for several months. Finally they got the green light, and they started the project six months ago, and they are now live in 17 countries. And this morning I was on the phone to him and he said Jerome, you know what happened this morning? I'm like no, what? He said, I was in a meeting and the CIO publicly praised me in front of the CEO and said, "You know what? I realized I was wrong to push on that because the system's really good and at least now I'm getting my resources." Because the CIO is actually often one of the managers that's suffering the most from recruiting. So I think it's worth the fight because you aren't going to come out of that as a hiring success hero, right? Because the managers need the resources. And if you can give them good candidates, they're going to love you regardless of how hard you were fighting for that system. So it's worth picking the battle. Chris Russell: Yeah, I love that story, Jerome. That's awesome. That's awesome. It's good to hear that. All right. Chris Russell: I've done a lot of work lately on the user experience of the candidate experience, especially around mobile apply and how a lot of systems out there are broken. A lot of these older ATS's come from a desktop era where they force you to log into apply, which is a barrier number one. And you have to put in your password twice. And you have to have all these special characters and it's like all the job seeker wants to do at that point is upload a resume. Why is it so hard for other companies to fix this problem right now? It seems like even some of the newer platforms I've seen don't do a great job at the overall apply process. Any thoughts around how to fix some of that stuff? Jerome Ternyck: I mean one main [inaudible 00:12:15] is that our click to apply ratio across all customers is 37%. Chris Russell: 37%. Okay. So break that down for us. Jerome Ternyck: We converge out of a hundred people who click on apply, 37 actually end up applying. Wow. That same ratio at Taleo is five. Let me translate that in dollars, that means for the same amount of candidates you're going to have to buy seven times more traffic if you're on Taleo so that alone would actually justify a change of system. So there is a large, large number or large gains that can be made in the apply. And if you think of recruiting as marketing, and I'm the CEO and I come to you as the TA leader and I go, so hold on, you're spending our money to advertise job to drive traffic on a page that has a 5% conversion rate. You should not be in your work, right? Like you should not be in this position. Jerome Ternyck: If a CMO would do that, they get fired, right? And so I would really encourage TA leaders to leverage that argument. Wait, wait, this doesn't make any sense. Plus the ones who abandon first aren't the worst ones. They are the best one. The ones that are busy, the ones that are on defense, the one that had a bad day. These are the gains. So not only are you actually reducing your ROI, but you're losing the best candidate. So it's worse optimizing. Jerome Ternyck: I think what's difficult here is the concept of identity management. How you identify users is at the heart of your software. And once you've designed a software to work in a certain way, it's actually hard to change. It's like you build a hotel and reception is this, on the corner of those two streets. And maybe it would make sense that reception is somewhere else, but everything is linked to that. So I think for legacy software it's very, very hard to change their principle. And we do it at SmartRecruiters, you just drop your resume. We actually even expose and apply API so you can drop your resume directly from LinkedIn in one take without ever to have to touch anything or from Indeed or from Seek. We actually just released the Seek apply. So we're actually facilitating the entrance. Jerome Ternyck: And then once you have applied, once you've expressed interest, okay, now let's talk. And if you would like to- Chris Russell: Yeah didn't you have an 'I'm interested' button at one point on the platform? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. Chris Russell: It's still there isn't it? Jerome Ternyck: It is still here. Yeah, we were the first one to convert or to change the apply now into I'm interested. Chris Russell: Right. Jerome Ternyck: Because this is what you do as a candidate. You're not saying I'm applying. Right. And you're saying, Hey, let's talk. I'm interested, and that alone actually increased our conversion rates by a few percentage point. Chris Russell: I would say too, at some point for some positions you don't even need a resume, you know if you're a janitor or a truck driver. If you just get their name, phone number, email address just to capture that information, then you can contact them afterwards. Do you see that as a trend that's going to happen in the next few years? As far as the way some of these systems do apply's? Jerome Ternyck: I think we're going to see the emergence of a central identity management and a few platforms are at it. Facebook actually manages your identity for a lot of set situation. Google does the same. There's some initiatives now where- Chris Russell: There's a Blockchain I think just came out. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, Blockchain that just came out led by Yvette Cameron, which we looked at. I think it's a good idea. Generally the fact that I carry my credential, my career- Chris Russell: With you. Jerome Ternyck: With me, it actually makes a lot of sense. Just think about it, you apply to 10 companies. All 10 companies are going to ask you to do a background check. For God's sake, why don't you do the background check before you apply and then you do it once? Rather than 10 times. There's a lot of things like this that makes no sense. Or take the example of a background check but I can say validated skills. I apply and I validated my skills as a Java developer. Like why do you care if I did Stanford, Harvard, or I was self-educated on YouTube. If I can actually be an amazing programmer on Java, you don't need my resume. Chris Russell: Exactly, exactly. Jerome Ternyck: So I think we're going to see a lot more of that happening. Synergization of skills and of resumes. Chris Russell: Excellent. What's new in the platform? I saw you came out with a self scheduling feature, but tell us what else is new with the product. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, so we actually just wrapped up a good year of innovation and by the latest count, we shipped 200 features this year. Chris Russell: 200 features, wow. Jerome Ternyck: 200 features. And we ship quarterly. So this quarter we done a couple of good things. So sales scheduling en masse. So if you want to schedule certain interviews in 30 seconds, that's your feature. Just select the candidates, click, and watch everybody being scheduled. And schedule in the right way with the right score card, the right indication, the followup in the morning, the followup to the interviewer to filling the scorecard, the reminders to the candidate, the whole infrastructure behind. It's not just schedule and interview. It's like everything that happens before and after. And so it's really nice. Jerome Ternyck: We released [drip 00:17:23] campaigns, which is part of our CRM. So you nurture candidates, which frankly if you actually do a good job at acquiring leads and nurturing them into becoming candidates. Well we actually have a case study where one junior marketeer outperformed 10 professional sourcers. Because what we've said here is okay, advertising doesn't work, which is not true by the way. Advertising still works. Advertising doesn't work. Let's hire sourcers and give them a database, LinkedIn. And then pick up the phone, smile while you dial in, hope your emails are okay. This is exactly as if we'd say to salespeople "Hey, you get no marketing and here's a phone book." This is how sales was done 40 years ago. The reality is you actually can collect new marketing, collect leads and get people in, nurture them, bring them as prospect, which makes a lot more sense. So nurture campaigns is another one. Jerome Ternyck: We released an automated job distribution. So early on I made the decision not to rely on [inaudible 00:18:27] distribution systems but to actually control the job advertising from within SmartRecruiters which is really nice because we now distribute to thousands of job boards, and we're the only one that has a proper click to hire tracking. So we know exactly the cost of a candidate, the cost of an interviewed candidate, the cost of a hire, the quality ratio, how many like, and so- Chris Russell: You had that back in the beginning too, I remember. Jerome Ternyck: Exactly. And so now we created a feature to actually centrally automate all of that, and so you set up roles that the sales job go to this job board, the marketing job go to this one. You actually have rules that are based on dynamic pipelines. So if I receive less than 10 candidates after one week, then up my bid or increase or post to LinkedIn. So this allows for teams to control and to optimize their advertising budget. Jerome Ternyck: We have our programmatic advertising that actually is expanding globally. So we announced a few more markets. This is where we actually programmatically optimize the budget of our customers based on real- Chris Russell: So you're doing some programmatic now? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, we do. And unlike any other programmatic offering, we know what's happening, like we know that last week you interviewed two candidates that got rated high and one of them moved to offer. And so the last thing you need is to spend more money to actually get more new candidates on this job because you don't need more candidates. Indeed doesn't know this. TMP doesn't know this. Recruiters don't react to it so for the first time you have a programmatic engine that's plugged onto your pipeline and actually dynamically optimize not only where you spend money but on which job and how much you spend. So the savings here are really, really interesting. Jerome Ternyck: And then we extended our SmartAssistance. So we have AI based matching, which is very, very nice. We expanded languages. So we released French and German as additional languages- Chris Russell: So the matchings are when a candidate comes in, you score them, and surface the top candidates? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, we use this machine learning for two things. One is all resumes come in, we read the resumes, we analyze the resumes, we enhance the resumes, and we apply the scoring. And we apply the scoring independent of any bias such as your name, your address or where you may be from, how old you are and so on. So we actually by that remove all the prescreening bias, which is massive in most organization to this day. There is actually a survey that come out by the BBC recently where a hundred resumes, same resume got sent to companies. It was in the UK, Adam got 10 interviews, Mohammed got four. Same resume right? Now that, the AI doesn't care if you're called Adam or Mohammed. And so the same scoring and if you have the same scoring becomes really hard to justify that Adam and Mohammed are not getting both interview. So we are removing this bias and of course accelerating the resume screening because you get your scores and you can react on it. You can automate. Jerome Ternyck: And the second thing is we use this to discover candidates. When you open a job, we go back to all your candidates and your employees, and we actually surface matching ones so that when you say to a candidate, "Sorry it didn't work out, but if we ever have a job that matches your skill we'll contact you." Well actually that's exactly what the IS is, it actually surfaces the candidates that you've talked to in the past and brings them forward. So that SmartAssistant as we call it, has been a massive time saver, sourcing saver, reduction of bias actually for everybody. Chris Russell: I hear a lot of TA leaders talk about automation and trying to make things more efficient, save time for the recruiters. And it sounds like you're really pushing a lot of those types of features, the product just to save time and automate as much as possible while still being candidate friendly. Right? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah we want to leverage automation to give time back to the recruiters to make it more human, more collaborative and to a certain extent automation is your friend here. Because the two hours are saved scheduling interviews is two hours I could spend following up with people who were interviewed yesterday and are keenly waiting to hear what has happened. Just as simple as that. The automation is, Hey actually those 17 candidates are still in stage new, they've been there for five days. Duh. What are you doing? Right? So that's also automation. I can reject them all if you want, but you can also look at them. Jerome Ternyck: Just helping recruiters deal with the volumes so that actually they can do what they want, which is offer candidates an amazing experience. I don't think any recruiter in the world gets into their job thinking my job in life is to offer a shitty candidate experience. It's just the consequences of them being overwhelmed by lack of technology and just too many things happening. Chris Russell: Yeah, definitely. I want to ask about Google for a minute. Couple fronts there. Google for jobs. Were you an early adopter of that in terms of pushing your clients' jobs to that? And secondly, what kind of traffic are you seeing from that particular platform itself? Jerome Ternyck: So yes, we were an early adopter, part of the initial launch actually working with Google on that in proximity. I mean they are a few miles from here, so that's good. I think Google needs, and this feedback we have given them, they still need to identify properly who is the ATS. For now they are applying a Google methodology, which is I want to buy a flight from Paris to San Francisco. Then they just tell me yeah, you can do this one and then I have Expedia and this and this and that. But the problem here is that this is not about booking a flight. Ultimately if you're looking for a job and you find something at Visa, they're going to send you to SmartRecruiters, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn ... But the truth is wherever you go, you actually are going to end up at SmartRecruiter because that's how you apply to a job at Visa. Jerome Ternyck: And so I think this is one optimization that Google, and I know they've been working on it and it's not an easy problem to solve. They have to make the life of candidates easier and instead of "selling" sending traffic to intermediaries here to actually allow candidates to go straight to the source. And if they do that, they'll get corporate recruiters way more interested. Because today most of my Google for jobs traffic is hidden behind LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Indeed, and the others because they are the ones receiving traffic. Chris Russell: Yeah. Do you think Google will ever try to monetize Google for jobs? There's speculation out there that they will. I don't think they will but what's your take? Jerome Ternyck: Oh yeah, I think they will. Chris Russell: You think they will. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. I think they will. Funny enough is actually just talking to someone there, and we were talking about our programmatic advertising solution there. Oh, this is really interesting. Where do you get traffic from? I said we get at this... and then I added "We're waiting for you guys to open pay per click on Google for jobs." And I had a big smile on the face of that Google employee because yeah, of course ... I think they're going to do it. But to do that they have to be able to know who are they selling to. Are they going to sell traffic to third parties or are they going to sell traffic to employers? And I think that that debate maybe has been decided at Google but hasn't been announced. I don't think it's clear yet. Chris Russell: Yeah, yeah. Were you surprised about the Google for Hire shutdown? Jerome Ternyck: I was and I wasn't. Chris Russell: Because that kind of seems like ... They just didn't really get that market maybe in terms of selling into, I don't know. Jerome Ternyck: So Google Hire started out of an attempt to increase retention and add more value for the Google customers, and meant to be as one of many apps that they would actually build. An easy use case if you have collaboration. I don't think that was ever a real push to say we're going to be the hiring platform that's going to win. And so I did not see the corporate commitment behind that initiative. That would really- Chris Russell: Right. Just not their heart into it. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. I don't think so. And so resources were reallocated, product doesn't get supported, and they shut it down. I think it's one of the qualities of Google actually. They know when to say stop, and I see that's paying off. Now will Google keep adding more tools to their business customer? I hope so. I'm a big Google user and big Google fan. We use the whole G Suite here at SmartRecruiters and it's great. Do they get into advanced business application like recruiting? That's a step. Chris Russell: How about Facebook? I don't know, they came out with their Facebook job board. They're starting to work on some ATS's now. I'm not sure if you're a part of that at all. But tell me more about your relationship with Facebook Jobs itself. Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, so again, we were part of that initial integration, initial launch. So all the jobs are pushed to Facebook Jobs. We actually did quite some work on our end to identify and to allow customers to point the right jobs to the right pages. Because it's very nice if you are SmartRecruiters then your jobs go to your SmartRecruiters page. You are a small company, you will recruit 100 people a year. That's all cute and cool. Jerome Ternyck: But if you're Bosch, and you have 900 legal entities around the world, then chances are you have more than one Facebook page and now actually discerning from a central ATS, which job's go to which parts of your Facebook pages is an interesting question. So we actually built a Facebook Jobs management module that really directs the right jobs to the right Facebook pages and the right brands. Chris Russell: Does the user have to authenticate their page with you guys? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah. So they actually do authenticate as the administrator, admin of that page on Facebook and then it's synchronized. So that's nice. Facebook on their end did some work on 'Apply with Facebook'. So you can apply directly from Facebook to SmartRecruiters and enhancing this. We actually have some more initiative going on at the Hiring Success conference in two weeks. We have a hackathon. So we have 20 teams competing in the hackathon. And- Chris Russell: Are these your developers? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, so we have some of our developers. We have customers bringing developers. So Square was bringing in developers. There's discussion about Facebook actually bringing in people and others that will be soon announced, but some big brands. LinkedIn of course who are scaling at LinkedIn or deploying at LinkedIn. And they're connecting SmartRecruiters deeply into their system. So one of our core principle has been API first. So we have a very powerful development environment, which allows more sophisticated customers to build custom integrations, custom experiences for their users or in the case of LinkedIn to actually merge what they get from an ATS where they're from their own system to actually optimize their own recruiting process. Chris Russell: Yeah. You're such a energetic, passionate supporter of hiring in general. Where does this come from, Jerome? Where's the early seed of helping people get jobs, and helping companies recruit better come from? Jerome Ternyck: It's interesting because I truly think that was my calling in life. It's really very interesting, and it was my first job. My very, very first job. I wanted to create a company. I went to Prague in the Czech Republic. I'm from France. And at the time Czech Republic, like the rest of the former Soviet block was expanding, and it was lots of opportunities. I got to Prague, and I started to ask people, what can you do here? What are some good business ideas? And everybody had one similar talk track, which was, Oh, you can do anything but gee, it's hard to hire good people. So I didn't have any money. And so I said, well maybe I could start a recruitment agency. Jerome Ternyck: And there I was 23 year old, I didn't speak a word of Czech. And I started- Chris Russell: You were 23 in Prague. You started your own recruiting agency? Jerome Ternyck: Yeah, and I started placing people. What's really interesting at that time is that all of the candidates had zero experience education in any field relevant to the market economy that my customers were looking for. So you had L'Oreal coming and say, I need a marketing manager with at least five years experience and a degree in marketing and speaking good English. And I would say, well nobody has five years experience in marketing in this country because five years ago there was no marketing. Oh shit, okay, you're right. Nobody has a degree in marketing because there is no marketing degrees in any Czech university at the time. I might be able to find you someone that speaks English is creative and we think could be a good marketer. Jerome Ternyck: And those roots of actually being in a position to figure out what could a person be good at independent of anything they had done before is what gave me the passion for recruiting. And to this day, I will fight. In scorecard for example, when you evaluate candidates, don't evaluate candidates on the must haves, evaluate them on must achieves. Back to my example, if I can code in Java like a God, do you care if I went to Stanford or I learned it on YouTube? You don't. So don't make a scorecard that says degree from a great university, five years experience, this is irrelevant. Make a scorecard that says amazing Java coder, good team player. Create. Okay great. So now you can evaluate me on scenes that I can achieve. And that has stayed with me. Jerome Ternyck: To this day I look at recruiting, I just want to match people to jobs at [inaudible 00:32:39]. I think it's a technology problem and I think it's a problem that can and will be solved by a technology player. And I'd like for SmartRecruiters to be that player. Chris Russell: Awesome. And last question for you, Jerome. What would the Jerome of today tell the Jerome of 2011 when you first started around this, about what you've learned along this journey? Jerome Ternyck: So if the Jerome of today, professionally, I would say get in tech faster. I spent the first 10 years doing a recruitment agency. I had good success. We ended up with like 300 people in the company and it was all nice. But in the end we were just helping one person at a time. And I think I would have loved to get into tech a bit earlier. On my management and my own personal leadership, I come from a place of vulnerability and authenticity these days that I did not have the courage, the experience to have back when I was 25. When you're 25 you want to conquer the world and you're protecting yourself. You are not self-confident. And I realized over the years that vulnerability and authenticity are just really core leadership skills. I'm here and with the team. I really love my Smartians, the whole reason why we are here. So I'm driven by purpose and leading by authenticity and vulnerability. So that's one thing I would advise myself.
Serge Boudreau is the Manager of Talent Acquisition at Calgary based BURNCO Rock Products. With his job board background he is revamping their recruitment process from a marketer's perspective. LI: post mentioned: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6620785258625409024 Serge Boudreau: This is Serge Boudreau, manager of talent acquisition at BURNCO Rock Products, and I'm next on the RecTech podcast. Speaker 2: Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who will tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now, here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell. Chris Russell: All right. You're listening to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology-inspired conversations. We're all about the new tools and tactics to land more talent. Today's episode is a practitioner edition. RecTech Podcast sponsored in part at our friends at Emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. You want to get superstars in demand and on the move, Emissary is the easiest way to connect with them faster and more effectively wherever they are. Each recruiter seat you get on Emissary gets their own phone number to use as their primary phone number for candidate conversations. All those conversations are stored in the text inbox on Emissary. You choose the area code, so each of your recruiters will get a 10-digit the candidate sees when they receive the message. They can have the option for call forwarding to their cell or office line. Go to Emisarry.ai, self-schedule a demo, let them know you heard it on the RecTech Podcast. Chris Russell: He's at the top. Serge Boudreau runs talent acquisition for BURNCO Rock Products out of Calgary, Alberta. He's also a listener of the show, so I'm extremely glad he's about to make is RecTech debut. Serge, welcome. Serge Boudreau: Thank you, Chris. I'm very excited to be here or talking to you. Definitely, I've been listening to your podcast almost since the inception, so for you to ask me to come onboard was very exciting on my end. Chris Russell: Awesome. I always love it when I get a listener on the show itself. So appreciate that volunteering there. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile before we get started today. You got an interesting background overall. I want to start there, I think. You've worked time at Kelly Services. You worked at Indeed Canada and also Workopolis. I'm assuming you were there at Workopolis when the takeover happened by Indeed. Would that be a correct assumption? Serge Boudreau: Actually, no. Chris Russell: Oh. Serge Boudreau: I was at Indeed when Indeed purchased Workopolis, which was very interesting. Chris Russell: Okay. So the reverse, okay. Serge Boudreau: Yeah, I actually had joined Indeed already. It was interesting. Like you said, my background is quite varied. I actually started my career in talent acquisition as a recruiter. Then got promoted in through a different recruitment manager roles. Then decide to really go on the vendor side and go at Workopolis. During that time, Workopolis was very dominant here in Canada as far as the job site of choice. I think it was really Workopolis and Monster had quite a bit of market share here as well. I had the pleasure of being in charge of sales and operation for Western Canada and Quebec for a while. I do speak French as well, but spent quite a bit of time there. Unfortunately, when Indeed came into the market or fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, it really took a lot of market share and really hurt Workopolis. Serge Boudreau: Eventually, pretty much led to Indeed acquiring in that point, but a couple factors that happened is here in Western Canada, especially in Calgary, it's very oil and gas focused, the industry. So in 2014 when oil and gas just crashed, also did the recruitment aspects of it. It really put Workopolis in strain in Western Canada, hence I moved to Kelly Services, which was actually my first foray in a staffing firm. I learned a lot, both on the permanent placement, but mostly, we did a lot of contract for contract workers for large oil and gas. A lot of the workforce became a contract workforce as they were hiring just based on the economy. Serge Boudreau: Then had the pleasure to do a very similar role at Indeed where I basically led the Western sales team here in Canada. I did Quebec for a while as well there, so it was kind of going back to my old days at Workopolis. Then one day, we acquired Workopolis, and it felt like the old Godfather line, "When you think you're out, they pull you back in." It's how I felt. I have so many great memories and everything at Workopolis, but, obviously, Indeed in the Canadian marketplace and also in the US has been very dominant. Chris Russell: Yeah. Rumor has it that ZipRecruiter was also trying to bid for Workopolis. Do you know if that's true or not? Serge Boudreau: I've heard similar rumors. Yeah, there's a couple of other. The other rumors I've heard, there was also other Canadian players that were looking to basically going around Workopolis. In Canada, just to give you a landscape, there was Workopolis. Obviously, the normal American job board, so CareerBuilder, Monster, but there's a Quebec job board that's making a lot of inroads in Canada was Jobillico. There was rumors they were potentially trying to acquire Workopolis. Obviously, Nubo or now Talent.com, there's rumors they were in the picture, but I don't exactly what happened in the end of the day, but I'd be shocked if ZipRecruiter was not part of that conversation for sure just because Workopolis brand was so strong in Canada. Chris Russell: Yeah, totally. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for that history lesson there, Serge. Tell me about more about what you guys hire for there at BURNCO and I'm curious to talk to me a little bit the size of your recruiting team there, and how many people they are, and how many recs you guys are looking to fill this year, and things like that. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. No. BURNCO Rock Products is an interesting business. We basically take big rocks and make them into small rocks to really simplify what we do, but a lot of people. We operate in Canada and the US. In Canada, concrete. So you've seen those concrete mixer trucks. We do asphalt aggregate, which is basically the foundation of construction for highways, anything like that. We also run supply, basically landscape supply, landscape, hardscape supplies to retail stores for contractors and for basically the weekend landscape person that's coming in to get a bag of rocks or get some landscape stones or whatever the case is. In the US, we're heavily focused on concrete and aggregate. We have operations in Texas and in Colorado. Serge Boudreau: The great majority of what we hire and the biggest challenge, as you're probably well aware of, is drivers. Our drivers in Texas and Colorado, it's a massive challenge as everyone is seeing in the industry of all type of driving jobs. In Canada, very similar, but we also hire in Canada anything from head office. We do from IT roles to anything across the board. Our structure is a little bit different as far as how much we recruit. In total, we hire around 550 people a year. Very small team. When it comes to recruitment, it's a little bit of a structure. How my role falls into play is basically I'm responsible for the creation and the governance of our whole talent acquisition strategy. The great majority of the actual execution is done by our HR business partners that's responsible for each business division. I do have a team of coordinators and also recruiters to assist, but the lead on the intake on the role from the hiring manager is done by the HR business partner or the HR manager in that particular location comes to us. Serge Boudreau: The biggest part of my job is more in the recruitment marketing side to make sure that we are doing everything out there, especially in the recruitment market to get enough candidates and enough qualified candidates so we can actually fill those roles. I'm going to brag a little bit, but hiring 500 roles and really having a tiny recruitment team is something I'm really proud of. A lot of that, coming in is I had the opportunity to create a really robust team, but I decided to look at how we can be efficient. We really automated a lot of our processes, a lot of how we're going out to the market from... Basically, if we can automate it, we're automating it. I really want the recruitment and the HR business partner focus 100% on relationships. I really do strongly believe in the candidate experience and our hiring manager experience is the two things I really care about. Serge Boudreau: When I first started, to give you an idea, we were still accepting resumes. We didn't have an ATS. We had zero technology. Basically, I was guided to a filing cabinet with all the resumes we'd received over the last 10 years, which I was kind of shocked to see. Chris Russell: Filing cabinet, huh? Serge Boudreau: Yeah, exactly. And just the word fax. I'm not that young. I'm not that old, but in reality, I didn't know fax machines still existed in the corporate world, especially coming from pretty innovative companies like Indeed. So we completely revamped what we did. I feel today, in our market, in our industry, we're definitely highly innovative in what we do, and how we go to the market, and how we actually get our employees. So quite a big of changes, but it's been lots of fun in the past year. We've accomplished a lot. Chris Russell: Yeah, it sounds like it. We're going to dive into that. I'm going to give you some props first though because as a recruiting marketer, I like to see people like yourself out there doing unique things that are unique in terms of social media stuff. You posted something yesterday which I called out and threw it up on my LinkedIn recruiting marketing group, which is basically just a job post. Now, when I typically see job posts on LinkedIn, it's all same thing. It's all we're hiring, right? With a simple link and maybe a small- Serge Boudreau: I hate we're hiring, by the way, not to cut you off. Chris Russell: So do I. Serge Boudreau: But I just hate that phrase. Anytime I see it, it's a massive turnoff. Sorry. Go ahead. Chris Russell: Everyone's hiring. Who cares what the- Serge Boudreau: Yeah, exactly. Chris Russell: What the job seeker wants to know is why should they come work there or something unique about that employer itself. Let me just read for the audience what you wrote here, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. It says... Well, let me describe it first. It was a picture of a bunch of trucks lined up. It looks like it's at a rock quarry, but it's from 1950s, it looks like. There's a bunch of old trucks sitting there. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. Chris Russell: Looks like old cement mixers. Are those cement mixers? Serge Boudreau: They are, yeah. That's 1940. Chris Russell: 1940, okay. So I go back even further. You've got the BURNCO logo in red there right on top, so it stands out pretty well. First of all, I think the black and white photo is unique too for one thing. That's going to catch my eye, number one, and your logo there is right there on top in red. You can't miss this thing. Audience, it says, "Judging by the picture, we need to hire someone to do some better financial planning so we can update our equipment. I'm kidding, but we are hiring a finance planning and analyst profession for our Texas office. Click on the picture to find out if this opportunity, an iconic 107-year-old family business, is the right place for you." I love that, Serge. That's a great example of how to use social media right when it comes to promoting a job. So kudos to you and great job there. Serge Boudreau: Thank you. What's interesting in looking at what our value proposition as an employer is and looking at how we're going to go to the market, I think there's a couple things that I looked at is we're 107 years old. We're a fourth-generation family business. In an economy, especially in the Calgary market, where I wouldn't say it's doing really well just based still on oil and gas and the Canadian market, people are looking for a little bit stability, companies that have been a long time. I do a mixture of either people that are genuine people that work within the company and are still here, and they're happy. The other is when I'm doing equipment or anything like that, I love the vintage stuff. I think it stands out. I think it's our unique proposition to the market that we've been around forever. We have a lot of history. That picture is from 1940. I have pictures actually from our inception, which was in 1912. Our CEO is... Like I said, he's a fourth-generation Burns, so it's been in the family. It's a unique proposition. Serge Boudreau: I leverage social media quite a bit. We have our own social media site that's just dedicated towards the employee side of it, what it is. It's also my recruitment marketing launchpad, but I'm trying a lot of different things to see what resonates better in the market. Some of it generic, just like, "Here's my job. Here is the 100 list of things that I need you to be able to do to hire here," just it doesn't attract. I know it from working plenty of years at a job board, and understanding what works, what doesn't. So I'm always testing from witty to straight up. Serge Boudreau: I try to stay away from the faux employer brand. What I mean by that is try to be authentic with what you're doing. I get caught in it sometimes, and I put buzzwords or things that really are too corporate-y. Our employees that we're hiring are true, what I call, salt of the earth type people, hard workers, and they don't want the corporate BS that a lot of job postings are out there or how we're targeting it especially. I do a lot of Facebook targeted ads. I try to do the same thing there because it's really hitting the demographic of the people I'm trying to start- Chris Russell: How are those working for you, Serge, because they changed their ad restrictions there? Were you affected by that? Because it seems like now it's a much broader set of people you can target with that ad, and it's going to lessen, I think, the overall quality of click-through rates in some of these ads there. Tell me what you're seeing from your standpoint. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. I hate it, first of all, because I was able to target. I think it's doing exactly the opposite of what they were trying to do. I get it. I get the reasoning, but I get the challenge because, in certain cases, it really has affected the way I can target from... To give you an idea of that is I was able to target specifically ads in either a different language or specific demographic or even in some cases, I am actually physically targeting a minority group because I want to hire them. Now, I'm caught in the situation that it's a lot tougher to do. Serge Boudreau: So right now, I can't be as targeted. I really have to spread it out to everyone, which is fine. I have actually had success in some ways because I'm hitting the husbands of people that could work for us or the wives, and they're sharing it to their network, which if I was really specific on my targeting, I maybe not would have hit them as much. So I'm not totally pissed off, but it's made my job a little bit harder in how I approach Facebook ads because I think they're a great tool for recruitment. I think especially I'm hiring a demographic that spends a lot of time on Facebook, so I need to be there more than I need to be on any other tools out there. Chris Russell: Are you- Serge Boudreau: Yeah, it hasn't been great. Chris Russell: For your ads on Facebook, are you doing legion ads where you just capture the contact info or are you actually redirecting them back to your job somewhere? Serge Boudreau: I leverage ViziRecruiter. I don't know if you've ever heard of Vizi, which it's basically how it's leading to my... Basically, I take the Vizi ad, and then it's basically driving it to apply directly to my career site, but there's not many clicks. It's they see the job description. They click on the ad. They see the Vizi, which, in my opinion, it's really cool. It's probably the thing I get the most complement- Chris Russell: Yeah. Describe ViziRecruiter for the audience, if you could. Tell them what it is. I love the product as well. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. So- Chris Russell: I remember when it came out a few years ago and I was like, "Wow. This is what every career site should look like basically." Serge Boudreau: I agree. I think the biggest challenge that I have I'm a horrible copywriter. I try to do my best, and when I looked at my job ad coming in, there's a big difference between a job description and a job ad. So I was able to really focus my job ad, but Vizi just brought it to the next level where it basically takes your job ad. It creates it in a really nice-looking format that's easily digestible with nice pictures. The key highlights are really easy to read as they're kind of in a... not in a bullet point, but I don't know what the exact word is. It's basically laid out in very visual way. Serge Boudreau: Instead of creating an ad for every time that I'm doing any type of social media campaign on my own, I'm just taking the link from Vizi. It's already done. Vizi is something that I've had a lot of compliments from job seekers, from my counterparts in the industry as how cool it looks because it does look... Not to advertise anyone. They're not paying me, but I definitely recommend if there's any practitioners out there to take a look at Vizi because it's made a big difference in the look of my ads. Chris Russell: Yeah. Listeners, go out there, search BURNCO careers. You can see some of their jobs there. It's a very visual. It's basically a visually-stunning job description overall. I like how I click on the Texas drivers here and the shot of the cement mixer pans in on itself. It's very colorful and definitely eye-catching overall. There's no paragraphs of texts. It's just blocks of images or, sorry, blocks of elements here with some icons, things like that. So I do love the overall visual-ness of the job. I think every job ad should look like this overall, but I shall there... so you mean- Serge Boudreau: It does make it stand out. You described it way better than I did, so thanks, Chris, but it does make it stand out. It really differentiates. It helps you, like what we talked about, as far as what your actual imagery is going to look out there. I'm always a believer that the most important thing in a job description is the physical content of what the job is. Chris Russell: Will Vizi... Will it suck in your ATS jobs and then kind of- Serge Boudreau: Yeah. Chris Russell: ... create the ad automatically? How's it work? Serge Boudreau: So they scrape my jobs from my ATS. They basically automatically update on their backend as far as what it looks... They create each one individually, but they scrape my job so any updates that I do, usually, the new Vizi, I call it, is updated in the next day. So around half a day turnaround, so it's fairly quick. Chris Russell: Nice, nice. Did you see a jump in applications or conversions when you switched to Vizi? Serge Boudreau: Yeah. We actually did quite a bit of research to see how much it would affect it. You got to put in perspective, my number one source of candidates right now is still Indeed, and my jobs are flowing automatically to Indeed as the quick apply in the background. But my jobs in Indeed are not being converted into Vizi just because of how their format runs, but all the other sources of social media and looking at what the conversion was before and after, we saw almost a 25% up-lick on our conversion. With the amount of volume that we do, which is not large... Obviously, we're not an international or a national business, but for our volume, that's a huge uplift. What I noticed too, I found a little bit deeper, we actually hired more from the Vizi than we did from any other sources outside of Indeed, which was definitely interesting. What that tells me is the quality that we're getting is higher with Vizi than it was before. Chris Russell: Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Your ATS there is Workable, it looks like, which you- Serge Boudreau: It is. Chris Russell: ... which you put in last year at some point. Just in the initial thoughts on Workable as an ATS, how do you like it? Serge Boudreau: I really like Workable. When I looked at different ATS, there's so many different alternatives and I went through... I'll give you an idea of where I got to. I shortlisted to three ATS. Those were Jobvite, SmartRecruiters, and Workable. Jobvite and SmartRecruiters are amazing ATS in the context, but our hiring managers are quite involved in the hiring process overall. And what I want to make sure is it's very easy for them to use. I found with functionality as far as the intuitiveness of Workable was impressive to me and what it could do. I felt that it wouldn't take me really long or anyone in my team to be able to train the hiring manager on how to access Workable. It's basically a five-minute conversation. It's done. They get it. That's a challenge with most ATS. Imagine trying to train hiring managers that's never used any software used in the field on Taleo. Not to bash Taleo, but that would be really difficult. Serge Boudreau: The other aspect that I found really key with Workable, and most ATS now, I'm seeing that change, is how easy it is for applicants to apply. Workable has a mobile-first platform, extremely easy to apply. So that's critical to me. I've heard on your show many times, I think you're a big proponent. Actually, your last one, your idea is we should have one quick apply for every ATS and every ATS should get onboard. I'm 100% behind it. Chris Russell: Thank you, Serge. Serge Boudreau: I do believe though, not to sound... It's a little bit of a pipe dream in some ways, so- Chris Russell: Yeah, I know. Serge Boudreau: ... I don't think they'll coordinate- Chris Russell: A man can dream, can't he? Serge Boudreau: Exactly. I think you're 100% accurate, but, hey, I got to take care of my own and I got to work with what I can control. And Workable definitely has that aspect where it's easy to apply. It's quick. It's a mobile type of platform. I don't even have to ask for resume. To give you an idea, in certain markets we're in, really tough to get drivers. I want to remove any friction if possible. So I'll ask them, "What's your name? What's your email address? What's your phone number? Write in one sentence why you're a driver." That way, I'll call them then get the... or someone will call them and get all the information. So anything that can remove friction from the system in applying is great. I also like they integrate with a lot of tools that I was planning to use anyway. Serge Boudreau: The one complaint, and I've told this to Workable many times, is their hesitance to work with programmatic advertising. I've had quite a bit of challenge getting Appcast or any other programmatic players integrated with Workable. They put a lot of roadblocks behind it. As you know, right now, programmatic is probably the hottest thing in HR tech. If you haven't looked at leveraging programmatic as an HR or as a talent acquisition practitioner, you're behind the curve because it definitely is a true course of candidates. What I'm trying to do is really go away from my reliance on Indeed like more practitioners in Canda just because of their dominance here. I have nothing against Indeed, but it's never a good business decision to have a reliance. So I'm really looking at programmatic to get the next level. We have to figure it out workarounds with Appcast and with other providers. Chris Russell: Could you give Appcast your feed or something like that and have them push out the jobs? Is that- Serge Boudreau: Yeah, yeah. We've created a backend solution, but it's not ideal because sometimes, I need to go to directly to the Appcast feed to get the candidates. And anytime you're adding layers in a really, pretty tight, efficient team, any more steps can cause a little bit of growing pain. That's the only complaint. So Workable, if you're out there, you've heard me. You need to do this. You need to work with programmatic. Chris Russell: There you go. All right. What else is on your HR tech deck, Serge? It looks like you got some referral stuff here. I guess that's also Workable. Serge Boudreau: Yeah, I'm actually using Workable's referral tool, which has worked really well. We had a very, very decentralized type of how we handled referrals. So we had spreadsheets, which ended up, we forgot to pay most of the people because spreadsheet wasn't updated. We had a different program in Texas, Colorado, and then in different business divisions in Canada. So it wasn't standardized. It was really tough to follow. It was tough to get our people paid on time. So Workable referral is actually really good on that end. They basically centralize everything for me. Serge Boudreau: Really, my long-term plan with Workable or any type of referral programs that I want to run, I eventually want to get away from paying any referral bonus. I think if you're a really good company to work for, people will actively go out and refer people. But in the meantime in going away, because we've always had a referral program. It's always been somewhat lucrative. Just dropping the ball initially and saying, "Hey, we're not going to do referral bonus anymore," could have had a negative effect. So I think the program and how we handle it right now will never change, but how we pay, that might change dramatically in the future as well. Chris Russell: Gotcha. Let's take a quick break, listeners, so I can talk about our other sponsor, of course, our friends over at WorkHere, WorkHere.com, the geofencing ad platform. They help employers reach people through online ads with pinpoint precision where they live, work, and shop. WorkHere is going to advertise your jobs on the screens that candidates use the most, of course, their mobile phones. Messaging is then delivered in the social mobile apps they use more often. From them, a chat team will qualify and engage them, send them back to ATS via SMS, email or redirect. So head over to WorkHere.com and tell them you heard it on the RecTech Podcast. Serge, on your social media profiles, how often are you posting? Just give me a general sense of the types of content you're posting up there as well. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. We're not posting enough. That's something that working really lean and having a lot of recs has been a... I'm a believer you need to be putting out like 10 to 15 pieces of content almost a day to really keep the candidates engaged, but what we've created is basically what we call Inside BURNCO. The purpose of it behind it is to really give... WE obviously have our BURNCO consumer, social media accounts out there, but Inside BURNCO was really created for two things. It was, one, a place to launch all our social media recruitment campaigns. So like the ad you started at the end, that's some of the type of contents we'll reach out. The other is just to give a little bit of an insight of what it is to work inside BURNCO. We'll profile different employees, if we have events. That's one of the places that we put it on social media. Serge Boudreau: I'm looking going in 2020... A lot of it was controlled by me initially as a new concept, as far as I was the physical poster, but also with the limitation of time, it's been a challenge. So I really want to focus in 2020 putting a lot of content and looking how we can accomplish that. There's obviously a couple different ways and how we schedule with different tools out there. So I'm looking at that now, but I want it to feel authentic. I want it to feel real. I believe in automation, but I also believe in having a real clear message that's authentic and it feels like it's a real person in the back actually creating those posts. And it is, so it's just how we schedule and how we can make sure that we have enough content that is interesting and people want to follow because I see it as a way to keep expanding our talent community. When I say talent community, it's... Drivers is a perfect example. I always want to be nurturing a new pool of candidates, so when we need them, they're ready to go. One of those aspects is keeping them engaged through our social media channels. Chris Russell: Yeah. Very cool. You're also one of our Rejobify clients, so I want to thank you again for signing up for that service, so you can Rejobify your rejected candidates. I'm just curious from your perspective, Serge, why do you think that's such an important thing to do in terms of the candidate experience for every candidate that comes to your company and tries to apply? Serge Boudreau: I am a big believer that candidate experience is critical. That's from the minute they see their job ad to them not getting the job. Let's put in perspective is most people don't get the job. We get over 30,000 candidates a year, and we hire 500, so in reality, the great majority doesn't get a job. I heard somewhere actually in the last couple days, and I thought it was brilliant, is we're in the business of goodbyes. We're kind of breaking- Chris Russell: Rejection, yeah. Serge Boudreau: Yeah, rejection. We're kind of rejecting- Chris Russell: We're in the rejection business, yeah. Serge Boudreau: We are in the rejection business. It's kind of breaking up with a lot of people. In a lot of ways, it's telling them that it's us, not them sometimes because there's so many great candidates, but we can only hire so much. I have been blown away, and I'm not just telling you this but, obviously, you being involved in this service. This has been a fantastic tool for us. It's been something that has... Because I've been trying to figure out how can we help our job seekers in any way. A couple of ideas I come up before this tool was, well, maybe... We run landscape, our retail stores here in some parts of Canada. I'm like, "Well, maybe we give them a discount on the product as a thank you." And something that, obviously, I think for a lot of consumer brands that are everywhere, I think you should look at that and I think it's something that probably could be integrated with Rejobify, but when- Chris Russell: Yeah. We have a retail client, in fact, that gives a discount as well as part of their page to their eye care centers. They can take advantage of that in addition to the stuff on Rejobify, so it's a great idea. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. I think it's a brilliant idea for companies that are doing it. I decided, because we're not at where... and the type of roles that it's something that we will be potentially doing, but this is really if one person gets a job from the advice or the tools that Rejobify is giving them, it's a big win for us. It's interesting because you shared on LinkedIn yesterday one of the rejection emails. I loved it. I was actually going to comment, but then I got busy. Do you have any clue of what the candidate did? Did candidate respond to that? I'd be curious to see what the candidate said actually. That- Chris Russell: I don't know. Again, I found it online somewhere. I printed it out, and it was sitting in my stack of papers. When I was doing some cleaning over the holidays, I discovered it again. I was like, "I got to blog about this," so it was printed out in tiny, little text. I had to sit there for a good 20 minutes and type it out, but, yeah, I'm not sure what the candidate thought of it or not. But to me, if I'm- Serge Boudreau: Well, it gives you- Chris Russell: ... reading that, I'm smiling at the end of that thing. It's a kind of a neat way to- Serge Boudreau: 100%. Chris Russell: ... let down. Serge Boudreau: Well, it's interesting because 99% of the responses I get from candidates by... because I try to customize messaging in a very non-corporate talk. Obviously, it's customized, but not customized because I'll be sending out the message to say 300 people at once, but where ATS, obviously, their name and my name is stated, but I try to put it in real talk. I put the Rejobify offer as part of that. I would say 99% of the time, the feedback is amazing. Chris Russell: Have you gotten- Serge Boudreau: There is always that- Chris Russell: Have you gotten candidates that replied back and said, "Hey, thank you for this?" Serge Boudreau: Yes. Chris Russell: Awesome. Serge Boudreau: Plenty of examples. Chris Russell: Awesome. Serge Boudreau: I've also had candidates or very few. I had one yesterday that was insulted that they needed help as a job seeker. This was the second portion of the email because the first part is, "I'm fully qualified. I can't believe you're rejecting me." I get that. It's really frustrating. You look at a job. You think you're qualified, and you get a rejection email. It does hurt the ego in some ways. If I'm getting 200, there's chances are I'm going to be rejecting people that are qualified for the job. But they did it in a very, I would say, rude way and basically called our company unethical because she deserves an interview, which I'm like, "Well, maybe you should look at self-awareness." Chris Russell: Okay, yeah. Probably not the right candidate for BURNCO then. Serge Boudreau: Exactly, your entitlement. So I responded nicely to be like... Then she responded back. She's like, "On top of that, you think I'm not a good job seeker, so you're giving me these tools to help me look for a job." I'm like, "Yeah, you probably need it," but aside from that, the feedback has been great. You see the numbers of people that I send. It's a 30% conversion rate that they sign up, which is fantastic. I've really enjoyed it. It's something that's going to be part of my, I guess, tech stack for as long as I do because it's really cheap too. Chris Russell: Yeah. I guess that's a win-win for both. Serge Boudreau: Cheap is not the right word. Very inexpensive. Chris Russell: Cost-effective. Serge Boudreau: Yes, exactly. Chris Russell: There you go. Awesome. Well, Serge, we certainly appreciate your time today. I guess my last question for you as we end up today's podcast is what are you dying to try as far any kind of new HR tech or some other kind of marketing tactic for 2020 here? Serge Boudreau: Well, part of my 2020 was getting really hardcore metrics for a company that had no metrics. So we launch all our metrics through a partner, webTactics, here in Canada for... Everything is to Power BI, so everything that was spreadsheet is now automatically sent to Power BI. So everyone has access too, every executive. We are just launching Click Boarding here for our onboarding, which directly integrates with our ATS. So I'm very excited about getting that onboard because we don't have a great onboarding experience right now. I was not a believer in video interviewing. When I say video interviewing, it's the normal interview tools. I've been converted and- Chris Russell: You have. Wow. Serge Boudreau: Yeah, I have. I have because I think if you do it in a particular way, if someone just applies to your job, and you just send them a video, and there's no personality to it, it's like applying to a job and getting a assessment tool that basically takes 45 minutes to do. That's just a bad experience, but if someone on my team calls you, does a basic screening, be like, "Hey. We're going to send you a video interview to go through a little bit more detail," not too lengthy, it's actually cut our screening time dramatically. I also include a very personalized message from either the hiring manager or myself in that video. I let them do retakes, at least a couple of retakes. I think that's the biggest challenge sometimes is you get one shot. It is awkward. Video interviewing is awkward, but the flip side to it is on my... where I run a really efficient and small team for what we hire, it's a tool that's actually from what I've seen... I've just launched in the last couple weeks, has saved me a lot of time because I've been able to do that screening that would take me quite a long time over the phone. It's helped me shorten that period. Chris Russell: Nice. It just struck me too as we're talking is you're probably the one company that could use the company rockstar in their job ads. Serge Boudreau from- Serge Boudreau: We haven't. Okay? We had that internal discussion, and I decided not to because... I still go back to it. I'm like, "We should use rockstar." Chris Russell: There's probably a funny way of doing it somehow. Serge Boudreau: We should use it, but I just hate those titles like ninja, rockstar, all of them. But I could use it. You're right. You know what? If I do- Chris Russell: Yeah. I say it jokingly, but yeah. Serge Boudreau: If I do end up using it, I'm going to put it on you say, "From this podcast that you're giving me justification to do it." Chris Russell: There you go. The one company that can use it is BURNCO. There you go. Serge Boudreau: Exactly. Chris Russell: Awesome. Well, Serge, thanks again for joining me today. Tell people where to connect with you and BURNCO. Serge Boudreau: You can find me on LinkedIn, Serge Boudreau. I'm pretty easy to find even though it's a French name. For BURNCO, please check out our social media site so at Inside BURNCO on Facebook, Instagram, potentially TikTok coming. I'm pushing hard on that. Also, BURNCO.com/careers. You can see all our jobs. You can see everything we're doing with Vizi. Come check us out. Chris Russell: Awesome. I could talk to you all day, Serge. Again, thanks for your time. Serge Boudreau: Thank you. Chris Russell: That will do for this edition of the RecTech Podcast. Thanks again to my sponsors, WorkHere and Emissary. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast. If you're an iTunes subscriber, leave a review, and I'll be sure to thank you on air. Thanks for listening, everyone, and remember always be recruiting. Speaker 2: Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisRussel or visit RecTechMedia.com where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech Media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcast, webinars, and articles. So be sure to check out our other sites, Recruiting Headlines and HR Podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.
Happy new year everyone this is the first episode of the new year and I have a special opinion episode to start us off. But let me start with some housekeeping items namely events I need to tell you about. I’ve got some discounts for you. Talent Acquisition Week is coming up at the end of January 28-30 in san francisco and you can use the code RECTECH to save 15% off a ticket...its 3 conferences in one week SOCIAL RECRUITING STRATEGIES CONFERENCE, EMPLOYER BRANDING STRATEGIES CONFERENCE and TALENT SOURCING STRATEGIES SUMMIT - learn more at talentacquisitionweek.com IAMPHENOM - the Phenom People conference will be held in Philadelphia on March 3-5 so if you want to save 25% use code RUSSELL - register at iamphenom.com I will be attending both events and conducting a number of interviews while attending RecTech Live Webinars Jan 16th at 1pm come see a demo of CandidateID a talent nurturing tool that also offers a free recruitment crm. CEO Adam Gordon will give us a preview of their software suite Jan 23rdt at 1pm come see a demo of Talenya - sourcing chatbot...very cool tool for employers...CEO Gal Amog will demo, they are targeting corporate TA professionals so if that you then tune in Register at rectechlive.com Cool tool alert - Tiny Scanner Plus is a 5 dollar app that will make your life easier if you do a lot of scanning. Your smartphone is an extension of your office. One of the most useful apps we found recently is Tiny Scanner Plus. Take a picture os a document and convert an image to a PDF that you can email or export. Contracts, agendas, letters, mark-ups, articles, receipts, kids' schedules or tournament brackets—scan it and send it in a snap. Name, organize and search your scans on the go from your phone. The app costs $4.99 in the app stores. Apple | Google Before we get started let me mention my other sponsor...WorkHere, the hyperlocal candidate delivery tool. Through their geofencing ad platform ….They help employers reach people through online ads with pinpoint precision where they live, work, and shop. Workhere will advertise your jobs on the screens candidates use the most: their mobile phone. That messaging is then delivered into the social and mobile apps they use the most often. From there, a human chat team will then qualify and engage those folks and send them back to your ATS via sms, email or redirect. So, head over to workhere.com and tell them you heard it on the RecTech podcast ------------------------------------------ ONE ATS APPLY TO RULE THEM ALL Now that 2020 is here and the candidate experience is top of mind for many talent acquisition teams, lets talk about the ATS experience for job seekers. To get more specific, lets focus on the apply experience. For too long, the average job seeker has had to navigate a myriad of logins from disparate systems of record, forced to create and remember passwords and usernames in order to apply. But jumping through these hoops has made job search a painful one for candidates. It's time to start reversing that trend. The 'login to apply' feature prominent on most applicant tracking software is an element of days gone by. It is a relic of software past, and if I had a choice I would ban this barrier to apply. The modern job seeker has zero interest in creating another user account to apply to your company. They simply want to upload their resume quickly and move on. Appcast, the programmatic ad platform says that only about 6.6% of candidate traffic converts into an actual apply on desktop. And its even lower on mobile at 4.7%. Though there are a variety of factors as to why someone doesn't apply, making them login is certainly a big reason they don't. There is a use case for having to create a login. But only if its a seamless process. The ideal solution would require adopting an industry wide single sign-on process shared by all recruiting software vendors. Indeed has their apply button, so does LinkedIn. Why don't ATS vendors band together and create one of their own? Imagine a world where each ATS could have their own version of Easy Apply! Two things would happen in my opinion. Job seekers would rejoice. Applications would rise. There are hundreds of ATS platforms in the market so this idea presents quite a challenge. For it to gain traction it would have to start with the bigger players like WorkDay, Brassring and Taleo's of the world to lead the way. The rest of the industry would be sure to follow if they saw the major recruiting software companies sponsor such an open source initiative. If I were the CEO of companies like iCIMS, Greenhouse and others, I would take this suggestion seriously. Job seekers have the RIGHT to an efficient and speedy apply process. A single shared apply account could make that a reality. Pipe dream? Probably. But its worth throwing the idea out there for the powers that be to contemplate. Recruiting software companies must adapt to the times or risk becoming extinct in this new world of experienced based software. That will do it for this edition of the RecTech podcast.....Thanks again to our sponsors Workhere and Emissary. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts…….if you are an iTunes subscriber leave a review and I’ll thank you on air. Thanks for listening….and remember, always be recruiting.
Last week, I spoke about lazy recruiters and given the response I have received, I felt that a follow-up post was warranted. I have noticed that many organisations have started using an even more automated process for their acceptance of resumes and cover letters using application systems (e.g. Taleo) . Typically, these are used by the big corporates in the market who have seemingly ditched the recruitment companies and started advertising directly through job boards and other networks like LinkedIn.
Entrevue avec Martin Ouellet, développeur de de l’application mobile «Voilà» et cofondateur de Taleo : Une application pour la gestion de la main-d’œuvre crée à Québec.
Being a CMO is a tough job, especially in the weeks and months after stepping into a new organization. Few people have mastered stepping into a new CMO role quite like Heidi Melin, CMO of Workfront. Heidi has more than 20 years of senior marketing experience. Previously, she has served as the CMO of Plex Systems, Eloqua, Polycom, Taleo, Hyperion, and was the group vice president of marketing at PeopleSoft. On this episode of Marketing Trends, Heidi shares her best practices for taking over as CMO. She also discusses how to optimize work management, how to build a great marketing team, and much more. Links: Full Notes & Quotes: http://bit.ly/2lLFEPM Heidi’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/heidimelin/ Workfront: workfront.com/ 5 Key Takeaways: - To build a category, it's important to focus on the voices that people trust most: Analysts and industry influencers. - "Look at marketing as an opportunity to ensure that all of your business processes are connected. If you haven't centralized your work process, you're missing a big piece.” - Heidi Melin - A CMO should focus on three primary objectives: First, developing a strategic plan and cascading goals to the marketing team, second, aligning the budget to those goals, and third, focusing on the actual projects and initiatives. - “Positioning and developing a brand platform is all about the company. Generally it's led by a marketing team, but frankly, it has to have engagement from across the company in order for it to become real.” - Heidi Melin - Great talent can be found anywhere. Marketing leaders can look outside the traditional markets to find very capable marketers. Bio: Heidi is the CMO of Workfront. Prior to Workfront, Heidi was the CMO of Plex Systems, Inc., where she was responsible for strategy and execution of all marketing efforts. She also previously served as CMO at Eloqua, Polycom, Taleo, Hyperion, and was the group vice president of marketing at PeopleSoft. In addition, Heidi served as a public company board director for Accelrys. --- Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world’s #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.
I met today’s guest while attending the Phenom People user conference in Philadelphia recently. She runs HR for Kansas based, Garmin International. You probably know Garmin as the company that produces activity trackers and sports watches, and GPS devices. In this interview we'll discuss her HR tech stack, recruiting channels and more. What have you been up to you since you got back from the conference? Can you describe your current hiring needs for 2019? How many open reqs, how many hires will be made in 2019? How big is your recruiting team? Which HR technologies are currently part of your HR tech stack? Taleo, oracle/fusion/kronos/learn.com/handshake/simplicity Any sourcing tools? What tech is on your radar? Sourcing stories? What’s your pitch to potential candidates about coming to work for Garmin? Fav Garmin device?
I recently spent a few months looking for work, so I decided to spend a few episodes complaining about the process of finding a job in the 21st Century, as opposed to complaining about my job. This episode is marked as Explicit due to one F-bomb.
This episode is brought to you by Hiretual. First up in the news…. According to the Wall Street Journal Facebook agreed to overhaul its lucrative targeted advertising system to settle accusations that landlords, lenders and employers use the platform to discriminate. The far-reaching settlement compels Facebook to withhold a wide array of detailed demographic information — including Zip codes, gender and age — from advertisers when they market housing, credit and job opportunities. Facebook said the new platform will also prevent advertisers from discriminating based on sexual orientation, age, ethnicity, and other characteristics covered by state and local civil rights laws. Upwork, the largest freelancing website, recently announced Upwork Plus, its first packaged service offering tailored for small businesses. To help growing businesses connect with and secure top-tier freelance talent, Upwork Plus features on-demand support, greater visibility for job posts, dedicated dashboards for collaboration, and access to an exclusive community board devoted to Upwork Plus customers. Feature include On-Demand Support from Account ManagersPlus provides clients with access to 24/7 customer support and additional on-demand support from account managers to help users post their first job or scale their hiring. Customers can also opt-in for talent specialist services that can assist in sourcing and highlighting top freelancers. Greater Visibility through Promoted Job Posts and Client BadgeUpwork Plus customers will receive a monthly Featured Job, which flags a post as a top job in search results and includes the post in a digest that is sent to Top Rated freelancers. Plus clients will also receive a client badge on the freelancer’s search results page to help attract talent. Collaboration Across an OrganizationWith a dedicated dashboard, Plus customers can track program efforts across an organization all in one place. It also enables customers to invite colleagues onto a shared account and access collaboration and project status tracking tools. Plus Community BoardPlus customers will also have access to an exclusive community board with guides and resources to help them find success with Upwork. Learning tools and forums will allow new clients to ask questions and share tips with other customers. https://recruitingheadlines.com/upwork-debuts-new-solution-to-help-small-businesses-attract-freelancers/ NEW YORK, March 21, 2019 — Fetcher, the outbound recruiting platform that combines AI with human expertise to recruit top talent for high-growth companies, is excited to announce its latest round of funding as well as several key executive hires. In late 2018, Fetcher raised $5.4MM in an oversubscribed seed round led by Accomplice and Slow Ventures, with full participation by existing investors, Picus and Revel Partners, as well as angel investors which include Paul English(founder of Kayak), Amol Sarva (founder of Knotel) and James Joaquin (co-founder of Obvious Ventures). They’ve also brought into the organization several industry leaders to help scale their business. “With our latest round of funding, we were able to hire several outstanding executives and industry luminaries to lead our Sales, Customer Success and Operations teams,” says co-founder and CEO, Andres Blank. “We’re also focused on using our funding to scale our Data Science and Engineering teams to ensure amazing product innovations for our customers.” Fetcher reimagines recruiting by utilizing AI to automate the recruiting process for large and small companies alike. There are currently 7MM open jobs in the US and Fetcher’s success rate in recruiting top-tier, diverse candidates for those openings is garnering the attention of high-growth organizations like Peloton, Paperless Post, Equinox, AppNexus, Bridgestone and DigitalOcean, which rely on Fetcher to help grow their teams. https://recruitingheadlines.com/outbound-recruiting-platform-fetcher-raises-5-4-million/ MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. and SEATTLE, March 20, 2019 — SOURCECON — Hiretual, the leading provider of AI-powered enterprise software for passive candidate sourcing and recruiting, today announced the launch of Intelligent Talent Pipeline™, a consolidated talent pipeline for the enterprise – a market first. Hiretual’s Intelligent Talent Pipeline consolidates and fuses all talent pools – combining data from a company’s internal systems with passive candidate sourcing data from the open web – to automatically deliver the best fit candidates to a company’s hiring pipeline. “Talent acquisition to date has been very transactional, with candidates going from job posting to hire. The Hiretual Intelligent Talent Pipeline creates an intelligent, closed loop system that continuously learns and gets better, constantly rediscovers, and actively integrates with all other enterprise functions within HR,” said Steven Jiang, CEO and co-founder of Hiretual. “The launch of Intelligent Talent Pipeline delivers the ‘Holy Grail’ in recruiting technology for HR teams, transforming talent acquisition from data-driven to intelligence-driven.” How Intelligent Talent Pipeline works Company X posts a job they want to fill on their career site via their ATS (i.e. Taleo, Jobvite, ADP, Workday, etc.), which posts the job to places like LinkedIn, Indeed and Monster. Company X is then awash in applications – even more so if they are a well-known brand. Many of these applicants are high quality, but unfortunately not currently qualified for the position. Hiretual’s AI-matching engine automatically screens the incoming stream of applicants in real-time, and delivers the best fitting applicants for the role to Company X’s ATS (Applicant Tracking System) – while automatically screening out and delivering applicants who are not qualified for the current role to a passive talent pool. This automation saves significant time and increases the quality of the applicant pipeline in Company X’s ATS by ten-fold. AUSTIN, Texas—Indeed, the world’s #1 job site, announced today that job seekers can now proactively take skills-based assessments and add the results directly to their Indeed Resume. This new feature helps job seekers stand out by highlighting their qualifications to employers, allowing hiring managers to more easily identify candidates who have the right skills for their open roles. “Assessments allow job seekers to show employers they have the skills a job requires in a way that their work history or educational background may not,” said Raj Mukherjee, SVP of Product at Indeed. “We believe this is an important step to providing a more holistic view of a job seeker’s capabilities and to help to reduce bias in hiring and to focus on what matters most – skills.” Resumes alone do not offer the full breadth of a candidate’s capabilities. Assessments help employers find and evaluate candidates based on their skills and abilities while also giving job seekers a way to demonstrate their qualifications when applying for jobs. https://recruitingheadlines.com/indeed-adds-assessment-results-to-online-resumes/ HiringSolved will be launching and showcasing the public beta release of the highly anticipated PROPHET II sourcing tool to sourcers and recruiters at SourceCon in Seattle. PROPHET II is an exciting update to the original PROPHET, combining millions of records and billions of data points with HiringSolved’s award-winning AI-based search, matching and collaboration features to make it easier for recruiters to find talent from the open web. PROPHET II features include: Open Web Data: Instantly search across millions of people with billions of data points including social data, contact information, web sites and more. Predictive search: Automatic title and skill expansion with autocomplete search suggestions. Resume match: Users can upload a resume and PROPHET II will automatically build a list of potential candidates with qualifications similar to that resume. This instant matching feature uses HiringSolved’s advanced candidate-to-candidate matching models to perform a pattern based search with no other user input. RAI: Access to HiringSolved’s Recruiter AI, the powerful voice assistant that can be used to conduct searches and boost diversity. HiringSolved’s Diversity Search technology: Diversity of people leads to diversity of ideas, which fosters innovation, creativity, and success. PROPHET II provides insights into the diversity of a current search result or candidate list, helping organizations find the best and most diverse talent with advanced automation. https://recruitingheadlines.com/hiringsolved-set-to-release-prophet-ii-sourcing-tool/
@MatthewCraven12 - LINKEDIN: A Senior Strategic Sourcer & Program Manager, in Talent Acquisition. Natural born leader, driving results by building strong relationships. Uncovering, the “purple squirrel” (not always with technology either) and gets the candidate to accept the job offer! In addition to my recruiting skills, I've managed the implementation of Taleo for North America, lead various continuous improvement projects and always looking for new ways to quantify and validate the efforts of what we do in Talent Acquisition. Driven by passion in all aspects of life, when I'm not out hunting for great people, I'm spending it with my family in the Pacific Northwest. You will find me hiking, kayaking, and exploring the beautiful beaches along the Oregon coast.
This week on IDIODC, Brent and Chris bring on special guest Thomas Stone to chat i4cp and workplace collaboration. The Institute for Corporate Productivity, or i4cp, focuses on the cultural, leadership, workplace, and talent practices that can increase collaboration in organizations. A recent study by i4cp revealed many best and next practices that drive increased collaboration at high-performing organizations, but also shed light on the dark side of collaboration—the issue of collaborative overload. Fortunately, there are practices you can follow to both avoid and address collaborative overload when it occurs. Tom Stone is a Senior Research Analyst with i4cp, the Institute for Corporate Productivity, where he is a writer, researcher, and speaker. He has 20 years of experience in the L&D and broader Human Capital industry. Prior to joining i4cp Tom was Director, Technology Based Learning at Dale Carnegie Training, where he led the product development for their live online and other digital offerings. Earlier in his career Tom also served as a Senior Research Analyst at Taleo and held various positions, including Product Design Architect and Content Development Manager at Element K. Tom is a popular speaker and has spoken at over 150 regional, national, and international conferences on a wide range of topics. He is also co-author of the book Interact and Engage! 50+ Activities for Virtual Training, Meetings, and Webinars (ATD Press, 2015). In addition to his research and writing in the Human Capital industry, Tom is also an avid baseball fan and wrote the book “Now Taking the Field: Baseball’s All-Time Dream Teams for All 30 Franchises,” published by ACTA Sports in the fall of 2018. Learn more about Thomas on his LinkedIn Profile! https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomrstone/ Become virtual friends with the IDIODC gang on twitter (and remember you can always stay in the loop with the #IDIODC hashtag): Thomas: @ThomasStone https://twitter.com/ThomasStone Brent: @BSchlenker https://twitter.com/bschlenker Chris: @Chris_V_W https://twitter.com/Chris_V_W Brent Schlenker is dominKnow's Community Manager. Chris Van Wingerden is dominKnow's Sr. VP Learning Solutions. Want to join us live? Follow us on Crowdcast: https://www.crowdcast.io/dominknow Interested in learning more about dominKnow? Sign up for our next live platform demo to learn why we do powerful eLearning-authoring best. (And get a free 14-day trial after you watch the demo!) https://www.dominknow.com/demonstration.html
Derek Murphy Johnson popped up in my LinkedIn feed the other day I figured he might make a good guest. Little did i know he is also a frequent listener of the RecTech podcast. By day he is the Corporate Talent Acquisition Manager for Portland Oregon based Kinder care education and he is also a board member of the newly formed Talent Brand Alliance. TOPICS Describe the recruiting team at Kindercare. Biggest challenge right now? Lets talk tech---what’s your ATS? Taleo What other tools are part of your HR tech stack? Phenom People, The Muse Plans for Employer Branding Creative Sourcing Stories RecTech Sponsored by Workhere.com and Hiretual.com
The Top Entrepreneurs in Money, Marketing, Business and Life
Louis Têtu is Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of Coveo. Prior to Coveo, Louis co-founded Taleo Corporation, the leading international provider of cloud software for talent and human capital management. Prior to Taleo, Louis was President of Baan SCS, the supply-chain management solutions group of Baan, a global enterprise software company.
Episode 030. Can a fan podcast for a TV show have a profound social impact on people's lives? Find out with Troy Heinritz of the award winning The Blacklist Exposed Podcast from Golden Spiral Media. Featured Podcast Angel: Podcast Envy Launch Pod this fall! If you've been waiting for the right time to launch YOUR podcast, the time is now. Become a part of this group launch ready for January 2019. Last chance to sign up for this round is 10/6 --- next round begins January 2019!!! Learn more & get on the priority list for Oct or Jan: http://bit.ly/launchpodenvy Resources: 5 Questions You Haven't Asked About Your Podcast (FREE) I mean, you want to make a show that matters right? You've got a message, a passion, a purpose. How can you make sure it's landing? These questions from your Podcast Boss (me) will help! Podcast Boss Interview Setup Guide (Premium) Get a handy PDF of our dual recording setup for online interviews using Ecamm Call Recorder for Skype AND and the Zoom H4n Pro recorder. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Spotify Stitcher Connect: http://www.podcastenvy.com Email or Voice (send me a question to answer on the show!) Facebook Group The Creative Impostor Facebook Page @andreaklunder.creative Instagram: @andreaklunder My favorite hashtags #podcastenvy #podcastboss Oh HEY! I'm on LinkedIn now... dropping pro podcasting tips, insights, and stories. Connect with me there and let me know you're a Podcast Envy listener. Our Guest: The Blacklist Exposed Facebook Community Twitter Instagram Tumblr Troy's Twitter Aaron's Twitter Support The Blacklist Exposed: #FillTheFedora - https://www.patreon.com/theblacklistgsm About Troy F: http://facebook.com/troy.heinritz T: http://twitter.com/troyheinritz I: http://instagram.com/troyheinritz HR Technology by day - PeopleSoft, Taleo, Cornerstone, Smashfly, Oracle HCM Cloud, Successfactors. Podcaster by night - Currently hosting: 2017 Academy of Podcaster TV & Film award winning The Blacklist Exposed - theblacklistexposed.com Remake This Movie Right - remakethismovieright.com Packers Fan Podcast - packersfanpodcast.com Beyond Westworld - beyondwestworldpodcast.com 11.22.63 A Look Back - 112263podcast.com TV Talk Revenge - tvtalk.com Resurrection Revealed - resurrectionrevealed.com Under The Dome Radio - underthedomeradio.com
Would you like to learn more about Oracle Recruiting Cloud (ORC), Oracle's new recruiting product native to Oracle HCM Cloud? Then join us on HCM Cloud Talk Radio as Nagaraj Nadendla, Oracle Group Vice President & General Manager, Oracle Recruiting Cloud & Taleo, covers the philosophy behind the product, the innovation customers will experience, and recommendations for customers and partners on their journey to ORC.
Would you like to learn more about Oracle Recruiting Cloud (ORC), Oracle’s new recruiting product native to Oracle HCM Cloud? Then join us on HCM Cloud Talk Radio as Nagaraj Nadendla, Oracle Group Vice President & General Manager, Oracle Recruiting Cloud & Taleo, covers the philosophy behind the product, the innovation customers will experience, and recommendations for customers and partners on their journey to ORC.
Insights on Proper Interview Communication and the ways to incorporate them effectively for the Hiring Process: What are the broken issues in the Interview communication Fix the crucial areas Utilize Solutions and Tools that are available to enhance communication and overall candidate experience With all the technology & tools available, Why is this still a problem today? We try really hard to take out the human element from the process Lost art Transactional Where the challenges lie Recruiter & Interviewee Recruiter & hiring manager Interviewee & hiring manager Forms of Communication & Issues Video interviewing vs phone interviewing, Video cons: implicit bias Chatbots- engagement /screening tool Text messages How do we make interview communications effective? Recruiter & Interviewee Recruiter & hiring manager Tools Interview Data/Evidence Remember your Conversations Reduce misinterpretation and bias Remove redundant interview steps Other Tools:videos, Chatbots Technical tests Take home tests Nick Livingston is CEO of Honeit Software. He has been scaling recruiting teams and companies in San Francisco and New York City for 15 years. Nick started his career as a technology headhunter in NYC. After a successful IPO at TubeMogul (now Adobe) while attending business school at UC Berkeley, he co-founded Honeit Software to rethink interview communication and simplify the hiring process. At MTV, Nick was the Recruiting Director responsible for digital media and interactive technology talent. Nick worked at HR Technology companies Taleo and NextSource. He received his MBA from Berkeley, with BS in Applied Mathematics. Check out the Blog on the Stride Search, Inc site for the supplementary “show recap” article with detailed takeaways/insights from the interview.
Communion Sunday - Taleo (It is Finished)
Communion Sunday - Taleo (It is Finished)
Today’s guest is ...Dean Da Costa...Dean is a Strategic Sourcing and Research Technologist at a Fortune 100 company in the Seattle area. A decorated veteran and recognized sourcing expert with more than 20 years of experience, he currently writes The Search Authority, one of the most influential blogs in the business. A frequent speaker on the recruiting conference circuit, His insight and knowledge (particularly of technology) has made Dean one of the top sourcers and full cycle recruiters in the business today. TOPICS Let’s start with the recent Linked User Agreement changes which is causing a lot of uproar among your fellow recruiters...can you explain what it says and what that means for recruiters? REFERENCE: https://www.eremedia.com/sourcecon/stop-the-madness/ Does it affect every extension on the market that uses LI in some way? You say InMails are a waste of time...why? What’s your open rate? What tools are part of your everyday souring toolbox…..elucify.com What ATS do you currently use? Luxo, Taleo, Smashfly How much do you spend on these tools each month? What has been your biggest win so far this year from a sourcing standpoint? When it comes to vendors pitching you...what are they doing wrong? How should they approach people like you?
Prior to RecordLinc, Mr. Rodgers founded start-ups, BrightWhite Teeth-Whitening, Mustang Technology Inc. (sold 1997), Talent Roundtable, and PLM Solutions. He was an integral force to take both Taleo public and in selling VirtualEdge to ADP Inc. in 2006. He has been selling and marketing software for almost 20 years for companies including IBM, Oracle, ADP, VirtualEdge, and Taleo. He graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo Business School with an emphasis in marketing and entrepreneurship. As a seasoned entrepreneur, Mr. Rodgers has been active and successful in building businesses; forming, financing, and staffing new companies, growing them into revenue generating enterprises, and taking them to liquidity. www.RecordLinc.com
Building out an SDR team is is no easy task in the world of business software. Many founders are curious about the allure of these programs as you never seem to have enough pipeline. Founders have probably heard about amazing resources called Sales Development Reps (SDR) that should generate a ton of inbound for your company. Today, we were joined on the podcast by Shelley McNary, the VP of Sales at Bill.com to discuss "Building Out An SDR Team" as well as the specifics behind how and when do this at your software company. Shelley knows a thing or two about the topic having led inside sales efforts for companies like Taleo, MapR, and SignalFX.
Building out an SDR team is is no easy task in the world of business software. Many founders are curious about the allure of these programs as you never seem to have enough pipeline. Founders have probably heard about amazing resources called Sales Development Reps (SDR) that should generate a ton of inbound for your company. Today, we were joined on the podcast by Shelley McNary, the VP of Sales at Bill.com to discuss "Building Out An SDR Team" as well as the specifics behind how and when do this at your software company. Shelley knows a thing or two about the topic having led inside sales efforts for companies like Taleo, MapR, and SignalFX.
For over two decades Doug Sechrist, Vice President of Demand Marketing at Infusionsoft, has setup some of the best Demand Generation and Marketing Operations teams at firms including Zantaz, Taleo, Eloqua/Oracle, Five9, and now Infusionsoft. He's won awards for lead nurturing, sales and marketing alignment, and even a 2010 award for most creative marketing campaign. Even more impressive is his track record for driving growth and revenue from within marketing. In short, Doug has the recipes for what works, and what doesn’t, and shares them in this episode. Doug’s 3 core priorities for setting up Demand Generation Teams Should telemarketing be managed by Sales or Marketing? Doug’s approach on investing in MarTech Tools and the importance of failing fast Doug’s blueprint for setting up a modern marketing “Demand Factory” What’s working in demand generation these days and his innovative “Subscriber Model” for content publishing
Tom Svec, DemandGen’s Director of Marketing Technology Services joins DemandGen Radio host David Lewis to discuss how the roles within marketing operations have evolved over the recent years. Tom Svec leads DemandGen’s world-class team of solution architects who assist mid-size and enterprise-class marketing operations teams with their deployment and adoption of marketing technology. Prior to DemandGen, Tom was head of marketing operations at Taleo (acquired by Oracle) and shares his perspectives on the ever-changing landscape and roles within modern marketing and what it takes to be successful as head of this critical business function.
Are you interested in learning about Oracle's HCM Cloud and Taleo integration? Oracle's Wiktor Ornatowski joins us on HCM Talk Radio and provides best practices when implementing Oracle HCM Cloud and Taleo.
Are you interested in learning about Oracle’s HCM Cloud and Taleo integration? Oracle’s Wiktor Ornatowski joins us on HCM Talk Radio and provides best practices when implementing Oracle HCM Cloud and Taleo.
Today, software companies such as SAP and Taleo, business information providers such as LexisNexis and consulting firms such as Palladium Group have moved much of their customer interactions to online communities they have built for their customers. While they are still in their early stages, these online communities are providing these enterprises with a competitive advantage: the ability to get much closer and become more valuable to customers every day, around the clock. That’s why LinkedIn marketing expert Kristina Jaramillo invited Vanessa DiMauro. founder and CEO of Leader Networks – a research and strategy consulting company that helps organizations succeed in social business and B2B online community building – to join her on the B2B Marketing Insider’s Radio Show. Vanessa’s bringing to our guests knowledge and expertise from over 15 years experience in social business leadership positions at Cambridge Technology Partners, Computerworld, Bitstream and TERC. You’ll learn how she has founded and ran numerous online communities, and has developed award winning social business strategies for some of the largest and most influential companies in the world. Listen to this radio show interview with Vanessa DiMauro - then check out our other community building interviews at http://www.b2bmarketingradioshow.com
Today, software companies such as SAP and Taleo, business information providers such as LexisNexis and consulting firms such as Palladium Group have moved much of their customer interactions to online communities they have built for their customers. While they are still in their early stages, these online communities are providing these enterprises with a competitive advantage: the ability to get much closer and become more valuable to customers every day, around the clock. That’s why LinkedIn marketing expert Kristina Jaramillo invited Vanessa DiMauro. founder and CEO of Leader Networks – a research and strategy consulting company that helps organizations succeed in social business and B2B online community building – to join her on the B2B Marketing Insider’s Radio Show. Vanessa’s bringing to our guests knowledge and expertise from over 15 years experience in social business leadership positions at Cambridge Technology Partners, Computerworld, Bitstream and TERC. You’ll learn how she has founded and ran numerous online communities, and has developed award winning social business strategies for some of the largest and most influential companies in the world. Listen to this radio show interview with Vanessa DiMauro - then check out our other community building interviews at http://www.b2bmarketingradioshow.com
For the week of September 15th, 2012: Oracle Support for HP Itanium Temporarily Extended More Critical Bugs Found in Java 7 Java EE 7 Not Going to Be Cloud-Ready for Near Future Taleo Brings Shiny Glam to Oracle Fusion HCM … Continue reading →
Messages Review for OSX, Oracle recruits Taleo, Sneaky peak at Salesforce's Many Who pilot and some iPad 3 predictions. CloudFocus App Picks of the Week.
Steve's HR Technology - Interview with Stuart Agtsteribbe. Steve discusses Applicant Tracking Systems, Talent Management, and trends in HR Technology with Stuart Agtsteribbe of Taleo.