January 31, 2023

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris discusses what measures are necessary to have a successful talent acquisition process and business with Wendy Taylor, a Senior Executive and Leadership Advisor, Silicon Country.

Wendy has 15 years management consulting experience leading over 50 engagements worth many millions of dollars for global Fortune 500 companies and fast growth venture-backed startups. She is trained in all things McKinsey. In addition to leading engagements with 30 clients, Wendy developed the curriculum and delivered training for Fortune 500 VP and C-level executives.Wendy also designed talent strategy for dozens of fast growth VC-backed tech companies — advising C-level executives on who to hire and when — to achieve their next round goals. When Wendy is not working with clients, writing articles for LinkedIn, or on podcasts, she can be found keeping score at baseball games, singing classical choral soprano, or planning the guest list and menu for one of her fabulous salons.

Transcript

Chris Nichols: 0:17

Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. The show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have the senior executive and leadership adviser Wendy Taylor, when he has 15 years of management consulting experience leading over 50 engagements worth many millions of dollars for Global Fortune 500 companies and fast growth venture backed startups. She is trained in all things McKinsey, in addition to leading engagements with with her many clients Wendy develop the curriculum and deliver training for Fortune 500, VP, and C level executives. She’s also designed talent strategy for dozens of fast growth VC backed tech companies, advising C level executives on who to hire and when to achieve their next round of funding goals. When the I am so thrilled to have you on today, we were just chatting in the pre show about when we first discussed having you on the podcast. It’s been many months, even years. But thank you so much for coming on. Hi, I’m so excited to be here. That’s again, like it’s great to have you. And I’m really excited about your unique perspective. And just your experience. Because I think it’s something that in the startup community, especially I have found in talking with founders, that is a weak spot. Many founders are more often than not one of two things, they are either really good salespeople, or they are really good software engineers, developers, etc. Or they just have I guess a third one would be they have a really big idea. They’re trying to figure out what to do with it. They have no idea how to hire, they have no idea when to hire they they’d have no they’ve not thought yet about a talent strategy. That’s so far down the line from where many of them ever get to their mindset that they’re so focused on what’s right in front of them. But it is one of the most important things that you can do is hire the right people at the right times in order to scale your business. So really looking forward to hearing from you. And so to set the stage, why don’t you give our listeners an idea of your background? How you got into working with with these tech startups and, and fortune 500 companies and how you got to this point in your career, if you don’t mind? Sure.

Wendy Taylor: 2:40

So I am a tech startup executive was actually really how I did this. So was part of a then tech startup that did something really, really innovative in the late 90s and early 2000s. And we actually postponed our IPO because of 9/11. So that’s that’s what we’re talking about, had our exit in the spring of 2002. And I stuck around and got some really great leadership experience in a fortune 200 company after we were acquired. But I’ve gone through all the grind pains, I was employee number 23. When we were acquired, we had 500 employees, 400 of them work for me, and a good deal, the 100 that didn’t used to because we tend to hire into operations. And then they got, you know, I would identify talent, so it was time for them to move on outside of operations. And so the funny story is when we did the announcement, all hands meeting we’d been acquired to the entire team, or at least all of the San Francisco based team. I sit in the back of the room greeted each person by name as they came into the room. 400 of the 500 people in the company were there that day, the VP of HR for that fortune 200 company was in awe because I knew the name of every person. And but I had hired most of them. So and so when I did leave that I joined a firm led a boutique consulting firm led by an ex McKinsey leader, Stanford MBA. He taught me so much and I worked with and rent and ran projects for his clients, mostly fortune 500 but also some huge engagements at Stanford. One of my most precious belongings is a Stanford blanket that they gave me and Sanford wineglasses when I finished that engagement and then it made sense to get back into the tech world and leverage my startup experience. So I joined a firm where I was focused on consulting with venture backed tech startups, mostly in talent strategy, and also did some executive recruiting but mostly it was consultative strategy. All that stuff that you were talking about that the brilliant minds, that creative minds that come up with our greatest startups don’t really have actually the management experience and sometimes the people skills to make really good talent decisions. And I will tell you that my first career was in education. And I ran Youth and Family Services for a YMCA. And before that, I worked full time all the way through college. So my first management job was at 20. So that 12,000 interviews I’ve done. That’s because I started interviewing 20 as as a boss. Yeah. So and for wide varieties of jobs, for sure. So

Chris Nichols: 5:50

well, and you mentioned the 12,000 interviews, while while you were chatting, I had the 12,000 in my mind, and then I was like, I got to do some math here. So effectively, if you had stopped at the 12,000. And I don’t know, when you stopped counting, but you stopped at 12,000, you’ve an end, on average, a 30 minute interview. That’s about 6000 plus hours. So to put that even in more perspective, 2080 hours is kind of the full time equivalent for the number of hours that one person works. So effectively, you’ve spent three years of a career interviewing candidates for yes. What have you learned?

Unknown: 6:33

I’ve learned that the best approach is left brained and right brained. And what I mean by that is getting really clear on what skills and experience the person needs to have, but also getting clear on what will help them be successful. So is your company at a level of funding where scrappiness is important, you can thrive without a big budget, you can thrive without a ton of people telling you what to do, then you need to be interviewing for that. If you have an environment that’s very athletic oriented, there’s in Silicon Valley, certainly there’s an awful lot of companies, where you they hire for young talent, ex athletes. Now, as a musician, I would suggest that serious musicians in high school had the same leadership development as serious athletes. But I couldn’t always talk people into that. I can and I can in Nashville, because they understand there’s a respect and valuing of music and the arts and just disciplines involved in that. But yes. So I will say that, that left and right brain, the other thing that I noticed oftentimes is early stage startups tend to hire their network. And that next thing, you know, everybody, there’s a whole bunch of people that are all the same. They’re all Bobbsey Twins with each other, they’re all identical. They go to the same school, they use the same vocabulary, they have the same personality, they have the same, same, same, same same. And no matter whether you’re running a team in a fortune 500 organization, or you have a startup with 25 employees, you will be more successful if you bring in diversity of experience, diversity of personality, introvert versus extrovert left brain versus right brain communication style. All of that’s important. And usually, we don’t talk about that when we talk about, say diversity in hiring, but your team will have so much more power and be so much more effective. If you think that

Chris Nichols: 8:47

that you brought that up, because that’s one of way. I’m so glad the things that I often talk about with with organizations when they’re like we need more diversity. What do you mean by that? Right? Because, unfortunately, when we talk diversity, especially in this day and age is we think about the color of our skin. And there’s so much more to diversity than than that. I mean, you see all the times in companies and shoot you know, even in our our government in the United States, right? It’s a lot of Ivy Leaguers. Not a lot of regional state school folks that are in those government roles. Yeah, so but there’s something to that in that diversity of thought. So if only the people that went to Ivy League’s are taking up the roles, there’s a lot of there’s not much of a melting pot there of opinion on how things should be done, because there’s a lot of overlap between those those Ivy League schools have very similar schools of thought. And so those perspectives are extremely valuable whenever you’re selling products and services to the rest of the country right when you’re selling to Middle America or we’ve seen it in Nashville windy with with companies that have tried to insert themselves into health tech. Right and the challenge is that, you know, Silicon Valley has faced and trying to enter themselves into the world of healthcare and thinking that they, they they can solve the problem because of who they are. And the reality is they don’t they don’t understand it. Right? They don’t they don’t speak the language. You see it in other fields. I’ve seen it in ag ag tech, right agriculture in Silicon Valley companies trying to solve that. And so, no, I think that diversity of thought and perspective and background is so important. When we when you talk about working with companies, I think that one of the things that you mentioned was that you’ve taught hiring managers, you’ve worked with these companies hand in hand about how to how to how to interview with three plus years of experience full time experience, just interviewing. What What have you taught hiring manager? What do you teach hiring managers to help them be a more effective interviewer,

Unknown: 10:58

the first thing we start with is getting really clear on what they need from the role. And so getting super clear on what the person has to do to be successful. And looking at the technical skills, whether it’s actually a technical role and engineering role, or product management role, or sales or marketing, there’s still technical skills. And so we look at that we get really clear at that. And we we then look at what are alternative ways the person could have gotten that experience. One of the things you frequently see if you’re a job seeker, is that most of the people making hiring decisions have a very rigid focus on what they’re looking for. There’s like a checkbox. And, and the application tracking software helps the human tick those boxes, and is really narrowly defined. Well, if you have enough management experience, if you know your area well enough, you can actually get creative and say, well, here’s one way they can get it. Here’s some alternative ways they could build that experience and come to our company and be successful. And then looking at what does it take. So here’s an example company I’ve worked with. They had an ed tech product. And so their engineers had to talk to teachers, elementary school teachers, and they did six weeks sprints. And two of those six weeks, were sitting side by side with people who were called to teach 5 to 12 year olds. That meant that these engineers actually had to be real humans, not your typical classic Silicon Valley stereotypical not to make fun of them, but stereotypical Silicon Valley software engineer. And so we had to figure out how do you build a talent strategy to attract engineers with people skills. And, and that was a kind of interesting thing for some, you could just say, you have to spend two weeks of every six week agile sprint sitting next to kindergarten teacher, and some of them you could see them cringe. And that was the end of that sometimes you had to dig a little deeper to so. So we start with that. And, and we go within into the soft skills, which is a really bad word that we need to replace with something better, but I’m still working on a better word for soft skills. And we figure out all that personality, how does our culture work? That company loved five syllable words. Now, I’m a geek. And I actually really kind of enjoyed getting to dust off my five syllable words I usually avoid using so I don’t offend anyone. But the reality is, is that was like part of their culture. So if somebody didn’t do that, they would actually not have been respected. And they would have had a hard time getting their ideas through. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It was a reality in that company. So basically, once we’ve done that, then we figure out how we’re going to approach the interview process. And for the hiring manager, I really want them to be able to dig into all the stuff. But then the other parts of the interviewing process, the other people play different roles. So obviously, if it’s a software engineer, you can have one of your serious Senior Principal engineers, do a deep dive on their technical skills. And really make sure that they’ve got the capacity to do what you need them to do. You can have somebody that they have to work cross functionally with, like one of the teachers evaluate their cultural fit, and talk with them and ask them to tell stories. And here’s where asking people to tell stories is huge. So whether it’s STAR method or SAIL method, getting people to tell stories that demonstrate whatever the thing is that you’re looking for.

Chris Nichols: 14:55

I love that. For those that don’t know what Do you mind explaining a little bit more about the those two different stories? Yeah,

Unknown: 15:04

sure. So star has been around for a while. The probably the most famous big company that’s really famous for using STAR method very consistently in its interviewing is Amazon. And it’s situation tasks, actions, results. It’s a really great way to structure getting out of people. What was the situation? So you as the interviewer are going, Okay, how does that situation compare to one in our world? And then what did they have to do that can kind of get at the what did they do versus peers or their boss versus their team. Now, if their team did it, they kind of get the credit. But sometimes it gets a little squishy about who did what, and then the actions that were taken, and then the results. And it’s a great format. Depending on your culture, though, and depending on how much you value certain kinds of emotional intelligence, which, quite frankly, isn’t typically valued in a lot of startups, but more so in some of our tech communities outside of Silicon Valley. So one of the cool things about working with outside Silicon Valley tech companies is, we see, I’m bringing best practices from Silicon Valley. But sometimes I’m also encouraging leaving behind the lessons learned what Silicon Valley doesn’t do well. And one of the things that I love to see is the SAIL method, that situation, action, impact, and learnings and learnings I love. Because that means that the person whether they are 24 year old engineer, or a 45 year old sales leader, they actually have thought through what they learned from that experience. And that can really tell you whether you’ve got a winner that you want on your team. It’s huge.

Chris Nichols: 17:04

I appreciate you sharing both of those because it just goes to show the thought that can go into the interview process in general, right? Because I see so many companies that just kind of winging out, do I feel good, it made me feel good. I feel like I could connect with them. Those Those sorts of things. So because of that, and maybe it’s a good lead into the follow up there is what are companies missing? Right? Like, what do they do poorly in the interview process? So so that way, if I’m listening into the podcast today, I can be like, Oh, wait, we do that? Maybe we should stop doing that. So what are some of those lessons that?

Unknown: 17:44

Yes. So I’d say three things. One is the you actually really aren’t clear about In fact, the poor recruiters are working from a bad job description. And you’re not clear about what you need for the person to be successful. So that’s one. The second is that you didn’t build interview questions to assess what will make the person successful. And the third is one of my favorite entertaining stories. This was a client with this actually the same company with the teachers working with the engineers, they had a highly, they already had a structured interview process, I didn’t have to teach them how to do that they already had one. Their problem was this. They had such a structured interview process, there was no human to it. So we literally sat at these executive level meetings to make hiring decisions. And the conversation went like this. Candidate A scored a 3.4 on a level four and a 4.2. On a level three, we’re making an offer at 150 K at level three, all in favor. Every single hire was done that way. And my mind was just blown. I like okay, I love teaching people to have structure, I build scoring rubrics to teach you to keep kind of keep score. But these are human beings and everybody who works for you is a human being. And they are not a number. You can have the numbers, and then you can look and say, Okay, now let’s talk as humans. And if you mix both of those, you’re going to make smarter decisions.

Chris Nichols: 19:24

That’s a That’s fascinating. Also somewhat concerning for education and technology companies. So I guess it’s par for the course. So this has been fantastic Wendy so far. So you, you’ve talked about designing talent strategy for fast growth startups, early stage startups, advising C level executives on when to hire who to hire. Talk about what that process looks like. I you know, maybe I’m I’ve launched a company or I want to launch a company, maybe I’ve got 10 employees. When you come in, what kind of questions are you asking? What are you trying to understand about the company?

Arran Stewart: 20:12

Job.com is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.

Unknown: 20:30

We start with who is already on the team? So is it two co founders? Or is it 10 people, and what the next stages, so I’ve worked with a company that had B Series funding some of their VPS were not the right people to lead those parts of those organizations, to through, C round funding, they weren’t the guy that was the VP of engineering, he needed to be running apart, he could not be a CTO of a C. Level company he couldn’t he was not that was not the right thing for him. Sometimes those are painful decisions, that that went really smoothly the CEO and I, I’d like to think that, you know, we handled that really well. The first thing I do if we’re talking smaller, for sure, but even for the for the smaller ones, it’s what do each of you bring to the table, whether it’s two of you, or five of you, what are your super powered strengths, one of the things you can do pretty darn well, if you have to keep doing them. Because until you’re about 100 employees, you’re wearing five hats, every person in that company is wearing five hats, two of them fit perfectly. And so that’s just the way it is pretty much until about B series about 100 employees. So what we look at is what is the thing you’re doing right now, when it’s two or five of you, that you got to get off your plate as soon as possible, because you’re gonna mess up. And you look at that you also look at personality. Sometimes if you’ve got two co founders, if they don’t bring if they’re pretty much the same kind of person, and have overlapping strengths, you need your next hire, to bring a completely different personality. If it’s left brain versus right brain, introvert versus extrovert, you need that difference. You just need to embed that into the organization. Then as you go through stages, whether it’s funding stages, SOT number of employees stages, number of customers, then you need to look at what do we need for our next step. So my sweet spot is I come into an organization when it’s time for it to grow up, which is ironic, because my name is Wendy and Peter Pan has about not growing up. And it’s time to create order out of chaos, because early early stage is just chaos. And so I am the order creator. If you embed me in a large organization filled with order, I will be bored out of my tears and you’re wasting your money. But if it’s time to create order, that’s one of my sweet spots, whether it’s operations or whether it’s from a talent perspective. And so you want to think about that for your company. If you’re a bunch of crazy, chaotic, brilliant idea, people, and you’ve got a few execution people, and you’re starting to get to about 50 people, what you need is you need an order creator, you need a Process Designer, and you need more execution people. And that’s what you need. So it’s about really assessing the talent each person on the team has and where the gaps are, and then filling those gaps with an eye to what’s our next stage of development because companies are like children. And so your newborn needs different things from you as a parent than your two year old than your kindergartener than your fifth grader. And the company said the same way.

Chris Nichols: 24:06

I respond very nicely here to your comment about being an order creator, I totally get it. And what I find is that those individuals who need an order creator don’t often realize that they need an order creator at the right time, right. Usually coming in to quite the chaos so and change management, especially with with founders is oftentimes difficult, right? Because they were really good at the idea stage. And, and to your point earlier about these VPS aren’t the right people to get us get us to the next stage. kind of stuck with the founders, usually like some founders have enough self awareness that they’re like, Hey, I know that I’m not the right person to be the CEO. I know that I’m not the right person to do this. But that’s not often the situation. So how do you deal with those types of situations when you’re working with founders who may not know when to let go?

Wendy Taylor: 25:01

Well, it’s actually a place where I’m a good partner for a VC. Because usually the VC, first of all, a lot of what I do is the stuff that isn’t in VC wheelhouse, but VCs will decide, sometimes for very good reason, this person really cannot be the CEO of this company has potential with this person can still maybe run product for the next year or so. But they cannot be CEO, we need to bring in a grown up, you know, that kind of thing. And so, in that scenario, and the grown up phrase I’m using from a Silicon Valley perspective, where you see so many founders under 35, obviously, and a lot of our outside of Silicon Valley tech communities were a little smarter about embracing founders who are over 35, and even over 45. But, but so I’m a good partner for, for those VCs in that circumstance, to sit down with that founder, and, and kind of coach them through some self awareness, and figure out how to have it be a win for them. Because frankly, doing the stuff that makes you a good CEO is, if that is really a bad fit, they are actually miserable. They just don’t want to let go. And if you can make it respectful, and you can make it a win win. And sometimes I’ve seen places where the VCs just got rid of people, and I got rid of founders, and there were ugly conversations, and that’s what they did. But ideally, you you have someone who can kind of come in from a human perspective and help that person see, okay, my baby’s growing up, and now, now it needs something else. And here’s the role I should play. And that that’s the best thing for everyone.

Chris Nichols: 26:47

I think that the other day, you mentioned the age component. And I believe I saw a number I think maybe you have the exact number, but I thought it was something like companies that have founders that are 39 years old or older, have like a 60 some odd percent chance more of being successful. Now, how do you quantify success? I don’t know. But, you know, I think when you look at the location of Silicon Valley, and its proximity to Berkeley, and Stanford, and then you throw in, you know, we talked about Ivy League earlier, and how so many of those individuals maybe, instead of going to New York City to work in the finance industry now, you know, they’re embarking across the country, to go out west. And I think that’s, we talked earlier about kind of the culture and young people getting involved, I think when you go to a place like that, you come out believing that you probably already know, as much as you need to know. Right? Yes. Experience, your knowledge and your experience. And so I think that’s why you see a difference. And, you know, other places in the country, I think people are much more humble in their engagements and more humble in what they believe to be finding the right product fit match, right, like, Yeah, I think a lot of young people think that they can solve challenges and problems, and they can, but the reality is who’s gonna buy it? Or is there a market for it? And so you often see, tech startups fail for that reason alone is that, was it really a market for somebody to come in and buy this idea, but not necessarily marketable? So no, great, great thoughts? What what do you see as being their the biggest challenges to overcome and some of that growth stage hiring? You know, you talked earlier about needing to find engineers that can can talk to kindergarten teachers, right? How do they? Are most of them aware of their of the things that they have to overcome? Or do they just have to be exposed to them? And if so, how do you typically go about doing that?

Wendy Taylor: 28:45

So I would say generally, that companies certainly knew, we expect our engineers to talk to teachers, but generally speaking, there was a lot of lack of self awareness in a lot of the companies I’ve worked with. And sometimes when I would coach on interviewing, I would hear oh, in my tremendous experience, conducting interviews, and they said, Oh, how many have you done? 25? Like, okay, would you like to hear some thoughts from somebody who said, 12,000. But, um, as far as the awareness, it’s it. So I’ll give. Here’s an example. I had one cmo I’ve worked with multiple times. And the first time I met him, he was he was, you know, getting to the point where you would expect some maturity, but he was still stuck on. Ivy League equals intelligent. And he didn’t believe that there was a way to interview to assess intelligence other than check to see where they went to school. Ironically, he went to Berkeley in one of the least competitive majors at Berkeley. So he had he was still 20 years later, kind of getting over or his not being able to get into the more demanding majors at Berkeley. And so his way to make up for that was to try and recruit talent that he thought was smarter than him. And it took some convincing that I could assess intelligence without relying solely on where the person went to school. Beyond my own personal experience. Sure. And so that’s that’s that was how I did with him is I showed him here’s the questions we can ask, here’s how we can assess it, look at this. And the next time I worked with him, he was so over that there was no more of that. IV, only IV Berkeley Stanford only hiring requirement that was gone. So it’s sometimes you can only get it incrementally. And what that means is that they’re not going to make all the best hiring decisions, because they’re just not ready. And in part, because if you do have founders and early management teams that haven’t managed before, then they don’t have any experience to rely on. They haven’t made bad hiring mistakes, and they haven’t made bad management mistakes, because they don’t have any experience with that. And that’s why you actually put a lot of people in Silicon Valley, even in their 20s and early 30s. And they’ll say, I won’t work for a founder who’s under 35. Because of the experiences they’ve had, even though that’s their peer, and that’s really kind of interesting. And I don’t mean to disrespect, you know, they’re brilliant young minds. And I love working with them in I love, especially working with him in the outside of Silicon Valley tech communities, because I see a little bit more openness, to your point, to perspective to wisdom to other thoughts, that kind of thing. And that’s particularly, you know, really rewarding, because I know that then I can really help them.

Chris Nichols: 32:05

Sure. That’s absolutely right. I get it. Because if they’re seeking outside counsel in the first place, yeah, that definitely means they have some level of self awareness. Or maybe the VC just said, you need to go talk to somebody, right? Yeah, exactly. One of the two, the two things there, right, so windy. One last topic that I want to hit on is board advisors, I think when you if you hop on LinkedIn, and you spend any kind of time there at all, you see lots of people have varying degrees of experience, working in quote, unquote, board advisor roles, not Board of Director roles, but they’re their advisors to startup companies, maybe they’re friends of the founders, etc. But in my experience, that the founders that I’ve talked to have mostly had bad experiences with these advisor type roles. I have a theory as to why that that could be but I would love to hear from you why you think founders, what role advisors should play you know, before you have a well functioning Board of Directors where you can pay people and have really senior level people, what, what role should a board of advisors fulfill? And and how do you you see companies maybe use it more effectively?

Wendy Taylor: 33:14

Great question. So the way I look at it is that an advisory board should be a safe space, where you can actually admit to the stuff that you really don’t want to admit to out to the world, out to the tech community where you live out to VCs and potential VCs. So safe space, first of all, caring and committed to your success and your idea of success. But beyond that, what you want is you want to make sure that they’re bringing serious experience, doing the things that you’re trying to do. And they end if you have more than one of them. Ideally, they each come from a different perspective. So one of them could know your customers and that market really, really well either from the kind of from a Chief Revenue Officer perspective, whether that’s sales or marketing, that would be really valuable. It’d be great if that person knew how to grow a revenue team. But that knowledge of the market that would be valuable, somebody who understands the challenges of leadership of you know, the the role I would play as a strategic advisor, someone who understands the challenges of the leadership, who can help assess where your weaknesses are, and figure out how to get those built up as fast as possible in the best way possible. Whether that’s another strategic advisor or whether that’s a first hire, or somebody who’s a fractional leader, that kind of thing. So that’s, that’s a roll out And then technically, you can think about that. Now, that being said, you want to be careful, I remember talking to someone and their technical adviser was very big on outsourcing everything to India. And I said, So initially, that could have some cost savings, and that person had deep ties and knew the people and could vet for quality. And that was wonderful. But as you grew, you probably wanted some engineering talent in the US. And you needed to figure out how to do that. And if he was really attached to all being offshore, that might cause some problems for your company. So to some degree, the advisors have to be able to kind of grow with you, too. And understand, okay, yes, day one, let’s outsource this thing, whether it’s outsourcing marketing to, you know, a small agency down the street, or engineering offshore to what do we do at the next stage, and that kind of thing, and they’ve got to be able to grow with you. And they’ve got to have literal or figurative, gray hairs? I don’t have a lot of them, but I have a lot of figurative gray hairs. And they do need to have that for sure. So I would say that those are some of the things I think there are a lot of people who just think they know everything. And they think it looks cool. And so they put that they put that on their LinkedIn profile. And it’s like, I’m an advisor, and I tell people what to do. And sometimes they really have no clue what that founder needs. And that’s probably how some of those go wrong.

Chris Nichols: 36:38

Yeah, I think the companies that have advisors that are that are effective are those that have self awareness, they’re willing to admit their flaws. They’re willing to take advice from others. at it, there’s a lot of opportunity to use advisors. But we get, we get so caught up in the day to day of what we’re doing, that we think that we have all the answers right, or that we’re alone in this endeavor. And I think that, you know, having a small group of advisers that you can bring together every so often and talk to them about what you’re doing, especially when you’re a small company, right? When you have, you know, founder LED or you only three to five employees, that outside perspective is everything because maybe you’re missing things that you mentioned earlier experiences matter. gray hairs matter, you get, you know, seeing some seeing life helps a lot when running businesses Exactly. Anything else you want to add to this conversation today, it’s been wide ranging from interviews to teaching board advisors, but any other advice for anybody listening, whether they’re recruiters or their their leaders and companies.

Wendy Taylor: 37:51

So with the recruiters, I just will say out to the recruiters Hang in there, it’s not a real happy time for you right now. Think about how you can support people in their job searches as an alternative way to kind of ride out bad times when you do lose your job. Hit me up if you need some thoughts on that. And also, do your best and also for the recruiters do your best to try and earn that capacity to become a trusted adviser. And so do everything you can to be worthy of it. And then do everything you can to make the case for your hiring managers that that’s who you are you your job as a recruiter will be far more rewarding. And you will be far more effective. And you have the potential to make far more money if you can do that.

Chris Nichols: 38:49

Great advice, Wendy. Thanks again for coming on. You mentioned somebody reaching out to you How can what’s the best way for for listeners to reach out to Wendy Taylor.

Wendy Taylor: 39:00

So the best way to find me is on LinkedIn. I was the first Wendy on LinkedIn. So linkedin.com/in/Wendy Taylor, and you’ll see a lot of hair. And you’ll know you’ve come to the right place.

Chris Nichols: 39:15

Congratulations for being the first one detailer. I am not the first Chris Nichols, for many of us out there. So I can put my first initial in on mine. But no, it’s great to have you on and I would recommend connecting with you at the very least, you think you do a good job on on LinkedIn of engaging. So thank you again for coming on the Talent Tide podcast. That’s a wrap on another episode here. Please subscribe to us on YouTube. Follow us engage with us on Spotify on Apple podcasts. Anywhere you listen, you can find us. Thank you for listening in and we’ll see. We’ll see you soon. Thank you

January 19, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

a preview of the 2023 Labor Market with Jay Denton, Chief Analytics Officer for Labor IQ including topics such as:

Hiring outlook for 2023
Location and Industry Impacts
Women in the Workforce
Salary Transparency
Impacts of Inflation

About Jay
Jay serves as chief analytics officer for ThinkWhy®, charged with leading the product and market analysis business units for LaborIQ®. His expertise in analyzing and distilling complex data into actionable insights supplies the industry with “why it matters” answers for strategic business and talent decisions. Denton has been featured in Bloomberg Business, Inc., The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Business Insider and many others, and is a sought-after speaker for executive groups, talent acquisition associations and media outlets across the nation.
Denton holds dual degrees in Management Information Systems and General Business from Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business.

Transcript

Welcome to a live episode our very first of the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in talent management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today for this very special first LinkedIn Live episode, we have Jay Denton of Labor IQ. Jay serves as chief analytics officer for think y charged with leading the product and market analysis business units for labor IQ. His expertise in analyzing distilling complex data into actionable insights supplies, the industry with why it matters, answers for strategic business and talent decisions didn’t has been featured in Bloomberg Business. The Wall Street Journal, New York Post Business Insider Business Insider and many others. He is a sought after speaker for executive groups, talent acquisition associations and media outlets across the nation. I vouch for that I’ve seen him live and in person. He also holds dual degrees and management information systems in general business from Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business. Jay, welcome. Thank you for coming on today.
Yeah, of course, Chris. And I think you set it up in terms of the wave of change that it’s a good way to describe what’s gone on the last couple of years. And what’s likely ahead of us still
Well, you know, it must have been good foreshadowing for us, because we developed this podcast in late 2019 and 2020. And the waves got real rocky real quick after after we created the talent tide podcast. But you right, and it has been a wild. Nearly two, well, yeah, almost three years now since the pandemic hit. And, you know, thinking back on it, and I’ve been telling people this, whenever I speak J, at conferences myself, if you, you look back, it’s not like talent acquisition, and recruiting retention was easy and 2019. Right, every conference you went to all we could talk about was, you know, sub four unemployment. The challenges and retaining, rising pay pay and competitiveness in the market? Doesn’t seem like a whole lot of change. If you ask me.
Yeah, I think it just got more turbulent, you know, in all these factors, and I’m sure we’ll get into a lot of these on the on the call today. But the last two years, it’s just been such an up and down and businesses having to evolve. And we’re just getting back to where we were during like you just mentioned that really tough period before we just weren’t fighting inflation or record turnover, or hiring volumes to re staff all of our organizations. And so, you know, certainly we’re in a different place. Now, even though a lot of the metrics look the same. Yeah, it’s a turbulence behind this. I think as we look forward, it’s going to be a little bit more returned to normal, it’s just when will we actually get to that spot?
Well, returned to normal, right, I think we are normal now. Right? There’s no more new normal that I think we are, are back to what we are going to be and now it’s just, you know, an ever changing workplaces. And I think that is something that we have to also stay on top of that, you know, this is where we are today. And we have to manage what we have. And we if we spent too much time dwelling on, on what it once was, our businesses are probably going to be caught in the past. So, you know, without further ado, let’s just get started talking about 2023. So what are some major themes that we’re going to see in the labor market this year? That you begin to notice?
Yeah, I think you know, when you when you read some of the headlines that are out there, it often misses the context of well, how does that compare to, you know, typically what we would see without the, again, the roller coaster of the last couple years. As an example, the latest job figures that came through one of the articles I read, right when it was released was the lowest job growth in two years, you know, but but are what we’re expecting. And we expected that that type of number of you know, 200 plus 1000 jobs added, we’re getting back to a more normal number, a more normal pace. And so I don’t I wouldn’t characterize 2023 necessarily, is what’s going to be normal. I think that’s probably more 2024. But we’re going to see some of these record figures that we’ve been experiencing over the last couple of years, just slow down and pace, there’s still gonna be a lot of hiring occur. Now, we might not create as many net new jobs but I would still expect there gonna be a lot of companies adding roles, adding departments and so on, while some others go through more pain. So I think 2023 is really going to vary depending on maybe what type of industry what type of job, how you handled the last couple of years. Were you one of those companies who overpaid for certain talent, you might be in a different situation and then people who got poached from who haven’t been in able to hire quite as frequently, wage growth should moderate a little bit? Well, we’ll get into more of those. But I think that there’s probably an inflection point that’s either already here or coming. And things will start to simmer down compared to just how, you know, off the charts, things have been the last couple years,
maybe more of a move back to a more symbiotic relationship between companies and employees rights and maybe a little bit less freedom, I guess you could say, employees have gotten used to significant pay raises, unlimited work from home packages and things like that. And I think that as you seek more competition, we probably start to flex back on that front as well. And there’s some things that, again, some normalization, right, and so when we talk about hiring, I find that or when we talk about the labor market, I guess you could say, at the beginning of every month, we get to these data points that, you know, some might say have huge political implications on a monthly basis. They also affect the stock market quite considerably. But I’m not sure anybody really understands a lot of what the terminology is in those BLS reports. And so, you know, whether they’re location quotients, or or hiring rates, would you mind maybe putting some giving us some layman’s terms around what some of these often quoted in news articles, terms mean to us as average citizens?
Sure, maybe, you know, I think the unemployment rate is one that I would start off with, I don’t know, anybody who, when they’re hanging out with their friends really talks about the unemployment rate. So that, you know, that’s one of the main numbers that gets thrown out there. But it’s, I think, very important when we think about for people out there either and talent acquisition, HR teams, managers, executives, when they’re trying to figure out, how do we get and keep the people that we need to produce our goods and services. So the latest number was three and a half percent. So essentially, 96, and a half percent of people who want a job have a job, that three and a half percent unemployment rate number, on a relative scale, is one of the lowest that we’ve seen in the last almost seven years. So you go all the way back to 19, like late 1953, there have only been nine months, since 19, late 1953, where the unemployment rates been below where we are now. So what does that mean? There’s not a whole lot of talent, just sitting on the sidelines looking for a job that doesn’t have one, the markets been ultra competitive. So when any of us go out to try to hire an individual, it’s extreme competition, because of the number of jobs that are open, that’s held, increased wage growth, and so on. So just know that when you hear unemployment rate, we’re at one of the lowest periods. That’s a big reason why the last couple of years had been a struggle. And when we talk about Yeah, remember, right before the pandemic, we’re basically about where we were then. And so it was tough back then. We’ve just had some other factors between then and now that we’ve been dealing with,
what about labor market participation rate? Jane? You know, whenever you talk to some people, you hear the the often quoted phrase of, well, you know, there’s a ton of people out there that don’t want to work or not participating in the workforce. Do you have any, any any knowledge or insights that you can share about how where we’re at today, maybe compares historically. And I know, this wasn’t set when we talked about free show, too much. So I might be throwing this one on you. But you mentioned in the unemployment rate, you know, those who want to work, right, that are a part of that unemployment statistic. But we also have the labor market participation rate, which also kind of gives us an idea about who is in that labor market?
Yeah, so I’ll talk about within that context, let’s talk about just the labor force the size, we could break down the participation rate. But we’ll keep it real simple and think about how many people and actually have a visual I can share here in a minute that I have on my having a deck that I can show. But how many people do we have actually out there looking for work today, they either have a job or they’re looking for a job relative to right before the pandemic. And that number has kind of ebbed and flowed throughout the last year. But the latest reading or one, the latest readings, we have roughly about half a million more, more people today in the labor force. So either have a job or looking for a job than we did right before the pandemic began. That’s nice. The difference is without the pandemic, we would have had probably two to 4 million more people. Because more and more people would continue either to move here or join the labor force and so on. So I’ll show you how when we think about it, it breaks down. Our question was okay, there, we would have had two to 4 million more people, which would have made a lot of placing these roles that have popped up over the last couple years easier because you simply have a bigger talent pool. So what we want to do is start to break down well, who’s missing? Like who’s missing out of that? So I’ll actually share a visual here with the audience. It’s great. I love visuals. Yeah, so Well, well, let me let me actually yeah, we’ll start here. So we’ll we’ll kind of bounce back and forth just depending on where the conversation goes. But as of at least November, I think there might be one more near Reading. But as of at least or November, we had roughly, you see the the number that’s over on the left, you know, 508,000 more people in the labor force, we have a million more men, but half a million fewer women. So I mentioned a number of we could have had 2 million more with if as many, you know, women were participating now on a relative scale as men, we kind of would have been back to that number. So it’s really how do we figure out how to reengage and get more of those women who were in the labor force back into it. You know, when when the pandemic first hit that the big thing that people pointed to as women were staying home to take care of children who were no longer physically going to school because they were home for the pandemic And that might have been a slice of it. But you know, it turns out, there are a variety of things, it wasn’t one factor, it’s a variety of factors. So this is part of what’s missing, we haven’t had as many women don’t have a visual for this, but we’re also missing people, more people that are over the age of 55. You know, again, for there can be multiple reasons for that one of the biggest things that I would point back to is immigration, you know, we we’ve likely missed out on a million plus people who would have immigrated here to find jobs in a variety of industries, you know, whether it’s manufacturing, agriculture, tech, healthcare, so all these different, you know, all these different industries and types of jobs are missing folks that never moved here, because they couldn’t, everything was shut down from the pandemic. And actually, that’s one of the biggest drivers. I think, for this one of the things I’ll show on this topic. So, you know, we have we have more people in the labor force today than we used to, but I know we have people from all over the country all over the US that are tuned in for this, you know, we ended up making a map to see, well, there are some places that are that are back in terms of their overall labor force, and some that are still far from it. So if you’re in the southeast, southwest, a Texas maybe the Mountain West, up through Utah, Idaho, even over into Oregon, those are some of the states, the ones that you see in blue, here have a larger labor forces today than they did before the pandemic began, if you’re in one of the orange states, you’re likely below and in some cases well below. So it’s made it really hard in some states to find talent relative to others. And it’s fine. You know, I know you were saw you at one of the conferences that we were at here in Texas, it’s much different here than well, I’ll go speak somewhere else around the country where they’re just facing a totally different climate.
So we look at the charts there. And there’s a couple of follow ups that I have, you know, speaking on, on on the genders, and how many more men there are right now. And then women that have entered the workforce? Do we know where those women have went? I mean, you did you did mention, hey, there might be some suggestive evidence that says that they’re, you know, they potentially chose to stay home. But, you know, most schools have been back in session now for quite some time. So looking at that, it doesn’t seem like that maybe is the most justifiable reason for that. But, you know, maybe there are some lingering effects of people maybe getting comfortable with the status of their their households, as it was in maybe a more toned down environment. So is there is there any anecdotal evidence that that you’ve seen, or that it’s been able to be extrapolated from, from the data for that,
I think it’s hard to point to any one specific thing other than the point that, you know, household incomes have have jumped. And so in households where there’s someone else providing an income, and perhaps and maybe they’ve switched jobs over the last couple of years and got a very large pay raise? That could be you know, one of the things that’s contributing to it again, I would also point back to, we would have had women emigrate from other parts of the world who would have moved here and taking jobs as well. And so it’s it’s a variety of factors, I think, that are playing a role.
So immigration was was my second follow up question. So obviously, the borders are shut down for a very long time. Do we do we see any political challenges currently with the whether it’s the current government structure that we have around immigration, kind of a pre and post COVID environment that has Has anything changed for us that that we know of that could be negatively impacting the immigration that we saw pre COVID?
Yeah, that’s starting to loosen up, I believe, with some of the work visas that are that are being issued. Now. Again, it’s it’s terrible in some ways that anytime immigration is brought up, it becomes a political statement. It just it does. But I think when you look at the reality of the situation for us to continue to grow when we have, when, you know, here in our country, if you look at the wave of population, that’s kind of teenaged early 20s, it’s declining sequentially each year, we don’t have as many there weren’t as many people born during those periods. And so to keep up the number of people that would actually join the labor force, immigration is one of the key routes that that the country needs to go. The main challenge really relates back to the fact that that everything was just shut down. Both ways, you know, not not just here in the US, but getting in and out of countries was very difficult. The challenge that creates is you can’t go back and automatically, you just flip a switch and and all of a sudden those those people are here. Now, it’s unfortunately a window of time where we just missed people. And that you can’t just gain that back. And it’s different if they were already here and decided not to work for the last, you know, year or two. And now all of a sudden, that’s a change to make. But when the people never moved here, unfortunately, that’s something that we just we can’t recapture.
And I think it’s important to note that, for the history of our country, immigration has played a significant role in our growth. When you look back at different eras in a history book, you can point to significant gains in immigration alongside the natural birth rate. And so you know, it’s important for us to have a healthy immigration policy that allows for the best and brightest from around the world to be able to come here to our great country and be able to do to establish themselves and grow in their career. So thank you for providing that kind of dose of reality around immigration, because, unfortunately, so many of these things can be, you know, are heavily politicized. But there are underlying market conditions that are at that are in effect here as well. So when we look at, you know, this year and the kind of hiring, you mentioned early on as far as labor market and what we are to expect that you see a slowdown, but not a significant slowdown right there. Was there a lot of over hiring, so maybe can you talk about the kind of hiring that we will see this year, and how that compares to what we what we did experienced the last couple, because you mentioned like that largest hiring, or the biggest reduction in hiring in two years. But we also laid off a ton of people about two and a half, three years ago. So can you maybe talk us through what that looks like? And how that looks for the rest of the year? And what kind of hires we should be seeing?
Yeah, you know, I remember, right, as you know, maybe three, six months after, after the pandemic hit, and I was presenting to a group of executive search owners and I was showing what our forecast was for the path back and it kind of scared the room, there they go, how do we hire and train and onboard people that quickly, because the numbers were massive, and they actually we actually recaptured jobs even faster than than what we had projected. What that took was, you know, just incredible, sometimes we would have months where a million new jobs were created, you know, compared to the prior month. And so that’s not normal, you know, if we’re in that pace of around 200,000 or so jobs, or even below that, I mean, before COVID, we would have been predicting somewhere between maybe 150,000, or fewer jobs added per month, we’ve been slowly moderating down to that number. And so it when we think about 2023, that challenge is really going to be Do we have a more significant downturn or not. So we’re seeing early signs from tech companies, from some finance companies. So remember, tech and finances are some of the first industries or types of jobs to fully recover. So it’s kind of a first in first out situation, although that’s not what it has to be, it’s going to depend, we could be in a job loss situation overall, even though some companies will be adding, we could lose half a million or more jobs, we could gain a million jobs. The Wall Street Journal actually does a survey of 60 to 70. Economists every quarter, they just released their their results. It ranges from 4 million jobs added to 4 million jobs lost on the two spectrums, you know, and and then everywhere in between. So our feeling is that it’s really going to be industry by industry, certain types of jobs. I think, again, those that over hired and likely had a lot of wages towards the upper end of the bell curve, if you will kind of hoarded talent over the last couple of years because money was free, because of where interest rates were. That’s where I would expect more job loss to occur. I would say just be careful of reading in the headlines too much when you see layoffs. So the layoffs numbers, it’s hard to look on LinkedIn in the top right corner where the newsfeed is or any sort of new site, you’re gonna see a ton of news about layoffs just know that we’ve been at record lows the last couple of years. Some of this is just again, some companies that might have ever hired, and then others just we haven’t been in a normal level of layoffs. Last thing I’ll point to, I hear this phrase, often, we’re not hiring. And what I would say is companies are still going to be hiring this year we’re projecting something like 64 million plus hires in the US, it’s just gonna be a lot of backfilling. So maybe not as much net new job creation, but there’s still going to be a lot of churn in the labor market. And because of that for you, especially, you know, executives at companies who are making decisions around this, just know that those hiring engines that you have, between recruiting and HR and so on are going to need to stay intact because you’re gonna still gonna be backfilling roles throughout the year.
Absolutely. And backfilling if required as much effort as you know, large amounts of hiring, you have to stay in the market and be present and make sure that people know who you are, and there’s a lot that we can do. Talk about with relation to that, for the the impact on time, I want to talk about another hot news piece of information that we often see whether it’s on mainstream media on LinkedIn when you see that upper right hand corner, but inflation gets talked about on a regular basis right now. We hear it everywhere we were seeing interest rates people are, the housing market has finally kind of not come crashing down. But you know, we the bubble has somewhat slowly deflated over the last six to 12 months. And so, but what does it mean for the labor market? What does that mean for the job market for all of us? employees as well as for companies?
Yeah, which is you’re very familiar with what we do here at labor IQ, we really focus on the compensation side of the equation and where that compensation is heading, wage inflation, in reaction to overall inflation has really jumped up over the last couple of years. And that’s part of what’s created the spread of you might have had an employee that has been happy, but all of a sudden, they’re out there looking for a new job, partially because their costs have gone up. And that’s driven up kind of where the new market rate is for salary, which is where we really focus. So for one, you know that to break down because people ask us this often, and how does that how does inflation relate back to me keeping employees or where wages are moving, or what’s happened to the overall economy. So the good thing about inflation coming down, is that it’s costing, you know, employees less just in their personal lives, for their groceries, and for what it might cost to drive to work, and so on. And so that’s going to put a little bit less pressure on individuals to maybe go out and look in the job market. So from an employer’s point of view, I think that’s, that’s a good thing. The the downside of it is to combat inflation, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates, which has now started to impact certain industries. So the really easy one we can point to is what it’s done to mortgage rates, which has slowed down the buying of homes. So you know, we’re starting to see the finance industry obviously, start to struggle with that. So raising interest rates is having an impact on where jobs are created, or where jobs are being cut. It impacts consumers. So, you know, prices are still up for food and otherwise, and so any credit cards, they go out to buy a car today, and what that car is gonna cost them due to interest rates for the car loan. So it’s squeezing down, and it’s lowering demand on how many goods and services people can buy. So if they can’t buy as many things, then companies don’t need to produce as many things. So all of it is just basically slowing stuff down. So it’s just not as heated as it was the last couple of years. And that’s why again, this year won’t quite be normal. I think once we kind of get on the other side of you start to see these costs coming down, interest rates can then start to come down as well. And hopefully we get on the other side of this where things are a little bit more steady,
then we head into an election year. And we know that election years are also crazy Jay so
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So just because I want to get to a few more questions here, but there are some questions coming in, I want to encourage listeners to ask any questions that they have related to compensation related to labor market. We will definitely be getting to those shortly here near the end. But we love those those questions. So keep shooting them in. So you talked a little bit about salaries and impacts on that. So one of the things that I love about labor IQ, and one of the reasons why we chose to begin partnering with labor IQ just a few years ago was the ability to put in locations, salary experiences, or sorry, years of experience, college degree versus no college degree, job types, etc, and be able to compare markets to markets. But how do you think all of the impacts that we’ve seen from inflation will impact the growth of salaries this year? You kind of mentioned a little bit what industries maybe do we expect to see an increase in salaries more so than others say like technology where we’re seeing, you know, layoffs occurring? Or is there any kind of industry overview that you can provide with relation to salaries?
Yeah, overall? Yeah. You know, some people on here might have seen articles we were picked up in whether it was Business Insider, or Bloomberg or some others last year where we really focused on that gap between if you if you surveyed all the workers and you asked them, you know, what are you making today versus looking at where the new market is for people getting hired? Overall, we tend to see a gap of around 7%. So if somebody left their job, they would end up getting somewhere potentially it depends on the role and the location, all that but they could end up getting a 7% or even at Double digit increase, oftentimes switching to another company, when you start to talk about the number of job openings, likely coming down the number of new opportunities out there a little bit less competition for talent, it should start to cap that upper end of the price range. And so we saw new salaries, expand, expand, expand, I think we’ll start to see them slow down in terms of that top rate. And so it’ll allow companies to take a breath and not worry about some of these life changing offers that many of their employees are getting. And that’s, that’s what they’re leaving for. So overall, would you say there’s going to be less pressure on the top side in terms of what new salaries have been, that should be good for this should be good overall for employer. So starting maybe towards the end of the year, getting back down to where a typical two or 3% maybe in some cases, 4% merit increase? Is okay enough to keep the employee in their seat versus hearing all these other lucrative offers that are out there?
Are you willing to step out on the ledge and name a few industries where you think that we’ll see some of those the most significant wage growth?
Well, I would say on the opposite side, what I would be looking at is technology. That’s where I think that we’ve seen a lot of a lot of these firms over the last few years that, you know, hiring people that did not have the experience they hadn’t, you know, their resume wasn’t fully filled out, but they’re being paid like it was, you know, is if they had had five or 10 years more experience. And so I think we could see people that end up unfortunately, losing their jobs during this transition period that actually take a step back and pay compared to what they might have accepted over the last year or two. And I’m sure that a lot of folks out there have seen something like that, healthcare is going to be one, I think that’s going to, you know, because of the demand for health care, it’s just going to continue to rise. And it’s a really sticky situation, because everyone wants to keep healthcare costs under control, but there’s just going to be sustained demand in that industry. And so I think that’s one where it’s going to be a little bit a little bit harder. You know, over the last couple of years, I would say, specific types of roles, between sales and marketing, as companies really got their revenue engines ramped up, and, you know, trying to capture all of that demand out there. We are also hearing of some companies where is they’re being a little bit more cautious this year, where they’re not, you know, maybe hiring as many salespeople or some of those roles that initially came back very quickly. So those were some I would say, like in the marketing department as an example, where I said 7%, and marketing technology, suppose it might have been 10, or 15% gaps that people were jumping for. Those are ones where I think we’ll see a little bit more wage compression compared to where it’s been the last two years.
So everybody’s favorite topic with relation to wages in the workplace, is around salary transparency. So we’re seeing a lot of adoption of that both voluntarily and involuntarily if you’re in states and cities like New York, in California and places like that. What’s the deal was such wide range is being posted. And and these are these are obviously the the companies that are maybe in voluntarily participating, right? Well, why do we see such large ranges? I saw a recruiter role the other day that was 75,000 to 600,000. How’s that for transparency?
That? Yeah, it’s funny, you brought that up yesterday, there’s a, we saw one from a company that everyone tuned in today wouldn’t would know who they are. And it was a software development role. And I want to off the top of my head, it was it’s similar range was like 90,000 to hundreds and hundreds of 1000s of dollars. I’ve seen some posted through through through articles that were, you know, much higher than that. And so, you know, part of what we’re seeing in terms of the challenges that companies aren’t sure exactly are they is an individual contributor, or somebody that the executive team, and they kind of lump it all together. I will say that overall, you know, we do see that there should actually be a gap, there’s pay transparency and pay equity don’t exactly mean the same thing, though. They support one another. And, you know, in an individual role, it does depend on what responsibilities, what skills you bring to the table, your experience level and so on. And that that’s why that’s why you should see some degree of of, of a range, but not hundreds of 1000s of dollars.
Yeah, unfortunately, you know, companies, it’s like tax codes or anything else, right. Like, if there’s a loophole, they’re going to find a way to combat themselves against it. Right. And so, this just happens to be one way that they have quickly been able to establish that there’s an opportunity. I mean, I’m listening to Sirius radio this morning and on my way to take my kids at school and evidently Netflix is hiring a flight attendant for their private jet. I believe that pay transparency that they have when there was $380,000 a year was was their salary that they had listed for that job. And so, you see, in that scenario, their probably gonna get quite a few applicants, they’re probably going to have their pick of the litter when it comes to flight attendants. But, you know, if you’re posting very wide ranges, I honestly think that makes you look like a dishonest employer in in the marketplace and unwilling to have the conversation about what reality is, I think it’s actually more harmful than not sharing that information at all. If you’re if you’re sharing such a wide range that it seems unrealistic,
yeah, I think what we really focus on to help people with is making sure that you know, from a pay equity standpoint, for in that location for that market, if you’re somebody who’s brand new to the role, versus somebody who’s been doing it eight years, and you’re a company trying to figure out that range, there is that difference. And that’s where from a pay equity standpoint, we try to figure out and help people with what’s the real rate that should be offered, regardless of where they worked before, race, gender, any of that this is the role that makes this is what makes sense for that market. That, you know, that role that you’ve defined.
So we’ve got some questions here that I want to get to now, Jay. And obviously, labor IQ, does a lot of work around compensation and wages. And and those hard numbers and value is great for the checkbook. But there’s also a lot of other in the making. And there’s also a lot of other, you know, non-compensation related rewards that companies use? Do you have any thoughts or opinions about what what you all are seeing that’s helping to drive any attraction or retention related numbers for not just this year, but in the coming years? You know,
I would say a lot of it just gets back to businesses running and treating their employees the way that they should. Now, I do think it comes down to individual employees and what they value, we focused obviously a lot on compensation. But there are other things around vision of the company, am I working somewhere why where I’m really aligned and understand their vision, any sort of training that they can get to really propel them in their careers, autonomy to actually do their job that the way that they believe there are a variety of those types of things. Obviously, the one that’s been flexed the most over the last couple of years has been work from home, you know that and what I feel I can I think you alluded to it a little bit at the beginning of the call is that’s been used as one of those other types of benefits that we could see swing back a little bit the other direction, I think over the next year or two is, it’s really been an employee’s market. And if things start to tighten up, it becomes a slightly bit of a more employers market. That’s the one I’m really focused on that will be interesting to see new companies start to change their policies a little bit, because times are now starting to tighten up. And they’re going to have potentially some more talent that they could choose from. I will find that interesting, see how that plays out over the next year or two,
as will I, because I have seen numbers and reports and I wish I hadn’t had some of them written down just to be able to bring them up for this today. But, you know, I have seen various reports, state things such as employees are willing to take less money in order to have workplace flexibility, right have the ability to work from home, it has become so meaningful to certain populations of people that they’d prefer to make less money and work from home than they would to be paid more and go into an office. And I think that companies need to be aware of who they employ, the types of culture that they have created. I think that I think that who piece though is really important. Understand your employees understand what they value, understand where they might live, what makes them tick, and get to know them to understand how it’s going to affect your particular organization. So what about another question here around women in the kinds of roles that they may have historically predominantly worked in, such as hospitality nursing teachers, three pretty significant industries that have been affected significantly by the pandemic that we went through? And a lot of burnout seemed like the great resignation, right was fueled by burnout from the pandemic. We have had to see that term in a long time since it’s 2023 Nobody’s talking about their great resignation anymore. But how do companies do a better job of ensuring that there is more flexibility, fair play and benefits for, you know, minority groups? Jay, any thoughts around that topic?
Well, I’ll focus on what you brought up at the beginning part, which is, I think, a great observation for for the folks that are attending out there. Part of the impact of women not being back as much maybe as men does break down into certain types of jobs. And similar to the burnout you mentioned, as well. So one challenge in healthcare. If you look at nurse practitioners, overwhelmingly female, and that’s been one of the roles that you could point to over the last two years where there has been just a ton of burnout. Other roles that are more in and face to face, whether you mentioned hospitality or other sorts of certain personal services sectors that because the pandemic just took longer to come back and some of the wages might not have been as attractive and those employers didn’t, didn’t adjust to where the new market was. And I think some of those are the things that, that cause that difference. It works as well, you mentioned by if you take my race, there are certain types of jobs that tend to, you know, when you start to break things down by race also show an influence of how quickly they came back or not. Those are some of the undertones I think that that have led to who’s rejoined the labor market? And who is not?
Another question that we have is around generations and their impact in the workplace. And I don’t know how closely this gets into your expertise, but compensation is part of that conversation. And so when we start looking at more and more boomers exiting every year also means that that Gen Z is entering the workforce, and that they can’t all be YouTube influencers, J. So how are they going to impact the workforce? What is that going to look like, as far as not just our labor rate participation? How they how they view the future of work? Any any any thoughts on that?
Yeah, my, my daughter is 16, I remind her that the YouTube influencer route is probably not the ideal primary target. So that hits close to home. Yeah, you know, it’s that Wall Street Journal put out an article recently that that dove into this a bit, I can send it to you afterwards if you’d like to. But it really talked about the differences of it’s almost, you know, ambition of really giving everything to the company versus I just want to go provide value. And then I have the rest of my life that I have where I really want to spend my time. And I think that is going to be one of the driving factors. It’s different or just generational level, you know, nine to five face to face, and so on versus what the younger generation expects in terms of, I can work when I want where I want as long as I do my job, and I just want to do enough, and this is certainly overgeneralizing. But if you look at that Wall Street Journal article, it’s a clear difference generation by generation in terms of really how engaged and how much are you giving all of yourself to your company all of the time. And it’s gonna be interesting to see how that unfolds is we start to shift generations in and out of the labor force.
Final question, before we wrap up? I don’t think we have any more. Are we in a recession? Or are we not J?
It? I think that depending on other technical versions of a recession, there are what it feels like to be in a recession. Some I think some industries and some types of jobs already are, I think you can easily you can easily say that when you look at how home sales have declined for a record number of months, even more than a decline following the Great Recession, which was caused by a housing bubble, and it was partially, you know, there are certain spots where yes, I would say we already are there gonna be some industries and some types of jobs that will just continue to go through this. We’ll we’ll see. It’ll, it’ll depend on which ones but yeah, I would expect more of a slowdown though, as we look over the next say, three to six months, the general consensus is that if we are in a recession, or we get into one that it will be a little bit more shallow and not as long as what we’ve typically experienced. So by the end of this year, while we probably have a tough several months ahead of us, and an aggregate level, expectations are by the end of this year or early next year, things are back on the upswing just not at the boiling point that they were the last few years.
So plenty of opportunity for growth, plenty of opportunity for business expansion. I think as as we move forward. I’m excited for 2023 I know it’s easy to be bogged down by news articles, and the things that you see that grab headlines, do you have any closing thoughts around? How to Stay positive? When there’s so much negativity around around us, I guess you could say it’s kind of a general kind of general negativity, but a lot of it is centered around work, you know, inflation, so many things that are impacting us as as humans are related to our work. So any any thoughts on that?
Yeah. Consider how resilient we have all been in the last two to three years, we’ve overcome so many obstacles, I mean, think back, you know, all of a sudden, a new strain of COVID would come out and businesses would have to close their doors again and back and forth, and back and forth. And you know, I think so much character has been built with businesses and people and so on the last two to three years that needs to be used as we make decisions this year and be more resilient than typically we might be in the type of slowdown we could have ahead of us. The number one thing I would say is don’t get too wrapped up in the headlines without digging deeper. Because there are anytime there’s a slowdown, it’s you know, people are looking for that next thing to really jump on and say Oh, this is the big one. Just know that again, there’s gonna still going to be a lot of hiring that that will occur. Shira,
thank you very much, Jay. One of the one of my favorite followers on LinkedIn is both your personal account and labor IQ. If you are listening and following along today, I recommend you you searching those two accounts out giving them a follow up like, Jay, if somebody wanted to reach out to you directly, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Honestly, I would say, Yeah, follow us on LinkedIn, labor IQ on LinkedIn, you can reach out to me as well. And we can we can stay connected that way. Awesome.
Well, I’m a big fan of labor IQ. If you’ve never heard of it, I am not left for making these marketing pitches for any anybody that we have on on the show. But I do think it’s a it’s an extremely valuable tool, and one that we use on a regular basis, both internally and externally at job.com with our clients and to attempt to evaluate and measure how we are doing as far as pay equity goes, as well. That’s a wrap on another episode of the talent tide podcast. If you would like to share this particular episode, you can do so on LinkedIn. We will also be uploading it to YouTube this afternoon, as well as you’ll be able to find the audio version on Spotify, Apple or Google or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you for joining and we look forward to seeing you again. Thank you all

November 29, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris discusses what it takes to be a great leader with Glynn Perry, Founder and Principal at JGP Leadership Advisors, LLC.

In this episode Glynn covers topics including:

Servant Leadership

Supporting women and minorities in leadership

What are the typical blind spots leaders have

Link to Glynn’s Linked In

Transcript

Chris Nichols: 0:16

Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change and Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have the founder of JGP Leadership advisors, Glynn Perry, prior to the founding of jgP. Glynn is a former C suite in a fortune 500 company and spent time in a variety of cross functional leadership roles, including leading multibillion dollar business units. Glynn currently serves on the board of the Encore leadership advisors, the advisory board for the Federation of State medical boards, the Bluegrass Chapter of the American Red Cross and the Business Advisory Council for his alma mater, Kansas State College of Business. Glenn, thank you for coming on. I’m so excited to have you on the podcast today. And I’m really looking forward to your unique insight on the talent tide today.

Glynn Perry: 1:15

Very good. Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it. It’s an honor to be part of the podcast today. And I’m looking forward to having a meaningful conversation with you. Thanks for having me.

Chris Nichols: 1:24

Me too. And I know that I mentioned that your alma mater is Kansas State. But you also have a unique connection to me in that you have a graduate degree from my alma mater, Eastern Illinois University. And you grew up in a small town kids like myself in rural Illinois. And so I I connect to you in that way. And I think there’s lots of folks that are listening will be listening to the podcast that will enjoy that connection as well. Do you have any unique memories about growing up in Coles County before we get

Glynn Perry: 1:53

you know, obviously, it was a, it was a it kicked off, was a land of a lot of really flat ground and a lot of row crops and a lot of agricultural type things. But you know, I’ve got a lot of really fond memories of that too and I grew up there, you know, went to school there. And, you know, a lot of my a lot of my values and who I am, were very much instilled in me, you know, we live in in East Central Illinois. So a lot of fond memories, I don’t get back there very often. But it’s a great place. And it was a great place to raise a family

Chris Nichols: 2:25

where it is hard to get back there. It’s not easy to get to, you typically have to get in the car and drive a little bit. And so you mentioned some of those values. And I wanted to kick the show off with, with most guests giving a personal introduction, Glynn, of where you started, and how you got to this point in your career. So why don’t you tell us about some of those values that you picked up on? And how they guided you through your career?

Glynn Perry: 2:48

Yeah, that’s, that’s a great question. You know, I grew up on a farm, I grew up on a horse farm. And so from a very early age, work ethic and responsibilities were instilled in who I am, and very much a fabric of who I am. And, you know, being part of a rural community. You know, you knew a lot of people, a lot of people knew you. And so from a credibility standpoint, having your word be what it is meant to be, and your morals and your ethics and family values. That was all very much part of my my upbringing, participate in a lot of sport activities, actually ended up going to college and played a little bit of professional baseball as well. And so that whole team aspect, and, you know, goal setting in, you know, striving to be the best version of yourself. Those were all very much part of, you know, those early years.

Chris Nichols: 3:44

That’s awesome. As you brought some of those items into perspective there, I thought back on my own upbringing, and while we are quite a bit different than age, it’s, it’s it’s unique in the fact that if you grow up in a small town or on a farm, many of those values are passed down upon generation to generation. So you mentioned your your path to playing professional baseball. What did the transition look like when you decided to stop playing, playing a kids game and transition into the real world Glynn? What did that look like? Where did you get started? How did you know what you wanted to do?

Glynn Perry: 4:21

Well, first of all, thanks for pointing out our age difference I greatly appreciate. But you know, but that being said, Yeah, you know, I went to college, had a very successful baseball career there was drafted by the New York Yankees spent a little bit of time in their farm system. You know, the point in time that I joined the Yankee organization. I was 21 22 years old, I had my degree, which I was glad that I did. I had finished my degree. And when you’re surrounded with a bunch of 17, and 18 year olds that can do as much and in many cases a lot more than you could that that transition out of baseball was pretty quick, and it didn’t take much to figure out the writing on the on the wall, so to speak. And so, you know, again, a lot of fond memories of that I met a lot of really great people, I saw a lot of parts of the country that I would have never had the opportunity to do had I not pursued that baseball career. But for me, it was a pretty easy decision, you know, to pursue getting a real job when I kind of saw the talent that it was around me, and, you know, kind of how my skill sets matched up to a lot of other folks.

Chris Nichols: 5:28

Where do you go, what would you go after, after your playing career ended,

Glynn Perry: 5:32

so when I was, you know, when, when I finished, my baseball career actually moved back to the state of Kentucky, my wife had not yet finished up her degree. And so went back there and kind of picked up on, you know, working on a horse farm there, as part of Murray State University, and my wife finished her degree there at Murray State. And so that’s kind of how we spent, I guess, 12 to 18 months before I moved back to the Mattoon area and took my first professional job, kind of a funny story there, if I could just quickly, you know, assaulted in, but I actually was an animal side pre vet major. And that was another category that once I decided that I was done with baseball, and I needed to get a real job, I wasn’t interested in necessarily going back for another four years of school to be a veterinarian. And, you know, I was married at the time and needed to figure out, you know, kind of how I was like, I was going to put food on the table. And so that’s what actually led me to pursue a job in the business world.

Chris Nichols: 6:35

And what was that job Glynn? How do you get started with that degree? Who hired you? Based upon the fact that wouldn’t be a vet?

Glynn Perry: 6:42

Yeah. Great, great question. And that was a that was a lot of funny stories associated with that. But I actually went to work for RR Donnelley, which is a, you know, business communication markets marketing services organization. And I literally started my first job there in Mattoon working for that particular manufacturer, and started as a customer service rep, very much an entry level position. And fast forward 38 years, over those 38 years that I spent with a company I moved around, the company worked in a lot of different locations, a lot of different departments. You know, I served in a variety of different positions, operating roles, logistics roles, supply chain roles, market facing roles, etc. And ultimately landed in a C suite, reporting directly to the CEO of a multibillion dollar publicly traded company. So to say that it was a very exciting journey, seeing a lot of different parts of the company and working with a lot of really, really, really good teams. That would be an understatement. But it was a there’s not many folks that spent 38 years with one organization anymore. And I’m proud to have done that.

Chris Nichols: 7:52

You’re right, there’s not a lot of people that are spending that much time with the same organization anymore. I think there’s a multitude of reasons for that. I think that people have become more transient. In human nature, they’re more likely to kind of leave the nest and find opportunities, I think what you see a lot of times is people leave an organization, and then they start to hire people that they worked with previously, as well. So while you might change organizations, you tend to be around some of the same people likely throughout your career. What do you think, Glynn? From the beginning, starting as a customer service? Rep. What do you think RR Donnelly saw in you? And that led you on to on a development path that ended up with you in the C suite before you eventually left there a few years back?

Glynn Perry: 8:41

Yeah, that’s a great question, Chris. You know, I don’t know that I’ve really reflected on that a great deal.

Chris Nichols: 8:48

We have perfect opportunity right here. That’s

Glynn Perry: 8:50

right. That’s right. You know, I think that, you know, I think clearly early on my work ethic was, you know, got the attention of a lot of folks because even when I started in customer service, after I spent a few years working in that particular area of the company, I knew that I had an aspiration to want to do more. And one of the things that you pointed out that I had my MBA from your alma mater, I actually knew because I had that pre vet animal side background that if I was going to move along in the company, that I needed a different educational path. And so I went to school at night at Eastern picking up those core business curriculum classes, so that I then in turn, could get admitted into the MBA program. And that’s where I got my MBA again working night. So it was about a six or seven year journey to do that. But I got it done and I did it at night. And so I think people saw that work ethic and that commitment and desire to want to do more and be more and then as I started to volunteer for shift work, and I started to volunteer to, you know, cover the manufacturing floor. Were on the weekend, and I started to express interest in wanting to get more exposure to different parts of the company, again, that desire and that tenacity to want to broaden my skill set to be able to provide as much value to the company that I could, I think, you know, came about, and then you know, it’s kind of an overused term sometimes, but I think my basic communication skills served me well, throughout my entire career, I was kind of a, what you see is what you get kind of a person, I was open, I was direct, but I was, you know, I was fair, I was objective. And, you know, I, I went out of my way to make people feel valued, equally as comfortable talking to folks who are working on the shop floor all the way up to the board of directors of a particular company. And so just having that, you know, those those communication skills and that that work ethic, and desire to want to exceed.

Chris Nichols: 11:00

I love hearing that I think there’s communication is an undervalued skill. And to be honest, I, I liked the story of you being an animal sci pre vet, Major, because we spend so much time focusing on majors spend so much time directing people towards being in a certain career path, that if you start to look around most organizations, those tend to just be an entry point. For you, It didn’t end up being an entry point at all, right? But so more often than not, if you’re going to advance in an organization, you’re going to have cross functional moves, if you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to be cross functionally trained. You know, if you’re in management, you’re going to need to understand how finance works, you’re going to understand you mentioned logistic logistics, depending on the type of organization. So can you talk to maybe some of your background? What that looked like? Maybe making those those moves into roles that you are uncomfortable with, at least initially upon hearing about roles? Or were there any roles that you’re like, Ah, I don’t know, but I will give it a shot. Because I know that if I know that I will work hard, and I’ll figure it out. But maybe skill set wise, you didn’t feel like you were prepared for it?

Glynn Perry: 12:13

Yeah, you know, I think kind of couple of things immediately come to mind for me there. You know, first of all, I was very blessed to have a number of different mentors, and people that somewhat kind of took you under their wing, when they knew that you had desires, and they knew that you had aspirations to do certain things, to help you accomplish that. And I would not be where I am at today had I not had some of those special people in my life from a very, very early on point of view within within within my working career. And so, you know, when when people give you those chances, and they work to develop you, at least the way that I was wired, I wanted to make sure that I didn’t mess up. And so I always worked to try to over achieve and exceed somebody’s expectations with respect to the role they put me in. And in fact, I had a significant a high leader in the organization early on in my career that labeled me as an overachiever, I didn’t have the educational background, I didn’t necessarily have the normal typical pedigree of being a senior leader within particularly a multibillion dollar, publicly traded company. And those and I still stay in touch with that individual today. And so almost 40 years later, you know, I joke with him frequently that his telling me that was the best thing that could have ever happened in my career. Because 10 or 15 years after he made that comment, he told me said I was wrong about you, you, you’re good. You’re not just simply an overachiever, you’re good at what you do. But the motivation that that gave me and the fact that I hung on to that and never forgot that. It just it fueled the fire with inside of me to, you know, to do some of the things that I did did within my career. And let’s also be honest with one another, I mean, you know, yes, I was part of an organization that had a tremendous amount of success, and we drove a lot of business results, could never have done that without working with a lot of really, really good people and a lot of great teams. And so just being in a position to be a servant leader and be in a position to you know, help others reach their full potential clearly helped catapult me to where I ultimately landed my career.

Unknown: 14:34

I all I could think about is the Michael Jordan documentary as you were kind of telling that story about being an overachiever where, where he talks about everyone that’s ever slighted him, you know, even the slight spit, and he’s like, that affected me. And more often than not, it was it could have just been like, Hey, he’s a great player, but I think I do this well, and all of a sudden he was able to take that and use it as motivation to help drive himself forward and sometimes I believe that have fear is often a bigger motivator than successes. And so it sounds like maybe some of that was there also driving you as well. And I think about fear of kind of fear of the unknown, right and thinking about where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there. The best way in my that I have found to drive through any fear that you have is to just put your nose to the grindstone and go do the work. More often than not hard work beats talent every every time. I know, that’s kind of an old analogy. But more often than not, I think it holds true. You know, on LinkedIn, since you’ve transitioned away from your role at RR Donnelley, you you’ve become a leadership advisor working with with other leaders helping organizations drive strategy and getting them on the right track, or at least advising them on on the positives and the negatives of the decisions that they’re making. And one of the things that I have noticed that you talk about on LinkedIn a lot is servant leadership. And you also alluded to that around the people that were around you and how they helped to guide you and mentors. Can you kind of give a broad based idea around what servant leadership is to you, Glynn?

Glynn Perry: 16:16

Yeah, you know, that’s? That’s a great question. Because you’re right, it does mean lots of different things to lots of different people. But you know, at its core, the way I think about servant leadership is that it’s all about focusing primarily on the growth and well being of the people that are around you, and not as much about yourself, right. And so that comes in a number of different, you know, forms and shapes and sizes, and so forth. But, you know, you really need to make sure that your team knows that you care about them. So that’s all about serving their heart, making sure that they, they know that you’re listening to them, that you know, you have a general sense of who they are as a person, you might have a good understanding of some of the trials and tribulations that they’re facing, both professionally and personally. So serving their heart really getting to know your team. You know, the second thing I would say is that your team needs to improve, well, then you need to be in a position to serve their talent, how can you develop them through the work experiences, that you’re providing them through the mentoring that you’re providing them through the coaching, that you’re providing them through the job opportunities that maybe they’re gaining? And having visibility to? You know, if you’ve got a team that’s struggling with doubt, how do you serve their mind and their spirit? How do you build them up from a confidence standpoint? How do you help them overcome some of the difficulties that they might be facing and that they might be encountering within the within the work organization? If you’ve got a team that has potential? How are you serving their growth, I think we’ve all been surrounded by a lot of folks in the organization that you know, they have the potential, but maybe they haven’t really had the chance to demonstrate that through their work assignments, through their special projects, through their exposure to other people’s within the organization. So as a servant leader, you’re always looking for those kinds of opportunities of how you can primarily focus on the growth and development and the well being of the people that are around you. As opposed to yourself, you know, you’re not looking to necessarily advance yourself, you’re not looking to necessarily take credit for things that happen, you’re looking for ways to get that back and help and help others with that. And so, you know, you started to you made mention a little bit of the transition that I’ve made from a professional standpoint. You know, I do consider myself to have had a very successful career. And I don’t mean that boastfully because as I said earlier, that has been through the result of working closely with a lot of great teams, and a lot of great people. And I reached a point in time in early 2021, where I had made the decision, I was ready to transition away from that career success to a career of significance. And what I mean by that is, I want to find a way to take all of my experiences, multiply those, leverage those and give those back to others. And the best way for me to do that as my board services work and the leadership advisory firm that I have started up and I’m having a ball doing it.

Chris Nichols: 19:25

That’s awesome to hear we need I think it’s, we need people that I’ve experienced, as as kind of a new leader myself, it’s extremely valuable to have people like you that I can go to and help me through maybe something that you’ve been through before and provide guidance. And so looking back on your career, though, how did you? Where did that mindset come from? Because you did talk a lot earlier. I think about being kind of self motivated, self driven, kind of driving to prove people wrong. Becoming a leader and being a leader is a lot different than that in a lot of ways, right? Because you’re managing different personalities, you’re managing people that may not have the same mindset that you have Glenn. So when, when you were leading people, how did you help guide people that maybe weren’t like you towards success or towards leadership development, etc? Do you have any, any thoughts on that?

Glynn Perry: 20:25

Yeah, you know, I think, you know, let’s be clear, when it you know, early on in my career, I didn’t have it all figured out. I don’t have it all figured out today, either. But I think that, you know, all of our individual journeys are exactly that they’re, they’re, they’re a journey of experiences, or their journey of successes or a journey of failures. And I go back to my athletic career, I think there’s a certain amount of leadership that comes out of participating, whether it’s sports, or any other kind of extracurricular kind of an opportunity. And when you’re part of a team, and you’re part of an organization, you have to figure out how to get the most out of one another, and how to hold one another accountable. And so I think a lot of my leadership, skills and techniques for that matter, kind of started there, if you will. And then ago, I go back to again, having been part of a lot of different great mentors, and a lot of different opportunities to go off to some different, you know, leadership, schools and leadership seminars, and programs and so forth. They were a very, very, very much a valuable part of who I am. But then, you know, making a lot of mistakes early on in my leadership career, you learn from those things. And I always tell folks, you know, there’s three things that come out of making a mistake, one, you got to be willing to acknowledge that you made it. Secondly, you got to be in a position to make sure that you have learned from it. And then third, you got to move on and get past it. Right. Don’t Don’t dwell on it. So if you can do those three things, with any kind of a failure or setback that you have, you’re going to continue to get better. And then I think, finally, you know, that this whole notion of a servant leader, I didn’t necessarily have that early in my career, I’m a person of faith, and I’m not here to pass that on, or, you know, throw that upon anybody. But I think that, you know, my maturity and my development in my faith, I learned an awful lot about what it was like to be a servant leader. And, you know, just began to bring that more into the fold of who I was, and how I operated.

Chris Nichols: 22:31

I have to, and I think some of the big things that I have taken from that are often like authenticity, to me is a big one, and being a servant leader. And people have to think that people have to know you, right. That’s, that’s my personal belief for me to get on board with someone’s vision, and where they’re planning to take us, you have to be authentic about it. And, you know, it’s, it’s easy to be fooled as well. But part of being a servant leader is continuing to come back to them and showing them that you’re willing to get your hands dirty, as well, that you are willing to do hard things, you’re not leaving people out to dry. You know, and so, being a servant leader, you know, you mentioned your faith and how that’s driven you are there any other kind of key attributes that that you believe, really stand out? When you when you look at how your faith helps you become more of a servant leader?

Glynn Perry: 23:27

Yeah, you know, I think that and you mentioned a great word authenticity, that’s a big part of it. But you know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s trust, right, and so, you know, your ability to be trustworthy, and, you know, at the same time, be willing to demonstrate trust in others. And, you know, that that is a very, very key part of leadership as well. And then it all kind of goes back to that whole morals and ethics thing. I mean, every decision that a leader makes if you can kind of funnel that through, you know, the, the funnel of ethics and morals, you’re not gonna have too many major situations, that they confront you in a negative way.

Chris Nichols: 24:07

So, you know, and trust is a good segue, because we tend to trust people that are like us, you know, when we look at someone else for for me, looking at you and your background, I instantly was like, Yeah, this guy’s you know, I see myself in him. Right. And, and we tend to do that, historically, that has tended to be do they look like us, are they from the same areas as us? And that’s one of the challenges that we’ve had in organizations and becoming more diverse, right? Because for a long time, the people that we trusted were like, you know, you and I, honestly, Glynn, white males. And so, there has been more of an emphasis in organizations put on diversity and inclusion, but when you look at your career, and maybe how you’re advising companies now, when have an increased focus on on diversity and leadership. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the the reasons for why we should do that. I think that they’re very clear when we look at our market capabilities and being able to talk to different types of people and having different perspectives and things of that nature. But as, as leaders and as organizations, how can we do more to support women and minorities in leadership development? And then once they reach their those roles? How can we help develop them, but I really want to focus on how we can do more to support them and getting to those types of positions earlier in their careers?

Glynn Perry: 25:37

Yeah, great. Great, great question. And you’re right, you know, this whole topic can be an emotionally charged topic for a lot of folks. And I, and I will be the first to admit that I’m proud to be part of a country that is putting a lot more focus on diversity and inclusion, we are woefully behind where we need to be, arguably, we’re making some progress, that progress is probably not being made quickly enough. But you know, to specifically answer the question that you present it in terms of what we can do more, you know, I really think that within most businesses, it really starts with kind of the culture that you’re building around diversity and inclusion. And so there’s clearly an educational piece around the value of D and I, and there’s an educational and program piece around making sure that your leaders are educated around, you know, the different aspects of it. But you know, tactically some of the things beyond the programs and the education, that that are important to developing the right kind of culture around it, you know, some of the things that kind of come to mind is that you know, if leaders will practice not being the smartest person in the room, which is always a real easy tendency for leaders to want to do. But you know, regardless of your intelligence, regardless of your experience, remember that there’s things that you can learn and you can get from other people that you are surrounded by at the table, within a meeting, within a conference, room setting or whatever. So remember that you’re not the smartest person in the room, and be willing to take on whatever you can get from whoever’s in that room with you. Right. That’s a big part of it. You know, secondly, I would say that it’s okay to lead from behind. And so what I mean by that is that good managers will push their people out in front of others, and let them get more comfortable being in front of others. And so the more that we as white male leaders, can surround ourselves with leaders that are from diverse backgrounds, different genders, etc. And we can push them to the front of the room and get the spotlight on them to help with their development. That’s one way we can continue to increase diversity. I would also say that we as leaders, if we will constantly seek feedback from diverse candidates, in terms of how we’re doing leading the organization, and how we’re doing in terms of developing them as leaders in the organization is critically critically important to this as well, if we will take the time to listen to others are, you know, for those of us that are surrounded by female leaders, and you know, people of color, and so forth, they will tell us how they’re feeling, they will tell us what their experiences are, they will tell us what they’re, you know, what their hurdles overcome are, why it’s different to be part of an organization. And if we’ll listen to that, and accept that feedback, and address that feedback, it’s a way to push the DE&I forward within an organization. And then finally, I think it truly is all about investing in the future. And it’s all about making sure that the next generation of leaders are being raised up. And that’s where I’ve got a lot of passion in the business that I currently have founded in that I’m working in now, as I have a deep passion and raising up the next generation of leaders. And I should say, the next generation diverse leaders. And so it’s all about that investment in, you know, helping to develop and helping to bring them along, in accomplish the goals that they have. Because I think we all need to remember whether we want to admit it or not. It is different for diverse candidates to be successful in an organization. I spoke of all the great mentors and all the support I had early in my career. A lot of women don’t have that. A lot of people of color don’t have that. They don’t get that they don’t receive that. And so going into it, they’ve got a more difficult row to hoe, so to speak, than what I probably had. And so I’m working with folks to try to change that.

Chris Nichols: 29:59

So, if you think back to being a servant leader, one of the things that typically stands out to me is the idea that you’re not a manager, right? So what I mean by that, as a leader, you have a have a look to the future. And I believe that when people are management, management is kind of the here and now you’re you’re managing tasks, projects, etc, but you’re not talking to people. And that’s where leadership starts to become more prevalent, and where you start to see what somebody is. And so your your capability to talk to humans, other people about what they’re feeling, what they’re experiencing, while they’re doing the work, gives you insight, and an opportunity to help bring others along with you. And it gives you a different perspective on what others are going through as well makes you a better leader yourself. And so, what we really I believe, have to focus more on Lynas is, is creating more leaders, right, not managers, not, you know, we’ve got to have better conversations about what it means to be a leader in an organization and manage to leaders not manage to manage from the top down, right, we’ve we need to be more open to communication. You talked about how your communication has been a big driver for you throughout your career. And just not enough managers are talking and communicating with their, with their employees about things that aren’t related to the work that’s getting done. And I think when you start to make that transition, you start to have conversations with people about what their career aspirations are, where they want to go where they want to be. And then it allows you to connect dots, right. And I believe that networking is more about taking the common collection of the conversations that you have, and putting them together as puzzle pieces. And so that’s where you see a shift and an organization is when you have leaders that are willing to work together to build other people up. And I think that’s where you start to see more women and minorities in leadership development, because it starts with honest, authentic, truthful conversations about our wants, needs and desires. Once they’re in these roles, Glynn, what can we do more? How can we support them more effectively, once they’re there? Obviously, you mentioned that a lot of diverse candidates maybe don’t have the kind of mentors that they would typically look up to. So what can organizations do more to support these individuals? So they don’t feel like they are kind of on an island by themselves? I guess?

Glynn Perry: 32:41

Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to go back to what you were saying about the importance of leaders. It’s critically important. And I like what you had to say there. And the whole communication aspect of it is critically important. But there’s one thing that I would want to emphasize, I’ve seen a lot of leaders that are willing to ask for feedback. I’ve seen a lot of leaders and organizations that are willing to bring people together and get their thoughts and ideas. But what you do with that is what’s critically critically important. Too many times people ask for feedback, they bring folks together, get their thoughts and their ideas, and then it just sits there, you miss out on a tremendous opportunity to build the culture and move the organization forward if you don’t take action on the endpoint on the inputs that you’re receiving. And so I would just emphasize that point that you made there. You know, with respect to what we can do more, it’s probably a continuation, a lot of what I was just saying right there. It’s really about understanding where people are at in their journeys, and really understanding what their aspirations are. And really understanding what challenges they’re being faced with, and then going to work on helping them to overcome those things. You know, I hear so many times from women and minorities, that it’s tough to get a seat at the table. I’ve got the education, I’ve got all the credentials, I’ve got everything I’m doing all the kinds of things that I should do, you know, why am I not getting a sit a seat at the table. And so really kind of delving into that to understand, you know, what those barriers and what those roadblocks are. And again, part of it’s an educational thing, but part of it is just setting the expectation and building the building the culture around that. And when I was mentioning earlier about pushing women and minorities more towards the front of what some of these opportunities are and giving them a chance. You know, when you when you’ve got when you’ve got a key position to fill, you know, how aggressive are you making sure that your list of candidates is a diverse list of candidates to choose from? You know, there’s too many times that I’ve received a list of candidates for an opening in my organization. That was all white males. That’s, you know, that’s just not acceptable. You have to, you know, demand and expect that you’re going to get a diverse list that you’re going to interview a diverse list. And then, you know, you know, making those tough decisions and given women and minorities, those chances to, you know, to be a part of your leadership team, I was proud that, you know, in terms of senior leadership positions, again, it’s not enough. But you know, 60% of the folks that I was placing, before I left the corporate world, were divided were diverse candidates, I had a reputation for being an advocate of DE&I and not only talking it but walking the talk around it. And we need more leaders that are willing to do that.

Arran Stewart: 35:37

job.com is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.

Chris Nichols: 35:56

So that leads us to our final topic, which are our blind spots that leaders face Glynn. And so I think when when you when you think about some of the things that we’ve talked about today, I even kind of mentioned it as as managers, we get focused on the task and the projects and the outcomes that we’re trying to accomplish. And as leaders, we can get sucked into the same vacuum. And so I use the term managers and leaders loosely based upon where our visions are, because you can be a CEO who, who falls into the trap of managing, right and managing to outcomes managing, managing your employees to ensure that they’re doing their job. But true leadership is about being a visionary, but helping move people along, and really being a liaison for the the organization. So what are typically blind spots that you see leaders find themselves? Not being able to see? And and how do you? Let’s start there? What are the typical blind spots that that leaders tend to not see?

Glynn Perry: 37:03

Yeah, you know, there’s probably a long list of them. Chris, but I, I guess, three or four that kind of immediately come to mind for me. You know, the first one kind of centers around. Tolerating good enough, right? There’s a lot of people that settle when it comes to driving business results or meeting an organization. And, you know, low standards for performance, not having goals, not setting the right expectations, not building the culture around what you want to what you want to accomplish. That can be that can be, that can be a blind spot for people, if they are in a position of tolerating good enough, or that will have to do, you’re not going to get it, you use Michael Jordan, I promise you, Michael Jordan, as a basketball player did not settle. He was the first one in the gym, he was the last one to leave. And, you know, what he put into developing his craft is unparalleled. And, you know, business leaders are much the same. You know, I think a second area blindspot would be not not going at it alone, you know, being being afraid to ask for help. There’s a lot of leaders who believe that, hey, I’m, I’m from a hierarchical organizational chart perspective, I’ve got the title, I’m leaving this organization, I’m supposed to have all the answers. That’s a big blind spot for folks, you have to be willing to ask for the help of others, you have to be willing to identify when you don’t have it all figured out. And, again, be willing to take that feedback and input and ideas from others to if you want to have a thriving organization. You know, I think another area for me is really around. You know how sensitive or insensitive you are to your surroundings and the behaviors of others. And you know, a lot of people aren’t always aware of kind of what their behaviors are and how they show up. And I talk about this shadow of the leader, whether you like it or whether you don’t, people are going to emulate your behaviors. And so if you’re not aware of the type of behavior that you’re dispelling to the organization, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble if you’re the type that pound your fist on the desk and you demand and you expect, chances are those who are around you are going to pick up on that behavior. And they’re going to act the same way. If you’re more of a person that is out and about and you’re connecting with people and you’re sensitive and you’re aware, and your decisions are made from a participative point of view, those who are around you’re going to emulate that behavior as well. And so you know, those are those are probably three and then I think the final one that I would I would offer is is people who avoid conflict. I have seen leaders who are afraid of of addressing conflict If there may be an organization, maybe it’s a working relationship, maybe it’s a result that’s not being driven. Maybe it’s the level of quality or service that we’re providing to our clients. And when those things happen, some leaders are not comfortable going in addressing the problem areas, that can be a real major blind spot for the effectiveness of leadership, you’ve got to be willing to take a stand, you’ve got to be willing to address it head on, do it correctly, do it the right way. And, you know, make sure that you’re always kind of raising that level of performance.

Chris Nichols: 40:33

How do I know Glynn how do I know that I have these blind spots? How am I locating them? Because that seems like I would need to be quite self aware. So what are some? What are some things that I could do as a leader to ensure that I’m, for lack of a better term, protecting myself against my blind spots?

Glynn Perry: 40:53

Great question, what do think self awareness is a big piece of it. And intuitively, you know, if you’re, if you’re if you’re connected to the organization, that people within the organization, intuitively, you’ll know some of these kinds of things. But for me, the biggest thing, and this was a major benefit to my career, I had a circle of influence that I that I call it a circle of influence, I have a number of folks that were within my circle, that were not always superior in the organization. They weren’t always peers, they were people that were down in the organization, they were people that were cross functionally parts of other areas that I knew that I could go to, and have a one on one conversation with them, and say, Give it to me straight. What is it that I’m doing well, that I should continue? What is it that I can that I need to stop doing? What are the points and areas of emphasis that I’m overlooking? What am i What is it that I’m missing? And if you’ve got the ability, and you only develop that through some of those things we talked about earlier, the trustworthiness, the communication skills, you know, people, you know, being a servant leader, people knowing that they can share with you and that’s not gonna have any repercussions back on them in any way shape, or fashion. But if you can surround yourself with people that are willing to give it to you straight, and you’re willing to go ask for it on a routine basis, and your your history suggests that you will act upon the feedback that’s given to you. That is the best way to have your blind spots called out for you.

Chris Nichols: 42:28

I can’t think of a better spot to wrap things up here. Glynn, you’ve kind of mentioned a little bit about the JGP Advisors, can you can you tell us tell the listeners a little bit more about what it is your organization does? And cap it off with how people can reach out

Glynn Perry: 42:47

to you? Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question. I appreciate the opportunity, Chris. You know, I think as a former C suite executive with and someone that has 25 years of senior level leadership experience, at JGP leadership advisors, I combined my extensive leadership experience and coaching skills to help elevate even the most successful leaders, I have literally helped dozens and helped to develop dozens of talented people who have since advanced to CEO position COOs, President positions SVPS, VPS, and even ownership, you know, types of positions for different companies. So you know, I help leaders to transition to senior executive leadership positions, I help them to undertake new ventures. And I also might help them to seek a fresh perspective on any one of the many business challenges that they might be faced with in their given situation. You know, I also would say to you that I understand the need to generate a return on investment. And I believe that there’s nothing that generates the level of ROI as leadership development does and can. And we work very hard to achieve measurable results with the companies and leaders that we work with. And I relentlessly work to bring out the leaders best performance to serve their teams, and to live a more fulfilled life. So there’s a variety of ways that we do that at jgP leadership advisors. If you visit my LinkedIn profile, you can see a lot of those types of things that we’ve made reference to throughout the call today. And I would welcome the opportunity to speak with any of your listeners. And my contact information is included in my profile, you can reach me on my email address, which is JG Perry 04 @ gmail.com. And again, that’s in the LinkedIn profile. I also have my cell phone number included in my profile. If you reach out to me, leave me a message if you don’t get me directly. I promise you I will return your call. I will get back to you. And, you know, I look forward to connecting with anybody that has has an interest to talk about any of these areas further. So thank you for the opportunity again, Chris. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity to participate on your podcast today. And looking forward to connecting with some of your listeners.

Chris Nichols: 45:12

Thank you, Glynn. I will make sure that your phone number or LinkedIn profile, and email are all listed in the show notes when we post those online. And I definitely encourage you all to just even follow Glynn on LinkedIn. He sharing some some great advice, great leadership tips and tricks to advance your organization as well. So thank you, Glynn, for coming on the show. Hopefully, we can have you on again in the future. Always looking at a variety of different topics. And thank you all for listening. This is a another great episode of the podcast if you’re if you’re finding us for the first time. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, wherever you listen or watch your podcast. That’s a wrap and remember, success is on the other side of fear. Have a great day.

Glynn Perry: 46:06

Thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.

November 15, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris discusses the benefits of using games to develop interpersonal skills among employees and leaders with Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks.

Topics Include:
1.     Engagement and retention
2.     Maximizing cultural intelligence in the workplace
3.     HR Tech – combining team-building, analytics, and upskilling
4.     Making vulnerability at work comfortable

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change and Talent Management. I’m your host Chris Nichols. And today we have the CEO and founder of employee engagement and retention company keep wall and Lauren Fitzpatrick Shanks prior to the founding of keep wall Lauren spent 14 years working at five fortune 500 companies holding numerous leadership roles. As a black millennial woman in engineering and tech. She is no stranger to being the first or only Lauren is the first black woman to graduate from the University of Kansas’s aerospace engineering department and the first black woman to win the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics international design competition. She’s a recipient of the women and technology Rising Star Award and has an MBA and operations management. But after getting to know Lauren, most importantly, it seems that she is a wife and mother of two and an avid conversationalist are top two values are authenticity and legacy. And she keeps these front of mind at everything she does. I have known you for 25 minutes. And I can say that your bio is quite authentic and totally believable. Lauren, nice to have you on the show.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Chris. I’m happy to be here.
So as I had mentioned in pre show, I’m very excited to have you on your organization, the company that you have founded is very interesting. And it’s as as your bio points out, you don’t sound like you have much of an HR background. So I’m going to need you to set the stage for me to help our listeners kind of understand your path from being this rocket scientist over here to getting to the point of having an HR tech company. So help us help help me fill in the blanks of how we got from point A to point B, if you don’t mind.
Yes, yes, yes. So you’re not the first person to ask this question. That’s commonly the first question I ever get asked is like rocket science, HR tech, how do those meet. So as you mentioned, in my bio, I worked for five different fortune 500 companies and with how I look how I identify and things when getting into the industry, no one looked like me, I was the youngest, I was the only woman I was the only minority like all these, only these. And you have to find some type of way of relating and being in this space, especially when you’re working on shop floors, when you’re working long hours when you’re trying to just build trust and foundation with the folks that you’re working with. And so for me that was that’s, that’s a key part of what we were talking about in the pre show. It’s like what retain someone at a company is really feeling like they’re valued. Like they’re appreciated all these other things that go into things when you’re looking from a talent acquisition standpoint. And I remembered, I’d be going into interviews and I would ask like, what’s the culture look like? What’s the setup look like? You see that I am a woman, I see. You’re trying to hire more women for certain reasons. But how do the women feel that are currently in this space? And so typically, I didn’t have responses because they’re like, well, there’s no women in this space. We’re trying to get more in. But what I was learning from being at these companies is really, how did I go about building those relationships? And it really went deep into, could I connect with them on something that didn’t seem traditional, wasn’t a conversation that would traditionally come up in the workplace wouldn’t traditionally come up in any of your team building activities, but created that space to really resonate at a deeper level. So I don’t know if you’ve heard of the organizational culture iceberg. And it’s like, this is what you say how your culture of your organization is, and this is underneath the surface, what’s really happening. I really have resonated with that because I care about psychology. I have a great interest in games and especially like board games and games that are like, how have you think so not so much as mindless type of games because I love those two that just like past the time, but something that I have you think and really dive deeper with the people that you’re playing that game with and learning and understanding. So I just did a meshing of like my interest in psychology and humans as a whole, and like the, like how our behaviors are. And then I combined that like with my engineering background, and with my interest in games, and I was like, How do I create this type of solution? That’s really more set on community occasion and understanding folks getting those insights and then being able to build that foundation for relationship. What was interesting about this, though, because we launched this, we created this methodology, and sold, it was a physical game, and sold it to 1000s of people across 27 countries across three different continents, just to see like, does this methodology work? And I always had an interest of digitizing it. But I was forced to do it once COVID happened, because there’s kind of like, okay, people can’t get together, game sales are kind of down because people aren’t congregating with one another. So once we’ve made the digital platform, we started doing these virtual game nights. And so folks from everywhere, were coming to these game nights, and of course, people have jobs. So after the game we played, do you have the debrief and discussion about what are you thinking things, and I was getting people contacting me and saying, I need to bring, you need to bring this into the workplace. And I’m like, I, I’m in the workplace, like, they’re not going to do this. Like, we don’t have these type of conversations. We aren’t diving deep, and like really wanting to know each other. And then this whole, that’s when we started having that shift of like, work integrating with your home life and being in the pandemic, and how those bleed over and stuff and being like, I need to really understand this person as a person and how they’re showing up each day. And so once, once I got it, I got contacted by these folks. And they’re like, can you come and do these sessions? They brought me into the workplace. So that was like, I didn’t plan on this being this solution for companies, but companies reached out to me. And then as they reached out to me, they’re like, Do you have a subscription platform for this? No, let’s try and build that. Well, is there any way that we can integrate with like our learning management systems or performance management systems? That’s interesting. Can we create different types of games that focus on these different areas? And so we went from being this like game that was really about, hey, how do I learn about this person from a social perspective, so like their life, love, self reflection, worldviews, family, things like that, to Now, we have 17 games on the platform. They fall in engagement, morale, team development, we have leadership and development games, we have professional development games. And we have diversity, equity, inclusion games. And so it was like, it went from me trying to figure out how do I integrate myself and have that sense of belonging and inclusion in the workplace with others, too. I brought people like strangers together, and they’re like, I was vulnerable. I opened up, I express myself to these people I’d never met. What if I could do that in the workplace? And it’s kind of like, Okay, listen to what customers were asking for. When we started. That’s
amazing. I mean, I’ll be honest, I didn’t know how the heck you were gonna get from point A to point B. And I still am a little bit just bewildered actually, how you, you took what was originally like a social game that you created, if I understand that correctly. Okay. And then eventually, it was able to be taken if you dig deep enough people got the game, and they were like, this works like, we should be doing this in the workplace. And COVID really help it sounded like to to expedite that. Yes.
Correct? Yes. Because, folks, when we had COVID, folks, we’re looking for ways, how can I connect with someone, since we can’t be in the same place? So these virtual game nights over zoom? Was that way to do that? And when we did that, people were like, Well, can you bring this into the workplace, because right now we’re doing these cooking classes are doing this different stuff over zoom. And I want to do that, like, we have team issues that are are happening here, like communication issues, dynamics, issues, things like that. And we feel like this could help. And so we became the solution that was just really revolutionary for that hybrid remote workplace situation where you got a whole bunch of people that were coming in, that started the job and have never met these other people in person, and don’t know how to connect with them as like humans. And then they’re like, what this solution enables you to do that in a short period of time, and then build that foundation that makes it easier for you to ask questions when you need help to seek out advice from folks to have better one on ones with managers and things because now you’re understanding them in a complete entity of who they are, rather than just Oh, I know, their workplace mentality, or I know their Myers Briggs, or their DISC assessment results. And so it’s really like understanding
about the new fad, which is in the enneagram.
Enneagram I like enneagram.
But it’s funny. I’m looking now at my notes for pre show and there was one line that we had a making vulnerability get more comfortable when I told you before the show was like, I don’t know how I’m going to transition from some of the other things to that. But you have made it very seamless to get there. And I love the style of game because I believe that there is so much value in getting to know the people that you work around. And we, yeah, yesterday was the election, right. And so I think there’s some comparisons that we can make here. And using that as a as a topic of the day almost right, because it’s so easy for us to judge others. Because we were basing our entire persona is off of beliefs that we have, have taken upon ourselves to have and to hold. But the reality is, we’ve taken black and white stances of saying it’s got to be this way. And it can’t be that way. Because that way is bad, in my way is good, when in reality, all of life is gray space, right? There’s so much room in the middle to come together and be like, Okay, I get that. And so that that’s what your game is trying to accomplish. So I’d love for you to maybe like, talk through some more of those details. Because I’m not interested, I’m going to be sending this podcast episode to our leader of people and culture, and we are going to be a warm a warm prospect for you.
Well, that makes me feel very great. So check mark there. Um, no, everything that you just described and saying, like, the thoughts of this black and white, and then it’s like, but no, the world is very gray. And people feel uncomfortable expressing they think that, well, I need to pick this side or the other or even if you think about the engagement surveys that we currently have, the spectrum of them are strongly agree or strongly disagree. And then you could put like, neutral, but what does neutral really mean, you know? And so that’s also reasoning. I’m an engineer, and I’m like, we need to quantify this, like how
I’m coming there next i’m gonna get to that part of
feeling. So yeah, we can talk about that. But with regards to like, how the game really surfaces in it really focuses on meaning that gray is we are game, it’s a question answer type game. So we have, like, we have points, we have penalties, we have badges for winning, you can get bonus points. So we have all the gaming elements in there. But the root in the heart of the game is this question answer. But our focus is not on right or wrong answers. It’s on what’s your personal perspective and getting other people to understand? What was your path travel that got you to this perspective, and then realizing like, oh, ah, I get why you see things this way, or how I can approach you to maybe open your mind up to different type of ways of thinking. But the main thing with the questions is our questions are ambiguous. So someone will get a question that will say, Well, I’m not this is not a workplace one, but it’s my favorite question that comes to the top of my head and like, what does happiness in love mean to you? And this is one of the, like, personal questions. And people will be like, love. So are you talking about in friendship, love? Are you talking about like, relationship love? Are you talking about like, we’re playing this at work, so like loving my job, and I’m like, you choose which direction and so it’s very much ambiguous. And then the, the keep keep walls stands for keep wandering out loud. So the wandering out loud part is an integral part of the game that really is now diving belief beneath that surface level to peel back the layers of the onion. And so as you start, like, you might have said, what about this? What about that you give an answer. And then someone’s gonna say, Well, you had mentioned, like you answered based on work. But now, you had mentioned something about personal we also want to know, that side of it. Why are the two different wire answers different? How is your work persona, so much different than your home persona, and just getting deeper in that, but then we also if that’s from a personal perspective, but then we’re also having questions like that for your team dynamics. So we have games that are focused on the light, like the development lifecycle of a team’s team. So forming, storming, norming performing, then we have risk and assessments. And it’s the same type of setup. But our main goal with the game because we talk about getting people to be vulnerable and feeling comfortable with that is like, if you think about games, games are universal, right? They bring people together from all types of ages and backgrounds, anyplace in the world. They have games, they’ve played games, like people understand that concept. And what’s really great about games is that they give you some type of structure, because one of the main things that we get when we say hey, we’re going to have these vulnerable conversation Asians that sometimes are uncomfortable or they’re hard to have, especially if you think about the DEI type of conversations to, or you’re talking about like society in the elections, and they’re like polarizing conversations. And our main thing is, we ask questions in a way that don’t put someone on the defense. So there, it’s not setting you up to be combative. It’s not in the game rules, it’s set up to not be a debate. And so you already having that structure of here’s what the game rules are, you know that if you don’t follow them, you’re cheating. And so then you can’t win, you won’t get your points and people will call you out on that. And it’s like, it’s like, when you’re playing uno, and you try to double up and someone’s like, no, that’s not like that’s up, they’re gonna call you out on not following the rules. And so you see these different types of outcomes based on like, Hey, we’re playing a game, I’m putting down my barrier, I’m following the rules of the game. And I’m doing this because the game said so. And then what you find from that is a whole bunch of laughter, a whole bunch of Oh, my gosh, I’m shocked that other people were willing to express that it’s like they were willing to because you were willing to because they know everyone here is going to. And so it really does make those conversations where they’re like, that’s not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. It’s because you, you’re not worried about the fear of judgment, or the fear of, I’m gonna get in an argument with this person, because rules of the game you can
fascinating trying to figure out how an engineer can tap into their softer side of psychology and connect the dots here. I mean, you are truly a unicorn in that way. I have to imagine the other engineers around you probably were like, Why do you care about how people feel Lauren?
Well, the thing is, because I was that person in the workplace that I’m like, I and I care about how people feel because I felt some type of way in the workplace. So if we’re thinking about it right now, in these last three years, people have been like, silently wondering about so much, right? They’re wondering about their current job status, because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the world. They’re worried about their security, because they’re like, What about my health? What about my safety, from this perspective, so much is going on with this pandemic? They care about, like their future career growth? Where am I like, can I grow in this way? Do I want to take a step out and like, start something on my own or whatever, and they’re wondering all these things. And then they’re not having the opportunity to express what their needs are, where they want to be, how they want to grow in their career, and things like that, in a way that they’re like, I won’t be judged, or my manager won’t shut me down to say, Well, let’s think about it for this performance review, and really express it. And then ultimately, they wander out the door, right? So they’re wonder they’re wandering in silence, and they’re wandering out the door, or they’re going on social media. And then we get trends like Silent quitting, and things like that. And people are like, wait, what’s going on it now managers are accusing you of if you’re silent, quitting, and you’re like.
No, so it’s these types of things. I’ve had actually I’ve talked to end users all the time. And they’ll be like, yeah, yeah, manager who was like, I think you’re silent, quitting, and like, you’re just not engaged anymore. And this and they’re like, do you understand the full definition of what silent quitting means at this point, and like, I’m just going to give you my 40 hours that you’re owed and not going over and beyond. But there was this whole discussion, but not being able to have those real conversations to understand the perspective of a leader versus a individual contributor. And so that’s really where we’ve honed in on under, like, harnessing the power of that within gameplay. But for me, as an engineer, I always cared about feelings, because I was always feeling some type of way. I was always wondering about something like, Well, I wonder if you’re wondering too and then people would open up to me because I would already be vulnerable, I would offer up information first, and then they would reciprocate. And then like, that’s typically what happens when someone else opens up, you feel more comfortable to also be open. And if you create a space where it’s, you know, everyone’s about to do that. And it’s not just a few of you, and people can use something against you potentially, then you’re more.
So how do we how do companies take your platform and start to be because CFO gets involved at some point, Lauren? So how do we take this what sounds like a great product, a great learning and development tool, great employee engagement tool, but how do we how do we put an ROI to it right? Talk to me about that. That’s that’s what’s really going to come down to
So we always get this. Like, we don’t always get this question because we answer it when we like from the get go. But that was part of this I, we talked about because I said, with engineer, I want to quantify things. We’re collecting data like, I’m not a softened squid, I’m very much very analytical, very logical, show me numbers, show me proof. Like, don’t just tell me this, show me it. And so with us, we were focused on, we said, Okay, we know that we’re getting engagement. And so what does engagement mean? But also retention insights? And what do we do with those insights that we’re getting? So when we say engagement, retention insights, we collect metrics in five key areas. So we collect metrics for engagement, but for engagement, we’re not saying how often is someone using the keepwol+ platform? Are they completing their training? Are they this? No, we take the definition of what each end user defines engagement to be. And then we say, how is your team stacking up against your definition of engagement? And are we falling on the scale of one to 10? Where are we falling in? Is it getting better as you’re playing games and being able to express these are my expectations, this is where I want to see things go. So that’s one. So engagement. The other one is team dynamics. And when we talk about team dynamics, we’re talking about the day to day communication, as well as the and then your overall work environment with the people that you work with day in and day out. And so a lot of solutions are organization wide solutions. So top down solutions, and we at heart are a grassroots. So we’re focused on that functional team level. And then you can compile data at the organization level at a business unit level. So team dynamics, innovation, and so not like our ideas being encouraged, are they being stifled is professional development being encouraged or not. So we collect metrics and that we collect metrics for innovation. Oh, I think I said that innovation and and cultural intelligence. So perspectives past travel, different demographics, you come back, your backgrounds from and then job satisfaction. And Job satisfaction is likelihood of remaining at the organization. And also comfortability moving around the organization. And so we’ve assigned everything we collect is on a scale of one to 10 rating. We have heartbeat assessments that are taken before games are played, every game you play, you take a pulse assessment, and we measure in an asset, we provide statements that map back to those five key areas again, and then on a quarterly basis, we do another heartbeat assessment that measures those to see measurements from quarter to quarter over quarter. So you’re getting post checks for every time a games played, which our customers play on a monthly cadence, some on a bi weekly cadence, and then you’re also getting the quarterly checks as well. And so we’ve increased engagement by 49%, up to 49%. And we’ve increased the likelihood of retention by up to 30%. And this is with not just saying, oh, yeah, I’d like to stay in my company more, where are you are for how likely you are to exit out this door? Like, are you at an 8 I’m almost walking out, but also why? And so with giving those things, you know, how close and how many, what percentage, so you don’t know who because all that’s anonymous, so you know, how close and what percentage of folks, and then you also know the reasonings. Why so you can mitigate against those or you can prepare for it, if it’s something you can’t mitigate against, or it’s something you can’t change, at least now, you know, prepare for some folks to walk out the door and do it in a way that keeps the culture of the current team still solid.
So the way that I hear a lot of this is very much of this, like the softer side of like interpersonal relationships, so less. I, the way that I’ve heard is it’s a little less like specific to like my job in marketing or my job in sales and kind of being able to provide feedback on what that looks like. But you have kind of talked about, like upskilling, and leadership development and things of that nature. So how do you tie in some of I guess, the harder skill type items and tying that back to the games? Is there a way to do that? Or what are we looking at?
Yes. So you just mentioned that. So how we said the games are set up to be ambiguous. So all of our games are agnostic to industry and also agnostic to job function. But there’s questions that are asked for you to respond to what’s happening in your job function. So if you’re talking to a marketing team, all your answers for those games being played are going to be based around what is happening in your marketing department, doing your specific jobs, what needs to be improved, what processes you need to be put in place, things like that. So you’re still going to have those conversations to talking to About what elements are missing, or gaps or development areas are needed there. And so with that being said, You’ll, with our upskilling, in our reflection assessment, you’re putting in group goals. So things that you think your team as a whole need to improve upon. But then you’re also putting in those personal development goals. And those could be leadership goals, it could be your hard job skills in something that you want to get better in, or it could ultimately be like, I want to my person like my interpersonal skills. And so then what we do is we use machine learning or AI technology, to then take what’s put in those goals and provide you with right fit educational content in your preferred learning style. And so we help you feel we number one, we help you self recognize what’s the area of improvement I have through gameplay, you then get to document that in your reflection assessment. And then we provide you educational content, but we provide you with only two pieces so that you’re not overwhelmed by too much content, and you never get like you never see more than two pieces of content at one given time. And what’s really great about this, because one of the complaints, or one of the common problems that we hear from a lot of our customers is that, hey, we have these upskilling platforms that we have licenses to and you know, our LMS and things like that. And we’re not seeing employees utilize it beyond just the mandated training that’s required. And we’re like, well, we go talk to the employees employees say, when do I have time? What do I do the training in I don’t know what I need to be trained in like, and then, okay, now I feel like I know what I need to be trained in, or I’m open to doing training, and I go on there. And there’s hundreds, if not 1000s of courses to choose from which one do I choose? And so with us with our process, we’re like, we’ve solved the problem of time, because now it’s not let me just do this training for sake of training. But I recognize I have a gap and I want to improve in it. And then we solve the gap of well, so we saw the time we’ve solved the what do I need to improve on and then we’ve solved that searching part. You don’t have to search training comes to you. And it’s for why do I know
what I need to improve on? Where does that part? come in, again,
from the from gameplay. So when you do the research and assessment, then it’s like, what are person like? What, what do you want to personally develop? And they
got it? All right. It’s just this is really cool. I’m excited that I got to have you on the podcast today, I think this is a really cool addition. One thing I would say here is that I honestly have no idea how much your platform cost or what that looks like, I don’t want to get into that today. But more. I guess at a higher level, Lauren, it sounds like you’ve worked with some large companies, but say I’m an HR department in one or I’m in a small company, or maybe my CEO doesn’t believe in, you know, purchasing, you know, tools and software to help us improve our employee engagement. What can I do as an individual contributor or a leader or manager in my company to like, improve employee engagement or to maybe help other people put more stock in in improving the workplace culture? What are some basic tips that you would have for individual because you sound like you, you went through this yourself back in your career. So I’d love to hear from you what you what your advice would be.
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I mean, from an individual perspective, I think the most thing is the the biggest thing that you can do is go and try and have those less, you know, deeper beyond surface level conversations with folks just to start with because then you’re building that foundation. But in all honesty, if I’m being real, if we’re talking about what engagement looks like what it culture looks like, it’s not something that one person can fix, because they don’t have that ability to they only have control over their own selves, right? And how they approach a situation. And if they’re putting in all that effort themselves, they could become a bit of like, become down a bit if they’re not seeing that others are doing the same. Right. And so I think it starts with that number one is having a mindset of when you approach people people have the best intentions But I think, especially in the world that we’re living in right now, we’ve kind of geared towards being a little more pessimistic with people’s intentions than being on the optimistic side. And so I think, if we’re, if we’re starting somewhere, I think it’s changing our mindset of how we’re approaching situations and not coming into something thinking, Oh, this is the worst of the worst. But thinking that I know we’re trying really hard to to improve in these areas. This is where I’m seeing some gaps. And these are some of the ideas where I think that we can make a difference, but like, acknowledging that, I think, like I have, I’m believing that you, you also see this and you have good intention, and that you’re trying. But I also have some ideas too. So at least giving a nod to that rather than the world’s ending, everything’s falling, our culture is terrible. And then people are like, then then people get defensive, right? And they’re like, No, this seems good. This is I’m a
big believer that most people want to see progress. Most people want to see change for the good, right? I think good is ambiguous, as well as the term right, because what is good to me might be different than what good means to you. And so the only way that we make true progress is just by talking to people, right. And by giving each other grace and having conversations about whether it’s work or interpersonal conflict, if you can’t talk about it, you’re always going to have a wall up, it’s going to create friction, that only festers and gets worse with time. So I’m a real big believer in just being real and authentic with people. I think authenticity is such a game changer for any, especially young leaders. And I think we, I think a lot of people experience and I even talked about in pre show, like faking it until you make it right. A lot of people I think, early in their career, put up a facade of like, who, who somebody thinks that I’m supposed to be right. And I and I found that when I was just honest with my leaders, or asked for honest feedback and took my feedback or, you know, went and sought out more information. It always seemed to work well for me. And that’s just my own personal, like experiences. But I’ve just found that authenticity goes a lot further than trying to put up a weak facade of of who you hope to be. So
that’s a huge point. It’s a good point. And it’s a big thing. And I think as people enter the workforce, I think gen gen Z has been a lot better than millennials. I’m a millennial, as coming in, and like showcasing like, this is how I how I am authentically, but I do still think that being new into the workplace, you’re still trying, you’re you’re testing the waters, you’re seeing, like, how do people react here, how don’t they and not having that foundation of like having that foundation of trust is what makes asking that like feedback and getting that critical feedback from folks easier. Because once you know them, like or feel like you know them at some sort of level, then what they say, as the feedback, you know, is constructive. Rather than thinking, Oh, I should be defensive towards this or something like knowing that it’s coming from a good place for them. And so I think, always building that foundation first date makes all of those other things become easier.
I really enjoyed having you on today. It’s been great understanding more about your company, but I think that I might have to hit you back up and have you back on and we can get kind of into the nitty gritty of, of a personality types, and probably can talk about generational types. It sounds like you’re quite in tune with, with what it is to be a millennial, and just some of the things that you’ve talked about. You mentioned Gen Z. And sometimes I look at like, it’s strangely like, I feel like I must be getting old because I’m starting to judge that generation younger than me, right. But like, they feel different in the way that they they interact with, with people. And I’m sure that Gen X and Boomers felt the same way about millennials but I can I can truly tell that millennials care a lot more about it seems to me that we as millennials care a lot more about image and like projecting yourself whereas gen z, yeah, they don’t seem to care.
I think they care a little bit, but I think they’re recognizing that Well, I have I was gonna say, I have a Gen Z person on my team. And I learn from her every day but I think that’s the thing like I’m very open. I’m like, I want to understand because we’re building this type of product that we that has created that space for folks to really show up who they are, and who’s going to lead that path to doing that, and show that it’s cool to do that is this new generation coming into the workforce. And so when talking to my teammate, really like getting their insights, and also their thought and perspective for for it is a big deal. And I think when I came in as a millennial new to the workplace, it was always wait your turn, like, you have to bide your time. There’s a hierarchy to this. And so there were so many like, it didn’t matter how great you are, or how much skill you bring it was, do you have the years of experience, and I think we’ve seen a lot of that shift in this new workforce and things. And especially for me, when I’m bringing folks on to the team, I’m like, I don’t care if you’ve been somewhere for 10 years. And this was kind of what we were talking about, too. It’s like you’re a different perspective that you bring you came from the entertainment world and sports world, it’s like you have a whole different perspective and outlook on this. That’s the same as what I want in my startup and from an innovation perspective, because if we want to see the status quo change, we can’t have the same way of thinking and expect that we’re going to come up with the solution. And so I think we need to open our minds to that in the workplace to with the different generations. And same thing, even with older generations. It’s like, hey, bringing, like with this more innovative idea, I still want the generations before me to come back on here. Because that perspective, they’re still in the workplace now from that
aren’t leaving the workplace anytime soon. It seems like we’ve been begging and believe for like, 15 years now they won’t leave. So
I said this, oh, my gosh, I said this to my peers. I had a friend’s mom sent me their resume. And she’s like, Do you have any jobs for this? And I was looking at the resume. I was like, actually, I think you’d be really great fit for this position. But I my response to her when she sent it, it was like, I swear, you and my parents will not retire. Like really? She’s like, I want to come out of retirement and do that. And I’m like, why I want to retire? Like I’m not understand I
get it. No, what I have, like, I like to read and go try to form my own opinions about things. But it does seem like we Millennials probably have a lot more in common with boomers than it seems. And it and I think maybe it has to, it kind of comes down to who you’re raised by. But it seems like Gen X and, and Gen Z have a lot in common as well, and how they when when they were young and transitioning how they kind of saw the world. And just so I think it’s going to be interesting as we continue to go through our lives and see, whatever comes after Gen Z, they’re going to be more like us and a millennial. Yeah, you know, so
we’re talking about kids, my daughter, I don’t know if she’s gonna like, I think she’s, I think our generation of kids are called Gen alpha, first of all, so I think that’s the, that’s nomenclature for them. But she’s both like, I just feel like that generation is going to be even bolder than Gen Z because she is at six just speaks her mind strong and convictions. And I don’t know if that’s because she’s raised by
being what is millennial parenting? What does that effect going to be? Right? Like, I think about like, millennials were raised in a generation of like, kind of the beginning of like, everybody gets like a participation trophy type thing, right? And to be honest, I think millennials are a little bit more resistant to that mindset as parents themselves in some ways. And so it, it will be interesting to see how you know, what, what problems we’ve created with our children.
Yeah, I’m not speaking of participation. So when I was growing up, we didn’t get I didn’t get participation awards, and I don’t like that. Like, I went, No, winning, which often goes into the game plan. Like there’s competitiveness in that which puts more drive and effort into getting someone to try and do something. So that’s also one thing I like about gaming is that it’s competitive in nature, too. I just think it just pushes you to limit like to more extreme limits.
non competitive. People like to win every once in a while.
Yes, in everyone’s competitive, no one should say they’re not competitive because no one likes to lose, right. cannot show me someone I like
it. I may be indifferent about winning, but I don’t want to lose. Right. Right. I definitely I definitely understand that. So Lauren, this is all sounds amazing. You obviously have an infection personnel. already, how can people find you? Where can they where they work and they interact with your expertise online? How can they learn more about your company?
Yeah, so you can find me and you can interact with me. My website is Lauren Fitzpatrick shanks.com. So it’s my whole name, all put together.com. You can learn more about people at keep cool.com and then I’m on social media. So LinkedIn, my name, Twitter, my email. Yeah, email [email protected].
Well, it’s been great having you on. Thanks again. We’ll probably love to have you back on on the talent tide. Again, with this Lauren I look forward to hopefully meeting you in person that at some point in the future. Thank you all for joining. You can listen to us and watch us on YouTube. You can listen to Apple, Spotify and any place that you get your podcasts Be sure to rate us and give us a review. And we look forward to seeing you all again next time. And have a great day. Thank you from the talent tide podcast.

November 8, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris discusses how leaders can better their TA System by just being human with Gary Benedik.

Gary is an old-school head-hunter evolving into a digital transformation geek, which made him the perfect guest for this week’s show.  He is efficiency-obsessed, truly believe that talent is the key to success, and take a consultative approach to solving problems within today’s World of Work.

Topics from the episode include:

1. The ever-changing landscape in recruiting

2. Leveraging tech (i.e. a recruitment marketplace) to hire talent (at scale)

3. How do differentiate yourself as a head hunter

Transcript

Chris: 0:17

Hello, and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change and Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have the CEO and co founder of arch advisory group, and Unghosted. Gary Benedik, Gary is a self described old school Headhunter that has gone through the evolution to becoming a digital transformation geek. Gary, it’s great to have you on the show. We’ve been working for quite some time now it seems like to make this episode happen. So so thank you for coming on.

Gary Benedik: 0:54

Of course, Chris. I feel like this is a big step in our in our digital relationship, right?

Chris: 0:59

That’s true, because we haven’t met in person yet. But obviously pre show. We were talking next. I’m in Chicago, we got to get together. So I’m looking forward. Exactly. Well, why don’t you give our listeners kind of why don’t you tell our listeners about that old school background and kind of guide us through how you kind of went through this transformation yourself?

Gary Benedik: 1:21

Yeah, I mean, so out of college. I was at a birthday party and somebody said, I can help you get a job.

Chris: 1:28

And pause right there. This is the most prototypical I became a recruiter story of all time, so so go ahead.

Gary Benedik: 1:35

I appreciate it is it comes Chris. So I wanted to this headhunting firm, and I have an undergrad in engineering. And they’re like, you know, you can actually socialize with people. I think we, we might want to hire you internally. I was like, you know, what sounds good. What’s the what’s the pay? And they’re like, well, it is 100% commission. But this is what people are making, right? So at the time, I had a car payment and student loans. I was like, You know what, screw it. Let’s try it while I still look for a full time job. And I never looked back. So it was a boutique headhunting firm in the Chicagoland area, specializes in hunting engineering talent. And so I spent five years there, it was a great experience. It was, you know, pre LinkedIn days, where you would smile and dial in in cold calls, candidate market. I then moved into corporate talent acquisition where I wanted to start buying what I was selling. And I ultimately ended up leading a large group in big box retail, where we were hiring over 10,000 people a year and touching millions of candidates. At this point, Chris, this is where I started to gain, you know, a lot of curiosity around leveraging technology to scale and automate and make things easier for my teams. So unfortunately, the the big box retail group that I was working at, that ship was sinking. So I decided to do some consulting in the marketplace space. So this is 2012, when I joined a progressive startup called shift gig. So they were one of the pioneers in matching talent to gigs on demand. So I started building some marketplaces for a couple of startups in the city. It was awesome experience. I like I was bought it, right. And then I actually made an interesting career move went over to the manpower group spent a couple of years there. So then I started to understand the MSP world work through programs, high volume, low margin stuff. And you know, unfortunately, the pace just wasn’t what I was used to. And I was actually asked to come back into the startup world for recruitment SAS marketplace called Scott exchange, where we grew that thing to have 520 employers talking to you about 3500 staffing and recruiting firms. So as you can see, my my career has gone from smiling and dialing, manually matching candidates to jobs to leveraging technology to match candidates to jobs intelligently, and injecting artificial intelligence so we can start to predict where we should focus and where we might need help. Over the last two and a half years, I’ve been running my own shop. And the majority of my time has been focused on really two things, Chris, it’s, it’s helping companies go to market, try to build or buy some type of digital online marketplace, as well as head hunt it. I just, it just can’t leave my blood. Right. So I’ve been building this network for 20 years. And I love introducing folks. So that’s, that’s where I am today.

Chris: 4:30

That’s it’s a nice side gig everybody’s side gig right next to their, to their their day job. Right. And so, that is kind of the cool thing about recruiting, right? If you’re good at networking and meeting people, and your genuinely interested in what other people have going on. It becomes quite easy to start introducing people and being like, Hey, I know the perfect person for for you or I know people that can do what you’re looking for. And so kudos to you for having such a great network. and being somebody that people can trust for so long.

Gary Benedik: 5:03

Thanks, likewise.

Chris: 5:05

So you have a great background, I don’t know that I knew that it was, you’ve been able to kind of go through each phase of recruiting. I like listening to you explain it to me, you’ve kind of seen it all. So when you look back at the last decade, and then you say, Okay, what what has worked? And then you think about the next decade? Where are we going? Like, what is what is the recruiting landscape look like in 2032? Versus what it looks like now in your mind?

Gary Benedik: 5:37

Well, I mean, let’s, let’s, let’s talk about the facts here. I mean, recruiting has been around for over 100 years. Right? I mean, it’s, it’s the last 10 years, obviously, as time and technology are injected into our lives, it moves quicker, faster, right. But people have been recruiting folks for over 100 years military, for example. Right. So, um, you know, as I mentioned earlier, when I was in this, when I started this, it was, it was aggressive, you had to be heard, you had to be, you know, touch points had to be there to get an answer from a hiring manager on a candidate you’re trying to place. Obviously, digital has entered our our lives. And, you know, we’re all leveraging 1000s, if not 10s, of 1000s of tools to try to make recruiting better now, in my opinion, you know, digitizing the experience for both hiring managers and candidates and personas Evolve is important. But I am one for not letting this industry be completely dehumanized. I think there needs to be a human element within the recruitment process for as long as recruiting is going to be around. So with that being said, you know, in obviously, we all came across a pretty life changing event a few years ago called COVID. Right, and I think that really exposed recruiting, right. So as a recruiter, and or as a candidate or hiring manager, you now had access to a lot more previous to COVID, you are looking for a job as a job candidate or job seeker within 30 to 45 minutes of your home. On the flip side, organizations were hyper focused on recruiting local talent for jobs that just exploded. Now you have folks in Vermont, working for companies in California and all across the globe. So when you think about the desired outcome of companies, what they’re trying to achieve, hiring a full time employee isn’t necessarily a full time local employee isn’t necessarily the right option. Right, so now you’re starting to think about Freelancer marketplaces, you’re starting to think about the gig economy, you’re starting to think about leveraging skills and expertise on a moonlighting or gig basis to solve the same problems companies are trying to have been trying to solve for. So when I’m running my business here, as a recruiter, I’m really trying to figure out what my clients are trying to solve for, and then reverse engineer and find the right talent. That might be a six month consultant, it might be a group of project engineers. But it’s no longer I will focus on finding you somebody that is okay with the commute. That is within your salary range. Right. So, you know, to make a long story long here, Chris, you really have to focus on what the desired outcome is of the organizations that are hiring this talent, and then reverse engineer and find the right resources, tools, or people and or people

Chris: 8:39

that’s a great way to look at it. And I think that companies now have access to talent that they maybe not, maybe they didn’t know existed. And I think having consultant like you by their side that helps them understand, hey, maybe I don’t need a vice president of XYZ, maybe I need a consultant to come in alongside and help us take what we have to the next level. But I don’t need that person long term. Or maybe there’s not a reason to have this forever. It just get us up and going. It’s funny, like VPs of sales. So it’s kind of like a running joke on LinkedIn, like the VP of sales, like average tenure is like 18 months, right? Because the hope is that by hiring a new VP of sales, you’re always going now expedite the the selling process, when the reality is most companies would benefit from evaluating why they’re not selling instead of just trying to find a new leader to come in and fix the problems, right. And so it sounds like that kind of consultative approach is something that you’re looking at. So if a company calls you up, like how do you how do you approach that conversation for them, Gary? Like, what are you asking them to understand? If they’re like, Gary, I need a chief revenue officer. Do you say are you sure? Or do you say, Okay, let’s talk about that. What does that conversation look like?

Gary Benedik: 9:55

Yeah, it’s it’s more discovery. Now, Chris. It’s not like just take the job board and go find an individual with a title of a chief revenue officer, right? I really want to understand what that chief revenue officer is going to come in and solve for. Right, because it builds credibility for myself and my teams in the market when we’re talking to talent. You know, in addition, I’m always trying to coach my clients on empathy. Right? When you’re talking about working remote or the opportunity to work remote or hybrid workforce, you really you have to ask why, well, why there’s things like fuel costs, there’s things like childcare, which is like a real issue, right? So when an organization wants a Chief Revenue Officer, I really want to understand why not necessarily or not only why, or what they’re going to be doing, but also, how are you like, why would this person want to come here, right. And then when one of the clients come back to me and say, we’re not able to fill out jobs, I have some real raw black and white data points to talk about, right. Whereas I can show them maybe competitive landscape of other organizations like them that are able to find a chief revenue officer that are able to budge on some of the things that are non negotiables for them. Right, so to answer your question, Chris, it’s more so sure you need a chief revenue officer? Well, what is this chief revenue officer going to do? What impact are they gonna make? What are they solving for?

Chris: 11:23

Love it. I love it. It’s a great question to start with in any situation, especially with hiring leadership, very expensive leadership, right. And I think that we get a preconceived notion of what something is in our mind and think we have to go hunt it down. So I love the way that you think about that, I think that’s going to be extremely valuable for for any leader listening. So I’d like to pivot that we were talking very specifically about hiring, you know, maybe high level talent. You did mention your background in high margin, or sorry, high volume, low margin work. You talked about recruitment marketplaces, which I think are maybe a little bit misunderstood. In the market. I think a lot of maybe even CHROS or executive team members would be like, What is your recruitment marketplace? So would you mind kind of giving us a giving the listeners a bird’s eye view of what a recruitment marketplace even is, before we can get into the dirty details of it? Yeah,

Gary Benedik: 12:16

well, I mean, I want to I want to disclaim this real quick, the term recruitment marketplace is totally subjective, right? However, what’s behind the scenes is, you know, conceptually, it’s it’s a, it’s an ecosystem with multiple inputs, that those inputs are actually driving talent into a pod of a virtual pod. And then that pod of talent has been matched to the jobs. Right. So that’s conceptually, in my opinion, what a marketplace is. Now we have two sided marketplaces, we have three mall tie, etc, etc. The organization that I referenced earlier in my career path, we built a marketplace that was matching talent directly to employers. But it wasn’t spiffy specifically tailored to job matching. And let me tell you why. We all know job descriptions are archaic. Unfortunately, there is a behavior to cut and paste old job descriptions for a new job that needs to be filled. We all know that, right? That’s a whole separate conversation, then we have talents, that might inflate their experience on paper to get recognized for that job description that’s been cut and paste. So if you think about the match, the match actually works. The candidates skills on paper, and the job description on paper is matched. But the actual output is not as pure as you would want it to be. Because the job is not actually what they’re gonna be doing, based on the job description shown in that candidate might not have as deep or broad of skills that they’ve mentioned on that resume. Right. So what we did is we actually injected a layer of experts and that layer of experts is those was the 3500, recruiting and staffing firms. Right, so we relied on those experts that might have a niche in financial engineering in New York. And we were able to introduce them to jobs or organizations in our marketplace where we knew 90% of their placements were within financial engineering in New York. So that’s kind of a little bit of a deeper explanation of a marketplace. But the marketplace should should be able to shift and throttle jobs and match them to experts, or talent. But again, the marketplace that I built and some of the customers that we have now are trying to be a little bit more strategic around just talented job matching. So, good point, and

Chris: 14:49

I’ll be honest, I thought the way that your previous firm did try to match some specific recruiters to help organizations with with problems that they had and whether it was existing markets or talent pipelines was was a really great idea. And it really helped firms help organizations find the talent that needed. So when you’re consulting around, you know, recruitment, say ta processes, or the general question of we can’t find people. Gary, can you help us? How do you? What are the kind of questions that you’re asking a chro, or VP of recruiting or talent acquisition, to kind of get down to the dirty, and help them understand where they need to find resolution? So what are they searching for? How do you help someone down that path of understanding what their real problems are?

Gary Benedik: 15:43

Yeah, I mean, it comes to discovery, and I want to see some like, you know, month over month, quarter over quarter year over year, historical data, you know, maybe it’s a retailer in seasonality is evicting. Maybe it’s manufacturing and the product you’re making just isn’t in demand. Right? So I think it’s a very loaded question, because some of the solutions or options that I would provide to my client depends on the client, right? But so for example, I can give you today, I have a client that’s in manufacturing, American made appliances that we all see and touch as a consumer every day. Right? Awesome, brand, debt free, and they’re growing like, like crazy. They need engineering and technical talent. But they might have a trouble finding this talent based on the demand they have where these folks need to be placed. Where they need to physically live, right, nothing to do with a great relocation package, and a really lucrative compensation package, it’s where they need to physically move right, then you’re thinking about empathy. Are these families? Do they have children? Do they need to know about the schools the crime? And what’s important to them? Do they want to be on the beach? Or they didn’t want to be in the desert? For example? Right? So these are questions that I’m asking so that before I commit to working on a project or job, I can actually, you know, I can, you know, I can put a value to the probability of getting the job or jobs filled. So for example, if they’re like, well, this job has been open for eight months, that’s a red flag. Or these jobs are open because we’re growing or we acquired a company and or, you know, these are incrementing, that new new jobs. But we do have to be outside advisors in the market. Because these clients they eat, sleep and drink their brand, their mission, their service, their products. But we need to come in as outside advisors to help them understand the why.

Arran Stewart: 17:45

Job.com is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at Job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves and a more human hiring process.

Chris: 18:03

Absolutely. So you’ve mentioned empathy a couple times. It seems like that is a buzzword around you that you’re taking into conversations, which I think is is amazing, because so many companies. It’s amazing how many leaders I’ve talked to in the last 12 months who believe that the reason that they aren’t hiring people at a higher clip is because of stipends or unemployment checks and things of that nature, when in reality, I think that word empathy probably could be used more likely as the cause for why they can’t hire individuals, either leaders or at a high volume. So would you would you mind describing what empathy in the recruitment process or in a company means to you? Because I think it’s I think, maybe it’s better to set the stage there, like what is empathy?

Gary Benedik: 18:57

I mean, I can geek out about this all day, Chris, I’d say from a high level, for the sake of time, or I think empathy is the hiring manager or the recruiter or whoever the hiring persona is, is to put themselves in the candidate shoes. How would you feel if your interview process or initial reach out was through a bot that’s very robotic? How would you feel if you made an offer to a candidate, that’s a 20% decrease in pay? How would you feel as a candidate, if you get to the final stage of the interview, you spend 10, 12, 15, 20 hours prepping throughout all the stages of that candidate lifecycle, and then you hear nothing? That’s the definition of of self awareness in being empathetic for the candidate population. Right so I always try to put my you know, For example, that Chief Revenue Officer example that you mentioned, I try to get my clients to think like they’re gonna be the candidate in the process. And why would they want to take that job? Why would they want to move their family? Why would they want to make a life changing job change, especially in this crazy chaotic world we live in, right? Today, it’s an interesting time to be alive. So that’s, that’s how I feel about it. But that’s what I think empathy is.

Chris: 20:28

I love about it, you described it. And I think it’s so accurate, because as candidates, we have more options than ever before. We also know our value, I think more than ever before. And I do a presentation when I go to conferences, and I speak, one of them is titled, are you who you say you are? And I always talk to firms about organizations about going on the candidate experience journey. You know, I talked to them about, you know, go open up a private browser or an incognito browser and just search, whatever the job is that you have a hard time filling, right? Manufacturing jobs in Des Moines, Iowa, right? If that’s where you’re trying to hire manufacturing workers, like, what’s it look like? What does that experience look like as a candidate? For me? It is, is it a whole page full of indeed ads on that very first page? Probably, right? Like, what can you do to combat that? Or if they do come to your website? Whether it’s through a job board or not, what’s the application process like, you want to, you want to realize why you’re not getting applicants? Well, it takes 30 minutes for me to apply to a job that pays me $14 an hour, I’m sorry, I probably am not going to spend my time doing that, because I got a job that pays me $13.85 Right now, and I don’t really have time to spend 45 minutes trying to manually input this data on my phone. So what what advice do you have for companies right now who maybe aren’t doing or aren’t being empathetic? Like how do we get companies to think differently? Gary, where do we go from here?

Gary Benedik: 22:07

Well, I think it’s all about optimization. Right? I mean, you know, we’re I mean, things like a career page, make it engaging, make it inclusive, make people want to be there.

Chris: 22:17

You mean, not like one that looks like every other career page? Correct?

Gary Benedik: 22:23

Once I hit the career page, optimizer job postings, you’re absolutely right. You know, when I was a job seeker, you would have to log into Twilio, or workday or iCIMS, based on the job that you’re applying to you. Right? It was, it was a halt. Right. And then the odds of you getting response were very poor, so you were just kind of like disinterested from the beginning. Right? And then you’re talking about, like, you know, leveraging social media to attach to your careers page and your inclusiveness and your optimization of the experience just to apply, then we’re talking about like, you know, employer branding, and then we’re talking about, like, let’s get out into the market, maybe we do some events for the demographic of candidates that don’t have the opportunity to apply online. Right. So you have to kind of think broadly, and then obviously, when you’re talking about like internal recruitment and steward stewardship around sourcing versus full lifecycle recruiting, are you focused on the candidate as an internal recruiter? Or are you focused on filling the job? Right. And then, you know, from there, I think extends into like building talent communities. I don’t want to just talk to Chris when I need him to fill it to fill a job that I have. I want Chris to know about us, I want him to be part of our community.

Chris: 23:45

How do you make that’s a good point? How do you make Chris care about you? When I already have a job in that instance? Because Because I, on the surface, I agree with you, Gary, right of like, I want people to, to want to come work with us because they know who we are. They know what we’re all about, etcetera. But I’m busy. What does being a talent community mean for me? My I know, I’ve got a good job. And I’m happy, like, what does that experience like for me? Like, how do you attract me to you in a talent community?

Gary Benedik: 24:17

Well, so a couple of ways. One is, if we’re, pushing you content, Chris, and you say unsubscribe, we get it. We’re gonna not do this, right? I mean, then we also could see like, what you’re clicking on, we could see what you do like, and then we can shift the content and maybe the cadence of the content, to cater towards what you like and how often you want to see it. Right. So it’s more it’s more of a digital, it’s more of a machine driven.

Chris: 24:50

It’s a marketing driven experience, right?

Gary Benedik: 24:53

It’s the same as a candidate. So like, when we’re building digital pods of talent, and we’re just throwing stuff out there, for example, you’re in the construction management space, we’re going to tell you about the 45 high rises that went up in Illinois in 2021. And if you’re clicking on things, you’re probably gonna be a little bit more interested about seeing the next article or piece of content versus folks that are unsubscribing or trashing it.

Chris: 25:19

It’s, it’s a commitment to being proactive in the recruitment space, versus what I would say historically has been a very reactive business segment. Yeah, agree. Disagree.

Gary Benedik: 25:31

I agree. Yeah. And you know, the last piece I want to, I want to tag on to that Chris is like, you have to respond when candidates have questions or talent has questions or when they reach out to you. Like, it’s just it’s bi directional. It’s not just Hey, Gary sending stuff to Chris and a bunch of Chris’s. There might be Chris that has a question for for the organization, or you know, our response to something and you have to be ready to respond to stuff.

Chris: 25:58

It’s, it’s truly taking the idea that you don’t want to take any opportunity for granted. And I think salespeople are notorious for like, over communicating, right? Like, I’ve showed a sliver of interest in buying your product or buying your service. Now I am bombarded with messaging forever. Whereas in recruiting, sometimes people apply for jobs. And we automatically reject them because we saw their resume and it didn’t, it didn’t fit that job. And then we never talked to them ever again. Never again, did that person who willingly gave us their information who expressed an interest in working with us? I mean, think about that. If you put on your sales hat, somebody that came to your website and said, I want to buy something, please call me, then you never call them. But across the TA industry that happens on a regular basis every single day. Am I wrong? Oh,

Gary Benedik: 26:50

no, you’re not.

Chris: 26:54

How do we how do we solve that? Like, what’s got to change? Because I think so many people know this occurs. But why is it occurring still?

Gary Benedik: 27:02

If I could solve that, Chris, I’d be on my own island right now.

Chris: 27:09

You getting the work about all the problems that we’ve got that I you know, I haven’t had a chance to get worked up about them in a while, Gary.

Gary Benedik: 27:15

Yeah. I mean, I wish I was an expert at it answering that question. But my responses are going to be more subjective. And based on my opinion, in my experiences,

Chris: 27:26

it’s okay it’s a podcast. We’re here for your opinion. Yeah. Well,

Gary Benedik: 27:29

I mean, like I said, it needs to be bi directional. I mean, and I just speak from experience is, the way that I’ve been able to build our advisory group is just being a human. Just not being a you know what? Yep. Like, there’s really like three things that I focus my business on its speed, transparency, and personalization. Right, those three things might change or throttle up or down based on the clients, or the assignments or the consulting project. But it’s speed, transparency, and personalization. Those are three things that I instill in my business everyday all day.

Chris: 28:06

How do we get executive leaders to view talent acquisition as a strategic business unit, rather than a cost center going forward?

Gary Benedik: 28:13

I think it’s changing. I do. I mean, you’ve

Chris: 28:17

got necessity or TA leaders, creating the change.

Gary Benedik: 28:21

I think ta leaders are creating change, I think, you know, there’s been several articles around like, the next CEO is actually the CHRO. Right? So like, if you think about, like, who has the biggest pulse on the business in order to be the big fish? It really is a chro. Right? Like, think about chro that go that are hyper involved in like m&a. Right, and they have to go back to their team or teams and say, Okay, we’re acquiring a company in a different part of the world, we need to make sure we have the right talent to continue the business. Right. So like, that’s a really valid question. But I think we are making progress where they’re no longer just the laughingstock or just a cost center. Right. And I also think, you know, COVID has impacted that as well, and not to bring up COVID Again, but internal ta functions and strategies and how departments are structure has kind of also blown up, right. And when we think about a year, year and a half ago, there was more job openings for recruiters, then there was software engineers. That’s wild. So now in today’s world, obviously, what the unfortunate impacts mostly in tech, these tech recruiters that were able to, to accelerate their their career and make a lot of money are probably in a spot where they’re looking for a job. So but the TA departments that need to actually continue to go forward. They’re probably thinking in order to solve these problems, you don’t necessarily need to hire or rehire full time recruiters, we could do flexible RPO, or we can work with folks like our advisory group. Right. So it’s a valid question, but I think there has been progress.

Chris: 30:12

I think I think there has to continue to be progress. We’ve got to get ta leaders that are thinking about the business, right? And about what their impact is on business, and be able to have a conversation with a CFO be able to have conversation with the COO. Because every I joke about this in my presentations a lot, but every CEO at some point says our most valuable asset is what? Our people, right? How do those people get there? They get there likely through your talent acquisition department, your recruitment marketing efforts. And so their first engagement with you unless you’re a big b2c brand, is through a recruiter more likely than not right? If you’re outside of the top 50, fortune 100. And you’re not a b2c brand. It’s probably a recruiter. And so what did that experience as like, is going to define the types of people that you hire is going to define their relationship with you as an employee? Do they have positive sentiment? And so that is, then in turn going to going to be a downstream effect on your overall business? Do they? Do they enjoy their work? are they passionate about what they’re doing? Do they care about your clients? Do they care about retaining customers? And so getting that mindset, right in organizations, I hope it’s coming. Because there’s so many bad experiences out there that, unfortunately, get posted all over the all over LinkedIn, and wherever else that talks about what what a terrible experience to have with a recruiter, you know, there’s so many people that love to knock the industry. But, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s harder than it seems, because it’s more constrained than it should be. When you think about how departments are funded, that, you know, a lot of ways, you know, I talked about how do we get them, they’ve been proactive. Unfortunately, a lot of times, their budget confines them to being reactive. They don’t have the ability to have a nice recruitment, marketing budget, they don’t have content creators that are focused on driving, you know, email marketing campaigns for engineers in California. And so it’s great chatting with you about this topic, Gary. And, you know, if for the listeners out there, if you’re looking for someone to just come in and talk to you about what you’ve got going on. I’ve spent plenty of time with Gary, he’s the type of person that you’d want on your side. And it’s going to help you ask the questions that you need to ask. So, Gary, how would our listeners be able to find you get in touch with you? Where can they locate you in that digital space?

Gary Benedik: 32:49

Well, I mean, I’m super active on LinkedIn, Chris, that’s probably the best spot to find me. I think I’m pretty searchable. And you’ll see in my subject line, it’s, you know, candidate experience enthusiast And go to market consultant, and I am, you know, pro candidate. So, if you see some stuff around, like, generating a better experience for the candidates, and I’m ghosted, and that’s me, but I just want to kind of close here, Chris is yeah, let’s be honest. Right. So there is such a low barrier to entry in this industry recruiting. There’s no Harvard, there’s no college classes, you don’t go to school to be a recruiter? No, you just show up to a birthday party. You just show up at a birthday party, right? There’s reasons why the overall perception of the industry is low. However, for any recruiters out there, my only piece of advice is flip that glass, let’s think about this half full, it’s very easy for you to differentiate yourself. It’s a very saturated industry for recruiters. But you can differentiate yourself in a very positive way. Very simply be human.

Chris: 34:06

I can be human, be authentic, be real. Be Be yourself. I think in a lot of ways is great advice for not just recruiters but any young employee, I think it’s okay to be who you are. Right. And I think too often we try to put up a put up a facade of of something that we think people want to see. When the reality is I think most people would get a lot further along just being human being themselves being being real with people.

Gary Benedik: 34:32

Yep. Speed, transparency and personalization. That’s it.

Chris: 34:36

I like it. I like it. Gary. Great having you on the talent side podcast today. listeners find Gary on LinkedIn. He is a great follow he posts regularly. He’s actually a good connection in that way. You’re gonna get some valuable free content out of the guy every once in a while too. But what about your email, Gary and arch advisory group or

Gary Benedik: 34:58

it’s gonna be gary or g-a-r-y at thinkag.com. So thinkarchadvisory.com. We’ll put

Chris: 35:06

it in the show notes, so that way you can find gearing and get an email over to him. Thanks again, Gary. That’s a wrap on another episode of The talent tide podcast. We’ll see you soon. And don’t forget to follow us on your favorite podcast listening platform. Thank you all

gotten very interested in the options I have

Chris: 42:38

Gelatto to Raleigh. As if it probably doesn’t already to bring exist there, Steve, thanks again for joining the talent tide podcast. Looking forward to sharing this with people. And remember, success is on the other side of fear, folks. So if you’re looking to improve, seek out individuals like Steve O’Brien don’t be afraid to ask hard questions, and we’ll see you next time on the Talent Tide. Thank you!

October 18, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris discusses the benefits of using AI in the hiring process.  Prem Kumar the CEO and Co-founder of Humanly was the perfect guest!

Listen as Prem shares his expertise on topics such as:
candidate experience
measuring interview efficacy and equity and the impact to candidate outcomes
automation, ai, and tech in hiring- where it can fail and where it can help

About Prem
Prem currently is CEO and co-founder of Humanly, an AI platform that helps companies become more efficient and equitable in their conversations with job candidates. Previously to that, Prem led the product management and design teams at TINYpulse, an employee engagement company that empowers organizations to build world class cultures with real-time people data. Prior to TINYpulse, Prem spent 10 years at Microsoft working in a variety of product capacities including within Microsoft’s HR technology department.
In addition to his day job, Prem loves sharing his ideas through writing, as a member of the Forbes Business Council, representing the US as a Peter Drucker Essay Challenge winner in 2013, as well as receiving two “Best of ThinkWeek” awards for white papers aimed at breaking down cultural barriers at Microsoft. Prem has been recognized as a Top HR Influencer, INROADS 50/50 alumni and a Forbes 1000 entrepreneur.
Outside of work, Prem spends time with his two young kids and wife and enjoys travel and Seattle sports.

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in talent management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have the CEO and co founder of humanly Prem Kumar. Humanly is an AI platform that helps companies become more efficient and equitable in their conversations with candidates, and I am a huge fan. Prem, it’s great to have you on the show. We’ve been working on this for seemingly months now. And just in kind of the pre pre show talk, you’re in surprisingly good spirits for your mariners being down 2-0, so you know, how are you holding up? What’s the situation we’ve gotten to Seattle right now.
Well happy to be here, a big fan of the show situation in Seattle as we need to win tomorrow, it’s been 21 years since we’ve made it to the playoffs. So I’m happy we’re here. But I’m hoping we can extend this a lot. I’m
rooting for you, the Astros were long a foe for my Cardinals in the NL Central and now they’re you know, they’re in the Al West. And they’re cheaters. And so, you know, anybody that can knock them out, that’s a win for me. We’re gonna do our best to get a good shot. So, obviously, humanly AI tech, you know, there’s if anyone does know anything about you, I think that it’s interesting how you got here, because you don’t have the most traditional background to get into HR tech. And so I’d love to hear about and I think our listeners would be interested in hearing about where your career started. And maybe it’ll plant some seeds for how you got to where you are today.
Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the Seattle area, obviously, that’s why I’m a mariner fan. So I actually like when I went to University of Washington, entered my kind of first job search, you know, the time was, it was 2006, the, the tech market was pretty hot. Facebook just kind of entered the market a couple years back a lot, lots of jobs to apply to, and my degree was in informatics. So I started, you know, applying to jobs. And it was kind of just like a disenchanting process, like I spent a lot of time on my resume, never heard back. And then I had a colleague of mine, and her and I would go into the same exact interview loops, the companies would come on campus, and we compare notes. And we talked to the same interviewers for the same job. And it was really interesting, when we compare notes, they would ask us completely different set of interviews is very inconsistent, maybe some bias. So they would grill her maybe a little more on technical skills, which is kind of very odd that I would be having a different interview. So we realized, you know, there was just some inequity here, just in the ability to engage with candidates at scale. Again, I never heard back a lot of the time and it just was how the process worked. And then when you got to the interview was very inconsistent. So you know, as I evolved in my career and spent some time at Microsoft in product as in HR tech, as I went to Tiny Pulse, learn more about talent acquisition, I learned that it wasn’t that recruiters were necessarily intentionally doing things that weren’t great for candidates it was they didn’t have the tools and the, you know, some of these technologies to be able to engage consistently at scale with candidates. So that’s kind of my journey, spent some time in Microsoft really focused on product and data and HR tech, and then went to a company called Tiny pulse in the employee engagement space. Before we before we started, when you
were at Microsoft, you talked about product development. Were you working on an internal product development tools? Is that Is that where you’re working on?
Good question. So I actually started on internal. So I, when I first started, I was actually on the account management working with our enterprise clients. I did some operations work, but then I settled in within product and started with internal tools. So I was the pm for our global HR portal. So everything from what we’re doing from a career content standpoint to internal mobility, employee engagement, so all the technology that we use for our global workforce, Mike, my team would build and then we’d go out to customers externally and say, Hey, this is how you can build a portal on top of the Microsoft stack on top of, you know, as your SharePoint. But then Microsoft got into the business of HR tech. So when I eventually moved to the product teams, and when LinkedIn was acquired, One of the my roles and our team’s roles were kind of how do we bring this this data, these set of use cases into the Microsoft ecosystem. So started internal, and then Microsoft had a kind of bigger appetite to go external. And now, now they have Viva and all those sorts of investment. I
think that’s a cool piece, because I don’t I don’t think most people really think about the types of intrapreneurship that occurs, especially in an organization like Microsoft, right? Like, wait a second, you’re you’re building tools internally to improve processes, right. So was there anything that you were building internally while you were there that kind of sparked? Or maybe you know, some of your experiences that you built there you were trying to build to just solve problems for Microsoft? And can you speak to that a little bit?
Yeah, absolutely. So and I definitely feel there’s a lot of parallels between being an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur, when I pitched VCs for humanly and raise money, it was very similar to pitching VPs and raising money when we were at Microsoft. So very similar deal. So yeah, one of the projects, which was probably the one of the most exciting projects I worked at with Microsoft, and ended up getting deeply external, but a project called me at work. So it was kind of internal, almost enterprise social network to and this is before, like Facebook, workplace and some of the stuff that’s out now. But it was a way for us to connect with other employees to find out, hey, is this person in Israel at Microsoft working on this same NLP algorithm that I’m working on in Redmond, maybe we should collaborate because we’re building the same thing for two different parts of the organization. So me at work helped kind of bring people together, it was also eventually going to be used for internal mobility scenarios. So if you were enroll for three years, you’re a high performer, maybe we’ll start pushing you some internal Microsoft jobs, because we know you’re getting hit up externally. So that was, you know, we launched that kind of almost like a skunkworks, Microsoft makes this intrapreneurship they have a program called the garage project and others where employees can kind of build things that they think could be beneficial. me at work actually was sponsored by a VP. And we ended up getting it to about half the company internally, ended up getting kind of sucked into what they’re doing with Office 365, in general, but it was a fun, that was
super cool. And I think that, you know, it’s such a great story, because Because looking now at you as a co founder of an HR tech product, right? It gives you an insight, now likely into how large corporations think about how they solve some of the problems. Right, so I’m interested to get into some of that maybe, maybe later on in the episode here, but, you know, we look at your time at Tiny pulse and what you’re doing from employee engagement. How can you use that to where did the seed idea for humanly come from? Yeah.
Yeah, so we’re working at Tiny pulse with, you know, 1000s of these customers that we’re trying to solve problems, as you mentioned, around employee engagement around diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging? How do you kind of take a pulse of, of your organization and make it a place that people want are retained, that they want to work at that you’re, you know, not just, you know, that quiet, quitting is a big term right now. You know, back then it was more, you know, engagement. There’s a professor Dr. Brooke Holten, I think he was at Georgetown, he coined the phrase reluctant stay or so people that are staying reluctantly, but kind of quiet quitting. That was what we were really focused on avoiding. But I realized a lot of building a culture really starts with, you know, who maybe it’s obvious but who you’re bringing in in the first place. So are you bringing people if you’re trying to build a growing organization, building, bringing in more of the same types of folks will keep you stagnant? So how are you actually building and bringing in new types of folks that will help elevate you to that next level. So that’s kind of where we kind of started finding that a lot of our tiny pulse customers that were solving these problems, a lot of the problems started with hiring and who they’re bringing in. And then we also found they had lots of great tools for Applicant Tracking lots of great tools for sourcing. So maybe they had really diverse pipelines. But really that inclusion journey, the equity journey, the culture journey starts in your first interviews, and what and your first touch points with the candidates, even if it’s through a chatbot, even if it’s through automation. So how can we really and we didn’t see great solutions for those direct conversations you’re having with your job candidates. So there’s tracking tools, but not interacting tools. Whereas in this was, you know, about three and a half years ago, there’s a little more now. But we saw in sales and marketing, you’d have tools like drift to engage on a website with a prospect You’d have tools like Gong, once they’re in the sales conversation, how can we bring that conversational AI to the candidate experience and help hiring teams be more equitable and efficient. So that’s kind of, you know, some of the Genesis, I felt that a lot of our tiny pulse customers had that gap. And we wanted to go out and sell for that,
right. And I appreciate that so much, because when I look at the hiring process, we’ve already mentioned some things that are just kind of funny, you’re talking about your resume early on. And they, in some ways, a resume is like the most pointless activity that you do ever, right? Because it’s like, I do all of this paper, and then I put it into an applicant tracking system. And it just has to be good enough. But I probably invested hours into building a resume for it to be just good enough to have the chance to get to have a phone screen with someone. And maybe I passed a few of the screener questions, to maybe get to talk to the actual hiring manager. And so what we do is we disqualify so many candidates, and yet we have 1000s of open jobs across across our most of our businesses, right? If it’s any kind of scaled company, you look at the market right now, it’s October 14.2022. And while you see big headlines of layoffs, if you start really looking, there’s a ton of jobs that are that are still out there in the market, we have way more jobs, and we have people. And so what we what every company that we try to disqualify as many as we can, when in reality, we should be finding ways to optimize the recruiting process for candidates, right, like how we make it a better experience for us and for them. So I’d love to hear you tell the story of what you’re trying to do as an organization at humanly what what processes are you trying to create to make a more human touch? Through technology?
Yeah, so we believe if you know if hiring teams had unlimited time, money and resources, every application or every, you know, candidate, you would have a conversation with so you would be able to scale can we have that, you know, conversation with every one that applies, so you’re paying in time and money to attract them to your employer brand. And then you’re only engaging with a very small few of them. And like you said, using things like resumes and other shortcuts to see how you can quickly get to a smaller set, because you’re inundated with this volume. You know, I often say Tell my marketer, hey, if if I were to tell you do all this SEO, drive a bunch of eyeballs to our website, drive a million eyeballs to our website. But by the way, our sales team only has time to talk to 5% of people that want to buy our product, the rest, we don’t have time to demo. That’s kind of what’s happening on the talent acquisition side, you have a lot of interests. And I’m not saying every single candidate is a great fit. But a lot of them are or could be for a future job. Or perhaps they’re your customers. If you’re a b2c, sometimes candidates are actually your best customers. I know, you know, Disney, for example, the average job candidate that applies spends eight times as much money in Disney parks. So lots of reasons why you want to conversate with everyone, it’s just hard to do without the tool. So what we’re trying to do through the, you know, as we think about these direct conversations with candidates, we use automation to help you engage with everyone. So if you’re like one of our customers, Moss Adams, you might have 4000 University applicants that apply in a three month period. Can the next step be an automated chat that goes out to them within 24 hours and says, Hey, thanks for applying, let’s move you to the next step. Let’s get to know you better, let’s not just screen you. But let’s educate you about what we’re doing at Moss Adams and why you should be here. So the reason why a two way conversation, even if it’s automated is better than you know, just a resume job descriptions, stuff like that, as this is a process where you want to educate, you want to give value back and you want to get to know them better. And I own I feel that can only happen through a two way conversation. And then you know, once you have that automated chat with everyone that applies, the ones that are a good fit, get scheduled in our tool sit in on the human part of it, taking notes, giving feedback to the hiring team. But that’s kind of how we see that process working, talk to everyone and then have your human time focused on kind of those conversations that you feel could lead to a hire
job outcome is an HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.
You know, whenever I speak at a lot of conferences, HR conferences and so you know, one of the presentations that I do is called are you who you say you are and companies spend so much time talking about a This is who we are, these are our core values, we care, we’re empathetic excetera, except for when it comes to the hiring process, and then there’s a whole lot less gearing and a whole lot less empathy, right. And one of the first slides that I have is, you know, love at first click, because the reality is, you’re either gonna fall in love with a company or fall in disgust, I guess, with a company, based upon your experiences. So everyone knows who Disney is, right? But the fact is, there’s 1000s of companies out there that are not consumer brands. And so I’m not going to have that same name recognition of them, I’m not going to go to Google and find them by putting in their name, I’m probably going to be searching for that type of job. And so if I were to compare, you know, two jobs, and I go to one, and I have immediate feedback, and I’m talking to even if it is a bot, right, if I’m talking to something, technically, versus, you know, just W my resume, and I’m gonna say, Wow, that was at least an experience. That was different. It was it was more innovative. And I know they have more information about me, because I was able to share it. So I love that that part of humanly and what you all bring to the market, maybe share, I’d love to hear more about the bias aspect Prem and what you know how that plays into the system? Like, what are we doing so wrong, that we need conversational AI to help us? Like? What are the kinds of things that it can help with?
Yeah, so I think it’s, there’s a couple of things. One is, you know, just being able to scale the interaction. So if you have 1000s of people applying, it’s unlikely that a recruiter is going to be able to call up every single effort for these high volume jobs, call up everyone. So it helps you kind of expand your touch. There at the other pieces, it helps you be more consistent. So you can have kind of the same conversation at the at the top of the funnel, not introduce things that might be unfair, biased approach, particularly, we see that coming into play after the point of application. There are some things that happened in the application process, of course, but once you get into the interview, and for the jobs that were our customers are hiring for generally, the next step is a virtual interview. So zoom call and Microsoft Teams call. But we’re seeing a lot of very interesting things happening there. And some of them are very simple. So you brought up the Seattle Mariners. So one of the pieces of data we’re seeing is if it’s a Seattle recruiter, or hiring manager interviewing a Seattle candidate, they’re more likely to spend I think about a minute more on Small Talk at the beginning, maybe they’re talking about the mariners losing to the Astros yesterday, or maybe they’re talking about something else. But it seems, you know, kind of small to small talk, but but what’s actually happening there is they’re those candidates are given almost an unfair chance. By the time the questions start, we can measure that the interviewer already interviewer already has a higher rapport and sentiment with the candidate. And they have less time to actually ask questions. So in extreme cases, maybe you spend the first like, five minutes just kind of talking about that. And nothing wrong with rapport building at all, I think it’s a good thing, and good recruiters are great at it. But giving every candidate a fair shot to have that kind of rapport building is important. So some of the biases we find have to do with inconsistencies in interview format, not being as structured, or I’ll end with this, but just treating people differently. Sadly, one of our customers, they were having a hard time. With their IT department, it was mainly men, it was about 73% men. The candidate pipeline was very diverse, but women were dropping off and taking jobs elsewhere at a much higher rate. What we found in their interviews is women were getting 12 minutes less even talk so we can measure. interruptions are interviewers showing up on time. So I feel to, you know, to create that diverse workforce. really paying attention to what’s happening inside those interviews and treating everyone the same is surprisingly not happening all the time. But
there’s so many opportunities for bias and we don’t even think about the ones that we think about and the ones that are in the news or the ones that you can see the color of our skin. Right. Or maybe that you can hear accents, things of that nature. You know, the the common one of my favorite quotes, my movie is from Sweet Home Alabama. You’ve probably not seen it. But the male lead character says do you think just because I talked slow that I’m stupid, right? And there are those are biases that we have, you know, regionally in race and everything and the reality is there’s so much more than that. I mean, you mentioned that you went to the University of Washington, but if I’m a Washington State rad I’d like, you know, he’s probably, you know, some wealthy kid from the suburbs. And you know, he’s not going to want to work hard, etc, because we all have these preconceived notions because of our own experiences in life. And so I love that the things that you’ve talked about, around how we help to eliminate some of those things. You know, what about like big, dreamy things around this? Is there anything that you all maybe aren’t doing just yet that you’re you’re working towards? Like, where are you? Where do you see more ways to eliminate bias from the recruitment process?
Yeah, I know, it’s a great question. So I think, you know, we’re start starting with the basics. So I think on the, on the chat side, we’re keeping things standardized, we’re not using like gendered language or ageist language, the words you use matter. So that’s where we’re starting. And then on the interview side, I mentioned some of the standardization pieces. But I think one of the things that where we’re trying to take this is can we help people what whatever conversation they’re having with a candidate, and then maybe, maybe even post higher as well? Can we measure things like empathy, which we actually are measuring empathy right now through active listening through leaving time for questions, things like patience, but really where where it moves the needle, for me is not just the fact that we can measure this a lot of this is now measurable, we can even measure like, are the interviewers looking at their phone a lot? Are they really engaging with the candidate? And again, the goal is not to get people in trouble. But organizationally, can we just show up better, and represent our employer brand better, but But to me, where this really adds value is not just having the data but tying it to outcome? So can we actually say, by doing these things, you are driving a higher offer acceptance rates. By doing these things, you’re driving a higher sentiment, and then I think beyond that is going back to my roots at Tiny pulse and working post hire, can we plug into these post hire systems and learn about performance, learn about tenure, learn about engagement, and say, Hey, that cohorts of candidates, you’re hiring the end up having the highest impact as employees, here’s what you’re doing in the interview. And that’s kind of that whole model is what we’re looking at. So being a little more holistic, but I think being predictive and really tied in to outcomes. One small example we had a customer that was struggling with with engineer hires and getting them to accept an offer, not so much a high volume scenario, but but it was actually turned out to be quite simple. The only part of their employer brand value prop that was a correlated to engineers accepting the offer was remote work. And it might seem obvious, but they were talking about how great their CEO was, or their benefits. But by just talking about remote work at the beginning of the call the middle and asking at the end, do you have any questions about our remote work policy, they noticed an 8% increase in engineers converting and accepting jobs. So sometimes it’s just simple stuff. It doesn’t have to be always kind of some deep, deep learning thing.
But you know, that brings up a good point, data is all powerful, right? Like Information is power, you need information, build and make informed decisions. And for years, I mean, the interview process is such a subjective process in most organizations, right? Like, oh, we have this list of 30 questions in our question bank? Well, I might use these four questions all the time. But there’s other recruiter that recruits for the same role might use these 10 questions. And, and so but nobody tracks anything like that. Right? Nobody tracking how often they bring up remote work, because you have to be persistent. And you have to be organized in your leadership approach. And just historically, most organizations have not had that kind of sense of, of objectivity within their ta process. So I, it’s amazing, you start measuring something, and you realize that’s not what we were trying to figure out. But it gave us a solution to this. And any thoughts around that or any more experiences that you’ve had?
Yeah, the measurement is huge. And sometimes it’s the simplest things, right? So like if folks asked me, So let’s say we tell someone, hey, being more empathetic, or being more consistent can help drive up candidate sentiment, it can drive up conversions. So it’s kind of sounds vague, how do I become more structured or empathetic? I might say it’s as simple as showing up on time to all your interviews, and in many cases, we see like interviews that are you know, one of them might start three minutes late into it just throws throws everything off. So sometimes it’s the simplest things that people just aren’t aware of until they show that we show them the data saying that hey, if it’s a junior candidate, you’re more likely to show up late, you’re actually showing up late a lot to these interviews. So sometimes my thoughts will be just look at the basics, try and get them right. And then you can start a kind of unpeeling the onion a little bit and getting a little deeper. But yeah, I mean, measurement is key, and you can’t change what you don’t measure. And now you can measure pretty much anything as it relates to how you’re interviewing and how you’re showing up, at least when it’s done. You
can’t, you don’t know why something is happening until you start measuring it, and then you are able to start asking questions about it. And so I think, what what we often miss out on is just just taking taking note of the fact that we can measure different items. And it’s not just about time to hire, or, you know, cost per hire, like let’s get let’s get into the weeds a bit more, let’s, let’s get tactical, right, like it’s okay to be tactical sometimes. And so we, I do want to go in kind of a negative direction here now. So I’m gonna put the pressure on you. We’ve heard lots of talk from, you know, there was the Amazon outcry a few years ago with, you know, AI in their recruitment process. And you know, it was causing challenges with hiring the same type of person over and over again, how do we look at how to come? How can companies trust AI and HR to be the function that it needs to be it needs to make, obviously removing bias, but how do we make sure that we’re not teaching it the wrong thing? Right? Because it’s all tied to machine learning? Well, how do we overcome that? And how do companies by HR tech to know that it’s right?
Yeah, great question. And you kind of were asking me earlier about my learnings at Microsoft and implementing internal tooling. And yeah, even internally, when we’re launching a product like me at work, and at the time, it didn’t have a lot of AI. But there were certainly, you know, people looked at HR as are their kind of Big Brother elements, are we adding bias by adding these elements? So there’s a lot one can do. So Well, oftentimes, I you know, when people are evaluating a new tool, I recommend that they write a job description for it. So just like you’re hiring an employee, what are the roles and responsibilities you want? For this particular piece of technology that you’re going to hire into your organization? What skills do you want it to have? What background do you want it to have? What education do you want it to have? So I have people kind of write it out like that. And, and I think that there’s a lot of things that go into so in our case, we’re not actually assessing candidates on using a lot of AI, it’s more so on the interviewer themselves. But it’s it’s one of those garbage in garbage out scenarios. So it’s very important to understand what data is, are your is your AI being trained on? Is a company coming in and saying the AI is just going to learn about your company? And it’s going to base it on that? Or is it coming with a lot of lot of data across multiple companies across multiple types of regions and candidates? So I think how you actually train the AI is very important. And it can be a little abstract, but you can ask questions around like, how does it make decisions? What is it basing it on? I think anytime vendors get very vague, and it’s almost like the Wizard of Oz hiding in some corner and some magic happens. Magic is not necessarily always good. I think explainability is good, I think when they’re able to say this is why it does this. So definitely press on those questions. Not not over, you know, making sure you’re very clear in what problem you want the AI to solve. Oftentimes, a lot of vendors make a lot of promises, and they act like the technology is going to solve every last problem, you bring it in. And all of a sudden, it’s it’s not doing that in the way you want it to be. But But I think as far as bias, there’s also, you know, there’s a lot of ethical AI practices, you can ask vendors, what is your model for ethical AI are? What are the kind of checks and balances in place? So we base a lot of our models on Microsoft has an ethical AI framework. There’s third parties that can audit tools. So you can ask them, you know, not only do you have a data security, like a sock audit, but are you audited from an AI ethics standpoint? So there’s the legal pieces, but there’s also the ethical pieces. So there are beginning to be more bodies that will help companies assess vendors on the quality of the AI and elimination of bias. But But yeah, those are some of the things I think about not boiling the ocean too soon and asking a lot of the right questions upfront to make sure that they’re really doing what they say that’s helpful.
I mean, you share some things there that I didn’t even know so we’re getting near the end of our time here and I don’t mind letting it be a bit of an advertisement for you Prem, but what I would leave it as though for you you mentioned earlier getting the right candidates into your into your funnel. That the same Same thing goes for if I’m buying HR tech, right, and I need to have the right tools, what kind of position? Would my company need to be in in order to be ready to buy a tool like humanly? Like? What’s the ideal customer that needs a toollike humanly?
Great questions. So thanks, Chris. So, yeah, right, right now, you know, the core way we land with companies is around time savings. So can we help you save time and processing candidates read that as they come to your website, or as they apply through indeed, so that kind of screening taking the big list and making it smaller for use scheduling them. So if you’re having a problem with processing large amounts of candidates, scheduling them, getting them into interviews, we can definitely help with that. As well as like reengaging, the ones that were maybe silver medalist, so if you’re getting lots of applicants can’t engage with all of them. That’s the big one. And then the other piece of what we’re doing, you know, in the actual virtual interview, so things like taking notes from a zoom call, putting it into your applicant tracking system, again, time savings. So really we land with how can we save you time up front? And then how do we save you time in the virtual interviews, note taking getting into ATS. And then the next piece is around quality. So time savings, and then quality is more so you know, can you reduce bias? Can you you know, attract those candidates that are going to have the highest impact at your company. But yeah, generally targeting companies that are hiring support ops, sales roles, health care, so high volume in? And yeah, we can usually save you quite a bit
high volume, similar time and your skill sets, etc. Probably worked very well. Yeah. Well, yeah. That’s great. And, um, and, you know, I’ve been through the way that just for transparency sake, for listeners, I, we were looking for tools that would help us automate and speed up our processes. Whenever I was at endevis, obviously, jobs.com acquired endevis. And so I was introduced to humanly by a mutual connection and never heard of them. And, you know, that was two years ago, we’ve used humanly on multiple projects now. And we have we we definitely see the cost savings, the time savings from being able to even hire fewer recruiters, right? And so many of our recruiters to do the type of things that they enjoy doing more, right, like it’s nobody wants to do 100 phone screens a day. And if there were 100 phone screens a week, right, like, that’s just that is that is mentally exhausting. But if I can go through and I can review things and kind of engage it in a more functional way, that creates a better experience for the recruiter, which is more likely to create a better experience for the candidate still yet. So I love it. I think it’s a great tool. That’s That’s my personal recommendation. Good people at their organization. And really, thank you for coming on. Now. If I was a prospect, where would I find you? How would I get a hold of you Prem?
Yeah, so you can check out our website humanly.io You can find me on LinkedIn Prem and my last name was Kumar, Twitter at Premkumar tweets and you can email me so [email protected],
but not tomorrow, October 15 Because he will be at the Seattle Mariners playoff game.
Go mariners, Go mariners. Hopefully we live to fight another day.
Thank you so much for coming on on the podcast. This has been a great conversation. Looking forward to getting feedback from all the guests. You will be able to find it on on on YouTube, Spotify, and any place that you get your podcasts. That’s a wrap on another episode of the Talent Tide podcast. And remember, success is on the other side of fear. Go get them folks

Steve O’Brien: 42:18

Yeah, I prefer it not being in mail because it’ll probably get the

Chris: 42:22

same. If I get one more message about becoming a franchise owner. I’m probably just going to deactivate my LinkedIn account at this point. Hey, Steve, yeah, I’ve

Steve O’Brien: 42:36

gotten very interested in the options I have

Chris: 42:38

Gelatto to Raleigh. As if it probably doesn’t already to bring exist there, Steve, thanks again for joining the talent tide podcast. Looking forward to sharing this with people. And remember, success is on the other side of fear, folks. So if you’re looking to improve, seek out individuals like Steve O’Brien don’t be afraid to ask hard questions, and we’ll see you next time on the Talent Tide. Thank you!

October 11, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris discusses how to have a more effective TA system with Steve O’Brien.  They discuss talent attraction strategies including phone screens, diversity, compensation, and many more!

About Steve

Steve O’Brien serves as the SVP of Talent Acquisition- Clinical & Corporate for Syneos Health

He began his career in agency search, boutique retained projects, and global Recruitment Process Outsourcing before selecting the intersection of technology and talent acquisition as his focus. Steve holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from The Pennsylvania State University.

Link to your Strategy Sucks Video

Transcript

Chris: 0:17

Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have a special guest, a friend and former colleague and Steve O’Brien. Steve is the Senior Vice President of talent acquisition at syneos health, a $5 billion global biopharmaceutical solutions organization. Welcome to the podcast. Steve, how are you today?

Steve O’Brien: 0:48

Thanks, Chris. I’m doing great.

Chris: 0:49

I’m glad to have you. I want to cover a lot today. But why don’t you take us through a journey of of how you got to be the SVP of talent acquisition? That’s such a such a cool company like syneos. Where do you start and how did you get here?

Steve O’Brien: 1:09

When I started, the key is to be really, the key is to be really handsome. If you guys are watching the video podcast. I got into I got into recruiting like a lot of us accidentally, I often quickly object that I stayed on purpose. I had done an undergraduate degree in a liberal arts field. But not just any liberal arts field, one of the marks obscure philosophy and was left after I graduated with a bit of a problem to solve. The original plan was to go to law school, I had gone so far as to apply and enroll. And I met a woman around that same time that didn’t want to be a law school girlfriend are involved in a long distance relationship. And as the wise is the plans to abandon a 22, everything I’d prepared for. It certainly took that option. Now she’s my wife and the mother of my children. So it worked out now. But it did, it did leave me with a problem to solve. And that was that I had an undergraduate degree in philosophy. Recruiting was one of those careers that it didn’t really matter what you studied, sort of mattered if you were willing to do the work and be compensated basically, based on your production. That was a bargain I was willing to take and I got into technical recruiting, and quickly fell in love with it. I enjoyed the competitiveness of it, I enjoyed the analytical nature of trying to find an individual that matched a set of requirements. But the glue that ultimately sealed the deal for me to stay was the unique way that we get to intersect with people’s lives. My first candidate that I placed was a guy named Sridhar, I took him out to lunch. And if you guys are familiar with technical recruiting, you take them out to lunch, not for charity, but to push them for leads and to figure out if they can introduce you to more managers in the company, right. I don’t feel bad about it. But it was obviously quite self serving, and his wife and child came along to lunch and his wife made a comment that I had made a big difference for them. That contrast between my motives and their experience, opened my eyes to the unique opportunity we have as recruiters to impact people in special times in their lives. And that was really a potent brew, so to speak, and I chose not to ever put it down. Throughout the last 20 years I’ve been in the supplier side for most of my career, spent about 10 years within recruitment process outsourcing and began to learn the joy of building large systems that produce great outcomes. And ideally also give recruiters really great careers and hiring managers and candidates really great solutions to their their problems, which led to where I am now. While I was at IBM, I lead the life sciences portfolio for business process outsourcing. And one of my clients was a clinical research organization. It’s a space where that not much comes easily. When you make ta work in clinical research. You did it on purpose. And I enjoy that challenge. And also the recruiters that succeed in this space, often are quite gifted at working through many different modes of talent acquisition strong with managing candidate experience strong with problem solving strong with sourcing, and that complexity was attractive. And so when the opportunity to join syneos came up, I said let’s talk

Chris: 4:31

I don’t want to go off script from the very beginning based on what we’ve already talked about man, the powerful moment that that must have been for you at lunch with that presumably young, to young ish family and to hear from them how important of a life change this was for them is something that I think we forget about all the time in talent acquisition in recruiting and honestly in business, right, like when we’re employing people. We’re not just employing the human And themselves were employing their, their, their livelihood, whether that’s their family or, you know, their goals, etc. And so I think that’s a missed a missed connection point in town acquisition in general, what are your thoughts on that?

Steve O’Brien: 5:18

Yeah, what I’ll say for myself, I’m quite idealistic. The charm of that intersection between, you know, navigating macro economic trends and large patterns and making enormous systems of recruiters and hundreds of 1000s of applicants work at scale, while simultaneously remembering that each of those 100,000 applicants is a human, a neighbor, a father, mother, spouse, child, son, daughter, you know, like that, that contrast between large systems and each member of the larger system, being a person that you in some way intersect with in a meaningful fashion is extremely attractive. And it’s a it’s sort of a constant tension, right? I will, from time to time say to folks that work closely with me that one of the one of the practices that is valuable, within designing ta systems is to on one hand and think of like these two hands as like graph paper or trace paper that you used when you were in school, you design out a solution that is only concerned with efficiency, and sort of Six Sigma type stuff, don’t really consider the human at all. And then on the other hand design, throwing Six Sigma out and asking what is it going to feel like to work in the system, right designed for the human, and then slide the two graph papers over. And it’s almost like the solution emerges, right? Like, in order to be great at ta we need to both design systems that work at scale, and systems that work at scale for the individual. And it’s not going to be the perfectly austere Six Sigma, often. But it’s also not going to be able to be the clumsy white glove. You know, everybody gets, you know, a 45 minute post interview debrief after every interview that they have when you’re doing 12,000 hires a year, it’s a slide those two papers over and then the solution sort of pops out, like every

Chris: 7:11

company’s definition of what it means to be great at recruiting is different. But because of that reason that you just explained, right? Like we all have different priorities. Every company has different priorities for what their expectations are in TA and recruiting and HR and employee experience. And I think the companies that are usually best at at all of those things are typically honest about that upfront, like, This is who we are, and this is who we’re going to be and I think it sets the right expectation. So I’m glad we got off on that tangent to begin with. We’ve never gotten off on tangents before in conversations.

Steve O’Brien: 7:45

No, never never. Yeah, well, I think, I think I think there’s a lot to that when you’re designing TA is one realizing that to some degree, we suffer from an oversimplification, by virtue of the fact that we refer to talent acquisition as talent acquisition. And my awful analogy that you’ve probably heard me use before is that there’s a similarity between the misleading simplicity of the word talent acquisition and the middle misleading simplicity of dinner. Right dinner represents something that’s a meal after lunch, it’s before you go to bed. It’s often you know, the biggest meal of the day. But for some people, it never includes meat. Right? For some people, it always includes a salad. There’s all of these variations culturally and in terms of cuisines, spices, construction. And so yeah, it represents something. But there’s an enormous amount of diversity underneath that word as well, talent acquisition has a similar phenomenon. It does mean something. But the way that you run talent acquisition has an extraordinary amount of diversity baked in to it. And so asking the question, what do we intend to deliver? What is our commitment to the candidate base to the hiring managers to the business to the employee population, that could be internal applicants? Those answers help you begin to determine what format structure and value do you plan to provide? And then the other thing that you’ve got to consider is what’s your source channel makeup? Right? So for a company that hires 85% of its candidates as applicants, meaning that they’ve without a recruiter, persuading them on their own, decided to fill out an application and raise their hand for interest, versus a company that hires 85% source candidates. They’re entirely different processes. And the way that you structure that organization is entirely different.

Chris: 9:33

Absolutely. You always have the best analogy, Steve, I appreciate the constructive way in which you can paint a picture. I’m getting back on based upon your introduction. So you talked about getting into technical recruiting. Now you’re developing and improving talent acquisition processes at At a large organization, what do you think are the biggest changes that you’ve seen since you began your career in this space? Because a lot of it remains the same. There are a lot of things are very similar to the way that it was 20 years ago, as far as the sourcing, screening, etc. So what do you see as being the biggest changes that you’ve experienced?

Steve O’Brien: 10:22

Well, there’s one that’s come up recently that I find fascinating. As we’ve we’ve moved into the post COVID world, and experienced meaningful inflation, in lots of aspects of our consumer life, there’s emerged a belief amongst candidates that they need to swing for the fences. And I don’t begrudge them that, right. However, in a context where every candidate is showing up willing to ask for the world, your recruiters need to be better negotiators now than they used to be. Right. And so if I go back 15 years ago, and I’m not longing for these days, I’m contrasting, right? You would just ask a candidate, you know, what do you make now? And then you would apply 10%. And you would basically say, alright, if you’re making 80 we’lloffer you 88.5 and a 5k, sign on or something like that, right? Like negotiation and salary for the majority of our careers in our roles was almost derivative, right? It’s sort of derivative of what you’re at now, plus some markup, so to speak, that the recruiter knows that they can close you within and then that becomes the the job offer. Well, not only are we not most states able to ask what you’re making now, and I understand why. And I have a lot of sympathy for that. But not only that, in addition, candidates show up, ready to ask for the world because there’s a zeitgeist, right? There’s just a cultural move to swing for the fences. And so not that I want to minimize the amount of income that somebody makes in a job change. But that can get out of hand. Right? You might have somebody that is making 120 right now. And they say that they’re looking for 180, right? Well, if we don’t have a way to negotiate and navigate that conversation, you could end up turning that candidate down, right, like you could move on, and then the candidates annoyed because they didn’t get a call back or they didn’t move forward. They’re not sure why. Or you don’t properly manage the candidates expectations, you do move them forward, you’re ready to make an offer for 150. But because you never really grappled with that 180. Now making the job offer feels like a negative, right? Like this is 30k less than what I told you I was looking for, it’s important to be able to negotiate in far more sophisticated ways in order to one make sure that you don’t miss candidates two exercise your responsibility as a recruiter guarding the finances of the organization, right? You can’t give away the farm with every single role, and three to not bring people into the company with a negative compensation experience. Right? We’ve heard this cliche before, or perhaps not. It’s one that I think about, though compensations a terrible motivator, but it’s a phenomenal demotivator, right? And the recruiter is at the tip of that spear, bringing people in brokering those deals and setting expectations and hopefully bringing people in feeling recognized, rewarded and wanted, as opposed to feeling sort of manhandled or unheard.

Chris: 13:24

Love that example. That is a big change. And it is one that continues to have a tipping point here it is on September 12 2022. As we record and there has been some talk in in some of the spaces whether you’re on LinkedIn about it beginning to tip back towards the employer at this point, I just saw something over the weekend, I think around current employees are are maybe a bit more resistant to be asking for raises right now. Just with the current economic situation in the country and things things that are going on. So how are you talking with your recruiters on how to balance these conversations, Steve, right, because you have you’re trying to match skill sets up with the job descriptions and the talent that you’re trying to find. But then understanding the the massive shift in compensation over the last really 24 months? How How are you helping to assist your your team and in developing these conversations more effectively?

Steve O’Brien: 14:33

Yeah, so there’s, there’s three questions and one one of the realities with getting training to be effective at scale, is making it simple is important, right? If the way that we want to instruct our recruiters to negotiate is complex or requires, you know, a master’s degree in hostage negotiation then it may be a really effective model, but it probably won’t lead to a lot of learning outcomes, you may not see it in the wild much. And so there’s a couple questions that I offered to the recruiters to ask that helped facilitate the dialogue and to help the dialogue be. So healthy is the word that’s coming to mind, there’s probably something baked in there. I don’t quite mean. I don’t mean to imply that not doing it this way is unhealthy. But I hope that the recruiters on my team are able to negotiate without it feeling hostile because again, I I’m very sensitive to the idea that the compensations are really great demotivator. And we don’t want people joining our company or any talent acquisition function, you don’t want people accepting your offers. With regrets, right. That said, one question that I teach the recruiters to ask when a candidate comes in with a number is just to say, Hey, that’s a big number. Can you tell me about it? Right, so as you ask it, candidate what they’re looking for, if you know that your range is 120 to 140, and they come at one in at 180. Don’t over rotate, right? Like, don’t try and like go for the jugular or negotiate them down, like just ask an honest, like empathy question in the sense, like, where are you coming from? Right? Tell me about that number. And sometimes it’s as simple as well, my buddy just left, and that’s what he got. Right? Or I don’t know, it’s what I’m shooting for, you know, but all of these are conversation starters. And they lead you into a dialogue with the candidate that isn’t adversarial, and doesn’t have or hopefully minimizes the amount of power dynamic, right? It’s just honestly, I want to know where you’re coming from, you asked for one ad, tell me about that number. A second question that is a bit more oriented towards trying to establish a range with the candidate or understand more about where they would accept or reject? If it’s true is to share with them, Would it surprise you that that’s higher than most of our associates in that role get paid today? It’s an honest, simple comment that helps again, bring the conversation forward and begin to establish some some numerical sort of marking points as you get ready to negotiate. So we know that internal equity often trails behind where you are hiring at. So the point is not to say that, because that’s more than our other associates are making that therefore I’m not going to make the offer. But I want to help ground right our conversation, and also make sure that you know that it’s not me versus you that’s more than other associates are making is that a surprise? Gives the candidate the opportunity to say no, right? When you’re negotiating? Yes, is there a bit of a cheap trick? No, is a way to give safety to the person that you’re negotiating with, and to make sure that they feel like they have a standing in the conversation? And then the third question that I teach them to ask is, at what point should I not call you back? Right? If it’s the right job, and the right hiring manager, and they’re going to offer 135? Should I call you back? Right? And if the answer is no, well great, that helps a lot. When should I not call you back? Right? And they might say 145? So now you’ve got a lot of information. And hopefully, if you do it, well, it hasn’t felt like you were steamrolled, if you’re the candidate, because the goal is not to steamroll the candidate. It’s just to do some of the upfront work to figure out like, where are you actually, where do you need to be? I want to give you some context on where the other associates are in our company today. And I don’t want to waste your time, right? I don’t, my intention is not to insult you as a recruiter. And if 135 is insulting, or it’s not on the table, just tell me that’s okay. I don’t want to call you back at 135. These, these are tactics, so to speak, that if you had asked 15 years ago, you know, does every recruiter need to be doing this with their candidates? I say, No, ask them where they’re at. Right. But that’s not the world that we live in now. And also candidates are shooting for the moon and God bless them for it, right. But it does change the dynamic for the recruiter to be able to fulfill their responsibility on behalf of their employer, right to make good job offers and to protect the company against sort of runaway compensation, which does unfortunately sink the organization if it’s sort of scaled out. Right? If you just allow every every person to pick their price and offer no sort of financial stewardship from the recruiting chair. That’s the problem.

Chris: 19:24

I think I would start with the third question first. That’s a pretty good one. I like that i, that where

Steve O’Brien: 19:31

where when? When should I wins? Yeah,

Chris: 19:35

like a lot it the process is so confrontational as it is, right? Like when you’re negotiating, and you’re having conversations. Typically, that’s not where the conversation started that right it’s you started on the basis of would this job be right for you. And you hear the job as a candidate. And think yeah, that is something that I’d be interested in, but your expectation in your mind lightly that it pays this when in reality, it pays that and that it’s amazing how much expectations play into the role of our happiness, right? Because in some scenarios, I might have been perfectly happy with 150. And another scenario, I might be very upset with 150 based upon the initial conversation and expectations that were set for what, what a job would be like, I’ve never been in that situation myself, but just throwing it out there. Yeah,

Steve O’Brien: 20:29

well, we, including me, we, we, we lean very hard as people into the idea of care. And as compensation becomes a more common pop culture, talking point, and more prevalent and LinkedIn posts, you see some big numbers out there. They may be true, they may not. They may be aspirational. They may be stirring the pot, who knows. But they begin to pluck at our strings of fairness that live in our our minds. And again, I include myself with this, this is not a psychologist ation of others. And there’s an there’s an interesting study that I’ll aggressively summarize here that just sort of illustrates that we may be able to relate to, in terms of fairness. So there was a study set up to try and test how or at what point would we draw the lines in fairness, and the line being, I don’t want to play this game, I don’t want to participate in this thing any longer. And so they set up a carnival game at a fair that had 100 cups, and underneath of one of the 100 cups was $100. Bill. In order to play the game, you paid $1. And you got to pick a cup, right? So mathematically, if the payoff is 100, to one, there’s one in 100 chance, and it cost one, one hundreds to play this a decent game, you know, I mean, like, if my son went up to that, and he was like, Hey, can I have five bucks? Yeah, that’s a fair game, you’re not being exploited, right. And so there was a nice long line, and lots of people wanted to play this carnival game. The next night, they set the game up differently, it was still structurally the same from a format, you know, 100 cups underneath of one of the cups was $100 bill. But now there were two players, not one. One player, paid the dollar and got a cup. The other player, the second player, paid $1, and got the other 99. Now the first players odds were the same, it was still a fair game, quote, unquote, mathematically for the first player, but to no surprise to any of us. Nobody wanted to play the game. Because it’s not fair. The odds for the other person are extraordinarily stacked in their favor. My experience with the game, personally is the same, but the context of the game has changed, because the context is unfair. People didn’t line up the play.

Chris: 22:47

Both both had the chance to win $100. But their odds were unequal. Right. And I think that’s where the conversation around fairness and equality comes into play quite often. And we assume that that one is is the same as the other and the reality is they are not. So I would love to keep talking about compensation. But there’s there’s a lot more that I want to get in with you get into with you, Steve, we only have a limited amount of time, we could probably spend our entire afternoon here. And so, you’ve you’ve been you’ve been an agency recruiter

Steve O’Brien: 23:18

this this is, this is why Chris and I couldn’t be colleagues is we would just do

Chris: 23:23

quantification. Absolutely. Absolutely. So you’ve been agency recruiting, you’ve been in RPO, you have been in the technology, space, services, etc. And now you are in house. I would like to talk to you a little bit more now about like the future like, how does this get better? How do we improve recruiting? Because like we just said, not much has changed over the last 20 years. Negotiating has played a bigger role that may start to trickle down a little bit as far as the role that it plays within the process. But how do we get better at recruiting? What does the future look like Steve?

Steve O’Brien: 24:09

Well, that’s a good question. Maybe Maybe I’ll wait into it just by starting to make observations about where things have have improved and not improved. So if you go back 15 years, technology wasn’t quote unquote, as good. But the operating environment was more simple. Right you 15 years ago, you might have used a monster job board and your ATS if you had an ATS. You had fewer systems and to get a candidate’s phone number. You didn’t have to go through some strange messaging protocol like LinkedIn recruiter right now, where we are today, we quote unquote, a better technology but the operating environment is far more complex. My recruiters use an ATS a CRM, a mismatch. I should have job boards, we might, we might use our CRMs messaging capabilities, we might use a different drip marketing solution. We’ve got text recruiting capabilities that you load into text recruit, you’ve got an of the number of systems that we work in now is significant, right? So they’re all cool. And they all do great stuff. But the experience of a recruiter is well, now my operating environment is extremely fragmented. So I think one of the things that we’ve got to do and this is not particularly insightful, I think the industry has been saying this for a while. We want to think about user experience in designing for the recruiter and actively squeezing out complexity in the operating environment, because it does lead to inefficiencies. I think the other thing that we want to invest in, even to the point of perhaps putting together teams that do this work, is get your recruiters out of LinkedIn recruiter as the only messaging protocol they use. I think, I love I love LinkedIn, I love LinkedIn recruiter. But it can be a poison to creativity. And if you’re on the receiving end of LinkedIn, recruiter messages, they show up as an InMail. If you’re recruiting a candidate, asking them Do you want to buy is not the first question that you ask somebody, right. But when the message shows up as an InMail, if you’re a passive candidate, basically, it’s opening the conversation with you. Essentially, as do you want a job change, right. And so not only have we given the recruiters a foreign messaging protocol, right through this website, as opposed to text message or phone calls. But we’ve also put the recipients of the message in a position where maybe I wouldn’t be open to a job change. But I don’t want to start with telling you that I’m interested in a job change. Right? Like, I’m just not there mentally, I don’t have an updated resume, I’d like to talk a little bit more about what you see is in it for me. And for you to learn a little bit more about what I’m looking for, before we go and take that step of Yeah, I’m looking for a job change.

Chris: 27:11

So what I heard from you then is centralization of our systems, right? Because we went from a process that was actually very easy and straightforward to one that is now a very complex web of environments. And we, we’ve created a negative experience because of that for both the recruiter and the candidate. How do we’re often seeing a lot of layoffs again, in the recruitment space, because we vote we don’t we only value recruiting when we need it. And we we get rid of it as soon as the first opportunity presents itself to move away from them. How do we create an experience that is both good for the candidate and good for the recruiter? Because we often see our recruiters as we hire them. And I say we meaning businesses, not necessarily you or I or any leader of TA as transactional, right? Because we look at them and say, well, we just need to we just need a button the seat to help us fill more butts in the seat. How do we create a more experiential environment that improves the entire system? Steve?

Steve O’Brien: 28:22

Well, it’s a really, it’s a really tough question. And we even see this. So I’m going to wander off into hopefully territory that doesn’t get me in trouble. But there’s there’s another, there’s another market segment where we see significantly different behaviors of different quote unquote, user types. So dating apps, right. And so when you look at dating apps, like Tinder, they’ve simplified sort of the the matchmaking component of swipe left swipe right. But the participants in the dating apps have different levels of selectivity. And so when you look at the the metadata for dating apps, you see patterns, any any pattern is going to miss the individual. Right? Let me say that first, I know that the rule does not define the individual. But at the metadata level, you see that men are less selective, and women are more selective, right? And so you, you see a decrease of selection at the swipe level for men and an increase of selectivity for the swipe level for a female. Now, you’ve got other products that are trying to control for this, like Bumble and others that are trying to add more science. My point is not that one is better than the other. But you see these these patterns as you make it simpler to select. The metadata reveals that not all participants behave the same, right? So we make it easier for applicants to apply, right? But then you have recruiters become quote unquote, more selective because they’re getting flooded with all of these expressions of interest. And so one of the problems is, how do we add more data or insight into where I should apply? And information about the applicants so that we help balance the difference in selectivity? Does that make sense right to get away from applicants just spamming applications, because we see that right now, I mean, we get, we get probably 400,000 applications, and a lot of the applicants, if there’s multiple roles to apply to, if they’re in a low selectivity mode, right, they’re an active applicant, they’re just shooting in tons of applications. But that creates a lot of noise in the system, which increases the recruiter selectivity, the likelihood that they’re going to engage with that source channel decreases, because there’s so much content, there’s so much noise in that channel. So one thing that we’ve got to do is balanced the signal to noise ratio at an applicant level, write an idea, and I know that you guys at job.com are working on this, that I still think has both a romance but also some some value to it is helping those that are not necessarily active applicants communicate, what kinds of jobs would I be willing to apply for? And then when jobs meet those criteria to actually raise that to you as a role that you should consider? Right? So Amazon does this with its shopping algorithms. So the idea that I’m shopping for a golf club, is not descriptive of lots of of lots of golfers, right? More likely a golfer that is willing to buy a golf club is shopping for a golf club, if it needs a whole bunch of different conditionals. Right? And so I don’t want Amazon to send me every golf club that is for sale. I want Amazon to send me golf clubs that are for sale that meet certain criteria, right? If Amazon’s algorithm was just to ship me, all of the golf clubs that are for sale, I would disengage with that, right. But if they can increase the match, if they can increase the accuracy between what I’m being asked to pay attention to, and what am I actually looking for, they get more of a balance between buyer and seller.

Chris: 32:13

And we have an imbalance on both sides. Because as you’re saying, so this is one thing, as you’re saying that you get 400,000 inbound applications every year. I’m sitting here thinking of my end, I wonder how many outbound communications your recruiters also send a year that they get no response from, by the way, right? Because we,

Steve O’Brien: 32:36

oh, it’s fun. It’s hundreds and hundreds of

Chris: 32:38

1000s. Right. So we have all of this terrible communication that need both inbound and outbound. And we’re creating so much noise in the system that it’s just the ineffectiveness of it all, is is astronomical. And it’s hard to think about another system that is as broken as, as this particular system in any organization. Would you agree with that? Steve?

Unknown: 33:00

Job calm is an HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and tan solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.

Steve O’Brien: 33:19

So when we look at trying to introduce some, some improvements in balance between the buyer and the seller, because you’re right, there is an extraordinary amount of inefficiency, you know, we we probably send out, you know, 800,000 outbound messages, at a minimum. So now we’re at 1.2 million, quote, unquote, intersections with the market. And we’re making about 12,000 hires a year in my groups. And so that, that hit rate of messaging is just painfully low. So if you go back to the 400,000, applicants, a certain a certain percentage of them are just going to be flipping applications. But a bigger percentage of them are just not quite ready yet. And so in clinical research, to be qualified for a role is relatively precise in the sense that if we’re looking for two years of data management experience, and you’ve got one, you’re not qualified, right? However, when we get those applicants that have a year of data management experience, if they haven’t changed career paths, you know, what they have next year, two years experience. And so how do we actively manage the data of the historical applicants to add value and insight into the information that we have, so that we can be a bit more like Amazon and reach back out as opposed to enlarge aggregates or in sort of the brute force of buyer seller, instead reaching out with a bit of insight injected into the communication and the data that we’re managing, so that we can say in a year, hey, you’ve changed and we’ve changed our record show that you probably have two years data management experience, we’d love to talk. Right? That’s a delightful experience, especially if you applied a year ago, weren’t selected really haven’t thought much about syneos in about a year, but to see us add value and insight to the data that we’ve received from you, and then to proactively reach out, not only is that more accurate, but it’s delightful.

Chris: 35:27

So centralize the system. So we think about that from a messaging perspective, and how we just get better and more effective. I think that’s a huge opportunity that somebody has to solve, right? Whether it’s a tech company, hopefully, it’s a recruiting company that has an understanding of, of, or at least a partner that they can go find at a tech company, because much like healthcare coming as an outsider into the industry and trying to fix things is not always the easiest solution to the problem. And so, we talked about centralization. What about the process itself? How do you see the process of recruitment process changing? From maybe the more traditional pieces of recruiting that you’ve seen in the past?

Steve O’Brien: 36:14

Well, I think an interesting question for us to wrestle with, if you if you do phone screens is Why do you do them? I understand that could come across as controversial, and I’m not even necessarily advocating for getting rid of phone screens. But if one of the questions that you ask about a process step is, how often does it change the future? I’m not sure the phone screen would score really high. Right? Now every company is different. Again, if you have really great uptake from your hiring managers with reviewing phone screens, and having that influence their selection decisions, cool. But for a lot of organizations, the recruiter spends, you know, probably 15 minutes scheduling an interview, or a phone screen, rather 30 minutes, conducting the phone screen, and then 15 minutes, cleaning the notes up and submitting them. So you’ve got an hour of time. If your recruiter is making $100,000 a year, you spent 50 bucks on that phone screen, and you’re probably doing them at Mass, how often does that phone screen really change a hiring managers behavior? Or how often does that phone screen honestly really get looked at? Right? Most many hiring managers click into the resume, do the same thing that we do as recruiters, which is make about a 10 second gut judgment, and then decide they’re going to interview the person or not interview the person. What value did the phone screen bring? And again, I want to be cautious here. I’m not suggesting that their value lists or that we can’t find a defense for them. But it’s an interesting question, because an extraordinary amount of time and cost goes into the phone screen.

Chris: 37:53

I’m glad you said it. It’s something that you and I have talked about a lot, we have very similar opinions on this particular subject. And I will take it a step further and say, you probably should be evaluating each step of the recruitment process with a little bit more of a fine tooth comb, then than you do at this point. Because there are many parts of the process itself that are not great, whether it’s the handoff to the hiring manager, the hand back from a hiring manager to onboarding, you want to improve your team and your efficiency, you can probably start right there with some very simple process and procedural changes within the recruitment process. Is there anything else that you you would say related to that topic, Steve?

Steve O’Brien: 38:34

So? Well, I want to expand a little bit more on the idea of getting rid of the phone screen. So for the listener, one of the sort of the, the resolves, in my humble opinion, is when you’re working in a role, where advocating for your candidate is part of succeeding as a recruiter, the phone screen is probably important. And counter intuitively, the phone screen is less about informing the hiring manager, and more about informing yourself on how to advocate for your candidate. However, if you’re working in a skill set area where you’re not really advocating, right, that’s just not part of the recipe that leads to success or closing that requisition. I think getting rid of the phone screen is something that is worth really thinking hard about. And part of coming to this, this aha begins with being willing to question the sacred cow so to speak that everybody gets a phone screen. We have a role category right now syneos that we’re exploring, getting rid of the phone screen for and some of the some of the Theses components are that for this role, the candidate would probably rather talk to a hiring manager right away than a recruiter. Right. In addition, the hiring manager is really just going to go into the resume and not look at the phone screen. It’s not a complex enough role that these complexities of a phone screen and an interview are going to affect their decision. And then finally, in in some role categories, if you advocating for the candidate doesn’t really have the weight and the ability to change the hiring managers decision, you sort of zeroed out the value of the phone screen. And arguably, you’re improving the process, you’re improving the candidate experience, you’re improving the hiring manager experience and the speed of the process by saying, You know what, I’m not sure I can really give a compelling defense of the phone screen here. That said, there are other roles where advocating for candidates, as we all know, is a essential part of getting that role filled, as well as really understanding the quality and caliber of the person that you’re looking at. And so in those categories, the phone screens relevant but not for the most traditional reasons, in my opinion, not because we’re going to add detail to the resume and going to help the hiring manager make a more wide eyed assessment, but because instead it equips you as the recruiter to be able to advocate for that candidate and defend the intangible or not as evident strengths and capabilities that are bringing that aren’t going to pop off the resume.

Chris: 41:11

For sure. Steve, this has been a great conversation, we’re up against time. If if you’re interested in hearing more of a conversation between Steve and I, we actually have an episode on YouTube, called your strategy sucks. You can put that into YouTube’s search engine and go find us. We’ll also put the notes in the show notes as well for the URL. But it was a good session that Steve and I did last November. And it was enlightening. You know, I think the conversation there is really valuable. Unfortunately, I’m going to be doing that same presentation this week by myself. So it won’t be nearly as good. But do check it out on YouTube. Steve, if somebody wanted to reach out to you and find you someplace, what’s the best way for them to find you online?

Steve O’Brien: 42:07

Sure, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, send me a connection request and shoot me a message just

Chris: 42:11

a custom message and don’t ask me if he wants a job.

Steve O’Brien: 42:18

Yeah, I prefer it not being in mail because it’ll probably get the

Chris: 42:22

same. If I get one more message about becoming a franchise owner. I’m probably just going to deactivate my LinkedIn account at this point. Hey, Steve, yeah, I’ve

Steve O’Brien: 42:36

gotten very interested in the options I have

Chris: 42:38

Gelatto to Raleigh. As if it probably doesn’t already to bring exist there, Steve, thanks again for joining the talent tide podcast. Looking forward to sharing this with people. And remember, success is on the other side of fear, folks. So if you’re looking to improve, seek out individuals like Steve O’Brien don’t be afraid to ask hard questions, and we’ll see you next time on the Talent Tide. Thank you!

October 4, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris and Arran go into detail about who is Job.com.  Listeners will find out Job.com mission and vision for the future, details of how the company came to be, and more information about it’s co-founder, Arran Stewart.

Arran Stewart is the Co-founder and CVO of Job.com.

Transcript

Chris: 0:17

Hello, and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in talent management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have a very special guest, chief visionary officer and co founder of job.com. Arran Stewart, this is going to be a two part conversation. But today’s episode is all about job.com The mission and where it is going welcome Arran Stewart to the Talent Tide Podcast. How are you?

Arran Stewart: 0:48

I’m very well, Chris, and thanks for having me on here. So I’ve actually to be fair of all the podcasts and all the different things I’ve been on for all out my career, I’ve been most looking forward to and waiting with bated breath to be on talent tide, because I remember when we first you know, kind of did the deal with endevis. And I remember looking you up, I was like, he’s got his own podcast. I was like, Well, how long is it gonna be until I get on there. And now you know, a meer, you know, 14 months after closing the deal, and you become part of the family. I’m finally on the

Chris: 1:20

shelves, and I’m on it just like a pretty girl, you can’t

Arran Stewart: 1:23

be too easy. Too easy.

Chris: 1:27

You know, I had to make the beg and ask a couple of times.

Arran Stewart: 1:32

I did.

Chris: 1:33

The level that you had to be at before you come on, you had to work at agile a little bit. So we have two parts. I’ve given you two parts. There’s a very select few people have ever gotten two podcast episode. So this one I’m excited about because like I said in the intro, we’re going to be learning more about who job.com is, which I think is really important. You know, you’ve been on podcast before talking about job.com You’ve had different conversations where in my opinion, the opinion was what job.com was, or is might have been misconstrued. Oftentimes, we’re out in the market at different conferences and things. You know, we always get the thing of like, Oh, your job board? And it’s like, no, no, we’re not. But let’s have a conversation about that. And so I thought, You know what, we’ll record a podcast and we’ll just let everybody know we can we can listen in this way. So before we get there, how about you introduce who Arran Stewart is because you got this funny accent? You know, I live in America, but obviously you haven’t always and I don’t think everybody knows who you are. So why don’t you share with with everyone who Arran Stewart is?

Arran Stewart: 2:42

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. I do have a funny accent. And I sometimes wonder is getting better. I got feedback, actually from a friend of mine in the UK that was like, Hey, you use a lot more American words now you’re starting to sound like you’re changing. I was like, gosh, and then actually when I thought about it, it’s true. So so I’m Arran Stewart, I am from Luton, which is a town north of London, rather large town called a million population grew up there born and raised 25 years I lived there. I’ve been in recruitment rec tech for 15 years, I have been fortunate enough to have a very colorful career in the space. Originally started at s3, shout out to the guys at s3 actually owned a job board called the IT job board, which was kind of like my first true work gig in this space. I had other jobs. My very first job was in construction Lane curbs. And then I did car insurance sales for the Royal Bank of Scotland. I’ve done all sorts of stuff, but really in this industry. I started and it was it was with s3 in the IT job board. I was very arrogant. When I was young and thought when I was working there. When I was working on the job board that I could, they’d given me a subdivision of the IT job board called IT jobs in the city. And they were like having me go out there and kind of effectively take that job board to market this in the 2000s. And I was like taking note of all the money that they were making out of this website, which honestly at the time was very primitive. Like, we wouldn’t even tell our clients, we wouldn’t even have access to database to our clients, we would just tell them we had this it almost felt like a made up number that they would tell us Oh 650,000 candidates in the database it’s like Okay, is there where are they? Like, you know, there’s just there’s just made up but they were making a fortune, like 10s of millions. So I was like I can do this myself. So I left and I set up. This was at a time where LinkedIn in my opinion was really getting a hype and like you know all about networking and people being able to network with each other and, and I came up with this brilliant harebrained idea that you could create a job board that was for networking for blue collar workers and allow them to kind of almost refer each other into work and stuff like that. When you say out loud, now it doesn’t sound too stupid. And if anything, might even sound a little bit like Job, just just throwing it out there. But this was, you know, 15 years ago, it failed miserably. I spent so much of my own cash on it up to my eyeballs in debt, it was a real tough, horrible time. But off the back of it, we created a distribution products, which basically allowed you to multiplex your job onto lots of different platforms and sites. And it also included the media buying in it. And a friend of mine was like, he was a, he was a director of Michael Page at the time, and he was like, you should just productize that and take that to market. And that was born I resourcer. And that was the business that then became part of Hamilton Bradshaw Ryder, the whole James Caan crew, all of that stuff. And that was the one that I would say, kind of put not put me on the map. That’s not true. But it definitely was a major step towards changing my life, changing the direction getting credibility, working with some incredibly talented humans that obviously existed in that organization. They set up a separate article, Hamilton Bradshaw Rida technology, so RIDA stood for recruitment industry development agency. And I was just in charge of basically put him in deals and roll up deals to do with, you know, augment, or, you know, augmenting tech for recruitment and stuff. And, yeah, so that was cool. And then in 2000, to 2011, we set up myjobmatcher, which is what we know today is job.com. And I can’t believe that we’ve been doing this for 11 years, and five years ago, I moved to the US and I’m married, we’ve got five beautiful kids, I’ve got a dog called Bernie. And I’ve got two top choices as well that I’m currently looking at oppositely in my office, so and that’s me Arran Stewart.

Chris: 6:59

I love it. I think that that’s a good intro for you. Because I’m not sure everybody understands like how long a you’ve been doing the job.com thing, right and how you got here. So I want to get into that sound, but also your background, right? Everybody knows you, honestly in America as job.com Arran Stewart and so I think helped me to paint the picture of like how you got to being job.com Arran Stewart is really important for our market here. Who are you? You know?

Arran Stewart: 7:25

Who’s this guy? Who is? Who is this weirdo? So no, no, I’m, well, I appreciate it. And I think it’s great. You know, America has been really kind to me, in a sense of when we arrived here, it’s very scary moving to a completely different country. Thankfully, culturally, it’s not hugely different. There are some nuances between Aussie London and Texas, of course, but in a sense of language, and barriers, and all that stuff, you know, those things are overcome quite quickly. But America has been an amazing move for us as a business and my family. And I’ve been really lucky that so many industry professionals in the market have given the time of day to want to learn more about my story, the company’s story, what we’re trying to do, and in some respects, you know, have been advocates to what we’re trying to achieve. There’s a lot of humans still in the market that still don’t understand what we are who we are, which is, you know, part of today probably helps towards maybe clarifying some of that, if they have the time to listen, our job is just to continuously spread the message until the message becomes clear.

Chris: 8:33

Absolutely. We’re going to have the time who’s not going to want to listen to to both guys.

Arran Stewart: 8:37

Everyone’s listening to the tide, bro. Everyone’s everyone’s everyone’s is tidy at the tide is.

Chris: 8:43

So you talked about coming to America. But before that job.com was around, right? What is job.com? Can you kind of take us through how job.com came to be in its current iteration and what it is?

Arran Stewart: 8:59

Well, so this is the bit where, for anyone that confuses us as a job board, of course, I completely understand how and why that would happen. Firstly, job.com was a job board here in the US from 2001. At one point during the 2000s. I believe that before the true rise of Indeed, it was possibly with CareerBuilder monster is one of the largest job boards in North America. I mean, it had, I remember when we bought the business, I mean, we did the due diligence on the historical traffic. It was huge. Like I said, like, I think like 35 million unique visits a month, which kind of puts it not too far behind where zip recruiter is today. So yeah, it was it was massive. So anyone that did remember it or knew it back then with its original ownership, of course, but in 2017 You know, job.com had not was a victim of what happened to the industry right? The you know, the king is dead long live the king which was when in detail monster basically A and then CareerBuilder didn’t really progress either. And then you had the new incumbents you had indeed. And then you also had the heavily funded zip recruiter kind of take market share. And then was this kind of slightly historical left behind job board called job.com, which really had not progressed or kept up with what brings a candidate to a website, which is marketing and SEO, they have not invested or double down in that, like the other competitors, like, indeed, zip, indeed, went down, SEO zip recruiter bought every piece of radio and TV, they could possibly get their hands on, you know, and that’s how they built their empires. So when we acquired the business, it was in distress, it was a business that was had gone backwards, but was sat on a whole heap of, you know, like 55 million registered users, and also had, you know, possibly the best URL known to man for our space. But we realized as a business ourselves, which had started as my job match, oh, we were an aggregator in the UK, we would match people’s resumes to an aggregated job search or population and basically send them an email with the most relevant jobs for them every day, and it was very populate got millions and millions of people using it, you know, every month. But again, that behavioral patterns of the job seeker, were driving more and more towards zip recruiter, and indeed, and we could see the writing on the wall that unless you had huge amounts of money for marketing, you were kind of really not going to compete. And it paid homage we paid homage really to my background being with Hamilton Bradshaw, which was obviously a big product, a group of recruitment and staffing agencies. And then my business partner, Paul Sloyan, had built and owned and sold multiple recruitment, staffing agencies as well. And we were like, Okay, is there a way when you look at the experience of how a recruitment and staffing agency works, right, and there’s 20,000 of them in North America? And there’s 227,827 Recruitment consultants in North America? What is their process for how they deal with a human, and I got battered for this on the chat and cheese show. So if like, you know, if either of those two are listening right now, hopefully, you’ll give me a squeezed when I explain this, and compare us to Uber. Okay. But what did Uber do for the process of ordering a cab, it streamlined it, it removes so many of the clunky processes of how to order a cab, where to order a cab, you know, deciding your destination, all of those different things, right. So our first iteration with job.com was to automate recruitment and staffing for a consumer facing URL, like Uber is a consumer facing platform for traditionally for ordering a cab and it streamlined so many of the clunky processes that do that job.com want you to do the same. We want you to create a process where you’re immediately assigned to a recruitment consultant through a website URL, something you’d never see on Indeed, you’d never see on zip recruiter, you would go through more scrupulous matching, not generic broad, what I would call curiosity matching, which is what Indeeds and recruiters do, because they want to drive high levels of response, you know, their goal is for high levels response, we want to we want to be much more filtered and find that needle in the haystack. Because we’re making money when we do placements. We wanted to do the screener. And we also wanted to do sheduled, within which scheduling within the ecosystem. So the experience for the job seeker was I go all the way through to one knowing which recruiter I’m dealing with to knowing if I was successful, and actually matched the job or not three if I pass the screener questions, and if I did do that, four I’m talking to Sarah, the recruiter tomorrow at 1030 and experience you just don’t get on a normal job board. And that akin like for like for him for an Uber, you know, excuse me for using it but it’s it’s something that we can all resonate with, is streamlining processes to create a digital experience towards recruitment and staffing. Obviously, that’s only the first guys and iteration of what we’re doing. We have so much more planned within our roadmap and how we make that, you know, exponentially better for the job seeker. But but that’s what we’re doing. We needed a route to market well, the recruitment of staffing industry is hugely competitive. And I think at first I remember we acquired high virgins. It was like why they bought this small little recruitment agency in the middle of Florida. And now it’s obviously become more apparent why we’re doing it and it was again, on the on the cheese chat and cheese podcast. They’re like they’re forcing the recruiters to use it and it’s like, Well, I wouldn’t use necessarily such aggressive language as forcing there’s no one there with guns at people’s heads just machetes, you know. So

Chris: 15:07

As far as I know everyone wanted to use it from

Arran Stewart: 15:11

everybody want to use them because they want to be part of a digital digital revolution

Chris: 15:16

wants to make your job easier. And that’s really what the technology that we’ve developed is about is making the lives of recruiters easier every day to make

Arran Stewart: 15:25

it easier for Think how many of those processes from job selection to advertising to database searching and matching to then matching and shortlisting screening and scheduling, if all of that is done in a singular streamline process through a domain URL, like job.com, and it’s been done 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and I’m not having to do any of that, as a recruiter, I’m just waiting for good candidates to land in my inbox to do to sorry, my calendar to tell me when I’m going to do a quick 15 minute call with them. That’s that’s pretty cool. Right? But the user experience is exponentially better for the job seeker. And now, I don’t go into that black hole of like, I just applied for a job on, you know, indeed, and I don’t know whether or not I’m going to speak to anyone or I don’t know whether or not they’ve even looked at my resume. I have no idea. I actually know that if my resume doesn’t pass the match that I’m not going any further. I know that if I answer the screener questions wrong at job that I’m not going any further, I know that I’m sheduled if I didn’t make up for it, as I, you know, I’m gonna repeat myself now. But I’m scheduled to talk to Sarah tomorrow, I know that I made it that’s, that is an exponentially better user experience as a minimum viable product.

Chris: 16:37

For the comparison, Uber makes the most sense, right? And, and we’re obviously honing in on that. But the reality is, when when, and look, I never had to experience this because I’m a millennial. But I assume from movies that if you wanted a taxi, you had to stand out on the side of the road in New York and hope that one would stop by with your thumb out in the in there, right. Or maybe you could go to a dial up phone and call them and say, Hey, I need a taxi at this time or whatever. That’s how it works. That’s the same experience a candidate has when they go to a job board, they’re putting their information in, they’re holding their finger out, and they’re hoping that somebody stops, but they may not. And okay, somebody stops, they have no idea what the experience is gonna be like when they get in that car. They don’t know who the driver is. They don’t know if they’re any good or not. And that’s what the technology that we’re developing at job.com does. It allows them to be able to see a recruiter profile, the same as you get an Uber profile, it allows you to see in the future state ratings of said recruiter right and be able to say

Arran Stewart: 17:35

yes, that’s right, which we like we’ve we’ve worked with great recruiters, by the way, plug right in. Yeah, I

Chris: 17:40

can see oh, wait, the recruiter that I’m working with is actually an engineering recruiter, like they only do engineering, recruiting. That’s what I want to be as an engineer. So now I’m talking to somebody that understands my industry. And that is why I think the comparison to Uber makes the most sense, right, is we’re creating an experience that’s great for the end user. But in the end, it actually creates a great experience for the recruiter as well.

Arran Stewart: 18:05

Yep. So I just want to point this out that you did a much better job of explaining this than I did. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna actually hand the baton over to you, Chris in the future. And we like don’t talk to Aaron, because he gets too fluffy on words, because he’s British. And they will try and say, Chris is much better. You did a freaking brilliant job of explaining that. You know,

Chris: 18:27

as co founder. You know that, then you are right.

Arran Stewart: 18:35

Yeah, yeah, exactly. You don’t want to the smartest person in the room, I’m saying are the smartest person on this podcast. So that’s great. But I do want to double click in though because I actually purposely listened to the chat and cheese podcast again, the other day where they kind of talked about our marketing, our positioning the message to the market. And the reality is, is that they will write, you know, they are writing what they said. And, and obviously, you know, when they beat me up on the Uber thing, because I’d only done a rant on LinkedIn and not provided some context behind it. I was like, Okay, well, obviously, I’m not saying that with the Uber for criminal se, but I’m saying this is how that process automated many components ordering a cab. That’s kind of where we’ve gone with the, you know, the recruitment staff inside through a digital platform for a job as a digital staffing platform. So and which again, you know, it’s new terminology is

Chris: 19:30

using to everyone, right, like that’s the problem is that, yeah, we’ve been around for so long, Arran, that there’s it is confusing, like what do you mean a digital staffing? Does it staff those staffing companies use digital processes to find candidates? Sure. Right. But

Arran Stewart: 19:47

they do. They do. But do they do it in a singular URL that represents their business or brand the whole way through? Do they provide do they provide complete transparency for who the client is the whole way through the application process? No, they don’t like like, like our candidates land. And they’ll know that they’re going to beta Scott White. You know, and that’s just you know, that that’s, you know, this this is, this is the difference. These are the fundamental nuances and differences that you’ll see. I mean, eventually, we want to have for salary transparency the whole way through the hiring process, too, because, as we’ve seen the laws change in in, you know, New York State and New York itself. And I think there’s nine other geographies around the US now that game through this transparency piece, you know, we love transparency, right? That’s what we want. I mean, we’re standing hugely promotional now, which is kind of what this this is, I don’t. But I just wanted, you know, for anyone that’s interested that does want to know. And then, of course, except there’s going to be bias from me, because obviously going to have the founder rights, of course, I’m biased. But these are the nuances. These are the differences, that we have a roadmap towards creating a vertically integrated hiring experience that takes you the full way through the journey of hiring to the point that you end up at the company. And in the end, when we redeploy you on assignment, off assignment off assignment, because sometimes I think people forget if they’re not familiar, but like seven, 8 million people moves work in the last 12 months, roughly 66% Those movements are typically internal labor market movement, Ilm. So people moving in existing company. So 34% brand new hires 16 million of that 34%, which basically half are, what more is are from staffing, recruitment agencies, staffing agencies are putting over half the brand new talent into work every year. So it would naturally feel like why is there not an Uber esque Amazon esque digital experience, that is a view on destination URL, there is just taking people from the point of application to the recruiter they’re dealing with to the client, they’re going to be hired by and then forever, redeploying them out in the market, akin to what recruitment staff he is currently do, but digitally, through a digital experience, you know, I don’t go to the store and wander around the store and look for what I want to buy, then go to the cashier and then put it there and they pay it. I just go to Amazon and I do it all digitally. It’s the same thing. I browse I look for I’m looking for I do it much quicker. You know, it’s this is the same process automation for what would normally be a bricks and mortar heavy, clunky process. Good news Arran,

Chris: 22:32

you mentioned that you thought we were selling too much the talent tide podcast represented by job.com. So you can sell as much as you want to, you’re paying for this time.

Arran Stewart: 22:44

Job.com is a hate or technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform and talent solutions on the market. Our mission at job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process. Wow. Well, I’m hoping like, you know, when we share this that you know, people do listen, if they’re interested to learn more. And actually just to give some kudos back to SIA, by the way, so because I had a proper random them a moment. Firstly, John, who’s sia personally, who’s actually a friend as well, he reached out to me with a huge email explaining, you know why there might be a misconception in the market what we need to do to do it. And it was a really, really depth thought out feedback to me, and it made me feel bad. They actually made me feel bad for my rant. So if SIA, have you listened to this, I’m sorry. Because John was

Chris: 23:42

so directly to the folks that say, Hey, let’s send it to

Arran Stewart: 23:45

John. John is a really nice, so they’re all really nice, actually SIA. And the reason why I bet and I was annoyed is because I know that their strategy behind having first content news to market for SEO to be the beacon of knowledge in the industry, stuff like that, which they are, but they have worked with us and me for some time. And I was annoyed that the opening gambit was job board. I was like you. Yeah, I was like, you know, that is not what we are. So mutually, I think we can all agree that they definitely realize we’re not and they do. And but same time. Maybe I shouldn’t have maybe I shouldn’t have been so brutal with my response, but it frustrated me because, you know, I want them to remain this beacon of knowledge in the industry. So they have to go above and beyond to make sure whatever information they release to the market is accurate. Okay, because they’re not the consumer. They’re not like if, if a candidate called us a job board, if a person in HR called us a job board, if a person hiring managerjob as a recruiter because I completely understand but the voice of the industry who’s going to be on the post of this stuff like when they called eightfold AI chatbot it was like, you know, it was it was not cool, but I do I’m sorry, SIA because you did write me hugely long at The Nation and I want to be with them at the CWs. And the gig economy piece thing in Dallas, I got to see him face to face, you know?

Chris: 25:10

each other accountable. Right? So that’s really what is being accountability partner. So well, let’s keep this thing rolling. Because we could talk on this all day. And this was my concern with bringing Arran Stewart on is that he and I would talk throughout and not get anything accomplished. So we made to do, yeah, we’re probably gonna start a daily a daily thing here. So we can just get all of the things out that we want to say. So why did you come to America?

Arran Stewart: 25:38

Good question. That you Okay, well, let’s talk about the we can get into some truth as well. Because it’s always sunshine and rainbows and stuff like that, right? I came to America because we have reached a point with my job matter which that’s what it was at the time, right? Where it was like, Where does this business go? there been some fundamental changes with GDPR in the European Union, and then also been some fundamental changes with what was called universal job match. So anyone in the UK that’s an industry will know exactly what I’m talking about. But basically, the government’s website for reaching unemployed people in the United Kingdom told us that we could no longer use that to reach those users. Because it was I think, kind of classes anti competitive, which is just the UK all over. So now you can’t reach people who are unemployed with jobs. So that’s anti competitive. It’s like, yeah, whoever made that up is a genius. So But nonetheless, it may trading and growing in the UK, and already a small market, tiny market next to us, just not as appealing. And you’ve got to look at, I will spend just as much time there trying to grow the vision of what we’re doing as I will in the in the United States, but the US, USA is just a, you know, a bigger, more affluent, more, adopting more, it’s just a better market. You know, I’ve lived and breathed in both. And I can tell you, this one is a better market, it just is. So that was the business case. The personal case, I want is a new opportunity for my family and my children. Okay, I grew up in a really ghetto part of the United Kingdom, actually, if share the article voted the worst place to live in the whole of the UK. So it I can’t remember the name of your you don’t have to do is put in this code. It was it was just called the Endo. They call it the end of humanity. Luton Town. That was the article, right? I grew up in that and I grew up in a worse part. My wife and I both grew up in the worst part of it, right, we’ve made up all of our lives. And we weren’t living there then and after. But I just had like relationships and historical memories, and just things of that nature to do with my life there that I was just very comfortable closing a chapter on and saying, You know what, I want to live the American dream. And I want to go to a place where I can nestle myself in a lovely little suburban bubble, which I have here in Lakeway, in Austin, and I can raise my kids that way. And I’m delighted to tell you everything I thought that would happen around that actually did. And we have a beautiful neighborhood. We have a beautiful home that we built. My kids are so happy at their school, my wife has met her lifelong best friend here now who they’re just like that Aaron, Jenny. And I’m really happy I made that leap. The only thing that wasn’t good, which was the most challenging thing of my life as we were trying to create this new world for ourselves. My new life, my family was my eldest daughter is not my wife’s, okay, I had her my ex relationship. And at the time, she did not live with me. I had her every weekend, we had gone through several, you know, fairly lengthy court decisions and battles with her, her mother and I wished by the way, her mother’s a brilliant mother, were great friends, but it’s just sometimes when you’re trying to go through those circumstances, you know, disagreements can happen. Okay. But we’ve gone through some fairly lengthy court battles, I’ve managed to gain, you know, be have access, retain again. And then maybe a few months after that final battle, you know, I had to then sit her down and very mind was so close and tell her that I was going to move to America. And it was the hardest conversation I ever had to have in anything in my life. And, you know, she asked me she never see me again, which obviously just broke me down in tears as a father. And you know, the first year I flew 132,000 Miles flying back and forth to pick her up for school holidays and just to see her and stuff like that. It was really tough. But as it transpired, because of the beautiful American dream, and the beautiful place that we live, and the wonderful people that live here. My daughter also fell in love with what America has to offer. And she moved with us and aim fell in our custody in 2020. So, you know, it all beautifully worked out in the end and I was so grateful to the universe for that happening. So yeah, that’s that’s why I moved to America there’s a challenges but actually thank God it turned out really really good for us you know, there’s a saying in the UK right there’s a TV show called Only Fools and Horses and it would be a real like cockney guy talk like that and me like he who dares rodders He Who dares right and that’s kind of what always goes in my mind anyone that knows the UK and knows Only Fools and Horses will know exactly what I’m talking about very well common thing UK but he who dares Rodders he who dares. So And definitely we did and it worked out good.

Chris: 30:49

We will be putting the YouTube link in the in the podcast notes at the end of the show for that. Hey, guys, my new hashtag that might be jumped out comms new hashtag.

Arran Stewart: 31:04

He Well, we have to make sure it’s inclusive. So we

Chris: 31:08

might not do? Whoever? Yeah, whoever does? Yeah, who can make it? I’m on board with that. Yeah. You know how jeff.com came to be? We’ve covered how you got to the greatest nation on Earth. And it’s true.

Arran Stewart: 31:27

I agree with I agree with so

Chris: 31:29

how do we Where’s job.com? Going? What what I mean, obviously, there are misconceptions about what it is today. But let’s let’s kind of wrap up here with with word job.com goes from here. What is what is it?

Arran Stewart: 31:43

Well, we we finished this sort of first iteration process automate, the first component of a recruitment consultants desk and a job seekers experience which is job goes out to market talent lands on the job reads it loves it can see which recruiter is working on it and who they’d be assigned to. They apply shortlist match screen shedule but then that bits done. But then the bit that needs to be done after that is all of the feedback loop and creating a beautiful image and timeline for the candidate that says this is where you are, you’ve been submitted to the client, you know, this is their feedback, or this is when your interview is with the client or you are successful or not successful or the negotiation piece. And then if you get hired than a piece after that, which is Hey, thanks, Aaron for being in your job for the last six months you’re coming to you and your assignment, we found another great opportunity for you. You can go forward for this. Basically creating what I would call my career, you no excuses of terminology, but almost concierge, something that just stays with me, right? If I sign up to job.com, why would I ever not want to be on it? It puts me into great roles. It puts me in touch with a human force anywhere else. I always know where I am in the hiring process. And I can, you know, consistently find myself new opportunities and know exactly who I’m going to work for which recruiter I’m dealing with and have transparency on my salary, all these extra things that just provide a much better experience, end to end. That’s that’s the sort of nearest and dearest didn’t you know, crudest of experiences that, you know, we continue to build out and make better? We have a huge vision, which we’ll see. Because I’m you know, I don’t like to do things by halves, but I will. Yeah, and I’ve talked about this in the past. I’ve been talking about this for five years, but it’s around the standardization of information. You know, we’ve got hundreds of recruiters a job that calm that are validating humans and credentialing humans every day to get them into companies. And there are hundreds of 1000s of recruiters doing this every day for 16 million people being placed into work every year by the staffing agencies, there is not a single source of truth behind someone’s career history anywhere. Okay, that’s on a framework that we’re all willing to adhere to, or what would be classed as a Cooperative Governance Framework. Okay. We have done an extensive amount of patents around this continue to do a huge amount of patents into the future for this, which is to create a single source of truth by citing someone’s credit history and objective quantitative based, did Aaron work I resource it yes or no? Did Aaron get this degree? Yes or no? Did he get this grade? Yes or no? information that can be forever crystallized. And you know, we’re all about blockchain. Right? And we’ve had people were like, oh, it’s blockchain, because they’re using a gimmick work. No, we, I mean, some of our patents are hugely extensive in utilization of that technology and why we believe that a single source of truth by someone’s career history, there’s only one other area in our lives that we’re used to having a single source of truth and that’s in our credit score. We allow that to a date that like you know, we’re dear to that with everything from our car loans to our houses, to our mortgages, etc. This this think of this as a credit score for your career. And it’s something that everyone in industry would adhere to as a single source of truth behind you. It sounds hugely ambitious. But I feel that there are many players out there in the market, I think that are also looking to do this trying to do this. The piece where I think that we have a competitive advantage to doing over others is that one, we are consumer facing digital experience running high volumes of candidates through a process, which allow us to gain this single source of truth data over everyone else and to we are seriously patenting the life out of this. And and I think we’ve got, you know, not to reveal the secret sauce, but I think we’ve probably got the jump on most people when it comes to doing this stuff. And that’s, I want job.com to become the home of someone’s career history. That’s what I want it to be for them. If 60 million Americans are going through the route of recruitment and staffing, then that’s a big enough populace of data. That means we can become the home of where people manage their career. So

Chris: 35:55

you’re talking about that. And I think most people initially say, everybody’s a little bit closer to their data than they’ve ever been before in history, right? There’s, there’s concern about who does what with data, but maybe how do you quell fears of humans that are worried about their data? And what it means to have your data in a centralized place? Like we’re talking about here?

Arran Stewart: 36:22

Yeah, so So, again, so let’s make sure we use sort of terminology. So single source of truth on a decentralized service system, right, which is blockchain. So yeah, why why would I do that? Well, we’ve all become pretty, you know, credit score came out in 89. And I know most humans that are concerned about their lives, their careers, their their financial health, they adhere to the framework of making sure that they have a great credit score, because it allows them to live their lives the way that they want to. But the moment most studies show that 78 to 85 percent of candidates lie in their resume during the hiring process. And and that’s gamification is causing issues when it comes to the time it takes to validate someone really, if they were who they said they were when you place them into a company, retention. Some of those, some of that misinformation might be like, Oh, I cycled three times a week. And it’s like, no, you don’t have that peloton in your garage is a bloody close hanger, okay? And that’s fine, who cares? It doesn’t really make any difference. But it might be a bit of senior developer at such and such. And actually, you will know more than a junior or some, some of this more significant will the fears for a person as well, the people that really will not want it will be the ones that know that they’re providing misinformation, okay, because anybody that can see the writing on the wall that providing a validated profile for yourself to streamline your onboarding, your hiring, if I could tell you that average time to hire in the United States is roughly 42 days. And if you have this profile, and skip all of this stuff that we have to do, you can be an actual 10 days earlier than normal. That’s a game changer for people. That’s a real game changer. And I think that’s something that we want for candidates and clients. Because as we become more and more digital in the future, change the tiny accountability on achievements and accolades, our meritocracy is going to become more and more essential, as we start to become more and more digitalized in our day to day lives. I know you Chris, as a person personally, if I’ve never met you before, and you’re only digital, like most things are now becoming digital, it becomes really difficult to really know if I can trust you, if you are, who you say you are, and stuff like that. So creating this digital accountability version of ourselves in the hiring process, I almost believe it’s just an inevitable, it’s inevitable

Chris: 38:55

how transparency is a good thing. And I think that, you know, both companies and candidates probably initially will ask the question, but why would I want this? And I think of it as this way, look, we’re becoming a much more transient workforce, right? Like, people move around. So as a company, you want to have accurate verified data on candidates, because the likelihood that you’re keeping them around for 25 or 30 years is probably not going to happen. Maybe less than 1% of your workforce right now will be there with you in 20 years. Right. Like that’s just the new age of hiring. And on the candidate side, I think unless they work at fortus healthcare, that everyone stays there forever. Jeremy? Yeah. On the candidate side, it’s about I think most candidates want a fair shot, right. And we see so much of the hiring process being referrals, right, like, Oh, I know that person. Yeah. And that’s their way of verifying that we should hire them. And what we’re saying is, what if it’s not about who you know, but it’s about what you’ve done. And I think when we talk about the American dream and the American way, I think too often we get, we get stuck in the idea of, it’s about working, we say that it’s about working hard. But the reality is unfortunate. A lot of times, it’s about who you know. And what we’re trying to do is trying to help break down the barriers, trying to make it a more inclusive environment for everybody. We want it to be about what you’ve done, what your experiences have been. And I think that at the core is who, you know, we realistically want to present ourselves to the market as

Arran Stewart: 40:33

Yeah, I mean, I agree with every word, and you actually touched on something there as well about removing the who, you know, because who, you know, actually also has, you know, diversity barriers, right, there are major diversity barriers on the who, you know, piece, you know, does that young African American guys know, the Caucasian guys that work at Morgan Stanley? Absolutely, you know, not saying that Morgan Stanley is all like that, but finance is typical for that, right. And just getting people in based on their validated merits, you know, and, and I think that that’s, that’s something. So that’s really the future for what we’re trying to do. That’s something that we’re investing heavily and hedged heavily against, with our IP and patents and strategy. And, you know, I’m kind of very much looking forward to seeing that someone’s gonna do it, right, someone’s gonna do, I believe that we will, I believe we will become that I think we’ve got, we start really heavily marketing job.com to the consumer, which is sort of on the cards. latter part of next year, we’ve stealthed our way to where we’re at, right? A lot of people are like, what are they done? Who are they raised? Who have they got behind them? And we’ve kind of done that a little bit on purpose because there’s a big competitors out there who are definitely thinking about what we’re doing right now. And we know that they are because they release platforms to do it and then they sunset them you know, like indeed hire you know, it’s on the minds and lips of everyone look at hired part of look at very part of adeco. You know, people are thinking about what we’re doing. I think paying kudos if they do listen, I think the other people in the industry who are very admirable, who are doing similar things, what we’re doing sort of, there is a difference is job bot. I think those guys I mean, that woman Heidi, who’s CEO there, she’s like proper, she’s like a culture queen, like and they don’t, she’s great, isn’t she man, I get excited looking, I want to work at job bot. I want to go there, I want to get I want to go on their trips. So they so but nonetheless, you know, it’s it’s, it’s it’s good. You know, they’re a good company. But I think the market is going that way. I think more and more competitors are coming into the market. I believe that job.com has what it takes to be to be honest. It’s got Arran and Chris, you know, which is always you know, to bald guides. To be fair, we’re missing the third ball guy on this Paul Sloyan, so and then yeah, so we could be like the picture of the coneheads. Or to go. This is what working at job.com does.

Chris: 43:06

It gives you the gray ones in your face. This is a perfect segue because we just started getting into recruitment technology. And I think this is a good place to wrap up part one. And part two, we can really get into what the future of recruiting is how it’s going to change. How we help modernize recruiting, right. So this is my little like, ticket for part two, like come back and listen. But Arran, I’m really glad that we got to do this finally. Finally, yeah, so

Arran Stewart: 43:37

listen, he kept me waiting. He kept me waiting long enough that it felt you know, it felt meaningful. You know, I don’t feel like an author for I feel I feel appropriate. And also as promotional. Promotional as this has been, which hopefully people that have listened to have also enjoyed learning a little bit more about us. I think you know, it’s good. I’ve enjoyed being on the podcast.

Chris: 43:59

Glad you were here. And that’s a wrap on another episode of the talent tide podcast. We’ll see you soon. And remember, success is on the other side of fear. Talk to you soon.

September 27, 2022

Back to the Talent Tide Podcast

Description

In this episode, Chris talks to Steven Rothberg, Founder and CVO at College Recruiter, Inc, about how companies can find the right candidates for the job.  Chris and Steven discuss topics such as programmatic job ad buying, pay-per-click and other pay-for-performance pricing models, and high volume hiring.

About Steven Rothberg

Rothberg’s entrepreneurial spirit was evident from an early age. Disciplined in fifth grade for selling candy during math class and in college for running a massive fantasy hockey league, he managed to channel his passions into something more productive after graduate school.

A fully recovered lawyer, Rothberg founded the business that morphed into College Recruiter and now, as its Chief Visionary Officer, help to create and refine the company’s strategy and leads its business development efforts.

Rothberg has been widely quoted by local, regional, national and international media including NBC Nightly News, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show, U.S. News & World Report, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, FOX & Friends, and CNN. He kept hearing that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so he co-founded and am the co-host of the JobBoardGeek Podcast, the only podcast about the business of connecting candidates and employers.

Rothberg was named by Mashable as one of the 20 top people for job seekers to follow on Twitter, Fast Company magazine as a “Top 50 online influencer”, LinkedIn as having a profile in the top one percent most viewed, and TAtech as one of the top 100 influencers in the talent acquisition industry.

Transcript

Chris: 0:18

Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have Steven Rothberg, a recovered lawyer and job board visionary. We’ll be discussing how we how companies get better at finding the right talent. Steve, it’s great to have you on. You are a very unique guest to the podcast. We haven’t spent a lot of time together, but I’m very much looking forward to today’s episode.

Steven Rothberg: 0:52

Yeah, this should be fun. And I’ve been called a lot of things in my life unique is probably one of

Chris: 0:56

Good, I’m glad we’re starting off on the right foot. the best. So you, you go to your LinkedIn profile, which I encourage all of our listeners to do because I’m a big proponent of LinkedIn. So go check out Steven there, but you have a lot of different job titles, a lot of things going on. You’ve been in around the job board industry for a while now. You’ve seen a lot of change, I believe. Why don’t you tell us about your background and how you got to where you are today? Yeah,

Steven Rothberg: 1:28

sure. So I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, right smack dab in the middle knew from the age of 13, that I either wanted to go east, probably Toronto or Montreal, West, probably Vancouver or south. Any one of those would have meant warmer winter. So I’m probably the only person who has ever moved to Minnesota for the weather. And if anybody has been to Minneapolis, where I live in January, and they think about me moving here for the weather, then that’ll tell them what Winnipeg is like in January so. So I went to came to Minneapolis for grad school. Graduated was working in my first year. And the sort of the lure of starting or joining a small business really pulled me started a business in 91, which is 31 years ago. And basically what it was doing for the first few years was publishing campus maps, selling advertising around the borders, to restaurants, retailers, etc. gave away the maps to the schools for free the University of Minnesota and some other schools. And then added an additional product a couple of years later. An employment magazine, which had ads in it from local employers regional couple of nationals like United Parcel Service, etc. And gave those magazines to College Career Service Offices for free. There were four different regionalised versions across the country. And the magazine was called college recruiter, because at that time, the people who were in charge of the college and university recruiting departments, for the large employers, the most common job title was college recruiter. And then this thing called the internet came along. So 1996, we went live with the first version of our website. And it was literally just supposed to be the sizzle that would help sell the steak that employers would buy ads in the magazine, we would run the same ads on the website, they would think that’s going to be the next silver bullet. Because there’s always another silver bullet coming, whether it’s AI or blockchain or whatever, it’s gonna programmatic or whatever it might be. But at that point, it was just the internet. I mean, it was it was an era where of the Fortune 500 Only 50 had websites and of the 50, only five had career sites and none of those five had a searchable job database. They didn’t have an ATS or anything along those lines. It was very much in its infancy, you’d go to their website, if you could find a career page it would usually say we’re hiring for and give you some bullet points. And if you’re interested, fax your resume to that was that’s what that’s what employer websites were in 1996. Flash forward to today. So College Recruiter helps about 7 million students and recent grads a year find basically any kind of job that requires zero to three years of experience, part time seasonal internship entry level, about a year and a half ago, we went global. So we are helping students and recent grads around the world. The businesses is still pretty tilted to the US, but we’re growing pretty rapidly and Canada, the UK, Europe and then other countries are coming as well. And now I think accelerated because of COVID. We also have employees in other countries. We’ve got a couple of people in Nigeria we’ve got a person in the Philippines and it’s it’s So we’re we’re pretty small, but we’ve got kind of a neat little global outlook.

Chris: 5:06

That’s, that’s very cool. I almost interrupted you. Because when you mentioned that there’s websites out there that want you to fax the resume, I’m gonna be honest. I’ve had a few clients that have come to us for help. And I went to their career site, and they said, email us your resume. Yeah, we’d be happy to talk to you. And it’s like, Oh, my goodness. Like, that is just not good. Yeah.

Steven Rothberg: 5:29

So if you’ve got a seven person company, and you’ve got a link there, you know, resumes at XYZ corp.com. Fine. Right. But if you’re looking to hire dozens or hundreds a year, get an ATS.

Chris: 5:42

Absolutely. There’s, there’s options for all sizes of companies out there. Now, there’s no reason to try to filter through emails and hope that somebody finds it. And they’re just, there’s options for every company out there at this point. Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned them. So what a transition I love this story, because it shows your entrepreneurial mindset to shift from what basically started as campus map, which probably are very valuable in Minnesota, because people were trying to figure out how to get to class as quickly as possible. And around what the the, the 10 months of winter that you all have hush and so it’s not

Steven Rothberg: 6:25

10 months, you’re grossly exaggerating, it could be more than nine and a half.

Chris: 6:29

And then you you transition from from from print to digital platform, and then onto a job board. I think that’s really cool. And it shows your foresight and looking ahead, and you’ve continued to, to own a space. And so the job boards space is one that is dominated, historic had been dominated historically by one to two players at the top. And then there’s always been, you know, dozens, if not hundreds, more, whether they are local, to certain markets, you know, say Miami jobs.com, or niche to certain types of of jobs. So travel, travel nursing.com. And then there is college recruiter, right. And so we have all these different types. So if you don’t mind, I’d love for you to provide an overview of the job or industry because I think it’s something that we we narrow our focus down very specifically into what we think job boards are. And I’d love to hear from somebody that’s been in it for the better part of two decades to understand what it looks like.

Steven Rothberg: 7:38

Yeah, sure, no, great question, Chris. And I and I agree with you whether the your sort of your view of it, it lines up very much with with mine. So 20 years ago, you had what was called the Big Three, you had monster, you had CareerBuilder, and you had hot jobs. And then hot jobs kind of was folded in and disappeared and came alive again and fold it in again. And whatever. It was a little bit like a prairie dog it kept poking its head up the early not early 2000s. Were was an era online, not specifically to job boards, but just for sites like Google, where they began to popularize pay per click. And in the job board space, traditionally Pay Per Click was where the candidate would see the posting on the job board, click the Apply button and go over to the employer site to apply when Google popularized that for consumer advertising, advertising a product services, even educational opportunities, it took a while for the job boards to embrace that the first one that did that really embraced it that really popularized it is now the dominant player. And that’s indeed, so when I look at the job board space now, I don’t see monster CareerBuilder and certainly not hot jobs at the top. But I do see indeed, LinkedIn. And then there are some some other big general job boards out there too. But those are those are definitely the big market leaders. Then you have like you were saying a bunch of niche sites. And it could be a niche in a geographic area. It can be a niche in an occupational field. It can be a niche with years of experience or education like us. So in our space in in sort of the early career. Some might call it college or university niche. You’ve got sites like college recruiter, way up is is another site. They were merged into yellow, I think about a year ago at this time. There are some other sites out like simplicity and handshake which operate basically job boards for individual College Career Service offices. And so employers that are that are looking to hire a lot of people across maybe a lot of different occupational fields are generally very well served by advertising those positions on the big general sites on eating and deeds of the world. Or on the LinkedIn ads, they’re generally well served depending on how many people they’re looking to hire, and the level of those people like how many years of experience or the kind of role with doing resume searching, which would be LinkedIn. Some people will say that LinkedIn is a social media site. I’ve never felt that way. LinkedIn has always generated the vast majority of its revenues, from talent acquisition, basically, profile searching and job postings. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. Other sites that generate the same revenues are called job boards, I’m not quite sure how LinkedIn isn’t. But in my mind, they’re, they’re a job board, they’re a heck of a lot more of like a job board than they are like a Facebook. And so when I’m talking to a candidate, or I’m talking to an employer, and they say, what sites should I use, what it generally comes down to, in my mind is usually three, maybe four different sites. If you’re an employer, and you’re looking to hire a bunch of, let’s say, early career, mechanical engineers in Miami, Florida, you’re probably going to be well served by advertising those on a big general site, and indeed a LinkedIn. Maybe also using resume the resume searching aspect of those sites. Also geographically focused sites, a Miami jobs or some site along those lines, and then an engineering site. And then if their early career, a handshake, a simplicity, a college recruiter, a site like that, that’s going to target those people at the early in their career. There comes the question to of scale. So there’s a huge difference, Chris, in my mind, between an employer who’s looking to hire maybe one or two people every few months, versus an employer that’s looking to hire dozens, hundreds, maybe even 1000s, that the tools that you use when you’re doing high volume hiring, are really different than if you’re just looking for the occasional person here, or the occasional person there.

Chris: 12:35

Why don’t we go there, that I’m interested in hearing your perspective on that, because we, you know, we have listeners from, you know, companies with 25 to 100 employees, and we have companies that are clients of ours and listeners to the podcast with 10,000. Plus, yeah, and so they’re hiring hundreds, if not 1000s themselves every year. And so I often find most companies have one large subgroup of jobs that they likely hire a lot. Most years, most companies don’t have, you know, 10% of these jobs, 10% of those, there’s usually some type of job that takes up the majority of the roles that they’re filling, but maybe talk a little bit about the different strategies that you would use, based upon your years of experience in the industry. If you put your if you put a different hat on if you put a chro or a VP of TAS hat on. Yeah. Or CEO of small business. Yeah,

Steven Rothberg: 13:30

yeah, that that employer with with small hiring needs, which tends to mean that they’re a small employer, but not always, sometimes you can have an if you’ve got a restaurant with 25 employees, and you’ve got massive turnover, you know, you’ve got 400% turnover, which actually isn’t all that unusual, then you’re always hiring for a bunch of people, you might not always have an opening today. But you know, within the next three or four days, you’re going to have a couple people quit. And so you are in that case, hiring at scale hiring and high volume. So if you’re just looking for a person here or a person there, it’s rarely going to be worth it to invest money in some kind of like real high volume tool, whether it’s online assessments, whether it’s a really robust enterprise level ATS, whether it’s something like programmatic where your job postings are automatically going out to maybe dozens or hundreds of different sites, probably paying on a per click basis, you’re probably going to get the volume that you need by posting a job to an indeed, a LinkedIn, maybe a couple of niche sites. So you might spend hundreds of dollars posting your ad, and you’ll probably get the response that you need to hire that person here or there for the employers that are hiring at scale. At that’s really different. Because at that point, you simply don’t have enough time in the day. What when I’m talking to an employer about hiring at scale, what I’ll typically say to them to sort of frame the conversation is, if you’re looking to hire one person, for a typical early career, kind of a role of general have somebody with zero to three years of experience, you probably only need five qualified applications or resumes. But if you’re looking to hire 100, people, you might need 500. If you’re looking to hire 1000 people, right, I mean, the numbers just keep going up and up, it’s really different to post a job to and getting, you get five good applications and maybe 10 that aren’t, versus posting an ad, and getting hundreds of applications, you need to be able to scale that your time now is far more important than the money you have. You can get economies of scale, you can post that job in a lot of places, and you need to automate. So one of the things that I’ve seen in the last couple of years, that’s very encouraging to me, is that more and more employers who are hiring at scale, are using a lot of automation, to make that experience better for the candidate that can tell the candidate right away, you don’t meet our minimum qualifications, right? You are awesome. But you’re in Bangladesh, and you’re a citizen of Bangladesh, and this job requires a security clearance and you’re going to be working in DC, sorry, under no circumstances can we hire you, you should tell that candidate that right away. The other thing that I’m seeing a lot of with automation are assessments, they’ve become a lot better. When I was a lot younger, Myers Briggs, and some personality tests like that kind of dominated, they were never scientifically validated, they opened up a lot of employers to a lot of legal exposure. And the new assessments are much better, because they’ve been scientifically validated, they actually can predict your productivity in the workplace. One of the other things I love about about the use of assessments is that they surface candidates that you otherwise might have ignored. So I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we were hiring for a full stack developer. And for the first time, we used an assessment at the front end of that process, we didn’t interview any candidate until they had gone through the assessment. So every single candidate that applied went through the assessment. And what we found were the top candidates that on paper, we thought would be the best ended up assessing the worst. And the candidates that we looked at, it’s like, how can you possibly have thought that you’d be qualified for this role, some of them assessed the best because they didn’t have the degree, they didn’t go to a certain school, they didn’t have a certain job title in their past. But what they did have was the ability to do the work. And so we ended up interviewing people that we otherwise we absolutely would have rejected. Now, employers that are hiring at scale can do that really efficiently. Because those assessments can be pretty pricey. But when you start to spread that across hiring a lot of different people for a lot of different roles, all of a sudden the cost drops to like $1 per person. And if you can’t spend $1, on a bunch of candidates that you might be looking to hire, it’s like, you shouldn’t be in the high volume game. So assessments also allow you to reach out to candidates that don’t fit your stereotypical hire. So if you’ve always hired Yeah, I think generationally, right. The world of recruiting from, say, the same 12 schools, and the same two majors, everybody that you’re hiring looks the same both, you know, gender and skin color, but also just the kinds of classes they’ve taken, the professors they’ve had the textbooks they’ve used, so everybody thinks the same. By using assessments, you’re really diversifying your workforce. And every study that looks at that the more diverse a workforce, the more productive that workforce is. So I’m, I’m a big believer that the technology has now finally caught up to high scale to high volume hiring. And that when I still see employers really struggling to retain that workforce, and you start to pardon, you scratch the surface a little bit. A lot of times it comes down to them seals still using the same process and the same tools as they were 20 years ago, and wondering why they’re not getting different results. So It’s encouraging. There’s sort of a whole new breed of talent acquisition, people that are a lot more data driven, and looking much more at not for just filling seats or going to the same schools or going to the same career fairs. But actually looking at the productivity, where did we get our best candidates from? In terms of who’s the most productive employee? Not who’s the least costly to hire? And that’s where I think talent acquisition is made huge strides in the last few years. to it really took off in the early 2000s, the same the same time that job boards started to grab hold, too, right. And so companies historically didn’t have talent acquisition teams, or let alone talent acquisition leadership, right? It was just kind of funneled under HR, some people now have to do that job. Because we have so much volume, somebody needs to do it, we’ll call them a recruiter. Yeah. And so you have a group of people that came up, who have finally got taught themselves primarily, right how to do talent acquisition. So you have individuals that are now senior enough that had been in the industry, quote, unquote, for 1520 25 years now that have some foresight, whereas in say, 1998, it was a much more segmented part of most companies, it was probably a manufacturing facility out in Warsaw, Indiana, was hiring for themselves in Warsaw, Indiana, with no corporate oversight, no structure, etc. So how, in your mind, I think people get lost on the purpose of job boards. And they, in my mind, you mentioned the word Silver Bullet earlier, I believe sometimes we look to job boards to be a silver bullet. What is your percent perception of what the purpose of a job board is, within the funnel of talent acquisition? Love the question, and I’m gonna give you a weird analogy, a job board is a bus. So what job boards have always been well designed for is bringing candidates to your door. But once the candidate gets to your door for a larger employer, that’s your ATS, a smaller employer, it could be your Facebook page where you’ve got like a button that they can apply through. But we can deliver candidates that are pretty well targeted to your door. And no further, once they’re at your door, once they’re once they’re on your site. At that point, you take over. So you have to have a page or section on your site, perhaps an ATS. That is that is good at getting, getting rid of the candidates that aren’t well qualified, right, in a good way, in uh, you know, not telling them to like, you know, go to hell. But allowing those people to self opt out, so that they understand what you’re looking for, and that they opt out of the process, preferably before they even start to apply. And then in a good assessment does that you they can see immediately that they are not well qualified for that role. And so they don’t end up applying, if you put the assessment up at the front, the art, the website also needs to be really good at converting candidates who are well qualified, especially those who have not yet been convinced that they want to work for you. So a lot of times the best candidates are somewhat passive. I’m not a big believer in candidates being active or passive, right? I mean, Chris, if your boss is awesome to you this morning, you’re going to be more passive. But you show up at work this afternoon, and your boss is just a total jerk. You’re all of a sudden going to be pretty active. If you are married, and everything is going well and stable and whatever, and things are good. You might be more willing to consider a new career opportunity because you’ve got more bandwidth. But you know, you have a new baby, you’re going through a divorce, you’ve got you know, a close relative who’s really sick, all of a sudden you’re gonna be more passive. You just don’t have the bandwidth. It has nothing to do with your qualifications. So when a kid when a job board delivers that candidate or candidates to your doorstep, it’s on the employer to then convinced the well qualified by candidates to apply, and the poorly qualified candidates not to, or show them a different role that they’re better suited for, you’re not well qualified for this sales role, but you are well qualified for this customer service role. So why don’t you apply to that? When the candidate has applied at that point, all the metrics are on the employer side, the how many of them are interviewed, how many get offers, etc, the biggest difference that we see, I mean, we work with 1000s of employers, the biggest differences that we see employer to employer, which ones are happy, which ones aren’t, the are the employers that have a well thought out candidate friendly hiring experience. So we work with one employer, a fast food company, that it’s taking them, I think they told me 22 days to go from the point of application to the point of a job offer. So over three weeks for fast food, they’re unhappy, and they’re complaining about job boards being terrible, and they can’t find any higher candidate candidates that want to work for them. And whatever, we work for another work with another fast food company almost the same, I mean, you’d pull up at the drive thru window, and you wouldn’t be able to distinguish the food too much, unless you’re a fast food aficionado. And they’ve got like a seven day hiring process. Well, guess who is filling all their seats, guess who is happy Guess who’s getting a really good return on their investment, when they’re advertising a role? It’s not about the pay, they’re both paying about the same. It’s not the industry, it’s not the location, it’s the hiring process. And the job board has nothing to do with that. That’s all on the employer side. That’s a VP of talent acquisition, who has said, we need to make this as good as possible for the candidate. Because if we wait 22 days, they’re going to be employed someplace else. And so no wonder they’re gonna ghost us.

Chris: 27:05

That’s it from being an active company, and a passive company, right? I mean, when you when you think about that same analogy applied to organizations, I could not agree more, you have to know your, you have to know the talent that you’re trying to attract. And you have to understand what their needs are. Because if you don’t, you’re never going to attract them in the kind of in the droves that you would like for them to be there. You need fast hiring processes. If you’re in, you know, high volume environments, like fast. Yep. But you know, what, if I’m an accounting firm, I might need to slow that process down to make sure that we’re finding the right cultural fit the right type of person that can grow and develop around the people that we have, etc. And so we get so stuck on metrics. And then we all assume that all the metrics are the same for all of us time to hire. Yeah, go look up on Google recruitment metrics, and time to hire always comes up first. But the reality is, every position is different in your organization. So A, you probably shouldn’t be getting an aggregate number for that data, right? Because it’s going to take us, you’re going to have outliers, like hiring VPS, or executives that you’re going to want to spend more time with. And those numbers are going to offset numbers that aren’t relative of the fact that maybe you know what we’re hiring people in 15 days, we have these 15 jobs that we filled at a senior level, that hat that took 180 days that are causing significant moves and changes. And so one of my Pastor Steve O’Brien, who’s now at syneos, health, he used to [email protected]. And I do a presentation called your strategy sucks. And we talk about stuff like this, right, like, strategy is, is tactical, likely you don’t have to have a real strategy because you’re reactive to the market and the situations that you have. And so you talked about a couple of things with regards to passive versus active. You’re so right about the difference in how we approach those individuals and how finicky they can be. I maybe I’m not active at all, but a recruiter sent me a message today on LinkedIn and said, Hey, we believe that you’re worth we have this job that we believe is worth 20% More than the salary that you’re making today. Well, that’s interesting, because I got a 3% bonus last or a 3% Raise last month on my annual review, these people are saying I wasn’t looking but now I am. And it has nothing to do with really like my management or anything. But you know what? It’s proven that if we job hop, we make a lot more money. Yep. And so there’s all these elements that play into that and it’s it comes back to understanding the people that you have on your team and understanding what makes them tick. Who’s looking at them how they line up in the industry.

Unknown: 29:54

job.com is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform in talent solutions on the market admission a job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.

Chris: 30:12

As we talked about assessment, which you’ve talked a lot about today, Steven, yeah, assessments can be a blocker in the recruitment process, as well as, you know, a nice additive. And so, especially in this environment today with a lot of jobs in the market, if I’m looking for a job, and I see an assessment, I might choose to skip over that. So and go to go to go to an easier path of resistance, less resistance. So can you talk about the right time to use an assessment, maybe the different types of assessment that you could potentially use? Any any insight on that?

Steven Rothberg: 30:47

Yeah, absolutely. So like everything else, not all assessments are built equally, right? I mean, you’ve got some really great assessments out there, you’ve got some really bad assessments out there. One thing that very few organizations do when they ask a candidate, not even an applicant, to get to go through an assessment, very few organizations explain to that candidate, why they’re going through the assessment, and how that’s going to be used, and what to expect. So if you were to tell a candidate ahead of time, that we put the assessment ahead of the application, because we’re more concerned about what you’re going to do for us than what you did for other organizations. Explain that, that that the work that you’re going to do for us over the coming years, is what is driving our hiring decision. And the best way for us to predict that is through this three minute assessment, and tell them, it’s three minutes. Now, if you put a fast food worker through a 45 minute assessment, I don’t care how much you explain it to them, they’re not going to stick around, you put a CFO through a 45 minute assessment, she’s probably going to stick around, if she knows that, that’s actually going to be evaluating her ability to do the job in your environment. The other thing is tell them right up front, not after I see this a lot after is this is this is what your assessment showed, these are the areas that you could improve upon, these are the areas this is how we’re going to rank you compared to other candidates. Now, you don’t tell Joe, that these are Cindy’s results. But you can tell Joe, that we’re measuring you against these eight different factors, you’re really, really strong and seven, one of them you’re not strong in, and but you’re still a 93% match. And so you’re going to hear from a recruiter within a day. And you just tell them that kind of thing up front, and what to expect in the process. If people know that you’re going to contact them within a day or five days, or whatever your timeline is, and then you exceed that. You tell them a day you call them for hours, you tell them five days you call them in for right, you’ve wowed them. And you have that assessment, you walk them through what does that mean for them. And these are some areas that you can improve on. The other thing is the what you asked about sort of when in the process, if you do have a good assessment that actually is is scientifically validated, to predict the performance in that role in your environment. And that’s a if if if then I would put that at the front, I see a lot of organizations putting assessments at the back of the process. So they get in the application, they interview people, they narrow it down to three finalists, and then they give them an assessment. And I think that that made sense in an era where assessments were really expensive, because it didn’t want to spend all of that money assessing everybody. But now assessments are really cheap. And they’re much more scientifically valid than they used to be. So I’m a huge proponent of putting that upfront, telling the candidate why telling the candidate what to expect, and sharing the results with them. And just saying that for for everything, not just the assessment, but the whole hiring process. If you’re going to take two weeks to make a decision. And there are four different milestones in those two weeks, tell them tell them, you know, we’re going to be reviewing your application within two business days. And if you tell them to, you want to make sure it’s actually one and occasionally to right, meet or exceed what you’re telling them. If you can’t tell them with any degree of certainty how long it’s going to take to hit a different step in the process. Then I think strategically you need to understand why you can’t predict that. Why can’t you determine if it’s going to take two days or 20? If you know if I’m talking to you and you’re the Senior Vice President of talent acquisition for some big company I say, how many days does it take for you to review an application? And you say, I have no idea. Okay, fair enough find out. And if you say we can’t predict that, it can be sometimes two hours, sometimes 20 days, sometimes 200 days, you should be looking for another job, you should, you should know, that, you know, unless a meteor hits the world, you’re gonna be you’re gonna have every single application reviewed in two days, or 10 days, or 20 days, whatever it is, and then you promise that it’s amazing how candidates respond to that kind of accountability, and that and that roadmap, it’s also very important because the candidates, then you have a lot more credibility when you’re talking to them. When you tell them, hey, you know, I’m going to extend this offer to you. And if you accept, here’s the roadmap that we have to offer, you know, you’ve been with us What if you be with if you’re with us for six months, you’re going to have this path, this path or this path. And you know, and they’ll believe you, what happens right now with a lot of job applicate job applicants is that they just simply don’t employ they believe the employer. It’s like, okay, I’m going to work for you because I want to paycheck, I need to pay my rent, I need to buy my my meds at the pharmacy, maybe meds at non pharmacies, but that’s another story for another day. And who can blame them we all need to eat we all need to have a roof over our heads. And and the lack of trust with employers is just is huge. The more you can earn that trust, the more you’re going to have people who will apply who will show up for their interview who will accept your offer and who will be productive.

Chris: 36:34

So you in my mind just encapsulated what I think makes a great talent acquisition team. It’s it’s honesty. Yeah, it’s authenticity. Yep. Transparency. Yep, it is under promising and over delivering. Right? Instantly, if you do those things people are going to enjoy, they’re going to recommend other people come to you. And that is, that is the pie in the sky effect that you want to create. Because the and I always tell people this to the bar is so low to be on talent acquisition, right? And you want to if you don’t believe that, just go look at LinkedIn, go look at Facebook groups, go look at Twitter, and just see how often companies are bashed by the fact that they can’t communicate effectively to candidates throughout the recruitment process. It’s why I’m a big fan of candidate expectation videos, set the expectation upfront, tell them what’s going to happen during the process. Yeah, let them know what it’s going to look like. They’ll be more bought in the fact that they are probably applying for more than one job. And if you’re the one company that tells them what’s going to happen, they’re going to remember you, they’re going to say, I’m going to look for the email from XYZ company because that was actually kind of interesting. And I think that the assessment piece as well, that you mentioned, putting it at the front also gives you more information about the types of people that you’re attracting, and it gets helps you understand who who they are, right, which allows you to get better at your marketing. It allows you to get better at your your branding, and making sure that you’re representing yourself as you want to right like this is who we are. You can speak to your audience more effectively, no matter the different types of positions, because you can segment that. And so it just requires you being proactive versus reactive. Yeah. And so you’ve talked about the assessments, you’ve described how to use them, are you going to do some free advertising for some of these assessment companies you need to do like, reaching out to do you have a favorite, etcetera.

Steven Rothberg: 38:43

You know, one that I one that I’m hearing more and more about is plum IO. So Caitlyn McGregor is the CEO, I had the pleasure of meeting her. Her company, and my college recruiter are both members of this new talent solutions community group that has been put together by the folks at career crossroads. And so I had the pleasure of spending a day and a half at the paradox office in Scottsdale, with Caitlin and got to know her and their product. They’ve hired some real rock stars in the industry. One of the really interesting things about plumb in our, in our little niche of sort of early career is that one of the largest banks in Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia now has completely done away with resumes for their students and recent graduate candidates. So if you’re a student at University, Toronto or some other really great school, you want to work for the bank of Nova Scotia, you go to the plum assessment, and then that determines if you’re going to be interviewed probably extended an offer etcetera. The number of successful hires and people who ended up staying with the bank after their internship and for more than a year skyrocketed, because they’re bringing in people who are a much better fit for the role and for the organization. So there is some drop off, I do think it’s important for people to understand that when you use an assessment, you’re going to have fewer applicants. And if your measure of success is the number of applications, we’ll you know, good luck to you. Because that’s not driving your business objectives. What your business objectives should be, is hiring people who are going to be the most productive, and minimizing your cost per application, minimizing your time to hire whatever, those are all proxies, and they are metrics that are worth looking at. And everything else being equal, if you can reduce your time to hire, if you can reduce your time for your cost per application, that’s that’s going to be better. But that’s about efficiency. It’s not about effectiveness, effectiveness is getting the best people in those seats, so that they’re with you the longest and they’re their most productive, most productive. I see a lot of employers on the recruitment side who are focused on metrics around hiring, and cost per hire cost per application, et cetera. And then it’s almost like there’s nothing It has nothing to do with what happens after that person starts. And I think that that is an area that I’m hoping HR is going to get a lot better at over the years, is looking at who’s been with us for three to five years. What were our sources with hire? Was it campus recruiting? Was it LinkedIn? Was it career fairs? Was it billboards beside the highway, and and then focus more efforts on those channels.

Chris: 41:52

While I completely agree with you, my concern is that we’re nowhere near that point, Stephen. reason I say that is because if you look at sales and marketing, which I believe sales and marketing is kind of a precursor to talent acquisition, because you see a lot of the same software that is in ta now was maybe a part of sales and marketing process. Seven, eight years before, right? And so when I looked at the sales process, and marketing, and how they were obsessed with the new and shiny object, Steven, which means we want new clients, we want bigger clients, we want better clients. What do we always do, we forget about the ones that got us to where we are. Yep. And we don’t talk to them enough. The great companies do like the really great companies do. The problem is even good companies struggle with with it, because they’re chasing something else. And they forget. They forget the good that got them to where they are. And they lose track of that. And so that’s where my concern is, to your point about are we getting closer to, to helping what we call from the dead period. So offer accepted until three, five years out, because there’s so much more that we could do to extend the life of an employee’s tenure. Even understanding when people start looking for other jobs and understanding when that point is in their career. I’m a big believer in career transparency. And so building the roadblocks to your next promotion, right, starting young people out on a path. And not just young people, when you bring somebody in mid career, hey, the opportunities for you, we want you to work cross functionally, we want you to learn this skill while you’re here. Those are the things that keep people engaged, it keeps them around. And it keeps them from becoming active job seekers, because they’re busy, right? Like they’re there. They’re happy, they’re busy, etc. And I’m also glad that you mentioned plumb, because Jason Putnam is a friend of job.com. And I was worried that if you didn’t say that I was going to have to send an email to Jason apologizing. That was one of his competitors. So that’s cool. I’m a big fan of plumb as well. I love I love it. If you’re unaware of plumb check them out, because it is a different type of assessment that you’re probably used to. And the way that they go about it, I think is quite unique. So I would encourage that, Steven, we are at time today. But I’m going to give you the chance to do some free advertising too. So if you’re, I think it’s important for our listeners to understand why should they come to you when what does the ideal company look like when they’re coming to you? And wanting to know more about college recruiter or University Relations etc. Yeah, like,

Steven Rothberg: 44:39

yeah, company is the our customers are primarily fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, and other employers that hire at scale. And when we’re talking scale, we’re talking at least dozens hundreds, sometimes 1000s a year. So employers that are looking for like one intern here or in one new grad there, quite frankly, we’re not the right place. But when you’re looking for, for dozens, hundreds, even 1000s, we’re really, really good at that. We’re really good at designing a package depending upon the employers needs. So we have some customers of ours, like big intelligence agencies, big government comm agencies, whose primary need is branding, is, is raising awareness. So the US Department of State hires a whole lot of accountants do accounting students in schools across the country know that, no, but when they get emails, some of which come from college recruiter saying, Hey, we’re the Department of State, we’re looking to hire accountants, now they know that now they’re going to be more receptive to those sorts of opportunities. So we do a lot of branding campaigns like that are what really sets us apart is a product called jobs at scale. It’s a pay per click job posting product, where typically we get a feed of jobs or we scrape just the jobs employers want us to run from their website, and do that on a pay per click basis. Average cost of hiring a student or recent grads through on campus recruiting is about $5,000, when you include staff time, travel costs, etc, as you need to, through a job board, like college recruiter, it’s about a 10th of that. It’s usually like 400 or 500 bucks. So you can do that in weeks, rather than in a year. And you can do it for about a 10th of the cost. And hiring online versus on campus is inherently going to lead to a lot more diverse hires. And that leads to better productivity.

Chris: 46:41

It’s a great point, because you we all are biased and that we talk, we tend to be more open to talking to people that look like us, because we feel like we know that we have something in common with them. And it’s not necessarily malicious, but it’s just human nature, right. And so we do it. And so it’s you know, if it’s really hard to be the diverse organization you want to be whenever you only have certain people in roles, and you’re trying to find people to go to these different career fairs and things. And so I think that’s a great point as well. You have to be intentional about being diverse. And so I think that’s a great segue into Steven, how can people find you? Where can where can they learn more about these these wonderful ideas that you have a college recruiter and listen to you and learn more about the industry?

Steven Rothberg: 47:26

Sure, if you just want to learn more about the company, collegerecruiter.com That’s pretty easy. And one thing that I know, some of your guests are leery about doing but I’m cool with it. I’ll give you my email address [email protected]. Thank you, Chris. It’s been a lot of fun.

Chris: 47:47

This has been great. I appreciate it. Steven. And this is a another episode of the talent tide podcast. We had a great guest today and we have many more scheduled up and coming so we look forward to those and remember win the day. Thank you. We’ll see you soon.