October 11, 2022
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.
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Transcript
Chris:
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:
Thanks, Chris. I’m doing great.
Chris:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
where when? When should I wins? Yeah,
Chris:
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:
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:
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:
this this is, this is why Chris and I couldn’t be colleagues is we would just do
Chris:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
oh, it’s fun. It’s hundreds and hundreds of
Chris:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
Sure, shoot me a message on LinkedIn, send me a connection request and shoot me a message just
Chris:
a custom message and don’t ask me if he wants a job.
Steve O’Brien:
Yeah, I prefer it not being in mail because it’ll probably get the
Chris:
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:
gotten very interested in the options I have
Chris:
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!