In the launch episode of The Recruiting Future Podcast Matt Alder publishes two interviews from the archives that are still as relevant today as when they were recorded.
Peter Lovell from Jagex talks about the challenges of recruiting globally in a very difficult talent market and shares an old school approach which Jagex have found works brilliantly for them.
Chris Hoyt from Pepsico talks predictive data analytics and mobile in a interview that was recorded at the iRecruit Expo in Amsterdam.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:12]:
The ages of history. Hello and welcome to the launch episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’ve been working on this for a while. I’m really excited to be able to finally publish it. The aim of this is to really create a place to talk about recruitment innovation, to look at what’s working in our industry at the moment, and then take a look into the future and see what’s coming in our direction and how that can sort of pragmatically be molded to meet recruitment challenging challenges that organizations are currently having. The format is interview based, so in each episode I’ll be interviewing a practitioner, a thought leader. I also want to kind of bring some, some new voices in, people that you may not have heard from before, and really talk about their views and their experience of recruitment innovation in practice. I’ll be publishing the podcast on SoundCloud very, very soon. You’ll be able to subscribe to it on itunes. And I’m also publishing it on www.rfpodcast.com, where you can see the show notes and all the archive of past episodes. When I was doing my research for the podcast, I came across two really great interviews that I recorded quite some time ago, I think sort of 18 months, maybe even two years ago, with two very, very different companies. But I think they’re really, really worth sharing and I wanted to bring them to you in this episode. So I interviewed with Peter Lovell from Jagex and an interview with Chris Hoyt from PepsiCo. So, so we’ll start with Jagex. This was actually a kind of a video interview that I did with Peter a little while ago and I think there’s some really, really interesting things that come out of it. We were talking about recruitment, innovation and I think you’ll be interested to hear that some of the very, very innovative company like Jagex, the most innovative thing they’re doing, is actually quite old school. So here’s the interview. I’m talking to Peter Lovell at Jagex. Is it Pete or Peter, by the way?
Peter Lovell [00:02:28]:
Let’s go for Pete.
Matt Alder [00:02:29]:
Pete. Okay, I’m talking to Peter at Jagex. Pete, would you like to introduce yourself?
Peter Lovell [00:02:32]:
Yeah. Hi everyone, I’m Pete, Peter Lovell from Jagex Games Studios. I’m the talent acquisition manager here and been at Jagex for sort of six years now, starting as kind of the company’s sole headhunter, up to talent acquisition manager scene. So much stuff going on here. It’s been fantastic and yeah, pleased to be speaking to you here today.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
And for the kind of the non gaming geeks who may be watching this, can you just sort of tell us a bit about who Jagex are and what you actually do?
Peter Lovell [00:03:01]:
Yeah, absolutely. So Jagex Game Studios is sort of, as it says, we’re a game studio based in the UK, predominantly an online game studio. We’re creators of MMOs and online experiences. Our flagship MMO, which means massively mad multiplayer online game, is a product called Runescape, which was a global success recently, surpassing 200 million accounts created for it. We’re also developing a number of other projects in house here, including Transformers Universe and lots of other sort of smaller but equally exciting products. So right now we’re a company of about 580 people. Talent from all over the world has joined us here. We’re really trying to push the boundaries in terms of innovation and online experience. And yeah, really, that’s what we’re all about.
Matt Alder [00:03:50]:
I mean it sounds like if you’re, you know, if you’re growing as you are, that recruitment might be quite, potentially quite challenging. What sort of methods do you use to recruit? What issues do you have? What’s been successful? You know, how does it, how does it work at Changx?
Peter Lovell [00:04:06]:
Absolutely. So you’re absolutely right, recruitment is a challenge for us. One of the biggest challenges, as I’m sure many people are aware of, is kind of finding top talent and bringing them to our hq. So although we do have sort of offices elsewhere, our main Jagex HQ is here in Cambridge and obviously we have to try and find and relocate people here. So that can be a barrier. If we go back a bit though, in terms of our recruitment method and model, we do operate a predominantly direct recruitment service here at Jagex. So we use obviously all the usual tools that you’d imagine. We’ve got an in house recruitment team here that are very, very, very active on LinkedIn and on CV database searches. We attend events all over the world and try and kind of present a much more face, person to person interaction to the best candidates when we meet them around the world, heavily push referral networks, recommendation schemes, internally, have a huge social media presence obviously and try offer that kind of full dedicated recruitment service internally in the hope eventually of turning the entire studio into recruiters that are pushing roles and opportunities through their own networks, etc. So yes, it’s a pretty all encompassing direct recruitment model with a good sort of five person team behind it that Sounds great.
Matt Alder [00:05:22]:
I mean, you mentioned your social media presence. Are there any particular networks or methods or approaches that work well for you?
Peter Lovell [00:05:30]:
Absolutely. So our prime one, the one that we live and breathe on, is obviously LinkedIn. I always feel funny about calling LinkedIn a social network, but it is a social network, it’s a professional social network and we practically live on that. Fortunately, the games industry is one of the biggest uptakers of LinkedIn in terms of a tool and most of the people we need are findable on there and indeed very engaged over LinkedIn, so we live on that. But we also have a huge Facebook presence. The Jagex Jobs Facebook page is our portal to connect with what we call upcoming talent. So we’ve done a massive push in the universities, in the graduate streams and intakes, and try and engage with them very visually over Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare we’ve used as well. I mean, we would just try and get across as many of us as we can, but obviously there’s quite a few networks out there that we’re still yet to explore and cover. The top three would be LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook and Twitter.
Matt Alder [00:06:21]:
Fantastic. It sounds like you have your hands full with those. From what you’re seeing or from what you do, what do you think is sort of innovational, you know, is innovation in recruitment at the moment? Is there something that you do that’s particularly innovative or on your travels? I know you just got back from a big conference in the States. Have you seen, you know, what’s innovation in recruitment looking like this year?
Peter Lovell [00:06:45]:
Yeah. So, I mean, I think really the area that we’re cracking into and really need to start building some momentum in is mobile. I know you and I have talked about that quite a bit and we’ve built a career site that’s very mobile friendly, but we want to add to that, we want to add a lot of mobile functionality to our entire kind of recruitment presence, seeing how we can crack these better into sort of a LinkedIn mobile, that kind of stuff, and also try to gamify the experience of. Of recruitment here. Obviously, we’re a games company, so mobile. With the experienced designers we’ve got here at Jagex, we, we know there’s more we can do in terms of making recruitment almost again, unlocking achievements, for example, for the more people you refer to as over mobile pushing and all that kind of stuff. So I think that’s an area we’re exploring. I think that’s going to be highly innovative and help to put us another step ahead of our Competition, but really it sounds a bit funny. I think for me, I think the most innovative thing we’ve done is actually not innovative at all. It’s almost rolled back to the pre technology days, but we’ve really turned ourselves into the studio that, as I mentioned earlier, goes out there and meets people face to face to try and break down some of the technological barriers. We really like to do that follow up. We have an aggressive global events calendar and we like to be the troops on the ground frontline meeting people. We found that’s been the best way to break barriers. So the next step is adding that level of mobile gamification to that global event’s attendance and really allowing us to contact people easily and then refer the message face to face.
Matt Alder [00:08:14]:
Pete Lovell at Jagex there. The next interview is with Chris Hoyt at PepsiCo. I recorded this at the IRECRUIT Expo in Amsterdam a little while back. So apologies for the background noise. It was lunchtime and there were lots of people talking in the background. In the interview Chris talks about data analytics and mobile and has some interesting views on how they will develop. Chris, would you like to introduce yourself?
Chris Hoyt [00:08:40]:
Sure. My name is Chris Hoyt. I’m based in Dallas, Texas, United States. I work for PepsiCo and I am the talent engagement and marketing director for our global talent acquisition team. So I have the responsibility for building sustainable strategies for digital, social and brand for talent.
Matt Alder [00:08:55]:
That’s great. And what do you doing or seeing that’s innovative in recruitment at the moment? What does recruitment innovation mean to you?
Chris Hoyt [00:09:03]:
Oh, that’s a great question. I think that predominantly right now we’re seeing recruiting finally doing some really neat stuff with data and really taking it one step farther than how many people applied and how many people made it through the interview. Right. The traditional candidate funnels. So it’s just fantastic to be able to see organizations now using historic data to do some predictive analysis on where jobs are trending, how long they can expect particular types of jobs to take based on their certain history in those markets, and then even tying in market driven data to help decide if that’s an ideal place to try to build that rollout and can it be built with those parameters like pay and reload in the amount of time they need to get up and running in that market. So data, I hate to say big data because it’s so cliche now, but the use of big data and the use of analytics to do more than report on what’s happened, but to begin to predict and change how we do recruiting is really big and fun to see finally kicking in.
Matt Alder [00:09:59]:
Do you think it’s kind of easy to get that kind of data? Is it, you know, in your role, is it easy to find those kind of metrics and make those sort of predictions?
Chris Hoyt [00:10:06]:
It’s certainly easier than it was five years ago. And I think that if you can get to the data and vet it, because I think getting all of the data points, usually depending on your organization, you’ve got to pull it for multiple sources. I think getting that data to sync up is probably the hardest part as opposed to just getting to it. And I think you’ve got some good stuff there that tells a compelling story.
Matt Alder [00:10:25]:
Fantastic. And just been watching you present on PepsiCo’s journey with mobile. What do you think the innovation is in mobile at the moment? What are you guys sort of looking at? How does mobile fit into the picture?
Chris Hoyt [00:10:37]:
Great question. Mobile Apply is still something everybody’s trying to tackle. And I think responsive, responsive design is also another hot one. We were just talking about this in an offline conversation that there’s a lot of conversation around. I think a year ago it used to be, well, do I do an app or do I build an M site? Now it’s really more about what does responsive design mean to me and mean to potential job seekers and how do I care for that candidate experience throughout the entire process. With that in mind. So big data mobile, it’s all the rage at the I Recruit Expo.
Matt Alder [00:11:05]:
Fantastic. Thank you for speaking to me. Thanks very much for listening to this launch episode of the Recruiting Future podcast. More episodes coming soon. Some really interesting interviews with some other practitioners and thought leaders in our space. If you want to keep up to date with the podcast, you can listen to all the episodes on SoundCloud. You can also subscribe on itunes, and if you go to www.rfpodcast.com, you’ll find all the episodes and the show notes. Thank you very much for listening.
