In this episode Matt Alder talks to Matt Buckland Head of Talent at Forward Partners.
Tech recruitment is challenging and tech recruitment for start up companies is especially challenging. In this interview Matt and Matt discuss the approaches and techniques that are currently working in London’s Silicon Roundabout. Other topics covered include why you can’t replace a recruiter with an algorithm, Schrodinger’s (stuffed) cat and how to get 25k retweets on Twitter.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:43]:
Hi and welcome to episode 11 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Tech recruitment is always a big discussion point in our industry. In this episode I talk to top tech recruiter Matt Buckland about the challenges he faces and the techniques he uses to find the best talent for Shoreditch based tech startups. Recently, Matt also briefly became the most famous recruiter on Twitter when one of his tweets went massively viral. Something we also talk about in the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:13]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview today. Today I’m in sunny Shoreditch and it is actually quite sunny talking to Matt Buckland from Forward Partners. Matt, do you want to introduce yourself?
Matt Buckland [00:01:27]:
Yeah, sure. My name is Matt. As you just said, I am the head of talent for Forward Partners. We’re a venture capital firm who invest in idea stage to kind of mid seed levels. So it can be anything from just a PowerPoint and an idea right the way up to a company that already has some growth and we give them money, we also give them access to development, design, talent, marketing expertise in house in the hope that we can accelerate their growth. But we’re not an accelerator. Ah, fantastic.
Matt Alder [00:02:04]:
Fantastic. And we’re sharing the room with a stuffed cat.
Matt Buckland [00:02:07]:
Yes.
Matt Alder [00:02:07]:
Would you like to tell us about the stuffed cat?
Matt Buckland [00:02:09]:
So our room names are supposedly indicative of our culture and we are sat in Schrodinger’s box because it was the smallest room. Looks like a little box. And we have a stuffed cat.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
As you would in Schrodinger’s box. Fantastic. So there’s lots of things I want to talk about, you know, particularly, you know, tech recruitment in Shoreditch and all that sort of stuff. But no interview with you should start without talking about the recent events that occurred where you briefly became the most famous person on Twitter. Do you want to sort of talk us through what happened in your own words?
Matt Buckland [00:02:50]:
Yes, certainly. So now I will just say that my celebrity has well and truly petered out completely. We are in full decline at the moment, so it feels safe to talk about was a normal day, as the best stories start, and I commute to work in from further east and had an altercation on the train with a chap who thought I had blocked him. He pushed past me and I said sorry in a very sort of sarcastic way. And he suggested I might like to go and F myself. As I tweeted, yeah, standard London commuting practice, pretty much. And nothing out of the ordinary for London commuting. For people who aren’t in London, that’s kind of an everyday occurrence. Then later in the evening, I had an interviewee coming in and it was surprising for me, as the interviewee who came in was the same chap, which was fun. But before I went into the interview, I thought, this is hilarious, and I tweeted it. It was about 20 past 5, went into the interview, came out, had 3,000 retweets. The next day it was about 5,000. And I think we’re currently around 25,000 retweets. So it occasionally bubbles up again. And then I go and wonder why this happened. But it went, this is the most viral that I’ve ever been. So we went to buzzfeed, the BBC, front page news of the BBC. So there’s even the Hebrew Times and the China Post. But pleasing to me, obviously, is to validate my own stereotypes. The most hatred for me personally came from the Daily Mail.
Matt Alder [00:04:36]:
Hated by the Daily Mail.
Matt Buckland [00:04:37]:
Absolutely. It was things like, I wouldn’t take the job anyway. Look at this expletive.
Matt Alder [00:04:43]:
And I’m like, thanks for that.
Matt Buckland [00:04:44]:
Thanks. So if I ever had that ego boost, they soon kicked me in.
Matt Alder [00:04:48]:
And how many? It was in the media, kind of everywhere. How many countries did you reach?
Matt Buckland [00:04:54]:
58 at the last count. And I only know this because the best thing to come out of it has been this data set. Yes. So then the presentations on, you know, do you have to pay to grow to get this? No, you don’t. You don’t. You just have to have something that resonates. And that’s been the most fun for me. That and the collecting, the insults. Yes.
Matt Alder [00:05:16]:
Yeah. You’ve shown me some of the insults. And there are some classics people even emailing your boss to my. You were fired at this point?
Matt Buckland [00:05:23]:
Yes, yes. We have a contact address for forward partners. And one chap suggested that I was in the wrong and should be fired immediately. I know that he was going to call the police, actually. Wow. Daily Mail reader, of course, you can tell. You can tell.
Matt Alder [00:05:39]:
Excellent, excellent. So, you know, there we are. That’s how you’re famous on Twitter. Probably unrepeatable, I’d imagine, in terms of being able to pull it off again. Or do you think, have you got your next big viral campaign?
Matt Buckland [00:05:53]:
The next one tweet. So the other things that I’ve done that have been viral, I think humour is the great. So they say that it’s either anger or humor that you should use to really kind of get this stuff. It’s hard to make people angry. Some people just generally are back to the Daily Mail. But that humour stuff, I think that really goes quite viral. There was another picture of Tim Berners Lee and Shingy from AOL talking about their job title.
Matt Alder [00:06:22]:
Oh, AOL’s digital profit. Yes.
Matt Buckland [00:06:23]:
So the digital profit versus Tim Berners Lee, whose job title on the television appearance was web developer. You could argue it’s the web developer, but put the two and then said, next time you use a Grandiose title on LinkedIn, look at this. Yes. So it’s funny for us and I thought a small world, but even that was sort of 6,000 retweets. Wow. And the knock on effect of that. So the audiences can be huge out of nothing. But again, not really related to me filling jobs.
Matt Alder [00:06:56]:
No. Which is going to be my next question. Actually. We should probably talk about recruitment. So tech recruitment, Shoreditch, huge amounts of stuff gets written about, you know, what it’s like to recruit tech people, what the problems are, all that kind of stuff. What’s it actually like? What’s it like on the ground finding talent for your startups?
Matt Buckland [00:07:17]:
It’s tough. It is tough for different reasons. So if you’re a single founder looking for a co founder, it’s normally the case you’re looking for a techie to help you build something for those people without funding. That’s really hard. You’ll go to meetups and you’re basically begging BO at that point, come and help me build something for the belief. Not for money, not for anything else, just for the belief. And that’s kind of like the lower level. But people do believe those and you know, you do see those partnerships come in. I think the next level is people who receive some funding or have something that they’re actually getting paid to do at the moment and that gets you a little bit further. So you can offer something, but there are people out there who just want to work in startups. So while it’s tough to find them, if you have a compelling message and you talk to them in the right way, people will take salary cuts. They will. There Is that belief in a bright new future or the way of working? That’s very different. So in some cases Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout, as people call it, has been quite a draw to pull those people out of corporates because if you’re a middling Java developer in an investment bank, but you desperately want to work in Scala and you can call yourself a cto, why wouldn’t you want to do that? Particularly if it comes with greater responsibility, greater autonomy, all of those great things.
Matt Alder [00:08:49]:
I think that the cynic and roundabout thing is interesting because, you know, lived in London for a long time and it’s Old Street Roundabout in its somewhat ugly state. But, you know, I’ve been at meetups and things like that in New York where people are talking about it and desperate to work on Silicon Roundabout from someone who’s outside of the tech sector. It’s quite interesting in terms of the draw that it seems to have.
Matt Buckland [00:09:13]:
Exactly. And I think the reality is not that at all. And the Silicon Roundabout thing is a joke. It’s almost like adding digital in front of something, like there’s an analog way of doing something. Yeah, I just. There isn’t. So it smacks of sort of the government’s involvement in these things and when it wins votes, they’ll be very keen to do it. When it doesn’t win votes, they’re less keen. So at the moment we’re all very anti immigration coming up to the election. Well, the Silicon Roundabout would love there to be more immigration of people they could employ.
Matt Alder [00:09:46]:
Of course.
Matt Buckland [00:09:46]:
Yeah. And those sort of things are at odds with each other. So we would look for. At the moment, I would love there to be a lowering of the barriers of qualified people coming in, admittedly, which I’m sure that people could get on board with, but it would be very different message than, you know, we’re going to close borders, we’ll probably win more votes outside of our 1 mile square radius of Old Street Rendezvous.
Matt Alder [00:10:09]:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. In terms of sort of specific, you know, sort of specific technology issues, what are the. Where are the biggest skill shortages at the moment, you think in the sector? Is that a certain type of developer? What’s the, you know, where’s the current problem?
Matt Buckland [00:10:26]:
For most startups, language is fashion, so the language they use to develop in becomes fashionable. So last year we were all Ruby.
Matt Alder [00:10:36]:
Yes, of course, Ruby.
Matt Buckland [00:10:37]:
Ruby was everything. And this year not at all. So I’m not going to say something outlandish like Ruby doesn’t scale because there are proofs that it does. But this this year it seems to be Python. What we found in house at forward is that the Python developers tend to be able, they have a better understanding of the bare bones of computer science. So it’s much more mathematical than perhaps Ruby is, which is more. You can be a very bad Ruby developer by stitching things together. It’s very much more difficult to do that in Python. What we look for is more the ability to be a polyglot. So yes, you’re a Python dev, but tomorrow we want you to build a mobile app and the next day we want you to do something different and.
Matt Alder [00:11:24]:
Then whatever language is in fashion after that.
Matt Buckland [00:11:26]:
Exactly, exactly.
Matt Alder [00:11:27]:
So it’s kind of a more core.
Matt Buckland [00:11:29]:
Skills and it’s kind of like your, it’s that language acquisition that we look for. So if you’re a Java developer or a C developer now, you’re probably not going to do that in a startup. But are all of your open source contributions in Scala, Lisp, Erlang and the Hipster languages then?
Matt Alder [00:11:46]:
Hell yeah, that’s great. It’s funny actually how it develops. I mean back in, back in the early 2000s when I was running development teams, finding people who could do HTML, was it a challenge? So it’s funny. And how do you go about finding these people? How do you find these experienced developers and bring them into businesses?
Matt Buckland [00:12:10]:
I’ve worked in massively large companies as well as sort of now these I recruit for companies in our portfolio, which is one person, the founder, looking for a developer. So how do you recruit for that? How do you recruit for those smaller teams? And you have to do so much more. It’s not a case of often they have no brand at all. There is no brand. Often they don’t even exist yet in any real form. So you’ll come and build this. What is this for those? It’s more about the opportunity. So if you can offer for a developer a problem to solve, so that can be scale or complexity of the issue. So offer someone some amazing machines, machine learning algorithm to build and they’ll want to do it. Whether they’ll be any good at it is another question. But also then the scale of that. So we have people who would be particularly interested in taking something which works for 10 users and making it scale to a thousand. Okay. And that’s an interesting problem to solve for them in particular, finding them. Mostly now the good recruitment is Shoreditch and in the East End of London at large is done through community.
Matt Alder [00:13:21]:
Okay, interesting.
Matt Buckland [00:13:22]:
So it’s done through meetups and all this stuff and it’s never explicit. We kind of play this cloak and dagger game in startup, which is if you have an event space, you have a great benefit because you can invite people in and not explicitly sell to them. We are hiring. We are hiring instead, of course, your meetup group can use my event space. And they come in and then you go, oh, did you enjoy that? Yes, don’t worry. What building are we in? Oh, it’s this building. And you just.
Matt Alder [00:13:48]:
Yes, yes, yes.
Matt Buckland [00:13:48]:
And there’s a great kind of psychologically implicit sell that happens, which is very different than come and work for me, which is more old school.
Matt Alder [00:13:59]:
Yeah, of course, of course. It’s really interesting. And I was in Silicon Valley three years ago doing some interviewing there and I remember Foursquare were doing very much the same thing. They were a very well known brand there and they were just hosting, they were hosting meetings, meetups and providing free beer and literally trying to get people to stay at the end and kind of work.
Matt Buckland [00:14:18]:
And I see it done really badly because startup, you have this certain set of stereotypical needs to quantify what a startup is. So I’ve tried to run meetups at larger organizations and an events manager takes over and before you know it, instead of a bucket of beer and pizza, you’ve got canapes.
Matt Alder [00:14:36]:
Yes.
Matt Buckland [00:14:37]:
And I’m like, wow, this feels very strict, strange. And then you get several bewildered looking devs looking around going, I think I’m in the right place, but I’m very uncomfortable with this.
Matt Alder [00:14:47]:
So it’s interesting.
Matt Buckland [00:14:49]:
It’s different.
Matt Alder [00:14:49]:
No, that’s cool. You mentioned machine learning algorithms. Now it seems to be a growing trend in 2015 to debate whether a recruiter can be replaced by an algorithm. So I know you’ve got some particular views on this. So can a recruiter be replaced by an algorithm?
Matt Alder [00:15:10]:
What do you think?
Matt Buckland [00:15:10]:
No.
Matt Alder [00:15:12]:
Excellent.
Matt Buckland [00:15:13]:
End of question. No, no, no. Why do you think that? Okay, so there is a growing need, and it’s been said by a lot of people that software will eat the world, which is largely true in a lot of cases. So there are industries which are ripe for disruption, and recruitment at its face, looks like an industry which is ripe for disruption. There’s the trope that recruitment is broken and people recite this like a mantra, I’m going to solve it, I’m going to solve it. But the people who create the tools that are solving this problem are often solving for their own edge case. So they’ll be a developer normally and they’ll build a tool which might look like a marketplace where recruiters can come and bid on their skill sets. That’s great. That solves for your edge case. That is an edge case. That’s not a generalization about the industry at large. And if it works in one company, there’s no guarantee it will work for another company because you’ve satisfied the hiring criteria for one person. It’s like saying that everyone who works for Company X is brilliant, so we want to steal from Company X. I’m like, no, they’re brilliant for Company X. They might not necessarily be brilliant for. Then we have a kind of a really naive buyer base for HR tech in the industry at the moment. They’re not very technical and the word algorithm has become synonymous with problem solving. So, oh, it has an algorithm. I will definitely use this. And I think it works, or it appears to work for very, very large numbers. So the law of large numbers takes over, which is, we made 20 hires from this or we made 3,000 hires from this. And what we forget in all that is that algorithms are biased too, because they are built by a person. They are biasing for selection on things they opt to weight heavier than other things, which no one really seems to ever comment on that. An algorithm can be biased as well. If it’s created by someone, it has their biases.
Matt Alder [00:17:13]:
And I think that’s interesting. I think that’s because lots of people don’t actually quite.
Matt Buckland [00:17:16]:
They don’t know what it is. They don’t know what it is.
Matt Alder [00:17:20]:
So, sorry, carry on.
Matt Buckland [00:17:20]:
That’s. So you end up with this kind of this weird construction that what the biobase thinks an algorithm does and what the implementer of an algorithm thinks an algorithm is are completely different things. And there’s something in the semantics now, which is, oh, we’ve got an algorithm, that must be amazing. And I sound like I’m quoting Ken Ward, but, oh, it’s got an algorithm. You’ve got to have an algorithm. And that’s become the thing to have. And it’s, well, why is that the case? And it’s not because that is beneficial to the candidate being hired. Because often in these cases the candidate is reduced to a commodity, which is the worst possible experience, if ever. You are using a tool and you can mass email someone, or you’re using software to distance your yourself from the real human experience. That’s terrible. You’re not ordering toilet paper online. That’s a person you want to encourage to change jobs. That’s up there. I mean, you can move house, you can get divorced or change jobs. The Most stressful things. That’s very different than just slide and drop.
Matt Alder [00:18:24]:
Very often in particularly in the sort of recruitment you do, it’s not just changing jobs, it’s changing locations or countries or cities or, you know, so it’s.
Matt Buckland [00:18:31]:
Moving houses and then in time lifestyle as well. So in the world of tech and particularly in startup, take a real gamble on this. It’s not like you’re moving from one of the big four to the other big four and you can see your old office from your new desk, which is literally the case on the flashback, which is very strange. But oh look, wave to your ex colleagues through the window. That doesn’t happen here. We might be saying take a salary cut. We might be saying this is a massive step up. We might be saying you’ll be learning every day. And these are very different things than the old models. So an algorithm solves for mass production. It solves for a business which is of a certain size and it solves for a business which is of a certain empathy level with the people who apply. And in those cases it can look like it works. I guarantee you’re gonna have more people who would never apply for your company again after going through this process than would say that was amazing. Because when it’s amazing, you’ve over communicated, you’ve bought them on. They are a net promoter. These things exist, we can borrow from other disciplines. They are a promoter for you and they will evangelize about how great that process was. And it won’t be because I got a great email. It will be a recruiter talked me through it, they gave me great feedback, they were there when I wanted them. Those things, it won’t be. I did an oblique video interview and it upset me and I answered questions and then they came back to me via email and then I did some online testing and got an email and then I met with a person and it’s like the fifth step is another human being. Before then you’ve just kind of ring fenced them off and kept them away.
Matt Alder [00:20:13]:
Okay, so what’s next? What’s next for recruitment? What do you think is going to happen in the next three to five years?
Matt Buckland [00:20:21]:
I think one of the. So I think the more it changes, the more it stays the same is the cliche I’ll adopt for this one. Because as we were discussing before we started, there’s not much new that happens. Technology as an enabler of the recruiter is where I’m interested. Allow us to do the things we do well, faster and better. So those Are things like communication channels. What does Slack look like in recruitment? Or something like this? The instant messaging thing. That’s kind of interesting. I don’t think it looks like artificial talent pools. I don’t think it looks like video recruitment. There’s a trend of whatever new technology, how can we use this for recruitment? And I think it stems from people whose only interaction with. With technology is in recruitment.
Matt Alder [00:21:10]:
Right, okay. Yeah.
Matt Buckland [00:21:11]:
So whatever new thing comes along, it’s like, let’s use Pinterest for recruitment. And I’m like, no, Pinterest is for interior design or I’m planning a wedding.
Matt Alder [00:21:20]:
Yeah, it was very useful planning my wedding Pinterest.
Matt Buckland [00:21:22]:
Exactly.
Matt Alder [00:21:23]:
It was great.
Matt Buckland [00:21:23]:
Exactly. But all you’ve got is you’re using it as pictures on the website, so you could do that better through another medium. So I think perhaps what I’d like to see next in recruitment is that recruiters are okay with the fact that this is a discipline. Recruitment is its own unique discipline. We’re not marketers, we’re not salespeople. We borrow from those disciplines. But it is a unique set of things that we all have. Once I think we accept that, then we’ll be able to use tools better to augment that.
Matt Alder [00:21:53]:
Fantastic.
Matt Buckland [00:21:54]:
So at the moment, we’re just. We’re trying to use sledgehammers and we should be watchmakers. There’s the quote in 140 characters as well.
Matt Alder [00:22:04]:
That’s the next. The next big viral.
Matt Buckland [00:22:06]:
There we go. Nut sledgehammers, watchmakers.
Matt Alder [00:22:08]:
Fantastic. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Buckland [00:22:10]:
Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:22:10]:
Thanks to Schrodinger’s cat as well for hosting us on this podcast. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:22:16]:
That was Matt Buckland. As ever, you can subscribe to the podcast in itunes and on Stitcher or in any good podcast app. Alternatively, you can listen to past episodes at www.rfpodcast.
Matt Buckland [00:22:31]:
Thanks for listening.
Matt Alder [00:22:32]:
I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
