In this interview Matt Alder talks to Matthew Jeffery VP Head of Global Sourcing & Employment Branding at SAP
As I do more and more podcast interviews it is becoming very clear that recruitment innovation is a complex subject. Every employer is in a different position and what is innovative for one company can just be normal recruitment practice at another.
Matthew Jeffery has always been someone at the cutting edge of innovation in our sector and in this episode we talk about some of the work he has done at SAP as well as his wider views on what is happening in the industry.
Topics discussed include:
• How SAP have “democratized” graduate recruitment by using technology to reach a broader audience
• How to give a good candidate experience at scale to 50,000 applicants
• What algorithms can do that recruiters can’t but why they won’t be replacing humans any time soon
Matthew also gives us his views on why he feels recruitment isn’t being properly discussed at government level.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:04]:
Hello everyone and welcome to episode 21 of the Recruiting Future podcast. My guest this week is Matthew Jeffery from SAP. Over the last few years, Matthew has been a prominent figure in the in house recruitment community and has implemented many innovative recruiting strategies for the companies he’s worked for. His work at SAP is certainly no exception to this and it was great to find out what he’s been up to there. Here’s the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:32]:
Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. Today I’m actually in a recording studio with its own drum kit, which is very exciting and I’m talking to Matthew Jeffery. Hi Matthew, how are you?
Matthew Jeffery [00:01:45]:
Hi Matt. I’m very well, how are you?
Matt Alder [00:01:47]:
Yeah, very good, very good. Excited to be doing this rock and roll. Rock and roll interview.
Matthew Jeffery [00:01:52]:
I’m waiting for you to leap on the drums and.
Matt Alder [00:01:55]:
Yeah, exactly. No, you don’t want to hear my drumming. So if anyone’s kind of, you know, not heard of you, could you sort of just introduce yourself and tell us who you are and what you do?
Matthew Jeffery [00:02:05]:
Okay, well, briefly, I’m the VP and global head of sourcing and employment brand for SAP, a large software and cloud company. Previous to that I was at Autodesk and previous to that people may know me from Electronic Arts. I was there for seven years.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
Yes, I do. I think I met you when you were Electronic Arts.
Matthew Jeffery [00:02:24]:
I was a lot younger, slimmer.
Matt Alder [00:02:26]:
Weren’t we all? Weren’t we all? So I was kind of really interested to speak to you because I know that you’ve been doing some really interesting work over the, over the last few months. You published an article on ERE about some of the stuff that you were doing. What have you been working on that’s interesting. What are you kind of really proud of that’s coming out of SAP at the moment?
Matthew Jeffery [00:02:49]:
I think the, the first thing is people know that SAP is a very large company and when you work in a large company, it takes time to move things along. Some people use the analogy of an oil tanker as you try and divert it. So we’ve been able to work on some pretty cool stuff. And I point to things like the sales academy and what we call the democratization of recruitment. Cheesy term. And we always put marketing in it. But we looked at the graduate market, Matt, and we thought, wow, it’s become very elitist. People and companies keep going to the same old select number of universities and you tick them off, you know, Oxford, Cambridge, in the uk, maybe Manchester, London School of Economics, et cetera. Then you leap over to Harvard and MIT and those universities and you start to think, are they really the best candidates that we can employ? And often we set ourselves up as companies that we focus on them, pour all our time and resources. We compete. So we go on campus versus a Google and a Microsoft and we’re all competing for that talent and they may not be the best people.
Matt Alder [00:03:55]:
Okay, so you know, what did you, what did you do that was different to kind of facilitate that process?
Matthew Jeffery [00:04:02]:
So we sat down and we thought, okay, how do we open it up to how any graduate or any student can apply to us? And so to do that, we obviously were going to throw our net wide open and we thought social media could be the best way to widen it because we can’t get to every university, we can’t publish and reach everybody. So bang, we thought, let’s use social media. The fear was then we would get thousands of applications. How would we deal with them? And then our poor recruiters would sit there with more applications and then they’d revert to type. Yes, they would start going, okay, how do we select these people? What university, what course? And you’re back to square one again. So we partnered with Chemistry, a well known company out there who do online assessments and we put together an assessment tool that was online. It was real time. We’d give feedback to that candidate, pass, fail. And we split in two. So we had a culture questionnaire, pass, fail. And then we had a selectivity part where we focused on some behavioral and situational judgment criteria and then gave pass or fail again for that. And those people that passed would then be going interview and a boot camp. And that for us was quite a radical move for a big company our size.
Matt Alder [00:05:19]:
I can imagine. And how many, you know, how many applications did you get? If you can, if you can say how much interest was there?
Matthew Jeffery [00:05:26]:
There was a huge interest. So 50,000 people plus started the online assessments and then we had to take them through that and whittle it down. Our fear was obviously candid experience. When you get a no, people go, oh no, we got a no. But we put together focus groups beforehand and we started polling those people that went through and got a no and to find out how they were feeling. Because the last thing they wanted was for someone to be, you know, fed up.
Matt Alder [00:05:52]:
Yeah, of course.
Matthew Jeffery [00:05:52]:
But they loved it because they said we actually had feedback straight away. And often when we send in applications, we don’t hear at all or we get, you know, just a very quick bounce back email. And that is candidate experience. So a no is actually a positive thing at the end of the day for candidates when they get it.
Matt Alder [00:06:08]:
And what kind of feedback was it? Was it, you know, commiserations, you’ve, you’ve not passed the test, or was it, was it more specific around the results of what they were doing?
Matthew Jeffery [00:06:17]:
Yeah, we would, we would give that sort of feedback. We apologize if you pass a test. We would try and give a reason. LinkedIn to some of the, you know, the algorithms we put in and then we put contact numbers in for them if they wanted to call to the stuff, discuss it with a recruiter and get even more personal feedback, which, you know, a number of people took us up on, which again, gave them the candid experience that they were asking.
Matt Alder [00:06:37]:
That’s, I think that’s, that’s really interesting because, you know, people often say that, you know, a large amount of applications means that they have to give a poor candidate experience. And it’s, it’s great to hear that you’re finding, you know, finding ways around, around doing that. What was the, what was the sort of type of social media activity that you were doing to reach the different, the, the different, the different universities? What kind of, what kind of things were you sort of putting out there or what kind of conversations were you having?
Matthew Jeffery [00:07:06]:
Yeah, I think the, the key thing was to embrace different channels. So we were obviously using our Facebook and our Twitter accounts to really get information out there. But key for us was LinkedIn. So we partnered with LinkedIn who obviously focused on attracting more graduates into their pipeline. And with LinkedIn job posts, the discussion groups, and with our own marketing materials that we put out to universities that we wanted to encourage, to recommend people in, we embraced a whole number of people which led to the 50,000 plus starts.
Matt Alder [00:07:40]:
Great stuff. So I think wherever you’ve been doing stuff, you’re always trying to sort of innovate. And do interesting things. Things. What do you think the state of innovation in our industry is at the moment? We were sort of chatting before we started recording about, you know, award ceremonies and sometimes, you know, entries not being quite up to scratch in things like innovation. You know, where do you think we are as an industry in terms of innovation and moving things forward?
Matthew Jeffery [00:08:09]:
I think it’s interesting because I think we still haven’t mastered the basics.
Matt Alder [00:08:12]:
Okay.
Matthew Jeffery [00:08:13]:
And so when we go to conferences, you know, you and I can look at the agenda and we’ll see how to use social media, how to use, you know, a basic ats, how to build a community. And a lot of companies are still not doing that. And that’s the interesting thing, is that then some of these companies are trying to innovate when they haven’t mastered the basics.
Matt Alder [00:08:31]:
Yes.
Matthew Jeffery [00:08:32]:
And, you know, a lot of us, and there’s still areas in SAP, I would say, that we need to improve the basics, be it candidate experience, be it the way we interact. And I don’t think any company has mastered it out there in terms of innovation. There’s little out there. I see. I mean, to innovate, you could go out there and, you know, you could put job descriptions and we could wrap to the background to it and you go, wow, look at that, they’re wrapping the job description. Fantastic.
Matt Alder [00:08:56]:
I’ve got a job kit if you want to. If you want to record something, you.
Matthew Jeffery [00:08:59]:
Know, and there’s companies that have done some great stuff. I mean, I was at LinkedIn last year and I remember that L’Oreal talked about how they’d use SoundCloud in their recruitment process. You know, some brilliant ideas. But again, I know their return on investment they listed at the time was one higher, which may put some off. But, you know, innovation has to produce a return on investment, otherwise innovation is worthless.
Matt Alder [00:09:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s. I think that’s a really interesting.
Matthew Jeffery [00:09:26]:
What about you? What excites you that’s innovating out there?
Matt Alder [00:09:29]:
Oh, you’re asking me questions now. I’m kind of with you, actually. I think that a lot of people try and sort of, you know, run before they can run before they can walk. I, you know, I’m always interested in what people are doing with social media, which is why I asked you the question. And I think that, you know, there are some great channels out there and great ways of reaching candidates, but people seem to be using lots of channels just as a tick in the box. So, you know, you see lots of people using, you know, Instagram and Pinterest with no real sense about what they’re actually trying to get out of that or how the channel works, how the channels are changing, and the kind of audience that they’re doing. So, you know, I think that there are outbreaks of interesting stuff in social, but there’s still a long way to go. And to be honest with you, I think a lot of the, you know, the startup companies that are out there at the moment that are kind of lauded for innovation just seem to be another version of a job board or another version of an ats. So, you know, I’m sure, you know, there are some great examples out there, but it just seems to be that we’re reinventing the industry in a slightly different way.
Matthew Jeffery [00:10:39]:
I share your pain on it than.
Matt Alder [00:10:40]:
It kind of worked. Before coming back to the kind of assessment, one of the questions that I think I’ve asked everyone who’s come on the podcast, which I think is particularly interesting in the light of what you were talking about in terms of the graduate assessment, which is, do you think you can replace a recruiter with an algorithm? And did you replace a recruiter with an algorithm? What does that look like?
Matthew Jeffery [00:11:03]:
So I think it depends on how you define an algorithm. So in our process, we wanted to use assessments and technology to help us do the selections, which was tough for an individual recruiter to do. So, you know, reverting to type, they would have looked at the universities, what’s being studied, and those usual things, and, oh, if they got a little bit of work experience or sandwich year, then boom, then they would select like that. That’s not looking at people from a pure talent perspective.
Matt Alder [00:11:30]:
Okay.
Matthew Jeffery [00:11:31]:
Looking at online assessments, you know, again, people will have, you know, different views on them, whether they’re good or bad. But for us, it helped us widen the candidate pool, allowed us to actually do things which a recruiter would find tough to do, and they would revert to generalism if they did, and then whittle down a short list to provide us with great talent. How do you judge great talent? Obviously, once we’d gone through our boot camp of where recruiters are interviewing and doing their usual things. So we didn’t replace recruiters there. We replaced them in that initial stage of filtering. Okay, that was perfect for us. But recruiters have their part with the experience and relationships down the line.
Matt Alder [00:12:09]:
And I thought it was interesting that the candidates who were rejected, if you like, by an algorithm, could actually phone a human to discuss that. And I think that was an interesting, you know, very Interesting aspect of what you were doing, Definitely.
Matthew Jeffery [00:12:24]:
And never fear, technology is that, you know, technology has a place. Sometimes it takes us off into sexy areas which don’t produce an roi, but sometimes it genuinely can help. And in this case, you can say that a graduate can actually feel, you know, they’re actually selecting me on my worth. And we went and hired people from universities we would have never, ever thought were going to be good for us.
Matt Alder [00:12:46]:
That’s fantastic. That’s a really great thing to hear. So a slight sort of change in direction in terms of questions. You know, you’re certainly someone who has a very big interest in politics and I know you’re involved in various different ways and commenting on it. Why do you think recruitment, you know, as we know it and describe it, isn’t on the political agenda or the government’s agenda in the way that perhaps we think it should?
Matthew Jeffery [00:13:18]:
Yeah. So interesting. I have to declare, obviously, an interest here. I’m one of the assessors on the Conservative Party selection panel selecting people to go forward for MPs, Euro MPs and mayoralty candidates. Again, dismiss the politics. You may be that side of the political spectrum or the other side, but it’s bringing helping politics. Look at the way they select candidates, which I think is important. But when we look at the. The general state of recruitment, you know, when I turn on Sky News and I look at people commenting on unemployment, on graduate issues and recruitment, on, you know, the state of education, I don’t see people like you, Matt, on Sky News or the BBC and being interviewed. I see other people who don’t have the gravitas and the knowledge and experience of this area. I then look at and hear the stories of, you know, how much does David Cameron and his team consult with recruitment leaders in some of these issues? How many of our people are going up and having meetings with George Osborne and the treasury team, then you start to think, we don’t have that voice at the top table. We should do, and we’re not being consulted and we lack gravitas. Given the importance that we have in some of the agendas that we see going on in national politics, how do.
Matt Alder [00:14:32]:
You think that could. Could change or should be changed, or what could the industry do to, you know, fix that problem?
Matthew Jeffery [00:14:40]:
I think we need to be more bold in making sure that we get up on that top table. People like you, Matt, who have, you know, wide experience, should be, you know, being consulted. I look across some of the industry bodies and at the moment they don’t have that gravitas that’s really helping. And seeing. When I look at Sky News, I want to see people like you on the papers, review at 10 o’clock or whatever, 10:30.
Matt Alder [00:15:02]:
I’m much better on the radio, but.
Matthew Jeffery [00:15:05]:
You get my drift. I think we have to be more proactive. And again, it comes back to that question, how many recruiters sit on the board? We’re a subset of HR or a subset of marketing. And yet when you ask people and you look at some of the comments in investor sheets, can these companies hire the top talent? Those are being asked, who does that? We do that as recruiters and yet we’re not on the board and we’re left to be a bit part in the overall company scheme of things.
Matt Alder [00:15:32]:
Absolutely. I think it’s some interesting times ahead, perhaps. And kind of on that note, last question. What does the future hold for recruiting? What are you expecting to see in the sort of next 18 months, two years, other than people maybe getting better at social media?
Matthew Jeffery [00:15:52]:
I think there’s still challenges within our industry. I think our recruitment leaders need to step up to the plate more. You and I both go to conferences and we see the same faces and we know that there’s some great leaders out there who are not going to some of the conferences. I speak to them and I know the reasons why they’re not stepping up and going to a conference often, because what I call the commentariat, those people who go and they tweet and they criticise from a comfy armchair about what some of these people are trying to do. And then obviously some of these recruitment leaders don’t want to have in their Twitter feeds, you know, the hashtag of their company name because their corporate team, corporate PR team, pick it up and then they feel under pressure. I think social media is brilliant because it gets the word out there, but we’re seeing, you know, people who are building their brands in social media, becoming the commentariat, and they have no gravitas, they haven’t achieved things, Matt, and yet they are not adding to our industry. So what would I like to see in the next 18 months, some of our recruitment leaders being more bold, coming out there, getting in the front line of their company, talking about their achievements, talking what they’re doing and leaving those who just want to talk about things on social media to it.
Matt Alder [00:17:05]:
Matthew, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matthew Jeffery [00:17:08]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:17:09]:
My thanks to Matthew. Jeffery, I hope that you’re enjoying these podcasts and if you are, I’d be very grateful if you could write a review in itunes for them. You can, of course, also subscribe to the podcast in itunes as well as on Stitcher for show notes all the past episodes. And to subscribe to the mailing list, go to www.rfpodcast.com. i’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
