I’ve recently returned from HR Tech Fest in Sydney and while I was in Australia I was planning on interviewing my good friend Dave Drury, a thought leader in Experience Design for HR. However Dave had other ideas and when I got to his office he decided that he wanted to interview me instead!
Our conversation covers a lot of ground and some of the topics we discuss include:
• The three revolutions we have seen during our careers in recruitment
• The talent centric future of the industry
• Key trends for the next five years
• The biggest problem with HR Technologies
I also talk about what I’ve learned from doing the podcast this year, who my favourite guests have been and give some hints about some exciting developments in 2016
Link to the Tech Recruiting Whitepaper I mention in the interview
Subscribe to the podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 36 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’ve recently returned from a speaking trip to HR Tech Fest in Sydney. I think it was probably my favourite conference of the year and it’s one that I’d recommend to absolutely everyone. While I was in Australia, I was planning on interviewing my old colleague, Dave Drury. But as you’ll now hear, things didn’t exactly go the way I was planning. Hi, everyone. I’m currently in Sydney, Australia, in a room with a fantastic view of the harbour. And I’ve come to this office today. Well, I had come to this office today to interview a really good friend and old colleague of mine, Dave drury. Dave’s got 15 years of digital HR experience. He’s an experienced design consultant. You don’t find many of those in the HR sector, which is why I was interested to talk to him. And he focuses on improving using technology to improve the lives of employees. Now, since I got here, Dave’s thrown a bit of a twist at me and rather than me interviewing Dave, Dave’s going to interview me. So, Dave, I’m going to pass this over to you.
Dave Drury [00:01:31]:
Thanks very much, Matt. It’s really exciting for me. I’ve obviously known you for quite a period of time and I thought what would be really exciting for myself and also for your audience is to learn a lot more about you and where you fit into the whole ecosystem of hr.
Matt Alder [00:01:49]:
Sounds good.
Dave Drury [00:01:50]:
So let’s kick things off. I’d like to start by asking you what your background is and where you got your passion for recruitment.
Matt Alder [00:02:00]:
So my first exposure to recruitment would have been a very long time ago, kind of about 1998 or something, or something like that. And I had a job selling recruitment advertising space in the Guardian, which is the, at the time was the kind of the leading publication for recruitment adverts in the uk. So I kind of learned a lot about recruitment marketing. I got to speak to all kinds of different employers and I kind of realized for the first time that there was actually some kind of industry and potentially a job here. So fast forward, sort of 1999, 2000, the.com boom was starting. The Internet was on the scene. I really wanted to work for an ad agency, so I was trying to get a job at an ad agency and almost completely coincidentally, I ended up getting a job at a recruitment ad agency. Really kind of exciting times. I was the second person in, in their digital team and you know, we sort of built up that, built up that digital team over a number of years. Met you in the year 2000. We were part of the team and it was just a kind of a really exciting time because recruitment was being sort of dramatically disrupted by the Internet. Did 10 years in recruitment, ad agencies from there and then the last six. I’ve been out on my own as a independent consultant and latterly podcast.
Dave Drury [00:03:27]:
Fantastic. Interestingly, over that course of 15 or so years, you must have seen an incredible amount of change. Describe some of that for me.
Matt Alder [00:03:37]:
Well, it’s really a tale of two revolutions so far. So 99, 2000 moving through to sort of 2001, 2002, 2003. It was the shift from offline advertising and marketing for recruitment to Internet based marketing and it was, it was kind of fascinating to watch. I think we all thought the, the Internet was fantastic and it would catch on a lot quicker than it did. But it actually took quite a long time to actually filter through and fundamentally sort of change the way that, that people did their recruitment marketing certainly and then kind of reflecting back on, changed some things, but it didn’t change other things. I think the kind of first generation of online recruitment advertising, you know, looked and in some ways still looks very similar to those newspapers that we were working, that we were working with. So, you know, almost like classified advertising. So that was the first revolution. Over the last five or six years I think we’ve been seeing the second revolution, which is the social revolution. And it’s been interesting to watch exactly the same thing happen. Companies really struggling to sort of make sense about what social media means for recruitment. Lots of attempts to build tools that were never going to work, lots of talk and creation of methodologies that don’t work. And I think finally now, five or six years into that evolution, we’re seeing people finding their feet and being able to harness what’s been an incredible communications revolution and harness that for getting stories about their employer brand finding and recruiting the talent they need. So that’s the kind of second revolution. I think we’re on the cusp of the third. A big part of that third. Previously I thought it was really just mobile. It was about recruitment going mobile, everything being mobile first. The more I think about it though, I think it’s about mobile and recruitment becoming much more user centric, which is why it’s interesting with your experience in experience design. So, you know, the talent at absolutely the center of the process. And mobile is something that Facilitates that because, you know, to work on mobile you need to be simple, you need to be focused on the user. And that’s where I think we are at the moment. So I did think it was going to be a kind of a quick mobile revolution, but I think this is a kind of a long term fundamental shift again in terms of how recruitment’s done, how recruitment marketing’s done.
Dave Drury [00:06:27]:
Great. It’s interesting, when I met you back in 99, 2000, there was. The UK was certainly well in advance of where the States were and certainly where we were in Australia. From a geographic and even attitudinal perspective, how has it transformed? Do you see still, you know, you move through these revolutions you talk about, from, you know, newspapers to social and then to wherever the next part is. Is everyone just following each other or is the market actually starting to learn from its behaviors from past revolutions in order to move forward?
Matt Alder [00:07:09]:
I think there’s two things about that. I think the first thing to say is the world has got a lot smaller. Well, here we are sitting in Sydney for a start. Although I have got a 24 hour flight home tonight. So maybe the world’s not that small, but the way that information travels in our industry is kind of is revolutionized. So it’s now, you know, you can see what’s happening in other geographies in real time because people are blogging, you know, tweeting, writing, recording videos. The event that we’ve just been at the last couple of days, HR Tech Fest, which I think was actually my favorite recruitment conference, our conference of the, of the year, and you know, again, international speakers. And there was no sense that speakers from one country were coming to tell another country what to do. And I think if you go back sort of 10 years, even five years, it would be, you know, principally probably American speakers coming to talk about the fantastic things they were doing and everyone was kind of learning from them. And I think in, you know, in the case of this conference, it was, it was about collaboration and blending different ideas. So I think the world’s got smaller. We can see what everyone’s doing. You know, you can borrow ideas from other countries very, very quickly. The other factor is individual kind of recruitment, talent marketplaces. So that’s not necessarily just geographical. It can be demographic or sector based as well. But you know, in certain places in the world, in certain markets, things are moving a lot quicker because they have to, because there are shortages of, you know, shortages of candidates, people having to think more creatively and embrace the tools that are out there to solve the problems they have. So, you know, obviously the one that immediately comes to mind is sort of tech and, tech and digital recruitment, which is pretty consistent around the world actually, in terms of, in terms of how people do it. So I think you’ve got a shrinking of the world and you’ve also got, you know, talent shortages and things going on in various talent markets that are kind of driving that change as well.
Dave Drury [00:09:16]:
Fantastic. Just moving. You’ve had a lot of experience in recruitment agencies, you’ve helped a lot of clients. I just want to move our focus now onto MetaShift. Why did you set it up? What’s MetaShift all about? And what are some of the stories of how you’re creating impact, how you’re impacting some of your clients?
Matt Alder [00:09:39]:
Yeah, I suppose I ultimately set it up for quite selfish reasons. 10 years in AD agencies was kind of more than enough. And, you know, I had a fantastic time, I worked with some fantastic people, but I think I was just keen to get out there and kind of work on my own and do something different. And the idea came to me because I thought, as you know, as recruiting talent, HR technology is getting increasingly complex almost by the, almost by the week in terms of what’s going on. I was kind of hearing feedback from the clients that I was working with that there was a real need to have a kind of independent, trusted guide through this kind of rapid change that’s happening, this kind of increase in complexity. So that’s really the idea behind my consultancy business. It’s to help employers with their talent acquisition strategies, to make sure that they’re fit for purpose and that they’re thinking strategically about what they’re trying to achieve. One of the troubles with a lot of in house recruiting departments is these guys are so busy and they’re so strained sometimes in terms of resources, there isn’t necessarily always time to the luxury of time to take a step back and think about what’s going on. So that’s kind of really where I help people. I audit what they’re doing, I optimize things and I do sort of crucial things that they don’t have time to do themselves. So things like, you know, competitive, competitive analysis, that kind of stuff. And the other part of it is I spend 20% of my time in research and development mode. So that’s really probably the main reason why I’ve come. I’ve come down to Australia to the event, because I’m interested in the market, I’m interested in what’s in, what’s happening. And what I’m looking for is kind of best practice approaches inside and outside of the industry from around the world that I can take back and kind of distill to my clients and help them stay ahead of their competition and also understand what the future of the industry and the future of the future, the future of work is, is going to be like.
Dave Drury [00:11:52]:
Okay, you say best practices. What are some of the best practices that you know, this audience can, can learn from that you’ve, that you’ve picked up?
Matt Alder [00:12:03]:
Oh yes, that’s, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a very, that’s a very broad, that’s a very broad question. He says, being slightly thrown by that. I suppose. I think if you look at, let’s just talk about recruitment marketing just for the purposes of answering this question because we’ve got HR tech, we’ve got all kinds of other things going on. If you look at what’s happening in the marketing industry at the moment, there’s incredible period of change in terms of analytics driven buying and behavior, inbound marketing, marketing automation, all that kind of stuff. And it’s interesting to watch some companies successfully integrating those techniques into their, into their recruitment in recruitment processes. And I suppose in terms of umbrella best practice, what’s really, what’s really coming through is companies that are putting the candidate, the customer, even the employee from the terms of being an internal candidate at the center of the process seem to be winning. So I just did a piece of research into global tech recruitment. So I interviewed 21 different in house recruiters who are successfully recruiting tech talent. And there’s a white paper that’s come out with all of the findings and I’ll put a link to that in the notes for this show. But the thing that came across is that candidate experience and some actual stuff that we consider basic recruiting best practice from 20 years ago in terms of communication was actually the secret weapon that all these guys had. So I think, you know, best practice is interesting. There is stuff going on externally in the marketing world. But actually are some of the best practices that I’m seeing from the best recruiters, the things that were just being done automatically 15, 20 years ago before technology came and ruined everything basically.
Dave Drury [00:14:04]:
In terms of burning issues, what do you see as some of the big HR issues that brands are struggling with today?
Matt Alder [00:14:14]:
Big HR issues again I think is this kind of candidate centric experience thing. I think people are struggling to define it, they’re struggling to understand it. I think one of the biggest issues that comes up time and time again in every single country is poor, outmoded technology that’s not fit for purpose. So one of the interesting things about watching the guys speaking some of the case studies at the HR Tech Fest, people looking to introduce unified HR technology systems and stacks into their business, and there was a real understanding that actually the recruitment modules that are bolted onto some of these big enterprise systems aren’t necessarily fit for purpose. And there are a couple of Australian companies who’d backed out of actually implementing the recruitment part of the enterprise software they were buying because it kind of wasn’t fit for purpose. So I think that, you know, candidate experience is a big thing, but really fundamentally, people don’t have the right technology to do what they want to do. And as an industry, we’re incredibly bad at filtering, at matching. You know, if a company’s getting tens of thousands of applications and they can’t cope with that volume, the default reaction seems to be to make the application process even tougher and even more, even less user friendly to try and put people off. And that just seems kind of crazy because you’re going to, you know, there’s a very, very high probability that you’re going to put off the talent that you need. So I think it’s that outmoded technology bit and the implications of that that’s the biggest challenge.
Dave Drury [00:15:57]:
Awesome. You clearly, in the one of the purposes of today, run the podcast series. I know. I look forward to, you know, listening to them. I know you can’t touch on all of them, but I’d love to know who some. Who are some of your favorite interviewees?
Matt Alder [00:16:16]:
Ah, I can’t have favorites. I can’t have favorites. Or maybe I can. So memorable. Memorable is good. Memorable is good. Well, they’re all kind of all memorable, so. So now the podcast has been a real kind of surprise for me. I sort of started it as a bit of research and development, almost a bit of a hobby because I was quite interested in some of the technology behind it. And yeah, it’s just gone brilliantly this year. So I think I’ve interviewed 34 people now and I’ve got a whole stack of other interviews lined up next week for next year. In terms of memorable ones, I have to say that probably the most memorable one was Laszlo Bok, who’s the kind of executive VP of Google HR for the kind of entire world. And I managed to interview him while he was on his book tour and I literally kind of have a 20, 20 minutes in Google’s HQ to kind of sit down and ask him questions and all this kind of stuff. And he, you know, he was great and he gave a huge amount of insight into what Google are doing to transform HR in a very, very short period of period, short period, period of time. So I think that’s probably the most, most memorable one. Also I was absolutely paranoid that I was going to erase the recording before I saved it. And I think the others. I suppose what’s been really interesting is that there’s been quite a bias towards technical and digital recruiting problems and interviews in the last few weeks. And that’s probably been because I’ve been writing this white paper and I’ve done some of the research as podcast interviews. So, you know, there was some really, really interesting things coming across from that sector. So there was a particular interview I did with Good Games Studios in Germany. I was really interesting. Ken at Wintercourt Consulting, Matt at List, you know, various, various kind of superstar tech recruiters. And it was, it was, it was really interesting to talk to them and have a kind of a bit of a theme running through it, sort of moving forward. I’m making sure that it’s not completely sort of tech dominated in the future, but for the last few weeks it kind of has been. So I suppose they’ve been the most memorable.
Dave Drury [00:18:27]:
Okay. And in terms of, you know, you obviously learn an enormous amount and you know, your work is probably, is no doubt stimulated by and inspired by the conversations you have with these people. What three, two or three insights can you share that you’ve gained from these talks?
Matt Alder [00:18:48]:
I can give you one kind of overarching one, if that’s, if that’s right, if no one’s keeping score. And that’s, it’s amazing how similar, how everyone is kind of in the same position. So I’ve talked to people from all kinds of different companies who are recruiting all kinds of different people. And it’s always the sort of same themes that, you know, the same themes that come out. You know, people are trying to make the best out of the resources and the technology that they, the technology that they have. Amongst the people that I’ve spoken to, there’s been a real sort of passion to make recruitment better, you know, better for the candidate, better for the better for the internal, internal stakeholders. And that’s just been really, really consistent. So I suppose that, you know, the learning for me is, you know, there’s so much passion and expertise and, you know, forward thinking kind of out there, out there, out there in the industry and that’s just been really, really Encouraging. And two very, very different companies in different industries can have very, very similar, similar issues that they’re trying to overcome.
Dave Drury [00:20:00]:
Very interesting. Fast forwarding to 2016. What can we expect from the podcast series?
Matt Alder [00:20:10]:
Well, from the podcast series obviously I want to make it bigger and better. The first thing to expect is I’ve actually recorded a kind of a spin off series so, and you know, sort of a, you know, an extension of it on the future of work. So I’ve got 10 interviews on the future of work that I’ve recorded and they’re going to come out as a kind of a distinct, kind of standalone, you know, series of people talking about, talking about that kind of stuff. Really interesting selection of people. A few sort of futurists, you know, some people involved in contingency recruitment and resourcing and a man who runs a company who takes millennials around the world working in co working spaces. So you know, all these kind of coders and sometimes lawyers and writers doing this kind of 12 month travel program around the world, working remotely. So some really cool stuff in that. I’ve got some sort of crazy, audacious ideas about what to do with this and I just kind of need to find the right partner to work those through. So I’m not going to tell you what they are at the moment, but hopefully all become clear.
Dave Drury [00:21:17]:
I think if what we’ve seen in 2015 is anything to go by then, you know, and speaking on behalf of the audience, I think 2016 is going to be pretty exciting. I have two more questions for you. One is let’s take you five years from where we are today, 2020. What does the HR industry look like and what can we expect?
Matt Alder [00:21:38]:
Well, first of all, I hope they fixed the technology problem, although I’m not confident that that will have happened. I think it’s, I think you have to look at when you kind of look at the future and try and predict what’s going to happen, you have to look at the trends and the overarching forces that drive this. And I think there are two things that are going to be on everyone’s agenda over the next few years. The first one is digital transformation. I’m already spotting that coming up on the sort of HR agenda. If you look at the research, a huge proportion of CEOs, established businesses are looking at how they can transform their business for the digital age because of the threat of disruption from startups. It’s really interesting. Traditional industries like banking massively being disrupted by fintech startups by cryptocurrencies, all this kind of stuff. So inevitably, if a company’s going through a strategic digital transformation process, that has huge implications for HR and recruitment. So, you know, that could be technology, it could be. It could be speed, it could be, you know, definitely skill shortages, because everyone’s going to be looking for the same kind of, you know, not. Not just the sort of, you know, coders, but also people who can think. People who can think digitally. So I think digital transformation is going to shape things, and the other one is just really the changing world of work. I mean, I think a lot of the lot of the trends are towards a much kind of more temporary workforce. Lots of companies are predicted to have a larger proportion of their employees, you know, not being employees, basically, you know, tapping into. Into pools of talent to work on specific projects or achieve specific things. And that’s kind of a massive trend, and that’s being talked about a lot in HR circles at the moment. And I think that has huge implications for our industry because even the term employer branding is wrong. Because employer branding infers that you’re working to brand your company for employees. And if you’re reaching out to a kind of a temporary, you know, a temporary workforce of temporary talent, none of these people will ever be your employees. And you need to sort of market and sell the company to them in a very, very different way. And there really aren’t any companies doing that at the moment. So I think that they’re the two big trends, and I think that that’s what’s going to drive the way that we recruit and use technology and try and find ways of connecting with an increasingly global audience over the next few years.
Dave Drury [00:24:23]:
Fantastic. Thank you for those insights. My final question for you is, what can we expect from Matt Alder in 2016?
Matt Alder [00:24:34]:
That’s a very interesting question. I wish I knew so well, I think the things that. The things that we’ve. The things that we’ve been talking about, basically, you know, I’ve got a big focus on making this podcast absolutely as good as it possibly can be and innovative as it possibly can be. Obviously, I’m continuing to work with, you know, some great clients and employers with Metashift, but also doing more research, producing content, doing joint research projects with people. So the tech recruitment white paper I did was a joint project with. With Monster, and that was a kind of great bit of research. So really looking at perhaps how I can partner with people to, you know, really take a deep dive into making sense of some of this complexity and some of these changes that are that are making place taking taking place and I definitely hope to be back in Australia. Not quite sure how or why yet, but the weather is the weather and the view is good to not come back soon.
Dave Drury [00:25:40]:
Well, as a friend and as an admirer of what you do for the industry, thanks for letting us reach into the vault and spend some time talking together.
Matt Alder [00:25:48]:
Thanks very much Dave. My thanks to Dave Drury for his insightful questions and I hope to get him back on the podcast soon to talk about the great work he’s doing. You can subscribe to the podcast on itunes and on Stitcher and find past episodes@www.this is the last episode of the year and I wanted to say a big thank you to all of you for supporting the podcast in 2015. I’ll be back next year and I hope you’ll join me.
