The mantra that in house recruiters need to behave more like marketeers is an often-repeated one. Like many recruitment truism it is easy to say but more difficult to justify and even more difficult to describe how it should actually work.
My guest this week is Ted Elliott CEO of Jobscience. Ted has spend the last 16 years building tools that help recruiters adopt key disciplines from sales and marketing to help them operate in competitive talent markets
In the interview we discuss:
• The concept of Blue Ocean strategy
• Increasing competition in global talent markets
• The importance of micro marketing instead of mass marketing
• Why just in time recruiting is vital in meeting hiring manager expectations
• Why corporate recruiters have an impossible task in 2016 and need to think differently.
Ted also and highlights the employers he feels are successfully implementing sales and marketing best practices for recruiting and explains why Jobscience is built on the Salesforce platform.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Broadbean, a smart, innovative global recruitment technology business, which helps recruiters to reach candidates in a fast, effective and efficient way. I recently spoke with their client James Purvis, Head of Talent Acquisition at cern, to find out what he loves about Broadbean.
James Purvis [00:00:19]:
What I love about Broadbean is the ability to take decisions based on data. So instead of having to believe what the vendors provide you in terms of their information of how many candidates they’re going to bring to you, you can really use the metrics of the tool to understand how many of the clicks turn into applications, how many of those applicants turn into interviews, and how many become higher. So it’s all about evaluating the quality and not just the quantity.
Matt Alder [00:00:41]:
To find out more, go to www.broadbean.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 40 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Something we hear said a lot in our space is that in house, recruiters need to behave more like marketeers. Very rarely, though, does anyone actually justify why they’re saying that or explain how it works in practical terms. My guest this week is Ted Elliott from jobscience. In our interview, Ted gives us the justification and provides practical insight that is often missing in the recruiters should be more like marketeers conversation.
Matt Alder [00:01:40]:
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest for this episode is Ted Elliottt from Job Science. Hi Ted, how are you?
Ted Elliott [00:01:53]:
I’m great. How are you doing?
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
Yeah, very good, Very good.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
Very good indeed. Could you just give everyone a bit of a bit of a background on you and Job Science and what you do?
Ted Elliott [00:02:06]:
Sure. So I’m Ted Elliottt. I’m the CEO of Job Science. I started my career back in 1994, actually 1993, and retained executive Search and went on to leave the recruiting space for a couple years to go to law and then came back and formed Job Science in 1999. We specialize in recruiting for corporates, for staffing and professional recruiting companies, and also for RPOs. Our customer base is over 640 customers globally and today about half of our customer base is in Europe and Asia.
Matt Alder [00:02:47]:
Thank you, that’s great. And I think what I kind of really sort of wanted to frame in this conversation is your kind of sort of mantra towards recruiting and recruiting software is applying marketing and sales best practice to recruiting. Could you tell us a little bit about that ethos and how it came about and how it sort of plays out with the work that you do.
Ted Elliott [00:03:14]:
Yeah, great question. So a few years ago, I read a book called Blue Ocean Strategy, and Blue Ocean Strategy talks about how we’re all doing everything the same way, and when we do things the same way, all the competitors tend to converge in the same area. They create the red ocean. The red ocean is where all you can do is compete on price. So if you’re an employer, all you can do is compete on paying people more. In other use cases, it’s generally going the opposite direction, which is you’ve got to lower the price of your product to be able to compete in the red ocean. So Blue Ocean strategy says, go pick something that’s worked somewhere else really well and try and redirect it for what you do in your business to be different. We at Job Science looked at CRM, or customer relationship management, and said, geez, recruiting is really a marketing exercise, a selling exercise, and a customer service exercise all bundled into someone generally sitting at a single desk who has to be all three of those things. What if we looked at the recruiting process as one where we need to focus on marketing to talent? And this really came from years of hearing recruiters talk about candidates applying for multiple positions on their website, but none of the candidates were right who are applying from their website, and people talking about going after the passive candidate and brand marketing, or employment marketing, branding for their companies, but really never having a clear sense of what it actually meant to execute on that. So for us, we said, hey, let’s start looking at how the best companies sell their products and how they do lead management and how they execute on closing deals. And let’s see if we can bring that sales and marketing discipline to the recruitment space and the software we provide. And that’s generally the mantra that we go to the market with.
Matt Alder [00:05:03]:
Is there a sort of distinct methodology to this? When you’re looking at how recruiters are working, working from a sales and marketing perspective, are there different stages? Are there things that you see people doing that work really well? How does it break down?
Ted Elliott [00:05:26]:
Yeah. So what is driving our thinking about the process or the methodology is what is going to actually happen globally over the next 15 years? And there are two facts that unfortunately are going to happen. One is that the workforce is aging, so there’s going to be less and less skilled labor. So compared to times when there were very few jobs and lots of skilled people to do those jobs, we’re going into a universe that regardless of economic conditions, there will be less and less skilled laborers to do work. The second phenomena that we’re paying attention to quite a lot is the fact that math skills and science skills have unfortunately not been something our kids want to study. As a result, the calling card is coming to the point where there are certain parts of the world, Asia, China specifically, that have spent a lot of time working on math and engineering skills. And there are other parts of the world, like North America and Europe, that maybe they haven’t done such a good job of mastering those skills. And so as a result, we believe you’re going to have a situation in which you have tighter pools of high skilled labor to pull from and you need to figure out how to maximize your utilization. Now, to go back to your question, how does that influence the marketing approach? Well, I would say a recruiter probably can have a relationship, a true relationship, with between 100 and 250 people at any point in time. And therefore they should probably be doing micro marketing, the folks they have a true relationship with, as opposed to trying to use mass marketing to develop relationships with hundreds of people or thousands of people who they’ll never actually know. This is a real change. And if this is where the market’s going, you’re going to need tools that allow you to manage that list of people who you have an authentic relationship with to market to them. Now, getting the people to get into your authentic relationships, yes, that’s where you use mass marketing tools to communicate to them, whether it’s buying pay per click advertising, going to shows, buying print advertising, the different ways that you get them to come to you in the first place. But then as a recruiter, you’re really going to need to create a hot list or a short list of those people who you can actually mature into a hire. And you’re going to constantly need to be refreshing that list. And that’s as much of being a salesperson as it is of being a marketer. But it’s really having that list of deals or prospects that you can talk to. And there may be cases where you talk to a candidate today who you might not be able to turn into a hire for a number of years, but you have to think in much longer cycles because of the shortage that is upon us. And it’s a global shortage right now, for example, in Europe, you would almost need, in Germany, for example, every Syrian with an education to come to Germany and stay there. It doesn’t sound like they’re very excited right now to keep them, but you would need every one of them to stay there because you’re not going to have enough people to fill the jobs you’re seeing that they can’t fill, apprenticeships, they can’t fill. A lot of the traditional German approach to how to train and hire is breaking down because of the lack of talent.
Matt Alder [00:08:39]:
Okay, so I can see that from a agency recruiting perspective, this is how a lot of recruiters already think. From a corporate recruiting perspective. In the time that you’ve kind of been, you’ve kind of been sort of talking to companies about this approach, have you seen a change in attitude over time in terms of corporate recruiters having a more marketing mindset when it comes to finding talent for their organizations?
Ted Elliott [00:09:13]:
Yeah. So we’re seeing actually I’d say three phenomena occurring that are surprising. The first phenomena we’re seeing is that folks in the business services category who are not staffing companies but consulting firms that are our clients are increasingly looking at acquiring people as an asset to allow them to execute their business. So they are very much focused on building talent pipelines and talent pools to try and find these people. And folks in high skill categories such as the pharmaceutical industry or the healthcare industry, where they’re already filling these acute shortages. Again, they’re focused on behaving much more like a traditional professional recruiting company would function because they know the shortages upon them. Okay. The other areas that we’re seeing are things like RPOs where corporates that are not either building their own internal recruitment firm that may service multiple business units as if it was a professional recruiting firm within the company are bringing in outsourced staffing companies to actually take over their corporate recruiting responsibility. So that’s what we’re seeing. And therefore, because of these pressures, we believe that corporate recruiters are going to have to reorganize themselves to think much more like an agency within the company for filling jobs. And hence they’re going to need to build talent pipelines and market to people and do an outreach that allows them to figure out what are the type of positions they can effectively fill and then what are the areas where they can’t compete, where they’re going to have to bring in an RPO or a third party resource.
Matt Alder [00:10:53]:
You mentioned a couple of categories of companies there. Are there any sort of specific examples of companies you think who are already doing this really, really well?
Ted Elliott [00:11:07]:
Yeah, so I would say that entertainment companies like Cirque du Soleil and Disney are definitely figuring out that they have multiple business units they have to service. And especially in the high skill specialty categories that they operate in, they’re Basically doing this. I’ve also seen some folks who aren’t our customers, like Genentech, which is part of, I think Pfizer now. Is part of Pfizer? No, it’s part of the big German pharmaceutical company. Sorry, I’m having a moment, Matt. That’s okay. But they specifically are building talent pipelines to pre market to candidates. And the reason they’re doing that is they don’t know what jobs they’re going to have to fill specifically next quarter. But they know that quarter X they have X number of scientists and X number of chemists and X number of vacancies that they will traditionally have to fill. So building pipelines of who these people are and having them ready to go even before the requisitions open allow them to do just in time recruiting. And I think that just in time recruiting concept is actually pretty important to the corporate recruiter because the hiring manager’s expectation of when they need the job field is not when they fill out the rack. It’s about five weeks before they fill out the rack. They just got around to finally filling it out because now they’re desperate. Right. And so it’s almost a more acute problem for the corporate recruiter than for a staffing company.
Matt Alder [00:12:25]:
Yeah, absolutely. No, I kind of see people experiencing that, that kind of issue all the time. Just to move the conversation, shift the conversation slightly towards software because software, legacy software, software upgrades, new, you know, new types of recruitment software are kind of very much on the agenda at the moment. And what’s always interested me about you guys is that you have built your technology on the Salesforce platform. Could you tell us a little bit about why you did that and how you found it and why you think it’s important?
Ted Elliott [00:13:07]:
Sure. So first off, we looked at Taleo, Conexa, isims, all the sort of legacy. Which one am I leading off that legacy list, success factors. All these legacy platforms start off by building software around a specific purpose or specific problem they were trying to solve. And we said, geez, every time we look at the HR landscape we see lots of different problems, but fundamentally no good foundations. They’re not building on anything that’s solid. Why don’t we go look at what’s the most solid platform in the market to build on. We determined that Salesforce as the market leader in software as a service and really understanding the sales and marketing customer service dynamics was the best platform to build on from that. We then said, okay, what are the specific things our customers are going to need? And let’s Build modules on top of this really strong foundation to address how you market to candidates or how you recruit a candidate. It’s interesting is if you look at Gartner’s research in the space, they’re really showing that applicant tracking is almost a dead space from a creativity standpoint and from a new idea standpoint. And that’s really because the market solutions have ventured out of kind of these traditional poor foundations in most companies. And most of your corporate recruiters will probably be able to feel this. The people who get the most money to spend on new toys are the sales and marketing team, because the company perceives that if we give sales and marketing more resources that somehow they’ll go out and create more revenue or wealth for the company. HR usually doesn’t get the best toys. So we said, hey, what if we strapped ourselves to the sales and marketing team because they seem to get the best, and instead of HR having to settle for secondary platforms or secondary tools, let’s strap ourselves to the tool that’s always going to be at the cutting edge of innovation, which is what we saw on the Salesforce platform. And in doing so now, we’re going to be able to bring innovation without a lot of extra effort to folks who usually have to wait for it.
Matt Alder [00:15:06]:
In terms of 2016, what do you think is going to happen this year? What are your predictions for corporate recruiting and technology? What can we expect to see happening over the next 12 months?
Ted Elliott [00:15:21]:
So I think corporate recruiters have been given an impossible task. They need to be able to set up an organization that’s going to be capable of finding people who don’t exist at a time in which leadership doesn’t know whether the economy is going to continue moving in a positive direction or a negative direction. Therefore, no one’s going to want to give them resources to do their jobs, and it’s going to become increasingly difficult for them to be successful, and they’re going to face outside forces such as RPO’s and staffing firms wanting to come in and wholesale replace them. So more pressure, less resources, and more uncertainty than ever before in a time in which finding the people is going to become harder and harder to do. Right now, most of the solutions are focused towards making corporate recruitment a service bureau that makes the hiring manager happy and tries to make sure that the hiring manager’s experience is the best possible, as opposed to figuring out, okay, why don’t we look out 3/4, 4/4 and make some commitments as to what we’re actually needing to hire and make sure we build those pipelines. And so this is a really tough time to be in corporate recruitment. I think that may feel really good right now because we’re hiring lots of people and things feel like they’re moving in the right direction. But what we really need to be looking at are what are ways that we can secure ourselves to make sure that we going to live. And I’m sorry to put it in a real politic way. I’m laying it out, but I think the things we need to be looking at are, okay, how many of our employees are attritting because they’re retiring? What are their skills and how can we recruit them back to work for us on a part time basis so that we decrease our demand for filling skills that we’re going to have a very difficult time filling. Okay. Especially in the higher skill categories, finance, legal, engineering, programming, things that are tough. Then how are we going to build pipelines of folks that we can tap into who may want to work part time, may want to work more of a flexible shift? May not be how we traditionally thought about it because we have a new workforce that we’re going to have to deal with starting in 2016 and going on for decade. That’s a challenge. Right now you can master the challenge by saying, okay, we’re just putting on a job board and just going into LinkedIn and trying to rate everyone that everyone else is rating the same way we’ve always done it. That’s not necessarily going to buy you a lot of advantage. I think you really have to start thinking about, okay, we’ve seen most of our most successful corporate recruiters are folks who are strategically thinking about the pipeline. They know they’re going to need to recruit for the next 12 months. Building specialty teams that do that, that are really primarily focused on sourcing and building those relationships with the people they need making that front end investment. So as those positions come up, their time to fill is greatly decreased because they have a lot of the talent ready to go. And that’s something that a good recruiting team will have to do because there’s going to probably be some uncertainty over the next 12 months. But in general, my thought is they’re in a tough spot and I think they have to start rethinking about how they’re organized and how they’re operating again to be much more like a staffing company that lives within the corporation as opposed to the traditional corporate player. I think there’s another pressure player coming in that will continue to put pressure on the corporate recruiter which is your purchasing departments where if you look at what SAP has done, they’re very much into thinking that purchasing should manage recruitment, not hr. And so I think HR needs to put itself in a position where it’s protected and where it is going to be effective. Which is to say, hey, purchasing shouldn’t be running this, we should run it ourselves. And we need to be structured so we can actually fulfill more of the jobs that we can fulfill. The last point I would make here is the corporate recruitment team should figure out what are the type of jobs it can consistently fill on its own and what are the ones that it cannot and the ones that cannot. It should call that out and give those to purchasing and let them go find a staffing firm and outside person do. The advantage of the corporate recruiter is knowing what you can do, what you can’t do. You’re going to have to move away from being just a service agency to a couple hiring managers. And you’re going to really need to think about how your real customer today is the candidate. And if you don’t feel like the customer is the candidate, wow, then you must be in the oil and gas industry right now because that’s probably the only market that we’re going to see a lot of candidates in that we traditionally were seeing deficits of three to four cans for every opening. We’re now going to probably go to a one to one equivalence.
Matt Alder [00:20:11]:
I couldn’t agree more. I think it’s going to be a very, very interesting year. Ted, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Alder [00:20:19]:
My thanks to Ted Elliott. Thanks also to everyone who has got in touch to say they’re enjoying the podcast this year. If you’re finding the content useful, I’d really appreciate a review or ratings on itunes so more people can find the podcast. Just open up the itunes store, search for recruiting feature and click the stars to rate. You can also subscribe to the show on itunes and on Stitcher if you use it for past episodes. To find out more about me and to join the mailing list, please go to www.rfpodcast.com. thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
