2016 will be remembered for many things but in our industry one of the most notable trends has been the reinvention and resurgence of recruitment marketing. I’ve been working in recruitment marketing since 1999 so its certainly not a new thing but it has been interesting that this year has seen so much discussion and debate around it.
To help me make sense of this my guest this week is HR Pro, Recruiter and industry commentator Tim Sackett. Tim recently hosted Smashfly’s Transform recruitment marketing conference and I was delighted to have him on the podcast to talk about the latest thinking in what is a critically important area for talent acquisition.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why Recruitment Marketing is back on the agenda and what has changed
• Marketing spin versus authentic employee experience
• The role of story telling
• How technology is supporting the reinvention of the discipline
• The advantages of corporate recruiting and marketing departments working closely together
Tim also talks us through which employers he thinks are doing this well and also shares his views on the likely impact of President Trump on recruiting and HR in 2017 and beyond.
This episode of the podcast is kindly supported by Hirevue
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from HireVue. HireVue’s team acceleration software combines digital video with deep learning analytics to help companies build and coach the world’s best teams. Team Acceleration Software is a modern digital answer to antiquated recruiting and training software that has placed barriers and bias in the way of finding, selecting and coaching a company’s most important asset, its people. Visit hirevue.com that’s spelt H I R E V U E to learn how organizations like Vodafone, Unilever, Nike, Red Bull, IBM and JP Morgan Chase are modernizing the way they work.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 73 of the Recruiting Future podcast. 2016 will be remembered for many things, but in our industry, one of the most notable trends has been the reinvention and resurgence of recruitment marketing. My guest this week is HR pro recruiter and industry commentator Tim Sackett. Tim recently hosted smashfly’s Recruitment marketing conference and I’m delighted to have him on the podcast discussing the latest thinking in what is a critically important area for talent acquisition.
Matt Alder [00:01:45]:
Hi Tim, and welcome to the podcast.
Tim Sackett [00:01:48]:
Thanks Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:49]:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone a little bit about you, what you do, a bit about your story? Basically?
Tim Sackett [00:01:59]:
Yeah. So my name is Tim Sackett. I’m a president of an IT engineering staffing firm here in the states out of Michigan. But we kind of have people all over. We do more contract consulting work than like straight head hunting work. Prior to that, ran corporate talent acquisitions for companies like Applebee’s and a large health system in the states, things of that sort. So have some experience on both sides of the desk. About 9 years ago, started WR in the space of talent acquisition in HR for Fistful of Talent. And then I have my own blog, TimSacket.com and through that speaking or writing, like people all of a sudden think, you know, now you know something and so they ask you to come and speak and do all those sorts of things. And so you get pretty active in the community, which I love. Like it’s kept me on top of the technology in terms of who’s innovative best practices, all that great stuff.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
And I think for me the, the great thing about the stuff you write is you’re always a man with an opinion. And I think that, you know, I think that’s great because I Think lots of people kind of, you know, sit on the fence, but you always, you know, you always kind of say what you say what you mean. So last week you were hosting a recruitment marketing conference. You were the, you were the mc. And, and that’s, and recruitment marketing is really what I kind of wanted to talk about on the, on the podcast. I mean, first of all, could you tell us a little bit about that event and, and just really what’s on your rad comes to recruitment marketing?
Tim Sackett [00:03:26]:
Well, Matt, you and I both go to a lot of different conferences all over the world. And I think one of the growing kind of segments of the conference world is user conferences. So it’s, you know, whether it’s an Oracle, an SAP, ultimate software, whatever the big, you know, the big ones are, now everybody’s trying to do one. So smashfly, their idea was we don’t want to do, and smashfly is a big recruitment marketing CRM. They didn’t want to do, you know, a normal kind of just user conference. What they wanted was, let’s not make this about us. Let’s talk about recruitment marketing as a segment within the industry and just bring in kind of people that are, they think companies that are doing really well, talk about that, thought leaders that can speak to it and just really kind of, I guess evolve the conversation to a higher level around recruitment marketing. And their hopes is to grow that conference so that it is recruitment marketing. And they had a lot of other vendors there as well. They didn’t have any competition there. But, you know, but that’s, you know, hey, they’re paying the bill and they’re putting it on from that standpoint. But they’re really trying to evolve that user conference into something that’s just not pitching product at people that are coming, but actually trying to give them some real chops around. How do you become better at recruitment marketing?
Matt Alder [00:04:41]:
That’s really interesting. I always think that’s, that’s a, that’s a kind of a great approach just in terms of sort of, you know, raising everyone’s knowledge and getting everyone to talk, talk to each other. What I’ve noticed that recruitment marketing is kind of coming up a lot, you know, a lot of events in a lot of conversations, almost not quite as a new thing, but as something that’s kind of been reinvented or evolved. You know, why is that? What’s different this time? What are you seeing, you know, what are you seeing in that space that’s changed, that’s put it at the top of everyone’s Agenda again?
Tim Sackett [00:05:16]:
Well, I think for years we had this employment branding kind of segment, right? And employment branding, you know, it’s one aspect of recruitment marketing. And I think everybody focused on that, just, oh, we have to have a brand. We have to have a brand. We have to have a brand. And then what happened was everybody had a brand and then they didn’t know what to do with that brand. And so the recruitment marketing side came out because I think everyone said, oh, well, wait a minute. Once you have a brand and you have this story now, you have to find a way to share the story. And that’s content marketing and email nurturing and social recruiting and mobile recruiting and career sites and SEO and employee referrals and talent networks and, you know, everything that comes into this recruitment marketing segment. And so I think it was started with that. And I want to say probably five, seven years ago, you know, that the employment branding side started to become really hot. And. And I think that’s what happened because people, all of a sudden, they would spend, I mean, Matt, we know big companies that were spending millions of dollars on creating an employment brand. And then it was like, okay, we have a brand. And then they were like, well, why don’t we have more candidates?
Matt Alder [00:06:22]:
And I think you. You kind of illustrate, I suppose, the problem and the issue there where you just listed all of the channels that, that people could. That people could use. What. I mean, what, What. How are people making sense of, you know, the sheer amount of things that in the last few years we’ve kind of suffered from this bright shiny object syndrome that as soon as someone launches, you know, a new social channel or there’s a new way to do email marketing, everyone kind of jumps on it as, you know, the, the next big thing. Without a kind of strategy and without thinking it through, what are you. What, you know, what did you see or what are you seeing? How. How are the best companies sort of dealing with that channel saturation? You know, what. What kind of strategies are out there?
Tim Sackett [00:07:08]:
Well, I think what I’m seeing from the best companies is they went to their marketing departments and said, hey, here’s our challenge. Because it’s exactly the same challenge as the consumer brand has, which is, how do we get this consumer brand out there? And then how do we get this employment brand out there? And so you started to see segments of the industry that were following marketing’s lead. So they went out and they would really follow kind of the CRM model from a technology standpoint of how do we go out and really kind of just drip, market and nurture these kind of candidates and do these kinds of things. And then the most evolved companies are coming out and saying, hey, maybe we should have one brand across everything. Maybe our consumer brand and our employment brand should really kind of, if not match. They should be parallel with each other, and maybe we can actually leverage both brands to help each other. And you see companies like geography, who, they run these consumer branding commercials. And I don’t know if you see them in the United States, they run these consumer branding commercials that are incredible employment branding commercials, but it makes people go, oh my gosh, GE is this really great digital brand that’s up and coming. And GE’s been around forever, right? They’re one of the big kind of Fortune 10 conglomerates worldwide. And now all of a sudden, people are looking at them almost like they look at startups, like a Facebook or some of these kind of cool Google and stuff like that. And that’s really hard to do because GE is just, you know, a rust bucket, old, you know, kind of company that’s building aircraft engines. But now, obviously they’re evolving, right? And they’re, they’re doing a lot of other stuff. But I think they figured it out. And what they did was for their head of employment branding, they went out and hired a true marketer with no HR recruiting background at all. I mean, they just came in and said, hey, here’s our challenge. Try to go figure this out. And they went at it from a different angle. They just kind of said, oh, so we just need to share this and let’s, let’s kind of wrap these stories together. And it’s really resonated with a lot of people.
Matt Alder [00:09:10]:
That is interesting, actually. And there’s been a couple of kind of employer brands, recruitment marketers that I’ve had on the podcast in the past who haven’t had an HR and recruiting background. You’ve kind of approached things slightly differently to, you know, to great effect. Is the, do you think then that the storytelling is the, is the big part of this rather than the individual channels that are being, that are being used? What are you seeing that’s working?
Tim Sackett [00:09:40]:
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the big things that came out of the conference was there’s a lot of those brands trying to determine how do we share the stories of our employees? And it starts even way back in terms of, like, the job descriptions. They’re like going, look, do we still need to do this job description thing? Why don’t we have an employee that’s working in that same job, tell their story, tell why what they’re doing and why they like what they’re doing, why they like working here in more of a transparent matter. And that could be on video, it could be, you know, all kinds of different ways that you share that. And, but it’s so, it’s all of that. So. And then on a bigger level in the brand, how do we get those stories out of our, of the employees that are doing really great stuff here and share that whether it’s through video or, you know, other kinds of, you know, storytelling? And so you saw a lot of examples in the marketing part of this is great. I mean, there was people in the conference that, I mean, it was constantly being tweeted out like they’re being brought to tears by these videos that these companies are putting together to share their stories. Because some of these stories are just so, you know, they just tug at your heartstrings so much. When you have an employee that got this job and they have a sick child and because of this job they were able to get these great benefits, all this stuff, and you’re just like, oh my gosh, like, this is a wonderful company now. You have to be able to marry that up with reality, right? So if you have, if you have this great story and you’re sharing this and you say this is who you are and somebody shows up day one and that’s not who you are, that’s not gonna, you’re not gonna last very long. And so I think that’s always the challenge was how do we, how do we share our great stories at the same time, be realistic. That, that’s not, that’s not everybody, right?
Matt Alder [00:11:19]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I was, interestingly, I was judging some in house recruitment marketing awards in the, in the UK yesterday. We were watching the, the kind of the video entry section and there was some, there was some brilliant stories, some brilliant stories in there. And I, and our challenge really as judges with the limited information that we had was to try and work out how much was marketing spin and how much was like genuinely, you know, genuinely what was going on. And, and really the ones that shone through were the ones that had the, the actual employees of the company, you know, in the video, their stories personally. Is that kind of similar in terms of what you were seeing last week and kind of in general in the.
Tim Sackett [00:12:06]:
U.S. yeah, I do think the companies that are doing it really well have figured out usually within recruitment, talent acquisition, hr, we just don’t have the budget money for this. And if you Go to the finance department and say, hey, we’re going to need millions of dollars to create this stuff. It’s probably just not going to happen. And I think the best companies are figuring out how do we leverage stuff that our marketing departments already put together and put our own kind of employment spin on it, or how can they help us do that with kind of the materials and the collateral that they already have put together? Because they have a lot and with some really small tweaks, sometimes they can make some really great videos and different materials that speak to hiring instead of to the actual consumer brand.
Matt Alder [00:12:51]:
And I think the relationship between marketing and recruiting is an interesting one there because there seems to be this ridiculous kind of ongoing argument about whether recruitment’s marketing and all this kind of stuff. And to me it just seems that these are very different disciplines with a synergy between them where there’s common ground and they can help each other out. Where do you stand on the is recruitment marketing argument?
Tim Sackett [00:13:18]:
You’re so right by that. What you said. I think it was something that wasn’t talked about a lot. It was talked about a little. And I’d ask some questions to some of the people coming off in between sessions about that. And it’s still something that’s very real. And part of that is a traditional HR view and talent acquisition view, which is, hey, we don’t want anything taken away from us. We have very little decision making ability on things that we do. And so if we give away this to marketing, then we just gave away one more thing of which we had so few. And so some of these talent acquisition leaders hang on to this stuff with such fever, you know, of like just, we can’t let this go. And I’m thinking, no, actually, if you actually would, you know, bring in your marketing team and tell them and let them run with it, you’ll probably get a better product in the end and you’ll be a part of it and you’ll create a better relationship. But sometimes they just refuse to do it. And what happens is, I mean, we’re not. As a talent acquisition leader myself, I’m not a marketer by trade or by nature. And so the chances of me pulling this off are going to be, you know, really high or really low versus pulling in my marketing department and asking for that help.
Matt Alder [00:14:27]:
Absolutely. I mean, I kind of see that the, the clients that I work with, they do this really well, tend to have a, you know, they, they tend to have either marketeers in their team or they, you know, there’s A, there’s a really good kind of relationship with, with the marketing department in the, in the, so kind of just sort of, you know, moving the thinking on a little bit. What role does technology play in this? I think that very often when we talk about recruitment marketing, it’s always a technology first conversation. And I think, you know, from what you’ve said, you know, that clearly isn’t the, you know, shouldn’t be the focus of the strategy. But obviously, you know, as these new technologies come onto the market in talent acquisition, you know, there’s some pretty exciting things that can happen. You know, what are you seeing that’s great technology? How is technology kind of supporting this?
Tim Sackett [00:15:19]:
Yeah, you know, my view in technology has always been the technology is going to allow you to do stuff faster. So if you have a really crappy employment brand, you’re going to be able to share that crappy employment brand really fast with technology. So you have to be careful. Right? Because if you said if you start with technology and you haven’t put all the hard work into building a really great brand, you’re just going to fail faster. Now on the technology side, what I see out there is a ton of confusion. Like you had mentioned earlier, there’s so many products that are coming coming up every single time. I was at HR Tech Tech conference in Chicago earlier this year and there’s 800 vendors on the floor. Most of those vendors, you know, have some kind of, you know, are trying to. Because the talent acquisition money right now into the industry is so high, everybody’s trying to get a chunk of that. And so there’s a lot of recruitment, marketing types of technology out there. There’s storytelling technology on the market. That is really awesome because I think that’s one of the things we struggle with as well is how do we get our employees to tell a story because they’re not natural storytellers and this technology kind of walks them through that. And there’s a bunch of different vendors out there. The one thing I think that’s super confusing for a lot of TA leaders right now is their ATSs are telling them, hey, don’t worry, we do CRM. You don’t have to go buy CRM. We have CRM and it’s awful. At the very minimum, it’s a vanilla based CRM that just basically does mass emailing. Right? It doesn’t do much more than that. And if you actually look at some of the great CRM technology that’s on the market for recruiting, it’s, it’s really really advanced. It’s some Big Brother type stuff that I think when people see it, they’re like, wow, that’s, that’s crazy that we can go out and actually, you know, continue to nurture these kinds of people that are coming to our career side.
Matt Alder [00:17:04]:
I think you’re spot on with that. I think one of the confusing issues is just that, you know, it’s, it’s not, the categories aren’t very clear. Lots of people will say they do everything and you know, they may only be a specialist in one part of that as a vendor. And I think, you know, I always say to, you know, people who are looking at the technology part of this, they need to go out and see what’s available and as you say, see what brilliant things you can get from a company that’s specializing in that particular, you know, in that particular section of the, of the, of the, of the process. Basically.
Tim Sackett [00:17:40]:
Yeah, for sure.
Matt Alder [00:17:42]:
So you mentioned ge. What other companies are you seeing who are, who are, who are doing great things in this space? Which employers are really sort of leading the pack?
Tim Sackett [00:17:54]:
Thomas Reuters presented, their head of TA presented and they had some of the most advanced analytics to recruitment marketing that I’ve seen from anybody. That’s one piece that I think a lot of companies, they haven’t even figured out yet in terms of hey, we’re going to put all these resources and effort into recruitment marketing. How do we really go out there and measure that effectively? They’ve done some really cool stuff. Stuff. Thermal Scientific was another that they’ve got their storytelling down to a science. They’ve really were advanced in that area, comparable to some of the other ones that we saw. But again, then it gets to, you got that great story. How do you share it? How do you make sure that everybody knows? Because both of those companies, people really had no idea who they are. Thomas Reuters is this mass media company and Thermal Scientific does a lot of different kinds of, you know, technical types things and so they really have a hard time sharing their story and getting that out.
Matt Alder [00:18:54]:
From what you were saying at the, at the conference, what does the future look like in recruitment marketing? What were the sort of cutting edge, bleeding edge things that people were thinking about? I know, you know, sometimes we shouldn’t get, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves because people aren’t doing, you know, some of the things that are available now, but just, just to get ahead of ourselves. What was kind of on the horizon that was really interesting.
Tim Sackett [00:19:19]:
A lot of people are talking about the artificial intelligence side of recruitment marketing. And there’s a belief out there, and we’re going to see if it comes true, that there’s probably some really advanced AI recruitment marketing types of technologies are being developed that will be able to take a candidate from first touch all the way to first in person interview without a human ever actually interacting with them. That’s pretty advanced. Awesome kinds of things. Especially when you think of companies who are hiring hundreds of thousands, millions of people a year and they have these recruiting teams. I talked to a recruiting team the other day. They had 200 people in their talent acquisition team for 8,000 hires a year. That’s wow, that’s a lot of recruiters for only 8,000 hires. And so an AI technology could really advance them and probably eliminate half that group, you know, and for a fraction of the cost.
Matt Alder [00:20:17]:
Interesting. Yeah, I think, I think there are some very interesting developments in that, in that space to, to come. Just sort of final question and I suppose a more general question about, you know, what’s sort of next in, in recruiting for 2017 where we’re talking a couple of days or maybe even three days now. I can’t, I’ve lost count. After the, the US presidential election, what are your views on 2017? What are going to be the key issues for recruiting in hr?
Tim Sackett [00:20:49]:
Well, in the US market and I’m sure there’s going to be ripples throughout the world with President Elect Trump in the US Which I think we’re all still trying to figure out how that happened. There’s going to be a lot of HR related items that companies are going to have to focus on because he’s going to take a look at health care. He’s going to take a look at a lot of the wage and hour issues and things that companies face, especially small businesses. And so we can see a lot of things kind of getting rolled back or repealed that the Obama administration has put in for years. It’s going to be a lot of heavy lifting and just flat out just a lot of work for those HR teams. Now what does that have to do with talent acquisition? I’m not sure. I mean the one thing we know in the US is the H1B probably is going to get re hauled in terms of hiring visas. And what he really wants to do is to say right now within the H1B community within the US so if I want to hire an Indian developer to come over and work for me, Matt, here in the States, I have to put them on an H1B visa. I hold that visa as the employer. I have three years, I can renew it for another three years. So for virtually six years, I have that person, he has to work for me or she has to work for me, and I have to pay them a prevailing wage. Now, that prevailing in quotes is very subjective. And so I might go out, hire that person, they’re working for me as a developer, and I’m going to put them on site at a client of mine, I’m going to charge that client 150 an hour. I might be paying that developer 50 an hour. Whereas if I had a US person in that same role, maybe they’re making 75, maybe they’re making 100 an hour. So there’s a lot of companies here that are really taking advantage of that visa thing. And Trump has said, look, we need to get a true prevailing wage for those H1Bs coming in so that if you’re paying a US worker 75 for that job, you better be paying that H1B75. Now, what he knows what will happen then is we’ll probably go out and actually then probably hire more US workers for those jobs, unless H1B. But the reality is, with the demographics in the US and how many people are retiring, it doesn’t matter. We could Open up the H1B to a half a million a year and people would still fill all those visas.
Matt Alder [00:23:05]:
Interesting. And I think, you know, it’s a, it’s, it’s very interesting times in, in Europe as well with, you know, with, with Brexit. And I think there are very similar, similar issues for, for, for. For. For hr. HR over here. So we live in interesting times, as they say. Tim, thank you very much for talking to me.
Tim Sackett [00:23:26]:
Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:23:27]:
My thanks to Tim Sackett. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes, Stitcher, or via your podcasting app of choice. Just search for recruiting future. You can find all of the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
