It’s always great to welcome a previous guest back to the show. I’m particularly pleased this week to be able to welcome back William Uranga, Director or Technical and Corporate Recruiting at GoDaddy.
Last time he was on the show William shared the tactics GoDaddy were using to recruit in some highly competitive markets. In this week’s episode William gives us an insight into the journey his talent acquisition are on to move from being reactionary to operational and ultimately to be genuine strategic partner for their business.
In the interview we discuss:
• How GoDaddy’s recruiting challenges have changed
• Finding new ways of being proactive and partnering with the business
• Making talent acquisition predictable in its delivery
• The benefits of providing analytics to hiring managers
• An incredibly smart way of improving the candidate experience
If you are an in house recruiting leader looking for a model for change then this interview really is a must listen.
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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 75 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It’s always great to welcome back a previous guest to the show and I’m particularly pleased this week to welcome back William Uranga, Director of Technical and corporate recruiting at GoDaddy. The last time he was on the show, William talked about the tactics GoDaddy were using to recruit in some highly competitive markets. In this week’s episode, William gives us an insight into the journey his talent acquisition team are on to move from being reactionary to operational and ultimately to be genuine strategic partners to their business. If you are an in house recruiting leader looking for a model for team improvement, then I think you’ll find this discussion particularly interesting. Hi William and welcome back to the podcast.
William Uranga [00:02:01]:
Thank you. Appreciate it Matt.
Matt Alder [00:02:03]:
A pleasure to have you back on the show. Last time when you were here a few months back we were talking about how to recruit tech talent in the competitive environment and you’re also talking about the sort of transition that your, your recruiting team was going through. So it would be good to sort of pick up themes and, and see what’s happened in the intervening time. Before we do though, I should probably get you to introduce yourself and say who you are and who you work for just in case anyone didn’t hear the the first podcast.
William Uranga [00:02:39]:
Certainly. So William Uranga I’ve been around in tech recruiting for, we’ll just say some, some, some time. I don’t want anybody to carbon date me or anything like that. But, but I’ve spent a lot of time both on the west coast, particularly in the Bay Area, working with tech companies from a recruiting standpoint, both in individual contributing role and then more recently in the last good 1012 years in a leadership role. Right now I lead a team of recruiters that does professional hiring for GoDaddy, which is headquartered over here in Scottsdale, Arizona. And we focus on the traditional corporate roles, everything from a frontline hire all the way up to an SAP technical roles, which for us tend to be design, product management, product marketing, and then of course engineering, which encompasses quite a wide spectrum of talent there as well.
Matt Alder [00:03:42]:
So before we get into your journey, I’d kind of be interested to get your perspective on what your market looks like at the moment. When we were talking last time, it was kind of highly competitive and you were, you know, you were kind of working hard and really sort of leveraging your employer brand to find the talent you needed. Have things changed? Is the. Is there still a shortage of talent in the areas that you, that you recruit?
William Uranga [00:04:06]:
In certain areas, yes. And you may surprise people. One of those areas, for example, is finding technical accounting people here in the Phoenix area. There’s quite a bit of diversity of different companies from an industry standpoint, but it’s not the same sort of intensity or concentration as you find, for example, in the Bay Area. Therefore, to find people that have their CPA is super hard to find here. And so it takes a little bit longer. And so we’ve had to adjust and almost make some of our sourcing plans and branding efforts almost on par with what we do for engineering, even though it isn’t for the same number. It’s kind of digging your well before you’re thirsty, so to speak. So it’s been a lot of discussions, but a great partnership working with the CFO and their leadership to be more involved in the community so that people know that we’re around and have us as part of, if you will, free rent in their mind from a brand standpoint, being aware of who we are, what we do, and as a viable option as they look to kind of develop their careers as a possible place to go. So that’s just one example. Just even within accounting, that’s not even, you know, engineering, so to speak. But we certainly do have challenges that have shifted and one went from super hard and now we almost have more applicants than we know what to do with. And that’s particularly within our frontline hiring that has been addressed by university team this year. I think we had about 9 to 10,000 applications just this past fall for internships and new college grad roles that we had open. So going from we couldn’t get enough resumes, qualified people, now we have too many. How do we respond, how do we prioritize? Those with a very small team became the next problem for us to solve. So I guess you could say in one case be careful what you ask for, you might get it and that’ll present a different set of circumstances to respond to. So that’s certainly within another group. And I think right now one thing that we’re looking to address has been more the mid career person. So not the junior folks, not the people leadership but the high level individual contributing folks particularly within engineering is a bit more rarefied air. So they don’t need to go to meetups, they don’t have to rely on a network to get tips. They already have this built often outside of a lot of social media platforms. So how do you get them? How do you engage that? That’s something that we’re currently working on and part of the solution that is certainly the brand aspect and we have particularly earlier this year had embarked on getting a whole lot of video footage. We also pointed one of our colleagues within the TA function to take on social media and brand as a person that already knew GoDaddy and would ramp up in this effort. And it’s been great to see how within talent acquisition we’ve started to develop our own even if it’s just one person center of excellence that we can go to and start leveraging them on the practices that we should be using to solve a very particular set of circumstances.
Matt Alder [00:07:44]:
That’s interesting actually because that’s something that I’ve seen with you know, quite a few companies to a sort of greater or lesser extent to sort of develop that expertise in house and to have someone who, who kind of truly understands the brand and can and kind of can kind of communicate that. So yeah, that, that, that makes a lot of sense. So you’re, you’ve kind of been on a bit of a journey with, with your team and with your strategy. Talk, talk, talk us through that. How, how, how have things been developing? What have you, what have you been learning?
William Uranga [00:08:17]:
Well this has been overall from GoDaddy has been going through a transformation of being what most people knew as domains and, and hosting company. The to help get your email address or website address to now being really a full fledged spectrum of technology to help the entrepreneur. That’s been a new pivot for the company and a new offering as we continue to grow very robustly. I think a lot of people have had the old paradigm of what we were doing still stuck in their head as well as the old super bowl commercials and advertisement. But this is really a new pivot for good adding and as we’ve been having a new paradigm for the Products that we want to continue to bring to the market, how we want to organize our business and the values that we want to operate by. We’ve also needed to, if you will, change talent acquisition to meet that. So we, if you will, have a people plan as well. And doing that, we found ourselves in a situation which we were extremely reactive. Get a wreck, it’s, you know, pure panic, if you will, or go, go, go until you fill it and then, you know, repeat the cycle, almost like groundhog’s day. And we realized that we weren’t able to have deeper conversations about the quality of the talent, how could we get ahead of the pipeline building efforts and so forth. And we realized that, you know, in some cases the business was going to be able to be a great partner with us, that as it was going through changes, we were going to be able to match them in step. And then there were some areas that we simply weren’t going to be able to partner, such as workforce planning. There was always going to be the 11th hour emergency of get me five engineers over here or a pivot in another part of the world where we would have to respond to. In some cases, we had to take that into account that if we couldn’t get that nailed down, how could we be the best talent acquisition group that godaddy needed to move forward and get where it was going? So we knew that being reactionary was not healthy. So we had started to say how we could move things into more of an operational footing. And this was a lot of long discussions about priorities, about what did we want to be known for? What value did we want to describe that we were going to be offering business and set about to have operational steps, start developing best practices and really re engaging the hiring managers and their executives about we can do this. If we can partner with you to this extent in how we hire people. So will you change in your expectations and your behavior along with us? And that was something that got us to the operational side, where we had a predictable set of plans. So if A happens, we follow up with B and and so forth. And that was good because talent acquisition could then become predictable in what we were delivering, as opposed to, what would be the right word, hodgepodge of experiences that people could have. Not maybe necessarily the same across organization, but became unified in that sense.
Matt Alder [00:11:44]:
How easy was that process with the hiring managers? Was it something that was very straightforward? Was there a lot of pain involved with that? Did they respond well? Any sort of tips or tricks that you could share with other people in Terms of getting that process right, sure.
William Uranga [00:12:03]:
Well, this has happened in several different cycles, but we found socializing, communicating, educating, and really asking a lot of questions was super helpful. So this had actually started before I had joined GoDaddy, which is now, you know, we’re moving into my. In my third year here, and having, if you will, a listening tour and asking questions about what are they facing in their business, not just on the talent front, but what are they struggling to solve in getting the product out the door, what are they changing in that aspect? And there was all kinds of different color that we got that otherwise wouldn’t have shown up on a. On a description, a role description before. And, you know, at the end of those conversations, sometimes it was with individuals, sometimes it was within teams. It was, you know, if we had a clear sense saying, well, we can. We can certainly affect this and do this if we were able to partner with you and actually get your interview team organized ahead of time. Now, some people said, well, that makes complete sense. It saves time if you talk and plan ahead of time. Others, you know, didn’t. Hadn’t had a good experience before, and they questioned why this seems like, you know, giving me homework to do something up front, how do I get the payoff? And so some of that, even after talking with them, was something they had to take on faith. Could we provide training so that everybody was on the same page and we had the same nomenclature and so forth. Others were happy to try it out and give us, you know, brutally honest feedback about what was working. And there were some things that I think we launched probably too quickly that we said, okay, we got to. We got to revisit that. One of the things right now is the feedback form that we use for our technical phone screens and on sites. Nobody uses it the same way between two or three people, unfortunately. So we’re trying to figure out, how do we simplify it. So some of the stuff we got right after having those conversations, others are more of an ongoing evolution to how to improve the tools and make it easier to use so that we have better results. But so it was more of. It was just that ongoing discussion with certain leaders. In fact, we’re still doing this on an ongoing basis. Each of the people that lead a team within Talent Acquisition are checking not only within the SVP level, but their direct reports at least a couple times a year saying, how are we doing? How’s my team doing? What could we be doing better? Are there opportunities to partner better together? And it’s amazing when you have that sort of 30 minute conversation, you discover where training could solve that. Spending time with some individuals that don’t see the value when you present something as a group, just some one on one time would make a difference in that area. But when you address stuff that’s very near and dear to their heart, as far as how they ship products or how they take customer calls, they get that. But if you throw them a bunch of HREs, mumbo jumbo bureaucratic terminology, they just shut down. They don’t have time to pick up and learn whatever HR folks are steeped in from day one.
Matt Alder [00:15:23]:
It seems that makes a lot of sense. And I think that HRES is now my new favorite word. So I kind of interrupted your flow there a little bit. So kind of what happened after you’d established this kind of dialogue with the hiring managers?
William Uranga [00:15:41]:
Well, and so having that dialogue with the high managers, you know, the other half of the equation is your team. And you know, it’s one thing to deal with the devil or the pain that you have at the moment, but change itself can be viewed as super painful in its own right. And so I had internal skeptics, healthy skeptics mind you, but said, I don’t know if that’s going to, you know, work. And there were people that just said, anything’s got to be better than what we’re doing now. That was particularly easy to. I didn’t have as many naysayers going from reactionary to operational. Right. But going from operational to a tactical. Excuse me, going from tactical to operational is. It was a different shift and I kind of mixed my terminology there. Tactical is when we have a set of plans. Operational is where we’re able to start defining better the products or the outcomes that we’re going to have within reportable and averages and metrics. And that’s something that I think that could probably have the most resistance internal with some of our teams that if we were going to work on our candidate experience, we needed to be able to set expectations up front of when a candidate will hear back from us. Which meant that even though we were getting inundated with applications, we had to get back to them within a certain period of time about whether they were going to move forward or not move forward. So those were harder discussions to have. And I found at least within the personalities within our teams, it was much better to present the opportunity or the problem and say, how would you guys solve this? What do you think we should do? What’s reasonable? What are we willing to commit to and sign on and get more buy in that way than just coming, you know, with a little snowflake memo saying, this is how the world will be moving forward.
Matt Alder [00:17:39]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, how do you, how do you solve a problem like that in terms of, you know, having to get back to people when you’re getting an increasing amount of, increasing amount of applications? And I’m sure that the resources that you have aren’t growing at the same pace.
William Uranga [00:17:57]:
So it’s similar in a way to not getting or having a problem with your, your hiring funnel, the candidate funnel. You know, if you measure stuff, if you care about something, you’ll measure it. And we found, for example, with some candidate funnels, that there was just too much throughput from the first level that the recruiter would see. They were just passing way too many on to the hiring manager to review. So in having that there’s a problem, one, you’re wasting your hiring manager’s time. You’re expecting them to do more of the lifting on the screening side, whereas the recruiter either doesn’t have time or hasn’t been equipped to do that. So when we talked about becoming more valuable to your hiring manager, if you can get it where as you go down each level of vetting to more, you know, from the widest part of the funnel down to where you actually have an offer and you have the conversion rate increasing, that’s a better sign. That’s much better to have that. And the hiring manager will sing your praises. The interview team will be amazed because they don’t feel like they’re wasting their time seeing people that should, they shouldn’t be looking at. And the recruiter gets, you know, gets kudos as well. And so painting that picture of what adding value is and letting the recruiters know that you don’t have to be a shorthand cook at a fast food restaurant, you can actually be more of a consultant or advisor if you go ahead and shift that work more up front. Now recruiters will say, well, that means that falls on me more. Well, not necessarily. Some of the solutions that we talked about how we could better reclaim our time as recruiters was how we were managing our time just from a calendar perspective. Some of it was setting expectations in the acknowledgement email with the candidate. Some of it was better understanding what the requirements were from the hiring manager and figuring out ways that we could either get better work samples or some of the prelim questions answered up front and taken care of so that we had a better qualified candidate to put in front of the Hiring manager.
Matt Alder [00:20:23]:
You’ve mentioned sort of analytics when, when you were talking there. And I think it’s really. I think that’s a really fantastic approach to solving that problem. And you’ve. You’ve mentioned sort of analytics as a way of kind of diagnosing where the pain points are. How else have you found analytics to be useful and what are you kind of measuring in this, in this sort of stage of your. Of your evolution?
William Uranga [00:20:47]:
Great, Great question. When I say analytics, I don’t want to make it sound like we’re doing anything too terribly advanced. We just have a team that has started here that we’ve built called Advanced analytics for the entire business. Those people are really doing, if I may affectionately call it egghead sort of work about how do we do predictive modeling and stuff like that. I guess what I would probably draw, what we’re doing is a little bit more to business intelligence, which is more reporting and noting what’s within the norms or blips on the radar screen. And if you measure what you care about and you report what you care about and you’re transparent about it, there’s a couple things that you can do. One, on the recruiter side, everybody loves to know when they’re kind of killing it, so to speak, that they’re just hitting a home run probably is a better analogy. People love to know that, too. If somebody’s doing it better than they are, that drives usually recruiter nuts, but only to the point where they’re asking, how did you do it better? I’d like to learn, too. So there’s kind of the peer teaching, peer sharing in that sense. But then there’s also the questions that would normally routinely come up from the hiring manager or their executives. And if you’re not producing anything, they’re saying what is happening, you leave them to fill in the blanks or create the narrative of how well your group is doing, or maybe not doing what helps with business intelligence or being able to provide metrics and analytics through reporting is you’ll be able to talk about what is happening and then quickly get to the next set of questions, which is probably more interesting as to why is it happening and what can we do about it? Where can we double down and make that even better? Or how can we minimize that moving forward? Those are the real interesting questions that our executives now enjoy asking and talking about. Because what we’ve done is we’ve taken a series of reports that we watch on a weekly monthly basis and now put it into our quarterly business review and Our talent acquisition off site that we have after each quarter, spends a lot of time looking at these dashboards, which is key areas where questions were asked. And we’re measuring things and we’re watching them trend over time and noticing when there’s improvement of a certain magnitude or maybe it’s moved in the wrong direction and we quickly get engaged as to what was happening. What can we do about that and how do we address that moving forward? And then we even took it a step further of where we had that reflective of the whole function and we turned it around and started to share, if you will, a scorecard or dashboard for each of the SVPs as to what talent acquisition looked like in their business group and how did they compare to their peers of SVPs as far as apt offer cost per hire, the number of diversity candidates that they hired compared to their peers. That took a whole nother level of interesting turn as far as discussion at the executive level.
Matt Alder [00:24:20]:
I can imagine that was a very powerful, powerful thing to do.
William Uranga [00:24:23]:
Yeah. And they asked for it now. So that’s a great excuse to have a conversation with your svp. And the fun thing, now that we have this and that, I’m that we’re working on our recruiters going from that last transformational stage from operational to strategic now. My recruiters are spending time with those SVP’s going over those dashboards and scorecards and I find that really, I mean, I could be doing that, my VP could be doing that, but man, when you have that level of ownership at the recruiter level, the senior recruiter level, that’s something special. And I smile when I see that happen because I know that they’ve bought in into the model and where we’re going. And it’s just super exciting to start to see that happen more and more.
Matt Alder [00:25:11]:
So you mentioned sort of moving from operational to strategic. How does this play out from here? What are the next stages for you?
William Uranga [00:25:21]:
Well, I don’t have a stage after strategic. At least I haven’t thought of it. Maybe we start getting into version 1.0, 2.0. There’s always something to, to test and try. You know, does, does making a degree required in a certain area improve performance as far as in customer care and consulting? I don’t know, maybe we test that out. You know, maybe we’ve been too. Maybe we’ve been silly in requiring somebody to have a degree in computer science because that was a cheap shorthand of knowing computer science fundamentals. And we should really be playing more emphasis on what they can actually do from a coding standpoint and assessment, if you will. But moving from the operational to the strategic is being what we call more of a consultant or a talent advisor. And it isn’t so much getting caught up in the machinations of applicant tracking because we certainly have to do that to a certain extent. I have some searches of my own that I do, so that’s how I kind of maintain contact on the street with what my recruiters are experiencing or seeing. But to be able to say let’s set this up and let’s run it, here’s a game plan and then start relying on some of these centers of excellence I mentioned at the, at the beginning to go ahead and do a lot more of the lifting with regards to screening or generating interest or content and so forth. And so it becomes much more of a clear partnership where the hiring manager is just as involved not only in the vetting, not only in the screening, but actually in the generation of talent. Whether it’s the referrals, contributing to a meetup, generating a blog. They’re in there because that’s how we see the marketplace going. And the recruiter, as we’re shifting to be more a talent advisor, becomes offering the best practices and advising about how to go about putting together the best offer with internal comps in mind or the strategy about how we engage as talent and what’s changed over the past year and making them much more of the go to person for not just the rec, but any sort of talent strategy challenge that they have moving forward. And when you have the SVP of a group coming to your recruiter because they have that confidence in them that then I’ll know that we’ve kind of rounded that, if you will, that final corner Right now I do get pulled into things and that’s okay because we’re not done with this transformation. But when you start getting that shift of emphasis and who your SVPs go to, that’s helpful. One of the things we’re kind of end with this that we’re doing is we’re aligning the recruiters to the SVPs. We used to have them geographically based. Now we have them known by the SVP and their leadership team saying that if you have a question, here’s a recruiter, they’re not going to be shifted to another location or something like that because we want them to be embedded with your know your business and represent your business. Well, if I haven’t focused on four or five different groups or it’s always rotating as to who they’re working with. It’s really hard to have that stickiness. So we’re, we’re going for that stickiness. Moving from being a mere recruiter to more of a talent advisor.
Matt Alder [00:29:03]:
William, thank you very much for talking to me again.
William Uranga [00:29:06]:
You bet. Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:29:08]:
My thanks to William Uranga. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes, on 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. This is the last episode of the podcast for 2016, and I just wanted to say a big thank you for all of the amazing support you’ve given to and to the show this year. I’ll be back next year and I hope you’ll join me.
