Time for something completely different. One of my favorite industry podcasts is Hiring On All Cylinders produced by the lovely people at Entelo. This week, in the interests of friendly podcast co-operation, I’m doing a podcast exchange with them.
I’m interviewed in the latest episode of Hiring On All Cylinders, talking about my new book and everything I’ve learned from interviewing all my wonderful podcast guests. Meanwhile on this week’s Recruiting Future Podcast my guest is Jill Witty, VP of Talent and Operations at Entelo. Jill has helped the company scale up from 7 employees to a 120 employees and has some fascinating insights into the modern world of Talent Acquisition.
In the interview we discuss:
• Innovative recruiting approaches
• Diversifying talent pools at the top of the funnel
• Establishing a compelling and competitive employer brand
• Values based recruiting that focuses on culture add rather than culture fit
Jill also gives us her take on the future of talent acquisition technology and in particular the potential role of artificial intelligence in recruiting.
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Glassdoor. Today, job seekers are doing their research before applying for jobs, and they’re doing it on Glassdoor. Glassdoor is the trusted and transparent place where 34 million engaged job seekers are going to research potential employers and where smart organizations of all sizes are going to recruit the best and brightest talent. Ready to get started on Glassdoor? To unlock your free employer account, Simply go to www.glassdoor.com employers. That’s www.glassdoor.com employers and fill in the free account form.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 87 of the Recruiting Future podcast. This week, something a bit different. One of my favorite industry podcasts is hiring on all cylinders, produced by the very lovely people at Entelo. In the interests of friendly podcast cooperation, this week we’re doing a podcast, Exchan. If you go over to hiringonallcylinders.com or search for it on itunes, you’ll find an interview with me where I’m talking about the new book and also the things I’ve learned from interviewing all of my wonderful podcast guests on this show. This week, I’m talking to Jill Witty, who’s VP of Talent and Operations at Entelo. To be clear, this isn’t a sales pitch for Entelo. Jill has some fascinating insights into a number of key areas of talent acquisition, including diversity and culture. I know it’s an interview you’re going to enjoy. Hi, Jill, and welcome to the podcast.
Jill Witty [00:02:11]:
Thanks, Matt. I’m glad to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
So could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Jill Witty [00:02:18]:
Sure. My name is Jill Witty and I’m the vice president of talent and operations at a company called Entelo. Entelo is a recruiting software platform. We are a bit of a startup. We’re about five years old, based in San Francisco, and we help companies use sort of data, predictive analytics and machine learning to improve their recruiting processes.
Matt Alder [00:02:43]:
So, five years old startup, how many people do you have and what kind of recruitment challenges do you face?
Jill Witty [00:02:52]:
Yeah, so we’re at about 120 employees. When I joined, we were 7. So I’ve gotten to witness and play a role in a lot of that growth, which has been a lot of fun and some of our recruiting challenges, you know, in the Bay Area, it is a very tough market, especially for some of the most in demand roles. The, you know, the senior engineers, the data scientists, the data engineers, you know, There’s a huge amount of demand because there are so many tech companies concentrated in this small area. And a lot of us don’t have the resources of some of the bigger companies, can’t be looking to import our talent from outside. So we’re all fighting over a very narrow pool of candidates for some of these roles. So that’s one of the biggest challenges. Another challenge that we face and that we actually help our customers try to solve is diversifying their talent pool and their employee base. And this goes hand in hand with being a tech company. There’s a bit of a lag between the roles that we need to fill and a diverse talent pool to fill those roles. So we help companies and we also, you know, focus internally on hiring outside of, you know, outside of the dominant majority, both in terms of gender, ethnic background, and then even, you know, beyond that, a diversity of thought and socioeconomic background and all sorts of other metrics of diversity.
Matt Alder [00:04:27]:
So, I mean, two very interesting challenges there. And, you know, I kind of like to talk about both of them in a bit more detail, I think. And obviously, you know, no pressure, because being a recruiting, software innovation, innovation company, I’m interested to kind of hear what your.
Matt Alder [00:04:44]:
Hear what your answers are.
Matt Alder [00:04:46]:
So with this, with the sort of hard to find, the hard to find people and the competition, what kind of.
Matt Alder [00:04:54]:
Innovation are you using in your sourcing and your.
Matt Alder [00:04:56]:
In your recruiting to overcome that problem?
Jill Witty [00:05:00]:
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of, I mean, the history of recruiting is a history of sort of being unfortunately very inefficient relative to a lot of other areas. I think recruiting has tended to lag in terms of innovation with software and with really using analysis on our data to drive our decision making. It is not always recruiting’s fault. It’s often just that the people who make software haven’t paid much attention to this area. So it’s nice to see that software is finally catching up a little bit and helping us be more efficient, be more targeted in our outreach, get to know our candidates better, all the things that we know make us better as recruiters. We finally have some software to help us with that. So obviously there’s our own intellisoftware, but I’m not here to pitch that. But that certainly does help make us more innovative. But even things like going out and thinking of creative strategies to be engaging with candidates outside of, you know, just posting on job boards or waiting for the applicants to file in. So that could be anything from building meaningful partnerships with organizations in your community where you think that talent might be growing and developing. So that could be coding schools, that could be colleges that maybe are not traditionally reached out to. You know, here in the Bay Area, it’s obviously very well known that you could go to Stanford or UC Berkeley to get fantastic technical talent. But what about trying to recruit from some of the community colleges in the area and building relationships there? A lot of them are doing great work around building programs specific to developing software engineers, but a lot of companies overlook those because they don’t have that same high profile. So there’s things like that. And then on the software front, I think a lot of recruiters have sort of grown up through using LinkedIn. And we really encourage people to step outside of LinkedIn to think about where else on the web could you be sourcing, you know, especially in technical talent. A lot of it is not even on LinkedIn. And those, those that are on LinkedIn are tired of getting hit up by, you know, literally hundreds of recruiters over the course of a week. They ignore their inmails. They probably never even log into LinkedIn. So we encourage people to really get to know the candidates, where they hang out online. And it’s not LinkedIn. It might be. If you’re an open, you know, if you’re an open source coder, you’re going to be on GitHub. So get to know, you know, the communities on GitHub and understand people’s projects and people’s passions that they’re working on so that you can engage with them in an authentic way. And that’s going to serve you much better as a recruiter in terms of.
Matt Alder [00:07:50]:
The amount of competition that you have in that geography for these technical roles. Once you’ve sort of found these people and built this initial relationship with them based on finding out about what they’re interested in, how do you make yourselves stand out? What’s the kind of the brand or the self for your organization that kind of gets people over the line?
Jill Witty [00:08:15]:
Sure. So, you know, I think so much about what’s going to be compelling in an opportunity is what is the culture of the company and is it a place where I, you know, whatever my requirements are, does it speak to me? So for our company and for our technical team, part of the fabric and really the most important part of our culture is the collaborative nature of the way they work, which is not true of all technical teams. But our engineers really rely on pairing to, you know, to program together, but also to do code review and, you know, testing before shipping. All of that is done through teamwork. And so, you know, we build that into our interview process as well. And we don’t make it a theoretical interview process where we’re having you whiteboard, you know, some sort of algorithmic challenge. But instead all of our technical exercises in the interview process are paired coding challenges where you’re meant to rely on the person already working at this company to ask them questions, to lean on them for help and support and not to sort of go at it solo. And that’s just a reflection of the culture. So that would be one thing that sort of makes us stand out is, you know, that importance on collaboration. Another that I think is different from a lot of companies in the area is our true emphasis on work life balance and how that can speak to people who have families or who have unusual needs around their hours or you know, outside obligations that would keep them away from work during, you know, during the usual 8 to 10 hour day that they might be expected to be here. And we’re very open about that. You know, a lot of the people on our exec team have families and have the so called second shift they have to get home to. And so while it’s true that we are a startup and we’re fast growth, we’re also very respectful of people’s need to find balance in their lives outside of their work.
Matt Alder [00:10:18]:
You mentioned also that one of your.
Matt Alder [00:10:20]:
Challenges was looking for diversity, you know, diversity of thought and really sort of, I suppose, considering, you know, biases and things like that in recruitment processes, how have you gone about sort of dealing with that particular challenge?
Jill Witty [00:10:39]:
Yeah, so diversity is such an interesting nut to crack because a lot of companies come to us with this question of okay, we, we want to do better with diversity. And maybe they’re looking at their, their numbers just from a breakdown and they say, okay, we’re X percent male and Y percent female. And then we have this many, you know, white versus Asian versus other underrepresented minorities. And we want to, you know, have a better balance and better mix there, which is great. And that’s definitely, I mean that is definitely step number one to be looking at your current metrics and say, where do we want to improve? But a lot of, a lot of companies, you know, their first thought is, okay, well how do we, how do we get more diverse candidates in the door? So it has to start with hiring. But unless you have an inclusive culture to begin with, then you’re going to find that hiring does not help because the people you hire will be likely to attrit and so you’ll just have a turnstile where you’re hiring new people in, but those same people, because they don’t feel included or because the way the organization runs does not support their needs, is just going to find them leaving in six months or one year. So it has to be a dual effort between the hiring and, and finding and bringing in that diverse talent and then the culture of the company and the way that that’s manifested through, you know, people OPS or hr, and also through leadership to actually retain and build and develop the diverse employees. But, you know, in terms of, in terms of step one on the recruiting side, it has to start with having a top of the funnel that is very representative of the populations you’re trying to recruit from. And it sounds very logical, but a lot of companies will say, gosh, why aren’t we, you know, why aren’t we getting more women in the door? Why don’t we see more Hispanics or African Americans or whatever your particular challenge is? And then you look at where they’re sourcing and how they’re sourcing, and they might only be. They not even know it, but they’re only reaching out to, you know, white men for their senior software engineering roles. So you can only do but so much if you’re not sourcing from diverse. From diverse pools. And there’s a number of ways you can do that. And, you know, we could get into that too, if you’d like. But it has to start at the top of the funnel. And then once you’re being very, you know, once you’re casting a wide net at the top of the funnel, you also then have to make sure that everything about your hiring process minimizes the effect of bias so that you’re not accidentally letting people go at a certain stage of the funnel because of something in your process that’s keeping them out.
Matt Alder [00:13:23]:
I think that’s really interesting, and I definitely would like to know more about the top of the funnel stuff. What are you doing to actually reach out to those specific audiences?
Jill Witty [00:13:34]:
Yeah. So at the top of the funnel part of it can be as straightforward as identifying. Okay, what do we need? So let’s just give the very basic example of we have an underrepresentation of females on our engineering team. So, okay, we know we want more women on our engineering team. Great. Where can we find these women? How can we identify them? How can we build relationships with them? So where can we find them? It could be you can start by using tools such as intellidiversity, but there are others out there where, you know, in addition to filling out your search criteria for what you’re looking for, your, your coding languages, or maybe there are certain, you know, schools you’re interested in or geographies, you can actually say female. And your results are going to be people who, algorithmically, our software has determined, are likely to identify as female. So that’s a very basic first pass is something like that. But additionally, going to meetups for women who code and pie ladies and women who go, things like that. You’re going to meet all of these women who, this is what they do, this is their passion or their, either their job or their hobby. Is this programming being open to university recruiting? Because we know that when people say there’s a pipeline problem, it’s not actually true. There are plenty of women graduating from universities with CS degrees, but what’s happening is they’re not being brought into a culture and developed at the same rate that the men are. So being open to hiring junior engineers, either, you know, straight out of university or out of boot camp, and you’ll find plenty of women there who are, you know, are eager to come and tackle the problems that your company is trying to solve. So those are just some of the ways that I would think about looking for female engineers and not just, not just sitting there and, you know, searching endlessly on LinkedIn and hoping that a woman turns up.
Matt Alder [00:15:41]:
You mentioned culture a few times as we’ve been, as we’ve been talking. How important is it for you to find people who fit into your culture? How does that sort of shape your recruiting strategy?
Jill Witty [00:15:58]:
So for us it’s very important and I do want to make a distinction because you said to fit into our culture and for us it’s, it’s less about fitting into the culture. What I want is a candidate who fits with our values, which for me is very distinctive from our culture. So if they’re not a values fit, then we probably don’t want them. At ntelo, you know, some of our values are we believe that great people are the foundation of great companies. And so everything we do every day is to, is in service of that belief. We want our employees to be what we call legit. And for us that means talented, passionate, gritty, authentic, resourceful. So these are some of the things where absolutely, if a candidate does not meet these qualities or not espouse these values, we’re not going to hire them. Because for us that’s as important, if not more important than the skill set and the acuities and all the strengths that, that it brings in terms of his or her actual role that they’re going to come into. But on the culture side, what we are looking for is what we like to think of as culture add because we believe that the company is the reflection. The culture of the company is what every single person brings to it. And so we think, well, what are you bringing that’s new that we don’t already have represented? So this goes back a little bit to the diversity. We don’t want to hire, you know, 100 people that look just like me or just like our CEO. And by look, I mean have the same backgrounds. You know, either we all went to the same college or we were raised in the same kinds of communities. We don’t want that. We want something new with each new hire because that’s going to make us stronger as a company. It’s going to make our business outcomes better. And frankly, it just, it makes it a better place to work. You know, it’s more enjoyable to have an environment that is rich and diverse with lots of different backgrounds and perspectives. So we always look for culture add instead of culture fit.
Matt Alder [00:18:04]:
So, sort of final question, where, where does this all go next? What’s on your, what’s on your radar for sort of the next 12 to 18 months? Are there sort of particular things you’ll be focusing on or, or new technologies that you’re looking at? What’s the, what’s the, what’s the, what’s next for you?
Jill Witty [00:18:23]:
Yeah, I’m really excited about where some of our product is going. You know, there’s been a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and how that’s going to impact the world of recruiting. And our next product, which is currently in beta but has not been publicly launched, is an AI based product. And I don’t want to talk too much about it, but what I can say is when you think about the processes in recruiting, where currently humans are not really adding a ton of value, meaning if we were to find a way to be able to automate that process by computers, we know that the computers could do it as well, if not better than the humans, that’s where AI is going to take over. And it’s a good thing because then it makes us all more efficient and it enables recruiters to be able to spend their time doing the things where they really do add value, building the relationships with candidates, being able to describe the company culture and paint the beautiful picture of exactly what the role is going to look like and why you would want to work for that hiring manager, getting them bought into everything about that company and the role. That’s where recruiters can really make a difference. And frankly, it’s why most people go into recruiting. They’re passionate about the human side. They’re not passionate necessarily about scheduling or sourcing and some of these processes that, if you really think about it, computers will be able to handle and sooner than we all think. So I’m really excited about that because the more we can automate the sort of tedium or the work where we’re not, you know, personally contributing something new, the better it is for all of us.
Matt Alder [00:20:02]:
Jill, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jill Witty [00:20:05]:
It was my pleasure, Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:20:08]:
My thanks to Jill Witty and the team at Entelo. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes on Stitcher or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for Recruiting Future in your App Store. You can find all the past episodes@www.dotrfpodcast.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.
