The trends in tech recruiting are something that every employer should be following with interest. Even if your company isn’t currently recruiting tech professionals, it is important to know what is happening in the sector as the methodologies and practices being used for tech recruiting today, are likely to be used by everyone tomorrow. Tech Recruiting is the bellwether sector of our industry.
Who better to get us up to speed with developments in this area than my guest this week, Hung Lee the founder of Workshape.io. Hung always has some great insights to share and it was brilliant to have him on the show.
In the interview we discuss:
• The current challenges in tech recruiting and the strategic decisions companies need to make to deal with them
• The importance of mind-set shift
• Having an “Always On” attitude to recruiting
• Myth busting
• The re-invention of the recruitment process
• Interoperability, modularisation and decoupling
Hung also gives us his views on the future of the sector and shares some of the great content he has recently curated.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from recx. RECX stands for Recruitment Explained and is the brand new event from the National Online Recruitment Academy, which has been inspired by TED talks. It’s taking place in the Leicester Square Theatre in London on the afternoon of Tuesday, 20 June. Ten of the most prominent talent attraction leaders will be filmed giving brief, intense and passionate talks about their path to recruiting excellence. To book your ticket, go to rexex.net that’s R E C E X.net click tickets and use the discount code rfpodcast to get 25% off the price.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 94 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The trends in tech recruiting are something that every employer should be paying attention to. Even if your company isn’t currently recruiting tech professionals, it’s important to know what’s happening in the sector as the methodologies and practices that are being used for tech recruitment today are likely to be by everyone tomorrow. It really is the bellwether sector of our industry. So who better to get us up to speed with developments in tech recruiting than Hung Lee, founder of Workshape IO. Hung always has some unique insights to share and I know lots of you will find this interview incredibly useful. Hi Hung, how are you?
Hung Lee [00:01:56]:
I’m very well, Matt. How are you doing?
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
Very good. Welcome to the podcast. If you could just introduce yourself and everyone who you are and what you do.
Hung Lee [00:02:05]:
Yep. So my name’s Hung Lee. I’m the founder of a talent matching service called Workshape IO. It’s a product that basically helps companies that need to hire software developers do so very efficiently and without using recruitment agents.
Matt Alder [00:02:22]:
And you’ve got quite an interesting background because you used to be a recruiter, didn’t you? So perhaps you could sort of tell us about how you went from recruiter to technology platform founder.
Hung Lee [00:02:34]:
Yeah. So first, obviously what you need to know, Matt, is that everything I do is generally completely accidental. So none of it was strategically thought out in any way. But basically I went into recruitment as you do. So I worked as an agent for about 10 years or so recruiting. Back then it was the new media people we didn’t quite know how to call web developers and what have you. I left the recruitment agency business around 2009 when I kind was doing in many respects a not dissimilar thing to yourself Matt, where, you know, my focus was really to study the Trends, the technology trends that were occurring at the time and how they were going to affect recruiting. So sort of fashioned a mini career as a consultant for about three or four years when I was advising companies on how to do things like direct hiring and what have you. And it just so happened that in the course of that work that I ended up speaking to a lot of tech startup companies, working with a those businesses and doing a lot of that scale up work and eventually knew enough developers myself that people said that eventually you should launch something yourself in recruitment tech and see whether you can contribute to it in a different way. So that’s basically how I segued into becoming an agent first and an in house guy and then now I guess a software vendor.
Matt Alder [00:04:04]:
So tech recruitment is very much your area now. There are a lot of people who work in tech companies who listen to the podcast and also a lot of people who don’t. But you know, most companies have some kind of tech hiring need or problems hiring tech people at the moment. Could you, what sort of trends are you seeing in this space? What does the, what is the, what is the, what does the market look like?
Hung Lee [00:04:28]:
Well, I mean, I think everyone who in the space would recognize that it’s a very challenging thing to do to hire software people, I think. What. So that’s a given. I don’t think anybody really enjoys it. The question has. Now I think everyone’s accepted that you need to be a bit more creative to have a competitive advantage in order to do it. So what I do see in tech recruiting is that typically a lot of the more innovative techniques and tools that you would see happen in tech recruiting first before they start bleeding out into other areas of the market. And that’s driven simply by demand. You cannot get away with simply sticking a, an advert on a classic job board, for instance. I think the people who do tech recruiting have probably know that more than people who might be more general recruiters, I’d say.
Matt Alder [00:05:24]:
Do you see the market getting even more difficult with things like Brexit and some of the other pressures on immigration in other areas of the world?
Hung Lee [00:05:31]:
Oh yeah, no doubt, no doubt. I mean, if you’re looking at the percentage of EU talent that currently exists within tech startups in the uk, those figures would be very surprising, I think to someone outside of the industry. But it’s typically more than 50% of your developer team would be non UK EU citizens and that may even be understating the case. So what Brexit does is essentially cut off a very large percentage of the talent pool that UK tech companies have been previously reliant on. And right now I’m not seeing really any kind of direction from the government to see how that’s going to be replaced. So I think, yes, tech companies in the UK have very big decisions to make and I think you could probably split that decision into two big buckets. You need to either invest more now to recruit the people that you want, or you might need to give up on it and offshore it and set up a dev team where it’s easier to recruit the people. So big decisions need to happen in.
Matt Alder [00:06:49]:
UK business, I think, for those companies who want to really kind of stand out and be competitive and be the kind of the first choice place that developers, that the shrinking pool of developers and other tech talent would go, what should people be doing? You sort of mentioned that people had to be more creative when it came to, when it came to tech recruitment. What kind of approaches are you seeing? What’s working? What do people need to be aware of?
Hung Lee [00:07:18]:
Yeah, mindset shift, Matt. And the big mindset shift is really to move away from candidate funneling, I would say. So if you think about the, you know, the classic candidate funnel that all recruiters are sort of taught how to, how to use that mentality, I think no longer is effective when you deploy into a marketplace where the labor is so tight. In English, what this means is an in demand software developer is not going to subject himself or herself through a funneling type of process. So where we’re seeing innovative and really, I think competitive advantage from tech companies is that they’ve shifted away from thinking you’ve got to process all these people and more towards this always on type of attitude to having conversations with people that they may one day recruit. And that really transforms how you behave as a recruitment business or as a recruitment function within a business. If you think that your task is really to try and have positive contact points with a lot, lot of people that you care about, rather than just isolating one or two people and trying to process them. And I think that, you know, forget about technology tooling or whatever. That’s a mindset shift.
Matt Alder [00:08:39]:
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. And I think that’s something that I’ve heard a lot of from, you know, guests on the show who kind of work in this, work in this area. I think one of the other interesting areas around this is some of the, some of the sort of myths that crop up about how you should engage with technical talent. What kind of myths do you see in the work that you do. And what’s the, what’s the real truth?
Hung Lee [00:09:06]:
The myth is that basically developers are interested in, you know, trivial perks. I think a lot of people would assume that, you know, we’ve got a foosball table in the office is sufficient to try and bridge that cultural gap, if you like, between what a company wants and what a person wants. I think that the reality is a developer is very much like surprise, surprise any other human being, and they care more about the people they work with and the work that they be doing over and above everything else. So what companies really have to do is to try and get those two elements into the message as soon as possible. So this is the people that we’re working with and the work that they’ll be doing. You need to get those two bits of information as early into the conversation as you can and do so in a way where it’s kind of consumable. So what I mean by that is that what you don’t do is send a very long pitch email to somebody and expect them to really pay too much attention to that. What you’ve got to do is provide a way in which this person can interact with these two components. Can they meet the team, for instance, can they have some sort of visibility as the work you actually be doing and do that in advance of this, of any assessment that you’ll be doing. So it’s not a case that you provide this information during an assessment flow. You provide this information as of course, right at the beginning of the process, browsable, accessible to whoever it is that might encounter it.
Matt Alder [00:10:56]:
We’ve talked about mindset change being the most important thing, but obviously technology tools are part of the picture here. Now we see lots of sort of new technologies being launched in the recruitment tech space. What do you think the role of technology is? Where can it really add value in this market?
Hung Lee [00:11:17]:
You know what, Matt? I think that technology needs to almost have a single use for it to be truly valuable for the end user. And what I mean by this is that I think the era of having a one stop shop, a massive big ATS system that does everything that you could possibly dream of, I think that era of solution is really moving away. It just requires too much commitment from the end user and too much workflow change from the end user for it to be effective. So what I would suggest, and what I see is that there’s basically services and apps that will make one part of a recruitment flow better and the end user will have a kind of a pick and mix approach. To, you know, those tools that might fit his or her kind of way of working. So for instance, you might have a tool that helps you schedule an email, or you might have a tool that helps you coordinate interviews, or you might have another tool that helps you do a quick video interview. All of those things don’t need to exist under the same umbrella of a single piece of software. I think the better if it’s a single use type of business, single use tool that a recruiter can pick up and use. So I’m not sure if I’ve answered your question exactly there, Matt, but I would say almost every part of your recru recruitment activity there is now a service or a tool that can help you get faster. And I think that the tools I would recommend are the ones that do that one thing only. So that gives you the flexibility as to whether you want to use it or not.
Matt Alder [00:13:05]:
I mean, that makes a lot of sense in terms of having something that’s been created for a specific purpose by people who really understand that part of the workflow. I suppose for that to really work effectively, there’s got to be a high level of integration and interoperability. Can’t even say that between, between these two platforms. Between these platforms. In the past that seems to have been an issue with recruitment technology. Getting different systems talking to each other and working together. Is that changing? Can we, can we expect to see easier, better integrations in the future in the way that we see them in the kind of, you know, in other aspects of business technology?
Hung Lee [00:13:50]:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, if you look at the ATS scene that’s still pretty much dominated by some of the grand old businesses that we all know, the taleos of this world and all the rest of it. But if you look at the ATS that are really exciting users these days, the likes of Lever, the likes of Greenhouse and Workable and those types of products, they’re very modern systems and they’ve been built to be interoperable. I think the vision that these companies have is that they don’t want to necessarily eat the entire cake. They understand that if they understand that, they don’t want to be that type of one stop shop, what they do want to do is be a very important part of the recruitment person’s toolkit and then connect seamlessly, as seamlessly as you can with other products out there. And I think the new generation of software generally works in that way. It’s been built, I think, with those ideas baked in. So I definitely see decoupled modular interoperable probably three important words to think about when you’re looking at purchasing software.
Matt Alder [00:15:09]:
So I need to make sure that I can actually say interoperable. There we are. I did it. Fantastic. So very interesting insights there. And it seems to reflect what a lot of other people are, other people are saying. One of the. I suppose one of the things about the recruitment tech space is there is a lot of spin, lots of talk about, you know, emerging technologies, whether that’s, you know, artificial intelligence or virtual reality or whatever it, whatever it might be. Well, what’s your sort of pragmatic view of the future? I mean, there’s obviously some fantastic emerging technologies out there that we can all see would have a, you know, really benefit. Benefit the recruitment industry. But what’s really likely to happen? What’s kind of top of your radar when it comes to new technologies?
Hung Lee [00:16:00]:
Yeah, I think that automated sourcing I think will happen. So this may be a kind of logical next step for the people aggregator world. So these are products that would collate social data from a single individual and present it into a kind of an aggregated profile that they’d create. But I think automation can operate in that space very easily where you can basically set up a robot to help you do the sourcing and maybe, maybe even first touch, sort of first contact could be taken care of in an automated way, in this way. So I think that probably will be the next practical innovation that recruiters will see, essentially a way to automate sourcing. I think that will happen.
Matt Alder [00:16:56]:
Now, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve always been a great curator of information and, you know, someone who enthusiastically consumes lots of, lots of content and passes those sort of recommendations onto other people. You’ve got this great newsletter that comes out every Sunday afternoon that I’m very much enjoying reading. Could you tell everyone a little bit about it, what’s in it and how they might subscribe to it?
Hung Lee [00:17:22]:
Sure. So this is on hiring, recruiting brain food for the week ahead. So the concept is there was so much crap out there, Matt. I mean, I think you and I are the same way in the sense that we are very sensitive to good quality content for the audience we care about, which is people in the recruiting world. But I think there’s a lot of kind of these content farms out there that are just pumping out endless rehashes of really old Stu. I got annoyed with that and I started collecting bits of content, which I thought was interesting for me, and I was saving it in a tool I had. And then I Realized, hang on, if I’m already archiving and saving this great content, why can’t I just share it with other people anyway? Because if I’m interested, maybe some of the people would be as well. So I started the newsletter about six months ago and the idea is, look, every week, Sunday morning actually, I’m going to send a curated list of what I think are very interesting things that recruiters should read. And the idea is it’s going to be recruiting brain food for your week ahead. So have a nice cup of coffee in the morning on Sunday, have a read of these articles, have a browse around, hopefully it’ll give you some inspiration for the working week that you’ve got going forward. So that’s basically what the project is. It’s as simple as that.
Matt Alder [00:18:51]:
So just to put you on the spot slightly here, what are the kind of best couple of articles that you’ve come across and shared in the last few weeks?
Hung Lee [00:19:00]:
I am on the spot. I’ll tell you what, one thing was very good from this is from Hired.com, which is the overview of the impact of Brexit, let’s say, on the UK tech scene. I thought that was an essential read, something all people really need to pick. All people in the UK at least need to pay attention to. And there’s lots of interesting stuff that’s happening around the future of work. So I think, you know, companies that are, that are looking at automation, literally roboticization of the workforce, that seems to be a prevalent topic that’s now expanded beyond recruiting, I think. So lots of non recruitment people are interested in this, in this phenomena. And you know what Matt, there’s a lot of political stuff happening. I mean it’s a spillover as to, you know, what’s happening with the future of work. If it is the case, for instance, that a great deal of humanity is due to be made redundant because they’re actually not economically viable anymore, then of course that has huge political implications. So I can’t quite cite the name of the documents that I’ve saved. I’m very interested to explore that type of future thinking because I think that future is probably closer than we realize.
Matt Alder [00:20:26]:
So where can people find you and connect with you? Online?
Hung Lee [00:20:29]:
Sure. So probably online I’m around on Twitter, so unglee. Follow me there or DM me there. I’m kind of more than happy to converse that way or anybody can catch me. To be honest with you Matt, I’m a bit of a fairly promiscuous when it comes to social media. So if you want to connect with me on Facebook, you can do that or on Linked. Feel free to do that as well.
Matt Alder [00:20:52]:
Hung, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hung Lee [00:20:54]:
My pleasure Matt. Great. Thanks for having me on.
Matt Alder [00:20:57]:
My thanks to Hung Lee. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes on Stitcher or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for recruiting future in your app store. You can listen to all 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.
