By far the biggest story in recruiting technology this year has been Google’s entry into the market firstly with their job search tool and more recently with their ATS system Hire. There has been a huge amount of discussion, commentary and debate about both Google products and their future intentions so I decided to go directly to Google themselves to find out more.
My guest this week is Bogomil Balkansky, the Google Vice President responsible for go to market strategy for recruiting related products.
In the interview we discuss:
• How Google’s appetite for solving big problems has driven their new focus on the recruiting market.
• Which part of the market Google are looking to serve with Hire
• Why Hire is different from other recruiting systems
• The benefits of integrating a recruiting system into existing productivity tools
• How to improve the candidate experience
• The integration between Hire and Google Jobs
• When Hire might be available outside of the US
Bogomil also talks about the customer response so far and the human centric design culture they have developed to improve and extend their recruiting offering
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Format. Format are the market leaders in providing award winning career sites to employers such as npower, View, Atkins and Muller. The secret to the great results Format delivers for its clients is complete focus on the candidate experience, including long term passive candidate engagement, while at the same time ensuring rock solid and completely seamless integration with the ags. To download Format’s free ebook on planning and implementing a new careers website, go to www.bit.lycareers website or to find out more about their services go to www. Format.com and format is spelt with the number 4 then M A T.
Matt Alder [00:01:10]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 102 of the Recruiting Future podcast. By far the biggest story in recruitment technology this year has been Google’s entry into the market with the launch of their Google job search and also their recruiting ATS hire. There’s been a huge amount of discussion, commentary and debate around this move, so I wanted to go directly to Google to find out more. My guest this week is Bogomil Balkansky, a Google Vice President who’s working on their recruiting related products. Hi Bogumill and welcome to the podcast.
Bogomil Balkansky [00:01:53]:
Pleasure to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:55]:
So could you just introduce yourself and tell us all what you do?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:01:58]:
Yeah. My name is Bogomil Bolkanski and I’m currently a Vice president at Google. I have been at Google for about 18 months and I’m responsible for everything. Go to market for a range of recruiting related solutions that Google has been launching on the market. Before Google I was at a startup. Before that I spent quite a few years at an infrastructure software company called VMware where I led product management and product marketing. Before that I was at Siebel Systems before with a startup and I started my career as a consultant at McKinsey of all places.
Matt Alder [00:02:33]:
Fantastic. So Google have just launched the new recruiting platform Hire. Why have Google done that? I suppose that’s a question that lots of people are kind of asking themselves. Why sort of enter the recruitment technology market?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:02:48]:
Yeah, very reasonable question. It’s no secret that Google gets excited about solving really big problems and we believe that recruiting is precisely the kind of big problem that Google can tackle. You know everybody who is in the workforce periodically looks for a job and in the US this is something like 160 million people worldwide. I don’t know if there are very reliable estimates for exactly how many people are in the workforce. But let’s say it’s something like, you know, 4 billion potentially. So on one side we have these job seekers, and on the other side you have millions and millions of businesses. Like in the US alone, there is something like 5.5 million businesses that actually hire people. And recruiting is really about finding an optimal match between the needs of these millions of businesses and the capabilities, skills, and aspirations of all these job seekers. So it’s really, really big market. And there is actually mounting evidence that the recruiting process is broken or challenging for both sides, for both job seekers as well as companies. If you take the job seeker side, a survey by Burson, by Deloitte, says that something like 83% of job seekers in the US rate their job search experience as really poor. Many people apply for jobs and never hear back from companies. In the US it takes on the average about 43 days for somebody to find a new job. And on the employer side, it’s almost a mirror image where employers really have one of two challenges. They’re either inundated with a lot of applications from people who are really not qualified for the jobs that the company has, or for certain kind of jobs. Companies continue to face severe shortages. And a lot of companies actually experience the combination of both of these things. And I think both of these phenomena actually require companies to hire more and more people, more and more recruiters, on one hand, to be able to wade through this mountain of resumes of people who are not really qualified for the job, and on the other hand, to proactively reach out to passive candidates to get them interested in these hard to fill jobs. And again, the statistic in the US is that it takes about $4,000 to fill any open position. Again, if you look at both sides, there are a lot of challenges and it’s a huge market. And this is the reason why Google is in that space. It’s a big market facing a lot of challenges. And obviously as a technology company, we do believe that we have some unique skills and capabilities to contribute to solving that problem.
Matt Alder [00:05:51]:
So as you say, it is a very big market. The initial product, is it aimed at a particular market segment or is it something you think everyone’s going to use? Where are you sort of pitching? Where are you sort of pitching your launch?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:06:06]:
So Haier, which is the recruiting app that we unveiled about three weeks ago, is targeted at small and medium sized businesses for the timing in the US and we’re also targeting exclusively G Suite customers at this point. G Suite customers are businesses that are using GMAIL Google Calendar, Hangouts, et cetera, as their productivity tool. Now, Haier is actually not the only recruiting product that Google has. Over the past few months, we have actually released a couple of different offerings. One is a new job search experience on google.com, that was launched on June 20th in the US and we also released a Cloud Jobs API which allows job boards and company career sites to benefit from the same quality of job search experience that now google.com provides. And the new job search experience and the Cloud Jobs API are both targeted at job seekers. And initially both of these offerings are available in the US but over time I’m sure they’ll be available internationally. So with both these offerings, we’re targeting job seekers and higher is our offering for companies to help companies more efficiently identify the right candidates to interview them and to make hiring decisions.
Matt Alder [00:07:39]:
So I’ll come back and ask you a couple of questions about, about jobs and when, when this stuff sort of might roll out around the world a little bit later. But in the meantime, I’m just interested. You, you, you were talking about solving sort of difficult, difficult problems of which, you know, I think we all agreed recruitment is one. How does the Haya product sort of different. How does it, how does it sort of tackle and solve some of the problems that we’ve been talking about?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:08:05]:
Y so Haier is actually aiming to solve the inherent inefficiency in the recruiting process. As I mentioned, one of the classic complaints from job seekers is that they apply, they never hear anything from the company, it takes too long, which is just indicative of the inefficiency of the recruiting process that job seekers experience. And why is that? It is simply because companies typically lack the right technologies and the right processes to be able to efficiently screen candidates to collaborate internally on making a hiring decision. Because at the end of the day, recruiting is a team sport. Recruiting is all about getting the right people inside the company to collaborate, to arrive at a yes or no decision. And hire aims at removing these inefficiencies and streamlining the process and making it a lot more efficient. And the unique approach that we have taken with Haier is actually to integrate it very seamlessly with G Suite with the personal productivity tools that people use every day. This is fairly different from other existing recruiting solutions that basically exist as a silo like within the company. It is very important and beneficial to have the recruiting system be well integrated with the productivity tools because this is where people live in their workday, people are in their email, in their calendar, et cetera, and With Hire, we have created a solution where recruiters and hiring managers can continue working in the tools that they love using. But anything that’s recruiting related, like any emails to candidates, any interviews that are scheduled in calendar get automatically synchronized inside hire. And in the reverse, whatever you do in Hire, if you email a candidate, if you schedule an interview, also gets automatically synchronized into the productivity tools. Because of that, we have actually seen a much more significant adoption of Hire as a recruiting system by interviewers, by hiring managers, and by getting people to use the tool and to collaborate in the recruiting process. We have actually observed that interviewers provide their feedback faster. One heartwarming statistic for us is that on the average our customers who are using hire, 75% of interviewers provide their interview feedback within 48 hours. And this is just one example how we streamline and speed up the process. Because again, why is that candidates are often in a situation to wait to hear from the company. It’s because the company is not fast enough gathering the interview feedback in order to decide if the candidate proceeds to the next stage or if the process stops there. To summarize, the unique thing about Haier is really the native integration with G suite that makes it a lot easier to adopt the solution. It makes it a lot more user friendly, which allows more people to use the system and facilitates and speeds up the entire hiring process.
Matt Alder [00:11:28]:
You mentioned that there’s been sort of great uptake of the system since it launched. How many companies have you got on there and were there companies who were sort of using it in beta? How long have people been on the system and using it?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:11:45]:
Yeah, so we officially launched three weeks ago. However, Haier had been at very extensive customer trials for about a year and we’ve had literally more than 100 companies participate in these early trials. So by the time we launched, although it’s a new solution, I would actually say that it’s somewhat battle tested because it has been kind of in the trenches in a lot of companies. All of our companies, all of our customers are small and medium sized businesses and our customer base is pretty well diversified both in terms of industries and across parts of the US and this is something that we are proud of. But also this was a conscious strategy and conscious design on our point to create a solution that doesn’t just cater to the interest of technology startups kind of in our backyard here in Silicon Valley. But it was very important to us to create a solution that fits the needs of small and medium sized companies, like in any industry, in any part of the country. And yes, we do have some technology companies as customers, but actually they’re not the biggest, the most represented industry in our customer base. We have anything from pizza chain to auto dealerships to a plumbing company, et cetera. And again, our customer base is all.
Matt Alder [00:13:16]:
Over the US So how does Haier integrate with Google’s new job search?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:13:23]:
So any open positions, any jobs that our customers create in Haier are marked up with this markup that we have made very public and released for anybody to use. And as a result of that, these jobs created in hire are being picked up and displayed inside Google job search.
Matt Alder [00:13:48]:
So as you kind of said earlier, it’s all of these sort of products and new services are currently only available in the U.S. is there a timescale for sort of rolling them out globally or is it something you’re going to kind of wait and see and move forward from there?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:14:04]:
Yeah, we don’t need to wait and see because, you know, without a doubt there is demand for these products and services outside of the US So it’s not a question of waiting and see is there a demand. It’s just a question of kind of prioritizing our resources and kind of trading off developing new features in these products and services versus making them available outside of the US And I would say the three products that we have, Google Job Search, the Cloud, Jobs API and Hire, will actually have very different schedules in terms of when they’ll be available outside of the US And I don’t really have precise timelines for any of them. But suffice it to say that all of our product teams across these three products are working very hard to make that happen because it is one of the main priorities for every single of these products and services.
Matt Alder [00:15:02]:
Fantastic. What might we look forward to in terms of sort of other future developments to the product set?
Bogomil Balkansky [00:15:09]:
In everything that we do, we’re taking a very, very customer centric approach. And one of the things that the Haier team in particular is very proud of is that we have created a great human centric design culture inside the team, which basically means that everything that we do, first of all, we research our potential customers, then when we prototype, we bring these prototypes to our customers and test them over and over again and optimize and improve whatever we do. So our product strategy is always very customer centric and customer led. And now that Haier is in the hands of many customers, we’re getting a lot of feedback from these customers and basically you can expect that we will be executing on these customer requests and the driving force behind our roadmap is what’s important to our customers and what our customers want us to do.
Matt Alder [00:16:15]:
Bogomil, thank you very much for talking to me.
Bogomil Balkansky [00:16:17]:
Oh, thank you. Pleasure was mine.
Matt Alder [00:16:20]:
My thanks to Bogomil. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes, on Stitcher, or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can download at your app store. Just search for Recruiting future. You can find 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.
