Technology is changing everything. Although there is still much debate about the actual pace of change in talent acquisition, most people would agree that the change taking place is fundamental. A good way to sense check what is really happening is to explore how one of the companies who is architecting the AI revolution is changing its own approach to talent acquisition.
My guest this week is Kevin Blair, Global VP of Talent Acquisition at IBM. In our interview, Kevin shares insights into how IBM is transforming their talent acquisition by applying their own technology and he also talks about the agile approach they are using to make it happen.
In the interview we discuss:
• IBM’s recruiting challenges in an ever more competitive market
• Competitive advantage via differentiated thinking
• Sourcing using skills and success profiles
• Helping candidates navigate opportunities using Watson AI as opposed to binary one directional searching
• Creating deeper engagement via technology in the onboarding process
• Agile talent acquisition methodologies and design thinking for co-creation
Kevin also shares his thoughts on the future role of recruiters in a world dominated by technology.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Wreckfest. Wreckfest18, the largest gathering of in house recruiters, resources and TA professionals in Europe, has now completely sold out. However, talks on two of the stages will be live streamed via the Recruitment Events Co YouTube channel. You can find it by going to YouTube and searching for the Recruitment Events code. Once you found it, subscribe and click the notification button to make sure you don’t miss Netflix, IBM and other amazing speakers telling their talent stories. I’ll also put that YouTube link in the show notes to this episode Wreckfest will take place on Thursday 5th July.
Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 134 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Technology is Changing everything. Although there’s much debate about the actual pace of change in talent acquisition, everyone would agree that the change itself is fundamental. A good way to sense check what’s really happening is to explore how one of the companies who are helping to architect the AI revolution are transforming their own approach to talent acquisition. My guest this week is Kevin Blair, Global VP of Talent Acquisition at IBM. In our interview, Kevin shares how IBM are transforming their talent acquisition by applying their own technology and also talks about the agile approach they’re using to make it happen. Hi Kevin, and welcome to the podcast.
Kevin Blair [00:01:58]:
Thanks Matt.
Matt Alder [00:01:59]:
So absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:04]:
Everyone what you do?
Kevin Blair [00:02:05]:
Sure. So I’m the Global Vice President for Talent Acquisition at IBM. I’ve been here for about seven months.
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
So I know you’re doing some really interesting things with technology and the recruitment process at IBM, which we’ll get into in a minute. But perhaps as a bit of context, could you sort of talk everyone through what the recruitment challenges look like for you as an organization?
Kevin Blair [00:02:29]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, so IBM is at a really interesting phase from a talent acquisition perspective and we’re really in a phase of reinvention. And where that comes from is a little bit about, from our history and a little bit about where we’re going to as an organization. So if you think of IBM, everyone knows IBM, right? And you know, I even remember when I got the call from the recruiter about the opportunity at IBM and I remember discussing it with my parents and like, wow, IBM. Because, you know, all the way through, you know, through history really, in technology and certainly in the, you know, towards the last 25% of IBM’s history, a large Part of that, IBM has been synonymous with it, I mean with technology. And you know, certainly through several decades, you know, IBM was computing, IBM was technology. I mean it was the foundation of all of that stuff. And so that made from a talent as traction perspective that made it fairly process orientated. So what you would have is you had an organization that really could, you know, had to be very effective operationally in order to stand up a TA organization. And what I mean by that is, you know, it was, they really, you know, they could put a bunch of application postings out there and they would get such a significant volume from an applicant perspective, they wouldn’t really need to try from an engagement perspective, from a proactive outreach to attract a candidate. Because IBM was really the mothership, right? You know, if you worked in these sectors, you know, around different pieces of like hardware for example, and these other things, you either had worked at IBM, did work at IBM or wanted to work at IBM. And I think that that was very, you know, from our perspective as an organization, that that made it a little bit easier from an attraction perspective. But what happened, like a lot of technology organizations is we’re in this evolutionary phase of where we’re going into new sectors that in some ways are not necessarily core to where we’ve come from and they represent significant growth. So you think about things like cloud, AI and security where IBM hasn’t necessarily grandfathered itself in that sector, but because of the opportunity from a commercial perspective, from the ask of our customers, then we’ve been able to go in and create an evolved and compelling offering. Now what you then have is you have a bunch of candidates that don’t have the same emotional connections in a way towards IBM. So then what we have to do is like most other organizations, because of the lack of talent in the market, we have to go out and we have to engage them and we have to be proactive. And so this whole transformation around us, going to organization, to individuals competing with organizations which historically IBM wouldn’t have competed with the composition of the technology market, where you have smaller, more nimble organizations being able to be more attractive, and I mean more nimble in the sense that they don’t have to go through the same processes that an IBM or any large organization would have to, then from our perspective we have to stand up a different talent acquisition organization. And that’s why I’m here.
Matt Alder [00:05:42]:
So I know that one of the initiatives you’re currently working through is effectively applying IBM’s technology to your recruitment process. Could you sort of give Us the background to that and talk through what you’re doing.
Kevin Blair [00:05:56]:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think if you look at the elements that we wanted to, that we wanted to hit on as an organization from a recruitment perspective, I think, you know, one of the journeys we had to go through was really in three stages which was around creating the domain expertise. So talking about what I spoke about a second ago in terms of being able to kind of have a recruitment organization that was fit and ready, for want of a better phrase, which involves by bringing in some domain expertise, but more importantly really developing and growing that muscle within our organization. And then the second part really about experience and driving a differentiated experience because again, we all know how difficult for those that work in the technology market. We all know how difficult candidate attraction is with us edging towards almost one in five roles as we go into the future. Being developer or technology orientated jobs. It’s every company’s problem. Every company is a technology company and your banks now can be platforms as opposed to just places where money’s just transacted in a very physical sense or brokered. And so this problem is felt kind of pervasively across all organizations. But the experience and then thirdly the prediction of that roadmap of things we needed to go after. So one thing you could say is that we are lucky in IBM in a sense from a TA perspective is that we have a product that many quarters is considered synonymous with cognitive and artificial intelligence, which is Watson. So we have the opportunity to develop on that. But I think it goes much more beyond that. It goes much more towards the idea that we would look to utilize differentiated thinking and differentiated methods. And so if you think about what does that roadmap look like from a cognitive perspective, we have the opportunity right from the minute we start to source. So using our own technology, using Watson to helping the sourcing process. So you know, being able to not just go out and do a skills match but actually work towards a skills profile that we would have in a success profile. You know, so really turning the job description into a three dimensional document in a way and it’s not even a physical document anymore, then you know, it’s a set of tags. But you know, taking a job description and being able to, you know, really go out and put a third dimension on it where you can actually think about, you know, what does success look like in IBM, what’s the typical success profile and how do you know, removing bias from the way a CV might be written or removing bias and you know, the way certain profile might look for somebody’s individual background, actually just finding the right type of candidate, but effectively doing that while we’re all asleep, right? So, you know, you don’t have to be sat there at a terminal and effectively kind of running Boolean strings and scrolling down 2,000 search results on a LinkedIn, for example, but actually going out and being proactive. So the first thing is actually getting to the point where we can identify the candidate and then using the technology to engage them in a very personal way. So being able to understand a little bit more about the candidate from the very first stages without the need to, to pre qualify to engage them in things that pull together the broader interests or the broader activities or the broader elements of the things that we see from them and being able to gauge them. Then you have the idea that, okay, so it’s great that we know who they are and it’s great that we’ve been able to match them to a role and hopefully be able to engage them in some way. But that’s not the only way every candidate comes to us. So then we looked at a second stream, which is where we would, how would, how do we then get a candidate that really wants to work at IBM and feels really compelled to come? How do we help them? How would we help them find the right connection point? And if you actually go to our North American careers page where we’ve actually standing this up, you know, you can use Watson Candidate assist, whereby you know, you’re able to not just search jobs in a very binary fashion. So most organizations say, okay, I’m interested in HR jobs in India, and it’ll come up with a list, you know, that’s functionally aligned, you probably can select the level at which you want to look and it’ll come up with a list. But actually being able to engage with Watson to actually start to find other opportunities more broadly, that may be a skills fit, that wouldn’t be an obvious thing. So, for example, you can copy and paste your CV into the chat box and then we will return to you the roles that are right for you. So instead of being a binary one, directional search is actually, you say, hey, this is my skills, tell me what you’ve got. And you can imagine an organization like IBM, we have a huge consulting and services organization, we have a recruitment company that’s attached to our organization and an rpo. And so for that, you know, so whilst you might be saying, okay, well, the obvious fit for me, Kevin Blair, is I want to look at HR jobs because I want to Be ahead of time acquisition. And then it comes back and it says, well, actually we need a, you know, ahead of client engagement for this business, which would be in some ways would be a really attractive opportunity for me. And it’s not. It would have come up in, you know, had I been searching in consulting or would I been searching in, you know, a seller profile. And so that idea that we can allow, we can assist candidates in the navigation of what is a huge opportunity and do more skills matching is really a great opportunity. So it’s nice that we’ve been able to pull together those two elements of initial candidate engagement.
Matt Alder [00:11:55]:
Is it something you’re looking at sort.
Matt Alder [00:11:56]:
Of extending through the recruitment process into.
Matt Alder [00:11:59]:
Kind of assessment and the other stages that you have to go through?
Kevin Blair [00:12:03]:
Yeah, and it’s a good point. I mean, one of the things we have is we have a very well baked out roadmap. I mean, to the point where, you know, we’re probably one of the very few recruitment organizations where we made a decision as a leadership team that we were going to have a technology organization because, you know, we effectively have a cto, you know, we have a guy who sits on the leadership team alongside me who really drives from a technology perspective, not operations, not cheaper staff. I don’t know, a lot of this stuff usually lands in those buckets, but is a dedicated technologist, you know, a guy from, not from, or briefly from a recruitment background, but very much from a coding project management background. And we do see an opportunity. So after initial candidate engagement, so one of the things we’re doing is building it into our onboarding process. So we’re in the process of moving fully towards digitized onboarding and rolling it back to the minute the candidate accepts the offer. And one of the things we’ve done within that is roll back our learning platform so that when a candidate accepts our offer and they’re assumed to be IBMer, what we do is we reach out to them, say, hey, these are the things, start engaging with us now. These are the things you need to do. Stretching out the day one experience. There’s obviously the process point of view around, okay, you need to fill in these forms and you can start this provisioning and you can do all these different things, which is great because you get more productive person on day one. But also the idea that we can in a cognitive way engage in a dialogue, we can push content towards them in very much a Netflix style. For those of you that know Netflix, I don’t know if you use it yourself, Matt, but you Always get that thing. People who watch this also watch this or Netflix recommends for you. Well, what we’re able to do is drive a similar thing based on the behaviors and the profile of the soon to be IBMer, but also based on the fact that what are they looking at in our platform and how can we then promote that? So there’s this whole engagement around onboarding. So that’s the first opportunity that we’re actually standing up an MVP for right now. A minimum of our products. So that’s really working. And then you’ve then got all the other opportunities that we really want to, we want to focus around. So things like, you know, cognitive interior. So things that really, you know, as candidates come through our process, you know, as we learn about them, you know, we get the insights as to, you know, what’s what more we need to know about what the areas that we should focus on in the dialogue, you know, making sure that every experience with us is uniquely different. So instead of, and we’ve all probably been through it in our careers, you know, some companies where you have, you know, five or six interviews or meetings and they’re all exactly the same, so all you do by the end of the process is you become very good and very refined at answering the same questions. So you actually sound better as you go through the process because you’re essentially asking, answering the same question, but in a much more refined way. So using it as an opportunity to really directionally steer the conversation. But also add to that the idea of, you know, the team matching and team profile and like what, you know, how would individuals work within a team dynamic and a team construct, you know, what would they bring and what would they add? But it allows us to add that diversity element. And sometimes in diversity, not always, a lot of times as you’re focused on diversity, you know, you think differently because it brings a different element to the team. And sometimes it’s very easy to look at the hard skills and the profiles of an individual and say, you know, in isolation, this person versus this person is a better fit. But actually what we can’t always legislate for is the idea that managers would think more about their organization and what an individual may bring to the organization or what an individual may bring to the company. And so being able to spotlight that and highlight that using cognitive solutions is going to be a real opportunity for us.
Matt Alder [00:16:09]:
I mean, that’s absolutely, absolutely fascinating stuff. And I think the one question that I have coming out of that I know is a debate. That’s a debate that’s kind of raging at the moment in lots of different places. And what’s the role of humans within that? So you know, how does the, where does the recruiter fit in in this process? Is there, is there still a role for that human judgment or are we moving to the point where, where technology is taking over?
Kevin Blair [00:16:39]:
Okay, so you’re going down the Terminator Skynet route, right? Okay, now that’s cool. Yeah, no, and I get that. And so listen, we see it very much as an augmented model. So the way in which you have, if you think about a recruiting evolution, so what you have is the traditional recruiter which is very, very reactive, very orientated around KPI model, very much working on a requisition basis. So individual requisitions, you know, really kind of, you know, through the traditional method of demand planning, working through a requisition approval process, source and screen assessment, interview and all the other things, which is very much the traditional. What we actually see in IBM moving forward is effectively two streams of recruiters. One is turning that traditional recruiter into an agile team of recruiters. And we can talk about agile in a second and what we’re doing with that. So we look at a group that’s very much focused around prioritization, sprints, working through a backlog. Anybody that’s got experience of using agile from, in a development environment will completely understand all these things I’m saying around backlog and sprints, but really working in a very specific focus way. So that’s one part. But then what you have is we see the age of the cognitive recruiter and the 21st century recruiter, which is a lot around predictive approach and there’s a lot around, you know, being able to, you know, kind of, you know, get, you know, start to work the demand before the demand and start to, you know, really, you know, infer where the organization is going is have the sourcing and matching augmented alongside them by creating a personalized experience. So you know, it gives us the opportunity to really focus on a more end to end talent. And sometimes I say that, you know, in a way that, you know, almost the old me wouldn’t have liked so much, you know, coming from a, you know, an entirely recruitment orientated background and you know, the idea that, you know, it’s, you know, that it would be a not proactive function and it would just be a, you know, a kind of consulting organization. We still see ourselves very much as a proactive function, but actually being able to look at so many more data points and so much more refined opportunity. And how do we infer from that and how do we interpret to move forward? So it’s actually complementary. So, you know, historically there is three stakeholders in a traditional recruitment organization or process. You have the candidate, you have the recruiter, and you have the hiring manager. But we actually see Watson as being the fourth dimension of our recruitment organization. So, you know, in the same way, you know, that you couldn’t have, you know, you couldn’t have recruitment without candidates. You know, we don’t believe that you could have recruit recruitment without recruiters, but very much you could have, you know, augmentation of the technology because it brings, you know, it brings speed, it brings personalization, it brings scale so much more quickly. So actually the role of the recruiter is what would change as opposed to the need for the recruiter to change.
Matt Alder [00:19:58]:
So, final question.
Matt Alder [00:19:59]:
This is obviously a big project and a big undertaking. What have your learnings been from the process of change so far? And you kind of mentioned using agile methodologies. Can you sort of share some of the learnings that you’ve had with everyone?
Kevin Blair [00:20:17]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think agile, we have Agile ta, which is what we actually work out. So we actually have defined a methodology and technology that creates this way of engaging our leaders and our organization to make sure that we stand up a process and engagement that’s highly effective. But we also have pervasively run through our organization agile thinking. And if I think about the way I run my organization now compared to how I did a couple years ago, so it’s very much focused around prioritization and working in a velocity from a sprint perspective. So I’ll give you an example. So the way in which I would have historically ran an element of a project is I would have said, okay, got my team together, okay, this is what we need to do. This is where we’re going. Let’s reconvene next week and then we’ll talk about it again. Let’s reconvene. Whereas now, if I look at some of the changes I’ve got going on, I’ve got two specific projects that I’m leading right now. They start on Monday. Each one of them has two hours a day, every day, for five days. So really focus with a degree of intensity, pulling people in, moving people out, but ultimately having the project owner and a core team focused with absolute intensity. So I think that’s one of the things that we, in terms of ripping the band aid off, if you like, and moving quickly, that agile thinking, that agile approach is really benefiting the organization and just my organization. But IBM as a whole, because we can move through decisions more effectively. And I think design thinking has played a much bigger part as we’ve done. This is the idea that we, you know, we co create a lot more and we bring people in. So this is not the, you know, this is not all the ideas that roll out of Amber’s head. My boss and very driven, very inspirational in terms of directionally where she wants to take this, but also the idea that we bring the leaders on our journey and we bring the other, the key stakeholders, HR the business, the recruiters, that we co create these solutions for a need that really that we all feel and for a solution that we can all experience. And so I think that’s been a large part of it. But I think what that also does is it creates this appetite for change and transformation. Certainly nothing I’ve seen is that we recognize as a company this is a real opportunity to differentiate ourselves moving away from this historical position. I spoke to at the very top of the conversation that IBM, where it was in recruitment thinking to where it is now is so different. I think that’s been a big part of it is the idea that working in an agile way, not just delivering an agile solution, working in a job way and then also bringing heavily designed thinking elements into co create has been key.
Matt Alder [00:23:29]:
Kevin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Kevin Blair [00:23:31]:
No problem. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:23:33]:
My thanks to Kevin Blair. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. 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.
