The pace of change in recruiting always makes an interesting topic for debate. For some, it is way too slow, but at the same time, it is still too fast for many others to keep up with.
If you took a proper helicopter view though, just how much have the fundamentals of recruiting changed in the last few decades. Are we now experiencing a revolution that is taking us to something radically different or is it just an evolution of what has gone before?
Who better to help me answer these questions than recruiting industry legend Gerry Crispin. Gerry has been a lifelong student of recruiting, with five decades of experience to draw on. As you would expect he has many great insights to share
In the interview we discuss:
• The most significant changes Gerry has seen in recruiting
• The growing recognition of candidate wellbeing and why this is happening
• What the real trends in recruiting are
• The dangers of silver bullet solutions
• Talent Acquisition leaders taking control of their strategic vision
• The potential impact of recruiting automation
Gerry also shares some details of the panel he is hosting at The HR Technology Conference in Vegas this September.
You can get a $300 discount on tickets to The HR Technology Conference by using the code ALDER300
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ’s groundbreaking automated talent attraction technology enables recruiters to spend less time looking for applicants and more time hiring great people by managing and optimizing their recruitment advertising. ClickIQ’s platform advertises roles across the largest network of PPC, job boards and social media to reach the best active and passive candidates in the most cost effective way. Using the latest AI and programmatic technology, ClickIQ ensures that jobs are always advertised in the right place at the right time and for the right amount of money, saving recruiters both time and budget. To find out how ClickIQ can help automate, manage and optimize your talent attraction Strategy, please visit www.clickiq.co. that’s www.clickiq.co.uk.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome episode 139 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The pace of change in recruiting always makes for an interesting debate. For some people it’s way too slow, but at the same time it’s still too fast for many others to keep up with. If you took a proper helicopter view though, just how much have the fundamentals of recruiting changed in the last few decades? Are we now experiencing a revolution that’s taking us to something radically different, or is it just an evolution of what’s gone before? Who better to help me answer these questions than recruiting industry legend Gerry Crispin? Gerry has been a lifelong student of recruiting with five decades of experience to draw on. As you would expect, he has many great insights to share. Hi Gerry, and welcome to the podcast.
Gerry Crispin [00:02:21]:
Well, thank you Matt. Great to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:24]:
Absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you, for the, for the very few people out there who may not have come across you before, could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do?
Gerry Crispin [00:02:36]:
Okay Matt, I’ve been in recruiting for actually my entire life and I’m old enough that it’s been a long play. So I’ve been active in recruiting almost every phase, from college recruiting to actually doing some contingent work, to working for a large firm like Johnson and Johnson for many years, recruitment, advertising, and a whole variety of things. So I’ve been at this for over 50 years and that seems like a long frickin time. But the reality is I’ve enjoyed it. I’m still absolutely fascinated by the changes that are taking place and for the last 15, 20 years I’ve been basically with Career Crossroads. And Career Crossroads is a platform that’s really building community among talent acquisition leaders. So it’s a place where TA leaders can talk to each other, engage each other, share practices, and do it in a pretty trusted environment. And there’s about 115 companies right now who participate in that membership, and they hire Collectively, globally, about 3 million people a year. So they’re not small companies.
Matt Alder [00:04:04]:
So I’m going to kind of circle back and talk about Career Crossroads again in a second, but before I do, I mean, you’ve got a fascinating breadth of experience there, and as you say, you know, being fascinated by the changes that are happening in recruitment and, you know, something that I’m massively fascinated about as well. In your time in the industry, you know, what do you think the biggest changes are and. Or do you think that things have fundamentally really stayed the same and just the technology’s changed? What’s your view?
Gerry Crispin [00:04:41]:
It’s a great question, and I could argue both sides, that nothing has changed in the last 50 years and that everything has. The truth of the matter is, and I view myself really from the point of view of a student. So if anybody asked me for that elevator speech, it’s basically, I’m a lifelong student of recruiting, and I really believe that. I believe that your attitude about how you approach people, how you approach problems, should be one out of born, out of curiosity, enthusiasm to kind of be compelled to improve whatever the hell you’re doing. And so that’s kind of what I still bring to the party, if anything, is that student view. And I’ve been an observer of recruiting and recruiting systems, as I said, since literally around 1969. So that’s a long time. And I would tell you that while obviously technology is fundamentally underscoring the changes that have taken place, the real issue is what is the impact on the candidate, the recruiter, the hiring manager, and the business leaders, because those stakeholders really make up the foundation of what we’re about. And so you can’t really look at changes in technology or changes in particular practices without really thinking about how does that impact each of those individual stakeholders. And for the recruiter, there’s been an extraordinary improvement in terms of the number of tools and the types of tools that they’re using in order to do stuff. So, you know, if you looked at workflow of a recruiter even 10, 15 years ago versus today, it’s essentially extraordinarily different. And I would anticipate that the next five years, we’ll also see significant changes in workflow. In how people do the job. But the goal is not going to shift a hell of a lot. If you think about it, recruiters goal, which is to identify and sort through a pool of talent to the few that may have the interest and where their decision to come and join you is equal to the decision that the employer wants them. That’s what we’re doing. We’re changing lives in how people look at their job in relation to a career, their career in relation to the rest of their life, whether or not they’re living their life fully. And if we’re contributing to that, I think we get a lot of satisfaction. We recognize that we’re going to get paid by the employer, but we also feel good about the fact that we’re bringing talent into an organization that benefits them as well. I think the biggest shift that I have seen really is in the recognition that the candidate counts, that the candidate’s emotional, mental, physical, well being in this process is important. If not in the short term, it’s going to be very important in the long term. I think that has grown as a critical element of how we’re changing recruiting simply because I wish it was because we thought it was just a good thing to do. But it’s really changing because the power of the candidate to affect the business has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. In part because they have access to technology tools from a communication point of view so that they can share their experience broadly and impact whether or not people are returning to reapply or whether they are referring others or whether they’re even buying, buying your product after the experience that they had in your recruitment process. And if I can impact all of that and measure the cost of all of that, I start to see how powerful candidates are.
Matt Alder [00:09:26]:
Fantastic. Now there’s always sort of lots of talk about recruitment trends and recruitment challenges. I kind of feel these days we sort of live in this content marketing driven, driven discussion where a lot of the sort of the narrative around the challenges that employers are facing when it comes to talent acquisition, that narrative is being driven by technology vendors who are trying to find problems to solve, you know, and amplify areas that, that they might have the solution to, which is, you know, which is absolutely fair enough with your work with Career Crossroads, you’re obviously, you know, having some very, very in depth conversations with a number of global talent acquisition leaders. What’s on their radar at the moment? What are the real sort of trends and challenges that are out there in the talent acquisition market?
Gerry Crispin [00:10:25]:
I think, I think the Number one challenge is they are, they are overwhelmed with the diversity of technology tools that are coming at them from every which way and the extent to which those tools can impact their recruitment process from both a productivity and an efficiency point of view. Now the issue is do they really understand what their vision is about what they’re trying to accomplish? Obviously they want to put a body in a seat, but again, taking into account the needs of the candidate, the needs of the recruiter, the needs of the hiring manager, the needs of the business itself means that you really have to almost do some Venn diagrams of all of those needs and find a kind of a sweet spot where you’re managing the majority of that and meeting the goals that have been set for you so that you can get paid properly. And with the shift in how technology is put together and the pieces of that, where it fits and how you put it together is really just a fascinating kind of thing to watch. Watch them talk about it, watch them engage how they use consultants to do that. Whether or not they’re going to believe any of the vendors. All of those things are taking place right now and keeping them up at night in a broad way. So it’s really two things. It’s the fast changing types of tools that are out there, what each of those contributes and how to put them together in a logical sequence, if you will, and integrate that into the platform that they have and then measure that. It’s, it’s augmenting our individual capabilities to communicate with candidates, to assess those candidates, to engage them through the process and then bring them in with the ability to step up and contribute to the corporation. I gotta tell you, that is, that’s been around for a couple years, but it’s getting more and more intense and that’s really where you see a lot of frustration. A lot of vendors tend to look at the recruitment process from their own lens, if you will, and so they don’t see much of what else is going on in this whole workflow kind of thing. But I am very hopeful because I’m seeing more and more interesting models coming out from recruiting leaders who now have 10 to 20 years of experience with recruiting technology tools that are Internet based in many cases. The exciting thing is that more and more recruiting leaders are taking back the vision of how they want to construct a recruiting model for their company, which obviously each company is extraordinarily different when they have this vision. They now are in a better position to sit down with vendors, suppliers, consultants, and better articulate what it should look like when it’s complete. And that means that there’s more ability, if you will, to better understand how to put these puzzle pieces together.
Matt Alder [00:14:34]:
That’s fascinating. And it kind of makes a lot of sense because I remember talking to people about recruitment technology 10, 15 years ago, and most of the conversation would be describing what it actually did and what was actually so, you know, encouraging to hear that people now have, you know, a kind of a vision of what they believe technology can sort of help them, help them enable.
Gerry Crispin [00:15:00]:
Well, at least more and more do, Matt. And if they don’t, then they’re left with listening to vendors who think that they’ve. Who all think that they’ve got the silver bullet. So they’re selling something, they’re selling their vision. They sure as hell have it. But the point is they are not sitting in the seat that has to execute this. So it really requires the leader themselves to come up with that vision. And I do think that’s growing at a rapid pace.
Matt Alder [00:15:32]:
Artificial intelligence and kind of automation are sort of dominating the conversation at the moment. Do you think that we’re on the cusp of a series of revolutionary change that those technologies might drive in recruiting an hr, or is it just more of the same evolution that we’ve seen over the last decade?
Gerry Crispin [00:15:53]:
I’m absolutely convinced that we continue to evolve not in a revolutionary way, but in an evolutionary way. And we can see the differences. If you think about years ago, people sorting through paper and organizing the paper into file drawers, and then you used technology tools on your desk to get that done, and then you started moving all that stuff onto the Internet in a variety of different ways to get that done. We, by and large, have taken what has been in the past a lot of flawed processes and simply made them, you know, faster and more interesting, if you will, but really the same kind of, you know, organizational kinds of tools, etc. And now you should be able to tell a chatbot to organize the damn stuff yourself itself. Right? But. But obviously there are some claims here that AI is going to replace recruiters as opposed to augment. And I think we really have to consider the fact that we will be augmenting recruiters in ways that will increase their efficiency. So if I can double the number of jobs that a recruiter can handle, just theoretically, if I can, why, Because I can send a chatbot out to interview or screen literally hundreds of people almost simultaneously, right. If I. If I start getting the tools up that allow me to do pieces of my work much more efficiently simultaneously, If I have 300 people who applied to a job and 295 of them I dismiss almost immediately because I got five that are going forward. I can tell an entity, hey, would you say something really nice to those 295 people on my behalf and call them based, call them, email them, or text them based on their preference. Right. So I can start building different ways to again gain these kinds of efficiencies. So what is the impact of that? If I can handle twice as many openings, that means there’s half. Half of all the recruiters will disappear. Think about that. Yep, I can. That means they’re not being replaced. It’s just the job is changing. It’s shifting. It’s becoming more of a. How do you manage the program, if you will? How do you manage the workflow? Using voice? Instead of typing on a text piece, you’re talking to Ali or Alexa or Olivia or somebody who’s by and large doing it for. For you. And you’re not spending all the extra time trying to type shit in. I’m just a fan of the fact that it’s not revolutionary. It is evolutionary, but it is going to mean that the job will become more involved, more complex. It will mean that I need to focus very clearly on certain types of interactions or relationships. It may mean that I haven’t. There’s a new job just for people to talk to, the few people that we want to talk to. And we don’t know what we’re going to call that. Maybe we call it coach. There could be a whole host of different ways that we’re going to do stuff, but it’s not. Again, it’s not revolutionary. It’s evolutionary. And yes, the job will be different. We may call it something else within the next few years and there will be fewer people needed to do all of that job, but they’re not being replaced.
Matt Alder [00:20:32]:
So we’re recording in the middle of July and one of the kind of the next big events that I’m personally looking forward to going to is the HR Technology Conference in Vegas in September. Now you’re doing a panel there. Could you tell us a little bit about what the panel’s about, why that topic and who’s going to be on the panel with you?
Gerry Crispin [00:20:59]:
Sure. I love going to HR Tech, to be honest with you. I think it’s one more incredible conferences that are out there. If I had to name four or five, they were. They will always be on the top. And I’ve had the privilege of being able to do a panel that I can put together each year. And I try to do something a little bit different each year as well. And this one additionally is going to be different. And it is basically, I wanted to be able to bring together some of the employers who have clearly been proactive in reaching out to people with disabilities, not just because they have disabilities, but because they have skills, they have knowledge, they have experience that we want to tap. And yes, they also happen to be differently challenged, if you will. And there’s very few companies, to be honest with you, that are actually doing that from a proactive point of view. Most companies simply react when they do get someone who’s willing to share that they are disabled. But the fact of the matter is there’s very few companies literally spending the time to put teams into tracking people down. And so the folks that we have, I have Chuck Edwards from Microsoft, I have Amy Mayor Holmgee, who’s vice president of talent acquisition from Sodexo, Kathleen Burris, who’s at CVS Health, and Peter Brooks, who is the senior director of TA for Northrop Grumman Corporation. I’ll give you one example with him. Peter Brooks has a team that’s part of what they call Project Impact that literally goes to hospitals where wounded warriors are being successfully treated and are recovering. And they. They assess them for various jobs and then hire them when they’re finished their treatment or if they don’t have an opening for them. And there is a key, key opportunity that these folks could fill. There are a number of other corporations, I think 30 or 40 that they share, and some of them are competitors of Northrop Grumman that they share the candidates with. And the reality is, I think over the last few years, more than 100 couple hundred severely wounded warriors have been hired by these companies. So I’m just fascinated by the fact that we truly can change not only the lives of the people that we go after and engage, but we change our environment as well. We start changing the company by the choices that we make. In terms of the kinds of talent that comes in, we tend to be overly focused on that. They come from a specific school or they came from a specific competitor, or they have achieved a certain technology capability or whatever. But we also want people who are kind of an easy cultural fit. And what we really need to do is expand what that means in a much broader way. And I think one of the ways we do that from a diversity point of view, is to recognize that some of our efforts should be in engaging people with disabilities. So hopefully it’ll be good conversation. I can’t imagine that it won’t be a good conversation because these are some passionate people doing really interesting work and I think there’s a lot of good learning. So I’m sure we’ll have a nice group and good audience.
Matt Alder [00:25:16]:
It sounds fantastic and I’m very much looking forward to watching how that panel pans out. Gerry, thank you very much for talking to me.
Gerry Crispin [00:25:26]:
My pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:25:28]:
My thanks to Gerry Crispin. If you’re interested in joining us at the HR Technology Conference, it’s taking place in Las Vegas between the 11th and 14th of September. If you go to www.hrtechnologyconference.com and use the discount code Alda300, that’s Alder300. Then you can get a $300 discount on your ticket. 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.
