The only constant thing in business today is change and very often just keeping up with that chance can take up all of a recruiting team’s time. With innovation being so crucial for competitive talent advantage, how can talent acquisition professionals make sure they are innovating against a background of changing objectives, goals and expectations?
My guest this week is Anastacia Flores, Director of Recruiting for Pipeline Development, Systems and Operations at Pandora. Pandora is a company working in a rapidly changing industry where there is enormous competition for talent.
In the interview we discuss:
- What does recruiting look like at Pandora and what are the biggest challenges
- How do you keep pace with innovation?
- The importance of data integrity and up to date talent pipelines
- Metrics and KPIs to evaluate partnerships with hiring managers
- Embedding company principles within the recruiting team
- The importance of flexibility and partnership in recruitment technology
Anastacia also share what she is excited about for the future and underlines the critical importance of podcasts!
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Avature ats, an applicant tracking system that redefines user experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. Just listen to one of the many ways in which L’Oreal USA has improved their hiring process with Avature, as told by Edward Dias, Director of Recruitment, Intelligence and Innovation.
Edward Dias [00:00:25]:
Since we’ve been using Avature ATS globally, we have been able to massively improve our communication rate with candidates during and following their application. Before, over a million people worldwide would never get contacted, but with the smart automation and flexible processes, we’ve been able to change that, and that’s been a huge achievement.
Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
Visit avature.net that’s a V A T U R E.net to learn why global market leaders like L’Oreal choose Avature to extend the candidate experience. From shoulder taps to first day.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 146 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The only constant thing in business today is change, and very often just keeping up with that change can take all of a recruiting team’s time. With innovation being so important for competitive talent advantage, how can talent acquisition professionals innovate against a background of changing objectives, goals and expectations? My guest this week is Anastacia Flores, Director of Recruiting for pipeline, Development, Systems and Operations at Pandora. Pandora is a company working in a rapidly changing industry where there’s huge competition for talent. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
Hi, Anastacia, and welcome to the podcast.
Anastacia Flores [00:02:15]:
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:17]:
Absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you, your role and the company you work for?
Anastacia Flores [00:02:25]:
Sure. So I’m Anastacia Flores. I’m a Director of recruiting for pipeline, development Systems and Operations at Pandora Media, and we’re a company based in Oakland, California in the US and we’re, as the title suggests or the company name suggests, we’re a media company, mainly music. So we started as an online radio station essentially, and now we have transformed into offering on demand and the creation of playlists, and we’re moving more into podcast offerings as well this year. And I work remotely at my house in California, and we have a number of offices throughout the US that I kind of travel to and see my teams as necessary.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
Fantastic. Now, I’m actually a big fan of Pandora and I’d love to sort of talk to you, talk to you about that forever, but, you know, we should really. We should probably really stick to talent and recruiting. So can you tell us what recruiting looks like at Pandora?
Anastacia Flores [00:03:24]:
Absolutely. So we have a small but mighty growing team. We’ve added a handful of people over the last couple of months and we have our teams divided by functional area and what we call executive leadership team members. So we have a group of folks on the non technical side that work exclusively on recruiting and handle applicants coming in and deal with some passive candidates, but mainly they’re dealing with everybody. That applies to our, to our careers page. And then on the tech side we have a partnership between sourcing and recruiting. So we have our sourcers that go out and find passive candidates, bring them through the process, and then we have them partnered one to one, typically with a recruiter who handles some of the active applicants as well as the on site through the rest of the process. So we like to make sure that our teams are aligned by their executive leadership team members so that they have a really strong understanding of the team, how it operates, personalities, interview process, the skill sets needed and things like that.
Matt Alder [00:04:32]:
That makes a huge amount of sense in terms of structure. What are some of the biggest talent acquisition challenges that you’re up against at the mom?
Anastacia Flores [00:04:41]:
So I think on the tech side, one of the biggest things is probably what every tech company faces is just finding that talent. We’re headquartered in the Bay Area in Silicon Valley with all the big names of tech companies. And so we’re up against a lot of those for our hiring because a number of our product and engineering teams sit in that office. And so making sure that we’re drawing the right people and we’re doing a good job of marketing ourselves and coming across as a competitive place to work is a big challenge. Also, just keeping up with being new and fresh and offering great features and marketing those features on our product. There’s become a lot of focus on online music and podcasts and Amazon Music and Google Music and Apple Music and Spotify, all of these things. And so making sure that we’re keeping up and exciting in the marketplace is really important to drawing that talent to the company and making sure that our product is superior.
Matt Alder [00:05:41]:
So I’ll kind of come back and sort of maybe ask you a little bit more about, you know, how you’re overcoming those, those challenges in a second. But you, you know, you mentioned that you’re sort of working in a very innovative market and obviously, you know, talent acquisition is sort of full of, full of lots of different innovations at the moment. How do you keep sort of pace with that innovation Are there sort of particular strategies that you have to foster innovation within talent acquisition?
Anastacia Flores [00:06:09]:
On the recruiting side, for my role, specifically having the systems and operations piece, I do a lot of demos with companies to identify what new tools or what new products are out there that we can expand into our teams. That’s been a really big focus of my year this year is finding out what our teams could benefit from what those demos and products look like and then get them into my team’s hands so that they can become more efficient and find better fits. And so things like scheduling tools to make it faster for them to get candidates time on their calendar, for my team to jump on the phone with them, or utilizing an AI platform to identify a better fit with a job description we have and candidates in the market, or video interviewing is something that we just started piloting a few weeks ago. Again, to improve the efficiency and reduce the amount of time it takes to get people in the door. So things like that are really key. And then also just listening to my team and hearing what they need and how we can help them, where we need to reevaluate and shift and make our focus.
Matt Alder [00:07:18]:
So, you know, you talked about being in the Bay Area and having, you know, having lots of issues, particularly around sort of recruiting technology people, and you’ve sort of mentioned some of the, you know, some of the, some of the tools that you use. What kind of approach to recruiting do you take, you know, in terms of things like, you know, brand and strategy to sort of overcome. Overcome some of those challenges?
Anastacia Flores [00:07:41]:
Yeah. So making sure that we have pipelines is key. Partnering with the tools that we have in our CRM, we use avature for our CRM and jobvite for our ats and making sure that we have those pipelines organized and clearly up to date. So whoever is working on hiring that profile knows exactly where we left off with a candidate who last followed up, what information and emails they got having that. That data integrity is really important so that as new recs come up or we have people shifting focuses, it doesn’t slow us down at all. We partner really closely with our branding team and we actually have a member of our recruiting team whose focus is on branding and social media. And we do a lot of campaigns on LinkedIn and we have social outlets that we highlight certain things on and make sure that we’re present at certain conferences and speaking events and things like that, that our team, our sourcing and recruiting teams can then utilize in their outreaches and their partnerships to make sure that all the candidates that we’re talking to have all the information about us, know all the up and coming stuff, the new features of the tool, new offices we’re building out and that we’re just being really honest and embracing the culture that we have at Pandora and drawing in people that have a fit with that.
Matt Alder [00:09:04]:
And how do you sort of measure your success overall? Because it sounds like, you know, what you’re doing is kind of sort of highly complex in terms of, you know, driving the best efficiencies and the best results. How do you know you’re sort of growing, you know, growing in success and improving your processes?
Anastacia Flores [00:09:25]:
So we keep a number of, you know, metrics and numbers and tracking and so there’s guidelines and KPIs that our sourcing and recruiting team has around, number of recruiter phone screens and offers and time to hire and all of those things. So those are guidelines for us. But really we look at the partnership with our hiring managers, how quickly we’re getting them a strong pipeline of people, how many recruiter phone screens it takes to get to a hiring manager call, it takes to get to an offer, how quickly we can do that, how we can respond to changes in the market. So all of those things are really key to determine that success. And we have the ability to create these custom reports in our various applicant tracking systems and CRMs that allow us to see that and then go back to our team and say, hey, we’re struggling with this. These numbers are a little bit off. Can you help us understand where we are? How can I help? Do you need a tool? Do you need a different partner? What’s going on? But that reporting and that data is really that starting point for us to get the full story and see how we need to move and shift.
Matt Alder [00:10:32]:
And are there other any other sort of unique recruiting programs or practices at Pandora that you’re really proud of? And if so, why would they be a sort of key focus for you?
Anastacia Flores [00:10:44]:
I think for us a lot of it is just rolling with the punches. We recently rolled out a number of new company principles and speed to innovation. Never settle. I got you. These are things that are really key to us and those go into the day to day. So while there isn’t any one specific thing, I would say it’s the encapsulation of all of those principles and all of our team members that we’re all in it together. We’re one big team. We have each other’s back. And if there’s something that needs to get done in a certain office for hiring or a certain functional area, we’re all going to jump in and do it. We’ve seen our teams move and shift around. I had a tech sourcer on my team who’s now currently a GNA full cycle recruiter because she’s partnering and she’s helping the team grow. We’ve been building out our Atlanta office recently and some of our team has shifted and paused on our Oakland hiring to make sure that we’re expanding that Atlanta office. So more than anything, to me, it’s really the people and the ability to embrace the principles that we have at the company and just go full force and partner as effectively as we all can.
Matt Alder [00:11:53]:
Now, we’ve talked about the importance of technology and all of this, and we kind of live in a time where recruitment technology seems to be getting sort of more diverse and more complicated the day. And I know that, you know, many employers struggle to sort of find, you know, find the right, the right partners in terms of, in terms of tech vendors. You know, why was it important for you guys to partner with the, with the right people and sort of, how did you, how did, how did you make the decision as to sort of who goes into your talent acquisition tech stack?
Anastacia Flores [00:12:30]:
Absolutely. So people are a big thing at Pandora and people are a big thing with our vendors. And so anytime that I’m demoing something with a company, not only am I looking at the product, but I’m looking at their customer service. I’m looking at the customization, I’m looking at the partnership that they offer and our CRM, for example, again, we use Avature and they’ve been great. We’ve used them for, I think, more than three years now. I was involved in the initial integration with them. The tool is highly customizable. We’ve been able to partner with them to build some of those metrics and reports that I was referring to earlier so that I get the data that I need, as do the other managers and directors around me that are leading teams. And they’ve been able to let us know about new features that are coming, have us demo them before they’re fully launched, provide feedback, you know, really build the tool the way that it’s going to be beneficial to us. They listen and then they come back to us with a suggestion and an option. And to me, that customization and that customer service and that partnership is really, really key. Whether or not a tool can do something you want it to do is one thing, but having that partner that can tell you, hey, you know, Anastacia, we don’t have that yet. We can’t filter by that, but let me put it on the roadmap and maybe we’ll get it in a couple of months or in six weeks or, you know, whatever the case may be. So those things, to me, really come out as being a strong and important piece of any product that we have.
Matt Alder [00:13:56]:
So what’s next? What excites you about the future of talent acquisition, sort of in general, and the future of talent acquisition at Pandora?
Anastacia Flores [00:14:05]:
I think, in general for me, I nerd out on all the data, all the new tools, all the cool stuff coming and how we can change the way that we hire and the processes that we take and the efficiency that we have. At Pandora, we’re growing and changing the company daily. We’re expanding out more from music into podcasts. While obviously we’re still going to offer that music, we have that new element. And so there’s a new group of people that we’re hiring and bringing into the company. And with that comes new challenges and new opportunities for us to bring in new members of our recruiting team and sourcing team and people that can really come in and be excited and give us new ideas and things that we haven’t thought about. You know, we’ve had a really senior team, both in terms of tenure at Pandora and their career, and recently we’ve brought in some new folks that have come to us with some great ideas and great suggestions and some new energy. And, you know, it’s been an up and down couple of years and I really feel like some of the changes we’ve made this year and some of the shifts and some of the new focuses we have are bringing an exciting light to where we’re going. And, you know, myself and another senior manager that I work with and our head of recruiting, we’re in it together and we partner so effectively. And knowing that I have their back and they have mine and the same for the team is really, really key. And, you know, it makes me want to wake up and come to work every morning because I know that there’s never a dull moment. There’s always something new that I can learn. There’s always a challenge that I can have, and I’m surrounded by great people doing it.
Matt Alder [00:15:42]:
So, conclusive proof that the future is indeed podcasting.
Matt Alder [00:15:46]:
Anastacia.
Anastacia Flores [00:15:48]:
Yes. You heard it here first.
Matt Alder [00:15:50]:
Absolutely. Anastacia, thank you very much for being on the show.
Anastacia Flores [00:15:54]:
Absolutely. Thanks so much.
Matt Alder [00:15:57]:
My thanks to Anastacia Flores. 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.
