As we all know recruiting is currently going through a massive period of evolution. Skill shortages, different ways of working and changes in the way we communicate are all contributing to the need for recruiting to be more strategic. But what does an effective recruiting strategy look like in 2019?
My guest this week is Mark Duebel, Global Technical Recruiter at Elastic Search. Elastic is facing some really interesting recruiting challenges which they are addressing in a very strategic way.
In the interview we discuss:
- The unique nature of Elastic’s recruiting challenges
- The problems of marketing distributed jobs with no fixed location
- Dealing with a high level of inbound applications in a human way while keeping the bar high
- Elastic’s “source code” culture
- Structured recruiting processes
- The role of automation and technology
Mark also talks us through the move from reactive to strategic recruiting and his thoughts on the future direction of talent acquisition at Elastic
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Smart Recruiters, the hiring success company Smart Recruiters offers enterprise grade recruiting software designed for hiring success. Move beyond applicant tracking with a modern platform that provides everything you need to attract, select and hire the best talent. From candidate relationship management to programmatic job advertising, recruitment, marketing, collaborative hiring and embedded artificial intelligence experience. A talent acquisition suite with intuitive user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters all love. Leading brands like Bosch, IKEA, LinkedIn and visa use Smart Recruiters to future proof talent acquisition and expand their businesses globally. Visit smartrecruiters.com to find out how you can achieve hiring success as well.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 184 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As we all know, recruiting is currently undergoing a massive period of evolution. Skill shortages, different ways of working and changes in the way we communicate are all contributing to the need for recruiting to be more strategic. But what does an effective recruiting strategy look like in 2019? My guest this week is Mark Duebel from Elasticsearch. Elastic face some really interesting recruiting challenges which they’re addressing in a highly strategic way. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
Hi Mark and welcome to the podcast.
Mark Duebel [00:01:58]:
Hi Matt, thanks, thanks for having me today.
Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself to everybody and tell us what you do?
Mark Duebel [00:02:07]:
Okay, so I’m Mark Duebel. I’m a technical recruiter at Elastic. I manage the recruitment process for different teams like machine learning, cloud side reliability and technical support teams. I’m kind of the weird recruiter and my background is in technology. In 96 I started out as a mechanical electrical system engineer in the Royal Dutch Navy and switched to it in 2000 at that time at the Royal Dutch Air Force and did that for about 12 years, 12 plus years. Basically built teams and being in tech and I liked that building teams part. I like to find the right people, match them together, etc. Etc. And slowly I felt that my career was going more into a project lead building team kind of role. Wherever I came, I went into the oil and gas, started building teams over there and at a certain moment in some companies you are forced to be promoted up to a management level where I didn’t want to be at that time. I wanted really to build those teams and a recruiter came up to me and had a chat for me and I joined as a recruiter at that time at an agency, learned A lot about recruiting. Really liked hiring people, getting people in the right spot. But I missed the building teams. I wasn’t really doing that in most agencies. It’s a little bit different. So after nine months, I left the company, found a great opportunity as a manager for it. Sometimes you make wrong decision in companies. I went back into recruitment more as a lead for an IT department, helping the team to open up new opportunities, those kind of things. I coached some people, I built the team, and when my goals were reached, I looked for a new challenge. And that’s when Elastic came around the corner. So I knew the team lead at that time from an old application. And when she approached me, I knew it should have been a good company. Right. I trusted her judgment there. And she was there for more than a year. So a little more than a year later, now I’m recruiting for amazing talent around the world from my own home. I live in Barcelona, Spain. Thanks to the distributed nature of Elastic. I work remote, I work distributed.
Matt Alder [00:04:20]:
Fantastic. And could you sort of tell us a little bit about Elastic, what they do and the type of recruiting challenges that you face?
Mark Duebel [00:04:29]:
Of course. So Elastic is a company that a lot of people that are not in tech may not even know, but they touch the technology, I think daily. If you have heard of Uber or about Tinder, the dating site, right when you swipe left or right, that’s Elastic powering that engine that actually gives you the relevant results. If you use Uber and you want to know where your drive is and what the cheapest one is and where there are at that moment, that’s Elastic powering that whole engine behind it. Elastic is a search company. We make search easier. And search is a very wide concept, so you can use it in different things. Finding people, finding data, unstructured data, wherever you are. That’s what Elastic does. We’re open source. That’s the beautiful part about it. That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to join the company. It has a different mindset. When I joined, you actually felt that little bit of a startup feeling still. But you really saw that people were interested in sharing their knowledge. And that’s something that’s amazing to work at at a company like that. And our recruiting challenges. We’re a distributed company and that’s not a default thing to be right. We’re distributed by design, and that means that everybody can live wherever they are. So one of our challenges is, say, tech job boards. Currently, main job boards and communities are anchored in the traditional employee system. You have an office in a Location, you’re looking for people in that location and then you’re done. So your post job says, we’re looking for a JavaScript engineer, London, but here comes Elastic. We’re distributed by design, so that means that we hire worldwide in about 30 plus countries, 18 time zones and the whole community spans a little bit more over the 100 countries. So how do you post your job and reach all of that amazing talent around the world since most platforms require a city to pin the job add on. Like I said, we’re distributed. We don’t mind where you lay your head to rest. So we are talking to those partners now on how this can be tailored for us because it’s not just worldwide, but think about scaling regions. So I’m just looking for people in Europe, I’m just looking for people in emea specific parts of the APJ regions, those kind of things. Another challenge we have is high volume inbound. And this is what I’m actually pretty proud of. May sound strange, but we have an amazing amount of inbound applications from the most talented people around the world. We have 100,000 plus per year. So the challenge is how to find that one amazing person that you’re looking for in between those thousands and how do you approach it in a technical, logistical way? And that’s where it gets interesting. How do you keep that high bar with such a demand and how do you keep that for you if you follow that amount of inbound traffic? There comes another challenge which is quite important to us. How do we handle all those people in the humane and thoughtful way when they provide not to be fit? Everybody always talks about how do you give the candidate an amazing experience. But the other side is how do you give all those people that applied an amazing experience as well? You have to respect them. They put some time in it, they put effort in it, they build a CV for you. They applied and they’re not a fit. So how can we as a human basically reject them and say, sorry, you’re not a fit, but please keep in touch, no hard feelings. And how do we scale that? Because it’s just getting more and more. And when you finally have found a talent and you guide them through the recruitment process, how do we provide that amazing candidate experience while handling that growing workload? So how do we stay personal, Keep giving, keep giving feedback even when they didn’t make it to the next round. Right, it’s high volume, but you still want to have people leave the process with an idea. Okay, now I know what I miss. Now I Know what I need to work on? Let’s try it again maybe next year or in two years. So those are kind of the challenges that we have right now. It’s the distributed nature and the tech side and of course that high volume that we’re getting in.
Matt Alder [00:09:03]:
So, I mean, lots of, lots of stuff I want to dig into and ask you about there. But so very specifically, before we kind of get into how you’ve solved some of these challenges, why is it that you have such a high level of inbound? Is it employer brand? Is it something you’re doing? Is it the reputation of the company? What’s sort of generating all of that interest?
Mark Duebel [00:09:24]:
Well, there are a few things. So employee brand is definitely a thing. People know us for our company, I hate to say culture, but we call it source code. So we’re known for how we treat people, how flexible we are, that we are distributed, etc. The other thing is that since a lot of companies use our technologies, engineers know us, it’s a little bit different in different fields. So when you’re looking at technical recruitment or more sales recruitment on the technical side, the chances that they know us or have heard of us is quite big. So they’re actually looking for it. And distributed working, remote working, is getting hotter and hotter day by day. Everybody wants it, everybody wants that flexibility. They want to lose their commute. So people are really looking for distributed jobs and that’s where they find this as well. So it’s a combination of all of those. So it’s a little bit of reputation branding and being remote that really gets that volume, that high.
Matt Alder [00:10:28]:
That makes perfect sense. So, I mean, digging into some of the, some of the challenges, I mean, what, what innovative approaches have you, have you taken to overcome, you know, some of the issues that you’ve outlined there?
Mark Duebel [00:10:39]:
Yeah, so this is, this is an. I like this question. It is, it has been a topic around the whole team. So we’re growing our recruitment team very fast. We have to scale with the company. Right. So this has been a topcoming team. So what is innovative? What are we actually doing that nobody else does? So it was hard to define. And when I look at it, we’ve done a few things to optimize a process and value to elastic as a recruiting function. So we’re actually talking to our partners to get a job. Distribution, in a fashion, it represents our distributed nature. So we’re talking to LinkedIn and to all those other companies to get them to understand what distributed means and that we cannot just post all our Jobs on every single city or country there is, because that’s the traditional way. So we’re actually building a more tight relationship with all those companies to make sure that we get to the future of work. Because I think we’re not the only ones that have that issue at this moment. The high volume inbound is a challenge where we are automating parts of the process. So recruiters and the recruitment coordinators, those who schedule for us, have to perform less actions to make sure that a candidate still gets that personal treatment. There’s nothing really innovating, but combination with a structured interviewing, it gives us much needed time back to be able to do the job we are hired for and more. My goal is always to reach that 80% workload, so you have 20% to innovate, to actually get there where you want to be. So we’re talking to our ATS partners to implement solutions to make our life easier. So automating a lot of stuff, but making it automated without losing that candidate experience. We’re moving from reactive recruitment. So when I joined Elastic, this was the first time that I heard about the way of doing this. Removing from reactive recruitment, where you get the job description and just start recruiting towards a more operational, strategic approach where we are actual true partners to the business. So in a lot of companies you just get the job description and here you go, you find somebody. We try to engage with the hiring manager on the strategic level more as advisors and we do that by using what Elastica basically is good at. We use data. So when you understand how teams are scaling and where the current and future challenges lie, you’re able to build teams for the long run instead of butts and seats, as I call it. So in one of our teams, we are transitioning from a more system focused team towards a more developer driven team. And as a recruiter, that’s a challenge, right? So we really became a partner for the team and we were looking at what qualities will you need to build it, what do you need to maintain it and if you scale it, what will be looking for this time next year and the year after that? Have you thought about management area leads? Can you train your people? How are we going to deal with attrition if that happens? And not to forget, how do we adjust a scale and process so we are not behind the facts when we need to take action? It’s a difficult challenge and even on the branding side, it also means we need to be more active and build a strong network of people that we may need in a Year or maybe two years. How do you keep them interesting? So we’re really going from that reactive model of recruitment we’re building up to tactical slowly to operational. And the last part is that strategic part where you are actually data driven and you can advise the company more than just hey, we’re hiring for you. That’s it. Like I said, we’re working on handling volume as well. So while we’re maintaining quality, we need to deal with at high volume. And one of our initiatives is a structured process. This really helped us a lot. For me, it’s not that innovative, but I talk to a lot of my peers in other companies and it seems that it’s a step they have not yet made or just are thinking about. So what we’re building is a structured process where the interviews, steps and the content of the interviews themselves are very structured. That means that every candidate gets treated equipment equally, Precisely equally. Same questions, same process. Everything, everything’s being forged almost into a fluid process where candidates know exactly what the next step is. They’re not answering the same questions twice. Because that was a frustration when I was an engineer going to four interviews and just keep repeating yourself. And we are assessing the people in a fair and unbiased way. So if everyone is interviewing according to the exact same assessment points, this cleans up the process for recruiter. Recruiter has concrete, unbiased feedback and is able to decide to move, is able to decide to move on or not instead of continuously checking with the hiring manager. So we’re much more empowered to make the decisions and that saves a lot of time. And in a lot of companies that’s still not happening, that the recruiter actually has the power to say this is a good one or this isn’t. We don’t have to check continuously with the hiring manager anymore. It saves a lot of time, but it also guarantees that the quality over the interviews stays the same as well. So we’re becoming business partners. We know the teams, we understand what they’re looking for, we know what brings value to the team. And it’s more than often not just a technical skill set, but personality trait as well. So in personalities you have the support of people that help the team reach the potential, the decision makers that make sure that things get done, the one who motivates the team and drives initiatives and the ones that are really taking it into a deeper, detailed level of work. So kind of like disk, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but that’s what they’re trying to Do. Building a team depends on those traits and you need all of them in a successful team. And as of Kudi you need to know what you’re looking for. So we really are in that phase where we and reaching towards a phase where we actually are able to do that. And for the candidates that means that they know what’s happening. They from day one they know I have five interviews. I know with who I’m talking, I know what the topics are, I know kind of what the questions are and I know where I’m ending up.
Matt Alder [00:17:15]:
And you kind of, you know, you sort of mentioned job boards and you mentioned working with your ats. What role has technology played in sort of facilitating the strategy that you’re putting in place?
Mark Duebel [00:17:27]:
Yeah, so this is a thing that goes those company wide and recruitment specific. So one of the things that we’re quite happy about is IBM Watson. We will roll that out soon. It’s one of those things that helps potential candidates with getting answers on their first questions. I don’t know if you’re familiar with IBM Watson but basically it’s a, I don’t want to call it a bot because it’s more advanced than that. But if you basically ask a question on the website on anything in the recruitment process, you will be guided to the answer somewhere on the website. So it will actually help candidates interact with us before they even started, before they even applied. And that’s something that we think that will help that candidate experience. It’s a machine learning thing, AI thing and it brings a lot of value. So we’re happy that we are going to roll that out soon. Second thing is tools like Zoom and Slack. We use them throughout the whole company. Thanks to those tools we are able to work all around the world from comfort of our homes. It lets us work in comfortable environments. Right. It gives us freedom. Thanks to that we don’t have to commute. Sometimes I even sit at the beach and do my job. I like to tease my teammates when we have a meeting and just sit outside, show them the palm trees. It’s thanks to those tools you don’t have to be in that office. Right. So it’s nice to teach them once in a while. But it also gives you focus. Not being in an office, it makes me more productive and helps us be more flexible. Why interview with somebody in the US while you’re in Europe or Asia? So we can distribute everything around that. So that’s what we do. Thanks to tools like Sumans Flag, they actually help us even with the time zone differences It’s a little bit about respect. If I select somebody, I do not always expect an answer directly. They can be asleep, they can be working, they can be walking the dog or at the doctor’s appointment. But that technology really helps us. For the candidates, Zoom is a very light, simple tool that we can use for the interview. So we still have that personal approach, we still see each other, we talk to each other instead of just a simple phone call. And it gives us the freedom to hire people around the world without forcing them to relocate and leave their family, friends behind. This is something where we very important. Distributed by design didn’t come into the picture without a reason. It’s beautiful that if I find an amazing engineer in Poland or in South Africa, that I don’t have to say, hey, you want to join a company, cool, but you have to go to Amsterdam or to San Francisco or to any other of our offices, they can stay at home. So cloud technologies, Zoom, Slack, all those things, make sure that we can do that. And in our quest for the best recruitment technology, our ats and tools have actually made it easier to find and approach talent, easier creating insights where talent is locating and finding diversity. Technology really, really helps us be who we are and making us the distributed company.
Matt Alder [00:20:37]:
Final question, sounds like there’s a huge amount going on, but what are you sort of looking at for the future? What’s the sort of the next stage for recruiting at Elastic?
Mark Duebel [00:20:48]:
So in our case, that’s the continued height growth while keeping the high bar for talent, right? We’re growing and growing. We’re hiring a lot of people and we have to scale. But how do you scale at such a pace without lowering your bar for talent, without losing what you’re actually looking for? That’s an ongoing challenge for recruiting at Elastic, Scaling and recruiting at the same time. So we’re constantly thinking about how can we optimize our recruiting team, how can we still be that business partner to our internal customers, or internal teams, however you want to call them. And an ongoing quest to improve the candidate experience from branding and the first outreach to onboarding and retaining. Recruitment isn’t just about hiring. It’s. It starts at branding your own personal branding to company branding, to of course, the whole process, but even onboarding and retaining them. You don’t want to lose people as well. Another challenge is, and this is a challenge that everybody has, right? It’s diversity, diversity 2.0 as we call it at the moment. It’s diversity challenges that are different by geolocation. So how do we make sure we attend all those different kinds of diversity. And I’m not just talking about skin color, ethical background, protective status, gender, lifestyle preferences, or even the accent in which you speak. It’s about diversity in personality as well. It’s about doers, thinkers, leaders, decision makers, extroverts, introverts, people. As a whole, we tend to confine diversity into a small package, but it’s much bigger than that. So as our source code kind of mentions, we all come in different shapes, with different interests and skills. We all have an accent. And at last we just celebrate that. Just come as you are. But it’s a challenge. You have to make sure that that stays working like you want. And the last thing that is coming is the continued evolution of recruitment. It’s changing every time. Again, technology is changing it. Laws like GDPR are changing it. So you have to stay on your feet, keep thinking about ways to improve and continually check on yourselves. Are we doing the right thing? Are we doing it in the right way? And what is right? So you still have to reach out to different partners around the world and say, okay, hey, GDPR is coming. How do we deal with that? How can we make that work for us as a company?
Matt Alder [00:23:21]:
Mark, thank you very much for talking to me.
Mark Duebel [00:23:23]:
More than welcome.
Matt Alder [00:23:25]:
My thanks to Mark Duebel. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts 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 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.
