As automation continues to build at a relentless pace across pretty much every business sector, the debate about the potential robotic future of recruiting is intensifying.
Who better to discuss this topic with than my guest this week, Jim Stroud. Jim has been a frontline corporate recruiter, is a pioneer of sourcing and a prodigious producer of content. He is currently VP Product Evangelist North America at ClickIQ and is a keen researcher into both the future of recruiting and the future of work.
In the interview we discuss:
- What recruiters will be doing in the future and why they will be doing it better than machines
- The importance of personal brand in recruiting
- How global privacy concerns are changing the nature of sourcing
- The critical importance of employer brand
- Why programmatic advertising is the future.
Jim also shares some stories about automation and human augmentation currently being seen in the workplace.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ is an automated job advertising platform that uses the latest AI and programmatic technology to manage, track and optimize the performance of your recruitment. Advertising in real time spend is focused where it’s needed the most to reach both active and passive job seekers across indeed, Google, Facebook and an extensive network of job boards. To find out more about ClickIQ, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.UK.
Matt Alder [00:01:00]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 188 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As automation continues to build at a relentless pace across pretty much every business sector, the debate about the potential robotic future of recruitment intensifies.
Matt Alder [00:01:21]:
Who better to discuss this with than.
Matt Alder [00:01:24]:
My guest this week, Jim Stroud. Jim has been a frontline corporate recruiter, is a pioneer of sourcing and a prestigious producer of content. These days he’s VP, Product Evangelist North America for ClickIQ and is a keen researcher into both the future of recruiting and the future of work. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:46]:
Hi Jim, and welcome to the podcast.
Jim Stroud [00:01:49]:
Thank you, sir. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:51]:
Absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you. For the. For the very few people out there who may not have heard of you, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Matt Alder [00:02:00]:
Sure. My name is Jim Stroud and I.
Jim Stroud [00:02:03]:
Am the VP of Product Evangelist North America for Click iq. I serve at their pleasure and what I do is that I tell the I spread the gospel of Click iq, how our automated job advertising platform will.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
Save companies time and Money. Prior to ClickIQ, I’ve worked for Google, Microsoft, Siemens, several other startups. Along the way, I’ve helped to found sourcecon, the premier global sourcing conference in the world at the time.
Jim Stroud [00:02:36]:
I’ve written several books. I have a weird, wacky kind of video series that talks about the future of work, and I also have a podcast which also talks about the future of work.
Matt Alder [00:02:45]:
Fantastic. And you are a prestigious creator of content. And also I know that you’re someone who is kind of out there constantly looking at the market, constantly looking at what’s innovative in recruiting and what might happen next. What’s on your radar at the moment? What are you kind of seeing a lot of that’s of most interest to you?
Matt Alder [00:03:04]:
Sure. Well, I see a lot of concern from recruiters who think that machines will take their jobs away. And I Want to assure as many recruiters that may be listening as much.
Jim Stroud [00:03:16]:
As possible that it’s not a us versus them. It’s not a Terminator kind of situation.
Matt Alder [00:03:23]:
If you remember that movie. I think it’s more of a Tony Stark scenario. There are some things, no doubt, that AI machine learning and how that is impacting recruiting activity. You can see now how you have a lot of tools out there assisting recruiters with resume collection or parsing or going through database, maybe even pre screening with chatbots and so forth. But there are several things that only recruiters can do. And I think that as more machines as and I say machines, I’m denoting AI machine learning and things like that. There are things that machines will do and will always do, and there are things that human beings can do and always do. Machines are very good at doing repetitive tasks. As the recruiter’s job changes over time, which I think it will do because of the movement of AI in the recruitment process, I think it’s going to change the recruitment job duties that they will have to do. So all that to say I see.
Jim Stroud [00:04:40]:
Recruiters jobs changing over time.
Matt Alder [00:04:44]:
I see recruiters doing more things like becoming marketing strategist and maybe more relationship management.
Jim Stroud [00:04:52]:
They do a lot of relationship management.
Matt Alder [00:04:53]:
Now, managing relationship between the candidate, managing relationship between hiring managers. But I also see them being marketing.
Jim Stroud [00:05:00]:
Strategists, doing things like assisting in promoting the employee brand of a company, letting prospects know that not only is it a great place to work wherever they work, but it’s also a great place as evident by their social media footprint. So just as recruiters can look at candidates and their background, candidates will also look at recruiters. And if they see that recruiters are doing things in the community or hanging out with their workmates, and they see evidence of that in social media, then they’re going to assume that it is truly a great place to work.
Matt Alder [00:05:34]:
Because I see it on the recruiters. On social media, I see recruiters focusing more and more on closing since they spend the majority of time speaking to candidates.
Jim Stroud [00:05:45]:
I think since they wanted to do things like scheduling and other tasks that robots or automation will handle, they’ll spend more time closing candidates, building more relationships with candidates, getting more referrals out of candidates, which is something that machines don’t necessarily be able to do because human beings want to feel that connection with another human being. And so they will be more likely to share referrals and information they know with another human being more so than say a machine. I think also recruiters will be Spending a lot of time identifying the unique potential of job seekers. You know, a machine will look at a resume and they’ll get information from it. They’ll maybe infer certain things from the resume itself, but the machine won’t be able to look at someone and say, okay, I see you’ve done X, Y and Z. Have you ever considered doing A, B or C? Because I think after talking to you, even though I don’t see it on your resume, I think you may be good for this other type of role. So machines don’t have intuition, so to speak.
Matt Alder [00:06:51]:
So I think that will be even more of what a recruiter would do. I really see recruiters focusing a lot more on negotiating, which is something we’re doing now, but even more so then because it’ll be more of a core competency. When I look at recruiter training, a lot of the recruiter training out there is about how to find people that are out there. I don’t see as much training around negotiating. So much for recruiting. And I think I’ll see more of that in the future as that becomes more of a core skill that recruiters would need to have.
Matt Alder [00:07:31]:
So, yeah, so basically what you’re saying is that, you know, rather than being replaced by robots, that recruiters become like Tony Stark and are augmented by technology to help them, but they’re still very much a human. A human inside the suit.
Jim Stroud [00:07:47]:
Yes, very much so.
Matt Alder [00:07:48]:
Which I think also accents the need for recruiters to have a strong emotional intelligence quotient and also to have really strong interpersonal skills. If you were to do a search.
Jim Stroud [00:08:01]:
On DuckDuckGo or Google or Bing or.
Matt Alder [00:08:04]:
Something like that, and do a search on millennials losing interpersonal skills, you’ll see that there’s a lot of research out there where some people are saying that because of tech addiction and other factors, that we’re losing a generation that has the ability, or maybe the propensity, to look someone in the eye and talk to them. You know, carrying on a conversation, being.
Jim Stroud [00:08:31]:
Able to debate something without becoming outraged or upset.
Matt Alder [00:08:35]:
And those are things that companies need a lot more, even more than ever. I mean, if you do a search on the top skills of the future, a lot of them are around soft skills. It’s, can you problem solve? Can you resolve conflict amicably? Can you build relationships, maintain relationships, things like that. So I think along with that, Ironman suit has to be a empathetic human being on the inside of it. And I think that companies are more sensitive to it than I think the.
Jim Stroud [00:09:09]:
Candidates are these days.
Matt Alder [00:09:11]:
That’s really interesting stuff. And there are obviously a lot of changes going on or starting to happen when it comes to the role of recruiters. What about the market that everyone’s working in at the moment? I know that you’re someone who’s kind of worked extensively around the world looking very carefully at how recruiting’s going.
Matt Alder [00:09:32]:
How easy or difficult is it to.
Matt Alder [00:09:35]:
Be a recruiter right now?
Matt Alder [00:09:36]:
I think depending on.
Jim Stroud [00:09:40]:
How well you.
Matt Alder [00:09:41]:
Maintain relationships is direct correlation how good a recruiter you are. I always say that the best recruiters are necessarily the ones that can find the most people, although that certainly helps. I think the best recruiters are the ones that can maintain their relationships with the hiring managers who can discern what it is they want and can talk them into interviewing people. It’s amazing to me how some recruiters can find all these people, but then they just don’t get past a certain point because they don’t have the relationship with a manager that will facilitate them getting people hired. So from that standpoint, I think that is the number one ability a recruiter needs to have. Secondly, they need to have a good technical acumen. I mean, there are a lot of.
Jim Stroud [00:10:30]:
Tools out there to help them find people.
Matt Alder [00:10:32]:
But unless you have that critical skill of being able to talk to people, maintain relationships, all the tools out there aren’t really going to help you all that much. But that being said, there is something to be said about finding the right candidate to talk to. And I think that to find that right candidate, you’re going to have to rely on a talent attraction strategy. And this is why I say that over here in the States, and you probably see it over there as well. There’s a story every other day about some sort of data breach, about some sort of information being hacked or something. I mean, it seems like every other day I see something like that. And so what I’m noticing is that people are starting to become a bit more privacy conscious over here, meaning that they’re not going to put as much information about themselves online as they had before. And I think that brings about an interesting problem for recruiters and sources for that matter, because all the different tools you have out there for finding people, they basically find information that’s out there. But what do they do when people are not putting the same amount of information out there that they used to before? So when you have that type of situation, you’re going to have to attract people to you. And so to do that, you will have to do things like programmatic advertising to attract the talent to you, which is why I see the next big trend. You think sourcing nowadays is about finding people, but I think even that definition of source is going to change to.
Jim Stroud [00:12:10]:
How well you can attract someone to you.
Matt Alder [00:12:12]:
And that’s really interesting stuff because for the, probably the Last sort of 10 years plus, sourcing has all been. Has been about how to find people, how to find people that other people can’t find. But as you say, it’s based on. It’s based on data. That’s data that’s out there and that’s changing. So tell us more about this kind of shift to programmatic. What does that, what does that actually mean?
Matt Alder [00:12:38]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that’s one of the reasons why.
Jim Stroud [00:12:40]:
I joined ClickIQ actually, because I saw them as being a leader in this kind of space.
Matt Alder [00:12:46]:
Click IQ is a automated job advertising platform. It is the future, in my opinion, especially the future of sourcing, because although, as I said, there are lots of.
Jim Stroud [00:12:57]:
Tools out there to help you find people, due to privacy concerns and all.
Matt Alder [00:13:01]:
These data breaches that you hear about online, people aren’t putting as much information about themselves as they used to do. So when you have these tools that can go out and find people based.
Jim Stroud [00:13:13]:
On information they’ve posted, if they’re not posting that information, what are you going to find?
Matt Alder [00:13:17]:
That’s why ClickIQ is very relevant now and I think will be increasingly relevant in the future. The things that I like about ClickIQ is that it posts your jobs, whether that’s 100 jobs or a million jobs, out to the various job boards out there through our media partners. And once those jobs are posted on the various job boards, candidates of course will see them and apply and click on them for more information and so forth. At that point, it’s a free ride for the company. But after a while, if your ads are not performing and you’re not getting the clicks, you’re not getting the applies, well, then our system will automatically take it to another level and place those job advertisements in premium slots on the different job boards. And if your jobs are not performing.
Jim Stroud [00:14:08]:
There, then it goes to another level.
Matt Alder [00:14:10]:
Through the Google Ad network. And people who are on Google can see your job advertising that way. It can also go to another level, which is social, meaning that people can see your job advertising inside of a Facebook newsfeed. They can see it inside of an Instagram newsfeed. And if they want to get more information after seeing it in newsfeed, they can click a button and engage with a Chatbot. That chatbot can ask them questions such as their name, phone number, what do they want to know about the job, things like that, basic questions. Then let’s say someone, which is what I like about the chatbot feature that we have, let’s say they’re talking to the chatbot and they decide that they want to leave for a moment without completing the questions that the chatbot has. Well, since they have elected to engage the chatbot initially, the chatbot will follow up with them a little bit later, say maybe a few hours later, say.
Jim Stroud [00:15:10]:
Hey, mate, we were having a discussion about this opportunity.
Matt Alder [00:15:13]:
Do you want to finish answering these questions, yes or no, that kind of thing. So I really like that because as you know, chatbots are 24 7, so you can always engage candidates 24 7, which is what I like about it. So all that to say, I really like Qlikiq. I really like the whole programmatic thing because people aren’t putting information out there, but you would have to attract them. And one way to attract them for sure is with job advertising.
Jim Stroud [00:15:41]:
So why not advertise your jobs and save time and money at the same time?
Matt Alder [00:15:45]:
Fantastic stuff. And that, you know, that makes a lot of sense as a process. Earlier on you were sort of talking about employer branding and it’s kind of importance. And I can obviously see in the context where you’re having to reach out to reach out to people that that of brand element is, you know, is pretty critical. What should people be doing to build that? What are you kind of seeing in the market at the moment? What’s good?
Matt Alder [00:16:17]:
Yeah, in terms of branding, I’m going to call out a company I use a lot, Amazon, and because I think they have a very interesting tightrope that they walk on. Right. They have. I don’t know if you’re aware of it over there, but they’ve received a lot of negative press recently over how they have been treating their warehouse workers. And when you read the reports of how some people who work at Amazon are super stressed, overworked. Overworked to the point of contemplating suicide and committing suicide, that’s a very negative news report that people will be reading about when they consider working for Amazon. So even if you are not working, even if you’re not pursuing work as a warehouse worker for Amazon and say you may want to work on the cloud or tech, that kind of thing, because Amazon is getting so much negative press around their warehouse workers. I imagine that several people who probably would have liked to work for Amazon, because it’s a Good brand. They may have second thoughts because of all the negative publicity Amazon is getting over how they’re treating their warehouse workers. So one thing that Amazon would want to do, I would think, is find a way to change that in their warehouses. Not just so that they can employ more warehouse people, but because they want to employ people in other aspects of their company and they want to show that they care for their workers. Because if I was a software developer thinking of Amazon, I’m going to think you treat your warehouse workers that way, how are you going to treat me kind of a thing. So I think that long way around that question, I think that to protect your employer brand is crucial. It’s how you treat the lowest worker, it’s how you treat the highest worker, everything in between. And I think that every recruiter who may work for Amazon at this point should have in their back pocket, so to speak, a series of positive stories of how Amazon has helped them personally, how Amazon has helped other workers inside the company, how Amazon gives back to the community, how it may help the environment, what have you. They need to have at least 10 other stories of positive things Amazon has done to counteract those negative reports and say, basically, yes, we are having challenges in that one area, but in all these hundred other areas, we’re doing pretty good. And there’s no other reason we need people like you to help us figure out how to make that one area where we’re lacking a bit better.
Matt Alder [00:19:13]:
So we’ve talked about how recruiters having to change, we’ve talked about how sourcing is changing, and we sort of talked a little bit there about employer branding. As a kind of a final question, because I know this is something that you think about and research into quite a lot. How’s work changing? What does the future of work look like from your perspective?
Matt Alder [00:19:37]:
Oh, I see a lot of things being done in the name of efficiency. For example, there’s this company in Wisconsin called Red Square Market that implants microchips inside of its employees. It’s about the size of a piece of rice inside of their. Between their thumb and forefinger. And once that microchip is implanted in the employee, the employee can wave their hand over a pad and they’re able to enter into the office building or buy food from a vending machine or make copies, all from the standpoint of workplace efficiency. Now, the employees can volunteer to do this. It’s not mandatory, but I found it all a bit weird, because even though that microchip is conveniently in their hand, I don’t really see it adding any additional value that, say, a key card couldn’t do. But nonetheless, that is what’s happening. And that’s not even the first time I’ve heard of people doing that. I can know that in Sweden they have this, this. This movement, I think four, I want to say 4,000, several thousand people have these microchips planted in their feet so that they walk. When they walk through a train station, they don’t have to take a ticket out or pay for a ticket. The information is scanned from the microchip inside their feet and their tickets are paid for, and they golf their merry way. So that’s interesting. Another example of the future of work is something I’m seeing in China. In China, if you are working in a factory, you’ll be wearing a helmet. Inside a helmet is some sort of technology that reads your brain waves. So by reading your brain waves, your manager can look on a computer screen and see if you are stressed or angry or any number of emotions. And if they surmise that you are so stressed, then perhaps you need to take a break from the factory line so that you can calm down and relax yourself. Or maybe everyone on the factory line is stressed, so they need to take an early break or make changes in the work process so that people are a little less stressed. Or maybe there are some people on the line that are so stressed that they need to be fired. So there is that. IBM has a magic algorithm that can detect when someone is getting ready to leave a company. And they say that their Algorithm predicts with 90% accuracy, which is, you know, I think is debatable, but they say that they’re able to do that with that algorithm. They’re able to, of course, see when people are leaving a job. So at that point, what they will do is they’ll have a manager approach a candidate and say, hey, how do you feel about taking on these new projects? How do you feel about taking on this new role? All in a bid to retain their staff over time? I see a lot of interesting things like that. And I also see. We’ll give you one more example because I think this is really amazing to me. There’s this company called Percolata that installs sensors inside of a retail outlet. So let’s say that you are the owner of a convenience store gas station, and you employ Percolada to put these sensors inside of your store. So once these sensors are installed, they are able to do things like this. They will monitor how much money is made in the store when Matt is behind a register and they’ll measure it when Jim is behind the register and they’ll say, okay, when Matt is behind the register, then sales increase by 8%. And when Jim is in the store, people stay in the store 10 minutes longer because they like talking to Jim. Well, we’ll see by the weather report. It’s going to be 80 degrees Fahrenheit on Saturday. There’s a big game down the street. There’s a concert just a little bit further down the road. So we anticipate a lot of foot traffic. So on that Saturday, we want you.
Jim Stroud [00:23:57]:
To have Matt and Jim in the.
Matt Alder [00:23:59]:
Store because that will increase sales by at least 10% by our predictive analytics. And because Jim will talk to them and they’ll stay in the store longer, chances are they’ll buy more stuff. So that’s another example of Tony Stark, where you have AI machine learning, analyzing everything possible about the workspace. Then recommendations are made to where you have the best people in place to talk to the customers, showing that no matter how much technology there, you still need that human touch. People in the room who can actually converse with other people and get things done. So Tony Stark, not Terminator.
Matt Alder [00:24:42]:
I was going to say it sounds like a cross between Iron man and Minority Report, but relieved to hear that there’s still a role for humans within all of that. Very last question, Jim. Where can people find you online? Where can they access your content?
Matt Alder [00:24:57]:
Sure, sure. If they want to see my personal.
Jim Stroud [00:25:00]:
Content, you can go to jim stroud.com all my stuff is there. G I M S T r o u d.com audio podcasts, videos, comic strips, and so forth.
Matt Alder [00:25:10]:
But if you want to save money and time with your job advertising, by.
Jim Stroud [00:25:14]:
All means, reach out to me by email. It’s Jim ClickIQ US C L I C K I Q.US Jim, thank you.
Matt Alder [00:25:22]:
Very much for talking to me.
Matt Alder [00:25:23]:
You’re quite welcome.
Matt Alder [00:25:24]:
My thanks to Jim Stroud. 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.
