Talent acquisition is difficult. Companies are changing, talent markets are changing, technology is changing, and for many employers, the transactional model of recruiting is no longer delivering.
So what is working and how should talent acquisition professionals be driving change within their business? My guest this week is someone with the insights to answer these questions. Allyn Bailey is talent acquisition transformation manager at Intel, and she has some very interesting experiences to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Intel’s talent acquisition challenges
- How the talent market is changing and how talent acquisition needs to change
- Why the transactional model of recruiting is broken
- Building relationships for the lifetime of someone’s career
- The infinity loop
- The role of technology
- Why talent acquisition is using the wrong metrics
- How to drive change and promote adoption internally
Allyn also talks about designing Intel’s candidate experience and their plans for the future.
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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 [00:01:01]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 189 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Talent acquisition is difficult. Companies are changing, talent markets are changing, technology is changing, and for many employers, the transactional model of recruiting is no longer delivering. So what is working and how should talent acquisition leaders be driving change within their businesses? My guest this week is someone with the insights to answer these questions. Allyn Bailey is talent Acquisition Transformation Manager at Intel and she has some really interesting experiences to share. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:43]:
Hi Allyn and welcome to the podcast.
Allyn Bailey [00:01:44]:
Thank you. I’m excited to be here. I’d love to chat.
Matt Alder [00:01:47]:
Fantastic to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Allyn Bailey [00:01:53]:
Absolutely. So my name is Allyn Bailey. I am part of Intel’s global talent acquisition team. My primary focus at intel is around looking at how we transform talent acquisition to be focused more on people versus transactions. And so for the last four and a half, almost five years now, I guess it’s actually closer to five, I’ve been working in the organization, taking a look with a candidate experience, user experience, lens, understanding experience design and trying to dissect how do we look differently at talent acquisition and leading a program office.
Matt Alder [00:02:31]:
To do that fantastic stuff. Now I kind of ask this question to everyone, but I’m going to broaden it slightly when asking it to you. So could you sort of tell us a little bit about the type of talent acquisition challenges intel has, but also perhaps the challenges that you think talent talent acquisition has in general?
Allyn Bailey [00:02:49]:
Yeah. So I think that when I think about intel specific challenges, the things that kind of started this work to begin with and the ones that we continue to deal with is the fact that, you know, talent in the landscape for talent is changing and intel is a, is a name brand obviously. Right. We have, we don’t necessarily have a lack of people applying to opportunities for us, but having relevant people apply or being able to articulate to people what it is that we actually do. As we start to transition out of being just a processor company to being one that’s really about data and thinking differently about technology in general, we’re constantly evolving both the types of skills that we’re looking for and the types of work that we’re doing. So a highly evolutionary space, right? What that means is that it makes it hard for candidates to understand how they fit. It makes it challenging for us to understand what types of candidates we actually need. And in the middle, what we end up with is a lot of transactions around applications and telling people no. So that’s our biggest challenge. I actually think that that is a version of the same challenge that we see across almost all large enterprises today. That from an enterprise focused talent acquisition space, we have focused so much on volume and speed and cost of hire, that we have created an engine that doesn’t necessarily align to the root of what talent acquisition is about, which is people and understanding who people are and how best to connect them to opportunities. And so it creates this dichotomy, this big challenge between how do you become efficient and manage the volume and the breadth of work that you have to do, but also do it in a way that creates quality and the right experience so you actually generate the right people in the right jobs.
Matt Alder [00:04:56]:
And you mentioned there that basically for lots of people, talent acquisition has become this sort of transaction driven engine. What should it be changing to and how should that change happen?
Allyn Bailey [00:05:07]:
So I think, I personally think the big shift needs to be towards thinking about people. So here’s what I mean by that. I think that if you look at what’s happening in the talent market itself, how individuals actually look for and manage their own careers and their own work, the deus of talent, you know, finding the one great job and staying there for 20 years, right. Has started to. Not only started, but has gone right instead. People are in and out of jobs all the time. They’re interning, they’re transitioning, they’re gig working. And I think talent acquisition has to adjust to that. And part of adjusting to that means starting to look at individuals and people that they engage with as relationships they’re building for the lifetime of that person’s career. Feeling comfortable with the idea that I’m going to engage with you today in one opportunity and you may or may not be a right fit for it, but I need to maintain and manage that relationship with you because someday you may be the right fit for something else further down the line. And in a transactional model where I’m only focused on one interaction at a time or one process at a time, I miss the opportunity to connect the dots between all the different times I may engage with you over the lifetime of your career. And if I don’t connect those dots, I don’t get enough insight and knowledge about you. The end of the day will make me slower, less efficient, and less able to really take advantage of the talent pools that exist out there.
Matt Alder [00:06:42]:
Now, I know you’ve written and spoken before about talent acquisition being like an infinity loop. Can you sort of talk us through that model? How does that work in practice? How do people sort of achieve the achieve the kind of thing that you’re talking about?
Allyn Bailey [00:06:56]:
So I think the basic premise is that once you build a connection with somebody, once you connect with a potential candidate or even a potential contact lead, once they’re in the process, the intention is never to drop them out again. What that means is creating infrastructure that understands how do you manage a pipeline of people and constantly be able to update their information, understand how they’ve changed and evolved over their careers, resort and reorganize them, and then be able to re access them and leverage them for the opportunities that you have available. It also means that as you move people through the different transactions of individual hiring situations, you are capturing and understanding the information they are giving you and updating and managing their contact record accordingly. So you’re really building a repository of information and data about people that can be used to increase your relationship with them, to be able to personalize how you connect with them and be able to connect them to opportunities more readily. The key to this is that you’re thinking about the people and what your engagement is with those people, building those relationships and using those relationships to capture more information about who they are and what makes them tick, and then applying the right levels of cognitive technology and capabilities on top of that to allow you to access and leverage that data to efficiently make matches across the way.
Matt Alder [00:08:36]:
That’s interesting actually, because that was going to be my next question about what’s the role of technology in terms of making this happen? Could you sort of talk about that in a little bit more detail?
Allyn Bailey [00:08:46]:
Yeah, absolutely. I think technology has two spaces here. The first space is the types of technology that are required to allow you to engage, capture, sort, organize contacts and their information successfully. Right. This is the first wave, I believe, of talent acquisition. Moving in this space was the use of recruitment marketing technologies, or CRMs. Right. Kind of moving away from just thinking solely about the ATS, but the inclusion of CRMs, where we can actually manage relationships over time and start to capture. So that’s that first layer of technology that needs to exist. The second layer is now, as we’re starting to see the new ways of AI start to come in and the ability to use machine learning and matching capabilities. How do you overlay that sort of capability onto that now database of insight you have about individuals to be able to help you augment or automate some of the key decision points that you have? Right. How do you help? How do you use it to help you understand how to target messaging? Leveraging AI technology and matching technology to help you match people to opportunities, help you constantly prioritize and resort the people inside your pipeline and also be able to manage your communication and engagements and kind of automate those where necessary. So technology in the TA space allows us to move to this kind of infinity loop processor. It’s a way of thinking about managing relationships over time because it takes the burden off of people to have to manage that full scale. Right. We can now insert technology to allow us to organize people. We can use technology to allow us to understand what’s common about different people, what connects with them, what triggers them to engage in different places. And we can use that to help automate and drive actions where we used to have to have people go in and intervene to do those things or to analyze that. And then we can use technology to help leverage the information that we’ve collected about people over time to make informed decisions and help connect it to opportunities and to help us leverage it to do things like matching and connecting people to specific jobs.
Matt Alder [00:11:11]:
Now, I think for many organizations, you know, this approach would make perfect sense. Obviously there is technology on the market and technology is improving all the time that can facilitate this. But perhaps the biggest barrier is, you know, is the changes that need to be made within the organization to sort of take on board this different way of thinking about talent acquisition. What advice would you give to people in terms of how they might drive change and sort of promote adoption within their organization?
Allyn Bailey [00:11:42]:
I laugh because it’s. I think it’s actually the hardest part of all this, right? You can. You can build a process, you can buy technology, but at the end of the day, it still requires people in an organization to be able to both understand this new way of thinking, but also to apply it to the way in which they execute their work. And this is something we’ve been looking at, like I said, for almost five years now as we started to do this process. I think We’ve done some things really well and learned some lessons where we’ve done some things poorly. And I can kind of pass those on. The first assumption, I think that was incorrect, that I would now warn others against, is that this assumption that everybody who is in the talent acquisition space, your kind of recruiters, your sourcers, recruitment markets, whoever is kind of in your talent acquisition space, is naturally going to understand how they would fit into a model like this. That when you start to introduce it and start to talk about the types of tasks and activities that would, that would happen here. Having people make the leap or the jump from how I do my work today to how it would look differently in the future is a much harder lift than we had anticipated. And I think part of the challenge there is that there was a, you know, we have been rewarding the behaviors around managing transactions. Look at the metrics that most of us have in our enterprise talent acquisition organizations today. If I hear one more person talk about time to fill or speed to hire, right? These are all metrics that we have used to help us understand the efficiency of our process. And we have taught the people who work in our organizations to focus on those things. So if people are focused on speed, if people are focused on how quickly they can close their requisitions, how they can ensure lack of excursions from a process, it’s very hard to start to help them start thinking differently about being more, taking a step back, being more focused on the interaction, the engagement, capturing of information. And so to do that, you have to go in and look at the metrics that you’re using. You have to go in and look at how you’ve designed your processes, but you also have to look at fundamentally how you’re rewarding people and what you’re holding people accountable for. For us, that required us to realize that we not only had to redesign processes and introduce technologies, but we had to redesign roles and as part, and then also go in and do a broad scale set of retraining and build an entire new upskilling program just to help people align to a new way of thinking about their work. And fundamentally those have been the keys to drive ADOP option. That it’s not the trickle down effect doesn’t necessarily work.
Matt Alder [00:14:43]:
Absolutely, that makes perfect sense. And I can see that it’s a big challenge for everyone, which illustrates why some organizations find it so difficult to change just from a candidate perspective. We’ve talked about changing talent acquisition internally and the methodology and that kind of stuff. How did you go about, about Sort of reviewing and designing your candidate experience at Intel.
Allyn Bailey [00:15:16]:
So from, you know, candidate experience is actually where we started all of this. My initial job coming into the organization was to look at our candidate experience. And I can tell you our early work was around talking to candidates. We are, we’ve been strongly involved in the Talent Board’s candy process for years and it provides a wealth of data and information if you actually go in and look at even just the open ended comments and can really get a good sense of what candidates are saying about their current experience. But we then augmented that with a lot of frontline user research globally with our candidates. And not just candidates by the way, who applied, but candidates who demonstrated interest and looked across the entire spectrum to understand how were they engaging with us, what was driving them to different behaviors. And then from there set up a couple of core things, right? What was it our intent, what were we trying to have them do? What would motivate them or drive them to want to engage with us in that way? And then what are the things we needed to do to create those experiences for them? And you know, fundamentally, here’s what we heard from candidates. Candidates told us that they were confused by our processes. And when I say our, I’m talking about not just Intel’s but most of our processes. Today most candidates feel as though it’s a kind of a zero sum game. You’re going to end up in a, in a black hole of the applicant. Doomsday, right? We have generated or created an entire generation of people who have learned that in order to find a job. And if you don’t have a contact in an organization, the best thing you can do is apply to everything that they have available that you might be relevant for. Candidates are savvy enough that they talk about the idea that they are targeting their resumes to focus on keywords because they believe computers and engines on the back end were sorting and organizing them and dumping them out before they were even being seen. This was even before, by the way. Technology was actually doing these things. People just believed that was happening, right? I loved it when I read first interviews five years ago and was like, wow, it’d be great if we had technology that did that, right? So in general, candidates and people, when looking for jobs, particularly if they didn’t have personal connections or an opportunity to have somebody help them navigate them through the process, saw it as a very one, a very transactional process, but also one where the cards were stacked against them, right? There was not a sense of fairness or a sense that there was actually anything related to what value they brought to it. It was completely about the luck of the draw and we needed to change that. And I think that was where we started to identify right off the bat that we had built a process that was focused on how we needed to manage the volume, not a process focused on how we would entice, attract, and be able to identify the best candidates. Candidates actually pointed that out to us when we looked at what their experience was. And I think that’s what drove a lot of the work as we moved forward and started to look at where we needed to change. You know, candidates, even today, five years down the road, I look at our candidate experience survey information, I look at it globally. If you look at the talent board results that came out this year, again, candidate experience is going up across the board. But one common theme remains. Candidates feel like they don’t get communicated with and they don’t understand what’s happening to them and they don’t know how to make the right inroads to be able to feel like they’re heard and they’re seen. And so dealing with the idea of how you build relationship and connection with people and you can do that, by the way, using automation and tools. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a human being that does that. It just has to be purposeful and planned and an experience that makes sense for a candidate as they navigate that, that process. Just the way in which we articulate and send disposition notices out of our ats. I don’t know how many people have read the emails that they send to candidates recently, but you know, try that. It’s not fun. Thank you very much. We don’t like you is pretty much what most of them say, right? It doesn’t have to be that way. That’s. That’s just a function of us getting smarter about copy editing. Right. So a lot of that work had to go into play as we started to look at differently about the candidate experience. And fundamentally it was about saying, how do you build a sense that people can be seen and heard, can be treated as unique? Even in the cases where you’re dealing with large volumes of people and you don’t necessarily have the resources, the capabilities to throw more recruiters at it. How do you do that and create that experience?
Matt Alder [00:20:32]:
Final question. You sort of talked about this five year journey that Intel’s been on. What’s next? What’s the next step? What does the next five years look like?
Allyn Bailey [00:20:43]:
So funny that you asked that question. I’ve been Having my own existential crisis about that for the last week. We just finished rolling out a large part of this to our organization. And part of what I’ve been doing for the past month is now reflecting back and saying, okay, what does this look like next? And the way I’ve started to think about this, and I’m starting to talk about this even inside the organization, is if you think about what we’ve done for the last five years and what we’ve just started to roll out to the organization, this idea of this new process, the idea of new roles, this baseline technology we’ve put into place, they’re like the roots, right? Those are the things that you have to do just to have a good strong foundation and a uniform belief that it’s about people, not transactions. That’s the root. Now the next five years is about putting the wings on it. It’s about accelerating to impact how do we now take the root of these processes, the root of this fundamental belief that we’re going to focus on relationship and not on individual transactions, that we’re going to focus on managing the candidate for the lifetime of their career, understanding that people that we engage with today may not be relevant today or tomorrow, but they may be relevant or it may be their best friend and we still need to connect with them. If we believe all those things to be true, if we set up an infrastructure to allow us to do that, what are the things that we now need to put into place that allow us to actually execute that in, in an accelerated fashion? I think that’s the. I think that’s going to fall into a couple of camps for us. I think it’s going to fall into automation, understanding how to access automation, how to leverage automation, and how to make automation smarter. So I think there’s a lot of opportunities there to accelerate what’s happening in that space. I think it’s going to be about thinking differently about assessment. How do we put assessment into place and at the right points in the process of pipelining, so that it’s both value, both to us and to candidates and how do we manage that successfully? I think it’s going to be about thinking at an enterprise level, differently about the talent pool. If we’re now understanding that we’re managing a candidate for the lifetime of their career, that means the segmentation of external and internal sourcing needs to stop. And we need to think about really how do you start to build an enterprise or kind of enterprise wide way of looking at internal sourcing that starts to bleed into that pipelining process. So those are a few of the areas I think we start heading into next. It’s about really accelerating to impact by putting the wings on our roots and making the foundation really sing by putting the top stuff on top of it now.
Matt Alder [00:23:27]:
Aylin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Allyn Bailey [00:23:29]:
Ah, you’re welcome. Thank you. It was great.
Matt Alder [00:23:32]:
My thanks to Allyn Bailey. 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.
