When I first started this show as a fun side project, I had no real expectations of getting much of an audience. I could never have anticipated that four years and three-quarters of a million listens later I’d be publishing my 200th episode.
I want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who has supported me and the show. My superb guests, my fabulous sponsors and most of all, everyone who has listened, subscribed, recommended, shared and given me feedback. The story doesn’t end here, I’ve got some big plans for the future and as some fantastic guests lined up for the coming months.
What better way to celebrate 200 episodes than with a live recording of the show. A few weeks back, I was on stage at the excellent RecFest event in London, and we recorded a live panel discussion on Recruiting Automation.
My guests were:
- Megan Butler from CognitionX
- Ben Gledhill from Yodel
- Andrew Soane from Accenture
The discussion was wide-ranging with lots of insights and experiences shared
Thanks to SurveyMonkey for supporting this episode, I highly recommend signing up for their online Curiosity Conference, more details here
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this 200th episode of the podcast comes from SurveyMonkey. Do you want to learn how to build meaningful connections between people and data? Join me and thousands of leaders and experts across hr, marketing, customer success, market research and education for the online event of the year. On September 18th and 19th, SurveyMonkey’s second annual Curiosity Conference will feature 20 sessions and endless opportunities to learn new tricks for using feedback to make data driven decisions, take action and deliver impact. Register at www.surveymonkey.com future. That’s www.surveymonkey.com Future.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 200 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Back when I started this show as kind of a fun side project with no expectations of getting much of an audience, I could never have anticipated that four years and three quarters of a million listens later, I’d be reaching my double century milestone. I want to take this opportunity to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported me in the show, my amazing guests, my super sponsors, and most of all, you people who’ve listened, subscribed, recommended, shared and given me feedback. Thank you. The story does not end here though. I’ve got some big plans for the future as well as some amazing guests lined up in the coming weeks. For now though, let’s get on with this episode. What better way to celebrate than with a live recording? A few weeks back, I was lucky enough to be on stage at the fantastic Wreckfest event in London and we recorded a live panel discussion on recruiting automation. My guests were Megan Butler from Cognition X, Ben Gledhill from Yodle, and Andrew Soane from Accenture. They were all absolutely brilliant and and I know you’re going to enjoy listening to this.
Matt Alder [00:02:28]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 200 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Thank you. Okay, for those of you who don’t listen to the show, the show is a weekly show about innovation in talent acquisition and this is the first ever live episode and I have standing before me the most outstanding panel of guests. And we are going to be talking about recruiting automation and these guys are the kind of real experts. So a big cheer. Welcome to the panel. Hey, that’s it. Okay panel, could you just introduce yourself one by one and tell everyone what you do?
Megan Butler [00:03:09]:
Hi, my name’s Megan. I work for a company called Cognition X where I am an AI analyst and researcher focusing on HR and I’m also doing my PhD in the same topic. So basically, I have no life.
Ben Gledhill [00:03:21]:
Hi, everyone, my name is Ben Gledhill. I’m head of resource at Yodel up in Liverpool and I’m here today to talk a little bit about automation and how I think robots are way better than human beings. No, I’m only joking. Just tell you a little about some of the work that we’ve done.
Andrew Soane [00:03:35]:
I’m Andrew Soane. I’m working for Accenture. I work in marketing communications. But I’m supporting our recruiting transformation program, which is all about what does next generation of recruiting look like for Accenture, for our candidates, for our people, for our recruiters and so forth. I am proof that you can in fact teach an old dog new tricks.
Matt Alder [00:03:52]:
Thank you very much. So, first question, we’re talking about recruiting automation. Megan, what trends are you seeing in recruitment and HR automation at the moment? And how do we compare to other industries?
Megan Butler [00:04:04]:
That’s a great question. I think the biggest trend we’re seeing over the last two years is just exponential growth, not only in the products available, but where industry is in the adoption of AI technologies. And I think the biggest trend we’re seeing right at the moment is we’re going from where we hoped to be about two years ago, where people were really receptive to it, to where we are now. And people are finally really opening up and going, hey, there’s something cool here. There’s something to gain from this. How can I be a part of it? So we’re starting to see it kind of jump the chasm and become more mainstream adoption at this point in time compared to other industries. I think hr, we have a lot of criticism that HR is behind, but we’re not. We’re actually kind of dead smack in the middle and sort of where we need to be because we’re not marketing, we’re not trying to just get people to click on an ad with no consequence. We’re affecting people’s lives and we should be a little bit slower to adopt because we need to ask the tough questions as we go. We can’t just run headlong and damage people because we didn’t hire them. They didn’t get an opportunity they should have had because of a decision made based on an insight from AI that was inaccurate. We need to be very thoughtful in how we do it. So I think we’re actually in a really good position. We’re asking the tough questions, we’re demanding the answers and we’re moving forward. But people are doing it. It is happening. And there’s some really great results coming of it.
Matt Alder [00:05:28]:
Thank you very much. Andrew, can you talk us through what are Accenture doing when it comes to recruiting automation? And are you seeing any kind of difference in attitude and approach in different countries around the world?
Andrew Soane [00:05:40]:
Yeah, that’s also a great question. Thank you. So I guess the context for this is about understanding a little bit about the scale and complexity of an organization like an Accenture. We are 482,000 employees globally. We service clients in 120 countries of the world across six business areas. We employ over 3,000 recruiters. And last year we hired 134,000 people. So there’s a real scale and complexity there. Of course, the truth is you don’t work for Accenture globally. You work for Accenture in a geography. I work for Accenture in the UK or Paris or Brazil or, you know, India or whatever happens to be. So all of the experimentation, all the work that we’re doing around recruitment automation is aligned with some of those geographies. And that’s really important. We’ve got a number of, as part of this recruiting transformation program, we’ve got a number of pilots that we’re running now. So, for instance, some of our current pilots around security and cyber security professionals in Italy or salesforce professionals in North America and so forth. So we have a number of these pilots and we’ve piloted and experiments with a whole bunch of different technologies and platforms, including AI, including chatbots, including smart sourcing solutions, programmatic, whatever it happens to be. But all of it is tethered with one of those geographies. So there absolutely is. And a different approach because it’s got to be aligned to those requirements. I think the bit that’s consistent is the. Is the overall approach, the overall attitude, if you like, you know, because. And it comes back to the tough questions that Megan’s just asked. You know, we’ve got to ask ourselves, is it something that we’re solving a problem for? Is it going to be scalable? Ultimately, does it really augment the human experience when we’re thinking about technology? And I guess most critically, we’ve got to think about the potential risk of bias and fairness. Is the process robust? So those are sort of the prevailing attitudes, if you like, but the approach differs geography to geography.
Matt Alder [00:07:30]:
Fantastic. Ben, you’re very good at sharing your story and talking about what you’ve done. And you were saying that people may have sort of heard it before, but could you just give us a quick overview of what you’re doing at yodel and how it’s working.
Ben Gledhill [00:07:41]:
Yeah. God, it’s warm in here. Yeah. So last October, when it was our peak period, which obviously make sure people get all their parcels loading at the time for Christmas, we were just getting way, way, way too many applications. In our peak period, we probably get around 5,000, maybe five and a half thousand a week. So what we’ve done is we’ve employed our army of chatbots to look at two areas. So the first one is we now have a chatbot on our careers site that helps candidates answer questions around what type of driver role they want, employed, self employed, what type of van they’re going to be driving. And then when it comes to the actual screening candidates, all candidates now that pass our trapdoor questions like driving license, react to work in the uk. The rest of it, they actually go through a chatbot screening before they’re booked into assessment by one of my delivery team. The two main positives of that is now candidates can screen themselves when they want. So we now actually have 50, 50 people screening themselves in the traditional nine to five hours, do a 50% assessing themselves outside, because people are not waiting around to receive a call from us. They have their personal lives. And I guess the second one is it’s freed my team up to do more value add with hiring managers, coaching, educating, getting out there. And my delivery team up in Liverpool, they’ve actually been able to kind of all go through a development program. They’ve changed job roles simply because now they have more time due to the automation that we do. So backing up what Andrew said, for me, automation is not about taking away jobs, it’s about augmentation. It’s making our recruiters better by giving more value our time.
Matt Alder [00:09:24]:
Cool.
Matt Alder [00:09:25]:
Now, here’s a question for you, Andrew. How do you make sense of all of the technology that’s on the market? And there’s a lot of it. When there are so many kind of vendors out there who are promising silver bullets and they can solve all your problems, how do you make sense of the landscape?
Andrew Soane [00:09:38]:
Yeah, I mean, that’s a challenge for any employer, of course. And I guess if I’m honest, when I’m thinking about the recruiting transformation and the journey that we’ve been through, at the start, we didn’t necessarily have a roadmap that was defined, so we ended up going down quite a lot of rabbit holes, having conversations with vendors because we thought that’s what we wanted. And actually, as we drilled in, it turned out it was until we wasted a lot of time. So I Guess, you know, we certainly. There were some lessons from that. I think for us, there’s probably three core learnings. The first piece is to be really focused in terms of what problem you’re trying to solve for and understanding what that is. Being absolutely ruthless around focusing on that. The second is about being informed and the fact that everyone’s sitting here today or listening to this podcast is part of that information. So we started off then by mapping out the marketplace. We started talking to vendors, you know, talking amongst ourselves, networking at opportunities like today to understand and make sense of the marketplace. And the third piece, I guess is about be collaborative. You know, I have a slightly different perspective to some of my recruiting colleagues, some of my HR colleagues, because I sit within marketing, community communications. Some of these technologies that we’re talking about aren’t necessarily owned in one place. So we need to look at it and think about the experience from a candidate perspective, from those different lenses. And I think we’ve worked better where we’ve looked at it sort of, you know, in a more collaborative effort.
Matt Alder [00:10:55]:
Now, Ben, I know this is a. This will be one of your favorite questions. How. How should employers with sort of limited budgets and limited resources be approaching recruiting automation?
Ben Gledhill [00:11:05]:
Is that, Is that bias? Because I’m from Yorkshire and tight.
Matt Alder [00:11:09]:
There’s no Yorkshire bias on this stage.
Ben Gledhill [00:11:10]:
Okay. I guess, you know, you know, it’s really, really good if you have a big budget and a, you know, empty check or whatever. But the good thing is in the HR tech vendor space at the moment, you know, it’s worth billions. You know, new solutions coming out each week, there’s lots of choice, lots of variety, and a lot of vendors are looking for collaborations with clients and end users. So maybe if you haven’t got the big budget, have a conversation around the problems that you have, because they might be able to engineer a solution that isn’t on their website, isn’t in their kind of, you know, their playbook or whatever, and just have a conversation. Good. Doesn’t have to be expensive. You know, there are very cheap platforms, solutions that you could literally get for dollars per month. But the one thing that I will say is, and kind of back to what Andrew said, the silver bullet doesn’t exist. You know, a crap process will only be crapper. When you get tech in, you need to sort the process out first. So, for example, at Yoda, we needed to fix our processor before we went out and got tech. So, like a lot of things in our space, look at the basics first before you kind of go out Shopping.
Matt Alder [00:12:15]:
So, Megan, what’s your advice to buyers in the market? What kind of pitfalls should they be looking out for? What kind of questions should they be asking?
Megan Butler [00:12:23]:
That’s a great question, because everybody should be asking questions. I think if you’re looking to buy a product, you are a buyer. You have the control, you have the power. Ask the tough questions, ask the stupid questions, ask the dumb questions, ask any question you want, because a vendor should be able to provide it. As you said, you know, it’s already been pointed out there are a ton of products out there. In our tracking of products from two years ago, we had, I think it was 250. I remember when we hit 350 and I went, wow, that’s so many. Now we’re well over 700. And that’s HR specific products. So there’s tons out there, there’s lots of people doing things. And so make sure you’re asking questions. The challenge is that sometimes we can throw tech at a problem. Doesn’t mean we’re really solving the problem, or we’re throwing tech at a problem that doesn’t really exist. So there’s a lot of really great people out there, really good ideas, but they may not have worked in hr. So they don’t really know what an HR problem really looks like. Like, they may think they do, but they don’t. So you need to be demanding of that. You may not understand the technology, for example, within it, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t science behind it. And as HR professionals, we know that science. We know the psychology, we know what works and what doesn’t work. But we can’t just assume that a tech company is saying we’re solving a problem by determining personality in this way. Well, do we know that that actually works? How do we know that actually works? And we need to, as HR professionals be demanding and asking, what is the science behind this? What is the research behind this? Not just blindly assuming that they know best. Do your due diligence. There’s lots of different ways to get involved in technology. At Cognition X, we call it buy, builder, partner. So you have an opportunity just to buy it, bring it in from the outside, build it in house, which can be very challenging to be building from scratch, even for large organizations. Or you can partner, which is a big opportunity to be able to work with a company as they develop their product and guide it with your organization. So there’s a lot out there, but don’t take an easy answer. And as I said before, tech doesn’t fix a bad process and do your due diligence. Be razor focused. There’s tons of products, lots of bells and whistles that will distract you from the problem. Don’t buy a product because of a fancy dashboard. We can build fancy dashboards at left, right and center, but what’s at the core of the product is what’s important and what problem it’s solving within your process. Map it out and really identify what the problem is, who your stakeholders are and how it affects them and how they’re going to integrate with it. Because that’s where your hold up is going to be, is how people adapt to the technology. There’s a lot of shelfware out there, people have brought products and no one uses it. So don’t waste money, don’t waste your time. Do something that as you said, is focused. That’s the biggest challenge.
Matt Alder [00:15:20]:
That’s fantastic advice if you stick with the microphone actually, because I can’t deviate from my list of questions and do them in a different order because the whole thing will fall apart. So kind of a final bonus question to everyone. So Megan, what do you think the likely trends in a rich AI and automation are in the next three to five years?
Megan Butler [00:15:44]:
So I’ll share with everybody here a little sneaky insider thing. So for some of my academic research I’ve been doing empirical analysis of the market and one thing that I really that has stood out is that recruitment was the first place that AI was really being kind of brought into in a meaningful way. And it was really big in the US and now it’s really big in the uk, there’s been a little switch in the US they’re now focusing and new products are coming out more around retention. And in the UK we’re still really focusing on recruitment. And I know, I remember doing recruitment a long time ago and a pulse wasn’t a requirement. When you’re doing volume recruiting, it’s a real challenge because if you’re filling a leaking bucket, you’re just going to continue filling it. And that’s when it became pulse wasn’t a requirement for the job because we were filling a leaking bucket and we had to fix the holes in the bucket first. And I think that’s what and we heard before we have more people in work than ever before. Keeping them in your company is going to become important. Recruiting the right people is important, but if you can’t keep them, you’re going to be filling that leaking bucket. And no matter how much tech you throw at that, it’s Exhausting.
Matt Alder [00:16:59]:
Fantastic. Same question to Ben. What’s next for Yodle? How do you see things progressing from where you are now?
Ben Gledhill [00:17:05]:
Cool. So a little bit of a big news as well. So next month we launch our new onboarding platform with Meet and Engage. Thanks very much. To be fair, my team over there are doing most of the work, I’m honest. So, yeah, because it’s one of those things whereby, you know, recruitment teams, resourcing teams, what we’re calling ourselves this week, you know, we’re kind of, we really chase candidates, we hind them down to offer stage, we get the contract out and then we forgot, we kind of forget about them. So we’ve identified that we can make a huge difference in the organization through a greater unborn experience. So we’re going to look at using chat bots for things like FAQs. There’s going to be kind of, you know, kind of automated milestones. So for example, a week before a start date, they’ll get this bit of content. The day before they’ll get this bit of content. But what we’ve done with the content is rather than kind of getting very shiny, glamorous, Google image type videos, we’ve gone for real kind of human feel. And I know human feel is a bit of a bingo buzzword, but you know, we want our content to really kind of land with people in terms of, well, if he or she can do it, I can do that role as well. So I’d say a little bit mix of greater human feel content with yet again automation, chatbots, text messages to really keep that relationship through. And we’re going to run it through to three months post start date and obviously through that period we’ll be doing things like temp checks, so we’ll be able to almost preempt those people that might land not that well and need a little bit spot our way. So it’s going to be a pretty exciting time.
Matt Alder [00:18:36]:
Fantastic. Thank you.
Andrew Soane [00:18:37]:
Andrew, same question.
Matt Alder [00:18:39]:
What’s next for Accenture?
Andrew Soane [00:18:40]:
I think that’s a bit cheeky actually, because I think you describe yourself as a recruiting futurologist so you should be telling us.
Matt Alder [00:18:45]:
But I have to get my insight from somewhere.
Andrew Soane [00:18:48]:
So I personally, I’m really interested in seeing the impact of voice. If for no other reason, I’ve got, we’ve got seven Alexa and Google home devices in our house. I’d like someone to have a great voice app for those things because if for no other reason, my kids might finally understand what dad does for a living. So those are some great answers. I think, I mean, and all of that is true at Accenture. I think I’d also want to sort of focus a little bit on the longer term, on the medium to long term stuff for us. We’re spending a lot of time thinking about how do we use technology to predict for success. You know, today we’ll hire you because you are a SAP HANA programmer with 3 years experience living in Bangalore working in financial services industry. And that’s great, but all of those skills can be trained and upskilled. That’s the reality. And you know, we know that as Accenture has pivoted, we have retrained and upskilled 300,000 of our employees over the last three years. We’ve just launched an app called Job Buddy which assesses employees skills and predicts which of those skills are going to get replaced by automation, makes recommendations on what retraining they should do. And 85% in the pilot, 85% of people who’ve been connected with that app have gone on to register for some kind of retraining. So the retraining is fine. Actually what our research tells us is that for people to succeed in organizations like except Censure, it’s down to the soft skills and capabilities like resilience, like how they collaborate and team with their colleagues, how innovative and creative are they and so forth. And actually that’s much more difficult. So our journey, and it’s very early steps is thinking about how do we assess and predict future potential based on those kind of capabilities, those soft skills, rather than rather than those sort of hard, you know, profile pieces of experience on your cv. And I think that’s where we’re really interested in seeing how technology takes us.
Matt Alder [00:20:39]:
Some absolutely fantastic insights there. Can we have a round of applause for the amazing, amazing panel?
Matt Alder [00:20:47]:
My thanks to Megan Butler, Ben Gledhill and Andrew Soane. 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. And if you live in a country where you can access Pandora, the show is also now available there as well. 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.
