Talent acquisition transformation projects seem to be everywhere at the moment as employers look to adapt to changing markets, shifting business priorities and new technologies.
I always tell my clients that transformation is impossible without evaluation and strategy, but how do you build and measure an effective strategy in talent acquisition.
My guest this week is Rebecca Carr, SVP of Global Success, Consulting and Strategy for SmartRecruiters. Rebecca talks in detail about the Hiring Success methodology and how it can help employers understand where they are now and where they need to be in the future.
In the interview, we discuss:
- Why the Hiring Success model was developed
- How do you measure talent acquisition effectiveness
- Reinventing legacy metrics
- Key pillars and the 4 level maturity model
- Strategic steps for transformation and improvement
Rebecca also shares her thoughts on who is doing this well and what’s next for talent acquisition.
SmartRecruiters Hiring Success Podcast
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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 212 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Talent acquisition transformation projects seem to be everywhere at the moment as employers look to adapt to changing markets, shifting business priorities and new technologies. I always tell my clients that transformation is impossible without evaluation and strategy. But how do you build and measure an effective strategy in talent acquisition? My guest this week is Rebecca Carr, SVP of Global Success Consulting and Strategy for Smart Recruiters. Rebecca talks in detail about the hiring success methodology and how it can help employers understand where they are now and where they need to be in the future. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:02:09]:
Hi Rebecca, and welcome to the podcast.
Rebecca Carr [00:02:09]:
Hi there, how are you, Matt?
Matt Alder [00:02:11]:
I’m brilliant, thank you. And it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Rebecca Carr [00:02:19]:
Sure. So I’m Rebecca Carr. I run our global success function at Smart Recruiters. We are a talent acquisition suite platform. Essentially, my scope of responsibility is everything making customers successful, from the initial consulting up front all the way to the support functions on the back end.
Matt Alder [00:02:38]:
Now, over the sort of the last 12 to 18 months, smart recruiters have been doing some really, really interesting stuff around this concept of hiring success. Tell us a bit about it. What is hiring success?
Rebecca Carr [00:02:50]:
Sure. So I think when Smart Recruiters originally came to market, we were obviously making a play at the enterprise space. We wanted to build a better version of all the enterprise software that exists out there around applicant tracking, the attraction process, the conversion process, etc. And what we realized in dialoguing with many of our customers and prospects was that technology was only going to play a very small role in the overall change and transformation that was required of them as a business. And they were looking to us as a vendor to help support a Conversation within their business around process innovation, around driving adoption, education, et cetera. And we decided in actually it was a little bit happenstance. Our head of hr, our head of people started to join some of our calls and she was a sounding board around this is what I would do and this is what my friend did, and this is how I would do it if I were you, based on the challenges that you presented presented in this conversation. And the customers responded exceptionally well to this. They wanted a peer, a community of people to talk to about process. And so we said to ourselves, what if we built a function called hiring success, which would focus on hiring talent acquisition professionals or people that had been in the job before to support some of our implementation and post sales behaviors around identifying opportunities for what we called hiring success, which was the intersection of talent, process and adoption. And so we defined this very largely and we call it hiring success, which is the ability to attract, select and hire the best talent on demand and on budget. And we built a set of measures around it that would help an organization understand where they are today, identify where they wanted to be in the future, and then sort of give them a scale by which they could see their progress over time. So that’s really how it all came to be.
Matt Alder [00:05:01]:
Now, I’ve watched presentations where you’ve described how you measure hiring success. And I’ve always, I’ve always found it really interesting because I think that measures of talent acquisition success are always difficult and debated and sometimes controversial in terms of what people measure and what, what success looks like. Talk us through how you measure hiring.
Rebecca Carr [00:05:24]:
Sure. So we looked at some of the legacy metrics of the past and we sort of reinvented them as part of this conversation. And we built out a hiring success scorecard that was really based on three factors. The first really was around spend, which was replacing the traditional cost per hire metric, which frankly we realized was somewhat irrelevant to most organizations. If you spend $10,000 versus $200 to hire great talent, the of that talent and the return on your investment there could vary based on the level, the location, the pipeline that you created ahead of time. And so we reinvented this metric to be what we called hiring budget, which was the percent of new hire compensation spent on recruiting new hires. So as you can imagine, if you’re hiring an executive, it’s just going to cost you more. You’re likely going to use a retained search firm or you’re going to spend a very long time, lots of recruiter hours, sourcing outbound to find these individuals versus A customer service representative that you might spend a very small amount of money on because there’s so much volume and there’s low scarcity in the market. So attributing this to a percent of what you ultimately paid the person seemed to resonate really well at the executive level. So that’s hiring budget. The next pillar was really around speed. And this was intended to replace what was traditionally the time to fill metric. I talk to so many talent acquisition leaders out there today, and most of them look at me and go, this number time to fill, time to start. It doesn’t tell me anything because if I had enough foresight to understand that I needed to have someone starting on a particular day, I presumably would have built a pipeline long ago. And it might take me 90, 100, 300 days to build such a pipeline. But the point is that I had them there the day I needed them. And so hiring velocity was how we transformed that. And it is essentially the percentage of jobs filled on time. This one’s actually quite tricky for a lot of larger organizations because frankly, this requires that they actually do some planning around their headcount. And vacancy management is a topic that we hear a lot of organizations only now really starting to think through as a business. But essentially how you expected somebody to be working on October 1st, was that person available on October 1st? And if they were, then you get a checkbox. And so if you look at your entire business, what percentage of your jobs are being filled on the day that you expected? The third and probably most interesting pillar is around quality. And a lot of people attribute quality to retention, which is. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because the quality of the talent that you bring in the door is there’s a lot of different factors that come into play once they actually start and they’re in the job, from hiring manager performance to job responsibilities, et cetera. And so we wanted to find a simple way to quantify quality for our talent acquisition group. And so we built out an NPS like 90 day post hire survey that essentially goes out to hiring managers and new hires, right? Like at that 90 day mark after their start date. And it asks them a very simple question. Do you think you fit? What do you think is your fit against this job? And it’s a scale of 1 to 10. If they rate themselves a 5 or below, then it’s sort of a missed. If they’re a nine or a 10, then it’s a win. If it’s a six, seven or eight, there’s that sort of a neutral score. And just like you would measure a customer success function, you would take the detractors and subtract the promoters and you get either a, a positive or a negative score. And so if I came out as a net hiring score 5, the conversation then we can start with an organization is well, if that quality score was, you know, a positive 10, what would be the return on hiring that you could ultimately bring back to your business? And this varies for any organization, but it’s a, it’s a financials conversation that can drive more conversations around things like the levers of hiring budget and hiring velocity. If I increased my hiring budget, would my quality go up? Would the return to my business be higher and the speed be faster versus if I reduced that, what would be the impact to speed and would I lose anything on quality? And this sort of triad of speed, budget and quality is something that C level executives, CFOs, CEOs really understand. They do this with other organizations of their business like marketing and sales, and really elevated the conversation of talent acquisition within an organization to one that felt much more strategic than those legacy metrics of time to fill or cost per hire, et cetera. So that’s sort of how it came to be.
Matt Alder [00:10:33]:
So driving improvement in organizations is always a, is always a bit of a journey. You can’t sort of expect people to improve overnight. How do you kind of map out that journey? Do you sort of segment the stages that organizations are when it comes to the hiring success?
Rebecca Carr [00:10:53]:
Yeah, so every journey starts with understanding where you are today. It’s an evaluation process that we do with our customers. And we’ve built out a lot of tooling around business audits and backed by a larger maturity model that actually takes essentially the pillars of the hiring success methodology which we built and breaks them down into lots of different core components of which we evaluate an organization on people that they have to support that initiative, the processes they have in place and the technology stack that’s there today. And we’ve taken that maturity model, it’s been broken. The pillars that I just described there are really around talent, attraction and engagement, which can be broken down into categories of sourcing and CRM, global mobility, diversity, inclusion, brand experience. The traditional pillars that one would expect around driving attraction and conversion, quality, talent in the market. The second pillar is really around selection and collaboration. Collaboration is actually a very interesting one because a lot of organizations are terrified of collaborating with hiring managers. And yet the results of investment here have been absolutely astronomical for many customers that have started to drive more Behavior toward a hiring manager whose job is to have a great team and to invest in that team. And so that collaboration and selection pillar is broken down to levels of maturity that we can measure in screening and review, or how you interview your people, hiring team, collaboration, what your offer management process looks like, etc. And then that third pillar is really around your management and operating model. This is sort of the foundation that supports the first two pillars around talent attraction and collaboration. And this is really all about how flexible and how global and scalable have you made the processes that you’ve put in place? Do you have a strategy for engaging and training your workforce? How are you going to understand and drive insight from what you have done? Do you have a reporting and analytics strategy? What level of intelligence and search and discovery are you using across the platform and technology stack? Today we go through this audit process and essentially it lands customers on this three level maturity model, levels one through four in each of those categories that says based on the people, process and technology you have in place, you’re a level three, which is integrated and data driven. And we’ve defined it as such around your talent strategy. But your selection and collaboration strategies are really a level one. They’re very simple and transactional. And in order for you to accelerate and drive change to your scorecard, you really need to be moving up those levels to a level 2 in order to compete in the market and ultimately drive better talent to your business. So we start with that evaluation process. The rest of the journey really is around defining the critical program, strategizing on where you want to invest now and how you can build your programs and technology to scale the actual execution of those strategies, which is really the transformation process and then the optimization process is ongoing. We’re constantly iterating with them, but presumably if they can travel through a journey of understanding where they are building this out and iterating over time, they’ll slowly move up through the levels of maturity in any one of those pillars or subcategories. And this is what our function today at Smart Recruiters is supporting them on in different capacities.
Matt Alder [00:14:39]:
So this might be a difficult question to answer because it might not be quite as simple as this, but, but what are you sort of seeing in the market, sort of typically, what level are companies coming in at? You know, how much work is there to. To.
Rebecca Carr [00:14:56]:
To.
Matt Alder [00:14:56]:
To do for talent acquisition professionals?
Rebecca Carr [00:14:59]:
Yeah, it is a hard question because unfortunately the answer is always, it depends. But I think generally each of the categories is fairly consistent based on size and location. So as A good example. We’re starting to see companies in EMEA become much more interested in elevating their talent and attraction strategy. We’re seeing a lot of conversation around sourcing and CRM. People that are really starting to invest in this, especially in industries like manufacturing, where technology is starting to intrude on the business that they have created and sustained for a very long time. They’re needing to compete. You see larger, maybe manufacturing firms that are working on advanced technologies competing with companies like Facebook or Zing or LinkedIn for the talent that they require to be successful. And so how they actually source their talent and build out a CRM strategy is something they’re very interested in. And they have an extremely low level of maturity in as a business. At the global level, you’re seeing programs like Global Mobility become equally as impactful for the exact same reason they’re trying to retain their talent. They know that that’s a pool of skilled workers which they’ve invested and built up a set of skills in for the newer and advanced technologies which they’re investing in. And they previously have made no effort to drive job discoverability back to their workforce. So global mobility being an area where we’re seeing a very low level of maturity. So I’d say that in the talent and attraction space at the higher end of enterprise, most people are just getting started and the level of work that they need to do to get them to where they need to be, as compared to maybe the high growth, very advanced startups coming out of places like Silicon Valley, that there’s a very deep disparity between sort of where most companies are and where some of those companies that are moving really fast are on. I’d say on other categories like collaboration selection, everyone invests here. It’s your standard ATS process. And I’d say the only area where we see a lot of lower maturity and need for investment is really around interview structure, collaboration and how you actually drive feedback from your workforce. Most people are quite weak here. And on the management and operating model, of course, there’s always an interest in understanding reporting and analytics and the concept of global templates within your business. So really most people are middle of the road, but have an interest in accelerating this because the access to data has increased significantly over time. Now platforms like smart recruiters are exposing every data element that they have. This is very different from the legacy technologies that you had today. And if you did have every data element, the maintenance on it was significant. And so people are starting to rethink the strategies that they previously had in place and figure out how they can become more predictive. So perhaps a long winded answer, but there’s a lot there and it does depend on sort of where you are and what your size is.
Matt Alder [00:18:32]:
So you’ve touched on this already, but it’d be interesting to find out a little bit more about, about your thinking around it in terms of the strategy that companies need to sort of put in, put it put in place to improve what they do. You know, what are the sort of key steps in evolving your, you know, your talent acquisition within your organization?
Rebecca Carr [00:18:56]:
Yeah, so I think it all starts with there’s sort of three ways that I break this down for most people starting some of these programs. And the first is answering a very, what seems like a very simple question, but is a very hard one for people to answer, which who are you hiring? If your business is changing out from underneath you, you need to understand the types of skills and the level of expertise against those skills that is required in order for you to be successful. So that you can almost do skill and talent mapping against the impact framework which we’ve actually created to support this conversation and know where, which strategies you’re going to need to invest in to drive the highest level of impact to those hires that are most critical to your business. If you can imagine an impact versus scarcity chart, impact being the vertical access and scarcity being the horizontal, that upper right hand corner, these are going to be the high impact, high scarcity individuals are really going to be the people in your business that you are what we call your unicorns. They have a skill that is going to drive and maximize the revenue back to your bottom line. It’s going to be the executives that are going to drive that change. It’s going to be high impact enterprise account executives that are driving million billion dollar deals in some scenarios. So you have to understand what percentage of the jobs you’re hiring right now are going to to fall into that category because the programs and strategies that you build are going to change. If really all you need to be a successful business is to find the customer support representatives and the sales development representatives that are really sitting in that lower left hand quadrant which is low impact, low scarcity that you would not invest in necessarily a sourcing and CRM strategy if that’s what was meaningful to you, you would want to invest in a programmatic advertising strategy that drove brand awareness and volume back to what you were doing. So who are you hiring? Is always a very interesting question because in most companies it’s a lot of different types of roles, but which ones are going to drive the highest impact is something which we’re trying to understand and we’re mapping to an impact framework to start that conversation. The second part is really what I’ve sort of gone through already which is really around understanding your maturity and mapping your hiring success maturity to the smart recruiters methodology and maturity model. And this is really a massive audit process around your people process and programs. And then the third step is what is your hiring scorecard today? And this is actually a process because we have to survey your workforce. We have to understand, you know, if they feel like they are a good fit. We have to do a lot of data analysis and collection around what you’re spending, where you’re spending. Ironically, most people don’t really have a good handle, especially enterprise organizations on their spend against talent acquisition because you have hiring managers sitting in countries just buying and spending money on agencies. You have recruiters that are buying ad hoc postings on on different networks or Investing in Google AdWords and Facebook ads and all of that. So we have to break a lot of your current data down to deliver you that foundational scorecard to which we can build from. So then if we know who you’re hiring, we know where your people process and technology is today and we have a foundational data set to build from, then we can really say what are going to be the most high impact programs within our pillars that are going to drive the fastest results and should really be where you start your journey and you iterate over time.
Matt Alder [00:23:00]:
So who’s doing this?
Rebecca Carr [00:23:02]:
Well, so our customers use these programs in all different capacities. I think that where we’ve seen some very high levels of success are actually I mentioned manufacturing earlier, but we have a number of large manufacturing customers that have really started to think about sourcing and CRM strategy in a very thoughtful and structured way. They’ve started to invest in. I actually had a conversation with one of them the other day where as part of our programs we identified that their velocity was severely impacted by their lack of people within their recruitment organization. They were outsourcing a lot of the sourcing processes to HR business partners in local regions. This wasn’t their job, this wasn’t their primary skill set. And as part of seeing how poor their velocity was as a business through that hiring success scorecard and frankly how poor their quality was because they were at the end of the day just becoming desperate in order to put butts in seats. And as a result of that they have now built a business case with their executive organization around building out a sourcing and recruitment marketing team that can really drive campaigning and nurture programs back to their critical talent pools and specifically around skills that they need to acquire now in order to be successful in five, even 10 years. Because obviously in a manufacturing scenario takes a very long time to drive innovation. Autonomous driving was something that was worked on 15 years ago by some of our customers. So we’ve seen some real success in sourcing and CRM. And then I’ve seen, I’ve seen some really nice success in more of our high tech technology companies in really unpacking reporting and analytics. And as a result of doing some of their scorecarding, their scorecard and analysis process, they’ve identified that their quality is actually very high in certain regions of the world. And because of a lack of adoption in process in other regions of the world, their attrition rates are higher, their quality of hire is very, very low. And they would have never known this if they hadn’t been able to see and invest in aggregate data sets that could break their organization down into very small pieces and take that foundational scorecard and figure out why are certain things what they are today and who’s impacting them the most. So I’d say in larger technology companies and in larger manufacturing companies, we’re seeing some very immediate success with some of these programs and analysis.
Matt Alder [00:25:53]:
So final question. What’s next for talent acquisition? What are you expecting to see happen in the next sort of two to three years?
Rebecca Carr [00:26:01]:
Oh, I would say right now when I talk to a lot of prospects, I feel like we’re in a maybe one more year moment. They know that what they’re doing today around process and the technology that they have in place is not good enough. There’s absolutely a very deep awareness to this. They know they need to change, but there’s fear and there’s fear because they aren’t armed with the data required to build a business case for change. And what we’re trying to do as an organization is support that conversation because how would you know if you didn’t have the right data sets and the right way of thinking at your disposal? And we want to arm these individuals with this data. I do think there is a massive movement toward moving to new technologies. This is not just on the. It is largely actually driven by the fact that the HRIs and HCM side is changing very quickly and moving toward the cloud. And there’s an opportunity window for talent to step up and change what they’re doing as well as part of this global HR transformation project. And so I suspect there will be a lot of technology change. But I also think you’re going to start to see a lot more investment in reporting and analytics that will ultimately drive focus on certain types of programs. As I mentioned, global mobility, a big one, but also intelligence. How do you understand who already exists within your business today that is going to be a good match for the positions you have tomorrow? How do you uncover that talent? How do you understand and predict when they’re going to change? So succession planning, we’re seeing a lot of conversation about how that can be incorporated into the talent acquisition process as as part of this upgrade in technology because frankly the technologies that are out there today are frankly far superior in flexibility in user experience and intelligence than what you’ve seen from more legacy tools. That upgrade in technology is going to drive a conversation around, I believe, internal sourcing, global mobility, job discovery, discoverability, candidate discoverability, and an investment there in an effort to drive velocity up, to drive quality up, and most importantly to drive spend down. Because the traditional spend that you see from outbound sourcing and agencies will reduce as a result of an investment in these programs. But that’s, that’s just one of my sort of what I’m seeing. There’s a lot of other places where I’m sure there will be change, but in our conversations around hiring Success, this is absolutely something that we’re seeing most frequently.
Matt Alder [00:29:00]:
Rebecca, thank you very much for talking to me.
Rebecca Carr [00:29:02]:
Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Matt Alder [00:29:05]:
My thanks to Rebecca Carr from Smart Recruiters. Smart recruiters actually have their own talent acquisition podcast called Hiring Success, which is well worth checking out, especially as I’m their latest guest on episode five, talking about finding top talent in the era of digital transformation. Follow the link in the show notes if you want to listen, 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 feature in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora 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.
