Work is changing. Jobs are changing. Is recruiting changing quickly enough to keep up? The demand for new mixes of skills and ever-shortening tenure means that recruiting needs to be extremely flexible and work faster than it ever has before.
My guest this week is Nikos Moraitakis, CEO of Workable. Workable work with 20,000 companies across 100 countries which means Nikos has some fascinating insights to share on the current and future state of recruiting.
In the interview, we discuss:
- How work and jobs are changing and the implications for talent acquisition
- The broadening fit between skills and jobs and why this makes matching more difficult
- Ever higher candidate expectations
- Recruiting automation
- The changing nature of screening and assessment
- Providing hiring managers with tools they don’t hate
Nikos also talks about the role of recruiting technology and shares his thoughts on what recruiting will look like in 5 to 10 years.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Workable, the hiring platform used by more than 20,000 companies to make the right hire faster. With automated and AI powered tools and workflows, Workable helps teams find and attract more candidates and work together to identify and hire the best. Advertise jobs to 200 job boards and source candidates with just one click, evaluate applicants fairly and consistently, schedule interviews and make offers and more. To learn more About Workable, visit workable.com get a demo that’s workable.com getademo.
Matt Alder [00:01:03]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 214 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Work is changing, jobs are changing. But is recruiting changing quickly enough to keep up the demand for new mixes of skill set as well as ever? Shortening tenure means that recruiting needs to be extremely flexible as well as faster than ever before. My guest this week is Nikos Moraitakis, the CEO of Workable Workable Work with 20,000 companies across 100 countries. Which means Nikos has some very interesting insights to share on the current and future state of recruiting. Hi Nikos, and welcome to the podcast.
Nikos Moraitakis [00:01:53]:
Hello.
Matt Alder [00:01:53]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:01:59]:
Great. I’m Nikos Moraitakis. I’m one of the founders and currently the CEO of Workable Workable. Some of your audience might already know who we are, but for those who don’t, it’s a recruiting software end to end from the moment you open a position to the moment you make an offer letter. And it’s currently serving more than 20,000 companies all over the world in about 100 countries, and has given the opportunity to more than 1.2 million people find a job.
Matt Alder [00:02:37]:
Fantastic stuff. So obviously we’re living in rapidly changing times and I wondered, what’s your perspective on how work itself is currently changing?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:02:51]:
I think the biggest thing that has happened over the last probably decade or so is that in recruiting we are facing a market driven by the candidate. That’s pretty much a good thing. People change jobs more often. I think the nature of jobs has facilitated that a little bit. People change careers a lot more often and the biggest implications for the employer is A that they’re in a market where they actually have to market and sell the job opportunity to candidates most of the time this wasn’t the case 20 years ago and B their expectation of tenure is much lower so their expectation of readiness and preparation during the recruiting process is higher. Another way of putting it is that right now you’re facing candidates who are looking at many employers. They need to move faster, the process needs to move faster. You need in that shorter amount of time to have a better evaluation. Because this person isn’t going to stay there for 10 years. You cannot assume just get someone with good skills and train them. You probably need someone who’s going to come in, assume a mission, spend two or three years, and then you can assume nothing more. So the times where you had a recruiting process that could last for three months and that yielded people that needed six months of ramping up is pretty much dead.
Matt Alder [00:04:29]:
As a business that’s working with companies in over 100 countries, is this something that’s consistent across the globe? Are you seeing this in all of the countries that you’re working in, in terms of this way that work is changing? And is it changing the same way across the board?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:04:47]:
I think it’s flowing in much the same way and speed that all changes in the industry usually starts from North America and then it flows into Europe. It’s also a business cultural change. And right now in Asia, I’m not seeing it to such a degree. But right now, with globalization and companies, Western companies working with Eastern companies and setting up the same processes and cultivating the same cultures, this is going to change pretty fast as well over there.
Matt Alder [00:05:17]:
And you talked about some of the implications for employers, but just to sort of dig more deeply, what are some of the very specific implications for talent acquisition teams here and now? What is it that they need to be thinking differently about?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:05:34]:
Let me tell you a few things that I see a lot of customers being concerned about right now. You can no longer afford not to have, let’s say, starting from a nice career page, a lot of information about your company. You need to be more transparent and reveal a lot more. And you’re actually, you’re giving your prospectus to people coming and working for you. You need to do this. You can no longer afford to just ask for someone for an interview without first pitching them the opportunity. Even at junior levels, people have a lot more resources to figure these things out. They can go to Glassdoor, they can go here in Boston, for example, there’s a nice website called Venture Phase, which has detailed profiles, a lot of market information about the company. So whether you want to provide the transparency or not, it will exist. And now the HR department, which used to be a compliance department, is thinking about how to craft an image for the company and make it attractive. That’s the most immediate change in today’s market. The other thing with recruiting is that right now the. I think. Well, the best way of putting it is that I think the fit between skills and jobs has broadened before. Let’s say if you were a company in the accounting space, you didn’t think of Facebook as a competitor. But right now you probably employ a lot of people that are doing similar jobs to a tech company or to a bio company or even to a mom and pop store in your neighborhood. So right now everybody in your town is a competitor. So if you’re, let’s say, slightly more traditional company that hasn’t adapted to those changes, and there’s a bunch of, let’s say, technology startups in town that are playing that game, you’re being compared.
Matt Alder [00:07:33]:
And what about the implication for the sort of type of talent itself? I think obviously we’re seeing as digital transformation sort of rolls across the sort of companies that you’re talking about, there’s obviously, as you say, a high demand. The same talents and skills in almost every business. What do you think employers should be doing? Should they be looking for people that they can develop or educate? How do they need to think sort of differently about the people that they’re recruiting?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:08:08]:
I think it’s always a mix. A good company typically has the capability to develop its own talent or to retrain talent, and also at times needs to get something ready. I think what has changed is the way that we go about it. So, for example, today’s 25 and 30 year olds don’t just assume they’re going to go into a good company, get a job, work for a couple of years and hopefully develop into something. They need to have a career path, they need to have a career plan. It needs to be clear. So, sure, you can get. We do it as well. We get a lot of junior salespeople in several places and grow them within the company. But it’s something that we expose specifically to them. We show them the way to get there. We show them the timing that they can achieve with that. Candidates today have higher expectations which are justified by the situation in the market.
Matt Alder [00:09:05]:
So we’ve really been going through a process of rapid evolution when it comes to talent acquisition. But one thing that strikes me that that hasn’t really evolved and hasn’t really changed is, is the recruitment process itself. You know, wherever you go, you see companies still reliant on resumes written in word and application forms and PDFs and all kinds of things like that. If we were sort of reinventing the hiring process from scratch, what would it look like in the. To be relevant to the world, live in?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:09:42]:
To be honest with you, I’m not sure the process of applying for a company and going through some steps is necessarily a bad thing or that gets invalidated. I hear a lot of people, you know, wishing for the death of the resume. It’s not dying because it’s useful. I think it makes total sense to have a single fair interface to which people are going to go in the process and get evaluated. I think what, what is going to change is how the company sees this internally. Because previously the idea is that recruiting is not the process where we try to use multiple means to find people. We had an application form, people put it in and then the company needed to find a way that was convenient to the company, not to the candidate, of engaging its own people and taking the step by step. I see companies with seven step recruiting processes and really many of those steps are just their own communications and meetings. This could be done faster, it could be done in a different way. So I think companies will expect hiring managers to be more involved, will probably use technology to get this done, and will simplify some parts or maybe automate some parts from the calendaring, which is huge nuisance for recruiters and pretty much can be automated these days. They will automate parts of the evaluation. Maybe you will see video interviews being more commonplace. Essentially the process is going to be smoothed out and streamlined. I don’t think it’s going to massively change because again, you do want to build the pipeline, you do want to have some screening, you do want to do some kind of evaluation. These things are good for everyone involved.
Matt Alder [00:11:36]:
And does the things that get evaluated, do they change? Are they changing?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:11:41]:
That changes a lot. That has changed massively, I believe, over the past few years. There are many reasons why. One thing is that there has been a trend specifically in the west these days, to put a lot less value on the academic credentials. I’m not one of the zealots of this that say academic credentials don’t mean anything. They do mean a lot, but they do mean a lot less than they used to. And that’s probably because, ask your friends, most of them are not doing what they studied. The way careers develop these days, they are less linear. So the academic credentialing pretty much tells employees. Well, to me, the only thing that it says is that from when you were 15 years old you could learn the rules of the system. Play by the rules and work and be a winner in whatever it was. So many employers say, I don’t care exactly what you studied, just that you could do it. Now it’s another topic of whether people should be spending all the money they do for that. But that’s for another podcast, probably. The other thing that has changed is that a lot of the jobs that we have today are mixing skills from different walks of life. For example, if I told you 10 years ago that you’d be podcasting, and let’s say you wanted to hire me as your assistant producer for podcasting, that probably involves skills coming from all sorts of places. So what would my resume tell you about it? Employers find it harder to match resumes to jobs. Usually prior experience counts a lot more than academic credentialing and. And jobs are indeed more fluid. Another trend that I’m seeing that’s kind of disrupting that a little bit is a lot of those career accelerators, boot camps. Some people have realized that you can spend six months in a good school, learn how to become, let’s say, a digital marketer, learn some basics over there, and then go to a company and hone your skills. Now that I’m mentioning marketing, we care a lot more about what kind of companies you’ve worked for and what kind of things that we’re doing and whether you’ve learned how to do these things, what kind of person you are, than whether you started marketing 20 years ago. So this thing has made them actually giving employer a lot more trouble in picking people up. Screening used to be okay. Have you done computer science? You’re in. No, you’re out. Right now, the people doing the screening are finding trouble, and that’s why they need to engage the hiring managers early. And that’s why they need to start thinking about their criteria and their interview kits and the way they set up the process. So now companies need to figure these things out on their own. It used to be that the university did that for you, gave a degree and then you knew it’s there. So that’s another thing that’s coming to the recruiting process. Maybe automated and fair evaluations, maybe. But there’s other areas where they need to work for bias and bias not just in the sense of people being racist, but bias in the sense of people just picking up things that are familiar to them. And not realizing that some jobs could be done perfectly well with a candidate doesn’t look like something typical. This is something that companies are struggling to learn.
Matt Alder [00:15:25]:
When I launch my first podcasting, Boot camp. I’m going to make sure you’re one of the first. One of the first invites. Definitely.
Nikos Moraitakis [00:15:33]:
I’ll, I’ll be your assistant producer if I get.
Matt Alder [00:15:37]:
So moving on to technology, what role should or does technology play in facilitating. Facilitating all of this?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:15:48]:
At workable, we make software to do this. We think of it in three areas. One area is finding talent, what we often call sourcing. And there technology can play a major role because really that’s a data problem. That’s a problem of advertising programmatically in many places, enabling referrals, finding things in your database. Which machine learning system can do much better than someone with a search Finding your passive kind of their technology can do magic, can really automate a lot of the work and give you better results in the process part in the running the applicant tracking process. Yes, technology can give you a lot of tools, but really there it’s the company that needs to commit to doing recruiting better. It’s hiring managers that need to be involved in different ways. What technology can do is provide these people with tools that they don’t hate. Let me put it simply. Why don’t hiring managers engage early in the recruiting process most of the times because it’s hard, it’s complicated, it’s a mess, or it uses parochial tools that they don’t like to use, or it’s people who are never on a desk. So technology can just present better systems, more usable systems, because if you get the people to engage, they will figure it out. And finally, in the evaluation process, this is something that I think we’re about to see a golden age for this. I know there have been companies doing this for a long time and they have been, but usually only big companies could afford to run. The complexity of running good, let’s say psychometric testing for example, or video interviews was a little bit of a science fiction a few years ago, but right now even the smallest companies will be able to afford easy tools that do these things. And linking back to what I said about resumes and evaluating candidates, maybe we’re going to see assessment in a different way than we used to see it in the past. Before we saw it as a competition for super high end jobs. In graduate recruiting right now, sometimes an assessment might matter more than the resume for some jobs.
Matt Alder [00:18:15]:
Final question, what do you think recruiting will look like in five to 10 years time?
Nikos Moraitakis [00:18:20]:
I think it will be faster. I think almost all of it will be done on mobile devices. I think the way we advertise jobs, the distinction between active and passive content is going to fade away. Everybody’s there, everybody’s discoverable. So we would not just rely on people walking to our website and putting in an application. And I think a lot of the things that we consider recruiting process today are going to be eliminated or automated. Right now, if you walk into a company and look at the recruiters, they spend 80% of the time scheduling stuff, putting together their own assessments and running them on their own, creating their own interview kits. You know, they’re doing a lot of administrative and I think as better things will start automating them, our process will focus more on the people and less on the process itself. So it’s a good thing, actually.
Matt Alder [00:19:23]:
Nikos, thank you very much for talking to me.
Nikos Moraitakis [00:19:25]:
It was a great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
Matt Alder [00:19:28]:
My thanks to Nikos. 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 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.
