Despite an influx of technology over the last 20 years, the fundamentals of recruiting haven’t really been disrupted. So how should we be challenging recruiting norms which no longer deliver what employers need and are process and mindset more important than technology?
To help me answer these questions, and more besides, my guest this week is Matt Buckland making a welcome return to the show. Matt is currently Founder and Head Of Talent at Rainmaking Venture Studio and has been experimenting with some new approaches to make hiring fairer and more effective.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The importance of challenging assumptions
- Using data to uncover bias and why bias is a loaded word
- Anonymous testing
- Why process is critical
- Making culture and mindset shifts rather than relying on techniques and technologies
- Matt also talks about the recruiter networking group DBR and shares his thoughts on the future of recruiting.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Edward Dias [00:00:25]:
Since we’ve been using Avature ATS globally, we have been able to massively improve our communication rate with candidates during and following their application. Before, over a million people worldwide would never get contacted, but with the smart optimization and flexible processes, we’ve been able to change that, and that’s been a huge achievement.
Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
Visit avature.net that’s a V A T U R E.net to learn why global market leaders like L’Oreal choose Avature to extend the candidate experience. From shoulder taps to first day.
Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 227 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Despite an influx of technology over the last 20 years, the fundamentals of recruiting haven’t really been disrupted. So how should we be challenging recruiting norms which are no longer delivering what employers need? And is process and mindset more important here than technology? To help me answer these questions and more besides, is Matt Buckland making a welcome return to the show? Matt is currently founder and head of talent at Rainmaking Venture Studios and has been experimenting with some new approaches to make hiring work in a fairer and more effective way. Enjoy the interview. Hi Matt, and welcome back to the podcast.
Matt Buckland [00:02:15]:
Thank you. It’s good to be back. It’s been a long time.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
It has been a long time and I think we’ll find out in a second what you’ve been up to during that the. During that long time. In the meantime though, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do now?
Matt Buckland [00:02:28]:
Yep, certainly. I have still been a recruiter for about 16. It must be 17 years now. And now I am the head of talent and founder at a company called Rainmaking, particularly the Rainmaking Venture Studio, which is an investment vehicle. We’re a startup ourselves and our product is other startups. So we make other startups in partnership with large corporates. So we look for things that they want to. If there was a brilliant new product they could buy that doesn’t exist. We found a company, find founders for that company, find a product for that company, my product market fit, and then we sell it back to them in Sort of three or four years time when it’s a fully fledged company, hopefully.
Matt Alder [00:03:12]:
That’s a really interesting, really interesting model and we can talk about, about that a bit more in a second. Also, in the meantime, you, you, you were working for an employer and then you went and worked for a recruitment tech vendor and now you’re sort of back effectively working for being a recruiter, you know, for an employer Again. How, how was that transition? What, what did you, what did. From client side to vendor side back to back to client side again, it.
Matt Buckland [00:03:35]:
Makes it sound like I’ve had lots and lots of jobs and if I Look at my LinkedIn, I probably have actually. So, yeah, no, I was working full time as a head of talent and startup in London and then I went to work for an HR tech vendor. I think during my time as a recruiter prior to that I was always, I was talking at events, I was blogging just for, not for, not for the want of being an influencer. That’s me doing air quotes by the way as well. Not for want of being an influencer, but, but just for the love of recruitment really. I was always interested in it, you know, nosy about how other people were doing it. And then this HR tech vendor came along, I can name them, it’s workable. They came along and said, look, you must come and do this for us. You must help us sort of with go to market stuff. You must sort of kick the tires of our product occasionally and go to events and talk for us. So I spent about a year and a half being sort of recruitment influencer, thought leader I think is the word that I’m struggling to find there. So I was sort of a mock thought leader for a year and a half because I don’t think it’s the same if you pay for your stage. And it gave me great insight. I think I learned a lot. I saw the sort of go to market strategy for a SaaS business, particularly one in HR tech. The sort of, the. Very much what we all thought was true, that fragmented nature of the HR tech buying audience and some of the sort of crazy reasons that people buy HR tech in particular, like I’m new so I must buy a new ATS because I’m new and that’s the whole reason they buy it in the first place. But yeah, I think we did some stuff in marketing for them, we did some stuff in product for them and it was really, really interesting. But it’s a bit, and this is towards the end of my time, I described it as Looking through the windows at a really good party that’s going on. So I spent all my time on stage telling people about cool stuff going on in recruitment without actually being able to do it myself. I started to get a bit itchy, wanted to get back to it. So after a year and a half of doing that, I could have stayed. They didn’t, they wanted me to stay, I think, but I just wanted to get back to it and back sort of down in the weeds and calling candidates. And I’ve always been very hands on as a recruiter. So yeah, after a year and a half of doing the marketing thing, flying all over the world, I went back to it and now I find myself here, really like I’ve got candidate calls to do again. So I’ve gone straight from these high, high powered worlds of speaker dinners to candidate calls and missing my lunch.
Matt Alder [00:06:16]:
Fantastic stuff. Tell us, tell us a bit more about the role that you’ve got now. What does it, what does it entail?
Matt Buckland [00:06:21]:
Yeah, so I’m head of talent for Rainmaking Venture Studio. As I said, they are the startup that builds other startups. So we take the advantages that corporates can give and then we co invest with that corporate to build a startup. So I’m really responsible for finding that founding team. So often we have an idea so we kind of know what the business is going to be, we know the area it’s going to be in and then we have everything we need except the people who are going to be founders for that business. So it’s my role to go and find the people who are going to make that business successful. So really, interestingly, most startups I think are founded by people with an idea and we’re not looking for that, we’re really looking for sort of a steady pair of hands or a very skilled technologist on the CTO side. So the founder pair is normally CEO and CTO and I find those guys.
Matt Alder [00:07:09]:
So you’ve been doing some interesting things to sort of disrupt the recruitment norms that you find in this space. Talk me through some of the, some of the sort of the techniques that you’ve been using to find the talent you need.
Matt Buckland [00:07:22]:
Yeah, I think one of the things that obviously I was, I was working for a venture capital company before, sort of a seed stage VC and I could tell you precisely the stereotypical person that would apply for the roles as associates or principals in that business. They would traditionally be male, they would be white, they would have done two years in an investment bank followed by two years in consultancy McKinsey or a Bain, and then they would have done an MBA at a European university. It’s normally Bocconi in Italy. No, it’s not normally that tight. But there is a sort of a standard career path that then leads you into this area. But what we produce and What I think VCs produce is ideas more than anything. And particularly in the model that we’ve got is this ideas. And I don’t think those people from that background, I don’t think the education, the career pathway gives you a monopoly on ideas. So, for example, could you be expected to. I don’t know. If we were doing business with an online retailer, for example, and you had never used those products, could you. You could understand the business model, but would you understand sort of the, the. Would you be able to empathize with the users of that business if you hadn’t been in it? To an extent, yes. But I think we needed, we needed to diversify our team a little bit. And I know that diversity and inclusion is, is the big watchword and we don’t want another, another white guy, me talk about it. But, but what I was coming at it from was, was a different angle, which is we need to get away from what we thought was the norm or what we thought was right and test some of our assumptions around this. So we changed it up a little bit instead of, instead of actually responding to CVs and looking at people’s universities and going, oh, yes, that’s a good university, I want that. What we actually did was assign a test for them and the test was quite nice. It was three use cases and we wanted them to come up with a venture idea for one of those and then tell us why they chose that idea and then similarly why they rejected another idea. That was it. That’s all we wanted. But that marries really closely with the job that they’d be doing. So it was really kind of tight, very focused on exactly the job that they’d be doing. And then I also got our CEO to do that test as well. He’s game, he’s good for anything. He was, well, happy to do it, which is fun. I know a lot of people don’t actually get to do that stuff because they don’t have CEOs who really want to get involved in that way, but he did it. And then I removed all the contact details, all of the identifying features from the submissions and I had everyone assess those results and see what they saw. And we did sort of a ranking that way. And then because they are I think because they are more into experimenting and certainly more open to the idea of it and testing their assumptions. I then also got them to rank the CV separately of the submissions and to see exactly, you know, did it marry up? Were our assumptions correct? Did we have the right people? You know, did we think the good work came from the best CVs? And of course, you can probably tell this, it didn’t. In some cases, it was absolutely inverse. So the. In one case, one of the. One of the guys who was marking gave the best work. He thought that was the worst cv. So I think it wasn’t. Some great. I won’t budget as some great sort of victory for diversity and inclusion, but I will say it certainly tested our assumptions and that’s the way to do it. By the way, the CEO did not win in this. He came second. Much to his major annoyance. He came second and even gave himself because he marked his own randomly and gave himself four out of five, so not the full score. I think we’re lucky because the organization as a whole wants to do these experiments and actually enjoys these experiments. So I think we get away with a lot, which I think in other organizations you don’t as much. But yes, certainly, I think just in that initial case, testing those assumptions has helped.
Matt Alder [00:11:41]:
I think that’s really interesting because on the show I’ve sort of spoken to a lot of people who are thinking differently about talent and changing up their recruitment process and really trying to address some of the issues of bias that exist out there. And sometimes I think it can make us feel that everything’s okay and everyone’s trying to fix these problems and recruitment’s moving on. But. But interestingly, members or a close member of my family is going through a kind of a job search at the moment. And I’ve seen some horrendous assumptions made based on things, things in their CV that aren’t actually relevant to the job, or lots of. Lots of other factors that have no bearing on how they might perform in their work. So obviously this is still an issue that happens in many, many organizations do. This kind of approach that you’re taking and experimenting with could be implemented at scale within a large employer looking for lots of different types of people.
Matt Buckland [00:12:40]:
I think it would be much more difficult to do at scale. It certainly took longer. So what we had to do was to chunk up these things. So you can’t review each of these assessments in isolation. For example, you have to look at a bulk of them. So we had to wait until we had sort of eight or 10 submissions to look through from candidates, and that took from the first person to the last person. I think it added a week onto the time scale, which is annoying. If you’re the first person to submit, then you have to wait another week. That’s quite annoying as a candidate. But I think transparency is the key there for everyone. So I explained to the candidates exactly what we were doing and how we were doing it. It’s interesting you mentioned bias there and testing those biases. That’s exactly what we were doing. But I think even that word is loaded. So we had to say to our CEO, you know, assumptions. So it’s funny, there’s like that little semantic difference for him that we could say assumptions, but we couldn’t say bias because bias is bad. I think we’re guilty of using a lot of those words and that’s what gets pushback from people when we talk about diversity and why diversity would be a good thing. These, I had the best group of people to do this with. They were literally up for anything like, oh, what are you going to make us do now? Quite excited about it. But what we were actually doing was sort of making them run into a brick wall of their own biases. The CEO in particular had a hard time reviewing CVs because he said, I don’t like any of these CVs. And it was only because I said, but you’ve seen the work they produce and you like the work. He was like, yeah, that’s what doesn’t work for me. And he’s actually getting quite animated. He even said, I found it emotional. But of course, what he’s doing is just running into the brick wall of his own biases, which is incredibly fun to watch as the recruiter.
Matt Alder [00:14:30]:
Absolutely. And so if you were, you know, I think there’s some interesting points about how you position this and the language that’s used and the collaboration, rather than a sort of a blame game, in terms of making things, making things better and finding candidates who are really going to perform in the. In the role. I mean, do you think technology might be a way to do this at scale?
Matt Buckland [00:14:54]:
Some of the technology I’ve seen in this area is misapplied. I think this goes back to previous rants that I’ve had with you. So say you just have an ats, which removes all of the names and contact details of everyone, so you got all of the identifying features of everyone. It’s still not a surprise to people when they later arrive for interview. So sort of giving yourself blinkers doesn’t help situation. I think the candidate is going to come and be in front of you eventually. I’m reminded of the time I worked for a large software company and we actually proved with data that one of our people was biased against women developers. But it took the data for us to prove that. I think if you just gave them the opportunity to reject them later in the process, they still reject people later in the process. You don’t uncover what those biases are and you don’t have the ability to sort of focus in on them and say, hey, look, this is what you’re doing. And that’s very different. I think the tech which tries to do this often gets it wrong. And worse, some of the tech is miss sold as this tech will help you be unbiased and it’s misapplied technology. So it’ll be something like a video interviewing. And this is not biased. And they just reject sort of totally wholesale that the algorithm themselves that runs that tech could be biased because it’s run on training data from interviews that have already happened, which of course are flawed because people have, people have run those interviews. So I think there’s a great will in HR and in recruitment to try and adopt this stuff to be, oh, I’ve done what I can do, you know, but at worst, I think people are using it as a get out of jail free card. So, you know, I’ve done my bit, you know, I’ve run my adverts through this gender decoder, I’ve done a blind, I’ve submitted CVs without names on. So now I’m okay, and now it’s okay that I’m all my guy, all the entire tech team is white guys. Because I’ve paid seven grand a month to this company to do this, and now that’s okay. So I think that we can process our way out of it easier than we can actually tech our way out of it.
Matt Alder [00:17:21]:
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s an interesting point. I think it’s kind of becoming obvious to me that this is, this is about a massive culture and mindset shift rather than individual tactics and technologies. And tactics and technologies can help with this. But ultimately it’s about thinking completely differently about recruitment and what its role is.
Matt Buckland [00:17:41]:
Absolutely. And I think even in your teams today, when I’ve, when I’ve run teams of sources before, if I said to those teams of sources, could you find me 100 female developers? They would say yes. And I go, okay, cool. Now if we assess all of those 100 female developers, the same assessment you’re going to do for everyone. I mean, you’re just tipping the scales in your favor. It’s madness to me that we say we’re hiring from only the best universities when what you’re actually doing is inheriting the catchment of those universities. So if we look at sort of Oxford and Cambridge in the uk, there are less people of color, there are less women in these institutions. But because we say, oh, we’re hiring the best, you know, we’re not prepared to look at the privilege that goes with coming, that goes with being at these universities, or the life experience or the accident of your birth that led to you being there in the first place. It’s not for HR recruitment to solve the wrongs of the world. I don’t think that fair to lay that on our door either. But again, I mean, by thinking just that little bit broader, we can do things. I’m not saying quotas are the answers, but I am saying that if you’re sourcing, you can find people who are qualified and they can be of color, they can be female, they can be, you know, I’m thinking of the big five for diversity, you know, the ones you can get sued for. But those diversity metrics are there for the taking. So it is possible to do this. I mean, there are companies out there with 50, 50 splits. Etsy, for example, has more female engineers than male engineers. So these companies do exist, I think. Yes, it might be a little harder to search for them. You don’t have to just rely on ad responses. But these people are out there and findable and a good recruiter is basically a good finder of people.
Matt Alder [00:19:36]:
So one of the other things that you do is you’re one of the admins of the DBR networking group for in house recruiters, for people who’ve kind of not heard of dbr, might be interested in what it does. Tell us a little bit about that.
Matt Buckland [00:19:52]:
Yep, certainly. So now it was about five or six years ago, I think it was five people gathered in a pub in Shoreditch in London. It was called the Dragon Bar. That’s the D, dbr. The B is beer and the R is recruitment. So dbr, if you give it initials, it sounds sensible. But what it basically was was a sat round drinking. It stemmed from a need, I think recruiters felt, particularly in house recruiters where we’ve been told that other recruiters, other. I mean, we all come up through agencies where we’re told that other recruiters are our enemy and we must keep Them at bay, you know, they’re after their candidates. We must be anti other recruiters. Basically every other discipline, every other industry on the planet shares ideas and tries to do this. But we were all tech recruiters and we had seen the benefits of the open source community, for example, we had seen the benefits of conferences, all of these things that people, the developers were going to and sharing ideas and coming back better at the thing they were doing. And we sort of. There’s also this need for catharsis that we had. The anger of this damn candidate did this, or the hiring manager said this. You know, tub thumping over a beer is actually really quite cathartic for people. So five of us got together and we just started like that. It turned into a WhatsApp group where people were sharing documents. Has anyone got a policy for this? That kind of stuff. Right the way through to, hey, a mate of mine is a dev. He said, can you have a look at his cv? All of this kind of stuff. So that happened in WhatsApp. And WhatsApp is a great way with sort of about 200 people in. That’s a great way to just completely drain the battery of an early iPhone. So eventually we moved to Slack and now we’re a Slack community of, hang on, 4,108 people at the time I’m recording this. And they are all over the world. It got a bit more sensible. So we do drinks on once a month and then we also have a meetup once a month as well, which is a bit more sort of lunch and learn style, but in the evening. So dinner and learn supper club. That makes it sound very elite. It’s not by any means. It’s people coming in and saying, hey, look, I’m doing this. And then sharing what they’ve done. And it could be what someone’s done for the apprenticeship Levy was recently, or what someone did with Facebook ads and how they were targeting people, what we can learn from each other. So it’s, it’s certainly busy. And now multiple countries as well.
Matt Alder [00:22:28]:
I was, I was gonna say. So these meetups aren’t just in London. They’re. They’re. They’re sort of all over the UK or all over the world.
Matt Buckland [00:22:34]:
All over the world. So in the uk, London, Leeds, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow. I’m gonna get shot by someone if I don’t say them all. There’s also a southwest one sometimes, and there was a rumor of a DBR Midland, but I think it was just two people in a pub. So I don’t think we’ll claim that as a meeting. And then further afield you’ve got Berlin, there is Australia, there’s Boston. Boston is quite big at the moment. So that’s. It’s normally where we have someone who is active enough in the community and wants to start this thing and then puts the effort into sort of inviting people, making people feel welcome when they get there, so they come back and then these little communities start again. And then we have this mothership which is the Slack channel, where we all sort of share information and share reviews of tools, share candidates, sometimes with their permission, hashtag gdpr and all get together and just sort of lament the recruiters.
Matt Alder [00:23:34]:
Lot in life and how do people find out more if they want to get involved?
Matt Buckland [00:23:39]:
Yeah, if you’d like to join, go to dbr.community and there is a section on the site there called Join. So we’re not a dot com, we’re a dot community, which is very cool. So dbr.community and you can join up there. That goes to Slack. It is in house people only. So there are no vendors, there are no salespeople, there are no third party recruiters for agencies in there. We’ve got a few sneaky RPOs, but only the good ones. So you have to prove you’re nice. But basically it’s just a very friendly community. There’s a lot of good. So for example, recently sort of a large trading company in London announced they were going into liquidation. And that was with the loss of I think 26 jobs. And within a week, eight people had found new jobs through the efforts of DBR. We had a company looking for office space. Well, one message in dbr people had eight free desks to keep working while they look for new office space. So it starts out with Community at its hub and then people just wanting to be good for each other. And not really, it’s not a quid pro quo in that way. It’s actually sort of people finding jobs, people helping each other. So it’s working out quite nicely. Fills me with joy some days, fills me with rage on others.
Matt Alder [00:25:00]:
So, final question, and I’m asking this because I think I asked you both other times you appeared on the show, what’s your current take on the future of recruitment? What is it? What does it look like? What’s going to happen?
Matt Buckland [00:25:10]:
Well, yeah, I think we did, we did a whole, a much longer thing just on the future recruitment. Last time I was here, I still. Look, the funny thing is that this whole interview has been conducted by a Chat bot. Not by me. No, I’m joking. It’s not that. It’s not that. It’s still not that. So I look at the things that I’ve done most recently and they are still people to people, those high touch, high value things. What am I using differently? What new technology am I using? Not much since last we spoke. I mean, I still hate scheduling, so I’m still using an automatic scheduler. But those things are just the boring, mundane stuff that get taken away. I think the ability to still phone a candidate, talk to a candidate about a job in such a way as makes them want that job or excites them and they are a hard to find skill set. That thing is still a human thing. That still human interaction is key and that’s very difficult. It’s very hard. I’m quite, I’m very much against a lot of the things that are out there at the moment where people say this will solve recruitment because I don’t think there’s a mantra that recruitment is broken and I must fix it. And I don’t think recruitment is broken. People get hired every day. I don’t think it’s broken because I think people are fallible and people are unique and we need to systematizing it and trying to make an engine to just recruit people, just drive. This recruitment process takes away some of that human element and takes away some of the empathy and dare I say, some of the magic of recruitment. Because there is this, there is this sort of, there’s a joy of coming together and when it all works, it’s really nice and actually it’s a win all round. We do change lives. And I’ve said this, I said this on stage at Rec Fest. Recruitment is tough, recruitment is horrible. But actually we shy away from the fact that saying, you know, one of the hardest things a person does is change jobs, you know, the stress, the psychological stress of it and we actually facilitate that. What we do is great. And I think trying to systematize it too much takes away some of that joy.
Matt Alder [00:27:25]:
Matt, thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Buckland [00:27:28]:
Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:27:29]:
My thanks to Matt Buckland. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for recruiting future. 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 time and I hope you’ll join me.
