Most recruiters would agree that hiring manager relationships are critical to effective corporate talent acquisition. But how do you develop effective relationships and what does it take to become a strategic talent advisor to your organization.
I’m delighted to welcome the always brilliant John Vlastelica back to the show. John is the Founder and Managing Director of Recruiting Toolbox and helps companies raise the bar on recruiting effectiveness. He has some highly actionable insights to share on strategic hiring manager relationships, and I know you will find this interview really valuable.
In the interview, we discuss:
- The definition of a strategic talent advisor
- Engaging hiring managers in pre-funnel work
- Fluid workforces
- The advantages of batch processing
- False positives and false negatives in hiring
- Fat, skinny and constipated funnels
- The role of technology
- John’s predictions for the future
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 247 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Most recruiters would agree that hiring manager relationships are critical to effective corporate talent acquisition, but how do you develop effective relationships and what does it take to become a strategic talent advisor to your organization? I’m delighted to welcome the always brilliant John Vlastelica back to the show. John is the founder and managing director of Recruiting Toolbox and helps companies raise the bar on recruiting effectiveness. He has some highly actionable insights to share on strategic hiring manager relationships, and I know you’ll find this interview really valuable. Hi John, and welcome back to the podcast and it’s an absolute pleasure to have you returning to the show again. For people who may not have heard of you or may not have heard the sort of previous times you’ve been on the show, could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
John Vlastelica [00:02:07]:
Sure. I’m the founder and managing director of a consulting and training firm called Recruiting Toolbox, and for over a dozen years we’ve been doing work to help companies raise the bar on talent. So we do a lot of hiring manager training, interview training, we do a lot of recruiter training, especially focused on helping recruiters be talent advisors, and a lot of recruiting manager training, helping to elevate kind of the leaders in corporate talent acquisition as well. And then a bunch of consulting projects kind of related to just helping companies generally improve, you know, speed, quality, diversity, those kinds of things. But I spent the first half of my career as a practitioner, so I was head of recruiting at Expedia and head of tech recruiting at Amazon and some other places. So come from a corporate side initially.
Matt Alder [00:02:49]:
One of the other things that you do is you do, you know, you produce a lot of content, a lot of articles, and you do a lot of press presentations about all aspects of talent acquisition. Now I know a topic that you’ve recently been covering is how talent acquisition professionals can become strategic talent advisors. Now, in my experience, everyone either thinks they’re strategic or wants to be strategic. Could you sort of give us your definition and break it down a bit for us?
John Vlastelica [00:03:19]:
Yeah, I mean, I think I kind of make fun of the word strategy a lot because it’s used, I think, for evil sometimes to justify big PowerPoint projects or bringing in consultants or something. And it’s interesting. We talk to a thousand hiring managers and business executives a year as part of our work. And I think about strategy in the TA space really through the lens of the business. Less so around kind of a pure HR lens, but the business lens. And so a lot of the way I think about it is how are you helping the business deliver kind of what they need? And in a TA context that usually sounds like speed and quality. It’s certainly not the traditional HR language of consistency or compliance or cost savings. It’s, it’s speed and quality. And so connecting what we do to business outcomes is, is really how I frame it. I have a TA leader friend who, who’s just awesome and he has all these great sayings and I just love him to death. His, his name is Tony. He works at a company called Metadata. And one of the things that, that he says when you ask about strategy is he says he’ll have business leaders come to and say, hey, what’s your strategy? And his response is what’s your strategy? Like I’m going to build my strategy. Do you have a strategy? And it’s awesome because I think it really captures the, I don’t know, the frustration, the challenges of being a TA leader and trying to just produce strategic stuff. If you don’t have that business lens, it’s kind of ridiculous. And it looks like a bunch of focus on high level employer brand stuff or let’s just roll out unconscious bias training or let’s put PowerPoint decks together about technology stacks. It doesn’t necessarily feel like strategy to the business if it’s not connected directly to what the business is trying to do.
Matt Alder [00:04:57]:
Absolutely. And I know that you have sort of really sort of identified some low cost, no cost ways that people can connect with their business and connect with their hiring managers and in a more strategic way talk us through your approach to that. How have you sort of identified, identified these steps?
John Vlastelica [00:05:18]:
Well, I think there’s a lot of ways to be strategic and it really depends a lot on to some degree the size of organization you’re in, the kind of challenges your company is facing. But one of the things that we do, you know, I have the best job in the world. I get paid to learn, I get to work with world class companies all over the world. And it’s incredible to hear what individual recruiters are doing, what recruiting, you know, mid level recruiting managers are doing, what heads of talent are doing. And so, you know, when we think about strategy, we think about it in a very kind of, it sounds funny to say this, but kind of in a very tactical way. You know, tactical strategy, strategy that’s very visible, that’s very tangible, that’s not just like I said, the PowerPoint deck or it’s not, you know, kind of the strategy I make fun of the most, which is called the try harder strategy, you know, which is the, the strategy where you just go back to your desk and someone just dumped, you know, 50 Rex on your team and you just go, oh, well here we go. We’ll just do our best. Let’s just kind of, you know, keep, keep going, try a little harder, work a little longer. So the kind of things that I get really excited about and the kind of people and strategies I like to elevate in our industry are those that are doing things that are, that are much more tangible and show up differently to the what I might call kind of traditional strategic stuff.
Matt Alder [00:06:29]:
Let’s talk through some of these practically. First of all, what can people be doing right at the start of the recruitment process before people are even going into the recruiting funnel?
John Vlastelica [00:06:41]:
I think there’s a lot of pre funnel work that doesn’t get the visibility. I think our industry hyper focuses on sourcing and I think it gets like 90% of the attention in our industry. But when you actually look at the work that needs to be done, strategic work that needs to be done, yeah, they’re sourcing components to it, but a lot of it is actually pre funnel work. And this is kind of the creating the culture where you’re getting your hiring managers engaged and they see recruiting as part of their day job, where you’re thinking more strategically about the way candidates search for jobs, the way candidates research opportunities. And you’re saying how can we get our hiring managers more engaged? How do we get them more visible online? How do we kind of get people thinking about kind of leads and targets differently and being open to have conversations with people that aren’t dying to work at their company. If you’ve ever sat in on some, some interviews, sometimes between, you know, a passive candidate and a hiring manager, you hear so much of this kind of what makes you want to work for us and they’re like, you know, you called me man. I mean, I don’t know, maybe I don’t want to work for you. And there’s this orientation of for many hiring managers that everyone’s an applicant. And in reality there’s a lot of conversations, coffee chats, you know, introductory conversations that need to be happening. But that’s really hard to do if your whole orientation around strategy and recruiting is just this kind of rec resume or rec CV orientation. It’s kind of broken. So pre funnel work has a lot to do with getting hiring teams I think more visible online, kind of creating that culture where they see kind of, you know, always be recruiting, always be closing. They see that always be recruiting as, as part of their day job.
Matt Alder [00:08:17]:
What else could people be doing to get hiring managers sort of engaged and actively involved with, with the recruiting efforts?
John Vlastelica [00:08:24]:
Well, I think there’s, there’s a lot of influencing that needs to happen. A lot of hiring managers are very busy. And so you know, one of the things that, that we lot about is, you know, where there’s, where there’s pain, there’s pull. You know, when hiring managers or hiring teams have, you know, big things they need to deliver, whether it’s, you know, a sales territory that’s uncovered or you know, it’s a product they’re trying to ship out, or it’s a finance team that’s under resourced to prepare for a big reorg or cost restructuring project or something, there needs to be some kind of pain there. And usually the cost of vacancy is really, it’s something that doesn’t get tracked. It’s not a traditional recruiting metric, but it’s probably the most powerful leverage point that, that a recruiter or recruiting manager has is to really understand kind of the cost of the vacancy, the cost of leaving that job open and compare that cost to the smaller cost of actually doing something about it, which is, you know, engaging your network and or you know, playing a more active role in selling or closing or whatever it is you need hiring managers to do. But a lot of, a lot of what I see as great leverage points is really helping hiring managers understand or kind of articulate or have a little more self awareness around just the cost and the pain associated with having a job open. And that usually gets them to act.
Matt Alder [00:09:37]:
So obviously we talk a lot about candidate experience. Sometimes very, very, sometimes very, very generically. How do candidates fit into this? What should recruiters be thinking about in terms of, you know, for example, the information that they’re, that they’re giving candidates at the start of the process.
John Vlastelica [00:09:55]:
I mean, I think it depends. I mean, a lot of candidates are much more likely to respond to, you know, hiring manager outreach than recruiter outreach. A lot of candidates feel like they’re relatively underwhelmed by our crappy job descriptions, which don’t actually explain what the day to day work is. A lot of candidates, especially those with a lot of options, want to see a lot more from the business side of things. Not just the traditional kind of HR posting, you know, career site with beautiful people and stories. They want to understand, they want to look someone in the eye and have a real deep understanding of the actual work they would do. And they want that work kind of framed differently than just you will be responsible for. But they want to understand the challenging projects they’ll work on, the smart people they’ll get to learn from, the kind of impact they’re going to make. Those kinds of things are typically things that I think the business and the hiring manager is even better at explaining than even a really good recruiter.
Matt Alder [00:10:51]:
What about the sort of the planning aspect of this in terms terms of really understanding where candidates come from for particular roles, whether that’s internally or externally and also the timing in which recruitment is done?
John Vlastelica [00:11:06]:
Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things, a couple of our clients, Sodexo, as well as the makers of Fortnite Epic Games, are companies we work with that have done a lot of work to really look at internal versus external hiring and think about it in a much more holistic way. I think traditionally talent acquisition leaders, including myself, I will admit to this, have worked hard to try and get internal mobility off of our plates. If someone asks us to take that on, we’re like, no, we fill external wrecks. That’s our role. I want hunters on my team. We’re not process managers, we’re not career coaches for internal talent. But what’s happened in the past, I would say 20 years or so, is that we have seen a lot of business leaders that don’t actually think that differently about external internal talent. Consultants, contract workers, gig workers. You’re seeing this kind of more fluid sense of how we get the work done. And so some of our clients have done some deep analysis to take a look at. Boy, let’s look at our higher volume roles and let’s ask ourselves if we’re getting a lot of really great internal talent for this kind of role, should we even focus as much externally or vice versa? If we’re not seeing internal talent for this kind of role, this different role should we be trying to get more external talent in? And what is the implication on things like ramp time, how quickly the person gets up to speed on diversity, on retention? You know, what kind of story does it tell external candidates? If we have job categories that they can enter into our organizations in that have this really strong career path where internals are likely candidates for these opportunities. That kind of stuff is a different kind of more holistic way of thinking about talent acquisition. And I’m seeing a lot of companies kind of spend more time thinking about that from a TA lens than just from an HR BP lens or from a, you know, talent management OD kind of lens. And that’s pretty exciting to me because it’s a, it’s an unbelievable source of talent and it’s one that I think is often ignored, just flat out ignored.
Matt Alder [00:13:02]:
Just in terms of logistics. One of the things that you talk about that’s really interesting is batch processing. Tell us a bit more about that.
John Vlastelica [00:13:09]:
Yeah, so one of the things that we’ve seen is it can be, it can be really challenging to get to create goals that are kind of short term. When you have big hiring needs, you can, you can find a lot of struggles and just scheduling. There’s so many scheduling challenges trying to get people, hiring managers, interviewers aligned on, on big priority needs. They’re very busy and you end up having maybe a scheduler administrative person trying to get time on their calendars. One of the things that we’ve seen companies do, especially in combination with kind of more of a pipelining or Persona based kind of interviewing process, has moved to more batch processing for the way that they, that they think about interview days or interviewing and they create these interview days where you basically have a, you know, maybe a sourcer recruiter and a logistics person who have a calendar built out where you have either days internally within the company or you do some roadshow traveling and you go to cities and you are scheduling, let’s say a dozen candidates to see per day and two or three hiring managers and a recruiter will spend the day bringing a bunch of candidates in all at once and making same day decisions and sometimes even same day offers. And one of the things that’s been kind of interesting again combined with pipelining and maybe some like sourcing jams where hiring managers have kind of laptops open and we’re all generating candidates, is it provides one really great visibility when you want to talk about what’s going on with recruiting right now. Yeah, you can send your rec status update reports to business leaders but having very visible kind of interview days set up and knowing how we’re doing, higher kind of, you know, slots in the slots, the 12 slots we have to fill is a really powerful way to bring more visibility to some of our work. But it also tends to give talent acquisition leaders an easier way to kind of measure progress. I think pipelining sometimes, you know, you’re just feeding candidates into a pipeline and recruiters or hiring managers are supposed to kind of pick them up and run with them. This gives you the ability to kind of have a source or recruiter with very specific short term goals, which are candidates that are interviewable, that are pre scheduled and put into a schedule. And you tend to have a different conversion rate, you tend to have higher return, which means you bring 12 candidates on site for an interview day and it’s very likely you will get three or four offers out of that. And what we found, I did this at Amazon a long time ago. What we found is those same 12 candidates run through a traditional process where you might have six or seven interviewers and you might have, you know, big delays in between. When hiring managers seeing candidates, the same 12 candidates have a, have a higher kind of ROI in terms of offers than if you would have brought them in one at a time. And we didn’t notice any difference in candidate quality. There was no difference in candidate quality or new hire quality. It was almost a function of, of the process of kind of batching it versus doing it in more of a kind of a serial way.
Matt Alder [00:15:56]:
The other, the other interesting thing for me is when you talk about false positives and false negatives when it comes to hiring, people talk us through that because I think it’s a really interesting concept.
John Vlastelica [00:16:07]:
Yeah, I mean, so a false positive hiring decision would be you hired someone bad. And most organizations are set up to try and avoid that. You know, when in doubt, flush them out. Like I’ve had hiring leaders literally say that to me, like, don’t take chances, it’s not worth it. A bad hire is so hard to deal with and you know, we just don’t want that. So if we’re on the fence, let’s just say no. That’s the, that’s generally, I think, how most people think about hiring. It’s interesting. Over the past few years, I’ve seen a lot more business leaders get concerned about the different kind of hiring mistake, which is a false negative hiring mistake. And that would be saying no to someone you should have said yes to. So that was kind of missing out on someone that would have been good. It’s really easy, I suppose, to measure a false positive mistake because the person shows up and they weren’t good. It’s much harder to know if you missed out on someone good because you know you didn’t hire them. I don’t know if they would have been good or not. One of the things some of our clients have started doing, espn, which is part of Disney, for example, the TA leader there, she was doing some work to look at. Where are these people that we’ve said no to? Where have they ended up going? And you can find this out on LinkedIn, of course. And what’s interesting for her and some other people that are doing this is they’re finding that many of the candidates that we decline are going to the very companies that hiring managers want us to source from, which I think is kind of funny and also kind of sad. And it makes you wonder what is going on in the middle of our funnel. Like, are we playing a role as TA professionals? Are we being strategic about prepping interviewers, aligning interviewers and making sure that we’re not having a bunch of false negative hiring decisions? And I would actually argue that most corporate recruiters that I talk to and my team talks to, they’re not playing a big role in that decision making process. You know, they might be a, a feedback chaser, a note taker, I might even sit in some of them, even facilitate. But rarely do I see recruiters bringing a strong point of view to the hiring decision conversation. And my concern is that there’s too many candidates that are coming in that are not getting selected because we’re not aligned on what we mean by diversity or culture fit or culture add or what it means to be an ass or what we mean by senior or all these things, Passion, potential, like all these, these terms that we think are well defined. I find that a lot of hiring teams, you know, half our business is getting hiring managers to be more effective interviewers. And one of the things I find when we’re in the room with them is that, you know, they’re not aligned even in the same team, even in people that work together all the time. If you ask them to define culture fit or culture add or diversity or seniority, you can have wildly different definitions. And so one of my concerns is that as TA leaders, are we spending enough time really understanding what’s going on in the middle of the funnel and are we making sure that we’re not missing out on good hires? When companies focus on this really effectively and some of it is pre funnel planning to define some of these terms, but when they do, you go from these very kind of fat funnels to very skinny funnels or you go from these very, I love this term, constipated funnels. You’re bringing in good people and it gets really kind of bloated in the middle, but you end up with way too, your interview to offer ratio gets just completely out of whack and it gets all kind of constipated in the middle part. And I don’t know that we spend enough time really digging into that and understanding, you know, are we missing out on good talent and are we aligned as an interviewing team? And that to me is one of the most, I mean that’s one of the most obvious and biggest ROI areas I as an individual corporate recruiter could kind of lean in on and do some work around.
Matt Alder [00:19:41]:
One of the, one of the things that we, we haven’t talked about so far is, is technology. And I find that very often people think that strategy is putting new and different bits of different bits of technology in. And you’ve kind of really illustrated through the things that you’ve talked through that that’s not necessarily, that’s not necessarily the case. But what is, what is your take on recruiting technology? How can employers be thinking about that more strategically?
John Vlastelica [00:20:08]:
Yeah, it’s really interesting. I mean it is, it is the golden age. I mean in recruiting it is unbelievable. I’m so happy to be alive in 2020 and to be doing what I do because the technology is just incredible. And there’s technology at almost every stage of the funnel that gets me really excited. I was on a call just yesterday with the head of talent acquisition at a well known company and this person was talking about all this cool technology. They’re doing demos and they’re very excited about it. And I just always come back to what problem are you solving? And, and sometimes they can articulate it. But then I ask where does that problem fit on the priority list? Like, of course it would be nice to have technology that did X, but given the long list of things you need to get done, is that the next thing you’d want to invest time in? Because most TA functions are so lean. I’m not anti technology and for me it’s do both strategic, human centered things and bring in the technology for sure. But I get very concerned when people go really deep. So for example, one of the clients I was talking to was very interested in kind of a bunch of online assessments and leveraging video interviewing technology And I think that’s great. I think generally I’m super excited about what’s happening in that space. But this is also a company that hasn’t aligned on what good looks like, that has hiring managers that really go in using what I would call kind of silly questions to evaluate candidates, including things like what kind of animal would you be and and making massive assumptions about people based on their pedigree background. I don’t think they even have the basics in place. A lot of technology can automate really crappy process. A lot of technology can just make your bad strategy kind of bad or worse. So I get concerned when I see people use technology in place of making sure you have the foundational basics taken care of. And when I see a lot of technology being put in, particularly in the kind of ATS CRM space, I find that it’s so poorly rolled out. Adoption is horrible. It wasn’t configured properly. They’re not getting the metrics out. The team is confused around where they should be prioritizing their time. And you start to see a lot of the ROI kind of quickly dwindle from kind of where it was set expectations set at the sales stage, through implementation phase into how is this actually helping us? And, and you know, business leaders have a very short timeline for ROI expectations. And I think there’s also just generally an inability sometimes in our profession to execute things well to get the ROI out of it. I have lots of thought about technology, Matt. I don’t want to just go off on, you know, talking for 10 minutes about that but, but, but I’m not anti technology. I mean I love technology. I think some of the, you know, scheduling tools like are a no brainer to augment what a recruiter does. I think it’s ridiculous to have a recruiter doing some of the back and forth scheduling they do. I think some of the tools that collect interview feedback that could be automated, mobile based, it’s just ridiculous not to have something like that in 2020. Some of the other stuff, you know, unless you’re really leading edge and you’re way out there already with a full kind of talent advisor model and you have managers that are aligned and trained, I get nervous. I think it’s put in prematurely and I think there’s this expectation that the technology will solve some of these strategy process alignment issues and it won’t. You have to do the hard work. You can’t skip the steps. Does that connect with you? Because you spend a lot more time thinking about technology I think than even I Do. But does that connect with you, what I’m saying?
Matt Alder [00:23:33]:
Absolutely, totally. I think that people aren’t thinking as strategically about technology as they should. And I see lots of people implementing technology because they think it’s going to solve a problem, but actually there’s lots of other things they need to do first before they kind of fit that technology. Fit that technology in. Final question. And I suppose, you know, related to the technology discussion, what’s kind of on your radar for the next 18 months or so? What kind of innovations do you think we can expect to see in talent acquisition?
John Vlastelica [00:24:06]:
You know, I got to be honest, I don’t know that we’re going to see a lot of things that I would call truly innovative. You know, I go to a lot of conferences, I speak at a lot of conferences, and I am just always impressed to hear, you know, especially, you know, vendors that have ideas and stuff. What I also recognize is that a lot of what’s considered innovative and talent acquisition is quite derivative. It’s stuff that’s been happening in marketing or sales or supply chain for years, and we’re just finally kind of bringing it into talent acquisition. I’m not sure if it’s truly innovative, but I think the things that I get most excited about are generally things that are helping recruiters kind of free up their time to be able to focus on kind of the soft skill, things that are unlikely to be automated. So things that are, that are getting hiring, you know, making it easier for hiring managers to engage their networks. Things, things that are really focused on kind of the, the funnel and diagnosing what’s happening in the funnel through, through better analytics and, or things that are helping to kind of skinny up the funnel. So things that are kind of making, making us, or allowing us to have kind of fewer touch points, you know, fewer, higher quality candidates versus this kind of shotgun approach. Most hiring managers will tell you in focus groups we have with them that, you know, all of our problems in recruiting would be solved by more candidates, by top of the funnel. And I’m excited about technology that allows us to do a better job of kind of targeting fewer people and getting people kind of through the process quickly while maintaining a really good candidate experience. And so the things that I tend to pay attention to more have more of a kind of diagnostic focus. They’re. They’re better at helping us understand where we should be focusing our time, where the ROI is and things that just get hiring managers more active in the communities we’re trying to recruit from. I think that is the the secret sauce to great recruiting is less about technology and innovation and more around hiring manager engagement, hiring manager ownership, culture of recruiting. So tools that some of our clients use, for example, example that make it easy for hiring managers to share content on social with their networks, things that are making it more efficient to get ROI from in person, in real life events. Those things to me, I don’t know if they’re super innovative, but they’re the things that I think are going to have the right kind of ROI and help us build our narrative that we’re being strategic because I think they’re the things that kind of get us the results and bring more visibility to the hard work that it takes to get top talent.
Matt Alder [00:26:30]:
John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Vlastelica [00:26:32]:
Hey, I really enjoyed it, Matt. I’m so glad I got to be on the podcast again. Thank you much.
Matt Alder [00:26:36]:
My thanks to John Vlastelica. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. You can also follow the show on Instagram, just search for recruiting future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also listen to the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.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.
