To recap, I’m currently mixing content between topics that are relevant to the right now and topics that are important in the medium to long term. This episode is a right now episode.
Previously, in episode 250, I spoke to Johnny Campbell from SocialTalent about the state of the talent acquisition market. What feels like an infinitely long two weeks later, my guest in this episode is Holly Fawcett from Social Talent to give us an update on what they are seeing in the market right now.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What is going on in the hiring market right now
- The supply of talent
- Adaption to virtual hiring
- Dealing with change-resistant hiring managers
- Talent acquisition as a leadership enablement function
- Building an engaging digital candidate experience
- The longer-term implications for talent acquisition
- How Social Talent is supporting recruiters
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Social Talent. Social Talent is the training platform for hiring teams, giving you the knowledge and skills you need to find, hire and develop great talent. Designed for everyone involved in the hiring process, this market leading platform provides training through a comprehensive library of video content delivered by the world’s best hiring experts. Trusted by the likes of IBM, intel and Siemens. Social Talent has trained over 80,000 people across 100 countries and a thousand organizations. Last year alone they enabled a million hires worldwide. Find out more@www.socialtalent.com. that’s www.socialtalent.
Matt Alder [00:01:11]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 254 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Just to recap, I’m currently mixing content between topics that are relevant to the right now and topics that are important in the medium to long term. This episode is a right now episode. Previously in episode 250 I spoke to Johnny Campbell from Social Talent about the state of the talent acquisition market. What feels like an infinitely long two weeks later. My guest in this episode is Holly Fawcett from Social Talent to give us an update on what they’re seeing in the market right now. Hi Holly and welcome to the podcast.
Holly Fawcett [00:01:53]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Holly Fawcett [00:02:00]:
So I’m Holly Fawcett. I am a consultant with Social Talent, which is a made up job title that I’ve recently bestowed upon myself at the beginning of this year as I focus more on client delivery and supporting our clients from a learning perspective and trying to grow out what their talent acquisition transformation teams are going to look like and, and what their goals are going to be. But yeah, very unusual job that I kind of do everything and yet nothing at the same time.
Matt Alder [00:02:32]:
This is an interview that’s sort of very specific about the current situation. So I just wanted to, as I’ve done in the past, kind of timestamp when we’re recording this. So it’s currently quarter past 11 on the 1st of April 2020. What we’re essentially doing is interviewed Johnny Campbell two or three weeks ago about the situation, how what’s going on is affecting talent acquisition, affecting which companies are hiring and which companies aren’t hiring, how they’re hiring and what might happen moving forward. So we’re, we’re reconvening to really see how things have moved on in the last couple of weeks and see, see where they are now in terms of who’s hiring and who’s hiring, who’s on hiring freeze. What are you, what are you seeing at the moment? Which obviously not all, not, not all industries are impacted in the same way. What’s going on in the market at the moment?
Holly Fawcett [00:03:23]:
You’re right, not all industries are impacted in the same way, but there certainly are industries which have been almost unilaterally flattened because they’re simply unable to operate. And that would obviously be the likes of travel and leisure, specifically the likes of airlines, hotels, tourism services. Those are things that just cannot, they’re not legally allowed to operate in many jurisdictions simply because of the lockdowns that are happening. And so they’re obviously on hiring freezes. But then across almost every single industry, I think because the economy has slowed down so much and everyone’s paralyzed in place and at the same time just kind of trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. Regardless of whatever stimulus bills are going to come into place and regardless of what the likes of the UK government are doing in supporting wages or what the United States government are going to do with literally paying people a salary for a month and seeing how that goes, I think every single company is just trying to figure out, you know, how do we operate in this new normal. And so because it’s a lot of, there’s a lot of unknown unknowns, I think they’re all a bit unprepared to continue hiring unless they have some sort of known in there. So there are obviously companies that are, that are ready to and are already in the sort of necessity space, if you know what I mean. So anywhere where in an industry that is currently experiencing a hyper demand, so the likes of some healthcare services, pharmaceutical and medical device services, but also online shopping and online delivery services and things like that that are now experiencing a dramatic increase in demand because brick and mortar retail is no longer really able to operate. The those are the spaces in which those companies feel the demand has increased and so are prepared to make a hire. But outside of that, because of the unknown unknowns, I think everyone’s just really hesitant to make the kind of big Q1 push that they were expecting to. And now today is a barking of Q2. So I think today we might actually start seeing some changes in the market where companies are beginning to, okay, you know, let’s put Q1 to bed and let’s begin now with the second quarter knowing what we know now and just move forward in as steady a pace as we can while also trying to preserve the fact that we don’t know what the end of the month is even going to look like in some regards.
Matt Alder [00:05:56]:
I suppose picking up on that from a, from a supply of talent perspective. So you know, say for example, focusing on all those E commerce companies and retailers and people who are trying to hire sometimes literally thousands of people very, very, very, very quickly, what’s the supply of talent like? Is it easy for them to find people or does that remain very challenging?
Holly Fawcett [00:06:18]:
Again, it’s a bit of a mixture. So E commerce companies, depending on the level of skill and the level of qualifications and experience and things of that are required. Like if you’re a software developer working in, you’re probably already working in E commerce or some form of online services anyway. And so those, you know, they’re not necessarily out of work. It’s you know, possibly some contingent projects that they’re working on, you know, that, that have dried up simply because of the unknown unknowns. They may be more available now to take more permanent positions if like, if needed. But the things like you know, operations and delivery and warehouses and, and those types of things that are lower skilled, you know, those jobs were, were already easy to get a supply of talent into because people needed jobs that were on the lower end of the, of the qualification chain if you think about it like that. So I don’t think supply and demand has, or the supply side has necessarily changed for the likes of E commerce and those types of organizations. It’s the willingness I think of, of. Of talent who perhaps have lost their jobs to go into those types of roles. So I know for example in the uk, Tesco, Asda, for example, I live in Ireland and we have very, very similar types of organizations. Tesco, we have Dunn stores, Aldi, Lidl, etc. Those are all looking for people now to come into stores because the demand has increased. But whether or not people who have lost their jobs as solicitors or people who’ve lost their jobs in marketing, if they’re willing to go into those roles in Tesco for a couple of weeks even just to see them out, I’m not sure if they are willing to do so because obviously governments have put in place stipends for people who have lost their jobs because of COVID 19 to make sure that they are sustainable because there isn’t that many jobs going. So while they might see a bit of a supply increase, it’s not an overwhelming supply increase I believe. And that’s like that’s okay. But I think again, it’s all about necessity. If you’re able to get, if you, if you’re a candidate and able to get yourself into an organization where the demand on your, on the products and services of that company are delivering is really high, you’ll always have a job in that industry. But as soon as the tide has turned, of course, and the necessity is no longer there, that’s where there’s, you know, you’re now out in high tide with nothing to show for it.
Matt Alder [00:08:53]:
So we’ll talk a bit more about the longer term implications of all of this for talent acquisition. Sort of particularly going into the later part of the later part of this year. Before we do though, just, just sort of focusing on the companies who are, who are still recruiting at the moment. One of the things that I talked about with, with Johnny a few weeks ago was moving hiring to be a virtual process. Since then, a lot of countries in the world have, have gone into, have gone into deeper lockdown and you know, huge, huge amounts of people are working from home again. I’m still seeing people on LinkedIn who, new jobs and as we said, there are people who are recruiting. How is this sort of adaptation to virtual hiring played out? What’s been happening in terms of the companies who are still recruiting? How have they adjusted what they do?
Holly Fawcett [00:09:42]:
Generally, what I’ve seen from our clients and from those who I’m speaking to, who I’m just picking up market signals, the talent acquisition teams are happy to move on to virtual processes because a lot of them are working in centers of excellence or in some sort of a remote space with a hiring manager anyway. So they’re pretty much used to doing virtual processes anyway, doing the likes of Skype interviews or an odor interview or something like that where they can, where they can conduct all of their work virtually with a candidate and move them onto the hiring managers. What they are finding is that difficulty, that bridge between the recruiter and the hiring manager in passing the candidate now to a hiring manager in a virtual process. They’re still finding objections with hiring managers about virtual interview. And it’s only really because it is absolutely a necessity in their business to hire for this role and to work remotely and to do everything remotely that they’re getting over that objection. If there’s any hesitancy whatsoever with that hiring manager that this role. Okay, yeah, it’s very important. But look, we can probably wait a week or we can probably wait another two weeks or three weeks until this role is filled that I can Actually see this person. I can press the flesh, so to speak. Those are the types of conversations I’m having with recruiters where they’re still finding hiring managers are just, they’re almost needlessly objecting to hiring in this space because it’s virtual. They would like to meet this person face to face. So the hiring managers who are smart, who understand that you still need to move fast in order to secure a candidate and to fill that empty seat, the hiring managers who get the kind of real impetus of recruiting needing to be a fast moving business where you make decisions in a smart but decisive and fast way, they’re happy to move on to virtual, they’re okay to manage virtual, they’re okay to onboard virtually as well. And those are the companies ultimately that’ll win out. So I am seeing companies who are still making hires, people who are, you know, they no longer have to work out notice periods, which is, which is great in some respect. They’re able to take up roles a lot faster. And then the onboarding to the new team is virtual as well. And they’re kind of, yes, they’re feeling around in the dark a little bit, but how to onboard virtually? They’re getting a little bit smarter at it. But the main thing for, for those companies is that they’re the ones who are winning. It’s the ones who, who are hesitant to make a decision on hiring because they can’t meet them in person and ultimately will lose out. And that’s the headache that those recruiters are really trying to get through to the hiring managers and kind of banging their head against the wall going, please, will you just interview them over Skype, please. We still need to make a hire here, you know, and obviously those kinds of hire managers like Bill, it’ll be, I hope that it’ll be escalated somewhere where somebody much more senior will just go here, look, you know, put your objections to the wayside. It’s no longer warranted here. We’re in extraordinary times. We need to keep moving. But until that happens, you know, and even when that happens, it might be too late as well. I think we’re actually really seeing a difference between the kind of the wheat and the chaff here. Hiring managers that are capable of making good decisions regardless of the times are the ones who will, who will find and adapt and keep moving and understand the importance of hiring. They’re the ones who will always keep moving. It’s the ones who are incapable and really unskilled at hiring that are really showing up now. And actually as they’re showing up the business as being incapable of making good decisions. In general, hiring is a very important business decision.
Matt Alder [00:13:27]:
There’s two things that come out of that. And I want to talk about what the companies who are doing this really well are doing in a second, but sort of focusing on, you know, those kind of problematic issues in the hiring process with hiring managers who just aren’t adapting the way that they work. Is there any advice that you’re giving to talent acquisition teams in terms of how they deal with this or is it literally just waiting for that more senior intervention or something dramatic to happen?
Holly Fawcett [00:13:55]:
Yeah, it obviously depends on the culture of the company where if it’s very kind of hierarchical, yes, you kind of need to escalate it. But at the same time, I think a lot of it is in how recruiters and talent acquisition professionals position themselves and their advice and a lot of my consulting work with clients as they are transforming their TA teams into becoming. They all want to move away from the order taker and move into that real talent advisor function. And so hence why we’re putting putting learning practices in place for them to upskill in that way. But the biggest piece of change management that we need to do with those teams when we’re implementing our solution into talent acquisition functions is simply repositioning how TA think of themselves as recruiters. So recruiters are not process owners. Recruiters are leadership enablement function. They are a critical leadership enablement function. And when recruiters think of themselves in that way, they behave very differently. And the behaviors that they need to show up with, with recruit with hiring managers is that I am your peer as a leader, as a leadership enablement function, you’re a people leader, I’m your peer and I’m here to help you make good business decisions. So they need to come armed with data, they need to come armed with insights and they need to challenge hiring managers decisions if they’re making a poor business decision. So ultimately, and a lot of it comes down to a lot of the learning that we have in our platform as well. Ultimately, how the recruiters need to think again for and how they position it is that the customer is not the hiring manager, the customer is the business. And so if the hiring manager is making that poor decision, that’s the point in which they need to say, look, you’re making a bad decision on behalf of our customer, our customer together, which is the company overall. And so whether they escalate it or whether they deal with it, nip it in the bud in that initial Intake meeting or strategy meeting or whatever that might be, or any other intervention with the hiring manager that they have. Ultimately it needs to happen where the hiring manager kind of has to cop on and recognize that they’re making a poor decision for no good reason. And those are the advice that I give to recruiters and to TA professionals is ultimately like, you are like, again, see yourself differently. You are a critical leadership enablement function. Your business is the customer, is the business, not the hiring manager. And when you act accordingly, the hiring manager behaves differently. And ultimately you’ll get different outcomes from that different behavior.
Matt Alder [00:16:34]:
And focusing on the companies who are doing a really good job of all of this, what interesting things are you seeing in terms of how they’re creating an engaging candidate experience in the current circumstances?
Holly Fawcett [00:16:48]:
Oh, that’s a really interesting question. So I tend to find that the companies are doing really well now, tend to have been doing this all along, which is a shame, right? They haven’t just suddenly found the magic pill. They’ve been, they’ve been on the gravy train the whole time. The ones who are doing it really well, they get the customer, they get the candidate, they understand who they are and what they need. So and that kind of comes down to a lot of different kind of product design and everything else. When you understand deeply the motivations, the intentions, the needs and wants of your customer, you build solutions to resolve that. And so the ones who’ve been doing it really well outside of a crisis, their crisis was different. Their crisis was absolutely zero availability of talent who are just wandering around looking for opportunities. They were actively seeking, either graduate or early talent in order to kind of bring them in from a very early generation of people to want and desire to work in their organizations and to keep them for a long time or to take them from existing opportunities. Whether they were a contractor or if they were permanently employed in one of their competitors or similar company doing similar things, they always understood what the candidates needed and they customized and adapted their kind of hand holding of account experience all the way through. So the ones who are doing it well now in a crisis understand the customer at the other end the whole way through, whether it was a crisis or not, in terms of the likes of COVID 19 or a crisis of zero talent availability, ultimately they just got us, they understood what the difference was and built solutions around it. And so again, our advice to talent acquisition teams who are looking to really make an excellent candidate experience and to do this really well in order to secure that talent, our first position has to start with, understanding who it is that we are seeking to employ, who it is that we’re seeking to attract, understand them in advance. Very fundamental in a deep, deep, deep way. Because when you get inside their heads, when you build that empathy with that person, you can build solutions. You understand fully all of the different objections that they might have, and you can build solutions to overcome those objections and to solve for the problems in which they have. When you get it, then the candidate feels, oh my God, they get me. And they really want to join you because they feel that you get me.
Matt Alder [00:19:19]:
So, looking forward to the future. Obviously still very, very difficult to make accurate predictions. But if we look forward towards the end of the end of this year, things are emerging into a new normal. Presumably all companies will be hiring. They might be changing their business model and their focus, but back hiring people. What do you think the implications are from a talent acquisition perspective as we come out of all of this?
Holly Fawcett [00:19:46]:
So again, I’m kind of loath to make predictions also because we don’t even know what’s going to really happen at the end of this month, let alone on the end of the year. What I have seen so far that might give a good indication of what might happen towards the end of the year are the objections towards technology that senior stakeholders or senior leaders in the business. And I say senior from a seniority perspective, not from a generational perspective at all, but definitely, if I take for example a company that my sister works for, which is an insurance and financial broker brokerage firm, it’s a smallish boutique firm which has always been based in an office. Everybody came into the office, everybody had this great culture in the office. Everybody really, you know, they were high performing, they did their work and everybody went home and it was all great and it was a wonderful thing. And then obviously lockdown hits and nobody can come into the office anymore. And there was a such a huge objection because the culture inside the office was so strong. There was an objection in the past to the likes of working from home. There was an objection in the past even of having access to their customer relationship management system, their CRM system, because it was financial information and GDPR and all these other issues. And having remote access to that system as well was also poo pooed for some unknown reason because of, because of other concerns. But now all of a sudden their business model has had to dramatically shift in the space of three weeks to having everything set up where people can work from laptops. First of all, buying enough laptops for everybody to have Rather than have desktop computers, having remote access to the CRM system, having to put it online, having complete remote working, and still being able to build that culture in a remote way and maintain that culture in a remote way. I think those are the types of businesses that are going to see dramatic shifts. Either you get with the program or you’re gone. That’s it. And ultimately that is the dichotomy that businesses face at this point. Whether you’re a small business or a large enterprise. All of those objections around working from home have simply fallen away by the wayside. All of those objections about remote access to databases and to systems in the company have had to fall away because we’re not physically in the building to be able to access those things. Even public services, the civil service and other governmental organizations are having to face the same, those same decisions. Do we allow people to work from home? We have to, because the civil service has to keep going. And yet we’re now providing people with remote access into the government’s data. That’s huge. I’m finding where there will be obviously towards the end of this year, a drama, dramatic cultural shift inside companies who all think all of a sudden, do you know what? Working from home is fine, nothing happened, nothing broke. I mean, hopefully nothing breaks, but nothing broke to the point where it was, you know, where the whole place went up on fire. That didn’t happen. And even having kids in the house was relatively, you know, it was annoying for those who had to also homeschool and entertain 3 year olds running around the house and things like that. But they still got their work done. I trusted my employees, I treated them as adults and I had to lead with trust and that happened and I did that. And look at the good things that have had. So I think obviously there is going to be a massive cultural shift, more so in organizations about how they work. And because they’re changing how they work, I think that will also change how they hire. It might even change the types of people that they hire because they will suddenly allow people to say, yes, I want to work from home. Whereas previously positions that had absolutely zero flexibility of working from home, people who had other commitments or people who did want to have that flexibility option to be able to work from home at least one day a week or possibly 100% of the time wouldn’t have applied for those roles because they were like, sorry, you’re not flexible enough for me. I have commitments outside of the business that I can’t, you know, I can’t make a two hour long commute, I’ve got childcare commit or I’ve got caring commitments of other people or whatever it might be and therefore can’t take on inflexible positions. So if my only vision, I think that will come out of this at the end is that we will be a much more open to the likes of working from home, much more open to flexibility, much more open to trust as well, of remote working. And that will therefore pay huge dividends, I think, to people who wish to work from home. And hopefully what that also means for, you know, if we trickle that out across the entire economy is that people who are employed in rural parts of the world who have access to the Internet will have access to opportunities that would have previously only been available to them if they worked in, if they lived closer to a main city hub. And that is transformative for those communities and also transformative for the companies that employ them because they suddenly have a much bigger access to talent as well that they wouldn’t have had before because they were so needlessly restrictive about you must work in the office, you must work 9 to 5, you must do this, that and the other, etc. I think suddenly we’ll find the people focusing on output over input, trust over authoritarianism or micromanaging, and flexibility over rigidity.
Matt Alder [00:25:25]:
So, final question, remind us what Social Talent’s doing to help people out during this time of crisis.
Holly Fawcett [00:25:31]:
So, great question. We have a couple of different things that we are doing to support recruiters and talent acquisition professionals at this time. If you’ve lost your job because your company has gone into a complete hiring freeze or stopped hiring or even laid off people as well, and you’re one of them, you can apply to have access to the social Talent platform platform to upskill yourself in the best skills that you can as a recruiter for the next three months. So that is completely freely available and is available through our website, socialtown.com if you’re still employed and you’re not on the Socialtown platform as yet, but you still wish to and tips and everything else. We’re rapidly producing short form content to support recruiters through this time and it’s also part of our free resources on our website as well. If you just go to our homepage and click on the free resources section, you’ll get into all of those. So there’ll be a ton of video content around managing remote teams about video interviewing, about online recruiting and other things like that just to get you over the hump in this really weird time. So those are all freely available, and those courses are similarly available in slightly longer form content then as well on the SocialTown platform, if you’ve access to that too.
Matt Alder [00:26:44]:
Holly, thank you very much for talking to me.
Holly Fawcett [00:26:46]:
Thanks Matt.
Matt Alder [00:26:47]:
My thanks to Holly Fawcett. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching 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.recruitingfuture.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.
