Despite years of discussion and many excellent initiatives to attempt to fix the issue, recruiting still has an experience problem. As talent acquisition leaders around the world re-evaluate their strategies moving forward, incorporating design principles into the reimagining of experiences, services, and processes is something that will bring considerable competitive advantage.
My guest this week is best selling author and speaker, Scott Berkun. I’ve been a fan of Scott’s work for a really long time and his new book “How Design Makes The World” is a fantastic introduction to design principles and thinking. It was great to hear Scott talk about the book and also share his thoughts on fixing the recruiting experience problem.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What makes something well designed and why it is essential not to take things at face value
- Thinking the actual problem you want to solve
- Design thinking versus design doing
- Design principles in organisational and service design
- The mismatch between candidate wants, and recruiter wants
- Applying design knowledge to solve recruiting’s service design issues
- Scott’s favourite story from the book and how it illustrates the hidden forces that often sit behind design choices
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Atrax. Atrax is the total career site system which converts site visitors into high quality job applicants. A fully SaaS system, Atrax is powered by the latest AI to deliver an outstanding and relevant talent experience, personalized employer branding, and a strong conversion of candidates into the ATS. To find out more, go to www.attracks.co.uk. that’s www.attrax.co.uk and Atrax is spelled a double T R A X.
Matt Alder [00:01:02]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 264 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Despite years of discussion and many excellent initiatives to attempt to fix the issue, recruiting still has an experience problem as talent acquisition leaders around the world re evaluate their strategies moving forward, incorporating design princip into the reimagining of experiences, services and processes is something that will bring considerable competitive advantage. My guest this week is best selling author and speaker Scott Berkun. I’ve been a fan of Scott’s work for a really long time and his new book “How Design Makes the World” is a fantastic introduction to design principles and thinking. It’s also a great read. Keep listening to hear Scott talk about the book and also share his thoughts on fixing the recruiting experience problem. Hi Scott and welcome to the podcast.
Scott Berkun [00:02:09]:
Hello. It’s good to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:10]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Scott Berkun [00:02:16]:
Sure. My name is Scott Berkun and I am an author and speaker.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
Fantastic. Now I’ve actually seen you speak once and I’ve read a few of your books and you’ve got kind of a really interesting story about how you became an author and what you write and speak about. So give us a, give us a bit of background, tell us a bit about yourself.
Scott Berkun [00:02:32]:
The short version is I studied computer science and philosophy in college and I got a degree. I got a job very quickly in the tech sector in the early 90s and I worked in the tech sector as a project manager kind of person for about a decade. And then I realized that I had a window of opportunity to try to do something else. If I didn’t do that at the age of 31, I probably would never do it again. I’d be stuck at the same company in the same industry and I would never have lived some other life or had a chance to live some other life. And I’ve always wanted to live an interesting life. So I quit. And the best thing I could come up with to do was to try to be a writer. I’d always wanted to try, never really tried, so I quit. I tried to write a book. I couldn’t find a publisher for it, but I loved the experience enough that I wrote another book called Making Things Happen, about my experience and my advice for managing teams of people and leading projects. And that book happened to do well. And that led me to write another book. Another book. And here I am, eight books later. I’ve made a living from writing and speaking for about 16 years now.
Matt Alder [00:03:32]:
Fantastic stuff. So your latest book is due out in May, and it’s called How Design Makes the World. Tell us. Tell us about the book. What’s the story behind it? Why did you write it?
Scott Berkun [00:03:45]:
I have always been curious about how things are made. It started when I was young. I was just curious. I got into computers young, and I like to take computers apart and how the motherboard works and all these components. I was always curious about how things work. And when I got to college, I studied computer science. But I realized about halfway through that degree that I was a terrible programmer. I was just not that good at programming. I was good at the first half, though, like figuring out how things should work and getting it limping along. But then after that, I was terrible. So I realized I needed to find another way to possibly have a career. And I looked through the course catalog for the whole university and I found this topic called design, where they talked about how you design things, how you design chairs, how you design equipment or user interfaces for software for other people. And I said, I thought that sounds like something I should study. And I started studying it, and I loved it, and I was good at it. And so very early on, I’ve always had this view of the world. Whenever I experience something, it could be walking through a park, it could be getting on an elevator, it could be using a piece of software. I’m always asking questions about why did the people who designed this thing make the choices that they did? That’s always been part of my worldview. And that helped me in my career in the software industry. It helped me as a writer. And I’ve realized over all that time that this view of the world is something that everybody should have some basic understanding about. But for the most part, we go through our lives, we take things at face value. We assume that the way our public transportation system was designed, that’s just the way that it was. We assume that the way airplanes or the mobile phones that we use, everything, we just take them as they come. But we should all have a better set of questions to ask and a better set of knowledge about what makes something well designed and what makes something poorly designed, so we can talk about it and try to help each other and help ourselves make better decisions about the things that we make and the things that we use.
Matt Alder [00:05:40]:
Talk about some of the key topics and key principles you cover in the book. Tell us a bit more about that.
Scott Berkun [00:05:48]:
Well, one problem that if ever you’ve used a bad piece of software or you’ve had some kind of experience that was just really frustrating, which is very common, that usually means that the people who made it didn’t ask the right questions. Now, when you make stuff, any company that makes doors or makes, like I mentioned, mobile phones or makes the pen that you use or the pad that you write on, most organizations when they’re making stuff, they’re really busy. There’s a lot of work to do, and it’s easy to forget thinking about what good design is. So one of the core ideas of the book is that there’s a simple set of questions that most good designers know that are just not commonly discussed on projects where things are made. And the first one, the first important question is very simple. It’s going to sound really obvious, but the first question is, what are you trying to improve? Or if you’re more cynical like I am, or skeptical, you can frame it differently. What problem are you trying to solve? And my job as a team manager, as a project leader, I’d be in lots of meetings where we’re coming up with ideas for what to add to the next version of software. And a lot of discussions would be these really interesting ideas. Oh, we could have this extra button or, oh, we could make this thing search through the database and report these things. And it’s very easy to get lost in ideas and in budgets and in schedules, but you lose the plot. And the plot is, well, wait a second. What problem are we going to solve here? Yes, we could spend $100,000 on this. Yes, we could add these features. Yes, we could have it do that. But what problem would that solve? And that leads to the second question, which is who you’re trying to solve the problem for? We tend to think that when you solve a problem, you design a thing, you make a park or you make a mobile device, that you’re just making it for everybody. Shouldn’t that be easy? Doesn’t everyone have the same needs? We all have two hands. We all have two eyes. But when you start asking the question of who, you realize that a good design for one person might be a bad design for another. Not everybody has two eyes. Not everybody has two arms. A public park is a very different experience for someone who’s carrying a baby or someone who’s walking a dog or someone who’s in a wheelchair. And the same thing is true for a mobile phone. People have different hand sizes. People have different needs, different problems to solve. So by asking those two questions, that’s an easy way in any discussion, in any meeting, in any industry, or even in a household to bring the conversation back to making sure it’s centered on actually solving a problem. What problem we solving and who are we trying to solve it for?
Matt Alder [00:08:13]:
One of the interesting things for me is there’s. There’s. There’s currently a lot of talk in, in our industry, the talent industry, the HR industry, about design thinking and using design thinking. And there’s a bit in your book where you talk about design thinking versus design doing, and that kind of really resonated. Could you. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Scott Berkun [00:08:33]:
So the whole design community has very mixed feelings about this term, design thinking. On the one hand, it’s a. The most popular term that attempts to give respect to the fact that designers, professional designers, the good ones, are good at making decisions and making good things. We like that. Where we’re frustrated, though, is the way design thinking is taught. It’s often offered as this very simple playbook that you just ask a bunch of questions, you iterate, and then you deliver stuff. And it tends to be a very simplified, oversimplified view of what good designers do. And so when I make the joke in the book about design thinking versus design doing, the fact that you understand the process that a designer uses, that they like to study how people work, they brainstorm and develop different alternatives, and they test those things and they iterate or they repeat. That’s great. And you can understand that. But understanding that process doesn’t mean that you’re good at it. So the joke I make in the book is this hasn’t become popular yet, but you could popularize an idea for surgeon thinking. Like surgeons, well, there’s a process they use for deciding what operation to do, and a process they use for sterilizing, and a process they use for making an incision. But the fact that, you know, the abstract process doesn’t mean that you should be doing surgery on anybody. You need a lot of experience with that process. Before you’re really good at designing things. And so that that notion that you can just quickly interpret and reuse a set of philosophies or attitudes from one discipline and just shove it into another, like HR recruiting is likely to lead to mistakes. Now that said, though, I have a lot of my own experiences with being acquired to use the right lingo and to being recruited. And I think that there’s fantastic things that can be applied from design knowledge to those processes. If you wanted me to go in there.
Matt Alder [00:10:29]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I really want to kind of hear your thoughts on that. Before we do, though, just give us a kind of an introduction into how these design principles apply to organizations. And they aren’t just about products and architecture and all that sort of stuff.
Scott Berkun [00:10:44]:
Well, sure. I think that design applies to everything. So if you work on a team that’s working on a project, well, someone picked who’s on that team. That’s an active design, that’s an act of organizational design, of deciding who has the right skills and which groups of people have the right chemistry. And then there’s another kind of design which is just the design of leadership, the design of a project. What are the project goals? What’s the project budget? What things are we attempting to do? We’re going to make a list of temptations we want to avoid that are going to come up, which is in my part, in the project management parlance, those are non goals. You’re saying these are things we could be tempted by. But I want to make sure that we don’t fall into those traps. So I’m going to list those out. Those are all, to me, a kind of design task. You’re designing a team and you’re designing a project to try to make it set up to have certain outcomes. And I think I get this question a lot because of this book of design. The world, like design, is handbags and fashion. Okay, fine, there’s interface design, but the world isn’t designed. And I go, well, yeah, it is. Except for nature. Everything you use every day, there was someone or a team of people that made it. Whether that’s an organization, whether that’s the, the interior design of your offices and who design where the elevators are, or now that everyone’s at home, someone design your bathroom, someone designed the layout of your kitchen. Everything was designed. And either it was designed well or not. So these things I think apply, apply everywhere.
Matt Alder [00:12:07]:
So let’s talk about the design of the process of acquiring talent. Where do you think people are going wrong? What do they need to think about how can we make it better? Because across the board, it’s a problem for lots of employers.
Scott Berkun [00:12:22]:
Yeah. So the, there’s many, many different kinds of. From the world of professional designers, that view of the world. There’s a label for every kind of design and talent acquisition and recruiting would be called a kind of service design. Service design means anytime there’s a service being offered or provided. That could be service at a restaurant, that could be how well served you are at a hospital, how long you have to wait in the waiting room, how many forms they ask you to fill out, that’s all called service design. And when I think of recruiting and talent acquisition, that’s a kind of service design. And the conflict often in service design is between the needs of the customer and the needs of the person or the organization providing the service. And so recruiting, in my world, at least my old world, the tech world, recruiting has a bad reputation because recruiters often reach out to you because their job is to try to find talent. They reach out to people who don’t want to be recruited. They have a good job, they don’t want to be annoyed. And so they get a lot of email from recruiters, often that is pulled from a huge database. It’s not very accurate. And the kind of jobs that are being offered set up the person who gets that email to be just recruiting is bad. Recruiting is terrible. I don’t want to reply to this. I don’t want to see that. Except for the one in 100 times that it’s a match and the offer from the recruiter matches just happens to be a person who’s looking for a job. So that service experience, there’s tension between what the, what the recruiter wants and what the people they’re trying to acquire want. That mismatch is something that has to be handled carefully, that you have to find a way for someone to improve the likelihood that they’re going to get better service from a recruiter. I get recruiting messages on LinkedIn every now and then and they’re often super generic. And there’s often no way for me to add that information to say, look, I don’t, I only want to hear from you if it’s job type A, B or C. If ever you reach out to me for D or E, F, I’m going to block you. There’s no way for me to give that feedback. So it becomes a very dumb. The experience on the, on the, on the recruit E side is often. This is a very dumb, not very intelligent process where I, as someone who’s being offered a service, have, have no way to help improve it. So that’s a simple one. And there’s I, maybe this is, you’re on the cutting edge of this. Maybe that’s something that’s being done now or people are experimenting with it. But every recruiting message I’ve ever seen makes me think they really didn’t do that much work to try to optimize to have their hit rate be better. And that sets up the expectation now for recruiting and the perception of that whole field to be diminished.
Matt Alder [00:15:01]:
I’d love to say that it’s a problem that’s been solved or a problem that’s being addressed widely. It isn’t. There are, however, companies doing great things, recruiters doing great things, technology providers, trying to sort of the tension within that and kind of solve that problem. But typically, as you say, these systems are designed within companies with the intention of getting talent into their organization. There may be multiple stakeholders between line managers and talent teams and HR and whatever. And kind of really struck me reading the, reading the book that none of this is actually designed with the recruitee in mind, as it were. Now a lot of companies are trying to change that and trying to make their candidate experience better, which is where the design thinking thing comes in. How should they be thinking? What should they be doing? What kind of considerations should they have if they want to design a service that really works for everyone?
Scott Berkun [00:16:04]:
Well, the first answer will sound like a cop out, but I think it’s true. The first answer would be to hire a designer, to hire someone who has experience designing services and has dealt with these reasonable challenges or trade offs of the needs of having high volume outreach because you need high volume to get enough hits with those needs that organizations have, but at the same time providing those services in a way that diminishes the friction or frustration it creates in the people you’re trying to contact. There are people who do this for a living and you can hire them as a consultant. You don’t need to have them do the whole thing for you. But having someone experienced in designing these things involved would be my number one recommendation or at minimum to go find a good book on service design. There are quite a few. If you go to Amazon, search for service design and quotes to make sure that you’re restricting the search right, you’ll find a bunch of good books that are short, that help frame the problem in a way that is going to have higher odds of success. That’s my delayed answer because you need to read a book to get that answer. My more short term answer is if you’re a recruiter and you had a successful recruit, all the people who made it all the way through, they responded to the email they got or the LinkedIn note and they make it all the way through is to have a 20 minute interview with them after about what the best parts of that experience were like and what the parts of that experience that they thought could be improved were like. Those are people who succeeded, so they made it all the way through. You want information from them about how they’re different from the people who reject and who don’t make it through. You want information about what allowed them to make it through that process. And also since it’s fresh in their mind, they just walk through all those emails and all those responses, which things they thought were the most frustrating. And some of those frustrating things are going to be hard to resolve, but some of them might be easy to resolve. Just the way emails are worded or how frequently they were contacted. There’s going to be all little bits of information you’re going to get from those interviews, which don’t take that much time, that you can’t get anywhere else. If you don’t get that information directly from your users, you’re going to be guessing. And guessing is a bad way to run a business. That data is there. You just have to give someone an Amazon or Starbucks gift card, hey, can I talk to you for 20 minutes? And to get your feedback what the experience was like, that’s something that’s available to everybody. But very few organizations have a good program for doing that. They often send out surveys and surveys don’t give you, they give you a very flat kind of information because a survey is biased towards whatever questions you put in the survey. But if you actually talk to people, talk to your customers and listen, you’re not, you’re not trying to poke, not trying to push them towards certain answers. You just want to listen to them. You’re going to get the customer’s view of what your process was like, the customer view of what your experience was like. And yes, if you’re interviewing, that means you can’t write a report that says, we talk with, here’s a survey from 400 people. But those little specific stories you get are going to give you way more information about how to improve things than those surveys probably will.
Matt Alder [00:19:06]:
There are so many great stories in the book, some of which illustrate the point that you, that you’re, that you’re just making what’s one of the favorite stories that you, that you found and put in the book to sort of bring. Bring all this kind stuff to life.
Scott Berkun [00:19:20]:
One of my favorite stories, it was a story that I came along in early in the research for the book, is about the town of Missoula, Montana in the United States. And it’s a small town. It’s probably about 50,000 people today when the city was founded. If you visit the city today, which most of you, most of you listening won’t do, but if you go to Google Maps and search for Missoula, Montana, you’ll see that the city grid in the city is really strange. That the core city grid is a grid, it’s rectilinear, but it’s connected to another city grid that’s rotated by 45 degrees. It looks completely mad. It looks like someone was an evil genius and wanted to torture people and designed a city grid that was half rotated 45 degrees. Because that means now that half the city has five way or six way intersections, which no one wants. And when I came along this map, I thought, that can’t be real. There has to be some really strange story for what happened. And the story of what happened, in short, was before the city was that well developed. This is the 1860s. There were two landowners, and these two landowners had different ideas for how the city should be designed. And the two landowners didn’t agree. They went for years promoting their own design and layout for the city. And eventually one of those landowners, through political machinations and his influence, was able to get his plan to be the primary one. But they never went back and relayed out the other half of the city. So when the city was fully grown, it inherited this model. That’s a broken design. It’s a design that causes more accidents. It’s a design that causes more confusion. And why is it badly designed? This is a great lesson for organizations and websites. You come along, this is a terrible design. How could this have happened? Well, in the case of Missoula, Montana, it was two powerful people who couldn’t get along. And that lesson gets played out over and over again in different aspects of ordinary life. If you use a product that was a merger between two different organizations, there’s a whole bunch of engineering and visual and functional decisions that are now the collision of two different views of the world. In the book, I extend that even further. If you look at the maps where you have borders between countries that are always at war in the Middle east, or India and Pakistan, and there’s this sort of innocent question of why these places always at war. And then you read the history of who designed those borders and what the constraints were, the reasons were for how they made those choices. And I think once you have that lens now you have a way to think about anything you deal with in life that was frustrating or unpleasant or more proactively in your own work. You can start to see early on that a political disagreement or one team leader who really doesn’t get along with the other team leader that’s going to ripple through and create all kinds of low quality decisions. And that in a way, politics and team organizations and team dynamics and the leadership skill of reducing the impact of those things is central to, to how the experience the essential to creating the quality or low quality of all the things that we experience in life. That’s probably what, that’s probably one of my favorite stories. I think about it all the time.
Matt Alder [00:22:34]:
Fantastic stuff. And so I suppose, final, final question because I could talk to you about this for hours because there were so, so many good examples in the book and I found it really interesting, really interesting to read. But I’m guessing it’s probably better if people, if people read it themselves. So read the book.
Scott Berkun [00:22:50]:
Read the book.
Matt Alder [00:22:51]:
Tell us where, where can people find, where can people connect with and find your work?
Scott Berkun [00:22:58]:
My name is Scott Berkun and that’s my name everywhere. So scottburken.com is my website. I am Berkun on Twitter. The book is called How Design Makes the World. If you do a Google, Bing or any kind of search, you’ll find it. It’ll be for sale starting May 5th on Amazon in digital and print. It’s up for pre order right now with a whole bunch of early reviews and some other details about the background of the book.
Matt Alder [00:23:20]:
Let’s go. Thank you very much for joining me.
Scott Berkun [00:23:22]:
You’re welcome. It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:23:24]:
My thanks to Scott Berkun. 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. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find all the past episodes@www.dotrfpodcast.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.
