Subscribe on Apple Podcasts 

Ep 266: Recruiting Future

Episode 2660

Over the last five and half years, I’ve published nearly 120 hours of podcast content, and I’ve always been very frustrated that there hasn’t been a more effective way to search the archive for specific topics.

Well as of now that’s all changed with the launch of the new recruitingfuture.com website. I know that the vast majority of you subscribe to the show in your podcasting app of choice or via Spotify and that is still the best way to make sure you’re up to date with all the latest content. However, if you want to search the back catalogue for interviews on specific topics including recruiting automation, employer branding, recruitment marketing, recruiting technology and talent acquisition strategy, then it is now super easy to do that on the website at www.recruitingfuture.com.

So on with the show and something a bit different this week. I’m delighted to welcome back the brilliant John Vlastelica from Recruiting Toolbox, but this time rather than me interviewing him he is interviewing me.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Recruiting automation

• A new model for recruitment marketing

• The evolution of talent acquisition

• Talent acquisition leadership

• The importance of specialisation

• The role of the recruiter in the future

• Candidate experience

Here are the podcast episodes I reference in the conversation:

Accelerated Change

The Realities of Recruiting Automation

Programmatic Advertising Explained

Solving Challenges with Technology

Inbound Recruiting

Responding to a Changing Talent Market

Is Assessment Technology Working

The Digital Transformation of Assessment

Rebel Talent

Rebel Ideas

Talent for Digital Transformation

CEOs and Talent Acquisition

Design Thinking

Data-Driven Candidate Experience

Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts

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.attrack. that’s www.attrax.co.uk and Attrax is spelled a double T R A X.

Matt Alder [00:00:55]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 266 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Over the last five and a half years I’ve published nearly 120 hours of podcast content and I’ve always been very frustrated that there hasn’t been a more effective way to search this archive for specific topics. Well, as of now, that’s all changed with the launch of the new recruitingfuture.com website. I know that the vast majority of you subscribe to the show in your podcasting app of choice or via Spotify, and that’s still the best way to make sure you’re up to date with all the latest content. However, if you want to search the back catalog for interviews on specific topics including recruiting automation, employer branding, recruitment marketing, recruiting technology, and talent acquisition strategy, it’s now super easy to do that on the website at www.recruitingfuture.com. so, on with the show and something a bit different this week. I’m delighted to welcome back the brilliant John Vlastelica from Recruiting Toolbox. But this time, rather than me interviewing him, he’s interviewing me. We talk about a range of topics around the future of talent acquisition, including technology, marketing, leadership, change, experience.

John Vlastelica [00:02:30]:
Hi, my name is John Vlastelica with Recruiting Toolbox and Matt. Welcome to your podcast.

Matt Alder [00:02:36]:
Thanks John. A pleasure to be on my own show and always a pleasure to be talking to you.

John Vlastelica [00:02:41]:
I’m super excited to get to interview you. I was checking in on your Recruiting Future podcast and see you’ve delivered over 250 or as I like to say, a quarter of a thousand because it sounds more impressive that way. Quarter of a thousand podcasts to our TA community. So thank you for that. And, and I thought that, you know, through that work you’ve learned so much about real world recruiting best practices, you know, the promises and failures of technology, some leadership do’s and don’ts, the evolving role of recruiters and all kinds of stuff. And I wanted to learn more about what you’ve learned and think the listeners of your podcast would enjoy a bit of a flip as you go from kind of the interviewer to the interviewee. What say you? You up for this?

Matt Alder [00:03:21]:
I’m definitely up for this with, with, with a couple of caveats that I’ve published over 100 now, which is actually more than the whole of the Game of Thrones box set. Basically listen to it in, in one go and I’ve spoken to some amazing people and got some amazing, amazing insights. The two slight problems I suffer from our recency bias. So I tend to, I tend to sort of remember the interviews I’ve done in the last six months. So apologies to anyone brilliant who’s been on the show who, who I kind of might overlook and also too much information. So I’m sure after we fin talking, I’ll be kicking myself that I missed out some amazing insight from a few years ago.

John Vlastelica [00:04:05]:
It’s such a great library. You know, you have so much breadth and depth in there and I hear you. And the good news is we can find all of your podcasts online, so we’ll even reference some podcasts that you maybe think we can point back to to go deeper in some topics as we chat. Does that sound good?

Matt Alder [00:04:21]:
Absolutely.

John Vlastelica [00:04:22]:
Let’s start with technology. You think a lot about technology. You talk to all kinds of TA leaders and vendors and kind of people that are, that are also kind of thinking a lot about technology in the, in the talent space. What, what technology are you most excited about? And, and technology that you might even think is, is underutilized in our industry today.

Matt Alder [00:04:42]:
Yeah, I think there are probably three areas of technology that, that come up the most in conversation that, that I’m, that I’m really interested in looking at and, and also come up in kind of other aspects, other aspects of my work. And I survey for the podcast earlier in the, earlier in the year and these were the sort of aspects of technology that came up. So the first one, which I think is a topic that’s only going to get bigger, is recruiting automation. And whenever I’ve had an episode or spoken to someone about recruiting automation on the show, what’s become really clear is there’s a lot of spin and a lot of hype. There’s a lot of people out there saying that recruiting is already automated and AI is doing, doing all this kind of, you know, amazing, amazing work and getting things done rather than humans. But actually the reality is very different and From a recruitment recruiting automation perspective, we’re really still at the beginning of the journey and I think as, as we kind of navigate the crisis that we’re now with the global pandemic and what’s going to happen next. I think this is an interesting time for recruit recruiting automation. I think a lot of the old arguments around this are null and void. So for an example, a couple of weeks ago I interviewed an HR director called Martin Glover who works for a law firm in Edinburgh in Scotland, which is, which is, which is where I live. And he was talking about the fact that lawyers in the past have never used technology very much or never been keen to use technology very much, particularly things like video technology. But actually the current situation sees them, sees them using that technology all the time. And he felt that moving forward in his approach to talent acquisition he would be looking at more technology, particularly video technology. Because the old argument that the best lawyers don’t use this technology are not interested in it has kind of been overturned. So I think that’s, that’s really interesting. I think a lot of the debate about recruiting automation has been, has been driven by self interest. So recruiters approach it from the aspect of saving their jobs or saving the parts of their jobs that they might really like but could be automated. And vendors already always come in from the aspect of trying to sell their services and automate. Automate as much as they, as much as they can. But I think we’re seeing some interesting stuff. So I think there’s some interesting stuff out there. There’s some interesting examples. This starting to take hold. I’ve done a couple, I’ve done some individual interviews and a couple of special shows on recruiting automation and things like chatbots and automated sourcing and all these kind of things. You know, we’re starting to see them creep in and we’re starting to see some, some quite good examples, if that makes sense.

John Vlastelica [00:07:53]:
Yeah, yeah, I do. And it’s interesting you bring up the kind of coronavirus. I was talking to another TA leader who has about 180 person corporate TA team and she was talking about this also sort of in the same context that, you know, the friend you talked to in Edinburgh there, that, that there’s. This coronavirus has kind of been a forcing function. It’s forcing them to look at things differently and try things that maybe they, they would be open to eventually. But it’s kind of accelerated their interest in trying things, experimenting, you know, being forced to adopt things. And not just that recruiting was resisting, but things that kind of touched the business. They were just being kind of put in a position where they had to try some different things. And so from her perspective, it’s an incredible time for kind of innovation in experimentation, innovation and kind of the way you push this out and drive adoption, which is exciting because the tech is there to do a lot of the automation. But your point, maybe it hasn’t been framed the right way. Maybe people have been a little too hesitant, maybe vendors have been a little too, had too much of a self interest driving it, tried to push it on. But where there’s pain, you know, where there’s pain in a business, I think there’s usually flexibility, there’s opportunity. And that’s, I think one of the potential silver linings of what’s going on now is we’ll see a little bit of that kind of move, you know, move into more of kind of a normal state for us hopefully now and after this. So I think recruiting automation is one area, but I know that there’s a lot of stuff that you think about in kind of the marketing space as well. And I was just going to ask you kind of how you see the marketing world and kind of generally candidate attraction world and how you see that evolving or how you see the technology there kind of being underutilized.

Matt Alder [00:09:28]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and this is an area that’s very close to my heart. My, my, my kind of entire career in the talent acquisition space has, has revolved in some way or other around recruitment marketing and, and employer branding. Before I was a consultant and before I did the podcast, I did 10 years running digital teams in some of the biggest recruitment, recruitment marketing agencies in Europe. So it’s kind of always been very close to my heart and I’ve always been incredibly frustrated by how bad we are at marketing in our industry basically. So I think that when it comes to recruitment, when it comes to recruitment marketing, there’s a real desperate need for people to update their strategies and update their approaches to it. And the map to do this is there. If you look at what’s going on on in digital marketing in, in other industries, you can quite clearly see the technologies and the model that, that are being used. So again, we’re, we’re in a time of evolution or revolution in terms of the way that the people look at stuff. And whilst I don’t think there’s a, I can’t think of a company who’s, who’s, who’s entirely nailed this, there’s been some really good examples of organizations that I’ve Spoken to and I’ll mention some of them, some of them in a second who are doing aspects of this or on a journey towards this. But I think that we need a new model that has its foundation on technology. It’s fueled by content and it’s driven by data. So programmatic advertising, I think is something that has kind of taken off quite slowly in our space. We have programmatic job board advertising, we have companies using programmatic display advertising for things like campus recruitment and stuff like that, but it’s never really accelerated. I found something I wrote the other week about what, what essentially was programmatic advertising. And I wrote it, I wrote it something like five, six, seven, seven years ago and, and it still kind of hasn’t really sort of taken control in our space because not enough people perhaps understand it. I, I, I did a special episode of the show a few weeks ago trying to sort of explain what was going, what was going on. So, so basically advertising that’s very, very strongly tied to are and driven by results is part of it. I think that career sites are probably the most neglected part of the recruitment marketing mix. I think they should be hubs of personalization of optimization and really driven by, really driven by data. And not many companies do that. I’ve interviewed a few on the show. So Mitchells and Butler, most recently Vodafone in the UK not so long ago about how they were implementing careersight systems to add personalization optimization and improve the data that they, that they’re using. Those guys were using a vendor called Attrax to do that, but there are several vendors out there doing the same thing. So I think programmatic advertising, career site systems, but also the real importance of data. What recruitment marketing needs is speed, flexibility and accountability. I’ve done two interviews with various people from the talent intelligence team at Philips. The work they’re doing there is amazing and they’re using, they’re using data science to really underlie their whole approach to talent acquisition in terms of workforce planning and lots of other things. But I think understanding and analyzing the data behind recruitment marketing is a skill that we’re not using in the industry and also something that works throughout the funnel. So a few years ago I did an interview with one of the recruiting recruitment marketing people at HubSpot and they’re doing, they would, they’re doing an amazing job of actually proactively creating content that helps unblock parts of their recruiting funnels based on data that they’re looking at practically in real time. So if they’ve got too many People dropping out of the interview stage, they try and find out why and then they try and address those objections or those issues with, with content almost straight away, you know, and that’s a fantastic approach, but you don’t see very many people, very many people using it. And also, you know, even, even the whole idea of a funnel, is that out of date? Had interview with Elyn Bailey from Intel last year and she was talking about the infinite loop approach to, to recruitment marketing and talent acquisition. So I think recruitment marketing needs a massive overhaul in terms of its sophistication, but the pieces of the jigsaw are out there and there’s some companies who are doing some, some fantastic work.

John Vlastelica [00:14:30]:
Mat you say is the root issue. I mean, the stuff that you’re describing, I can picture if I’m a TA leader, listening to you describe kind of the opportunity. I’m nodding my head. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it. We got, you know, I understand the need for, you know, for kind of the, the opportunity to take advantage of the technology, have the content, get the data and the insights. Why aren’t people implementing this? Like, what’s, what’s the biggest blocker? What are the biggest blockers that are preventing people from doing this? Is it, is it, you know, a lack of, of, you know, leadership around it? Is it, Is it budget? Why wouldn’t people be investing more in this?

Matt Alder [00:15:03]:
I think there’s a number of aspects to it. I think the biggest one is actually round specialization. I think that in many organizations there’s a view that this is something that the TA team can, can do as part of its job or recruiters can be doing at the same time that they’re recruiting and perhaps a, a lack of willingness to invest in, in special resource to make this happen. But, and also I think that sometimes a lot of conferences, people will stand up and talk about this kind of stuff and really oversimplify it, make it sound like it’s something that’s very accessible, that everyone can be doing, but it’s really not. It’s. These are, these are very specialist skills and the employers who are doing this well have invested in either training or headcount or whatever that might be to bring those skills into their team. So I think part of it is a lack of specialist skills and then the other part is just really not necessarily understanding how it can, how it can really sort of drive, drive positive things as part of, a, part of a strategy. So I think it’s having a strategic approach to it rather than treating recruitment, marketing, as a tactical issue, but also having the specialist skills to do this because this isn’t easy, whatever anyone tells you at a conference.

John Vlastelica [00:16:28]:
Right, right. The other I want to ask you about in the technology space was really around assessment, which can be kind of top of funnel, but you know, a lot of middle of funnel area. There’s so many recruiters that are involved in kind of doing the profiling work with a hiring manager, sourcing and then a lot of them, after they kind of present the screened candidate, aren’t that involved in middle of funnel. And I know that different industries, different geographies use assessments differently. I have many clients that would never use any kind of assessment tool and I have some that you can’t get hired without going through a formal assessment. But I’m curious, what kind of opportunities are there kind of technology wise in the assessment space? What are you kind of interested in? And again, what do you think is kind of underutilized?

Matt Alder [00:17:12]:
Yeah, it’s a really interesting area and I was really conscious about 18 months ago that I can’t remember what episode number I was on then, 100 and something or whatever. But I’ve been doing the show for, for a number of years and I was really conscious that I hadn’t actually done. I hadn’t actually sort of put much content out about assessment. I hadn’t done very many interviews about assessment. So I’ve probably really overcompensated for that in the last. I’ve spoken to a lot of people about what’s happening, what’s happening in assessment. I’ve had Bas van der Hattard, who’s the Dutch consultant who kind of really specializes in looking at new and interesting forms of technology being used for assessment. He’s been on the show a couple of times talking about, you know, everything from, you know, assessing micro movements to, you know, all kinds of almost sort of crazy sounding, crazy sounding stuff. Some, some of which he found to be useful and some of which he didn’t. It’s, it’s a kind of, there’s, there’s an interesting. It seems to be with assessment that it sort of polarizes into, into sort of into two areas. So very often when we discuss technology and assessment we really focus on the sort of the bleeding edge stuff that doesn’t have much context and doesn’t necessarily work, but it makes for a great media story. Using micro facial movements to find the best salespeople or whatever that might be. Or we kind of ignore technology altogether and say, no, no, no, this is all about the recruiter’s. Experience or the hiring manager’s experience. And it’s all about humans seeing the potential in humans. So it’s kind bit of a seesaw debate and really where I’m seeing things being the most effective is, is, is where there’s balance. So undoubtedly there’s, there’s a huge amount of things that technology can do brilliantly in, in the assessment space, but then there’s things where humans, things where you can’t, you can’t sort of replace humans. So I had a really interesting conversation with SHL actually a few weeks back now and how they’re, that they’re using, they’re using a kind of a blend of AI and humans to really human capability to really get the best outcomes for the assessments that they’re doing. And I thought that was really interesting and I think the key point that came out of it was it isn’t actually about the type of technology that you use, it’s all about the outcomes that you’re trying to get to and what the balance of human expertise and technology you can mix to get there. So it’s an area full of sensationalism. But I think we’re seeing some really interesting work being being done to, to really kind of work out that conundrum about, you know, how do we select people who are going to perform the best in the role.

John Vlastelica [00:20:07]:
I think you bring up an interesting point there because, you know, a lot of folks, it’s, it’s tempting to, to kind of be drawn to the shiny object. And there’s nothing I love more than going, going to a conference and hearing someone on stage say something that doesn’t sound just derivative of all the other stuff we’ve been doing for 20 years, but instead sounds really innovative and new and interesting. And a lot of it has to do with technology. But tech is a means to an end. And just like the company you said that’s looking at assessment, look at the outcomes, don’t just focus on the tech. We don’t get high fives from the business. If we’re implementing new tech that doesn’t solve a real problem. And a lot of the understanding the problem, as you said earlier, starts with understanding, understanding the data, the insights really, you know, as HubSpot did, take a look at where people are dropping out and then how do we specifically address that? And so I love that that’s maybe a common theme you’re hearing is don’t get too caught up in the technology itself. And even the technology specific technology you select may not be as much of a difference maker as kind of really understanding the problem and being able to measure the outcomes.

Matt Alder [00:21:06]:
Yeah, absolutely.

John Vlastelica [00:21:07]:
I want to evolve our conversation to talk about TA evolutionary little bit. And one of the things that you’ve heard over, over the years you’ve been doing your podcast is this. You’re hearing the evolution take place in talent acquisition. I’d love to hear a little more about what you think kind of needs to change. What do we need to see more of and less of in TA as a function? And as you look at kind of your version of a maturity model and think about where TA is today and where it needs to be, what are the kind of gaps that you’re seeing? What are the biggest areas? One of them we just talked about is kind of, of leveraging technology effectively. What are some other things you see that need to change?

Matt Alder [00:21:44]:
So I think we’re in a period of time now where talent acquisition, talent acquisition strategies, talent acquisition resources, Talent acquisition leadership is going to be under the microscope and scrutinized by companies in a way it’s probably never been done before. So I think in the past we always tend to predict revolution and, and get evolution and, you know, and that, that may well be the, the case here. But, but, but I think that this intense scrutiny may well lead to some, some sort of significant, a significant period of reinvention, if you like. And recessions always do that. You know, obviously we’re not quite sure what the recession that we’re in or we’re about to be in is going to look like or how long, how long it’s going to be last, how long it’s going to last. But, but every time there is a recession, there is a certain amount of, of reinvention in acquisition. Talent acquisition works. So from a, from a leadership perspective, I think that the, the, the TA leaders who are really gonna shine now are the ones who can be credible, brave and effective, an effective part of that scrutiny and also curious about how, how they, how they can do things differently and how they can think differently about what’s going on. So technology is obviously a key area. And thinking strategically about technology, I think is something that would help everyone. I think sometimes as an industry, we’re very driven by the tools, whether that’s new shiny objects that we flock to or legacy technology. That means we have to run recruitment processes in a certain way because we’ve had this tech forever and it kind of makes us do that. So thinking about technology strategically, I think is a, is, is, is, is a big part of this I also think that there, and this has come out from a lot of content I’ve had on, on the show over the last sort of two to three years. Thinking about talent as a whole, I, I think is important and it’s an opportunity to, to maybe reassess how we think about talent. You know, we, we talk a lot about unconscious bias in the recruiting process, but I also bias, you know, people being ruled out of jobs because they’ve had periods of unemployment or they’re too old or someone considers that their skills aren’t transferable enough and all those kind of things. So I think rethinking the whole way that we think about talent I think is really, it’s kind of a really important aspect of this. One of the things that I do with the Recruiting Future podcast is every, you know, every, every sort of few weeks or so I’ll look outside the industry to look interesting ideas from, from thought leaders who have nothing to do with, nothing to do with ta. And three of the ones who sort of just popped into my, my head that I’ve spoken to in the last 12 months. Professor Francesca Gino, who wrote a book called Rebel Talent, which is all about not rule following and recruiting people who don’t, who don’t follow the rules. Matthew Said, who’s very well known in the uk. I’m not quite sure what his international profile is like, but he’s written a really, really, really good book called Rebel Ideas which is all about cognitive diversity in teams. And then the, the one that really sort of pulls this together is an interview I did with Tom Goodwin, who has a very, very high profile on LinkedIn commenting on marketing matters. I think he’s global head of strategy for Zenith. He may have moved jobs since then, but he’s kind of a very well known figure in marketing circles. And he was talking about the, in terms of companies that are being digitally disrupted, which is pretty much every company at the moment. You know, companies who’ve, who’ve not embraced digital operating models are having to, having to do that very quickly or not survive. And he talked about bringing people into the organization with different ideas, with diversity of thinking, you know, who might not necessarily kind of fit in, but actually could drive organizations forward. But he also highlighted the fact that our current recruitment processes would screw those people out before they arrived in the business. Actually, our HR functions actually set up to manage these people. So I think that’s a, I think that’s really, really interesting in terms of the type of talent and the type of skills that companies are going to be looking for in the future? And does talent acquisition and the way it works strategically, does it align to those corporate objectives and actually facilitate that type of talent coming through its processes and thriving once in post?

John Vlastelica [00:26:41]:
It’s really interesting because you’re talking about a lot of, you know, very pre funnel kind of kind of work. You know, the strategy of what is the kind of talent we need, what’s happening in our industry and our company. And I would say a lot of TA leaders aren’t part of those conversations. I’m not even sure those conversations are happening. I get disappointed when I hear a business executive talk about a major shift in the business and they’re not really thinking through the talent opportunity or the talent needs or even just the talent availability. What’s the address, addressable market for that kind of talent? Are you going to find all of those people that are going to, that are going to transform your company? There’s a TA leader I really like who has this saying and I keep repeating it because it just cracks me up. It captures so much the opportunity here. But he started as a new head of TA at a company and immediately in his first week is meeting with all the executive teams and there was a lot of pent up demand for TA leadership and they were asking him what’s your strategy? What’s your talent acquisition strategy? And he responded right away with well, what’s your strategy? You know, what’s your business strategy? What are you trying to do? And then I’ll tell you my strategy because my strategy should come from your strategy. I shouldn’t have this totally separate, running parallel, never intersecting with the business TA strategy. It needs to be part of the business strategy. And I think that’s one of the areas where there is a lot more evolution needed if you’re company’s being disrupted. As you said, Matt, you know, we need to be thinking about the talent angle. Like what’s the talent angle on this? And are we screening out the exact people that we need to transform our business? Are we screening out the very people we need to survive? And I’ve had lots of examples as a consultant and a TA leader where I see people, you know, decide at the high level that they want to hire a different kind of profile. But to your point, they start bringing those people in to interview and they don’t pass the interviews. Right. They’re, they’re not like us, they’re different. And the differences are the things we need. Yeah, yeah.

Matt Alder [00:28:31]:
And I think that’s, it’s interesting as well. Because it kind of, it also throws a light on this disconnect between what CEOs think of in terms of the way talent, you know, should, should, should be looked at in their business and then what actually happens on the ground. And a couple of sort of examples that spring to mind. A couple of years ago I went to a really great conference in India looking at the sort of the future of, future of HR and the future of talent acquisition. And I’ve never seen this at, I’ve never seen this happen at another conference, but they open the conference with two, a panel of two CEOs. These CEOs represented two of the companies in India with the most employees. So these are, these, these are kind of, you know, very legitimate people to, to have. And, and they talked about their expectations from talent acquisition and HR over the, over the next two years. And it was, it was just really interesting to, to kind of watch where the disconnect was. And I’d previously had a conversation with someone sitting next to me who was a TA leader for quite a big company and they were just sort of really frustrated because they didn’t feel they kind of got any senior support in evil, you know, evolution and changing things. And then we kind of watched these, we watched these CEOs talking about their vision for it and they, they sort of turned around to me went but how’s that going to happen? How was that going to happen? And I had a, I interviewed Jerome from Smart Recruiters last, last month and he’s actually written a book aimed at CEOs about talent acquisition and hiring success and really talking about how talent acquisition leaders can empower themselves to get into that conversation in a strategic way. And a lot of that was driven by having the right type of data and being able to deploy that data strategically in those kind of high level conversations. So I think it’s, yeah, it’s, it’s a, interesting area and it’ll be interesting to see how many companies can kind of get on board with that kind of step change of thinking.

John Vlastelica [00:30:37]:
And I think it’s a reframing of the role of a talent acquisition leader to be thinking more holistically. As you said, some of the things we’re talking about, you need to be so much more involved in the planning phase, the kind of pre funnel work and certainly think of yourself and your team is not just filling wrecks. There’s a whole bunch of strategies, strategic work that just kind of sitting there. You know, the, the business I think is wanting us to step into that. So pre Funnel stuff. You know, we talked about middle funnel assessment area. I think that’s, that’s a lot, that’s a black box for a lot of TA leaders. We don’t spend nearly as much time thinking about kind of the assessment space. I think we over index as a profession on, on top of funnel sourcing and kind of forget that middle funnel stuff. And even now the post funnel experience, right, the employee experience to make sure that our, our EVP is actually true, that it’s not a bunch of bullshit, that what we’re promising people in the recruiting phase and the courting phase is actually kind of being delivered afterwards. And even studying retention and particularly in the context of diversity and inclusion is looking at where you’re losing people and making sure you’re building that into your strategies on the attraction side, the marketing side, the content side, all of that. I have a question for you that’s, that’s more around, I guess, influence and a little bit of kind of root cause analysis, which is when you see TA teams evolve. When you hear the stories of the TA leaders that you interview, Matt, are you hearing a lot of that evolution being kind of pulled from the business where the business is saying we have to change and therefore TA is the one kind of reacting to that, that request? Or are you seeing TA leaders that have successfully kind of changed without a business pull, which, which is more common?

Matt Alder [00:32:19]:
I, I think, yeah, interesting question. It’s definitely, it’s definitely a mix. I would say that it’s more common that the business is driving it and they’ve found a TA leader who can, who can champion and really sort of drive through that change. And also the, the DNA of the business matters a lot. So I mentioned HubSpot earlier and that sort of great case study about content through the recruitment funnel. Well, guess what? That’s what their business does. Their marketing software and that’s what their business does. And interestingly, one of my other sort of favorite interviews about sophistication in recruitment marketing was with the TA leader of Salesforce even longer ago, I think it was four years ago. And they were doing some amazing sort of testing around content and segmenting target audiences and all that kind of stuff. You know, guess what, it’s Salesforce again, you know, a company, a company that has marketing technology. So I think the DNA of the business often, often plays a part in it as well. But, but that said, I think, you know, there are some, you know, some really kind of inspirational leaders out there. People, people who are, people who are brave people, are effective but also, you know, that, that whole sense of people being curious, of really wanting to find out what’s going on, going out and gathering evidence and taking that to their leadership teams and saying, you know what, this is absolutely what we, what we have to do and why we, here’s the evidence to support it, here’s how it’s going to, how it’s going to work. So, you know, we, we do. And I’m sure you see TA leaders like that all the time in, in your work. There are some great people out there, but I think a lot is still driven by, you know, the business either either in terms of business objectives or the type of business that it is.

John Vlastelica [00:34:06]:
Yeah. And I think it’ll be interesting, Matt, to see what happens. I mean we, we are definitely, you know, in a recession, economies are not growing right. Right now, they’re shrinking right now. And it’ll be interesting to see, as you said at the start, what kind of things we’re kind of forced to kind of consider changes we’re likely to make technology the way we think about talent. Some of those things might change as a result of this. And so some of it I think is very much driven by business growth and a new profile. It’ll also be interesting to see what kind of TA leadership opportunities exist because of potentially a shrinking situation. We’re not doing as much hiring. Maybe we’re more focused on quality, maybe transferable skills. Maybe diversity becomes more of what we optimize for going forward. You talked about some evolution generally in kind of talent acquisition and we’ve talked about some leadership opportunities. Is there something you’re seeing in the role of the recruiter? If I’m a hands on recruiter, beyond some of the automation opportunities we talked about earlier, are there things that you see changing in my role, what do you think is going to be going away? What do you think is going to be added to my plate?

Matt Alder [00:35:11]:
Yeah, so I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s absolutely, as I said right at the beginning, it’s absolutely inevitable that there’s going to be more automation and more technology driving things. I think we’re seeing more automation in business as a general trend. Companies looking how they can automate processes and things that they do coming out of this crisis. Automation is only predicted to, to increase across businesses and there’s absolutely no way that TA and recruiting are going to be able to have some kind of exemption card. It’s, it’s going to happen. The extent is going to happen and the speed is going to happen are the two question marks. But it’s, it’s, it’s absolutely inevitable and I kind of 100% believe that. So the, the, the kind of the, the recruiter of the, of the future. Very often I ask people the sort of the, you know, the human versus machine question when they come on the show. Can I used to ask it as can, can a recruiter be replaced with an algorithm? And, and I broadly always get a very similar answer which is, well, you know what the technology can deal with repeatable processes and you know, aspects of our, aspects of our work that could be automated should be automated. And that leaves the recruiters free to do the kind of, the more human, the more human things. And I was thinking about well, what are those more human things in the future? So you talked about employer brand and authenticity and all that kind of stuff. So I think the recruiter is the human face of, of the company’s employer brand. Recruiters essentially are there to persuade people to join their businesses. And I can’t see, I can’t see that changing that, that element of persuasion, that, that element of representation, that representation of the brand. I think that’s important. Also. Best recruiters that I’ve worked with and the best recruiters when I’ve been in the recruitment process are the ones who really are the champion of the cast candidate. They’re really promoting the candidates kind of throughout the process. So I think that’s part of it as well, really helping the company stand out and differentiating the experiences. And also as kind of mentioned before in the assessment part of our conversation, providing the human checks and balances to the machines. There are lots of sort of documented examples of AI bias and recruitment automation going horribly wrong, you know, with algorithms optimizing for the wrong things and all that kind of stuff. And it’s kind of really important to have the human recruiters there to stop that, to stop that happening. So I think this is big human driven, brand driven role for recruiters. And then the other aspect of it is what I mentioned already, which is about specialisms and sort of too often in the past I’ve seen seen TA leaders trying to upskill their recruiters in, in lots of different things, which is, which is great. It’s kind of a very sort of noble approach to things. But you can’t be good at everything, you can’t specialize everything to the degree at which we need specialization at the MO at the moment. So, you know, I see roles for marketing specialists, for branding specialists, for content strategy specialists and for data scientists in, in, in the recruiting teams of the, in the recruiting teams of the future. So if as a given, I think it really is about specialization, it’s interesting you say that.

John Vlastelica [00:38:39]:
I’m curious when I, when I talk to hiring managers or my team does, we have focus groups and you ask hiring managers what they want. Most hiring managers want a one stop shop, right? They just want one person they can go to for all of their people needs. I mean they don’t really say I want an HR BP to do everything in HR business partner. But what they’d really like is just one person. One, one person that knows their business, that they trust, that can handle everything. But when you look at building kind of a world class TA function, you know there’s tremendous specialization needed for all the reasons you just stated. One of the things we’re working with a big retailer right now, a big global retailer and they have not had a very strong central programs function. And in the central teams is sometimes where you can afford to put those deep specialists. And what’s interesting as a, as an outcome of not having that is you have all lot of, you know, you don’t have programs, you don’t have central leadership around things. So you have a lot of individual recruiters making up their own stuff or even worse, hiring managers making up their own stuff. You know, hiring managers going completely outside of the norm and just doing it because there’s been a leadership vacuum, there hasn’t been someone leading it. And so just to add a little humor to our conversation here, we have seen hiring managers start their own private university recruiting program, build their own personal career sites, of course, no surprise, build their own interviewing competency models. But we literally had a client where a hiring manager went off and built their own ats because they were not getting leadership from the business. This was an engineering leader. But it just cracks me up. And so this almost ties back to what we said earlier around, you know, the businesses is there’s actually quite a bit of pull from the business for us to step up as TA leaders. And when we don’t step up and we don’t have that deep specialization, especially in a central function, when we kind of focus too much on just generalist or just kind of filling racks, I think the business gets so frustrated that sometimes they take action. And the action might be to outsource you, right, is to go RPO with you. Or it might be to start kind of building a lot of the innovation on their own, building what they need, building the solutions to the problems they have. They certainly aren’t just going to wait around for us to get our act together. The business has to run its business. Right?

Matt Alder [00:40:44]:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve always said, I’ve always said that talent acquisition needs to look at automation and technology and strategy and take ownership before ownership is taken for them, basically, before people make decisions about it. That is so key at the moment because that could happen in many, many organizations as they kind of review all of their business strategically. But picking up on the hiring manager point, just a small point, but, but, but something that I think something that’s interesting and that makes a difference is. So I have a report out at the moment that I co authored with my, my very good friend and co collaborator, Mervyn Dillon, where we just did it. We just did a kind of a small sort of research project on hiring manager relations and combining that with a couple of sort of podcast interviews that I’d done. One, one with you. Actually, the, I think the most interesting thing was, was we asked TA leaders whether they gave hiring managers input into technology decisions, and very, very few of them did. And when I spoke to Mitchells and Butler on the show a few weeks ago, one of the things they did when they put their new ATS in is they acknowledged that they have a small TA team, but actually they have hundreds of hiring managers who use this system. So those hundreds of hiring managers were effectively the users of that system and their needs needed to be. Needed to be heard and taken into account during the whole kind of process of vendor selection and implementation. Otherwise, it just, it was never going to work. And very few companies do that. And I think that’s really interesting.

John Vlastelica [00:42:30]:
Why, why do you think, why do you think the, the, the user, one of the end users isn’t, isn’t their feedback isn’t incorporated, incorporated into the decision?

Matt Alder [00:42:36]:
I don’t know. What would you say? What have you seen in your experience?

John Vlastelica [00:42:42]:
It’s really interesting because I see a lot of assumptions that hiring managers are going to do what we’re going to tell them to do. That it’s almost got a compliance consistency orientation. Like, well, of course they want better reports, so we have to have them do this. And of course we have an interviewing process where we collect feedback. So they have to enter feedback, feedback. And of course a hiring manager has to be the one to, you know, approve their rec and, and, you know, whatever, and that can now be fully automated in the system. So all the stuff that they have pain around that they’re doing manually, maybe we’re just going to put into the system and they’re going to love it. And they’re not really thinking about, you know, the user experience. They’re not really incorporating in the hiring manager feedback. And really they’re automating potentially a shitty process. You know, they’re taking something that already hiring managers don’t like. And you’re just assuming, assuming that we can just improve it by automating it. But the reality is we need to start by looking at the process itself and say, this is a bad process. You know, before we go and automate this, let’s engage the business in the conversation around what are the outcomes. We want reverse engineer to build the right process and then talk about what we should automate and the role of the hiring manager in this system or in this tool. And I think we skip that. I think we just kind of jump to. It’s a compliance issue. We need to force them to do it. So our job is change management. We have a program manager who’s driving it. Or we just automate bad process and just think that somehow the business is going to high five us and applaud us for doing that. But it was so bad to start with. Those are off the top of my head. Those are two things that come to mind that I’ve seen.

Matt Alder [00:44:09]:
So I’ve reverted to type after 45 minutes and started asking you questions. I’ll let you ask some more.

John Vlastelica [00:44:17]:
Yeah, I want to ask a little bit about candidate expectations. And one of the things that’s, you know, it’s really different when you’re in a recession. Obviously, the number of recruiters, the number of recs. We have the capacity to give quality feedback. There’s a lot of challenges still in candidate experience. I don’t think it’s improved nearly as much as I would have thought given all the great technology we have now. In fact, some of it potentially has gotten worse. And I guess I wanted to hear a little bit from your perspective. How has candidate experience become. Become better or worse in the past, you know, X years? And, and what’s to blame? Or. Or what’s. What. What should we give credit to if it’s gotten better? What should we blame if it’s gotten worse?

Matt Alder [00:44:56]:
Yeah, interesting question. I’m. I literally think from episode two of this podcast, I was talking about candidate experience. So it’s a. Candidate experience has been probably one of the most consistent themes that’s gone through all the interviews that, that I’ve done. Has it improved in five years? Is. Yes, it has. And I think a lot of that, I think there’s two things driving that. One, the huge spotlight that’s been on it, been, been placed on it. So you can’t go to a recruiting conference without hearing someone talk about candid experience and how important it is and what, what they’ve done. So I think that’s, that’s, that’s one part of it. But also we have to recognize that our expectations as consumers of the world have grown exponentially. You know, we, we expect to, to be able to do things with, with no friction instantly through mobiles or whatever, whatever that is. And that’s the kind of reality that talent acquisition is working in. So it’s inevitable that the experience will get better to some extent. However, I’m still seeing and hearing about so many bad candidate experiences and there’s so much that hasn’t changed and there is still, still areas, still kind of massive problem areas here and it kind of hasn’t shifted anywhere near as much as you would have expected it to over this five year period.

John Vlastelica [00:46:22]:
Is technology to blame for the fact that it hasn’t gotten, you know, 2x better?

Matt Alder [00:46:27]:
Yeah, good, good question. I think it’s easy to blame technology, it’s easy to blame resources, it’s easy to blame hiring managers which is what most, you know, seems, excuse that seems to happen, that seems to happen quite a lot. But actually it’s all to do with the way that processes are designed and who the stakeholders are in those processes and who those processes have been designed for. So I recently spoke to Scott Birkin who sort of a well known, well known business author and he’s, he’s got a new book out about how design rules the world world. And he looks at, he looks at design and actually spoke to him about candidate experience, design, you know, and he said, the first thing he said is there is this obsession with design thinking. Everyone, everyone’s talking about design thinking but actually not much design doing. So it’s all very well talking about redesigning processes and we’re using design thinking, but it’s like what does that actually, you know, what does that actually look like and what does that actually feel like and how does, does that, how does that actually happen? So he came up with a, he’s not a recruiter, he doesn’t work in the recruitment space. But he came up with a really interesting, you know, he came up with a very interesting suggestion which was, why don’t you do a interview with everyone who has successfully got through your recruitment process and asked them in detail about their candidate experience journey, what was good, what was bad, what, what almost put them off, what, what, what was a real struggle and use that data to input into the redesign of that experience. And I kind of reflected on it and I thought about it, I thought it’s a really simple idea. But I bet, I bet not many companies do it. Lots of people use surveys and scores and NPS and all those kind of things to judge candidate experience effectiveness. But are they actually getting the input from the people who experience it that’s actually usefully going to change, usually going to be able to change it. And I think, I think that was an interesting point. And I think the other thing is it’s about data and data and measurement. I think candidate experience measurement has always been very subjective and very poor. So it’s very difficult to change something if you don’t understand, if you don’t have the data to understand where, where the, where the problems are in that. And had an interesting interview with Wayne Camp, the Dutch E commerce company. And they’ve put in a proper data driven approach to candidate experience. And the first thing that they realized was they were looking at certain aspects of data in complete isolations. They were looking at NPS scores at certain points of the process and making false assumptions about them. And instead they looked at the whole process and they looked at the velocity of candidates moving through that process and sort of combined all the data to get as again going back to the DNA of a business, as an E commerce business would do, combined with that data to really understand it. So I think it’s process, it’s who designs the process, it’s thinking about process, it’s the data. And also some of the technology, particularly the legacy technology, makes it very difficult.

John Vlastelica [00:49:45]:
I agree with everything you said and I would just add, you know, accountability is really lacking. You know, a lot of measurement is done, but there’s nothing, you know, if we’re not measuring our recruiters or hiring managers or companies on the basis of candidate experience and there’s, and there’s, you know, goals and there’s consequences for not meeting those goals. I think it’s really hard to change behavior. It feels like it, it can just become just one of a million other things we’re asking our recruiters to do. You know, make your hiring managers happy, make your candidates happy, get all your data in the system, make sure you’re sourcing, make sure you’re, you know, capturing feedback from everyone, chasing down this information, getting these approvals. There’s so much we ask a recruiter of 2020 to do. And I feel like candidate experience just everyone just kind of nods their head and kind of agrees. It’s an important area to focus on. But I don’t see the same kind of, you know, metrics when we’re evaluating candidates being applied as we do to simple things like, you know, time to fill or hires per month or something like that. So I would say that’s probably another foundational miss in the whole thing. I want to ask as we as we wrap up if I wanted to get a lot so smarter about, you know, recruiting obviously recruiting Future Podcast. Your podcast is fantastic. Are there some other favorite podcasts if I’m a TA leader you’d recommend I I look into, I listen to to go deeper into some of these topics or topics that might influence my thinking. You mentioned digital marketing several times. Getting smarter about just the marketing world as a way to be a better TA leader. What, what do you listen to? What do you love?

Matt Alder [00:51:12]:
Yeah, good question. I I think the first thing to say is all the sort of podcast interviews that I’ve mentioned in our conversation I I’ and put links to links to them in the show notes so people can go back and check them out. So I mean obviously there are a lot of you know, there’s a growing number of podcasts in talent acquisition and I’m I’m sure people will be familiar with, with, with, with many of them. I I suppose my my, my must my must listen guilty pleasure is the, the Chad and Cheese Podcast. I couldn’t not mention them. You know, obviously a great place for breaking news and a very, very different style to to, to my podcast. But but outside love listening to to long form interviews to podcasts that really kind of get to the nub of what’s what the nub of what’s going on. My my absolute podcasting hero is Tim Ferriss and the Tim Ferriss show was the podcast that inspired me to start podcasting. Now he has a very wide selection of guests and, and some of them, some of them may not may not seem very relevant but he had Bob A.R. tiger, the CEO from Disney on a couple of weeks ago and he’ll do an hour, two hour, three hour really in depth interview and I think listening to, listening to long podcasts like that is a great thing to do because it really challenges your mind, it challenges your sense of curiosity. It helps you ask interesting, interesting questions. So I love his podcast. There’s another one called the Knowledge Project by a guy called Shane Parrish which is a very Very similar dial. There are lots and lots and lots of marketing, marketing podcasts out there, you know, which I think, you know, Marketing week have got a great podcast in the, in, in the UK And I think, I think, I think it’s just about being open minded and going out and find, finding things that challenge your thinking. I think podcasting is, is the perfect opportunity to, to do that, to spend, to spend time in another. You know, if I want to go and learn about marketing, I’m going to look at the, the top marketing podcasts and really listen to what, to what people are saying. So I’m probably being reluctant to name specific shows because things move so quickly and I kind of listen, listen back to this in a few weeks and think I should have mentioned that show. But I think generally looking outside the industry and listening to long form podcasts would be, would be my recommendation.

John Vlastelica [00:53:38]:
That’s great. That’s great. I appreciate that. And I appreciate you’re going to put some of the podcasts we’ve mentioned in the notes section as well because I think as I’m hearing you doing this, I was thinking I want to write all these down. So appreciate you doing that. Hey, I want to thank you for this opportunity to kind of switch chairs a little bit and interview you. I’m a huge fan of your podcast, really appreciate everything you do for our profession and I appreciate the kind of deeper insights you’re bringing in, the kind of conversations and the way you approach your podcast.

Matt Alder [00:54:06]:
So thank you for that and thank you, John. Thank you for interviewing interviewing me.

John Vlastelica [00:54:10]:
You’re very welcome. Great to talk to you, Matt.

Matt Alder [00:54:13]:
My thanks to John Vlastelica for being such a great interviewer. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also make sure you follow us on Instagram, but you can find the show by searching for recruiting future. You can also listen and subscribe to the show on Spotify. You can find and search 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 time and I hope you’ll join me.

Related Posts

Recent Podcasts

Ep 736: Trust, Influence & The Future Of Recruitment Marketing
October 11, 2025
Round Up September 2025
October 9, 2025
Ep 735: AI’s Impact On Recruitment Marketing
October 5, 2025

Podcast Categories

instagram default popup image round
Follow Me
502k 100k 3 month ago
Share
We are using cookies to give you the best experience. You can find out more about which cookies we are using or switch them off in privacy settings.
AcceptPrivacy Settings

GDPR

  • Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

By using this website, you agree to our use of cookies. We use cookies to provide you with a great experience and to help our website run effectively.

Please refer to our privacy policy for more details: https://recruitingfuture.com/privacy-policy/