As regular listeners will know I’m currently mixing podcast content to provide information and insights that are valuable for right now, during the pandemic and insights which will help everyone as we plan for the future. This episode is a right now episode. My guest this week is Gerry Crispin. As many of you will already now Gerry is the co-founder of Career Crossroads, a long-established community for talent acquisition leaders.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What talent acquisition leaders are thinking, planning and doing right now.
• How remote hiring is changing the game
• The pivot from goal-directed behaviour to community-directed behaviour
• Will candidates be making different choices in the future?
• Moving furloughed workers frictionlessly between employers
• The Recruiters Recruiting Recruiters initiative; its aims and code of conduct.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Eightfold. Eightfold delivers the talent intelligence platform, the most effective way for companies to identify promising candidates, reach diversity hiring goals, retain top performers and engage talent. Eightfold’s patented artificial intelligence based platform empowers enterprises to turn talent management into competitive advantage. To find out more, go to www.infold.AI. that’s www.infold.AI.
Matt Alder [00:00:55]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 268 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As regular listeners will know, I’m currently mixing podcast content to provide information and insights that are valuable for right now during the pandemic, and insights which will help everyone as we plan for the future. This episode is a right now episode. My guest this week is Gerry Crispin. As many of you will already know, Gerry is the co founder of Career Crossroads, a long established community for talent acquisition leaders. In the interview, Gerry talks about what TA leaders are thinking, planning and doing right now, what’s essential in the short and medium term, and the launch of a fantastic initiative to help the recruiting industry. Hi Gerry, and welcome to the podcast.
Gerry Crispin [00:01:51]:
Well, thank you Matt. It’s pleasure being here and I absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
Pleasure to have you back on the show as well. For the very few people out there who may not have heard of you or come across your work before, could you just give us a quick introduction and tell us who you are and what you do?
Gerry Crispin [00:02:06]:
Sure. Not, not a problem. I purposely confused things by concentrating on calling myself a student and obviously I’m probably one of the oldest students around. But I love the approach of having more of an attitude of, and reminding myself of being, having an attitude of that kind of curiosity that we all had when we were students. And it reminds us more and more that the world continues to change quickly and there’s very little expertise out there because you’re, you’re dealing with real time and boy, that’s, that is the truth right now. But, but basically for a living what I do is to support a community of talent acquisition leaders. I’ve been doing that for about 20 years. Career Crossroads has been around for 25 years now, this year so, and basically was started in the mid-90s to sort of take a look at how the, the world was changing in recruiting and for the last 15 years focused in, on, on building a community of people who by and large try to help each other succeed. And they’re mainly leaders in large companies. So that’s basically it.
Matt Alder [00:03:32]:
Before we go any further, I just want to timestamp this episode and say that we’re recording on Monday 11 May, because that’s important if people are sort of listening back, back from the future, as it were, in a year’s time. And I still have content from sort of three or four years ago that people, that people listen to with that in mind about where we are and what’s happening. You’re obviously talking to a lot of TA leaders as part of the community that you, that you manage and build. What’s going on in the right now? What, what are, what are they saying? And you know, what’s happening? What are they doing?
Gerry Crispin [00:04:07]:
Well, I think, I think talent acquisition leaders, one way or another, whether they’re part of an existing community like mine or others, they have a true hunger right now for talking to one another about what they’re doing because literally things are changing almost as we speak. And, and most of them have in the last two months been ripped out of the 19th and 20th centuries and, and forced to deal with what’s happening in the 21st century. And you can see it on, on a whole host of different levels. I mean, we, we’ve been talking for years about the digital shift from a recruiting point of view and automation and big data and all of those kinds of things. And we, we’ve had our toes in the water, some companies more than others. But you know, for example, one of the things that actually surprised me was how many jobs were not filled until a hiring manager physically saw the candidate or the final candidates. And as you can imagine, that’s changed a hundred, I mean, totally. So, so right now most of the large companies select any new hires that they have without ever seeing them physically in front of them. And that creates interesting opportunities for hiring managers to get over their needs. It changes the game for the company in terms of how they help the candidate make a decision when the candidates haven’t had the opportunity to come in and meet either the hiring manager or the teams. So it’s just something simple like the shift to video as a, something we did now and again as part of what we did to something we’re doing 100% changes the cultural feel of how we explain who we are, and also incorporates a whole set of decision making around how can we improve our selection process, reduce the time that it takes to get it done, etc. So that’s just one thing. Another thing that we’ve, that I’ve observed in talking to many of the talent acquisition leaders out there is that when they, when they spend time with their teams now, they’re not, they’re not just starting in with, here are the goals for the day or the week or the month. And here, you know, here’s what we need to get done. Rather than focusing in on work. Usually the first half hour or longer of most of these team meetings is now, you know, how are you, how’s your family? How are things where you are? Talk to us about, you know, helping us better understand what the challenges are in your life. Because they may have their kids home and then they’re doing school, they may be complicating things because relatives may have COVID 19 so any number of things exist now that make the emotional and mental set of issues that interfere with getting work done a priority for leadership to address and acknowledge and deal with. And that shifts leadership styles to much more servant leadership than more the authoritarian, you know, let’s get it done. So we’re seeing, I think, significant changes that, that suggest a pivot from, from goal directed behaviors to more community directed behaviors with the assumption that people who belong to communities have higher engagement scores, more motivation to succeed long term. And it goes on and on and on. So I’m seeing very fundamental shifts. I will say that I look at it from a different perspective than a lot of folks. I tend to have been an observer for a long, long time through a number of recessions. And this one feels different in a variety of ways, almost hearkening back to the great depress of 100 years ago in the sense that it could be a long term thing. Number one and two, we’re using words like furlough in ways that I’d never heard it her used so frequently before. And implicit in that definition, which really has no standard definition, is that they’re sending a message. Our employers are sending a message to the workers that they’ve laid off, that we want you back. And to the degree that that’s true, that means that the employers feel a responsibility for the experience that those furloughed workers will have between the time they’ve been laid off and the time they return, in part, if only from a selfish point of view, that that may impact the conversion rate of getting those return. Those are just some of the things that are out there. There’s certainly, certainly a great deal more.
Matt Alder [00:10:23]:
Absolutely. And from what you said there, there’s, there’s so much I want to kind of dig into, dig into a bit deeper. It’s interesting what you said. Because we were, we were talking before I press record about an online conversation that, that you me had back in February, which does feel like a different decade ago. I was writing about intelligent recruiting, the use of data and automation and all this sort of stuff. And you made the very val that many organizations are still stuck or were still stuck in the 19th and 21st century. And you know, that made adoption problematic and slow. As you say, this has turned everything on its head. And from a lot of conversations that I’ve been having with TA leaders, it’s all about embracing these things at very high speed and thinking completely differently. You said that this doesn’t feel like a recession, like any other. What do you think happens as we, as we come out of it, come out of this, or at least establish the way that things work moving forward? Do you think that this sort of behavioral change and different way of thinking is going to stick? Or will people go back to the way that they were behaving and acting before?
Gerry Crispin [00:11:37]:
Well, I’ve had a lot of conversations on this, this topic so far, and I’m sure that we’re going to have a lot of conversations between now and the time we ascertain who’s right. But I think the dependent variable is really the impact that this has on the candidates, not so much the employer. The employer clearly is going to be focused a lot more on the balance of working from home, the use of video and other digital tools, etc. Etc. So there’s, there’s going to be shifts that, that people are talking about, but they’re primarily talking about it from the point of view of one or two stakeholders, the business leader who spends a lot of money on real estate, or the, or the recruiter in terms of how their tools and where they use their tools take place. But, but the real change is whether or not the job seekers, the folks who are the candidates, are going to change in terms of their growing power, if you will, to influence. I mean, we’ve seen it slowly and surely as things like Glassdoor become more important. Why? Because that’s where candidates bitch and moan about the experience that they’ve had. But, but until, until candidates truly believe that they want to work for a company that takes more interest in them as individuals than in abusing their skills and knowledge and experience in return for pay as individuals, they’re going to have to, we’re going to have to see whether or not they collectively, as, as a set, as a group of candidates, make choices differently. And that’s, that is the key. The longer this lasts, the more likely we’re going to shift the values and the weighting on those values that candidates make when they make decisions about who they want to work for. And if, if you start seeing candidates going, well, I looked up how you treated the candidates in this pandemic, and, and that is inconsistent with my values. And there’s no way that I would want to go forward in conversation with you about a job regardless of the money, then you’ve got something different. If you start seeing candidates as a group speaking out in a way that forces the employer to change their practices in order for them to even hire anyone, then you’re going to see some really interesting shifts and changes. So, for example, in the United States, in a couple different hospitals, nurses complained vocally and publicly about their lack of PPE and the lack of safety that should have been taken by the administrators in the hospitals. And some of those nurses were fired in the middle of the pandemic. But what happened was the outcry was such that the employers really had to shift. They had a change. And we found that some of the hospitals that were in the greatest need, but were doing everything that they could to listen to, to engage their employees in a total effort, if you will, were getting volunteers from everywhere coming who wanted to work for that place. And so when we get to a new place, to what extent is safety, health and a community sense of belonging going to be critical for the employer brand, if you will, of, of the kind of companies that will be more and more successful? And that’s only, we’re only going to see that if, in fact, this lasts a little bit longer and we get on the other side. I potentially believe that some new form of union might take place, especially among hourly workers, as they realize a, they’re often essential workers. They don’t have a choice about whether to go to work in a pandemic. They’re, they’re the least paid in our society and the most abused. And as a group, they realize they’ve been pitted against one another and so might, might essentially form much more of a guild kind of approach than, than we’ve ever, than we’ve seen in many, many decades.
Matt Alder [00:17:07]:
I think that’s, that’s really interesting, particularly that aspect around community rethinking work and, and, and how it balances with, with life and fl. So the role of key workers and how are they, how they’re treated. I think it makes for a very sort of dynamic and complex situation because I suppose the simplistic thinking would be around this world would be, well, hang on a minute. We’ve gone from low unemployment in many, many countries to high unemployment literally in a week. Surely that means that employers have the pick of the candidates they want. But thinking about it that way.
Gerry Crispin [00:17:43]:
You would think so, right? You would think so. But the point is, do people still say he. I’m so hungry that food and shelter become the, the critical issue for me, so I’ll take any job and be abused in any way, shape or form. And I, I get that, I do get that. But. But it doesn’t take long before those things, if they’re satisfied, are looking for something a little bit more. And there’s no question that a huge number of workers at every, at every level have been rethinking what it takes for one to, you know, think about a job in relation to a career and a career in relation to their life. And, and more and more, there’s a community feeling in terms of how we help one another, either by neighborhood, by family, by extended colleagues and peers in professions. So you’re seeing a lot of potential for change. Whether or not the change takes place, in my opinion, is. Is going to be thinking about it through the eyes of each of the stakeholders, not just one of them.
Matt Alder [00:19:03]:
Absolutely. I mean, it’s. Yeah, it’s a, It’s a very, It’s a very. It’s a very dynamic. It’s a very dynamic situation. And people are absolutely rethinking their relationship with work all over the world, I’m sure, building on that community aspect. I know that you’ve been part of an initiative that’s been launched to sort of help recruiters during this time. Could you tell us a little bit.
Gerry Crispin [00:19:28]:
A little bit about that? Yeah, it started really about four or five weeks ago, sort of the beginning of April, at the end of March or beginning of April. That’s when the rumors started and I started hearing my members talking about, we can’t go public yet, but in a few days we’re going to lay off 50,000 people or 25,000 or 100,000. And I’m going, holy cow. And we’re, we’re going to furlough them. And so we started thinking about, what, what does that mean? And at the same time, we’re seeing the efforts of probably the most resourced firms starting to cut out all of the middlemen. And basically, companies like CVS and Hilton were having conversations that allowed for some of their furloughed workers literally to move overnight to CVS with a lot of the in between things. Like background checks and a variety of other things dispensed with. Why? Because they’d already taken place in order to get the job with Hilton, so why not just move them over? And so you. You start. You start hearing and seeing that Hilton is creating partnerships one by one with a whole bunch of different companies who may still be hiring in order to help their workers. And CVS in a surge of hiring is looking for partners as well who may be furloughed to make it faster, easier to bring people over in mass without adding to their structures as well. And so I thought, I thought that was absolutely fascinating. It was brilliant on the part of the TA leaders who were thinking that way. And in talking to them, they were. They cared about the people, you know, Hilton wanted to make sure that their furloughed workers were treated well. CVS realized that there may be a time at which in which the surge is over and they could walk back those workers to their previous employer. And those kinds of ideas kind of stimulated a few of us to say, why don’t we see if we could get a bunch of technology people together from some of the larger technology groups and see what could be done collectively in our space? And that did happen. And the employers in the room described to a number of technology folks what good would look like. And many of the technology folks basically said up, we’re already there. We’re already thinking about it. We’re building our own thing. And so it became evident that there were a lot of. Lots of effort going on all over the world, really, to step up ideas. And they range from free event tools to furloughed platforms to whatever. So we realized one of the things we should do is just capture some of the links to some of those bigger platforms that are out there. And the only. The only downside of that is then each employer has to figure out which ones work for whomever. But we also said, what could we do that would be a little bit narrower and might be more focused on a place that would engage people in a way that allowed for them to have a better conversation about what’s going on, maybe even crowdsourcing, which of the platforms work better than others, and so on. And so several technology groups like Smart Recruiters and Great People and several others came together and, and with a number of employers and basically said, let’s, let’s see if we can take care of our own in some way that’s positive. So our own, obviously, are recruiters. Somebody said, recruiters, recruiting recruiters dot com. And we said, oh yeah, that’s, that’s awkward enough that I can’t even say it right and I can’t unhear it in my head. So people will definitely remember that. And because the employers were so concerned about making sure that this was a place that they could recommend to their recruiters that they furloughed, they agreed that there should be a code of conduct that employers would have. So, so embedded in this platform are a couple things. One, all of the employers who are participating have to agree to a code of conduct, which probably the, which is really three things. Setting expectations, delivering on those expectations. And the third is no black hole. And, and then we had to say, okay, well how are we going to know that? And we’re only going to know that if the employee, if the candidates were there will tell us. So we built that part of it into the, into the platform and then we, we decided that all approved employers who agreed to that code of conduct, we would get their jobs for recruiters by scraping their website twice a day, which we’re doing. And so we know that there’s about 300 open jobs among the 300 employers that are approved, many of whom have no jobs for recruiters at this time because they’re laying them off. And we, we also know that there’s a whole bunch of folks who are looking for recruiters and obviously they have to be part of that approved group. And, and we’ve got about, I don’t know, about 4 or 500 now recruiters who are seeking openings, who are now profiling on the website. And we’ve created a directory to guide them to other places like what Accenture has put up and what Phenom has put up and Candidate ID and Intello. And there’s so many different organizations that are trying to step up places where folks can look for a job. But in, in our case, we want to continue to expand the idea of having recruiters potentially crowdsourcing what’s working for them in terms of finding gigs and, or full time jobs. And that’s kind of where we’re at. We’re still sort of launching this out. It was launched last week or a week and a half ago and we hope to continue it for a while. And we also want to get feedback from those who are using it because it’s not about the number of jobs, it’s about the quality of the experience and the ability to communicate and potentially build a little bit more community.
Matt Alder [00:27:45]:
And is this just us based initiative or is it expanding globally?
Gerry Crispin [00:27:50]:
No, no, it’s global Obviously our ability to share information tends to have more US centric groups that are talking about it. But you know, an example is just talking to you and spoke a little bit to Hung Lee last Friday. So we’re continuing to try and and get in our consortium more companies and organizations who either are furloughing workers or looking for recruiters or who have a network and are adding their in, you know, their support to the consortium. So we’d certainly like to add you to the consortium of folks who are supporting the standing up of this as well as everything else that’s out there.
Matt Alder [00:28:50]:
Absolutely. And where can people go to find more information?
Gerry Crispin [00:28:55]:
Recruiters, recruiting recruiters.com and I don’t think.
Matt Alder [00:29:00]:
Anyone will forget that once they’ve heard it once.
Gerry Crispin [00:29:03]:
No, I know, I know.
Matt Alder [00:29:06]:
Gerry, thank you very much for talking to me.
Gerry Crispin [00:29:08]:
It’s my pleasure, really is. Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:29:11]:
My thanks to Gerry Crispin. 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.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.
