The seismic shocks of 2020 continue to come hard and fast and are undoubtedly driving a dramatic change in focus for talent acquisition teams all over the world. So how are talent acquisition leaders dealing with this and what are their key points of focus as we move forward?
My guest this week is Annie Rihn, VP of Recruiting at Zillow. In our conversation, Annie talks about the pivoting and prioritising Zillow is currently undertaking in talent acquisition and gives her thoughts on what the future might look like
In the interview, we discuss:
• Pivoting and prioritising
• Listening, learning and taking action against racism
• Developing approaches to internal mobility
• The importance of candidate experience
• The scale and sustainability of virtual hiring and onboarding
• Building a virtual culture
• Optimising the recruiting technology tech stack
• Employer Brand
• Measuring the metrics that matter
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:02:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 273 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The seismic shocks of 2020 continue to come hard and fast and are undoubtedly driving a dramatic change in focus for talent acquisition teams all over the world. So how are talent acquisition leaders dealing with this and what are their key points as we move forward? My guest this week is Annie Rihn, VP of Recruiting at Zillow. In our conversation, Annie talks about the pivoting and prioritizing Zillow is currently undertaking in talent acquisition and gives her thoughts on what the future might look like. Hi Annie and welcome to the podcast.
Annie Rihn [00:02:52]:
Hi Matt. Thank you. I’m really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:56]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you.
Annie Rihn [00:03:02]:
Absolutely. I joined Zillow, believe it or not, a little over 15 years ago and I was early in my career. I was a recruiter back then, about three years into my recruiting career and I had this incredible opportunity. It was a friend of a friend, old school networking and Zillow was pre launch, pre business model, pre brand, pre everything. They just had a vision back then that they wanted to disrupt an industry and empower consumers and they also knew that culture, HR recruiting, that having a strong people function was incredibly important. And the leaders knew that from their days at Expedia and at Microsoft. So I joined in and fast forward, 15 years later I’m here, I’m the head of recruiting and recruiting’s all things recruiting, programs, operations, centralized recruiting, sourcing, all the things related to recruiting. We’ve got about 160 people all over America and it’s just been a real privilege and honor to be part of this journey from the very beginning and certainly here in a leadership capacity just with everything going on with relation with everything going on in the world right now with COVID with racial injustice and just certainly as we’re reimagining the future of, the future of recruiting is an opportunity right now. I’m just, I’m thrilled to, to be able to be able to lead some of this work and, and share some of that with you today.
Matt Alder [00:04:41]:
Absolutely. And we’re going to talk in a moment about some of the, the unique and incredibly difficult challenges that that 2020 has, has, has thrown up. Before we do though, I just want to. It’d be interesting to sort of know a little bit more about how the recruiting challenges have years and the sort of challenges that you were facing up to the current situation.
Annie Rihn [00:05:03]:
Yes. Goodness. I mean, it’s interesting. There’s so many ways to think about that question. I’d say certainly in the early days the challenges were always how do you differentiate yourself, your experience, your brand to candidates when you may not have the money, resources or brand as you’re growing, hiring engineers kind of growing at scale. So certainly those were some of our early challenges. Now fast forward. I think the challenges that we’re facing right now are how do we truly examine what we have amidst all of this with COVID and figure out how we really redesign. Use this time now to experiment to optimize this virtual interviewing, virtual onboarding and really optimize for that. Take these learnings and then carrying it forward to building the future. And we did slow down, Matt. So my CEO made a very early kind of proclamation to our business and very, very decisively so that our priorities are to our employees and they’re to our customers. And because of that we’re going to be prudent and wise. We’re going to dramatically slow down in hiring. We now imagine this huge engine, massive engine, hiring thousands of people a year, 600 plus openings at any given time for at least for our business, and then shifting that back just to some handful of critical roles. So we pivoted and prioritized again, focusing on some of these critical positions, which is great. But it’s allowed our team now to focus on a few things. Project work that’s always been very important that perhaps we hadn’t gotten a chance to get to. We’ve also created this cool thing called Project Pitch in where we have about 40% of my team right now is working across the business in other teams. And frankly, I think this is actually super cool map because it’s allowing my team to have an opportunity. We have a very. Which I’m happy to chat more about if you’re interested. To. Our mobility is a very, very important strategy, I think a huge competitive advantage for an organization to have a strong, robust mobility function. But this Project Pitch in is actually kind of a neat way to test out almost like a temp model, like can you flex workers in sort of shorter term, you know, shorter term capacity across the business? So, so we’re experimenting with all that. And so that’s what’s going on on the work side. And then obviously there’s. There’s all the things on. On the team side as well that, that we’re really trying to do to, you know, to. To lean into our, our employees too.
Matt Alder [00:07:58]:
There are so many things I really want to kind of dig into there, but talk us through a little bit more how it’s affecting your team and, and. And how you’re responding to that.
Annie Rihn [00:08:07]:
Matt, people are, I mean, people are suffering right now, and there is an immense amount of pain and challenges that have been presented through Covid. But then also with you know, just the racial injustice that has. Is very sadly so. But I think much, much needed to rise to the surface, to a place now where, you know, we, we as an organization have made a very firm commitment to our employees and to our community that racism has no home here. And that we are going to listen, we are going to learn, we’re going to take action, we’re going to do more than being allies and really, really with the support of our black community and our other communities of color and underrepresented communities, really elevating our work and leveraging the power we have to do good in our community. There’s a lot there, but there’s just a lot of listening, a lot of learning and really creating a safe space, I think is most important for our employees to feel like they have the support they need and that they’re being heard. And then there’s Covid. My goodness, there’s so much just unique situation there’s not a one sort of a one approach to say, oh, we’re doing this one thing. I think a lot of it is this understanding that we can create some minimal best practices to help optimize and support our team to work from home. But then the unique needs, because some people are alone in their apartments, some people are struggling with mental health challenges, some people have single parents with children or dual working parents with children and a host of unique situations. And we have to, you know, we have to be there to address those needs one on one. And honestly, my main focus aside, what I shared before. Yes, I’m very, very interested and excited about this opportunity for future of team, this new sort of candidate experience, how we elevate and build the future of all these things. And I want to, you know, I want to lead and be on the forefront of that. But right now my focus is my team. My focus is my team and really taking care of my team.
Matt Alder [00:10:31]:
Absolutely. I can completely understand. I can completely understand that. Just coming back to the mobility thing, I think that’s a really interesting response to the situation. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and is that likely to be something that comes into the way that the company works long term moving forward?
Annie Rihn [00:10:52]:
It’s an interesting one. So mobility has been one of our top three sources of hire for the past several years, and we’re continuing to make investments. We actually have a team, a dedicated team. We have mobility recruiters, and, you know, we’re trying to elevate right now a big focus and strategy is leveraging the technology that we have. So not just the resources to focus on the employee experience, frankly, to make it even better, it should be at a minimum, equal, if not better than our external experience. You know, ideally both of them are really best in class. But I always find that quite paradoxical that people’s internal mobility practices aren’t nearly as good as their external ones, which is always just a head scratcher to me, just from a retention and development perspective. But to your question is, where do I think this can go, one we’re going to leverage? I think where I was going before is with the technology, with workday, there’s so much you can do with skills inventory and starting to do skills mapping and really leveraging our employees, contributing all their information, knowledge and skills in a way so that the team, the mobility team, can go in and unleash that knowledge to help make connections across the organization for two things, full time, as we’ve been doing, and really elevate those Opportunities by having more access to skills and experiences and things that aren’t necessarily manifesting in their current role. Maybe experiences they have from previous experiences or volunteering or additional supplemental work or education. Their current manager often doesn’t even know that. So we have to leverage our technology there. But this project pitch is really an interesting one from a workforce planning perspective. We all know there’s ebbs and flows in business and the old reflexology is to just to say, great, go hire somebody else, go get an external temp and then we spend all that money, time and resource to go ramp up these new external resources. And why, you know, can we say that we have fully optimized and leveraged the talent that we have right in our own employee base, either in a temp capacity or in a full time capacity. And I think our work, our work is to examine both of those and to try to optimize for both of those as well. And so I think the short answer is we’re going to experiment now with Project Pitch in and we’re going to continue to carry this forward until we are back up at full, full speed with 6, 700 plus openings. I will continue to ensure that my team is working across the business because for them, people, people want to be productive. Even though productivity is this like very complex, complex notion right now it looks different, it feels different than it used to. But people want, when they can, they want to be doing meaningful work, they want to be developing, they want to be adding value. And it’s our job as employers to help create those opportunities for them. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Matt Alder [00:14:05]:
So focusing on the, the way that talent acquisition has, has had to, has had to change. What are your views on the scale and sustainability of virtual hiring and onboarding and what does that mean for the candidate experience? I suppose both now and in the future.
Annie Rihn [00:14:24]:
Yeah, such a good question. You know, we are, I don’t know, I don’t know quite yet. What we’re doing is we’re going to, we’re listening, we’re learning, we’re experimenting and we are not going to draw a line in the sand and build our sort of new best practice quite yet. So I think I had shared before, we have this project real briefly, it’s, we’re calling it Reimagine and this is going to be a six month journey for us as we start to build an experiment with our full candidate experience. But we’re going to, as part of that reimagine, we’re going to really Put the candidate, the new hire experience, at the center of that design. We’re going to look at all those critical junctures that a candidate has, and we’re going to examine those closely and say, how do we want people to feel? What impression do we want to leave them with in those critical moments? And then we’re going to. We’re going to build from that. But it’s working so far. Look, the data showing us, the surveys are showing us that, you know, quantitatively and qualitatively that virtual interviewing and virtual onboarding is working. But the question is how? You know, we can scale this, Matt, but can we sustain it? And, you know, there’s another piece here too, which is you can bring people in, like the mechanics around it. You can get those pieces to work well in a virtual experience. The difference is that for those of us that have been working inside an organization, we have a foundation built of trust of this knowledge. We broke bread together, so to speak. We’ve had coffee, we’ve sat across each other from rooms. We know how to assume good intent. We know what people mean. Because we’re not just building these relationships off of what people write in Slack or how they show up in email or frankly, how they show up in one tiny little square in the middle of a zoom call. We have that, and these new hires come in and don’t. So building this virtual vibrant culture is so, so important. Almost as important as, you know, the candidate experience is the work is really thinking about the culture. And this all ties together because if we hire people and we’re conveying a message and it’s kind of, we can chat about this more sort of the evp, the brand, but like, what we want to convey to people, we have to deliver that experience to them. That truth to them needs to carry through. And, you know, we’re hearing from new hires like, yes, you did a great job. It works well. Onboarding was great. Recruiting process was great. But here they are as an employee and they’re trying to figure out their space in this virtual world, in this new company and make their way. And we’ve really got to be mindful about that whole journey from candidate through the employee experience recruiting. We can’t just stop and say at the point of onboarding now it’s HR’s job and the business’s job to go sort of figure out how to retain them and make them feel good. It’s all of our job to keep that experience really cohesive and just being really mindful for the whole thing.
Matt Alder [00:17:58]:
You’ve mentioned technology a few times in the conversation so far. Tell us more about how recruiting technology is helping, helping your business at the moment. And are you sort of fast tracking any additions to your, to your tech stack? What’s your strategy at the moment?
Annie Rihn [00:18:15]:
Yeah, our goal is to try to not reinvent the wheel, so to speak. And so I don’t want to solve our problems with technology. I want to optimize the technology we have. And as we go through this reimagine journey, we very well may find out that we have some big gaps, we may find out that we have opportunities, and certainly we will consider bringing in something very strategic. If it solves a problem that we can’t solve ourselves through leveraging our existing technologies, we will do it. But the things right now, the obvious stuff that I think most people need to optimize for is for scheduling. Certainly the virtual interviewing, we use Blue jeans, some people use Zoom. Whatever they’re using, is it working effectively? And then specifically for tech, you know, whiteboarding, tech whiteboarding, you know, is that working as well? And what portals are they using? You know, if you’re using Google Draw, if you’re using HackerRank, you know, we’ve got some different ones, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna keep working on that. But I do think that it’s just the virtual interviewing piece is gonna be big and then there’s like quite honestly a whole separate, whole separate topic of conversation around not just the tech stack, but it’s also, how do we ensure that the interviewing process is fair and equitable, especially if we have one that’s, or if a company chooses to do something hybrid where maybe it has you net sort of post Covid with something that has a little bit of an in person experience, maybe a little bit of a virtual experience. The reality is we will move more virtual in our interviewing whether or not we go all virtual. These are decisions we haven’t made yet. But I have to make sure that no matter who goes through the process, the rubric for decision making, the interviewing tools we have and the way we’re assessing talent also needs to be re examined and needs to have a lens of equity on it.
Matt Alder [00:20:31]:
You mentioned employer branding earlier and it would be great to sort of dig into that a bit more now. I mean, how, how is everything that’s sort of happening in 2020 affecting your approach to employer brand and is that likely to be a long lasting change for you?
Annie Rihn [00:20:47]:
Yeah, employer brand is, is everything. I mean, employees are employer brand and the most powerful voice and proof point that we have is our employee brand, it’s our people. And, and right now, like our focus is, you know, unleashing the ability for our employees to tell the stories and be able to speak their truth and tell the stories about our company. And that is our, that’s our employer brand. So we’re doubling down. We are very, very fortunate. You know, when I have an opportunity, I always say thank you to our leaders for allowing us, you know, to really make investments. We have a small team that we’ve, you know, we didn’t have this before, we have it now. And just having that wisdom, those voices in the room to really help us elevate our thinking has just been such a gift and so incredible for us. So look, the pandemic right now and what’s going on with racial injustice, everything is impacting employer brand, short and long terms. And it’s also more than anything too, it’s an opportunity to really create trust and pride within employees and even that extends out to our customers. So, you know, I’ll just say short, you know, short is that it is absolutely, you know, one of our number one focus. And you know, as part of that reimagine, we’re continuing to make sure that our employees are front and center of that, of that experience, of that design. And you know, if I were to give someone, you know, a tangible takeaway from this, I would say, you know, your employee brand needs to be crisp, it needs to be consistent, it needs to be hard hitting, it needs to be authentic and it needs to be conveying your truth. And if you can’t deliver on that promise, you know, that’s where you’re going to fail as a business. And don’t rush it. Right. I think a lot of companies, I see people wanting to be the first out the door with their sort of proclamation of, you know, X company, we stand for this. And if you, if that isn’t true and your employees don’t feel that that’s true and you can’t carry that message forward in a sustainable way, it’s a very, that’s a, it’s risky. So I would say be thoughtful, be intentional, go, go do the work and come up with something that, that is authentic to you and your business and ideally can differentiate you, but something you’ve got to be able to stand behind and really make that part of your DNA.
Matt Alder [00:23:31]:
Looking ahead to the future. You’ve, you’ve talked about your, your reimagining projects. It’s very, very difficult to predict what’s going to what’s going to happen and what things will look like. But what do you think is going to be important in talent acquisition moving forward and what might be different in terms of the way that, that businesses approach 2021?
Annie Rihn [00:23:56]:
I think it’s sort of how maybe it’s the how we are approaching it might change is that we are going to maybe as part of reimagine and just part of, you know, the overall sort of strategy of how we think about it is really through the lens of almost sort of in the spirit of co designing it with our candidates and with our employees in mind at sort of the center of that experience. And it’s interesting, I was sort of reflecting back on, you know, what was the soup du jour, so to speak with you know, employer brands or TA strategy. And you know, it was all about, you know, let’s, we got to keep up with the Joneses. We got to have our, you know, we have to have our perks and, and people just leveled the playing field. That was just a minimum point of entry, you know, having ping pong tables. And I’m drawing some broad brush generalizations here but you know, what I’m trying to say with sort of the perks and all the benefits, but now I think it’s moving more to a place of even going beyond personalization and sort of taking the candidate experience and leveling that up to I would actually say like, like humanity, like deep humanization and having that be at the center. So it’s not just companies telling employees what they need, but it’s really employees and candidates telling companies what they need. And we’ve got to, we have to rebuild and sort of rethink and re examine, you know, all of it, our whole, our whole TA sort of function and experience and even our metrics, right, even the metrics that matter, like what how are we holding our teams accountable? What are we measuring them on? What really matters? And certainly, you know, for us at Zillow, you know, we’ve, and we could do a whole other podcast on this, Matt, but like our work on diversity and the commitments we’ve made and we’ve been on this journey for a while and we’ve got some really, really cool things we’re doing that are leader led, recruiter facilitated deep partnerships that we’re doing there. And for me it’s making that work part of our daily practice that’s a priority. We’re going to continue that work. The humanization piece is key. And then I think it’s going to Be certainly where we started this conversation around optimizing a virtual environment. I don’t think companies are going to swing a pendulum. Some will, but I think most will probably net out in a hybrid environment. That’s what we’re hearing. That’s what I’m hearing from when I talk to my peers is probably, you know, folks want to come in some days, they want to have more flexibility. Flexibility is going to be key. And I think being able to engineer this backs into your question, Matt, is that you’re thinking about from ta perspective. Our interviewing process has to support that nuance, has to do it in a way that provides a fair and equitable experience for our candid and one that they walk away feeling good and they can be champions of your brand no matter how that journey ends for them.
Matt Alder [00:27:15]:
Tell me more about the metrics that matter and what you measure.
Annie Rihn [00:27:19]:
So we still, Matt, we of course still care about what I’ll call the more traditional metrics, which would be time and stage is still important. You know, the overall conversion rates, you know, we still look at those and care about those. I think maybe I should have taken a step back to frame up that what I’m most important and most interested in is what are the variables and metrics and behaviors that are in our control. And I actually, you know, over years of thinking about metrics that matter, I realized a lot of metrics that recruiting leaders and teams are held accountable to are actually things that are out of their control and it ends up driving the wrong behaviors. And I, I know, you know what I mean. It produces like infighting and unnecessary competition and not doing what’s right for the business and the candidate. So we care very, very, very much about the experience. I want people to walk away with a positive experience. And we have by design set up our recruiting org so that people have lower rec loads, they can deliver a higher touch, more personalized experience and one that communication is at the center. So all that being said is the metrics that matter most to me are connections, candidate connections. When, how? In a consistent way. So the team has certain metrics that they’re held accountable to that we engage at those critical junctures, critical touch points around interview screening, follow up, having best practices specifically set for what’s an email, what’s a phone call and how we do that, the quality and the content of that conversation. Those are the metrics that matter to me most. And I think our team really, really appreciates it. One, because it’s something that’s in their control and two, is because it’s the right thing to do. And if you do all those things well and you optimize for your conversion rates and optimize for time and stage and remove barriers where you can based on that data, you’re going to end up with the right amount of hires. If you focus on the means, you get the right end. I think some companies just they put these goals in place, like number of hires, but that actually doesn’t in and of itself doesn’t incent and drive the right behavior. So net Net is connections with candidates are are really one of, I think one of the most important metrics that matter.
Matt Alder [00:30:03]:
Annie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Annie Rihn [00:30:05]:
My pleasure, my pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:30:09]:
My thanks to Annie Rihn. 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 search and find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
