Finding and persuading people with highly specialised skills to make the move and join your organisation is something that remains a big challenge. So how do you build and engage long term pipelines of talent and how is technology changing the way talent engagement works?
My guest this week is Marvin Smith, Enterprise Talent Sourcing Lead at Lockheed Martin. Marvin was one the very first people I saw talk about talent communities and talent engagement and is a genuine expert practitioner in this aspect of talent acquisition.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The recruiting challenges at Lockheed Martin
• Engaging over career lifetimes
• Identifying highly specialised talent pools and building long term segmented pipelines
• What do effective talent communities look like in 2020
• Providing relevant, valuable and extremely personalised content
• The role of technology in talent engagement
• What does the future look like and what tools do we need to develop
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:54]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 288 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Finding and persuading people with highly specialized skills to make a move and join your organization is something that remains a big challenge. So how do you build and engage long term pipelines of talent and how is technology changing the way talent engagement works? My guest this week is Marvin Smith, Enterprise Talent Sourcing Lead at Lockheed Martin. Marvin was one of the very first people I saw talk about talent communities and talent engagement and is a genuine expert practitioner in this aspect of talent acquisition. I’m Arvin and welcome to the podcast.
Marvin Smith [00:01:46]:
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever you are.
Matt Alder [00:01:49]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Marvin Smith [00:01:55]:
I’m involved in talent engagement. I focus on talent sourcing and specialize in engaging talent over a period of time. The team I’m on focuses on finding people that are mapped to the critical skills that Lockheed Martin needs and we try to think about engaging those people over their, their career lifetime. So, so it’s not just a one and done type of conversation. We want to stay connected to these people because we want our organization to be top of mind when they look for another opportunity.
Matt Alder [00:02:38]:
I think I first met you probably about 10 years ago, maybe even longer ago than that and you’re one of the first people that I saw talk practically about talent engagement and, and talent communities and all of that stuff. Before we sort of go into some of the sort of the techniques and things that you are doing now, could you just tell us a little bit about your story and how you got to, got to where you are now?
Marvin Smith [00:03:06]:
Like a lot of things I think in my life I, I’m kind of an accidental tourist on, on this journey. I’ve been in recruiting a long time. I started my, or I, I think I started my 49th year in recruiting a couple of weeks back. So I came out of college and this is all I’ve ever done. So I started in the third party world recruiting, had my own firm had firms with a number of people and then made a transition into, into the corporate world. And, and I think my first realization that something needed to change in the corporate world was just there were things that we had in third party recruiting that had to do with building relationships with people. And I noticed that what was missing in the corporate world was that person that was a specialist in, in the area you might cover that would call and check in every once in a while and just say, what’s the market like? And they weren’t talking about the stock market, they were talking about the career marketplace for them. And we thought of it in those days as kind of a headhunters network or whatever you, whatever you would call it. And the corporate world didn’t have that. And so when I went to Microsoft in the early 2000s, I had an opportunity to experiment with thinking about a network. And in this case it was far enough into the social revolution that we thought about it as being a community. And so taking things that I’d learned in the third party world and as a recruiter and engagement, I began to experiment using the technology of the day that would build relationships with people. So it was about leveraging that technology to better enhance the engagement, if that makes sense. And so that’s how my, that’s how I found on discovered it or got involved with it. It was one of those things where I started at Microsoft as a contractor and as I was transitioning to a full time role, my boss came to me and said, you can either be a full cycle recruiter or you could become a talent sourcer. And he said there are downsides to being a talent sourcer in that we don’t really have a career path for them, but you’re going to be able to continue some work that we had begun looking at an early, an early product called Jobster. I don’t know whether you remember that or not, but it was kind of a precursor of what was to come. And we had begun a pilot with that and we were able to engage people differently, taking what I’d learned in that headhunter network and applying it to what was going on in that community. And so I think the real eye opening piece for me was a recruiter came to me and said, what have you done? He said, I’ve had this job open for a year and a half and suddenly I have two candidates that are the right fit for this job and they’re interviewing with us. What, what kind of magic do you have? I hadn’t a clue. So I went to the folks at Jobster. And I said, what’s going on? Why would, why would this show up? And they talked about search engine optimization. And so I began thinking, well, what is that? How does that work and how do they optimize things? And so that began a pursuit that led me to jobs, to web as a platform and other technologies that I used over the years. So that’s really what, sorry for the long winded way of getting to it. But you know, I think that it’s, it’s one of those, you know, accidental things that, and curiosity, I guess that’s, that’s the thing that kind of drives everything I’ve done. I’m curious about people, I’m curious about how they react in, in certain kinds of circumstances. And, and that led me to trying to find solutions for that, bringing things up to date.
Matt Alder [00:07:55]:
What, what does talent engagement look like now? First of all, talk us through some of the recruiting challenges that you have and then how you’re sort of going about solving those.
Marvin Smith [00:08:06]:
Absolutely. So the recruiting challenges, I work in the defense industry and the defense industry in the United States is very competitive. Requires in a lot of instances the people that we’re working with to be, have clearances, whether they be top secret or, or all the different levels of clearances. So we’re looking for typically a group of people that are, that are, you know, can meet the qualifications for that clearance. And it’s very competitive. When I first came to Lockheed Martin eight years ago, one of my hiring managers told me that this is the toughest recruiting you’ll ever do. And of course, being a little skeptical about that and having a lot of different experiences, I, I sort of in my mind question it. And he said, it’s like this. Within the DC metro area around Washington DC and Virginia and Maryland, there are about 3,000 people that have the highest level of clearance and are software developers that focus on Java and JavaScript. And he said of those 2,500 or 3,000 people, there are 6,000 firms chasing them. And he was right. It is really, it is really interesting. So, and the challenge in the defense industry is it’s, you can’t really buy people, you can’t offer them just more money to make a change. It gets more into the, the motivation of people and the mission and a lot of different things that, that create that opportunity to move. So it is a very challenging area. So when you think about talent engagement, then we’re, we’re faced with, you know, how do you build a relationship with people that virtually with Their clearance, have lifetime employment. If they don’t like the way we work, they can change badges and work for another organization. So we have to kind of drive a way for people to engage with us and show them other kinds of ways to satisfy their career aspirations. So that’s kind of the background. So when we think about talent engagement, it’s really having a conversation and building a relationship with those folks over time. It’s, you know, there’s a lot of different lingo that, that we use in recruiting and the recruiting industry uses to describe those. Those folks. But if you think about it being there’s a pool of talent, you know, in that Washington, D.C. metro area that, that have the right skills that we’re looking for. So my challenge and our challenge is how do we, how do we identify those people and engage with them? And so one of the easiest ways to do that is to think about a talent network. And people call these communities, but that they’re not really a community, they’re just a database. They’re a way that we can engage iteratively with those people. And if you broke out, you know the specifics of that Washington, D.C. software industry by language and by clearance level, then you can have a potentially, what we think of as a pipeline. You can have a segmented group of those folks that you can interact with with. So you’re, you’re basically just subdividing the network. And, and this way you’re, you can be more personalized, you know, about their experiences and so forth. And then if you want to go to the next step was to engage those people and bring them all together in a place so you could bring a person from competitor A, competitor B, competitor C, along with your folks, and you’re appealing to their common affinity, not who they work for, but their profession. And so a community is really built around a segmented profession of people. And so the conversations are different. It’s not about your job with your company. It’s about the industry as a whole and how can we make that industry better? Ten years ago or so, Doug Berg, who founded JobsToWeb, and I were in a conversation and we were doing a little whiteboarding, or in this case, on a napkin. And we were trying to anticipate, okay, where does this go? How do you take these? Basically, we think of it as inbound recruiting, where you’re pushing your jobs into all these different channels of social and so forth and hoping to get the right people to respond to it. How do we engage these folks over time? Because they’re not always going to be looking for a job. The circumstances will change. And how do we find out when they are looking for a job? And we sort of landed on content as being the key to it. Not job content, but non job content. You know, in other words, how can we be relevant and valuable in the content we get to Folks, folks. And so that’s still true today. I think if you want to engage people over the long term, it’s really about how you can be relevant and valuable to them. And in the this era of social, the social mandate I guess is that it’s really about them and not about us. So you, you have to think in terms of that and bring them things that are going to be useful to them over the long term, not the short term. Does that make sense?
Matt Alder [00:14:27]:
Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Could you give us some, I suppose, some kind of examples of the thinking round content? Because I still see far too many organizations thinking that content is job adverts or job adverts that are, that are just job adverts in disguise. What kind of content do you use? What works these days.
Marvin Smith [00:14:49]:
So when we think about non job content, we think about what’s going to be valuable to the audience. So let me give you a couple of different examples. So one of the communities that we have is called Military Connect and it’s for veterans that are transitioning from the military to civilian life. And so if you put yourself in their shoes or their boots, you, you can imagine that a person, if they’ve retired from the military, have put 20 plus years into a whole different world than what the civilian world is going to look like. And so what we offer them is, is an opportunity to learn about the marketplace. Not specifically about Lockheed Martin, but, but about, you know, what’s it like to go through that. And so you start with basically they’re going to have about 90 days once they leave the service to find a job. And so it’s preparing them for that. And we have a group of people that are military relations managers that have been there before. They’re all retired military and they, and I don’t mean retired, they’re, they’re a highly functioning group of people. So it’s not like they’re out the pasture. They are passionate about this cause and this initiative and so they help people make that transition. And so we give them the tools. We created a model around which somebody transitioning will go through and the steps. And then we have online forums and chat and it looks like Facebook online, a place that people can interact Ask questions. And frankly, some of the best content is the content that our military relations managers write in terms of giving them advice. But we bring in content that is from the Muse and from Jobscan and from different places like that, that, that, you know, there are a lot, there’s a lot being written today about how to get a job. And so we, we go through and hand curate the, the information we put in there. So it’s, in that case it’s really about, you know, how do you find a job in a civilian world. Another group that we have community around is called Engineering Connect. And we, we designed this for early career engineers. And so again we have a university relations team or university recruiting team that is, was, were visiting campuses. Now it’s all done virtually of course, but they would, they would strike up relationships with the placement offices and we would have different people on campus that would, you know, be fans I guess of Lockheed Martin. And so we would, we would engage those people. But it’s, you know, we needed something that would last a little longer than that. So we created Engineering Connect and we, we invite the people to, to be part of, part of that experience. And so we have recruiters, we have engineering leaders, we have a number of different stakeholders from Lockheed Martin. And again, we’re not just promoting Lockheed Martin, we’re promoting, this is your, this is your career, you’ve worked hard through the university experience. This is what you can expect. And so we have webinars, we have learning sessions, we have online events, job fairs, that sort of thing for the people that are, that are most active in doing that. And so again it’s an active segment, short time frame in terms of whether they are looking for an internship or looking for their first job in industry. And so that’s really the second kind that we have. And then the third kind is more of a passive audience and that’s cybersecurity. And so we’re working on engaging people over time because one of our biggest products is cyber and one of, and of course that’s everybody’s concern with what goes on in the world. And so we’re trying to build long term engagements those people and it takes a little longer to do that because first of all cyber people don’t want to be online. They’re skeptical of everything. So we found the most success is to talk about a technology, have a, have a webinar about a technology or have our thought leader that we have present about, about something new that we’re doing or something that will educate them in terms of you know, going forward. So that, that’s really the kind of content. So that’s in a community, which is a smaller initiative. We also use that same content in terms of that talent pipeline. So if I have my segment of software engineers, I want to present in content in, in the form of more. Sometimes it’s the newsletter which is explaining, you know, what’s going on out there, you know, recanting something that stack overflow or something did in a survey, perhaps polling them for input, showcasing an article that would resonate with them, that they may not have seen that sort of thing. So it’s not really, it’s, it’s like Red Bull did with the X Games. Red Bull to me has always been brilliant at marketing because they became associated with the X Games through their sponsorship, but they weren’t just a sponsor, they became a citizen of that community. And so if we can do that with, with an affinity with a segment of a, of a talent population, then we’ve really done what needs to be done.
Matt Alder [00:21:22]:
And how do you use technology to support the, the, the, the kind of, the recruiting and the, and the talent engagement that, that you do? What type of technology sits behind everything?
Marvin Smith [00:21:31]:
Just a quick history less. When you and I first met, we were, we were all enthralled with building community and engagement. And you know, we were looking at the technology of the day, which could have been jobs to web. It could have been something from SAP. There were some different vendors doing things like that back then. And I loved inbound recruiting. That’s for me, inbound recruiting is where we’re automating everything. We’re measuring clicks, we’re pushing these job adverts into all the social channels and bringing people in without ever seeing us. And we can drive them right to applying for a position and going from there. And so our recruiters inbox is filled with people. Well, there’s a downside to advertising. What happens if people don’t answer the ad? And so, you know, we’re, we’re capturing the active people. And there was a couple of things that we needed to do. And one, and we discovered this was jobs to web was we really needed a way to iteratively engage people. So everything was built around a funnel, you know, and it’s a transaction. And we used to call it apply and goodbye because people would apply and that was the goal. And then we sort of forgot about them. And so we needed to augment that process. And part of the augmentation was really adding a CRM to that, you know, variety of web crawlers and, and so forth. And so I think the first product on the market that, that did it after job two Web was probably smashfly and you know, a company that grew up around a need and you know, I think have did a great job of, of, you know, great marketing company. I mean they really, they really did a nice job in that area and provided a lot of education for us. So the key to me became the CRM. How can we use this for iterative engagement? And so it’s really about enhancing the inbound with a CRM, but also focusing on what we think of as outbound recruiting. And outbound recruiting is more of, instead of using that magnet of a job or something to pull something in, it’s really taking almost a bullhorn and reaching out to people on a very selective basis to do that. And so the technology for that is a CRM to augment the ats, which is really a transaction kind of a process. And so that is, that takes the forms of email campaigns, you can host live events on it, you can, you know, do a number of different things with that CRM. And then from there it’s, it’s about employee referrals as well. So it’s another way to beef up that outreach, that outbound recruiting is to engage your own employees to tell our story out into the marketplace and invite those people because we’re going after those hard to find Java developers in the D.C. metro Marketplace. And boy, that’s tough because if you think about them, they work in a secure skiff all day. So they don’t really have any access to the outside world. So over the last eight years I’ve seen a number of different creative approaches to this. People rent billboards going into, into, into the, to the workplace and, and they have, they stake out the lunch counters where people go to, to dine for lunch. And they put coffee cups that are branded, they put placemats that branded, they use the radio they use. I’ve even heard of food trucks showing up. I’ve heard of people driving up with an ice cream truck giving it away. And on the, on the stick is, is their brand. I mean if you think back to you know, kind of 10 years ago or so and everything that people were doing in Silicon Valley to capture people, they were doing this in, or have done this in this cleared space. It was, it was like a whole new world that I had not experienced in my, in my career to date. And so it was, it was fascinating to watch. So it really comes down to the tech that’s going to help you facilitate that relationship. And so for me, the cornerstone is more of a CRM than it is going to be the ATS or other things. And then, and we can talk about it a little bit more. There are a lot of interesting tools out there right now that help us better understand the people we’re trying to engage with. And we need to do this in a personalized manner. So we need to understand more about their, their individual likes and dislikes. It’s, it’s, it’s deeper than, than, you know, thinking about marketing Personas or recruiting Personas, which are important to, to understand your target audience. But I think it’s, it comes down to the individual. And so that’s really where I see technology moving forward in talent, engagement, fantastic stuff.
Matt Alder [00:27:42]:
And I think that really ties into my final question, which is about the future. You know, how you see things, how you see things in a year or two years time. And are we moving towards this, this, this kind of much more sort of automated personalized era of recruiting outreach?
Marvin Smith [00:28:01]:
We are and we aren’t. You know, I think we’re living in cognitive dissonance right now and we’re somewhere, you know, we’re, we’re fighting to go back to the way things were. At the same time we realize that things may never be the same again. And, and whatever we call it a new normal or, or whatever is gonna, it’s gonna go forward and you know, it’s, nobody really knows. And, and we’re living in the, the roller coaster of the United States right now anyway. I am. And, and it’s, it’s hard to predict. What I can predict is that the, the technology that I’m seeing that’s intriguing are, is the technology that, that have hap helps us understand the person. So the does. What I’m encouraged about are companies like Crystal knows and HumanTech that are taking, taking the disc survey and saying, okay, this kind of person based on their LinkedIn profile is better communicated using short sentences. And you know, we’ll give you kind of a profile of that individual and how they might respond and those kind of things. You know, if you think back before this, we used nlp and I’m not talking about natural language processing, but neuro linguistic programming to better connect with people over the phone. We use it to better connect with people in an interview. You know, we mirror kind of the, their actions so we can better communicate. Not to manipulate, but just to, to be able to get into their own representational system. And I think that’s that’s what we’re doing now is getting into their brain a little bit more and understanding that. I see companies like human predictions that are just, you know, they’re, they’re working on the signals that people give off before they decide that they’re going to make a move. So they’re, they have an individual, you know, they have individual profiles on people and they connect the social profiles or social information from a variety of sources, aggregate it together and give you their best guess on, on when somebody’s going to move. So that helps on the timing aspects and it’s all really exciting. The downside of all of that isn’t so much protecting the consumer as it is. It seems like everything is built on a LinkedIn profile, the LinkedIn public profile. And so most cases that’s really limited information. And if you’re building something with limited information, you know, how do you really know that you’re connecting with, you know, the right disk, you know, profile, or whether you’re seeing the right signals? I think one of the challenges is, is in the limitation of all of these tools, whether it be seekout or zap info or all these wonderful tools that help us understand more and to better target the people that we’re looking for. They’re all built on and around one thing, and that’s a LinkedIn profile. And Gartner reported a few years ago that more and more technical people were saying less and less about their particular skills. So, you know, we, we, we’re left with some challenges. So for me, you know, I, I think we’re going to see this continual evolution of tools that are going to help us better understand our, our target audience and better understand how we can relate to them. Gonna have to make some improvements on that. There’s probably need more, more information. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s like all the tools that are saying they have AI, you know, they’re, they’re kind of limited now because they’re again, based on a lot of LinkedIn profiles. So I think the thing to remember about AI is, is these tools will make us better. And I’m excited about that. They’ll eliminate some of the, the lesser important parts of our jobs and that’s going to be there. But, but machines can’t substitute for people and, and they can’t solve for things that we don’t understand. So, you know, until we understand more about that individual process and individual, you know, what the individual themselves are going to be looking for and do it in A way that brings value and relevance to them at the same time protects their privacy. That’s where it’s going to go. So I just see a continual evolution of where we’re headed. I see less. I think there’ll be a new generation of ATS out there, and some of them are there right now. I think the biggest challenge of those of us that are in the enterprise, and I’ve been at Microsoft, I was at the Gates foundation, and then here at Lockheed. You know, we need a common tool, right? We need a common platform that will speak to each other, that, you know, every new idea comes out and it costs six or seven figures to use that tool and to integrate it. And it takes time. And when you think about if you want to change tools at the enterprise level, it takes a couple of years to change an ATS or a CRM or something like that. There’s so much planning goes in because none of the tools will work together. So that could be the biggest home run that people have, is how do we do that?
Matt Alder [00:34:34]:
Marvin, thank you very much for talking to me.
Marvin Smith [00:34:36]:
You’re welcome. It was great to get reconnected.
Matt Alder [00:34:39]:
My thanks to Marvin Smith. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify 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 search through all the past episodes@www.on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the podcast. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
