All over the world employers have had remote recruiting and remote onboarding imposed on them. Recruiting has gone through a forced accelerated digital transformation, and it’s now becoming clear that things will never completely go back to the way they were before.
So what should talent acquisition leaders be doing to make this shift a sophisticated strategic revolution to make recruiting better for everyone?
Well, some of the answers can found by learning lessons from digital disruption in other industries.
My guest this week is Arjan Spies. Arjan is taking lessons from e-commerce and applying them to recruiting in innovative ways.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Solving the challenges of remote recruiting
• Automated assessment instead of resumes
• Putting hiring managers through assessments and sharing the results with candidates
• Selling the opportunity remotely.
• Removing human error with technology
• Labour market intelligence and marketing automation
• The challenges of getting culture across in remote onboarding
• The future of work and talent acquisition
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcription:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by smart recruiters.
Matt Alder [00:00:04]:
Smart recruiters offer an enterprise grade talent acquisition suite designed for hiring success. Future Proof your talent acquisition with a modern enterprise platform with everything you need to attract, select and hire the best talent. Over 4000 leading brands like Bosch, IKEA, LinkedIn and Visa Trust smart recruiters to deliver hiring success with them on a global scale. Visit smartrecruiters.com to take the first step on the path to hiring success.
Matt Alder [00:00:56]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 295 of the Recruiting Future PODC. All over the world, employers have had remote recruiting and remote onboarding imposed on them. Recruiting has gone through a forced accelerated digital transformation and it’s now becoming very clear that things will never completely go back to the way they were before. So what should talent acquisition leaders be doing to make this shift a sophisticated strategic revolution to make recruiting better for everyone? Well, some of the answers can be found by learning lessons from digital disruption in other industries. My guest this week is Arjan Spies, head of recruitment@carnext.com Arjan is taking lessons from e commerce and applying them to recruiting in innovative ways, making this a must listen interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
Hi Aryan and welcome to the podcast.
Arjan Spies [00:02:01]:
Hey Matt, how are you doing?
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell.
Matt Alder [00:02:07]:
Us what you do?
Arjan Spies [00:02:08]:
Yeah, sure. Arian Spies, living in the Netherlands. Currently I’m working for Carnext.com as their head of recruitment. So yeah, that’s what I’m doing.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
Carnext has got a really interesting business model. Talk us through what Carnext does.
Arjan Spies [00:02:23]:
Yeah, so if you look at the business model that Carnext has, is that the biggest problem people have acquiring or buying a second hand car, high quality car, is that they don’t know what, what happened to the car when you, when you purchase it. So the fact that what we do is basically get that uncertain element away because we put online the entire service history of the car. Now that getting that emotion out of the way, we try to persuade people to buy a car fully online because basically what you do@carnext.com is you purchase a car online, you know what you buy and it’s get delivered on your doorstep. That’s what we do.
Matt Alder [00:03:12]:
The really interesting thing about about that is if we were talking about this a year ago, my instinct would be, well, you know, that just feels like the wrong way to buy a car. If I, if, if I want to buy a car, I want to, I want to, I want to sit inside it, I want to potentially test drive it. But obviously you’re absolutely right in terms of the data and the history. I might not get that. Now fast forward to where we are in 2020. So we’re in the, in the, in the middle of, in the middle of August and all of our lives have moved online and all of us are doing much more online than ever we thought would possible. And this model now makes perfect sense. Is that kind of a common reaction that you, that you find?
Arjan Spies [00:03:49]:
Yes, yes. Obviously the current situation we all live in around the globe, if you look at what we do to certainly progressed, all of a sudden think about public transportation, people are looking way more on, on different ways of becoming mobile and not having to spend an awful lot of time in, in areas where there are a lot of people. So owning a vehicle or renting a vehicle becomes a, all of a sudden more interesting. We see that in our numbers as well. The big thing is that if you look at, from different age perspective, if I would ask my dad or my uncle, you know, would you buy a car online? They would say, no, no, no, no, I need to touch it, smell it, feel it, I need to drive it. As you said. If I asked my 14 year old daughter, would you buy a car online? She looks at me weird and she goes like, I think that’s a stupid question. Why shouldn’t I buy a car online? I do everything online. And then if you look at our proposition that, you know, we have your 14 day of trial period now, who has ever had a 14 day trial, trial drive, when you go to a dealer or whatever, you know, you drive around for an hour and then you’re done.
Matt Alder [00:05:06]:
Absolutely. And what’s really interesting here is obviously we’ve spent several minutes talking about car buying and that’s not something that the audience podcast is probably expecting. But the point here is, if you haven’t got it already is the parallels to what’s happening in recruitment are really, really, really, really interesting in terms of remote recruiting, remote onboarding, hiring people who you never meet, and doing things in a way that you wouldn’t necessarily have imagined before 2020 started. Talk us through your perspective on that. What’s going on with remote hiring? How does it relate to what you do with cars and what kind of challenges are you having in solving?
Arjan Spies [00:05:47]:
Yeah, so if you, you know, if you think about what we do as a company, that was for me, the main reason to actually join, join the company as their head of recruitment, because there are so many similarities with getting that emotional 1300 kilogram thing in relation to recruitment. Right. And then do it all fully online remote. So for me, in that perspective, recruitment for Carnext will operate in the same way. You know, we will provide full transparency on what we do, who we are and we will give you the best candidate experience because we want to apply the best customer experience. But as said, people have a problem with, okay, how do I test drive? How do I know what’s happened to the car? How now if you bridge that to recruitment, I think that’s where we face a lot of challenges with technology.
Matt Alder [00:06:50]:
Absolutely. Talk us through that. What’s your perspective on how we can solve this and how companies can kind of really embrace remote recruiting and make it work for them?
Arjan Spies [00:07:02]:
First of all, I must admit that I hate resumes because that doesn’t show who an individual is. And it’s the same with a car. Right? You see a picture, it’s not what you think you get. We should be applying way more assessment technology in making sure that not only the company or not only carnext gets a better sense of, hey, who are we acquiring to come and do a job for us or have a career with us or life changing opportunity, but it’s also for the candidate to show, you know, are you really true as, as a fit for us? And I think that’s where we will make the difference in the upcoming weeks, months as we progress. We need to be way more transparent in why shouldn’t I share the assessment results of the hiring manager with a candidate? You know, this is an individual you’re going to be working with. How do you like it? So that is something that we’re currently trialing with a in Carnext.
Matt Alder [00:08:06]:
Talk us through that a little bit more. How does that, what does that actually.
Matt Alder [00:08:09]:
What does that actually look like?
Matt Alder [00:08:10]:
How’s that working in practice?
Arjan Spies [00:08:11]:
Well, you know, what we see on a daily basis is that people say, you know, people don’t leave companies, they leave, they leave their bosses. I fully agree with that. Although sometimes it’s the company as well. So why, why are we as companies, we can ask candidates to complete an assessment, but why can’t candidates ask us to do an assessment? And how that will work is that basically if you have a role as a hiring manager, you need to complete the assessment that we give our candidates so you know what they will go through and we will share with candidates at a certain point in the process that this is the personality traits that your leader has or your potential leader has. What do you think about that? What are the questions you have? Because you need to make these remote decisions today, you know, not only as a company, you make 100k investments ongoing when hiring people. You know, people are also in a position that I need to throw away my old shoes before I actually have tried out the new ones.
Matt Alder [00:09:22]:
That’s absolutely fascinating. And I suppose what’s really interesting about it is we’re looking at a whole new way of thinking about and doing recruitment and. And that really opens up the opportunities to do things differently rather than just sort of taking the same old sort of habits and ways of working and just moving them online. So I guess this is all part of how you sell the business to someone remotely. What other aspects are there that you’re looking at in terms of sort of reinventing the way that this all works?
Arjan Spies [00:09:56]:
Yeah, so you think about digital readiness. Right. If you need to work all remotely. And let me say that the most important thing to do this math is not only did that we get more insights as a company, but if you look at unemployment rising across the globe, people are way up until like seven months ago, people were really, candidates were really like, okay, do I want to work there? And what if I were going to work there? How will it end up? And if you see unemployment rising and yes, there will be rules that remain scarce, people are way more throwing overboard some of their, you know, knockout criteria for companies because I get that, you know, you need a job and you need an income, but at the end of the day, if it’s wrong, you get an income, but it’s not going to be working out in the way you would like to see it working out. And so it’s making sure that we both guide candidates to make the right decision in order to become successful. I think we should apply way more focus on that because everything is as flat as an iPad nowadays. So you can find everything you need to know online.
Matt Alder [00:11:05]:
Let’s talk a little bit more about the role of technology in all of this. What technologies are you finding most useful? What would you like to see developed that would really move things forward in terms of recruiting in 2020 into 2021?
Arjan Spies [00:11:24]:
Oh, I’m a big fan of everything that removes repetitive work, you know, everything that if you think about process automation, if you think about marketing automation, the automated planning, which we can do today, you know, if you think about assessments, you know, if you progress to stage whatever you can, you can automate your assessments in that kind of way. So I’m if I would need to pick out one technology that truly those are two. To be honest. The. The first one that I use on on a daily basis is. Is labor market intelligence. And I do that through various ways. I do that through intelligence group, others out there that have talent, obviously LinkedIn, talent, insights, all that kind of stuff. But. But that’s the kind of technology that I’m using on a daily basis. That, that is one where I base all my foundations on. But. And the other one is marketing automation and because I look at technology usage in a way that E commerce organizations do and the marketing automation together with labor market intelligence that will decide how we basically fill the funnel with the right quality to make sure that we hire the right individual for us as.
Matt Alder [00:12:53]:
A company and talk us through the assessment stage a little bit. What kind of technology are you using for that?
Arjan Spies [00:12:59]:
So if you think about technologies in relation to assessments, there are a lot of cool products out there. If you. If you think about Taylorized gamified game based assessments which, which I love because they’re always language neutral. The current technology I use is QT from Aeon because it has a combination of very old school assessment based for certain roles works perfectly. But they also got these gamified assessments which were really cool on the other side of the spectrum. And the reason why we work with QT right now is because they have so many languages available which we need to have so that we make sure that every candidate who applies at a job can do his or hers assessment in their natural. In their, you know, their native language. So and, and that is automated because you know, we tie it into our ATS and then we say if somebody progresses from stage X to stage Y, it triggers it and the candidate automatically gets the invite to complete and we will not schedule an interview for the next stage if he or she has not completed the assessment. So there’s not an awful lot of reminding in that process potentially. I forgot to mention that I have a supply chain background and I’m always looking at where can it go wrong through human error and can I remove it through technology? One wise leader of which I had in the past says Arjan, you don’t get to pick a technology to solve your problem. You find out what your problem is and see if technology can change it. And I use that on a weekly basis. Where is my problem? Do we have technology that can help us to prevent that error from happening again? And if so then what’s the business case around it and then we’re going to be selling it to our cfo. And I think we should look at different parts of organizations or businesses or pieces of the world how they apply certain technologies. Because we live in this HR tech recruitment tech bubble and we don’t have an eye for what does marketing actually uses? What is E commerce using? What kind of tools and techniques are supply chain people using? I’ve learned so much from that. When I was looking at it into E commerce organizations at my prior job. Is that like why, why aren’t we using that? Because it’s not even needs to be an HR tooling you’re using. It can also be something from a different piece of an organization what you need to use. So I would encourage everybody who listens look around in your organization, talk to people, what they do to either figure out what, what happens with data, how to improve customer service, candidate experience. Because you know customer service is nothing different than candidate experience.
Matt Alder [00:16:06]:
Is there a kind of a specific example you could give us of something that you’ve sort of taken from the, the broader world of E commerce and applied to what you do now?
Arjan Spies [00:16:15]:
Yeah, so when I was, it was about five years ago, six years ago when I was rolling rumbling into this talent acquisition world because I I don’t have a long life history in HR or talent acquisition slash recruitment. When I started to look at at an E commerce organization which we had in our business seven years ago, I noticed they were measuring everything. Everything you know from, from views, clicks, time spent, drop off, that kind of stuff. And up until today I’m still using all what they do on a daily basis. I want to know every single thing that happens on our career page. I want to know every single thing what happens on our adverts, our content, our socials and track that until you are able to track it so that you can re engineer everything to make sure that the quality hires or the hires in general, you know where it happens, you know where it comes from. Ask people why are we asking an NPS score to customers but not the candidates or hiring managers? It becomes more common today, but I think everybody should do it. I just think we’re afraid to hear what potential candidates or hiring managers have to say. When you think about your own service, I’m for one which isn’t afraid because if you don’t ask, you can’t learn. But you know things like NPS in customer service, if you look at sales, how do they measure revenue and that kind of stuff, you know, spend versus we all need to do apply those simple rules in talent acquisition and then you can build the fancy content or the nice campaigns, but then at least you know where to build those campaigns and how to measure it, how effective it is.
Matt Alder [00:18:15]:
Absolutely. So we’ve talked about marketing automation, we’ve talked about assessment, we’ve, we’ve talked about ways that you’re, that you’re selling the, the offer of the job and the company remotely in innovative ways to people. What about onboarding? What’s happening now when you’re sort of bringing in people into the company? When we’re still in this working from or socially distanced period of time.
Arjan Spies [00:18:40]:
Yeah. So onboarding is still one where I think we can, we can improve from, from our perspective. You know, we do our best. You know, we have, we have everything available that we can do. If you think about, you know, the video conferencing tools, the chat tools, whiteboarding tools, learning, etc. But what you still see is that we find it very hard to get culture across. That’s the one in the onboarding phase where you truly, you know, that’s running on your new sneakers and then you say, you know, how are they feeling? And functionally seen. It’s very easy to onboard people. You go through, we go through a very strict set of these are the systems, these are the tools, these are processes, and these are, those are divided into buckets for certain pieces of the business. The one where we struggle is in the first month you see that people really, really are in that functional funnel to people where they talk to. It’s very hard to talk to cross border or cross functional spaces because that’s something that nearly doesn’t happen. And in the old days it was very nice to do that during lunches or office time. You know, you would see, okay, that’s that department, this department, they’re doing that over there. So we’re basically, what we’re currently doing is we already have a lot of teaching teach in going in our organization. So every week we have at least two teach in where everybody can actually do a subject on what they’re either working on or what happens in their part of the business. So we record those teach ins and for all the newcomers, they basically have this entire library now after, what is it, 25 weeks, this entire library of people from various elements of the business talking about what they do, the projects or the functionalities. You know, people and you know, that is just published through the very simple method of Microsoft Teams and Slack. So. But, but I would like to See that, that, that will be the next thing that we will wrap onboarding.
Matt Alder [00:20:54]:
What does the future look like?
Matt Alder [00:20:56]:
I mean, obviously there’s a big kind of ongoing debate at the moment about whether this, of offices for certain types of work and, or whether people will be returning to offices. I suppose working on the assumption that people will return to the office in some way, shape or form for this type of knowledge work that we’re talking about.
Matt Alder [00:21:15]:
What does the future look like?
Matt Alder [00:21:16]:
Do you. What aspects of this new way of working would you hope to retain and what would recruiting look like in two or three years time?
Arjan Spies [00:21:25]:
Obviously that’s kind of hard because I’m very uncertain how we will shape work in the future. Is it office? I think the shaping of work doesn’t have anything to do with offices, but it’s, you know, do we have, how do we shape work? And the way we shape work is going to be determining how we will shape recruitment. I think what will stay for us in recruitment is that I’ve applied and my team applied so much work in making sure that both candidates and hiring managers are comfortable in making decisions in these periods. That is one that I’m very certain for me at least that that will stay because I think that’s the dominant role we currently play as talent acquisition or recruitment is to make sure that both sides of the table are created. We, we create comfort with both the candidate and the hiring managers that they’re making the right hiring decision. That is one that will definitely stay and that is one that I totally believe in the near future needs to be an ongoing thing for improvement.
Matt Alder [00:22:39]:
Ariane, thank you very much for talking to me.
Arjan Spies [00:22:42]:
Yeah, thanks very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:22:45]:
My thanks to Arjan. You can subscribe to this podcast in any 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.recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
