Talent acquisition has been forced to change more during 2020 than at any other time in its history as a function. It’s now several months since the pandemic turned everything upside down, and I think it is an important time to reflect on the impact of the changes that have been made and their sustainability into the future.
My guest this week is Himanshu Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at SHL. Himanshu works with talent acquisition leaders all over the world and has vast insights into the challenges they are facing and the changes they are making.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How the pandemic has changed talent acquisition
• The rapid acceleration of adoption recruiting technology
• How candidate experience is changing
• Is the kind of talent employers are looking for changing?
• Identifying the behaviours needed for effective remote working
• How is virtual recruiting impacting quality of hires?
• The importance of using technology that has been built for hiring
• Science and data
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Transcription:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by shl. From talent Acquisition to talent management, SHL has the people insight to help you build a talent strategy that achieves outcomes like increased productivity, internal mobility, engagement and leadership diversity. SHL brings transparent AI technology, decades of trustworthy data science and objectivity to help companies attract, develop and grow the workforce you need to succeed in the digital era. Visit shl.com to learn how you can unlock the full potential of your greatest asset, your people.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 299 of the Recruiting Future podcast. It’s clear that talent acquisition has been forced to change more during this year than at any other time in its history. As a function, it’s now several months since the pandemic turned everything upside down. And I think it’s an important time to reflect on the impact of the changes that have been made and their sustainability into the future. My guest this week is Himanshu Aggarwal, Chief Growth Officer at shl. Himanshu works with talent acquisition leaders from all over the world and has huge insights into the challenges they are facing and the changes they are making. Hi, I’m Anshu and welcome to the podcast.
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:01:54]:
Hi Matt, Nice speaking to you today.
Matt Alder [00:01:56]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:02:01]:
So this is Himansh Aggarwal. I’m the Chief Growth Officer of HSL Group and my job is to work with customers around the world to understand better what their needs are and making sure that the products and solutions meet those needs and we grow with them.
Matt Alder [00:02:17]:
Fantastic stuff. Now I know that as you say, SHL work with customers all around the world. So that I’m sure gives you some really interest think insights into everything that’s happening in terms of how companies recruit in this very unusual year. What are you seeing that’s happening out there? How is the pandemic forced recruitment to change, to transform, to virtualize? And is is that something that’s here to stay?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:02:43]:
Absolutely. No. I think we’re learning every day, you know, you know, organizations as we know globally are dynamic and adopt very quickly and you know, we get the opportunity to look at some of these processes very closely and learn from them and work with them to better them. As we all know, recruitment has steadily seen technology adoption, be it in any aspect of recruiting, be it in sourcing, workflow management, evaluation and Onboarding, what are you seeing in the last few months? Just like every business function has seen is a rapid acceleration of technology. So years of transformation is happening in a matter of weeks. For example, some of our largest IT customers, like Cognizant, for example, has moved their entire campus hiring, which is like about 100,000 candidates being processed in a matter of weeks, completely virtual. Starting from engaging, assessing and using our virtual solutions to interview them. So technology adoption in businesses just in, especially in recruiting in businesses, just become like extremely rapid. Well, of course that brings in the question of sustainability, right, that such guided adoption will it sustain? We strongly believe that this is here to stay. Of course there’ll be some balancing out where some things may not continue to be as aggressive a technology, but most of the changes we see are here to stay. I think the other thing which is changing, Matt, is, is that we are ending up hiring people whom we may never meet six to 12 months in. You may never meet these people, let alone meet them during recruiting. You may never meet them at all or meet them over virtual tours. I think there is this entire need, especially when it comes to recruiting, is to make sure that the candidate experience maintains the elegance of inviting these great people into our spanky offices and also make sure that the technology works seamlessly for the candidates, but also works seamlessly for our hiring managers who need to ensure the quality of the recruits they are doing for the organization over time. So I think that aspect is again evolving with a lot of organizations as they go about recruiting during these pandemic times. Over these last six months, we’ve seen a lot of global customers aggressively adopt synchronous and asynchronous interviewing technology from us and also focus a lot on the experiences candidates have and better insights and love to talk more about it. But one of our largest BPO customers, Concentrix, has been working with us to virtualize their entire recruiting process in 20 countries simultaneously. So the sheer adoption of technology has been like quite mind boggling and exciting for organizations like us, which are continuing to push the envelope when it comes to making recruiting more technology centric, efficient and effective.
Matt Alder [00:05:50]:
That’s really interesting and it’s certainly something that we can dig into a bit later before we do another question. Are you seeing a change in the kind of talent that organizations are looking for?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:06:01]:
So yes and no. So, you know, so there are some organizations, right, which are simply rehiring the talent they lost during the pandemic. So think about like restaurants, retailers, entertainment businesses, they just had to shut shop and they’re now coming back in, in the holiday seasons for the preparing for the festival seasons and just need to go back and hire a lot of people to come back into the premises and service their customers. So those organizations, we haven’t seen a huge lot change. Of course the recruitment processes are changing, but the kind of talent they’re hiring is pretty much the same. While there’s an entirely significant set of businesses which are now starting to change the success profiles, the quote unquote the success profiles they define to accommodate the new working environments, the new working environments, especially working from home, require a different level of discipline, different people management style. And we are seeing organizations coming in and trying to adopt or adapt their success profiles to cater for some of these changes and the kind of talent they need. Just give you an example. We launched what we call the Remote Worker Questionnaire or the rwq. And you’ve seen a lot of our customers really use that instrument to better understand the personality and behaviors you need for people to perform better in remote working environments. And this goes to better insights. And some of these insights are not only being used in recruiting, but also in talent management aspects to be able to give feedback to people to understand how they can do their jobs better in this new reality we have all come to.
Matt Alder [00:07:45]:
And just a quick follow up on that. What aspects does that look at in terms of people working from home? How is that different in terms of skills or approach from working in the office?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:07:58]:
Varies a lot, right? It could be around adaptability, making it, you know, being more comfortable, you know, interacting with colleagues in virtual settings, making sure that you can, you know, so, you know, the work now the home is the workplace and people sometimes don’t appreciate that. So giving people the flexibility they require and to some extent even trying to understand that we aren’t being over demanding on people, especially in this new reality where everyone is in a different state. Keeping in mind all that is happening around us, around adaptability, around flexibility, around how to ensure discipline and productivity without keeping in mind that it’s not your traditional workplace. So a lot of those aspects get tested through this questionnaire and we are able to give people feedback on how they could better engage with both colleagues as well as their teams and make sure that we are adjusting to this new reality.
Matt Alder [00:09:09]:
From the conversations you’re having, are talent managers worried about the impact of virtual recruitment? Are they concerned about the effect on the quality of the talent that they’re bringing on board?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:09:20]:
Yes, they are, I think. Let me just elaborate on that a bit. So as we know there are certain organizations which have continued to scale and grow during the crisis. A lot of our technology companies, the technologies we are using, have continued to scale and grow and continue to recruit because of that, while there are some who are rebuilding their organizations from scratch. And then compounding with the high levels of unemployment in the market, we are seeing the change and we just talked about the change in nature of jobs. So there are multiple aspects playing out here. The growth, the unemployment, as well as the change in the kind of people you need or what you are needing to look for. It’s become very hard for organizations to maintain the same rigor in this new reality of virtual hiring, which they could have done if they were doing the traditional process of hiring. So not only has the hiring gone virtual, but the require required to maintain the same quality of people has gone up. And a lot of our customers, we had these great relationships with the FDSE 100 work with dozens of Fortune 500 companies. And I think we’ve seen a consistent approach to how one can adjust to this new reality. I think first and foremost is we all need to understand that the old process isn’t going to work and we need to recalibrate the process. So it’s not about just adjusting the old process, but it is about thinking through how the process is going to work in this new environment. I think the second, which we consistently recommend to our customers, is ensuring that we enhance candidate experience. It is a very different thing to come into an office, shake a hand, meet your hiring manager versus meeting someone virtually. So your candidate experience becomes foremost and paramount because that is where you could end up losing the best of talent, which decides to drop out of the process because they just don’t enjoy this virtual experience they’re getting with the organization anymore. So that’s become a fundamental part of, you know, this change. And then as you would realize, you know, earlier we would have like series of interviews and we would be able to evaluate a variety of different aspects of people. Now, the same in a virtual environment isn’t as comfortable, isn’t as comfortable for the hiring managers or the candidates. And we are seeing more and more adoption and adaption of our automated assessments, be it cognitive behaviors and skills so that the process remains robust. Organizations can get the right insights without the candidates resorting to an experience which they just don’t enjoy by doing a series of virtual interactions and not learning more. So a lot more adoption and adaption to our assessment technology. Just to give you an example, one of the world’s largest Ride sharing companies is adopting a fairly automated evaluation of cognitive behavior and skills from a tool sets for their entire customer service organization, which goes into the tens of thousands of people. So we are clearly seeing a lot of new adoption to make sure that the process remains rigorous while we while we operate in this virtual environment. Now lastly, what we’ve seen is virtual interview. You have the choice of using some of the typical tools available. But I think more and more we are recommending the customers to use virtual interviewing technologies which is built for hiring. Rather than resorting to a standard video conferencing tool, you might as well use something which has all the bells and whistles. Not only does it have a great candid experience, but all the bells and whistles for a hiring manager to make sure that it is efficient, it is engaging while they are able to maintain the same rigor as they were if they were doing this face to face with people. I think virtual interviewing and using tools which are built for that has been very impactful. We’ve done a lot of work with our global customers on this and the work we’ve done demonstrates the process can be not only effectively virtualized, but it can also drive up the quality of talent you’re recruiting.
Matt Alder [00:13:59]:
That’s really interesting. Have you got any tangible examples of how that happens, how talent quality is improved?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:14:06]:
Absolutely. I’ll give you a very classic example. So anyone who’s run a recruiting process, you talk to any talent acquisition heads. One of the biggest challenges for talent acquisition heads have been how do you ensure that people follow a structure when they interview candidates and are able to collect feedback to the extent that some talent acquisition experts have just given up on the fact that they will ever get qualitative and quantitative feedback on the candidates interviewed by interviewers. Now what’s happening is that this virtualization drive is forcing technology into the interviewing process. And that technology can fundamentally help you solve for structure and feedback quite easily. To give you an example, one of the Fortune 500 aviation majors moved to a synchronous video interviewing technology platform and could effectively leverage a built in structured interviewing product to drive more efficiency in more effective recruiting practices. And they’re rolling this out across the organization. And today the adoption of this rollout is fundamentally better than it would be if this was a non Covid time. So bringing structure and consistency in interviewing is a clear outcome over here. We also see, because the process is changing, as I was just talking about, and bringing in more high quality assessment instruments, we see a lot more adoption of our science backed assessment Tools, be it the OPQ or the motivational questionnaire, MQ and the cognitive and skills. Now these tests are backed by decades of research, science and data and making the life easier for their hiring managers dramatically simpler and help them make more confident decisions because they’re getting feedback from scientifically validated instruments. Again, adoption of these tools is bringing more drive towards consistency and quality in the kind of talent they end up recruiting. And I believe one of the other aspects, again tying back to candidate engagement, which we were just talking about, is that candidates are now today seeing a more consistent experience which is allowing us to ensure that the best quality talent continues to be driven through the system and people don’t drop out of the process. And we are seeing more and more adoption by our customers with this candidate experience and ensuring that they are seeing, you know, consistency in how they interact with the organization going forward.
Matt Alder [00:16:59]:
You mentioned candidate experience a couple of times and it’s obvious that it’s critical in terms of this transformation that we’re seeing in the recruitment process. What are you seeing changing in terms of candidate experience?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:17:12]:
Right, so candidate experience, you know, is, or more broadly the experience people have when they interact with us during a recruitment process is probably the most important factor today in this, you know, quote unquote Twitter world.
Matt Alder [00:17:27]:
Right?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:17:27]:
The 140 character world we have. You know, our millennial talent pool goes, you know, in an, you know, decides if they want to work for an organization based on how they they experience the recruiting process. And this interaction is not like, limited to, you know, our friendly recruiters or hiring managers, but also to all the digital assets which support the same right, career websites, the job requirements, the application process, the assessments, interviewing, technology and so on. And we see that that holds the organizations which have been able to stitch all these together in a consistent and efficient manner end up coming out on top when it comes to this talent war of high quality talent. We have seen our clients and their competitors build solutions with us to exemplify candidate experience and of course keep candidates informed and engaged and ready to sign. What we’ve done is over time, our new initiative, for example, of experiences as a science, give recruiters and hiring managers tools to set up the right experience. Our science and experiences helps recruiters source better focus and scale better. So we are bringing more and more science and technology into the experience aspects so that our customers and recruiters have modern age marketing tools at their disposal in the recruitment environment to ensure that they can engage and keep their clients or candidates consistent through the process and across the finish line.
Matt Alder [00:19:13]:
So final question. What’s next for shl? What’s this year been like? What are your eyes on the future?
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:19:18]:
We have at at SHL welcomed this transformation with open hands and supported by our customers and future clients with best in class technology backed by our science. We have been busy this year launching new products, new tools and technology and I would like to thank my colleagues for the tremendous effort in this unprecedented times. Also univocally thank our clients for the continued trust and support over these troublesome few months. And we are hoping that we’ll continue to drive innovation and science through the recruiting processes for many, many years to come.
Matt Alder [00:19:59]:
Himanshu, thank you very much for talking to me.
Himanshu Aggarwal [00:20:02]:
Thanks Matt.
Matt Alder [00:20:03]:
My thanks to Himanshu. 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 at 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 you’ll join me.s to break down what’s ahead for the year and how to prepare. New episodes of Her Money are released every Wednesday, with bonus episodes every Friday. Check out HerMoney on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you like to listen.
