In previous episodes of the show, we’ve talked about the reinvention of talent acquisition and what it takes to be world-class. Behind any significant reinvention lies a transformation process of people, practices and purpose. So how are employers approaching recruiting transformation and what is the best way to ensure success.
My guest this week is Diane Circo, Head of Talent Acquisition at Siemens US. Siemens has been executing a significant transformation in talent acquisition, and Diane has valuable insights to share about co-creation, innovation and technology.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The drivers behind recruiting transformation at Siemens
• Automating repetitive and transactional work
• Design thinking in delivery excellence
• Opportunity and urgency in 2020
• Using technology to reimagine the hiring manager process
• The importance of a robust well-segmented tech stack
• Why candidate experience is now critical
• Innovations and the future
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Avature ats, an applicant tracking system that redefines user experience for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers. Just listen to one of the many ways in which L’Oreal USA has improved their hiring process with Avature, as told by Edward Dias, Director of Recruitment, Intelligence and Innovation.
Matt Alder [00:00:25]:
Since we’ve been using Avature ATS globally, we have been able to massively improve our communication rate with candidates during and following their application. Before, over a million people worldwide would never get contacted, but with the smart optimization and flexible processes, we’ve been able to change that and that’s been a huge achievement.
Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
Visit avature.net that’s a V A T U R E.net to learn why global market leaders like L’Oreal choose Avature to extend the candidate experience. From shoulder taps to first day.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 307 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In previous episodes of the show we’ve talked about the reinvention of talent acquisition and what it takes to be world class. Behind any significant reinvention lies a transformation process of people, practices and purpose. So how are employers approaching recruiting transformation and what’s the best way to ensure success? My guest this week is Diane Circo, Head of Talent Acquisition at Siemens US. Siemens has been executing a significant transformation in talent acquisition and Diane has valuable insights to share about co creation, innovation and technology. Hi Diane and welcome to the podcast.
Diane Circo [00:02:18]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:19]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Diane Circo [00:02:25]:
I’d be happy to, very, very happy to be here with you. So my name is Diane Circo. I’m the Head of Talent Acquisition for Siemens us. Siemens actually has a very large footprint in the United States. The team that I lead supports our core businesses, smart infrastructure and digital industries, as well as Siemens financial services and our corporate functions and a few other groups sprinkled in there as well. The team that I lead, we’re about 45 people strong. We have 30 recruiters which we call Talent Acquisition partners. We, we have eight candidate experience specialists and these are folks who handle interview scheduling and pre boarding and anything and everything that has to do with creating a great experience for our candidates. And I have a handful of amazing TA managers and support staff. I myself have been in TA for about 23 years and this profession keeps me young. It has never Failed to keep me on my toes, especially this past year.
Matt Alder [00:03:23]:
I can imagine, I can absolutely imagine. So as you said, Siemens is a large organization. Tell us a bit more about the sort of specific recruiting challenges that your team face.
Diane Circo [00:03:35]:
Yeah, you know, I think our challenges are similar to many large companies and maybe even some smaller or mid sized companies. Historically high hiring volume. I guess that’s more of a pre Covid statement these days. Right. But we are hoping for things to normalize again soon. Intense competition for top talent, especially digital talent. Siemens is undergoing a digital transformation, you know, for ourselves and we are helping our customers through theirs. So the focus on digital talent is more intense than it ever has been. We also are dealing with rapidly changing market conditions. Some of them today are inspired by Covid and some other things going on in the world. But the market is always rapidly changing. It’s very dynamic and especially for ta, we have to keep up with that. At Siemens, we’ve also had numerous organizational changes. I’m sure many out there, you know, in the audience can relate to that. Technology disruption is a big one, you know, and, and on and on and on. It’s, it’s, it’s a lot for a TA function to keep up with.
Matt Alder [00:04:42]:
Absolutely. And I, I know that your team is currently going through a recruiting transformation process. What are the, the drivers behind that? What’s the, the ultimate goal with it and where have you got to so far?
Diane Circo [00:04:55]:
Yeah, so you know, our, we are going through a transformation and our ultimate goal, interestingly enough is really the same North Star that we’ve always been focused on, which is to deliver business value. For us, what has changed is how business value is defined for ta. So I think many TA organizations are somewhere on the journey from order taker to strategic talent advisory. And we’re no different. In fact, RTA function was at one time outsourced. A little over 10 years ago. We brought it back in house and the in house model has been really successful in supporting high rec volume in a cost effective way. So it was really a win for the business. But we started getting signals from the business that they wanted more than high volume support. They started asking for more strategic partnership from ta and they didn’t even know exactly what they wanted or what they were looking for, but they just sensed that maybe it could be better. And on top of that, technology is allowing us to really rethink how TA is delivered. Most of us are looking at automating the repetitive and transactional work so that recruiters can focus on roles with the higher business Impact. Most of us are looking at that and have been for a while. And all of that is a lot of change to manage. And we knew at Siemens we couldn’t just flip a switch and be where we needed to be. So after we talked to the business, we started the transformation by focusing on our greatest asset, which is our recruiters.
Matt Alder [00:06:39]:
How have you involved the recruiters in the process?
Diane Circo [00:06:43]:
When we started developing our transformation strategy, as I said, we talked to the business first, obviously, because we have to understand their needs. But we also talk to recruiters about how they spent their day, how they manage their desks, what their challenges were. Right. They’re on the front line, they’re in the trenches. You know, they’re seeing everything. The recruiters on my team have an average of about 17 years of experience. So these folks know a thing or two about what good talent acquisition looks like. They brought a lot of experience with them to Siemens. So as you can imagine, we learned a lot from those conversations. And we realized that most of what we needed to make this transformation successful was actually already here within the team. And like I said earlier, business value is still our North Star. But what we needed to do was prioritize and deliver differently. We needed to enable recruiters to focus on high value activities that drive more business value. We at Siemens, fortunately, we have the technology, we have the cumulative expertise on the team. We just needed to tap into it in a different way. So for us, this was really about recruiter mindset and empowerment. We wanted to create an environment where recruiters are empowered to do their best work every day. So we empowered recruiters by doing a couple of things. We shared responsibility and ownership, and we created opportunities for growth and development. And I’ll give you an example of something we did early in our transformation. I asked recruiters to think about what they want to be known for as a team. I asked them, what’s the experience you want to create for hiring managers and candidates? How do you want them to feel after they’ve interacted with you? What do you want them to say? What are the results you want to deliver for the business? What are the standards you’ll hold yourself to? If this sounds a little bit like design thinking? It is. It is. It was. And we took all of that. And then I asked them to author. I asked the recruiters to author what we now call our delivery excellence standards. And they came up with nine standards. And these are really their commitments to the business. Everything from consultative partnership to diversity to technology, to a commitment to developing their own expertise. They created the standards. They now hold themselves and each other to them. And that is shared responsibility and ownership. That’s empowerment. And since then, I’ve engaged the team to design our future delivery model. So right now, as we speak, they’re co creating agile recruiting services and offerings and they’re completely reimagining how we’re going to show up and deliver TA every day. When they’re done with that, I’m going to ask them to reimagine their own KPIs. And all I and the other members of my TA leadership team had to do was support the recruiters and then quite frankly, just get out of their way.
Matt Alder [00:09:50]:
I mean, that’s amazing. That sounds like a really sort of fascinating process to be going through. Now, I know that it’s an ongoing process and you’ve mentioned the impact of the pandemic on the recruiting challenges that you’ve had this year. How have have the events of 2020 so far impacted on the work that you’ve been doing?
Diane Circo [00:10:13]:
Yeah, it’s been quite a year. So in the context of our transformation, the pandemic really created both an opportunity and it created urgency. So it was an opportunity because lower hiring volume gave us a chance to focus on recruiter development. That was really important and it gave us a chance to kind of accelerate through the phases of our transformation. It created urgency because we, we know and we knew that we had to emerge on the other side of this pandemic equipped to deliver maximum value. We knew we had to. So, you know, not to be overly dramatic, but this was really our moment, you know, so we seized it.
Matt Alder [00:11:00]:
So you’ve talked about recruiters co creating the process and how you’ve kind of moved forward with that. What about the other stakeholders that you’ve been working with? So, you know, for example, how have you been engaging with hiring managers?
Diane Circo [00:11:15]:
Oh, I’m so glad you asked. How can we forget about them? Right. So in general, the hiring manager experience has been really different, really since last fall when we rolled out the Avature ATS in the US So we worked very closely with avature to completely reimagine the hiring manager experience. And what we, what we didn’t know is that we were laying groundwork for our transformation, which I’ll explain. What we ended up with in this collaboration with avature is a very simple, very intuitive, mobile, optimized hiring manager interface. We even removed the requisition approval process from the tool. And that was controversial at first, as you can imagine, but we really wanted to empower and engage hiring managers. And it worked. And believe it or not, no one has been hired that wasn’t supposed to be hired. It’s shocking. And the other great thing about this, of course, is that recruiters aren’t perceived as order taking process administrators. These changes really encouraged and enabled that consultative dialogue between managers and recruiters. And this could not have come at a better time to support our transformation and to really allow hiring managers to start experiencing something different, you know, something better from ta. It was just, it was just great timing.
Matt Alder [00:12:41]:
You mentioned that Avature was helping you do that. Tell us a bit more about the role of technology in all this. You also mentioned automation. What role is technology playing? How does, how is it fitting into the strategy?
Diane Circo [00:12:55]:
Yeah, I could talk about TA technology all day. How much time do we have? Matt, I’m just kidding. As a TA leader, I’m fortunate that I can say here at Siemens we have a fairly robust TA tech stack. And our stack is really, really well segmented, which I think is key. We have tools to understand the market, we have tools to help attract talent, tools for sourcing, tools for assessment and selection, tools for conversion to hire. We have Avature ATS and the Avature CRM kind of as the backbone of everything. One of the things that, that we wanted to achieve through our transformation is to create more time for recruiters to use the stack strategically. Right. And we really got a taste of that strategic flexing of the tech stack during the pandemic. So for example, at the beginning we relied heavily on our video interviewing platform so we wouldn’t lose momentum on the positions that were still open and active early on in the pandemic. And as we shifted from recruiting against OpenRex toward more proactive pipelining and candidate engagement, we relied on our Avature CRM to build pipelines. And we used our recruitment marketing tools to nurture and engage those pipelines. And as demand is starting to pick back up, and we hope that stays that way, we’re using our market intelligence tools to understand current trends and to identify new talent pools, because the talent pools and the market dynamics are so different than they were pre pandemic. So I really believe that smart segmentation of the stack is really key. You have to have the right tools for the right purposes. And this is going to continue to be really important for us certainly during and after our transformation.
Matt Alder [00:14:48]:
Can I just dig a bit deeper into candidate experience? You mentioned that you have a candidate experience team. What does that look like? What are the kind of things that they do? Again, has the pandemic changed the way you look at candidate experience?
Diane Circo [00:15:04]:
It has. I don’t know that it’s changed the way we look at it, but it’s really brought candidate experience into focus that much more. Candidate experience has always been one of the foundational principles of our, of our talent acquisition model at Siemens in the US So candidate centricity and the focus on the candidate has always been critical for us. What we realized early on in the pandemic is that never, ever has candidate experience been so important. Even at a time when we’re not hiring as much or when we were not hiring as much, candidates were looking to their experience with Siemens as an indication of our culture. And, you know, just as we as employees will always remember how our company handled the COVID crisis, you know, how the company treated employees, how we will always remember this, candidates will always remember how they were treated. And so that had to be at the forefront of everything that we did because we know we’ll be on the other side of this pandemic. Hopefully soon hiring volume will pick up again and we need to make sure that we have candidates who have a good perception of our brand and have had a good experience with us so we can pull them back into the active candidate pools and convert them to hire. So it’s been a huge focus for us.
Matt Alder [00:16:33]:
Obviously, this is a time of great change, but also a time of great innovation. Out of all the things that you’re doing or all the things that are sort of that are happening in the near future, what innovations are you most excited about?
Diane Circo [00:16:47]:
Oh, so many. So, you know, I shared earlier, we’re trying to take full advantage of, you know, machine learning and predictive analytics and AI big data to automate some of the more transactional aspects of the recruiting process. I think a lot of TA organizations are looking at that, right? That’s a. It’s a hot topic and we want to really embrace that so that we can enable recruiters to serve the business as true talent advisors. Take them up out of that transactional work and let them focus on things that have more impact. I’m really, really excited about automation where it counts. That’s what I call it, Automation where it counts. To make recruiters even more effective personally and professionally. I’m really curious and interested in chatbots, resume matching, sourcing technology. And there are actually some really cool use cases for technology that’s been around for a while. I think it’s important that we stay focused too on it doesn’t all have to be new and Shiny. But maybe there are new use cases for it. And I’ll give you an example. We recently did, over the summer, a text campaign to get candidates to a series of drive through interview events that we held for skilled trade talent for two of our manufacturing facilities. And across those three events, we hired 120 people. So it’s just a kind of an interesting new use case, a creative approach during the, you know, the pandemic that was wildly successful. And we’re probably going to keep doing these events. I mean, that’s just an example. Honestly, Matt, I could geek out on TA technology all day.
Matt Alder [00:18:34]:
Me too. And I would love this interview to go on all day. But I will ask a final question now. So from your perspective, what does the future of talent acquisition look like? If we were having this conversation again in sort of 18 months, two years time, what would we be talking about?
Diane Circo [00:18:51]:
Oh boy. You know, the talent markets are going to keep shifting and changing and the demand for top talent will only increase. I think any of us can see that and agree with that. I really see a future where the role of the recruiter changes significantly. Recruiters will become strategic talent advisors. They’re going to use data to analyze market trends. They will be developing strategies. They will be advising hiring managers, they’ll be advising the business. They’ll use technology to automate where it counts, like I mentioned earlier. But I see the approach as being balanced with human insight and human decision making. So in my opinion, this is my view, it’s the best of both worlds for maximum business impact. And that’s the future that we’re working toward here at Siemens in the US And I want no recruiter left behind.
Matt Alder [00:19:56]:
Diane, thank you very much for talking to me.
Diane Circo [00:19:58]:
Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:20:00]:
My thanks to Diane Circo. 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@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.
