As digital transformation accelerates even faster, the market for data analysts, data scientists and data engineers continues to grow exponentially. So how do employers make sense of this talent market to hire the right skills for their business, and can data science be applied to the process itself to drive better outcomes?
My guest this week is Tim Freestone from Alooba, a company that is helping to answer these questions and change the way data and analytics skills are assessed. Our discussion is extensive, and Tim shares some valuable insights relevant not just to recruiting data professionals but also broader talent acquisition strategies.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Job definitions in data science and the current state of the talent market
▪ Issues with traditional recruiting processes
▪ Why the CV is a poor quality data set
▪ Generating structured data around skills
▪ Removing unconscious bias
▪ Pragmatic analytics, automating repeatable tasks and human intelligence
▪ How will recruiting evolve in the next 3 to 5 years?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Aloober. Aluba is a leader in data science and analytics skills assessment, offering comprehensive testing and candidate benchmarking with seamless integration into your hiring process. Aloober helps you assess the skills of data professionals in a fast and unbiased way, allowing you to uncover hidden gems which are often overlooked during manual CV screening. With Aloober, you can save the time and cost of filling data and analytics vacancies by providing an advanced online skills assessment and instantaneous feedback to all of your candidates. Find out more about aloober@aluba.com recruitingfuture and book a demo today. That’s aluba.com recruitingfuture and Alooba is spelled A L O O B B A.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 359 of the Recruiting Future podcast. There’s currently much debate and discussion about the talent shortages a number of markets across the world are currently experiencing. There’s a lot of focus on the issues caused by the pandemic, but it’s important to remember that a lot of the challenges talent acquisition teams are facing are part of existing long term trends that the pandemic has just accelerated. My guest this week returning to the show to share his unique perspective on the current state of talent markets and talent acquisition is Tim Sackett, co host of the HR Famous podcast and president of HRU Technical Resources. It’s always great to have Tim on the podcast and he doesn’t disappoint this time around. Hi Tim and welcome back to the podcast.
Tim Sackett [00:02:11]:
Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
Always a pleasure to have you on the show. For anyone listening who doesn’t know you, could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Tim Sackett [00:02:20]:
Yeah, so I, I run an actual like technical staffing firm out of the states. Been doing that for like the last decade. Before that I was a corporate HR talent acquisition leader at a number of organizations on the enterprise side, whether that’s healthcare, kind of casual, dining, retail, and then also within that space. I started blogging back about 10 or 11 years ago and at Fistful of Talent and then Chris Dunn, who owned Fistful at the time, well, he still owns it, but we own it together. He challenged me to kind of start my own blog writing around talent, hr, execution, leadership, all that good stuff. But the challenge was, hey, I want you to write every single day for a year. And I’ve been doing that now for a decade. So I’ve been writing. And then you get involved with speaking and podcasting and wrote a book and all of, and then we, you know, you and I run into each other at conferences. Well, we hope we’ll, we’ll be soon beginning to run each other.
Matt Alder [00:03:23]:
Hopefully we will again in the future.
Tim Sackett [00:03:25]:
Exactly. We can’t wait. We’re desperate to get out of our bedrooms and get back to conferences.
Matt Alder [00:03:31]:
Oh, tell me about it. Now, you’ve been on the show a couple of times before and I think the last time you’re on we were actually talking about your book. Obviously a lot’s changed since then. How, what’s your experience of the, of the last 18 months been?
Tim Sackett [00:03:45]:
You know, again, pretty much I was, I believe I’ve been pretty fortunate overall, comparable to so many people out there. And so I’m empathetic when I talk about it because you know, I think like the recruiting world in the US shut down like you know, most of the world for, for a couple of months. But because we did technology and white collar kinds of roles and people went either remote or hybrid or some combination of whatever, you know, we were back up and running by mid summer of 2020, pretty much at full capacity to what we were. So you know, again we, you know, have a cloud based stack and you know, kind of metrics driven and people can kind of work from anywhere. And what we found was the client base that we work with was still desperate for technical talent. So we were fortunate from that standpoint. I think we learned that, you know, in the recruiting world you can work from anywhere, but just because you can work from anywhere doesn’t mean everybody is going to prosper in that environment. Right? Some we had people that went remote and were actually better working remote, which we again, we were hoping, but we also had people that actually got really like worse at their job being remote. So we really had to figure out like it wasn’t about, well, of course you can do this job remote, but can you be successful at doing this job remote? I like because I write about this stuff and we talk about this stuff, Matt. Like I like having the microcosm of my own company to kind of test things constantly. And that was one that when people sit there and again, you and I both know a ton of thought leaders that are like, yes, you know, remote is here forever and you know, blah, blah, blah, and, and I’m always like, be careful. I don’t think it, I, I, I think there are people that can be successful and remote. And I think the pandemic has forced us to really look at work and where work can be done. But we can’t just say arbitrarily we’re now always going to have certain roles be remote. Because I don’t think it’s just the role. I think it’s the combination of the role, the technology, the person doing the role and the company culture. When you put all those together then, then we have to make decisions. Right. Some people will be hybrid, some will be full on site premise, some will be remote. But it’s, it’s, I think it’s too early for us to say, oh for sure this is going to work for everybody because it won’t work for everybody.
Matt Alder [00:06:02]:
Absolutely. I mean I couldn’t agree with you more there particularly about it being too early. I mean I think the narrative on Twitter or the news media about are we all going back to the office, are we never going to the office again? It’s, it seems this very black and white discussion of what’s a very nuanced, you know, I think we’ll be having this debate for, you know, months, if not years to come in terms of working out what’s going to work best.
Tim Sackett [00:06:27]:
Well and I think we discount how difficult it is for an entry level new person in a job, especially like a white collar job where you can be remote, having onboarding them, training them in a completely remote world. Like, and again I just, I go back to my own life. I had two sons that graduated university during the pandemic. Both started working in a remote way and they really take a look, they were like, if one is one thing that both of us said, I don’t feel like I’m connected to my company at all. Which as HR leaders we should be panicking and going wait a minute because that’s just a turnover waiting to happen. So the digital culture piece is really complex and hard to do, but they also don’t have the same relationships. When you and I first went to work and we were on premise, we got to, you know, you get to go to lunch with people and you get to the coffee chats and the water cooler conversations and you know, stopping by the cubes in the offices and all this stuff and you build these relationships in a face to face way. Now again you could, we could force that through zooms and all these other stuff but I think we discount how important that is. In fact, I saw a study recently that it was new college grads, so Gen Z’s 98% said they would prefer to actually be on premise for their first job. And again, they want flexibility. So they want to be able to say, hey, it’s a Monday. It’s, you know, it’s snowing. Like, I’m just going to work from home today. And like, and if you can, you can be effective. I think we’re, you know, employers should be like, sure, like, yeah, it seems crazy that you would even try to come in. But they also have said pretty loud and clear they want that interaction with real people, you know, in a company. You know, this is kind of why they went to university to begin with. So when we sit there and say, hey, only 2% said they would prefer to be remote. That’s a pretty telling to what, what the future of work looks like, especially around bringing in and training new workers.
Matt Alder [00:08:29]:
Moving on to talk about the state of talent markets right now. I think for the last sort of 12 months, 18, 18 months, we’ve been sort of, everyone’s been making predictions about what recruiting is going to look, supply and demand are going to look like. And really what’s happening in a number of markets in a number of countries has taken everyone by surprise. What are you seeing? What’s your perspective on it?
Tim Sackett [00:08:53]:
Yeah, you know, I wish I could speak more intelligently on the global talent marketplace. The pandemic, that’s one of the things that’s probably shut that down a little bit just because I haven’t traveled internationally during that time. But within the US Market right now, we see this people desperately wanting to hire like hourly workers. Right. And then, and then there’s this narrative out there that it’s, oh, it’s because of unemployment insurance extensions and stimulus and where the government’s actually paying people not to work more than what we, you know, employers could pay. And there is a part of that, right. There’s no doubt that if you’re in that 15 to $20 an hour kind of pay range in the US if somebody’s collecting unemployment in certain states with stimulus, they probably can make as much or more just being unemployed. Right. So that a lot of that ends in September and some states have already ended it. And so there’s this belief that, oh, the talent market’s going to open up beginning September. And I’m like, slow down. Pre pandemic, we were already struggling to hire hourly workers in a lot of markets and also, I mean, next to impossible to hire skilled workers in many markets. So we have this like, weird thing happening, right? So I think there’s a number of things that happened during the pandemic a lot of companies reduced their, their talent like acquisition or you know, TA teams or recruiting teams. They didn’t put a lot of money and investment into their recruiting stack. And sometimes they just even like reduce their stack to kind of reduce expenses and then they want to come back and like automatically go from like 0 to 100 in terms of being able to like, hey, we did no recruiting to like need to go full recruiting. By the way, we’re, it’s not just full recruiting. We’re desperate for recruiting and, and so that’s hurting us. We do have this, this Gen Z millennial kind of. You know, again we kind of talk about this with every generation, but there’s this mindset that, you know, they maybe they’re more purpose driven in their work and so they go, wait a minute, I can make $17 an hour working in an Amazon warehouse. You know, carrying boxes around like that just doesn’t seem like something I would want to do. And they would almost rather live at their parents house and have no pay then go do that job. Right? So there’s this shift in mindset of around purpose of work. I also think we forget about again in the US market, like the baby boom generation, we’ve been known for like a decade or more like that these people were leaving the workforce and people were like, yeah, but Tim, we’re not hiring old people anyways for these hourly jobs. But if we really take a, go back and take a look at all those baby boomer charts of when they were leaving, 2021, 2022, 2023 were actually the biggest parts of that wave. Right? So there’s more people leaving. And what happens is you see this kind of step up approach to hiring where imagine a million baby boomers leave the market. What happens is somebody that would come in and maybe take that Amazon job at $17 an hour, all of a sudden now they can go and take a service rep job at an insurance company making 20 an hour. Right? So there’s a step up in employment. They almost get to skip like the lowest entry level jobs and go to a higher paying entry level job. And because so many people are leaving the marketplace from, from in the, from the employment marketplace with all these baby boomer people leaving that now we’re starting to see that. We’re starting to see kids who maybe don’t want to go to university, graduating, you know, secondary, like high school and then immediately taking jobs making like 19, $20 an hour right out of high school because they just like, look, we just need young Aggressive, you know, semi intelligent people that are, that have an agility to learn and we’ll teach them a job but they’re going to skip the dirtiest, you know, jobs at $15 an hour kind of thing.
Matt Alder [00:12:46]:
I think it’s really interesting and I think absolutely with these long term factors because I think if you look at lots of different countries around the world, they’re in similar positions, there are short term factors in play. So for example, in the, in the UK there’s a problem recruiting workers in hospitality and, and some of that’s been putting down to the furlough scheme over here, is continuing till September. And also we’ve had this lovely thing called Brexit which shuts off large parts of the labor market in Australia. Their borders have been shut for 12 months and they’re having problems sort of not able to bring talent into the country. So there are all these short to medium term issues. But I think you kind of nailed what some of the long term issues are here. And this is not a problem that is going to go away at the end of September and it’s probably going to get worse.
Tim Sackett [00:13:34]:
I know, I tell, I tell people constantly. I’m like this, this is not a like end of summer, like we’ll be, will be, all of everything will be back to normal, taken care of. Like this is truly, you better change the strategies of how you’re getting this work done. Whether that’s automation, robotics, like blah, blah, blah, a combination of a lot of things. You, you’re going to have to increase pay, you’re going to have to be better at your branding, you’re going to have to, you know, train your managers to be better leaders of people. Right. You know, because that’s, we go back to, it seems like table stakes. Right? It seems like we go back to like, weren’t we talking about this stuff a decade ago in like post, you know, Great Recession kind of stuff. But it’s all the same kind of stuff that, you know, companies kind of took a year off of making their technology better, making their managers better, making, you know, and yet we still have this struggle of we probably should have done like, we probably should have doubled down on like digital training, digital culture, digital, you know, all this stuff to make our people better. And we didn’t, we kind of just waited around for the pandemic to end and then we thought, oh, it’ll be just back to normal. It’s a new normal for sure.
Matt Alder [00:14:42]:
What are you seeing in terms of changes to talent acquisition and how talent acquisition Works. I mean, obviously it’s a very, it’s been a very disruptive time. There is this massive focus on talent acquisition in many organizations at the moment. What do you think is changing?
Tim Sackett [00:14:58]:
You know, the actual like, function of talent acquisition tends to like, and this is in HR in general and probably most functions in organizations, they actually change pretty slowly over time. Right? Like, they don’t. There’s not drastic changes. But what I think what I’ve been seeing over the last probably five to ten years is this gradual kind of change of corporate talent acquisition becoming much more like agency recruiting. I mean they’re starting to take on the metric funnels. They’re starting to bonus and compensate a little bit differently. Their tech, their, you know, technology is becoming much more sophisticated. They’re less. And again, this is, this is a broad stroke because it’s not happening everywhere. But I think with, with companies that are really, really reliant on getting the best talent to actually, you know, to do their work. And we all would say we went, well, we only get the best talent. Like, no, we don’t. We just get the talent that’s available for the most part. But the companies are really going after talent have really kind of upped their game that they’re actually, their recruiters are actually recruiting. They’re not just administering a recruiting function. And so I do see like this, this continuing to happen. So when we take a look on the horizon, whether that’s three years, five years down the road, especially in the US market, and we start to see this even in the UK market, right? Because UK was always like, hey, for the most part we’re going to let agencies do our heavy recruiting for us. But we’re starting to see many more European companies really be aggressive in the corporate talent acquisition space as well and really take on a lot of these similarities and personalities of the agency recruiting market in house. I thought this would have happened a decade ago and it never really caught on. But I start, I think it’s starting to really take place because I think we have executive teams, meaning the CEO, CEO, like CTO, CIOs, like the C suite in corporations going, hey, wait a minute, like people are really important. Why aren’t we, why aren’t we better at this? They’re starting to ask questions and like that talent acquisition leaders looking around going, well, wait a minute, we’re still posting our jobs. And they’re like, no, that’s not enough. Like, why do these other people do it better than we do it? You know, and starting to ask the hard questions?
Matt Alder [00:17:16]:
Absolutely. One of the previous times you’re on the show we were talking about the TA Tech stack and technology has been a very big discussion point over the last 12 months. Whether that’s the rise of video interviewing, video everything and automation and all these things going on. How have you seen the TA Tech stack changing and what do you think is going to happen next?
Tim Sackett [00:17:42]:
You know, we continue to see the increase in automation. So I think there’s. But the hard part is, is it’s easy to just to throw automation on stuff and say, hey, how do we, how do we automate the, the top, you know, 60% of the recruiting process, right? The, the, the outreach, the screen, you know, until we get basically to the interview. Because you can definitely do that. The problem is, is you lose a lot of that kind of personal touch, right, that you know, that we need in recruiting. So I do think we’re starting to see more, much more automation that really tries to deliver that personal one on one touch. It doesn’t feel like spam, right? It doesn’t feel like mass automation. So it’s this kind of one on one automation where I think you call it a human in a loop, right? Where at certain points in the automation a real person can kind of step in and take control, right? So it’s like, hey, we have somebody that we desperately need. They’re interested in all the machine learning and AI and all this stuff actually got us to this point. But you know what, it’s time for us to step in and actually put some personal human touches on this process now and make sure we don’t lose this person. And so we’re definitely starting to see that side of it. I still think there’s massive confusion because what we see now are all these platform products that are out there that do some sourcing, that do some automation, that do some matching, that do some, you know, and there are people are like, well wait a minute, doesn’t my ATS do some of this? Doesn’t a CRM do this? And we start to see this crossover of platforms happening where a lot of the platforms do some things the same. Like they’re like, well, I can text in my ats. Well. Oh yeah, well, we have texting too. Oh my, I can get, we have a chat bot. And like, well, I think my ATS has a chat like, you know, and then you’re like well why would I have your versus this? And there’s always pieces, right? They’re like, well, we don’t have matching and outreach or we don’t have this. And I think it’s caused a lot of confusion for TA leaders trying to figure out what they have. Because, of course, the foundational side of ATS is like, wait a minute, you know, we. We do that, you know, so they go, well, wait a minute. And then the recruiters who are actually using the tool go, well, wait a minute. It does it, but it’s kind of clunky or it’s not, you know, it doesn’t really work the way we need it to work. And of course they’re not going to change it. And that’s why we want to bring in these kind of recruiting automation, you know, platforms. And so, you know, we continue to see this kind of. This rise of all of this. And I also think, like, the screening assessment science has gotten much more sophisticated. We’re out of the traditional, like, personality profile kind of matching stuff, right? Which is in some aspects. We saw this with, like, higher view, with kind of the, you know, the facial recognition software stuff. You know, sometimes we push the envelope a little too fast and we have to kind of back it up. But I think the science has gotten to the point where it’s helping us eliminate a lot of the bias we have. Like, I, you know, I’ve seen some really good products out there that will start to match and select, and you start to question, you know, it’ll show you across, like, your funnel. So you’re like, hey, in our top of Funnel, we have 50% female candidates, but by the time and when we assess them, we still now have 50% female candidates, but through the first interview, we now only have 25% female candidates. So automatically you’re seeing where the bias is happening within your process and within your stack. And I think that’s really important as TA leaders can start to really look and dig into that and say, wait a minute, here’s where we systematically have, like, points of failure when it comes to, you know, bias and things like that.
Matt Alder [00:21:26]:
Obviously, if you’re a TA leader listening, you have a huge amount on your plate at the moment and a huge amount of things to focus on. What would your advice be to talent acquisition professionals in terms of, you know, what they should be thinking and focusing on over the next six months or so?
Tim Sackett [00:21:44]:
Wow, that’s a big question because, you know, like, it depends on. Everyone has their own pain point and problem, right? And it’s, you know, you and I both kind of, you know, deal with a lot of TA leaders and have these conversations, and I think if I, you know, Just broadly speaking, I think still the most underutilized resource that every organization has is the database of candidates that have said that they’ve actually applied to come work for you at some point. They’ve said, hey, I love you, I want to come work for you. And we, we hired a like a tiny minute portion of those and the rest we screened some, we interviewed some for the most part, the vast majority we never even said hello to. And yet all of those people at one time said, hey, I want to come work for you, I want to, I’m making a choice that I want to come work for you. And we kind of forget about them. And some of the, I mean, Matt, like these, some of these databases have millions of candidates and we don’t, we, it’s the most underutilized resource across the world in talent acquisition. And so again, I would find technology that really digs into these databases that will match, that will do outreach, that will update through, all through automation, because I think the ROI that you’ll get on that is significantly higher than probably anything else that you’ll ever put in your stack.
Matt Alder [00:23:04]:
So, looking forward to the future a bit, which I think the last 12 months has showed us is difficult to do. But I’m interested in terms of what’s on your radar for the next 12 to 18 months to two years. What are you hoping that’s going to happen? Where do you think we might be.
Tim Sackett [00:23:23]:
Getting to, you know, for how much we look at the future and think recruiting is changing because of technology? I do think there’s a piece where I think what automation in all this recruiting automation, and there’s some just really great, you know, technology out there will do is actually add all of it should add capacity to our recruiting teams. Right? And then what happens then is we actually have recruiters who become like really old school recruiters. They’re the relationship builders. They’re the ones that now you actually have time to actually talk to people and talk them into why they should come work for your job. And so, you know, I, I take a look at the future and go, for the most part, technology should be able to do all the administrative kind of heavy lifting of the process of recruiting, sourcing all that good stuff. But it still comes back to having our teams of recruiters go out and actually build real relationships and then be able to measure the effectiveness of those. Right. Like how, how is that conversion actually happening at that point. So I do think, you know, for how much we talk about the future of recruiting being completely robotic and automated I think it actually gets more personable. I think that’s what. I think candidates want that as well. I think at the end of the day, candidates want to feel wanted, and technology can only make them feel wanted so much. And then it goes back to us then creating this personal relationship with candidates in a really fast way that makes them feel wanted.
Matt Alder [00:24:56]:
Final question. Tell us about your podcast.
Tim Sackett [00:24:58]:
Yeah, so we started really almost start of the Pandemic. We started a podcast called HR Famous. And it was a joke, kind of an inside joke, the title. So because we were messing around with a ton of titles, you know, like, you know, we all do in the podcast world. And you know, one of the funny things when you talk about influencers, and I think you and I are both considered influencers on a lot of lists and, you know, different things out there and whether you put a positive connotation to influencer, a negative connotation influencer, you know, some of the jokes on the, on the inside would be, oh, so you’re HR Famous. You’re not really famous, you’re just HR Famous. And so we always thought that was so funny because my wife would be like, yeah, you’re not. You’re a micro celebrity. There’s like 15 hr ta ladies around the country that, you know, want to picture with you. And so we thought, let’s call ourselves HR Famous. So it’s Chris Dunn, Jessica Lee, myself. We, we all actually Chris and Jessica were kind of the first two people at Fistful of Talent. I was brought in soon after. So we’ve all known each other for a really long period of time. And we’ve always had these text message exchanges, right, where we would see something funny or see something interesting and we would share it with each other. And it blows up into this kind of 20, 30 minute back and forth, really kind of active conversation. And so that was what we wanted to go with. Like, we want to just get on a podcast and show people what these kind of inside baseball conversations look like when we’re just talking shop with each other. And we. And there’s a lot of trust between the three of us. So we know if we say something, especially in today’s world in the cancel cultures and people getting just triggered by anything. We know at the end of the day, we all have each other’s back and trust each other implicitly. So if we say something wrong, you know that somebody would be triggered by. We know that the three of us would never. We know behind there, there’s probably something like, you know, at the heart of it. There’s someone, something there that’s not meant to be the way it was said or thought of. Right. So I think that allows us to have a lot of freedom to really kind of sometimes ask some questions that people would not ask in a public way. Right. You know, and we. And so there’s. There’s some of that. I mean, for the most part, though, I think people just love to hear the conversation. It’s like, you know, Matt, when you and I sit down at HR Tech and we’re at. What’s one. Like eye candy, one of those bars in the middle of the casino. Right. And it’s 1:00 in the morning and we’re a few drinks in and we’re having these kind of dynamic conversations about the world of talent acquisition and technology. This is the conversations we have. Like, this is what it’s like minus the drinks. It might be better with drinks.
Matt Alder [00:27:45]:
Absolutely, absolutely. You should do. You should do a kind of a bar version of it. Definitely, Definitely.
Tim Sackett [00:27:51]:
Now, I was.
Matt Alder [00:27:51]:
I was going to ask you where people can listen to it, but obviously it’s customary at this point to say. I presume that’s available wherever people get their podcasts.
Tim Sackett [00:27:59]:
Exactly. Yeah. Every. All the normal podcast channels.
Matt Alder [00:28:02]:
Fantastic stuff, Tim. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Tim Sackett [00:28:05]:
Great talking with you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:28:07]:
My thanks to Tim Sackett. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us 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.
