When I launched this podcast almost seven years ago, I had an expectation that I was in it for the long haul, but I couldn’t have imagined that 400 episodes later, I would be publishing two episodes a week, and the audience would still be growing. Thank you for listening and for your support; it means so much to me.
In keeping with the show’s theme for this 400th episode, I want to look forward and not backwards. 2021 has been a year for talent acquisition like no other, and I believe we are seeing trends emerge that will shape recruiting for the next decade or more.
I’ve had some fantastic guests on the show this year, and I wanted to showcase highlights from five interviews that shine a light on some of the innovations and trends that have made 2021 so important, and that will, in turn, have a significant impact in 2022.
Interviews featured in this episode:
Ep 333: Automation, Simplicity and Experience
Ep 331: Transforming Recruitment Marketing
Ep 395: The Challenges Of Recruiting Recruiters
Ep 375: The Magic Of Behavioural Science
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Show transcript:
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Matt Alder (48s):
Hi, there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 400 of The Recruiting Feature Podcast. Can I just say that again? Episode 400. When I launched this podcast almost seven years ago, I had an expectation that I was in it for the long haul. But I couldn’t have imagined that 400 episodes later the show would be at two episodes a week and still growing. Thank you for listening and for all of your support. It means so much to me. In keeping with the show’s theme, I want to look forwards and not backwards. 2021 has been a year for talent acquisition like no other. And I believe we’re seeing trends emerge that will shape recruiting for at least the next decade.
Matt Alder (1m 33s):
I’ve had some fantastic guests on the show this year. And I wanted to showcase highlights from five interviews that shine a light on some of the innovations and trends that have made 2021 so important, and will in turn have a significant impact on 2022. One of the big things for me this year has been the practical application of AI in talent acquisition and its impact. We’ve been talking about AI for years. But only now are we starting to see its true potential. My first interview highlight is from a conversation with Jeff Uden, Head of Talent for UK Retailer Iceland in Episode 333. The challenges of the pandemic or Iceland having to revolutionize their recruiting process using AI very, very quickly.
Matt Alder (2m 20s):
In this clip, Jeff talks about what they did the impressive results, and just how you get buy in for rapid change in a large organization.
Jeff Uden (2m 30s):
This system that we’ve now using through predictive hire. And you know, the main driver behind that was the introduction of artificial intelligence in terms of that assisting us in making, some of that those initial sifting decisions that we had. But it was also about making sure that wherever possible, the actual process itself felt as human as it possibly could. You know, that’s a key thing around the Iceland culture is around — you know, we talk within Iceland about feels like family. And we certainly want our people to feel like that within our stores.
Jeff Uden (3m 11s):
And we need them to understand that our customers are part of that bigger family as well. So, we wanted that human touch in there, we wanted people to feel as though they were really respected, and they were valued. But also, to a point of the store managers had as much influence as they could, in terms of making the decisions for the right individuals. We are seeing some fantastic results. The sifting has significantly reduced. On average, in a normal calendar year, we were receiving circa 500,000 applications a year. And this year, by the end of this financial year in March, we probably will have received about 1.6 million applications this time around.
Jeff Uden (3m 59s):
Now, based on that average of the 500,000 applications in a year, our store managers are spending circa 35,000 hours a year actually conducting and doing recruitment, whether that’s sifting, or actually completing applications, or alternatively updating our HR information systems. Now, what we’ve done is through this is we’ve significantly reduced that down to around about seven and a half $1,000 a year instead. So, it’s a massive return of time to our managers.
Jeff Uden (4m 40s):
And they are now using that to spend more time with their people in the stores and doing the activities that managers should be doing in stores as opposed to just that recruitment part of that. The other benefits that we’re getting out of it is the candidate experience. Now, our candidates are actually at scoring as an 8.9 out of 10, in terms of the candidate experience that they’re actually going through. And also, what it’s doing is as well is significantly impacting their perception about Iceland. And with us, you know, 64% of all of the applicants said that they were more likely to shop in Iceland that over 70% of them work said that they were more likely to recommend Iceland as an employer.
Jeff Uden (5m 36s):
And that’s a sort of benefits that we were never able to understand before. But we know we will be impacting the business further down the line. As any talent acquisition leader will know, a critical part of installing any sort of change in that is about involved in that business, right from the very outset. You know, understanding what the size of the issue actually is, understanding what the size of the prize is. But then involving as many people across the business as you possibly can, in terms of the project, the testing of the project, taking on board, all of the relevant feedback, and making sure that they were as comfortable about the experience as what potentially the candidates were actually going to be as well.
Jeff Uden (6m 24s):
So, you know, we tested our products, with senior leaders throughout the business, we tested our products with hiring managers, just so that they could see what potentially it could be giving them, and how they could actually use that. But also, we took it out to our frontline colleagues out in our stores, and said to them, “If you were to experience this right at the very beginning, how would you feel about it?” And it was a unanimous view that came back and said that they would have thoroughly enjoyed actually going through that process, and would have felt that it was more relaxing, more enjoyable than perhaps that initial quite nervy first interview.
Jeff Uden (7m 12s):
So that’s where it needs to be. It is about that buy in, right before you even start the change process. And just making sure that people understand the simplicity of the new process that’s actually coming through and making it incredibly easy to understand.
Matt Alder (7m 34s):
The potential of AI to revolutionize the recruiting process itself is undoubtedly the most talked about impact of the technology. But what about other areas of talent acquisition? Where else might we see radical change? In this clip from Episode 331, Allyn Bailey, he was at the time Global Recruitment Marketing Leader at Intel talks about the impact of AI and automation On The Future Of Recruitment Marketing.
Allyn Bailey (8m 2s):
Here’s what I think is has happened to us. I think that, you know, really five years or so ago, we started to understand this concept of Recruitment Marketing as a discipline inside our organizations. And it was really focused on kind of two key lenses. The first was, how do you make your brand appealing, and engaging, and enticing? And the second was, how do you then gather individuals who are interested in your brand and start converting them into people who want to apply and to have jobs, right? And we did that through a variety of different marketing capabilities and tactics. And we built a practice around that. But there was something happening simultaneously, while we were building up this idea of what recruitment marketing was, the talent acquisition ecosystem was changing underneath our feet.
Allyn Bailey (8m 53s):
What was the way in which we attracted, manage, even selected and matched people to jobs and opportunities has dramatically changed with the inclusion of new technologies, right? I remember sitting in HR tech, four years ago, maybe, and people were like everybody’s talking about AI. “Is this thing ever going to take off? Is it real? Is it important? And then the next year, we went back, and all sorts of companies were starting to shoot up who are going to produce some sort of great matching technology or AI based technology. And then the next year there was this conversation around, is this about conversational AI? Or is this about machine learning?
Allyn Bailey (9m 33s):
Or is this about using algorithms to do predictive modeling? And so, all this stuff was happening. Recruitment marketing kept focusing on, “How can I attract, and attract, and attract more people?” But what talent acquisition and what structures and recruiters were starting to function and think about was, “Can I make sense of all these people that I have using this technology and match the most effectively to these opportunities?” And the biggest gap was and has been and can needs to be, not only do we know who these people are, but do we have enough of the right data about them to be able to let these algorithms and machines, and ecosystems we put in place from a technology perspective actually do the work of matching and connecting people to opportunities.
Allyn Bailey (10m 18s):
What that means is recruitment, marketing has to transform. It has to shift, no longer to be just about, how do I attract people and engage them and get them interested? My job as a recruitment marketer now is to build a relationship with these people to get them to trust me enough so that they will tell me more and more about themselves. And so that data can be used in the talent acquisition process. So, I think the biggest opportunity on the horizon is the ability to start to automate our engagement decisions. And here’s what I mean by that. I’m seeing some really cool technology out there that allows people to build complex workflows that can really start to trigger very specific engagement paths and they can automate those, right?
Allyn Bailey (11m 7s):
But it always requires today a person to have knowledge about kind of what’s kind of the marketing know how that’s going to allow you to know which direction to send somebody based on their behaviors and actions. I think, as we start to apply some of the AI capabilities and predictive modeling into the recruitment marketing space just into content, leveraging and the impact of content execution, and it starts to be able to web together, kind of what the potential predictive outcomes are for leveraging different types of content or different types of experiences.
Allyn Bailey (11m 47s):
What that will allow companies to do is to start to build basically automated algorithms that will create marketing strategies or marketing executions for us based on our strategies. To me, that’s going to be a big win. And I’ll tell you why. I think that recruitment marketing and marketing in general is a very complex capability. And most companies do not have the ability to have enough resources to execute at the level that they need to. And so, the more we can do to start to move the predictive modeling, the predictive capabilities to actually automate actions and tasks up the funnel, I guess, kind of further into the marketing space, the more it’s going to allow us to leverage our resources more effectively on the strategy side.
Allyn Bailey (12m 44s):
So, I think that’s what’s going to happen. I think, just like we saw a few years ago, more and more people starting to apply AI to matching people to opportunities. And now that starting to become more and more mainstream. I think we’re going to start seeing technology starting to match solutions or engagements interactions to results, and that will start to become something that’s programmatic.
Matt Alder (13m 12s):
If AI was one of the big themes of the year, then diversity, equity, and inclusion is certainly the other one. The last 18 months have seen an enormous focus on discussions about DE&I. But is meaningful change actually happening. Back in the summer, I collaborated with the team at TA Tech on a live podcast Conference, which included a panel debate on DE&I here is Global Communications and Branding Leader Charu Malhotra giving her perspective on inclusion, leadership and the pace of change.
Charu Malhotra (13m 46s):
But how things change was your question. I don’t believe they have. I think there’s been a lot of noise around it. But I would mirror it to the noise around candidate experience that’s probably been talked about for the last decade. But are we actually seeing any real significant change in diversity inclusion from a leadership perspective and a pipeline perspective? I think the same conversations keep coming up. There’s been a lot of focus on attraction, as I said. So my heart always sets with branding, because that’s where I spent most of my career. I think a lot of works already been done on by the organizations that get this around the word and the language we use in our comm.
Charu Malhotra (14m 25s):
So be that on our job adverts be there on how we think about web copy, and in the way that we showcase our employees. So, you know, visual imagery and visual language. Those type of things. I think we’ve taken more than baby steps on which is only but a positive. I think what’s been done really well. So, people like EY IBM, Unilever, I would call out. They’ve been piloting small initiatives that helped, you know, things around your diversity. Thinking about social mobility. I think Deloitte have done some really fantastic work around social mobility. So, then the recruitment lens have not just thinking about this as an attraction piece, has been a really positive point.
Charu Malhotra (15m 7s):
And I think for me when I think about what does good recruitment look like it, it’s having organizations being brave enough to pilot something in the DE&I space to help DE&I recruitment. But then actually go, well, this isn’t working and stop it. I think when it goes, when people invest too much, whether that’s dollars, or sponsorship, it becomes really hard to backtrack. So, you know, versus safe space and recruitment. I think it’s brave space. Let’s pilot something. Is it working? Is it getting tangible results? Because it’s around and measuring? You know, what’s the impact of this? Is it working? And if it’s not, let’s try something else. I think some of the organization’s I’ve mentioned, have done a really good job doing some small-scale pilots, which then they can now make much more scalable.
Charu Malhotra (15m 51s):
I firmly believe, and I’ve been saying this for seven or eight years now that you start with inclusion, you start, don’t start with a diversity. So, anything until you have an integral to an organization that has a culture, where people can feel that if they want to be able to bring their full selves to work, they can. And I say that slightly differently to how I said it a year ago, has been doing a lot more reading around this it terms of the diktat around bringing your whole self to work because it got its own kind of implications to it. So, building an inclusive culture, where people are welcomed, where people can thrive, but also that an organization has forensically looked at processes and protocols that are keeping unrepresentative groups back is the first step.
Charu Malhotra (16m 39s):
Before you start thinking about diversity recruitment. And I think what’s really interesting, certainly what in in the last five years, the first step organizations seem to take when they think about, “Oh, gosh, I need to look at a DE&I because my competitors are always become important is let me go and hire a diversity recruiter. Let me go and hire a diversity consultant. Let me go and hire a head of DE&I that often sets to eight reports to HR. So, I think inclusive culture and the equity I looking at processes and controls, looking at the culture, dismantling where there are biases is the first step. And then you look at diversity recruitment. The role of leadership is really fundamental.
Charu Malhotra (17m 20s):
You can’t do this in organization without being role model from the top for not being something that is not just seen as important, but also accountable and measured, not vanity metrics, because that’s really easy just to look at the front end and the top of the funnel, but actually looking at everything internally, where are people leaving. Why are they leaving? How are they leaving? So, I think it’s key. It requires leaders to be accountable, it requires leaders to role model their behaviors. Take themselves sometimes into an uncomfortable space. I’ve just done a project at a seven, eight months at a tech organization where the entire board where white male Americans, by one leader that was HR.
Charu Malhotra (18m 2s):
And actually, in my first week, because I was brought in to look at branding and inclusion, I pointed this out and said, “You know, what are we doing about this?” And I was totally that’s for later on in the day. So, it requires people to feel that their leaders aren’t just saying this. It’s not just a initiative and DE&I is an initiative but as I said accountable, make movable changes, role model behavior, and then something that Adam Grant shared yesterday in a podcast I was listening to, which I thought was really interesting. DE&I and the values of business house isn’t just around, you know, what painted on the walls or on a wonderful manifest on a website is the behaviors that are tolerated.
Charu Malhotra (18m 43s):
So, I think its role modeling is really important. If we’re saying bringing in women of color, if we’re saying bringing in poorly represented minorities in the organization, it matters in every single team and every single function. And how then that is then communicated externally and internally is something that leadership need to take hold off and not just see it as a 2021 program, or kind of goal.
Matt Alder (19m 12s):
I don’t have to tell you how challenging 2021 has been for talent acquisition professionals. The continuing pandemic and unprecedented imbalance in the demand and supply of talent have meant a tough 12 months for all of you. One of the biggest reasons I produce this podcast is because I strongly believe that we need to celebrate, recognize, and raise up the profession of talent acquisition. Here’s Amy Schulz, Global Head Of Talent Acquisition at Canva talking on Episode 395, about The Evolution In The Role Of Talent Acquisition Professionals, and why we need to celebrate this. And make it a first choice career rather than something that people just fall into.
Amy Schulz (19m 56s):
I love that question. You know, I think it is about, you know, to your point raising the profile and then also celebrating. You know, I think celebrating the role of recruiters. And I’d love kind of saying now, you know, more and more industry awards for recruiters and recruitment teams because I think it’s so important to celebrate and recognize the work, the craft and the impact that recruiters have. So, you know, I would encourage, you know, more, more industry awards and more companies to sponsor, you know, awards, or even have kind of their own internal recognition for recruiters like that celebration point can’t be underestimated.
Amy Schulz (20m 40s):
And then coming back to your point around raising the profile, you know, I certainly, this year, I have spent more time partnering with our marketing and communications teams than I ever have before, Matt, around, you know, talent brand. And I think, you know, companies have really now recognized or a lot of companies have recognized the value of linking consumer brand and talent brand and really, you know, they do go hand in hand. And so for the opportunity for TA to start working with other teams on projects that are outside of sort of operational hiring, I think is a great way of demonstrating our value and perhaps, you know, shifting the profile or the perception of hiring is just, you know, this kind of operational recruiting.
Amy Schulz (21m 32s):
But actually, you know, there’s so much more strategy and creativeness that we apply day to day in what we do. Likewise, as you know, folks are returning to the office and companies are starting to think about, you know, hybrid work and flexible work. I’m also involved in more conversations than I ever before around, you know, where should we hire? What are the right patients? What are the skills that we’re going to need in the future? And so, all of a sudden, you know, you’re in these conversations with perhaps L and D, perhaps real estate, perhaps employee experience, you know, perhaps even business development or corp.
Amy Schulz (22m 16s):
Dev if companies are looking at M&Ns. And I’m finding more and more that TA are at the seat in a lot of different tables. And we have really valuable insight to contribute, I think to business strategy as it relates to talent. And I think, you know, right now talent has never been more important to any company’s ability to grow, be successful and scale. And I think that’s also starting to up level our profession and the value of it. And I think that’s just, you know, great for our industry as a whole.
Matt Alder (22m 56s):
Finally, one of the things I always look to bring you on the podcast is an external perspective from thought leaders in other disciplines. As well as giving us all food for thought, I also do this because I want to raise the profile of talent acquisition across the wider business community. A few weeks ago, I was delighted when Rory Sutherland agreed to come on the show. Rory is one of the world’s leading thinkers on Behavioral Science, and was really interested in talking about how it can be applied in talent acquisition. I think his insights on thinking differently, and the nature of decision making will be beneficial to bear in mind as we go into 2022.
Matt Alder (23m 38s):
If you’re interested in learning more about his work, I would thoroughly recommend his book, Alchemy, The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense.
Rory Sutherland (23m 50s):
I’m the vice chairman of Ogilvy, the advertising group in the UK. But I’m also within Ogilvy, the co-founder of a behavioral science practice, which essentially studies what I occasionally call the science of knowing what economists are wrong about. And in particular, I’m conscious of the fact always that in any business setting, there is a what you might call a Newtonian deterministic quantifiable dimension to a problem, but there’s also an emotional or perceptual dimension to the problem. And one of the curses of business is our need to appear rational in all settings to defend our decisions.
Rory Sutherland (24m 36s):
Sometimes, in fact, makes business decision making more biased and more ridiculous than consumer decision making. Because the one advantage consumers have in making a decision is they don’t necessarily have to justify it in front of a U-shaped table. And so, they’re free to use a mix of emotional heuristics and rational calculus in making a decision. Now, I always put it very simply, I say when you make a decision as a consumer, this is an oversimplification, but it’s a useful distinction. What we’re trying to do is minimize the risk of regret. And when we make a decision in a business setting, it’s subtly different because what we’re trying to do is to minimize the risk of blame. And as a result, we may choose a course of action, not because it’s in fact better in terms of its results, but simply because it’s easier to defend.
Rory Sutherland (25m 27s):
So, recruiting graduates would be a perfect example of this. It seems perfectly rational. Despite the fact actually that there isn’t much evidence. In fact, there’s quite a little bit of evidence that shows that degree category does not correlate very well with workplace performance. There’s also evidence I think from the workplace that after you’ve been doing a job for four years, nobody cares what you got at university, because your performance in your job is a much better measure of your value than your performance doing some artificially generated tests five years previously. It might be that your degree got you the job in the first place. And it’s not a completely hopeless proxy metric.
Rory Sutherland (26m 7s):
I mean, it shows some degree of intelligence, some degree of literacy, some degree of determination, and self-organization. But equally, the reason we do it is not necessarily because it’s a good decision, but simply because it makes sense. And the reason the subtitle of my book is The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense, is because business I think, explores far too little. Because if you can make a decision that’s easy to defend, you make it. You say, decision taken completely rational justification for this decision, move on nothing to see here, and you fail to experiment in more interesting areas.
Rory Sutherland (26m 49s):
For example, recruiting people from a mixture of places and backgrounds. It’s much, much easier to get fired for being irrational than it is for being unimaginative. And so, there’s a distinct rationality bias in all business decisions, which causes it to fail to explore paths of action, which may be slightly counterintuitive, or may have a second order intelligence, not a first. I’ll give you a great example from labor economics. And I’m talking about this quite a lot, which is, if you ask people, would you like a company car or would you prefer the cash alternative? Nearly everybody will say the cash alternative. Because that sounds like a rational answer. Okay. After all, I go and lease a car myself with the money.
Rory Sutherland (27m 31s):
I would argue that there were there was huge value to employers in providing company cars, because it showed long term commitment to the employee. But it also gave the employee something they may value more than money, which is a guilt free luxury. So, put very bluntly, okay, a company car allows you to drive a much better car than your spouse would allow you to buy with your own money. What I say is that we’ve turned business into a rationality competition and an efficiency competition because those approaches are very, very safe in career, what you might call career insurance terms. I’ve got a good reason for doing what I did, and therefore, I will happily make that decision.
Rory Sutherland (28m 15s):
But quite often, the best decisions involve a degree of counterintuitive logic, emotional logic, or, you know, metrics, which to some extent, don’t exist, because we’re packed full of objective metrics about time and distance and cost. But we don’t really have SI units for the human emotions. We don’t have an SI unit for regret, or an SI unit for anxiety and uncertainty. And my contention is a lot of fantastic discoveries are made in the consumer space, almost by accident, or not necessarily fully intentioned, because they happen to tap into a psychological truth, which nobody’s been looking for because it’s not easy to measure.
Rory Sutherland (28m 56s):
So, my example of that I was favorite is the Uber map. It’s a piece of psychological magic, because it relies on the fact that actually, we’re not that bothered about the duration of our wait for a taxi, whether it’s five minutes or 12, doesn’t really bother us that much. What we really hate is the degree of uncertainty about its arrival. And so, the map doesn’t reduce arrival time appreciably, if all you were measuring was how quickly a taxi turned up. You’d never notice the effect of the map. Psychologically, however, it’s transformative, because instead of going, “Oh my god, why isn’t he here yet? I bet they lied. He’s not coming at all. Maybe he’s already left. Maybe he can’t find the house.” You look at the map, and you immediately go, oh, look, he’s stuck at those traffic lights.
Rory Sutherland (29m 44s):
I have another point. And your emotional state returns to a happy norm.
Matt Alder (29m 48s):
A big thank you to Jeff, Allyn, Charu, Amy, and Rory. And a huge thank you to all of my guests across all 400 episodes of the show. I’m sorry, I didn’t have the time to feature more of you in this episode. I also wanted to thank my sponsors without whom the podcast would not exist. A special shout out to the companies who sponsored in the last 12 months. Thanks to you Quantiphi, PredictiveHire, Metaview, SHL, Eightfold, a Luba, Willow, Avature, E6, Outcast, Fetcher, Totaljobs , and Paradox. Finally, and most importantly, thanks to you for listening, sharing, and giving me feedback.
Matt Alder (30m 29s):
I’m overwhelmed by the support that I get. I could not do this without you. And I’m very much looking forward to bring you the next 100 episodes, and many, many more after that. If you’re listening to this at the time that it’s published, it’s not the last episode of the year. I have a great interview on the impact of AI, lined up for next week, and a bit of a holiday special coming up between Christmas and New Year, looking ahead to 2022. 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.
Matt Alder (31m 12s):
You can search all the past episodes at 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.
Matt Alder (31m 51s):
I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me my show.