Round up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.
Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:
Ep 406: A CEO’s Perspective On Remote Work
Ep 407: Science Driven Talent Intelligence
Ep 408: Hiring Revolution
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Transcript:
Paradox: The AI assistant for recruiting (0s):
Support for this podcast is provided by Paradox, the conversational AI company, helping global talent acquisition teams at Unilever, McDonald’s and CVS Health get recruiting work done faster. Let’s face it, talent acquisition is full of boring administrative tasks that drag the hiring process down and create frustrating experiences for everyone. Paradox’s AI assistant Olivia is shaking up that paradigm, automating things like applicant screening, interview scheduling and candidate Q&A so recruiters can spend more time with people, not software.
Paradox: The AI assistant for recruiting (40s):
Curious how Olivia can work for your team? Then visit paradox.ai to learn more.
Matt Alder (1m 5s):
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to the January Roundup episode of The Recruiting Future Podcast. If you’ve not listened to Round Up before, it’s a short review of the episodes that I’ve published in the last month to make sure that you don’t miss out on the valuable insights that my guests are sharing. So the long dark month of January is finally over. Well, it’s certainly long and dark here in Scotland, and it feels like the year is gathering a bit of momentum. It’s certainly going to be yet another challenging and disruptive year in the talent space and the conversations I had on the podcast in January encapsulate a number of the issues that we’re facing.
Matt Alder (1m 49s):
Skills shortages have always been a challenge for employers, and I’ve certainly come into sharp focus in recent months. Skills mapping, predicting feature skills requirements and opening up talent pools via hybrid and remote working are just some of the solutions employers will be looking at in 2022. My first guest of the year on episode 403 was Vanessa Tierney, CEO of Abodoo. But as this organization recently surveyed a hundred HR directors and C-level executives from the world’s best companies to work for and ask their opinion about their firm’s working strategy, talent workforce, and social infrastructure.
Matt Alder (2m 30s):
Unsurprisingly, skills were the number one issue. There’s lots of insights in this conversation around predicting future skills requirements and understanding gaps, which will help everyone who’s designing their talent acquisition strategy to take a long-term view. 2022 has only just begun and it’s already clear that the great resignation will continue to be a huge talking point as companies fight for the talent they need. However, some employers are already reframing this challenge as a fantastic opportunity to attract talented people that might not have previously been persuaded to move roles. This isn’t easy and obviously employer brand and employee experience are huge factors.
Matt Alder (3m 16s):
However, there’s a lot that talent acquisition teams can be doing to stand out from the crowd by focusing on areas within their control that make a real difference. On episode 404, I spoke to Maggie Spong, VP of Talent Acquisition at AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca has certainly been thrust into the spotlight by the pandemic, but they’ve also spent the last few years developing several initiatives to differentiate themselves in the talent market. In our conversation, Maggie shared a number of these, including their talent scout program, building a personalized and inclusive candidate experience and focusing on the training and development of their talent acquisition team.
Matt Alder (3m 59s):
One of the early discussion points in the pandemic was the access to global talent pools that the move to remote working could open up. Two years on and it is pretty clear that remote working is now a permanent fixture in the working life of many people. So how far are employers tapping into global talent pools and what are the challenges and opportunities? My next two guests really helped to shed some light on this. First up in episode 405 was Nicole Sahin, CEO and Founder of Globalization Partners. Nicole and her company work with many employers who are building global remote teams. And we talked in the interview about the long-term trends that are coming out of the pandemic in this area.
Matt Alder (4m 44s):
Following on from this in episode 406, I wanted to get a hands-on perspective of someone who’s built a highly successful remote first company. Everett Harper is the CEO of Truss, a software engineering business that has been fully remote for 10 years. In our conversation, Everett shared myriad insights on hiring, communication, retention, culture and diversity, and we explored some of the real implications of global mobility. Talent intelligence is something that has gathered significant momentum in the last three years. And data-driven decision-making is a crucial part of every sophisticated talent acquisition function.
Matt Alder (5m 28s):
But are we asking enough questions about the sources of the data that is used and truly understanding the risk of bias? My guest in episode 407 was Markellos Diorinos, CEO at Bryq. Markellos is passionate about using science and unbiased data to inform hiring and internal mobility. And we discussed challenging recruitment norms by using objective data to support decision-making. DEI continues thankfully to be an extremely high-profile issue for employers. However, the needle is still not moving quickly enough, and some of the data is shocking.
Matt Alder (6m 11s):
For example, it would still take 200 years to close the race and gender pay gaps at the current rate of progress. So what can employers do to accelerate the pace of change and how much can individual recruiters influence diversity in hiring? In episode 408, my guests were Trina Olson and Alfonso Wenker, co-founders of Team Dynamics. Trina and Alfonso work with some well-known organizations to improve their diversity and hiring practices. They have recently authored a book called Hiring Revolution that offers some extremely practical advice on how recruiters can inject DEI into their organization’s hiring.
Matt Alder (6m 57s):
Finally, I wanted to say a special thank you to the team at Paradox. Paradox is one of my main sponsors for the first part of 2022. And as part of that, they’ll also be sponsoring these Round Up Episodes. You can check out all the great things they do by going to paradox.ai. So onwards into February, and I have some really interesting guests coming up. So make sure you don’t miss out. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to the podcast in Apple Podcast, 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 (7m 38s):
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. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
