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 415: LinkedIn & Career Breaks
Ep 417: Optimizing The Recruiting Process
Ep 423: Perfecting The Candidate Experience
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
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 about 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 March 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 March was a bit of an interesting month. I got COVID but luckily recovered very quickly. Although you would have been able to hear my croaky voice in some of the interviews. And also my second book, Digital Talent was released. More on that a little bit later. Once more, we had a really interesting set of guests talking on a very diverse, but very relevant range of topics.
Matt Alder (1m 48s):
I learnt a lot, and I hope you did as well. Kicking off the month with episode 415, it was great to welcome LinkedIn, back to the podcast to talk about the new career breaks feature on the LinkedIn profile. De-stigmatizing career breaks is something that I feel very strongly about and something that talent acquisition needs to take very seriously. With so much lip service paid to diversity and inclusion and the current difficulties of finding talent, it makes zero sense to still view career breaks negatively. As well as talking through the Career Breaks feature, my guest, Jennifer Shappley, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, discuss the key findings of LinkedIn’s latest global talent trends report and shared her thoughts on the future of talent acquisition.
Matt Alder (2m 36s):
For many people, remote working now feels like business as usual. However, most employers still haven’t evolved their working practices to embrace its advantages. Adopting an asynchronous model of work has been something that remote-first companies have been doing for years. And there are proven benefits in terms of both productivity and wellbeing. So what are the strategic differences between synchronous and asynchronous? How does leadership work in an asynchronous model and what steps should employers be taking to adapt to different ways of working in a remote world of work?
Matt Alder (3m 17s):
In episode 416, I got some great insights into this by speaking to Liam Martin, founder of a remote-first company with people in 43 different countries and no office. Liam is a thought leader on asynchronous work and co-organizer of Running Remote, the world’s largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. With so many challenges in talent acquisition, process improvement and optimization are a constant theme as employers attempt to speed up their processes. But how do you speed up recruiting while protecting the integrity of the quality of hire and DE&I?
Matt Alder (3m 58s):
My guest on episode 417 was Erin Crask, Director Solutions Architects at SHL. Erin and her team use science and data to help enhance people’s strategies. And she has a tremendous amount of experience helping companies to streamline their external and internal recruiting processes. Continuing the Career Breaks theme from episode 415, in episode 418, I spoke to Lori Mihalich-Levin, founder of Mindful Return. For many people who take parental leave, returning to work can be a very challenging time where they’re not getting the support they need from their employer.
Matt Alder (4m 42s):
So what should employers be doing to support new parents, particularly when talent retention is such a big issue? Mindful Return is an organization focused on helping parents and employers manage effective transitions back into the workplace. And Lori had some very actionable insights to share. Episode 419 picked up again on speeding up recruiting while simultaneously maintaining or improving the quality of process and quality of hire. It’s pretty clear that this is one of the hottest topics of 2022 so far. And it’s something that I’ll be getting a lot of different perspectives on in the coming weeks.
Matt Alder (5m 24s):
As I know, it’s a critical challenge for many of you. In this episode, my guest was Shannon Russo, CEO and Founder of RPO firm Kinetix. Shannon’s organization is working with many employers to help them speed up hiring. And she has lots of hands-on experience that we can all learn from. The world of work has changed in many ways. And one fascinating area is the adoption of a more agile approach to talent. Project-based contracting is on the rise as employers work to ensure they have the right skills at the right time in rapidly changing business environments.
Matt Alder (6m 5s):
So what mindset do employers need to adopt to be successful in The Project Economy? And what are the implications on the career paths of knowledge workers? My guest in episode 420 was Kate Duchene, CEO at RGP, a human capital company redefining how professionals work in more flexible and collaborative ways. Kate is at the cutting edge of The Project Economy. And I learned a lot from this conversation. As we all know, recruiting and retention are tough at the moment and employers need to work harder than ever to acquire and keep the talent they need.
Matt Alder (6m 47s):
Purpose is often talked about as a critical differentiator in employer branding. But what does that actually mean in practical terms? New research from Cognizant has revealed just how important purpose is at work and has also highlighted a growing disconnect between employers and younger workers. So what does purpose mean for Gen Z employees? And what should employers be doing to close The Purpose Gap? I was joined on episode 421 by Eduardo Plastino, Director of The Cognizant Center for the Future of Work, to talk through the research and explore its implications.
Matt Alder (7m 29s):
This is such an important issue for talent acquisition. If you only listened to one of my interviews from March, then make sure it’s this one. So I mentioned in the introduction that March saw the international publication of Digital Talent, the book I have spent the last two years writing with Mervyn Dinnen. We’re incredibly excited that everyone can finally get to read it and wanted to record a special show to discuss the themes and some of the significant learnings from our research. In a disrupted and technology-enabled world of work, the ability to attract, recruit, and retain people with digital skills can be the difference between business success and business failure.
Matt Alder (8m 12s):
Our book explores how employers can do this successfully. I am absolutely delighted that Trish McFarlane, host of the legendary HR Happy Hour podcast agreed to be our guest host and interview me and Mervyn for episode 422. She asked some amazing questions and this is a must-listen if you want to know more about the themes in our book. Delivering a high-quality candidate experience isn’t easy, but it has arguably never been more critical with the recruiting challenges employers are now experiencing. Of all the years that candidate experience has been an industry talking point what’s become really clear to me is that it is fundamentally a strategic rather than a tactical issue.
Matt Alder (8m 58s):
My final guest in March on episode 423 was the brilliant Carlos Fernandez, Director of Talent Acquisition at Houston Methodist. Houston Methodist puts innovation at the heart of its corporate strategy and its approach to candidate experience truly reflects this. Finally, I wanted to say a special thank you to the team at Paradox. Paradox are one of my main sponsors for the first part of 2022, and as part of that, they’re sponsoring these Roundup episodes. You can check out all the great things they do by going to paradox.ai. So onwards into April and after two years of Zoom presentations and hardly leaving Scotland, I’m back on the road again.
Matt Alder (9m 45s):
I’ll be speaking at a client event in Portugal, in early April, and then heading over to Scottsdale at the end of April to do some podcast recording in conjunction with the team at Paradox. I’ll share insights from my trip on LinkedIn and Instagram. So make sure you follow me there. I’m very easy to find on LinkedIn, and you can follow the show on Instagram by searching for Recruiting Future. If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to this podcast in Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. 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.
Matt Alder (10m 27s):
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
