The one theme that has come over very clearly in the conversations I’ve had with talent acquisition professionals in the last 12 months is the relationship between speed and quality in the hiring process.
Speed is currently a competitive advantage which means many employers are focusing intensely on speeding up their hiring process. However, quality of experience and quality of hire are still critical, so how do you speed up talent acquisition and improve quality at the same time.
Earlier this year, Mervyn Dinnen and I joined forces with the team at Metaview to work on a piece of research to see if we could answer this question. We spoke to employers who are successfully improving both speed and the quality of the talent acquisition to distil the mindset, strategies and tactics they are using to solve this complex challenge.
We recently published the results in a whitepaper, and I’m delighted to welcome Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger to the show to discuss the findings. Germaine is a People Experience and Operations consultant who was previously Chief People Officer at several high growth tech companies. She was one of the people we interviewed during the research, and she has some very valuable perspectives to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The current state of the market and the background to the research
• Can you increase speed and improve quality at the same time?
• How difficult is it to overhaul the recruiting process?
• Being ready to hire and running a great process
• The importance of talent management
• Talent intelligence and data
• Being transparent and legitimate
• Partnering with leadership
• Human to human interaction
• Using technology to understand what works, what doesn’t work and what training is needed
• What does the future look like
Interview transcript:
Metaview (0s):
Support for this podcast comes from Metta View. Metta View is an interview intelligence platform that elevates interview quality in high-performing, high-growth companies. When hiring at scale, it’s impossible to keep interviews high quality and consistent. There are too many different interviews run by too many different people to be sure there’s a common understanding of what good looks like. This can result in missing out on top talent and making mis-hires, both are painful and damage business velocity and culture. Metta View gives talent acquisition leaders and hiring managers visibility into what’s happening in interviews, and you need data insights and training flows to help interviewers calibrate and improve.
Metaview (44s):
All of this means you can interview and hire faster without sacrificing consistency or quality. If you want to learn more, you can visit Mettaview.ai now.
Recruiting Future (1m 0s):
There’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement, and material progress in your lifetime and mine in all the ages of history.
Matt Alder (1m 15s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 437 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. The one theme that’s come out very clearly in the conversations I’ve had with talent acquisition professionals in the last 12 months is the relationship between speed and quality in the hiring process. Speed is currently a competitive advantage, which means that many employers are focusing intensely on speeding up their hiring processes. However, quality of experience and quality of hire are still critical. How do you speed up talent acquisition and improve quality at the same time?
Matt Alder (1m 57s):
Earlier this year, Mervyn Dinnen and I joined forces with the team at Metaview to work on a piece of research to see if we could answer this question. We spoke to employers who are successfully improving both the speed and quality of their talent acquisition to distill the mindset, strategies, and tactics they are using to solve this complex challenge. We recently published a research in a white paper and I’m delighted to welcome Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger to the show to discuss the findings. Germaine is a People Experience and Operations consultant who was previously Chief People Officer at several high-growth tech companies. She was one of the people we interviewed during the research, and she has some very valuable perspectives to share.
Matt Alder (2m 41s):
I do. Hi, Germaine, and welcome to the podcast.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (2m 43s):
Thank you so much for having me here.
Matt Alder (2m 45s):
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show, particularly as you are one of the people that we spoke to during the research stage of the white paper. It’s great to be able to talk to you to get your insights on the published research basically. To start with, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (3m 4s):
Sure. My name is Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger. I have spent probably 20 to 25 years in startup environments working in, oh goodness. It’s changed over time. It’s been human resources, people operations, people experience, but all things people, running various size organizations. Now, I do consulting and help out startups in that same realm.
Matt Alder (3m 33s):
Fantastic stuff. That really makes you the perfect person to answer the first question, which is before we start talking about the white paper in detail, tell us a little bit about what you’re seeing happening in the market at the moment for talent.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (3m 47s):
It’s an interesting time, but there are also differences between larger and smaller companies in what you’re seeing in both. I would say, across the board, we’re all consistently seeing the perfect storm, right? We’re in the second war for talent, which is impacting companies in how they think about compensation and benefits. What perks matter now if you’re no longer in an office and can draw people to that site? I think it’s been described as a great resignation, but really what I am hearing and feeling more is that it’s a great reprioritization for individuals as COVID really reminded us what truly matters about what we do with our time and where we spend it.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (4m 33s):
Then lastly, I think talent over location has come up more and more. Do companies mandate returning to the office, do they go hybrid, or even remote-first where they haven’t ever been before. In this, you’ll see smaller companies are definitely more challenged as they don’t have the luxury of multiple office locations or infrastructure in the company to get those set up. They’re not international. How do they retain their employees that want to work in various locations? I think all companies are grappling with the changes that this makes to their culture. How do they bring people together, create comradery, and a bond between their employees?
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (5m 16s):
I think we’ll continue to see this evolve over time as companies state they’re returning or not returning, do they dial that back? What happens if we have another pandemic and things shut down again? Will employees become increasingly more demanding of what companies can provide for them?
Matt Alder (5m 38s):
Absolutely. Fascinating times, challenging times, disruptive times, basically. One of the issues that has come up time and time again in the conversations that I’ve had with TA and HR leaders in the last 12 months is really the basis for wanting to do this research. That’s the conundrum that lots of employers buying themselves in that they really need to increase the speed at which they hire, for many reasons, but particularly because talent is hard to find, talent has choices, and they need to move very, very quickly, but at the same time, they need to improve the quality of the people that they hire and the quality of their process and their candidate experience.
Matt Alder (6m 25s):
In your experience, just how difficult is it to do both of those things at the same time?
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (6m 34s):
Well, it’s a major challenge because it’s a complete overhaul of how a company thinks about hiring. If they haven’t been doing this before, right? Retention of employees starts at the job description and recruiters care as much about hiring individuals as they do about retaining them because they don’t want to spend the vast majority of their time back-filling roles that they’ve already once filled. When you start at the job description to retain employees, it reflects not just the job and the responsibilities, but also talks about the culture of the company and what they should expect. If a company is prepared, and quite honestly, if they have the budget to do so, then ramp may not be as difficult to have increased speed with improved quality.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (7m 23s):
However, if you don’t have the structure in place, it leads to a lot more burden on people managers, on your HR business partners, because companies have to be good at recruiting. In all honesty, companies have to be good also at talent management. You don’t often see companies good at both. Interviews still remain in this artificial environment to decide if a person will or won’t work out. Even with multiple interview rounds, coding challenges, take-home assignments, the whole nine yards, try to cut that time, add back pressure from candidates and multiple offers scenarios, or interview scenarios while also changing comp practices and benefits.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (8m 13s):
It’s building the plane while it’s going down the road and trying to take flight. It’s all to say that a company that has tight processes also has enough trained people to effectively interview candidates. You’re hyper hiring, accelerating the speed of that volume, and you’re crushing people’s schedules that are your best interviewers, leaving them little time to get their own workload done. It’s a challenge that impacts companies on a scale beyond just, “Oh, we need to improve our talent acquisition team.”
Matt Alder (9m 1s):
Absolutely. I think that really underlines why it’s so difficult for employers and such a challenge at the current time. When we did the research for this, one thing that came out very strongly as, I suppose, a strategic concept in terms of dealing with this challenge was there was this two-pronged approach of being continually ready to hire in terms of having talent pools and nurturing people over long periods of time, having people ready to go, and also running a great process. Dealing with the problems that you’ve talked about there in terms of interior availability and quality, and how people feedback to candidates and all those kinds of things.
Matt Alder (9m 48s):
Now, you’ve had a chance to read the white paper in its entirety. I’d just be interested to know what stands out for you. In terms of the bit where we look at what companies are doing in terms of being ready to hire, we cover a few aspects of it. What were the ones that really stood out for you?
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (10m 9s):
Transparency, I think, are all relevant, right? Data on the current team and the future needs and priorities of the company, as well as branding, the company are all this multi-viewpoint of how companies are showcasing themselves to candidates, right? Do they have a good handle on what they need to hire? What do they have within the company? What the holes are? Are they also representing themselves in a transparent and legitimate way? You never want to walk into a company and feel like, “Wow, this was a complete bait and switch and nothing like what they sold me in the interview.”
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (10m 54s):
This isn’t the old adage of “Interviewing is dating and the job is marriage,” where you find things out in the real world. You want it to actually be near themselves. I think it’s a lot of data and a lot of partnering with the leadership within the company, partnering with the business partners, the HR business partners. It’s critical to understand what the composition of the company looks like and ensure that there are people in the recruiting team or in the data team that can provide these insights into what’s going on.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (11m 34s):
It’s going to be a little bit of both, right? The HR side of the house may know more about who is not working out, what roles we need to replace, or what holes exist within that organization as they do planning with leadership in conjunction with the talent acquisition team, but companies are also notoriously bad across the board at headcount planning. The good news is nobody ever fully hires to their headcount capacity so there’s always some flop from year to year, but being able to have enough runway to figure out how can we plan talent acquisition, get the data that we need in time to get some sourcing done, to get some job descriptions written, and posts out there for people will consistently remain a challenge.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (12m 28s):
That’s not something talent acquisition can often accelerate unfortunately.
Matt Alder (12m 32s):
That mirrors what you were saying earlier about talent management being this part of the solution. There is that sense of the whole company working on all the different aspects of this to be as prepared and informed as possible, but that is a challenge in the real world. I think it’s a challenge that lots of people that I’m speaking to are addressing and finding ways to deal with that. Moving on to the piece about the recruitment process itself and running a great recruitment process, what stood out for you in terms of some of the areas that we cover in that part of the research?
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (13m 19s):
For me, I live by the adage of anything worth doing is worth measuring. Somebody told me that many years ago. I think qual will be as important as quant. Rich Joe was right in that in the end, this is about human-to-human interaction. As much as we want to interject data in there, it’s about humans connecting and how can we improve those interactions through tools? Quite honestly, like Metaview, it will remain important to understand what works, what isn’t working, what training we need to provide, and what education needs to be done for the interviewers, and in some cases, the interviewees. What are we missing in communicating with candidates that isn’t being translated correctly across video, or even in-person, to understand what’s the hook for this one candidate?
Matt Alder (14m 12s):
Yes, absolutely. I think you’re right in Rich Joe’s comments about that human-to-human process that we feature in the report really resonate definitely. As a final question, but probably the most difficult question of all, which is, really thinking towards the future. It’s obvious that we’re in a time of transition and great change, and things have been changing very, very quickly. What would you think the future looks like? How are some of the trends that we’re talking about going to kind of solidify and develop in the future?
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (14m 51s):
I think some things will continue to improve, right? Video interviews are still a fairly new and novel idea. I think it gives candidates more flexibility. Now, they don’t need a travel or commute to the office. They don’t have to take an entire day off for a marathon interview or go in after hours. They can slide it into their overall day. You can break up interviews and curate the order of those interviews and probably bang out as many interviews in a day that you would have with a person sitting in the room. I think we’ll continue to see things like automation, tasks like scheduling, and maybe tools to ensure data collection post-interviews are completed.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (15m 39s):
In the end, connection matters. Tools like Metta View will be able to provide additional data to improve interviews and interviewers, but how do you improve the connection? How do you paint a picture of what it’s like to work at the company? Does a tool like Metta View move into biometric data, providing insights into a person’s real-time reactions, like having a small group of people? I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that show it’s no longer on. It’s called Lie To Me, where they would record individuals and see these micro-expressions and tell if a person was lying, telling the truth, reaching beyond explaining what they’d actually done at their last jobs.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (16m 30s):
We now may have more data from our wearable devices – Fitbits, Apple watches, what’s your body temperature, your heart rate at a certain level that should make a person nervous. Things like VR are still in infancy and likely will play a bigger role in the future, not just in interviews to show the team they will work with or attend meetings to get to know the team better, but they will run some type of simulation to see how the person reacts for a company to better understand how are they going to fit within the group when you don’t have this in-person meeting that people can have different reactions over video and not ever having met the person.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (17m 25s):
Then will AI pull data on candidates from various social media platforms? Will it look at the videos you’ve posted or words you’ve used in posts to create a, we’ll say, bio of a candidate before you even interview the candidate? That can improve the interview experience because companies can better tailor their questions, that candidate’s interview experience, what they learn about the company, or even what the company decides to share. Now, naturally, laws are going to come about in order to cover all of this, but with employee activism, continuing to be on the rise with the shift in work cultures as companies decide if they want people in-house or working remotely.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (18m 19s):
Transparency of data for employees will always be required. If you do start pulling biometric data, if you do start using all of these other AI tools, what will employees want to see, want to know, and understand about that will also impact as much of the hiring and the disclosure of that information that leads to a diverse working environment that people will appreciate and enjoy. Then work-life balance has definitely changed.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (19m 0s):
Companies are going to struggle to hire the number of employees required to deliver the volume of products and keep up also, at the same time, with the increasing compensation for, not just the candidates, but also their preexisting employees. You’re seeing Amazon have this battle right now about what they’re paying their candidates versus what their employees are being paid because gone are the days in startups at least where cash is traded for equity. This 9-9-6 mentality is a long-forgotten notion. If it does come up, there is a lot of vocalization from the employee base that this is not going to be acceptable.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (19m 47s):
I think you’re going to see changes from the inside of a company that also need to be reflected to candidates as much to understand what is happening and why they’ll want to join the company.
Matt Alder (20m 1s):
Germaine, thank you very much for talking to me.
Germaine Yokoyama Heiliger (20m 4s):
Not a problem. Thank you so much for taking your minutes with me.
Matt Alder (20m 7s):
My thanks to Germaine. If you want to download a full copy of the report, you can find it at mettaview.ai/RecruitingFuture.
Matt Alder (20m 48s):
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 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 so much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
