Everything is changing very quickly in talent acquisition, and many employers are struggling to keep up with the ever evolving best practices that are driving results. It’s a critical moment to get a helicopter view of what talent acquisition strategies are working and the successful attributes of the highest performing recruiting functions.
My guest this week is Janet Mertens, VP of Research at The Josh Bersin Company. Her organisation has recently published an independent report on Human-Centered Talent Acquisition which looks at the strategies and tactics successful talent acquisition teams are deploying in these challenging times.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The background and methodology of the research project
• A perfect storm in talent acquisition
• What business practices are having the most significant impact
• The critical business issues talent acquisition is addressing
• Being bold, creative and human-centered
• Intentional experience design
• What truly drives competitive advantage
• Attracting and retaining top talent
• The importance of authenticity and consistency in EVP and employer branding
• The role of recruiters as talent advisors
• Recruiting technology
• Levels of talent acquisition maturity
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:52]:
Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 441 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Everything is changing very quickly in talent acquisition and many employers are struggling to keep up with the ever evolving best practices that are driving results. It’s a critical moment to get a helicopter view of what talent acquisition strategies are working and the successful attributes of the highest performing recruiting functions. My guest this week is Janet Mertens, VP of Research at the Josh Burton Company. Her organization has recently published an independent report on Human Centered Talent Acquisition which looks at the strategies and tactics successful talent acquisition teams are deploying in these challenging times.
Matt Alder [00:01:43]:
Hi Janet and welcome to the podcast.
Janet Mertens [00:01:46]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be here.
Matt Alder [00:01:49]:
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you just introduce yourself and.
Matt Alder [00:01:54]:
Tell everyone what you do?
Janet Mertens [00:01:56]:
Sure. Happy to. So I am the Vice President of Research at the Josh Berson Company. I have been inside and outside studying hr for about 20 plus years. We’ll leave it at that. I have practiced in hr, consulted in HR and also studied as a researcher, studied all things people and talent for many years. So this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart.
Matt Alder [00:02:24]:
Fantastic stuff. Now you have just researched and released a report called the Definitive Guide to Recruiting Human Centered Talent Acquisition. And it’s, it’s an excellent report and I was really keen to get you on the show and you know, sort of find out more about it really. I suppose just, just as a starting point. So just as a starting point, why this topic now and how, how did you put together the research?
Janet Mertens [00:02:52]:
Sure. Well, listen, we all know that hiring is harder than ever. The last few years certainly have been like no other. But even if we go back 10 years, the disruptions to organizations and business have been just sort of non stop. And the conversations that we’ve been having at the Josh Burson Company have really been about, you know, what is the new normal, where are we headed next? And so we started this research mat probably about a year ago right in the Heart of the pandemic. And we started by really just hearing from and talking to dozens of heads of TA and CHROs who were sharing with us their challenges. Right. We talked to, I’ll give you an example. We talked to the head of talent acquisition at a US Airline who said to us, you know, sort of mid pandemic, right around the time that travel was starting to come back, people were returning to offices for the first or second time that, you know, her comment was, ta is back with a vengeance. But we can’t find the people to fill these 3,000 open wrecks that we have. So, you know, really heard this refrain over and over again in our conversations. And so what we wanted to do was really dig into what is going on in talent acquisition. How has it been impacted by the events of the last couple of years? What are companies doing to meet the needs in this incredibly tight talent and labor market, and what’s actually making a difference? That’s sort of the background that led us to this research.
Matt Alder [00:04:39]:
Absolutely. And it kind of makes perfect sense. And as I was just saying to you, actually, before we turn the mics on, it’s great to see some independent research looking at the talent acquisition market, because we don’t, you know, we don’t actually have very much that looks kind of holistically at everything. That’s everything that’s going on. So, I mean, tell us a little bit more about some of the challenges that you. That you found. You know, what companies have been doing that might not. That’s not been effective.
Janet Mertens [00:05:09]:
Sure. Well, listen, I, you know, there are kind of three big stories here out of this research. One is that, as I mentioned, hiring is harder than ever. We have just a number of external forces hitting organizations, hitting employers at the same time. It’s sort of a perfect storm. There are hundreds, thousands of open jobs now, not enough people. There are employees who are in the driver’s seat now. And what I mean is that they are on the move. Right. We’ve been talking about the great resignation, the great migration, the great return for a long time. The data is pointing to incredibly high quit rates. Burnout rates are rising. So just a number of kind of forces or issues coming together. And so when we dug into the research and we really tried to understand what’s happening, we went out to about 600 companies, Matt, and talked with them about their practices and what’s working and what’s not working. And we did a couple of things in the research. One is we to understand who’s doing what. What are all of the different hiring practices and business practices that companies are applying to, to, to hire in this, in this new market. And which of those are actually having an impact not just on the ability to recruit and retain employees, that’s certainly a big piece of this, but also on other aspects of the business. Financial performance, customer satisfaction, innovation, where are those, you know, how is talent acquisition really shifting to address those critical business issues? So, you know, the big story out of our research is that the old approaches and the additive approaches are no longer working. Three in four companies that we spoke to are not succeeding in how they are hiring or being able to hire and retain their top talent. But the few that are the pioneers, the 25% 1 in 4, they’re not only winning the war for talent, they’re actually winning at everything. And that’s what I think we’re going to unpack today.
Matt Alder [00:07:27]:
Absolutely. And I think that insight into the real business impact of getting talent acquisition right in this real challenging time is kind of a really important insight. And it just shows how seriously leadership teams within companies need to be taking TA and investing in TA at the moment. Well, I suppose the obvious question is what is it the companies that are succeeding in these really challenging times? What is it that they’re doing and what is it that they’re not doing?
Janet Mertens [00:07:58]:
So when we started looking at our data set and we started to think about, you know, what are these practices that are going to make the biggest, you know, have the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak, we looked at about 100 different hiring practices, practices across all domains of talent acquisition, from traditional domains like how TA is structured and organized and operated, right through to more emergent domains or disciplines around job architecture and skills taxonomies and job design itself, and internal mobility and gig economy. And we found that this group, this sort of North Star group of companies, are pioneers, these level fours, they are doing a couple of things differently. One is they are incredibly bold and creative and the other is that they are laser focused on being human centered in every aspect of talent acquisition, of hiring. So let me just share what I mean by that a little bit. So when I talk about being bold, you know, I’ll give you the example of McDonald’s, who is a company that we explore in the research and in our study and we talked with the folks at McDonald’s to really understand what’s going on. So the story at McDonald’s is that this is a quick serve restaurant that hires a million plus frontline employees, restaurant workers, every year in the US Alone. So they’ve got huge hiring volumes that they’ve got to contend with. And then on top of that, because of the franchise model of the business, they’ve also got owner operators of restaurants who are actively acting as recruiters and hiring managers, but also running restaurants. And so they had a very fragmented approach to hiring for these, you know, these high numbers. And they were finding that their ATS was not being embraced, not being used. Owners and operators were sort of, you know, tacking on their own homegrown solutions and doing whatever they needed. So McDonald’s actually started an initiative to just throw out the system that they had in place and figure out what would work properly. And what they came up with was a very lightweight solution designed by their owners and operators. So a portion of their, their owner, operator, restaurant manager network, and it’s a chatbot. And that chatbot allows their hourly candidates, job seekers, to apply for a job in the time it takes to drive through the drive thru. And because it was designed by the users, by the owners, operators, who are the recruiters and hiring managers, they’ve seen a 98% uptake of the use of that, you know, that technology. It’s automated all of their scheduling. It’s allowed hourly workers to apply and get scheduled into interviews quickly without loss of candidates. So it’s just been a really bold move for that company. Instead of just relying on the existing technology, which has been part of what we saw across the board. The other thing that these level four companies are doing, Matt, is being very intentional about the design. And the McDonald’s story is such a great, a great one because it shows how companies are thinking about the experiences of every single member of that, you know, recruiting process, from hiring manager to recruiter to, of course, candidate to employee and new hire. What is the experience, that irresistible experience that is going to attract and recruit and retain the top talent that you need?
Matt Alder [00:11:57]:
That’s such a great example. I’ve seen that McDonald’s strategy and it’s a brilliant example of what modern recruiting needs to look like in the circumstances that we find ourselves in. Thank you for all the insights into that, especially in terms of how it was designed. One of the things that you do in the report is you kind of have these practical suggestions. You have these areas that you recommend people should focus on if they want to really kind of excel with modern ta. Can you talk us through those?
Janet Mertens [00:12:39]:
Sure. Well, and when I talk about being bold and human centered, I mean, those are easy to say, hard to do, right? You know, there are probably three Maybe four key areas that stand apart in our research as the most important or essential of all of those practices. You know, that we looked at the hundred or so 15 rise to the top, Matt, and we call them the essential practices. And really they roll up into probably four areas I want to talk about. One is brand and evp. So employer brand and employee value proposition have been around for decades. It’s not a new concept to ta. And yet candidates, there’s sort of three things at play right now because as we talked in the opening, candidates are in the driver’s seat, right? They are increasingly looking for not just a job, but a future. We’re doing some research right now with LinkedIn and some of the early data says that next to pay, growth and development is at the top of the list for candidates and job seekers when they look for a new job. So it’s not surprising that most organizations are actively reinventing their brand and their EVP. Our research shows that 98% of companies in the past year added benefits to, you know, health and well being, benefits to their employee value proposition in the hopes of attracting talent. But that’s just not enough. And this is where it gets really interesting. It’s going to take more than just perks or a very slick career page to attract and to keep top talent. And what we found in the research is in our level four companies, in our human centered, our creative, human centered organizations is that authenticity and consistency in the brand and the EVP matter more than anything else. And they are the guideposts now with which companies are refreshing their brand. When companies are thinking about and linking what it’s like to work in that company and including employee voice in the development of their EVP and their brand, they are seeing astounding results. So these level four companies are seeing five times higher financial performance than their peers or six times higher rates of customer satisfaction. I’ll tell you a story about Bayer, who we explore in the research. So Bayer, of course is a huge life sciences company, has been around for decades. The head of talent acquisition there talked to me about the last few years and what’s changed at Bayer. So they’ve gone through a real evolution. Bayer started out as a German chemicals company and has, you know, evolved into a life sciences company today. And for a long time they saw, they talked about how they could rely on being big and being stable and being well known and everything about their brand was geared towards our organization is great, come work for us. Now though, they’ve really shifted that approach. What they’re Noticing is it’s just not enough to rest on your laurels anymore. And so they have really endeavored to rethink their brand, to put the employee first. And we see this across the board with many of these level four organizations. It’s now about bringing your true self to work and doing your life’s work in the company. And so companies like Bayer, like IKEA, like L’Oreal, they are all rethinking their brands to hire for a career, for a lifetime, and to show and demonstrate to candidates how they can contribute not just to the company, but to society, to the environment, to the world at large.
Matt Alder [00:16:56]:
And what’s the role of recruiters in all of this?
Janet Mertens [00:16:59]:
Great question. This is actually my favorite finding from the research was the importance of recruiters. So I’ll start by saying the demand for recruiters has skyrocketed. So we found that nearly four times the number of recruiter job postings have jumped by a factor of four in the last couple of years. So there are more recruiter job postings on LinkedIn than there are data scientists right now. So this need is really, really clear. One of the heads of TA I spoke to said to me, forget about the thousands of open recs we actually have, we don’t have enough recruiters to hire for those people that we need in the company. So, you know, we know that recruiters are in high demand, but what we found in the research is they need to be taken care of differently. So nearly half of the respondents that we talked to said their recruiters are dealing with 50 or more job wrecks each. Some, you know, some are even upwards of 50 to 100 job wrecks per recruiter. So there’s a lot of focus right now on, or a lot of attention rather on the potential for recruiter burnout. There’s been research that shows that, you know, 60% or more of recruiters are feeling an increased level of stress in their jobs due in part to things like isolation during the, the pandemic period, the return to the great resignation, and these high job rec numbers, even the layoffs. When we think about recruiters now, what we found in the study is really the skills of the recruiter are changing and companies need to pay attention and invest in developing their recruiters continuously and in designing experiences for those recruiters that are as irresistible as candidate experiences. We’re talking about things like empathy, you know, skilling recruiters in empathy or in business acumen and adaptability. They’re no longer simply a sales role. They are true talent advisors. And that is the role that recruiters can play and should be playing. And certainly our level four companies, our pioneers, are taking note.
Matt Alder [00:19:30]:
So a lot of the changes that are happening are predicated on the development and adoption of new technologies in recruiting. What did you find in terms of recruitment technology and the role that it’s playing in all of this?
Janet Mertens [00:19:45]:
Technology is such an interesting part of the TA story, isn’t it? So Matt, you and I both know and your listeners know that the TA tech stack is, I mean it’s, I think a thing of beauty is maybe an understatement, but it is still a mystery. And recruiters are in and out of multiple solutions and systems every day. And so what we found is that first of all, most companies are dealing with probably 20 or more TA solutions. And when we think about the recruiter experience, so much of that results in a almost an impenetrable or fragmented experience. The lowest scoring element of everything we looked at in terms of TA maturity in our research showed that technology was the one place that companies are still really struggling. And you know, add in AI or automation and it’s a real mystery. So I think when we look again at those top performing companies that are leaders, they’re focused heavily on two principles, adaptability and design. So flexible systems that change and allow for adaptation and growth and then also design with the recruiter in mind. And I’ll give you a story of L’Oreal again. So L’Oreal talked to us about their recruiters and the technology work that they’ve been doing to simplify the recruiter experience and their recruiting platform now that they are using there is so simple that the head of TA talked about how the recruiting team has now become data analytics experts. They are actually in the system playing around with the data and have been able to use it to adjust recruiting metrics and increase diversity in hiring diverse candidates because of the simplicity and the adaptability of the software. So, you know, I think when we talk about technology, we really have to think about the people who are using it.
Matt Alder [00:22:05]:
So as a final question, I know that lots of people who are listening will be very curious about how their TA strategy really kind of benchmarks against everyone else who’s out there. And you mentioned sort of level 4 maturity companies in the conversation and in the report. You have a maturity model in terms of TA strategy. Could you just give us a quick overview of that so people can benchmark themselves?
Janet Mertens [00:22:34]:
Sure. Our research analyzes the data and what emerged from that analysis are four levels of maturity in TA And I’ll just talk through them really briefly so that folks can think about where they are today and how to move forward. So the first level of maturity, we call it reactive and fragmented. And these are organizations that are really just order takers when it comes to hiring. Right? So these are. There’s about 14, 15% of companies still here. And they are really sort of a downstream process. Talent acquisition and hiring are not consistent across the organization. It’s very reactive and there’s not a lot of process or governance in place. Not many companies still live in level one. Although it’s worth noting that size does not necessarily matter here. The thought might be that small companies might be there because their hiring needs are lower. We found a significant portion of companies, over 100,000 still fell into level one. So level two is a big shift forward. And I like to think about level two and level three in our maturity model as sort of the recruiting limbo that companies often find themselves in. So level two, we call it standardized and structured. And this is a group of organizations that really have double clicked on defining their processes. This is all about control. They’ve gone from a fragmented, reactive, sort of disconnected approach to very controlled, standardized processes and rules and governance around talent acquisition. This is where we see centers of excellence emerge. A lot of global standards are implemented here. And there’s a very basic approach to internal mobility that starts to show up in level two. And then of course level three, where we have about a third of companies. These are the folks who have set the stage with the standards that they need, really established those controls and now are turning their attention to the people, the humans in the process. So we call this proactive and personalized. And at this level, there’s a lot of emphasis now on that candidate experience especially so a lot of focus and investment in defining the perfect personalized candidate experience. There’s some attention being put on the recruiter at this stage, but not a lot yet. It’s not too mature what they are doing in level three. These companies are really paying attention to brand and employee value proposition. But again, it’s sort of a basic approach, I would say. So in level three, these are, these are organizations that are adding perks and adding benefits and really thinking about pay, but not going deeper than that. And then we get to level four and level four are the pioneers. And when we look at what they’re doing, we talked about brand, we talked about investing in recruiters, we talked a little bit about technology. These companies are really purposeful and intentional in the design of how they hire. They are thinking about technology as it fosters and supports the human experience. And they’re also heavily focused on internal talent. So there’s a real understanding of what the skills are inside the workforce, a culture of growth and mobility inside the workforce. So they’re really tapping into their own talent as well as external talent. And these are folks that just think about hiring differently. They think about people as a competitive advantage in the business.
Matt Alder [00:26:27]:
Janet, thank you very much for talking to me.
Janet Mertens [00:26:30]:
Thank you for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:26:32]:
My thanks to Janet. 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@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.
