One thing that has remained constant in our changing talent markets is the importance of targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time. In the noisy world of recruiting marketing, talent marketplaces are proving to be effective platforms for bringing employers and like-minded potential employees together.
My guest this week is John Beard, Head of Corporate & Technical Talent Acquisition at One Medical. One Medical is competing for talent in some challenging markets. John has a lot of insights to share on finding, connecting and persuading the right talent to join the organisation in rapidly changing times.
In the interview, we discuss:
• How recruiting challenges are evolving with the market.
• Recruiting missionaries, not mercenaries
• Candidate experience as a north star
• Offering feedback to all
• Cutting through the noise to connect with the right people
• Doing something important versus doing something with impact.
• Compelling storytelling
• The role of talent marketplaces and the advantages they offer employers
• How will the tech talent market evolve over the next two years?
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Transcript:
Hired (0s):
Support for this podcast comes from Hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world’s most innovative companies with the most ambitious tech and sales candidates. With Hired, companies can see what candidates want up front with visibility into competing offers and recruiting metrics. Hired’s unique offering includes hired assessments and diversity goals, a feature to more easily discover qualified underrepresented candidates. By combining technology and the human touch, Hired’s goal is to provide transparency in the recruitment process and to empower each of its partners to employ their potential and keep their talent pipeline full.
Hired (48s):
To learn more about how Hired can help you find your next great hire, go to hired.com/recruitingfuture.
Matt Alder (1m 19s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 483 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. One thing that has remained constant in our changing talent markets is the importance of targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time. In the noisy world of recruitment marketing, talent marketplaces are proving to be effective platforms for bringing employers and like minded potential employees together. My guest this week is John Beard, Head of Corporate and Technical Talent Acquisition at One Medical. One Medical is competing for talent in some very difficult markets.
Matt Alder (2m 0s):
John has a lot of insights to share on finding, connecting, and persuading the right talent to join the organization in rapidly changing times. Hi, John, and welcome to the podcast.
John Beard (2m 14s):
Thank you, Matt. Very happy to be here.
Matt Alder (2m 16s):
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
John Beard (2m 23s):
Sure. My name is John Beard and I have the great privilege of leading a few of the recruiting teams for One Medical, which is a US national healthcare company. Specifically, I lead our tech recruiting teams, our corporate function recruiting team, and the recruiting operations organization.
Matt Alder (2m 46s):
Fantastic stuff. Lots of things I wanna ask you. I suppose before we do, by way of context, just tell us a little bit about One Medical and the size of the enterprise and he things that you do.
John Beard (2m 58s):
Sure. One Medical started about 15 years ago with one brick and mortar office in San Francisco, with the thought that the primary care experience for most people was just a horrendous experience, and we wanted to make it better. Now, that has grown now to, we serve nationally, 20 markets with more coming online in 2023. We are approaching 150 offices nationwide. Again, more coming in both existing and new markets in 2023. It is a hybrid model of both telehealth and brick and mortar.
Matt Alder (3m 40s):
Now, I’m imagining, because it’s obviously been such a crazy couple of years for recruiting, but particularly so, I would, imagine that in the healthcare sector. Tell us about the recruiting challenges I in your market, and I’d be interested to know whether they change this year as the market’s changed.
John Beard (3m 58s):
They really, in some ways, have changed. In some ways, they haven’t. We remain in a very competitive space, especially when we’re talking about trying to hire providers, but even for things like tech and corporate functions, earlier this year, as you know, Matt, the market was just crazy. We were back in what we used to call the war for talent truly because it seemed like every candidate that we talked to or made an offer to had three to five other offers in hand. Obviously then, in what felt like almost an instant, things changed dramatically and the layoffs and riffs started, and the market just changed dramatically.
John Beard (4m 43s):
In the beginning of the year, we were looking for talent. There’s obviously, in a hot market, a lot of people who simply want to optimize their earning potential during a unique point in time. Totally get it, totally respect it, but that’s not who we’re looking for. Being a healthcare company, we’re looking for people who are very tied to a company’s mission, who really want to be a part of healthcare and change the way that healthcare is delivered in the United States. What we used to say is we’re looking for missionaries, not mercenaries when it comes to that. Our challenge was just trying to identify those candidates that really were tied to the mission and wanted to be part of what we were doing.
John Beard (5m 30s):
Fast forward to today and the market’s entirely flipped on its head, the challenge is a little bit different now, because with unemployment rising, with people getting laid off, now, we’re faced with trying to identify those candidates who really, again, want to be part of a mission and are not just looking for a lifeboat, any port in a storm kind of feel because the market is so bad right now. It changes the way that we assess a candidate’s motivations, but yet it still remains very competitive for us in the kinds of roles that we’re looking for.
Matt Alder (6m 11s):
You mentioned there missionaries, not mercenaries, which is a great phrase. Tell us more about your strategy to identify and bring those people on board, particularly, in terms of things like employer brand and candidate experience.
John Beard (6m 28s):
Candidate experience is really our north star in the whole assessment process. Whenever there is a decision to be made in how we do something, we will always err on the side of the Candidate versus the business. We try to keep the candidate in control of the process as much as possible. We have SLAs in terms of our response times and things like that. Are we perfect in it? No. If I’m being honest, I wish we were perfect in it and we’re striving to be perfect in it, but we’re not there yet. We probably never will be, but I think we provide certainly one of the far better candidate experiences in the industry as compared to a lot of other companies.
Matt Alder (7m 13s):
What is it that really differentiates you in terms of that candidate experience?
John Beard (7m 18s):
I think it’s exactly that. I think every time we’ve looked at process optimization, we’ve looked at the way we do things. We always say, “How is this going to feel to the candidate? Is this going to be a good experience or is this going to be a negative experience? One of the things that we do that a lot of companies don’t do is we’re willing to provide feedback to our candidates after their interviews. We offer it to them. It’s up to a candidate whether or not they want to actually connect with us and and hear the feedback, but we think that that is a huge differentiator. There’s been numerous and countless candidate surveys out there that say the lack of feedback is one of their number one complaints.
John Beard (8m 0s):
I think that and I think the speed at which we operate, and I think the consistency. We have a very structured competency-based interview model. Each Candidate gets almost the same experience through and I think that that serves us really well too.
Matt Alder (8m 17s):
Obviously, the market’s very noisy in terms of competition, particularly in areas like tech. How do you cut through that noise and really make sure that you are connecting with the right people for your business?
John Beard (8m 31s):
Yes, so that gets back to looking for people who really want to be a part of healthcare. When we’re looking at at tech people, we know we’re not one of the great big sexy tech companies out there and yet we’re competing with all of those companies for the same kind of talent. We do want those tech folks who wanna work on something important. Everybody says that they wanna have an impact. I don’t think that’s hard to do actually and I don’t think impact is actually the right word that they mean, but it’s not hard to have an impact. You come in, you do a good job, you’re going to have an impact on the company that you’re working for.
John Beard (9m 12s):
I don’t think that’s hard. We talk less about impact and more about what’s important. What we’re doing is important. We’re trying to change the way that primary healthcare is delivered in the United States. Our membership growth and our NPS scores indicate that we are being successful in it. It’s a really competitive landscape right now. We’ve proven that the model can work, so there’s a lot of fast followers and not so fast followers. There’s a lot of very big players trying to get in the healthcare business too. It’s not an easy business at all and a lot of people have failed at it or just not made any progress, but we have made substantial progress and continue to grow.
John Beard (9m 57s):
Getting back to your original question, again, it’s about finding those people who wanna be involved in that. Do you wanna use your technical skills to help people find more pictures of the Kardashians a little easier or do you really wanna work on something that’s going to change people’s lives?
Matt Alder (10m 14s):
You’ve obviously got a great story to tell there. How do you tell that? How do you get that message out there?
John Beard (10m 21s):
At the end of the day, recruiting is still a business of people and person-to-person communications. It can be hard to cut through the noise, especially in a hot market when candidates are getting reached out to countless times a week. We saw that earlier in the year. It can be hard to cut through the noise. There’s no shortcut for really taking the time to craft personal messagings out to candidates and to be persistent about it because we know that timing may not be right exactly when either on their side or our side. We just keep at it.
John Beard (11m 2s):
I wish I had a secret panacea for it. If I did, Matt, I’d sell it and retire to an island. It’s funny, in many ways we still do the same things that we did a hundred years ago when I started in this business. It’s still about people and we’ve really automated the heck out of our process as we do look for efficiencies, but there is still no substitute for that person-to-person communication when you want to tell a story and you want to hear someone else’s story.
Matt Alder (11m 32s):
In terms of finding the right people to tell that story to, what role do things like talent marketplaces? For example, hired.com, what kind of roles do they play in your strategy?
John Beard (11m 44s):
Yes, they play a big piece. There are certain of those of those platforms that lend themselves naturally to one community or another. We actually do use Hired. That’s actually our number one source of hire for technical folks and we use some other ones. We use some ones that specialize in clinical recruiting. We use some that specialize more of the entry level kind of roles for our front desk people or maybe for allied health for our phlebotomists and things like that. There are a lot of specialty ones out there. We have the data that tells us who performs well for us and who performs less than ideally.
John Beard (12m 27s):
When budgets are tight and you’re trying to make good decisions, you have to be able to look at that data and know where your dollars are gonna be spent most effectively.
Matt Alder (12m 36s):
What’s the differentiation between the candidates that you find on talent marketplaces and ones on more traditional job boards?
John Beard (12m 43s):
It’s more like a warm introduction, right? When you connect with somebody that’s already on one of those platforms, just by virtue being on the platform, at least, if they’re not actively looking, they’re open to the right discussion. Some of these platforms with your employer profiles, that’s where you try and tell the story as compelling as you can, even though it’s just a digital story at that point, but you’ll hopefully at least can make it compelling enough, and then the messaging to the individual, you wanna make compelling enough that they want to at least have that first conversation.
John Beard (13m 25s):
We feel pretty good based on the story that we have to tell and what we have to offer. If we can get that first conversation with them, the vast majority of them are going to want to keep engaged with us.
Matt Alder (13m 38s):
As a final question, there’s obviously a very big emphasis, particularly in the media at the moment, the commentary around the industry about layoffs in tech and all these sort of things. How do you think the tech talent market is gonna develop over the next one to two years? Do you think it’s gonna be easier or more challenging to hire? What do you think the key drivers are gonna be?
John Beard (14m 3s):
I think that it could very well be even more difficult. I think in uncertain times, people tend to hunker down. Certainly, we saw that at the beginning of the pandemic and now that we’ve come out the back end, depending on which new source you read on any particular day, but I think that people, when they’re nervous, will hunker down, burn the hand so to so to speak. That will make it a little more challenging for us, but again, we have such a good story to tell. At the beginning of the pandemic, we didn’t lay off anyone in tech even when things got much, much slower.
John Beard (14m 44s):
The pivot for us was more natural because telehealth was already a part of our business business model and have been for several years. The pandemic pivot for us was probably easier than for most healthcare companies. Now, I look across the tech team, and once again, we’re not taking the same approach that a lot of other companies are taking. We are being more conservative in our hiring right now and in our spending right now but no layoffs. I think that’s a really good story to tell. We like to say we’re human-centered in the way we deliver healthcare. My experience in the almost three years I’ve been here is that One Medical is very human-centered in almost everything it does.
Matt Alder (15m 27s):
John, thank you very much for talking to me.
John Beard (15m 31s):
Matt, thank you.
Matt Alder (15m 31s):
My thanks to John. 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.
