The current evolution of TA is not just an outward facing exercise. New thinking around internal mobility, skills, culture and experience means that the lines between Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and Learning & Development are starting to blur. So what can we learn from the employers proactively working to break down these silos?
My guest this week is Debby Clement, VP of Talent at Pax8. Pax8 have a massive focus on a quality experience for both candidates and employees and has reinvented its TA strategy to reflect this. Debby has a lot of insight to share on the importance of removing internal silos and having a holistic approach to talent.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The talent challenges of a fast growing organization
• The Big Tech layoffs in context and why it is still tough to recruit the right people
• Building a new recruiting model
• Heart and whole person values
• TA as the umbilical cord going through the whole business
• Job descriptions tell, and job adverts sell.
• Knitting together Talent Acquisition, Talent Management and L&D
• The Wardley Mapping concept
• The unintended consequences of silos in HR
• People Analytics
• The role of technology and AI
• What does the TA team of the future look like
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Caraffi (0s):
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Matt Alder (1m 40s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 497 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. The current evolution of talent acquisition is not just an outward facing exercise. New thinking around internal mobility, skills, culture, and experience means the lines between talent acquisition, talent management, and learning and development are starting to blur. What can we learn from the employers proactively working to break down these silos? My guest this week is Debbie Clement, VP of Talent at Pax8.
Matt Alder (2m 19s):
Pax8 have a massive focus on a quality experience for both candidates and employees and has reinvented its TA strategy to reflect this. Debbie has a lot of insight to share on the importance of removing internal silos and having a holistic approach to talent. Hi, Debbie, and welcome to the podcast.
Debbie Clement (2m 42s):
Hello, Matt. It’s lovely to be here. Thank you for the invite.
Matt Alder (2m 45s):
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please, could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Debbie Clement (2m 52s):
Sure. Hello everyone. My name’s Debbie Clement. I’m VP of talent for Pax8 in Europe. Pax8 is cloud marketplace platform, B2B2B, a bit like the Amazon for cloud software products and services. What am I? 20 years now in talent. Gosh, where’s that time gone? Yeah, agency, mid-market, global executive search, franchise background. Some time with a master franchise, some agency, my own agency, and a consultancy, and then a nice little sabbatical in the USA working with a whale conservation charity as well.
Matt Alder (3m 31s):
Oh, very cool.
Debbie Clement (3m 31s):
That’s where I kind of suffered some, “Where is the industry going? What are we all doing? Why are we doing this?” That was nice.
Matt Alder (3m 36s):
But then you still came back after that?
Debbie Clement (3m 39s):
I did, and about a year ago I joined Pax8 as a full-time employee having worked as a retained consultant for five years with their first acquisition outside of the USA, tiny company there. We were 30 in the UK when we were acquired and we are now 258, 260. Changes every day. In Europe, we made a third European acquisition last week, so that’s adding another 140 or so people as well. We went from hiring 12 people a year to 20 highs in a month at one point, and we’re now 1,300 employees globally.
Debbie Clement (4m 22s):
Yeah, it’s been quite a ride. Never thought I would be in a large corporation, but here I am.
Matt Alder (4m 29s):
Sounds like it’s been a very interesting time. Tell us a little bit more about the talent challenges that you have as a growing organization.
Debbie Clement (4m 37s):
It is quite amazing. Our founder, John Street, says with the size that we are today in spite of ourselves, I think we hit a billion dollars in annual occurring revenue just before Christmas. The pace, everybody talks about the pace in technology companies, don’t they? Until you are actually in it and feeling it, you don’t realize that literally you are outgrowing your tools on a daily basis. You are building the job descriptions literally as you’re going to market. All of those things are just, I just never appreciated just the pace and there’s so many interconnects that you have to get your arms around when you are moving at speed like this, but that’s what makes it amazing.
Debbie Clement (5m 31s):
I think the thing about Pax8 is people just do. They just get on and do. There’s not too many things in the way, although that’s becoming increasingly, as systems grow and structures grow, you have to be more organized. Whereas, I think before we were like this amorphous growing ameba. Gosh, that’s a big mouthful, isn’t it? That’s what it feels like sometimes. Now, we have to be more disciplined, more organized, and be a bit more grown up about it.
Matt Alder (6m 6s):
Let’s put this just in context of the market in 2023 because, obviously, all the headlines are about layoffs in tech and lots of disruption in the talent market. What do you see happening and what do you think the implications are?
Debbie Clement (6m 22s):
I may have somewhat of a controversial view there because I do look at the scaling up that’s happened and I do question the growth playbooks that get implemented by the investment community that drives us to these kind of behaviors. I do wonder whether they’re fit for purpose for the future. I think, as I look at the future and how we want to gear up, we want to gear up to be as flat and as agile as we possibly can in terms of layers and structures, and yet, the growth models that most people go to market with or get funded for seem to be completely the opposite.
Debbie Clement (7m 5s):
There’s this real interesting dynamic that companies in the way that they were built in the past is that the model for the future in terms of the way that our companies should operate, run, and be grown even. That’s where my thinking has gone of late. I don’t know whether other people would agree with me, but I I do see the layoffs as being driven maybe by the investment community rather than following through on where they put their money. I dunno, maybe that’s somewhat controversial in what I’m saying there.
Matt Alder (7m 40s):
I don’t think that’s controversial at all. I think it’s a very strange time in terms of what’s happening. Is it still hard to recruit the right people?
Debbie Clement (7m 47s):
It’s always hard to recruit the right people. When I rebuilt the model, I built the model that we have in Europe, I’d spent a year, as I mentioned, working in the whale conservation charity. One of the things that I learned there was we did amazing things with people that got paid nothing at all that were volunteers. It really got me questioning the recruitment model on how it operates and how we do it. I literally spent a whole year exploding every part of the recruitment process and looking at it from many different angles. I stopped counting at 160 different failure points that I found in that.
Debbie Clement (8m 32s):
Then when I came back to the UK and launched my own consultancy at the time, I built a different model for recruitment that worked for the SME inside that was around fixing as many of those failure points as we possibly could. We broke it down into five key areas – profile, process, control, brand, and land. We built the processes around the outside in, so we built it from the candidate experience into the organization. Also, interestingly, we do things like all of our TAs use the same interviewing framework, which is built firstly and foremost around hiring the whole human and hiring to values.
Debbie Clement (9m 19s):
That’s really helped us because in post pandemic world, people really want a sense of community. They want to join a company with heart and values. Now, it’s really stood us in good stead. I was in the office a couple of weeks ago, we had some vendors and suppliers come in, and each of them commented on how we have done this, how we have got to this kind of culture? It’s palpable. They feel it when they’re walking on the floor, and that’s what I’m particularly proud of and the team have delivered.
Matt Alder (9m 55s):
Does that also reflect in things like the employee experience and also in terms of retaining great people?
Debbie Clement (10m 2s):
Yes, it does. I look at the start of TA as being the umbilical cord that goes right the way through the organization. It unquestionably starts with us. The values that you get on the inside follow right the way through people operations, we call it people operations, not HR, to talent enablement. We call that TED (talent enablement and development). I think that’s the anchor for the whole business is the whole person values that you rest your business on. That’s the thing that sees you through the ups and the downs, and it helps you retain people, but it is hard work get over a hundred people and it becomes harder and harder.
Debbie Clement (10m 51s):
I think this is what everyone says. It gets harder to maintain culture as you get over 150 people certainly, but so far so good. We have to work hard to keep it, but it does start with the TA team and the chord runs right the way through pops and talent enablement and development. I think a lot of people out there don’t knit those three pieces together, which goes on to my three-legged stool analogy, doesn’t it? I think, in a lot of organizations, TA pops and TED are three separate silos, and no one knits the processes together behind the scenes. Often you see cut and paste initiatives from HR being populated around the business, but very rarely do you see things really joined up really slick.
Debbie Clement (11m 43s):
Some of those divisions don’t even meet together weekly, so how can you expect everything to follow through when you’ve got this discombobulated machine?
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Matt Alder (13m 36s):
It’s a really interesting area because more and more companies that I speak to, you have talent acquisition looking to play more of a part in talent mobility. You have organizations struggling to make sure they have the right skills in their business, dovetailing into, how they upskill the people that they’ve got, and how they look to talent acquisition to fill the gaps. I think that we’re definitely starting to see a blending of all of those areas, but as you rightly say, in many organizations, they’re still entirely separate.
Debbie Clement (14m 14s):
Yeah, they really are. They really are. One of the things that I have been doing, I found a really interesting thing in the last month that I’ve been looking into, and it’s called the Wardley Mapping concept. There’s a really interesting mapping process for looking at your culture and analyzing the relationship between all the different elements of your culture. It’s so often, and certainly in pops, I think, they’re very much about, “Let’s find the process for this. Let’s do the process for this.” Process is incredibly important to pops, but not very often do we examine the relationships behind those processes and how they’re built.
Debbie Clement (15m 2s):
For example, if you switch out a piece of tooling, lots of people have got the employer surveying tooling. In our business, we use Lattice, for example, for pops, which is the weekly recognition that people put in for everybody around the organization. Hugely valuable as a mechanism around the organization for recognizing people, valuing people, and the impact of maybe switching one of those tools out and removing that recognition piece, which is part of that community, that sense of belonging, ripping out those kind of things.
Debbie Clement (15m 44s):
Sometimes people don’t think about the relationships behind that tooling, they just think about the processes. It’s a really interesting dynamic to have a look at.
Matt Alder (15m 55s):
There’ll be lots of people listening who really aspire to this way of working for their organization, but as you say, it’s complicated and it takes a lot of work. What would your advice be to people who are getting started on this journey in terms of what they should be doing and how they should be thinking?
Debbie Clement (16m 17s):
Relationships. I think one of the things that I’ve learned in the last six months is you cannot resolve your differences without first having relationships. We are really lucky in our organization. We have some great people. We’ve got our global chief people officer, one of our former CEOs from one of our acquired companies. Our chief people officer is a former marketing director and they are all about the people, but they are people who bring divisions together. In our organization, for example, we have a weekly people org meeting. Someone from tech’s in there, our senior pops manager is in there from both sides of Europe.
Debbie Clement (17m 0s):
I’m in there from talent and Chloe, our chief people officer, she’s in there as well. We have a meeting each week, we look at our metrics, we analyze the relationships between the metrics as well, so we can analyze the attrition in one area means. We need to lean on TED in one area, and then we need to tighten up on the interviewing skills in another area. There’s this constant pushing, pulling, and recalibrating around the three-legged store between all of us.
Matt Alder (17m 31s):
How important is the role of HR recruiting technology in all of this?
Debbie Clement (17m 38s):
Well, we can’t do without it today, can we? I think where a lot of companies fall off the wagon, so to speak, is in the implementation. I know we’re maybe in such a rush sometimes that we implement it, but we don’t think about user experience enough. That’s user experience on three sides of the coin. For example, in our ATS, we think about the hiring manager experience, we think about the candidate experience, and we also think about the TA experience. In so many organizations, it’s just built for their TA needs, and an add-on might be the candidate experience, but it’s built for process and efficiency internally from the inside out, rather than from the outside in in terms of, “Okay, what does a good experience look like?”
Debbie Clement (18m 34s):
Yeah, hugely important technology, but I don’t think many technologies think enough about the user experience.
Matt Alder (18m 40s):
Also, I guess, a lot of them are being designed in those same silos in terms of not necessarily working across the organization in the way that perhaps they could.
Debbie Clement (19m 0s):
Yeah, yeah. I don’t think there’s any perfect tooling out there. Yeah, the evolution. If you think about it, if a piece of tooling is built in one leg of the stool, your ability to change that as you grow and as it becomes more sticky across the organization, it gets harder and harder, so you end up building processes on top of not great processes, but yeah, whoever rips those out and starts. Some of these tools cost millions, don’t they? I think the other challenge we’ve got, again, goes back to this command and control structure.
Debbie Clement (19m 43s):
I know we need command and control in some areas, but it does hinder us, which is why I’ve gone back to the Wardley Mapping tools. If you look at the evolution of cloud and how that evolves, one minute you are in design phase and the next minute it’s a commodity, but how do you iterate from that? How do you bring new ideas in on a canvas that’s so heavily built, you can’t adapt it and then suddenly you find you’re a walking dinosaur effectively, and it’s killing you because it’s slow and it’s cumbersome, but you’ve invested so much money and you can’t throw it out.
Matt Alder (20m 27s):
Taking this to, I suppose, its logical conclusion, what do you think the talent acquisition team of the future is going to look like in terms of skills and in terms of what it does?
Debbie Clement (20m 43s):
I did some naval gazing into the chatGPT3 automation and AI world that I’ve been diving into. I came up with this analogy of think about a middle ages farmers standing in the middle of a wheat field with a sickle cutting wheat. Imagine explaining to him that, one day in the future, you’ll be driving this monster machine that will be directed by something near the moon floating around the moon. I was trying to think what would happen to Talent as a result. I don’t think we can possibly even imagine at this point.
Debbie Clement (21m 25s):
We’re already experimenting with this in the business and the code that’s able to be written, but at the end of the day, how is a human being going to know that they found their tribe in an organization? Is that really going to be done by email? Surely, it’s gonna go back into the human qualities that they need to see on our websites, in our job adverts. Gosh, if anything, if I could write a crusade out there at all, it would be job descriptions tell and job adverts sell. They’re two completely different documents.
Debbie Clement (22m 6s):
Who knows? I can’t predict it. I’m sure there’s better people out there that can predict it than me, but I’m looking forward to it though.
Matt Alder (22m 19s):
I don’t think anyone can predict it. I think you brought up some fantastic points there. Debbie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Debbie Clement (22m 24s):
My pleasure. Great to be here. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder (22m 26s):
My thanks to Debbie. 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.
