In October 2008, I started writing a blog called Recruiting Future, and over the next seven years, I regularly documented the changes that were happening in talent acquisition. As part of my blog, I started publishing interviews with industry practitioners, sometimes as videos but often as audio files embedded in my blog posts. I called these “Recruiting Future Expert Interviews”. I soon realised that I had found something I absolutely loved doing and looked for ways of going all in and making this a bigger part of my work.
The growth of podcasting gave me the opportunity I was looking for. On the 10th of January 2015, I published Episode One of The Recruiting Future Podcast. It was far more challenging to make than I expected, and the sound quality left a lot to be desired, but I didn’t care. I was all in and would focus on building a resource to help talent acquisition make sense of the radical transformations ahead.
Eight years and 499 episodes later, here we are. I’m still blown away by everything the podcast has achieved. None of it would be possible without the fantastic people I get to interview, the brilliant, supportive sponsors, and all of you who listen and spread the word about the show.
For the 500th episode, I thought I would do an Ask Me Anything episode as something a bit different. Thanks to everyone who submitted a question, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t include them all; what follows is a representative sample of the kind of topics people were asking about.
This episode features questions from:
Jessica Adams
Matthias Schmeißer
Mervyn Dinnen
Sara Dalsfelt
Victoria Williams
Viktor Nord
John Wallace
Topics covered include:
Strategic Talent Acquisition, Conversational AI, Future Skills in Talent Acquisition, Recruitment Marketing, Assessment and Podcasting.
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
(0s):
This episode is sponsored by Seek Out the number one in talent intelligence and diversity recruiting software for enterprise companies. There’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mine and at all the ages of history. Hi there, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 500 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. In August, 2008, I started writing a blog called Recruiting Future.
(43s):
And over the next seven years, I regularly documented the changes that were happening in talent acquisition. As part of my blog, I started publishing interviews with industry practitioners sometimes as videos, but often as audio files embedded into my blog posts. I called these recruiting Future Expert interviews. I soon realized that I’d found something I absolutely loved doing, and I look for ways of going all in and making it a bigger part of my job. The growth of podcasting gave me the opportunity I was looking for.
(1m 23s):
On the 10th of January, 2015, I published episode one of the Recruiting Future podcast. It was far more challenging to make than I expected, and the sound quality left a lot to be desired, but I didn’t care. I was all in and I was gonna focus on building a resource to help talent acquisition make sense of the radical transformations ahead. Eight years and 499 episodes later, here we are. I’m still blown away by everything the podcast is achieved. None of it would be possible without the fantastic people I get to interview the brilliant, supportive sponsors and all of you who listen and spread the word about the show Recruiting Future is on the cusp of 2 million downloads and thousands of you listen to the podcast every month.
(2m 23s):
Thank you all so much and I promise to make the next 500 episodes of the show an even more valuable resource for you for the 500th episode. I thought I’d do and ask me anything as something a bit different. Thanks to everyone who submitted a question, and I’m sorry that I couldn’t include all of them, but what follows is a representative sample of the kind of topics that people were asking about. Hi Matt. Congratulations on 500 episodes. My name is Jessica Adams. I am a talent acquisition sourcer based out of of Cleveland, Ohio. My question for you is how do you come up with your topics for your show and how do you select and engage potential guest?
(3m 8s):
Thanks very much for the question, Jessica. Choosing guests and choosing topics is the most critical thing about doing this type of podcast. And my advice to anyone who is doing an interview based podcast, the the people that you choose to interview, the quality of the interviews that you do is everything for the success, for the success of the show. So most of the effort that I put into the podcast is in choosing guests. So I’m always interested in having people on the show who’ve got new stories to tell, interesting stories to tell about how they’re dealing with the challenges that talent acquisition is under right now, and also their visions for the future of the industry.
(3m 56s):
I also want to give people the opportunity to to access, you know, new ideas and ways of thinking that they might not have come across before. So I I also work hard on finding guests from outside of our industry who are doing interesting things and have ideas and ways of working that that, that we could adopt in talent acquisition and really drive the industry forward in, in terms of topics, I always really want to reflect what all of you want to hear about. So I do regular surveys. I try and talk to as many people as as I can about what’s going on in the industry and really I want to reflect the, the, the challenges that everyone’s facing and, and talk to people who are successfully dealing with those challenges.
(4m 46s):
So if there are any topics that you wanna see covered on the show, please get in touch. I’m always, always, always open to feedback and your guidance is incredibly important to make sure that I’m giving you the most relevant content. Hey Matt, this is Mattias from Berlin, Germany, global Director of Talent acquisition at mfi. And my question would be, what is your advice to a TA leader on how to convince the C level to build a mature hiring culture in the company? Thanks, Mattias. That’s an excellent question and really great to hear from you.
(5m 27s):
Like all of you, a after the pandemic, I really hope things had changed During the pandemic we saw lots of recruiters, talent acquisition professionals, employer brand professionals get laid off. As we came out of the pandemic, there was this massive rush to hire recruiters and I, like many people, felt that finally, hopefully organizations were realizing, you know, the value of talent acquisition and how it’s incredibly important to drive their business forward. So really I’ve looked at, you know, really the last, the last few weeks and months have, have been, have, have just been so depressing in terms of exactly the same thing happening again.
(6m 12s):
Companies laying off recruiters, laying off talent acquisition teams, laying off employer branding people. It’s such a shame and I think it really underlines the fact that as an industry we still have to convince the sweet C-suite of the value of of, of what we do. And there’s, there’s obviously a huge amount of work that still needs to be done and it’s a really transformational time for talent acquisition. I think that the, the combination of the, the economic times that we’re seeing around the world that the quantum leaps in in technology presents a really big opportunity to get organizations to think about talent acquisition differently and really value its input into the, into the business.
(7m 9s):
In terms of how to do this in episode 499, the last episode before this one, I spoke to Graham Paxton, who’s c e o of Kafi, which is a talent acquisition advisory consultancy, and he gave one of the best answers I’ve heard for a long time to this question. Now the whole of the interview covers covers his thoughts, so I would actually urge people to, you know, go back an episode and, and listen to it because it’s well worth it. But in summary, he really talked about how talent acquisition leaders need to understand the, the mission of their, of their business, what’s really driving their, their C-suite and, and then really kind of align the way they talk about talent acquisition to that.
(7m 55s):
A big part of that is thinking about the future skill sets that the business is gonna need to grow and illustrating the huge role that talent acquisition will, will play in that. And also he talked about looking at the example of the marketing department and how marketing has become a much more strategic function in recent years with CMOs very often being the natural successor to to, to CEOs. So there really is a lot of work to do and we probably need to think very carefully about how we talk about what talent acquisition does.
(8m 36s):
So I would urge everyone to go and listen to episode 499 because I think that there is some fantastic advice in there that precisely answers this question. Hi friends in TA and math, this is Sarah from AWE and we do automated social recruitment marketing from some of the world’s most innovative ta. So in what way can the principles of e-commerce be applied to recoup marketing and how can companies ensure that their social media presence is as effective at attracting talent as it is at attracting or engaging customers? Really curious to get your response to this and keep doing what you’re doing.
(9m 17s):
We love you in the TA community. Thanks era. Much appreciated. Really do appreciate this question actually because it something that I’ve been talking about for a really, really long time. My, my background was very much in recruitment marketing and it’s been interesting to see the parallel development of digital recruitment marketing and e-commerce. When we first started on the internet in 2000, you know, the ATS was very much seen as the, the, the equivalent of an e-commerce engine, which is why for a very long time we got crazy things like job baskets and checking out when you were, when you were applying.
(10m 3s):
Unfortunately though, that’s where the comparison between e-commerce and digital recruitment marketing stopped. Unfortunately, up till this point, digital recruitment marketing has really lacked the sophistication that we’ve seen elsewhere in the internet, particularly when it comes to, you know, converting people to buy products and services. I’ve been really heartened in the last couple of years to see things now moving. There’s much more sophistication in the way that organizations do recruitment marketing, but to me it’s all about how you get the attention of the audience that you are looking for and then how you get that attention and make it into action.
(10m 52s):
And I could really talk about this for about an hour, so I’m just gonna kind of zero in on actually on the career site aspect of this because lots of great things going on in social media. There’s lots of things that companies still need to learn about how they use social media for recruiting and there’s some great technologies and some great companies out there who can help you do that. However, I really think that thinking differently about careers pages and career sites is the absolute key to this. It’s been really great to see companies like tracks, which became part of smart recruiters last year, developed career site systems that really do nurture that interest and make people apply for jobs by giving them a very personalized experience.
(11m 45s):
And this is one of the reasons why I think that personalization is so, is gonna be so incredibly important in our industry. So, to keep my answer sure, I would urge everyone listening to take a very, very close look at their career site, how they convert the interest that they get from their recruitment marketing and how they convert that effectively through the ATS or whatever technology they’re using into, into applications. Do you do that in a personalized way? Do you give people a frictionless experience? What is the point of spending huge amounts of money on marketing on social media if you are losing candidates because they’re going through a clunky application process?
(12m 27s):
We’ve been talking about this for decades and I know that many organizations have done a lot to improve it. We can still learn so much from the way that digital marketing works in other industries. A quick message from our sponsor, seek Out. Seek Out is focused on helping organizations understand talent with dynamic and comprehensive data. Powerful people search and deep analytics. They offer actionable data and insights to unlock the potential of people seek out is dedicated to helping build a diverse and agile workforce for the future. Their technology is designed to help organizations build a culture of internal mobility and illuminate career paths for everyone.
(13m 13s):
Book your demo today to see how seek out can help your company. Seek out.com, helping great people and companies grow brilliantly. Hi Matt, my partner in crime, my fellow writer, my my co-conspirator around the world of work and the future of work. Congratulations on 500 episodes. I still remember sitting in a Starbucks in Central London all those years ago and you telling me you were going to start a podcast and my my answer to that was what’s a podcast? Who knew, who knew For your 500th episode?
(13m 56s):
I would like to ask you a question and that question is this, you speak on a weekly basis to people from the world of talent acquisition. You talk about how the world TA is changing. I’d like to ask you in the future with, with what you see now and the conversations you have, what do you think are gonna be the core two or three skills in years to come for a successful talent acquisition person? Thank you. That’s Mervin Denim, the my co-author on exceptional talent and digital talent and the man who holds the record for most guest appearances on the podcast.
(14m 41s):
Thanks Marvin. That’s a really great question and I think, I think as I said earlier, we’re at a very interesting point in the evolution of talent acquisition. What’s becoming very clear is the level of complexity in this discipline is growing all of the time. And as we get more technology, more data, we need new skills into the industry. I’m very much of the belief that it’s impossible for one person to have all the skills that will be needed moving forward. And I think that the onus is really on talent acquisition leaders to think very carefully about the skills that they need in their, in their business.
(15m 27s):
Thinking back to, you know, recent interviews, I’ve spoken to people who are skilled in TA operations, I’ve spoken to TA teams that were hiring videographers and also, you know, technology is gonna be one of the things that’s absolutely central moving forward, understanding the way that AI fits into talent acquisition fits into business and how do we manage that? How do we optimize that? How do we make the the best of that? So I think it’s impossible to give a general answer about some specific skills. What I would say though is if, if we were looking for a, a general competency behavior that I think is, is very important in talent acquisition moving forward, it’s gonna be curiosity.
(16m 14s):
Back in episode 465, I spoke to Stephan, who’s the founder of the Global Curiosity Institute. And again, it’s an interview I’d really urge people to, to check out because we talk about how important curiosity is in terms of learning new things and, and having the kind of growth mindset that, that we’re all gonna need over the, the next few years where I think we, you know, we’re gonna see lots more disruption and change. The really interesting thing about that conversation for me was finding out that curiosity is actually something you can measure scientifically, and it’s also something that you can train.
(16m 56s):
So my answer to the question is curiosity, curiosity and curiosity. And I would really a again, urge people to check out that interview because it’s absolutely fascinating. Hello, Matt. So I’ve been a fan for, with your podcast for, for years now, even before I even founded Awe, have we been, always been listening to your podcast and I’m so astonished by how you can keep the energy up and be so interested in all of your guests now for 500 episodes. So my question to you, how could you keep being that inspirational and keeping that high interest in all of your guests?
(17m 37s):
Thank you for great podcasts. Thanks to Victor at awe for that question. I really would refer you to the answer I gave to the last question, curiosity. I’m just so curious and interested in what’s going on in this space and there are so many great people out there with, with so many great stories and that’s what gives me my energy, just giving people a platform to tell those stories. I just find it endlessly fascinating. So it’s just the best job I’ve ever had and I hope I get to do it for a very long time into the future. Hello, Matt, my name’s Victoria Williams and thank you very much for allowing me to take part in your 500th episode of Recruiting Future.
(18m 23s):
I’m delighted that you’ve picked me to answer or ask you should I say a question? So given the current skills crisis and the war for talent and the shortage of talent that we’re experiencing right now, and also the ability for chat G B T to fake applications, particularly cover letters and cvs, I was just curious to know how do you think recruiters can actually navigate these challenges effectively? And on top of this, do you think an assessment solution like a psychometric assessment or behavior based assessment should be a mandatory part of the recruitment process now to overcome these challenges? Thanks to Victoria for that question. Victoria works for Arctic Shores, yes, interesting times, lots of lots of things in that question.
(19m 10s):
Skill shortages, chat, G P T, fake applications assessment. I think that the interviews that I’ve done on the podcast around what’s going on in assessment at the moment have all been really interesting conversations. There’s, there’s so much innovation going on in that space at the moment, and I’m really interested to see how it becomes more mainstream and how it helps to solve some of the issues that we’re having. I really believe that we are reinventing talent acquisition at the moment and we really need to reinvent the way that we do recruiting.
(19m 51s):
We still use resumes, we complain that they’re not effective, but yet they’re still used all the time. Now obviously breaking habits that have been established over decades, if not centuries, is very, very difficult to do. But I think now is the time to really revisit the way that we do recruiting and I think things like chat, g p t offer us the, the opportunity to do that. So I think that we are seeing this, this kind of quantum leap forward in technology. We really need to embrace it. We really need to think about better ways of assessment and selection. And from what I’m seeing, technology is at least part, part of the answer here.
(20m 32s):
So as a final question, I wanted to include this one from John Wallace, who’s a chief people officer based in Edinburgh. I once interviewed him for the podcast in a golf club, and another time I interviewed him for the podcast standing in the middle of a bar at the Edinburgh Festival. So he’s made some very interesting contributions to the show in the past. His question is, how many of the predicted changes that people have made about talent acquisition have come to pass and was there one that was a wow moment? I think there’s been lots of wow moments in terms of things that I’ve talked about on the podcast.
(21m 16s):
Very often our industry, we focus on very, very specific sometimes tactical things like specific products. So at the moment, all the conversations about chat, G P T A as if it’s the only game in town and as if conversational AI has only just been invented. So I think that the, the wow moments are really about long-term trends. And I think conversational AI really is the, the latest wow moment for me. And I think with chat G P T, what that’s done is it’s put it kind of front and center for everyone, but actually this technology’s been around for, for, for quite some time and it’s been changing our industry for a while and I think there’s a learning there.
(22m 1s):
I think that perhaps we’re too fast to jump on the very, very specific things, particularly if they sort of take off and everyone talks about them. And actually we need to, we need to focus on long-term trends. So rather than getting fixated on one particular iteration of, of ai, how do we think about how we apply AI strategically to, to what we do? And really that’s what this podcast has always been about, trying to find out how some of the incredible things that we are seeing fit into talent acquisition in the long term and really drive change and really make our industry better.
(22m 48s):
So my closing thought on this, ask me anything is, let’s look to the long-term. Let’s think strategically, shiny objects are great, but thinking about long-term implications, making changes now that are gonna shape the future of the industry for years to come is really important. So take a step back, take a breath, and really think about what this all means. My thanks to Jessica, Matt, Mateus, Mervin, Sarah, Victoria, Victor, and John for the great questions and thanks again to everyone. For all the support you give the podcast, it really means the world to me. I just want to finish with a plug for the podcast newsletter recruiting Future Feast.
(23m 34s):
If you go to recruiting future feast.com or recruiting future.com, you can sign up for the newsletter. It comes out once a month and has lots of content in it that you won’t find on the show. You can subscribe to the show in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com. And as I said on that site, you can also subscribe to the monthly newsletter, recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thank you so much for listening.
(24m 14s):
I’ll be back in episode 501 and I hope you’ll join me. This is my show. HR technology is a heck of a business. Investors are putting more money into it. Employers are using artificial intelligence more and more and analytics are applied to everything from performance to engagement to workforce planning.
