At the beginning of May, I attended UNLEASH America as a podcaster and panel host. It was UNLEASH’s biggest event to date in the US, and the content and conversations were excellent. As you can imagine, the implications of Generative AI dominated the discussion. From talking to a range of practitioners, vendors and thought leaders, it was clear that everyone agrees that Talent Acquisition will be changed quickly and forever by new technology.
However, it is not just technology that is driving change; aside from the obvious economic issues, many employers are rethinking their whole approach to talent, and this was reflected in several conversations I had about the blurring lines between talent acquisition and talent management.
Next week I’ll be publishing some long-form interviews I recorded at the event, but in the meantime, here is a series of short conversations that capture the essence of the discussion at the show.
Appearing in this episode:
John Vlastelica, the CEO of Recruiting Toolbox
Sarah White, the Founder of Aspect 43
Mervyn Dinnen, HR Analyst and my co-author on “Digital Talent.”
Crissy McConnell, Internal Recruiting Lead at Guild.
Topics discussed include:
• Thinking holistically about talent
• Breaking down the silos between Talent Acquisition and Talent Management
• The impact of Generative AI
• The market for recruiting technology
• Legislation and legal confusion around AI
• Psychological Safety and ERGs
• The future of jobs and the end of everything
• Candidate and consumer attitudes to AI
• Regenerating talent to open opportunity
• Surfacing internal talent
• Total experience
• The future of talent acquisition
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Transcript:
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Matt Alder (Intro) (1m 24s):
Hi there. This is Matt Alder Welcome to Episode 518 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. At the beginning of May, I attended UNLEASH America as a podcaster and panel host. It was UNLEASH’s biggest event to date in the US, and the content and conversations were excellent. As you can imagine, the implications of Generative AI dominated the discussion. From talking to a range of practitioners, vendors, and thought leaders, it was clear that everyone agrees that Talent Acquisition will be changed quickly and forever by new technology. However, it is not just technology that is driving change;
Matt Alder (Intro) (2m 6s):
aside from the obvious economic issues, many employers are rethinking their whole approach to talent, and this was reflected in several conversations I had about the blurring lines between talent acquisition and talent management. Next week I’ll be publishing some long-form interviews I recorded at the event, but in the meantime, here is a series of short conversations that capture the essence of the discussion at the show. You’re going to hear from John Vlastelica, the CEO of Recruiting Toolbox. Sarah White, the Founder of Aspect 43. My co-author, co-collaborator, and HR Analyst, Mervyn Dinnen and Crissy McConnell whose Internal Recruiting Lead at Guild.
Matt Alder (2m 49s):
Hi John, and welcome to the podcast.
John Vlastelica (2m 51s):
Thank you man. Excited to be here.
Matt Alder (2m 54s):
Absolutely. So for people who might not know you, I can’t believe there’s anyone who wouldn’t. But just introduce yourself quickly and tell us what you do.
John Vlastelica (3m 0s):
Sure. I’m John Vlastelica. I’m the CEO of a company called Recruiting Toolbox. And we’re a consulting and training firm that works with lots of big companies to help them improve kind of who they hire by helping them improve how they hire. So a lot of training for recruiters and hiring managers and consulting work to help them kind of define their bar. And just make sure the teams are focused on the right kinda outcomes for their business.
Matt Alder (3m 23s):
Now, we’re day two of Unleashed in Vegas, and you can tell it’s day two just by this state of everyone wandering around, lots of very tired people. You’ve been very busy the last couple of days. You’ve done quite a lot of sessions and things like that.
John Vlastelica (3m 35s):
Yeah.
Matt Alder (3m 36s):
Talk us through it.
John Vlastelica (3m 34s):
Yeah, I got to do three panels and then a TA leader workshop, which is great. So it’s interesting because I would say one of the themes, that’s true across all of the sessions I’ve done here is very much this kind of a more talent management than pure talent acquisition. So my background and experience is very much corporate talent acquisition before I became a consultant and led a consulting firm. But a lot of my panelists were actually in talent management, DEI, other areas. And a lot of what we were talking about was, how do you not just think like a TA practitioner, even though the audience was TA. But how do you think about onboarding and internal mobility and compensation and pay transparency and diversity?
John Vlastelica (4m 14s):
In the context of what we do a lot of executives are asking us questions and asking us to help solve things that frankly are not going to hire or you’re not gonna solve just by making more external hires. You have to have influence over point of view on all these other things. If you’re onboarding sucks, which most companies onboarding sucks that actually has an upstream impact on how you’re gonna kind of build your target candidate profile. Like, I might need more hit the ground running if I don’t have good onboarding and training. Once the person starts, I need someone that’s got all 10 out of 10, right? But if I’m more flexible on that, or if I have better onboarding, better training, better way to integrate people and develop people, I can actually widen the aperture a bit and maybe consider talent that the hiring manager hasn’t considered.
John Vlastelica (4m 57s):
Maybe we can go from hit the ground running to hit the ground learning. Right. And that’s a real shift. So we’re talking about those kinds of things.
Matt Alder (5m 3s):
Do you think the silos are breaking down in HR and talent? Because I’m just getting that kind of impression. Because again, I had a very similar panel which brought together TA and talent management and it was a very joined-up conversation. Are we kind of seeing that within employers?
John Vlastelica (5m 19s):
Yeah, I was joking, like we’re getting the band back together. It’s crazy. Because, you know, I’m old now, but in the late nineties in particular, when I was on the epicenter.com and Amazon Leading Tech Recruiting, we were like, “We don’t even belong in HR. We should be in sales and marketing.” We’re like internal head-hunting. I don’t wanna report to some, you know, personnel VP. Like, this is ridiculous. And that was really, you know, as conferences like, source con and other things were coming out. There really began to be this focus in the 2000s away from being even part of HR. And now I would say it is fascinating. I won’t name all the names, but I can’t tell you how many clients we have or friends I have that are VP of TA, and internal mobility and onboarding, and DEI, and like one person is like the recruiting and retention, you know.
John Vlastelica (6m 6s):
I mean, that’s kind of all of the stuff. You know what I mean?
Matt Alder (6m 9s):
And what’s driving it? Is it data? Is it technology? Is it the market? Is it a combination of all of those or something else?
John Vlastelica (6m 16s):
It goes back to, you know – I frame it – I get to talk to executives for a living, right? Business executives as part of focus groups and work we do. They don’t think about HR siloed like we do, like they expect – if you wanna be a talent advisor partner to them, they expect you to be thinking about internal talent. They expect you to be thinking holistically, like if onboarding sucks, what impact does that have? They expect us to bring insights. And certainly, our tools are getting more integrated. A lot of tools still suck. But some of our tools are getting integrated. But it’s not the tools and technology driving it. It’s that the quote problems, the talent problems are just more complicated. And you know, I would say this varies by country. I was in a session with about 30 TA leaders yesterday and I was show of hands, how many of you recruit just in the United States?
John Vlastelica (6m 59s):
How would you describe the US culture around developing people? And everyone’s like, thumbs down. Like if when you’re obsolete, we’re just gonna hire someone else to replace you from the outside. I’m like, now how many of you recruited in Europe are parts of Asia? And so someone’s like in Netherlands for me. I’m like, “Tell me about the Netherlands.” We develop our people. That is part of our culture of development. And one of my panelists worked for a French company – same thing. You don’t just kick people out and then hire different one. But that’s a little bit of the culture. Historically, what I’m seeing and some of it’s driven by pain from the pandemic, and all the challenges of hiring. But somewhat I’m seeing is companies are like, we have to have a strategy for internal talent now. Because there’s just not enough talent. So I, unfortunately, I’d like to say it’s being driven by a lot of like, “Oh, we need to think about our, it’s being driven by pain.”
John Vlastelica (7m 40s):
I mean, it’s being like, we have to do this. And that’s okay because sometimes good things come out of that. But in the United States, I see a real shift starting to happen. That’s kind of bringing the band back together.
Matt Alder (7m 51s):
You can’t have any kind of conversation here or anywhere in TA at the moment without talking about generative AI. What’s your take on it? What’s direction is it taking us as an industry?
John Vlastelica (8m 1s):
I’ve seen some. I was not designed to be scary videos, but I’ve seen some videos that just kind of freak me out that really make me wonder, you know, what is the role of the professional going to be that has anything to do with kind of knowledge and content? Like I just, I feel like if that’s the thing you’re standing on that’s gonna be very unstable for you in the next few years. I’m very excited. The thing I am most nervous about had lots of conversations here about this with vendors and colleagues and analysts is just verifying identity. Like, how are we going to know that that avatar that looks just like me, that is speaking words, that has clone my voice, clone my is me and not someone else? And deep fake videos have been around for a while, which are scary, but you can kind of tell their deep fake videos.
John Vlastelica (8m 44s):
And I was over talking to the vendor that won one of the awards yesterday for startup — I forgot what, it’s a startup competition called Hour One. And he was showing me avatars. And they are good, Matt. I mean, they’re like, he’s like, I could clone you in two hours. And I’m like, “Geez, what the fuck?” You know, I’m just like — and confident and not like salesy. Like I can actually do it. And here’s how we, and I said, walk me through how you do this because I make a living off of doing my — and this is kind of freaky. I can enter text. You can — he goes, “Yeah, you’re a little too animated for us. Like, we’d have to have you kind of keep your hands down and stuff.” But I’m like, “But I’m a little too animated for you now. But wait a year, right?” He goes, “Oh yeah, in a year. We’ll be.” And I was just like, “Holy sh — like this is Fanta –”
John Vlastelica (9m 26s):
I mean, this is, I’m a geek at heart. Like I love technology, so I’m both like thrilled and then I’m terrified at the same time. Right.
Matt Alder (9m 34s):
I’ve got, they’re literally thousands of hours of me talking on the internet.
John Vlastelica (9m 38s):
— on social talent, I’m on YouTube. I got, I’m —
Matt Alder (9m 42s):
We’re gonna get cloned. In fact, this might be a cloned interview. No one’s gonna know.
John Vlastelica (9m 47s):
Talking to you right now. I need some proof. I need some proof.
Matt Alder (9m 52s):
Absolutely. Yeah. Great to talk to you, John. Thanks for talking to me.
John Vlastelica (9m 55s):
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder (9m 55s):
Hi Sarah, and welcome to the podcast.
Sarah White (9m 56s):
Hey Thanks, so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Matt Alder (9m 59s):
Well, an absolute pleasure to be talking to you. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Sarah White (10m 5s):
Sure. My name is Sarah White. I am the Founder of Aspect 43. We are a strategy firm focused on HR tech and Work tech.
Matt Alder (10m 13s):
Fantastic Stuff. So here we are on day two of UNLEASHED. In fact, we’re very near the end I can see it’s starting to thin out a bit. It’s been a bit of a marathon. Tell us what you’ve been up too. What have you been presenting on? What have you been talking about while you’ve been here?
Sarah White (10m 28s):
Yeah, so we are a little bit different than a lot of other strategy firms. Our clients are actually the vendors that are here. And so we work with a number of the technologies from early stage all the way up through kind of the large enterprise. And we’ve had the really cool opportunity of doing sessions specifically for the vendors as the week has gone on. And so we did a day zero summit, which was only vendors allowed, where we really presented research around what buyers and what TA teams want. How do we fix their marketing? How do we fix their sales? How do we fix their product? So they stop building crap that we don’t care about. They stop emailing so many times. They stop calling all the time.
Sarah White (11m 9s):
And they really start engaging in a way that’s a little bit better. The other cool thing that I got to do is we ran a live focus group. So we had heads of TA from a number of very large organizations, very large global companies. And then we invited a number of teams – heads of marketing, heads of sales to sit in silently and hear directly from the mouth of the practitioner what they wanted for their product and from the sales teams and from the marketing. And it was, it was just really eye-opening. I mean, we hear, and we do this research all the time. And so it’s really exciting that it’s not me telling them like, “Hey, here’s what’s happening.” They got to sit and see it live for themselves and it’s the first time anything like this has ever been done in a conference.
Matt Alder (11m 52s):
That’s very cool. And where’s the demand in the market? What are the areas that the TA people are most interested in? What technology solutions are hot at the moment, for want of a better word?
Sarah White (12m 4s):
Yeah, so what’s really interesting, we watch market trends. And so we’ve been researching this 14 years. We know where market movement is, what is high interest, what’s gonna be bought in the next six months, 12 months, 18 months, and 24 months. And so, we can forecast all of the trends for everybody to look at. Overall product purchases are gonna be down drastically. I mean the last three years everybody has been buying everything possible and we’re stepping back more to normal levels. And so we’re going to really see, especially on TA, they’re starting to re-look at the basics. Things that are improving the process, things that are improving the overall employee experience, the customer experience, the candidate experience, kind of the whole experiential piece of it.
Sarah White (12m 50s):
A lot of a t s replacements are about to take place. Recruitment automation, Recruiting CRM are actually the top three out of 77 categories that we index both in and out of TA.
Matt Alder (13m 2s):
That’s interesting. Obviously huge amount of talk about AI. And you know, that being adopted into lots of different products. I’ve heard everything from, it’s nothing, nothing different. Nothing’s changed to, it’s the end of TA as we know it. Where do you stand on the, where’d you stand on the continuum?
Sarah White (13m 20s):
Do you remember when job boards were gonna die 20 years ago when we started this? There’s a benefit to aging, I guess, that we get to watch the cycles over, and over, and over. And this is my third recession. This is the third time that I have watched really industry being told it was going to die because something happened. You know, first it was the internet, next it was when we went to the cloud. Now we are, you know, because of Ai. AI is going to drastically impact, drastically impact recruiting as we know it. But it’s going to take away the crappy part that we don’t wanna be doing anyway.
Sarah White (14m 1s):
It’s going to make it simpler. The scheduling, the coordination, some of these pieces that are slowing down the process and causing us to lose really good people. It’s also going to automate and change things around how we engage and market to sourcing and to prospective candidates. And in doing so, it’s going to allow us as talent acquisition and as leaders to really become far more strategic on how we are doing it. And we’re gonna get to be more personal. The relationships are going to go way deeper with our candidates, than we’ve ever been able to have before because of a simple issue of time.
Matt Alder (14m 39s):
Absolutely. And are you seeing that sense of the possibility of personalization with the vendors and with the —
Sarah White (14m 46s):
No.
Matt Alder (14m 46s):
It’s just not, yeah, yeah. It’s just, yeah —
Sarah White (14m 49s):
We’re trying, I’m trying. You know, the reality is TA is still, or AI and TA is still very new. You know, there’s, we’ve been talking about it and they’ve been fake marketing it for 10 years at this point. But most of that is really just truly recruiting automation and some minor, minor tweaks. But true AI is really new. And it is, we are gonna see some innovation. And I think where we’re gonna see it first is helping with things like helping write the job descriptions and helping write the emails, and how do we get more personalized with messaging? And we’re gonna see it more on a content side. Recruitment, marketing, job advertising. That area is actually gonna be probably impacted first, which is a nice little soft launch as the true technology gets better built-in.
Sarah White (15m 34s):
You know, the challenge we have to be aware of is. There’s Legislation around using AI and hiring. You know, New York has just passed up, the EU is looking at stuff, California’s looking at stuff. And so there’s very real legal confusion, right? I mean, it’s not like these guys didn’t even know what retargeting campaigns were. So they don’t understand at all what AI is. And so they’re passing laws and they’re creating Legislation in the US at least that could potentially slow down product road mapping and true adoption of what we could be doing very effectively.
Matt Alder (16m 9s):
Final question. Tell me something that surprised you about the last few couple of days. What have you seen or heard that you maybe weren’t expecting?
Sarah White (16m 22s):
I’m absolutely so excited about the number of young professionals that have founded companies that are coming into the space. The number of founders under the age of 25 that we’ve had a chance to talk to this week has been amazing. You know, I was 27 when I sold my first company and it was hard, right? Being an early, like a Founder in my 20s in an industry that was predominantly men and was predominantly older men and not necessarily always being taken seriously. And I think that a lot of times we forget to look at that next generation and really take the time and mentor them and develop with them and help them craft because they’re creating what is going to be the future of what we’re doing.
Sarah White (17m 11s):
And I learned so much from them. And it’s so refreshing just to like get to experience this industry through the eyes of somebody completely fresh versus, you know, us old buggers now that have been here for 20 years. So, it’s amazing.
Matt Alder (17m 24s):
I feel like I’ve been at this event for 20 years by putting in the take.
Sarah White (17m 30s):
I know you’re — Yeah, it’s a bit least been 20 years in the last 48 hours.
Matt Alder (17m 35s):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Sarah, thank you very much for talking to me.
Sarah White (17m 40s):
Thank you so much for having me.
Matt Alder (17m 41s):
Hi, Mervyn. Welcome back to the podcast yet again.
Mervyn Dinnen (17m 43s):
Thank you, Matt. It’s an absolute pleasure to be here, as it always is.
Matt Alder (17m 46s):
Do you know what? I’m not even gonna ask you to introduce yourself because I think everyone, everyone should know who you are by now.
Mervyn Dinnen (17m 54s):
I should. I should hope so. But if they don’t, I’m sure they can find me.
Matt Alder (18m 2s):
Absolutely. So day two UNLEASHED, you’re looking very spritely for a man who spent three days in Vegas. So pretty good. What have you up to, you’ve been hosting a stage, haven’t you? What have you seen? What’s interesting? What are the kind of messages coming through?
Mervyn Dinnen (18m 19s):
I have been hosting the Total experience stage. And we’ve had some fascinating sessions, really, really interesting about Total experience. So it, I was keen to host this stage because a lot of the research and writing and stuff I’ve looked into is very much around this concept of, you know, historically, and we’ve written books on this. Historically, you know, it’s kind of, we talk about candid experience, and onboarding experience, and employee experience, but it’s a Total experience. It’s what the employees experience and it’s, you know. And so many of the sessions that I’ve introduced are people who — are just doing things differently.
Mervyn Dinnen (18m 60s):
AI gets constantly mentioned. It is obviously the big topic. But as a way of trying to understand the sentiment, I suppose, around your people. I mean, if I can give a plug to somebody else, I was at the Work Human Conference last week. And there was a lot there around kind of psychological safety, employee resource groups, employee preferences. And to me this is a huge topic at the moment. It’s something we don’t really talk about. You know, if you say to your, somebody working for you, how are you feeling today? Is everything okay? Well, you know, it’s unlikely. It’s almost confrontational.
Mervyn Dinnen (19m 41s):
And you know, it’s most organizations, we’ve just seen a great session from Greg Roche of United Health Group. I’ll give him a shout-out. And as he was saying, you know, most of the research he’s done around this shows that we don’t really start talking to people until they resign or until they, you know, somebody says, you know, you really need to speak to Matt because he, I’m sure he is not happy here. And it’s too late then. And it’s this kind of, it’s not checking in all the time, how are you today? How are you today? But it’s just understanding, I suppose, the employee lifecycle un understanding what employees want, how they want to be treated.
Mervyn Dinnen (20m 23s):
So no, some good sessions are there. I think to me, this is a big topic at the moment. It plays into things like career experience. It how we recognize people. How we allow them to develop. And certainly judging from this conference and last week’s and one or two of the online things that I’ve done alongside AI and ChatGPT and people listening back to this in, in the years time, we’ll say, “God, what, what was all the fuss about that?”
Matt Alder (20m 58s):
It could be like that time people used to run how to recruit with Pinterest workshops or we could just all be cloned and out of a job. It’s gonna go one of two ways I think.
Mervyn Dinnen (21m 7s):
Indeed. Indeed. But I think the — and I suppose it is to be understood of. You know, we’ve come out of a global pandemic. People’s priorities have changed. But their preferences in how and when they work and where they work has changed. So I think actually looking at the individual understanding the individual employee, their experience, their lived experience, what it is they want, I think it’s understandable that that’s a hot topic. But to me, that’s the main theme here.
Matt Alder (21m 40s):
Yesterday, I was sitting next to you. We were watching a couple of presentations on the main stage. And I kinda wanna pick up a bit about, a pick-up bit about AI because it’s been such a, obviously such a big theme through everything that’s kind of been going on. But the presentations yesterday were very much about almost the future of jobs and the future of work. And what will AI do and what will people do? And it was quite interesting to sort of see a couple of perspectives on that. What were your sort of takeaways from those sessions in terms of the future of the labor force?
Mervyn Dinnen (22m 21s):
It will be different. So I suppose I’ve covered the fact that the more people wanting more choice over how, when, and where they work and things like that. I think in terms of AI, I mean there’s obviously something you and I have discussed about kind of one day the recruitment team won’t exist and hiring will be automatic. And that’s actually crops up in two of the sessions. Not that recruitment teams won’t exist, but just that the way we hire with AI will be completely different. And almost going to the person as opposed to the person applying. So I think that it will change.
Mervyn Dinnen (23m 1s):
But then, you know, the end of the job as we know it, I mean we’ve been in this kind of, shall we say, HR tech-driven space now for what, eight, nine years. And we’re always talking about the end of the job as we know it. The end of recruitment as we know it. The end of HR, the end of everything.
Matt Alder (23m 23s):
Yeah.
Mervyn Dinnen (23m 23s):
But I think that the point about AI maybe taking over some of the human side. I suppose the interaction side the cognitive side. I always think back to a futurist from Cambridge University that I saw speak at a conference. I was talking about this back in about 2015, 2016. And I gave ’em a couple of examples of jobs of those people that I’m close to and how I thought they would change. And it was interesting because I think people most listeners who know me will know my wife’s a flight attendant. And I have been joking with her for ages that she’ll be replaced by a vending machine in a chatbot.
Mervyn Dinnen (24m 4s):
And this future has said, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Flight attendants won’t be replaced because they have to make cognitive decisions the whole time. The flight deck will be replaced. And of course, the plane can be flown by computer now. But as yet, I don’t think we are a population that would get on an airplane with nobody in the flight deck.”
Matt Alder (24m 28s):
I think that’s interesting as well because there’s a lot about how do the candidates, the consumer feel about AI running everything. And that could be an interesting sort of theme that develops. One of the interesting things, we were in a conversation yesterday with a vendor called the Hiring Branch who had a client. Who had — I think it was only for a particular program of recruiting. So it wasn’t necessarily across the board but was doing interviewless recruiting, so was doing everything via assessment software and the people were starting a job and they’d never had a conversation with anyone in the company.
Matt Alder (25m 9s):
And you know, an outlier, but it’s the kind of thing that people said would never happen a few years ago. And here it is happening.
Mervyn Dinnen (25m 22s):
Definitely. And I think that there are certain sectors, certainly say the hourly sector, the hourly workers particularly where they’re not customer facing or — it’s just the job. I mean it’s just filling time working, getting paid. And it’s, as long as that happens on time, then it is kind of, that’s all they’re interested in. It’s the human side. I mean, I know that some of the examples that we are given are in workplaces where there are a lot of people. And it’s the human side is important because it’s about connection and that’s one of the things that has come out of the pandemic and remote work.
Mervyn Dinnen (26m 4s):
The lack of connection. How do we build connection remotely? How do people particularly newer entrance into the workforce build that knowledge base without the connection? And we’ve got, I suppose it’s easy to say, “Oh, I can do this. I can do that. In the future we won’t have a recruiter. But people are still human. And unless we do something, unless we do something and put something in the water they’re going to remain human. And humans need human connection.
Matt Alder (26m 37s):
Mervyn, thank you very much for talking to me.
Mervyn Dinnen (26m 40s):
As always. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Alder (26m 41s):
Hi, Chrissy. And welcome to the podcast.
Crissy McConnell (26m 42s):
Thanks, Matt. Very excited to be on the show.
Matt Alder (26m 46s):
Oh, well it’s an absolute pleasure to be talking to you. Can you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Crissy McConnell (26m 53s):
Absolutely. I’m Crissy McConnell. I have the privilege of working on an incredible talent team at Guild. At Guild we unlock opportunity for America’s workforce through education, upskilling, and career mobility. More than two-thirds of our workforce won’t have the skills needed for the future of work, a decade from now. So we’re unlocking opportunity in a way that drives value for employees as well as employers. So through the Guild career opportunity platform, we’re able to meet employees where they are at any point in their career and help them up-skill through educational programs that align to their individual goals. But we do all of this while helping them prevent student debt from happening in the first place.
Matt Alder (27m 35s):
Very cool.
Crissy McConnell (27m 35s):
If you work for a Guild company, you’re 2.2 times more likely to find internal mobility and 2.4 times more likely to see a wage increase if you take an advantage of education benefit, through the platform.
Matt Alder (27m 47s):
Your chief people officer did a presentation yesterday that was really interesting about kind of navigating the future and some of the kind of great work you were doing. So really, really interesting stuff.
Crissy McConnell (27m 59s):
Absolutely. He has been an incredible force coming into Guild. And really helps shaping the way that we think about talent and as we think about talent going, going into the future. So something that he had chatted about regenerating. And what are we doing to put more into our employees lives than we are taking out? So when we think about that from a talent perspective, are we providing to our employees everything that they could need to attain opportunity? Now, opportunity could mean internal mobility here at Guild. It could also mean what’s that opportunity going to mean outside of Guild. So we will do everything that we can to provide career resources upskilling to help you move internally.
Crissy McConnell (28m 42s):
But if the opportunity isn’t there or the timing isn’t right, we’ll also support you beyond Guild as well.
Matt Alder (28m 46s):
So tell me more about your role. You focus on internal mobility. Is that right?
Crissy McConnell (28m 54s):
I do, yes. So I lead our internal recruiting efforts. We’ve got a really great squad that focuses on surfacing internal talent. We really wanna understand everybody that’s at Guild, where they’ve come from, the skills that they’ve brought to the table, what they’re doing to upskill themselves through the Guild platform. So we’re drinking our own champagne. And then how we can match that to the opportunities that we have coming down the pipeline when at the point that the business needs it as well.
Matt Alder (29m 20s):
And do you sort of work very closely with the other sort of aspects of talent in terms of, you know, L&D and talent management and all that kind of stuff?
Crissy McConnell (29m 29s):
Absolutely, and we really are seeing that our teams are blending more together and it really is a whole talent team effort. So we need to understand what are the competencies that are gonna help you as you come into Guild and be successful at Guild. But then it’s on the whole talent team to really help be talent coaches and talent mentors. We’re really thinking of it as a complete talent curation team at this point.
Matt Alder (29m 55s):
And so you’ve got a specific group of people who just do internal abilities. They don’t do external recruiting and internal recruiting. It’s kind of sort of separated out.
Crissy McConnell (30m 4s):
Well, we are a lean team, so I still have external recruiting roles that I work on, but we do have an internal sourcing squad. So we have people that are leaning in from their regular functions that they’re doing to figure out where’s our talent and how can we then redeploy that and match it to our internal employees’ aspirations as well.
Matt Alder (30m 26s):
And how does sort of candidate experience meet employee experience in that sort of scenario?
Crissy McConnell (30m 31s):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So we think of when we bring people in as an external candidate, your experience matters all the way through. So you are still, we’re still focusing on that internal employee experience and that includes your whole experience for upskilling your career while you’re here as well.
Matt Alder (30m 46s):
So we’re on day two of the show. And there’s a huge amount of content that’s been happening. Lots of just lots of stuff. What have you heard or seen that’s interesting?
Crissy McConnell (30m 60s):
Absolutely. So what I’ve been really interested in is checking out all the different platforms that are using AI. That is a challenge that we are working on or trying to really think through at Guild, is how do we scale up our internal recruiting efforts? How do we make this go faster? Bring it from a manual process to something that’s a little more automated. And also how do we harness AI to help us solve the problems that we have, that will help us in the future as well. I think a lot of companies are asking those same questions. And so it’s been really interesting to hear about that everyone’s different perspectives and what they’re working through.
Matt Alder (31m 35s):
And what do you think the future looks like? So, huge amounts of content discussion about AI and how it’s gonna drive the future. What does The future of talent acquisition look like from your perspective?
Crissy McConnell (31m 47s):
Absolutely. So, what’s really been on my mind about that and the future of talent is that and how we’ll be able to use AI is these skills matching and job matching and being able to surface talent in an automated and even a better way is also really going to highlight how people managers are able to develop their talent and then ultimately release it happily to other teams internally. And I think that a really cool impact that’s going to happen is we’re going to be really shining on the managers that are helping people grow their careers and then really be their cheerleaders going forward.
Matt Alder (32m 25s):
One of the things I’ve heard people talk a lot about in terms of skills and things like that is basically sort of future-proofing. You know, future-proofing organizations because work is changing so quickly. The things that people are working on very quickly change. And actually, when you’re Recruiting people, it’s not what they can do right now. It’s what they can do in the future. It’s the most important thing. What’s your wish or take on that?
Crissy McConnell (32m 47s):
Absolutely. So I have a lot of conversations with internal people around where they are right now. What they’re interested in? And a lot of conversations around to get to that point. Here’s maybe the, the programs that you can take advantage of in the Guild catalog to upskill yourself. And very frank conversations around if you want to get to that point but also as roles are changing and how just everything is changing in the talent space and jobs so quickly. And what can we focus on together right now to help guide you towards making sure that you’re still relevant in the future with your skills?
Matt Alder (33m 25s):
Crissy, thank you very much for talking to me.
Crissy McConnell (33m 27s):
Thank you.
Matt Alder (33m 28s):
My thanks to John, Sarah, Mervyn, and Crissy, and also a huge thank you to all of the team UNLEASHED for inviting me to the event. 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 our monthly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast, and get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show.
Matt Alder (34m 33s):
Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
