Effective technology is a critical pillar of any TA strategy, and with the current unprecedented pace of innovation, regularly reviewing the tech stack is essential to success. However, securing a budget for new technologies can be difficult with the challenging economic backdrop.
So what can TA Leaders do to ensure they make a compelling case for investment?
My guest this week is Jeff Lackey, Founder of JKL Advisors, Former VP of Talent Acquisition at CVS Health and former Global Head of Resourcing at Rolls-Royce. Jeff has unmatched experience in developing TA Tech Stacks and has some invaluable advice to share on building successful business cases for investment.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Framework for bringing in TA technology
• Understanding how TA creates value for the organization
• Finding budget within the broader organization
• Creating an agile space to experiment
• Aligning tech stacks
• Avoiding long technology implementations
• How do you get leadership buy in?
• Developing business cases
• Leveraging EVPs
• Mapping talent challenges to specific business objectives
• Advice for TA leaders on dealing with the current market
• Quality candidate experience
• How will TA evolve over the next few years?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder (0s):
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Matt Alder (39s):
That’s recruitingfuturefeast.com/webinar.
Matt Alder (Intro) (1m 2s):
Hi there This is Matt Alder Welcome to Episode 526 of The Recruiting Future Podcast. Effective technology is a critical pillar of any TA strategy, and with the current unprecedented pace of innovation, regularly reviewing the tech stack is essential to success. However, securing a budget for new technologies can be difficult with the challenging economic backdrop. So what can TA Leaders do to ensure they make a compelling case for investment? My guest this week is Jeff Lackey, Founder of JKL Advisors, Former VP of Talent Acquisition at CVS Health, and former Global Head of Resourcing at Rolls-Royce.
Matt Alder (Intro) (1m 51s):
Jeff has unmatched experience in developing TA Tech Stacks and has some invaluable advice to share on building successful business cases for investment.
Matt Alder (2m 4s):
Hi Jeff and welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Lackey (2m 7s):
Hello Matt. How are you doing?
Matt Alder (2m 9s):
I’m doing very well, thank you. And it is an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
Jeff Lackey (2m 18s):
Well, thank you very much for having me on the show, Matt. My name’s Jeff Lackey. My background is currently, I’m the CEO and Founder of JKL Advisors, LLC, but I’m also a podcast host for Growing Your Business With People, a podcast dedicated to business leaders to help them understand how to grow their business with the one and only asset that they really have any control over, which is their ability to influence people. So, I also have a consulting firm that helps organizations throughout the United States and globally to help understand the intersection of people and profit. Usually is found in purpose and helping organizations identify ways to drive profit through creating a better and more engaging environment for their people.
Jeff Lackey (3m 10s):
So, but actually, some of my most fun work is, is doing what you’re doing right now, Matt, is actually working on the other side of the microphone and interviewing interesting people, which is always the question why people would ever want to talk to me because I don’t find myself that interesting quite frankly.
Matt Alder (3m 27s):
No, rest assure you’re very interesting. You’ve got — for a start, you’ve got a really interesting backstory. Tell us about your kind of experience in TA and the sort of things that you’ve done.
Jeff Lackey (3m 36s):
Yeah, so it’s been phenomenal. I’ve been truly blessed with the opportunity to starting out in executive search it whenever I was just in my twenties and being able to recruit CEOs and CFOs and even board-level recruit. All the way up until time with organizations such as Rolls-Royce and helping to implement talent acquisition and what they call resourcing across the organization and in more than 70 different countries in implementing a couple different TA solutions. And then jumping over to the little organization called CVS Health, a Fortune 12.
Jeff Lackey (4m 17s):
The 12th largest organization at the time in the United States. And which grew over the course of seven years to Fortune 4 healthcare organization. And where we put in place over 37 different technologies to support the acquisition of talent within the organization. Which is actually a little bit mind-blowing. Because I never planned on putting in a total of 38 technologies, 37 new ones and one that was already in existence during my time. But we certainly evolved and learned from all of those. So, I’ve really had a great opportunity to recruit in over 70 countries.
Jeff Lackey (4m 58s):
And my teams have hired over 1 million people in total.
Matt Alder (5m 2s):
Wow. Coming back to that, that bit about technology, because I think that’s really interesting because we’re this incredibly dynamic time at the moment where the pace of development and change in technology is phenomenal. You know, new products are launching all the time. I know that there are lots of heads of TA out there looking, if they’re not looking at the market in confusion, they’re looking internally to wonder how they can get this technology to work within their organization or even get buy-in to update the technology that they have. In your role of doing this, what kind of framework did you use to bring in those new technologies?
Jeff Lackey (5m 42s):
You give me the credit of actually having a framework here there, you know, Matt, enough high. In all honesty, we did have a few things that we did put in place. So, first off, we understood as an organization how talent acquisition created value for the organization and that was actually fundamental. We helped our leaders hire great people. And we were really clear about that. And we broke that down to begin with. And within that we made sure that whatever talent acquisition system or process or new way of working that we put in, we would put it up against that framework and those guiding principles and say does this actually enhance or our ability to, to achieve our purpose and to be able to work to affect those guiding principles.
Jeff Lackey (6m 30s):
So that actually helped us rule out different technologies or sometimes it helped us to pick the most impactful of all the technologies that you have in front because you literally have hundreds of thousands of opportunities. It can be overwhelming. The next thing we did was you have to be willing to experiment, right? And so you have to get the — in our case, we got the trust of business leaders who were willing to make, I treated our business leaders almost like an internal private equity. And they would give money toward things that they would want to do or achieve within the organization that, you know, so say some of ’em would want a more advanced selection for data analytics in scientific professionals, data science professionals.
Jeff Lackey (7m 15s):
Okay, well, we could go down that road. Maybe another one was looking at is using AI to help in a candidate concierge to drive the retail sector, which had literally tens of millions of candidates applying and being able to narrow, to get them into that funnel and get them through a process in literally hours rather than weeks or months. But you had to go with your client and allow them to pull in and be able to invest in the technology that maybe you didn’t necessarily have all the budget money set aside for in that given year because there’s no way.
Jeff Lackey (7m 57s):
We all know how the budget cycles run. You have to budget almost 18 months prior to anything in the world, as we all know with the pandemic and everything else can change in 18 months. So, you have to be, as a talent acquisition professional leader, be willing to create an agile space that in a place for funding within your business that allows you to experiment and try things out and work with leaders in a very honest and open way to say that, we’re going to experiment with this and there is a possibility of failure, but with that failure will be the success of learning and then we’re going to [unintelligible] adapt and maneuver.
Jeff Lackey (8m 37s):
So, in many cases across all the different technologies, I’d say that more than three-quarters of them were inspired by the client side of the organization who wanted to achieve something. And then we came back to them. And we said, “Here’s a solution that can fit within our organization’s tech stack that actually aligns really nicely with the tech stack, but that we can try out and potentially even try out independent of the tech stack while we experiment with it.” And, I tell people, I say, “Don’t be afraid to experiment. Don’t just buy the whole thing right off the get-go because that often takes way too long and the world will change while you’re in the middle of implementing it in that two to three years that it takes to implement something from zero to like 120.
Jeff Lackey (9m 28s):
Take the time to experiment and do small batch and pilots and let that give you the impetus and the learning to get lift-off.”
Matt Alder (9m 44s):
No, I couldn’t agree with you more there. I think that one of the issues that we’ve had in our sector for a really long time is those incredibly long implementations and very often putting products and features in that no one’s ever gonna use because the world has changed so much since the project started. Drilling into that bit about leadership there and building kind of flexible, agile budgets and getting permission to flail as it were. How do you do that? How do you get that leadership buy-in for working in this kind of way?
Jeff Lackey (10m 19s):
It’s interesting because you can’t go around with a hammer believing everything is a nail. So, you don’t go in with all your favorite toys and technology and say, and spread them out on the table and say, “Hey, you know, I got all these cool things and gadgets and gizmos. What do you want to use?” Right? That is the best way to turn off a leader. Because then the leader is scared because they are like, I don’t know what these things are, I don’t know how they work and I am not ready to buy off on somebody else’s idea. The way I would approach it was more from a position of curiosity. Tell me about how your business is successful.
Jeff Lackey (10m 59s):
How it makes money? Define success for me. What are the major challenges that your business is facing? And let’s dig in and understand and start really root causing where those things, where those failures or where those risks exist, and where does talent lie on the spectrum of things that we can solve for. What parts of these equations or things that the HR or talent or talent acquisition team can help you solve for? And as I would go through those conversations, it would be very organic. They’d be very natural. Be like, “Hey, tell me about it. What are you going through?” As they would tell me about it, I would reflect back to them and I would dig in and I would try to understand better what it is that they’re facing into?
Jeff Lackey (11m 47s):
What it inevitably would come to a place would be that leader would say, “You know, if I could just have somebody who could help me solve for this, you know, I would give their weight in gold to be able to do that because that –” And then you allow the leader to describe how financially or what is the business case for that? Like why does that actually matter? Because sometimes they’ll just say, “Well, it would be, it is just a pain in my side.” And you’re like, okay, well that’s great, but business doesn’t make money by resolving pains in people’s sides, right? The business has to make money by doing other things.
Jeff Lackey (12m 29s):
So, tell me in a business perspective, why is this critical? As they unpack that, they often will say something like, “I would be willing to give 1% or 5% or 10% of that toward a strategy that was solved that.” And I’d be like, “Well, if I came to you and came, and one of those strategies was actually just one-half of 1% of those things, would you be interested in trialing it? Because I couldn’t tell you that it’s an absolute surety that it’s a winner, but I could give you the reasons why we could make it more likely to be successful.”
Jeff Lackey (13m 14s):
And it’s a very honest conversation. And then they would often go away because usually the investments way less than what they anticipate. And then they’d go away and they’d say, “Yeah, I would definitely be interested.” And then you bring in them on the journey. You start with the where their need is, and where the business drivers at. You turn it into something that is financial and help understand what the impact is. So, let me give you an example. One of my clients, and I won’t describe exactly who. This organization was a medical services organization. And their ability to drive the service.
Jeff Lackey (13m 55s):
They’re short-staffed. The number of recs that were open was creating up to a $20 million EBIT impact. And so what did we talk about? We said actually the fact is that your employee value proposition that you have is not being clearly articulated by your recruitment or your marketing organization, but it actually has perfect resonance with the market. We’re just not telling the story. And so they were offering $25,000 signing bonuses. And what I did was I did some advertising side-by-side and gave $25,000 signing bonus versus this new employee value proposition that is a very true reflection of who they were and all who they aspired to be.
Jeff Lackey (14m 43s):
And it was a two-to-one ratio. 200% more people clicked on the one that was about the EVP and they passed over the $25,000 signing bonus, which then led us to be able to double down on that investment and say, ” We’re gonna collect a lot more resumes.” And we increased the hiring by significant, vast great significance such that it was closing a large portion of that gap, which, which actually resulted nearly a $20 million EBITDA impact for the organization just because we went back into the root cause and discovered that one, the number of openings is a problem, we know that.
Jeff Lackey (15m 30s):
Two, we actually have a solution at hand that we can work with. And then three, we need to articulate with the business leaders and have them amplify that new employee value proposition, not just in the advertising but throughout the interview and selection process so we have a higher capture rate. It was so phenomenal and that occurred over the course of like 60 to 90 days. You know, it’s not impossible to do those things if you come at it with an open mind. And guess what in this case, it wasn’t a huge investment in technology. It was a thinking differently about your go-to-market strategy and your thinking about the market itself.
Jeff Lackey (16m 16s):
And then it can be enhanced with that technology to drive more efficiency and effectiveness and be able to get the outreach back out to the market.
Matt Alder (16m 27s):
I think this is incredibly important and I think sometimes people struggle sometimes with the nuances of it. Can you sort of give us some other examples of, I don’t know, some specific common TA challenges that people might have? And how they could be mapped over to a broader business value?
Jeff Lackey (16m 48s):
Sure. So for example, one of the things that we struggled with was the fact that during the pandemic when I was working at CVS Health, we really jacked together the hiring process for retail. Such that we were able to make hires as little as one to two business days, in theory, not every single hire was made in one to two. But for the retail you could do it in as little as just a few business days, right? What we had to do is we actually short-circuited it so efficiently that we found that we lost the candidates in the process. We were making offers and sending them into their inbox and the candidates weren’t even knowing that they had an offer in the inbox because we were moving so fast.
Jeff Lackey (17m 36s):
So, we actually worked with Paradox is, which was one of our partners. I was an early partner with Paradox that — and they specifically built out a candidate concierge that allowed us every time we made an offer for this chatbot text message to go out into that individual and let them know, “Hey, congratulations, you need to check your inbox.” We couldn’t do it yet through text. We weren’t that advanced with some of the other technology, but we were, “Hey, go check your inbox. If, you don’t see it there look in your spam. If you don’t see it there come back to us and this is how you contact us because you should be seeing an offer in your inbox right now.
Jeff Lackey (18m 22s):
And please go in and here’s your next steps. And then it would walk them through the different stages and steps of not just accepting the offer, but going through the background checks, any drug, if there’s drug screenings or other testing, medical testing that was required for being in a healthcare environment. All of those things were in there. That concierge took them all the way through to stark, right? And that was super important. We had to develop that as a secondary. So, don’t think we’re like all seeing and all-knowing. You know, sometimes whenever you jump and you and you create something, it creates another layer of problems for you that you have to be ready and willing to address and solve.
Jeff Lackey (19m 2s):
And that’s what it did. Our condensation of our process was great, but it’s not good if it leaves the candidates without knowing that they even have an offer. Kind-of misses the purpose.
Matt Alder (19m 20s):
That’s really interesting, especially in terms of those, kind of those secondary issues to solve. I mean it’s a very, very strange time at the moment for lots of TA leaders. You know, there are talent shortages, there are budget cuts, there are layoffs, there are hugely forwards in technology, all kind of happening at the same time. What’s your advice to TA leaders at the moment in terms of dealing with the sort of the market that’s in front of them?
Jeff Lackey (19m 49s):
There’s three things that I’m going to tell you. As a TA leader with nearly 30 years worth of experience and ifs on camera, you’d be able to see all the white hair, right? So, the first is that, remember that your brand lasts a lot longer than you anticipate. So make sure that even during the downturns of it economy that you creating a great candidate experience is exceptionally important. And the number one way to create a great candidate experience is by creating a great employee experience for both your recruiting team and also for the leaders of your business to make sure for their employees.
Jeff Lackey (20m 36s):
So, that’s rule number one, take care –you know, if you have your team’s back then they don’t have to worry about having their own back and they can focus entirely on delivering great service to your customer. And that ties straight into your long-term brand because they will enhance that. Rule number two is that whenever you have difficult times, whenever there’s a lot of recruiters who are looking for work right now and looking for jobs, this is the time to harvest great talent. You know, so this is the time to collect. If you have that opportunity, if you want the employers who is still hiring. This is a great time to greet to do that.
Jeff Lackey (21m 19s):
But also don’t forget that TA people have a very long memory of how they were treated. So this goes back to rule number one, especially take care of the interaction with those folks within your industry. Put something special around to make sure that you protect that because for better or for worse, they talk louder than almost anybody out there and they will tell everybody about it. And I give you a good reason. If you’re in the retail or other sector, if you have something that is a business where consumers actually purchase it. If they have a negative experience, they’re between research will tell you they’re between 40 and 80% more likely to abandon the brand than somebody who has at least a neutral deposit experience.
Jeff Lackey (22m 10s):
So, that’s a huge impact. And then the last thing I tell you is that go in without making, I would not make huge, large commitments that are multi-year commitments right now. I would go in with a growth mindset in very nimble mindset and make agile commitments against a bold strategy. So your strategy can be multi-year. It can be thoughtful and have end goal of where you want to go. But the stuff that you do to get there, don’t try to put all your eggs in one basket. Many TA leader has fallen.
Jeff Lackey (22m 51s):
No, you thinking that this will be the thing that will dig them out of the hole. And inevitably no matter what air quotes “this is” it never is whenever it’s that big. You have to your changes are usually many incremental and agile changes that you learn and grow and that your team implements very nimbly. And some of them get canceled. They say, no, that didn’t work. We’re moving on to the next one. Others say, “It’s worth keeping. Just we need to learn and adjust for it.” Yeah. And so the first two are really how you treat people. And then the last one is really about how you think about executing your strategy.
Matt Alder (23m 36s):
So final question for you. It’s impossible to predict the future as we’ve learned very clearly from the last, the few years. But I’m interested in terms of your thoughts of how TA might evolve over the next few years. And, you know, what do you think TA’s gonna look like in the future?
Jeff Lackey (23m 52s):
I’ll be very clear. I’m a terrible forecaster of the future, but I will tell you this, TA will become — it already has become, but it will become a more essential business partner to the business than it ever has in the past. Because the talent shortages, the macroeconomics, even though the microeconomics of today may see a lot of TA folks, you know, without jobs or potentially in transition or what have you. The macroeconomics are clear. There’s way more jobs than there are people available. And even with advancement of AI that at the very least will — that at the best will level the playing field it certainly is not gonna erase all of the debt that’s out there in terms of the difference between jobs and people.
Jeff Lackey (24m 45s):
And what I would tell you as a leader is be prepared. Don’t just overinvest yourself in ChatGPT and the next. You know, learn about those things. Grow with them. But also stay curious about other solutions that you think that are coming up on the horizon. Be willing to experiment agilely with them. So, for example, whenever I was at CVS Health, the way we put in 37 different technologies is I didn’t come up with 37 ideas of different technologies that we should come up with. I allowed my team to go out and gave them the — I asked them to meet with vendors, and to talk with people, and to understand what’s the art of the possible in the marketplace and understand that, and then listen loudly to their customer bases as to what they needed.
Jeff Lackey (25m 43s):
So what they did, they brought these technologies back and then we created a clearing house amongst the project management organization and the leadership team to figure out, which of these technologies made the most sense for us to execute? And then we did so with as much speed and agility as a Fortune4 organization can. Most people felt like they were getting whiplash that so much was happening so fast. But that’s what — you know, stay agile. And then lastly is in stay in tune with their business and then have fun with this. Because there is so much fun to be had leading talent acquisition in this market.
Jeff Lackey (26m 24s):
If you and your team are not having fun you are doing something wrong. And flip the script somehow and make sure that you and your team are actually enjoying what you do.
Matt Alder (26m 36s):
Jeff, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jeff Lackey (26m 39s):
Thank you very much, Matt. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Alder (26m 43s):
My thanks to Jeff. 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. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
