This special episode was recorded at the first ever Recruiting Future Podcast live event at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas. I was blown away by how many people came along to share their views on the future talent acquisition.
On such a magical night (we even had a magician doing card tricks), it seemed fitting to ask people what we need to do to make talent acquisition more magical. Here is a selection of the brilliant insights shared with me and my guest co-host Jenny Cotie Kangas from White Rock.
Topics covered include:
• Automation and human interaction
• Candidate and employee experience
• Skills based hiring
• Speed and engagement
• Hidden pools of talent
• Influence and persuasion
• Co-operation and collaboration
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt: Support for this podcast is provided by Hackajob, a reverse marketplace that actively vets engineers. Hackajob flips the traditional model on its head, meaning companies apply to engineers versus candidates applying to jobs, with companies getting an 85% response rate to the candidates they reach out to, as well as exposure to tech talent that directly meets their organization’s diversity objectives. After all, the ability to attract, hire, and retain tech talent from all backgrounds is critical to every organization’s success. Companies such as S&P Global, CarMax, and Sensor Tower are all using Hackajob, so why not join them? Go to hackarjob.com/future to get your free 30-day trial today. That’s hackajob.com/future. Hackajob is spelled H-A-C-K-A-J-O-B.
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Matt: Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 558 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. So, I’m recording this at the HR Technology Conference in Las Vegas the morning after the night of the first ever live Recruiting Future Podcast event. I was absolutely blown away by how many people came along and shared their views on the future of talent acquisition. On such a magical night, well, we even had a magician. It seemed fitting to ask people what we need to do to make talent acquisition more magical. Here’s a selection of the brilliant insights shared with me and my amazing cohost Jenny Cotie Kangas from WhiteRock.
Mark: My name is Mark Chaffey and I’m the co-founder and CEO at Hackajob.
Matt: Not only that, you are the sponsor of this evening, so we are supremely grateful for helping us put this on. We’re currently standing out on the rooftop bar looking at this incredible view of the Vegas Strip. This is your first time in Vegas, isn’t it?
Mark: So, yeah, this is my first time in Vegas. I landed about 24 hours ago. I’m here for another 48 hours. I’m not sure I’m going to get any sleep in that time. But I must say, of all the bars you could have chosen, and you did choose the bar for this event, we just pick up the bar tab. We don’t really do much more than that. The view is spectacular. I’m looking at the classiest hotels in Vegas and Planet Hollywood, which makes me really happy. The chalk and cheese of Vegas.
Matt: Absolutely. There’s a mini version of the Eiffel Tower over there just to make things complete. So, start the HR tech conference. We’re having a magical night in Vegas. We’ve got a magician here doing magical tricks. So, the question that we’re asking everyone, and you’re going to be the first person that I ask this, how can we make talent acquisition more magical?
Mark: I mean, we’ve built a whole company that focuses on the candidate experience. And it’s probably a cliche answer, but I still think that as TA professionals, as people that live and breathe this world, I sometimes think that we forget that a candidate changing a job is a massive life event. If you’re a permanent employee, you’re maybe only changing jobs every two, three, four, or five years. We sit on data, we sit on processes, we sit on software that sees thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of interviews happening. We think that it’s just another data point, it’s just another number. But that experience is so important and is so meaningful to those individuals. So, I think it all comes down to candidate experience. And like I said, we built a whole company that puts the candidate at the heart of it. If we all just remembered that actually that is an individual going through a very high pressure, high stress environment, I think the industry would better for it and I think would create more magical experiences.
Jenny: My name is Jenny Cotie Kangas or JCK for short, and I’m a Founder and Chief Solution Architect for WhiteRock.
Matt: Tell us a little bit more about WhiteRock.
Jenny: WhiteRock is a consultancy that is helping organizations learn how to build scalable infrastructures around the technology solutions that they have. So often the problem isn’t what tech do I need, but how are we going to implement it, and how are we going to bring it to scale, how are we going to bring it to market, how are we going to instill change? So, I come alongside of the practitioners and help them learn how to do that.
Matt: So, you didn’t mention you’re actually my co-host tonight, and you’re going around interviewing people, getting some great stuff. So, I’m going to ask you the same question that we’re asking everyone, which is, how can we make talent acquisition more magical?
Jenny: I think we can make talent acquisition more magical by truly trying to understand what is the end game that we’re trying to solve. So, beginning with the end of mind, what’s the problem? And getting very laser focused and crystal clear on that, and then reverse engineering solutions that are going to be able to solve that and being able to do so without looking at how we’ve always done it before. I think that’s how we really began to get HR a little bit more magical.
Richard: My name is Richard Cho, but I go by Cho. I’m the Executive Vice President of Charlie Health, which just really means I lead recruiting there. I’ve only been there six months, but prior to Charlie Health, I’ve been at companies like Gem. I’ve been at companies, well, prior to Gem, I was at Robinhood for three years, growing that company from 390 people to about 4400 in less than three years. The other companies I’ve been a part of their hypergrowth phase was Facebook, now Meta and Dropbox.
Jenny: It sounds like you’ve done some incredible scaling in your past. One of the questions that we’re talking about today is how do we put more magic into the world of HR? So, looking at the future, do you have anything to share on the topic?
Richard: Yeah, look, here’s the thing about human business whether it’s HR or recruiting, we have to put humans back into that business. Over the last 20 years, everything’s been commoditized, everything’s been digitized. There are so many buttons you need to push in order to be able to attract and hire somebody. What’s missing is the ability to be able to build that relationship with a candidate, to convince that person to take a chance at a small little social network startup in 2008, walking away from 30% less salary from Google to take a chance at a company that might accelerate their career.
Jenny: Just to be clear, the social networking startup that you’re referring to, could you just share what that brand was?
Richard: Facebook. Facebook at that time and that was actually not that long ago when we used to convince people to take a chance. Trust me, as your recruiter, I’m going to walk you through the reasons why your career is going to better as a result. And yet we’ve now missed that because we’re too busy doing Boolean search strings or pulling down 100 resumes off a LinkedIn recruiter. So, we need to go back to the human business, that relationship, build trust, credibility, and that is what’s going to allow the talent acquisition professional to do their jobs, to do what they’re best at.
Jenny: Let’s say you’ve got somebody who’s listening to this podcast and they’re looking for some actionable tips that you’d be able to do. Could you share a couple of those?
Richard: If you’re a leader of recruiting, get out of the way of your recruiters, just look at the numbers around data, give them insights, teach them how to use data to drive decisions, and just get out of the way of the professionals that are paid to really be that trusted advocate, that ambassador for your company. If you’re a recruiter, fall in love with your mission. If you don’t love your mission of your company today, you could find a company that you will fall in love with and go and sell that vision for that career where someone’s going to have the most amazing career because they’re aligned to something that they’re passionate about. I think that’s the best tip I can give to a practitioner and a leader.
Bill: Hey, my name is Bill Fanning. I have recently joined talent TAtech with Peter Weddle. I’m the Chief Strategy Officer and I’ve come on board to help increase the focus of TAtech, beyond job boards onto the full spectrum of talent acquisition technology and create an awesome network for vendors to connect, collaborate partner, and grow.
Jenny: How do we create more magical moments in the world of talent acquisition?
Bill: Yeah, that is a great question and it’s one that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in my career. One of the things that I think would create magical moments in TA tech, in the technology spectrum, not TAtech where I work, is the ability to better match people to jobs. So, when I think about that, I’m going to take a step back because I spent 10 years in the army, and when I exited the army, they recommended I’d make a fabulous truck driver. Where the fail is, is the ability to look at job titles and make connections. So, you look at a military and I’m using this as an example, but it’s diversity, its people coming from other industries, and it’s an employer’s ability to make smart choices for the right people for the right job based on skill set and experience.
I think when we get to a platform that can get past a resume and a title and start looking at the capabilities of the individual intelligently and matching them to the requirements of a job, we’re going to create magical moments for employers to hire and magical moments for candidates to be hired based on what they actually can do. I think one of the things that could be of interest is the ability to do skills-based evaluations of applicants. I will give you an example. You could take a supply sergeant or a military chef above E5, and they could easily come in and become experts in logistics and bookkeeping. Now, you would not know that without taking a minute to understand their background and the skill set of what it takes to get that job done.
Now, on paper that sounds awesome, but it’s a hard task to saddle an individual with, and that’s why technology and if I’m a TA leader investing in that type of approach, would allow me to hire high quality people faster. And when we look at a TAtech leader, an HR leader, a recruiting leader, finding high quality applicants is the number one mission and problem that they have. And part of the challenge is the antiquated matching technology and comparison skills that we’re using in some of the applicant tracking systems and some of the technology that doesn’t do that deep taxonomy evaluation of the job versus the applicant. I would highly encourage people to start thinking that way and looking at tools that allow them to do that at scale.
Amber: My name is Amber Wanner and I’m the Founder and CEO of a company called Vette and we are essentially Uber for phone interviews. We’re utilizing the gig economy to interview applicants right at the moment of intent as soon as they apply to your job or express interest.
Matt: Tell us a bit more about how you do that. So, basically you can interview applicants very, very quickly. Who are the interviewers? Where are they from?
Amber: Yeah, so they’re called Vetters, our gig workers and they are stay-home moms, retirees, military veterans, HR people doing in their free time, people with disabilities, who can do it from home. It’s really having that warm human conversation with someone as soon as an applicant applies.
Matt: What can we do to make talent acquisition more magical?
Amber: Show the applicants that they matter. That’s the most important thing is as soon as they express interest in your company and in your job, get them on the phone with a human, stop them in their tracks, don’t let your competitor come in, and get them on the phone and show them that they matter.
John: Hi. My name is John Duarte. I’m founder of GoHire. I’ve been in the industry since 1996, built one of the first job boards and 27 years later, I’m always trying to solve the hypothesis. How do you get qualified candidates talking to hiring managers faster?
Matt: How’d you do that?
John: Automation and texting is the way to go and you got to connect to your ATS and you got to be able to make it personalized because it’s a personal channel.
Matt: So, related question, how do we make talent acquisition more magical?
John: It’s got to be personalized. I know a lot of people don’t like this quote, but Josh Bersin said, “The recruiter has to be the part of the equation that is the relationship.” We all know that. So, everything else, automation is going to take over.
Allyn: I am Allyn Bailey, and I work with SmartRecruiters.
Matt: How can we make talent acquisition more magical?
Allyn: Stop pretending we need humans to do it.
Matt: I’m going to have to get you to elaborate on that a little bit more. What do you mean by that?
Allyn: I mean we need to allow ourselves to embrace the technologies that are available and not be afraid to figure out how to allow them to free up our time and let us be more capable.
Jenny: Could you please share who you are and what it is that you do?
Mervyn: My name is Mervyn Dinnen. I’m analyst, writer, a co-author with Matt of two books and about to start our third. I have an HR podcast, but nothing like as great as Matt’s podcast.
Jenny: Thank you so much. If we’re talking about the magic of talent acquisition and how to get talent acquisition right, what advice would you have for the listeners?
Mervyn: I think we need to think about hotels, the best hotel we’ve ever stayed in and what made it magical. It was the concierge. It was the person when you first go in, gets everything right for you, tells you everything, makes everything happen. And that’s what talent acquisition needs because we go from candidates to interview, to assessment, acceptance, onboarding and it kind of happens. But what people need now is somebody to guide them along the way, that they know there’s somebody there to give them information, they can ask questions, they can find out what’s going on. So, talent acquisition needs to offer much more of a concierge service.
Maren: My name is Maren Hogan. I’m the CEO of Red Branch Media, which is a full-service marketing and advertising agency for HR and recruiting tech and services businesses.
Matt: So, the question is, what can we do to make talent acquisition more magical?
Maren: Oh, my gosh. So, honestly, it’s very Jacobin of me. But I do think that we’re going to have to start putting profits after people instead of before them. HR can only be magical when there’s truly maybe you can’t care about every single employee, but you need to be able to know that you can support every single employee so probably that. Barring that, since that’s not in most people’s control, I think HR can start realizing that the goals of the company are going to be so much and they’re going to be so antithetical to what the employee wants. Start thinking about being a place for someone to develop their career and start recognizing that there are cycles in everything including work. Once you recognize those cycles, you can performance manage to them, you can hire to them, you can offboard and onboard to them. There’s a lot of ways to make that experience good for everyone without acting like we have to be together forever.
Robin: Hi, my name is Robin Schooling. I’m the Director of Talent Strategy with Humareso, which is a consulting firm, and I am based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
Matt: How can we make talent acquisition more magical?
Robin: Well, we can’t necessarily sprinkle pixie dust or magic dust over everything, although that might be nice. So, I think our magic comes from being a little more practical. Perhaps because of my background, my trade, my experience, I want to strip it all back, get to the basic, simple process of connecting people to jobs and letting them do their best work. Start there.
Matt: So, some very clear themes emerging there about speed, relationships, and candidate experience. To finish off, here are some thoughts from two new vendors to the market, both of whom are appearing at the startup competition in the conference. So, first of all, introduce yourself and tell us what you do.
Summer: Hi, I’m so happy to be here. Summer Delaney, I’m the Founder and CEO of CollabWORK, and we built the first community powered hiring platform connecting companies to referral base and underrepresented talent pools at scale.
Matt: Tell us a bit more about that.
Summer: Yeah, so my background, I was a journalist for a decade. I worked at Yahoo News, I worked at CNN, I worked at Amazon, and I never got any of those jobs through applying online. It was all through communities, through Facebook groups for women in media, through Listservs for people in tech. I was really fortunate. My network is really my net worth got me my roles. But how do companies connect to these talent pools that are existing in these hidden job market of people on now, Slack and Discord and other platforms? So, we really wanted to build the infrastructure to connect talent acquisition teams at scale to source from these communities.
Matt: I suppose that answers my question, because my question is, how do we make talent acquisition more magical?
Summer: Yeah, it’s a great question. I think one of the big themes we’re seeing at this conference is the change in talent acquisition teams. I mean, a lot of the recruiters who do such meaningful work were the first to be laid off during reductions. I think that a lot of those teams are going to look different moving forward. So, we really want to be for companies that can afford to have recruiters, be that active sourcing partner, and for those that can give them back their time, we’re about two-thirds quicker than alternatives that they allow them to automatically source. So, we sync up to over 40 plus ATS’s, we pull your jobs into our database using some AI algorithms as well as some human touch. We identify which talent pools to automatically send your jobs to and give you a curated shortlist of candidates. So, we really think that this is a way to automate sourcing, but still find really great referral-based candidates.
Rich: So, I’m Rich Wilson. I’m the Co-founder and CEO of Gigged.AI. We are an open talent platform that works with digital transformation to tap into internal and external talent very quickly.
Matt: How can we make talent acquisition more magical?
Rich: I’m writing a blog that I put out and I’m going to bolt it on at the moment, but I think it’s about how more platforms and more companies actually integrate more business models and not just tech. So, I think we could get four or five companies that could get together, not a joint venture per se, but we could actually collaborate more than just beyond the normal API and actually work together to solve customer challenges directly instead of all these desperate platforms competing against each other. So, I think for example, an internal platform, permanent talent platform, a contract talent platform, and a EOR payment compliance platform could actually work together seamlessly to solve a problem instead of creating more headaches for procurement, more headaches for TA, and actually I think that would be a great experience for the customer.
Matt: My thanks to our amazing sponsors Hackajob, the legend that is, Evan White for his party planning genius, JCK for her interviewing mastery, and everyone who came along to join us. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, or via your podcasting app of choice. You can also listen to all the past episodes @recruitingfuture.com. And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter Recruiting Future Feast. Thanks very much for listening to this special episode. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
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