One of the things that I love about our industry is the sense of community. Wherever talent acquisition professionals gather, whether online or face-to-face, at industry events, there is always a strong emphasis on peer-to-peer learning and support.
My guest this week is Krista Tan. Krista is a TA leader and the founder of Talent Collective, a non-profit organization building a community to help support the careers of women working in talent acquisition.
In our conversation, Krista discusses the motivations for starting Talent Collective and the benefits curated communities can bring. With so much disruption in the market, we also discuss the advantages of working fractionally and what the future looks like for talent acquisition.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The story behind Talent Collective and its purpose
• Who the community is for
• Market expectations for 2024
• The benefits of fractional working
• Advice for TA professionals looking to move to fractional
• What does the future of talent acquisition look like?
Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Transcription:
Matt Alder: Support for this podcast comes from Talent Collective, the dynamic, nonprofit community dedicated to empowering, connecting and advancing women plus in the ever-evolving realm of talent acquisition. Talent Collective’s mission is to elevate the careers and networks of its members through carefully curated experiences, ensuring women plus in recruiting thrive, learn and connect. Whether you are a global TA leader, head of talent, corporate or agency recruiter, or an expert in recruiting or people operations, Talent Collective is tailored just for you. With over 200 women in recruiting globally, you could enjoy a multitude of benefits from quarterly fireside chats, monthly networking events, boardroom peer groups, mentorship programs, engaging workshops to a dedicated recruiter job board and discounts from their recruiting service partners.
Talent Collective is more than just a community. It’s a supportive ecosystem where careers flourish, explore unique experiences and opportunities to connect with like-minded professionals on their free community platform at talentcollective.community. That’s Talent Collective dot community. Follow them on LinkedIn and Instagram, and join women in recruiting whose careers are thriving and flourishing.
[Recruiting Future theme]
Matt Alder: Hi there. This is Matt Alder. Welcome to Episode 580 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the things I love about our industry is the sense of community. Wherever talent acquisition professionals gather, whether online or face-to-face, at industry events, there is always a strong emphasis on peer-to-peer learning and support.
My guest this week is Krista Tan. Krista is a TA leader and the founder of Talent Collective, a non-profit organization building a community to help support the careers of women working in talent acquisition.
In our conversation, Krista discusses the motivations for starting Talent Collective and the benefits curated communities can bring. With so much disruption in the market, we also discuss the advantages of working fractionally and what the future looks like for talent acquisition.
Hi, Krista, and welcome to the podcast.
Krista Tan: Thank you, Matt, I am so honored to be here. I’ve been listening to your podcast for a while now and just find so much value in it. So really, really appreciate you bringing me on.
Matt Alder: Well, I’m delighted to hear that, and it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do.
Krista Tan: Absolutely. So I am co-founder of Talent Collective, which is a new community for women in the TA space. We were started in the Bay area in California. However, we have quickly grown and scaled within six months to a global organization with members all over the world. It’s been a really fun ride so far and just excited to get into 2024 and continue to grow.
Matt Alder: Fantastic stuff. So tell us a little bit more about Talent Collective. Why did you start it, what does it do, who are the members who are coming together?
Krista Tan: Absolutely. So my co-founders and I, we really saw a need for more of a community in the TA space, specifically for women in TA. We saw a need for more connection, deeper relationships and professional development in the space. So we decided this summer to just rip the band-aid off and we launched it in June. We are a community that is open to all women or those who identify as women in the TA space, so could be on the agency hot side, in-house. We have an executive membership that is kicking off in the new year. And then we have people in IC roles, middle management roles and really everything in between, even recruiting operations and RC roles. So really, anyone who owns the TA space or is responsible for it or is a recruiter themselves is welcome to join. And we’re excited to have more members and more members apply.
Matt Alder: So tell us a bit more about why you created the membership just for women.
Krista Tan: Sure. So we went back and forth quite a bit [giggles] in the beginning on, do we have men in the membership or not. And obviously, we have a lot of really amazing friends in the TA space that are men. We love men. There’s nothing wrong with that. But we really decided for a couple of reasons to just have women. So one is, if you look around at leadership in the TA space, there’s fewer leaders really at the top, and even fewer leaders that run podcasts, or that are speakers at conferences that are women. So we wanted to be a space where women could really elevate their careers more in TA.
And then secondly, I think it’s really about that vulnerability and transparency that women can have when they’re in a room with just other women. I’ll give you the perfect example of this that happened at our launch event in San Francisco. We were hosting a fireside chat and we had a panel of TA leaders speaking. And at the end, one of the participants, one of the members had asked like, “What’s something that you regret in your life or wish you had done sooner?” And without hesitation, one of the panelists raised her hand and said, “I would have gotten my divorce sooner.” It was one of those moments where I was like, “That probably would not have been said if it was a room full of men and women.” And so it was really just solidified our decision to go with all women. We’ve had a lot of really good feedback from members so far that just a lot of appreciation that it’s just women.
Matt Alder: It’s been an interesting and a pretty challenging year for everyone working in talent acquisition. Tell us a bit about the kind of challenges that your members have faced that they’re discussing, and also how being in a community can help them with those challenges.
Krista Tan: Yeah. So we have a few different buckets of members. So obviously, a lot of people are unemployed right now in our industry, so those members are definitely looking for opportunities to network and then also to keep their skills and knowledge sharp while they’re out of work. And so we’ve had a lot of workshops and whatnot on AI, and employer branding, and DEI, and just a lot of those hot topics that are continuing to be in the TA space. And then for the people that are employed, we typically see people in one of three buckets. So maybe they’re in house, their team has been drastically cut, and they’re one of the few people left trying to fill way too many roles, do more with less. It’s been really challenging for them to keep up.
And then the second bucket would be people who still have a good amount of TA members on their team, but not as many roles to fill. And so they’re really figuring out like, how do I continue to provide value for the organization even when hiring is slow. And then the third, I would say, are agency recruiters who, for the most part, have been struggling to find business. And so this is just a really good opportunity for all of these groups to come together, again, to build that network, to share knowledge, to really just get in community and be with one another through this time.
Matt Alder: What are you seeing in the market at the moment? We’re right up against the end of the year as we’re having this conversation. So what would you expect to happen in 2024?
Krista Tan: Yeah. So I think later on in this year, fall, going into December, the winter, we did see a slight uptick in new roles and recruiter roles specifically. I haven’t seen as many TA leadership roles posted or available or people within that leadership executive category. They’ve been having a more difficult time finding a role, to be honest, I think January will probably not be heavy hiring. I know a lot of people are very hopeful, as am I. But in the times where I’ve seen a slower recession, January doesn’t tend to be kick off the new year with just being slammed. I think things may pick back up in February or March.
And then I think there’s also a lot of recruiters who are out of work, have been out of work, have been laid off several times who are considering and or have already decided to go with an alternative option, like, maybe they’re going into more of the people-op side or they want to do fractional recruiting. And so really looking into ways to continue to work in this environment, whether they want to do fractional permanently moving forward or just meanwhile until they get a full-time job.
Matt Alder: There’s been a huge amount of conversation this year about technology, AI in particular, displacing jobs in TA. Do you think that’s something that’s already happening, or how fast might that happen moving forward, or will it happen at all?
Krista Tan: I haven’t seen that happen yet. I haven’t seen jobs being displaced by AI because I think we’re still at the very forefront of really how AI is going to help our profession. It’s interesting that this AI boom started in a market where so many recruiters have been laid off. So I think companies will expect that recruiters can do more with less with the tools out there. But I think the verdict is still out on that. I still think it’ll be a few years until we see a huge impact on what technology will do for jobs in TA.
Matt Alder: You mentioned fractional working there as an option that lots of people are looking at, and it’s certainly something that I’ve seen as well. It’s a really interesting shift in the market. Talk us through the benefits of that, both from the fractional worker but also the people that they’re doing business with.
Krista Tan: Sure. Yeah, so I’ve actually been one of those people who has done some fractional work this year after I left my full-time job in September. And so I personally know a lot about the benefits of being on the worker side. So number one, I think is the biggest, is really that flexibility to work the hours and the projects that you want, so you can take on work that you want to do. If you’re in a full-time position and they’re requiring you to do something that’s probably not your favorite, [laughs] you’re going to just suck it up and do it. But with fractional work, you can really choose what you want to take on and what you don’t want to take on. And then you’re not tied to your desk 09:00 to 05:00 or whatever hours are expected of you in a full-time job.
And then I think diversity of income sources is another huge one right now. When you have a full-time job and you get laid off, there goes your entire income and benefits and all of that. But if you have maybe two, three, four fractional clients or projects going on at any given time and you lose one of them, it’s not the end of the world for your income. You still have some income coming in.
And then on the employer side, I think it comes down to, again, it’s kind of a similar thing, cost and flexibility. So on the flexibility side, they don’t have to commit to a full-time hire. You can flex with more hours or less hours depending on the hiring needs. And then the cost is significantly less than, let’s say, a staffing agency model. So at Talent Refinery, our model is that the client pays a monthly retainer upfront. So at the beginning of the engagement for a certain amount of hours per week, like up to a certain amount of hours and then let’s say it’s a search, if it goes into the second month, that monthly retainer is then renewed for the second month.
Matt Alder: So as someone who’s already doing this. What advice would you give to people looking to refocus their career on being fractional?
Krista Tan: The very first thing you need to do is decide if you’re going to go all in on this or if this is just going to be a side gig until you find your next role. So if you’re going all in and you really want this to be your long-term work moving forward, then you want to set up a business structure, like an LLC or another type of business structure, and really get your tools in place and some really solid tech stack and invoicing system and all sorts of process and procedure lined up, so that you have the structure for a business. But if you are just going to be doing this on a part time basis, until you find your next gig, I think you can wing it a little bit more, and go out there and try to find gigs just through your network.
But again, if it’s going to be a long-term thing, you really need to set up even business development, and sales, and marketing and put more of an investment into it, and also just to highlight we—So at Talent Refiner, we are going to hold a course in February. It’s going to be like an accelerator course for anyone wanting to start their own fractional business. So if this is something that people want to do for their long-term gig moving forward, we’re going to walk you through those steps and make it really simple for you.
Matt Alder: Fantastic stuff. What do you think the future looks like for TA? Huge amounts of conversations about the role of recruiters and technology and new ways of working and all these kind of things. How do you think TA is going to evolve over the next three to five years?
Krista Tan: Yeah. I was actually just listening to your last podcast episode this morning and was thinking about this question. I really resonated with the last guest that you had on. I don’t see technology and AI fully taking over recruiting jobs. There’s just too much of a human component. I think your guest had called it like the emotional piece of the recruiting process. I just think that there’s going to be more recruiting operations roles in the future, more people to really manage the technology, make sure you have the right tech stack, hopefully consolidate tools, because right now, there’s a lot of tools out there that just do enhance one piece of the recruiting process. So over time, obviously companies are going to want to consolidate those and find tools that will do more pieces of the process.
Also, I think tools really help us to be more efficient, but my hope is, as a society, that we don’t just say, “Oh, with these AI tools, we’re going to do more with less.” I hope we see a shift in work life balance for TA teams. Before all of these layoffs started happening, there were so many TA professionals that were so burnt out over the past few years, just working crazy amount of hours and just grinding. And my hope is that, with better tools, more efficiency, people can actually focus a little more on their friends and family than just work more and do more.
Matt Alder: So final question for you. Where can people go to find out more about Talent Collective?
Krista Tan: Absolutely. So you can go to our website. So it’s talentcollective.community. We have an amazing platform in circle where you know if you sign up, you get access tools and resources. We have peer groups, and we have a mentor program kicking off in the new year. So lots and lots of resources and opportunities to learn and network and connect with people. But yeah, you can go to talentcollective.community.
Matt Alder: Krista, thank you very much for joining me.
Krista Tan: Absolutely, Matt. Thank you. Really, it’s been a pleasure today.
Matt Alder: My thanks to Krista. You can subscribe to this podcast on 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 @recruitingfuture. 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.
