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As I’ve said many times before, automation in recruiting and HR is inevitable. This means that every TA and HR leader should be thinking strategically about automation, its implications, and, most importantly, the value that it will add right now.
So what are the benefits of automation, and where and how should talent functions be automated?
My guest this week is Brandon Sammut, Chief People Officer at Zapier. Automation is in Zapiers corporate DNA, and they are successfully using it to drive their talent density strategy through automation in recruiting, onboarding, and skills development.
In the interview, we discuss:
• What Talent Density means at Zapier and how they built it
• Focusing on what is uniquely human
• Being transparent about a remote-only employee experience
• T shaped talent
• Automated Onboarding
• Using automation to solve hard problems and make things more personal at scale.
• Experience design and empathy
• Understand where to apply automation and where not to apply it.
• Developing AI skills across the business
• What will the future look like?
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Matt: Support for this podcast comes from Greenhouse. Greenhouse is your altogether hiring platform. Engage top talent with smart sourcing tools, deliver a more equitable interviewing process. Welcome new hires with ease, and get the insights you need to make measurable improvements all within a single platform. Hire better altogether with Greenhouse.
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Matt: Hi there. Welcome to Episode 613 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. As I’ve said many times before, “Automation in recruiting an HR is inevitable.” This means that every TA and HR leader should be thinking strategically about automation, its implications, and most importantly, the value it can add. So, what are the benefits of automation and where and how should talent functions be automated? My guest this week is Brandon Sammut, Chief People Officer at Zapier. Automation is in Zapier’s corporate DNA, and they’re successfully using it to drive their talent density strategy through automation in recruiting, onboarding, and skills development.
Matt: Hi Brandon and welcome to the podcast.
Brandon: Thank you. Good to be with you, Matt.
Matt: An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Brandon: I surely can. I am Brandon Sammut. I serve as the Chief People Officer at a company called Zapier. Zapier is in the business of making automation work for everyone, and we do that by providing no code tools for people and organizations to build much of their businesses, Zapier.
Matt: Fantastic. And give us a sense of how many people are in the organization.
Brandon: The team at Zapier today has about 750 folks. And one of the distinctive things about Zapier, a 13-year-old company, is that it started as an all-remote company, meaning that we could hire and collaborate with teammates from all over the world. And so practically today, that means that our 750 teammates live in over 40 countries.
Matt: Now, I know that a real focus for your business in terms of the talent that you have is talent density. It may be a phrase that some people listening to the podcast aren’t familiar with. What does that mean in the context of your organization?
Brandon: At Zapier, we think about talent density as the extent to which people and teams are fully living into their accountabilities in the organization, and specifically when it comes to things like productivity or performance, that they’re able to do that per person in a way that is atypical. So, if you take someone in customer support or in sales, for example, we ask the question, “What would need to be true for an individual customer support person or individual sales leader to be able to do more, produce more measurably than if they were doing the same job in another organization.” And we think a lot about the different levers that we can pull to enable folks to be unusually impactful in their work and could talk a little bit later about why that matters for us.
Matt: Yeah. I mean, that’s obviously super interesting. What’s been your strategy for achieving that for sort of building that within the business?
Brandon: Well, there’s one thing that we believe that is part of the anchor for this talent density strategy. And it actually starts with Zapier’s mission. Again, Zapier’s mission is to make automation work for everyone. We believe that things like automation can abstract a lot of tedium out of so many jobs that exist today so that what’s left for us to do are the things that are more uniquely human, the things that people do best. And what personally motivates me about this talent density strategy, aside from it being like an unusually good fit with what Zapier is out there doing with our customers, is that it is a talent strategy that, yes, can help the business operate more effectively. It will help a business operate in a more financially efficient way.
But when you think about what a talent density strategy can do for people’s work, the amount of learning and growth that can come with that, when more of the job are things that are uniquely human to do, you think about what that means for employee engagement and retention. You kind of get doubly excited, because if we’re able to lean into this strategy effectively, we are going to operate a Zapier that is more successful in serving our customers, and we are going to run a company that is an unusually growth oriented and amazing place to work.
Matt: Fantastic stuff. And how does that kind of strategy reflect in the way that you recruit people, the way that you sort of do, the way that you develop people? What are the kind of the levers that you can pull to kind of realize it?
Brandon: Absolutely. Let’s start at the kind of the beginning of the employee lifecycle, when folks are first starting to get to know the company. So, we do a couple things there at the recruiting stage. One is we try to be unusually transparent about what it is like to work with Zapier. Again, Zapier is an all-remote company. And even though many of us worked remotely during the pandemic, even to this day, very few of us in the workforce have ever worked at an all-remote company, certainly not one that started that way. And so Zapier works in some fairly distinctive ways. We work across time zones by doing a lot of work asynchronously, rather than having more of a meeting heavy culture, just as an example, it is also fairly writing heavy culture because writing things down is one of the best ways to make sure information is available to everyone all over the world, no matter when, during the day they are working.
And so, there are some things that are distinctive about what it’s like to work at Zapier. And we really lead with those during the recruiting experience, we don’t believe that Zapier or any company needs to be the perfect match for every candidate. We just want to be really clear about for whom we might be a good match. And so, to create really a two-way decision, there’s a lot of focus on the work of the company to decide whether to offer to a candidate, but we try to put an equal focus on making sure that the candidate can make a really informed decision about whether they want to join us if we make an offer. So, it really starts there in terms of alignment. And that relates to talent density, because if you hire folks into the company whose experience is different than what they expected, that can impair their engagement. In some cases, they can just practically impair their ability to do their job really well. And so, we start there.
There’s another thing that we do during the recruiting stage, increasingly around assessing the extent to which folks operate in what we would call a T-shaped way. And what we mean by that is, you think about the letter T, that vertical bar. We talk about subject matter expertise. If we’re hiring a marketer, we’re certainly looking for domain expertise and marketing. The top of the T, the broad horizontal area is the other piece of the pie. And with that, we’re looking at, “Yes, we’re looking for someone who is a subject matter expert in marketing, but can they do some copywriting?” What are the adjacent skills that may not be like squarely in the typical job description for that role, but where if we can find someone that can flex a little bit adjacently, they can actually do more and not have to, like, hand things off quite so much to other folks.
There’s a lot of kind of coordination tax or time lost and handing things off from one person to another, to another. And so, where we reasonably can, we’re looking for what we call T-shaped talent so that folks are able to take more complete ownership over their work, which A, in addition to being more satisfying for folks that can do that also, again, reduces handoffs and therefore some of the coordination tax of running a large organization. So that’s just the recruiting stage, but I’ll pause there to see if that evokes anything.
Matt: Yeah. No, I think that’s definitely really interesting. And that sort of makes a lot of sense in terms of kind of how you build that within the business. I mean, how does it go from there? How do you sort of, with the changing nature of skills that are out there at the moment with skills going out of date so quickly, how do you follow through and make sure people have the skills they need to do their jobs moving forward?
Brandon: Absolutely. Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t name automation as one of the ways that we’re building talent density. And so, we do actually have a fair amount of folks apply to jobs at Zapier who are, in fact, also customers of Zapier. And that can be really interesting as for a variety of reasons, one, they already kind of understand the mission, what we’re trying to do in the world. They’re familiar with the product, which is helpful in many of the obvious ways. Like if you’re doing customer support, for example, it’s great to come in and already know how to use the product a little bit, although we don’t expect that same thing in sales and many other roles. The other thing that’s helpful, whether you come in with those skills or we develop them once you join Zapier, is that we use a lot of Zapier at Zapier, automate things that otherwise people would be doing by hand so that they can use more of their time to do the things that are uniquely for people to do.
And we do a Zapier’s onboarding experience, just to give an example, is pretty extensive. It lasts really six months in total. And a lot of those kind of like, training moments that happen throughout those six months are also automated based on timing or different triggers in their first six months of the employee experience. It’s a remarkable program. I went through it scarcely two and a half years ago, and it really stood out to me. A lot of respect for the team that maintains it here at Zapier. But to get right back to your question, that one of the next most important ways that we build talent density is by making sure that our team has the skills to use automation and these days, AI in their daily work. And if you’re curious, we could talk a little bit about that, because we made a pretty concerted effort on AI skill development about a year ago that has produced some really useful results for the company?
Matt: No, fantastic. Very keen to dig into that in a second. I suppose before we do, I just want to dig a little bit more into some of the things that you talked about in terms of automation. Very familiar with Zapier personally, I use your product and it is amazing. It’s almost magical in [chuckles] terms of some of the things that it does. So, it’s not surprising that a lot of the stuff that you do is run on that system and is automated. You mentioned the onboarding there, and that being that sort of automated process, how does it feel to go through that? Because I’m guessing that some people who are listening might be thinking that this is being managed by robots. It’s not personal. You’re taking the humanity out of the process. What’s the experience actually like?
Brandon: It’s a really good question, because it brings us to a really important point. The best applications of automation that I have seen in the Zapier onboarding experience is a good example of this, actually makes things more personal at scale, not less. And here’s what I mean by that. If you’re doing a scaled new higher onboarding experience, for example, if you’re doing it all by hand, it could be hard to personalize training modules or content for each individual and to create these custom agendas. And I know this because I have done this in the past in another organization. It’s meaningful if you can do it, because again, someone joins the company and they can see that real consideration was put into their experience. It’s not all entirely cookie cutter. That can be hard to maintain at scale, especially if you’re running a lean team, which is the case for so many organizations that we work with.
And so, by using automation, you can actually automate the personalization of a new hire onboarding agenda. And so, the received experience for the new hire, it looks and feels very personalized. Someone thought after me when they were creating this, but we’re able to do it scalably with help from automation. And so, we think about automation in so many ways across the company, not as a replacement for people doing the work. We have a brilliant leader who continues to maintain and design and scale our onboarding program, for example. But as a helper, and ironically a helper in ways that sometimes can take things that are hard to personalize at scale and actually unlock the ability to actually personalize those things, which again, from a received experience on the front end, can actually feel more human. Although ironically on the backend, there’s a lot of automation powering it.
Matt: And I suppose the interesting thing about that is when we sort of talk about automation, it’s always about automating these processes and things like that. But there’s obviously been a huge amount of experience, design, and human thought and empathy that’s gone into building that process.
Brandon: Oh, certainly. Absolutely and this is where, again, and we think about AI in a similar way, like automation AI as the Hero’s Cape, as a copilot and with our customers, we end up in a lot of similar conversations, which is, “How do I take the team I have today? How can I use something like Zapier or AI to make us capable of more together rather than as a substitute for human creativity?”
Matt: Does that work back through the talent acquisition process as well? Are there levels of automation within your recruitment process?
Brandon: A great deal. And then to your point, from like, user centered design, we try to be thoughtful about the places where we’re going to apply automation and AI to help in the places where we will not. And so, in our talent acquisition workflow, for example, we use plenty of automation to automate sourcing of candidates, which then we have kind of a human [unintelligible 00:13:55] working through everything. A human at Zapier still reviews 100% of applications at the company. So, there are products these days where you can use AI to do some automated screening. We’ve chosen not to do that. For us personally, for the kind of the type of reviews that we’re trying to do. We don’t think the technology is there yet to inspire the confidence that we would need to automate that particular workflow. But we do use it for everything from scheduling to certain types of outreach and follow up. And we can customize a lot of that using automation as well. Actually, another great example of how you can actually create more personalization using automation than what a team would ordinarily be able to pull off doing it entirely by hand. But at Zapier, all applications are reviewed by humans and all assessments are done by humans.
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Matt: You mentioned earlier about the kind of the skills that you’ve identified and been working on in terms of what people will need or what people do need in a kind of environment of automation and AI. I know that lots of people listening will be looking to the future and looking at automation and looking at AI and how it’s changing things like talent acquisition and HR and wondering what are the skills that they need to work on or develop to sort of continue their career in this changing world. What have you found?
Brandon: Well, I think you just said one of the key phrases, which is, “In this changing world.” And so just to give an example, a year ago we declared, we called it an AI code red, AI call to action for the entire company. And we’ve been building with AI in our product for some time. But with GenAI kind of coming to the forefront culturally, there was a real opportunity for us to go from dabbling to really putting it towards the center of how we were building for customers and similarly how we were thinking about upscaling the Zapier team itself. And it was a somewhat jarring experience for a lot of the company at first. Zapier had never done a call to action quite like this before and we had to be really clear about what the opportunity was, what we needed from folks. And then also importantly, like when you’re doing a call to action like that, what it’s not. We weren’t trying to create alarm or fear or anxiety, but we were trying to create focus and purpose on this topic. And one of the things we did practically around scaling the workforce in generative AI and prompting in particular, is we said, “Hey, at Zapier, we have a tradition of everyone in the company having personal growth goals in addition to performance-oriented goals.”
And so, for some length of time last year, we said for the first time, “We’re actually going to ask everyone to have the same personal growth goal.” And that personal growth goal is to find at least one meaningful way to put generative AI to work for you in your daily work. And we’re all going to do that from Wade, our CEO through our executive team all throughout the organization we are all going to learn together. We created a companywide Slack panel where folks could share questions, no questions off the table. There are no silly questions on how to get started with GenAI. We have a variety of folks that work further in their skilling journey answering a lot of those questions, we created a kind of repository of knowledge around use cases or ways to put it to work for you in your job and we went from there. And what’s interesting– Then we also started measuring, asking folks whether this is actually happening. Like, “Are you now able to use AI in your daily work?”
And the last time we measured this, which was fairly recently, 70% of the company said, “Yes,” or a strong yes to being able to use AI in their daily work, and 70% isn’t 100%. But if we dial back to a year ago, that number would have been in the single digit. So meaningful progress there. And when you look at the examples of how folks are using it, you do get that benefit that we talked about earlier. You can see folks using it in ways they’re enabling them to increase their overall performance or productivity. But then when you talk about what it means for them and their daily work. Like, they’re able to spend more time doing the things that personally, like, they enjoy doing more. It can help folks actually reduce anxiety at work by removing things like writer’s block or translating content from one language to their first language and so on. So, there are all kinds of really interesting applications here, but that has been a big focus for us.
Matt: So obviously, you’re a company that’s on the cutting edge of this, and that’s reflected in your talent strategies, and what you do with your people. Where do you think this is all going? What’s the future of work going to look like? What are we likely to be talking about if we had this conversation again in five years’ time?
Brandon: You know, the truly vulnerable answer on that, Matt, is, “I’m not sure, but I can tell you what I think it will depend on.” One thing I think it will depend on is regulation, mainly around AI. So, if we end up in a highly regulated environment, I think that points to, like, a different and maybe narrower set of opportunities than if we have a lighter approach. And I personally don’t know what the right approach is because I think we’re all still getting our heads and our hands around what the technology can do. And part of the reason I think that’s interesting and challenging right now is because the answer to that question shifts. It feels like on a monthly or quarterly basis, that’s really fast. So, the regulatory environment feels like a big question mark, and I don’t have a good sense of where that will go. And I personally don’t have a great sense of what I think a good answer is. But I think that will have a lot of influence over which applications of AI are ultimately allowable and therefore how that influences folks. I also think the big open question around who comes out ahead with AI, a new technology sometimes can shift the relationship between employees and their employers. And sometimes it can shift the balance of power either from employers to employees or vice versa. That’s something I’m paying a lot of attention to. But again, a big question mark there.
Matt: Brandon, thank you very much for talking to me.
Brandon: It’s a pleasure, Matt. Thank you.
Matt: My thanks to Brandon. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also subscribe to our YouTube channel by going to mattalder.tv. 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.
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