Transforming a business function is a difficult process. It can become impossible if no one knows what the function is transforming into. It is vital that anyone undertaking a TA Transformation develops a clear vision to generate buy-in and set the direction of travel.
With so much disruption going on, there has never been a better time to create bold, innovative visions that take TA Acquisition in new directions.
My guest this week is Jill Leonard, Global Senior Director of Talent at Hello Fresh. Hello Fresh has developed a vision for talent acquisition that they call “TA As A Service.” In addition to discussing Hello Fresh’s TA Transformation, Jill also talks about her experience implementing video interviewing and the benefits of embracing new technology early.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Current TA challenges
• TA Transformation at Hello Fresh
• Recruiters as Talent Advisors
• TA as a service
• Agility and change management
• Upskilling and professional development for TA teams
• How video interviewing has evolved to solve specific business needs
• The benefits of embracing new technology early
• How to drive adoption.
• How should TA leaders respond to AI?
• Optimizing the candidate experience
• How will TA evolve over the next five years?
Follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts.
Follow this podcast on Spotify.
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Willo, a video interviewing platform for scaling businesses. As the talent market evolves, you’re probably thinking about how to build a more inclusive candidate experience that doesn’t require long days on Zoom Teams or Skype. Willo is a virtual interviewing platform where candidates can record responses on their own time using video or audio or text, and it’s used by some of the fastest growing businesses like Coinbase, Hotjar and HelloFresh. Willo’s flexible platform means candidates can truly be themselves and recruiters get a consistent, transparent process. It’s also excellent for the candidate experience. 35% of candidates interview with Willo between the hours of 6pm and and 6am Willo also integrates seamlessly with over 5000 business applications such as Workday, Workable Lever, Greenhouse, and Team Tailor. There’s a free trial to try everything and if you need more, Willo’s tailored plans include features to help you expand your talent pool and streamline recruiting operations, all with 24. 7 live support. Request a personalized demo today at Willo.video. That’s Willo.video.
Matt Alder [00:01:40]:
Hi there. Welcome to episode 658 of Recruiting Future with me, Matt Alder. Transforming a business function is a difficult process. It can be impossible if no one knows what the function is transforming into. It’s vital that anyone undertaking a TA transformation develops a clear vision to generate, buy in and set the direction of travel. With so much disruption going on, there’s never been a better time to create a bold, innovative vision that takes talent acquisition in a whole new direction. My guest this week is Jill Leonard, Global Senior Director of talent at HelloFresh. HelloFresh has developed a vision for talent acquisition they call TA as a Service. In addition to discussing HelloFresh’s TA transformation, Jill also talks about her experience implementing video interviewing and the benefits of embracing new technology early. Hi Jill and welcome to the podcast.
Jill Leonard [00:02:50]:
Thanks very much. Thanks for the invite.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Jill Leonard [00:02:59]:
Sure. So I’m Jill Leonard. I am a Senior Director of Talent. Currently my responsibilities are around recruitment delivery, so I’m responsible for making sure that the business gets the hires they need across our global organization for tech and commercial roles up to senior Director level.
Matt Alder [00:03:18]:
Fantastic. So it’s been another interesting year for Interesting lots of ways, but interesting year for ta. What are the kind of the biggest challenges that you’re seeing in TA at the moment, from your perspective.
Jill Leonard [00:03:32]:
Yeah, you’re not kidding about the times that we’re in. I mean, I think that most organizations are in a bit of, of a period of stability versus growth and some are reducing headcount. So I think in these times, you know, we get a spotlight on ta Sometimes that can also lead to a perception of recruiters treading water and you know, but actually there can be large volumes of hiring that’s still happening because you’re backfilling. So yes, we might not be, you know, building new heads or something, but we’ve actually got large volume roles of attrition that we’re backfilling. So I think that, you know, that impact and the challenge that is for TA is that sometimes, you know, there’s a shift in attitude that needs to happen. It requires us to raise more awareness of the effort that’s happening in recruitment. You know, probably for people, leaders, you know, bringing some more support to your recruiting teams, they’re probably feeling a little bit vulnerable and in the mix of all of that, you know, Absolutely. Bringing your best game, you know, to your, to your stakeholders.
Matt Alder [00:04:45]:
No, no. 100, 100%. And I suppose to, you know, the whole concept of TA transformation is sort of everywhere now. Either organizations are going through it or they’re, they’re about to go through some kind of change process, at very least. What’s kind of happening where you are, what’s, what’s changing? What does that look like?
Jill Leonard [00:05:05]:
I think that change is always happening and so it might feel new to a lot of people. And sometimes there’s some comfort in knowing that you’re not first footing this change. People have gone before you. So when, when it came to Covid, for example, and people, you know, were in dark times then. Those of us who are a bit longer at the tooth, you know, can remember the financial crisis and the credit crunch and you know, just the weird times that, that, that was. So I think, you know, change is constant. You can pull on your experiences of change that’s happened in the past in order to prepare you and not get freaked out about the change that’s ahead of you. So I think, you know, changes that are happening across the board, I think it could be org design, you know, some of the stuff that we’re doing when we’re faced with change, it means, you know, maybe standing up new teams or building a new function. And our recruiters are so tuned into the market that they can bring that advice to managers. So we’re supporting managers going through change and trying to help them to navigate what they need, you know, in the new, new. So we do quite a lot of that. Those new leaders then in turn, you know, in terms of the, they’re going through, they’re, they’re looking around the organization saying who can help me understand the way things work around here? And because of the strong relationships that you know, we’ll have built with those people as we bring them into the organization, you know, we’re providing that change management ourselves to people, you know, that’s supporting that, counseling, advising, you know, and then ultimately, you know, perhaps recruiting the teams that those new people leaders will lead. So you know, in terms of change, we, we’re in that position where we’re affected by change to us and to our function. But we’ve also got to advise people because we know what that feels like. You know, we then deliver that up as a bit of an extra service to colleagues, you know, when we become the talent advisors to the organization. So I think those are the sort of the broad things. We Also here at HelloFresh, we use a service called Talent Acquisition as a service. And this is a big, big change for us and for the organization. We’ve been working on this now for maybe coming up to two years. It started as a transformation program and then became, you know, actually this is the way that we just do things around here. And ultimately what that means is we’re like an in house rpo. We flex our team according to where the big priorities are. So when somebody comes and says, hey Jill, you know, we’re opening a new center or a new site or there’s a new team or there’s a new something, I can then flex our team to prior, you know, to that business priority. So that might be, look, I’m going to give you a couple of people who are going to do front end pipeline management or it could be, actually I’m pulling together a big SWAT team that includes people from different disciplines across the team. Whether that’s, you know, EVP brand management, whether that’s campaign management, whether that’s, you know, implementation of new tools so we might buy new platforms or we might leverage something new that we’ve used in another part of the organization to really maximize what we can deliver for that business at that time. So this sort of changes and we have to be super comfortable with it. I mean, just think about that, that we’ve just described the big sort of macro changes that come that you cannot affect then having to defend Your role and the secret sauce that you can bring in the midst of all of that. And then being an agent of change, not knowing kind of what team you might be supporting tomorrow because there might be a new business priority. That level of agility and change management is just absolutely critical.
Matt Alder [00:09:23]:
Yeah, that’s. That’s kind of really interesting. And how do you sort of, I suppose, create the culture of that within the team, you know, dealing with that, you know, that level of uncertainty in a fantastic way.
Jill Leonard [00:09:34]:
Yeah, it’s. It’s not without its own challenge. And I think you have to be quite programmatic about it. You know, you have to use the opportunity to skill people up. So we’ve done a lot of training, professional development, you know, with our teams around, you know, either the skills that you need for resilience or, you know, some of those, like, personal qualities. Then we have teams that are working on projects or OKRs that will be designed to improve our service. So that might be an OKR around speed of hire or quality of hire. And we bring together in those project groups, you will work with people perhaps you’ve never worked before, and in different parts of the world. So with that sort of intervention, if you like, we’re saying to people, look, you’ll constantly meet with people you’ve never worked with before and you need to have some common ground and, you know, you’ll work together in this team and then after six months, the team will disband because you’ll have delivered what was needed and you’ll regroup. So this whole, like, creating the moments, giving them the skills, setting the scene, that change is going to happen. It’s just the way we are.
Matt Alder [00:10:53]:
Absolutely. That’s really interesting. And just want to dig a bit into the technology aspect of this because obviously the way that technology is evolving, the speed that it’s changing is a. Is a big factor. Just to take the kind of the example of video interviewing, because I know it’s something that you were early a doctor of. How’s that sort of evolved in the last sort of 10 years in terms of how it’s being used, but also the attitudes that candidates have towards it.
Jill Leonard [00:11:20]:
Yeah, I mean, the whole topic of video interviewing is so fascinating to me. I started using this, like 2012 and nobody kind of heard of it before, and I was a bit of a geek, you know, on. On tech recruitment. Tech and. But we had a business issue that we had to fix, so we had. I was working in travel and tourism. If you’ve ever been on a package holiday, you’ll know that you know you, your destination and someone’s there with a, a board and gets you on the right bus. And we, you know, I worked in a business that had this peak hiring that would recruit these in resort reps overseas. And we had big, big assessment events and they were a little bit haphazard and a lot of no shows, you know, for these assessment events. So we’d have a big team on the road hiring venues, and then, like, I want to say 35 to 40% of candidates would actually turn up for interviews. And so we had a massive amount of wastage in time and resources and budget. So we introduced video interviewing at that time to get better engagement and commitment from both sides. So, you know, the promise to candidates was, look, do this video interview and, you know, and then come. And we want to spend time with you, but showcase who you are and what your skills are. It was very much that sort of premise. And then for the managers, you know, who had given up their time and energy, it was like, look, you’ll be, you won’t be sitting around twiddling your thumbs on the day, and we won’t have this sort of, you know, drop off in people because that’s a very low, engaging experience for them. So we introduced video interviewing for that population. We got people who were more serious about the job versus those who just, you know, pinged in their CV. And we saw more than a 50% uplift in our attendance on the, on the days at the assessment events. And it was a massive success because the quality then of the people we subsequently hired from those that turned up was, was enormous because we’ve got committed people who, you know, were, were prepared and they’d really thought about the job, you know, because ultimately you have to pack your bag and go overseas, you know, so they, they spent the time and energy on those kind of decisions. The success that we had with that video interviewing for those in resort reps meant that we then extended that to other parts of the business. And our recruiters were super happy about that because they then again were spending their time on, you know, people who were serious about job, you know, job hunting and they could spend more time with managers because this whole screening of video interviews was a massive, massive impact. But that was back in 2012. It seemed so long ago.
Matt Alder [00:14:18]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And things have moved on quite a lot since then, haven’t they?
Jill Leonard [00:14:21]:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, so building from that, when I moved to my next organization, I was then in a global team, a very lean team. We only had one recruitment business partner per sort of huge market. And you know, sometimes I had somebody sitting in Chichester who was supporting, you know, a massive team in New York. And you’ve only got three or four hours overlap in the day. So we actually went pretty bold in that organization and we just deployed video interviewing as standard at all levels of the organization. So if you were earning, you know, seventy, eighty, a hundred thousand dollars, you’d still do a video interview to demonstrate the skills and the behaviors that we needed. And we, we linked it all to our competency framework. You know, we had some great killer questions that were linked to the job description. It was very sort of tight in terms of the quality then that you’d get back. And candidates can submit their interviews at any time of day. You know, they can do it. Look, this is back in the old days when people were in the office five days a week, so they could do it the weekends, they could do it in their evenings, they could do it whenever they like and submit it. And you know, we, we also use some branding to tailor the, the introduction. We introduced our, our recruiters to candidates and said, hey, you know, I’m the person that’s going to be looking at your video. I know you might find it a little bit awkward, but here I am doing it. You know, go ahead. So, so yes, it really continued to devolve.
Matt Alder [00:16:07]:
The interesting thing is now post pandemic, it’s easier to talk about to people because they, you know, we live in a kind of a different world when it comes to video and things like that. Well, I suppose this kind of applicable to what we. I might go and talk about next in terms of when it was a newer technology, you know, and I remember people were very skeptical about was this a thing? Would this work? What were the kind of lessons that you learned about persuading people to, you know, to kind of shift towards it that sort of might be useful, you know, for people to know on sort of as other technology kind of comes into ta.
Jill Leonard [00:16:43]:
I think, you know, what having that person represent the business and say, you know, welcome to you know, fill in blank name of company here. You know, we’re fascinated and this is why we’re asking you to do a video interview because, you know, it’s important to have people who are at the heart of our business. I know that sounds quite trite, but, you know, the people that we work with and the people that we partner with, our customers are incredibly important. And so we want to see the person that you are from the very get Go. And. And we. So we laid out, you know, a very personal message about the business. It wasn’t just a click here and get on with it. And here’s five questions. You know, good luck. We really set the scene in the context. But, you know, we also had some teams that I want to say there’s some disciplines that were less on board and both in terms of the hiring managers and also the candidates, those disciplines that weren’t really in favor of. Of, you know, using video interviewing technology. We had a big conversation in the team, in the recruiting team. Like, whose decision is it is. Can a line manager come up to you and say, look, I’ve got a vacancy, but I don’t want you to use video interviewing? You know, is that their call? And, you know, our answer was, no, it’s not your call. Because the way that we. The number of requisitions that we have to manage, we have to be careful about our time. And one of the ways that we manage our time is by using these kind of tools. And, you know, we want to provide you with a short list of screened candidates. That’s the way that we do that really sits in our discipline. But of course, nobody in recruitment ever wants to say no. So, you know, it’s just a really fine negotiation and a big influencing moment. And often that meant how on board is your recruiter with using this technology? Because if they’re not convinced, they are absolutely not going to convince a hiring manager.
Matt Alder [00:18:38]:
That’s a really great point. And I suppose it sort of leads on to the next question in terms of, you know, in terms of AI and everything that’s happening at the moment. What’s the kind of effect on. Effect on your organization and what you do in terms of AI so far? And how do you think sort of TA leaders should be responding to everything that’s kind of going on in that space?
Jill Leonard [00:18:59]:
Yeah, I mean, there’s. There’s video interviewing technology now with AI in it.
Matt Alder [00:19:03]:
Yeah.
Jill Leonard [00:19:04]:
And has been for a while. So, you know, I’ve deployed that tool as well, where AI makes pretty much all of the decisions for you in that video interview and assessment process. You know, there was. I think there was online assessments, and then it linked to a final video interview. And, you know, AI was involved in that. And the, the results of that were. Were absolutely fantastic. You know, we. We hired people from different socioeconomic backgrounds that we’d never accessed before. The number of female hires was higher than it had ever been before. We were able to filter through, you know, thousands and thousands of applications. And you know, this was in sort of 2021 when, you know, there was a lot of people looking for a job. So I think, you know, you have to be open minded and understand that AI is going to have a positive impact, one that you need to be aware of and one that you, you know, you really need to embrace. And you know, we use a lot of AI tools in our organization beyond video interviewing as well.
Matt Alder [00:20:15]:
No, absolutely. And I know that also what you do is very data driven. And you know, that’s obviously another big trend that we’re kind of see play out at the moment with the kind of the, you know, data driven efficiency and AI doing various things and everything that’s going on. How important is the kind of human aspect of that? Do you think technology can sort of amplify the humanness within all of this?
Jill Leonard [00:20:40]:
Oh, without a doubt. I mean, you know, we use that phrase human centered all the time, you know, in our team and we use that as a way to craft our candidate experience. So we use NPS scores, you know, they can tell you how is the experience going not just for the candidate, but how is the recruiter delivering for the hiring manager team. So we do a recruiter NPS score as well. And when you think that this, you know, the technology can help you to understand time to hire, time in each stage, the conversion rates, et cetera, this is where the data tells you where you’ve got blockages in your system apart from the data that that brings you. Look, your time in third stage is increasing. What’s happening? Or the conversion rate between application and offer has gone up. What’s going on there? So we use all of that data and we also use a tool that allows people to give us comments so we can deep dive into particular focus areas like respectful hiring. You know, how did they feel? Did we give them enough information? Did their interviewer pay them enough attention? Were they on time? Did what was the, you know, how robust were their interview questions? We, we’ve got so much information that we can, you know, we can use that in our meetings with hiring managers, with hiring teams. It feeds into our QBRs, it feeds into our OKR initiatives. So, you know, the data is important. Absolutely. But it points you to something that means you can change the experience for someone. And that again, helps us as recruiters when we’re in this current environment of, hey, you know, we’re proving our worth when we can go with data and say, look, you know, time to has, you know, increased because we have changed our process and you know, we’ve eliminated five days. That is a massive win, you know, and if you’re not using tools to provide that human centered experience, you’re really missing a trick.
Matt Alder [00:22:54]:
No, that’s fantastic. And again, you know, makes perfect sense. So as a final question, what do you think the future’s going to look like? I mean, how do you hope talent acquisition might evolve in the next five years?
Jill Leonard [00:23:06]:
I mean, I think we started talking about, you know, change, didn’t we? And you know, the, the current sort of environment. I think we’ll continue to see these big, big changes, some that will come, you know, out of nowhere. And so I think that talent acquisition, you know, the opportunity now is to hone your craft and be, you know, a flexible, agile individual. You know, you really gotta have one eye, you know, on the day to day job, but one eye on the environment around you so that you can keep relevant and building on the theme around being human centered. If you don’t listen and understand your customers, and that could be your line managers, it could be your senior leaders, it could be your candidates. If you are in touch with them, then you’ll know what’s needed of you and you can then flex to whatever the future brings.
Matt Alder [00:24:05]:
Gill, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jill Leonard [00:24:07]:
You’re very welcome. Thanks for the invite.
Matt Alder [00:24:11]:
You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. You can search all the past episodes at recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Recruiting Future Feast and get the inside track on 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.
