Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps Talent Acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in Foresight, Influence, Talent, and Technology.
This episode is about Talent and Technology.
Timely and effective measurement of the quality of hire has long been a significant frustration for talent acquisition, with meaningful data often trapped in subjective performance reviews that arrive too late to be of any help.
But what if AI could help connect interview assessments, onboarding metrics, and performance data in ways that reveal which hires are going to succeed, creating real-time feedback loops that continually improve hiring decisions?
So, how exactly can employers build these types of connected systems?
My guest this week is Mark Linnville, Head of Talent at Garner Health. In our conversation, he reveals how to identify accurate leading indicators for quality of hire, why authentic interview experiences help predict performance, and how AI helps connect the dots we’ve been missing.
In the interview, we discuss:
• Talent market challenges
• Removing the silos in the talent function
• Providing a true-to-self candidate experience
• How do you judge quality of hire from a TA perspective?
• Leading indicators versus lagging data
• Creating continuous feedback loops
• Using AI to connect interviews to performance
• The importance of the human element of talent acquisition
• What does the future look like?
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00:00
Matt Alder
Measuring quality of hire has always been a challenge. Measuring quality of hire in a time frame that allows recruiting strategies to be adjusted and optimized in a meaningful way seems impossible, however. Has AI just changed the game here? Keep listening to find out more. Support for this podcast comes from smart recruiters. Are you looking to supercharge your hiring? Meet Winston Smart Recruiter’s AI Powered Companion. I’ve had a demo of Winston. The capabilities are extremely powerful and it’s been crafted to elevate hiring to a whole new level. This AI sidekick goes beyond the usual assistant handling all the time consuming admin work so you can focus on connecting with top talent and making better hiring decisions. From screening candidates to scheduling interviews, Winston manages it all with AI precision, keeping the hiring process fast, smart and effective.
01:03
Matt Alder
Head over to smartrecruiters.com and see how Winston can deliver superhuman results. Hi there, welcome to this episode of Recruiting Future with me Matt Alder. Recruiting Future is a podcast that helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing their strategic capability in foresight. Influence, Talent and Technology. This episode is about Talent and Technology. Timely and effective measurement of the quality of hire has long been a significant frustration for talent acquisition, with meaningful data often trapped in subjective performance reviews that arrive too late to be of any help. But what if AI could connect interview assessments, onboarding metrics and performance data in ways that reveal which hires are going to succeed and creating real time feedback loops that continually improve hiring decisions? So how exactly can employers build these types of connected systems?
02:27
Matt Alder
My guest this week is Mark Linville, Head of Talent at Garner Health. In our conversation, Mark reveals how to identify accurate leading indicators for quality of hire, why authentic interview experiences help predict performance, and how AI helps connect the dots we’ve all been missing. Hi Mark and welcome to the podcast.
02:49
Mark Linnville
Thanks Matt. Good to be here man.
02:50
Matt Alder
An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
02:57
Mark Linnville
Yeah so I’m Mark Linnville. I am the Head of Talent at Garner Health, which is series D health tech startup based in New York City. Before that I spent about eight years at an EDGE fund called Bridgewater Associates. They’re well known for their culture for trying to understand more about people management as well as being the largest hedge fund in the world. And while I was there for eight years, kind of made my way through the talent acquisition hierarchy and ended up leading Tech recruiting for my last kind of four to five years there. The thing that I thought was really cool there. I’ll just kind of share one snippet was I actually got the opportunity to kind of build a talent function outside of core hr.
03:43
Mark Linnville
So I actually, you know, about halfway through, worked with the CTO and a couple other leaders to actually take my team. We went embedded within technology and to report it up into the CTO. Reason for doing that was because we’re trying to solve very particular problems for technology hires, which we found very different than solving investment professional hiring and needed to kind of build kind of functions and processes and capabilities that were unique to us. And so I would say got my. Got my teeth really in, you know, first principal designing and having to solve problems for the first time at that. At that spot and in particular in that process. And then, you know, after that, I’d say for eight years. It was awesome.
04:27
Mark Linnville
I went to another series D tech startup here actually based in Nashville where I am, where I, you know, took the team or, you know, had to scale again. And so it took the team had to build, grow and fly the plane and continue to. To build it and get all the processes. So that’s kind of my path to garner. And then on the personal side, I’d be remiss to say I’m not a massive soccer fan. Football probably for most of your audiences. I played in college. I’m a Liverpool fan, so never walk alone. And really enjoyed the last season getting to watch them with the prem. So that’d be remiss not to throw that in there as well.
05:09
Matt Alder
Being a Southampton fan. Literally finished at completely the other end of the test.
05:13
Mark Linnville
The other tents. Well, I remember the time in which Southampton, basically we always joke Southampton was Liverpool be. We would just keep taking all your players. And so were like, oh great, fantastic. But yeah, sorry about the relegation.
05:26
Matt Alder
Oh, it’s okay. It happens quite often. So kind of coming back to. Coming back to ta, I mean, what do you see as the kind of the main market challenges at the moment? And you kind of worked in some innovative structures and seen some different things. What kind of TA leaders do you think we need to solve those challenges?
05:45
Mark Linnville
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think. Well, I’ll steer away at first for the easy one, which is AI is going to change everything. And so let me go towards more of like maybe a niche problem which I think that as we are continuing to in the TA space be pushed to do more with less with an influx of candidates out in the market. I think really what the main problem is becoming is how are you able to find the right fit for your particular company in today’s market? I think for so long there was such a focus on just getting bodied in and being able to scale whatever. And there’s such more of a focus now I think on getting the right people in and having a super quality of hire.
06:33
Mark Linnville
Being able to make one hire, that’s an amplifier for two to three other people compared to going to gain two to the other people. And so I think this more with less attitude trickles down directed TA directed to like what we actually have to go and find and hire. And so for me what that means from an actual kind of problem standpoint is do you have to get way more creative and able to get the right people that you want? Are you having to be way more data driven in actually determining like who are the people that succeed at our company, who are people that are quality? And then can we take that back into who, what target companies were going after or what target people we’re looking at?
07:10
Mark Linnville
And I think three, you have to do all that while being a leader for your team and not letting them get burnt out. And I think that’s another really hard challenge in TA is like there’s with the continued push and continued like you know, desire again I guess that to do more with less. You always risk ruin on people running out of steam and or I think you know, the last part of it which will, you know, segue into a little bit of how you deal with AI is like how do you also maintain this real human connection and human touch? At the end of the day, no matter what we are trying to do, we’re still dealing with humans. And humans aren’t numbers on a spreadsheet all the time. They have emotions, abilities.
07:51
Mark Linnville
And so how are you continuing to have this enterprise scaling, hiring practice while ensuring that every single person has a unique human touch and unique human element can experience to their process? I think that’s a really big challenge. I think it can become really easy to be super rote to just crank, think and go, especially when you’re being pushed. And I do think then I guess transition into a little AI of like. I think that’s also going to become the differentiator between like companies that are using AI well and companies are using AI to just do a lot.
08:21
Mark Linnville
I think that companies that use AI well will obviously be able to innovate processes, you know, improve processes look at data different way, solve, I would say the low hanging fruit stuff that’s like, you know, a pain to be hands on keys and recruiting to go and do. But what I think it should also do is then like enable recruiters to do the unique element of their job that AI I do not think can do yet, which is talk to a person, assess whether or not they’re a good fit, really understand deeply and then sell them on the company. I think those are going to be things that we have to continue as TA leaders to push at the forefront.
08:59
Mark Linnville
Because I think when we lose that, we lose the combination of what I think this, not just job, but what this, what ultimately this sector is, which is a combination of art and science.
09:10
Matt Alder
What I’m interested in is obviously you sort of talk about data, they talk about AI’s capability to do lots and lots of things. Do you think, or are you seeing, or is it like this in your organization that the boundaries between talent acquisition and talent management and all those kind of aspects of the talent cycle are kind of breaking down and starting to feed into each other more?
09:31
Mark Linnville
Yeah, I think that’s naturally what I see happening. It’s where I’ve always tried to push my teams to go and I think ultimately is where TA is going to end up having to go. I think obviously everyone knows what the talent ecosystem or what the employee lifecycle looks like. Right. You have your business need that gets translated to a person. You have to go attract and hire that person. Then they come in, you have to onboard them, assess them and either retain or exit.
09:57
Mark Linnville
And I think the thing that we’ve struggled with has been how do you take the learnings, host the onboarding or even honestly post the hire and go what’s the connective tissue back to recruiting to evolve how TA actually does their job and not just how TA does a job, but how does the manager think about their role, how does the manager think about their org and does that actually affect what you need in the future? And I think we are going to continue. And again going back to that theme of with the focus on quality of hire, with the focus on again doing more with less and getting the right people in the door, I think that’s going to be even more stress test to say, okay, for any mis hire, what did we learn?
10:39
Mark Linnville
Oh, for any really good hire, what are we learning and how are we getting more of these people? And it’s become, I think as a TA leader you’re going to have to almost become a very seasoned HR bp. To start to create those connective tissues conceptually. Hrvp to create the connective tissue. To actually evolve your own recruiting practice without it being pushed by somebody else. And I think I can help with that. For what it’s worth. I think AI can look at that and go, okay, what interviewers? You know, I think of AI as like being able to do processes and analyze data in ways that I could never think about. And so it’s like cool. Are you able to then like create the prompts to go, all right, like let’s see what our core interviewers are.
11:17
Mark Linnville
Let’s see, here are 10 mis hire and here’s the feedback and here’s, you know, what we learned. What does it, what do we need to like, how do we analyze that data? How do we actually look at. How do we go, oh man, we’ve had this interview isn’t working or oh man, this actual like company or this background is a common theme and pulling those things out so that we don’t continue to make those mistakes. Particularly I think for companies that are trying to scale and grow where every single hire is so important, that’s going to become critical in how TA does their job going forward.
11:48
Matt Alder
Yeah, I mean a hundred percent. I think it kind of solves so many problems about data being in different systems or not existing. So it’s creating more data for us for things like interviews and then, you know, the ability join it all up and actually create some kind of actionable things that make things better. It’s just, you know, it’s kind of a massive opportunity come back to AI shortly. But just to kind of dig into the human side of things a little bit in terms of candidate experience. What’s your kind of take on the candidate experience? What does that look like in your organization?
12:21
Mark Linnville
So I think at Garner we have a really unique and I think like, I would call like a very true to self kind of experience where, you know, I think there’s been a lot of push for obviously standardized interviews and really trying to make sure that we assess people correctly throughout the process and are able to go like apples to apples versus, you know, very subjective. I think Garner does that. I think the added element of what we do that’s really cool from a can experience standpoint is like we try to make it authentic to what we think life will be like at Gartner. And so we try to schedule our, we try to like structure our interviews around real life Garner problems and then structure it around how we think you will interact in real Life with us.
13:03
Mark Linnville
And so obviously we have our kind of interview that is focused about our culture and we dive deep and we have a very upfront culture and we want people to authentically experience what that looks like in the day to day. And some ways we actually expect some people to opt out of that. And we’re okay with that because we’d rather have them opt out now knowing, you know, open kimono, what everything is compared to get in. And also know, like, wait, I was lied to my interview processes, not what’s going on, like, no, no, no, we want you to know. And so I think that’s really big from a culture perspective.
13:36
Mark Linnville
But then I think the other thing that’s super cool that we do is we really try to structure our like meat and potatoes interviews around, like I said, real life Garner problems and solving them with, like real life Garner people and solving the way that we think Garner would try to solve them. And so, you know, in my space, right, instead of, you know, asking about a time a search has, you know, been off the rails or whatever, and how do you deal with hi managers, Like, I create literal. I have literal three prompts that are problems that we deal with on a day to day basis at Garner. And we talk about that and then it’s literally just like a session of here we are solving this, or hey, I haven’t even solved this problem yet. I would love to get your idea.
14:14
Mark Linnville
So there’s no right answer for like what the thing is. But really what we’re trying to get at is how do you think about like the problem that we’re trying to solve? How do you design and diagnose whatever the issue is, how do you get more information and then how do we do it in a way that’s actually, like I said, authentic to like how I think we will work at Garner together and structure interviews around that for our working sessions and our case studies. That I think is just like a slightly different take on, you know, candidate experience, which is just like, hey, we want you to really, like. The goal is we want you to know what it would be like to work at Garner full stop. And then we think we can get a good assessment through that as well.
14:53
Mark Linnville
But ultimately you can also assess us and determine if that’s a company you want to join and this is a place you want to be and these are people that you want to actually be side by side with as well.
15:04
Matt Alder
You mentioned quality of hire earlier. We’re talking about joined up data and all those kind of Things from a TA perspective, how do you judge quality of hire? Because obviously that’s something that could take quite some time, it could be quite subjective. How do you kind of judge the quality of people that you’ve hired?
15:22
Mark Linnville
Yeah, if I fully ever solve this, I’ll just start my own company and let you know I’m not. So I can’t say I’m the right answer, but I can tell you what at least I’ve done and what I know our problems are about it today. And so I think the thing you stated up front is like, yeah, I would say typically I’ve seen quality hire go in two different directions. One which is people just look at the scorecards and feedback from the interview and try to assess like, hey, is this a really strong hire, an okay hire or whatever. The other side of it, which is I think the unfortunate side of quality hire, at least for how it’s been structured today, is this lagging indicator of performance reviews. Right?
16:00
Mark Linnville
So like you hire someone and then really you can’t tell if they’re a quality hire for six or 12 months. Like that feels way too long, particularly for how fast and the velocity we need to like adjust and evolve things. And so what I am continuing to do and what I’ve continued to push to do, and we’re working on this actively at Garner is trying to figure out how fast of an indication can I get through structured check ins. We talk about 30, 60, 90 onboarding which is like why is there not an assessment piece of that? Why can’t we actually have true signal early on to understand if things are going on or off the rails?
16:39
Mark Linnville
I think that actually like, you know, AI can actually help in onboarding so that like you can actually get to the ramping period to be down so you can actually get to true assessment faster. I think though that like the data that you have to start to structure is you have to have your core competencies really laid out for the role and have a clear understanding of what success looks like and have like clear criteria. I think that is the first and foremost thing that a lot of people don’t do super well, which is say, hey, what are our core competencies? How do those apply? And then like literally then level down. What does it mean for this role? And can I actually measure expectation against that in a disciplined way?
17:15
Mark Linnville
And I think it’s really almost in that way, like an act of like upfront thinking, structure and then discipline that you can get to a much higher fidelity quantity of higher metric early on and then I think the layers like that’s your early like indicator one. And I think the layers then that you take from that have to be attrition, promotion and performance management all wrapped together and basically say, hey, here’s my quality of hire based upon what I see. And then you can throw in a few other structures like nine box and stuff like that. But I would typically say less is more in this space. So do the upfront work. Make sure you have managers actually be able to give you signal within I think 90 days. I think you can get signal within 90 days at least directionally.
18:03
Mark Linnville
And then you have to layer in the that like that performance management data, which I think if you have the infrastructure set up right from the performance management standpoint, you can actually get to be much less subjective and way more objective.
18:17
Matt Alder
No, absolutely, that makes perfect sense. Circling back to AI, we obviously talked about AI kind of in every sort of facet of this conversation, I suppose in terms of sort of a summary or to give advice to people who are listening when it comes to thinking about what a AI can do right now, how it can change the. What would you say, what would your advice be to people about how they should be thinking about AI right now?
18:40
Mark Linnville
Well, I think my first advice would be don’t be scared of it. I think that ultimately I’ve seen or at least I’ve read a decent amount of tension of like will AI end up replacing, you know, a particularly recruiting or TA or HR jobs? And I think that instills a weird faux dynamic with AI that I just don’t think needs to be there.
19:04
Mark Linnville
And so I think my advice would simply be like one, don’t buy into that narrative because I still think no matter what I will be able to do for us, I think until it gets to a point of which is not going to do hallucinations, you’re not going to be able to like always set in front of a candidate because like if even it does a 1 out of 100, like if you lose that one person, like you’re going to be in trouble and that could be the person that’s a hire. And again it gets back to the human element. But like I think that’s just thematic thing of don’t be afraid, experiment, try things out.
19:33
Mark Linnville
Then I think practically where I’ve been focusing a lot of how can we think about AI is can we actually think about AI first and foremost on cleaning up our processes. And so anything that you do today that was like you’re literally sitting down to write Hands on keys on something. I would say immediately try to do that with AI Just like literally go, okay, wait, what was I about to go do? Was I about to try to write an assessment? Was I about try to write a job description, whatever? Like, nope, don’t go. Go to AI, think about that. And then the second piece, which is like, again, I think about processy and analysis and say, okay, you know, I don’t think that TA folk myself include are always the most quantitative junkies out there.
20:17
Mark Linnville
And so as much as we might try to want to live in Excel, I don’t know if we all can. And so it’s like, how can you amplify AI to help you do that analysis piece? And then how can you really, I think about building a system which AI is an assistance compared to, you know, replacing you. And then I think there’s interesting places that I’ve begun experimenting that I think people are going to be experimenting going forward, which is really interesting of like, how does it, what does AI do with data in general? And how do you think about that? Not just from the assessment side, but also like I said, that can experience side.
20:58
Mark Linnville
And so my guess is you have to have some sort of combination of AI can do a certain amount of things, but then you would still need a human element touch. And so how do you think about creatively trying to meld those two things of where’s the AI assist? And then what does a human have to do? I think interviewing is again the really interesting one to try to get at, because as best you can, even AI has its own subjectiveness at times. But as best you can, I think you can create enough assessments that are objective that it can run. I think if you think about high volume recruiting or if you think about very high level of applicant pool that you’re trying to sort through, I think there are clever ways that AI will help you out there.
21:47
Mark Linnville
You know, obviously there’s plenty of tools out there to staff crank resumes and stuff like that. But like, even when it gets to more qualitative stuff, I think you can start to experiment and kind of lean on it more to then create more efficiency for your recruiters to actually focus on the right people.
22:03
Matt Alder
No, that makes perfect sense. And I suppose to round things off, as a final question, what do you think the future might look like? So how does this all pan out? So if we had this conversation again in three or four years time, what would we be talking about?
22:16
Mark Linnville
Yeah, well, I think it might be in like two months Time because AI continues to evolve rapidly. And so I think, I say all of these things I today and like in two weeks it could have a completely different version out that changes the game. And so I do think this is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this conversation. I think though I had to try to throw on my Nostradamus and figure out what the future would look like. I think that ultimately you’re going to have clean recruiting teams and you continue to be having to do this less and more. But I think what you’re going to end up having is way more of a question on how has actual work changed and what type of roles you actually need to hire now in three to five years.
23:01
Mark Linnville
Like I think that’s the thing of where we’re going of like I think anything that we’re recruiting for today is going to be vastly different in three to five years. And I think that’s the, you could argue that’s like the biggest change that’s happened since the, I don’t know, 2000s and coding really was coming at. I just think that ultimately these roles that we’re hiring for are going to change and everything’s going to have I think within three years an element of either AI or a different technology piece to it and everyone’s going to be a technologist. And so to be more than, I think a question of what separates people out, right? It’s not just their ability to use a tool but it’s going to be I think their ability to think.
23:43
Mark Linnville
And I think we’re going to actually see a bit of a reversion back to abilities, capabilities. First principle thinking as a means to find the best problem solvers that will then cobble together and use all the tools that are available for everyone at that point versus I think today where we’re still looking for a very skill heavy environment at times. Like I just can’t imagine in three years that’s the same story. I think that like the, I think the way the AI works and the way It’s going to affect all these jobs is going to be drastic. I think, you know, I think obviously on the tech side that’s true. I’d be interested to see where that goes on like the go to market side because I actually don’t know.
24:23
Mark Linnville
I think that there’s still an element by thinking about sales or anything about marketing, like there’s elements in which I think AI helps you but you’re still, you know, in that person to person human connection piece. But I don’t know if companies change how they accept sales calls or how they accept pitches, does that then evolve how you have to actually try to get them. And so I think that’s going to be the biggest thing, which is we’re going to have to shift and evolve and become even more fluent with AI and with honestly, my guess would be with what our businesses are doing to like in a deeper way to actually solve the talent problem because it’s going to become I think a very like hydraulic. Like I’m very, a lot of people are going to have the same skills.
25:08
Mark Linnville
It’s just going to be very hard to separate out the chess.
25:12
Matt Alder
Absolutely fascinating times. Mark, thank you very much for talking to me.
25:17
Mark Linnville
Yeah, it was great. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it and hope you have a great rest of the day.
25:21
Matt Alder
My thanks to Mark. You can follow this podcast on Apple Podcasts on Spotify and or wherever you listen to 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.
