Despite the challenging economic landscape and wave of layoffs across many sectors, finding exceptional senior talent remains a challenge, and many employers are making it worse for themselves.
Trust has eroded with lengthy interview processes, poor candidate experience, and misaligned employer branding are pushing top talent away. With as many as one in four workers set to be over 55 by 2031, age-related biases are also causing employers to overlook exactly the experience they need
The best insights always come from looking at things from the job seeker’s point of view, and that is precisely the insight my guest this week can offer us.
Loren Greiff, Founder of Portfolio Rocket, is a career strategist for C-Suite executives. In our conversation, she reveals how top candidates assess roles, what builds and destroys trust in executive hiring, and why your process might be filtering out your best prospects. The frameworks Lauren discusses will also be very relevant to TA leaders navigating their own career moves.
In the interview, we discuss:
• The current state of the market
• Cutting through the noise
• Identifying urgent and expensive problems
• Use of AI in the executive job search
• The hidden cost of age bias
• Highlighting the trust issue
• Ability, agility, and adaptability
• The future of careers and jobs
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Transcript:
Matt Alder 00:00
The way job search is happening is changing for everyone, including senior leaders and C suite level talent. So how can employers now get a competitive advantage by attracting exceptional executive talent to their organizations? Keep listening to find out
Matt Alder 00:18
Support for this podcast comes from talent pilot, the first end to end, AI native platform for recruiting. Let’s be honest, no one becomes a recruiter to copy and paste CVS, Chase feedback or write interview notes. Talent pilot is helping the role of the recruiter to quickly evolve from a junior admin heavy, one to one of the most strategic roles in the entire organization. With talent pilot recruiters can build their own hiring workflows by deploying AI agents at different touch points of the recruiting process to source, screen and select the best talent. They’re offering a free demo for everyone who listens to recruiting future. So head over to talent pilot.com/matt, to experience the new era of recruiting. That’s talent pilot.com/matt, and it’s Matt, M, A, T, T
Matt Alder 01:21
Hi there. Welcome to Episode 753 of recruiting future with me. Matt Alder, recruiting future helps talent acquisition teams drive measurable impact by developing strategic capability in foresight, influence, talent and technology. This episode is all about talent, despite the challenging economic landscape and a wave of layoffs across many sectors, finding exceptional senior talent remains a challenge, and many employers are actually making it worse for themselves. Trust has eroded with lengthy interview processes, poor candidate experience and misaligned Employer Branding, which are pushing top talent away with as many as one in four workers set to be over 55, by 2031, age related bias is also causing employers to overlook exactly the experience they need. The best insights always come from looking at things from the job seeker’s point of view, and that’s precisely the Insight My guest this week can offer us, Loren Greiff, founder of portfolio rocket, is a Career Strategist for C suite executives. In our conversation, she reveals how top candidates assess roles, what builds and destroys trust in executive hiring, and why your process might be filtering out your best prospects. The frameworks that Loren discusses will also be very relevant to any ta leaders navigating their own career move. Hi Lauren, and welcome to the podcast.
Loren Greiff 03:10
I am thrilled to be here, and thank you so much, Matt,
Matt Alder 03:13
it is a pleasure to have you on the show. Please. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Loren Greiff 03:20
Absolutely. So my name is Lauren Greif, and I’m the founder of portfolio rocket. We are a career consultancy for executives and C suites who want to land and last in today’s market also earn more in less time. So that’s what we do. We really focus specifically on those who have been out of the market for a while and who are currently in the marketplace. I know we’re going to talk a little bit about the marketplace. So back over to you, Matt.
Matt Alder 03:54
How are you advising your clients to stand out when they’re engaging with an opportunity, with an employer, what is it that they do to cut through the noise and really kind of make themselves the preferred candidate?
Loren Greiff 04:09
I’m so glad that you asked, because I’m excited to share this little I guess you could call it formula or framework. Let’s use that, because I don’t like anything that’s too too rigid, because you have to be agile in applying any of these tactics. So to stand out, I’m going to give you the way that our clients not only have been most successful in cutting through the noise, but also moving from one interview to the next to the next, the next, to create what I call that competitive wedge. There’s you candidate, and then there’s all the other people. And so the way this works is to identify the urgent and expensive problem. Options that you as the candidate have the unfair advantage to solve. So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to break that down a little bit so companies have openings, or even if they don’t have an opening, this is important. It’s based off of a level of urgency, even if it’s a backfill, right? They can’t let that can’t let that team, you know, go without their leader. If it’s a net new position, there could be a market influence or consequence that they absolutely need to address. And part of this is on the candidate, to be able to not just wait for these open opportunities where they say, Oh yeah, we need someone as a backfill, but to really be visionary in saying, hey, you know, if you don’t fix this, obviously, not in those words, but if you don’t address this, your company is at great risk. So companies are slated slate their opportunities based on where the 911, is right. And we know that as humans, we don’t do anything until we’re there’s some urgency, right? Not everybody is working out proactively. People don’t necessarily drink, you know, eight glasses of water, unless you know they’re, they’re, they have some kind of health concern, so we’re just they. They are operating based off of needs, and the higher the need or the more urgent the need, the faster that search will move the second area, urgent and expensive. We want our clients to be able to identify the expensive problems that they’re able to solve. Because number one, if it’s not an expensive problem, chances are they will find somebody who is less expensive and may not have the same level of maturity to be able to solve this urgent problem, somebody without the pattern recognition, somebody without the ability to to read between the lines, the more expensive that problem is, the the greater the likelihood that you will be seen as a highly valuable candidate, and the risk of being told that you’re overqualified will be minimized. The last leg of this stool, right urgent and expensive problems that you have the unfair advantage to solve. When you identify what that unfair advantage is, you know you’ve scaled this company 17 times. You know you’ve been through these scale ups 17 times. You know how to increase shareholder value by XXX, when you have identified what those urgent and expensive problems are with the unfair advantage, it’s almost a no brainer, but you have to own this from end to end.
Matt Alder 08:14
That makes a huge amount of sense and kind of following on from this, obviously, lots of people are using AI as part of their job search. At the moment. How are you advising your candidates to use it? Because I know it’s something that plays a part in what you just described.
Loren Greiff 08:33
So the first, the first and easy way to do this is take that job description and run it through that filter. What I mean by this is that I want you to to get under the hood of whatever that job description is, not just the tasks and the responsibilities. Anybody can do that, and at this level, there’s a much, much, much bigger implication that should be part of the consideration. And what I would say is yes, take, take that or that job description. Ask your favorite AI LLM to go through this and identify the top three to five urgent and expensive problems there. You might even upload your resume and say and help me identify my unfair advantages. And if you have this is really, really stunning. And if you have anything, a podcast from a CEO or founder earnings report, this all can help to put that hierarchy together.
Matt Alder 09:45
From a talent acquisition perspective, what are you kind of frustrated about? What are you seeing in terms of the sort of the barriers or the the outdated thinking that’s preventing kind of exceptional talent finding, finding a role because they don’t. Fit some sort of traditional mold.
Loren Greiff 10:02
You know, I think that the that the hardest, the hardest part of what’s been happening now in the industry. Well, there’s a couple things the rounds of interviews certainly wears down on candidates. It’s important that recruiters, decision makers, really, really help them in the ways that they can. Of course, I know some of it’s out of their control. Things happen. However, just helping them benchmark and understand what that process looks like, and being completely transparent about it, don’t throw things in at the you know, the second to last round, it just takes the air out of the air out of that, you know, the confidence, and also the ability for them to weigh numbers of options that they have. So that’s always, that’s always frustrating. And we know that in times, in the of uncertainty, and especially when it’s an employer’s market, sometimes there can be a little bit of a an attitude and a power struggle like we get to pick from all these people. And so I think that that’s rather unnecessary, because everybody’s under such extreme pressure right now, especially at least here in the US, you know, we, we just came off of an October layoff of 158,000 people, primarily in tech. But you know that that’s, that’s a real open wound, especially, you know, given so much of that, the over glut of hiring and then only to be let go, typically, you know, in in fourth quarter, it just, it just, is, is very rough.
Matt Alder 11:45
Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And we talked about trust a bit earlier in the conversation. From the other side, what is it that employers can do to build trust with senior candidates, people that they’re, you know, looking to kind of bring into their business at that level.
Loren Greiff 12:00
I wish I had a fancier answer. It boils down to integrity. And the way that I encourage my clients to show up is that your words and your actions match. So if somebody asks you for referral, you make it if somebody is, you know, in a in a situation where you have an opportunity to invite them to a conference or something, take care of your fellow job seeker and take care of, you know, the people in your network, I find that companies are very, have very, very short term Thinking. And if you say that you are a organization that is advocating for diversity, and that includes age, then please, you know, like, put your money where your mouth is, because it might not hurt right now, because of it, because it is an employer market. But why? Why? Why? Why put your company at risk, and why put other candidates through that? So being on time, avoiding last minute cancelations, of course, not ghosting, making sure that what is in public view, whether it be on LinkedIn, any of the websites or even email correspondence, is in accordance with whatever the mission of the company is. I mean, that’s the first thing that usually causes that raised eyebrow. Oh, you really it says this in your mission, and this is how you act, so all of those things will erode trust.
Matt Alder 13:44
Yeah, no, 100% and as you say, it’s a shame, in some ways, that all those basics are not, you know, they’re kind of not in place and not happening. As a final question for you, what do you think the future is going to look like here? I suppose, in terms of, you know, a careers changing for people at that level is a job search changing. You know, what do you think? What do you think we’ve sort of got in store over the next few years?
Loren Greiff 14:12
There’s a couple, a couple of key shifts, and they’re not neat either. And, I mean, tidy. So we have a lot of mean, this is a demographic challenge, because, you know, we’re getting to the phase now where, or the stage where, it’s about one, one in four, I believe, is going to be over 55 by 2030, it could even be a little bit less, right? So those folks are in in somewhat of an interesting spot. Many of them do not want to retire. Do not they like they like the structure of work. They like the purpose of work, and in some cases, they may not be able to afford to stop working. And so what that means is that. The companies don’t want to lose that institutional knowledge. And at the same time, there’s a biases, and I know that you talk about this a lot, right? There’s a bias against those who are older workers, because typically, they think that they’re flight risks in terms of wanting to retire, and quite frankly, a lot of the skills are often perceived, perceived being the pivotal word here, as outdated. So you as a candidate, must, must, must, if you decide that you want to work, it comes with the responsibility of staying relevant. And I make it very clear to my clients too, I’m not just talking about experience as a timestamp. I’m talking about relevance as a way to identify that you are future facing. So that’s the first one. Is just the aging population. The second area that the market is moving is and as you know this too, right? Matt, by 2030, about 70% of the jobs that we see non existent. So this requires more agility, and also skills, skills and agility and that and that and that really does bring us to the third area, which is change, changes in the New Black. Get good. Get good at change and demonstrate that ability, agility and adaptability, however you can talk about it in your networking conversations, learn out loud in your on your LinkedIn posts, make sure that people are not just seeing the polished and and, you know, this veneer that you, you know everything was a cake walk, because that doesn’t show that you’re able to overcome the storms that that are happening. We want to see that you are old term, by the way, battle tested. You want to know that you know that’s not going to knock you off your square. We want, we want to have this understanding and the level of certainty that you’re going to figure it out even when there’s no map.
Matt Alder 17:17
Absolutely do. I completely agree with you, and it is. It’s going to be a very interesting few years. In the same way it’s been a very interesting last few years. Lauren, thank you very much for talking to me.
Loren Greiff 17:29
Are so welcome. It’s been a pleasure, and I’m so happy that we finally got to meet
Matt Alder 17:34
my thanks to Lauren. You can follow this podcast on Apple podcasts, on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts, you can search all the past episodes at recruiting future.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.
