In light of events this week with the coronavirus pandemic, here is a special short episode to help the talent acquisition community get access to relevant information. I’m joined by Lars Schmidt, who is curating an information resource that everyone needs to be aware of.
Here is the link to the Google Doc
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. In the light of events this week with the coronavirus pandemic, I wanted to publish a special short episode to help everyone in the talent acquisition community get access to relevant information. I’m joined by Lars Schmidt, who’s curating an information resource which everyone needs to be aware of. Hi Lars, and welcome to the podcast.
Lars Schmidt [00:00:21]:
Hey Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:00:22]:
Thanks very much for coming on the show. Could you just start by introducing yourself and telling everyone what you do for the people who may not know you?
Lars Schmidt [00:00:30]:
Yeah, thanks Matt. I’ the principal and founder of company called Amplify. We do, we do. It’s just me. It’s a boutique. I do strategic consulting in employer branding, recruiting and talent strategy and HR executive search, all centered around what I frame is 21st century HR. So I also host a podcast called 21st Century HR. It really focuses on highlighting next generation and modern people in HR practices. And so that’s where I spend a lot of my time. Yeah. And I’m based outside of Washington D.C. in the US.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
So for the last month or so you’ve been curating an online resource looking at how HR and recruiting teams around the world are responding to the current situation. Which is why we really wanted to talk to you to share that with my listeners who may may not realize that that kind of resource is available and just really get information out to people. Before I ask you to talk about that a little bit more, it’s probably really important to timestamp this episode. All the other episodes of the show are evergr and are designed to be listened to over a long period of time. Obviously this is a very dynamic and fast changing situation. So it’s worth saying that it’s currently quarter past one on Friday the 13th, 2020 in Scotland. What time is it where you are?
Lars Schmidt [00:01:45]:
Yeah, it’s 9:15am here on the east coast of the US.
Matt Alder [00:01:48]:
Tell us more about what you’ve been doing in this curation.
Lars Schmidt [00:01:51]:
Yeah, well, for me it started. I’m a member of a couple of different communities of CHRO’s and CPOs and one of them in particular is called People Tech Partners, which is a group of chief people officers, mostly in tech, mostly in the Valley in the us and about a month ago people started talking about coronavirus and talking about how it might be impacting companies. And so that led me to write an article for Fast Company. One of the things I didn’t mention in my intro is I also write for Fast Company and Forbes where I cover similar topics around modern HR and so I wrote an article called How HR Leaders are Preparing their business for Coronavirus, probably about three, three weeks ago now. And in that I curated a variety of resources I could find, most notably coinbase. Coinbase was the first company to publicly publish their coronavirus response plans early in this kind of outbreak. And so I wanted to make sure I could amplify that because it was a fantastic resource and then also start to curate resources around remote work and other aspects of how I saw this likely impacting employers. And so that published and probably within about two days, I quickly realized that the situation was so dynamic, a blog post just wasn’t the best way to capture everything because it was changing by the hour, it seemed. And so that then led me to create a Google Doc. What I wanted to do is kind of take my background. One of the things that I did, you know, years ago was co found the HR Open Source initiative. And so I wanted to tap into some of my experience from building that to create a, essentially a crowdsourced public open source Google Doc where I could start it by adding all the resources I was able to find through the fast company research and others and then encourage viewers to add their own information. And so I wanted to kind of organize it around topics that, that I knew would be most, you know, important for HR leaders and practitioners and business leaders frankly. So it was around companies that were restricting travel, companies that were enforcing remote work policies or encouraging that conference cancellations, school impact. I just added a section unfortunately on hiring impact and layoffs and then resources and articles and templates and tools for business leaders and practitioners to help guide them through this process. Because I knew that a lot of companies were going to be encountering things like, you know, mass telework at scale that they’ve never experienced. And for a lot of companies that don’t have any remote work policies, that is a significant impact to the business. And so really my aim was to kind of bring my own community together, my own network together, who I know were, you know, proponents of open source and sharing and creating a gut doc that we could be updating on the fly as the situation unfolded, to essentially help practitioners have some more resources and have a line of sight into what other companies are doing so that they could then take that, you know, back to their own companies and hopefully be better prepared to support their companies, their employees.
Matt Alder [00:04:56]:
You’re obviously covering a lot of, a lot of ground there. Is there kind of anything else in there that’s sort of very specific to recruiting? The reason I ask is I’ve seen a lot of social media conversations today about things like on site interviews going remote and how people are keeping hiring going during this period of time. Is there anything that you’ve been seeing from a specific recruiting perspective?
Lars Schmidt [00:05:15]:
Yeah, there is. So the in, there’s a section in there on companies that were going, companies that were canceling travel and that were going remote. And in those sections companies were also adding if they were going remote for interviews. And so I think that that trend started probably two weeks ago. I think companies started doing that. I think particularly if you look at global tech codes based in the US the Amazons, the Googles, the Twitters, et cetera, they started doing that early and I think others started following their lead. And you know, now I think we’re in a position, you know, certainly in the states where most interviews are remote. And I think that this is going to have, you know, this is going to have a pretty profound impact on recruiting because. And it’s from a variety of places, right. One with remote work, more interviews are going remote. That means full end to end interviews being done virtually, which is something that very few companies do and had done in the past. So that’s going to be a big shift. I think the reality of this is this unfolds is, you know, companies I think will also be looking more scrutinizing more closely their growth and hiring plans just to allow for some flexibility with the uncertainty that the situation presents. And on the other side, I think candidates, you know, candidates are going to be obviously, you know, and let’s just even take the candidate term away. Humans. Humans are pretty uncertain with all of this happening right now. And so I think for a lot of them the idea of changing jobs with all of this uncertainty is something that they’re probably going to think twice about compared to having that conversation a month ago. And so I think both of those things will have a pretty profound impact on recruiting.
Matt Alder [00:07:01]:
And before we go any further, I should ask where can people find this Google Doc?
Lars Schmidt [00:07:05]:
Yeah, so if you go to bitdog.ly it’s L O Y slash coronavirus with a capital C H R both capitalized and then comms C O M M S with a capital C, you’ll be able to get to it there. And sorry for the convoluted title, as anybody who’s worked with Google Docs knows, you get a word letter soup of a URL for a Google Doc. And so I created a bitly if we could probably put that in the show notes to make it Easier for, for viewers to find.
Matt Alder [00:07:35]:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll make sure there’s a. I’ll make sure there’s a link in there. Are there HR specific or recruiting specific resources that you’ve come across that it would be good for people to check out?
Lars Schmidt [00:07:46]:
Yeah, so I think CXR Career Crossroads, which is the group created by Jerry Crispin and now co led with Chris Hoyt, they have exchanges of TA leaders all around the world and they’ve come together to open up some of their exchanges, their online communities, especially their community around coronavirus conversations. And so that’s a great resource. There’s a link to that in the doc where you can see how other. And again, they tend to skew a bit towards larger companies, but how those TA leaders are, are kind of guiding the organizations through this as it unfolds. There’s a variety of other links and resources in that Google Doc. So the Google Doc, like I view that as a master curation platform. So as I come across other, you know, either communities, articles, resources, et cetera, I’ll be adding that. So that doc will be added, you know, for myself probably three to five times a day, but also from the community at large. Because it is a crowdsourced doc, we’ll continue to add more resources. So I would, I would encourage people to check that out. I also encourage listeners. If you’ve come across resources you feel are helpful, you can either add them yourself directly. One challenge with that is the way Google Docs works is Once you exceed 100 viewers or you’re around 100 viewers, editing can get turned off or it can be kind of go in and out. You can get knocked out of editing in and out. So don’t get frustrated by that if you’re trying to add your own information. If you don’t have time. My email is in the Google Docs so you can send me an email with the links and I can add them myself. I’ve been setting my alarm to get up early in the morning when the traffic is a little less high so that I can keep the dock current so you can add it yourself. And if you can’t, just reach out to me directly and I’m happy to add it.
Matt Alder [00:09:32]:
Lars, thank you very much for talking to me and thank you so much for the great work you’re doing here.
Lars Schmidt [00:09:37]:
Yeah, I appreciate that, Matt, thank you.
