One of the most common themes I hear in conversations with in house recruiters is their frustration at the failings of their recruitment technology. A decade and a half on from the online recruitment revolution many employers are finding that their technology is holding them back rather than being the enabler it should be.
My guest this week is Brad Cook, Global VP of Talent Acquisition for Informatica. Over the last five years Informatica have harnessed their CRM and ATS to win the battle against the global skill shortages in the talent markets where they operate proving that recruitment technology can be used strategically rather than just reactively.
In the interview we discuss:
• Brad’s philosophy of capturing data once and using it many times
• Why you need an SEO mindset to attract active candidates
• The importance of analytics
• How Informatica have reduced friction in their apply process to capture data from 45k applicants a year
• Why candidate experience is critical
• The one piece of data you must collect from each prospect
• The current revolution in the ATS market that is driving a move away from legacy vendors
Brad also empathises the importance of humans at all stages of the recruitment process and makes it very clear that recruitment is not just a science it is also an art.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Broadbean, a smart, innovative global recruitment technology business which helps recruiters to reach candidates in a fast, effective and efficient way. I recently spoke with their client James Purvis, Head of Talent Acquisition at cern, to find out what he loves about Broadbean. What I love about Broadbean is the ability to take decisions based on data. So instead of having to believe what the vendors provide you in terms of their information of how many candidates they’re going to bring to you, you can really use the metrics of the tool to understand how many of the clicks turn into applications, how many of those applicants turn into interviews, and how many become higher. So it’s all about evaluating the quality and not just the quantity. To find out more, go to www.broadbean.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:05]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 38 of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the most common themes I hear in my conversations with in house recruiters is their frustration at the failings of their recruitment technology. I’m delighted to have Brad Cook, Global VP of Talent Acquisition for Informatica, as my guest this week. Informatica have a well deserved reputation for using recruitment technology brilliantly to drive their recruiting strategy forward. To find out how they do it, keep listening. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. My guest this week is Brad Cook from Informatica. Hi Brad, how are you?
Brad Cook [00:01:51]:
Hi Matt, how are you doing?
Matt Alder [00:01:53]:
Yes, not too bad. Not, not too bad. It’s a very dark January evening where I am at the moment. I suspect, I suspect it’s probably a bit sunnier where you are.
Brad Cook [00:02:04]:
Well, actually not. I mean California and I could be looking out the window thinking I was in the uk. Right now it’s dark and overcast and quite, quite drizzly.
Matt Alder [00:02:12]:
Wow, that’s certainly not normal. Do you want to give us a bit of background about you and what you do and how you sort of come to be at Informatica?
Brad Cook [00:02:24]:
Sure. So I’ve been in Informatica for just close on five years. So Informatica is a big data cloud company where the leader in the data integration space and have been for many years. We’re about 5,000 people globally in 32 countries. I joined them from Cisco five years ago and basically had to rebuild the organization and we’ve been on track over the last five years sort of hiring between 6 and 800 people a year in all of those locations, across all disciplines of the business sales, which I would probably say today is some of our challenging areas. R and D major centres within the U.S. redwood City, Silicon Valley and Bangalore are our two major centres. And then we have some other tech centers around the world as well. So being here for five years in the same role, the longest job I’ve had in any one company.
Matt Alder [00:03:16]:
Cool. And you sort of mentioned the challenges you’re having in recruiting salespeople. What are those challenges and what sort of techniques and tools have you been using to overcome them?
Brad Cook [00:03:29]:
Well, I think that the biggest challenges we’ve had is that the market is so hot over here, especially Silicon Valley as a company. Informatica has been through our own transition. We’ve gone from a publicly traded company of 20 years recently to a private company, private investor held company. So the market is changing, startups are out there, capital is cheap. So there’s a lot of companies being acquired with that. That means there’s a lot of startup companies, which means there’s a lot of call for all sorts of talent, not just engineering talent, engineering talent certainly been challenging in the Bay Area and in India, but across the world. I guess software is the new black and everybody’s looking for strong people that can sell software platforms. What we’ve been doing to get around that is building solid CRM platforms and solid information, gathering, research, gathering to know where the talent resides whenever we want to go and do that. One of the things we’ve done over the last five years is actually build a research arm. So normally companies would have either full lifecycle or sourcing, dedicated sourcing. We’ve also got one step further and built dedicated research into the organization. So we have a group in India who continuously are out there scouring the web or doing research on particular companies so we can go out there and find the name, the contact detail so we can sort of bypass having to get to them through a LinkedIn InMail. Because we all know LinkedIn is becoming saturated from a recruiter perspective to candidates. Candidates are getting inundated with contact requests, so we need to find other ways to get around them. And that’s where I guess the CRM platforms and contact information becomes critical.
Matt Alder [00:05:13]:
I think that leads nicely onto my next question because, you know, I’ve always, you know, we met once a few years back and I’ve always, you know, been interested in your thoughts on recruitment technology and the kind of things that you’ve been doing. What tech do you use to support your recruitment, recruitment efforts and what do you think? You know, what are the important elements within that?
Brad Cook [00:05:42]:
Well, I think over the five years my thoughts have definitely changed. But one of the most important things is the principle of capture once, use many and working with the data integration company. What we do is not necessarily integrate all our platforms, but understanding the data that has been asked for or of either a candidate or that we may be collecting from a passive candidate, capturing it once and then using it many times. So a CRM platform becomes critical. But there’s multiple aspects of this. There’s the hunting down of the passive candidate or the passive prospect and then there’s also the active. So from a technology perspective, we have to make sure we’re covering off both. From an active perspective, SEO is very, very critical. We’ve done a lot of work with SEO over the years. A lot of the talks and speeches I’ve done around SEO is, is still relevant today and I think more so. One example is in April last year, 2015, Google made some changes to one of the algorithms and a whole lot of us in the industry started seeing massive drop offs of people coming to the career site. That was around exactly the same time that Informatica was going private. We actually thought it was due to. Well, we’ve gone private. When we started to dig into some of my peers and some of their data as well, we found that the algorithm that Google had changed was actually stopping a lot of the SEO functions getting through. So we lost 50% of our traffic. So technology that allows me to see that becomes critical because if I wasn’t monitoring visitors to my career site, visitors to apply applies all the way through to hire, I would never know whether there was a problem. Since then we’ve actually changed our front end to our career site, putting thing on people and done a lot of work in building SEO. There’s a link I can’t remember off the top of my head from Google that you can put in your career site and it will give you a scoring out of 100. You would guess Google’s career site scores 99 out of 100. At the time we were scoring 33 with just some simple changes. With SEO mindset focus, we’ve been able to get our career site back up to 87%.
Matt Alder [00:07:49]:
Fantastic.
Brad Cook [00:07:50]:
Out of 100. So it’s a lot of those things. You have to not just collect the data, but you want to be focused on measuring the data of where your traffic is coming from. We all have limited budgets, so wherever we’re going to spend our money, we need to make sure we’re getting our biggest bang for Buck. On the flip side, the passive side is if we’re going out there and have a research organization finding names and finding contact details, we need to be able to make sure we have somewhere to put them and collect them so the team can go back in and pull them again in the future. Collect once, use many times. So there’s a lot of different technologies we leverage with that. The core ats, the CRM functionalities, the SEO front ends with their analytics platforms as well, along with ppc. And those are things. A lot of them still sound quite basic. If you don’t have the basics in place, you’re not going to get the volume of traffic you need.
Matt Alder [00:08:40]:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll come back to ATS’s in a second because I’m interested in your thoughts on how that market’s changing, but just to just sort of briefly pick up on analytics. I know that a lot of people in terms of recruitment, marketing, aren’t necessarily sort of tracking everything they should, and they’re certainly not using analytics in a predictive or particularly sophisticated way. How important have those analytics been to you and what kind of things have you been able to do from having that data?
Brad Cook [00:09:14]:
Yeah, so I think it’s critical if you can’t measure something, it’s an old manufacturing conversation. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. So metrics for us has been very critical. An old data point that we had years ago, we calculated this is probably 2011 that we needed. On average, based on the vendor I was using at the time and their data from all of their 300 customers, we would need at least 300,000 visitors to our career site. Number one of that, 300,000. We would need at least a couple of thousand people to apply to actually have the close ratios that we have that’s been valid and we’ve continued to use that. We have probably half a million hits for a small company. We have probably half a million hits to our career side today. And in the seven years prior to me getting here, we had, I think 10,000 appliers. We now have gone from 15 to 25 to 35. This year we’ll probably get 45,000 applicants because we’ve streamlined the apply process. So if someone is going to take the time to apply, I want to make it as simple for them as possible that, number one, they’re going to finish it. And then number two, I actually get their data that I can then use in the future. And the most Important thing is email address and phone number. And it’s usually a personal email address that someone is going to put in and apply versus their work address, which means I can get them in the future. We made some modifications over the years to not just ask for phone number but specifically, specifically ask for mobile phone or cell phone number. Because every time I do a conversation somewhere I always ask how long have people had their cell phone for? And it’s always five to six to 10 years. Now if you’ve got access to someone for seven to 10 years, that’s a long time to be able to get back to that person. So those things become critical. Some other areas within the analytics space becomes critical is the drop off rates. Years ago I had a drop off rate which is pretty consistent in the industry. About 40% of my appliers will drop off before they get to the end. We’ve continuously made improvements over the years and we’re sitting between a 5 and a 10% drop off rate which means I get 90% of everybody that takes the time to apply. I get their information in my system that I know I can go back to and find them in the future if I need to.
Matt Alder [00:11:25]:
So 45,000 applications. How do you kind of sort of protect your brand and make sure that those people are having a kind of a good experience and, and being communicated to by your recruitment team?
Brad Cook [00:11:43]:
So that’s setting up some basic things and I think that the most important thing there is then following the disciplines and following the methodologies of Candidate Experience all the way through the activities that the Talent Board have been doing around the whole Candy Awards. We’ve been a participant of that from the beginning. I’ve been a Candy Board member for many years because of the work we’ve done around Candidate Experience. As soon as someone applies, we send them a little mini survey and at different touch points throughout the application process, we’ll actually send a survey to someone. We have rules internally that if someone comes through a certain way, they’ll be treated a certain way within an sla. So everybody, that’s not something that one person can own. Everybody has to be behind the whole candidate experience. And to be honest, we miss one year we missed and we slipped up in a few areas and we’re all over it again now because I think at some point we may have taken our eye off the ball and become a little bit complacent. So we just won the Candy Awards in the uk, we missed this year in the us so we’re back on looking at what is going on within the data. Where are the things causing our problems and driving accountability back out to the recruiters and then they know exactly what they need to do and everybody’s on board with that.
Matt Alder [00:12:58]:
Fantastic. Coming back to the ATS question, obviously there’s been a lot of sort of changes in the ATS market in the last couple of years with new, smaller agile players coming in and challenging some of the kind of legacy providers. What’s your view on the ATS market and how it’s developing?
Brad Cook [00:13:23]:
Yeah, it’s gone through some changes. So we were on an applicant tracking system, virtual edge, since 2003. At the company, we’re the second VE customer and we only just removed it. And we only removed it because it was being sunset, it was being end of life and they’ve turned it off. Rest in peace, Virtual Edge. So over the last couple of years, I’ve actually gone out and done quite deep dives on what I would call the legacy ATS vendors. And when we weren’t exactly sure ve was going to go away, we did a full analysis on all the legacy vendors at the time. And we decided based on what we saw back then, we stay where we were. Then they come along and said, no, we are going to turn this off. Wow, we have to move. So we already seen what we knew from the legacy vendors. So we then started to aim our guns at the new vendors out there, the greenhouses, the smart recruiters, more of the smaller startup type vendors. And what they were able to do and what we could see from them was chalk and cheeks. Whether that translates, I’m not sure. But it was so different from the legacy vendors in what they could do. What I’d built from a technology platform over the last five years, some would say, and a lot of us are in the same boat, was a Frankenstein. There was lots of point solutions. Some things connected together, some things not. It was a Frankenstein, but it worked. And I’ve had a number of vendors say, well, you’ve got a Frankenstein. That’s really hard to do. No vendor out there has, has created the perfect, the perfect platform yet. But I think the smaller startups, and that’s why we’ve gone with Smart recruiters, are going down that path. Smart Recruiters for me has a marketplace within that allows vendors, and they’ve already got multiple vendors integrated already to interconnect. So the day we went live, we went live with, I think it was six, six or seven integrations straight out of the box. I actually changed some background check vendors. Why? Because they were already pre integrated into the platform, which made it a much more streamlined approach for the user. The candidate having to do the background check, but also for the recruiter to be able to trigger that background check and not have to go from multiple systems and double key things. And that’s the area that I think a lot of the newer startup atss have that more holistic view of all of the aspects you need, not just the applicant tracking side of things, which applicant tracking is really more for compliance than for recruiting. Whereas a lot of these newer platforms are out there for how do we market to candidates, how do we drive more messages out there, how do we measure where things are coming from? And then the application process itself and then the workflow of getting a candidate from point A to point B through the interview cycle to hire is much easier.
Matt Alder [00:16:09]:
Absolutely. And I, a number of people that I’ve sort of been talking to recently have really sort of shared that view in terms of how the market’s developing. Again, I suppose that leads on to my next question. You guys have always had a reputation for innovation in what you do in terms of recruitment. What do you think is innovative right now? What is innovation in innovation sort of look like at the moment? What have you got on your radar? What’s sort of piquing your interest?
Brad Cook [00:16:42]:
The innovation things for us, we did a lot of work around data collection in the past and we still continue to do that. The area of focus for me is getting above the noise. Four or five years ago, not everybody was doing employment branding because it was still relatively new. No one knew what it was years ago. Everybody wasn’t doing mobile career sites. Everybody now is doing them. So the bar is rising considerably and very, very quickly. The area that I’m really focusing on these days is around the marketing side of things and getting out of how recruiting would do marketing normally, but into the way marketing does marketing. So amplification of employee voice. So we have a number of technologies in house that allow employees and our recruiters that whenever messages come in, they’re amplified through five people after their Twitter networks or their LinkedIn networks out to, we’re talking millions and millions of people to get brand awareness and information about the company in the front of lots of people to draw more people back in. So we’re focusing a lot more on the marketing aspects of things and then also teaching recruiters how to be marketers first. If you can’t market what you do and you can’t promote the marketing aspects of the company, the job you as a Personal, branded, individual recruiter. You’re not going to attract the type of people we’re looking for. So teaching them to be marketeers first, when they then get the talent in front of them they’re trying to hunt down, then they can put their recruiting hat back on. And that’s. That’s a big change we’re doing on that front as well.
Matt Alder [00:18:18]:
Last, last question, and I think you may have actually already answered it, but with all the kind of technology that’s available and the analytics and the way that things are going, lots of people talk about replacing some of the role of a recruiter with technology or with algorithms. Do you think that’s ever going to happen? Or is that human aspect still absolutely vital?
Brad Cook [00:18:44]:
Can you ever say never? I don’t think in my lifetime, I just don’t think in my lifetime. I think technology has its place to be able to filter things down. Machine learning can go so far. But that human aspect, I know if I get to somewhere I need to place a call into and I just end up with an IVR or a call center and I don’t talk to a person. I’m pressing zero because I want to talk to a body. And I think recruiting is still that personal touch. And I often talk about the science versus the art. The art of recruiting is a learned art. Some people are great at that sales approach and they interacting with candidates. The science side of it, I think we can automate as much as we can, but I don’t think in my lifetime we’re going to see a recruiter being replaced by some technology. People are people. If we look at society today and kids are coming out with not a lot of social skills because they’re doing everything digitally, I think maybe in the future when the kids think that’s okay, well, maybe that would be okay in the future, but I think not in my lifetime.
Matt Alder [00:19:49]:
Brad, thanks very much for talking to me.
Brad Cook [00:19:51]:
Pleasure. Had a great time.
Matt Alder [00:19:53]:
My thanks to Brad Cook. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes and on Stitcher. You can listen to past episodes, subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about me at www.rfpodcast.com. thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
