This week sees the return of one most popular guests I’ve had in the 47 episode history of The Recruiting Future Podcast.
Matt Buckland joined me for Episode 11 of the show last year when he was working for Forward Partners and shared his thoughts recruiting tech talent. It’s almost a year on and Matt is now Head of Talent and Fashion Tech company Lyst. He also recently appeared as the resident recruitment expert on “Who’s The Boss” the BBC TV series which experimented with the concept of “collaborative hiring”
In the interview we discuss:
• The likely future of recruitment
• The advantages and pitfalls of collaborative hiring
• Why recruitment technology can be a bad thing
• Snapchat and its relevance to recruiting
• The role of LinkedIn and Job Boards
• Recruiters v Marketeers
Matt also shares what he considers to be the most important skills a good in house recruiter needs and tells us about the book he is currently reading….
Links to things we talk about
Matt’s previous podcast interview
The Lyst recruiting analytics podcast episode
Subscribe to this podcast in iTunes
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Cielo. Cielo is the world’s leading provider of global recruitment process outsourcing and related solutions spanning the talent lifecycle from employer branding to onboarding. Cielo takes a we become you approach to RPO that provides their clients with customized solutions that match industries, geographies and business priorities. To find out more, visit www.cielotalent.com.
Matt Alder [00:00:49]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 47 of the Recruiting Future podcast. This week sees the return of one of the most popular guests I’ve had on the show. Matt Buckland joined me last year to talk about all things tech recruitment. Since then, he has a new job and recently appeared in the BBC TV series who’s the Boss? Which experimented with the concept of collaborative hiring. Keep listening to hear his thoughts on the future of recruitment.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi, Matt. Welcome back to the podcast.
Matt Buckland [00:01:24]:
Thanks for having me back. Obviously I didn’t upset too many people the first time.
Matt Alder [00:01:28]:
No, actually you are so far our most popular. Our most popular episode.
Matt Buckland [00:01:34]:
I’ll try harder to offend this time.
Matt Alder [00:01:36]:
Absolutely. So great to be talking to you again. Now, since we spoke, I think it was last April, actually. So getting on for a little while ago, Things have changed. We’re in a different office. Do you want to update everyone on what you’re doing now?
Matt Buckland [00:01:51]:
Yeah, different office. So I used to work for Forward Partners, the venture capital company helping startups grow their teams, and now I work for a company called list.com. we’re a fashion aggregator, so we take the world of fashion and put it all in one place. And you can shop everything all at once. So from your T shirts to your Valentino dresses, all in the same place, you can tell I’m not hired for that piece of expertise.
Matt Alder [00:02:16]:
Excellent. I’m after a new Valentino dress at the moment, actually. And what kind of recruitment challenges does that bring?
Matt Buckland [00:02:25]:
Well, the fact we’re in fashion is really a misnomer. We’re a technical company, so there’s a great deal of data science in the background, lots of machine learning that we do to get down to, like user likes, user preferences, even things like being able to take a picture and return who the designer of what that person wearing is. So it’s very heavily data and just a little bit of fashion on top.
Matt Alder [00:02:52]:
Excellent. Last time we spoke, you’d just become the most famous recruiter on Twitter. A year on. You’re now on the BBC, do you want to sort of tell everyone a little bit about what you’ve, how your broadcast career has developed since the, since the podcast last year.
Matt Buckland [00:03:12]:
So most people do Movember and I’ve started doing Famous February, it seems that way. So that tweet just won’t die. It keeps coming back and every time it appears on a new channel, I get to deal with the subsection of that audience. And it’s normally someone who hates me for being that person. So if it appears on Unilad or something like that, or the Lad Bible, I guaranteed a new slew of followers who all hate me but will follow me anyway, which is just a bit strange. So since then I’ve hopefully forgotten about that and moved on. New job, new challenges. Went quiet for sort of six, seven months. Sorting out hiring here, getting new systems in place, hiring a team, an excellent team. I think Matt Bradburn’s been on this podcast before.
Matt Alder [00:03:57]:
It has indeed.
Matt Buckland [00:03:59]:
So the team has just been phenomenal. And then the BBC got in touch to do a show that was an experiment about new ways of hiring applied to those businesses who are a little bit more old fashioned.
Matt Alder [00:04:12]:
And that’s kind of really what I wanted to talk about. Not necessarily the BBC, but the new ways of hiring and you know, really what the future of recruitment is from, you know, someone who’s a, you know, who’s a, who’s a practitioner and seeing this kind of thing every day. What, what were your, what were your sort of takeaways from trying to take new ways? Well, first of all, what new ways of hiring were you trying to get these companies to embrace? And, well, how did it go?
Matt Buckland [00:04:39]:
So the BBC had an agenda right from the outset. They wanted to use what they were terming collaborative hiring. They describe it in such a way as was a bit sort of textbook, but basically taking the power away from the hierarchy, that pyramid structure, turning the hiring decision back down to the workers. And they do this in a much more expanded way. So the interview process takes a week and a series of tasks based on competencies and then there are a series of votes. So people the role would impact on, get to vote on this person. The idea being that over that time you see more of the person, you learn more about them, get to know them a bit better. And it’s not just that show pony decision. Instead you actually get a valid decision at the end of it. And is that decision better than just an hour with the, with the MD and then a yes or a no?
Matt Alder [00:05:29]:
And how did that go down with some of the companies you were working with.
Matt Buckland [00:05:33]:
So the first company, the one that’s already been shown, was a logistics company called Reynolds that was run by a family, been in the family three generations. You can imagine that hiring process. Do you like him? Yes, let’s hire him. That kind of thing. And it went down really well. So what they discovered, and I think what came across in that first film was the engagement of the staff was absolutely incredible. Suddenly, drivers who wouldn’t normally care were so invested in this hiring decision that it became their be all and end all other films not quite as successful. So I won’t ruin the surprise that comes, but there is so some of the time that collaborative process displays the tensions, I think, between sort of factory floor versus the office workers. That’s something that comes up. And also I think the big takeaway that’s coming up is surrendering control for some managers is very, very tough.
Matt Alder [00:06:32]:
I can imagine. I think I’ve seen the trailer of that particular thing you’re referring to. It may have even aired by the time this podcast has gone out. So if it has, I’ll put a link to iplayer in the notes so people can see. And you know, is this the future of recruitment? What, in your view, where is the industry going? What? There’s a lot of hype out there, particularly around technology and recruitment is broken and, you know, by buying some bit of kit, you can instantly fix it. What’s really going on and where do you think recruitment’s going?
Matt Buckland [00:07:10]:
Well, big question. So I think there is something endemic to this industry which I haven’t seen in other industries. And that’s when we look at something, we want it to solve all of our ills in one fell swoop. So the normal practice is the most senior member of a team will go along to an event, see a piece of technology, suddenly decide it’s right or it’s wrong, bring it in, force it on a team that haven’t met it before, it will fail and then they’ll repeat the cycle. And most of that is it’s a number of things. So it’s a misapplied technology. So look at something like video interviewing at the moment. And we love video interviewing because it’s easy for us where it’s a terrible candidate experience. And I also worry that the. So I don’t mean real time video interviewing here. Things like Skype and Hangouts, we use all the time, brilliant time savers. But if you have a recorded piece of video, it’s so passive, so alienating. For the candidate side and passive viewership for the recruiter. There’s no function to step off piece, there’s no chance to explore anything deeper. It’s just how do you respond to these? And I think it’s sold as a silver bullet, it’s solved as something which will make your life easier. But I think if you’re reducing your recruiters to passive viewers in your team, you’re barking up the wrong tree. And that’s just one example of each new technology as it comes along. We have this kind of magpie technology lust in recruitment which is like whenever anything new is launched, like, how can I use this for recruitment? I read a tweet just this morning which is like, recruiters should know about Snapchat. And my response was, well, why, why? How are you using Snapchat? And I actually said there was a speaker at a technology event who was saying Snapchat will be the future. And afterwards I asked if she had Snapchat on her phone. She said, of course not. Well, how is that the future then? I mean, if it’s the future, you’re going to be adopting it, you’re going to. And I think there’s a drive to be seen to be the early adopter. And actually that bears no resemblance to the day to day, eight hours a day that people are spending still in places like LinkedIn in trying to write better adverts on job boards. People decry this industry and say those things are dead or dying. It’s very good and it gets good headlines, it’s attention grabbing, but it’s not dying, it’s not going away. That is the stuff of recruitment. That the stuff is being on the telephone, talking to candidates, meeting them, making sure they have a good interview process, making sure that process is short and people don’t like it. I think because it’s a bit samey.
Matt Alder [00:09:45]:
Absolutely. I think the Snapchat thing is interesting as well because I think you have to look and think, well, what is it? And it’s a messaging system. It’s not a very efficient messaging system for the kind of things that people might want to use it for. But you know, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a big trend. It’s every, everyone’s talking about it. So we must be able to use it for recruitment. And I think, you know, Pinterest was, was, was, was, was, was very similar. But having said that, I think there are some, you know, there’s some awesome channels that work, work really, really well. I mean, anything that you’re using that you’ve been surprised useful. It’s been.
Matt Buckland [00:10:27]:
I think so the trend is messaging as platform is really interesting. That will continue, but it doesn’t. It still doesn’t. I don’t think we’re. I think at the moment we’re too concerned with the channel that that message is in. So I see still on forums and stuff, there are forums for recruiters. It’s sad where people will still say, oh, you should get on the telephone. And I’m like, what? Why aren’t we just using the best possible thing at the best possible time? So I don’t often phone people first. I’ll message them in some way. I don’t SMS them. I tend not to use Facebook. I might use something like a LinkedIn message if I can. If I can’t find an email, I think there’s a. There’s almost like an expectation on the side of a candidate that a formal work solicitation shouldn’t come from an informal channel. I think if I Snapchat a new head of technology, he’s probably going to be like, what the hell is this? And I know now. So just recently they announced yesterday, Snapchat have released custom geolocation filters. So you can do the same thing they did where they set up a geolocation filter for Uber staff. So every time users in Uber tried to use Snapchat, it would come up with this extra, you can work at Snapchat type filter. We’re going to see lots of that sort of thing. But again, how to target that in a reliable and robust way. I mean, you might get sort of two or three times out of that, but you’re not going to get a repeatable experience for those things.
Matt Alder [00:12:00]:
Well, I think that’s a work of genius for Snapchat to hire people who know how to use Snapchat to come and to come and work for them.
Matt Buckland [00:12:07]:
Send drastic millennials that are all there, those dastardly millennials. I think that the Snapchat side of it is perhaps an attempt to be seen as doing something millennial. And I’m doing air quotes at the same time as I say that because I absolutely hate the term. I think there is an interesting one as well where we feel we must adopt technology or you must change how we recruit because of the age group of someone. The panic over millennials that I see on blogs and stuff is very similar to the panic of sort of the teenager in the 1950s. It feels like the wild one all over again. Where it’s like, oh my God, they’ve got disposable income. What can we do where actually you’re trying to attract a 21 year old person as a graduate? Well, they can legally go to prison for committing murder. They can drink and smoke and do all the things that adults can do legally. And yet we’re still going to put them through some awful gamification filter where they might have to do a quiz to apply. I mean, that’s craziness. It’s absolute craziness to me. It’s like, no, you can’t apply just by sending me your CV or a link to LinkedIn. Instead, you must play this game. It’s infantilism. It just scares me.
Matt Alder [00:13:21]:
So if, if someone could invent something like a bit of technology or something that would, you know, improve the recruitment process and that you would make, you know, you more efficient and better, your team, you know, operating better at what they do, what would it be?
Matt Buckland [00:13:39]:
It would be something. So technology is a great enabler and what we’ve done is we’ve become reliant on technology. So to be more effective, we should take away those repetitive tasks. That’s why you get robots to do stuff for you, is because they’re going to do stuff and they don’t complain, they don’t get tired. What are those things, those pain points in your organization which are problematic for you are the boring things. It’s like getting back to candidates with proper feedback. So a decent feedback filter or some way that would in the ats, nag your hiring managers to get robust feedback, actually train them on that feedback as they were writing it. God, that sounds like clippy for feedback. But I don’t mean that.
Matt Alder [00:14:20]:
Are you trying to reject a candidate? Click here.
Matt Buckland [00:14:23]:
Yeah, exactly. Do you want to tell them to go away in a bad way or in a nice way? So something like that, which would actually reinforce the L and D as you go along, would be quite interesting. One of the biggest problems that I find in everywhere I’ve worked, and that’s from colossal companies like Facebook down to small startups, is booking a damn room. So calendly and plugins like this, which fit towards Gmail and actually tell you when rooms are free and when is the best time to book an interview, are great time savers. That’s a great use of technology that not many people are going to say, hey, let’s implement calendly or something like that, but it’s great and it works wonders. A decent ATS is just a workflow. It shouldn’t be trying to do your job for you. And on the back end of it, you want to be able to report in a way which gives value to your business. And I won’t step on Bradburn’s toes by making out Lounge’s claims for our data. He’s already done it.
Matt Alder [00:15:20]:
I’ll put a link to that interview with the other Matt in the show notes as well. Kind of sort of continuing this theme, but maybe slightly broader than technology. If you could change one thing about the recruitment industry, several things, but one thing to start with, if you could change it about the recruitment industry tomorrow, what would that be?
Matt Buckland [00:15:43]:
So I think there’s, there’s like a catch all for me and that’s that we should be true to ourselves a lot more. So I’m very lucky and occasionally people decide to let me speak at events for them and this kind of stuff and I enjoy it and I like meeting people and we see great speakers, we see these inspirational folks on stage and then we go back to our jobs and we do things in the same way. So we get to see all this great technology, we see the demo, we don’t use it, we go back to our jobs and do them in the same way. I was recently on a panel talking about agency usage and the biggest problem that people had was their hiring. Managers still see agency as magic. So they can’t do the things you do. Well, at the back of my mind, I think there is no candidate database at the moment that exists which is bigger than LinkedIn or an X ray search of any of the other sites. So they only have access to those things as well. We have access to better tools I think than agency. We pay for licenses for NTELO and Guild and all these great sourcing things which we can find other people who perhaps have put their email address on a website 10 years ago and suddenly now they’re contactable. But those things are sort of light years away than the actual reality. And I think people, we go along with this thrust of like this is new and wonderful in recruitment where actually recruitment feels like it’s 10 years behind other industries. Certainly things like digital marketing where we’re only just catching up with the ability to measure stuff. I mean, we’ve talked about time to hire or cost per hire. Like it was the key defining metric for years now. Whereas digital marketing, they’ve got mouse flow which tells you where users click on a site, it tells you exactly the traffic, how they interacted, where did they abandon that process? We can do all these things Very, very simply, we just choose not to.
Matt Alder [00:17:43]:
And with that in mind, there’s always, it’s always lots of talk that recruiters should be like, you know, marketeers and all this sort of stuff. What qualities and skills do you think make a good in house recruiter in the sort of current, you know, the current world we live in?
Matt Buckland [00:18:01]:
Well, I think we said before we started recording, I said that recruiters often say, oh, recruitment is marketing, but there’s never any decent marketeer that will ever say, I want to be a recruiter. And that’s true because to them it looks backwards. It’s like looking at their history. For me, the best recruiter isn’t a sourcer. There’s a great thrust there as well, that we should X ray searching and Boolean and people have built careers just on the back of these things that you’re going to be a fantastic sourcer and that will be the making of you. Well, that’s finding people. And technology is a great enabler of finding people. So you can either use Boolean to discover people or you can pay a grand a month to get one of these fancy sourcing tools which will do the same thing. They all work, but that’s finding the people. The key that I found and the biggest business benefit is the skill of selection. So my recruiters on my team can find you a thousand people. And if I say your goal is to find a thousand CVs this week, they will. Of course they will, because that’s how they’re metricized. If I attach cash to that, they’ll find me 10,000 because they’ll just go and they’ll download and they’ll fill up my ATS full of LinkedIn. It won’t help anyone. But once you start to measure things like how much engineering time are we wasting by doing that sort of recruitment versus your skill of selection is such that the candidates you have selected have got to second round, have got to third round, are now hired and actually use that metric to measure quality in the recruiter. That sort of stuff is game changing and actually works so much better because then you don’t have recruiters just doing busy work. You have them. You know, your bar for entry grows and grows with that. Because actually it’s a bad thing then to find someone who’s just going to get through the first stage. It’s not like they’re good enough, but are they good?
Matt Alder [00:19:54]:
And so to kind of finish off with a prediction, maybe. So this time next year, if we’re doing this interview again, obviously Presupposing you want to come back or you’re not in Hollywood making a film about recruitment or something.
Matt Buckland [00:20:08]:
February, it’ll be the Oscars.
Matt Alder [00:20:10]:
Yeah, exactly. So if we were to have this interview again in a year’s time, what would we be talking about? What would be the. The issues of the day?
Matt Buckland [00:20:20]:
So it’s easier to predict what won’t happen, I think. So back in, in back to the future time, we all thought we’d have flying cars and hoverboards and stuff like that. We do kind of have what we call hoverboards, but they are on wheels. I mean, and that’s really a great metaphor for future futurism in the recruitment industry. We all think we’re going to get hoverboards, but really there are still wheels there. So, yes, technology is going to get better. We’re going to do cool stuff, selection sourcing. I hope candidate experience gets better because of those things and that people are more aware of that. What I would really love, and this is not a prediction because I don’t think it will happen, is that we get away from the sales cycle as recruitment discourse, so we’re not just sold to and that being brand leading, we don’t need that. I’d like to see the rise of the practitioner. So someone who actually there talking to candidates, doing the work, making their case and saying, well, actually this is the truth of recruitment. Do I think we’ll get there? Probably not, because there’s too much money to be made as an ancillary service to those practitioners and those practitioners are probably a bit too reliant on that ancillary service.
Matt Alder [00:21:33]:
Now, before we finish, I’ve got to ask you about your book because it looks intriguing. So tell us about the book. Obviously people can’t see the book, but I can. But tell me about this book, it looks fascinating.
Matt Buckland [00:21:47]:
So I’m always reading and one of the things that I say to my team, part of their okr is we should all be reading about how to make ourselves better recruiters. One of the best books I’ve read before I get onto what I’m reading at the moment, was Nudge on Behavioral Economics, Richard Thaler, and he just put out another one called Misbehaving. If you want to know how to negotiate better with candidates, behavioral economics, because it’s not just an economic decision, so we need to get away from money. However, I’m currently reading about bureaucracy.
Matt Alder [00:22:19]:
Just to clarify, this isn’t a book you’ve written, it’s a book you’re Reading just in case that came across wrong.
Matt Buckland [00:22:25]:
Yeah, I don’t write books at all. I write the occasional sarcastic blog, but not a book. So at the moment I’m reading a book by David Graeber and it’s called the Utopia of Rules. And it’s how his case is since the Second World War, how we’ve grown into this great bureaucratic society and how bureaucracy has spurned all of these great almost industries, this entire industry in itself. He states that the rise of America as a superpower is also the rise of its skill at bureaucracy, which is kind of interesting, but also that in bureaucracy there is now in its later stage form, it has replaced capitalism and its institutionalized stupidity. Now that’s a big claim. That’s a big claim. And I like to think there are corollaries with what I am doing in the industry and in my career and. And perhaps that’s being a little bit more daring, cutting through some of these things where you see these rules and HR is a great place for them. You see these rules grow up and it’s. No one questions it because it’s the way it was done. I think there’s a good chance to get away from some of that institutionalized self obstacling, if that’s a word. I’m going to use that as a verb. Terrible. Matt will beat me for that afterwards. But there is that. We get in our own way too much and how can we actually make things better just by doing that? So the history of that might help.
Matt Alder [00:23:51]:
Food for thought indeed. Thank you very much for talking to me.
Matt Buckland [00:23:54]:
Thank you, Matt. Always a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:23:56]:
My thanks to Matt Buckland. You can subscribe to this podcast on itunes and on Stitcher. You can find all past episodes of the show at www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
