In our relentless pursuit of HR and Recruiting Technology innovation are we losing sight of its ultimate purpose? Is all the bright shiny new software on the market actually serving the needs of the ultimate end users in the way it should be? These are interesting questions and my guest this week has some very strong opinions about them.
Laurie Ruettimann is a well-known blogger, speaker and ex HR professional. She has also just launched an excellent podcast called Let’s Fix Work.
In the interview we discuss:
• The clash between the way people actually behave and how technologists think they should behave
• Why HR Technology needs to be Business Technology
• The vital importance of human relationships in business
• Why an app will not solve workplace harassment
• Why Talent pools don’t exist
• Empowerment in the employee experience
• Why software vendors need to be closer to their customers
Laurie also share her predictions for the future and gives us a preview of what is coming up on her podcast
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 129 of the Recruiting Future podcast. In our relentless pursuit of HR and recruiting technology innovation, are we losing sight of the actual purpose of what we’re doing? Is all the bright new shiny software on the market actually serving the ultimate end user in the way it should be? These are interesting questions and ones that my guest this week has very strong opinions about. Laurie Ruettimann is a well known blogger, speaker and, and ex HR professional. She’s also recently launched an excellent new podcast called let’s Fix Work. It’s brilliant to have Laurie on the show and this is an absolutely must listen to interview. Hi Laurie and welcome to the podcast. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone a bit about you?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:01:12]:
Well, there’s nothing more boring than listening to someone talk about how wonderful she is, so I won’t start there. I will tell everybody that I’m Laurie Ruettimann and I’m actually a failed human resources lady. I was so bad at that job that they had to like kick me out of the world of human resources. But I can’t quit it, Matt, because here I am today on your podcast.
Matt Alder [00:01:33]:
Absolutely. And you know, you’ve, you, you, you do a lot of, a lot of things, a lot of writing, a lot of speaking. You now have your own podcast which we’ll talk about a little bit, a little bit later. But could you maybe just fill in the gaps a little bit for people and give them a bit more of a sense of, you know, if the few people that perhaps have not heard, heard of you. So just some of the, some that you focus on.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:01:55]:
Sure. I’m a 20 year veteran of the world of human resources and I started out as a human resources recruiter and generalist. So I always worked on the corporate side and I did that for 12 years and I was secretly blogging and I worked for companies you might know like Monsanto and Pfizer and some that you might not know, like I don’t know, Kemper Insurance company. So I had all this corporate experience and I absolutely hated it, was blogging anonymously and in 2007 outed myself as a blogger. And back in those days there weren’t many human resources bloggers. It was me, evil HR lady Chris Dunn in the United States and really nobody over in Europe. And so for a while I locked up the market on writing and speaking on the world of Human resources, recruitment, and emerging digital technologies. And so that’s taken me through like the past decade. And as my career has grown, I’ve consulted with big Fortune 100 companies on HR technology strategies. And I’ve also consulted with a lot of startups, especially in the HR technology space. But, you know, my first love is really myself, not human resources. So, yes, I have started a podcast like every other narcissistic person out there. And we like to talk about fixing work because at the core of everything I’ve done over the past two decades, it’s really about improving the work experience and the employee experience.
Matt Alder [00:03:20]:
So let’s sort of start by picking up on that fixing work. As a sort of a close observer of work recruiting, HR and technology, what strikes you about what’s changed the most in the last sort of two or three years? What do you think the big issues that people should be focusing on are?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:03:40]:
So I think there are two issues that I’m primarily focused on. One is that we have all of this emerging technology that’s kind of cool. So it’s really interesting to see the way that the cloud is being used, the way that that HR technology almost looks like consumer technology now. So I’m very fascinated by that, except that it’s all about the employer and not about the user. The day has not yet arrived when someone is opening up their phone and begging for an HR app. And I think we really need to rethink the way that we’re thinking about design and use of HR technology. And then the second thing that interests me is that HR technology and recruitment technology for IT to survive needs to be business technology. And I don’t think vendors have made the jump to that just yet. So this technology is for HR or for recruiters, by HR and by recruiters oftentimes. And we’re still forgetting about the business, about the enterprise, and ultimately about the end user.
Matt Alder [00:04:40]:
And so from that end user perspective, I mean, let’s sort of zero in on, on recruitment technology. For example, what do you think companies should be doing? I mean, how, how are people looking for jobs? What’s different? What would make someone, you know, really want to, you know, an end user, really want to engage with, you know, technology in that space?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:05:04]:
You know, I’m not a technologist, although for a little while I did have a tech company. And we can talk about that later. You know, I’m a dilettante. I like to do a lot of different things. But from my perspective, one of the things that still drives me crazy about recruitment technology and we’ll just use this as an example is this idea of a talent pool. You know, Matt, how long have we been talking about talent pools and talent communities? A decade? 15 years? You know, and still most people find work through people they know. At least here in America, that’s how people find work. And so from my perspective, there’s this big gap between all of this energy and trying to create community and trying these places where job seekers can tell their stories. And the fact of the matter is, when my husband is looking for work, or my mom or my siblings, they go to their community. But they do it verbally, they do it orally. They still make human to human connections. And so there’s this big chasm between the way people behave and the way recruiters and technologists think people ought to behave. Does that make sense?
Matt Alder [00:06:06]:
That makes perfect sense. And what do you think people should do about that? How should they be getting feedback? You know, what kind of actionable strategies should technologists and recruiters be thinking of to sort of improve this?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:06:20]:
You know what, I don’t care about technologists and recruiters. I care about employees and job seekers. So from my perspective is if you’re finding work through your individual human to human network, continue to use that. If you’re finding employment through talking to your dentist or talking to your next door neighbor, continue to do that. And don’t worry about enterprise technology. And in fact, at some point, enterprise technology will either figure it out or will go through a new cycle. But if you have found a way to get a job and you’re in this age of talent, you like what you do and what you’re doing works, continue to do it. I’ve really pivoted over the past couple of years. I’m done speaking to technologists and recruiters who think the world should be a certain way. And I’m now talking to people who are living their best lives.
Matt Alder [00:07:13]:
You’re obviously very forthright with your views on that.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:07:19]:
Well, let me give you another example. There’s this push out there to address MeToo, right? Everybody wants to talk about MeToo and giving people a different way to talk about workplace harassment and sexual harassment at work. And the best way to address what workplace harassment and sexual harassment at work is not through enterprise technology. It’s not through apps, it’s not through widgets. It’s through changing behaviors and also changing expectations and being incredibly clear with supervisors and managers on what’s expected and being clear with human resources and recruiting departments on if you see something you have a legal obligation to say something and intervene. No technology is going to change behavior. But yet I was at a recruitment conference a couple weeks ago and all of these new apps and widgets are popping up to address workplace harassment. And I don’t think you need technology to tell somebody in leadership to keep their penis in their pants. I don’t know how else to say that. Right. But where in the world did we ever start to think that technology could address human behavior like that? It’s just insane to me. So I think we’re having the wrong conversation sometimes about the world of work.
Matt Alder [00:08:28]:
So building, you know, building on what you’ve just said there, there’s a lot of sort of talk and focus about employee experience and employee journeys in general. What’s your sort of view on that? Is that a thing? Is that something, you know, is that something that we should be. Should be thinking about and talking about? What’s your perspective on that?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:08:51]:
Yeah, I mean, there is a total micro economy around the employee experience. So this is something that people are figuring out happens. Employees do have experiences and now they’re creating product and services around that. And I think just like with the natural course of capitalism, we try to monetize everything. But employees have been having journeys since they’ve had jobs. And I think now this renewed focus on it is a little disingenuous. But I am all for any organization coming in and saying, from the moment we contact you, through the moment you’re employed, all the way till you decide to exit our organization, it should be a positive experience where you learn and grow. We’re committed to that. We believe in you, we love you, you’re part of our community, and we want to make your employment experience the best it can be. The problem I have with all of this is that we’ve tried to split it out and we’ve tried to commoditize it and we’re trying to make it into these segmented markets. And for me, I think it’s inauthentic.
Matt Alder [00:09:54]:
I think that’s a really interesting point, actually, because, you know, having sort of done. Having done sort of a lot of, A lot of research into what companies are doing in this area. I think one of the, you know, one of the dangers is L and D only gets talked about by L and D professionals, recruiting only gets talked about by recruiting professionals, you know, etc. Etc. And it just seems that there isn’t anyone who’s taking a helicopter view of the whole. The whole experience and the. And the whole journey.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:10:25]:
Wait, wait, you know who takes, you know, who takes the helicopter view of the whole experience? It’s the employees themselves. And I don’t think we’re having enough of a conversation to employees saying, you are enabled and encouraged to own your own career. So if there is a point at any part of this journey where you’re not satisfied and L and D isn’t blending with your daily experience and your onboarding wasn’t as good as it could be, you’re empowered and enabled to say something. You’re empowered to say, speak up for yourself. Now, once we enable workers to speak up for themselves and be their own career advocates, we need to put in systems and processes to address that. And I think that’s where HR often falls down. You know, you can say to an employee, you’re encouraged to complain about your learning opportunities, but if you don’t have a mechanism to address those encouragements, you’ve got, you just have a tremendous amount.
Matt Alder [00:11:17]:
Of problems, I suppose, sort of leading on from that and circling back to technology. So at the moment, technology is it, or the attitude that comes with technology, is it a hindrance? Can it ever be an enabler? What should its role be?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:11:36]:
I think about technology and the potential of it and how it’s kind of played out in our lives. About 10 years ago, I was wandering all around America and actually over in the UK quite a bit, telling human resources leaders, get on Twitter, get on Facebook, get on LinkedIn, or you’re going to be left behind. And that was absolutely the wrong message. The promise of the cloud, the promise of digital communicating was so great. It turns out all of that was a lie. I mean, what do we have now? We have a culture where people are bickering with one another and jumping to the worst conclusions. We have tools that amplify implicit biases. And what I should have been saying is, start to make more human to human connections, start to recognize and reward good work within your organization. But instead I got so excited about the technology, I forgot about the relationships. And I think this is just kind of a human tendency. We jump on a bandwagon and we forget the infrastructure of life, the infrastructure of technology. It’s relationships. And if we’re not focused on relationships, we’re always going to get technology wrong in the future. So what’s the next hot technology for recruitment? Who cares? If we don’t have good relationships in our business, it doesn’t matter. We’re going to blow it.
Matt Alder [00:12:59]:
So obviously there’s a lot of, a lot of things need to be addressed and there’s lots of thinking perhaps the organizations need to do about their purpose and how they relate to their employees. Who have you seen who’s. Who’s doing some of this? Well, what are the, you know, what are the great case studies? What are the great stories, you know, in this space that might inspire, that might inspire other HR people?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:13:24]:
I’m probably not your woman on case studies, so let’s not ask that question, but I do have a story for you that you may be interested in hearing. Okay, ready? So I was sitting with the founder and the CEO of a major recruitment technology company, and I asked him, hey, can you give me examples of customers who were struggling with the world of talent acquisition, struggling with the world of recruitment, and used your technology and really turned their function around and really sing your praises. They love you, they need you, they adore you. And he said, I can’t think of any customers right now. And I’m like, oh my God, you have thousands of customers. Why can’t you think of two or three customers who absolutely love you and adore you? And he said, as my technology company has grown, I’m sitting further and further away from my customer, and I only talk to customers who are complaining or are on the cusp, and when they need to renew, they need me to come in and close the deal. He said, so I make it a goal of mine to try to talk to five customers a month, but I can’t do it. And I thought to myself, my God, if you can’t talk to your customers on a regular basis, what hope is there for recruitment technology? Right? I never want to hear a technology founder or CEO who’s so far removed from his customer base that he can’t, in an evocative moment, come up with two or three success stories. That, to me, summarizes how broken the technology field is right now. And it actually makes me think about all the demands we place on founders and technical co founders. If they’re not sitting with their customers, how can they innovate? How can they be creative? How can they really hear feedback and iterate the next version of the product? And I wonder what’s happening with product and product development if they’re not getting that direct and important feedback on a regular basis. I was a little disheartened by that.
Matt Alder [00:15:27]:
That is a disheartening story.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:15:29]:
I bet it’s not uncommon either. The bigger you get, the more successful you get, the further you get away from that end user of the recruiter or the HR professional. And I think we’re starting to see that as technology starts to evolve, that’s just one story, but I’m 100% sure it’s not an uncommon story.
Matt Alder [00:15:47]:
So, coming back to your podcast, it’s called let’s Fix Work. How do we fix work?
Laurie Ruettimann [00:15:53]:
Well, I’m not sure we can fix work. I think the major thesis that I’m coming to is that we fix work by fixing ourselves. There’s so much learned helplessness and slack in the system, and it’s almost like negativity is contagious. And so we go to work, we have a bad day, and a bad day turns into a bad week, and we start to blame people, processes, systems, and it just starts to be one big whinge festival. I don’t know how else to say that. Right. Everybody’s complaining. And so instead of perpetuating the cycle where everybody’s moaning about work, what I would like to do is talk to people who are taking a swing and really making an attempt to fix work at the local level, at the community level. And so it’s not about talking to the head of L and D or talking to the head of talent who has this big five year strategy. Because, Matt, you and I both know five year strategies get changed every 18 months. So it’s really not a five year strategy ever. It’s an 18 month strategy, if that. So I’m talking to individual community activists, I’m talking to founders of very small technology companies. I did have to talk to my friend Tim Sackett, because in America, he’s HR famous. So he’s one person that I’ve talked to that’s kind of maybe known by your audience.
Matt Alder [00:17:10]:
Well, I don’t think you can actually run a podcast without having Tim Sackett on it. I think he’s been on mine. He’s been on mine twice.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:17:18]:
So I talked to Tim Sackett, you know, just as a rite of passage. But yeah, individuals who are really thinking about taking personal accountability, but also rethinking systems. So I’m excited about an upcoming guest by the name of Eric Barker, because he wrote a book about counterintuitive methods of success in the workplace. And it’s called Barking up the Wrong Tree. And I really recommend that book. It was one of my favorite leadership books of 2017, because everything you know about being happy, you know, you know, from motivational speakers like Tony Robbins or, you know, from 1950s, you know, leadership gurus and Dale Carnegie. But there’s a lot of neuroscience that actually talks about the way that we find happiness. And it turns out we’re our own worst enemies. So by making small, basic, incremental changes to our lives and to our expectations, we not only fix work, but we fix ourselves. So I’m interested in those conversations now.
Matt Alder [00:18:18]:
I am hugely jealous because I actually read that book last month and it’s absolutely fantastic. So I completely, completely endorse your recommendation of it. It’s one of the best books I’ve read for. For a really long time.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:18:29]:
Yeah, he definitely comes from the school of Daniel Ariely, who’s a professor here in North Carolina, where I live at Duke. But he takes neuroscience and actually puts real stories, real narratives behind it and makes it accessible to the reader. So I thought it was the best HR book of 2017, so I highly recommend it.
Matt Alder [00:18:48]:
Okay, so final question on the podcast. Always kind of ask people about their sort of predictions for the future. What do you think, you know, what is going to happen in the next 18 months? 18 months to 2 years in HR and recruiting technology. Pick an area and give me, you know, give me a prediction or give me, give me your thoughts about what you might, what you think might pan out.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:19:15]:
Well, the easiest answer is to say that there’s going to be rampant consolidation, because there’s always consolidation. You know, when there’s money in an industry, people try to figure out how to make the most money, and it’s often by consolidating and putting one technology into another. And then where they really make the most money is by reducing staff and layoffs. So I think as we start to see innovation in the human resources space continue, unfortunately, we’re going to see a lot of layoffs, and we’re starting to see this in the American market as well through some mergers and acquisitions. But just in general, companies are really motivated to return great returns to their shareholders and to their executive leaders who are bonused based on revenue and margins. And so, Matt, I guess what I’m saying is my big prediction for the next couple of years is layoffs. And what does that mean? It means that really brilliant people will go out into this gig economy, this freelance economy, and try to pave their way in the world, and that’ll produce more innovation down the road. But there’s going to be some heartache. So I am a Debbie Downer. I’m really sorry, but I think we’re in for some rough stuff. Seas in the next 18 to 24 months.
Matt Alder [00:20:27]:
Sad to hear that.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:20:29]:
Yeah, I know, Me too. But on the other hand, I think about all the really great work that was done in the last recession and you know, I honed my skills as a writer and a speaker that prepared me to be an entrepreneur and an innovator as the economy turned around. And there are so many stories of people who really went out and tried new things because, well, why the heck not? They had free time on their hands. So as we start to think about the upcoming dip in the economy, if there’s ever something that you wanted to do in technology, now is the time to start thinking about it. Assemble your friends. Start thinking about how you can barter and swap and form guilds and really take a swing. Why not? You’re going to have some free time on your hands. So do it.
Matt Alder [00:21:12]:
Laurie, thank you very much for talking to me.
Laurie Ruettimann [00:21:15]:
Yeah, I enjoyed it. Thanks again.
Matt Alder [00:21:17]:
My thanks to Laurie Ruettimann . You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@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.
