The pace of change in business seems to get quicker every day. Disruption is everywhere, and companies are having to be ever more agile and ever more flexible. This means that many Talent Acquisition teams are having to work at an unprecedented pace and deal with challenges that are continually evolving.
My guest this week is Ronan Mooney, Chief of Staff and Head of HR for Web Summit. Web Summit is currently in massive scale-up mode and Ronan has some brilliant insights to share on dealing with hyper growth and rapid change.
In the interview we discuss:
• The recruitment challenges of a scale up business
• Developing a recruiting team which is fit for purpose
• Managing stakeholder’s time
• Metrics and monitoring
• The importance of an honest pitch and recruitment process
• How expert recruiters can build credibility in 30 seconds
• Recruiting with no established employer brand.
Ronan also gives us his take on recruiting technology and shares what he is looking forward to the most about attending the Hiring Success conference in Berlin in September.
More details on the Hiring Success Conference
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Smart Recruiters, the hiring success company. Smart Recruiters is an enterprise grade talent acquisition suite designed for hiring success. Move beyond applicant tracking with a modern platform that provides everything you need to attract, select and hire the best talent. From candidate relationship management, sourcing and recruitment marketing to screening, selection and offer management experience. A talent acquisition suite with a user experience that candidates, hiring managers and recruiters all love. Companies from Kelly Services to Visa to Bosch leverage Smart recruiters to achieve hiring success and expand their business. Visit smart recruiters@www.smartrecruiters.com to find out why companies across the globe consider them the number one ATS replacement.
Matt Alder [00:01:14]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 144 of the Recruiting Feature podcast. The pace of change in business seems to get quicker every day. Disruption is everywhere and companies are having to be ever more flexible and agile. All this means that many talent acquisition teams are having to work at an unprecedented pace and deal with challenges that are constantly evolving. My guest this week works for an organization currently in hypergrowth mode and has some brilliant insights to share on dealing with rapid growth and change. Ronan Mooney is Chief of Staff and Head of HR at Web Summit. Enjoy the interview. Hi Ronan, and welcome to the podcast.
Ronan Mooney [00:02:01]:
Thanks very much. How are you, Matt?
Matt Alder [00:02:02]:
I’m very good today, thank you very much. It’s a nice sunny day still here in Scotland, which is always good. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone a little bit about what you do?
Ronan Mooney [00:02:14]:
So my name is Ronan Mooney. I’m the Chief of Staff and Head of HR for Web Summit. What that means is I have been here since April 2017 helping to scale this business. We run a series of technology festivals around the world in Lisbon, North America, Hong Kong, and here in our hometown of Dublin. And yeah, we’ve scaled significantly both our headquarters here and internationally over the last 12, 18 months.
Matt Alder [00:02:45]:
Now, I think it’s probably important for the people who may not be familiar with Web Summit just to tell people the kind of scale of it. I mean, could you give us a bit of the history of Web Summit in terms of the kind of audience size it started with and where it’s got to now, and also perhaps some of the kind of speakers that it attracts?
Ronan Mooney [00:03:05]:
Yeah, it’s a real success story of how to come in and disrupt a fairly well established industry. So tech conferences have been gone for decades. Web Summit was started Eight years ago here in Dublin by three co founders who were early mid twenties but wanted to bring something new to the tech conference experience. And they established a content led event here in Dublin, very humble beginnings, where they invited three or four named speakers and attracted 400 attendees. But the concept of it was to bring debate and thought leadership back to the tech conference experience and that really resonated and it’s scaled significantly since then. So that initial event of 400 people grew year on year to now. We run four events globally and the format of them, the scalability has changed, but the concept is still the same where we have C level leaders, recognized thought leaders in their industry, telling us what’s happening now, but also in the future. SO Web Summit 2017 saw 65,000 attendees in Lisbon. We descend on Lisbon for the week in November and in that Altice arena, which holds 11,000 people, we had, you know, former Vice President Al Gore talking very passionately about the human impact on climate change and how it’s on us to change the narrative. The introduction that opened the event by it was the last recording interview by Stephen Hawking talking about the rise of AI and how it is both an exciting and perilous situation. And then in the pavilions around the Altis arena, which are the size of airplane hangars, we have 13 different stages running concurrently with leaders in technology and healthcare and music and fashion. So it is very much that festival feel. And then the other events we run around the world have a very similar format, but we’ve localized them to their region. So North America, five years ago we established our event there called Collision. It has been in New Orleans for the last three years and we’re moving it to Toronto next year. We run an event in Hong Kong for the last four years called Rise. And then for the fintech industry, we run our smallest, newest event called MoneyConf and that has about 5,000 attendees. But all of those events, again, the concept behind them is bring people together and have discussions, have debates, and in that connect people, whether that’s investors with startups, thought leaders, collaborators. And it is extraordinary. We measure somewhere in the region of $180 to $190 million US dollars worth of investment is secured during the week of Web Summit. And then following on from the event, you can see further investment taking place. And that’s really what we’re very proud of, the connections that we make and the thought leadership that comes out of and the discussions that come out of each of our events.
Matt Alder [00:06:36]:
So going from an event of 400 people to an event of 65,000 people. I’m guessing that’s, that’s obviously quite a scale up and I’m guessing that’s presented some interesting recruitment challenges. So, so, so what kind of recruitment challenges do you guys face and what you like to sort of, sort of face in the future?
Ronan Mooney [00:06:57]:
So not all of this is my journey obviously. I sit with our founders. Our CEO Paddy Cosgrave kind of talks of the early days where it’s a lot of ambitious, potentially inexperienced people coming together to try and establish something disruptive and that’s what they achieved in the early days. So it is a lot of ambition and hard work and legwork to start something new. And anyone who works in a startup will, that will resonate with them. The challenges that we faced over the last 18 months is how we manage the scalability of our company, the company behind these world class events. So we’ve made that evolutionary jump from startup to hyper growth. And the challenges in hyper growth is choosing your battles. We are a company that people come to our events so they see what we produce. But our employer, brand people being aware that there’s a company behind us that’s a media challenge and how we compete. Our headquarters are here in Dublin, but we’re establishing offices in Toronto and Hong Kong. We have an office now in Lisbon and Portugal. We’re making strategic hires around the world from London to New York to San Francisco to Beijing. And so our challenge is telling our story and telling it honestly about what the opportunity is, but also what the challenges are in that scalability. But it’s actually in that telling of what our challenges are that resonates with real talent that we can’t say we’re the biggest company in the world. We’re not a Google, we’re not an Apple, but we are a company that achieves extraordinary things and our greatest days are still ahead of us. So telling candidates what our challenges are and how they can help solve those problems is actually how we’ve started to resonate with candidates who may never have talked to us before. And the second challenge is the breadth of requirements that we have. So 12, 18 months ago we had just over 100 people, all based here in Dublin. We’ve established three new offices, but we have five separate divisions. As a company that creates events, you’d expect we have event managers and event producers, but we also have a team of data scientists and engineers who build our own technology and help us manage and grow our events. We have various different types of salespeople and fulfillment marketing and so the breadth of talent we require and immediate, you know, we’ve made 100 hires in less than 12 months. We’ve another hundred hires to make. Not, you know, at just, I suppose not at a single level, but at all levels, including C level positions. So we’re adding new leadership to this business both here in Dublin and internationally. So how we start to solve that problem is I had to hire a really good recruitment team. And that’s, you know, nothing that we’ve done is groundbreaking, but getting it done and getting it done in the right way has been the challenge. And so I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve developed a recruitment team around me that essentially is fit for purpose, you know, able to work with internal stakeholders, you know, do that lovely tightrope walk every recruiter does between managing a stakeholder’s expectations as well as, you know, understanding what the market is able to provide in a timely fashion that we can get these people, these talented, wonderful people that will help us grow, you know, exponentially from where we once were. And, you know, it’s not a straight line and you’re constantly reviewing. One of the things we do on a weekly basis is monitor our ratios, how, you know, how many people are we bringing through the process, while also making sure that we’re managing our internal stakeholders most important asset, which is their time, making sure that we’re bringing people through an interview process that is reflective of who we are, not what we hope or a version of events. We want an honest recruitment process that allows us to interview the candidate, but also similarly allows the candidate to assess us because that’s the meeting of minds. It’s not about just putting people in seats. It’s about putting a sustainable level of talent that will help us scale faster than we’ve ever done before.
Matt Alder [00:11:43]:
There are, there are so many things I want to ask more questions about in that. I mean, it sounds, you know, it sounds like there’s an incredible amount of stuff going on. So just to kind of drill into to some of this, I’m keen to sort of talk about the employer brand aspect of this and perhaps the sort of the process and the candidate experience. But before I do that, you sort of mentioned that you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’ve kind of put together a recruitment, a recruitment team. And I’m presuming that everything you do, you have to do, you know, you have to do very, very, very, very quickly, but also very, very well. How, how did you go about bringing in the recruitment team that you, that what advice could you share with someone who might be looking to do something similar in their organization?
Ronan Mooney [00:12:32]:
Maybe. Matt is the first controversial thing I will say to you, because I do. I think sometimes as recruiters we have to be very aware of our bias. And I have a very obvious bias if you look at my recruitment team, which they all have worked in agency before, like myself, and this is not to say anything disparaging about those recruiters who do an extraordinary job in house, but I do think that element or experience working in agency recruitment, certainly for a company who’s going through the degree of scalability we are going through and will continue to go through for the foreseeable future, we need to be able to find great talent both at scale and at speed. So when I built out this recruitment team, I was very honest with what we needed. I needed recruiters who didn’t rely on inbound flow of candidates. I needed people who knew what it was to deal with the stuff that we were doing 12 years ago. Boolean searches. With all the technology advancements and all the different platforms that exist, we’re still doing again the, the basics frequently to make sure the outbound outreach to attract talent in is still being done. So each of the people that are on the team now own a part of this business from stakeholder management. So one recruiter is in charge of our engineering recruitment, the other in charge of our commercial acquisition, the other in charge of the sourcing of, you know, event producers and event managers. Because I genuinely believe, you know, when I started an agency, you know, significant time ago, it was all about the more specialist you become, the more expert you are, the more you’re able to manage not just the candid experience, but your credibility when you’re out, when you’re trying to attract someone to your business who’s potentially never heard of your business before or never even thought of you as a prospective employer. You have to be able to talk from a level of credibility. And I genuinely believe in that first 30 seconds of recruiters outreach phone call. The candidate is looking for credibility. And so the recruiters that I’ve surrounded myself with come with that credibility. They come with a level of understanding of their market or their specialization. They know how to manage internal stakeholders in both telling them, you know, asking good questions and qualifying what they need, but then balancing it in that consultative manner of saying, right, I understand you want these 10 requirements, but what are the top three? And then finding what the market’s able to provide and managing that process from all the cliches you like to Use Matt, you know, from cradle to grave, full360 but this genuinely is it. We do not have a team of resourcer, we don’t have an onboarding. The recruitment team here own everything from the posting of the jobs to the onboarding and beyond. And I believe for now that fulfills our requirements for the scalability that we need. But one of the things I say to my team all the time, we have to be open to change and when this business does take its next evolutionary step, we have to adapt to it. I think the best recruitment teams out there that I’ve seen work, the best recruiters I know are like chameleons. We adapt and evolve around the different requirements of the business.
Matt Alder [00:16:24]:
So just to dig a bit deeper into kind of that opening pitch in terms of how you’re kind of initially selling yourselves to candidates that you’re reaching out to that may not have heard of you. You know, you mentioned that you probably haven’t had time to build a kind of a very visible, you know, employer brand, talent brand. How have you kind of sort of developed that pitch to candidates and what’s their thinking behind it?
Ronan Mooney [00:16:59]:
Yeah, it’s an interesting process to go through because there’s many, many schools of thought to this. And you know, again, I talk from my personal and from this vantage point, so by no means am I dictating to anyone to follow suit. But I do think the challenge you have, if you are, you know, Dublin is an interesting location from a talent perspective. You know, we do have, you know, a population, both domestic and that’s moved here forward, is highly educated but also highly mobile. But it’s also a really competitive market. You know, you’ve got Emea headquarters for the biggest brands in the world and they’re all within a 30 minute commute of each other. So, you know, one of the things I identified good and early when we started was we’re not, we shouldn’t. And in fact we, our unique selling point should be not to compete with those businesses by saying we’re all things, that it’s a bed of roses here. Actually we should go with a message that tells of our successes that says, look at this startup that’s now going through hyper growth. Look at this company that creates four global events that attracts over 100,000 people. And look at this small team that’s managed to pull this off with all the challenges that go with it. And whether it’s in our advertising, whether it’s in our initial phone screen or whether that’s in the, throughout the Interview process, talk about the problems, give a honest version of events, of saying, this is what the challenge and this is actually what this hire represents. Because if you’re in a company of 4, 5, 6,000 people or more, you can talk a very different story. And all the assets and all the challenges that go with that, but for our requirements, you know, each hire represents a significant investment and also a significant asset that we now have in both experience, but also bandwidth that we represent so we can actually show a candidate their direct impact to our bottom line, to how we’re able to deliver and scale events and plan and execute events even better. And that really resonates with people. It resonates with me. It’s why I joined this business. Because, you know, don’t tell me about all the. All the, you know, all the wonderful things that have already been done in isolation. Tell me that, because that shows me where you’ve come from. But tell me a story about, you know, what problem I can solve, because that’s ultimately beyond, you know, if you look at any candidate survey, you can ask them, you know, what motivates them, and salary obviously is up there, but it’s not actually the first or second or even the third most motivating piece. If you ask candidates, and we survey candidates all the time who completed the interview process, what they’re interested in is understanding the difference they can make. You know, you talk to the millennials and whatever that actually represents is a category anymore. But, you know, they want to know that they’re making a difference, whether that’s in finance or, or data science, in engineering or sales. They want to know that what they do makes a difference. So our opening pitch or how we’ve developed our engagement is say, we have done so much with so little over eight years and look what we’ve created, but we now want to be somewhere else. We want to scale to a business that is not just doing one event of 65,000 people. We want to be doing how many X number of events with 65,000 people. If we’re building technology in house of this size, we want to do it with this level of impact and so telling people of the scalability, but also the challenges with that gives them an idea of the difference they can make if they join our business. And that’s the story we’ve been telling. And actually that’s the story we’ve been attracting. And one of the most satisfying things I have is when someone is, say, relocating to Dublin and they do have a choice of the Microsoft and Google of the world that are based out of Dublin and they have offers from them, they’re choosing us now. We’ve been extremely lucky. But I’d like to think that being very honest and very transparent about the challenges we have and how they can help solve those problems has significantly helped in attracting that key talent that we’re looking for.
Matt Alder [00:21:40]:
Really interesting stuff there and I can see, you know, that’s, that’s obviously working for you really, really, really, really well. One question would be what, what role is technology playing in your process? You’re obviously, you’ve talked a lot about the, the quality of the recruiters and also how you’ve, you know, scoped your, your pitch and your recruitment process. How is technology supporting, supporting you through, through your journey?
Ronan Mooney [00:22:05]:
From my perspective, the fundamental challenge I have with any technology and there’s so many different platforms and apps now out there, there’s AI backed solutions that can do the initial screen for you based on a job spec and they are extraordinary in what they do. And there is absolutely. There’s so much innovation in the recruitment space that needs to happen because it is at its essence a human led and human flawed industry. The problem you have right now is we are still using the same fundamental product, if you like, that existed 100 years ago, which is the CV. It is created by the candidate with no real guidance or criteria. It has flawed amounts of information in it depending on the person who’s written it. And similarly it’s reviewed fundamentally by another human and the innovation in that hasn’t changed. So my challenge, and even at our own events we see startup companies who are trying to innovate in this space. And what I do see as the next evolutionary step for all recruiters is how they do adapt AI into that initial screen because it is still a very manual process to do outreach and find relevant candidates. There’s one thing to I think there’s been far more innovation and we’ve certainly used it from a candidate attraction perspective. From a recruitment advertising, I think there’s been the rise of pay per click advertising has seen far more efficient spend in how companies that go about attracting talent and recruiters have had to marry their skill set in finding talent with a marketing strategy. And I liaise internally with our marketing team consistently to make sure that whatever we’re doing from a recruitment point of view complements what we’re doing from a company marketing perspective. And I do think the biggest impact to most recruiters currently has been the rise of pay per click advertising opposed to the traditional job board Model. Again, I am biased in this. I used to work for one of the leading, if not the leading employment platforms in D.com for five years. So I’m an advocate of that. But there is still so much headroom in what can be done. And so I do think the development of AI in the recruitment sector to help really decrease the time and manual process of both selecting and essentially screening candidates, as well as throwing up a selection of relevant candidates from set criteria. That has innovation and it is happening. But whoever actually invents the replacement for the humble CV is going to be a multi billionaire because that’s the fundamental flaw. It still requires a huge amount of manual labor. I also am, you know, I am a technology enthusiast, but I am still a believer that as long as we’re hiring humans, nothing fundamentally replaces the process of getting, you know, what recruiters are built to do. Get, you know, an internal stakeholder, get a hiring manager in an interview room with a really good candidate and step back and let that happen. That fundamentally has some change. And again, part of me doesn’t want that to change because essentially that’s what we do.
Matt Alder [00:26:14]:
So, final question. We’re both speaking at the Smart Recruiters Hiring Success event in September. What are you looking forward to about attending that event?
Ronan Mooney [00:26:26]:
It’s a real nice selection of speakers and thought leaders. And I do think we are at an evolutionary step within the recruitment industry where we need to be far more connected to one another. You know, we can, you know, when I meet up with other recruiters, recruitment leaders, you know, there can be that element of polite but rivalry. We’re all competing for talent, but the reality is we have to, we are going to lead the innovation needed within the recruitment sector. Whatever technologies are developed, they’re implemented and used by us. And I do think more dialogue, more connectiveness. And again, it breeds through to the fundamentals of what Web Summit is about is the basic human contact of this is my world and my challenges. What’s your world and your challenges like? What are the similarities? What can we learn from each other? And you know, the event in Berlin I’m really excited about is essentially learning from other people’s experiences because we’re all in our own evolutionary development in companies. You know, other companies have gone through what we’re going through now. I’m very interested in seeing how they’ve managed those challenges. But similarly, there are companies that have been, you know, have yet to go through the rapid change we’re going through. And I’d love to be able to give them my own experience and see if we can help. Because we should. As a recruitment industry, we should be helping each other rather than solely looking at each other as avenues for talent to steal from each other.
Matt Alder [00:28:08]:
Ronan, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ronan Mooney [00:28:10]:
Thank you very much, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:28:12]:
My thanks to Ronan. If you’d like to join us at the Hiring Success Conference in Berlin in September, you can find out more at www.smartrecruiters.com hiring-success Berlin 2018. 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.
