The changing relationship between talent acquisition and talent management is something we’ve been talking about a lot in 2020. With accelerated digital transformation causing a skill crisis for many employers, the role of learning across the talent acquisition journey is increasingly important. Upskilling recruiters and hiring managers is an obvious part of this, but what about the potential for employers to use digital learning systems to upskill talent pools of potential hires.
To explore this in more detail, my guest this week is Peter Gold, manager of Recruiting Solutions EMEA for Cornerstone On Demand. Cornerstone is doing some pioneering work in this area, and with over 30 years of experience in recruiting, Peter has a lot of insights to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ Recruiting resilience
▪ The changing relationship between skills and talent acquisition
▪ Skills matching and gap analysis via machine learning
▪ Upskilling talent pools
▪ Moving to a buy and build model of talent acquisition
▪ Providing learning content on a limited budget
▪ Hiring Heroes
▪ Predictions for the future of talent acquisition
Subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast is provided by Cornerstone on Demand. Cornerstone is the world’s leading talent technology specialist, helping organizations drive people’s success in uncertain times. Their enterprise class talent acquisition platform, TalentLink supports recruiting teams with the challenges of today, helping clients to deliver digital first hiring experiences while guiding them in the shift to skills based hiring and their missions to build more diverse workforces globally. If engaging hiring and onboarding the very best people in today’s environment is important to you, visit www.corstoneondemand.co.uk and get in touch to find out why. TalentLink is the platform built for the smarter recruiter.
Matt Alder [00:01:12]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 314 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The changing relationship between talent acquisition and talent management is something we’ve been talking about a lot in 2020. With accelerated digital transformation causing a skills crisis for many employers, the role of learning across the talent acquisition journey is increasingly important. Upskilling recruiters and hiring managers is an obvious part of this. But what about the potential for employers to use digital learning systems to upskill talent pools of potential hires? To explore this in more detail, my guest this week is Peter Gold, Manager of recruiting solutions at EMEA for Cornerstone on Demand. Cornerstone is doing some pioneering work in this area and with over 30 years of experience in recruiting, Peter has a lot of insights to share. Hi Peter and welcome to the podcast.
Peter Gold [00:02:17]:
Hi Matt, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:18]:
An absolute pleasure to have you back on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Peter Gold [00:02:24]:
Yeah, sure. I’m Peter Gold, I work for Cornerstone on Demand and my role is the kind of the subject matter expert of recruitment. Having been in the industry for over 30 years now.
Matt Alder [00:02:37]:
Tell us a little bit more about Cornerstone on Demand for people who aren’t. Who aren’t familiar with it.
Peter Gold [00:02:42]:
So Cornerstone on demand started 21 years ago actually as a learning platform and over the years have progressed from learning into talent management. And a part of that progression into talent management included recruiting. So they started building an ATS about seven years ago. And then as you’re probably aware, they acquired SABA in the middle of Pandemic earlier this year. So SABA were the world’s second largest learning talent management platform. Cornerstone were the largest. So we put them two together and built an even bigger business. So we now have two ATSs, one’s talent link, one’s Cornerstone Recruiting. And so we have kind of a best of breed standalone platform in TalentLink and a fully integrated talent management platform that includes recruiting as part of that.
Matt Alder [00:03:30]:
Now we’ll sort of talk in a minute about some of the implications and things that come out of combining talent management and talent acquisition. Before we do though, tell us how you’re seeing the market at the moment from the employers that you’re talking to. What are the sort of issues that they’re facing? What are they doing to solve them?
Peter Gold [00:03:49]:
Yeah, I mean the kind of three things we keep hearing about are agility. So obviously recruiters being able to swap and change what they’re doing, how they’re reacting to the changes in the market because of the pandemic. Arguably recruiters have always had to have been agile. I just think it’s a bit more polarized now because of the pandemic. Diversity, hiring, it’s all again, it’s always been a major issue for organisations but it’s just again becoming more of a priority at the moment, particularly as technology is there to help some of that process and part of that kind of screening and of course attraction of the right kind of people. And then the other thing is kind of wrapped up within the candidate experience kind of genre is the whole skills piece matching, finding the right candidates, but doing that in a way that gives the candidate still a good experience but delivers the right business impact. So they’re the kind of, the three kind of key areas that we’re kind of hearing all the time.
Matt Alder [00:04:50]:
Let’s talk about the skills side of this. So there’s been a huge amount of talk about skills this year about companies having to change their business model, digital transformation being very aggressively speeded up because of the pandemic and the issues, the issues around it. And of course there was a report by the World Economic Forum a few weeks ago that that kind of really outlined that the majority of employees are going to have to update or reskill themselves in the next few years to keep up with the sort of the pace of change of technology within the workplace and companies. What’s your take on the sort of the relation between skills and talent acquisition in terms of where we are currently?
Peter Gold [00:05:36]:
The whole skills thing has always been there. Let’s be honest, if you think about. You and I have both been in this industry quite a while now and we’ve seen a lot of change over the years and I would kind of suggest that both you and I have probably been, have done, been very much focused on a self learning approach. We haven’t had people, you Know, tell us how to become a podcaster, tell us how to become an expert in SEO. We’ve just gone out and learned those skills in order to become better at what we do and, you know, evolve our own kind of careers. So I think the skills thing has never gone away. It’s always been there. But what is different now is there’s a lot of focus on it and the whole digital transformation piece is being accelerated because of the pandemic and people are talking about skills. But the advantage we have now versus, let’s say, 10 years ago, the conversation is right at the top of the agenda. But also the technology is, it allows us as an industry to identify what skills are missing and help candidates understand and employees what skills are missing. So if you take Cornerstone Learning as an example, they have loads of data, 20 odd years of data around what training people take, what the business impact of that training has been, what the individual skill increase has been from that training and what kind of training works, what kind of training doesn’t work. We acquired a company called Clustree just before we acquired Saba earlier in the year. And what Clustree have, they have all the job titles and they have all the skills that are associated to those job titles. But effectively Cornerstone had a list, Clustery had a list, and they were kind of almost run in isolation. But you add those two things together and all of a sudden you’ve got the big data and the technology and the machine learning that can actually say, well, here is a job title that has these skills that an employee or candidate doesn’t necessarily know they have those skills. So the machine can kind of say, here’s some information person, you help validate that. Which off the back of then validating the skills the person has that I could do it myself, or the machine can make recommendations, kind of the Netflix kind of Amazon recommendations type mindset. But then off the back of now knowing the skills and then matching that to the kind of jobs that somebody wants to do, we’re able to say, or the machines are able to say, well, this is the training that you should do in order to help you progress in your career. So from an internal mobility point of view, traditionally you’ve needed to have all the performance data in order to be able to say these are the competencies of Matt. This is how he matches up against this job. And if he wants to change career path, these are the kind of learning interventions he should take in order to move his career in the right way. And Cornerstone already does that. But with having the, the skills engine as well, we now be able to accelerate that learning of the individual on more generic data. And so that if you think about from the talent acquisition point of view, rather than say, to a candidate who comes to your career site, find a job, you can actually say, well, let’s look at your profile and we can recommend jobs to you. And off the back of the recommendation show how well you are matched, and off the back of the match say, well, and here’s some kind of training that we would actually provide to you as part of your career. Career or hey, who knows, maybe as part of the candidate experience, you give some skills training as part of that journey.
Matt Alder [00:09:21]:
That’s just so interesting because the internal mobility piece is something that sort of, you know, comes obviously out of this. You know, employers are going to have to reskill the employees that they have and offer them access to systems where they can, that can help them, help them learn those skills. But taking that concept actually into talent acquisition and obviously, you know, working on the basis that there aren’t enough people with the skills that companies need to hire, are you actually saying that it becomes a responsibility of the, of the hiring company to help upskill the people that it wants to hire?
Peter Gold [00:09:58]:
Yeah, I mean, if you think about talent acquisition, it’s, you know, it says it all in the name. It’s all about acquiring something. So, you know, recruitment has always been about go out and find and buy that talent. And all the technologies that have been built have all been around how to make it easier for the recruiter to find, attract and buy that talent. But you can’t keep hiring. That doesn’t exist. So I believe we’ve got to move away from a buy talent to a build talent. Obviously you still got to buy some talent, but I think we’ve got to have a much stronger focus on building talent now. You know, people listening might think, nah, he’s wrong. He’s talking a lot of, you know, tosh here. Yeah, I’ve said these kind of things in the past. You know, I wrote a book literally 10 years ago called who Moved My Talent? And it was actually Falumes, funnily enough. And that book had a lot of predictions and ideas in it. Things such as, you know, one day every organization will have something like workplace, you know, an internal social network. And of course that was scoffed at and said, yeah, that’ll never happen. And of course now that’s commonplace. So in the same way, you know, I’m kind of talking about this utopian idea of building talent and so a lot of people say, well, that’s not going to. Not going to happen. I really do think it will and I really think it’s absolutely vital. And you know, we could be talking anything from, you know, we’re looking for a particular type of engineering skill. Here’s some information, there’s some learning you could do to help prepare you for an interview with us when we want to talk to you about AI in engineering. Or here’s some skills training you could do if you’re going to work in a call centre. Or here’s some. It could be anything, it could be simple. These are some COVID policies we have and some Covid training we have. If you’re going to come and work in our takeaway restaurant or hopefully restaurant allows people to sit inside one day, then these are the things you will have to follow and we will assess this with you as part of your interview. So absolutely, I think that we, we will and have to move from a pure buy model to a buy and build model. But a candidate from a candidate perspective, not just an employee perspective.
Matt Alder [00:12:05]:
I suppose there’s a couple of aspects to this. There’s the learning technology, if you like, that could be utilized to make this happen. And obviously lots of companies offer that technology and lots of employers have that technology and those sort of capabilities already. I suppose the interesting thing for me would be around the content because how do companies get started with this? What do they do if they don’t have a budget to produce this kind of learning content?
Peter Gold [00:12:32]:
I think the first thing is there’s two types of recruiters. There are those recruiters that are quite siloed and quite transactional in their model, in their activity and in their mindset. And so they will carry on as they are and they will do what they’ll do. Those that are prepared to be look at talent more holistically and have the right kind of culture within their organization. The first thing to do is obviously talk to your L and D colleagues, see what they can do to help you. Because organizations spend a fortune on content. So it may be that you’ve already got some of the content that is relatively low cost. It’s not particularly secret to your organization. So you could actually there might already be content you could put out there, maybe within a portal or maybe within your ats, because most applicant tracking systems now have a candidate portal area. So you could put it in there once somebody started the application process, or even if you’re using a talent pool type system, then it may be that, that Platform allows you to put learning content in there. So that’s the first thing. Secondly, again, going back to the fact that Cornerstone’s been doing training and learning for so long, we know the kind of learning that people absolutely enjoy and absorb and benefit from and short TED Talks type content that’s on YouTube or on Vimeo. That kind of stuff is really useful. So it could be you actually go just say, well, look what’s out there. What kind of relevant information is out there. So it could be that resilience is a topic within your organization and you think, well, okay, let’s find some relevant videos on resilience. And there’s a fantastic video by a lady called Lucy horn. It’s about 15 minutes, it’s a TED talk, it’s on YouTube. Something as simple as that you could embed within your career site because it’s YouTube. So there’s lots of different ways of looking at it.
Matt Alder [00:14:19]:
Are there any examples of things that Cornerstone’s done in this area?
Peter Gold [00:14:22]:
Yeah, I mean, earlier in the year we launched something called Cornerstone Cares. So Cornerstone Cares was launched right in the kind of the middle of the pandemic early stages. And that portal was free to everybody. And it contained a number of what we call playlists. One was focused around what is the pandemic? To try and educate people on how to look after themselves and stay safe. There was a playlist around health and wellbeing, things you can be doing during the pandemic to stay, you know, mentally strong. And then third about working from home, because obviously so many people all of a sudden were working from home. So we had a playlist around how we had to remain productive and focused and do’s and don’ts of working from home. So that’s something that Cornerstone did early on in the year. We’re also because of this whole skills thing. And again, having spoken to our recruitment user group earlier in the year, we were talking about some of the challenges they were facing and we talked about the challenges which you mentioned earlier. We also then talked about some specific operational needs they had, such as they wanted to keep candidates warm, they didn’t know how to nurture them properly, you know. Why is that? Well, because it’s recruitment marketing. We’re not really great at that. So. Okay, well, if you had some training, would that help? Well, obviously, yes. So we’re about to launch again a training portal for the talent acquisition industry. It’s not just for our clients. We’re calling it Hiring Heroes. There is a reason for that name which we’ll explain another time, but Hiring Heroes is a training portal for talent acquisition people. And we’re starting that off with three playlists. One is recruitment marketing, two is talent sourcing, because again, that was another skill they were looking for. And the third one, which is a bit more kind of strategic, is how to build a business case. Because obviously, with all the changes in the world of recruitment, recruiters need different technology. Maybe they need plug in technologies to their ats, they may even need a new ats. But recruiters aren’t typically great at asking for money because they don’t build business cases and they don’t talk the right language of the cfo. So we’ve put together a specific training course around how to build a business case. So they’re some of the kind of things we’re doing around saying, look, this is how you know the world needs to improve your skills. And these are some of the kind of options you’ve got and some of the channels you’ve got to improve your skills.
Matt Alder [00:16:42]:
Final question. Very, very difficult to predict what the future is going to be at the moment. But I’m still kind of. I’m still asking everyone this question because I think it’s interesting to get different perspectives on that. So what do you think the next 12 to 24 months looks like for talent acquisition?
Peter Gold [00:17:00]:
I’ll tell you what I think it should look like because obviously I can’t say what it, what it will look like, but what I think it should look like is recruiters need to understand the value they add to the organisation and understand that they are professionals who know how to do their job. So let me give you an example, what I mean by that. If you are a recruiter taking a brief from a hiring manager and as part of taking that brief, you look at the working environment, you would not then, having seen the work environment, say to the engineering manager, yeah, I wouldn’t kind of work to those tolerances for that kind of titanium. Or you wouldn’t say to the IT manager, well, I would. Wouldn’t use that code language to, you know, to write that program. Or you wouldn’t talk to the marketing people, say, I’m not sure about those designs. I would have done it slightly differently. You wouldn’t question their professionalism, you just wouldn’t do that. Yet as recruiters, we are questioned all the time on the candidates we submit. We go, kind of go, here are, here are two or three really good candidates. And the line managers or hiring manager will very often say, well, yeah, it’s a candidate LED market at the moment. I’d like to see some more candidates, please. And the poor recruiter’s pulling the hair out thinking there just aren’t three more people as good as this. But we aren’t always in a position or feel we’re able to push back. So I think recruiters need to start enforcing that. And as a result of that, I think, you know, I’m not saying. Well, I am saying let’s eradicate the hiring manager out of the decision making process. Let’s say to the hiring manager, this is what you need. This is what we’ve agreed as a specification and the requirements for the person. And here are two people that are the right match for your position, Mr. Hiring or Mrs. Hiring Manager. And because they’re not haven’t got all the skills necessary, we’ve actually got training aligned to these people and this is how they’ll meet your criteria. And that’s what I think should happen. And the recruiter should make the process far more controlled by recruitment, not controlled by the hiring manager. And that then has a positive impact on the candidate experience. And we talk about candidate experience forever as being one of the top three priorities. So let’s actually put our money where our mouth is and say, no more hiring manager interventions because it creates problems, it creates time delays. There’s often bias in that decision making process. So actually I’m the professional. These are the candidates that are right for you. That’s what I think should happen.
Matt Alder [00:19:27]:
Peter, thank you very much for talking to me.
Peter Gold [00:19:30]:
My pleasure, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:19:31]:
My thanks to Peter Gold. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your favorite podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search through all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
