The corporate focus on Talent Acquisition is significant at the moment as companies across the world deal with the challenges of getting the right talent into their organisations. But what strategies do talent acquisition leaders need to successfully scale their recruiting operations at a time of such significant transformation?
My guest this week is someone who has been scaling recruiting teams in Silicon Valley for a long time. Richard Cho is Head of Recruiting at Robinhood, having previously been with Facebook, Dropbox, Machine Zone and The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Robinhood recently made headlines in the industry by acquiring recruiting firm Binc; I am delighted that Richard agreed to come on the show to talk about Robinhood’s strategy and share some hugely valuable insights into the way ahead for talent acquisition.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ The recruiting challenges at Robinhood
▪ Building the business case
▪ Don’t normalise the extraordinary, have the right foundation of resources in place.
▪ The three levels of talent acquisition technology
▪ Sophisticated data modelling to build capability models
▪ Building specialist interviewing capacity and gathering interview intelligence data
▪ Why diversity is a selection issue, not a pipeline issue
▪ The Binc acquisition and combining two recruiting cultures
▪ What will the future of talent acquisition look like
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 361 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The corporate focus on talent acquisition is significant at the moment as companies across the world deal with the challenges of getting the right talent into their organizations. But what strategies do talent acquisition leaders need to successfully scale their recruiting operations at a time of such significant transformation? My guest this week is someone who’s been scaling recruiting teams in Silicon Valley for a long time. Richard Cho is Head of Recruiting at Robinhood. Having previously been with Facebook, Dropbox, MachineZone and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Robinhood recently made headlines in the industry by acquiring recruiting firm Binc. I’m delighted that Richard agreed to come on the show to talk about Robinhood’s strategy and share some hugely valuable insights into the way ahead for talent acquisition. Hi Richard and welcome to the podcast.
Richard Cho [00:02:19]:
Hi Matt, Good to, good to chat with you again. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:23]:
My absolute pleasure. Brilliant to have you on the show. Could you just quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Richard Cho [00:02:30]:
My name is Richard Cho, but most people start to call me Cho over time. So if you hear about some guy named Cho at Robinhood, that’s me. No one, no one else. You know, I’ve been doing this recruiting thing for 22 years, but the last 14 years I’ve been lucky enough to join lots of hyper growth companies helping them scale from 500 to 6000 a place like Facebook and 5001200 at Dropbox. And here I am doing it all over again at Robinhood. As the head of recruiting started here, there was 390 people at the company and we now have over 2,000 people at the company in just over two years. So I guess. What do I do at the company? Well, help the organization be set up for scale. But mostly it’s firefighting all day long, all day, every day.
Matt Alder [00:03:29]:
Absolutely. I can imagine. And for listeners who may not be familiar with Robinhood and what it does, could you just talk us through and tell us a little bit about the company?
Richard Cho [00:03:39]:
Yeah, I mean, there are specific things that we’d like to try to describe Robinhood. Ultimately, our mission is to democratize finance for all. We’ve created a commission free platform that lets all types of investors amateur experience, trade stocks, options, ETFs, exchange traded funds, and cryptocurrencies. Ultimately, we want people to be able to learn about investing, take control of their financial future and all the possibilities that come along with it.
Matt Alder [00:04:08]:
Now, you’ve talked there about just how rapidly Robinhood’s scaling at the moment. Talk us through the sort of the evolving recruiting challenges that you have and how your strategies sort of really evolve to meet them.
Richard Cho [00:04:22]:
Basically, yeah. Do we have two hours on this podcast? I guess so. Look, I mean, it’s very similar. Anytime you have to scale companies from one, you know, hundreds to thousands. What got you to hundreds is not really what’s going to be that helpful moving forward at scale. So the first thing it starts with is the resources that you have available. And ultimately companies. No company says, hey, recruiting hire with as minimal resources as you can. I mean, well, maybe some companies do, but if the ultimate goal is to exponentially grow. The conversations that I’ve had with previous leaders of organizations, founders, executives, is that if there’s a, a clear way to justify both growth and team investment in tools and other things, they’re 100% on board. So evidenced by it, Robinhood. I inherited a team of 14 people at the company. We now have over 300 people, I’m sorry, 314 people within the recruiting team. And we now have over 300 people on the recruiting team, which includes an acquisition that we could talk about later. But you know, that is the first thing is to set the foundation for the right number of resources, because what got you to hundreds of people at the organization won’t scale. And it very much, it feels like brute force recruiting. If you use that same math to calculate the number of resources and tools that you need, you start to standardize the extraordinary. And you don’t want to do that. You don’t want to normalize the extraordinary, because that math never takes you to thousands. Resources is first. Second is technology. It’s important to be very clear about the technology that’s going to stay with you at the next two or three evolutions of scale. And it also requires you to be very disciplined about putting in processes so that the recruiters, sourcers, coordinators all understand that moving from one person doing their job to hundreds of people doing their job, it requires having consistent processes. And then finally, and this is not, you know, this is actually one of the most important things you could do is you start to lay the foundation for a full transformation so that you can continue to focus on increasing diversity at the company. And again, that’s another. This is the reason why I’m like, do you have two hours for the podcast? Because we can go on each one of these tangents and spend at least 45 minutes on each of them.
Matt Alder [00:07:34]:
Absolutely. I mean, let’s just sort of dive in for a few more minutes to get a little bit more of a flavor. I mean, I suppose talk us through a little bit of about your thinking around technology and then perhaps just give us a bit more insight into the diversity strategy.
Richard Cho [00:07:49]:
So I have three buckets for technology. One is these are table stakes tools of the trade that every company needs. These are, you know, the common things that people all know around a proper ats. No one loves their ats, but you need one. And not only do you need one, but you need to make sure that the ATS has a great way to capture data so that you can do more sophisticated modeling to ensure that that feeds into the capacity models where you justify the resources. I mean, it’s a virtuous circle and it starts sort of at the heart of that. You want LinkedIn, you want CRM, and those are kind of table stakes. Then the second bucket is what are the things that really start to enhance or create efficiencies in your work. A great example for coordinators is like good time. The good time tool helps to create so much more efficiency where they automate at least 60% of the process so that you can scale really quickly. And that in my opinion, is one of the table stake tools of the trade. But it, it still falls into the innovative category because you can, you can run a recruiting organization and scale without good time. It’s just, you know, you should probably think about doing it. The and other parts that fall into innovative technologies are some of the companies that we’ve had midterm and short term relationships with where we’re, we’re piloting really interesting tools. So let me first talk about carrot, who we’ve had. I personally had a, about a four year relationship with them, which is a good chunk of the time that they’ve been around. The reason why I consider Carrot a tool, even though really the premise of their product is to have interviewers that are calibrated in with your engineering recruiting bar and the goal is to really supplement your entire tech screening process with them. The reason why I’m saying that they’re on the in this innovation bucket is given that their practices around recruiting, their ability to mitigate bias, create a more fair interview process, is innovative. Because of the things that I continue to see at every company that I’ve been a part of, both conscious and unconscious. Bias creeps in when you have your own engineers responsible for the interview. And it takes a long time to get those interviewers trained and recognized how to create a fair interview process. And Carrot helps to shortcut that. And they also help to save maker time where we reserve our engineers time for the on site interview. And so that is both, I guess, efficiency and innovation all wrapped in one. Then the second example I’ll use in this innovation bucket is a company called medaview, where medaview is really a nascent technology, but they’ve figured out a way to not only transcribe the interview process, but then they apply a machine learning bot, if you will, that starts to predict the effectiveness of that particular interviewer, how the questions were asked, apply them to how that question was asked in other interviewers, flagging areas where there’s some anomalies, and then also providing some suggestions on how to improve on the interview process. Again, the reason why that falls in the innovation category is it provides two very distinct things. One, it gives you a phenomenal tool to teach your interviewers how to be better at interviewing. We all could use more training there. But the second area, which I’m really excited to work on, which I’m really excited to work on with a founder, is applying those bots to think about how to apply some metrics, some other things to flag where bias may have occurred. If the machine is intelligent enough to continue to detect this, what you can do is it creates a phenomenal opportunity to create that feedback loop to help your interviewers get better at debiasing the interview process, which we all know is highly bias. So that’s in the innovation category. And then the third area around technology is really on, on mostly around efficiency. So what are the things that you can do to make things better, faster, more efficient? And there’s a number of things that we look at, but you know, the, the primary premise of that category is, you know, how you look at how, you look at your data. You know, what data dashboards do you have? So we currently use tableau to visualize our data and then we apply some commonly understood metrics around what would market standards be and look at where we can add more efficiency along the way. So those are the three buckets. And you know, the faster you scale, the more challenging all three of those buckets are as you, as you grow.
Matt Alder [00:14:09]:
Absolutely. I mean, that makes perfect sense. And you talked about bias and debiasing interviews and sort of training people as part of that. How does that fit into your, your approach to diversity?
Richard Cho [00:14:20]:
It’s the primary thing. So I, you know, I may, I mean, reformed, you know, talent leader, that is, that originally assumed it was a pipeline issue. You know, I don’t mind admitting it because I originally thought, wow, you know, diversity is super simple. We’re fishing from the wrong pond, so if we fish in new ponds, we’ll increase diversity. And boy was I wrong multiple times. And I learned my lesson as we, as I thought about the multiple times that I’ve attempted to increase diversity at really important companies and failed. And it really wasn’t until we, we looked at this problem set using a first principles lens at a company called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, where we got it partially right. And what I learned, what we learned there was that diversity is not simply a pipelining problem, it’s a selection problem. We looked at the data and it’s really clear that a vast majority of the interview outcome falls in this category of maybe yes or maybe no, you know, at that company or something on the order of 60% or more. So greater than half. It falls into this I’m not quite sure category. And it’s there because, you know, most people want to, you know, select in folks with non traditional backgrounds and so they fall in this I’m not quite sure category. So then how do companies adjudicate at that stage? They adjudicate by saying, okay, fine, I understand, like in this middle, where do they go to school and what company they work at? That’s the driver for people adjudicate. So not only, even if you, if you’ve increased diversity in the pipeline, you started teaching people about unconscious bias, you still fall into this category as I’m not quite sure. So then companies fall into that. Then they perpetuate this diversity debt because they fall into the category of, okay, well, if we’re not quite sure, where do they go to school and where do they work? Does anybody know this person? We all know that those Questions lead to increased diversity. So at Robinhood, we’re not immune to that. We’re working on this. There’s a long road ahead of us, but we’re starting first with that transformation around what are the things that we can do to create more weighting towards objective questions in the interview process? What are the things that we can do to ensure that we have checks and balances where interviewers hold interviewers accountable for when some of these consciousness, unconscious or conscious bias shows up in the process, how do we arm them with the right talking points so that we can flag them for discussion? So that when we go into this, the Offer Review Committee, that, you know, there’s someone in the room to be able to ensure that we don’t fall into that same adjudication trap and challenge where bias might occur. So again, this is a long process, this is another hour conversation, but hopefully that gave enough high level steps on what we’re doing at Robinhood.
Matt Alder [00:17:58]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. And thanks very much for sharing because I think there’s, there’s a huge amount of sort of valuable value, valuable insight there. Earlier in the conversation you mentioned an acquisition that you’d made and this is something that caused a sort of a fair bit of discussion in the recruitment community a few months ago. So give us some background and tell us what happened and what you did.
Richard Cho [00:18:18]:
Yeah, so, you know, we, we essentially acquired Binc and Binc has been known, they’ve been around for quite some time actually. Boris started Bink 30 years ago, actually. But it really was in the last, let’s call it, you know, 20 years, 20, 21 years that they’ve really shifted towards becoming the de facto recruitment process. Outsourcing for the best way to describe what they did, they go beyond RPOs, but they essentially were the de facto RPO for hypergrowth startups. I initially spoke to Boris in 2009 while I was at Facebook because we were really challenged with hiring product designers and there was a specific category of talent that was really hard to find in the market and Boris and I really hit it off. Now we didn’t work with them at Facebook, but later on in my career we officially started working together at a company called Machine Zone and Boris and Team and James, James Hunt was a co founder that really catalyzed the shift from a standard agency to this like sophisticated RPO that they were known for in the market. And it was at that point that I realized, wow, not only do we share very similar values, but every time we talked about the innovation and recruiting we Just kept riffing on each other’s ideas and kept going and making ideas really better. And it blossom into a phenomenal relationship where I brought him over to the Chance Zuckerberg initiative, I brought him over to Robinhood. It was because of the fact that we shared very similar hiring philosophies and we were complementary and added value to each other. And I’ve always said to them, like, at some point, like, boy, it wouldn’t be great to work together at some point. So fast forward, I met Robinhood. Every year we’re doubling. Year one, we hired over 400 people, where the previous year we hired just under 200. Year two, we hired over a thousand people. Again, previous year we hired just over 400. And this year we’re going to hire well over 2,000 people. And so we’re doubling every year. And I led into the intro talking about building capacity models. And part of scaling is to ensure you have the right resources. Well, guess what? Every time you double the output, you need to double your resources. So Binc had approximately 90ish people at the organization, 20 of which were already on our account. And what was important to me was that we were able to not only retain the 20ish folks that were on our account, but bring in leaders like Aborus and James and others on the team like Eli and Desiree to really round out the organization as we grow, in addition to the number of amazing ICs that they had on the team. So the need really was I needed to figure out a way to more than double the organization in a very short period of time. The market was really hot for recruiting professionals. It was really hard to find them quickly and hire them quickly. So the acquisition came into play. So, you know, this made sense for all, all the reasons. The common question I get after people get done yelling at me that I took away Bink in the market where, you know, we’re in the. Probably the hottest talent market that I’ve seen in a few years is how’d you do it? How’d you justify it? And I talked about capacity models. But it also is important that I at least recognize our leaders, including our founders, where, you know, once they understood the need to double the organization, once they’ve also put a lot of trust in our capacity models, they just kept saying, well, how fast can you. Can you do this, Joe? And that’s, you know, both having the support, understanding that there is a need, knowing fully well that that bank shares very similar hiring philosophies and they have a very high quality Bar for talent on the recruiting team. It made a ton of sense. And so here we are.
Matt Alder [00:23:47]:
Fascinating stuff. And how’s it panned out? Because I can imagine there are sort of quite a few challenges with bringing a 30 year old business into kind of a much newer, faster growing business.
Richard Cho [00:23:59]:
Yeah, ask me again about a year from now. But right now it’s going really well. Now it’s not without challenges. I don’t want to just like, you know, speak to you through rose colored glasses, but it’s just like the biggest thing that I was worried about in this initial acquisition is that more than doubled our organization overnight. Overnight we went from 88 people to 160. We’re now almost 300 now. But just in the organization that there’s a lot of, there’s a significant amount of strain to the culture and the connections that we have in the organization. So one of the first projects that involve leaders from both BINC and Robinhood was a culture integration project that took, wow, it actually took about two months to build, socialize and then finally launch because it involved, we didn’t, you know, leaders as leaders. We didn’t go in a room and decide these are our values and this is our mission and this is how we’re going to create our culture. We actually involved a lot of culture ambassadors, both from what we’re calling old school Robin Hoodies as well as folks that were culture carriers at binc. And we challenged, you know, the things that make up what was great about each organization and we pressure tested it against each other and it turned out like 80% of it we shared the same values. So that was good. The 20% of it we needed to think about how do we evolve our culture to meet the organization where we’re at today. So it was a big challenge, but I’m happy to report it was a really successful launch. And cultures are for everything. You don’t do it once and you don’t do one presentation and have a fun off site and then high five. And then you don’t think about it anymore. It’s a continuous investment and that continuous investment continues to pay dividends. So part of that was the challenge, but also a great result. Then ultimately the ROI is are the resources producing results in the way that you originally planned? And I’m happy to report, yeah, absolutely. They’re only three months into their specific work as Robin Hoodies. Outside of the 20 that were already here, that were already phenomenally productive, the rest of the community, the professional community, the IC community is doing really well. When we do models, we actually plan for a 90 day ramp up. And actually that’s another podcast we could do. Matt. I think I’m just pitching new podcast ideas all day long.
Matt Alder [00:27:12]:
We haven’t even finished yet. And you’re more than welcome.
Richard Cho [00:27:14]:
I know we haven’t finished one and I’m like, oh, we could do like 17 more together. So there’s a 90 day productivity that we add to the capacity models. And it’s like I said, there’s both some art and science to it. But in my 22 years, I haven’t figured out the why behind the 90 days. But always it’s 90 days when resources start to really produce results, incremental value. So we’re right at that 90 day mark with this crew and they’re doing phenomenal work. We’re at a stage where, because you know, if you deliver on work, the organization has a lot of trust that you can deliver more work. So we, we’re going to yet again increase headcount. So I’m unfortunately, there’s no more companies to buy that I could think of right now. But like I need to go and, and continue to hire aggressively and add to our resources. But for right now, where we’re at with the bank acquisition and with some organic growth, we’re in really good shape. So we’re set up really well.
Matt Alder [00:28:24]:
So as a final question for this interview, anyway, it’s obviously been a very disruptive and strange time, but also potentially sort of quite transformational for talent acquisition for recruiting over the last 18 months. What’s your view on the future? Future how, what do you think recruiting is gonna look like moving forward into the future?
Richard Cho [00:28:45]:
Yeah, I, you know, thank you for this question. This is, this is something that I, I haven’t been this excited about talent acquisition for, in a long while, mainly because in our, in our world and in most, in the technology world and also by the way, also in financial services and fintech, there’s a clear message from a lot of companies saying, hey, we actually realize that people can be just as productive and in some cases more productive when they work from home. Many companies are working out these strategies like this return to office strategy tends to be mostly around how can we manage a hybrid workforce, a flexible workforce, or a full time remote workforce. And Robinhood is actually right in the middle of it as well. And what that does is it means that candidates are now anywhere in the nation, but also anywhere in the world. And tools for working in productivity, increasing productivity while managing a hybrid workforce have gotten a Lot more sophisticated. And look, companies like GitLab are probably like, we’ve been doing this for years. You guys are late to the game. But quite frankly, they’ve pioneered a lot of really interesting ways to manage a remote workforce that many companies are learning from. So because of that, talent’s everywhere, and because talent is everywhere, I actually think functionally on set, interviews are gone. Now let’s let the market dictate this. And this is just an assertion from an old talent leader like myself. But I think gone are the days where people take full days off to do an onset interview where they may or may not get the job. Sitting in traffic or traveling. And traveling requires losing weekends and so on and so forth. It just that investment is no longer a thing that you have to do in order to get a job, because we’ve proven that you can get a job by doing an interview over a virtual conference tool. What that means is it’s going to put a lot of pressure in recruiting to create great experiences virtually. What we underappreciated, which was culture, is captured by people just walking in the front door of our lobby that you’re going to have to recreate virtually. Now, I don’t know of any great tools and, or companies that are focused on this idea, but this is where you start to differentiate your company, your values, your culture from others. And that’s something that someone needs to tackle. The other is you need to make sure that you’ve created interview process that is as flexible as any time in the day. And this is where carrot comes into play. They do interviews really literally any time in the day. And as a, as a result, they are a lot more flexible for this environment where candidates can be anywhere in any time zone. And then the other area where this is the one that gets me the most excited is like, if interviews occur virtually, you can do so many really innovative things in the conference room, because now you have machines in the conference room that can transcribe interviews. Obviously, this is all with consent. I have to say this in a highly regulated environment. We care a lot about ensuring that we protect personal information and so on and so forth. But assuming we can get over the regulatory hurdles and we do it in a fair, equitable way, the things that you could do in the interview room, because you now have access to the interview interview room is endless. And this is where you can drive fair hiring practices, you can drive more effective interviewing, you can drive testing these interview questions that get stale over time. All things that we had to react to in the past. We can now be very proactive and create these really amazing experiences for our candidates, but create even better interview effectiveness as a result. And then, you know, forget about all the data. Like I’m, I’m very excited about the data that we can collect along the way just to ensure that we continue to drive effectiveness along the way. So anyways, that is a high level, sort of excited rant about what’s, what’s possible. I do think the workforce is going to be anywhere now. It’s going to be borderless. Recruiting and recruiting professionals need to learn how to do that and do that at scale if they, if they want to continue to compete in this talent market.
Matt Alder [00:34:24]:
Richard, thank you very much for joining me, Matt.
Richard Cho [00:34:27]:
I always appreciate our conversations. I’m glad this time we were allowing and a lot more people listening in on our chats. So thank you for inviting me.
Matt Alder [00:34:36]:
Absolutely. Thank you. My thanks to Richard Cho. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search 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.
