First of all, I want to thank everybody for picking this session today. There is tons of great content and tons of amazing speakers, so we're really grateful that you're here in this session today. My name is Alexis Smith, and I'm the marketing lead for LinkedIn Canada, so very happy at any Canadians in the room. Nice. We rarely get the shout outs on the south side of the border, so thank you for entertaining me there for just a second.
So I'm going to start with a question. By show of hands, how many of you feel like you spend a lot of your time on operational transactional tasks? Oh, the murmurs and all the hands going up, all of us. My hand is up as well.
And how many of you would like to be more strategic in your roles? Perfect. Well, I am excited to tell you you are in the right place today. So... You're in the right place because we have a powerful speaker that's here this afternoon who's going to give it to you straight.
And that's one of the things I love most about him and probably one of the reasons among many that all of you are here to hear him speak as well. And he's going to teach us all how to be talent acquisition pros and provide tips. and tricks and actionable ideas that we can take away to be more strategic in our roles. So I'd say that's a pretty effective use of the next 45 minutes, don't you think?
Perfect. So with over 20 years of experience in the TA and recruitment space and an impressive roster of global clients, please join me in welcoming the founder and managing director of Recruiting Toolbox, John Vlastelika. You nailed it.
You nailed it. I got it. I got it.
First and second. Good afternoon. How are you guys doing? It's late afternoon. It's day one.
I'm really excited to be here, and I was just high-fiving Alexis because Vlastelika is not an easy name to say, and we practiced it a hundred times, and I will say, out of however many years I've spoken to this event, she is the first to just kill it. It's fantastic, so great job for Alexis. So here's the deal. We are going to talk about how to be strategic. This is not a kind of high-level, 30,000-foot kind of what-is strategy.
strategy kind of conversation. We're going to get into the weeds. And oh my God, I'm going to share nine things in 45 minutes.
I probably have time for five, but I'm going to do nine. I want to keep this really dense and practical and share some very real world things that some of our clients are doing and some of my colleagues are doing to actually deliver more strategy to the business they support. We are not going to be talking about buying ATSs or Chrome extensions or spending a million dollars on updating your shitty career site.
We're not going to talk about that stuff. In fact, we're going to talk about things, with the exception of one tiny little thing that costs money, everything in here is stuff that we have control over and we can do as recruiters, as recruiting leaders. Does that make sense?
So my background briefly, I've spent about half my... career as a practitioner, about half leading a training and consulting firm called Recruiting Toolbox, and we work with amazing companies. I don't know what your job is, but my job's better than yours because I get to work with really cool people all day like you guys, and I'm super passionate about our space. I'm super passionate about...
the problems we face. And believe it or not, as unique as you say your company is, as unique as these different companies are, what I find is there's like a dozen problems in talent acquisition. There's not a hundred. There's like a dozen or so, and we're going to address some of them today. Part of my job doing training, we do recruiter training, hiring manager training, we do recruiting leader training, and some consulting work.
I get to sit in the room with hiring managers and executives and recruiters like you and recruiting leaders, and we talk about strategy a lot. And what I'm going to share with you today are things that some of our clients and colleagues are doing in the real world where you don't have a lot of time and you don't have great budget and your ATS is really shitty. Sound good?
So every hiring manager I've ever talked to when we talk about strategy wants more strategy from us. When I ask them what they think strategy is, they're not really sure. Sometimes they say LinkedIn.
So they say that. Sometimes they want big fat pipelines full of passive candidates, but they don't really know what that is or what that entails, but they want it. So some of you are telling hiring managers about pipelines, and I wish you'd stop. When I talk to recruiters, guess what recruiters want? They want to be more strategic, not less strategic.
And so there's a lot of kind of interest in being more strategic from the very people we're supposed to be strategic with. We just have to step up a little bit. Now, one way to be more strategic is just to change your title, of course.
That good-looking guy down there, you recognize that guy? 1989, baby. Check out the hair.
Check out the hair up here. Just calling yourself a talent advisor does not mean hiring managers are going to invite you in to talent advise them. Just because you got promoted to manager doesn't mean instantly you are now strategic. And the big one for me, I was at Amazon for years in the early days, and I was asked to move from head of tech recruiting to this kind of central... programs role and I'm like, oh yeah baby, like central program, center of excellence.
Can you experience the center of excellence? My shit was so strategic it like didn't fit in all the swim lanes. It was just, it was going everywhere.
So being the center of excellence doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be strategic. So when we talk to the business leaders in these focus groups and trainings and we talk to recruiters and we ask them about strategy, unfortunately some of us point to PowerPoint decks. And I'll give you a little pro tip.
PowerPoint decks do not make you strategic. And I've delivered a ton, probably more than you, PowerPoint decks. And that is not what strategy is. When I talk to business leaders about strategy and ask them, what have you seen come out of talent acquisition that's strategic? Sometimes they're aware of like some award we won for our brand or a great place to work.
Sometimes they hear about how you went from a shitty ATS to a less shitty ATS, or you implemented, you know, some. insights tool that's kind of doing cool stuff and you can now heat map talent, which is all great. You always want to go from shitty to less shitty and you always want insights.
But in terms of like making my life better, like actually giving me what I really care about as a business leader, they struggle sometimes to come up with examples. They can't think of examples, which is frustrating to me because I think we're very strategic. I don't think we control the definition of strategy.
I don't think we... We really set expectations on what strategy looks like and what being strategic looks like with hiring managers. And when we don't teach them what strategy is, they come up with their own shit.
How many times have you said shit? That's a lot. This is being recorded.
Anyways, so big opportunity there. When I say strategy, I'm not going to define strategy, but I don't just mean innovative. And I think sometimes we think being strategic means it has to be the shiny object, latest, greatest, whatever. And I would tell you from talking to thousands of hiring managers and business executives in a dozen years of doing consulting work, I can tell you what they want. They want things that deliver speed, quality, and diversity.
And if what you are doing is in service to speed, quality, and diversity, you are being strategic. If what you are doing is in service to consistency, compliance, they do not care. That's HR language. That's internal stuff. That's getting our house in order.
But that is not what the business is looking for. The business will label things and recognize you for being strategic when what you're doing is clearly connected to things going faster, better quality, more diversity. You with me on that? That's what gets funded.
That's the framing we need to keep in mind when we're selling some of this. I'm going to talk about how to put some of this into the real world for you as well. So I've got nine things.
It's too many. We're going to go fast. You guys okay with going this speed? Are you with me? Okay.
So we're going to cover nine things in the next 39 minutes and seven seconds. So the first thing I want to talk about is one of many things that are practical, low-cost, visible things you can do to be strategic. I'm going to flash this slide again at the very end as well when we wrap up.
You guys all know the funnel. We all understand how the funnel works. One of the things that drives me crazy is every hiring manager I've ever spoken to, when we start talking about sourcing, they want pipelines.
I said this earlier, they want pipelines. Fat pipelines full of passive candidates. That's what they want. And from their perspective, that's on you to do.
They don't see themselves playing a role in pipelining. And I will tell you, the companies that are most strategic to me around doing pipeline recruiting, what they're doing is they're getting hiring managers engaged pre-funnel. So what are some pre-funnel things?
What are some examples? We have a client, Autodesk, during the interview training that they do, they have a day and a half training for hiring managers, they spend a couple hours on just how to show up online. They're trying to build their hiring leaders into thought leaders.
They're trying to teach them how to engage. with the communities where we need to be farming, we need to be planting seeds, would they teach them how to show up online, how to share content through social, how to engage in non-interview conversations? You ever send a hiring manager in to talk to a passive candidate and the first question they ask is... What?
Yeah, what do you want to do? Why do you want to join our company? It's like, you called me, mother fu-like, boom!
Like, I didn't-maybe I don't want to work for you. Maybe I don't want to work for you. I don't know you.
I don't know you. You called me. Like, why should I have to convince you? You know, that makes me nuts.
So, getting your hiring managers to be more visible in the communities you want to recruit from, that is key to doing great pipelining. That's key to going after passive talent. HR open source, great organization. General Electric, another one of our clients.
put a great deck on there on how to build a brand ambassador program. So they put it out there free for you to download and review. A lot of companies are doing great brand ambassador stuff. I would love it if you could help your hiring managers be more visible in the communities that you want to recruit from. One of my former employees turned competitor for a while when I was a corporate guy.
One of the things that she did, which is awesome, is she was actually setting coffee chat goals for hiring managers. So you would have a goal of three, four, or five coffee chat goals. They were based in New York.
They were in Chelsea. You would go have coffee. They would give you a prepaid coffee card.
And you would have a non-interview conversation with a passive candidate engineer. And you are talking not about all the great reasons to come work for us. You are talking about what most people like to talk about, which is them.
You're getting them to talk about themselves. You're listening. You're having a conversation around what they like to do, what projects they're working on. You slip in where appropriate conversations about the interesting problems and challenges and work you're doing.
And then the next step, which is still not in the funnel, the next step is if that goes well, we invite you to game night. And game night's where you meet the team and you come in our cool loft and you have a conversation. And then maybe the step after that is you start getting a little more interested in maybe becoming a candidate with us.
This is pre-funnel work. Meetups are common. How have you done meetups?
Anyone gone to meetups or hosted a meetup at your office? If you're not hosting meetups at your office and you have nice office space. offer your office space up for people that are trying to host meetups for those communities you want to recruit from.
Really, really great way to kind of give back to the community and also potentially build some brand and relationships with people. Another thing that's interesting, one of our clients has been doing webinars lately. They've been actually hosting webinars with subject matter experts. Not like, I'm a recruiter, let me tell you how to get a job. It's a subject matter expert that maybe doesn't even work at the company that they're just doing to do lead gen with passive candidates to kind of get people in that pre-funnel stage where now there's awareness.
going on and maybe they want to have a further conversation. And then external succession planning. One of my VP's of TA friends, one of the things that he did that I just loved is he would actually sit down with the executive team and with each one of them identify four or five people that he said you need to have conversations with.
This level of talent may take years for us to recruit. It's long, kind of long conversations, one or two years, major exec comp involved, major relocation involved. but I want to know when you're going to be in Houston because one of them is in Houston, and when you're there, I want you to have dinner with them.
And so he was identifying always having four or five kind of people that could be good direct reports down the road so that we're kind of always be recruiting. You with me on that? So you say, John, I like that. No one in my company will do any of that.
I call bullshit because I've seen it happen even at companies where hiring managers suck. And so I want to share with you a couple ideas on how you leverage the hiring manager better and get them to do some of this. The first thing is if you ever want to influence someone in the business, They are busy.
Recruiting is not their full-time job. And when you ask me to do stuff, it sounds like you're pushing your work onto me. You think you're busier than me? You think you're busier than me? Well, let me tell you how busy I am.
Don't ask me to do your job for you. That's the kind of response we might get. Can you guys relate to that a little bit?
You ever heard that? Yeah. So one of the things we want to do is we want to identify where's the pain?
Where's the pain? What is the cost of that vacancy? And I don't try and go do some formula to kind of come up with some analytics to tell them what the cost is.
But if you've worked in professional services or healthcare, you recruit for sales or tech, Many of your leaders can tell you exactly what it's costing them to have that job open. And then what you want to do is you want to pivot into a talent advisor conversation. This comes out of our talent advisor training.
We ask the business, how much is it costing you to have this job open another 60 days? And then you say, well, would you like to hear what some of the other hiring managers I'm working with are doing to get that kind of talent filled 30 days faster? And that's where you get invited in as a talent advisor because they will probably say yes, because you're talking about speed, quality, or diversity, not some other stuff.
Does that make sense? How many of you have ever found or measured response rates when hiring managers send emails or in-mails are actually better than when you or your recruiters send in-mail, right? It's usually three to five X better response rates, getting them to do that. Some of our clients do sourcing jams with hiring managers.
You get all the laptops in a room, you spend a couple hours, create a war room feel, everyone go, go, go. You do a bunch of outbound. It's usually pretty eye-opening for them because even though they get three to five X better response rate, they're still probably under 20% and they're shocked that people aren't getting back to them right away because boom.
I work at General Motors, bro. Like, why would you not want to? Or I work at whatever.
You know, I mean, they're just like, how would some people not dying to talk to me? I don't understand. You're like, welcome to our world. Come on in.
Hi. This is what it's like. And it's even better for you.
And then sometimes putting, you know, goals out there and highlighting results so that your hiring managers are seeing the success from the coffee chat, seeing the success from the webinar, actually putting that on your intranet or highlighting it as staff, meaning it's a really good way to engage people. Now, some hiring managers are not going to do any of this. And I would just say. Focus on the ones that are willing to engage.
Start there and kind of build your reputation, build the ROI story so you can get other people that aren't interested to do this. Second thing I want to talk about is something that's a little bit boring, but I think it's quite strategic, which is taking a look at your internal and external sources for your higher volume jobs. So one of our clients at Exo did some interesting work to analyze one of their core jobs, and they found that 90% of the hires for that job category were internals.
They looked at how much time the recruiters were spending talking to external candidates, and it was more than the kind of 10% you might think that's focused on external. So they were kind of heat mapping. How much time are we spending on this? How much time are we likely to kind of, what ROI are we likely to get from that effort? And they actually started to shift, and they said, maybe we should just make this rec more of an internal, like we're going to target internals.
We're going to say as a company, this is a really good development opportunity. This is a really good role to fill with an internal. Why are we even spending time doing external stuff? And on this, you're going to be able to download all these slides, the URLs on the last slide, by the way. Some of this text is tiny, but one of the things that I encourage you to think about is take a look, go up 10,000 feet, take a look at the recs that your team focuses on, And see if there aren't some that you go, we're always needing to go external.
We're always needing to go internal. And then ask, is that what you want? Is that a good thing?
Maybe you want more internal, more external for diversity or whatever. But have a conversation with the VP or the department leader and say, what should our mix be? And if it should be different, maybe we can reallocate our resources to those jobs that maybe as a recruiter I should be spending more time on the jobs that we know we need to go external or we know we need to do outbound with and less time on the jobs that have inbound or internal candidates.
Does that make sense? How many? Anyone play Fortnite? Or have kids that play Fortnite, if you're old like me? Yeah.
So Epic Games is one of our clients. And one of the things they did when they were building Fortnite, which is maybe the most popular game in the history of the last five years, one of the things they did, they were building this new Battle Royale game, a mobile game, it exploded. And they were looking at how long it takes to build a game like that, usually about 12 months.
The talent acquisition team and the leadership team took a look at what it was going to cost to have this game delayed. or to take 12 months. And they said, what would it take to get it done in 12 weeks, to get the hiring done in 12 weeks instead of 12 months to staff this team?
And you know what they did? They moved internal resources around, put it on the thing that was most important, and backfilled those other positions from across other games they were working on. That is strategic shit, you guys. That is next level strategic shit. It's super basic, but how often do we pause in our day-to-day, as Alexis said, you know, we're super busy, transactional, go, go, go.
When's the last time we paused and said, should we just move other people into this role and backfill those? Would that be better for development? Would that let you ship your product?
Would that let you cover that sales territory earlier if we did something like that? That is super strategic. One of the ways you win as a talent acquisition pro is giving people time back. Hiring managers are busy.
They're busy. And most of the time you're coming at them from talent acquisition or HR, you are adding shit to their plate. You never take something off their plate. It's more training, more process, more forms, more systems. Now you're going to create your job description.
Now you're going to do your rec. Yay, it's all self-service now. The cloud, whoo, the cloud is here. Everything's going to be better for you.
And they're looking at it going, this sucks for me. You're asking me to do more stuff. What would it be like if you could give hiring managers more time back?
What would it be like? One of our clients, Adidas, or as they say in Germany, you know how they say Adidas in Europe? Adidas, yep.
So I was in Germany a couple summers ago. Their ATS allows them to kind of break down time to fill. And they can actually look at time and stage.
How many of you have that functionality in your system now? You can kind of break it down a little bit. It's really interesting when companies do this because you can actually see where some of the problems are and you can compare, as you can see in these slides, kind of how long this step takes on average versus you or your team.
And then you can have a really great talent advisor conversation about that gap. Why is it taking longer here? Whenever you are able to give managers back their time or show them how they can speed things up, you are winning, you are winning. So what are some of the things you can do? I want to talk about two areas where there's a lot of problems.
One is screening, one is interviewing. A couple of our clients, Northrop Grumman and Disney, have done some work to look at jobs where they question whether or not they really needed a hiring manager screen. Now, there's all kinds of reasons to put a hiring manager screen after a recruiter screen and before an on-site interview.
Sometimes it's a passive candidate. They need to build a relationship with a hiring manager. But for some of these jobs, they didn't need that step. People were excited to come work for their companies for these jobs.
And they said, what if we just did the screen and we went direct to on-site? What if we were qualified as recruiters to pre-screen on the things that are kind of deal breakers and bring them on-site? And we could give you back hundreds of hours of phone screen time and reallocate that time to other things like coffee chats and webinars and meetups and other things that maybe are pre-funnel or top of funnel. So clients are finding that maybe, and you want to test this.
they did maybe you can skip that step and use your recruiter screening go straight to on-site which is great because if you're on the phone with a candidate and they sound great wouldn't it be awesome to find out their availability right now wouldn't it be awesome if you had access to like uh an interview day and you could just schedule them on the phone and not have that delay wouldn't that be awesome we would be so strategic in the minds of business leaders if we could cut five or ten days out of our time to fill uh there's uh this is the thing that costs money the head of recruiting at pinterest a guy named adam ward uh He's a friend of mine, and he spoke at a conference I was at, and he was talking about how they outsourced tech screens for their engineering team. And we do a lot of interview training, and this sounded like a bad idea to me when I first heard it. I'm like, that's really important. You want to keep that internal.
Why would you trust an outside partner? But he found a really good outside partner, and he was looking at the total number of hours the engineering team was spending to recruit talent to the team, and they said a ton of the time is being spent on phone screens, and only one in X phone screens converts to a higher. What if we could move you out of that process, but had an outside firm that was calibrated, calibrated to our bar, calibrated to our interviewing techniques, and our...
questions and what could looks like do that for us and they found a firm and I'm not here to pitch a firm but if you don't know the name of the firm kind of send me a note in LinkedIn app and I'll tell you but it's really like super strategic because he was literally giving the engineering team back and you could quantify you guys know you could quantify how many phone screens your hiring managers are doing for some of your bigger companies like T-Mobile it's hundreds of hours hundreds of hours you can get back to them or reallocate to on-site interviews or better selling or better sourcing somewhere else in the funnel Now interviewing, has anyone ever had an interviewing team where you had more than five interviewers on the interview loop? Every hand should go up. Anyone ever had more than 10? More than 10 people on the interview team?
Anyone ever had like 12 even? 16! Ridiculous! Do you guys agree that's ridiculous?
One of the ways that you can help, and we do a lot of work trying to convince teams to do this, one of the ways you can give time back... is just to reduce the total number of people involved in the interview process. You do not need 16 people for 99.9% of the jobs. If you're hiring a new CFO at a public company, there's probably over a dozen people that need board members and investors and all kinds of stuff. But for most of us, 16 is ridiculous.
Ridiculous. So one of the things that I want to walk you guys through is a tool we use to coach managers on kind of selecting the right number of interviewers. And many hiring managers, when we go into that conversation, will say, who do you want on the interview team?
And they tell us. And unfortunately, we operate like an order taker and we write down what they say. And then we just go back to our desks and either try and schedule and or pass it off to someone else and make the nightmare their problem to try and schedule 16 people on a Tuesday when you have people in all these different time zones and traveling and whatever. One of the things I want you guys to think about is what are we optimizing for when you're selecting an interviewing team? And one of the things, at a minimum, there's multiple things.
One of the things, at a minimum, you should be optimizing for. is that you're making a good quality hiring decision. You want to make sure you're making a good decision. And I'm going to define a good decision as we say no to people that wouldn't be good and yes to people that would be good. Right?
That's basic. So we turn down people we should be turning down, and we say yes to people we should be saying yes to. What I've drawn up here is I put the quality of decision on the vertical axis.
And it's interesting. This graph with the number of interviewers on the horizontal, this graph does not go straight up to the right. More interviewers does not mean better decision.
What is happening at the X, do you think? What's happening to the right of the X? Why would it go down?
Why would the law of diminishing returns kicks in? If you only needed five and you have eight, what's happening on the right side of the X? Anyone guess?
Bad decisions, and they're called false negative decisions. This is where you're saying no to someone you probably should have said yes to. Because if I had seven of us trying to decide where to go to dinner tonight, I'm not gonna reach consensus because I just had Mexican at lunch with Dawn. So you wanna go to Mexican, I'm gonna do Mexican again, I don't care.
So now we all have to go somewhere else and we're all going to settle on something shitty and then we're going to say screw it, we're just going to do our own thing. And that's what happens a lot in interviewing. That's what happens a lot in interviewing. You get seven, eight people trying to agree on something and, you know, if you require consensus, do you know how many false negatives you have in your process? A lot.
A lot. Because you're saying everyone is equally good at interviewing. Is that true?
Everyone's aligned on what we're looking for. Is that true? Think about when you're talking to hiring managers, whatever your magic number is, it might be 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Think about what is the right number and base it on job function, geography. Be smart around who needs to be involved, but always bring up quality of decision.
I don't want to just optimize for like, let's involve as many people as available and make them all required. That's going to push your time to fill way out. You with me on this? Okay.
One of the things that I think is really strategic is to think smartly about Access to information that's going to help your candidates be successful. And one of the things that I've learned, sort of the hard way I will say, I have a little bit of a wake-up call on this. I'm born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. All my professional career has been in Seattle. And I've grown up in tech companies and done a lot of tech stuff.
And I know how that stuff works. And if I were to interview for a corporate job, not looking, never will go back to corporate, but if I did, I would know what to expect from a typical big brand company when I'm interviewing. If you are really focused on diversity or you're focused on reaching out to people that maybe don't have experience interviewing in a company like yours, maybe you're professional services, maybe you're tech, maybe you're a call center, whatever it might be, it's really, really important that you spend a little time thinking not just about the candidate experience generically, but how do I set them up for success?
I don't know about you guys, when I started in recruiting, I was kind of a dick. And I'll tell you why. I was all like, you know, I'm going to tell you if you're good enough to work with us. Because we're the best company to work for three years in a row, bro.
So we're going to have a conversation after this assessment, because I'm an expert in assessment, because I'm a talent advisor, because I've worked in HR for two years. So of course, I'm great at behavioral interviewing, and I've got 14 questions in 20 minutes. Let's go.
I've got to get through this. But I'm going to tell you if you're good enough to work here. And I had this really kind of, I'm embarrassed, but I had this kind of arrogance around it. And now I recognize, of course, a lot of candidates have a lot of choice, and a lot of the talent I'm talking to, they actually, I want them to win. It's not me versus them.
I actually want them to be successful in my process. I want to see their best selves show up when they come into interview. Are you with me on this? So if I'm interviewing in Detroit, and I'm talking to someone who isn't grown up like I have in Seattle, with all these tech companies around them, or big brands, or I'm talking to someone in, you know, Warsaw, Poland, who's never interviewed with a Western whatever in the style or communication, whatever, I want to help them be successful. I put some things up here.
I want to highlight three or four of these examples. One is if you go on Google's blog, they do a really good job. Recruiters have written kind of what to expect when you interview with Google.
You should have something like that on your career site, and you should write it and take the initiative and just put something out there. Maybe talk to your boss in legal first, depending on what you write. But generally, you should just take the initiative and just ask for forgiveness, okay?
One of the things that Electronic Arts, one of our clients does that's really cool. When you are being scheduled for your interview, one of the questions that's asked is, is there anyone you'd like to meet from one of our employee resource groups? So they've worked with the employee resource groups in their company. They're very committed to diversity. They've talked to people in their different groups and said, hey, would you guys be willing to meet with a candidate if a candidate wants to get some more information?
What's it like to be a working mom here? What's it like to be LGBTQ? What's it like to be African-American in gaming or whatever it might be?
If there's someone you'd like to meet from one of those communities, we'll try and schedule that when you come on site. How amazing is that? Choose your own adventure, meet the kind of people that maybe look like you, that have experiences like you, that maybe come from different places.
I had a client, it was kind of funny, but they were in kind of a boring city. They were trying to hire a lot of young people and young people are like, what do you do for fun? I don't mean like Chuck E. Cheese. I mean like, I want to go out and get drunk and find my people and, you know, hook up. And so Putting information out there that helps people be successful is great.
One of our clients in Brazil does something that I don't know we would be comfortable doing in a typical American company. But when you come into interview, after the interview, they give you unbelievably frank feedback if you were not selected on why you were not selected. I mean frank.
I mean like, wow. I'm reading this stuff, but it is fantastic. It is so helpful. It's done with love.
And I'm surprised at how specific they are. And maybe culturally there's some differences. But people are not turning into stalkers when you tell them no because they're saying, hey, you didn't do as well on this as we wanted you to do.
Here's a class you can take at the local university. Here's a book you should read. Here's a site you should go to and study up on this.
If you're able to get better at these kinds of things, I want you to come back. One of the things you didn't do as well on was we didn't have a lot of confidence to be able to kind of work at the pace and adapting. And your examples weren't like this. We'd like you to see you get more experience in an environment where things aren't pre-planned out for four quarters, but you actually have more startup experience. So.
go get that startup experience, and then reach out to us again. I don't know if we could do that in the U.S. Do you guys agree that'd be hard? But how awesome would that be for feedback? Uber has been, one of my friends, Craig Campbell there, he's the head of, I think, U.S. tech recruiting up in Seattle.
And one of the things that he does is he puts together Q&A calls with executives. So he's found challenges. Obviously, they do a lot of white glove, one-on-one candidate experience stuff when they're trying to close somebody.
But he's also realized... some of the candidates have the same kind of questions or concerns. And wouldn't it be great if I could kind of maybe batch them together and pull in some really senior executives?
And they set up calls where candidates are able to submit questions in advance and have live kind of real-time conversations with engineering leaders. In that case, we're able to address some of the questions about what's going on in the press or their product or whatever's going on they have questions about. And it's just another way to give access to people that might not feel comfortable asking or not feel comfortable asking in an interview situation. but afterwards are more comfortable doing it, especially if you can submit questions in advance. Then you get a little more honest questions out of people.
That's a great idea. How much would that cost for you to do? A little bit of influencing, but really no money to do something like that. One of the things that's related to democratizing access, if you are like most companies, you're focused on diversity and inclusion, diversity and belonging. Most of you focus on D&I kind of stuff right now.
Big focus for your company. One of the things I find, I may get in trouble for saying this, but a lot of the training that's built, a lot of our clients are doing this, a lot of it's built for people like me, middle-aged white guys. A lot of the training is around opening my eyes, unconscious bias. It's great stuff.
It's absolutely essential, but I think it's not enough. And one of the things, I read an article, it was super cool. It really opened my mind to this because I realized from reading this article, this person was making the case, you need to offer different kind of training.
Where's your training that's helping underrepresented people know how to get promoted in your company? Where's your training that's showing people in your company how to interview and get opportunities? Why isn't recruiting talent acquisition stepping up and teaching your internal employees?
This is how you navigate. This is how you get exposure to the kind of opportunities that maybe you're not seeing. When I look at diversity numbers from some of our clients and some of my colleagues and reports I read, a lot of people have a ton of diversity sometimes in entry-level jobs, and you guys know it looks like this really kind of skinny pyramid as you go more senior, way less diversity at the top. Lots of women down here.
not nearly as many women up here. And I would say one of the strategic things you could do is get some of your underrepresented folks that have had successful careers to teach other folks in your company. Make it open to everybody.
Teach them how to get promoted in your company. Sometimes that stuff is based on unwritten rules. Wouldn't it be great if you brought some transparency to that shit?
You with me on that? Love that idea. I wanna talk, I'm going fast.
You guys with me? Okay, I just wanna make sure you're with me. So I have four more things to talk about.
One is, is is kind of wreck opening. And it sounds like reckoning to me when I say it, but hiring managers absolutely, absolutely hate the process where they have to go get approval. And I would say in my 25 years in talent acquisition, time to fill is not really improved in my whole time, despite all the crazy ass technology we have at our fingertips.
I started when you, you know, had scented cotton paper, you know, resumes mailed and fax machines. And, you know, I'm old now, but But one of the things that has not changed like it should have with all the tech we have is time to fill is still like 45 to 60 days for most jobs. And that is embarrassing to me in my profession, I think, that we haven't made improvement on something that the business cares so much about. And one of the things that is broken is all that pre-strategy kickoff shit that hiring managers have to deal with.
If I talk to a recruiter about speed, they will speak to me in the language of time to fill, time to fill. When does time to fill clock start from a recruiter perspective? What day does it start on? The day the rec is approved. Some people, even the day I meet with you to talk about your rec.
Some people, it's the day after I meet with you and actually post your job. Isn't that nice? When you talk to a hiring manager about when the clock starts, when do you think the clock starts with the hiring manager?
When the rec has been approved in workday? It's weeks, baby. Weeks, weeks, weeks probably before that.
And I'm not going to read through all this, but you know, day one is shit. Someone resigned on my team. Or day one is like...
My boss just said I could have this new salesperson added to my team when I was going down the hallway. So for me, the clock started then. Now I've got to jump through all these hoops. And by the time I get to you, it could literally be two or three weeks after my need started when you're telling me, now are we going to flip the clock on?
Dude, the clock started. I'm ready to go. Where are my candidates? What do you mean you want to do an intake meeting?
Do your job. Bring me candidates. Where's your pipelines?
Pipelines, baby. I want passive candidates. Where are they? So what can you do to be strategic in this situation? There's a guy on my team, Matt Grove, who was a recruiting director at KPMG, and one of the things that he did is he was actually taking a look at turnover.
Without fancy analytic tools, although they're pretty spreadsheet-oriented at KPMG, he was taking a look at turnover, he was taking a look at what it cost him to have a job open, he was taking a look at historical time to fill, and he was talking to the business, not trying to solve workforce planning, which is a cluster at most companies, but for certain jobs... You know you're going to have needs. You can see them coming. We know if we have 18% turnover in this job category, and we know if bonuses are paid out in September, I can tell you when a lot of those, that turnover is going to happen. Why in the heck are we waiting till the people resign and why don't we start that shit early?
Seriously, guys, shame on me for not doing that. I wish I would have done that. I can see some of that stuff coming. Now, I may not be resourced to do with that, so that's a whole other issue. But from a planning perspective, I think huge opportunities for us to be strategic.
By not asking the business, can you open these recs, but telling them, you need to open these recs now in September if you want these jobs filled by December 1st. Don't come to me December 1st and tell me you want them filled by the end of the year. Tell me now. Or don't even tell me. I'm telling you, Mo.
Like, you need to do your job. Open these recs. Open these recs. Hodor. Hodor.
All right. So I put a little bit of... Kind of how I might do this and how Matt did this on my team a little bit, but this is definitely a partnership thing and not everyone's going to be open to this, but I would love it if we take more of a leadership role around this and stop being the victim of poor workforce planning because guess what?
25 years to this day, I've never seen amazing workforce planning and I get paid to look at stuff like that. It's just not there yet and I don't know, I actually do know all the reasons, but there's a lot of reasons why it's not going to happen, but I say take a leadership role. Don't sit back and wait for someone to do this.
Start telling the businessmen to open their recs. Anyone ever do talent days or batch interview days where you group a bunch of interviews onto the same day or something? Yeah?
I love this practice. I think it's strategic and I'll tell you why. This is an example of something that is in service to speed, quality, and diversity sometimes, but especially speed. One of the biggest constraints when we diagnose and kind of break down time to fill, like I said Adidas did, you look at kind of time and stage, one of the biggest challenges is just simply scheduling.
Would you agree? Simply scheduling can add 5, 10, 20, 30 days to your process, which is ridiculous. We have a huge opportunity, you guys, to take more of a leadership role.
In 1997, I was a recruiter. I joined a part of our company that had Monday and Friday interview days. 95% of interviews happened on Mondays and Fridays.
We had a lot of candidates, 75% or more, were relocating to Seattle. We wanted them to have a little weekend time to do house-sending trips because houses were only $250 back then. Sweet, get a nice house for $250. That I picked up and I brought when I went to Amazon and we did it a little differently. We actually called it kind of more like event recruiting and we do either interview days on site or we go to other cities and we started bringing people together.
And the idea from this was let's find jobs that are high volume we always need and let's pre-schedule these interview days far in advance. Let's have dedicated sourcers or recruiters whose job it is to fill 12 interviewing slots on every one of these days and let's invite two different teams to compete slash collaborate to hire the best people out of this dozen candidates that are all interviewing on Tuesday the 21st. And we would set these things up in advance.
It brought great visibility because people could see something was planned. So when some VP gets a note from her boss saying, hey, what's going on with recruiting? You go, hey, we got two events planned. We'll be in Phoenix next week.
We're going to be in London in three weeks. You know, you can show something visible. But even more importantly, it had a really interesting kind of impact.
And one of the things that I found from this kind of batch processing around interviewing. was we had a much better funnel. We had a three to one about on average interview to offer ratio, which was better than our four or five to one interview ratio if we brought those same kind of candidates on site to interview one group at a time.
Why do you think that is? Do you think it's because we lowered our bar? I don't think so. The quality seemed to be the same, but we had a bias to hire. You were going to an interviewing day to make hires.
We had two teams that were sort of competing for the talent. We let the talent choose which team. And we had a small, well-aligned interviewing team. We didn't have five, six, seven, nine people. Sometimes we only had three or four interviewers.
We made same-day decisions while the information was fresh, and sometimes same-day offers. That is a very different kind of process from most of the interviewing that most of us do at our company. So we saw a lot of real benefits, one of which was just simply blocking time on hiring managers'calendars. This blew my mind. I remember this hiring manager I worked with, Jeff.
Jeff getting 30 minutes on Jeff's schedule to do a closing call, getting an hour to do an on-site interview. His EA was like super hardcore, really hard to get on his calendar. But if I said, Jeff, you want to go to Austin and do an interview day?
Dude, yeah. You're going to give me two days with travel, but I can't get an hour? For some reason, like university recruiting, people are willing to leave the office and go do stuff.
So big opportunity for us. And making same-day decisions is awesome if you can do it. I talked about false negatives a little bit, and it's an area I think doesn't get enough love in our space. Most people build their interviewing process to avoid making bad hires. I don't think often we think enough about missing out on good hires.
People that should have been hired should have gotten an offer. When we avoid false negatives, we have a much faster time to fill because potentially we're having more candidates that are making it to the next stage. They're getting through more gates.
Diversity is a real challenge for a lot of us, and I'll tell you, There are so many false negatives because we haven't aligned on what diversity means. We haven't gotten biases out of our process. Capacity is better.
If we can hire faster, people are available to do more stuff. And, you know, our reputation is better. How many of you had a candidate that have gone through a process and you're debriefing with them, telling them that they're not going to move forward, but you're on the inside, you're shaking your head like, I thought she was awesome. I have no idea why they didn't hire her. Like, she is so much better than these other people we didn't hire.
But, you know, I wasn't in the room. I wasn't, I don't know. that sucks, that sucks, that feeling sucks.
So one of the things you want to maybe take a look at if you want to see if you have a false negative problem is figure out if we made a false negative hiring decision, it's really hard to tell because of course they didn't come work here, so I don't know if they would have been good. But one of the things that one of our clients, ESPN did, their VP of talent acquisition, started to take a look for one job category, the people that we said no to, where did they end up working? Where did they end up working afterwards?
And you know what she found out for some, a pretty high percentage of the people? They went to work for the very companies hiring managers were asking her team to source from. I only want people out of company X. And then we interview someone, we say no to them, and guess where they go?
Company X. You following me? That's ridiculous. That makes me crazy. That makes me crazy, you guys. Crazy, crazy.
That happens. You ever experienced that? There's a great tool called LinkedIn. You can usually figure out where people are going, right?
Go figure that out and come back to your team. And don't be like, speak to the hand, you suck, but put it in their face a little bit. Say, let's have an honest conversation. What happened here? We are saying no to these people who are getting jobs at the very companies, maybe even bigger jobs.
And you said they weren't senior enough, and now they're not good for a senior manager, but they can be a senior director at a direct people competitor? Now, maybe those guys are idiots and have a shitty process. Maybe this person wasn't good.
That's a possibility. Maybe it wasn't a false negative. But I would say some of the time it is, and we need to call that out. Do you guys agree? We need to call that out.
So what are some common false negative root issues? One, I mentioned diversity is poorly defined in a lot of companies. What I think is diversity and what you think is diversity is a problem. But also there's just challenges with bias and stuff.
I literally still have clients when they're describing culture fit, they talk about hiring young, energetic people. They literally use the word young. And when I say clients, I don't mean like HR approved. I mean, but, you know, individual hiring teams, a hiring manager will describe who they're looking for.
And they are a 28-year-old telling me they want to hire young people. And you can just imagine what it's like to be in your 40s or 50s going through the interview process. It's probably not great. There's probably a lot of assumptions made. level and seniority.
I spoke about this a lot more detail last year if you saw that deck, but there's a lot of issues with level and seniority. What do we mean by senior? What do we mean by mid? What do we mean by director? There's so much misalignment on that that you end up saying no to candidates that probably should have been good simply because we are not on the same page, not because they're not qualified.
And then the third one is just, what do we mean by smart? What do we mean by potential? What does someone that has kind of good leadership potential mean?
These are these undefined things that often are used to discriminate against people, and it makes me crazy because it's used for evil in the same way culture fit has been used for evil. And then ramp time and training is similar to me. People say, I don't know if she would hit the ground running. I don't know if he'd hit the ground running. No one hits the ground running.
No one does. No one hits the ground running. So stop with that bullshit around they have to hit the ground running thing. That's just not going to happen.
So let's talk honestly around... What are trainable things? If they have some gaps, question one, is that trainable?
Question two, how long would it take for them to get ramped up? And what's reasonable hiring manager for you to expect for a ramp time? Let's not let one interviewer who has their own perception that you have to hit the ground running, ruin the whole thing and create a false negative. I want to talk about not a program, but I'm going to talk about this idea of bar raiser for a second.
Anyone ever heard of this term bar raiser before? So Bar Razors is a, the Bar Razor program that's at Amazon is a program that I co-built and co-led a long time ago, 1999. And it was designed as a quality control mechanism. It was also designed as a way to instill recruiting culture in every single kind of, in every team, every hiring team out there in our company.
And I want to share this with you, not to convince you to do Bar Razors, because I definitely don't think this is everyone. And you can't just copy-paste something like this and make it work. And it may not even be a problem that you kind of need solving. But I want to highlight. One of the things that we do a lot of for companies, we do a lot of interview training.
We do a lot of work to define what good looks like. We spend lots of time training people all over the world. Companies put a lot of money and time into it.
We train their trainers. They roll it out. Thousands of people have received training at some companies.
But you know what? If you don't have an accountability mechanism to make sure people aren't using culture fit for evil, if you don't have an accountability mechanism to make sure there aren't 11 people on the interview team, if you don't have an accountability mechanism to make sure that you're not just making up on the fly what senior means or leadership potential, or some of that other stuff, you are not going to hire great people. What a waste of money to train everyone in behavioral interviewing or whatever, and then end up with no accountability in the room when we're doing decisions. Now, some of you are inserting yourself into that process. You're playing a talent advisor role.
You're not there as a note taker. Some of us can't be in the room. Some of us, they're remote. There are different time zones. We're just not able to scale to kind of be in every on-site interview.
I totally get that. Bar raisers are people that are designed to sit in on interview processes that don't report to the hiring manager but have some backbone and are able to push back if they think a bad decision is being made. A bad decision like we're about to say no to someone we should say yes to and they need a champion or we're about to say yes to someone we should say no to and we need someone to kind of call this out, this is not a good hire. But just as importantly, they instill discipline in our interview process and they hold us accountable to what we mean by our core competencies or our behaviors that we look for in people. They're not letting people do some of that really biased or no evidence, gut feel based kind of interviewing.
If you don't have an opportunity to play that role for your company, something you might want to think about is maybe something like this as a strategic mechanism to make sure you're keeping the bar high. Particularly if you're having big turnover issues, first year turnover issues in some groups or big performance issues in some group. If you want to learn more about this and Google hiring committees and some other models. BarRaisers.com has the webinar on it that I did for LinkedIn a few months ago comparing these different models.
This is kind of more detail on what makes a good bar raiser. I mentioned a couple of these things, backbone already and trainer, but also someone who's well-respected in the org. The last thing I want to talk about in our last few minutes is probably the most strategic thing you can do, which is how do we build not just great teams by hiring great people and fill recs, but how do we build a culture of recruiting?
How do you build a legacy in your organization where you're actually building better hiring managers? I have seen organizations get top talent who have amazing hiring managers and crappy recruiters. I have not seen organizations get great talent who have amazing recruiters and crappy hiring managers, though. And I'm not trying to discount us.
We play an unbelievable role. But when you have crappy hiring managers, top talent sniffs that out and they do not want to be part of C teams. They want to be part of B, A teams, right? So we got to make our hiring managers better, not just in interviewers, but for all those things, pre-funnel, all those things we were talking about. So when I think about who gets top talent, top talent goes to engaged hiring managers.
And that's something that I've talked about a few times. I want you guys to take that back if you haven't heard that message. Leftovers go to hiring managers that suck. If you want great talent, you step up. And I want to be really clear with people about what stepping up looks like.
That doesn't mean like, you know, you're on speed dial for me and you return my calls quickly and you give me feedback in every resume I send you. That's not what I mean. I mean, you have a more of a leadership role to play as a manager, as a leader in our company.
So what are some things you can do? If you want to create this culture of recruiting and empower hiring managers, I'm going to give you five quick things you can do. One, I have a lot of recruiters tell me in focus groups, my hiring managers aren't awesome. And you know what drives me nuts?
I'll go talk to hiring managers, and a lot of them are saying, tell me what I should be doing to be better. I don't even know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know our process. It's half the time I don't know who my recruiter is.
I get these forms I'm supposed to fill out. It has a required field. I don't even know where I'm supposed to get that number.
It's some rec number. Where do I get that? I called finance. They don't know.
I mean, they are so frustrated sometimes. And yet I hear recruiters saying, my hiring managers suck, and the managers are like, tell me what to do to be better, and I'll be better. Some of them don't. Some of them say, well, you suck. But some of them, some of them will step up.
We have to set expectations. Shame on me if I'm a recruiter and I'm not telling my hiring manager partner what I expect of them. So much of the language used in recruiting is this customer-supplier relationship, or you're my customer, hiring manager, anything you want.
11 people on the interview team, no problem. You want to say no to 15 candidates in a row who are all perfectly qualified? I'm not going to call you on it. It's your rec.
It's your good. We're good. We're good. I'm just here to please. Screw that.
WTF you guys like we have an obligation to step up a little bit right so so one of the things we need to do is we need to set expectations for what great hiring managers look like and that includes going into orientation pushing yourself into staff meetings talking to VPs around how you're going to build hiring manager expectations into performance reviews and all kinds of stuff second thing is fix your surveys so many of your surveys if you have them go to hiring managers after a rec is completed saying how is your recruiter and they rate us why are we not rating them Why are we not getting a survey every time a rec is closed saying, was this hiring manager responsive? Did they help do some pre-funnel work? Were they involved in networking?
Did they lead the interview process? Did they run a good debrief and make a good hiring decision? Did they help close down the candidate?
But if you haven't set expectations, you don't get to send surveys out. But why are we not, if we're trying to create a partnership, why are we not surveying us about them? You with me on that?
It's ridiculous not to do that. Third thing, rewards and recognition. You know, people respond to carrot and stick. I say if someone is great as a hiring manager, recognize the shit out of them.
Bring them into staff meetings. Take them on tour. Tell them only certain people get to be interview trainers and make them one of your behavioral interview training people. Send them out to do campus presentations.
If they're a lower level manager, get them exposure to the VP, SVP, the CEO for doing great work. Send information out that says this is what we expect. This is the kind of behavior that we're rewarding. This is what great hiring managers do.
Obviously, train them where you can, and where possible, create some pull so they want to step up. Sometimes you do this through public shaming by putting metrics out there. And I have some stories about that if you ever want to have a Diet Coke with me, where I've done some really stupid things around that. But a lot of times, just peer metrics really help. Just kind of take a look at your department leaders you support and start publishing close rates.
Start publishing funnel metrics. Talk about employee referral percentages. Talk about time to fill.
Highlight that. And talk about it in a way that's not, oh, I'm so sorry. You make yourself small. And I know your time to fill is longer than hers.
And I will try harder. I'm so, you know, don't talk like that. Put it out there and have a confident conversation and ask some questions about it. And ask them if they'd like to hear what they can do to get this kind of time to fill.
45-day time to fill, 60-day time to fill. Would you like to hear what this team, what we are doing in that team, what they're doing differently to keep time to fill 15 days shorter? Of course, they're going to want to know that.
That's our opportunity to kind of step in as a talent advisor. So I've talked about a lot of things. Influencing people to change is hard. You guys ever heard this term love language before?
My wife told me about it years ago. Apparently her love language is not Doritos and Blizzards. I just learned that.
But one of the things that for me I recognize when I talk to hiring managers is when I'm asking people to step up and do more, a lot of times I said this at the start. I frame it in this kind of HRE language. And I talk about, you know, well, we're trying to create one global consistent process. We're trying to win this award for our brand, and I need you to be in this video.
One of the things that I see over and over again is we don't frame things up in the language of the hiring manager, and it drives me nuts. The language, the love language of the hiring manager is speed. It's quality.
It's diversity. Talk to them about the stuff they're being measured on, they care about, that impacts their job. Don't frame it around this other HRE language.
When you're speaking in those terms, you are absolutely, absolutely going to get more engagement from them. I'm not guaranteed that they're going to. do everything you ask them to do, but they're going to lean in a little more.
Very rarely, as I said, does someone from TA or HR walk in and actually help me do my job better. Most of the time, someone from HR is walking down the hallway, I'm pressing the close button in the elevator because they're just going to ask me to do shit I don't want to do. You know what I'm saying? So I want my job, my job should be make their lives not better and I'm, you know, you're my customer, anything you want, but to help them be more effective and frame things when I'm asking them to help me around the things that they care about, their love language. Last thing, career advice.
Uh... If you take on the big, scary problems, you will grow in your career much faster than your colleagues will. I want you to run to the fire. When you see a problem, when you see a pain point, when you see something that's broken, I want you to not say, I don't want to get involved in that.
If it's tied to speed, quality, and diversity, you run to it. If it's not, you run the other direction, because that's not going to help the business. But if it's tied to speed, quality, and diversity, you run to that fire, and you take advantage of the opportunity to work on a big problem. Where there are big problems, there is pain. Where there is pain, there is motivation.
Where there is pain, there is flexibility to try new things. Where there is pain, there is opportunity to be a better partner, and they will be more receptive to doing things that they're not doing today. I love, love, love to take on the hard problems in my space. I actually think on the surface our problems don't look that hard, but you introduce culture and personalities and limited resources and shitty ATSs and... All the other stuff, the press is talking about us in a not nice way and all these things and our jobs can be pretty hard.
If you can find opportunities to go help someone kind of run their business better, I think we have a huge, huge opportunity. We talked about nine things. I'm just over time a couple minutes.
I want to say this was a lot of stuff to cover. I get that. I put the slides. I'll give you the URL in a second for the slides. If you are doing something strategic that doesn't cost a lot of money, I would love for you to tweet it.
or send me a note about it, because I'd love to recognize you the next time I do something like this. I think there's some great stuff going on in our space. I'm really proud to be part of the talent acquisition.
I love, love, love our space. I love all of us. I think we have a great community.
And I'm really excited that maybe one or two of you, or 20 or 200, were inspired to maybe take a couple things back. Did you feel like you got a couple things you can take back and use that are practical? Awesome.
So if you want to get a download of the PDF slides, it's at recruitingtoolbox.com slash TC19. I'm over time, and some of you have drinks waiting for you. I'm going to do some Q&A off to the side here, and if you ask me a question or you just want to come up and rush the stage, I have some stickers, including a few inappropriate ones for your laptops.
Thank you guys so much for letting me keep you in the afternoon. Thank you, guys. Thank you, thank you.