Announcer: Hello and welcome to Eightfold Radio. Jared Lucas is chief people officer with MobileIron. Jared acknowledges that attracting technical talent is a big challenge in his industry. And he spent years building out a pool of qualified candidates. Let’s listen now as JoAnne McDougald speaks with Jared about how Eightfold is helping MobileIron tap its candidate pool most effectively to fill positions.

Eightfold: Hi everyone and welcome to Eightfold Radio. We’re joining you here from lovely Menlo Park, California and I’m joined by Jared Lucas from MobileIron, who’s the chief people officer. So chief people officer isn’t a role that’s been around forever, it’s kind of new. So tell me about a day in the life of a CPO.

Jared: Yeah, I think it’s kind of the modern way of looking at the human resources function. So everything that has anything to do with attracting, retaining or developing talent, that’s part of my charter at MobileIron.

Eightfold: And what keeps you up at night? And what are the things that make you look for new technologies?

Jared: Well we have huge supply/demand challenges on technical talent. And so that’s been something that for many, many years I lose sleep over. How do we get the right talent to build the products that we need? So when I think about new technologies, I’m always looking for ways to optimize, ways to make things more efficient, ways to make things smarter. And I’m also looking at the team behind who’s building these companies, because I want to really be attracted to the best talent, who’s building out these technologies for my team.

Eightfold: And so when you were—you are an Eightfold customer.

Jared: Yes MobileIron is an Eightfold customer.

Eightfold: Lovely. And when you were evaluating Eightfold, what were your top three things you were looking for? I know Eightfold is a brand new company and so they must’ve overcome some challenges in that regard.

Jared: Yeah, absolutely. I think the concept of automated ATS search, so the ability to search your own applicant tracking system with automation, is a really exciting concept and very, very compelling. Because we’ve spent many years building out the pool through all of our various marketing techniques to get candidates to apply and we don’t have a really efficient way to mine that data, so I think that was very attractive. And I think the overall concept of nurturing that pool over time, going back to it and building that pool up was something that was really attractive.

Eightfold: I love that. So I even think about the concept of getting an email from a company that I, at one point, had bothered to research, put in an application, write a torturous please hire me letter and then there you go and then they sent, bing, me an email. So that’s why you’re getting the 70 percent open rates and really being able to convert those people who were, at one time, a fan of your company, found you. And then now you’re actually doing what companies have said over years, “We’re just going to hold on to that application, we’ll be back in touch with you.” But nobody was ever in touch.

Jared: Yeah and think of a company like MobileIron, we’ve only been around for 10 years, but over that decade, we’ve touched thousands of candidates in the market. So even though we’re not a Fortune 500 company per se, with thousands and thousands of employees, we still have a huge footprint of candidates we’ve touched. And we have ongoing needs and building/finding solutions in technologies that make that process better are really important to me.

Eightfold: Yeah, no that’s terrific. And even the jobs have changed, so maybe somebody that wasn’t right for any of the jobs that you had open at the time, now all of a sudden, everybody needs a data scientist.

Jared: Absolutely. And candidates certainly change over time, and somebody three years ago may have gone off and picked up some new technologies or skills and now they’re much more interesting to us and more interesting to us to hire.

Eightfold: Yeah, no that’s terrific. And so in terms of talent management, being able to keep your existing employees engaged and on a path… I think this is such a nuanced idea that I think people like a CMO, CPO would want to be able to identify that. But this gives you a regimented repeatable process for, at month 14, I’m going to reach out to everybody in that month 14 and give them an opportunity. “Oh would you like a mentor? Would you like to join this training program? Would you—are you ready for some more school?” I think to me, that is fantastic. I’m a serial job hopper, I have to say and—but I think if I had worked for a company that was ready to nurture me and keep me, I would stay longer and I think it’s important.

Jared: Well, and the reality is if you don’t nurture the employees they’re going to leave. And the data on tenure at employer has just gone down dramatically since the ‘70’s, the ‘80’s, the ‘90’s. So we live in a new world where people are free agents and if you’re not continually offering them upside internally, they certainly have a lot of options externally.

Eightfold: Yeah. So what’s your parting word today? What would you tell people about Eightfold, your experience and what’s the one thing that you’re really enjoying with your implementation?

Jared: Yeah, I think the—my parting words would be we have to kill the status quo and we have to be questing after new ways, new approaches, more systematic, more efficient, more automated ways of doing things. And I think Eightfold is a company that’s got that vision and so we look for companies like that to partner with to make us better.

Eightfold: I love it. Thank you so much Jared Lucas from MobileIron. Thanks for joining us for Eightfold Radio.

Jared: Okay, no problem, thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Eightfold Radio. To find out more about Eightfold please visit us at Eightfold.ai, and be sure to listen to our other episodes chronicling the experiences of Eightfold’s customers and partners.