Rebecca Warren 00:00
We’ve got two amazing guests. They’re going to join us as we talk through “Bringing your talent back from the dead”, a little ominous title for us today on Halloween in the US. So what we first before we get started, what we should cover is just a few housekeeping things. So if you look towards the bottom of your screen, you’ll see some widgets that you can use during the event. There’s further related reading in the resources section. If you want to ask questions, feel free to go ahead and throw those in the Q&A section. We may or may not be able to get to them during the webinar. If we don’t, I will do our best to follow up afterwards, and then next. You can also register for next month’s Talent Table, which is about us asking the C-Suite “what do they want from HR?”. So, without further ado, our two wonderful guests who are joining us, we have Victoria and Hung. I’m going to ask them to go ahead and do a short introduction of themselves, and then we have a bit of a polarizing question. So my name is Rebecca Warren. I am the host of the talent Table event at Eightfold for coming up on four years now, and I am in our talent center transformation group, where we talk about organizations transforming from a job centered focus to a people centered focus, putting folks at the center of all that happens in the talent life cycle. The question now so I’ll ask our two folks introduce themselves in the question in a Halloween candy trade war, what candy do you keep no matter what and what candy do you get rid of? Now, we did have a little bit of a discussion prior to going live, so I’m excited to hear how we go. So Victoria, I’m going to throw it on over to you to introduce yourself and answer the candy trade war question.
Victoria Bombas 02:02
Thank you, Rebecca. My name is Victoria Bombas. I am smiling because I’m thinking of candy already. I am a veteran of talent acquisition and recruitment for a long time. I have worked for a number of RPO and recruitment organizations in global roles, helping companies transform their ta function when it comes to their process, how they’re structured, their tech and so forth. And for the last couple of years, I have worked at EWC UK. I am part of the workforce team, where we help clients, as it says on the tin, help clients solve problems around their workforce. And of course, as we all know, talent acquisition skills, the skills gap, the labor the labor shortage, is a top, top issue facing PwC clients and organizations today. So thank you very much for the invite. Passionate about the topic and excited for the Halloween theme. I in the great candy trade war. So we have a bit of a we did, we did preview this a little bit. I’m not going to steal homes thunder, but we’ve definitely got a geographical sort of divide. I live in London, but I’m, I, you know, I’ve had sort of a different upbringing. So I would say the candy I keep is Reese’s. I keep anything Reese’s. So I will any, any shape, any shape those guys make. It’s a cup. It’s whatever, anything Reese I keep. And I am partial to North American candy, so I will, I will be right there, apart from candy corn, that’s my caveat. Rebecca, Candy Corn is the limit. Is the bits.
Rebecca Warren 03:46
Okay, so that’s what you trade away. Candy corn gets out of the basket. Immediately. Any races can come my way, I’ll swap. I love candy corn. So I know welcome just colored sugar, but I don’t know there’s something about candy cord. All right. Hung over to you.
Hung Lee 04:06
Hey everybody, and thanks Rebecca for inviting me on the show. So my name is Hong Li. I basically write a newsletter called Recruiting Brain Food. Also do a bunch of other things in and around, sort of the recruitment ecosystem. I’m a guy who still self-identifies as a recruiter. So you know, even though I haven’t sent a CV or a resume in anger for 10 years or so, I’m still in that mindset of being a recruiter, but these days, I’m basically more like a support, support person for the community. So I’m delighted to be here. I’m also very passionate about chocolate, in particular, what is described as chocolate. And I’m outraged for our American friends who have to kind of live under the oppression of Hershey’s, which I think is a criminal organization, because they produce, they produce, like, very popular candy, which I don’t think is actually candy, I would definitely get rid of that doesn’t need Halloween for it. If I see it, it gets destroyed. I would do the same, you know, on Halloween or any of the day, I would retain this particular piece of candy. Folks. I even have sort of brought it, and I am now currently addicted to Ritter sports, corn flake flavor. Imagine corn flakes in chocolate, in a in a square like this. Oh my God, that’s not going anywhere my stomach, I can tell you that. So all her shoes, candy in the trash, Ritter Sport on your desk all day, every day. That’s it.
Rebecca Warren 05:45
Okay. Got it all right. So Is now the time to say that I love Snickers, and those have always been in the basket recess is it is a top contender as well, but I’ve always been I’ll tell you a super quick story. So when I was growing up, I loved Snickers so much. My mom would take our Halloween candy and put it up on top of the fridge, and I went through, pulled out all of the Snickers, and as a punishment, she made me sit down and eat all of the candy that was in the candy bucket in one go. Terrible. Here’s the thing that I will never, ever, ever eat again, and I don’t even know what they are, and they’re in the US, and they’re black and orange wrapped, like I don’t know what they are, toffees or something not toffee. They’re disgusting. So that was, I don’t even know what they were. I don’t even know if they make them anymore, but orange and black wrapped, some things will never hit our table. So all right, well, we could talk more about chocolate, which is is which is fun, but we’ve got a topic that I’d like to think is even more engaging, and we are talking about bringing talent back from the dead. So what does that mean? We talk about the dusty meeting requests, the crumpled pages of interview questions and the terrifying pile of resumes, and then our HR teams worst night, where nightmare the graveyard of past candidates who could have been great. Wa, wa, so let’s talk about that point, right? The resumes of the people that could have been great, or even just forget the word resume, and the people who could have made a difference in your organization that you didn’t hire because you didn’t know about them. So what are we talking about when we say bringing candidates back from the debt and Victoria. I’ll throw that one over to you, just to get your thoughts on it.
Victoria Bombas 07:46
Well, it’s a really, so, so as we’ve been leading up this discussion, and it’s I’ve been thinking a lot about this, because it’s a real, it’s a really all encompassing categories in it. There’s all sorts of, all sorts of folks in that graveyard i was looking for seasonal puns, you know, different kinds of zombies. And it’s a wide it’s a broad range, isn’t it? So you have, you have people who were part of a recruitment process, so your silver medalists, or people that so they really had quite an active engagement with your organization and your team at some point. Then you have so that. So they were very, very close and potentially good talent that you might, you might have missed out on. You have mass applicants, right? So we’ve seen a huge rise of applications, and that will continue, huge numbers of applications, people also leveraging in all sorts of tools and tech to plug we’ve all read about it. So huge numbers of sort of sort of unqualified applicants who haven’t really had contact, but there could be some real gems right in there. And then you have other categories. You have alumni, for example, and alumni networks and referrals. So it’s a, it’s a really mixed group of people who are lying there. That’s the old graveyard. And there’s, there’s different, different ways to engage with them, and different value to engaging with them. And and the other thing I was thinking about as well is, is there there, obviously, and again, it’s been talked about quite a lot, but they’re your consumers, potentially, aren’t they? Or they’re your public, your consumers. And so all throughout this conversation today, that’s sort of always the angle that we have to come back to, you know? So they’re either they’re either valuable future talent or current talent or future talent, or they’re they’re consumers, or they’re people who could be vocal about your organization, right?
Rebecca Warren 09:29
And all of the folks that are in that talent graveyard are folks that have preferenced your organization at one time or another for some reason, so they’re sort of warm leads, right? So Hung What do you think about that?
Hung Lee 09:45
Yeah, I mean, the it’s kind of a paradox, because they are the obvious people to speak to first, because, of course, they’ve been kind of pre acquired. So as you mentioned, they already have brown familiarity. They’ve already had a touch point, in the case of alumni and silver medalist, candidates have actually progressed significantly in the process in some way. And so they’ve actually we have strong relationships with them. The obvious people to go for. The problem we have is simply that we once, once we’ve processed them as candidates, we typically forget about we throw them into the graveyard. We don’t add a team or a policy or a system that can reactivate them or keep them engaged. We are getting better with this in the sense that even pre-AI, pre-Gen AI, should we say, we started to get a little bit more sophisticated talent relationship management tooling, which did was, it was certainly an upgrade from what it was before, where, typically the candidates would just sit in, statically, in the database. Nothing would happen unless, you know, at some point someone would send a big mail merge to it to them all. We’ve got a little bit more intelligent, I would say, around sort of the late teens or so, 2016 1718, but now, with the advent of Gen AI, the promise really is, is that we do definitely today have technology that can be that can be really useful in keeping these people engaged throughout their entire engagement with us. Can send them relevant information, pick up relevant signals from their behaviors to when they’re ready again, to look for work for us even start proactively matching them to opportunities as they emerge within our business. So I do think we’re going to have a very different sort of world. We’re on the cusp of really reanimating all of these folks, and you know, that will be a very welcome thing, given the fact that it’s increasingly difficult to to make the case for constantly doing external hiring, I mean theory that essentially, you know, we’re already at the point where we’re quite frightened to advertise today, because we just get inundated with job applications. So we have a very different problem that we didn’t anticipate, but for getting to the point where actually acquiring people from fresh turns into a low ROI activity, then we do have to look back to the people with pre acquired and that turns into, in fact, the primary source. So I’m very excited about this future. I think it’s going to be it’s going to be great. We’re going to lean a lot on the tooling, but I think that will also shape the sort of roles and structures that we have within, within recruiting,
Rebecca Warren 12:26
And jumping off of that, I think one of the things that we’re hearing now that is different than what we’ve heard in the past, or maybe it’s just been heightened, is What you said hung about the volume of candidates, of people that are applying, right? But what we’re seeing, and what we’re hearing in the market, is hiring managers are like, where are all the people? And the candidates are like, I’ve applied to 200 jobs in the last two weeks, and I’ve heard nothing. And so it feels like we have these kind of ships crossing in the night, right? You’ve got hiring managers who have this idea that there’s so many candidates in the market that were to be very choosy. And I’ve had several friends of mine who are looking for opportunities, who have heard that from hiring, that from from recruiters, right? While they’re just being really choosy because there’s so many folks in the market. But that’s really a misnomer. There’s really not just gazillions of people for that job, right? And then you’ve got all of these candidates who have great skills, but maybe their resume looks like a certain you know, I always say resumes a list of things I never want to do again, but it’s like in one area, usually, or in one particular place, so the skill piece is missing, right? So you’ve got all of these candidates who are looking for jobs, who are getting ghosted, who aren’t getting responded to, and then you’ve got hiring managers who have this idea that there’s all these candidates out there and we’re missing them, and they could be sitting right in our ATS, it could be sitting in our in our CRM, and we’re not spending the time to get the dots connected. So I think it’s not just the the actual people and the actual hiring managers. It’s the information and connecting the skills that we’re looking for, maybe thinking differently than we have in the past, based on all of the disruption that we’ve seen over the last couple of years. Thoughts on that?
Victoria Bombas 14:22
I would agree. I think hung mentioned the paradox. It’s a it’s a perfect storm. The tech is a perfect storm, isn’t it? So to what hung was saying, what you both saying, so it’s a perfect storm of amplifying the ability to apply in allegedly. Well, what we’re reading, right, what the reports are saying is that it’s people are applying in all like, I’ll use the term reckless, like, lightly, but reckless applying. I haven’t seen data for that, actually, maybe, maybe Han has. I’ve heard about increases in applications, particularly in our early careers, and in demographics you would expect to be, you know, high adopters. But I’ve heard it more anecdotally, so I haven’t seen the data, but there’s a sentiment that there’s regular application enabled by AI, and there’s also a sentiment that there is really high level so data says more than 50% of candidates in the UK are ghosted, for example, and this sort of paralysis of the ability that to match, you know, the this, this mismatch of the the ask and the activity, and it’s, it’s super interesting. It’s, yeah, it’s very much sign of the times, I think so, yeah, the good points made. It’s very interesting.
Hung Lee 15:34
I think those two things are actually kind of connected in the sense that, you know, even though, I mean, sounds like a paradox, but probably isn’t where you’ve got essentially. I mean, firstly, again, even pre AI, we had, we had the phenomenon of mass supply. So, so, you know, the tools, we kind of had this pre COVID, we had a talent crisis. And we thought, okay, we have actually have a problem at the top of the phone. We need to actually reduce the friction for candidates to apply. And we’re all of the job boards ended up saying, okay, one click, apply mobile, apply all this stuff. And we started to get really lower the friction as to how much effort it took to apply to a job. A friend of mine called Josh willows, who works for one of the program programmatic advertising providers, actually says mentioned a really interesting first sort of concept, which is what is the right level of friction that is required for a job application, because it can’t just be zero, but if it’s getting close to zero, then basically it’s very low effort, low risk for a candidate to not press that button. Now the crisis we have today is that we’ve added generative AI, which is personalization on top of mass supply. So now we’ve got personalized mass apply, which, as far as I’m concerned, is like a digital denial of service for traditional recruiting funnels. If you’re sitting there sticking an advert out, you’re going to get absolutely swamped, not only swamped, but you’re going to unable to identify which is a good or bad candidate, because this is all being personalized to your job ad. You know, their CVs or resumes have all been now tailored perfectly to the advert you’ve put out, and you’re no longer able to eyeball that make a right decision, and so you don’t, and therefore, just sit in a kind of ever increasing sort of inbox, and that’s where the ghosting comes in, because we can’t actually action this. And I think what’s going to happen? Two things will happen. We’re either going to stop advertising, and I think there’s some evidence already. We’re going to start with doing that. In other words, we’re going to make more intentional advertising choices. So rather than just click multi post that you do when you create a job in ATS two years ago, that was a smart thing to do nowadays, a dumb thing to do. You know, you’re going to be very selective as to where you put that job ad, even if you even decide to put it out there, and you’re going to look internally, or potentially you can look internally, or alternatively to non public ways to acquire candidates. And this is where we go back to pre pre acquired, because pre acquired means you can go in fish into that pond without subjecting yourself to this overwhelming surge of external job applicants.
Victoria Bombas 18:22
I am, I wonder if, and I am sort of going to take us down the dreaded, you know, Gen AI topic. But I wonder, I wonder if this mismatch will close a bit. The delta will close a bit when, obviously, Gen AI is democratized, right to the extent that it’s very accessible to all the candidates, all the applicants, right to all of us and all those democratized corporations. There are obviously all the considerations involved around adopting it corporately. So the Gen AI race, like the candidates have raised to use the tools and to apply in a personalized, customized way. There are the tools there. I mean, there was LinkedIn announcements a couple of days ago. You know, there are the tools there to use the Gen AI enabled recruiter tools that would allow you to match that behavior, right? So to meet them where they are in terms of the personalized assessment. But corporates have had more of a barrier to entry there, right? Because it’s slower to take it up. And corporates, as we know, are adopting the Gen AI tools, you know, the agentic tools and so forth in their recruitment process. But inevitably, they’re slower to adopt so I wonder if, as they catch up and they start to use all of these co pilot tools and whatever in recruitment, and, you know, agents in recruitment, it comes together a little bit and actually closes that gap just hearing you talk about it?
Rebecca Warren 19:47
Yeah, I think that makes sense. And and hung, I’m taking a note of that concept of adding in the right level of friction, because is the answer, make it as easy as possible to apply, or is the answer, make it the right fit, right personalizing that, or being very maniacal about making sure that the job ad is correct, and then also making it not complicated, but making sure that those right fits are coming together So folks don’t feel like they’re applying to a ton of jobs, not hearing back, and then also making sure that hiring managers say, hey, we need to think a little differently and be intentional about what we’re putting out there to make sure that we’re getting the right stuff back.
Hung Lee 20:36
I would, you know, I’m not sure that’s the right approach. I think the simply because, I think the moment might have passed this, if you’re a job candidate today, we’re in this weird situation that if you don’t sort of go personalize mass supply, it’s actually it’s actually irrational not to do that. I spoke to a guy who actually designed one of these tools. And he designed the tool. He’s a software developer. He built the tool in order for him to get a job because he felt that he was getting out competed. So he thought, actually, actually, need to up my game. I’ll build a tool that scraped all of these job ads that come in and personalized with the Apply and then send the application guy. The guy sent 1000 job applications of this tool, and got 50 interviews of it. Now if you’re coming and you release the code, so now people can go and use the users tool. Now, if you’re like a really motivated job seeker, ie, you’re a job, you’re out in the market, you need a job, and you didn’t use technology like this, you’re going to be outgunned. So it makes sense for this, for this candidate, and all candidates, to use these tools. Now, I think it’s, you know, we can take a moral position, but I don’t believe in morality actually, so let’s not take the moral position. It’s just about incentives. This person is incentivized to do it. It’s rational. Sense to do it. Irrational not to do it. How do we respond as employers? I think we need to respond basically with what we’ll see is that we’re going to drop in kind of an automated assessment prior to hitting any inbox. So in order to preserve the recruiters inbox, we’re going to have to put in something, probably even in the advert to say, Hey, listen, if you want to expedite your process, click on this additional link, and then we drop that person into an assessment. And that assessment will be, we’ll see a pre Cambrian explosion of automated, AI powered assessment tools, which I think will be wonderful to see, because how we make those choices as employers as to which assessment tool we use will say a lot about who are, who are, who our business is. I believe this will be a fashion based choice as much as a functional based choice. So how we identify as an employer will determine what type of assessment on what even vendor that we might use to to kind of intercept these automated responses. So I think it’d be very exciting, but it’s going to be aI heavy, human light for job applications, the other side of recruiting, sourcing, community based, recruiting alumni, mining the alumni networks. That’s going to be human heavy, AI light. So I think we’re going to bifurcate how we handle those two groups of candidates.
Rebecca Warren 23:29
Yeah, because I do think that going back to that idea of the graveyard that we have of applicants, folks that have applied, that even if they’ve gotten a turndown, are still in our on our books, right in our in our talent pools, I think we need to figure out the right way to keep them engaged. So is there, if you think about in your in that talent pool, is there the the idea that we should connect with all of the folks. Or do you think in that talent pool we should figure out a way to make sure to segment those folks that are the right that that could be the right fit, and communicate with them singularly? I don’t know if that makes sense. Should we? Should we connect with everyone in the talent pool? Or do we spend time looking at using tools, right? Using using technology to help us communicate with just portions of that talent pool?
Victoria Bombas 24:34
I Well, I’ll jump in. And I this isn’t, this isn’t new, right, and the idea of the candidate as consumer and consumer marketing led approaches to candidates, right is something that we’ve talked about in our industry for a long time, and approaches we’ve talked about, and segmentation and personalization is part of that, and we have, obviously, so many more tools now to enable us to do that. But I think simply, I would be a big supporter of identifying and segmenting, but just in really simple terms, just seeing who’s in that pool, what do they want and what are they up to, right? So using the tools to work out what their priorities are, and then I think again, matching with what we see that people want to hear and want to experience, showing some authenticity and some accountability. In our messaging to those folks, right? So, so I think again, you know, segmentation is valuable so that we can, well, first of all, like select and target the right audience, meet them where they are, get to know them, and then be purposeful and clear and authentic with the communications again, if we put aside tech and all of those issues and skill shortages and all of that for a second, and the other factor that is there and backed up by all the data is how candidates and how people employees want to be spoken to, and what they value and what drives them to engage with an organization. So I think unless we think many people work out who they are and where they’re at and what they want, we can communicate authentically in a personalized way with them. So I I would stick with that old consumer as a candidate, as a consumer type of marketing approach, personally.
Rebecca Warren 26:16
Yeah, I think that makes sense. What are your thoughts?
Hung Lee 26:19
Yeah, really quickly. I couldn’t agree more. I think the, you know, the era of sending the big mail merger out that people are just tired of that, and it doesn’t really do us any favors, because we’re going to just end up kind of rustling up a bunch of people we can’t deal with at that at that time. And, you know, ultimately, all we want to try and do is kind of combine what we know of this candidate. So this is the biographical data that we’ve collected with their behavioral data. So for instance, if they are, when was the last time they sort of wandered across any of our assets? For instance, have they when we do send a monthly newsletter with, you know, job search tips or whatever it might be, did they open it or not? And, you know, that kind of basic CRM type activity should tell us, you know, the sorts of things we should then do to interact with with the next we shouldn’t be making calls to these people, by the way, as just as a in the sense that, you know, we shouldn’t, should we say, presume that a human heavy approach at this point is the right thing. They may not want to call, you know, we need to. The system should tell us when that is the case. So for instance, if they are repeatedly coming back to assets that we have or properties that we own Or click on our ads in whatever way they found them? Yeah, I’m pretty certain this person might be interested in maybe a chat to describe what their next step might be. And I think that’s really good concierge thing to do, particularly if they’ve gone through the flow as an alumni. For instance, if I’m an alumni and I’m actually checking out the career page of the company I’ve left, I don’t think I’d mind have a call from a manager from that business to say, hey, you know what’s happening. I think really nice concierge. So yeah, combine combining, sort of, the biographical data we have of this person and then the behavioral data, as long as, of course, we stay, you know, GPR compliant, etc, etc, which, in fact, we need to do to stay compliant. We actually need to be in touch with these folks then. Then that would be the optimal way to do it.
Rebecca Warren 28:28
Yeah, and if there is that, with those pieces of communication, the way to understand what skills they have, what passions they have, what interests they have, and then we can further segment and make sure that we’re serving up content or interactions that match with what they’re looking for, so continuing to think about what’s important to them, and again, those skills that maybe they haven’t used that they want to I know we saw a lot of that that happens around the pandemic, where folks are like, I’m going to do what’s right for me. And you know, the focus shifted from employer led to candidate led where candidates are like, nope, not moving, not doing that. Here the skills I want to do, here the work, here’s the work that I want to do. So if we have a better understanding of what people actually want to do, as opposed to just what’s on their resume, right, those are easy ways to interact with folks, to understand that and then continue to divide into areas where we can connect with them in the way that they want to be connected around, the things that they want to be connected
Hung Lee 29:28
about. That’s true, but so fiendish they’re like sentiment. Data is the one thing that is basically the missing component of data out there. If you think about what a biography is, is basically historical data, as you say, as you said, Rebecca, stuff that you’ve done previously. And part of the annoyance of recruiting is that we basically, that’s the data we work off. So the first question a recruiter asks any candidate is, oh, you know, what are you looking for? Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out what that person’s looking for without being intrusive, but that is fiendishly difficult, because that person’s dynamic. What that individual wants changes over time and unless, unless we literally go full on surveillance state and be massively intrusive, there’s no way we can really figure that out, which is why recommendation engines today are terrible, right? I mean, anybody who’s on LinkedIn, no disrespect to LinkedIn, I’m sure to do a fabulous job, but you end up getting surfaced up jobs that you literally would never consider. So this is one of the leading products out there on the planet, so that they can’t get this right. So very, very difficult to figure out segmentation, I think actually isn’t the way we’ve we’ve got to find a way to talk to them about their career path, so not just the next job, but what is their near term direction, you know? What is the things perhaps they’ve self identified as what they like to do? This is where some of, sometimes some of these assessments are quite cool, because they might be able to give the candidate, actually, some insight as to what types of work motivates them, because oftentimes we’re the worst judge of this, you know? I mean, I’m sure we’ve all got friends that insist that they love doing this type of job, but then they don’t understand why they’re always resigning after after six to nine months. It’s because they actually don’t enjoy that job. They’ve just like, you know, they’ve just failed a process of self self awareness, and which we all do. We’re the worst judge of ourselves. So so yeah, having some assessment, I think to you know, map your personality, your traits, your behaviors, where you perform best, etc, that I think would be really interesting for candidates, and maybe the best way to kind of keep in touch with them is that is to almost perform as a as a careers coach, you know, as a, hey, we’re an available careers coach for you, just come in and talk to us about what it is you want. Perhaps that’s the best way to figure out, you know, keep in touch of what their sentiment is.
Victoria Bombas 31:53
Building on what you said, hung in the self just expanding and the self awareness theme is interesting. Often it’s not just that your data is by your your your data on your CV is biographical. And you know, you talked about how hard it is to work out what people want to do. Sometimes people don’t even know what they want to do, right? And this is where the interesting dimension of the skills based approach is right. Because if you can can identify or help people work out, identify people’s core skills. You can use the predictive ability we have to actually suggest things to them, right? So many of us find ourselves in our careers at times where you’re not you know what your set of skills is, you don’t you have an ambition, but you don’t necessarily know where you want to go. So just expanding what you said about a career coaching service and and this is where the skills, the whole skills theme, ties in really well. Actually, these, these people who are in this in this pool, look, looking at an organization’s strategy, Workforce Strategy, based around skills, and then actually, again, concurging or effectively coaching people towards where the need is. You know, I think there’s a real opportunity. There’s an opportunity there helping people, helping people idea devise their career paths, right? Or the potential that non linear, non obvious career paths, because many people might have an interest in the company and be engaging, but not clear where they want to go,
Hung Lee 33:17
I want to help you launch a PWC initiative, Victoria, because, because your PwC is such a powerful brand, like, I don’t think you have a problem attracting people in. You could, you could do that. You could sort of say, Hey, we’re going to provide this, you know, AI powered Career Service for folks come in and and, you know, tell us what it is that you do and what it is that you think you want to do, and we’ll find those together. We’ll figure out what that is that could be a really powerful way to help people build brands, but also acquire candidates, right without putting ads out books of Hershey’s coming your way. Actually, okay?
Hung Lee 33:57
I would, I would, I would agree a contract if you sent me all the Hershey bars in the world, because then I could destroy them.
Victoria Bombas 34:03
Amazing.
Rebecca Warren 34:07
Okay, but I do want to, I don’t love the idea of assessments, and so maybe we need to unpack that a little bit. Because when I think about assessments, and I think about, you know, we talk about adding in a little bit of friction to her people apply to make sure that we’re getting the right fit, or, you know, asking the right questions. I know myself, that to me, I’m like, You don’t know me, and you’re asking all these questions, and I have to jump through these hoops, so I’m not going to do that. So maybe that’s part of the answer, right? Having people bounce out because they’re not going to take the time to complete an assessment. But the way I would, the way I would think about it, is that to me, if you have the tools, if you have the tech to look at getting the people in your talent pool segmented and ask those questions after they apply, to me, that feels like I’m in the system. I’ve got my automated Hey, thanks for applying. We’ll let you know if there’s a fit, even if I’ve been turned down for a particular position, but then I get a message that says, hey, we’d love to learn more about you to see if we have opportunities in the future, not the Hey, click here to see all of our open jobs. I think those things are kind of sucky, right? Like I’m not going to go through and again, as you said, Victoria, guess which job I might be interested in? Hung all of a sudden, I take this job and six months down the road, I hate it, right? But if they’re if using your tech once somebody is inside your talent pool to say, hey, here, here’s a here’s and maybe the word assessment is what’s throwing me off, but here’s an opportunity for you to tell us what you’re looking for. What gets you excited? What are you passionate about? Can we send you more information about things inside the company once they’re in the door. To me, that feels personalized, engaging, and that helps us and continue to gather information from a we want to help you, right? We want to give you that coaching, that idea. Hey, have you thought about XYZ? To me, it feels better to do that once they’re inside your doors and building that brand, even if right, it’s the greatest compliment for someone who interacts with your brand doesn’t get a job and then says, Hey, but I’m going to refer someone to you because that was an amazing experience. Or I love how I’m being treated, or I feel like I’m being engaged with personally. So maybe it’s the word assessment, but to me, it’s, I don’t know that automation for automation sake, is the right way to segment the audience. So let me throw that out there.
Hung Lee 36:38
I was going to say to Rebecca, actually, just to better understand your hostility to silly, but ask the question, no, no. Like, why? Why is it that you feel that it’s the wrong thing to do?
Rebecca Warren 37:01
I think maybe putting it too early in the process is where I struggle because, and I think about when, and I’ll date myself right when we used to do multiple assessments before somebody actually even came into interview, or once they came into interview, and then we did multiple assessments that just felt like to to a candidate they will invest for as you know, as much as needed when they feel invested in and so doing assessment up front questionnaires, things that feel like you’re asking me these things. And I don’t even know if this is the right fit to me too early in the process, I think, is where I have a hard time if you said, Hey, this is great. Thanks for application. Here’s five questions that we want to know that’s going to take you five minutes. We’d love to, you know, get that to understand you more. To me, that feels better. So maybe hostility is a strong word, but maybe that’s right too early in the process.
Victoria Bombas 37:58
I’m entirely on your side. I you know what I was gonna I was gonna discuss this the so bringing back the Halloween theme, right? Because we used to have killer questions. So these sound like killer assessments, right? I, I, we know that there are obviously, in terms of measure, measuring experience, we know that there are drop off points. And traditionally, assessments were always a drop off point right in the process. And and, of course, the problem we have is, we have is two, is mass applications. So I get the sentiment of introducing an assessment to qualify those mass, personalized applications, right? And ask for a level of investment, but I’m with you, Rebecca, I just, I just think that an assessment that tries to really tease out what I want or who I am, when you’ve not engaged with me yet, I’d be like, Nah, it’s, it’s, there’s, there’s something that you haven’t invested anything in me. Why am I investing something in you? And that’s my personal that’s my personal feeling about it. But we also do know that it’s always been a point where there’s, from a data point of view, a high drop off of candidates in the process. So I’d love to hear more. So hung I mean, I was thinking while you were saying it, are there new technologies and assessments, like, Are there new and not not things like the gamified stuff that we know that’s around her? But what is it these assessments that makes people want to invest in them and the candidate want to be in there? I don’t know. What have you seen?
Hung Lee 39:31
I’ve seen innovation, technical innovation, but I’ve seen psychological innovation, so UX innovation, and I do believe we’ve solved that problem of exchange. So I think you’re right, the outrage that we have as candidates, and we’ve all been candidates, by the way, we’ve all applied to jobs, and it’s a horrible experience. So that’s, you know, let’s not sort of think that we don’t understand this. So we do understand it. The primary problem that we have is, look how much energy Am I putting in as a candidate, and what am I getting back out of this? That the black hole complaint is generally a sense of an unfair exchange, so the candidate has applied, typically, written a nice email, and done all of this stuff, jumped through a bunch of hoops. Could be actually quite an extensive application, depending on how the thing is set up, then there’s nothing. And it’s like that feels like an unfair exchange. Now you replicate that manually across however many applications you make, then obviously it becomes an outrageous, sort of an egregious experience right. Now, the way in which you kind of fix this sense of, look, am I hitting this I’ve applied. Now this person’s hitting me with an automated application. Again, outrage. Think about the energy exchange. I’ve put a huge amount of energy in. This person’s zero energy back, and here I am jumping through hoops. Again, you risk EV damage from doing that, and you risk all sorts. The way companies have dealt with this has been rather clever. So there’s two techniques. First technique is to guarantee an outcome if they actually go and do it. So in other words, let’s say there’s really good example. I won’t mention quite the names, as I don’t know the relationship they fall have with these companies. But there was a huge retailer that had a massive sort of surgery candidates couldn’t process simply. They were sitting there. They just literally could not process them. They had a manual sort of flow, just sitting there, losing candidates, losing Eb, everything. The way in which they did it was deploy an assessment solution. But the assessment solution actually was in the advert where they said, Hey, if you want to expedite your application, you can take this test and we’ll give you a result in 24 hours. And it turned out that candidates were clicking that link because they were they realized that actually I can sit in queue and wait for a human being to get to me, or I could just expedite by clicking so think about when you go and get a visa, right? How many times are you saying, Yeah, I’ll upgrade. Expedite. You expedite because you want the result the ambiguities to the period of ambiguity. You want to eliminate the ambiguity, even if, even if, you get a negative outcome. And so it turns out that lots of people subject themselves to the test, as long as the test is short for five to 10 minutes, something like that, even shorter. And obviously companies are making these things entertaining as well, so it doesn’t have to be a horrible experience. But then you hit them with the result and say, Hey, no, it’s no good. Here’s the reason why. However, here’s some other options that might look good, etc. Then suddenly you really do a great job of reducing the negativity that the person might experience. So there’s one example. The second way in which you can do it is related to this is that you give them some report. So you don’t necessarily need to give them an outcome, but you deliver them some value back from the energy they put in. I’ve just gone through this test. Okay, I’m going to come back to you with report which breaks down how you bench against everyone else who’s done this test. And then, you know, maybe we’ll give you some demographics as how you compare against your demographic cohort, or whatever it is, and how we rank your chances going forward, you do that, and then suddenly people think, okay, great, I’ve got something useful here. In exchange for my effort. So I think the UX innovations we’ve seen actually very powerful. I think they work, and I think they eliminate this sense of, you know, inequity that candidates inherently feel when they apply for jobs and then have to do assessments.
Rebecca Warren 43:37
Yeah, I think that’s that’s fair, and I like the way that you talk about that deliver value back to them for the time invested. So I think that makes sense. So let’s, let’s talk about, we’ve got about 15 minutes or so left. Let’s talk about the candidates that are in our databases, in our CRM we’ve talked about using technology to help us understand where they’re at, because I think that is a huge untapped value, right? I always used to tell my recruiting teams, go back into the ATS and then, you know, see if there were folks that you like. It’s horrible, right? Like ATS is, we’re not built for search function, and then you still have to pull them out, like, I have to remember what job they were attached to, what the rec number was, what their name was. Sometimes it’s just like, that person who did blah, blah, blah, that was amazing. And then you’re like, was it Sally? Was it? I don’t remember, right? So it’s a hard experience to go do that. And so then you still have to go and look them up on LinkedIn or GitHub or whatever, to see what they’re doing now, very time consuming. So if we have people in our databases, and we have organizations that have millions of folks in their ATS because they’re doing more of that, acquire function, and once they’re in the database, dead to me, right? Like it’s easier to go out and find new candidates than it is to try to bring candidates back from the dead, so, you know, the graveyard. So we need to think about, what are we going to do with these candidates that are already in our talent pool, that have preference even if it’s just because it was easy, they’ve preferenced their organization for some reason. So let’s talk about those that are in our database, the tools, the ways that we need to think about folks that are are in our circle already. How do we connect with them? Think about them, reach out to them. Home. You had mentioned that mass mail merge, and you know, sometimes that happens, like two years after like, hey, let’s clean up the database, and all of a sudden they get this like, sorry, you’re no longer considered for this job. But you know, and they’re like, I don’t even remember applying for it, because it was two years ago. So how do we be respectful? How do we deliver value? How do we think about those folks that have preferenced our organization and make sure that we are not missing out on a candidate that maybe was a silver medalist, or maybe we, just at the time that they applied, we had just, you know, accepted or delivered an offer that was accepted. Love to hear thoughts about, what do we do with those folks that are in our graveyards to make sure that they also feel respected and engaged?
Victoria Bombas 46:20
I would say, I would say, before we go to what we do with them when they’re at the graveyard, I would, I would caution that we need to be good to them before we kill them off, right?
Rebecca Warren 46:39
So no more ghosting, right? Is that our number one thing?
Victoria Bombas 46:43
Stop the ghosting. Stop the ghosting. But also, again, anecdotally, I have had some I’m sure Hangul have heard the same in the job market in the UK recently feedback about ghosting post interview, which I find really rude and shocking, actually, people not receiving proper feedback. So silver medalists, or, you know, not even people in the short maybe not the kind of number two, maybe not the silver medalist in a role, right? It’s like the sort of second person, but the people in the short list of four or five or six who were interviewed not receiving feedback or receiving generic, you know, email, mail merge, that terrible email that you get, you know, not not getting a call. And I just, I just find that, you know, I think that’s definitely something we need to address. So I would say, before we get to, what do we do with when they’re in the graveyard, making sure we have the processes in place to actually give constructive, personalized feedback to people who have engaged. And then, I think in an ideal world, we’d be looking, then to start from from, especially with people who have participated actively in a recruitment process, and we’ve engaged with them, not just applied, to start to actually, then capture what their preferences are at that point, and to then start to have a systematic engagement with them in a personalized, meaningful way, right? So they’re receiving not that generic mail merge or that newsletter that hung talked about, but they’re getting, they’re being engaged with in an appropriate way. And I think there’s a lot to be said. There’s a lot written about alumni networks and exclusive groups and again, creating, like, a more concierge experience for people. I think there’s great power in the alumni networks and the referrals they bring as well, and looking at those differently too.
Rebecca Warren 48:25
Yeah, I think that I love your don’t kill them off before they’ve even made it to the graveyard, right? Like, let’s, let’s make their experience pleasing, right? Let’s be respectful. Let’s make sure that they feel great about submitting their application, whether or not they actually get the job. I think that’s great. And then once they’re in the system, then figuring out the right ways to engage, making it personal. But but to what hung said earlier, there’s there’s that, that shift of human heavy and tech heavy. So how do you make that because, because there’s going to have to be some human investment up front. Even if you set your tech up, you’re still going to have to be thoughtful about, what are we sending? Who are we sending it to? How often giving folks an opt out, right? Like, so there’s going to be investment up front. How do you sell that to your HR teams to say, hey, in order to get to maybe a more automated or a more structured process, we’re going to have to either blow up what we have or put some time and energy into developing it the right way. Do you have some ideas about how to do that and to sell that to HR teams to say it’s worth the investment.
Hung Lee 49:42
It’s not, it’s not HR teams that need to be sold to it’s the HR teams need to sell it to the business. So our crisis is, is that we’ve, we’ve basically had to do more with less, with truncated teams for last two years or so. So that means we’re already under resourced, over capacity, so we’re running at 120% now what’s very interesting in this year is that we’ve basically failed to operationalize AI and automation, even though it seems like, hey, it’s right there. Like, why aren’t we doing this? It’s because we literally have no bandwidth. So we’re driving the car 300 mile an hour. We don’t have time to pull over, and what we have to do is, is speak to the boss and strike a deal, basically to say, yes, we do need to pull over, because the wheels are going to fall off anyway, and we do have some extra wheels in the in the in the trunk that we can really make a difference. We’ve just got to accept the temporary slowdown of efficiency, because there’s always going to be switching costs. And I think, you know, CEOs shouldn’t understand that they’re business people. They understand what it means to change a system. But I think we as a function have got to find the courage to have that conversation. A problem we have in TA, in HR, is that we, we kind of have a very customer service mentality. You know, this is true, you know, I think it’s true really, whether, whether we come from a recruitment agency background where customers always right, we never say no real customer, or even HR background, where we think of ourselves as business partners. So again, we never say no to the customers. We’re there to service them. So we don’t have it truly in our in our cultural DNA, to actually argue the case forcefully here. But I think we do need to do that, because if we don’t, then CEOs are going to just look at us and think, you know what these guys can’t do. What I want them to do. I want to just ship in some consultants to do it, probably a PWC arm, the consult the arm of someone like PWC would roll in and, you know, they will do the change management for us. But that is no bueno for us in TA, if you think about sort of, you know, the future AI enabled organization. You know, what are the, what are the, what’s the activities that could be supported by artificial intelligence optimized with artificial intelligence? How do we do Job? Job design going forward? How do we design functions and organizations? All of those things are naturally things that people function should do internally. But if we don’t, kind of argue the case for a temporary kind of suspension of the do more for less idea, then, then, you know when we’re gonna we’re gonna have outsiders do it for us, which is, which is not good. So,
Victoria Bombas 52:36
I was just gonna agree and kind of just give a data point there.
Hung Lee 52:44
I mean the final thought is, basically, we’ve got to talk and the language of recycling the productivity. So the way in which I would pitch this argument to any C level would be to say, look, we can definitely improve our productivity. We can save the hiring managers like, 5000 hours of time if we did this. However, if we save this degree of time, we need at least 2000 of those hours back, because then we’re going to spend that on further optimization. We need to have that sort of dialog and think about time saved and then converting and recycling that time saved back to further optimization, and indeed, other activities which may not be focused on productivity, per se. So for instance, we’re talking about things like D and I that’s dropped off the corporate agenda of the last two years. Rather depressingly, is they literally fell off the cliff? Okay? Well, you know, why has it done that? Is because, basically, the optimization narrative is completely taken over. My argument would be, hey, that’s great. We’re definitely going to optimize. But you know what? Some of that time we spend back isn’t going to be recycled. Purely backed. Optimization is going to be recycled to things that you say you care about, such as creating a more exclusive, inclusive and equitable environment, creating a, you know, caring about employee well being trying to adapt to a flexible workforce that takes time and effort, isn’t necessarily maximizing on profit, but that’s the sort of thing that we need to really be quite forceful on. We need to find the courage within ourselves to do that.
Victoria Bombas 54:20
So I again, I couldn’t agree more, and I was going to just add hung that there’s never really been a better time for TA leadership and HR leadership to do that, because the the the issue of skills and labor shortage, it has actually never, never been higher on the CEO agenda, right? And there’s a lot of data and document around that. And yeah, and and it’s actually as a sort of closing thought, there’s, there’s never been a better time to not make this, not make this hrs problem, or not make the TAs problem. This is, it’s not, it’s documented as measured, again, PwC research, like our CEO research, over half of CEOs in the UK in our 24 CEO research, 2024, over half had skills and labor shortage as the top three threats to their business or issues at this at the C suite table. So it’s not, it’s not hrs problem to solve this or TA problem. It is the C suites problem and that that should help us as HR, ta professionals to make the business case exactly as you described.
Rebecca Warren 55:23
Yeah, and I think that’s exactly right. There needs to be that stronger connection with the business, because it’s a business problem, and so siloing it, saying it’s HR or TA even, even more so isolates it and doesn’t actually solve the bigger business challenges. Okay, so we’re coming up to our closing statements here. So this has been fascinating. You know, you just started to turn a corner. I’m like, oh, that’s another hour’s worth of conversation. So we’re going to have to hold that for the next time. But I really love what we talked about in terms of making it I’m looking back at my notes here. So first of all, we need to try Ritter Sport corn flakes. Send recess to Victoria. But I love the ideas about delivering value back to the candidate or the applicant. I think that’s great. Introducing the right level of friction. The question is, where does that come in? Operationalize the the idea of we need to pay attention to our candidates, be more connected to the business. Need to stay. Need to say no, sometimes, right? We need to slow down, to go fast. So I’ll give you each just 30 seconds or so, one last salient comment that you want to drop about bringing talent back from the dead, or kill or something, or ghost graveyards or whatever. We want to talk about 30 seconds hung. We’ll start with you.
Hung Lee 56:49
Okay, cool. In terms of what you do when you talk about candidates, talk to the candidates in the graveyard. The one thing I think is that you have to do is basically not talk about jobs all the time. I think once we expand the scope and start thinking about what matters for them, career development, salary negotiation, how you get better at all manner of things, it suddenly opens the door in terms of the sorts of conversations you can have with that person. And it decouples it from that transactional need to have a job, because that person who’s in the grave our graveyard may actually be have secured a job elsewhere, and that doesn’t mean we forget about that person. It means what we’ve got to do is we have a two to three year engagement plan with them, because we want to still be top of mind if and when they decide to transition out of the job that they’ve just secured. So the way to do that is not just to hit them with jobs, to talk about them with careers, how do you go forward? How can we be a resource for them going forward? I think that’s the way to keep them engaged and keep our brand top of mind. Love that.
Rebecca Warren 57:49
Victoria. Closing thoughts?
Victoria Bombas 57:52
I will echo sort of where we landed at the end of our conversation. It’s not, it’s not TA’s problem, it’s not hrs problem. It’s, it’s the business’s problem. Bring it to the table as such. And just to close with in contrast to all the ghouls and skeletons and go some more positive sort of thought, really, it’s, it’s, again, looking at the candidate graveyard, and all these methods and techniques we talked about are a way to help people onto the career paths, to give them the jobs they’ll be good at and they’ll love. So it’s actually solving a business problem and doing good for people who have engaged with your organization.
Rebecca Warren 58:32
So let’s, let’s, let’s end it on a, not a spooky but a positive note, building the brand for your organization, right by positive engagement, pulling people in to areas that they are interested in and that they want to talk about. All right, we are wrapping up thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Looking forward to more.
