00:01
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us for day one of the HR Daily Advisors, HR Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Week. We have a lot of great content to share with you. So I hope you’re ready to kick off this week. We have an engaging panel discussion geared up for you today, the future of recruiting from technology to trends to today’s best practices. This panel is sponsored by Eightfold. Today’s session has been approved for both HRCI and SHRM recertification credits, and we will announce those at the close of the session, how you’re able to obtain those codes. So let’s get into some housekeeping items and introductions. My name is Madeline Collins from Simplify Media and an editor at HR Daily Advisor and I’ll be here as your moderator for today’s session. The console that you’re looking at right now offers multiple application widgets that you can use. There’s a widget called the media player widget which will allow you to control the volume of today’s session. Please note that there’s no dial in number for attendees, and the audio is streaming directly from your computer speakers. So be sure they’re turned up and on. You don’t want to miss any part of today’s session. However, if you do miss parts of our session, we’re recording today’s session and it will be sent out via email in about 24 hours. If you experience any type of technical difficulty, please feel free to let us know in the q&a widget on the bottom of your screen. And I’ll be happy to assist you. And speaking of that widget, our presenters are eager to hear from you. We’ll be hosting a live Q&A session at the end of this presentation. So please feel free to submit any questions that you have on the topic at any point throughout today’s event. We’ll be getting to as many as we can at the end. Please also note that there’s a free resource widget. Sorry, Michelle, cut that line, because I think that’s from a previous one. Okay. All right. Without further ado, I’d like you to please welcome me. Please join me in welcoming our guest speakers to the floor today. We have Michael Watson, Director of Global Customer Evangelism at Eightfold AI, Daniele Bologna, Ph.D., HR Senior Director at Procter & Gamble, and Whitney Wilber, Global Head of Employer Brand at BNY Mellon. Michael and Don Whitney, thank you all for joining me on this panel.
02:14
Thank you for having us.
02:16
Yeah, I’m really excited to have this conversation. So to kind of kick off the topic, what recruiting trends should HR leaders keep an eye on and 2024?
02:28
Yeah, so it’s quite interesting. I think from an employer brand perspective, it’s really leaning into authenticity. You know, that’s huge right now. Keeping your audiences in mind, around your storytelling plan and transparency in the recruiting process, what to expect, understanding employee experiences, and really aligning it to your employer value proposition, your EVP, and for your brands and teams to show up with social accountability and consistency across their talent facing channels. In the topic of trends, and keeping your audiences in mind in you know, 2025, the Gen Z, labor force participation will outpace baby boomers for the first time. So it’s being mindful of these generational shifts and talent pools, and really leaning into how content is consumed by talent and what their preferences are. By generation. I believe that forming human centered storytelling and for HR and talent acquisition and employer brand teams to really craft these messages together, and share these excellent proof points around values that talent audiences, especially Gen Z really care about. leaning into themes such as belonging and inclusion, growth, passion-driven work, and really trust that these employers instill in them early on, you know, these all rank high as important company values for an employer to really demonstrate. So there’s a clear linkage here for potential talent that’s exploring your company, your employer, and also a retention lever for current employees seeking that further connection across their teams and the work.
04:28
Yeah, I would agree with everything that Whitney just said and to add a few more additional trends that that I’m seeing. I think we we need to also call it a call out I mean, especially ever since COVID, I mean, the nature of hybrid work, what candidates are expecting from from potential employers in regards to remote work opportunities, flexible work arrangements, things like that is constantly evolving. It seems like once you once you think you’ve figured it out and understand what your potential candidates are looking for, it starts to evolve some more so I’m really keeping an ear to the ground and knowing what your candidates are looking for in regards to hybrid work and how that aligns to your greater company strategies, whether business strategy, talent, strategy, things like that is going to be a focus for a lot of employers within this year. Another big bucket I would point out would be with skills. This one isn’t as complicated to talk through. A lot of ATMs or different software’s are pushing skills, a lot of consultants are pushing skills. And so being skills focused understanding your job descriptions and your work in regards to skills, understanding your talent in regards to skills is a big area of focus that I’ve seen, an additional one would be general AI and data privacy. And when I say AI, I really it’s just shorthand for tech or math, really. So anything that involves any sort of technology or any sort of like analytics, or predictive analytics, is is being put under high scrutiny, not only from legal bodies, but also from from candidates. So they want increased transparency on what are you looking at? Why are you looking at what decisions are being made off of these things. And it’s not like there’s one big body who’s putting together kind of like the global standards, a lot of these things are being put forward by states or universities or even cities are putting together their own laws. And so staying close to that, and making sure you understand what isn’t outside of scope in regards to Ada, AI and data privacy with your candidates, is really critical. And then the last one I’ll point out is, and this one’s extremely complicated and could probably be its own, its own topic is the evolving landscape of AI. So whether it be recent affirmative action cases in the US and other changes within the DNI space, is forcing companies to continue to look at how they assess candidates and how they look at diversity within their talent acquisition strategy.
07:05
That’s a really good point. And along the theme of DNI I think it’s also reframing your employee employer value proposition focus from, you know, not just what we do, as teams and as companies to give our employees, you know, these rewards and benefits or showing up and doing the right thing and being on the right side of history. But it’s the why explaining the why, through our EVP in the positive impact on our people’s lives and the lives of potential talent considering you, I think it’s really important. And in really, based on the maturity of your employer brand program, it’s really ensuring your HR teams are informed and aware of the value of strong employer brand, how it can positively impact your organization, in leaning also into more exploration of employee advocacy programming, Brand Ambassador programs, really sparking that shared experience, and building trust across the talent markets for talent audiences that you’re looking to attract and weaving in those important themes that you know, are important for talent audiences when exploring and considering you as an employer.
08:29
Definitely, that’s really well said you guys. Shifting on to our next question, how are HR professionals using data analytics and metrics to make informed decisions in the recruitment process? And what impact does this have on overall business outcomes?
08:48
Yeah, I think I’m on the hook to jump on this one first. Um, so I think the big one, and there’s a few but like the big one for me, and so I’m an industrial organizational psychologist by trade. And so I wouldn’t be doing justice if it didn’t start with the pre-hire assessments. So if you’re not familiar with these, you can think of like the MCAT or the ACT or the LSAT, but for companies, right, so you can build an assessment for for your company, if you’re if your candidate pool is big enough, and you have you have the ability to do this. Definitely do so. And so how this relates to business outcomes is when you build these assessments, you do it in a way that ensures those who pass the assessment are more likely to be higher performers hype higher potential within the organization. And so it literally segments your candidate pool into these individuals who are more likely to be successful, and these individuals are less likely to be successful within our organization based on our competency model and other things. It also if done right can help you lead to less adverse impact, right. So you’re you’re able to quantify your entire selection system and look at different parts of the selection process that may be contributing to different types of adverse impact, you can remove the ones that lead to higher adverse impacts and keep the ones that lead to less. It sounds simple, but it’s obviously a lot more complicated than that. So the easiest, and the one with the most data and science behind it would certainly be pre hire assessments. But over the last, I would say, I don’t know, five to 15 years, HR, analytics and talent acquisition has absolutely exploded. And so there’s all sorts of other areas where you can use leverage analytics to make a more informed database. hiring decisions, source tracking Analytics has come a long way. So looking at when you source from campus, which campuses do tend to show up well, it’s not as simple as going to quote unquote, better schools. Because I’m getting into Whitney space, your employer brand just made me stronger at another school. And so you’re able to get the top talent at a tier two school, whereas at a tier one school, you’re, you’re getting kind of the bottom of the barrel. And so the source tracking analytics, and sometimes they’re in Excel or Power BI or whatnot, allow you to really look at your funnel and make more informed decisions where you’re going to get more ROI. So when you send a campus team to go recruit, they’re actually going to schools that are going to get you top talent, diverse talent, talent that fits the profile that you’re looking for. I would also add kind of a few few others that are not as familiar with as those two websites are getting extremely advanced, we’re able to curate content to were based off of a candidate’s you know, geo tracking, or their brief interactions with a chat bot, we’re able to push them customized content. And so all of that data is working in the background to make sure that that candidate is more likely to see what they want to see. And more likely to have a positive view of you and your, in your company. I mentioned chat bots briefly, that’s pretty simple. And then the last one I’ll touch on is augmented writing tools. These are really cool. And it seems to be really promising. They’re early, most of them are only a few years in existence. But essentially, these tools can analyze your job descriptions and tell you are you using biased language, are you more likely to have men or women are equal between both both genders to apply to your positions and actually gives you recommendations on small language changes you can make to increase overall applications as well as applications from a certain demographic profile. And so it helps you kind of remove bias from the system where it can kind of hide without your knowing. So there’s just some ways that I’ve seen analytics work really well within talent acquisition. They’re not all fully baked, I would say pre hire assessments are the one that’s an exception. But the other ones we’re learning a lot. And there seems to be a lot of opportunities there.
12:46
Yeah, and kind of going hand in hand with the concept of analytics comes the tools that go with a couple of which you’ve mentioned. So as AI in particular becomes more prevalent in the recruiting process, what ethical considerations should HR professionals keep in mind to ensure fairness, transparency and compliance with regulations?
13:08
No matter? I’m happy to take this one, I think, right, you mentioned three components: area of compliance, fairness, and transparency. So let’s start with, I think is probably the easiest of these three, which would be compliance. Compliance is coming, regulation is coming. Right. The Biden Administration has announced a task force a few months back, I think, a week ago, their office of management and budgeting also came up with policy policy, around governance and risk. So regulation in this field is definitely coming. So I think, when we’re looking at vendors, and we’re looking for companies like eightfold, you know, are they open to regulation? Are they opening? Now, they’re not going to open up our IP, but are we going to be forthcoming about how our algorithms are working? And what they’re trying to solve for, I think is, is really critical when making some of these decisions. Now, that leads me to fairness, right? I think when you look at AI companies, and you look at some companies that have gotten in trouble in the past, right, they’ve gotten into trouble because the size of their datasets weren’t robust enough. And if you’re only strictly using your data set and the AI model, it’s inherently rife with bias. So you know, one of the things that we talked about and Eightfold in is really a common best practice for any AI company out there is that the larger your data set, and the more different sources your data is coming from, the more it kind of works bias out of the system. Right? So when you look at an AR model, for instance, we ingest your data. We ingest publicly available data, and then we’re also modeling that and we remove all the PII obviously, but we’re awesome Mileena against all of our other customers’ data. So we have over a billion and a half data points to help us distill down to our AI model and our recommendation engines, right. And that’s very, very robust. And that’s how you can help remove some of the bias from your organization, is taking some of your data and looking at that versus trends in your field outside of your industry, across the globe, and that helps drive fairness. Now, as far as transparency, yeah, any organization you work with in the AI space should be open to this right, they should have plenty of spots on their websites, where they talk about fairness and transparency. And if they’re not willing to do that with you during the process, I would really urge you to take a step back and talk to some other vendors, because this is a really key component. Right? There’s so much talk around AI right now. And I think there’s some things that are just and I think there’s some things that are hyperbole. And I think some things have gotten out of control. When you look at it from an HR perspective, right, we should be using this to really level the playing field. Right? Well, you know, one of the things we talked about eight times, in fairness is, in a perfect world, we’d love to get rid of the resume. Right? What do we care about what school you went to? Do you have the skills we’re looking for to do this job or not? Right. And I always think back to you know, my parents were both military, they didn’t have formal or formal four-year careers. But they went into the military, they came out, they found jobs, they struggle in today’s world, you know, they’re in their 80s. Now. So when we talk about fairness and transparency, right, what we try to do is we try to level that playing field and say, okay, you know, whether you went to Cal State University, or Stanford, that’s great, but let’s look at the skills you have, let’s look at how you’ve used those skills in the past, let’s look at some of the skills adjacencies. And that’s where AI really comes into help is not just looking at the written word and the written resume, but looking behind the curtain. So, you know, when you talk about all of those components, whether it’s compliance, we know that that’s happening, whether it’s fairness, you know, I think the robust data sets is really what helps. And then transparency, making sure you’re working with a vendor that explains, Hey, this is how our AI is working. Here’s how we’re driving. Fairness, right? We’re using equal opportunity algorithms, we’re removing PII, we’re only looking at skills and data and job titles, all of those things should go into your decisions when talking to vendors and trying to scope out which AI solution is right for you in the HR space.
17:47
Yeah, quickly, Matt, if you don’t mind, quickly build on what Michael said and completely agree with everything he said. But two quick additional points. First, I would highly recommend partnering with legal and or IO psychologists, if you have them. They’re gonna help shortcut some of the things that Michael was outlining. And then second, and again, I kind of made the tongue in cheek joke earlier that AI is a shortcut for tech or math. But these decisions are being made by individuals who don’t necessarily understand some of the things that Michael started to get into, like, what actually is behind AI. And because of that, what I’ve at least seen is AI kind of raises the bar for ethics and compliance and transparency, a lot of those things that were behind this question. I mean, there’s a famous Fortune 500 story from a few years ago, where they built a resume scraping technology, a resume scoring technology. And the reason they decided not to launch it was because it had bias in it because it was built off of the decisions they’ve been making. So I think the loud message behind that, that I think a lot of people missed, is that the tool was the exact same as the people, but the tool was not okay to move forward with and they kept doing the work with the people. So I think it’s a really clear example of when we think about ethics, when we think about compliance, we think of insurance transparency, for whatever reason, AI seems to have a higher bar versus individual people based decision making that we’ve been doing for a long time.
19:18
Yeah, and I’ll just add on that, right, Craig Lean used to be the former commissioner of the OFCCP, as on record, as saying is, if you want to remove bias, you should be using AI. Now, it depends on the models you’re using, right? You want to use the ones that use these large datasets to remove this bias. But to make a point, you know, the bias is in the recruiter, and we’re not this is we’re not saying you’re maliciously sitting there and making decisions based on race, gender. I mean, if you have people like that in your organization, you need to get rid of them as fast as you can. But we all have these implicit biases that we don’t even realize that we have, and that’s where using AI comes in. normalize those large datasets to say, hey, look, whether you know this or not, this is how you’ve been leveraging the data. And this is some of the biases. And this is where we can kind of help smooth out those curves and make sure that you’re, you’re, you’re doing what you can to mitigate the bias. So you’re 100%, correct, right? Team up with your IO psychologists and team up with your legal teams. Make sure everyone knows what your intentions are, how you’re trying to use this and be clear communicators, both internally and externally. It’s really important.
20:37
Yeah, so we’ve focused so far on two huge branches within the recruiting space, which is like the AI and the technology available to that. So to shift on to another branch that we haven’t really discussed yet. What role does providing learning and development opportunities have on employee retention as that’s something that a lot of candidates are looking for in this market?
21:01
To jump in here, I think it’s an interesting piece. You know, really, since the pandemic, we’ve seen a trend where employers have had to move quickly to find more competitive advantages to really attract candidates into their organizations. And it’s also become more of an expectation from candidates. I believe, when exploring employers and other job opportunities to have continuous learning and development already is an option, not just for early career audiences, as well, so I believe when HR and L&D teams are exploring L&D programs, it’s identifying a platform and an experience that is accessible for all and flexes to different learning styles. Really making learning fun and easy and engaging. With multiple media formats and team collaboration. really ensuring the platform for learning is intuitive, easy to find training content, share content, on top of making it Collaborative for teams, and for sharing courses with one another right along with you know, just the process overall, being collaborative and fun and value back to the individual as an reward essentially. I believe L&D programming can really benefit an organization because it creates an environment where people take ownership of what they want to learn and what they want to learn more about. There’s an empowerment aspect here. That’s an important nod to owning your own development, but giving individuals the tools and flexibility to take it at their own pace. I think this overall can spark again, employee connectivity, right? shared interests, shared learnings, as well as a feeling of being welcome and invited to participate. It’s really a retention lever that matters. And I think as a communicator, a really important element with L&D programming is communicating back the clear benefits, the rewards, and the successes that your employer brand and comms teams can help build out these success stories and this positive employee sentiment around these types of programming. It’s really a proof point within your EVP to promote the experience of your people, to candidates, because they really expect to receive this, you know, when they come on board.
23:58
Definitely, and I feel like it goes back to an idea that we’ve been bouncing around for a lot of this conversation is just the fact that it’s about the people. It’s about building that connection with your candidates. It’s about keeping your people making hiring decisions accountable and ethical. So, as technology is integrated into recruiting strategy and recruiting practices, how can hiring teams marry the human-first experience with that technology?
24:27
Yeah, the thing that comes to mind for me here, and I don’t want to seem like I’m just full of cliches here, right? Is the old win-win cliche, right? And I do think that it’s appropriate here, right? You want to look for a solution that helps your candidates and makes it easier for them to apply. It makes it very, very clear what about the background is a good fit for what they’re looking for? Or, you know, from the TM side, what in their background would make them a great fit for a role that maybe they hadn’t even considered? And let’s use those AI and the l&d to look at your background and understand some of the skills that you might not possess currently. And then let’s map out some things for you. So from the candidate perspective, that’s the win, I think internally for the companies and recruiters and the talent management folks in the HR business partners using this is our win, there is want to make our jobs easier, right? If this takes me back to this old analogy, my grandfather, as a little kid, had the coolest job ever. He supplied video games to arcades. So here I am a 10 year old kid, and every time I’d go to my grandfather’s house, he’d have different arcade games in his garage. And he was fixing them, right. And he had this instrument in there called an oscilloscope. And what the oscilloscope does, it separates the signal from the noise. And once I was here at Eightfold for about six, six months, it hit me, like what we are trying to do, what we are using a phone for is we’re separating the signal from the noise, right? The noise, if on the TA side is the 1000s and 1000s of people that apply to your jobs. And we all know is for us recruiters on the call, there’s many nights that I’m sourcing resumes on my couch, and it takes me five or six clicks to finally get to a resume to look at it to know very, very quickly this person is not even a remote fit for my position might be great person might be great fit for something else. But for what I was trying to source for that night and that evening, I would have been better off to not even look at that resume and focus on the ones that were the right fit. And that’s what I mean by separating the signal from the noise if we can use AI to look at these vast amounts of data, and help us focus in on where we should focus our time first, to me, that’s the win on the corporate side or the company side is it’s helped me focus my time and my efforts and spend my energy where I need to spend it. And that’s the folks that have the skills and have a likelihood to be successful. Like that’s where I should be spending my time. And when you do that, right and you do that correctly, what you end up doing is you end up getting more work life balance back to your teams, right, because now I can get through my sourcing and I can get through my regular day, by using the help of AI where traditionally I just ran out of time with all my Zoom meetings and in person meetings and collecting feedback and interviews and wrangling down hiring managers to show up all of those things cut into your time. So if I can use an AI solution to help get through my day much faster and identify where I need to be spending my time. You know, that’s where I coupled that win win together, right? Where we’re doing the right thing for the candidate and the internal mobility folks by really highlighting to them why they’re a great fit, why they would work out for this position or what they maybe need to take to be a great fit, while also giving that win to the folks on the other side of the table by increasing their work life balance and freeing up some of that that heavy load of just time eating work that we can better use AI to help us with.
28:14
Yeah, definitely. And I feel like that flows into the next question kind of well, too, because AI has that nice, like technical aspect to it to reduce that noise, like you said, and part of reducing that noise is attracting the right talent in the first place. So how does Employer Branding influence recruiting strategy? And what are some best practices there to put your best foot forward?
28:40
You know, one of the first things I like to do when I’m speaking with talent acquisition team members, and coming on board and trying to build a new employer brand program and understanding kind of what’s working, what’s broken, what what can be improved upon and at different levels is asking the question of when was the last time you applied for a job at your own company? What was your experience and really placing them within the candidates position, right, reviewing the experience across not only your applicant tracking system, whichever platform or experience you may be creating or using, but really analyzing it from the start, have multiple candidate touch points from your website, from your job boards, your CRM, looking at it through various social channels that you may be promoting roles and careers or any job distribution point. You have to understand all the elements that really go into that candidate experience and understand what mass audience opportunities does the employer brand and recruitment marketing teams have to improve upon you know what, what’s going to happen? To give you the most global impact and improvements at one time, and then taking a look at it, really from the next piece, which is a targeted strategic approach, you know, what are the experiences you’re trying to build and the messaging that you’re trying to share and get through to your candidates with your various targeted audiences. You know, this is an exercise that can really pinpoint areas for improvement around communications, keep warm strategies, points to share storytelling and really make that human connection. And provide just helpful guidance to really lower candidate anxiety, right, take away the uncertainty of the recruiting process, right. And really calm nerves create these powerful moments where your values, your principles can be felt and experienced before or after applying, regardless of the hiring outcomes. So that’s, that’s one place I like to begin when thinking through the recruiting experience. You know, and the next piece that I’m really passionate about when it comes to building strong employer brand programs is recruiter enablement. You know, going back to the basics, I think no matter where you are on your team, if you have a mature employer brand program, if you’re just starting, it really starts with leaning into the basics, that is the foundation is strong. And that’s ensuring that your people who are the face of your organization, your talent acquisition, and team members are equipped and feel comfortable and confident in speaking to who you are, telling your story to these candidates to help them understand and really envision themselves with your organization. So recruiter enablement, ensuring they have the right talking points, they have the right toolkit, and that they’re able to really express the true behaviors and principles and values of your organization as they’re connecting with talent and really attracting them into your organization. And I think the third piece that’s really important for me is digging into the data. What’s your data landscape look like? What are your KPIs and really having some conversations and not just within your employer brand team, but bringing in talent acquisition, bringing in people team, bringing in your analytics team, your people analytics team, you know, ensuring that you become best friends. And really understanding what data is available. So that you can collect it, you can use it to make informed decisions on how you can either improve the candidate experience and support talent acquisition as your customer. And then you can actually pair it with your recruitment marketing strategies, connect the dots to the data that you own around content, EVP messaging posts that you know, content styles that you know, your talent audiences most engaged with, so that you can create as successful outcomes as possible. And apply as much pixel tracking source code data to anything and everything. So that you can really analyze these journeys and experiences that you’re creating for talent and do more of what you’re successful at. And then go back to the drawing table and pilot something new. If it didn’t give you the results that you were looking for.
34:03
Yeah, if I can catch that, right. But you know, before I joined the fold, the first 25 years of my career were on the recruiting side. And I remember a stat. This was prior to me joining Eightfold. So within the last five years, 70% of the folks that apply to your jobs have done hours worth of research on you and know that they want to work there before they’ve even applied for a job. So going back to this point, right, if we do employer branding correctly, that helps us on the TA side get to this nirvana of zero days to hire. And what I mean by that is if we’re engaging, we have YouTube channels. We’re sharing not just about, hey, we got this job. But hey, here’s some philanthropic work we’re doing as an organization. Here’s some houses we built for Habitat for Humanity. Here’s a blog post. You know, it was recognizing women I think last month So you know, highlighting some of the successful women in your organization, like when you’re doing that all of a sudden, those candidates are sitting on the other side of the computer thinking about applying to you, all of a sudden, they’re like I see myself there, I can see myself in that organization, because the things are talking about are the things that are important to me. So all of a sudden, they apply, you’re using AI to match them. So they’re matching really well to a job coming in, it gets to a point where by the time they get to a recruiter, the recruiter has one conversation with them. And then they’re reaching out to the hiring manager saying, Hey, I have your next hire. It’s, it’s, it’s Whitney here, let me go ahead and set you up for a call. And so that is a marriage made in heaven, if you will employ your brand name and TA and recruiting. If done right, it will really drive some tremendous efficiencies in your organization.
35:54
Yeah, definitely, I couldn’t agree more. So with what we’ve talked about, with, you know, making sure that your employee branding is putting forward what you believe in as a company, and that your technology is there to find the candidates who also align with those values? How can HR teams enhance the candidate experience throughout that recruiting process, from the application to onboarding? And what role does technology play in that journey as well.
36:31
So I think I’m up first to take this one. And, sorry, I had some brief technology issues there, hopefully, hopefully, my internet’s good to good for now. Um, so I think there’s a few different ways that companies can enhance the candidate experience through the recruitment process, I think the, perhaps the simplest one, and it’s related to some of the things that were said earlier is speed. So time to fill time to hire is not just a company metric, it’s also something candidates are looking for. They want to get to a decision, if they’re on the job market, whether they’re in school, or they’ve had, you know, maybe an experience with their employer that made them start looking for a job. They’re, they’re going through companies really, really quickly, they’re applying to a lot of companies, typically. And so they want to get to a decision as fast as possible so that they can move to the next company, but they also want to feel like they were actually considered and feel that it was a fair process. So making sure that they feel like they were properly vetted, they were able to kind of flex and show their skills and be actually considered as important as well. But being faster in that process, can can be viewed as candidate experience. There’s also a lot of work with, you know, branding that Whitney can maybe get into, but also like gamification, making the process a little bit more fun. I’ve seen mixed results, I’ve seen cases where that’s really well received, I’ve seen cases where it comes across a little too silly, a little too gamified. And not serious enough for the professional workplace. That also goes back to your brand as an employer too. So, you know, for example, you know, Michael mentioned gaming and arcades earlier, if you’re that type of company, then maybe it does make sense to be highly gamified, it’s somewhat of a preview for what it may be like to work for that company. The last thing I would say is expand, really think about expanding what you consider to be and not be recruiting within the space of recruiting. And I can bring up an example of this. So, pre-hire assessments and other kinds of CSR or social responsibility aren’t usually connected. But we had a case where we were getting a lot of pressure to give candidates feedback on their assessments. And so here’s how you scored, here’s how you did, here’s what you can improve on, here’s what you did really well on. And when we looked into this, we found that that wasn’t a good decision for us. So you basically unpacked how the assessment was scored, candidates had mixed results with how they react to that type of feedback, it didn’t make a lot of sense. So we thought, could we connect this with a bigger company strategy? Long story short, we connected it with a technology that we had created, that basically creates a leader of clean drinking water for children in need. And so we ended up with a situation where after we took our assessments, we said as a thank you for investing your time in us as an employer, we’ve donated a liter of clean drinking water to children in need on your behalf. Follow this link to learn more. And so you give, arguably, for many candidates as the worst part of the recruitment process is going through the assessments, you give them a little positive moment, you give them an opportunity to learn more about your company, and you get the chance to see kind of what your company’s about, right? So it’s a way to say hey, at XYZ company, this is what we do. This is what we’re about. Maybe it makes sense for you to work at a company like this in the future. And so I think really expanding the boundaries between recruitment and Talent Management and L&D we got into, but even outside of HR, those are coming down with how quickly we can flow information. And so I think thinking about what opportunities outside of the space of what we would call traditional recruitment is an opportunity for numerous companies.
40:27
Yeah, I agree. And we had touched on this earlier, sorry, bringing it back around. Full circle, we talked about di initiatives and how to incorporate that into a fair equitable recruiting process earlier in this conversation. So what strategies are organizations adopting to foster diversity and inclusion in their recruitment processes? And how does that impact overall workplace culture?
41:00
I think from a recruitment marketing perspective, one thing that I always recommend talent acquisition teams lean into, is that it is a powerful place to begin. Really from a global mass audience perspective is your global job posting strategy, and your global job posting templates. In terms of how your job descriptions are crafted and written, it’s really important, right? Research shows that most candidates encountered job postings first before researching their employer’s website or social media handles, or seeking out review-based job boards. On average candidates use the first 14 seconds to really determine if a job posting is even worth reading, you know, 14 seconds or more more quickly than that.
42:01
I think that data tells us that women typically only apply to a role if they meet 100% of the listed criteria. This is an HP study that was done. That’s noted by many groups, and when compared to men, men typically apply for roles when they meet about 60%. So if we’re thinking about ways to self-select in and encourage talent to raise their hand and apply to roles, it’s really starting with the way that we’re crafting and writing these job descriptions. And using a standardized approach to the templates. You know, leaning into a strategy that encourages diverse talent. To not self select select out is a great way to think about your, your DNI approaches to your roles and how they’re positioned. Encourage encouraging, posting language that is inclusive, and I think Da hit on this earlier. You know, there are paid solutions around us in the market that can do this for us that are very slick and sharp. And there’s also free tools that can test language from a masculine and feminine leaning perspective, to better train recruiters and hiring managers and bring awareness to the words that they use hold power, and that we should be seeking out a balanced approach to the words and the phrasing. I think this is a strong recruiter enablement play that any organization can move forward with, regardless of your budget constraints or your size, that will positively impact your recruiting process, your talent pools and ultimately support your hiring goals.
44:01
Yeah. One thing that we’re also seeing is this front loading of diverse candidates from the moment the requisitions opened. So, intentionally adding women to the interview scheduling intentionally adds people of color and impacted communities to the front of the hiring process. Now, right, I think even when companies are doing that, I think the messaging still has to come from the top right. You’ll get some managers that push back on you and they’re all why are we doing this, but when the message comes down from the board of directors and the messages coming down from the CEO and the CHRO, and we’re talking about why it’s important to us as an organization, right, and we can point to studies that show that companies that embrace DNI their profit gains and their profitability is 10x. Some of the companies that don’t. So, you know, we can prove that it has a financial positive impact on the organization as well as just doing the right thing. I think we all want to work for a company, at least I do in my age, that does the right thing, right? I want to be a part of an organization like that. So, you know, a lot of customers I’m seeing right now are using AI to front load the front of that funnel, with diverse candidates, trying to have an impact on what’s coming out the back end with hires.
45:34
Yeah, definitely. I think that’s really well said. And since we are approaching the tail end of our conversation, we can go ahead and shift over into the question and answer portion. So, for anyone in our audience who wants to submit some questions, go ahead and pop that in the Q&A widget on your screen. So we actually already had a couple come in. So one question that we had is what has changed relative to best practices for talent acquisition? And basically, what should be best practices should people continue to adopt and keep with their strategy?
46:25
I can get us going with one. Um, so I think one of the biggest best practices that I’ve seen evolve quite a bit in my tenure is the opportunity area within digital, just generally. So social media, LinkedIn, different digital platforms, and candidates are going there more and more. I mean, you think about Michael being brought up like Grant Grant, you think about, you know, decades ago, going door to door with your resume, and maybe I’m going too far back with that reference. But those kinds of networking relationships are still important. But there’s faster movement in the talent marketplace than I thought in the past. And so candidates are figuring out ways to show up digitally to apply quickly into a large scope of potential employers. I’m not saying that going to campus or networking or social events or conferences aren’t important. I’m saying that in some of those environments, where we used to not think were as important or you didn’t get to see enough of the candidate. There’s more and more success occurring in those environments. So that’s a best practice that I’ve noticed kind of changed over the last maybe decade or so.
47:41
Yeah, I think one that I’ve seen in the as a former TA director, and someone who’s in charge of global TA programs, we have this mantra, we want to recruit people the way we want to be recruited. I don’t want to apply to a job that’s just a black hole. And I never hear back from anybody I don’t know. I don’t want to go through an interview process to never hear back from somebody now I understand. You know, we might not, you know, give you exactly what you did, where you tripped up, right, we might give you a hey, you know, appreciate your time and efforts. And it’s not quite right. So I’m not saying to go that far. But to get back to people to let them know, like, hey, we appreciate your time, it wasn’t quite right. But just no longer ghosting people, no longer applying to companies where you never hear back. You never get a hey, thank you for applying or, you know, we reviewed your resume, it wasn’t right. I think one of the best practices that I employed and that I see a lot of our customers using is the move around, we recruit people the way we want to be recruited. Right? If you’ve interviewed da, and I tell you that, hey, I’m waiting for feedback from a hiring manager. I’ll give you a call by Friday. And then Friday rolls around, and I still don’t have that feedback for a hiring manager, I still need to give you a call. And I still need to, you know, pick up the phone and say, Hey, DA, we’ll give you a call on Friday. Here’s that call. Unfortunately, I don’t have the feedback yet. But little things like that go so far. As far as building a strong brand, the market is a place that people want to interview and work for. Right? So, you know, go back to the old adage, treat people the way you want to be treated, right? recruit people the way you want to be recruited. Right, lots of communication. You know, shoot them straight. Don’t keep them hanging, don’t over promise for things you can’t deliver. But that’s a huge best practice that I’m seeing that they also use themselves.
49:41
And just to add on to this, I know I mentioned it early around the topic of authenticity. But I think it’s showing up with your people and as much realness as possible. One one way to easily do this is across your recruitment marketing collateral and your assets. What you’re equipping your global talent acquisition teams and your recruiters with to help sell and share and tell your story. Ensure that it’s representative of your people, right? That it’s your people, your office environments, lean into photo shoots, lean into testimonials, lean into building a strong employer brand. It all starts with trust and realness so that authenticity really matters. And it can be done on a small scale with some big impact. You know, it’s something that anyone can pick up and just apply to the recruitment marketing strategies in supporting talent acquisition globally.
50:46
Just to add an exclamation point that completely agrees with what we just said. I remember a couple of years ago when our employer brand lead showed me some assets. And I remember my reaction was you looked like you just did this on an iPhone. And his reaction was Yeah, exactly. That’s the point. It comes across more genuine, it’s more authentic. We actually have our employees literally, we just say, here’s the prompt, take pictures, show candidates to reality, because our data suggests to candidates like it, and also it’s a realistic job preview, so they don’t get here, and then they’re expecting something different. So I completely agree, and I’m not as well versed in the employer branding area, but I’ve seen it tangentially quite a bit.
51:28
But it also to your point and aligns with the content that talents are already digesting. I mean, we have social media that we’re following, you know, we’re always in our feeds. So realistic clips and video content and day in the life stories and testimonials and photos. That’s what we’re sharing all day. And that’s what we’re used to seeing. So talent can spot, you know, something that’s misaligned and fake from a mile away. Totally agree.
52:00
Yeah, and that idea of, you know, talent, being able to identify when things aren’t as they’re presented, brings us into one of the other q&a questions really well, which is, how do you get the correct talent for the position? How do you make sure that they are right for the job description, write for the team and write for the overall company culture, skills wise, personality wise, everything that goes into making the right hire?
52:29
That is a million-dollar question. I wish I could sit here and tell you I did it right every single time. You could check off all those boxes, but you still have some misalignment at times, right? You obviously want to mitigate it. But I think all the points we made earlier, like Don was talking about assessments upfront, right? Are we using the right assessments? Are we identifying what success looks like in our organization, then looking for that elsewhere? Right? We know these skills are what it takes to be successful here. We know these traits are what it takes to be successful here . We are also looking for those, you know, understanding who you are as an organization and what it takes to be successful, I think goes a long way with that. But I will tell you this, if we had this 100% correct all the time, we wouldn’t have to do a lot of recruiting, there would be a lot of TM and internal mobility, we’re keeping our best people because we wouldn’t have attrition. And, you know, I think average attrition is between 15 and 20%. So, you know, until I see that global number move, we definitely have some work here to do. And I wish I had a magic pill or magic solution to give the audience that says do this, and it’ll be fixed. I think doing your due diligence on identifying the right people based on what works for you, not what works for a company down the street or one of your competitors. But what works for you, I think is the first place to start.
53:58
Yep, I agree with what Michael is saying. I think thank you first because I had a lot of thoughts on this question. So the first thing is, it’s statistics and probability, right? It’s all about putting the odds as much in your favor as possible. So increasing the likelihood that you’re going to have a good fit and a great hire and that’s the mindset you have to go with. Even if you do everything right, there’s still, you know, X percent chance that you’re going to have a missed hire for whatever reason. There’s also a possibility that you do everything wrong, and still have a great hire. But you want to make sure you want to build consistency in that. And so that’s why it’s important to go through a lot of the best practices. The shortcut answer that I’ve mentioned briefly earlier, is just hire an IO psychologist, like having an IO psychologist on your team that’s going to be thinking about this and has been trained in this area. But some of the best practices for maximizing your chance to hire the best talent. I O psychologists would say start with a job analysis and basically all that means is make sure you understand the work you understand the role and you understand the jobs to be done, what you know, the profile you’re gonna go out for? Right? So now you understand what you’re looking for. And then using best practices like actually validated assessments, so not like telling me your leadership style and just seeing if you like what they say, but actually using validated assessments.
55:21
Oh, we might have lost.
55:24
I wasn’t sure if that was me, my system, or anything else. And I know he had some weather systems rolling through earlier. There might be a thunderstorm right now. Yeah.
55:38
But with Da, unfortunately, caught off, cut off mid-response. Whitney, do you have anything you want to add to this question?
55:48
Yeah, I think one thing that is helpful for me as I is, I’m brought in and brought to the table and take see, you know, the questions that I’ve started to ask of talent acquisition, and to dig a bit deeper into the problem that we’re trying to solve, which is normally, how can we hire talent in these locations for these roles, this function is really trying to collect as much data as possible, right, and not to create analysis paralysis, but to really be informed of the problem that we’re trying to solve, and how can we best approach with a with a recruitment marketing strategy, from my perspective, to attract talent into these roles? Right? It’s, you know, to Don’s point, it’s, you know, I’ve partnered closely with an ISI IO psychologists in the past, and it was incredibly helpful in eye-opening, in adds additional perspective into the process, but it’s collecting and understanding market availability within the area, right, because I think it’s been we have to be realistic, right with who we’re trying to hire and for which roles, right? It’s being mindful of the people’s data, right. It’s being mindful of our value proposition for the audience, which EVP attributes are most important to that particular talent audience type? It’s taking into account all the different factors. distribution channels, which channels is this audience most active on within? Right. So it’s approaching it from multiple spokes to get the outcome that we’re seeking. But that’s one place I begin with the data. Yeah.
57:48
And, I know you’ve probably had some weather-related issues. Did you want to finish your point?
57:56
I don’t know exactly when I cut it out. But basically, I think I was ending on a multiple-hurdle approach. So, ensure that you have more than one step in your process. Candidates can have great days; they can have bad days. And if you didn’t show the multiple steps in your process, you have different ways of looking at the candidate, right. So there is a resume review, an interview, and an assessment. Those types of things help you look at the full picture of the candidate and also help you mitigate against cheating, as well, right? So I can write on my resume that I went to Harvard, that’s possible to do, there’s ways to cheat on certain assessments, there’s ways to gain interviews. And so by having those multiple approaches, it helps you see the whole candidate and makes it less likely that somebody can get through with some nefarious practices. But yeah, sorry about the internet issues. There’s a pretty big storm here. I think I keep getting kicked out.
58:53
It’s okay, we’ve been rolling with the punches, as have you. And as we’re approaching this end of time, do any of y’all have some final comments or advice to the recruiters in our audience that you’d like to impart?
59:15
Yeah, I’ll go real quick. I think you’ve heard a few of us talking about it. But being intentional, right, really looking for those win-wins, where you’re serving the job seeker and the candidates and giving them a great experience while also giving the tools and the technology to your teams. To do less with more. I mean, there’s one thing I think we can all agree on is that those of us in HR we’re constantly being asked to cut budgets. I think every year you know we go through these exercises September/October, we finalized our budget and then all of a sudden CHRO come back to me and be like Mike, I need you to cut off another million dollars $500,000 where whatever it was depend on the side As your organization, so, you know, try to leverage technology to do less, or to do more with less is some of the party thoughts that have.
1:00:13
And from my perspective, I would just say lean into authenticity as much as possible. When it comes to collecting data, both qualitative and quantitative, around forming your employer value proposition or segmented messaging, I think it’s leaning into true lived experiences so that you can accurately reflect and tell the story of what a potential candidate could expect, if they bring their skill set in, you know, their abilities to your organization. So having realistic, authentic EVPs that are not everything for everyone, but realistically present the experience that you know, they will have.
1:01:02
Yeah, I’m trying to think of something different from the things we’ve said so far. So I think maybe two things come to mind. I think they’re pretty quick. So first, make sure. And you don’t necessarily do this on a daily basis, but connected back to the business or talent strategy. Right. So for example, I think Michael mentioned high attrition earlier, if you’re, if you’re turning over your entire workforce every six months, you don’t need a three month recruiting process. Right? So what we may work and be ideal for one company may not make sense for you. And the second thing, and that’s like the business answer, and then the people answer is, don’t underestimate how big of a deal this is to your candidates, right? Like, like being like, some people may stay at a job for 510 2030 years. And so they may only go through this a couple of times in their life and getting a new jobs, big deal. They’re telling their family, they’re talking to classmates or talking to friends. And I think we get lost, especially when you get into bigger companies, and you’re recruiting all day, every day, it’s another number, it’s making sure of the right assessment score, and okay, you fill the seat. But don’t forget that these are people and these are, these are big moments for them. These are huge moments for them. And, and you could be, you know, hiring the next CEO of your company, not the next CEO of your company, depending on what your talent model is. And so it’s really important not to. I think we got into a lot of data and a lot of tech. But it’s also important not to lose the people.
1:02:30
Yeah, that’s all solid advice. Thank you. And unfortunately, that does look like it’s all the time that we have left for today. So, thank you to everyone in our audience for joining us. And thank you to Michael, Dodd and Whitney for sharing your knowledge. And also a huge thanks to our session sponsor, Eightfold AI, for making the event possible. And as I mentioned earlier, in my introductions, this session has been approved for HRCI and SHRM recertification credits. However, you must be attending this session live. So today April 8, in order to be eligible for those credits, if you’re attending this session on demand, unfortunately, you do not qualify. Our system keeps track of all of this, and those of you who watched it live will receive a link to the codes via email in about 24 hours. So keep your eyes open for that. The same email will contain a link to our full recording as well. So be sure to tune in for the rest of this week’s exciting events and resources. And thank you again for joining us and have a wonderful day.
1:03:29
Thank you. Thank you
