Lou Adler - The Almost Daily RECRUITING Show

Hey. Hi, everyone, this is Lou Adler. We are going LinkedIn live right now with Josh Burson. Although I can't find Josh Burson, so we'll have to have someone substitute for him. Josh will be here. He told me yesterday that he will be here. Just sent him a text. Irrespective of that, we are going to have an event. I'll just play two parts. Part a is maybe three parts. One will be what I experienced 30 years ago about hiring and hiring diverse talent in the 90s. One will be hiring diverse talent today. That'll be me two times. The younger version and the older version. And then I'll ask a question to Josh Burson. And somebody just arrived. Maybe that's Josh. See, it is. We got Josh here. He's allowed to talk. And I'm going to promote Josh to a panelist. Josh, you there? Your phone is still mute. Where. I was going to tell everybody I was going to ask you a question. I'm here. Good. Hi, Josh. How you doing?

Good.

You might want to put your camera on, but you don't need to. But the only cameras that will be seen and if you haven't shaved or.

Something, it says the host has stopped it. So I think I need.

Okay, I can do that. I think I have a capability to do that. So make a co host. That's the wrong person. You kept on. Sorry, you can't. You. Oh, yes, I do want to make you a co host. You should be a co host now, Josh. Okay, let's see.

All right, I'm on.

There you are. Hey, how you doing? Hey, you know, Brian, can you put your camera on just for a second? I just want to kind of wait. We are LinkedIn Live right now. But I just. Brian, could you have played Josh for. If we actually tried? I mean, maybe mush your hair up and put on. Take your glasses off.

You know, I can't start my video because I'm not able to do that. So. No, nobody can play Josh, Lou.

Okay, well, that's absolutely true. So there's nobody. So. Hey, welcome, everybody on LinkedIn Live. I'm actually doing that as a stall a little bit only because we have a 30 second delay on LinkedIn Live. So I had to get you people to start saying, you're listening, Brian. Do you see us on LinkedIn Live?

It does not say live yet, but I'm working on it.

No, that doesn't. Yeah, I don't think it's working. It's online.

I haven't been able to figure out how to Use it myself. But if you guys.

We did it. We did it once and it doesn't seem to want to go right now. So I'm going to stop and I'm going to try again.

Okay. There was another platform that.

Know what I did. I have to keep the browser going until it makes the connection. Now it's going. I see it when I see my email and I'm looking at a different screen than you guys are. This LinkedIn is having a problem on this browser today. That might be what it is. That might be what it is.

Lou, you are live now.

Okay, good. Thank you, Brian. See my email and I'm looking at a different screen. Okay, I see josh there. I see lou there. Brian, do you see me on LinkedIn? You can say no, Brian. You've muted yourself, Brian, so yeah.

Yes, I do. I see you.

Hi, everyone. We're now LinkedIn Live. I apologize for being a few minutes late, but the technology at certain times of the year is more effective than others. This is Lou Adler. I am delighted to have Josh Burson with me today on my weekly, almost daily recruiting show, which doesn't make a lot of sense, but that's what we do it. Josh is probably one of the. Enough. I won't even say one of the. He is the most outstanding researcher in the HR space. Clearly preeminent number one knows everything inside out about hiring, hiring technology.

You're overdoing it here, Lou.

This is the setup, Josh, as I'm giving you a tough question. So this was not, you might have thought it was a great pat in the back. It wasn't a great pat in the back. It was. I'm going to ask you a question in a moment here and I want to make sure we have people responding. Have you seen any comments coming in yet, Brian, from the LinkedIn Live session? I know you don't need to leave your microphone on mute, Brian, because you're going to be talking, both of you are. So I don't.

Thumbs up, but no comments, Lou.

Okay?

Okay.

Any questions are fine. I can't find the LinkedIn Live, but whatever comes in, we'll just deal with them.

I can see them. I've got the. Irrespective of that. I got it. We're recording this irrespective, so we'll get it out again. But Josh is a really remarkable researcher, understands this space. My background is at the micro level of doing hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of searches and seeing it from a candidate and a hiring manager perspective. So I have a very Micro view. But you start doing it hundreds of times, you start seeing some trends. So many, many years ago, I wrote a book. My first real book was in 1997. And technology was just ramping up. ATS were being built, job boards were coming into their own. Companies were building in house recruiting teams. And at that time, McKinsey had a study say the war for talent is going to be one with all of this technology. I did not believe that. 22, well, that's 25 years ago. But I had this cartoon drawn 22 years ago, Josh, and it was just what I called the state of the technology market. I didn't draw it, I had a cartoonist. Hey, we put a bucket with a lot of holes in it and money spent for advertising cumbersome websites, boring jobs, long application process, recruiters who didn't understand the job or understand how to recognize top tier talent. Hiring managers made biased judgments, they were poor interviewers and the systems were architected poorly. What's changed, Josh? I mean, you've seen this. Is that the way it was 22 years ago? And what do you think?

You know, it's funny, it's an interesting part of HR, or really business, where technology has been introduced in every single step. From searching, assessing, interviewing, onboarding, trying to do more intelligent screening in every different place. And the interesting thing is all of those technologies have grown and grown and grown and grown into this multi billion dollar industry. But the bottom line is it's still a business about human beings. And human beings are very complicated machines. No two are the same. And to me, the reason recruiting continues to be so challenging. I was just on a meet in a call like this yesterday where Madeline Laurano, who's a good friend of mine, just did some research that 2/3 of candidates still don't know what's going on in the jobs they're searching for. They get no information from the, from the hiring organization is that there's two sides that are changing. Jobs keep changing. You know, who are we recruiting this person, what are we recruiting this person for? This job that we tried to write down in a description on a piece of paper that was kind of very clearly defined, maybe in the 1970s and the 1980s. You know, these days it's not clear what the job is going to be in a lot of cases, unless it's a very manual, routine job. Because the routine nature of jobs has become more and more automated. So we need to look for people that maybe had skills or experiences that look like they're relevant to this, but they also have cultural attributes that are relevant to our company and they have to be willing to take care to do the commute, location, pay, other issues that we have around that. And then on the candidate side, we have this constant change in the nature of the economy. During a very peak period of the economy, like what we just came out of, people are very picky. During a very poor time in the economy, like we're now, people are a lot less picky. It's a really complicated problem. So I don't think it's become automated, the automation is being used, but humans are still directly involved in a huge way. In fact, I remember one of the interviews I did years ago, was the head of recruiting at one of the oil services companies and he said we analyzed every single factor on our high performing candidates. What schools they went to, what experiences they had, their IO psychology assessments, their intelligence, their technical assessments, their interview skills. He said, and we couldn't find correlations of almost any of those things with the highest performing people. But we did find an enormously high correlation between successful candidates and the recruiter, the human recruiter, which I never forgot that story that human recruiting is still maybe the center of this, regardless of how much technology.

How long ago was that, Josh, when you came up with that?

It was about four or five years ago. It was Halliburton, I think. I can't remember if it was Halliburton or another company, but. But I think that's still true to a large degree. Unless you have a job that is so routine that any human being with the skills can do it.

That's an interesting. Let me kind of go through a few things here and then I want to kind of get your viewpoint, but I want to come back to that because I had a story yesterday.