Competing For Talent: A Workshop for Enterprise Leaders w/ Greenhouse CEO + Dir, Talent Acquisition

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Saster Enterprise. We are thrilled to have Arianna Moon, Director of Talent Acquisition, and Daniel Chaitz, CEO at Greenhouse, join us for this session. They will be discussing Competing for Talent, a workshop for enterprise leaders. There will be time for Q and A, so please make sure to drop your questions throughout the session into the chat below and unmute yourself and turn off and turn on your video to ask Daniel or Arianna a question live during the Q and A portion. Arianna. Dan, take it away. Thanks so much, Brian. This is me. Great. I'm really excited. Quick question to get things started. How many? Answer this in the chat, if you could. How many people in the audience here went to engineering school or computers, have a computer science degree? Just chat your name into the. Into the chat, Eric, or else. Who here has a business degree, an mba, a law degree with law school, business school, anything like that? Great. Lots of people, more and more. Excellent. Now, who went to HR school? Anyone? Usually not. So the reason I asked that question is if you lead an organization of human beings, you're in the right session here. And this conversation we're going to have today is all about competing for talent and specifically what you, as leaders, should know about attracting and finding the right people for your organization so that you can grow your business. And as a fellow business leader who also didn't go to HR school, I've had to learn a lot of this through hard experience at work and how to make hiring critical talent a key to business success. Daniel I'm Daniel Chait. I'm the CEO and co founder at Greenhouse. Greenhouse is the hiring software company and our mission is to help every company to become great at hiring and.

Hi everyone. I'm Arianna Moon. I'm the Director of Talent Acquisition at Greenhouse. And we're very excited to be here with you today.

So thanks to everyone for joining today. Let's get right into it. We've only got 20 minutes together. I want to make sure that we cover what's most important to you as enterprise leaders in the time we have. And so in this session, we're going to plan to share with you our framework for what the leader's role is in hiring at your organization. I'll turn it over to Arianna to speak to how a leader can most effectively work with their recruiting teams to get the right business outcomes. And then we'll finish with a few tactics, things that you can do right away for finding the best candidates. At the end, we'll have some time for Q and A to be able to answer any of your most pressing questions. After the session, we'll be able to continue the conversation. And my invitation to you is to join Ariana over in the Greenhouse Lounge, where she can pick up from there and answer more of your pressing hiring questions. Okay, so here's what we're here to talk about. Traditionally, hiring was thought of as an HR task, but that's not enough anymore. In 2021, it's going to be the year of the great rehiring. More people are going to be entering or reentering the workforce this year than any other year on record. And yet at the same time, talent is more mobile than ever. With 40% of employees looking to move jobs post pandemic, people today have control over their own careers in ways that they never used to. And so companies ability to compete for talent, to diversify their organization, and to build winning teams is more relevant and important now than ever before. And leaders and managers throughout the organization are now becoming accountable for hiring outcomes. The challenge is that many leaders don't actually know what their own role is in making hiring a core company capability. That's what we're here to talk about. Now, people often think of hiring as kind of a black box. There's some things that your recruiter does and they result in a hire and you're sort of the passenger on that ship. But what I've learned and what I've seen while working with so many founders and leaders at so many different companies is that hiring works best when everybody in the organization is deeply involved and especially when the leaders are highly engaged in hiring. It turns out there's a specific set of behaviors that I've seen in leaders whose companies are great at hiring talent. And it's not a secret black box that their recruiter has or some special job board that they know about. You don't. They're people who prioritize hiring and they know the value of bringing great people into their teams. And we call those leaders talent makers. And a talent maker is a certain mindset. A talent maker sees themselves in three very specific roles that relate to everybody inside and outside the company impacted by hiring. And so let me break it down for you and tell you about those specific roles. So how do you become a talent maker? Well, the first way in which a talent maker works differently is as a leader. And so we define a talent leader. That's someone who's going to build and lead a culture of hiring. And when leaders are engaged, they signal to everyone that they work with that hiring is a Key focus, it's something that they care about. And when a leader views hiring as a privilege, when a leader views hiring as a priority, then everyone in the company will start to focus on winning for great talent. And so a story maybe to illustrate that point. When Greenhouse was a small company, it was easy for us to sort of get the team in the room, order a pizza and throw a referral party. Now we're a big global company. We've got offices in many locations. Our leaders help to drive sourcing parties and they fund referral contests across the organization and across the world, amplifying the importance of keeping candidate diversity front and center. A great example of that is the head of our EMEA region in Dublin, Ireland. He's beloved by our recruiters because he personally gets on and hosts sourcing parties, generating lists of hundreds of prospects for our team, our leaders and our recruiters to reach out to. This is super helpful because it means that we're not overly reliant on who's in our recruiters networks, what job ads we happen to be buying and, and also allows us to really diversify the kinds of people that we engage with in our pipelines. But look, being a leader within your own team isn't enough. You also need to consider the people that you're reaching out to to try to hire the candidates and prospects, the talent. And so the sort of, the second role of a talent maker is to act as a talent magnet. And we say that when a company becomes great at hiring, all of its people and all of its leaders start to become talent magnets. And so in short, a talent magnet is somebody who's very personally and actively involved with candidates and prospects. So an example, I met a head of sales who had started a blog and she wrote every single week about sales topics and things that were going on within her team, within her organization and her approach to sales. And she built an audience and, and the audience was people that were interested in sales, that were passionate about the craft and that knew her and her company. It turns out that within just a few months, she had made three incredible hires just from people reading her blog and getting excited about her work and the company's culture. Another example, our head of revenue operations at Greenhouse has done an incredible job building a really strong network of talent that she can tap into by being an active member in, in the operations community. So the sales ops sort of community within New York and most of the people within her team have been sourced or who have applied through that network. And so by participating in the Community. By putting out your own work and your own brand through those communities of interest, she's been able to open roles quickly. She's been able to build in great talent. And it's shown that the candidates and the great talent wants to join the organization because of the work that she does as a talent magnet herself. Okay, so you're a talent leader. You're building and leading a culture of hiring throughout an organization. And you're a talent magnet. You're spending your own time trying to land the talent. There's still a thing missing. What about your partners in this process? What about the internal team? And that brings me to the third and maybe even the most critical behavior as a talent maker, which is to be a talent partner. And a talent partner is someone who empowers those who are driving the recruiting process, enabling them to do their best work. And in order for you and your organization to be great at hiring, you really need to be a talent partner. You have to own that responsibility of enabling your talent team to do their best work and not just see themselves as order takers. And for recruiting to run well, the leaders have to trust them. They have to ensure that people involved in the hiring have the right tools, that they have the right information so that they can partner with you to make every hire a great hire. And there's a whole art and science to this. I'm going to bring up Arianna to elaborate on what great partnering really looks like.

Awesome. Thank you. Daniel, I love what you said earlier about recruiting working best when business leaders are involved. When you think about your recruiting team or your talent acquisition team, making sure they have the tools they need to be successful and making sure that they're well supported. If you do all of that as a business leader, you can hold your recruiters to a higher standard of performance. And so, as Daniel mentioned, to paint a more concrete picture of what this kind of successful partnership between business leaders and TA might look like, I'll talk through some of the behaviors that make talent makers that talent makers demonstrate when they're being effective talent partners. So next slide, please. Thank you. Okay. Talent makers who are good talent partners proactively demonstrate their support and they lead by example. There are a few behaviors outlined on this slide here. I'll give you some real life examples of what these behaviors might actually look like in practice. When you think about understanding that business success is enabled by hiring the right people, one of the things that comes to mind for me is at Greenhouse, our executives know that hiring is an organizational priority. One of the things that we've done is the executive team has partnered together with the people team to launch a regular internal operating review to put more attention and visibility and rigor into understanding how well is the business hiring for the people that it needs to achieve its business goals. And does TA or the talent acquisition team have enough resources to be able to hire those people? And so having that conversation at the executive level is something that is really heartening to see as a TA leader, because we know that this is a front of mind thing for the business. If we think about something like holding not only TA but also your team accountable as business leaders to your hiring outcomes. The thing that comes to mind for me as an example is the work that our customer success team has been doing. What they've been doing is they've been partnering really closely with the recruiters on my team to do things like help take initial phone screens for high volume hiring pipelines and sitting down and working together with our recruiters to work, look at our process and diagnose areas in the interview process that may be impacting different demographics disproportionately in the effort of creating a more inclusive and equitable hiring process. So really sitting down and getting into the weeds and having the hiring manager buy in is really critical. And then when we think about leading by example, it can be something as simple as an executive blocking off time on their calendars to make space for interviews, but also to make space for time to submit their feedback on the interview. A lot of the times executive executives will take back to back interviews and not have time to submit feedback. And that's a really important part of taking an interview and keeping your interview process moving so that your TA partners know how to move that process along. Now I'm going to move on over to the next slide. Cool. I'm going to speed up a little bit through this one. So talent makers are also very actively involved in the recruiting process. So again, there are some behaviors outlined here. I'll tell one story that comes to mind in terms of one of these behaviors. So when I think about the second piece of selling the story of why talent should join your team. And a great example here is what our CTO does. He has a willingness to drop anything and everything at any given moment if my team needs his help to help sell a candidate or an engineer on joining our engineering team. And so this conversation can involve walking candidates through our career ladders on the R and D side and growth paths and kind of sharing why greenhouses are really cool and cool and challenging product to build. And that's really useful when you're, you know, when candidates have offers in hand for, from other companies that may have bigger brands or larger packages. Now let's move on over to the next behavior. So the next one is all about being an inclusive partner. Again, there are some behaviors outlined here. And one, the example that comes to mind for me is if I think about the last one around, not only defining the talent you need, but also remaining open minded to new ways of being inclusive. I think a really good example is what our professional services team at Greenhouse has been doing throughout their hiring process. So instead of trying to find people who've done the job that they're trying to hire them for in the past, we're having a really rich conversation around what are the competencies we're looking for and can we recruit people from different industries who've never done the job before but have transferable skills? And we've actually seen a lot of success in those kinds of hires that we've been able to make. Okay, so now that we've covered the roles that a leader has to be to be a talent maker and an effective partner, it's time to look at briefly what recruiters actually do to fill the hiring funnel. And again, this slide here is a lot to look at, but I'll kind of walk you through what you're looking at here. First, some context. I think it's easy for leaders to express frustration when it looks like nothing is happening in the recruiting pipeline. And so I often hear leaders say, hey, like, I don't think my recruiting team can find really great people. And at the same time as they're saying that it's common that they don't demonstrate an understanding of what it might take to find that great talent. In the past, it was as simple as post on the job board and wait for candidates to come. But today we have to take a more holistic approach. And so what you're looking at here is a list of techniques to be more organized, systematic, measurable and personalized in your overall hiring strategy. Some of these techniques take a longer time to bear fruit. Others can be used a little bit more immediately when you need to fill a role. But you need this entire continuum to be successful. Okay, so just to touch really briefly upon each of these questions, the hiring brand is basically your employer brand. How are you marketing yourself to candidates to make them want to come join your company? When you think about pre qualified pools, this includes your existing database of candidates as well as pools that you can tap into for talent from underrepresented groups. When you think about advertising, this is the traditional pay to play strategy, which gives recruiters a lot of control. The only constraint here is the size of your budget. The downside of this strategy is that it only reaches the candidates who are actively looking for jobs. And then finally, there's prospecting. There is that. It's the more personalized, targeted approach to finding people, which your recruiters can do or you can hire an agency to do. And again, this is a highly targeted approach, but it will be costly in terms of time and fees. So again, you need this whole continuum to be successful in your hiring strategy. And I think the truth is that it's a really competitive talent market out there and your competitors are doing a lot of these things. So in order for you to win the best talent, you have to engage in these techniques and strategies to succeed. So now I'll turn it over to Daniel to wrap up.

Thanks, Arianna. Lots of great material in there. I'm just going to wrap up before we get to Q and A with three key takeaways that everyone can bring home with them. First, hiring is really a leadership behavior. It's not an HR task. It's your job to make your company great at hiring. Second, in order to be a talent maker, there's three different things you have to do. Learn how to lead and build a culture of hiring. Relate directly to candidates. Spend time recruiting talent yourself, and then support and partner with your internal hiring organization. And then lastly, the best organizations are out there competing against you every day. By recruiting proactively across a wide range of strategies and tactics, you have to be on the front foot if you're going to compete. Let's open it up for questions now. And it looks like one just came in. I see a question from Suzanne. Great strategy for attraction. Can you briefly describe how you manage to retain talent? Briefly is hard to do. I think just like with hiring, retaining talent is a holistic behavior. It's something that leaders have to be involved in and you have to really lean into. Just like you need to know, why are people going to come work at your company to begin with? They need to have a reason to stay and why are they going to wake up tomorrow and come back? If you don't know why that is, then you need to develop that employer value proposition. Maybe you're one of the two or three companies in the world that can pay them the most and offer them a free sushi and dry cleaning at their desk. I Don't know about you. I'm not one of those companies. So why should in my case come, you know, great, talented people with lots of opportunities in the marketplace today stay working at Greenhouse. And I have my reasons. But you need to be clear what those reasons are. And then you need to partner with your internal teams to make sure that those reasons are true and working. I see. Another question came in from Jackson. How might a talent acquisition team inspire a leadership team to adopt these takeaways? It's a great question, Arianna. I don't know if you've got anything to chime in on here. I think the thing I would say, Jackson, is that often in a big organization, change is hard. You don't need to boil the ocean. What I typically see is that they will find one leader who's bought in or who's open to change and work with that leader to do a pilot project, share the framework with them and say, hey, you're someone that I know cares a lot about talent. I see that you are the U, X, Y and Z. Can we kind of showcase some of your behaviors? And obviously the numbers are going to, are going to bear fruit that it's working and use that to kind of start to build momentum. I don't know if you have anything else to add to that.

Yeah, I think this is a really important question and kind of what Daniel just briefly touched upon, I think it's important to show like, hey, if you get involved in, in these ways, here's what the outcomes can look like versus here's reality. Today these are, you know, we're working with a really competitive talent market. We have these challenges. If you can provide an alternative that is data driven around, these are what the results can be. Or maybe if you do have a leader in particular in your organization that is bought in, leverage that leader and then show the outcomes of that partnership, I think that can be a really powerful story to tell.

So many more questions. I see questions about internal referrals, about incentives, about hiring, sales, talent. I think the idea that hiring is an important leadership responsibility is really resonating with this group. And I'm grateful. If you want to pull up Brian, or I guess I can share the slide again. Go ahead and share that slide quick. That'd be great. There we go. We can continue the conversation. So Ariana is going to be over in the Greenhouse Lounge right away to answer any questions you've already asked and any others on this very important topic. Thank you so much for your time and energy here today.

Awesome. Thank you all. Please join me in the lounge if you have time, and I'll take your questions from there.

Thank you, Dan and Arianna for a great session. We have a lot more great content today, so see you in a.