Heidi Gerhard, Head of Talent Strategy, BASF

Everybody, happy Friday! We are live on Shelly's Alley. It is basically 1 PM, and today we have a very special guest, Heidi. Hopefully I'm saying your name, your last name correctly. I always wonder about that. Gerhard or Gerhard? Okay, good. All right, got it. Excellent. So Heidi joins us from BASF. You might know them as the chemical company, but they do a lot more than just chemicals. They do all kinds of— they work with the government, they work with materials and foods and everything. Heidi's been there for, I think, 5 years now, if I'm not mistaken. Is that right?

5 and a half, yeah.

5 and a half years, yep. But before that, Heidi has worked in big RPOs like FutureStep. I'm not sure if that's an RPO or not, the pontoon. Big enterprises like that. Heidi also volunteers as a board member on a couple of organizations. I'm not sure if you want to mention that, if you want, if you're still active in some of those boards.

Yeah, I'm still on the HR TechConnect board.

So she's got a bit of a volunteer streak. And Heidi has a degree from Stern in finance. That's a pretty big deal, right?

Finance, international business, spent time on Wall Street before making a 180 pivot to HR.

Be curious to know if your finance background and finance, let's say, attitude has helped you in this role. Like, have you used your Wall Street know-how?

Absolutely.

In all of my—

my entire HR career, I think my finance background is just so ingrained in, in my way of working and thinking. Obviously it was applicable in the RPO side when you're managing a portfolio and P&L, and my time with consulting doing resource utilization and all of that. But with BASF, it really— I shifted my career from a profit center with Korn Ferry to more of a cost center operating model, which is your traditional HR operations. And there it's really been applying it to quantifying our team's impact. So how are we delivering that business value when we are on the books, essentially an expense? So really fun and different ways to apply my finance and analytics background for sure.

Yeah, or in CFO speak, it would be we're COGS. Cost of goods sold, as opposed to EBITDAB or whatever that other one is. I always have a hard time with EBITDA versus EBITDAB versus COGS. I know COGS is basically the, you know, the hard cost. So that's the cost that doesn't change much. And so we're part of that, right? Because we're, we're part of the cost of doing business. But there's always been talk from people about how do we turn HR into a profit center, or how do we turn HR into our TA at least into, into something that's not a, you know, a direct cost like COGS. How would you do that? Is it even possible?

Yeah, I think you can. I think you— and it depends on the organization, the industry you're in, right? So when I was in consulting, we were able to show that every talent we brought into the organization was a billable resource, so they were driving the revenue. It's a little bit easier in those environments.

Or in sales that they drive, right? Yeah, I can see that.

Yeah.

But what about, you know, a recruiter that you bring in? How do you prove the value of that? Like, it's just cost of goods sold, right? Yeah. How do you turn that around?

Quantifying the, like, the performance, the acceleration to performance, the quality of hire, the career progression into leadership, and that multiplier effect of the talent you bring into the organization. I've seen some really interesting formulas to be able to do that. And breaking it down by job family too is another way to look at it, especially if you're bringing in kind of engineering resources that are delivering the products that ultimately are sold to the customers, or business developers who are driving that revenue growth.

So yeah, it's another look at metrics, right? It's a different kind of metric. It's not a performance metric for the individual, it's a metric of the entire function, right? The function of the Yeah, so when I was, I was a member of the US delegation to the International Standards Organization, ISO. A lot of people know ISO as the ISO 9000 manufacturing standard, right? But ISO is much more than that. They have standards in a lot of industries, and there are many countries that participate. In the United States, the official body that governs that is the ANSI, the American National Standards Institute. So essentially, ANSI has a delegation that sends delegates to ISO and there's conferences and all that. Anyway, so I was part of that for a very long time and participated in the talent acquisition part of it. Basically, there's a code for that. It's not ISO 9000, it's another one. But the reason I'm bringing that up is one of the things that we were looking at as standardizing is essentially the costing. So standardized costing for an organization, when you're looking at the ISO, it has to apply to every company in the world. We look to have it apply to every— what it really does is it applies to every company that's participating in that standard, which could be 30 or 50 countries, but that's close enough, right? Otherwise, you're not— how are you going to get 200 countries to agree on something like that? Getting 50 countries to agree on is hard enough. But one of the things that we were trying to figure out around costing is For example, the cost of a vacancy, like the cost not to hire, right? Because it's, you know, it's a way to sell staffing. It's a way to sell your internal recruiting team to your leadership, right? The cost not to hire and how we can impact that. But how do you measure the cost not to hire, right? So the standard ended up being that the cost impact— this is according to the ISO, what we ended up agreeing to. 50 countries. The impact is 2 times the annual salary of that person beginning on the moment that the vacancy occurs. So Shelly leaves his job and Shelly's salary is $50,000. The day Shelly quits or is fired or whatever, for whatever reason, is terminated from the company. Yeah, it costs $100,000. What we never got to and what I was fighting for that never got kind of matured was how do you calculate it from there on? Right? So $100,000 the moment that there's a vacancy, but now what about if it's a week, a month, a year later? Like, what, how do you do that?

You know?

So it's good to have an initial cost of 2 times the actual salary, and that's an easy formula. And ISO likes to have those easy formulas because everybody can apply that. But then after that, it becomes, like you said, if they're in sales, it's the loss of potential revenue or the not gaining of that revenue. Right?

And what's the kind of snowball effect on the employees around that role, right? You can have engagement issues, retention, because burnout, people are taking on the work of people that are not working.

The burden and all that. Yeah. How do you calculate that? So, you know, we didn't do it at the ISO because exactly that, the complexity is so big. But you have to learn to interview your leadership team. And get that cost from them, even if it's empirical, right? 'Cause I'll give you an example. You might have heard this or something even better than this. So I'd love to see if you can beat this one. But as a consultant, I was advising this company and I went to this divisional leader to try to understand where are the service gaps between TA and what you're seeing? What's the perception? And one of the questions that I typically ask in that case is, What does it cost you? Do you have any way of measuring the cost of a position being open for 6 months? Right? Because the division leader said something to the effect of, well, you know, this impacts our business to have these positions open for so long. Okay, how? Like, let me take that back to the leadership team and say, here, you know, calculate. So I asked him, I should have known better, but I asked him, do you have data on measurable cost? I gotta tell you, this person was in charge of category management for the entire company, a Fortune 100 company. So of course, you know, the answer was absolutely yes, like to the penny, right? And I was like, okay, can you, you know, naive shall we, can you please like explain that to me? And he goes, $13 million. And I said, okay, $13 million, like 1-3 million for what, the whole year? And he goes, no, per month. What? That's what I— and I'm like, okay, and how long has it been open? 18 months. Yikes. Like, that's one of those moments where you're just like, um, I kind of wish I hadn't asked this question because that's now a $234 million gap I'm gonna have to explain to this. Oh, I'm like, I'm gonna get fired, right? Like, this is big, but apparently it's not as big as I thought. So this was one of 4 divisional leaders. The, the, my client that I was talking to had 4 direct reports. One was a vacancy. It just happened to be 4 quarters of the United States, right? So regional leaders, it happened to be probably the biggest one. And their job was essentially to decide what products to put on discount and what products to put on where so that they could get rid of it so that it wouldn't cost them inventory. And they knew exactly what the cost was because if this person wasn't there, there were no discounts, right, for that region. Therefore, right? And I was like, oh my God, that's a lot of money. Have you heard of anything like that? Have you heard of a number that big?

No, never. But I mean, it's, it's proven what he has the data to back it up. It's so—

yeah. And I'm sure there's many other— I'm sure there are a lot of other places where that data exists. We just don't ask. And so I learned my lesson to do a little bit of homework before I ask.

I mean, that's a huge, that's a huge impact or an attractor for the right talent to say, this is the size of impact that you bring to this, you could bring to this role in this company.

Seriously.

That's exciting.

Yeah. I mean, you could have a $200 million impact, but I started scratching around and I found that in procurement, there's some similar things. Like, I'm not sure if, have you worked with procurement? Organizations before. I'm not sure if this is standard or not, but I was told that procurement people, like a recruiter has a quota or some sort of metric that we say, okay, we know that you're doing your job if you fill X amount of jobs or, you know, whatever. It's different for every organization. Similar in procurement, but for them it's a certain dollar amount of money saved. So like, we know you're doing your job if you save the company $1 million more this year than we, you know, than last year. But then there's also an incentive plan for some of them, I guess, depending on levels. So they get a percentage of that. So they save the company a million, they might get $10,000 as a bonus or something like that. Anyways, so that one is another one's like sales where it's pretty easy to calculate, right? I'm wondering why we don't just include this, as you said, as a marketing pitch, but also as a way to get budget. Like, wouldn't it be great if in HR and TA you could go to your CFO and say Listen, we're not filling this position and it's costing us $234 million. Could I have $100,000, please? I mean, that's a rounding error, right?

Right. Yeah.

I mean, to explain to the audience what a rounding error is, is it kind of the acceptable margin when you're doing these kinds of massive calculations, when you're at the millions and billions, the $100,000 or the $10,000 don't really quite add up. So you can go to a CFO and say, for the, for the cost of a rounding error, I can double my department. You know, for this, why don't we do that more? Why don't we have that kind of savvy in, in our business?

Because nobody's asking those questions, right? When you go to change that.

Yeah, I'll start the petition. You can be the first one to sign.

I'll be right there, first in line.

I think it's those are the kind of things that—

so smart. Recruiters need to really dig into the inner workings of the organization and it That's where the ideas, the innovative approaches, the differentiators really can come to light.

So having a finance degree, you know, does help, but you don't have to have a finance degree to ask these questions, I think, right? Yeah. Interesting concept for maybe a blog post or a topic on how to use finance to sell your CFO on why you need more money. Not because we need to hire more people, because duh, we know that. Like, we don't have to tell the CFO that we need to hire more people. We need to tell the CFO why we need more money to hire more people instead of less money, which is Usually what happens, right? Yeah. So in your job at BASF now, you're in a position where the way you explain it to me is it's a strategic role. So you're in the thinking capacity. You're not necessarily filling jobs, but what you do has impact in filling all jobs for the organization. Tell me a little bit more about what that's like. What's a day in the life of a strategist in TA? For those of us that would like to be that someday?

Yeah, so my remit includes talent acquisition, but also the broader talent management areas. So it really connects the entire employee lifecycle, talent lifecycle, which is where that strategic thinking and what I like to call the integrated value proposition comes into play. And this is actually why I pivoted my career when I was on the executive search side. I was just seeing the front end. And so it was great because I was able to kind of churn and burn, bring talent into the organizations, get the business, but then you kind of hand over the talent to the organization and hoping that they're going to nurture that talent.

It's not your job to, hey, you got it from here, right?

Okay.

And then arguably they could drop the ball.

Right. But it's important that, you know, when you're bringing talent into an organization, you're delivering on that value proposition that you sold them on to join your company. And so how do you cultivate that across the different stages of an employee's career within the organization? And how do you drive greater diversity and inclusion and a sense of belonging within the organization so that everybody grows and delivers that business value? So that's really my role today is connecting all of these pieces to ultimately drive high performance and profitable growth. I have a workforce analytics function within my unit as well, which helps us quantify that impact more intentionally across all the stages of the employee lifecycle.

Really curious about workforce analytics because I, I sort of stumbled into that when I was at Viscerve, in, in that there was a gap and, uh, I, I was known as the kind of the Excel, you know, wizard. And so they just went to me and said, is this possible? Can we do this in Excel? And I said, yeah, I can figure it out. Well, I did, and then later on I found out that happens to be workforce analytics. I didn't even know what it was, right? But, and they didn't know what it was. They just wanted to know. They just wanted the answer. Yeah, of, you know, they had a problem. They had a business problem. They want an answer, and they figured Excel could do it. So they came to me, and so I did it. It turns out to be workforce analytics. But how does somebody go from being in TA to workforce analytics without accidentally stumbling into Excel like I did?

Well, I think If you're on the TA side and you have a passion for quantifying your impact and getting into the metrics and the performance indicators, there's a segue there to build into the analytics space because you're already dealing with the data and you're deconstructing the data to identify those areas of opportunity where you can drive greater efficiency, greater impact, greater candidate volume, greater diversity. So the way I like to describe workforce analytics is essentially taking those those data points across an organization and being able to synthesize that into a compelling storyline that not only tells, you know, the— not only takes the insights from the data, but then translates that into actionable recommendations. So how do we improve? How do we move the needle? How do we drive this forward? And if you're, if you're really sophisticated, you're getting to the point where you're essentially putting together like an org health diagnostic or an org health assessment to say, okay, what is our culture and, and are we living the culture that we promise? Where are we falling short and how do we maintain our standards going forward?

So analysis is a part of it. If I'm hearing you correctly, so you have the data, you know, information, and the data by itself isn't going to tell you anything. So the analysis is part of it, but then it's the interpretation of that analysis that then becomes, as you said, the storytelling. So you start with the analysis, start with looking at the numbers and, and then painting a picture. Then you take that picture and try to figure out what the picture means. Step 2, I guess. And then based on what that picture means, you then come— it's also your job to come up with recommendations. And when asked, why do you recommend that, be able to produce the, I guess, the back it up, right? So you have the data, you paint the picture, you interpret the picture, you make the recommendations, and then if they ask you how you know this, and you're able to go back to the data. Is that about right?

Yeah, and I've seen workforce analytics functions. I mean, they absolutely have to be embedded with the organization. So they're not going to come up with all of the ideas, because if you're, if you have a strong analytics team, they're experts in the data, but they need to know who to go to across the organization to actually tell the story, translate it with the qualitative. And that's your job.

That's what you do. You take their, okay, and then you figure out.

My team and I, we do that. We work with our HR business partners across the company. We work with our centers of expertise to really understand a bit more at the granular level. This is what the data is saying. What does this actually mean? And then what are some of the best practices that can help change this storyline to our favor?

Heidi, how is that not internal consulting?

It is internal consulting, absolutely. We're strategic advisors to our executives and to our SVPs for all of our business units.

But you roll up to your, your organization rolls up to TA, to HR, or to internal consulting, or it rolls up to what we are now calling people services, but it's essentially HR.

So I run talent strategy and we have all of the talent areas under my organization, and we are kind of that engine to support all of our divisions.

Okay, so if your company has a CPO type of role, it would be that. Otherwise, the closest would be the CHRO, the CRO as we call them, right? The CPO or the CRO would be— okay, gotcha. But internal consulting can be lateral to that. Yeah, in some organizations, right? Then yeah, they're bringing in the consultants at former McKinsey and Bain and BCG consultants to kind of help do this and that, but they're They are not analysts. They have analysts too, right? So it's kind of like the analyst feeds that information. So would you partner with somebody from internal consulting on projects? Do they tap you? Do they say, you know, we should ask Heidi this because Heidi knows about the strategy for HR, or are you ignored in that capacity?

No, no, we are, we are instrumental in all of our change management, our culture topics, our DNI, and our talent-related initiatives. So my organization is that internal consultant and project team oftentimes to mobilize this. We have a very collaborative approach that we co-create together with our HR colleagues across the organization. But oftentimes my team is in the driver's seat for these projects to ultimately drive the growth and change we're looking to.

Hey, so stop recruiting me. I'll take the job. That sounds great. Are you hiring?

This is a very fun, exciting time for sure.

Do you have any openings? I mean, this is a good venue to tell some of our TA folks to, you know, if you want to get into strategy, it sounds like this would be a good— do you have any openings or?

Yeah, we are, we're going through a global business services transformation right now, which is really centralizing all of our functional areas into one organization, which we are calling GBS. So that's where we're focused right now. We're not, we're adding headcount, but not much because we're driving the transformation.

Trying to figure out, right. Yeah, but once you figure out what it's going to look like, then you can open the— yeah, don't want to start hiring people and then be like, yeah, we weren't really sure where we're going to put you. Welcome, we don't know what your job is yet. Yeah, right, cool. That's, that's really cool. So that tells me a lot about, you know, one of the questions I had for you, which was what are the improvements you plan on working on? I mean, you pretty much just broke that down for me really well. But the other thing that you mentioned that you might want to talk about, and I'm hoping you have some inside for this is around the SLA. And the question is, I like to ask, should recruiting and/or sourcing, either or both, have an SLA? And if no, why not? And if yes, what would that be in 2 minutes or less? Like, what would the SLA be? Not overcomplicated. So yes or no, and then if no, why? And if yes, what?

Well, I can't, I can't I can't say no. I talked to you about my financial background. I have to quantify impact. So I would say absolutely, there needs to be an SLA. One of my favorites is present-to-hire ratio. It's a great indicator of efficiency and the recruiter's true understanding of the business and the hiring manager needs. You know, I would say a good target is anywhere in that 3:1, 4:1 range, but it really depends on the maturity of the talent acquisition function and how an organization sets up that role of the hiring manager. But I also—

Is it not interview? Is present to hire as opposed to interview to hire, or is that the same?

Present to hire is the one I like because it drives the efficiency overall of the process. Does the recruiter understand the needs of the hiring manager? Do they present that recommended slate? And of that batch, the hiring manager will hire somebody.

In the present batch, some will be interviewed, some will not. that they've been presented. So part of that is what happens from present to interview, which will be a component of that, one of the ratios in that.

It's part of the calculation.

Right. And then so what percentage doesn't get interviewed? And then of the ones that get interviewed, what percentage get hired? That's now looking at a different— that's looking at a different business process. That's now the interviewing process. Yeah.

Right?

If you're consistent— That's why I like that.

That's why I like to present to hire, because I judge a good recruiter by if 90 to 100% of the resumes they present and recommend to the business, the business interviews. If you're presenting, you know, 5 and they're only interviewing 2, you're, you're missing the mark in terms of the upfront work to truly understand what the hiring manager needs and your assessment of this talent that you've engaged.

Okay, but that's present to interview, not present to hire. So what's the— if it's 90% present to interview, what would be the good target? What would you say is a strong target for present to hire?

Present to hire is what I said, the 3 to 1. So I would say, of the present to— this is getting really detailed, but of the present to hire, I would say that should still be the same as interview to hire. So you should have 3 to 1 present to hire, 3 to 1 interview to hire. So 100% of who you present should be interviewed and one of them should be hired.

Should get hired. Yeah. If not, then you're, you're where you should be working on is maybe presenting fewer. Cause this is one of the biggest complaints that I get surprisingly as a, as a consultant coming in and, you know, doing an analysis, try to diagnose, right, where the issues may be. Very commonly, hiring managers voice the complaint that I'm not getting enough resumes. Yeah, just I'm not getting enough resumes. And conversely, the other side of that argument is the recruiters complaining, I don't get any feedback from the hiring managers. So if you think about it from a big picture point of view, you have one side of the equation, the hiring manager These are all working towards the same goal, which is the hire. But one of the members of that, of that team is saying, I need more resumes. And the other member is saying, I don't know what to send you because you didn't give me feedback on those I sent you. So I'm going to send you more of what? Right.

There's a communication gap there. The upfront work to truly diagnose the need was not done in an efficient way, in an effective way to where the hiring manager trusts that they're going to get the quality. It doesn't matter how many. They can get one resume, but if that resume is the talent that they're going to hire, they're in a good spot. Why do they need 50 resumes?

That would be perfect. But yeah, but however highly unusual. Yeah. Yeah. So that is the diagnosis. So essentially, the SLA becomes this, this statement that says we will do the best we can to provide you with as few resumes as possible to get the highest number of interviews to get the hire. So we're going to give you as many resumes as you need, but we're going to aim for fewer rather than paradoxically, right? We're not going to send you more resumes because that's not going to help. We're going to send you fewer, better resumes, right? And you'll interview more of the fewer that you get, right? And you'll get more hires out of the fewer that you get because you'll interview more because you'll— I got you. Okay.

And I think part of that credibility building with the leader is really helping them understand that all of the backend work that you're doing to get them that 3 or 4 resumes, you're not just talking to 3 or 4 people, you're talking to a lot more. You're saving them time in the process by you doing the work and really culling that down to a recommended shortlist for them.

Yeah, for me to give you the present list, I didn't just randomly— I didn't like— yeah. And that's the other thing that I get a lot from recruiters. They feel like the hiring manager has this expectation that they just punch the button on the vending machine and the next candidate just pops out like, you know, next, and they're just like waiting in a line, you know, behind the vending machine. I'm like, no, it doesn't work that way. So that's the back of the napkin conversation that I like to have is how many leads does it take for me to— how many people do I need to reach out to? How many as a recruiter, right? How many people does a recruiter need to reach out to? But an SLA has to be bilateral. So what's the other side of this?

On the hiring manager side? Yeah, I mean, I think there's the responsiveness piece. So a timely responsiveness because the recruiter can't keep candidates engaged indefinitely, right? So there are some key agreements that should be made up front with the hiring manager. If I send you recommended slates, I need a response within 2 days on who you want to interview. Those interviews should be scheduled within, you know, a period of time, a week to 2 weeks. And then we need a decision within, you know, a week or two weeks. And that timeline threshold on the hiring manager side, I think, changes quite regularly depending on the market, right? We know now—

business, some places, the type of role, right? I mean, if you're working on help desk positions or front, you know, frontline cashiers and things like that, the timeline is going to be— it's going to shrink. But if you're working on like biopharmaceutical research people that are you know, where science takes a long time to prove things and you have to go through FDA approval and all that, then you have a whole different timeline. So, but the SLA needs to include the ratio of here's what we're going to aim to do. We're going to aim to present fewer, more quality resumes to have a higher ratio of present to interview and present to hire. Sorry. And on the other side of that is we'd like to have a response from you on X days, an interview on those that you selected by X days and a decision by X days. Otherwise, if you're not holding up your end of the bargain, we— we what? What's the consequence? We don't work with you. You don't have a choice. You can't say we won't send you any more candidates. So what do you do?

Well, I think it's the conversation on what the hiring manager can commit to. If they can't commit to a particular time period, then the rec goes on hold until they can. Right. Or you cancel the requisition until they're ready to be actively engaged and hold up their end of the bargain. Because it doesn't do anyone any any justice, any good if they're just spinning wheels and you're going through this process multiple times over because the hiring manager cannot make the time to go through the process.

And they may— and maybe there may be a lot of other things going on. It's not necessarily just the hiring manager. You know, for example, my longest, my rec, my world record rec was open for, I want to say, 27 months. Oh, wow. You know, the case that I made multiple times, the business had to make the ultimate decision, but the case that I made was what you just said, close it, we'll reopen it. Like, let's go. But no, they actively, you know, they would follow up and we want more candidates, we want more candidates. The reason for this was different, right? It wasn't, the reason wasn't, I can't get into that, but it was a very record-breaking, you know, length of time. And I think what you're saying is, That may be the exception, but typically, if we're not— if we're sending you the resumes and you're interviewing them and we're not getting the hires, let's think about maybe we put this on hold, we close it, we reopen it later. We're not going to stop working on it, but we need to, right? Because otherwise you end up with these recruiters that say, I've got 400 recs that I'm working on. Uh, no, you're not. Yeah, you're working on 7. The other 393 are just in your inbox. Like, you're not working— are you really working those recs? Really?

And we go back to kind of the quantifying the impact, the value of recruiters. If you're sitting on a rec load like that, you're not delivering efficiency for the organization. So you need to go back and strategically contract with your leaders to basically say, okay, this is why I'm spending— this is how I spend my time, this is how I allocate my time, and this is how it impacts the candidate experience and the external market brand for the organization as well. And if everybody's not keeping on this key pace, then recs need to get put on the back burner, offloaded, closed, canceled, because that's a waste of utilization and there's a cost.

It's inventory that's not going anywhere. Numerically, one of my favorite ways to demonstrate outcomes as far as ratios is to apply the staffing rate, right, or the staffing ratio, which is percentage of the positions, percentage of the, percentage of the positions that have been filled. Um, in other words, we had this year, we had 100 recs that were opened, we filled 90 of them, so we have a 90% staffing rate. And the other 10, you know, did they continue being— it's the other side of that— is did they remain open and unfilled, or did they get closed? That's fine. I mean, you can calculate, we filled 90 and we closed 10, okay, that's fine. But then how do we— not measuring the individual recruiter, but measuring the team, measuring the department. How do we improve on that? Do we try to go to 95%? Does that mean that we have to be a little bit more careful when we open recs, or do we have to be a little bit more aggressive when we close them, etc.? And that's diagnosing the team, not the individual, right? Again, looking at it, you know, there's individual metrics and then there's team metrics. On the one hand, you're measuring Shelly for his performance review. On the other hand, you're measuring the team for improvements overall, and those are not necessarily the same thing. So what kind of results do you expect to get from a team like, say, a sourcing team in order to make it worthwhile having invested in that?

Um, so I think sourcing— and this is I think it depends on how you set up your operation, your TA engine, and every industry—

And how you define sourcing. Yeah, right.

Yeah. But because I'm a big fan of the efficiency, I think the sourcing team, if they truly understand the business and how to market opportunities to talent, to external talent, they should be accountable for a diverse candidate pool. Bringing in really high-caliber talent with a track record of performance. And this is the, the one that I think doesn't necessarily apply to every organization, but the one that I particularly like is where they cultivate those talent leads to a point where the talent is engaged, they're hooked, they are interested in learning more about the company and the opportunities. It's not just a cold name and contact information. I think that's the tipping point to where the recruiters can really drive that efficiency and talent caliber for the hiring business.

That's smart. I get that. So on the one hand, you've got what people call, generally speaking, talent pools, which are essentially lists. Yeah. And so we call them talent pools, but it's, as you said, a cold list or whatever. And it doesn't necessarily mean those people are engaged. And then you have the other end of that, which is the engagement piece, you don't have a position necessarily open for them, but they're interested. They want to work there when the right role comes around, if the right role comes around. They're interested in the role. That doesn't mean that you've presented them to a rec. And so how do we track that? What do you think we should— because that's not something that you— you know, ATSs are terrible for that. It's not— the ATS follows the lifecycle of the rec, right? This would be tracking Yeah. So what would the, what would the, what would the demonstratable outcome be?

I think it's the cultivation of the lead similar to how you do it in sales, right? How do you bring the talent into the organization? It's that talent that you bring into the CRM is engaged. They've expressed interest in opportunities and how do you cultivate that over time to an actual hire? And what that timeline looks like and what the sources of those engaged talents are, and then measuring that effectiveness over time. And also seeing how that building that warm lead pool actually can drive greater efficiency, time to hire, because you're kind of always in this talent scouting, you know, organic recruiting mode.

The pipeline. Yeah. So building the pipeline with ready, interested candidates despite not necessarily having an open rec. And so that would accelerate time to fill because when there is a rec, you don't have to wait for the talent to be interested. They are somewhat, you know, somehow or however percentage of them partially interested. Okay. So the percentage of— I'm thinking about this one— the percentage of your pipeline that is engaged. I like that.

Yeah.

I don't know if a CRM has that. I don't know if a CRM can show you the percent. I can show you how many people apply.

You can add it, especially some of these more configurable ones. You can add that checkbox that says, you know, actively interested or open to new opportunities and then be able to report out on the pool. If you segment it by job family or job classification or level, however you structure your CRM talent pools.

I did that before, is I had a status that was basically called pipeline. So, you know, didn't— that means I phone screened the candidate, they're interested, but there was no rec at the time. I have no rec to submit them against, right? But, but I sourced them for a rec, just they're not interested in that rec, or they're not qualified for that rec, but this is kind of talent we want to keep and they're interested in us. So they go in the pipeline and that would be that, but it doesn't show me Yeah, I'm thinking I'm gonna have to think about that because it's got to be able to automatically— it shouldn't be dependent on me triggering that, right? Because you could manually do that with a crayon and a piece of paper. I mean, you can, you know, check, right? Ultimately, we could do that that way.

If you do campaigns, you can probably look at it too by the open rates, the click rates of those campaigns that go—

yeah, that's what I was thinking, something like that combined with, you know, reply rates, open rates, phone screen rates, all of this combined into like an engagement number. Yeah. I like that. I like that a lot.

That's exciting.

So, we see how we solve the problem. Yeah, there we go. So, what keeps you up at night? What do you, you know, and maybe you sleep well, and I hope you do, but if you have nightmares at night regarding sourcing and recruiting, what are they?

I would say, yeah, what keeps me up at night now, especially in this hot market in the US, is retaining our talent. Our recruiters in particular. It's such a competitive market right now, and we know how instrumental our recruiters and sourcers are to the success of our businesses. So really focusing on delivering on that employer promise, not just to the external talent they're bringing to the organization, but to the great talent we already have. And so making sure that we are doing those stay interviews, we are delivering that positive, rewarding work experience, We're connecting our work back to the organizational purpose and mission. And I think now even more so is embracing this flexible, inclusive environment that values all perspectives. That's really been a differentiator for us, especially with COVID you know, that we're not reverting back and we're really embracing a bit more of a flexible work environment so people can enjoy the, the balance. Of this blended line between work and home.

Yeah, that's a good point. I've had a few diversity leaders and thought leaders and, you know, people that are very passionate about various components of diversity on the show. And I think the one thing that I've noticed in common amongst, you know, the ones that are in the know, that are talking about diversity from the thought leadership point of view and helping organizations define that, The one thing that I've noticed that is in common across all of them is that we tend to over-categorize diversity. We put diversity into these buckets— Black, white, female. And ultimately, the measure of diversity is exactly what you just said. It's diversity of perspective. It's— to a certain point, to a certain degree, we are all diverse. Because we all have, right, that we're not clones, right? We're not cookie cutter. But when we think about diversity as this closed category, that in and of itself isn't helpful. It's, it's the diversity needs to be about, as you said, inclusion and making it possible for people's opinions to be heard rather than leaving them out, right? And that's, that's the question. It's not how many Black and female candidates are in the talent pool. It's how many people are actually— but what percentage of the people that are in the room are we listening to? And what does that look like? Right. That's really the key statistic, I think. Yeah.

It's the, it's the employee, the employee experience, right? Do you feel like you belong in this organization? Are you heard?

Like you said, are you heard? Right.

Are you truly embraced as a key player within this?

You may be wrong, but are you being heard? Like, it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. What matters is, are you being heard? Obviously, you know, if we're not listening to you, then it doesn't matter if you're right or wrong. And if we are listening to you, then it does matter. But it's not about whether or not you're right or wrong. It's about, are we, you know, providing that opportunity to people with different opinions?

Of course, and engagement.

Yeah, right. To be here in the first place. Are we— who are we leaving out of the room? And then when they're in the room, who are we leaving out of the conversation because we're shutting them out and we're not listening to them.

Yeah, it's so interesting because I was reading a Harvard Business Review article the other day, and even when, even if you have a diverse team in that sense of diverse perspectives, diverse backgrounds, ethnicity, what have you, if you're only showing up, if you're only bringing the portion of yourself that is the same as everybody else in the room, where you have those commonalities, you are negatively impacting that outcome, the innovation, the value of that team because you're only sharing this one piece of yourself. We have to get to a point where employees are comfortable sharing their whole selves because now you expand the pie. There's different ideas and perspectives and there's no fear of sharing something that may be different a different idea or a different perspective than somebody else. It has to be safe. And everybody needs to recognize that those different perspectives are actually where they're gonna catapult the team even further.

Hey, oh, wow. That's another, I hadn't thought of that. So that's another angle. It's not, are we listening to them? Is, are we even, do they even feel like they are allowed to speak? Yeah. In a way, not speak.

Can they share their thoughts?

Can they share their thoughts, opinions, whatever, you're right, to speak. I didn't mean speak as in like, voice, but, you know, is their voice— are they stifling their own voice because of the culture that we have, right? That's even deeper. Was that recent, the HBR?

Yeah, I think it came out a couple— it came out last month.

You remember? It was just— I'll look it up and see if I can post it.

I can send you the link.

Oh, okay, great. Yeah, I'll post it on there. That'd be great. I'm curious about that. Cool. So the last question I had for you, and I know I'm keeping a little bit past what I promised, but I was really curious about this. You had a You got some thoughts around disruptive technology. What do you think is going to happen? What's your crystal ball saying? What disruptive technology do you see coming to us soon?

Beyond all of the automation, like the chatbots and RPA and automatic scheduling, which we know is already in place in some areas, but I think that'll get even further developed. The one that's particularly interesting to me, and I think will potentially dismantle this whole how we operationalize talent acquisition today, is this direct sourcing and crowdsourcing approach through employees and broader networks. Do we even need to use agencies anymore? Do we need to have our own talent acquisition advisors? Can we tap into a network of alumni or independent sourcers, or even customers and suppliers for referrals and recommendations from talent. So I don't know if you saw the PeopleConnect solution that popped up during COVID where organizations were basically sharing their names and profiles of impacted employees so that they can kind of cross-pollinate and secure positions for them. It's really interesting. So I'm, I'm curious to see how this whole direct sourcing and crowdsourcing of talent evolves in the next couple of years.

Yeah, I did see that. And, but, you know, I've been in the business for 25 years and I've always been a fan of technology. Been accused of being more of a geek about it, but yeah, that's okay. The geek shall inherit the earth is what I say. So I've always had my eye on technology and I can tell you, in my 25 years, I have seen more than, more than a handful of iterations of something like that. Like the one that you mentioned, but the idea being sharing networks, sharing referrals. I mean, the whole— it's almost like you think about it, it's basically a private LinkedIn in a way.

You know, you have your own gig network of recruiters, then they don't have to be recruiters. They can just have a great network.

It doesn't matter what— yeah, exactly. That's the point. So LinkedIn wasn't the first. By the way, I mean, this whole Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon has been around since you and I were kids and played Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. You know, that's basically what I could— there was a social network called Six Degrees that was actually the first SNA, social networking architecture, right? And that was touted as, oh, a way to, you know, use your network to find people and stuff like that. It didn't make it. LinkedIn took a different tact and, you know, you see where they are now. But there was also another one in between that, that Microsoft developed that was internal. And it was— it totally explains why they bought LinkedIn, by the way, because this existed internally. It was an idea that had been developed. And, you know, of course, LinkedIn pretty much had already a product that, you know, after the fact, right? The internal one. I can't remember the name of it, but the idea was to leverage Active Directory If you're not familiar with that, it's your address book and it's your corporate address book. So when you start typing someone's email or someone's name in your, in your to email and it finds them, that essentially it's Active Directory. It's, you know, it's our internal web pages. So it was leveraging that. The problem that the, that system ran into and others like it is that there isn't enough data inside of that to really make a meaningful connection. In other words, Um, let's say that you had Workday or some other HRIS that, that has all of your employees' information, payroll and all that. Even that system doesn't have intel on what your expertise is. It doesn't necessarily know that you're a strategist that has a finance degree, that it's— so the software can't really do it. There has to be some— there was something missing. LinkedIn came around and made that promise but hasn't fulfilled it because unfortunately with LinkedIn, we now have the blessing and the problem that comes with user-created content. The blessing is a lot more people create content, so crowdsourcing depends on, you know, there being a large number of people. But then the problem with that is that they're not telling the truth. Exactly. So now, you know, so there's got to be a balance for that. And there's been lots of programs like that that have tried to come. There was, um, a company that had a product that was like alumni communities. I forgot the name of it. It might have been Talent Circles. Does that sound familiar?

I haven't heard that.

They had something like that, but they haven't— none of them have stuck. I wish one of them had, and someday somebody, someone will. So I'm there with you. I get what you're saying, and there will be something. There's been many versions of it that didn't work. Eventually it'll get figured out, and that's the promise really that social networking architecture brings. If you didn't have the encumbrance of the social issues of Facebook, the noise issues of Twitter, the self-audit issues of LinkedIn. If we could figure out that, you know, there would be a way to do that. Um, that would be very disruptive, very disruptive, and also very empowering because there are companies that can't afford recruiters, you know. They can't afford to hire a full-time recruiter. They can't even afford to pay a staffing firm because they're small bootstrapped organization with 5 employees, they just want a big contract and they need to hire their, you know, they need to double in size from 5 to 10. That doesn't mean they can afford big staffing firm fees or an RPO or, you know, or to hire a full-time recruiter. They just don't. So how do you help them? You know what I mean? Yeah, good questions. Good question for another show. Yeah, so thank you for being here. I appreciate you staying this time. It's really fun. Anything you want to tell the audience before we go? And any last thoughts, messages that you want to share with everybody? It's your podium.

I would say stay connected to the hot topics in this space. The pace of change in talent acquisition, I think, is what's kept me so engaged and interested in this space, even though my career has evolved more broadly to talent and talent strategy. The— this think tank of talent acquisition is so cutting edge and leading edge and really can inform the broader talent strategy for organizations. So stay close to what's going on, continue to ask good questions, challenge convention, and stay curious. And of course, if anybody's interested in talking to me, meeting me, hearing more, feel free to reach out. I'm an open networker on LinkedIn and more than happy to connect.

Thank you for that. Appreciate it. If you can send me that article, I'll post it.

Yeah, I will.

Cool. Thanks a lot. Well, have a great weekend, everybody. Have a great weekend, Heidi. I'll see you around. Hopefully we'll be back on the show another time.

Sounds great. Bye, everyone.