Holly Elms and Joe Peters Live on Shally's Alley

Live on Shelly's Alley, it is Friday, March 3rd, the first Friday in March. Today we have an unusual situation. We have special guests, plural. Normally this is a one-on-one conversation, but, uh, Joe and Holly had an idea that maybe we can actually all three of us get on the call together, and I thought that was a really good idea. For those of you that are not aware, we actually used to work together, the three of us, in the same company. Can you imagine that? Me working with somebody else at a company? No, I'm just kidding. So Holly and Joe were members of the Fiserv talent acquisition team along with me, and Holly was there before I got there. Actually, Joe was also there before I got there, and I'm pretty sure both of them stayed past when I left. No, yeah, yeah, right. So I was there for about 5 years. Holly, you were there for what, 8, maybe 9? Yeah, 9.

Yeah.

Joe, you're the same?

Yeah, more, uh, but almost 17. Almost 17.

Oh, 7. Oh my God, right, that's right. And you are in Rochester?

Close.

I am.

I'm actually kind of in between Buffalo and Rochester, New York, so I'm kind of equal distance to both. But yeah, not, not too far. And I know that, um, you're RIT graduate and not too far from RIT, probably about an hour from RIT.

Yeah, that's where I went to school. Yeah, so upstate New York. Yeah. Oh, you got some fans already. There's Ed. Ed's another one that used to work with us. Hey, Ed. And Greta. And Greta. Wow. It's the whole family. Should we let them in?

It's a reunion. I love it.

Hi, Ed.

Hi, Greta.

Fun times. Well, we actually had a couple of interesting things to talk about. What I was thinking is, to kick things off, you know, we all were at the same organization where things had been set up a certain way, and we learned how to, you know, operate in that environment. Joe, you were there 17 years. I was there probably— that was my longest tenure at a single employer so far. Definitely not going to be my longest in my lifetime, but definitely my longest so far. And now that we've all moved on to other places, I kind of wanted to talk about the differences, right, like, and the similarities. So what has stayed the same as you've moved into other roles? And what has been almost a shock? Like, you know, what have you been really surprised that has changed as you moved into this other organization? And what has actually again, been surprisingly the same. You guys have any place you want to start?

Uh, first I want to say hi to Karen C. Walker, who joined also.

Karen!

Oh my God, best manager on the planet ever, of all managers.

Wow, it's the whole family.

I know, it's making me— I'm getting verklempt. Um, so I'll— first, if you don't mind, Joe, I can jump in. Uh, sure. Because I've done— I've bounced around a little more than Joe has, had, you know, I've been alive longer and had a few more jobs before, uh, before we were at Fiserv, and then since actually, because I've been in consulting and shifted fully over to the operations side. Um, and so I've seen some smaller organizations and, you know, that are not in the fintech space, um, not federal contractors. So that has had some impact on kind of what I've seen as well, I think. But The common thread for me is that they're all using Workday Recruiting because that's where my expertise is. But I've seen— I think I was shocked a little bit at some of the lack of— and not where I am today. They're actually in good shape today. But some of the places I've consulted before I landed here at Endeavor, there's, I think, less of a concern or maybe awareness around just, you know, kind of compliance and—

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and I think that leads to— I think a lot of us, when we were at Pfizer, because we knew it wasn't a matter of if we were going to get audited, it was when, because Pfizer was a big federal contractor, big organization.

Yeah, and a federal contractor.

Yeah, so you have to really live in the system, and you've got to, you know, keep your data as clean as you can. And so I think when that's, you know, not sort of lurking over your shoulder, sometimes you're not paying quite as much attention to kind of living in the system. So I've learned that. And what that's kind of prompted me to do is really look for other reasons why someone would want to live in the system, right? We want to have clean data. We want to be able to tell, like, what is a recruiter's workload? And, you know, can they take on more? Should we, you know, shift some, you know, load balance a little bit with the rest of the team?

Wow. You just hit 3 major topics. So compliance and not just compliance, but like the entire what's the word, like Overwatch. There's legal compliance. There's also, you know, things that are not necessarily legal requirements, but that are ethical standards and, you know, other governing bodies, let's call them governing bodies, that have impact on. And I'm surprised, you know, this has always been surprising to me how few recruiters are actually aware of the variety of governing bodies that have an impact and an influence and a say in what we do in the, in the field of recruiting. There's 7 different agencies. It's not, you know, most people just think, oh, it's the EEOC. There's 7 different ones. So you hit on that, and then you hit on the, um, the, the whole technology side of things. And then the data, data hygiene is— yeah, you know, Holly, we, we had so many conversations about this. Everywhere I've been, I've always been shocked that the quality of data is not very good in our industry because people don't think about these things when they set them up. For example, and I'll just use one example to illustrate, you know, at Fiserv and at other organizations, when different systems are implemented, sometimes the naming structure of an individual user is created differently. So for example, in one system it's Peters, comma, Joe, and in the other system it's Joseph Peters, right?

Yeah.

And you can't match them up together because it's not like it's the same employee ID, because on the one system they don't use employee IDs and on the other one they do. So you have like employee ID over here and, and user ID over here and email address over here, but even the email address could be joe.peters or it could be joseph.peters or jpeters or whatever. And then you want I want to have these reports. People want a report that involves all 3 systems. How do you match it up? Because it's 3 different Joes.

Yeah, I remember those days, Shelly, where we were pulling our hair out over, you know, trying to get that right and matching things up and how many tries you had to, you know, to do to try to figure out exactly what we needed to do to get it right. And so there, I mean, I think Power BI is kind of coming more into play where companies are using that. But what I've seen is— To more segmentation.

So you can say, okay, this entity is these 3 entities and kind of, okay.

Right. Yeah. To make sense of it. But there's the kind of, there's that whole integration piece, right? Whatever system you're using has to, unless you wanna do a bunch of manual feed, you've gotta integrate your system with Power BI. And so I think that's the bigger challenge for a lot of companies too. And Workday actually has kind of a semi-answer to Power BI. It's not nearly as fancy yet. Maybe they'll get there, but it's called Discovery Boards. And I've just been able to use that recently. And it's pretty cool. Yeah, a new-ish. Yeah. I think it's been around a little while through a few releases, but I just haven't landed anywhere that actually had it live in their system until recently.

And it's a reporting system.

It is. Yeah. So it's, It's basically where it takes— you can choose your filter. So you're like creating the report in real time basically within Workday. And there's a drive that everybody has in their settings and they can just click on it and it'll show them. So it's got graphs and charts and it's not just the bare data that then it has to export into Excel, which is typically what happens when you run kind of a standard report in Workday. And that's all still there, right? You can still do that, but that's like a point in time view, right? As soon as you run that report, pull it out of Workday.

It's all obsolete.

Obsolete, something's changed. But this discovery board is updating every time you look at it. So you go into and you can export from that as well, but it just gives you all kinds of different views and slices and ways of looking at the data. So it feels a little bit like kind of what you might see if you were an end user who was just going in to look at something in Power BI.

Okay.

So it's kind of nice and there's no integration, right? Because it's just using data that's already there and you're already pulling that. I'm not trying to sell anybody on it, but it was just a nice—

No, it's a good thing if you work on a birthday, you may may not even be aware of it, right?

Right. Yeah.

Yeah. So what advice do either of you or both of you have for people that may be setting things up and, you know, just, just to prevent some of these headaches that we all encountered? Like, what— I'll start. One, one of the things for me would be make sure that you're mapping the single pivotal point of what a user ID is across all the systems equally. So either stick to the email address or stick to a, you know, a code number or something like that, because what happens otherwise is, you know, people have middle names, nicknames, preferred names, you know, married names, all these other things that change these IDs, and you can easily overlook or even report on the wrong data. So that would be my big piece of advice would be lock down whatever the key is for a user field that is going to be your identifier for what a person's lookup code is. That's mine. What do you guys got?

Yeah. Yeah, I think it's the consistency, right? So there's agreement on what's being used and that it's not, you know, it's not changing or that, you know, there's not area for confusion on what's being used. So I do think it's the consistency.

Yeah. So when it comes to the integrations, because I've seen so many of these and they're usually some degree of painful, right? It depends because it's two different teams, two different companies typically working together. Right.

Like there'd be a merger or an acquisition.

Right. There's a lot of that as well. So it could be that, you know, like a Company A acquires Company B and then they've got a live in sort of two worlds within the same world, which is challenging. And we've been through that, all three of us, and lots of folks who are on the, in the chat over there too have, have felt that pain and kind of getting everybody out of the, you know, two system duality and into one. So there's that scenario, but then there's also just integrating your, like, ATS, for example, with another system. And I think Shelly's right and Joe, like, you have to be consistent. You've got to And I think people tend to sort of hold on to like, this is the way we've always done it. And there's not necessarily any sort of reason other than that to keep doing something the same way. I've encountered that quite a bit myself consulting, you know, with companies that maybe aren't as far along in their journey as we might have been in our talent acquisition team at Fiserv. So it's, you kind of have to meet people where they are, right? Understand what might be the reason why they're sort of holding on to something that could be potentially keeping that integration from being successful, for moving along more quickly. So I think—

Ask, ask why you're holding on to that.

Yeah, I mean, just try to understand. You may not want to just directly ask, but just try to talk about it.

Why are you holding on to it? What's wrong with you? Let it go. Let it go.

Just get to the bottom of that, you know, and try to understand. Because then I think you can come back and, like, Karen Walker will love this, like the WIFM, the what's in it for me. You know, we, we put that at the top of our Anytime I'm trying to get a group of people at a company to come into Workday, right? Maybe they've never used it before and they're shifting from another system or just start using it more, right? To live in it and let's click on the button on the day something happens instead of 2 weeks later. You've got to sell them on why does this matter to me? Why is this going to be helpful to me? So I think that's a big part of integrations too, is what is the— is it going to be worth this pain, right? And why would we want to use this tool? Because we've all seen companies spend, frankly, some big dollars on tools that then did not get utilized properly. So, you know, you've really got to sell people on what that tool is going to do for them. And then I think kind of stay on it, right? Sort of consistent outreach and training and, you know, make sure people are really understand how to use it, first of all, and, and, you know, put some kind of either reward or, you know, punitive something around not using it.

An incentive for utilization of the— you know, that's a very good point. So You know, people think, "Oh yeah, you had it easy because at Fiserv, you know, big company, lots of money." Well, you know, it kind of goes both ways. On the one hand, if you work for a large organization, you do need more advanced enterprise-grade technology because you're doing things in a volume scale, you know, 50,000, you know, IDs to look up. And you do have perhaps the financial the buying power to acquire a higher-end software like Workday. I mean, it's not, you know, it's not cheap. You have to be a certain size company to afford that kind of— and to need it in the first place, right?

Right.

But it also cuts the other way, which is it's really hard to get anything approved. So, you know, if you, if you need to add something on or, or buy a bolt-on to make this talk to that, um, it's not like you can just you know, flip the switch on. You have to go through approvals and everything. So it takes longer to spend. You have to plan further in advance. You might, you might be planning for a year or two before you're able to, you know, kick off an integration like that. I know, Holly, it's taken you 2, 3 years sometimes to launch an implementation of Workday.

Yeah, it does take a while. And I, you know, I think Fiserv is a good example of when we were shifting all the First Data folks off of to Leo and into Workday. I mean, that was, I think, 18 months or something. And I mean, it was, that was a huge—

Just a lift and shift.

Just to lift and shift that many people because we had to tackle it regionally, right? Because in some cases, we even had to, like, translate the training materials into another language. I think it was done in Portuguese and maybe at least one other country we translated. So, and you've got to, I think, kind of tackle it in small, small bites like that if you can, because stuff's going to come up and everybody has different needs, right? There specifically within recruiting, we know there are lots of laws, right? And those may be different from one country to the next. So it usually worked better for us if we tackled a project regionally and sometimes even broke it down country by country, which is what we did when we automated offers in Workday Recruiting. It was, you know, one country at a time. And each country had very unique needs and laws and, you know, even specific to like the onboarding piece as well, because it was, you know, kind of offers all the way into onboarding. And where, you know, where's somebody supposed to park? Do we have a a piece of paper that we need to turn into a PDF and deliver to them about, you know, here's where to park when you drive to the office. I mean, it was so specific. Sometimes you have to really kind of meet, I think, smaller groups of people where they are.

So that prompts me to ask the question of, all right, if you have, if you have centralized technology that is supposed to be enterprise-grade, but it's not being used correctly, whatever it is. Let's say it's a— and let's not say correctly, but it's not being adequately utilized. It's underutilized or very lightly utilized. And you have that technology. Of course, if you try to get approval for a competitive technology, they're going to be like, well, we already have this, why not use that? And so on. So an example might be for for people that are listening, there's a way to combine LinkedIn data with Workday data. And this is not uncommon. There's other technologies where you can do similar things, import data into, you know, to clean it up. But there's always these caveats. So do you have any advice for people that might potentially be looking at an integration from a technology that they, they think isn't working, but it's because it wasn't properly implemented, and maybe they're like, is there possibly another— so like, how would you, how would you explain this to them and say, hey, maybe what you need to do is get the most out of what you're actually using right now rather than try to get approval to buy something else? Because I see this a lot, you know, migrating from this to that in, in, in ATSs, for example. They're with this ATS for 2 years, then they go to the next one, and they go to the next one. Is it really that they need a new ATS or is it that they never set it up right? You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I think what I've seen that's most important is really evaluating, you know, the technologies that are being used because it's very easy, I think, for a lot of companies to kind of jump on to whatever the next thing is that is presented to them as a tool. And there's no shortage of, you know, tools that are out there to help with recruiting, whether it's sourcing or with ATS systems or other technologies. And so it is important to really take a step back and evaluate like, what are you using today? Is it accomplishing what you're looking to do? And like you mentioned, Sheila, like maybe it's, maybe it just wasn't implemented correctly at the onset or the users just don't, you know, they're not, they don't know how to use it. There's not maybe a desire to use it. It's not adding value. And yet it may be something that an organization just continues to use over time because at one point it looked really great. And I think that's especially important in organizations sometimes where, you know, there may be a new leader or someone that maybe steps into a role, implements software, and it just doesn't get utilized because there wasn't, you know, it wasn't a need for it, but it looked really great at that time. When I think about Workday specifically, you know, I do think there are organizations sometimes that do struggle with its use because it is a, it is a, you know, it can be complex in terms of what it can do. There's you know, kind of the out-of-the-box opportunity to use it, and then there's a lot of customization that can be done in Workday to meet the organization's needs. So that is something, you know, that I've, I've become more aware of as I've used Workday, is that it does look different in different organizations. So it's not always a case where, you know, it's going to look exactly the same or function the same way across the board. So I think for those that are, you know, feeling like they're not getting what they need out of the the technology. I think they need to really be in dialogue with those that are using the technology to understand, is it still adding value for you? You know, is it getting what we need? Can we put those dollars towards something different? And when I think about Workday specifically, it's, you know, are the users trained on how to use it? Are we encouraging self-service, which, you know, is really— that's how Workday is designed, is to promote that.

So ask, is it broken? Or does it not do what you want? Or do you just not know how to do what you want?

Yeah. Yep. And the other thing I've noticed, because Joe mentioned this too, so, and we, I think companies get into this trap of they, they make their like job profiles, for example, and things like that so complex and so voluminous that if you want to actually go to, to self-service, manager self-service, where they're going in and creating their own job reqs, we create these obstacles for them that are— I mean, it's important. They're going to do it, what, once a year? Maybe the average hiring manager hires somebody once a year, if that, if that frequently. And so there, you know, there's, I think, a lack of training. There needs to be like on-demand training, right, that's required, right? If you want to open, you're going to create a job req, go in and do this training. But also, the onus, I think, sits on other COEs within the broader HR group to think about the end user, right? Like the average person who's not an expert on job profiles and job architecture and things like that. Or give them some really good training on those things as well. Because we essentially can set people up to fail if we create other systems and sort of directories. And, you know, this is like, this is our long list of 3,000 job profiles. Well, the average hiring manager is not going to know which one of those to pick if they're asked. So I think that's part of it as well. The other thing I've seen as I've moved from, you know, through several companies that are using Workday, and I agree with Ed, his comment about that, you know, if you have more functionality, it can definitely cost companies more money. That is not incorrect. So there's definitely add-ons, right? There's a ton of add-on things you can buy just for your work, your average Workday recruiting module. You can tack things on. They have like their answer to a CRM tool now that's called Candidate Engagement. They've got Workday Messaging where you can send SMS texts out to candidates through Workday. And, you know, just what I mentioned with discovery boards, those are all add-ons and they cost additional money. But even basic Workday has a lot of functionality, a lot that can be turned on and configured in the right way. And what I've seen fairly consistently is that if you look at, like, let's just stick in Workday, for example, there's different COEs that are using Workday: payroll, compensation, you know, there's maybe you have time and attendance, there's talent management, performance management, and there's recruiting. And if you look at those groups, for example, just that handful of groups, recruiting by leaps and bounds are heavier users of Workday than any of those other groups. And so it would sort of logically follow that you would need the right number of HRIS, like technology experts in Workday, to be the partners for your recruiting team to get in and get things, you know, configured on the fly for you and answer any sort of like break-fix, right, ad hoc requests to get stuff done right in the moment, right? Like this, this is blowing up today and we need help with it right now. And again, against those other COEs, if you compare, you know, recruiting to like payroll compensation, not that those groups don't have deadlines and not that they don't have like times of the year—

Yeah, payroll has a deadline every, every week. Yeah.

It's, that's a consistent deadline, right? It's always the same and they know when it's coming. And, you know, and not to diminish the work that those folks do because they're all great. And it's all very critical and important, right? We all, it all works together to make everything. Yeah, to make the magic happen. But from a, from a recruiting perspective, like we, we run like salespeople, right? I mean, it's just constant.

And that is part of why the data is sometimes missing. You know, you just, you, you sometimes don't have, you can't stop to put in all the details. I get that. Yeah, it's not, I don't think there's anybody, I don't think there's anybody's fault. But when you mix technology together or try to get technology to work together, missing data is just as bad as incorrect data.

True. Yeah, that's true. For sure. Agree. We love good data. Good data hygiene.

So the other thing I wanted to ask was about the compliance, right? We talked a little bit about how some companies just, you know, compliance is almost built in because it's a larger company or they work with the government, they have more restrictions, there's— and clearly there are times when organizations have just been singled out, you know, for whatever reason, and get frequently audited. They're frequent flyers, not because they're frequent violators, but that just happens. And then there's organizations that never get audited, right? So what have you noticed in your, you know, in your travels? Because Fiserv, for me, having worked at large technology companies, you know, Google, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, retail companies. I've seen different types of compliance-related and privacy-related things. But at Fiserv, I learned a lot about the kind of data that, well, it's transactional data around money, and money is not replaceable. You can't copy and paste money. right? It's like this finite number. You can't back it up. You can't have a duplicate of like, here's my money, and then here's like my backup. So at Fiserv, they were very sensitive about security and about compliance. In addition to the regular HR-related compliance, there's also banking industry-specific compliance. Regulations and, and things that had— that we had to do, um, for hiring practices, for example, um, certain types of background checks and so on. But at other companies, things aren't like that. They're sometimes looser, may not even be aware. Do you know of anything— is, is there anywhere where you could point to what you should and shouldn't have You know what I mean?

Well, I mean, I think any, any employer, if we're just talking about the US, right?

In the US, yeah, that's a good point.

GDPR is a whole separate thing. But if you, if you're just looking at the US, I mean, there's definitely hiring laws that protect people. Even if the company is not a federal contractor, they're not also bound by banking regulations because they're in the, you know, banking industry. You know, there, there are fair hiring practices that have to take place. So I think for the most part, most companies I think above a certain number of employees are— and even below that number, right? You could still sue for unfair hiring practices, right? Someone can still do that. There's nothing to stop you from doing that and winning in the US. But beyond a certain number of employees, even if you don't have that extra OFCCP layer that you have to worry about, and even if you're not a huge company with really deep pockets, where I think sometimes those agencies will pay a little more attention to the companies that can actually afford the fines. In terms of, you know, who are we going to audit next? But so I think there is a layer of that as well. And part of what I've also seen in recruitment delivery is that we tend to not spend a lot of time training, or we may train recruiters on that, but we might not necessarily train hiring managers on that, for example, right? There's a lot of discussion, for example, around like DE&I. And you want to have a, you know, certain diverse slate, right? But what does that mean? And are we, are we just training the recruiters on that? Are we training, you know, the hiring managers on that too? Hiring managers tend to be the wild card a little bit, right? I think recruiters will agree with that, that we can train the heck out of ourselves. But, you know, hiring managers may not be as trained. And that's a little bit harder to do. It tends to be a much bigger population. And there has to be motivation for them, right? And if they only hire once every 18 months, you kind of think, is it worth spending this money? You know, why bother doing that? And we've certainly seen where training hiring managers can make a difference. And we did all the lovely candidate experience training at Fiserv. You know, Joe and I were just talking about that the other day, about that. So I think it's possible to do it, but companies just have to decide, this is what we want to do, because we want to avoid, you know, getting ourselves into hot water, even if we're not, you know, federally bound to do that, like by the OFCCP.

Yeah, I think when I think about compliance, the first thing that kind of comes to mind for me is really around, you know, going beyond, you know, what is required, but just really doing the right thing. And so, you know, there are certain things that, you know, yes, some organizations may not have certain audit restrictions or, you know, audit concerns or, you know, have compliance things that they need to keep in mind. Many do, but, you know, those that don't, I think they still need to be keeping in mind, you know, making sure they're doing the right thing. And I think about job postings a lot, you know, like when we're thinking about how we post roles and what do we require. What I've seen across a lot of different organizations are definitely different approaches to this. There's kind of the open-ended, you know, anyone qualifies for this role versus the you need to meet these requirements. And they oftentimes I've seen hiring managers kind of lean towards the open-ended job postings, and those give me some pause oftentimes when we don't have, you know, at least some form of what are we requiring for this role. And most of the roles that I've recruited for over the years have always had some sort of basic requirement or expectation. There's not many that someone could step into the role Some exceptions, maybe it's, you know, a role where maybe someone could have, you know, a few months experience in this, or maybe it's a recent graduate, those, those things. But, you know, what we're— or someone early in their career, I should say. But that's what I think about when I think about compliance is, you know, organizations really thinking about how they're posting roles. You know, education is a big one. Is it required? Is it not? I've seen organizations—

you have the salary disclosure in some states. Yeah, yeah.

That's another piece. You know, that's a piece of it. Thinking about years of experience. You know, I know, you know, the three of us probably have had discussions about, you know, ranges of experience, you know, must have 3 to 5 years. Well, what if I don't have that? You know, who did you hire? Those types of things that kind of keep me up at night. So I think really evaluating job postings, making sure that what we're saying we require truly are requirements and not just continuing to use the same job postings or descriptions that have been used for 20 years, you know, and never revisited, which I think many organizations are still kind of stuck in because we're so— we want to move so quick to get jobs posted without, you know, kind of taking a look at what we're actually putting out there. And it's an important part of the hiring process clearly is, you know, a lot of our applicants are, you know, kind of going through very closely what the requirements are for roles and, you know, we should be hiring for what we're posting. So I think that's what comes to mind to me when I think about compliance is regardless of whether there's, you know, compliance concerns in terms of audits. And that it's more so like, let's make sure we're doing the right thing and hiring the right people.

Yeah, it does. I mean, those things really tie closely together and the candidate experience is so critical. And, you know, the average candidate is so much more savvy now these days. I mean, they really— they pay attention to everything. They do not miss a trick. And, you know, we've got to give them credit for that and not, you know, underestimate what candidates can find out, right, and can pick up and can and also expect from their experience, whether we're legally bound to treat them that way or not.

And they do their research. Yeah, they look into it and investigate it. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

And I like, I like Karen's update there that, that she's working on a job posting format, keeping them to around 300 words. So that, that is excellent.

That's interesting. Yeah. I never thought about like the number of words that up there. They do get super wordy. I imagine like the hiring managers who haven't hired in a long time, you know, or they want to keep using that same old job description.

Yeah, hey, a job description is a job description.

Yeah, you know, right?

And the job posting is candidate, why do you want this job? The job description is here's everything that you have to do in this job.

Ever, ever, right? Like in all the technical stuff. And they, you know, there's anything ever anybody ever did, dust it off, blow the dust off, and, you know, give to the recruiter. That's interesting, Karen. I want to hear more about that because I'm thinking of like, what is it? Oh no, I'm thinking characters. Okay, so 300 words. So I remember we used to have to write 500-word essays. Did anybody else have to do that in school?

Yeah.

Is that because I don't think so. Where did that come from, Taryn? Do you know, do you know where the 300 Uh, where did the number 300, you know, objective 75— oh, I'm gonna put this one up here too. Rapid search on mobile. So long. Ah, okay, so it has to do with the visibility of the—

that's true.

Nice.

Yeah, you don't want it below the fold, as they say, because they'll miss it. And you know what I've noticed is the pay transparency for like California and New York and Colorado, this— that tends to be at the end of the the job posting, like the very bottom, and sometimes they don't see it. And we've had some— that's actually been going on recently where we've had some questions from recruiters on what do we say? Because candidates, you know, to the ones who think that they should get the high end, right? It's a minimum and a max that are posted, right?

It's a range.

Yeah. And you're— I mean, it's natural, right? As a human, you're like, oh, that's how much I could make in this job. So let me, you know, just ask for that or expect that. And so it's, that's, we've had some interesting discussions around kind of the message that recruiters need to, to give to candidates and then also prepare hiring managers, right? We need to make sure hiring managers know, hey, this candidate's walking into the interview, they already know. So, you know, you're not, you're not going to have these cards to keep, you know, close to your vest here. You've got it. We've had disclosure on this.

And then there's your current team members that might be seeing the job posting. And they see the range, and, you know, I'm just going to say it's— the range is $80,000 to $120,000, and they're making at that company, you know, $90,000, and they're seeing $120,000, and then they're like, wait, how come I'm not making $120,000? Again, it's a range, right? But that's, of course, human, human nature. You see that, that somebody could be making that, and of course that means you, right? Of course that means you. So in addition to, you know, this is the regulation around, you know, Equal Employment Opportunities and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. But, you know, there's a few other organizations that enforce the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection. UGESP, I think, is what it's called. There's also the Department of Labor. There's also the Department of Justice. There's the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, and that's the OFCCP one if you have government contracts, which we were talking about the Federal Contract Compliance Program, right? And there's also medical, right, medical information. And you don't think about that in recruiting, but it does affect what we do because it could adversely impact somebody's eligibility because of a disclosure that might be medically related that you're not supposed to disclose or you shouldn't be disclosing. So there's more than just, you know, there's more than just equal opportunity employment is what I'm trying to say. And I think a lot of times smaller organizations are just not aware of that.

Yeah, they may— there may be a lack of awareness. Sometimes it's just hard to manage, right? That's a lot to keep up with if you're a small, you know, kind of lean organization. Maybe you don't even have a recruiting operations team. There's companies that don't. And so they've got, you know, recruiting leaders who have to wear the operations hat as well. And it gets to be a little bit challenging, I think, to keep up with all of that. And, you know, you have to be reading articles every day, I think, to stay up to the minute. Right, Joe?

Yeah. Change is quick.

Of course, the ATSs and the systems aren't going to, you know, help you with that. It's not their job.

Not usually. Yeah, not usually. Oh, Textio. I miss Textio too, Karen.

Oh, Karen is saying that the 75% applicant, applicant search on mobile is an Indeed survey result. So thank you for telling us how to find that. And Ed is saying that there's absolute minimums, so have-to-haves, right? And then there's nice-to-haves to fine-tune that, which is You know, that brings into perspective the degree requirement that you mentioned earlier, right? Is it really— is it necessary to have a degree requirement? And at what point is equivalent experience acceptable in lieu of a degree, right? So things like that. And I've experienced another side of this whole equation. There are organizations that are legally allowed to discriminate on purpose because of the requirements of the job. Um, and, and so, you know, it gets really complicated. It's not easy to just— there's no, there's no definitive guide that is published that says here's what you have to do. If you are hiring, let's say, models and you need people to model a particular look, um, that, you know, you can specifically say we need people that are this shape and this color. I mean, you know, that is part of the job description because that's the job they're going to be doing. So it goes beyond that. And I think systems in general are not really equipped to handle these exceptions because there's too many exceptions, you know? There's no technology that's going to be able to have all these if that's— well, if you're an employer of this size but not this and you have the other, you know, if you employ in this area, there's too many of these gray areas.

Yeah, so that's why you have to have, you know, people, employment lawyers on staff.

Exactly.

You are not us.

There's no compliance robot is what I'm trying to say, right?

There's not, and there never will be, because like you said, there's all those agencies, and then they're at the state and even municipal levels, they can pass these pay transparency laws. And, and the— to me, the big question that employers are going to probably have to answer pretty soon as more of these pay transparency laws start to pass is because it's not an easy thing to go in and tell Workday if the job or any other ATS, right, if the job is in this location or if the candidate could be in this location, right? It's not where the job is, it's where the candidate lives. They're protected, right, by that state where they live.

All their jobs are remote. But if you happen to be living in the state, then you have to disclose the salary range for that state, but not for this other state because it's different because the cost of living over there is different. So if you imagine the disclosure state, if you reside in this state, it's this much. If you reside in that state, it's this. That's going to be a long job posting, definitely over 300 words.

Yeah, for sure. And so the comp— I think the question employers are going to have to answer at some point is, rather than try to keep up with this and reconfigure, go in and configure our system every time we have to add a state and it changes, because, you know, these, like, legislatures change, right? People get voted in.

These are the—

that's what's happening is these are like state legislatures. That are passing these laws, and those laws can be unpassed, right? They can go away 2 years later when a different group of people come into office. And so it can sort of ebb and flow for some states, right? Some are probably going to consistently kind of stay that way. I think that the leaders in this that are coming out in front are, you know, probably obviously going to continue to have laws like this. But at some point, employers are going to have to say, do we just do this across the board? Do we just bite the bullet and say we're going to do this across the board? And then that goes back to your compensation team to say, okay, what is— what are— what numbers are we going to put, right, if we're going to do it, like, you know, nationally, right across the entire United States? So, but I think that discussion is probably coming for—

it's going to be coming. You know why? Malicious compliance. There's going to be employers that just say, okay, well, the range is, uh, $40,000 to $240,000. There you go. You know, I mean, like, okay, that is a range, but that helps nobody.

I mean, yeah, like any— every job at our company, if you look at the, you know, most entry-level job, right, right, it's start here, yeah, $10 an hour, and then, you know, the CEO makes this much. This is a range.

This is the range. That is legitimately the range. But, you know, you'll be somewhere in the middle there, or maybe not, or everybody will get paid the same as the CEO. Which means the salary for CEOs is going to go down, right?

Yeah, to $17 an hour.

$17 to minimum wage, right? Minimum wage CEOs. So let's, you know, we've had this conversation around technology being assistive, not being constrictive. Yeah. So, you know, the applicant tracking system is unique, I think, in technology in that first of all, it's a misnomer. It's not really an applicant tracking system because you're not really tracking applicants. It really is a requisition tracking system if you think about it, because the workflow and the process is that of open a rec, people apply, close the rec. The process isn't of person applies, track person, right? So it's a misnomer, but also it exists because of this compliance situation, right? A lot of, a lot of the, the, the rules around applicant flows and keeping a log— I had to do it back when it was pencil and paper. Literally, we had a spreadsheet, right? And you had the disposition codes and everything in there. It came from that, like, there's got to be a better way. Okay, so that's where ATS came in. But on the other side of that, the HRIS, that is decision support for executives, that is reporting, that is In some cases, you know, it's payroll. It's how people get paid. It's how people get vacation time. Those are not necessarily optional. I would say they're— it's almost you must have, and it's not because of compliance. It's because of rules of business. So some technology is assistive. Some technology is obstructive. Is the ATS— have we seen the end of the ATS? Are we at the point where HRISs are going to have a built-in ATS, and there's not going to be a standalone ATS. Do you think that's—

I don't think so. I mean, I think, um, no, because I still feel like people— as someone who's, you know, my focus has been in Workday for a number of years, and I, and I talk to people all the time who've come in from, you know, their, their last company they worked at used a standalone ATS. I still feel like there's a huge usage of the standalone ATS. And I think because some of the challenges that happen when your ATS lives within the broader ecosystem of your full HRIS suite, right? Like Workday is an ecosystem. That's kind of the way I see it. And there's like little—

There's a lot of—

pieces of it and they all talk to each other and they all have downstream impacts or can, some of them. So you have to be hyper-aware of that. And with a standalone ATS, you bolt it on to your other HR systems that you want it to talk to. But you can also unbolt it, make your changes, do some reconfig enhancements, and then bolt it back on. And theoretically, there may be less downstream impact if you do it that way, right? If you're able to sort of keep it walled off while you make your changes.

Yeah, there's an argument for— people say best in class in the technology. So Buy the best in class, buy the best of the best that's gonna necessarily do that job, and they could be a standalone. It doesn't have to be part of a bigger suite or ecosystem, as you said. And then there's a case for them not talking to each other or all these other compliance issues, data transfer issues. So it's not, I don't think it's decidedly one way or the other, but what I am seeing is that there's a lot of players that are occupying this sort of in-between space that are relationship management. I would almost say more on the CRM side.

Yeah.

Like Gem, for example, you may not be familiar with them, but Gem is a, essentially it's a CRM really for candidates. It is not an ATS. It doesn't replace your ATS. It works with your ATS. I believe it works with Workday, it works with, you know, Greenhouse, but the, the focus of it is the relationship with the candidate. So it's— that is the nurturing of leads and prospects and candidates and so on. It's not based on specifically requisitions. The ATS does that. And I've seen the growth of this even to the tune of like LinkedIn, for example, behaving much more like, like this. Like almost you, you can stay inside of LinkedIn and use LinkedIn as a candidate management tool. It's not your ATS again, but so getting squeezed from, you know, Workday on this side and ecosystem on this side and, and CRMs on this side, the ATS slice is getting thinner. That, that's why I'm, that's why I'm asking what I'm asking.

Maybe so. Yeah.

I don't know. Maybe it'll, you know, it'll stop at a certain point.

Yeah. I mean, it could be, I'm sure a lot of it, you know, comes down to the, the expense, right? So I think there's, I think there's an easy way to utilize a CRM tool or LinkedIn kind of in an ATS way. But I think it is very limiting. And I think there will, you know, to me, it's an, it's an easy way to kind of ramp up volume, but it's not always a great candidate experience necessarily, depending on how that's being managed. And depending on the scale too, especially, it just, it, you know, what I see the value of the ATS really, you know, in any way, whether it's a standalone or not, is really being able to, you know, allow the full recruiting team, depending on the size of the team, be able to see specific requisitions, what someone's applied to, see the history, all that. There's some limitations, I think, in a CRM-type tool. I haven't had direct experience with it, so I can't speak directly to that, but I do see in the ATS the ability to, you know, just be able to manage the candidate lifecycle in a way that creates a positive candidate experience and even just directing applicants on where to go for postings and that. Like, I think, I do still think there's value in it. And when I hear organizations that aren't using an ATS, it kind of makes my head spin and wondering how they're managing, you know, depending on what the volume is, right? If it's a smaller organization, maybe there's not maybe, or maybe more niche where it's a smaller, you know, number of candidates that they're interacting with. But if we're talking, you know, I'll speak specifically about fintech space, financial services technology, you know, we have large applicant pools. We, you know, are reaching out to many different applicants, and having that system in place is really critical for us. In Workday, having all those different areas integrated is like, to me, is essential. I've worked in the standalone before where those weren't connected, you know, between payroll and HR and all these other integrations.

ATS, the payroll, the HR, the different systems.

Yeah, accounting and all that. And so when you don't have that, I think you're really limited as an organization. So to me, having those integrations has been really important and it has been a game changer, I think, at least in my experience.

From a point of view of like, you know, speed and agility, basically.

Right. Yep. And making— and the consistency of the communication so that there's a single source of truth versus working out of all these different systems. And, you know, I know there's an appeal to a CRM tool potentially because, you know, it may be easier or just, you know, working in it may be, you know, easier to navigate, things like that. But my experience has always been if you take the time to kind of learn the ATS system and how it operates, you're going to get much better results, I think, utilizing an ATS.

I think that's true with all systems. And I think that goes back to the beginning of the conversation where we were talking about, is it that system doesn't do its job, or is it that you just don't know how to do that with the system?

Right.

Yeah.

You know, yeah.

And that's usually one of my first, one of my first reactions, I think. You know, if I do hear that we're using a system that's not working, my question is, are we using it? Are we using it? You know, are we using this? Oftentimes it does what we want it to do. You know, someone said something recently within one of our teams that we shouldn't be surprised when systems do something specific because that's how it's designed. It's doing what it was designed to do, right?

We shouldn't be surprised when the robot does exactly what you told it to do, right?

So if it's not working, well, maybe it's because we didn't— it's not set up correctly, or we didn't tell it to do that, right? You told it to not work correctly, so this is what we got, you know? So it shouldn't be it shouldn't be a surprise.

That's right, the whole computers don't make mistakes, people make mistakes.

Yeah, that's right. That reminds me of a Karen Walker-ism, and I'm not sure where she got it, but she calls it, it's a PICNIC, P-I-C-N-I-C, and it's problem in chair, not in computer.

Yeah, problem between chair and computer, somewhere between the chair and the computer, namely here. Right.

And I think the implementation makes such a difference too. I've encountered this as I've gone, gone to a couple companies that have, you know, are using Workday Recruiting, and it matters so much who, who was there, who was making the decisions when it was implemented in the first place, and, and if they used like really good, solid, very experienced consultants to help them implement and set up the system. And that it's so much more painful, I think, later on, right, to try to change those things from how they were set up at the beginning, rebuilding it. Yeah, because again, people get so hung up on and like attached to the way we've always done it, even if there's no actual real reason for it to be, to keep being done that way. And so you have to kind of overcome two things, right? The fact that everybody's busy, right? We're now busy, right? It's implemented, we're using it, we've all got full—

Too late to change it. We don't want to change that. We don't want to change the tire while the car is on the highway.

Exactly. That's kind of what it feels like. So you had— so there's, I think, a lot more sort of persuasion involved when, you know, I land in a situation like that to say, well, here's the way you guys have it set up, but here's, you know, another way that could probably be better for you. It's going to take a little work, maybe a little pain and some resources, right? We need people to help us with this.

Pull over for a pit stop or your tire might blow up and cause a whole bunch of other problems that you don't want.

Right. Here's what happens if we don't, right? If we just ignore this forever, here's what's going to keep happening to you, right? Your data is not going to be good or Recruiters are not going to like shop at home first, right? If you don't— I mean, I've had folks at several companies that I've consulted at that use Workday who did not even know they could search the Workday system for candidates. And, you know, some, some places they'd had Workday in place for several years, right? So that's not a small database of people who are essentially warm leads for you. They've applied for a job at your company at some point in the however many years, you know. And so let's look there first. Let's shop at home, look in our own closet, you know, before we go out shopping around. And not that you wouldn't also go out and look for those passive candidates on LinkedIn and some of the other tools, but why wouldn't you just type in find candidates, right? And, and, but you could— those filters that come, like Joe said, out of the box from Workday aren't necessarily what you want. They don't always label the way you want your recruiters to kind of see things. And the same with find jobs in Workday. Both of those are, you know, essentially Workday reports, but they're configurable and you know, you can make them work better for you. And then the dynamic candidate pools is another, um, that's like an advanced search within Workday that's super handy. But I have found consistently that companies are not using that. They don't have it turned on or configured. And, you know, recruiters who work for companies that have Workday Recruiting in place didn't know it existed. So, you know, those are kind of big things people could be doing. Oh.

Wow, guys, time flies. I know we usually try to keep these to half an hour, but it's been a little bit more than half an hour, in case you didn't realize that. So this has been fun. I'd like to give you both an opportunity to leave a parting shot, piece of wisdom, thought-provoking something. So we'll start with Joe. Anything you want to leave people with to think about over the weekend and, you know, just to word of wisdom that you want everyone to know?

Yeah, you know, one of the things we've been talking a lot about at Green Dad is metrics and how we measure success. And so, you know, I was talking to one of my team members recently, and, you know, we were talking about how we're learning something new each day, right? And it's— and I think for me, I like that as a metric for myself. And I guess I would encourage that to anyone that's, you know, viewing is challenge yourself to learn at least one thing new each day in your role. And I think a lot of that is through your networks or the people that you're working with. I've learned that a lot over the past couple years is that, you know, as we build our career in talent acquisition, we work with a lot of people, you know, over time, you know, whether within our own organizations or that we're connected to that have a lot of wisdom and experience. And, you know, don't hesitate to reach out to people in your network to ask questions, or, you know, if you need feedback on something or want to run something by someone. I guess I would say make it a focus to learn something, at least one thing new each day, and, and really utilize your network to learn from each other, share best practices, understand industry trends. And I found that we're all going through a lot of similar things, and so just leverage your networks and make sure that you're building those over time.

Networks.

Yeah. So I think there's really two things here. One thing I've tried to do for myself is just to kind of give myself grace because I think the types of folks who sort of land in the recruitment space, we tend to be overachievers. We tend to be really hard workers. We're a lot of Type A personality. We expect a lot of ourselves. And so I think it's good to give yourself grace. And I've kind of tried to do that. Lately in my career is to just kind of calm down and think about like, what, you know, what can I really get done today? And not— and also diplomatically get others to give you grace as well, right? If you feel like there's too much on your plate, and that tends to be the case for recruiters so often, is that they're asked to kind of do the impossible, right? And fill, you know, a million jobs with the best candidates ever in, you know, 5 minutes. So I think, you know, setting— help kind of set expectations of others for you as well and stick to those. And if you do that really from the outset, or even now, you know, even if you've been in a job a long time at the same company and same manager, I think you can still kind of stop and have a conversation to make sure that other people aren't, you know, placing impossible expectations on you as much as you can, right? We don't always have control over that. But I think those two things are really good. And then the other thing is just to really think about what it's like to be the candidate. I think that really changed my kind of the way I looked at being a recruiter years ago was someone told me that, you know, put yourself in the candidate's shoes and really try to feel what they feel. The candidate's not an annoyance. They're not, you know, you're— they're not doing you some kind of favor by applying for your job. Like, we have to really see them, you know, they're human beings and they've got, you know, needs and wants and, and things they're trying to achieve as well. And so I think I started to become more of a candidate advocate as a recruiter when I started thinking about it that way. So that was super helpful.

Cool. Well, thank you both. I think we should do this more often with, with, you know, the, the people that were at the same company at the same time kind of conversations. And yeah, I think there's a lot to be learned for sure. Not been enough.

So we've got several people in the comments who could come on and do a reunion show for you again.

Yeah, reunion. So there you go. That's cool. I like that. Well, thanks a lot, guys, and have a great weekend, both of you. Everybody take care of yourselves. We will see you next Friday on Shelly's Alley.

All right, cool. Thanks.