Live with Dan Piontkowski, Global Head of Talent Sourcing, on Shally's Alley

Going live any minute now. There we go, we are live. Welcome to Shelly's Alley. It's Friday, 1 PM, time to start getting some chat on. And my chat partner today is a dear friend, Jeff Webb. Jeff is in Canada and he is one of my all-time favorite people in the great wide country of Canada. Haven't seen you, Jeff, in a while, so it's good to see you. Haven't been able to get up to Canada in a while.

No, we blocked the borders to you. We said Chalet can't, can't come over.

Yeah, I remember that. I remember that.

Yeah.

So, uh, you just got a new job recently, uh, and I want to tell people about it. You are leading, um, what, what is called Talent Brand and Technology strategy for an organization that saves lives called Organon. It's a pharmaceutical company. So you are basically saving lives by carrying forward the, the talent brand and the technology needed to attract talent, basically, right?

Yeah, absolutely. That's your job. Yeah, we're, we're focused on— we're a, we're a spin-off of— for those of us people who don't know us, we're a spinoff of Merck MSD, but Merck and MSD took all of their women's health products, as well as their biosimilars division. And I always have to say that because apparently there's a difference between women's health and biosimilars. And put it into one company and that's Organon. So we focus on things like fertility treatments or endometriosis treatments, or I think our big one is estrogen replacement for, you know, late-stage menopause. So, you know, we do a lot of that, really focused on women's health today from a pharmaceutical perspective. I think in the future we may have things like devices and other, you know, other medical interventions.

Right. So yeah, it's an important part of the healthcare system worldwide. It's not just a Canadian company, by the way. Jeff happens to be in Canada and That's how I know him, through an event in Canada. So that's why I made the connection. But Organon's an international company. And Jeff, by the way, has had a very— I would say a very wide, broad, and colored past in the industry, going back to— I think you got into the industry like 2 years after I did. So you have—

Yeah, Microsoft was, I think, our initial point of connection, right? We both knew Rob McIntosh back in the day when Rob wasn't insane and— oh, I'm kidding. Rob's fine.

That's right. When Rob was just a typical Aussie, not an off-the-rails Aussie. That's right.

Yeah, for sure.

And yeah, you spent some time in Microsoft and you also worked with Intuit, great company, lots of cool stuff there as a sourcer. You were at Hewitt. You were at CDI for a while and then PeopleScout, a massive RPO, then LexisNexis. So that's kind of in fintech a little bit where, you know, when I was around Fiserv time. And I think you went back to PeopleScout. So you've been a sourcer, you've been a technologist, but now you're doing talent and branding and something that you said, I wanna bring it up because I think it's really important. Um, oh, and also, you know, you work with Jen Hinkle. Love her, she's great. I, you know, know her from, from a few engagements in the past. But both of you have this thing in common: you call what you do talent attraction, which I think is a better word or phrase for what we do than talent acquisition. I don't like talent acquisition.

No, neither, neither do we. No.

What's up with that? So tell me about that.

Yeah, I mean, so, I mean, it's pretty simple, right? We, we don't acquire people. I think you and I talked about that, right? We, we— that's bad. You don't acquire people. You don't buy talent. Um, you, you attract them to your organization. You tell them about your culture. You tell them about, um, you know, what, what benefit is it for them? What, you know, that whole 'what is in it for me' kind of question. You answer that question for people. Um, but you don't, you don't acquire them. You attract them. So, so we're completely rebranding that. We're all You know, we're all global talent attraction professionals. We're not global talent acquisition anymore.

And these people are joining you to lend their talent to the organization. You don't get to keep it when they leave. If they leave, hopefully they stay a long time, but when they leave, they, they take their talent with them. It doesn't stay behind, right? The joke that I made was, hey, there goes Shelly, he's leaving the organization. Well, he is completely talentless now.

He's got no talent.

He's got no talent because we acquired it, and now we have all his talent. Doesn't make any sense, right?

I mean, I think you, I think you leave a little bit of your talent wherever you go, but, um, but you know, um, you influence the talent in other people and hopefully for the better, you know?

Um, so as you're, and you're, you're building a branding team and there's also a sourcing team. So any, any sourcers out there, any people interested in, in TA, talent attraction branding, definitely reach out to Jeff as he's starting to build his team. But what are you thinking about as you're building this talent attraction strategy? What's on your mind? What are the, what are the big insurmountable or seemingly insurmountable obstacles that are, that are being faced right now?

Well, I mean, I think, I think part of it is that there's, there's a, there's a mindset change out there right now, right? So, so prior to the pandemic, I think people believed that they would, that they would be part of, you know, organizations would look after them. They were, you know, this is, I work here now and it's part of my family and I'm in with the mission. Um, and they will take care of me if I take care of them. And then March 2020 hit and business disappeared. Um, and organizations had to make hard choices and understandable hard choices where they, you know, where they had to let go of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of their employees in some cases. But what that woke people up to is they said, holy cow, I prioritized my career and I prioritized this company and it didn't prioritize me when push came to shove. And so as we, as the great rehire started, I think a lot of individuals were sitting there saying, again, answering, thinking to themselves, what's in it for me? Like, if I come and work for you, I want to, I want I want DEI to be important. I want, um, I want workplace safety to be important. I want to know that I'm going to have flexibility in my job. I want to know that you have the proper health and wellness benefits for me so that, you know, if, if, if I'm feeling very, uh, isolated in my stay-at-home job because I'm in lockdown, I'm going to have the mental health, uh, resources to help me through that. You know, help me process that. So I think that's been a massive change in terms of people's mindset and—

Wanting more out of a job than just a job, basically. Sure. Wanting and expecting more than just a steady paycheck, right? Expecting a company that's actually gonna care for people.

And I think there's a lack of trust, right? People don't trust that companies are, you know, have got their back necessarily. Anymore. Because again, during, you know, during March of 2020, a lot of people experienced the fact that the companies that they were working with didn't have their back. They were kind of like, yeah, you're, you know, hopefully the government gives you some benefits. But you know, our business is going downhill. So we got to get rid of some people. And that's a really good point.

My friend Brian Fink, you know, Brian?

Yep.

You know, he was, he was doing this podcast I was, I was lurking in. And he mentioned something called Compassionate Employers. And it's what we're talking about. It sort of, it really hit me. It's people no longer put up with employers that aren't aware of the fact that we're human, that they're not aware that we might have families, we might have kids, we might have illnesses, we might have, you know, it's no longer acceptable. People are, and I think that's the silver lining as he was explaining this, this thing about compassionate employers where he works, and what you're saying resonates a lot with that, is this is what people are asking for. What really hit me about that is people no longer accept a discompassionate employer or a situation where they're just not comfortable. And it's not, oh, pay me more and I'll stay. It's like, you know what, I can make the same or even less somewhere else. It's not about that, but be happier and be, yeah, be better. For my family, 'cause that's why I'm working in the first place, right? So that's really interesting. And I think as horrible as this sounds, and I'm probably gonna get a lot of hate mail for it, it's the silver lining to this tragedy that's happened to our world. That COVID has maybe made it okay for us to, as people, to push back on that and recognize COVID has woken us up to the fact that we need to expect a little bit more from employers and that compassionate employer concept may be the positive outcome that comes out of this absolutely horrible situation. Right.

I mean, so, I mean, back to your original question, when I say, you know, what am I looking for? I'm looking for people who can compellingly tell that story. Who can say, you know, what the reason why you want to come work for, um, for Organon in this case is because we're here for women's health, because, you know, everybody's got a sister or, uh, or an aunt or a grandmother or a mother, and, um, we're here for— we're here for them. So, um, so if you are passionate about that and if you, you know, you align with our values, uh, then we're interested in in talking to you.

And how are they telling the story? So what does that mean? Is it, are you, are you out there blogging, commenting, posting? What's, what's this?

We do. Yeah, well, hopefully we're doing, we're going to be doing all of it. But today we're, we're, we're sort of focused on, on growing our social presence. But a lot of it is kind of authentic storytelling, right? So getting our, getting our employees, our founders, we call them founders, getting them to to tell their stories and then, and then hopefully helping get those stories out to a wider audience.

Okay, so your team will be essentially storytellers. Yeah, they're gonna make that possible because the people that are doing the job of, you know, whatever job it is they're doing, they don't need to be social media experts. They just need to tell the story and your team can tap, you know, take that and translate it to a talent attraction strategy.

And taking that to a, you know, to a sourcer, you know, a sourcer level, you know, sourcer is often the first point of contact, right, between a candidate and a company. And so it is part of their job to say, to answer the question for the candidate before they've even asked it, what is it in, what's in it for me? And so finding sourcers who, I mean, look, you and I both know that it's extremely easy to find people, right? It's, you know, there are hundreds of— yeah, there's hundreds of tools out there. And, you know, and the Shalleys of the world could easily go and search, you know, whatever database, whatever database they're on. Um, the hard part now is getting them to pick up the phone and actually talk to you. And so, you know, when you're, when you're talking about, um, about sourcers, you want to find people— A, I think Dan actually said it well last week— you want to find people who are naturally curious. Who want to break apart, you know, systems and figure out how they work. But you also want to find people who are really good communicators.

Yeah.

And are able to actually, you know, convince somebody to pick up the phone and talk to them. Because these— I mean, people are— must be getting— I mean, I still get 6 or 7 or 8 outreaches a week. And people must be getting— a lot of people must be getting more than that. So, so how do you get them to actually pay attention to you?

Yeah, what do you say? How do you say it? It's not just what you say, but how do you say it? Yeah. And where do you say it?

Yeah, absolutely.

So are you discovering any new tool or technology to help communicate? Like, you know, we used to do like Buffer app and what was the other one? Yeah, Buffer. Hootsuite, you know, Hootsuite to like you know, retweet yourself.

Now we're going old school.

Yeah. So what's the new school? How are people spreading the word?

There's been a lot of really interesting stuff being done in marketing automation. So marketers have been using automation tools for the last decade. And you and I have talked about things like programmatic before and how, you know, how that works in terms of, you know, being able to reach the right people and using your spend correctly. But beyond that, then, you know, how do you bring them into a pipeline of talent and then keep them warm? And so there are a lot of products, or there are an increasing amount of products, a lot of them are startups right now because it's a fairly new concept, where they're taking that marketing automation principle and then they're applying it to the talent attraction space. And so like, for instance, Candidate ID comes to mind. Martech, which is a small company out of Australia, comes to mind. There's a few of them out there that, that— yeah, I think— yep, yep. And so these are all, again, this is stuff that marketers have been using for a very, very long time, but that's well established as, I mean, you know, the whole interruption-based marketing doesn't work anymore.

And so this is the solution that marketing has devised, and it's established that it works. So we just need to translate it to recruiting, is what you're saying?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And, and, and so these companies are doing that. It's funny though, because I don't, I don't sense that a lot of talent attraction, uh, groups really understand the power of marketing still. No, that's true.

You're right. That's right. I see that a lot. That's absolutely right.

Yeah, so I mean, and that always surprises me because, you know, they, they have been selling— marketing firms have been selling to us for, for ages and have been doing it successfully. And so why wouldn't we take some of those, those principles and turn it into attraction tools? A good one that comes to mind is, is, um, is remarketing. So I love the concept of remarketing, right, or, or retargeting. Um, so, you know, Shelly comes to my website, Shelly is not interested in anything any particular job today, but he goes through all the HR jobs. And so we pick up a little cookie or we drop a pixel somewhere and then we start to serve Shelly with ads wherever he is online. So when you go to read the Washington Post the next morning, you get a job about an Organon or an ad about an Organon job. And then you go to Facebook to check your Facebook, you get an ad there. Again, stuff that Amazon does all the time, right? Every time you go to Amazon, you look at a pair of shoes, you're going to be inundated with ads about other shoes or things that you can put on your feet or things that—

yeah, exactly.

And so like, why not do that for, for talent attraction? I mean, why not get the people back who, who had a passing interest in your company and maybe, maybe they'll turn into your next great hire.

Why not indeed? It's rediscovery and remarketing, or in some cases, I hate to say it, it's marketing for the first time because you know how before COVID right? We have to come up with some term for this like PC or prior to COVID or whatever. In this time before the pandemic, when things started to recover, the economic situation was starting to recover, Um, there was, uh, kind of a, a lot of— I want to say a lot of noise about talent communities, right? Products being sold and touted to be talented. But you know what that ended up being for the most part, which is lists, flat lists, resume graveyards I call them. Yeah. And they just, in many cases, it's static lists that never— people never even got contacted. So at this point, we're not really even remarketing. We're like marketing for the first time, but we're doing it in a lead nurturing kind of drip kind of way where that's the lesson coming from, from the platforms that you're describing. That makes sense.

Yep, absolutely. Yeah, and I mean, I'm happy to see that, that again more organizations are starting to pick up on that concept, but I think it's got a long way to go, um, much like I think sourcing had a long way to go when we first started, right? Like nobody, nobody was really thinking about going and finding people and searching them out, um, and hunting for them. They were— everybody was just like, I just post a job and I'm going to wait and hopefully people will apply, and then I will interview them and I will take the best available talent versus the best talent out there.

Yeah, that's right. Talking about the best talent, that was another interesting thing that's been coming up a lot lately. So you're probably not too involved with hiring specifically just for software engineering. I'm sure you're all over, you know, you've got all kinds of positions open, but you have done some software engineering roles in the past. What are your thoughts on this movement to target what they're calling 10x developers, which I think there's some, you know, there's two sides to that story. Some people go, oh yeah, a 10x developer is like, you know, a rock, what used to be called a rockstar. Like they were rockstars. And they were ninjas. Now they're 10x developers, but the same kind of concept has not varied much throughout the years. How do you find the top candidate? Because that's something that hiring managers always want. They say, I want the top candidates. Well, we can source people, but how do you source only the top candidates? How do you, how do you ensure that you're sourcing just top candidates and not sourcing, like I said, any available?

Well, I think you'd have to define top candidate first. I mean, to start off, that's right.

Yeah, for you, John, brother.

And I mean, like, so what does that mean exactly? Yeah, exactly. I mean, when I did— when I worked with X-Wave, um, many, many years ago, I was hiring primarily developers. And I remember going to my boss at the time, Jack Friedman, a very good developer, and I— and he said, I only want the best developers, uh, Jeff. And I said, okay, Jack, so like, what does that What does that mean? Like, are we looking for people who have programmed, you know, the most cutting-edge technologies? Or are we looking for people who are really, really passionate about development and want to learn all the time and want to be, you know, involved with the newest product? And if we go find those people, will we be able to give them an experience where they actually can get to do that? Um, and we actually—

top talent wants top job. Top talent doesn't want bottom job.

No, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. They're not gonna be happy. They're not gonna stay. We actually ended up hiring a guy who was the former lead guitarist for a band called, uh, Whitesnake. His name was Sam. Um, and, uh, yeah, and so he had been a musician his entire life. Late in his life, he got into development and coding. But he was brilliant because, you know, music and coding, very similar in terms of your creativity and in terms of, you know, how you look at it. And Sam was by far one of the best architects I had ever worked with because he had this mind that was there for— that had been born in the world of music, but then had moved over to coding, but had taken a lot of its, you know, a lot of that musical ability and then moved into the coding world. So he was very creative. And it ended up being about passion in that case, because he wasn't— I mean, he wasn't— I don't think he would have come across at any interview as kind of the best architect in the world. Like, he hadn't architected the biggest systems and he hadn't always been involved in the best technologies. But again, he had this really unique mind. And that I think is what made him successful. So to answer your question, I don't know, I think is probably the best answer.

Right, right. But, but you just, so you just opened up another angle here to that, which is you may want to find them in ways other than, like Sam, for example, in ways other than the product. That they're producing, like rather than say, okay, we need people that have Java, maybe there's other dimensions, right? So for example, that they have a wide variety of programming languages, they've learned 30 different programming languages, right? Or in the case of a 10x sourcer, how do you find a 10x sourcer? You find a sourcer that has a lot of experience with all the different tools. Or is it a sourcer who's got very deep experience, like knows the inside and out of a particular, say, SeekOut? They can, they can do things on SeekOut, like our friend Eric Jaquith. They can do things on SeekOut that nobody else can do. They're magicians on it. Is that the clue? Or is it the fact that they know SeekOut and 500 others?

Well, can I hire all of them? You know, can I do both?

So you're saying both, right? So you're saying Yeah. So whether it's wide or deep, find an angle that shows excellence in another way. And in the case of Steve, Sam, he was an excellent guitarist. And so he had an excellence mentality.

Yep.

That's the angle I was going for is the excellence may be there in just not the obvious way. It's not excellence in Java code. It's excellence in 500 different languages.

Yep.

Or something like that.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, with, with, with sourcers, the first thing I always ask a sourcer is I say, when you're going to look for people, what do you, what do you go to? And when they, when they come back and they, the ones that come back and say, oh, I, you know, I go to LinkedIn Recruiter, it's the most important place ever. I think to myself, no, I'm not gonna, yeah, we're not, this is, this is not going to work out. And it's, it's because, you know, they were They're probably a recruiter who was at some point brought into sourcing and they were given one tool and that's it. Um, I want the, I really do again want the person who's, who's like, I'm just gonna, I want the competitive, uh, spirit, right? I want the person where somebody says you can't find this type of individual, they don't exist. And the sourcer says, hold my beer, right?

The sourcer says, challenge accepted.

Yeah, exactly. You know, I understood the assignment if you want to go that way. But, um, you know, so they, they will go out and they'll find them wherever. I mean, I think it was— I think it was one of your stories actually where you, you talked about hiring people in Australia and you ended up going— yeah, exactly. And you ended up going to— I can't remember what the list was, but, but it was ingenious. It was court cases. Yeah, court cases. Exactly.

Yep.

And, and ended up picking people out of court. And I always tell that story to, to sourcing teams that I speak to, I'm like, who would have thought to go to a list of court cases? Because you were looking for highline, high wire, or high wire.

Power linesman. Power linesman.

Exactly.

They're walking the wire and they get called in as expert witnesses when there's an accident or something related to the condition of the line. The power company brings their linesman as an expert witness to say, you know, Jeff walked the line and here are the logs. It's been inspected. We've done everything that we're supposed to do. We've done our due diligence. Therefore, this is not our fault. It's lightning or an act of God or whatever. So the expert witness is the person who can testify that they did the work. And that's the only time they ever surface because they don't have cell phones walking those power lines.

And that's brilliant, right? I mean, at some point somebody had said to you, you had been talking through a conversation, I'm sure, and somebody had said to you, 'Oh, you know what, a couple weeks ago I wasn't in the office because I got called as an expert witness.' And you probably went, 'What? You got called as a what? Does that happen a lot?' Right.

'What is an expert witness?' Exactly.

Yeah. Um, and then you said, 'Well, is there a record of that? And where could I find that?' And a lot of people would have just glossed over that part. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. See you next week.

Exactly.

Right.

Um, the good sorcerer sits there and goes and questions everything. Like, what did you just say? When did that happen? And did somebody take a record of it? Yeah, exactly.

That's funny. It's, it's funny that you have that, uh, that question as a knockout question. Mine is name a search engine not Google, right? So any search engine other than Google, and I'll accept any search engine, but what I won't accept—

Bing, uh, Bing is fine.

I don't get any searches, but when they come back with LinkedIn, I I know that they're like, LinkedIn's not a search engine. No, it's LinkedIn search box.

Is it? Yeah. It's a community of people behind a paywall, my friend. Yeah, exactly.

It's a database. It's whatever it is. It's the same as you can search your email, but that doesn't mean that that's a search engine. No. So that's when I know I'm like, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Moving on. So fascinating.

That's when you try and fill in the next 15 minutes with small talk. Okay, well, this has been great. Thank you so much.

Right, right. So what do you think about the Braves? Um, yeah, that's funny. So we're, we're getting pretty close to time. I like to, you know, cut these off at about 30 minutes, but I did, I did have one more question if you have time.

Sure.

To, to ask that one last question. What would you say is the most important factor the single most important? Because I know your answer is going to be like, well, there's several, right? Or it depends, because it's that kind of question. But what would you say is the single most important or salient factor in measuring the effectiveness of what we do? Recruiting and sourcing, lump it. Sourcing, firing, whatever.

I actually, I think I did a SourceCon presentation on this, so I have an answer. Perfect. It is the most salient metric for me is the acceptance rate. So from where to where?

Yeah.

So from when a sourcer says, I've got a candidate and sends it to the recruiter and the recruiter says, yes, that's the perfect profile for me. I'm going to accept that as, as a candidate and, you know, move them forward in whatever the process is. So I know a lot of, I know a lot of sourcing organizations will sit there and say, well, we want to see hires. But the problem with that is that there is, there are so many things that can happen after the point of acceptance that the sourcer really has no control over. Right. You can have a, you can have a bad hiring manager experience. You can have a bad potentially recruiter experience. Maybe there's another offer in play, whatever, right? The sourcer doesn't control any of that. But what they do control is, is can they find qualified, qualified and available and interested candidates who are passionate about what they do? And if they can do that and they have a good partnership with their recruiting partner, then you should see a very high level of acceptance, right? If they're— if that either that partnership has gone wrong or, um, or they're just not getting the job, or maybe they're just not good at what they're looking for, the wrong thing, or—

right, exactly. Whatever.

Then you're gonna— then you're gonna see that number plummet. Um, so for me, that is— I mean, that's the metric that, that I look for as kind of my, my bellwether metric.

So the question is about effectiveness. Which means that, you know, you can't have— there's no machine process, workflow, or system that's ever going to be 100%, which means, you know, and this is something that I took from one of my employees here where I work now, Amanda, she's very fond of saying that perfection is the enemy of efficiency. So what I'm saying is, um, when measuring the effectiveness of what we do, we're not looking— I'm, I'm saying we're not looking for 100% acceptance rate.

We're looking for maybe like over 80%, right?

80%.

Because you're never going to get it always— you're never going to get it right.

And if you try to get to 100%, then what that probably means is you're not sending enough, right? You probably should be sending more so there's more variety and more choice. You actually don't want 100% is not a good target. I think, yeah, 80% is a good target. And sometimes you come in at 70, sometimes at 85.

And by the way, if you are coming in at 70, 75%, it doesn't mean that you're bad at your job. Maybe we just— maybe it's like a learning opportunity, right? Maybe you just need some help figuring out, you know, maybe something is going wrong with the partnership. Maybe it is your, your recruiter isn't inviting you to all the, you know, collaboration sessions or, or whatever the case may be, right? Something not right is happening there. But it's like I said, it's a bellwether indicator. It allows you to say something is not happening correctly here that we need to address. And so, you know, that's an opportunity to sit down with the individual and say, so are you getting the support you need? Are you having the communications? Right.

Where do you feel like there's a gap? And also, I would add to that, like, what we're looking for is an improvement in that over time, right? So if they started at 70% and they go to 72, 74, But if you start seeing it going the other way, then that's also a bellwether. You know, why are your accept rates declining? You know, they were increasing or they were flat, now they're declining. So there's something, and all that's doing is it's saying we need to dig into this. It's not saying, oh, you met the 75% threshold, that's it, you're fired, or whatever. It's more like, okay, something— this tells me something is going on, we need to investigate. Yep. And look further into it. Yeah, yeah, that's excellent. That's really good. I definitely think that's a huge takeaway. Well, Jeff, I really appreciate your time here. We're 3 minutes past the half hour. But I had so much fun. I think we should probably try and do this again soon. Maybe when you've settled into this talent attraction strategy role and maybe have a little bit more of your team in place. We'll have you back to tell us part 2.

That sounds great. I look forward to it.

Great. Well, happy holidays.

Yes, you too. Yeah, you and the Atlanta crew. All right.

That's right. Thanks. Bye, everybody. Take care.