Paul Norman Live on Shally's Alley

Hey, what is going on, my good people of the interwebs? Happy Friday! If you're watching this, that means that you are live on Shally's Alley, and it must be Friday around 1 PM US Eastern Time, and I don't know whatever time it is in your side of the world. Super excited for our, our show today. I have a fun guest. His name is Paul Norman, and Paul is a senior consultant with Riviera Advisors, a top-tier management consulting firm where I happen to also be an associate consultant. Welcome to the show, Paul. Say hi. This is the first Chally's Alley in February. 2025. Hello to everybody.

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. Thanks for inviting me. And, uh, you know, it's, it's an honor to, to be on your show and talk to your audience and hear from your listeners. And, uh, you know, you're, you're, you're a legend in the space, so, uh, I'm just, you know, I'm honored to spend some time with you. It's been great to get to know you at Riviera as well.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm glad we've, we've had a chance to work together on a few things. So folks, uh, I have some questions that I wanted to ask, but please bring your own questions if you'd like. Paul's area of expertise— well, several areas of expertise— so one thing that I wanted to drill into quite a bit today is high-volume hiring, something that I have less experience in. I, you know, my focus in my career has been kind of the top of the funnel and purple squirrels, unicorns, hard-to-find candidates, but not necessarily high volume. I have done some high volume hiring for like commercial drivers and other things like that, but not nearly as much as Paul. So I want to talk a little bit about, you know, focusing on, on that area. If you have any questions about high volume hiring, this is the place, this is the man. Um, why don't we start with, for people who are listening, not everybody that is out there knows what high volume hiring means. Some people probably think that they are in high volume and they have like 35 recs. So can you tell us what, what, what is actually— what does high volume mean in the area of talent acquisition? Really, what does it really mean?

Yeah, well, I'd start by saying, you know, most companies have some version of high volume hiring, right? And what I kind of think of high volume hiring is when you've got to hire a recurring role multiple times, and most often that's a frontline role. A lot of times it's geographically dispersed. Many times it's a higher turnover kind of role, hourly often, etc. But, and so a lot of people see this as call centers is one obvious big kind of place where you have high volume. But look, hospitality, you've got housekeepers and front desk agents and maintenance people, or you may have high-volume sales reps that you have, or customer service kind of people, or retail, or theme parks, you know, anywhere where you've got—

So it could be seasonal, it could be— Is it typically the same job filled multiple times? So that means there's like high turnover or is it just lots of the same, you know, lots of openings but not necessarily the same job being filled over and over again?

Yeah, I think high volume is typically a similar job or the same job, right? Being filled over and over again. Now that doesn't mean the same, right? And so, look, and the recruit— all the recruiters on the phone know, you know, the, the housekeeper at my resort is so exponentially different than the housekeeper across the street at that resort, right?

Yeah.

Um, and look, to some degree there might be some truth to that. So, um, the, the challenge and the differentiation is often, uh, geographical, or maybe they're doing something slightly different. Or using the housekeeper example, Maybe it's the type of property they're, they're in or servicing, right? Whether it's one kind of big timeshare space or—

but the job title is the same.

Job title is typically the same.

And your versions, variations.

Yeah. And the key thing that is a little bit maybe nuanced from the niche recruiting or the specialized recruiting you were mentioning earlier is from a recruitment standpoint, You're now looking for 10 by 10 by 10 or 100 by 100 by 100 instead of the one, right? So, all of your strategies really have to be around how do I get volume, volume of candidates, volume of applicants, volume of, you know, pipeline, volume of planning. And that takes a lot of planning, calculation, just forethought, right? Because if It sounds really easy to say, hey, give me a class of 25, right? It's just 25 people I need into this class.

Well— Class meaning they start Monday.

Yeah, yeah. They might start at the same time, right? Well, 25, if you're gonna interview, you know, if you have a 25% accept rate on your interviews, you need 100 interviews. And then if you're backed it up to applicants, right? Maybe you need a 4-to-1 applicant-to-interview ratio. So now what do you need? 400 applicants, right? So this thing starts to scale as you go back, especially when you get into class-based hiring. But the volume is around usually, I'm starting to look at things by multiples, right? Instead of the one, that's all my sourcing.

We need 10 of these, 20 of these, right? Okay.

Yeah, it's around that.

And it could be all over the organization really. Doesn't have to be just customer service as long as there's multiple openings. Either the same job or multiple openings with variations or definitions of that same job, like versions of it, like a long haul driver versus short haul driver or something like that. Okay. Or it could be a moment.

I mean, it could be a moment in time. I mean, I've had the privilege.

Oh, like we have an event coming up or we have an opening and we need. Gotcha. Yeah.

Or a business ownership. I mean, I've had the rare opportunity of And even putting recruiter, the recruiter role in a way into high volume because at one place we were at, we hired 100 recruiters in 3 months.

So many recruiters.

So that became a high volume, right, kind of strategy because we needed that many of that. That's not a typical role you would consider high volume, but it was at that time 'cause we needed that many that fast.

Wow, okay. Before we get into the deep, deep questions, what are some of the key differences? You've been on both sides of the spectrum, you know, high volume to specialty to, you know, like you said, unicorn or unique or purple squirrel. What are some of the key differences in how you configure your desk for high volume versus what most people are more familiar with, you know, which is kind of working one rack with one opening at a time, right?

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, I think it's the multiple kind of thinking about things in bigger buckets, right? Because the volumes get really large. So I started as a headhunter in the pharma, biotech space, uh, and so I was after the purple squirrel, right? And I was after the one person, and, you know, you kind of run your desk having multiple jobs and arranging the tasks based on that. In volume, you do a similar thing, you just have more tasks, right? Because you've multiplied it now. So now you need to interview 10x the number of people. So how do you get through that? You have to use good process or technology, or you have to figure out in your process who's gonna do those tasks because there's so many more of them. Right.

But sometimes they're the same. So it's a repetitive task or it's same task you have to do multiple times for different things. So do you have like a different way of, you know, most recruiters will have some sort of a workflow that they follow for someone to post a rag that I'm gonna, you know, do you have, is it very different for high volume?

I think it's, it's, or is it still?

Similar.

I think the best of friends are the same, right? Because the key steps of a recruiting process are always the same, right? I'm gonna identify what the job is. I'm gonna contract for success with the hiring manager, right? Through an intake or a launch meeting. I'm then gonna go and source, and then I'm gonna move from source to screen, right? And then I'm gonna select. And then I'm going to do the offer and then the pre-boarding and so on. And that's—

I think that's the mechanics are for— okay, so you do still source for high volume.

You do still source, you're just not looking for one, right? You're sourcing for how do I get a bunch of it. Yeah, yeah. And then the downstream of how do I, how do I work through 100 in my pipeline versus when you're doing niche, you've got maybe 5, right?

So name an example of a difference there. Normally we do phone screens for 5 or 6 phone screens for a job, submit some candidates. You probably have a number like, all right, if we have 10 reqs, we need to do 50 phone screens. So you have a big batch of phone screens.

Yeah, precisely.

You have to schedule. Okay. So, so calendaring is like a huge, probably a much, even much bigger problem or challenge or hurdle than—

handle it differently.

Okay.

Right. How?

Like, that's what I'm looking. So is it, what do you, do you like block your calendar? What do you do that, that's different?

Yeah. So, so let's start with the, let's just start with the launch kind of intake contracting phase, right? Which, you know, if If you kind of read into this, I feel like contracting and being a consultative recruiter regardless of what kind of recruiting you're doing is an absolute core critical skill. And that sometimes gets lost in the high volume space because you're hiring frontline workers. It's kind of this big machine. You're just kind of always doing it. But the contracting part on the front end of, okay, if I have to hire 10, of a certain role, right, for a property or for business or whatever, then you actually do need to do the math. All right, to hire 10, that means manager, hiring manager, you're going to need to do, let's say, 4x. If that's your, you know, if they hire 25% of the people you put in front of the hiring manager, whatever your ratio is at your company, do the math. So now you go to the hiring manager in that intake meeting, you say, In order for us to meet our goal together, you're gonna have to hire 40, or you're gonna have to interview 40 people. So when are you able to do those interviews with 40 people? And you put that on there, right? You contract the calendaring in there, and then you back that up, kind of book a few days or a few chunks. Yeah, the recruiter would have to phone screen if that's part of the process. They might have to phone screen 4x of that, right? So now a recruiter is going to figure out, okay, when can I do that many interviews? And, and then it starts to, to, you start to go down the efficiency road of you cannot spend an hour on each phone screen, right? There's an ROI.

So you got to be more efficient with your phone screens, you got to be more planful with your interviews, otherwise you'll get Railroaded, more automated, right? Okay.

Use more technology, use scoring in your ATS, things like this, right? To really hone your time on the most impactful candidates or applicants that you have. But the planning of it, right? It's very similar to—

very similar. You just have a lot of other, you know, bigger chunks of interviews, bigger time. Yeah, I see what you're saying. And you have to set it. I think the setup is more careful because you can't just sort of wing it, you know, throw the wreck out there and start working on it 'cause you'll get overwhelmed. I mean, you know, you'll get overwhelmed with not planning and not being able to process all that and not having a scorecard and et cetera.

Yeah, and then you layer on things like classes, right? Like your call centers or, you know, where you have training classes for sales reps or some other roles where you have to have all of them.

Oh, right, right, right, right. They all have to start.

Yeah.

We do this once a month and they gotta start then. So you gotta back, there's a lot more planning back from like versus, you know, the more traditional, we got a wreck, let's post it, let's see what we get, let's plan, you know, plan it as we go along. You're basically saying, we almost have to start with this training class and then work backwards. How many screens? And when do we, you know, so you have these timelines, these deadlines that are a lot tighter. Deadline planning seems like a bigger issue than for the other side of recruiting where we're actually working towards the deadline, not working back from the deadline. Okay, that's a pretty key, that's a pretty key difference.

Yeah. The plus side of that is that you can actually see and track things along the way, right? So when you're doing class-based hiring, if you have a target of, you know, 20 people that have to start on a certain date and you've done the math based on your conversion ratios of each step of your process, you actually can see when, by what date I need to hit this goal of having this many applications to work with, right? And by this day, I need to hit this goal of how many recruiter screens, or else we won't make it, right? Or, or background checks that have started because there might be a, you know, a 3% fall-off rate. So you start doing all this math, more formulas, more math, more— I say it's a little complicated, but that you also then can track where you're at, right? Because you'll know, you know, 6 weeks, 4 weeks, whatever ahead of time, I'm tracking toward this, right? I need to adjust. I need more recruiter, you know, screens. And so I need more resource or I need to change something in the process. So it gives you this opportunity to see things throughout the whole process. But I think it is a big eye-opener to, you you know, to people who haven't done this or to the individual hiring manager. Because at the end of the day, it's, look, I just need 10 of these, right? I just need 20, it's just 25 people.

It's just 25 people, but it's 100 phone screens and 1,000, you know, leads basically or whatever.

Yeah, the biggest eye-opener is when, you know, as a recruiter, you start explaining this, right? And doing your contracting and saying, look, okay, You only hire 25% of the people that you interview.

That you interview.

And so, that means you're gonna have to hire, you're gonna interview 100 people. Do you have the time? Can you tell me what days we're gonna put those in place for? Oh my gosh, right? Maybe I need to change. So then, you know, and there's opportunity to change. Maybe it's the conversion ratio gets better. You get a little bit better on who you send to the hiring manager because you get a better target at it. The interview gets smaller or so on. But, uh, the cool thing about volume hiring also is you get to see what works really fast.

Oh, right. Okay, right. You're doing a niche because you have more samples.

You have more samples and you see it very quickly because it moves very fast.

So, you know, I just thought of something, you know. So typically when we're looking at the, at, you know, how many leads we need, and when I when we advise companies on configuring their workflows and all that, we do take into consideration the offer decline or the offer accept rate. So if we know that the company has an 80% offer accept, then we need to add a 20% buffer to that. So if you need 5 people to interview, we also, you know, we gotta throw in a 6th one because this could be that role where the person that we want declines and we don't wanna have zero candidates. So we, you know, we also, we always have that buffer, but you're talking, have you, or do you all also consider the 90-day drop rate?

Yeah, it really is.

That could have a huge impact.

Yeah, it's part of the process, right? So, you know, if you walk through the process until, and especially if there's training, right? Because there's, there's a drop-off at every step after training.

And then, right, some people don't show up to the first day, some people don't make it through training, some people don't make it after the first 30 days, gonna accept the offer.

So you're gonna drop off there, right? Those that accept the offer, you're gonna have some level of drop-off typically in a background check if you're doing background checks, right? And then you're gonna have some level, especially with volume, you're gonna have some level of they just didn't show up to work, right? And then you're going to have a drop-off through training, and then you're going to have a drop-off of whatever your key product is, 90 days, right? Yeah, they're fully productive at X days post-training, right?

That could be— so that could be 50%, that could be, you know, you have 10 people starting, you have 10 people booked for the starting class on Monday, but only 8 show up and only 4 make it through training. So you're back to, you know, you got to go find 6 more people and it's too late at that point.

Yeah. So this is where you look as a recruiter or recruiting leader, doing your diligence and, and finding out what all of those conversion rates are, right, really helps you hone in on number one, you can quantify what the size of the actual task and ask is, and then you can you know, ask for appropriate resources and plan for it, right? Because having a plan is critical when you're talking about volume hiring. It is hard. You can't wing it. And then you'd also know where to go and look to fix things, right? So, if there's a high drop-off rate of people who've accepted the offer, passed the background, and there's a big drop-off of they show up, Well, then you put things in place, you put strategies in place to go decrease that, right? Or increase that conversion rate at that step. Or people are failing out of training or dropping out of training. Why is that? Let's put together some strategies there. And if you start to see that it happens at certain dates or there's some sort of consistency around it, you know, at day 60 post-hire, there's a drop-off. Right? Then what can you do around that time or just before it to help combat that? Is that the right time for a check-in, uh, or, uh, uh, you know, a stay interview? Or is that the right time to send somebody, uh, you know, lunch, right? Or whatever. But you put strategies into that. So knowing your data and knowing the conversions is a great point, Shelly, around it doesn't stop when the person, you know, says yes and accepts the offer, or when they start. It goes on for a while.

Okay. Well, I feel like I just took a crash course in high-volume hiring here, so I can see that the key differences there. Let's switch the topic up a little bit. And it kind of— I think automation, you mentioned that, so that's what made me think about this. You mentioned automation, um, you know, AI, automation, and the human touch. Where's, where's the sweet spot? You've worked a lot in, in high volume and automation, technology transformation. Uh, people seem to be racing toward, you know, the, the agent tech AI. How do we make sure the technology is working for us not just running rampant, you know, and like going nuts on its own? Where's the balance?

You know, it's often— you have to remember who your users are, like, what's the primary user experience? And my bias is that the primary user experience should be the candidate. And then potentially secondarily, it's a hiring manager, and third, it's a recruiter. Now recruiters are going to get mad, right, about that, and often we have that the other way around. But your candidate is what you're spending all the money to get, right? They're the gold.

Yep, that's true. As a recruiter, your work product is— yeah, definitely.

So what— so, so who should we be giving the best experience to, right? So, so I've always tried to look at, all right, what's the experience that candidates going through. And unfortunately, if that causes a minor amount of pain on the recruiter, or sometimes it temporarily does until we can get the technology or some sort of automation in place to help on the recruiter side, but if it's a good experience for the candidate, that's kind of the guiding number one priority in my mind.

Right, so the place where we lose the human touch is the place where the candidate's no longer benefiting or like they're not feeling like they're valued?

Well, it depends. So let me give you an example, right? So, you know, one of the things that volume, especially high volume or frontline candidates, value is speed and clarity. So if you can give me clarity and you can get me through the process fast, if I can apply to a job quickly, if I can get a decision quickly, if you can communicate that decision to me quickly, right? They'll— that's really high valued, and sometimes maybe more high valued than if you had a drawn-out process with a whole lot of human touch along the way, right? So there's a bit of a trade-off. And so it isn't always just human touch, it may be how fast can we get through the process. And as long as you're upfront around, this is what our process looks like, right? Step 1, you're going to answer these questions or take an assessment or whatever, right? Step 2, we're going to schedule— you're going to self-schedule for an interview with whoever. Step 3, as long as you're clear about the process, it doesn't necessarily have to be all human touch. But if it makes sense from an efficiency and a smoothness— what doesn't work is When you do things like send candidates to interviews and the hiring manager doesn't know who they are, or they're not prepared, or they make them wait for half an hour before they can speak to them, or so on. It seems like common sense, be nice to people, treat the candidates well. But getting that aligned start to finish through the whole Everybody who touches the process getting this understanding of the candidate user experience is pinnacle. It's really often hard to do. I mean, we see a lot of companies that struggle with that. They might do it really well on the recruiter side or the front-end side, and then it gets to the hiring manager interview and just falls apart. Now, I saw this— I'll give you a story. My daughter is a sophomore in college, and so she was home for the summer and she worked frontline hourly jobs this summer. And she had one job at— in the food service industry, and she wanted a better job. Now, what was better for her? Better for her was more money and the hours were better, right?

That's better for her. I see what you mean.

That was better for her, right?

Doesn't mean better for everybody.

So in order to interview for this second job that was better because it paid better and it had better hours, she had to take time off of— so look, she's hourly employee, which means she's not getting paid to take a day off to go interview for another job, right? An hour away, 'cause that's where they asked her to interview for the client.

Gotta take a day off or whatever, yep.

Yep, she gets to this second role place, waits a half an hour for the hiring manager to have time to talk to her. And then the hiring manager asks her logistics questions. When, how much do you want to make? When can you, what days can you work and what hours? That's it. And then says, I actually, I'm not sure why you're here because we don't even have that job open.

Oh my God. Okay, wow.

And what I, what I find is that that's, that's not uncommon.

Wow. So what's the point? Like, what was the point of doing the interview? Like, why did, why did they even invite her?

Yes. So let's, let's take that one step further.

Forget that you wasted her time, but like, why did you even invite— like, what was the point?

Yeah, and she actually— it cost her money.

It cost her a day off. Yeah, right.

It cost her like lost wages, lost money, gas to get over there, etc., right? And so will my daughter ever eat at that restaurant in the future?

Yeah, no way.

Will her dad take the family of 6 to go eat at that restaurant in the future? Right. So that's the other kind of interesting thing about a lot of frontline, uh, hiring is that it's, it's so part of a company's brand and customer experience. And often your candidates are also customers or potential customers. And so it's so critical to get this, to, to think about the entire process and everybody involved. And, you know, how do you, how do you provide a really amazing user experience for the candidate. And look, this isn't like— this isn't hard. This is like I interview, you know, at a gas station and they give me a free soda. Hey, thanks for coming over to talk to us, right? Here's a free soda. How much did that cost the gas station? Like 20 cents, 30 cents? Those kind of things.

Yeah, listen, I used to work at Coke, so yeah, let's— I can tell you less than that. It's probably actually free if they're giving it out, is because they do get promos. But anyway, um, wow. Okay, interesting.

Um, yeah, as you can tell, I'm passionate about the candidate experience.

No, I get— I absolutely get that. And I, and I think that the candidate experience is, um, I don't want to say more important because then that also assumes that it's less important somewhere else. But it's extremely important when there's not a whole lot of hard qualifications for these jobs. Like the fact that you're able to, you know, provide customer service, walk around and bring food and take orders is not something that is like hard to find in a resume. The problem there is people who are willing to do the job. So if someone's willing to do the job, providing them a good candidate experience is even more important. Not saying that it isn't important when you're hiring a software engineer, but when you're hiring someone like a software engineer or a PhD, they have other things in mind like career progression. It might not all, it might not be about the paycheck necessarily. There's other things. And so the candidate experience is one of several things in the portfolio for a recruiter. That can help them attract talent. Having a poor candidate experience doesn't mean they will never hire anybody. It just, you know, it makes it a little bit harder. But in this space, it sounds like a poor candidate experience is basically all you got.

I mean, it's, it's a big factor, right?

Because yeah, people aren't taking these jobs because of the brand name that, you know, these are jobs that they, they're taking a job because they got to work and make a paycheck. These are not career opportunities, their jobs.

Yeah, I have a—

necessarily. I mean, they might be, but, you know.

Yeah, but look, I have a former colleague that runs a really high-volume recruiting shop at a major retailer, and, and he talks about, look, people come to work for us, they come for a job. Honestly, they come to our stores for a job. They then stay for the career. But we're marketing, right?

Right. So they get the job and then they realize, Oh, I could, I could do something when I'm here. But still, the candidate experience is like the first gate.

Yeah, it's a gate, especially since, you know, a lot of, a lot of frontline jobs, or when you're hiring volume, a lot of times the salary is set, right? This is the salary. Like, we, we start everybody at, you know, $14 an hour, right? Or whatever the thing is. So, you know, unlike niche, you don't have— you may not have the levers for that, right, to offer that kind of variability or differentiation. It may be that. So the candidates— and here's the other thing, it's so— it's done so poorly, so broadly, that just doing a little bit, just improving the candidate experience a little bit is a huge deal. Sets you apart. It sets your company apart and differentiates so greatly. And look, it's a sad thing to say, but there's a lot of reality to this because it's hard. You're dealing with a lot of people. You're dealing with a lot of hiring managers. They're often geographically dispersed. They're often in businesses where the management team has been in their roles or done that or been in the industry a long time. And so, they do it a certain way. And so, to get all of that machine aligned well is not as easy as it sounds to just say.

You know, you— people talk about like it's an assembly line or a sausage factory. Well, okay, fine, let's take that analogy. An assembly line still needs to be well run, you know. So sure, maybe it's an assembly line because there's so many similarities, but that doesn't mean that it's sloppy, you know. You can't have a sloppy assembly line.

For sure.

Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people love to— I'm even going to say everyone loves to talk about the future of work, the future of work. But let's be real. Most companies are trying to figure out the present of work. So, what's one trend that you think is like overhyped?

Yeah, it's a good question. Look, I think, I think with any new technologies that come out, right? I mean, I was thinking, I was thinking back to this year, this April will be my 25th year in talent acquisition. When I started as a headhunter, monster.com, it kind of just arrived. And my first placement was, I literally, I probably shouldn't say this, but I will, because it's 25 years ago, I went to resume search on Monster, found a candidate, submitted them and got paid you know, the fee, right? And so my point of this is there's always this new technology or these new things that are coming out that people, you know, either think are really going to solve everything or not going to solve everything. So today's— today obviously is AI, right? AI is going to fix everything. Like, and AI is super powerful. I mean, everybody has access to ChatGPT for free if you want, and you can see some of the, the the power behind it and the opportunity behind it. But there's always a hype cycle as well, right?

So you're saying ChatGPT or GenAI is overhyped? Not— you're not saying it's not valuable, you're saying it's overhyped.

I think that they're making too much out of it. Okay, there's a lot of noise and confusion in the market around what it actually is and what it does and what it doesn't do. How I find benefit in this, right?

Hence the overhype. Yeah. So it doesn't mean, it doesn't take the value away. You're not saying generative AI and ChatGPT is worthless. You're saying that people are giving it a lot more attention than perhaps it deserves because it's not maybe as significant as you think. Not that it isn't significant, but that is just not, it's not gonna change everything and solve it. It's not the panacea that, is going to solve all your problems. That tends to be the, the thing that happens in our industry a lot is they come up with a product. It's like, oh, we're going to solve all your problems. Well, yeah, that's not possible. You know, if that was possible, Workday would have already done that. You know what I mean?

So, well, and it, and it changes.

I mean, the problems— exactly, the problems change, right?

How fast things are changing, right? So by the time you figure out, okay, how do I put put this in place and actually get return on it, right?

It's already changed.

It's changed. I mean, and that's the really, I think, hard thing about AI. And, you know, so aside from the, you know, overhyping, you know, I mean, every tool is AI-powered now, right? In some sense, which I don't think is false. I think every, probably most pieces of technology do have some level of AI in it at some point. But the, this will solve it. This is where, you know, I've learned as a, as a TA leader through pain is to like, what am I trying to solve? If you can define what you're trying to solve, then you go find the tools to empower that. And if it's an AI tool or an AI solution or whatever, that's great. But in TA, we do often do this backwards. We often go to the shows and see the cool thing and we go, wow, that's amazing. I could do this with that. And we plug it in and sometimes we don't. I've not taken a step back to go, is this the most important thing I should be solving as a TA leader? Does this give me the highest impact or return on the investment? Not just on cost, but maybe on time. Or change management or whatever. And that's, that's really important. So this future work thing, I think there's a lot of really exciting, innovative things happening and a lot of ideas. I don't think anybody in any TA leader or recruiter should be scared of that.

No, but definitely the pace is— yeah, I agree that the pace of change has picked up. I mean, years would go by without a really massively revolutionary kind of idea, concept, technology. Whatever in the past. And I think we, we now are seeing those come up much closer together, you know. So I totally agree with that for sure.

Yeah, yeah, it's— look, embrace it, learn about it. But again, like, the, the idea of what problem am I trying to solve never goes away.

Yeah, right, right. We just have, like, unfortunately, more solutions too. That's another problem. But Um, yeah. Okay. Let's take the opposite of that. So that is, so the overhyped one, but what about what, what is something that we talk about that companies should take far more seriously? In other words, completely underhyped, right?

Yeah. I it's, I'd say two things that I've seen, uh, you know, as moving into a role of a consultant and, you know, which is a ton of fun 'cause you get to see a lot of different industries and a lot of different processes and a lot of different ways to do things.

Yeah, definitely enjoy that.

But some of the things that are trends, I would say, is I'm not fully utilizing what I have in place. So this is things like, I'll give you a simple example. I have it most ATSs have some sort of scoring functionality in them, right, where you can put questions in for candidates to answer as part of the application and they can score that based on that.

Okay. And all right, okay.

And, and as an example, a lot of companies don't even— don't use that. And so their way of screening through candidates, visually screening, is a recruiter has to look through one by one by one by one by one by one by one, right? When if they have this massive volume of applications, which has been a trend, right, over the last year to 18 months, application numbers have grown exponentially.

Some people say it's because of robotic processes, but yeah, yeah, right, right.

It could be that, right? It could be the market, uh, as well. And recruiting teams as kind of a trend, have gotten compressed and smaller with more pressure on individual recruiters, definitely more and more recs. And so you get to the point where you just can't look at all candidates one by one by one by one, right? And so you go look for another technology solution. But my point in this is you may have something already in your portfolio that you just haven't turned on, underutilized, or You know, yeah, that's interesting.

You know, I did that leadership survey, the team leadership survey for the white paper. That's actually going to be— I'm like 90% done with it, the writing. I just need to send the result to participants and get their okay to use their names, but the content is done, so it's going to be coming out pretty soon. And I did actually— that was one of the questions that I asked in these interviews. What do you have that you're underutilizing? And there were all kinds of different answers and people are aware of it, but they just, you know, for whatever reason are not using it. Like some companies told me that they had a CRM that was just basically sitting there. It wasn't really, at some point they bought it and they used it for a little while, but now they don't really use it much because volume went down or whatever. So yeah, I see what you're saying. So basically, kind of, I guess what I'm hearing you say is do an assessment of your, do an inventory of your toolkit and see if there's anything that you have that you're not using or not using enough, right? It could be something you think you're—

Well, there is a lot of things. Yeah, there's a lot of things in your control, right? As a recruiter, as a TA leader that you can drive some change in without any additional money to tools, investment, etc. Some of that is maybe the tech, you know, you don't have that piece of the technology turned on or optimized. Maybe it's process. I mean, one thing that we see a lot of is the, uh, you know, I have to approve a requisition as part of the process. The requisition has to be approved by 4 sets of eyes, and then maybe 4 weeks later it has to be approved by 4 sets of eyes again before you make an offer, right? And why— and a lot of times it's built that way because, you know, 5 years ago when we set the ATS up, we had to put these approval processes in place.

Oh, that leadership needed it, right? And like, we don't use it anymore.

And then look at that, you're like, it's taking a bunch of time, right? It's all this time lag in my process to get this thing approved, especially if you've approved it on the front end and then you're doing a second round of approvals 4 weeks later on the offer. And maybe it's— and go back to high volume. If it's the same salary, starting salary for every candidate, I don't know if there's a lot of value going over that offer over and over and over again.

Right. Okay. And it causes a time lag and they might drop off and not take the job. Yeah, yeah.

So my point is there's things, whether it's technology or pieces or functionality you have on or off, or parts of your process that you've just dealt with.

So go back and reassess your process to see it. I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, you might have things in your process that were just put in there before your leadership, uh, currently, and it's somebody needed it back then, but you don't need it anymore. So why, why continue to do it? And I think maybe we just keep going on our momentum because it's always been that way and nobody stops to say, well, you know, we used to use this, we don't use it anymore. Do we really need it? That's a good thought.

Yeah. Or it's just fallen to, you know, falls to a priority C kind of task for me as a recruiter because I'm stuck in the tyranny of the urgency a little bit. And that's a proactive thing that I never have time to get to. I mean, I, I'd be curious how many of your listeners have wanted to optimize their job postings and have never had the time because it's a C priority, right?

Or it's, it's important but just not urgent, and all the urgent things are getting in the way, borrowing from the Eisenhower Matrix.

My, my really like bad, you know, horrible job description, uh, is posted, uh, for the next 3 years, right, for that role. And it— I'm guilty of this. I, I— it was been my to-do list at many companies and never got done right. Now, what's the solve for that? The solve that I think was a win at a couple companies I was at was to say, what's our highest impact roles, our highest priority, or our highest volume? You somehow— you prioritize the roles that you're hiring for And do the top 3 or the top 2 or the top— just start somewhere, right, with the biggest impact role. And so we do that sometimes too, is we look at the whole problem and we try to solve for all of it when maybe it's a little bit easier to just say, well, what if I just did it for these 2 jobs?

Yep.

I can get a lot of value out of that, right? And you do that and see what the impact is and measure it. And then maybe that moves those priority C tasks to priority A tasks. But there's a ton. I think what I've learned is recruiters and recruiting teams, there's a lot of opportunity that's sort of missed because we get really busy filling recs and there's a ton of pressure to get the hires and get the recs and get the hires and get the hires as fast as possible. And I've got the time to fill measurement that my boss has put in place and so I got to hit that. And I'm responding to the metric of noise, right? Because my hiring manager's jumping up and down and I've got to make them happy because we've made that a metric for TA in a lot of places that everybody has to be happy and that equals success. And so, you know, there's a lot of distraction to the ability of taking a step back and saying, well, what What about my process could I fix? What am I not really optimizing here? What do I have that I'm not using? How could I look at this a little bit differently? And what I found, Shelly, you know, talking with people like you, other TA leaders, consultants, even just in a 5-minute conversation, you know, hey, what are you doing? Hey, I've had this problem. Like, how did you solve this? You start learning things and it opens your mind. And then you start doing things you didn't think of, or you start tackling things that you thought were really, really hard. And then you find out that maybe they weren't quite as hard as you thought in your mind.

Yeah, because you took a minute to— it's almost worth it. Not a minute, but it's almost worth the pause and go back and kind of audit yourself. Really? That's a good idea. I like that. I'm gonna recommend that to people.

Yeah, I was in a meeting once, and this was a super impactful task. And the facilitator, it was a bunch of senior TA leaders. And the facilitator said, all right, pair up and give each other your career sites. And I want you to apply for each other's job, like find a job and apply to a job. And the silence in the room was deafening because you had all these leaders who were responsible, in essence, ultimately accountable, right, for that process, who, you know, many thought it was really, really good. But then you sit next to somebody with— who's in kind of the same role, and they're working through it, and and they hit this barrier, and you kind of lean over and you're like, well, that's because the system has this thing. And then they hit a second barrier, and you, you kind of explain it away why that's a barrier, right? Uh, but it really does open your eyes to go, wow, the process is really fun. I thought we had this highly optimized and all figured out, and I kind of walked in here thinking, you know, we're, we're a leader in this, we got it together. And I walked away from that exercise thinking, oh my gosh, this is horrible. These things got to be fixed. It doesn't matter that there's a barrier. Like, we have to figure out how to fix it and how to get through that barrier. That's what our jobs are. So, you know, it's— that was a huge— that was a really, really beneficial exercise. And look, do it yourself.

Yeah.

Like, catch a minute. Apply to your own job without bias and see what it feels like.

Anonymize your own application to your own job. I like it. Interesting.

Yeah.

Do you play video games? Never, never have, never played any video games.

They're like, they're too like, this is now you're gonna make me feel Not even on your phone or anything?

I try.

No? I can't, like, they're too fast.

Not even Pac-Man when you were a kid?

Oh yeah, of course.

I know those games. The reason I'm asking is, you know, with everything that you've, teams that you've built and high-performing teams and the leadership that you've held in these high-volume recruiting and hospitality recruiting, financial recruiting. If, if it was a video game, if, if all that leadership that you've done were a video game, what's the cheat code that most people don't know but should?

Yeah, it's up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right.

What's the shortcut? What's the cheat code? The hack?

Yeah, it's good. It's, it's a good— it's a good way to tricky question. It, it's, it's to take a step back and think about it from an experience standpoint.

Okay. I, I think that audit yourself from a candidate experience. Pretend you're a candidate going through your own process and, and how does it feel? Yeah, I like that.

It's really, it's really easy to kind of get stuck in the, in the grind pretty much, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Because you, you, again, you're under all this pressure, right? I mean, TA teams are always under enormous pressure to deliver, deliver, deliver, that it's hard to do. And there's typically a reason. I mean, I haven't met a TA team or a TA leader or recruiter that's built a bad process because they just wanted to build a bad process. There's always a bona fide reason, right? Whether it's the technology has a limitation or the hire, you just can't get the hiring manager to move off of whatever, piece of the process they're stuck on, right? Like, you know, give you an example. Lots of properties in hospitality, the GM says, I have to, I have to meet every single person who works in my hotel. They may have a 600-person workforce, but they want to meet everybody that works in their hotel. And it's all like for good reasons, right? Because they want to be welcoming. They want to have a kind of an open-door culture. They want to make sure the person, uh, feels, you know, welcome to the team, things like this. Like, there's usually very good reasons behind it, um, but it's this, you know, it's, it's these kinds of things that take a look at it deeply, right, and go, does this make sense? How can we get through that barrier? Just because it's always been there, is there Is there another way around it? What if we tried a different process? What if we pilot something? You know, that's always an easy way to get around something. Let's do a pilot and try this, and then we'll measure it and see if it works. You know, most companies and people are more open to pilots than whole-scale change. So try something, and don't be afraid to try it. I think that's a cheat code.

Yep, that's it. That's the cheat code. Um, I have two more questions. I know we're getting pretty short on time here. First one is, there's two questions that I always ask every guest, and the first one of those is, who should be our next guest?

Yeah, I, I've seen, I've seen some of the answers, right, that have come to this question.

Hey, it's okay if you give me some— somebody that First of all, I'm gonna reach out. They may not, they may not even accept. That's happened a few times or aren't able to accept. As Stephen Hardy was supposed to be on and canceled twice cuz he wasn't able to get approval from his employer. And it just happens, right? So first of all, it may not be someone that, that's able to come or interested in coming, but also if it's a duplicate, then that just gives me all the more reason to reach back out and say, hey, so yeah, let's throw it.

Here's, no, here's what I'd say. I mean, a couple things, right? So, People like Brian Del Dawn at Talentech Labs has been super helpful to me in my career and just understanding kind of the TA tech landscape in an unbiased kind of way. And you know Brian and that team over there. But the thing that I think also, and I don't have a person, we could work on this together, but I think it'd be valuable to hear from CHROs or CEOs or maybe private equity partners from companies. Because, you know, one of the things that's really important, especially for TA leaders, is to understand what you're trying to get accomplished for the business. We really get stuck often in the task and the business of recruitment and looking up. You're there for a reason, and the reason is to help make the business successful. And so the perspective from those roles has always been really helpful to me to understand what are we trying to get accomplished. Private equity, because then it kind of sets the North Star. And it really does empower you as a recruiter, recruiting leader to have the conversations with, you know, people in the organization or leaders in the organization to say, is this really the right thing for us to doing, because what we're really trying to get accomplished together for the company is this, right? And we're arguing about some minute thing in the recruiting process, right?

We're like getting stuck on— we're stuck on that one little process step. Yeah.

Yeah. So I think it's really important to understand what you're trying to get done for the organization and the perspective of the CEO. And I think You know, I've seen— look, a lot of recruiters and recruiting leaders don't know because, um, it, it— maybe it's not shared, or maybe it's not clear, or maybe it's just, just been hard to connect the dots. Or again, you're mired in kind of the business and the urgency of recruitment, right? That it's part of this taking a step back and going, how do— like, are we really doing the right things and impacting and making the right decisions for the company and where the company wants to go or where, uh, you know, the board wants to go, uh, or whatever. And that's been super valuable to me. So those might be— I know that's a role.

No, but I like it. No, but yeah, let's, let's put our heads together and see if we can come up with, with some people to invite. Um, and, uh, I like that, especially the private equity. So, uh, last question. Paul Norman unfiltered, what is a strong opinion that you hold that others frequently disagree with, but you stand by anyway? Could be, you know, a hot take, belief or prediction, something about the, you know, about our industry. That you hold that is, let's just say, unpopular or other people disagree with, but you stand by?

Yeah, that's a good one. I think that— I think a lot of people would agree with this, but it's hard to do. And it's that, look, your role in the company is not to just say yes. And take the order and work as hard as possible to go say yes. Your role in the company, in my opinion, in TA, is to set up hiring and, and be able to hit the goals that make sense for the business. And sometimes that's saying no. Or I should back up, I never tried to— I tried not to say no. I said a lot of yes, however.

Okay.

Yes, however, in order to accomplish that, right, we need to do this, or here's your choices, right, or here's what's going to happen if we go down this road. Yes, however. But it takes some, you know, it takes some courage, it takes empowerment from your leader. Um, so I don't know if that's, you know, I don't know if that's really People would disagree with that, but I think it's hard to do. It takes the skill to be able to contract. It takes the courage to be able to have those conversations. It takes some knowledge about what the business strategy is and alignment. But I'd say that that's super, super important. And world-class TA teams, world-class recruiters that I've seen, in my opinion, have the ability to do that.

Okay. All right. That's, that's challenging. I can see how it might be unpopular because people don't want to put in all that hard work in the middle of, you know, getting their hair on fire. Um, but man, yeah, lots to think about. Let's, uh, let's do this again. Let's put our heads together on that private equity. I want to make sure that I got you here by the end of the hour before your, your clock starts going crazy in the background there. If it hasn't already. So thanks a lot. Appreciate you coming, uh, to on the show, especially last minute like that. Um, folks, for you, everybody that is interested in coming back for Valentine's Day, our next show will be February 14th. I have two guests and they are specialists in healthcare recruitment and branding. Um, from a company called Rogue Hire. So come on back for Valentine's Day, February 14th. Until then, be kind to yourselves. Take care, everybody.

Awesome. Thanks, Shelly. Thanks, everybody.