A back to basics approach to TA | with Brad Cook

Hello everybody. And you are very, very welcome to this week's shortest from Social Talent. I am Holly Fawcett. I'm the director of content here at Social Talent. And yet again I'm in the hot seat while our CEO and founder Johnny Campbell annual vacation again, very jealous. But he'll be back in a few short weeks. In the meantime, I get to play with one of my favorite topics which is actually about recruiting metrics. I know it sounds really improbable, but it's all these nitty gritty problems that I tend to uncover using metric analysis and stuff like that that really is my jam. I am very sad. I am aware. But I'm sure many TA folks like you are around me also find similar similar problems really encouraging and kind of delightful actually to find how do we get back to those nitty gritty basics of recruiting? And that actually is the topic of our show this week. We are talking about getting back to basics with talent acquisition and recruiting. I think in order for TA teams to really be successful in what is an incredibly tight employee market right now, we all have to be at the top of our games in terms of hiring. And really that fundamental challenge facing talent acquisition at the moment is really that sheer difficulty in finding both recruiters, which is a huge issue unfortunately, and the talent in order to fill all the other requisitions that we're working on right now with a two tone problem, that's really hard. But how do you rise above the fray when everybody else is facing a similar problem? How do you position yourself and your organization in that prime position to snag and then retain talent, including recruiters? So according to our guest this week, it's all about getting back to basics. With me is Brad Cook, who is the Vice president of Global Talent Acquisition at Intuitive, which is a corporation that develops, manufactures and markets robotic products for minimally invasive surgeries. If you've ever had surgery where the da Vinci robot has been worked on you, or maybe a family member, that is all because of Brad and his team at the Intuitive Surgical Team. Brad will be telling to us about the importance of getting the fundamentals right, particularly in terms of outbound search. Really the basics of candid experience and getting back to the absolute most fundamental part of our recruiting job description, which is creating great job descriptions. We'll also be looking at the importance of data and metrics, my jam to diagnose where there may be problems in the areas within our TA processes so that solutions can be found quickly and effectively. Brad, welcome to the show. Would you like to introduce yourself for our listeners and viewers, please.

Thank you, Holly, and great to be here. Thanks for the invitation. Brad Cook, vice president of Level recruiting for Intuitive. Been here for just over two years. It's been the fastest two years of our life. And Intuitive is on a major growth. We are doing double digits growth. We have been for the last many years. So it's been a fun time at the beginning of COVID Not so much fun being at home, but with the growth that we've had over the last couple of years, it's certainly been a journey, a fun journey and an exciting journey and one that has forced us to get really back to some of the basics we'll be talking about today, for sure.

I think that actually might be my first question for you, Brad, really, about joining an organization in the throes of the ambiguity of the beginnings of COVID what that was like for you as a TA leader. That also may have given you insight into how you scale candidate experience or even employee experience in a virtual world that we had to kind of come to terms with over the past two years.

A couple of things. So I started with the company three days before lockdown in California.

Oh my gosh.

Where the coffee was, where the toilets were. It's like, okay, off you go. Working from home. And I'd work from home the last couple of years before then with the previous company. So I was used to working from home, but I knew where everything was. Yeah, I'm one of those people that you can go to and ask and I'll know where the skeletons are. For the last many, many years. I didn't have that here. On the flip side, I would say starting during COVID actually worked because the first 90 days I must have spoken to at least 100 people in the organization and I had a captive audience. So they were behind the other end of the zoom. So I know they weren't traveling, they weren't on a customer site. So it gave me very easy access to the executives across the company to really get into that, listening to it and know what's going on. So I do see that as a positive. The negative of that. It was very difficult to build team camaraderie when everybody's being remote and especially at the beginnings of. And it's only literally been within the last 30 days that I've actually had big chunks of my team together. First time in two years I've met my full leadership in one room. Two weeks ago. First time in Europe with my European team. First time in two years. And I really realize how wonderful it is to be back with everybody live again. But also what you don't get by being on Zoom, you don't get the nuances of what's really going on for that person or, or that region or that business unit because of it. So, you know, I've seen pros and cons for both of it. I'll make lemon cello at the lemonade or out of lemons and do the best I can. So that was the, that was the introduction to intuitive during COVID My gosh.

That sounds a bit of a baptism of fire for sure. And also a lot of unforeseen struggles that, you know, usually when we join in a reorganization, we don't really have to contend with. You're right. Like where is the coffee machine, where's the bathrooms? But you know, who are my team? What are they like? And starting to build those relationships within your organization for sure. But speaking of that team, particularly of your, of your, of the recruiters, the day to day recruiters who are, who are facing candidates every day, they themselves are in short supply. What's that been like for your organization within ta?

I think we've struggled like everybody finding good recruiters on board. I think I've changed the dynamics of what and when we need recruiters. So, you know, do I say we have a perfect workforce plan? No, by no means. And I'd say most companies are still struggling with that as well. But the shift that we've made is really getting clear of what we know is coming. What I've been talking to the business about is if you want to give me 100 positions, I need to make sure I have the capacity for 100 positions. And I'll say at the beginning of 2021, we were not in capacity at all. And by getting a clearer view of what's coming, I was able to set expectations of it's going to take three months to find recruiters, bring them on board and build them up. So now we're really focusing on not just what we have now, but what is coming for the next three, six months. And then we've built out a capacity model to know exactly, plug in some numbers. We know our fill rates from a metrics perspective. That spits out how many recruiters we should have to support this volume. Resources coordinators. That has helped. The other thing that we've done is we've tested a lot of things. Could we go out there and find a whole lot of full time staff? Yeah, probably full time is Much easier to hire these days, contractors a little bit harder. Seems like a lot of contract recruiters want crazy money and doesn't mean that that comes with crazy great experience. So there's definitely an over elevated sense of ability from a lot of contract recruiters in the marketplace today that we've seen. But we tested different small RPOs, larger RPOs. We just tested a lot of things. Some of them worked, some of them didn't. But on a whole we've come out of it the other end. We grew the team by four, we grew our REC volume by four during 2021 and we did a damn good job. The team did a fantastic job getting there. It nearly killed a lot of us. That was the hard part, the exciting part. And the plug is at the end of last year our CEO gives what they call the GRIT Award away each quarter. A team in the company has just gone above and beyond and the TA organisation was awarded the GRIT, the CEO's GRIT Award for what we were able to produce. That was a great feeling and I guess a great honour for the team to receive that because they were the ones doing the hard yards.

Oh like 100%. It's wonderful that it's being recognized, right? And not that necessarily the last year, 2021, which was difficult I think for every organization and certainly that you, you felt that within intuitive for sure. I mean a 4x fold of your team as well as your requisition load is, is no mean feat, let's, let's face it. But that's, that's pretty extraordinary. And yet, you know, this isn't the first time that we've encountered those types of problems that they've just, it's now become such a headache I think for so many different parts of the organization that it's, it's really affecting their productivity and their ability to meet their own timelines. Because we have a leaky bucket in so many parts of our organizations that our requisition load is, is, you know, we're filling empty, emptying seats all the time that the, the benefits of skilled talent acquisition and the benefits of good hiring processes and like you say, getting back to those basic elements, unfortunately we do have to rely on a strong foundation to successful before we can start really doing much innovation. But you know, it's great that it's being recognized now because it wasn't really recognized I don't think in the past. Our ability to do great things and hire the right people to grow our organizations up till 2020. Do you agree.

I do. I do. It's been it. This is probably the pinnacle of my career. I would say that the support of leadership, the support of the organization, the understanding of the criticality of bringing talent on. This is a partnership. This isn't just about talent acquisition, going, filling talent and just giving it to a manager to do something with it. It's become a partnership with the business. So that's the exciting part about hiring for intuitive.

Yeah. I think it also comes back to the next evolution of organizations in coming out of COVID This level of maturity that people, particularly the C suite, are growing into, which is the importance of hiring. Right. We always knew we were important. We certainly felt it within recruiting. But did the rest of the business really feel how important we are and the contribution that we make and the.

Point around the importance of that, because it was part of my interview process as well, is are you willing to go where the talent is? Okay. We're a Bay Area headquartered company and they were conversations that I had two years ago during the interview process because historically it was a very headquarters centric organization. And I'll say that was another positive of COVID Guess what? We need to go where the talent is because everybody's remote now. And that was called a lesson or a big aha that I think the company as a whole has got around to. Are there areas within the business that aren't as productive? Absolutely. We could be more productive if we're all back together in some areas. But as recruiters and sources and coordinators, we can be anywhere. And that's also helped, I think, the dynamic shift with attracting talent, finding talent, interaction with TA and the business because we are more focused on where the talent lives now versus where our headquarters are.

Yeah, 100%. And how did you. I mean, obviously this was, as you're saying, was a conversation you had within your own interview process with the. With the business leadership. But as you then entered the organization, found your feet right. Virtually where everything is. How did you utilize data? I suppose at a very. At a very minimal level or perhaps quite a. Quite a complex and a nuanced level, how did you leverage data to be able to demonstrate this is where the talent is and here's why we should change our strategy, etc.

Yeah, a couple of things on that. So walking into the company, there was no metrics. We had a really old version of Taleo. The workflow globally was different. You could not even just say everybody did things differently around the world. Even people within the US supporting different businesses were doing things differently within Taleo because there was nothing locked in Tale from a workflow perspective. And if you don't have a tight workflow process within your systems, you can't measure it. So straight out of the gate, I jumped on the bandwagon with the team of we need to build a consistent workflow that everybody can manage to and everybody follows. There were still challenges within that platform that didn't allow us to mandate certain steps. If you look at our funnel data with Taleo would show that there's a higher percentage of manager screens than there are recruiter screens. How can that be? It's because recruiters were able to go from a new candidate straight to manager submit and not and skip because it wasn't a mandatory step. So number one was getting a consistent workflow. So I'd say that took a good three or four months to get back consistent. We then had to build that within Taleo. We built off a number of tableau dashboards and that was the first time the company had had something like that within ta. I remember the CFO saying, I've been asking for this for three years and how can I get it in three weeks? It's like, you gotta know what questions to ask and where the data comes from. And it would be garbage in, garbage out. If. If he'd been given data straight from Taleo in the past, it would have just been useless because you would never know what was going on because it was a very inconsistent process. And then from there, as that started to come, then there was strong visibility of what was open, what was pending, what was on hold, really the full end to end. And we really started to focus on the open and close rates a few times. And this was a big aha for me that I didn't spot and I hadn't spotted it before, but we had situations where we would be opening more jobs than we're closing now. That can go on for maybe a month, but as soon as that happens, you're in backlog mode. And we were in backlog mode pretty heavy at that point. And that was when we started to really test out how can we find other types of talent to bring them in to get ahead of that. And that's now a metric that we're always watching. Are we closing more jobs than we're opening? Which means we're always ahead of the curve. And then to the talent question, I bought LinkedIn Insights and had everybody in the team have LinkedIn Insights to be able to see what is going on. And part of that Part of the requirements of a recruiter is to go in there and do an Insights report, walk into it when we do a recruiting strategy meeting and have good visibility of what does the market look like, be able to set those expectations with the manager. What does the market look like today with the roles they're looking for in the location they're looking for? And those things started to change a little bit. Are we perfect? No. Every organization still has pockets where they want to see more. Can we have more? Can we have more? We've given you three, we've given you five really great candidates. By the time we find you more, those five are going to be gone because of the talent market. So yeah, all in all, there's been a lot of work, really foundational work during 2020 and 2021 of building that consistent workflow within Taleo. And then last year we spent, we signed a contract in February with smart recruiters and we were, we went live this the beginning of this year with smart recruiters. So it took us a good year to globally standardize our processes, get them all into, into smart recruiters. So that's now our core platform that we can now build upon, which I'm excited about.

Yeah, that's, I mean I quite like smart recruiters as an ats. It's really nifty and nimble and you know, for, for a big wieldy ats, when you're looking at examples like the very big traditional large enterprise systems, I suppose it's a nice refresh to have something that is technically, you know, initially started off building for small organizations, now working in an enterprise kind of space. It's great again foundation that we have the right tools and as you say, the right processes and just being able to measure things. Having the data to hand I want to pick up on. You're saying that you gave LinkedIn Talent Insights licenses across the board to your recruiting team, but in order to walk into those recruiting strategy meetings with the piece of paper that says here's where the talent is and here's why your hiring criteria will work, won't work, etc. What was that level of skill of kind of the ability to walk in and be that partner that the hiring manager needs, or were you trying to unlearn some of those kind of slave mentality or order taker type mentalities in your company?

The latter I would say in all organizations I've been at, it doesn't come natural to a lot of people. Data did not come come natural to me 10 years ago in my career. And I think it's a learned behavior. And when you really see the value of what data can provide in different, whether it's in selling, whether it's in trying to get a proposal through leadership, whether it's putting up an argument to say, I need another 10 recruiters, you need to be able to use that with data. And I think that's a muscle that recruiters are starting to learn to have. I don't think it comes naturally. I think in some recruiters, it doesn't come naturally to be marketeers. I'm a recruiter. I'm going after that person. But there's a big marketing side of what you do as well, which is also very data driven. So are we where I would like us to be from a true talent advisor perspective? Not yet. We've got an initiative this year to really help recruiters become storytellers with the data and know what to look at. In the past, I've run different workshops where I literally pulled apart every page of an insight report and pulled apart, okay, this is what this data means. Here's the story you can tell around that. So, yeah, we'll start walking first and then we'll start a job and then we'll run. But yeah, it's just an ongoing evolution of data as we're talking about prior to jumping on the call. There's so much technology coming in today. Doesn't mean all the data is actually useful. And I would say through the last 15 years, I've gone from not having enough data to having way too much data and then trying to find out how to meet him in the middle. And I'll call myself out on that. I was definitely a data junkie at a number of different companies, and now I guess I'm focusing on what is really going to move the needle. Every bit of data will tell you a story. It's just whether it's relevant at the time.

Yeah. What's the saying? The more you interrogate data, it'll tell you anything you want to hear. I think that experience is certainly not unique to intuitive. For sure, Brad. It's definitely the first time I've heard that story across virtually every organization that we've worked with as social talent. And similarly, any recruiter that I talk to on the street randomly, you know, you do find that the more you build up relationships with hiring managers and the business, that behavior of being the advisor can grow for sure. And I think it builds in people. But, you know, the position of a recruiter versus the leadership team of a business unit or whatever that we're hiring for. You know, there's that very natural kind of misstep or misalignment between our kind of seniority levels as a recruiter. Right. If as a recruiter we, you know, in terms of like the band levels of our company are probably mid level in terms of our seniority in the organization, but we're suddenly working with like band 8 type like really senior people within the organization and our natural position is to go, oh gosh, this person's really senior. I'm just going to sit back and listen to what they have to say because I'm a bit petrified here. And so yeah, we do, we revert back into that like order taker, let me take your order kind of thing, which is, which is not what the business needs. So yeah, practicing that.

Every leader is looking for the same thing. They're looking for some information to make a decision. Yeah, that's what they're looking for. And if we can provide that, and I think we can in many situations, sometimes it's great data, sometimes it's all we have to go once we're making hypothesis from it, which is fine. But that's all executives want is to be able to prove a hypothesis right or prove it wrong.

Yeah, for sure. So I kind of are in this part of the show. We bring in some articles that we have been reading up on this week around this kind of topic of conversation and I think kind of going back to that hypothesis that you're talking about around what might be going wrong, etc. I think there's a lot of hypotheses going on there about why the great resignation is happening, the great reshuffle, the great migration, whatever it is that we're calling it. The great I think it's just the talent evolution really that we just suddenly realized that talent holds more value in other places. Loyalty holds no value. But the interesting to note around like what we try to resolve the problem is a very, very basic thing like candidate experience and employer brand. That very top of the funnel. So the first article that I wanted to bring in was from Forbes from last week called how to attract in demand Talent in a Competitive Market. And this article is a nice short little article. I'll put the link into the chat facility for those of you who are joining us live on LinkedIn or YouTube. And it's in the show notes of the podcast as well. For those of you who want to dive into this. It's quite a neat little article that really Just brings it back to two of the most basic things about how to attract talent, which is your candid experience and your employer brand. There's nothing evolutionary or, or revolutionary in that. And yet hearing it being spoken about as the solution, it kind of feels like a bit of a, I don't know, I kind of feel a bit hard done by. I was hoping and praying for something that's like, oh, here's the missing ingredient. But actually it's just doing. It's going back to that basic of, you know, delivering a human centered candidate experience and a human centered employer brand. How does that fit with you and your hypothesis and certainly what you're seeing in your organization and around filling the top of funnel for your, for your pipelines.

So top of the funnel, quite frankly is the critical element. But attraction really fits all the way through. You know, you're still attracting someone to the company, whether it be before an outbound research engagement happen, to the first touch point with a recruiter, to the interview, all the way through to the offer accept. We are still in attraction mode. You know, we have not signed the offer. We're still there. And I think that's where so many articles and so many stories go off the track as well. They're always talking about attraction from a digital perspective. How do I make the company look sexy to the outside world? Intuitive historically hasn't done a lot of outbound activity marketing wise from a talent perspective. You know, we've just signed up an employment brand vendor that we're going to be building out our EVP and our talent brand. So yeah, give us six months, it'll be a very different conversation out there. But during the time we worked with what we had, we created a new career site. We made it look a lot better. The career site was sexy. It had great information about the company. We've been lucky enough to be on best places to work within Glassdoor for many, many years. So that certainly does help. But I think attraction really, you need to look at attraction all the way through during the beginning of COVID And this is where the data really comes in at all areas of the process. So on the front end, the top of the funnel and I would say the top of the funnel is the career site. And before the career site is, are we attracting the visitors to the career site? Number one, what conversion rates do we have from visitor to apply? Once they apply, how are they then getting through the process so early? I realized that all we had advertising wise or posting wise was LinkedIn. So jobs were either on the career site or they were on LinkedIn. Now, if you didn't know who intuitive was, you wouldn't know to come to the career site. Okay, problem number one. So let's start to focus on SEO. Come back to that one in a second. Then the second part is, okay, now we've got to rely on LinkedIn's algorithms. Well, the LinkedIn jobs algorithms go up and down based on your volume of jobs. When we started, when I started, we had 1200 jobs open. In the beginning of COVID it dropped down to 400. Well, that was a massive ding against the algorithm. So we started seeing less traffic coming over from LinkedIn. So out of that, well, how do you drive more traffic to a career site? You start doing programmatic. You either do PPC or CPA type activities and start to drive traffic back to the company from a programmatic perspective. And that has worked. We started that on April Fool's Day last year and we've seen 100% improvement in traffic back to the career site. So we know exactly the volume coming back. And this is where, I guess at this point, this point of the year, why back to basics is critical because we are now seeing new ats, a whole nearly a year's worth of programmatic advert happening. We're seeing that now through the funnel where we can continue to improve that side of it. Candidate experience all the way through. The last thing I ever want to have is candidates feel like there's a black hole. Talea was challenging from that perspective. We had a lot of candidates that applied to a job and the way Talaya was configured was, is even if the recruiter had dispositioned the candidate, the system did not automatically send the notification saying, holly, thanks for applying, but we've moved on with another candidate. So we had a massive black hole. Those things are being fixed or those things have been fixed from a process perspective. And all of those metrics through there all start to feed in one feeds to the other. Then we start to look at the ratios between step A and step C, whatever that may be, and then we work to how do we improve that. So the top of the funnel is, I think, number one branding activities that can have that. But if you don't have a company external brand that's solid as we don't, there are still plenty of things to do, like programmatic advertising to draw talent back in. Once you're drawing the talent back to the career site and they apply, then you just got to make sure the recruiters are reviewing all the people that apply my view is more so now you use the word before you. And the great resignation, the great reshuffle. It's the great opportunity. What are we doing? We're recruiters. What are we looking for? People are willing to move jobs. That's what we're in. So now we have what was, I think the number that Johnny threw out once before. 67% of the US population is willing to move jobs. Well, guess what? We now have a 67% population. All we've got to do is get in front of them, get above the noise, talk to you and go, are you ready for a change? Do you know about the company? Oh, wow. I never realized that. Let me tell you more. And that's where what I can see in the data, we still have work to do at the top of the funnel. Getting to the apply, getting them through the. Getting them through the apply and getting them into the process. Once human to human touch happens, magic happens here. It does because the story is wonderful. So yeah, I get excited about the story. If anybody gets their hands on a da Vinci, game's off, game's over. Once you get to play with the da Vinci and then you understand how intuitive it is to use for a surgeon. And then when you start to hear the stories of people that have had da Vinci surgery and up and running and out of the hospital in a very short period of time, that's golden. That's really mission led and that's easy to get up every day and get behind that.

Oh, for sure. And for any lay people out there who don't know what we're talking about, just Google the image Da Vinci peeling the skin off a grape and you will, you will be like, oh, my word, that is remarkable that surgical procedures have. And that was like 10 years ago, by the way.

Yeah.

Since then I can only imagine. Gosh. Yeah. Like digital health has been such a cool, fascinating industry that thankfully we're all benefiting massively from in this pandemic. I think it's, it's really remarkable, but I want to kind of stick with that candidate experience piece around attraction all the way through and perhaps throw a bit of a curveball at you. Brad, apologies in advance, but I think we miss a step as recruiters and talent acquisition about candidate experience following all the way through, including the employee lifecycle. Not that candidate experience and employee experience are purely the same thing, but when we try to re engage employees who are looking for opportunities inside our organization, we kind of forget about the candidate experience experience of our existing employees. Or we don't have a well designed process that can that actually gets them into that top of funnel to look at opportunities in our organization. How is that? Does that seem the case for you or have you done anything different when it comes to their internal ability?

I'm a hard taskmaster and my whole teams and always will tell you to tell me that. Have we improved it? Yes. Is it perfect? No. And I don't think there's always Nirvana will never really get there because we'll always be looking for the next best thing. During COVID we did the same thing. We had no easy way for employees to be able to find jobs. It was again an old clunky taleo system. So we did, we put in an internal ability platform that allowed employees to easily now see what jobs within the organization exist, be able to set job alerts so they can come and get them. They can refer people to them. As to the candidate experience, I would say that is an internal talent pool is no different to an external talent pool. Quite frankly, if that internal talent pool is loose in the seat, it is more important to be really close to that internal talent because it won't take very long for them to flip the internal switch to external and then they'll leave the company. We've toyed around with having dedicated recruiters focus on internal talent only and I'll say we haven't been able to nail it because. Because a lot of times you might as a recruiter open a requisition. It's open publicly and internally and the best talent may be external or internal and you never really know until you get through the interview process. So have it an internal only recruiter. We just haven't been able to crack that nut yet because it would have to be a discipline of every organization and having a handful of recruiters knowing every single role across the company would be challenging. You know, we're toying around with the ideas of if it gets to a certain point and we think that the internal candidate is going to be the successful candidate, well then maybe we can flick it over to more junior recruiter to finish off that process. But again we bump into issues of that disjoints the candidate experience. The recruiter's been the single contact with that employee or the candidate all the way through. That feels a little bit jarring, which we haven't done it. But we've, we've created a better process to ensure that recruiters know when someone's applying that they're internal so they can see that as internal or it's referral or it's a source candidate.

Yeah, for sure. The first question in a job interview. So why would you like to work at intuitive? You know that doesn't really work when they already work here. And yet I guarantee a hiring manager has asked that question of an internal candidate in your organization. Well, maybe not specifically an Intuitive, but certainly in any listener's organization. Just assume that that has been asked and that needs to stop. You know that we, we very much need to understand source of hire or source of candidate for. For job interviews and be that bit more responsive and adaptive in that candidate experience. For sure. So you're mentioning about job descriptions as well actually. And that kind of leads us very nicely into the second article that we wanted to review today, which was from Fast Company, which is seven things Companies get wrong when writing job descriptions. I found this article quite useful and I agree with those seven things. However, it does say that job ads should be redone so that they engage rather than turn off prospective employees. And I think this one, I, I don't know. I'm a bit on the fence about this one. Where do you sit on, on that particular piece of advice? This should be only there to engage prospective talent, not turn it off for our organization. Where, where does that, where do you fall on. On that fence?

I fit into the category of this has been an industry problem forever. Do we ever get to the perfect job description? I haven't seen one. I've played over the years with different types of ways of doing it. You know the things they talk in that article about the length of. The length of the JD I think that's right. You know we're toying around with at the moment. Yeah. Our company, our company blurb is really long. Do we shorten that we're playing around with trying to configure in the system. Do we move it from the top to the bottom? Is talent today conditioned? Where they get to a page and just scroll down to the second paragraph because they know the first paragraph is just going to be the blah blah blah. So I think for me job descriptions are about AB testing. You never really know what's going to happen in the job description. My team in Europe have played around with looking at different types of SEO. Really thinking about the title of a. Yeah, too many times you call a job what the job is called internally linked to the compensation system. Yeah. Software engineer too means nothing to the outside world. Or a da Vinci technical associate as a sales role doesn't mean anything to the outside world, call it what it is. So the team in Europe and the US have played around with just different titles to see what has worked within the job description, to at least get someone there. Because job descriptions and as an FDA regulated organization, it is even more challenging. This is the first time I've been in a medical environment and had to have to deal with some of the FDA rules and regulations. It's even more challenging when it comes to job description. So that's a topic unto itself. But I'd always say ab test out, see what's working, try and reduce it a few times, as short as you can. We've played around with an external party that would come in and interview a hiring manager to try and condense the nuggets of excitement. It's been hit and miss because yeah, that person doesn't necessarily know the company. And I'll be the first one to say I'm not the best writer in the world, I don't have skill set. But I've always preferred to see job descriptions that sort of talk to me versus talk to the role. Here's what you would be doing and putting in that first person. So I think for me my answer is it's still we're still testing, we're still seeing what can work and what can't. Every role is going to be different. Which is why I think the big thing for us, as soon as someone sees a job, they see something they may be interested in. We want to get them in the system. We've made the apply process super, super slippery. So once they've started, they're in, they're done and then that gives us the opportunity to have that first human to human interaction. Then that's where the magic happens.

Yeah, for sure. And we've had some wonderful advice from two previous speakers over the course of the last two years, I suppose on job descriptions on the Social Town platform. Certainly one is Katrina Kibben and the other is Dave Hazlehurst from PH Creative, which is a creative agency. But Katrina Gibbon with three years media kind of specialized in job descriptions. And just kind of one thing to keep in mind around that A B testing when you're looking at your analytics, which again, not every recruiter has access to the analytics on the back end of how many people have come to this webpage and how many people have viewed it over and over and over again. But that particular statistic, how many people have viewed this job ad over and over again is like gold dust. If you can identify. Yeah, for sure. If you can identify that. Actually the average view rate of this job ad is four times. You know, that you have hooked people in or they're just, they can't get enough of that job ad. They're like, I want to go back and read that because actually that just feels really exciting. Average time on page as well. People kind of keep it open on their phone and they on, on a lunch break, like, oh, I'm just going to read that a little bit more again, like that's when you know that you've kind of got somebody really thinking about what life could be like for them here. Exactly. As you're saying, what's it going to mean for me as a candidate to actually do this job, to be the salesperson for this piece of technology that's then going to positively impact people's lives? You know, or translate that back down to your own organization and what your purpose is and what people are, how they're going to contribute to that. But I mean, in terms of where.

The other thing I'll just jump on that is when we can't have the perfect job description that really articulates everything we'd like. The other thing we've done is we've created landing pages that are specific to an organization that goes one level deeper into what it does. We did that for, for our veterans community, our sales community. Because we know part of the sales model is you bring in, I'll say you bring in a junior burger and you spit them out, a Big Mac. Because there's amazing training programs that come through as a. I'll just say it's a junior salesperson. They go to a massive six months worth of training and then the career path is perfect. You can't say that in a job description. You can't get that words in there. So we built a landing page that the recruiters and sources use as an outreach tool to come in and say, okay, these are the different types of jobs. Again, it was originally targeted the veteran community because vets have a lot of great leadership. And when you're interacting with a surgeon, you've got to have some gravitas about you to be able to interact with a surgeon that's doing some important stuff to the human race. And that's the way to, I guess, adjunct to a job description to be able to tell more of a story that you. Because that's still an intermediary story before I can get a human interaction. So see a job description. Let me. You want to see more. Get into the job. The landing page from there. Yep, let's. Let's learn more about it. And then you know what, maybe you are willing to pick up the phone or reply to that email from the recruiter to have a conversation. Yeah, for sure. That's the goal. I've got every, every interaction and I'd love to get to the point where I have a metric that it's a one to one. I'll aim for the world, aim for the moon and settle with where we get to, but then continually improve. It is every outreach becomes an interaction of some point, whether it's for today or whether it's tomorrow. And we talked about the funnel before. I have a mindset of the talent pool is not infinite. It is not LinkedIn isn't growing exponentially every single year. It's just not. So once you have a clear view of the talent that you know you want to target, the goal then is just to know who that talent is. And if you know who that talent is and you can now extract that talent into a system now it's within your four walls. Now it's just a process of going through and rediscovering the talent that's already engaged, that's already applied within the system, maybe in the CRM and you don't have to change the top of the funnel. You know, we just. The first two, the first time getting my full leadership together a couple of weeks ago was we really focused on if we just moved our screen or our new to screen or screen to interview ratios by 5% we would hit our hiring targets and we would not change anything on the top of the funnel. We would have the same number of applies. It just means be more efficient within your funnel of conversion from step to step. Then the rest of it plays out. We wouldn't have to go and do more sourcing because that's what we're doing now. We're trying to touch more people to get more people in the funnel. We need more. We need more. Yeah, Scotty, we need more power. Focus on the process of getting those we have through and find those nuggets in the system and find those nuggets in the process and make sure they're rediscovered at every single point. That's where I think we're going to be. That's where we're focusing. Because the great opportunity is to make sure we can get in front of that talent. And if we are in front of that talent now and we know exactly how many people hit our career site, we've just got to get all of those to interact with us to want to come and be here.

Yeah, 100%. I can't disagree with that in the slightest. Focusing on those really, really, really critical pieces of conversion around around candidate screening to job interview as well and re engaging in particular job families. So there's even organizations like intel for example which completely revamped it recruiting funnel so there wasn't a throughput, it was a, it was a loop, an infinite loop. So. Exactly. So in fact you, rather than applying to a specific requisition, you apply to a job family and you would always, even if you weren't selected for that specific rec, you would always be in the job family. So that when another opportunity came around, which was always the case, they were always hiring similar to yourselves. They would have a ready pool of candidates that they were engaged, they were able to drip feed. And it really made a significant difference in to their candidate experience for sure because more humans got to interact with one another and their, their actual success rate at closing talent too because you know, it wasn't that negative experience of I had a reasonable okay interview experience etc. Such and such organization, but I've never heard from them again in my life. You know, if you regularly had that relationship that would be different.

I think that, I think that's where technology really plays in. Like technology, you know, shouldn't be there just because it's a shiny object. It should be able to drive productivity. Now if you've got a couple of million names or contacts, whether you call them applicants, candidates, prospects, whatever you want to call them of how they came in there, how do you ever find them again? Like yeah, we don't have the Rolodexes anymore to remember. Oh, I remember Holly, she was great. Where is she? So it all comes down to rediscovery. I still struggle, as probably most of my peers do, is recruiters get a requisition, they tend to always go outside. They start off with LinkedIn or they start off in a sourcing tool because a lot of the technologies don't allow you to rediscover what you already have in your own four walls. And that's where I'm excited. Having a new applicant tracking system in. We're now able to start to bolt on best of breed applications around that that can help us rediscover not just rediscover talent or discover talent externally in the cloud, but how do we discover talent that's already within our system? CRM, ATS that's already engaged, already understands the brand, have Already been back a couple of times to see. Based on what you said before, that's more of a captive audience. That's still a muscle I think most organizations need to bleed into. We're still one of those that we're still coming to grips with a new system. Teams are still getting used to using a new system, but we've got to that point where the momentum is going. That flywheel has started to spin and it's spinning faster, and that's golden from a TA leadership perspective.

Yeah, that's exciting. That's really great. We have absolutely whizzed through these 45 minutes. I have no idea how that went so fast because I have about 12 other questions I want to ask you, Brad. However, I'm restricted to one more question, which is to beg you for one piece of advice. So, as you know, we compile a short list of great pieces of advice that we have learned from all of our guests. So would you like to add something to our short list? And by what I mean, please do add something to our shortest of advice. Either something that has been given to you or that you would like to share with others. And it can be related to this particular topic or it can be, you know, something about life. I'll leave it to you.

The one that always jumps out from professional perspective is my last boss at Cisco is a guy named Don McLaughlin. And Don built manufacturing at Cisco. Well, Don moved into talent acquisition. And when Don moved into ta, we thought, what are we going to learn from a manufacturing guy? Like what Don taught us about supply and demand before HR even knew what the term was. Don talked about, if you can't measure it, you can't fix it. And those two things have just stuck with me since whatever it was, probably 2007. And that's always the advice to anybody at any level in the organization. If you can't measure something, you can't make it better because you don't know where you are. And I would say to anybody, don't set goals just to make. We've got to improve by 25%. No, just set incremental growth quarter on quarter, get better every single time and continue to measure. That's to leadership in measuring different aspects of the business. It's the same for recruiters. Like you said before, if I'm a recruiter, we actually build a dashboard that we call the dossier, and it's one page where it can be used for a recruiter to see, plug in their name, and here's all the information about what they have open what they've closed, what their fill rates are, what their funnel looks like. We have a separate one for diversity for them, but that gives them their view of the data for their world that they're measured against. And if we want to, you could just go in and plug a manager's name and say, here's the manager. That doesn't happen unless you can measure what you have. So I always come down to, if you can't measure it, you can't fix it. And TA is a constant evolution because every month our job gets. I won't say harder, it gets different because something else will be thrown at it. And if you can't measure where you came from, you don't know where the areas of improvements are. And things like timing status become a very, very valuable aspect to measure. If you think about the time it takes in the whole recruiting cycle, the time to slate talent and the time to interview are the two biggest chunks of time. Everything else is like minimal days. But those two process steps are big chunks of time. If you've got an interview process that takes two to three weeks, you can take three days out of that, a week out of that. Well, now you've just changed your time to fill by potentially a week. If you can take your time to slate to the business down from 21 days, down to, I would like to say 24 hours, big chunk of time out. So then again, how do you improve time to slate? It comes down to how do you bubble up the talent that you already know? And this is where technology can feed into that. I open up a wreck with AI today, and I'm still, I'm pushing my vendors to be able to get this. I open up a wreck. You know what the wreck is? You know what the database is? You match them, give it to me in 24 hours. Here's the first slate of calibration candidate. That's where I come back to if you can't measure it, you can't fix it. And you've got to be measuring lots of process steps all along the way, for sure.

Yeah. Hence getting your new ats where you actually have the data. Right?

We can do that. Exactly.

Yeah. I love it. And actually it's my own husband would say measure twice, cut once, as any good engineer would do. Brad, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been, as I said, far too fast. I still have a load of questions when I ask you, but that'll have to be for another day. Sadly, it is. Our time has come at the end of our shortlist. Thank you so much for your, for your warm advice and for reaffirming. Getting back to basics is not a, it's, you know, it's not diminutive. It is not, you know, reducing ourselves to not doing anything highfalutin or far too innovative. In fact, I think the innovation is really in just clarifying that the things like the main thing is keep the main thing the main thing. So Brad, thank you so much for that. I really enjoyed that conversation and I hope you all did too. Join us for, for next week at the same time next week, which will be 4pm UK Ireland time where I live. Or like Brad's time where he is 8:00am Los Angeles time. It's about 11:00 o' clock in the morning New York time for this live conversation. Or of course it'll be recorded and put onto the podcast afterwards as well. And then also we have our Social Talent Live event coming up on May 5th. And this one you have to pre register for. When you pre register, of course, you can join us on the live zoom call, but also be able to get recordings afterwards as well if you can't make it for the whole thing. This is a really, really wonderful event that's on for about 90 minutes and my goodness, do we talk about an awful lot in those 90 minutes. There'll be panel discussions, fireside chats, and a huge amount of interaction as well with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of your recruiting peers. I would very much encourage you to register for that event. It is on engaging and retaining top talent in 2022. So a hugely topical area. So to register for that event, go to south socialtalent.com live and that event will be on on May 5th. It's a Thursday at 4pm London time, which of course, as we just said is 11:00am Los Angeles time. Please pre register for it because it those, those seats do fill up fast and we'd love to see you there. Thank you so much. I will see you in a week's time and if not, I'll see you on May 5th. Thank you everybody. Have a wonderful day. Bye.