Better Hiring Managers with John Vlastelica

Foreign. Welcome, welcome, welcome. It's the 3rd of June, it's a Wednesday, it's 4pm here in Ireland. It's 8am on the west coast of the United States. Coming up on, I think 11am on the East coast of the US which means it's time for the shortlist with myself, Johnny Campbell of Social Talent. So I'm really excited this week about our guest. Our guest is a good friend of mine. We've been working together for a number of years. He's one of, if not the best speaker I know on the circuit. He always tops the conferences. It kills me inside because if I ever do really well at a conference and John's on the bill, I know I'm only getting to second place, but this is a man with a huge amount of knowledge to impart. He's going to teach us today how, how to make our hiring managers not suck, which I think is a pretty good aspiration. Wow. It would be amazing to make them amazing, but to make them not suck would be a good start. I think you'd agree with that. Don't forget though, we want to get your questions, we want to get some discussion going. So please join in the chat on LinkedIn. We're going to take your live questions and comments here. Myself and John will, and trust me, this is a rare opportunity to get to ask John questions directly. So do pump them into the. Into the chat. The man is full of knowledge about hiring managers, interviewing, recruiting. He's got stories that you know you won't even believe. But trust me, there's learning in all of them. So do jump in to the questions. If you can't watch the whole show or if you want to check out any more of our shows, go to socialtalent.com the shortlist, where you can register to be notified of future shows or check out any of our previous shows or see who's coming next. But without further ado, let me hand over to our guest today, the fabulous John Basilica. John, I'm going to let you introduce yourself and explain why you are the man in the hot seat today and why you are here to impart such amazing knowledge on the world.

Sure, yeah. Keep your expectations reasonable. My name is John Vlastilika. I lead a consulting and training firm called Recruiting Toolbox. We are based in Seattle, Washington in the US but we've done work in about 20 countries. We do work on the consulting side that's focused on helping companies improve their strategy and process with a ton of work around defining what good looks like so what makes a great candidate a great candidate for an organization? And then we're probably best known for our training. We do a lot of hiring manager interview training, we do a lot of talent advisor recruiter training as well. And I spent about half my career on the corporate side, so I was the head of tech recruiting at Amazon, the head of recruiting at Expedia and come out of that kind of practitioner background. So I have this kind of low tolerance for HR bullshit and love my job. I just have the best job in the world.

So John, I shared an insight recently with somebody who was asking me about what kind of training or learning and knowledge are people looking for during the pandemic. And we run our stats, we look at our charts every week in terms of what content goes to number one and stuff. And often it's just people watch what's topical. Interestingly, over the last three months, the most consistent new top 10 program we've seen, which was a very popular course, always has been, but in the top five actually has been your program on being a talent advisor. That's been top of the charts for the last three months with us always in the top five. And it's not always in the top five in a normal period. So I just thought it was interesting that in these kind of crazy times, people's teams around the world, thousands of recruiters seem to be going now is the time to learn how to partner with my hiring manager. So yeah, I want to share that. I think that's why we thought it'd be topical to talk about this. It's not something that is going to be something just about COVID 19 a pandemic, quite the opposite. I think this has always been an important topic, but for some reason, and maybe you'll have an opinion on this, people seem to be prioritizing it right now, which is which. Which I'm sure you think is a good thing.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah. And it's, it is a timeless topic. You know, it's interesting when I talk to heads of talent acquisition, I'm sure as you do too Johnny, and you talk about their goals for the year or, or you know, what they're. They're kind of charged to do by their chro or the business. I would say, you know, 90% of the TA leaders that I talk to have had and continue to have a goal to elevate the recruiter role to something more than just kind of filling recs and managing the process. I mean it's a perennial topic that I think is the kind of thing that when you do maybe have a little slow time and you are looking at developing yourself, particularly if sourcing isn't the big challenge for your organization right now, I think it's an obvious place to invest some time.

So before we get into the meat, let's have a check of this week's news. Niall, let's roll the news.

Foreign.

Article that we came across, John was in Forbes last week and it talked about how the coronavirus is changing hiring and recruiting going forward. Now I'm going to focus on the word here in this article. Changing. I don't know if anyone else on the call or the broadcast has read this article. Do check it out because I'd be interested to hear your opinion. But I read this John, and I just don't see what's changing. What about you?

It's interesting, you know, there certainly are some dynamics changing in the kind of supply demand dynamics, right? I mean some organizations have not only, you know, cut back hiring, but have laid folks off. We have unemployment at record highs in many markets. So I think there is maybe a bit of a shift in the kind of power balance between employer employee that is more a function of a recession than a function of the kind of coronavirus. Obviously there's a lot of changes when everyone's working from home and there's more demand as people experience the benefits of it. You know, I think that you're getting a lot more questions from candidates to employers saying, hey, is this something I can, I can do full time or do I need to be close to headquarters or this office? And I think there's going to be some things that drastically change around the way we think about compensation, the way we pay people. I think there are some changes that are going to happen, but a lot of those changes are just an acceleration of what was already in place. It's not like it's out of nowhere. There's all these things that have radically changed the way we recruit. There's still critical work to be done around your evp. There's still critical work to be done around defining what it looks like for your company. Really making sure you're focused on diversity, inclusion, all these kinds of things. There's a long list. They continue to be really important to CEOs and heads of HR and heads of talent acquisition.

But I thought was interesting and you said you're dead right. Lots of things of course are changing. Recession being probably the major impact. This article is kind of sole premise was that there's been a massive shift in the principles. And one piece that I latched onto, right. Maybe it was just me, John, it was referencing a piece of research from jobvite. Right. And we all remember Job Job used to a social recruiting survey, like years ago. And it was like everyone in the industry read it and then became the recruiting survey. And then, I don't know, I don't think anyone reads anymore, right. But Forbes do. But they referenced this and they said, you know, in this new world, employees are going to. Are going to focus on three core things that are going to be important when they look for jobs. Their enumeration, the values of the company and the culture. And I'm looking at this going, really, they're the new things people look at. Renumeration, values and culture.

Right, right. Never mattered before. Suddenly it's the new thing. Right? Yeah, yeah, I do, I do think that's, you know, it's really hard. People go to experts and I'll put that in quotes, right. You know, for what's changing. And you feel compelled to say something because you're getting interviewed, right. You're going to be in Forbes or whatever. So I think it's hard, you know, people can't predict the future. I do think there is a shift. You know, you and I were chatting a little bit. You know, the values have always been important, but maybe there's going to be a closer look at what those values are now. I think there probably is a little bit of a swing. People that were feeling comfortable that if I don't like my job, I can walk out the door and get a job across the street with a company just as good. Might be a little more focused on kind of stability of the company. And maybe this is a place I need to be prepared to kind of stay at for several years, which also means I might be a little more focused on values and career opportunities and culture and some other things. So I think there's, I think the weighting of things might have changed, but I don't think that things have changed. Right.

Yeah, they should have interviewed you for that article. Which brings me on to our second news item now. Our second news Item is from LinkedIn this week. So use the hiring manager maturity model to build a culture of recruiting. John, have you read this article?

I saw this article. I think it's fantastic. It is probably the best article I've read this week. Yeah, it's absolutely.

So, John, you wrote this article and this is. I saw this as one of the top trending articles and if anyone wants to check it out, go to recruiting toolbox.com hmm. In caps for the last four letters. Hmm. In caps. I encourage you to read this and encourage you to sign up for the document and research that John links to on this article. But talk to me, John, about this maturity model. Why does the world need another maturity model? And why managers?

Oh, geez. Yeah, you know, there's so many maturity models out there, I would say. I'll tell you what's interesting is there is such a focus on, you know, fixed recruiting and the role of the recruiter. And great recruiting depends on great recruiters. And there's definitely opportunities for all of us to step up and be better at our craft, but I think there is not enough of a voice in the world for the role of the hiring manager. And I would say if there's one thing that I've talked about consistently in the 20 years I've been speaking at conferences or doing, you know, doing my consulting work for the last 15 years, it's how do we make our hiring managers better? And when we work with companies and we've worked with all kinds of interesting companies, you know, we see a bell curve. You know, there's some hiring managers that are just absolutely horrible. There's a bunch that are in the middle that I think actually want to do the right thing. And then there's some that are just these talent champions. Amazing, amazing hiring managers that aren't just amazing because they get great talent. They literally make me better as a recruiter. Like, they make my job better. They make me better, they push me harder. And so one of the things that I felt like was missing in our marketplace was a way to kind of talk about the different kinds of hiring managers that exist and then more specifically, better. How do we get them to be better at their craft? When they're better at their craft, everything improves. Speed, quality, diversity, and my happiness as a recruiter. I mean, I. I loved going into my job as a corporate recruiting guy knowing I got to work with people that were smarter than me, that were amazing at their craft, that would push me. I give credit, and I don't mean to take away from. I've had some pretty good managers in my day, but relative to the kind of hiring manager learning I received, I got very little from my direct manager. I got almost everything that shaped the way I think about hiring from working with just really, really smart, effective hiring managers. And so I think there's an opportunity for us as an industry to reflect a little bit on a piece that maybe only gets addressed through interview Training or unconscious bias training. We just kind of throw stuff to our hiring managers and say, go to this training. I don't think we're really stopping to think about how do we help our hiring managers just be better and make that a goal of a talent advisor, make that a goal of a recruiter, not something that just the training department does. Or you go online and watch some training and you get better, but we're actually going to hold you accountable for being better. Does that make sense?

It does. So you list a bunch of attributes on kind of four different pillars of maturity in terms of where a hiring manager can be. But if you were to say, and maybe this is an unfair question, right, but if you were to recommend one really important pillar to kind of start with, if you've got hiring managers in your business that you think they are more on the suck end of the scale, right. What would be one of the most critical things to do to get them on the journey to being these super duper hiring managers? Like, cause if you give this to loads of things they could be doing right and a lot of people might go, right, that's like 10 things I gotta fix. Like, where do you start, John?

So I think one of the things that frustrates me in the area I'd probably start with is a lot of hiring managers when they describe their work. You know, if I'm an engineering manager, I build software that helps consumers do X, right? If I'm a marketing manager, I'm all about SEO SEM. I'm trying to drive more traffic to our site and convert leads, whatever that is. How they describe their day job. Very, very few managers describe their day job as kind of including recruiting. They see recruiting as something that lives outside their day job. It's this over here thing, and it's, I'm doing you a favor, Johnny. When I spend time on, you know, recruiting, it's something I'm doing that's extra. And so one of the things that I think the most important thing we can do probably to start is define what are our expectations of hiring managers? Like, when we go inside organizations and we do an audit of their recruiting process and we do an audit of their strategies, we rarely see expectations being articulated back to the business around what we expect of them. Instead, we see all this NPS survey feedback, you know, how am I doing as a recruiter? You know, what are the top five things we need to be fixing to serve the needs of the business? And that's fine. You should get feedback. You know, you should Absolutely. Get feedback from the business. But my question is, have we defined expectations well enough so that hiring managers have goals? Hiring managers are measured. Do our competency models, do the way we define what looks like for a hiring manager include hiring, you know, people? Managers can be successful in so many companies and still be shit at hiring. That seems broken. How can you be a successful engineering manager, a marketing manager, sales manager, finance manager, if you're not good at hiring? And a lot of people say, well, of course you can, that's a core part of the job. I'm like, prove it. You know, where, where in your performance management process, where in your competency model, where in your career leveling guidelines? Where are you actually embedding success in recruiting as part of a hiring manager's job? And so I think we can sometimes be enablers of something that frustrates us, which is, you know, hiring managers should step up. And I'm like, define the expectation first and then give feedback. That's probably a great place to start.

So it's funny, that reminds me of a customer I was talking to last week and we were talking about, you know, learning is our business and trying to get people to learn and through learning they can develop. And we had feedback from one of their senior managers and the senior manager said, listen, I'm not measured on my team's learning, so I'll be honest with you, I'm not going to ever care about it. And it was just so disappointing to hear. But so it's honest, right? Because to your point, if the person's not going to be measured on it, sorry, I'm just not going to. The average hiring manager or person is just not going to prioritize that. Like unless somebody's going to hold me accountable to go, you're at this, you need to get to this. Where are we? People aren't going to focus on that. They're going to look at the KPIs that their boss is going to beat them up over. Exactly. They'll do everything they can around that and that's the end of it. So I've got a great question, actually. It kind of follows on a bit from our last point here. Right. And I'm going to mispronounce this. So my apologies. Iwa Zacek is asking, do you have tips on how to work with distrustful hiring managers when you're jointly delivering on a hiring goal or as a team of recruiters? This situation poses different challenges than when you have a one to one relationship. So it's two things Here I think she's getting at. Or he. My apologies. One is, you know, you have a team of recruiters as part of your, part of a team and you have a distrust trustful hiring managers. Have you come across that before? What would your advice be to kind of work through that?

You know, it's interesting when hiring managers distrust recruiters, you have to, you have to really diagnose why. And I will say one of the things we do to kind of hurt our credibility sometimes is we're not actually bringing enough insights into the conversation. So, for example, I get frustrated by articles in Forbes or the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times or something that talk about hiring from kind of not experts or that highlight what Google is doing or something as this kind of best practice thing. And a lot of our hiring managers are reading those articles. They're picking up on insights that may not reflect the reality for our organizations. And so when we come in and say, hey, this is actually going to be a really hard job for us to fill, and then they look at us and go, but I just read an article saying unemployment's at an all time high. What the hell are you talking about? This is going to be hard. And they feel like there's a disconnect there. And then we don't counter that with our own internal insights, our own external insights. So a lot of I think the opportunity for us in recruiting is to think of our jobs. How do we educate hiring managers so that they're more aware of market realities? I think the mistrust comes from the sense that, you know, either one, we're not in tune with the market, which of course, we're way more in tune than the hiring manager is probably, but shame on us for not sharing that. Or sometimes the mistrust comes because there's this sense that, you know, as a recruiter, I'm just trying to get a butt in the seat. Like I'm being measured on hires per month, I'm being measured on time to fill, I'm being measured on diversity or something. And I'm just pushing really hard on the hiring manager to make a decision or to do something that maybe she doesn't feel like is the right thing to do for her business and that creates mistrust. So those are probably two things I would say I see most frequently is root issues when there's a lot of tension between the two. The third thing, you know, is sometimes just in recruiting, we're just not doing our jobs. Like, you know, it's really cool, we're Quick to blame the hiring manager for being unrealistic or something. But a lot of times I have recruiters that are either so busy or just don't have the skills to go out and headhunt the talent the manager wants. And so the hiring manager gets frustrated with us and just starts to not so much distrust us, but they just have lost confidence that we're going to be able to get them what they need. And so they start doing what I call end arounds, right? They send, they go get their own search firm involved or they, you know, they do something outside of our process because they don't, they just don't trust that we're going to be there.

And that trust thing is really important. I remember I had a session with a team of recruiters and we talked about, you know, the challenge. You mentioned hiring managers. How do you make them suck less? They're like, yeah, yeah, those hiring managers, they got to suck less. They're going to work with me better. And I was like, how do we get there? Well, they need to do this, that the other. They need to. And I'm not saying that. Great. Grace has put a comment in here. Grace Kenyan Joel put in a comment that successful hiring managers push to be part of the conversation. Yes, they do. But I think what can be misconstrued from a comment like that is that you think, well, if they do this, it'll all work. And I've always had the belief that it's up to us to earn the trust. Like for you to partner with somebody, they have to think you're a credible partner and don't assume that, you know, they'll do all the work. You're, you know, I think a lot of recruiters I know, unfortunately have sat back and said, I'm brilliant, waiting for the hiring manager to realize this. And as soon as they realize that they need to get involved, this is all going to work. And you mentioned, obviously, insights and you mentioned the market knowledge and etc. I think it's incumbent on us to go earn that trust. Mistrust comes from just, I don't know who you are. I don't believe you're a credible expert. Whatever. I'm going to go to, as you said, my own people or whatever. Whereas if you're kind of proactively saying, I'm going to go and earn your trust, I'm going to bring you insights, I'm going to help you make decisions that are more informed, that are bringing my level of expertise to the equation so we can do this together. I think, you know, what's lost is that you have to recognize someone has to go first in becoming a partner. And I know about you. I think it's incumbent on the recruiter to go first. You know, we should be doing this. We're the experts in hiring. We need to go first. And then you get a bit trust back and then you get more trust you earn. It's a back and forth. It isn't perfect and it isn't. We'll all come together, come by and all solve it in the one day.

Yeah, I 100% agree. And you know, I get frustrated too. I think sometimes people hear me go off on a rant about some, you know, shitty hiring manager is not doing their job. And I gotta say, I always hold the mirror up first. Like, what have I done to educate that, you know, this man? My managers are so unrealistic. My managers want to, you know, get this quality and pay this salary or my managers think this job's going to get filled in this many days. But it's really this, you know, I hear that kind of stuff and I go, okay, I get it. Like, that is frustrating for you. Like, I have empathy for you for sure. But let's talk. Have you educated your hiring manager? Have you talked to hiring managers about the market before they have an urgent open rec? Or is the first time you're talking to them about market insights after they had a rec open? And by the way, by the time a rec is opened, the hiring managers probably had the need for 5, 10, 15 days. The minute they thought they were going to terminate someone, the minute the VP told them, yeah, I'm thinking about releasing another head for you to add to your team. In their mind, that's when the clock started. Then they got to go through all the jumping the hoops, the bullshit of getting the wreck approved and blah, blah, blah. And then we have our kickoff meeting and you know, by the time we meet with them, they're ready to roll. Now is not the time. You kind of miss the window if this is the first time you're ever talking about the market. So I don't say shame on us like, everything is our fault, Johnny, which I don't think you're implying. Like, it's not like all, but we need to start. Like, we need to really step up. We talk about, you know, being more proactive in our craft. How do we get ahead of that so that we're not, you know, helping hiring managers be better only after they have a rack open, right? And So I think that is, I think it's totally true. I always say start with us first. What have I done? What, what do I, what's in my control? And I don't think hiring managers suck. Like I said at the start, I've learned more from hiring managers than anyone else in my career. Hiring managers may be better at my job and I think most can be fantastic, but the onus is on us. They're not just going to be better because of what I said at the beginning. You know, here's my day job. Recruiting is out here. We have to bring that into their day job and then help them be successful.

Yeah, I think the time is right. Like if you look at, I've got a comment here, a question from Naveen Venkat, who's asking, is gig staffing going to be the next big thing across the world? Would you see there would be a change. You've also got other questions that are similar in terms of what are the big differences that COVID 19 is going to bring? Now, I'm not going to directly answer Naveen's question here. I think it's not necessarily the topic we're talking about right now, but it highlights to me the fact that many of us are just not sure what's changed. And we mentioned that article at the start where Forbes are saying everything's changed. Has it changed? People are going, gig workers are the new thing. Are they the new thing? Well, we're all going to hire contractors. Really. Everyone's going virtual. Is that true? I think hiring managers probably today have more questions and more confusion about the talent market than they ever had. Right. And so if you're ever going to have open ears as a hiring manager to work with a recruiter, now is the time where a recruiter goes, calm down. Listen, I've been on all the webinars, I've heard all the John Blasilika speak about this stuff. I've gone on some sessions, I've looked at some economic data. Here's my opinion and here's why. And that will calm you down. I think you got, you could probably have an open door right now as a recruiter for a hiring manager to go tell me what's going on in the world, because I just don't have a clue. You know, many, many of us recruiters who do this full time are not sure.

Right.

So hiring managers, you only do this occasionally. It's got to be a minefield for them right now.

I think so, yeah. And I do think we have to Bring more point of view. You know, there's a lot of, there's, there's a lot of data we have access to. And I get frustrated when I, when I sit in on a recruiter hiring manager conversation and there's not enough of a point of view or we're not addressing the root issue. And so, for example, Johnny, one of the things that frustrates me is a hiring manager will have one role to fill and we bring in all this high level macro data about the economy in the UK or the economy in India and we're talking at macro level and the manager's like, I just need to fill one rep. Why are you talking to me about 36 million people unemployed? Why are you talking to me about trends with baby boomers and Gen X and what I need to fill one rack? Right. And so I think sometimes we have to check our elevation when we're having these educational conversations like what does this manager need to hear? And the closer you get to one rec, the less the macro data matters and the more the internal data matters. Like what have been our best sources of hire? Should we go contract, should we go internal, should we go external? Like those things are really more kind of company specific or rec specific. And I'd like to see more of that, more of that thinking. But to go to the point about India and the gig economy, I do think something that is shifting, fundamentally shifting, not because of COVID 19 is, you know, hiring managers are starting to look or think about talent. And whether you're full time employed or contractor consulting or whether you're externally hired or internally developed, managers are thinking less and less in the language of recruiting, which is recs and resumes. And I think that there's a shift going on that is absolutely going to change what it means to be a talent advisor. And I get a little frustrated by this because I feel like there's already a lot on our plates as recruiters. But I think we're going to have to get a lot smarter around alternatives to FTE hires, alternatives to external FT hires in particular. And I spent a lot of my career pushing back on HR leaders that wanted to put, you know, internal mobility on my plate. I'm like, no, no, no, my recruiters are external headhunters. We bring talent from the outside into the company. That internal mobility shit, that's HR's job. That's not, I don't do that. That's not, that's not me. You know, where we're recruiting outside in, that's what we do. Now, I think 2020, but it's not just 20, 20, 20, 19, 18. I mean, for the last several years, that's not how leaders think about their talent needs. They think about them and you know, Build, borrow, buy and bots. Right. I mean, they're thinking about all the different opportunities out there. And if we're only in the kind of buy mindset, we're only thinking about bringing outside talent in, I think we're going to really miss the opportunity to, to have a strong voice when we talk about talent strategy. I just, I don't know how we're going to do it because we're going to just have our blinders on and be too focused just on external hiring. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think I spoke with this at Talent Connect two years ago and talked about that concept and talked about Build, borrow, buy bots as well and kind of saying that we're going to see this move and then not a whole lot change in two years. A little bit. Right. To your point around COVID 19, if anything, it's just been accelerant of things. I've heard so many large, I mean, large enterprises, a couple hundred thousand employees plus who are going to be asking their recruiting teams over the next few months to recruit internally for the first time. Not go. No, it's not. It's not HR's job anymore. You got a head hunt. Get on LinkedIn, source with company name us. You know, look for the skills and the talent. You have their phone number in our directory. You're going to deal with their manager first because you got to prep them. But we're going to go do this. This is because we don't want to be only looking externally. We're going to make the most of the people we have right now because an event like this forces people to start accelerating these things. So I do think that's going to be. And that puts more pressure on that relationship piece. Right. And I've got a great question here. We got a comment from Tetiana, who's a recruiter at Amazon Operations. Tetiana is adding to the mix. I think there's a really good question. I'd love to hear your view on this, John. Working remotely is way harder to build credibility with hiring managers. I think this is so true. What tips would you give to the employees or those employees to successfully do this? So building credibility as a talent advisor, building a relationship. A lot of us think about that in person in an organization where you can walk up to the office or you sit on the same floor. What is your sense of doing that virtually, which may be the thing people have to do more of in the future? John?

Yeah, I mean, some, some of the things that are required don't change just because it's, it's virtual. I will say probably, you know, the thing that's, that's more challenging for a lot of us is, you know, there's not the hallway conversations, there's not the informal bumping into the person in the elevator or lift. You don't necessarily, you know, end up in the same meetings, hearing things the same way, being able to debrief the same way. For example, when a VP in a business is talking about her priorities for the quarter and you're in there as the recruiter and you see the hiring managers in there and you now know both, you know, you both heard the same information, you both understand things. It requires more communication. I just think there's, there's too many opportunities to have email dominate and email is just a crappy way to build a relationship with someone. And so one of the things that we see, recruiters that have really strong relationships with hiring managers, by the way, this is, you know, predates COVID 19. Of course, a lot of recruiters work remotely is that they have regular conversations. They're, they're setting up conversations. They don't just kind of chit chat and waste someone's time, but they're making sure they're having conversations outside of just that kind of kickoff meeting for a recommendation. And sometimes that looks like a video call where we're checking in on holding each other accountable for the things we committed to doing in the kickoff meeting. Sometimes it's debriefing a little more detail on a candidate that was submitted. I see a lot of recruiters, I don't want to call it laziness because it's just the way we work now, but you send a bunch of profiles through an email and you say, let me know. I think especially now when you're working remote, when it's the new normal for us, I think especially now, I'd encourage you to get away from just sending a bunch of inmails or emails and saying what do you think of these candidates? And instead set up a 30 minute review, pull up your screen on Zoom and talk people through and have the manager kind of talk through their feedback On a particular LinkedIn profile or CV live with you and do some real time calibration. I think that kind of confidence that you build when you're calibrated really early I think really helps the relationship but now makes it easier for us not to check in as often because I feel a lot of confidence that you really get me, you get the company, you get the business I'm in, you get the work this person's going to do and you really understand the target candidate profiles. That to me is what I'm seeing is more communication but also trying to move a little things that we traditionally did, you know, an email maybe back into a zoom back into a live conversation.

Yeah, I think that's an excellent tip. Actually. It reminds me of my schedule. I have, I have people who schedule meetings and then they have attached a document that I meant to have read beforehand. And I know for me it's like I had to book time to read the document. That's the way I run my schedule. I think you should assume our hiring manager is the same. It's like don't send them and say let's talk about it later on. It's like as you say, book the time where we're going to review it and discuss it all at once. The hiring manager will appreciate that. It's like great. I don't have to touch any resumes or CVs until this meeting in my diary with this recruiter that I know. She's going to walk me through. We're going to have a conversation and at the end of it we're going to have made decisions on whether we go forward or not. Fantastic. I can get, I can get stuff done. That's what we do in this world. We get stuff done virtually. We work it out that way. I have a couple of comments here from Martin Warren Martin saying recruiters now need to be coaches and trainers of hiring managers for the right practice hiring in their org and then moves on to a question to say is the issue John, here we don't develop our recruiters capabilities so they can have the conversations. You're talking about, for example, developing recruiters influence and persuading skills. So is it that like the concept maybe people can, can get to understand but they actually aren't great at these influence and persuading skills. By the way, Martin, if they're a recruiter and they're not good at influence and persuading. But yeah, I do hear you, I hear your point. Martin. What do you think about this, John? Is it more, the more fundamentals there?

Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting. You know, we do a lot of work teaching recruiters and recruiting managers how to influence, I would say a lot of our workshops, that's, that's probably the, the core focus. How do you change behaviors? How do you get people to do things they don't want to do? So I think there's absolutely skill development opportunity there. But I would say there's also some other dynamics going on. Some recruiters are so stuck in that order taker mindset. You know, I'm the subservient customer service rep and you, the hiring manager, are the almighty. You're a director. I'm just a recruiter. There's real fear around that. And I don't mean to make fun of that as much. I make fun of that a lot. But I don't mean make fun of the recruiter, but that people pleasing, you're my customer kind of shit that, that I grew up with. When I started recruiting in the 90s, it really did not serve me well. I did not really step into my influencer kind of role with hiring managers until I shifted my mindset. And frankly, I didn't just have a revelation one day. I had a hiring manager who happened to be a C level executive at Amazon who was the one who really pushed me to get out of that mindset. You know, he told me my thinking was flawed. Like you were broken, man. You are going to be very unhappy here if you think of yourself as just purely a supplier to us as the customer. And we had this amazing conversation and it really shifted the way I thought about my job. And so I think it's not just skill building. I also think there's a certain permission that people need or a certain mindset shift that people need and they might need to be pulled a little bit more into that direction. And then just as importantly, if you're in a culture that doesn't support a recruiter pushing back on a manager, if you're in a culture where that kind of shit gets escalated to the, you know, the personnel office, you know, the HR rep, or to you as their boss and you don't have their back. Nothing's going to change. Nothing is going to change. And I won't out the client, but I had a client who was trying so hard to transform their TA team into something more like a talent advisor, you know, group. And the challenge was any bit of noise got escalated so quickly and people just shut that down. And so, you know, you can want to develop your skills, you can want to exercise those skills around influence and pushback and strategy and coaching and training and all of that, but if your organization doesn't support it, if you haven't fundamentally said we absolutely not just want, but we expect our recruiters to show up and have these kinds of conversations which may, by the way, get a little ugly because we may actually be acknowledging it's not our fault. The time to fill is so long for this role. It's not our fault that, you know, it's actually the hiring manager is not responding. The hiring manager is not making this a priority or whatever. And therefore I need to kind of elevate my conversation to more of a peer to peer conversation until we're ready to do that as an organization and the leadership team is kind of behind it. I think it's going to frustrate a lot of recruiters. Some are going to do it no matter what. And that was me. I didn't wait for everyone's permission for me to transform my TA team. But, but it absolutely requires some, some leadership on the TA side as well as kind of a little bit of a business kind of getting the benefit of it and kind of pulling for it a little bit. Once they see recruiters that are more advisory, more consultative, that are bringing more insights, that are actually improving speed, improving quality, improving diversity, once they start to experience that a little bit, it creates pull from the business. The business wants more. Yes, please. More, please. I want to work with a recruiter like John who's going to bring these insights, who's going to push me, who's going to make me better. That's, that's amazing when that happens. But it doesn't happen just through training as much as I love it does. As a guy who does a lot of training, training is 20% of it. Right.

You remind me of two stories, right? One is I was in Barcelona many years ago with a small group of people, including Jim Jackson, who at the time was leading recruiting for Dell in Europe, Middle east and Africa. And Jim told, told the group about how, you know, what metrics he uses. He says, well, amongst the metrics, or he takes an MPS from hiring managers of the recruiters. And I was like, oh, that's a really good idea. You get feedback. He goes, so like they, you know, the recruiters who have a bad mps, you know, they're not the good recruiters. He goes, no, not necessarily. And he goes, my best recruiter had the worst MPS score of hiring managers. And the room was like, what? And he goes, yeah, he didn't give a damn. He pushed, he pushed. He caused fights and arguments, but by God, he got results. He was the best damn recruiter we ever had. But he that tension made him a great recruiter. And people then would react and might not give them a good score because their emotions are taking control. So it's not about making friends. And second piece, second story was around. I was at a conference in Minneapolis. I was meant to be at a conference in Minneapolis this week, today, actually speaking. And I was there several years ago, last time I was in the area. And we had a VP of recruiting being interviewed on stage as part of the conference. I think he was just up after me and I was listening to him. And he asked the audience, let's talk about the customer. He said, who is our customer? It was a big audience of recruiters and you had a few mumbles as you do, people started to speak up. The hiring manager. Oh, the hiring manager. The hiring manager. Okay, who in the room thinks the customer is the hiring manager? And everyone's like. And then a few didn't put their hand up. Okay, you guys, who's the customer? They were like the candidate and they thought they were clever, was they got the right answer. He goes, ah, so a quarter of you think the candidate, 3/4 think the hiring manager. Do you know what? You're both wrong. And the whole room was like, but we thought of both options. Candidate, hiring manager. And he said, the customer is the business. He goes, the business is the customer. You work with the hiring manager to service the business. That's the way you got to think about it. You know, you have it all wrong thinking that your hiring manager is the customer or the candidates and customer, they're important stakeholders. Of course they are. But when it comes to partnering, you and the hiring manager, you're a partner servicing the business, the needs of the business. Which means, as you said, sometimes the hiring manager going to be pissed off with you because the right thing to do for the business. Yeah. And speaking of which. Right. I'm bringing up a question here from someone who's online, Aaron Daniels, good friend of yours as well, John. And Aaron's asking, you know, on the hiring manager metrics piece, I think it's appropriate in the week that's in it. John, can we chat briefly about metrics that make sense for diversity and inclusion? Because it's, it's, it's many, there's many aspects to hiring, quality, et cetera. But, you know, and it's particularly charged at the moment where, you know, this is a high highlighted issue at the moment. But how can you influence hiring managers as a recruiter? How can you be a great advisor and help also drive metrics? Around D and I what have you seen? What examples can you share with us? John?

Yeah, there's a lot of confusion I think at the recruiter level around what's okay to track and what's okay to share. And there should be some hesitation before anyone goes and starts pulling data or tracking data in a spreadsheet. So let me just start by there by saying, you know, there's laws and very, very big legal exposure if you start making your own guesses at who's LGBTQ or you know, identifying ethnicity or gender or religion back religious background or whatever. So I'd encourage you to make sure you talk to your boss and make sure you talk to someone in legal before you start tracking stuff. The organizations that I see kind of leveraging metrics effectively, they're primarily looking at the kind of current mix they have and the mix they want across a number of dimensions. And they're working on it not at the rec level, like they're working at it at the function or department or company wide level. So there may be look or just the candidate level, like the job level in the company. And so what I see is this is probably if someone is getting started and wanting to kind of drive some more accountability around this. I'm seeing organizations, of course, you know, bonus some of their executives, Uber just published its quarterly report as part of their filings and, and they talked about executive compensation being tied to some gender metrics, for example. So you're seeing companies that are actually being, you know, rewarded at that kind of executive level. From there, what you're seeing is organizations that are talking about here's our current mix, here's where we want to be and then identifying the kind of program level things or the kind of specific, you know, sourcing, interviewing, closing, onboarding, you know, remote, all the kind of, kind of company wide level things that we're going to do to kind of drive better hiring in those areas. There's a lot of, there's a lot of concern I have when people get very rec focused with their diversity metrics. And in the United States, for example, it would be illegal to say I only want to hire a woman or I only want to hire a person of color into this, this role or I am only going to hire a person of color or a woman into this role. And so I think there's also just concerns on the recruiting side. How do you make sure that you are being fair, providing equal opportunity to folks? I think it's absolutely common to see sourcing being focused on certain underrepresented communities. And talking to the manager about that and talking about how you're bringing in talent and maybe there's something called the Rooney Rule which looks at kind of requiring a diverse slate and asking yourself, how often are we putting people into scoring position? How often are we getting a diverse slate built? Where of our five candidates the hiring manager reviews to our women to our underrepresented groups, how often are we doing that and just tracking that and then of course seeing what comes out the other side, like when you go, when you just, you know, there's so much effort on. Our industry is just addicted to sourcing and like as if sourcing is going to solve everything. And largely it's because what hiring managers think all of diversity would just be solved if you just source more like you have to be able to source for sure. But then we have to look at what's going on in the funnel at each stage of the funnel. So I think the metrics that organizations are using kind of depends on the sort of problem or opportunity they're trying to address. But a lot of the kind of what's our current mix, what's the desired mix? And then there's kind of company wide program level stuff and then getting down at the kind of are we building a diverse slate so that people are in scoring position and then tracking kind of how well that works through the funnel to see if we're, if we're then maybe have another problem. Maybe our problem is kind of middle of funnel. So a lot of folks are using diversity metrics as much as a diagnostic to figure out what's going on in our process as much as just kind of a way to kind of measure did we or did we not hire more people in this category? Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. And I think you can, you can. There's danger in metrics in terms of using the wrong metrics to drive the wrong outcome. You know, I remember working with a very large engineering organization and they had a diversity metric around, around slates around. You know, we got to make sorry earned hires. We got to hire X percent based on these different ethnicity and gender targets. And the recruiting team was able to hit it because it was a recruiting team target. And they found that the attrition level was off the roof. It was just insane that they, they were burning through this. And after four years of this, they, the overall company mix was identical. So they were hiring an unbelievably larger number of people who are diverse. But the people would walk in, arrive in day One go. I don't want to be here. This is the most uninclusive environment. I don't feel welcome. I feel like I was hired to hit a number. It's quite obvious the rest of the business thinks as well. There's no, there's nothing in place to make me part of the team, part of the organization. I'm gone. You know, I'll take my three or six months with this organization and go somewhere else. And the recruiters I met were so frustrated. They were hitting their goals technically, but they saw it as just useless. It was a useless goal because it.

Wasn'T big enough situation. Yeah, you keep filling up with water and it's just leaking out. And I think that one of the big shifts that's going to happen, I think there's, there's a lot of recruiters that are very passionate about diversity, inclusion, belonging, equality. There's a big focus on that organizations and I haven't met people that are anti diversity. Right. I mean, so at least in the organizations we work with, people are behind it, they get it. But it's so frustrating. And quick story. I worked at a company, CEO level directive to fix diversity. And that was perceived as a problem for the university recruiting team. Like it was, it was, first of all, it's perceived as a problem of recruiting and then within recruiting, it was a university recruiting problem. If we just went to more historically black colleges, if we just kind of targeted more women in engineering groups, we would solve diversity in a company with many thousands of employees. And I remember at the time, you know, again, coming at, you know, CEO level directive, it felt very disconnected from reality. Like to your point, Johnny, even a reasonably intelligent holistic thinker is going to go, you're not going to solve diversity with recruiting and you're not just going to solve diversity by bringing more entry level people in. And by the way, there's a shit ton of work we have to do after you hire them to make sure this works. And so I see people on the recruiting side get frustrated because they are ticking the box maybe on some of the things they're supposed to be doing. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. I mean they're doing the right thing on their end. Diverse slates or diverse interviewing teams, they're sourcing from places that maybe underrepresented groups are in. They're doing all the right things at the top of the funnel and maybe even the people get hired. But then the question is, what's our plan post funnel? Like is There a plan post funnel. Because it can be really disheartening to invest all this time to build, to build real relationships in communities that have been underserved, to really tap into the employee resource groups. And you can actually do worse for your brand by making a lot of noise in a community. We want to hire you and then have this like horrific attrition rate or have horrific ROI or have Glassdoor or Kanunu or indeed fill up with all this horrible feedback on what it's like to actually work there. You're gonna, if you're not ready to think about this in a holistic way, I'm not saying don't start, but I'm saying, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna stub your toe a lot, you're gonna have a lot of false starts, you're gonna have a lot of frustration.

I think it speaks to the trend you mentioned earlier. John, sorry to cut across you, but you made a point around ta. Professionals are being asked to widen their sphere of thinking to solve business problems. You know, and I think that that's. That, that in there is. It's kind of going, if you just see yourself as a recruiter, your job is to get them in the door. You are not actually solving the problem more immediate. What I've seen in the last couple of months is recruiters are being asked to solve the next adjacent problem, which is onboarding. You talk about hiring managers aren't involved in the hiring process. They haven't been really involved in the onboarding process. People like Ben, Ben Horowitz has written about this extensively. The hard thing about hard things, he talks about that, you know, while we might be more on the side of hiring should be the most important thing to focus on. His belief is onboarding is the making of a leader. And you need to be brilliant at onboarding and that should be your job. How do you onboard and get people up and running? And that's become apparent in a world where, you know, you hire somebody and at 9am on the Monday morning, they are just connected to your corporate systems and they're like. But they're in their bedroom or the kitchen going, what's next? The pressure is on the leader to go enable them. Because if they don't enable them properly, that talent, because you're hired in the current market, you're in demand, you're a good person, good skill set, that person is going to go somewhere else who look after them. Right? So I think our role is going to expand. I think we're going to work more and more with hiring managers to solve even more complex problems, which is exciting. We're at time, John. We could go on for another 45 minutes, but I got to come to wrap and ask you one final question. First of all, thank you so much for imparting some brilliant advice and tips and taking those questions and comments from our listeners. And thanks everyone for the questions that they put in. Don't forget, you can register for next week's shortlist by going to socialtown.com forward/the shortlist. They'll be recording of this episode, as with all the other episodes. And we're excited to have a good friend of mine, Jill Larson Larson, join us next week. She's Chro with a fantastic tech company in the United States based out of Boston. Jill is going to be joining us on the show next week to talk about her insights more from a holistic HR perspective and the kind of she joined just before COVID 19 kicked off. So I'm keen to hear her perspective next week. But before we get there, John, you were to give one piece of advice to recruiters listening either advice from you or advice you've heard from somebody else that stuck with you. What would that be to add to our advice shortlist?

I think we covered a lot of it. I guess I would say one of the things, the most important thing around getting hiring managers more engaged and get hiring managers to be better at their craft is we need to establish what good looks like and then we need to have feedback mechanisms. And Johnny, you mentioned an example of the NPS ratings and, you know, someone's best recruiter maybe didn't get the highest NPS rating. One of the things that one of our clients did that I think is just brilliant that I'm now evangelizing is why in the heck aren't we surveying our recruiters about hiring manager performance? You know, so we talk about NPS surveys that go to the hiring manager, how am I doing? How's my driving? Am I doing a good job? Why are we not flipping that? And also not instead of but also so surveying recruiters when a wreck is filled and say, was this hiring manager effective? And I would love it if there was a movement underway for companies to kind of rethink about, you know, rethink about the role of the hiring manager and actually gather feedback from the recruiter so we have a voice. That's the only way this becomes a partnership is if we have a way to give kind of the person formerly known as our customer feedback. It needs to be more of a partnership. So that's what I would love to see happen in our industry as a.

Two way they give you back on us but hey, we're going to give you back a new we have this challenge in the, in Ireland at the moment. Quick side story, our leaving cert, which would be our kind of finishing exam when he gets like 17, 18 in school and they're skipping it this year and teachers are going to just rate people and you know, I can imagine all these 17, 18 year olds going oh no, do they like me? I used to be I could stick my two fingers up to my teacher and just perform in the examination. Now it's like oh no, they're going to have to rate me. There's something different if they had a known upfront because I think it's unfair maybe now. But if you know upfront that there's a rating coming, I think you act differently. You know, it's like they're going to give an opportunity to rate me, but I'm going to give an opportunity to rate them. I think when you talk about mistrust, I think there's more of an incentive for both sides to develop some trust. Brilliant piece of advice, John. Thank you so much for that. We're going to, we're going to jump out of here. John, don't forget to join us on our after, after hours chat. There's a link in there for you to join. But for those of you who joined us this week, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Hopefully we get John back on the show in a few months time because we've tons more questions for him, tons more to talk about and the guy has just so many topics. Watch out from online at a conference, virtual conference near you soon. Don't forget we'll be back next week same time which is 4pm in the UK and Ireland next Wednesday which is going to be 8am on the West coast of the US that's 11am on the East coast and that's about 11pm I think Singapore time if you're in that part of the world. And we'll be talking to Jill Larson, who's Chief People officer with ptc. PTC is a fascinating tech company based out of Boston and Jill has a fantastic experience. She's a former VP of Talent acquisition from tons of big tech companies. She's now in a Chro role as chief people officer and she joined at the beginning of COVID and she I think has an opportunity to just roll out some amazing change in a new way of working in the new world of working. And we're going to be hearing her thoughts next week. Don't forget to join us by signing up at the@social.com forward slash the shortlist. This has been a fantastic show. John, thank you very much for joining us. I've learned more, as I always do from John. Do join us next week. I'm Johnny Campbell and thanks for listening.