Building a hiring culture | with Kelly Jones

You're very welcome. I'm Johnny Campbell, the host of the shortlist and CEO and co founder of Social Talent. Welcome to episode 75 of the show. We're broadcasting from Dublin, Ireland, on what is actually unseasonably mild Wednesday afternoon, 10th of November. And for episode 75, we're going to be talking about how to build a hiring culture. For those of you who are newcomers to the show, you're very welcome. We are a show that broadcasts every week live on LinkedIn and YouTube. And for those of you listening live, we'd love your comments and we're going to take those. And I can try and answer those towards the end because today's episode is a special episode where we're going to be replaying a chat from an event we ran a couple of months ago that was discussing this broader topic of building a hiring culture because it's quite crucial right now for pretty much every organization out there and the great resignation who's struggling to hire on hang on to talent. You have to really have the best recruiting and hiring excellence in the market to compete right now. But we wanted to dig into this concept of what is a hiring culture. And you might have been familiar perhaps with the concept of a recruiting culture before, but we're talking about a hiring culture. And as the number of vacancies in most organizations escalates as we grow back kind of post core pandemic, it's really important that we don't just see hiring as the job of the recruiting team. You know, our experience with working with some of the best organizations with regard to recruiting excellence and hiring excellence is that they don't treat it as a job for just the recruiters. It's very much a team sport. It's an organizational muscle that needs to be flexed. It needs to be worked on. It needs to be developed to redevelop what's called a hiring culture. It's a function that's aligned and woven into the very DNA of a company not siloed to a single person or single team or department. We took this discussion to a new level with several panelists and interviews back in September of this year. I'm going to share with you one of those excerpts today on the show, and I'm going to rejoin you at the end of this conversation. Should take about 20 minutes to take any questions or comments that our live audience have. But joining us on the show and the interview I want to replay for you today was with Kelly Jones. And Kelly Jones is the SVP of Global and the Global Head of Talent at Cisco Systems, an organization that many of you may know if you don't. Kelly's going to explain a little bit more herself and she's going to walk us through Cisco's journey to move more towards a recruiting kind of organization to a culture of hiring across the business and also how they've expanded that in terms of talent mobility and the importance of tracking data. So we've got about a 20 minute conversation here with Kelly. Really hope you enjoyed those listening live. Please do put your comments and questions in and be more than happy to rest them at the end. But now over to Kelly.

Thank you so much. I have to say I so enjoyed listening to the first part of that panel. It's always so fascinating to know that as we're having these discussions, we're not alone. So thank you for inviting me to this chat today. I'm in Denver, Colorado. For those of you familiar with the US It's a right near the Rocky Mountains. As Johnny mentioned, I work for Cisco Systems. That is Cisco with a C versus an S. I know we have a couple Cisco's out there. And for those of you that might not be familiar with Cisco, we are an IT software, computer networking and collaboration company. We're based in San Jose. We do business in about 362 countries around the world. We have a fairly diverse portfolio when it comes to hiring everything from software engineers to customer experience to our corporate functions group. So we do a good bit in that space. I've personally worked in talent acquisition for longer than I'd like to admit because it puts a little bit of an age on me, but I would say more largely in the talent space. So I've been at Cisco about 14 years. In that 14 years I've done. I'm on my 11th job actually at Cisco. So I'm one of the one company, many careers people, all of those roles have been focused on talent, talent acquisition, talent development in the HR business partner space. And prior to that I worked in the IT staffing agency world, which is interesting when you talk about culture of hiring because I've kind of run the spectrum of hiring is the lifeblood and the revenue of an organization to working in an enterprise where hiring is one of many things that people do. So I'm very excited to be here. Thank you for the invite Johnny, and particularly passionate about this topic, so would love to get into it.

Well I might ask you then to start with perhaps defining hiring culture as you see it. And we've had great definitions from aime Michele, initially, but perhaps you could define it in your words and also perhaps explain what does it mean today for Cisco.

Sure, there were some great explanations and I was nodding off camera as I was hearing some of it. When I think about hiring culture, it's a little bit like if you've ever known Anyone who does CrossFit, kind of that global sportswear sports Sunday morning, I'm out with my coffee, walking my dog, and you walk by and you see these people pushing tires and running around buildings. The question of how do you know if someone does CrossFit? They're going to tell you the first five minutes you meet them. Like, literally, you're never going to have to guess. And that type of fanatic fandom about something is really where you want to go with the hiring culture. And some of these things were mentioned earlier. But the idea that you can recruit and hire people from anywhere and at Cisco, it's about a hiring culture. But you touched on this earlier. It's not just hiring, it's hiring and it's talent mobility. I almost feel like you can't bifurcate those things because we look for leaders to have leadership capability when it comes to building their teams. And building their teams has to do with hiring, which is recruitment, the process of how they bring people on, certainly, but also how they're developing their team and identifying talent in other areas of Cisco to be able to bring over. So when I think about how we define a hiring culture, it's hiring and mobility for me at Cisco is how I think of it. And it's really when we have this embedded into the leader job whereby they have a certain number of business results, we ask them to drive, certainly as a leader. But it's also at Cisco, we have a certain number of leadership behaviors that we expect them to drive. And this runs the span from how they run engagement pulses with their teams. Are they utilizing our weekly team space check in tool, which is to find out what everyone's priorities are, how they're addressing those priorities, what help they need in that. And then another piece of that that is, I would say, newer to the ecosystem. Because this focus on culture of hiring, it's been ongoing for us, but I would say it's really been heavy over the last year going into the pandemic, understanding all of the changes in the external marketplace where hiring has gotten really, really hard. We have a lot of practitioners on this call, and I don't think anyone would say it's gotten easier over the last year. It's gotten really hard and this has highlighted this need with our leaders to really focus on hiring, becoming more of a team sport.

Yeah. I so empathize with what you're saying and I love that definition of the fandom. You said it would take five minutes for a CrossFit person to tell you. I'd say 30 seconds. You're being polite there. But yeah, I love that. I love that emotive way of describing it where you know, they'll tell you all about what they're hiring for in the organization because that's so part of the culture. Like it kind of comes to Makeda's point. Right. You just know it. And that's a great way to observe it. That people just come out with that. It's. They're so passionate. It's the cult in culture. I guess when you look at hiring culture, isn't it? This might seem obvious to all of us in talent acquisition, the talent space, that course hiring is important. But let me just kind of pull back to Cisco, let's say at an executive level. Right. Why is this important? Why does it go up the chain of importance to near the top for an organization like Cisco, considering I imagine all the competing priorities, all the other things that you could focus on. Organizations can't focus on everything, of course. Why is it important for Cisco? Why do you feel it goes up the top for Cisco?

Yeah, I would say two things. First of all, we spend a lot of time listening to our employees. And over the last year, our people strategy that we've stood up has been based on feedback from our employees, our leaders and our executives. And one of the biggest things that came out was hiring. When we ask people, what is important to you, what are the things you think we need to do better? Where are the areas of greatness? Hiring always pops up in that. So it was the number one folks of our people strategy in this last fiscal year, pulling into this fiscal year. So I would say, number one, it's very visible. So. So it's something we talk about. But even more broadly, if you think about Cisco, every product that we develop, that we sell, every time someone develops something, sells something or supports it with a client, that's a person that we brought into the organization and that visceral connection to. We're not just a 78,000 person company where things get done by magic, things get done by people, people move things forward, people drive innovation at Cisco. And so every person that we bring into a team is, is a factor in that either contributes to it or detracts from it. At the end of the day. And so I think this realization that it's so critical to everything that we do, that we have high performing teams and great hiring process and mobility process is a pillar for high performing teams.

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Like, you know, essentially hiring is controlling the front door to everything, like who's in the room and it's so important to get that right mix. And I may mention the kind of importance of diversity inclusion with that mix earlier on as well. You've mentioned the importance of internal mobility. I totally agree with you and I like that you see it in that wider context. I'm going to come back to you to maybe tease out a question related to what I asked our previous panelists, which is what I think are some of the barriers to internal mobility today. Because with a great recruiting culture, you're probably nailing external talent acquisition, doing it really well. But there is, it's been recognized by most leaders. There is a disconnect between how we do the internal mobility and how we do external hiring. What do you think are some of the obstacles there and perhaps. And how would you go about fixing them to really align the great stuff we do in external hiring with what we could be doing with internal hiring?

Yeah, I mean, my perspective is there are three things that really prohibit this from happening. The first, this is not going to be popular to say, but I'm going to say it sometimes it's a tool. You know, it's a tool issue in terms of how do you. It is easier to go onto LinkedIn and identify the background and skills of external talent sometimes than it is to find them in your internal ecosystem. So that can be a bit of an issue. But I think even larger than that, there's a cultural issue around talent hoarding and this concept of is this Cisco talent or is this my Kelly's talent? You know, and the idea that when we bring people into the organization, we need to elevate our thinking a little bit on this. These are not just employees for our team. They these are employees for the entire ecosystem. And there will be times they work on your team, there will be times they work on other teams. But that thing that I think inhibits us sometimes is this idea that when you get a high performing person, this desire to really hold on to them. So my comment earlier about leadership capabilities, there has to be something in leadership capabilities around your ability to identify, develop and move talent along within your organization is an indication of how good are you as a leader. And we did a hour and a Half session on this. In our teams week, we pull our leaders together for teams week a couple times a year where we basically go into a topic that we want to educate them on. And we picked Building a culture of hiring and mobility as the internal teams week session. And we had three executives come in to talk about this. And one of the biggest things that our employees were putting in the chat was around this concept of talent hoarding. You know, they're sometimes concerned to tell their leader they'd like to do something else. They don't want to be punished for wanting to do something else. So being able to free up talent to move across the ecosystem and make sure that leaders understand that it is their role to develop and to move that talent is critically important. And then the third thing I would say that can kind of be a barrier around some of this is bias. You do have this. We don't have that talent here. They have much better talent doing that at Google. Let's go raid Google and get the Google talent to come and do this job. And sometimes that's just perception. It's perception which are between what you've seen someone do and not really understanding their full capabilities. And this came up a little bit in the earlier panel, but this in the hiring organization, in the mobility organization. The other thing we're talking about a lot is this reskilling and upskilling. Because the reality is with the quote around more jobs for recruiters and software engineers right now, we are never going to catch it with external hiring alone. We also have to look at our teams and we have to look at how do we upskill and reskill and, and create opportunities for people to move because skills are dynamic, they're not static. So how do we make sure that we're enabling our employees to do that? So that third being really just this bias, this idea that we can go find someone who is kind of, for lack of a better term, off the shelf ready to do this job versus saying, Johnny has skills in these three areas and we think he has strong capabilities in this area. How do we enable that?

I love that. I love the kind of Team Cisco approach as opposed to Team me. It's Team Cisco. And you measured metrics and you mentioned, mentioned the focus on leadership and owning these things. I've heard of organizations, too few, unfortunately, perhaps, who give leadership metrics such as how many people did you provide to the rest of the organization? Did you help promote up to another level outside your team initially as a metric that drives their bonus. Speaking of those kind of Outcomes or goals? What are some of the outcomes metrics, KPIs you're hoping to drive at Cisco with this focus on a hiring culture? When you come back to measurement, what are some of the things that interest you or you? I know you're very dashboard focused and you've got great metrics in different areas in the organization. What are some of the key ones that would indicate we're doing a good job or a bad job on hiring culture?

Yeah, you're right. We do measure a lot of things. You know, we can go into our process at any given point and see how we're doing. Some of the key things that we are focused on, number one is experience. And so this is part of the reason why we invested in working with social talent around how do we train our leaders to be exceptional interviewers? Because there is an experience piece that happens and we measure our candidates, both selected and non selected. What was your experience in the interview process and the reason this is critically important There is the recruiting element. And this came up in the earlier panel. Recruiting culture versus hiring culture. You know, the way I see those different is hiring culture is the recruiting element plus plus plus so once they're in the door, what do you do with them? What is the experience that they have with you? And whether they ultimately join Cisco or not, we want them to leave this process with an experience. That said, that was a good experience. I would have liked to have gotten selected. I didn't get selected, but I would recommend Cisco to another organization. The leaders showed up well in the interviews. People are prepared, they ask relevant questions. So we focus largely from a data standpoint on what is the experience that the candidates are having. Now one of the things that we're exploring to support hiring as part of our people strategy is having a hiring manager metric that has four quadrants looking at how did they do during that cycle. And to be clear, this isn't a goal to kind of weaponize the data and come back and beat people above the head and neck with it. It's more of information we want to provide executives to say you've declared this is important because I think our executives understand the importance of hiring, without a doubt. So you've declared this as important. How are you doing? You know, so this four quadrant could look at what is the experience of the candidates that are going through. How many employer referrals went through the process did you actually generate? How quickly did you respond to the candidates that we sent you? You know, there's a myriad of data that we could put in this. But the idea is we're already measuring our leaders on how well are they doing as a people leader. If we accept that hiring is central to the role of a people leader, then measuring it through this four quadrant piece and just giving it out and saying this is what's happening. And that's my experience rating only a 4. You know, can we get, can we get into this and then just information is power. Right? Come with the data. So we're thinking of it largely through that lens.

I absolutely love that. Like, I remember speaking with a good friend of mine in Microsoft's TK team a few months ago and she was sharing with me how on some of their diversity efforts and she was saying it didn't change until we made it a leader metric. It's not a hard metric. There's an element of softness with discretion around that. But it became something that everyone was measured upon and everyone had to be accountable for at the end of every period. And all of a sudden everyone was invested in making this work right, metrics work. And I know you're not, you're not suggesting that Cisco is done on your journey to being a hiring culture, but let's say where would you put yourself at the moment in terms of on your journey? Where are you as a company in enrolling at a hiring culture? Would you say you're midway starting off towards the end? What would you say? Where would you say you are at the moment in that?

I would actually say we're probably early to midway, but I would quantify that with. We have points of brilliance in our organization. And let me bring an example to you. We have an engineering leader we hired externally. He came in and I had a conversation with this executive probably three months after he was here and and he was shocked that we did not request or expect leaders to passively manage five to 10 candidates at a time. And it was a fascinating conversation because he said every organization I've worked in, I've just expected it. You know, it's a role of a leader to passively manage five to 10 candidates at a time. And to be clear, that doesn't mean they're talking to them every week because time is the biggest currency. You know, we're not going to ask our leaders to become full time recruiters, but he had that expectation. And so we have areas in the organization. I would say sales is pretty brilliant at it for all the reasons that were mentioned previously. They understand they always be selling. They're very comfortable networking, they're comfortable selling the company, they're comfortable selling themselves. We have areas in engineering and customer experience that are pretty brilliant at it. Maria Martinez, who is an EVP in our 1x organization, we hired her to lead customer experience. And I will sometimes use her as an example when people say, I don't have the time. When you're asking someone or trying to train them as to how to be a talent attractor and they say, I don't have the time. You know, one of the things we have in our back pocket is, well, Maria has the time. Who has less time than Maria? She's running the largest function at Cisco. She's an evp. You know, she's got a huge remit. And one of the first things she did when she came to Cisco is invest time building out her team personally. She didn't just go to executive recruiting and say, I need these five things. Find them. She immediately went into her network and started personally calling people that she knew would contribute to her team. And so there are areas where we have this and it happens naturally and intuitively, there are areas that it doesn't. And in the areas that it doesn't, the way that we're trying to double down is through really what is the. Everything comes down to what is the wifm, why should they care? And so why should you spend your time doing this? And one of the things that I will always say to executives and we try to bring into conversations is if you don't have to focus on hiring exceptional talent, when are you going to find the time to performance manage that talent or to rehire that talent a second time? Because if you think about the difference between a great hire and an okay hire, all of us who've led teams, we know that difference. A great hire contributes to, like the productivity of your team at such a different level. And so when you bring it in on this visceral level with the leaders, they tend to go, ah, yeah, because we've all experienced that any leader you've ever had has had okay talent and fabulous talent. So putting it in that context usually helps. But to make that very long answer a little bit shorter, I would say we are probably getting to midway through on this. And what's really helped us is the elevation of hiring as the number one part of the people strategy that we worked on. And to be fair, I don't know if that would have made it to number one had we not experienced all the challenges we have over the last year with the great resignation is a lot of recruiters read that article and practitioners have been talking about it, people leaving the workforce, allowing people to work from anywhere. In this new hybrid world, companies like ours, where remote work was a differentiator, it is no longer a differentiator. And so everybody is kind of attracting your talent. And so I don't know if two years ago we would have been able to make as much progress as we've made over the last year because of the pain, the pain that we've had in the system with regards to hiring.

You're right. Now is the time. If any leaders are listening to this, wondering, should we do it now? It's never been a better time to prioritize this and get the buy in. I love what you shared about leaders and having the time to have the court five candidates. A good friend of mine who runs TA globally for the big four firms will explain to me how they've always mapped out making sure we have backup talent for every executive role, down to Cto 4, let's say. And more recently they've said, well, they've looked at that and said, how diverse is the panel of potential candidates? And force diversity. So they're not just asking people to make sure they're managing five, they're looking at who makes up the five and anticipating the actual candidate pool to be diverse to drive future leadership. So really connecting the dots. Kelly, we're going to keep you on for the next panel. My time with you is over. So many more questions I wanted to ask our audience have been asking, but I listened to your long answers all day. So don't, don't, don't try and shorten them. There's hurdles of wisdom in there. And thanks so much. Stay on the line because I'm going to ask you to join our next panel. So I really hope you enjoyed that. Kelly's insight in terms of what Cisco are doing, I think is even more relevant two months later after that original broadcast as we face into an even tougher recruiting environment. And when I ask those of you listening to think about is, are we working towards a hiring culture in our organization? Because I think that's going to be one of the big differentiators as companies look to compete for talent out there today, it's not just about how good your recruiting team is. You got to have a great recruiting team, of course, but you need to have a hiring culture across your business. That's what's going to be imperative to really make that work. So have a think about that as well. So next week we're going to be back from the VP of Global Talent with Cisco to NBC Universal Media. That poster behind me in both of those earlier shot now came from Universal Studios. Universal Studios are part of nbcu, NBC Universal, one of the biggest media companies in the world. And Susan Village is the VP of Global Talent Acquisition. Actually, we join me to talk about from Hollywood to Hiring, the importance of embedding diversity in your organization. NBC. You are doing some fantastic things and Susan's going to be talking to me about what we're seeing as a media organization, the power of influence you have over diversity and inclusion, but then also tactically from a recruiting team and recruiting organizational perspective. What are they doing over at nbcu that's working. That's going to be live next week. You can join us live for that chat and put your questions to Susan. That's on Wednesday 17th of November at 4pm UK Ireland time, which is 11am the east coast of the US and 8am the west coast. Or you can find us on podcasts. Our episodes drop Wednesday evenings on Apple, Spotify and wherever you find your good podcasts. And you can find out more about upcoming shows and previous shows by going to socialtown.com forward/the shortlist. I really hope you enjoyed Kelly's comments today and heard that refresh. We'll be back with another live show next week. Thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next week.

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