Creating a Culture of Hiring: John Vlastelica on Amazon's Approach

Hey everyone. This week's podcast was originally recorded during our Social Talent Live event where Johnny spoke with world renowned expert John Vlastilika about how he helped instill a culture of hiring in Amazon's early days. Remember to visit SocialTalent.com live to make sure you catch our next live event. Enjoy the show.

But to get started, I'd like to welcome our first guest for the first discussion of the event, John Basilica. John, do you want to turn on your camera? And we have you there. John, you're very welcome. You might share with the audience where are you joining us from in the world and maybe you could give a summary of your history and background and why this topic is of particular interest to you as well.

Sure. I'm on the west coast in the US and I love this topic. It is probably the notion of creating this hiring culture, this culture of recruiting, where everyone sees recruiting as part of their responsibility, not just ta. HR is probably the most strategic differentiator I see between organizations in terms of who gets the best talent. It's not as much about compensation as you'd think. It's not just about return to office. It's not just about job titles and career offerings. When hiring managers are super engaged and see recruiting as part of their day job, you win more top talent. And so this is something that I think is if I were to prioritize what a TA leader should focus on in any economy, regardless of your, you know, ats, your CRM, your sourcing tools, your interviewing tools, whatever, like this to me has, has the biggest lift, the biggest ROI for organization. So I'm super passionate about it.

So John, you know, you run an organization called Recruiting Toolbox. For those who haven't seen John speak or present before, if you haven't been on one of these shows, if you're not a social talent user, maybe John might be new to you. If you, if you are, you've no doubt seen John and his team present amazing content on interviewing, on being a talent advisor and tons of other areas. And I know, John, your business delivers consulting around this topic to organizations around the world. It's been a passion of yours for several decades. If a leader is on this call and she's going to her CPO or CEO tomorrow and saying, I was on this webinar where we talked about a hiring culture. The CEO says a hiring culture. What do you mean? How could she best answer that? How would you frame it or how should she frame it?

I think it goes back to what your poll question said. A Hiring culture is really one where recruiting is part of everyone's job. It's getting great talent to the organization, retaining great talent, that's part of everyone's job. And I'll be honest, a lot of startups have that culture by default. You don't have a big TA team, you don't have a big HR team. So everybody, the CEO is his or her directs, their directs, everyone is part of it. They're recruiting off universities, they're driving referrals, they're playing a role in interviewing, they're on the phone on the weekends or late at night trying to close a candidate. Everyone sees it as part of their job. As you grow and scale, NTA comes in, you start having a formal function around this, you tend to lose it a little bit. And one of the things that really drives me crazy is there's this shift that starts to happen, which we talk a lot about in our talent advisor training where, you know, the business starts to see themselves as the customer of ta. Right? And it starts to shift where it's like, oh, we have this big talent acquisition recruiting team now. Now maybe I don't need to step up and play as big of a role. I as the hiring manager can just be an interviewer, a reviewer, an approver, not really someone who's engaged in getting great talent to the organization. So when I look across organizations and I see, you know, who is delivering, you know, the best candidate experience, who has the best conversion funnel metrics, who closes and wins the best talent, it's usually companies or teams where you have really engaged hiring managers. They're championing ta. They're not doing it as a favor for ta. Right. They're not doing it because there's some new policy or the CEO announced it on yesterday's effective Monday, we're all going to start have this hiring culture. It's because usually they're in some kind of pain around hiring is what starts it and they realize the more engaged they are, the better talent they get.

John, I know in your early career you work with Amazon, you work directly with Bezos and the senior leadership team back in probably the earlier days of Amazon, not to date you, you were a teenager when you worked there. Let's just say that.

Yeah, right.

I think Amazon in the world of recruiting is pretty famous for. Most people would agree. I think having this hiring culture and maybe it's most typified in their bar raiser program. Where, where. Well, maybe you can explain the bar raiser program, but to me, you know, people talk About Amazon, they talk about bar raiser interchangeably. I think what they're really looking, what they're aspiring to achieve is probably something of that culture where despite the fact that Amazon scaled to more than a million people now, you know, it's probably fairly well considered that they have retained this hiring culture, this shared responsibility. Can you maybe talk, talk us through, you know, maybe the roots of that and maybe artifacts like a bar raiser program, what role they play in developing that culture.

Yeah, so, so the bar raiser program is a program I got to build and lead and scale when I was at Amazon a long time ago. And you know, we were, we were trying to solve this, this idea of a, of a variable hiring bar. Right. A lot of organizations before bar raisers existed, you would have the hiring managers, manager sit in on the interview process and make sure that you were hiring not just a button seat but a good long term hire. You know, you weren't desperately hiring as a hiring manager. Right. And so the bar raiser program, the origin story is really around how do we make sure that we maintain a high bar as we scale. Recognizing that we had a few areas where you brought in a leader who maybe wasn't effective at hiring, hired a team, the leader didn't work out and now we're stuck with a team of low or, you know, or average performers. And so it became part of the culture that you would have an independent, not the hiring manager, not working for the hiring manager, interviewer and hiring meeting facilitator who had veto power, but who was a trusted assessor of talent, who was well respected by the business, well respected by hiring team. So you'd be a hiring manager, this bar raiser would be added to your interview process and the bar raiser would interview not with a short term lens. Is this a good fit for this, you know, rec number 744. It's, it's, is this a good long term Amazon hire? And one of the ways that that helped with kind of hiring culture, although it wasn't primarily aimed at hiring culture at the time, it was more aimed at just quality control, was really around shifting some of the orientation of recruiting as just a TA responsibility or a TA problem or TA opportunity to a business opportunity. Bar raisers would spend some of them more than 10 hours a week on top of their day jobs interviewing often for roles that were not even on their own team. So this was an incredible investment by the person, by the business to say hiring is that important, that we want people out of the business to dedicate a big chunk of their time. Now, Amazonians worked, you know, 60 plus hours a week, so I can't say it was 25% of their week, but it was kind of one of those things that it wasn't thankless. You were definitely rewarded for it. But it was one of those things that, like, you could tell we had to have a culture. You had to have executives role modeling this. You had to feel like this was. There was accountability around this to make it scale, right, to get it to the point where it became the Amazon way of hiring. And so a lot of it was around not just quality control, not just kind of getting the business involved, but also the bar raiser was an educator, a coach. The bar raiser gave feedback on your feedback on a candidate. The bar raiser was able to provide some decentralized accountability to make sure that we were making quality hiring decisions beyond what a recruiter, talent advisor, or the hiring manager would do. And so for me, it was one of the secret weapons of Amazon scaling a high hiring bar was to have this inspection and accountability mechanism inside every single hiring decision across the company. And so that, that was that, that was a big, a big part of Amazon's success. And it's interesting because while Jeff Bezos didn't talk about the bar raiser program in 1998, I joined in 1998 as a teenager, as you said. But Jeff Bezos even talked about hiring and the questions we ask ourselves to make sure that we're maintaining and scaling a high hiring bar in his letter to shareholders. So this was a company that was much smaller, a fraction of the size that Amazon is today in 1998. But it was that kind of commitment to keeping the bar high as we scale and acknowledging that one of the biggest risks to our company success was, you know, not getting top talent in the organization. And he found it worthy to kind of call out in his letter to shareholders. And he attached that letter almost every year, all the years I was there. And I think up until probably Andy Jassy took over as CEO, it was referenced every year as kind of one of the most important things that makes Amazon Amazon.

I think what happened, the team share that letter into the chat so everyone can dig into it. They want to have John. You know, I think any TA leader listening, any recruiting leader listening today is probably going, yes, I want that. Why wouldn't you want, you know, that, that kind of culture, right? But you mentioned two things that you maybe threw away. But I want to, I want to circle back because I Think they're really important. I'd love if you dig into them. You mentioned executives modeling behavior, this behavior, and you mentioned accountability. Would you mind digging into the importance of the two of those? Because I think they, they shouldn't be just understated and they shouldn't be glossed over by folks. Because getting to this is agreeing we should have it is kind of easy, but getting to it, I expect is hard. So, so maybe talk to me through those, those at least those two aspects of getting there.

Yeah. And I want to share something, so let me kind of share my screen real quick. This is from our hiring manager maturity model. And one of the ways, you know, you can't have an accountability if you haven't established what good looks like first. And one of the things that, that I think a lot about and I try and help our profession with is how do we make sure that we are not just de whiners about terrible hiring managers. And in fact, we hold the mirror up and ask ourselves, have we even set expectations for what good looks like for a hiring manager in our company? And I see a lot of recruiting teams complain about disengaged hiring managers. And I'm always like, yeah, but you might be the enabler on this. You might not have even established what good looks like. And so in the hiring manager maturity model, which you can download off our site and we'll throw in the chat here, we talk about kind of the different levels from kind of the passive aggressive or passive hiring manager who, you know, recruiting sucks kind of hiring manager all the way to the talent champion. And one of the ways that, that one of the starting places for, for creating this culture is, is defining what good looks like. Otherwise there's no way to hold people accountable. And the framing that I tend to use when I think about this accountability is, is that not, you know, this isn't about shifting work from TA to hiring managers. This isn't like, hey, we're really busy in recruiting. Could you help us get great talent?

We.

That is the wrong framing. That doesn't speak to them. What speaks to the business more? What speaks to hiring managers more when you're before you kind of have the accountability mechanism is top talent is demanding this, that, that. This isn't you doing TA a favor. This is if you want to get your unfair share of top talent, you have to step up, you have to level up. You have to be more than just that kind of passive hiring manager who just complains that they're not getting enough resumes from recruiting. You have to play a much bigger role. And it's because top talent expects to have a leader who is more than just an interviewer in the interview process. They expect a lot more Q and A time and such. So step one in accountability to me is really defining what it looks like and framing it the right way. The kind of accountability that I've seen work really well ranges from kind of rewards and recognition that kind of reinforce the behavior to actually building it into performance review. So I was really fortunate at early Amazon I shared an office for a while with a person that was working on our new performance review docs and this thing had gone through many revisions. And I said, hey, is there any way we could put like actually put an expectation around recruiting in the performance review that every hiring manager, every people manager in the company will, will now be evaluated on. And it was so much part of our culture and values it was a no brainer to stick it in there. Most organizations, when I asked around accountability around hiring manager performance, they haven't established what good looks like. They don't measure it and they certainly don't put it into their performance reviews. And so I would say one of the early mechanisms that I'd be thinking about if I were, if we're on this webinar listening to this would be how do I establish what good looks like and how do I then make sure that there's some accountability around that? So we measure. And so one of the things that I'm really excited about I shared and we'll put it in the chat, but I shared some sample survey questions. Like one of the things I think companies are doing that's interesting now is, is we have more surveys. You ready for this? Going to recruiters about hiring manager performance, my whole career it's go to the business and say how are we doing? How's my driving? We really need to flip that a little bit. Still do that. But add on to that, hey, if hiring is a team sport, if this is really something where we want to create accountability, we should be serving recruiters when a rec closes and say how did the hiring manager do? And I created a post on LinkedIn's talent blog where I actually give away all the questions that we recommend you use and we'll throw that in the into chat there. But those are some of the ways that we think about accountability. You know, start with define what good looks like, build some mechanisms and performance reviews, get some data from recruiters and there's all kinds of other metrics you can measure recruiting performance On So that's, that's part one. Does that make sense, Johnny?

100% does the part. The executive modeling actually leads me to a kind of a bigger question. Is this even possible without, see, you know, a senior level executive by and above you as a tier leader.

I'm going to talk to Danny about this on our next part of the chat as well. But I, I think that is actually part of a requirement is, you know, you can't have executives talking about talent in a way that sounds like it's an HR issue and not role model this high ownership culture and expect to get a great culture of recruiting out of it. Like you absolutely have to have that. And one of the things that I, I see we do a lot of live hiring manager training addition to the training we do on social talent. And one of the things we talk a lot about in our interviewer hiring manager training, we call it license to hire, is really the expectation that we have of hiring managers and the expectations they should have of their managers, the executive team. And when we do executive interview training, that is actually probably a third of the workshop is not so much teaching C level and VPs how to ask behavioral interview questions. It's reinforcing. You have to be role modeling this. My mom used to say this all the time, more as caught than taught. And the idea is I will do what I see more what I experience. What you as a parent do, you know, with a child, more is caught than taught. My mom smoked when I was little. She's like, she was a nurse. She's like, smoking is terrible. Never smoke. Jv. Never smoke. Never smoke. It's terrible for you. Well, I didn't smoke, but I could have because I'm watching my mom, I'm hearing what she's saying, but I'm watching what she's doing. And so I tell executives more is caught and taught. And you have to role model this stuff for it to really get embedded in the culture. And if you're doing the opposite of this, whether that's focusing on pedigree versus on skills or just not role modeling, investing the time or talking about talent is recruiting is broken. As if that's HR's problem, you're really doing yourself a disservice.

I have a question gets given from Kat through the chat. I think it's really interesting when you talk about the Amazon change and I think it's not just related to the Amazon experience, but any organization with a hiring culture where we're putting that in accountability on managers when team Members. When managers that are stretched with kind of BAU work, does that get deprioritized over hiring? How do you, how do you, what does the culture need to say around the forks in the road, the decisions like if 25% of my time is hiring and I've got BAU stocks, I'm running engineering, I'm running sales, I'm running customer success, how was that managed or how is it managed across clients you've worked with around this challenge?

It's really interesting. It's, it is hard. I was a bar raiser for HR at Amazon and it was very hard and frustrating. I had a very full day job and then I had to go do an interview for a compensation person. Was not even my area of expertise. Right. And it is hard to do. There's no question that the business as usual day job fills up, you know, is largely a full plate for most companies. You really have to get in the mindset of it. It's an and not an or. Like you have to prioritize it. And one of the ways that you, you prioritize it and don't ruin this culture is you put hiring as part of the performance review of a manager. If you say this is a really important part of your job, but I'm not even going to talk about your performance in it, including rewarding you financially with bonuses, rewarding you with performance ratings for doing a great job in this, it starts to feel like this extra thing I'm doing, it's a favor I'm doing to ta. Adobe is one of our clients. We did some recruiting leadership training for and as part of the focus groups. I was talking to an executive in Eastern Europe and I ask executives all the time about this hiring culture stuff. I don't call it that, but I say, what are the expectations you have as an executive of the hiring managers that work for you? And there was this executive in Eastern Europe and he said, I tell my team there's only two reasons you miss an interview. There's only two reasons you don't engage in resume review and engaging candidates. And that is a family emergency or the website is down otherwise 100% of your focus. If you have to choose between something else and hiring, it's hiring. Hiring is the most important short and long term work we do here at our company. And I remember just, I mean, the grin on my face. Johnny, as you can imagine someone who's dedicated their career to pushing this idea, hearing a leader not prompted by me share something that definitive around his expectations just lit me up for the whole day. I mean, it just made me so happy that there's people like that all over the world that are thinking about hiring in that way. And when I talk to Adobe TA leaders about the quality of talent, they said that leader gets the best talent. Everyone wants to work for that leader, and he is putting high expectations beyond your day job. Most people joining that team have never spent as much time on recruiting as they have when they joined his team, but he is still one of the highest rated, highest performing leaders in the company.

I love that we have a great comment in it from Ian Perlman. We can't lose sight that what allows that type of accountability is having a strong relationship between TA and the business lines. That brings me to my second poll question, actually, because I think this is the perfect timing for us to launch this.