Fireside Chat with Tom Sayer: Transforming Recruitment at Accenture

Hello and welcome to the Hiring Excellence Podcast. This week's episode was originally broadcast during our recent Social Talent Live event where Tom Sayre, Global Recruiting Director of Assessments, skills and Experience at Accenture, joined me to offer behind the scenes look at how Accenture manages to hire over 200,000 people every year across a variety of roles. If you missed this event when it was broadcast live, be sure to sign up for the next one over at socialtown. Com Live. And can you enjoy the show? I'm really excited to introduce our Fireside Chat. As I mentioned earlier, I'm speaking with the incredible Tom Sayer, Global Recruiting Director, Assessments, Skills and Experience at Accenture. Tom is joining us from England today. Tom, you're very welcome. And not your first time on STLive, but it's great to have you.

Thank you very much. Johnny, thank you very much. The introduction. Appreciate it.

Tom, can you give our audience some context? First of all, if they're not already familiar with the scale of hiring over the last couple of years in Accenture, like a lot of us think about hiring, we might do 100,000, 2,000 hires a year. We might have 10, 50, 100 recruiters. Can you give a bit of an idea of the scale and maybe the types of profiles of candidates you're recruiting for, just to give context to our conversation first?

Yeah, sure. So for those unfamiliar, Accenture is a global professional services and technology consulting organization. We have around about 730,000 employees around the world. And over the last three or four years, we've hired well over in excess of 6, 700,000 people on average, somewhere around 200,000 folks a year. The skills that we typically require for in those volumes are technical skills. So we've got delivery centers based out in India and also in the Philippines, where we do a lot of delivery center hiring for technical skills. But we're also looking for a range of profiles. I mean, you know, there's thousands and thousands of different skills that exist within Accenture. And of course, we have a large consulting workforce as well around the world. So really it's a blend of skills at a blend of levels right the way from entry level through to managing director level. And so the challenges are various.

One of the results in our poll that came up near the top was the need to have better skills around data analysis, interpretation. And Kevin, in his conversation with Cheryl talked about how, you know, surveying, which is something that Candies advocate for Cheryl and Arup does as well. But Kevin's point was that sometimes the only happy people are the people who Got the job at the end and everyone else is dispositioned. Can you maybe share with us your experience around that data collection piece and maybe share a little bit about what you collect, how you collect it, how that maybe has evolved over the years?

Yeah, sure. So I mean, I've been in this role for a couple of years now and when I took it over, you know, one of the teams that you explained there is the Experience Team, Recruiting Experience Team, which I understand is pretty peculiar. I don't think a lot of companies have a recruiting experience team per se. So we're fortunate in that regard. And that in part is due to our scale. But one of the things that we looked at was our net promoter score. So that had been running for a number of years and really what we were doing from a candidate perspective was we were sending out a survey, you know, two weeks after someone had been finally dispositioned, they were receiving a survey with 10 questions. And those questions were quite high level. And really we weren't getting much by way of actionable insight. And as you might imagine, because the nature of the business, we are very data hungry company. And in order for us to really drive the right transformation across recruiting, we needed to get a lot more granular in terms of the insights that we're getting right the way across the candidate lifecycle, but also from other stakeholder groups as well. We needed to understand the experience of our recruiters and hiring managers and indeed our referring employees as well. And we just weren't really capturing any of that data at the time. And as I said, the data we were capturing from candidates was very high level, only 10 questions. And it was all after the fact. It was all, you know, way after you'd either been unfortunately rejected for a role or if lucky, you've been offered a role. So we're also starting to see that skew as well in the data that Kevin mentioned earlier on. So one of the things that we looked at doing then was really kind of thinking about how might we use, you know, perhaps behavioral science to start thinking about how we look at the journey. So one of the things we looked at or two of the things we looked at were one, the peak and rule in terms of the two memorable things that people take away from experience. And two, we started looking at behavioral frameworks like the scarf model. So really trying to understand from a psychological safety perspective what is it that people need throughout an experience in order for them to have a positive experience. So we looked at those things and we also looked at the mechanism for how we Survey our candidates in particular. We realized to try and remove the skew as much as possible. What we really need to be doing is pulsing people in the moment. So we reimagined it, pulsing candidates all the way from point of application right up until the last point of their process. Ready? So post, offer, post, any kind of disposition that they've got within the process. So that's one of the things that we started to do. We redesigned it and we started to pulse our candidates throughout the journey to try and get more real time insights into how they were feeling. We receive around about 5 million applications every year, so we knew that we were going to get a huge amount of data even with just a 10% response rate, which is actually around about what we get today. And then finally really kind of making sure that as we ask people questions throughout the process, really trying to get the root cause or root driver of an experience. So one of those things that we also tried to do was look at things through different lenses. And this is actually something we're doing with each of our stakeholder groups, not just our candidates. So that is really, really to categorize each of the questions that we're asking under people, process or technology. Because we know actually in the way of solving things, we've got different drivers. Something might be a problem in terms of technology, something might be a problem in terms of a broken process, and something might just be a problem in terms of the training that people are receiving and the way in which their behavior is impacting the candidate experience.

Once you began to do the pulsing and get more grounded data at different stages from different stakeholders and you've broken it out into those topics, what did you learn? Like, were there some surprises, what was unexpected, what was different, and how did it shape your strategy after that?

Yeah, I mean, I think what, what surprised us to begin with probably is actually candidates didn't have a problem with our application process. I think there was kind of almost, there was almost a perception that, you know, we need to make the application process much easier. And what our data said immediately was actually candidates don't have a problem with it. And that was interesting. And I don't know, you can hypothesize is that because we're actually pulsing people in the moment rather than waiting weeks and weeks and weeks until the end of the process to ask them a question, we're still actually not too sure about that. So that was a great surprise to begin with, I think. Then the interesting thing was as we started to try and identify what are the peak of the experience versus the end. We found that actually the peak came when it when people met our people. So the peak came when people had interactions with our recruiters and interactions with our hiring managers. So really the interesting insight that we've gained from that is actually if we really want to optimize the experience and lean into a particular area, then really trying to lean into the way in which we enable our people. And interestingly, just from the last poll there we talked about it being intuitive to develop communication capabilities and communication skills. That is definitely, certainly something we picked up from the insights that we received. We received somewhere in the order of half a million responses in the last year. And it's remarkable how if we look at the trend line month on month, it remains relatively stable despite millions of applications in terms of people's experience. So that would tell us that actually from country to country, the experience is relatively stable. But also it's really interesting that it's really human experience that develops that peak in the experience for candidates, for those.

Not familiar with the peak end rural research, which is from Danny Kahneman, which suggested that when we remember experiences, we remember the highs and we remember how it ended and creating highs rather than trying, and a good ending is better than trying to fix absolutely everything that might be broken in the process, short of a course. You have to fix the massive potholes that might be there, the big things that hold you back. So Tom, you know what I'm hearing is obviously that people part became the differentiator or certainly the focus area for you from a hiring perspective. And again, oftentimes we look to technology to fix something or we look to a new process. Can we buy a new tool? Can we throw at our ATS or CRM? Can we get a good new career site? Can we get somebody to design better job specs? And yes, those things can help, but the impact of people and putting the focus on the people in the process can be a real differentiator. That might be a surprise to folks who are thinking of putting more AI and more process piece. And maybe it hints at Cheryl's comment where, you know, putting in a process that was better automated, better automation for the business wasn't, wasn't perhaps taken up as well by the candidates in terms of the automated interviewing. But there is a balance. There's a trade off between, well, we still need the automation and scale. So how do you see that balance between where do you automate and put technology in versus where do you double down on the people experience?

I think it's a great question and I think technology plays an absolutely critical role still within the process and within of course, the tech stack. So I think if you look at the challenges of our organization, with millions of applications every year and hundreds of thousands of hires, volume is a real challenge for us. So technology is a fantastic enabler in helping us to do that. You know, screen it's also help helps us to get through and manage the volumes from, you know, scheduling perspective and, and those sorts of things. So it definitely has its place. But I think you've got to read the context and I, you know, when I say read the context, that goes almost down to the granularity of the requisition that you're managing. Different types of recruiting happens across our organization. You know, the way in which we run, you know, executive hiring for our managing directors differs vastly from the way that we conduct entry level recruiting for our delivery centers. So the experience is going to differ depending upon the type of recruiting that you are delivering ultimately and the way in which you automate it has to depend upon that type of recruiting. So I don't think there's a one size fits all answer. I think it's all contextual and you've got to make it fit, you know, ultimately what you need to deliver. So ultimately where it is higher volume, then that's where I think you can lean more into automation, into that process. But then certainly when it comes to, you know, our more senior consulting roles, when it comes to managing director appointments, where you would expect more of a white glove experience, then that's where you need to dial things back slightly. Naturally the volumes are probably going to be small around anyway and that's where you know, you need to design for more human intervention.

Can you give us some examples of some of the changes you've made, let's say with the recruiters or hiring managers, even some of the ones you're thinking of, that are leveraging what you've learned around the importance of the unit experience in the hiring process for candid experience.

Yes, I can. So I mean, I think, you know, it's very important to make sure that our recruiters understand what we've learned from the data. They understand what we've learned from experience. It's very important for us to try and disseminate that information. It's not easy in an organization where we have several thousand recruiters across our organization. So it's not really kind of something that you can just, you know, put on a slide on an all hands call. What we've instead tried to do is really try and fuse that in the way in which we train our recruiters. So one of my teams, as you kind of introduced that Johnny, is in charge of our capability and our skills development of our recruiters. And indeed, through the social talent platform where we've been partnering with you guys for the last couple of years, we've started developing, you know, what we call internally, our credentials. So we've created an Accenture professional credential for recruiters. And utilizing, you know, both content from your platform, but also from our own business and our own experts, we're putting our recruiters through training, which helps to explain the impact of, you know, certain behaviors upon the candidate experience and helps to explain in terms of the way in which we're measuring our experiences and goes into the detail of, you know, what we pull together in terms of our, you know, refreshed npx, as we call it. So education is a strong part of that and it's not just extended solely to recruiters. You know, the business has, you know, a large hand in this too. And we haven't got round yet to deploying training to our hiring managers. That's for our next financial year, which started this week. And I'm excited to see that happen too, because as I've said from the data, right, it's the hiring managers who have that peak end effect, that peak effect on our candidates as much as our recruiters. So we've started with our recruiters this year, and so the information and the training is starting to get through and started to be inseminated in what we do. But I think that's a fundamental way of making sure that we're improving experiences and making sure that people feel equipped to understand not just their impact, but, you know, feedback, as I imagine is true for many companies and many people attending the school today, feedback, the quality of feedback and the timeliness of feedback. Feedback is our number one candidate experience issue. And I think that's fairly universal across most organizations. So a large part of that emphasis has been put on, you know, why that is the case and what we can do to help to improve that.

What can you do? Because that is one of the biggest challenge. You talk about the peak at the end, you can have a peak with human experiences, but when you end the transaction, just like you can be in relationship with somebody, it's fantastic. When you break up, how you break up can be a big impact on how you remember that relationship. Right? So when someone's had a relationship in the hiring funnel with Accenture and you've got to break up with them, which is maybe 99% or 98% of the candidates for all of us. What have you done and what are you thinking of doing or what interests you? What are you looking at to try and improve that, to scale that?

Yeah, so what we've done in the last few months is probably more tactical. So what we've done is we've, as I said mentioned, we've, we've created training around feedback for our recruiters so they're far more aware and empowered to take action. We've also managed to within our own chatbots, which we have for our hiring managers in terms of the way in which we chase feedback, which is automated. Within Accenture, we've got various prompts about feedback and quality of feedback, links to training for hiring managers and quick reference guides. So we're really trying to, with our hiring managers, put it at point of service or point of need, should I say for our hiring managers. Because ultimately it's a hiring managers where we tend to have the challenge in terms of getting the feedback to provide that to our candidates. One of the things that I'm excited about and to go back to your question about technology and where is technology's place is actually in the field of feedback? Because we've seen over the last 18 months the rise of, you know, several products, dedicated products in the market which are dedicated to capturing interview notes, summarying interview notes and giving you back end insights into, you know, interviewer performance and all sorts of other wonderful things as well. And really that kind of turns feedback into a two click exercise potentially right at the end of an interview. And so the challenge I think for us as an organization is really actually interviewer time because they'll, they'll close out an interview and then they'll rush back onto a client project, whatever it might be. And so the quality of feedback, you know, could just be as bad as, you know, a few lines or a paragraph. Right. But that's where technology can play a real part in elevating the experience by helping to make sure that we're capturing feedback in a far more robust and detailed way and providing a lot more value back to the candidates.

A couple of comments to Feedback to you as we close Tom, Kathy Bowman saying, great idea in hiring manager training, such a vital component experience. You can have a stellar recruiter, but the hiring manager can kill the peak or some of the interviewers. And Kevin Grossman who was on our first panel, just pointing out, loving all that Tom is sharing Accenture has won multiple Candy Awards in the past, which I think you have. Tom, thank you for sharing that. We could go on for the 20 minutes, but you've shared a ton of insights there. Hopefully people are left with that overriding experience of your learning on great scale is that investing in those people experience is important. Looking at that peak and the end. So the peak in terms of the people experience, the end in terms of how you regret or disposition, somebody is super important. Tom, we'll come back to you again, hopefully for some more insights as you develop your next phase of this. Looking at the impact on hiring managers and interviewers.

Maybe.

Hopefully you'll join us next year for another session to discuss this further.

Be great. Thanks Johnny.