Hiring Excellence: Transforming Candidate Experience with Paul Peterson | SocialTalent

Having the same thing communicated in multiple places, we realized not everybody learns or grabs the message through an email. Some people learn visually by seeing a step 1, 2, 3. So by covering a couple of different areas for the same thing, we had a lot more success at people understanding or knowing in advance. Oh, here's the three, four stages I'm going to go through.

Hi, I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And this week on the podcast we're speaking with Paul Peterson from Grant Thornton, Canada, and a candid experience. Paul, you're very welcome to the podcast. Could you give our audience a little introduction to yourself? Where in the world are you? What do you do? And maybe something interesting about yourself as well you want to share with our audience?

Thanks, Johnny. I'm delighted to be here today. I'm from working, actually working today out of Toronto, Canada, and I've been with Grant Thornton about coming up on 15 years. I got a team of about 20 or so amazing people here and we recruit across all of Canada from everything from co op interns right up to C level folks internally for the firm. The only one exciting thing about myself I don't know, my strategy has always been to hire people that are smarter than me because they make me look really good. And that's worked really well for the last 14, 15 years. So I'm going to keep doing that one.

We should get your team on here then instead of you, Paul, get the real insights. Paul, I, personally, I didn't share this with you before, but I cut my teeth doing accountancy recruitment. I used to qualify, I used to hire for qualified accountants. I did a lot, I did a lot of audit work as well. I'm very familiar with the firm and some of the different nuances. But maybe our audience isn't so familiar with Grant Thornton and maybe some of this, some of the skill sets you hire for, maybe could you share a little bit about the firm, the organization and for those who have never hired in Canada before, maybe some of the market dynamics and challenges of the market as well?

You bet. So Grant Thornton, generally speaking in professional services, the majority of the people that we're looking for are people that have got a really strong financial backgrounds and they have a desire to get their CPA designation or their charter professional accountant designation has different names across the world. But it's, it's that general idea from that it builds a foundation that people go into all kinds of different areas of consulting or tax or other kinds of advisory works. But that's generally the foundation of what we look for, and it builds out from there. The other areas that matter a lot to us, really just a lot of internal stuff that also makes a difference. We'll have a lot of your standard marketing it things that you would at any large national firm.

What kind of numbers? How big is the firm globally? How big is the firm in Canada?

Within Canada, we're about 3,000, 3,500. The numbers kind of go up and down depending, you know, where you count, where you don't. But in Canada, we're across, I think, five or six time zones. I forget if it's five or six, I forget. And about 7,000 kilometers. So the geography is absolutely massive. And We've got about 100 offices across the country and we're in a lot of smaller communities because that's where our clients are as well as the major centers. So geography wise, we're really covering from one side of the country clear to the next and most major larger cities in between.

So I've only ever hired for folks in Newfoundland, weirdly, in Halifax of all places, that's a whole different story. So I'm not usually familiar with the market dynamics of Canada.

So.

So high unemployment, low unemployment, very mobile workforce, not very mobile. Lots of international folks. Lots of international folks. Talk me through those dynamics.

Yeah, so it's reasonably low unemployment, I think lower compared to a lot of Europe, not quite as low as the United States. But generally we're in between what you'd find in the UK and what you'd find in the us. Probably a little better than one and not quite as good as the other. Some of the different dynamics that come is that people. We do have mobility. Not as much as we'd like, actually. We'd love it if people moved around the country more. It's not a Grant Thornton thing, I'd actually argue. It's more of a Canadian thing that people just don't. Culturally, for whatever reason, we don't tend to move around as much. I've got lots of friends in the US that recruit and you can hire people out of one city and they're happy to go to any one of five or six or seven places and move around every five, six years. Yeah, I'd love to have that opportunity. We do have a lot more international folks in the last five, six years, and that's been a fabulous opportunity for us. It's really exciting to see a lot of the skills that people bring in from elsewhere and how do we adapt and how can we use those. Those folks are a lot More willing to move around, which helps us as well.

So a lot of our audience may be familiar with your competitors either accounting firms, tax firms, advisory firms, consulting firms. And maybe a comment this may be unfair. Fair, you tell me, is that they're all the same, you know, all very good of a certain standard. You get to a certain standard, the size of Grant Thornton, great firms, you're going to get a great training environment, you know, it's going to be great in your resume or cv, you're going to get into the same work. But listen, auditing is auditing, tax is tax. What's the difference? Is that fair? And if there's even an element of fairness to that comment, how does one go about differentiating yourself for the talent market?

You know, I hate to admit it, but there is some degree of fairness to the comment. The if it's not so much in the everyday work, but what people actually do at each place isn't demonstrably different all the time. In many respects, you could say audit is audit and tax is tax. And consulting can be consulting, clients can change, but the methodology and how you do it, it might not vary dramatically. And people in the industry do struggle to explain a lot of the differences. Does it make a difference here or there? And we came across this early on, when I was early with the firm and we were recruiting at senior levels, we struggled initially to explain some of the differences. And we really quickly learned that, hey, there was a difference, at least for us. And how did we articulate it? For us, it was really culture and culture and experience really go hand in hand. So for us, it was about how do we tell people that, yeah, even though audit might be audit or tax might be tax, the experience that you'll get or the experience that we deliver to the people in doing it is what makes a difference. I suppose the one way I explain it to people is what people does might not be what people do might not be as different. But the how they do it is what really we talk about a lot more, which is a lot of the experience in the culture.

So how do you go about translating that? Because obviously to your point, if the work is broadly similar, right, And I'd argue a software engineer doing coding in X is the same as coding. And well, maybe there's a product differentiator there for folks go, I want to build that product and not this other product. But when you talk about the team, the culture, the environment, the how, how do you start communi communicating that through a hiring process, through employer, brand, and through experience, you know, what did that look like when you first hit upon this? And how has that evolved or how does your team think about the experience of a candidate? Different, let's say, to an employee, of course, retention and so on, so forth is really important about the culture of how you work. But when you're kind of sell up front or trying to communicate up that front, how do you go about approaching that?

Paul one of the things we do is we make sure that it's the main thing that a recruiter is focusing on, is the experience that they deliver. And we measure as much as we possibly can. It's not perfect, but recruiters even have their own individual scorecards, their own dashboards, which measure as much as we can of the experience that they deliver to clients, candidates. So if you decline a candidate, for whatever valid reason, that candidate has the opportunity to complete a survey and say, what was my experience like? And it's tied back to the recruiter that gave them that message. And it's hard if you're a recruiter, you've got to turn around and tell somebody in the nicest way, thanks, but no thanks. And then right away we're going to survey that person and say, tell us how your experience was. It's difficult to have them be super positive, but we still do it because we learn from it and we learn. How can we continually make ourselves even better? How do we give a good experience makes a huge difference. But if the recruiters are focused about that all the way along through the whole journey, it makes a big difference in the experience we deliver. If they know that, yes, somebody's going to give commentary on here's the experience I deliver, I'm going to give the best experience I possibly can.

Do you look differently, Paul, around, let's say, digital experiences versus human experiences? You know, a candidate might have an experience applying for a job, which it doesn't involve talking to any of your recruiting team. It's about, you know, maybe the job description, the application process, the form, the automations in there. Do you measure everything or just the human pieces and is there a difference?

So one of the best ways that we measure what we do is we've got this huge chart on the wall. It's about 6ft long and about 3ft high. And the columns we have in it represent every one of the possible touch points that somebody could have in their candidate journey. Then what we try to do is we say, in a perfect world, what do we want somebody to feel at that stage of the experience? Because the experience is not just about giving information that isn't hard. The hard part is, what do you want somebody to feel along the way? And so we broke down to five or six emotions, and we said, at every one of those high 20s, low 30s, touch points, I forget the exact number. What do we want somebody to feel? And then we tried to say, and how can we measure this? And it's not perfect, but. But we've learned as time goes on, different questions on surveys or how people respond to different things that are put in front of them gives us some indication of, oh, we think they're actually inspired by this, or, gee, they're kind of intrigued by this. Gee, somebody shows. You can see the excitement in them when they're at this stage of the process. And that helps us know, hey, are we. Are we successful in what we're trying to do, or are we lacking here? And every recruiter along the way knows that we're measuring as much as we can. And we don't even always keep it confidential. Like when a recruiter declines somebody at the resume review stage or after they had a phone screen, every candidate has a chance to fill out a really brief survey, which is largely, tell me, you know, how was your experience? A simple question, open text box, and what you thought, we shared that with the whole team. So everybody can learn. So if Bob rejects somebody and somebody's like, yeah, Bobby just called me, really didn't give me any information. This wasn't really helpful. Everybody sees that. So we all learn from it. And it's really helped us over time to realize, oh, how do we get. It's not about pointing fingers at anybody or even things. It's about, how do we get better? And we all learn from different things that happen.

When you first started measuring this poll, were there obvious areas in the process and the steps where you're perhaps weaker had more opportunity to improve than others? And if so, what were they?

Yeah, the first things that came through for us that were real weak spots were we all get really excited when somebody signs an offer letter. Oh, great. Yeah, the offer letter sign. We move on to the next rack. And what we found was the time between when somebody says yes signs an offer letter and when they actually start in our mind, it was like, oh, it's a done deal. It's great. Everything's fine. They're happy. They sign the offer letter, they're going to start. And what we realized was people are still really vulnerable, and they're very impressionable in that timeframe. And it was A huge opportunity for us to do a couple of small things that could have a significant impact because when people showed up, we wanted them to be like, oh yeah, no, I made the right choice, I'm fine. Rather than I signed the offer, haven't heard from, I don't know. I hope it's the right choice. I'm not really sure. I think I'll figure it out. That was a real eye opener for us. At first we thought, done deal, no problem. And we realized, goodness sakes, there's things we can do that make a really big difference.

I recently wrote a post about a hack for candidate experience being setting expectations as I find that it's often the easiest thing to do is just you have negative feedback because there's either a lack of expectation and misalignment of expectations. But actually informing people of what to expect goes a long way. Do you have any such learnings in terms of those kind of principles where you found like these were kind of dull moments where it's like, this is simple. Why didn't we do this before? If we just do this, it has a big effect on our candidates?

Yeah, a simple thing like a graphic. When somebody applies to say, here's the four or five steps in the process. What we, what we did is somebody applied we in text, in an email saying, since you've now applied, here's our process. These 1, 2, 3, 4 things, we thought, oh, it's just plain as day. But people, sometimes we realize they skim emails, they don't read them very fast. And we would console ourselves by saying, well, if they read the email, fine, it's all there. But at the end of the day, how they feel makes a difference more so than just because you communicated. If they don't feel good about it, doesn't really matter. You weren't successful. So simple things like putting a little graphic on the website going, oh, here's the four or five steps, which we already put somewhere else anyway. But having the same thing communicated in multiple places, we realized not everybody learns or grabs the message through an email. Some people learn visually by seeing a step, 1, 2, 3. So by covering a couple of different areas for the same thing, we had a lot more success at people understanding or knowing in advance, oh, here's the three or four stages I'm going to go through.

How often do you review this data? You talked about the steps, the data collected from the candidates and the different feedback. You talked about how it's shared openly within the team so everyone can learn. Is that a Monthly exercise, weekly exercise. What's the frequency there?

No, more often than not, it's quarterly. We started off doing monthly years and years ago and found it was, for one, there wasn't enough change in the early days. There was lots of change month to month because we were continuing adjusting. But as you perfected your system and as the model got more perfected, we found we opted more to really quarterly. And there's some things that we just do semi annually because you can only collect a limited amount of information on some stages of the process. We're like, you know, if 35, 40 people respond to this survey, it's like, yeah, that's, it's. It's not really enough to warrant making a huge system change if it's 35 out of a thousand applications, hypothetically. So we broke down the timing more to how often do. How much information do we have that validates for us whether we need to make a change or not?

Is there ever a question of too much information? Can you ask too many questions? Because obviously the more surveys, the more options, the more friction for the candidate. So was there any learnings there around what the sweet spot, amount of information to capture is, or is it take as much as you can?

No. Yeah, that was a good learning for us because we thought we were completely justified in asking all kinds of great questions at the beginning. And what we learned was that the fewer questions you have, the greater the probability is of somebody completing the survey. Doesn't matter how nicely you've worded it or whatnot, just the fewer the better. We even tried an experiment once. We wanted to. The problem we were trying to solve was how do you increase the number of surveys that are completed? So we had an idea. Well, let's incentivize people to complete the surveys. And we found, you know, we offered, you know, for every time you complete the survey, we put your name in a draw. And once a month we'd draw like a gift certificate to a fabulous online retailer or something like that. And then we track it all to see what were the responses before. And we let that go for a number of months and try. And it had a little bit of impact. But what had more impact than anything was to say we just have one simple question for you and an open text box, and that's all the survey is. That was the biggest indicator of probability for is somebody going to complete the survey, make it as short as possible. And we actually did away with the incentives because they didn't make a difference once. It was like a You know, a simple one question survey with an open text box. Wow. Wow.

A question on the stats, like on average, what kind of response rate do you typically get? And would a candidate get surveyed many times in the process or only at one point in the process?

Oh, it's a good point. Candidates could be surveyed many times along the way. Certainly if somebody applies, they go through the recruitment process and they get hired, they'll get surveyed at multiple points. We try to make it so there isn't overlap, but there could be a little bit of overlap after you start with the firm. Like there's automatic surveys in the HRIS system. When you've been here for seven days, for 60 days and for 90 days, some of those will go backwards and say, hey, how was your hiring experience? But most of the time we try to separate so you don't get over. You don't get the same things twice. But we try to increase the number of ways that somebody has exposure to see that they can give their feedback. For example, the feedback, we're interested in all the feedback, but it's not all of equal value when you get feedback. If I get feedback from somebody that's halfway around the world, might not speak English or French, which are the primary languages in Canada, wants to come here, wants, and for all these great reasons, but they might not be at the top of the list that it's somebody that I'd really want to hire. The type of person, the feedback I get from somebody who's been through the whole process and we hired them and this is a great candidate. That feedback actually means a little bit more to me because it's more closely aligned with, hey, we think this person will be successful at the firm, whereas the other candidate is like, yeah, they could be, but they're years away because they're not even in the country yet. Or the language barrier isn't quite there yet. They could be there, but today it's not as valuable. So we try to segment some of the feedback into, you know, which, which feedback is of greater value at which.

Point in time I'm kind of response rates. Are you talking about 1 in 10, 2 in 10 overall? What kind of numbers?

You think you know it, it's funny, it goes up and down like a yo yo. And it even varies by recruiter. A key metric that we look at for recruiters is when they send out the. We call. It's the decline. Thanks, but no thanks. After you've had a phone screen, at least I have some recruiters that can get, you know, 25, 30% feedback and others that will get 5% feedback. And what we're continually doing is to say, okay, we're not looking at what the 5%, what they did wrong. What we're saying is okay for you that got 25% feedback. What was your secret sauce? What's your magic recipe? What did you do? And what we find is that there are little tiny things people can do that make a huge difference. So we had one gal on our team where she had twice as many responses coming back as others did at this stage. And one of the things that we learned that she did was something as simple as when she dispositioned. People said, here's why we're going to move forward. Here's why she said, oh, and by the way, sometime soon you're going to get a survey in an email. It would really mean a lot to me if you took a moment and completed that survey so that I can get better if I need to, or you can let me know, you know, where I'm doing really well. That simple little task of itself exponentially increased the volume of surveys that people got just by that simple line that that person used.

Wow, I love that contrast between having a financial incentive or a voucher barely moved the needle, but just asking for help and for feedback as a human being was exponential in terms of its impact. That's amazing.

Yeah. Made a huge difference and we learned a lot more from it too. Because, you know, some things we go through, yesterday was a day we were viewing, it was a feedback we get for people to go through the website. So twice a year we go back and look at all the feedback that people get. And these are people who've applied but might not have been hired. So you went through the whole process. What was your, what was your experience on the website as a whole? And there was this one simple little comment that somebody made that we would never have gotten. It's like, well, on your website you say that when I create my profile, I have to enter a password. It's going to be at least six digits long. But when I got to that section, it had to be at least it said eight digits long and what's your problem? And yada, yada, yada. Normally we go, not a big deal. But we realized it was a simple little thing like, oh, the ATS vendor had updated their security provisions sometime and we would have just, okay, fine, yeah, and not remembered. Oh, yeah, it's on the site. Quick little change on the way. It sounds small and inconsequential. But what we find is what surveys do is they give you a handful of things like this. That one thing in and of itself that small likely won't turn somebody off from your brand. But if there's a collection of them that add up over and over, it just gives you a really sloppy perception. And they're really like that one. Before the meeting was done, my technology guy in town attraction had already gone and made the change. And I was like, we would never thought of it like you get little nuggets like that. That's like, oh yeah, that's easy. I can fix that in two minutes.

You mentioned that and you mentioned the image in terms of trying to give people the steps of the hiring process that you learned and put in. Can you share me any other examples of, you know, key things that you change in the hiring process or maybe what behaviors you see different in your recruiting team since you have all this data?

Yeah, so the key. I'll start with the recruiter side of it. The key difference with the recruiter side is what they're realizing is the holy grail for candidates is really feedback. They want feedback. If you can only do one thing in the whole candidate experience, I would tell somebody the single most important thing you can do is give as comprehensive, detailed feedback to a candidate as you can and honest feedback. And what recruiters have learned more and more over time is the detail of feedback the candidates are really seeking. They would have thought before. Well, they would have given some indication of here's the feedback of why we're not moving forward or here's how you performed in an interview even before you go. And they felt that was great. But the surveys let us know that they needed to give better and more detailed feedback in more specific areas. And so that's really helped change the behavior in that way. That's made a big difference there. There was a two part to that question.

Yeah, so the behaviors is one part. Maybe some of the process change. So you mentioned one of the examples earlier on where you put the image in in terms of what the process looks like. Anything else where you went, okay, are changing the 6 to 8 on the ETS? I think as I thought that was like, oh, that's an easy thing we can do. Remove a step, do something else. Any other insights are projects that change there.

The single most important thing we did process wise, that, that we tried to automate as much as possible are just automatic notifications. So if you go along in our process, it's typically, you know, you can apply and you'll get a notified hey, thanks for applying right away. We commit right away to say within the next three to five business days is how long it takes us to go through everything on average. So you should expect to hear from us within the timeframe. So we set, we set the expectation then every time along the way if you move forward to from the I've just applied to the okay, recruiters now looking at your resume to okay, you're gonna have a phone screen to you're gonna have an in person interview at every single one of these stages. And their, their status is in any applicant tracking system. Anytime somebody's status change, they get an automated notification that goes out to them to letting them know, hey, you've now moved on to this stage or congratulations, you've now moved to this stage. It happens anyway and candidates love it. They love, they just like knowing where they are. And recruiters get measured on the amount of time people are each stage. The, the goal is we want to move people as quickly as possible. It's not a perfect science because sometimes we waiting is the right thing to do. But what's not the right thing to do, we've learned is you never want to have somebody apply and their resume sits there. And then two and a half months later when the role is closed, everybody in the thing gets an email saying, oh, thanks, we filled it. You want to let people know as soon as you can along the way. And one of the things that we learned that was also surprised was we were like, you know, sometimes you go forward with a candidate and you're thinking, oh, this is it, this is great. I've got two people here for sure. They're going to make it. You disposition the others because one of these two are going to make it for sure. And then in the end it's like, oh, those two didn't make it. I had one even for our team, my team. I had to go back to the pool that I rejected. I called this guy up and was like, look, I'm really sorry. I know this worked out, but now I've been through it all. I think I made a mistake. I said, are you open to a conversation? And I've got two people on my team like that unfortunately was me both times that did it. But one's been here like eight years or so. The other guy's been here two years. They make a good, they give me a hard time. They make a good joke about my mistake doing that. But what we learned from that was you're better off to reject Somebody go back to them and say, oh, I'm so sorry, I did it. We've rethought it now, actually, I think this might be fine. People are okay with that and we make the assumption that oh no, nobody wants that, but you're better off to do that and go back to them. They're flattered by the fact that you come back and you'll for one, you'll admit your mistake and go, you know what, things have changed actually. Are you okay? I've never had somebody go, well, you turn me off, so forget it, I'm not interested. You're better off to do that than what most recruiters used to do is they would leave somebody hanging for the whole duration and then dismiss them all.

At the end just in case, just leave them there because you never know, we might want to go back to them or one of these two people would turn down our offer. We want to have a third in the wings, etc. Paul, our listeners would probably be angry with me if I didn't ask you about tools and tech. You know, is this all built into your CRM? Did you try different tooling around, serving and so on, so forth or what has that journey being around just the products, if somebody else wants to get started or if it's not a particular product, just how you thought about what the product functionality needed to be.

Yeah, so we, our applicant tracking system, we use Teleo Business Edition. It works really well for us. I look through the market every year on, every year I go through and I look at what's new in the market, what's not. There's a lot of really good ats out there and I think at the end of the day there isn't one that is the best, better than everything for everybody because it depends on your business. I like the one we have because it's super. It's, it's an open source concept and we can, we have lots of flexibility how we configure things. That works really well for us, some organizations. But I also have a full time person on my team who manages all the technology of our recruiting team. So I have the luxury of having, I don't have to go to somebody else in IT and say I want to make a change in our system. It's like we own the system, we want to make a change, we just make a change. So it's a bit of a luxury to have that, that allows us to be super flexible in how we configure the system. We learned though when we did Surveys that just simple was better. We use SurveyMonkey and we take SurveyMonkey links and we embed them right into the ATS to our automatic notifications. And then we go back to SurveyMonkey to look at stuff. And for the thousand odd dollars a year, I forget what it is. It might be pinch more that we spend. It's worth its weight in gold. Lots of other tools could do the same. But sometimes I found it easier to have. I like the technology that specializes in surveys rather than trying to use, you know, a lot of ATS will have everything built into them. Sometimes it makes it just a little more complicated and this way it works better for us.

I love that. Simplify the process but also simplify the tools. Don't overcomplicate your technology, your process because maybe it just doesn't get off the ground or it becomes too monstrous to try and manage part in all of this. Right. You know, I'm a big fan of canned experience. You're a big fan of canned experience. But I'm going to put my business hat on for a second here. What's the value in improving canned experience? Have you been able to measure that over the years in terms of, you know, I'm thinking about offer acceptance rates, I'm thinking about decline rates through the process, etc. Is there a noticeable difference? Can you quantify and say yes, here are areas where we've seen the improvements the business or to hiring by having a better account experience?

Yeah. And we knew that going into that. It's like if we couldn't find ways to measure and do that, then we were just throwing kind of money into the wind. We can absolutely track and measure the effect for the business. A lot of it is on at the campus area. A lot of it we focus on is acceptance rates and the experience we give there. And that's made a huge difference and we can measure those. That's not a hard thing to measure. What we also do from it though is if I, if I pick on campus, as one example, we will go back through and if, because the volume is much higher there, we'll go through and if, if I've got, you know, whatever percentage and you know, If I'm at 85, 90% acceptance rates of offers in one city, we will manually reach out to the people that declined our offers either through us or through a third party consultant and we will incentivize those people to have a quick conversation with a third party who's, who's, who's usually not us. And Tell us about our experience of why they didn't take our offer. And so we'll learn from those when if the experience is better or not. And we learned sometimes there are things that were totally out of our control, like, oh, I had the chance to work on this thing in this city, in this area. We realized that had nothing to do with our experience at all. Like. And they said, but you really tempted me. It made it hard because of this, this, you know, the experience factors. That's something that helped us learn a lot that way. We also found we track it with retention rates because if you bring the right people in the door, if we get the experience right in the. We'll have, we should have lower turnover in certain areas so we can track it by which people we bring in the door through which. Which process versus if the business might hire people on their own or if people come in through different transfers or other things. We can track the experience of how well that that translates to the business and retaining people. We also look for. Go ahead. We also look for other ways that we can tell in terms of like how quickly the process goes with the experience. We found, you know, makes a difference in how quickly we get people through our time to fill. But when we deliver a good experience in professional services, one of our challenges is the. I call them, the gene pools are often pretty small. If I'm looking for very specific niche talent in a specific city, generally speaking, I can count on my fingers and toes the number of people in the city that have that skill. And we usually know where they're working. The difficulty isn't figuring out where could they be. The difficulty is it's the sell. And so the experience we deliver has mattered immensely because we know from, we reach back out to them. People remember the positive experience they had and we will reference that throughout the process. So the business sees that as more senior people also come in.

As we look forward, Paul, and we read about and we hear about and we probably experience different ways that candidates are applying. We hear scary stories of, and I've seen this in action, candidates using AI to apply for jobs, 2000 jobs at a time, overwhelming the, the, the application flows for recruiting teams. We have a higher expectation on, on, on, on candid experience. But obviously that costs time per applicant. If your applicant funnel is growing, you're getting more people. The top of the funnel, they all want personalized feedback. We get it. You know, how are you thinking about some of these challenges? Right. You're aware of the things that, that, that, that move the needle, like giving personalized experience and giving it fast. But you are going to be challenged by the fact that over time you might get more applicants. You're going to have to then decline a lot more folks. It's harder to give personalized feedback. And then if you get more feedback on your side, you know, these are manually entered text based responses that have to be analyzed, et cetera. Have you begun to use any technology to try and solve for that or as a process wiser? What do you think about the next few years in terms of some of those scaling problems or some of the challenges that will come in? Are there other challenges? Paul?

And I think those challenges are. It's not even the future. They're starting now. They're already there. So people like to give their opinions. People like to tell you what they think of, like whether it's your process, your website, whatever it is. What we've recently started to use to help us understand large amounts of information is sentiment analysis. So you can get technology out there that will take large reams of text and from a high level for us to go through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of individual responses. You're right. Also, as the firm gets bigger, it's more and more data. So for really large sets, we tend to use sentiment analysis to give us a sense of like, as a general rule, are people generally feeling, you know, are most responses positive, negative? And we'll go by that, that analysis that helps us get through large amounts that way. For other areas, we try hard to make sure we focus on communicating. Hey, here's where we use technology and here's where we don't. We put a new section up on our website about a year or two ago. That was, we just thought it was kind of the right thing to do. We didn't really appreciate the impact I think it would have. We just called it how we recruit and we put on there. Basically it was like the wisdom of Oz. Pull back the curtain. Here's everything we do behind the scenes. Here's all the process, what we do. And like we let people know, for example, we don't use any AI in our assessment and selection process. We're experimenting on the sourcing side to see could it help us find things where we're still experimenting but on the assessment side we want to let people know. It's like no, it's still real human beings. We haven't, we have the luxury in our industries that I don't have masses of applicants for most of what we do. It would kind of be A problem we'd like to have at the campus level. You do, but we have enough people that we can take resources from one area, reallocate it for periods of time to help us deal with the volume. But for otherwise, I don't have very few roles. Am I, like, overwhelmed with the number of applications we get, just depending on the market and what we're looking for? Because we're. We're quite particular, and so, yeah, not as many might apply.

That sounds like a podcast for another day in terms of how we get that funnel right and get it slimmer rather than too heavy at the top. Paul, as we wrap up, if we have a leader or a recruiter on this podcast listening in, thinking, I'm sold. I love what you've done. I want to try and get to where Grant Thornton and Canada are. Where would you recommend they start? Or what's the kind of core thing they should be thinking about in terms of building out what you've done with your team over the last few years?

I think a good place to start is to say, what is the experience we want to deliver? Not just like, hey, let's do a great experience, but. But define it like, what is the experience? A great starting point is to say, what are all the touch points I have? And it might seem overwhelming at first because there could be 25, you could have 30 touch points, you might have fewer, but you could have a lot. And you just start small and say, okay, this year we didn't start off and make a plan for every single touchpoint. In the first year, we said we did a little survey and figured out, hey, we've got all these 20, whatever touch points, these two or three looks like we're pretty weak. We could do better in these. And so for the first year and two, we just focus on those ones. And then the next time, next year we said, okay, we've done better there. Let's find where the next weakest spot is. And you just pick a couple each year. You can't. If you think you're going to go in and change all 20 things in one year or so, you're probably going to make yourself disappointed and you'll run your team out the door really quickly. But get the one or two areas to be the biggest impact and focus on those one or two areas. And then the following year, pick another two or three, then another year, pick another two or three, and then over time, you'll gradually get at it.

Paul, if anyone wants to pick your brains further, find out a bit more about what the team is doing or hear your insights about what you're looking at next for 2025. What's the best way to reach out and contact you?

Probably just LinkedIn. You can find me Paul Peterson on LinkedIn. There's not too many of me in Canada that work for Grant Thornton. Actually just one. There is another Paul Peterson that works for Grant Thornton in the US though I did find out by accident when I got some of his emails.

Don't worry, we're looking for the Canadian one though, so we're all good and clear with that. It's been such a pleasure to hear the story of you and the team, what you're doing. I think it's commendable. I love the way you've connected to data, the approach you've taken in terms of mapping it out, understanding the touch points, focusing on the emotion, the feeling there as well, changing those behaviors whilst also changing the processes. It's a real roadmap for what a team can do, I think, in any industry, in any part of the world as well. I'm really, really grateful to you for sharing with us today. Thanks for joining us, Paul. We hope we hear an update from you as you develop it, as the market changes and I'd love to hear what you do next over the next couple of years.

Thanks so much for the opportunity. It's been a pleasure.

Tune in next week and we'll hear from Glen Cathy where we're talking about how do you become a world class sourcer.