How Celonis is using Prioritization and Agile Swarming to hire talent 2X faster | with Kevin Blair

Foreign. Welcome to this week's shortlist. I'm your host, Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And you're very welcome to the last shortlist of Q1 2021 on the last day of the month, of the last day of the quarter. So it's March 31st we're broadcasting, and today we're going to be talking about efficiencies, I think 2021 so far in terms of what we're seeing is that there's a whole lot of companies who are coming out guns blazing and hiring and growing and almost it's kind of been a reset for talent where, you know, a certain amount of people I'm talking to are back at year zero in their new talent plan because whatever, whatever where they were in their old town plan at the beginning, in the middle, near the end, they've kind of thrown it up into a ball, throw it into the trash and said, we're going to, we need to go again. We've got all or most of our team working, distributed. That could continue for a long time. We had to much more take an ownership of or an acceptance of our role in the wider life of our employees, not just the work life. All these things have changed things. And although the economy is doing amazing in the US and other parts of the world, the stock market is doing great. Whilst there's growth, there's a real prudence to that growth, which is to be expected from, you know, coming out of this unbelievable year we've had so far with the pandemic and the resulting recession and the economic collapse of the stock market for about two months before it roared ahead, people are a little bit nervous about spending money, investing where they don't need to, even though they might be growing again. And in this kind of time frame, from a talent perspective, you need to make sure that as you're growing again or going back to growing or growing further, that you're doing it the right way and you're balancing your spend with real quality and the right delivery in the right place. And that's why today's topic for the show is prioritization when it comes to talent acquisition and how all recs are not equal. And we're going to be interviewing our guest today to talk about how he has seen roles he's held in the past and is currently working with his current company and team, who are growing like crazy, to introduce a methodology that some of you may not be familiar with, but hopefully all of you in the talent space will be super interested in knowing more about over the next 40 minutes, how to get more results from the same or less resources. Who doesn't want to know about that? Before I introduce our first guest, our guest today, let me just remind you, if you're listening live, we'd love to have your questions. You can jump into the chat on YouTube and LinkedIn. Ask myself and our guest any questions you wish and we'll call out those questions as long as they're not ridiculous throughout the show. If you're not listening live, you're probably listening to our podcast or recording. We're a podcast that goes out every Wednesday evening European time on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your good podcasts. And you can find any links we share during the show that I might reference in the show notes in the podcast or you can find them on the comment section retrospectively on YouTube or LinkedIn. If you'd like to know more about the shortlist and check out our previous 40 plus shows or find out what's coming up next, you can go to socialtown.com theshortlist where you can find all that data. But that brings me to our guest today. Our guest is a good friend of mine. I've worked with this VP of global talent acquisition for many years over several companies. He's currently in a company you may not know that started out of Berlin called Celonis. And Celonis are a company that are blowing up into kind of DECA unicorn status now at the moment, I think, and you correct me in a second, they have more employees employed today than they did who have started after Covid than they had before COVID such as the rate of growth in the organization and that's a particular unique type of business. But Kevin Blair, who is our guest today, previously ran huge global talent acquisition teams in the lights of Citrix, in IBM. He's worked in Oracle, Salesforce. If anyone knows tech and tech hiring, it's Kevin. And to talk about his requisition prioritization model, we've asked him to join us for the show. Kevin, welcome to the shortlist. I'm hoping maybe you can do Celonis a bit more justice and explain what Celonis does and your team and a bit of born your background to kick us off.

Exactly. Well, the first thing I'll do justice is correct the city. We're actually a Munich founded company but most tech companies in Germany come out Berlin, so it's completely understandable. But yeah, no. So my role at Solonus, as you said, is the global head of Talent acquisition and Celonis is like a really interesting technology. So what we focus on is what we call enterprise management systems which really what we do and kind of layman's terms is we really deep mine a company's data and we basically identify where you have like process friction, where you have latency and wastage and then we help re architect solutions so that you, you're basically able to create better business processes and business efficiency. So it's not like RPA where you basically put robots in and it greases and lubricates the friction. We actually rebuild processes. So someone described it recently to me as like kind of like a, you know, an automation of management consulting which I think, you know like value engineering which I think is actually pretty accurate to what it does. But yeah, phenomenal growth. And you're right, I mean I, I, I joined the company in June last year. We're almost double the size of the company since, since then and we're continuing at a phenomenal growth rate. And yeah, 50% of the employees joined during COVID times and yeah, it's a whole new world now I'd probably be.

Wrong of me not to plug this but I assume if you're in that kind of deep tech space, you're hiring people can go to your career site. And I'm sure you're always the lookout for good recruiters as well.

Absolutely, yeah. I mean currently as well in the US and in Europe and in fact we just hired our first recruiter in India as well. So yeah, absolutely. I'm open to hearing right now it's a very relevant topic for us in this growth stage and interestingly enough at some point Johnny, we'll do another one on this. We're not quite there yet with sharing it with you but even using our own technology on recruitment data, I'm right now have it plugged in of the Solonus product to do that deep mining on talent acquisition data. And I'll tell you, you sit this above an ATS and a CRM. Like the insights are like nothing I've ever seen and it's phenomenal and so it's going to be really interesting as I've spoken to you before about what is the future of an ats, how does that relational database elevate up to become a tool of business intelligence and like drive operating model And I'm not like we're doing some interesting stuff right now with it. So we'll come back to this, come back to me in three months on that one.

So we so Much to pack into this show. Kev, we said we'd skip the news this week because this is the news. I want to try and get this out there and get your opinion and I want to start with, you know, you've told a story that I've heard several times, which I really like, which is around and I'm going to ask you maybe to share, was about the moment you realized that perhaps, forgive me if I paraphrase this incorrectly, that sometimes TA leaders choose the metrics that make them look good without actually connecting that to real business outcomes or reality for the business. I wonder if you could talk me through the story you've told several times before, maybe in private audiences of the time you realize this. The clapping moment.

Yeah, the clapping moment. Yeah. No, it's. I feel, yeah, I'm glad, I'm glad you still think of this story warmly after hearing it so many times by the sounds of it. And you know, but yeah, no, so it was, listen, I was brought up, I'm a career recruiter, right. And I've been in house for as long as in house. Recruitment's really been kind of professionalized. And it's not just, it wasn't just an administrative function of HR to filter ad response. And you know, one of the things, you know, I bought into the narrative that these, these KPIs and these performance metrics that, you know, were defined by TA and hr that were with targets were set broadly by the audience that was, was, was, was effectively delivering the outcome and they would become, you know, almost a little bit self congratulatory that you would sit back and you would say, hey, well you know, we have this, we have this scoreboard and we're green across the board. So we should all feel good about that irrespective of whether that's actually creating the right value in the business. And I, the story I was telling you about was a few years ago I was sat in a meeting and I was quite early into a role and I was presenting the out of the box recruitment metrics that I'd inherited that at this point, as I said, I'd been the cheerleader for many years. These are the right things to measure and I presented them and one of the things I'd done is I reduced time to hire quite significantly. Now I think that most TA leaders, if not all TA leaders who are watching this, you know, could have a, if they went into a new role, could have a positive impact on traditional recruitment KPIs because we've all been around Long enough to know what levers you need to pull, right? And you pull these levers and you know, certain things happen and outcomes happen and you create this, this, this, this, this position. And so I was presenting this data and it was a large scale enterprise solution and, and I was presenting the data and like I, what I'd done is I'd taken the time to hire from like, you know, whatever it was like you know, 100 days to 65 days and significantly reduced it, dropped it down by at least a third, 40%. Right. And I've done this in a very short period of time. And like, you know, the people in the room actually clapped. Like the people who were sat around the table actually started clapping like the business leaders and some of the HR people about the impact in this relatively short period of time. And I was like, why are you clapping? Like, you know, and again, like, it seems superficially like a good story, but all I've done is I pulled a lever that's allowed us to be really impactful in a large scale. Relatively low value in terms of the corporate sense of the word, relatively low value roles. But because it's such a significant scale, it's dragged down the time to fill. So it looks like it's off. The roles that you really care about, the revenue generating roles, the billable roles, the hard to fill the niche, the deep product roles, they're still where they were because we haven't got to the capability building of being able to significantly impact them. So it took me on this journey of like, okay, we need to stop thinking about this, this egalitarian approach to recruitment, this thing that like, you know, this socialism of recruitment, that everything is equal, all requisitions are equal, and that we should homogenize our performance and we should homogenize our work to reflect as if it was. And, and so yeah, I started on this journey of let's do it different.

So maybe can you walk me through what prioritization means? Because I, I've talked to many TA leaders and some believe they have prioritization. So for example, they might say, you know, what we expect, you know, our admin recruiters to do, you know, 10 hires a month. We expect our tech recruiters to do four hires. You know, we have different expectations for different people because we understand that there's, there's different. It's harder to hire some jobs, it's easier to hire some jobs. Oh, we're not egalitarian. We, we treat them differently. That's very different from what you're Proposing, you're proposing a fundamental across the board view of the organization from the very top down. Can you talk me through what that kind of top down look of the business is like and how you went about it?

Yeah. So when, listen, and one of the things that anybody that wants to get into a deeper discussion about this with me, one of the benefits they can have is me sharing where I didn't get it right. And the first thing to your point is around prioritization within a narrow swim lane isn't prioritization. You know, it's stack ranking. And, and what I mean by that is, you know, I, when I started doing this, I went to a level within the organization that was too low. And so what I did is, I did basically I was end up having like VPs or directors or individual leaders debating prioritization with, within their own group. And you know, everyone thinks that, you know, often people think that they have some of the most important mechanics of the company. And so therefore they would, they would start to, they would start to do that. And one of the things that I quickly learned is that first of all, in order to get this to tie to what is the most important thing was tying recruitment performance to business outcomes and business objectives, you need to go much higher up the organization. You need to go as high as you possibly can in order to make that, to make that impact. And so what the discussions had is then we moved up the food chain very quickly and what we found was where there was some groups where you would be versus some groups where you would be focused on, okay, like let's stack rank one to ten your roles. Right. When you go further with food jam, that whole group doesn't even make it into the top five. Right. Because at a business level, at a strategic level, they're not a group that's creating the most value. Now different companies will find, define value in different ways. You know, I've spent all my career in technology and so therefore you can look at things like primarily the highest value things would be product and engineering roles and they would be revenue generating roles, sales and SES and stuff like that. You would have some things around it, but broadly you would have subsets of that. And so by going to the top of the organization, by having them get into this conversation around how that prioritization should look and what's creating value for the company, it's actually a very easy conversation. So whereas I spent a month dithering around at the lower parts of the organization, at the very top, it's a 15 second conversation. Because they know what is driving value. They know what the strategic imperative of the company is. They know what is going to make the company money, what's going to drive growth and what they really care about. So by leaning into that, that's important. The second thing is don't confuse kind of outcomes and even capacity with prioritization. So one of the things that when I was going on this journey that like, and I've talked about this before is, you know what I, what I used to believe as a TA leader was if I have 100 roles and 10 recruiters, what we should have is 10 recruiters with 10 roles each.

Right.

You know, because then what you've got is then you've got some equal. Then you've got like, you know, an even distribution of workloads, right. Which should drive an outcome. Right. I wouldn't do that now. Like, I wouldn't do that now. And even working now, you know, getting the foundational things in Solonus has been important and I feel we're getting close to that point where now we start to pivot into this model, which I've looked at previously and used previously, which is you start to create differentiation through the service you offer. So what I would do in very simple terms, I would say, no, no. Instead of having 10 recruiters with 10 roles each, I would have one recruiter with 40, I would have one recruiter With 30, and then I would have eight recruiters on 30. What I would is I would have those working deeply in a positive area, in the areas that drove positive outcomes and they'd have them work in an accelerated way. So instead of saying that I arbitrarily think, okay, I'm just going to cut my time to fill in half, I actually start to look at the high priority roles and say, well, well, those were always hard to fill because they're the most in demand skills and they were always 120, even 120 days in example, even when we halve the time to fill because we were just creating this homogenized approach to how we view it, those are going to go down to 30 days and the other stuff might actually creep up and be a little bit longer. So being prepared to lean in and offer a differentiated service and actually segment how you report your activity in your outcome and how you actually allocate the work and how you focus to drive out wastage and latency, that's the totality of prioritization. So, Kelly, I wonder if you could.

Walk me through the nine grid model. That you used. I'm going to ask NA maybe to share it on screen there to help us. This is something that I thought was really interesting because it's probably one level deeper than what most people might do, which is business value. You've got one axis with business value, but you've got another axis that perhaps many people don't look at. Can you walk me through what priority looks like rather than just as a. Well, some stuff is a high priority, high business value and some stuff is low. This adds a different dimension which I think is quite unique and really interesting to the way that the business should look at that combined view of what is actually important or a high priority.

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. The first thing where I started on this is I need all my stakeholders on board. So think about the HR stakeholders. HR love a nine block, right? So that's easy. So no, that's, that's actually not the origins of that. But I like to think that I was that smart that I tied it into a nine block before. But it actually made sense when we got into it. And you know, kudos to Nicole, who is my, who's my operations leader and IBM, my operations leader at Salonis, because her and I went very deep on how we solution this and she was very valuable in that discussion. So but what you have here is you basically have a nine block and what you have on the left axis, as you said, is business value. So business value is, you know, does this make money for the company? Does this role create product? Does this role allow deep execution with our customers? Is this something that we would consider having a varying degree of value to the, to the company on this scale? So you know that yes, this is high value or no, this is low value or lower value. We'll get to the naming convention in a second because that was another learning experience. And then what you have on the bottom axes is this hiring complexity. And this is where this is the one that most of all. So the business value is easy. You work with the business, you work with the different stakeholders and you come up with this, you know, this, this model of like where you're able to stack rank and you're able to, to solicit an audit that, that really points that hiring complexity started with how. What's the, what, what's the availability of talent? So just outright, what is the availability of talent? You know, you're hiring blockchain people, you know, 13, 000 blockchain people in the world. 70, 000 blockchain jobs, right? It's a very low supply of tal to the demand. So that's where we, that's where I started to think about it. And then what I started to do is evolve that thinking to think, okay, hiring complexity is more than that. So hiring complexity is what is the availability of talent for sure. What is the propensity of that talent to engage with our brand? What is the propensity of us to be able to execute on that talent quickly? So how does our process support high velocity decisions? How does it support being able to attract talent? The, you know, average Java developer is on the market for something like 16 days. Like if our process is a, a five or 10 week process, that's just not going to work, right? How well do we orientate our compensation towards being attractive to individuals within that space? And you know, and, and so, so it becomes this like this deeper dynamic around okay, like what is the ecosystem of dependent things that, that make a candidate an employee and what are all the variables and then how does that tie into how effective? So introspectively, how effective are we as a company at executing on that strategy? And so hiring complexity is, you know, is very much about, you know, really mining your, your own data and trying to get insights or even, I would actually say even being speculative on that as to like how, how good or not good are we at basically hiring that talent? You know, your offer rejection rates is a great point. You know, like there's loads of little points of data that go in that. So when you've got these two axes, so you've got the, the business value and you've got the hiring complexity, what you saw is you were able to, then there we go. What you're able to see then is you're able then to plot your roles into all of this. And you can start with job categories and then move on to job families and then move into individual roles and actually have them plotted out here so you understand in both service and execution how they should be considered. What you have is you have a position where just because it's high value doesn't mean it's high complexity. You know, you may be very attractive. Like if you're the market leader in a particular space and you're considered the destination of choice. Like, you know, you know, certainly, you know, some, some engineering talent, certainly companies like Microsoft, et cetera would be, you know, the, if you, if you work with Microsoft technology or Salesforce Technology or something similar that, that might be the mothership. Like they might say, listen, we, you know, we can pull from our ecosystem. So it's high value, but it's low complexity because those, we have those people in our talent communities right now. And equally something that may be low value but might have a high degree of hiring complexity, but it doesn't mean you'd want to serve it, service it in the same way of something that is high value and high complexity.

And when you kind of did this process, you know, it's one thing prioritizing them and noticing what's more important. But critically then you chose to reallocate your resources. So you know, again, to the point of. Right, knowing its high priorities. One thing having that done and to your point around, you get the top, the very, very top level of the business to, to give you that signal to understand where it fits in. How did you then what was the shift, you know, in terms of, you know, where you reallocated resources to, where did you take them from, where did they go to? How did you think about that and why did you make the decisions you made?

Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I don't know if we have, we got, we got the, the other slides, I think. Yeah, there we go. I think this explains, explains a lot better. So this is obviously a hypothetical set of numbers, but if you were to plug in your numbers into the nine block on the left there that we pull through so you can see and you think about this, this requisition value model. So what you have is you might come out with numbers like this where you have 35% will be in low value, 45% in medium value and 20% in high value. And back to this, 100 rolls, 10 recruiters, 10 Rex each model, which is how most people think about capacity, planning and utilization broadly. What you have is you then have your allocation applied equally. So what you would say is no, I don't think we should do that. And so we don't. Shouldn't go all wholesale to my, if I had 10 recruiters, I would have like eight on 30%. That's not practical to get to on day one.

Right.

It's like that's downstream and lots of use cases. But what you could certainly do in the short term is say, okay, I'm actually going to strip away 15% from my low value work and I'm going to apply that onto the high value work immediately. What you've created is you've created this differentiation of capacity. You basically got more resources working on less work at one end of the scale, so therefore be able to create higher velocity outcomes. What you're able to do is think, okay, this is actually a model that would support moving to a differentiated service model. And so as you start to get into this you could say okay, you know, in low value and we'll get to these naming conventions in a little while because as I said that was another learning. But in low value you could have more automation, you could have more self service. You can actually encourage managers to do more of their own activities down there. You know, you could, you could have, this is a training ground. You could have this with or without source of support. You could have this without coordination support. So actually getting your resources focused to the point of impact in the middle you might have regular full life cycle recruiter maybe with some bells and whistles and some little things that go on top of it. And then in the high value you could have your resources pointed for higher value outcomes. So you could have okay, sources and sources a whole other topic that we need to get into. Johnny, as you know, because I don't like sourcing models, not the sourcing models that most companies use today, you know, and so, you know, so, so you could say okay, like source, like the high value stuff has coordination support so that we can execute more quickly. So all the coordinators are there because everything needs to move. You can't every, you have to have interviews the next day. Our processes are different, needs more administrative support. You could have more sources that you could have swarming sources. You could have an agile model in there. Which is the. One of the things that I did is around having these agile teams deployed in the, and you know, we've got a, you know, examples where we, on, on very technical roles, like very technical roles, architect roles and high value consultants, very senior people we were able to get, take the time to fill down from 120 days to 19 days in the high value stuff, you know, and it's, you know, just the impact you're making to your company is, is astounding. Like, and you, you know, one of the things we hypothesized is that you know, what would happen is you would have a differentiation of service. You'd have to be prepared that things aren't going to be resolved as quickly. And so you know, when I look at this low, medium and high in the low you would always say okay, we might be slower, like we might, we got to be prepared as a company that we're not going to be as fast as that work. But it has less commercial value to the organization saying that people have less value. They for sure don't you know, I'm very strong socialist roots and so, you know, I'm very much around the idea that, you know, don't want to dehumanize the work that people do. But you know, it has lower commercial value in the middle. You might say, okay, we will probably stay the same and the high value stuff, we should be better. What actually transpired is you get better across the board because what you create is you create a program programmatic and systematized way of execution. So what you have is when you introduce automation, things move more seamlessly at the lower end. When you're asking recruiters that have maybe limited capability to headhunt to say they don't need to go after these high value roles because rec dispersion is based around services and capability building in each of these three groups and not based around the random almost like Russian roulette approach to what requisition is going to fire out next and is this something I'm capable to, to do? But it doesn't matter, I've got to do it because I look after that group. I'm arbitrarily aligned to a business unit or a country, so I'm gonna have to do that. You know, you say no. If you're, if you, if you're not, if your talent isn't head something, your, your talent is managing process. You could do really well. And so what you find is an impact to a positive impact. So where you thought you'd get what you maybe get worse, you got better. And then where you thought you'd stay the same, you get a bit better. And where you thought you would do better, you do significantly better. Right? Because you're skilled for the right purposes. And you know, and there's a lot of things that underpin this, you know, it's, it's part, you know, your, your, your strategy to your own talent. You know, I mean, Johnny, we were talking off air, you know, and something we'll get to at the back end of this conversation is we were talking about, you know, some of the, some of the requirements I've come to social talent with over the years and kind of said like, you know, I don't need to develop skills unilaterally. That's what you offer. You offer this incredible database of whatever it is, 3,600 hours or 36,000 hours or 36 million hours, I can't remember. Whatever you have, you have a lot of content, right? That's great and I like the fact that it's self paced, but actually I want. I have different service offerings now, so I want learning paths specific to my service offerings so that we develop and refine skills that are specific to. To that. Yes, we have some that are unilaterally good. I think the things like diversity segments are good. I think some, you know, how to construct certain elements of the process. But there's also some areas which are highly relevant and specific to that service offering. And I think that that's an important differentiator is Stop thinking recruiters have. Are a homogenized job Description and the 1 skills profile. Like it is. It is this idea that recruiter is the job and it doesn't. That we have. We've created this one product and it doesn't come in any other flavors is absolutely ridiculous. You know, it is. You know, you don't have salespeople that come in one flavor. You have channel sales people, you have indirect. You have business development. You have, you know, you know, accounting, like, you know, but we have recruiter, like, get out of here, right? It's like, come on. Like, they come in different flavors, they have different skills and they have different strengths. Let's start leaning in to those strengths and dealing with this in a way that we have a more advanced ecosystem than we're giving ourselves credit for or the companies or executives allowing us to believe we have. Right? And that we can own this. And I always think about the fact that we've. We've fallen into this narrative of this. This equitable service offering. This kind of like, oh, you know, let's just. They say client. I would never say clients. My colleagues are my colleagues. They're not my clients. Right? We're all in it together. Right? But like this, this HR narrative that, like, oh, like, who's your client? Like, it's cringe when I. My clients or your colleague, they. Your partner. Like, it's driving mad. Anyway, that's a. That's an aside rant. We'll get to that rant another show. But it's like, you know, it's. We're kind of like, you know, no, no, we can have a service offering. I think I used the one where you recently, Jody, I was told, like, you imagine a bank, right? Banks are now digital platforms. They're now, you know, they disappeared off the high streets and stuff like that. Because what they do is they do everything electronically and they're trading platforms. And what you would have is in the bank's head office in London or in New York, they would basically have. They would be operating the system with the Traders and what you would have is you would have a slight reliability engineer. So as every nanosecond the site is down, it costs the bank millions in non executable trades. Right? So you want that person to be paid well, you want them to be sat close to the problem and you want them to be ready to go and over resource for when you hit the okay, that's great. So the site goes down, they're there, they're on it, they're expensive resource and they'll fix it. What you have is you then have a medium kind of dispersed location. And this is not about cost, don't tie this to cost. You would have like a bunch of people where they would be working on the next version of the platform. So they'd be working in an agile or waterfall environment developing the next version of the platform. Then what you would have is you would have somebody who sits in an office in a bank whose laptop won't turn on. Well, we're not going to send up the 200 grand a year site reliability guy to go and fix his laptop when we need them to keep the site running. We're going to get somebody who's in a dispersed location who provides a lower commercial value service that can help you fix that. Right. And so we've got to set ourselves up like a services operation. Unless like this, this, this, this equitable, everything's going to happen like this kind of operation. And so I think that's important. And then when I was getting into this, this is where I become unstuck with the low, medium and high. Nobody wants to hear that they're low business value. Right.

And it just, I was going to get this, it's like, it's shit. No one wants to work that. No recruiter, sourcer, talent advisor is like, well why am I on the low priority stuff? Yeah, no hiring manager wants to know you categorize it that way.

Absolutely and absolutely. And I was sharing this model. I actually did a workshop like a while ago, maybe a year and a half ago with Colleen and Liv over at Siemens Health and I was like, great bunch of recruitment, great recruitment team. And I was actually doing something with them and I was saying to them, I was like, you know, the one thing that like really annoys me and this is why it's real, this is why I'm so open about this stuff. Like I really genuinely believe in open source recruitment and, and that we crowdsource these ideas. And then so I was like, I was like, you know, this is kind of really interesting they were, yeah, that wouldn't go down well in our company either. I was like, yeah, if I was to have my time over, this is one of the things I changed. And so they went with, they were looking at having standardized, configured and customized. So standardized, you get this like standardized service that's got a lot of automation and self service in configured is if you imagine there's 10 elements to that recruitment process, you could maybe customize like three or four of them and then customize would be like maybe seven or eight of the 10 have a bespoke solution attached to them because it's high value work, it's high velocity, it's very well resourced. And so I kind of like that. I kind of like what they come up with was standard, configured and customized. And so I was like, yeah, I'm going to go with that now. That's a much better, that's much better than low, medium and high service offerings. So.

I want to dig into the how for a few minutes. Kevin, I'm just going to quick shout out for anyone listening live if any questions or comments for Kev, if you got a prioritization model in place, you want to give us a comment about how you do it or how you'd approach it, or how you deliver higher value at that level for the configured or customized level. But Kev, when you looked at it, I was most surprised that you had improvements in KPIs and some of the roles you've had in the past on the low end stuff where you've almost halved the resources and not just people, but money for tech, for licenses, for different things, you've had the resources and they've actually come out even better. One of the areas that we've talked about was sourcing and you talked about, you mentioned at the top of the hour that you have a bit of a bugbear on the way a lot of organizations do sourcing and you've tried different models and developed those over the last few years. Where, where do you currently stand? What works for you? What's the model that you have seen work best for you? I'm not saying it's for everybody, but you know, what's wrong with the current way that most people do sourcing and think about sourcing as one element of it and how have you seen it evolve when you've applied this model to get real efficiency, even in the volume, let's call them lower value or standardized roles.

Yeah, yeah. So one thing anybody that's worked closely with me will know that I always pose a question when sourcing comes up and I know pose it quite a few times because the last time I did it Craig Sweeney was in the room and shouted out the right answer. Craig over at Wilson. So I know I've done it in front of him before, but I, I, I always put, I always write it up on a whiteboard. I always say one plus one equals what? And everyone in the room says two. Right. In every scenario, except when you talk about sources and recruiters. So 1 and 1 does not equal 2. 1 and 1 equals 1.3 or 1.4, maybe 1.5 if you're lucky. Right. Adding a saucer to a recruiter does not double the productivity of that. In fact, often the cumulative resource of having 200% of people and often in real terms brings down the output of the recruiter because what they do is they have a dependency to not, not feel that they overstretch. And so if you are like me and have worked in most models where you're constrained by a combination of either budget and headcount or one or the other, you know, and particularly if you, if, if it's both, you have to make some trade offs. So the trade off for me is always around. I have a financial finite amount of resource to do, a variable level of demand. So I would always want to reach into, to have the highest level of productivity and capacity to apply that to my utilization, my results. So what I would want is I would want the most quota carrying resource as I could. So what I would want is, yeah, they might not have the same target. So let's not confuse targets and outcomes with what that resource is. So I would much rather have, as a traditional model is not have a recruiter. So if a Recruiter's target is 10 highs in a quarter and you give them a saucer, they might do 12, 13, 14. Right, okay. But if you have two recruiters, a, a more junior profile and a senior profile and you could say actually the resource allocation for that is 20, now it might be that one does 14 and one does 6. Because one of them might be working on higher value work, one of them might be working on what we perceive lower value from a commercial perspective work. But what you end up with is you end up with this model whereby you've increased your available capacity thinking like a services company, right? And so then you dispel this idea that like, well, why would I just have like this traditional sourcing model? Like I just, I just, it's, it's illogical to me. It just makes no sense because what I then want to do is say, well if I am going to, if I do need to support. So what you get is a critical massive engagement. So there's only so many people you can have interact with hiring managers. You don't want this like this free for all with hiring managers where they're having to deal with a bunch of recruiters. So what I would, what I would move towards is saying, okay, so if we want to prop up and provide velocity to a recruiter, it should be very specific. So it should be specific to the value model. So based on low value stuff should not have sourcing support because by its very nature it has less commercial value to the organization. So you then decide, okay, goes in here. And actually if you look at the wastage and latency of any source, it's actually quite high relative to what it could be. Because what you have is if they say a recruiter, you've got to assume that all roles are requiring a degree of sourcing or that you're able to make a decision around at what point you feel it's sufficiently resourced for, right? So that there's sufficient pipeline and you can never, you can never fully take away that latency. And so what you might have is, you know, you have sources that attach the roles way beyond they need to be because the candidates already in there, they either don't know it or they develop sufficient pipeline or the fact that you know that role is going to have a different outcome. So what you then look at is having two different things that I've worked with and found to be more successful in traditional sourcing. The first one is based around Agile, which is you would have them work in high velocity sprints for a short period of time. And what you would do is they would work in a small team and what they would do is start to graduate off individually. So people would leave those sprints and so they would work maybe for, okay, this is a two week sprint and, and after six or seven days one of the three might drop out, then the second one the next day and then the third one after the two weeks. So what you're doing is that you're pushing them towards restarting other searches instead of seeing them all the way through these project based searches. So that definitely probably takes your wastage and latency of a source. And these are just numbers off the top of my head. You might have like 75% actual product, product productive, useful time for source. So you got 25% wasted in latency. That might take it to like, okay, you've got 15% wasted in latency because they're overlapping, they're moving off searches at the right time and the sequence and the team goal orientated. So that works very well on a project base. But the second one is around. This idea of swarming is that you create a huge amount of velocity in a very short period of time. So what you would do is you would basically have team goals. So again, I'm moving away from the idea that recruitment and time acquisition is an individual sport, that it's a, it's a solo sport. It is much more orientated towards team goal and teams objectives. And I think we're going to see more and more. I'm working on some stuff now that I think will further reinforce that. So, you know, the collective and so having these swarming sourcing teams where basically they bombard something for a day or maybe 2, they create such velocity as a group, maybe 6, 8, 10 sources, create so many such a huge swell of activity in a short space of time and then obviously, you know, connect back to a follow up and a loop back on it and set the, set the recruiter up, the recruiter or recruiters up for success after day one or day two to run with that. And then so what you've got is potentially like, you know, you know, restarting these, these, these things like light, lighting these fires every day, five days a week, you know, 220 days a year. And you're accelerating these projects and this work and the wastage and latency then goes down to like 5% because they're not there beyond, because they can go back if it's not successful, but it's more productive work. If the pipeline isn't there or the recruiter starts to not see the pull through, they get back on it. But in the meantime, instead of just being sat there waiting for that outcome to happen, they've worked on five or six more searches and accelerated them. So, so I think that traditional source of recruitment, I'm sure you'll have people that'll write you a letter or whatever. No, it's not 1980. They're writing an email or they're like.

They can comment, they can talk, they can message.

Yeah, they'll write in the comments full of crap. Yeah, I mean like that's not going to work or whatever. And like that's fine. That's, that's, you know, people have seen that successful at one to one model or that one to that one to several model. Yeah, good for you like, if you made it work, then great, share it with me, like. But I'll tell you, for me, the wastage and latency is too high on that traditional model. And I would be much more like agile. Sourcing or swarming just reduces that greatly. It's not to say they're not effective in the other model. Could they be more effective? I probably think so.

I'll be honest if I go back to the wider topic that we started with a prioritization and reallocating your resources. Is that Kevin, only for large companies?

No. And actually I went through this with, I was doing some work with one of Jamie Leonard's in the recruitment events, companies sessions a couple of years ago and somebody said a similar thing and said it's great for you. You have 800 recruiters, 900 recruiters or something at the time. And we can't do this, we only hire 100 people a year. But within that the subset's the same. So you might be servicing that with three recruiters, but like, you know, again, have one recruiter on 50 and two recruiters on 25 each or whatever, whatever you do. But the service model, the prioritization, the focus, the investment should be differentiated. Like, you can still put your work, even if it's like 50 or 100 rolls a year, you can still plot your work and how it should be valued for the business. Because again, as you come back, you don't sit there and you don't put up a scorecard that's all green, that's self congratulatory, that sits around and say, you know, this is great and you've got to be prepared to make yourself a little bit vulnerable and say, you know what, we, you know, we, we did really well in this and we didn't do so well in this. And be prepared to have a red dot on your scorecard for a couple of years while you perfect the model. But your aspiration will be higher, your outcome will be better. And so no, it is, absolutely, if anything you should get it, you know, get into, get into this habitual behaviors at a much earlier point. At a much earlier point, you know.

So there's a lot to unpack. And for those of you who've maybe caught bits of it, are trying to go back and scribble through notes or remember it. We're publishing a white paper today on this that we've written with Kevin to explain it with the, with the charts that we've shown on screen. If you've listened to the podcast, you haven't seen those charts. I recommend you do. And it's available now to download. You can get it from socialtalent.com forward/resources, our resources page. You'll find it there. There's several resources on that page but if you go to that socialtalent.com resources you'll find the white paper that Kevin worked on us, worked with us on, which shows all those diagrams, gives you a bit more detail. And Kevin, I'm sure you're, you mentioned already, but I know this to be a fact. But I'm going to ask you again anyway. You're happy to take any leader call message, reach out to say, hey, tell me more about this. You've helped many others already with this, but is it okay to say that, that you're happy to kind of hear from any leader around how they can do this?

100 and after the session, we did a session with a very small group last week. I actually had two companies from that reach out and ask me for a private session with their own internal leadership team to almost become in as like, hey, I've got no, I've got no, I've got no chips on the table in this debate like you guys. You, you're having a debate about what your model should be. Let me show you a different perspective. So, you know, always happy to engage and chat for sure.

Well, Kevin, we've would you believe, rushed through 45 minutes. We're at the end of the show. You've given a huge amount of value and insight, hopefully made lots of our listeners think if you're a TA leader in a leadership role, looking to aspire to a leadership role, we very much think, I think in terms of social talent. But also, Kevin, this is the way forward. If you're not doing this, you're kind of crazy. There's no reason not to. You're not buying new tech, you're not investing in new hires. This is about, you know, optimizing processes, which I guess is appropriately what Sloanists are trying to do as a product. But in that business they brought the right kind of person who thinks about this. And it's a model that anyone could adapt, whether you're doing 100 hires or 50,000 hires, as Kevin pointed out, you've given a lot of tips and advice already, Kev. But I'm going to ask you, as I ask every guest on the show every week, to leave us with one piece of additional advice, the piece of advice that perhaps rings in your head from advice you've been given by others in the Past or it's just something you give to others because you've learned it yourself over the last 20 years. What would that piece of advice be?

Yeah, no, and I alluded to it before. My piece of advice would be expect more from your vendors, right? Expect more from the companies you work with. I, you know, it's funny because Johnny and I went on a journey together many, many years ago where I was the first person to ask him for SSO single sign on. Right? We were the first, we were the first company to ask that. Now that's a given that that's an offering for the company. Right? But at the time it was like, you know, I need this integrate with different systems. I need sso, I need individual learning parts. I had it with a vendor recently where, you know, I, they presented a product and said that's not going to work for me unless you can do this and I really need you to do it like this. And I think this whole narrative is like that. We should be accepting of looking at out of the box solutions to get into the design of an individual. I think it's applicable. We should put much more emphasis on expecting a higher value, bespoke solution from any vendor in this space, whether that be ats, CRM training, service provision, integrated learning systems, Johnny, whatever. And honestly like only work with vendors that are prepared to entertain that idea, you know, and you know, because you know, I haven't always, you know, you don't always need to be the biggest spender with them to have an opinion and create a narrative around their product and what they should be doing to support you. And as I said, more often than not I found that, you know, many of the vendors I've worked at have leaned into this idea that we should, they should allow me to influence how I consume their service and not just the accepted. So my advice would be, would be do that, you know, put more pressure on your, your suppliers and your vendors to give you much more customized, accessible services.

It's great advice. Our head of customer success, Kelly Gussain, asked the leadership team to read a book in December called the Outcome Generation. I have told many people about it and I will continue to tell people about it, but basically the philosophy is that as I give it to other founders and, and, and execs and software companies as a kind of a wake up call speaks to your point, which is that, you know, your job is to, to help your customers solve their problem and therefore the success of the success is not the usage of your solution, it's the success of the customer, whatever they're looking to achieve. And your job is to do whatever it takes. And that also involves listening and understanding and making sense of what the customer needs and going, well, can we through our solution, our offering, our service, our software, whatever it is, can we do that? So great advice. Jennifer Elliott's asking, can you repeat the link for the white paper? We can. We've put a link in the chat and LinkedIn, but it's at socialtalent.com forward/resources if you want to get it. It's got tons of information in there, explains this in more detail and gives you a summary. Going to share it with your teams. Kevin, thank you so much for joining us and explaining that. I never tired genuinely of hearing it because I think it's just something that should be heard out there. And hopefully any of the leaders, our leadership wannabes on the, on the, the podcast or chat, I think they, they should listen to this because it's the model for the future for any sort of scaled TA organization. And as you said, you're always happy to take questions on it directly. So I appreciate your offer. Kevin, thanks for joining us. We're gonna have you back because we've got tons more topics to talk about over the next coming months and year. So please, thank you for giving. Please give us of your time again. You've been very generous of your time for the white paper and today's talk. And we'll talk to you soon. So those listening, we are back next week with more. There's more.

Yes.

This is year zero for talent. As I said, that's what we're seeing. Everybody's looking to change everything. And you know what? It's really good. It's a great opportunity. It's a real positive time. If we're in the talent space as things are changing and things are accelerating. Next week we're going to continue the conversation. We're going to really push the limits of talent acquisition into the area we think it should be, which is how do we bring that team in. Kevin mentioned team hiring is a team sport, not just within the recruitment team, but it's your colleagues, your peers in the business, including the managers, for whom these team members are going to go work for. And we've got the fantastic Jason Lauritson and Linda Jonas joining us. Jason's been on the show before. Linda's a first timer to the show. But Jason and Linda having working together since the pandemic began to really understand employee performance and understand how remote and virtual and distributed working is affecting the leaders and the individuals working for those leaders and trying to make sense of what is working, what's not. They built an amazing data set and off that began building training and working coaching workshops. And we're really excited to be launching a whole bunch of new programs with Jason and Linda in April for our users that will teach you exactly as a leader, as a hiring manager, how can you work with your with your remote workers, your virtual workers, or as a recruiting leader or as a colleague. And that's mindset, not mechanics, the biggest obstacle for remote team managers. So join us next week. Linda and Jason are going to give liberty of their time and join us from different continents for the show next week. That's Wednesday, 7th of April. That's 4pm UK Irish time. And we're all on the same time zones now as the clocks have reworked themselves around the world. That's 11am on the east coast of the US, 8am on the west coast. And of course you can always find the recording on YouTube on LinkedIn, or you can find us in your podcast and just subscribe and you'll appear by Thursday morning in your subscription list on Apple or Spotify. Join us next week. We'd love to hear what you thought of Kevin's white paper of the show this week as well. Any thoughts you have on other issues that you're faced with, please let the team know and you can check out more, as always on upcoming shows and look at our back catalog@SocialTown.com the shortlist. We'll see you next week, new month, new season. See you in April.