Looking back: The holistic role of TA leaders

You're very welcome to this week's special. In case you missed the edition of the shortlist today, we wanted to showcase an episode from earlier this year because the topic is just as relevant as ever. Thinking Holistically About Talent Acquisition why TA Leaders need to care More about onboarding, Compensation and Internal Mobility in this episode we chat with John Vasilika, the founder and CEO of Recruiting Toolbox All About Talent Acquisition. As John puts it, talent problems need holistic thinking. As you're going to hear on this show, it's very easy for people to slip into a mentality of that's not my job. But I'd like to encourage you all to consider the entire puzzle with things like compensation, retention and onboarding and how they have a direct impact on talent acquisition. It's hard to keep a healthy pipeline when it's riddled with leaks. And this episode dives into how a holistic view, seeing everything as being connected, can actually take some of the pressure off TA teams. I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you next week for brand new live episode where we'll be talking to Jonathan Knowles and Hannah Grove, co authors of the Harvard Business Review article what is the purpose of your purpose? And we'll be talking about the purpose of a company's purpose. Hope you enjoy this episode with John. See you next. Let's get into it. The function of TA talent acquisition is continually evolving like it didn't really exist in that name even 15, 20 years ago. And while hiring of course is the, you know, the the best external candidates is the primary focus of talent acquisition like it's in the name, right? It's becoming increasingly important for talent acquisition leaders to think a little bit broader than just acquiring acquiring talent into the organization. It can't just start and stop with hiring TA leaders arguably more involved after a person joins a company as well, ensuring that there's a better chance for alignment, retention and success for that talent. And joining us to discuss this topic, and it's a timely and crucial topic, is our good friend John Bastolika. John is the founder and CEO of Recruiting Toolbox out of Seattle. He's a renowned expert in the town space. He's typically the number one rated speaker, not just in LinkedIn Talent Connect where I first heard John, but every every single conference stage he typically goes on to. And he's also, I'm proud to say, one of the most popular presenters on our social talent platform as well. John is joining us to talk about why talent acquisition leaders need to expand their scope of Influence to encompass other areas like onboarding, compensation, internal mobility and others. John, you're very welcome. Thanks for joining us this morning from your home in, in Washington State. Perhaps you can just remind our viewers about your career, what brought you here, what you do today, day to day that gives you an opinion on this matter.

Sure, yeah. Thanks for having me, Johnny. I geek out on all things Talent acquisition. Our consulting and training firm, Recruiting Toolbox, we've worked with hundreds of companies, so hundreds of TA teams from about 30 countries. And most of our work is focused on helping companies improve the way they recruit. So we don't do any headhunting, but we are deep in the belly of the beast of a lot of enterprise talent acquisition functions, doing work to help them define their hiring standards, you know, to skill up recruiters, skill up hiring managers, drive alignment across the executive team on kind of their strategy around talent acquisition, their strategy around talent broadly. And so one of the things that I get to do, and I say get to do, not have to do, but I get to do is learn a lot from our clients and see things in the real world. Prior to Recruiting Toolbox, which I started about 15 years ago, I was the head of tech recruiting at Amazon and the head of recruiting at Expedia. So come out of the corporate TA world and very much lived as part of a, you know, functioning and sometimes, you know, dysfunctional HR person in my, you know, 12 years of that kind of world. And so got to experience a lot of the things that I'm going to share firsthand as a, as a TA recruiter, manager, head of ta, kind of working my way up and getting more visibility into what's on the chro or chief People officer's plate and just the challenges of leading an organization where talent is everything in a lot of these organizations. So it gets a lot of inspection and focus by the business and certainly a lot of unsolicited feedback on how well we're doing. So that's a lot of my passion is really around geeking out on how we can make sure that this thing works well. And today we're going to talk as you know, a little bit about how we can think a little more holistically as leaders, as TA leaders. Whether you're a recruiter or a recruiting, you have a manager, director, VP title, there's an opportunity to think more holistically.

John, you've ran large TA teams around the world. You've advised hundreds of large TA teams and their leaders. But fundamentally, most TA leaders, if I'm not mistaken. They're paid and KPI'd and measured on things like speed of hiring, the cost of hiring and so on, so forth. Why should they care about onboarding, compensation, internal mobility, dni? Like before we get into it, like, is there a need to even think about this? Like if you're a leader should be going, I'm going to skip this podcast because like my job involves hiring. So I just got to keep working on hiring. Don't know what these two crazy guys are talking about. Like what is there a need? And if so, why?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I'll be honest, when I started in recruitment, I had people come to me and say, John, we want you to do more work, you and your team more work around, you know, internal mobility. And I was like, not my job. I mean literally not my job. And I put big boundaries around my role and my team's role and said, we hire world class external talent into the organization. I don't want to touch that. That's HR generalist work or that's, you know, internal. Candidates just need different kind of feedback and managers suck at giving feedback. So I just don't want to touch it. It's going to be a bit of a disaster. Someone else should own it. What's interesting, using that as an example, what's interesting is when you're having conversations with executives in the business, they don't separate out external and internal talent the way we might do it in hr. They don't separate out university from tech, from call center, warehouse, retail from executive recruiting the way we do. They don't want to talk to many people. You know, they don't want siloed thinking coming out of their partners in hr. They to don't want, they want someone that understands how to help them solve whatever talent issue they're facing. And so what I realized using internal mobility as an example is by squeezing that out of my world, I was unable to have what I think was an adult strategic conversation with some of the business leaders because I just didn't have visibility. And honestly I just didn't care that much. I didn't think I needed to care that much. And so I think what that probably did in the minds of some of the C level execs that I was interfacing with was made them realize, okay, this guy is just your go to for filling recs, right? He'll fill the racks, he'll get that done. We need to work with other people or build our own capability internally or something else. And so when I think about the struggle that a lot of recruiters have or recruiting leaders have to make sure they're not put in that order taker bucket. You know, they're not branded as the order taker. I think crap, what a missed opportunity I probably had in some parts of my career now my thinking evolved over time. So over time I, I took on all kinds of stuff that was outside of just traditional Phil FTE Rex full time equivalent Rex with external candidates. I had contractors and consulting come into my world and other things. But in the beginning days I was like not my job. So I think that's one reason is talent problems need holistic thinking. They're connected and the business doesn't view it. Maybe the way we organize ourselves in HR. Does that make sense? Johnny?

So it does, right? 100 I mean I think it's probably easy enough for most people to get their heads around the fact that hey, you do external recruiting, maybe you should be in charge of internal recruiting. So that's. You're not going to get much disagreement there again from people who've experienced it like you have. Sure. Like when you get to things like well onboarding and comp things that are like very, very traditional HR areas like why the heck should a TA did or hear about those areas like why should you think more history. Where does it end?

Right. Yeah. And let me be clear. I'm not suggesting everyone should own internal mobility and you may have experts, but we have to care about it. We have to be informed about it. We have to be able to influence it because it is a major source of talent. And so same thing with compensation and onboarding. There are a lot of people in the broader HR org that are writing checks that we have to cash. They are making decisions that have massive impact on our ability to deliver hires for the business. And so one of the things that I've seen is this kind of passive like you know, not my job comp. Made some weird decisions, I just got to make it work kind of thing. And I want us to fight a little more. I actually worked as a contractor as a compensation consultant. My first HR job out of university was for covering for someone on maternity leave for three months as a compensation analyst. And I don't think I really appreciated when I was later in ta. I don't really think I appreciated how that experience helped shape my ability to, you know, engage and influence compensation leaders because typically they are very under resourced. A lot of times the people put in those roles are trying to balance the needs across, you know, lots of Stakeholders, you know, keeping costs low. They're the protectors of internal equity. And then you got someone like me in recruiting is telling you the market is crazy. People are paying, you know, these massive sign on bonuses. Base salaries are out of whack with the market. Our hiring managers only want talent out of these companies and they pay 30% more than us. And we're just banging down their door and they're like, we can't afford it. What do you expect? This is crazy. We have surveys that say we're not that out of whack. And I'm like, well you're out of whack. And you know, you get into this big thing. And so what I realized over time is we have to be really aligned with compensation and we have to make sure that we are teaching compensation. And I don't mean this in a condescending way. Okay, teaching compensation and the broader HR leadership that decisions and comp will have a massive impact on us and talent acquisition. Not just for the obvious reasons, it might be harder to close. But for example, we had a client that was paying about 30% below market and that was just their company philosophy around comp. They just didn't pay high base salary. They didn't use sign on bonuses in a big way. They had some equity, but equity or stock only started at certain levels. And what were the consequences of that? Well, you had hiring managers who wanted to hire out of certain companies. They couldn't get talent out of many of those companies. They tried. But the real consequence that I noticed as someone kind of up, up above, looking down, not living in it, looking at it, is they had to make their recruiting organization probably 50, 50% bigger than it needed to be because of this decision in comp. Because their funnel was so fat, they had all these candidates that would get in the top and just would. They had a leaky bucket, you know, a leaky funnel. They just couldn't get people down to the final offer stage and close them to because comp was so out of whack. So they employed the strategy I make fun of a lot in our recruiting leadership training, which is the try harder strategy. You know, hey, sorry about the comp. Just go do your job and run faster and try harder. And so this poor TA team, I shouldn't say poor. They were a great team, lovely people. But this TA team, you can just realize like you are having to hire so many more sourcers and screeners and senior recruiters than you would need to have. I don't know how much that Cost, but it's certainly a real cost. You should compare to the cost of consciously paying below market by that much. Does that make sense as well?

I have this image John, you just created from that story of two rooms in a building. One is the HR room, it's really quiet and somebody sitting there in excel going range 60 to 65, beautiful piece. They press submit and they go on their lunch break. Then a different room with ta. Everyone's like ah, like just disconnect right? From some listeners on YouTube Aluci Abeora saying yes, John Moses went through similar thinking they're not my job script. So loving that one. And then we've got Iska Gonzalez saying, as always, great comments. Decision making influence. That's what I love about ta. I want to talk about the compensation piece just for a second. We'll get back to China mobility and other areas in a moment. John, there was an article that we uncovered in researching this show published a few months ago by Francesca Di Meglio on HR Exchange Network. And it was called compensation truths you need to know for success in 2022. And what was really interesting, because I think your comment is evergreen around just the importance of compensation and its impact. But this article highlighted this year in particular as being challenging because of the remote working element. And comp was always about like are we keeping up with the market? But the market just became for a lot of organizations like 50 other cities and countries and exchange rates and it just been crazy. And the article digs into that issue. But also, you know, this compensation around stock and benefits in the tech sector. And then, you know, it reminded me obviously of a recent move. I think only last week your former employer Amazon made a big change on the kind of cap on base salaries. Right. So obviously you're seeing how it impacts an employer of 1.5, 1.6 million people having to change a policy like that, increasing I think of $160,000 caps, like $300,000 or something like that. But like it's very, very, very relevant today. And do you see, do you think that that you know, mobility piece around whether you're going to be working remotely, working hybrid, has that accelerated this conversation made even more urgent around comp in 2022?

Yeah, for sure. I think, I think the remote work thing, obviously, you know, there's cost of living, there's cost of labor, there's questions around how we pay people, you know, that move from a high cost living area to low, all that kind of stuff. And I'll tell you when, at the start of the pandemic. I reached out to some of my compensation consultant friends and I and you know, I asked them some questions and honestly what I heard is, yeah, you know, shit's about to get real. Like, you know, there's a whole bunch of stuff that's going down and we're going to see some major changes for sure. So everyone kind of saw it coming once it became obvious that remote work was going to become more normalized. And by the way, many companies, including many of our clients, have been remote work almost from the start. So it's not like this is a new thing. But I do want to highlight something that sometimes is not talked about and that is there is, you know, compensation to me. I'm going to get in trouble if there's anyone from compensation listening to this. Compensation to me, the whole premise around compensation is to benchmark talent based on years of experience and university degrees for most of the jobs that, you know, are the professional sort of white, traditionally white collar type jobs. And one of the things that's really changed, I would say in the last five years is that there is an acknowledgement that years of experience and college degrees do not predict on the job success. And so what's happening is you've got a whole compensation system, you know, surveys and benchmarking and, you know, leveling guidelines that unfortunately are based on things that just aren't actually very applicable to the way we recruit in 2022 and beyond. And so when we are helping companies define their hiring bars and we're talking to executives and trying to influence executives to maybe let go of some pedigree bias or let go of degree requirements, you're seeing this loosening. You know, a lot of, a lot of companies are kind of loosening requirements. IBM CEO famously talked about this. There's a whole bunch of work going on in that space. And I would hate to be in compensation because how do you possibly benchmark when someone with three years of experience could be considered a senior engineer, as could someone with 20 years of experience, someone with a PhD in engineering, someone, someone with no degree or a degree in biology or music could be a senior engineer. How on earth do you benchmark in that kind of world? You know what I mean? And so I think compensation has gotten more complicated a little bit because of that. Not even counting how sign on bonuses and performance reviews and bonuses and equity and all that stuff has just made it more complicated. There's just this whole fundamental kind of base level thing that is shifting in the way we think about Valuing talent. And I'm happy about it. I'm happy we're moving in that direction. But the reality now is that we have major translation challenges between recruiting and compensation. Because if compensation is involved in kind of the approval process, not just setting ranges, but some kind of escalation point for approvals, which in every corporate team, you go to maybe the HR partner and then comp. How do you make your case for a comp person who has to be in charge of comp across a global complex org hiring warehouse workers, retail, you know, whatever, you know, truckers, all the way up to engineers, software engineering leaders, finance people, mergers and act. How do you talk to them in a way that they can go back to a survey and find where this person should be, what's the midpoint, when on paper this person maybe doesn't look like it doesn't benchmark. Well, you know, and so I feel for the compensation folks, but I also am like, you guys got to figure this out. You people need to figure this out because this is. This is where things are headed and we need help in TA to be. We have to be aligned on this. Not just TA and comp. We have to get the business aligned on this. The HR partners like the employees. Everyone has to understand it's not just tenure and degrees that determine level and pay. So you get me all fired up.

And I was there on down. I never thought I'd labor on compensation, but I'm excited by that. I have an observation I never thought about before.

Yeah.

Do you think, John? And again, I don't labor on it, but do you think maybe there's this shift from compensation Decisions were based around background, your education, your academics, your years of experience. Built it, built it. Now it's shifting towards value to the business and competition for those folks. And it's like, just say this, someone doing this role should earn this. It's TA's decision who they put in there, like from any background, any degree, whatever. We think the business value is like 70 grand, 100 grand, 30 grand. So go find somebody who's willing to work at that level. So it's more about the value to the business and an element of what the market pays and less about, you know, count up your years of experience and benchmark you want to on a sheet to say someone like you should earn this.

Yeah, I think, I think that's interesting. I think it's a great observation. I think today it's more a function of what you know, you have to pay what the market tells you. You need to pay more than even the value of the role. But yeah, absolutely. And I think that's going to be a really hard transition. And you know, another area I feel for compensation, you know, they're the protectors of internal equity. And just think how hard that is when you have a 5,000, 10,000, even a 500 person org and you start bringing external talent in that doesn't have the same background you have and they're getting paid or leveled titled like you. And how do you have that conversation? I mean it's going to be, it's, it's a disaster around communication and change management. I acknowledge it's going to be hard. But a lot of times companies, and this is where the things are so connected, companies will say, for example, you know, we're only going to these 20 universities to recruit, you know, entry level computer science grads or MBAs or whatever. And, and we get there and it turns out that they're making $20,000 a year more than people who we hired two years ago who now have two years of experience in our company. And you have a decision to make and everyone that's run university recruiting programs, early career talent, which, which I did for a while, knows this conversation. You have to have a really hard conversation with the business because you got to pay to play. We should not even be going to this university if we're going to offer 20k less. But, but, but John, John, we have all these people that now we hired that they're two years and they're, you can't pay them. You have to, if you're going to go, you have, otherwise don't go. And I think those lessons learned in the early talent university space, I think we need to be broadening that and think more broadly about experience, talent and entry level talent and all kinds of talent and say, oh, are we as a company prepared to kind of screw up internal equity so that we get the top talent we need from outside the organization? And if the answer to that is no, wow. That is a very different kind of talent philosophy. If we're optimized for internal equity only and some organizations, government agencies, you're required to pay people you can't, you know, there's very fixed bands. You're not going to get the kind of talent that many hiring managers are expecting you to go get in talent acquisition. So we need to have some honest conversation around that. If we can't influence it, we need to have an honest conversation about it.

So let me move on from, from comp for a sec, right?

Yeah.

We get a lot of time to comp and we could continue. Right. But there's other areas we mentioned that you think TA should get involved. You just hit me, take us out of comp. You know that, that, that issue around hiring grads and two years later they've gone up so much and your two year old grads are now earning less than your gradual coming in or whatever it might be. Yeah. You know, in the old world of to Aluchi's comment, hey, not my job. Right. Which you mentioned earlier on the TA leader is probably saying to herself, I need to talk to the business about paying our current people more to keep them. Now you could take that not my job script and go, that's not my job. Right. But my observation is that our new people are coming in at a higher salary than are experienced people. I see a problem here. I don't want the wreck landing back on my desk when those two people quit or the whole team we hired two years ago quit. So talk to me about how you extend, you know, let's say the post hire kind of input from ta. Where should TA be getting involved? Where are they getting involved in having an impact and how does that work?

Yeah, I mean I love that you bring that up in, in many organizations, you know, you can have 20, 30, 40% of your hires being some form of kind of backfills or either backfills because the person left or backfills because the person got promoted or something. But I think we need to play a bigger role in that kind of front end conversation, more strategic conversation on workforce planning and, and just kind of where do recs come from? You know, I have this, you know, mommy, where do Rex come from? Where, where the job? Where, where do, where, where does the work come from for a recruiter? Like you know, where does that come from? And, and I think there, there's an opportunity to recognize of course company growth drives a lot of the new hires, the new recs. We're, you know, we're hiring and most, most people listening are in growth mode. But there's a big chunk that comes from losing people. And I think as TA leaders, recruiters even, we need to be asking ourselves why. You know, when I was a TA leader at Expedia, for example, I asked to look at the exit interview feedback. So I know why people told my recruiting team they were leaving. And oftentimes they have a relationship with a recruiter and you know, and you can look on LinkedIn now and see where they went. And sometimes they'll tell you they got a better offer. And, you know, sometimes the HR generalist is more involved in that conversation than a recruiter. Typically they're the ones, you know, that someone has to, they process kind of the resignation, if you will. But look at excellent interview feedback, see if there's some trends in there. Look at compensation as a reason a lot of people lie and don't tell you the real reason they're leaving. We did a, we did an employee value prop and branding project for a client and we actually called people that left more than six months ago. So we talked to people that used to work at the company and said, hey, you've been gone six months now. We're an outside consulting firm. Can you give us the scoop? Why did you leave? We got some really interesting feedback about compensation, recognition, career development opportunities that was really in conflict with what, what the recruiting team was selling. It was very different for some people. And so that's the kind of stuff that I hope we're curious about. And we lean in on and ask questions about and say, hey, why are people leaving? Why are we experiencing so much turnover? Especially if we're out there pitching an employee value prop that maybe doesn't land, maybe it lands for 100k plus people, people making the big bucks in your company. But that's not the experience for people coming in at 60k or not the experience for people in Italy, but it is the experience in Germany or Singapore, but not the United States or whatever. And so getting clear on that is a huge way we can add value as TA leaders for sure.

That disconnect you talked about there, John, often the research I've seen and the conversations I've had would suggest that that often first manifests itself and most manifests itself in the first few months in the job. The first week in the job.

Right.

And I've seen, particularly since the pandemic begun two years ago, more TA teams being involved first, maybe in pre boarding. Maybe they were already doing a bit of pre boarding stuff, but they kind of moved all the way into onboarding when we had to go virtual and we needed more resources. And lots of those TA folks have stayed involved in onboarding. Is that a good move? And what's the, how important is it that we, we kind of knit those two things together, the kind of hiring experience and the onboarding experience? And is that the most, one of the most important things that TA can do next, you think?

Yeah, I mean, I want to be careful here. What I need as a TA leader is excellent Onboarding, I don't have to own it. I just need it to be great. And sometimes I'll hear people argue, and it makes me frustrated. You know, we should own this. We should not. That's crazy. Draw the line here, like, whatever. Figure it out for your company. There's probably a right way and a wrong way to do it for your company. The bottom line is, if you have great onboarding, I, as a recruiting pro, can be a lot better at my job. I can coach my hiring managers a lot better. I'll share with you. One of the consequences of bad onboarding is if you have bad onboarding and you have hiring managers that you're trying to influence to widen the aperture. Consider talent from different companies, different pedigree backgrounds, right? They can come out of different industries, maybe, but, you know, onboarding is bad. You're gonna have a really, really hard time influencing them because in their mind, they're like, hey, John, I support widening the aperture. I support hiring people from different companies. And it may even have a diversity kind of angle to it where they're, you know, saying, hey, I'm willing to hire people that maybe didn't even have access to those kinds of companies for whatever reason. But if, you know, the pressure I'm under, if we don't have good onboarding, if we don't have good training post hire, I'm stuck, man. I'm sorry. I support it generally, but I need someone that can hit the ground running, right? How many times have we heard that hit the ground running? And so I think about, I don't need to own onboarding. I just need onboarding to be better. I need someone to own it and lead it and make it amazing. And if I have amazing onboarding, it actually from a TA pro standpoint, it allows me to be more strategic. Now I can more confidently go to the business, not just an individual hiring manager, for, you know, rec number 72 2. I can go to the business and say, hey, if we improve onboarding, we can actually tap into talent pools that we considered kind of, you know, under qualified in the past. And now we can bring those people in and run them through a program. And lots of companies do this at scale for particular programs. Most call centers have a very significant onboarding program, and there's lots of training and you get certified and you go through phases, all that. But for many organizations, that's just something that's, I don't know, it's under led, underfunded. It's just not getting the attention it needs. And it has massive impact, massive consequences for who we even target. Not just who we hire, but who even target.

A question from Matthew Shakespeare, who's listening live. Will this be recorded and available later? Yes, it will podcast this evening and you can watch it live straight afterwards on YouTube and LinkedIn with hashtag John is the goat. I'm taking it. That's a good thing, right? That's a good thing, right? Actually, you reminded me on the onboarding piece there, two stories. One was, oh, had a friend of mine in intel who was running VP of talent acquisition for intel for many years. He told me the story about his metrics and he said in intel his metric was he owned time. We talked about time as a matter which is normally time to hire. He was measured from the day the rec open to the person was at productivity. He had to reduce that. That was his goal. And so therefore, yes, you have to hire faster and do your process, but onboarding to get them up to a level where they were actually at full capacity was also his job. And his team, I thought was a really interesting way to change that timing frame to go. The business and TAC are. The business goes. I just want someone doing the job at full capacity. Like, can you shorten that period of time? And there was another one good. A good friend of mine who runs Oracle, Jan Akerman, Oracle's TA team. He was talking about how his team had nailed all his India hiring goals, right? They like got all these hires and completed them. They're like, this is amazing. And he was on a trip and he was meeting the kind of country manager for India, and he was like, this guy's gonna love me. Like, we've nailed all our targets. And he met this really irate person who was like, really pissed off. Like, what's wrong is like, we hit all our hiring goals, as in we filled the roles. And the guy was like, it's taken you months, like, and, and the ramp ups and the notice periods are insane. But, you know, John wasn't measured by that. Right? And he didn't realize that that's all the business cared about. And he is the wrong metric. I think that happens a lot in leadership.

Right.

I want to talk about leadership, John. Right. Because, you know, sometimes it's the business, they have the wrong metrics for the leaders and therefore the leaders are led by their metrics.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's the leaders, like, they're stuck because their metric doesn't, doesn't allow them to do these things. It doesn't allow them to be More agnostic to jump out of the pure TA piece. Like what, what advice can you give to leaders? Right. You know, you're a TA leader going, I'd love to, you know, I have an opinion on onboarding, compensation, other areas, but it's just really hard because I'm based, I'm, I'm, I'm measured on X and X is all about recruiting. What's your, those leaders? How can you break out of that?

Yeah, a few things. You know, I had a conversation with the, the head of HR from a well known tech company we worked with last year. And, and we were talking, you know, just very, very openly about things that aren't really HR things but are just business culture things that have a huge impact on, on talent acquisition. And one of the things we talked about is just cultures that are addicted to speed. The whole culture is addicted to speed. Not, I don't mean talent acquisition is addicted to it, but I mean, I say this with a smile. Speed is the love language of hiring managers, but speed is the love language of business. And so what happens is you have these teams that are rewarded for getting their product out faster, closing the sale faster, making the new warehouse, get the warehouse up and running faster, whatever, there's speed, speed, speed. And what that does is that creates a culture where you don't really have, you know, time to fill becomes this primary driver. And a lot of, I think very good, savvy TA leaders are moving away from time to fill is the primary one. But the business asks for that because that's their, that's the pressure they're under. And then what happens is you end up, you know, giving these people managers, some of whom are first time people managers. I can't tell you how many clients tell us. Yeah, we have hundreds or thousand first time people managers hired in the last two years as we've been scaling up a lot of internal promotions that don't necessarily, you know, they're still figuring out their jobs, they're still learning how to manage and lead. And so you have these managers who are now trying to, you know, they don't have slack in their system to be able to do some of the good onboarding and training. So they're just reinforcing the speed, speed, speed. So one of the things I recommend TA leaders do is have an honest conversation with your head of hr, conversation with business leaders and just talk about this, this obsession we have with speed and ask ourselves what, what are the consequences of that to not just talent, but the business when we do that when we put so really, really lean teams and focus them on speed, how does that impact our ability to kind of improve diversity or organization? How does it impact our ability to hire people that maybe come from different organizations that aren't going to ramp up as fast, they're not going to hit the ground running? How is that impacting our ability to, to create a culture and employee experience with managers that have time to be good managers? I think that's, that's kind of a big, not leader specific thing, but I think we should be asking those questions. And then for leaders in particular, you know, most talent problems are not going to be solved with siloed thinking. We have to get curious. We have to recognize downstream upstream impact. We have to, we have to be leading more and employ that. See something, say something. If you see something. A decision that's about to be made that people may not understand is going to have an impact or it's not, it's not explicit. People kind of think it's going to matter, but it's not explicit. We need to elevate the cost of these decisions. I think there's a lot of focus on the benefit of these decisions for something else. But I don't know if we always talk about the cost, which means the negative impact that it's going to have on things we care about. So get friends in other areas, get aligned with those people. Find allies. Be an influencer. Don't just be an order taker. Don't just be in the room listening, but you know, speak up and ask questions and pull out the opportunity to maybe say, let's think about this more strategically because this decision has a massive impact on these other things. I would love to be the TA leader in the room asking those questions. I think it'll, it'll help you and your career be seen as a more holistic thinker, which is one of the indicators of IQ intelligence, you know, but when you're asking those questions, and I think it also allows us to now be more influential and strategic with the business because we're in the room, we understand the why behind the decision. So many TA leaders are just like, you know what, I agree with you. Hiring manager. I agree with you. This decision sucks. Not my fault. I wasn't even in the room. I was. You know, I'm like you. I'm the victim here to comp. Just did this, onboarding did that. They cut L and D by 50% this year. I don't know why either. You know, we sometimes have that victim me kind of, you know, this just happened to us and I call bullshit on that. Like we got to step up and lead. We can't just be the, the victims. And that's a huge opportunity. That was a huge opportunity for me in my career. I think it's a huge opportunity still in 2022.

John, you launched a brand new TA leadership program on the social platform last year that's proven really popular with loads of demand for more TA leadership content specifically. But I know you run, you run labs, you run it here in Dublin over a few years ago as well for Europeans. I recall our last conversation. You're running one in a couple of months I think in New York. Can you share some details about that? And how would folks who are interested in that particular leadership skill sign up?

Yeah, sure. We have these things called recruiting leadership labs and they're in person. We've done a bunch of them I think 20 or so over the past 10 years. And yeah, we're doing New York City end of April. We have seven spots left. Not selling anyone. You have to be a corporate TA manager or director to attend. And it is all about executive influence, building strategy, getting buy in, leveraging metrics to influence. And we have different topics we use but those kinds of workshops. I think one of the things that I've seen in my career, Johnny, is I never had an opportunity to go to a workshop like that. I got to go to a general management workshop where I learned how to give someone performance feedback in a one on one. But I never really learned how to be an effective TA leader from a training. I learned from some mentors. I learned a lot about how not to do it from some people that I observed that they weren't successful in their career. And so yeah, I mean I'm generally on a mission to help recruiting leaders win in their jobs and help recruiters win in their jobs. And that's one of the, one of the things we do. Recruitingleadershiplab.com has more details. We can maybe throw something in the chat if someone's interested.

Pretty, pretty. We'll take that out and put it in the chat if anyone wants to find it and put in the show notes as well. But I want to return to a topic John, we started with at the top of the hour, which was in turn of mobility. We came across an article Forbes, the Forbes Council published last week, a week before, which was 15 ways to generate better results by developing internal talent. And it's, it's kind of created from 15 of the Forbes Coaches Council. And I Was like, this is brilliant. Internal mobility. If I read this, I'm going to get like everything I need to know about solving it. Because this has been a big thing for the last two years. It's been a thing organizations have done for, for decades, don't get me wrong. But your point at the start of the hour was, was probably a very HR generous piece. They look after internal mobility, TA look after external recruiting. Yeah, I read this article and was like, okay, there's fluffy quotes about things like, you know what, Give people their opportunity, ask them what they want to do, and your problem solved. It isn't that easy, is it? Like it's not whether it's your job or not, it's not an easy thing to solve. Or is it? John?

You know, here's the thing. I feel like in TA we don't have a strong enough point of view on internal mobility other than not my job. I do see some people like Daniel Monahan at Uber, who is VP of talent acquisition and internal mobility. So I'm seeing some TA leaders actually formally grab it and pull it in. And of course she has a strong point of view on that, I'm sure because she owns it, but a lot of people don't have a strong enough point of view on it. And so what happens is because we don't have a strong point of view on internal mobility, not just who should own it, but just how it should work. And do we open jobs for a week first and let internals apply? Do internals go through the same interview process as everyone else? How much do we use? Performance feedback? Are there eligibility requirements? Do you have to get permission? I mean there's all this policy level stuff that someone else typically makes decisions on that we don't have a voice in those conversations often enough. And that makes me crazy. We need a voice in that stuff because internal talent can be a gigantic portion of your hires. One of our clients years ago, 40% of their total hires. The number, the 40% of the wreck load of a recruiter was based on internal moves. This is a mature company, but 40%. And so these recruiters became career coaches as much as hunters. And that had a significant impact, not necessarily a good one, on a company that was trying to hire innovators. When your recruiters are really have more of that HR generalist career coaching kind of background, dealing with managers that don't want to release their talent. And you know, how big of an increase are you eligible for if you're transferring? And then, you know, and so they lost Their focus a bit on external talent and started focusing more on internal talent. What I love to see is organizations that are getting strategic about this, not thinking at the rec level, not just thinking of the policy level, but sitting down at the start of a fiscal year or doing a quarterly review and saying let's look at all the openings we expect to have. Where should we be filling these roles with internal talent? Where should we be filling with external talent? And why? Why? Because you need to understand the why. The why behind this going to help you as a TA leader shape your strategy. And so there's a whole bunch of organizations. Sodexo, one of our clients for example, they identified certain roles were just really good feeder jobs into other roles. And just like a lot of early career talent university leaders do they recognize, you know, we're going to hire these MBAs or these computer science grads or whatever in and they're going to become this in three years. There's, there's a big focus in many bigger organizations on consciously at pre identifying openings that we say we should fill these with internals. This helps us live our EVP promise around development. It's a fantastic source. They know the business and it's much easier to fill their backfills than it is to fill these roles internally also. So it's a double win. Now you may say of course John, we do that. But most recruiters, most TA leaders, they do that kind of at the rec level like you're making that decision individually. Why not have the bigger conversation with the executive or the executive team and say let's decide as a company what kinds of roles we fill with internals and then be strategic about how you do it. Build a separate interviewing strategy, a separate promotion, pre identify what the comp is, sell it to the people before they join your company. In two years you're eligible to blank. And now let's tell EVP stories about the people that came in through this program that got promoted. Now what they're doing, what's their before and after career story and you know, it gives us just all this great, I don't know, it's a great source of talent that I feel like is underlooked and we deal with it more on an ad hoc basis.

I totally agree with you. And there's so many more of those examples where TA leaders have been giving internal mobility as well under the remit or even the wider role of talent. Moving to a final topic that we didn't quite touch on in depth yet, but I think is really Important, and it's the role of diversity, equity, inclusion, but not just from a pure front end external talent acquisition perspective. And the story I wanted to share, and I've shared it on the show before, but it was came from Zalando and from Virginia, who runs global talent acquisition for Zalando, based out of Berlin. The company's based out of Berlin, kind of global e commerce fashion business. And in trying to operationalize their diversity goals in the business, you know, VA looked at from a TA perspective, using that TA operational kind of view, what she'd need to get done to hit those goals. And you know, she identified gaps where there was no way that there was a talent pool to fit the wrecks that were being handed to her team. Not possible. And the only way to perhaps, you know, achieve the goals of the business, back to what the business goals are versus TA goals was, was to say we need to be more big thinking on how we hire, who we hire, what the role even looks like, how we support folks to develop their learning. Because for whatever reason a whole lot of people were disenfranchised and didn't have the opportunity to train and get the degrees and get the experience that our REC is saying we need. So how can we basically bring in L and D resources to support them, change the look and feel of the role, better support internal mobility into those jobs. And it was just impossible to achieve that if you only looked at it from an acquisition perspective. You never hit those goals from a diversity, let alone the inclusion perspective. So do you see as much of an opportunity for everyone in that space? And how does that look from a TA leader right now? And she looks and says, how can I get more involved in D and I beyond just obviously my targets as they're given to me? Because that's what a lot of leaders are given. Hey, you got to hit this quota. Go, go get that quota. Yeah, that's almost impossible to do in today's market. No.

Yeah, it is. And you know, if you, if you are really focused on having a balanced executive team and, you know, balanced engineering leadership teams and and such, you absolutely have to think about internal mobility as part of your strategy and promotion and retention. And it definitely takes holistic thinking. And I'll tell you, you know, I remember when she presented that I was on one of your leadership calls where she talked, talk through that. And, and I, I love the thinking because you could just, you could see the holistic thinking that was going into this when she was actually doing the math to say, here's what it would take, you know, and for many of our clients, many organizations, you know, you might hire, let's say you're a 10,000 person company, you might hire 1000 or 1500 total people, including back hills backfills in a year, maybe 2000 if you're lucky. And, and then you have executives or DEI leaders that are trying to say we need to be more balanced in this area. You, you go back and do the math and you would almost have to hire 100% women to meet the, which you're probably not going to do or be able to do. And so I think sometimes we do have to, you know, do do the math and, and look at it. Where I see big opportunities though is I think there's this again rec level thinking that goes into this. We get, we get down to the weeds. We try and please the hiring manager, the hiring manager is supportive in general. We may or may not be able to, you know, help, help achieve a diversity goal with this individual hiring manager. We need to go up many levels and talk more strategically. One of the TA leaders I really respect who used to work for me years ago, he is at another company now and he said, you know, one of our challenges, John, is that we are making diversity decisions kind of at the rec level and sometimes we make diversity decisions that are, that are bad. And what he meant was we are letting a hiring manager tell us that this, you know, senior Data scientist with 12 years of experience, the da da da da da da da, all these requirements, PhD in this whatever has is, is the job that they want to make sure they get a woman into. For example, they want gender diversity. And it's not that that's a bad thing. We should absolutely try and do a balanced slate. But the bigger question is if we have 100 software engineering roles, I can probably get 50 women into those hundred software engineering roles. And if this recruiter is investing their time, if I as a leader, I'm saying yeah, investing their time and it may take them six months to go find someone that even meets this and get them in and such. Would our time be better suited focusing on where some of the big numbers are and not just let each individual hiring manager tell us I'm a champion for diversity. So I want to see a balanced slate here. Can we as a company level up a little bit and say let's look at our big high volume areas and now let's put some concerted effort into it and be more prescriptive around balanced slates, be more prescriptive around offers and companies and reduce those pedigree requirements or whatever it might take to widen the aperture and let more candidates, let more light in. I see a lot more of that kind of strategic thinking and that includes looking at retention and internal mobility and onboarding and compensation and all the things we've been talking about. And it makes me have hope, you know, it makes me have hope for our future because it's that kind of holistic thinking that's gonna, that's gonna drive the kind of, you know, inclusion and the kind of balanced organization that people are looking for. It's not. I real quick, I had someone tell me, I won't say the company, but I was working at a company and the CEO got called out at a meeting about the lack of diversity. And so he told his head of hr who then told me, we need to fix diversity and came to me in recruiting, right. And so I'm looking at my organization. This is years ago, diversity had a very different kind of focus, much more compliance oriented, much more of a defensive kind of thing. And, and it was interesting because it just sort of trickled down and eventually landed with head of university recruiting. And I remember having a conversation with my head of university recruiting where he said, seriously, I'm supposed to, quote, fix diversity. Like, I'm going to go to 20 schools and hire a couple hundred people through this program. And we work in a company that is many, many times zero extra zeros. You know, how this, this is ridiculous. And I'm like, I know. And we all know it's ridiculous. And it felt so performative and it felt like we were doing this just so we could say we were doing something. And I'm really happy that we're in a place now where a lot of TA leaders are calling bullshit on that kind of stuff. We have strong DEI leaders, we have executive champions. There's just much more of a focus on like, hey, let's talk about what it's actually going to take now. And it's not just around hiring and it's not just within hiring, around university or something. We need to think much more holistically. And that, as I said, that gives me hope for the future.

I think it's, it's again, the bigger picture thinking is we're going to get, get rid of the language such as that's not my job. That script is gone. It's like that's my problem to solve. Like I got to make sure that we have the right talent doing the right thing in this organization. I'm part of that, but I work with everybody else. I'm not going to see my silo be more holistic on that. John, it's been an absolute pleasure. We've rattled through so much in such a brief amount of time, and I can't believe we're over time. You've given us so much advice here today. Can I ask you to give us one more? You've already added to our short list of advice. 88 pieces of advice I. We've gathered up to this point. But for a piece of advice, number 89. What would you leave our audience with today?

I think it's, it's, you know, I think a lot of TA leaders are like, I don't have time to go in that HR meeting. You know, I want to be separate from hr. We're more of it. We're different. We're marketing and sales org and all that. And I'm not, not suggesting we like, somehow become HR generalists or we own all these things we're talking about. But I absolutely. It would make me so happy for our industry, for our profession if we showed up more with a voice, with a point of view. Don't fall into the kind of victim mode where things are happening to you. These other decisions have a massive impact on you. So show up, speak up, raise your hand, ask the question, get curious, find allies in those organizations that will give you the real scoop, understand the why behind the decisions, and then challenge. Right. Just be willing to push a little bit. I think that's what the business needs from us. I think that's what HR needs. I think that's what HRs aspiring to be, is to be that kind of partner. And I think some of us in Talent Acquisition, especially with the insights we have from the marketplace, we are by far the most externally kind of focused part of hr. I think we bring tons of value and insight to those conversations. And it, it makes me sad to think that maybe we're not participating. Even though some of those meetings suck. Like, let's just be clear, they suck. But even though, even though they suck, try and find out what the agenda is. See if you can show up and yeah, smart, speak up. Show up. Like be. Don't make yourself small. Like, I'm just in ta. Make yourself big. Like, this is. There's an incredible opportunity in front of us and the business wants this. This isn't like us pushing some new HR strategy on the business. The business is pulling for this. They're asking for this. Every conversation my team and I have with executives is they want more of this kind of holistic strategic thinking, and they're seeking it out. And I think that person could be you or me or whoever's on this call. Right. Don't, don't delegate that or ignore it. There's a huge opportunity here, John, I.

Don'T think you could ever be in a meeting that you'd let suck. John, thanks so much for joining us this morning from Washington State. Hope to see you soon. I know we will see you soon. And for those social talent users who are listening in, John has some of the best library content available on the platform around leadership training, being a talent advisor, interview training, diversity, equity, inclusion as well. You'll find it.

You'll love it.

John, thanks for joining us this morning.