Reimagining Talent Acquisition with Kevin Blair: Aligning Business Goals

Too much of the TA ask has been based around holding up a defensive shield. Right. You know, let me try and protect my budget, let me try and protect my fiefdom. And not around creating this almost like this windshield to the future. So, yes, you can see what's happening in the rearview mirror and history does dictate some of future activity and outcomes, but actually start looking forward at the opportunity and down the road and seeing how you can align that opportunity to create opportunity for your organization.

Hi and welcome to the show. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And this week on the podcast we're speaking with Kev Blair about TA pronouns. This is going to be an interesting one. I think we're going to enjoy this one. Kev, you're very welcome to the podcast. Back again, previous podcast guest. Even before the official podcast that we launched four years ago, you were on one of our earlier incarnations of a video podcast. And always wonderful to have you on the show. Wonder for those of you who haven't had the pleasure of hearing you speak or meet with you in person, Kev, if you could tell our audience a little bit about yourself, what you do.

Yeah, happy to and thanks for having me, Johnny. So currently I'm the global head of talent acquisition at Ericsson. I've been there for 12 months, loving life, doing the work, the transformation work we have going on there. And in my spare time, I'm the co founder of the exec TA Social, which we'll make to a little bit later. And my background, career TA leader, something I've always loved. I love what we do, I love that we have a product. I love that we create real value for an organization. I so former global head of TA at IBM, former global TA leader at Cisco, always worked in technology and as I said, always worked in talent acquisition, both from way back in my search days and been in house for about 25 years, which kind of, I guess ages me a little bit.

Well, Kev, I've always appreciated your insights and I'm somebody who, you know, first thing I usually do is when I'm talking to a leader about their challenges, I go, do you know Kev? You need to meet him. And you've always been very generous to your time and spoke with many.

I had one of them this morning on LinkedIn actually.

Yeah, did you?

We're name checking, but that was this morning as well. Yeah.

So I love that. And you know, you're always very generous with your time, one on one and now you're doing it one to many in terms of sharing your insights. And you have always been very insightful. I was at one of your talks in Dublin. Great to see you back in Dublin last month, Kev. And you were talking, you opened, you opened the talk with. And I smiled at this. You said, so ta, what are your pronouns? I wanted to explore that because people might go, where are we going to go with this? But, but, but. Kev, actually I may ask you to explain, you know, after you got a chuckle from that, where did that go? And you know, when you, when you, when you give that intro about how does TA identify itself, what exactly are you talking about?

Yeah, no, and listen, as you know me well and a lot of people know me, it was always designed to get that chuckle, but also be a little bit provocative in the thinking as well to, to, to make us think about what we are and what do we identify as? Because I think as we start to think about the evolution of tm, we've been talking about for such a long time, but broadly, it's yet to find its true voice in terms of its point of impact in an organization. Is it a service provider? Is it a consulting organization? Is it a reseller? Is it a wholesaler? Is it B2B or is it B2C or products or consumers? They're people. They're individuals, the humans. Are we a franchise? Are we a big break off from, from hr where we take some of the, the work and practices and methodology, we deliver it back? Are we a not for profit? Are we doing this in service of people's careers and just elevating organizations and giving people opportunity? And I think that's the, that's the real thing. Is this, you know, what are. Is TA identifying as? Because once you know what you identify as, you're able to articulate your value and being able to demonstrate that value is something I believe that is a big gap across many, many areas of talent acquisition. I think I see that play out when you see organizations hitting the TA organizations very hard, not valuing them, not partnering with the right organizations with the right performance metrics because they're not understanding the value of the organization fully.

Kevi, you're in many of the same rooms that I'm in in terms of whether it be online or in person, rooms with other leaders. And we're in a challenging environment as we close out 2024, where a lot of TA leaders, budgets were cut, a lot of decisions that TA leaders thought were theirs and previously were theirs got pushed back to CFOs making decisions for them. And so you have, I think after a couple of years where, you know, VPs at TA were gods because hiring was the hardest thing in the world. It was the most important thing for companies and all of a sudden it changed a bit. In the last two years, particularly in tech. I think you have that identity crisis with a lot of TA leaders who aren't sure what's going on. They're, they're, they're looking at AI as well going is AI going to change my whole team and structure? You know, I've been in conversations where people are terrified about losing headcount because what they see is they see themselves as the protectors of headcounts. I need a big team and keep a big team as well. So there's a lot going on right as we close at 24 that might be causing these tea layers panic. But what would you say is the most typical or are the most typical ways that TA leaders see the role and see the function? You listed a bunch of different ways, but if I could narrow down to one or two, what do you think are the most common that you see out there?

Yeah, I mean I think there's a couple of things a big question. So I think there's a couple of things within that. I think first of all, I think what we're seeing is I think everybody talks with great affection for the booms of 21:22. The kind of during and post Covid, early post Covid era has been very good. What wasn't very good is it created this almost hyperinflation of experience on TA elevation. So what happened is a lot of people accelerated up because companies became, you know, very much in need of accelerating talents through the TA functions. And therefore we're making what was, I think wild decisions. When I look at some of the roles where people were being put into either not having a full understanding, appreciation so coming from loosely attached areas of the sector or just not having gone through the learning experiences of the different elements of ta. And therefore when the market squeezed, it was very difficult for a lot of people to be able to articulate what they were. They were creating value for the company. And I think that ties to this obsession in talent acquisition and a lot many T's have with these self congratulatory metrics. Right. And we've talked about this before, we've talked about this in public. We've also talked about over at Guinness as well. And we know that, you know, I have a very strong feelings on these is that you know, we've got to move away from this homogenized approach to how we measure our success. And we've stopped by, got to stop convincing organizations to give us our own predefined self congratulatory metrics that show us to look good. So it shows that we can hire this profile, which is easy. And we benchmark that against hiring this profile is more difficult. And what we do is we amortize our data that gives us an average one of these, creates significantly more value for the company that has more value creation for the organization, that has commercially more value to the organization. The other one may not. Doesn't mean it's not important. Okay. You know, every, every role has a value in a company. But we've got to start this, this narrative that we homogenize our data and we talk about things that aren't that important anymore and we throw them together and what we do is. And you know, listen, I went on this path as well. Like I remember, I remember the moment when I, when I realized that I was in a leadership meeting seven or eight years ago. And I remember presenting back the company key performance indicators for recruitment that I'd inherited. And I got up and I, they'd all been red, like when I got there, all been red. And then I'm presented and like now, you know, six months in, half of them are green. And I remember like the, the hrlt, like the group I was presenting to, they kind of almost like spontaneously clapped, you know, they were like, this is great, this is. And I go, hang on. All I've done is remove a process step in India which at the time was about, you know, 30% of our hiring. And that had skewed so many metrics the other way. I hadn't really got under the skin of improving the quality of the team. Hadn't really got under the skin of the hiring manager capability. Hiring manager enablement. Hadn't really got under the skin of those things. And that's when I was like, you know, we've got to start presenting this data because it just doesn't, it doesn't work in service of articulating the value of what we do, which is ultimately tying us back to revenue. Revenue or product, at the very least. Product or whatever your company produces. But ultimately, you know, the purpose of business is to drive shareholder values. What is recruitment doing to drive shareholder value? How do you articulate it? The shareholders asking what our time to fill is? I don't think a shareholder's ever asked me that.

It's Funny that. I was in a session with 50 TA leaders last month and we talked about, I was on TA dashboards and we had several people get up and show their dashboards and it was the same old shit. It was, you know, my dashboard's bigger than yours.

Was that, Was that it? My dashboard's bigger than yours? Yeah, yeah.

So seriously, it, it was, it was. To who are the most. The photographs are being taken of the most complicated dashboards. And I'm looking at them going, as a business owner, right? I'm kind of going like, I know as a business owner and I don't work full time recruiting anymore. I couldn't care less about that data. I, I, you know, I get those upstream metrics that a team has to measure because those upstream metrics may correlate with a downstream outcome. Totally get that. But I had this, I was, I did a talk yesterday, actually, Kev, with, for a bunch of sales leaders, revenue leaders, we've always talked in this industry about how sales and marketing are closely aligned with, with recruiting. And the, the, the managing director of HubSpot, EMEA, who's the VP of sales there, got, Mark, got stood up and he was talking about how they'd had it all wrong in HubSpot. He said this was the kind of a realization around metrics. Right. Because metrics are not unique to ta, Kev. Surprise, surprise. And you've supported these sales teams, he said. We became obsessed with like how many calls people are making. The activities of sales, he said. And most sales leaders talk about the activities of sales, he said, like, it doesn't matter what salespeople care about. They care about revenue and profit. Like same basic business principles. And they change their whole approach to everything starts with that. How are we driving revenue and profit? Are we doing that? And you only get back to those activities if we're not, if we aren't hitting our numbers, you can work your way back upstream to a metric like that that might indicate we're where the problem lies. So it's not that the dashboard is completely irrelevant because upstream, you do have to try and figure out how to drive the outcome. But when you have conversations or you have had conversations with business leaders, I'm guessing it's not about time to hire and everything else. So what is it about? Like, can you walk me through maybe some examples of proper business conversations that you've had with your leadership peers that you think other TA leaders should be having or you hope they're having as well?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And first of all, the conversation you had with the revenue leaders to come back to that in a second as well. We'll come back to that because I think that they do something different in their space through technology that we haven't done in our space yet. They're going on that journey. So we'll come back to that. But I think just in terms of the, the, the, the, the, the conversation should be having it's again, it's backside values. I'll give, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. This example I shared at this event that we were at in, in Dublin. I've really spoken about it much publicly, but I was the former head of recruitment for a large organization where about 50% of our hiring was billable consultants. Right. So they were, they, you know, directly day rate consultants that were billable based on utilization. Right. And at the time of going into the organization, parts of recruitment were a little bit federated. And I was given the task of, of, of consuming it into one organization with the team and then going and finding those outlying teams that were, that were, that were disconnected. And one of those teams was North American Consulting Recruiting, right. And we went in to have a conversation with the leadership and we talked about like how do we, how do we create this value? And they could clearly see that we were set up strategically and tactically to support them. We are operating rigor was a lot stronger and it made sense to bring it across. But what they did is when they sent across money, they sent across the money for 86 people and the capacity needed was for 100. And I went back to the finance organization said no, you need to send the money for the 100. They said no, no, no, it's it, it's, you know, those are open head count or they're not filled or the maternity cover or long term sick or whatever. So you know, this is the cost of the, this is the price. The 86 of it were, were, send it over. And I said okay, well let's, let's have a look at the impact of those 14 other people. So what we did is we basically applied our performance metrics for our consulting hiring globally. We applied that to the capacity of 14 recruiters. We then overlaid that against the three to three and a half thousand hires that the consulting organization did in North America. And what we were able to do is have a determinate value that basically said with an extra 14 recruiters on average for supporting this organization, on average, we can speed up and expedite recruitment, you know, with all of These extra qualitative metrics and our execution being better to the tune of about, I think it was about eight or nine days, right? It was, it was basically faster. Right. And then, you know, we basically said, this is, this is, this is the difference. This is the delta you've created for me. And then we handed our data over to the CFO and we basically said, why don't you do the math based on what you know to be the case for your billable organization. And then that was, I remember this was, I was in, I was actually in New York at the time and I remember it was like 10am we sent that stuff over. I remember getting a slack call from the CFO two hours later. Can you chat? Yeah, sure. He said, right, we've run your numbers and what we, what we can say is that we can attribute an extra $94 million of revenue if you're able to impact that volume of hiring by eight or nine days. Right? So, okay, so he said, so we're going to send over the, we're going to send over whatever the 4 million for the extra 14 resources. Is that enough? What could you do with 6? And then I have to get into the conversation about, you know, to manage a recruitment process effectively. You know, you can't go too quick and you can't go too slow, right? Because everyone's got to make the emotional connections. Everyone's got to do their due diligence, operating rigor. So you know, you know, it's, that kind of thing is, you know, kind of, you know, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Right? So you do it well, you do it deliberate and it's, it's fast enough. Right? And you know, so, so yeah, so again, in that example, what you're talking about, there is a straight line between the work of our organization, our team, and a direct contribution to revenue with no real, you know, impact other than the fact it says give me your investment and I'll give you a 20 to 1 return on your investment. It's a no brainer, it's an easy conversation. And then more and more as we've got into those conversations and you know, I've wor, you know, we've been in some sessions with you before, Johnny, where we've talked about, you know, that the nine block where we plot roles on these two axes, one of business value and one of hiring complexity. And you know, looking at like what creates money for the organization, what produces product, what's the contribution of that role in an organization and how do we start to calibrate our activities to that, you know, does everyone, do we need to have a homogenized process? Do we need to have homogenized performance measures? We should be breaking out our performance based on its value to the organization, not on whether it's quick and cheap or whatever. I don't know, whatever you measure, you know, whatever, you know, speed, cost, quantity, whatever, whoever's measuring what, that has to be clear value. And I think recruitment teams in my experience generally not only perform better like that, but generally operate in a, in a better cultural ecosystem because what they're doing is they're, they know their value and they're able to align to work the better suits the skills because not every recruiter is the same. So you have recruiters that absolutely want to work on the high hiring complexity, high demand, high business value, commercial discussions with the business and driving it forward. You also have ones that want to do the low complexity hiring that's important for the organization, but actually can be quite programmatic and deliberate. And again, what we often think about is that thing around the teams and we just, you know, we basically, you know, divide the work up based on what the demands of the work are, not what the skills of our teams are and not what the value we're trying to create is. And that, you know, I think we took old adage around, you know, you have 100, you have 100 roles and 10 recruiters. What do all the recruitment leaders do? Well, they give everyone 10 roles each. You don't do that. You give one recruiter 30, you give two recruiters 30, and then you put the remaining eight recruiters on the 40 most important roles in that, you know, because that's what drives value for the organization and that's, that's what's important.

So two points I want to take from that one. One, Kev, just in case our listeners missed it, you know, you very deliberately didn't cook your own numbers. You asked the finance organization in that example to come back and do the math. I think that's really interesting. Point is we're teasing out why did you do that and why is that important that to not do your own numbers?

So I'm going to do answer it in an honest way and not in a post rationalizing way. Right. So if I was to post rational, say, because obviously it had more integrity, it put the pressure back onto them. And then I met it, that was the learning from it. And that's why I've gone on to do it since. And I've actually asked finance Teams. And you know, we're going through some process here where we're actually asking business to deliver their numbers back to us and deliver the narrative back to us on it. And, but, but in reality at the time is I also didn't know what the charge out rate was and how they measured, how they measured value. Right. So for me it could have been like, okay, they could have looked at these roles and thought actually 50% of these are back office. We don't attribute any value to that in terms of revenue value or we tribute minimal like $4,000 annually or whatever is the uplift on the, on the, the shareholder value. But actually, you know, they then looked at these roles, these gaps and were able to specifically say okay, the mix of these is X, so regular, senior principal, managing partner, whatever, this is the average bill rate at those levels and they were able to produce it. And you're right, the numbers are absolute credibility. Now the learning from that is that that then becomes a little bit habitual in how you work with the organization. Because now I'm very comfortable with the idea of saying like this is what we do, this is what we produce, these are our performance metrics or this is what we hope to achieve depending on where you are in your maturity, evolution and like you know, what, what does the impact of this work mean and how, how, how does that pull through? And, and I think they, they value that because a lot of the conversations they have with many parts of hr, not all, but many parts of HR conversations are not talking about commercial value. They're talking about initiatives, incentives, programs that have a value that might be, not even have a, an explicit value that you can point a finger to around employee engagement or diversity or payroll or target salary range strategies. And the leader's not always clear on what the value is. I know diverse teams are good. I know there's data that tells me that they perform better and I know that organizational health is very important. But I'm being told to do this whereas words, that very commercial value that attaches that. Whereas TA can have those conversations because we batter, what do we identify as we produce a product and we produce a product of a determinant value. And so how do we just articulate the value of that? And that's, that's where we need to start moving and less of this, you know, getting, being very comfortable with our homogenized limited accountability framework.

When you talk about business value, I see a lot of leaders in this space change, striving to be that and believing they're talking like that and how it plays out because like I build business cases. I know I do this all the time. I show the value. And I was at a session recently where we had this conversation and the facilitator was asking folks about value of different things and several people were doing this and we brought this new initiative in. We managed to save 286 man hours. They go, Brilliant. So that's 286 man hours off your budget, is it? Like no, like no. Their savings and productivity were 286 hours. He goes, yeah, but like so, so much as off your, your cost line. And then the people are like, what do you mean that like no, we're just more productive by this amount of hours. Like that's not a real fucking saving, pardon my language. That, that's a, that's a nice notional thing. But finance, the business is going. But hours equals money.

Yes.

And we can reduce money. And we had a conversation with Olga from Just the Takeaway recently on the show and she was talking about initiative she brought in, around bringing an AI tool in for, for one of those kind of those volume roles in terms of proven product productivity. And she had X amount of hours saved. And I asked herself, oh well, you know, is it hours saved or is it money? She's like, I took two headcount days, you know, and that's like, that's somebody who really talks the business. Like I didn't just make it a bit fancy, but actually I, my cost is still the same, my head get still the same. I'm, I'm, I'm more productive. But then it's intangible, it's tangible, measurable things. I think that's what we lack. You know, I saw a great presentation in September from a leader who had brought in a really automated end to end AI solution for hiring volume blue collar roles in a retail environment. And they took 400 recruiters out. Like that's a tangible. And it's a, it's a leader who's like, I'm doing my job and creating value versus, you know, I, I see. And I know if you see, I see leaders who just are terrified of losing headcount, terrified of a shrinking budget because they're not thinking about the business value, they're thinking about protecting their fdom, their budget, their people. You know, so where, where do you land in terms of like what, what's the mindset?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, so we, I mean we're going through quite a large scale transformation here. And it's funny because when I started the business case and when I did it, I didn't approach it like a recruitment business case. I approached it like it was a commercial document that could have led to many different outcomes and scenarios without a predetermined case of give me more headcount, give me more budget, let me upgrade my technology, or anything like that. And actually, some of the areas we focused on are things that often I've never seen when I've helped friends out or I've seen or even when I've been privy to different images. They don't talk about things that you would talk about commercial presentations. Mine had a lot around cost avoidance as much as it did around cost impact and direct spend. Right. So this is the downstream impact to the organization of this decision. Right. We avoid this future state and, you know, the downstream uplift of productivity. So, you know, working on the. If we do X, Y and Z, what happens in the organization that necessitates that? Because for too long, I think you're right, is that, you know, too much, too much of the TA ask has been based around holding up a defensive shield. Right? You know, let me try and protect my budget, let me try and protect my. The. And not around creating this, this almost like this windshield to the future. So, yes, you can see what's happening in the rearview mirror and history does dictate some of future activity and outcomes. But actually start looking forward at the opportunity and down the road and seeing how you can align that opportunity to create opportunity for your organization, whether it be through automation, whether it be through AI. Every company takes different views on that. So there's no, there's no like, you know, kind of like specific flavor you could do. But you've got to start looking at your organizational requirements and what you need to be of impact and how do you align to that. Now these people who say, I took out, you know, 400 headcount and two people like, that's. That's great, it's a great story. But actually, is that like a net saving for the business or is that actually we found a better way to produce and that we've made other investments or we've invested 30% that. So we start to talk in terms of the net net. The cost avoidance, the. The impact of the work is really important. And both those examples are really good cases where TA leaders have stepped forward and said, actually let me start aligning to what the company needs and let me see where the, where the cards fall and what that means for my team. And let me Take brave commercial decisions that actually produce a better outcome. I mean that I'm not tied to this binary position and that actually in some ways segues back to the comments I made before about your revenue leaders. Right. When you said I was rid of CROs. One of the things that I've seen in CRM, significant steps that I haven't seen in recruitment technology and I've been banging this drum for a couple of years and I say every time I meet a technology vendor, an ats, a CRM, anyone, you know, anyone claiming to have the next greatest thing that's going to impact my recruitability, the work, they don't have it and that's the ability to direct the activity in the way I need it. They focus on my reporting experience, ux, you know, enablement, all very valuable things. But what you've seen with CRMs is they started to direct the work of the salesperson showing them where the best opportunity is to be successful. Right at the moment, no matter what, recruitment technology primarily is there to support the decision making of the person and the person is self directing on that decision. Right. So if I come in as a recruiter on a Monday and I say you know what, tough weekend, what am I going to do today? Oh, I've got 10 recs open that you've been open for a while. I'm just going to disposition 500 candidates off those requisitions and they legitimize that work by saying well I've created value today because that's an activity and a task that needed doing. Ignore whether it could have been done through automation which obviously should do and could do in the future. But what they've done is they just self recognize activity. Where's the glide path that shows where these people should be relative to the work that's expected of them. Right. And I always talk about as glide paths is like, you know I talked about this a couple of years ago, I would, I would completely reverse the idea of time fill. I would say if you, if someone said to me the average time to fill target for this, if that's what you want to have, should be 65 days. Don't start the clock at zero, start the clock at 65 and start counting down and then show everybody where they are relatively so in two weeks you should be at first interview, three weeks you should be at second, four weeks you should be final round and actually start. And if you're not based on that business value, again if you're like that's easy for the easy roles and you're showing the hard freeze them out of that work, force them to work on the things that are really important to your outcomes. But the homogenized metrics cover it. The 8 out of 10 roles that are potentially the 80% that are least important they keep within that glide path because nothing's managing it. And the two that are way out, that are really real value don't get serviced at all. But it doesn't matter because they get 80% within 65 days and everyone sits around and claps and says what a great result that was. And I think that's a big thing around this whole space around. You know, if we're going to create value we need to put more pressure on the technologists and the people are bringing products in this market. So yeah, you know, this is what we need. Yeah, there's this ever, ever, never ending appetite for consumption of mi. I get it. But I've got pretty good mi. You know, you link your ats, your CRM up to power bi, you get pretty good mi. I have enough MI to do what I need to do right. So I don't need this incessant appetite to keep going forward. That reporting is the most important thing in an ats. The ability as a leader to direct activity that serves the best outcome in the commercial interest of the business is what that technology needs to do. That's what Salesforce Einstein does says, you know what, go and call this prospect because this is the, this is the point at which it's got the highest propensity to, to, to close the AI enterprise, AI architect, whatever is this thing that Salesforce have just released as well. You know, using technology to direct in complementary way the person is doing the activity to get to the best possible outcome. We're still allowing all this self directed behaviors and I, it's, you know, it's not that I want to create a kind of slave or servant mentality around well, you know, just come in and do everything I tell you to do. But like people want to be successful, Jonny. People wanna be told that they've had the most impact in the best possible way and let us allow the processes and the technology to help them get there.

I love you mentioned that we use GONG here in Social Talent as one of our sales tools and on top of a Salesforce stack and other things. And GONG does the analysis of your pipeline and your opportunities and it looks at all these different activities and it does exactly that tells you what you should be doing next, what the risks are, what you missed. So it really does guide you rather than just saying, you know, it just a document, a record keeper. Because a lot of CRM is just record keepers, right? Ats are the same. This is actually going, here's the tactical things you should do on, on these particular. Even these opportunities are the high value ones, the ones that are most likely to close. But here's the four things to do today, or the five things, or here's the risks to that. But you're right, that is, that doesn't exist. We seem to always lag behind hate, you know, HR tools lag behind the likes of the, the, the, the revenue tools, the sales marketing tools. And listen, before we digress off into that, if you're a leader listening to this, Kev, and you're kind of nodding your head going, okay, right, I need to be doing more of that. I'm not doing enough of that. I am speaking the wrong metrics. I'm looking at the wrong things. I'd love to be able to talk to the business the way you talk to the business. I'd love to be able to have that conversation in terms of trying to do the things I need to get done. Where do you start? Like, what are the basics in terms of, hey, you'll need to have this in place before you start moving to this level, to this level, or where does a leader go from here listening to you going, I'm sold. Tell me what to do, Kev?

Yeah, well, I mean, there's no. First of all, I wouldn't be arrogant enough to say there's a prescribed way that I know to do it, but there's. Because there's so much context and I miss it. But I think there's some ways in terms of the thought process and the activities that you can do to support it. The first one is, you know, back to what you said at the very top of the conversation is what do we identify as. What we should be identifying as is a value creating services organization, Right? And most services organization work on a bunch of core activities that lead to a collection of different performance metrics based around different categories. The one that I never see being used with in talent acquisition, very rarely some do. We do and we're starting to do it. It's focusing on wastage and latency, right? So instead of focusing on the outcome and the work that you do, any services organization would focus on wastage and latency, right? So where are we losing opportunity in our, in the way we work? Where are we, where are we, where are we creating a, A burn in our budget cycles or burning our time and our, burning us our activities. So I think starting to look at wastage and latency from a, a, a, a performance perspective is, is really important and folding that in, I also think starting to move towards, actually starting to drive towards actual dual accountability and start to project service expectations onto the organization that consume your work. You can create the highest performing, most value creating organization but, but if you're not able to articulate the impact of not doing that work in the organization, I think that, that, that, that, that's huge. You know, in the same way if we go back to that consulting example, I could say to consulting leaders, from that point on, every day you delay in this hire is costing this company $10,000. Every time this is happening, this is what's happening every decision, every time we have a candidate that doesn't turn up on day one, that's going, you know, I'm resetting that cycle that's going to cost this organization $120,000, $150,000, $200,000 in lost billable revenue opportunity. So actually starting to project that dual accountability in commercial terms I think is really, really important. Understand this is the impact of not doing and this is the impact of doing nothing. And I think that, that, that's really important. And then I think starting to again back to the services mentality is start to segment and federate your work and how you service things. I was, it was a, when I was in this, this, this, this services, this consulting organization, one of the business leaders actually played it back to me in the story. They, one of our clients, one of our IT services clients was a major bank and they said, you know, what we have is we support them across everything in it and what we have is we have our offshore, our nearshore and our on site. He said our on site people are site reliability engineers. This bank has told us every minute that their trading platform is down, cost them about $2 million a minute, right. And lost margin and revenue. And so he's like, so when somebody's laptop doesn't turn on, we don't send the guy in the office, he's the site reliability engineer up to that floor to fix it. We send them off to the offshore site where someone can help them with that because that's the service they require. These people need to make sure nothing's fallen over. So starting to actually. And that's what the business played back to me. When I was talking about the differentiating services. They were like, yeah, don't send Your very senior recruiter that can absolutely smash in a managing partner hiring in Western Europe. Don't send them over to go and hire our janitorial staff, you know, because we're killing the value of the service. Right. And, and so I think that starting to get into segmenting services is really important as well.

Gav, at this point as we close, I usually ask guests, you know, how could people follow up with you? But I want to bring up your background exacta Social as you know, rather than just message me on LinkedIn, tell me about exact Social and tell, tell our audience about how anyone listening who does want to find out more might be able to leverage Exactia Social for help.

Yeah, so, yeah and absolutely. So Executive Social is a community of TA leaders, TA executives only. So we, we, we tend to stick to the people at the very top. And what we, we set it up about eight or nine months ago, myself and Dion and both heads of ta, both in house, heads of ta. Bit disillusioned with a lot of the space where we got information from. What we've always found it is to be, you know, really, you know, a very vendor led construct and we wanted to build a safe environment. So we kind of set it up and we've worked very closely. You've done a lot with our community in private where we basically said let's create this safe space. We have about 800 heads of TA in 10 countries around the world. We're continuing to, to grow that. And if, yeah, if anyone wants to reach out and get involved and join our community, it exclusively inclusive I think is what we describe it is. It's for heads of ta, it's for people that are these conversations we've had today. It's for those conversations to happen in a safe environment on a one to one or a one to many basis. And what we do is we invite the vendor in to have that to bring their expertise in. And you've done some things with as well where we say, you know, we had a great example is the license, the hire we did recently four or five communities ask, well how do we do hiring manager enablement. I was like phone John, he said listen, can you come in to do a, do a chat with our organization not based on, you know what social talent, based on your experience and everything you have to offer came in a great chat. Everyone got the knowledge in a safe environment to ask you the question and then, and then you bug out and it's, yeah, it's been, it's been great so far. Really, really Enjoyable. Puts a lot of pressure on the time, but it's going fantastic. So.

And the cost to a senior TA executive to join. Executive cost?

Yeah, there's no, there's no cost. It's. It's a free community that we run through the platform and through WhatsApp communities. And yeah, it's. Yeah, it's completely, completely free. Like I say, it's just, you know, we keep it exclusively to heads of TA or senior TA executive, people who sit on the executive team in ta. As I said, it's a. It's a global community. So it's going.

Their website, a social handle, TikTok channel. We can go find Exacta Social.

Yeah. So, I mean, I go do a lot start with Exactia Social on LinkedIn. It's very timing because if you look at a post by Exactia Social, yesterday they announced the website's getting launched next week, so. Exactly. Social will be live from. From next week's. So definitely check it out.

Probably by the time this is live and broadcast as well, Kev. So. So fingers crossed.

Even better. Yeah. So it will be absolutely. So.

Well, again, really want to thank you for coming on, sharing your wisdom advice. Tons of insights there for anyone listening in. As always, it's a pleasure. Kev, we can have you back every week and we will run out of ideas.

I hope I don't sound too ranty. You know, I just, I'm so passionate about some of these topics and I just, you know, that's why I, you know, you joke about sending people my way. Like, I always make time to have these conversations if anyone wants to reach out to me one to one. Like, I'm so, like, passionate about helping us as a sector move this stuff along. So always my pleasure.

Pleasure. And thank you for listening audience as well. We're taking the time out to enjoy this conversation. We'll be back next week with another episode and if you have any suggestions for guests, please reach out to me. Johnny socialtalent.com and we'd love to hear your ideas. Until next week. Thanks and take care.