Shaping a Winning Hiring Culture with Johnny Campbell & Nicholas Mailey

Hello everyone. This week's podcast was originally recorded during our Social Talent Live event when Johnny spoke with former head of TA in Equinix and Intuit, Nick Maley, about how you begin the journey of developing a hiring culture regardless of your size or sector. Remember to visit SocialTalent.com live to make sure you catch our next live event. Enjoy the show.

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Let me introduce our final guest. Nick Maley was previously a guest on our podcast Hiring Excellence, which you can find Nick's episode. It's phenomenal. I've shared it with tons of people where he shared with us his story about hiring on scale for Equinix at the time. So you can check it out in Apple or Spotify. But Nick is the former VP of TA with Equinix. He also worked with Intuit, leaving TA there. He's somebody I've admired for more than a decade. You may have heard of Nick before, seen some of the inspirational stuff he's put out there over the years about what we could do in the future. But Nick, it's such a pleasure to have you here to talk about this topic as I know you have a lot of experience in this and something you're quite passionate about. But maybe if I can ask you to open with any comments or thoughts from our first two panels that struck you. And by the way, I want to just take one comment from Danny. As she closed, she talked about courageous TA leaders. I think it's so important you are one of those courageous TA leaders. I think anyone who knows you would use that word, courage. The team who worked for you in Intuit and Equinix would say the same thing. I think it's vital and a topic not talked about. That's what I want to take out from previous two panels. But what's on your mind the last 45 minutes as you're hearing these panels to maybe.

Great, Johnny, thank you so much. John and Danny. I continue, it's funny every time I join one of these, continue to learn and, and sort of have aha moments. So it's fantastic and this forum is great. So thank you for this. As I think about this, I will remind all of us that leaders, managers, recruiters, we're not finished projects. We are all continuing to learn and grow. And most companies over the last three, four years, not all, have been continuing to grow around 10% or there's been an additional 10% attrition. So just imagine, just within manager or leadership ranks, you've had probably 20% churn annually. And look, every industry, every company is a little bit different. So it's the, it's remembering when we talk about transformation within a company and we touched on it, it is a change management at its change management at its core. And you probably need to apply change management practices. And everyone learns differently. I loved John. Sort of it's not what's taught, it's what's caught that certainly is a part of it. But you need to also think about different kinds of strategies for teaching. So it could be structured learning, it could be digital learning, could be workshops, could be case studies, it could be different kinds of micro learning. But we as an acquisition in HR professional team, are continuing to teach not just ourselves so that we're learning and growing, but the managers that we partner with. So the first thing I take away from this is we're not finished projects and we have to remember that. I think the second thing for me is that this is a change management solution which is ongoing. It never, it never ends. And we need, we need to have strategies as acquisition leaders to apply those within the organization. And then the thing that I'll harp on, that we're talking about, Johnny, is that excellence elevates excellence. Excellence elevates excellence. And I'll talk about our craft in honing our craft as, as acquisition leaders and how critical that is. And it goes to perhaps the thought around courageous leadership and the impact we can have on the businesses that we work with. I was thinking about why that recruiting culture and John led with this, which is great people ultimately change the trajectory of the people. If you're able to acquire great people, it will change the trajectory. I think we all know this. I'd also add that great, great people create a dynamic community and culture for the company that feeds on itself. It creates a network effect. And it was Steve Jobs who sort of said, A, players hire A players, B, players hire C players. And it kind of. That adage is actually valid. And I think people forget, like we have seen it within our world where top thinkers come together in academia to follow to solve some of the biggest problems in the world. Artists come together to redefine different movements, whether it be impressionism or abstract. Athletes train together to get a better edge. It's no different in each of the businesses that people are representing in the community today. Business leaders are coming together to learn from one another and to improve. And your top performers in the company most likely are coming together. And so they're creating a network effect. And I think the opportunity for us as talent acquisition leaders is to capitalize on that. And we might not have the ability to connect for whatever reason with the most senior leaders in the E suite or the CEO to really drive that change. But each of us has an invitation and an open door in our recruiters to meet with them, essentially where they're at to drive change, if you will, bottom up. And that's the opportunity I see that we have. And there's what we need to do is why we do it, obviously from a, a business perspective and then where we do that from what I characterize as an employee perspective. And then why you personally should be driving and developing a recruiting, recruiting culture from a professional perspective for each of you on the call today. And that's more what I, what I like to talk about, which is sort of service to excellence and you being great. So sorry, I kind of, I kind of ran on. So I'll just take a quick pause and see if you want to dive into any of those areas.

You burned the right Nick, in my opinion, to make any speech you want. I love that and I love listening to that because you reminded me. I was in a session in Barcelona a few years ago with 30 other CEOs, 29 other CEOs, and the lecturer was talking about. He said, so who in the room, in the room wants to be, wants to be the biggest and number one in their industry? Like three hands went up and everyone thought was a trick question. Who and. And no more than the three hands went up. We said, why the, why the hell are the rest of you in business? What you hear, it was a program called Leadership for Growth. He said, why are you here if you don't want to be number one and the biggest? Go home. And. And he kind of made this point. He said, he told a story of, of, I think it was the Italian, some sort of water polo team. And they were, they were crap in the 80s. And someone came in saying we're going to win gold medal in the Olympics. It was like, oh, we're not as ridiculous. He said, well, why are we here if we're not striving for this? He said, it's not going to be next Olympics. It could be in five Olympics time. Well, that's what we're going to do. We're going to be the best. And I love that. To follow on the comment from Courage is that it starts with the TA leaders saying we're going to be the best at heart in the world. Because if you don't believe that, why the hell are you doing your job? Why are you running a TA function if you're not striving for that excellence. And I do agree with you. And I speak to hundreds of TA leaders every year of a privilege to speak to them. And so few people, unfortunately have that aspiration that they don't see their role as I am here to make the business understand that we're going to be the best in the world at hiring. And if they don't agree with me, I got to either persuade them or move on because this is just too goddamn important. Right. But, but in the face of that, notwithstanding that, because I agree with you, it is hard. We surveyed the group just before we came on and the majority said leadership Buy in is what they perceive to be the hardest challenge and to kind of go to where John and Danny were talking about, which maybe are big organizations maybe you know, perceived to be fantastic at this. Sometimes it's hard when you're the TA leader, maybe in a smaller organization or in an industry that's maybe considered to be a little bit behind some of the tech companies that we've mentioned so far. So far it can seem daunting. You want to be getting gold in the Olympics, but right now you can't, you can't place in a regional final. So how the heck are you going to get to an Olympics? It is a daunting challenge. What, what have you learned in your career that you can share perhaps with the audience your lessons on, you know, how can you still strive towards excellence whilst, you know, have your eye on gold, but get out of regional heats first, get to national, get to, you know, build that success without, you know, how do you keep your eye on the Olympic gold while still battling the, the, the 20 different levels you're going to have to battle through to get there.

Awesome. You know, I, it's a fantastic question and I think we're all continuing to work on that in our respective organizations. I'm. I'll answer it in a couple of ways and so I'll answer it in where I drive. I'm sorry, where I derive inspiration and how I think about us doing it more tactically within acquisition for each of us. And the journey, I'll just share my own journey. At the end of the day, it is starting small. So where I derive inspiration for it is actually like in TV shows I love. My favorite show on Netflix I shared with you at one point is Chef's Table. And it's about the journey that these chefs have gone on to become Michelin star chefs and world renowned chefs. But they didn't, they didn't start with the Michelin Star. They weren't a finished project, if you will. Right. They were on it. They were on a journey, and they continue to be on a journey. And it's that pursuit of excellence that's always inspired me. Likewise. My favorite show now is Bear, which is really about a dysfunctional restaurant and its journey to get on a Michelin Star. And I. What I love about it, of course, is I think it's very similar to what we in talent acquisition run, which is not necessarily dysfunctional organization, although this one is for dramatic, dramatic effect, although some of you may be in a more sort of dysfunctional sort of environment, but it's a highly pressurized operational business that you run. You're under a lot of pressure. You probably have lots of different operational parts you need new to operate, and then you're evaluated on ultimately what you deliver, the quality of the service or the quality of the food, or quality, in our case, the quality of talent. But in. In watching Bear, I think it was. It's in season two, it's called Forks. This episode, which is one of the characters, has the epiphany that you need to deliver great service, and it's the journey that that person goes through. And this is going to sound sad, and that makes me cry. So what the heck does that have to do with us in talent acquisition, which is that we as leaders are going through the same journey. So how do we do this? And you know the adage, you know, how do you eat an elephant one piece at a time? Well, that's what we do in creating a recruiting culture here. You start small and it's a journey in over time, we can get to that. Init and Star, if you will, you get to that piece. And so I, you know, I think about your business. What are the core areas that the business is focusing on that they really need to deliver on that are critical? And then what is the new lens or new approach that you can apply to that specific area? As a leader, you know who the leaders you can connect with in advance? Who on your team can you have work on that? Like, who are your lead recruiters and how will they approach it? Can you take a step back, really develop a holistic strategy? And then, like, when you start to implement things will help to build a recruiting culture? Can you start to set shared accountability on how you're sourcing talent, what channels you're going to leverage, how it's going to be conveyed? Who is actually conveying the message? Are managers posting things? Are they doing podcasts? Are they willing to jump on a platform to share more about the role? So there's that piece of do you have time, can you build out well, do you have time to commit making sure that you have teams commitment to really focusing on this. As we know it's not just the hiring manager, it's the interview team. And do you have time to really get the right team committed and do they have the time to commit to a specific initiative? Can you align around the things you want to interview for? Like what's key and what you interview in a role? What will the process look like? How will you interview and assess? How do you want to close? Who's involved in the closing of a candidate and then how do you effectively stay engaged with those candidates after they've accepted and how do you effectively onboard those people? So think about it end to end and what I would inside just sort of, you know, kind of went through a general process and you can just start with the front end which is how do we source as a starting point? Like how do, how do we get. When I say how you you want to seek with the recruiting team and with the manager whether or not they will share the role wherever that, where wherever may be appropriate. And then you want to dive into once you've aligned there, like how do we want to assess and interview so on and so forth. But I that's that would be the starting point. Starting small is, is what I would say break up your process and and then start in one area.

So you reminded me Nick of most organizations that have a reasonable sized sales team will have a sales methodology and agreed upon way we sell and it's written down, it's trained when you onboard it's measured, you're measured against it and we refine it and try and make it better. But yet we do not have a hiring process that we agree upon. We write down, we onboard you into, we train you on, measure you against and improve over time. We just have a whole bunch of people doing whatever the heck they want and hoping the outcome will be good. You know, I think that's a good framing for an organization that has a sales methodologies to go to the leader and go we have this, this is important. Or yeah, it's really important. We wouldn't change it, we wouldn't dump it, we might replace it, but we would never get rid of it. Why don't we have a hiring methodology when we have a hiring process that we do the same? It makes a lot of sense. You have in the baby steps Nick, you shared with me, I thought was a really interesting idea. One of the ways in which you can start, because there's as many ways as you say, you could start at the top of the full, you start with sourcing, you align them there and you build slowly over time, one chunk of the elephant at a time. But equitable hiring is something that we spoke about in the podcast a year or two ago, but it's another way you can begin to align the organization process wise. Talk to me about that and your thoughts around that and your experience there.

Yeah, I mean, depending on the nature of the company which you're working at, in terms of creating buy in and I think first alignment and I would say greater levels of buy in throughout the organization, applying a practice that can consistently be repeated will create buy in with employees because they will believe in level of fairness. So if you define your hiring practice or process in philosophy and you take it to your ergs, your employee resource groups, more than likely they're going to buy in and be ambassadors for you because they're going to buy into the idea of consent, consistent practices. There's something in it for them. Right. They know that, you know, their development and growth into new opportunities at the company is in, you know, in, you know, intricately involved or in. And in the outcome of that process right there, they should and ought to be motivated. And you usually are. And creating, you know, a philosophy and process and leaning into your, whether it be your DEI teams or your employee resource groups, more than likely they will be more than supportive of shared accountability and work with you in ensuring to apply it throughout the company. And again, there's typically real incentive through those organizations to ensure developing essentially what is a consistent process, which is this is the way we're going to, you know, both source talent from, you know, different from different sources. This is how we're going to interview and assess talent and how we're going to onboard it. And that that level of consistency should and often does resonate. And in my own experience, those teams and organizations have been instrumental in driving growth in getting additional buy in. And so I think I was using sort of the land and expand. Well, if you're leveraging the ergs, they will land and expand and it's almost a bottom up approach to the way in which we should be doing things. And they hold our recruiting teams accountable for following sort of equitable practices and they hold also themselves as leaders within the organization for continuing to diversify but also create sort of a consistent process.

In recruiting, I love this kind of stealth way of doing it. It's like almost that when, when an organization first introduces a global ats, you are taking step one on the journey to building a hiring culture because it's step one of alignment of processes. You know, 20 steps later or 50 steps later, maybe you're at the full on hiring culture that John and Danny introduced that we've gone over time. And thank you audience for staying with us, by the way. I really appreciate it. I think most of us would, if not all of us, would be delighted to spend more time listening to Nick. Nick, we'll get you back on the podcast for a longer conversation. These 20 minute conversations are short. We only get to cover a couple of points. But I might want to hand the last word to you, Nick, on this. So how important is it that leaders embrace this concept like where does it rank, this idea of building a hiring culture and all the things you can do tomorrow as a recruiting leader, where does this rank?

Yeah, it's a top critical business deliverable, right? Again, I'll say excellence elevates excellence. And I think every leader understands if they're bringing in top talent, acquiring top talent, they're building a sustainable organization that is positioned for growth. Again, each of you is TA leaders can change the trajectory of the company. Business leaders understand that the talent you bring in has a direct impact on the outcome and the growth of the companies. And so your focus and continue on excellence, your business leaders focus on excellence will elevate the prospects of your company and success.

Nick, thank you so much for those insights. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for joining us. And also huge thank you to John Basilica, to Danielle Monahan for joining us, and for you, the audience, for joining us.