Talking Candidate Experience with Wendy Mayer

Hi, Jonny here. I just wanted to jump in, let you know that the shortlist is now the Work Smart podcast. It's the same insightful interviews, just with a new name, new format, and new focus on helping you to get work smart. Now let's get started. Hi, and welcome to Work Smart, a podcast with social talent, all about becoming more work smart. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent, and this week we're talking to Wendy Mayer from Pfizer about candidate experience. Do this, Wendy. You're very welcome to the podcast and the show. I'm wondering if you could give our audience a little bit of introduction about you, your job, and who is Wendy Mayer?

Great. Thank you, Johnny. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Wendy Mayer and I lead candidate experience at Pfizer. As many of you are probably aware, Pfizer is a global pharmaceutical company. We have 85,000 employees, around 64 global markets. And my team is responsible for the recruitment, marketing, all of the recruiting, early talent programs, and onboarding here at Pfizer globally. We fill about 25, 26,000 positions a year. And we are working across the global Pfizer organization, as I mentioned, which includes commercial roles, scientific roles, manufacturing and sales. So very diverse set of candidates that we look for to fill the positions that we have here at Pfizer. We do both internal as well as external recruiting. And I have a team of just under 300 people that tackle all of that work every year. For myself personally, I've been at Pfizer for 26 years. Relatively new to the HR space. I've been doing this for about two years, but I have a strategy background, so I've been doing strategy across many different parts of Pfizer. I've actually had 18 different roles across seven functions in my 26 years and just love it here. And it's been just an amazing company to work for personally. I live in New York. I'm based out of our headquarters, our global headquarters, which is in Hudson Yards in New York City. And I live with one of my three children, so two are in college, so I don't see them quite as often. But my husband and I like to play tennis, we like to travel, and as a family, we like to do kind of puzzles and trivia things. So that that's what we like to do for fun.

It sounds like doing that much hiring across those disciplines is a puzzle enough to solve without having to add to your evenings and weekends. Wendy, it's great to have you on the show. I'M dying to get into the topic of candid experience with you. And particularly because I think you bring a very unique perspective. As you mentioned, obviously your career has been mainly in strategy and less in HR or in talent acquisition, which I always find brings a brand new diversity of thought and background to something that traditionally is full of folks who've worked in the same area, which can be great. But I think there's a real advantage to bringing extra perspective in one of those roles that you had in Pfizer. A big, big, big, big push for the amount of internal mobility that the organization is obviously behind are that many opportunities was looking after the employee experience as well. Maybe if you wouldn't mind starting by telling tell us a little bit about that role, maybe how that relates in your experience now to candid experience.

Yeah, sure, I'd love to. And actually I'll expand it a little bit more because a few years ago I had a role where we were looking at customer experience. So that's really where I started on my experience journey and trying to really understand what makes a good experience. How do we get people to think differently about the work that they need to do and think about it from the perspective of the person receiving the outcome of the work that they're doing. And so I started to do that a few years ago as we were looking at our patients and the experience that they have from a commercial side. And that was a really nice transition into the role that I had around employee experience. And with employee experience, we really looked at the employee life cycle. So looking at all of the events that could happen in an employee's career at Pfizer, from the point that they're hired to the point when they retire or leave, and what are the critical components and how does that from an employee standpoint, enable them to have a fulfilling career at Pfizer? And so, you know, thinking about the process in the way that we did for employees and so, you know, thinking about what is our talent management process and what is the opportunity for people to do growth experiences and how do they deal with life events that they may have and the interactions that they may have with our benefits organization to deal with those life experiences, you know, all of that work really gave me the perspective of thinking about how the end user, in that case the employee, and now in my current role, the candidate is reacting to that experience and whether it's, you know, with as least friction as possible and really leaves them at the end of the day with a positive perception of the organization. And so obviously from an employee standpoint, we were doing that to really try to engender retention and make sure that colleagues were. That some of the things with the managing their career wasn't getting in the way of the work that they were trying to do on a daily basis. And so as I came into candidate experience, it was actually at a time when we were looking to do a transformation of the organization from what we had called Talent acquisition, which I know is what many organizations call the function, and really changing it to candidate experience. And it gave us the opportunity to really define what that transformation meant, what it meant for how we operated as an organization, but also what it meant for, most importantly for the candidates that we wanted to give this better experience to. So in a very similar way to what I described with charting out the employee experience, we did the same thing with candidates. So as Talent Acquisition, our focus was very much time to fill. How quickly, how many positions do we need to fill? How quickly can we fill them? And that was really the main metric that we measured and the main thing that we were looking at. As we started to think about this transformation, we said, let's look at our process. And the first thing, the first learning we had was that we don't have a consistent process. So people were doing things differently. So it's extremely hard. So that was right there, the first key, learning. Because you can't manage to a positive experience if you don't have somewhat of a consistent process, it becomes much more difficult because you're managing so many more, you know, diverse types of situations that could happen. So we started by charting out what we wanted the process to be and then looked at how consistent that was across our different markets. Obviously, there's things legally that vary across the many different markets in which we operate, so we needed to factor that in. But we've developed this core journey, and. And through the development of the core journey, it gave us the opportunity, you know, we obviously started to look at it from the process flow that we do on our side of the equation. But then we had the opportunity to say, let's put ourselves in the candidate's shoes. How does this come across to the candidate? And very importantly, and one of the biggest things that we emphasize through this process is, you know, we all know, because we work at Pfizer, how amazing of an organization it is to work here? Does that come across in our recruiting process? Do people feel the type of organization that Pfizer is to work with, to work for from the minute they start interacting with us? And so as we looked at the process, it enabled us to identify where we had significant pain points. And we complemented that with research with candidates, with hiring managers, with recruiters to kind of match up and make sure that we were getting some consistent pain points, which also helped us kind of prioritize the areas that we were going to tackle. So there were a lot of similarities, I would say, coming back to your original question of the employee experience to the candidate experience, we did a similar type of evaluation process and prioritization process. So that that kind of structure and I think from my strategic background, that kind of lend itself, lent itself nicely to that and I think helped us get on our way.

So I remember from. I've written a lot about experience as it relates to candid experience. And like you, I've actually just borrowed liberally from customer experience and other types of experience because I think I agree with you that experience is experience. And one of the quotes I love to use was that happiness equals expectations minus reality. Sometimes when people think about canned experience, particularly in the talent acquisition hiring world, they think canned experience means having the best or having a perfect experience. My experience in this topic is that's not necessarily true. The expectation management can be extremely important, which I think aligns very well with consistency of process. What have you learned about managing expectations throughout that experience, career, and particularly as it relates to the candidate experience?

So I love that quote and I talk to my team about setting expectations all the time. And I think the best example to use there is that as we did this evaluation of pain points, one of the biggest pain points, and I'm sure many organizations deal with this, is time to follow up that candidates, it's like a black hole. They start interviewing and then they just don't hear back. And it could be weeks, it could unfortunately be months. And that was the biggest frustration. And so the analogy that I always shared with my team is, you know, if you call into a service center now, they will say to you, your time to speaking with an agent is seven minutes. Now, before they used to do that, you would be on hold and it felt like an eternity. And if you waited seven minutes, that seven minutes felt like it was 70 minutes because you just didn't never knew when somebody was going to pick up the phone and your call was going to be answered. But when you know that it's seven minutes, it. There's no stress that you know when it's going to happen. You know, you're setting the expectation and, and unless you're significantly longer than seven minutes, they're gonna have a positive reaction because you've set their expectations. So as we started to work through the process, one of the key things that we felt we needed to address was being transparent to candidates about when they can hear back from us and setting their expectations. So that it may not be bad that it takes us three to four weeks to evaluate a number of candidates and do the interview process. But as long as we tell people what the expected wait time is for hearing back from us, as long as we are able to either meet that time or exceed it or follow up with a follow up communication that explains what the new expectation should be, then you know, we're improving that process and we're creating a better experience. Experience, even though it still may be, you know, where they're not going to get immediate response from us. Which if to, you know, to your point, if you were to look at what might be the best experience that might be getting an answer, you know, having an interview and hearing back in two weeks, as long as we tell them it's going to be a four week, four weeks, they will have a much more positive view of the experience because they know what to expect and we've managed those expectations.

When you talk about managing expectations and the prioritization of projects as well.

The.

Common misconception about this is that we need to fix everything. You mentioned about prioritizing things. I know that on our learning platform, the great author Dan Heath, who's a New York native as well, he talked about the Power of Moments, one of his books, he talks about the scientific research that came out of the University of Chicago on this, says that when we think about an experience, we typically remember two moments. We typically remember the peak and we remember the end or the transition. That it isn't about making every part of it perfect. It's about trying to sometimes create those peaks and create a good transition or end moment. I use the kind of analogy of potholes and he says that's all very well, but you can't have potholes in your process being gaping holes with horrible experience. You must, must fix the potholes, identify the potholes. But after that he said there's less benefit from trying to get everything perfect and more benefit from trying to get that to peak moments. In the peak experience and the transition experience. Is that something that rings true to you and these, it's something you've adopted and I, that can have process builds and if so, perhaps share something about that?

Yes, yes. So definitely rings true. I would say I, I actually hadn't heard that, the academic support behind it, I wish I had because that would have been helpful in communicating to my team. But what we did actually very much aligns to what you described. You know, coming back to our mapping of the process, there were two key points that, that were the pain points and one of them would align to the peak and one of them would align to the transition, interestingly enough. So the peak I just shared about that was about the communication and knowing about where you were in the process. So we have worked on addressing that, as I mentioned, with the expectation setting, as well as trying to improve our ability to provide more communications from a transition standpoint. The second area that came out in the work that we did was feedback and providing feedback to candidates so that they understand why they may not have been selected for the role. And very importantly, and I think from a very good place from the candidate standpoint, they want to do better in future interviews. There's nothing more frustrating than, than interviewing for several roles, not getting any feedback and thinking that you're just never going to get a role. You can't, you can't address what may not be going right because there's no information there. So those became the two areas that we have identified. We spoke about it more from a standpoint of we have to prioritize. These are the two biggest impact areas and we call them moments that matter. I know a lot of people frame them in that way. And so we said these are really the two things that if we could address, they're going to have the biggest beneficial impact on our candidate experience. But I will say the other thing that we have emphasized, and this goes back to your point about not all experiences are going to be perfect or having a good candidate experience doesn't mean everything went perfectly, was equipping the team to be able to address things when they go wrong, because that's also a very good display of management of experience. And so what we've talked about or I've. I've emphasized with the team is to say, you know, put yourself in the shoes of the candidate and think about what, whatever situation it is that went wrong. Think about how you would like to see that situation revol resolved. What would make you feel better about that situation? So to use as an example, we use automated interview scheduling and we had a situation where there was a candidate who had scheduled an interview with our recruiter and the recruiter missed the call and the candidate wrote back to share about their negative experience and how disappointed they were. And I've used That as an example with the team, because there was a good opportunity to kind of manage that. You know, the recruiter. The recruiter just wrote back and said, all right, let's set up another time. But if you think about it from the candidate standpoint, the candidates about to interview for a job, they're probably nervous. They really want to do well, they want to make a good impression. And then we don't show up, and we just treat it as if it was a minor glitch. Oh, we'll just reschedule you. We need to have more empathy for the situation that the candidate was in. So how could we address that in a better way? If you were the candidate, what would have made you say Pfizer really handled that situation well? They went above and beyond. They did something that really made me feel better about this situation. So I use that example because whatever it is, missing an interview, not sending the right information, having a delay in getting something processed, whatever it may be, that could come up along the way. And there will always be things that come up along the way. It's not about coming up with a playbook for how to handle every single one of these situations. It's when you're uncertain of what to do. Put yourself in the shoes of the candidate and think about what would make you feel good about the actions that Pfizer took. And sometimes it could be apologizing, and sometimes it could be, you know, you know, sending them additional information. It's definitely not just giving them the job, that's for sure. Right. That we don't do that. But we try to think, how could we remedy the situation? And it really is taking from. I think when you think about customer experience and you think about those great stories of, you know, somebody missed their flight and what did the airline do to make it better and things like that. So we're trying to employ those principles so that we could focus on the two key moments that matter that we really think are going to have the biggest input, impact on our experience. But then how can we equip our team to be able to handle anything else that might not go in an ideal way?

I love that example from a consumer world. I think it was either Marriott or Hilton have that approach where they empower, think every employee with a budget per year to go fix problems up to, let's say, $2,000. And it's at their discretion to basically decide how they do that, which could be comping someone in a room, it could be getting someone in taxi, it could be doing whatever but it's a in that moment. Again, to your point, put yourself in that person's shoes and can we solve that? And the benefit of that, having that, that creating that moment for that person and the power of that without having to go through a chain of bureaucracy to get it done. They just make the right decision in the moment to do something right. Again, don't get in the job without a proper assessment, but do something, fix that experience. I love that. By the way, on the academic side, Dan Ariely is the professor who did this. There's the study on the work of experience. Kind of come up with that peak end. It was this peak end theory was referenced as it's a great one to use. There's tons of great examples in there to kind of talk about Kansas experience as well, its impact. If I go back to something you said earlier on, when you look at all this effort and you look at all the initiatives, you look at all the changes and the priority stuff, how are you measuring this? What's your learning on the best way to measure experience, and how have you and your team applied it into candid experience over the last couple of years?

Wendy so I'll say it's still a work in progress. So what we did initially, we created what I affectionately call among my team our pyramid of metrics. And it's the pyramid of metrics because very much like the hierarchy of needs, it kind of starts with a foundational component. So the foundational component is actually operational. Are there operational things that we're doing that we think will improve the candidate experience? So to use as an example, one of the things that we found, and this ties back to candidates being notified of where they are in the process, was that recruiters were not dispositioning candidates in a timely manner. So we may have already hired somebody for a position, but they haven't taken the rest of the candidates that were in the candidate pool and actually put them into, you know, the no. The no bucket. And when we do that, it triggers a notification to tell them that they have not been selected for the role. So as you can imagine, you know, people are hanging out there for months. Meanwhile, we've hired somebody, they've started, and we've kind of gone on. So we track what percentage of candidates after a position has been closed have not been dispositioned. And we're looking for that number to be zero. And so that's an example of an operational metric that we have that we track. We also Time to fill. While I mentioned before it was the key metric when we were talent acquisition. We're not putting all of our eggs in the time to fill basket, but it's still an important metric because we do want to make sure, and we do recognize that attracting top talent requires a kind of nimble and sometimes accelerated process. So we want to make sure we're tracking to a reasonable amount of time on our overall process. So those are two examples of operational metrics, and we've identified a few others that we use and, you know, develop a dashboard that tracks that across the different parts of our organization. The second layer on our. On our pyramid is experiential metrics. And we have two key surveys that we use around experience metrics. So one is with the hiring managers. So every hiring manager, after a job requisition has been filled, gets a survey. And we actually just recently implemented a change in this survey because the survey originally was almost like I used to call it, I love my recruiter survey. So it was like how well it was. It was about the recruiter and not about the process. And so the scores were on a scale of 1 to 5, anywhere between like 4, 6, and 5. Right. So it was giving us no information and no ability to approve the process. So we recently changed that survey because the experiences is also about kind of the steps. Are they getting the information that they need as a hiring manager? Are they getting a diverse slate of candidates? Did they feel like they got a good candidate at the, you know, the best candidate at the end of the day? So there's still a measure about the service that they received or the partnership, I should say, with the recruiter. But. But we've added many more metrics that are related to the process itself and how well that's working with the hiring manager. So we use that as a way to see how we might need to calibrate that relationship and where we might need to provide additional information. But it gives us a lot about the experience that the hiring manager is having through the recruiting process. The second survey is obviously the candidate experience survey, and that we've recently modified as well, because we actually used to only do it with candidates that got the job. And so as you can imagine, that was a little bit biased on the positive side. So now we send out the survey to every candidate who interviews, who gets through to the interview stage. And the survey asks about all of the different elements of the process. And we send the survey out and let them know that the survey is coming out before a final decision has been made. So we're not getting their feedback through the lens of the decision, but rather through, hopefully it's hard to totally get it to be unbiased, but to get it through a little bit of a cleaner lens and get their perception of the experience through the different parts of the process. And so that's the middle layer and then the top layer, which in all transparency is one that we're still working on, is the ultimate the quality of hire. So how do we really get equality of hire? Today we look at one year turnover as quality of hire, but we're looking at how can we better tie quality of hire to performance. So one of the things that we're considering, we haven't fully implemented this yet, is that we have a biannual performance process. And so looking at how well somebody performs in role after they've in their, we call them semesters, in their second semester of performance. So do we see that the person that we hired is able to accomplish a good amount of the goals that's been set for them in that role? So that's another element that we're contemplating. We're still working on quality of hire a little bit, but having this kind of pyramid of metrics, and I say it's a pyramid because there's obviously many more operational and, you know, fewer as you get to the top, but also looking at the relationship between them. So are there if we, if we're ultimately able to identify what we see are the best quality of candidates, were there components of the interview or evaluation process that we that worked best that got us there? Were there perceptions of the experience that may have helped us get to a better quality of candidate? So looking at the relationship between those metrics as well is critically important. So that's how we measure the candidate experience. We communicate that out across our team, but we also share it with our business partners with our we call HR Advisor People experience. So we share that with our People Experience experience partners. And we're using those metrics to continuously improve the way we perform.

So when I was talking with Tom from Expense Accenture, one of our clients last week about candid experience, and he was sharing with me that last year they hired 240,000 people and they pulse, I have a candidate, can they have an MPS score across those candidates? And when he was watching Dan Heath's program about the power of moments and the science behind that, it convinced him that they were doing it wrong. And he said they started changing that process to pulsing at six different stages in the candid experience because they realized they were only getting a sense of what was happening at a very particular stage, and they were changing things at many different stages and experimenting with different things. I think it's really important to have more data. And to your point, not just one single data point, multiple data points that might interact with each other, to see the influence of different approaches. It does sound very much though that as an organization, and probably no surprise, perhaps you take a very scientific approach to trying to understand what's driving the experience. Were there any surprises when you looked into the data are as you look into the data, as you continue to do so, as you're, as you're evolving this that you probably wouldn't have expected coming new into ta that came out of the data that said, actually this is a thing that matters massively. And I wouldn't have thought so, or this is the thing I thought mattered massively and doesn't really matter as much.

Yeah, I think, I mean, the two areas, I would say that came out as our big areas of opportunity were not surprising. Right. They're critical pain points for I think many organizations and I think frustrations of candidates. And in general, I would say maybe not so much from the data, but I think the thing that was most surprising to me, and this was something that I thought was a small change, but has ultimately been one of the most impactful things that we've done is to work on our notifications. And there were two changes that we made. So these are the communications that go out to candidates at different points in the process. And so the first change that we made was that we wrote the letter in a less business speak way. So Pfizer, you know, we have communication teams. Everything's pretty buttoned up. We've got a lot of, you know, business language, you know, that people, you know, get, get caught up in. And it doesn't really speak in a. Or come across in a human empathetic way. So we changed that and made it sound like we were talking to someone that we might talk to in a more informal way than the more traditional business way. But the biggest impact that we in the change that we made was that I put my name at the bottom of the letter. And everybody told me not to do that because as you would imagine, everybody now knows who you are and you get a ton of communications. But it made the biggest impact in two ways. And one, I'm happy to say, and maybe it's a reflection of our process. I actually don't get a ton of emails and LinkedIn posts about our process. But one, and part of the Reason why I did it was it signaled that somebody owns this and there's somebody accountable, that it's not just the Pfizer candidate experience team. And you're kind of left out there with a nameless, faceless organization that you're interacting with. There are people who own part of the process, and I kind of sit at the top of that. So I felt it was very important to put my name there. But the second part that I think has been most beneficial to this is that it does give me visibility into some of the areas where the things are not going right or that are bothering some of our candidates. So, you know, we had a glitch in the system where there were some people who never interviewed for a role, and then they get a letter that says, thank you very much for interviewing for this position. So it helps us really get a real time view of things that might not be going as positively as we would like them to. But I think that, you know, when I did it initially, I was like, oh, you know what? Did you really have my name on it? Because it's coming from, like, nobody, right? It's just coming from some amorphous team. But that really, and I've heard it from many people that, that. That really means something because it means that that somebody is really taking accountability and that it's. There's somebody to go to who will address issues that you. You may have in the process. And I think it's a very positive view of candidate experience right from the outset, even if you, you know, haven't had any issues.

I love that I haven't heard of a leader taking that position, but it makes sense, particularly in the context of a word you used earlier, which just rings true to me throughout the entire conversation we've had, which is empathy. You're starting from perspective of empathy and understanding what it's like for that candidate and how can you put yourself in her shoes and think about what she's experiencing and make it better.

Right, Exactly. Exactly. Yep. And so that's. That has really had a big impact. And. And empathy does, like, we try to have that run through everything that we do as a team because I think it's, you know, we're dealing. We've all been in these situations. And so, you know, it's. It comes back to you to treat people how you'd like to be treated. And so that's fundamental to what we do.

So this show is called Work Smart for a Reason. At Social Talent, we believe that some people are street smart, some people are book smart. Anyone can be work smart. Right now, Andy, we want to focus on how you make yourself work smart. Are you ready?

I'm ready.

Let's do it. So we've got some work smart questions from the fantastic team at Social Talent. Behind these categories, I'll let you pick the category you want to answer. Wendy. So the categories are Back to the Future, Tool Time, Workspace, Jam, the Chill Zone, Seesaw or Robot Rock. Which of those you fancy having a go out? Andy?

See, let's go with Back to the Future.

Back to the Future, one of my favorite movies as a kid. So glad you chose that one. Let's go. So back to the future, Wendy, what is your favorite time saving tip?

So I, I would say time saving tip. I, I very often have difficulty getting time to exercise into my daily work schedule. So I try to combine some of the things that I need to do. So we recently, our office recently moved to the opposite side of town from where my train comes into the city. And so I combine combine my exercise with my commute to work and I walk from the train station to the office. So I get a nice 3 mile healthy 30 minute walk whenever I commute. And it also, to be honest, we have now remote hybrid work so we come into the office two to three days a week. So it actually also gives me a positive incentive to come into the office because if I work from home, I usually don't exercise because I'm sitting at my desk all day and I don't have any place to walk to. So I so coming into the office. So that's really a good time saving tip in terms of combining two things that you need to get done into one so that you're able to accomplish both of them in the same period of time.

I love that. I used to do something similar myself before the pandemic. Our office is about easily about 10km from my home and I have four kids. I struggled to get time to do the exercises and do the commute. So I switched from running to cycling. I cycled to work and cycled home from work and I had my more than my fair share of exercise done by the time I get home and didn't even try and find that extra time in the evening. I love that tip.

Yeah, yeah, it's great because it's, it's also I was having trouble like getting dedicated exercise time. So yeah, the more you can combine, the better.

Maddie, it's been great having on the show. Thanks so much for joining us and teaching us about candid experience and really particularly what Pfizer have done and what you have done with your team. With that unique insight, is there any way that folks can get in touch if people are looking to try and test out the candidate experience of Pfizer to see what kind of job opportunities the business has around the world? How can they find out more?

Yeah, sure. So we are definitely hiring and you can see all of the jobs that we have available@pfizer.com and we have a specific career page as part of of that site. So feel free to check that out. And if you do apply for a job, you'll get an email from me thanking you for applying for that job. And then if you'd like to reach out to me directly, I'm on LinkedIn and happy to to take connections there.

I love that. I love the taking ownership of the whole experience for me. So top tips I got from this conversation was very much about focusing on the moments that matter. That's a big thing. Using data to drive those decisions, trying to focus on those critical few things that really matter for the candid experience. Measuring as much as you can and looking at the combination of measures. But obviously importantly, make sure you don't forget the empathy piece. Through all that, step into the candid shoes, see what it's like from her experience and empower people to go fix those problems. Wendy, thank you so much for sharing your insights on candid experience and for sharing with our audience as well. We've learned a ton and it's great to met you here today.

Thank you. It's been a pleasure.