The latest trends in TA Tech | with Jonathan Kestenbaum

Foreign.

I'm your host for the next 40, 45 minutes of episode 118 of the shortlist this week. We're coming live from Paris where we're at unleash the conference about all things HR technology. I've been proud to be involved with Unleashed for the last 12 years. Always a great event to see what vendors are out there talking about, what tech, what thought leaders are speaking about, what topics to do with human resources, people, talent, talent acquisition, all of the above and more. And it's a pleasure therefore to invite our guest today who's somebody who's been a go to person for me around certainly talent and talent acquisition tech for the last few years. And if you know him, he's probably your go to person as well because that's what we're going to be talking about, the latest trends in TA tech for today's episode. And it's kind of a funny time, right? You know, talent acquisition is constantly changing. 2022 is one of the craziest years for this, right? Starting with such demand, heading into recession and inflation. Yet talent still is impossible to find out there, right? What was, was once best practice pre pandemic has been overtaken by new ways of working, new strategies, new tools like all that. Innovation is great for the industry. It means, you know, hopefully candidates are getting a better deal and we're more in tune with what they're looking for. But with all this different tech, it's hard for the TA and the talent folks to keep up. It's hard for the candidates to keep up as well. So what should you be focusing on? Right? If you're looking at your TA organization, your team thinking, you know, at the end of the day, I just want to find great talent or bring them into my organization and keep them. What tech should you be looking for? What's, what's happening, what's worth looking at, what categories are out there, what are the kind of up and coming vendors, what are people no longer using, what's merging, all this kind of stuff. And to help us make sense of it, I'd love to welcome an expert in HR and talent technology, Jonathan Kestenbaum, who's joining us from the east coast of the US And Jonathan is the Managing Director of Technology Strategy and Partnerships, AMS or Alexander Mann Solutions as you might know them. And John is going to be sharing with us today his deep knowledge in this space and talk to us about how he stays up to date and the latest trends in TA tech and maybe how therefore you could do the Same what impact the trends are having on the industry, what, what challenges are being solved and how can we take advantage of these insights as leaders to get ahead of the game? Jonathan, it's a pleasure to have you. People might notice that technically we're not sitting in Paris right now. We're, we're pre recording this a little bit early because we're probably right now on the floor of a niche in Paris, walking around doing our thing or listening to a talk. But tell me this, maybe you can introduce yourself because I think for folks listening and hearing you for the first time, I think it's interesting to know your background and where this knowledge and passion comes from and then maybe what your role is today within Alexander Mann Solutions and why you have this. Trust me, it is an expertise in the space.

Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here today. As you know, I'm John Kestenbaum. I'm the managing director of Tech Strategy and Partners at ams. I've spent my career evaluating talent technology. I'm actually a lawyer by education. I'm still a licensed attorney. I've been an entrepreneur in the HR technology space my whole career. Prior to joining joining ams, I founded an organization called talentech Labs. Many of you might know of talentech Labs for the ecosystem infographic we used to publish with all of the talent acquisition technology tools. And now talentech Labs publishes a talent management version of that ecosystem. And I've really been passionate about helping folks find right job. And you know, I think that talent acquisition, talent management, what's more exciting than, you know, helping folks either find a company to go work for or within that company understand how they could grow, learn and find the right opportunity.

So I just want to clarify for listeners who are concerned or about to press pause on the podcast, Jonathan is not here to pitch you any talent technology. He's not here to sell you anything because that is not what this is about. This is an independent advice and opinion on what's happening. And you may disagree with this opinion, but trust me this, you will not be sold anything over the next 30 or 40 minutes. So, Jonathan, tell me this, right? First of all, you mentioned talent Tech Labs that you see my go place source for what's happening in the TA tech space, should that still be my go to source? Where else do you get your inspiration from for our listeners and viewers? Where do you suggest folks go to really understand what's working, what tech they should be looking at and what's not working?

Yeah, no, I think, I mean talent tech lab is still a great place to go learn about talent technology. We at AMS are actually launching a platform that we call AMS Verified. We're actually launching at the conference in Paris. And you know, ultimately we're, you know, out in the market. If I learned anything over the last eight or so years that I've been evaluating talent technologies, it's that the technology is only as good as the people and process you build around it. And so what we've been able to do with all the clients that we're working with at AMS is start to gather intelligence on how these technologies are working in market. Really not just what the technologies do, but what they do well, what features are resonating, does it actually integrate with the solution? And so we've built a marketplace called AMS Verified where we're sharing information about vendors. So in addition to talentech Labs, you now have AMS Verified as a solution to start to learn more about talent technologies. You know, I think some of these conferences are great unleash being, you know, one of them to go and learn and understand and identify new technologies, you know, and, you know, where do I learn about technologies? I could tell you that maybe, you know, not so long ago, maybe, maybe six, seven years ago, I would call vendors to learn more about what they were doing and they didn't really know who I was or cared to share much information with me directly. What I started to do was write a lot about talent acquisition and talent management technologies. The more I wrote and shared my thoughts on the market, the more folks started to come to me with more information and be more comfortable sharing information about their technologies. And so I'm now at a point where folks are coming to me with their technologies more than I'm identifying new ones out in the market.

So before I get into what's trending today or what might trend tomorrow, let's go back a bit, right? Can you look back at the last three, four years? What have been the trends? Like what are the kind of common themes where let's say we go back five years, Hartford results, remember five years ago, what seemed novel, new, different five years ago, that is kind of becoming or has become mainstream and just, you know, most TA teams use or most folks have a, have a budget item line for X type solution like that maybe wasn't there 10 years ago, like so going back out for the last few years, what has emerged as pretty much base standard, not considered terribly new or innovative anymore. Before we go into the what's, what's coming out or what's trending now.

Yeah. So it's really, it's a really interesting question. And, you know, I think broadly speaking, the business problems have been similar. You know, everyone has always wanted to solve. How do I get more diverse candidates into the pipeline? How do I, you know, get a quicker time to hire? How do I get a better quality hire? The technologies that have been able to facilitate that have changed over the years based on the new, you know, you know, I guess technological capability that exists out, you know, in the world to support these kinds of initiatives. Also, the amount of capital that's been invested in this space, there's been billions of dollars invested in the HR space over the last five years have allowed organizations to, you know, build new solutions to solve some of these broader challenges. I'll never forget, maybe five years ago, I was pitched the concept of a candidate relationship management system, which made a lot of sense. You know, we, you know, you need to engage. You know, recruitment is a specialized form of marketing. You need to engage candidates, pre apply and get them to fall in love with your brand. And we brought the concept to a number of large enterprise organizations. And, you know, those organizations all said, well, this sounds great, but I don't have a budget for CRM. And so what, what the CRM companies did was they said, well, do you have a budget for career site building? And so many of them, of course the organization said yes. And so many of them started with a career site builder and then sold their way into a CRM functionality. And now you don't see an organization without a CRM budget. You know, this has become commonplace. And so I think, you know, you know, there, there are a number of reasons why different things have happened over the years, you know, and technology trends that have driven them. Just to take a step back, to go two steps forward. You know, your applicant tracking system, you know, was the system of record. It still is a system of record. There wasn't a lot of technology that sat on top of that system. Even technology platforms that sat on top of that system seven years ago. Today you have a CRM. You have recruitment marketing platforms, you have matching technologies that integrate. I would say CRM being one of the new systems that now folks have budgets for matching is another one. I can't tell you how many times matching was brought into a conversation over the last couple years. And you know, ATS would say, well, we do matching. It's clear now that actually matching requires a whole different train of thinking than workflow engines. And so you're starting to see Independent matching technology systems. And so I'd say, you know, matching CRMs, you know, those are two, two systems that have, you know, kind of came and established themselves in the space as, you know, we deserve to be here.

There's been a lot of other ones like come to mind. Recruitment CRMs was the one I was, I was also thinking of.

Right.

That was novel a few years ago. Now it's like, you gotta have a recruiting CRM. It doesn't make sense not to have one. Video interviewing was a thing that was probably novel a few years ago. Covid made it essential for everybody. And it's probably doesn't exist as a standalone tool really anymore either. It's kind of to your point, it gets wrapped up in other stuff. So some of this stuff, like recruiting CRM stayed standalone, became mainstream. Some stuff came along and it might have gone as a category, but it still exists as a functionality of something else. Would that be fair to say?

Yeah, yeah. And so there's another, you know, broadly speaking, another trend has been consolidation. So we've seen significant consolidation in the space. You know, the way that, that it, you know, the system, broadly speaking works is, you know, you have to be able to, if you're going to raise venture capital money, you need to be able to validate, you know, you know, a $250 million enterprise value, right. To be able to get the returns that those investors want. Right. And so there's only certain places you can do that. You know, if you look at the 22 or so categories of talent, technology, talent acquisition, technology, talent, there's probably four or five categories where you can build a platform, work that capital. So you either build a point solution that gets acquired by a larger platform, or you build a point solution and then become a larger platform. And so we've seen a lot of that over the years as these organizations have started to merge. One area is referral tools. Those were point solutions. And now you pretty much get that as functionality within an ATS or CRM these days. You know, I think interestingly, there's also been point solutions that we all had a lot of excitement about and thought could make a meaningful impact. And then in practice, didn't play out the way we thought they would. Two great examples. One would be recruiter marketplaces where, where you put a bounty on a job and recruiters can submit candidates against that bounty, like in theory, makes a lot of sense. In practice, you have hard to fill roles that are generally going onto these platforms. Recruiters that are working the night shift and Getting half the fees and then a poor communication channel between in the marketplace. And so while they can scale to a certain amount of revenue, they really don't scale meaningfully beyond that. You know, in a similar capacity. Share talent networks where you can share talent, you know, makes a lot of sense. I have a second, third, fourth place candidate that I vetted, went through my whole process, but I didn't hire. Can I share them with another company for credits to get access to their candidates? That didn't really scale because the cost to scale that meaningfully was too expensive because you have to really stay hyper focused, hyperlocal. If I'm focusing on New York developers and I'm sharing those developers with other New York companies hiring developers, fine. If I'm Deloitte and McDonald's and we're in the same network and McDonald's is looking for hourly workers and Deloitte's looking for, you know, accountants, that there's no meaningful connection that can be made there. So and so lots of lessons learned. I think also timing is, you know, sometimes plays into these things. You know, now with remote work, maybe it'd be easier to scale a share talent network because it doesn't matter where you work. It's one dynamic that's less complicated. So, you know, you know, I definitely think it's been interesting to watch these things evolve over time and see how they've been accepted. And again, I think sometimes it's timing. And interestingly, just, just on that topic, with the, you know, with shared talent networks, maybe now that the location is in such a dynamic, they'll be easier to scale with recruiter marketplaces. Maybe blockchain will help remove the transparency issue and maybe that will enable those to, to be more effective. So, you know, to me, it's been, it's been a lot of fun to watch these, you know, different ideas come to market. In some cases scale. In some cases fail. In some cases pivot.

You reminded me about like many years back how everything was a social media solution. How to post your jobs on Facebook was like a product you buy by itself and there were competitors and everyone was producing a version of that. Yeah, you mentioned blockchain. I remember going to conferences five, six years ago, and everyone's talking about blockchain solutions for recruiting. And that would, you know, was kind of like build a product around blockchain as opposed to solve a problem. You know, it's kind of gone there. Well, I love this idea that there could be 20, 30 categories, but really there's four or five big ones. And I want to mention a guest we had a few months ago, Yasser Ahmed from HelloFresh. He shared with us his team's, you know, open source talent acquisition tech radar, which they borrowed from the tech team in Zalando, who use a similar approach to the tech that they use across their business, where he categorized it in four categories. And I'm keen to understand the categories the big four or five you use because, you know, they use in Hellofresh, in one corner they've got CRM and project management tools. They put that as a kind of group, a category. You know, you got your greenhouse, you've got your phenom, but you've also got things like Asana and Jira, right, in terms of generally how do you manage work, right, They've got automation tools, so they've got, you know, recruiting automation, things like HireVue, they put in Greenhouse IV tool, Text Expander, but also Good Time Visage in Flight Pave, lots of different recruiting and non recruiting tech tools. Automation, second category. They look at interviewing as a category, right? You've got things like Pymetrics, Codility, you've got Hacker Rank. They even put social talent in there for the interview training we do Harvard. But then you've got the fourth being talent intelligence tools, right? So LinkedIn insights, LinkedIn recruiter, Horsefly Harold, Candid ID Eightfold there, rather than CRM, which confuses me, but hey, so they've got these kind of four categories, right? Talent, intelligence, interviewing, automation and kind of CRM. Do you have a different big four? Do you have commonalities? Just to make sure the folks are really understanding what you might consider core tech before we get into maybe emerging tech, what are your big four or five?

Yeah, so I package things up a little bit differently, but I'd say, you know, it's, it's probably similar in nature and you know, so look, you need, you need a system of record, an applicant tracking system. In the contingent world, you have a vendor management system. In, you know, freelance world, you have a freelance management system. I think you're going to have consolidation within that category of tracking systems. You're already seeing that happen with Aperture building VMS functionality and Workday buying Vinley, for example, ETS is buying VMSs. So I think that's a category. I think in front of that, if you think about, okay, someone applies to a job, they go to your ats. Well, what happens before they apply to a job? Well, they go into your system of engagement, your engagement system. And so I'd say that your CRM is the basis of your engagement system. But this has expanded beyond CRM these days and in some cases includes chatbot, in some cases includes, you know, referral tools. And you know, the, it's, it's all about how do you engage a candidate prior to them, the text messaging is another one prior to them applying for a job. And then I actually think there's a system of record that sits in front of the CRM, which I'm calling a recruitment marketing platform, which essentially is a system, you know, your career site builder, your retargeting remarketing system, programmatic advertising. It's, it's how do you engage folks before they even share a form of PII with you, like personal identifiable information. And so I think there are three main categories across source to hire there. I think there's an opportunity to build an analytics, a robotic process automation system that sits across these, ties data together, tracks analytics across them. I think there's an opportunity to create a talent intelligence layer, a matching technology that cuts across these systems and even goes into talent management and helps with upskilling. You know, so I'd say those are the. Oh, sorry, there's one more which is assessments, you know, video and assessments is behavioral skills, video interviewing. And again, I think that while it could be a category that sits within like the selection process, I do think it cuts across because you might want to start to use these assessments earlier in the process, you know, because especially now that they're mobile, they're digital, they're, you know, you can collect information so much more quickly than you could before. You know, I think they'll be embedded earlier in the process than they are now and it'll be cheaper to do it. So I kind of think that it cuts across the process.

So one of the things that I always think about when you talk about those categories and the types of system, right. Sometimes it's overwhelming. Other times like, well, I've got more systems than that. And often it's just to do with the size of the organization hiring, right? So if you're an organization doing 500 hires a year, you have a handful of recruiters, you're going to have a very different tech stack to an organization doing 50,000 hires a year. So when you think of tech stacks, and even you mentioned consolidation earlier on, is consolidation more for the larger players or actually is it more for the SMBs, the kind of small players, as in small volume hiring a year? How do you think about tech when you think about size of organization? And the volume of hiring they're doing.

Yeah, really, really interesting question and I think opens up a lot of other angles here. So first of all, we're seeing a lot of consolidation in the enterprise technology space. But Enterprise generally is more interested in buying a best in class solution in each of those areas rather than buying a suite that does, you know, everything okay, where in SMB you're generally finding suites that do everything okay, because you don't need to have the level of permissions and functionality that you need at the enterprise level. So, you know, I would argue that there is already more kind of one size fits all organizations for, you know, for small to medium sized businesses than there are for enterprise companies. Just because, you know, I mean, there's a thousand examples, you know, within referral tools, the abilities you have to refer, you know, all the different things you could do, you know, to reward people. But you know, I think the other layer is I personally believe that there's a more complicated dynamic here than just, you know, what size company a technology can support. So I think we've already seen a bifurcation in technology technologies that focus on small to medium sized businesses and enterprise companies. And I don't think we've seen a meaningful bifurcation in companies that support different Personas of hiring. And I think there's a huge opportunity. So what do I mean by that? The process through which a hourly worker looks for a job is very different than the process through which an executive looks for a job. The timing they have to find the job, the experience they need to have, the amount of selling that needs to be done in the organization, the engagement that they need to have with different folks in the company. Very different. The same thing would apply to contract workers versus, you know, full time workers, professional hires. The same thing would apply, you know, there's, there's other ways to cut that data. And so, you know, broadly speaking, I think the large majority of the money that's been invested over the years has been in professional hires and systems that support professional hires. And I think that there's a huge opportunity to build systems focused on some of these, you know, other Personas. And you're starting to see some of it with, you know, AMS has identified this issue with some of our clients. And so we launched a product called Hourly where essentially we hijacked the apply button for hourly workers because an hourly worker isn't going to want to sign into an ATS, sign into a CRM, fill out the application 10 times, and then wait two weeks to hear back from their job like they're working paycheck to paycheck. They want a job, you know, where an executive might be willing to go through that process because, you know, they have different timetables and you know, they need to be sold more on the opportunity potentially, you know. And so we're starting to get to a point where, you know, the, the technology, you know, has, has been focused on, on professional hires. And now how can we build unique systems? And is there a market to build unique systems for these different Personas? And I, I would argue that there is.

I was in a panel discussion this morning with a bunch of CPOs and CHROs and they were talking about, you know, how tight the talent market is and the things they're having to do to go to the markets. In my head, going in tech, this is a 12, 15 year old problem. You know, tech hiring, engineering hiring. They first started seeing this 15 years ago. And then we built solutions. They changed their whole culture and focus. It's just that it's finally got to healthcare workers, retail workers, blue collar, factory workers. Right, I see that. You know, certainly there was always a split, right? Folks would or po part of their business. They could or the corporate hiring or they could or po the volume hiring or have different teams and they'd have different systems running it because they just saw them as very different. One was, one was very focused on going out to the market, you know, selling to the candidates, sourcing them, all these different things. And the other was just about filtering and assessing and taking a big funnel and making it smaller. And what I've seen, and maybe, you know, you've seen something different or would agree or disagree with this, the behaviors of volume workers are looking more like the behaviors of professional workers. You got to go after them more, you got to sell to them or chase them more. And do you agree the solution isn't the same? Because the one on one solutions we had for professional hiring worked right for the level of salary, the volume of the roles wasn't quite there. When you're hiring 100,000 workers a year on an hourly basis, you just can't afford to have a recruiter sourcing a shortlist per job. It's never going to happen. Right. You have to come at it very differently. You have to think about scale. So when you look at that, Jonathan, like first of all, do you think that some of those behaviors are shifting towards volume workers? And what are you seeing as the differences in the technology, the difference in the approach now that call it volume, hourly Blue collar retail type workers are beginning to behave more like the professional stem workers were 10, 15 years ago.

Yeah, so I'm just going to answer the second question first, which is, you know, I think that, and I'll give you an analogy. When we were bringing CRMs to enterprise organizations five, six years ago, the, the question was, well, why can't we use Salesforce? We have a CRM, let's use Salesforce for recruitment. And the answer was, well, does Salesforce integrate into your ats? No. You know, is the process through which a candidate applies to your job the same as the process through which someone buys your product? No. You know, and so in any area where there's unique process and unique integrations, I think you can make a business case for a unique platform that is worth, you know, X amount in enterprise value, I think. So that's, you know, the second question. I definitely think, you know, you're starting to see hourly workers not just want to, for example, be there transactionally. You know, they want to be more bought into the culture, aligned with the, you know, the ethos of the organization, have, have internal mobility opportunities. And you know, you know, we're now at a point where we can learn from a lot of what's worked in some of these other areas and apply them to, you know, some of these other Personas. And I think technology, you know, will enable us to do that at scale. Because one of the challenges is, and this is a question that people always think about is, okay, well, is technology going to replace recruiting altogether? And the answer, in my opinion is no. This is going to be a combination of tech and touch. Right? We're always going to use technology. We're always going to have people to operate these systems. The question is, can technology make us more strategic? And I think that is the answer is, you know, and I think if you look historically at any industry that's been disrupted by technology has created more jobs, not less jobs, and elevated folks. And so I think that technology will enable some of the, you know, recruiters to, to do the things that they do for professional hires at scale with, for example, hourly workers that they weren't able to do before because they now have the resources to give them the time to do it.

So when you, when you go to the unleash kind of floor today, tomorrow when we broadcast this will be today and tomorrow, or maybe looking back at HR tech in Vegas in the last month, what categories did you see or do you expect to see it unleash that are what we might call emerging Categories that perhaps weren't, weren't there pre pandemic, but you're seeing more of or expect to see more of over the next few years.

Yeah, I actually, I came across a really interesting company at, at the HR Tech conference, and I believe they're actually going to be at Unleash. So there's been a rise in matching in AI. I mean, I can't. Eight years ago, every technology deck I looked at said big data. You know, four years ago, every technology deck said AI. You know, The challenge now is efficacy, bias, compliance. You know, New York is releasing a law where, you know, you have to basically disclose how you're, first of all, that you're using a AI system to evaluate someone as they go through the process, but disclose how the system works and these laws are going to get more complex and, you know, go global. And so I came across a company called Holistic AI and that actually assesses technology, AI technology for both compliance with local laws and bias. And they're focusing on hr and I think. So I think you'll see a rise in company sensitivity towards leveraging AI and also potentially the use of technology platforms like Holistic AI to assess that this is a new problem that's evolved. You know, I think the other trend is you're starting to see some of these systems focused on these Personas as I described. So there's a new suite of technologies called direct sourcing technologies that you're starting to see. Interestingly, they made their way to the HR Tech conference because they're moving from contract to perm. But direct sourcing is basically focused on contract workers and there are systems focused specifically on, you know, helping hire contract workers at scale. And in some ways technology is, you know, commoditizing the staffing business and making the fees kind of less. And so that's a new. Another area of technology that's, you know, I've seen evolve and there's some interesting tools there.

Anything to do with kind of remote working, let's say it's like contracting, which I think is certainly driven a lot more interest in from remote working. Does that remote working flexibility model that's really emerged strongly out of the pandemic. Has that any implications for the tech categories of the platforms or new vendors out there that you see?

Yeah, so I haven't been paying a lot of attention to specifically the technologies that have have emerged due to remote working. I would argue that if you tried to post a job on a job board during COVID the pandemic, a remote job like Some of these job boards models didn't even allow you to post a remote job. Like so there's like little changes that these systems have made. You know, I have been taking a look at, you know, the new technologies that have emerged as a result. I think a lot of the work's been done in talent management tech because it's all about how do you keep remote candidates, remote employees engaged more meaningfully when they're not in your office. I'm still not sure if this is a temporary change, if this is an acceleration of what was going to happen or, or if this is going to go, things are going to go back to normal and people are going to go back to the office soon. I think there's just lots of complicated dynamics beyond just like how people work best that might influence that. You know, like we have, you know, hundreds of hedge funds invested and private equity funds invested in commercial real estate that's, you know, not being used and the, you know, the pressures that governments are going to put on folks and companies to make folks go back to the office so that like the economy doesn't crash because of this. You know, I think there's other dynamics involved in the return. But you know, I haven't seen anything meaningful within talent acquisition around remote hiring. That kind of caught my attention.

One of the big themes that a lot of CPO chros are speaking about the last couple of years is the whole ESG movement. Right. And the focus by boards on ESG metrics. And I guess DEI is a subcomponent of that, one of the subcomponents of that. And I've seen, I'm sure you've seen a lot more diversity tech.

Right.

You know, I saw a pitch this week from an organization that provides a marketplace for early in career undergraduates to connect with employers for internship opportunities. And they have. The whole angle is we can find you diverse interns.

Right.

Which maybe four years ago they wouldn't have the diverse part. Just it's just a marketplace for, for talent. Right. So sometimes it's a pure DI tech and sometimes it's standard tech but with a bolt on that's making it diversity focused.

Right.

Do you see a growth in that area? And if so, and even if not, do you see any other TA related tech that is kind of going after that ESG challenge that you know, the board level are trying to deal with?

Yeah, I want to touch on the diversity thing because I think there has been movement in diversity a bit and you know, diversity has always been top of mind for every head of talent. And there's been hundreds of technology solutions that have come to market to address different parts of that. You know, hiding gaps in employment, hiding names, you know, removing all types of bias from the process, you know, changing the text of the job description to better target the audiences you want to target. I'd say, for the most part, those have all failed to solve the problem of getting more diverse candidates into the organization. Why? Because it all falls short when you get to the hiring manager. And when you get to a hiring manager, no matter how many diverse candidates you put in front of them, you know, if they're not incentivized and many times legally, they're not able to be incentivized to hire diverse talent, you know, it doesn't work. And so what we've seen recently is, you know, this, this rise of, like, what I call social accountability, so creating dashboards to show which groups of the company are hiring diverse talent, and so you're able to hold people socially accountable for the behaviors you want. And I learned, I learned this the hard way. You know, I. I was in a room of heads of talent many years ago, and I said, look, like, basically, if you, if you think about, you know, I didn't say it in these words, but I guess it's. It's kind of what I meant is like, hey, at the time, it's what I meant, which was like, hey, you know, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you talk about diversity, if you think about diversity, if you, if you, you know, tell people they got to hire diverse talent, they'll do it. And the answer was they won't do it. You have to create the incentives or the, you know, accountability for folks to drive the, you know, the thing that you, the action you want out of. Out of people. And I think at the time I said, if you solve for cognitive diversity, everything will fall into place. And the room was like, no, it won't fall into place. And I've learned it won't fall into place. You have to be thoughtful and purposeful. And I think the same thing is going to go for esg. You can't just talk about it. You can't just say, I want to do it. You have to build in the metrics and the incentives within the organization to drive the behavior that you want if you want it to happen.

Yeah, we did, we did. A great bit of insight from Rick Kelly, who's the managing director of Meta Ireland, who joined us on the podcast a few months ago, and he also is the SVP of their global gaming business, Facebook's global gaming business. And he talked about how he drove 50% gender diversity in his team in the gaming industry, which is highly unusual and really high levels of ethnicity, ethnic diversity in the team. And again, what he, what he, what he talked about was rewards for behavior because of course you can't in most jurisdictions reward for the outcome because you're not allowed. And that, that, that stinks of quotas. But he said, you know, they, they, they outlined the behaviors they wanted to see leaders exhibit around hiring, promotion, etc. And they measured those. And whilst the outcome might be that you didn't hire the diverse talent or don't have a as diverse team as they'd like, if you display the behaviors, you got rewarded and acknowledged for that. So, you know, I totally agree with you that it's, it's, it's complicated. Right? It has to be intentional. There's many aspects to cover. But let me just move because I'm very conscious of the time we've, I can't believe we've rattling through so much time. I wanted to ask you another hours of questions. But let's bring bring it down to the TA leader who's out there looking at her budget for 2022. You know, whether you're large or small, probably can't get into, you know, differences for everybody. What are you, what's the core tech stack you think a modern TA leader should be investing in? What are the core things you should have in your tech stack? And then what are the things that you would look out for? Like if folks are walking the floor in Paris this week or they're planning to attend to their conference or just meeting with a vendor or deciding which of the emails to screen out. You know, talk to me about the core stack that, you know, a modern tailor needs because I don't think everybody fully knows what that is and has it. Even though you and I might say this is core, not everyone does that. And then what are the emerging tech stack items that you think, hey, you should look at these vendors or if you get an email from someone doing this, you should probably have a look into it because it may, may become important.

Yeah, yeah. And so at AMS, we have a 800 person talent acquisition consulting firm and we do a lot of advisory work with heads of talent chros on tech stack. And I could tell you the one question I always get is what's the one technology that's going to solve all my problems globally? And the answer is there Isn't one. The other side of it is, and I hate to be a consultant is it depends on the type of organization. You have the technology stack that Disney should use because of the fact that they are a consumer brand and they have more applicants likely for jobs than they do opportunities within the organization. Similar Nike, potentially. You know, their focus is going to be more on, you know, matching, sorting through the noise, providing a good candid experience for those folks even if they don't get the job where, you know, a random bank in the middle of Idaho, despite their scale, might have very different challenges. Because it's not about matching through the noise. It's about how am I going to use a CRM to engage with candidates more meaningfully to get them to fall in love with my brand? Because we have an awesome brand or even an organization that is in Livermore, California competing for talent against Facebook and Google, but just isn't Facebook or Google and doesn't have the, you know, the, the, the, the benefits that they have. So I think, look, everyone needs an applicant tracking system. You know, one of the trends within SaaS technologies has been open APIs. I think the more open your system, the more meaningfully it integrates with other platforms is important. I think a CRM is table stakes these days. Engaging with talent. I think matching technologies would be another layer. Again, the, the, the how heavy you lean on CRM versus matching depends on the industry that you're in. I think there's lots of opportunities to create more engaging career sites using video and, you know, embedding your employer brand more meaningfully into your hiring process. I, and, and again, depending on where you fall within that spectrum. And also it depends on where you are today. Like what system is your core system today, what you know, what you know, gives us the universe of what we can build around it. And actually within AMS Verified, you have the ability to build your tech stack and see how you're optimized for these different processes. So as I had a talent, not only can you search for verified talent technology, but you can build your tech stack and see how you're optimized. And so we take things a couple steps further. I think, you know, emerging is going to be should I use specific systems for different Personas? It should hourly be, should I use a special system for hourly, should I use a special system for contract workers? You know, I think you're going to see consolidation in that area. You know, many of these ATS's and CRMs have gotten to a point of scale where they're like, okay, we got this professional hire thing, now let's focus on contract hires. Or we got this professional hire thing, now let's focus on hourly. So you're going to start to see consolidation here and folks building functionality with the awareness that hey, you know, it is more complex in those different areas. And so, you know, I'd say ats, CRM matching, recruitment, marketing, another area where I think there's huge opportunity and then analytics. I still don't believe there's a fantastic analytics platform out in the market. As an organization, we bring our own to our clients because we haven't found one that we love enough that we can point our clients to. So, you know, despite all of the money that's been invested, I would argue there's still lots of opportunity to build new technology.

What are the categories to kind of to watch for Again? You mentioned a couple of interesting areas that you saw already. You know, the analysis of bias on AI driven platforms. I love that it's quite meta. You're getting into like the analysis of other HR tech as a HR tech platform. But anything else that's kind of, you know, I think direct sourcing.

Direct sourcing is a new category. It's, it's kind of crossing the line between permanent contract. Definitely an interesting area. There's, there's definitely a trend where you're seeing talent acquisition and talent management merge more meaningfully together. And so you're going to start to see all kinds of interesting things that come out of that.

But I see it on that last point, like I see a bunch of again, big box retailers, for example, and, and food and beverage companies in the us Likes of Walmart, even likes of Disney, hiring a lot of early workers who are using kind of eduployment techniques where they're giving you your college degree or your, or your, your high school diploma online for free to enable you to apply for jobs with them. And then when you join, they'll also keep training you. And you know, Walmart have something like 155,000 people on these university programs completely for free, who are employees, but you can actually apply for some of these programs before you even join. Like it's a, you're right, that merging of talent, it's creating talent pools so you can solve your TA problems.

Yeah. And I think so as you think about the technology drivers that drive new innovation, that allow for new systems to be built, you know, one specifically the Internet, broadly, you know, 5G connecting folks together more meaningfully is creating a lot of transparency that Transparency is creating a lot more noise. Companies know more about candidates before they apply. Candidates know more about companies before they apply. It's making it so that I believe the most important thing for organizations to do is to focus on building their relationship with prospects before they apply for jobs. And it's, it drives some of the things that you're discussing describing. What benefits can we provide to candidates that sit in a town pool? How can we build a relationship with them before they apply to a job? One, it will lower the cost to hire. Two, you're building an advocate within, within the world of your organization. So I think you're going to see a lot more of that.

Jonathan, We've ran way over it. There's so much more we could have talked about. Let's do so live in Unleash. And for those who are going to be attending Unleash in Paris this week, Jonathan, be roaming the floors. Grab him, ask him his opinion. You're going to, you're going to love the answers and get tons of advice. Jonathan, before I let you go, though, you've given us lots of great advice today. So I'm going to be. Be greedy and ask for one piece more. We ask every guest in the show for one piece of advice. Leave her on. Audience with Whether it's something that you've garnered through your own career and experience or something that was handed down to you by somebody else, what can you leave our audience with today?

Yeah, so I have, I have two pieces. Can I give two pieces? One is so one is tactical and specific to the recruitment space, and one is just a piece of guiding advice that I've used in my life. So specific to recruitment, if I learned anything analyzing the technologies that I have over the last eight to 10 years is the technology is only as good as the people and process you build around it. So you have to focus on optimizing and changing your processes. When you bring in these new technologies, you can't just assume it's going to fit in and work. So that's a tactical piece of advice in the industry that I think is important to think about. A guiding principle for me, something that I live my life by, is the line between success and failure is as thin and malleable as a spider web. I really believe that sometimes you're pushing as hard as you can and that spiderweb is curved and you can't understand why you haven't crossed over that line. But, you know, it takes one next thing to do it. And sometimes, like, it's just timing luck and everything works out and you cross the line. And to me, you know, it's just a really good way to live your life is just keep focusing on crossing over that line and thinking about, okay, if I just do this one next thing I'll get there. And if you keep thinking like that, be it as a practitioner, you know, trying to solve business problems within your organization or a technology builder trying to figure out what feature you should build next or, you know, or just following up from a sales perspective, I think it's good advice to live by.

That's great advice, Jonathan. And one of my favorite podcasters, Guy Raz, asks every guest, you know, guess how much is hard work, how much is lucky? And I think we underestimate just that thin, tiny slice between success and failure. And folks who have air quotes failed are just the folks who are on the slight wrong side of that spider web. But it could have been you. And likewise, when you have failed, go back again because next time around, odds are you could be on the other side of that spider web. Jonathan, pleasure to have you here. Really hope you have a good unleash this week. Look forward to catching up with you in person and we'll have you on again. Maybe to give a rundown of tech in the early new year to see what's coming in 2023 and what you have your eye on. Thanks for joining, Tom.

Thanks for having me.

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