The Shortlist's RecFest 2022 Recap | With Kirstie Kelly, Emma Mirrington and Bill Boorman

Foreign. Welcome to episode 106 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm going to be your host for the next 40 minutes or so. I'm the host of this regular weekly podcast and also the CEO and co founder of Social Talent, the learning platform for hiring and talent. And you're very welcome. We're going to be talking this week about something that hasn't occurred to me in two years and that is a massive, big event with people in a massive field talking about HR. It is our 2022 rec fest recap. So after two years of making sure Laptone microphones are switched on, we have our ring lights on, Internet connections are stable in person. Recruiting events and town events finally returned this year, and in particular this summer. We were delighted last week to attend RecFest in Knebworth Park. What is Wreckfest, I hear you ask. Well, recfest is arguably the largest talent and talent acquisition event in the world. And it's a festival, if you can imagine a Coachella or a Glastonbury, maybe on a smaller scale, but instead of going to see bands, you're going to see talks about recruiting. But there's still all the food, there's the great weather, there's the entertaining carnival acts, there's the beer, there's the wine, there's the fun, there's the fields, the. There's no tents. That's what Rec Fest is and it's absolutely wonderful if you can imagine it in your heads. And we at Social Talent ran a stage last week called the Hiring and Talent Management Stage. And by the Nebwork is Nebworth. You may have heard before you go, what I've heard of that word, Nebworth. Oasis had a very famous gig there many years ago. Robbie Williams had a big gig there as well. They big gigs every year. And one of our guests on stage was there for Ozzy Osbourne, I think, as she said 30 years ago. I won't mention who that will be, showing her age. So Nabworth is a very famous location where normally there's 200,000 people. We do about four and a half, 5,000 people, all in the HR space. But trust me, we're having plenty of drinks and we're enjoying it. So it was awesome. We really enjoyed it and we wanted to share with you what we learned. But I didn't want to just share with you what I learned because there were many stages and tents running. So on this week's show, I, along with some of my guests who are joining me here, got Emma from the Firm, Kirsty from the oral 100. They'll introduce themselves in just a second and hopefully Bill Borman will be also joining us. Just to give you a sense of what we Learned, consolidate in 40 minutes, what you missed at Wreckfest, what you could have learned and your best bits. Welcome Emma. Welcome Kirsty. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show this week, Bill as well. Great to have you on the show. Maybe I'll start with you Emma. Tell us who are you? Why we get breakfast. Tell us about it was your first time. 10th time. Tell us about your experience.

Brilliant. Thank you Johnny. So hello everyone, my name is Emma Merington from the Firm. We are a membership organization for talent acquisition professionals. It was actually my very first rec fest. So not only was it my first rec fest, but I was also hosting the future talent stage. So that was everything. Early careers, which is a particular passion of mine. So fantastic day. Loved it.

Dying to hear more about what you heard, what you saw and heard on the stage, Emma. Thank you. Kirsty, tell us about the stage. You tell you first and what stage were you involved in?

So I was lucky enough to co present the leadership stage along with my buddy just coming in here, Bill Boorman. We, we really were, we believe we had the best stage. Apart from your own, Johnny. I mean it's competitive of course you understand why, why, why am I being so bold with my search? And so I'm part of R100. I'm lucky enough to represent our 100 members to make sure that we present to them some really innovative and brain stretching content and really make sure the industry is moving forward. And I'm also non exec director to the recruitment events company who were the clever folk that hosted the event and boy was it an event. Johnny, I mean try. You explained it beautifully and Coachella is probably the thing that is best aligned to such an event. But it was work.

Who knew it was. We got Jared wheeler online on LinkedIn who I think was was having a bit of a joke. Either he likes the phrase recruiting Coachella or he's laughing at the phrase recruiting Coachella. I'm gonna take it Jared, as a positive vote by the way. Quick, quick shout out to those of you who are listening live. We broadcast obviously live on YouTube and LinkedIn every week. If you're lucky enough to be crazy enough to be live with us, we'd love to hear your questions and chat and comments for any of our guests here today. But if you're one of our regular Podcast listeners, of course. We broadcast every Wednesday evening. Our new show goes out on Spotify, Apple or wherever you find your talks and we'd love to hear your thoughts and any links we reference, we'll put them in the chat as well. And we've a LinkedIn user just saying it was an amazing event, if you were there, tell us about it. We're dying to hear what your best bits are as well. And Bill is working to try and join us and log in as well. We'll get to him in a second. I'm going to launch back in. Right. So Kirsty, tell me what was it like being back at an in person event after so long? Like maybe contrast, you know, the two years between. I think it was mud shoot. Was the last three years, maybe since the mud shoot, which the last wreck fest on this. How did you feel? Were you nervous? Were you scared? Were you excited? Talk to me about what you felt was the big thing you missed the most that you didn't realize until today.

Yeah. So obviously it's concerning. When you see the numbers expected, then you know, just its natural reaction to feel a little bit anxious that this might suddenly feel like a stretch too far. We've all spent the last couple of years being terribly thoughtful about who we spend time with and how we spend time. Luckily we, as you alluded, were in the middle of a field. So the really knowing that we were in the fresh air made it easier and, and actually any concerns were dispelled the minute you had your first conversation with somebody you hadn't seen for a couple of years. And look, we all connect on zoom and we've all spoken regularly but really looking somebody in the eye and being able to see their smile, truly see their smile was a gift. It was truly a gift. That's so. So for me, I would say to anybody that was wondering how to spend their time, whether they should continue to be virtual, I would say do it, but do it with thought and care. Our time is so valuable now. So if you're going to step forward into a group, make sure it's a really good one.

I love that.

Emma, was that the same for you? Was this the biggest event you've done in two and a half years or.

Absolutely. And actually the very first person I saw was the day before was Kirsty and we haven't seen each other for years, so it was so lovely to reconnect again, wasn't it Kirsty? And I think the fact that it was such a large scale event, you know, over 4,000 people. I was to walk from one end of the field to the other, which typically would probably take you about 10 minutes, but it took me about an hour because I kept bumping into so many people that I hadn't seen for years and years. So it was such a lovely way to reconnect. And I think because of the format of the event, it was just a lot more relaxed than some of the more traditional conferences that you might attend.

Talk to me about highlights. Right? So whoever wants to jump in first.

Right.

I have tons of highlights. I'll leave my highlight to last. But what for you, maybe Emma or Kirsty, what was your. The big kind of wow moment of the day? And I know that I'm sure there were loads of wow moments on your stage. What was the one that stands out to you the most?

For me. Yeah, let me start. Emma. I've got a thousand, so I'm just going to sort through the first hundred for you. Johnny. I had the, I had the pleasure of standing at the entrance with the founder Jamie Leonard. At the point we had, you know, 4,000 people patiently waiting to come in as they would any festival and seeing the joy and excitement on everybody's faces. So for me that was the moment where it really came alive in terms of, you know, the, our speakers. We had some amazing speakers, but probably when we showed that intro video with Torin talking about what it means to stay connected. And I think Torin Ellis, if anybody, you know, wants to look him up, then he speaks a lot of sense about diversity and inclusion and equality. And his intro video for us was just a really very smart and thoughtful way of encouraging us all to think about our peers and stay connected and what the, you know, what's the value that brings.

I haven't seen this video. I'm dying to see it. I heard it talked about in the last week and I imagine if you follow any of the RL100 recruiting events or rec fest social channels that will be posted pretty soon. I love that. Emma, what about you?

So I think two levels. So on a personal level, highlight was just reconnecting with so many people that I haven't seen for years and it was, yes, it was lovely to have those connections and I think on a professional level, just the insights that I got from my stage, there's some top class speakers and I learned to a lot and I see a lot of events, I run a lot of events. I run training sessions and, and I just felt that the insights that, that I gleaned were fascinating. So I think, yeah, just the insights in one place were fantastic. I wish I could see all of the stages.

I. I know there. Many of them were recorded, Kirsty, weren't they? I know there's. There was video cameras on our stage and we were a smaller one, so I'm guessing there was cameras on pretty much everything.

Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely follow the feed and you'll get snippets of all that went on and I think you'll probably still be able to see the agenda. There's a Rec Fest website, so have a look at the agenda and you'll see some of those brilliant speakers as well. It's definitely worth tracking those people and I've certainly followed all of them on LinkedIn to make sure that I. I get to hear their pearls of wisdom.

I'm going to ask Simon's backstage and Simon just sends the link with the actual video we're talking about. I want to see if Simon can get that. Play the audio and video that live on the show. Simon, you think that's good? We'd love to see it and love to broadcast it to our listeners and our viewers here so people get a sense of what the opening act looked like while you're doing that, Simon. For me, Kirsty, Torin was. Was part of one of my top highlights of my stage and it was towards the end of the day back to the last session and the bars that open at 2 o' clock to set the scene for everyone listening. The bars had opened at 2 o' clock and there was a kind of WhatsApp group going around for all speakers. And it was generally a consensus after 2 o' clock that some of the stages began to thin out. We didn't quite see the same crowds consistently as folks began to enjoy the sunshine, which had just appeared about one o' clock as well. And people started queuing up for a drink and some lunch and stuff like that and I was expecting maybe a tail off on the stage. But our final session, Torin was on there along with Paul Bowles, who's the global Head TA for Nokia. And again, we were talking about inclusion and diversity metrics in a TA context. And the tent was packed, Torn was passionate. We were sitting on three stools and he couldn't sit down. He kept trying to lift his body off the stool because he had so much energy to try and release. And it was the only panel we actually took audience questions on because we just didn't have enough time on the other panels of 30 minutes. And we could have taken questions for an hour and a half. That crowd was charged. They had so many questions, brilliant questions. We ran over by 15 minutes, like this was 15 minutes eating into somebody's nighttime entertainment time. And everyone was stuck in this tent and there was like three rows of people standing at the back and the sides. And it was just such a high to end on a subject that sometimes doesn't quite get the excitement. Sometimes you go to a talk on diversity and inclusion, people kind of nod their heads and they feel like I should be here because, you know, someone said it was important. This was a tent full of people who really love the topic and were passionate about it. I just, you know, you don't get that on a zoom call. To your point earlier in Kirsty, you don't feel that you have to be there, you have to be in our charged, tend to kind of feel electricity of the magic of an important topic.

And I think you make such a valuable point that we experienced in our tent as well. The questions that were posed, the interaction from the audience really, on every topic really showed that this was meaningful stuff. So whether it was about, you know, expanding your role in ta, what were the success measures, or whether it was something more technical about employer branding, people were really thinking through what it meant to them and how they were going to apply it in their role. And that's quite. Unfortunately, that's quite unusual for typical events. But I think we broke down barriers that day.

We did, we did. Let's get into the actual talks in detail again. There's so many great talks. Emma, Any talks of conversations that particularly, you know, you go, oh, wow, that made me think or wasn't what I expected was really different. I think it comes to mind from your stage.

Yeah, I mean there were a few things actually from each of the sessions which should have really built for me when I was reflecting, thinking that from an early careers point of view, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between what graduates are potentially looking for in terms of engaging with employers and what employers are actually doing. So Stephen Isherwood from the Institute of Student Employers, which is a graduate recruitment membership organization in the uk and I'm just looking at my notes, so I remember the stats correctly, but he said 42% of recent graduates actually cite text messaging as their preferred form of communication with companies, but only 13% of companies are actually utilizing text based recruiting as a tool for college hiring. So I was like, okay, that's really interesting as a, as a sort of as A bit of a challenge there and as a disconnect. And also the other thing was around Tick Tock and Lucy Cole from Grow Mentoring, who's the youngest speaker at rec fest, only 22, really inspiring. So I'd highly recommend looking at her and looking her up on LinkedIn. And she was just talking about the use of TikTok for recruiting purposes. And you could just see in the audience, everyone sat there thinking, really, really, we're not on TikTok at the moment. And I had to look just before this and at just Jobs, the hashtag on Tick Tock. And there were sort of 2.6 billion views, so thinking, wow, this is really a really interesting opportunity for people.

Wow, that is a huge gap. Huge gap. Bill, Bill's just joined us. Bill Borman. Bill, same question to you before we jump in with, with Kirsty. What Any talks that particularly surprised you or like you had a wow moment because, you know, for the same reasons as Emma, it was a, you know, a startling statistic or just like a speaker that wowed you maybe on your stage.

Yeah, well, mine wasn't a recruiting talk actually, so Mine was. Mine was. I. I was foolish enough to interview Rebecca Adlington. What a bit of data that she gave was that we have a million kids leaving school every year, every year at primary school age who can't swim. And the impact of swimming, I know it's a really strange thing, but the impact of that and how learning to swim is very much. It's quite an expensive and class thing and the impact.

Can you maybe give some background as to who Rebecca is, some context for those maybe you don't know outside the uk?

Yeah. Who's Rebecca? Rebecca Addington is a double gold winner and a bronze medal winner too, at 2, 2 Olympics and also a. A regular commentator on, on television and a. A guest on. I'm. I'm a celebrity who had to eat some stuff. So known for lots of different things. But I was really two of the aspects in, in the, in the conversation that we had. So first one was really around how many increasing number of children who can't swim and the increasing number of deaths and impact on kind of broader society. I think in the opportunity we have to impact broader society. The other aspect was quite a strong conversation around social media and for people who don't know Rebecca. Adding to Rebecca was particularly harassed, having won two goals at kind of age teens. You came in for a lot of social media abuse and talking about that broader impact on family and dialogue within social media and society. Which I'm sorry I'm not giving you a massive recruiting data that really stood out for me in the day just in terms of the conversation that it was really a, a strong moment about thinking about responsibility for the way in which we communicate.

It's part of, Yeah, I remember we talked about this and you told me this on the evening of, of, of Rec Fest and I'd share with you, Bill. I'll share with Emma and Kirsty. Every month on the social platform, we get about 26,000 unique pieces of text feedback from users watching content and the stuff they post, like it's, some of, it's horrific about some of the authors and like abusing their looks and you know, I think it's carried over from social media where people just, they type things into systems and they feel no responsibility for what they say and how it could hurt somebody. And it's just startling. I think it's a, it's a valid point for anything.

Bill.

Right. It's the, it's how we, we, we use social media and we almost have this different personality when we type into this screen of unknown people. And it's horrific but it's how, it's.

How do you change that when, you know, when you're looking at the narrative that's going on, on at the moment. So how do you change that in terms of just the real impact where some of these comments land and how Rebecca told the story, said when she went into the jungle, she, her sister, her younger sister ran her social media accounts. When she came back into the house, she threw her phone out and said don't, don't put me through that again. Just, you know, the level of abuse in the license, people think that they could say that, that it's not something I wasn't knowledgeable of, but I guess I've, I've not seen too much apart from some people like when I've been out with Joe Lockwood for example. But the level of the, there's, there was two things that really struck me. One was in the way she was speaking, she was kind of just saying, oh, that's just the nature of the game. I go on television, I'm in the public eye, kind of an acceptance of it, that this is going to happen. And that made me really sad actually that, that people have to accept that level. And I think we see that on a micro level, that's a macro level. But I actually started thinking about the micro level of some of the things I've seen post our events when, when People are, have been speaking, you know, and we go through this debate all the time. We talk about how do we, how do we even up the, the gender balance of speakers and all this kind of thing. And how can we expect to do that when there are people on the other end who are really open to, to really throwing in personal comments and abuse to all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons? How can we expect to even up gender balance or have an equal playing field or even just show people, show younger people how they should conduct and behave in society in general when this kind of stuff is. We've almost kind of just accepted it now. We're not, we're not saying that, we're not responding. You know, we're seeing these things and we're kind of going, oh yeah, it's another troll attack. We're letting it pass. And, and I think we need to. We can't affect them, the macro world, but we can certainly start looking at our micro world. Those of us who run events, those of us who have events, those who have a public voice to think about how we shape the narrative that. So we were encouraging people to come in and join in the difficult conversations and not making. There's so many people, I think you feel like I've got a view or I've got an opinion, but I don't want to put my hand up because people are going to attack me or shoot me down, you know.

Kirsty, what about you? Anything like, similar to Bill that was nothing to do with talent or recruiting that hit you or was to do with talented recruiting that really struck you on the day?

Well, two things. The first, just to sort of build on my co pilot's comments about Rebecca, what I also loved about Rebecca's session, she talked about the personal responsibility she took for preserving how she felt about a lot of these comments and how she, you know, that the attitude she adopted to almost make herself impervious and, you know, these were. She had the choice of whether she was going to let these comments affect her. She chose to consider those from people very close to her. Beyond that, it just didn't matter. It was their comment, they owned it. She didn't need to. And for me, I think certainly being a, a woman who, you know, like Emma, we put ourselves out there and I'm sure there's room for lots of criticism, but actually we can all choose, all of us, you guys included, of course, choose how we let that affect ourselves. And that for me, I think, is just simple, powerful message. The. The second Session that really stood out for me was beginning of the Day, this amazing woman called A.J. thomas. She, she also sung on stage, Johnny. I mean anybody that can cut a note at the beginning, beginning of the event. And she was breathtaking. But she was talking about the future of work. If you get to see the video, that's one to watch. She sang the theme tune of Frozen, what's Not to Love. But more importantly, she was talking about the future of work. And the comment she made that really went away with me and gave me lots of time to cogitate was that the future of work really needs a leap backwards and we need to think really carefully about meeting human needs first. I think we get so wrapped up in this, you know, war for talent and really thinking about clever ways we can get to talent first, whether it's through hiring or employee engagement. And really just taking, taking things down to a human level I think is a really smart one. Let's, let's.

Yeah.

Johnny, Thoughtful.

I would add to that one of the things I got back after, after the talk that I did that Kirsty Carly introduced me to for. So at the end of my talk, one of the things I talked about was that we're going through a recessionary phase. We're going to see lots of stop start hiring. There's going to be lots of things. And that one of the things I was fearing that a lot of our diverse because we're under pressure in terms of candidates at the moment and we're having to hire in kind of sprint circumstance because there is stop start, green, red, green red. And lots of people who were in the audience came to me and then said actually that's what's going on with me at the moment. We're getting this stop start, we're getting freezes. There was two big points I wanted to make in that talk. One was it wasn't the time to be cutting recruiters, although we were going to go into freezes. And you know, there's, there was quite a few people spoke to me afterwards that they had concerns about that, about their own positions or the positions of their team. And the other one was that we've done a lot of good work in the Last kind of 18 months, two years in lots of organizations around diversity and diversity initiatives. And I really gave out a plea to say it's going to get tight in terms of hiring. It's going to be a recession like we've never seen before because normally you have too many candidates and not enough jobs. We're going to go into recession where there's going to be lots of financial cutbacks and TA is one of the first places that gets frozen or cut on that. But that I have a real fear that that's then going to mean we're going to start looking at things like our diversity initiatives and good work that we've been doing in the last two years in this stage. And I probably have 30 TA leaders come up to me afterwards with some pretty significant organizations saying yeah actually that I'm starting to feel the pressure on my diversity initiatives. We started to get the push on our EDNI and how we're hiring because there's such a candidate shortage. We've been told to start dropping that. So the feedback I got from the audience really stood out to me. One is the way in which I, I think the market is going seems to be the, the general reaction that that was the right kind of call. But the, the bigger thing was this pressure that's beginning to come to say, oh okay, maybe we need to rethink edni. Maybe we need. Because we can't get the candidates, maybe we need to rethink change our, our standards. And I think a lot of the good work we might have done in the last two or three years is potentially getting unpicked.

Emma, speaking of those bigger themes Bills alluded to there and Kirsty started off as well. Like you talk to represent a group of in house recruiters, right? This is your member network. You know, did you walk away with a similar feel of this conflict that recessions here, talent is still impossible to find, pressure for TA teams, DNI taking a backseat. If those are some of the themes that I'm summarizing well enough. Kirsty and Bill, do you get similar, similar impressions, Emma, or different impressions?

Yes, I was just going to say actually. So on Bill's point from. So I had the early careers stage and one of the key themes that came through not just from the stage but also speaking to people afterwards and dealing with their questions was that a lot of are really relying or leveraging their early careers schemes to drive D and I within their organizations. So looking at it as a potential silver bullet, which obviously it's not going to be. So I think that was one of the interesting themes that came out of the stage. And I think just sort of generally we, from a firm perspective, we do research every year and one of the questions that we always ask is what's your biggest recruiting challenge? And it's a free text box so people can put anything they like, and normally the answers are so varied. And this year, for the first time ever, 95% of respondents said, you know, recruiting, talent shortage, scarce skills, that's the biggest issue and that's what's keeping people awake at night.

It's funny, I spoke about this to a private client group two weeks ago and Josh Burson published an article last week. I looked into it because I didn't, I had a sense of something and I looked into the US inflationary data because it's nice and consistent and then the unemployment data map to that and there's never been a point in, in recorded economic history which is about 100 years old or consistent where you've had high inflation and very low unemployment. Like this is a really weird time.

It's weird. Johnny. Johnny, it's weird. You know I'm old, right? I'm really old man. Sometimes that means I'm called a veteran. But that means I've worked through five recessions now. This will be the sixth one in a recruiting capacity. And the trends have always been really predictable historically. So you get the first warning sign you get is things is that the hiring starts to go to contingency or short term. So you start to lose long term commitment towards candidates and roles change and then you start seeing the freezes in terms of hiring and you begin to see a funnel. So I added on stage as two slot as two scales. Really what normally happens is you get more and more candidates and you get less and less jobs and more and more competition. But this current time is really weird because the labor market was kind of exhausted before we went into recession and because the types of jobs that we have are, are very polarized in certain areas where we don't necessarily have the skills for those jobs. So that we, we're kind of mining a very small pool. What we're seeing is the, the weird thing about this recession is we've got a recession, we're getting the financial commitments, we're getting 20 cut of headcounts in some tech organizations and other places being announced. We're seeing hiring freezes being announced across the TA spectrum and yet it's still really hard to find candidates. So what you're seeing is budgets getting cut, resources being cut, numbers of people being removed, the time in which you have to hire from a, as a TA team being shrunk down because you're having to do Sprint hiring because you get the okay on something and that might be pulled in two or three weeks. So you want to move really quickly. You don't want candidates in process and suddenly you have to dump out. You've got all kinds of strange things happening in a recessionary time that we've never seen before. So we're having to kind of guess it a little bit in terms of what the right strategy might be. What's the right route to take? I think what we're going to get is lots of stop start, lots of Sprint hiring and what we've got to do in TA is really have a lot more data, battle a lot harder to keep our teams together, make sure we don't get the cuts and that when we have downtime people are meaningfully utilized in pipelining and building and being involved in different activities. So I think we kind of but it's very strange because we have recession and we're getting cuts in organizations at the same time we've got these whole chunks of talent that we can't find. So it's really uncharted territory. Johnny, you know, even for someone who's been through lots of recruitment cycles, I've never seen this before. I'm having to spend a lot of time with people talking and saying let's just figure this out a bit.

100 is that also your sense and is that your sense walking away from Wreckfest? Would you say that's a consistent theme? Because I know I spoke to so many leaders going I'm here to hire TA leaders going I hate to find recruiting talent. I had a talk at quarter past one on last Thursday with Stephanie McGinty of King Fisher, Jennifer Candy of Cargo and both made a shadow from the stage going I'm hiring the following jobs. Come talk to me recruiters. So like there are conflicting messages of I'm here to hire. I brought my team of 30 and we're here to find more recruiters.

We can't do enough.

What was your sense from breakfast and what's your general sense of the or? 100 I think.

I think that's exactly it. There is a I'd love to plot all of the organizations on a chart to see whether there's any correlation between the maturity of the hiring function and their ability to influence the senior leadership of their business. So they're tooling up. As Bill said, don't, don't cut your team. Get it ready for the next wave. Get it ready for the next Sprint. And I so I think what we were able to do at Rec Fest was show, hopefully show that there is, there is a need for confidence, stand firm and all of the education from all of those Amazing speakers should help leaders and their teams be able to build the business case in a far more cohesive and competent. And competent way. What I loved listening to was, you know, the crowd questions around performance and recognition for recruiters. They certainly weren't talking about exit routes. But you know, maybe we were lucky we had the forward thinking 4000.

I. I'll have to labor data exactly for you on that within the next couple of weeks, Johnny, so keep in touch. But I'm doing a track at the minute to see what it is. But we were actually seeing. But it is kind of, I think what you're seeing is very similar to industry wide in terms of hiring. You're seeing boom and growth, boom and growth and still boom and growth in recruit teams, you know, so it's no surprise that someone like Amazon is continually and continually growing, growing their recruiting team, increasing their head count. But you know, Amazon as a business is increasing, increasingly growing its business where other sectors are shrinking and feeling, you know, it's very closely linked to the economic cycle. So if you look across and you. I'm doing some work with Jamie on this at the moment. If you talk to the members of the R0 100, you look at the data, you will find as many people desperate to hire recruiters as you'll find people going. If I'm honest, I'm a little bit nervous at the minute about whether I'm going to be able to maintain my head count. So I think we're in. It's easy to look at the headlines that there are people who are growing and growing and growing. They want more and more people and in their businesses they want to keep growing their headcount, growing their headcount, growing their headcount. At the same time there's other organizations outside of kind of supply chain and FMCG, even things, you know, things like technology, 20% cut in tech stuff at the moment. And if you cut 20% of tech stuff, it's logical that you would cut 20% of your tech recruiters. Right? A business step that isn't surprising.

If you are like most TA teams, short 30% of your tech recruiters you'd like to have at the moment and you're short 20% of the tech talent. That cut in forecast doesn't actually necessarily hit you. Like I, I've seen this on scale with, with customers. They're relieved that the hiring plan has been cut back because they couldn't hire the team to find the talent and they knew that the talent wasn't out there. So this actually makes it more realistic to hit their goals.

It makes it realistic to hit the goals. Yeah. The only challenge that they have within that is they're being asked to hit their goals with less money. You know, if you cut. If your high requirement in theory, supply chain principle, if, if the requirement for your service is cut by 20, your budget tends to get cut by an equal 20, where do you find those savings? Right. Where do you have to find those savings? So I think TA leaders are having to work from a leader leadership perspective, which is really the people I'm thinking about in this have to be closer to so many other economic factors and what's going on in their market, what's happening much closer to labor market insights, more of an expert voice in their business to guide their business in the right direction. I think it's.

Let me push on to a different topic that's related to that, Bill. And I'd love to open this back up to Emma and Kirsty and your opinions of this. I talked to Jamie who you know, leads the recruitment events company at the end of the day and we talked about the topics. Just a general, you know, the topics there were so less pure recruiting focus than perhaps previous years. And you know, he commented about our stage was a lot of talent topics rather than talent acquisition and that actually it seems to be across most of the stages and it was the sense that it's been a growing trend for maybe five years at least that talent acquisition is no longer a pure silo and no longer seen as a standalone solution that, you know, we're having. We're seeing the industry having to think bigger, think about other ways to solve. We had on our stage, we had a big talk about internal mobility. Nokia hire 40% of the professional staff internally. They don't, you know, only 60% actually goes external. That's different number of different places with lots of talent leaders who used to be talent acquisition leaders speaking on the stage like Yasser Ahmed and hello Fresh, who was a TA leader and now leads talent because his job is not just to find external people, it's develop internal future leaders, L and D, all these different issues. Dni, like did you. Are you seeing that trend as well? You know, in the talks and in the members of.

Yes, absolutely. If I can jump in there. So I think. And not just from, from, from Rec Fest on the day. So again, sort of. I look back at our annual membership survey. We ask everybody every year, what are your top strategic priorities? And obviously DNI EVP employer brand candidate experience always in the top three. But for the first time in 11 years of the history of the survey was succession planning. So we're also really seeing an increase in terms of talent managers joining the firm or heads of talent and so and people's sort of spans of experience broadening as well. So people very much sort of picking up talent management as well. We're seeing sort of a big increase there. So I think internal mobility is definitely being explored. As people are finding it hard to recruit talent externally, they're really looking at identifying potential internally. And it was also identified as a skill that hiring managers are not very good at in terms of succession planning. So clearly a development area for people.

Kirsty, is that the same for you in the R100 and in the other businesses you work with?

Yeah, absolutely. That and my wry smile was, you know, on one hand, we're in crisis and there's lots of flux and movement and agility is necessary, but maybe this is exactly the kind of economic situation that will force organizations to connect ta, with tm, with L and D. Are we actually going to see integrated talent solutions? And we've seen some smart members like Dave Vinton over at BP taking on those roles. Their sole gamut is to make sure that all of the functions become integrated and it no longer is siloed in the way that candidates and then employees are treated. And I think that's a really exciting evolution of our, of our craft.

I'm going to move to that summary point here in a second, folks. Right. As you know, I'm gonna ask each of you for your piece of advice before we close with three pieces to try and get out of the way before we close the show. But in anticipation of that and just to close off on Rec Fest because awesome event kind of, you know, express to the listening audience who weren't there how much they need to be there next year. Right. And how, how great an experience it is. And hopefully we'll see a Wreckfest version appear in maybe North America soon. What was your biggest kind of takeaway? If you haven't mentioned it already, your biggest take takeaway from the day? Maybe, Bill, I'll ask you that and maybe ask you to try and summarize it in under 60 seconds.

Yeah. So I'd follow on from that last point. Johnny, you and I had a. A disagreement probably five years ago when I said that I felt L and D and talent acquisition was going to become a single function. I think we're actually seeing that now. We're seeing a single function in Terms of talent, talent mobility, everything from acquisition to development to career pathing. So, you know, and I got that from lots of places.

Yeah, I think it's been coming. I disrupt HR talk in 2017 on it and I only had about six examples. You could find 6,000 examples of it in companies today. It's growing.

A slight adjustment to that. I was shaking my head. I don't think it will be a single function. It will be centers of excellence that are completely integrated. I think the danger of having a single function is that it could become a mediocre version of all. And in talent acquisition, we've really worked hard to make sure that it is seen as an area of expertise. Just in the same way that early careers. This is a, you know, this is. This isn't the same as volume recruiting or senior exec recruiting or any others. So I think explicit areas of expertise, fine. But it surely. I totally agree with you, Bill. It surely has to be. They all need to be integrated and facing the same direction.

What was your top takeaway? Was that this still the top takeaway or anything else? Christie, from. From the day.

Actually more about learning rather than even the topics that were discussed. I think what hopefully we've shown from this conversation, you know, we were there to host the stages and we've all taken away. I've got a notebook, you know, with lots and lots of commentary just. Just from conversations with Bill, to be honest. But if we're, you know, that those events should be an absolute opportunity to absorb some really great insight and stretch your mind. And I think Rec Fest really did that. So I'd say to. To any. Any professional, whether it's tah RL and D TM when they're thinking about how they. How they're spending their time. And time is so precious right now, Johnny. And so if you're going to. If you're going to find a way to learn and stretch and think differently about our industry, then really think carefully about the sort of event you go to. What was breathtaking about Wreckfest, as Emma said, is it was that lovely blend of being a social environment and a learning environment. And so all the barriers were dropped. So people didn't mind asking questions. They'd tap somebody on the shoulder they were walking past that they might never have met before. They were having smart conversations. And actually you can have smart conversations in a relaxed way. Isn't that the inclusive environment every organization is trying to create? And we created that at breakfast.

The safety around that. I want to go over Emma for her Top tip and come back to you. Give me a sec.

So my top tip's my highlight as well. And it's probably building on what Kirsty said. So when I was at Unilever, we had a competency called external orientation because it's felt that people were so focused on the business internally, they really didn't look to the external world for insight and inspiration. So I really felt from Rec Fest that I got that and so many people got that. And I know that people are busy, but it's so worth taking the time to get out and about and listen to what everybody is saying because, you know, that innovation, that insight, it drives inspiration. I think the sort of. The three go hand in hand, really. So my advice is get out there.

I love that. I love that. And by the way, is that. So I'm going to ask you, is that your top tip as well? I probably load that question wrong. So I'm going to move into the.

It's my highlight and top tip. I've done two in one. Johnny.

Efficiency. Thanks, Emma. I'm gonna move to you, Bill, your response. And also, what is your top tip? You want to leave our audience.

So I think the other thing that's really important about Rec Fest, which makes it different to lots of other events, is that you have every level of recruiter. So normally when you go to an event, it's ace very specific type of recruiter, usually someone who's got some buying budget. So if you go to an event, it's either top leadership, middle leadership to people with budget. This, I think comparing RO100 events to Wreckfest events are separate things. Rec Fest, when you've got people bringing the whole team, hundreds of people, in some cases, you've got every level of recruiter and every person in every discipline in the same place. And that's. That's unique in terms of networking opportunity, of getting that unique perspective from someone who does a different job to you.

I don't think I've seen it elsewhere. There's a photograph of the Amazon team and they fill a whole conference themselves. Yeah, Crazy. It was nuts. Top tip, Bill, we ask every guest and you've given it about nearly two years ago a top tip. But what was your top tip you'd like to leave our audience with today? I think just to become.

Yeah, you need to look closer at what's going on in the broader labor market, understand data a little bit better and become. Become expert voice to prove your value. To prove your value in the organization. Because I think that's in in a batten down hatches time. That's going to be really important.

Peter Colson from Spotify, the global head of TA for Spotify, spoke on our stage at one point and informed us that he just completed a three month course in people analytics in Cambridge because his boss said I want to the data. He went, okay, I'll go learn it. And yeah, we need to be doing that. Yeah, I, you know, I love. You're right. The data part's so important to the conversation and you can learn it. Kirsty, final word to you.

God. Top tip, I think to Bill's point. But you know, data really matters and it brings alive the conversation that we all want to have with our senior leadership teams. But we so often look inwardly at the sort of data we're sharing and it becomes terribly ta. TA focus, think about, look externally, talk the language of your organization. It doesn't have to be, you know, a dark art. You're not a politician, but you can make a case with some really smart data that's available to you at your fingertips. Talk to all your vendors and suppliers because they'll be desperate to give you insight.

I love the cohesiveness of those three pieces of advice. Get out there, talk externally and get the data. Fantastic advice. Emma Warrington, Christy Kelly, Bill Borman, it's been a pleasure having you on sharing those insights. Even bigger, pleasure spending some time with you all last week. Great job again with these next year. Thanks hope everyone and thank you for listening to this week's show. Hopefully that's given you a summary of what you've missed out and you want to do more. We'll put some links to Torin Ellis's opening video, some links to where you can find more videos from last week's wreckfest of the talks. But come back to us next week. I won't be here. My fantastic colleague Holly Fawcett will be interviewing the brilliant Sabrina Ptluga, who is the TA manager of experienced hire recruiting for Emeasa at Boston Consulting Group. And they're gonna be about the importance of learning and development, which is a big topic closing out today and time management, something a lot of recruiters are struggling with at the moment because they're so underwater with the amount of wrecks and the lack of talent out there. So join us next week with Boston Consulting groups Sabina Pitluga and Holly Fawcett for another episode of the Shortlist. Until then, thanks for listen.

Sam.