Max:  Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome Larry Nash. Larry is Director of Talent Acquisition for Americas EY: Ernst and Young, formerly known as, what was EY called a long time ago, Larry?

Larry: Well, Ernst & Young but yeah it was Ernst & Whinney and Arthur Young merged a long time ago to form Ernst and Young. I think it was 1989 around that. So it's been a long time since we've been EY or Ernst and Young.

Max:  Yeah it was, and then EY the acronym became the official name just a few years ago, right?

Larry:  Correct.

Max:  All right, great. Well, welcome Larry. Thanks for joining us today. And I'll start by asking you how

you ended up working in talent acquisition, if you can go back to your pre EY days, which you've been there for over 18 years. So, take us back to the start of your career, how did you end up in talent acquisition?

Larry:  Yeah, great for at first, Max, thank you for having me on. I'm really looking forward to theconversation. So yeah prior to joining EY, I was at Arthur Andersen, another professional services firm, where I was for 13 years in a variety of human resource roles, mostly in the recruiting space or talent acquisition space. And prior to Arthur Andersen I started out at Price Waterhouse. So I have the theme in my career Max where I've spent all of my career within professional services and have just really enjoyed and love the culture, the focus on people, constant innovation and progressiveness and focus on inclusivity and diversity, so it's been over 30 years in the profession, as you said, almost 1985 and it's been a wonderful experience for me and for the last few years now I've been leading our America's, what we call actually talent attraction and talent acquisition. 

We used to be called recruiting, but recently we change that to talent attraction and acquisition to recognize the broadness and diversity of our roles, and the focus of not only getting candidates interested in the profession and in opportunities at EY but obviously then having an amazing process to bring them in and assess them and hopefully join the organization. 

So we have an excellent community of recruiters, or talent attraction and acquisition professionals across the world. And lucky to be a part of that team.

Max:  You're mentioning this industry. What should we call it, management consulting? Well, professional services at large as being an industry that you feel great kinship to because, from the outside it's something that's always good to have on your resume, something like that so it's a great place to attract ambitious young talents, coming out of the best schools, and that's the main thing right from a talent acquisitions perspective, you don't have to fight too hard to get some pretty good resumes.

Larry:  Yeah I think we use professional services because there's a multitude of services from consulting and tax and energy work to a whole slew of services that all the organizations in the industry offer. And yes, we do feel we have a really strong brand and part of our value proposition for candidates is an exceptional EY experience, it's yours to build right, we provide the tools the experiences, the platforms to help you grow your career as you want to grow it, whether that's working in different service lines over the course of your career, whether that's making partner, wonderful achievement or having just wonderful experiences and becoming a CEO somewhere else or CFO or Chief Development Officer or starting your own business. So we're really excited over the course of our life as an organization to build careers across industries and within our organization. And I would say though, Max, it is certainly a competitive market out there right now. 

A lot of organizations, not just those in our vertical, but really in all facets of industries are looking for a lot of the same talent that's technology transformation or strategy work or technology skills or tax consultants, I can go on and on about what we're looking for, but a lot of organizations are looking for that top talent. So we work really hard to differentiate ourselves, and to get to know talent, and hopefully distinguish what we can offer versus what other organizations can. Certainly on the student side we do a lot, we have a lot of programs to offer from a variety of internships, challenges and programs.

Max: Let's stay on this topic Larry on the competition that's stiff, to simplify things we could say the MBAs, they end up either in consulting industry, or maybe technology is the hot one right now. So are the looming threats today, where a greater proportion of the deep thinkers, the strategics end up working in technology, and that's eating part of your talent pool.

Larry:  No, I wouldn't say that I think a lot of MBAs, and we certainly hire a number of MBAs, but we also hire a lot at the undergraduate level. I think, continues to be the case as people are looking for a variety of work and I think one of the things that has become more common lately is wanting to work at an organization that aligns with your values and purpose. For us at EY it's building a better working world. And that's not just what we're doing with our people but how we help our clients build a better working world. And that could be working with an organization whose bringing a drug to market faster right, to address and be working with governments or entities to create infrastructure and programs to help the needy. So, we offer a lot, around an individual's purpose and hopefully that's aligned with our purpose of building a better working world. I do think though that individuals like you mentioned MBAs, they certainly are interested in strategy work, working for financial services organizations, technology companies. But I also think, again, that sector is really interested in aligning with their values and purpose and that is a big reason. I think that is why individuals are joining organizations or where organizations might be differentiating themselves is the purpose that aligns with that individual.

Max:  And almost 19 years at EY and so you must have seen different styles of leadership and adapted to a changing market. So, can you give us a sense for how EY's EVP has evolved during that time. It sounds and I'm reading between the lines that perhaps EY is focusing a little bit more on the transformative power of it's work on the workplace, and I am still attached to the romantic notion of no the road to partnership and the hyper competitive world of consulting, where you come in and you're treated like cannon fodder, but if you rise, then you can rise fast. So that's an image that maybe is a little bit dated.

Larry:  Yeah, having been at EY for 19 years I would respectfully say that's a little dated, and we've always been focused about offering the right experiences and getting the right training. So training, learning and coaching and being part of an inclusive and diverse culture, I've always been mainstays of what we offer that hasn't changed. 

But we also recognize that experiences and learning are building blocks to where you want to take your career. And that's why it's evolved into it's yours to build. We as an organization need to p...