Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. Today. We are honored to have on the show, Mrs. Susan Hanold PhD, who is also the VP and the ADP Strategic Advisory Services Group. Susan, welcome to the show. 

Susan: Thanks Max. Great to be here. 

Max:  Susan  was named top women in HR technology by Recruiting Daily, and works with ADP's clients to build out their recruiting strategies. So tell us a little bit about ADP and then we'll go into our usual round of questions about how this industry is changing. Susan, I will let you talk about ADP, you will probably do better than I can. We were talking before the show that ADP does a lot more than payroll, and through acquisitions has moved into the RPO world. And into the technology world. Can you give us a quick summary of your universe? 

Susan: Sure. So interesting to me about eight years ago, when I was first hired at ADP. I came in as a talent strategy expert. So it was like you, I thought, Oh payroll! It's only payroll, but it's not. It's a full HCM human capital management company. And it's been in business over 70 years. And you know, over the last eight years, our talent ecosystem has grown. You know, eight years ago we started our RPO business. We have talent management, talent activation, you know, you have to put different words on all the different types of talent products. So activation is kind of a new area. That's an engagement, and performance area,  talent management, and you've got talent acquisition.

Max: You’ve got my attention with this talent activation. We'll come back to it later. 

Susan: Yeah. So, you know, to me what's exciting is that, it's a global organization, it's got 140 countries and, you know, of course we're known for payroll and that's very core to us and we have 58,000 employees. And for me, you know, like you Max, as we were talking before, my day job was traveling a lot, I lived on an airplane and what was most important to me was satisfying our clients and helping them build out their talent strategy. And so I was basically traveling around trying to be in person, getting to know them and their businesses. And so that has switched a bit here now. 

Max: Well, we have so many hours in the day now. I understand that you're investing some of this time that you got back from all that traveling around the world, into helping  your community and working with the University of Texas in Arlington.

Susan: Yeah. So I felt one of the ways to give back is to share those experiences and what I'm learning right now in my day job and the real life experiences. And I just feel like they are really enjoying that. They love hearing, you know, balancing the book work if you will, with the real life application.

Max: Yeah i could make a nice segway on the world of recruitment. Hearing more about the stories and about the book, hearing more about the candidate than about the resume, which is something I believe we must move away from in recruitment. Move away from the resume. Tell us. How, how did you end up in talent acquisition professor? 

Susan: Well, it just happened naturally. I mean, I didn't say, Oh I'm going to go into talent acquisition. I am just a sponge for learning. And at ADP, I was given the opportunity to really keep learning and building and learning more about what they offered from a talent product perspective, and ourselves, and our services. And I started off in talent management and then it just naturally evolved to talent acquisition. And with the model that we follow which is attracting, engaging, and retaining. 

So many times I'll have clients that'll say, well let's talk about our turnover. And everything comes back to let's look at the whole ecosystem. So let's start from the beginning and come all the way through the talent life cycle. And so I just started expanding my conversation and learning more. I'm so very thrilled to be talking about it today, 

Max:  I've been asked by a number of companies to look at retention and you know, for me, it's the ultimate success metric for the company. Are you a people-centered company? It should be measured by whether you can retain your people or not. And the unfortunate thing is you cannot really give that number, the retention number, you cannot let any one department own it. Because it really starts even at sourcing.  If you source a wide enough audience, a big enough talent pool, then  you'll be able to be a lot more picky and find people who have a better culture fit, which should certainly increase retention, logically. So, I think these arguments are a little hard for me  to carry on the sell side. To say that recruitment helps retention and sourcing helps retention. But I do believe that fundamentally and in principle.

Susan: Well, it's interesting, how did you know of the email I was just looking at before our conversation, because I had just got a request from a client that wants to have a turnover workshop. And that seems to come up quite frequently. And you know, in my role, my goal is to help our clients. So I'm external focused and help them with a lot of advice and insights. So I'm not really necessarily executing on a product, but it's looking at the whole people process and technology and in my role in product agnostic. So when the clients are coming and asking for help, like hey I've got a pain point of turnover. It's like exactly what you said. It's really having to dig in and look at the bigger picture. And where is it going to, where's it really coming from? 

And I'd say about two or three years ago, our team got together and we were hearing a pattern of turnover retention coming up and we're like, well we just need to start at the basics. What is it? What data do you need? And then we actually put a diagnostic together and it sounds really fancy when you say, well, I put a diagnostic together, but I honestly started going to key stakeholders. And businesses and saying, what data are you gathering? What are you measuring? And start pulling this together. And I hate to use the word HCM, but it truly is. It was a full human capital management list of questions. And I said, hey, here's a great list of questions. That you as a recruiter, or you as an HR leader can take to your CEO and say, if you say no to any of these questions, then you don't have a comprehensive turnover retention strategy.

And so I just kind of knew exactly what it said. I started adding more and more questions to it. And it's wider. It was outside of recruiting, it went to performance, it went to communications, it went to marketing, and they all have an impact. So, anyway, I ended up with a good tool out of it.

Max:  Yeah, the diagnostic, you can repurpose it? 

Susan: I sure can. 

Max: I mean, with a PhD  you can turn any worksheet into a methodology. Right? There is a way to commercialize that for sure. And I want to go back to that word you used earlier, talent activation, is that a new fancy word for onboarding?