MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today, I'm delighted and honoured to welcome the VP of talent acquisition at Lowe's companies, one of the largest retailers in the world, certainly in the US but also big enough that we can say it's a worldwide leader and DIY. DIY equipment is how I would describe it as an outsider.

ROBERT: Yeah all home improvement but at this point it's anything for your home.

MAX: Anything for your home, that's ambitious. So I didn't yet introduce you, Robert. It's Robert

Daugherty, VP of TA for Lowe's, thanks for coming on Robert.

ROBERT: Happy to be here MAX. Thanks for having me.

MAX: Pleasure. Before we go into the Lowe's story, you've been there for a year and a half now so it must have been an unprecedented time.

ROBERT: Yes it is.

MAX: Tell us how you ended up in the field of high volume recruitments. I suppose that all began back a long time ago.

ROBERT: Yeah a long time ago. My hair was much darker at the time compared to the greys and the bit of weathering.

MAX: All those candidates have depigmented your hair.

ROBERT: Yes, that's right. So yeah I've been recruiting now for almost 25 years and I've yet to meet somebody in recruiting that intentionally went into recruiting right so I got my degree in finance and statistics. Started out in commercial banking for about eight months and realised I didn't like it, and met a guy and I'm like what do you do?, he said I am a headhunter, like what the heck's a headhunter, and ended up having lunch with the partner of the small boutique firm, and I've been in it ever since, moved over to the corporate side a little after 911 back in 2001, and here I am still surviving in this race of TA.

MAX: So after you jumped into recruitments I saw stints in the logistics space, health care, then the insurance base, and then more recently at American Airlines. I guess you jumped ship at a good time, American Airlines. You left just before the crisis. And, the bulk of the hiring there at American Airlines must have been a cabin crew?

ROBERT: Yeah it was, I had a little bit of everything. I wish I could say I was smart enough to have the insight or foresight to leave American Airlines in January and jump over to Lowe's but it was definitely some blind luck. But yeah at American Airlines, we had what I thought at the time was high volume with about 15,000 hires a year, both from cabin crew but certainly gate agents, our men and women that were on the ramp. So it was, it was across the board, but I truly found out what high volume was when I made that switch to Lowe's about a little less than a year and a half ago.

MAX: And American Airlines business has been around for such a long time, good year or bad year, the volumes don't fluctuate that much right.

ROBERT: Correct, yeah they went through a down phase obviously after 911 and then about almost 13 years before they started hiring again. And one of the things about my background is, I've somehow fallen into a niche that I tend to love which is going into transformational projects where it's either building something from scratch or Turner out. If somebody wanted me to go somewhere, it was like hey,everything's perfect to steer the ship straight, definitely wouldn't be the right role for me because I'd be pulling levers and breaking stuff so going into somewhere where things are broken or the rebuilding and that's why it wasn't they hadn't hired really since 911 until the merger with US Airways and then it was okay full steam ahead with two different RPOs, three different applicant tracking systems, none of them had been really touched in probably eight or nine years, no processes. So it was a fun kind of rebuilding

that organisation or you know post merger.

MAX: And the RPOs are probably gonna have a good year in 2021 as people are rebuilding as well. But,they can be a symptom of an organisation that has kind of given up on its core duties.

ROBERT: Yep, absolutely. Yeah, I think RPOs really play a strength right as anytime you've got that seasonality to your business, where you've got those fluctuations of kind of busy season and non busy season to where you can really be able to scale up, scale down. I think that's really critical to have that at least as a strategy in your back pocket versus kind of that static organisation that you're kind of tied to,where you're either almost always under worked or overworked and you very rarely get it perfectly right.

MAX: So you were talking about the seasonality of hiring and I suppose at Lowe's you have holiday season, and maybe the back to school.

ROBERT: Yeah. Actually our busiest season is the spring. So, we're recording this one day after

Memorial Day weekend is our Super Bowl. So, we think about all the honey-do lists spring cleaning, all the people have been cramped up all winter and want to get out and start doing their projects, focused on their yards flowers, plants, this is the busiest time of year for us so we've been in in full hiring mode really since the end of January.

MAX: And I think correct me if I'm wrong that your space has also had a record breaking year where everybody's home and spending more time at home and therefore, investing with the money they have into their home.

ROBERT: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, so once COVID hit really back in, in March of 2020 and everything

started to shut down, right, those honey-do lists grew for a lot of people. Alright, it's time to repaint this room, all these little projects just to keep people busy, and Lowe's as a recognised an essential employer, our business took off. So we started seeing sales go through the roof, we had to hire a lot of people, and we hired 280,000 external people in 2020. So, in the first four months this year we're already over 120,000. So, our fiscal year starts February, but yeah about 120,000 our first four months, so we were well on pace to continue to hire a lot of people to make sure we can take care of our customers.

MAX: Okay, well, you must have a lucky star to have moved into such a high growth. I mean I don't know if it's a lucky star or not. You said you'd like to change so I suppose that kind of stress to the organisation should keep you entertained.

ROBERT: Definitely, yeah. There's always new problems to solve every day right and and going from 2020 was so interesting because nobody obviously planned for that as you start going into the pandemic and the availability of workers was a lot higher. Now fast forward to 2021 and between stimulus,enhanced unemployment, and all of these companies the demand for hourly workers. I don't know if it's ever been higher, right, and the supply has gotten a lot lower. So as your demand starts to really outpace that supply, it really creates some interesting dynamics around what companies are doing, how they're trying to attract candidates, focused on some of those, employee value propositions, leveraging dollar sign on bonuses. I mean there was a fast food company, I saw a sign th...