HR Interviews Playlist

Live at the HR Tech 2022 conference, our guest Sarah White, CEO of Aspect 43, speaks with Mark Feffer about what skills *are* and looks at the bigger picture of the whole movement.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast.

Turn down the lights and turn up the Marvin Gaye, because we're talking about VR in recruiting on this episode. Turns out, there's a really cool organization called VisionThree that's raising $80 million to advance virtual reality in schools and partnering with corporations and local governments to increase the level of talent in the workforce. Heather Jackson, chief revenue officer at VisionThree breaks it all down for us. Spoiler alert: It's all Mark Zuckerberg's fault. 

With the news cycle currently dominated by significant layoffs in large tech companies, it is essential to take a step back and consider the longer-term picture. Many employers are still struggling to find the right tech talent. Recent research has shown that skill shortages will continue for years as education systems are not setting students up with the right skills for our AI-dominated future.

So what should employers be doing right now to recruit and develop tech professionals, and what is the impact of remote and hybrid working on early careers talent?

My guest this week is Atli Thorkelsson, VP of Talent Network at Redpoint Ventures. Atli advises start-ups across Redpoint's portfolio on talent acquisition and development. He has some important insights to share on the current state of the market and the strategies employers need to adopt to deal with the longer terms challenges.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The current state of the tech hiring market

• Long term challenges

• Development of early career talent

• The role of the Chief People Officer

• Building the right foundations for talent development

• How do remote-first organizations support mentoring and development?

• What are the biggest hiring mistakes start-ups make?

• What can corporate TA functions learn from start-up hiring practices?

• How will recruiting technology develop in the future?

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

DE&I remains a major priority for employers, but progress is slow and sometimes completely stuck. So how should companies be thinking about diversity, and what practical actions can they take to build and benefit from teams of difference?

My guest this week is writer, broadcaster and consultant Simon Fanshawe. Simon is a well known figure in the UK and has recently published an excellent book, "The Power of Difference". He advocates that progress comes when employers move away from the jargon around DE&I and genuinely understand how building a diverse workforce will drive their specific business objectives. 

In the interview, we discuss:

• The human question of diversity and what does it actually mean.

• The power of combining difference

• The dangers of conformity and the imposition of rules

• Building teams of difference

• Using data to understand what is happening and why

• Understanding specific diversity business cases

• The virtuous circle of selection

• Is unconscious bias training actually helpful?

• Redesigning the recruiting process to challenge assumptions

• The most accurate predictor of future success

• Making employee resource groups more effective

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

A full transcription will appear here shortly.

Live at the HR tech 2022 conference, our guest Robin Schooling (VP of Growth and Innovation at Cielo) speaks with Mark Feffer about rethinking compensation for up-skilled employees, and how to transition your organization into a learning oriented environment.

We're bringing everything back to our roots at this HR Tech conference. Companies are reenforcing their core offerings, and it seems sticking to what they're good at is the best way to shine. Products and organizations are trying to stay their course and make sure they're the best product for a specific goal, instead of trying to be the "all in one" solution that does everything in mediocre fashion.

Buy, Build, or Borrow...the age old question.

Borrowing skills will never go away, because it's always going to be the most efficient and quick way to solve a unique problem you'll only encounter a few times. Buying skills is difficult, as talent is scarce nowadays. Growing skills might just be the best solution in today's market. Who would have thought that growth platforms and LMS's have become a reasonable alternative to hiring platforms?

The only issue is having to rethink titling and compensation for these up-skilled workers. Most companies want to grow their employees from within, but that comes with the added challenge of letting these blossoming employees shine in the manner that they deserve. Internal growth comes with more financial overhead than just the training process; you need to be comfortable with compensating these individuals more for their newly acquired skillset.

Getting to a point where learning is acknowledged as an important organizational goal takes a lot of restructuring. Business leaders, upper management, and the company culture all need to be on the same page so that identifying internal growth opportunities is seamless enough to even attempt it. Propping up your employees is no easy task if you never have done it before, but with the right effort and mindset any organization that puts in the effort can get there.

We would like to extend a warm thank you to our friends at Fuel50 for sponsoring this podcast!

A volatile talent acquisition market and the immense disruption we are seeing to traditional ways of working our driving significant changes in employer branding strategies. Culture, EVP, and employer brand marketing are going through a period of intense evolution, and it is essential to understand what's happening in this space.

My guest this week is Charu Malhotra, Global Head of Talent Branding and Recruitment Marketing at PA Consulting. In our wide ranging conversation recorded at UNLEASH World in Paris, we discussed some of the current issues in employer branding, culture, and retention.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The impact of external forces on talent acquisition

• Building inclusive workplaces when workforces are increasingly remote

• Proximity bias in hybrid working

• How do you create, manage and flex a culture

• Embedding values in high-performance cultures

• How does employer branding work on an international scale

• Focused segmentation and a constant heartbeat of content

• Employer brand and retention

• The importance of assessment technology

• Changing the balance between internal mobility and external attraction

• Reimagining EVP projects as nimble and responsive instead of one size fits all.

Listen to this podcast in Apple Podcasts.

A full transcription will appear here shortly.

Recorded at HRTech we welcomed Dave Deitering, GM HR & Immigration from Mitratech.

Mitratech is waiting with their hand stretched out towards us in recruitment. 

• If you’re with an organization who is recruiting internationally, you may already know the I9 is a tricky process, one wrong field checked off can turn into penalties and fines.

•  Dave takes us through the history of Mitratech and how they take the I9 compliance off your hands and maneuver their way through the maze of governmental requirements. 

• The last 2 years, they have added to their HR services lines with TalentReef and AssureHire. Listen to where the exciting world of legal compliance is headed.

To say Indeed has made changes this year would be a gross understatement.

Here's a roundup:

1) changes to bid optimizer,

2) changes to their resume reward system

3) alterations to Geo and Title expansions

And to say some people are unhappy with the changes is also an understatement. That's why we invited Jim Durbin, the man Indeed calls "The Indeed Whisperer" to the podcast to get to the bottom of what's going on at the world's most popular job site.

With recruiting challenges so acute and talent acquisition technology developing at such a great pace, tech stack adoption and transformation strategies are critical for many employers.

So what are the key issues, and how are talent acquisition teams specializing and evolving to exploit new technologies and methodologies?

My guest this week is Samantha Ramsay, Head of Experienced Hire UK&I at EY. I caught up with her a couple of weeks ago at UNLEASH World in Paris, where she was delivering a presentation about Tech Transformation.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Current challenges in talent acquisition

• Driving change in recruiting

• Asking five whys to get to the root cause of the problem

• Building stakeholder consensus

• What makes a great vendor/employer partnership

• Talent intelligence

• Using CRMs in the right way

• Developing specialist skills within TA functions

• Building long term engagement and affinity with talent pools

• What does the future look like?

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.