Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

I know that many of you who listen to this podcast are very aware of the quality of your employee experience and the importance of your employer brand reputation. However, as the balance in the workforce between permanent hires, contractors, and project-based workers evolves, do you still truly understand all the factors influencing your employer brand?

My guest this week is Tanya de Grunwald, journalist and founder of The Good And Fair Employers Club. Tanya is a long time campaigner for the rights of young people in the workplace and has been working tirelessly to expose the use of exit or training fees by some IT outsourcing companies. This interview is an absolute must listen for everyone working for an organization that contract in workers from external providers.

In the interview, we discuss:

• What are exit fees, and what are their implications for young people?

• The implications of denying people the right to move jobs

• The legal position

• Activism

• Outsourcing and placement: who is and isn’t an employee?

• Why have employers been so slow to act

• Ethics in procurement and supplier management

• Providing consistent values and experience for the entire workforce

• Whistleblowing & PR disasters

• Good and fair employers

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I'm on holiday at the moment, but I want to make sure that you have plenty of Recruiting Future content to listen to until I'm back. So for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to republish some of my favourite episodes with conversations that you may have missed the first time round.

This week's replay is my conversation from earlier in the year with Maggie Spong, VP of Talent Acquisition at AstraZeneca. It is one of the best examples I've had on the show for a while of a company developing holistic, long-term strategic solutions to deal with ongoing skill shortages. It is well worth a listen, even if you have heard it the first time around.

In the interview, we discuss:

• How Talent Acquisition is evolving at Astra Zeneca

• Using Talent Scouts to build external talent pipelines for hard to fill roles and where there are gaps in internal succession planning

• Building a personalised and inclusive candidate experience.

• Giving feedback to all interviewed candidates

• The challenges of the pandemic

• Encouraging candidate self-selection by showcasing the authentic employee experience

• Turning The Great Resignation into The Great Opportunity

• The role of technology

• Employer brand advocacy

• Investing in development and the Talent Acquisition Academy

• Astra Zeneca's focus for 2022

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

I'm on holiday at the moment, but I want to make sure that you have plenty of Recruiting Future content to listen to until I'm back. So for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to republish some of my favourite episodes with conversations that you may have missed the first time round.

This week's replay is my interview with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chair of Ogilvy and one of the world's leading thinkers on behavioural science. I firmly believe that behavioural science will take a leading role in talent acquisition in the future, particularly when it comes to automation and personalisation, and that's why I wanted to give you all a second chance to listen to what Rory has to say.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Why Behavioural Science is the science of knowing what economists are wrong about

• The dangers of defensive decision making

• Finding psychological truths and the importance of emotions

• Why Uber has a map

• Recruiting for diversity of thought

• How Ogilvy have redesigned the recruiting process to find people of exceptional non-standard ability

• While the average is not the optimal solution

• The difference between equality of opportunity and diversity of opportunity

• Why work is a relational relationship, not a transactional one

• Cost reduction versus lost opportunities

• Personalising the value exchange between employer and employee

• The future of work and why it has taken a pandemic to get us there

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Round up is the monthly show on The Recruiting Future Podcast channel that highlights episodes you may have missed and gives you my take on some of the key learnings from the guests.

Episodes mentioned in this Round Up:

Ep 442: Lessons From Elite Cycling

Ep 443: The Nowhere Office

Ep 444: Workplace Culture

Ep 445: Happiness At Work

Ep 446: The Competitive Advantage Of Employee Experience

Ep 447: Dealing With Disruption

Ep 448: Proving The Business Value Of Talent Marketing

Measuring the impact of talent marking in a way that aligns with the rest of the business and demonstrates value for the c-suite has always been challenging. TA leaders often find themselves judged by measures and outcomes they don't fully control, which are impossible to translate into business value.

So how do you prove the business impact of recruitment marketing and employer branding, particularly in such volatile times?

My guest this week is Nick Thompson, Global Talent Marketing Leader at IBM. Nick and his team have been working on this issue for a while and have devised a way of measuring the value of talent marketing that resonates with the C-Suite and provides a laser focus for optimisation and improvement. 

In the interview, we discuss:

• The scale of recruiting at IBM

• The current state of the global market for tech hiring

• The shortcomings of existing talent marketing metrics

• Speaking the same language as the rest of the business

• Measuring where you have ownership and control

• What is the time to apply metric, and how was it developed?

• What insights does time to apply enable?

• Mapping onto business value 

• The reaction 

• The levers that reduce time to apply

• Removing the reasons why people don't click apply

• The role of employer branding

• Advice to TA leaders

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Back in 2020, there was an acknowledgement that talent acquisition had changed forever but a sense that things would eventually stabilise into a new normal. Two and half years later, it is clear that the only new normal is continual long-term disruption, change and uncertainty.

So what should TA leaders focus on to give their organisations the best chance of maintaining a competitive talent advantage in these challenging times?

My guest this week is Hayli Thornhill, Head of Recruiting at Brighthire. Hayli is an experienced TA Leader with experience in both start-ups and large corporates. She has some insightful advice on dealing with disruption and preparing for an uncertain future.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Long term disruption and uncertainty

• Intelligent interview and evidence based hiring

• What should TA Leaders be focusing on

• Efficiency and quality

• Auditing tech stacks

• Modernising interviewer training

• Improving the hiring process

• Five non-negotiables to focus on

• Providing a brilliant candidate experience

• Looking to the future

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts

A full transcript will appear here shortly

Many employers will claim to be people-centric organisations, but how many actually have the quality of employer experience to back this up? A high-quality employee experience dries value for businesses in many ways, including competitive advantage in talent acquisition, better retention, increased productivity and better service for clients and customers.

So how do you build a genuinely people-centric organisation with an employer experience that delivers on its promises? My guest this week is Mayra Chimienti, COO of Mister Carwash, the largest car wash operator in North America. Mister Car Wash is a certified Great Place to Work that has built a category-leading employee experience.

In the interview, we discuss:

• What it means to be a people-first business

• Employee experience and customer experience

• Building competitive advantage in Talent Acquisition

• Telling authentic stories and showing evidence in the recruiting process

• Retention, professional development and benefits

• The long term impact of the pandemic

• Innovation

• The future of people strategy at Mister Carwash

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

With so much unhelpful noise around the topic of the future of work, I'm taking a deep dive into the practicalities of what is actually going on over three podcast episodes. In the previous two episodes, I spoke to authors Julia Hobsbawm and Bruce Daisley about our physical relationship with the workplace; in this episode, I want to explore happiness at work.

The John Lewis Partnership is a unique UK-based retailer jointly owned by its employees and founded on the premise of ensuring worker happiness. My guest this week is Lord Mark Price, the former UK Trade Minister who was CEO of Waitrose and Deputy Chairman of The John Lewis Partnership. Mark now works via his business WorkL to help employers increase workplace happiness using some of the lessons he learned during his time at John Lewis. 

In the interview, we discuss:

• Lessons from The John Lewis Partnership

• The six core elements of happiness at work

• Why looking at averages is dangerous.

• How can employers build a happier workplace?

• Using happiness for competitive advantage in talent acquisition

• The relationship between the individual and their line manager

• Prospects for the future of the labour market

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.

With so much unhelpful noise around the topic of the future of work, I'm taking a deep dive into the practicalities of what is actually going on over a series of three podcast episodes. In the previous episode, I spoke to author Julia Hobsbawm about some of the challenges of this emerging new phase of work, and I want to continue this theme in this episode.

My guest this week is the perfect person to help me do this, and it is great to have him back on the show. Bruce Daisley is a speaker, author and workplace culture enthusiast. Previously a VP at Twitter, Bruce now hosts one of the world's most popular podcasts on making work better. 

In the interview, we discuss:

• Critical issues in workplace culture

• Why flex is the new pay

• The danger of uncoordinated hybrid

• Productivity and worker satisfaction

• The intentional curation of culture

• Using the office as a tool

• How management infrastructure is changing

• The rise of the community manager

• Rethinking knowledge transfer

• Understanding the demands of top talent

• Challenges for talent acquisition

• Work from anywhere

• The danger of nostalgia

• What will work look like in five years?

Pre-order Bruce’s new book “Fortitude”

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All around the world, debates about hybrid and remote working rumble on as employers and employees experiment to find mutually agreeable and effective ways of working. There is a lot of noise in the debate around the future of work, and I really want to cut through this. With that in mind, I'm going to focus the next three episodes of the podcast on the future of work, exploring the real issues, looking at the practical solutions that are being put in place and taking an informed look at what the future might look like.

My first guest in this mini-series is writer, speaker and consultant Julia Hobsbawm, author of the brilliant book "The Nowhere Office". In her book, Julia explores what is happening at the moment in the context of workplace changes over the last few decades and examines the current issues to help map the future. 

In the interview, we discuss:

• Reimagining and reframing how we work

• The four phases of work since 1945

• How the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already there

• The complexity of hybrid

• The real challenges with developing the next phase of work

• Undoing assumptions and old norms

• The challenge for talent acquisition

• Autonomy, flexibility and networks

• Thinking strategically to improve wellness and mental health.

Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.