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

Effective storytelling is a crucial part of hiring, flowing through recruitment marketing, employer branding, assessment and onboarding but does your organisation have a strategy that sits behind it? Knowing what kind of stories to tell and how and where to tell them is something that brings a considerable competitive advantage. So how can we all get better at telling our stories compellingly and effectively?

My go-to storytelling expert is journalist, writer and tech entrepreneur Shane Snow. I'm delighted to welcome him back to the show to do a deep dive into storytelling strategy. In a world of challenging talent markets and virtual hiring processes, this interview is a must listen for everyone.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Why business storytelling is important and what it can achieve

• The four elements of a great story

• Storytelling in employer branding and recruiting

• The three different types of business story

• Why should people care?

• How and where do you tell a story?

• Weaving storytelling into every piece of communication •

A full transcript will appear here shortly.

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The one theme that has come over very clearly in the conversations I've had with talent acquisition professionals in the last 12 months is the relationship between speed and quality in the hiring process.

Speed is currently a competitive advantage which means many employers are focusing intensely on speeding up their hiring process. However, quality of experience and quality of hire are still critical, so how do you speed up talent acquisition and improve quality at the same time.

Earlier this year, Mervyn Dinnen and I joined forces with the team at Metaview to work on a piece of research to see if we could answer this question. We spoke to employers who are successfully improving both speed and the quality of the talent acquisition to distil the mindset, strategies and tactics they are using to solve this complex challenge.

We recently published the results in a whitepaper, and I'm delighted to welcome Germaine Yokoyama-Heiliger to the show to discuss the findings. Germaine is a People Experience and Operations consultant who was previously Chief People Officer at several high growth tech companies. She was one of the people we interviewed during the research, and she has some very valuable perspectives to share.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The current state of the market and the background to the research

• Can you increase speed and improve quality at the same time?

• How difficult is it to overhaul the recruiting process?

• Being ready to hire and running a great process

• The importance of talent management

• Talent intelligence and data

• Being transparent and legitimate

• Partnering with leadership

• Human to human interaction

• Using technology to understand what works, what doesn't work and what training is needed

• What does the future look like

Download the full report here

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Diversity in hiring is a critical issue for all employers, but many are still struggling with it. So who is doing it well, and how much of a role can recruiting technology play in diversifying talent pools.

My guest this week is Shaun Daly, Head of Resourcing at The Open University. Over the last few years, The Open University has been increasing the diversity of its organisation by rethinking how it does hiring, building an inclusive employer brand and deploying point solution technology which helps to enable these strategies.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Recruiting challenges at The Open University

• Operating with legacy systems

• Developing a compelling employer brand

• Anonymous recruiting and diverse interview panels

• Making the candidate experience more engaging

• Recruitment marketing automation

• Online events

• Talent pool segmentation

• Future innovations

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A full transcript will appear here shortly.

This is part two of my mini-series on personalization. So to recap, I feel very strongly that personalization is the new Megatrend in Talent Acquisition. Offering personalized recruitment marketing, candidate journies, assessments, feedback, onboarding, and communication will be critical objectives for employers over the next few years. Candidates are demanding it, the technology is here to facilitate it, and the amount of friction that will get removed from recruiting processes will be a win for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers.

So what is possible, and how are employers dealing with the practicalities of personalization in talent acquisition?

A few weeks ago, the awesome team at Paradox invited me to speak and record some interviews at their client board event in Scottsdale, Arizona. Paradox is a technology that is really driving the progress of personalization. It was very insightful to talk to some of their clients about the need for personalization in their TA processes and the change journies they are taking their recruiters and hiring managers on to make personalization happen.

In this second set of interviews from the event (check out Episode 435 if you want to hear the others), you'll hear from Derek Braun, Staffing and Recruiting Manager at GoWireless and Steffanie Chaviano, VP of Talent and Patient Access at Autism Learning Partners. Derek and Steffanie talk us through their experiences of using conversational AI to transform the effectiveness of their recruiting strategies. First up, though, is Adam Godson, Chief Product Officer at Paradox, talking about some of the psychology behind conversational interfaces.

These are some of the topics you'll find discussed in this episode:

• Personalisation at scale

• The psychological elements of conversation design

• Using conversation to drive processes

• Connect with people, not software

• How technology is affecting recruiter career choices

• Handling high volumes of applicant flow is an engaging way.

• The importance of being user friendly for hiring managers

• What does the future of talent acquisition look like

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Those of you who have read my book Digital Talent (available wherever you get your books!) will know that I feel very strongly that personalization is the new megatrend in talent acquisition.

Offering personalized recruitment marketing, candidate journies, assessments, feedback, onboarding, and communication will be critical objectives for employers over the next few years. Candidates are demanding it, the technology is here to facilitate it, and the amount of friction that will get removed from recruiting processes will be a win for candidates, recruiters and hiring managers.

Two weeks ago, the awesome team at Paradox invited me to speak and record some interviews at their client board event in Scottsdale, Arizona. Paradox is a technology that is really driving the progress of personalization. It was really insightful to talk to some of their clients about the need for personalization in their TA processes and the change journies they are taking their recruiters and hiring managers on to make personalization happen.

I'll be sharing these interviews over two episodes of the show. Later in this episode, you'll get to hear from Adam Chen, Chief Marketing & Experience Officer at The Amenity Collective, Rachel O'Connell, VP of HR at Great Wolf Lodge and the return to the show of Victor Gaines SVP of Talent Acquisition at Aveanna Healthcare.

But first of all, I sat down with the amazing Madeline Laurano, Founder of Aptitude Research, to get her views on the drive towards greater personalization.

These are some of the topics you'll find discussed in this episode:

• How technology is driving personalization

• Creating experiences through conversation

• High volume recruiting challenges

• Significantly reducing time to hire

• Change management

• Building a consumer grand candidate experience

• Using personas to differentiate the employee value proposition

• The role of technology in personalization

• Implementing technology

• The future of talent acquisition

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Employer branding has always been important, but it is now absolutely critical to employers if they want to connect, engage and influence in demand talent. Employer branding isn't easy and for larger organisations building a global employer brand is a significant undertaking.

So how do you make the business case for employer branding, and how does employer brand activation work amid all of the challenges 2022 poses for employers?

My guest this week is Marije van der Togt, Head of Employer Branding at Just Eat Takeaway.com. Marije is highly experienced at building successful employer brands across multiple countries and has a massive amount of valuable insight to share.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Challenges of becoming one company with one story

• Evolving recruiting challenges

• How strong consumer brands create challenges for employer brands

• The importance of culture in candidate choice

• Why invest in a global employer brand?

• How employer brand strategy enables the business strategy

• Storytelling and linking authentic people centric stories to EVP pillars

• Strategically positioning podcasting as long form content.

• The role of data and technology

• Segmentation

• Advice to other employers on developing a global employer brand

• What does the future look like?

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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 425: Building A High Performing Talent Acquisition Team

Ep 426: AI Driven Talent Intelligence

Ep 427: The Job Board Market

Ep 428: Strategies For The Great Resignation

Ep 429: Open Hiring

Ep 430: Developing People Analytics

Ep 431: Talent Density

Ep 432: Long Term Trends

A full transcript will appear here shortly

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After over two years of unprecedented disruption, it has become evident that things have changed forever. However, many employers are still attempting to stick with the talent acquisition and employee experience strategies they had before the pandemic. 

So what are the dangers of behaving as if nothing has changed, and how should companies now set their strategies for the long term?

My guest this week is Amanda Black, Director of Inclusive Search at Good Works Consulting. Amanda has wide-ranging experience in talent acquisition and DE&I and has some expert insights to share on the long term impact of The Great Resignation.

In the interview, we discuss:

• A disrupted talent market

• Shifts in the employer/employee model

• Revealing inequalities in the system

• Permanently changed expectations

• Long term solutions and The Great Opportunity

• How successful employers are shifting their employee experience

• Modelling and demonstrating values

• Are companies taking DE&I seriously?

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The challenges of 2022 are causing many organisations to think very differently about talent. The employers who are getting it right are looking holistically at talent acquisition, development, retention and attrition to create the opportunity to build a talent dense organisation.

So what does this look like in practice, and how can your company get there?

My guest this week is Taylor Roa, Director of Talent at Wistia. Wistia is a growing technology company with an incredible culture and a big focus on talent density. They also use video as their superpower to showcase their unique employer brand.

In the interview, we discuss:

• Recruiting challenges at Wistia

• Meaningful work and culture versus cash and compromise

• Using video to represent the company culture authentically.

• Making a competitive advantage of putting people first

• Becoming a talent dense organisation

• Why retention is not about trapping people

• Being a business that it is good to be from

• How the pandemic has changed work

• Advice on getting more from video in employer branding

• A defining decade in the future of work

• A full transcript will appear here shortly.

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With a growing number of use cases, people analytics continues to develop both in sophistication and the amount of value it drives for employers. However, despite the quantum leap in recruiting technology we've seen in the last few years, I still feel that talent acquisition is significantly lagging behind where it should be in terms of data and analytics. 

My guest this week is Vic Akosile, an HR Strategy Consultant at Humananalytics. Vic is a highly experienced people analytics specialist. He gives us an excellent overview of what is going on in the space and what talent acquisition leaders need to consider if they want to develop their data and analytics capability.

In the interview, we discuss:

• The evolution of People Analytics

• Cutting edge use cases

• Increasing digital interactions mean increasing amounts of data.

• People Analytics in talent acquisition

• How to develop more sophistication in People Analytics

• What trends is technology driving

• Using sentiment and network analysis to help with retention

• Where is People Analytics going in the future?

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