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

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster and today, I'd like to welcome to the show Jim D'Amico from ATAP and from Celanese.  Jim, welcome to the show. 

Jim D'Amico: Hi max. Thank you very much for having me, appreciate it. 

Max Armbruster: A pleasure. And Jim was telling us, we were having a little chat before the show. He was talking about the transformation from talent attraction to talent seduction, which I guess is taking a more active role in recruitment. And I can't wait to get to that, but before so, I think the nice thing to do is to ask you for an introduction. Introduce yourself, what got you into recruitment? If you could go back in time. 

Jim D'Amico: Oh, sure. So currently Max, I lead global TA for Celanese and the board president for ATAP. I, like everybody, got into recruiting through a non-direct manner. Right? I did not grow up wanting to be in talent acquisition. So actually my background was in the military, a failed stand-up comedian. Needed food. So I got into sales, and from sales, the company I was selling for got bought, and a friend of mine said, Hey you gotta try recruiting, it's sales, but it's really cool. Cause you're selling two wins and it's exciting. So I got into third-party recruiting. And I loved it and I was hooked and have enjoyed it ever since, launched an RPO very early in the Midwest, sold that. And since then I have spent my time working with various companies, to help really improve their TA function so that they're the best in class. 

Max Armbruster: It's quite the journey. And I think, obviously a stand up comedian and sales is a great place to start for recruiting because, you've got to find a way to break the ice and warm up your audience where you call them. And there was a time when recruiters had to deal with a very cold audience. You had to deal with a big downpool of people who got a phone call. They didn't even know where they got their phone call from. Right? And, and I think today is quite different, you have very few cold calling recruiting happening, or is that still happening? I don't know. Maybe I'm missing part of the markets. Now I'm more focused on the high volume space.

Jim D'Amico: You know, I think you see less of the cold call, but I think what's moved from the cold calls, moved to the Inmail. So where I used to get recruiters calling me to recruit me on the phone. Now it all happens in InMail, but really the other thing that's changed back when I started. So, you know, to date myself, we still put ads in the newspaper, right? There was no monster career builder. This was even pre OCC days, right? So in order to get the word out, you had to go to the candidate. Now, you know, for the past 20 - 25 years, now we can find jobs. If I'm looking for a job, I have a million tools to find jobs and connect myself to a job. So the role of the recruiter being the town crier for the job, isn't really part of that anymore.

Max Armbruster: Tell us a little bit about ATAP. I think it's an organization that was founded just a few years ago. But a much needed organization to bring the industry together. I think most of the membership is in North America. We have an international audience, but why should they join and how do they join?

Jim D'Amico:  Sure. So, ASAP is the association of talent acquisition professionals. And, you know, we exist to improve the quality of life for our members. And we do that through education, community, advocacy. We are a global organization. Yes Max, most of our members are in the US however, after September, our international members have shut up.

So membership is fairly inexpensive at $95 US dollars a year, but we do the global town acquisition day event. It's a 14 hour conference. First Wednesday of September, I believe this year within that 14 hours captured 35 hours of content from speakers globally. And that's available to all of our members for free, we have programs that we just launched and we just started adding international people to as well, our diversity inclusion, center of excellence for TA professionals, a year long cohort program, that is very inexpensive for members. 

We're building out programs to elevate recruiters from recruiters to talent advisors, to talent strategists. So teaching recruiters how to manage, analyze, present data, develop their narratives for their business. How to manage projects, how to manage executive communication. So we're really working to elevate this field that we all love so much and support people. One of the things that I feel is a crime in our industry is how many people get into this field and then leave disappointed. And we really want to put a stop to that because we think that this is not a stopping point on your career. This is not something you do when you can't do anything else, but this is an actual career that adds value to your share and stakeholders. 

Max Armbruster: Well, it's going to be a hard sell in 2020. Jim. I imagine, I don't keep track of this, maybe you do. I imagine a lot of people lost their jobs this year in talent acquisition, and they must be relaying and you know, some people might be thinking, wow, recruitment is the last place I want to be right now.

Everybody's being furloughed put on hold. And on top of that, there's all this automation coming in. We have a disappearance of some of the manpower consuming activities of recruitment. What do you have to say to that? Are there going to be more talent acquisition professionals tomorrow than there were yesterday? Or is the industry shrinking? Because in 2020 it will probably be shrinking a little bit. 

Jim D'Amico: You know, but it's been randomized to some degree. So our membership's up over 15% this year. And what we see is that the market is recovering. So Celanese, we're back to pre COVID hiring my team's bigger today than it was March 1st. And we're seeing hiring, picking up. I think what we're seeing though, is that there's different work that the recruiters are doing. I think automation has had a tremendous impact on transactional recruiting. So in a differentiated recruiting pyramid, that bottom tier. That your tier two supports was transactional. There is a lot of automation there, but what we've seen is that the value of your top two tiers, the recruiting that you do there, has a tremendous impact on the return to the company and the value to the company. When your top performers in that strategic tier are producing value at eight to 10 times the value of people that are just slightly below them in quality of hire, it becomes really, really essential that you are hiring well.

And to do that, you need people now that are not focused on finding because automation can help us find people still requires a human state, that human intervention, is the actual recruiting, that's the deduction, but also then the assessing of the talent. And I think that's where our work becomes more valuable.

And as you move to a talent strategist, what you're now talking about too, is not just filling individual positions, but how do you leverage your knowledge, the data that you have, your experience to h...