This week we welcome Bryan Adams to the podcast. As Founder and CEO of Ph.Creative, a leading employer branding and talent attraction agency, Bryan has spent more than 17 years helping organizations build world-class employer brands. His creative, unconventional and even controversial methodologies have changed the way people think about employer branding and EVP’s. We sat down to discuss the state of the industry as a whole, as well as an article he recently wrote challenging the importance of retention as a metric against which to measure talent acquisition efforts. 

Topics include: the maturation of employer branding as a business function, the stubborn misconception that employer brands are “created,” good and bad aspirational branding, internal collaboration (and conflict) between employer branding and consumer branding teams, how strong employer brands generate revenue and value for consumer brands, the difference between retention and regrettable loss, how supporting employees who leave for better opportunities leads to higher performing cultures, the intersection of politics and the employer branding, the impact of virtual work on employer branding, and how remote work serves as a “litmus test” for strong employer brands.

This week we welcome Raghav Singh to the podcast. Raghav’s career in talent acquisition spans more than 30 years, including chapters at Taleo (where he served as Product Manager from 2000-2004), UnitedHealthGroup, KornFerry, and Salesforce, where he currently serves as Director of Product leading a team building HR and talent acquisition products. Raghav also regularly appears as an author in noted industry publications, including ERE, where he’s written extensively about the pre- and post-pandemic labor market.

Topics include: the advent and evolution of the ATS as a SaaS product, the commoditization of HR technologies, the record high numbers of job openings in the US, the impact of government incentives on hiring, how lack of quality childcare and eldercare has forced women out of the workforce, the persistent bias against the resume “gap”, Baby Boomers and “forced” early retirements, the challenges of skills mismatches between recent college graduates and available jobs, the difference between American and European approaches to addressing unemployment, the long-term implications of birthrate falling below replacement levels, the outlook for immigrant workers entering the job market, and the effects of remote work on talent pools and wages.

This week we welcome Scott MacGregor to the podcast. Prior to entering the world of talent acquisition, Scott spent 17 years as Chief Revenue Officer for Flo-Tech, where he saw the company grow from five employees to more than 300. Along the way, his experiences with recruiting systems and processes led him to believe that talent acquisition is fundamentally broken, which inspired him to start his own talent strategy firm, SomethingNew. Scott is also the proud Founder & CEO of the Talent Champions Council, a private membership community designed to mobilize expertise in talent strategy from the best in corporations, the military and professional sports.

Topics include: the value of applying first principles thinking to talent acquisition, why traditional recruiting fee structures are illogical, the “epidemic” of treating recruiting as a cost center, the disconnect between the importance of HR and its lack of attention from the C-suite, why many recruiters lack the skills required to effectively vet job candidates, what professional sports and the military can teach us about recruiting, how to use scorecards to make data-driven hiring decisions, the importance of investing in employees with robust onboarding and training programs, and the post-COVID outlook for talent acquisition.

This week we welcome Lindsay Pedersen to the podcast. Lindsay spent her early career as a brand manager at Clorox before starting her own brand strategy consulting firm, Ironclad Brand Strategy. Her recent book, “Forging an Ironclad Brand: A Leader’s Guide” provides an accessible overview of what branding is (and isn’t) and offers a multitude of real world examples to demonstrate how strong brands help businesses make better decisions—from product design, to customer experience, to talent acquisition.

Topics include: the various meanings and incarnations of “brand,” the concept of brand as a relationship between a company and an audience (i.e., customers, candidates), the distinction between “functional” (rational) and higher order (emotional) benefits of a product or service, the connection between strong brands and Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, how strong brands serve as “north stars” to guide business decisions, the recent emergence of “employer brand” as a concept and its connection to an organization’s consumer brand, the value of having a singular unified brand for both employees and customers, the challenge of rehabilitating a brand with a poor reputation, the four P’s of positioning, and the importance of building strong connections between talent acquisition and marketing.

This week we welcome Hung Lee to the podcast. With more than 20 years of recruiting experience, Hung is the creator and curator of the wildly popular “Recruiting Brainfood” newsletter and community, and Founder of Workshape.io, a next generation matching service for tech talent.

Topics include: the origin and growth of Recruiting Brainfood, the historical nature of resumes, alternative approaches to visualizing the interests and goals of tech talent, the inherent subjectivity of words and the implications for recruiting, the switching cost associated with moving away from the resume, employee experience and career pathing, the shift to remote work and the digitization of workforce behavior, opportunities to automate the ~170 unique tasks of a recruiter, and the use of AI for sourcing, scheduling and sentiment analysis. 

This week we welcome Aaron Kraljev to the podcast. Aaron began his career at Wells Fargo, where he served as VP - Marketing Program Manager for the Student Banking Program, before transitioning in 2009 to lead the organization’s employer brand and candidate advocacy program. At the time, the concept of employer branding was still in its infancy, uniquely positioning Aaron to watch the industry evolve alongside his own career. Today Aaron brings his employer brand expertise to Fisher Investments, where he serves as Group Vice President for Talent Acquisition and  Employer Brand. 

Topics include: the recent history of employer branding, the connections between consumer marketing and talent acquisition, the challenge of translating talent acquisition concepts and nomenclature to marketing “speak” (and vice versa), the growing importance of data in employer branding functions, approaches to measuring ROI of employer brand investments, the tradeoffs of outsourcing talent acquisition efforts, the hidden costs of making bad hires and leaving positions unfilled, the future of job boards, and the value of a strong consumer brand for talent attraction.

This week we welcome Vivek Ravisankar, CEO of HackerRank, to the podcast. Vivek co-founded HackerRank in 2012 with the mission of using skills assessments to match developers with the right jobs. Since then, the company has helped more than 2,000 organizations go beyond résumés and ‘pedigree’ to find talent with proven programming skills. 

Topics include: the advantages and limitations of using résumés in hiring for technical roles, the issues with relying on educational or career ‘pedigrees’ as proxies for technical skill, the biases introduced when screening based on measures like GPA, why software development has been one of the last fields to “digitize” its screening processes, the role of emotions in making hiring decisions, the hidden costs of communication when hiring a remote workforce, the meaning of culture and the implications for remote workforces, the necessary ingredients for creating a thriving tech eco-system, how a city’s “vibe” dictates which industries will thrive there, the attrition problem facing engineering departments, and the ways in which technology can enable career development within an organization. 

This week we welcome Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami, to the podcast. Mayor Suarez made news in recent months with his Twitter activity promoting Miami as the next Silicon Valley. We sat down to discuss the tweet that went viral, how Miami is capitalizing on this “lightning in a bottle” moment, and the city’s efforts to build a workforce development pipeline for tech talent of the future.     

Topics include: the efforts of local governments to attract employers and employees, the concept of employer branding as applied to cities, Miami’s divergent approaches to tax and public safety policy, the role of a mayor as a city’s chief brand ambassador, Miami’s pitch for Amazon’s HQ2, the issue of gentrification, Miami’s ongoing campaign to re-brand itself as a new tech hub, and how the city is cultivating tech talent of the future with its “Miami for Everyone” initiative.  

This week we welcome Ashutosh Garg to the podcast. Ashutosh is CEO & Co-founder of Eightfold.ai, the first Talent Intelligence Platform to address the talent gap by harnessing the power of AI and search, and Founder of Bloomreach, a leading vendor for Digital Experience Platforms. Prior to founding these enterprises, Ashutosh managed Search and Personalization efforts at both Google and IBM Research. With 6000+ research citations, 50+ patents, and 35+ peer-reviewed research publications, Ashutosh is one of the world’s experts in machine learning.

Topics include: hiring for potential vs. hiring for past skills and experiences, the connection between hiring for potential and diversity, the limitations of resumes and their modern-day equivalents, the growing problem of attrition, the mismatched incentives between advertisers (employers) and job boards, the importance of viewing talent acquisition and talent management holistically, the concept of a “half-life” as applied to skills, the hyper-specialization of jobs, “good” attrition vs. “bad” attrition, augmented intelligence vs. artificial intelligence, the importance of transparency when deploying AI-powered solutions, the rise of remote work and its effects on pay parity and talent pools, and and employer branding for cities. 

This week we welcome Alysha M. Campbell to the podcast. With more than a decade of experience as both a recruiter and HR business partner, Alysha is currently Founder and Principal of CultureShift HR, where she helps companies utilize and engage their best talent while creating diverse and purposeful work environments that help businesses grow and thrive.

Topics include: the meaning of culture in an HR context, understanding culture as the “why” behind a business, the difference between company culture and employer brand, the “checkbox” mentality behind many HR initiatives, the effects of remote work on company culture, approaches to setting realistic goals for diversity and inclusion, the importance of building new pipelines for under-represented STEM talent, and how to measure progress on DE&I initiatives.