This week we welcome Todd Davis to the podcast. Todd’s career spans more than 25 years in talent acquisition, from his current role as a Global Talent Executive at IBM, to leadership roles at Ancestry, Amazon, and WarnerMedia.

Topics include: why HR lags behind other departments in analytic prowess, the limitations of focusing recruiting efforts on the top of the funnel (“we need more candidates”), approaches to up-skilling recruiters and hiring managers, how data analysis can reveal surprising opportunities in candidate sourcing and selection, the ways in which good data “tells its own story,” the good/fast/cheap triangle of project management, differing approaches to measuring candidate quality, how implementing consistent metrics across recruiters can lead to better insights, how to think about the apparent tension between analytics and the “human” side of talent acquisition, the role of intuition in making hire decisions, the value of conducting regular interviewer process audits, how flashy new pre-hire technology can distract from talent acquisition goals, why analytic dashboards have risen in prominence, and how dashboards focus our attention in good ways and bad.

This week we share our thoughts on the recent announcement regarding the Glassdoor/Indeed partnership, and discuss the results of a recent poll we conducted regarding LinkedIn’s Workforce Diversity Report.

Topics include: what we know about the new Glassdoor/Indeed partnership, the migration of Glassdoor sponsored jobs to Indeed, what is likely to happen to existing Glassdoor sponsored jobs packages, the implications of the partnership for job aggregators and the candidate experience, the future of Glassdoor (and Indeed) ratings, likely scenarios for the merging of reviews from both sites, the potential impact on staffing companies and RPO’s, unanswered questions about quick/easy apply and ATS integration, LinkedIn’s lack of minority representation in its leadership teams, how labor market statistics can provide a benchmark against which to measure D&I efforts, the connection between under-represented employee groups and educational attainment, the value of publicly sharing an organization’s D&I statistics, the difficulty of connecting minorities with forward-thinking employers, and how employer can meet under-represented “where they live.” 

Links

Press release: Glassdoor and Indeed Partner to Help Employers Hire More Efficiently

Article: 2019 LinkedIn Workforce Diversity Report

This week we start the show with a continuation of our ongoing discussion of candidate experience, and end with a deep-dive into our recent blog post, "Diversity and Inclusion Is Not an Employer Brand Strategy."

Topics include: how job aggregators negatively impact the candidate experience, why Glassdoor has paused its job board partnership program, why quantity has historically trumped quality with regard to job board traffic, alternate job board revenue models that prioritize candidate experience, the four key qualities of a strong EVP, why diversity and inclusion is not a basis for a differentiated employer brand, how strong EVP's are inherently exclusionary, the apparent tension between a strong EVP and D&I efforts, and the question of whether D&I is a "table stakes" dimension of employer brands.

Links

Blog post: Diversity and Inclusion Is Not an Employer Brand Strategy
Book: Give & Get Employer Branding: Repel the Many and Compel the Few with Impact, Purpose and Belonging

This week we welcome John Ambrosino to the podcast. John is Chief Employment Officer at Employing.us, and brings more than fifteen years of HR expertise to the table, ranging from payroll, to candidate experience, to reputation management.

Topics include: why the “black hole” of candidate experience remains a persistent challenge, how candidate experience expectations and challenges vary by organization and role, the importance of establishing recruiter performance metrics specific to candidate experience, how poor HR tech can undermine even the best recruiters’ efforts, the challenges posed by having too many candidates, how strong employer brands can improve candidate experience (and vice versa), how to define a compelling mission statement for high volume recruitment, the blessing and curse of employee review sites, how average ratings obscure crucial differences that exist between (and within) departments, and how diverse employee personalities (via testimonial videos) interact with an organization's overarching employer brand.

Connect with John Ambrosino:
LinkedIn
The 4 Minute Podcast 

This week we discuss Gem’s recent “2020 Recruiting Trends Report.”

Topics include: the continued dominance of LinkedIn as a sourcing tool, the lack of basic email click and open tracking among recruiting teams, why a majority of TA leaders don’t think they need to understand “marketing” to do their jobs effectively, the connection between employer brand and marketing, the challenge of finding quality candidates when speed (e.g., time to hire) and cost are often the dominant metrics against which recruiters are measured, the prevalence and future growth of CRM’s, the top initiatives for TA leaders for the remainder of 2020, and the growing importance of data-driven recruitment marketing practices.

This week we welcome Brad Markis to the podcast. Brad is an Instructor of People Analytics at the University of Toronto and a Director at McLean & Company.

Topics include: why Fortune 500 organizations struggle to deploy sophisticated HR analytics programs, the importance of using business outcomes to guide your HR analytics strategy, why dashboards have exploded in popularity in recent years, the ways in which chatbots are under leveraged within talent acquisition teams, why HR often lags behind other departments in its analytic education and prowess, how AI/machine learning has caused many organizations to overlook time-tested analytic models and approaches, recommended starting points for organizations interested in “resetting” their people analytics strategies, and how to select a framework to bridge the gap between analytic strategy and tactical execution.

Brad's LinkedIn
Brad’s Course: People Analytics - University of Toronto
Book Mentioned: The New HR Analytics: Predicting the Economic Value of Your Company's Human Capital Investments

This week we discuss our recent blog post, “Employer Branding for Entry Level Positions: How Your Most Satisfied Employees Should Guide Your Strategy” as well as a recent article by Bas van de Haterd entitled, “Future TA Skill: Ethic Advocates.”

Topics include: the special considerations when developing an EVP for high volume recruiting, how Maslow’s hierarchy of needs should inform your employer brand strategy, using surveys to create “personas” of satisfied employees to enhance recruitment marketing messaging and targeting, the distinction between developing personas based on attitudes (e.g., NPS) and behaviors (e.g., tenure), the effects of record unemployment and the stimulus on high volume recruiting, which recruiter tasks are best “outsourced” to technology, how to use AI to elevate the role of the recruiter, and the questions talent acquisition leaders should be asking of HR tech providers. 

This week we welcome our first guest to the show, Janine Nicole Dennis, Chief Innovations Officer of Talent Think Innovations. Janine’s career spans more than fifteen years in HR and Talent Acquisition and has taken her through the world of pharmaceuticals, healthcare, staffing and R&D. Her deep industry experience, combined with her upbringing as the child of a black NYPD sergeant, affords her a unique and invaluable perspective about the TA challenges facing police departments at this heightened moment of awareness. Janine first shared her thoughts on race and police relations in a 2015 piece entitled, “Dear NYPD: You Need a Talent Management Overhaul.” In this episode, we discuss the article, what has (and hasn’t) changed since its publication, and the lessons talent acquisition leaders in any business can glean from her experience.   

Topics include: the challenges of attracting black candidates given the historical frayed trust between the police and communities of color, the issues that arise from assigning rookie officers to patrol disadvantaged neighborhoods, the problem of police officers living outside the communities they patrol, the difference between “compliance” and good faith D&I efforts, the true meaning of “inclusivity,” and what it means to create a culture that not only attracts diverse talent, but allows it to thrive.

This week we discuss our recently published HR Digital Transformation: 2020 Trends deck, with particular focus on how the pandemic is accelerating the pace of change for organizations of all sizes. Topics include: automation of recruitment team activities, gaining better insights on talent analytics, the importance of investing in employer brand, using social media to drive candidate engagement, and new approaches to improving the employee and candidate experience. We also discuss a recent article on HR Dive about how COVID is changing the pre-hire tech stack. 

This week we discuss why the term ‘recruitment marketing agency’ has such a negative connotation in the talent acquisition world. We share our views of a flawed compensation model, and our own client frustrations that led us to start Change State. 

Then we unpack Marty's own blog post, 'Candidate Experience and the Hidden Costs of Cheap Job Seeker Traffic,’ to highlight how the search for the cheapest 'job seeker click' can produce a scavenger hunt for job seekers, creating hidden costs in terms of candidate experience and employer brand.