In this special episode we record from the floor of the International Festival of HR - Unleash America. We needed a special guest co-host Jason Putnam who is one of the most connected and respected individual in this space to help us breakdown this impressive event.

Highlights:

TA Practitioners Series

With a TA team of 80 across Canada, Nicole and Harneet share with us why KPMG is the best place to work if you are a recruiter.

• Hiring Leaders who understand the value of TA is no accident. With Nicole flying the plane and Harneet as co-pilot, Hiring Managers are fully onboard with investing in TA. 

• Early talent, campus, internal mobility, alumni, sourcing for domestic and international, this team does it all.

• KPMG’s pandemic response was to upskill the team by investing in better technology to allow Recruiters to spend time where it matters - with candidates.

• When offer acceptance rates declined they built their own offer Playbook to enhance negotiation skills. 

• If by the end of this episode, you aren't on their careers page, then you weren't listening!

Another germ makes its way thru the Boudreau household. Meanwhile, shares in Lysol products are a sure investment for anyone with school age children!

In The News:

• Another CEO scolds staff on a town hall to stop their pity party if they don't get a bonus, while her bonus swells to $1.29MM. How dare you think of your own families well being!?! Now get back to work

• Mega merger in Canada with 2 telecom giants merging with the promise to create jobs that no one wants; 3000 call centre staff to take your complaint about cable TV.

• LinkedIn goes legit by offering a free service to verify you are a real person and not another fake profile trying to sell you SEO services.

Tip of the Week

• Talk your top candidate out of taking the job. Drop the hype and give all the gory details of what’s not to love about working at your company.

Recruiting Insights

• Indeed walks back their plan to muscle customers into PPA and PPAS. 

• Full circle, the first quarter of 2023 is very similar to 2019. A positive sign if you over look inflation.

• Tech companies are throwing money at PhDs in the AI space. They could be cutting themselves off of future talent.

• Advertising benefit for low paying job is slowing while retirement benefits are hot in the high paying roles 

Hearing from the front lines TRF’s Practitioner Series Nancy Drees CEO of Vacare Group joins us.

Nancy took an arrow through the heart in her first professional recruiting job. She shares her journey into recruiting and why she started her own, very successful, firm. 

Taking the best part of recruiting in a staffing company and the best parts of being an inhouse recruiter, Nancy shares her light bulb moment that became Vacare Group. 

Highlights

• Tips to grow a remote only engineering team

• Emerging markets are not all that different if you take the time to understand what is important to the candidate

• ‘You simply cant replace humans’ the robots are not coming for the biggest part of a recruiter’s job

• Engineers love to talk to other Engineers, recruiting tips of when to get out of the way and let the magic happen

This week on The Recruitment Flex:

• UnLeash America Events - Watching the water cannon display at the Bellagio when you’re high may sound like fun, but only one of us are going

• After work plans? Save the date: CRNG meet up on May 11, 2023 in Calgary 

• Shelley is nominated for the 2023 RBC Women Entrepreneur Awards

Tip of the Week

• Cost Per Applicant is coming to Canada. Start planning for it now

Recruiting Insights

• The graduating class of 2023 fill find the world flipped on its head with companies offering $90K per year for truck drivers and $60K a year for MBAs

• Throw Back - 20 years ago when waves of layoffs were coming,  How did HR and Recruiting arm wrestle for who gets cut & who stays

• Show us your racist hiring practices! Arthur Grand Technologies will never recover from their job ad blunder.

• Recruitment metric trends to watch for 2023, our top 2 favorites OAR and Time to Offer. 

James Ellis Author of Employer Branding for Small Business

We are big fans of James and were pleased to have a preview of his new book. Employer Branding for Small Business : Your blueprint to compete for talent against anyone.

Available April 4, 2023 on Amazon

• Incredibly entertaining and always teaching, some snippets of our conversation with James.

• Social media and employer brand don't mix

• The #1 skill of an Employer Brand person is the ability to influence.

• What would Star Wars be without Darth Vader? Tell the whole story of what its like to work at your company. 

• The truth about your company career pages and why they go stale.

• Even your offer letter needs to embrace your employer brand

• Activating your brand and where to start.

We Cover:

• In more depressing news, we see layoffs at Canadian darling, Talent.com with a 25% reduction in their workforce

• Who knew that MacDonald’s had 150,000 corporate employees? Laying people off remotely was a choice!

• What’s old is new again. The title of CIO is outdated and hardly quantifies the role. Same with CHRO, the latest trend in what to call the top person in HR. 

Tip of the Week

• Proving age discrimination is tough! Recruiters need to choose their words carefully when declining candidates or they could end up in a world of hurt.

Recruiting Insights

• Not everyone wants to work for the high risk and high reward type of companies. In fact, one third of workers prefer dependable, stable employers.

• Branding your company culture as entrepreneurial is kind of a bad idea. Considering that most people who fit in this category were teenage vandals. 

• Changes in the last few years in job seeker behaviour, have HR teams spending 25% more of their time doing recruitment work. Time to hire your recruiters back?

• Doing it right - CANVA has no plans to lay people off; their hiring was well thought out and each role intentionally filled. 3 cheers for them! 

Alex Murphy of JobSync

As Co-Founder and CEO, Alex’s career in HR Tech led him to the creation of JobSync. Making the complex application process simple yet remaining compliant. Partnering with job boards and most ATSs, they make the process fluid, easy and beyond.

• The big industry news, Indeed laying off 15% of their global workforce; Alex had high praise for Chris Hyams as ‘The Masterclass on how to write a letter regarding layoffs’.

• Speculation and some warning signs that layoffs were coming

• Google job ads - Can you move any slower?

• TA Leaders concerns and opportunities

• Prediction for 2023, we have become resilient to bad news and Black Swan events. 

Florida tourism welcomes the Boudreau family! The ultimate family vacation, baseball, sun, lego and Peppa pig!

Join us for the Canadian Recruiting Networking group- the next in-person meet-up is May 11 for Calgary!  

James Ellis has a new book launching on April 4 - Serge and Shelley were given an early copy to read, so we can say, it's a great addition to Talent Chooses You.

Like watching a great movie, we want to see how this will turn out! Will the Americans ban TikTok? Will they continue to embarrass themselves with their out-of-touch questions?

Tip of the Week

LOXO.co is a great idea for anyone looking to hang out a shingle as a solo recruiter or small companies looking at an ATS/CRM - it has a free version!

Recruiting Insights of the Week

• Starting to write a job ad is difficult for a lot of recruiters, LinkedIn hopes to leverage AI to help you.

• Hiring the best people as you find them - not based on a staffing requisition - the big 5 accounting firms do this well and they may be on to something great

• PepsiCo put their money where its mouth is with its DEI commitments. Paying up to $100 per day for caregiver expenses, paying for CDL training - and it's working they have the numbers to prove it. Well done

Shelley shares that she thinks Anthony Kiedis will fall in love with her when he sees her in the audience next week. You will have to wait another couple of weeks to find out!

This week we cover:

Tip of the week:

• Check this cool free tool that real time analyses jobs on Google for Jobs and gives you insight on job titles being used, percentage of remote jobs, publishers etc.. https://rta.jobdescription.ai/

Recruitment Insights