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Max Armbruster: Hello, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Ambruster, and today on the show we're going to talk about hiring remotely and

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Max Armbruster: how do you do that

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Max Armbruster: at scale. I'm delighted to welcome to the show Liam Martin. Liam is the Co-founder of Staff.com, Time Doctor which… which helps employers hire employees from anywhere in the world, and and and help manage their time the or the organizer of the run running remotes.

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Max Armbruster: conference, which has been going around for a few years and great timing on that Liam and then and, recently, you took that running remote title and you slapped it on a book.

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Liam Martin: That is true.

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Max Armbruster: And so, yes, well we'll we'll talk about that book. Thanks for coming on Liam, and looking forward to… to picking your brain on how to hire remotely.

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Liam Martin: Yeah thanks for having me.

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Liam Martin: I think that hiring remotely is actually one of those issues that hasn't really been addressed all that much during what I like to call the

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Liam Martin: pandemic panic period of remote work, the last two and a half years, because no one really had to learn how to play because they were literally just transitioning their teams to a remote work model, and now I think we're actually going to see a lot of work being done in this space.

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Max Armbruster: Yeah yeah then then last year, the big theme was the great resignation.

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Max Armbruster: And I don't know if the numbers have come in, yet on whether people have been able to retain their remote workers, but certainly i'm hearing a lot of people saying

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Max Armbruster: it's harder to hire now because people refuse non remote work so there's all segments of the population that refuses to come back in.

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Liam Martin: Yeah there's a statistic that I heard actually when I was speaking at a conference a couple months ago and I'm going to

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Liam Martin: pair it it here may or may not be true, but supposedly more people quit in the month of June last year in the United States than history of the United States,

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Liam Martin: which is pretty scary statistic when you think about it, so many people quitting their jobs, and when you look at the actual reasons as to why people are doing it,

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Liam Martin: it all ties back to remote work, undoubtedly, it is fundamentally easier

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Liam Martin: to enter and leave a job now with remote work than it was in the past, so it's even more important to be able to retain that talent and I think there's a bunch of strategies that people can implement to be able to do that, but before you even do that need to actually hire them.

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Liam Martin: A little bit more of a complicated process. Yeah hiring the right people you know I got some counterintuitive perspectives towards that.

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Max Armbruster: Okay, great well before we dive into those perhaps for for those who don't know Time Doctor and Running Remote, could you give us like the the one minute overview of what you do.

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Liam Martin: Sure, so time doctors, a time tracking tool for remote teams that company's been in operation for 10, 11

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Liam Martin: years.

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Liam Martin: We effectively lovingly call it fitbit for work, and it really came out of the problem that I was having which was, I actually had a business before Time Doctor, which was a Tutoring business.

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Liam Martin: And I couldn't actually measure how long a tutor work with a student, it was creating a big problem instead of that business. So Time Doctor scratch that itch. The second business,

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Liam Martin: which was born out of basically our core mission statement which is trying to help

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Liam Martin: the world transition towards remote work was running remote, and we did one of our team retreats in Baraka, which is a very small island, it's the party island in the Philippines and we we get to like oh it's a great spot, isn't it?

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Max Armbruster: yeah yeah.

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Max Armbruster: Great great fun.

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Liam Martin: Lots of lots of red horse that we drink there, I think I got very, very drunk at the end of that actual team retreat and.

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Liam Martin: The issue that we had was there was so much information on how to hire a virtual assistant.

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Liam Martin: Or how to be a digital nomad but we didn't want to know those things. We wanted to know how do we get to 250 people, 500 people, 1000 people, 10,000 people.

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Liam Martin: As a remote first organization, a lot of remote companies and since you've been remote from the inception, you probably know this.

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Liam Martin: They have a bit of a chip on their shoulder where they're kind of seen is like lifestyle businesses right like oh,

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Liam Martin: that's a cute little half a million dollar a year business that you have, I hope that it goes well, as opposed to really.

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Liam Martin: The incredibly fast growing segment of the market that I think it is today, I actually think promote first organizations

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Liam Martin: are going to be the majority of hyper growth tech companies within the next five years, and so we're really frustrated on this. There was no information and I just said okay, let's do a ready shoot aim philosophy. Let's just get on you.

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Max Armbruster: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Ambruster and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show Julia DeBari who is

Max Armbruster: a designer turned into a recruiter of designers, and we’ll get to her story in a minute, and I hope to ask Julia about how to hire designers and how to hire them in a way which opens your talent pool and opens the door to as many qualified talents as possible.

Max Armbruster: So Julia well, welcome to… welcome to the show.

Julia DeBari: Thank you very much Max, I appreciate you having me.

Max Armbruster: It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. We… we got connected because I saw some of Julia's work online where she… she explained some of for UX and design work. And… and Julia like many, many recruiters kind of stumbled into recruitment and talent acquisition. I suppose bit late in your career.

Max Armbruster: So it's only been… you've only been a full time recruiter for less than a year, right?

Julia DeBari: Five months.

Max Armbruster: Five months. So well,

Max Armbruster: that's the hardest part probably.

Max Armbruster: Hope… hope you're hanging in there and but yeah how did you end up… Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background and… and then perhaps how you ended up in talent acquisition.

Julia DeBari: Sure. Sure. Yeah, so as Mike said then in UX design actually 22 years, primarily in the San Francisco Silicon Valley area. Most of my life, I recently moved up to the Pacific Northwest.

Julia DeBari: And I had the normal career, you know, go up the career ladder and then I decided that wasn't for me, and so I switched to teaching UX design for five years.

Julia DeBari: And I got a little burnt out, and switched to design program management for a year and felt like I just wasn't having the same impact that I was able to in the past.

Julia DeBari: So yes, I decided to try recruiting to see how the sausage is made, so to speak.

Julia DeBari: As I was doing education, I saw so many students struggling to find that first job after graduating. And I just really wanted to understand the hiring process and more detail, so I took the plans and jumped right in and been doing it for five months.

Max Armbruster: All right, all right. And you're… you're helping… are you able to help those young people today find jobs? Or is it like every other field? Nobody wants to hire them straight out of school. We want them to have like three, four years to basically to have their…

Max Armbruster: To… to have all their training, the initial training, paid for by someone else.

Julia DeBari: Yes, now it's just like that.

Julia DeBari: In my recruiting role, I got one junior graphic design position and I've gotten 500 applicants in 24 hours.

Julia DeBari: That I get to go through.

Julia DeBari: So yeah it's really tough, just like many other industries, design mostly wants senior people.

Julia DeBari: Frustrating. And many people out of school do a lot of contract or freelance work for a few years before a company is willing to take a chance on them.

Max Armbruster: Yeah, it's a great way to at least get something started, go build a portfolio, you go on Upwork, you take the odd gig, and then adds up right? I mean,

Max Armbruster: Yeah, people put Upwork on their resume all the time now.

Max Armbruster: Good enough for me, actually. As an employer who works with a remote distributed team, I'd be happy if somebody spends five years on Upwork, as long as they got good credentials.

Julia DeBari: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's sort of your only option to waive the processes right now.

Max Armbruster: Well Julia, I'm thinking about these…

Max Armbruster: these young people who don't have a long portfolio and these 500 candidates. Did you know… did you come up with a process that works and that… that you could recommend for others who are hiring designers?

Julia DeBari: Um, I don't think I've quite finalized the process. I think I've made some improvements.

Julia DeBari: But the thing is the improvements are mostly just me. I'm still trying to scale those improvements out to other people.

Julia DeBari: And I think one thing, so when I was in UX design, I was a manager and hiring.

Julia DeBari: And I was much more open to mentoring, whoever the new person on the team was. And I know there’s a lot of hiring managers who are just too busy and don't have the time, which is why they're looking for seniors.

Julia DeBari: So I think what's positive in the industry is there are a lot of design apprenticeship programs

Julia DeBari: popping up where people can join and get the ongoing mentorship well working, if they can get someone to take a chance on them. And I think that's really important to be like, I have a regular steady mentor who I talk with and reviews my work.

Julia DeBari: And I think that helps when you can bring that to the table when you're interviewing.

Max Armbruster: And that does sound…Oh, you mean the candidates would…Oh, no, you mean the recruiter of the candidate should…

Julia DeBari: Oh, the candidate. So, something I like advocate

Julia DeBari: for when I get junior candidates is to tell them like step by step, how to like get a regular mentor, and like how to get by.

Max Armbruster: Get a mentor and bring that to the discussion. Bring out to…to the interview.

Julia DeBari: Yeah.

Max Armbruster: Oh yeah, brilliant! I could use a mentor from…from my designers. That's…that's not a dig. It’s just to say we know we're a small business and we don't…we don't necessarily have the layer of senior mentorship available in house. 

Julia DeBari: We need to take that conversation offline and give me some

Julia DeBari: free consulting advice.

Max Armbruster: Thank you. I will…I will take you up on that. And so thinking about the…the mistakes we want to avoid when…when hiring designers.

Max Armbruster: What are…what are some…I mean you must have…you must have hired a few in your days when…when you were on the other side, when you're managing your design.

Max Armbruster: Can…can you run…you know, kind of walk…walk me back through some o...

Max: Hello, welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. And I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, I'm delighted to welcome to the show, Fahad Subzwari, who is Director of Shared Services for ibex. in Pakistan. If you don't know ibex., you're not in the BPO industry, because it's a global player with operations, and I think in Africa and Europe, in Latin America, in the Philippines, and Pakistan, all over the world, and they've got thousands of people, and they hire about 8000 people a year in Pakistan. And the reason Fahad is on today's show is because he was recently awarded an award at the Global BPO TA Awards for the Most Inspiring TA Leader. It was the popular vote on LinkedIn, with hundreds of people voting from all over the world and some fierce competition pegging Fahad against, I think, some people, some stiff competition coming from the Philippines. But yeah, I guess Pakistan can be proud, they pushed you over the edge and got you the award. And well, good to meet you again, Fahad. Welcome to the podcast.

Fahad: Thank you, Max, thank you for the introduction. It was a great event, by the way, I enjoyed a lot. And yeah, hopefully not blushing right now.

Max: Oh, wow. That was a few weeks ago already. So, I'm sure the blush has gone by now. But it was great to see. My marketing team, you know, this could be a tip that could be applied for recruiters, my marketing team talked to me about doing a competition on LinkedIn. And I thought, oh, it's gonna make too much noise. I don't want all this attention. And then we saw in a matter of two weeks, the number of followers on our LinkedIn page, which is really hard to get, it went up by 50% in like two weeks, considering we’re a 7-year-old or 8-year-old company is quite a rise. So, yeah, basically, marketing was right and I was wrong on this one. 

Fahad: That was a great idea. Brilliant idea. What I've noticed is that these kinds of events now even on digital medium, you have now ATL and BTL activities at the market here. So, this is kind of a big deal activity you do and it does pay off and it's great. Whoever came up with the idea, kudos.

Max: Yeah, and then it got to the award, too. So, double bonus and an opportunity to talk a little bit about ibex. And before we go there, perhaps tell us how did you end up in the beautiful world of talent acquisition?

Fahad: Okay, so I've been associated with the BPO industry for almost 20 years now, 19 plus. I started with the operations side of it. And before that, I was in hospitality industry. So, in about nine years ago, I was given an opportunity to run the Shared Services, which started with different control functions, then the recruitment and training was also added to it. So, it was a turning point in 2014. And that's when we decided that with the global BPO focus increasing towards Pakistan, we need to have changes in our different support functions. One of them was recruitment and marketing side of it. So, we started from there. And it's been an innovative year, year after year. The changes are definitely, I mean, division was right, for [unintelligible] a year that changes are happening very fast. And we actually still are learning and, you know, change is a constant factor every year for us. So, that's how I got into TA.

Max: How big was recruiting volume in 2014 when you got started in Pakistan?

Fahad: So, if I just speak about international, it was probably around a couple of hundred people in a quarter, you know. Now we're taking about 4000 a year in just international demand. 8000 overall in BK, you know, so it's a big chunk.

Max: You kind of came into recruitments not the traditional way. You came from operations and kind of running a good shop and making sure you have a high productivity organization. And you didn't have to sit through thousands of job interviews, recruiting and interviewing candidates. You were able to skip that step and kind of go straight into the orchestrator role. 

Fahad: Yeah, well, so I did have some experience on this in terms of when has been decided to always involved in the recruitment process. So, the interview and mechanics of interview and the profiling aspect was already there as a requirement aspect, right. But yes, from the TO workshop itself, it was not there, right. So, the business experience did help me, the operational experience still help me run an efficient workshop, develop the processes. I'm a process guy. So, it helped me build the processes that were missing. The framework, required overhaul, the past experience helped me build that. So, it is not a typical [unintelligible] that's for sure. I mean, that's the disconnect that, I guess, comes when we look at the BPO industry recruitment process, and the ATSes available in the market, right. And that's where I think the normal recruitment process doesn't hang up the BPO industry recruitment process, in my opinion, just because of the sheer volume that is there.

Max: I agree. And I think, for having met a number of professionals who came to talent acquisition, for the BPO industry in a high-volume world that did not come from HR, I have found that they can be very effective. And because they're not tied to certain practices, and they don't have preconceived notion on how the information will flow. I know that ibex is one of those companies and there's, actually you're in the minority, but one of the few big companies that have decided to build their own ATS, applicant tracking software, as opposed to purchasing a solution from one of the big vendors like Workday, or SuccessFactors or iCIMS. That's a decision that as a technologist myself, I've often challenged and said, No, that's, that's crazy. Why don't you use what the leaders have already built? I'm sure that that's been a consideration for you guys. So, I really like to dig into that topic a little bit. Because I think we're gonna find some common ground on why the ATS is not great for what you're doing, and why you felt the need to build something in house.

Fahad: Okay, so two major reasons. One, was the disconnect that I feel is there in terms of support for the industry, I'll explain that aspect more in detail. The other is obviously the cost factor. And that was there. We had the leverage of having in house development team and utilizing them. So, it was an initially into [unintelligible], it was a no brainer that we should build our own. The main aspect that I spoke to you about earlier, the disconnect, was that the solutions that were available, they were only evaluating one aspect of the whole framework, right, which was the when the candidate is either assessed at any of the point of the process, right?

Max: And that’s the stage of the process where they're already at the assessment stage.

Fahad: Exactly, right. There's a communication aspect of it too. Whether people are talking to them, or engaging them or, you know, monitoring the… in the digital age, it's more on the social media now than anywhere else. Right. So, that communication aspect and it's monitoring is missing in most of the ATS and, for me, it is hand in hand, you can escape a lot of processes of physical on all the assessments by having more of a communication side improved or integrated, whether it's, you know, WhatsApp, Facebook, Zoom, Skype, ...

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, delighted to introduce to you, who don't know, Mr. Alex Murphy, CEO and Founder of JobSync. JobSync is a technology partner that can help to speed up the application process and improve the candidate experience, notably with marketplaces and job boards, and its very cool technology, which is trying to connect two worlds, marketplaces and ATSes. I'll let Alex explain it a lot better than me. But we'll talk about job board and about Facebook and how the sourcing world is changing. Alex, welcome to the show. 

Alex: Max, thanks for having me. Much appreciated. 

Max: So, did I represent what JobSync does decently or you want to take another stab at it? 

Alex: No, I think you did. I mean, we are, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is we're trying to help companies, specifically employers, create more efficient recruiting processes, right. So, it sounds fairly generic, most of us are trying to do that. The way we go about trying to do that is we are connecting the various systems that they use in the recruitment and talent acquisition process. So, as you said, between job boards and applicant tracking systems, this means enabling the candidates to apply while they're on the job site. So, whether that's on Indeed, and Indeed Apply, ZipRecruiter, Zip Apply, or anywhere where they may be, to use the applications natively on those job board platforms or job board marketplaces, and to not have to leave, but for the employer to still get all the questions that they need to have answered in that application, and then delivered directly into the applicant tracking system, just within a few seconds. And then the recruiter can start the recruitment process immediately, as opposed to waiting for some period of time or recognizing and seeing a huge fall off. So, the end of the day, we're helping companies get more out of the recruitment advertising spend than they were previously. 

Max: And to put a visual on it, I mean, I'm thinking back to the days when I was a jobseeker, I was unemployed, a long time ago, and I would go to job boards like Monster, and I would have applied to 10, 20 jobs a day because, you know, I needed a job. And in that context, I would, of course, be more likely to complete an application if I didn't have to bounce around from website to website. And so, I think job boards have now recognized that and this is what you're describing with the Indeed Apply, Zip Apply, and others. That's the candidate experience improvement in a nutshell, right? 

Alex: Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's a lot of talk about candidate experience, there's actually an award, right, the Candidate Experience Awards, the candies. And what that's really gets that side of the world kind of gets hyper focused on is what is the experience like after I apply? And unfortunately, for a long period of time, there hasn't been enough focus on the applicant experience. Right? What is the experience before I apply? Or will I even apply? An interesting kind of side note, a recruiting benefit that we have is we talk about in our job ads for when we're recruiting new people that come work with us, we talk about fixing this application experience. And we're speaking to the people that are literally going through this really bad application experience, at which point, they get really excited about being part of the solution to this problem, because pretty much every job seeker has had this experience where they are on a job site, they leave the job site to go to apply to a job. They're viewing the job for a second time because they already viewed it on the job site. They view it on the company's career site. They're then redirected to the applicant tracking system, they probably been presented with two different places where they had to sign up for some newsletter, join a talent community, they finally get to the applicant tracking system. They click Apply for the third time. And now they're presented with a login form. And they're kind of like, what is this? A login form? I haven't created an account. And that's an immediate path for that candidate to leave and go to TikTok and start watching videos, right? Like nobody wants to go through that experience at all. And so, when we communicate to prospective candidates ourselves about fixing that, it resonates pretty highly because everybody is having that same really terrible experience as an applicant. 

Max: Talent acquisition is always running behind on a smooth experience, but yeah. Of course, in 2022, where everything goes so fast, and you can get everything done and delivered to your home in just a couple of clicks, you would want that application to be just the same, if not better. And well, before we talk about the market, Alex, how did you end up creating JobSync to begin with? It’s an insider's trick to activate JobSync in a booming marketplace, kind of working at the frontier of different tech giants. So, you need to be an insider to do what you're doing. So, I gotta ask you how you ended up in that area. 

Alex: So, I have a co-founder, John Bell, he was the founder and CEO of a company called Boxwood Technology that he sold in 2014. Boxwood, was a job board software platform primarily for associations, they had over a thousand associations and he had started that back in the 90s. And I actually credit John, I think, with the real observation about what happened between I'll say 2002 and 2012, which was the experience for applying to jobs changed fundamentally. In 2002, virtually all applications online took place on job boards, and the application was delivered by email to a recruiter, and in the early 2000s, and then kind of really taking hold by about 2006 and 2007 in the US market, in particular, with respect to the EEOC questions, companies started to require the application process to take place on their ATS. And what John observed was this massive decline in conversion rates, and what used to be 40% conversion rates or better, meaning, if 100 people viewed my job posting 40 People would apply, had tanked to sub 10%. And in a lot of cases, with really arduous applicant tracking systems, that conversion rate might be 1%. So, one out of 100 people would apply. And so, he observed that. In parallel, I had been job.com as a co-founder there in the early 2000s, was at Beyond for eight years, as part of the traffic and business development teams, was observing the same thing happening as from the operator side, that the product that we're selling is deteriorating, right, like we are not able to generate the applicants that we once were. So, fast forward, and I left Beyond John started a company, and we brought a bunch of different ideas together in 2019 around creating this integration platform that was focused on connecting the job boards and applicant tracking systems to make it so that we could emulate the application on the job board that was taking place on the ATS, so as to improve conversion rates, and on Indeed, their data shows that you get a 4X increase, meaning 400% improvement in applications. That's like a 400% improvement in your recruitment when you return on ad spend. That has massive implications in terms of not just your ROI, which is great, but really, at the end of the day, the thing that you're really getting more of is you're getting access to candidates that would otherwise drop out, which typically are going to be the most sought-after candidates. And so not only…

Max: Candidates like ...

Max: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to meet again somebody I met a few years back in Cape Town, South Africa, Rudé Alley who is the Managing Director and Founder of the Surgo Group, which is a BPO business or contact center business. Feel free to requalify that, Rudé. Based in Cape Town. Welcome to the show.

Rudé: Thank you so much, Max. Thank you for the introduction. You had it spot-on. Surgo is a business process outsourcer based in South Africa.

Max: We recently reconnected because Surgo was in competition for the Global BPO Talent Acquisition Awards on the category of the Most Inclusive BPO and voted by a panel of esteemed judges from the BPO industry. Surgo won the votes of the judges in competition with many global BPO brands. I think in part of recognition that Surgo may not be a globally recognizable brand just yet, but you don't need to wait until you're a giant corporation to start investing in inclusion. I think that's what won their hearts. We were one of the sponsors for this event, I've congratulated you and your team before, but tell us, me and our audience, what diversity means for Surgo in the context of your company's history and the community in which you work. 

Rudé: Thank you for the introduction and also winning the award with Talkpush and BPESA was really an incredible thing for us. We were very excited. The whole group just got together, and we were watching this online, and we were very happy to bring the award home with us because I know that we are not necessarily a very big recognized name internationally, but it means a lot to us, especially locally because we have been on the outsourcing industry for about 12 years. Surgo has been in operation for about 8 and winning an award like this is really good for us in terms of scratching more visibility in terms of what diversity really means in the workplace. So for Surgo… [overlap]. Sorry, Max

Max: It's so common for people to talk about diversity and inclusion that it almost feels like it's in everyone’s mission statement by now, especially in the BPO industry which is traditionally very inclusive. And so I suppose it's hard to differentiate that factor as an employer brand because everybody says they're very inclusive. My subjective opinion is that actually most BPOs are very inclusive generally.

Rudé: That's very true. I think that the key was in ensuring that you're creating a work environment that is such inclusive for a diverse workforce. It's one thing to say that you're a diversified company and that the employment equity or affirmation or transformation is one of your key areas of development, that you focus there on that. But does it really boil it down to the race of your business? Do you have the buy-ins in your senior executive teams, your manager to frontline managers? I think that the idea behind diversity in the workplace is all about inclusion, and that's probably the key that we'’re looking for when we're talking about diversity. South Africa is such a diverse country already that if you don't have a diverse workforce, I'm always asking the question is why don't you have? You have to look so hard and to not have a diverse workforce than to just really accept and embrace the diversity that's already in the country. 

Max: Yeah, absolutely. If I remember my trips there, it's people from all over the world and all the neighboring countries working there. Yeah, it'll be a melting pot. I'm thinking of my first trips in the Philippines in the BPO sector, I also saw the LGBT community heavily represented. It was an eye-opener for a country which is a traditional, Catholic country to have an industry so prominent and where inclusion is so strong. How is the South Africa brand helping your business on the international scene when you're promoting Surgo and the talents that you have access to?

Rudé: You know when it comes to diversity and having a diverse workforce, I go to employers for our client’s competitors as established in inclusive workclass [unintelligible] employees. So we're looking at some stats, according to the Lloyd's, diverse companies enjoy 2.3 times higher a cash flow per employee. Gartner found that inclusive teams improved their performance by up to 30% in higher diversity environment, and in a BGC study, companies with a diverse management team has had a 19% increase in revenue compared to the list of its counterparts. And I think that any investor would probably be very interested to look at companies that have this because if you're looking at the stats, the numbers speak for itself. 

So, you're looking at increased productivity, improved creativity, profits reduced attrition, which we spoke about earlier before we started the podcast, and then improved company reputation, a wider range of skills, and an improved cultural insight. So it really just makes sense to focus on having a diversified workforce. But, the thing is it's not necessarily a strategy for us, it's really just about lives. It's part of what a company and a country is about. It's about the diversity. The key is really to just embrace that and then to ensure that you can have workspaces that is conducive for a diversified group. For example, if you have people from very poor areas that don't usually have access to certain skills and education coming into your workforce, what are you doing as a company to ensure that that person is successful in your workplace. You can't just necessarily exclude those marginalized groups either. People from very poor, very far, essentially from very rural areas, what are we doing for those type of people?

Max: You were talking about Impostor Syndrome as something that you can feel as a business owner. Of course, you can feel as an impostor even if you're not a business owner, if you're an entry-level, new in the workplace, particularly if you come from a family that never had a white-collar job for instance. Perhaps that's the strongest way in which you can be inclusive, as an encouragement to people that nothing is gonna hold them back. Why don't you try to be the boss, take the manager's job, and promote from within people who themselves couldn't articulate the ambition if left to their anxiety of their cultural background.

Rudé: Absolutely. I'm actually getting goosebumps as we're talking about this because it's something that I'm very passionate about and it's something that is such a prevalent thing in our country. We're a third-world country, even though South Africa has been voted as the number one outsourcing destination in the world, but when we have people who were going into the workplace, we have people coming from very poor areas. I think that as part of your talent management strategy, it is also important to establish a sense of belonging for everybody. I've been in call centers working as a group agent management before where people come to work, they don't have food to eat, they're all wearing the same clothes three days in row. They're poor. And that money that they're making they are taking it right back to their homes and they're feeding their grandmothers and grandfathers and their uncles and their aunts and their children. So, that is a very very important point that you have raised because of course, I even suffer from Impostor Syndrome, and I have no need to suffer from Impostor Syndrome, but when you have people from those backgrounds coming in and mixing with also a diverse group of p...

Max : Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Alison Kaizer who is head of talent at Lunchbox, and Lunchbox is a company that helps restaurants get better engagement and more sales. Alison will tell us about a little bit about that exciting startup or technology company. And we'll talk as well about the transition to remote hiring and how to reinforce how to establish strong connections remotely during the recruitment process and how to communicate employee culture in the recruitment process so that people are not walking into a company that feels strange and foreign and disconnected to them, which is the game that I guess most of the world is trying to figure out right now. So a hot topic. Alison, welcome to the show.

Alison: Thank you for having me.

Max: Thanks. Thanks for joining. So tell us a little bit about yourself to begin with. How did you end up in the beautiful world of recruitment?

Alison: It's a funny story, actually. I feel like no one decides that they want to go into recruitment, everyone falls into it. 

Max: It's an accident 

Alison: …by accident. But I have a background in business. I worked in management consulting for a little bit. I worked in advertising. And then I ran my own business for some time. And when I decided I wanted to go back into a more formalized kind of office environment, I sent my resume to a recruiter. And she basically said, I think you would be an awesome recruiter, based on your background, you have experience in the industry from multiple facets. So I went through an interview process with this agency, and it was fantastic and ended up deciding to kind of take the plunge. And I really haven't looked back for the last seven or eight years that I've been recruiting.

Max: And what she liked about your background is the fact that you were working in marketing. Correct? And I think I keep telling people that, you know, recruiting and sales, and actually recruiting is marketing because it's more and more about managing big digital media spend, and large funnels. And it's, you know, I think it's even more of a valuable skill right now to be able to buy media than it is to study psychology, which has been traditionally where a lot of recruiters come from.

Alison: Yes, definitely. And also really understanding the subject matter expertise that you're talking to candidates about adds so much value. You can be strategic, and you have a lot of empathy for their position as a candidate. So it's a great entry point if you're interested in becoming a recruiter to, you know, enter an era and a function that you know a lot about.

Max: Well, I'm glad that you're part of this industry. I also fell into it by accident. And well, let's say what about Lunchbox. What is Lunchbox? And why? What makes it an exciting challenge from a talent acquisition standpoint?

Alison: Yeah. So Lunchbox is a really incredible company to work for. It's incredibly disruptive in the restaurant space. And basically, the premise is allowing restaurants to compete with third-party platforms. So the door dashes and the Uber Eats of the world are charging significant fees to restaurants where they end up breaking even or losing money on their orders. And they also don't really have access to their data, in order to make strategic decisions that impact the business moving forward. And so what Lunchbox does is it facilitates that digital experience for restaurants completely holistically, but allows them to maintain all of the control as a first-party platform. So we help with web orders. We can do mobile. We help with loyalty programs. We even have an in-house studio that helps with all of the marketing that restaurants need to drive the customers directly to that first-party platform that we're facilitating. And then they also have access to all of their data, which is incredibly empowering. So it's almost like a Shopify, for restaurants. And from a talent acquisition perspective, I think the challenges are very similar to what so many other tech companies are dealing with, currently, especially at an early stage. It's so competitive from a talent standpoint, particularly around engineering, sales, and marketing. We're growing incredibly quickly as well. So just the sheer volume of our recruiting efforts. When I joined in early March, we were about 60 people and now we're about 250 people, we've hired almost one and a half people a day on average. And so building a scalable process where there's a lot of alignment and allowing us to be competitive, but also very measured in our evaluation of candidates is a significant challenge for any talent leader.

Max: Sounds incredibly expensive to be growing at that pace. In this from March 2021, onwards, when the cost of… Yeah, the cost of hiring has gone up, basically, across the board and in marketing in particular. So well, maybe could you share a word about what your marketing mix looks like from, you know, recommend marketing spend?

Alison: I'm sorry. I don't totally understand the question like, “What are…[overlap]

Max: Where would you spend most of your ad money? Is it the traditional channels like Indeed and LinkedIn, or are there other new ways to connect with people? I mean,  I don't want to spill the beans if you have a secret sauce you don't want to send to the competition. But just to get a feel for where you operate.

Alison: Now that I can definitely answer. So from a recruitment marketing perspective, I think we're really lucky because one thing Lunchbox does unbelievably well is branding and marketing. In general, if you take a look at our careers page, it's very advanced, the brand is excellent. The career page is extremely robust. There's a very clear tone of voice. And so we've invested a lot in our marketing in general, as well as our employer brand, which allows us to cut through a lot of the noise. And so we actually spend very little money on marketing from a traditional kind of sense. We do have some LinkedIn job slots that we leverage, and we use Greenhouse so it allows us to post all of our jobs on LinkedIn in general. But a lot of the traction that we get is just, you know, us all being very active on LinkedIn, and having very strong recruiter networks, making sure that we have really strong outreach. And that's really speaking to our employer brands and our culture. So a lot of our active outreach, gets positive response, and just focusing on having a great culture and brand. So when people hear about us, they're excited as opposed to using a lot of the more traditional marketing tactics.

Max: Alot of word of mouth and yeah, positive feelings that generate enough talent and enough applicants. I believe that-- obviously, it's working for you so I'm not gonna tell you it's a good strategy. If it's working, that's all you need to know. You don't need to hear it from me. But I do believe that when you get to a certain size, maybe like five, 600 people, you kind of hit the wall in terms of how much referral, with the share of hires that you can do through referrals at some point. Those, I think, numbers go down a little bit when you get to a bigger company. But…

Alison: Alot of our hires are candidates that we actively sourced. I mean,...

Max: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Thad Price, CEO of Talroo. 

Talroo is one of the leading platforms for programmatic advertising, and please, Thad, correct me afterwards if I'm mischaracterizing what Talroo does. But the point of this conversation is to go over some of the trends in how advertising is being spent in the recruitment space, particularly within the North American market, and how that's affecting the work of recruiters listening to this podcast. Thad, welcome to the show.

Thad: Max, great to be here. Thank you for your time and happy holidays.

Max: Thank you. Happy holidays. For those who are not familiar with Talroo, could you start with that? Tell us a little bit about how the business came to be, its evolution, and its current state. 

Thad: Yeah, absolutely. So, a little bit about our brand. As we think about the Talroo brand itself, it really is the intersection of recruiters and talent in helping companies find the right hires and the right talent to drive a business. When we think about the evolution of the industry over the last few years, we've seen a lot of similarities to traditional marketing, and where marketing, where ad tech and marketing have moved. And you know our thought processes is about the audiences that you're attracting to your job. It's about attracting the right talent to your jobs. So, really if you think about how we provide a lot of value to our recruiters and employers who leverage Talroo, it's about finding the right audiences wherever they are. Right time, right place, right candidates, and how we can leverage data to ensure that we're actually doing that. We were incubated in Silicon Valley a number of years ago, over ten years ago, and we moved to Austin, and we call Austin home for a little over 8 years. So, we moved in the first wave of folks moving from California to Austin, Texas, a great town for us.

Max: Elon followed you a few years later.

Thad: That's right. That's right. But it really has been a great opportunity for us, specifically because Austin is such a great town for entrepreneurship. And if you think about what makes a great town, and there are two things that I constantly hear in research. The first is the idea of creativity and the second is entrepreneurship. And I think we're seeing that in Austin. It's been terrific for us to attract the right talent and to take our business to the next level.

Max: All these universities which are producing tens of thousands of graduates in the engineering space but also in business functions. I work a lot in the call center space, and I know that these student towns are a wonderful place to locate a call center as well. So, you don't have to be a Python and LP developer to find a job in these areas. They just attract a lot of productive capital

Thad: Yeah, great point. When you think about UT here in Austin, a lot of students don't wanna leave. They call it home. They've moved from other areas in Texas, and Austin is just a terrific town. They get a lot of entrepreneurships, a lot of opportunity, and it's been great to just experience growth over the last 8 years.

Max: So, I admit, Thad, that I'm not very fluent on the topic of programmatic and I described Talroo as a platform that does that. Am I on the right track? For those like me who need an education, could you go over what programmatic does?

Thad: Absolutely. So, there's been a movement in job advertising, probably the last 5 years, where there's this idea of more efficiency in job advertising investment. From what we can tell, the total addressable market on job advertising is anywhere between 10 and 12 billion dollars worldwide. And so, there's a lot of inefficient investment that typically is in this [unintelligible]. So, the idea of programmatic is to be more efficient and to attract the right audiences so you can drive hires. The Talroo kind of definition of programmatic is this idea of profile-driven programmatic, which is beyond the ideas of the site in which you advertise, but based on the audiences and the people that you're attracting to jobs. So, I think that's a big differentiator when you think of the idea of programmatic in the job advertising world. Again, today, it's more about job distribution and how can I get on a lot of different sites. The key with profile-driven programmatic is this idea of reaching the right audiences at time of search, and how can we ensure we're reaching the right audiences to drive hires. And that feedback loop is what's so important. So, in traditional… I'll give you a little information about how this works in consumer advertising. So, if you take a large advertising marketplace like Google, for example. Google has data on what people are searching, and based on data on what people are searching, they're able to allow consumer advertising companies to attract consumers based on audiences and based on buying behavior. So, an example is, I'm in the market for buying a car. I'm in the market for buying a Ford truck. How can Ford advertise to people based on their data searching for folks looking for a truck? So, it's about the audience and about attracting the audiences that will show this behavior. And so, that's the consumer advertising world in a very basic terms.

And I think about it in job advertising. So, in this idea of Ford Motor company who's looking to attract people looking to buy a truck. 20 years ago, it would be that you would need to be on cars.com because people on cars.com were looking to buy a car or a truck. And so, people would advertise on cars.com with the hopes of attracting people who are looking to buy a car or a truck. And so, that's what's been happening in the job search industry for the past 20 or 30 years where people advertise on many different job sites, and the idea is well, if someone is on a job site, then they're looking for a job. The next stage of this is how do you then leverage that data to go beyond a single destination and leverage data to ensure that you're reaching the right audiences at the time in which that audience is looking for a job. 

So, that's what we do here in Talroo, we power over a billion searches per month and we allow companies to attract audiences and match companies to audiences based on job advertising and job ads and based on profile, specifically. So, early on in our company history, we were a job site. Our technology powers one of the top job sites in the US, and that's Jobs2Careers. And so, we opened up our technology a number of years ago, so we could go beyond a single job search and really think about how we can access audiences outside of a single job site, which of course at that time is Jobs2Careers. Jobs2Careers is still a terrific destination, it's one of the top places that people look for jobs online in the US. So, the extension of that was how do we open up our technology to access additional audiences and provide scale for high volume hiring needs for employers looking for essential workers.

Max: I remember, this is from many years ago, but I remember that the number one place where people go to look for jobs is Google. They go and type in a job title and then hope something pops up. Obviously, in the last couple of years, that search is a lot better than it was before because now Google is scraping all of this content. Do you access these insights to redistribute ads to the people who are looking for these job titles? How ...

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'd like to introduce you to the CEO and co-founder of Truss, Mr. Everett Harper. Welcome to the show, Everett.

Everett: Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it and thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it and hope the listeners get a lot out of this one.

Max: I'm sure they will because from what I’ve heard, you've implemented some very innovative strategies in order to attract and retain talent, notably around the sharing the transparency around salary information, an information that is typically kept very very secret and that nobody wants to have leaked. And you found that it could be used by some organizations willing to make that leap as a competitive advantage in the world of talent. So, that's the conversation we're gonna have, if that's okay with you Everett, but first for our listeners who are not familiar with Truss, what do you guys do? Who do you hire?

Everett: Sure. So, we are a human-centered, purpose-driven software development company. What we do is solve really complex problems for large government agencies, such as Department of Defense, Center for Medicaid Services. We're one of the groups of folks who helped repair and helped save healthcare back in 2013, for example, for those of you who are familiar with that. On the private sector side, we have several Fortune 200 companies, and we will address issues such as supply chain software issues or how to enable military service members to move without many of the hassles that they normally experience by developing software that's really about being human-centered and human-focused. At this point, we're about 132 people and we are a remote-first company, so we are in, people in about 30 different states across the United States and have been that way since 2011. So, we have a lot of different things that we do with our company, and we'll get a lot more into that as well, but that's just the summary.

Max: Thank you. Thank you. So, you hire engineers, mainly.

Everett: Yeah, so good. Thank you for bringing that up. So, the people that we mostly hire are actually across a range of disciplines. From research and design to application engineering, infrastructure engineering, product delivery, because you can build a thing but you gotta be able to stand it up and make sure it delivers to the customer, as well as a lot of the support and operational disciplines as well. 

Max: Okay, and the remote culture since 2011, well, great for you for having that foresight, but now that great competitive edge is gone, everybody is doing remote so you can't use that as your main selling pitch anymore. Although of course, there are different levels of remote, and if you've been at it for 10 years, you're gonna be Level 3+. What are some new tricks or hacks that you have worked on recently to give you a new competitive edge, considering that remote isn't enough to stand out anymore?

Everett: Yeah, so I think the main one is that there is a difference between somebody who’s just doing remote, who's had a very strong in-office culture. It takes a while to figure that out and we have built this up to solve various problems for a decade now and so, the communications structures, the documentation structures, how we hire, who we hire from, the networks that we can hire from. All those have been a decade established. So, there's still a lot of built-in knowledge and mistakes that we've made that we can deploy as far as a competitive advantage. It's things that people will feel in some ways with regard to other companies. In terms of things that we do that might be, I wouldn't call them hacks, but as solutions to challenges, we have a really strong documentation culture and it sounds real boring until you think about how many things were in your office that you sort of just picked up because it was on a whiteboard somewhere or you could lean over someone and get a synopsis of the last meeting, or you could overhear it if there was an open office. If a documentation culture isn't established, who is gonna take notes, how is that being done, where are those published, are they done in a way that everybody can understand, are action items really clear, and are deadlines really clear? You can all of a sudden have a meeting, yeah it was all great, and then nothing happens. And it's probably because there's some missing pieces with documentation, so I can't emphasize how important that is for anybody, for any company, but that's something that we're practiced at. So, I think that's just one off the top of my head.

Max: Yeah, yeah. When hiring remote first, you would think you need people who are warm and great in front of the camera and fun to hang out with, but as it turns out you need people who are good with pen and paper and a keyboard and who are very meticulous about notetaking. I've found the same thing, my company is also fully remote and yeah, it's absolutely essential because it's asynchronous communication as well, you're working on three different time zones, so you might save a lot of time this way. 

Everett: And even to go further, whne you say you broaden it to talk about asynchronous communication, that's visual communication as well, can you draw diagrams and so forth that are easily shareable to show process steps. So, for folks who are in talent acquisition, clearly, it's a pipeline. How is that visually represented so that different groups can understand and plug in at the right time? We go through a lot of iterations of that. 

Max: So, the transparency theme, before we get into the touchy subject of salary, you talked about documentation. So, I assume you also sharing with candidates everything from the leave policy to benefits to how you guys run meetings. You just dump it all on the internet and let them kind of sift through it?

Everett: Um, well.

Max: Maybe dump is not the right word.

Everett: No, no. It's available to them. What I would say though is, we do have, you know we have GitHub repo where we have a lot of our policies people can read through and so forth. But I think one of the things that we do explicitly is we put our values and we put our operating principles on our website. My co-founders and I spent six weeks every Wednesday after work for three hours a time, honing those values really early in our history. The reason is because we knew the benefit of having strong cultures. And a good, clear, actionable value statement or operating principle statement is such a foundation of a great culture, in my opinion, and in particular, it repels the wrong people and attracts the right ones, before they ever get into the pipeline. And I mean repel the wrong people is people who aren't a good match, they may be brilliant at another company but not for us. Everybody needs to know that as early as possible. So, we have the benefit of people seeing and say hey this is a place that I want to be.

Max: Who are you trying to repel? It's a hard one. Because I know you're coming from a point of view of inclusivity as well, and so, who you wanna repel sounds like a gotcha question. 

Everett: Yeah, no no not at all. I'm happy to answer that. People who aren't interested in communicating. In a remote space, great communication written and verbal, and now visual, but written and verbal, is really important because it's highly...

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I've got a world traveler, a man who I first interacted with in Malaysia a few years ago and who has since moved industries and has worked in entertainment, in games today, and a few other, and oiling gas before, and is today the Director of People and Legal for Big Viking Games. Welcome to the show, Bob. Mr. Bob St-Jacques, I hope I'm pronouncing it right. Welcome to the show, Bob.

Bob: All right, well thank you, Max, happy to be here.

Max: Pleasure to have you. And of course, we interacted with Bob when he was leading the people function at a company called 7Geese which got acquired by Paycor which is a leader in OKR methodologies. So, for the HR performance enthusiasts that are listening, they'll be familiar with OKR methodology and it's a great foundation for start-ups. So, anyway, that's a little bit about your background but perhaps, Bob, I'd like to ask you to walk us back to the early days of how you ended up working in talent acquisition and dealing with people. Was it by design or by accident?

Bob: It was by design because I had a very good mentor and it was, going back a few years, 1992 and I was going to get a master’s in industrial relations with Cornell and my mentor suggested, he said, what do you want to do? I said, I wanna do HR. He said, no no no that's not gonna work.  He said what you need to do is pick a problem. Pick something that you wanna pour your heart and soul into and I said, well HR is basically broken, right? 91, 92, there was a recession going on in North America. I was working in Parliament at the time, so we were holding hearings, and nobody was happy. Employees, employers, communities would lay off. Nobody was happy. So, I said, hey look this is one of those problems that, like climate change, it's big and I can't fix all of it, but maybe I can fix something. So, he said, look if you wanna do that, go to law school and practice employment law then go into HR because you will spend the first five years learning from other people's mistakes. So that's exactly what I did. I went to law school, practiced employment law for five years and then got hired by my client. And basically, what I've done since 2000 is work on transformation efforts. So, in the beginning, they were turned around. So, I worked for a client who's called the Lens Crafters and they were in pretty rough shape, but if anybody wonders why I'm an optimist two and a half years later they're number 58 on the Fortune 100 best companies to work for list. Then I worked at Delta Airlines after 9/11, so I turned them around, right. So, this is why my optimism comes in. Moved to Dubai, things got a little bit more difficult because I had to help transform companies that were in scale-up and that were already growing about a hundred percent every year and how do you tell those folks, you're leaving money on the table you need to do more. So that was a further challenge and so I helped a lot of high growth organizations in Dubai, all over the Middle East, South Asia and Africa as well, worked in oil and gas in Nigeria for example. And then I went to the Far East and started focusing on tech, tech high-growth companies, tech scale-ups in that area and I've done the same thing here in Vancouver. So, the central theme is I've kept to my mission which is I want to help HR. And that's what I've done throughout my whole career. Sometimes, as you mentioned, being an OKR expert, spreading the love and the gospel of it, of OKRs, and sometimes there's goals more specific toward the company.

Max: I think it's good advice for the young people to walk towards the problem, not away from the problem. You see an industry that's broken and a company that has issues and, you know, don't run away from it. That's an opportunity to make an impact and to work on a whole career duration on fixing something. I can empathize with that on my end. I saw a lot of broken things that I'm still trying to fix on high volume recruitment. So, maybe a word about Big Viking Games, your current company, which I understand has gone through some transformation over the last few months since you've been there for six months now. And we're gonna talk about how the talent acquisition strategy has been transformed to expand the talent pool. But can you set the scene for us, what does this company do?

Bob: Yeah, so, Big Viking Games was started at, well I could tell you, it was 10 years ago in about a month. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary which is a pretty big deal. Only 4% of companies make it to 10 years so we had a fun event for everybody, and we managed to bring a bunch of people together. Now the challenge was six months ago is that the company had been making games but had been kinda flat-lined and just kinda been bumbling along for the past three four years. And so, they were looking to revive and expand. And the interesting piece is that in the gaming industry it's usually boom and bust all the time, right. Hire a bunch of people to make a new game, I'll make some money, oh you sold it off and then you drop the right number of employees and the revenue goes like this, it's big yoyo. So, what they decided was that's not sustainable and that's not great for employees. Employees in the gaming industry will tell you, yeah, I've been laid off and hired, right. You look at gaming LinkedIn profiles and they've all had 14 jobs in 10 years and it's not because they're job-hoppers, it's been most of the time because they've been laid off. So, the company decided to move towards a live operations model. What does that mean? It means they don't create their own games, they either expand things that they have, and they typically buy intellectual property and then expand it and run it. So that's a big switch from making games boom-and-bust to just kind of like very linear growth. And so, it's a challenge because you need different types of people, different types of mindset in that area.

Max: Basically, in the oil and gas, it's like moving from being a builder to an operator.

Bob: Correct. And so, there was the challenge. We need different types of individuals, different types of talents. and we needed to grow, and we were looking at acquisitions and so on. So fast forward, six months, what we have found ourselves is before we were in one vertical where we had a Facebook/Web games there which you know was alot so we had really high MPS scores. 70% of our players play our game 27 out of 28 days which is pretty impressive for games right. So, we got this loyal fan base. But now, we've attached, we've done an acquisition, we've expanded on a couple areas and so as folks will see throughout December, we will be putting out press releases in these areas. So, where we were in one verticals, we will not be in four verticals starting in January as we close these deals. So that's created some challenges and opportunity areas as well because we got new places we're expanding into and we're also expanding our current offerings. So, another piece of good news and we just got it less than 24 hours ago, again talk about the power transformation. When I joined, the Glassdoor score for the company was 2.2, when I said things are bumbling along, it was a bit in rough shape. Yesterday we were just notified by the Great Place To Work Institute that we are certified by them as a great place to work. So, when people talk about transformation is too hard, and I love the phrase that you used, running towards the problem. So, if you look at things as an opportunity in terms of aligning people behind the business s...

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'm excited to welcome Bas van de Haterd, and not the way he was referred to by the great podcaster Chad Sowash as, well, I don't know, you tell us Bas, how he butchered your name, but Bas, hopefully I get it right. Bas is a professional snoop, is his title on LinkedIn and how he introduces himself. He's a consultant for the talent acquisition professionals who are looking to revisit and improve their process, and today, we agreed we were gonna have a conversation on the world of assessments. And notably, assessments, everybody's been looking into assessments in 2021 and deciding, is this the right time to revisit? So, we wanna dig into Bas's brain to find out when is the right time to change your assessment strategy and what are some case studies that we can learn from. So, welcome to the show Bas.

Bas: Awesome to be here, awesome to be here, Max.

Max: And sorry to hear about your American friend Chad butchering your name. You were telling me, Bas, for those who don't know your work, you're very present on social media, so, maybe, where can they meet you on the internet? Where's the good place to interact with Bas?

Bas: On personal interaction, it's usually LinkedIn. If you just wanna listen to my views, The Talent Savvy Podcast is a great one to subscribe to as well. And of course, I am avid member of [unintelligible] Recruiting Brainfood Group by Hung Lee which we've also digitally met before, Max. I tried to keep it down a little because I was too active there according to some people, but it's a great source of inspiration for me and I try to add a lot of information on assessments and strategies. 

Max: In valuable resource, I've made it a mandatory reading for anybody in my company as well. The Recruiting Brainfood by Hung, great source, and also an active community on Facebook. So, great place to interact with Bas, and what was the name of the podcast again?

Bas: Talent Savvy

Max: The Talent Savvy Podcast, so you can find Bas more for more insights there. So, let's jump into the topic and let's talk about assessments. That's a hot topic in 2021, as I was saying, because it seems like a lot of companies have decided to deal with numbers, finally. The balance has changed a little bit, we have more candidates and less recruiters during a part of last year at least. And so, naturally, assessments came to the fore and people, a lot of vendors have also appeared in the last couple of years that are credible vendors that can do all kinds of assessment. I've had a few of them on the show. So, what's been your, you are like, from a consulting standpoint, are companies revisiting the way they do assessments and are they coming in and asking you for help, of that sort, or do you have to really shape those discussions good that you're just happier with? What works, don't break what works and we have an assessment based on it and we need to change. Are you pulling or are they pushing?

Bas: No, I'm usually being asked, you know, can you help us? The downside is usually in the budget there is no room for an external consultant, so, I'm most often get asked for free advice and as soon as I'm like, well, how am I gonna make any money off this, and they're like yeah, we never thought of that. But you do see a lot of companies now revisiting their assessment strategies. I actually do see a lot of difference in there. So, in my home country of The Netherlands, a lot of governments are looking at it, both national as well as in the local level because they've now read so many stories in part published by me and a lot of other people, how assessments done well can actually help your diversity and inclusion and be more fair in your selection process, and for governments that's of course very important. So, there's a lot of governments who have actually done amazing cases which is really interesting to see. You know, the most traditional organizations you'll probably think of being the most innovative and piloting cool, proven, and new technologies in a really smart way. And actually, now also, and I love that about them, they feel the need to also go externally with their data with their knowledge, and just share what they did and share what the results are. So that's how case studies are coming out. A lot of them government related. I see, interestingly enough, Scallops don't see a mis-hire as being part of the process, they see a mis-hire as something they need to improve. A lot of Scallops are ditching the resume as their first point of entry very quickly because they have one or two mis-hires, and they're like, yeah this cost us a lot of money and we have a culture in this company that if something fails, that's not a problem, but we should learn from it. So, they don't consider mis-hires as something that is part of the process, that's unavoidable, like a lot of recruiters do. They see it as, okay how do we prevent it from happening again? And you really see an awesome development there and so small companies are implementing all kinds of assessments. Sometimes good, sometimes not, because as you said there's a lot of new vendors on there. A lot of them are awesome, some of them are complete and total crap, to be honest. 

Max: I'm totally fascinated by what you just said on governments jumping into the foreign, like, innovating, initiated by a consciousness and an awareness on fairness and inclusivity. So, some strong innovation has been driven by this sort of alleviated political discussion which has therefore push the buyer to say, okay well we're gonna remove some of the human error. 

Bas: Yes, and a lot of them, most of them, let's be very honest, try to do it the traditional way. Oh, we'll do a gender-bias training, and that will at least check the box. But in some cases, for example one of my major clients is the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they now have a Head of Recruitment who isn't originally from HR, he just got in there, he worked in an embassy for 25 years. And he was just looking at the selection process and said to me at an event, listen I think it's really strange how we do it, and I'm like, yeah, I totally agree with you. Okay, cool, we're gonna redo this. And he was looking at it with fresh eyes, and of course, there was some push back from the recruiters at first, but we've always done it like this. He's like, does that mean that it's good, the fact that we've always done it? So, he asked all the questions which you should ask. History doesn't mean it's good, it doesn't mean it's bad either, but we need to revisit our original thoughts and they were basically sending the last candidate to an assessment, because they said, listen we need to have an assessment in there et cetera et cetera.

Max: Like a QA check at the end of the production line.

Bas: Exactly. And he literally said like, listen about, almost nobody gets rejected by the assessment, so we're basically spending a lot of money. I'm getting an external company to sign off on what we've already decided. 

Max: That sounds like governments, sounds just right.

Bas: Yeah, and this guy, although he's been in government forever, he said, now you're telling me, because he saw one of my lectures when we, it was pre-covid when we were still able to go to events and stuff like that, and he said, and now you're telling me boss that by moving it to a different part of the process, basic...