Transcript
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. Today we’re talking to Doug Leonard, the CEO of Clovers AI. We’re going to talk about how recruiters can operate successfully in today’s unsettled market, the impact technology’s had on recruiting’s evolution, and movement toward diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. That and more on this edition of PeopleTech. Doug, it’s great to see you.
Doug:
Thank you. It’s great to see you too.
Mark:
In terms of recruiting, how would you wrap up 2021? And what do you think recruiters should be prepared for during 2022?
Doug:
Let’s start with last year. And I think the wrap up is the old saying, the war for talent is alive and well. And Mark, I don’t know if you recall, that term was coined in probably the early aughts or late ’90s by McKinsey. And at a certain point, you realize that, holy cow, that is never going away. And I think it’s still as real and alive as it was 20 years ago. The war for talent, it continues. And there’s a bunch of trends that are forcing that to happen. But I think that’s probably the thesis statement from last year, because so much has changed last year.
Mark:
Well, and what about 2022?
Doug:
So I expect that it’s going to continue. I think that like so many facets in our lives, the pandemic has changed so much. And one thing it did, especially in the talent acquisition space, is it starts to create this geographic fluidity. Remember there was a point, I used to live up in the Northeast in Fairfield County and it was like, “Okay, you’re going to work in Manhattan. You’re going to work in Greenwich, Connecticut. You’re going to work in Westchester, New York.” And I was really bound by where you live.
Doug:
And boy, times have changed. Usually, when people post wrecks these days, it’s not even like, “Hey, you got to live in Pittsburgh, you got to live in New Jersey.” It’s like the 10th thing on the list of where you live. And I think that opens up a lot of opportunity for a lot of different people. And man, that is going to continue.
Doug:
Even when you look at some companies, they used to say, “Well, you have to come into the office.” Two years ago, maybe it was three, four times a week, now it is hybrid. And that hybrid is not going away, because people want it. People are demanding that, “Look, I don’t need to go and commute into Manhattan every day and take a train for two hours a day if I don’t have to.” And that just does so much for the labor pool, it does so much for businesses, because now all of a sudden you get talent from anywhere in the world. And you use Zoom just like we’re doing today. I think it changes things and we’re going to continue to see that.
Doug:
The other thing is that great resignation is real and people have choices. And I think technology is allowing all of these choices to be available to people no matter where they live and it’s going to continue. And they want to have a job with purpose. And if they don’t feel they have a job with purpose, they’re going to go online and they’re going to have access to jobs wrecks all over the world, and they’re going to pick exactly what they want.
Doug:
So that great resignation is going to stick and it’s going to be here this coming year, as it was last year. And it’s going to have a big impact on talent acquisition for sure.
Mark:
Let me trail down a little bit into 2021. Remote recruiting became ubiquitous pretty much during the year.
Doug:
Sure did.
Mark:
Is it here to stay? I mean, how do you anticipate it impacting recruiters’ overall approach to talent acquisition?
Doug:
I do think it’s here to stay. And I can give you the actual data that will show that most companies are using video conferencing tools for most parts of their business, that includes talent acquisition. There’s a lot of hope that this pandemic is eventually going to end. And I think that even if it does end, which hopefully it does in 2022, even if it does end companies are still saying, “Hey, we’re going to continue to do remote interview some part of the process,” it’s such a great tool for the early part of the interview.
Doug:
And I’m so reluctant and I don’t use the word screen because no one wants to be screened. But having that initial dialogue on video, that will continue, I think, for as long as we have video conferencing tools and people use it and it’ll continue to be ubiquitous.
Doug:
And I’m not the only one that that says, if you look at Microsoft Teams, you look at Zoom, you look at Cisco’s WebEx, you look at Google Meets, all of their CEOs, all of their executives are putting tons of money, tons of assets and resources into developing these tools. And they don’t do this haphazardly, they’re putting money into the tools that help us be more productive and that is going to continue, no question.
Mark:
Another thing that became a thing during 2021 was internal mobility. More companies are incorporating that into their recruiting efforts. Will that continue? And what should recruiters be thinking about?
Doug:
I often look at things from a macro economic standpoint. And, look, we’re at near full employment Mark. A healthy and robust economy is about 4% unemployment. So there’s 4% of the people that just don’t need to work, or they don’t want to work, or they’re not in the workforce. But when that labor pool gets restricted to that level, 4%, I think they get a lot more choices and companies have to bend to help them.
Doug:
So what that means is as you interview somebody, you’re not just interviewing them for the job that’s there today, you have to have a game plan and a pathway for people that includes internal mobility. And it started to crop up with, I believe it was millennials, where you hire them and they say, “Okay, when am I going to be the CEO? When am I going to be the VP?” And we chuckled at that, and we were like, “Oh, come on. You got to put your time in.”
Doug:
But today it’s not like that, I think, because the labor pool is so constricted, you really do have to think about what does the pathway look like for five years? And give people an idea of what they can do. And boy, you better put that into practice with actual plans, formal strategies around internal mobility. Internal mobility is so critical.
Doug:
And I look at my own little company, we have 50 employees based in, we have South America and we have in the United States, and I charge my team with like, okay, great, we hired them as this particular role. What does the next three years look like? And you know what, the people love that. And I love it, because I want to keep the great talent that I have. And it’s economical too, doesn’t make more sense for me to make sure I’m putting the right people in the right jobs and growing people, or do I incur the cost of hiring someone off the street?
Doug:
Internal mobility makes sense in so many ways and it’s going to continue to be a really important part. And I had a great conversation with the leader of talent acquisition at IBM a couple of months ago. And she was talking to me about it. It’s like, “Look, we were really good at recruiting. We did a great job of recruiting. We did a terrible job of mapping out what internal mobility looked like over the years, even though there was tons of opportunities at IBM.” And that was something they wanted to focus on. And IBM is not alone, this is everybody.
Doug:
And it’s always driven by the candidate, by the employee. They’re like, “Look, I don’t want to do the same thing for five years. I want to be able to grow my talents and do the things that I want to do with passion and vigor.” And it’s great to continue to develop.
Mark:
Let me shift gears a bit, just to talk about diversity. It became a more pressing concern in the last 12 months, candidates are paying more attention to it. And the talk has evolved from diversity to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. Can you talk about how DEIB fits into today’s recruiting process?
Doug:
Sure. And again, I look at it, again, from an economic standpoint. First, because that’s my roots, the cost of not doing a true diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging program, the cost of doing it wrong are staggering. So there’s that economic part that I think companies are starting to recognize.
Doug:
I think that the recognition was sparked by all the social justice things that happened in the last two years. It actually moved the needle significantly. When I was selling talent management systems and programs years ago, I would have the conversation with the CHRO or the VP of HR and we would talk about diversity. You’re right, it was just diversity. And they were like, “Yes, we absolutely want to do it.” And you know what was behind, “Yes, we absolutely want to do it,” nothing other than we know we have to do it.
Doug:
After all the social unrest. And social unrest was a great thing, because I mean, it was a terrible thing that actually happened. But the good thing about it was it held a mirror up to the executives and it held a mirror up to us collectively and said, “We have to do way better from a social standpoint.”
Doug:
And then people started looking at it from an economic standpoint and it makes sense on all those levels. It’s ethical, it’s moral, it’s economical, and it’s fair. And if you look the way there’s areas in the country that I’ve always done well economically. You look at the west coast, different pockets on the west coast, you look at Silicon Slopes, which is in Salt Lake. You look at New York City, great.
Doug:
But there’s pockets in Mississippi, pockets in parts of Texas, pockets in parts of Montana or whatever that people just didn’t have opportunity. And now they have opportunity because, again, there’s geographic fluidity. It doesn’t matter where you live. And also now there’s a real intent and a process to be more diverse and not just hire people that look like you and sound like you.
Doug:
And I’m grateful that it’s happening. I’ve seen a material change in the types of people that are being hired. And I have a great conversation with the CEO of NAACP, and this was about two months ago. His name is Derrick Johnson. He says, “Look, first thing is the intent. A company needs to have intent.” I think companies got the intent, they want to do it. There’s never been more chief diversity officers ever in the history of American business or global business. There’s now, I think, 65 or 70% of them were hired in the last 18 months. That means companies are putting calories into it, they’re putting effort, they’re putting actual process behind this C-level position.
Doug:
And that’s what Derrick was saying, Derrick Johnson, NAACP. He’s like, “Great start with intention, but make sure you do something about it.” And that’s what we’re doing now. I’m not trying to plug my product here, but Clovers is part of that. It’s just one thing that we could do to do a great job and being more equitable across the board.
Mark:
Now, all of these things are a part of the new normal, I’d say, in recruiting. So how can recruiters use technology to adjust to all of this and manage it?
Doug:
I love that question. And again, it’s so funny, my answers are foundational and economics, the VCs, the VC community, they’re also very grounded in economics. If you look at the amount of investment in talent acquisition, in talent management from the VCs over the last five years. Let’s say four years ago, it was $2 billion in venture funding, three billion the next year, and you keep inches up in the low billions, two billion. Do you know what it was in 2021, the investment in basically human capital or talent management and recruiting? The investment was 15 billion.
Doug:
So from an economic standpoint, the VCs and that VC money does drive a lot of innovation. The VC money is there and now there’s tools. And it goes back to what I said about Derrick Johnson. He’s like, “Do something about it.” Look, the investments are there, the money is there, now the innovation is there, and now you have to be exposed to it.
Doug:
So I think, a long way to answer your question, I’m sorry about that. But when you look at a talent acquisition or a recruiter, they have to look at the tools that are out there and they have to adopt their processes in order to utilize them. And I think that’s going to happen. And there’s magic things that they always had to do.
Doug:
The biggest thing for talent acquisition, one of the biggest things is time to hire. Do you think technology can improve time to hire? Can we make the process better? Can we make the process more fair? Can you make the process more consistent? The answer is yes. So there has to be a willingness, there has to be an intent to get better, to use the technology and then to implement processes that actually leverage those technologies. And I think that’s it.
Doug:
And in the past, I think recruiters, they had a process, they’re going to stick to their process. I remember talking to a recruiter years ago and they were like, “Doug, it takes me five different major steps for me to hire somebody. Within these five steps it’s 23 clicks per candidate. And there’s the process, and here’s the emails, and here’s how we ask the questions.” And it was so detailed.
Doug:
All of that needs to be disrupted. The disruption needs to be like, “All right, look at all your steps. What can we improve? How can we improve it? And what technology is out there to do it?” And the good news is the money is there, the innovation’s there, new companies are here and it’s all there at the fingertips, and now it’s time to deploy and it’s time to get better.
Doug:
And man, it will improve DEI&B, but it’ll also improve quality of higher, it’ll improve time to hire. I mean, they’re going to continue to look at those things. And those things are super important. And speed, speed, speed. And I think that’s where technology has historically always given a big advantage is in speed. Speed quality.
Doug:
Can we do it better than you did last year? And I think that those things are going to happen. And the other thing that’s going to happen, this is, I guess, anecdotal in a way, look, we don’t have face to face meetings as much anymore, it’s virtual oftentimes, but there’s tools too to improve engagement.
Doug:
If you look at the tools that were deployed over the years, it almost dehumanized the process, because you’re talking to bots and you’re talking with technology and everything is automated. Candidates don’t love that, candidates want to be able to find a career that is purposeful, and you can’t do that when you’re talking to a bot, right? I don’t serve bots, bots need to serve us.
Doug:
So that’s another thing that needs to be looked at from a recruiter standpoint, is like, look, don’t dehumanize the process by making it like an ATM transaction. These are humans that are going through an interview process. I think those are the big things that are going to change, and we have to keep an eye on.
Mark:
Doug, thank you. It’s really great to talk to you about this.
Doug:
It’s my pleasure.
Mark:
My guest today has been Doug Leonard, the CEO of Clovers AI. And this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR Technology, visit the HCM Technology report every day with the most trusted source of news in the HR Tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com I’m Mark Feffer.
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