Announcer:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We are recording from HR Tech in Vegas, brought to you by our friends and partners at Fuel 50. Here’s your host, Mark Feffer.
Mark Feffer:
This is PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer, and we’re recording today from the exposition floor of the HR Technology Exposition and Conference, and I’m joined with Tim Sackett.
Tim Sackett:
Hey Mark.
Mark Feffer:
Hey Tim. Tim, a lot of people know you in the business, but would you take a minute and introduce yourself?
Tim Sackett:
Sure. I mean, I run a staffing firm that my mother started literally 45 years ago. I’ve owned it the last three years, ran it the last 12, that’s the day job. But then probably 12 years ago, the RecruitingDaily Zone, William Tincup, got me into the HR tech space and started writing and demoing. And I probably look at 150 different technologies on an annualized basis, which is still is a fragment of the actual landscape, right?
Mark Feffer:
Right.
Tim Sackett:
But it’s that, it’s Gladwell’s 10,000 hours. It’s still, I’m probably doing more of that than most people so you’re going to become a one percenter and become kind of an HR tech expert. So do a lot of analyst consulting work around technology, especially around the talent acquisition tech stack. But really I’m a nerd around all of it so I love all the HR tech stuff. So coming here is Christmas for a lot of us that love, nerd out on HR Tech.
Mark Feffer:
Now, we went a couple of years without an HR Tech. So now that we’re back, what have you seen here that really, really interests you?
Tim Sackett:
I mean, again, I think to me, that’s taking all of the data is I think one of the things in HR, we tend to be data rich, information poor. We have a ton of data, maybe more than anywhere else in the entire organization, but we’ve been really lacking on the BI kind of capabilities. And so what I see on the floor now is how do we really take the data you have and transform it into insights and information to really help drive the business outcome, not just HR outcomes, but drive business.
Mark Feffer:
Do you think practitioners, by and large are really ready to handle data properly, are they getting the education that they need?
Tim Sackett:
No, and I think that’s another piece of what we’re seeing is the simplification of all that. Most people, if you take a thousand HR people, only one of those that thousand will want to really get their hands dirty with the data. Most of them want the picture of it, they want the dashboard, “Tell us what’s happening and give us some predictive kind of insights to what we should be doing based on what it’s saying.” And I think that’s the level of where most HR people want it. Quite frankly, it’s the level where most of our leaders organizationally want it as well. They don’t really want to, I mean, they want to leave the data to science, to the data scientist and the business analyst. They don’t really want to dig in that deep. They just want to go, “What is the data telling us and what should we be doing?” And if you can tell us that level at a very high level, that’s probably where they all should be sitting about right now.
Mark Feffer:
Well, let me ask you about recruiting.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
Specifically, that seems to be using technology more and more, getting more and more sophisticated.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
So it’s kind of great walking around here and seeing what everybody’s up to. What do you think are the big trends that are happening?
Tim Sackett:
I mean, you and I can take a look just on front of us in our face right now, and I think the buyers overwhelmed with the complexity and the overlap of all the technology. So to me, some of the better trends around the recruiting side is, “How do we make a lot of this stuff invisible to the end user?” So that recruiter shouldn’t, I don’t need them to flick more switches and pull more levers, right? I need just stuff to work behind the scenes that is delivering them a pipeline of candidates that match what we want them to do and spend time on really developing relationships and having conversations. I don’t need them to spend hours upon hours sourcing and searching and trying to match when we have technology that can do that better 24/7.
Mark Feffer:
Well, I guess that’s sort of hints at the balance between technology and people.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
We let the technology do that sorting kind of stuff. And the people, I always read about companies adopting AI and that, in turn, gives their professionals, their recruiters more strategic work to do.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah, yes.
Mark Feffer:
Is that true?
Tim Sackett:
It could be true. And the question is that we have to define strategy, right? In terms of that strategic, because I think the future of recruiting is recruiters that actually have a skillset that would be around building and to build trust and relationships with candidates very quickly. In figuring out how do we that versus I’m going to have them spend 35 hours of their 40 hours of work dotting i’s and crossing t’s and doing all this tactical stuff of scheduling and all the operational stuff of recruiting.
And so ideally, the technology adds capacity to a recruiter then you go and not just with a candidate, they should also have a great relationship with the hiring manager and great trust. If I’m a recruiter and I say, “Hey, I found this great candidate. I screened, I feel like this, they’re a match for the job, for the company, blah, blah, blah.” I shouldn’t have to send that to the hiring manager. I should actually be able to put that on the hiring manager’s schedule because they have a trust in a relationship with me that they 100% believe if I’m recommending somebody, they want to talk to that person. What we have right now is not there. Most recruiters do not have that ability or access or time, really, to build that kind of level of trust and relationship where they go, “I think my recruiter that supports me knows my business and knows what I’m looking for.”
Mark Feffer:
With the tools doing the sourcing, are they doing a good job?
Tim Sackett:
I mean, think they’re doing a better job. The problem with any kind of technologies is you’re talking about scale and number, and you can always pull out one, you can say, “Well, hey, the technology didn’t find this person. I found this person.” Yeah, but statistically, over time, the technology is finding way more people than you were finding. And that’s where we fall down is too often I find when the adoption lags and the technology is, you have a recruiter that’s trying to compete with a technology and they give one on one examples that are valid and versus going, but we’re talking about scale, not talking about one to one. And that becomes a problem.
Mark Feffer:
Shifting gears a little bit.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
Skills has become a big conversation the last year or so.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
How is it impacting recruiting?
Tim Sackett:
That’s a great question, I don’t know if it really truly has yet. I mean, I think at enterprise it has, because now if you’re a recruiting team and you’ve really turned on internal mobility to understand what skills do we have and where can I move people within the organization, start rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titan, so to speak. And in a much more intelligent way, I kind of understand right away like, “Okay, hey, we have a gap here and here from a skills standpoint,” at mid-enterprise and lower, which is still the vast majority of the hiring that we do, I don’t know if it’s really made that impact. But at enterprise, we’ve seen just a huge adoption to that so I do think more and more we have a TA team strategically thinking about not just how we bring people into the company, but how do we actually keep them by leveraging the skill sets they have and leveraging when they want them, not necessarily just when we want them, right?
And that’s been that difficult piece. We’ve allowed so much talent to leave our organizations for our competitor because we were not allowing them to easily understand where they could be in our organization, how they could move. And the more and more we do that, it just helps overall. I mean, I tell people all the time, “The best recruit that you’ll ever have is the one you don’t have to make because you retain somebody.”
Mark Feffer:
Right.
Tim Sackett:
And we only do that if we really have that knowledge of skills that are at our inventory that are already in our company, right?
Mark Feffer:
I’ve heard it said that there’s three ways you get skills, you build them, you buy them, you borrow them.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
So I get that, but when you sort of apply it to a company like an enterprise, that’s got to be a really complicated thing to-
Tim Sackett:
And expensive.
Mark Feffer:
Implement.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
Oh, can you talk about it?
Tim Sackett:
Well, Mark, you and I have been in an industry long enough that we remember a time when companies would actually invest in building talent. Whether that was an apprenticeship program of some sort or whatever that might be, they would actually spend lots and lots of money to build the talent we needed. And then somewhere along the line, over the last couple of decades, we’ve really walked away from that and assumed that higher ed or public education or somebody would do that for us. And what we’ve found is that’s actually a really bad replacement, right? We actually have to go back as organizations and start investing in building the talent that we need. And so it’s not always about, “I’m going to hire entry level college grads.” Maybe for a lot of the jobs I have based on the skill sets we need, I can hire high school kids, we can develop them, train them more as a white collar apprenticeship versus the blue collar apprenticeship. But we’re starting to see those come back.
And I think to me, that’s another future of HR that we don’t talk about enough is, I mean, the technology landscape is there, right? I mean, there’s technology out there that can help us do that and build our talent, but there’s a lack of an investment and part of that’s trust of our leadership. Our leader’s like, “Well, wait a minute, if we spend all this money building the talent, what’s going to happen? They’re just going to go work someplace else.” You’re like, “Well, no, no, no, no.”
That’s a bad idea to say that, that’s going to happen. It only happens if you decide that you want treat them poorly or give them a bad work experience or whatever. So you can’t say, “Oh, we’re going to build talent and then treat them like shit and think they’re going to stay around,” right? We got to build talent, treat them well, give them a great opportunity, and then that investment comes back tenfold. But yeah, of course, if you’re just going to build and then try to grind them out, that’s going to be a bad investment. And too many of our leaders believe that the investment’s bad, so they would rather just go and borrow and steal, right? Those skills, instead of build them.
Mark Feffer:
Steal. You’re talking about learning basically. And it seems like learning platforms and learning systems have become a lot more flexible and a lot more interesting, frankly, in the last say, two years. What’s driving that?
Tim Sackett:
I think, it’s really, to me, it started with, we got away from traditional kind of training development that we’ve seen. It hasn’t really changed in decades. I mean, we might have added some technology or platforms around stuff, but the ability to, I think, microlearning coming in and understanding that we’ve really built a culture around younger generations that expect that they can pull up YouTube and learn something in three minutes, right? And we had to adapt to that kind of culture of saying, “You don’t have to have a three-hour, a four-hour, an eight-hour, kind of sit in a classroom for one day and learn something. Let’s figure out bite size ways to do this on an ongoing basis over time. And you’ll probably get a higher adoption and a faster move for a lot of these.” And again, the ability to do multi-channel video, audio, not just written book kind of stuff that we would do traditionally.
So it’s really, it’s kind of become more entertaining in a way. And again, “Hey, that’s just part of what we have to do if you want to keep someone’s attention.” The best trainers I ever had going through my career as I was coming up were always people who actually were entertaining. They made the training interesting. Well, we figured out that, that’s really unreliable to hire a bunch of people and you hope that you got some people who are entertaining, but we can actually create content in a multi kind of channel environment that actually is very entertaining and engaging and keeps somebody really hooked in. And again, the social media is the, just the advent, I think of a lot of the technologies that we use on a daily basis in our life has really showed us in the training world and learning world, how we should be able to get that connected.
Mark Feffer:
One of the things people are talking about in this space is learning in the flow of work.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
Only really started to hear that, I think late last year, this year.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
What’s your thoughts about that?
Tim Sackett:
I mean, it makes complete sense, right? I mean, we talk about this even in the recruiting side, as well. You want to add technology into how they work on a daily basis. You don’t want to ask them to actually leave that flow of work and go someplace else to have to get something or learn something, it breaks up your day, it becomes less efficient, there’s more waste. And so if we can teach them and have learning set up in that flow of work for them, it makes it so that, one is, it’s just easier for them to actually consume on a daily kind of basis. They’ll do more of it, and it feels like it fits. It feels like it’s not just, it was something that was designed separately from what they’re doing on a daily basis so I think it works perfectly, yeah.
Mark Feffer:
It makes integration more important.
Tim Sackett:
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Mark Feffer:
Where do you think that’s going? I mean, I have this vision of there’s going to be a generation of technology products that have no UI because they’re just going to be delivered.
Tim Sackett:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I still don’t even think, I mean, we’re really early in the virtual side of this as well, and even not even just for learning the power that could have and the virtual reality, augmented reality world. Think about that from a learning perspective, but even a meeting perspective, think about the… We have three kind of workplaces. We have a remote, we have a hybrid, we have an on-prem.
The problem we have culturally is we’re asking people to kind of connect in whatever environment they’re in, whereas I could throw them all, no matter where they were sitting or working in a virtual environment, and now they’re equal. They’re in the same exact environment, they have the exact same tools, the exact same connection and to me, we’re going to see more of that kind of stuff happen as well. In terms of just, I wouldn’t say necessarily fairness, I think, it’s a struggle to build culture across all these different landscapes. Somebody who’s working remotely versus somebody on-prem, they’re always going to have different cultures. But we need one organizational culture, so the more we can pull them in together in one shared space becomes really powerful.
Mark Feffer:
Right, but with remote workers and hybrid workers, really more remote workers, I’m getting the culture to sort of wrap around them is a lot more difficult and-
Tim Sackett:
Oh, yeah.
Mark Feffer:
How do you do it?
Tim Sackett:
I wouldn’t be here at this if I figured had figured that out. I will tell you, it’s a challenge because everybody I talk to, unless they’ve actually worked remote for a long time and they’re comfortable there and they’re working for a company that has figured, I mean, not really figured it out, but maybe it’s full remote company, it’s the challenge of having remote, hybrid, on-prem together because what we’re hearing then from the remote workers in those environments are, “I don’t feel connected enough. I don’t feel necessarily I’m a part of the overall culture.”
And you have to really reach out. And by the way, it’s twofold, the worker has to reach out and the company has to reach out and build that and kind of build that bridge on the remote side. Hybrid might be a little bit easier, again, we see all kinds of stuff people are testing. I still think we’re still early on all of this. I think that digital build of digital culture is something that, as we take a look at 2023, 2024 in HR Tech, we’re going to see companies coming out saying, “Hey, we figured it out. Here’s how we do it, and here’s the solution.” I have yet to see anybody, I feel, you see a lot of culture companies, but you don’t see ones that have said, “Hey, we’ve figured out this kind of digital landscape.”
Mark Feffer:
Tim, thanks very much.
Tim Sackett:
Thanks for having me.
Announcer:
You’ve been listening to PeopleTech of the HCM Technology Report. This HR Tech series is graciously brought to you by our partners at Fuel 50. For all other HR, sourcing and recruiting news, check out hcmtechnologyreport.com.
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