We talk with Trakstar CEO Julie Rieken.
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer. My guest today is Julie Rieken, the CEO of Trakstar. Their platform helps companies deliver a strong employee experience by providing HR departments with workflows and data insights. We’ll talk about candidates, employees, and their behavior during the Great Resignation on this edition of PeopleTech.
Mark:
Julie, welcome. Activity on your platform shows a stunning amount of employees are getting ready to switch jobs or are prepared to switch jobs. Can you talk about that?
Julie:
Definitely. Mark, what you’re seeing from the data that we’re seeing and that you’ve seen that we’ve shared, it really is stunning. We’ve seen job postings up 52 and a half percent. This is our June data. Applicants are up 23%, interviews up 85%, and hiring up 163%. All of those numbers are to say everything is up. The important part about that is that we’ve heard about the Great Resignation of 2021, the turnover tsunami, and we’re seeing that, using our anonymized aggregated data, within our hiring platform. And it’s matching some of the things that we’re seeing from the Bureau of Labor. So we are definitively seeing more people being ready to move jobs and think about either new career paths or new companies or different kinds of work environments. And we’re seeing that reflected in our data. So we can confirm the things that we’re hearing about, and we can see it through our applicant tracking system and watching the data of our customers.
Mark:
Now, what do you think’s behind this?
Julie:
Gosh, I think, honestly, I mean, it’s maybe the obvious answer, but I do think it’s the pandemic, and I think people have been pressed, and it’s created a bit of an open enrollment event is the way I like to think about it. And what that means is that people may have been thinking about a job change before, but now the world has opened up. If you think about how we used to hire, we used to hire around geographic locations and centers around offices. And now, the entire world is open for employees. So an employee who might be looking for a change is no longer constrained into their geographic area. And they may have found some benefits as well from some remote working during the pandemic. They may have also thought “Gosh, maybe it’s time for me to change my career or what I was doing wasn’t the thing that I thought I wanted.”
Julie:
The combination of those things has led employees to look around. And in fact, what I’m hearing… And I think this is actually a salient point. I think it’s interesting. I was talking with someone the other day, at a very well-known company, and they said, “We have a new manager, and the manager is seeing a lot of turnover.” And the company asked themselves, “Gosh, are we a horrible place to work? How come everybody’s looking around?” And I don’t think that’s at all… I mean, I think we should all… As organizations, my advice is for us to reflect on our own organizations to find out if employees are engaged. But I think this has been an open enrollment event that, regardless of the kind of workplace, people are thinking about change right now.
Mark:
Well, one of the things that your report said, or at least the documents that I saw said, was that companies who focus quickly on recruiting great talent, while at the same time retaining their own talent, are going to put themselves at an advantage. And it seems like employers hear that formula a lot. Can you make it real for me? I mean, what specifically should employers be doing?
Julie:
Oh, that is such a good question, Mark. I actually have some specific advice on that. I think, first of all, the talent pool is… For as much unemployment as there is, it feels like the talent pool is restricted. And when we’re looking for people, I’ve actually compared this to a shotgun wedding, we talk with somebody and we want to hire them quickly. What I think employers need to be thinking about is, actually, that fiercely competitive nature of the job market. And so my advice to organizations would be, number one, evaluate your careers page, just the page on your website that says, “These are the jobs we have available.” Number one, does it communicate your culture? Does it have pictures of your employees? Does it accurately describe a job description? Is it inviting? Because in this day and age, when it’s fiercely competitive, you have to have a careers page that stands out. So that’s my first piece of advice. And I think sometimes we don’t go through and re-audit those. We may not have looked back to determine “Hey, is this what we want it to look like today?” But you want that page to be awesome and to stand out. That’s number one.
Julie:
The second thing I would advise employers to do is to think about the actual application process and maybe actually go through… You’ve heard of secret shopping where the secret shopper comes and gives you a report on how their experience was. I think employers should secret shop their application process and go back and re-audit it, try it again. Are their speed bumps? Is it complicated? Is it preventative? And find out if those things could be preventing great candidates from even applying, because when you finally do find that…
Julie:
Oh, okay, and the third thing, I would also make sure that you have your hiring process collaboratively set up with outstanding communication to the candidate. Once you finally do get somebody that you’ve attracted them through your site, you have made sure that the application process is frictionless, and they’ve made it through to your pipe, make sure that your team is ready to go. Your team has to be ready to go. And I do think this is shotgun wedding, Mark. I think it’s get your team ready to go on an interview. Speed matters. Tomorrow, the next day, and be ready with your job offer when you find the candidate that you like. I think these are critical pieces. And we’ve built some of those pieces into our platform as a response to some of this, because we see that we are facing the same challenges everybody else is, so these are important pieces.
Mark:
So let me ask you the same question, but ask it about HR rather than the company as a whole. Obviously, HR’s right in the center of this whole storm or whatever you want to call it. What should HR be doing, specifically, to help shepherd the company through?
Julie:
Oh, I think there’s two things that come to mind for me. Number one, I would say HR should be gathering the pulse of the workforce. And by that, I mean, surveying employees and finding out, do I have hotspots or cold spots in the organization where the sentiment may be creating a space where I could have more attrition than I anticipate? So providing that kind of information to managers I think would be critical, and HR can lead in that space. So finding out if employees are engaged and where there may be any hotspots or cold spots, through some surveys, I think that’s a critical piece of what HR can do.
Julie:
And the second piece, I think, is even just to go talk to those managers of various departments. Here’s an example: Let’s just say that HR wasn’t sure if there was going to be attrition, and, by the way, there will be, so they may want to go to a department. And here’s a specific example that you could broaden out to maybe other departments. Let’s just say that a software company was going to release a new feature in November, but engineers are at a premium. They’re super hard to find right now. Anybody that’s in tech knows this. Well, what happens if you have attrition on your engineering team? Will you be able to deliver that widget by November if you don’t have enough people? And how will you know if people are thinking about resigning or thinking about switching? An engagement survey might help, which would allow HR to be out on the forefront saying, “Hey, I’m seeing some numbers here. Do you have any idea what kinds of positions you need? Should we start recruiting for those positions now and have some people on the back burner or keep them warm in the event that we see attrition?”
Julie:
So I would get ahead of that because that candidate search is complicated, and you don’t want to come around to, in this example, November and be like, “Aah, we’re going to miss our deadline for the release of this feature, because we don’t have the right people.” So getting ahead of it. And HR can help. They can increase their recruiting efforts. They can keep people warm and be actively searching. They can find recruiters in specialty areas. If they can’t find the talent state side… And I’m using an engineering example. You can expand this to other places as well, but maybe you need to look offshore for additional talent. Those are places where HR can provide meaningful contributions to helping find the talent.
Mark:
It makes me wonder, though, how do you keep people warm to get ahead of things in a market like this where good candidates aren’t staying on the market for very long.
Julie:
That actually may be a pretty big challenge. I’m not sure how you do that, Mark. Maybe just through great communication and keeping in touch. And one of the things we’ve done, and I know others have done too, is when you find a great candidate, if you’re not ready to issue that job offer just to stay in touch, “Hey, how’s that new job going for you?…” I know we actually have an employee here. And our example is broad. People have seen this. There was a candidate that we wanted a year ago, and the timing wasn’t right, but we kept in touch and came back. And when this candidate was in a new position, I went back to the candidate and said, “Hey, how’s that new job working out for you? Is it what you’d hoped? And if not, would you like to re-engage?” And in our case, we were able to bring that candidate in, because it wasn’t what they hoped. Now, oftentimes the answer is, “Yes, I’m very happy.” But just keeping warm and finding out the pulse of the new position and was it what they expected might be a way to keep people warm.
Mark:
That’s a good idea. A lot of this probably is COVID driven, and you indicated that before. Have you been hearing different requests or needs from your customers over the last 18 months or so?
Julie:
We really have, yes. Higher participation, more employee engagement, better performance reviews, better job descriptions, we’ve heard a lot of our customers are doing. And one of the things that we have built into our platform that we’ve seen an increase in is the delivery of content remotely. Imagine that, again, we used to be geographically based, so our customers are looking for ways to deliver content remotely, so remote learning and content delivery systems for new employees or simply for people that can’t make it to a particular event or training. So we’ve seen an increase in those kinds of pieces of technology.
Julie:
And I think one of the interesting things, Mark, is that some of these pieces, when you think about talent development and the role of HR, HR has always been critical. Of course, we’re big fans of HR, but HR has been elevated now. HR is now at the C-Suite budgeting level, and HR’s always wanted a seat at that table. And now they have it. And that’s important because quantifying the speed to hire, being able to provide great and measurable communication to employees, being able to quantify that we’ve delivered more training remotely to our people, are things that we’re seeing an increase in. Those were nice to have sometimes before with HR, but they’re mandatory components now. The table stakes have changed.
Mark:
Okay. With all of this swirling around us, would you care to predict what HR is going to face during 2022?
Julie:
Okay. It’s a risky ground, but I’m in. Let’s predict. Absolutely. I think 2022 is going to be a super interesting year. I don’t think we’re going to make it… If you look at the statistics on filling the number of positions that are available, we cannot get there until 2022. There’s a lot of positions and not enough applicants, so it’s still going to be as super hot hiring market. And I think this hiring market is going to last not just through this time next year, but I think it’s going to go on for another couple of years. I think the Delta variant is throwing us a curve. And it’ll be interesting to see what happens when federal unemployment benefits run out on September 6th. I think it’s going to be a hot, active, competitive environment. And I don’t think it’s going to end in 2022. I think it’ll move on.
Julie:
But here’s another prediction. Employees have more choice than they ever have, and they’re demanding more. And what that means for employers is that we are looking at things like rising costs of salaries, increased benefits, and yet, we have to also maintain the idea of being able to write paychecks. So what I think is going to change is that we’re going to have fewer employees doing more work. That’s my prediction, actually, that we’re going to hire more experienced people at higher salaries, but we might have fewer overall headcount, which could potentially put a strain on the workforce. And the reason I mentioned that is because when we think about the stretch of the rubber band, I don’t think it’s just a matter of quick hiring and filling positions. I think there’s going to be more repercussions once we do hire those people and more balancing and settling, even beyond 2022, with employers. That’s what I predict is going to happen. I think it’s going to be a challenge.
Mark:
Julie, thank you very much. Appreciate you visiting today.
Julie:
Thanks. This has been a lot of fun. Thanks.
Mark:
My guest today has been Julie Rieken, CEO of Trakstar. 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. We’re 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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