Tim Sackett – HR Tech 2022 Series – Recruitment and ATS in 2022 and Beyond

Connect with Tim:

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Connect with Dwight:

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• dwight.brown@salary.com

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• david.turetsky@salary.com

 

Podcast Manager, Karissa Harris:

• HRDataLabs@salary.com

 

Production by Affogato Media

Resources:

• HRU Technical Resources
• Compensation Consulting Services
• HR Data Labs Season 5 Episode 5
• HR Data Labs Season 5 Episode 3

• “I believe that in talent acquisition especially, we are data rich, but information poor. We still aren't very good with insights. And so when we take a look at 2023 and beyond, to me, we're going to start to redefine success of HR and talent acquisition in a completely new way.”
• “The biggest mistake I find . . . is that companies are trying to take their current process and just overlay new technology and call that digital transformation. What they should say is, ‘What happens if we scrap our entire process and start with a blank, white piece of paper? How could we do this differently, better, etc?’ That's really transformational.”

Anouncer: 0:02

Here's an experiment for you. Take passionate experts in human resource technology. Invite cross industry experts from inside and outside HR. Mix in what's happening in people analytics today. Give them the technology to connect, hit record, pour their discussions into a beaker, mix thoroughly. And voila, you get the HR Data Labs podcast, where we explore the impact of data and analytics to your business. We may get passionate and even irreverent, that count on each episode challenging and enhancing your understanding of the way people data can be used to solve real world problems. Now, here's your host, David Turetsky.

 

David Turetsky: 0:46

Hello, and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky. Like always, we find fascinating people inside and outside the world of HR to give you the most recent on what's happening in HR data analytics process and technology. Today, at the HR Technology Conference, the 2022 HR Technology Conference in beautiful Mandalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada. We have with us, Tim Sackett. Tim, how are you?

 

Tim Sackett: 1:11

I'm doing good. Thanks for having me on, David!

 

David Turetsky: 1:13

It's my pleasure. You guys remember Tim. Tim is one of the thought leaders in the world of HR technology around recruiting and ATS. And we've had conversations with him in the past. In fact, I think it was last year at this time.

 

Tim Sackett: 1:25

Yeah, right around that time.

 

David Turetsky: 1:26

Yeah. So, Tim, the one fun thing no one knows about you?

 

Tim Sackett: 1:32

Oh, wow. You just got me like out in the middle of nowhere. I think the one fun thing for me is like, I have this belief that everybody should have one like a karaoke song and he can pull out that'd be really good at. I don't have mine yet. But I'm working on that. Like, I think you should like you sometimes you just randomly run into like something and are like, Oh, it's karaoke night

 

David Turetsky: 1:51

You trip over and fall, and you run into a karaoke night.

 

Tim Sackett: 1:54

I'm like bad bad at karaoke. Like, I'm like, I just wanted to be I want to have one song I can just go kill it. And then like, oh, do another! Like nope.

 

David Turetsky: 2:02

Like Don't Stop Believing or something. Yeah,

 

Tim Sackett: 2:04

Yeah exactly. I think that's the key though, yeah. too. You have to have the crowd. When I used to get a sing along, you know, someone in the crowd is going to join in.

 

David Turetsky: 2:10

Yeah. Well, you know, Piano Man from Billy Joel. Yeah, that's a great sing along. Yeah. Yeah. La da da, da, da da. So the topic we've chosen today is 2022 2023. What happened in 2022? What surprised Tim in 2022, around HR technology in the recruiting and ATS space? Let's first start, Tim 2022. What were you expecting going

 

Tim Sackett: 2:43

You know, I knew we were going to have a hard time By the way, there are countries that actually do this. in? hiring. And I think that, like that expectation came through. I think the surprise, I wasn't surprised by it just because a Exactly. Yeah, and actually pay them right. And I was I was I've been like trying to, for a long time like go, Hey, we have espousing some of those same kinds of things like we should a problem. I think 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post. And I got some really bad feedback at the time, which I was saying HR be bonusing. Right. And so in 2019, we had historic low 3.5 should start paying their employees to have sex. Meaning we need more, we need more babies, right? Because we have a demographic issue on the horizon that was going to kick our butts. And people were just like, Oh my God, how could you ever say HR should encourage their employees to have sex? You're like, come on. Like it's we, 3.7% unemployment, we had five, 6 million open jobs. And it was super hard to hire, pandemic hits. We all know what happened. We have this big giant V. And often we come back and we're like, oh, my gosh, why is it so hard to hire? When is everybody going to come back to work? You're like, we didn't have anybody to work before!

 

David Turetsky: 3:50

Right.

 

Tim Sackett: 3:50

And then we had obviously major shifts that happened demographically, with three jet, three years of baby boomers kind of leaving early women leaving early close the border. So no immigration,

 

David Turetsky: 4:00

Close the borders. That was the thing I was gonna say.

 

Tim Sackett: 4:01

Yeah, like. So we literally said that if you put all of those things together, and you just use conservative numbers, we might have like taking 11 million people out of the workforce. And then that speaks to the additional, you know, five, 6 million jobs open the 3.5, like unemployment. So people are like, well, you know, it's a recession and a downturn. I mean, as we're talking today, in mid September, unemployment numbers are down again.

 

David Turetsky: 4:28

Right job growth as well.

 

Tim Sackett: 4:29

Yeah. The other countries are kicking our butts in terms of their immigration policy, and we're still sitting on the sidelines. And so I think

 

David Turetsky: 4:36

Which is remarkable with this administration to think that it was different.

 

Tim Sackett: 4:40

Yeah, don't I mean, that's the hard part. Right. You go, hey, the people that usually support immigration are in charge of all the branches.

 

David Turetsky: 4:48

Right, right now Yeah, well, the midterms coming up it's gonna be weird. But but but to that point, that's what I don't understand. Economic demographers and I'm an economics demographer in my training. We could have told you years ago, hat was going to happen from a demographic bubble? It was obvious. Nothing was going to change dramatically unless an immigration change.

 

Tim Sackett: 5:10

Yeah, Japan knew what their problem was for 20 straight years and still are just starting to make some some changes to turn that

 

David Turetsky: 5:17

Right.

 

Tim Sackett: 5:17

It's hard!

 

David Turetsky: 5:18

Right. Well, we also have a really big problem, which is the kind of the death of a traditional family. Which is causing fertility rates to fall as well. divorces are all time highs. And, you know, let's just say what it is. We need more births, it's not happening. And there's a lot of talk around political politicization of people's bodies. And I'm not trying to go there. I'm just saying that unless we get more births, we're gonna have a big problem. We can't fill roles.

 

Tim Sackett: 5:47

There's not enough humans in the United States in you know, obviously, in the world, there's there's enough humans who are some of that's just in the wrong spots. And that's why immigration really is the only silver bullet we have to pull the lever we have to pull.

 

David Turetsky: 5:59

But that's a short term problem.

 

Tim Sackett: 6:00

Could be Yeah, yeah. I mean, the long term. I mean, again, depending right, we still, thankfully are in a country where a lot of people want to come in. So that's, that's one of the things. But how do you encourage like, if it's, if it's the birth replacement rate is 2.1. And we're at 1.7. That gets it back to 2.1. Even? And that's just replacement. Yeah. And if you're thinking, well, we need to do more than that. So we know,

 

David Turetsky: 6:23

By the way, sorry, one thing though, it's replacement without pandemics.

 

Tim Sackett: 6:27

Yes, yes.

 

David Turetsky: 6:27

When you start introducing pandemics, it's you have people who have higher mortality rates. Yeah, we've had very high mortality rates lately.

 

Tim Sackett: 6:34

Oh, for sure.

 

David Turetsky: 6:35

That causes replacement to be higher then.

 

Tim Sackett: 6:37

Yeah, we've seen the backup in the average age, you know, for living for likelihood for both men and women in the US, which is a rare thing to happen, right. And modern world and rich world that we're in. But we do. So we know that we're not going to change that. So then automation, robotics, all of that stuff comes into play. Because I mean, you see this with everyday service jobs, more and more, you're a kiosk when you go into a McDonald's versus a real person and all of those things, right?

 

David Turetsky: 7:02

Or, I mean, even go to a CVS or Walgreens. Now, when you go to supermarkets, or you go to CVS or Walmart, even here in Vegas, they have the self service. But they've replaced the person who does the checkout, you're that person that does checkout. And they have one person manning five or six different channels, whereas it used to be one person on each, that's a real difference in how things are getting done in the super market.

 

Tim Sackett: 7:26

Yeah. And that's a real life today example, if you really like think about in the future, where that could be all those other things that are being taken over by automation. That's really the only again, that you know, that's one of the only ways we're ever gonna get out of this in the short term, even though a lot of that stuff isn't short term, because there's a whole kind of adoption and build, but you know, technology tends to come up and help us out with some of that stuff. So,

 

David Turetsky: 7:49

So you one fun thing you just brought up that I just remembered is you can walk into some Amazon and Apple Stores, purchase something and never talk to anybody. Never, ever talked to a human being you can go up by something. Yeah, somebody might give you a bag or give you a receipt. But you don't actually really have to interact, you can just literally walk out the door, legally, because you paid for it. And to your point. The technologies are there. You may need to have people who service those technologies. Right. Well, there's NFC going on there. There's others to make sure you're not stealing. Yeah, but But the person who is an unskilled laborer who used to are relatively unskilled who used to be the checkout person there is now gone. And by the way, unskilled labor is going through the roof in other areas of the economy.

 

Tim Sackett: 8:38

Yeah. Yeah, they're, I mean, there's always gonna be some of that, like, we even take a look at it from the recruiting standpoint. And I think people ask me this all the time, what's the future of recruiting? And for years and years, it was always the conversation was around technology, it was always like, Oh, here's a new tack. And here's this, and this is how it's gonna, you know, change the recruiter life, the future of recruiting is a person having a real conversation with the candidate. And that's it. That's your job as a recruiter

 

David Turetsky: 9:02

Wait wait wait, that sounds like Back to the Future.

 

Tim Sackett: 9:04

Exactly, exactly. Difference being, we're using technology. Now, for all these tactical pieces were previously in the old school recruiting decades ago, you would have to call and call and call and call and then eventually get someone to call you back or whatever. And you might have, if you were lucky, you know, 10 20 conversations in a week, you know, now, with the way that technology and scheduling and automation all this is, we theoretically you could say, hey, every half hour on the hour, we're gonna have a candidate for you to have a conversation with. Now again, we know that burnout, there would be really high but like the future of recruiting becomes who is the recruiter that can get you the quickest to trust you with their career and build that quick relationship? And understand like, is it somebody we want to you know, we want to have interview or date or whatever right so, so that becomes, and that's what the funny thing is, is like I think a lot of organizations have their talent acquisition teams built around people that administer a recruiting process. And so you're going to have this huge transformation of, we need to bring in closers. The technology is going to be invisible, it's going to do its thing. It's going to bring candidates to you that are warm and excited and ready.

 

David Turetsky: 10:14

Right. Right. Right.

 

Tim Sackett: 10:15

And now you have to talk them into why you know why us? Right.

 

David Turetsky: 10:18

Totally different skill set.

 

Tim Sackett: 10:20

Yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 10:20

And I guess the question is, can that really be trained? Or is it a different type of person? Is it more of a salesperson? Because they have to have that closing, not only mentality but hunger?

 

Tim Sackett: 10:33

Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, it's, I almost think that it's somebody that is a true believer in your brand, right, that becomes another piece of that. So it's someone that can close. But they also because I mean, if you get somebody to trust you with their career, one of the most big biggest decisions you'll ever make in their life, you have to have someone that has pretty deep empathy around that whole entire thing, right? And traditional sales would be like, no, no, no, just close, close, close to get him there. This is a little different. I always tell people, because people say, Oh, recruiting is sales and I'm like, it's not exactly No, because you think about I'm selling you a car, you come in you want the car you have the money you're gonna buy the car that's transactional. Here is I'm like, you want the job? And if it was, if it was that you would just say, hey, I want that job and I'm gonna go to work. And that would be that's the sales cycle. Right? But we're going well, it was put it back into the car analogy, you come in, you want to buy a Cadillac, and I'm gonna go, I'm not sure if your Cadillac material, David.

 

David Turetsky: 11:28

But by the way, that's actually happened to me. Walk into a BMW dealer and see the looks you get. Wearing that versus this versus shorts and a t-shirt.

 

Tim Sackett: 11:38

Yeah. But thinking about thinking about that, you know, in that process, it becomes crystal clear to say, oh, it's not all sale, right? Because that's a very like one to one transactional, I'm going to try to entice you to come in, and I'm definitely if you want to buy I'm selling. This is, I want you to buy I want you to buy I want you to buy I no longer want you to buy.

 

David Turetsky: 11:58

But let's break that down a little bit. Because as we get more, I guess, legislation around pay transparency. And they'll be more self selection. And we're going to find people who are, I guess, either more driven toward a role or say, I'm not even going to apply because that's not the money I want for that job. Won't we get a more streamlined approach so it does become more of a transactional thing?

 

Tim Sackett: 12:25

I mean, I think in the low skilled, no skill world, for sure, right? I still think you know, at a higher skill level side, you're gonna have to have, if you want the best talent to come work for you versus where they're at or work for somebody else, you're still gonna have to be a little bit of that.

 

David Turetsky: 12:40

Virtually no conversations anyways, right now, is there?

 

Tim Sackett: 12:42

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's still, it's a hard thing to give up for a hiring manager to say, I'm just gonna have somebody show up. Yeah, quite frankly, like, and I've put this, you know, written about this. I think a lot of these companies, you better off just literally, the way they select should be like a lottery. Like, why are you even interviewing because like you and you put the bias and, and stuff like that you're not, you're no better than anything, you might as well just randomly say, hey, we have 10 people that want the job. And we're picking two, seven and 10, you come in to work tomorrow. You're gonna have just, your success will be exactly the same of you going through an interview process.

 

David Turetsky: 13:18

I was talking to somebody yesterday, and we were talking about using assessments on the front end to make sure that there were the the right skills necessary to complete the hire, right? Don't actually I take it back not at the end of hiring at the beginning of hire of the hiring process, before someone actually applies, have them go through and and test out to see if you should even gather their data to be able to be put into the process. Because the moment you get all of their data, then they're are a record in your system. And if they're not really serious, or they don't really have all those skills, why bother putting them in as record during in your system?

 

Tim Sackett: 13:56

Yeah, no, I agree. I think it's, it's always that they might not be somebody that we want now, but maybe later, but we you and I both know, the reality is is ATS has become a dead database of millions of candidates for a lot of these companies, because they don't really utilize kind of a, you know, marketing automation to go in and revive some of that talent that's in there.

 

David Turetsky: 14:15

Totally lost opportunity by the way.

 

Tim Sackett: 14:17

Yeah. For most companies. Yeah. I tell people, the biggest resource, the underutilized resource they have in their company is their database, he spent all this money, getting people to apply, attract them, make him go through their process, jump through hoops, and then they just sit there and for the most part, the vast majority, 99% of them will never get the job and they just sit there as dead inventory. You know,

 

David Turetsky: 14:38

So can I talk on that thread for a couple of seconds? Because I'm a data guy. Yeah, you have so much data. You have so much insight as to not just the candidates and the resumes you have in the process, but what their disposition was, and usually it's going to be 10 seconds after they apply to send them a note saying, hey, you've got really great credentials, but we're not going to go forward with you. But why isn't it that becomes the first place we look other than employees. I mean, I would think we would go look for employees in the recruiting process first, but okay. Besides that, why wouldn't we look at that data source? Why invest in the money to go out and do the posting and spend the money on postings? When you have all that data just sitting there waiting for you?

 

Tim Sackett: 15:19

There's a psychological factor of, hey, they're in our database. And if we didn't hire him, they must be garbage.

 

David Turetsky: 15:26

But But why? They've they've if they've never gone through the vetting process? Or even if you've gone through the vetting process, the vetting process may be better now!

 

Tim Sackett: 15:32

The other piece of it is is is you're talking about outbound recruiting versus inbound recruiting. So it's like 90%, of of the recruiting that's done, and maybe even larger than that could be 95% is going to be inbound. It's like, I post a job, you show interest. And that becomes a very easy tactical process to go through. Right? Either we all like you, we don't like you. And then we move on to somebody else who's interested, right? For me to go after people who are unknown, I wouldn't say they're uninterested in us. They just don't even know if there's interest or not. So I have to figure that out first, and try to capture you then and talk you into it. That's heavy lifting, recruiting, versus post and pray, post and pray, post and pray.

 

David Turetsky: 16:08

But but not to sound contrarian. Because you know, much more about recruiting process than I do, it takes an email.

 

Tim Sackett: 16:14

No, yeah, for sure.

 

David Turetsky: 16:15

Or reach out. And by the way, that does not need to be a person sitting at Outlook doing, it could be a, here's a job that we're going to look for. I don't understand at all.

 

Tim Sackett: 16:24

And I think there's a lot of technology out there in the landscape, that people are starting to use, like matching technology that an AI automatically reaches out catches interest, right, and they don't just reach out to they reach out to people in your database, but also in that overall kind of micro landscape that you have around whatever that might be. It could be you have, hey, you have 10 employees that have this background, we should be asking them as well, right? Who do you know, or maybe even internally is like, hey, there's jobs open? Would you be interested? Like you talked about, like, I think that's one of the bigger kind of retention things that companies kind of utilize, use as well. We'd rather see somebody leave us for you know, and go someplace else, then I was like, Oh, hey, maybe we should give them the opportunity to go kind of work. I do believe like in talent acquisition, especially in it, we could argue probably in HR, we our data rich, but information poor, we still don't aren't very good around the insight side. Right? We have, I mean, we might have more data points than any other system within our company. And yet, we still haven't really figured out how to utilize that really well. And again, like that's one of the things I see here at the show, is we're starting to really see the power of BI coming into a lot of these systems in in. So that's, you know, when we take a look at 2023 and beyond, to me, we're gonna start to redefine success of HR and talent acquisition in a completely new way. Because we've what we've been defining success, as has been the same thing for like, really decades. You know, days to fill, employee engagement, like, you know, all these kinds of things that, you know, have really zero correlation back to our quality. Yeah, and I think so we're starting to see much more black and white data driven, like kind of measures of success, you know,

 

David Turetsky: 17:59

That's a hope for maturity for the for not just, and I'm not gonna blame the recruiting function for this. Because a lot of times, people put pressure on the recruiting world, if we're not hiring fast enough. So they just totally tense them out.

 

Tim Sackett: 18:13

But there's that false, it's a false correlation of faster is better, right? Yeah,

 

David Turetsky: 18:19

If you're going through the hoops to get a requisition approved, then the best thing to do is hire quickly. Because if God forbid, the economy changes, the requisition away, you don't have that opportunity. And even if you get a shitty candidate, you at least have a body in there before the requisition goes away.

 

Tim Sackett: 18:34

So we started the conversation talking about demographics, right, and this lack of employees, and then, you know, I have these conversations all the time with TA leaders, they'll go well, you know, my recruiters have, you know, 50 60 40 recs, whatever means, you know, just, you know, it's it's kind of an arbitrary number, but it's a big number. And they're like, Well, historically, that seemed like that was fine. You're like, but you understand we're, we're not, we're not in the same history right now. We have historic low unemployment with like, they might have been able to do 40 recs before and been successful. It might only be 20 now or 25. But we still have this mentality. So when you say like I don't like blame HR TA for some of these things? I don't right now, for sure. Because what I feel like most TA leaders and teams that I talk with now are just surviving day to day.

 

David Turetsky: 19:18

Absolutely.

 

Tim Sackett: 19:18

I mean, it's insane.

 

David Turetsky: 19:19

Absolutely.

 

Announcer: 19:21

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David Turetsky: 19:31

So great conversation, and I don't know if and within that I asked you what surprised you about 2022?

 

Tim Sackett: 19:37

I think the for me, the surprise is still been. And again, I'm not thinking back into this lands like this HR tech landscape that we're in for the show. We still have pretty bad marketing because the buyers are super confused. And it's a lack of it's kind of a lack of an awareness that that confusion lies there. And part of that might be we kind of overestimate the sophistication of the buyer. If you go out and you measure the competency of a TA leader, an HR leader, the lowest competency that they will have consistently is technology. And yet we believe that they know exactly what they want and how the tech will work for them. Instead of saying like, hey, how do we build this out for you in a way that we can show you what's what's capable and what's what you should be doing? Right. And yet, like these, most of the people out here, still, they still want to go to you and set you. We can do whatever you want. They don't know what they want. Yeah, show them what they want.

 

David Turetsky: 20:33

Well, if you walk the floor again, I'm not gonna I'm not saying Tim hasn't, because Tim has definitely walked the floor. But if you walk the floor, there's so much confusion because they're all trying to use buzzwords. Yes, bullshit. Pardon my french, that if I'm a practitioner, I'm walking this floor. And I did have some problems. I couldn't get 10 steps without everybody saying exactly the same thing. Everything's about AI. Everything's about insights. Everything's about data. And at the end of the day, they're all trying to solve different things, but they're all saying the same things to everybody. So there's literally hundreds, if not 1000, or maybe more vendors here. All confusing the shit out of the people they're talking to.

 

Tim Sackett: 21:13

Yeah, yeah, you're right. I mean, that's, it's surprising, because the amount of money VC wise, like in this space is I mean, I mean, I think Georgia rock said is like the second biggest year ever, over 10 billion a year to date. So obviously, there's a ton of money coming into the space, and you would think we will get better at getting right to you as like, what's the actual problem? And here's how we can solve that for you versus just, you know, we're gonna be the next shiny thing on the market, you know.

 

David Turetsky: 21:41

And I'm gonna applaud companies that stay in their lane, right? There are some companies that stay in their lane, they do their thing, they only talk about that. I'm applauding, I'm not gonna name any names, but there are others that to your point, they're trying to solve world peace. You're confusing the shit out of your economic buyer. And you're right. They're not sophisticated. They're still in the, you know, moving from administration to insight, they're still moving from administration to strategy. And the more you confuse them, the worse you're gonna have a time for trying to get their attention.

 

Tim Sackett: 22:17

Yeah. And again, I want to make sure people are clear like I don't, I'm not disparaging our HR leaders or TA leaders from an unsophisticated This is really advanced stuff. Yeah, I mean, I spend in you know, I both spent a ton of even hours and hours a week, just heads down in the technology, really trying to learn what it is, and still are just scratching the surface of what's really out there. And an HR leader or TA leader? They might spend an hour every quarter. That's it. And so like, it's not surprising that they're that they don't I mean, most of them know the most about their own system and capabilities, but not

 

David Turetsky: 22:54

Well, I wish. They just scratched the surface of what they literally have. And then they say, we are making a business case for change. And the brilliant question comes from the CIO, what doesn't your system do today? And they go, Well, when we talk to the salespeople for this new thing, they said, they're not understanding what they currently have.

 

Tim Sackett: 23:15

Yes, that's right. I mean, that's my push to every person I work with on the consulting side is become a super user of your tech first, then tell me what that tech doesn't have. Because you're right, you they can't tell you what they want, or what the system lacks. All they can tell you is like, Oh, well, that feature over there. It looks great. And I'm like, Yeah, that's a feature. And by the way, it's not really used that much. But it looks super cool. You know,

 

David Turetsky: 23:36

I had a great conversation with somebody yesterday, where I said, you know, why are you making a platform shift from XYZ company to Y, Y, Z company? And they said, well, they have some features that we really wanted. And I said, okay, so you're going to shift your HRIS, payroll, benefits, tax time, talent, all of those HR core functions, because of features. I said, Are you sure you really want to do it, you're going to spend millions of dollars and upset lots of different systems and processes for that. And they're like, Yeah, I mean, this is the newest stuff. It's the latest stuff. Like, that seems like you're chasing the shiny nickel. It seems like

 

Tim Sackett: 24:15

If you think about digital transformation, that's really what all these all these HR departments and TA departments are trying to do is most of what the biggest mistake I find is that they're, they're trying to take their current process, and just overlay new technology and call that digital transformation. What they should say is like, what happens if we just scrap our entire process? And we started with a blank white piece of paper? How could we do this differently better or whatever, that's really transformational. Instead, they're just like, well, here's how this works. And you're just like, every time I go in, and I dig into the process, they're like, they're always like, Yeah, our process sucks, and here's why blah, blah. And usually there's a little ownership there because they're like, Well, we I was the one that rebuilt the process, but you know, and to me, what I find usually has nothing to do with HR TA. It's a legacy kind of leader issue of saying, Well, we're forced to do this because of but then when I sit in front of the C suite of that same company and say, Why are you doing that? And they're just like,

 

David Turetsky: 25:12

I don't know.

 

Tim Sackett: 25:13

But somebody in HR thought it was super important. That leader had that step at some point. Yes, instead of going to him and saying, hey, you know, this actually doesn't work for us. This is actually holding us back. This is causing a lot of waste in the system, you know, right. And then we go, okay, don't do it.

 

David Turetsky: 25:29

Right. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I think Chris Havrilla said, There's six levels of why, like you say, why are you doing that? Oh, well, we've been doing this for a long time. Why are you doing that? Oh, well, you know, if you peel back the layers, it was somebody did something for some reason 10 years ago. Yeah. Because someone made a mistake and approve something that shouldn't have been approved. So it got codified into law. For one that one issue, yeah, blew up and became the panacea.

 

Tim Sackett: 25:57

This is a great example. Because we always we like to laugh about it and say, well, that's not us, that's everybody else. It's everybody. So I'm working with a company. And I'm working with a recruiter, like going through a diagnostics and really understanding her process. And it's very typical, where she's like, I screening candidate. I like the candidate. And I say, okay, when can you interview? Then what happens? Then we have to call the hiring manager and say, Hey, I have a candidate, when can you interview they can interview and that's best case scenario. That means that the hiring manager trust you, they're just going to they don't have to see the candidate. And I'm like, ask her, I'm like, why don't you have access to the managers calendar, where you just automatically say, Oh, you can do Wednesday at three? Yep. Okay, great. I have you in.

 

David Turetsky: 26:37

Right, Calendly?

 

Tim Sackett: 26:38

And her answer was, Well, I actually have that for most of my managers. But I have a couple that they refuse that access. And I'm like, and so they put it in process step because you have two hire your managers, or a handful of hiring managers that are like, I don't want to give you access to my calendar. And I said, so here's the conversation that would take place, when I come is, I'm going to pull that hiring manager in, I'm going to pull the recruiter in, I'm going to pull in your your CEO. How long do you think that that hiring manager will standby they're I don't want you in my in my calendar. It won't happen. They will say, Oh, my gosh, I never told her she couldn't have access. For sure.

 

David Turetsky: 27:19

It was a misunderstanding.

 

Tim Sackett: 27:20

Yeah. And it's the same thing. We asked recruiters all the time, I'm like, why aren't you sending emails to candidates from the hiring managers email? Well, because they think that's their personal email, like, no, it's work product. I mean, this is gonna be an eye opener for them. But guess what? You know, because we already know, you're gonna get an 80% higher response rate from the hiring manager than a recruiter. Why aren't you utilizing that? I'm not trying to be manipulative to a candidate. Immediately once that candidate is interested, I'm going to, I'm going to introduce the recruiter, who's also me, you know? In that conversation, and we'll take it real from there, you know.

 

David Turetsky: 27:56

Wow, just wow.

 

Tim Sackett: 27:57

There's so much waste, that we don't necessarily feel is a waste, so we feel we can't get around it. And then the third party outsider comes in looks at it, has one conversation and it all changes. And they're like, Oh.

 

David Turetsky: 28:09

But thank God. That's the reason why we exist though too. That's how we get paid.

 

Tim Sackett: 28:14

Exactly.

 

David Turetsky: 28:16

Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, Man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR data labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast, or whatever is on your mind. Go to Salary.com/HRDLconsulting, to schedule your FREE 30 minute call today. Let's talk about what your prognosis is. And you know, Dr. Sackett, put on your hat put on your put on your white robe. And we're, you know, put your badge ID for your hospital? What's happening for 2023? Where's it going? What's what's going to dramatically change in four months?

 

Tim Sackett: 28:58

You know, I think the hard part is is like it's hard for a buyer here to buy tech that's invisible. But the more invisible we make our technology, the better. We just need stuff to happen. That that no one has go into a dashboard or a separate system or a login or whatever, they don't see anything. It's like, oh, my gosh, I have a candidate in my email who is interested, how did that happen, right? That invisible tech becomes the future of what we're trying to really do. I need less people pushing buttons and pulling levers and all that within the technology, right? And letting that AI automation, Intelligent Automation kind of run behind the scenes and just get us to that point where stuff can happen. So we start to we're starting to see that more and more. There's a lot of vendors out here that are espousing that they can kind of do that. The hard part is for a buyer or TA leader or HR leaders, they look at it and they always want to see something, I want to see the dashboard, right? And you're like, that's not how this works. This is getting pinned together those 10 pieces of technology that you already have you've already paid for and actually make them work the way that you believe that all would work when you when you put the dominos together.

 

David Turetsky: 30:00

It's connective tissue, yes,

 

Tim Sackett: 30:02

And in that, but it's all invisible to them. So they're paying a lot of money for tech, they don't see. But also, the hard part of that is you have, she actually then goes gets back to data, you have to build that benchmark data and like baseline to say, here's where we're at, we're going to pay a lot of money and put in this tech we can't see. But then we'll measure and see where we're at, right. And you'll see this kind of this growth, because that's where we, we have to keep going back. Because what will happen a year from now, two years from now, someone will go, wow, we don't see it. I don't even know if it's really doing anything. And you go, Okay, here's where we're at, here's where we were, when it was down here, ones up here. And you have to keep going back and kind of showing them there is advantages to having all of this kind of in there.

 

David Turetsky: 30:41

But does it have anything to do with control and ceding control and at least with the dashboard, you get to see how the dials are moving? And yeah, feel like, you know, like, if you're driving a car, and the car doesn't have a speedometer, but the car knows it's gonna start like, like, if it's a Tesla, yeah, it's got all the automation built in.

 

Tim Sackett: 30:59

Yeah, I do think there's, I mean, there's a lot of that, that we just, we need to build out BI dashboards for our leaders. So they understand, like, you can give him a picture of that. And what I find is, most leaders just want the picture. They don't really want the data, right, once in a while, like one out of 100 will want to dig in and get like their hands dirty with the data. For the most part, they want the picture, right? They want to be able to send someone to like the hiring managers complaining and you want to go look, I'll show you the funnel. Yeah, let me give you a picture of exactly what we're doing right now. Shut your mouth, you know.

 

David Turetsky: 31:26

But but the invisible I think is the scary part. Yeah. Even know it's working.

 

Tim Sackett: 31:31

Because it doesn't seem real. It's intangible.

 

David Turetsky: 31:33

Right. But it's working.

 

Tim Sackett: 31:34

Yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 31:35

But they just don't know it's working. Exactly. Wow, it's a concept. Wow. It's just doing what it should be doing.

 

Tim Sackett: 31:42

But like, that's the heart, it's so hard for them to buy into, you know, because usually they're like, you know, your background check out or this company or whatever, you're, you're actually seeing something. So then you feel like, Oh, that makes sense. And I'm paying every month for this piece of technology.

 

David Turetsky: 31:56

But I mean, I would liken it to bill pays, right? We set up automated bill pay, because they just happen, right? Yeah, get our paycheck, the mortgage gets paid, you know, maybe we get a receipt and begin an email, maybe get a notification that the transaction happened appropriately. Because now I know that the control even though I've ceded control to the bill pay mechanism, it's happening.

 

Tim Sackett: 32:18

Yeah. And if you had to go backwards, like Bill Pay didn't work. And then you have to write the check and put the stamp on and drop it off. You'd be like, Oh, this sucks.

 

David Turetsky: 32:24

It does. Why can't I automate? Well, you know, but that's what we're getting to from a society, we're actually ceding a lot of control. Yeah. But there are some areas of it that we still need or want or don't trust, maybe?

 

Tim Sackett: 32:41

it's a trust thing for sure. I mean, we have a we have a distrust for technology in a lot of ways. And so if you can't see it, you can't see it running. And you're like, Well, I don't know if it's running, you know, but that's where I think we get back to the measurement side and in, you know, being able to deliver that and really understand. But, again, most companies don't even have that baseline to know where they're at. So you have to really kind of come in from that standpoint and show them, okay, here's what we're measuring right now. And here's where you're at. And then let's go 90 days, six months a year, and we'll show you this progression of how it's getting better.

 

David Turetsky: 33:09

But But does that kind of speak to the fact that they haven't set what the goals were from it from the beginning. And so therefore, when they see the measures, they really don't know what they're shooting for at the end of the day?

 

Tim Sackett: 33:19

Well, in here, this is a whole nother podcast around performance management,

 

David Turetsky: 33:22

right, especially with TIS.

 

Tim Sackett: 33:24

Well. And so when you think about how our measurements, and what they're like, in the interaction with compensation, is you don't want to have necessarily black and white measures, if it's 20% of your annual salary bonus, right? You want to measure that, like update time to fill days to fill whatever it is. If I have my measure being I met 37 days to fill January 1, if I get to 36.5, on December 31, I get 20% Bonus, right? And all of a sudden, it's November 1, and I'm like at 36.9. And like, oh, I need to close some recs. Oh, I'm 36.5 Look, I get my bonus. We have to take away that kind of performance management bonus thing where it's like, Look, I need to know what success looks like and how to measure success, right? And we'll do your, let's do your bonus based on like, maybe business objectives, right? Maybe, you know, margin and revenue or whatever, right, and you'll get bonus on the same thing the CEO gets bonus on or whatever, right? Because if you're running a great function shouldn't that roll into business performance.

 

David Turetsky: 34:28

But then we need to close the gap in understanding of the business so they understand what their piece of it is. Because the line of sight to incentive programs has always killed the use of the company metrics on people who don't really understand the company metrics, they can't understand their piece of it. So therefore they go. I don't know how I'm gonna solve for margin because, you know, what do I do? I'm just, I'm hiring people. And

 

Tim Sackett: 34:52

It's a broken system to allow somebody to design the metric that they're gonna get bonused on. You should say no, here's the talent metrics are the HR metrics that we know equal success. And this is what we're going to measure. The only way we get through that is by decoupling that bonus with them right at this point, because you're saying, Hey, we're going to allow you to build metrics that you're going to bonus on, you're like, Oh, well, then I'm going to build mine on that. I think there'll be 50 days of sunshine next year. You know, like, it's people laugh at that. But they're like, all's they're doing like, Oh, we're doing ours on the hiring manager satisfaction. Well, what does that even mean? Just because a manager is satisfied with your recruiter? Does that mean that you're better at recruiting?

 

David Turetsky: 35:32

How about, how about first year turnover for your for your new hires?

 

Tim Sackett: 35:36

Well, no. And then you're like, can you the quality of hire one is the bigger one, because they're like, oh, it's quality of hiring, like, what is quality of hire? And then isn't that really a hiring manager measure? Not really. It's not HR GA?

 

David Turetsky: 35:47

Yeah. Yeah. Hey, listen, if we're going to talk, if we're going to talk about like crazy things for the future. Let's talk about how the DE&I metrics get in there and getting diverse slates of candidates, even if it doesn't end in a hiring of a diverse hire. Even having diverse slates. Yeah, I would love to have that metric in there. By the way, if you're listening, and you're designing an Right. To me, it actually goes a little bit incentive program.

 

Tim Sackett: 36:08

I mean, I always like, it's funny, because I'm, like, you know, your prototypical, you know, middle aged white guy, you know, I should get my 23andme thinking, beyond that. I look at job descriptions and say, job because I like my I was always told, like, my grandmother is a quarter Cherokee or something like that, right? I'm like, I do mine want to find out. If I have some Native American me, it was 0.2%. So I'm 99.8%. White guy, but yet, I always feel like on the recruiting front, I could come in and actually have an immediate impact of diversity of recruiting way more than somebody that that is just, oh, well, this is a person of color or a female or whatever. Because to me, I'm gonna turn on the measures and understand where in the funnel, is that falling out? Where gonna have that bias? Where it could be an assessment, it could be an interview process, it could be the selection, like, right, and then you then you have a real convert courageous conversation with where that bias is happening and make the change. And yet we we know, we have the ability to do that right now, today, every person could do it. And yet we see major major Fortune 100, fortune 500 corporations continue to not make one fricking percentage point difference in their diversity hiring. It's because they refuse to do hard measures on that, you know, on the funnel. Because the diversity is in the funnel. They're just not showing where it's falling out. And we know where it's falling out. It's in that unconscious bias, right? At the selection level, right? But they're not willing to have that that conversation with that hiring manager. Because when first thing you do is when you go to a hiring manager and say, Hey, by the way, you're sexist or you're racist or whatever. Yeah, it's like you shut down. descriptions have some unconscious bias. For sure. 100%

 

David Turetsky: 37:44

Sourcing may have unconscious bias. Are we really looking at HBCUs? Are we really looking at the the neighborhoods where we be able to find good people who need jobs who are fully qualified, but because they're a little bit further away, and maybe it'll take them a little longer to get there? We're not doing it. But that's where we could be going to be able to satisfy that.

 

Tim Sackett: 38:06

Yeah. Yeah.

 

David Turetsky: 38:15

Tim, any other prediction?

 

Tim Sackett: 38:17

I mean, I predict that we'll still have a really hard time to hire people for the foreseeable future.

 

David Turetsky: 38:22

Well, given the fact that we first talked about the demographics, I totally agree.

 

Tim Sackett: 38:26

I like we're this is not going away.

 

David Turetsky: 38:28

No, it is definitely a long term problem. And, you know, I think we pray that we're not going to fall into a recession that makes it worse. When we start talking about whether it's the job rec versus the job loss and things like that, but we will see we'll come back next year at this time and find out whether we were right or wrong. Hopefully, if there's no recession, and we don't have HR Tech. Tim, thank you so much for being on the program.

 

Tim Sackett: 38:53

Thanks for having me, I really enjoyed it.

 

David Turetsky: 38:55

You're awesome. Take care. Stay safe.

 

Tim Sackett: 38:57

That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week, and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.