All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal focusing on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for weekly episodes.
I'm your host, Lydia, and with us today is Matt Charney (formerly) Talent Acquisition Practice Leader for HR.com. It is a pleasure to have you with us, Matt.
Matt: Hey, thank you so much for having me.
From a Practitioner to Observer: Staying Ahead of the Curve
Lydia: Tell us a little bit about your background, Matt. I see that it's an interesting mix of Talent Acquisition, product, and editorial. So, how's that?
Matt: I’m like a polymath, career-wise, or an existentialist since none of this was planned. I have a degree in a Bachelor of Fine Arts and screenwriting and I had to get a job because, as it turns out, that’s a hard way to do it.
I got my first job in recruiting almost by complete accident. I applied for a job as a talent scout, thinking it was entertainment industry-related and as it turns out, they said, ‘Your job is to sell jobs,’ which seemed like the easiest thing in the world since everyone I knew wanted one and couldn’t get one. So, I started recruiting for RPO, and then I actually moved in-house for three Fortune 500 companies: Amgen (a biotech company), Warner Brothers, and The Walt Disney Company. In those roles, I led the executive sourcing function and also developed what’s now called employer branding and social recruiting for those entities. So, I built those programs out.
Then, the 2009 financial crisis hit. Turns out, recruiters were not in high demand, so I wrote an essay for ERE called ‘How Recruiters Read Resumes.’ The next thing I knew, I was on a plane from Los Angeles to Boston to meet with Monster.com about potentially doing some work for them. The next thing I knew, I was in marketing, and I’ve been doing B2B content creation and industry analysis about recruiting ever since.
I’ve served as the CMO of companies like Cornerstone OnDemand and Chief Content Officer of Allegis Global Solutions (a global RPO.) I’m still a partner but served for many years as the Managing Editor and Head of Editorial at Recruiting Daily. So, it’s just a mix of experiences, but ultimately, it’s all about knowing what’s new, what’s next, and what’s not working in Talent Acquisition.
Lydia: Exactly. So, you’ve gone from being a practitioner to being an observer of the industry and staying ahead of the curve. How do you give back to the industry by being in this position? I mean, what activities might there be?
Matt: Yes, it’s pretty simple. First off, in marketing, the skills you learn as a recruiter are always relevant. Sourcing, for instance—I find myself doing it all the time. ‘Oh, I need to get a lead in this company.’ Fortunately, I know how to do that. I know how to engage and communicate. But what I’ve noticed is that recruiters often get a bad rap.
People complain about receiving unqualified job offers via [LinkedIn’s] InMails, and they say, ‘Stop bugging me!’ However, in reality, recruiters are an intriguing mix of people with varied backgrounds and experiences. Those who stick around tend to be the smartest and most intellectually curious.
There’s an incredible amount of learning agility and synthesis involved—both in interpersonal interactions and in understanding market conditions. So, it’s a very multidisciplinary job, which keeps it interesting. Now, let’s talk about the heart of the matter: Talent Acquisition.
We tend to overcomplicate it, but at the end of the day, the job is about making a hire and if you do that right, you’re changing lives in tangible and positive ways. You’re improving someone’s social mobility, enhancing their self-worth and identity, and providing them with the next step toward self-actualization. From an altruistic perspective, it’s almost like a drug—the feeling of helping someone find a livelihood or an opportunity. Even now, I’m fortunate to have a strong network of Talent Acquisition leaders. With so much movement and cyclical activity in this industry, I spend a lot of time working with recruiters in transition, connecting them with opportunities. It’s not just about giving back, it’s about ensuring that the industry retains its best people.
Lydia: Matt, as a Talent Acquisition Practice Leader for HR.com, what really goes into that role? I mean, you have a membership base, right?
Matt: Yes, we do. So, we have about 2 million global members, and we do certifications and training for HR professionals. So, we're the largest accreditor of like Sherman HRCI, especially like the bread and butter, but obviously with Sherman HRCI, as well as just kind of the persona and interests and worldviews recruiting is very distinct from HR.
HR.com has been around since I started my career, but never really had any sort of like, I would say, offerings or communities are really vibrant for recruiters, despite the fact that there are 700,000 to 800,000 global members. So for me, it's really just basically running programs that are educational, creating content that is informative. For me, actually, the best part is I get to build things like events or advisory or research boards where people can not only get to know their peers who are generally global talent leaders of major organizations, but also help them get their voices and their stories out. Whether that's through a case study or a speaking opportunity.
So, like I think TA leaders in particular, are incredibly hard and incredibly passionate and don't always get the opportunity to talk about their successes, and I really love being able to give them a platform to do that.
The More Things Change, The More They Remain The Same
Lydia: I also see that HR.com has recently released some research, and as a result of research conducted on the future of recruitment technologies. Interesting.
So, what's top of mind? What are some of the salient points from the research?
Matt: So, there are some very interesting findings, I'd say. So I'll run through a few. The first is that as much money as we spend, and just to put it in perspective about recruiting technology, the biggest three companies by market share are Workday, SAP, and Oracle. Their combined market cap is about a billion dollars more than the UN estimates it would take to alleviate global poverty. So I guess, we could cure poverty, or we could get ERPs that nobody likes. We chose the latter.
So, all that is to say, one thing that I was just very surprised by in the report is that people invest in technologies largely because of their capabilities to align with the business. That's why people buy a product like Workday, right? Because it's an integrated suite with finance and procurement and everything else. But when it comes to actual usage, some of the most basic stuff we still don't have a handle on, like we talk about the quality of hire. That's like putting the cart before the horse. A very small minority of respondents to the survey, which was predominantly recruiters at Fortune 500 organizations said that they had any confidence in their ability to accurately track the source of hire, trying to fill costs per hire, and some of the most foundational metrics you could think of. So, I think the headline there is we still don't know how well we're doing, and as much as we'd like to be data-driven, we don't know what is valid and are overly reliant on vendors.
Number two is that as much as we talk about AI, there's a very broad reticence of both recruiting leaders and practitioners to use it. So, rather than excitement, there's a lot of hesitancy.
We found that 37% of companies right now use any form of AI for recruiting, which, if you were to compare that to the hype cycle, is a pretty big disparity between what we're talking about and what we're putting into practice. The counterintuitive part of that is the biggest opportunity that recruiters identified in the future state of AI is actually to increase personalization, which seems like an odd outcome for something that is specifically engineered to remove it.
So, I think the report kind of showed people don't love technology, particularly their core technology. It should come as no surprise that Applicant Tracking Systems are not widely loved, and some of the point solutions aren't either. But there's a general optimism that technology, in particular, automation and machine learning—I don't want to say AI because I don't think we're even close to there yet—but what vendors say is there's a lot of optimism but tempered.
At the end of the day, recruiters and talent leaders still very much believe that it comes down to process and it comes down to individual recruiter capability. And that, to me, is a refreshing finding in the technology report, because it's like, the more things change, the more they remain the same. I liked the fact that as technology-forward as TA can be, ultimately, there seems to be a rejection for once of this category, saying we can change how you work, and instead saying, we don't want it, it's important that we build these relationships, not an hour, and I like that.
Lydia: So, going back to your research findings, which is also as you said, counterintuitive, because there's a direction in which it has to go, but also the view is that you're probably not going to achieve them without optimizing the usage of technology, right?
Matt: Here's the thing about technology particularly in recruiting. We are in an industry where best practices are led by vendors, as opposed to organizations of action, right? So we're following theory rather than validating it, and I think that's very unique. But, ultimately, we have engineered this function to a level of complexity that I don't think is good for anyone other than venture capital and PE firms, who are out there investing in all these solutions because the job has not changed.
You are a good recruiter if you make the hire, hopefully in a cost-effective and efficient way, but that outcome has not changed. The end is the same. It's the means that have become so overly complex. I don't know that technology has actually helped anything. I'll give you an example: employee engagement technology and platforms. Huge category, billions of dollars a year in spend, and employee engagement is actually at its lowest level ever recorded. After that, we spent so much money thinking technology would fix that problem. As it turns out, it just continues to get worse and [they] might have fixed employee engagement by reallocating that to salaries. But there it is. So, yes, I think this is an interpersonal and very human discipline that tends to think of technology as being an enabler rather than a potential obstacle, honestly, if you think about how complex many processes are.
Cultural and Ethical Orientation Equals Good Candidate Experience
Lydia: That's employee engagement, and that's once they've already gone in. But let's talk about candidate experience, Matt.
Matt: Let's talk about my favorite topic.
Lydia: What might be the impact of this increasing use or adoption of AI and recruitment technologies on the candidate experience, in your opinion?
Matt: I actually get angered a little bit by this because the concept of candidate experience is I think I was there at that meeting, and I'm not hyperbolizing. So, I've kind of seen this as a development from theoretical construct into imperative. It sounds really good, like, who's going to argue that candidates shouldn't have good experiences? But at the end of the day, the reason why candidates have bad experiences is largely because of technologies created by the same vendors who are now trying to monetize the problem that they created.
I think that candidate experience gets solved when there is a cultural and ethical orientation towards all of the moral business cases. Candidates are customers and are supposed to do the right thing. I think it's a philosophy, not a platform or a process. We make a deliberate effort to talk about how important candidate experience is, but at the end of the day, it’s a) it’s not improved, but I also don't think it matters. People apply for so many jobs these days, they're not going to remember, like, “Oh, I never got a callback from this company.” Realistically, that doesn't happen.
But more importantly, we confuse applicants with candidates, and I don't know that candidates have bad experiences. By US law, it’s actually defined as people who are qualified for the position, interested, and actively in your hiring process. I owe those people a white-glove service, particularly the more time investment they make. But if somebody applies for a job in which they meet none of the qualifications and don't personalize it at all, just dumping.
AI can now help people apply for jobs en masse. If you apply for a job that you're never going to be considered for, I don't think recruiters owe you anything. Am I going to reciprocate wasting time by wasting my time? That's asinine.
Lydia: We're talking about technologies and it’s not particularly AI or anything else. The kind of tech stack that you might have to improve your processes to increase engagement with your employees.
Matt: Technology and candidate experience. As soon as I don't have to set up an account and give all my information just to be able to view a job when I can view and apply for that job on a mobile device when the UI and UX that those vendors who are also selling candidate experience products are as intuitive as a consumer product, and when I don't have to literally manually replicate my resume in the fields that you have pre-provided and spend all that time to be able to click the ‘Apply’ button successfully. Those are the technological changes that need to be made, and it's simple, but it's what we lack.
Candidate experience from a technology perspective is the UI/UX experience, and I'm sorry, but, like, update your interfaces. There's no reason why it has to look like Lotus Notes in 1989 in some of these Applicant Tracking Systems, but, they have market share, and it's going to be a problem.
None of them use AI, but they say that they do. They use automation, machine learning, and natural language processing. So yes, AI.
Lydia: How do you think the use of these technologies might impact hiring policies?
Matt: I think that it's interesting because, at least in the United States, so much of the conversation and honestly, budget and programs over the last few years have been dedicated to DE&I and specifically eliminating bias from the hiring process. What we're essentially doing by implementing these tools is we're replacing one unconscious bias with another, which is automation bias.
We're just trusting that this black box developed by a vendor who can't create an instance that can be viewed on a mobile device can suddenly have a magic algorithm that will do my job for me. That is fantastic thinking, but I think there's a level of desperation. I think what's going to happen is that there is going to be an over-reliance on tools to do our work for us. Who is going to win are people who, to your point and verbiage, have solid, streamlined, and effective processes, rather than the most comprehensive tech stack or the latest thing that Gartner or Forrester ranks as being relevant to doing my job.
Your Next Top Talent is Right Under Your Nose
Lydia: In your experience, or what you've observed so far, what are some of the most innovative resourcing strategies? Going back to sourcing all the different communities we're seeing. In fact, even companies have started creating their own communities to tap into those pools, right?
Matt: Which is great.
Lydia: What are some of the innovative strategies, maybe for sourcing that you’ve seen?
Matt: I don't know that sourcing has become much easier as the years have gone by. I don't know if you're familiar with the MTV show ‘Catfish,’ where the premise is, I have to find somebody who I met online and figure out who they really are. A 17-year-old can do that. If you told them that people get paid six figures for it, they'd laugh at you. It's very easy to find people online. You talk about, “Oh, they're building their own communities.” But, what they're building is segmented mailing lists so that they can be like, "Hey, remember that company that didn't hire you? Guess what? We have more jobs available now that you're not going to get,"
So, if anything, I don't know that talent communities are particularly effective. Data shows that they are not. So, the only talent community I think that actually matters, coincidentally, is called an org chart. It's your employee base. That makes up 80 to 85% of hiring events in aggregate.
So for me, honestly, companies that source internally and rely on referrals rather than cold calls, let's say warm and more knowledgeable leads, as opposed to just pure demand gen, which most sourcing is, or whose first step is not, "I'm going to post this job on job boards and blast it out," but, "Let me see who I have in my Applicant Tracking System."
It sounds very simple, but if you look at data over the last decade, there's much less of that. Again, internal mobility and things like that don't necessarily have to be promotions; they could be contract or intern conversion, lateral moves, or rotational. That, mixed with referrals, makes up nine out of ten hiring events globally. Direct sourcing makes up about two to three percent of corporate hires, and I'm assuming maybe a little bit higher on the agency side.
So, we spend the inverse amount of time focusing on how we are going to attract this top talent to our organization. There's this talent scarcity. From a statistical standpoint, your next hire is either already working for you or knows somebody who will be, and the companies that win leverage that and make their company a career destination, make it as easy as possible for employees to apply for jobs, and are able to correlate learning and development programs when they don't get those jobs. Like, "Sorry, you didn't get it. Here are some courses or things we can offer you to get you to that next step," and who have very defined career pathing, mapping, and fair performance and succession planning methodologies. I don't know if it's innovative, but those companies win. It's when you get too clever at sourcing, like, "Let me go into GitHub and look at these repositories, and then I'll use that to communicate with this front-end engineer," that is a giant waste of time if you look at the likelihood that that is going to convert. Period.
Lydia: And it's interesting that you brought up how the internal community. So to speak, your employees are your biggest entry point for the best talent that you can find for your organization. So what might be…
Matt: If you did your job the first time, absolutely. Yes.
Lydia: So, what might be some ways to make sure that this pool of great people whom you've just introduced to the company, stay in their role?
Matt: I think retention is interesting because of what we're seeing, and I think this has probably always been a trend, but now, obviously, the way to identify it is that when you lose certain employees, and this is not everyone, but you can very easily kind of tell who it is, just even based off of email flows, when that person leaves, then you lose six or seven people because that just changes the dynamic. It's just like you'll start seeing exodus on those teams en masse. So, I think the first step is if you look at a non-traditional org chart, it's like Business School 101.
I'll show you the hierarchy and then the influence chart. The most influential person in your organization is not necessarily a vice president, director, or executive. They may even be the woman who's answering the phones, but she's friends with everyone and has their hands on everything.
So, identifying who is in your organization and who is the center of communications is crucial. I would say the ringleader in the lunchroom, to use a really old metaphor, and starting with those people, because we talk about brand ambassadors externally, but identifying who those key players are, who, if they leave, will take people with them, is essential. That largely could be done by network analysis.
The other easy step is we make it way harder for internal, existing employees to find and apply for jobs than an external candidate, process-wise as well as technology-wise. So, just to use a company that I worked for, if I wanted a job there as an external candidate, I would fill out the application, hit Apply, and be instantly under consideration. If I was an employee who had been, let's say, there 15 years and I was interested in that same job, I couldn't apply until I had contacted my HR person. That HR person then contacted TA to verify that they were transfer or promotion eligible and then got a form signed by their manager telling them that they were allowed to interview for the job. Well, obviously, I'm going to go to the place across the street that doesn't make me do all that stuff.
So, I think just looking internally, your employees are everyone else's candidates, and we don't treat them like that. I think just that mindset change of knowing that, “Hey, guess what? Not only do you have to backfill them, but they're going to walk out with a bunch of institutional knowledge and give it to your competitor.” That should be all the business case people need to really step it up with internally focused employer branding, which, again, then aligns with engagement, as well as creating referral programs. Because the more people you know in a company, the likelier you are to stay.
Lydia: Still on the topic of retention. It's interesting to see that your actual talent pool for internal mobility moving on to different roles and making them more agile to serve the business needs and to see how your candidate experience actually starts inside these companies.
You're pushing those jobs towards the people who are already there, acclimatized, and they know the company, and they want to be able to pursue something else. What might be some steps to engage these internal candidates, so to speak, and even as passive candidates, maybe?
Matt: Well, they are passive candidates until there's a job open at the competitor across the street, and then they get activated. So, I think definitely a couple of things. A lot of more progressive organizations are starting to build recruiting capabilities and even dedicated teams as sort of internal career concierges. Oftentimes, we lack very transparent career pathing or skills mapping and things of that nature internally. So, one thing that recruiters tend to be experts in within an organization, or at least have the subject matter expertise, is how to get a job in that organization. So, working with them as an advisor rather than a recruiter is really important.
The other thing that I'd say leans more towards that trusted advisor paradigm than a peer TA, which is sort of the model I think the best talent organizations are moving to, is you need to spend time with your employees on the line.
It's great to sit up wherever HR is centered, but if you're not somewhat embedded in the business and know what they do, then you're just the dude or woman from HR. We know how those interactions go, and people get really scared when you try to contact them. But when you do that, not only are you better able to align with the business needs, but you can also be very proactive in terms of hearing if people are going to leave, and if there's going to be a new headcount created. You can get way ahead of that, "Oh, I have a rec open. Better start searching."
If you get to know the particular hiring managers and to some degree their direct reports, when top performers leave, it's generally not a shock to the hiring team. HR might say, "Oh, but their performance reviews were great." Well, yeah, because they're top performers, so they have more market value. I think the best way to get ahead of the curve is to put yourself out there as a resource, have conversations with people, and really help facilitate career and skill growth in your employees, rather than just making sure they have or don't have it for whatever rec happens to be opening up next.
What Separates Winners and Losers In the War For Talent
Lydia: Matt, the role of a Talent Acquisition Professional today is obviously far more multifaceted. It probably was about 10 years ago. I think looking at different technologies coming in, would you agree with that?
Matt: Honestly, I don't. The technologies actually haven't changed all that much. We love to talk about AI, and I have to say, 12 years ago, I had the capability in my Applicant Tracking System to take a job description, paste it in the field, and then return stack-ranked candidates from a bunch of different sources based on how closely they fit the job. Now, this is called AI. Back then, it was just matching, right? So, the tech hasn't changed, really, at all. The systems are still the same.
If you replace Workday, it basically used to be—I'm blanking on Dave Duffield's first company. It's late, but essentially, you're just seeing the same enterprise technology providers not changing really anything. Look at Oracle or ADP. I don't know that they've updated their code bases in the last 10 to 12 years, but there's been a healthy ecosystem of point solutions and integrations that have developed to overcompensate for the shortcomings of those core systems.
But at the end of the day, ATSs still stink. Job boards are still considered the most reliable source of external hiring and posting and praying doesn't work. Nothing has really changed when it comes to technology; our faith in it has become greater than our faith in ourselves. The best recruiter, in my opinion, can still sit down with a phone book or a Rolodex and start cranking out cold calls and filling a role. It's the hunter versus farmer mentality, and the hunters will always win. They don't need technology to do it. They need empathy and the ability to create affinity with the person they’re talking to.
Again, to my earlier point, anyone can find people online; their information is out there. It's not hard. Getting that person to respond to your messaging, to not just be another recruiter showing another job, but to be a person who's interested in their well-being—that is something even the most advanced AI, I don't think, will ever be able to do. But that's what separates winners and losers in the war for talent, I believe.
Lydia: There are also traits and the right skills that come with Talent Acquisition today. I mean, there's technology as it may not have changed, but there's also that insight and that human element that you need to bring to the business. So, in terms of skills or traits, what kind of person does a Talent Acquisition Professional need to be?
Matt: I think there's actually just one skill that, if you have it, you're going to be good at recruiting, and if you don't, probably not. It's learning agility, which is the fancy HR way of saying you're able to synthesize disparate sets of information on the fly. So, you're a knowledge generalist, almost, and you're able to directly apply those to interpersonal interaction, particularly, but also, you're learning. You continually are learning, and you're continually adjusting, and you don't hold anything sacred. You're not like, "Well, this is how we've always done it," but rather, "This is how we can do it." That tends to be the one thing.
Nobody trained to do this; there's no real good recruiter training out there, as much as a lot of companies would like you to think otherwise. Are you intellectually curious, and do you care about other people? If the answer to those two things is yes, you'll probably be great. If you're doing it for a paycheck, or you're doing it, God forbid, because you get to use some cool technology, I don't think you're long for this profession.
Remember, You Are Dealing With People, not Numbers
Lydia: Final question, Matt. What is your favorite or most memorable recruitment story or Talent Acquisition story, anything that you want to share?
Matt: I'll give you a good one and a bad one. Does that work?
Lydia: That's perfect. Maybe one in the middle, too, just to even then that out.
Matt: So, I would say that my favorite Talent Acquisition story involves one of my favorite colleagues, and ultimately one of the best people I've ever had report to me. I hired her twice. The second time around, I found out she was on the market when she listed me as a reference during a reference check. I gave an honest, but not entirely comprehensive reference, then immediately called her up and offered her a job. We underuse reference checks as a strategy, but if you're not using them as a signal to identify potential candidates, you're missing out. Also, asking the person at the end of a standard reference call, "Who else do you know who might be a good fit for a role like this?" can yield recommendations and referrals, which are very high-performing.
Another story, although traumatic, is a good example of how you can overdo it in recruiting. I used to work with a corporate strategy group at a biotech company, which required very specific qualifications like an MD and an MBA with clinical development experience—candidates were few and far between. One day, I found a candidate who fits the profile perfectly. I contacted him every day, emailed every other day, and called every other day for two or three months. I was persistent because he was local and had amazing work experience. One day, I got a call back from his number, and I thought my persistence had paid off. However, it was his wife calling to inform me that he had passed away a few months ago, and my continuous attempts to contact him were incredibly traumatizing for her.
That's when I learned the importance of knowing when to quit and remembering that these names on a resume or profiles on a social network are actually people.
Lydia: Communicating and still not being totally aware of the realities of another person that day, today, and then getting a shocker like that. That's quite a lesson. Thanks, Matt. It's great having you with us, and thank you so much for your time and your insights. It's been great.
I particularly loved your insights on how you need to rethink candidate experience for both internal as well as external, and really look at who's inside your company as well to source really good people and see who's the immediate connection.
Matt: Yes, if you want efficiencies, you know the outcomes are way easier that way. So, there you have it.
Lydia: Thanks, Matt. I'm sure the audience also wants to connect with you, if you have a direct connection, what platform that you like to connect with?
Matt: So, it turns out like there's this thing called LinkedIn. Just add me there and I'd be happy to chat.
Lydia: Thanks, Matt. We have been in conversation with Matt Charney, Editor in Chief at Recruiter.com (former Talent Acquisition Practice Leader of HR.com.) Thank you for joining us this week, and remember to subscribe to our channels to stay tuned for more weekly insights from All-In Recruitment.
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