EP103: WellTech - How to Bring Talent Leaders to Build Pipelines

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.

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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; YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Luke Eaton of WellTech. Welcome to the show, Luke.

Luke: Thank you very much for having me on [the show.]

Scale Up What Works, Scale Down That Doesn’t

Lydia: So Luke, what's kept you in the talent space? We spoke pre-show, and you've been in several roles before WellTech. How have you kept up with the changes in this industry so far?

Luke: That's a really good opening question. So, there's been so much change over the past few years. In terms of my background, obviously, for the past eight to ten years, my role has been embedded into hyper-growing businesses that have recently got some kind of VC backing or investment and set them up for scale. So change is very much a core part of my role because I'm there to effect a transformation, and I'm in a change role.

In terms of how we keep up, that's an interesting question. One of the main ways in which I've kept up with the trends in talent and the methodologies that create the best results for these fast-growing businesses is by using more advanced methodologies from other parts of the business world, bringing them into recruitment, and using those methodologies and data to drive best practices to decide what we do next—not arguments from authority, but arguments from data.

So essentially, a lot of what we need to advance or to become more sophisticated as a talent function has already been there. We don't have to create things from scratch. If you look at DevOps processes and manufacturing processes, they’re excellent at reducing waste, we can use principles like that in recruitment, project management, and best practices, and change management best practices are all there for the taking.

So, the ways I've really kept up with the pace, and I would say, how talent has evolved into more of a business-critical function, I think maybe 10 years ago, it was used very much as an internal service.

In actual fact, now, I think the businesses that are doing best, particularly the ones that are scaling quickly, are the ones who are bringing talent leaders into the C-suite. The chief people officers are coming from recruitment backgrounds instead of HR backgrounds and things like this.

I've really been keeping up by essentially learning from the more sophisticated business units and the ones that have been strategic partners for longer and using those principles, bringing them into recruitment, and using data to help drive a cycle of continuous improvement. So, we're always being more efficient and getting more from the same level of effort. We're also scaling up the processes that work and scaling down the ones that don't.

Reducing Waste Is Lucrative

Lydia: In terms of the methodology that comes from different business units or different industries, as you were saying, what might be some of the more recent methodologies that you've used in talent transformation projects?

Luke: My experience is very much catered to that business that is suddenly changing gears and scaling significantly. I would say one of the most underused but impactful areas of the business world that need to come into recruitment, and that I've had a lot of success with, is lean and the theory of constraints.

Fundamentally, if you were to build a car, there is a set of best practices that essentially says, "How do we get as many car parts turned into cars within a specific amount of time?" What is the mathematics that governs how we reduce waste at every step, and how do we manage capacities versus volume?

You may have heard of something called ‘just-in-time manufacturing,’ - how cars can get made. The basics of those best practices have been around for about 60 years. About 25 years ago, software engineers realized that by eliminating bottlenecks in the software release process, they could increase the cadence at which they release software to the point where they can release daily or weekly if they want, rather than one big project every six months. That's DevOps.

Those processes of manufacturing, those lean processes, were brought into software development about 25 years ago. Recruitment hasn't really done that yet. We haven't used these methodologies to improve and reduce waste in our own process. Recruitment is still a process. Candidates go into one end, they go through a series of stages (those stages require a certain amount of resources), and then out on the end comes employees.

If we do that at a scale, reducing waste is very lucrative. You can save millions of dollars by applying these principles to a recruitment process, reducing waste, and increasing efficiency at every stage. So, I'd say anyone who really wants to advance their game or needs to help a company scale with the same amount of resources but do a lot more with it, to look at learning about the basics of the theory of constraints, marginal gains, and lean processes. You can buy books on this. There are decades of studies out there, and recruiters can get out there and start learning and applying straight away.

Lydia: Now, applying these methodologies or these principles onto a vertical or an industry or a team, a recruitment team, and a Talent Acquisition team that hasn't been perhaps transformed in that manner. What might be some of the challenges that you face in terms of bringing that idea and implementing it and turning that into a standard process or a system?

Luke: That's a really good question. A lot of people just want to get into the how-to, but understanding the obstacles first is a really sophisticated question. The main areas of resistance I see aren't actually at the leadership level, particularly because I work in technology companies. It's easier to get buy-in and sponsorship from the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) because they use the same processes when they build software. It's beneficial because they usually don't work too well with recruitment leaders who are using arguments from authority and their own personal experience. Instead, you can say, "Hey, with this methodology, we're going to increase the cadence and the throughput of this system. This means that with the same budget, you'll get more hires or the same number of hires with less budget. You can then use the savings to buy a cool tool or take your team to Mexico for the weekend.”

The most resistance tends to come from people in leadership and recruiters from the bottom up. Many recruiters started in an agency where data is often used like a weapon, with arbitrary KPIs like the number of outreach calls.

So, when someone comes in and starts measuring everything and changing things, there's a lot of resistance because they think I'm there to do damage or make redundancies. In reality, I'm there to empower the individual recruiters with this data.

The first thing I have to do is treat it like a change management piece, with a lot of over-communication with recruiters. I speak to every individual recruiter in the business I join to see where their problems and pain points are. We map it out. I have a hiring manager who always says no at this stage. What it means is I need to do 30 screens to fill this role, or I may never fill it. By starting at that pain point, we can map out their volumes, conversions, and capacities at every stage and then say, “This is our conversion. What can we do to improve this conversion by 5%?" After maybe four to twelve weeks, they see the benefits of these little marginal improvements and get time back.

All the time they save making that one hire can be put into filling another role, improving the quality of stakeholder communication, or other improvement projects. Or they can just take time back for themselves to pick their kids up from school, go to the gym, spend time with their partner, and all the other things needed to be a mentally healthy recruiter long term.

The most resistance comes from recruiters who may lack understanding of these more advanced concepts. Bringing them on board involves using the pain points they already have and making the process transparent so everyone on the team can see how we're measuring and tracking in the future. An amazing thing happens; they start improving each other. Instead of me being at the top of some pyramid, working with 20-odd different recruiters, they start bringing each other up the hill.

Because someone can see my outreach-to-screen conversion isn't very good. But Jane over there, her up-reach the screen is fantastic. So what do they do? They go talk to Jane before they talk to me. “Jane, what on earth are you saying to these candidates? It's getting them back to you.” Kind of use your nurture campaign and then, of course, that brings the floor up for everyone. Everyone has their own little improvement points. So that's kind of where I start, and how I kind of break that initial resistance. It's just by bringing them on the journey from day one, starting with their pain points and then using my methodologies to solve their problems right in front of their faces. Once you do that, it really does improve the efficiency of the individual, but it also improves the management efficiency because they start improving each other.

Lydia: And that brings me to the point of data empowering the recruiters. Is this what you mean by the success replicates within the team with data and knowing where the data is taking you, is that what you mean?

Luke: Yes, that's exactly it. The best thing about that is it scales. So, an individual recruiter should be empowered to measure the volume of their work every week and the conversions just function of their volume, and then the capacity at every stage. A recruitment team leader, maybe a small team of recruiters in like a piece of a business, should be able to aggregate that and learn from their team and get good insights on how to improve every quarter and right up to the Chief People Officer.

They should be able to aggregate this data and use it for performance management. So, A: this conversion if you increased it a little bit, then, the same amount of work you get, two or three more hires a quarter, but also for process improvement. So, you can go to the other way and look to your stakeholders and say, “Look, this is our funnel, this is our data. This specific conversion is costing us this amount of money. And I actually want to max out an ideal model of scaling the company over a six-year period for about 1000 technical hires.”

We audit this model based on the averages it was based in America. So, the American averages, the operational costs of the hire, and if you increased every stage by 4%, just the conversion by 4%, if you can squeeze 4% out of every little bit of the operational cost, the difference in operational costs over a scaling period is $1.3 million. That's just the operational cost of every recruiter, just by tweaking up by 4% the conversions at every stage.

Treat It Like Cattle Instead of Pet

Lydia: That's interesting. When you talk about using data and projecting your performance or the success of a team, using that data and also looking at what the actual cost is going to be, and what is the savings behind that.

So, in terms of a recruiter, just using this methodology, or adopting this methodology for the first time, what is the mindset that a recruiter needs to have in order to be open enough to take on these different ways of thinking, or different approaches toward work mindsets?

Luke: I think a good way of framing that is that a lot of individual contributing recruiters are on the ground. They’re highly operational. They are given a lot of rep load and essentially, their value to a business, in their mind, is just how many hires they can make.

So, they tend to just run at the problems head-on. Just go through the process that they know well. If they want to make more hires, then they do more of that. We’ve all been in that situation in the early parts of our careers. We love that. It’s high energy. But there comes a point where I personally have burned out in the past. Psychologically, I’ve burned out in a situation like that. It comes to a point where that will happen. So, I think the mindset has to be different.

There’s a mindset in DevOps called “cattle, not pets,” which I like as a way of framing it. Before DevOps and before the use of systems administrators, they would love the server, and they would have one server, and they would know it inside out and all the little tweaks, and they would treat it like a pet. They would know it inside out and it was very labor-intensive to take care of that one server. But in actual fact, if you treat them like cattle—lots and lots of servers in aggregate—you kill this one, and you spin up the ones that work, and you kill the ones that don’t.

So, if you start treating them like cattle, then you end up with a much more efficient system because you’re just driving inefficiency out of the system. I think a mindset that recruiters need to adopt is that it’s like you’re running a pipeline. It’s not like an individual race. You need to think of all of your work, and this could scale up to your entire career, never mind just in one job. You need to think of recruitment as an everlasting pipeline.

So, your conversion to outreach and screen is something that you should be working on throughout your recruitment career, whether you’ve got a head of paid social media, a DevOps engineer, or a product designer. You’re always thinking to yourself, “How am I going to get that outreach to screen up?” So, you’re just always thinking about that. Then all of a sudden, the psychological hits that you get when people accept counteroffers still hurt. Of course, they do. We’re all recruiters, but they hurt less because it’s just more of an industrial process in your mind.

But I think that’s the first thing you said. There are like cattle, not pets, build these pipelines. Don’t build really important little one-person races but build pipelines, and that helps you with your sourcing as well. You will source in a more consistent manner, and your work will be more consistent. And again, recruiters, we have these bad habits from agencies, where we’re highly target-oriented, and there’s nothing wrong with that, and highly tenacious, but we’re told to smash it, you know, smash the goal.

In actual fact, I would rather have a recruiter who carefully meets out every day a certain amount of work over the period of six months, than one person who’s just going to absolutely gun it for a week. Because what you see in the data is that you smash the sourcing for a week, you do loads of sourcing, and then the following week you do lots of screens because you obviously did so much sourcing. But then, “Oh, I didn’t have the time for any sourcing that week because I was doing so many screens.” So next week, you’ve got no screens, and you go, “Oh my God, where am I going to get my screens? I better do lots of sourcing.”

So, you’re kind of going this way and that way on the road, and trying. What I would rather see, and what is much better for you as a recruiter in terms of building improvements in your game, is to do enough sourcing to get enough screens, to get enough technical interviews, to get enough final interviews, and then to figure out what’s enough, what’s my target, and work your way back. So, I definitely recommend recruiters start thinking in a more data-driven way.

In particular, and this is the last thing I’ll say about it, it’s really important to empower the recruiter with data. It’s that sliding scale where, let’s say you make a series of improvements in your pipeline. Yes, for the same amount of effort, you’ll make more hires, and that’s what the company wants, and that’s what you, to a degree, want. But you can always look at it the other way. For the same number of hires, do it in less time. Go spend time with your family, go to the gym, or do whatever. Go for a walk, whatever it is.

The empowering component is that once you know how to use continuous improvement to that sliding scale between performance and time back for you, that’s not my sliding scale to use. That’s your sliding scale, not mine. So, you can say to yourself, hey, I’m going for that big promotion. Pay reviews in three months’ time, maybe you want to ratchet up the performance. Like, what can I improve? And then another time, you may say to yourself, you know what I need? Time to myself. Work isn’t the biggest priority right now. I want to focus on myself, a sick relative, or something. You knowing how much you need to do to hit your target, with no waste, gives you the maximum amount of time with yourself, with that sick relative, or whatever.

So, that’s why I think it’s really cool. It’s not just some mathematical, inhuman way of dealing with recruitment. It actually boils down to very empowered, personally empowered recruiters. I’ll get off my soapbox because I get excited about this.

Transparent Data Equals Reasonable KPIs

Lydia: I like it when you're excited because there's so much that I'm getting from this. But moving on. So much of what you've just said talks about practices, and daily habits of a recruiter switching to something that is far more productive or enriching for them in terms of performance and also as a professional.

How does the emphasis on lean recruitment, for example, or data empower the recruiter? How does this influence the culture within a Talent Acquisition team?

Luke: That's a really cool question. First of all, once everyone gets it, it creates a much more open environment. Everyone has their own metrics and uses the same methods. The data they're measuring is the same data their colleague is measuring, so they have a common language and set of principles. This transparency helps them communicate better. When the data is transparent, KPIs stop feeling arbitrary. For instance, if someone can't do the same amount of sourcing as someone else, it's not the end of the world as long as they increase conversion somewhere down the funnel to get the same result.

In terms of how it affects the culture, it creates an open, transparent culture, which is very beneficial in a tech company. Democratic leadership styles tend to work better in such environments. Not being command-and-control and being more open and democratic as a leader is very valuable. When you're confident that your team has the principles they need to talk to each other and make informed decisions about their work, it reduces the leadership bandwidth required. As a leader, you have much more time because the team essentially elevates you, allowing you to focus on other things.

Secondly, it kicks off a cycle of continuous improvement. This is something you would be doing with the business anyway. Every quarter, we measure conversion, volume, and capacity, look for areas in aggregate that we can improve, and then, as a team, decide what to improve and why. So, let's say tech interviews are a low percentage, and not converting very well. As a team, we can discuss why they aren't converting well. It could be that we don't have the right sourcing strategy, or the candidates aren't good enough. Maybe the candidates aren't prepped well enough, the interviewers need training, or there's a bottleneck causing delays. For example, if a candidate waits three weeks for an interview, they're probably less likely to put effort into it or might have already accepted another offer.

With the team, we can identify specific areas of the process to improve. We might decide we want to increase conversion from 55% to 59%. Then, we agree on a specific action to take in the following quarter to achieve that goal. For instance, we might commit to a 30-minute prep session for every candidate two days before a tech interview.

This is a very practical approach. We can calculate the impact: if we hit that conversion target, how many more hires do we make for the same effort? It depends on the size of the team, as that dictates the volume. However, a 4% improvement at that stage could result in five more hires for a team of four to six recruiters.

You could be looking at five more hires per quarter. Then, what do we do the following quarter? We do another retrospective, measure our performance, and decide what to do in the upcoming quarter. This creates a cycle of continuous improvement, making the culture much more positive and solutions-focused. It's also really valuable if you're in a tech company because it aligns with how the rest of the tech organization works. They use retrospectives and agile project management to improve their software.

This approach gives more credibility to the recruitment team because stakeholders see that we're using the same methods they use in software development. They appreciate that alignment. So, to answer the question, yes, it is very beneficial.

Keep Being Curious

Lydia: That's a great point. I love how that comes together, especially in the tech space, where you're speaking the same language. That barrier usually exists when the people team and the business units, even the product team and engineering, talk to each other. It's typically a space where you have to overcome a kind of barrier. But this is a great point you made about being able to speak not just the business language in terms of dollars and cents, but also in terms of process and the ways in which systems are being put in place.

So, this is great. Thanks so much for sharing. The final question is, what advice would you give, having said all this and gone through the whole transformative talent transformation angle we talked about today, to someone starting out in the people space today?

Luke: Initially, what I would say is measure, measure, measure, measure, measure, measure everything.

Don't just measure what you're told to measure, or what's in the ATS. Get yourself a spreadsheet and measure anything that you find interesting. Get curious about your own performance.

It's easy to fall into whatever process that company or agency gives you, and that's fine—learn to work that process—but there's nothing stopping you from measuring. It's free. Spreadsheets are free, right? So, just measure everything and get curious about your own performance. Ask yourself questions like, “Why did it take me that many? Why was that harder? Why did this role stress me out the most?” Examine those types of roles, and figure out why they caused you so much stress. Get really curious.

The second thing is to sit next to the best person. One of the best things about recruitment is it's highly meritocratic. If you do something well, you make hires. It's really obvious. If you're a project manager, it's very difficult to speak to another project manager and assess why that project was good. There are ways of doing that, but it's much softer. Recruitment is a little different. There's a lot of soft components to it. The way we do our job is highly emotionally intelligent at the end of the day. Good recruiters make lots of hires, and they do that well and efficiently. So, find whoever's doing the best. Go on the ATS and find them. If it's an agency, it'll probably be up on a board somewhere. If it's internal, it'll be on the ATS. Sit next to that person, buy them lunch, observe what they do and how they do it, and when they do it. Do they do everything by email? Are they on the phone with candidates all the time? How often do they speak to stakeholders? Are they business-like or very chummy and friendly? What is it they do? How do they make an offer? Sit in on one of their offer calls, sit in on one of their screens. Get so curious, and just get stuck in and learn as much as possible, and measure as much as possible.

If you can do that, the feedback loop between you and everyone else in the business gets really fast, and then your learning curve gets a lot less steep. You learn much quicker. So, I think that's probably the best thing to do. Curiosity in a recruiter is probably the core sensibility, in my experience. Anything that piques your curiosity, keep that fire, that mad curiosity. Keep that burning, and you'll do pretty well as a recruiter, I think.

Lydia: There’s retrospective, introspective, and there are plenty of ways to keep that process improvement happening for recruiters themselves, not just the process. It lends the benefit to one another, and that’s great.

Thank you so much, Luke, for these insights and especially for your time today. I understand you're pretty busy this week, so please drop us your contact details, Luke, so that the audience, whoever’s listening in, might want to contact you or pick up the conversation with you.

Luke: I'll send out my contact details. It's easiest to just grab me on LinkedIn. I love having conversations with anyone, so feel free to grab me on LinkedIn anytime.

Lydia: Thanks again, Luke. We have been in conversation with Luke Eaton of WellTech. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe. Stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.