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 so far, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes.
I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Sandeep Sethi of Emids. Great to have you with us, Sandeep.
Sandeep: It's my pleasure to meet you and join your podcast, Lydia.
It Was All About Personal Connections
Lydia: So tell us a little bit about your journey in this space, Sandeep.
Sandeep: So, my journey goes back about two decades from now, Lydia, and if I look back, it's quite enriching, transformative, and quite rewarding. I started my journey with an Indian IT enterprise organization. I started with them as an associate and over a period of years working with them, I moved to the cadre of a senior manager.
In those days, I was managing recruitment operations, overseeing the India business unit operations for them. As I moved forward in my career, I gravitated more towards strategic assignments with respect to recruitment operations, defining processes, and realigning the overall horizons pertaining to capacity planning be it about optimizing sourcing strategies, and the kind of work that I've done over those years has helped me to take up a leadership role as I moved ahead in my career journey. Thereby, I've taken up roles within domestic IT services companies and multinational assignments. Currently, I'm with Emids I take care of recruitment operations for the APAC region of Emids, where we focus more on providing services and bringing talent to the health tech industry.
Lydia: You mentioned sourcing as being one of those areas in which you look at. But is there a particular trend or pattern that you've seen in terms of sourcing that has changed maybe in the past 15 or 10 years?
Sandeep: Oh, yes, absolutely. If I go back to the time when I started, job boards weren't so prominent. It was a time of personal connections. I remember I used to have quite a few diaries or cards, where people used to exchange visiting cards, and that's how you generally sourced your candidates. But as the technologies moved along, you had initially job boards, and now social websites like LinkedIn, and these are the various forums where you interact with people, assess, and, connect with the relevant candidates whom you would like to see through.
Thereby, the techniques of engaging and approaching people have evolved. Today, I would say the technologies have eased a lot more approachability. People can connect fairly easily using any of these modern mediums. There are specific places and communities where you can go and participate and look for the relevant talent.
So, it has really evolved from where it was to where it is now, and it continues to evolve. It is just moving at a really fast pace today. Recruitments generally happen through social media as I go and meet people outside, and we interact in various forums and communities. We do engage with talent and that's how there are various other modalities of doing new tech sourcing—not just like I said, one-on-one interactions, but one-to-many.
Lydia: It is dynamic, as you said, and there are also many different channels to choose from today in terms of the health tech industries.
Is there a specific type of sourcing channel that you tend to go to? Is it a community, or is it social media being more broad? Where do you tend to look for?
Sandeep: Well, from a health tech perspective, of course, there are traditional ways of sourcing. I just mentioned, that there are job boards where you do find people, but if you need to hire, I would say, mid to senior candidates, those are the ones. Or the passive seekers, you won't find them very actively available on the job boards. For them, you have to engage them and as you rightly said, there are certain communities pertaining to the health tech sector, and you need to be part of them. There are many available, even on LinkedIn.
There are certain individuals or specific groups, and there are groups created on WhatsApp. There have been groups that you can create on Twitter, and then there are communities where, by virtue of being in that space, you get invited. There, you have to have conversations, and you engage with them on common topics and various threads. By virtue of it, you have to find ways to talk about what your vision and mission are as an organization, and then you embark on conversations about a role that you have, and that's how those conversations begin with that set of professionals.
Lydia: In terms of communicating that vision that you talked about, they have to be very fluent in whoever is recruiting in these channels.
Sandeep: Yes, absolutely. It is extremely important, and that's where our leadership believes in over-communicating our own value systems. It's quite relevant to all of us because we have a strong belief that purpose is the most important or motivating factor for an individual to excel in his or her role. So, our three important value systems, as we practice day in and day out, are that we want to be a trusted guide for our customers, we want to create an impact—so we are impact-obsessed in whatever we do—and we want to continue to innovate. We believe in being inclusive innovators, and these are the three value systems that we practice, day in and day out. We communicate this to each and every member of our organization, even to our candidates. Since the beginning of the process, we ensure that not just the job description is part of our conversation with candidates, but we also pass on the message about what the purpose is that we're trying to achieve as an organization, and if you join us, what purpose you should envisage as you join hands with us.
Elevate Recruitment Transparency for Candidates and Managers
Lydia: So in your role in Emids, are there some key areas that you are focusing on or prioritizing at the moment, maybe in the past year or so?
Sandeep: Our focus has been to make the lifespan of people longer. I mean, that's presumably what health tech does—to take care of, to increase longevity, and by virtue of it, that's the main purpose. Now, as an IT or a tech organization, how can we ease healthcare services for common users? And then, of course, we have our customers who are in the health tech space, and they are either in the segments of payers, providers, or life sciences. We help them transform their existing systems to make their overall operations a lot less tedious and more easily consumable by the end consumers.
Just a small point, right? I mean, imagine there is a patient who has to visit a clinic. Generally, what we do is make an appointment, create a clinic visit, wait at the clinic, then meet the doctor, explain the situation, and then the doctor tries to diagnose. That takes a lot of time. Now, imagine there’s an app where, even before the moment you make an appointment, the doctor gets to know about your history. You can also mention the problem you're dealing with, and before you even reach the clinic, half of the diagnosis has been done. Not just about the current diagnosis, but the doctor also gets to know the previous history. The technology can also tell you the anticipated wait time before you reach the clinic. Now, that helps save time, brings a better experience, and maximizes the time of both the patient and the doctor, right? It adds a lot more time and wiser resource allocation to the entire ecosystem.
Lydia: In terms of delivering this or communicating this business need to incoming talent, is there any particular area that you're looking at in terms of increasing the number of talent, or looking at streamlining a recruitment process inside Emids?
Sandeep: So we have been working on trying to be better at what we do.
We have been focusing for the last couple of years on making our recruitment more of a data-driven approach, and we also look at how we can bring a better experience to our candidates and internal stakeholders. Now, experience is the fulcrum and the central element of whatever we focus on and do. That's been the important point.
Now, when you talk about what we have done, we're trying to make our process far more efficient and agile so that from the moment a candidate enters the process until it ends, it shouldn't take much time. During that overall process, the candidate should know where they are and at which stage they stand. Because half of the time, there is a curiosity among candidates—wondering where they stand in the process if it is leading to closure, or if it will take more time. Likewise, there are other stakeholders, like hiring managers, who are also curious about how many candidates are in the pipeline. So, when you bring efficiency to the process and make it more transparent, it helps bring a better experience to all stakeholders. And, of course, one of the important stakeholders is the recruiter themselves.
Navigating Challenges in Health Tech Recruitment
Lydia: In terms of recruiting for positions in health tech, are there any unique challenges that you might have seen or the team has faced?
Sandeep: So the challenge is about looking for a specialized skill set. As you rightly said, being in health tech, you need to look for people who have an amalgamation of both sides—technology as well as health tech as a domain. That's a challenge, and it leads to a point where there is always a talent shortage, right? You need skilled talent, but that kind of talent is not readily available. And it's also the way technology rapidly changes itself. It's very difficult to keep up with it, right? You decide to focus on A, but then it has already moved on to B, and then you have to move on to C. So, in this ever-changing environment, I want to quote a line from one of my leaders. He says that we should always look for an athlete, not just a sportsman. And that says it all, right? It means endurance.
Lydia: Being a key factor in them.
Sandeep: Absolutely. And it's not just about one thing. If I may quote an example here—if you look at cricket, there's a cricketer called Jonty Rhodes, but he himself is in a unique position because he represents South Africa. He’s not just a cricketer; he’s also a footballer and a rugby player. So, you need someone like this, who can play and change modes as needed, who is able to move from one sport to another. The basic elements remain the same, of course—you need to be fit, have endurance, and have passion. Those elements are there, but skills can shift and change. So, we look for people who are possibly like an athlete, who we can mold as we look forward to the current and future landscape of hiring.
Lydia: So, how do you assess a candidate's potential in this rapidly changing sort of environment or very dynamic, as you said? What does it take in terms of technology or in terms of an outlook or approach to recruitment?
Sandeep: That's a very interesting question. So, I would like to categorize this into two segments. One, of course, is entry to junior, and the other is mid to senior. The reason I say that is because, for entry to mid, our assessment criteria are not very different from any other tech organization, right?
We typically do skill assessments and then have in-person conversations with candidates to understand them better. But it differs for mid to senior, because that's where we want to find an individual who not only understands the tech but also understands health as a domain. Health tech is a domain, and we want someone who would be a cultural fit. To assess those, we conduct BI assessments, which are behavioral interview assessments. We also conduct STAR-led assessments for them.
For certain levels and above, we perform psychometric testing to understand how this individual has been performing in specific scenarios and situations. If needed, there would also be reference checks for certain key roles where we want to see how the person has been performing in past roles. These are the additional checks and balances that we like to keep in place when we hire for mid to senior roles.
Lydia: In terms of hiring time or time to fill, is there a specific target or a time frame that you look into as being ideal for hiring?
Sandeep: Yes, absolutely. Recruitment is all about hiring at the right time, the right cost, and the right individual.
So, time plays a very important role. We believe that we should be able to hire an individual in about 30 to 60 days. That's the time that, if you look at it again, it varies, right? Like I said, for a junior role the supply is slightly more available. So you can hire them slightly faster than key roles or senior roles, because the supply is limited, and thereby it takes slightly more time than that. But that's the time frame that we look at.
Cultivate a Purpose-Driven Company Culture
Lydia: So in your experience, what are some of the components of a great place to work, now they've got this talent coming in? And what do you think makes a great place to work?
Sandeep: Yes. By the way, we are also a great place to work. We've been awarded for it consistently. I go back to what I said about purpose and value systems, which define a positive company culture.
In my view, this is the most important element of a great place to work. Until members of an organization relate to its purpose and what we're trying to achieve, they won't be able to connect with that organization. That's where our value systems come in really handy.
It's not just about having value systems but also about communicating them clearly. It's extremely important that what we say is understood by our employees.
Secondly, I think career opportunities, particularly stable opportunities for growth, are extremely important for a place to be considered a great workplace. Employee well-being is also a focus here, whether it's mental, physical, or financial. There are various activities that HR and even senior leadership participate in to ensure that there is guidance and mentoring available. Of course, there are benefits designed to make people comfortable while they work with us.
Last, but very importantly, is rewards and recognition. Whether informal or formal, it's essential to reward and encourage meritocracy and better performance within an organization. Open communication is also crucial. If you don't have open communication, you miss out on feedback, which is extremely important for an organization and for individual growth. You need to have those platforms in place. We have created a base platform as part of our town halls. We also have our intranet sites with an internal chat system where employees can write anything and everything, from junior executives to the CEO, as part of that chat community. If I need to share something or have a great idea, I can just type it in, and I know the next day I might get a chance to meet my CEO and discuss it. These are a few components I believe are essential.
Harness AI to Interpret Data for Better Talent Matches
Lydia: Yes, and all those as well. These are great initiatives to make sure that there is a dynamism to the place of work and also to the talent that's coming in. And of course being the internet, being all the chatbots that you have, there's no escaping automation and AI, for instance.
So what do you think has been the impact of AI and automation, particularly in this recruitment for health tech?
Sandeep: Yes, I think AI is definitely a great enabler of what we've been doing, and we have been early users of AI. We have implemented some use cases as part of our recruitment process. Our recruitment team takes help from AI to define job descriptions and eliminate any biases from them. We also leverage AI to source better and enhance our sourcing capabilities.
Previously, a recruiter had to go to multiple places just to post and attract talent, but now, with the help of AI, there are many more tools and technologies available in the recruitment arena. There is now one forum or place where you write, and it gets spread out across multiple locations from the backend. This greatly helps in enabling a screening process, which is a significant operational efficiency for recruiters.
A recruiter has to go through about 5,000 applicants to find maybe one relevant candidate. Thanks to AI, which screens and searches based on patterns, it does a great job of aligning the key components we are trying to look for in an individual, allowing us to shortlist similar candidates and present the top 10 or top 50 individuals for us to consider first compared to the rest.
These are great benefits. The backbone of AI is data, and that's the new oil of this era. We always had data, but we never knew how to make real sense of it. AI has really helped us to interpret the data in ways that can help us make relevant and strategic decisions. These are the areas we believe AI has helped us so far, but there is still much more for us to learn.
Lydia: With data comes that constant look and re-look at your processes and looking into improvements. Has that become a culture over there, Sandeep?
Sandeep: Yes, that's absolutely right. I mean, that's precisely what I said. It's extremely important. I can gladly say that we are now a data-driven hiring team. The reason is that my recruiters know that if they need to hire a health tech architect, they don't need to go to about 20 players. They know there are just about two or three places they need to go. There are certain communities they need to engage with, how to write, and how to connect. This makes the work so much easier and faster.
Previously, it might have taken about 90 days to hire, but today, it just takes about two to three weeks to identify the right sort of candidates. This makes a strong business case for us to promote AI as part of our overall hiring approach.
Coordinate a Team for Complex Cross-Country Hiring
Lydia: That's also extremely efficient because time dictates the success rate of recruitment in any company as well. Moving on to a different kind of question, do you have a favorite or memorable recruitment story?
Sandeep: Yes, Roland, that will possibly go back at least a decade, and I still remember it because it was unique in itself. This was an assignment where we had to do hiring for a government enterprise. It was unique in the sense that the kind of services or recruitment we needed to do was across our country. If you know a bit about India, it is spread across 3,500 kilometers, and we had to deploy people to the remotest areas to provide support. It was really unique, first and foremost, to identify talent in such remote locations and district areas, hire in those locations within the stipulated period of time, and really make them understand what the assignment was about, and then deploy those people within that time frame.
I’m talking about remote areas where it takes about two days just to reach, and connect with the drives there, even creating a different sort of overall process—those days, virtual hiring was never thought about or dreamt about. By virtue of this challenge, we were the first to adopt the overall virtual hiring process, even when it was very difficult to make people commute from one place to another. We had to leverage WebEx in those days, and those were the mediums we used to conduct interviews and have virtual onboarding sessions. We ensured that people completed the documentation properly.
It was quite memorable in the fact that we had to innovate in many ways, from a sourcing strategy perspective to our execution ability perspective. It was on such a scale of hiring—about 1,200 professionals over a period of two months—just to give you a little bit of sense.
Lydia: Gives a good picture of what the assignment was.
Sandeep: Yes. So, if you emphasize this 1200 workers in about two months and spread across the country, which is all directions, it was an interesting assignment. You have to have a team to coordinate and collaborate; it's a cross-functional team to collaborate. And there are lot many learnings that we had as part of that particular assignment. There were stories that we possibly have only heard of and were dreamt of. But, those are all stories that we came across during that part of an assignment, and indeed, it was truly memorable to us.
Lydia: Indeed. And there may have been a lot of need for different languages as well to be able to connect to all different parts of India.
Sandeep: Well, yes, absolutely. And that's where I said, and very well said. In fact, we had to look for recruiters who are very well conversant with the regional languages. Because in India, there are about 25 languages, and there are many more dialects. So you can imagine that if you need to have a conversation with the candidates. Although, we all speak a common language, which is English, when you go and manage the hiring at such remote locations, you have to have different pies and different ways and means. There were many challenges, and that made the assignments a lot more memorable and interesting.
Lydia: Yeah, definitely. And finally, Sandeep, what advice would you give someone who is starting out in recruitment today?
Sandeep: Well, for me, anybody who wants to start needs to have followed just the 3Ps. You need to be passionate, you need to be persistent, and you need to have perseverance about whatever you do. So, to be in recruitment, just be curious about what you do. Always keep a larger picture in mind and always relate to the purpose of an organization as to what you or whom you're hiring for. The rest are just the nuances and skills and tricks. Track all things that can be learned and done but I think these are the basic elements one should relate to as they try to begin their career with recruitment.
Lydia: Well, thank you very much, Sandeep. This has been really valuable and thank you for your generous sharing today. For those who are listening in, who might want to pick up a conversation, or who may want to connect with you, which is the best channel to do that?
Sandeep: Well, LinkedIn. I may not be available on my official communication, but being a true recruiter, I'm always available on LinkedIn. So yes, that's where viewers can find me.
Lydia: Excellent. Thanks again, Sandeep. We have been in conversation with Sandeep Sethi of Emids. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.
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