EP122: PayPal - Balancing Dream Lists with Realistic Needs

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 another episode of All-In Recruitment podcasts 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 our weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and with us this week is Tyler Briggs from PayPal. A pleasure to have you with us, Tyler. Good evening.

Tyler: Good evening. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. And thank you so much, Lydia.

Emergence of DevOps and Tool Building in Software

Lydia: So tell us about your journey in the tech TA space, Tyler. I think you may have observed some significant changes in this particular vertical sector in recent years.

Tyler: Absolutely. So, it's kind of all I've ever really worked with in the talent space—tech. My focus has always been software, from AS/400s and COBOL—not to date myself too much—to the more nuanced pieces, all the way into the various parts of the software development life cycle. I've seen things change. But, you know, one thing that has really stayed constant is areas like backend development, such as Java and Python, which I've been working with since around 2014. So, the languages have stayed somewhat similar. However, the scale of software development and technology has grown significantly—monstrously, if you will.

Besides AI, I think the other big changes I've seen include a lot more focus on security and areas like DevOps or tool building in the software realm. That's probably the newest area, if you will, in this space.

Lydia: In terms of candidate expectations, or dealing with candidates or the available candidate pool, have you seen any changes in the TA tech space? You hold a global talent acquisition role, right? So maybe looking at a very broad talent pool?

Tyler: Oh, absolutely, yes. I mean, there's one thing that's for sure: in tech, there's never enough. There's always an appetite for these talents within all these big companies that we all know about, and, of course, all the small companies too.

So the talent pool has definitely changed quite a bit. It's grown, but it's grown, I'd say, symbiotically with the needs of the growing companies that we all know again, and back to the small ones too.

So now that it's been such a sought-after skill set, a lot of people actually have gained the skills. There've been a lot of people entering the market as software engineers. The downside, though, is that the market has continued to grow and have that appetite, so it's really kind of stayed the same as it’s always been extremely limited as far as top talent goes. When you're hitting those talent pools, you're touching a lot of similar types of educational backgrounds sometimes, and I guess, companies if you will if you're looking for something very niche.

But overall, the education system has actually done a great job internationally, I should say, in producing talent for the companies. But at the end of the day, it's still a tough one. It's still a tough market.

Lydia: And what are some key areas you're focusing on right now? Are there any core technical roles that you're actually responsible for hiring?

Tyler: Yes, the team I manage works on a ton of the back end, full stack, and even front end, as well as the engineering management core. So as far as those go, they'll never, never go away. In fact, the languages are pretty much still the same, if you will: back-end Java, JavaScript, front-end, and full-stack Python. So it's very similar to what we've always seen, but we're really ramping things up at PayPal. There's a lot of growth happening right now in all these technical areas, quite honestly.

Balancing Global Talent Pools and Assessment Strategies

Lydia: Going back to the bread and butter, the sourcing element, right? How do you find your candidates? Is there a specific strategy, or strategies that you think can work when it comes to finding talent in this space?

Tyler: Yes, you have to use every tool possible because it's so limited. But honestly, I think the best thing to do is treat it a bit like an octopus and put all your tentacles out there and touch things, of course, low-hanging fruit—things that you can identify, or, I guess I should say, people you can identify. They already have a signal, whether that be like a referral, a previous interview, or they're at a technical conference. There are always those types of folks. You can always tangent off them into other areas, so you're touching, say, a given company or something like that.

But the talent sourcing aspect of it has always been a challenge, and it certainly is, especially if you're trying to get talent to possibly relocate or, maybe work in a different time zone than they're currently located in, as well as with a team. So there's always going to be a challenge, and those challenges are, quite honestly, just part of the game, and it's always going to be there. But yes, it's a great space to be a part of, for sure.

Lydia: Let's speak about technical assessments and the processes involved in it. In your experience, how have these assessments, or the processes within these assessments, evolved recently?

Tyler: Yes, so we went from having lease code to kind of the phone interview from anywhere with engineers at your company to using a combination of both to a hacker rank and now you have things like third parties such as a company like Carrot that does phone interviews or assessments of your candidate pool prior to on-site. So the assessments have changed so much over the years. It went from a take-home to in-person to now we have to worry about AI, the use of AI during the interviews, and those other pieces.

So I think it's probably one of the biggest parts that's changed. It's always going to be important as, if you will, the signal to turn on the candidacy for more investment, and you always want to have the activation of the candidate in those early stages. So, I mean, it's always been a super important part, but it's definitely changed a ton, and I think that it's only going to get more and more complicated as we have an international pool of candidates, and you also have tools such as AI that potentially could make it so you want to change the way you're asking these questions, particularly.

Building Trust in Compensation Negotiations

Lydia: So in terms of handling compensation or benefits when it comes to candidates in that hiring process, how should TA professionals maybe go about negotiating salaries in the kind of competitive market that we're in?

Tyler: It's really through trust. The best way to navigate this type of market, and really the market that we've always been in tech, is just purely through trust. You want to not show your cards, because you don't really have cards to show, per se, but you want to tell and educate the candidate on what the vehicles are within the compensation package, how they work, and the timing of those pieces so that they know when you come to the table, what their expectations should sort of look like. They should give you an earnest answer that way if they understand the compensation philosophy of the company.

When you get into having competing offers on the table and other things that either muddy the waters, if you will, or make things more interesting depending on who you are, then you have to think about, okay, what time of year is it? How can we best structure this for them, depending on when bonuses are paid and equities are released, or if there's a cliff on any sort of equity package? So you really want to do that through trust and education, and then hopefully, when you build that trust, if there's a competing offer, they'll share it with you, and you can compete against it.

You always want to go with the right move for the company and the right move for the candidate. So, if you identify their trigger points and what they're really looking for, hopefully, you can come to the table with those pieces.

Addressing Misalignment Between Hiring Managers and Talent Pools

Lydia: Let's move internally now. If there's a situation where there's a significant misalignment, for instance, between a hiring manager and what a hiring manager would expect, and the talent pool, or other list of candidates, how do you handle those situations?

Tyler: Yes, that's a great question. Really, the best thing to do is bring to the table some data to influence and help them understand. We can sit there and talk until we're blue in the face, but at the end of the day, our client base in tech is usually that software engineering manager or director who has quite a bit of access to information and is used to processing the splatter chart, if you will, of data points. And so it's not a tough sell for them when you come to the table with something like, hey, the population of the talent pool in a given area, perhaps, or maybe the population of people who have two given skill sets together, or other things, right?

So when there's that misalignment, it's really about helping them kind of back into: Is it a location problem? Is it a talent pool issue? Perhaps it's an expectation of a given role problem? And you can talk through that with them. I always do find that a technical lead is good to have in the room when you're with that maybe new hiring manager as well—someone who can really speak to what is actually needed versus maybe what's on the dream list, perhaps. So you gotta get realistic.

Lydia: Yes. And in terms of getting these top candidates in, I would imagine there's a lot of storytelling of that data to your hiring managers. I mean, bringing raw data to the table is one thing, but being able to contextualize it and really make it a piece of communication to the hiring managers and others is another. So what kind of traits should a professional have to be able to do that effectively with a hiring manager?

Tyler: Yes, it's really that problem-solving, analytical mindset. So if you're coming to the table and looking at it as this is not a blame game—this is a problem to solve—then your analysis can show lines of green, lines of red, and major issues, and you can talk through it.

If you're coming to the table with just the raw table data or a scatter plot, you're right—that's not going to be as clear as telling the story. This is the model that we have in front of us with the talent pool available; this is what we can actually produce. Telling that full story is pretty handy-dandy to be able to pull off. You can easily do it with things like Google Analytics or other tools, but sometimes you have to pull it out of your ATS and show the ATS mapping what your pipeline is attracting, and where as well. That can also be a good point.

Lydia: Now, in terms of retaining the top talent that you've got, it's first and foremost, as you said, challenging to even find them and then bring them in, and have them navigate all the differences within a large organization. So, what strategies do you use to retain top talent once they're hired?

Tyler: Definitely. So, outside of the TA space, anyone who's not in TA, the methods that we primarily deploy or I've seen deployed quite well, and have done myself, would be around getting folks involved right away. If they're top talent, you want to make sure that they're helping you bring other top talent to the table. So, things like referrals are obviously important, as well as treating the referrals with that white glove, if you will—really going to them and being curious after they've started. How are things going? Is there anything I can help you with on my side of things?

Then maybe a month in or something, you start talking about referrals, or whatever the policy is at your company around interviewing and waiting around that time to get back in touch with folks. So that is one thing. I think it builds more of a community around one technical family that's trying to drive forward the product.

That's what I can do from the TA side, as far as also just engaging with engineering managers and understanding what we're hearing from, let's say, the interviewers and what would be more helpful to them as they're executing these interviews. For us, it's something that will always be tough: getting interview feedback within an SLA and getting everyone to say yes to the invite within the first 12 hours of having sent it. These things will always be kind of an issue. So if you can just handle that with grace, all these things—those people you've brought on, they're top talent. They're going to see that grace, and they're going to respect it, and they're going to want to help perform for you as well.

Lydia: Within the company, retaining talent may also involve, I would imagine, working or collaborating with different departments within that HR space—right, learning and development, or internal communication. So, is there a specific way to keep engaging with these departments in order to make sure that retention is there?

Tyler: Yes, I do. I definitely feel the opportunity really sits with events, both internally and externally—going along with folks to those events and helping them maybe come out of their show, producing training that might help them, and possibly even bringing in referrals. I mean, really, you can do this kind of thing to help them grow themselves, right? And so that also includes introducing them to other pieces of the HR system or helping them engage with their HR business partner if there’s something needed, possibly a compensation issue, locational issue, or anything like that.

Solving those problems, helping them solve those problems from the internal stance is great, but where I see a ton of benefit, really, is that event engagement—being able to hear a common message, discuss it, and understand it together. That, to me, is a beautiful thing, especially from the technical point of view. I love this stuff, but that's also me. But yeah, it really doesn't. It should never stop. It should always be a symbiotic relationship between TA and all other parts of the business. Quite honestly.

Lydia: Now, you've had extensive experience in the tech talent space, right? So, what advice would you give someone who is starting out in this particular vertical today, Tyler?

Tyler: Yeah, so there's a lot to think about entering into this space, but the good news is tech is everything and it's everywhere. So anywhere you get into recruitment these days, I feel like tech is a part of it at some point in time. Again, back to what we were talking about just slightly earlier, though, having that problem-solving analytical mindset when you're getting into tech recruitment. You're dealing with, obviously, things that are a little ambiguous, so look at it again as a fun problem to solve and analytically design your thought process so you can speak intelligently to it around candidates, hiring managers, and interviewers. That's the number one thing, I think, is still that analytical and problem-solving mindset.

Lydia: Excellent. Thank you so much, Tyler, for all these insights and also for your time today. For those who are listening in and want to connect with you and find out a little bit more about you, where can they connect with you?

Tyler: The best place to connect with me is honestly LinkedIn at this point. Yeah, so if you find me on LinkedIn, it's just Tyler Briggs, and I'm currently with PayPal.

Lydia: All right, great. Thank you again, Tyler. We have been in conversation with Tyler Briggs from PayPal. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe. Stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All in Recruitment.