EP61: How emnify Fused Talent Acquisition With Coaching and Tech

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.

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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 joining us today is Matthias Schmeißer from emnify. Hi, Matthias. Thank you for joining us today.

Matthias: Yes, it's a pleasure to be here, Lydia. How are you?

Lydia: I'm good. Thank you and how are you?

Matthias: I'm good as well on the other side of the world and really excited to be here.

Building the Ship While Sailing

Lydia: Great. So, Matthias, your role in emnify is as a Global Director of Talent Acquisition, right? Could you tell us a little bit about your role and how has the past year been for you so far?

Matthias: When I started, I had a situation in my company where there was a perceived understanding that we didn’t have a really professional in-house team. There was the assumption we couldn’t attract the right talent, let alone hire the right talent. There were trust issues, no data pool, and a poor TA tech stack. Hiring Managers literally told recruiters what to do. There was no good alignment in terms of stakeholder alignment, and the decision-making was biased and based on gut feelings. So, it was all over the place, if you will.

When I came in, I was handed a couple of roles. 40, to be exact. The organization probably had 180 people, or at the time it was even 140-150 people. So if you consider this, this is almost 1/3 of the company. We needed to hire them in particular in tech recruiting, by the way. They had a huge backlog, and they always assumed that they couldn’t do this.

So, we were actually building the ship while sailing, as people might say these days. That means we introduced a lot of new technology, made it more data-driven, helped the Hiring Managers understand how we work and how we attract talent, and succeeded with this.

In the next six months, we really hired all the people that we wanted. That helped us build trust and then really focus on more strategic topics, for example, building a new in-house TA team and working on the hiring culture to be more data-driven and less biased.

We started coaching people on top of that and started working on an employer brand because that’s also not happening over time. These are things that in an overall change management process are things that I’m working on. And that was literally my first year, to say the least.

Lydia: First year and you've got infrastructure matters to solve. You also have staffing solutions to look into. So, what did you prioritize first in such a scenario? Because something would have had to start before the other.

Matthias: It depends a little bit on the priorities of the company. If I had stopped all hiring and just coached all people for two or three months, and then continued hiring, then this would not suit the needs of the business. They wanted those roles. They needed those roles. They had understaffed teams, literally.

So, what we focused on was purely delivery, operational recruiting, and getting the roles taken care of while educating the people on the way and really helping them to be successful. We focused on the priorities first and then started to facilitate and evolve as a talent acquisition team from operational recruitment into more of a value-added kind of approach.

“Hey, we are not just filling seats or putting bums on seats. We’re actually also there to build a brand. We’re actually there for coaching and advising the business and creating a kind of talent advisory on the way.”

Lydia: It’s interesting because the coaching element also comes into play. That’s a long process, right? You also need to manage stakeholders, in this sense, manage time, and also handle plenty of different expectations that might come along the way.

So, in terms of implementing those initiatives, how long did it take in that period of one year after you completed or while you were going on with the delivery?

Matthias: We are just about to launch a new hiring interviewer training based, of course, on our findings, where we want to transition into skill-based hiring. If you imagine yourself, you have a low mature hiring culture. And everybody just looks at the pedigree recruiting as they say, “Right. So how long has this person worked, which company have they worked for, and which industry are they from, right?” And these are all biased. First of all, don’t predict future job performance. You will lead people along with their biases, which then leads to bad hires.

This transition is just the first step that you should take in talent acquisition. Because if you have a skill-based approach, you get automatically rid of resumes. I’m exaggerating a little bit but read of resumes, looking at data because you probably assess certain skills that are not just out of interviews.

And now we start strategically. So what we start doing is actually doing a functional assessment, as I call it, which means it could be a case study or presentation, scenario-based interviews, where we don’t tell candidates, “Look, you don’t need to prepare anything.” These are scenarios on your day-to-day. And I want to understand if I hire somebody, how you solve problems, and what your thought process is.

These are the main topics because, at the end of the day, we know this; I’m not always there as the leader. We cannot always watch people, especially in a remote setup. There needs to be a certain autonomy. And so we need to trust people to solve the problems and I need to understand how they solve it. Do they jump to conclusions? Do they ask the right questions? Do they get to the root cause of a problem? These are things that are very important to me.

And that actually shows me and there’s a bit more of the traits that people have. And then you get to the real interesting personality type of what we actually need, while when you just have a conversation, you don’t want to hire the best interviewee, right? The people who can answer questions in the best way; I want to actually see if they understand how to work with data and how to do certain approaches to analyze as well.

Dependability is a big part of every hire, right? And this is something that I found very interesting.

Hiring Manager Empowerment

Lydia: This approach to talent acquisition has changed over the years. You’ve been in TA for some years now, right? So, pre-pandemic, post-pandemic, during the pandemic - has anything changed?

Matthias: I think it depends a little bit on where you hire. For me, in tech, it has always been remote. I think the biggest shift that we’ve seen is a little bit about how you help hiring managers to become better and coach them more. There’s always the assumption that we believe hiring managers know what they need to do. But hiring is not their key area, right? They have other things to do in the business. So, I put more focus on helping them to be successful.

Also, hiring managers play a huge role in engaging and convincing candidates. Candidates do not decide on the company; candidates decide on the leader that they will work with or the team. So, if they don’t do a good job in this or don’t know how to engage, then this is really a problem. I always talk about talent champions, so to speak.

And what is also something that has, of course, disrupted our space in the last six months is, I would argue, skill-based hiring and AI. So, I had a huge discussion on tech recruitment and how AI influences tech recruitment.

I think, first of all, companies who won’t always fight AI on their tech assessments, that’s a very active approach. So either look at the skills of how can somebody work with AI and assess their programming engineering skills, and actually see how in their day-to-day solve problems with AI, which is much more interesting than always looking and saying, “Oh, have they produced an outcome with AI?” And, “Oh, then it’s not worth it.”

I think this is something where people also need to understand and change their assessment approach a little bit, especially with tech talent. Because even Talent Acquisition people are starting to use it, they start working with it. And it’s good to understand how they use it.

Because what we can learn in AI, it’s a little bit like interviewing. If you understand how to prompt better or if you understand how you ask the right questions, you will be successful. But if you don’t know how to do this well, you’re not getting the outcome that you’re aiming for.

Lydia: AI has indeed been front and center this year, and it has drawn a lot of attention to technology. As you said, many job scopes have changed, right? Prompt engineering is one of those things that have come into play.

And Matthias, would you define that as a skill? Or would you define that as a full role for someone? Or would that be both?

Matthias: It’s an interesting question. I’ve seen those prompt engineering roles popping up as well. But at the end of the day, I would consider it a skill. Why? Because prompt engineering is not tied to engineering. You can learn about prompt engineering also as somebody with no engineering background.

A lot of people, when it comes to copywriting, when it comes to AI, even these days can create PowerPoint solutions, or you do market research, or you try to understand who are the successful companies that you need to learn about. Or certain roles and job descriptions.

At the end of the day, the prompt is good if you know how to do it; it’s the first way, but you need to have that critical thinking approach as well. So then you combine another skill, saying, “Look, is that really something that hits home or not?”

Because so many times, I felt, during this type of AI, everybody believed that everything I put in there and every outcome that I get is actually fantastic. Because yes, there is common sense. And it sounds logical. But everyone that you see that has more experience and is very well versed in a certain area of expertise will probably say, “Yeah, almost there, but not yet.”

And this is where the follow-ups start. It’s literally like if you ask a question to somebody an open-ended question in an interview, sometimes that person is providing a really good answer. But then you want to dig deeper, follow up, and really understand, in order to get what you want.

The Social Skills Perspective in Tech Recruitment

Lydia: In terms of using AI on a day-to-day basis within the talent acquisition team, we’ll get back to that question later. But how has the usage of AI really disrupted tech recruitment? I’m not sure if you actually covered that part.

But in terms of its implementation or integration into tech recruitment processes, has that changed the process itself?

Matthias: Well, yes. 100%. Let me start here. When you do tech assessments around the world, you have a couple of different approaches. One is the coding challenge that everybody knows. It’s a top-funnel solution. So you say, “Look, I am a big company with 300 applications. And I just want to make sure that the person has the key programming language I need or that skill and coding skill that I need is covered to a certain extent.” Then you have a cutoff score. And then you understand that, “Hey, these are my five or ten candidates I talk to first.” Let’s put it like this. It’s a filtering mechanism.

Now, these coding challenges are very much under threat. Because everybody with AI or code pilot, or whatever you use, can get a result quickly. Now, what do people do if, let’s say, you do those tests manually, you produce them on your own and you don’t have a tool there, then you never know, is this an AI result? Or it’s just a human being? So there’s a huge risk of fraud or cheating. Let’s put it like this.

If you have an advanced tool, then what those tools do, they actually tell you. “Hey, wait a minute. AI was involved.” So they kind of flag it. But again, this approach is very reactive because we are chasing our tails here, “Oh, is this AI? Oh, that’s a new function or they can do something new. So I need an update. And then I need to flag it again,” and so on.

What I’m trying to say here is people need to think hard about their coding challenges and say, “Maybe we use a completely different approach. And one of the approaches could be pair programming.”

Pair programming is when you sit down with people; you solve problems together. And this is what I meant with the functional assessment early on other roles; this way of collaborating with people on solving problems together and understanding a little bit not just why you do the things you do with code but what are you actually solving for? What is the problem here? How can you bridge this is much more important.

And lastly, it will also add the social skill perspective. Because so many times in tech recruiting, I have seen that people look 80 or 90% of the time at technical skills and not at social skills. And we know from academia and other research that social skills make you successful in your career. It’s not just your technical skills or your social skills.

Lydia: Moving on to HR technology, there’s a survey that showed that 50% of companies use HR technology to find, attract, and retain top talent.

So, what would you say, perhaps the top three HR tech trends in the near future?

Matthias: I think one of the trends that you've already seen is that everyone has jumped on the AI train, right? So, this means that many HR technologies now have their own talent tool. For example, we use Hi People, which is an assessment platform. When you input the job description, it automatically uses AI to guide you to the right assessments for social skills and hard skills. So, you have an opportunity to make things easier for yourself and use these tools more effectively. However, this isn't the only AI topic. In general, this is a trend that I observe, and you'll likely see more developments aimed at reducing administrative work and making tools more seamless.

Moving on, I'd also like to point out what I see now and what we are currently working on, which is a shift away from just sourcing. Sourcing has always been significant, but I see assessments, in general, taking a more central role in development due to the skill movement. Everyone wants to hire high-quality people, but defining what "quality" means or what constitutes high performance can be a challenge. Assessment tools that help identify the right skills are becoming increasingly important.

Now, let's shift the focus to what I'm actually involved in. My scope encompasses not only talent acquisition and employer branding, but also onboarding. What we're doing in onboarding is putting a strong emphasis on automation. Why is this important? Let me provide some context about how the German market operates. Notice periods here can be as long as three to six months. So when you hire someone, there can be a significant gap before they start.

This makes for a somewhat slow-moving market in terms of perception. To bridge this gap and maintain engagement, we need to understand what's happening when a new hire begins. We've seen that when competition is high, as it has been in recent years, and companies are hiring rapidly, keeping people engaged during this period is crucial. Many hires were lost before they even started due to a lack of engagement. So, why not automate this process? I believe we should start looking more holistically at every aspect of our journey.

Additionally, smaller startups might explore tools that can cover multiple functions. It's not ideal to have separate tools for candidate experience, big data, ATS for employer branding, onboarding, and more. It can become cumbersome and messy. Hence, you'll probably see more solutions in the market that encompass various dimensions.

Lastly, it's worth noting that the HR tech market is similar to the global market in that it's consolidating. Many HR tech solutions are being acquired by larger companies to create comprehensive solutions.

Strategically Aligning with Business Objectives

Lydia: In building out these functions that you have been overseeing and also developing, you would also need to develop comprehensive recruitment strategies that not only fulfill business needs but also look into the future.

So, what might be some ways that talent acquisition professionals could think about perhaps future-proofing their recruitment strategy?

Matthias: I think one of the things that you definitely need to start doing is connecting it to business outcomes and the business strategy. Every recruitment strategy that is disconnected from the business and business outcomes is useless. So, that’s something where sometimes in smaller startups, we struggle because there is no real company strategy. The runway is very short. We keep on surviving and surviving, right? But nobody has thought it through, so maybe there is no people’s strategy. How do you then build a recruitment or TA strategy if all of the other strategies don’t exist?

What I would always do is, I will talk to the C level, establish this relationship with the C level and say, “What is important for you? What do you want me to fix?” And so when I started that we said there was the assumption we cannot attract the right talents. In the end, it turns out that it was not attracting the right talents that was the problem. It was assessing and identifying the right hands; there was more of a problem.

So saying, “What is it that you want me to fix? What is your key problem? What keeps you up at night?” And then if you understand what your pain points of the business are, then you really help build this and create a strategy, a vision around this, and execute it.

And last topic on this. I see a lot of times people changing strategies too fast because they always believe, “Okay, the strategy didn’t work.” No, think about it; it could be the execution and not so much strategy. So disconnect one from the other, because so many times, I’ve seen poorly executed strategies where the strategy was okay, but actually, the execution was the problem. So, it’s always about the how; how do we do things? If we have the why, then we need to look at the how.

Lydia: How does data play into this changing of strategies? And at what point do you tweak the entire thing? Or just change a tactic, for instance?

Matthias: It's really important. Obviously, this was also one of the topics that I struggled with. Of course, you can build BI data dashboards on your own if you have the expertise in the organization. However, that takes longer. It's not a quick fix. So what I always do is, I instantly acquire a tech stack that provides me with the right data points and then really define and communicate them.

Currently, what we're doing involves my KPIs. I have three slides on the management report that comes out every month, directed to the C-level and senior leadership. In these slides, I showcase the impact of my work through the delivered KPIs. This approach allows us to see what's happening and identify opinions and objectives rather than relying on subjective feedback.

Regarding your last question about changing and when to change, I'm a huge fan of experience-driven KPIs. Ultimately, it's about onboarding and candidate experiences. For me, it's not just about the quantity of hires; it's much more important to focus on how we do it. Therefore, having these KPIs is crucial. When you start with employer and candidate experiences, you might begin with a low score, perhaps around minus 30 or minus 40 on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) scale.

Over time, you need to understand global benchmarks. Currently, the global benchmark for candidate experience is around minus one. This benchmark helps us understand how to improve and consistently work on our messaging. Do we have candidate decks? Do we create videos? How do we prepare people, considering various drivers? To make a real change, you need to work with data.

I believe that if you are an experienced talent leader, having your KPIs and understanding where you stand is essential. It provides you with an opportunity to track and use the data effectively. This approach aligns your KPIs with the value you want to create for the organization. It helps you share the understanding of how your impact reflects in the organization.

From Headcount Plans to Workforce Strategies

Lydia: In terms of achieving those KPIs using AI, for instance, in a talent acquisition team, we’ve seen widespread adoption. As you said, there’s been a hype; the past six months alone have shown the results of the usage of AI and exactly what you need to have in terms of skills to be able to get the best outcome from AI.

So, how do you think talent acquisition professionals can actually benefit and get the most out of AI in their day-to-day strategies, and also in their forecasts and planning?

Matthias: One of the common challenges we face, especially in talent acquisition, is the scarcity of time. We're constantly swamped with tasks and responsibilities, leaving us with limited time to focus on crucial aspects. For instance, it's challenging to dedicate time to refining outreach messages, crafting job descriptions, or developing communication plans for our hiring processes. However, taking the time to map out these aspects from a holistic perspective is essential.

We must consider what impression we want candidates to have from the very beginning. Should we prioritize introducing them to our company, elaborating on the recruitment process, or setting clear expectations? Additionally, streamlining and standardizing templates is vital. This paves the way for automation, allowing us to utilize AI effectively. Creating persuasive templates demands significant effort, but it's worthwhile in the long run.

Another example is intake meetings. Filling a role successfully often hinges on meticulous planning and structured intake meetings. These initial discussions determine what we aim to achieve, how we'll make decisions, and what our assessment approach will be. Neglecting these aspects and addressing them only when we already have candidates can lead to suboptimal outcomes. My experience has taught me the importance of laying the groundwork early and assisting hiring managers in formulating pertinent questions.

Standardization is key, and questions should revolve around leadership skills, team skill gap analysis, and their strategic relevance. At present, we require leaders to create business cases for every hiring request. This step ensures that each hire directly contributes to our business objectives and strategic goals. Without this correlation, the hire may not be justifiable.

This upfront investment of time and effort ultimately results in greater efficiency down the line, a point where I can offer assistance. Crafting an effective one-pager business case and guiding people through insourcing are critical aspects. LinkedIn, for instance, offers tools to automate outreach efforts, emphasizing the importance of a thoughtful, engaging, and multi-touchpoint sourcing approach. It's not just about initial contact but about creating a meaningful and captivating journey for candidates.

Lydia: It's interesting that there is an emphasis on having hiring managers present the business case for every hire. So, how was that communicated? Or rather, how was that implemented in terms of stakeholder management?

Matthias: I think at the minute, and this is typical for startups, most of the startups have headcount plans, but not workforce plans. And there’s a difference, right? So headcount plans mean literally giving you the roles, then based on the roles, that’s what you need to hire for.

Now, you can imagine that sometimes revenue growth doesn’t turn out the way it should. Or there are other obstacles. So how do you deal with this? And so for that reason, you can, as an organization, understand and say, “Look, if we maybe not replacing every role, that reduces costs.” Or if we say, “Look, why do we actually need a team for this? Is there maybe an opportunity to say, I don’t want to hire somebody, but I maybe invest in the existing people, and give them an increase and fix that problem this way, or reprioritize.”

My work will help us to be more productive and a more outcome-oriented or performing company. And these are easy things. But per default, we all just say, “Oh, I need to hire and I need a full-time hire.” But we don’t think about interim managers; we don’t think about freelancers; we don’t think about maybe part-time roles.

And so there is a huge amount of opportunities on how we can actually answer this request or this opportunity here. And this is where we want people to start thinking a little bit more about what is actually the right solution for you and your team.

Building a Diverse and High-Performance Recruitment Team

Lydia: Going back to eliminating bias in the hiring process. Diversity is a big aspect of recruitment today, especially in the past few years. We're already seeing that emphasis and it's great to see the changes taking place right now.

So, what might be some factors that TA leaders or heads of recruitment teams think about when they structure a diverse team of recruiters?

Matthias: First of all, I would always argue that when you set up your team, hire a diverse recruitment team. It would not make any sense if I just said, “Oh, I work for a German company, and all of my recruiters are Germans.” That’s not going to work, especially for us. We are a global company. That means we need this global footprint in this recruitment team. So at the moment, it’s very funny. I’m located in Berlin, Germany, but I have no one from Berlin on my team. I have people from Poland, Romania, the UK, and even America. So, really all over the place. But that gives me the opportunity because I have a diversity of thought, diverse backgrounds, and diverse skills.

And that is something that is very unique. It sounds very obvious, but once you have this, then you can really create that high-performance culture because. With this high-performance culture, everyone leverages their skills.

That’s a leadership task; to create a safe space, inclusive culture, a speak-up culture, a learning opportunity for everyone, learn with the team together, and give them the opportunity to say, “Look, I can always reach out to you if I have a question.” This is kind of a cultural thing, the psychological safety, and then this will help you to facilitate this further.

My team will have an impact and will have an opportunity to perform because I can discuss everything with them. We are open here. We are in this together. And as a leader, I am judged by the performance of my team. Nothing else. If they are successful, I am successful.

So, I think this is something that I would keep in mind in order to build the opportunity here. And then as a next step, when it comes to the business, I think it is coaching and training. You cannot get rid of them, right? I think you need to do them and you need to have an iterative approach. Don’t just say you once finished this and then you never touch it again. In either iteration, they certainly have to be key elements.

The skill-based approach is also important because, at the end of the day, if it’s all about what kind of skills you have, it’s not so much about where you are coming from, what industry you have been in, or what company you have been in.

And I think these are things that I always tend to see. People have this, “Oh, she works at Google. Oh, he has worked at Netflix. They must be good.” These companies don’t have, by default, all the best employees. We need to tackle these biases.

We also need to understand that we cannot unbiased human beings. Let’s not be naive and say, “Oh, if you run through seven or eight different trainings, you are not biased. We all are biased and we need to learn how to deal with biases in the workplace to make the most objective decisions And by that, I would mean multiple people involved in the process, having a good debrief, having a good decision-making structure, and having good interview rubrics.

These are all opportunities to help you to get less bias and get more effective.

Lydia: And that culture element, that culture piece tends to sit heavily in the employer branding structure that you are currently building. So, what might be the role of employer branding to attract and even retain candidates today?

Matthias: That’s a good point. Employer branding is super important. And so many people don’t prioritize this from the get-go. Because a good employer brand probably takes two to three years, depending on the size of your company. But it’s a mid to long-term project.

What I’ve seen in the market is that a lot of people build that from the outside in. And so we built something where a lot of applicants came in, we had a lot of traffic. And we then kind of risked losing a great candidate experience because we cannot handle all of the people at the same time.

So, my advice here is to build the employer brand from the inside out. Start by having people say, “Hey, this is good. This is what other people are doing.” Focus on internal communication and make sure people get comfortable with that brand. And then from that, you have the authenticity to then say, “Look, they identify the brand already because of the work that we did.” And then we start going outside.

Because at the end of the day, I would argue that the measure of success for an employer brand is the quality of applications, not quantity. And if you build an employer brand, you have to always think about personas.

You create a persona, but that does not mean it fits for everybody. An employer brand should never fit for everybody. It is always for a certain target group that we actually design it for because they are relevant and are most likely to succeed.

I think this is really important. And what I have seen in the past is that we just put diverse people in pictures because we know that diverse people will apply. But then the culture and the company are not diverse at all. This is what I want to pay close attention to. Don’t create those fake images. Don’t pretend to be somebody or some company that you are not, because that will never be successful and it will create a lot of tension and friction.

Open-Mindedness and Curiosity: the Foundation of Recruitment

Lydia: Given all the things that we just talked about, all the points that you raised about the challenges in a startup, the technology coming away, and even looking forward to the future, what advice would you give someone starting on recruitment today?

Matthias: I think they need to be open-minded and curious. This is really the first thing. It has nothing to do with where you’re from or what kind of background you have. If you are interested in what people have to say, that is really the starting point where you can learn, where you can be open. Our profession at the minute does not have a degree or does not have certain courses that you can do and then you will know it all. Our profession develops so quickly that you need to learn on the job. And you need to probably start in a bigger team to understand, get some structures in place, and get familiar with policies. This is something where you have probably a good playground to start.

And then from there, it really depends on where you want to go. I’ve been in tech recruiting my whole career and I think what I underestimated is that sometimes I’d be like, “Yeah, commercial recruitment. That’s easy.” But now we see that it’s very challenging, especially in the broader market. It hasn’t got easier.

So what I’m trying to say here is to have this curiosity, open-mindedness, willingness to learn, and always iterate on your approaches. And that will bring you or make you successful very fast.

Lydia: Thank you very much Matthias, for your time and your insights, I particularly enjoyed the way in which you approached organizing or structuring a department that previously had no real direction and structuring that for the long term, especially in a startup environment, in which you have to look for many niche talent and you're also looking at AI coming into play to possibly make it easier for you but also that growing pain of adopting everything.

So thank you so much for your time and your insights, Matthias. If our audience wants to connect with you, where can they find you?

Matthias: Yes. LinkedIn, preferably. I'm quite active there. Just reach out to me, send me a message, or willingness to connect. LinkedIn as I always say, is my second inbox. So, sometimes I'm faster there than in my real inbox. But don't tell anyone.

Lydia: You just did. Thank you so much, Matthias. It's been fun having you on the show.

We have been in conversation with Matthias Schmeißer from emnify. Thank you for joining us this week, and remember to subscribe to keep up with new weekly episodes of All-In Recruitment.