All-In Recruitment is a podcast by Manatal that focuses on all things related to the recruitment industry’s missions and trends. Join us in our weekly conversations with leaders in the recruitment space and learn their best practices to transform the way you hire.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Lydia: Welcome to the All-In Recruitment podcast by Manatal, where we explore best practices, learnings, and trends with leaders in the recruitment space. If you like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes. I'm your host, Lydia, and joining us today is Danny Caines, Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Nortal.
Welcome to the show, Danny. Thank you for joining us.
Danny: Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Danny’s Tips for Scaling and Performing in Talent Acquisition
Lydia: So, walk us through your experience in Talent Acquisition, Danny. Tell us a little bit about your current role as Global Head of Talent Acquisition.
Danny: I’ve been in Talent Acquisition or in-house recruitment for over 20 years, which is a little [bit] scary, and that transverse numerous industries, from broadcast media to IT software-oriented recruitment. My current role with Nortal, which is an Estonian-founded consulting firm, they are based out of Tallinn and spread across 23 different offices across numerous countries. My role is to head up a team of 50 people across 13 countries, managing Talent Acquisition across these extremely different cultures. I think the key thing for my role is building a TA team that is scalable globally because we are growing significantly, but also one that can perform and help positively impact the organization from a growth perspective.
Lydia: 50 people, that's a large team across different places. What's the percentage of this team being built from scratch? How many of them are already there?
Danny: Pretty much the whole team was there when I came in. I have not recruited anyone yet because of the economy. If I'm being honest, growth has been slower than anticipated this year. So, we haven't been able to grow the team.
Lydia: So that team of 50 to serve various countries and different markets, and workforce. How big is Nortal right now?
Danny: Nortal has 2000 employees at the moment, but we've got pretty ambitious growth plans over the next four to five years, hence the size of the TA Team.
Lydia: So, what are you looking at in terms of growth?
Danny: I think the the aim is to get us to around 10,000 employees in the next four to five years, that will be a combination of M&A (Marketing and advertising) and organic growth. But I'd probably hazard a guess that 70% of that is going to be organic growth. So, that will be sitting on my and TA’s shoulders over the coming years. Pretty ambitious.
Reducing Costs & Saving Time in Recruitment
Lydia: It's a highly critical 12 months to just pivot that towards the growth targets such as that. So, what are some areas that you prioritize in this role?
Danny: Interestingly, there have probably been only a handful of core priorities initially. Because of the economy, everyone would have seen that in Talent Acquisition, there have been lots of people laid off, unfortunately, across the market. So, the focus when it comes to Talent Acquisition right now tends to fall into a small number of camps. Cost per hire is one, which is the total TA costs split across a number of hires and also time to fill. So, the role opens right away through to offer acceptance.
For us, if I look at those two in isolation, because they were pretty important for us at the end of last year (2022), cost per hire was really high because we had a bigger team, and the hiring numbers were lower than anticipated at the end of last year. So, we would probably have a cost per hire of an excess of €10,000, which is pretty extreme. The aim is to get that down to a global industry normal of around €5000, and we are well on the journey for that.
Time to fill, again, if I look across the board for core hires, such as Software Engineers and testers, and the like, that makes up about 70% to 80% of our hires. That was sitting at about eight to nine weeks, which is not great, at the end of last year. So, the aim is to get that down to two weeks, which is super ambitious, and my team looks at me like I’m nuts sometimes, I think. But we had already got that down to 3.6 weeks by the end of the summer, without a massive amount of effort. So, we are well on the journey.
I think the other two pieces that have been a priority for me is; one, we had to go through a change of structure at the beginning of the year to move from a localized aligned business to a group function that is capability aligned, which was a big change. But also, we had to implement an Applicant Tracking System in April. So, we had to cram a lot into the first four or five months of this year (2023.)
Finally, the next piece I’m looking at from a data perspective is how we monitor the quality of hire. Initially, that will be what the attrition in the early stage of the employee lifecycle is, say, the first three to four months. Eventually, we will track the data through performance into the first 12 months of the employee lifecycle to understand if there are any trends between how we hire, where we hire from, and does that impacts attrition, performance, and all that sort of stuff. But we lay off that one for the moment.
How to Identify and Engage with Core Talent
Lydia: That's a huge reduction in time and a great bit of progress, especially in the past 12 months. What went into getting results like that?
Danny: I think the first thing is you need to set ambitious goals. If I came in and be super realistic and said, “We’re going to go from eight to nine weeks down to five,” then we probably would have got to five or five point two. So, I set the two weeks, which was a bit of a scary objective for my team. But I said, “Look, I’ve told the board, that’s what we’re aiming for. So, let’s work out how rather than how not.”
A lot of it we haven’t standardized tons of processes yet, but we’re in the process of doing that because it’s absolutely key to increase speed by standardizing processes and making things efficient. However, the good thing is that we’ve made it not just a TA target but a business target. Everyone’s now looking at it, and everyone’s sort of saying, “How do we get to that point?” I think that’s the reason why we’ve done it, and if I’m being completely honest, it’s been done through an element of brute force, initially. But as we standardize all our processes and understand what “good” looks like for Nortal for a Software Engineer, for example, and that’s a consistent view across the globe for us, then that time to fill will get quicker.
I think the other key thing here is trying to get more proactive about what your core hires are. Like most organizations, our Strategic Workforce Plan is not that great. I think most TA folks will complain that planning is not great in most organizations, and it is. So, we did a bit of a retrospective and said, “Over the last year or two, what were our core hiring skill sets?” and that’s what led us to this target. So, we understood that it was Software Engineers, whether it was Java, .Net, Node.js, you name it, and test engineers.
So, that’s why we put that focus on there, and what we’re currently doing to help speed up that time to fill is to start building talent communities, not just pipelines of talent. We’re going to start building these pipelines by engaging the talent with events, white papers, and interesting articles. So, we’re going to do a full talent marketing piece on it as well.
Challenges of Sourcing Talent in a Gig Economy
Lydia: So, in terms of sourcing the candidates, we've already seen what might be the plan in the near future, building these communities. Moving a little bit back, in terms of challenges that the team faced when you saw, as you came in, what were these unique challenges when it comes to sourcing talent for these roles in various parts of the world?
Danny: It’s interesting. I don’t think too many people in the Software Engineering recruitment space have too many different challenges. It’s quite similar, so Software Engineering has always been a tough piece of recruitment. But actually, it’s been even worse with the economy. Businesses have this misconception that there’s this flood of candidates out there, and therefore, it must be easy. I think the term shooting fish in a barrel was being used with me on occasion. But actually, it’s completely the opposite.
Most people are sticking where they are. They’re a lot harder to move because they don’t want to put themselves in an insecure position by moving. Those that are moving are going down one of two or three routes. They’re either taking some time or actually maybe one or three routes. More people are changing their careers. One of the big trends I’m seeing at the moment is this whole gig economy thing. This is something that most organizations, including ourselves, are going to look at and this is where more and more people are looking to do consulting, straight contracting work rather than being in a permanent role.
If I look at the UK and the US, for example, at one point, the average term that someone spent in a role was somewhere between 18 months and three years, whereas people can do a contract role for that and earn a lot more. So, we’re starting to see some of that and that’s created some real challenges. So, I think for us in Nortal to address that longer term and that’s probably into early next year, we need to start segmenting what our hiring is and understanding what we need for the different clients and different types of hiring. So, I think that’s the next challenge that’s coming in for us.
Trust Goes a Long Way
Lydia: You raise a great point about looking into the contract, but also the gig economy or what was previously known as even the liquid workforce. There are so many terms to describe people who may not necessarily be fully employed in one place. And I noticed also that Nortal has the Nomad program. Does that move into things like employee empowerment? Tell us a little bit more about how that works.
Danny: I’ve only been with the organization for 13 months, but having spoken to my boss, the Chief People Officer, there was a concerted or definite decision made on how we would employ people globally. So, the first thing is we can hire from anywhere and we can do that for most, not for everything. But we have to bear in mind the client's needs and the certain regulations that we might have to consider in different countries. But typically, we can almost hire from anywhere. So, if we don’t have a legal entity, then we do use an employer register to help us with that. That’s the first thing.
The Nomad program is something I’ve not taken advantage of yet, but I probably will do it soon. Anyone who’s following us on LinkedIn and Instagram will see that there’s been a number of things raised on this recently, and this is where people within the organization, within certain realms, there are only some countries we can’t go to and we’ve got to be careful how long we’re in those countries for tax reasons.
But you could, in theory, say, during the winter, I'm going to go to the Canary Islands, and I'm going to live and work there for the next two to three months. All I need is a good WiFi connection, so that I can do my work. But then whilst I'm out there, I can do tourist stuff and have some nice sun. People are doing that. Some people are splitting their time up so that they're going to places they've never been before. They can mix up the work environment, as well as take some holiday and annual leave to get out and see different things.
What I’m looking forward to on this front is the ability to not be stuck in my home office the whole time [and] actually get to go out and see different places and for it not to have to impact my annual leave. Which means I can balance family commitments as well. So, the organization is very good at that. We don’t track people. We do ask people to tell their managers what they’re doing so that we know in case there’s something we need to be aware of. But ultimately, we don’t control. So, I suppose what I’m saying in short is that you were talking about employee empowerment.
This is ultimately what it is, we’re trusting our people to do the right thing and therefore being in the environments that make them comfortable to do a good job. That’s the key thing for me.
Using Storytelling and Culture to Attract the Best Talent
Lydia: So, going back to the community that you plan to build with developers and people in the tech scene, what might be some of the unique offerings or value propositions as an employer that you might present to these communities?
Danny: That’s an interesting question. That’s what we’re working on. So, just to give a little bit of background as to why we’re working on this - it’s not so well defined now - is that the organization, up until recently, has mainly grown through merger and acquisition. So, a lot of our businesses have been locally run. They have had their own message and their own approach under the Nortal banner. There was a conscious decision made that we need to be globally scalable, fairly recently. So, we’re now looking at this 80/20 rule in the sense that this Nortal is 80%, but the 20% is the local nuance.
As far as looking at those communities is concerned, there are a couple of things. We’re still building these up at the moment, so they’re still in their infancy. But what I want to do is, I didn’t just want a pipeline of candidates because then we would be like everyone else or another recruitment agency or whatever that’s just churning bodies through a pipeline that adds no value at all. I think the proposition for us is being able to tell the Nortal story to people in those pipelines and get them closer and closer to the brand.
So, there are a couple of things that happened. One, they know if it’s either right or wrong for them because I think it is important to know the positive and the negative side as anything else. This isn’t just about attracting, but it’s also about letting people make an informed decision about whether Nortal is right for them. Also, it starts to get people engaged in Nortal and who we are as an organization. So, they always feel part of it before they’ve come on board, which almost entices them to think, “Why wouldn’t I want the job at Nortal?”
The other piece for me is that when you do this with these pipelines - I’ve done it in previous organizations - they then make referrals. So, they’re talking to their friends in the bars and the restaurants, at home and they say Nortal has this great thing going on. They’re engaging with these developers or these testers, or I’m looking at building one up for TA and actually, it’d be a great community to be part of. I’m seeing this information come out.
What I want is, I want us to be seen as a conscientious contributor to the industry, not just a body shop. I’m not saying that’s what Nortal is now, but I want us to make sure that we’re seen as someone that people want to come to for all the right reasons. So, that’s a long-winded answer, but that’s the aim for those communities.
Empower and Flexibilize Employees
Lydia: It's interesting that these communities are built around shared interests or a shared goal, if you're looking at adding value to a community of developers that might be also giving back to that community in that industry.
There's also this opportunity to tell or to present these communities, an opportunity for growth within the company, and you might be getting various types of cultures. People who will be working remotely, as you said, and working by themselves.
So, what strategies might be useful to make sure that there is some kind of cultural assessment for those who are coming in?
Danny: It is interesting when we use the term assessment. I’ll give you an example and I’m a prime example here. I’m only one of three permanent employees in Nortal who works in the UK. The rest of my team, the MD of the UK, and one of my team. We have a lot of contractors in the UK, but the permanent side is quite low. The majority of who I speak to is well outside of the UK, transversing from Finland to Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, Serbia, the Middle East, the States, and places like Ukraine and Poland. So, I have to do this all the time.
There are a couple of things we need to bear in mind. One is that we need to be cognizant of the rituals and cultures and different things that go on in different countries. For example, the Middle East has a different working week compared to the more western side. I’ve got some of my team in Seattle, which for me is an eight-hour time difference, and for people in Estonia, it is a 10-hour time difference. So, what we’re trying to do is make sure that our daily rituals, if you like, our daily routines, and our meetings, are aware of that, and we can work around that. We’ve got flexibility.
Now what we don’t want to do, and I think going back to the Nomad thing, Nortal gives employee empowerment. So, if I need to work till nine o’clock at night because I’m dealing with the US, they’re not expecting me to start at 8:30 in the morning and work all the way through 12 to 15 hours. What we try and do is, we try to say to people, “You manage your days as you need to, as long as it doesn’t impact client work, as long as it keeps the quality up, and as long as we’re not burning you out.” That’s the most important thing.
Lydia: What about the internal culture?
Danny: This is an interesting one. We’re creating our EVP now and going back to the fact that we’ve had a lot of mergers and acquisitions. So, I would say that we’ve had almost 13 different organizations along the same route with slightly different cultures in each one. Each organization has done a really good job of doing that. I think, naturally the organization has been good at collaboration. So, we’re quite lucky there. That’s worked across the organization.
More recently, we’ve relaunched our brand, and we’ve started to look at creating our EVP. So, going back to this 80/20 rule, this will then help inform us on how we should communicate across the organization, and what things we should be doing to make sure that Nortal is front and center around what we do. We’re not there yet, but we will be fairly quickly.
Lydia: Now it's gonna be interesting to also see how that 80/20 rule just plays out in terms of mergers and acquisitions. Which part of the entire culture becomes the 20, in which part of that becomes the 80?
Danny: The aim still is to have 80%. This is global, this is low talent 20%, like nuance. So, this is what we're keen to do. But you're right, I don't think it's going to be as clear-cut as that in every single region.
Cutting Down Hiring Time from Two Months to Two Weeks
Lydia: I’m super intrigued by how quickly you brought down the time to hire, which is nine weeks to 3.6. This goes back also to the interview, the hiring process, and the onboarding process for international hires, or for anyone who's joining the company.
So, what might be an ideal time, I know you said two weeks being the target, but what goes into these two weeks? What makes the interview process seamless?
Danny: This goes on way before the interview process, to be honest. This is how we attract, this is how we select, this is how we go into offer management. So, if I were to just give a really brief synopsis, one of the things that goes into those two weeks is getting rid of the need to start recruitment from scratch every time you hire.
We’ve already identified the core roles, and we’re building those pipelines of talent communities. We’re going to have engaged candidates that we can pick out all the time. That’s the theory behind it. That’s what I’ve done in practice. So that saves a lot of time upfront.
Then when you look at the interview process that really defines this as the candidate's journey, there are a couple of things that need to happen. We need to standardize as many processes as possible and at the same time, we need to be in agreement about what “good” looks like because the problem is when you’ve got an organization that is so local, as we have been up to recently. What “good” looks like in Germany is completely different from what “good” looks like in Serbia and it’s not that one’s good and one’s bad. It’s just different.
So, we’re making a concerted effort with our engineering capability to define what “good” looks like. We can then start to use qualified interviews from anywhere across the globe. So they’re not limited to just a small number of people.
If you look at standardization, what good looks like, and then that pool of interviews, that naturally gets it quicker.
We should, in theory, be able to go to an interview role intake meeting with five profiles of candidates and say, “Do they look great?” “Yes, great.” “Let’s get them straight in and constantly picking from those pipelines that we’re getting it going quickly.”
Then, at the same time, if we can ensure that our steps are no more than two or three steps, the candidates are already screened before they get to that intake meeting. It’s then hiring manager technical interview and a technical assessment, straight into the final manager interview, straight into the offer. You should be able to turn that around in 10 working days, and I have done [it] in previous organizations. But you need to be really organized in your process and very engaged.
You’ve also got to balance because I have been asked, “Can we do this with other roles?” The answer to that is “No.” There are certain people like Senior Project Managers or Program Managers that would feel you’re being too pushy by pushing them through too quickly in two weeks. Software Engineers are a different story. Because they’ve got multiple opportunities flying around them.
So, they want to be able to make a decision quickly. That’s the reason why we’ve done this, and fingers crossed, it works. I’m confident it will do. We still have a lot of work to do. But if you standardize processes, get the right interviews in place, and make sure you’ve got those pipelines built, then that two weeks is absolutely attainable.
Lydia: This also takes into account technical assessments.
Danny: Yes, there are other ideas I’ve bounced around with in the past, but they don’t always work. Some of them are quite out there. I’ve suddenly thought about doing some gamified assessments for people who are in our pipelines and throwing technical challenges out there for them to have a shot at. They could win an Amazon voucher, and then we’ve inadvertently assessed someone before they even hit our pipeline. So, these are other things we could do. I know I’ve done them with other organizations, again, and they do work to a point. But what you don’t want to do is blast that community with lots of challenges because they soon wake up to what you’re doing.
Building a Talent Intelligence Capability in TA
Lydia: It's interesting to see the different ideas that come into play when we talk about engaging communities, and all these are already people within the tech space and you've got to also keep up with what they're doing and what's the latest in these industries, know what might be the latest skills that you should look out for that's out in the market, what are the trends. So, how does your team keep up with these trends?
Danny: Again, we’re getting there at the moment. What I’m trying to do at the moment is build a talent intelligence capability in TA. So, what I mean by that, in simple terms, and not to patronize the TA community, because these are interlinked words, but talent analytics is how you perform internally as a TA function. Talent intelligence is what you’re getting from the market. So, where we’re moving to at the moment is looking to get more proactive on this front. So not only does that look for skills and where they’re sitting and cost, but it also starts to identify what are the new technologies coming out.
So, generative AI is a big thing right now. Everyone’s talking about it, ChatGPT, and the various sets of flavors of that. But also, we’ve got to start to understand what other technologies are coming up. This is going to be really important for us as an organization because we’re a consulting firm. So, what are our clients going to be looking for from us in the next two to three years? But on top of that comes the next hard question; how are we going to find the skill set? Or are we going to train the skill sets? Or are we going to do both?
Therefore, we’ll use this intelligence to understand what academia is doing in different regions of the world. Because we might identify one region that’s doing particularly well on the AI front or AI data, or natural language programming, or something like that, or something even more advanced that we should be paying attention to.
So, I think that the short answer is using that intelligence and the data just to keep the business informed and keep ahead of the trend. Again, we’re not there yet. It’s a journey. But we’re starting to build the foundations of making sure we can do that.
Lydia: In terms of your team using these AI capabilities that are out there and the past 12 months, what is the impact of Artificial Intelligence in your team's Talent Acquisition,
Danny: It varies per region because not everyone has adopted it as well as others. I mean, personally, it makes me more productive. I’ve become an editor rather than a copywriter. If I’m being honest, in a lot of cases, when it comes to ChatGPT, and I think the same could be said for a lot of the team. There are some out there that have got more productive with their stakeholders that are interested in this. At the minute, it’s more based around, let’s be honest, writing a job description, coming up with an interview format, or what a good social media post would look like. It’s all really rudimentary stuff. But this is stuff that might have taken a recruiter or a hiring manager an hour or two to write and it’s suddenly become a five to 10-minute edit exercise. So, at the moment, it’s been more about increasing productivity and making life easier.
In the long term, where I’d like to see AI really play a part is in our attraction and talent intelligence, but also secondly, how we can use AI in the selection process without taking away the human aspects because there are a lot of horror stories out there when it comes to AI and selection. So, it’s understanding where we can best use it ethically, to make things easier for both us and any candidates that we would want to attract.
The Importance of Data, Solutions, and Resilience in TA
Lydia: Final question, Danny, with all these changes, you've seen in your experience? What advice would you give someone who's starting out in talent acquisition today?
Danny: I think there’s a common misconception that Talent Acquisition is just recruitment, but it’s not. So, I think anyone coming in, most organizations, if you are truly Talent Acquisition, you are a business partner. You’re an internal consultancy, you’re not just there to put bodies in seats. You’re there to actually start to advise the business and the markets that you're working in and the skill sets that you have.
So, anyone coming into TA, I would say start to think about how you generate and learn that internal consulting skill, where you go to find that information. That’s the first bit and then how you use data to drive it and see things because quite common in TA in the past, we’ve been driven by emotion. Now I can’t find that purple unicorn, because it’s impossible. I just know it. Actually, it doesn’t cut it with most managers. Go with the data, go with solutions, talk.
I think the other thing is resilience. TA is a delivery function that sits typically in the HR or people and culture space. So, it’s always at risk of becoming the blame, the reason things go wrong, okay, and anyone in TA can probably relate to this. I think if we become more data-oriented, we become more resilient and therefore more confident in our messaging, then there’s no need for that because that won’t be possible. For anyone coming in, be consultative, know your market, and be data-driven and be confident.
You are another employee, and you are not a slave to the master.
Lydia: Yeah, we're seeing a time in TA where it is as much analytical as it is communicated. So, it's an interesting time to definitely be in TA and to see all the different progress that are coming in and making an impact in that industry itself.
So, Danny, thank you so much for your time and these great insights. Congratulations on the results you've achieved in the past 12 months with your team and looking forward to it. I wish you all the best for the next four to five years and the plans that are around it. Do drop us your contact details, so anyone in the audience might be able to pick up a conversation with you.
Danny: LinkedIn, there's not too many Danny Caines on LinkedIn. I'm also on Instagram. But LinkedIn is probably the best place to catch me.
Lydia: Thank you very much, Danny. We have been in conversation with Danny Caines, the Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Nortal. Thank you for joining us, and remember to subscribe to stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-in Recruitment.
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