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. And stay tuned for weekly episodes. I’m your host, Lydia. Joining us today is William Tincup of RecruitingDaily.com. Welcome to the show, William. Thank you so much for joining us.
William: Hi, Lydia, and hello to the audience. So glad to be here.
Rise From the Agency World
Lydia: Tell us a little bit about your experience.
William: So, I came up through the agency world - the ad agency, marketing agency, and interactive agency world. I worked for one, then built my own up to a certain level. Then, I sold my equity because I fell in love with HR and recruiting. We were an agency that was focused on HR and recruiting. So, what do you sell? What do they buy? How do they buy? What drives them to purchase? We represented a bunch of vendors that sold into the HR and recruiting community. As I got to know HR and recruiters more and more, I just fell in love with them. For different reasons, HR is different than recruiting.
Lydia: So, is it HR or recruiting that drew? Which one?
William: Both, but differently. So, HR knows everything. To me, I fell in love with them because they can know the dark things and still be hopeful. Why I fell in love with recruiting is like sales, in the sense that it’s a game. It’s a game of being an advocate.
If you’re a great salesperson, especially in enterprise sales, you’re the customer advocate. You find a way to represent the company. You’re selling something for the company, you find a way to represent the interests of the customer. Great recruiters do that. They’re candidate advocates, and they find a way to say, “Okay, let me tell you a little bit about this job. Let me tell you about the hiring manager. Let me tell you where you’re going to find some success, maybe where you’ll find some failure.” And they’re not overselling the job. They’re advocating for the candidate into a system that hires them. And I fell in love with that part. So, I fell in love with both of them, but for different reasons.
Lydia: And that led you to eventually start RecruitingDaily.com as the publication and move behind that. And you have your podcast too.
William: Our mission is basically to help train recruiters and HR professionals to do their job better. And I think that comes in the form of webinars, white papers, blog articles, and podcasts. It’s about what you need on that particular day. Not every day does someone want to read a white paper or attend a webinar.
But sometimes, they just need a 600-word article on a particular topic that can kickstart their thinking or creativity to then go and tackle that topic. I like to think that it’s a place where people can go when they get stuck, or when they need some type of inspiration. Do you remember how we used to go around the web, and at one point, you just felt like, “I need to do something just to get my mind off things?” I’d like to think that RecruitingDaily.com does that for people who care about HR and recruiting.
Lydia: What is the impact that you've seen from running RecruitingDaily? It’s been seven years, I think.
William: It’s training. There’s nothing like seeing a room full of 300 people in a virtual world, with 5,000 people on a two or three-day training session. People’s skill levels go up. They can ask real questions. If it’s about sourcing, they can ask a real person a question and get an answer. For example, “I’m trying to source for a healthcare position in this particular area at this pay range, but I’m struggling. Why am I struggling?” Seeing that light bulb go off is amazing.
We’ll take a look at the problem until we figure out, “What if I did it this way?” There’s nothing like education. I mean, there’s nothing that beats the energy that you get from someone learning, and you can just see that they’ve learned. When we used to do in-person sessions and training sessions, people would bring their laptops to the actual sessions for eight hours. They would get pounded with education.
Most of these people hadn’t been in school for 15-20 years, but now they’re going through an eight-hour class. They leave exhausted, but happy. You can see a smile on their face. But there’s also a sense of numbness from what just transpired. I like that. The compliments we’d get when people would leave were like, “That was completely overwhelming.” But in a good way.
Lydia: How does that enrich the work that you do? Maybe not just a publication but also in training and also your podcast. Does this manifest in it?
William: To me, I view my podcast, probably other people's podcasts as well as continuing education. So, instead of getting another degree in something, I listen to podcasts, and I produce or create podcasts. Because that's how I learn what's going on.
So, it's a great way for the audience and your audience as well. This is a great way to catch up and learn something new. When people listen to this particular podcast, if they get one nugget that they can take home and use or something that inspired them, it is all worth it.
Radical Flexibility Is Up for Grab
Lydia: Interviewing these people, or having these conversations with industry professionals, will also keep you ahead or allow you to see, perhaps, some of the trends or some of these changes within the industry.
Has anything struck you? Or maybe looking ahead in the next couple of years or even next year, what might be some of the trends?
William: So, I interviewed a CHRO at the beginning of COVID in March 2020. I said, “Okay, Amy, what’s going on? How are you making this work?” And she said, “William, it’s radical flexibility.” I said, “Do tell.” And she goes,
‘”Radical flexibility means everything in HR is up for grabs. Everything, the way that we do payroll, we could do it differently, the way that we manage time and attendance, we could do it differently, the way that we recruit, we could do it differently. Everything that we thought was set in stone, nothing was set in stone. It is all changeable.”
As an HR leader, as a talent acquisition leader, you just erase that and say, “Okay, let’s do it differently.” Even though that was three years ago, HR leaders are still in that place. They’re still in that mindset of, “Hey, just because we did it that way for 10 years, or 15, or 20 years, or whatever it was, doesn’t mean that’s how we’re going to do it tomorrow.”
The phrase that makes the most sense to me is about containers, just like shipping containers. If you think about shipping containers, the shipping containers of yesterday are not the shipping containers of today or tomorrow, we’ll have to use different containers. So, we have to think in a way that is fluid. What I like about that is it’s brought agile or agility into HR and recruiting, where they have to think in an agile manner, which I think helps them but more importantly, helps their audience, which is candidates and employees. It helps them serve their audience because their audience is moving fast. Both employees and candidates are moving fast. So, having some agility in your thought process gives you the ability to change things quickly.
Lydia: It’s interesting. Thought processes are the ultimate driver and the tools you have will be in the form of technology and maybe some of the channels that you use. So, in terms of being open to change, what goes into that for the recruiter?
William: Keep a finger on the pulse of your audience. So, if you are in recruiting, your audience is candidates. If you’re in HR, your audience is your employees, and potentially candidates as well as alumni. There’s a potentiality of having some other audiences, but by and large, it’s employees.
So, you have to have a finger on the pulse of what’s going on with your employees, almost to the point of having a FITBIT for what’s going on with your employees’ sentiment. What’s driving them? Are they happy? Are they fulfilled? Is there something you need to do that’s different? You need to know before they know or as they know.
Because their knowledge and their awareness of themselves are changing so fast, you can’t think in days and weeks. You have to think like a FITBIT, or any type of one of those wearable watches, which gives you data in real-time. So, thinking like that, there’s technology out there that helps you do all that stuff. But the idea is a mindset of going, it isn’t a point where I get to December, and then I can reflect. My reflection can be the year and I can reflect on what went well, and what didn’t, etc. If you do that, you’ve already lost your audience.
If you want to keep your audience and you want to keep your employees great, you have to move as fast as they do.
Using Data to Have a Voice at the Table
Lydia: That’s interesting. For the most part, practitioners or leaders come in with a strategy, an overall strategy that they might want to follow to their best ability. But in terms of agility and going this way, it also means having to be open to changing your direction.
William: Not only change but also making mistakes. I think that’s one of the things you’re highlighting that’s terrifying for a lot of people. This idea that every change is going to be wonderful, and it’s not true. You’re going to make mistakes along the way.
You’re going to change something and say, “Okay, let’s do onboarding this way. Okay, we have some remote employees that are in Africa. Let’s do onboarding this way.” And you’re going to try it and it’s going to completely fail. That’s the part of agility that scares people the most, but most people who are agile thinkers, they take that failure and go, “Okay, that didn’t work. Alright, let’s do this.”
They just move on really quickly to the next thing. It’s like, “Okay, well, that didn’t work.” And then they move on quickly, like, “Done, next.” Again, you have to break a couple of eggs and throw some things against the wall to see what sticks. You have to have that mindset. We need to think that we’re in a lab, and we’re trying things. It’s experimental. We try it, it works. Great. We do it again until it doesn’t work. We try it, it doesn’t. Okay, great. We do something different.
Lydia: In terms of HR leaders, or even Talent Acquisition leaders, we’ve heard plenty of times that there’s a push to have a voice at the table. So, when they experiment or try to achieve something, or maybe they fail, they use data, of course, to justify that. So, what do you think is the impact of using data to make sure you get a voice at that table and in terms of decision-making for the overall business?
William: First of all, you’ve got to have access to the data. HR has always sat on a tremendous amount of data because it is based on payroll. You’re sitting on a massive pipeline of data. Now, you add on performance and compensation, succession, total rewards or rewards and recognition, and Talent Acquisition. Data is not our problem.
If you’re an HR professional, you’ve been sitting on data and dealing with data for your entire career. The thing is, having confidence in your data is something we suffer from, which is different from sales and marketing. Salespeople have their forecasts on salesforce.com. They have an idea of what their numbers are, they forecast and they can say, “Yeah, I feel like this is going to play out like this.” One of the things is confidence in your data. So, that’s one aspect of being successful at the table. The other is the ability to tell a story around data. I think salespeople are really good at this. This comes naturally to them.
I think marketers have become good at this over the last 10-15 years. They can now tell a story about their data like the response rates of an email campaign or webinar, or whatever it is, they can say, “Okay, this is what we tried. This is what worked. This is what didn’t work. Here are the changes that we’re making and here’s why.” They take you through a journey, this little story, narrative paths of what’s going on and why, and they do it really quickly and succinctly. So, the rest of the people at the table, even if they’re not experts, like finance and accounting could get the story.
So, it needs to be two things, I think, and we’ll go deeper into it. But two things are having confidence in your data and having the ability to tell a story around your data, whatever that is.
No Data Is Pure, Perfect and It’s Never Enough
Lydia: Going back to confidence in the data, first and foremost, you need clean data to be able to rely on this, right?
William: As clean as you can have it. Now, the struggle is that there is no data set, regardless of what we’re talking about, that is pure. There are always imperfections. There is no such thing as perfect data. So, let’s just kill that myth right there to start with.
The other thing is, you never have enough data. So, you’re going to make decisions based on the best data that you have at that particular moment and make the most informed decision that you can possibly make. But it’s never perfect. It’s never enough. I think getting over that intellectual or emotional hump for a lot of professionals is very challenging. Because they want more data. But is the data correct? Do we know if we had someone validate the data? Has everyone looked at the data? Is the data perfect? It’s never perfect and you never have enough of it. It’s almost giving up on that idea, like, “I’m never going to have perfect data and I’m never going to have enough data, yet, I still have to make decisions.” Make the best decisions that you can based on the data that you have.
Lydia: In terms of tools or recruitment technologies that are out there, what is your take on all the recruitment technology that we have and not to forget generative AI that we're seeing?
William: What I like is the trend that I see in sourcing, CRM, and ATS, all the way to onboarding. So, in Talent Acquisition, I see more tools that are doing analytics across all of them that I like. Instead of it being siloed, like inside of an ATS, we’ve had analytics inside the four walls of an ATS. You have pretty good analytics and pretty good data because it’s all contained in one little database. You can look at it and run reports on it. But we haven’t had great analytics across all of Talent Acquisition. Where was the person sourced? How fast did we source them? Once we sourced them and we started marketing to them, how fast did they respond? When did they respond? What time did they respond?
You’re looking at these disparate databases, and you say to yourself, how do you connect all the disparate databases, either on one suite or platform? Or you do it as a metal layer across those that then pull that data so that you can then run reports against it and understand it. “Okay, our best source of hire that converts into interviews is this. When they accepted the offer is this.”
So, we could say our best source of hires is one source for getting candidates into the pipeline, the top of the funnel. But are those our best candidates that actually accept jobs for this? Before, you wouldn’t be able to get that because that data was spread across, sprinkled across all these different databases. The movement in the last two years of doing Talent Acquisition analytics and workforce analytics that goes across databases is helping people understand better about what’s going on in those different databases.
Focus on Speed and Quality
Lydia: It also tells you the volatility of the market that we’re seeing and also candidate demands. It’s just not as static as it used to be, or rather, as it seemed to be before. What might be the best time to hire? What’s the best time to source and start your sourcing activities? Has there been any change, William? Is there really the best time to hire?
William: No, not at all. Now, those things are like, “What’s the best time to have a drink of water?” It’s almost as abstract or arbitrary as something like that. There’s going to be some guide rails. But at the same time, if you’re hiring hourly versus corporate salaried employees, where do you find them and how do you respond to them?
So, one of the bits of advice I give practitioners now is to focus on speed and quality. So, if I text you, I expect a text back. Even if it’s to say, “We’ll get back to you. Right now, we’re heads down doing a bunch of production work. Early next week, I’ll get back to you.” That’s fine.
The expectation is, you text me, I text you back. I text you, you text me back. Again, it’s not like we have to have a follow-up conversation. It could just be something short, like, “Hey, super busy with my kids. Alright, talk to you later.” It’s okay. That’s the candidate's expectation now. Whether or not they’re salaried, or whether or not they’re hourly, doesn’t matter. When they reach out to you, that’s the moment of interest. You have their moment of attention, if you will, for that split second, you have their attention. If you wait, the further you go from that moment of attention, the less likely you are to hire that person.
So, how fast can you respond in a quality way? “Hey, my name is Jerry, and love to see you?” That’s where we get that wrong. It’s like, yes, we got to him fast. But it was such a fake and insincere way that it actually hurt us. So, we got there fast, but we didn’t get there in a qualitative way. You have to do both.
You have to get there fast, but you have to get there in a highly personalized way. For example, “Thank you so much for looking at our website and filling out our form, we’re really excited to get to know you. We’re going to go to your LinkedIn URL and find out some of the skills that you have. We’d like to set up a time to talk, here’s a calendar link.” That fast.
I think that’s the part that’s off-putting to a lot of people who have been in recruiting and HR for a long time, because they’ve had time to breathe, and with candidates and employees now, there’s just no time to breathe.
Meet Candidates Where They Are and How They Want To Interact
Lydia: We have AI and chatbots built on generative AI and natural language processing. So, what kind of changes can we expect maybe in terms of trends?
William: I like giving the candidate the option, “Hey, do you want to talk to somebody live? Do you want to talk to a chatbot?” You’re going to get the same answers. But people, probably I’d say under the age of 35 or so, don’t have a problem talking to a chatbot. Especially our kids’ age, they have no problem whatsoever interacting with a chatbot. Like, “I have this question.” and that’s normal. It’s just, “I just want the answer.” So do candidates.
So, in the recruiting process, I think if you can give them an option, meet them where they are. If they want to text back and forth, great. They want to email back and forth, great. If they want to interact with a chatbot, fantastic. They want to interact with a live human being? Great. It doesn’t matter.
Meet them where they are, and how they want to interact with you. With employees, I think the conversational AI is doing amazing work like helping them find stuff. So, if you have a vision plan, and let’s say you’re in Malaysia, we’re a part of a global company and I’m in America, our vision plans might be a bit different or might be run by a different company. You go into a conversational chatbot and say, “Hey, we just relocated to Malaysia. What’s our vision plan?” Then it just pops up a URL and you can go download the file, go look at the file, or whatever. You don’t need to interact with a human for that.
Historically, that’s what we’ve done in HR. We’ve been the call center for employees. Like, “Hey, I have a question about my pay.” Or “I have a question about how many days off that I have left.” We basically think of HR as a giant call center for the employees. I have a question.. Whether or not that comes over email or phone, great. But now with conversational AI, that helps them get all that stuff, they don’t have to contact HR. They just open up the bot and go, “Hey, I have a quick question about my time off. How many days off do I have left in the year? Or if I don’t use them, do they roll over?” Those are questions human beings used to have to answer. They’d have to call or email HR and get someone to then respond to all that stuff can be completely taken care of by conversational AI.
Be Fast To Get Candidates’ Attention
Lydia: The impact of AI or rather, the kind of changes that you see in AI in the technologies that we're seeing today that have been implemented in different companies also changed processes inside agencies. So, what kind of business impact that have in terms of running a recruitment agency?
William: I think the thing for recruitment agencies is that they need to keep their customers happy. They need to present jobs and present candidates fast. So, the thing that we were talking about earlier about speed and quality on the corporate side, just gets even more heightened as a third-party recruiter.
They’ve outsourced that recruiting to you, which means they trust you. They want you to go find the positions and every day that position is not filled is something that didn’t get done. In some cases, it might not ever get done. If they’re software engineers running lines of code, they’re never going to be able to write those lines of code. So, it changes for staffing owners and staffing leaders.
It changes that, “Hey, we’re gonna give them a slate of candidates.” This is the best practice that staffing firms would use, “We’re gonna give them five candidates. So we’re gonna wait, and then get the five, maybe they’re diverse, maybe they’re not, but we’re gonna get the five best candidates, and we’re gonna push the slate of candidates over to the hiring manager.”
What I’ve seen now is that as soon as they get someone who hits the qualifications, poof, they go. There is no waiting. Before, it was like, “Oh, wait and get this,” but now there’s like “Get the hiring manager to see it as fast as possible. Let them make a decision on it.” Actually, you can learn from this. Let them make a decision on, “I liked them, but…” or “I hated them, and…” Getting that is actually good feedback so that you can then make those decisions even faster.
Speed and looking at the process internally to say, “How can we do a better job?” because they actually have two different audiences that they have to manage; the hiring managers - internal, and candidates. So, they’ve got to be fast with candidates to get their attention. So, “Hey, we got a job for you. Looks pretty good. Your skills are right on point, we want to put you in front. Is that cool? The salary is this and this is another.”
Finding out for the hiring manager, “What’s critical?” So it’s not the laundry list that you see on job boards. It’s like, “Here’s this 42-point skill that [candidates] have to [have.]” What do they have to do right now? What do they have to do in the first 90 days of their employment? Let’s go even further than that. What do they need to be able to do? “They need to be able to do this and this, okay, cool. Let’s go find those people.”
So, it’s working with both those audiences in a way that basically says, “We can manage the expectations of both candidates and hiring managers,” which means that you’ve got to really have your finger on the pulse of both of those audience types, if you will, and you got to provide what they need.
Overcoming the Common Mistakes as a Recruiter
Lydia: In terms of pitfalls or some of the common mistakes that recruiters tend to make, in terms of engaging in a timely manner or fast enough or delays that would affect the response rate from HR or hiring managers or even some of the clients, what are some of these common mistakes and how can they overcome them?
William: The biggest mistake is not educating the hiring managers as to what’s happening in the talent market right now. They have no idea what’s going on in the market. They have a job to do. They’re doing a job and they need talent. Historically, great recruiters don’t do this, but by and large, they are led around by the nose by hiring managers who don’t understand the market.
So, the best thing that a recruiter can do is stop and explain the market. You want a person that has 10 years of generative AI software experience, that person doesn’t exist on the planet. Okay, so let’s take a look at your desires, and the reality of those talent desires. The recruiter then stands firm and says, “Okay, here’s what’s going on. Here’s the supply, here’s the demand, here’s the market rate, and here’s what you can expect. Okay, you want that? I can probably get you five of those, it’s going to take six months. Now, are you willing to wait six months? If you are, then great.”
But usually, the response is no, “I need them yesterday.” “Well, then, let’s take a look at what your requirements are, and let’s understand the job description.” The way that I’ve told people how to do a job description with the hiring managers is to delete. When they send you a job description, delete the email, get them on the phone, get them on a Google Doc, and say, “Okay, what are the three things, five things, two things that they have to do? What are the outcomes? What are the KPIs? What do they need to be? What are they going to be measured by? What are the things that they have to do from day one? If you’re thinking about potentiality? Great. What does that look like?”
Since they build it together, that’s why it isn’t so much about taking the job description and destroying it, it’s about the reality of the talent market at that particular moment. Recruiters have to know what’s going on and by and large, they do. So, sources and recruiters have a pretty good idea of if you ask them to fill, let’s say, a warehouse working job in a particular area, they have a pretty good idea of what the candidate pool looks like, how much money they need to put in it, how much budget they need to market it, and what type of timing that takes.
Then when you’re doing something new, completely evergreen, they’ve never done it before, they might not know as much. But that’s all the more reason to build that with the hiring manager and go, “What’s absolutely critical or important? Everything’s important but what’s critical?” So, if we have 10 things on the list that are important, fantastic. What are the three that are critical? Meaning they can’t move forward in your process if they don’t have those three things.
Once the recruiter knows that, then they can go out and understand the market, come back to me, “Okay, here’s the thing. Here’s what we’re looking for, here’s what we’re looking at.” Then that becomes a discussion around total compensation. Because if you pay someone above market rate, you can get them there faster. But then that has another effect inside that; now you’re paying that person more than you have paid people that currently work the job and now you’ve got pay inequities that you’ve got to deal with. So, a lot of people don’t think about that. They don’t think about how recruiting and hiring managers make decisions about compensation that impact the organization. Better companies, what they do is they bring compensation and recruiting together to offer letters. So, no offer letter goes out that’s too disruptive to what’s going on with the company.
Meet Wherever Candidates and Employees Are
Lydia: That takes a certain level of planning ahead in terms of business. So, in terms of supporting the business to go through that kind of wave, is there such a thing as future-proofing recruiting or really even just forecasting in a realistic sense?
William: No, there really isn’t. People will lie to you and tell you there is. But the truth is, future-proofing is not about being comfortable. So, when you say future-proofing, how do you future-proof things that are moving at that speed? The way you can future-proof is your company, your hiring managers, and your talent.
You can’t future-proof it, but you can have an understanding of how they’re changing in real-time, which just gets back to that monitoring and understanding behavior. We talked about onboarding, I think we could do that at one point. Someone asked me the other day, “How long do you know if a candidate, once they’ve taken the job, has made the decision if they’re going to stay?” And I said, “Well, I’m gonna guess but I’m gonna say, a week.” And they’re like, “It’s one to two days.” and this is salaried employees. They get the job and then they work the job for one or two days, and they think, “This isn’t for me.”
So now, what does that mean to the organization? What do you have to do to offset that? You can’t leave them alone. You can’t just say, “Okay, Sally, fantastic, glad you’re here. Talk to you in a week.” That’s not going to work. You’re going to have to interact with them much more frequently. And again, meeting them where they are. If they’re people who like to be on Zoom calls, great. Do Zoom calls. It can’t be a single dimension. It’s got to be multi-dimensional from a medium perspective. You’ve got to meet them wherever they want, however they want.
I think that if you do that, you’re on the way to future-proofing because you have a feeling, you’ve got the mentality of, “Yeah, we’re gonna do whatever it takes to meet them wherever they are.”
Stay Curious and Adapt
Lydia: Then that also goes back to the skills that a recruiter needs to possess today. What type of aptitude should they have? What kind of skill, or rather, personality or mindset should they build? With all these changes happening at breakneck speed, you've got intervals getting shorter and shorter in terms of technology. So, what type of person should a recruiter be?
William: The ones I’ve seen that are really successful in this particular era are the people that are the most curious. There used to be this phrase, “Strong beliefs are held loosely.”
So, this idea of being really curious as a recruiter, like, “How does this work?” Not work for the next decade, but how does it work right now? The people that are the most curious, I think, are the best recruiters, because they’re curious about candidates and their behaviors and how they’re changing.
They’re curious about hiring managers and their behaviors and how they’re changing. They’re curious about their peers, curious about technology, curious about process reengineering. They’re just curious. Nothing’s written in pen. Nothing’s written or carved in stone, everything’s in pencil. The best recruiters that are curious just write things in pencil knowing they’re going to go back and erase that and write something new there.
I think those are the folks that adapt well in this particular environment and in the future. They just don’t, again, hold strong beliefs loosely. This curiosity and this desire to be curious in every facet of the job, I think that’s the opposite of rigid. When something’s rigid, it’s set in stone and you can’t change it. When something’s not rigid, someone’s curious, and they’re thinking about different ways to make that better all the time.
Let Employee Decide What Best Work Is, Employer Should Care About Outcomes
Lydia: The takeaway that I've had is, it's speed and curiosity in a volatile or disruptive environment. Then there's rigidity that you have to stay away from. But HR, to a large extent has that element of rigidity.
William: Certain things in HR are always going to be rigid, like compliance. When you work with compliance as an HR leader, it has to be a certain way. There’s no flexibility in that. If it’s a sexual harassment policy, everyone has to read it, everyone has to sign it. There’s no creative way to come about that. It is what it is.
Outside of compliance, there’s some flexibility there. I think that if there is a silver lining to the pandemic, it is that it broke HR in a good way. It broke some of that rigidity off. People then can interact with it and go, “Okay, let’s try this. Let’s try that.” So, during the pandemic, they tried all kinds of different things. “Let’s try remote. Let’s try a hybrid. Let’s try in person. Let’s try this. Let’s try that.” I heard this fascinating story the other day.
It was sourcing for a manufacturing job and it was a nine to five type job. They just couldn’t get anybody to apply. So then someone had the bright idea of changing the hours and saying, “Hey, why don’t we just do nine to two?” They were overwhelmed with applications because it was parents with kids who could drop off their kids, do their jobs, and then leave and be with their kids.
It’s like that mindset of going, “Okay, we’ve looked at this job as a nine-to-five job for years. We can’t get people to commit to that. We make a simple tweak, nine to two.” All of a sudden, they got more candidates they didn’t even know how to deal with. It’s just changing one word. So, that flexibility and thinking about flexibility in such a way that says, “You know what? We need to be radically flexible with everything, maybe even the hours of the operation, where people work, and when they work.”
If it’s outcome-based, why do we care where they work, or when they work or how they work?
If the outcome is like, let’s say in your job, you’ve got to crank out a wonderful podcast every week, you could do that at three o’clock in the morning. I mean, not to say that you will or should or any of those things, but why would anybody care?
I think it’s looking at work differently and thinking about how to attract talent. Talent loves flexibility because we’ve gotten them used to it for the last three years, they basically said, “Yes, remote work works for me.” So, they don’t want to go back to the office. Through certain jobs, we’ve given the flexibility to just do their best to thrive to do their best work. Whatever that best work is, let them decide. You just care about the outcome.
Lydia: This future of work that you're talking about already exists today. So, in terms of, I suppose recruiters are not an exception to this and it's not gonna be any exciting developments. Do you think that we might be seeing it in the future for recruiters?
William: It’s all technology and automation. Recruiters for years have done tasks that are low value, like scheduling a candidate. That’s something that has to happen. Going through a resume and looking for skills, I can tell you that, yes, a recruiter can do that. But there’s technology out there that can do that much better and much faster.
So the beauty of what I like about what’s going on in recruiting now is that they’re coming to grips with the fact that there’s a bunch of stuff that we’ve historically done as tasks, we don’t have to do anymore because we’ve got technology that will automate those things. So that we can actually have deeper and better conversations with people that we need to; candidates and hiring managers. It frees up their time, instead of being sucked away by all of these low-value tasks.
Now their time is freed up with automation, they can actually focus on the conversations and have really good conversations with candidates and hiring managers to really understand what’s going on, because that’s a finger on the pulse.
They’ve got to have the finger on the pulse. So, I think that’s happening and has been happening. The more recruiters come to grips with automation being their friend, being the copilot that helps them along this way, along their journey. So, we’re not going to take recruiters out of recruiting, we’re going to let them do the most human aspects of recruiting and let all the other stuff happen.
Lydia: I like what you said about speed and curiosity, being sort of the hallmark of how to take on the different changes that are going to come in with technology, the economy, and all the disruptions we’ve seen today. Being curious and open enough and agile, as you pointed out, I think it is definitely going to go far.
Thank you so much for your time and these great insights, William. RecruitingDaily.com is your website. But if you have a preferred channel to with anyone who might want to pick up a conversation.
William: Lydia, I'm an open book. If you just put William Tincup into Google, you'll find me.
Lydia: It's so easy to find.
William: It's that easy. The last name Tincup helps. There's not that many of us. But I've also chosen to live a lot of my life online; Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all that stuff. So, it's pretty easy to find me.
I'm open to anybody who's listening to this and if you have questions or even if you don't like some of the things I've said, I love critique. When someone tells me, “Hey, you missed here.” That's great. Because that's how I learned.
So, reach out in any way that you feel comfortable, through LinkedIn, Facebook, or whatever. I'm totally comfortable wherever you are.
Lydia: Thank you so much, William. It's been a real pleasure and an honor to have you. I wish you a good week ahead and thank you again for joining us.
William: Thank you for having me.
Lydia: We have been in conversation with William Tincup of RecruitingDaily.com Thank you for joining us and remember to subscribe. Stay tuned for more weekly episodes of All-In Recruitment.
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