EP 82: Evgenia Pavlova - How to Educate Candidates Through Work Experience

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.

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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’d like more content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for our weekly episodes. I am your host, Lydia, and joining us today is Evgenia Pavlova of ECM Space Consulting. Welcome to the show, Evgenia. Thank you for joining us.

Evgenia: Hello, and thank you for inviting me.

Navigating the Tech Staffing Landscape

Lydia: You’ve been in the tech staffing consulting space for a few years now, I understand. So, tell us a little bit more about your role here, Evgenia.

Evgenia: ECM Consulting is a Canadian-based company. I am the director and the owner of the company. We focus on delivering specialized services for IT engineering companies, but we also work with big organizations and their IT departments. We work with consulting companies, as well as small and medium-sized companies.

Speaking about the company’s services, most of the time it’s related to project staffing, business processes outsourcing, test management, and advisory services. We focus on the client, not on a particular location, which means that we work pretty much everywhere, helping our clients solve their problems in different parts of the world.

In 2021, we established an acceleration program for oriented and small companies. For this program, we engage a lot of young professionals and students, and we involve them in various business tasks to enhance their skills in professional and behavioral areas.

Speaking about myself, I have been working in business for more than 17 years. I started as an HR professional and worked in different areas like recruitment, management, performance management, orientation programs, and graduate recruitment. I’ve worked for big companies. Since 2011, I joined an IT company and focused more on providing consulting services for my clients. I’ve worked in different countries like Germany, and the United States, and now I’ve been in Canada since 2019.

Lydia: I think it’s interesting that you brought up a few key points. One is the fact that you have to work all over the world to locate these talents. Second, we’ll maybe delve into this later, but you’re also looking at inexperienced or rather fresh graduates as a talent pool for future readiness. So, moving on, what are some areas that you might have prioritized in this role, especially given the increased emergence of advanced technology within the staffing and recruitment space?

Evgenia: Speaking about the technologies, that's true. We work in the IT world. First of all, it's a very global area. Our company has a priority to provide high-quality and, at the same time, cost-effective services because everyone is interested in budget. For this reason, we utilize different solutions and tools based on AI. We work with market-leading providers, such as Manatal, to achieve this goal. These tools assist us with storing and monitoring candidates, collecting information, and simplifying the search process by integrating with various professional networks, like LinkedIn.

It's very important when we work with our clients to understand their business environment, sometimes cultural environment. For these needs, we have very strong software, and it's somehow unique because it's something like advanced recruitment technology. So, we implement AI and machine learning tools to go through a large number of applications and identify the most suitable candidates.

For example, I am an account manager and I'm also a recruiter who works closely with the client and the company. I know their culture, and I know the hiring managers, but what can happen if I need to go to some other role, maybe have an internal rotation within the company or somewhere else? Of course, as the responsible employee, I will prepare different materials and guidelines, and they will teach other employees how to deal with a particular client. But there is no guarantee that a new team member will follow the instructions precisely or the situation can change.

For this reason, among others, we created this tool that analyzes our recruitment experience. We're not just speaking about analyzing job descriptions, but our recruitment experience based on interview feedback from hiring managers, stakeholders, and candidates. Most companies use very typical job descriptions and sometimes they use one job description for different roles. This approach, which often includes a very basic set of skills, does not give us enough information about what kind of professional they need for a particular project. To understand this better, we collect all this information because all hiring managers and stakeholders have their priorities. For example, Manager A values international experience and Manager B considers that a certificate is a significant asset.

By using and collecting this knowledge in the recruitment process, we can focus on essential aspects, and we can get a better selection in comparison with the selection based on job descriptions only. That's one point. Another advantage is that machine learning and AI tools don't have a biased approach. They can collect and contact all possible candidates related to professional skills.

Another significant advantage is market knowledge. Since I mentioned that we work pretty much in the international area, we understand that some technologies can be more developed in one country and not very well developed in other countries due to various reasons.

Lydia: So, this software you talk about, it's created in houses, is it?

Evgenia: Yes, it’s our in-house solution. We started it at the beginning of this year, so it’s still in some development stage. When the tool goes through huge databases, it’s a significant challenge for researchers to analyze all this data to understand which market can be the best for us to get the best candidates, especially for people who need to work with data. This technology helps us to contact as many possible areas as we need and get better access to candidates. Let’s say we need experts with SAP or Microsoft. We know that in some countries, Microsoft is very developed, but in some countries, it may not be. We need to understand which market can be the best for us in terms of getting a higher number of potential candidates with the required skills.

This machine learning algorithm can analyze the market potential and provide us with a report. For example, the United States is the country with a large number of experts with the skills you require, and maybe some other countries. You probably need to start with the United States if you are interested in this particular technology.

Lastly, and my favorite, AI tools can replace recruiters because we’re all humans, we have our capacity and our speed, and we have holidays and occasions. This tool can replace recruiters and what I like the most, it can work without weekends. It can work without holidays, and always with the same speed. So, if we can set up their priority like we need to get a certain number of potential candidates’ resumes within two or three days, we will get that. With recruiters, it depends on the workload. It takes more time for humans to analyze others.

Addressing Location Constraints in Talent Acquisition

Lydia: Yes, definitely. In terms of looking for or identifying these specialized tech talents as you mentioned earlier, how do you go about streamlining? I understand that the technology itself gives you the groundwork to start in terms of finding that talent. But in terms of the process itself, what goes into finding specialized tech talent?

Evgenia: That’s a very good question. Since our company works with different clients, the process can be very complicated and depends on the client’s requirements and sometimes their corporate culture. For example, some companies are interested in candidates with a passion for growth, and they are ready to invest a lot in their skills and performance improvement. But sometimes they don’t have budgets, and they will likely offer a lower salary, but multiple opportunities such as international assignments, internal rotation, or any other benefits.

Here, our company’s role is to provide a project-based team to support various aspects of our clients’ IT business operations.

As I mentioned, the biggest challenge here is the budget. Our recruitment team has the goal to find candidates with special technology skills ready to work in a great culture, but sometimes with a medium salary in comparison with the market. Because we work closely with the project managers and hiring managers, we try to understand their needs and provide the best solution.

Sometimes they have so many requirements that it can be very hard to achieve or sound unrealistic. In this case, when we have this requirement, we focus more on profile, rather than location. That means that we need to do our search pretty much everywhere.

For these reasons, we utilize our software AI to help us achieve our goals. But also, finding the right candidate doesn’t mean that we can easily get this candidate because, very often, it means relocation. So, another big work for us is to organize the relocation process for selected candidates. We have different programs and it depends on the location.

In general, the programs include help with adaptation, language courses if needed, and also cultural integration.

I believe, as a person who has traveled a lot and worked in different countries, it's a very big step to move from one country to another. So, by applying this approach, we solve different problems.

First of all, we have access to a large number of candidates and professionals. We also help our clients if they have any diversity strategy. For example, if they need to have more female professionals in their team and they don't have enough female candidates in their domestic local area.

Some client companies are the opposite. They are not interested in someone junior or middle-level. They would like to hire experts who can join their team and start working on their projects right away. So, I am speaking about senior professionals. They expect very extensive experience and knowledge of the particular technology, and sometimes it can be industry knowledge. In this case, we also don't limit ourselves by geographical location. We try to work pretty much everywhere. Because knowledge and experience are priorities for our clients. They think less about motivation or passion for growth. They think more about the value this expert can bring to the organization.

There is another problem sometimes, not only their expectations but also the location of the company. We work a lot with manufacturing companies, and they can be in a very, let's say, northern area, or they can be far away from big cities.

Lydia: And they require on-site expertise, is it?

Evgenia: At least hybrid mode like right now. But before, yes. You should go to this area and see what's going on. You should speak with the project managers, stakeholders, and businesses, and it's not so easy to attract candidates to move to this area.

Lydia: How do you go about engaging these candidates or rather trying to convince them to come about to take on new roles in other countries and make that relocation happen for them?

Evgenia: We have a compromise with our clients. If we speak about experts, we engage them for a particular period of time. Basically, what they need is someone who can solve the most complicated part of the project, provide any knowledge transfer, and teach the local employees and the team how to work with this new technology. For people who can bring this knowledge, it’s easy if they go for a certain period of time, let’s say for half a year. Half a year does not seem like a lifetime, and you can come back home.

We also organize trips back home and create different opportunities if someone cannot take their families with them. We try to organize trips home at least two to three times per month. Also, we offer benefits if candidates want to work longer hours, so we’d benefit them with bonuses. I think it’s a motivation that works in all countries.

So, we try to focus on someone who has enough expertise to come to the client, solve their problem or implement the solution, or organize something they need as quickly as possible, like half a year, maximum a year, and then the local team can continue to work with this technology.

Narrowing the Candidate Pool by Balancing Specificity with Availability

Lydia: So, the emphasis is the business continuity when bringing in that talent?

Evgenia: Yes. Another problem with experts and technologies is that sometimes, knowing a particular technology doesn't mean that you can join a particular project. For example, we have a request for a configuration management database expert, which doesn't sound like something very complicated or hard. But it's very important to speak with the hiring managers to understand their needs. Another important thing is to understand exactly what solution the company uses or maybe is going to use. When they speak about configuration management, is it ServiceNow or BMC Atrium? What kind of certificates does the company expect from the potential candidate?

Also, it's very important to understand asset management because it can be hardware, software, or licenses. The bigger the company is, the more complicated and larger the number of assets they have. And if someone has experience in configuration management, but they never worked with a high number of assets, it can also be a problem. In a country like Canada, knowledge of the language is important as well. Especially when we speak about French in the Quebec area, it can be a requirement.

By understanding all these requirements, we can see that the number of potential candidates decreases a lot. Because in the beginning, we spoke only about configuration management, but when you add in what kind of technological solution, language knowledge, and market knowledge, for example, for technologists like SAP, industry knowledge can be important as well. Their solutions sometimes don't work. They might work very well for the insurance industry, but maybe they don't work for aerospace or manufacturing companies. So, we need to take into consideration lots of details.

That's why we created this tool to keep and track all those data to use in the future. Because clients don't like to repeat the same things again and again.

Learning by Doing: Education Through Work Experience

Lydia: And moving on to that little bit of information you gave earlier, you mentioned looking into younger or rather slightly more inexperienced hires who are coming into the workforce as one of the ways to diversify the talent pool. So, how might this be beneficial to companies in the long term?

Evgenia: We started this program in 2021. It was pretty much because of the COVID situation. Many companies had to change their processes and many big companies closed their projects or put them on hold. We decided to refocus on medium and smaller companies. For medium and smaller companies, budget means a lot and of course, in comparison with big organizations, they are limited with the budget.

We created this accelerating program called ‘Careers Corner.’ We hire students and graduates to do tasks for our clients with the organizations and increase their professional and personal skills. This program is designed to set up a request-based center. Here, young professionals can act - we call them student consultants - and they can provide different services, such as digital marketing, graphic design, testing, programming, data analysis, and many other tasks related to those areas.

Basically, the best benefit for students is to try different tasks to explore their potential. But the center also has many benefits for our company and for our clients as well. First of all, it’s cost-effective. And it’s a very fast hiring process. Because when you have access to a large number of young talents at the same time, you have a choice and you can hire as many as you need. And there are no extra costs for education because all participants - we would call them participants - learn while working.

By engaging young professionals in different projects, we can get valuable resources for our company as well. Because our participants learn how to work with different clients and how to follow their professional style. They learn that professional styles can be different.

Some people are faster, others need more time to make decisions. Our clients had the opportunity to hire successful students if they liked. That would be based on successful operations. Actually, this program is designed for anyone, and students can teach other students and help mentor newcomers. Basically, we share the same tasks between two or three participants to make sure that we receive the result. This approach also helps them to work within a team, and learn about synergy, which can also be a very valuable skill for the market. They might like to get another job.

Lydia: Is this program any different from an internship, for example - the term internship versus the program that you have? Is there any difference between the two?

Evgenia: Yes, it’s different because an internship is basically oriented toward a particular job. We hire students or graduates, young professionals, to do certain tasks within a period of time, three months, or four months. The program duration is between six and 12 months. All students are engaged in different projects. They can try their skills in marketing, recruitment, or data analysis depending on what they can do.

After this program, participants have a choice. They can stay with us as permanent employees, they can join our clients, or they can go somewhere else because they will gain valuable experience. Also, during their work and participation in different projects, they can receive feedback all the time, and identify their strengths and areas for improvement. Sometimes they can change their mind.

I have examples of when someone joined our program, being very confident that this person would be a Marketing Specialist in the future. But by being given the chance to participate in different projects, sometimes not related to marketing at all, for example, recruitment or client communication, or any other projects, they changed their mind because they found that they demonstrated better results in something else.

This is one of the best benefits of this program. It gives flexibility for young professionals to adapt their skills to diverse tasks and projects, and most importantly, to understand what professional areas interest them the most. Of course, we can always make some adjustments based on feedback and project experience.

Lydia: And this project is currently still running?

Evgenia: It's still running.

Lydia: Since the pandemic. So, that’s three years?

Evgenia: Since 2021. Yes, that’s correct. We receive requests from our clients and we provide potential solutions of what exactly we can do, and how we can help them under supervision. I participate in this at a program level, but we also have supervisors who discuss tasks with clients, responsible supervisors. When we get the task, we engage to solve the client’s problem, to work on their project. Then we identify how much time we need to complete the task. We prepare the draft. When it comes to data analysis, we prepare the draft of the market they are interested in or any other information they find useful. We prepare the final report. If they need some adjustments, corrections, or more details, we adjust that.

Assessing Fit through Task-Based Cooperation

Lydia: This has definitely brought added value to multiple parties in this sense. It’s not just the client, it’s not just the company, but also the individual. Have there been cases where they’ve stuck around and maybe joined a client or stayed on with you?

Evgenia: Yes, then there is a fact that if you want to hire young professionals without any business experience, first of all, it can be a high risk that they will simply not like this job. If you don't have experience, you don't know which area can interest you the most.

For clients, it means that they need to pay a salary, and they need to invest their time for this education process, they need to invest their budgets. If they see that there is no interest on both sides, it will be a very unproductive way of cooperation.

If they wanted to work with students on this task-based approach, they would not spend much money, they would not spend much time, but they would get the result anyway. They can also see if they like to work with this team. Or maybe they prefer to work with someone else. And what kind of tasks they can share with this team or another team.

So, it's always a very valuable way of cooperating. And the most important for smaller companies is cost-effectiveness. They don't need to spend much. We try to make projects and divide projects into small parts to make them cheaper. So, they don't feel like they spend a lot, which I think is important for small companies.

Lydia: That's a great value-add as a service, just looking into the greater need or cutting short. That time that a client might spend on, as you mentioned earlier, orientation, training, or briefing, going through that entire process takes time. So, it's almost like onboarding, but not quite because you've already planned that in. Is that how it's supposed to be?

Evgenia: Yes, that's correct. Clients, like small companies, have a small team. So, it means that everyone does a lot of jobs. Sometimes the owners are also in place, and they have to do different tasks. They simply don't have much time to provide this orientation program or teach students, and young professionals, how to engage in the business. But in this case, they benefit because they will explain to us what exactly we need to do, and we will provide the results. There's a team inside that can control, communicate, and discuss the task with each other. So, we don't engage our clients in this process. We just share the result or if, of course, we have some particular questions, we will ask them. But yes, the goal is to share the result and make some adjustments or maybe the client will accept the draft without any adjustments. This happens very often. And everyone is happy.

Maximizing Human and Technological Capabilities

Lydia: Indeed, everyone's happy. That's what I can see from this. But now, I know you've spoken about this earlier, a little bit about recruitment technology. But in your experience, actually, you did speak about it extensively. We will go back to that question. In your experience, what would you say is the impact of recruitment technology on your business and even for finding specialized tech talent?

Evgenia: Well, the impact is important; it's huge. Because the clients, despite their size, want to get a cost-effective solution. By utilizing technology, we can solve major problems. First of all, we keep the data internally. The AI solution helps to analyze that and provide solutions when we need to hire someone new. Recommendations for this client, this candidate will be the perfect match based on the information I have in my data.

Second, technologies help us to work globally. Again, we don't know much about the markets; markets can be very different. We can conclude that in some countries, they probably have this technology developed in other countries. But sometimes we work with something new, we don't know for sure, without technologies that will take us a significant amount of time, effort, and resources to get all this information and provide the report. So if you want to focus on SAP, or Microsoft, or any other Oracle, it's better to go to this location or that location, because we will be more successful.

So definitely, AI technology helps us to solve this problem. And you just need to check or make some adjustments. It's especially important because we work with our clients and sometimes we don't have much time to respond, the project can be urgent or they have urgent needs, and we have a couple of days to respond. It's simply impossible if you have only human employees who can do that. With technology, we can work much faster.

Lydia: Evgenia, thank you so much. You've been really generous with your sharing with us today and all your insights. So, for anyone who's listening in and wants to pick up a conversation with you, where can they find you? Or where can they connect with you?

Evgenia: I have a LinkedIn profile, Evgenia Pavlova, ECM Consulting. Also, please feel free to contact me through my email, e.pavlova@ecm-space.com. I'll be happy to connect.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Evgenia. It’s been such a pleasure to have you on the show. We have been in conversation with Evgenia Pavlova of ECM Consulting. Thank you for joining us and remember to subscribe. Stay tuned for more weekly episodes from All-In Recruitment.