EP97: Liz Ryan - How to Humanize Organizations for Better Outcomes

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 like our content, please subscribe to our channels on YouTube and Spotify to stay tuned for weekly episodes.

I'm your host, Lydia, and this week we have Liz Ryan, founder and CEO of Human Workplace. A pleasure to have you with us here, Liz.

Liz: Happy to be here.

Empowering Organizations and Individuals for a Better Workplace

Lydia: So, what's the story behind Human Workplace? What is your mission behind it? I know we talked about what drove you to set this up. Tell us a little bit more about this.

Liz: Well, Lydia, my background is in HR leadership in small companies that became very large, as well as in large companies. The most impactful thing I learned in decades as an HR leader is that the more human a workplace is, the better it is for absolutely everyone: customers, employees, shareholders, and the community.

It creates an energy when a workplace is human in its practices and communication. This positive energy is what we really need to fuel the growth of our companies, non-profit organizations, and institutions. I felt like I should start a process to teach this to HR and recruitment professionals, as well as to leaders.

How do you get there? How do you make an organization more human, warmer, more vibrant, more energized? How do you get there in terms of the practices and the communication? That’s what we do at Human Workplace. We have been doing this since 2007. Our mission is to reinvent work for people.

Lydia: And you did describe this as a movement. So, it goes into that.

Liz: I’ve been a consultant for a long time after I left the corporate world. I love consulting, and that’s great. You can consult, come in, and work with a leadership team and HR team, put things in place, and then go away and wish everybody well.

But you know what? This idea of making work human is not something to drip out in little drops to companies that pay for it, and then go away and hope that a flower grows and becomes a whole force. Everybody is part of it, you know.

So, we invite every single working person and every single non-working person to be part of this movement to make work human. We are empowering organizations and leaders, and empowering working people to choose organizations that are more human. For them to recognize that and to know what they bring, makes for a better workplace for everyone, in my observation and experience.

So, it is a movement. So far, we have 3 million members on LinkedIn and other social platforms who are all communicating and talking about these topics. What should work look like in the 21st century? It’s already shifted.

Balancing the Implementations of AI in the Workplace

Lydia: We are in an era in which generative AI plays such a huge role. We see chatbots, generative AI, or just Artificial Intelligence taking over humans, a person's role, in fact, in terms of communicating. At least in that first layer of communication.

So, with more of this technology seeping in, how critical is the human touch point?

Liz: Well, what works best is the right answer. There are chatbots and automated customer service agents and intake agents of various kinds in various, previously human interactions, which are good things for everyone because they save time and make interaction faster and more efficient. If I’m talking to a chatbot that can get me a return label, that’s great. No problem at all.

It’s when we have really sticky human interactions with emotional content, a problem with performance, or I need some kind of help with a human issue. Work has thousands of human issues in it. Things that people need to take care of themselves and their families, or flexibility, or interpersonal conversations that go the wrong way and feelings get hurt. Those are the places where a chatbot just should not be involved with that emotional content. It’s not a good thing to delegate those kinds of communications to algorithms, basically.

So, this is where we have to be really sensitive when implementing AI. It can be really helpful technology in general, AI being one aspect of that. It can be really helpful, or it can be really negative. I would maintain, for example, that the massive infusion of technology in the recruiting process has mostly been a bad thing, bad for employers, bad for candidates, bad for managers, and bad for recruiters.

We can say, I can get a snapshot of you from your CV, but that’s not you. Your keywords are not you and I can do a keyword search on your CV, and that’s not anything like you. That won’t tell me without talking with you, about what you will bring to my organization, or what I’ll bring to your organization.

That’s where I’m critical of this over-reliance on technology in something as human and as sticky and warm, and vibrant and personal as recruiting, because I don’t think that keyword searching is a good way to hire talent. It’s just not. Those are bullet points, and it doesn’t capture how someone could actually help your organization.

Lydia: So, in other words, it's trying to maintain that critical balance between where you step in as a person interacting with another person and using that technology to accelerate your speed and your efficiencies.

Liz: That’s exactly right. For example, in the recruiting process, my view is that once you’ve received, let’s say, we’re talking about ATS (Applicant Tracking System) technology, once a candidate has gone through that process and submitted their materials, there’s a great room for improvement in that process which we could talk about separately.

But once a person has hit submit or send, and wow, that took me 45 minutes, but now my materials are there, they need confirmation, of course, “Thank you so much for applying to work at ABC Industries, it’s great to meet you. We look forward to talking with you.”

The very next communication should be fast, and it should be a person. If it’s a week, and then it’s silence, and then it’s another chatbot saying, “Here’s a test to take,” any self-respecting candidates can be gone. Because they’re a person and they brought their time, their human time, which is finite, the same 24 hours a day we all get, their energy and their fingers, and their thought process to filling out all this stuff.

So, if a robot comes back and says, “Here’s some more work for you to do,” we cannot blame them for running away as fast as their legs will carry them. That’s not how humans communicate.

If we want people to come and invest in our companies, and bring their talent to us versus somebody else that’s also hiring, we can’t be replying to resumes and CVs with automated, auto-responder messages, particularly giving people additional assignments. That’s the worst thing we could do.

Lydia: You recently talked about the hiring process being broken. Is this what you mean?

Liz: This is exactly what I mean. That’s an aspect. So, if I as a person, or you as a person, say, “Wow, I think I might want to work for ABC Industries, a fictional company, let me learn about them. Let me fill out an application, and upload my resume.” You get a little auto-responder that says we received your materials. It’s fine. It’s 11 o’clock at night. I don’t expect them to be working.

But then a week goes by and now I get another auto-responder, “Please take a writing test, a math test, and whatever.” I’m not interested anymore. Because I brought all this human time and energy and effort but you’re not interested in me enough to have me do the next step. So, there was a decision made.

Right now would be a great time to get an email or chat that says, “Hey, this is Sarah, at ABC, thank you so much for your application. We see some great things. We have a couple of openings we might want to talk to you about. Would that be something you’re interested in?” You can automate that. But it’s still got to be Sarah and she has to be a living person. Because if they respond, she’s got to be able to get back to them.

So, it’s just smart design, where we use technology and where we don’t.

Redefining Recruiting to be Beyond the Transactional Approach

Lydia: Going back to the point of interpersonal communication really close touch points. A big part of being a successful recruiter is to be able to understand what a candidate's current career pathway might be, but also their future pathways.

I mean, as you mentioned, you did work in two places in which they scaled up. So clearly, there's so much potential in places like that. To what extent do career coaching or career coaching skills benefit recruiters, especially those who are actively recruiting in disruptive environments that we're seeing?

Liz: There is such a huge overlap between recruiting and career coaching. There really is. The best recruiters are career coaches, except that they are career coaches with boundaries. They make it clear to candidates, “I work for an employer, or I work for an agency, which could be me or a large, multinational global agency that works for employers.” So, I can guide you with some ideas that I think might be useful for you. But our relationship is based on me filling jobs for my employer or another employer that I’m recruiting for.

So, I’m limited in that I can’t go all the way back to, “What do you want to be when you grow up? How do we get there? How do we brand you for that?” That requires a dedicated career coach if that kind of service would be helpful for you. But coaching, in terms of listening and responding appropriately, is so critical for recruiters. It’s just so critical, and it distinguishes the best recruiters from others.

So, for example, one of the big complaints, of course, from candidates about recruiting is that they say a recruiter reached out to me and said, “Let’s talk,” and we set up a Zoom call, and we spoke or a phone call, and we get on the phone, and they reached out to me. I was living my life and they said, “So, do you have this background? Do you have this certification?” I said, “It’s all on my LinkedIn profile, you had to look at my LinkedIn profile in order to reach out to me on LinkedIn. So, you saw it. But now you’re asking me questions that a quick glance at my LinkedIn profile would have answered.”

And also, I get, once again, I’m giving you my time, this is my dinner time, or my reading to the children time, or my walking the dog time. So, I don’t want to be on this call and be interrogated, “Do I have this, this, this, this?” I need you to convince me that it’s worth being on the phone with you right now. Recruiting is selling and I could say it a million times. I’m so grateful that one of my early managers told me recruiting is selling, you are going to be selling candidates on our opportunities, not by giving them a sales pitch, “You should come and work,” but by listening, which is all good selling.

Listening to what’s important to you? What do you need to know to stay in this conversation right now? Because I know you have a lot of other priorities and things to do. If you can listen, and if you can respond appropriately. A candidate says, “I want to work completely remotely,” and you say, “Great, I don’t know if we can get there with this particular opportunity, I will find out. But I don’t know and I don’t want to mislead you. But let me find out, get back to you in 48 hours.” If you do that, you’re already way ahead of the game.

If you don’t write to the candidate and say, “It’s going to take me a little longer, my contact at ABC Industries is on vacation,” then they may not answer your call and we can’t blame them. We’re looking at recruiting through a different lens now. It’s not mechanical, it’s not transactional, it can’t be.

The best recruiters are much more closely involved, and much more longitudinally oriented over years. It may place this candidate 5-10 times over their career, and this is how it has to be. Anybody can just dial for dollars and call 30 candidates a day. But that’s not really what recruiting is.

Lydia: So, in terms of a job seeker or a candidate, a potential candidate in this instance, how would you define an empowered job seeker that a recruiter might be approaching? What would this empowered job seeker be looking for in a recruiter? I know you have answered quite a bit on that.

Liz: More and more employees, candidates, and job seekers are better educated and more well-informed than they were in the past. That’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for employers. It’s a good thing for all of us for more people to know more about how the pieces fit together. Like, using a theatrical analogy, to get backstage and look up and see the rigging and see how the sets are put into place and see how the whole operation holds together.

In general, understanding more about our economic systems and how businesses work is a very good thing for the individual with that knowledge and for everybody else. So that’s a good thing. The more well-educated and empowered a candidate is, the more requirements they’re going to have. They’re going to have more confidence, and they’re going to expect more.

What they expect, number one, from recruiters is attention, meaning focus. I know you have 25 calls to make today, but I’m a separate person, and you reached out to me. So, I was harming no one out here, living my life, and you reached out to me. I’m not a passive candidate. I have lots of things to do and things to take care of. So, I may just be one tiny part of your day. But if this conversation doesn’t go well, in the sense that you cut me off, or you hammer me with questions, or I don’t feel like you’re listening to me, I will just disappear, and we won’t speak again.

That means you won’t place me and all the people I know that you would have an opportunity to place that also won’t happen. So, the number one thing candidates want from recruiters is to pay attention to what I’m saying. Pay attention to what I’m telling you. Give me a chance to answer questions here. Here’s a classic thing. I’m a recruiter, I’m calling a candidate, I’m talking to them and they say, “Do you have a particular job in mind for me?” I can’t answer that. Well, if you can’t answer that, why am I on the phone with you?

We can’t expect candidates to just give you all the information for your database, they want [you] to know their time is valuable. This is the shift, I would say 25 to 35% of recruiters get this entirely. They get it, they live it and it’s a competitive advantage for them. The entire organization, they get it, they do this organically and it’s a huge recruiting advantage for them.

The folks who are lagging behind, they’re going to really suffer. They’re going to have a hard time hiring the people they need because it is not, as you said earlier, for certain positions, a lot of hard-to-fill positions. Candidates are in the driver’s seat and that’s good. That’s not a bad thing. The people who need to be sold are the best people to help your organization thrive and grow.

Positioning a Role Attractively to High-Demand Candidates

Lydia: Going back to the human element, how does the recruiter get someone excited about a role or a candidate who is in high demand out there? I mean attention is definitely key here and listening [too]. So, what else can they do to position a role attractively to a candidate [high in] demand?

Liz: Before you call or talk with the candidate, you’re going to think about, “If I were them, if I were this candidate that I’m about to get on a call with, what’s going to be important to me? What do I care about?” This candidate has skills that a lot of employers need. They probably talk to recruiters all the time. How am I going to make a difference, and make an impact on that person such that they want to continue to explore this opportunity?

So, I’m not going to presume that I know what they want. I’m not going to go in there with a sales pitch. I’m going to say, “Jane, thank you so much for taking the time to get on the phone. I know you’re so busy. Is this still a good time? If it’s not, I’m getting off the phone.” She’s in charge. It’s her life. “Is this time still good?” “Yeah. Thank you. It is still a good time. I’ve got about 20 minutes.” “Okay, great. Thank you. So, I want to make the best use of our time together. I come from XYZ recruiting. I’m working with ABC Industries over here. They’re my client. We have an opportunity that I thought might be something you could be interested in. Tell me what you need to hear about this opportunity to decide.”

I’m not going to start asking you questions because she’s in charge of the call. “You’re asking me irrelevant questions. This is already all over my LinkedIn profile.” “Well. Great. Thanks for asking. I need to know, where’s it located? Because I have to go there. What is the title and what are they working on? That’s exciting. And then, of course, I need to know the compensation.”

“Then you said great. The title is this. This is where it’s located. This is the unit, the business unit. Here’s what they’re working on. It’s pretty cool stuff and here’s the rough compensation, and this is what they need.” And she says, “Okay, great. That’s perfect. I appreciate it. So now, please go ahead and ask me whatever you want to ask me.”

That’s not just polite, it’s actually selling. If you walk into a car dealership to look at cars, they’re not going to start telling you what you need to know. They’re going to ask you, “What are you looking for? What are you excited about? What made you come in? What kinds of automobiles are you interested in? What features are important to you?” We’re going to do the same thing because recruiting is selling.

Lydia: And consultative selling, in fact, can sell.

Liz: Exactly. I am not telling you anything new for a big chunk of recruiters, both internal and external, but it's not universal. There's still a lot of unfortunate sort of old-school stuff going on, where people will get in touch with the candidate and then immediately start interviewing them like they are the only ones with the decision to make.

Recruiting in the Face of Workplace Disruption

Lydia: Given the changing workplace arrangements, we're seeing a huge disruption in the way work is being carried out, and in the future, we're going to see more of that. So, how should recruiters be thinking about this hiring process, given all these changes in the different variations of situations that a candidate might be in? How do they think about the hiring process in this respect?

Liz: We have to look at the recruiting process from the candidate’s point of view. There was an exercise very popular 20-30 years ago called “Staple yourself to an order.” It was a way of looking at the order processing system from a customer’s point of view. So, the idea was, if I’m an order form that’s coming in from a customer, what happens to me as an order form? First, I go to this desk, and then that desk, and then Mike processes it, products are allocated, and then a delivery date is set. We saw holes in the process and places where it could be tightened up and made shorter and friendlier.

Now we’re saying the same thing, “staple yourself to a resume.” Look at the hiring process from the candidate’s point of view. If they apply for a job, and they submit a CV, and two or three weeks go by and they don’t talk to anyone, they’re gone. We have to assume they’ve been hired somewhere else. But also, even if they haven’t, they’re not excited about us. They’re saying, “What is wrong with your company that it takes that long?”

So, it’s really about looking at the recruiting process with fresh eyes. Why do we do interviews where we have a script, and we ask all the questions? There’s nothing God-given about that. That’s not the best way to hire people. Why are these questions, especially the really lame 1965 questions? “What’s your greatest weakness?” Who cares? Why do we even assume I have weaknesses? And what does it have to do with my job as a programmer or marketing analyst or whatever? Nothing. Weird, ancient, crusty questions. Why would you ask what my last boss thinks about me? Who cares? Why would you ask what my five-year plan is? It has no correlation to anything.

So, we’re going to throw out that old script and we’re going to talk to candidates. Here’s what the job is. Here’s me, I’m a hiring manager. I’m just going to be transparent with you. A lot of things are going really well. Here are some things in the department that could get better in 2024 and I could use your help. Here’s what’s cool about this job and this is the reason I am excited to kind of get you excited about what is possible in this job, not just career advancement. That’s cool. But what about right away? Here’s what you get to dive into and it’s awesome. Do you like this kind of coding or this kind of product development? I think you’re going to like this. You tell me, ask me questions, and I’ll answer for you because this interview is a two-way street, not one-way.

Lydia: All these elements bring me back to the impact of the 3 million people who are now members of the Human Workplace. So, do you have any high-impact stories for instance, that you'd like to share from?

Liz: We have published practices, ideas, how-tos, tools, courses, books, and obviously an article about how to do this stuff and how to shift communication and leadership. The stories are about people coming together inside organizations to surmount really big problems sometimes because they have a shared vision for their support of one another, their customers, their organization, and their community.

A particular story: I worked with an organization that was about to be sold. It’s common when organizations are acquired that the acquirer makes all the decisions. That’s the way of the world. The acquiring company makes all the decisions; who stays, who goes, who gets what job, how processes roll out, and what processes are kept. It’s usually the acquiring company that’s kind of like the winner, and they’re in charge. The acquired company just has to kind of do what they’re told and really has no voice.

So, I was working with the acquirer about to acquire the company, and they wanted my support. The question is, how can we fit into this organization without completely losing all the good things that we did in our organization? We didn’t, we lost this battle. We were being bought, and we didn’t have any votes and clout. The most likely thing is that all of our best employees will just leave and go someplace else. It’s just an unfortunate thing.

So, I said, “Look, I’m working with you folks, I’m not working with the acquiring company, they did not ask for my help. But the thing that you can do is to let these folks know, in every interaction at the micro level, in your department, and from a leadership level, what you believe is valuable, and how you’d like to interact with them, and how that will manifest the big vision that they have for the combined organization. You’re going to be really earnest and you’re going to be really transparent, and you’re going to tell them what you’ve been doing that works. You’re going to give them an opportunity to sort of rise up and see where there’s value from your side of the deal. If they can’t do that, they can’t do it, and you’ll all quit. If they can do it, there’ll be a wonderful thing. The organization will be stronger for it.”

They found their voices, which is not a common thing to do when you’re being acquired. They said, “Look, I’d like to stay. But if I stay, it’s going to be because I still have a contribution to make. This is the contribution that I make, and that I’m passionate about, and that I’ve been doing here, and here are the results.”

They were able to create a new hybrid of both organizations, both cultures, both sets of practices from everything from onboarding to leadership training to succession, every single compensation, and it was actually greater than the sum of its parts. Because the folks on the acquired side of the equation said, “This is what we need and this is what I personally need in order to continue to commit here.”

The acquiring company was smart enough to see, “We need these people. If we didn’t need these people, they would have all been going on day one. But we do.”

Lydia: Going back to selling value and really presenting positioning value, right?

Liz: That's right. Taking the other person's point of view that that's an element in everything we teach, getting altitude, getting up above the ground, looking at the big picture, and then taking the buyer's point of view.

In this case, the literal buyer, the acquirer, says, “You know what is going to benefit them most? What are the three things that we want them to know about us? And we're asking kindly and politely but we'll also we'll be gone.” So, there's also that.

Lydia: So, there is a facilitation aspect to this, right? The facilitation piece. So this would fall, I would presume under HR, right?

Liz: The thing is, all the categories are falling away. It’s not that it does or doesn’t fall under HR. The categories themselves are becoming kind of meaningless. We’re really reaching a point where we have problems in our institutions. All institutions are struggling. Higher education is struggling. Government [agencies] are shaking and shocked. The educational system is coming under a lot of discussion. Are we doing things the way we literally did them in the 1850s, not just in the United States, but worldwide?

We’re looking at our institutions and saying, “Why? Why is this the right way? Is this the best way?” Healthcare has a lot of discussion and investigation. Are we doing things in the right way? And so in organizations, I think a lot of the questions are, “Is this HR? Is this IT? Is it OD?” There’s really a big “Who cares?” over it.

Why are these silos and divisions even part of the conversation? Let’s figure out the best way to get the result we want without respect to what department it falls into.

Starting Conversations is the Heart of Recruiting

Lydia: That's a key point looking at how lean an organization has become, how overlapped these roles have become in and of themselves.

So, Liz, just to close this beautiful conversation off, going back to recruitment itself, what is your favorite or most memorable recruitment or HR story, if you may, that you'd like to share?

Liz: I have done a ton of recruiting myself, and I was passionate about it because it was my way to make a contribution to grow our company. HR people often struggle to have an impact and to have a noticeable, tangible, concrete impact on their company’s success. So, when you’re doing recruiting, it’s right there. There’s no question about it. If you can get people to join the company and keep the growth happening, you’re feeling really good about that, and other people are feeling good about your contribution too.

So, I took recruiting extremely seriously. I flew many times from the Midwest where I lived at the time, Chicago, to San Francisco or New York, to meet candidates at the airport. Just in their own airport, I didn’t leave the airport. I went there to meet them in the airport lounge and talk to them about our company. As I said, listen to what’s important to them down to, “I have a child in a soccer camp that he loves, and I don’t want to pull them out of it. Is there any way to do whatever we need to do?” That’s what we’ll do. If you could join us, we’ll figure out a way to do that.

I’ve interviewed candidates at midnight and in a coffee shop because that’s what they could do. One time there was a mom with nursing twins. She could meet at midnight in the coffee shop. Let’s go, I’ll be there. It’s the way that we can have the most tangible impact is in recruiting in HR. I don’t think there’s any question about that. A lot of the stuff is really good. But it doesn’t have a strong competitive advantage. But recruiting does.

So, if you’re involved with recruiting or talent acquisition, the idea of going and getting candidates, not just letting them come to you through the career portal. That is passive. That’s not really what the job is just evaluating and weeding people out. It’s going and getting, creating relationships with schools and organizations and individuals. I went to every trade show. I’ll give you one little snippet. I used to go to big trade shows, several 100,000 people.

So, you’re walking around this place, and there’s everybody there. It’s cramped with people. And I brought books. I had a favorite book at any time, a small one, a paperback, and I just stapled my business card in the back of it. I’m interested in physics. So this book is called The Elegant Universe by a physicist named Brian Greene, about string theory and this kind of stuff.

I would get into a conversation with someone, a tech person at a tech conference. I would say, “Listen, do you like physics? Are you interested in physics? Have you heard of this book, The Elegant Universe? Have you heard of that? Listen, here’s a copy. It’s got my business card and read it on the plane or when you get home. If it’s interesting, if you want to talk, just give me a call or send me an email.” Recruiting is going out and starting conversations and we hired a lot of people that way.

Lydia: Yes, and also understanding that in going out and getting these candidates, you are also representing not just yourself, but the brand. It's a great opportunity to be on the frontline, and you're out there. You're the first touch point, the first impression to make on a candidate.

Liz: 100%.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Liz, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think there's so much to reevaluate in terms of recruiting processes, the hiring processes, what kind of skills you bring to complement the technologies that are already out there, and how you differentiate that human element from everybody else.

I think that's been great. So thank you very much for your time and your insights, Liz. If anyone in the audience wants to pick up a conversation with you, where can they find you?

Liz: They can reach me at support, humanworkplace.com.

Lydia: Thank you so much, Liz. And it's been a pleasure having you share these insights.

We have been in conversation with Liz Ryan, founder and CEO of Human Workplace. Thank you for joining us this week. Remember to subscribe to our channel. Stay tuned for more weekly insights from All-In Recruitment.