Episode 12

Guest Shannon Pritchett from CareerXroads and I talk about the most influential technology to hit talent acquisition in 2019. We also make some predictions for 2020.

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AI, SMS, Voice Tech, alexa, google home, chat, chatbots, funnels, video, blockchain, workforce analytics, diversity, bias, job boards, social media, employer branding, video job ads, video interviewing, cloud, recruitment marketing automation, API, ATS, CRM yea I think we covered it all.

- Give it a second to catch up to the recording. Okay, welcome my guest, Shannon Pritchett from Career Crossroads. Shannon, thank you so much.

So this is our year end wrap up kinda podcast video cast. I thought I would bring in somebody that is an absolute expert, has been in the industry for years and years, has been on the speaking stage plenty of times at SourceCon and everywhere else. So there's been a lot of new technologies. There's been a lot of technologies touted over the last 12 months. At the beginning of 2019, did you make any predictions as to, or have any kind of thoughts about what kind of technologies were really gonna take hold in 2019?

- Oh, gosh. You know, we have to start with this question, 'cause I have a feeling it's going, this is also gonna be my, what's gonna happen in 2020, right?

- Yeah.

- That we didn't get to? I was expecting more AI adoption for 2019 and I was also expecting more groundbreaking tools and technologies to emerge and we really didn't see that this year.

- Groundbreaking

- We saw

- Groundbreaking, what way?

- I don't know, something that would

- Consolidating all the adhoc kind of verticalized different tools into one tool or?

- Yeah, I think that's what we're getting towards, but I was looking for something revolutionary that we haven't seen before. You know like that magic help button that doesn't exist. I was looking for something that I didn't even know what is was. And that's typically what we see around this time come out, and I don't think it's coming out this year, I think there have been so many acquisitions and mergers that you know more building towards those tools. And so instead of companies figuring out, okay this is what I need to build myself, and kinda say oh what if I buy this company, and then bring it to what we have, and that's gonna build that one big pro-, sorry, proprietary system. But, no, I was kinda looking for something that really didn't exist. Don't really know what that is yet, but I was hoping that there would be some new ground breaking, "Ah-ha", jaw-dropping tool and it didn't really happen. So I wish I had a more information about what I was looking for, but I'm always looking for, of course that tool that can make everything happen.

- Ah, I kinda get it. I mean, I was hoping for something like that out of Google, and especially with Google for Hire, and obviously they did Google for Jobs, things like that, we're both tongue tied today. Neither one have really taken off. Google for jobs, obviously has taken off a lot better than Google for Hire, but there actually closing down Google Hire, some time in Q1, I think right. They not even taking on new clients right now. Which is a big surprise, I think they didn't really fully understand that if you go in and do SMB market, your talking about lots of little Mom and Pop pizzerias, and shops like that are only making 1 or 2 hires a year. And it's just not worth $50 bucks a month or $100 bucks a month. You know.

- The one thing tech.

- Yes, these small companies, you know that I don't even know how they would know that Google for Hire exists. I get, I have a lot of friends that own businesses, and I told them about it, and they were like, why would I need something like this.

- They had a sales force, you know pounding away at it. So, they had people, anybody that signed up for the G Suite, they were trying to get them you know into Google for Hire, or if they saw any kind of activity like that. That's how they were doing it.

- Yeah, yeah, so.

- The one technology that I think that really took off in 2019 and it kind of took place with the acquisition from iSense, them buying TextRecruit, right. So texting in recruiting, really took off. Do you have any thoughts on texting?

- Yeah, I like to look at patterns that have also emerged in that space. I think iSense was one of the more impressive technologies systems that we saw last year, and I think that's great because I think they are headed towards that archaic kind of route, and then they purchased TextRecruit, they purchased Jibe as well, so they're heading into that model. I think recruiters, it's funny, I think candidates are always quick to show us what trends that they like, and it's when texting . I think recruiters and score search are the ones who are so slow to adopt those changes, and it's nice to finally see them catch up. And so, that was a smart acquisition, Jibe was a smart acquisition. I think iSense, ascends to have a very successful 2020 and beyond.

- What's funny is, everyone blames recruiters and sourcers for adopting slow, to adopt these new technologies and by in large, I think that is true, but I also see it in the executive leadership teams, that are running some of these companies, they are very hesitant to change anything that they are currently doing. They still want to follow, a post, search and pray methodology, post a job on the job board, search the job board, and pray you can find the right candidate, or the right candidate finds you. But when they grab onto something that the recruiters really like, as long as it fits into their overall recruiting processes, I think they're willing to do it. And that's the big thing, they don't want to login to a separate system, they're lazy. They don't wanna, you know if they can stay in their ATS or CRM world, and they're happy, right. So, I think that's where TextRecruit really made it easy. Even though in the beginning, they did have to login, it was natural for them and kind of talk to candidates through texting. It was actually a lot easier for them.

- Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

- I don't know if you have ever pounded and grounded away on the phone, but 50 to 100 phone calls a day is not my idea of fun, that's why I kind of pushed out video voicemail landing pages, and stuff like that so I didn't have to grind away on the phone everyday.

- I started with call sheets, so I've been there. You know that you know you hit certain number, I would throw my friends phone numbers in there occasionally, so like, hey what's up, thanks. Right you down for this Java Developer position.

- Yep, we outsourced some of our sourcing to a guy that we had trained, you know he had to meet x number of names a week to get a bonus. He was throwing in names like Donald Duck, and Mickey Mouse. And I'm like really dude, come on, you think we're not gonna check this? We're not going to pay you a bonus for throwing in fake names. All right, so another technology that was really touted at the beginning, especially through the Candy Awards, and the Talent Board was video, video job ads. What do you see in the video job ads space?

- You know, not much. I think it's because it is well adopted. I think like a lot of companies do use it. I think candidates do like it. You know I think the coolest thing this year we have seen is the merger with like Montage and Shaker and how that's become Modern Hire. I like what they're doing there, and I know that they're doing a lot of research and experimenting with diversity and AI for some of their interviews. Some of the technology out there around video interviewing, makes me very nervous. You know reading social queues, and facial expressions and stuff like that. Just because, I think Neural Diversity is gonna play a huge part in 2020, and beyond in the whole next decade that we're approaching. I wonder how the video interviewing might hurt candidates with a Neural Diverse background. I always feel like I'm someone who is a little more extraverted, so I can do really well with interviews, but somebody I know who is just brilliant as if not more brilliant than me whose maybe intraverted, how does that play against them, I don't think we've studied that just yet? I did spend some time down in Australia, and there was a company down there called Curious Things, that was doing some cool things. And they impressed me a lot down there, and they impressed me the most at HR Tech. So what they do is they provide on-demand, not necessarily video, but phone interviewing screening. And they use AI technology, to ask like qualifying questions, and probing questions. So you can go on and talk about your experience, and they'll ask probing questions from there. So you're having a conversation with a robot, and it's feel like your having a conversation with a person. And I thought, for the positions I was looked at, I thought, 'Oh my gosh, that's asking better follow up questions, than I ever did as a recruiter. And it won the competition that I was at, at the HTC Conference down in Sydney. And then we have a lot at the booth at HR Tech. And, so not necessarily video, more phone interviewing, but that's something that's coming, that's really really cool. They have an on-demand apprentice.

- What company was that again?

- Curious Things.

- Curious Things, I have to look them up, see if they want to... Anybody from Curious Things want to come on the Speaker Agenda show and talk about it, give me a holler.

- Ah, there good guys.

- You did mention a little buzz word that's floating around, and a lot of the audience may not be familiar with it. Can you give me a 30 second definition of Neural Diversity?

- Neural Diversity, all right. So we've long looked at Diversity as race, disability, gender, ethnicity, but no one has really looked at diversity as thought, and expanded on that a little bit more. And so Neural Diversity is looking at the different things that go on with mental awareness and mindset, for example, introverism versus extroverism, autism, Asperger's, and those different categories, that really do make a lot of people bring different sets and thoughts into the workforce.

- So it's not necessarily neurological impairment, let's say, for TBI, traumatic brain injuries, or autism, for example. It really runs the gambit of identifying what your personality is and it also is inclusive of TBI's and autism and anything other that changes how the way you think.

- Absolutely, yeah, Glen Kathy actually did a lot of research on it and posted a lot of articles, that talks about being intraverted, and how that actually leads to very good not only candidates but employees, and how it's important to have a good balance between the intraversion and extraverted people in the workforce and on a team. And I couldn't agree more, it's very easy for me to go into a room and dominate the conversation, and I'm sure Jeff you're the same way. You know, we're kind of bold, loud, type A, personalities, and we thrive in those situations. But sometimes, it requires a person in the room who really has all the ideas, they're just waiting to say it.

- Believe it or not, when I was younger, I had paralyzing anxiety, about, I was just very very shy. And that didn't like come out and go away, until I was probably in 6th, 7th grade, when I started wrestling. And just built up my confidence on the wrestling mat, and things like that. But literally, I could not talk to anybody, I was paralyzed with fear of other people.

- I would have never have known that about you.

- Yeah, now here I am, doing a talk, fricking video cast, and podcast, go figure right. So thank you for that definition of Neural Diversity, I know that a lot of people may not have even heard about it. It's kind of interesting, I had a conversation with somebody that had a TBI from a snowboarding accident, so he did a jump, did a flip and landed on his head, and this was a semi-professional skater, so. Knocking, what?

- Oh, no, wood.

- So yeah, so, it was just interesting having that conversation with him and just the challenge he's been having to overcome with his rehab and things like that. A lot of people don't realize is that TBI's they can take years to even get back to semi-normal, if ever right.

- Yep.

- So the next one is, the other thing that's really taken off is employer branding. I'm seeing a lot more employer brand videos going out, a lot more companies taking risk with their employer brand which I think is absolutely fantastic, their not taking their employer brand as seriously as, in a good way, as a consumer brand. Consumer brands are typically very tight, and they don't like take any risks, but I've seen a few companies take risks. What have you seen as far as employer branding?

- You know, absolutely, I think we're headed towards the more proactive employer brand approach and also a universal approach. Not just universal as in what we may see in the US, but globally, a universal approach. I can't count how many times I've seen a branding strategy here in the US, I'll travel abroad and see something completely different. So I think overall, we're trying to see a more global and unified approach, and also make that a little bit more proactive as well. So I think it's just now is the time that branding has become a little bit more into fruition with a lot of these big brands, and it really is helping with the INVAL recruitment's.

- So I know you mentioned AI, machine learning, a little bit of cognitive there. What kind of technologies, or what kind of companies have you seen really in the AI space, that have made any kind of advancement? I know you're a little bit disappointed, but are there any companies that are making some good advancement?

- Well yeah, sure, no. I think it was, well let me clarify the disappointment, I think I'm disappointed, because we expected it to have taken over by now, right. And we all know that that's not happening anytime soon.

- Okay, right.

- No, I really like what Aleo is doing, I think Dave advanced a lot. You know Aleo had some cool partnership now with SAP Info, so there's kind of another, not really a merger, but a partnership that we're seeing.

- Shout out to David Bernstein, hoot, hoot. He was on the show, episode 5 or 6 something like that.

- Olivia and Paradox, you know, I like what they're doing. You know we've seen a lot of good case studies and what they're doing with McDonald's for example. In terms of some of the interviews that they're doing for their front line workers. And also, you know some of these sourcing companies that are using AI, HiringSolved has been a very good component, and

- Jeremy Roberts, shout out, boom.

- Oh, yes, they have a lot of free products, released this year, I know they are taking some away in 2020, but you know that's the company that can almost solve or hire all the positions for you and same thing with the AI, you know SeekOut is also doing great things to. So, I think we've seen it a lot on the sourcing side, I would like to see a little bit on the branding side, I don't know how that would work, but that would be really cool to see how a very good branding strategy that we're just talking about, that you can kind of rope that in. I guess the AI I'm looking for there is more on the chatbot side, that all ties back to candidates experience, and then that's the point as well.

- Yeah, I think the big hurdle right now, far adoption, is A, budgets. Budgets are always a concern, but now is budget season, so if you are looking at you know moving some of your let's say advertising budget which may not be performing as well as it has in the past, moving it to more of an engagement strategy type budget, so anything where your SMS or chatbots, or something like Honeit, which is doing the calls, or something around the AI outreach. Candidate engagement, I've been touting this for 15 years. It's all about candidate engagement and not about candidate sourcing. And the reason I say that is, coming from a sourcing background, I started my first ten years, I ran a sourcing desk, that's what I did, I was a sourcer. And I never used a job board for the first 15 years of my career. Never spent a single dime on job boards, and we were sourcing 10,000 candidates a month, I mean it was high volume stuff. Very difficult positions, but what I found was with social media, with the Internet, with all the different tools that we have access to, everybody has access to these same tools. You may not buy them, but you have access to them if you want them. And that levels the playing field for a sourcer. Now there's certainly people that know how to use those tools a lot more effective, like Steven Leavy, and things like that. But, by and large, what's going to differentiate you and the marketplace is an engagement strategy.

- Yeah, I agree completely. You know I think we actually have the long conversation about this at TalentNet, Greg Fisher's conference.

- Yeah, another shout out.

- Shout out to Greg, ten years at TalentNet. But what we're talking about was exactly what you were referring to, how it relates to branding, I ran the SourceCon conference couple years ago, a year ago, exactly, where we looked at combining the branding and marketing piece with the basically outbound, so inbound and outbound and how like that ultimate strategy. Intuit's doing a lot of cool things around that, so shout out to that company in terms of loss success. They've actually eliminated a lot of the need for sourcers, within Intuit. And they are not eliminating sourcers, they are taking the sourcers and they are putting them on the critical need to fill positions at the player brand new strategy that just doesn't cover. So I think that's one success story that we've seen a brand actually do it well and successfully. But I also think yeah, sourcers really needs to step up on their soft skills. I think that those core competencies are more important now than ever, because the playing field is easy. You and I know that you know sourcing is all just it goes above and beyond especially today now, than just finding a particular candidate, and I think anyone can find a candidate. I don't think that's very hard. I can put my pet's on sorting, to find things, it's that easy. But engaging the candidate to your point, that's gonna be more difficult, and I think that's a challenge that many town ours are leaders are looking at. Okay, we can find a million people, so easy, but how are we gonna get them interested. How are we gonna get their attention. I think that is where recruiting is somewhat broken right now. I hate to use that term broken, but I think we can see the most improvement in.

- It's broken. Anytime you have like 3% of the candidates that hit a career website actually engage with it in someway. That means, applying doing a search, 3%, that means the very beginning of your funnel is broken. And then you get down to your recruiters not being able to talk to hiring managers to do intake meetings. Hiring managers ghosting candidates, candidates ghosting recruiters. Recruiters ghosting candidates, and on and on and on. So, they are definitely areas of opportunity where we can make huge improvements help fix some of these holes in the recruiting process.

- Yep. So, all right, here's one that you may or may not have a whole lot of information on, block chain.

- Yeah, I'm a fan of block chain. Again why isn't that adopted yet.

- Nobody's, well there's only one company I know of that's really is taking it in earnest to develop it, and that's job.com, so.

- I would love to see LinkedIn adopt block chain, how cool would that be.

- Give me a use case for block chain in your view?

- Verification.

- Okay, Employment Verification, right?

- Employment Verification, you know and all that great things that go along with it. I think it's cool too. Also too, I look at block chain as also a from crypto currency, because they kind of both --

- Yeah.

- I'd like to see some employers, that it'd be really cool do, you know let's get outside of the dollars, and pay a little bit in crypto currency.

- Really.

- Think about it, if your a tech candidate and your investing in the bit coin world and whatever other currency is out there, and you have company offering bonuses along that, you might attract some cool people.

- All right, that's an interesting thought.

- block chain.

- The conversation I've been having around block chain with Aaron Stewart was more around it wasn't employer verification, just verifying what's information, what information on your resume is static, and it's not going to change. So where you work and what years you work there are probably not going to change, right. I worked from Exacanexa from this date to this date, my job title was this, it's not gonna change. However the rest, the duties that I had there may change so I would prefer that not get on the block chain, because it's immutable, and if I am ever applying for a job, if I were a candidate, I needed to customize that portion of what my responsibilities and accountabilities were, then I'd like to have that free. But the years, that I worked there, the location I worked, that's not going to change, so put that on the block chain.

- Exactly, it's also a good, I think that block chain is also going to help with a lot of privacy and security concerns too.

- Yeah.

- You know, I'm surprised there hasn't been more you know I mean to have little or all the information enhance that candidates give us. I'm surprised that there hasn't been more questions around privacy and security.

- Well, there's lots of questions, JDPR is a rise from all those privacy questions. Besides making a law, I don't know how much of a, that JDPR is actually protecting people's privacy at all. People have been shown time and time again, to their certainly more than willing to give up their privacy for convenience, but is that a single act or an ongoing. And most social media, most consumer websites, they think, you give it once, your good forever. And I don't necessarily think that's the case, right. I mean I wouldn't be getting 5000 spam emails a day, or spam phone calls everyday if that weren't the case.

- Right.

- So we talked about this, all right. Here's a little bit of a different topic, Workforce Analytics and Tracking what's going on, and just tracking metrics inside of your organization. What kind of advancements have you seen there?

- Not much, I think I've seen a lot of companies aggregate some of that data into you know other deployed in more systems to better track those analytics. We've seen some mergers in that space, like Workforce Logic and Engage software is one that comes to mind. And so, but in terms of predictive analytics, I think we're still measuring the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results. I would like to see more changes around quality from some of the data that we're looking at. Candidates,

- Quality, as far as quality of the data? Quality of hire, quality of what?

- I'm not worried about quality of the data. Quality in terms of the people that your dealing with. Satisfaction indexes, real world candidate experience data. For example, internal candidates experience, hiring manager satisfaction, you know that kind of stuff. I think that to me is where we need to be. And the reason why is because we're such a competitive marketplace, I think we keep focusing on time to fill, you know cost for hire, and all that other stuff, you know we're going to be in the same predicament, year after year after year. I'm not saying those are in-important, not important messages, or metrices, I'm just saying that I think we need to examine more of quality over quantity moving into this next decade.

- Yeah, I would agree, because and I just said this on my last podcast, which doesn't get released until January. So I'm okay repeating it. But I think that corporations need to be a lot more transparent about what's taking place inside their organization. 53% of the people that leave their job, isn't because they don't like their job, it's not because they don't like their co-workers, it's because they don't like their boss. So, if I knew that ahead of time, that this boss had some problems I would think twice about joining that organization. So, I'm calling for company assessments, department assessments, employee assessments for hiring managers. And make that transparent to candidates as opposed to constantly asking candidates for more information, more information, more information.

- Exactly, couldn't agree more.

- I don't see anybody even starting that stuff yet, so that should be an interesting way to help.

- Yeah, not yet.

- All right, so, I came from monster, what do you see in the job board space?

- Not much, you know, I think it's been on a slow decline.

- Indeed's just crushing it.

- Right, I know, I just think that social has done such a huge push for us. I still meet a lot, ton of recruiters, and talk to a ton of leaders, and still get a high return on investment. I'm always curious to what Indeed's doing. They had a big acquisition this year, I believe it was ClickIQ, that they purchased, and so I'm always kind of looking at what they're doing. I just think it's slowly but surely, flat lining. Again, I don't think its gonna go away, but I think they have the best opportunity to integrate AI in order to appease what we want in this market.

- Yeah, so if you look at Indeed, they've released a couple of major updates this year. The first one was the assessments. They started testing in 2018, they rolled it out, at least in the United States, I'm not sure about globally. The candidate assessment tool. They also rolled out some of their employer branding options, because you look at their site, it's like looking at Google, I mean it's plain blue, right, pretty boring.

- Right.

- So they are out offering some of those now for their employer side. A couple of years ago, they started doing the Glassdoor thing, because they purchased Glassdoor, but now those evaluations are available on the Indeed site last I saw. What I'm concerned about with Indeed, is they're becoming a massive, organization. They're very concerned about ROI, they're very concerned about keeping up the revenue. I'm wondering when the innovation is gonna start slowing down. Two or three major product updates a year, for an organization that size, I don't know, I think it needs to be stepped, the pace needs to be picked up a little bit.

- Yeah, yeah, I agree and that's what I think, you know integrating AI comes up in some of those. Also LinkedIn, like right in there with it, 'cause I look at LinkedIn as a job board, pretty much.

- Tell them that, but yeah, they are a job board.

- LinkedIn did a great thing last year, with integrating their talent insights and also their applicant tracking system. But we really didn't see much come from them this year, although they're slowly rolling throughout 2019. I would like to see Indeed do something similar. I think that that concept would work wonders with them. I don't think it's a lesson learned from Google. I think it's a case study in what works, what doesn't work and I think LinkedIn has been successful, and it has been successful with their ATS. I think what's next for LinkedIn is eventually a CRM which we all know will eventually come. I'd like to see Indeed be a little more competitive with them on that front.

- Well, I mean LinkedIn already had that CRM light built-in to their platform where you can track notes and things like that. Which caused a lot of confusion on my team, when I was running it, because I was like, you do not use that under any circumstances. I want it in my ATS, my CRM, not in theirs. That was interesting. All right, now that we are on the ATS and CRM side, what do you see in there?

- Aw man, CRM, I think, I don't know really any ATS's really making a big plan doing a lot. Workday they acquired Scout, the irony there, you know ATS, Workday is known for being very complicated and hard system to source and find information and you know use, so when they acquired Scout, which was like a week ago, or two weeks ago, I was like, okay, well maybe they know this, and maybe they're trying to a advance their sourcing practices a little bit, so that was good. We saw Smashfly go under Symphony Talent, I thought that was a very very cruel move on their end. And so, we've talked about iSense earlier, but I think the CRM's are gonna continue to flourish. I think eventually we're gonna get to the point where you don't see many companies using ATS because their ATS has become the CRM. And so the CRM will eventually as well be able to--

- I mean, the rise of the CRM happened more or less because ATS is A, we're not able to handle a lot of the marketing activities that really need to be done. But then OSBCP really put the nail in the coffin for that, right. You need to have separate databases, so having two different ATS's or an ATS and a CRM was just kind of the next evolutionary step. I don't know, the only way that I see that a company can get rid of an ATS or a CRM is if a job board, like Indeed, like LinkedIn really supports ATS or CRM. And then you've got that capability. Which is where the candidates are anyway, for now. May not be in the future, but for now they are on Indeed, and LinkedIn, which in past, anytime that candidates are flocking to one or two certain areas, that means the industry in my view is ripe for disruption. Something will come along and boom, now those candidates are flowing somewhere else.

- That's what I was kind of alluding to in the beginning, what else is out there. What's gonna be the next mover or shaker. That is such a good point. I've been very impressed with CRM's, you know ATS's just haven't evolved and legally they really don't have to. And so you're right, it's time for a little bit of disruption.

- The system of record, right, its kind of what does it really need to do. Does it need to track the individual on the job. I mean open up a job okay. As long as it does those two things well, I think that they can get away with it. But the CRM's are severely lacking in my point of view, if you can pair any CRM in the market, and please correct me if I'm wrong. If you can compare that to ClickFunnel, or Cartera, or HubSpot, or any of these other consumer marketing platforms where you can create landing pages, and video, and you've got tons of API integrations, with just about anything, you can pull in data from any resource, it's been verified, you can setup triggers, actions, follow-up sequences. Show me an ATS or a CRM that can support all of those functionality, I don't see any of them.

- And once again, I completely agree.

- CRM's you need to pick up your game. That's my two cents. So, next one is API and cloud. I know that Monster is definitely has a cloud platform in the works, for their, a lot of their stuff. They are moving everything onto the cloud. Have you seen corporations starting to adopt the cloud as well.

- Yeah, that was actually a big project I was on when I worked for Manpower Group. I don't know where they are now, so I guess, I don't know. But yeah, there are a couple of our clients that have migrated and they are using API's to kind of look at everything at once. And it's fascinating, and watch them go through system to system, and just on one page, really cool. Yeah, I have seen it adopted, and I have seen champions of it. And I think it saves them a lot of time, and more accurate reporting.

- As far as stack ranking candidates, the search match stack rank capabilities, putting it into the cloud is really your only option if you want to have a broad view. If you just want to have a singular view, that's fine, but let me see here. Something just popped up on my screen. So, if you want to have a broad view, you need to move it into the cloud. If you want to keep it in your little siloed, then I guess you don't need to. It depends on your volume of hiring though, a lot of these cloud corporations are very expensive, right.

- Mm-hmm.

- All right, so we already covered recruitment and marketing. All right, funnels? What I'm seeing is very low adoption of funnels. What a funnel, what I mean by that is they are still driving most of their candidates to a single landing page, and that landing page is typically on the ATS or CRM, and it's a career website, where they've got 25 or 30 different options to choose from. Join my career, talent community, get job alerts, apply to this job search for a job and oh, by the way share it to 15 different searchable networks. Candidates don't do all that. They want a single action. Create a candidate journey through a funnel, are you seeing anybody really take hold of that?

- No, not yet. And I think a large part of that is simply because the whole premise around the talent community still doesn't really appeal to anyone. Let's be honest the talent community in my opinion is a group of people who come together that care about one another. If you are in the talent community for a job, you could careless if the person also in the community gets it or not, therefore it's not a community. And I think there is so much focus on that. And also there's a lot of focus on pro-activeness, pro-activeness, pro-activeness. And that is not proactive. None of that as what you said, it's all reactive. And that's where I think branding needs to step it up, and also the leaders re-vamp the whole system, like this doesn't work. We do want text messages, we do want to be able to apply in three seconds, I was joking around with a friend, and we were talking about why don't we go and apply for jobs, like we used to just to experiment, and I was like it takes to long to experiment. And to find a candidate, and so, yeah, I just think it's so archaic and so broken and there's a lot of BS out there, and really we want to all come down to it and simply just, not join the community, we want to be in the community, and the company, you know what I mean and so.

- Right.

- To me I think all that stuff needs to slowly but surely go away, that to me is not that great.

- The one company that I'm seeing some good things from is Phenom People.

- Yes.

- There website and their candidate flows, their just the overall candidate experience is extremely well thought out. When I took a few critical looks at a few of these websites, I was like, wow, these guys and gals. I'm sure their tons of female engineers there too. But they've been very thoughtful, and I hate when everybody tells, this is built by recruiters for recruiters. Anytime I hear that I tend to step away, because recruiters they know what they want, but they are not very good at developing the U-X to produce it. But Phenom People has been able to do that. There's tons of recruiters there, that help them build out their site, and they also got tons of candidate feedback as well, so I think they did their research.

- So let's not forget that Ed has gone out and he started a consulting practice within Phenom, that's given individuals more of that, ARC companies that individual consulting type approach, and I think that's going to be so valuable in the marketplace, and he's built quite an impressive team around that, and I'm looking to forward to seeing them get really a lot of good business out of that.

- All right, one of the other topics, du jour right now is, and we already kind of discussed this earlier, but diversity and bias in the recruiting process. A, I know that there's lots of people trying to do things around this, I'll let you kind a give your two cents, and then I'll throw my two cents in the hat also.

- I think we're stepping in dangerous waters when we're using AI to solve our diversity problems. A lot of these systems are built off of very small talent pools and very--

- Define very small?

- Yeah, very short amount of time too.

- Define, define very small?

- Oh, 500 people.

- Oh, I would say anything less than 500 million is very small from an AI perspective.

- Yeah, if you really look at the numbers, yes and the data science behind it, you'd be surprised how low some of these companies actually are. None of these companies are ones that we mentioned, you know me, I'm not gonna call people out or anything like that here, but I don't think AI is in a position to solve our diversity problems. I think our mindset is in the position--

- What about putting AI aside, what about recruiter bias or hiring manager bias? What do you thinks taking place there?

- I really don't have an opinion on that because, I think it changes per organization. You hear the horror stories, and you know I think some of that stuff might be exaggerated on both ends of the spectrum, but to me it is important to challenge and have those numbers represented and to measure on it. You know bias, everyone is bias. I'm bias, your bias, it's something we can't control. Unfortunately hiring will be biased, and I think that's the whole point, of you know having diversity metrics, to escape the biasim, to get different opinions, different people on the team. I don't think it--

- I think bringing awareness to it definitely helps out, right. As long as you can, if your a recruiting team, or your a hiring manager team, have not been educated on you know bias, and how to avoid it, as long as your aware of it, you can start taking action, right. But if you are not aware of it, even taking place, then how are you gonna you know change your effectiveness. What I've seen though in the job board space in, is that by and large a diversity, posting strategy is worthless. It's fairly worthless right. The vast majority of companies that are pushing their diversity posting strategies, they really cannot produce the results and I think it's more of a checkbox. There's little to no accountability on either side, for actually producing quality candidates from a diversity standpoint, or inclusion or military. There's very very few companies, that actually have a viable diversity inclusion or a military recruiting strategy.

- Yeah, I could careless about a diversity advertisement. I only care about how diverse is their board. You know one of our clients, AARP, has an absolutely brilliant campaign, and a brilliant commercial. I highly recommend you go out to YouTube to watch it. You know it involves, when you think about AARP, you know, where does your mind automatically go Jeff.

- Old people.

- Retirement, yes, exactly.

- I just got a letter in the mail, when I turned 50. I wasn't happy about that.

- But I'm amazed at how many people work there are not older, and obviously agism is a bias, and a diversity issue many organizations face. And they have so many programs in place at AARP that really helps bridge the older workforce with the younger workforce and vice versa, and that is part of their branding and recruitment strategy. It shows the actual programs that the company are actually doing, and then you look at their board, and you see a mix of gender, race, color, disability, etc. To me, that is one company that is talking the talk, walking the walk, and that is a good branding and awareness strategy and it made me want to work there too. When I left, we had a meeting there when I left, I was like, can I take a picture with your CHRO. you know 'cause I was like so proud of like what they're doing inside of the organization, to me that's an organization that can have successful campaign, and back it up. And unfortunately you don't see that with a lot of the different diversity ads, right, like to your point, they don't back it up.

- Yeah, like Peloton. Not that it was a diversity ad, but completely flopped, completely, showed a complete unawareness of what's going on in the marketplace. So, where gonna talk about social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, what are your thoughts on, my favorite right now is TikTok, so what are your thoughts on TikTok?

- I don't know anything about TikTok.

- No, okay, then let me give my two cents.

- I'm old.

- I'm a lot older than you believe me. So, if you're not on TikTok, and you're a recruiter, you're making a huge mistake. Every recruiter right now needs to figure out a way to start pushing content out on TikTok. This will be a absolutely massive platform for recruiters eventually. It is not there yet, but there are one or two recruiters on there, that are absolutely slaying it. One of the recruiters that I follow is, she posted one, she got 200 and some odd thousand views in 48 hours, 24, 48 hours.

- Was this for a job, or just sort of personal?

- She puts out like job and recruiting tips. So how to go for an interview. What should you say when they ask you, why shouldn't we hire you. All those stupid questions in behavioral interviews. She'll go through those. She'll also go through why your resume isn't getting seen by recruiters. So she just puts those in the little 30 second, 1 minute videos, and she's crushing it.

- What?

- Does that help her fill her positions, you think?

- Well, it's definitely helping her promote her brand, her personal brand, right. And I think recruiters have a huge issue, with maintaining a positive personal brand in the marketplace. So having another channel, she also massively available on LinkedIn, so she been doing that. She's under the handle, self-made millennial, so I'll put a link to her stuff, she's really good. Her last name is, I think her first name is Madeline Mann. I could be wrong, M-A-N-N. All right, so Instagram and SnapChat. I remember when Instagram and SnapChat really started taking off, and Pinterest as well. I just, from a talent acquisition standpoint, I just don't see it yet.

- Nah, nah. You can source Instagram. You know people put whatever they want on there. If your that desperate you looking on Instagram, you know more power to you. But I don't think it really. We'll leave that for the branding folks.

- What I have seen on Instagram is, there are companies that do have a good employer branding following. They're building up there brand there. They're mostly their own employees following their channel on Instagram. But what's happening is, they take a picture, a group picture, and then they tag everybody in the picture, right. So if your sourcing software engineers, and they tag somebody, everybody in their software engineering team, that could be a good source of candidates for you. You just gotta look through those--

- That's gonna be really hard to find, going through all the photos.

- If your that desperate, you know go there. What about obviously Facebook, they closed down their social graph this year. Was it this year or last year, recently. Within the last twelve months.

- I just had a great conversation about this, with Eric Jacobs, who works for SAP Info, Friday. So, for those of you listening in the future back in December. And I, he actually showed me some cool tricks that you can do in search engines to target a lot of people on Facebook. And it's amazing what you can, it reminded me of like ten years ago, when we just hopped into sites, and hopped into LinkedIn. And we had all these like nifty little tricks. We can do that with Facebook. And yes, Facebook is a tramble, and you can easily find candidates and basically you logging out and paying attention to what you see on the front page, when you find candidates information. So as long as candidates give us their information on Facebook, then we can find them via search engines. So it's not as bad as we thought.

- I'm surprised more companies haven't taken advantage of Messenger as a chatbot for talent acquisition. Sorry.

- Me, too. I agree completely.

- Yeah, I'm seeing a huge in the consumer side, right. Brands connecting with users. People that want to buy their stuff. Or using it to just push out their content, things like that. But I haven't seen it really from a talent acquisition standpoint yet.

- I haven't either, there was a couple years ago, remember there was a push a talking with chatbots, and building resumes, and doing stuff like that. And you could do direct it through Messenger. And you know it made headlines for a second, and never took off. And that always surprised me, because I think people are so worried about the data that they have on Facebook, being shared with employers, still. But I look at Messenger as though that's something completely separate. That to me, is still one I think we should watch out for. And again, I'd like to see LinkedIn mimic that model of a messaging system as well.

- And they'll charge for it, Messenger is free. If you charge for it, recruiters are gonna be less likely to adopt it.

- Ah, there not using their money.

- That's true. So 2020, hiring technology conferences, are you going to any?

- You know I am planning on, I already registered for SourceCon coming up in March, so that's one.

- Look at you, that's four months away, and you're already registered?

- Keep the party going. Maybe 'cause I just love fair, I don't know. Excited though. But usually, HR Tech, Unleash are some of the ones that I love to attend. As well as Craig Fisher's TalentNet, Talent Connect from LinkedIn, that's always a good one. ERE's, and the Camden experience is always a major, I don't miss.

- I'm telling you what's really taking off is Craig has done an incredible job, down in Dallas Fort Worth area building up that recruiter network, that tribe if you will. I mean, I look around here in the Raleigh area and the, any kind of meet up, or things like that, they've all but disbanded, theirs not a very tight knit crew community here in the Raleigh area, at all, but down in Dallas it is so tight knit it's amazing, you know everybody, its cool.

- Yeah, and believe it or not, so Craig's event sold out, it was 300+ people there, it was very crowded. It was at Toyota's headquarters, that was beautiful and at night we have a SourceCon event at Uber's offices here and Daniel Monaghan even flew in town for it, as well as some other big wigs. And so that also has sold out. It's funny, you have an event, when Atap has an event here it sells out. You have an event in Dallas, it will sell out. People just vane gate the community, you can give credit to Craig Fisher, and a lot of other people in the region.

- Louie Placenow.

- Yes, yes.

- Lots of people down there doing great job. So, rise of podcast and webinars, huge resurgence in podcasts, something like a 50% increase in the number of podcasts over the last three years. What do you attribute that to?

- They are on-demand, easy to listen to. I think webinars are heading in that direction as well. You know there so many webinars out there, that I can't watch live recording, but you know it's I wish they would record, and then put it in a library just as podcasts do. And I think podcasts are very cool to hear people talk that I can listen, when I'm walking to work, when I'm in the car, I do long drive trips to San Antonio often. That's my podcast time, when I'm on a flight, etc. You know they're very on-demand, and they're great for the person on the go. Which is like 80% of the population. So I would like to see what more is going to, because there's a lot of good ones out there, and I wish that were more on-demand.

- Well, that's what I'm doing, I'm doing the video and the podcast. That's why I kind of jumped on that bandwagon. And believe me, it wasn't by choice, I got laid off from Monster, so I was like, what the hell else am I gonna do right. Well might as well fill up my day, with speaking to people that I'm interested in speaking to. So, last topic I wanted to talk about, is voice technology and using it in Talent Acquisition. So we're talking about Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Siri, even podcast, that could be a voice technology, or recording phone conversations. What kind of positioning do you think that voice technology will play in 2020?

- Huge, I brought it up earlier with McDonald's'. I mean huge. You can interview through it now, you know what I mean. And also was that talking about on-demand, you can do it right at your home, with a device you already have just sitting there. Playing music with it occasionally. I think that's on the radar of things to watch for closely in 2020.

- Well, January is going to be voice technology month, on the Speaker Agenda show. I've got some really amazing guests. One is a recruiter that's pushing, kind of job board style but more like a career webinar, with hiring managers and things like that. He takes the mp3, pushes it out that way, and then candidates can find it and apply right through a text message. We also had Scott and Susan Westwater, from Voice Strategy. They wrote the book, and they are voice technologists, through and through, so they completely understand it. And they are really about developing a candidate. I'm sorry, developing a marketing strategy around voice technology. And then I had Nick Livingston, from Honeit on also. I think he's on so. I've never seen anything quite as comprehensive as the platform that he's put together, so.

- I agree.

- Recording and putting snippets together, and transcribing it, it's a very sweet package. That is one that was built by recruiters for recruiters, but the UX is also slick, right.

- Yes, yes, yes.

- All right, any last thoughts?

- No, you know my last thought is in 2020, one thing we didn't talk about with technology. This is more of a prediction, I just want to put it on the record.

- Oh, prediction good.

- I would like to see the return of Head Hunters.

- In what fashion? Define it?

- So, somebody that goes out and is an advocate for the actual candidate. Traditionally, recruiters we find people for jobs, right. I think there's a market that we are entering in the marketplace, where you can actually have a person who finds jobs for people. So I think we can see it emergence of Head Hunters re-entering the workforce. I think with the competition out there, I think now is a prime time.

- I don't know, I mean, I think the reason why it's changed so much is because whose paying the bill. The company is always going to pay the bill. Candidates are not gonna pay $20, 30 thousand dollar fee or 20% of their income to a recruiter. And in many states that's illegal, right. So whoever pays the bill, gets to write the rules of the game.

- Oh, yeah.

- I don't know, I think that there's a market for it. I don't know, how they're going to position it though.

- Obviously, upper level, you see it, it hasn't gone away in the executive, seed suite. But I think now you can start seeing at the VP, Senior Management level too. I think there's so much competition out there that I think companies will pay. I think those positions are getting harder and harder to fill.

- Yeah, I mean, what would be different though, would it be more of just a hands on, with a specific candidate and you're finding them a job.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Okay.

- The way we used to see it.

- Yeah.

- So.

- Interesting concept.

- Mm-hmm.

- I'll leave it at that. So before we started the call I asked you for a call to action. So 2020 Alumni Exchange Career Crossroads has a Talent Exchange. So if you're an alumni of Career Crossroads, please go to the Talent Exchange area. I'll put a link in the description here and you can follow them. They want to get back in touch with you, building hugely vibrant community, through their exchange community there, so. Anything else.

- No Jeff, thanks. Always a good time.

- All right man, you're the best. Make it a great one.

- Woo.

- Thanks everybody.