Transcript
Speaker: Welcome, everybody, back to another episode of the Transform Recruiting Podcast.
Speaker: As always, I'm your host, Brad Owens.
Speaker: And I got to say, recruiting goes much further than just the tactics we use to get candidates interested in our job and how we shuffle them through a hiring process.
Speaker: Recruiting and hiring itself extends into much more
Speaker: much more of the business than we probably think about on a day to day basis.
Speaker: So I brought on someone today that I want to have talked with you a little bit more about how this percolates throughout the business and how hiring, you know, might have much more to do with maybe some culture issues.
Speaker: And maybe there's some other things we're not really paying attention to.
Speaker: So I want to introduce you to the fabulous Mr. Tim Gloa.
Speaker: Tim, thanks so much for spending some time with us today.
Speaker: Brad, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: Excited to be here.
Speaker: Well, perfect.
Speaker: Well, before we dig in, I want to make sure everyone kind of understands where you're coming from and your background.
Speaker: So could you give them the quick runaround on Tim's background?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So I'm a recovering consultant.
Speaker: I used to spend most of my career working at one of the big global HR consulting companies.
Speaker: I've worked at Aon, Ernst & Young.
Speaker: I sold a company to Deloitte.
Speaker: I was a partner at Grant Thornton, and I've started HR Brain now to help organizations, primarily in the HR space, leverage some of the AI tools to make their lives a little bit easier.
Speaker: Perfection.
Speaker: That is the gigantic buzzword of the day for sure.
Speaker: AI is everywhere.
Speaker: I can't tell you how many times I hear that throughout my day job.
Speaker: Well, that's awesome.
Speaker: So you came with a multitude of experience then.
Speaker: So when we think about the recruiting world as it is, the tagline for our show currently is the people, ideas and tech that are kind of changing the recruiting landscape.
Speaker: So what do you feel like truly is changing the recruiting landscape today?
Speaker: So I think there's a few problems or a few challenges.
Speaker: And also that presents itself as an opportunity for companies to do things a little bit differently.
Speaker: But it's really almost starting before the recruiting part of this equation and making sure that you get your foundation right, your business right, which will also then help
Speaker: your recruiting and your ability to attract and retain employees.
Speaker: I did a study in January.
Speaker: I released it in February.
Speaker: It's free for download if anybody wants it.
Speaker: It's called State of Work Today.
Speaker: If you go to stateofworktoday.com, you can download a copy of this report.
Speaker: We surveyed 6,000 workers globally in this study, 2,000 in the US, 2,000 in Canada, 2,000 in Europe.
Speaker: And we found a lot of problems that many workers are experiencing kind of day to day.
Speaker: So for instance, for 32% of Americans, they agree that their manager is the single most stressful part of their day, right?
Speaker: That's problematic, right?
Speaker: That's really, it shouldn't be like that.
Speaker: We know there's good managers.
Speaker: We know there's bad managers, but it really indicates that there's
Speaker: you know, there's a problem within organizations and putting people into managerial positions that maybe they're not getting any training.
Speaker: Maybe they were a really good deliverer, right?
Speaker: They're a good salesperson or whatever it is.
Speaker: But now they're leading people and maybe they shouldn't be, right?
Speaker: So from a recruiting perspective, I think that's going to be problematic because you're going to have higher churn with some of those managers like that.
Speaker: And it also could hurt you in your ability to attract new candidates because how organizations treat employees lives forever in the Glassdoor era.
Speaker: right?
Speaker: 75% of job seekers in America look at Glassdoor, good or bad.
Speaker: I'm not saying it's good.
Speaker: I'm not saying it's bad data, but your Glassdoor reputation is something that you need to be aware of and manage.
Speaker: And if you have terrible managers causing stress for your employees, that's going to show up in Glassdoor.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I want to pause here on that one because I want to highlight that one for everyone.
Speaker: Think right now or just go ahead and do this.
Speaker: I want to get your reaction audience.
Speaker: Type in your company and Glassdoor on Google.
Speaker: See what comes up.
Speaker: Before you actually do that, though, how did just thinking about doing that make you feel?
Speaker: That's probably a sign, right?
Speaker: Maybe we should be thinking about this a little bit more.
Speaker: Not to derail you, but I always love that thought experiment for people.
Speaker: Yeah, it's so true.
Speaker: We actually have created an AI-powered culture assessment tool that will scrape Glassdoor data or any employee feedback, employee survey data that you might have, and can paint a picture of your corporate culture.
Speaker: It assesses leadership.
Speaker: It assesses and determines whether your culture is toxic or high performing.
Speaker: And so many companies, when you look at that data, so many companies have leaders that micromanage.
Speaker: that change their minds continuously, provide conflicting information or instructions.
Speaker: It really is a little bit of a leadership deficit for many organizations.
Speaker: That's come in clear in a lot of that Glassdoor data.
Speaker: But also looking at the survey again, it's becoming clear to many workers that only 38% of Americans trust the decisions made by their senior leaders.
Speaker: The vast minority.
Speaker: A vast minority have kind of a trust deficit with their senior leaders.
Speaker: Now that's different than your manager, right?
Speaker: This is intended to get at the senior leaders in a company.
Speaker: But when you look at the Glassdoor data and you can see thoughts about unethical behaviors or favoritism, or I mean, that stuff comes out when we assess culture using that Glassdoor data.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So the potential problems and things that are going to plague hiring, we mentioned kind of that big first step of that foundation.
Speaker: What else is on your list?
Speaker: So I think another big aspect, we are talking about culture and the importance of culture.
Speaker: And I think it's worthwhile for everyone to understand what
Speaker: What is that?
Speaker: What do we mean when Brad and Tim are talking about culture?
Speaker: And it's, first of all, it's kind of the DNA.
Speaker: It's a secret sauce.
Speaker: It's the way organizations do things.
Speaker: I don't necessarily believe, you know, that there's one size fits all for culture because every organization has a slightly different culture, a slightly different way of doing things.
Speaker: And culture is always evolving, right?
Speaker: You probably had a very different culture pre-pandemic.
Speaker: Then all of a sudden the pandemic hit and that shifted culture probably more radically than any other shift in recent memory.
Speaker: But it is always evolving.
Speaker: It's always evolving.
Speaker: I think the culture that many organizations want is also very different than the culture that employees may encounter day to day.
Speaker: Just their day to day experiences is different than what the vision that leaders have.
Speaker: would like to see with their culture.
Speaker: Back to the state of work today, 29% of Americans describe their corporate culture as toxic.
Speaker: Not just bad, but actually.
Speaker: Not just bad, but toxic.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: So that's almost one in three, right?
Speaker: So if you look at three companies, almost one out of those will have some sort of toxic culture.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, what is that?
Speaker: That's leadership that doesn't listen.
Speaker: That's leadership that micromanages, even though they may say that they empower employees.
Speaker: That's leadership that changes their mind.
Speaker: And we have to make changes.
Speaker: We have to be flexible.
Speaker: That's, you know, but it's saying do this, do A in the morning and then an hour later, you know, do Z instead.
Speaker: It's, it's,
Speaker: It's a problem.
Speaker: It's a real problem.
Speaker: And it's not just that organizations aren't, you know, that they're creating this environment for employees that isn't positive.
Speaker: Nobody wants to work in a toxic environment.
Speaker: Nobody wants to work in a company where their boss is the single most stressful part of their day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And eventually many of those, you know, it's funny, eventually many of those employees may leave or you may capture them, right?
Speaker: They may be, if you think back to the TV series Married with Children, right?
Speaker: And Al Bundy, the shoe salesman, right?
Speaker: He stuck to that job.
Speaker: He didn't leave, right?
Speaker: It was, his viewpoint was almost, it's the devil I know, right?
Speaker: I'm, I would, it could be worse even somewhere else, right?
Speaker: I want to, you know, so he kind of stuck out there, but was he, do you think he was performing at his best?
Speaker: Likely not.
Speaker: Was he engaging customers and going above and beyond?
Speaker: I mean, no, right?
Speaker: So you may be doing okay, but if you're in this toxic environment, you could be doing better, right?
Speaker: If you have a toxic work culture, you may be growing 10% a year, but you might be able to grow 15% if you, 20%, if you didn't have that environment.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So again, I mean, the audience that I typically have coming on here is thinking, well, where's the recruiting gold?
Speaker: Well, think about it this way, y'all.
Speaker: Maybe recruiting is not the issue.
Speaker: Maybe if you try to recruit into like something that might be on fire, why in the world would people come work?
Speaker: We're trying to help you think about maybe there's some deeper underlying issues here that you may want to think about as an organization before you start thinking about your actual recruiting itself.
Speaker: So I appreciate you coming on and doing this.
Speaker: So we talked about two.
Speaker: We talked about the foundation.
Speaker: We talked about that culture.
Speaker: What are some of the other things that pop up for you is potentially playing into this?
Speaker: So I think another big one here is the importance of diversity and inclusion in people's lives.
Speaker: Now, this has gotten a little bit of a bad rap.
Speaker: Lately, it's become a dirty word.
Speaker: So is ESG.
Speaker: That was a headline in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks back.
Speaker: But it is really important to workers, not just people who might be minorities or LGBTQ or whatever, not just to women.
Speaker: It's important to a lot of workers.
Speaker: In the same State of Work Today study, 42% of Americans believe that their company effectively
Speaker: implements diversity, equity and inclusion policies in their workplace.
Speaker: 42% as well also believe that their internal communications are inclusive.
Speaker: That leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Speaker: I think most importantly, as it relates to recruitment though, getting this right really does impact a candidate's decision to continue in the process or to accept the interview.
Speaker: 51% in the United States believe that an organization's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion impacts their decision to accept a job or not.
Speaker: Numbers are higher in Europe and higher in Canada.
Speaker: Almost three quarters, 72% of Canadians, if you have some operations in Canada, 72% of Canadians and 76% of Europeans feel that their organization or the organization's commitment to diversity impacts their decision to accept that job or not.
Speaker: So those are almost kind of the table stakes things that we have to get right as part of this issue.
Speaker: as part of this process.
Speaker: And a lot of organizations aren't getting those table stakes right.
Speaker: And it's not just big companies, it's little companies as well.
Speaker: Right now, when I've analyzed, so another tool that HR Brain has is a DE&I, diversity, equity, and inclusion, unconscious bias detection tool.
Speaker: solution.
Speaker: So you can look at any piece of written content and assess it across 22 different dimensions of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it will identify if there's any biases in that.
Speaker: I've looked at the global Fortune 100 companies.
Speaker: I took five of their last jobs, job postings, and ran them through this.
Speaker: 25% of companies have at least one strong bias in them and the most common biases in those job descriptions.
Speaker: And these are big companies, Global Fortune 1000.
Speaker: The most common bias is gender related.
Speaker: The next one is age.
Speaker: So if you have language in your job description that is talking about being young and energetic and full, you know, that's really a bias that is going to target younger workers as opposed to some of us who may have gray hair.
Speaker: you may use unconsciously masculine coded language.
Speaker: For instance, if you're hiring a salesperson, right, the job description may read, you know, aggressively meet sales targets, right?
Speaker: Well, that's very masculine coded language, which may alienate a potential female candidate.
Speaker: Gender and age are the two biggest offenders, most common offenders, I should say, as it relates to job descriptions.
Speaker: But a quarter of all job descriptions have some sort of bias in them.
Speaker: So there you go.
Speaker: You're missing out on a larger recruiting pool of candidates.
Speaker: Check out your job descriptions.
Speaker: Maybe your job descriptions aren't exactly attracting the type of people that you would truly want in a diverse candidate pool.
Speaker: You know, it's even something as simple.
Speaker: Last week, when I looked on LinkedIn, I typed in the word salesman.
Speaker: How many Brad jobs do you think appeared?
Speaker: in LinkedIn with the term salesman in it.
Speaker: All of LinkedIn?
Speaker: Millions?
Speaker: No, there was 77, right?
Speaker: So there's only 77, right?
Speaker: Looked at those 77 jobs and if they've been on, if they've been live for more than a week, so it's not something that just went up, right?
Speaker: It was not something that just...
Speaker: was thrown up, you know, minutes ago.
Speaker: I only looked at the ones that were open and accepting positions for longer than a week.
Speaker: Of those 77, how many do you think had zero applicants?
Speaker: Judging by your stuff, 75% of them.
Speaker: 74 of the 77 jobs.
Speaker: So almost all of them had zero applicants through LinkedIn.
Speaker: Now I know there's other ways to apply and all that, but if you've got salesman in your title of the job that you're looking for,
Speaker: Um, you're not going to attract a lot of women candidates.
Speaker: You're also not going to attract a lot of male candidates either.
Speaker: Um, because that's not necessarily the environment that many people might want to work in.
Speaker: It doesn't seem as inclusive as it could be.
Speaker: Very interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I love words matter people.
Speaker: Words matter.
Speaker: Words matter.
Speaker: Language is important.
Speaker: And we all make mistakes, right?
Speaker: I use the term guys.
Speaker: How are you guys doing?
Speaker: But we need to be as inclusive, I think, as we can and really check ourselves on those unconscious biases.
Speaker: These are not at all suggesting that these are blatant...
Speaker: blatant offenses, it's unconscious, right?
Speaker: We are just using language that may alienate a certain part of our target audience.
Speaker: If we think of a lot of the functions in HR, we really need to leverage a lot of the thinking that happens every day in marketing.
Speaker: We need to figure out how we can write copy and job descriptions, which is really basically an advertisement, in a way that we can attract the best candidates, just like advertising copy does and just like direct mail copy does.
Speaker: We need to think like a marketer and use some of that data, not be stuck in...
Speaker: You know, the last century, like many in HR, not everyone, of course, but many in HR, many HR leaders are afraid of using data, right?
Speaker: Whereas it's common in marketing, right?
Speaker: You can forecast data.
Speaker: lifetime customer value in marketing.
Speaker: You can forecast the probability that a customer is going to sign up.
Speaker: We don't use a lot of those same analytics in the HR space.
Speaker: And I think we can learn a lot.
Speaker: HR leaders can really learn a lot by partnering across the silo with their marketing colleagues and see what they're doing and see how we can apply this to the entire employee lifecycle, the attraction, the retention, the rewarding,
Speaker: the engaging and in some cases, the offboarding of talent and how we can use data to make smarter decisions in that entire process.
Speaker: Love that.
Speaker: I love it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So you and I can certainly talk for an hour or two or five about all of the different problems that people could have.
Speaker: But you've been in this space a while.
Speaker: You've been seeing transformations.
Speaker: You've been helping people through these.
Speaker: What do you feel like if someone's listening, they're all of a sudden like, oh, crap, you're right.
Speaker: I may want to start thinking about some other things.
Speaker: Where's that low hanging fruit that you typically see companies able to knock out and start?
Speaker: making headway towards solving some of these issues?
Speaker: So I think the easiest way to look at this really is to bring data into the equation.
Speaker: Do a quick employee survey.
Speaker: Spend five minutes.
Speaker: If you've got somebody in your marketing group who can help with the survey, put together a survey, an engagement survey, a culture survey, use some open-ended questions, put that data into ChatGPT and get some insights as to what's going on with your workforce.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm a huge believer in data, right?
Speaker: Because that brings light into the picture.
Speaker: It sheds light on problems.
Speaker: And then you can start to make decisions and adjustments in a more thoughtful way.
Speaker: Another great one to do is to really look at onboarding surveys.
Speaker: Why does somebody join your company?
Speaker: A simple survey, two, three minutes for every new hire.
Speaker: Send them a question, even an open-ended question.
Speaker: Why did you join our company?
Speaker: Just have them respond back.
Speaker: Compare that to your off-boarding surveys.
Speaker: right?
Speaker: If I joined because of reasons X, Y, and Z, and I'm Canadian, so I apologize for the Z there, X, Y, and Z, but I'm leaving because of reasons X and B and C, right?
Speaker: Then we're probably messing up X, whatever that is, right?
Speaker: I joined for
Speaker: you know, to learn about a new process or a new technology, right?
Speaker: That was my expectation, but I'm not seeing that, right?
Speaker: Then we're having a breakdown in either the communication or the delivery, or in some cases, we can have a breakdown just in that whole recruiting process.
Speaker: If we're telling people,
Speaker: raising their expectations about being able to do something and not delivering on that.
Speaker: That's why 60% of workers feel, of job switchers feel that their expectations were met.
Speaker: Why is that so low?
Speaker: What are we over-promising but then under-delivering?
Speaker: And we need to have that data in order to make those sorts of informed decisions.
Speaker: So I'm a huge believer in short surveys.
Speaker: They don't have to be long.
Speaker: Gone are the days where the survey should take 30 minutes, but you really should be looking at...
Speaker: brief surveys, a couple of minutes, two, three minutes long, ask one open-ended question.
Speaker: You even do the net promoter surveys, right?
Speaker: Just track those over time, every quarter and use that data.
Speaker: Ask the follow-up question, ask why you feel that, not just the net promoter score, but
Speaker: ask why they answered in that way.
Speaker: And you'll get far greater insights into your workplace that you can then start to develop some strategies to address some shortcomings.
Speaker: There is no silver bullet, right?
Speaker: There's no one thing that you can do that will solve all problems because we don't know, as a former consultant, we don't know what your problems are.
Speaker: And your problems at company X are going to be very different than company Zed.
Speaker: I like your idea of gather the data.
Speaker: If those listening might need some different ideas, Google employee pulse surveys, that used to be kind of the big term of, hey, just really quick, easy pulse surveys, once a week kind of thing, and you'll start gathering some of this data so you can start using it.
Speaker: There's also templates with SurveyMonkey that you can use.
Speaker: I think the two other things that organizations should really think of is they should really look at their
Speaker: talent acquisition, funnel, and pipeline.
Speaker: I remember working with one client in the past, and they were a manufacturer in the US, and they were doing a lot of stuff with Styrofoam and food containers and things like that.
Speaker: And they would hire 50 people, but after two weeks, only one or two would still be there.
Speaker: Ouch.
Speaker: So a lot wouldn't even show up for the first day.
Speaker: So you hire someone, you're going to start on Monday and 10 of those would not even show up because it was really kind of, it was not ideal working conditions.
Speaker: It was hot, there were smells, you're dealing with chemicals.
Speaker: It was not necessarily ventilated all that well.
Speaker: They weren't paying really well.
Speaker: They increased the salary by maybe a quarter.
Speaker: Or they find that if a chicken factory were to come to the same town where the factory was, they would lose a whole bunch of their workers, right?
Speaker: Because they pay $4 an hour more.
Speaker: So really kind of get that, you know, understand those metrics, right?
Speaker: Understand your pipeline.
Speaker: And, you know, maybe that's what you have to do.
Speaker: But if you need 10 workers, right, that means you need to get 250 new hires, right?
Speaker: Just understand, you know, really, really,
Speaker: understand those metrics.
Speaker: And then I think the second big thing that organizations need to think about is, is what are your demographics of your current workforce?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The average age of an American worker today is 42, right?
Speaker: Just the straight average in some places.
Speaker: The average age of a worker is much older.
Speaker: So nurses, for instance, the average age of an RN today is,
Speaker: is 50.
Speaker: So if you're a hospital, right, or bus drivers are also have typically older workers, libraries typically have workers over 50 and also electrical utilities.
Speaker: A lot of the linemen, people fixing things are often over the age of 50.
Speaker: I'm not calling those folks old, but I am saying that they are one step closer to that glide path into retirement, right?
Speaker: And
Speaker: If you thought there was a challenge a couple of years ago with the great resignation, we as a society are going to be facing that in the next couple of years as a lot of these workers start to exit.
Speaker: And what can you do to retain them?
Speaker: Only 10% of organizations in America today have a mature worker retention strategy in place.
Speaker: So your recruiting challenges can get a lot worse in the coming years if we're not able to kind of hold on to some of those critical people today.
Speaker: Now, they may not want to do the same job.
Speaker: Maybe they want to leave a legacy.
Speaker: Maybe they want to work part-time right before they leave.
Speaker: Maybe they want to mentor the next generation of workers.
Speaker: There's lots of different ways that organizations can get smart about that, but you really have to know your numbers, right?
Speaker: You have to know the average age of your workers.
Speaker: And if that is going to create just, I wouldn't like to say a tsunami, but a big wave of exits in the coming years, you need to know about that now and start to plan for it.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: Well, those are some fantastic takeaways.
Speaker: I don't want to overload people.
Speaker: I think like just a couple is a good start for everyone else, but I want them to be able to find more when they want them.
Speaker: So give everyone a little piece of Tim on the internet.
Speaker: Where can they go to find you?
Speaker: So on Twitter, I'm at TimGloa, G-L-O-W-A.
Speaker: And also my company is HRBrain.ai.com.
Speaker: It's quite the coveted URL.
Speaker: That's fantastic.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: I will, can you shout out the link again to the state of work that you did?
Speaker: You bet.
Speaker: So go to stateofworktoday.com.
Speaker: There's also a link from my main website, hrbrain.ai.
Speaker: Under the thought leadership tab, just sign up, grab a copy of the report, and you'll have it in your mailbox within seconds.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: I'll make sure that that link is in the show notes for everybody.
Speaker: But Tim, thank you so much for giving us a little bit of insight into maybe thinking a little bit deeper outside of our recruiting processes to see that there may be some underlying problems as well.
Speaker: Really, really appreciate that.
Speaker: Everyone, if you enjoyed this episode, there are many, many more like it at transformrecruiting.com.
Speaker: If you have any suggestions for what we may want to discuss in a future episode or know someone that may be interested and you want to hear what they have to say, shoot me an email.
Speaker: It's hello at bradowens.com.
Speaker: Happy to talk to you about what we could potentially do in the future.
Speaker: But Tim, thank you so much again.
Speaker: Really, really appreciate it.
Speaker: Brad, thank you so much for having me.
Speaker: All right, everyone.
Speaker: We'll see you on the next one.
