86 [EB Series] Activating Hiring Managers to Transform Recruitment | Martin Warren (ex-Grab)

[00:00:00] You're listening to VideoMyPod's Employer Brand Series. I'm David Machucker and joining me for this very special Singapore edition is the wonderful co-host Emma Lang. We're sitting down with incredible people shaping employer brand across the region to have honest conversations about what's working, what's not, and where to next for employer brand and recruitment marketing. Where's it all heading? There's a lot to learn from this part of the world in Singapore. Let's get into it.

[00:00:30] Welcome to the Video My Podcast Series where we go deep in employee brand and recruitment marketing. I'm David Machucker. I'm Emma Lang. I'm Martin Warren. And I'm really excited to be unpacking this episode. This will be a good one. We've got, we're really going to focus in on what other recruitment activities you can be doing through sourcing channels. And I feel like we've got someone who's very credible and experienced and does things slightly differently.

[00:00:57] So there's a lot in it for people listening into this episode. Martin, welcome. And if you don't mind, please introduce yourself. Thanks, David. Great to be here. I'm really looking forward to this. So Martin Warren, originally from Australia, now live up in Singapore, 25 plus years in recruitment.

[00:01:16] And the last seven years I spent at Grab building and running the sourcing function there, managing all our channels, and also in the last 12 months took on the employer brand and recruitment marketing. Awesome. Now, a lot of people in my neck of the woods, Australia will be listening to the episode and more broadly people here in Singapore and beyond. But maybe people haven't heard of Grab. Right.

[00:01:45] Maybe. Because they're not from this region. Can you give us the context of who Grab is and the numbers that you might have been working with? Yeah. So if you're from Australia, you travel up to like Bali, I'm sure you've heard of Grab. You've probably seen the green motorbikes or helmets going. But Grab, think of Grab as Southeast Asia's equivalent of Uber.

[00:02:06] So Grab operates across eight countries, which was Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Miramar, Malaysia, I think Philippines. And they're just kind of moving into Taiwan. So it's ride sharing and also food delivery. So they're massive. You know, the 600 million people in Southeast Asia. So it's huge. Yeah. And employment numbers.

[00:02:28] So I'm not exactly sure what Grab would be now, but probably around about 8,000 permit employees and probably at least that many contingent workers as well. So it's a massive organisation. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, I'm really looking forward to unpacking this theme, how you created efficiencies through sourcing and activating hiring managers.

[00:02:49] For me, yes. The hiring managers that have certainly got my interest. It's one of my favourite episodes, this one, I think, because as an employer brand practitioner, I always talk about how I think the hiring managers are one of the most powerful unlocks for us, but the hardest one to do. Because it's not a tech channel. You can control and own and activate when you need to. These are very busy people, but very powerful, influential people to support your recruitment, hiring and your sourcing efforts. Why wouldn't they show up?

[00:03:18] Why wouldn't they show up? Why wouldn't they show up? Yeah. For their own roles to hire in their teams. So we'd love to hear a little bit about how you approached that. Yeah. So look, at Grab it was pretty unique, right? It was a very fast paced environment and the love drug at Grab was speed, right? So, you know, recruiting is a team sport. Okay. And I think it's how you frame it.

[00:03:40] And, you know, if you can address and understand the pain of a hiring manager, it gives you leverage, right, to influence them and get them into the team sport of recruiting, right? So how it came about at Grab was, you know, we were doing a lot of hiring, you know, and I'm talking about our junior to mid-level engineers, okay, across multiple markets and some mid to senior roles as well.

[00:04:10] So the issue was speed, you know, so we were doing, we had a lot of inbound, but also my sourcing team was going outbound for particular roles, right? And the thing was about speed and getting applicants to apply, right? Good applicants. Sorry? Good applicants. Yeah, good applicants, right? So obviously if we're outbound, we're identifying and inviting them to apply, right? And to me, recruiting is, it's a science and an art, right? So the science is actually how you go about identifying candidates.

[00:04:38] And that's not super hard these days, right? You've got lots of tools and things like LinkedIn that you can do. But the art is the engagement piece. It's actually getting them to apply, right? And I think over time, and, you know, you see a lot of articles about this now where candidates have little or no trust in recruiters because we don't get back and we're not transparent and things like that. So just thinking about this around, okay, we need to activate these candidates faster, right?

[00:05:06] Because speed is the love drug at Grab, right? So what we ended up doing or what I did was I sat down with a couple of really senior hiring managers at Grab. Like these are heads of engineering, very senior guys. And I kind of said, here's a way that we can go about it. We can actually do the outreach on your behalf, right? Very different. Outreach on your behalf. So what does that look like? So we would be sending the actual outreach, the campaigns would be coming from the hiring manager, not from the talent sourcer. Via email? Via email, yeah.

[00:05:34] All our outreach was via email, right? So EDMs. Yeah. So we had a sourcing platform that allowed us to integrate into your email and your calendar, okay? So we could actually, behind the scenes, the talent sourcer could manage all this. We could build the campaign, which generally was four or five or sometimes six emails that would go out over a period of time. So they were sequenced as well? They were sequenced, yes.

[00:05:59] So what would happen is if the candidate didn't respond to the first one, then four days later, the second one would go out, you know? And so if they responded, then the campaign would stop. But they would come from the hiring manager. You know, it's from the hiring manager's email address. And what did you find the difference between a recruiter sending out an outreach email versus a hiring manager? What was the – do you have any number of that? So the open rates didn't change a lot. Maybe slightly they went up. It's the reply rates, right?

[00:06:29] So, you know, from a recruiter who wrote, you know, a really good email, we would get reply rates of, you know, maybe 25% to 30% given to a hiring manager. And let's say it's coming from, you know, head of engineering for whoever. The reply rates would go up to 80%. Wow, 80%. And if you're targeting, you know, like if your pool is, let's say it's 50 people. Yeah.

[00:06:52] And you're getting 20% or 30% reply rates versus 30%, that's the difference between actually filling the role and having really good quality. Yeah, got it. Well, they might not all be wanting to apply for a position, but they could be quite grateful that they've been thought of as well. Exactly, exactly. And one of the things that we, you know, we sat down with the, and we only did this with senior hiring managers. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't the junior, like the people in the team, it was the hiring manager.

[00:07:19] Because what we wanted to do was we wanted to show to the candidate that you're special. Okay? Coming from head of engineering, right? An email to me who was, you know, like a, you know, a back-end developer of eight or nine years experience to get it from the head of engineering. Wow. Special, right?

[00:07:38] And it was very much, we would help the, you know, we would write the emails for the hiring manager, but we'd give it to them to build, you know, put their tone, their language around the opportunity and things like that. So that's what kind of drove the, you know, that engagement. And yes, we didn't always get, yes, I want to work for you. But we got, hey, thanks for reaching out to me. You know, I'm not ready at the moment or, you know, da, da, da. But I'd love to stay in contact.

[00:08:02] So we actually, we kind of educated the hiring managers and we gave them like some rules of engagement, if you like. So what we said was if a candidate replies in the positive, you need to respond to them within 24 hours, right? And just treat it like just a conversation you're having around the barbecue or sitting at the bar, right? And set up an informal call with them and talk about, you know, about them, not about us, okay?

[00:08:27] If they didn't reply, if they replied in the negative, also reply to them, say, hey, thanks. That's great. If you know anyone, let us know. Let's stay in contact. And if you're in my area, let's have a coffee in the future. So that's what, that's how we framed it. That's how we presented it. And it wasn't, it didn't take up a lot of their time, but that's, I think, why we got the sort of engagement that we did. So we made it very clear in terms of the outcome and what was expected. And if they didn't do it, we'd actually call it because our platform allowed us to see everything that was happening.

[00:08:56] We could see the reply, right? We could even prompt the hiring manager, hey, you haven't replied, reply. So we could see it. So we had complete visibility. And I think that's what drove the behavior as well. Nice. And in a market where people refer to AI slop, this is very different. This is intentional, personalized. It's not coming from a fake email address, which often can happen. Yeah, I really like it. Yeah, yeah.

[00:09:24] What was, what was, did it take much convincing to get those senior leaders to really lean in? So, you know, I went and, you know, the two or three hiring managers that I first worked with, they were really friendlies. They were very pro the sourcing team, right? Because, you know, we did lots of really good work with them. And I went with this idea to them. And they took it on. And then what happened was that we started to get some really good results quite quickly.

[00:09:53] So it kind of, the word got out. It got to the point where I actually had to stop hiring managers. And even the TAs were coming to us all the time. We're going to get this hiring. We need to kind of, we need to be very selective here because it was going to be a fire hose and a teacup sort of scenario. So it was kind of word of mouth where it really, you know, and they started to see the results. But I really like that because you're starting off small and it's really the best way to grow any program of work.

[00:10:20] You don't want to go from zero to 100 and, but start off small, create that advocacy and then organically it grows. Yeah, it's experimenting, right? Give it a go. Do it on a controlled scale. And then if it works, scale the hell out of it, right? If it doesn't, change the game, right? And look, we had some fires as well. You know, it wasn't all, you know, a rosy success, but there were some fires. But in general, you know, it was quite successful.

[00:10:49] And to that point, it drives the behaviour even when you had to say stop. We can't handle it in the scale it yet. But maybe they proactively then just behave in that way as a hiring manager and they're proactively outreaching and sourcing, which is ultimately what you want to drive as well. So I see you achieving that. So I see you achieving supporting that funnel very quickly and getting those replies in. But you're also building the talent pool, right?

[00:11:13] So, you know, the 99% that don't get through, but those that do apply that want to stay in touch, that would generally engage because the hiring manager reached out to them. And I'm assuming you've then moved into your, to a CRM or a talent pool to then nurture. So, yes, we did. We had a CRM connected to our sourcing platform as well. So we would move those candidates that did respond but not ready to move now, depending on what, you know, the reason for that was. But we also encouraged the hiring manager to stay in touch, right?

[00:11:43] Now, we actually did this for really, really senior roles as well. Like I'm talking like heads of, you know, very senior product managers where those people weren't necessarily a veil in this market. They didn't have the experience or the scale and we would go overseas. The other thing that when we went overseas with this, if you've got the role coming in from like head of engineering or very senior execs in the organisation, often, you know, we'd reach out to these people in the US. They didn't know who Grab was, right? Yeah.

[00:12:11] But they could see who was messaging them. They'd go and look at their LinkedIn profile because we always hyperlink their name in the email to their LinkedIn profile. And that kind of created credibility, right? So, but we encourage the hiring managers, especially for the senior roles, not so much the more junior roles, but for the senior roles, build that relationship and stay in touch. Even though we would push them into the CRM, but, you know, we relied on the hiring managers to really, you know, kind of keep engaging.

[00:12:40] So, you mentioned emails. Where did you get their names from? So, that's the science of sourcing, right? So, you know, using our platform, you know, you could source across, you know, 50 plus platforms online. So, for example, obviously LinkedIn. Yeah, but, you know, not everyone's on LinkedIn. You know, so GitHub, Stack Overflow, you know, if you wanted to go after, you know, product or UX UI to people, you know, your Kaggle and Dribbles, that sort of stuff.

[00:13:09] You've got, you know, various other communities that we would source through. So, and the platform allowed us to, you know, would build, pull the profiles from all these, or details about their profile from all these different places online, and it'd build a unified view. And more often than not, it would find their personal email in the public domain, right? Some countries wasn't so good, and sometimes we even get a phone number. We never reached out on phone numbers. We never reached out on company emails.

[00:13:38] It was just on personal emails. Yeah. So, you know, so we probably got maybe 75, 80% of the people that we identified, we would have contact information. Okay. So, yeah, so that's how we would go about it. And you mentioned a little earlier some mistakes. So what were some of the learnings?

[00:13:57] Some of the learnings, I think, were, you know, maybe kind of maybe stretch out the, you know, the gaps between the emails. You know, we would do it every four or five days. You know, that was probably one learning. We got some feedback on that, you know. Too much. Too much. Really? Right, yeah. So, but that's fine. Good feedback, bad feedback. It's, you know, it's great. Right.

[00:14:23] The other learnings, I think, were to be really selective in terms of who you work with, what hiring managers work with, because, you know, you don't want to kind of dilute what you're doing. And the other learning was educate the TAs, right, because the TAs were out in front of the hiring managers and the hiring managers were hearing about this and they were asking the TAs about it. Right. And the TAs were kind of, we didn't really educate the TAs a lot in terms of how it all works.

[00:14:49] So, make them more aware so they can actually explain to the hiring managers, you know, what we're doing, but also explain the commitment and the necessary activities required of the hiring manager. Right. So, that's probably the main learnings that we had. And if you had access to a resource like an employer brander or someone who leaned in more for internal comms or communication in general, what's the benefit of having them involved in a project like this?

[00:15:18] So, I think, so in terms of like an employer branding person, I think they can help us with the messaging, definitely. Although sources are generally pretty good at writing, you know, messaging because that's kind of, that's the art bit. But I think getting more, you know, maybe using, you know, other content, right? So, for example, you know, like if we have any really good videos or stuff like that, that we can embed into the content.

[00:15:42] You know, we had a couple of scenarios where we embedded some images into emails, but the images maybe, you know, like we kind of stretched them ourselves and they would be blurry and things like that. But that was kind of, again, that was a speed thing, right? We just need to do it and we kind of found it, right? One of the really good things that we had actually was this infographic on the history of Grab, right? So, we used to embed that in the email and that used to be really good for people that are overseas because they could see, you know, how Grab started in 2012

[00:16:10] and listed on the NASDAQ in, you know, 22, I think it was, December 22 and so on. So, they saw the evolution of the organisation. So, yeah, more using, you know, content from EB I think was, you know, really important. We probably didn't do that enough. Yeah. I was wondering, did you also then, because you've got a great engagement from the get-go as the cans are hearing from the hiring manager and if they continue down that funnel and they go through the interviews and they're being shortlisted,

[00:16:39] do you still encourage that hiring manager to be present outside of the formal interviews to then, for the real quality shortlisted cans, it's to feel like it was great to meet you or let's have a separate coffee and, but that's also ways you could probably embed up the content. Yeah. So, our process was, so, you know, so if we go end-to-end, like obviously the source of the TA would sit down and do a really detailed kick-off with the hiring manager and we'd kind of align on what was required and then we'd go, okay,

[00:17:08] so we're going to do the outreach on behalf of the hiring manager for our outbound stuff and we would do that. We coached the hiring manager in terms of, you know, what to talk about and gather a little bit of information, like just basic things like, you know, confirm their, get their phone number, stuff like that, right, but also really honing on what's important to the candidate and we gave them a little bit of a script and a template to, you know, put notes and they could add that into the platform, right?

[00:17:33] So, then what would happen was we coached the hiring manager to say, okay, you make a decision as to whether you think, based on your conversation, you want to bring this candidate into a formal kind of interview process. Then they would introduce the TA, right, and they would do a handover via email to the TA, but they would still stay involved in the background, making sure that, you know, things are pushing forward

[00:18:01] and if the candidate, and obviously the candidate's got their email address, you know, we had situations where the candidate would reach out and ask questions and things like that. We just encouraged the hiring manager, you know, to kind of just respond, right? But once the candidate wanted to, you know, opted in and the hiring manager thought, yes, it's worth pursuing, we pass it over to the TA to manage. Okay. Love that. I was wondering if there's also any, you mentioned maybe learnings, if informing TA more around that program would be one,

[00:18:30] because if your hiring manager, you guys, are practically going after candidates A and B, but then your recruitment team also uncover the same candidates and they're going to be messaged at the same time and that's when it could perhaps have a mixed message or a bit of confusion point for the candidate. Did that happen? So, I mean, generally that didn't happen because a lot of the candidates that we were going after, it was more like to get them, you had to go outbound, right? Yeah.

[00:18:56] So, and because the, you know, the platform that we were running the sourcing in, the TA had access. They could see the pipeline. Yeah. Right. So, I don't recall of a situation where, you know, we had inbound and outbound for the same candidate. And generally the TA of sourcing was working on the role. The TA wouldn't be doing their own outbound sourcing. In fact, if they were going to do that, we would pull out because we had limited resources and we'd focus our resources on something. You know, maybe it did happen.

[00:19:24] I don't recall it happening, but, you know, yeah. Yeah. It's good to understand the ways of working, you know, the operations behind it. Yeah. It was really important, like, you know, when we, you know, we'd always do a pre-kickoff, the sourcer and the TA, and we'd define how we're going to work together, right? And then we'd go into the kickoff for the hiring manager and get really aligned on the requirements and make sure that, you know, we're not kind of duplicating what each other does. You know, I don't want the sourcer to be sourcing through LinkedIn and the TA's doing the same thing. Exactly.

[00:19:52] You know, that's kind of, that's crazy, yeah. I'm generally excited about this one. If you work in talent acquisition or employee brand, you would have come across James Ellis. Four books, over 15 years of experience, one of the most recognised employee brand authority voices in the world. On September 2nd, he's coming to Melbourne for the first time ever. He'll be talking about how to be choosable. How to be different in a market that's super competitive.

[00:20:21] If you're in TA or employer brand or you're a CPO looking for differentiation, this is the most valuable afternoon that you'll have this year. Tickets are in sale now. Don't sleep on this. I do feel like hiring managers need to step up and sell the role. Yeah. But sometimes they're not very good at it. Yep. Whereas talent acquisition, they are typically salespeople. Yeah. And they can get ahead of the curve of

[00:20:49] and anticipate questions that might arise. So how did you empower the hiring managers to answer any questions, whether it be around culture or ways of work? Yeah, good question, David. In fact, Glenn Cathy recently wrote an article about this about six weeks ago, and he talked about how we don't train our hiring managers to interview, right, and sell. Whereas, you know, other professions, they get trained. And even if we do train our hiring managers, they do an interview once every blue moon.

[00:21:19] So it should be a constant thing that we're encouraging and coaching there, right? So, you know, what we tried to do was get the hiring managers to focus on the candidate and not themselves, right? And we would give them some, you know, some things to talk about. But, you know, I think that's part of the reason why we wanted hiring managers to send the email, right? Because generally, and what we saw was it wasn't,

[00:21:47] we didn't get a lot of responses on the first email. But the second email, the responses went up, right, significantly. The third email, they went up again. The fourth email, they started to come down. So we knew that the second, third, and fourth email that went out was where we were getting the responses, right? Because after the first email, I'm sure they were going and clicking on the profile, right? And looking at what the background of the hiring manager is. Do I want to- You're planting the seed. Yeah. Do I want to work with this hiring manager now? Can I learn from this hiring manager, you know?

[00:22:17] And probably done, you know, did some other research. So we sold to the hiring manager that your, you know, your brand is really important, right? People want to work with good people, right? And obviously they want to work on good projects. But so that's kind of how we presented it, how we coached them. So sell them on the, you know, the impact and, you know, what they can do. Contribution. And grab it. You could actually see the impact, right? Because you see it every day out in the street.

[00:22:47] You know, the stuff that we do and the impact that it has, right? So that's kind of how we drove that, yeah? And how did you think about, if you said that you're popping a LinkedIn profile, was there any education to the hiring managers about, you know, maybe just putting an image that is more, you know? It's amazing how many hiring managers don't actually say that they're at the company. So again, that was probably something that we never really thought about at initial stages.

[00:23:16] And we did have situations where the hiring managers actually hadn't updated their profile or they had very little. So again, we would just give them some advice to go in and update your profile and at least have, you know, the banner and stuff like that, right? But yeah. And did you want them to be, I can imagine if they're a bit more active and consistently sort of posting things when the campaign was about to kick off, that could have helped with the person feeling like, oh, this is a real person and they care about the company? Yeah.

[00:23:46] Look, you know, we work with quite senior hiring managers. So, you know, they generally had pretty good profiles. Okay. Did they kind of regularly post? A lot didn't. Some of them would post like blogs, but most of them didn't. And we didn't kind of really push that because, and that's probably again where we probably should have got EB involved and taken some advice on that because that certainly will create more social proof, right? If they're kind of putting relevant stuff out there. Yeah. So yeah,

[00:24:15] we probably didn't focus on that enough. Yeah. Yeah. So the Canon experience clearly improves by getting the hiring managers to lean in. That's what I'm hearing. Oh, yeah. Look, it's, you know, like would you rather be spammed by the talent saucer or have a, you know, an email treating me special from the head of engineering or head of product. We did it for non-tech as well. So I know what I'd rather, and I think we've created this in TA, right? Where, you know,

[00:24:46] the TA never gets back because they're so busy. And I'm not pointing fingers, but they're so busy. So it was just, it was different, right? And I think, you know, when you're different, it kind of creates, you know, a different reaction. So, you know, that's kind of how we went about it. I imagine this formula works in any way in the hyper-growth situation. I don't grab, but you've probably got hiring managers with quite a few roles to other ones, to your point, only might hire once or twice a year and it could just be one or two roles.

[00:25:15] And with your other experience since just different types of employers, I'm wondering if there's any other ways you've tweaked it or you've learned from it, seeing it all into the spectrum to kind of deploy in this approach. Yeah. The tweaking was, one was send out messages on a larger frequency or, you know, not after four or five days, but maybe after seven days. That was one. And we got that feedback a little bit. I think the other one was just really,

[00:25:46] and, you know, if we sent, let's say there's five emails in the campaign, it was the first email that had the meat, right? That was kind of the one to start the conversation. The follow-ups were not so detailed. And even, you know, what we did over time was made them a little bit less, the follow-ups, a little bit less kind of formal and more kind of put a bit of humour in there. You know, things like, hey, David, I know you're probably really busy at the moment and your email's buried in the, you know, on page 55, but, you know, I'm just putting it to the top of the queue.

[00:26:15] So that's kind of the things that we probably, we tinkered a little bit with and also played a little bit with the titles as well. Actually, one of the things that we found that kind of pushed the reply rates up is when you put their name in the title. Yeah. That's nice, yeah. Simple. So, you know, different times of the day really didn't have any effect. We certainly never sent anything out on weekends because who wants to look at a job and reply on a weekend? And you're not sending the job ad out to them. No, no, you've never sent job ads. No.

[00:26:45] So you just say, are you interested in an opportunity? That would be the opening. Yeah. So we would, you know, it was kind of, you know, it was a paragraph of, you know, the impact, what we're doing and what we're looking for. There was never any, you know, you must have five years experience of this or whatever because we knew, we could see from the people's profiles, right, even though if they didn't have a very detailed profile, there was enough information in there and from their history and that they would have, you know, they would probably have the level of skills. Yeah. You know, probably the one thing

[00:27:15] that we never really, it was hard to gauge is whether they had the scale of experience to work in such a large environment like Grab. Yeah. Right? So that was probably the challenge and, you know, we'd find that out when we started to talk to them. Yeah. Did you include the link to the actual job advert? No. No? Wow, that's super interesting. Never. Yeah. I kind of like... It makes sense. Yeah, yeah. It's like you want to have an authentic conversation to a hiring manager reaching out, being curious, just going, hey, I saw your profile. Exactly. Not too forced. Yeah, and it's like,

[00:27:45] you know, I used to see this a lot on LinkedIn where, you know, people would send out emails and they'd bed the job and go and apply. To me, that's like, you know, that's like walking into the shop and the salesman pounces on you and tries to sell you the red shoes but they haven't actually found out what you're interested in. Not red shoes. So, that's how I look at it, right? So, I'm not going to present a job to you if you're not interested, right? Yeah. So, I need to find that out first and align in terms of value proposition and then say, well,

[00:28:14] okay, here's something that could be applicable or, you know, maybe we don't but let's stay in touch. Yeah. Yeah. It's like seeing a Coca-Cola ad just because I've seen one doesn't mean I'm just going to run out and go buy it and still warm them up a little bit first, which I, which I absolutely agree. I feel like what, where you're going with this is a place of authority and maybe advisory. Creating that motion enables you to advise.

[00:28:43] How have you transitioned into that more advisory? What's your thoughts on having more of a seat at the table? So, yeah, I think we, you know, we're so busy. We've got so many things we're trying to do and I think, you know, in the world that TA's in now where the teams are a lot smaller and we've still got all these things that we need to do, right? And I think what happens is we tend to take the path of least resistance and we just want to get it off our plate and move to the, you know, to the next one, right?

[00:29:13] So talent advisory to me is all about, so let's really understand, you know, what the business need is here, what is really important for the hiring manager, you know, what is their pain point, right? And if we can understand that then it allows us to influence and leverage the way we approach stuff, right? So, you know, we used to have situations where a hiring manager would say, you know, they must have these skills, they must come from these universities and they must come from these companies,

[00:29:43] right? So I can walk away and do that, right? And follow that path but as a source of what I've done is I've just, you know, I've just screened out a whole lot of potential candidates, right? Whereas what I want to do is screen in, right? So what I want to do is broaden the search. So I want to go, you know, it's always the skills for search, right? And then, so that's the sort of conversations we could have, right? So, you know, if you could say, well, okay, we can go down that path but this is the outcome, you know?

[00:30:13] What if I... Well, these are the people that will exist if you were to put this search in. Exactly, exactly. You know, you can say things like what if they didn't have come from these universities but they met all the other criteria? Do you not want to see them? So that to me is kind of the advisory bit. So it's having the courage, right? You need the bravery scripts to have those sorts of conversations, right? And call it out and drive that alignment, right? I think, you know, met a lot of recruitment marketers and the ones

[00:30:42] that really do well are the ones that partner with hiring managers and they're running campaigns on their behalf. what you're saying and what I'm hearing is you're effectively qualifying and running a campaign for them but without an actual campaign like a recruit marketer would do in terms of content. Yeah, totally agree. I totally agree. And again, it's, you know, the tools that we have at our fingertips now,

[00:31:12] like, for example, I read an article recently about ChatGPT, right? And one of the highest searches that candidates do on a ChatGPT at what am I worth salary-wise in the market for these jobs? I don't think as a recruiter, I think, wow. So they're coming to the core with me already knowing what they're worth, right? So how can I, so I need to be as a recruiter or a talent sourcer, I need to be aware of this, right? Because I need to understand what the market is paying for these sorts of roles.

[00:31:42] They're the conversations I need to have with the hiring managers, right? So again, you know, like, we've been asked on our sourcing team to source roles that have been open for a number of months but when we dig in to understand why they're now getting sourcing involved is because they've had three candidates knock it back because we're paying 20% below the market. Sourcing can't solve that. So that's kind of, you know, the sorts of things that we need to think about, right? And, you know, it's kind of, you know, even when we, from a recruit marketing point of view, like even in sourcing,

[00:32:11] like one of the things that I also want to do, I don't want to outreach to a whole lot of people that are not going to respond to me, right? And I always would think about, so, you know, is our value proposition, if it's neutral or worse than who we're reaching out to, they're unlikely to respond to us, right? So it's all this kind of signals and stuff that we needed to think about. So, you know, so they're the sorts of conversations you need to have with candidates, with hiring managers and if they're narrowing the pool, then you're kind of almost defeating before you start, right? So, yeah.

[00:32:41] Your mindset is very similar to a recruitment marketer, I've got to say, because it is about metrics. Recruiting is marketing, isn't it? Oh, no, it certainly is, the old adage, but, you know, sourcing is that proactive outreach, whereas the way I see recruitment marketing, it's your magnet, you're sort of putting things out there into, you know, social platforms mostly to attract talent, to impact

[00:33:12] the talent pool. You want to increase the talent pool. Everyone wants a great talent, impactful people who are going to make absolute impact. They want big great talent as well and see great talent, they do want to avoid, they don't want everyone who's just going to smash the job boards and just apply for everything. So having that narrative, having the right messaging, timing as well, it's all really important and relevant. Yeah, I totally agree. But I also feel like there is an education for the hiring

[00:33:41] manager as well and that advisory certainly needs to come out because their expectation needs to be aligned with the market situation. Yeah, yep. And that's the alignment piece, right? And, you know, John Vastelica who, you know, worked at Amazon, he was the one that kind of started the bar raiser, you know, hiring and he talks about the root of all evil in recruitment is misalignment, right? And I truly believe that because, you know, if we don't align on the skills and the, you know, the outcome

[00:34:11] based tasks that these candidates need to perform and that, then we're never going to have alignment. We're never going to have the quality of candidates that we want, right? So, yeah, you know, it's really important, right? And educating and hiring managers around that, we need to differentiate, we need to show why we're different and what's, you know, what's impactful if you join us. You probably do because there are so many more candidates

[00:34:40] out there today than what they were years ago, so you don't want everyone applying for the position. And 25% of them are fake anyway. Is that true? Aren't they saying one in four is fake? Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know about that, but that's what they're saying. But, yeah, yeah, like, you know, we don't want, we want, so, you know, my view is I want to attract the candidates, you know, not the candidate that's, I want to attract someone that maybe hasn't made the decision to move, but something gets put

[00:35:10] in front of them that's really compelling and they say, hey, I want a piece of that. They're the ones that I think, you know, generally are, and maybe that's a little bit unfair to say generally, but they have the sort of quality, you know, the traits and competencies that you're looking for, but they have the motivation. And that's where employee brand and recruit marketing can really impact their decision because through over time, if you're showing up and you're consistent and you're sharing those messages on online, when you do get a personal message

[00:35:39] from a recruiter or from a sourcer, you will turn, more likely to turn their head. But if they don't know who you are, if you're not showing up, you're just another nobody. Totally, yeah. And I agree with you and I think, you know, you may identify a whole lot of people that have got the skills, right, but they're not motivated to move or whatever. So if you're putting that messaging out in front of them, over time, hopefully you're shifting their motivation to jump into a role down the track, right?

[00:36:08] And I think that's, you know, as recruiters, I think we all want to get married on the first date, right? And recruitment's not like that. It's a process that you need to follow and take time, but you need to be really consistent to keep your, you know, your message on their radar. Music's my ears. I'm just sitting here. Well, I spoke about A and B grade talent and if we tapped into the mindset of them and an A grade player who is impactful, let's call them a, you

[00:36:37] know, one in, one in 30 higher, someone who's going to make a huge difference to your culture, impact the work through great contribution. They're rare, but they've probably got a mental list of who they want to apply for a role. Like for me, I like sport and, you know, I love my job. I'll never change, but there would have been a time when I was employed if Nike called me and said, hey, I've got this really neat role, would you like to join? I'll be like my perception, like, oh, this is great.

[00:37:06] I'd be really excited. And although I wasn't looking, it was one of the four companies I would apply for if an opportunity arose. Be great talent. You know, they're similar, but they're probably going to be a little bit more curious. They're going to want to know about your culture. They want to investigate you a little bit more. And then they'll make a decision if they'll proceed and then see great talent. Well, maybe they're unemployed. Maybe they need to, they feel like they need employment pretty quickly and they're

[00:37:35] open to anything. And they're the ones you really want to avoid. You want to be able to target A and B great talent. I agree. I agree. Yeah, totally. That's the challenge. That is the challenge, but you're not going to turn their head unless you show up and you're consistently messaging these people. It doesn't always have to be about the perks. Just authentic stories are really helpful to enable them to turn their head to apply for your position. I agree. It's just, as you say, it's just constantly being there because candidates

[00:38:05] will and they've, it's easier than ever before is to do their research. As you say, just going to chat GBT or whatever platform you want to use and you can get so much intel about that organization. You also then look at the organic and authentic activity too, but they are coming armed perhaps a little bit more when they get to you guys and the recruiters. They've done their research. So it's really important to make sure that you are providing the right content out there. You think about it as consumers, if you're

[00:38:34] looking to buy a pack of biscuits, those big brands, they're advertising all year round for a reason. So in that moment, if you're hungry and you want a snack and you're looking at all those choices, you know which one you want to go for. And it's the same. When that moment comes and Nike taps you on the shoulder, you're going to respond. Yeah. It's kind of, it's being, you know, like on their radar screen, you know, in their front of their mind at the right time, right place, right. So, you know, so that's kind of the

[00:39:03] art of recruiting. I think what's really important that you mentioned is just being brave actually to screen in because I think quite often as well, that's where efforts can get impacted is it comes back to that really narrow criteria and we're not actually hiring for skills base, the capability base that we're talking about and actually trying to open that up for the hiring managers. From an employer brand perspective, that opens up our targeting and what we can do from a campaign perspective as well. And I think that's

[00:39:32] still a real good area to focus on for that advisory piece. Agree, yeah, agree. Yeah. And just one other point I think, David, you started to mention was around, you know, being able to address the hiring, the candidates kind of questions, right. That was another reason that we found the hiring manager has that first informal call. Candidates tend to ask more kind of impactful or kind of questions that, information that they really need, right,

[00:40:02] to kind of, you know, start to move from the back of the bus towards the front of the bus. Whereas when they're in an interview process, it doesn't tend to happen or it tends to happen, you know, down the track, right. It's so much more formal. Yeah. It's like they're going to show up and answer your questions where you're giving them the opportunity to speak to a hiring manager and they're curious about the working environment. So you're, it's, it's, you're hooking them in, in a more authentic way by answering their questions that are most in their mind

[00:40:32] and not wasting anyone's time. Yeah, totally. Totally. And, you know, recruiters are good at doing that, but they can't do it at the same level as a hiring manager, right? They don't have the authority. Yeah, yeah, true. True. But that feedback loop is also gold dust for the employer brand team or recruit marketing team. If we hear back, you know, regularly that you know, Kansas are still asking about ABC, that informs the next campaign, the next piece of content, whether it's just around the benefits or actually more of the meat of the role and what's the leadership style

[00:41:01] and how can we unpack that earlier on with the hiring manager and showcase that in the right way. So it's not always a piece of content, but how do we coach, to your point, the hiring manager to then talk about it when they reach out? Agree. Agree. So if not everyone is lucky enough to have a saucer, but they do have creative recruiters or recruit marketers and employer branders who do want to engage with hiring managers, how should they start having

[00:41:31] this, the first conversation to get the first one on board? So, you know, like I, again, I think when you sit down and have the kickoff meeting with the hiring manager and, you know, you can, you understand their pain, so it gives you leverage, the ability to influence, start to kind of, you know, seed these sorts of ideas, right? And maybe what you say to the hiring manager is, hey, you know, like, let's just send the outreach from you for three or four candidates, right?

[00:42:00] Give them the emails and if you don't have the technology to automate it, then maybe, you know, you've got to do it manually, right? So you can even give, you can write the email for them, you can give it to, they can send it from their email address, right? So that's how I would do it and just start to kind of educate and show them the benefits of, or the impact, yeah? And see what happens. It's just experiment, right? But you've got to kind of create the, you know, the hiring man's got to have the kind of the want to do it, right?

[00:42:29] So you're suggesting, and you mentioned this earlier, you want to go to more of a friendly hiring manager, one that you can work very closely with. Yeah, or even, you know, like, you know, I've had hiring managers that give me a really hard time. No. Why would they give you a hard time, Arden? That's their job. So, and I probably deserved it. So maybe, you know, maybe you go to, you know, one of those hiring managers that is not happy, right? And you kind of, you know, give them this idea because I think that also tells you stuff, right? If they're not willing to kind of give this a try, then maybe they're more the

[00:42:59] problem than you are. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, that could be it. But yeah, it's different for, you know, for different people. But I think, you know, I always had the view as if I'm not trying, you know, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, expecting a different result, right? So if I'm not trying different things, then I should just move aside and let someone else do it. Yeah. So that's all that, that was always what I looked at. I agree. You don't always, maybe going to the one that is the most disappointed could be the one that partners with you best because

[00:43:29] they're now at a point where they are open to trying something different and not having their time wasted. Yeah. And I think sometimes if you do that, like it's high risk. High risk. But they could, you know, end up being your huge ambassador, right? And be a huge, you know, cheerleader for you. Yeah. And also, you know, like as a, you know, TI, I think this sort of stuff, we probably need to be a little bit selfish as well and go out and do this sort of stuff and then shout it

[00:43:58] from the rafters in terms of what we did, right? And really kind of, you know, promote what we're doing because I think a lot, you know, we just sit back and we're not telling the business. You know, the impact that we're having, right? You're not ringing the bell in the office when the deal gets done anymore? That's agency days. If they bring that back there, no worries. I used to hate that, like someone would ring the bell and then you'd be up there for an hour because everyone else would want to do it, right? Such a job waster. Yeah, time waster. Yeah. Yeah. It's been fascinating conversation.

[00:44:28] I feel like we could talk to you for a lot longer, but I really appreciate you coming in and telling your unique story, something that's really valuable and practical that people should be able to introduce into their workflow. Thanks, Dave. Really appreciate it, Emma. It's fun to sit down with you guys and have a chat. So hopefully we get to do it again. Can't wait to see the outcome.