Rob Stevenson 0:05 Welcome to talk down to me, a podcast featuring the most elite talent leaders on the front lines of modern recruitment. Speaker 2 0:12 We actually want to understand the themes of someone's life. We want to understand how they make decisions where they're willing to take risks and what it looks like when they Rob Stevenson 0:21 fail. No holds barred completely off the cuff interviews with directors of recruitment VPs of global talent, CHR rows, and everyone in between. Speaker 3 0:31 Once I went through the classes and the trainings and got the certifications through diversity and inclusion, I still felt like something was missing. Speaker 4 0:39 Talent Acquisition. It's a fantastic career, you are trusted by the organization. You get to work with the C suite and the security at the front desk and everybody in between and everybody knows you. Rob Stevenson 0:52 I'm your host, Rob Stevenson, and you're about to hear the best in the biz. talk down to me. Here with me today on takedown to me on what has turned out to be a very hectic frazzling Tuesday is the global lead for talent attraction over at Amdocs Victoria Myers, Victoria, welcome to the show. How are you today? Victoria Myers 1:11 I'm fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Rob Stevenson 1:14 Yeah. Happy to have you here. I should clarify that I'm the one who's frazzled. You are unflappable, you are in the zone. It is myself it was I'm kind of all over the place. I was late getting here. Car troubles. The week is already getting out of control. And it's only Tuesday but I'm sure you know that kind of mitigated or unmitigated chaos happens to us sometimes. Right, Victoria? Speaker 2 1:34 Oh, absolutely. I'm married with kids working life. Yeah. And that the frazzle happens on occasion for sure. Rob Stevenson 1:41 The frazzle happens, that's a great bumper sticker. Victoria Myers 1:44 We just coined a new phrase. Yeah, look at that. Rob Stevenson 1:47 I think we can stop the podcast. Now. I don't know if we're going to do any better than that. That's been our show everyone. But do you have this experience where it's like, Oh, I'm gonna get done XYZ today. And then you start looking at emails, and then you have meetings? And it's like, Nope, none of that got done. Speaker 2 2:00 Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that's why I have my handy notebook of writing down the to do's so that way, if it's really important, and it's something I feel like I have to get done, or I'll just schedule it on my calendar, I'll block the time. So someone can't put a meeting so I can get those tasks completed. Rob Stevenson 2:17 That's a good trick. I think the meeting booking like booking meetings with yourself is like, Okay, I, I'm going to dedicate real time to this, I'm going to treat it like a meeting that I can't move. And so then when the clock strikes, whatever, now I know I'm working on next task. I think that's great for productivity, but also your position, you're like protecting your time too, because when you see a gap on your calendar, you're like, oh, great, then I can work on blank. But when someone else sees the gap on your calendar, like, oh, great, I can book Victoria. Now she's thinking about the thing I want her to think about? Speaker 2 2:46 Absolutely, it has helped my ability to complete projects, by booking my own time. Rob Stevenson 2:54 That's smart, that's smart. Do you ever have to like set boundaries in the organization to be like, Hey, I can't let my day just run away from me, I have to work on XYZ today, like I'm gonna say no to this meeting. Speaker 2 3:04 Very rarely do I say no to the meeting, I might send a delegate in my place if I'm if I can't attend. But for me, it's we're a global company. And so I'm working with my peers that might be in India, or Israel. And so it's about setting the I'm not willing to have meetings before this time, used to be 7am for the first three years. And then we started this big global project, and I bumped it to 6am. And for a couple of meetings, 5am. But I then tell them, I will not be on camera before 7am I'm most likely even still in my pajamas. So Rob Stevenson 3:38 that's how I am like I've had to record with people from like Australia, or you know, India or whatever. And there's just no good time, there's no time with someone in on the opposite side of the planet where it's good for both people. So I've done the same thing. I'm like, for my benefit, and yours. I will not be appearing on camera today. But anyway, that's a good tip about booking your own time. I think that's really smart. Even if you're not like protecting your own time. Like for me, that's kind of the only way I can get stuff done is like oh, this is a serious thing you want to do and then it's real. When you throw time at it. It's real when it's on the calendar. Speaker 2 4:11 Exactly. And I live by my calendar now. So it's always up. There's always what I'm looking at every day is a different day. So some days today, I started at 6am Tomorrow, I don't start till 7am. So you know, I actually get up every day at a different time depending on when my day starts. I'm not one of those that gets up at 5am and works out for seeing every day. Nope, that's not me. Rob Stevenson 4:33 I can't stand those people. Like if it's okay, if you're doing that good for you. You're healthy, but I can't stand the people who have to like treat it like it's content and be like I get up every morning at 430 and by the time 8am rolls around I've already had you know XYZ and it's like Yeah, shut up like anyway, Victoria, really pleased to have you on before we get into some of the stuff I want to talk to you about that's going on over there and Amdocs would Do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you wound up in the role? Speaker 2 5:03 Sure. After college, my brothers and I actually started our own consulting firm doing, you know, as an agency world doing staffing placements. And I was the VP of Operations, I was the salesperson, I was the recruiter. And it was a great training ground, we were successful. And after a year, we decided, okay, we did that let's go do separate things. I stayed in sales and recruiting, I worked that double desk where I would land the opportunity, and then I would go recruit for it. And I knew from the get go, that while I was good at the sales, I loved the recruiting, I loved helping people find a job or feeling like I was doing something positive in someone's life that really fed to me fed myself. And so I decided, Okay, forget the sales part, let me go full scale recruiting. And I just, you know, kept on at it for years. Obviously, it's been it's been a long time now. And I also didn't really like the agency world, I knew I wanted to get into corporate recruiting work for a organization to fill their positions instead of more of that Headhunter style that's out in the agency world. It's a bit more cutthroat and agency versus corporate. And again, it felt more aligned to who I am and what my my degrees are in speech pathology, as well as psychology. So obviously, there's some part of me that wants to help people. And again, I feel like that corporate recruiting aspect fit me better. Rob Stevenson 6:35 You know, we do beat up agency recruiting a fair amount on this podcast, which is not entirely fair. I think the issue is like, look, it's just not for everyone. And I tend to interview people who are in house, I will say we're gonna have the founder of an agency recruiter on shortly I we're recording together next week. So if you're out there in the agency world, and you're like, hey, you know, Stop hitting me, then it feels good to you. Speaker 2 6:58 Ground? Absolutely. And they have a role to play in what needs to be done in the business world. Absolutely. And it's not that I wasn't good at it. It's just not I didn't enjoy it as much as being in house. So that's just me. Rob Stevenson 7:12 Yeah, it's a different function. It's the same similar skill set different sort of approach. I just wanted to call that I don't want my I can understand why, you know, maybe it wasn't for you, Victoria. But I will want the agency folks out there to becoming aware of it as you're seeing it. Yeah, I have total respect for them. So yeah, we will make sure y'all are represented, we won't beat you up too bad. But that's coming down the pipeline. But in the meantime, I'm curious, like when you were you kind of had that consultancy going on? You were filling a lot of different roles, you realize recruiting was right for you? What was it about the function for you at the time where you're like, you know what this is? This is what I want to do. Speaker 2 7:44 I think, again, it was really feeling like I was helping an individual on the sales side. Yes, you get to know the customer. And you get to know what that managers need is, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. But you get that in house as well. You get to know your managers and what their needs are, and you build those relationships. But at the end of the day, the best experience in the world is giving someone an offer and them saying yes, I accept. That is rewarding work right there. And in. I don't know, I like a gives you a high and I loved it. And I still do. I don't get to do that anymore. But I absolutely love it. And the best even better than that is on a Friday, because Fridays are great. Everybody loves a Friday. But when you get to do your offers on a Friday, and they accept, it's just like, you know, you Rob Stevenson 8:30 know they're going right to pop some champagne. Right? Exactly. Victoria Myers 8:35 Yeah, we got kicked off the best way possible. Rob Stevenson 8:38 Definitely. So it is too bad. You kind of don't get to scratch that itch as much anymore because you're in the lead position. But do you ever get to get in there on actual recruiting and speaking with candidates? Speaker 2 8:47 No, not really, on occasion more as let me assist someone else who and I'll be your first interview, I'll help determine, you know, I'll take your list of candidates and boil it down to the top five, so that then that senior manager is only interviewing the top five, I'll do that I have done that. Instead, I get to you know, celebrate the wins of my team. And that's actually fantastic as well. Rob Stevenson 9:11 Right? Right. You know, they get to have that feeling every day or however often offers are going out anyway. Absolutely. So what's going on over there and Amdocs? What are you working on? Speaker 2 9:19 Wow, a lot. We've implemented AI technology that's skills based technology for our talent marketplace. It's everything from our ATS. It's implementing a CRM, career hub for employees, a new career site for candidates. And it's been really a very multifaceted project that started for me a year prior with really trying to think through what could talent attraction look like in the future for us. Once we did completed that project, then we jumped into actually implementing the tool and it was bringing in everyone from lnd to our HR team. Games, our business and field HR, learning and development, our od partners. So it was a broad spectrum to implement the tools. And it's been a great experience for me as well working on a global project like this. Rob Stevenson 10:14 So what's interesting is that it seems like it's outside the realm of recruiting and mere talent attraction, right? Like, you are also talking about developing people. But I guess your perspective would be that it all hangs together, It all affects, like even if it's not about candidate enroll, it all is part of the same mission, right? Speaker 2 10:33 It is talent attraction is a piece of talent acquisition. Right. So talent acquisition is your recruiting, I have a position to fill. Let me source candidates explain to them about this job. This role, this manager, this team, as well as obviously the benefits of your company and everything else. There's a lot of sales involved with recruiting, we're always selling our company, we're selling the jobs, all of that. When it comes to talent attraction, it's a broader scope. That's part of it, obviously, because you're attracting talent to roles, but it's really in recruitment, marketing, employer branding, and EVP your social media posts, how do you look? How do you view? How do you attract what are so these are different aspects that we were looking at. And what we did as a team, we built a project team, and we really thought, what do we not have today? What do we want in the future? What's coming, you know, and we really took an opportunity to envision something big, something bigger, and that's where our starting point was? Then we did the gap analysis, truly looking at what are the gaps between our current processes versus what we want it to be? Also keeping in mind that we're a global company. So we looked at each region? What are the steps of the process? What is different? versus what's the same? What's the candidate experience in all those processes? And really, again, focusing on what do we want to change along the way, through that brainstorming, we were able to take all of those ideas and group them. So we had ideas for and recommendations to make for tools, such as we wanted to implement a CRM, once we implemented a candidate Relationship Management System, who's going to operate it, who's going to really be focused on filling those talent communities. And being proactive in sourcing that was another aspect of what we wanted to change is not being reactionary, and only filling positions as soon as you get them, but thinking to the future of what are our needs going to be and ensuring we have talent pools already in place for that? Rob Stevenson 12:37 Yeah, that is the interesting piece to me about breaking out talent attraction from talent acquisition is that I think most recruiters now understand the importance of a CRM and just like the long term approach to recruiting, right, it's like, we are going to engage with this individual over a long period of time so that when they come to market, now, we have a shot at landing them as opposed to we're going to source people hope we can convince them to suddenly leave their job, or hope that we land in their inbox in this six week period that they haven't be looking for a new role, right? Okay, that's fine. Here's the problem. You have goals to hit and you have headcount to hit this month, this quarter, right? Like there's a shorter term need to fill talent. So it's always going to be both right? You're always going to have to be filling talent right now, but also play the long game. So I'm curious, when did it become apparent that there was a need to focus a team specifically, on the longer term part, which sounds like what's going on with the talent attraction team, Speaker 2 13:33 there's a lot of aspects to it. One was we had done some surveys and learned that one thing that we knew feet on the ground, but it was nice to have it validated by an external firm, that in many markets, Amdocs is not a well known name. In Israel, we're very well known. And we're pretty well known in India. But a lot of the other markets were not which we knew, but again, it was validated by an outside survey. So how do you become known? And it kind of goes to even back to the sales stays warm leads, right? So you had cold calling where you're calling calling some company literally out of the blue, they're like, Who are you and you have to try and really overcome that. It's like that with recruiting as well. You have cold, cold calls, right? And so recruiters and Sorcerer's are out there on LinkedIn, pinging people sending the in mails, hoping people will respond. And what we want to do is be more thoughtful about it, be more strategic about it. And essentially what we're doing is filling the pipeline, and we're filling the funnel, and we're warming them up to the Amdocs brand, using the knowledge of marketing that it takes up. Typically, I think it's seven to nine instances of engagement with your brand before it becomes more recognized or before someone will take an action. So if a candidate on that long term vision is in our database, and we're engaging with them by sending them relevant and engaging content over the course of months By the time there is an actual position to fill there, what I'm calling a warm lead for our recruiting teams at that point, and it's now saying, I have this position and I reach out to you, you're thinking, I've heard of this brand. I've been getting emails from this company. Okay. Yeah, let me talk to you. My team has warmed you work. So that now, during that six week window that you might even be interested, you're more interested than you would have been before? Rob Stevenson 15:25 Right, right, you're speaking my language, because this is like funnel marketing, right is like this, a podcast is considered top of funnel content, by the way, right? And it's like, you, you want someone to become familiar with you over time you want to make asks that are appropriate to the relationship and not overstep your bounds and not turn people off. And then when you provided a lot of value, only then and only then can you ask for something in return. And in your case, that's, you know, a phone screen, right or an informational call something to that effect. But with like the longer term approach, I'm so curious how you message this internally, you know, to just to be able to prove out the ROI, because like I said, you still have the quarterly needs, and they're still headcount. And it's like, look, look, this approach is going to pay off in like, eight months, just trust me. And the meantime was people who maybe are not focused on just the the day to day of filling roles. So what did that conversation sound like? Speaker 2 16:17 It was a challenge, for sure. It's about being long term vision versus the immediate. And we all know that business demands results. You know, that's how businesses stay alive and stay relevant. I've been very fortunate that I have great support of strong leadership, who at Amdocs are very people centric, their employee centric, their candidate centric, this people first culture helped me to sell this idea of we need to create a relationship with our candidates and not being so transactional, and not being so reactionary, to whatever that immediate demand is. And so I think that that overall strategy was something that they could buy into. Now, we also have to show ROI. So what's different is it's not necessarily about time to hire, although we shouldn't be impacting that. But that'll be down. You know, as we said, eight months to a year from now, what we're tracking now is the open rates, the click through rates, the application rates, and even hires. And can we show that a candidate was hired after we were engaging with them that they applied because we were engaging with them? And you know, we've only been live with our system for three months, and we just tracked to hire last week, our first hire, so it's very exciting. It works. It works. Absolutely. Rob Stevenson 17:37 Can we speak about that person in particular, like, what was their journey to hire, like, let's start before the interview process starts. Speaker 2 17:46 So they were an alumni candidate. And so from a scene from their experience that they had apply to a role a year ago, and we put them into our alumni count community engaged with them, you know, just as the initial engagement was telling them about the community and what we've changed. And you know, a little bit about what we're trying to do with our alumni community. About a month later, they applied to a position. And a month after that was when I saw the hire in the system. So it was about from the time they applied June 22. I want to say it was less than a month because it was July 14, that they were hired in the system. Rob Stevenson 18:25 Okay, so the alumni, when I hear that word, I would think, Oh, they worked at your company and have left and now they're coming back, but you are qualifying as alumni. Anyone who has applied for a role? Speaker 2 18:35 No, no, this was a former employee. Oh, it was your correct? Yeah, I've got it. Yeah. So it was a former employee that we had put into the alumni community and then engaged with the individual. Rob Stevenson 18:45 Okay, so then, that sounds to me like to continue the marketing tie in. That sounds to me like persona marketing, like candidate persona, right? Like you're going to segment all the people out there based on their perceived or actual relationship with us. So what are those segments for you? One of those persona is persona is yes. What are some other segments? Speaker 2 19:09 silver medalists, so those would be the individuals who had applied and interviewed in the past, but were not selected. So we want to do a reengagement with those individuals. They know a little bit about who we are, but again, we want to engage with them. And what's important about the personas is your tone of voice or what you might share with them could be different based upon who they are, right? So alumni obviously know who Amdocs is, that maybe if they've been gone long enough, they don't know everything that's changed and everything that we're doing now, same a silver medalists, another group would be early professionals. So we're looking at people from like zero to six years is about the window of an early professional. We have seen your specialists, management and executive. So those are the persona types. But you also want to segment in other ways, so we're segmenting based upon fields of work. So what An example would be corporate functions, which would be like HR and finance, very different type of content you would want to share with those individuals versus someone in r&d and engineering. So our software developers and software testers, now, what we found from our research is that you don't want to over segment. So I may use that same example, software testers, and software developers are both actually interested in the same type of topics. So we don't want to only have a community of software testers, because the content would be the same content we would send to the developers. Rob Stevenson 20:35 Right? So just be redundant and to break them out. Correct. So where is the content for each segment coming from? Speaker 2 20:42 Well, multiple areas, so we're looking at you know, videos, and white papers, and blogs, and podcasts, anything that could be relevant now Amdocs actually puts out a lot of content. So that's the first place we look, is there content that Amdocs is putting out that could be relevant to a community, otherwise, we would look in the industry. So as an example, if it's cloud developers, we could be looking at partnership that we currently have with Microsoft in the cloud space and share a white paper or share something, or we could go find an article. And that could be an article that we would want to share with a community of developers, for example. Rob Stevenson 21:21 Got it? And so then, are these people who have subscribed, like you have their email address? How are you kind of serving up content, I guess, Speaker 2 21:28 we do it through the CRM. So there's an aspect to our system that has campaigns is where you're building out beautifully. Of course, there's a lot of great aspects to what the tool provides. But we're building out email campaigns, everybody has the ability to unsubscribe, so we definitely respect that as well. The system itself will enable you to not send communications to people who have already unsubscribed. So utilizing an AI tool as well. So it can do some matching for you and find all the candidates in your system that match what your topic could be, for example, and then you would send the campaign and it does all the tracking for you as well. Rob Stevenson 22:08 Got it. Okay. You know, when you are explaining some of the segments, in particular, the silver medal one where, you know, as someone who maybe got to the offer stage, but then there's someone you liked a little more, and it's like, oh, we wish we could hire this person. But you know, there's just something a little better. It's like, okay, here are people who maybe weren't right for a specific role, but we know are still warm on our company who would still be a good fit. I feel like once you do a little bit of this, it's just such a clear, like, can we map this and just overlay it onto our existing employees, right? Like, because in that case, it's like, oh, here's someone who is at our company, maybe they're a silver medalist in the role that they have, right? Like, over time, they become a little disinterested in it, they were good enough to get hired, they did an okay job at this role. They're ready to move on. Can we keep them and move them somewhere else? So do you see I'm saying it's like, can we leverage? Or can we overlay the same approach onto our existing employee base? Are you thinking about that, too? Speaker 2 23:03 Absolutely. Yes, that's actually one of the things that we are working to implement. Now. We're calling it proactive internal sourcing. And what we're doing is exactly that. It's the individuals who've applied to positions internally, have interviewed and for whatever reason, we're not selected. We know from our own internal research, that they're more likely to leave the company at that point in time, because now they're looking, I'm interested, I want something I want career growth, and they weren't selected Rob Stevenson 23:32 I expressed not being happy in my current role. And you know, I didn't get to fulfill that. Speaker 2 23:36 Right, right. And so we don't want to just let it lay like that. So we're being proactive, identifying who those individuals are, and then proactively reaching out to them to see, is there another match? Is there another open position that we can get them engaged with? And I think that the idea is they'll feel taken care of, right, they'll feel heard and seen. And another important aspect to your own employees who've interviewed and were declined, for whatever reason is you have to be authentic, and provide relevant feedback. You can't just say someone better was selected. But why? What did the manager see in that person? And if you can provide them, it was this specific skill set that you were not as strong on? And here's the training options to help you upskill in that area. Now, you've engaged your employee in a way where they're potentially less likely to leave. Rob Stevenson 24:27 Do you need to wait for someone to apply to an internal roll? Or can you maybe solicit from managers like Hey, who do you think is maybe not quite right for the role they're in? Speaker 2 24:37 We respect our employees in the same way that we would anybody who hasn't opted in. So we do request that they either apply to positions or they can opt in to being you know, part of those types of proactive processes, but they have to take that action on their side. Rob Stevenson 24:56 Got it. It's like LinkedIn putting open to work on your profile picture you You can put like open to mobility on your Amdocs profile. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Because it probably wouldn't feel good if you were just humming along, you know, doing what you thought as an okay job and someone comes along as like, Hey, Rob, have you thought of a different job? And this company like, Wait, what did I do mine trouble? Speaker 2 25:18 You know, I think that there are aspects to what you said about, you know, reaching out to the managers and finding out who might not be a fit in their current role. But we're what we're planning on, we're in the phases, the planning phases now of what we're going to roll out next, will be automated systems to help both the manager and the employee to kind of help figure that out, what are the gaps that you might have in your current role? And then here's the training programs to help you upskill in the role you are today? And then what are your career aspirations? What are the gaps for you to get to that? And then here's the training programs to help you get to there. So those are the types of things that we're looking to roll out later this year, early next year? Rob Stevenson 25:57 Got it? Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you would give them the career development stuff to help them get better at their job, if they're perceived to be not as good rather than just move them out of there. It seems obvious when you put it like that. But yeah, speaking of hiring managers, another challenge of the more long term, proactive sourcing approach is occurring to me. And that is that you also require the hiring managers to have a longer term view of their own team, right, and like their to do some workforce planning of their own to anticipate what their needs might look like, you know, a few quarters a couple of years down the road so that you can begin building that long term pipeline, is that a challenge to make sure that hiring managers are thinking that far ahead? Speaker 2 26:35 Absolutely. It is a challenge. And it's something that when we created this proactive sourcing model, we envisioned two types of the model, the first being that always on approach of what we kind of already discussed about just being proactive, filling the pipeline having warm leads. And what we did there is we focused on what are the high volume roles that we're always hiring for, and then we're always going to be sourcing for that. The second approach is what I'm calling more of like an ad hoc project based approach where it's, you're gonna have a ramp up in a certain area, it needs to be enough volume for it to make sense. So if you know some manager has 50 positions that are going to be coming open, you know, that need to be filled in one location, what we want to do is really hit it hard and fast with we're going to find that persona. First, we're going to, you know, figure out what that persona is, go find those talents, add them to the communities and engage with them maybe over three months or six months, and not over the course of eight months to a year. So how do we get the managers to even be aware of this new model, we're going to be doing a roadshow. So that's my next thing that I'll be working on in the next quarter will be going around and meeting with all of our sales managers, our business leaders, letting them know about this new capability that we have internally. So that they'll be thinking about those oftentimes, that they might already know, oh, maybe it's a 50%, we might be having a ramp up over here, I want to know about it, even if it's 50 or 60% going to happen. So that is the next challenge, I have to do a bit of internal marketing, so to speak, to make them aware of what we're wanting to bring to them the service that we want to bring Rob Stevenson 28:16 totally, and it is a little outside their normal expectation for how recruiting works, right? They're probably used to like I come up with a job description, or I pair with talent to write one. They go off and source they bring back a few people, I say yes, no, they bring back a few more people, right? And then we get in the interview process. But I think they'd all probably in the same way as recruiters, getting the import of the CRM and the long term approach hiring managers would do. It's like, hey, wouldn't you rather someone that was just like we got the right person at the right time, because we had been building up to trying to get them for a long time as opposed to just in time hiring. So that it seems like they would get it. But it does take that like, they need to be told need to be told like this is the approach. This is how we're going to be doing things now. Speaker 2 28:59 Absolutely. Another thing that we added to our team, so they're part of talent, attraction, or talent, acquisition and strategy are a few leaders that we're calling talent strategy leaders. So they actually are within our organization, but they focus on specific business units globally. So that we have this idea of strategy and forward thinking, and what is the business need? And what is coming? And what are the skills? And what are the skill gaps, all of these types of things that really are another funnel into what talent acquisition does. And so since we have the strategy leaders, those are my peers that I work with on a regular basis. Obviously, they're aware of what we're doing, but it's really helpful to have another voice, another person that's at the table with those business leaders who can advocate for the changes and for what we're trying to implement. Rob Stevenson 29:51 Yeah, definitely. Victoria this has all been fascinating. This is probably the deepest dive into like segmented recruiting marketing I've done on the show. So thank you for watching. me through all this. Before I let you go, I want to ask you one more question to kind of slide into home here and this episode delicately thread the needle here at the end. I'm curious, what is the best career advice you ever received from someone else? Speaker 2 30:14 I'd hate to be cliche, but I think it's true. To do what you love to find that sweet spot of obviously, we all have to work and have an income. So you know, work is work. But when it can be something that you enjoy, and that you love, it becomes less work. And I think that that's really good advice. It's sometimes hard to do. It's hard to find that sweet spot of, you know, something that you're enjoying, and you can love. But I think that that is the kind of key to having a healthy, happy adult life where you can go to work and not feel that drain at all. It's work, you know, like he wanted to be. I'm working on this project. And it's amazing, and I'm impacting people's lives. And it's so wonderful. For me, that's what my story is, I'm sure for someone else that maybe he's a heart surgeon, he's going to work saying, I'm saving people's lives today. And it's amazing. Whatever that is for you is what you should pursue. Rob Stevenson 31:12 That is fantastic advice. And it sounds like you love what you do Victoria because you definitely aren't expert and your passion really comes through in your voice. So thank you for sharing that passion with me. And all the folks out there in podcast land today. I've loved having you on the show. Speaker 2 31:25 Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invite Rob. It was amazing working with you. Rob Stevenson 31:29 Talk talent to me is brought to you by hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world's most innovative companies with ambitious tech and sales candidates. With hired candidates and companies have visibility into salary offers competing opportunities and job details. Hired unique offering includes customized assessments and salary bias alerts to help remove unconscious bias when hiring. By combining technology and human touch, our goal is to provide transparency in the recruiting process and empower each of our partners to employ their potential and keep their talent pipeline full. To learn more about how we can help you find your next great hire, head to hire.com/tt2m
Amdocs Global Lead for Talent Attraction Victoria Myers
Victoria MyersGlobal Head of Talent Attraction
In this episode, we do our deepest dive yet into the fascinating field of segmented recruiting marketing.To explore this topic in detail, we are joined by Victoria Myers, the Global Lead for Talent Attraction at Amdocs. Victoria chose a career in the talent space because of her passion for helping people, and that passion hasn’t waned one bit.
Episode Transcript
Victoria Myers.txt
Open with Google Docs
Rob Stevenson 0:05 Welcome to talk down to me, a podcast featuring the most elite talent leaders on the front lines of modern recruitment. Speaker 2 0:12 We actually want to understand the themes of someone's life. We want to understand how they make decisions where they're willing to take risks and what it looks like when they Rob Stevenson 0:21 fail. No holds barred completely off the cuff interviews with directors of recruitment VPs of global talent, CHR rows, and everyone in between. Speaker 3 0:31 Once I went through the classes and the trainings and got the certifications through diversity and inclusion, I still felt like something was missing. Speaker 4 0:39 Talent Acquisition. It's a fantastic career, you are trusted by the organization. You get to work with the C suite and the security at the front desk and everybody in between and everybody knows you. Rob Stevenson 0:52 I'm your host, Rob Stevenson, and you're about to hear the best in the biz. talk down to me. Here with me today on takedown to me on what has turned out to be a very hectic frazzling Tuesday is the global lead for talent attraction over at Amdocs Victoria Myers, Victoria, welcome to the show. How are you today? Victoria Myers 1:11 I'm fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Rob Stevenson 1:14 Yeah. Happy to have you here. I should clarify that I'm the one who's frazzled. You are unflappable, you are in the zone. It is myself it was I'm kind of all over the place. I was late getting here. Car troubles. The week is already getting out of control. And it's only Tuesday but I'm sure you know that kind of mitigated or unmitigated chaos happens to us sometimes. Right, Victoria? Speaker 2 1:34 Oh, absolutely. I'm married with kids working life. Yeah. And that the frazzle happens on occasion for sure. Rob Stevenson 1:41 The frazzle happens, that's a great bumper sticker. Victoria Myers 1:44 We just coined a new phrase. Yeah, look at that. Rob Stevenson 1:47 I think we can stop the podcast. Now. I don't know if we're going to do any better than that. That's been our show everyone. But do you have this experience where it's like, Oh, I'm gonna get done XYZ today. And then you start looking at emails, and then you have meetings? And it's like, Nope, none of that got done. Speaker 2 2:00 Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that's why I have my handy notebook of writing down the to do's so that way, if it's really important, and it's something I feel like I have to get done, or I'll just schedule it on my calendar, I'll block the time. So someone can't put a meeting so I can get those tasks completed. Rob Stevenson 2:17 That's a good trick. I think the meeting booking like booking meetings with yourself is like, Okay, I, I'm going to dedicate real time to this, I'm going to treat it like a meeting that I can't move. And so then when the clock strikes, whatever, now I know I'm working on next task. I think that's great for productivity, but also your position, you're like protecting your time too, because when you see a gap on your calendar, you're like, oh, great, then I can work on blank. But when someone else sees the gap on your calendar, like, oh, great, I can book Victoria. Now she's thinking about the thing I want her to think about? Speaker 2 2:46 Absolutely, it has helped my ability to complete projects, by booking my own time. Rob Stevenson 2:54 That's smart, that's smart. Do you ever have to like set boundaries in the organization to be like, Hey, I can't let my day just run away from me, I have to work on XYZ today, like I'm gonna say no to this meeting. Speaker 2 3:04 Very rarely do I say no to the meeting, I might send a delegate in my place if I'm if I can't attend. But for me, it's we're a global company. And so I'm working with my peers that might be in India, or Israel. And so it's about setting the I'm not willing to have meetings before this time, used to be 7am for the first three years. And then we started this big global project, and I bumped it to 6am. And for a couple of meetings, 5am. But I then tell them, I will not be on camera before 7am I'm most likely even still in my pajamas. So Rob Stevenson 3:38 that's how I am like I've had to record with people from like Australia, or you know, India or whatever. And there's just no good time, there's no time with someone in on the opposite side of the planet where it's good for both people. So I've done the same thing. I'm like, for my benefit, and yours. I will not be appearing on camera today. But anyway, that's a good tip about booking your own time. I think that's really smart. Even if you're not like protecting your own time. Like for me, that's kind of the only way I can get stuff done is like oh, this is a serious thing you want to do and then it's real. When you throw time at it. It's real when it's on the calendar. Speaker 2 4:11 Exactly. And I live by my calendar now. So it's always up. There's always what I'm looking at every day is a different day. So some days today, I started at 6am Tomorrow, I don't start till 7am. So you know, I actually get up every day at a different time depending on when my day starts. I'm not one of those that gets up at 5am and works out for seeing every day. Nope, that's not me. Rob Stevenson 4:33 I can't stand those people. Like if it's okay, if you're doing that good for you. You're healthy, but I can't stand the people who have to like treat it like it's content and be like I get up every morning at 430 and by the time 8am rolls around I've already had you know XYZ and it's like Yeah, shut up like anyway, Victoria, really pleased to have you on before we get into some of the stuff I want to talk to you about that's going on over there and Amdocs would Do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you wound up in the role? Speaker 2 5:03 Sure. After college, my brothers and I actually started our own consulting firm doing, you know, as an agency world doing staffing placements. And I was the VP of Operations, I was the salesperson, I was the recruiter. And it was a great training ground, we were successful. And after a year, we decided, okay, we did that let's go do separate things. I stayed in sales and recruiting, I worked that double desk where I would land the opportunity, and then I would go recruit for it. And I knew from the get go, that while I was good at the sales, I loved the recruiting, I loved helping people find a job or feeling like I was doing something positive in someone's life that really fed to me fed myself. And so I decided, Okay, forget the sales part, let me go full scale recruiting. And I just, you know, kept on at it for years. Obviously, it's been it's been a long time now. And I also didn't really like the agency world, I knew I wanted to get into corporate recruiting work for a organization to fill their positions instead of more of that Headhunter style that's out in the agency world. It's a bit more cutthroat and agency versus corporate. And again, it felt more aligned to who I am and what my my degrees are in speech pathology, as well as psychology. So obviously, there's some part of me that wants to help people. And again, I feel like that corporate recruiting aspect fit me better. Rob Stevenson 6:35 You know, we do beat up agency recruiting a fair amount on this podcast, which is not entirely fair. I think the issue is like, look, it's just not for everyone. And I tend to interview people who are in house, I will say we're gonna have the founder of an agency recruiter on shortly I we're recording together next week. So if you're out there in the agency world, and you're like, hey, you know, Stop hitting me, then it feels good to you. Speaker 2 6:58 Ground? Absolutely. And they have a role to play in what needs to be done in the business world. Absolutely. And it's not that I wasn't good at it. It's just not I didn't enjoy it as much as being in house. So that's just me. Rob Stevenson 7:12 Yeah, it's a different function. It's the same similar skill set different sort of approach. I just wanted to call that I don't want my I can understand why, you know, maybe it wasn't for you, Victoria. But I will want the agency folks out there to becoming aware of it as you're seeing it. Yeah, I have total respect for them. So yeah, we will make sure y'all are represented, we won't beat you up too bad. But that's coming down the pipeline. But in the meantime, I'm curious, like when you were you kind of had that consultancy going on? You were filling a lot of different roles, you realize recruiting was right for you? What was it about the function for you at the time where you're like, you know what this is? This is what I want to do. Speaker 2 7:44 I think, again, it was really feeling like I was helping an individual on the sales side. Yes, you get to know the customer. And you get to know what that managers need is, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. But you get that in house as well. You get to know your managers and what their needs are, and you build those relationships. But at the end of the day, the best experience in the world is giving someone an offer and them saying yes, I accept. That is rewarding work right there. And in. I don't know, I like a gives you a high and I loved it. And I still do. I don't get to do that anymore. But I absolutely love it. And the best even better than that is on a Friday, because Fridays are great. Everybody loves a Friday. But when you get to do your offers on a Friday, and they accept, it's just like, you know, you Rob Stevenson 8:30 know they're going right to pop some champagne. Right? Exactly. Victoria Myers 8:35 Yeah, we got kicked off the best way possible. Rob Stevenson 8:38 Definitely. So it is too bad. You kind of don't get to scratch that itch as much anymore because you're in the lead position. But do you ever get to get in there on actual recruiting and speaking with candidates? Speaker 2 8:47 No, not really, on occasion more as let me assist someone else who and I'll be your first interview, I'll help determine, you know, I'll take your list of candidates and boil it down to the top five, so that then that senior manager is only interviewing the top five, I'll do that I have done that. Instead, I get to you know, celebrate the wins of my team. And that's actually fantastic as well. Rob Stevenson 9:11 Right? Right. You know, they get to have that feeling every day or however often offers are going out anyway. Absolutely. So what's going on over there and Amdocs? What are you working on? Speaker 2 9:19 Wow, a lot. We've implemented AI technology that's skills based technology for our talent marketplace. It's everything from our ATS. It's implementing a CRM, career hub for employees, a new career site for candidates. And it's been really a very multifaceted project that started for me a year prior with really trying to think through what could talent attraction look like in the future for us. Once we did completed that project, then we jumped into actually implementing the tool and it was bringing in everyone from lnd to our HR team. Games, our business and field HR, learning and development, our od partners. So it was a broad spectrum to implement the tools. And it's been a great experience for me as well working on a global project like this. Rob Stevenson 10:14 So what's interesting is that it seems like it's outside the realm of recruiting and mere talent attraction, right? Like, you are also talking about developing people. But I guess your perspective would be that it all hangs together, It all affects, like even if it's not about candidate enroll, it all is part of the same mission, right? Speaker 2 10:33 It is talent attraction is a piece of talent acquisition. Right. So talent acquisition is your recruiting, I have a position to fill. Let me source candidates explain to them about this job. This role, this manager, this team, as well as obviously the benefits of your company and everything else. There's a lot of sales involved with recruiting, we're always selling our company, we're selling the jobs, all of that. When it comes to talent attraction, it's a broader scope. That's part of it, obviously, because you're attracting talent to roles, but it's really in recruitment, marketing, employer branding, and EVP your social media posts, how do you look? How do you view? How do you attract what are so these are different aspects that we were looking at. And what we did as a team, we built a project team, and we really thought, what do we not have today? What do we want in the future? What's coming, you know, and we really took an opportunity to envision something big, something bigger, and that's where our starting point was? Then we did the gap analysis, truly looking at what are the gaps between our current processes versus what we want it to be? Also keeping in mind that we're a global company. So we looked at each region? What are the steps of the process? What is different? versus what's the same? What's the candidate experience in all those processes? And really, again, focusing on what do we want to change along the way, through that brainstorming, we were able to take all of those ideas and group them. So we had ideas for and recommendations to make for tools, such as we wanted to implement a CRM, once we implemented a candidate Relationship Management System, who's going to operate it, who's going to really be focused on filling those talent communities. And being proactive in sourcing that was another aspect of what we wanted to change is not being reactionary, and only filling positions as soon as you get them, but thinking to the future of what are our needs going to be and ensuring we have talent pools already in place for that? Rob Stevenson 12:37 Yeah, that is the interesting piece to me about breaking out talent attraction from talent acquisition is that I think most recruiters now understand the importance of a CRM and just like the long term approach to recruiting, right, it's like, we are going to engage with this individual over a long period of time so that when they come to market, now, we have a shot at landing them as opposed to we're going to source people hope we can convince them to suddenly leave their job, or hope that we land in their inbox in this six week period that they haven't be looking for a new role, right? Okay, that's fine. Here's the problem. You have goals to hit and you have headcount to hit this month, this quarter, right? Like there's a shorter term need to fill talent. So it's always going to be both right? You're always going to have to be filling talent right now, but also play the long game. So I'm curious, when did it become apparent that there was a need to focus a team specifically, on the longer term part, which sounds like what's going on with the talent attraction team, Speaker 2 13:33 there's a lot of aspects to it. One was we had done some surveys and learned that one thing that we knew feet on the ground, but it was nice to have it validated by an external firm, that in many markets, Amdocs is not a well known name. In Israel, we're very well known. And we're pretty well known in India. But a lot of the other markets were not which we knew, but again, it was validated by an outside survey. So how do you become known? And it kind of goes to even back to the sales stays warm leads, right? So you had cold calling where you're calling calling some company literally out of the blue, they're like, Who are you and you have to try and really overcome that. It's like that with recruiting as well. You have cold, cold calls, right? And so recruiters and Sorcerer's are out there on LinkedIn, pinging people sending the in mails, hoping people will respond. And what we want to do is be more thoughtful about it, be more strategic about it. And essentially what we're doing is filling the pipeline, and we're filling the funnel, and we're warming them up to the Amdocs brand, using the knowledge of marketing that it takes up. Typically, I think it's seven to nine instances of engagement with your brand before it becomes more recognized or before someone will take an action. So if a candidate on that long term vision is in our database, and we're engaging with them by sending them relevant and engaging content over the course of months By the time there is an actual position to fill there, what I'm calling a warm lead for our recruiting teams at that point, and it's now saying, I have this position and I reach out to you, you're thinking, I've heard of this brand. I've been getting emails from this company. Okay. Yeah, let me talk to you. My team has warmed you work. So that now, during that six week window that you might even be interested, you're more interested than you would have been before? Rob Stevenson 15:25 Right, right, you're speaking my language, because this is like funnel marketing, right is like this, a podcast is considered top of funnel content, by the way, right? And it's like, you, you want someone to become familiar with you over time you want to make asks that are appropriate to the relationship and not overstep your bounds and not turn people off. And then when you provided a lot of value, only then and only then can you ask for something in return. And in your case, that's, you know, a phone screen, right or an informational call something to that effect. But with like the longer term approach, I'm so curious how you message this internally, you know, to just to be able to prove out the ROI, because like I said, you still have the quarterly needs, and they're still headcount. And it's like, look, look, this approach is going to pay off in like, eight months, just trust me. And the meantime was people who maybe are not focused on just the the day to day of filling roles. So what did that conversation sound like? Speaker 2 16:17 It was a challenge, for sure. It's about being long term vision versus the immediate. And we all know that business demands results. You know, that's how businesses stay alive and stay relevant. I've been very fortunate that I have great support of strong leadership, who at Amdocs are very people centric, their employee centric, their candidate centric, this people first culture helped me to sell this idea of we need to create a relationship with our candidates and not being so transactional, and not being so reactionary, to whatever that immediate demand is. And so I think that that overall strategy was something that they could buy into. Now, we also have to show ROI. So what's different is it's not necessarily about time to hire, although we shouldn't be impacting that. But that'll be down. You know, as we said, eight months to a year from now, what we're tracking now is the open rates, the click through rates, the application rates, and even hires. And can we show that a candidate was hired after we were engaging with them that they applied because we were engaging with them? And you know, we've only been live with our system for three months, and we just tracked to hire last week, our first hire, so it's very exciting. It works. It works. Absolutely. Rob Stevenson 17:37 Can we speak about that person in particular, like, what was their journey to hire, like, let's start before the interview process starts. Speaker 2 17:46 So they were an alumni candidate. And so from a scene from their experience that they had apply to a role a year ago, and we put them into our alumni count community engaged with them, you know, just as the initial engagement was telling them about the community and what we've changed. And you know, a little bit about what we're trying to do with our alumni community. About a month later, they applied to a position. And a month after that was when I saw the hire in the system. So it was about from the time they applied June 22. I want to say it was less than a month because it was July 14, that they were hired in the system. Rob Stevenson 18:25 Okay, so the alumni, when I hear that word, I would think, Oh, they worked at your company and have left and now they're coming back, but you are qualifying as alumni. Anyone who has applied for a role? Speaker 2 18:35 No, no, this was a former employee. Oh, it was your correct? Yeah, I've got it. Yeah. So it was a former employee that we had put into the alumni community and then engaged with the individual. Rob Stevenson 18:45 Okay, so then, that sounds to me like to continue the marketing tie in. That sounds to me like persona marketing, like candidate persona, right? Like you're going to segment all the people out there based on their perceived or actual relationship with us. So what are those segments for you? One of those persona is persona is yes. What are some other segments? Speaker 2 19:09 silver medalists, so those would be the individuals who had applied and interviewed in the past, but were not selected. So we want to do a reengagement with those individuals. They know a little bit about who we are, but again, we want to engage with them. And what's important about the personas is your tone of voice or what you might share with them could be different based upon who they are, right? So alumni obviously know who Amdocs is, that maybe if they've been gone long enough, they don't know everything that's changed and everything that we're doing now, same a silver medalists, another group would be early professionals. So we're looking at people from like zero to six years is about the window of an early professional. We have seen your specialists, management and executive. So those are the persona types. But you also want to segment in other ways, so we're segmenting based upon fields of work. So what An example would be corporate functions, which would be like HR and finance, very different type of content you would want to share with those individuals versus someone in r&d and engineering. So our software developers and software testers, now, what we found from our research is that you don't want to over segment. So I may use that same example, software testers, and software developers are both actually interested in the same type of topics. So we don't want to only have a community of software testers, because the content would be the same content we would send to the developers. Rob Stevenson 20:35 Right? So just be redundant and to break them out. Correct. So where is the content for each segment coming from? Speaker 2 20:42 Well, multiple areas, so we're looking at you know, videos, and white papers, and blogs, and podcasts, anything that could be relevant now Amdocs actually puts out a lot of content. So that's the first place we look, is there content that Amdocs is putting out that could be relevant to a community, otherwise, we would look in the industry. So as an example, if it's cloud developers, we could be looking at partnership that we currently have with Microsoft in the cloud space and share a white paper or share something, or we could go find an article. And that could be an article that we would want to share with a community of developers, for example. Rob Stevenson 21:21 Got it? And so then, are these people who have subscribed, like you have their email address? How are you kind of serving up content, I guess, Speaker 2 21:28 we do it through the CRM. So there's an aspect to our system that has campaigns is where you're building out beautifully. Of course, there's a lot of great aspects to what the tool provides. But we're building out email campaigns, everybody has the ability to unsubscribe, so we definitely respect that as well. The system itself will enable you to not send communications to people who have already unsubscribed. So utilizing an AI tool as well. So it can do some matching for you and find all the candidates in your system that match what your topic could be, for example, and then you would send the campaign and it does all the tracking for you as well. Rob Stevenson 22:08 Got it. Okay. You know, when you are explaining some of the segments, in particular, the silver medal one where, you know, as someone who maybe got to the offer stage, but then there's someone you liked a little more, and it's like, oh, we wish we could hire this person. But you know, there's just something a little better. It's like, okay, here are people who maybe weren't right for a specific role, but we know are still warm on our company who would still be a good fit. I feel like once you do a little bit of this, it's just such a clear, like, can we map this and just overlay it onto our existing employees, right? Like, because in that case, it's like, oh, here's someone who is at our company, maybe they're a silver medalist in the role that they have, right? Like, over time, they become a little disinterested in it, they were good enough to get hired, they did an okay job at this role. They're ready to move on. Can we keep them and move them somewhere else? So do you see I'm saying it's like, can we leverage? Or can we overlay the same approach onto our existing employee base? Are you thinking about that, too? Speaker 2 23:03 Absolutely. Yes, that's actually one of the things that we are working to implement. Now. We're calling it proactive internal sourcing. And what we're doing is exactly that. It's the individuals who've applied to positions internally, have interviewed and for whatever reason, we're not selected. We know from our own internal research, that they're more likely to leave the company at that point in time, because now they're looking, I'm interested, I want something I want career growth, and they weren't selected Rob Stevenson 23:32 I expressed not being happy in my current role. And you know, I didn't get to fulfill that. Speaker 2 23:36 Right, right. And so we don't want to just let it lay like that. So we're being proactive, identifying who those individuals are, and then proactively reaching out to them to see, is there another match? Is there another open position that we can get them engaged with? And I think that the idea is they'll feel taken care of, right, they'll feel heard and seen. And another important aspect to your own employees who've interviewed and were declined, for whatever reason is you have to be authentic, and provide relevant feedback. You can't just say someone better was selected. But why? What did the manager see in that person? And if you can provide them, it was this specific skill set that you were not as strong on? And here's the training options to help you upskill in that area. Now, you've engaged your employee in a way where they're potentially less likely to leave. Rob Stevenson 24:27 Do you need to wait for someone to apply to an internal roll? Or can you maybe solicit from managers like Hey, who do you think is maybe not quite right for the role they're in? Speaker 2 24:37 We respect our employees in the same way that we would anybody who hasn't opted in. So we do request that they either apply to positions or they can opt in to being you know, part of those types of proactive processes, but they have to take that action on their side. Rob Stevenson 24:56 Got it. It's like LinkedIn putting open to work on your profile picture you You can put like open to mobility on your Amdocs profile. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Because it probably wouldn't feel good if you were just humming along, you know, doing what you thought as an okay job and someone comes along as like, Hey, Rob, have you thought of a different job? And this company like, Wait, what did I do mine trouble? Speaker 2 25:18 You know, I think that there are aspects to what you said about, you know, reaching out to the managers and finding out who might not be a fit in their current role. But we're what we're planning on, we're in the phases, the planning phases now of what we're going to roll out next, will be automated systems to help both the manager and the employee to kind of help figure that out, what are the gaps that you might have in your current role? And then here's the training programs to help you upskill in the role you are today? And then what are your career aspirations? What are the gaps for you to get to that? And then here's the training programs to help you get to there. So those are the types of things that we're looking to roll out later this year, early next year? Rob Stevenson 25:57 Got it? Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you would give them the career development stuff to help them get better at their job, if they're perceived to be not as good rather than just move them out of there. It seems obvious when you put it like that. But yeah, speaking of hiring managers, another challenge of the more long term, proactive sourcing approach is occurring to me. And that is that you also require the hiring managers to have a longer term view of their own team, right, and like their to do some workforce planning of their own to anticipate what their needs might look like, you know, a few quarters a couple of years down the road so that you can begin building that long term pipeline, is that a challenge to make sure that hiring managers are thinking that far ahead? Speaker 2 26:35 Absolutely. It is a challenge. And it's something that when we created this proactive sourcing model, we envisioned two types of the model, the first being that always on approach of what we kind of already discussed about just being proactive, filling the pipeline having warm leads. And what we did there is we focused on what are the high volume roles that we're always hiring for, and then we're always going to be sourcing for that. The second approach is what I'm calling more of like an ad hoc project based approach where it's, you're gonna have a ramp up in a certain area, it needs to be enough volume for it to make sense. So if you know some manager has 50 positions that are going to be coming open, you know, that need to be filled in one location, what we want to do is really hit it hard and fast with we're going to find that persona. First, we're going to, you know, figure out what that persona is, go find those talents, add them to the communities and engage with them maybe over three months or six months, and not over the course of eight months to a year. So how do we get the managers to even be aware of this new model, we're going to be doing a roadshow. So that's my next thing that I'll be working on in the next quarter will be going around and meeting with all of our sales managers, our business leaders, letting them know about this new capability that we have internally. So that they'll be thinking about those oftentimes, that they might already know, oh, maybe it's a 50%, we might be having a ramp up over here, I want to know about it, even if it's 50 or 60% going to happen. So that is the next challenge, I have to do a bit of internal marketing, so to speak, to make them aware of what we're wanting to bring to them the service that we want to bring Rob Stevenson 28:16 totally, and it is a little outside their normal expectation for how recruiting works, right? They're probably used to like I come up with a job description, or I pair with talent to write one. They go off and source they bring back a few people, I say yes, no, they bring back a few more people, right? And then we get in the interview process. But I think they'd all probably in the same way as recruiters, getting the import of the CRM and the long term approach hiring managers would do. It's like, hey, wouldn't you rather someone that was just like we got the right person at the right time, because we had been building up to trying to get them for a long time as opposed to just in time hiring. So that it seems like they would get it. But it does take that like, they need to be told need to be told like this is the approach. This is how we're going to be doing things now. Speaker 2 28:59 Absolutely. Another thing that we added to our team, so they're part of talent, attraction, or talent, acquisition and strategy are a few leaders that we're calling talent strategy leaders. So they actually are within our organization, but they focus on specific business units globally. So that we have this idea of strategy and forward thinking, and what is the business need? And what is coming? And what are the skills? And what are the skill gaps, all of these types of things that really are another funnel into what talent acquisition does. And so since we have the strategy leaders, those are my peers that I work with on a regular basis. Obviously, they're aware of what we're doing, but it's really helpful to have another voice, another person that's at the table with those business leaders who can advocate for the changes and for what we're trying to implement. Rob Stevenson 29:51 Yeah, definitely. Victoria this has all been fascinating. This is probably the deepest dive into like segmented recruiting marketing I've done on the show. So thank you for watching. me through all this. Before I let you go, I want to ask you one more question to kind of slide into home here and this episode delicately thread the needle here at the end. I'm curious, what is the best career advice you ever received from someone else? Speaker 2 30:14 I'd hate to be cliche, but I think it's true. To do what you love to find that sweet spot of obviously, we all have to work and have an income. So you know, work is work. But when it can be something that you enjoy, and that you love, it becomes less work. And I think that that's really good advice. It's sometimes hard to do. It's hard to find that sweet spot of, you know, something that you're enjoying, and you can love. But I think that that is the kind of key to having a healthy, happy adult life where you can go to work and not feel that drain at all. It's work, you know, like he wanted to be. I'm working on this project. And it's amazing, and I'm impacting people's lives. And it's so wonderful. For me, that's what my story is, I'm sure for someone else that maybe he's a heart surgeon, he's going to work saying, I'm saving people's lives today. And it's amazing. Whatever that is for you is what you should pursue. Rob Stevenson 31:12 That is fantastic advice. And it sounds like you love what you do Victoria because you definitely aren't expert and your passion really comes through in your voice. So thank you for sharing that passion with me. And all the folks out there in podcast land today. I've loved having you on the show. Speaker 2 31:25 Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invite Rob. It was amazing working with you. Rob Stevenson 31:29 Talk talent to me is brought to you by hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world's most innovative companies with ambitious tech and sales candidates. With hired candidates and companies have visibility into salary offers competing opportunities and job details. Hired unique offering includes customized assessments and salary bias alerts to help remove unconscious bias when hiring. By combining technology and human touch, our goal is to provide transparency in the recruiting process and empower each of our partners to employ their potential and keep their talent pipeline full. To learn more about how we can help you find your next great hire, head to hire.com/tt2m
Victoria Myers.txt
Open with Google Docs
Rob Stevenson 0:05
Welcome to talk down to me, a podcast featuring the most elite talent leaders on the front lines of modern recruitment.
Speaker 2 0:12
We actually want to understand the themes of someone’s life. We want to understand how they make decisions where they’re willing to take risks and what it looks like when they
Rob Stevenson 0:21
fail. No holds barred completely off the cuff interviews with directors of recruitment VPs of global talent, CHR rows, and everyone in between.
Speaker 3 0:31
Once I went through the classes and the trainings and got the certifications through diversity and inclusion, I still felt like something was missing.
Speaker 4 0:39
Talent Acquisition. It’s a fantastic career, you are trusted by the organization. You get to work with the C suite and the security at the front desk and everybody in between and everybody knows you.
Rob Stevenson 0:52
I’m your host, Rob Stevenson, and you’re about to hear the best in the biz. talk down to me. Here with me today on takedown to me on what has turned out to be a very hectic frazzling Tuesday is the global lead for talent attraction over at Amdocs Victoria Myers, Victoria, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Victoria Myers 1:11
I’m fantastic. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Rob Stevenson 1:14
Yeah. Happy to have you here. I should clarify that I’m the one who’s frazzled. You are unflappable, you are in the zone. It is myself it was I’m kind of all over the place. I was late getting here. Car troubles. The week is already getting out of control. And it’s only Tuesday but I’m sure you know that kind of mitigated or unmitigated chaos happens to us sometimes. Right, Victoria?
Speaker 2 1:34
Oh, absolutely. I’m married with kids working life. Yeah. And that the frazzle happens on occasion for sure.
Rob Stevenson 1:41
The frazzle happens, that’s a great bumper sticker.
Victoria Myers 1:44
We just coined a new phrase. Yeah, look at that.
Rob Stevenson 1:47
I think we can stop the podcast. Now. I don’t know if we’re going to do any better than that. That’s been our show everyone. But do you have this experience where it’s like, Oh, I’m gonna get done XYZ today. And then you start looking at emails, and then you have meetings? And it’s like, Nope, none of that got done.
Speaker 2 2:00
Oh, yeah, absolutely. And that’s why I have my handy notebook of writing down the to do’s so that way, if it’s really important, and it’s something I feel like I have to get done, or I’ll just schedule it on my calendar, I’ll block the time. So someone can’t put a meeting so I can get those tasks completed.
Rob Stevenson 2:17
That’s a good trick. I think the meeting booking like booking meetings with yourself is like, Okay, I, I’m going to dedicate real time to this, I’m going to treat it like a meeting that I can’t move. And so then when the clock strikes, whatever, now I know I’m working on next task. I think that’s great for productivity, but also your position, you’re like protecting your time too, because when you see a gap on your calendar, you’re like, oh, great, then I can work on blank. But when someone else sees the gap on your calendar, like, oh, great, I can book Victoria. Now she’s thinking about the thing I want her to think about?
Speaker 2 2:46
Absolutely, it has helped my ability to complete projects, by booking my own time.
Rob Stevenson 2:54
That’s smart, that’s smart. Do you ever have to like set boundaries in the organization to be like, Hey, I can’t let my day just run away from me, I have to work on XYZ today, like I’m gonna say no to this meeting.
Speaker 2 3:04
Very rarely do I say no to the meeting, I might send a delegate in my place if I’m if I can’t attend. But for me, it’s we’re a global company. And so I’m working with my peers that might be in India, or Israel. And so it’s about setting the I’m not willing to have meetings before this time, used to be 7am for the first three years. And then we started this big global project, and I bumped it to 6am. And for a couple of meetings, 5am. But I then tell them, I will not be on camera before 7am I’m most likely even still in my pajamas. So
Rob Stevenson 3:38
that’s how I am like I’ve had to record with people from like Australia, or you know, India or whatever. And there’s just no good time, there’s no time with someone in on the opposite side of the planet where it’s good for both people. So I’ve done the same thing. I’m like, for my benefit, and yours. I will not be appearing on camera today. But anyway, that’s a good tip about booking your own time. I think that’s really smart. Even if you’re not like protecting your own time. Like for me, that’s kind of the only way I can get stuff done is like oh, this is a serious thing you want to do and then it’s real. When you throw time at it. It’s real when it’s on the calendar.
Speaker 2 4:11
Exactly. And I live by my calendar now. So it’s always up. There’s always what I’m looking at every day is a different day. So some days today, I started at 6am Tomorrow, I don’t start till 7am. So you know, I actually get up every day at a different time depending on when my day starts. I’m not one of those that gets up at 5am and works out for seeing every day. Nope, that’s not me.
Rob Stevenson 4:33
I can’t stand those people. Like if it’s okay, if you’re doing that good for you. You’re healthy, but I can’t stand the people who have to like treat it like it’s content and be like I get up every morning at 430 and by the time 8am rolls around I’ve already had you know XYZ and it’s like Yeah, shut up like anyway, Victoria, really pleased to have you on before we get into some of the stuff I want to talk to you about that’s going on over there and Amdocs would Do you mind sharing a little bit about your background and how you wound up in the role?
Speaker 2 5:03
Sure. After college, my brothers and I actually started our own consulting firm doing, you know, as an agency world doing staffing placements. And I was the VP of Operations, I was the salesperson, I was the recruiter. And it was a great training ground, we were successful. And after a year, we decided, okay, we did that let’s go do separate things. I stayed in sales and recruiting, I worked that double desk where I would land the opportunity, and then I would go recruit for it. And I knew from the get go, that while I was good at the sales, I loved the recruiting, I loved helping people find a job or feeling like I was doing something positive in someone’s life that really fed to me fed myself. And so I decided, Okay, forget the sales part, let me go full scale recruiting. And I just, you know, kept on at it for years. Obviously, it’s been it’s been a long time now. And I also didn’t really like the agency world, I knew I wanted to get into corporate recruiting work for a organization to fill their positions instead of more of that Headhunter style that’s out in the agency world. It’s a bit more cutthroat and agency versus corporate. And again, it felt more aligned to who I am and what my my degrees are in speech pathology, as well as psychology. So obviously, there’s some part of me that wants to help people. And again, I feel like that corporate recruiting aspect fit me better.
Rob Stevenson 6:35
You know, we do beat up agency recruiting a fair amount on this podcast, which is not entirely fair. I think the issue is like, look, it’s just not for everyone. And I tend to interview people who are in house, I will say we’re gonna have the founder of an agency recruiter on shortly I we’re recording together next week. So if you’re out there in the agency world, and you’re like, hey, you know, Stop hitting me, then it feels good to you.
Speaker 2 6:58
Ground? Absolutely. And they have a role to play in what needs to be done in the business world. Absolutely. And it’s not that I wasn’t good at it. It’s just not I didn’t enjoy it as much as being in house. So that’s just me.
Rob Stevenson 7:12
Yeah, it’s a different function. It’s the same similar skill set different sort of approach. I just wanted to call that I don’t want my I can understand why, you know, maybe it wasn’t for you, Victoria. But I will want the agency folks out there to becoming aware of it as you’re seeing it. Yeah, I have total respect for them. So yeah, we will make sure y’all are represented, we won’t beat you up too bad. But that’s coming down the pipeline. But in the meantime, I’m curious, like when you were you kind of had that consultancy going on? You were filling a lot of different roles, you realize recruiting was right for you? What was it about the function for you at the time where you’re like, you know what this is? This is what I want to do.
Speaker 2 7:44
I think, again, it was really feeling like I was helping an individual on the sales side. Yes, you get to know the customer. And you get to know what that managers need is, and I really enjoyed that aspect of it. But you get that in house as well. You get to know your managers and what their needs are, and you build those relationships. But at the end of the day, the best experience in the world is giving someone an offer and them saying yes, I accept. That is rewarding work right there. And in. I don’t know, I like a gives you a high and I loved it. And I still do. I don’t get to do that anymore. But I absolutely love it. And the best even better than that is on a Friday, because Fridays are great. Everybody loves a Friday. But when you get to do your offers on a Friday, and they accept, it’s just like, you know, you
Rob Stevenson 8:30
know they’re going right to pop some champagne. Right? Exactly.
Victoria Myers 8:35
Yeah, we got kicked off the best way possible.
Rob Stevenson 8:38
Definitely. So it is too bad. You kind of don’t get to scratch that itch as much anymore because you’re in the lead position. But do you ever get to get in there on actual recruiting and speaking with candidates?
Speaker 2 8:47
No, not really, on occasion more as let me assist someone else who and I’ll be your first interview, I’ll help determine, you know, I’ll take your list of candidates and boil it down to the top five, so that then that senior manager is only interviewing the top five, I’ll do that I have done that. Instead, I get to you know, celebrate the wins of my team. And that’s actually fantastic as well.
Rob Stevenson 9:11
Right? Right. You know, they get to have that feeling every day or however often offers are going out anyway. Absolutely. So what’s going on over there and Amdocs? What are you working on?
Speaker 2 9:19
Wow, a lot. We’ve implemented AI technology that’s skills based technology for our talent marketplace. It’s everything from our ATS. It’s implementing a CRM, career hub for employees, a new career site for candidates. And it’s been really a very multifaceted project that started for me a year prior with really trying to think through what could talent attraction look like in the future for us. Once we did completed that project, then we jumped into actually implementing the tool and it was bringing in everyone from lnd to our HR team. Games, our business and field HR, learning and development, our od partners. So it was a broad spectrum to implement the tools. And it’s been a great experience for me as well working on a global project like this.
Rob Stevenson 10:14
So what’s interesting is that it seems like it’s outside the realm of recruiting and mere talent attraction, right? Like, you are also talking about developing people. But I guess your perspective would be that it all hangs together, It all affects, like even if it’s not about candidate enroll, it all is part of the same mission, right?
Speaker 2 10:33
It is talent attraction is a piece of talent acquisition. Right. So talent acquisition is your recruiting, I have a position to fill. Let me source candidates explain to them about this job. This role, this manager, this team, as well as obviously the benefits of your company and everything else. There’s a lot of sales involved with recruiting, we’re always selling our company, we’re selling the jobs, all of that. When it comes to talent attraction, it’s a broader scope. That’s part of it, obviously, because you’re attracting talent to roles, but it’s really in recruitment, marketing, employer branding, and EVP your social media posts, how do you look? How do you view? How do you attract what are so these are different aspects that we were looking at. And what we did as a team, we built a project team, and we really thought, what do we not have today? What do we want in the future? What’s coming, you know, and we really took an opportunity to envision something big, something bigger, and that’s where our starting point was? Then we did the gap analysis, truly looking at what are the gaps between our current processes versus what we want it to be? Also keeping in mind that we’re a global company. So we looked at each region? What are the steps of the process? What is different? versus what’s the same? What’s the candidate experience in all those processes? And really, again, focusing on what do we want to change along the way, through that brainstorming, we were able to take all of those ideas and group them. So we had ideas for and recommendations to make for tools, such as we wanted to implement a CRM, once we implemented a candidate Relationship Management System, who’s going to operate it, who’s going to really be focused on filling those talent communities. And being proactive in sourcing that was another aspect of what we wanted to change is not being reactionary, and only filling positions as soon as you get them, but thinking to the future of what are our needs going to be and ensuring we have talent pools already in place for that?
Rob Stevenson 12:37
Yeah, that is the interesting piece to me about breaking out talent attraction from talent acquisition is that I think most recruiters now understand the importance of a CRM and just like the long term approach to recruiting, right, it’s like, we are going to engage with this individual over a long period of time so that when they come to market, now, we have a shot at landing them as opposed to we’re going to source people hope we can convince them to suddenly leave their job, or hope that we land in their inbox in this six week period that they haven’t be looking for a new role, right? Okay, that’s fine. Here’s the problem. You have goals to hit and you have headcount to hit this month, this quarter, right? Like there’s a shorter term need to fill talent. So it’s always going to be both right? You’re always going to have to be filling talent right now, but also play the long game. So I’m curious, when did it become apparent that there was a need to focus a team specifically, on the longer term part, which sounds like what’s going on with the talent attraction team,
Speaker 2 13:33
there’s a lot of aspects to it. One was we had done some surveys and learned that one thing that we knew feet on the ground, but it was nice to have it validated by an external firm, that in many markets, Amdocs is not a well known name. In Israel, we’re very well known. And we’re pretty well known in India. But a lot of the other markets were not which we knew, but again, it was validated by an outside survey. So how do you become known? And it kind of goes to even back to the sales stays warm leads, right? So you had cold calling where you’re calling calling some company literally out of the blue, they’re like, Who are you and you have to try and really overcome that. It’s like that with recruiting as well. You have cold, cold calls, right? And so recruiters and Sorcerer’s are out there on LinkedIn, pinging people sending the in mails, hoping people will respond. And what we want to do is be more thoughtful about it, be more strategic about it. And essentially what we’re doing is filling the pipeline, and we’re filling the funnel, and we’re warming them up to the Amdocs brand, using the knowledge of marketing that it takes up. Typically, I think it’s seven to nine instances of engagement with your brand before it becomes more recognized or before someone will take an action. So if a candidate on that long term vision is in our database, and we’re engaging with them by sending them relevant and engaging content over the course of months By the time there is an actual position to fill there, what I’m calling a warm lead for our recruiting teams at that point, and it’s now saying, I have this position and I reach out to you, you’re thinking, I’ve heard of this brand. I’ve been getting emails from this company. Okay. Yeah, let me talk to you. My team has warmed you work. So that now, during that six week window that you might even be interested, you’re more interested than you would have been before?
Rob Stevenson 15:25
Right, right, you’re speaking my language, because this is like funnel marketing, right is like this, a podcast is considered top of funnel content, by the way, right? And it’s like, you, you want someone to become familiar with you over time you want to make asks that are appropriate to the relationship and not overstep your bounds and not turn people off. And then when you provided a lot of value, only then and only then can you ask for something in return. And in your case, that’s, you know, a phone screen, right or an informational call something to that effect. But with like the longer term approach, I’m so curious how you message this internally, you know, to just to be able to prove out the ROI, because like I said, you still have the quarterly needs, and they’re still headcount. And it’s like, look, look, this approach is going to pay off in like, eight months, just trust me. And the meantime was people who maybe are not focused on just the the day to day of filling roles. So what did that conversation sound like?
Speaker 2 16:17
It was a challenge, for sure. It’s about being long term vision versus the immediate. And we all know that business demands results. You know, that’s how businesses stay alive and stay relevant. I’ve been very fortunate that I have great support of strong leadership, who at Amdocs are very people centric, their employee centric, their candidate centric, this people first culture helped me to sell this idea of we need to create a relationship with our candidates and not being so transactional, and not being so reactionary, to whatever that immediate demand is. And so I think that that overall strategy was something that they could buy into. Now, we also have to show ROI. So what’s different is it’s not necessarily about time to hire, although we shouldn’t be impacting that. But that’ll be down. You know, as we said, eight months to a year from now, what we’re tracking now is the open rates, the click through rates, the application rates, and even hires. And can we show that a candidate was hired after we were engaging with them that they applied because we were engaging with them? And you know, we’ve only been live with our system for three months, and we just tracked to hire last week, our first hire, so it’s very exciting. It works. It works. Absolutely.
Rob Stevenson 17:37
Can we speak about that person in particular, like, what was their journey to hire, like, let’s start before the interview process starts.
Speaker 2 17:46
So they were an alumni candidate. And so from a scene from their experience that they had apply to a role a year ago, and we put them into our alumni count community engaged with them, you know, just as the initial engagement was telling them about the community and what we’ve changed. And you know, a little bit about what we’re trying to do with our alumni community. About a month later, they applied to a position. And a month after that was when I saw the hire in the system. So it was about from the time they applied June 22. I want to say it was less than a month because it was July 14, that they were hired in the system.
Rob Stevenson 18:25
Okay, so the alumni, when I hear that word, I would think, Oh, they worked at your company and have left and now they’re coming back, but you are qualifying as alumni. Anyone who has applied for a role?
Speaker 2 18:35
No, no, this was a former employee. Oh, it was your correct? Yeah, I’ve got it. Yeah. So it was a former employee that we had put into the alumni community and then engaged with the individual.
Rob Stevenson 18:45
Okay, so then, that sounds to me like to continue the marketing tie in. That sounds to me like persona marketing, like candidate persona, right? Like you’re going to segment all the people out there based on their perceived or actual relationship with us. So what are those segments for you? One of those persona is persona is yes. What are some other segments?
Speaker 2 19:09
silver medalists, so those would be the individuals who had applied and interviewed in the past, but were not selected. So we want to do a reengagement with those individuals. They know a little bit about who we are, but again, we want to engage with them. And what’s important about the personas is your tone of voice or what you might share with them could be different based upon who they are, right? So alumni obviously know who Amdocs is, that maybe if they’ve been gone long enough, they don’t know everything that’s changed and everything that we’re doing now, same a silver medalists, another group would be early professionals. So we’re looking at people from like zero to six years is about the window of an early professional. We have seen your specialists, management and executive. So those are the persona types. But you also want to segment in other ways, so we’re segmenting based upon fields of work. So what An example would be corporate functions, which would be like HR and finance, very different type of content you would want to share with those individuals versus someone in r&d and engineering. So our software developers and software testers, now, what we found from our research is that you don’t want to over segment. So I may use that same example, software testers, and software developers are both actually interested in the same type of topics. So we don’t want to only have a community of software testers, because the content would be the same content we would send to the developers.
Rob Stevenson 20:35
Right? So just be redundant and to break them out. Correct. So where is the content for each segment coming from?
Speaker 2 20:42
Well, multiple areas, so we’re looking at you know, videos, and white papers, and blogs, and podcasts, anything that could be relevant now Amdocs actually puts out a lot of content. So that’s the first place we look, is there content that Amdocs is putting out that could be relevant to a community, otherwise, we would look in the industry. So as an example, if it’s cloud developers, we could be looking at partnership that we currently have with Microsoft in the cloud space and share a white paper or share something, or we could go find an article. And that could be an article that we would want to share with a community of developers, for example.
Rob Stevenson 21:21
Got it? And so then, are these people who have subscribed, like you have their email address? How are you kind of serving up content, I guess,
Speaker 2 21:28
we do it through the CRM. So there’s an aspect to our system that has campaigns is where you’re building out beautifully. Of course, there’s a lot of great aspects to what the tool provides. But we’re building out email campaigns, everybody has the ability to unsubscribe, so we definitely respect that as well. The system itself will enable you to not send communications to people who have already unsubscribed. So utilizing an AI tool as well. So it can do some matching for you and find all the candidates in your system that match what your topic could be, for example, and then you would send the campaign and it does all the tracking for you as well.
Rob Stevenson 22:08
Got it. Okay. You know, when you are explaining some of the segments, in particular, the silver medal one where, you know, as someone who maybe got to the offer stage, but then there’s someone you liked a little more, and it’s like, oh, we wish we could hire this person. But you know, there’s just something a little better. It’s like, okay, here are people who maybe weren’t right for a specific role, but we know are still warm on our company who would still be a good fit. I feel like once you do a little bit of this, it’s just such a clear, like, can we map this and just overlay it onto our existing employees, right? Like, because in that case, it’s like, oh, here’s someone who is at our company, maybe they’re a silver medalist in the role that they have, right? Like, over time, they become a little disinterested in it, they were good enough to get hired, they did an okay job at this role. They’re ready to move on. Can we keep them and move them somewhere else? So do you see I’m saying it’s like, can we leverage? Or can we overlay the same approach onto our existing employee base? Are you thinking about that, too?
Speaker 2 23:03
Absolutely. Yes, that’s actually one of the things that we are working to implement. Now. We’re calling it proactive internal sourcing. And what we’re doing is exactly that. It’s the individuals who’ve applied to positions internally, have interviewed and for whatever reason, we’re not selected. We know from our own internal research, that they’re more likely to leave the company at that point in time, because now they’re looking, I’m interested, I want something I want career growth, and they weren’t selected
Rob Stevenson 23:32
I expressed not being happy in my current role. And you know, I didn’t get to fulfill that.
Speaker 2 23:36
Right, right. And so we don’t want to just let it lay like that. So we’re being proactive, identifying who those individuals are, and then proactively reaching out to them to see, is there another match? Is there another open position that we can get them engaged with? And I think that the idea is they’ll feel taken care of, right, they’ll feel heard and seen. And another important aspect to your own employees who’ve interviewed and were declined, for whatever reason is you have to be authentic, and provide relevant feedback. You can’t just say someone better was selected. But why? What did the manager see in that person? And if you can provide them, it was this specific skill set that you were not as strong on? And here’s the training options to help you upskill in that area. Now, you’ve engaged your employee in a way where they’re potentially less likely to leave.
Rob Stevenson 24:27
Do you need to wait for someone to apply to an internal roll? Or can you maybe solicit from managers like Hey, who do you think is maybe not quite right for the role they’re in?
Speaker 2 24:37
We respect our employees in the same way that we would anybody who hasn’t opted in. So we do request that they either apply to positions or they can opt in to being you know, part of those types of proactive processes, but they have to take that action on their side.
Rob Stevenson 24:56
Got it. It’s like LinkedIn putting open to work on your profile picture you You can put like open to mobility on your Amdocs profile. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, that makes sense. Because it probably wouldn’t feel good if you were just humming along, you know, doing what you thought as an okay job and someone comes along as like, Hey, Rob, have you thought of a different job? And this company like, Wait, what did I do mine trouble?
Speaker 2 25:18
You know, I think that there are aspects to what you said about, you know, reaching out to the managers and finding out who might not be a fit in their current role. But we’re what we’re planning on, we’re in the phases, the planning phases now of what we’re going to roll out next, will be automated systems to help both the manager and the employee to kind of help figure that out, what are the gaps that you might have in your current role? And then here’s the training programs to help you upskill in the role you are today? And then what are your career aspirations? What are the gaps for you to get to that? And then here’s the training programs to help you get to there. So those are the types of things that we’re looking to roll out later this year, early next year?
Rob Stevenson 25:57
Got it? Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, you would give them the career development stuff to help them get better at their job, if they’re perceived to be not as good rather than just move them out of there. It seems obvious when you put it like that. But yeah, speaking of hiring managers, another challenge of the more long term, proactive sourcing approach is occurring to me. And that is that you also require the hiring managers to have a longer term view of their own team, right, and like their to do some workforce planning of their own to anticipate what their needs might look like, you know, a few quarters a couple of years down the road so that you can begin building that long term pipeline, is that a challenge to make sure that hiring managers are thinking that far ahead?
Speaker 2 26:35
Absolutely. It is a challenge. And it’s something that when we created this proactive sourcing model, we envisioned two types of the model, the first being that always on approach of what we kind of already discussed about just being proactive, filling the pipeline having warm leads. And what we did there is we focused on what are the high volume roles that we’re always hiring for, and then we’re always going to be sourcing for that. The second approach is what I’m calling more of like an ad hoc project based approach where it’s, you’re gonna have a ramp up in a certain area, it needs to be enough volume for it to make sense. So if you know some manager has 50 positions that are going to be coming open, you know, that need to be filled in one location, what we want to do is really hit it hard and fast with we’re going to find that persona. First, we’re going to, you know, figure out what that persona is, go find those talents, add them to the communities and engage with them maybe over three months or six months, and not over the course of eight months to a year. So how do we get the managers to even be aware of this new model, we’re going to be doing a roadshow. So that’s my next thing that I’ll be working on in the next quarter will be going around and meeting with all of our sales managers, our business leaders, letting them know about this new capability that we have internally. So that they’ll be thinking about those oftentimes, that they might already know, oh, maybe it’s a 50%, we might be having a ramp up over here, I want to know about it, even if it’s 50 or 60% going to happen. So that is the next challenge, I have to do a bit of internal marketing, so to speak, to make them aware of what we’re wanting to bring to them the service that we want to bring
Rob Stevenson 28:16
totally, and it is a little outside their normal expectation for how recruiting works, right? They’re probably used to like I come up with a job description, or I pair with talent to write one. They go off and source they bring back a few people, I say yes, no, they bring back a few more people, right? And then we get in the interview process. But I think they’d all probably in the same way as recruiters, getting the import of the CRM and the long term approach hiring managers would do. It’s like, hey, wouldn’t you rather someone that was just like we got the right person at the right time, because we had been building up to trying to get them for a long time as opposed to just in time hiring. So that it seems like they would get it. But it does take that like, they need to be told need to be told like this is the approach. This is how we’re going to be doing things now.
Speaker 2 28:59
Absolutely. Another thing that we added to our team, so they’re part of talent, attraction, or talent, acquisition and strategy are a few leaders that we’re calling talent strategy leaders. So they actually are within our organization, but they focus on specific business units globally. So that we have this idea of strategy and forward thinking, and what is the business need? And what is coming? And what are the skills? And what are the skill gaps, all of these types of things that really are another funnel into what talent acquisition does. And so since we have the strategy leaders, those are my peers that I work with on a regular basis. Obviously, they’re aware of what we’re doing, but it’s really helpful to have another voice, another person that’s at the table with those business leaders who can advocate for the changes and for what we’re trying to implement.
Rob Stevenson 29:51
Yeah, definitely. Victoria this has all been fascinating. This is probably the deepest dive into like segmented recruiting marketing I’ve done on the show. So thank you for watching. me through all this. Before I let you go, I want to ask you one more question to kind of slide into home here and this episode delicately thread the needle here at the end. I’m curious, what is the best career advice you ever received from someone else?
Speaker 2 30:14
I’d hate to be cliche, but I think it’s true. To do what you love to find that sweet spot of obviously, we all have to work and have an income. So you know, work is work. But when it can be something that you enjoy, and that you love, it becomes less work. And I think that that’s really good advice. It’s sometimes hard to do. It’s hard to find that sweet spot of, you know, something that you’re enjoying, and you can love. But I think that that is the kind of key to having a healthy, happy adult life where you can go to work and not feel that drain at all. It’s work, you know, like he wanted to be. I’m working on this project. And it’s amazing, and I’m impacting people’s lives. And it’s so wonderful. For me, that’s what my story is, I’m sure for someone else that maybe he’s a heart surgeon, he’s going to work saying, I’m saving people’s lives today. And it’s amazing. Whatever that is for you is what you should pursue.
Rob Stevenson 31:12
That is fantastic advice. And it sounds like you love what you do Victoria because you definitely aren’t expert and your passion really comes through in your voice. So thank you for sharing that passion with me. And all the folks out there in podcast land today. I’ve loved having you on the show.
Speaker 2 31:25
Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invite Rob. It was amazing working with you.
Rob Stevenson 31:29
Talk talent to me is brought to you by hired. Hired empowers connections by matching the world’s most innovative companies with ambitious tech and sales candidates. With hired candidates and companies have visibility into salary offers competing opportunities and job details. Hired unique offering includes customized assessments and salary bias alerts to help remove unconscious bias when hiring. By combining technology and human touch, our goal is to provide transparency in the recruiting process and empower each of our partners to employ their potential and keep their talent pipeline full. To learn more about how we can help you find your next great hire, head to hire.com/tt2m