00:01 Rob Stevenson: Oh yeah, welcome back, you wonderful rabble of recruiting darlings. It’s me, Rob, your talent acquisition podcast buddy, and I am as ever thrilled to present to you another fantastic conversational journey through the wild wondrous world of talent acquisition. If this is your first time joining me, I literally cannot tell you how happy I am you’ve tuned in. My entire livelihood depends on it. But my gratitude and bills notwithstanding, here’s all you need to know. Every week I will bring in one of my favorite recruiters, or directors of recruitment, or heads of talent, and they are all going to do primarily one thing.

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00:39 RS: Talk Talent To Me. Today’s guest is a brilliant, strategic and thoughtful Head of Technical Recruiting over at One Medical, Viet Nguyen, and One Medical has some really interesting recruiting challenges because in addition to all the standard departmental hiring needs, they also are hiring medical personnel. We didn’t really talk about that, but it’s important for context. What did we talk about? Well, Viet has done a great job ensuring a consistent candid experience across all levels of seniority and in a variety of different departments. And he has also instituted core competency interviewing, and that of course comprises technical ability, but also soft skills like collaboration, interpersonal, savvy, how results driven a given candidate is, which is all well and good. But what happens when you are too collaborative, or too results driven? You can be overly core competent, but at what cost?

01:38 RS: Viet left me self-diagnosing over here in terms of what I might be using as a crutch in the workplace, which is dangerous but it shows this interesting approach to hiring that paints recruiters almost like psychologists. I loved chatting with Viet, I love this episode, I love podcasting. I’m bursting with love over here, enough about me. Let’s do the damn thing. Please give a warm Talk Talent To Me welcome to One Medical’s head of technical recruiting, Viet Nguyen.

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02:48 RS: Okay, Viet Nguyen is in the building. Viet, how are we?

02:51 Viet Nguyen: Doing well. It’s 4:00 PM in the afternoon, so, second cup of coffee has already gone down.

02:57 RS: Okay, yeah, hope you can get nice and lively for this podcast. I know this is normally the time of day when I start winding down too, but here we are. So how is everything going over at One Medical?

03:06 VN: It’s great. We’re growing a ton, like everybody else in San Francisco.

03:09 RS: Right.

03:10 VN: And I feel like we’re getting to the point where we’re running out of seats, and I actually don’t have a seat anymore. I gave it to the newest recruiter of my team. And so…

03:19 RS: Wow, what do you say about a guy like Viet? That kind of leader.

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03:22 VN: Just float around, and help where I can.

03:25 RS: So, do you post up at a table in the kitchen or what do you do?

03:29 VN: Most of my day is spent either in phone booths on phone reviews, in meetings, hovering over someone on my team’s shoulder as they’re working through something, or floating around the engineering floor and just hanging out with people and continue building that rapport.

03:43 RS: Got it. I actually used to ask my boss to do that sometimes if I was working on something that I didn’t really know how to do, I’d be like, “Can you just watch me do this, and tell me where I’m going wrong?” So it sounds like you have that thing going on a little bit at One Medical?

03:56 VN: Yeah, I think so. All of my team sits in a pod and so I feel like I’m constantly just orbiting around the entire pod and just like, “Who needs help?”

04:06 RS: Right, right. Can you think of an example of something someone needed help with?

04:11 VN: Yeah, one thing that one of the recruiters was working on recently was a prep email. He’s recently new, he was working on prep email to all of our interviewers, where we wanna send them summary of the candidate, what their hot buttons are, and he had come from an agency background, and so he was very careful about not overselling, and so he had me stand over his shoulder and read it as he was typing, and we were able to make small edits. But honestly, he had it, he just, I think, needed the confidence of knowing someone else is looking at it.

04:42 RS: Right.

04:42 VN: But that’s one example I can think about off the top of my head.

04:45 RS: Got it. What is overselling?

04:47 VN: It’s the little things that you do in phrasing, like saying this candidate is actively interviewing everywhere in a way you could sell it, if you’re an agency, you’re like, “This is a hot candidate. We need to get this candidate through the process immediately.”

05:03 RS: Got it.

05:04 VN: And so, it’s removing a lot of the subjectivity and I think flowery language, and just being as objective as you can as you communicate, especially with engineers where they cut through that stuff pretty quickly.

05:15 RS: Yeah.

05:15 VN: And if you get to the point where they feel like you’re not being as concise as you can, they can be quick to cut you off.

05:24 RS: Totally.

05:25 VN: Fortunately, at One Medical everyone’s really, really nice and everyone’s very hospitable, but I’ve seen it in other places it’s not so much.

05:31 RS: Right, right, and not just being too flowery or verbose, but also if they think you’re being disingenuous. It’s like, if you’re gonna tell me, “Oh yeah, we’re a total rocket ship. And we’re gonna IPO in two years.” They’re gonna be like, “Shut up, get out of my inbox.” Right?

05:42 VN: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right.

05:43 RS: Okay, so just being honest and upfront about the opportunity.

05:46 VN: That’s right.

05:46 RS: Got it. Okay, cool. On the way in, we walked past the hired all hands area, and I wanted to ask you about this right away. You said that every all-hands at One Medical people keep asking you about hiring, which is great to have people that are invested in growing the company, but also that means you get to stand up in front of the company maybe more often than you would like. What are some of the things people ask about?

06:08 VN: Sure, and so before I go into what recruiting covers during all-hands, there’s two things that we do at every all-hands. So, the first one is something we call popcorn. And popcorn is where you just show appreciation for someone else in the company, generally not on your team, somebody that’s cross-functional. For example, I might say, “I really appreciate Jerry jumping into the interview this morning, it was at 8:45 and we couldn’t find any other interviewers.” And he raised his hand, and he’s like, “I’ll be in at 8:45 ready to go.” And it’s not always that easy.

06:41 RS: Right.

06:41 VN: And so I might say, “Popcorn to Jerry for doing this.” And in a lot of companies feedback and appreciations oftentimes shared through HipChat, or Slack, or whatever mechanism you have. But at One Medical, it’s pretty nice to actually be able look someone in the eye and say, “I really appreciate what you did for me,” or for us, or whoever it may be. And you know it’s genuine because it goes sometimes 15-20 minutes in an hour-long meeting. And so this is something we do at the beginning of every meeting, or every large meeting rather, as far as recruiting. So, every all-hands recruiting is asked to give an update, and so they ask for a couple different things between funnel metrics, offer activity. So, who’s accepted, who’s declined, who is currently at the end of the process. And something that I found to be really cool in my first all-hands when I did this was when I said, “Hey, these are the candidates that are at the end of the process, and we’ve extended an offer to.” And multiple people had asked, “What’s their email address? What’s their contact information? How can I help reach out and at least provide perspective for these candidates?” And it’s not always selling, it’s just giving, I think, their opinion of the opportunity.

07:54 RS: It’s almost like a back channel on the part of the candidate, right?

07:57 VN: It is, and we do something that’s interesting called reverse interview that allows candidates to actually come back in after we’ve given them a thumbs up, “Hey, we wanna hire you.” We then give them the opportunity to come back and really interview us to make sure that they have every rock turned over, and they understand exactly what they’re getting into, and all I asked them is, “Who do you wanna spend more time with? What topics do you wanna cover?” And I lay a panel in front of them, and they come in, in a position of strength knowing they can ask any question they want between our finances, spending time with our CTOs, CEO; ask about out DNI stats. Sometimes they ask some really, really hard questions, and they also, they ask for things like I wanna sit in on a planning meeting where people don’t agree. I wanna understand how friction works at this company. And it’s been a really, really cool experience and not everyone takes me up on it, but the people who do, tend to join, ’cause they know exactly what they’re getting themselves into. But, sorry, going back to what your original question was…

08:53 RS: No, I love that though, I love the reverse interview because it strikes such a strange balance when you’re in an interview because you are selling yourself, right? You’re trying to explain how great you are without bragging, but at the same time you’re supposed to be assessing the company, they’re supposed to be selling themselves to you. And how do you tow that line of talking about yourself, but also gathering information about the opportunity? And usually that takes a form of, in my interviews with about 10 minutes to go, I’ll usually say, “Do you have any questions for me?” And that’s the opportunity I present them to ask questions, but usually they don’t really ask hard questions, like, “What’s it like working here?” Right? That’s not a hard question. So, actually segmenting it to a separate part of the interview, I think is really great. So, how many candidates take you up on that?

09:38 VN: If I had to say, maybe eight out of 10.

09:40 RS: That’s a lot.

09:41 VN: It’s a good amount, and I think the main reason why we actually came up with this process, because we recognize, very similar to you, it’s never an even playing field. You never feel comfortable asking the really hard questions. And so by telling them actually at the beginning of the process, the very beginning of the interview process, we walked them through the whole thing, and before the on-site, we prep them as well. And we say, “Hey look, you’re gonna get to ask questions, but frankly, you’re not gonna get all of your questions answered. Just know that you’re also gonna have this opportunity thereafter.”

10:11 RS: I love that. So then they’re not trying to squeeze them in during the assessment, they’re like, “Okay, there will be a time for me to ask this later. I can focus on just performing.”

10:20 VN: Yep. And as much as we would love to make it an even playing field, the nature of interviewing, it’s just very one-sided, and as much as we would try to… We can try to figure out a solution for that very problem, but we’re just assuming that it’s unsolvable. So, how do we actually come up with a solution that helps later on?

10:39 RS: Right. Has that affected your speed to hire, or time to hire at all? Does it slow things down?

10:44 VN: It definitely slows things down, but not as much as you would think because, at least for me, I’ve never taken an offer or gotten an offer where I’ve had zero questions. And so oftentimes, you’re having to ask, “Hey, I wanna jump on a call with the hiring manager. I wanna talk to people on the team.” And it happens more often than not. And so why not just codify that process and actually bake it into the actual interview process itself. And so it doesn’t slow down as much as you would expect, but it does slow it down because you have to figure out logistics of… Sometimes your CEO is the person that is best equipped to answer the question. Sometimes it’s your Chief Medical Officer, in our case. A lot of engineers, they wanted to hear directly from the most senior doctor of the company to understand how technology interacts with medicine. And so, it’s fascinating, it’s hard to get on his counter because he still sees patients, and so sometimes we have to push it a week out, but when you give a candidate that opportunity, oftentimes they’ll wait, if need be, if they’re really, really interested.

11:42 RS: Right, yeah, and I guess that’s okay if it slows it down because what you’re creating is a reliable process that generates people who know exactly what they’re getting into, right? Better to have a two or three-day slower speed to hire, if that means that people aren’t gonna accept an offer, and be like, “Wait, what? This isn’t what I signed up for.” And then quit, right?

12:02 VN: That’s exactly right. And I know one of the topics that we’re gonna cover today is candidate experience. So I did this at a previous company, and primarily hiring engineers.

12:12 RS: Yeah.

12:13 VN: And so when I came to One Medical, I was like, why not try it out? And so we’ve taken the reverse interview and we have applied it in corporate, which is all of our business functions and then we’ve also applied it in the clinical world, and that’s been really, really cool to see. There’s these different artifacts that we do just in tech, and tech, oftentimes, we feel like we’re in a bubble, and everything only applies to us. But we’ve taken a lot of really cool ideas from both sides and actually have traded and been able to create a pretty cool experience across One Medical, not just within tech, or clinical, or corporate.

12:45 RS: Yeah, I was curious how you’re able to deliver a consistent candidate experience, given such a varied interview process. I know it’s not your purview, but One Medical is interviewing and hiring a lot of doctors, for example, and medical personnel. That’s their interview process, by it’s very nature is gonna be different than an engineer’s, it’s gonna be different than a marketer’s because of the people involved, because of the level of assessment, etcetera, etcetera. So how are you able to maintain and make sure it’s great in every capacity if they’re also different?

13:18 VN: The first thing we did was we met as a group, so we had people, we had recruiters from clinical, we had recruiters from corporate, and recruiters from tech all meet, and we try to understand what experience we’re creating independently and then we started to trade ideas and we started like, “Oh I really like how you guys do that. I really don’t like this.” And so we have two primary coalitions within recruiting, so all of recruiting reports in to a VP of Talent. And so I have two counterparts, one on the clinical side, one the corporate side, but I have a coalition with two other recruiters, where all we do is talk about candidate experience. And so we created this Trello board of all the different opportunities that we can work on and an example of that is our voice., and so both written and verbal. And so we first looked at written communication, how do we create a consistent experience even just through messaging?

14:16 RS: Right.

14:17 VN: So, are we all using the same template to request availability? Are we all using the same template for on-site confirmations and how can we make it consistent? And when we first started, we had all these preconceived notions that there’s no way these three very different functions could use the same templating system. And if anyone who uses Greenhouse knows managing templates is sometimes a job in its own, oftentimes falling in recruiting operations. And we’ve been able to manage to not have to rely on any single person by just communicating between these three teams and trying to create a consistent experience from just a written communication perspective. And then there’s the verbal communication, which an example is prep, how we prep a candidate. In clinical, they used to not prep candidates because some of the questions that our doctors would ask candidates, a lot of recruiters felt like they’re out of their depth and they couldn’t properly prep a candidate.

15:10 VN: And so, I actually shadowed one of our clinical interviews just to understand what is it that doctors ask and then generalizing the ideas and giving it to recruiters like, “This is how you could prep a candidate just to put them at ease.” You’re not giving them any answers, but how can you put them at ease so they feel comfortable going to the interview and bringing their best self. ‘Cause we do that in tech, and I would say that’s a relatively common practice across all of tech recruiting now. But in clinical it’s something that just hasn’t seen that. And so we’ve been able to take some of the ideas in tech, apply them to clinical, and then the idea of doctors wanting to meet with engineers, now we’re doing that as part of the reverse interview. So doctors are starting to ask like, “I would love to meet with an engineer to understand the technology and what you build and how you interact with doctors and how can we be part of the product development process?”

16:00 VN: So it’s a lot of shared ideas and I think creating consistent experience, a lot of it is accountability and make sure we’re executing on it every time, but before that actually designing things together, rather than assuming that these silos are predetermined and unbreakable.

16:15 RS: Got it. And so part of it is just identifying what is this about the process is the same regardless of department or seniority, and messaging is a good example. That’s another good example of where marketing skills are really important to have as a recruiter, because that’s something that we’ve talked about here at Hired. My boss wanted to hire a brand czar, which was just like it was gonna go and make sure that everyone’s using the same language because some people were calling it the opportunity network or a double opt-in marketplace, that’s mine. Or there were all these other ones, and it was like, “Lock it down. We all need to be on the same page so that people understand who we are. We can control that.” So in the same way you can make sure that that’s happening at all, on the jobs page, on the careers page and wherever else that you have control of the website. And then in messaging and even in not just outreach, but in the whole process, there’s a very regimented funnel cycle that someone goes through and at this stage, this is how you should be approaching people.

17:19 VN: That’s right. And whether it’s a doctor, or an engineer, or a marketer, hopefully they have the exact same experience when they come to One Medical, whether it’s the first call or the last call. And we’re trying to become hyper-rigorous about structure and how we approach things, but obviously not being robotic ’cause One Medical, we’re about people. People come to work at One Medical ’cause they fundamentally wanna help others, and so we wanna make sure we stay human. But how can you stay human while still creating a very consistent high quality experience.

17:50 RS: Yeah, definitely. On the same note as how do you control for different departments and different conversations that are happening, core competency interviewing is really crucial to you over there. So I’m just interested in that whole process in terms of what was it before, if core competency interviewing is something that new that you installed, what was going on before? What is the process of identifying what they are? Does that mean that you revisit the whole interview process? I should probably ask one question at a time. But you can interrupt me at any point and start talking about this.

18:26 VN: Yeah, so, as we think about interviewing, oftentimes you interview for two things: You have hard skills and you have soft skills. Hard skills generally, they’re much more straightforward to evaluate; oftentimes, it’s much closer to binary than soft skills. Soft skills, there’s subjectivity that falls into place, people define different soft skills differently and so what competencies allow you to do is actually define what these soft skills are. And so when we first kick off a role with a hiring manager we’ll go through what are the nice-to-have skills, what are the must have skills, like standard stuff. But then we also go through what are the hard skills that you need to evaluate during the interview process and then what are the soft skills. And so the soft skills, we use a product or a program called Korn Ferry which is, I would say reasonably common in Fortune 100 companies. And so what Korn Ferry does is it helps you define competencies. So an example is collaborates. Everyone says, “I need someone who’s collaborative,” like, what does that actually mean? And so Korn Ferry will help you define what it means to be a skilled collaborator and unskilled collaborator. And probably the most important piece is, when you overuse the skill. And so, an example, like collaborate…

19:48 RS: Meaning, weighting it too heavily when you’re interviewing someone?

19:50 VN: No, when someone uses that skill as a crutch for something else.

19:54 RS: I see.

19:55 VN: I’ll use one that probably most recruiters are very familiar with is, drives results, which is a competency. And so as a recruiter, in an interview, you may ask, “How have you overcome all these challenges and hit your goal?” And people will talk about, “Oh, I had to fill this really hard role, and this and that, and this and that,” but no one really thinks about the overuse side, when you’re too results-driven, where you start to actually do things like step on people’s toes. No one ever talks about that. There are negative things to look for as well.

20:27 RS: Got it.

20:27 VN: Like, if you have to drive results, a second question is like, “How did you work with other people around you to drive that result?”

20:34 RS: Right. Like, you drive results but at what cost?

20:38 VN: That’s right, and so Korn Ferry helps actually between defining the competency, what questions to ask, positive and negative themes to look for. And so, you take the competency and then you actually apply them in the context of the role. In engineering, it might mean, “Hey, you had a deadline, how did you hit that deadline? Were you working till ungodly hours in the night? Or did you figure out a way to work with other people to get it done?” And then there’s the technical part of it, that you weave in throughout the conversation. And so, the technical piece might be how well you understand that particular technology, but then the competency is how you drove results. And so, we just actually start to weave both those things in. And so, a lot of… In technical interviews, especially for engineers, oftentimes, it’s so focused on hard skills, but as we know, being a good engineer now also relies on the soft skills. And actually, not just engineers, but everybody. And so now we actually have a mechanism for actually defining and measuring soft skills, which has been really, really powerful for us.

21:42 RS: Yeah, what are some other soft skills, at least, on the tech side?

21:45 VN: Yeah, collaborates is another one. There’s interpersonal savvy, which is interesting for recruiting. ‘Cause everyone says, “Yeah, of course I’m interpersonally savvy.”

21:53 RS: I work well with others, yeah.

21:55 VN: Yeah, I work well with others.

21:55 RS: Nobody wants to admit that they’re a bastard to work with. [chuckle]

21:58 VN: [chuckle] That’s right, and it’s interesting. The overuse, when you’re overly interpersonally savvy, I think that Korn Ferry defines that as, you spend too much time trying to understand dynamics and actually reduce productivity, or you care too much about being liked that that actually affects your performance at work. And so, there are other things. So another one is, instills trust. As a recruiter, you have to be able to instill trust in other people. And when I actually went through this exercise with my manager, my VP, I overuse the instills trust competency, and I was like, “How is that possible? How can you be too too trustworthy?”

22:38 RS: Yeah, transparent. Too trustworthy, yeah.

22:38 VN: How can you be too trustworthy?

22:39 RS: I love that Viet guy. I wish I didn’t trust him so much, though.

22:42 VN: What can I do?

22:43 RS: Well, what’s that look like, being too trustworthy? What was the negative that the tool showed you?

22:50 VN: I operate on almost full transparency across pretty much everything I do. And for example, I manage a team of recruiters and as things are happening in the business, I try to keep them in the loop as much as I can, and oftentimes, it means telling them exactly what I heard so they know, them and I are on the same page. And the feedback that I got was, sometimes I would give people on my team news that they didn’t necessarily need to hear because it wasn’t final. And all it did, it actually, it created anxiety and actually decreased productivity. Whereas, if I waited a couple of days until the dust settled and told them then, it might have reduced the anxiety and everyone would actually… Would have been fine.

23:31 RS: I am just diagnosing myself now in terms of, am I too this? What is the fall out of me trying too hard to be liked? [chuckle]

23:40 VN: The fallout, I think, I’m not a psychologist by any means, but I think trying too hard to be liked is essentially being inauthentic, right?

23:51 RS: Yeah.

23:51 VN: Because if you try too hard to be liked by a bunch of different people who you actually just need to have a productive relationship with, it can create weirdness with authenticity and then actually, you then lose people’s trust.

24:06 RS: Got it, got it. This tool is showing you what the potential fallout of being too core competent. How do you then screen for that? How do you… Like okay, this person, well, you need to know if they’re trustworthy. Yeah, they’re trustworthy. Are they too trustworthy? How do you assess for the negative of… What did you call it? Over possessing one of these traits?

24:28 VN: Overusing the skill.

24:28 RS: Overusing the skill, yeah.

24:30 VN: Korn Ferry is nice ’cause it actually gives you actually a set of follow-up questions. And I don’t remember them off the top of my head, but as far as assessing, let’s say, someone who’s too trustworthy, I imagine you may ask, “When did you tell somebody something that they didn’t need to know?”

24:50 RS: That you wish you hadn’t, right? Yeah.

24:53 VN: You may have wished you haven’t, but whether it’s on a need-to-know basis, or you want them to know, I think it becomes quite nuanced.

25:02 RS: Right. And so, you follow up with behavioral interview questions. Tell me about a time when you then insert the potential fallout here.

25:11 VN: For example, a good one for a recruiter, especially, is like, “When have you given a candidate feedback that, because you wanted them to have the full perspective of how they did but actually ended up having a huge blow back?” That’s happened to every recruiter that gives feedback, as far as I know. And so, how do you become tactful in sharing what is actually on a need-to-know basis, versus just potentially could be just taking jabs at them?

25:40 RS: Right, right. That’s really fascinating, I had never considered that you could be too core competent.

25:45 VN: Yeah.

25:46 RS: And is that a reason for passing on someone? If you saw that they were overcompensating and leaning at… Is this at the interview stage? Or is this more of like a workforce planning, this is like, internally we’re gonna take this as like 360 feedback kind of thing?

26:04 VN: Yeah, so when we open up a new role, we define the hard skills, the competencies. And oftentimes, those competencies that you set during the planning stage of the job, you also use those to evaluate the person once they start the job. And so it definitely comes up during the interview process. And depending on what the competency is… Like, I can’t imagine someone’s not… If my job is to be discreet, and I may be too transparent, that could be a problem. For example, if I was a lawyer, and if I worked on our inside consult team and I was way too transparent when I shouldn’t be, that’s actually detrimental to the job. Or, as a recruiter, if I overuse the kind of drive results competency, that could actually hurt the people on my team. So yeah, that could be a reason not to move forward somebody. But it’d have to be pretty extreme, I imagine.

27:00 RS: Yeah, yeah. And this is something for, certainly, recruiting leaders and then really any sort of… Gosh, I mentioned earlier that there is this opportunity to borrow from marketing. This is an opportunity to borrow from therapists and be like, “This person is leaning way too heavily on this thing, and it’s causing this problem.” It’s like, “Hey, you’re compensating,” or, “You’re too good at this, and then your team is kind of paying the price.”

27:23 VN: Right. And I actually had a guy on my team, one of the other competencies is action-oriented. So he overused that skill, and what that looked like in real life was, whenever he’d see a problem, he’d jump on it and he’d try to patch it, but he wouldn’t actually be fixing the long-term problem.

27:45 RS: Got it. He’s putting Band-Aids on things.

27:47 VN: That’s right. And so being too action-oriented sometimes isn’t good. Sometimes you have to balance that with having a strategic mindset, which is another competency. They all kind of work together and they’re all puzzle pieces and somehow fit together. Oftentimes, people overcompensate in one area ’cause they’re really, really good at it, but oftentimes you see that’s a bit of a crutch for something else.

28:10 RS: Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Well, Viet, thank you so much for coming in. We’re creeping up on optimal podcast length, so at this point, I think we should just call it a day. I really appreciate you coming in here. Hearing all about the dark side of being too core-competent was really, really fascinating, so thank you for sharing that with me. This has been a blast, and we gotta get you back in here. I’d love to have you back at any time you like.

28:31 VN: Absolutely, my pleasure. Thanks, Rob.

28:32 RS: And to all of you out there in podcast land, that just about does it for us here at Talk Talent to Me. I’ve been Rob Stevenson, Viet Nguyen has been Viet Nguyen, and you’ve all been amazing, talented, wonderful recruiting pros. Have a spectacular week, and happy hunting.

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28:54 RS: Talk Talent is brought to you by Hired, a double opt-in global marketplace connecting the best-fit active talent to the most exciting recruiting organizations. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you find your next great hire, head to hired.com/employers and we’ll get started.