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Welcome to the CXR channel, our premier podcast for talent acquisition and talent management. Listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting, engaging and retaining the best talent. We’re glad you’re here.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:18
Alright, everybody, welcome to another CareerXroads podcast, we’re actually doing a little bit something a little bit different here, we’re going to do a recap. The idea we just we have just wrapped up our first 2021 Candidate Experience meeting with our members members only meeting but we are going to just spin some wisdom into the stratosphere of the internet. And talk a little bit about a couple of big things we took away. We’ve got some guests with us. But let me first tell you who’s on the line, obviously, myself president of crossroads, Chris Hoyt, but we’ve got Gerry Crispin, the founder of CareerXroads. Gerry Say hello to everybody.
Gerry Crispin, CXR 0:54
Hi, hi, everyone,
Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:55
The godfather of talent acquisition, he needs no further introduction. But in addition, we had a guest speaker today. And it was Kevin Grossman of the talent board and the candidate experience where it’s Kevin, how are you?
Kevin Grossman, CandEs 1:07
Great. Glad to be here. Thank you for Thanks for having me.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:10
Yeah, we had a fun time. So it was really helpful. Had you do a quick presentation on a couple of elements today. So we’re really appreciative of that. Thanks for joining us.
Kevin Grossman, CandEs 1:17
Absolutely.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:18
All right. And Merrie, who are you? Who are you with?
Merrie Gebhardt, Nielsen 1:21
Hi, I’m Merrie Gebhardt. I’m with Nielsen coming to you from New York City. And I lead our talent acquisition operations globally at Nielsen.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:29
Fantastic. appreciate having you here. Tiffany, Tiffany, you might be the newest addition to Church and Dwight, from a talent acquisition perspective. Give us a little bit of info about yourself.
Tiffany Reyes, Church and Dwight 1:40
Yeah, so my name is Tiffany Reyes I am the TA Operations Manager for Church and Dwight. I’m having a great time. I’m learning a lot of great things. So thank you for having me.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:51
Welcome. Welcome to the membership. Welcome to Church and Dwight. So it’s nice to see you over there. And Brooks. We know you, we love you. We’ve known you for a long time. tell the audience who you are and where you’re at
Brooks Thurston, Trane Technologies 2:02
So I am Brooks Thurston. I am with Trane technologies, and I am the talent acquisition and global process lead.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:09
Awesome. Thank you so much everybody for being on. So today, we focused on four sort of elements with our membership of the candidate experience, we focused on four pieces, and it was sending expectations. It was customized communication. It was the feedback loop. And it was interview prep. That was the last one. So not necessarily in the order that they happen, hopefully. but so did anybody have any big I got a couple of things that were interesting for me. But did anybody have something that stood out today or a takeaway from the meeting or the way that we did that?
Merrie Gebhardt, Nielsen 2:48
I think from from a candidate experience perspective, a lot of the things that we talked about today, we’ve talked about on our team. But what came out to me was being able to serve as an advocate to the business and to our leadership teams and our stakeholders to make sure that our recruiters have rec loads that are realistic to be able to have a lot of these things and to add a lot of these things as a part of the candidate experience to deliver that feedback to set those interview expectations. It’s really going to be a requirement in order for us to add those to our experience.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:25
Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely call out. Brooke, I can see you’re dying to say something.
Brooks Thurston, Trane Technologies 3:30
Yeah, I was just gonna say, I loved the collaboration. And, you know, we’re all in the same boat. We’re all fighting the same fight. And really just hearing some of the amazing ideas that people have come up with. And right here to your point, I think we keep asking our recruiters to do more and more. And yet, we’re just, you know, we’re piling more on them and expect the candidate experience to still be amazing. So we’ve got to find that that perfect balance and, and what that looks like. So I think that’s still an ongoing challenge for everybody.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:10
Yeah, Brooks. I think there’s a support element that I think’s been constant for years and that phrase we love it’s never boring, right? it’s never boring around here. Just means Oh my god, we’re drowning. Tiffany how about yourself.
Tiffany Reyes, Church and Dwight 4:27
I actually really enjoyed Not that I we did it on all this. I think I enjoyed the business impact, right, tying everything into the consumer being now in consumer goods and being able to understand the purchasing power and how if we get the candidate experience wrong, that was really impactful for me to be able to take back and have in this isn’t only a recruiting like we’re not the only stakeholders here the businesses. So that was something that I can take back. So I really enjoyed that.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 4:58
Yeah, if I’m not and Kevin, you might be able To keep me honest here, if somebody else says, Remember, if I’m not mistaken, one of the very first people to sort of do that, at least on stage might have been Starbucks, where they told a story of how all the realization, and this is years ago, so keep me honest, but the realization that all of their candidates were essentially customers or potential customers. And if the average Starbucks customer purchased, you know, a $3 purchase from them when they visited the store, or their little brick and mortars than pissing off the candidate who says, I’m now going out of my way to no longer buy your product, if they just had a 9% 10% of the candidates get that upset? It would it could ultimately cost Starbucks millions is that they get a rise at the front. Is there a more impressive story to put that together?
Gerry Crispin, CXR 5:51
No, I think I think Cat Drum was was, was there at the time. I think she was doing pieces of this calculation, and then just throwing it up, but at the leaders that we need to be able to do that. And fortunately, they had the kind of culture that that you know, the leaders, the leaders get it pretty quickly in relation to that, because they are doing some pretty progressive things for their employees. So So yeah, but that was one of the early efforts to calculate what is the what is the cost of doing it badly? What is the reward and doing it well. And I think out of that, Elaine and and Kevin and others began starting to build the calculations within the talent court.
Kevin Grossman, CandEs 6:41
I remember years ago, I don’t remember exactly the exact year but it was that Susan Lamont when she was with Marriott still, and she was actually talking about that at a talk at Facebook that I remember seeing her speak. And she did touch on a little bit on the candidate experience and how that impacts the Marriott business as well. It’s always encouraging to hear so many companies are really working hard to try to improve communication and expectation setting and feedback loops, and interview prep and everything that we talked about today. Because it is not easy to sustain over time, right? Because who plans for a pandemic, and you have economic fluctuations, and m&a activity and leadership changes, and there’s things hitting the business all the time, but when companies, you know really are trying to make those sustained improvements, that’s, that’s exciting to hear about.
Gerry Crispin, CXR 7:34
It’s also important for your leaders to know that companies they admire. So members that are part of CareerXroads, companies that have won that candidate experience awards, when you can go back to them and say, here’s what some of our competitors and or companies we admire, for the way in which they manage our operating and give them those kinds of case studies. You’re You’re incenting them to go Hmm, are we missing something.
Kevin Grossman, CandEs 8:06
And that helps. And that, again, goes back to helping make to build any kind of internal business case of making any improvements to recruiting and hiring, to have that data to have that information. And and that was another thing that I heard too is that’s always a perennial struggle making that business case. And lastly, if leadership is already on board, that’s great. That makes it an easier road. But sometimes you have to push up to get to have action taken. So
Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:33
You know, so it’s funny. So in the in the greenroom, I was making a joke about how like, I took a lot of notes. But I will tell you one thing that really interests me is as the the various companies, I think we’re about 20 different companies that we’re trying to get, as all the companies said, what they would do to improve the experience here there, there was one element that each group of people that were sharing included, and that was some sort of chat, or engagement technology, whether it be a chat bot of some sort real or imaginative, right future state, or some sort of live chat session was in every element of the recommendation piece, which two years ago was fantasy, right? I mean, people are just now starting to implement things are just now looking at chatbots. And could they could they do this could do that. So it’s interesting that that was pretty standard. For me. I think that was kind of an interesting insight for me.
Gerry Crispin, CXR 9:32
I think it’s a recognition that scale is a critical component. And we have had years in which we suddenly discover that somebody thinks of a candidate only as those people they interviewed, not as the people who have applied. And now people are starting to recognize that anybody who’s taken the time, energy and effort to research or accompany and declare their interest has an investment in you. And, and their experience is going to be important as well. It’s fantastic.
Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:09
So I want to thank everybody for jumping on the line with us, Kevin, you’re going to share with us some links to some research that can experience warrants and some case studies. We’re going to put those on the website for everybody.
Absolutely Yep.
Thank you so much for that. Merrie, Tiffany, Brooks, thank you so much for being part of this call. We will see you guys on the next candidate experience meeting number two, that’s coming up not too long from now. So thanks we’ll see you then.
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