S4 E83 | eXpertease: Shaunda Zilich shares some hard lessons she’s learned

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 0:20
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the CareerXroads podcast as a part of the show that we call expertise. My name is Chris Hoyt. I’m the president of CXR, and I am your host for the next thrilling 10 minutes as we catch up with industry friend, Shaunda Zilich, who is the global talent brand leader at Qualtrics. Now, these episodes are sort of a fast talk track with industry leaders and industry personalities who have agreed to come on and share a life or work lesson they have learned. So this could be a victory in their recent career, and how they got there or a crushing moment in their lives that proved to later galvanize them from failure. If you were here last week, you got to enjoy that one. It’s like I probably laughed the entire episode. But regardless of the topic, it is derived from our 2021 priority survey that literally anyone can participate in. And that already has focus areas sort of honed down from hundreds of talent leaders from around the world. So if you’re interested in adding what you think we should be sharing about, head over to the 2021 priorities benchmark that can be found within the research and Reports section of CXR.works. Now. If you’re with us live today, you can jump on that keyboard and add a question for our guests in the chat section. And if we’ve got time, we’ll take a shot at getting it answered. If not, we’ll address it in our open and free exchange at CXR.works/talenttalks with all that Shaunda, how the heck are you?

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 1:38
Great, thank you so much for having me on here. I’m so excited. I’m a little pressure now you laughed the whole time last week I feel like I’m now I’m going to try to be funny and I’m probably not gonna be very funny. So

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:50
It’s okay. It was a it was a terrible story. Somebody youth it was you got to listen to it. It was really well,

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 1:56
I will I’ve got to you definitely have me on the edge of my seat.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:00
So if our listeners are watching the video cast, they likely see that you have a guest with you.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 2:06
I do this is Wesley He is my 13 year old son today his job shadowing day. And lucky for Wesley, you know, with COVID and everything, he’s got one person this shadow, so we’re gonna we we started off the morning with a few emails and I’m just trying to explain even what I do. So maybe we can talk a little more about that. But he decided to join us for the conversation today. And I think it’s gonna be kind of fun.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:33
All right, Wesley. We’re glad to have you on anything you want to share before we jump right in?

Wesley Zilich 2:38
Ah, Nah, I’m good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:40
No, no, no sports forecasts. Nothing like that.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 2:43
Oh, yeah. Who’s gonna win? Who’s gonna win march madness?

Wesley Zilich 2:46
Oh, um I’m probably going to go with Michigan. Just because my mom’s a fan.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 2:51
Oh getting good with me. already

Wesley Zilich 2:53
They have a good chance we need Livers back though.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 2:56
Yeah, yeah. There you go.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:03
Well, Shaunda as a and Wesley Feel free to jump in throughout the entire conversation as a global talent brand manager, right, we know that there’s a ton on your plate. There’s always tons for you to do. There’s just so much responsibility, especially the large organization, a global organization. And while you’ve done things, right, we’ve talked about this, you’ve not always been able to knock it out of the park, have you?

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 3:28
No. No. And you know, I am? Yeah, you know, and in talking about and just I guess for our viewers, too, I was at General Electric before kind of implemented that, that global employment brand, strategy for General Electric. And then, close to three years ago, I joined Qualtrics, actually, for the same type of reason. And you want me to dive into what I’ve done wrong?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:55
Nobody wants to hear about what you did okay. Like, what would you say is probably like, if you had to sort of siloed or break it down a little bit? Like, how would you sort of position the challenges that you had to learn from like, where where you didn’t just you didn’t quite make it all the way to the hoop? Welcome was didn’t quite make it right. The missed three points. Like it’s like, give us give us that from a high level?

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 4:16
Yeah, you know, so I think the biggest thing to point out is one of the areas that really one of the biggest areas we’re concentrating on at Qualtrics. And that I was concentrating on when I came in, was to evolve our current recruiting org into an attraction lead recruiting org. And so what does that mean? Just make sure we’re all on the same page is, you know, instead of going and finding the needle in the haystack, we’re basically applying a huge magnet to the haystack. So we’re trying to attract all those needles to us. Now, doing this stepping into recruiting org where basically every single person that was part of the recruiting or was a full time recruiter, I should have thought to myself, maybe I need to be, you know, very thoughtful and respectful on how how I approach this. And unfortunately I did, I did things wrong. And looking back, obviously, it’s been three years, I can probably simmer those down into basically three things. One is I think, you know, I went in with my vision, I went in and I said, Hey, this is my vision, we’ve talked about how and you guys, you know, we can, we can get this out if we want to. But I have a huge journey map that I put together of every single stage from unaware of an employer all the way through to alumni of a company. And I called out every single data point in every stage. And I said, this is how it all needs to work together. And this is the storytelling that needs to work. This is how it impacts everything. And really having it be my vision was the first step of where I went wrong. And I think, you know, honestly, like, is as, as my son, if I come to you, this is actually a real life thing, actually, that I can think of is two years ago, I came to you and I said, Wesley, you’re really good at acting, you need to take theatre. How did you respond to that?

Wesley Zilich 6:06
Since it was your idea? I didn’t want to take theatre, and like I wanted to, I wanted it to be my own idea. Um, to take theater. So I ended up not taking it

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 6:16
Right. Yeah. But then like, a couple months ago, he came to me and he said…

Wesley Zilich 6:20
I want to take theater.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:23
Because now it’s his idea.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 6:24
Yeah, whenever it’s his idea. And so I think that’s the first big thing is like, I went at it as, hey, this is my vision, everyone get on board, my vision. And what I should have done is I should have tried to figure out ways to allow our recruiters and allow our hiring managers and allow our talent acquisition leaders to say, hey, look like this is our vision, we want to be attraction lead, we want to do this faster, we want to do it smarter, and put steps in place to not be my vision, but to be honestly their vision or really our vision, right? Instead of instead of two teams like that.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:57
Yeah, yeah, I think one of the toughest lessons I learned as a up and coming leader was that being a leader wasn’t necessarily about taking people somewhere, it was about getting them to go with you.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 7:08
Yeah.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:09
And that’s a tough thing to learn.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 7:11
And I should have known that, right? Like, oh, kicking myself, for sure.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:17
It’s one of the, I want to keep going but you gotta I saw this journey map that you were working on, when you when you were in the midst of you were knee deep in it, and you were slugging it out to build this thing. And I have to tell you, success or fail for that map is one of the most impressive documents I’ve ever seen from a candidate journey, just from an experiential standpoint.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 7:42
I’ve added a lot to it, too. Now, honestly, for me, there’s um, in this journey is that was mostly about the attraction lead and the recruiting side of it. But the reality is employment brand, we serve two masters, we serve the attraction recruiting side and the talent brand, but we also serve the company brand. So now there’s, it’s it’s even more overwhelming. I’ll put it that way on involving the company brand and the data points that it actually impacts as well. And each stage so yeah, we can dig into that deeper things way more than a podcast.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:17
For sure. It’s at least an hour just to walk through that it was every touchpoint was really incredible.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 8:23
Thanks. I think you know, and moving into even additional things that I’ve done wrong, honestly. The second thing is, I, my background is in marketing. And I think you know, I just as a marketer, you shouldn’t walk in and try to change the way people are recruiting. You know, as a as a, you know, actually another example of this Wesley here is a really good soccer player. And I How would you feel if I was like, let’s go in the yard, and I’m going to teach you how to, I’m going to teach you how to kick with your left foot.

Wesley Zilich 9:03
I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t want to do that since you don’t since you haven’t played soccer before.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 9:09
And I’m really not that athletic.

Wesley Zilich 9:15
Welllll…

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 9:15
You know it right. There is a great example. I think, you know, and I think I mean, even building on the analogy, like if your dad took you out to play soccer, how would you feel?

Wesley Zilich 9:24
I would feel better since he’s played soccer for a long time. And he used to coach people too

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:30
So your mom has no athletic street cred to you.

Wesley Zilich 9:35
In running.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 9:36
He is being nice.

Wesley Zilich 9:38
She can run well

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:38
No soccer cred?

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 9:40
Yeah, now I’m not a soccer in fact, we’ve tried to do passes before and he’s like, uh, I’d rather not.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 9:47
That makes a lot of sense. Like you’re talking about this perceived issue of true credibility before you just come in and turn my world upside down.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 9:54
Right, right.

Wesley Zilich 9:56
If my coach asked me like, if my coach were to teach me some of these things I would feel even more sure, because he coaches right now, and it hasn’t been a while since he’s coached. And he probably still plays too.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 10:12
So one of the things that I think the analogy and that even plays well into the analogy, right, like one of the things we’ve now got in place is we have we actually call them tarps is a horrible acronym, but it’s TA, M, talent acquisition, something, I can’t remember what it stands for anyways. But we have one on every one of our recruiting teams. And what they are is basically a talent brand representative. They meet with my talent brand team on a weekly basis. And they go back to their teams. And there are basically our champions for those teams. They are full time recruiters, which is a balancing act. And I’m not sure we have exactly figured it out yet. But they getting the message getting behavior is getting feedback, even to our team from that through them is way easier than if I’m trying to go to their team meetings, because we tried that for a while I’m going to their team meetings, and I’m saying, hey, let’s do it this way. And they’re saying, No, we don’t want to or No, that doesn’t work. Instead, if these tarps are actually going to like, Hey, I did this video online to post for my job, I had 4000 views within 24 hours, then I had three people in the pipeline that I had this, it’s a lot easier for them to buy in coming from the tarp rather than coming from somebody from talent brand. So I’d say that’s the second thing is you don’t know you don’t know what you don’t know everything. As a talent branding specialist, you know, you’ve got to have that recruiting background.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:39
Well, I imagine also the relationships, it begins to foster a level of trust. And they can actually see the experience that the specialist is sort of bringing in sort of in those intakes, are those are those overviews?

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 11:54
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think, you know, along with that, to even the talent leaders, you know, um, when we talk about vision, and when we talk about knowing something like, it’s really important for them to even be able to say it back to you, right and not, in your words, say it back to you as a memorization, but like in their own terms. What are we doing here? And how are we evolving? And I would say our talent acquisition leaders and our tarps have been champions for doing that. And like, that’s the moment where I’m starting to realize, okay, we’re moving forward, we’re making strides here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:29
There is, you know, you’ve probably, you may or may not know, this right, there is actually a technique, and I think it’s called the drive thru technique, where when you are done during an intake, you repeat the order back, the way that you heard it, just like you get at a drive thru restaurant, you could say, No, I didn’t ask for any fries with that what I was looking for was an apple pie. And it’s a whole it’s a whole nother piece of that. I love that.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 12:49
Yeah, for sure.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:51
I give us a third one. Give us a third silo on our way out of here.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 12:55
Yeah, I think the third one is you, you have to be able to talk about the full roadmap. You know, there’s, there’s moments in talent, we’re saying we’re going to bring these people in, we’re gonna bring these people in, we’re going to bring these people in and your recruiters are out there going, No, I don’t need more applications, right? Like, I don’t need more talent. And it’s really important to kind of have that whole roadmap and we’ve gone as far as even into the employee experience side, and how the internal mobility program action makes the external attraction side smarter. And so I think having that whole roadmap and what it impacts is really important. I always tell as Wesley is like a kid, he likes to know things ahead of time, right? So like, I said, he is open. It’s like, if I wake him up on a Saturday morning, I’m like, Hey, you got a soccer game. And he’s like, great. He’d be like he immediately what are we doing after that? What are we doing after that? What do we get? One, I think he wants to know when he gets to be lazy, right? Like, he doesn’t want to he wants to make sure he’s not playing soccer the whole entire day. But I think also it helps in his brain to know you know, what’s coming, he prepared

Wesley Zilich 13:59
For what’s coming.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 14:00
Yeah. And even probably even weigh in on it, I would say to you know, he has what he wants to do on a Saturday. And I think that was with that whole roadmap with recruiters. And in even in going back to number one, and it being our vision together, recruiters then weighing in on what the roadmap looks like, and even making it smarter than we could do on our own just on the talent branding team. So that would be the third thing is just making sure that you have that whole roadmap and what it all impacts and making that really clear and really making it our roadmap again, back to that our vision together.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 14:33
Yeah, I think that’s really insightful. Wesley, thank you so much. You have been not only the youngest podcaster that we’ve ever had on our guest show, but certainly one of the best shadows we’ve ever seen.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 14:44
Maybe we can record that and send that back to his teacher.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 14:48
We’ll send the whole episode. It’ll be wonderful. Shaunda, thank you so much for your time today. I know it was just a little snippet kind of a peek into what you’re doing. But I just think some of the lessons that you’re able to share are invaluable. Really appreciate it.

Shaunda Zilich, Qualtrics 15:01
Well, thank you again for having me. This is so much fun. I love it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:04
Good stuff. Well look, my hope is that everyone will jump on next week. At this time when we connect with Linda Brenner. She is the co founder and managing partner at talent growth advisors. Now Linda is quite honestly one of my favorite people to share mic with she embodies the term personality when we say industry personalities she might be she might be up for some sort of awards that she’s the funniest person in the space but she’s going to share with us her opinion that not all roles are critical and not all people are vital for your success. We’ll definitely have some fun with that one Don’t miss it until then we hope to see everyone online at www.CXR.work/talenttalks. Thanks everybody.

Announcer 15:41
Thanks for listening to the CXR channel please subscribe to CXR on your favorite podcast resource and leave us a review while you’re at it. Learn more about CXR on our website, CXR.works Facebook.com and Twitter.com /careerxroads and on Instagram @careerxroads. We’ll catch you next time.