Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 
Yeah, I get those emails all the time. And they just make me laugh No matter how many I discard, block, unsubscribe.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:07
Yep.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 0:07
Somebody’s teaching that sales tactic somewhere.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:09
Well, it is interesting, because I got I think, as Gerry was saying, I think he’ll be back. But it’s Gerry was saying earlier. And I think it was either call it out to you get the email that says, I don’t know if you’re just ignoring me. But here’s the fifth email to tell you what a great deal I can get you.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 0:23
That’s right. That’s right.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:24
I got I got one. I got one last week that said, you have been pre approved to apply. And I was like, pre approved, approved to apply to something.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 0:36
Yeah.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:36
How magnanimous that you’ve, you’ve approved me to apply to be considered, which is kind of interesting.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 0:42
I got one yesterday that said, You’ve been selected for a fellowship. And I was like, huh, and then I opened it up. And it was like, a fellowship to take a class to increase the number of leads, we’ll get running out of creative options at this point.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:00
You weren’t. Were you hoping for a Fellowship of the Ring? Is that maybe,

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 1:04
I guess, I don’t know.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:06
We’re on a Lord of the Rings binder, over the course of a holiday to do marathon Thanksgiving.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 1:12
We’re a little that’s great. That’s all right. That’s all right. We’re still making our way through the crown. So we’re finishing finishing haven’t

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:18
I haven’t even started that haven’t even started.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 1:20
So good.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:21
So all right, you ready to quick chat?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 1:24
Yeah, let’s do it.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:25
Alright, source of influence. Here we go.

Announcer 1:28
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 1:57
All right, welcome back, everybody. I’m Chris Hoyt, president of CXR and your host for the next 20 minutes or so on the CXR recruiting community podcast show. Now if you’re new to us, we do about 20 minute conversations where we’re talking about something that’s top of mind for someone in the space, it could be recruiting leader practitioner, could be somebody sort of running the show over to consulting organization, or just just I think you’re gonna see we’ve got one coming up too with industry analyst and economist. So either way, all the conversations that we’re chatting about, and we’re and we’re connecting with leaders on have to do with something in the space within recruiting within that recruiting industry, and sort of what’s top of mind for them, we try to keep them, like I said, about 20 minutes, but we do stream them live anywhere, you’re listening to a podcast. So it might be on iTunes, Spotify, you name it. But we’re also on LinkedIn, streaming, Live, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube. And of course, CXR.works/podcast. If you are on LinkedIn live with us. You can go ahead, I think YouTube as well, you can go ahead and drop some questions you might have for today’s guests, or comments you’d like to add to the show, they’re in the chat, and we are happy to include them. We’ll even do a fancy schmancy overlay sort of showing showing you off a little bit if we can and feature you in the show. As a reminder, we don’t do ads. This is not a pay to play podcast. So what you see is what you get if we bring somebody in, who maybe isn’t a practitioner, but who is in the vendor spaces which in space, it’s because we like what they have to say. And we think they’re doing some pretty cool stuff that deserves getting some eyeballs. So with that, I’m gonna go ahead and welcome and I have you’re gonna have to keep me honest on this. Susan, is it your Is it your first time on the show?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 3:34
It is my first time on the show.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:36
Thanks. You’re not a stranger to CareerXroads, and certainly any writer workshops that we do. But we’re excited to have you on the podcast.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 3:44
Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here and a big fan of the work that that you all do do.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:50
Well, thanks. Well, so today’s kind of an interesting one. But before before we jump in it is a fun topic. But before we jump in, for those who may be Susan don’t know you. Can you kind of give us the escalator pitch of who is Susan Lamotte? And what is Exaqueo, and why should we care what what Susan has to say?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 4:08
Yeah, for sure. So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be. I’m Susan Lamott. I’m the founder and CEO of Exaqueo, we are an employer brand and experience consulting firm. So what that means is that we every day are on a mission to transform the employment relationship. So the relationship that you have with your employer that candidates have with potential employers in three ways through insight, brand and experience. So that means that we work with our clients to understand the relationship through research and insight. We help them build and market their employer brands by really defining what is that shared and authentic perception they have as an employer, and then we help them strengthen and sustain the relationships they have with candidates and employers through candidate and employee experiences. And I’ve been doing this for God Just a little over 20 years prior to starting Exaqueo, I was the global employer brand and marketing leader for Marriott International. I spent some time running day to day talent acquisition for Ritz Carlton. And I live in work with my husband here in Charleston, South Carolina, where we raise our two kids and it’s going to be 70 degrees here today. So happy happy for warm November’s

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:23
We’ve had a cold front and Austin. It’s actually 70 this morning. So it’s it’s quite nice.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 5:28
A chilly front. put that sweater on Chris.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:30
Yeah. Yeah, I think I met you when you were working that power brand. I think that’s when we met. Yeah.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 5:35
Yeah, I think so too.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:36
That’s good stuff always doing really good work. So. So we’re gonna we’re gonna talk today. And maybe we set a baseline. But before this quick chat on, we’ve talked about this term called source of influence.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 5:48
Yeah,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:49
But let’s start with maybe, let’s start with maybe talking about what sort of source of hires looked like and sort of the state of source of hire over the last number of years, do you have an opinion on how a wonderful reliable broken dysfunctional get one way or the other and source of hire?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 6:05
Well, if you’ve been in the space, as long as you and I have, I don’t want to date you. But you know, we’ve been the

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:10
Your not the first person to say they didn’t want to date me Susan so that’s fine.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 6:16
I’m a married woman, Chris, a married woman as you are taken, I know to, nonetheless, if you have been in the space long time, you know that the source of higher term comes from the use of applicant tracking system, right. And we didn’t invent applicant tracking systems to make lives better for candidates, we did it for ourselves as employers, right? Track EEO data to make AAP, planning easier. And so what happened is, we started just creating these lists, right, a drop down for a candidate to say, here’s where I found you. And we’ve never really changed that over time. So these long lists have become really data, they’ve become really dysfunctional, and they make it really challenging to actually get good data. And that’s what I’m in the business of doing right is helping our clients find good data. So I think that’s why I get so frustrated by source of hire, because we spend too much time on it, we report on it, it influences what we do. And yet the data, the way it’s collected is kind of meaningless, as is.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 7:19
Oh, 100%, I will tell you, I used to be a big fan of source of higher data early in my data analytics days. And I will remember, I even remember the cubicle that I was sitting in. When I had with Revelation, we were looking at our source of hire report that we’ve been basing, like monies on, we had been tying budgets to some of the data that was coming out of it. I had a network technician job in I think it was Anchorage, and the sorts of hire for that, that that role was the black collegiate magazine. And I looked at that, and I thought, Well, that can’t be right, for a couple of reasons, right. But most importantly, why is that we had not run an ad in that magazine for years. And so to have found a job that didn’t exist years ago, to be tied to a source that we hadn’t used for, you know, it was a hot mess. And we realized what we had done is that the candidates were picking the very first choice when we when we present them with the drop down of where they came from, they just pick a

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 8:26
That’s right. And sometimes because it’s required, right, it’s got that little red asterisk 100% required. Yeah, right. And we, you know, early on in those days to the application process was really long, because we just kept adding steps because we wanted more information. The longer it got, the less candidates actually pause to look at a question. It was just click, click, click and get through it. So that was part of the problem, too, I think.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:51
Yeah, I think the whole the premise was okay. But the process was broken. Yeah. And then I think we had some vendors come out and and introduce us to the idea of first source last source, right, the most recent source and the original source. And then the idea for us to weight that which one was important, did we care? And then of course, that evolved into just tracking all the sources and trying to figure out

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 9:17
That’s right. That’s right. And then what you’re looking at is this laundry list. And even if somebody picks a number of sources, you have no idea what level of influence that source actually had on the individual, right? You had no idea where in the journey that source appeared. So that also makes it hard to determine as we got more sophisticated, as an industry. From a marketing and brand perspective, it makes it really hard to determine the levers to pull, right? It’s like a series of levers. You’re trying to decide when do I advertise here? When do I use this content? And not to mention all of the offline influences that we know exist? And so that’s what his main source of higher so complicated and so meaningless That’s point.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:01
Yeah. So are you thinking, here we go we’ve got a little feedback in the stream here. Josh is saying candidate driven responses are at best. 10%. Accurate?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 10:09
That’s right.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:10
Tracking is a must?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 10:13
Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:14
So are you thinking, Susan, that we’re just Are we just done with it? Is it? Is it time to just do away with source of hire? Or is there something different you’ve got in mind.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 10:24
So I think source of hire is dead. I think it’s long been dead. It’s just part of so many existing applicant tracking systems, I think we have a challenge in our space that we lead with tech. So what happens is we go and buy at ATS. It has an existing sort of set of things that we can leverage, we see source of hire, and we’re like, Oh, that’s cool. we populate our sources, and we call it a day. And that’s a big problem in HR in general, is that we’re leading with tech and not with strategy. And because source of hire is dead, it’s not providing you the value. And instead, where the value really comes, is determining how a human being thinks and feels across that entire journey. So we’ve moved away long from source of hire, and we’re focused on source of influence, which is what our friends and marketing do and have done for over a decade.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:15
All right, so, so you’re gonna have to break that down a little bit, right? And kind of kind of explain that to the viewers and the listeners some clarity on that when we move when we shift from source of hire to source of influence? What measures and how do you count how somebody was influenced by sourcer, too? Can you walk us through it?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 11:34
Yeah, for sure. So if we first unpack what actually is influence, influence, essentially, is the ability to inspire action. So if you’re trying to influence someone, right, so if I’m trying to influence my husband to do the laundry, I’m trying to inspire him to clean up that mess of clothes on the floor, right?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 11:55
The laundry fairy came through and imagine,

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 11:58
I wish if you have one of those, please, for Christmas, I would really love a laundry fairy. But nonetheless, nonetheless, that’s what influences we have to unpack what influences first, then we have to pause and say, Okay, if ultimately, as talent acquisition leaders, we’re trying to simply put get people to be aware of apply for and take our jobs in the simplist manner. We know it’s more complex than that, right. But in the simplest manner, we have to figure out how do we influence them along the way. So rather than finding out where their last click was, before they actually applied for the job, it’s much more valuable to unpack how they were influenced across the journey itself. And so I always tell people to start by looking first at the actual candidate journey and what that looks like. So if you want to pop that up, you can Chris,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:55
Yeah we have a slide here.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 12:57
I’ll walk you through that,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:58
Yeah, for those who are listening, we’re gonna walk through it, we’ve got a slide here that Susan’s presentrf, and she’ll help us out with it.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 13:04
Yeah, so this is a walk you through what you see here. This is the candidate and employment journey, right through what we call the full lifecycle. So if you start in the top, right, from candidate experience, it goes from understanding understanding, you actually exist as a company, to a lot of organizations that that’s their biggest challenge, being attracted to actually be interested in the role, learn more, to then actually have a preference for it, apply, interview, and then ultimately, feel a sense of belonging, because you’ve made a decision to accept accept the job, you’re actually having impact and contribution, then into your actual employment journey, managing your career, growing your career, and then either transitioning to another role in the organization, right, internal mobility, or transitioning out. So that’s that outer ring. And then along the way, you are influenced constantly, by the organization, by your managers, by the people you work with. And by the job itself, right, you might start out in one job, and you’re really loving it. Two years later, you don’t love it so much anymore. And it’s influencing you to look somewhere else. So this is the simplest way to think about source of influence. As you go through this journey. What are all of the things that are constantly coming at you online and offline to help you make decisions to take or to keep a job?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 14:31
So Susan, I’m gonna I’m gonna sort of be a little bit and wait for those who didn’t notice Gerry has joined us from the peanut gallery. Welcome back to the show, Gerry.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 14:31
Thank you.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 14:32
So I guess I’m gonna play a little devil’s advocate like this is a lot of soft, soft tracking here. So tie this to something measurable. How do I loop this loop this in so that I can tie it to my budget so that I have something to bring back to the team or bring back to the leaders You ever bring back to the purse strings holders and say this is where we should invest more on this, this source of influence or that source of influence.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 15:08
So think about the journey itself, if you are managing talent acquisition anywhere you have a budget, and you’re applying that budget from a brand and marketing perspective in all of these places. So for example, on the retention side, you might be applying from internal mobility, right? Especially if you have a hiring freeze right now, you might be putting some of your dollars to marketing internally to people who might be considering leaving, right? That’s one sphere of influence, if you will, you might be marketing to active job seekers, people who are in the job market right now they have that circle around their LinkedIn profile that says open to work. That’s another area you might be spending budget, you might be spending budget on people who are actively in the job application process, right? They’re going through your journey right now. And you’re spending money on content to influence them. Or you might be spending money on people who’ve made the decision to make sure that they actually follow through, they don’t ghost you on day one. So you’ve got this branding and marketing budget, you’re spending it across the journey? How do you know where to spend it? How do you know where you’re getting the best bang for your buck? How do you know what actually is making a difference? You can look at basic stuff, right? Are people clicking on it? But is it actually working? When someone clicks on a piece of content? How does it make them feel? That’s the other level to influence is thinking about? How what information? Is it giving? How does it make me feel? What emotion is it bringing up in me? And then what action is it inspiring me to take? So this is where you can get really concrete and you can specifically determine through testing through research, figure out what actual actions you’re taking are making a difference in your journey.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 16:56
What I love about this is that you’re you’re focusing in on decision elements, in my opinion, that that that more and more candidate should be pushed to, if you will, to make better decisions for themselves currently and in the future. The one the one devil’s advocate thing I would have is is your definition of influence, in my opinion, is is the word inspire can be misunderstood? For sure. No, I think I think we’re causing influencing is causing action. And when those actions are focused in on improvement of that individual’s decision making, if you will, by moving them through a set of either activities or knowledge or whatever it is that you’re investing in, to help them, then you’re really empowering them to make better decisions. And so the net result is going to be a very positive affect of them toward you, and you toward, you know, the career that you’ve taken to do those kinds of things. Because you’re not only helping your employer, but you’re also helping the people that are making those choices and decisions that are better. But it’s not inspiring. It’s more empowering, in my opinion. And I think that’s just a subtle difference.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 18:27
It’s I think it’s an important difference. I’m glad you bring that up, because I think it’s also comes back to the organization and what your goals are what you’re trying to do. Right. And so it may depend on the organization. But I think it’s an important difference. I like the replacement of the word empower. I think the other piece you mentioned is that positive action. And so I think it’s also really important to figure out what are people doing right now? What’s influencing them? And what actions are they taking as a result, so you can determine is that positive for your organization. So this what you see on the screen is sample data from a client, where we actually went through and measured source of influence for them throughout the journey. So now it allows them to determine is this the kind of influence they want to have? So for example, if you look at the bottom right, we found out that the biggest influences on accepting an offer at this particular client, were the brand reputation, benefits, schedule, flexibility, and work from home options. That’s a fact right? Data is a fact the client now has to decide, is this why we want people to accept offers here. And if it’s not, they can adjust their branding and marketing to influence that they can make specific procedural or policy changes. Or they can double down and say, Wow, we didn’t realize our brand reputation had such a level of influence. Now they can pull that through other parts of the journey.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 19:56
So Susan, what I mean what I what I’m interpreting here is a lot of this has collected through research done with the candidates, right either. And I’m assuming not not just those that get the job but but that candidate body, the folks who have expressed interest in that role and at least move forward at some stage. Yeah,

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 20:14
that’s right. And with employees too. So doing candidate research sometimes can be expensive. Because if you’re not capturing them on your career site, you’ve got to actually go out and source those candidates, especially if you want data from people who have never heard about you, or who are have left the journey before you’ve actually captured their data. So that’s, and that can be really expensive. So on the flip side of that, you can use new hires, you can use your existing employees that are, you know, a year in, or you can use existing employees that are going through internal mobility, or have gone through internal mobility, and get your data that way. Or you can use existing employees and ask them, What are they sharing with friends and colleagues, that’s another way to get the data. And that way, you at least can be informed on multiple levels, and also be respectful budgets, research is not cheap. And I tell people all the time, when you go and do this kind of research, especially, you know, technology right before this sort of tech recession hit, everybody wants a data on how can we attract more engineers to our company. And in particular markets, if you go to let’s say, San Francisco, or Seattle, or Chicago or New York, you’re paying $250 to $500, for an hour of someone’s time to make it worth their while. Multiply that by the right representative sample, and you might be spending 70 grand just to get their attention, before you’ve even done the work itself. Market research is expensive.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 21:42
Yeah, I gotta tell you, as a former practitioner, I wouldn’t see me coughing up 70k of my budget, which is already tight, especially now on something as fluffy, right as some things fluffy is a source of influence.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 21:58
But if you can tie it to actual impact, so rather than starting big, start small, pick one particular audience in your organization that everybody’s having trouble recruiting, find a manager, hiring manager or someone you’ve got a good relationship with that you can say, I want to do this test with you, right? I know we’re having trouble, or do you like the idea of data, here’s the kind of data I can collect for you. And then have them help share the budget. Right? So you go into it together, you get a really good dataset, you show the impact of changing your activity through AV testing. And then you go back to the organization and say, hey, look, what we were able to do, or you know, supply chain technology, or whatever small area of that organization you made the impact with, and that can be really helpful to you, and an easy way to show the value. If consumer marketers do it all the time, and they show the value, we should be able to do the same thing. And we should get the same amount of budget.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 22:55
Yeah, well, we should always work like that, like, great reminder, Susan, of folks that they should take pilots, like small piolts. And those are usually a lot easier to get approved, within corporate, but to take a small function and run with that, and maybe do it on a much smaller scale. Susan, is there? Is there anybody you could out as doing this? Well, I know you’ve you’ve shared some of the stats from one of your customers, I don’t know if you want to you want to out them? If they’d be okay with that, is there an organization that we consider to be keeping an eye on that is leaning more towards influence them than source of higher than traditional source?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 23:34
Yeah, so I can’t out anybody, but I can share another large multinational b2b company, I’ll say that we work with, they are doing research at regular intervals. And that is also the key. One of the hardest parts I think about working in HR is that we collect data, typically once a year right through an engagement survey, or we’re collecting it in really small functional bits. Like if we’re using a candidate survey on our career site. We’re not looking at a holistic data set like they do in market research. So I think it’s really important to think about why we collect data in the first place and what we want to do with it. True data scientists will tell you it’s about patterns, and looking for those changes in patterns over time to drive meaningful impact to bottom line, or whatever it might be. That’s what your consumer researchers will tell you. And yet in HR, we do one engagement survey, we try to hit a benchmark, and we call it a day. So no wonder we’re not seeing any of that meaningful change. But that recurring market research is the most important trend, even if you can only do it in small bits. You can get a research sample in your organization. And you can test those individuals, 6-7-12-15 times a year, and they come to expect it right. They’ve either been specially selected, right or It’s part of their job or you pay them in case an hourly workers, you pay them a little extra to participate.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 25:05
They’ve been pre-approved to fill out…

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 25:07
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 25:10
I think that’s a brilliant call out. I mean, we’re already doing, we’re already doing surveys on some level within the organizations, even though they are disparate, and like the timeframe between them, is usually usually pretty regular, but not often. But I would bet that most organizations have at least one function that they are recruiting for that would be willing to take the chance and give a pilot like this a try.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 25:36
I think so especially if they’ve run out of options. So I would look for a function that is desperate, they’re always hiring, either they have evergreen reqs, or they just can never fill positions, they’ve always got open positions of function where the manager or the leader of the function likes the first mover advantage, they like to be the one to show their peers right at the manager executive level, hey, look what I did. Right, or look what we’re doing, they don’t mind being that first mover, and they’re willing to take risks, and then someone who’s got budget, right, you gotta look to the corners of your organization, who tends to have budget, who do you know, always has extra at the end of the year. And by the way, right now is a great time. Because if your organization is on that calendar, your fiscal year, they’re getting ready to have budget that they need to either use or loose. So it’s a really good time to say, hey, can we earmark some of that to do a data study? Yeah, and that’s a you know, that’s a way to get some dollars, it doesn’t have to be your own budget, if you’re servicing your internal clients.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 26:41
Yeah, that’s a great call Susan, for that. For those who are listening or watching on the stream, where could they learn a little bit more about source of influence anywhere you’d point them, even if it’s your own site, or the research that you guys have done, you begin to implement, or another resources or somewhere you point out,

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 26:58
I have a we have a couple of blog posts that we’ve done, because it’s a topic that’s not talked a lot about in our space. So I’ll send those over to you after the podcast and you can share them with your listeners. And I’ll post them on my own LinkedIn channel, in a or my own LinkedIn page in just a few minutes. And that way that they, they can link to it and understand what it is. I also always recommend, go talk to your marketing colleagues. If you work in an organization, especially one that’s got a strong marketing team, there’s no better way to learn than to build that relationship with the marketing team. Ask them how they’re doing market research, when we worked with Geico, and this is public knowledge, the CMO at the time, he’s no longer CMO, he told me they spend a billion dollars billion with a beat on ad buy, and a million dollars on the talent acquisition side on ad guy. And so as soon as we heard that nugget, we said the team Hey, go learn everything you can, from your marketers. Yeah, go figure out what are they measuring and how is what they’re measuring actually influenced the action and affecting the bottom line. And then we were able to take those lessons and port them over to talent acquisition. So they can make better strategic decisions about that million bucks. And it helped them grow their budget.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 28:15
The only the only caveat for me between marketing for a consumer product and marketing for a job, it is the fact that the sources of influence that you choose are based upon that those those elements that I think are responsible for better decisions by by candidates, whereas the marketer for the product very often looks for the kinds of influence that might not necessarily mean a good decisions being made, but somebody is still buying the damn product. Yeah. And so I wouldn’t want someone to invest heavily in being I don’t know, because recency is important. And the last thing that you saw is what you would buy. So therefore we spend money to be the last thing you say, and and then you’re making, you’re helping people make decisions for the wrong reasons, as opposed to the right reasons. And what I love about your approach is you first determine the right reasons, or the right elements that should be looked at in order to make a better decision. And then the degree to which we’re helping the candidate go through that process, or find out where they are in the process and help them get to the next level. And to me, that is an element that marketing would say, oh, yeah, but here’s a way to make them, you know, go right through that and choose us immediately or for the wrong reasons. Does that make sense?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 29:54
It makes perfect sense. It’s the old you know, sort of get as much volume into the funnel as you can Yeah, that is the big difference, right? Marketers are trying to sell to the many, we’re ultimately trying to narrow it down to one person for a job, right? So I think it’s taking the lessons of how they do it. Right, understanding what is market research, and then adapting it for the different style and the different aim and goals we have, and outcomes are trying to drive

Gerry Crispin, CXR 30:24
We have value based marketing is what we have or should have. And yeah, and that’s not necessarily bought into by our colleagues on the other side. You know, some do, but not necessarily all

Chris Hoyt, CXR 30:37
Your, I think you’re 100%, right. And I think when deployment branding, six, or seven or eight, or whatever years ago, it was it’s all blur, really began to bubble up and try to partner with the consumer side, the consumer side, early days, just wasn’t having it. Because any, anything outside of their their area of expertise was a distraction from the buy button was 100% of distraction, getting somebody to click the Buy button, take it off the shelf and buy it like that was a distraction, we took away from the billions with the be spending. But I think over the last half a decade or so we’ve really seen some of that come around. And Susan, I have a crystal memory of you and I have had a conference talking about how we were beginning to see people come out of the CPG side or out of the consumer marketing side and move into recruiting, right, and we can name a handful folks that we still remember, were some of the first to do that. And I had a talk with a leader just yesterday, who said they have hired their payroll, they hired a marketing person that will report directly into marketing, but dotted line to them. And that was the agreement that they made for just that reason to make sure there’s some cross learning, right and some error across there. Because to Gerry’s point, I think you don’t have the same objectives. They’re never going to have the same objectives. Nor will I think they ever have the same budgets. But there is an awful lot of expertise. And I think candidate care and customer care that can cross both ways.

Gerry Crispin, CXR 32:03
Absolutely.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 32:03
We have a client right now, who is the CMO? It was the organization I was talking about earlier, one of the largest fortune 500 companies, multibillion dollar company, and our main client is the CMO. And we work with the CHRO as well. But the CMO is owning this because ultimately what she knows is that the employees have to deliver on the brand. So the way that they’re influencing the experience they have as candidates into them, the employment journey directly affects her remit. Right as a CMO. I think the difference is that Gerry, you talked about right, this human element of the employment relationship. I mean, ultimately, the employment puts a roof over our head, right? It puts food on our tables, like there’s nothing more Maslow epilobium there is nothing more Maslowvian than that. And so for us, when we think about influence, it’s not just influenced to click right, that’s pretty pedestrian, I think there’s a lot of talent acquisition professionals, employer brand festivals that are are doing that they’re trying to drive clicks. And I appreciate that value that, but I think it’s taking it up a level and really understanding that influence is all about the human connection. So we talk about influence on three levels, the individual level, the group level and the organization level. So that’s also another way to think about source of influence in your organization through the talent acquisition journey, is where are people influencing candidates one on one? And how are you working with them on that influence? Every recruiter conversation is influential. Right? So are we recording our recruiters? Are we asking them to tell us how do they tell the story of the company, get 10 recruiters around the table? I guarantee you they’ll tell 10 different stories. What’s the commonality? What’s the consistency? How do we want to influence candidates at the organizational level at the organizational level, right? You’ve got like a career fair or a career event. And you might or at the group level, I should say. And so you might have multiple people from an organization, talking about the organization or employment in different ways. And then you’ve got the organizational level, right, your career cite all the things that are coming out at that level. That’s really important, too. So I think sometimes when we think about influence, we’re thinking only about the organizational level, what are we putting on our social channels, right? What are we doing on our career site? That’s the easy stuff we can control, especially if we’re a manager, or an individual contributor, setting a talent acquisition. But the other stuff is equally if not more influential. And our data tells us you have anywhere between eight to 20 plus influences on your journey to take and keep a job. So how do we control all of those influences? How do we understand the level of impact they’re making? That’s where I think the real exciting challenge lies for organizations.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 34:57
It is and I still think the biggest hurdle to that I think one So you’ve got a little momentum in an organization, right within a function within that organization, I think you’re onto something, I still think probably the biggest hurdle in sort of shifting that mindset or is going to be collecting that data, and arguing about the burden that that will then put on the candidate or you know, the customer or the employee or whatever, you know, whatever discipline you want to use, I think that will be the biggest challenge either to wrap your head around or to sell internally,

Gerry Crispin, CXR 35:27
I think we’d also I would hypothesize that one of the largest values that we that we, we really are not measuring is, is our ability to if our ability to influence candidates decision is focused in on what’s best for them, then a lot of them will understand better, why we’re not going forward with them. And some of them who could go forward with us may decide it’s not the right time to go forward with us. And the impact of that is going to be very hard to measure. But what it means is that people don’t care may in fact, raise their view of us and our employer brand, to a level that does add value to us somewhere, either in the consumer side, or in the referral side to others who could be joining us and reducing the friction of recruiting as a result of that. I don’t know how to necessarily see I’ve never seen anybody really measure this well. So but if we could, I would hypothesize that may be the highest return on investment that we could have.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 36:37
Yeah, so Gerry, we measure that all the time in our research through focus groups. So to your point earlier, Chris, an easy way to start or to get the attention in your organization, go back to that high need function, you know, within the organization, have your executive sit in on sit in or listen in blind to a focus group, get eight to 10 candidates in a room, it’s not a huge investment, and have them talk through their journey. Right? There are there’s a science behind it right? You can’t just get them together and start asking questions, there is a science to focus group research for sure. And watch that executives perspective change, when they start to see the value. When you ask an individual, you didn’t get the job? You know, here at ABC organization, how did that make you feel? Who did you talk to? What did they tell you? Did they tell you why you didn’t get the job? How did that make you feel? After you were declined from our organization? What did you do? Did you tell anyone you didn’t get the job? What did you tell them? That’s a really simple way to get started. Right?

Gerry Crispin, CXR 37:43
The key I want to you cannot emphasize this enough. The key is you’re talking to people you did not hire. And And while you may be doing that, there’s very few companies I’ve ever seen, even attempted. So yeah. So I would encourage that for sure.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 38:00
Yeah. And I want to the flip side of this too. And I’ll throw it up on the screen, because we have a little bit of a chat going on. And it’s in the sidebar here out on LinkedIn. So I’ll put it up on the screen so you can see it, Susan. So we’ve got Ellie Cohen PHR s HRMC, PCPC. XYZ, who says what about the brand of the actual recruiter right in terms of what they’re posting and communicating? Right? What about the brand and the company and the influence that they present? Is there anything you maybe would add to that concern? Because I do think that is part of the influence, right? And sort of where that comes from whether we’re attracting or repelling candidates on that front.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 38:36
So I will connect that back to where employer brands sits in an organization. If you have an employer brand leader that’s got an A managerial remit, right? They have power control relationships and influence as a leader in the talent acquisition organization. They can then be responsible for how thority and budget to be looking at recruiter brands because LA’s right that matters. But if you have an individual, contributor, employer, brand manager or associate sitting at a really low level, they’re not going to be able to influence the recruiters they might pointed out they might be able to give the recruiters more things they might go into Canva create more talking points or visuals recruiters can use an email but they won’t be able to affect their brand. Now they can do brand training. That’s certainly one thing that you know we’ll often do with clients or organizations who will do I think Allison Cruz has done that at Baxter that’s one way to do it depending on the level in the organization, but that she’s spot on that’s that individual level of influence.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 39:43
One of my favorite pocket we’re going to do some best stuff here as we get into the holiday season but one of my favorites that we picked was a podcast we had with Allison it’d be fun to do it. Alright, so Susan, I know we’re way way over time and I’m so grateful for the time you gave us today but I got to ask you just like we ask every every guest that’s on the show that we enjoy. If you were going to write a book about this topic, what would the title of that book be for you?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 40:09
Oh, that’s a tough one, I think it would have to particularly be about what really makes you tick. What makes you act what makes you do what you do. So something about, you know, that sort of influence to actually take action. Maybe Gerry said it best earlier in power to act. What’s going to empower you what’s going to make you motivate people with their hearts are lazy. So what’s gonna make them click on something? Right? What’s gonna make them connect?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 40:43
I love that. Well, okay, so now I gotta ask you who’s gonna get the first signed copy?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 40:48
Oh, Gerry, of course.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 40:50
There he goes.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 40:53
I don’t know if Jerry wants more books. Right. If you’re downsizing Gerry, I don’t know that you want to add to the bookshelf,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 40:59
he might change his mind copy for signed copies. He’s got a couple of books under his own belt. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I would keep yours for sure.

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 41:08
Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s been a while since I’ve written a book. And once you’ve gone through it, it is it’s like birthing a child and I have to already so I don’t know that I want to have before

Chris Hoyt, CXR 41:19
You forget the pain a little bit later, you forget the pain?

Susan LaMotte, Exaqueo 41:22
Yes, very much. So

Chris Hoyt, CXR 41:23
Okay Susan, hang out. Again, much gratitude for your joining us. We really appreciate catching up with you. And we love when you’re able to attend any of the workshops or the webinars we do I know that our memberships and big fan, so just hang out for a little bit. Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to just give a couple of people. Some heads up what we’ve got ahead. I’m gonna throw you in the green room. Gerry, I’ll put you in there with her too. How about that? That is I got the puppet master skills over here. Well, we’ve got gone. And look, I just I want to remind everybody before we let go, if you’re not already a part of CareerXroads in that community, Spire, 1000, recruiting leaders and professionals in their over 130 companies and brands in there, head over to CXR.works and see if you qualify, check out what you’re missing, see if you qualify to connect and join. And I also want to remind everybody, it’s a tough time right now, under the end of the year, we know there’s an awful lot of displacement going on in the recruiting industries and recruiters that are being laid off removed from their roles. So we’re going to ask to get pass along the URL CXR.works/jobs As of this morning, 197 recruiting jobs at those membership companies that they’re hiring for all the way all the way up to Vice President of talent and they’re from coordinator to VP Believe it or not. So CXR.works/jobs, you want to check that out cxr.works/podcast Listen to the other podcasts that we’ve done, be aware of the ones that are coming up and you can subscribe literally anywhere else that you listen. And then lastly, I’m just going to tell you CXR.works/events. So you can see the calendar of what we’ve got coming up for next year live meetings and virtual we’re beginning to get populated in there. So watch that page for updates. And with that, we’re gonna say thank you everybody, and we will see you on the best stuff show coming up. And we’ve got an analyst economist coming up next week, so we’ll see them.

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