Talent wins games, but teamwork wins championships.

Welcome to eight players. But guess what? We'll tell you how to target, hire, retain and train top performers for your team. For many, many years, recruiting has been run as closer to a ticketing system. You know, somebody applies for a job and that resume is a ticket and a job process. And the I think more and more organizations are starting to look at them as people that if that job didn't get hired for, maybe we could get to them for another job without them having to apply again.

Maybe we could consider them for a job even if they didn't apply. Maybe we can speak to them about it. And that's a shift from treating this as a ticketing process to being people that are not only trying to keep warm, but considering the multiple opportunities. I am Robin shows you at our suites and we are sourcing automation software that helps companies hire the best talent at me. And follow me now on LinkedIn who want to keep an eye on this.

Hey, everyone.

Today we're having thoughts from Bimberi to talk about a very specific topic, which is your recruiter and candidate experience will change next year in 10 years, not in five years, but next year. So one consultant, very happy to have you today. Can you tell us more about yourself, about Dimery? And then we'll look at the topic of the visit today by Rob.

And thanks. Thanks for having me on. So boomeranging is the leading talent operating system, which means that we are the primary provider for large enterprises, typically Fortune 500 companies of CRM marketing and talent data software. And we started the business to actually in the last financial crisis in 2012. So it's pleasing to see us in a similar position now in the world, but with technology to make an impact. Actually, last year in the last 12 months, we were able to help just under half a million people find jobs through our platform, directly through our platform.

And the great thing about it is that all of those people that that entire things, four hundred eighty thousand didn't apply for the jobs they found because that's what our software does. We don't deal with traditional applications, but we deal with proactive recruiting, helping companies come to their candidates market to them. We target candidates who might have applied years before. So that's what we do and very happy to from the vantage point that we have, seeing some of these trends and some of the things that are evolving to share some perspectives on what's changing in the next five months.

Right.

And so the experience with these companies that you created, Marine, what, 2015, right?

Yes, we launched by 2015. We started working on it in late 2012 and 2013. And I spent a couple of years with it being a side project, an experiment. But in the just over five years now since since we launched, it's been an interesting journey because there aren't many technologies that go straight for large enterprise software solutions. And that's because it's it's a bit of a catch. Twenty two to try and establish yourself as a credible enterprise software solution, especially when what you do isn't just a feature like a video interview, for example.

But when we are asking companies to make us that call system of record for old people and talent data and doing that before we had any credibility or any customers, just technology was it wasn't easy. Our first customers had to take a leap of faith and to be visionaries around what was possible. Companies like VMware in particular, and a company that brought them really at the time as a new type of solution back when CRM and marketing technologies didn't really exist.

And it's great to see that this is now becoming the norm for large organizations in particular, and not only for talent teams, but especially after a year like 20, 20 H.R. functions, companies that are trying to not only recruit faster and better, but do so with with more data so they can have predictability so they can fine tune what's working and where candidate and employee experiences can be improved. So it's a step by step journey. And initially we started with the CRM as a primary offering something that would allow companies to move beyond just waiting for applications and interviewing and start actively pipelining talent pool.

And on top of that, we build products for every vertical within recruiting from campus recruiting events. This year, we added virtual events started last year in twenty search recruiting for in-house search. So modules for every part of the lifecycle. And one of the key things and again, one of the reasons we're called to tell an operating system is the backbone for a lot of this. Working in a large organization is having people focus not only on being recruiters, but having somebody focus on things like talent operations, a function that helps steer.

How do we think about automating things? How do we think about leveraging AI? How do we think about our data and empowering and enabling everyone the talent function, which is already the norm in other parts of the business of sales operations, product operations. But it's starting to. Technologies like was the norm in recruiting as well. And so the topic we decided for today is how you recruiter and candidate experience will change next year before we tackle that one.

I'd be interested to know how that changed in the past five years, according to you. So there's these companies not just waiting for people to apply, engaging more in outreach. So 10 years ago, there were the first you eighth generation that CRM, so that these new generation of talent operating systems. Can you tell us about how it changed in the last five years? And then what's your vision for the next few months? Because we're talking near-term here.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first key thing to to bear in mind when we think about what's changed about that experience is that people don't think of themselves as wanting different experiences as candidates or as customers. And a lot of the expectation any human being has is being weighted and influenced by how customer experiences are evolving. In the last five years, the experiences we have as consumers, as customers have continued to not only become more frictionless, but to be really personalized.

We've started seeing a huge adoption of technologies like Netflix that have made it the norm to not be browsing websites or shops like in the blockbuster days, but to actually have an app that's personally tailoring recommendations to, you know, to people's Netflix is of the same, to people's Facebook to the same. And I think that that expectation that the recommendations and experience you have is not only effortless but personalized is something that comes across verticals and processes. And so with that being what you now expect, an online experience and interaction with the company to be, to start finding that from the recruiting side, you're still having to complete applications, even if you have applied before having to submit all this information that you probably shouldn't need to submit if you've already linked in or out of your resume.

And even more so, having to do it all yourself. You don't have to browse for every film. You get recommendations. And we are not very good in the world of talent at giving those recommendations. And what's changed is that those expectations have started to creep in and companies that have started to make those smarter experiences by not just using job applications, but starting to do things like talent communities by not just waiting for candidates to come to them, but being more creative and using anything from social channels to other ways of having to recruiters, employees and firms.

They work with staff more proactively marketing to candidates that started to happen. A lot of businesses are now a lot more proactive in their brand. A lot of businesses have started bringing marketing expertise and even people from marketing into their recruiting teams. And it's it's still an evolving change. But in the last five years, we've kind of gone from zero to one. We've gone from marketing, not really being a part of recruiting and not being something the candidates really see changing to something that is now increasingly becoming the norm.

The idea of leads and talent pools is becoming the norm. Pretty much every so started to have some form of CRM functionality, having this concept of leaders becoming the status quo rather than something that is an idea. And that's a pretty big transformation to have gone on within within a five year period.

Now, you mean that companies will even start replying to those candidates when they say, we'll keep in touch and we'll keep you in our database? And they used to never do like those people and then those thoughts to actually create the debate and engage with those people again, right? Yeah, exactly. And also starting to treat people as people rather than those tickets. And a process. I think for many, many years, recruiting has been run as closer to a ticketing system.

Somebody applies for a job and that resume is a ticket and a job process. And the I think more and more organizations are starting to look at them as people that if that job didn't get hired for, maybe we could get to them for another job without them having to apply again. Maybe we could consider them for a job even if they didn't apply. Maybe we can speak to them about it. And that's a shift from treating this as a ticketing process to being people that you are not only trying to keep warm, but considering for multiple opportunities.

OK, so now if we're looking into the future, so we see how this changed, what's your provision now in the next few months and what's the new expectations from candidates and recruiters like this?

I think that quite a lot of things have started shifting and twenty twenty and we're starting to see in the next 12 months them manifesting itself and pretty significant impacts on how candidates will expect the experience and operations will do. I think the first piece is diversity, equity and inclusion. We are starting to see not only is this much more important theme, we actually have been we ran a research study recently and found that the percentage of organizations that have started to train solely for diversity and inclusion as a primary focus of twenty twenty one has more than doubled in the last six months.

And I think the the impact of what that means is that companies are going to be much more actively running one programs for it. So not just trying to tweak job descriptions to be more inclusive. Which is something companies are starting to do and candidates are starting to expect and cool out, but also starting to do things that aren't just about jobs. We see companies starting to actively run events, including virtual events, starting to showcase their employees more actively to show what type of employees they have in the company, including what that means in terms of diversity and inclusion.

And it's something that candidates are starting to expect and call out an intern. You see people posting on social media and calling companies out where they didn't have an equitable the recruiting process or interview process. And as a result, many companies are starting to hire people to run this, to have a diversity officer and so forth. So I think that's one big theme. And it's going to manifest itself in a number of changes across the entire recruiting and candidate employer, brand lifecycle.

I think the second piece is as part of this consumer experience piece, I think obviously more and more people are starting to want work that is part remote, if not fully remote. And that actually has a pretty big impact on, again, the full lifecycle. If you start with how a company portrays that brand and how you pitch a company before a lot of companies will take his all locations, like it starts with, like here's the places you could work.

Here's our jobs. Here's our offices that even when we all go back to our offices, that's not going to be the main pitch for a lot of people. This culture that we've had emerge in the last 15 years of touting how cool your office space is. Is it going to be the most important draw, being able to speak to why we work well together, how we collaborate together, and what it is about our company that has the ways of working in the culture, that provides people with the psychological safety and the empathy that is needed to get through difficult times.

How that's conveyed in every part of the experience a candidate has, how a candidate can be given comfort that if they do need to work remotely, that this is going to be still an enjoyable experience and a productive experience. I'm sure everyone's already seen candidates starting to ask questions about this, but companies haven't yet actually adjusted that processes or the employee brands to reflect this in many instances on moving interviews online. It goes much deeper than that to have a competitive advantage in that kind of candidate market.

And I think the next 12 months is going to see some some very significant moves by companies to try and become more competitive for those types of candidates.

OK, so that's the second piece. Is there another piece about so I liked how you compared the recruiting experience with Blockbuster with Netflix. And yeah, we can think of all these outreach messages saying, Dear Sir or madam, this could be interesting for you with an absolutely relevant job. How would you gear towards more personalization in the candidate relationship? And what do you think about using A.I.? Because Netflix is the algorithm. Facebook obviously invested a lot in the day for their recommendation system.

So should it be done by some kind of automation? Should it be done by humans, would you think?

I think there's a few pieces to this and some of this is going to be, I think, a big impact in the next two to three years, perhaps more so than in the next six to 12 months. But the change is definitely starting. And I think the first part which you touched on is tools like Netflix. And all of these consumer tools are not just driven by the fundamentally content recommendation systems you expect as a consumer. Ten years ago, we were also browsing websites and shopping on websites, and those websites use content management systems and recruiting, still use content management systems.

It's almost the last bastion of sort of a pre intelligent world where we are building sites, building job searches. And it's definitely starting to shift where companies are moving away from websites and emails towards things that are dynamically recommending content. And that's started to manifest itself in various places. Job board tools have started to embed elements of slightly deeper intelligence. But to really make it work, you need to have more information about who you're speaking to in order to truly personalize, in order to give a recommendation to somebody about this job might work for you.

It doesn't help to know that name, helps to understand what are the skills they have, what is their intent and where are they starting to help is a big thing that we've been focusing on for years from a data perspective and now starting to get an experience perspective ourselves is when you look at something like a resume or a candidate's profile, what can we learn from where they worked and when they work there? And from that, what can we do to personalize the relevance of our recommendation?

If we can see that they were in a job as a as a product manager, what different types of career path might that lend? It's up to not all product managers and product and vice versa. If you have somebody who is in customer support, maybe that's a common career path into product marketing. The personalization isn't just about looking at job titles. Manager to jobs. If you can be more intelligent about what does that skill set, where is it likely to lead them and what can we learn about the interactions when they're visiting our website or clicking things?

That's how any consumer experience tailors the recommendations. But it starts with tracking it like. Do we learn the intent and more and more companies are starting to use analytics to not just say how many visitors a website had to actually use it at a human level? If somebody applied for a job, are they coming back or they clicking the website again? How do we track that? And as we start having more products that make this easier for companies that are using that, and that's that's definitely a big thing that's going to be happening the next 12 months.

From a technology standpoint, I think we're going to start seeing the ease of being more personal, not just with my first name, but relevance of this is a job that seems to be a perfect career path for you or the growth opportunity. Then doing that with intelligence based on things like content and skills is going to become a common feature. And I think that we're already starting to see some of the more sophisticated companies doing that is probably going to start moving into a more mainstream process by the end of this year and certainly next year.

And do you feel that conflicts with also there is a deep trend in recruiting industry recruiting experiences, which is the privacy of your data, etc., etc.. So do you feel more personalization conflicts with more privacy, or do you see a way that these two could live together?

Yeah, great question. I think that not just personalization, but data and I conflicts with privacy unless you give people control. And one of the reasons that it's likely to not end up conflicting, but actually helping is because today a lot of companies use A.I. and there's no way for a candidate to really see what's going on. It's not like you as a candidate can say easily for most companies. Can I see my profile? Can I see what's triggering incriminations?

And more and more companies are starting to look at making this not just something that a candidate requests for DPR and they get a backup of their data, but actually being a profile they can log into, if you can access or access your profile, update some of your data. There's a lot of companies using data enrichment services and various forms of A.I. So making that more accessible to a candidate, being more transparent, there's definitely a shift. And I think that if you again, think about it as an effort to experience Facebook, even for all the challenges you can see, like who has your data, especially because you have a Facebook profile, you can log in and there are some settings of privacy controls.

And so I think from a talent and recruiting perspective, that's going to become whether this is likely to have the people are going to have a candidate profile that they can access for a company like that they are interacting with rather than just applying for a job saying, look, this is my profile, here's my marketing preferences, here's my data preferences, privacy preferences. And that's going to be a again, a direct transfer from what we already use to in the consumer world.

Would you think will lead this change will be at CES in software or will it be job boards or will it be a professional network? And I'm thinking maybe LinkedIn. So who should lead that change to have that kind of one place where can put your candidate data and see how it's played between different companies?

I think it's an open question because ultimately what people need for this is for it to not to be to be specific to a company. You might apply for three different companies and you might have different preferences on what those companies have about you. You might have different preferences of communications. So it's irrespective of what types of solutions exist, it doesn't necessarily matter who makes them, so long as it becomes easy for each company to tailor this to their own recruiting process, just like you take, or it's still your learning system or any other product you use.

And it's definitely a space that we are operating in and are not looking at this as a one technology solution. And if you want to make good experiences for candidates across the board, it's likely to turn into more of an App Store style ecosystem than just a single product. So it's an open game and an open question. I see it being likely to emerge as a set of solutions that might integrate.

OK, and so if we know think about origins today, recruiters, recruiting managers, even hiring managers, funders of all sorts, what do they need to do now not to be lagging behind the industry when it comes to candidates experience? So what's the advice you should give? One that you gave was having talent pool. So how did you do that? How do you implement these? What kind of contests do you send? You send? I don't know.

Thanks to your blog, to your engineering blog, links to up and job growth. What are the steps that anyone can implement this year to update the candidates experience?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the having a way of tracking leads prospects, if that's not something that you're already doing, is super important. I think a lot of people just sort of a single one man shop approach, in which case you could just use long term projects or a tool like that, having one place where you can see is there somebody that's applied before spoken to us or this company before and being able to whether it's through a CRM or otherwise doesn't really matter so long as you have a mechanism through which to track pipelines and market to those.

And I think if you do have that, the question for this year is how do we start looking at skills and intent? What skills are we really recruiting for? If we were to look at this not just as a job description, but as something that when we speak to a candidate, we can talk about growth opportunities and. Things that that job might grow into or the key things that you are truly rooting for in terms of capabilities for this role, and that can have a different dialogue throughout the process with candidates, but also make them much smarter personalization.

Imagine you can pick out why you think the job is relevant for somebody and tell the candidate that. And obviously we'll be better at targeting the right people as well as getting their interest at the same time. So skills and capabilities as different ways of referring to this. But ultimately, what is going to make them be successful in this role? And how do we find out what that looks like for each role and what what we can learn about a candidate's profile to help track that?

And the other is being much more intelligent about capturing intent and tracking it. How do you know if a candidate is interested? And can we do that through signals like checking if they're opening our emails? Do we want to prioritize following up with the people that are how do we make sure we don't drop the ball if somebody says I'm finishing a contract, that I might be free in three months, figuring out the timing of the right time to message them, such as being a lot more strategic around that.

And I think finally, and this is perhaps the most important and the most actionable, is tailoring your content to acknowledge what do people care about Molnau? Some people have been through really difficult times. And I think whether it's for personal reasons or health or family or work, being thoughtful around how to empathize and be empathetic in your messaging, being thoughtful around other components of the content you're sharing, both from the candidate's perspective, but also from the employer brand, which includes the piece I mentioned on diversity and inclusion, includes potentially showcasing more videos to candidates as part of your communication.

More and more companies are starting to record videos of their employees and their teams and including what they share. So really rethinking content and then using that content to proactively reach out to people I think is really the highest priority thing I do.

And aside from Demery, obviously, which allows people to track leads prospects and keep all the data in one place. Aside from memory, what other tools would you recommend people have a look at? So you mentioned digital recording tool to record video of the employees. Do you have any recommendation that you see your own customers use?

There's a few, one that we use ourselves as a company called Altra that actually recently got acquired, but they're still offering their services. And it's very it's a very good way of rolling out the employee video capture process. So Altra is one. I think that whilst there are many different types of tools across the process, I think the one of the key things to look at, especially to try to capture employee videos, is what's going to make this simple, because ideally it's going to be a process that is no harder than sending a link to every employee with a few questions that you'd like them to answer.

And that's what tools like Altero designed to do. And then you'll have a library at your disposal for any candidate, communications that can use real employee case studies and stories that you can use in the recruiting process.

OK, and if anyone wants to check all true that spill A-L to you and they just got acquired by checking the website just now. And concerning the job, the wording itself, the kind of information you ask to candidates, should companies change anything this year? Should stop asking for cover letters resumes. What's your view on this? It's a good question.

I mean, there's certain things if you're asking for somebody to apply for a job that I will see kind of compliance driven. But there's a lot of things that you don't necessarily need to ask for, particularly up front. And I think it's possible to make the upfront experience very simple, especially if you can get things like either somebody to sign up with LinkedIn or if you have a method to use data in Richmond, which there's various technologies for which can help bring in some extra data about a candidate.

But the key thing is that if you want more information, you don't necessarily have to either ask for upfront or wait to have a call. There are ways always after you get the initial application or the initial sign up to then follow up. If you need more information, stagger the experience. And that could also be asking somebody to record a video if you're using a video tool or could be asking somebody to do a psychometric test, which I think other companies apply.

Metrics and architectures are becoming increasingly popular as ways of simplifying the recruiting process with something that isn't a formal assessment that can be done before you end up doing a face to face or video interviews. So I think figuring out how to just reduce the friction and and not ask more than you need to up front if it gives you a way to then route to the next step in the process. What you can ask relevant people for more data.

And one space where companies probably need to improve a lot is also to nurture talent course, how to engage with your best candidates, your best applicants, your best prospects as well. Somebody you talked to two years ago. Do you have any advice on these? What kind of content should you send? What kind of relationship should you have with those people? Should it be only just an email a few months, a year, or should it be more like sharing content or sharing news about the company?

I think there's two sides to this. One side is it depends on what level of interest the candidate already has, if it's somebody has already applied for a job before. They're probably going to be more interested in general updates about the company, latest jobs, things like that, and not something like these jobs can be more tailored if they were an engineering applicant, maybe include the things that are specific to engineering. And if you have opportunities to share things like blogs, especially if they're like engineering blogs for an engineering candidate, and of course, that that can be great.

People can always opt out and you can see who's opening and clicking. And then if you are any campaign to use, even if it's a tool like MailChimp, can give you some of the analytics to decide who's engaged and do we want to focus in on those people with some more direct contact? Maybe we actually feel more direct for people who are engaged and who are relevant. Candidates can occasionally do something like offer a webinar or an AMA. Maybe there are ways of engaging with those candidates and offering time.

So on the other side, if it's somebody who's perhaps less engaged, I think a part of it can start with also checking what might the candidate be interested in? You know, there's ways of sending surveys either about what might be relevant to them or if they had a recruiting experience in your company, what their experience was. And I think that the act of doing so will not only teach you about what's working, but is often a very good way of actually having the candidates feel recognized for being given relevant content and being having their opinions appreciated.

OK, so main advice, other way to fill up with leads and prospects. Be more intelligent about tracking Internet, capture the intent to get data because most of them people don't even get the data, don't even take their emails open and then tell you can turn to what people need now. And that's basically all goes down to the same advice each time, which is personalized. And think about first, gather the data, keep track of the data, personalize and be.

You mean about it, right? Exactly.

And the last piece I'd add just on the content, I mentioned that if you have a blog, great use it. But most companies aren't going to have a ton of great recruiting, relevant content that's updated every now. But what you can do again is if you use things like getting employee videos or in general, if your company has things that are recorded that can be shared publicly, figure out what type of content is being generated, even if it's not being posted on your career site, that might be relevant.

What can we capture certain bits about will be just released in our product. If you have a product company or what our employees have been up to, I'm sure that I see more and more companies actually going public with some of their internal handbooks and internal processes, and that tends to get a lot of appreciation. That is great ammunition for recruiting communication.

Great final word and thanks to Super and thanks for being here today and looking forward to those few months then. Thanks a lot, Robyn.

Appreciate the time and you inviting me to join.

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