Dan Jessup: TotalPicture Radio Transcript

Peter: This is Peter Clayton reporting from . Joining me is Dan Jessup, Vice President, Human Resources at Groupon. Just a quick program note before we get started, you'll find a complete transcript of this podcast on Dan's feature page located in the Talent Acquisition Channel of TotalPicture Radio. Dan Jessup has been with Groupon since June 2009 directing recruitment as the company scaled from approximately 50 employees that summer to over 1,000 in North America in the 4th quarter of 2010. He transitioned to Vice President, Human Resources in the Fall of 2010 as the company began to build out a larger internal HR team to reflect and expand the company's employment brand and culture. Dan's background is in talent acquisition and training with a double life as an improv actor.

Dan, welcome to TotalPicture Radio.

Dan: Thanks Peter, this is great.

Peter: My first question is actually a question that was just asked in your session here. Tell us about the candidate experience. Groupon in such a hot company. I'm sure a lot of job applicants think this is a place where they can pile on the stock options and get rich quick. How do you deal with the volume of candidates and still keep people happy about your brand and the customer relationship?

Dan: I think as difficult as it is sometimes for us, and especially for candidates, it's how are we treating this like any other opportunities. If I was working at any other company or if they were applying anywhere else, it still comes down to the classic nuts and bolts of relevance for the role and what the candidate wants out of the job and their career pursuits and what we want out of an employee, and what we want to need and so is there a match for that. Again, I'm totally sensitive to the fact that we had a ridiculously hot employment brand and that's an awesome place to be in.

Peter: Right. I'll take any job!

Dan: Yeah, so it's on us to say, "Hey, we respect that but realize we have an obligation as recruiters and hiring managers to staff the most relevant talent and we're upfront about that and that we expect the candidates to be in front with us.

Peter: You have a unique way of phone screening candidates, can you tell us your approach?

Dan: I don't know. I don't know exactly what that refers, but there's no set script to what we do and I think we try to intentionally add randomness or we will – to me, I don't think it's tremendously unique or crazy, but I do think it's important that we're very upfront. I think we're sometimes brutally honest about what makes a great but also what are the struggles and the hurdles of the gig. Personally, I want every recruiter on the team to play their own strengths. For me, I like kind of giving fake answers and seeing if the candidate can pick up on that. I love if someone asks what the compensation is like and answering "what do you mean compensation…" or whatever just to see, are they with us, did they pick up on that. Do they understand sarcasm. That's huge because it shows it gives us a sense of their mentality.

Peter: You were talking about putting out one job posting that used every cliché in the world… A-player, 110% commitment.

Dan: Oh yeah. I have that secret dream to put out that job description and to see who would apply to that, see who would apply to the A-player job description that is full of no real content.

Peter: You do have limited recruiting resources to scale with the numbers of hires you need to make. You were saying that you're hiring like 200 people a week?

Dan: A month.

Peter: 200 people a month… that would be awesome… 200 people a month which is still a lot of people to bring on board, but you don't hire fast. Can you explain what you mean by that?

Dan: By that I mean that we still keep a true process, we keep a diligent process with having multiple people interface with a candidate, giving the candidate a thorough chance to vet us out and not just say, "Great, here's what the job is. Can you do this? Prove it, yes or no." It's, "Hey, here's what we're all about. What are you all about? Let me a couple of other people for you to speak with, get their perspective on the same things even if they're asking the same questions, or if you're asking the questions, you're going to get their take on it. So at the end of the process, you have an objective view of who we are, we do of you and even if we have to compress that, because yeah, we have to sometimes compress that into three days, but let's give it that weight and that time, because if we don't, we fail across the board. We don't do the candidate any good, we don't do ourselves any good, we fail the company. It's easier said than done, but that's just the big difference between hiring volume versus hiring fast.

Peter: One thing that you were talking about that I found really interesting is you like to bring in recruiters who have relevant experience in their job and you were specifically mentioning like people hiring sales people.

Dan: I think that's huge for organizations to have recruiters that can speak in depth and can speak believably to the roles. For example, I want to make sure that if we have someone apply to, example, a sales job, I want them to speak with a recruiter who maybe the recruiter doesn't have to have been in sales all their life, but have they been in a sales role, have they been at least been in a very active business to business sales environment where they can speak that they understand it as opposed to just reading off questions that they got on 'here are things to ask a salesperson.'

Peter: Right.

Dan: Be able to convey that you get it, that you know it, that you understand what that pressure is like, not fake it – be honest about – I want people to be honest about what their experience has been and if they've done it or not, fine, but convey to the candidate that you understand their world a bit.

Peter: What's the culture at Groupon like; how would you describe it?

Dan: It's funny and I usually cringe about describing it because I think the second that we do, we begin to bracket it, but that said, I think it's a very honest environment. I think people are very upfront or direct with each other. There is a great energy to the place which I understand is a subjective answer, but there is a lightheartedness to certain things; there's a tremendous deal of pressure at the same time. There is this interesting dynamic of a great deal of pressure and expectations and having to out-execute and out-pace our own previous months deliverables and productions while at the same time operating as humans and not getting too robotic about everything and having a sense of self, and I think a lot of people are able to be themselves there. I don't think we have an environment where people feel they are different at work than they are at the bar and hopefully, the person that I work with at work, I'm going to see that same personality if I see them at a library, a bar, or a post office; I want them to be the same person.

Peter: Is cultural fit really important to your organization when it comes to hiring?

Dan: Absolutely.

Peter: How many recruiters do you currently have on staff?

Dan: I think we're around 15. I should get a more accurate number, right around 15, I think.

Peter: Do you deputize your hiring managers and are they trained or certified in a particular process?

Dan: As it relates to interviewing?

Peter: Yes.

Dan: We're getting there more and more. We have some that have come in with great experience already and they can speak to that because we have a lot of homegrown managers and then we have some we brought in from the outside in part for that reason, to be able to scale and to guide newer managers, and now we're actually crafting out certification processes and even if it's legal stuff… for example, bringing in outside counsel to speak about and making sure we're rock solid on what you can and cannot ask, the idiosyncrasies of that and the very black and white issues of what you can ask and what you can't, as well as the rapport components and interview dynamics.

Peter: Dan, you're a comedian and I'm serious. Second City Improv in Chicago, national commercials, your SAG and and AFTRA; how did you get in to HR and what are some of the more humorous stories you can share with us about the recruiting process.

Dan: I got to know this by way of wanting a day job back in 2002. I was taking classes, I was taking improv classes, and I wanted one of my nights free to take more classes, so I got into a staffing firm administratively and eventually began to do more sourcing of résumés, helping out the recruiters and then took on a recruiting role, really liked that realm, made the move to internal corporate recruiting with CareerBuilder and then just kept doing that and then eventually Groupon and all the while, that was kind of a double life to what I was doing in the acting space. I think a lot of it, especially on the recruiting side of it as well as performance, relates to the human element, relates to the human condition, it relates to so much of that. That was good and I eventually just kept doing both and now I'm a little bit more weighted on the recruiting side of my life and HR side of my life and the performance but I try to keep at least a foot in that world, so that I can get two feet back in at some point and there hasn't been a crazy gap.

As far as crazy stories, boy, you think back to random interviews or crazy situations that I guess I don't have any powerful anecdotes that are going to rock anybody here, but it's always interesting when you never what you're going to get. You'll never know what's going to happen when you walk into an interview situation. I think it's fun to just kind of ride that wave I guess and to know alright, where is this going to go and whether someone gets overly emotional, whether they get aggressive, whether they completely prove or disprove assumptions walking in the door, is interesting, where we expect someone's going to be very much like this and they're completely a 180 when you meet them, or we expect certain tendency that you never see proven, that's what's fascinating, I think.

Peter: You talked a lot about EQ versus IQ and social intelligence, can you kind of share some of what you were discussing and your perspective on that?

Dan: I believe – and this is something that I'm trying to even myself through books and in meeting with people to get better, to be able to articulate – but I think that's an amazingly powerful aspect to consider when we're looking at our staff is their level of EQ and their level of social intelligence and how well they read subtexts, how well they read people interpersonal communication and some of that which just drives so much of the long-term job satisfaction which relates to productivity, which relates to a good team dynamic and all of that stuff. I'm a big proponent of that, even though I admittedly am not psychologically trained to speak to it, but I think that it's very undervalued, especially as we look at managers and recruiters. I think we undervalue at times the EQ of those people and more so, we're getting more and more, we're pushing that more even if we don't use those terms. We're aware of that and more cognizant and I think those areas just beg a lot more adherence.

Peter: What are you doing to sort of promote your employment brand and get it out there so people have understanding of who you are as a company?

Dan: Composite of things. We have obviously are our career page. We have a social media presence through the classic channels of LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter and doing more and more of that as we grow, but then also looking strategically at what could we be doing better, how could we be doing more it. Because we have a good presence now; it could certainly be better, our career site can certainly be better. I think we just never assume, especially the risk for us is resting on the laurels of success, which I'm glad that we don't but it's definitely out there as a potential risk. I think for us, as it relates to employment brand, let's be very grateful that we have what we have but not assume that we're good to go. Let's get ahead of the trend because we need to still stay as competitive, if not more so, as we keep going.

Peter: So you have a social media manager who's going out there and doing the Twitter stuff for you and the Facebook stuff for you, tell me about the process of hiring that individual. What were the skill sets that you were looking for when you started interviewing for that because I'm really interested with that particular role because three years ago it didn't exist, right?

Dan: Great call. What I think it is, is it's people that view social media as a communication tool versus an advertising tool. To me, that's the real important thing there, is how well they engage and subscribers are engaged… because we also have a social media presence for the B to C side, right? But even as it relates internally, because it's one of our recruiters that doubles down as this for us on the recruiting side, he has an ability and an affinity for that and he understands the way to communicate and how to keep an ongoing conversation, how to mix content and necessities as well as just fun fluff stuff and how it relates.

Peter: The opening keynote was by Matthew Jeffrey this morning and he is also the conference chair here and he talked a lot about this idea of candidate engagement and the fact that a number of companies will go and set up a Facebook account and then basically just scrape their job board and put it up on Facebook and say, "Alright, now we have a social media strategy." That's not engagement.

Dan: No.

Peter: When you look at Twitter, when you look at LinkedIn, so many of these companies, especially like the big old legacy companies that have been around for a long time, it's like, "go find us a kid to this to do Twitter thing, whatever…" without understanding how strategic that really needs to be and that you really need to engage these candidates that are coming and it's not just a one-way communication.

Dan: Absolutely, yeah. It's much more than having a presence, it's much more than frequency of tweeting. I think it's much more than the sometimes even the content. I think it's everything. It's acknowledging that this is a whole different channel of communication and so it requires the same things that face-to-face communication requires, the written communication requires. It's looking at context, it's looking at timing, it's looking at how far reaching and what are our subscriber base, what's my audience for this, who else is seeing this besides that one person I might have sent the direct tweet to, how global are we are with it… I think it's really understanding that it's a lot more meaningful than that. Again, I need to do a better job myself personally, because I think it's easy to get – some people are just so good and this is what makes this guy good and I think a lot of social media people who focus on that so well, what makes them good is that they incorporate it as part of their routine. It's just what they're always doing as opposed to, for a lot of us and I think myself included, sometimes it needs to be a concerted effort to go and update my status.

Peter: Right, it's more transactional than it is just fluid, right?

Dan: Right.

Peter: Even as hot as your brand is, you want to attract the right candidates, and there is a petition out there for the right candidates, a lot of it, right?

Dan: Yeah.

Peter: Because you're trying to recruit the same people that Microsoft is, that Intel is, that maybe Google is, right?

Dan: Yeah, absolutely. In different pockets of the country it's different and certainly it's competitive in almost every department for us. Again, it' about being appreciative and proud of the employment brand we have but not assuming that that's going to do everything for us.

Peter: You talked about using humor strategically, can you explain that?

Dan: I think a lot of times humor is viewed as, "Oh, they're being funny and that's cool and I'm entertained," but I think as it relates to recruitment branding and employment branding, I think it's a strategic tool as well and strategic in a sense, I think, sends the signal to the candidate that they can relax a bit and they can walk into the interview a bit more at ease hopefully. We're stripping away one more piece of interview pretense, stuffiness and stiffness, and we're kind of showing them a bit more of who we are and we're saying, "Hey, we can laugh at ourselves as well. We can have some lightheartedness in this, so please do that in yourself on your end."

Peter: You have a lat of job openings. I was on your website yesterday and I was going, "Wow!" Do you use job boards? How do you find your candidates for the roles that you have open?

Dan: It's a mix of a lot of things. Again, we're very fortunate to have a strong employment brand so we do get a lot of inbound for some roles. For others we don't. For others, we do have to use a different approach where we're – and even I would say for the roles where we do get inbound, we still want to have there be a mix of approaches. Even though if we're getting more candidates than we need apply to our site, that still doesn't mean that we wouldn't benefit from running an ad in a different place to get a different seeker, at getting a passive seeker or whatever it is. We'll balance it.

We try the major players in this space of recruitment advertising. We tried niche boards, we tried niche players because some of them relate very well to tech hires, to certain types of design hires, to editorial hires, to interim staff, what have you. I think you have a composite to that and you make sure that you have a brand that's consistent and that you have enough arms out there. Sometimes that's advertisement, sometimes that's personnel. You do the occasional engagement of third party recruiters when it makes sense, but I think overall we try to keep things in-house.

Peter: Groupon is the fastest startup ever, faster than Google, faster than Twitter, faster than anything and yet, you still have this passion in this other career of being in improv. How do you balance the two or do you? Are you just now saying, I really have to put this improv thing, as much as I love it, on hold for awhile until we kind of get to a certain plateau here.

Dan: I need to be a bit more selective with the improv engagements I do, which is great, but it's by choice and it's what I want. I wouldn't want to just to try to do everything. I know I'd burn out at both ends probably.

What's great for me is one-off contract gigs here and there, doing a show once a month sometimes, maybe it's once a quarter, just to be again, I want to say, somewhat active so I don't go dark on it. It's cool. I like the fact that I get a chance even to still speak to large groups at our orientation days. Little things like that keep me somewhat sharp from a presentation standpoint. I dig that. And when I can, even if it's quick one-off stuff or shorter term commitment shows are good, and I keep auditioning as well just to keep those chops somewhat sharp.

Peter: So are you auditioning for the AFLAC duck?

Dan: Not yet. They have yet to call.

Peter: What have you absorbed here at ERE?

Dan: There is so much genuine passion for the industry as opposed to just marketing services. There are a lot of people that genuinely want to make the industry better. There are so many people that want to improve it. Again, going off the keynote today, recruitment 3.0, how do we improve on what we've done? How do we not assume that what worked in 2010 is going to work now? How do we constantly reinvent what it is, which is great and that's the whole point of that I suppose.

Certainly there's a plethora of options from a vendor standpoint and I think the neat thing with that is it's not just a bunch of vendors; you see a bunch of people that fit different specificity. Some are large scale advertisements, some are very connected to the social media space, some are just there as a referral source, some of there are tangential to even the job boards themselves, some are there as RPO which is good to have – it's a good mix.

Peter: One last question; what haven't I asked you or what would you like our audience t know about Groupon?

Dan: One big thing about Groupon or at least I think this is probably true for a lot of places, but when people apply – when applicants apply – it's much more well received when they're not promising the world and when they're not saying – and we get a lot of people and I respect this and I respect the interest, but some will say "I'm your perfect candidate, I'm the best and you'll never find anybody better than me and I'm perfect," and personally, I don't believe in perfect, because no one is perfect. I'm not perfect for my job. Humility is huge, I think. I think people that come to us that can blend confidence with humility, whether it's an applicant or a vendor, someone that comes in saying, "Here's what I'm all about. I'm interested in learning more for these reasons and I'll be upfront with you as to what I can do and what I can't;" to me, that's very attractive.

So people that come in that have that mentality and from a job applicant standpoint that are intentionally applying to something that's relevant to them and articulating why they might be a fit, but that are also looking out for themselves. They've never been here before, so it's unfair for us to assume they want the job, so I wouldn't want them to want the job and I don't want an applicant that wants to sign their offer letter before they've ever met us. I want someone that thinks they might be interested and they've heard great things maybe and they've researched it and they want to see if we are who they think we are.

Peter: Dan, thank you very much for taking time to speak with us today on TotalPicture Radio.

Dan: Of course, thank you. It's been great.

Peter: Dan Jessup is the Vice President of HR at Groupon. I'm going to give you a little insider tip, if you go interview there, be nice to the receptionist.

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This is Peter Clayton reporting. Thank you for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.