Interview Transcript

Peter: Welcome to an Inside Recruiting Channel podcast on Total Picture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting from the SHRM annual conference in New Orleans.

Jeremy Eskenazi is managing principle at Riviera Advisors, a highly specialized consulting firm that is focused on helping clients improve, enhance and optimize their internal staffing functions. His presentation here at SHRM is titled Consultative Staffing and Recruiting Strategies for HR Generalists: Taking It Up A Notch.

Peter: What is the buzz at the show with your clients and with the people that you're talking to?

Jeremy: Well, I think that the people who are here, as I mentioned to you when we were preparing for this talk, is that I think that the people who are here are focused on getting stuff done. These are people who are serious.

In the past, you know, we've had several thousands of people more at these SHRM conferences; we have less people at the SHRM conference but I think that they're a little bit more serious, they're focused. These are the people that got their company to send them to New Orleans, and so they're really doing some major work. And I think that there is a buzz here about getting ready for the rebound, getting ready to come out of this economic situation that we're in and I see a lot of people preparing for improved recruiting and staffing processes, which is my area of expertise, and really focusing on sort of getting your house in order.

I heard somebody tell me the other day that they were focusing on the whole GOHIO, which stands Get Our House In Order, attitude, and I appreciate that and I see that sort of GOHIO buzz happening here. So it's fairly positive.

Peter: I think one of the challenges in doing that – you and I were both at ERE Spring and one of the themes of that show certainly was the fact that a number of the HR and staffing departments had been decimated and we kept on hearing, "I spent five years building this really fantastic team of people and now I've had to split it up." And so how long is it going to take people really to get back on track and to build those really essential teams that you need to be successful in this?

Jeremy: Well, unfortunately, I'm not sure that they are going to be built back up with fulltime recruiting and staffing professionals. I think that, you know, there is a certain amount of buzz, which is positive, around the idea of outsourcing part of the recruiting and staffing function.

My own personal viewpoint is, is that I don't really believe in full RPO. I don't believe that a company should basically give up that entire function 100% into another company. However, I believe strongly in partial RPO and partial outsourcing because it's the only way to have a scalability model. You know, in the past I have personally, in my own experience, tried to be the emperor almighty of recruiting and build thousands of people up and organizations and lots of internal people and in fact, I've learned very specifically that you cannot do all recruiting at all levels, all functions and all geographies in house all the time because the business cycles change and there is no reason to have a staff of people when, in fact, the business moves down.

So I do believe that there will be an increase in recruiting and staffing professionals but those people who are going to be coming back, who will be adding to the organization in the future, will be more project management focused professionals. So we're going to see less specialized recruiting and staffing people that are just going to focus on sourcing and just focusing on candidate development, just focusing on candidate care, just focusing on full cycle recruiting. We will probably see kind of a hybrid person who is more of a recruiting and staffing specialist, who is much more of a project manager and they might buy certain services external to the organization. So instead of having an internal sourcing team, I might buy sourcing outsourced or offshored from any number of companies that offer that service on a turn it on or off basis.

The same thing goes with background investigations and things like that. So I definitely see that there will be people that will be added back to the organizations, but I don't see the kind of uptick in hiring just loads and loads of people that we have had in the past.

Peter: And I think that's a good thing because we've been going through this binge and purge, right? I was in Silicon Valley in 1998 and if you had a heartbeat, you could get a job somewhere. Eventually when the downturn starts, then people just start doing this massive layoff. I think it's good for the HR and for the recruiting professionals to be more strategic in looking at how can we go about building up the bench strength we need without having to hire full time all of these people all the time that were trying to do these things.

Jeremy: Absolutely. Peter, one of the things that I would say is that the message I brought here to SHRM, which is clearly an organization primarily focused on the generalist population is about being more of a consultative staffing and recruiting professional if you are a generalist.

Now there is definitely a push/pull relationship that HR generalists and staffing and recruiting specialists have had inside of organizations in the past. So the HR generalist population has – in our profession – have consistently kind of avoided using HR generalists because they didn't want to do staffing, they didn't like doing staffing, and we sort of relegated that to the staffing profession which has become much more of a profession in its own over the last 10 or 15 years. And now I see that actually changing again, and HR generalists are having to become much more focused in being effective recruiting and staffing people.

So I am seeing more, for example, in our business, we're doing a lot more training and development now of HR generalists and teaching them how to be more effective recruiting and staffing professionals. So there will be more HR generalists, I think, in the future that will have to pick up the bag of recruiting and staffing, instead of just hiring up staffing and recruiting specialists because we won't have the need to have staffing specialists in this whole sort of up and down cycle. So that is also part of the scalable model.

Peter: So there is a lot of new skills that HR professionals really need to learn and looking at what's happening in journalism, for instance, and I was speaking to somebody at the New York Times recently; if you want a job at the New York Times you have to understand Ruby on Rails, you have to understand podcasting, you have to carry a tape recorder with you all the time, you have to carry a camera with you all the time, you have to carry a little video camera with you all the time – because all of these roles are now getting collapsed into one as that whole industry is redefining itself. And I think the same thing is going to happen in HR.

Jeremy: Yeah, I totally agree and I think that at one point in time, there was the idea that as an HR professional back when I started in HR, back in the early 80s, you kind of had to do a little bit of everything, you had to be an expert at recruiting in HR, generalists had to be an expert in employee relations and learn a little bit about comp and a little bit about training and development, etc. And then we sort of moved away from that as recruiting was so specific in those boom years in the late 90s and then in sort of the mid 2000s, we've went up again. Honestly, I think that HR generalists moved away from being focused on staffing because they could lean on their specialists in their organizations.

Now I think that HR generalists will now need to focus more on this whole idea of being much more of a consultant across all of the disciplines inside of HR, but specifically in staffing and recruiting, the whole key skill here is not the finding of candidates, not the courting of candidates, but the whole contracting idea – contracting with hiring managers, setting expectations, who is going to do what, I'm going to do this, you're going to do that, and we, together, are going to facilitate the process of hiring somebody.

The finding candidates is no secret anymore. I mean everybody knows that that is almost a commodity now. So the trick is to create more of a relationship management skill and that's where HR generalists, or all HR people, can really improve their skill set is to learn that recruiting and staffing is all about relationship management; it's not some kind of magic. It's something that certain people have and certain people don't.

If you don't like talking to people, if you don't like talking to people who you don't already know, then it's probably not a good idea to be in HR at all. But that's really what it is. It is not a magic skill.

The contracting idea, though, of getting something done by making sure that the other person has responsibilities, I have responsibilities and we, together, facilitate the process, is a real core skill that I think that HR generalists and recruiters need to focus on.

Peter: Jeremy, if you walk down into the exposition hall here at SHRM, which is vast, I would guess three-quarters of the people down there are technology vendors. How has technology changed the HR profession and what technology has come along in the last few months that you are looking at that you are saying this is really going to be a big shift for what we need to do in HR?

Jeremy: Yeah, I would tell you that technology for the last 10, 15 years has really been a boon to our profession because it's allowed us to really maximize sort of the administrative tasks that we have to deal with in recruiting and staffing specifically. However, it's also been a credibility problem for us because what has happened is that a lot of HR people, a lot of HR recruiting and staffing people have allowed technology to be a crutch for them. Again, as I said before, this is all about relationship management and the only way that you can hire somebody and the only way you can recruit people is if you have the ability to call somebody up on the phone and touch them in person via the telephone line.

I love Twitter, I love Facebook, I love LinkedIn as ways to connect with people. But at some point, at some time, somewhere, somebody has to actually pick up a phone and talk to somebody on the phone live. Face to face is going to be an interviewing process that we're not going to get away from. And in fact, nowadays, I see more and more companies adding more layers of interviewing and assessments.

So I can tell you that that's actually not going to go away. People are getting more and more and more selective about who they hire when they have a few open requisitions. The face to face, telephone process is still going to be at the end of the day, important.

But the whole technology thing has been a boon and a bust for us because it's helped us improve vastly our process, our management of the processes that we have to deal with, which are many, but it's also allowed us to have a feeling that we have a crutch. Well, this technology is going to solve that problem, this technology is going to solve that problem, and every year I come to one of these conferences, there is always some buzzword. This year it's Twitter.

I love Twitter but you know what; Twitter is not going to help us find and recruit somebody that is in a job right now sitting in an office somewhere that's a financial analyst. Maybe it might find some young 20-something person who is in the online space right now who might be unhappy at their job. But I do believe Twitter is yet, one of many tools, and all of these technologies are tools that recruiters need to focus on learning more about, so they can have them in their toolkit.

At the end of the day, technology is important to us but it should never be used as a crutch.

To answer your question about what I see as sort of the next kind of big thing. Honestly, the next big thing is optimizing your applicant tracking system to what you already have, improving what we already have, looking at some connectivity between systems so that we don't have all of these back and forth between systems and things like that. So I think that there is an opportunity to improve technology, instead of buying something new that's going to be the panacea to fix everything.

You know, ATS systems are a boon to us, as I said before, and if used properly, they can be a huge opportunity for us. One of the questions somebody asked me in my session yesterday was "do I actually have to call every candidate who we interview for a job and tell them they didn't get the job? Could I just send an email to them telling that they didn't get the job?" And I said "absolutely my philosophy is absolutely no. You should always call a candidate and tell them they didn't get the job live on the phone if, in fact, they took off time out of their day to come for an interview in person." However, if you get resumes on a daily basis and you have to reject 500 resumes, if they haven't come in for an interview, I highly recommend customizing your ATS system and using that to make it feel at least more personal.

So for example, just changing the way you change the emails that are automatically generated from your ATS system will help your candidate experience. A good example of this is that some ATS systems actually have the ability to have a delay from the time that you submit that resume to the time you get that automatic response. I mean it's just kind of human nature to think that oh, I submit that resume and somebody is going to look at it. In reality, as we all know, somebody doesn't look at it right away; I might not even look at it at all if you don't come up in the right search string.

So the good way to do it is just to put a delay, maybe a day or two days. When someone pushes ‘send' on their resume, they don't automatically get an automatic response that says ‘thanks so much for your resume, we'll get back to you in X-Y-Z time…' but it feels like maybe somebody is actually looking at that resume.

Another thing that I would recommend is perhaps even on the response, you can attach an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) about what happens next.

For example, you could say – I have a question that says what happens next? Well, a recruiter will review this and if you don't hear back from us, that probably means you didn't come up in the search string or you didn't come up in our searching, but we'll keep your resume on file.

Can I call you? If you want to put a stop to people calling you, tell them how to contact you if, in fact, they can't call you. So if you have to have an email address that has questions and somebody responds to those on a weekly basis, do that; but don't just be a black hole and you can use ATS systems to help manage the process.

Peter: Jeremy, what are the biggest challenges your clients are facing today?

Jeremy: The biggest challenges are, again, focusing on making sure that they have a scalable recruiting and staffing function. Obviously, most of my clients now are in a difficult time; they're laying off people but at the same time, they're trying to hire people. Those people that they're trying to hire are critical to the organization.

When a requisition is open now, it's even more critical to find the right person. That typically means that we have to have a lot more time and energy focused on specialized recruiting when, in fact, we may have laid off a large number of recruiters. So recruiters may have a larger number of requisitions and harder to fill positions.

In addition to that, they are also having difficulty identifying candidates who are willing to make a move. This is a big challenge in this marketplace because of the fact that the economy is so difficult, people are not willing to make a change. If they're in a job right now where they're at least secure and they've been there for a couple of years why, if anything, would they want to quit that job and move to your company where they are the low person on the totem pole.

The same thing goes with relocation. In this country, in the US, it's very difficult to get someone to relocate across the country, across the county, across the city; people can't sell their houses, companies are having difficult times getting people to make relocation moves. So they're generally having to do a lot more work in recruiting with less resources. So they're very, very challenged right now on resources and when organizations look at recruiting as yeah, well we might need it or maybe not, but still want to hire people, it's very difficult for recruiting leaders to show their value during this timeframe.

I'm seeing a lot of challenging opportunities for people in having to deal with scalability right now.

Peter: I've heard what you just said from numerous people, especially that they cannot get someone who is currently employed to leave their current job. Are your clients using outside recruiting executive search firms?

Jeremy: Yes, my clients are using outside agencies and other resources. As I said before, I really believe in this whole idea of kind of a partial RPO, if you want to call it that, and using outside resources to have a more scalable model because we've had to reduce the number of staff and recruiting and staffing and HR generalists and what recruiters we still have aren't able to handle everything all the time, all levels, all functions, all geographies.

You have to have a strategy in place to be able to pull upon resources if they're not in house. That means don't start looking for those resources when you need them; start looking before you need them and start building up kind of a cadre of resources so that you can call upon them when you need them. And that means they're using research firms, they're using outside resume mining services, they're using outside executive search firms – lots and lots of "unbundled," if you will, services are being used right now. So I may not need to use a 30% executive search firm for a particular position; I may just hire an outside recruitment research firm and pay somebody $10,000 to generate a list of names and qualified candidates of which I then will own all of that data and then I will call those candidates and then I will turn them into final hires.

So I do see a lot of this, and I do see a lot of opportunity for executive search firms too, especially for those very difficult to find, very difficult to get to relocate, hard to fill jobs in this tough market. And the best executive search firms out there are still working and doing well.

Peter: Do you think LinkedIn and the other social networks are going to disintermediate the job boards?

Jeremy: Partially yes. I definitely think that with LinkedIn, especially, LinkedIn has the ability to tap into various networks which were unattainable before.

Nowadays – and I get this all the time on my LinkedIn – I have access to 7 million people on my own LinkedIn and honestly, everybody who is on my LinkedIn in my own network I know personally, I've met them personally. And so if somebody sends me a note, I look at it. If they send me a note that says hey look, I'm looking for this position; generally speaking, I can refer them 10 people in 5 minutes, or they can find out who I know in 5 minutes and ask if they can contact those people and vice versa.

So I definitely think that it's a huge change in the way we do business, and I definitely think it's taking away business from job boards and resume databases, absolutely, especially if you look at the cost value. In some cases, if you're good at it, you don't have to pay LinkedIn right at this moment anything now.

I think that we all are waiting for the day when the shoe is going to drop and LinkedIn is going to start charging people more and more and more to access it. But right now, it's huge and it's taking away huge, huge pieces of the job board business and the resume mining.

Peter: I keep hearing at these conferences "we have a perfect storm coming because you look at all of the baby boomers out there and they're all retiring." Jeremy, I'm a baby boomer, I'm not going anywhere, and the other baby boomers I know aren't going anywhere either.

Jeremy: Well, I think that message is used by a lot of professional speakers to generate a lot of controversy. I can tell you personally that I think the perfect storm is coming, but it depends on what industry. I'll give you a good example.

Certain industries that are perhaps seen as less than sexy – a good example of this might be public utilities – we don't really understand all of the people that are involved in making sure that the electric is running and the pipes are filled with water and things like that, but there are millions of people in this country that are working for public and private utility companies that are out there. I can tell you now that they have people that are retiring at a rapid pace and nobody is interested in going into those jobs. That concerns me as not only a recruiting and staffing person, but as an American, because there is a certain amount of infrastructure that goes on that we just sort of assume is happening, it's just automatically happening in the background.

Millions and millions and millions of utility workers, railroad employees, government agency employees and things like that, are incentivized to retire early because of their very specific union and pension issues. Frankly, if I was a utility worker and I was nearing age 50 and there was a really good pie at the end of the rainbow, I would take it. And they are taking it.

Now does that mean that they're not working after that? No, that may mean that they may take some time off and then go do something else. But what happens to those workers when they leave is challenge for these people. I can tell you it's millions and millions and millions of people that are leaving those jobs with no pipeline coming into the future. You don't hear kids in high school saying yeah, you know what, I want to be a line worker working for the Edison company. I want to be a pipeline employee working for one of the pipeline companies – you don't hear these things. You don't hear somebody saying yeah, you know what, gee, I really want to work in government service, I want to run a DMV. You don't hear people saying that. But literally, there are millions and millions of those jobs which are not being filled and that does have something to do with the demographics.

It's true in some ways, but maybe in some of the more sexy jobs – like when you hear about technology jobs and jobs in the entertainment and content industry, even in the legal industry and professionals – those are not being affected as much as what I just shared. There are so many jobs that are in these sort of background of our minds that we don't think about that are very challenging right now.

Peter: There are no NCIS TV shows for utility workers.

Jeremy: No, but maybe that might be a good idea for some of the utilities out there that might be listening. So maybe that might be a good idea, maybe do a reality show on line workers or something like that. I know it's helped the fishermen industry with some of these reality shows.

Peter: One last question for you Jeremy, and this is from my good friend, Stan Smith at Deloitte. A key question is how does HR effectively deal with leaders who really only want HR to take orders and will not accept HR professionals as expert in recruiting and/or do not want HR pros to act as consultants?

Jeremy: I have to responses to that question. The first obviously is that I hate HR people who ask "when do I get my seat at the table," "I'm not being seen as a consultant…" and things like that. What normally I see happening is that HR people start talking about the fact that they're not valued or they whisper about it in the halls of their organization, or they talk more about what they're going to do, rather than what they show that they do.

My idea has been in the past when I have been in this very similar situation as this question, I worked in the entertainment industry for 11 years of my profession, and I'll be very honest – and no offense to the entertainment industry people who might be listening – but entertainment HR is not as valued as in other industries. I mean it's just seen as sort of an order taking kind of – you know, keep me out of court kind of environment. I can tell you that I felt that I was successful in that environment because I didn't tell them what I was going to do, I showed them what I was going to do.

So even though they thought that they needed me just to take orders, I was able to push back on them by bringing up some suggestions and ideas of my own that had some valid business cases around that. I didn't just say okay, I'll jump when you tell me how high; I said okay, I'll be happy to look at that, but what about these other options?

I look at everything as a consultant. As a consultant, our job is to provide a menu of options and jump up, down and sideways about the reasons why and why not to go with those options. If they choose at the end not to pick any of my options, I have to be okay with that.

Most HR people aren't that way; they get very emotionally involved and again, I'm not trying to generalize here, but we have to see our role as a consultant. My job is to provide a menu of options to you and I'm going to tell you all the reasons why you should or should not go with those options and use my own experience, my skills and my research to provide you some ideas on why or why not you should do that. If you decide not to do anything that I say, that's okay; I have to be okay with it and move on.

After awhile when people start to see that you're passionate about certain things, that you're bringing to the tables facts and data and that you're providing non-emotional responses to their requests, people start to listen to you more than these order taking kinds of things would happen. So I definitely see that as a way to sort of kind of crawl out of that hole.

The other thing is, is to really make sure that everything that you're doing is a contract. This is what I'm going to do, this is what you're going to do, and this is how we are going to get it done together. There are ways to do that and not tell them that you're doing that. You don't have to call it a service level agreement; you can just simply send emails back to confirm what you say and what you don't do and what you do.

These kind of things – setting expectations – are always the key to success in this kind of environment.

The last thing I'll say though is that if you find yourself in a role that you are seen as being just an order taker and just an administrator and that's not what you want to be, maybe that's not the right organization for you to be in the first place. I will say that it sounds like a cop out to this but there are, in fact, organizations that do value HR as a consultant and that do value HR at the table and if, in fact, you work for an organization that doesn't and you want to, and if you've tried everything that I've just shared with you, maybe it's not the right fit; maybe that's what they need – they need an administrator, they need a junior level HR person and it's not the right fit. Just because it's not the right fit for you, doesn't mean it's not the right fit for someone else.

So that's my response.

Peter: Jeremy, thank you very much for taking time to speak with us today on Total Picture Radio. It's really been great and I've really been wanting to do this interview for a long time and happy that we've finally been able to hook up.

Jeremy: Thank you very much, Peter. I appreciate it.