The Future Structure of Recruitment Teams

Welcome to the employer. Content show part of the talent insights series brought to you by hire well, and before you apply, I’m your host.

James Hornick joining me is my co-host from before you apply my mentor in dry January Nate Guggia ,

I’m happy to do it. How many days then 20 days, that’s fine. I guess if I was going to summarize, I mean, the first, you know, the first two or three days, it didn’t really phase me because like new year’s Eve was, it was rough. So I was fine to take a few days off. But yeah, after, you know, I’m just kind of in the zone now, whatever, it’s fine.

Yeah. Well, Glad to be here, sleep, you know, sleeping. Great. Yeah. All right. Say segment for everyone. the future structure of recruitment teams. So I think what we wanted to talk about was, you know, things are changing, times are changing. , I should say, and , recruiting always seems to be a little bit behind the curve.

You know, we can make comparisons to sales and other and marketing other competency areas. But there’s a lot of things that seem to be working really well for companies that are having an easier time hiring and others. And it’s just kind of interesting to see like what the adoption looks like and whatnot.

And I guess before we start this off, because this is the employer content. So I think everyone’s expecting us to just say. Well, content content content. That’s how you hire and we’ll get to that, but that’s literally your job, Nate, but, there’s a lot more to it. We’re not going to skew a completely along those lines.

this is focused mostly on. Internal talent teams is what we’re talking about. Not like third party recruiting firms, but things are kind of applied to both. And I guess I do want to kind of highlight something. So I was talking to,  Ryan Perez. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him probably four months ago or so.

Cause he’s building out his firm and he was like asking me. So like, if you’re making your first. Three or four hires, you know, what would that look like? You know, and I think he was expecting me to say all these different things, you know, different types of I’m like, you just need to hire.

If you’re just getting started, it’s just fulfillment. You need three recruiters, you know, like who know what they’re doing. So keep it simple. But I, it things all the different internally though, I think that the structure is different because there’s a lot of brand building and there’s also a lot of things around kind of your internal systems and working with departments and whatnot.

So I’ll also let you in to kind of kick this off. there’s an inside joke. We have a higher, well, okay. That I, every time I can fit this into a conversation, if it’s a client call or if it’s a company call, I’ll always get a few people snicker. But anytime I can work the phrase data-driven storytelling into a conversation.

Crowd goes wild. Yeah. it’s an agreeable term. The reason for this is we. so my background in marketing recruiting, we realized one day that literally every role we work on. Looks for people who have a background in data and people who have a background in content and storytelling, like any function that’s worked its way in every single job description.

Yeah. So, and then I just, you know, when we’re talking to a client, like, so you’re looking for a data-driven storyteller, that’s exactly where a little confronting, it just became kind of an ongoing thing. but here’s the thing that literally is every job nowadays. Not everybody wants the ideal person for virtually every skillset, not just marketing brother.

He’s two is someone that has that background in tech slash data slash process was really kind of how I phrase it for this, as well as creativity, content creation, how to phrase things for their client. And I think those are ultimately the two aspects on top of being a solid recruiter that you want in your recruiting department of the future.

Okay. So that’s kind of where we’re going with it. and I think it’s, I want to start with kind of the data side, and , these are all different things, but I think it’s the same side. These are really, you know, you’ve got your left side, left brain, right. Brain. I can never remember which one’s, which for the life of me, but you know, it’s the same side of the brain.

When you’re talking about people who were like process systems, data, those types of things cut me off anytime here in case I know I’m talking too fast, whatever. No, you’re fine. I’ll just get going. what’s always driven me crazy about many time I’m on social media or anywhere else. When I hear someone complain about how they were poorly treated about from recruiters or by a company and not, not.

Complaining about them complaining, but it’s always this idea of these people are jerks. Why they treat people like this, but it’s like a repetitive thing. Like everyone has the same story that they got ghosted on or that the interview kind of sucked or they applied, it was a black hole and everything back and it’s it’s process like, okay.

These companies have fundamentally broken processes. That’s why they don’t know. They don’t have a mechanism in place to follow up with you.  , they don’t have a mechanism in place to kind of sort things out with the resume black hole or how were you applied? and so that’s definitely a need that, that places have, whether they’ve realized it or not.

And that’s why it candidate experience is so bad. It’s not cause like, The people working there are jerks it’s because processes in the technology to back them up, enable them to start there. At the same time. I’m always hearing, every few months someone will ask me about some new technology that came out.

and if you think this is going to disrupt recruiting, and I’ve been hearing this for literally 15 years, there’s always some new thing. Like people, when job boards first came out, when monster came out, people thought like this is going to kill the recruiting industry. And ultimately like all of these pieces of technology.

They’re mostly sourcing based. Yep. Not all the way, but they’re mostly sourcing based and sourcing is actually pretty good. Like all the technology exists. Like it’s really easy to find people with skill sets if you’re a recruiter. Right. but the, the bigger thing is that like most of these tech pieces of technology ended up not displacing recruitment.

They just become tools that recruiters use. And the bigger challenge is, is like none of them talk to each other. So like there is, you’ve probably seen like the MarTech 5,000 list or whatever it is, slide that keeps like growing every year. Like it’s the same thing, recruiting. There’s like more and more and more recruiting tech that comes out.

And it’s just a ton of like one-off solutions that address like one part of the recruitment process. And now it’s like AI gets thrown around machine learning it’s thrown around, which I don’t know. We know if half these things use AI or machine learning, they dislike. Throwing that key phrase in there because like, it gets them a lot of eyeballs and attention and whatnot.

but  I think the one thing is like all of these things are created by usually by non recruiters. So it’s like someone from the outside who thinks they can reinvent the wheel and they know better, which they probably have great ideas, but  they don’t understand the UX. They don’t understand the use cases.

Like they’re creating things that don’t necessarily address pain points and don’t address the bigger environment that recruiters are working in. Yeah, if that makes sense. Yep. And the other part of it is, and this is where I guess getting closer to the point of kind of what I wanted to mention, none of this stuff integrates easily.

So you’ve got lots and lots and lots of tools being created that weren’t created to work in the same ecosystem or environment that really just don’t integrate well. and it’s not like you can just hire. A tech person to do it for you because they don’t know exactly how you need to use it. You know what I mean?

it really falls on the teams to sort this out themselves. If you want to get like. PR, you know, product to integrate with product B to kind of make your life easier. So it’s, it’s the thing that, if I were going to make an example though, and it’s one of the, why this is kind of a more specific challenge to recruiting, like say the sales world has Salesforce.

Yeah. So every tool integrates like every tool that wants to be relevant in the sales world. They have like. First thing you have to do is integrate with Salesforce because that’s what everyone uses, but like the recruiting world. And I haven’t looked at this in a couple of years, but like recruiters typically don’t use Salesforce because as of two years ago, last time I checked, they haven’t created a module that actually works for recruiting in any kind of seamless way.

So recruiters will have things like they have different ATS systems. So there’s like, third-party ones like I use, which is one we use a called Bullhorn was like the biggest one. still a train wreck, a nightmare to work with. Internal teams might use stuff like JobBite greenhouse, but it’s not like all these other tools that recruiters use automatically seamlessly integrate with any of this stuff.

And probably the prime example, the number one tool that any recruiter uses LinkedIn. Yeah. LinkedIn has an express policy. They don’t want to integrate with anything. Right. Like they do not want their stuff working with anyone else’s stuff. So, I guess kind of getting to the point is that if you,  I’ve been spending a lot of time on this myself personally, lately, and It’s something that you require some dedicated effort to one, think through how like I’m currently integrating, we have a website, we have a sales enablement platform. We have an ATS and then we have a whole like leads engine. That’s actually based in Google sheets and I’m using Zapier and some other things to integrate these things together.

So the data gets replicated across all four of these. Yep. Now I have the time to do this because I’m a partner here, but I can guarantee you like. And most organizations like, you know what I mean? There’s not someone who’s just like, has the time to kind of sort this stuff out. And if you’re talking late organizations too, like, I don’t think this is, this is a competency, like someone who can do this internally at affirm someone who can actually like understand systems and workflow and try to start integrating these types of different things, because it saves you hundreds of hours per year.

Yeah. Not only that it makes you enabled, it makes you better able to follow up with people. Better able to follow up with candidates, remember candidates, get back to them in a way that like the technology is working for you. You know? So,  I strongly believe that,  One half of this equation for internal talent teams is finding people who is recruiters becoming tech savvy, not like technical experts.

You’re not becoming the developer, but becoming like the quasi business analyst or the person who has some light technology background, just in terms of figuring out how to actually use the stuff at like a deeper level. As like a power user integrated with things like Xavier or being able to tell the developer what you need them to do to kind of integrate stuff better.

That way all these tools you’re buying are actually maximized, to make your process flow, to cut out ghosting, to provide better candidate experience, to, let you reuse the data you have in a way that works for you. So, Okay, wait before I get to my, well, I have a couple of questions. One, if you were going to go foundational tech stack for an in-house recruiting team, can you rattle off what you think that’d be?

I think that like, you start with your ATS. Right. So I think that your greenhouse, from what I understand, I haven’t worked internally, but greenhouse is probably the best one that’s out there, but it’s like, it’s one of the most expensive, that’s like your ATS one, if not that you’ve using job biter or some other thing, kind of similar to that.

Okay. second things in your tech stack. I mean, LinkedIn, you know, is, was one that is probably the thing that like you need every recruiter internally to have, beyond that, it kind of comes down to where I’m, I’m a little weaker, cause I haven’t worked on this side is like your HR systems. So you want this stuff to actually tie into your HR systems that operate with your company.

Ideally, you want to see like your employee, whether it’s your payroll and stuff like that. So whatever kind of solution you kind of figure out there, you should have all this stuff kind of working together. but if we’re talking recruitment technology, there’s, there’s tons of things in terms of just, we use a couple of different tools that are for outreach that can, you know, if you have a recruiter who’s working on.

A tech recruiter might be working on five different jobs and they’re going through LinkedIn sourcing and they’re finding, you know, even if they’re looking at the same kind of profile, you might find different things that are more applicable to each candidate. You know what I mean? Being able to kind of figure out how to sort them manually by list.

but there, I mean, there’s a lot out there. Okay.  This is making me think of, I was looking at. What a demand gen leader at a company looks like, because we’re looking for that on our side. Right? like what that role entails. and I’m seeing how this is really applicable to the recruiting side now.

I mean, this is very much like sales and marketing and recruiting and employer branding. And so on. I mean, that’s exactly like the, the relationship, you know, like recruitment and sales, employer branding. And I think we talked about how like, salespeople are becoming marketers, recruiters are becoming, you know, and so this, demand gen hire this leader oversees the entire process from.

Interest or like top of the funnel all the way till deal closed. So in this case it would be new hire and how like that’s their job and their job is to figure out how that can be the smoothest process, where they’re sticking points, where people are falling out of that process. Why they’re falling out, how to fix all that stuff.

What technology should be used, what are the channels, all that kind of thing.  That would be an extremely valuable role on the recruiting side, just because like, we’re talking about time and for example, I talked to an in-house recruiter at a late stage startup yesterday, who they’re at 300, let’s just, I think like 350 current employees right now.

And they want to grow to like almost 700 in the next. 12 months. They have five recruiters globally. Five, yeah. To hire 300 plus people there. There’s no time for that team to do anything else besides Source and talk to candidates and try to get people hired. Which makes me think that like there has to be somebody to step outside of those roles and like oversee everything because, I mean, another example I remember like sitting down with with the recruiter during the workshop we were doing during the break and he was like catching up on work.

So I was just like looking over his shoulder and asking him like, what was going on, you know? And we were looking at like his pipeline. Which is huge, you know, and of all these candidates. And he’s like, Oh wow. Like that person opened my email 20 times that person opened it 17 times or whatever. And he’s like, I should probably be following up with those people, but they don’t have the time to even like, think about that stuff because it’s always like, yeah.

New activity. So, yeah, you lose when you’re working at that high volume, when you that under resourced, things are gonna slip between the cracks, unless you’ve got the system side kind of sorted out. I think that like on the demand gen side, and this is kind of a realization, like I I’ve kind of come to, I think there’s, it’s the same challenge that like sales and marketing teams have.

Right. Except it’s employee brand teams. But I think that the reason why it’s so far behind is because I think a lot of companies have like top-down management. If you go back to like legacy company culture, there’s an inherent level of arrogance that everyone thinks everyone wants to work for their company.

Like, what do you mean? We have to market ourselves? Like anybody who taught were we’re just better. Everyone should realize that. Right? I mean, there’s, that’s what a lot of companies think. And. It’s always struck me as odd because, those same companies, like there’s an understanding of how hard the sales process is.

even your most knuckle dragging old school cultures realize that sales is hard and it’s a hard fought process and you have to go out and dig and fight for it and blah, blah, blah. Right.  But those are also the kinds of companies that there’s not that same understanding for hiring. No one thinks like hiring’s hard, you have to fight for, to get every hire in the door.

Like th th like they have the opposite kind of mentality because they apply kind of a different mental filter when it’s literally the exact same thing. Yeah, it totally is. This is like, now making me think of how, like, you know, like the topic of the show is like the, basically like the future structure or the future state of, of an in-house recruiting team and how, you know, I think we have like the recruiting.

Traditionalist very much like the sales traditionalist who like sales is going to be, or recruiting is going to be done with like brute force. Right. It’s like, we’re just going to like pound the phones, emails, whatever. We’re just going to, like, it’s a numbers game. And then there’s like the recruiting futurists.

Who would like to see this entire function go in like the branding and marketing direction, where it’s just like, it’s all content and it’s like an inbound game, but I think there’s this, like, there’s the realists who, in my opinion, are the smartest ones who see that this industry is changing and it’s shifting and it’s all driven by.

Candidate behavior. That’s all it is. It’s not about like right or wrong approach. It’s just like things have changed and candidates want things done a different way. So it’s about adapting, but, I think the realists see and are starting to put things in place to move more in that direction. So you see them start paying more attention and dedicating more resources to recruitment, marketing, and content while they’re still doing.

The try to ensure recruiting practices. It’s not like an all or nothing because I don’t think anybody’s in a position right now where they can do all or nothing. unless you’re one of those companies which we’ve talked about, and there’s very few of them who everybody knows and the best people just naturally want to work for them.

then you can do things like really different. But I think like in the meantime, this is like a transition and, Yeah, I don’t, I don’t know. I just like, I don’t like the conversation which I’ve seen in probably I’ve been a part of leading in some ways of like this all or nothing approach, you know, I don’t, I don’t think that’s, that’s where we’re at.

I think that, there’s a reason why, companies that have an easier time hiring, it’s always the companies that are more employee focused to begin with. You know, because they, the thing I was saying about the struggle for, places that think sales is sales is hard, but hiring should be easy.

But, the places that are a little more progressive in their thinking are the ones that realized they need to have a more, put more emphasis on creating a positive culture. Which makes helps them better understand it. It’s just communicating that culture to the outside. That’s what people to about.

Right. So you have to have a story kind of build into tell.  I was thinking like if I’m to put some kind of some specific structure around what you need your recruiting staff to be good at. And I think I also want to temper expectations too. there’s three parts. This is the way I think that solid recruiting skills.

data slash tech competency and then content slash you know, writing branding skills, whatever. So your team needs all three of those things in the future. How you break those down? I don’t think it’s realistic that you’re going to have one person who’s great at all. Three. I just think that’s a unicorn, right?

Yeah, but you need to kind of structure a team, what you have, kind of all those bases covered. And I think two out of three is kind of what you should look for, you know? I think the realistically for most organizations, cause like, if you’re a huge organization,  you can have dedicated employer brand people, but for most companies that aren’t there yet, you know, you might only have a team of four or five.

Like you probably need everyone to have a recruiting hat on still. Right. Yep. And then ideally some people who can like, okay, you’re your kind of side gig is, is figuring out kind of the systems that are better process than your side gig is figuring out like how we can do these content things. Now, when I think about content, like what’s realistic for a company to kind of do without having a dedicated employer brand area, I think that part of it is.

one, the ability to have solid writing skills is like fundamental. And I think this is something people need to work on because they need to be able to write, , part of it is, I mean, social media is something you need to be good at. Yeah. In order to get your brand out there, you know, you need stuff on your website.

You know, you need to have a lot of other things you needed to do, but like, it’s really hard to really get the word out without being good at LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever else you’re using. And you have to have writing skills and just a savviness about that type of stuff. , I think creating, engaging content, it doesn’t need to be.

And, and here’s the thing I I’m actually against, like suggesting here’s what you should do content wise. Like I forgot what’s worked for us, but I think the best content is stuff where people’s need to be just be creative and figure out what’s going to work for them, whether it’s videos or podcasts or some cool stuff on social, we haven’t thought about before, but a general creative level of creativity and a willingness to jump in.

Yeah. And then the third thing is ability to work with hiring managers and get them to put themselves out there. Because I think that’s the most critical thing for all of this to pull off because no matter what, if you’re an internal recruiter, sure. People want to hear from you. But what people really want to hear from is who they’re going to be working for.

Yep. And if you can find creative ways to put your head of development, had a marketing, your whoever. To make them vocal, get them on video, get them to post on social. We’ll get them to whatever platform they work in. , and so that inherently requires like building good relationships. I also think this kind of circles back to another conversation we had before about like recruiters should not be sitting in the HR area.

They should be sitting in the business units. They support, like you have to be tight with these individuals to have the credibility. And the trust to get them to buy into what you’re selling in terms of okay. If we want to hire great people, you need to become like a vocal leader and thought leader. So, yeah.

okay. So, there’s, I don’t know how to solve this problem without giving people more time or that’s the thing I keep running up against right now is like, I have some, like, Creative ideas. And then I get blocked by like, well, nobody has the time to do it. Right? Like, I can imagine the recruiting team going to the head of engineering and saying like, Hey, we have this idea.

, we know you have a lot of smart things to say, we think it would be cool to run You know, a small, private invite thing with a bunch of other engineers where you and somebody else are just talking about like things in the industry you’re talking about, like whatever product development or like whatever is like really applicable.

And you’re just like, you’re just like knowledge sharing. It’d be like eavesdropping on like a cool podcast interview. Right. And you have like other engineers hearing, like they want to hear from other smart people and stuff. And like, you’re not, it’s not about saying like, Hey, we want to hire you. It’s just like, get into like our ecosystem and hear how our leaders think.

That takes time. It would, I think it would really work. It would definitely. It’s a, really solid long-term play too. Especially if you can create  an audience and consistency with something like that. And this is like, making me think that, 

, if we were to fast  forward to like the future state of like a recruiting team, It’s like, we talk about sales and marketing and it’s like interesting. When it comes to like the talent side of stuff, it’s just expected that everybody’s going to do all, all of it.

It’s like we’re going to put sales and marketing and whatever, like customer experience and everything, and just like cram it all together and like make it one role. But, , , if it were broken up into like, Sales and marketing or sales and demand gen. However you want to think about it. And you had recruiters who were really good at relationships and closing, and then you had another set who were really good at creating content and generating awareness and focus on that.

The two could work like side-by-side, you don’t have to be extremely large teams, but you would start be, you would start doing things in tandem. Instead of like trying to have acid with like one person trying to do it all. yeah, I think that the other thing that we probably didn’t really touch on yet, and this isn’t even a conversation I was realizing we needed to have, but this is why a lot of this stuff probably doesn’t happen is that you also need to structurally change the way people are, how they’re comped or how they’re, what metrics they’re actually being asked to kind of track.

And I think that’s a big, like you and I have talked about, we have some different thoughts on. Next generation of comp structures and that’s clearly kind of from conversation with different day. Yeah. But a lot of this stuff like, the traditional. Internal TA, they’re just the metrics that they follow are gonna come down to, like, it’s like individual sales metrics.

The reason why every sales person doesn’t become like a great marketer on the side. We know that to help them out is because they’re trying to hit their monthly quota. You know what I mean? Yeah. in this, whereas marketing and branding is more like a long-term thing. I think that’s also the issue with recruiting.

It’s like, it’s easy to talk about this kind of stuff. Like you should be doing more content stuff, right. Because it’s can help you out. But meanwhile, you have to get these 10 hires done this month. So when the hell do you actually have time to do that? You know what I mean? So that’s the challenge you run into is that you have to kind of change the expectations of that.

It has to be like a top-down thing versus a, at what I have a hard time convincing someone who’s just a recruiter, Hey, this will help you out in your job because. You know what I mean? but it’s, addressing that always hair on fire thinking is part of it. Cause if you don’t do that, then none of this is possible.

Yeah. And I know that there’s there’s recruiters, or even like marketers who want to work more on the people side of the business, who, if you were to present different roles to them, they would like just mentally like fall into one or the other and just be like, Oh, I, all I want to do is just Talk to really great candidates and like get people hired.

That’s all I want to do. I don’t want to have to worry about any of the other stuff. And then you have some people who are like, ah, all I want to do is like market our culture and figure out the best ways to get in front of candidates. All I want to do, I don’t even want to talk to anybody. And when you can start figuring that out and putting people in those roles, that’s where like, I mean, one fulfillment goes up, taught me to be certain.

Yeah, maybe a certain size is the thing, though, right? For small companies, if you, if you have a team of three, like you don’t have the ability to like, have people who are just strictly like making content or doing like very specialized things like that, but in large organizations, that’s where that kind of kicks in.

So, but I think of this, I try to think of this in terms of. You know, what’s achievable. What can be 10% of like someone’s time? What school can be 20% of someone’s time. So the idea that I think you gave me this, I think you’re actually saying it, but maybe you’re, but I want to kind of, here’s a takeaway that I, that you led me to, and you can do right now.

if you’re an internal recruiter, do a monthly webinars series, featuring someone in your organization at a high level. So someone who’s a hiring manager at different parts of the organization, market it on LinkedIn, send it to whatever email list you have. And have a driven by, you’re going to ask five questions.

How do you run your, like, what are things about like what the person’s thought process make it focused on their thought process, their management style and what initiatives they have going on right now. And then take questions from anyone else who might from the crowd, invite anyone to it, record it.

Yeah. Put it on social media and in small clips shares after the fact, put it on your career site, after the fact do it on a regular basis. and then you have something to actually point people towards and drive towards on social, just to kind of create your profile. And all it really does is take one event a month and cutting a bunch of videos flips.

Yeah. And it starts developing that relationship you were talking about earlier. Yeah and whatnot. And if you’re doing webinars where people are kind of get involved in their one-to-one, they’re able to ask questions, give answers, you’re getting a better idea of, okay, what questions to candidates who want to work here actually have.

Yeah. that way you have a better idea of kind of the things that you need to be better at articulating in your real process. When I say real process, I mean the interview process, you know, so like all those questions that come out during these kinds of events, those are things that you should make sure you’re kind of hammering.

In interview one, interview two, even people who didn’t ask those questions because as you and I know everyone wants to have the same. Yeah. I hope someone heard that and uses it because, Oh, don’t worry. I think it will be a resurfaced as a   clip don’t worry. You know. Okay. Like, I think we’re about done, but I mean, the thing that I want to leave with is I realize, you know, I, I mean, we’re hiring now too, and I’ve developed a ton of empathy for recruiters because we’re a small team and we got a lot of applications and it’s hard.

It’s really hard.  and I know it’s like easy to. Sometimes, like sit on the outside and say, you should be doing X, Y, and Z. If you want to be, the future recruiter and stuff like that. And   I don’t believe that. I don’t think that’s realistic for anybody. and so I think that this is, a progression, that teams need to make and like, It doesn’t mean like you can just keep doing things the way you’ve always done them.

It means you need to start doing some things differently, but it’s not an overnight thing. And I don’t want anybody who’s sitting there going, we need to be doing more employer brand need to be like beating themselves up because it’s fricking hard. . And it takes real commitment. And, I want people to go easy on themselves and just like, see that like just make progress, make progress, and move more in the right direction.

You just, you do one thing at a time you start roll there’s, there’s a million things you could do. If you’ve got five people on the team, ask every person to try one new thing out and stick with it for a couple of months and start to see what kind of work and don’t compare yourselves. Like some of the few companies who do it really well because they have massive staffs and big budgets.

And they’re just, yeah, you can get there. It’s just, gonna take time, but you have to start now. It’s an excellent mug by the way. That’s wonderful. I’ve been trying to like casually advertise it. All right. You got anything else? No, I’m good. All right. everyone out there, that’s a wrap for the employer content show.

If you want to hear more about what Nate and I have to say, you can subscribe to the Hirewell channel on YouTube, where we have a playlist of all of our episodes and the talent insights podcast, which is available on Apple podcast, Google podcast, Amazon and Spotify. Nate. Thanks for joining as always.

All right, buddy. Everyone out there. We’ll see you soon. Bye.