All right. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series where we breakdown things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space. Maybe even pitch a solution or two. Before we dig in, all of our content can be found on talentinsights.hirewell.com. This week’s topic, Jeff, welcome back to episode 102. This seems so strange, we kept going after the 100 mark. Going to slide right into this holiday. Yeah. Finding candidates is the easy part. Yeah. Our year end show. This is the last one of 2024. We’re not doing any dumbass predictions for 2025.
I absolutely despise any content around predictions because no one knows what the hell’s going to happen next. But how are you feeling? How are you? What’s your feeling about 2025, Jeff, as we head into the new year? Yes, this will tie into today’s topic. We already, we did the recap of all of our dumb predictions, for episode 100 anyway.
So lots of momentum. I feel like there’s tons of positive signs in the funding markets. I think companies are tired of running lean. It’s been that way for quite some time, but it’s just now being verbalized. Feels like 2025 is going to be a good year for us. Yeah, the only prediction I can make is both venture capital and private equity backed firms are going to start hiring more. And that’s because people I know in the venture capital, private equity space are telling me they’re going to start hiring more.
So it’s not exactly going on a limb when you have insider knowledge. Not much of a prediction, but, yeah. So that’s why, you know, I think things are looking good for next year. Yeah. Quick summary of where we’re at. I mean, we’ve kind of had the best 4 months of the year. From August to November, which is like, very rare that it- actually like October, November, we’re actually even having a pretty decent December.
It’s not like blowing it out of the water, but this is a month where we usually hedge our bets, so to speak. And it’s been kind of the best stretch overall for two years. We’ve signed 21 of our, you know, solutions, volume type engagement, since May 1st. And as we’ve stated in some of the other episodes, we had five in all of 2023.
So again, another harbinger of the market to come.
So it’s not just the off the shelf stuff. We’ve been getting super creative. And you and I were talking about this, it’s been really fun. The job got fun for the first time in a while. Companies have all of these unique instances and opportunities that we haven’t seen, and they’re coupled now with realistic compensation packages for the first time since the middle of the pandemic. Companies have figured out what to pay people in this, like, remote versus hybrid versus onsite setting.
And the long and short of it is it just, it feels normal again. So going back to like the original talk track, we’re talking optimistically about this talent market. The question is, will that make recruiting easy? Right. And if so, what does easy mean? Yeah. Titling the show, finding candidates is the easy part of hiring.
And like you’re either dumbfounded by us making that statement or just nodding your head saying, “yeah, thanks, Kevin obvious”, or you think we’re just being arrogant. Maybe we are. I don’t know. But the biggest challenge- the biggest challenge to maintain this forever for companies with not yet fully baked processes is the idea that you can just find a boatload of candidates and everything’s going to fall into place.
But the thing is like those companies find out that “falling into place” is the hardest part of hiring. All the things have to line up for all those candidates you just have to find actually wanting to join your firm. Sourcing candidates, I hate to say it, really like finding the people out there somewhere really is as simple as keyword searching, keyword matching, especially in the AI era.
And side note when I say that, don’t confuse easy with simple. That’s a completely different rant for a different day. And we’ll get into that sometime. Sometimes the companies don’t find out that everything falling into place is the hard part, and that makes it even exponentially harder.
Marker
So the flip side of it is-
okay so you’re looking at the sourcing side of things, right? Hiring and retaining, retaining being the really, really key word that talent, is, it that’s the beast. That’s the hard part. It’s by far also the most important part of the hiring life cycle. So, you, me, anyone else could be the best recruiter in the world, we can go out find this top talent but if the company isn’t good or equipped to 1.) sell the candidate on what’s in it for them, what do you get by providing this work? 2.) offering a competitive compensation package and 3.) setting up an ecosystem and a support system to retain the talent. You’re shit out of luck. So finding all of these candidates, all of that sourcing work that you did becomes pretty much an all for nothing sort of equation. Now pretty much every conversation I’ve had with like a real client, someone who’s asked me- like
I always get the question like what makes Hirewell different? It’s like 101, client every company out there gets that question no matter what they’re selling. Truth be told, there’s more than one thing. But I think for the purposes of what we’re doing here kind of today in this rant, I want to focus on one of the things we offer, which is definitely above and beyond what normal recruiting does, the way we can help companies get to those fully baked hiring processes.
We do what we call talent advisory, which really kind of bakes in a lot of kind of like internal process creation. So breaking, there’s really kind of six parts of this. So breaking these down, we can talk about each one individually. And I want to do this in the most plain language as possible, but we can hit all six.
So Jeff, lead us off with them. Yeah. Number one is the idea of candidate experience and any customer who’s watching us, I would be hard pressed if we don’t mention this in a lot of our calls. Your hiring process has to excite candidates. It has to make them want to join and it has to make them feel valuable.
It has to make them feel like a human first. Secondly, the value. And you have to have like a cohesive process. The steps have to make sense and follow up has to actually happen. All of this feels and seems so rudimentary, it’s astonishing how many companies miss this stuff. Yeah, and it’s entirely, it’s not on a whim.
It’s not just, oh, this went great this time. It’s a process structure and regimented. Now, when you talk about that’s ultimately you’re making a plan. Number two, the second part of this is a trained hiring team. People actually know how to execute on that plan. You can create a plan, but like if you’re hiring manager on one team versus another team, versus people involved, they don’t actually know what the plan is,
they aren’t actually trained in how to both like, conduct effective interviews while keeping people excited while reporting back to whoever’s kind of the quarterbacking the entire process with each other in time, like, it’s all for nothing. You can do all the planning in the world if the people and mind you, these are people whose primary job isn’t interviewing people. But for the purpose of this, like, they have to be just as good at this as they are at their primary job.
I’ve been seeing lots of interview debriefs where the quarterback that you mentioned gets in there and you have, like, kind of this idea of what the feedback is. The quarterback comes in and says something really positive or really negative, and then the whole wave goes following that person. It’s kind of like, why did we do this?
The point being, give everyone a lane, give everyone a something to dig into and come in collectively and make a decision collectively on somebody and don’t let 1 or 2 people sway those sorts of processes. Number three, messaging and branding. So content’s everything. Don’t do the show. Your messaging has to be intriguing.
People should want to learn more. When they do their research, they should find answers, preferably good, to their questions. You want to cultivate what your buzz is, is the bottom line. Yeah. I heard someone give us a compliment. We had someone join us recently. I forgot we actually did this, but like two or three years ago,
we took every single question that every single job seeker had asked us over the course of a year, put them into a Frequently Asked Questions, posted on our website. And he’s like, yeah, it was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I didn’t have a lot of questions because you already answered them all. And like the fact that any company would do it, it’s small things like that, but just making sure that when people like- it’s just like when you’re buying anything, people just want to know what the details are.
They don’t want to have to dig for it. They don’t want to guard it behind something, but making sure your branding message is on point is obviously great. Number four, I realize we’re already following, but we thought this would be a quick one today. Number four, work design. Making sure you’re actually hiring for the right seats, like intentionally. Not on a whim.
The amount of times that people think, just have a thought in their mind that, hey, maybe I need a marketing coordinator or maybe I need another recruiter for this area or maybe I need a sales person. Like the amount of non intentional hiring I see is like mind boggling when you can actually take the time to kind of not just look at hiring as a onesie twosie thing, but actually holistically and what the organization needs.
Makes complete night and day difference when people are slotted into roles where they actually have a full role to do and they’re set up for success versus set up for failure. Because maybe it wasn’t even a full time job. I hear this- my senior product manager resigned. So I want to backfill it. And the first question is, okay, why?
And it’s like, well, because that person is leaving. Okay well, is there a job there still? Are you just backfilling it to backfill it? Or is it like- that’s where it manifests itself most often. Maybe that’s for a whole other rant. Number five, comp structure. Just make sure your pay doesn’t suck. I don’t even think we have to go into anything else.
Like do your research. Ask people in the industry. Just make sure your comp is on market, please. Number six, succession planning. When people leave, you actually know what the hell you’re going to do next. It’s kind of a thing and people outgrow their role. Do you have a plan for what they can grow into or when it’s time for the organization to grow?
Are you always going for outside resources to fill the gaps or do you have people internally who can fill those roles? Do you actually have a process to figure that stuff out? Or once again, are you just kind of doing it on a whim last minute? And maybe you pass someone up for a promotion because you didn’t realize like, oh, I should have thought of that.
Anyways, it happens a lot. Yeah, and it doesn’t have to be in that silo in the organization. Go look elsewhere in the organization to find the hidden gems. Anyway. Point being, it’s a heck of a lot more than finding candidates. And these are the most critical parts of that retention component. Not every recruiting firm does any of this or looks at it through the lens of what we just talked about.
This is what makes us who we are. And if a prospective customer or an existing customer isn’t interested in talking about a lot of these things prior to kicking off one or many searches, we know we’ve got a hill to climb. And frankly, we’re in for it, right? We’re going to try and change that behavior. So, a couple of takeaways.
Number one, if this is news to you, you either need to hire a strategist, you know, internally, who understands kind of all of these concepts or give us a call. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the call to action. Call me. Call Jeff. Put us in. Other takeaway, log off for the holidays. We’re ramping up a short week here. By the time this thing goes live and by the time you probably see it, just like, take some time off. Reset, recharge.
No one’s going to watch it. Yeah. We are short on clock. That’s a wrap for this week. Thanks for tuning into the 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insights series, which is always available for replay on talentinsights.hirewell.com, as well as YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon. Jeff, thanks again as always.
Everyone out there, have a great holiday and see you soon.
