Brainfood Live On Air - Ep403 - From Talent Acquisition to Organisational Performance

0:06nd so this is this is actually a recruiting question is exactly a problem um like when you you you know we recruit people as if they're like fungible like this guy is going to give you this amount of capability a good capacity doesn't matter when and where he joins your team it's going to be exactly that no the context is much more important than just this person's contribution it's all about how team gets reformulated and if you have massive turnover in team like you guys have newcastle have also had the same i'm fully anticipating a very very tough start to the year because of the turnover of key players.

0:41I mean, that's as simple as that. It's actually, I mean, that alone is one challenge, but I think an even bigger one is that there's a new leader as well. And the new leader's got a different way of doing things. So again, same in any type of group environment, I think, especially a board, but like a band, sports teams. There's very few companies that actually deal with this. And I'd love to hear more from everybody here, by the way. Our assessments, our recruitment sort of approach generally is the unit of analysis is the individual. We test for the individual. And over the last 10, 15 years or so, we've kind of gone away from the concept of fitting in with team, I think, because of a version of bias.

1:27And, you know, we don't want to be in a position where we're excluding people based on bias sort of reasons. Yet at the same time, if the job role is highly collaborative and you are going to be working collectively to produce outcome and value, we can't neglect that. So I'd be interested to know whether anybody has gone scientifically produce some sort of way to assess for team fit. Okay, let me know in the comments, folks, whether that is something you should be talking about. All right. Welcome, everybody, to Brave Food Live on Air, episode 403. And we've got a very exciting conversation with you today.

2:06We're going to be talking about the expansion of scope of talent acquisition. We've been banging on about this for a lot of years, really. Time is finally happening. We're starting to see people step beyond TA and into things like organizational performance. And today we're going to bring in a bunch of recruiters who are in various levels on that step, kind of growing beyond TA and into a much wider, much more valuable, I think, function, much more future-proof function, which is taking an examination of the organizational health and thinking about how to make that perform. And that's much wider and deeper than just TA.

2:50Okay. We have Adam Gordon here in the ranch. Adam, great to see you. I mean, I guess everyone knows who you are already, don't they? I mean, you're a famous man in recruitment these days, aren't you? No, I don't think so, but I'm not going to do an intro. No intros needed. He's Adam Gordon. He's Scottish, and that's all you need to know. Brilliant. So Adam, did you read the newsletter yesterday or earlier this week, should I say? And if so, what was interesting to me? I did. So let's start with the guy from andreas and horowitz who is head of insights there used to be a professional cyclist um anyway he um put out um a really interesting post about the way that you can predict if somebody is going to be moving jobs um and it's based on them updating their linkedin profile i say interesting slightly sarcastically because i think it was probably interesting in about 2016.

3:47um we've covered this topic for a long time. Intello literally built a business in predictive analytics, which was effectively that, telling you when the average length of time that somebody stays in a... I'm not slagging you, by the way. Let's say it was interesting in 2016. I'm slagging the post. It was... It's not great. It's not great. Like, it doesn't help you with recruiting that somebody updated their LinkedIn post three years into a particular role. Now, what helps you with recruiting is if you've got a better job tool for them, or you're really great with the words that you use to get them on the phone, and then get them to agree they're interested.

4:29But I have never seen anybody engineer a scalable system which is based on approaching people because they are three years and one month into a specific role, and they updated their LinkedIn profile two weeks ago, including some previous job history. It's not a scalable thing. You can do that with AI now, mate. You can understand it. I just don't believe it's a great predictor if they're going to take your call. There's other things that are much better predictors of whether they're going to take your call or not. All right. I reckon you're on dodgy ground here, Adam. You've just said something which I think is without evidence.

5:13and I reckon that we're going to prove you wrong all the time because I do think that there is a point where you kind of run out of steam in any job and your kind of interest in our inbound sort of opportunities will increase. And it's about three to five years. I think that period of time probably makes sense. I do think percentage-wise, if you hit the same call to the same person in different parts of their career tenure, your chances of getting a reception, positive reception increase if you hit it within that window. I've got no evidence either, but... Well, let's just put a couple of additional nuances into that.

5:53So first of all, the average tenure in Royals is coming down and that is going to increase very substantially now because completing tasks is now more of a one-off job than it ever was. There's much less jobs where you start the job and three years later you're doing the same things because it's going to be based on organizational tasks rather than there's always somebody needed on a call center or filling up the petrol pump or whatever it might be. So it's going to be less of those types of jobs. Then who knows what that length of time is going to be because the past doesn't predict the future.

6:27And also you could look at it and go, well, the dangers, like from a retention perspective, the dangers of them is going to be within that first three months. So I see that is a perfect time to approach somebody. is that first three months because one in four probably realized they made a mistake and shouldn't have taken that job but then again just one last quick thing i i can't believe that this even should register as a predictor of getting somebody to move job in comparison to i am brilliant at talent sourcing i am influential and i and i've got jobs that people are going to want and i can pay more than they're currently earning those those old things are like 99.9 better

7:13much better things. I can see you've got more faith in sales than I do, mate. I do think it is about circumstance more than anything else. And I don't think sales is that powerful way to pursue it. It's not charisma that persuades people. It's circumstance. But anyway, we're going to have to beg to differ on that. It's a very good sort of topic of conversation, though. And it's an answer we all knew about. Like changing your LinkedIn for a normal human being, meaning you're a non-recruiter, if you're logging into LinkedIn and updating your profile in some way, chances are you're looking for an opportunity.

7:46And this post is saying, look, there is a spike in activity in around about three years tenure of the same job. Anyway, take a look at it. Let me know what you think. Give us a couple more, Adam, before we bring on Colleen. All right, your poll. How does this current AI moment make you feel about your profession? 36 % said energized 23 % in fact 36 % said energized 30 % said either disoriented or resentful we've got a very 26 % conflicted so a third of people energized the rest uncertain at best so I would say although the biggest number was energized I would say that if you combine the others which are all kind of they're not even neutral, they're kind of negative or they've got some elements of negative I would say we've got a bit of stress in our industry right now as a result of AI Yeah, I would say that I was actually surprised at the 36 % because I thought it would be lower but I took this as good news 36 % of the respondees which are recruiters basically felt energized by AI, which is very positive but as you say, a larger percentage just felt a bit discombobulated.

9:08By the way, this is true for everybody. I had a few drinks with my old sort of developer mates. I recruited a developer team about 15 years ago for a startup and got together for a few drinks. They're all devs still and their vibe was vaguely similar, conflicted. They could see their job change. They could see themselves getting more productive but even so, they felt that their job was changing in a way that perhaps they didn't anticipate and may not even enjoy. And it was like, yeah, I'm not sure what to think about it. And these are the people building software, building technology. So I think everyone more or less feels in that same bucket.

9:45But we do a poll every week on brain food. So if you want to participate in that, just simply sign up for the newsletter and you'll be able to contribute your thoughts. Okay, one more, Adam. Well, I remember the last time that you and I had a meal in a restaurant together. And I remember that you were pretty rude when you arrived to the person who welcomed us at the door. You were then snappy about something. You also didn't really have any conviction around what you wanted to order. And you waited for me to choose and then said that you'd have the same as me. And instantly I felt like you're not the right person for that executive job that I want to hire for.

10:27that is part of bupa's ceo's executive resourcing tactics his view is that one hour interview is not nearly sufficient to understand if that person is a good executive team member which i think that bit's kind of obvious but he thinks he wants to spend like six hours with that person including a variety of different circumstances including do they have the conviction of being able to make decisive choices around what they're going to eat how do they interact with restaurant staff are they courteous and charming you know those types of things 100 % this is a great like you know put celebrities in the jungle and see what happens type of test around what's this person going to really be like to work with?

11:27Are they actually a leader, et cetera? All good. I also think it's all good, even though I believe you and I are probably outliers in that view because this type of CEO hiring rules, the rules of thumb that CEOs have in hiring people, they very typically trigger the brain food audience who are mainly recruiters and HR people. And they just think, what an absolute bellend this guy is. Because all the bias comes in, all the lack of inclusion comes in, all of the gut feel stuff comes in. And the most interesting thing for me is how much we are against what CEOs typically are for. And that kind of leads me to think why that is.

12:15Why is it that we seem to clash fundamentally with how a CEO wants to hire for particularly his or her executive team? So the context on this, CEO at Bupa, obviously massive organization, dissatisfied with having a one-to-one interview over a course of an hour for one of the C-level team. All of us agree that's not enough, no matter how much interviewing or assessment that person has gone through at the time, and wants to see this person basically in different contexts. Again, it feels right. But then we very quickly segue into stuff that TA and HR are very uncomfortable with, which is how are those decisions being made?

12:54It's impressionistic. It's how you feel. It goes back into these instincts, these intuitions. We don't like it. And yeah, that post is uniformly condemned by the TA industry. but I personally think, you know what? CEOs make decisions like that. They vibe their decisions. That's what a CEO is there to do, to make decisions where the data is insufficient to provide the answer. Because if the data was sufficient, there wouldn't be any need for a CEO. The CEO's job is to sit there with a 50-50 call. You literally have no further guidance as the which is better. They've got to intuit their way into a decision and get it more right than wrong.

13:34That's the executive part of the CEO's job. So it's what this person is there to do. So I don't see why we have such a negative issue with this. And executive resourcing is the type of circumstance where there is a lot of subjectivity and nuance, and the data will not be sufficient to choose between Sarah and John for that particular role. So, you know, there has to be an element of what feels right, which I am generally against in recruiting. But the interesting thing about this is it's normally, when we disagree with CEOs in recruiting, it's normally some absolute batshit crazy startup CEO who's done something mental.

14:22In this circumstance, you know, WIPA is a pretty conservative type of organization. organization and um so you know it's unusual to have an industry disagreeing but i think the guy's ready yeah i think i'm proud of the ceo here even though i want to hear from colleen um because colleen gallagher here i'm going to bring her on now she of course um works for uh textio great to see you colleen back on the show in fact why don't you quickly introduce yourself let me not do that Who are you? What do you do? Hi, everyone. I'm Colleen Gallagher. I'm the CEO at Texteo. Great stuff, Colleen. And you, of course, you know, you're a CEO yourself.

15:06So you've got to look at this from multiple lenses, right? You're in the CEO seat. You've got to have to make these 50 decisions. And yet here we are. We have sort of a situation where everyone is like up in arms in the TA and HR space on this particular example. by this kind of almost demand for intuition that the CEO at Bupa made. I wonder what your take is on this. And then we'll hear a little bit about sort of what Textio and LaValle is all about. Yeah, yeah. It's funny because as you started talking about this, one of the things that made me laugh is I've talked to so many folks where with our new product, LaValleer, they've seen it and said, I wish I could get my executive team to use it.

15:51but I don't think my CEO would ever use this to hire, but they think they're, they think they're great at hiring, but they aren't. Um, we've seen, we've seen the effects of it. We have to deal with it. So, um, I, I've seen the, the rift that you're mentioning between, um, you know, between people in TA and HR and the executive team. So, um, yeah, I mean, you know, when you're hiring for an executive role, you certainly, I think need to spend more time with people. I think it's important that you have the culture fit.

16:25But, you know, I don't know. I would assess any human, I guess, if they were rude to a waiter or a wait person. So I think that's just, you know, it's an interesting point that they made, but they're just being honest. I think, and I think it is legit in a way. So there's these little signals of character, I think, are not to be dismissed. We're talking about how you address people at different levels of hierarchy. I think that's relevant. I mean, maybe you don't have a problem with someone who's very much top-down and a directorial type. I mean, fair enough. But it does signal something, I think.

17:11Your speed in terms of making a decision. Are you overly quick in ordering a bavette steak or something? I don't know. Maybe that's a problem. Like, should you really explore the menu? I think there's really small signals that might say a lot about your character. But so I'm very sympathetic with the CEO of Bupa and CEOs generally, because I know it's very difficult here. But there we go. yeah i mean okay you know they should have studied the menu ahead of time and you know ordered for already known yeah exactly close the deal imagine imagine if you were hiring for a c-level person your team clean the person comes in and orders for you and are you not going to have an opinion on that yeah yeah they're not getting the job yeah um immediately no right so it's like okay lacks etiquette or lacks sort of basic eq right i mean come on these are important things for the role um so so yeah i totally get it okay colleen you're sponsoring brain food live of course so this is the segment where we get to say and learn a little bit more about this new product that text you'll produce everyone i think in the industry knows text you're wonderful to see new innovation coming out of a well-respected and well-loved tool so wonder whether you give us a little bit about text you and what uh lavalier is um in uh in the market yeah yeah um lavalier There's, you know, I guess in short, an interview intelligence tool, but I think what's different about it versus, you know, other products in the market or other ways folks are solving this is we're giving you more than just a transcription of an interview and a summary afterwards.

18:48I was talking with somebody recently who is an early adopter of, you know, using that in their interview process. And what she told me was we've made three really bad, like senior hires last year, because what we found when people were just using a summary was that the AI summary just happened. They put that in the notes. It didn't really change anything about how they were actually hiring. It just helped with the efficiency part and the thing that often has been such a difficult part of a hiring process, particularly from a recruiter's perspective where you can't get anyone to give feedback or notes.

19:25And she said, what's happening now is people are using this to give notes, not reading them, and it's not really changing the way that they're hiring. So one of the things we've been really thoughtful and meaning and intentional about with Lavalier is we're giving you coaching in the moment. We're making sure that if somebody gives you a surface level answer to something, we're going to prompt you during the interview to dig more into the question, make sure you're getting some evidence around it, and just really giving you better signal about who the person is you're hiring. I mean, when you think about the folks that are doing interviewing, a lot of folks are interviewing once or twice a year, right?

20:07And you can do all the training you want around what makes a good interviewer, what makes a good interview, but that doesn't really stick unless you're giving it to people in the moment. So that's one of the biggest things that Lavalier does. No, that's really useful. Go ahead, Adam. Yeah, I've got a question actually, Colleen. One of the other recruiting brain food articles that I had shortlisted to talk about at the start of the show was, the headline was, I've had to Botox my CV because of AI assessments. And it was an article about middle-aged women who were like, this is not working for us the way that companies are doing using AI for assessing and things like that anymore.

20:50And it immediately made me think of Textio's sort of history in inclusive language and that type of thing. And I wonder whether some of that kind of DNA has come into your AI assessment, because if so, that sounds really great. Yeah, yeah. No, that's a good question. Absolutely. Um, you know, we've been doing AI and HR before it was called, you know, before people were talking about AI machine learning. Um, and we certainly see a lot of value between, um, what you might get from a general LLM or something like that versus what you're getting out of text you, because we've had that sort of deep history and it starts, you know, at the, you know, we believe we've believed this for a decade.

21:39It starts all the way at the top with your job descriptions, but you really have to have that carry through everywhere. And I think some of the things we're seeing now, particularly with AI, and because companies are seeing so much fraud, is people are reintroducing bias in ways back into their process because they're trying to combat fraud as well. And so you really need to have something to help make sure that you're not reintroducing bias once you bring in AI. And that's not just in the top of the funnel, which is why we created Lavalier, but it also allows you to really make sure that when you're assessing a candidate, you aren't bringing in the bias.

22:27You're actually, in some ways, you can use AI to actually be more neutral than a human because humans are biased. And so that's really a thing that we're being very conscientious about and staying true to our values on. I think that's a huge selling point for a lot of us compared to a lot of the incumbents that you're challenging. They don't have that DNA that you've got. Yeah. I love the concept of DNA, folks. we're back to intangibles, we're back to sort of the cultural values of businesses, which I have a huge commitment to. I think it is a reality, even though it's difficult to capture. Okay, let's move on to this conversation, because we are talking about from talent acquisition to organizational performance.

23:21And just to lay the land here for the folks who are listening in, And what I mean by this is that TA, original purpose is simply to hire external people into the organization. And there was a handover. Once we got the person in seat, we switch our attention to the next role. We continue to pipeline those people in. That's basically what the job was. Someone else would deal with what happens with the individual once they become an employee, their development, their approach, their longevity and their value to the company. Someone else does that. Now we're talking about expanding the role of TA to encompass a lot of this post-hire work, particularly taking the view of organizational performance.

24:07In other words, the reframing of the role from hiring great talent to building great performing organizations. I think it's a really important sort of idea because it expands our vision, expands our scope. And I think it future-proofs the world as well because it means that for a company that is not hiring at the same pace as it was before, the requirement for someone who's still caring about organizational performance is always going to be persistent. So I'm going to bring on a couple of guests here to help us with it, but I want to get Colleen's view on this as a general concept. What are your thoughts on it?

24:43Is this a pattern you've seen where TA folks are expanding scope? Do you endorse it or do you have a strong opinion one way or the other with regards to this trend? Yeah, I mean, I think it's absolutely warranted. I've seen people post, and this is probably a controversial statement, right, that talent acquisition doesn't own quality of hire. because once you get past, you know, 30, 60, 90 days, you're just transitioning and handing off the person to, you know, the HRBP team. I've seen people say that, you know, TA should be a separate function from HR. And I think that's absolutely incorrect.

25:28I think one of the things that, you know, in the early days of building out Lavalier, we had, I spoke with a customer of is a very large organization based out here on the West Coast. And they were saying that one of the biggest gaps for them is they don't fully, you know, they're hiring thousands of people every quarter. They don't fully know what skills the people they're hiring actually have. So they can't really understand when they look to try and assess what made somebody a good hire. They don't really know what people exhibited during an interview process and throughout that. And so when they try and do some analysis, these are big organizations, they have data rich, they want to look at the data.

26:13They try and do an analysis to say, what was it about the 60 % of our salespeople that succeeded and the 40 % that didn't? Was there any pattern that I can pick up on? And so there was a big partnership between the TA and the HR team, talent management team to try and figure that out. And it was really challenging. But I think you have to be really in lockstep with those folks. Yeah, really, really interesting. And it's going to be a very interesting journey for TA as a function. The way we're going to learn about that is to bring on some people that have made that journey. So I'm going to bring on Jacob Kimba, who, of course, his post and his promotion, actually, really sort of promoted this idea for us.

27:00um let's see where jake is i'm bringing christine as well christine you made that jump really early on christine's birthday by the way at least it's christine's birthday yesterday so make sure you say hello and happy birthday to her um let's move chris jacob here we've got michael here as well michael's got some great things to say about this um so i want to make sure we get his input also let's get christine on happy birthday christine thank you how are you I'm good. You're looking better than I thought, to be honest. Didn't you greet me to say, yeah, you're going to be disheveled today? That was yesterday.

27:34I've had a 10-hour sleep now, so I'm fine. Yeah, great stuff. Very nice to see you, Christine. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do? Sure. Hi, everyone. I'm Christine Ung. I'm the head of talent and people here at Quantum Motion. So I've been here five years. So encompassing everything from recruitment, talent management, and all the way, everything across the employee life cycle at the moment. So very exciting to be back. Great stuff. And Christine, you were one of the first to kind of, I remember having a conversation with you actually a couple of years ago when your job was expanding scope.

28:08And it was like, okay, brilliant to see this happen. So love to hear how that journey has worked for you personally. We have Jacob Kimber here as well. Jacob, great to see you. Can you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you, what it is you do? Yeah, sure. Well, first it was a bit of a surprise. Sorry, just see my face pop up. I didn't know how this worked. I'd never been on this platform. I've been waiting the whole time, like, could I be heard? So I've been like not even breathing for 20 minutes. So sorry about that. But yeah, I'm Jake. Really nice to meet you. So I'm currently a director of PNC Strategy and Business Performance at Aristocrat that was in TA for 15 years and have recently moved into this new role in PNC.

28:43No, hung for a while. I've been talking about lots of different things and they finally invited me onto the show. So I'm really happy to be here. Thank you. Yeah, brilliant. And whilst we get Michael wrestling with the audio and visual, let's start with you on this, Jake, because it was your promotion that really caught my eye. And it was like, OK, great to see this happen, but also wonderful to see you publicize it and just describe a little bit about how that works. So firstly, let's start with this. How did it happen in this context for you? Like you're a TA person. Great. Things are going great.

29:15Why now see a PSE person? Yeah, really, really good question. So I think there's a couple of factors. So firstly, it was a move that was in the works for a little bit for a while. And I've been thinking about it for a long time. And kind of eventually the right opportunity came up internally to make that move. I think it's very fortunate for that role to come internally because it can be a difficult move for us to make. I know there are some people in the space, you know, Gary Manning, Mel Hayes have done amazing moving from TA into P &C or HR. And I wanted to do the same thing. So that was the first thing.

29:45But I think there's kind of two factors. One is I suppose I was getting greedy. I wanted to know more. I wanted to be part of the process earlier and later and part of that transformation process. I felt very much I was, you know, loved doing what I was doing in TA, but it was a very deep specialism and I wanted to broaden my skill set. I think, secondly, I'm just going to be very, yeah, I'm going to be honest with it. I was getting really worried about my future in TA. I'll be honest. I'm nearly 40 and I see amazing people out there that are incredible and they're still struggling in the space.

30:15I don't see it getting a lot better and I'm not trying to be negative at all. But even when we found my replacement, I saw the people that we were screening and interviewing. And I thought if I had if I lost my job and I had to find a role, I'd be up against these people. And I don't fancy my chances. It's an amazing space out there at the moment with some really, really talented people that in any normal market would be absolutely fine. And I'm honest, I felt like there was a ticking time bomb. I thought if something goes wrong here, I'm not confident I can just walk into another job. and I need to learn new skills and I need to make sure I'm employable for the future because I might hit a point where I'm not and uh you know earlier in my career I had that relentless hunger and I needed to keep that and I think I remember one kind of last project in TI I did where it was another big growth we're going to hire certainly 100 people we need to do this and I was really struggling to get fired up for it I felt like here we go again here we go again I want to do something new so that's really what fired this up for me and uh yeah I've been loving I'm only three months in I don't know how long I can keep saying hey I'm new you know don't it's a new thing for me but uh yeah really really enjoying it so that's how it came about brilliant keep riding that honeymoon period as long as you can mate no worries about extending that as far as you can um but i really appreciate you being very frank and candid uh jake i think we're all i mean there's no lying about it i mean just look at the numbers of jobs being created in the uk specifically um i think we lost payroll didn't we uh last ons reports from like 16 000 less than the previous report there and pretty much zero growth rate for jobs, particularly in the white collar space.

31:45So that obviously has a downstream impact for anybody in the job of looking of building companies. And I think that is I think the UK has its own challenges, but it's pretty much the same case in most sectors globally, I would say, where we've kind of hit the peak recruiter moment a couple of years ago and companies are definitely now taking their time to hire. They're hiring far fewer and the bar is higher. So the job is changing. Smart thing to do is to change with it. Okay, we have Michael here as well. I'm going to bring him on too. You know what, Michael, I'm going to struggle to introduce you because you've got a really bizarre type of work, don't you?

32:26So you better just introduce yourself. Who are you, Michael? What it is you do? Thanks, Hang. Lovely to be here. So yeah, I'm Michael. I'm originally from the UK. I've been in Berlin for 25 years in that time, over a decade at eBay, going from customer support into marketing. And then in the startup world, the last 10 years from marketing into people, into people roles, a lot of recruiting, very heavy recruiting part of that. And now since April, I started my own consultancy business, doing some consultancy, but also building AI agents to help some of the AI use cases we have out there. So, Jacob, what you've been saying about TA really resonates with me as well, because I think, you know, the talent part is feeling the pinch first.

33:12But honestly, you know, it's a thing that's affecting so many parts of the company. And I think back to my old days in customer support, right? You had this wonderful dashboard showing also the customer support, entry level jobs, how that's flatlined in recent years. and that really resonates and also Colleen what you were saying about you know how important it is for you know the edges of our organization the parts of the organization that are talking to the real world right yes it's recruiters when you're out there interacting with the talent market but it's also customer support right those jobs that we're automating out at the moment battling on the sixth with the sixth AI agent last week for crazy experience, right?

34:02We're losing organizational market intelligence on the talent market, but also from our customers with the automation that's happening. So it's a super interesting moment where we see this all coming together. Yeah, I think right now, intellectually, it's difficult not to be interested in the moment whilst we balance how that impacts us personally. Christine, go to you because you've kind of been around. You probably had this thought process during the COVID period, didn't you? I remember we had a similar or at least an analogous episode there where the TA basically stopped for a period and then suddenly we had to busy ourselves with doing other things and expanding scope.

34:45Tell us a little bit about that experience there and how has that helped you as you expanded your position at Quantum Motion? Yeah, thanks. And Jacob, as you were mentioning that I was nodding away. For me, COVID seemed like ages ago. So that definitely brought back memories. But exactly that. I think you remember I was very much working at Financial Times at the time, leading product and tech hiring. So all the recruiting team was put on furlough. And we didn't know what was going to happen. I'll be back to work next week. You know, when's the hiring freeze going to be lifted? So I think I was on furlough for about two to three months, just kept myself busy, was doing all these online courses.

35:23And when I went back to work, there was still a hiring freeze within the product and tech department. So they seconded me to editorial. Never done any editorial hiring before. They had me do an audit on D &I stats at the time in editorial. So I think it was largely because of that. I was like, you know what? It was such a terrible place to be. I'm just going to say yes to everything that comes my way at that point. and when the opportunity at quantum motion came up so we were a small young team of 10 at the time I was very much you know head first into recruiting but after two years my CEO just said to me Christine you're effectively also wearing the people hat you just don't know it yet and I remember just going to him well I don't have a CIPD you know the whole imposter syndrome everything just kicked in and he goes Christine you're doing it so continue doing what you're doing you're just going to get a title change.

36:14I don't expect you to do anything differently. I'm like, okay. So fast forward two years later, I am still learning every single day. It's very, very challenging, but it's rewarding. And I think back to the point of having that TA hat, knowing how difficult it is to hire, in my space anyway, in quantum computing, quantum engineers, we have to nurture these leads from university level. 30 % of our team are on visas. They're extremely expensive. So I know how difficult it is at the attraction level. So I do my very best now to sit down with managers, make sure we identify who the flight risks are, who are the high performers.

36:51We need to be more strategic rather than reactive with hiring. So I think having that knowledge has actually helped me now as I'm building out the recruiting function. So I'm not just looking at recruiting as thumbs on seats. It's a whole end to end process for us. Can I just quickly add something to this? because I think that's all really interesting stuff to hear about. I believe that talent acquisition is one of the more commercial and business-focused HR disciplines. And as a result, I think it is a very, very good launchpad for a broader career profile. I agree. Is that actually true, though?

37:36I mean, I think we talk about ourselves in that way. We self-referentially think we're very commercial. But I think that stems a little bit from our agency route. Like a lot of us are recruitment agents. We think we're commercial. It basically means we're worried about our commission. But our business acumen is actually quite narrow. It doesn't equip you to learn about business ops, marketing, anything. I don't think it's for those reasons. I don't think so. So, yes, naturally you might think, oh, well, people that come from recruitment agencies, which is many of us, including me and you, they're used to selling.

38:11So, therefore, they've done a sales type job. That's not what I mean. We take briefs from the head of engineering and the head of sales and the head of finance and the head of IT and the head of this and that. We get right around the business having business conversations about what it is they need to be successful, whereas the people in comp and bends don't. And I know that's just a slightly rude comment to me there, but they don't. So that's why I think it is. We're having business conversations.

38:45I mean, I think commercial and business acumen are two different things as well. I do agree because I feel like if you look at the network of all the people in PNC, the TA folks are probably ones most connected across the business. That's one of the biggest changes I've found. Admittedly, I'm in a more operational role, but I'm spending more time with operational functions than the business now as with those of TA it was completely the other way around most of my time was with was with the business so I'd certainly say from a kind of exposure network point of view TA is very well well positioned for that business acumen is another thing um but certainly commercial yes what would you say sorry Colleen go ahead I was just gonna say you know one of the things I ask TA leaders a lot is like, what makes a good recruiter?

39:31And the thing that I constantly hear from people is that curiosity and sort of really understanding the business is going to make somebody the best recruiter. And I think, you know, not everyone is going to be overly curious or understanding of what and why they're hiring. But I think that the best TA folks, and then the people who can have some expansion into other parts of whether it's the people function or even across the business are going to be the people that take that opportunity. Like you said, you're sitting down with the head of engineering, you're sitting down with people leading these functions.

40:06And if you can really understand what motivates them, what are the, you know, a really corporate term of like, what are the KPIs? What are the things that they make their bonus off of, right? Like, what are these people going to help them get done? If you understand that, you have this visibility across the organization that almost no one else has that really can make you flexible and give you opportunities across the organization. And I say this with a little bit of learned experience. Like my background is through the finance function. And I used to have people tell me all the time, especially when I went into some earlier stage companies, you know, why is our head of finance sitting in a sales forecasting meeting?

40:52Or why are you sitting in on the CS team's QBRs? And it wasn't just because I cared about what the forecast was. I really just wanted to learn more about what the business is doing. And that's what has made me be as, you know, able to move into different functions. And so I really do think some of this is, you know, what people make of the role and the access that they have and what their goals are for themselves and how they want to grow their career.

41:22I think we're coming back to this concept of curiosity as being a universal trait that we value now. Probably we always did do, but maybe it wasn't a kind of a core requirement. But as organizations shift and as jobs kind of evolved beyond our ability to define them, we're increasingly looking for that sort of mindset that's just asking the questions why, like, you know, constantly being curious and interested in exploring other methods. So we're developing some sort of idea as to what kind of traits would be good for a person moving from TA to a wider scope. What other traits do you think should be there any thoughts on this Michael I mean I was definitely double down on the curiosity thing that's that's that's absolutely true and when you were talking about the why asking the why questions it's reckoned ring the bell around you know we were we had a follow-up a conversation a while ago about lean manufacturing right and one of the key questions in you know you're trying to analyze processes there is to ask those five why questions to really drill down on things and um definitely the best hr people that i've i've worked together with and maybe it's a behavior that i've also had it's been to it's been to persistent on those on on exactly that um so i would definitely yeah definitely advocate for the curiosity point what about you christine um if you could hire someone um doing your job um and you know to from a TA background, what things would you be looking for from that person, from a traits point of view?

43:07Yeah, I think, well, we already mentioned curiosity, but I think more specifically curiosity with data. And I mean that in a way, so we recently just hired another recruiter and a team. They're both ex-agency absolute machines, right? You give them the roles, they fill it within two weeks. And I realized, oh God, you know, I've actually been slowing down the process the last two years because I've just been running around trying to get the job descriptions. getting the benchmark information all the managers like what have you been doing so i realized i get so bogged down with um the internal politics of things so but what i also realized with um both of them is they they can fill the role so quickly but at times when i'll ask them like well what are the rates of well what's the hiring quality like what are the percentage coming from they just like oh i haven't really looked at it to be honest so we also need to coach them and guide them to understand like okay well where are we spending our most of our time and being productive on versus you know not right so really start thinking about strategic capability mapping for the team framing TA as more resource allocation and not just headcount filling right so at the moment because we're in R &D so setting down with finance to go how much does it cost for us to acquire x talent from x university in the US how does it accelerate our timeline and de-risk you know our tape out a project.

44:26So yeah, I think that's things I would have to say. It's not just curiosity, but actually have data just ready to go when we're asking them about the context of each hire. No, I love that, Christine, particularly with that, you know, exemplars of the ones that are machines. This is what we want from recruiters. You know, we want them to go deliver fast, have that urgency. The focus is a big part of what makes good recruiters, in my opinion. And one of the challenges we have is for the folks who want to expand scope, is it about defocusing? I don't know. It's about being able to expand your mind to take on just a wider frame.

45:06It's almost like you need your tunnel vision at times to do that thing and get that thing executed. But then there's a bigger role where you've got to step back and see a wider horizon. Jake, three months in, what are the biggest things you've had to change in your kind of rhythm, your method? It used to work for you as the head of TA. It doesn't work for you as the head of PNC. I think the first biggest change, the biggest shock, well, not shock, the biggest change was I'm now asking and requesting help without really having direct authority. So as part of my role, bringing together many different elements, many different aspects, many different departments, many different teams to pull them together in one direction.

45:52And in TA, you have a very direct brief that you're very responsible for, you know, to get to that end goal. And I think that's been an interesting change, but something I've really enjoyed. I think if I had to take a little bit more of a kind of listening, a bit more of a pragmatic approach a bit more of a solution orientated approach you can't just go in like a battering ram and try and get things done and I'm not saying that works in TA either but certainly with TA it's a very clearer objective sometimes, some of the challenges some of the things we're trying to solve here, we're actually not clear of the answer and the starting point of the meeting is how are we going to solve this I don't know, help me sort of thing which is different so I say definitely in this role and I kind of was looking at that kind of shift is definitely that's that kind of more of a thinking and trying to influence without direct authority so I know in TA a lot of our time you know we start out it's all about influencing but yeah it's really being able to listen a lot and then use something I don't know how you get better but sound judgment if you like but really trying to turn away things up so it's that kind of pragmatism I'd say is that's the first three maps have really kind of made me think about that listening and and just absorbing at the moment no i get it go ahead adam question um jacob sorry just i missed this study your new role was that was it was it effectively a sideways move or was it a promotion it's a sideways move yeah so um yeah so the question so this this the follow-up question therefore is do you do you think that it it would be easier for you if you had made that move into a different organization to come in and be able to go we're changing that we're changing that we're changing that we're changing that and you actually have to be more collegiate because you're inside the organization where you were previously leading to it i actually think it'd be the opposite it'd be difficult and i think my biggest regret and i've been really open with this in my company when i came to this place nearly eight years ago is i was like that i was like a consultant we're going to solve this We're going to solve that.

47:56We're going to do this. We're going to do that. And I wish I'd just shut up and listen for six weeks, for six months to really understand the business. Because I think some of the shots I took earlier were wrong. I actually should have listened a little bit more. And I feel like coming into a new org, I would try and do that a little bit more. So a little bit more of the listening and trying to understand. And I feel like what helped me here is the credibility I'd already built in the business, allowed me to make a move where, let's be honest, I'm not able to lean on my experience anymore because it's not there.

48:24I've got to build it and I can't just go well there was this one time at xyz we did this it's not there and it's really sometimes scary because I go oh no okay I haven't done that this is the first time um I suppose if I went to a new org there could be a little bit of like well hang on a minute you've not you've not done this but maybe that's about how you make the first impression um but I felt like it has really helped me because I've got the relationships there then when I say uh requesting support without the authority I'm getting the support because people know how i work and they're working really well with me um yeah that's an interesting take i don't know maybe maybe you know coming in externally like oh okay it's an external expert i've never never really thought of it that way that's another job on there jake that's like two jobs down the road that's one of these people i just comes in and blasts out change like dgf attitude um but yeah i think the kind of credibility you have within an organization that is transportable, isn't it?

49:21I mean, Colleen, Christine, you've had that experience where your job roles change within an organization. And, you know, people know you. The relationship is there. The relationship strength is there. There's an element of trust that's got you there. And it should help. Not in every case. I can imagine there'll be some people that have a problem with your movements internally. I mean, that's normal politics. But I can understand how that may be more useful than just dropping in from outside in. Okay, I want to talk about organizational performance because CEOs are probably looking at all this and this idea of, you know, we want our organization to be the best, the most capable we can be.

50:04We want optimal performance from everybody. Recruitment is a part of that, but it's not the only thing. In fact, human beings are part of that, but it may not be the only thing. So how do we look at organizational performance? Firstly, how do we measure it? Like, do we know we're doing okay? And how do we improve it? Any thoughts on that? Anybody can answer this. I'm happy to quickly start. Conscious, I've talked quite a lot. So I'll just quickly, I think the definition is really simple. And it's literally organisation's ability to perform its objectives. That's as simple in its simplest terms, what is it looking to achieve?

50:42And is it capable of achieving that? Because organisations look at different things. So for example, our company, we're all about growth. We want double digit growth every year. And if we don't get that, we're not where we want to be and we're not performing where we want to be. I've been in other organizations where it's survival and we just need to survive. And that's the end goal. I've been in other organizations where we want to be stable. Things are great. We want to keep going. We want to remain stable. And that's also great. So I think it's that kind of ability. And then that's what drives the metrics.

51:13I don't think there's kind of one PNC metric or sorry hr metric that would that would read that you know the organ like i said it could be that growth it could be like a capability do do we have as a business a capability to deliver on this do we have the leadership capability are we in an environment where people are happy you know the it's the feed the engagement goods are we hitting what we need so i think it's kind of driven both first by the business strategy and its direction and then that's that's how you can measure because that that's it at the bottom line like that's where you're trying to go yeah so how do we i think we all agree now it's brilliant way to put it and very important to to kind of make sure that every organization has a different objective i mean it's not necessarily we're all charging towards the same goal we have different points of view uh and absolutely you know survival business as usual they're totally legitimate sort of things to uh to want to to achieve depending on what it is what kind of business that you're involved in um okay so we understand what the objective is how do you know your organization is equipped to achieve that Christine yeah I think ours is a bit tricky though because we're pre-revenue and we're an R &D environment that said you know our business outcomes are still very much tied to technical milestones and technical goals so I think it's really important like as a talent team we're able to drive business outcomes by being more strategic rather than reactive so an example I can give you is, you know, we have a lot of people tapping our shoulders and say, hey, I need to hire X, the CEO sign it off.

52:44We're like, have they? So we just started adding in a new layer of approvals within the process. And I think that's very standard in a large organization, right? But actually, TA should feel empowered to be able to push back onto the manager or to the individual. And we do this to the exec team as well. They all want an EA. And we push back and said, do we even need one at this stage? Like, do we not hire one that can support all of you or the entire exec team? So we need to be able to improve performance by advising our stakeholders and leadership whether the capability gap actually requires an actual hire or is there a way you can look at it holistically.

53:19And I say that because I've worked in a startup before where we doubled our headcount in six months and we over projected. And it turns out we over hired and went to let go of 30 percent of the team within the end of year one. So that's just war scars from the past that I've now learned. Let's not bring the same mistakes for, you know, into the next role. So I think there's a capability element there where as a team, you should feel empowered to push back into the managers. Yeah, really good. Michael, capability these days involves artificial intelligence, doesn't it? So does the new PNC function have to now think beyond human?

53:56You know, we're there to get organization performance. I would say five years ago, that was obviously going to be the case. We need to accumulate and develop human capability. but in 2026 and beyond, there's a plus there, isn't there? That's not the full story. So how do we kind of grab hold of this problem? Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the things that I've been really obsessed by the last year or so is being understand or trying to figure out ways to make sure that the data that we have and the knowledge that you have within an organization can actually be used properly, right? So yes, it's a question before AI, right?

54:35Because AI is only going to produce good output or help you with automation or whatever else you want to do, including organizational performance, if you've got really high quality inputs, right? Crap in, crap out is always a problem. And I've seen that in startups, also in the bigger companies, messy SharePoints, Google Drives, Notions all over the place, out of date. so I actually think that there's a big role for people leaders to really push the organization to make sure that not just that the the hris system is clean but actually that the whole the whole of the company's knowledge base is also actually in a really good shape because it's going to be the foundation and the basis for driving so much of the performance that we're going to have in the coming years yeah very interesting Colleen I want to I want to get your view as a CEO of a business.

55:29So you're obviously thinking about along these terms as well, how do you run the most efficient organization you can? You want to have organizational performance. There's obviously humans that you want to cultivate and develop and hire. But increasingly, there's increasing sort of capability from artificial intelligence that can either supplement or even replace some of that stuff. So how does it look from a CEO point of view in terms of building organizational performance with the combination of human and artificial? I mean, certainly AI is helping create efficiencies and allowing us to work faster.

56:05You know, obviously, like from a product perspective, we're able to push out features much more quickly. But I think even in an environment like we're in where we're, you know, we're a small sort of startup type of environment, like I still go back to leaning on things that I've used effectively at large organizations, which is like, you know, to Jacob's point, like if you know what your goals are and you know what it, how, how do we do define success and how are you making sure that the things that you're doing ladder up to those? like we still use an OKR framework internally. And, you know, we just check in on them probably.

56:47It's not that we check in more frequently, but we are reevaluating what those are on a much more frequent basis because of the life cycle or the stage of life we are as a company versus where I've been at other organizations. And so we really look at our people delivering against what we expect them to deliver on and really focusing on leading, you know, anything that can be more leading indicator versus lagging. You know, the, when I think about the, the question we started with here, which is like, what are some of the metrics, you know, like the, the CEOs, you know, sort of CFO experience person in me is like, well, the, the thing that's consistent, no matter if you're fighting to survive or growing is some metric around like revenue per headcount.

57:37Or in today's day and age, I think you look at revenue net of AI costs per headcount as a way to understand like how you're operating as a business. Like certainly those things are lagging indicators, right? But I think that's where you have to marry things like that up with, are we hitting the metrics that we've set for ourselves that are going to, you know, ladder up to those things? And are we, how are we tracking against those? And, you know, for us, AI becomes a lot, helps us be a lot more efficient around that in terms of, you know, or just our leadership updates, how I run my leadership team meeting, making sure people are, you know, staying on track.

58:21So I still think that you have some of the same core approaches to this that have been successful in businesses for decades. It's just about how you adapt to it using AI and get the efficiencies out of it. Yeah, really interesting. Are we at the point where we want to get people using AI? Is that part of organizational performance that we as the people function take some responsibility for? Like, for instance, I've heard the story that actually this is great times for HR because all businesses are going through this AI enablement transformation. Nobody better than people in HR to lead this approach.

59:03I presume part of that leadership is to, I don't know, audit their AI enablement or audit AI literacy and then potentially, you know, move people forward in it. Is that sort of where we see the function? Any thoughts on that, anybody? I've got something to say about that. So I think there's a gap in most organizations now, and I've talked about this many times on here, but not quite this specific term. So HR has a responsibility for organizational capability and structural organization and individual people's capabilities, but it doesn't have a direct remit around organizational tasks and how do we complete those to get those done for the benefit of the organization's you know ultimate goals so somebody needs to take responsibility for that um because whether something should be done by a human or it should be done by technology or it should be done by a technology-enabled human slipping through the cracks, I think.

1:00:12And I think the HR function or the PNC, has got a lot of claim to be able to take responsibility for that. Yeah, it's a big opportunity. I absolutely agree. I just wonder whether we're doing it, or is it something that is kind of so new we're not sure what to do? Christine, again, I know Quantum Motion is kind of a very weird organisation and very difficult to use your experience there as a potential template anywhere else. But I wonder whether there is any kind of thing you could add to that idea that, you know, the people ops function should be in some part looking to increase AI enablement, AI literacy, because we presume that that is going to lead to greater performance, you know, maybe according to some of the measures that Colleen just mentioned, you know, more revenue per capita, et cetera.

1:01:06Yeah, for sure. And I think a lot of our engineers, you know, the reality they're using Copilot in their day to day. And the reason I suppose just for everyone's benefit, the reason why we're a bit slower to adopt technologies is because the nature of what we do here. Our IP is extremely critical. So our IT team just does not allow us to use any external third party tools, period, just because they're just worried about data leakage and export control. So, yeah, I think that we were able to use Gemini. We're able to kind of build random workarounds based on our current workflow. But the reality is, especially in HR ops or in people ops, there's a lot of very repetitive tasks.

1:01:43It's very cyclical, right, in our space. It's like payroll, performance review once a year, supporting our managers with probation review. Like what are parts in the process that we can automate? And these are things that we're doing on the side. Even the ticketing system I mentioned earlier for job requisitions. You know, these are things that we're tinkering and using Jira and then integrating to Slack. So there's just lots of little things I think we're doing as a team and we're hoping that it will stick. So we're seeing it really as a product, our end users, our internal users. And if the adoption rate is able to increase, then we're able to justify our time that we can spend actually sitting down with managers and doing more strategic work with them.

1:02:20So I think it's a step by step approach. That said, one of the EA roles that my CEO was looking to hire for earlier, he's hoping to have this person to be an AI, to be completely literate, literate in AI, or at least maybe native in AI. and be able to go into every single team that we have here at Quantum Motion and understand their workflows, what can be automated, and really just trying to get everyone engaged into the use of AI. So we're slowly on that journey, I think. Yeah, really interesting. Go ahead, Michael. May I just say one final thing? I think coming back to the start, we mentioned how HR and engineering, these are the two parts of a business that are being impacted hard and earliest by this transformation.

1:03:03I think we in HR and people role are uniquely positioned to be actually great examples of how to do this, because often my experience was the engineers have amazing AI tools, but it's very hard for non-engineers to relate to what they're doing in those environments and what they're producing. whereas we are modeling AI note takers and interviews. We are modeling how to leverage these tools to remove bias and create better performance reviews. These kind of use cases, we're modeling those in our interactions with the rest of the organization. I think that's actually a unique point for us in the people team to champion some best practices around AI because of our exposure.

1:03:51Yeah, really interesting. Folks, we can continue this conversation I want to explore it further in another chat. How exactly does HR and people function accelerate organizational performance? Because we have some sort of pathway or a framework to do that. I think it does solidify, again, selfishly solidifies a little bit of our value to the wider organization out there. All right, that's it. We are over time. We have to let everyone go. Just thank you, everyone, for joining. Thanks for watching, everybody. Hope you enjoyed it. Michael Jones, Jake Kimber, Christine Ung Colleen Gallagher, Adam Gordon thank you so much for joining the panel it's been brilliant to have you we'll be back next week of course as ever, we've got a very special show I'm going to be in the US actually I'm going to be in San Francisco, I'll be seeing Colleen as a matter of fact, Colleen let me bring you back we're going to be having a dinner on the 27th I believe, so wonderful to see you there we've got some wonderful guests by the way I don't know if you've seen the guest list on this we've got some crazy folks joining us, that'd be brilliant and on the day after, so I'm not going to drink any alcohol because in the morning after, I've got a very special conversation with the one and only John Vlastelika.

1:05:00It's just going to be a one-on-one, me and him, and we're going to be chatting with him. He's one of the best thinker-doers in our industry, but we've never been able to get him on properly on Brave Food Live because he lives in Seattle, but I'm going to be West Coast myself, so I'm going to use the opportunity to get a breakdown from him as to how he sees the future of TA. Make sure you sign up for that show, folks. It's going to be brilliant. Thanks for watching. Follow the channel if you want to see more. We're on every Friday, every week.