Susan Burns – Talent Synchronicity: Candidate relationship management

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Susan Burns, who’s the Chief Talent Strategist for Talent Synchronicity, and Susan talked about the idea of an adaptive talent strategy really focused on how can you create a steady flow of talent to ensure a company can react to the changing business needs when they come, recognize that you can never predict what exactly you’re going to need three or four years down the road, what can you do now, so you’re ready to meet those needs, with a strong focus on the idea of what she calls “candidate relationship management”, and some very interesting ideas and thoughts around how to maintain access to the talent that you’re going to need as your organization advances over time. So let’s listen to Susan Burns from Talent Synchronicity.

Hi, welcome to People Performance Radio, this is Steve Hunt. Today we’re talking to Susan Burns, who’s the Chief Talent Strategist for Talent Synchronicity, she’s also the Director of the Future of Talent Work Institute, or Future of Talent Institute. Susan has a very extensive background in advanced talent management areas, she was the person behind Retailology, if you followed employer branding, that was one of the leading branding sites, actually won several awards several years ago, and since then has done a lot of cool things.

So Susan, welcome so much to the show, welcome to appearing on People Performance Radio.

Susan

Thank you Steve, it’s great to be here with you today.

Steve

So Susan, we were chatting a little bit before the show, and you said we’re going to talk about adaptable talent strategies, and that’s what you’ve been focusing on? – can you tell us a little bit what you mean by ‘adaptable talent’?

Susan

Yes, actually I frame it as adaptive talent strategies, and really what’s been driving that is as I’ve had the opportunity to follow a lot of the trends that have needless to say been shaping the business environment, social structure and so on, that I think while we certainly have been seeing that change has been a constant for many years now, that it’s reach a new level, and we’ll really see now this confluence of events coming together, but not only is change a constant, but we’re seeing an increase in overall complexity, and that complexity in the business environment certainly seeps down into the organization’s talent function and specifically within the talent function, I think that there’s a few different things happening.

One is as soon as this migration to the internet began in the late ‘90s, that brought one wave of complexity, and because of the influx of tools and technology we’ve now seen that increase, at a pretty rapid rate, just over the last I’d say 18 months, with what’s happening with social media and what’s happening with channel fragmentation. So that’s one aspect of it, in terms of I think a call for talent functions to really think about how they’re structured, how they’re better able to effectively make decisions around the structure of a talent function, as well as the tools and applications that they use, so that means we take that in addition to this business complexity, and the need to be faster in making decisions and implementing strategy and now of course and shaping that strategy, it really calls for organizations to be much more agile in how they develop a response capability, so part of that looks at the skills and competencies that make up the workforce of the organization, but it goes deeper to understand not just what the organization needs are today, but to understand where the point of alignment began between the talent function, and the business strategy, and so then they’re better able to understand the direction that they need to take to meet the business needs in the future.

Steve

A lot of times companies don’t exactly know what they’re going to need three years from now, it’s dependent on growth expectations, and is there something, a leap of faith, to say we’re going to invest in our employees now, and developing them, in the belief that something is going to happen in three years, whether this investment will pay off? – as opposed to the more reactive, let’s just wait till we have the opening and we have to go outside and pull somebody in from external recruiting? That’s a real shift in mindset for a company to say, we’re going to invest in people just because we believe if we invest in them, good things will come from it? – is that really what this is about, or am I going too far, is it really still more a, wait until there’s an opening, and then try to build people?

Susan

Well, I’d definitely would invest a piece of that, and that really gets to the heart of this idea around adaptive talent strategies, and I have a model and I can send that to you if you want, post it with this interview, but the first step is how you understand the allocation of your resources, and specifically within the talent function, and to do that there has to be an initial point of alignment with the business strategy, and absolutely in today’s environment to try and forecast out three years with any high degree of certainty is probably not feasible, but at least if you do that, you have somewhat of a roadmap then to follow and to work around, and can make better decisions, than if it is just reactive. I think what we see too often today is what I would call “just behind recruiting”, and that recruiting does learn of an opening at the time that the person is needed, and so if you factor in that, your average time to hire, for a position depending on what the level on the difficulty of filling that position is, can be anywhere from 30 days at the low end to 90 plus days at the high end, so by the time recruiting knows about it, they’re already potentially 90 days behind, and so to develop that response capability is really key, but there has to be a conversation between the recruiting function and the business organization.

I think that that brings up a couple of things: one is that recruiting has to get to the table, and so we’ve often heard in the past that it’s about HR getting to the table, and that is absolutely important, but recruiting comes at it from a different mindset, they’re going to ask different questions, and I think one of the key challenges for businesses today is that there needs to be first better alignment across the HR talent function, so between HR, recruiting of talent acquisition and organizational development, and that’s really key as well, so if you’ve got alignment there, and then you’re aligning with the strategic business process, you’re better able to understand what those skills and competencies are that are not only needed today, but are anticipated in terms of the future, and then if you get visibility into your current workforce and can identify where there are gaps, whether it be in succession planning by position, or whether it be within skills, recruiting then is in a much better position to say, OK, within the resources that we have, what are we capable of doing in terms of meeting the immediate recruiting needs, but also allocating time to build an approach that says, we will be able to begin looking for this talent, begin building relationships with them, begin a more effective pipeline approach, and that’s where I think we then come back to them, and say, OK, now how does this align with the organization’s brand? – in terms of building out a good brand visibility, building out an approach that engages people in the organization, there’s more tools and channels and approaches today than ever before to engage people on a conversation around your organization’s brand and product or service, and what that then begins to do, quite frankly, is it starts to really force the organization to re-think what their relationship is with talent, and presents a really big opportunity to them to say, how now do we think about workforce planning?

Let me just stop there for a second, to see if you want to check in on any of that, before I continue.

Steve

Yes, I think one of the things, I mean the question you’re talking about there is this idea to say, recruiting and really workforce planning, you should be looking to the future, and not just to positions we need to fill now, but what sort of positions do we think we’re going to need to fill in three to five years, and then say, where are we going to get that talent from, and part of that discussion should be internal sources, but there’s a lot of people, that there’s arguments, that some people have said, well you shouldn’t invest in employees, because they’ll just leave, and you really can’t plan for the future that far out. And then you have the flipside, and United Technologies is a company that stands in mind, where they actually invest a tremendous amount of money in education and they actually tell people what degrees they think they’re going to need in five years, so people can go back and start working on an engineering degree now, and say, well we think we’re going to need mechanical engineers or hydraulic engineers in five years, and it’s very long range, but it’s also very expensive. There has to be a real faith that the company’s going to grow.< br />
In your experience, trying to get executives to allocate an investment in people like that, what has been key to get the organization to say, let’s get away from our reactive recruiting mentality to a pro-active development standpoint?

Susan

Well I think that the real key there is being able to show the leaders of the organization what the benefits are, and obviously if you can bring that back to efficiencies, if you can bring that back to cost savings, that’s really the first step, so an example would be, when I was heading up global recruitment at Wagner Restaurants, it was an environment that was very challenging because of it being in professional services, and often times you weren’t able to hire until you closed on a new deal. Well again, if it’s taking 60 to 90 days to get somebody into the role, and in an organization that’s got a billable model environment, you’re losing dollars every second you have that role open. Now, some of that work might get transferred to other people that are current on board, but then there comes a time obviously where you begin to burn those people out a little bit, so what we’re able to do is, by working with the Agency Advisory Board, was really a couple of things – one is I developed a new role for somebody that would be a sourcing strategist, and if I was to create that role today in house, I would really look at it more as a blend between a sourcing strategist and community manager, and we can get to the community manager piece in a minute, but that person’s role was not to work on roles that were open today, but to understand that these were the key areas where we know that we have challenges, whether it be a position that was a high volume position, that we always needed talent coming in in that role, or it looked at specific geographies, that we knew that these were really challenging geographies, and so it took longer to hire, or it looked at a specific skill set.

Now, within a small organizations, which Wagner Restaurants was, you certainly can’t do that across the whole organization, you’ve got to narrow it down to a certain degree, and that was our approach, as I focused on geography, I focused on level and I focused on skill. What that allowed us to do was, by being very focused and targeted on that, is to show the organization that first off we could have taken an approach that I call an ‘opportunity cost of talent’, and that brought in a relationship with the CFO, I thought instead of looking at this, and saying, OK, it’s going to cost us x amount if we hire an extra person, let’s look at it and say, it’s going to cost us more if we don’t, and that the opportunity cost there is saying, if we can get somebody in that role faster, we will deliver more dollars to the bottom line.

Steve

How did you calculate opportunity cost? – what’s the actual equation?

Susan

Well specifically, and it’s easiest when you’re in a billable model environment, but if you look at the average number of days to fill a role, and what the average billable rate is for that role, that tells you how much you’re losing by not having somebody in there, and so then if you can say, well gee, if I hire ahead of the curve, it might take this much of an investment to bring somebody on 30 days early, but you’re still ahead by looking at it in terms of the dollars lost by not having them there.

Steve

OK, that sounds a very similar thing done in a retail organization that calculated the cost of a store manager vacancy, and they realized it was cheaper to overhire store managers and have some sitting on the bench, so they reduced their time to fill to zero basically, because it cost so much to have a vacancy in a store manager spot.

I’m curious to go on what you call the community manager, or the strategist, where, and let me know if I’m getting this right, basically saying, have a role in the organization, where their goal is not to fill positions, their goal is to really build candidate pools for critical roles? Is that a good way of describing it?

Susan

Yes, that’s a piece of it, and really where I come up with that is, coming back to something we said initially in terms of this increase in amount of complexity within the talent function, so if you have, which is true in many instances within a corporate talent function, you have recruiters that are doing full cycle recruiting, they’re managing everything from the initial conversation with the hiring manager to sourcing to screening to interviewing to making the offer and so forth, and I think that that is still a very important role, there needs to be that connection with the hiring manager, but there is no way that the recruiter’s going to be able to do and be effective in using social media or social networking, it’s too complex of an environment, and it takes too much of an investment to really do it well. I think a lot of what we’re seeing today in that space is around the socializing of job postings, so if I push a job out to Facebook, I’m using social media, but I’m not necessarily doing social networking, and it really calls upon the opportunity to move from, I think we’ve gone from transactional to now relationship, but now we can go from relationship to community, so if you have somebody who is dedicated to building communities, they become sort of this blend between the marketing expert, the technology expert and the relationship expert, but it has to be closely aligned with the talent function, and understanding where the key needs are, so that they’re not all over the board, you don’t want to have the firehose approach where they’re trying to be everywhere, but if they know that here is the key pockets of talent that we want to focus on, where are these people? – how can I begin to engage them in a conversation around our brand, our product, our service?

Now, there’s going to be some opportunities for them, if they get introduced to somebody and begin a conversation with somebody that happens to fit a current need, they should have the ability to then expedite that person to a recruiter, but it really comes more around, very similar to what an organization would be and do in terms of building a relationship with a customer, and sharing information about the organization, inviting them into a conversation, bringing together market data for them, sharing things about what the company’s working on, sharing insight from business leaders, so it’s not just necessarily HR, but HR’s the one that facilitates that, and is able to understand where there’s value, and type of content, and what the interest is from the people that they’re trying to attract.

Steve

When you’re talking, I take it it’s really this idea that we need to segment recruiting into different areas, maybe the way the sales is, that in an advanced sales organization you have salespeople that are focused on closing the deal, that is maybe like landing the candidate, but you also have lead generation people, then you have marketing people that are just about getting their brand out there, and then after people are hired, you have customer service people that stay engaged when people look for upsell opportunities, so it sounds like, I don’t know if that’s a good analogy, but it sounds like maybe you’re saying, in recruiting we need to have some people playing this role of lead generation, marketing, as well as customer service relationship building?

Susan

Yes, and in fact similar to what’s in the sales role, what we’re now seeing, I think, that this is a really important piece of technology for organizations to consider is the use of CRM, except in this case, candidate relationship management, and the value there is if you now take these people that you’re connecting with, and you’re putting them into the CRM, not necessarily into your ATS, but you’re putting them into the CRM and gathering a little bit of information on them so that you have a more active and engaged community that’s filling that pipeline, you already know then that you’ve got people that are interested, that have the type of skills you’re looking for, the potential or cultural effect, and most importantly have some sense of when they might be interested in making a move to your organization. What that then allows you to do is now, coming back to that issue of developing the response capabilities, instead of just being reactive, at least now you know that, as needs come up, because they always will, there’s no way you can make business 100% predictable, there’s always going to be changes, but what this does is it allows the talent organization to have better insight into the readiness of this community, so if all of a sudden you’ve got the business leaders coming, and saying, “Hey, we want to go after this piece of business in this market – can you support us?” – well, in real time now the recruiting function, you’ll get visibility, and it’s OK, who do I know in that market, what kinds of skills capabilities do they have, and how soon are they ready? And so that begins to now make the talent organization much more strategic, much more aligned with the business needs, and in fact in some cases if those conversations can be had with the talent function when those business strategies are being developed, I think that the organization benefits even more.

There was a story recently about a very successful company that was based in Miami, and they opened up a call centre in North Dakota. Their business was very very good, but they had to close that call centre because they couldn’t hire enough people. Now, to hear, and this has happened in March, so to hear in March of 2009, when you’ve got 16 million some people out of work, that a company has to close a facility because they can’t hire enough, that’s something that potentially could have been prevented, if there was better alignment with the talent organization.

Steve

So the last question is, I’m sensitive to your time, but the last question I ask is, when you look at this candidate relationship manager position, and you’re talking earlier about the need to really not just look outside, but also leverage internal people, should that person be focused on both relationship management with the existing employees as well as relationship management with external candidates? And should that be the same person? And if so, how much would you allocate their time on working with the existing employees versus external candidates?

Susan

That’s a great question, Steve, I think it’s going to depend on the size of the organization and the complexity of the organization. Most likely it’s going to be two separate roles that have a close working relationship, so you’ll have somebody focused externally on brand positioning, relationship building, content sharing, engagement, and they’re managing the CRM tool as well as part of that strategic component. Then you’ll also have somebody that potentially is not only just managing this internal pool, but is facilitating conversation internally, so if we take this idea of social networking and bring it into the organization, and again IBM is a great example of that, with Beehive and Best Buy has done some of this as well, but it’s learning how to facilitate that conversation, how to help people get connected, how to better facilitate a platform that says, “Here’s the kinds of projects that we’re working on – what ideas do you have?”, or that lets employees begin to develop their own ideas, so if you look at Google’s commitment to 20% of your time is spent on thinking and developing new ideas, and I’m sure that Google has something that’s similar to this that allows them to share and collaborate, but I think organizations too often are missing that opportunity to leverage their workforce. You think about how often a company that has been started by people, that has lost an organization because they couldn’t get those ideas heard internally, so then the people leave, they go off and they start their own company, they become very successful. Well, why can’t organizations become better at almost providing like an incubator type of environment that lets people get more involved in that, and I think again, coming back to the, how do you keep people engaged, and how do you keep them retained, that’s certainly one way to do it.

Steve

I think that’s true, I like the idea of the focus on the relationships, if you focus and have the right relationships when you have the need, it’ll be easier to fill it, because you already have the relationships, but also, the point you made earlier, it’s not just doing internal job posting, because that will frustrate people, because they’ll apply and I think they’re ready for it, and they have no conversation around it, so they don’t understand why they’re stuck where they are at the moment, so just keeping that real strong dialog, and having people really focus just purely on keeping that dialog going, I think, and collecting that, that’s really an interesting idea.

Well Susan, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts around the adaptive talent strategies, and the role that candidate relationship management plays in it, there’s a couple of great new terms, I think, to think about. Any last comments before we sign off?

Susan

No, well I’m sure I can always come up with something, Steve! But this is has been a lot of fun, it’s always great talking to you, and thanks for having me on.

Steve

Well thank you.

Speaker

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