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Welcome to Recruiting Evolution, the podcast for people shaping what recruiting becomes next.
Hosted by Kortney Harmon, Director of Industry Relations & Partnerships at Crelate, Recruiting Evolution explores the people and ideas changing how organizations find and engage talent.
Through candid conversations and practical insights, we go past surface-level trends into the real work of finding and supporting talent in an industry that never sits still.
Join us live or catch the replay of our live event series, where Kortney and industry experts share strategies you can bring back to your organization immediately.
In our Industry Spotlight series, you'll hear from the leaders and practitioners moving recruiting forward as they share hard-won lessons and their read on what's coming next.
Short on time? Recruiting Evolution Express delivers fresh ideas and practical takeaways in 10 minutes or less.
With new episodes released weekly, Recruiting Evolution keeps you connected to the conversations and voices defining the future of talent. Subscribe today, and visit our website to learn more about upcoming live sessions and events.
Recruiting Evolution is a podcast by Crelate.
Fresh ideas. Future ready. Creating relationships that fuel growth.
Denise Chaffin [00:00:00]:
I do not believe that the future will eliminate our roles as recruiters. I do, however, with my 38 years of experience in this business, think that AI will actually elevate the recruiter.
Kortney Harmon [00:00:13]:
Welcome back to a special episode of Recruiting Evolution. If that name sounds new, that's because it is. The Full Desk Experience is evolving, and as our audience, our conversations, and the recruiting industry have continued to grow, we knew it was time for the brand to grow grow with it. So welcome Recruiting Evolution, our new name and new brand built for the next chapter of conversations that you already know and trust. And while you see the new look and hear the new name, you can expect the same impactful topics, candid conversations, industry voices, and really practical insights designed to help you stay ahead of what's coming next in recruiting. The session you're about to hear was originally recorded as a part of the FDE+, our original event series under the Full Desk Going forward, those conversations will be live within the Recruiting Evolution brand. New name, new brand, same commitment to moving the industry forward. I'm your host Kortney Harmon.
Kortney Harmon [00:01:15]:
Let's jump in with some fresh new ideas, future ready, and creating relationships that fuel growth.
Kortney Harmon [00:01:30]:
All right, we're going to keep this train moving for everybody that is still here. This session, I think, is going to be one that helps you reframe how you think about talent acquisition entirely. Denise is CEO of Top Source Talent and the host of the Talking TA podcast. She is here to challenge something a lot of us have been doing wrong. Her session is about innovating present and future talent acquisition from automation to rearchitecture. I'm super excited to hear what Denise has to say. Every, every time she talks here, has very good insights. So Denise, I know you're one of the leaders in our space with TA and having this conversation.
Kortney Harmon [00:02:09]:
I am so excited to hear what is on the plate and I'm going to jump off stage. I'm going to put your screen up. The running joke is if you say my name 3 times, I'm like a bad genie. I'll pop back up or I'll come back.
Denise Chaffin [00:02:21]:
I'll remember that.
Kortney Harmon [00:02:23]:
That's good.
Denise Chaffin [00:02:24]:
I like that. Kortney, Kortney, Kortney.
Kortney Harmon [00:02:27]:
All right. Have a wonderful talk. I'm going to jump off stage.
Denise Chaffin [00:02:29]:
Thank you. Thank you, Kortney, for a great intro. Love it. Yes, I'm Denise Chaffin, and welcome to Innovating Present and Future Talent Acquisition. Yes, we'll be talking about the transition from talent automation to talent rearchitecture. I'm going to jump in though, and I'm going to start off with an opening question here. You know, for the last few years, we've been hearing the same question over and over. Is talent acquisition going to replace recruiting? I I don't think that's the right question.
Denise Chaffin [00:03:00]:
I think a better question might be, what if AI isn't replacing talent acquisition at all, but what if it is teaching us how to rethink how talent acquisition works? So this is the conversation that I want to have today. So before we talk about re-architecting talent acquisition, I'm curious where everyone is in their AI journey. Now, I can't see a show of hands, obviously. But I would be curious, you know, how many people, and if there is any way to poll this, Kortney, I'd be curious how many people are at a level 1, you know, or level 2. I think a lot of people I'm talking to now are actually an operational level 3. Some maybe even might be hedging into integrated, the integrated level at 4. And if anyone's brave enough to admit that they're at level 5, that's awesome. So here's the thing about it.
Denise Chaffin [00:04:01]:
What's interesting is that regardless of where we are on our AI journey, many organizations are still asking that same question. How do we create better hiring outcomes? All right. Why rearchitecture? Well, we have an AI paradox here. Well, AI is accelerating our recruiting activities, acceleration hasn't yet begun to guarantee better hiring outcomes. So as you can see here, our nature of work is shifting from activity to outcomes, transactions to relationships. It's really interesting that the very tactical nature of our business is really kind of moving over to softer skills and higher-level thinking, in my opinion. Our recruiting roles are definitely evolving, we have to have an operating model, right, that is going to evolve with it. The future of AI and of talent acquisition won't be defined by better tools, better recruiting practices.
Denise Chaffin [00:05:07]:
It will be defined, though, on better talent decisions. So over the last 30 years, I've had a front row seat, actually, to the evolution of talent acquisition. My career started in 1988 in this business, and our focus was very activity-focused. We were using a lot of manual tools, if you would. That's what I'm going to call them. You know, we were using phone books actually, and Rolodexes. We didn't have the job boards really probably until closer to 2000, but there were a few. That were popping up in the mid-1990s.
Denise Chaffin [00:05:47]:
I think that Monster started around 1995. And of course, we had spreadsheets that we could use. But today we have automation and automation intelligence platforms. And we also have predictive analytics. You know, honestly, the tools have changed dramatically over the years, but our responsibility has not changed. And looking at what we have here for 1996, if you would, traditional TA. I think a lot of what's happened with TA is we have kind of looked at recruiting from a whole different perspective. So we've got the activity, efficiency, and process.
Denise Chaffin [00:06:28]:
We've got that down now. We really do, especially with the tools that we have developed early on when technology was still new. But now we have to shift our focus. And I really like the questions that we are Looking at for a re-architected TA. Did we hire the right person? Did they succeed? What did we learn and how do we improve? I mean, these are going to be some of the game-changing questions that are going to happen for us as we move forward. You like this one? AI didn't break TA. I mean, I think a lot of people think that they're blaming— they want to blame AI for a lot. But here's what's happening, though.
Denise Chaffin [00:07:08]:
AI really is exposing some gaps, right? We have underestimated, for example, the importance of talent engagement meetings. I mean, seriously. In fact, I just did a presentation not too long ago just on talent engagement meetings. It is an entire conversation unto itself. If you don't have a talent engagement meeting scheduled before you start a search, don't start the search, period. Job design, I think, is the process of actually defining the work for a position before you define the worker. Traditional thinking might tell us something like, oh, we need to hire a senior manufacturing engineer. But when we look at a job design around this, we're asking more questions about, we need somebody who can actually reduce scrap.
Denise Chaffin [00:08:01]:
Somebody who can improve yields, somebody who can help support a new product launch. And now you're looking at hiring for outcomes and not just titles. See the big difference here? So AI is exposing some very glaring gaps that are existing in our system. Unclear success criteria, a weak job description or job design, inconsistent evaluations of candidates. Poor decision-making, limited organizational training. All of this are questions and gaps, if you would, that we need to expose so that we can correct, obviously. Design questions might include things like, what problems are we trying to solve? What outcomes are we looking at? You know, what matters? What outcomes matter for us? What skills are going to be required? I mean, really required. You know, we need to like kind of hone in on those once we figure out, you know, what the problem is we're trying to solve for.
Denise Chaffin [00:09:02]:
How will success be measured? That's a really big one. Really big one. So who do we need? Instead of saying, who do we need? We might wanna say something like, what needs to get done? Honestly, if we don't know what success looks like for ourselves, how is AI gonna know? It's not. So now we're moving from a recruiting title to a talent advisor title. And honestly, again, you know, because I've had this long career in this business, we kind of start— when I started my career, I kind of started out in a talent advisor role. We didn't have the transactional recruiting that we kind of like leaned into once technology started. Technology kind of gave us some tools that we We became kind of dependent on, we relied on, and we kind of got away from that talent advisor role that we had a long time ago. So now, we're kind of making this pivot backward.
Denise Chaffin [00:09:59]:
We're kind of coming full circle. And we're now moving ourselves back from recruiter to talent advisor. I first started in this business, some of the traditional recruiting activity that we were measured on you know, a lot of it had to do with how many calls did we make in a day? You know, how many candidates did we submit in a week? How many placements did we make in a month? You know, those kind of questions came up. Today, you know, our activity is actually increasingly automated, and the value of talent acquisition is shifting from execution to influence. And I'm gonna repeat that again later on in the, in the presentation, because I think that's like one of the most impactful statements, you know, that we need to remember. Many of you have been asked over the years, you know, by hiring managers, you know, hey, can you go out and find me somebody with 10 years experience and blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is. And I, of course, that makes me shudder because so many of them do that. You know, I need at least 8.
Denise Chaffin [00:10:58]:
In fact, we've got a client right now who's still, I'm still arm wrestling with him over this and I'm getting closer to winning though. But anyway, The talent advisor of today needs to ask questions like, what evidence do we have, you know, that tells us that we need 10 years of experience, you know, for this particular role? Another thing too on artificial intelligence, you know, AI does do a great job here to help us, you know, with some of our tactical responsibilities. You know, it can Create a great job description. It can help us create good outreach messages. It can help us summarize interview notes, which I absolutely love the note-taking that AI has provided. Oh my gosh, it's going to save my hand. But AI can't walk into a meeting, though, where a hiring manager is and challenge them and challenge their assumptions. That is totally a talent advisement role.
Denise Chaffin [00:11:59]:
So in nearly 4 decades, we have seen tools change dramatically. But the recruiters who thrive in this business always do the same thing. They help people make better decisions. All right, we have this big shift. Our old TA mentality tells us we just need to go and fill jobs. Our new talent acquisition helps us to enable better talent decisions. So I'm kind of driving this point home, I realize, but it's worth driving home. You know, when you've got that hiring manager again who's screaming, I want somebody with 10 years of medical device experience, the recruiter of the past says, okay, I'll go and I'll look for somebody with 10 years of the specific medical device experience.
Denise Chaffin [00:12:45]:
Today we need to shift. Our big shift is how we think about this and saying something like, oh my gosh, the talent pool Right now is extremely tight in this specific area. But our market analysis that we do using AI— again, our innovation— shows that candidates from aerospace, defense, and even advanced manufacturing have some of the same skills we are looking for in this position. Maybe if we are able to access this larger pool of candidates, We'll be able to hire somebody without sacrificing capability. You know, that is what we call decision enablement. And we've got another example here as well. Now let's talk about our recruiting funnel and our talent ecosystem, which is a lot bigger than our, our talent, our traditional funnel. I think honestly that the TS business has created, and the ATS platforms have kind of helped create this funnel for us.
Denise Chaffin [00:13:44]:
I think prior to the first ATS, we did have the traditional process, if you would, on how we hired people, posting jobs in the newspaper, people answering the jobs, contacting them to screen them. It was still kind of the same process. But I think the ATS kind of solidified and kind of really made a process more concrete for us because you've got applicants who are sending their resumes in. You're doing the screening. It was very transactional, very tactical. this initial funnel. Now, as we're shifting over to this talent ecosystem, you know, we're looking at this from a completely different perspective. You know, instead of just looking at applicants and doing these transactionals, getting them hired, you know, see in the cafeteria, passing in the hallway once in a while, we're now looking at those applicants as the future for the company.
Denise Chaffin [00:14:39]:
You know, we've got our talent ecosystem, It includes our new hires, right, as well as employees and all of the others listed here. I have silver medalists on here because a silver medalist is somebody who maybe didn't get the job. Maybe they came in second place and somebody else was hired for a role, but they had a stellar background and they would have been the next selected person. So we call those people silver medalists because they're still so placeable. And so What we are looking at with respect to hiring, we need to look at who are the other people that we've already interviewed? Why are we going to let that talent just kind of go by the wayside? We need to be looking at this and keeping these people in this ecosystem that we need to develop and that we need to focus on right now. So let's talk about then devising our talent advisor. operating system because we need one. We've spent the first part of this discussion talking about what's changing.
Denise Chaffin [00:15:42]:
AI, talent advising, ecosystems, better decision-making. The question, though, is now, what does a talent advisor operating system look like? Woo. For me, when I see this, I see a system of these 5 pillars, right, of modern talent acquisition. So let's go to start here. So on the signal side, this one is so vital. Because if you get this signal wrong, then everything else that is downstream from there is just going to go by the wayside. We'll have a bad job design. Or if we have a bad job design, for example, we are going to wind up having poor candidate evaluations.
Denise Chaffin [00:16:26]:
If we have poor candidate evaluations, we'll make poor hiring decisions. If we make poor hiring decisions, we'll have poor business outcomes. So what we really need here is we need clarity before we take any action, right? The best searches begin with clarity before sourcing or recruiting is even started. And like I said too earlier, that strategic talent engagement meeting with the hiring teams, Again, can't place enough importance on that. You know, it's interesting too. I have a little story about this. There was a director position for DEI. This is in 2020, right during COVID But anyway, one of my large enterprise clients in San Jose had me come over because they had been trying to fill this position for a year.
Denise Chaffin [00:17:14]:
It's a director. It wasn't even, I mean, a C-suite level position, but they wanted this. DEI. So I go into Richard's office and I'm sitting there and he shows me the spreadsheet of all these people that they had interviewed over the year. And I've got the recruiter there, sweet, wonderful woman. Anyway, so we're looking at this and I said, oh my gosh, you guys, all of the people on this spreadsheet all come from the semiconductor industry. What's up with that? And they both looked at me like, well, because, you know, don't we need them with semiconductor experience? I said, for DEI? Why would you need a DEI expert to come from semiconductor? Why don't we open it up to other, you know, other industries and see what happens? Long story short, 2 weeks later, we had our candidate, Antoinette. She came out of L'Oréal cosmetic industry.
Denise Chaffin [00:18:01]:
Yes, L'Oréal cosmetics. She's still there, and she is still running their programs. So it was just a matter of opening up our minds and looking at this from a whole different mindset. So we have to change our mindset to, what are we trying to accomplish here versus who are we trying to hire? All right, the next phase here is design. OK, so when a search— the automatic response is, let's blame recruiting and sourcing, right? Of course. But many hiring challenges start long before the first candidate is ever even contacted or approached. We have unclear requirements. We have undefined success.
Denise Chaffin [00:18:43]:
We have unrealistic expectations and a lack of alignment. So we need to look at all of this, right? A job description describes a role. A job design defines success. Here we're talking about defining work before defining the worker. And I had mentioned that one earlier. And just a real quick note on that one, another search that I was on, and I love to use some of my stories because they're just good. But anyway, so I had a hiring manager who walked into my office way, way back when we still had offices before the cube environment became a big deal. I digress.
Denise Chaffin [00:19:19]:
But anyway, he walked into my office and he says to me, hey Denise, I need to find a design test engineer and here are the skills I need. Look at this laundry list of skills. And so sarcastically I said to him, okay, Tom, does this person also need to have red hair and freckles? And he just real quick back, he says, no, but they need to know how to play pool and drink beer. So he caught my sarcasm. You know, the problem here was that success was never even defined. We didn't even have the role really defined. And if success isn't defined, how can we evaluate candidates effectively? We can't. So here is another short conversation between a A TA hiring manager.
Denise Chaffin [00:20:04]:
Again, I need someone with 10 years experience, but let's see here. The talent advisor now is going to come back and say, well, evidence tells us that we need 10 years of experience required for this role. So let's move on to engage. This is the next phase of our model, of our operating system here. With engage, relationships become the competitive advantage, really. And I've seen this, I mean, time and time again. It's not what you know, it's who you know. Remember that saying? Okay, that applies here.
Denise Chaffin [00:20:35]:
To the audience, how many people are in your ecosystem today that are not your employees or that are not employed by your company? So let's talk about those relationships. You know, in the past, we have spent way too much time belaboring tactical conversations around hiring, like automation, efficiency, Productivity, but how many people were actually discussing trust? Because I mean, it's all part of the same engagement here. You know, you've got your relationships that you've developed that you maintain. You've got the trust that comes along with that, your influence, your reputation. It's all tied together. In a world where everyone is playing on the same playing field with respect to tools, I mean, because we all have access to the same tools now. It's amazing. The one thing that's gonna differentiate us all is gonna be, you know, our relationships, our reputation, and our trust.
Denise Chaffin [00:21:33]:
So, you know, it's interesting because relationships compound just like other investments, I think. So referring back to our ecosystem, you know, the candidate that you did not hire for maybe a gold medalist role, could become your next hire, you know, that you may need tomorrow. Right now, I can look back and I say, I have 3 clients, enterprise-level clients, who have asked us to reengage with former employees. It's amazing, but these projects can go extremely well. I mean, seriously, we've had, we had a boomerang project a few years ago where one of our clients wanted us to go and find their top female talent that left the company. We wound up over a 10-month period finding 63 people who came back to the company because we re-engaged with them, went ahead and started maintaining some relationships with them. It was really an amazing, I mean, and that in itself could be its own conversation as well. And as well, we also have a private equity company.
Denise Chaffin [00:22:34]:
It's really funny on them too. They are in San Jose and New York, and they have really struggled to hire people, and they wanted us to go and find people in their ecosystem. Which included former employees and colleagues. And one of the reasons is because they give this really hard case study test for their interviews. And those are the only people who can pass it. But those people also know the culture of their company too. So it's all well and good. We have here though an AI tie-in.
Denise Chaffin [00:23:01]:
So I'm keeping this on this screen for a second. This is where we make an important distinction, how AI can help us identify and rediscover people, It can help us communicate effectively, but relationships, right? And that trust, those are still human traits. So automation can improve communication, but it cannot replace connection. So again, you know, look at your ecosystem. Who is in your ecosystem? You know, from that list that I had up a while ago. And just a reminder, that list includes former employees, silver medalists, referrals, Contractors, alumni, your industry peers, conference contacts. Oh, I love conference contacts. So every interaction creates some future value.
Denise Chaffin [00:23:50]:
So once we've defined success and built relationships, the next challenge is making good decisions. And that's where so many of us struggle. Oh my gosh, really seriously. It's not because we lack candidates, it's because we lack Consistency in how candidates are evaluated. And this is really huge. So candidates, or a structured interview asks every candidate the same questions, and they're evaluated against those questions equally. I love a structured interview. I love it when we can go into an interview and we've got a list of questions, and John Doe and Mary Smith, they have their questions, and we're all aligned.
Denise Chaffin [00:24:31]:
Some of them, there might be a couple of questions that are different from one interviewer to the other, but the core is the same so that we can evaluate those candidates equally. So calibration here also creates consistency. Calibration isn't the goal here. I mean, I shouldn't say that. The goal isn't to get everyone to agree on a candidate with calibration, but the goal is to get everyone evaluating, again, the candidates the same way. Without calibration, we've got— it can be a messy situation. For example, if you have a candidate who comes in without calibration, someone might say, oh, I really liked her. I think we should hire her.
Denise Chaffin [00:25:07]:
Somebody else might say, I don't know. She may have lacked some leadership presence. But if you have that calibration, we're all going to be looking at calibrating that candidate on leadership, on problem solving, communication, influence, technical capability. See the difference? So calibration creates consistency, and consistency improves decision quality. So referring back to our theme here, talent acquisition isn't being re-architected to improve recruiting, but it is being architected to improve hiring decisions. So instead of using our intuition or our assumptions about during interviews and hiring, We need to use evidence-based hiring. So evidence-based hiring includes demonstrated work skills, relevant accomplishments, problem-solving examples, anything that's measurable we can use as evidence. Because evidence beats opinion every time.
Denise Chaffin [00:26:13]:
You can write that down. Evidence beats opinion. Last but not least, references. Again, I could go on all day about references. Never underestimate the power of a reference and make sure you get them. All right, so this is the last slide on our operating system. So every hire is data, every outcome is feedback. So now we're talking about measurement, right? So you've gotten through your interviews, you're making your decision.
Denise Chaffin [00:26:40]:
Now you need to measure the quality of your hire. And it's so important to do that. Oh my gosh. How do we know if we had the right hire? How well are they performing? Are they going to stay? What did we learn about hiring for this role? Would we hire this person again? So we've got these time-to-fill measures efficiency, but quality hire measures effectiveness. And some of these measurement factors might include things like performance, retention, Hiring manager satisfaction, candidate hiring experience, and also employee engagement. All right, so where AI fits in. AI accelerates our system. Oh, and we have to love that.
Denise Chaffin [00:27:26]:
I mean, honestly, I don't know. I would never want to go back. I love ChatGPT. I love Claude too for presentations and certain things, but I'm really— I also am learning some of ChatGPT's, uh, like maybe not perfect little personality traits. Sometimes it can repeat, you know, and you have to kind of watch stuff like that. But I do love the way it has accelerated our lives. And those of you who are at, you know, level 2 to level 4 or level 5, I'm sure you understand what I'm talking about. You know, throughout this presentation, you know, we're talking about Defining success, defining hiring systems, building relationships.
Denise Chaffin [00:28:10]:
Oh my gosh, the important— some of the really important things here. Improving decision quality, of course, and also learning from our outcomes. So I love here that we have just on this page, you know, where AI can help us, but where we are still in charge. So humans, are not going to give up context, judgment, relationships, influence, decision-making, and trust to AI. It can't be done. But look at what AI can do for us that we used to spend hours on, hours. And in fact, interestingly enough, I have a new company that I'm working with just starting this week. They're kind of a sourcing company.
Denise Chaffin [00:28:54]:
It's called Provenbase. And I'm going to go ahead and do a shout out to them because they have kind of a new system here for recruiting that I absolutely love what they're showing me so far on doing deep searches. But one of the things that they did yesterday is they provided me, we put into the search field some criteria for a search that I'm working on that's of course challenging. And what it did is it pulled up all this information on the complexity 89% harder to find people in this particular area. It showed heat maps on a US map of where all these people reside. It showed data on the possibility of hiring people, you know, from that particular industry. The data was amazing on just that one search. And it was exportable so that I could share it with my client.
Denise Chaffin [00:29:45]:
Because that's one of the things I've been struggling with, with some of the The other platforms is the exportability of the data that I'm pulling up. So I think that, you know, with AI accelerating research and talent mapping and drafting data now, it's just amazing to me. I love it. So again, going from recruiter to talent advisor, let's focus the rest of our conversation here on our roles in talent acquisition. You know, so if AI is gonna do more, where are— do we create value? You know, as talent advisors, recruiters that from the past have just filled positions, especially the last, I wanna say maybe 20, 25 years. Well, maybe almost 30, you know, because again, of the technology was given to us, you know, it just helped more transactional. We were able to, to kind of move through the process using that old talent funnel that I showed earlier. But now, you know, we have as talent advisors, The role of solving business problems.
Denise Chaffin [00:30:47]:
And again, the questions that we ask, going back to that engagement meeting, you know, with the hiring team, I have a 3-pager of questions to ask a hiring manager to get through an engagement meeting. It takes sometimes an hour, hour and a half to get through that meeting. And, and I try to get as many people involved who are gonna be part of the interview process so that they were all on the same page when we leave that meeting. Because oftentimes, some of the people who are going to be part of the interview process have some really great questions and some really great suggestions for the interviews. And if they're included in that conversation, they're more likely then to provide us with great feedback too on the candidates and just have that— we have great debrief meetings as a result of it. So recruiters collect feedback, talent acquisition— or talent advisors, rather, improve decision quality. Regarding market intelligence, the future of talent advisor doesn't just know candidates. We also need to know the market.
Denise Chaffin [00:31:46]:
And I think it's really important. One, I remember working for On Semiconductor many years ago, and they used to pull us into what we called competitive market intelligence sessions. And it was with the marketing team. So the marketing team would actually bring us in from talent acquisition, into their meetings so that we were all part of, again, this inclusive meeting talking about market intelligence. It really helped us in our roles to be able to go out then and be able to speak with our hiring managers because they didn't attend those meetings necessarily and share with them what we had learned and be more of that business partner to the hiring managers versus just an order taker. And I hated always being thought of as an order taker. Ugh. Nope.
Denise Chaffin [00:32:32]:
Anyway, so referring back to that other slide earlier, the value of talent acquisition has shifted from execution to influence. And regarding business partnerships, so a conversation between a hiring manager, and I love these, and a talent advisor. So the hiring manager might say something like, we're not finding enough right candidates. So now your talent advisor The comeback is, hmm, let's examine whether our requirements align with the market. That's business partnership. So tomorrow we have a to-do list. And our to-do list, I mean, we don't have to re-architect everything at once. We can just pick one place and start.
Denise Chaffin [00:33:17]:
But we really need to have a to-do list so that we kind of get into this because honestly, this is the direction we're heading in, my friends. And that's why you're here, because you want to know what the next steps are, right, in the evolution here of our industry. Here they are. So get involved. And again, it doesn't have to be some big daunting task. Pick one. What is— if you've got a role that you're working on right now, you can start the search over again. You don't have to continue on this path.
Denise Chaffin [00:33:46]:
You can actually go back to the hiring manager and go, hey, I had this thought. What if we'd look at defining the success of this role before I do this work any longer on it? I think it might help me find the right candidates. Building a structured interview process. Again, that's a conversation completely— I mean, a separate conversation unto itself. But part of that structured interview process is the candidate evaluation forms, also the scorecards. Don't forget scorecards for those candidates so that you can compare one against the other for the same exact criteria that we were talking about earlier— communication, leadership skills if it's a leadership role, their tactical skills that they need to have. Anything there are all operating from the same scorecards. And then, of course, re-engaging one talent community.
Denise Chaffin [00:34:42]:
So again, I brought up some of my examples of clients that have asked us to go back and reengage with prior employees. In fact, another one comes to mind right now was a company called FormFactor in Livermore, California. They were looking for a ceramics engineer. And I love this story because Tim, who was the VP of HR, calls me. And he says, oh my gosh, we just cannot find the right people. So we started working on the search. We got all of our information from the hiring team. We start working on the search.
Denise Chaffin [00:35:14]:
But what had happened was the skills that they were looking for, the people who were new, like say, for example, new students who were graduating with ceramics engineering, didn't have the same level of skill that they were looking for. They were almost looking for older technology for this particular role. So what we did then is we shifted, we went back, and we started contacting people who had worked for the same company, worked for FormFactor previously in the same role. And believe it or not, we found a guy. He had left the company because he and the manager he was working for at the time didn't get along, but that manager had then left the company. So we brought him back at a level higher than he had left at because by this time now he's the expert, right? So they hired him. And I don't know if he's still there or not. I haven't done work for them in a while, but it was just, it was a great success story.
Denise Chaffin [00:36:06]:
So re-engaging with a talent community that you haven't worked with in a while, can't underscore the importance, and measuring one outcome beyond time to fill. So if you take and you go back to a position that you have hired someone for, and you look at the outcome of that hire, maybe even 3 months, 6 months down the road, and you look at beyond when they were hired to see how well they're doing, To see how well they're performing. Are they happy? Is the hiring manager satisfaction up to par? These are the important things that we need to be looking at. So go ahead and, and start picking this out and start doing it yourself because it is important. So our key takeaways to find success before you recruit: the best searches begin with clarity and not sourcing. Remember that. That's our number one. Relationships are the competitive advantage.
Denise Chaffin [00:37:05]:
Trust grows when people feel remembered, not processed. So that is huge, especially right now. How many times are we hearing and seeing posts like on LinkedIn and whatnot of people just so tired of being ghosted or their resumes falling into a black hole? Now, we can't turn this big ship around, you know, overnight. But we can chip away at it little by little. So when we are keeping that in mind, though, the relationships and the trust, candidate trust, that's huge. So we need to remember to make them feel remembered and not processed and stop the ghosting. Oh, gosh, I wish there was some way we could stop that. And then also on improving decision quality, talent acquisition isn't being re-architected around AI.
Denise Chaffin [00:37:53]:
But it is being re-architected around better talent decisions. So this is our final slide. And it's just as important as the rest of them, obviously. So many people in our industry are wondering still, am I going to be replaced? My talent acquisition godmother intuition says no, we are not going to be replaced. I do not believe that the future will eliminate our roles as recruiters. I do, however, with my 38 years of experience in this business, think that AI will actually elevate the recruiter. And I think that showing these slides and kind of going through some of these examples, hopefully you'll concur with that because I do believe that we will elevate ourselves, you know, as talent advisors versus transactional recruiters. A routine you know, will continue to be automated, which, hey, yay, happy for us, right? But judgment will become more valuable.
Denise Chaffin [00:38:55]:
And again, I think that the judgment there too, as we are becoming more valuable to our business leaders, what's gonna happen is they're gonna rely on our judgment more and more. You know, when everyone has access to AI, honestly, human judgment will be the differentiator. So keep that in mind. I think that we could almost create a little anthem here. Talent acquisition is not being automated. It's being re-architected around better talent decisions. So that is my presentation. Are there any questions? This is a great time to open up for any questions.
Kortney Harmon [00:39:32]:
Yeah, so we have plenty of time here. Any questions for Denise? Denise, do me a favor. Can you send me this deck? So we are making all of these decks available for everyone. In our event that we— our email that we send everybody at the end. So that would be wonderful if you could send that our way.
Denise Chaffin [00:39:49]:
Actually, I sent it last night, but I will resend it. Yeah, sure.
Kortney Harmon [00:39:52]:
If you sent it last night, that's fine. Janine probably has it. All good.
Denise Chaffin [00:39:55]:
All right.
Kortney Harmon [00:39:56]:
Amazing. Denise, I do not see any questions as of right now. I did put Denise's LinkedIn profile in the chat, so feel free to connect with her if you have not already. Listen to the Talking TA podcast as well. Other than that, I think I'm gonna give everybody a few minutes to get a reprieve, uh, 'cause there wasn't much of a break before. So we're gonna also, we'll take 15 minutes and then we'll get restarted here at the top of the hour. Denise, thank you so very much for joining us today. Thank you.
Kortney Harmon [00:40:26]:
All right. Have a great day.
Denise Chaffin [00:40:27]:
All right. You too. All right.
Kortney Harmon [00:40:29]:
Bye-bye.
Kortney Harmon [00:40:31]:
Thanks for joining us for this special recruiting Evolution episode. As you heard, this session was originally recorded as a part of the FDE Plus series, but going forward, you'll find these conversations under the new Recruiting Evolution brand. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss what's next, including new episodes, live sessions, industry spotlights, and Recruiting Evolution Expresses. I'm your host, Kortney Harmon. Thanks for being a part of this next chapter. chapter with us. Fresh ideas, future ready, and creating relationships that fuel growth.