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Join Pinpoint CEO Tom Hacquoil for quick-fire questions with leading recruiters on Talent Talks. And catch up on previous episodes of The Talent Revolution—a podcast dedicated to talent acquisition specialists, people leaders, and CEOs who want to hire better humans, and build stronger teams.
Know someone who'd be great on Talent Talks? Email us at podcast@pinpointhq.com
Pinpoint Talent Talks with Nathan Scede
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Tom Hacquoil: Hi everyone. Welcome to Talent Talks, quickfire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, founder and CEO here at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Nathan Keighley, Manager of Advisory Services at Scede, an amazing partner of ours and a Pinpoint customer. We're huge fans of what Nathan and the Scede team are doing.
They're known for helping build world-class talent functions as a trusted scaling partner for global tech companies. Nathan, thank you so much for joining me today. Are you happy to get going with 10 quick fire questions?
Nathan Keighley: Let's go.
Tom Hacquoil: Amazing. Look, first off, if you weren't in a talent space, what would you be doing?
Nathan Keighley: I didn't have an answer for this. I had to ask my wife. I've done this the whole time she's known me prior to recruitment, I used to work in music, which probably explains the horrendous amount of tattoos on me. And she believes I would probably be a jingle writer. Writing
Tom Hacquoil: nice
Nathan Keighley: jingles like adverts that you hear on the radio.
The really awful ones probably. Yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. [00:01:00]
Nathan Keighley: I'd like to think I'd be in project management or something like that, but she's, yeah, she's utterly convinced I'd be a jingle writer.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah.
Nathan Keighley: Or still related to music and that kind of space.
Tom Hacquoil: I love it. First off, love the tattoos. I have one. It's horrendous.
So let's not start on a competition there. I think second amazing disparity in you and your wife's perspective on what you might be doing if you think you are a project or product manager and she thinks you are basically Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men. But love it. I think it's great.
Nathan Keighley: Yeah, she called me quirky the other week and I'm still not entirely sure how I'm taking that yet.
Tom Hacquoil: I could take, I take it as a compliment. I think it's great.
Nathan Keighley: Let's go with that route.
Tom Hacquoil: Amazing. So look, you said you've been in this space a long time. I think I'd love the sort of 60 second version of what took you to Scede and what your work looks like there.
Nathan Keighley: What brought me to Scede is pretty, probably pretty the same as what takes people to a lot of other companies. So for me it was the people and the culture. So I knew someone here at Scede prior to joining them and knowing more about them who reached out to me back in my previous position and [00:02:00] said, look.
I've got something on the go that looks it'll be a great fit for you. But what brought me to Scede really was the people and the culture. So it is a company that prides themselves on data. I'm incredibly data focused, probably to a fault, might be the right way to put it. But to have the breadth of data that they have and the experience they have.
How many companies like Scede have worked with over 250 different clients across the world. How many have helped scale businesses to IPO and to incredible growth. It is quite an exceptional company, and to get the ability to come in there and help and grow and build and influence the kind of change to make Scede even more well known is a great opportunity.
That would be a bit silly to miss out on.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes perfect sense and yeah, we recognize all the success you guys have and obviously proud to partner with you in many ways. What's interesting to me is obviously you talk about these sort of 250 world class companies and things like that, that you're working with.
I guess like how do you mutually define with those organizations what success looks [00:03:00] like for the sort of TA role you're playing and how do you measure that?
Nathan Keighley: I think important to note is it's case by case, right? Certain clients will have certain requirements, certain clients will be at different stages.
Some will be series A, some will be series C, some will be public. It fully depends on that. But if you get to the root really of what recruitment is, there's a project management measurement system that we use quite a lot here at Scede is called level of effort, right? So you can calculate exactly what metrics you need to do, what activity, proactive activity you need to do to make sure you end up with a result that you're required for. So we engage quite a lot with level of effort. We have it within our own dashboards. I've put them into the teams' individual sheets this year, so it's easy for them to see and know how to plan their week, be proactive ad delivery, but.
Outside of sort of level of effort? Definitely like quality of hire is an important aspect. It's hard for a business to scale if they're hiring the wrong people. You need to pay close attention, calibrate correctly at the beginning of a [00:04:00] role. Customer feedback's a big thing as well, so that extends both to recruitment for candidate feedback.
It's not always the nicest thing to receive, but it's vital to make sure that you can improve. But for a company like Scede feedback from our customers on how we can improve. We're quite lucky to have really strong customer feedback, but it's making note of the ones that can lead to improvement, and it's something I think Scede and also our customers are aware of.
That kind of feedback is vital to make sure that you have a better process, have a better recruitment function as a whole.
Tom Hacquoil: Makes perfect sense. I think like everything you said really resonated, but I think the piece on quality of hire is really interesting to me. Do you have a standard quality of hire sort of measure or calculation that you use with all clients or do you work backwards from each individual client's definition of what that means?
Nathan Keighley: Definitely work backwards 'cause every company is different. Like context is key is a sentence you hear quite a lot. But for certain companies there's certain things you can do to almost guarantee a higher [00:05:00] level quality of hire. If you go into sort of national, global statistics, it tends to prove that sourced candidates.
Do end up being a better quality of hire further down the line when you do a three, six month review. So we really do push on sourcing as a business. We're there to add value and to get the candidates the company might not be able to get. And I think that's definitely important for scaling businesses or businesses that might not be commonly known of.
Every company started off as a small place, be it Apple, Klarna,
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. Hundred percent.
Nathan Keighley: Amazon. And that proactive approach to getting source candidates, you can almost ensure that the quality is gonna be a bit higher sometimes. So definitely with quality of hire, it is different per customer. But if you know what you're looking for and you're seasoned in what you do, you go by the statistics, right?
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. Super clear. We'll circle back to that in a little bit. I guess you got this interesting, quite broad perspective on what a lot of organizations are doing in the market, and I guess super interested in what you think the big mistakes most talent teams are making today.
Nathan Keighley: One of the [00:06:00] things that definitely we see is focusing on short term fixes.
Rather than strategic planning, which we know is hard to do in this sort of economic market that we're in at the moment. Everything's very fast paced. We don't know who's gonna be putting in new things globally. Wink. That could affect everyone.
Tom Hacquoil: We do, yeah.
Nathan Keighley: Hiring super experienced sort of TA people because they're available.
Only for them to leave when the market picks up, as we know it does it's a rollercoaster. There's always an up and there's always a down. Yeah. Not spending time training TA. If you think about a normal way a business runs, every other department tends to have training systems. If you're a project manager, for example, you're going to your PRINCE2 and supplementary ones.
If you are change management within IT you'll do ITIL.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah.
Nathan Keighley: You don't tend to see a lot of that within recruitment. You expect people to come in at the top of the game and stay at the top of their game. So investing in training TA, be it with an external resource or from an internal resource. [00:07:00] Rushing to get roles filled is another one, rather than concentration on calibration.
That's what leads to quality of hire problems, right? If you're not calibrating with hiring managers and just generally the one size fits all approach to, to recruitment is the typical kind of problems that we'll see. Plus weird random ones occasionally pop up, but they're the more typical ones.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. Maybe we'll touch on those in a bit. I think everything you just said makes a great deal of sense, and really resonates with our own experience? Especially rushing to get a role filled rather than being quite iterative and flexible on the process. I think if I think about our own hires, often the people who've been unbelievably like transformational to the business are people where we actually iterate on a role in a spec three or four times, often over nine months or 12 months, which is embarrassing, but actually we'd go to market, wouldn't quite land, we wouldn't get somebody we felt excited about.
We don't hire the second best candidate just 'cause they're there. Do you know what I mean? And we've really, and actually you look back at that and you go, [00:08:00] actually that took nine months. That was a painful process. But those people are still here 3, 4, 5 years later and they've transformed that area of the business.
And it easy to say, it's hard to do, but it seems to always pay off, right?
Nathan Keighley: Yeah, a hundred percent.
I think if I look back at my career over all these years. I can't count the amount of wildcard kind of candidates that are outside of a remit that I've placed. The people that I think some recruiters would look at and just be like, no.
Or if they were using some form of, I guess we would probably get into this later, but AI to screen candidates that AI would "no" them. Yet, these people have turned out to be some of the most senior people I've known in my banking days and have gone to do incredible things or people that have changed transformation entirely within insurance as an industry, let alone the one company that they've worked in.
But yeah, no,
Tom Hacquoil: I super in agreement with that. And I think that, to be honest, to me, is a tremendous part of the value of the recruiter, right? Because anybody can roll out an AI system that's gonna spit out very similar results to everybody else's use of it. It's your unique kind of [00:09:00] lens that makes all the difference.
Intentional or not you used the word wildcard. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna sneak in a wildcard question now, if that's cool with you. If you could instantly master any skill outside of recruitment, what would it be and why?
Nathan Keighley: Oh, that's good.
That is really good. There is one I've wanted to try to do, and I've put it off absolutely ages, and I live in a really lucky place in the UK to do this, and I've still not done it.
I would like to learn the skill of actually building a guitar. Like from scratch.
Tom Hacquoil: Nice, okay.
Nathan Keighley: There's not a lot of luthiers here in the UK, but there is one based down in Dorchester. I live in Dorset and that's maybe one of the only big luthiers in the whole entire country, and they do these courses. You can go for two weeks.
I've always, I just thought I was gonna do it for my 30th. Never did it. But that sort of attention to detail of like sort of natural resources, making something that will be played and loved by someone.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah.
Nathan Keighley: Yeah. That would be something I would love to [00:10:00] do 'cause I know it's a lot more technical than I think it probably is and it'll take a lot of time to learn.
But I've just never I've got a 4-year-old kid, I have no time. It Time is not a thing I have in abundance. So that would be, if I had all the time in the world, that is probably what I would go and do and enjoy it.
Tom Hacquoil: I adore that answer. That is really considered and very nice and I would love to join you on that.
I have a few old guitars that are quite well made and I just have such a respect for the craftsmanship of it all. Yeah. But I also have a 4-year-old kid, but I also have no time. And so it's, yeah. We'll find a way mate. We'll find a way.
Nathan Keighley: Will, hopefully.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah. I love that. Back to the task at hand, right?
It's always interesting to me when someone goes out to the market and they bring an embedded talent partner like Scede into the fray, how do you think about that and what do you wish those clients knew, before engaging with an organization like you?
Nathan Keighley: I think this might sound like a silly answer, but I think it'll make a little bit more sense when I get into it, but [00:11:00] it's in the name, it's embedded.
What we find is our most successful clients and the clients that we're able to add incredible successes too. And Scede's motto as a business is we enable companies to achieve hiring success, and the companies where we really excel in that and become partners for years and years, and returning customers and the companies that engage with the whole of Scede.
So not just embedded, but Source and Advisory and PURPL and People, are the companies that actually let us and enable us embed. So I know if you are in-house for example, having this sort of external team come in and be a part of your actual team can be daunting for some companies, especially certain industries and certain requirements.
But letting a team like us be embedded, not thinking of us as external contractors letting us be part of the team in the standups, involved in maybe more than you would let a normal contractor [00:12:00] is where people really see a shine to what we're able to do. We're not just recruiters there delivering. We can help with everything across the board. We're so lucky to have so many incredible senior recruiters that have worked for some amazing companies. Utilize us, let us in. And we're very lucky that the near all of our customers let us do that. But it's so vital to making sure that we can come in and add value quickly and make sure that we enable you to achieve the hiring success we say we're going to do.
Tom Hacquoil: Just let us in. Like I love that. I think it's so simple, but it makes tremendous sense. I think building on that and perhaps thinking about the sort of broad range of teams that you work with, scale, size of team, industry, et cetera, like what do you think the highest performing talent functions are doing and that everybody else should be replicating aside from letting you in?
Nathan Keighley: Yeah. I. think again, all of these can seem pretty simple, but it's getting them all right and making sure you're consistently doing them all. But one would definitely be [00:13:00] sourcing. You'd be surprised a lot of companies don't have time that's a big problem we have in the industry at the moment.
The recruitment teams are smaller than they have been and they're staying small, but companies that need hires, I think they say, I've always gone by the metric that for a recruiter to do everything they need to do, it is probably seven to nine roles a recruiter, depending on what they're working on, be it tech, it can be different numbers for a thing.
It's not a direct number, but we've got, I know some recruiters, not with clients, but friends of mine that have got 30 something headcount each. And if you're doing that and actually having stakeholder management and actually doing candidate care, you can't do sourcing, you can't bolster your roles. And roles tend to stay open, a lot longer.
So sourcing. Continuous improvement of processes. I. That's the one thing I love about Advisory is that's what I work on, a lot of processes and there's no perfect process, and I think staying stagnant with processes causes a lot of problems. If not now, it really will do in the future when you forget about it.
So [00:14:00] continuous improvement on processes. Another thing I see have a lot of success, and it's something I've always done when I was embedded when I joined and I pushed before my time in embedded as well is splitting recruiters per function. It's easier for recruiters to make relationships if they're consistently working in one business unit.
So have a recruiter for marketing and finance, have one for tech, have one for commercial, and you'll see them build such stronger relationships with hiring managers and such higher influence of hiring managers there. It has a natural effect on recruitment to be more efficient. Yeah. And then training staff.
There's so many new things happening. We're seeing incredible leaps and bounds, not just in recruitment, but in technology. If you're not educating people on that, you can't make the most of the efficiencies these technologies give you. Without knowing they exist.
Tom Hacquoil: I love that. Yeah. And you've made that training point a few times and I really appreciate you doing that.
I think it, it's so true. And I think you talked about a diverse career prior to this and [00:15:00] I used to be in cloud computing and software development and the culture of training and continual professional development and just having to keep pace with the market evolving around you, it's just so ingrained in that space.
I think it's the biggest difference I observe between my kind of quote unquote old life and my life of the past eight, nine years. It's just, it takes a lot more effort to get businesses excited about training their TA teams. And to be honest, it often takes a lot more effort to get the TA folks themselves excited about the training.
And I think anything that could be done to fix that as a sort of state of play for the industry, I think would be very warmly welcomed. Yeah. But yeah. Love it. Three questions. One wild card, one AI, one challenge, right? Let's go. Cliche as it might be, it's a desert island disc, right? You're stuck on a desert island with a record player.
You got one album. You talked about music. What's the soundtrack?
Nathan Keighley: Oh, I hate this question. Oh, I don't like it. Because you have to pick one album. That's it.
I'm gonna preface this answer with the fact that when I did work in music as a session musician, I only played in quite [00:16:00] heavy bands, like very heavy bands. This is not gonna be what you're expecting me to say. I don't think you can get it anymore. I don't think it's online, but it's a version of Cat Stevens Greatest Hits, but it was from this version of it, which I've never been able to find online. My mum's still got the original CD. It's just called Cat Stevens Greatest Hits. It came out in like the late nineties, but I grew up on that album. It shaped me as a musician in a very weird way, considering the genre I played in.
But yeah, I don't think you can go wrong with Cat Stevens. It's just not an answer people ever expect from me that. Any album by TLC. Also a weird answer, yeah.
Tom Hacquoil: I like all of this. This is a great answer, thank you Nathan that's brilliant.
Much less interesting question, depending on your perspective, but you touched on it before. We can't get away with not talking about it today, right? There's a lot of hype still in AI and recruitment. I think you, you have this interesting perspective of doing [00:17:00] advisory services, talking about process improvement, talking about new technology, like all of these things play into this AI kind of shift.
What are you seeing? What's real? What's noise?
Nathan Keighley: I talked about this before publicly, and I don't think it's a controversial answer, but I think there's a careful balance with AI. I think what's real is using AI to reduce recruiter time. I said it before, recruitment teams aren't massive anymore like they were during, like the post COVID boom.
Recruiters have got more workload to do. So utilizing AI to take notes during meetings, using AI to maybe even help you source if you have no time to source. That's real benefit, that's real tangible things that AI can be utilized if calibrated the right way, especially when it comes to sourcing.
What's noise for me is you hear real kind of candidate horror stories where they've been screened by a robot [00:18:00] and that for me is something that I don't understand. I don't understand as a person who's ran teams, I don't understand as a person who's been a candidate in the past, why that would be a thing.
What people need is human connection. What people need is to know they're speaking to a real human being and candidates, at least from the research I've done, and I've looked into a lot, even in my own time, which I dunno if that's depressing to admit, but what I've seen candidates don't like is knowing that they've been declined for a role by a robot that's got a very small set of parameters.
What a lot of the tools, and this isn't all of them, obviously there might be some amazing tool in the future, of course, but what a lot of tools rely on is a job description. And if there's one thing all my years in recruitment's told me is most of the time job descriptions are wrong. That's why we calibrate with managers and we do kick off calls at the beginning and you find out half the stuff in the job description they don't actually want or don't need, or in some cases in enterprise [00:19:00] businesses, they've never even seen the job description that recruitment's using. They're like, oh, I didn't know you had a JD. Knowing that's going into a robot that's discounting human beings, I think that's noise and I think it's not something we'll see or something I hope we won't see as more of that happening in the future.
I'm all for AI, reducing time and reducing admin. I think that's a great use of it, but not for actually making decisions or interacting with people that might join your business, spend time with them, get to know them.
Tom Hacquoil: I think it's a great super articulate answer. I agree. And I, and I've agreed many times with people with quite similar approaches, which I think is great.
I guess the comment I'd make is when you were talking earlier to, in an answer to previous question, you referenced what I'm just gonna reference s the squeeze of TA team sizes, right? We know what the market looks like today. We know about the volatility you referenced earlier. We understand TA teams are not gonna get bigger anytime soon.[00:20:00]
And you said, oh and forgive me for the exact numbers, but eight, nine recs seems a good number, 30 probably seems a bit underresourced. And in my mind the first thing that happens when you've got 30 recs on your plate is that you spend less time on that iterative process internally with the hiring manager, understanding the real depth and scope of the role, getting that internal feedback loop tight.
And I think about it much in the same way of these automated AI tools, right? The first thing you are losing when you've got a smaller team and you're replacing that team with tooling the first thing you're losing is that internal dialogue. And that internal, and I gave an example myself before of a process that took nine months for the job description, changed four times 'cause we evolved it with the market that we were seeing. I just, I also share a big worry that the second you stop being supportive and start being replacement focused, it becomes a bit of an issue. Like I, I'm a CEO of a software startup business, my life is in an email inbox. I use Superhuman and I use AI and Superhuman to help tag emails and filter them for me and organize them in the right way and put them in different [00:21:00] buckets.
So I can focus on the right thing. What I don't use Superhuman for, even though I can, is have it respond to my emails for me. That's the line I will never exceed and I feel like we should think about recruitment in kind of a similar way.
Nathan Keighley: There is, there's very bright lines. I don't think it's difficult to see them.
It's use AI to make your job easier, but not to do parts of your job.
Tom Hacquoil: Again I think like the, "let us in" statement earlier, that's just a super, super clean way to encapsulate that, so I love that. Thank you. I think final question and maybe we've touched on it, maybe we've not, but I guess what do you think is the sort of single biggest challenge facing our industry in 2025?
Nathan Keighley: I think it's similar to what I've said before. I think it's economic uncertainty. I don't think necessarily a lot of people want to hear this answer, but.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah.
Nathan Keighley: This is the truth. The world we live in, yeah, we don't know what's gonna happen in three months. I don't know how much my mortgage is gonna go up, in September.
I don't know that, and that kind of [00:22:00] means automatically we're in a sort of a state of insecurity at the moment as in terms of the economy at least. So when it relates to recruitment though, like companies are being more cautious with hiring decisions at the moment, and they're trying to automate too much with AI to save costs, and balance the cost efficiency with having no office and ensuring cultural fit and distributed teams.
There's a lot going on. That kind of roots down to this sort of economic instability and uncertainty. And I think it's not necessarily only recruitment that suffers from it's all of us, but I think that definitely affects recruitment where we don't know who we're gonna hire, how much we're going to hire, what we're going to hire for.
Is our product actually going to be developed and launched this year? Are we be able to get funding? If you're an early stage business, so it's just general uncertainty, I think. I think we can see the blue sky over the hill.
Quite optimistic about the future, but [00:23:00] there's no guarantees at this point in time.
So just an age old adage, my granddad used to say, which I think everyone knows, but it's prepare for the worst and hope for the best.
Tom Hacquoil: I don't think I've got anything to add to that, so I'm not even gonna try. But that was wonderful. Thank you Nathan. It's been awesome to have you. Thank you for hanging out with me today and making it through all 10 questions.
Nathan Keighley: No, thank you ever so much for having me.
Tom Hacquoil: No sweat. Everybody else, you can follow Nathan and Scede on LinkedIn if you wanna stay up to date with what they're up to. We'll put the links to both in the show notes. If you have anybody else anywhere near as good as Nathan to join me on Talent Talks, please do get in touch. And have a fantastic day, thank you for listening.