Rebuilding and Reinventing the Workforce w/ William Tincup

In HRchat episode 215, we welcome William Tincup back to share his take on how candidates are getting to grips with the 'now normal' and some ways that companies are reinventing themselves in order to thrive in the future.

William is the President/Editor-at-Large at RecruitingDaily and a member of multiple boards of advisors. At the intersection of HR and technology, he's a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's written 100s of HR articles, spoken at over 150 HR & recruiting conferences, and produced over 1000 HR podcasts.

Listen to the interview with William and discover: 

• What job roles are still in demand despite this topsy-turvey year? 
• How has the pandemic driven innovation in recruitment? 
• Adapting and anticipating the skills gap thanks to workforce planning: what are the challenges for leaders and HR as they look to rebuild their workforce?
• What sets Millennials and Gen Zs apart? 
• How and where can firms attract top Generation Z candidates? 
• Embracing the art of video interviews: tips for candidates preparing for virtual interviews
• How has 2020 changed the priorities of employer branding? 
• How will reward strategies change after the pandemic has passed?

This podcast episode is supported by Virgin Pulse, the employee well-being solution that helps employees create habits that matter so they can be their best at work and at home.


We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared in this episode are entirely independent of our show sponsors. There is no relationship between the guest and companies advertising within the podcasts published by The HR Gazette or our partners.   

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the HR chat podcast, bringing the best of the HR and talent communities to you.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Welcome to another episode of the HR chat show. I'm your host today, bill Banham. And in this episode, I am delighted to say that we're welcoming back William Tincup and we're going to talk, all things do with recruitment and technology. William is the president at recruiting daily as a member of multiple boards of advisors at the intersection of HR and tech. William is a writer, speaker advisor, consultant, investor storyteller, and teacher he's written hundreds of HR articles spoken at over 150 HR and recruiting conferences and conducted over 1000 HR podcasts.

Speaker 1: 1:03

This podcast episode is sponsored by Virgin pulse. The number one global employee wellbeing solution provider supporting seven and a half million members in 20 languages across 190 countries. Virgin pulse offers solutions that deliver on their Homebase for health vision of simplifying and unifying other point products into a better together ecosystem and transform the mental, physical, financial, social community, and emotional health of organizations and their people. You can learn more@virginpulse.com.

Speaker 2: 1:41

William, it's my pleasure to welcome you back to the show, sir. I'm happy to be here, bill. Thank you for having me on. And I should just add as well, listeners, um, William, uh, I saw him present one session once where he used one slide for out the whole session and it stuck with me and it's still one of the best presentations I have. And so, um, what are your, what, what, what what's going on? It's been a while since we, since we spoke it, it has, um, you know, I think, I think, you know, obviously we were in the midst of COVID boom, God only knows how long it lasts. I do see a bit of the ice, uh, you know, uh, cracking a little bit and people looking at technology, they're looking to hire. In fact, uh, I have a girl tweaked to me yesterday. She's got 80 open recs and two recruiters, so completely overwhelmed with now that they've reduced staff and reduce their hiring a team and all that stuff. And now she's got to hire a ramp back up and, you know, literally another recruiter with her. So she's got 40 recs, a person. So yeah, that's a good thing on one level like, okay, hiring is happening again and hiring has been happening throughout this process. Um, but, uh, but Oh, okay. Now, now what do we do? How do we kind of get back into the business of, you know, hiring sourcers and recruiters and how do we, you know, bring that talent back on board. I'm starting to see a bit of that, you know, cracking and that's a good thing. And, uh, I'm, I'm happy that I'm seeing some of the technology purchases and implementations. So it's not, it's not the breakneck pace that we were, you know, uh, accustomed to in December and January early January. Uh, but at the same time it is happening, uh, hiring never stopped, uh, especially for some industries hiring, just ramped really, really far up. But for a lot of folks, obviously with, uh, you know, in America, as many people that went in to an unemployment, uh, and put in an, a number of people that are employment unemployed right now, these are our numbers. Um, but, but I w I think we are starting to see some of that starting to, uh, to kind of come back a little bit, which I'm excited about. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 4:01

Hopefully there's, um, there's a big rebounder moon. I talk about, about that later on William, but, um, I wanted to pick your brains. You, you recently hosted, uh, the HR TX virtual summit back in, in early September 9th and 10th. I think it was, uh, you hadn't selected 18 at the highest rated trainers that you've worked with over the last 12 months. Like the awesome Carmen, Hudson and Katrina Kalia who, uh, the audience over in the UK will be aware of. And he built a virtual sourcing event around them. Uh, the event attracted over 3000 attendees, tell our listeners all about it.

Speaker 2: 4:37

Yeah, it was, it's a really interesting concept because what we wanted to do is not just do topical training. Um, so our events are our training and not conferences and the difference being a real tactical things you can use tomorrow, whereas conferences as you well know, some of it's intellectual, it's academic, it's trying to get you to think, um, et cetera, these are, these are really tactical things, but what we wanted to do and what we achieved in September was, um, you bring a rec. So the audience gets to bring a wreck that they have opened and the sourcers then take that wreck and show people how they would source for that wreck. So it's real specific, you know, when people would show up with, I'm looking for a software engineer, Topeka, Kansas, with three years of, you know, defense department, uh, experience, okay. So then, you know, Carmen or Jair they would, or Katrina, they would, didn't take that wreck. And right in front of people, show them how they would then go and try and find candidates for that job. And so it was a lot it's, you know, live in front of people and not training based on a topic like we're, we're, we've done a lot of training, you know, how to, how to source from Facebook, how to source Tech-Talk, how to source from Instagram, you know, those types of topical sourcing training. Those are great. And those will continue to be great. This event. We want to, over two days, we wanted to do something completely different where we said, okay, audience, you bring, you know, your hardest challenges to this group of people, these 18, you know, expert trainers, and then let them show you what they would do with that in real time, right in front of you. And it was magical.

Speaker 3: 6:27

Okay. Wonderful. Thank you very much. Uh, I'd like to get back to talking a little bit about the, the jobs market with you now, um, we'll, we'll try and make this a positive interview today, William. Um, but we, we, we should, we should talk about, you know, the way things look right now and, and how a lot of people can get out of a sticky situation and how recruiters and managers can confined combined the best talents. Um, paint a bit more of a picture for me in terms of what's happened since February, March to, to the job market. Um, and how is it rebounding now? So w w we recording this interview and, you know, towards the, the, the latter part of, uh, of, of 2020, um, people are hoping that by, by the holiday, he's at the latest that they're back in work and, uh, employers are hoping that they've got all their processes in place with a future proof, the gangster potential second wave, just talk to your audience for a minute or two, if you don't mind about what the heck's happened, but, but also what they can expect to see.

Speaker 2: 7:35

Well, I think, you know, from my perspective, I think one of the things that you get is, um, you, you, you get from a knowledge worker perspective is you've got an opening now that we've proven to ourselves that for the last, you know, X number of months, we can do a job. If it's outcome based, we can do a job from anywhere in the world. And that what, that's, what that's the, the, the miracle that just happened, that we're probably still not consumed yet, is that now you can apply to jobs anywhere in the world, and employers can hire from anywhere in the world. Whereas before we would have looked at jobs, if, you know, if we were in Toronto, we would look for jobs in Toronto, uh, because we would occasionally go into the office or occasionally meet for the team and things like that. But over these last year with COVID, uh, we've learned that, you know, you can substitute that with Uber conference or zoom or other Slack, other types of communication and collaboration tools where you can work anywhere in the world, and that's changed employment. I believe that concept has changed employment forever. Now we can literally work with knowledge. Workers can work from anywhere in the world. So the aperture of hiring and for candidates from both sides. So now hiring managers or recruiters and sourcers can look at a much wider aperture and candidates can look at a wider, much wider aperture, which will help hiring because now people, instead of thinking that they have to hire within a certain geography or zip code or postal code, now they don't have to, and candidates will do the same. So the good news is we would have eventually gotten to this place. COVID sped all of that up for us. Um, so it's, you know, a lot of people were sick. A lot of people, um, you know, passed away a lot of hardships with recessions. And so, okay. All that being said, and, uh, not to just, you know, not to, not to diminish any of the, the, those things, we've gotten to a much better place employment wise, because now we're not tethered to location. So the upside for everyone listening is that, you know, your, your prospects, your future prospects for jobs now just got much brighter and much wider, uh, than, than they were, let's say, December of 19. So I think there's a tremendous positivity to that, that we haven't quite at earth yet because, uh, of all the things that are going on in 2020 and have gone on in 2020, um, I think, you know, I think one of the things that, you know, with, with, with that is that companies with, through, um, you know, they kind of reacted maybe even overreacted at the beginning of COVID and cut deep. And the idea was instead of doing a thousand tiny cuts, make one drastic, cut and hope you don't have to cover again. Um, and you know, time will tell on whether or not that was a great strategy or not, but hiring when you, when we hire those folks back in, I don't think that they're going to come back to the office and the way that, that the, that we did in December of 19. So the office itself, again, kind of in parallel with what I said before the office itself is going to be an interesting thing. We were, we thought the office was culture. And what we've learned is that culture isn't the office per se culture is, is the communication, collaboration, uh, and interactions with, you know, all of our team and all of the, of the human beings. So, you know, I think what's going to be interesting is its office is going to be working at the office is going to be optional, and which is going to, again, again, be a great freedom for candidates and employees to then be able to work where they want to work and how they want to work. So if they want to go the office, let's say, give it to kids under five, and they've got a nanny. They want to go to the office so that they can kind of go and be away from that great. Or they're extroverts, you know, they want to go to work, but if, again, if they don't want to, they don't have to. So again, I think it's, I think it's when, as we see these waves of hires that come back in whether or not it's sourcing and recruiting or marketing, whatever those, whatever those positions get, come back in first, I think it's going to be optional. Like I remember reading a study and indeed put out in 2017 or one of the keywords key phrases that were searched was remote work. And this was three years ago, and this was one of the top five phrases that was on there that people were looking for. Will that, that's gonna be the number one phrase that people look for post 2020, is it, you know, whatever the job is, can our work remotely period, if I can't, I'm not going to apply. So it's going to change the way we think about work again from a, you know, from a, from a perspective of, uh, do I need to be at that office or do I just need to be able to do the job?

Speaker 3: 13:00

Let's, let's, let's talk a bit more about those people who will be, um, entering the workforce. Um, and, and let's maybe break it down into two groups, William, uh, those, those with prior experience and perhaps those who were, uh, just about ready to enter the workforce for the first time or following an internship. Um, so the, the, the, the gen sets, um, in terms of those people who would be reentering the workforce, what's changed for them. What, what skills perhaps have been taken away, and now we're going to be, um, replaced by machines by AI, um, have been, or mentored in some way. What does that mean for that group in terms of needing to, um, up-skill before reentering our position and, and, and throwing in the, um, them, the gen Zed as well? What does it mean for, for, uh, the gen Zetas who are entering the workplace actually, is this going to be a huge competitive advantage to them? Because they would never have known anything else. Okay. So, um, there there'll be going in, I'm expecting to be a bit more agile in the, in the way that it works. Um, in, in terms of working in an augmented environment, um, uh, being prepared to maybe take, um, they take a role, which is perhaps more, um, uh, an uncertain, it might not be a direct employee role. They might, they might be jumping in from the gig economy standpoint to talk to us about that, those two different groups with very different expectations,

Speaker 2: 14:38

Gen Z, being digital natives to your point are not threatened by technology. So I think your, your intuition is spot on. Um, they're, they've, they've up with Siri, they've grown up with the internet. They can ask Google anything they want to, they're just not things that are automated, things that are, uh, ubiquitous, uh, are natural to them. And so they're not going to see them as a threat. Okay. So the, so the upside for gen Z is technology and enablement and automation, and all of those things, none of that is a threat to them. They don't even see that as a threat. It's not even on our radar. The downside for gen Z is, is simple with a recession. You have compaction, you have people that used to have, let's say a director role are now doing a manager role or managers that are now doing a coordinator role. And so just getting into the workforce is going to be the hardest part, uh, because you have overqualified people above you that have come down to take the positions below you, which used to be your entry spot. Uh, so that's going to be the hardest part is just getting a job, but the job itself not intimidating. And again, anything technology related is not going to be something that they, you know, that, that overwhelms them. So for them, there's a plus minus not intimidated by technology, harder to get the job because of the people above them already have five, six, 10 years of experience, um, with those folks that were let go or, um, that stayed on, they stayed on and it took lower roles, uh, just to stay on and keep benefits, et cetera. Um, the folks that they're their biggest challenge, let's just say, that's, you know, other generations other than gen Z, uh, their biggest challenge is again, where do they thrive? Do they thrive in the office? And in that collaboration that happens there, or have they thrived in a world of zoo, uh, where it's outcomes based. And so the thing for them is when work changes, if you will, let's say we're past COVID or post COVID, where are they going to thrive is making sure that they understand, I thrive best in this environment, whatever that is in the office, partially in the office at home, we're working from the other side of the planet, whatever, where do I thrive? And then the second question that you asked was, uh, technology. Uh, and, and where do they see technology as a friend or foe? I think most of the folks will look at technology, especially AI, machine learning, et cetera, anything that automates the job. I think they look at that and they see it for what it is. It's not a fret. It does things that they probably shouldn't have been doing, and didn't want to do like scheduling. Like, you know, if you schedule something ever again, that's, that's a problem. That means that, you know, you, you probably need to be retrained to do something different because there's technology that can do that for you. So they're going to see it as they should as like, okay, these are tools that will help me do the job that I can then go and spend time doing other parts of the job that, that technology is not enabling. So strategy, you know, things like that. Like, I look at HR and I say to myself, you know, HR is fighting fires every day. And if you can give them some of their time back with some of this technology, enablement and automation, well, the now they can be, they have their time back. They have some of their time back, they can go be strategic and they want to be strategic. So I think, I think, yeah, there's a plus minus on both sides.

Speaker 3: 18:36

I'd love to hear from me now. William, what do you think has changed as a result of Corona virus in terms of innovation within recruitment, whether that's, um, uh, fast tracking, certain types of recruitment technology, you, you mentioned using a new sources, such as tick-tock earlier on, um, please in your answer, go beyond the, the ultimate embracing video interviews for recruiters. What are some of the, yeah. Beyond the video, but what are some of the big changes we've seen middle six months?

Speaker 2: 19:06

I think people are looking at the, the micro experiences, like every type of experience that a candidate can have and how can they make that better. And also how can they make it more candidate centric? So a candidate, like, what do you want, what do you, what questions would you like to ask? How do you want to interact with the team? Makes such a, um, so I think that, that people have dug deep, even in an employer driven market. I've seen a lot of articles. I've seen a lot of conversations or heard a lot of conversations, and I've just seen a lot of technologies that are now trying to leverage the candidate experience and make it more personal to them. So that, what do you, what do you, what would you like to get out of this experience? Because we're trying to get to fit. And I think that's ultimately what we've seen the growth in, uh, in, in recruiting technology is getting to fit faster. So how do we get to fit candidate, employer? How do we get to fit faster? Um, and so this is kind of how do you attract and repel simultaneously? How do you get to a point where you, the candidate can say, no, that's not a job for me. That's that doesn't fit me. Or the employer says, now this is this, isn't a good campus. It's not a good fit. So how do we get to that faster? And both have a great experience. We want our hiring managers to have a great experience. We want to recruiters to have a great experience when our sources have a great experience where candidates have a great experience with any executives they interact in hiring. We want them to have a great experience. So it's, everyone should be able to get out of this, what they want. And at the same time, um, everyone have a great experience.

Speaker 3: 20:50

I'd like to talk a little bit about in employer branding in terms of projecting an attractive employer brand, what what's been the challenge for organizations during, during the pandemic. And do you think that the, the bar has been lowered or raised in, in, in terms of how companies need to show themselves towards potential, uh, candidates towards potential hires? And what I mean by that is, um, you know, like you said earlier on, um, that, uh, it's an employers market right now. Um, so maybe they don't need to try so hard or actually, maybe it's, it's the reverse, uh, in, in a, in a crisis like this, you've got to set yourself apart as a, as an employer of choice for when, when the market does rebound,

Speaker 2: 21:33

This is the perfect time to act like it is a candidate-driven market. So what I mean by that is, uh, this is not the time nor the place to regress into old habits where we treat the candidate poorly. Um, and the reason, main reason for that is it isn't going to be that long that this is this way a and B that we live in a much more transparent world that we did the than the last time that we had a recession. So the last time we went to the great recession here in the United States, um, you know, it was less social was there, but it wasn't as ubiquitous as it is today. So one of the things I would tell people is you need to act like you're in a hyper transparent world. Yes. There are more people applying to the job, uh, than there was in December. Fantastic. Treat them, treat them carefully and be nice to them. And in all ways, shapes and forms that you can so that, you know, again, just because there's more people that apply, you're going to want to, you're going to want to have great relationships with those folks. And again, maybe not for that job that moment, but you're going to want to build those relationships for the moments in which you need to go and hire a thousand engineers. You know, in, in one quarter, you're going to will have great relationships with people that's predicated on how you treat them. Now, if you treat people well, now, when you don't have to, then they're going to remember you and you're either going to have a positive brand experience. And so I, my advice to employer, brand and recruiters, um, right now is just act like it's still December of 19. And don't let your mind, even though you're having more people apply to the job, don't let your mind slip into bad behaviors.

Speaker 3: 23:23

We are coming towards the end of this interview, William. Um, before we wrap things up, tell us a bit more about, uh, recruiting daily. What, what was happening over there at the moment? Have you got any more events coming up? Uh, you've got some pretty amazing podcasts which are getting launched all the time. Uh, tell listeners a bit more about all the things that they can check out over there.

Speaker 2: 23:42

Yeah. The, the podcasts are great. Uh, I do a lot of topical podcast, uh, which are just fun taking on specific topics and kind of tearing them down. I'm doing a podcast called the use case podcast, which is really, I'm trying to get at the heart of how people buy technology. So like, what is the process, you know, when, when the vendor's not there, what happens? Um, so that's kind of a fun bit. Um, we have two events, one in November, one in December, uh, again, training events, uh, sourcing training events in particular and, uh, always looking for great content. So if anybody would like to write about, you know, opinions, uh, or things that they have going on, I always like, I always like people that challenge kind of the status quo. Like, I don't understand why we do it this way. Like who decided that, uh, so I love those types of articles, but things are things you're on. Well, it's a, it's a good time to be in talent acquisition to be studying town acquisition, because there's going as you have, you already alluded to there's so much change there's technology changes, process, change, collaboration change, and just a massive employer driven market candidate driven market. You got scarcity and surplus got all kinds of fun stuff going on. It's just a really good time to be in talent acquisition. And William, how can our listeners connect with you? Are you on LinkedIn? Do you tweet a bit, you all have a Tik TOK by the sounds of it, uh, one of the best ways to get in touch. Um, I am, I find, I make it very easy for, to get in touch with me. So just tin cup had recruiting daily.com, but if you just put my name into Google, um, you'll, you'll be able to find me all the way to my cell number. So it's, it's actually really, really, really super easy to find me. And I'd love to talk with anyone on the vendor side or practitioner side William. Um, I've had the pleasure of interviewing, I dunno, well, over 200 guests so far in this show. And, um, I, I just wanna, I just want to say to you today, before we wrap things up, I've got so much respect for you. Um, your voice is so powerful within the industry, and I just want you to keep doing what you're doing and listeners, if you haven't checked out William and all the wonderful things they're doing over at recruiting daily in the past, where have you been get over there? They are. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, my friend, I appreciate you and appreciate your audience and listen, this, that just leads me to say for today, a big thanks to William and thank you T to you, the audience as well for listening, and until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 26:20

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