Perspectives on Talent | Balancing EVP, authenticity, and AI in hiring

My name is Jim Holt. I'm a VP of Solutions here at Wilson. And today I'll be talking a little bit about general tips and tricks for adapting AI into your existing processes and future proofing talent processes moving forward.

So in the economic environment we're in right now, where there's very low churn and it's very difficult to hire people, whether it's because of unpredictable hiring predictions or volume predictions, or we're thinking about just niche skill sets and folks that are already working and are hard to pull out of the job-hugging mantra right now, there are a couple of fundamental aspects of the talent acquisition strategy that you really need to kind of have buttoned up moving forward.

One is what your employment value proposition, your employer brand really say about you. How authentic are they to the process that you're executing, to the employee experience once those people come on board? And then once they are on board and they are working with you for a long time, how much long-term truth is there versus sort of the short-term excitement and the honeymoon period that exists when you think about things like ⁓ talent mobility, when you think about things like skills development or utilizing things like a skill tree. So kind of backing up a authenticity, I think has been a buzzword since, gosh, it really kind of came into vogue in 2019, 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic and thinking about, you know, gosh, like, you know, with everything that's going on in the chaos of our country, like, are we really being inclusive? Are we really being supportive of our employees and and what's going on in this chaotic social and health environment. But I think that where a couple of organizations have started to really kind of lose their way is they fall into the trap of leveraging buzzwords or leveraging buzz topics as part of their EVP and their employment brand. And maybe not necessarily doing the work to carry those through into certain aspects of the business. I think it's particularly tricky in more traditional industries, like if you think about manufacturing or if you think about financial services, where it can be hard to turn the battleship in terms of hiring manager behavior, ⁓ learned behaviors, as folks kind of atriculate up the organization or come in from different other organizations within your industries. I think it's very important to constantly do a little bit of a pulse check around, are the things that we are saying in terms of trying to engage and attract people to our organization really reflective of what we're doing in a day-to-day sense? Or once they come on board, is there the potential to have a disconnect between the employee experience, the candidate experience, and overall long-term kind of a managerial or executive experience?

I think there are couple of steps to kind of maintain authenticity in either a digital first or a digitally augmented or an AI augmented recruiting process. The first thing is your people are always your greatest asset. And that's been true going back to the days of literally, hey, we're hiring at the plant. Go tell your friends and family and bring them here and let's have them out an application. Let's get to work. Same thing with alumni networks. Same thing with encouraging people to give testimonials or to leave good reviews on certain platforms. Or again, just telling their friends in professional and social settings different conferences they're at. I really love working for Company X. Like, here's how they've taken care of me. So I think that your own people, your own, and not just your top performers, but think about the people that quote unquote maybe fall through the cracks when you think about sort of your workers, your doers, like your makers, like those people are going to be your biggest advocates in the market. Conversely, if they have a bad employee experience, they'll be your biggest detractors. Very few people get on Yelp to write good reviews. They're very helpful when they write good reviews, when it comes to restaurants and things like that, but you always have to keep in mind that like the negative reviews will always kind of shout louder and kind of drown out some of the positive noise.

So utilizing your people and doing things like video content with your top performers around, this is why I love working here. This is the culture that made me feel welcome. This is why I chose to come here from a competitor and being able to utilize that, not just on your website, but sending it out, being proactive about, we're looking for people like this woman engineer. We're looking for people. in these categories, these hiring categories, these role types to come and join us and to join this culture and have them speak about it versus it being a series of five buzzwords on the website can just speak volumes to what you actually wanna say out there. And at that point, I think it becomes easier to start to bridge some of that digital divide with folks where it's, well, what's the real story? Like, what's the real experience? I also think that as we continue to see hybrid work and remote work continue to be factors at some companies, you may not always go on site for interviews. You not be able to get a feel for the vibe as you're walking around the office and see people and what's the culture look like and how do we interact with these people. So thinking about things like ⁓ maybe not necessarily shadowing, but if you're going to have prerecorded meetings that don't have sensitive company information or there's a fun event. and you can kind of stitch together certain clips and kind of create a quilt about here's some fun things we do. Again, photos of volunteer events and having people that are doing charitable things for your company are one thing. Every company does that. How can you really work to stand out and make your employment value proposition, your employer brand stand out in this type of hiring environment where there is zero churn? Anything you can do to be proactive in terms of communicating that authenticity and not waiting for people to go find it somewhere on your website is critically important, I think.

So as we think about where technology plays a role in terms of authenticity or in terms of quote unquote future proofing your processes and your authenticity moving forward, I think it's really important to consider what the tool is doing and the types of people that it's interacting with. So whether it's a point solution in terms of handling some of the initial outreach and some of the initial knockout screening, or whether it's a broader based end to end solution where in theory, a candidate doesn't have to speak with an actual human being until they're ready for onboarding. I think it's really important to think about and consider just again, what that human experience is going to do and what does that platform really reflect in terms of your organization? If you talk a lot about, touch and sort of a either a family or close knit environment, having less people to talk to during the recruiting process may not necessarily truly reflect. those values and what you hold true there. You also have to think about, again, is the candidate population that you're working with, is this a candidate population that's comfortable with this type of a technology and these types of interactions? Something as simple as looking to the camera versus looking at themselves on the screen, or if they tend to look off in different directions, is there answering questions and does that trigger a fraud alert or not? Are they comfortable understanding some of the potential negative ramifications of not interacting with the technology properly, and or are they just comfortable interacting with the technology, period. It's very, very rare in any industry or any role type that somebody says, the recruiting process was great, but I wish I'd talked to less people, or I wish I'd talked to nobody at all. There's still that craving of human interaction, real-time feedback, and particularly when you're gonna do a job market like this, where things are very, very tight and people feel very much under pressure from an economic standpoint, or they potentially have been searching for a job for a long time and are feeling the pressure personally as well as professionally to fill that gap in their resume and to once again sort of become an earner It can be very tricky to have some of those aspects of interaction and feedback be taken up by technology. We see it all the time on LinkedIn. So many posts about I was ghosted or the tool ⁓ didn't interact with me properly or there was some miscommunication or anything that potentially is going to add additional wrinkles to your recruiting process or potentially negatively impact either your employment brand or your consumer brand needs to be carefully considered before implementing any sort of AI tool.

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