Veris Insights – Is It Easier To Hire A Data Scientist Than A Corporate Recruiter With Hannah Moore And Syeda Younus

Music: (00:00)
This is RecruitingDaily’s Recruiting Live podcast, where we look at the strategies behind the world’s best talent acquisition teams. We talk recruiting, sourcing, and talent acquisition. Each week, we take one overcomplicated topic and break it down so that your three year old can understand it. Make sense? Are you ready to take your game to the next level? You’re at the right spot. You’re now entering the mind of a hustler. Here’s your host William Tincup,

William Tincup: (00:34)
Ladies and gentlemen, this William Tincup. And you are listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast today. We have returning guests, Hannah, and Syeda from Veris Insights. And our topic today is one we went back and forth on email. And it’s just a funny topic. But it’s a serious topic. RecruitingDaily did an event on this in March, recruiting recruiters and recruiting HR because there’s so much demand. But the topic today is, is it easier to hire a data scientist than a corporate recruiter, question mark. And we’re going to unpack that and just jump around and explore the topic. So, Hannah, would you introduce yourself? And Syeda, would you do the same thing. And then also introduce Veris Insights?

Hannah Moore: (01:22)
Absolutely. So I’ll kick us off. Thanks so much for having us again. Always love doing these. And this topic is near and dear to me as a former recruiter. So my name’s Hannah Moore and I lead our Experienced Recruiting Member Experience Team here at Veris Insights. Essentially, I get to work with over 50 Heads of Talent Acquisition on some of their biggest challenges and priorities of the moment. Recruiting recruiters or recruiting talent acquisition professionals being one of those challenges right now. And we both, Syeda and I, work with Veris Insights. Veris Insights is a recruiting intelligence and analytics advisory firm. And we’re really dedicated to providing Heads of University recruiting and leaders of talent acquisition on some of the biggest candidate sentiments in the moment.

Hannah Moore: (02:13)
Our main goal is to help those leaders attract, engage, and recruit top talent. We go out, we do extensive candidate, and employer data surveys. That’s where Syeda and team comes in. We aggregate a lot of those results and bring them back to the leaders to help move the needle on things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, their interview processes, competitor, best practices, et cetera. So really excited to be here and I’ll kick it over to Syeda to introduce herself.

SyedaYounus: (02:43)
So I’m Syeda Younus. I am a Senior Project Manager on the Experience Recruiting Council Research Team. And what I do is I typically lead our long form strategic studies. We recently did one on recruiting tech talent, where we looked at data scientists, in particular as well as other groups. And I’ve been with Veris Insights for about two and a half years and have just really enjoyed my journey here and researching these really interesting topics and talent acquisition. So excited to have this conversation today.

William Tincup: (03:14)
So I’ve seen a bunch of my friends, in fact, in every day in LinkedIn, I get to see everyone’s changing jobs, like left and right. Which is good. Fantastic. Also, I can see that the other side of that is, “Oh, those jobs are now open.” Which is growth, or could be potentially growth for people internally to take on those positions. But what are y’all seeing from just an attrition perspective with corporate recruiters and talent acquisition, in particular? And we’ll just start with your insight and want to get your input as well.

Hannah Moore: (03:54)
So actually, one of the new tools that we just rolled out looked specifically at macro labor trends. So looking at various economic indicators to look at the movement, the volatility, and just longitudinal trends within the labor market. And what we’ve seen, especially over the last year or so, is that job openings are at a pretty high rate. And when we look at the percentage of candidates that are being hired or the total number of candidates that are being hired, there’s still a really, really wide gap. So if we go back to 2020, when you look at the number of job openings and the number of hires, there’s not really a gap between the two. They’re pretty in line. And what that told us was that organizations were able to find talent and there maybe weren’t as many jobs as there are today. But then when you look at the data from last month from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you’ll see the gap is pretty wide between the number of jobs that are open and the number of candidates that we are hiring.

Hannah Moore: (04:51)
And what that tells us is there’s a lot of competition right now. Even with some of the hiring freezes, the layoffs, the offer rescinds that we see, there’s still a lot of competition. And we’re seeing a lot more candidates are voluntarily exiting the workforce. So they’re really stepping back. They’re evaluating their jobs, their work-life balance, what work means to them. And that’s causing a lot of people to leave jobs without jobs. And recruiters are unfortunately not immune to that. They are definitely folks that are reevaluating what work means to them, especially as req loads have increased quite a bit. And one of the interesting things that we see is, now more than ever, because requisition loads are increasing, because organizations are hiring at pretty high rates, recruiters and their work is heavily impacted. They run really lean. They were already running lean before this competitive market. Throw that into the mix. And now you’ve got the perfect storm

William Tincup: (05:56)
And Syeda, what are seeing from your team?

SyedaYounus: (05:59)
Yeah. So actually, something that we typically do throughout our pulses, our monthly check-ins on candidate sentiment is we ask about how open people are to changing employers. And we actually found that throughout most of last year, recruiting professionals were more open to changing employers than other candidates. And that blasted through with many recruiters reporting very high openness compared to other candidates. And we’re also seeing that there’s more competition, in terms of, compared to other talent groups that we’re seeing. That two out of three recruiting professionals are being actively recruited while in their current role compared to… As you were talking about data scientists about like 55% or something along those lines.

William Tincup: (06:47)
This is fascinating on so many levels because in 25 years, I’ve never seen this. So it’s fantastic. I love it. I love it especially for the people that I care about in HR and recruiting. But it’s also chaos. Because a lot of people haven’t seen this happen before. I mean, technically it has happened before. I just haven’t seen it on this level where people are leaving, A, without jobs. They’re just leaving because the job they’re in is too hard. It’s soul crushing. Or they just can’t make it work either through technology or process. Or it’s just an unwinnable battle. Or they’re leaving because there’s money being thrown at them. And I see that part too. I’m sure y’all have witnessed that as well.

William Tincup: (07:38)
It’s someone just is going to give you 50, 75, $100,000 more to do the same job at a different place. And I guess the question that I have is, why do you believe people are leaving? Like what’s the drivers of why people leave a job right now? Or corporate recruiter in particular. What’s forcing them to leave? And what do you see things, on the other side of that, that’s attracting them to a new gig? And Hannah we’ll start with you. And Syeda, we’ll close with you.

Hannah Moore: (08:15)
Yeah. So I’m going to take a little bit of a different spin. Syeda may talk a little bit more about the compensation piece. But when I think about a lot of the drivers, I’ll go back to something. I mentioned a little bit earlier. I think all candidates, recruiters included, are really evaluating how much time and energy they want to dedicate to work. I think 10 years ago, there was very much this hustle mentality and that’s what you needed to be successful. And I think a lot of people are realizing that there’s so much more to life beyond that nine to five job. And that’s, what’s really causing this reevaluation. I think for recruiters now, from our latest study that we did, there are a couple stressors that we know are really weighing heavily on these folks. And they’re feeling like they’re not being supported.

Hannah Moore: (09:07)
So I think a lot of recruiters, when you think about what stresses them out, what’s driving them to leave. There are a couple things that stand out. One that we’ve heard quite frequently is just a lack of access to career growth. A lot of recruiters feel like, “When I’m a recruiter, if I’m good at my job, I’m stuck at that job.” So if I’m a tech recruiter, that’s all I’ll ever be. And unless my manager’s role opens. Which there’s only a few of those, I will continue to be an individual contributor, tech recruiter because that’s what I’m good at.

William Tincup: (09:39)
Real quick on that point, Hannah. Growth in terms of width and breadth in depth. Is it growth in terms of them learning new things, but staying in the same title, but just learning new things? Or is it career opportunities to grow internally from Manager to Director, VP, et cetera, like that type stuff? What type of growth is it? Or is it both?

Hannah Moore: (10:02)
It’s both. I was going to say it’s both. So it’s the opportunity to be able to grow in terms of promotions, higher titles, things like that. But it’s also just being able to lean into other parts of the business, new challenges. So for example, one of the things that we’ve heard that’s a great practice is one of the firms noticed that their recruiters were really burned out. And this was something that they said, “I do the same job. I’ve done the same job for X amount of time.” And so one of the things they’re trying to do is take some of their high performing recruiters and create what’s called a SWAT team. So allowing those recruiters to get trained up on every part of the process. That way they can lean into diversity sourcing if that’s where the support’s needed or they can lean into tech recruiting if that’s what business needs, extra support. So really making sure that recruiters are being challenged and they’re not feeling stagnant or stuck in their role is one piece.

William Tincup: (11:05)
I love it. And Syeda, what are you seeing from your perspective?

SyedaYounus: (11:10)
Well, we’re also seeing that there’s definitely as Hannah spoke to, we’re seeing high burnout among recruiters. About one third of them that we found in our research who are reporting feeling stress that is interfering with their productivity. So feeling burnout at least once a week. So if we can think about what’s pushing people, probably some of that stress around burnout is going to be a [inaudible 00:11:35]

William Tincup: (11:35)
Syeda, too as I interrupt and then apologize for interrupting. What’s driving burnout? What do you all see as the underpinnings of burnout? Is it the reqs? The number of the reqs that they’re carrying? 15 to 30? Is it the reqs are staying open? It’s just a harder job. Like you got to go and get full stack developers, which is impossible these days. What’s driving to burnout?

SyedaYounus: (12:04)
I think that both, I think we’re seeing that like the volume of the req load is pretty high end causing stress with more intensity. And the average that we found in our latest benchmarking is 28 per recruiter. And that probably is going to remain pretty high and with the way that the economy is looking. And then we’re also seeing that even with those req loads, establishing some efficiency, trying to have them filled in the time that is being requested of them. All of that is placing more intensity onto the recruiters. And I think contributing to that burnout.

William Tincup: (12:45)
Perfect. Perfect. And Hannah, do you see anything different out in terms of what’s driving some of the underpinnings of burnout?

Hannah Moore: (12:52)
No, I think that’s spot on. I think the one thing I was going to add is recruiters have shared lately. And what we saw in a lot of our study, in our study in December, was that this time to fill. This has been a metric that they’ve been measured on for quite some time. But there’s so many components of that are outside of their control. i.e. How long a hiring manager might take to schedule an interview? Or get back with feedback? Or how long a candidate may want to take in between roles? And so I think that really reevaluating the metrics that you’re using to measure recruiters could be a great way to mitigate some of that stress and burnout that they may be feeling right now with those time to fill metrics.

William Tincup: (13:34)
So I’m not a huge believer in stay interviews. So I’ll just admit my bias up front. I don’t believe in exit interviews or stay interviews. I don’t like either of them. But how does an employer have a finger on the pulse of their corporate recruiters to figure out, “Okay, I got to get in front of this. This is going to be a problem. It is a problem. I got to get in front of this.” How do they figure that stuff out and then start programmatically working to address it before it becomes burnout? And yeah, Hannah, you take it. And Syeda, you take it away as well.

Hannah Moore: (14:12)
Yeah, it’s interesting. This is a topic that we just looked at recently. How managers can better support their employees across all functions, not just across talent acquisition. And one of the things that came up was simply asking the questions frequently. A lot of times as firms, we don’t solicit feedback from our colleagues enough. It might happen once a year, twice a year. And to your point, it doesn’t always need to be in a formal setting, like a stay interview that may take additional time on the calendar. It could just be an internal survey. So sending out a survey to your recruiters. Trying to get an understanding and a handle on what is contributing to their stress and burnout. Because it could be different based on the firm and the technology and just the req load and the variety of roles that they’re filling.

Hannah Moore: (14:59)
Both from a quantitative perspective, collecting data, but also potentially having a few leaders sit down one to one. And do individual interviews with the recruiters, just to see, are there any themes that are continuing to arise? And I think it’s a win-win. One, it helps you as a firm, really get a handle on what is contributing to your recruiter’s stress. So you can fix it. But the second is your recruiters then feel heard, which that’s something that we saw quite frequently. Recruiters a lot of times don’t feel like their work is appreciated. They feel like they get pushed back on a lot. And so feeling heard and feeling supported is one of the great things that could help retain them right now.

William Tincup: (15:42)
Love it. And Syeda?

SyedaYounus: (15:45)
I would just echo that. I think feeling heard, feeling like their managers, their direct leadership really cares and cares enough to proactively check-in. Something that we do at our firm that I think has been really helpful in managing feelings around work-life balance is we do calibration check-in. So each weekly one on one, a manager will proactively ask about like, “How is your workload feeling?” Obviously asking usually means there’s an expectation for doing something about it. So I think that is a step that people really need to think about as they are checking in. But I think with everything that Hannah said, just feeling like their perspective is cared about and heard.

William Tincup: (16:27)
So Syeda, I’ll come back to you and ask you this question. Do y’all see anything different for corporate recruiters in terms of hybrid work, remote work, in person work, anything like that? Is there something more or less attractive with corporate recruiters in a different work styles?

SyedaYounus: (16:47)
Absolutely remote work is actually huge. I think we ask candidates about how important different factors are for them to accept an offer. And recruiters are 15 percentage points more likely than all other candidates to say remote work options are up there. And they’re actually willing to forego salary increases to have more expansive remote work options. So I think that would be a really big.

William Tincup: (17:12)
That’s massive. I see the same thing. And it’s interesting. I just read a study that was talking about fresh grads and they’re saying two out of three of them are saying no to remote work. Which is fascinating and in reading the report and getting to the final the analysis was that they’ve had enough of remote. They’ve been virtual for so long that they want to actually be in person there’s this desire to be in person or going to an office commute, whatever, all those things. That if someone wanted me to go to an office, I mean, for any amount of money, I don’t know if I’d go. And I see that in a lot of my corporate recruiter friends as well. I guess some of it might be the amount of time they’ve spent in recruiting. So for those that have spent a lot of time in recruiting 10, 15, 20 years plus, I don’t see them going to offices. But y’all are the experts. So Hannah, do you see anything different with remote and hybrid?

Hannah Moore: (18:20)
No, I think I would agree. It’s interesting because even when I think to some of our data that we’ve pulled on the university recruiting side of the house. Which is the house where we survey students. What we see is candidates all around. They just want the choice. So they want to have an office there available to them to be able to access and go in. But then they also want to have remote work as an option. So they don’t want the employer to have to decide for them as much as possible. They want to be able to stop to decide if one week I want to go in on Monday and Tuesday. But the next week I might want to work from home Monday and Tuesday. That choice is ultimately going to be one of the most appealing options to folks today.

William Tincup: (19:03)
Okay. So now let me ask, and Syeda, I’ll start with you as well. We’ve talked about some of the underpinnings of why people are leaving. I wanted to ask you the question around tech, like the stack of technology or the budget for technology. And also the way teams are calibrated. And you use that word in a different context. So we’ll use it differently here. But like the way that if you’re going into an environment as a corporate recruiter and you’ve got 10 sources versus an environment where you’ve outsourced you’re sourcing to a provider, et cetera. That might be more meaningful to one recruiter as over another. So if you seeing anything that’s either driving recruiters out or attracting recruiters either on the technology side or the way the team’s laid out.

SyedaYounus: (20:02)
Yeah. I think that the choice of tech can definitely be an attractor or a deterrent. Because I think having to work with that doing administrative tasks can often be a part of a recruiter’s work. And if it’s taking a longer period of time and having to deal with the different tech and lots of different functionalities, that’s going to take away from some of the things that recruiters really value the most. I think we think a lot about folks as people. They come in to make those connections and build those relationships. And so I also think that in terms of team structure, if there are ways to appeal to those recruiters who are looking for that connection. And make sure that some of the admin tasks are more automated or made more efficient, that could be an effective way to appeal some different styles.

William Tincup: (20:53)
I love that. Hannah, what about yourself?

Hannah Moore: (20:58)
Yeah. I think one of the things I go back to, so we looked at all of the factors that contribute to recruiter, stress and burnout. And we looked at how often they’re happening. And then when they do happen, how intense they are in terms of contributing to stress. And two things came up that were surprising to me. But also really great tools for organizations to use to improve. One was that a lot of recruiters right now have the responsibility of sourcing their own candidates. So trying to figure out should you have a centralized sourcing function, especially for some of those niche roles. That could eliminate a huge burden off recruiters.

Hannah Moore: (21:38)
And then going back to your point about technology, what’s interesting is one of the things that came up, it doesn’t happen as frequently, but when it does, it’s really intense in terms of stress, is just having a lack of access to technology to make their roles more streamlined. So to Syeda’s point, that could be as simple as getting a tool that’s going to review resumes, getting a tool that’s going to take some of those administrative burdens off of recruiters. So they can be more talent acquisition, strategic business partners with their hiring team.

William Tincup: (22:15)
Yeah. I see the same thing with automation that a lot of recruiters are seeing. Instead of having a candidate scheduler, I want a bot that does all that stuff. So I need the budget. So again, going into an organization, it’s funny. Because in marketing, we do this bit where if you’re taking a CMO role, one of the things that you review is the previous two or three years marketing budget, and then you build your own. To get a CMO job, that’s actually one of the things you do is you go through this budgeting experience. So that you’re on the same page of not only strategically where you’re going to take marketing. But tactically, where you’re going to spend money in marketing. And I’m seeing more of that in TA. Where there’s technology that they’ll avoid.

William Tincup: (23:05)
Like it’s just harder and I am not going to name names or any of that type of stuff. But it’s just harder. It’s a harder job. That job is the same. But it’s harder because the technology that’s been purchased before them. And I see more due diligence from TA professionals. Again, the higher you go up, the more the due diligence around what am I inheriting from a tech stack perspective? What do I have flexibility around? And what’s the budget? Et cetera. And are y’all seeing some of the same things?

Hannah Moore: (23:38)
Yeah, I think there’s always a risk with new technologies. There’s so many legalities with recruiting and I think that sometimes can be where the hesitation comes in of what if we integrate a new technology and it backfires. It doesn’t work. It hurts our diversity, bias creeps in things like that. And so I think really doing the due diligence on the front end could be important before integrating. But the second thing we’ve been hearing a lot about recently, and it’s probably because of how competitive the market is right now. There are so many vendors that exist. And so how do you cut through the noise to know which vendors, which tech platforms are actually going to be useful for our process?

William Tincup: (24:27)
And Syeda, first of all, answer that question. And I’ll ask you a different question.

SyedaYounus: (24:35)
Sure. So we’ve definitely heard from leaders. And as a best practice to ask some of those questions when you are evaluating vendors about, is this actually going to make the work easier for my recruiters? And it makes sense the question to ask. But it also is one that is not often asked. So I think that is definitely a consideration.

William Tincup: (24:53)
So thank you that for that, by the way. The question I wanted to ask you is, what what do you see if a corporate recruiter is going to change job? Let’s say they’re burnout for whatever reason. They’re at a place they just want to change jobs. What process should they go through in order to evaluate? Because here’s where the question comes from is years ago. So the data’s changed. But let’s say one in two marriages in divorce. So second marriages the number is actually like 68%. And as you study that, one of the things you find out is a lot of the baggage of your first marriage goes into your second marriage. So the success rate is much lower because you didn’t deal with what was wrong in the first marriage, et cetera. And again, we’ll put all the numbers aside. The point is you’re basically taking what didn’t work into a new relationship. So if a corporate recruiter is leaving a job in essence, they’re leaving a relationship. And they’re starting a new relationship. What advice would you give them, Syeda, to start off that new relationship in the right way?

SyedaYounus: (26:14)
That’s a really great question. And do you mean what advice would we give to the recruiters?

William Tincup: (26:19)
Yeah.

SyedaYounus: (26:20)
Gotcha. So I think we know that engagement is a really huge driver of like satisfaction and of wanting to stay at your role. So if we’re thinking about why do people leave and not repeating that, there’s definitely that lack of engagement. And you have to balance that out with burnout and having too much engagement to an extent. But I think being proactive about engaging in their role. Really asking, making sure that there is what are some of the things that make someone less engaged and really being proactive about seeing if those resources exist at their new role. So things like career growth opportunities, bringing up those conversations early on, getting a gauge on how one likes to feel appreciated, and trying to have those conversations with their new leadership about like what is a style that works for me to keep me more engaged. And I think having more leverage as recruiters now there’s a greater position of power to have those conversations.

William Tincup: (27:24)
I think so and I think that first of all, we can handle this response. But I think the error is out of the bottle. I think that we don’t go backwards. I think one of the things that corporate recruiters have learned about this, not just about leverage-able moment. But the layers of questions that they’re going to ask before they get into another situation is going to be a bit more. What I love about it is they’re going to ask tougher questions about the job, about what really happens at the job. ‘Cause oddly enough, corporate recruiters, in general, don’t take the advice that they give candidates.

Hannah Moore: (28:02)
So true. It’s so true.

William Tincup: (28:06)
So it’s like, they’re not great at actually doing some of the things that they give advice to candidates. So Hannah, what do you see?

Hannah Moore: (28:15)
No, that’s that’s exactly. I was going to jump in and say, because we are recruiters, we know when recruiters are selling you versus when they’re being authentic and transparent. And so I take a step back and say, “Before you decide to leave your firm, or before you jump into a new opportunity, really think about what are the top three or five most important things to you? Is it comp? Is it flexibility? Is it career growth? And make sure that you really vet all of those things out throughout your recruiting process with the new firm. Both from the recruiter, also from someone on the potential team, you’re going to be working on. Make sure that you’re getting an authentic view and response to each of those questions before you dive in head first in a new opportunity.”

William Tincup: (29:05)
I love this. What do you think your favorite corporate recruiter interview question is right now? Both of you are like what?

Hannah Moore: (29:17)
No.

William Tincup: (29:18)
So I’ll tell you what mine is.

Hannah Moore: (29:20)
I love it.

William Tincup: (29:21)
And then give you a little bit of time to think about what yours would be. Mine is, we’re all misunderstood. How are you misunderstood?

Hannah Moore: (29:33)
I’d love to be a fly on the wall for some of the responses that you get.

William Tincup: (29:40)
True. Syeda what’s your favorite interview question?

SyedaYounus: (29:43)
That is a great question. I think one that I love that we ask here is, what is something that’s not on your resume that you’re proud of? And I think it really-

William Tincup: (29:53)
Nice.

SyedaYounus: (29:53)
-elicits some of those skills and strengths that you build that you’re not necessarily seeing in your job description. So I think that’s a good one.

William Tincup: (30:02)
Hannah?

Hannah Moore: (30:04)
Yeah, I would say for me, just because work-life balance is the number one most important factor for me. I always ask, what does work life-balance look like for you? And I always can tell if it takes them a really long time to answer, that’s a red flag for me. But if something right away comes to them, that tells me it’s a priority.

William Tincup: (30:22)
That’s right. That’s right. It’s a tell, which is wonderful. Y’all this has been great. Time has flown. And I appreciate the time with you each time we do this. So thank you so much for carving out time for us.

Hannah Moore: (30:34)
Yes. Thank you so much for having us.

William Tincup: (30:36)
Absolutely. And thanks for everyone listening to the RecruitingDaily podcast. Until next time.

Music: (30:41)
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