The gag is simple: One magic wand, one magic wish. What would you do to change the Talent Acquisition landscape to make it better? We were at HR Tech 2022 asking industry leaders about their opinions on this crazy industry and how to improve it.
Joveo Customer Experience and Marketing Shehzad Karkhanawala talks with William Tincup about moving away from an intuition based approach. We should be using data to determine hiring metrics, and not force people to use guesswork to determine candidate quality.
Shehzad also is concerned with humanizing the candidate conversion. When these potential candidates get into the “funnel” how do we make sure they don’t get lost? The right level of communication and content is important to keep them in a conversation with us.
This #HRTechConf 2022 series was hosted and brought to you by our friends and partners at Joveo!
Announcer (00:01):
You’re listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast. We are recording from HR Tech in Vegas. Thanks to our friends and partners at Joveo. We are talking to some of the best minds in HR and business and digging into the most pressing issues in the workplace, so you don’t have to. Here’s your host William Tincup.
William Tincup (00:20):
Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup. We are broadcasting live from Joveo’s booth at HR Tech and I’ve got Shehzad on with me.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (00:29):
Hello.
William Tincup (00:29):
Shehzad, would you do us a favor and introduce yourself?
Shehzad Karkhanawala (00:32):
Absolutely. So I run customer experience and marketing at Joveo. My role involves making sure that we are delivering a world class experience to all of our clients. And at the same time, looking at the presales part of the experience as well for all of our prospects and making sure that our brand gets out there. We’re generating demand, working across the teams to delivery company.
William Tincup (01:01):
Love it. I love it. Okay. Shehzad, I’m handing you a magic wand and if you could change anything about talent sourcing, what would you change?
Shehzad Karkhanawala (01:11):
Well, there are so many things I would change about talent sourcing.
William Tincup (01:14):
I know, I know. And you have a magic wand, so you’re good.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (01:17):
I do have a magic wand. I think the number one piece that needs changing is, how do we move away from an intuition based approach to decision making when it comes to recruitment, when it comes to talent sourcing, when it comes to identifying the different sources that drive candidates or volume of hires across the different job roles that you’ve got? When we move away from intuition and then we move towards a more data driven approach. When we look at metrics all the way across the funnel versus just the traffic or the number of clicks or the number of applications. When you do look at the number of hires, when you look at retention, and then you factor those metrics into your decision making and what sources do you want to make those investments in? I think that would do all of the talent sourcing ecosystem, a huge service as well as the candidates or the job seekers.
William Tincup (02:31):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (02:31):
Because that’s reaching out to the right job seeker with the right content when they’re looking, where they’re looking. And that’s basically the fundamentals of marketing in general.
William Tincup (02:41):
Right. Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (02:41):
So that would be number one. I think a close number two would be humanizing the job seeker conversion piece or the candidate conversion piece.
William Tincup (02:56):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (02:56):
Which is what happens after they see their first ad? When they get into the funnel from a recruiting marketing context.
William Tincup (03:06):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (03:07):
When they fill out the application form or they just sign up to something. How do we make sure the job seeker doesn’t get lost into a black hole? Communicating with the job seeker, engaging with them, sending them the right kind of content, the right level of content. Personalizing some of that with, I know today we’ve got chat bots and conversationally AI and all of that good stuff, but how do we make that process more human? How do we innovate personalization at scale?
William Tincup (03:44):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (03:49):
Making that conversion funnel, making that engagement piece a lot better is the other thing I would change.
William Tincup (03:56):
Do you know what I love about both of the things that you’re solving for? Is we’ve solved them in other aspects of our life. Like in ad tech or in other parts of our lives we’ve, they’re gotten pretty sophisticated, right?
Shehzad Karkhanawala (04:10):
Yeah.
William Tincup (04:10):
Google, other resources, they’ve gotten pretty sophisticated. But for some reason we haven’t pulled through some of those best practices into recruiting and in talent sourcing and into recruiting, and even at HR, by the way. So it’s pulling the stuff that we already know that works and pulling it, repackaging it, instead of think of consumer candidate. Well, you can switch out consumer and candidate and you pull those things through.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (04:37):
Yeah, and I think there’s a few things about how our ecosystem is evolved over time that has something to do with that. And so I think there is a need to, and I’ll share one example of that, right? So let’s say in our ecosystem, when we’re looking at downstream sources, when we’re looking at job sites, there’s something called latency.
William Tincup (05:02):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (05:05):
So even when you pause a certain campaign, it’s still the campaign is still running for another 24, 48 hours because there’s email scheduled.
William Tincup (05:15):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (05:15):
There’s this text messaging campaign scheduled that are supposed to go out.
William Tincup (05:18):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (05:19):
In the consumer advertising world, when you look at programmatic display campaigns, when you say stop a campaign pauses in a hundred milliseconds, right?
William Tincup (05:28):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (05:28):
And so when you include factors like those, I think there, there’s a need to go back to the drawing board when it comes to things like that. When it comes to attribution logic today, it’s extremely difficult to have accurate tracking on impressions that a certain job gets.
William Tincup (05:43):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (05:43):
And so you’re of course able to measure the click, but then how do you go one step backward to see, well, what are the number of impressions.
William Tincup (05:49):
Right.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (05:49):
What’s the click through rate that you’re seeing on specific jobs? And so when you’re looking at some of these things in the consumer ecosystem, I think there’s a need to really take some of those learnings and look at what that ecosystem used to look like in the mid two thousands probably, right?
William Tincup (06:12):
Yeah.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (06:12):
And see how we can rebuild certain parts of how ecosystem from that standpoint.
William Tincup (06:17):
Yeah. We’ll leave the bad stuff behind and pull the good stuff through and then innovate on top of that.
Shehzad Karkhanawala (06:22):
Exactly. Yes.
William Tincup (06:24):
Drops Mic. Walks off stage. Shehzad, thank you so much. You’ve been wonderful.
Announcer (06:30):
You’ve been listening to the Recruiting Daily Podcast. Live at HR Tech, graciously sponsored by Joveo. For all other HR recruiting and sourcing news, check out recruiting daily.com.
The RecruitingDaily Podcast
Authors
William Tincup
William is the President & Editor-at-Large of RecruitingDaily. At the intersection of HR and technology, he’s a writer, speaker, advisor, consultant, investor, storyteller & teacher. He's been writing about HR and Recruiting related issues for longer than he cares to disclose. William serves on the Board of Advisors / Board of Directors for 20+ HR technology startups. William is a graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham with a BA in Art History. He also earned an MA in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona and an MBA from Case Western Reserve University.
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