Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Welcome to Talent Talks, quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, CEO at Pinpoint ATS, and today I'm joined by Brad Clark, Director of Talent Acquisition at Article. Not only is Brad Director of Talent Acquisition at Article, he's also been a long time Pinpoint customer and one of the very few people that we escalate things to when we want input on product or industry input, market analysis, and things like that. So super grateful for all of Brad's time and especially grateful for his time joining me today. Are you ready for some quickfire questions, Brad?

I am. Yeah, let's do this.

Cool. If you weren't in recruitment, what would you be doing? I really like product management and UX. So I like solving problems and I like thinking in terms of systems.

So I think there's some crossover to recruitment, but I think that's what I'd be doing.

Sweet. Love it. I'm sure you'd be awesome at that.

Give me the 60 second summary of the role you do currently at Article.

So I lead talent acquisition function. This also includes employer branding. Article itself is a direct consumer furniture brand. We sell in North America, our head offices in Vancouver, Canada, and then we have fulfillment and delivery locations across the US and an office in Vietnam. So we're a global company that sells primarily in North America.

Awesome. What's the number one thing you do to attract the best candidates and create a great candidate experience at Article?

I don't know if I can do one thing. I'll be honest. I don't know. if I can just say it. To pare down to one thing, we're a consumer brand and so the candidate experience is very similar to customer experience for us. And it ends up, we hire probably less than 1 percent of applicants. So this comes down to communication, setting expectations. So we spend a ton of time in writing job postings. Our communication is super important. We also have a capacity model, which really limits the number of roles each recruiter can work on. And that's really important for quick communication and just overall high touch hiring experience. So those are the two things. And the final thing, which is a Pinpoint specific one is we've got a lot of application questions with automations, which gives specific rejection emails. And that is one of the features we just absolutely love because we can actually give quick communication and specific reasons instead of the black hole of unknown rejection, but we just do not want to get into.

Sure. I appreciate the considered answer. And I think sometimes we ask this question people and the way they even respond to the question tells you everything they need to know about what the candidate experience actually looks like at the brand and yeah, I hear you loud and clear. That's awesome. If you could only pick one, what's the most important hiring metric to track as a talent team?

It's actually TA capacity. So it's a number of recs per recruiter and that if you get that right, everything else, every other metric actually just works a million times better. So that's why number one focus is how many recs per recruiter.

Nice. That makes a great deal of sense, actually, and not the answer we normally hear. So thank you for sharing that. Let's go for a wild card question. Give me a number from 1 to 10.

All right, we'll do four.

Favorite or funniest interview story.

I think myself being interviewed was pretty, when I applied at Article. Went through the interview process for final interviews with our CEO and a founder and everything had gone really smooth and he's an engineer and he just drills and drills into questions, which I like doing as an interviewer, but being interviewed is hard. And so I thought at that stage, I was like, well, I had a good run. Clearly this is not for me. And so when I actually got called back and offered the position, I was actually a bit shocked. It was a super challenging interview, but I just thought, Hey, I'm good at this stuff. I know how it feels on the other side, but at that stage I wasn't.

Love that. And how do you think that ties into your narrative around candidate experience more generally, right? Aggressive is not the right word, but that's quite an intense experience to go through as an interviewee. Does that align with the rest of the interview experience at Article?

It doesn't. Yeah, it doesn't. It still doesn't. And there's a good reason. It is a hard interview. Yeah. However, we now know this and we let candidates go in expecting this versus going in not expecting it. So we do a lot to make sure we're in the right mindset.

This is it. I'm not critical of the intensity. I think the intensity is awesome. It's exactly what you want to see. And actually some change and some dynamism in the process is quite useful. But I think I remember doing a podcast with some folks some time ago and they talked about whether you should share all of the interview questions you're going to get asked, right? And I think there's a line that needs to be drawn there, but at least giving candidates a heads up that this is what they should expect from that final stage is super useful. Awesome. Okay. What's the single biggest challenge you think is facing talent leaders in 2024?

I think the macro economy is challenging, which means more senior level ICs or just leaders are reluctant to change. If you're in a good position, chances are you're gonna hunker down and just see this through. And so hiring at a higher level is much more challenging than it has in the past, people are just resisting that idea of moving jobs. And so for us, we shifted a lot of our strategy into how and where possible can we hire within. If we were a sports team, in the past, we heavily focused on free agency and now we're focusing on the draft. It's building talent from up, everyone moving up from within.

Nice. I love that analogy. And I think it's interesting. I had a conversation earlier today with sales where the narrative is exactly the same, right? Macro economy, difficult. Challenge. Everybody parks the bus, everybody's quote unquote risk-off and they're risk-off as a prospect evaluating new vendors, they're risk-off as a candidate evaluating new opportunities. And I think that kind of tie-in with sales activity and other areas of the business is super cool, but love that draft versus free agency analogy, it makes a lot of sense. Top tip for someone new to recruiting.

If you love problem solving, if you've got thick skin you're gonna love recruitment. If you love learning, those things, thick skin, problem solving, learning all the time. You're gonna love it. If you're in it to make people happy, you're gonna hate it. You are like, cause there's people who think, Oh, this is great. It made me feel happy. And you don't make people feel happy. You solve problems for the business, but if your motivation is just smiles you're in the wrong gig because you're rejecting a lot more people than you hire, that's for sure.

To your point earlier, it's one call to hire someone versus 99 rejections, right?

Yeah.

No, that's very true. Again, the brutality is awesome and actually makes a great deal of sense. We talk a lot here about like talent should have a seat at the table and things like that. But we come back to this question around senior leadership and getting buy in from senior leadership can often be challenging for talent leaders. And what are your best practice tactics there to get senior leadership on page with what you're doing?

Yeah. The number one thing is focusing on the impact to the business. It has to be tied to the business. And I think a very underused term is employee lifetime value. And understanding that concept and understanding where on one axis, you've got time, the other one, you've got output what you're doing, where does it impact that on that timeline? And so very similar to, customer lifetime value, if people know those terms from a SaaS organisation translates right over for employees. And if you speak to them with those business terms, and you say, we're doing this because this is the impact and here's where we're going to feel it. Then that makes it like way easier versus we're doing this because this makes you feel happy. We're doing this for smiles. It's just what is the business impact?

I love that and yeah, oftentimes folks struggle with translating the work you're doing on the ground floor to the actual underlying business impact. But I think that makes that super easy. Wild card question again, 1 to 10.

Let's do number 8.

What's the worst hiring experience you've ever had as a candidate? Oh, as a candidate? Just getting ghosted sucks. Getting ghosted, not hearing back. You apply and you never even get a rejection email. That's brutal. I remember getting a rejection email four months after I applied to a job.

How long had you been in your new job at that time?

Yeah. You're already working somewhere else and you get this email and you go, Oh, wow. I totally forgot about this position. And now you're reminding me and now I'm actually upset about the whole process. It's actually worse than them ignoring you. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Honestly, I think the other one is anytime you have to apply and you have to set up a password and a profile is the worst. And I don't understand that concept of force me to put in all this information or duplicate the information because you're not even actually parsing the resume, you just go, why am I doing this? If this is how bad this system is, what do the rest of the systems look like in the organisation?

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree with you more. It's amazing the amount of LinkedIn posts that I see going viral these days that are from talent acquisition people going, if I have to apply for a job and the company I'm applying for a TA role at uses Workday and needs me to sign up for an account, I just won't even bother applying for the job because I know I've got an uphill battle the day I join, right? It's just impossible to work in that environment. But I also love, by the way, that you called that out because we spent some time earlier talking about the importance of candidate experience and communication and how you set up all these clever rules based on inputs to questions to give people quick responses, even if they're negative. And a lot of that is seemingly born out of your own frustration around seeing that as a candidate, right? And a lot of our candidate experience and a lot of our approach to employee experience here at Pinpoint is born out of my own frustrations from annoying previous experiences as an employee. And it's funny how those two correlate and how you over index on fixing stuff. I think there's this misnomer that if candidates really want it, they'll struggle through the process. And it's actually the opposite. Your best candidates are going to say, I'm out. I'm not interested in this and your lower talent will struggle through a process and. But it's abundant, the best candidates have choice and the worst candidates are willing to tolerate that sort of crap and so, no, I couldn't agree with you more. Cool. Final question. What's your favourite interview question to ask and why?

I don't have a set interview question, and to be honest I would rather ask a few questions and go deep into follow up questions. I think there's way more value from understanding why they made the decision, how they made a decision. Would they do the decision again? Who is part of the decision making process? I love to ask a handful of questions and drill super deep in a friendly way not an interrogation way, but just in an actual seeking to understand way. And so I can understand the thought process and the challenges or constraints and other things which are part of that decision versus just taking the first answer. So super focused, super tight. And then diving deep.

I love that. There's a lot more expectation on you as the interviewer to have a baseline level of intelligence and understanding to be able to do that versus I think we see a lot of pre written interview questions where they don't go deep enough, but it's relying on a sort of one size fits all approach where the bar for the interview is quite low, right? And so I love the fact that you're willing to do that work and approach things in the same way.

It takes a really good intake process and that's something like the team does is like. Invest up front get that intake understand what we're actually looking for what you're assessing and then you can dive in deep. Because if you don't have that work up front, you're not gonna be able to understand the questions and have good follow up.

No makes a lot of sense. Cool. Look Brad, that's us done. 10 questions completed. Thanks so much.

Oh I survived. Thanks Tom, it was fun.

You did survive. Thanks a lot. Look everybody you can follow Brad on LinkedIn if you want to stay up to date We'll obviously share all the links and if you want to be the next person in the hot seat, please get in touch to join me on Talent Talks. Thanks very much and goodbye.