Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Tom Hacquoil: Welcome to Talent Talks. Quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, CEO at Pinpoint, and this is a bit of an experiment for us. It's the first edition of a new series speaking to a whole range of folks in the TA community. Our first guest slash guinea pig is Jim D'Amico, director of Shoreside Talent Acquisition at Holland America Group.

Thanks for joining us, Jim.

Jim D'Amico: Thanks for having me.

Tom Hacquoil: No, thanks a lot. I'm going to ask a bunch of questions related to recruitment, a few wild cards we're going to throw in there. And the aim really is just to keep this super short and sweet. Are you ready for some quick-fire questions? I am ready. Awesome.

We'll start with a fun one to ease us in. If you weren't in recruitment, what would you be doing?

Jim D'Amico: At this point in my life, I would be thigh-deep in a beautiful trout stream, fly fishing for trout all day.

Tom Hacquoil: That is awesome. Give me the 60-second summary of your current role.

Jim D'Amico: Sure. So I lead what's called Shoreside Recruitment so you see Holland America, but I don't recruit for the ships.

So my teams recruit for our corporate roles, as well as our expansive land-based operations in Alaska, where we hire 4,000 seasonal roles every year to support that. And then I also oversee recruitment marketing and our TA systems.

Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. What do you think is the thing that kind of sets you apart at Holland America Group in terms of candidate experience?

Jim D'Amico: So I think it, what comes through is that the folks that work for our organization are very passionate, not just about the company, but about our industry which is obviously cruising and it's very guest experience-focused. So we want to be able to give our candidates that same level of joy and experience that our guests receive, and I think that really comes through.

So our candidate journey should feel very much like a guest journey.

Tom Hacquoil: I like that. Yeah, that makes so much sense, actually. If you could only pick one, what do you think is the most important hiring metric for talent teams and why?

Jim D'Amico: Hiring velocity, which is not something that's super common out there, but hiring velocity is the number of positions open versus the number of positions filled in a given time period.

So we use a rolling 12-month time period, but from a TA leadership perspective, what that allows me to do is to make sure that we are not creating a surplus of open rocks that we're actually keeping ahead, which also allows the business to plan for the activities that they need to do. They have a level of confidence that will keep up with the roles and not continue to create or continue to have a surplus.

Tom Hacquoil: Sure. No, that makes perfect sense. We're going to jump to a wild card question. Give me a number from 1 to 10. If you could only interview one person, dead or alive, who would it be?

Jim D'Amico: George Patton. 100%. My hero.

Tom Hacquoil: Good shout. Rogue choice, but I like it. I like that a lot. Back to job stuff, right?

Single biggest challenge facing talent leaders in 2024. You had a kind of controversial or slightly different answer to the tiring metric. Do you have a different perspective on talent challenges?

Jim D'Amico: I think that the challenge we're going to have this year for a lot of TAs, really, what does AI mean to us?

What should AI do? What shouldn't it do? How do we integrate it into our business? There's so much apprehension vagary around the AI capabilities, but we're also in a position where we can't ignore it. So we're going to have to step up and figure that out this year. And

Tom Hacquoil: just digging into that a little bit, like how are you thinking about figuring that out?

What advice would you give to folks looking to upskill in that arena and think about reincorporating AI into their strategy?

Jim D'Amico: I think you have to understand what problem you're really trying to solve. And to realize that AI, like any other technology, is not a panacea. So think specifically about specific problems or actions that you want to solve for and work step by step.

Don't think that AI changes everything. Change one thing at a time.

Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, no, I like that's good advice. Speaking of advice, like what's your top tip for somebody kind of entering the talent acquisition space as a junior?

Jim D'Amico: Don't learn the tricks of the trade, learn the trade, take the time to really understand how TA works and at the same time, understand how your client, your customer, your employer, whatever it is, how they make money because you exist to help enable that and so you need to understand how the mechanics of them making money works.

Tom Hacquoil: I love that. Yeah, we've spent a lot of time talking to folks recently about sort of talent acquisition becoming more strategic and that is a consistent theme, right? This gap in understanding and competency between the TA folks on the ground and what's actually happening commercially within the business and like bridging that gap I think you're completely right super important. One more mark wildcard question one to ten.

Jim D'Amico: Four.

Tom Hacquoil: What interview question do loads of recruiters ask that they should immediately stop asking?

Jim D'Amico: Tell me about yourself.

Tom Hacquoil: I read somewhere recently that people basically say, tell me about yourself because it buys them time to actually think about an intelligent question and or to read the CV that they haven't yet prepped for reading.

So I think I completely agree with you. It's nice to hear you say that. You talked a little bit earlier when we were talking about metrics and this hiring velocity concept, I thought was a really nice way of again, bridging that gap or closing the gap between what you're doing in TA and the perspective of the business from strategic leadership.

What tactic would you recommend for TA folks looking to get buy-in on your kind of talent strategy plans when you're looking and talking to senior leadership?

Jim D'Amico: It's all about data. Businesses don't make decisions based on their guts or based on what they think might work. They want data. So when we look for buy-in, what we're doing is we're making sure that we understand what our estimated return on investments are, how we're going to measure that, how we're going to report on that kind of discipline, that kind of attention to detail is how you get that buy-in.

That's how any function within a business gets buy-in.

Tom Hacquoil: No, makes total sense. But again, We always still see folks really struggling to bring data to the table in those conversations, right? Either they don't have the systems or the tools or frankly, they just don't know what data they need to arm themselves with and so yeah a recurring theme we're seeing a lot and great to hear you say that.

10th and final question. We've talked a lot about interview questions, stuff not to do. We've talked about Patten. What's your favourite interview question to ask a candidate and why?

Jim D'Amico: So I interview a lot of leaders and my favourite question is to ask them to tell me about a time when they had an underperforming employee, how they knew they were underperforming, how they approached it with the employee and what the end result was, and the reason I like to ask that question of leaders particularly is.

We always want leaders whose focus is on developing their people and great leaders can turn around underperformers through coaching, inspiration, teaching them how to do things differently. So when I ask that question, that candidate has two paths that they can choose to go with me. They can talk about a time that they did that, or they can tell me about a time they followed a PIP process and exited somebody.

And I think that's very telling. Which choice they make.

Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, I know that makes sense. And I think I love the colour that you added to that, right? Cause I think there were a bunch of underlying questions in there, but the bit that I miss other people saying is how did you know they were underperforming?

I find that piece specifically super interesting as well, right? Because just the whole kind of systems and framework and assessment piece gets encapsulated in their answer to that question. I love 'what revolutionary truth do you strongly believe that almost everybody would disagree with you on?'

I think that makes people super uncomfortable. But it's really interesting to get under the hood of how people frame things and what their answers to that are but I love that.

Jim D'Amico: I'm stealing it.

Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, I'm sure you are. Yeah look, we've made it through 10 questions. Jim, thanks so much for joining me. You can follow Jim on LinkedIn if you want to stay up to date with all the great work He's doing we'll link that in the show notes. Stay tuned for more editions in this series And if you're a recruitment leader or know someone brilliant in the space that we should be talking to, please get in touch with us to join me on Talent Talks. Goodbye. All the best.

Jim D'Amico: Thanks, Tom.