Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Talent Talks. Quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, founder and CEO here at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Joe Atkinson, founder of PURPL. PURPL's a peer to peer learning platform built by Talent Acquisition for Talent Acquisition. Joe's turned his own experience as a recruiter into a business designed to help the industry level up. Joe, thanks for joining me today. You ready for some questions?

Looking forward to it, Tom. Thanks for having me.

Okay, cool. Let's get going. Give me the 60 second summary of what brought you to found PURPL in the first place.

Yeah, so I've tried to build the product that I would have loved to have when I was a recruiter. So I was recruiting in a small team, recruiting for small teams. And I found that recruitment training generally has been split between agency and in house, and that's about as far as we've gone. Whereas my experience recruiting for very early stage companies is recruiting for a 50 person SaaS is not really the same at all to recruiting for a 10,000 person pharmaceutical company. There's some common best practices across all of recruitment, but then there's a lot of nuance and difference. On top of this, I generally hate L&D, which is quite ironic. I know, but I've started an L&D based company, but I found it super hard to engage with people who maybe did recruitment 10 years ago and have become a trainer. That's just my personal preference. I wanted to learn from the people who are actually scaling the companies that I look up to right now, like what's actually working in 2024, not what worked in 2014. Try to combine those two things. And as you mentioned, build something by talent acquisition for talent acquisition and actually get insight from the people inside those companies.

Makes loads of sense. I think a couple of comments from my side is A love what you're doing B. I think it's funny. I'm not a talent acquisition person by background, right? I'm a geeky engineering dude. And I think you speak to engineers and you speak to marketers and the sales folks and every other facet of the business, and there's all these kinds of very obvious, like learning and development platforms are like, I also hate this kind of blanket term of L&D, but there's obvious winners or there's obvious places to go. And I spend so much time now speaking to TA folks, and I'm always super interested in where they're going to upskill and get better. And there isn't a particularly consistent and to be honest, often just not a very good answer. And so I think, yeah, like massive opportunity and couldn't agree more that the market looks very different today than it does when a lot of the content that's used actually was produced. So no, I think that's awesome. Digging into the detail a bit more on the content and the actual kind of trend lines, what's the sort of big thing recruiters should be doing to actually upskill today.

So I think a big one for me from speaking to, hundreds of ICs, but also their managers is data literacy. So I think there's a big opportunity. We've got tech providers, ATS's who now provide amazing functionality in terms of data and reporting that you can pull all kinds of amazing reports and get loads of insights. That's great for a TA, a head of TA, VP of talent, who's probably going to have the insight to take some action on those, but I think that becomes a lot more valuable if your ICs can actually take action on those, so that taking it into their meetings with hiring managers. They're using it to inform those discussions. They're using it to inform their next sourcing session. So I think it becomes a lot more powerful if the whole team understands data. And from my experience, there's often a big difference in maturity from org to org about how well the IC recruiters understand data and can take action on it. So I think data literacy is probably right up there at the moment.

Yeah, again, to be honest, couldn't agree with you more. Obviously I'm slightly biased as a resident nerd, but I think it's been interesting to watch that the composition of talent teams change in terms of job titles, and I think, again, without over linking the two, like watching sales and marketing over the past 10 years. And, I have these job titles like, rev ops manager or analytics people or sales ops and marketing ops, et cetera. You're starting to see those things over the past few years become more prevalent in talent teams, right? We see a lot of people ops, a lot of people analytics and things like that. And that's great. But I think oftentimes the mistake is made that you bring like the one person who actually understands how to use data and pull them into an existing team. And it doesn't really have the impact you want. And so I think anything we can do as an industry to support people actually knowing how to use data at scale would be awesome. Like just changing track a sec. So obviously your background is predominantly in talent in a bunch of ways, right? But if you weren't in the talent space running PURPL today. What else would you be doing?

Good question. So I think before I started recruitment, I spent a year in Australia and I was playing and coaching cricket which is obviously an amazing experience. So yeah, maybe I'd be on a beach somewhere and coaching junior cricket. If I if I didn't land in recruitment.

Yeah, that's like a much more interesting answer than most people say, fair play. I think if we look at what PURPL was founded to do, right? Like the focus is on offering recruiters somewhere to go learn and develop, like where are the barriers to actually making that happen? And what are you seeing getting in the way of businesses adopting things like that?

Yeah, so you mentioned like sales earlier, and I generally, I think we overcompare recruitment and sales, but I think for this question it's quite a good comparison when we look at sales enablement. So there's a couple of things. One they have tools. Gong is one that springs to mind where you record calls, you get analytics from it and then two on top of the tools, they've also got processes. So they have maybe time dedicated in the calendar for the teams to come together, to share their knowledge. It's also like a safe space. So people are okay being vulnerable, saying what they're not good at. And you can learn from whoever's best in the team, that particular skill. So I think sales are quite well set up in tech orgs, especially for tools and processes that raise the bar in talent, I don't think we really have both. So there's not many tools supporting the enablement and there's often not time put away in the calendar for reflection, self improvement, sharing knowledge amongst the team. So I think those are a couple of. Open goals for TA.

Yeah, look, it's really interesting. And again, I know we keep breaking the rules and comparing sales and recruitment, maybe a little bit too much, but I also find it interesting because I speak to a lot of people at the moment in TA teams where people seem to still see talent acquisition as this function that you can easily stand up and stand down. And obviously we've seen a lot of layoffs and budget reductions and other things in the market where you've not necessarily seen the same degree of cut in sales, because I think everybody at the top tier seems to understand the correlation between sales and business performance much more than they do between people and business performance. And I think it's interesting thinking about how easy it is in principle for a board or an executive team to justify an investment in things like sales training, but how people are too short sighted to see the equivalent for recruitment, right? It's a difficult market. Moving on a bit. We talked a little bit before about the difference between what the market used to look like and what a lot of the content available from a training perspective was built within. What's the biggest challenge facing the industry in 2024?

So I think we probably all agree the TA industry is in a bit of a weird spot right now, like on one side. We're seeing these massive cuts in budget and headcount. On the other side, there's still this kind of expectation of delivering better hiring outcomes. So there's a big focus on candidate experience and quality of hire at the moment, are two metrics always spoke about which seems a bit of an imbalance. So it's often described as do more with less. And I think that's the biggest trend we're probably seeing at the moment. Yeah, a couple of ways we support with that. I think one generally raising the power of IC recruiters is generally going to help with that. But more specifically, we've got training on like prioritisation and understanding and aligning with business priorities, which, it's always important, but I think it's particularly important at the moment.

No, that makes perfect sense. And you actually answered my next question, which was just like, how are you guys thinking about building content to support that I think before we dig into some sort of bigger picture stuff, like love to just go off on a different tangent on you personally. So first and foremost, like, where are you going to learn an upskill as a founder? Cause obviously you talk a lot about your experience in the TA space, but you're also running a business now. And like, how do you think about that and where are you going and finding support and education?

Yeah, so definitely no expert on this topic. I'm trying to fail forward. So yeah, learning as I go. Community has been a big one for me. I'm a solo founder and that has been tough at times. I've actively sought out some communities of folks in similar positions and, I think that really helps just even if you're not learning from them, just having people around you who are going through the same thing. And again similar to what we spoke about before I've got time in my calendar each week to learn something, which is going to help me and going to help the business. Yeah, probably over indexed on that for a while and joined too many communities and I've reeled in a bit and found the ones which are more helpful for me, but that's been the biggest thing just having a few people around me who are in my corner and I'm in theirs as well, I would say.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think the key thing really is just making sure that advice and that content is fresh and relevant to today's market. Again, we keep talking about this delta between the recruitment market of old and of new but the level of change there is equally represented in the founder community, right? And the difference in terms of expectations and fundraising and recruitment and other challenges facing founders, even in the past 24 months, it's just markedly different. And sometimes it's very difficult to work out whether that blog or that advice or that, Podcast you're listening to or watching is still relevant today? It's a real challenge. And yeah, props to you for sticking to the community piece.

Yeah. I think on that, you can do too much. Sometimes the best thing is just to go to market with something quickly, see if it works, if it fails, and then try again, that can be quicker than listening to 10 podcasts on something. And that's probably something I've learned as well.

For sure. It's probably borderline sociopathic, but I think my biggest skill is just learning to ignore people. I'm very interested in gathering a really wide net of advice. But I feel quite good at ignoring it and just doing the thing I was going to do anyway. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't, but it is easy to get that overload, right? And if you just listen to every piece of contradictory advice, you'd never do anything. There's a lot of skill in disseminating that. Thinking about you again, before we round out the recruitment piece, like you talked about playing cricket before, and I think that is quite surprising, but is there anything else that people would be quite surprised to learn about you?

Good question. I guess before, even before that just to stick on my career, cause it's top of mind. I worked for an egg company before I got into recruitment. So that's probably a little bit niche and yeah, it was in business operations and supply chain. So I think that's how I've become quite process driven in some things. Again, I think everyone has a weird path into recruitment, right? And that was mine, egg company, cricket, recruitment.

I love that. And I think it is so common rightly or wrongly to see people in founder positions or in recruitment positions, especially in the startup ecosystem today, where they've only really ever worked in startups. And I think there's like a huge amount of personal development and value to get exposure to different industries or in sports, eggs, et cetera, et cetera. That's an eclectic mix. But that perspective is super, super valuable. And I don't think we should diminish that. So I think obviously you had a bit of perspective on a bunch of things before you moved into recruitment and then you've been in recruitment for a while now. And you've seen kind of different sides of the coin if someone's entering the space for the first time, like what's your kind of low hanging fruit advice you'd give them?

Yeah, this is probably an obvious answer, but I don't think it can be overemphasized and it's just nail the basics. I think as a recruiter, you're going to spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. And unless you're some kind of superhuman you'll end up scrolling the feed of LinkedIn like we all do. And you might come away with the feeling about, you need to know a thousand different things and complex topics from thought leaders going down the rabbit hole of various different topics, but I think if you can source well, manage candidates well, and manage stakeholders well, then you're on to a winner in your first few years of recruitment and probably would be better spending loads of time really perfecting that process versus jumping on to some more advanced topics, which is easy to do. It's very easy to be drawn to those things, but if you can really nail the basics even to like a senior level, then I think you're doing well.

I actually love that. Look, we've had a lot of answers to that question. I think that is probably the best. And I like, I know it's without being disrespectful. I know it's like a boring answer, but it's the right one. And I think, yeah, if you can get the basic stuff, everything else is a winner, right? It's the same like looking at the ATS markets, very congested space. There's millions of features. Everybody's building and shipping. I think if you don't get the fundamentals you don't make it easy to manage candidates and push them through a process. Everything else is irrelevant, right? You're polishing a turd. And so I totally get that. Okay. So rounding us out kind of two bigger picture questions, one on the market and sort of one on. On PURPL specifically. So talk to me about the future of recruitment. Like, how does it differ from today? And what do you think the trends of the future are looking like?

This is the the million dollar question, isn't it? I think that the way that it's going is like more tools, more tech, more automation seems to be seems to be what we're going to be faced with. So I think, that's coming, but what's key is like, how do we manage it? And I think there's a couple of things. One is we need a stack of tech, which works together. We need a suite of different tools that are all going to be complimentary. I think it's a bit of a shame that we've seen like the rec ops role really take a hit, when the market's taken a hit, because I think that role is super important to have someone who sits over and manages that tech stack and then. I think complimentary to that, something that's becoming more and more important now is quality of data, because we're going to have so much, we need inputs for all these tech and tools. But if the inputs come in bad, then the output is going to be bad as well. And again, that this probably links into that, that rec ops type person who would manage that as well. Yeah, I think those two things probably.

Makes a lot of sense. But I think in support of those, because it's one of the things I sometimes find interesting is people like yourself who have a big macro strategic perspective are often interested in talking about and learning different things to people on the ground in the tools. And I guess if you look at the content that you've got available on PURPL at the moment, what are the most popular topics folks are digging into and learning?

Yeah. Data and stakeholder management are by far our two most popular ones. And then we have a general mix between everything else from, interviewing, DI, sourcing, all the others are, pretty even. Specifically on the most popular courses, we've got effective prioritisation is right up there. Measuring for success with Luke Eaton about how to manage your data. And also building candidate centric processes with Mike Bradshaw. I should call that one out as well. That one's been super popular. But yeah by far data, stakeholder management are always popular when we do something around those.

Cool. Yeah, makes a lot of sense and big props to Mike. I guess finally, any kind of stuff coming up in the pipeline from a resources perspective beyond the awesome stuff you just referenced that people should be looking out for?

Yeah, so we're going through a bit of a rebuild 2.0 of the product right now, where we're moving all the content we have into a new format that I can't say too much about now, but we'll be able to soon, which I'm hoping is going to be more engaging and move the needle even more for ICs. So yeah, I'm going to be quite boring on the answer, but I would say look out for the stuff we publish in about a month's time, I think.

Awesome. Great politician answer. No, look, it's not. It's super exciting and wish you all the best. I think what you're doing is awesome and look forward to learning from it myself. Look, that's us all done. 10 questions completed. Thanks for joining me today, Joe. Really appreciate it.

Awesome. Thanks for having me. It was fun.

No worries. Everyone else, you can follow Joe on LinkedIn if you want to stay up to date. And of course, please do go check out PURPL, P U R P L. If you want to join me on Talent Talks, get in touch. Otherwise, enjoy your week. Thank you so much for listening.