Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Welcome to Talent Talks, quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, founder and CEO at Pinpoint ATS, and today is a special edition because I'm joined by our very own Mike Bradshaw, Head of Talent at Pinpoint. I spend a lot of time with a lot of very influential, successful, and intelligent talent leaders, none more so than this fine gentleman who is very generous to have joined us amongst his busy schedule. Are you ready for this, Mike?

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Cool. No sweat. Let's get going. If you weren't in recruitment, what would you be doing?

If I could go back, I'd probably get my law degree and would want to do a public defender role. I say that now without knowing the day to day, but yeah, would do that. If I could go back, if I couldn't go back and just had to do something different and didn't have to worry about money, probably do some sort of community organising, something like that here in DC.

Sweet. That's awesome. Can you give me the 60 second summary of your role here at Pinpoint?

Yeah, so I own the TA and recruiting function here at Pinpoint. So everything from process design to actually sourcing and owning most of the open requisitions that we have. I'm also part of the management team. Strategic partner to the business and also have some input into the product which I really love.

And we love having you. What's the best thing you and I guess we do to attract the best candidates and create a great experience for our folks here at Pinpoint?

Yeah, we think candidate experience has a couple different elements. One is ease of use. So obviously we use a great product here called Pinpoint. We make it super easy for people to apply, to get good information, to get status updates, to get feedback, to schedule. So we think that should be a really seamless process. We don't want to add any additional friction to what can be a difficult hiring process. I think transparency is a big one. So in everything we do from the way we craft our job postings, we're super candid about what the job is and what the job isn't. We share the hard parts of the job, why it's open. We share what the hiring process is going to be. You can see who you're going to meet, the timeline, what we're going to cover during that time. And interviews, we structure our interviews to be really more generous than others in terms of the time we give candidates to ask questions, and we try to be super candid with the answers. And of course, things like salary we're always transparent with. So ease of use, transparency, fairness is a big one for us. We spend a lot of time on the intake process to really make sure that we know what we're asking for when we go to market with a role and that it makes sense. We're thoughtful in terms of the hiring process to make sure it's fair. The assessments are done the same for all candidates. And again, I think when we're transparent with things like timeline and salary, it ensures that it's a fair process. And the last thing I think is responsiveness. When we have a candidate enter our process, we're getting back to them in under two days on average, two business days. So when someone applies, they're going to pretty much know right away if we're going to engage them through the process or not. After our interview, we generally aim for 48 hours we get back to them on feedback, whether we're going to advance them or not. And in general, once you're in our process, it's usually like around three and a half weeks that you can make it through to an offer.

Great summary. Thank you for that. If you could only pick one, what do you think is the most important hiring metric for our talent team?

It's not as interesting, but I think it's it has to be headcount to plan. I mean at the end of the day the core function is for us to deliver great hires and they have to be on time, right? The business is dependent on us to meet their commitments and so there's obviously lots of interesting and really important metrics that you can go through but ultimately it has to be headcount to plan. I think.

Yeah, love that. And selfishly as the CEO, that's my favourite metric here too, right? It's the stuff we look at and review all the time because it's what determines the ability for us to actually execute our plan as a wider org. Cool. Okay. Wildcard time. Give me a number from one to ten.

Five.

Favorite movie, tv show, or book.

Gotcha. Favourite movie is a movie called Beginners. And I don't think a lot of people saw it. Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer maybe 10, 15 years ago, but yeah, it's called Beginners. Highly recommend it.

Cool. Love it. We'll check that out. Single biggest challenge facing talent leaders more broadly in '24.

Yeah, there's a lot like a top of mind that I think about one is obviously everyone's talking about AI and how you're gonna use it and how can you use it in a meaningful way and I think if recruiters are utilising it some way, how can they then with that sort of time saved continue to add value to the organisation? It's going to be really important that every recruiter, I think, should be thinking about. I think in the U.S., what does DEI look like after a Supreme Court ruling, right? What does that mean? And how do you still run a sort of inclusive process that can navigate those things. But I think for me right now is. How do you properly assess a candidate in what's been a sort of chaotic job market, right? So post-COVID bounce back and then just the tech layoffs for the last year and a half. Candidates profiles are looking a lot different and we're seeing a lot more candidates that I think old sort of lazy recruiter ways they would disqualify them because they've been in three jobs in four years or whatever it might be. So I think how do we properly assess candidates with that context, understanding that good people get laid off, good people work for companies that maybe aren't a fit. Some companies are not maybe properly run. There's bad products out there. And I think for recruiters, it's having that context, not relying on the old ways of looking at resumes in and out quickly, it means you're probably spending more time interviewing. And that as you meet candidates, you really have to advocate for them with your hiring managers and ask them to have an open mind. I think it's easy to, when you look at someone's resume, you can make up a story in your head about them. And that can be really harmful for a number of reasons, obviously. And so you can have those concerns. You should ask them about those concerns and test that throughout the interview process. But we have to be aware of this context, that it's changing the way that candidates are looking. And we should still engage them in many cases.

Makes a lot of sense. And I think obviously you've been here a while, but even anecdotally, like I've been at a lot of events with senior leaders in TA recently. And actually many of those people have had the same sorts of challenges you've referenced, right? Gaps in employment, lots of jobs in short periods of times, because they've gone and worked for high growth organisations that have had layoffs and talents been affected and otherwise. And so interesting to watch the way people evolve, how they assess those sort of component parts of the CV and experience. It's interesting. What's your top tip for someone new to recruiting?

To ask many questions all the time. Challenge assumptions. Play dumb if you have to and this is everything from job intake to decisions on candidates. Ask a lot of questions. Don't be an order taker. And if you can't provide honest or clear answers to candidates around things about your company, around the reason for the opening, rejection reasons, if you're not clear on being able to provide that information there's something broken with your process and you really need to go and ask the questions and challenge those things, which I know is difficult, but really important.

No, cool. Makes it makes a great deal of sense. One of the things we hear all the time is this challenge some recruiters have in getting buy-in from senior leadership, right? From a talent perspective, what tactics would you advise other TA folk use when they're trying to get senior leadership on board with broader talent strategy things.

Yeah, I think, if someone's new to a role or new to the organisation, one is you have to, and this is for any role at any companies, of course, you need to build your credibility. And so that means you may have an agenda, you may have things that you want to impact or change, but you have to, take the time to understand the context, understand the business, understand every department. You have to have that information. So asking again lots of good questions, but really also building the credibility that you're listening and you're understanding, and you're applying that to your decision making. But at the same time, ultimately, when you're trying to get something done or improved or changed or budgetary requests it's to lead with data, right? Whether you're asking for something to invest that you think is going to improve your time to hire or improve the candidate experience, the offer acceptance rates, whatever it might be. Talk about those things, but talk about the monetary impact around delivering hires quicker or on time. You can talk about, if it's an investment to ensure that you have better quality candidates, that's an easy one to talk through the cost of a bad hire and time and resources and all that. Even secondary metrics, like candidate surveys and Glassdoor and all those types of things. You can tie that back to when you're going and you're sourcing and competing for top talent or when you are extending an offer to somebody and you're going up against another company. Your reputation, your candidate experience, those things really do matter and have a monetary impact. So definitely lead with data, but make sure you have the sort of credibility internally that you understand the business and the challenges of the company that you're working with.

Sure. I love that. Wildcard question again, one to 10. Three. What's the weirdest place you've ever conducted an interview? It's a great question. I don't know, probably an airport, not particularly interesting or weird, but yeah, probably airport delay and then, had to get on a call.

Nice. I once, near you actually, conducted an interview with someone on a park bench outside the SEC which was my only DC experience. Cool. Final question. Favorite interview question to ask a candidate and why?

What have I not asked about that I should have? Obviously, interviews are super stressful. And there's things that I, of course, need to cover. And there's questions I'm going to always ask, but I want to make sure I give the candidate a chance to brag or highlight something that maybe I don't know if they had something that they wanted to get across, but they didn't get the chance to. I want to give them that opportunity. Maybe earlier, They've alluded to it, but feel like they didn't land the plane on, hey, no, I really did this. And so I want to give them that opportunity. And you learn a ton and candidates you might maybe be on the edge about, they have this great answer that ties everything together. And if you didn't ask that you might, maybe you've missed out on them. So.

Absolutely love that. Nice one. Cool. Look, that's it for questions today. Thanks so much for joining me, Mike. You can all follow Mike on LinkedIn if you want to stay up to date, obviously I'm biased, but he does share a bunch of brilliant insights on there. And if you're a recruitment leader or know a brilliant recruitment leader, I should be talking to, please get in touch with me and have them join me on Talent Talks. Thanks very much. All the best.

Thanks.