Talent Talks with Tom Hacquoil

Tom Hacquoil:

Welcome to Talent Talks. Quick fire questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, the CEO at Pinpoint. And today I'm joined by Traci McCulley, talent executive and leadership coach. Traci's has many years in the TA space at the executive level and now consults with a wide range of businesses and TA leaders looking to unlock their own high performance.

She's a member of the HIGHER community's, Talent 100, a bunch of talent execs known for leadership and innovative approach to talent acquisition. And she's got a great number of views and experience to share with us today. You ready for some questions, Traci?

Traci McCulley: Yeah, let's go. Thanks for having me, Tom.

Tom Hacquoil: Thank you for joining me.

So look, we talked a little and gave a very high level sense of your background, but would really love a 60 second summary of how you help businesses and TA leaders in your consulting practice.

Traci McCulley: Sure. So I work with companies and help them get to the root of their problems. And, essentially the way that I look at it, it's usually about digging into the fundamentals.

So there's all kinds of fancy stuff out there now. But to me, it comes down to how you're showing up internally and externally as an organization. How well you understand what good looks like in your hiring and how well optimized your systems are. And I say systems intentionally, because it's not just about process.

It's about really setting your intention and, setting those systems, that vision on where you're driving toward.

Tom Hacquoil: Sure, that makes a lot of sense and we'll dig into each of those kind of strands as we go through the questions no doubt. I think before we do that, it'd be great to understand if you weren't in recruitment what you'd be doing?

Traci McCulley: Okay, so I have a weird answer for that.

Tom Hacquoil: Love it.

Traci McCulley: I love to just solve problems and come up with ideas. So if there were an idea factory say if there was a billionaire out there who just needed someone to come up with ideas and ways to solve problems. I'm the gal.

Tom Hacquoil: Okay. I love that. I wish I was said billionaire, but we'll do our best.

Yeah. Nice. Okay. So coming back to that. And again, to be honest, through the lens of the kind of problem solving stuff you just referenced, I think you do work with this really broad range of organizations. What's the most common mistake you're seeing TA leaders make and how do you help them navigate those?

Traci McCulley: I do think a lot of it goes to those basics that I talked about before. I would say the most common is as you're working with those hiring teams and hopefully you're building the relationships with them. And when you're going in and you're kicking off the new search, the rec, whatever you want to call it not getting to what good really looks like, the further away you are from that, the longer it's going to take you.

And so for an example a lot of times those hiring teams are going to tell you, we want X, Y, and Z, they're hard skills. We want them to be able to program in Java, they need to be full stack. They need to be this. But when you come back and you hire someone and then you ask them, Hey, why did you hire them?

It's about the soft skills. I like the way they solved the problem. I like the way they thought about this. They might not have everything, but I think that they're smart and we can train them up. So the idea is to get that in the beginning. So you're not going through this whole slew of candidates to get to that point at the end when you realize, oh, wait had I understood that's what they were really looking for, we could have hired for this much faster.

It's how to ask those questions in the beginning and get to what good really looks like so that you can hire, for quality and speed.

Tom Hacquoil: Totally get it. And that's just a really hard problem though. And I think people seem to almost unilaterally struggle with that. Do you have any advice on how to get to the root of that?

Is it looking at data? Is it looking at who's been successful in the organization? Are there a bunch of kind of cheat code questions you can ask your hiring managers? How do you help people frame that?

Traci McCulley: Yeah, I think you hit on it when you said people that are successful in the organization, because a lot of times they, you can, if you ask them in that way, you frame it in that way.

Okay. You've got 10 people in your team. They all have these skills, right? Are they all performing the same? No. Okay. So your top performers, what are they showing you? What are you doing different? So I had a client once and a position had been open for a year. And he was looking for a developer, recruiters were giving him developers.

So I was like, Hey, let's just, let's back up. Let's talk about this. And he wanted, this whole slew of skills and some were old technology, some were new technology. The recruiters weren't finding it. So I said, Hey what is it that stands out for you?

The people that have been successful in your organization? He's like, Oh, they're really good at troubleshooting. And I'm like, okay, we're looking for developers over here. And you want more kind of tech support type skills. People that can troubleshoot, that's different, and so we were able to turn it around and get to that hire, but they churned thousands of resumes for a whole year.

Tom Hacquoil: That's why it's super interesting because just framing the conversation differently solves the problem.

In a completely different way. I get that. That's really helpful advice. Thank you. Let's ask the flip side question, right? So we've just talked about what we're seeing TA folks get wrong. When you're looking at high performing TA people beyond the advice you just gave, what's the pattern there?

What are they getting right?

Traci McCulley: Things are really hard out there right now. You're getting a ton of applicants and sometimes it can be hard to navigate that. So the organizations that I'm seeing that are really getting it right, they're still treating these candidates like humans.

It can become overwhelming. It can become something where, it just feels like it's all just a number. You're getting 100 applicants in 10 minutes or whatever, but the ones that are getting it right are still communicating with folks. They're treating them like humans.

They're, still managing that candidate experience.

Tom Hacquoil: That makes sense. I think to be honest, this is something that we spend a lot of time in internally, right? Obviously we build an applicant tracking system. We process millions of candidates a month. I think it's really easy for everybody in our business from CS to engineering to sales, everybody in the middle to just think of that as like another row in a spreadsheet, but like every one of those applications is a person applying for a life changing thing.

They might be moving across the country or across the world. They might be uprooting a family, changing schools. This isn't buying a pair of shoes, right? This is a big thing. And I think like we try really hard not to forget that those millions of people, this is a huge thing for each of them.

And I think we also think a lot about that communication piece and our Head of Talent, Mike, will talk a lot about no news, still being news is the way he frames it. And like really making sure that we take the obligation of communication extremely seriously. And I know it's hard because as you said, applicant volume is through the roof and quality on margin is aggregate down.

But if you can work out how to keep that communication and experience bar really high, I think you will continue to win. And I love that advice. Thank you. Spicing it up a bit before we talk about challenges, I think have you got like a personal mantra or some sort of philosophy that you live by as you go about the day to day?

Traci McCulley: Live with intention. It sounds really simple, but I think a lot of times we end up floating through life, floating through our days. So I, when I go on my morning walks with my dog every day, I think about, okay, what is my intention for today? What meetings do I have? What is my intention for those meetings?

And just getting in that mindset of where am I headed and am I still moving toward, where I'm wanting to go?

Tom Hacquoil: No, I like that. I think, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Selfishly, it has nothing to do with talent acquisition, but what dog do you have?

Traci McCulley: She's a half beagle, half mini Aussie.

Tom Hacquoil: Awesome. How old?

Traci McCulley: She's six years old. And she's behind me and thank goodness she's behaving

Tom Hacquoil: She's doing much better than my Bernese Mountain dog would be doing in this circumstance. So well done. Well done. That is a well raised dog. Back to shop talk.

I think you've alluded to this a little bit, right? But what do you think is the biggest challenge facing TA folks in the near term? Yeah. We've talked about applicant volume and other things. Is that what you think it is? Or is there something else that's a bigger threat?

Traci McCulley: I think there's just so much paralysis right now. It's like this weird thing where everything's changing, but everyone's also paralyzed. We're just being thrown so much in the world, so much with technology, and then companies seem to be, a little bit nervous. They're not making a lot of moves.

And so there's all of this uncertainty going on. And I think when that happens, we can tend to get in our heads and make assumptions about what that means about what things are. So I think again, just kind of those basics of staying close to the business. And, what's going on, where they're headed, keeping your hand on the pulse of the business. It would be my best advice.

Tom Hacquoil: Makes a lot of sense. I think aside from actual execution, one of the things that I'm always fascinated with from people in every industry is how they stay current with industry trends and where you're going to learn new stuff and continue to improve.

And I guess. What are you doing in that regard? How do you find new stuff and what works for you?

Traci McCulley: I lean on the HIGHER community mainly. They have great webinars there. I'm in the Slack group. I'm in the Talent 100 Slack group. So it's fantastic. I'm able to just hop in there when I have a question and, I had something when I started with this new client, I jumped in there, asked a question and someone said, Hey, I'm facing something similar.

You want to jump on a call. And it's great.

Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, the value of that community piece. It just can't be underestimated, right? I think context is so important. And I think one of the things that I would observe is that over the past couple years, as you said before, so much has changed so frequently that what worked six months ago or a year ago just doesn't necessarily ring true anymore.

And being able to speak to folks on the ground today and get that kind of wisdom of the crowds is just so valuable. And yeah, I love that. I think. Selfish wildcard question, but we were speaking before we hit record about books and learning and training and other things. And I'd love you to share a book or several, if you want, or podcast, or talk, something else that's really had a big impact on your life.

Traci McCulley: Yeah. So I'm a real nerd about this stuff. Yeah. James Clear's Atomic Habits, where he says and I'll probably get it wrong, but you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems or something similar to that. And so, yeah, James Clear.

I read Chris Voss's Never Split The Difference. So, yeah, also brilliant book. I saw Carla Harris speak at a LinkedIn talk. She's amazing. Just Carla's pearls. Mita Mallick, the diversity and equity inclusion side, incredible. So she has a book around what's it called?

Reimagined Inclusion. It's on my bookshelf behind me. Yeah. I could keep going, but those are.

Tom Hacquoil: This is super helpful. Thank you so much. Yeah. We'll put the links to all of these things in the show notes. The first two I've already knew and think are fantastic. The second, I didn't, so I'm going to go check those out.

We'll make sure everybody can find them super easily. So thank you for sharing that. Let's talk about AI, right? A kind of buzzwordy hugely powerful, loads of potential, but are we there yet? What's the impact you think it's going to have on the industry? What's your take?

Traci McCulley: Chatty G and I are great friends. I definitely use AI, and I think there's a ton of uses for it for me, if it's helping you do the basics better. Amazing. But if it's mucking that up for you, then it's not worth it. And I think that's where in the talent space, we're still navigating that.

So there's all these rumors around all of your resumes are being filtered by AI, I think, a little bit, but it's all still that human thing, because there's so much nuance in recruiting, not everyone's resumes the same, not all the buzzwords are the same. There's still that, there's still that factor, that nuance that's so important.

But I think, When it comes to helping schedule, helping, automate communication, improve communications, it's fabulous.

Tom Hacquoil: Makes sense. And yeah, just picking up on two things, I think. I find it fascinating the whole kind of AI is automatically screening everybody's CVs and making the decisions.

We see that a lot, obviously, because we build an ATS and we see what the public think of that. That just isn't the case in the vast majority of instances. And it's super interesting to see how we shift that perception with applicants. And then I think the second piece is what I'm hearing you say is this idea that you think ChatGPT and, all the other kind of similar tools, are going to help you and people like you supercharge the work that you're doing already, but not necessarily do the job for you or fundamentally change the way this stuff is tackled.

Is that a fair summation?

Traci McCulley: Absolutely fair.

Tom Hacquoil: I agree with you, by the way, I completely agree with you. But I think that sometimes, these kind of very extremist views on either side of, there's no role for TA anymore, cause AI will do everything versus AI is pointless and it's biased and you should never touch it.

And it's nice to find someone a bit more moderate in the center. Cause yeah, I think you're completely right. Okay. Last question. You've absolutely nailed this. I think what's the best piece of advice you'd give recruiters to stay motivated and avoid burnout? And I think the point you made earlier, right?

Which is that we need to recognize how tumultuous the environment is right now for TA folks, right? There's so much change. There's so much stasis to your point. Nobody knows what's happening. There's a lot of fear and all rightly right? Like, how do you help folks deal with that?

Traci McCulley: Recruiting is one of those roles where it's hard to turn off.

You can do it 24 hours a day if you're on your email and everything. I think that's what it is. You've got to figure out what that thing is for you that when you're doing it. You're not thinking about work and do more of that. So whatever it is for me, I like to go see live music.

I like to go see comedy shows when I'm doing that. I'm not thinking about work. So as much as we can do that, I think the better we'll be.

Tom Hacquoil: I love that. What's great about that advice is it's actually very practical. I think people often will give these very like meta pieces of advice in response to that question and they're not wrong but I think what you just said is easy for someone to go do. My version of that is Lego with my son because it takes enough concentration that you can't be thinking about other stuff whilst you're doing it right and so that's how I find it quite relaxing and so I think that's great advice.

Traci, this has been amazing. We've done 10 questions. Thank you so much for joining me. For everyone listening, you can follow Traci on LinkedIn, everything that she referenced through our conversation today, plus links to her LinkedIn, everything else will be in the show notes and if what Traci's saying resonates, she's actively working with new clients.

If you're a company going through TA transformation, you're looking to bring some new perspective into the business, or you're just looking to level up on the basics we'll make sure it's easy for you to get in touch with her. If you'd like to join me in the hot seat next to get in touch with us. But thank you very much for listening and goodbye, Traci.

Thank you again.

Traci McCulley: Thanks so much, Tom.