Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact Show, Dr. Jim interviews Tim Sackett, a talent acquisition expert, about data-driven leadership and recruiting. Tim shares his insights on the importance of measuring recruiting processes and building capacity as a function. He emphasizes the need to move away from the "smile and dial" approach and focus on developing a high-performance team. Tim also discusses the pitfalls of comparing recruiters' performance and the importance of building from the middle out.

Key Takeaways:

1. Building capacity around the middle performers, not the outliers, is crucial for success in talent acquisition.
2. Data-driven leadership should focus on development, not micromanagement.
3. Days to fill is a health metric, not a performance metric. Being faster doesn't necessarily mean better.
4. Stop looking for unicorns and focus on finding candidates who have the potential to succeed in the role.
5. Measure data that correlates to good performance and use it to improve processes and develop recruiters.

Timestamp

0:01:12

Tim Sackett's background in talent acquisition

0:04:43

Importance of understanding recruiting capacity

0:06:05

Reverse engineering hiring goals based on capacity

0:08:20

Importance of focusing on people and processes before technology

0:10:30

Reengineering talent acquisition teams may result in turnover

0:12:24

Using data to improve recruitment processes and identify issues.

0:16:03

Shifting the conversation to focus on desired outcomes for candidates.

0:19:14

Building capacity around average performers, not top performers.

0:21:01

Collecting and analyzing clean data to improve performance.

0:22:19

Using data to develop and improve rather than criticize.

0:22:19

Building trust and performance in teams

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So that sounds really strange, but it'll make sense in a little bit. The person that's going to take us through that learning is joining us today. He is a chief storyteller at a fistful of talent blog. He's on board of directors for a number of TA tech and TA adjacent orgs. And for those that are new TA is talent acquisition.

So just so you're aware of that. And he's been a long time president of HR technical resources. Tim Sackett, welcome to the show.

Tim Sackett: Thanks for having me. I I appreciate it. Yeah. Like I think, I got involved with HR and Town Acquisition. I always tell people from birth, my mother started a staffing company when I was in elementary school.

Dr. Jim: That's a nice bit of background.

Aside from being born into talent acquisition, what are the things that you feel are important for them to understand about your background that's going to be relevant to the conversation that we're about to have?

Tim Sackett: You've worked on both sides of the fence.

So I've worked in the corporate side of talent acquisition and HR, and I'm also, run a staffing firm. And I also work as an analyst and advisor to a lot of the recruiting tech companies that are out there have written in this space for about 10 years. So I really like to I always take the side of a corporate talent acquisition leader in terms of the impact that's going to have.

And right now the landscape is so overwhelming. It's just the confusion levels very

high.

Dr. Jim: That's really good context. And this should be an interesting conversation

regardless of that background, but I come from the agency side of talent acquisition. There's some interesting contrast in terms of your perspective and mine.

I think one of the things that I'm really curious about, and this is why I opened the show with the comment about smiling and dialing and in the agency world, when we're talking about data driven leadership. It's basically turning everything into just pure metrics about, hey, if you do this amount of work, you're going to get these kinds of results.

And I've always bristled against that sort of thinking like, hey, we can't get enough submittals. So what do we need to do? Oh, call harder, email harder. Is the solution. And I think that's just one of the dumbest solutions that are out there. So really looking forward to digging into what you have to say.

Tim Sackett: Jim, I grew up in the agency world. I understand exactly what you're saying and what you're coming from.

And I think there's a part of us that we hate the numbers game. And at the same time, the numbers don't lie. And so there's this constant kind of push and pull between like science and art when it comes to recruiting. For me, the big learning was, especially when I went on the corporate side of TA, I was shocked first at.

The lack of data that was there the lack of how we just didn't really, in every environment I've went to, and I've been in healthcare, casual dining, retail, like nobody was really measuring recruiters and recruiting in a way that I saw on the agency side at the same time, our executives would come to us and they would say, okay, hey, we have to open a hundred restaurants next year.

You could work 24 seven. And so it was this, it's really trying to, the understanding of. You better build in and understand what your capacity is as a function so that when those executives come to you and they say, hey, we need to increase the hiring plan by 25% 50% in the next quarter that you can actually have a really great business conversation and one of those conversations might be, yeah, that's not going to happen and they would just go back and say, no, it has to happen.

Dr. Jim: Ooh, there is a lot there that we can dig into. Let's peel back those layers a little bit. So you mentioned that one of the things that you noticed when you were in the corporate side was that things weren't being measured to the extent that they needed to be measured that are relevant to the goal that you're trying to get to.

And you also mentioned that oftentimes it would mean that people need to be ready to be told no, or that it's not realistic. Yeah. There's a long way from goals and being able to be told, no. So walk us through the process that you had to take a executive through so that they're in the space to hear, this is what the reality is.

Tim Sackett: First, I took some of the stuff over from the agency world, which is I need to understand what my funnel is by recruiter, by team, by function. And so when somebody comes to you and says, hey, we're going to have to need more people than you have, okay, hey, if we need to hire.

Because it's not just about connecting with more people and it is about connecting with more people, but you might do that through recruitment, marketing, through branding, there's all kinds of ways, right? To get more people in the top of the funnel. And then you have to know, again, do I need 25 of a candidate to get down to the interview process, to get down to, the offer and, how many hires I need once I have all of that data.

I can reverse engineer it to say, okay, our capacity at any certain time is X. And, maybe I'm actually, only at 90% capacity. Maybe I'm pushing people really hard. We have some competition stuff going on. They're working some overtime. We're over capacity in terms of what we normally would run.

I'm going to have to engage another, maybe a contract recruiter, maybe another hire, maybe more recruitment marketing, maybe adding some technology that will make us more efficient. All of those pieces play into having that real conversation that right now, without that. You're just guessing. And what I see, we see this constant churn and turnover of talent acquisition leaders in our industry.

And it's all because to me, it's their strategy is we're just going to take broken systems and processes, and we're just going to whip them in. We're going to work harder. And after about 12 to 18 months, the executive team goes. It's, we're getting the same outcome. We're still failing. And you're just, and again, they truly feel like I've given everything I could to try to make this work.

And if they didn't apply, we just said. That's just how it works. And I'm like, actually, no, that's not how it works. We have an opening. There's people out there. We need to go get them.

Dr. Jim: You said a lot there that I think is pertinent. I'm going to tie a couple pieces together.

When you were walking through the things that could be done to solve the particular problem that you're facing with, you listed off a whole bunch of stuff. And then you mentioned technology last. So the way that I took what you said is your laundry list of things were people in process focused and then you introduce technology.

I don't know if that was intentional or not, but share with us a little bit of why you sequence that answer that particular way when it comes to examining your funnel and really digging deep into what's going on.

Tim Sackett: I tell

But if you put bad processes and bad people into that technology. It's you're all you're going to be as bad faster, and so you really have to, nail down what is that hiring process look like and so often, right? We're putting in all these roadblocks and hoops for candidates to jump through that are really meaningless.

It's we're not asking. We're not trying to go out and find the best talent. We're trying to find the talent that will survive our process. And again, just really bad conceptual filters that we've built over time. And then, and again, part of that is then it's like, Hey, if we have the right process that has the right touch points, then I'm going to get all the measures I need to know what actually is happening by a recruiter.

And they're just like, I spent all week sourcing. That's a different than really recruiting, so there, there's just some things that we have to, go out and really be able to measure.

So for me it's processing people and I, every single time I've gone in and re engineered a talent acquisition team, I'll tell the leader, the CHRO, the chief talent officer, whoever's going to be my point person, you're probably going to lose 50% of your team in the next 90 days. Because you have people here that are getting paid really well to be a recruiter, but they're really an admin.

And they were actually producing more. With 30% less people.

Dr. Jim: What you just said doesn't surprise me a whole lot because there were a lot of conversations that I had from the agency side with internal recruiting within the clients that I would bring on and oftentimes I would always ask why are we having the conversation?

What's happening within your environment that, requires you, or at least compels you to go out for an external resource to find these roles, walk me through your process. And oftentimes, one of the questions that I would ask is, okay, when a position comes out, you talk to your hiring manager internally, you find out what the role is required.

What's the first thing that you do after that? And say, I'll post a job. Why wouldn't you look in your own database to see if there's any candidates that you passed over that could be redeployed or could be a fit that didn't make it the first round or time around? And you'd be surprised how often I would get stunned silence.

One of the things that you mentioned in pre show was that you're a big advocate for data driven leadership, but not as a hammer. Tell me what that

means.

Tim Sackett: It's one of the things when you start to open up the funnel or measure the funnel of your recruiters, their initial reaction is going to be, this feels like micromanagement.

It feels like, why are you're measuring every single thing I'm doing. And because again, they think of a traditional leadership is you're going to use this against me. The reality is, especially like if I'm working with new recruiters or senior recruiters, I need to know what's going on. If they're sending out, screened candidates to hiring manager on a weekly basis, and let's say they're sending 15 or 20 in, none of those are getting.

So I'm not going to go and yell at them, right? To get more. I'm going to go and use it as a development opportunity to see what's really going on. And I think that's, so often though, when we, especially those of us who grew up in the agency world, those measures were used as a hammer. But I think even in my world now in the agency world, then when I was in the corporate TA side I espoused that, Hey, we're going to measure this stuff, but this is all about development, how to make us better, make us more efficient.

Plus we enter, we have to know the capacity of what we can do and. We're going to use this for development because what we would usually see is, and this is a great example. If I'm on the corporate side of T. A. and I have great relationships with my hiring managers who I can have one to one every single person I send them, they should actually interview.

You send five, they come back and want to interview one or two, you send 10, they want to interview, three or four. And to me, that's a failure at a colossal level in corporate talent acquisition. The amount of resource failure that we're doing where we're acting like somehow we're just, the machine is going to continue to come, right?

Oh, and then we'll hear hiring managers, and we'll hear the teams and the frustration of, I sent this, TA person or this hiring manager, 10 candidates last week. He rejected them all and they want to see more. And we've given them this perception that there's always more instead of saying, Nope, I actually understand the position.

Okay, cool. That's awesome. Even though the resume looks good and all the background, they actually have a personal relationship. They know I'll give you one out of 10, but if you're not batting 900, there's a problem in your organization. And yet most organizations are batting 300, 400. And then if in baseball, you'd be a hall of famer in recruiting.

You're a failure.

Dr. Jim: Even at that three or four out of 10, there are a lot of recruitment firms that strive for that and do just fine. And what was interesting is that when I was actually building my division so I was in it staffing and I built that from the ground up. So zero clients, zero revenue to an 8 million business.

So I've shifted the conversation from the bullet points that you see in the position descriptions to what's this person going to actually need to deliver for you to be. Wowed by their production and that opened up the amount of candidates that they would look at because if you have a two or three year person that's done this thing that's a high potential candidate or on the flip side, if you have somebody that is a 20 year veteran that this is what they focus on, this is what they've done over and over again.

They'll just reject those candidates and ask for more, like you said. And the recruiter is sitting there wondering. What am I looking for? If you're not going to give me any feedback, if you're going to be slow to respond, you haven't framed out your outcomes why are we talking?

Tim Sackett: On the corporate side of TA and the health system, the IT was our, one of our biggest pain points, right? And, One of the things I was able to test, because I knew the CIO, created a relationship, and I go, let me test some things. One was, we had about an 80% rejection rate on candidates that we would send over to these hiring managers.

And so I said, we're going to take a couple of your desperate managers. And we're just going to set up interviews. And then they're just going to show up and they're going to interview these candidates. They won't have the resumes beforehand. They will have the resumes right before they go into the interview.

And then they, when they started to talk with people and interview them, they started to see the possibilities of each candidate, not the negatives of each candidate. And I think that's one of the failures in corporate, in the corporate world is we've allowed these hiring managers to believe. That there's unicorns out there.

There's not, there's just a lot of great candidates, some of which have what you need. Some might, maybe not, but the vast majority are going to have pieces of what you need and you're going to make a decision. Can I work with this person or not?

Dr. Jim: This fits into your part time job as a chat GPT prompt engineer, but you're prompt about about stop looking for unicorns.

Is absolutely dead on because the first thing that I would do when I'm looking at a position description for a role that I'm recruiting on, you would see five to seven different roles that are contained within one description. And I was like, this person doesn't exist at the dollar amount that you want.

Tim Sackett: One of the biggest issues we face, especially when we start, you start to compare and then there's this mindset of Tim is our number one recruiter and he's putting this much out, his funnel looks like this.

Everybody's funnel should look like this and I try to tell people don't ever compare your funnel or don't ever build your capacity to your best performers. You build it to your mid performers. You build it to those B players. Because at that point, that's the vast majority of your team is going to be B players are not going to be a players.

And I think that's the one issue we face is that as most leaders try to build to the outliers. And then you're going to rate yourself that you have more capacity than you really can perform. You're going to make everybody in the middle feel stressed and overwhelmed because they can't ever reach what your outliers are doing.

And I think that's probably the biggest issue is stop trying to build to your A players, build to your B players, and know that's going to be enough.

Dr. Jim: If I was putting what you just said into a bumper sticker, it would say build from the middle out. Instead of from the top down. You can put that on a t shirt.

I I expect a royalty check more than the writers in Hollywood though.

We talked about a lot of stuff in this conversation and you walked us through the scenario that you uncovered or you encountered. That helped you do this. Now, if you're taking what we talked about and building a framework around it for others that want to do the same thing.

Tim Sackett: I think, one of the things I would first take a look at is what's the data. that you actually have that you know is clean data or that is non subjective data.

So often we get in like we start to build a classic one in the talent acquisition HR space is this like days to fill metric, which again has no correlation to you hiring better. It's just, it's a measure that we could actually make up and that we felt comfortable. That was a really good measure.

And so all of a sudden we said, Oh my gosh, we're faster. We must be better. Being faster isn't better. Days to fill is just a health metric. It's not a performance metric. And I think really getting data that actually correlates to good performance, even if that data is ugly and doesn't look good on your function to begin with, because you at least that gives you the benchmark and groundwork to start to improve.

There has to be some self insight there. So get data that actually speaks to performance, measure that data, be maniacal about tracking and gathering that data. And, again, and then don't use the data to beat up your people, use the data to actually develop and get better. And if your people know that you're going to do that and you consistently do that over time, the trust will increase, the performance will increase and things are going to get better.

Dr. Jim: Last thing before I close down, where can people find you?

Tim Sackett: timsackett.Com, TimSacca on the Googles. It's me and a truck driver chaplain out of Minneapolis. I'm not the truck driver chaplain. It would be amazing if I was both guys. TA guru during the week and truck driver chaplain on the weekends, but I'm just the one guy.

A model and tie it to the exception, a lot of people are going to automatically check out because they're going to realize in their real or imagined it's not attainable. So that was one of the biggest things that came out of this conversation. And then when I'm looking at the overall discussion, what I really like about what you said is start with the people in process elements of the problem that you're trying to solve for first.

Uncover all the implications and consequences after that. That's going to create the space for you to establish a realistic goal. Then you're going to need to communicate that across the enterprise and then execute. If you follow that framework, that's a recipe for success. So that's what I gathered from this entire discussion.

For those of you who have tuned in for the conversation, hope you enjoyed it. We will have more great guests sharing their insights that help them build a high performance organization.