The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
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The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 142: ATS Evolution and Talent Strategies with Anton Boner, Co-Founder of Screenloop
Join host James Mackey in an insightful conversation with Anton Boner, Co-Founder of Screenloop, as they discuss the creation of a groundbreaking ATS platform. From AI-powered recruitment to optimizing processes for hyper-growth companies, discover the keys to enhancing candidate experience, improving hiring metrics, and tackling biases in job descriptions.
Gain valuable on talent evaluation, compensation strategies, and the importance of employer branding in attracting diverse talent. Explore how innovation and data-driven approaches are reshaping the landscape of talent acquisition in today's competitive market.
0:37 Anton Boner's background
1:31 Innovative ATS and talent platform trends
11:09 Recruiting capacity planning and strategies
15:55 Streamlining candidate feedback and process
28:42 Effective talent evaluation and compensation strategies
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Hey, welcome to the Breakthrough hiring show. I'm your host, james Mackey. Welcome back, really excited for today's episode. We're joined by Anton Bonner. Anton, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me, big fan of the show, interested to get talking.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and now me as well. It's going to be a good episode. Let's start with your background. Can you tell us about yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so my career and talent acquisition started at a business called Stack Overflow, what, 11 years ago, so just over a decade Helped a business hire software engineers. And then I started my business, screen loop, just over three years ago. The reason for that was just a ton of areas of improvement that I could see within the talent acquisition space. So, yeah, we've been building product out for three years. We now have an ATS plus a load of other tools, which include, like an AI note taker and things like that. But keen to talk more holistically today, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you had a chance to check out the episode with Debbie Shotwell.
Speaker 2:Not yet, but I know Debbie well.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, OK. So yeah, I guess she's still there, right, she's a chief people officer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Yeah, she came in probably a year before I left, but yeah, she's a big figure at the business and I know very well liked over there as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah for sure. So I think, just to start us off here, I do want to know why you went the ATS path. I feel like it's really ambitious because there are so many applicant jacking systems on the market. There's a lot of players out there. We're seeing more companies do this kind of lean into this concept of consolidation, where companies, due to budgets, are looking for more all-in-one solutions and of course, hr and recruiting seems to always get scrutinized the most right, like people want to cut budgets here first, it seems I think I understand it from that perspective in terms of consolidation. Tell me if I'm wrong or if there's more to it From that perspective, from a retention and stickiness standpoint with customers. But then, beyond that, I'm curious to see how you're approaching it to have a meaningful difference than what other ATS provider. Maybe it's the fact that you're doing ATS plus your other side of the platform and then that connection is what makes it unique. But I'm curious to just get your thoughts on why you're doing this and how you're making it work right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're getting there. So we actually started as a point solution platform. We started with an AI note taker, which are into intelligence products. Then we started adding on additional modules. So we essentially looked for what ATS didn't do a very good job at and then built on. So we were just essentially trying to solve problems. We just kept looking for problems that we needed to solve and it came to a point where we had everything but the ATS. So we knew that we did a good job with these point solutions. So we decided to fly an ATS underneath and let all the data talk to each other. So that's a big play. For me is allowing all of the data that you collect, all of those point solutions that you maybe have to hack in and integrate through an API. Allow them to all function within one platform and, like you said, it saves you money, you consolidate. But for me, the long-term gain of that is being able to run some really nice queries and some really nice reports on what is actually happening in your pipeline.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. So you guys starting off, interview intelligence we had a long time ago I hope I'm going to say this name right Siddharth CEO of. Is it MetaView? Yeah. Because they're a pretty small company, I think 20, 30 people, something like that but I think they've had some success. I don't know what types of customers they're selling into or how they're doing as of late, but I think they were doing some kind of interview intelligence, right? Is it similar?
Speaker 2:to that that product is. Yes, I think. When we both businesses started roughly three years ago, there was a little bit more reluctance in the market to this type of tech. Now we're seeing candidates bring in their own AI notetaker to their interviews. So there's a big trend which has gone from a fear of this tech to why the hell aren't you using this tech? You're literally slowing down your performance. You are not able to provide your candidates with better feedback. You're not able to give full attention to the candidates. So there are a few key players and, yeah, they're definitely one of them and one of the ones that are leading the way in Europe and across the US, as well as Screen Loop and a few others. But, yeah, we start adding on additional products to our suite so that all of those AI notetakers are just a part of the platform now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. I feel like that's an important piece. But to be a holistic talent platform, you probably need a lot more functionality, particularly in this market. We had the CEO of Jim come on the show, steve Bartell, just for people tuning in. If you don't know exactly what Jim is, it's primarily a prospecting tool that sat on top of LinkedIn where you could drop candidates into email cadences and it would actually pull the emails for you and you could track conversion rates and they had some pretty cool stats about second, third time follow-ups, increasing rates by really intense the good numbers 20% to 30% in some cases, particularly, I think, for engineering roles.
Speaker 1:It's really good. So it's used as another really incredibly powerful tool in addition to LinkedIn recruiter that people use. But then what's really cool is they started to build out the reporting and the reporting is so great, like it's just its next level and it's so intuitive and it's like the UX and UI. It's all just, it just works and I think it's going to become probably my favorite from a reporting standpoint. And now they're also going the applicant tracking system path, because it's like all the craziness in tech over the last few years, these companies are trying to avoid churn, they're trying to get stickier. They're trying to have multiple parts of their products where it's like stickier and more value creation for the customer and season.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know that they're in like screen loop. Again, your favorites will be screen loop and gem is what I think you meant today. Yeah, but the data aspect of the platforms that have come out in the recent years the likes of gem, screen loop, even Ashby in the full APS play that data is at the forefront for easily accessible data. Otherwise, the average hiring manager or the average talent position leader doesn't have time to create these pivot tables and export data into a BI tool. They want to live in their ATX and have it surfaced to them. So that's where the big trend is going More accessible, easily, easier to manage. Data is always in front of you that you can access and use at your disposal, rather than, like I said, exporting into Excel and no one likes Excel right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no one. So, yeah, I think we were seeing this kind of trend. Maybe this is 2021, when people had a ton of money, or maybe it was even 2019. But there was this trend for late stage companies and big tech companies moving towards these BI, business intelligence tools, having these integrations of Greenhouse and creating these top-level, top-down data reporting functionality, and I definitely it's really cool, but it's difficult to budget. A team of data engineers, data scientists, specifically for talent acquisition, a team of that.
Speaker 1:I saw a couple of companies do it. It would be nice if that's not really required, like at some point, that even if for an enterprise company that seems like a little bit ridiculous, like from the standpoint of there should be a solution out there that can do that without this total different technology stack that has to sit on top of it, ideally.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. If you're having to log into a separate platform or download or create separate documents, the platform that you're using isn't right, like your ATS or your platform or your CRM in sales should be able to do that stuff for you. It should surface the dashboards that you need and you should be able to fill to your job within there without having to create these crazy plugins and additional add-ons which, like we said at the start, additional spend. It's additional complexity, additional DPAs, legal terms that you've got to get through. It's a pain.
Speaker 1:I just don't feel like a lot of the stats we need in talent acquisition are ultimately that complicated. Like there's funnel metrics. There are conversion understanding. I always think that companies that focus on conversion rates. That's actually not. You should know them on what averages are, but don't overemphasize them, because if they're too high or you're screening well enough, if they're too low, why are you cutting people?
Speaker 1:There's a lot of context but primarily like anything like funnel metrics, like time to fill time and stage, the amount of candidates required to make a hire, a lot of these things that are down the pipe, trackable from a talent acquisition perspective. It's not overly complex. It's not DE and I metrics are still not overly complex. Like all of this stuff is relatively straightforward and we shouldn't need a huge business intelligent tool sitting on top of our applicant tracking system solution to be able to give us the insights we need. And I think for some companies they're like when they get into different geographical locations where they might have a market in Europe and then North America, they start to, oh, we need some kind of high level.
Speaker 1:No, you can actually. There's ways to segment reports and put it like multiple locations, even if it's like a self. I don't know the term I'm looking for, but like you have to manipulate a field and not use it in the way that it was intended to be used in order to get the segmentation you need, there's ways to do it where you can still avoid this massive million and a million dollars like millions of dollars spend on some BI integration, which I feel like that budget could be so much more effectively used toward hiring an additional recruiters, coordinators, sorcerers, whatever, like. Just there's better ways to spend that money.
Speaker 2:It should just be a dropdown and it is with these new platforms like Screenloop and others like. It should just be a dropdown. If you want to see how many hires or whatever you've made or your time to fill in Germany for a specific gender or for a specific role, it should just be three clicks done. Give me the time period, give me benchmark me against other areas of the business and it's done. But yeah, what's getting quite interesting is the type of data that we're getting requested.
Speaker 2:A one that came in the day that the team built was it was how often the hiring managers are pushing out interviews because they were getting their backs broken on your time to hire as extended. Why is that? And they know that Bill in the IT team keeps canceling his interviews, so Bill stopped canceling them. And then they have the data now to say Bill has moved this interview six times. He's canceled it once. We can't fill the role because we can't book time in with Bill. So little bits of information that really helps TA and creates a case is actually where I want to try and get to loads of data like that. How long has it been since this candidate was last contacted? They may still be sat in stage two for six days, but when was the last time we spoke? We were speaking to them every day. That should be readily available data, but yeah.
Speaker 1:That's interesting stat in terms of going over how many times the interview been pushed back. That kind of stuff frustrates individual contributor recruiters, right, and I think that there is an executive level strategy or understanding that needs to go into that. I think you know what, honestly, man, one of the data reports that I would like to see and I do this custom through Excel for my customers when I'm putting together proposals for embedded recruiting anything that's a quarter I'm looking at one, two, three quarters out a year out, mapping out hiring plans and then determining how many recruiting resources are required to deliver on that hiring plan. One of the things that's often overlooked is the time of the interviewing team. Okay, let's say I can increase your pipeline from hiring enough candidates to hire two SDRs a quarter to hiring seven SDRs a quarter. From going to two engineers to hiring 10 engineers a quarter. Right, and we're gonna be doing this over a period of one to three quarters, right.
Speaker 1:Let's say I can build out the recruiting engine, get the right recruiters in place, the coordinated sources, recruiters, the engine in place to actually achieve the volume required in order to achieve that goal. Do your hiring managers even have enough time? Yeah, and there's like this. I think this massive undervaluation of the amount of time that it's actually gonna require hiring managers to hire, and I think it's like mapping out how many actual hours go into making it a hire and a lot of times for companies like late stage companies, it can take 75 to 90 hours of total time in order to make a single hire. That is something that's grossly underestimated. So I think one aspect would be and I don't know if people necessarily look for this, but if there's like some kind of reporting into capacity planning, into understanding like, okay, is there a disconnect between what recruiting is producing and what the hiring team actually has the capacity to manage?
Speaker 2:Yeah the knock on effect of that is huge, like the knock on effect of you telling your sales team, your leaders, that they now need to give up 10 hours a week to interview because the volume has increased significantly. They need to know that, they need to know that and also the business needs to be aware of it. So how far up the poll do you flag that information? I think it should go all the way to the top, because revenue is probably gonna take a hit for a short period of time. Even just those small differences then being away from their team for eight 10 hours a week compared to one in the previous quarter, is a huge difference. Yeah, sure, you're taking them away from their team a day a week essentially, but yeah, a really good point and it's something that overlooked so often.
Speaker 1:It is man. So the two people that really struck this point home that I brought on the show were first with Steve Cadigan, and Steve was the first chief HR officer of LinkedIn and helped scale them from, I think, 300 to 3,000 people, and this is unfortunately actually. I got him on my board here at Secure Vision, which was pretty cool, so I still get to work with him. He's been advising me for a few years now and there was a couple of really interesting insights that he shared, and one of them is related to this A lot of the times hiring managers at these hyper growth companies, they're spending as much as like 50% of their time. All right, and even there still has to be like that has to be worked in. We can't underestimate the amount of time. And Matt Caldwell, so another. I feel like I'm bringing up a lot of names here.
Speaker 1:Matt Caldwell built and sold probably the biggest RPO firm specifically for tech. He sold it to Kelly Services, but I think he built Rocket Power to like 400 people and better recruiters and then he sold it to Kelly. Kelly's doing it yeah, whatever they're doing, but when he was building he always said that one of his parts of his pitch that he would go into is recruiting is math not magic. And he was always like very adamant about really slowing down on the numbers, understanding the amount of hours required from the recruiting team, from the hiring manager team, and a company would come to him and say, oh, we need 10 recruiters because we're going to hire 100 people in the next two quarters, and he's like, your hiring team doesn't even have enough time to hire half of that. I could give you 100. It doesn't matter, I could give you a thousand, it just it doesn't, the math doesn't work, and so I think that there's just a big disconnect there in the industry.
Speaker 2:What do you think the knock on effect of that is? So there's huge implications, but, other than the capacity and the output of these heads of or hiring managers, there's such a massive impact on morale on like shoving the square peg through the round hole and trying to force people into the business the quality drops of the candidates coming to the business because people are forced to hit these targets and figures. We've seen it several times, probably in our careers, where the volume has gone so stupidly crazy that the knock on effect is kind of experience. It's then how long someone lasts in the business because you've just put bombs on seat to the quality of higher drops. There's so many negative outcomes of that same scenario if you don't plan it effectively.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a lot of stuff we can experience. I feel like it's like speed to feedback is just one. There's speed to feedback. There's just making sure people feel like they're a priority, they're investing time and to give them feedback, and give it to them quickly, like I'm. Honestly, I feel like a lot of interviews like at the end of the interview, you should tell the candidate if they're moving forward or not. If they're moving forward, go ahead and send them scheduling links for the next round. Like why are we waiting three days to fill out an evaluation form? People want to see more important.
Speaker 2:That's why I will get back to you when I'm ready. Type vibes it should be. You know that if you know you're moving forward with the candidate, let the poor candidate know. Keep them happy, let them go home to the family and say that they're through to the next round or whatever it may be, or that they've got the role. Who are they going away to confirm? Who are you going away to?
Speaker 1:confirm. If you can't make a decision at the end of the call, you're not organized enough. The process isn't organized enough. You ask your questions, look at the answers. Even if you got to say, hey, give me a minute while I review everything I think people are fine with a minute of silence Like, just say, I want to give you a few back where you're on this call and we look at everything. And if you're on the fence, then you tell them you're on the fence, yeah, but I'm on the fence.
Speaker 1:I think X, y and Z aligns right. Like you're interviewing, let's say in account exactly Like hey, I really I think your average deal size makes sense for sales link complexity. You're selling into multiple buyer personas in the enterprise space. I think all of that makes sense. However, they are currently looking for cans that have X, y Z experience and this doesn't seem to align From my perspective. I think that if you have all this other stuff, that it makes sense to continue the conversation. Just want to make sure you're aware that this is potentially something that could prevent you from getting the role or something that you're going to want to speak to. To make sure you feel comfortable delivering on X, y, z or hey, I don't know if this is going to work. This is my concern based on the feedback I've gotten. So I'm really looking for somebody with X, y, z experience. So I think at this point we should probably pass, just because I want to conserve your time.
Speaker 1:As a kid, this type of stuff is basic, but it's even like the whole, like some ATS is now. They have okay, three days, send a rejection email, so you get off, you hit, reject it automatically. What's the three day thing? So, just so you can seem like you're taking three days deliberating, like what is the damn purpose of that? Like why not just if you're going to pass, what's up with the three day wait, like I've seen that in a couple. Have you seen that before?
Speaker 2:I hear it all the time, even they put the phone down. I was with a client the other day and they told me that they get sent a Slack notification with a thumbs down five minutes into an interview and then they've got a wait. So, like they've already made their mind up three minutes, five minutes into an interview. One, they're on Slack not talking to the candidate. Two, they've made their mind up in five minutes, which is insane. And three, to your point, they're then waiting for music. She said they leave it a couple of hours. But I know you mean, like a lot of business, actually physically haven't set up to send it out three days later.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so let's just see like we're delivering it. Yeah, just so we can have anxiety for the next three damn days. Like it's just, it's silly. There's a couple cases where maybe you can't give them a decision because it's like you want to move them through to the first, the next round, but prior to scheduling it, you want to talk to the person in the next round and say, hey, so I got this person. I really like this Doesn't exactly fit. For this reason, I'm thinking about sending them through, but I just want to make sure you want to talk to this person.
Speaker 1:Like that kind of stuff is more reasonable. But I think, more times than not, people know. They know what they're going to do at the end of the interview, like just communicate it.
Speaker 2:There's another trend which we're hearing at the moment. It's data that we've collected 40% more candidates are saying that they're not aware of the next steps of the process. Now, of those businesses that we've been speaking to, they haven't changed anything. What has changed, however, is the volume of applications that that candidate has submitted around the world. So they tell the candidate at the start of the process. You have a four stage process. First you're going to meet James and you're going to meet Anton, and then you've got a final interview.
Speaker 2:The candidates got that many other jobs that they're applying for that they've forgotten by stage two what the steps are. So they forget. Whereas previously they were only interviewing with us because they're applying for multiple jobs, now much more jobs to be applied for. They're applying for far more. There's far more applications coming in. Auto acquisition leaders are being advised to just consistently keep reminding them of the next stage to keep them engaged, otherwise they're thinking about 10 other roles. They've forgotten that. The interviews with me next. But it's an interesting data point for here and now, when candidates are spray and pray and applying for multiple roles and using these AI tools that will apply for 50 roles for them, and the ones that come back are the ones that come back. Yeah, it's a really important data metric to consistently remind your candidate of what the next steps are to keep them engaged. Otherwise, they're applying to a million other roles.
Speaker 1:It's as easy as sending an email. You don't even necessarily need a robust technology to do that, it's, say, screen call. Hey, thanks for chatting with us today. We're looking forward to moving forward to the next round. Please follow the link to book your next interview, and here's an outline of the entire interview process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and that's getting missed because they think telling them once is enough or send it in the first email is enough. But can? The time has bought into the roles that they previously were.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think too. Just giving candidates to prepare in the right way, Just giving people the chance to prepare and understand what's coming up next, is not giving them the answers to the test. Let's make this call as valuable as possible for everybody. So you want them to know what's on the next interview. It's okay if it's covering XYZ topics and tell them that so they can prepare, so they know what to expect. They're not. You don't want to be thrown for a loop in the middle of the interview. We've all been in conversations where it's like we know what we need to discuss, but maybe we don't know the focus and so we're our heads not thinking about a certain thing. Right, it's just, there's just basic things like that. I don't know. I don't ultimately think candidate experience is that complicated.
Speaker 1:It's not really done Once you've got the foundations.
Speaker 2:once you have the foundations in place, there are small tweaks that you can make for a specific needs. Like we always get asked how can I attract more female engineers? Are you asking the female engineers that are in pipeline or that are in the business why they applied, why they joined, what they liked and what they disliked about the process? There's tweaks and changes that you can make for the better of the business like that, but the fundamentals and the foundations should be set in stone from day one. You shouldn't have to change, but you should be able to put a structure process in place and not annoy the candidates that are going through the process.
Speaker 1:This is what gets measured and what gets done, and I think every department is cross-functional to some extent. Every department relies on other departments. But the telemarketing position definitely does not operate in a silent and it really is tied to literally every department. It's interacting with every department throughout the company almost on a daily or if not weekly basis. So top-down leadership really needs to make clear that performance metrics for town acquisition need to be placed on function leaders. So VP of product, vp of engineering needs to be accountable for town acquisition metrics within their own department. It's not just town acquisition being accountable for those metrics. And so then it's deciding okay, what metrics are. There's like number of hires per quarter, like the team capacity is the private, most basic one. If you're getting into there's problems in the funnel, there's problems with time and stage can't strap you out because there's confusion to the process so they're not happy with their interview process or whatever it might be. Then it's like setting metrics in place, like evaluations are due when the interview is over. Feedback for this type of interview. We should know at the end of the interview, yes or no. We know every time. The evaluation form is completed then and the feedback is automatically given to the candidate. Those things need to be measured and be considered part of performance.
Speaker 1:For hiring managers. Let's say they're they're hands on job. That's not hiring. Hiring is part of their job. It should be communicated. That's a big part of what their job is recruiting. But the other parts of their job, like those, have performance metrics. If they're going to be spending 30 to 50% of their time on a hiring activity, then their performance metrics should reflect that. They're 100% of their performance. Metrics shouldn't be designed around 50% of their job and I think we've got a lot too right, Like that's the thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we probably see similar in that we see such massive difference between those, those who are fully bought into hiring from the top down, like it's a company objective, it's reminded, they're reminded of in each, all hands, they have constant training versus we need to hire 10 people, go and do it and the CEO and no one else gets involved, like the knock on effect of that is huge. And at the bottom end, lack of collaboration with the talent acquisition leaders, lazy score cards or no score cards being filled out, a thumbs down on Slack. These things aren't acceptable. If a business wants to hire the best people, yeah, there's product to ship and there's stuff to sell, but the business won't grow without the fundamentally bringing in the best people to the business.
Speaker 1:You know what is really this is make it super basic, right. What gets measured is what gets done, and the fundamental issue with a lot of these companies whether it's Canada experience or delivering on hiring plans or you name it it's like their performance metrics are 100% based around product or engineering or revenue and none of their performance metrics are based around talent acquisition, even though talent acquisition is taking up minimum 10% of their time. Upwards of 50, 10 to 50%. You're somewhere in there If you're in tech company, particularly like you know, it's very common if you're a growing tech company that upwards of close to 50% of your leader's time is going into talent acquisition.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so here are some easy metrics that you can put in place straight away to hold hire managers accountable. So, with any feedback survey that you send out, rank your hiring managers based on the feedback from candidates how did they find the interview? How did they find the follow-up? That's one easy metric straight away. Follow-up to that could be once they've joined the business, because the candidate gets passed over to a hiring manager. It's then on the hiring manager to make sure that they're successful, whereas talent gets the blame if they fail probation.
Speaker 2:Oh, it was a mis-hire, you gave me someone that wasn't good enough. No, it's actually on the hiring manager to nurture that individual and make sure that they ramp, make sure that they're included within the team. So you can start to measure metrics like that. And it ties into quality of hire. Once you've passed over your candidate to the team. Yes, check in with them, but let's actually start to collect some data from that individual. Were you supported during onboarding? Were you included within the team? Were you able to add value? Ask those questions to that new hire three, six and maybe even as long as 12 months into the role, because then that gives you the data that includes the hiring manager in these decisions. It makes it a more broader company decision and it gives you a decent quality of hire metric that's well-rounded rather than just based on the hiring manager's.
Speaker 1:The focusing on onboarding piece. Right Like that is critical. It's Daniel Chate episode. Talks about the CEO greenhouse total lifetime value of employees and talks about how when you accelerate the ramp, it accelerates like the ultimate output value you get from the person or one way.
Speaker 1:I think I had a VC Senkhet who is over at Peakspan Capital as another good episode and he's talking about acceleration of the J curve and compounding growth. And I think one of the things you brought up in relation to hiring is okay, if you get a rep in ramped up in three months versus six months, that's going to have X percentage of incremental revenue. That's closed. And if you compound that over several reps, then you're talking about increasing compounding growth on a year over year basis by X percentage which over the next three years is going to significantly impact valuation. There's this whole and that's to me. When I hear employee experience, I think about that Like my employee experience is like if somebody, first of all people are gonna be happy if they're producing the role, if they're ramping fast, things are easy from that perspective. But as an executive, I want to see people ramp you quickly also because there's a real ROI to that. It's not just happy employees. It's happy employees that are driving revenue and growth. It's both.
Speaker 2:This kind of goes back to your capacity planning piece as well If, after that person has hired, there isn't sufficient time dedicated to ramp support onboard that individual, and if you've got a bigger team that you're onboarding. You mentioned going from 10 to 100 or whatever from one to 10, hires that you're bringing in. It's a very different experience. If you're the sole hire, you've got one-to-one time with your hire manager, versus there's 10 of you in a room and you all get the same beige treatment. So there needs to be a lot of extra detail taken into consideration, especially when there's variables like that, because the success of those 10 will be far less than the success of that individual that got the one-to-one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, For sure. And then some of the other stuff is easier, like just identifying what its performers have in common. I think what's really interesting there is a lot of times it's more the personality is the right word Just wiring-based in terms of their approach to their job.
Speaker 2:There's certain folks that seem, from a value perspective, a scorecard perspective, like starting up, excited about really just certain things that actually influence a lot more than people that check every single box when it comes to the skill set, like I Tying all these things together, like, if you have a top performer, imagine a world where you could actually look back at the interview, the questions that they asked, the types of interview that they had, the data points, their feedback during that time of the interview process. This is where I want to get the business to where you can look at a top performer and go all right, tell me all the things that person asked in an interview. Are there any commonalities between our other top performers? What should we be looking for in interviews? What should we be ignoring? This is where we should be able to get to, where we can replicate and recycle or reuse that information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but you got to be careful with that too, because I think two different top performers can answer technical questions in different ways but still achieve great results, and so it's like finding that combination of when we're talking about a scorecard and we're talking about their skill set versus how they're wired, for instance. Yeah, I can. When I think about the top performers I've hired at Secure Vision. Some of them were down the pipe relevant, but more times than not there's no I can't really find a clear correlation.
Speaker 1:If I put it on a graph and it's like relevancy of experience and their ability to deliver, obviously they have the underpinning skill set. But like when we start to get hyper specific, like Series B tech company that did this to this and this, those things are important but not that they have 100% of that. Like I always said that for a lot of scale positions at least, I'm talking like a lot of engineering hires or a lot of sales hires. Like if you can get somebody who's 70% of the job has done 70% of the job, the reason they're going to accept your offer if they're a top performer is so they can do the 30% of stuff they haven't done.
Speaker 1:Get the right person with the right wiring, with the right fundamental base, give them room to grow and just let them go Do the onboarding, but just let them do their thing and the right person is just going to go at it. Hopefully you're giving them a lot more money than they made before, and that's the other thing. If you get people that have the right foundation but they're moving up, they're coming with all that energy because they're making more money, they're hungry, they want to prove themselves, they got a chip on their shoulder. Whatever it might be, those are the people that drive results. There are a few positions where you want the person that's like 100% qualified. I don't want a CFO that's not qualified.
Speaker 2:I want the CFO that needs the 30%, the learning of 30% and what is the? 30% is payroll.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no man, like I want my CFO to have done like 95%.
Speaker 2:So I'm not saying it's across the org, but Sales is the key one that you've mentioned there, like commercially, that is, it's the most interesting hire that you'll make. The correlation and the variety of personalities that you look around are very high-performance. Sales team is nuts, but the reason for that is that they take a little bit of everyone and mold themselves as they come into the business and then they teach someone else. Like the way that they do things, the way that a sales team absorbs information is crazy. I've seen that firsthand. Whereas engineering, I think the skill set is probably slightly higher. I agree, the 70, 30 for sales, I think, for, like engineering, real solid software engineer probably up towards the 90, 90, 10. They want to learn a new product, they want to be able to advance the skills, maybe pick up the odd new tech here and there. But yeah, it's an interesting dynamic for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think it's probably very spinning on role in a company and environment, all that kind of stuff. I just it's just interesting how we evaluate talent and I think too, it's like a lot of my experience too, specifically speaking, to building a recruiting embedded recruiting firm. It's like some of the best recruiters of hired, for instance, and they might come from high volume, they might come from temporary staffing, they might come from like a pure sourcing position, they totally different backgrounds. But my job is I want to go to those companies. I want to evaluate who's the best day in person on a team. Are they like, are they great? Are they crushing it compared to everybody else there?
Speaker 1:And from there, if I think you could do the job, I'm going to give you the top into the salary band. I'm not going to be like we're currently at 60, so I'm going to give you 80. It's like, no, look, you're making 60, come here, you can make, we'll get you 100. Like, yeah, let's do it. And just the amount of fire people have when you find a great person. They feel like they've been hustling and then you can change. Help them, change their life, do their hard work and opportunity that you create, get them like that increase in comp, like a lot of times. Those are the people that are like almost doubling their income when they come work at secure vision over the first year that they work at secure vision. Those are the people that crush it. And my company position is different, but I just think that, yeah, sometimes the way we evaluate, we just get too caught up on Like these minuscule, like little things versus really understanding what are the key drivers of performance in the role right.
Speaker 2:What advice would you give to businesses that can't match the high comp? They can't match the top end of the bracket. Their top end of the bracket is what they were previously on. It's difficult. Yeah, it can be interesting to hear.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's actually good. There's two main points there. I'm just writing them down so I don't forget. So the one thing is that I don't think any company should ever target being the height of the top end 90th, 95th, 100 percentile. When it comes to compensation. There's always going to be competitors out there who are spending an unreasonable amount of money and are running toward a cliff. Yeah, we've slept plenty in 2021. So the goal should never be to be at the top.
Speaker 1:The compensation read you always have to expect there's always going to be somebody willing to outbid you. Maybe it's differently if you're Google or Facebook or whatever, but most of us aren't right. So I think it's really important to never try to be to the top better. If it's a non-scale position and it's strategic, fine, you want to go for it and just pay a ton of money, then I'm more okay with that. But for scale positions I always say shoot for around 80th percentile. Don't try to be the top better, but be competitive, be above the median and try to structure your company in such a way that can provide that level of compensation. I do think it's really important to be above average on the mean. We need to be close to 80%, I would say.
Speaker 1:If environments where the margins are incredibly limited and that's just simply not possible because you're feeling like a niche need in the market and specifically for that type of customer that needs to be served, there are limitations in terms of budget or whatever else, then it's very important to make the position limited in scope. So if we're not necessarily going to be able to outbid other companies for top talent, we need to make sure that there's a level of simplicity to the role, to where we're not too highly leveraged on a few key people. So, for instance, if it's because a role is hard to fill because of your average compensation, it takes you six months to fill a role because people aren't as interested in it, and then it takes you six months and then you ramp and then somebody leaves sooner because you're a comp as a competitive, you're too highly leveraged on that person for the business to be successful. So you have to find a way. But how do we deleverage ourselves so if somebody leaves, we can get somebody else in the seat quickly?
Speaker 1:And the way to do that often is understanding how do we make the role simple enough? How do we make onboarding and training good enough in a combination of those things to how do we change the skill set? What can we do to lower the requirements and still achieve the result? That's really what it comes down to, because the flip side is that companies that stick to their guns are like no, we're only going to hire this person, but we only have a budget for this person. You're going to be in a perpetual loop of not delivering a good enough job in that area because you're too highly leveraged as a business executive. When you look at your org chart, there should be no one in your business that, if they leave, your screw.
Speaker 1:And sometimes it's a scale position, sometimes it's a key person, but you have to build your business to be bigger than any individual working at the business.
Speaker 2:There's never been a truer story than what you just said with engineering over the years. The list of requirements that people put on their job specs and it's a list of bullet points where an engineer will look at that and, more specifically, female engineers are statistically less likely to apply for a job. That is bullet pointed and list of moth tabs or requirements. You are narrowing the pool or shortening the pool of candidates that you're going to go after. Even just a slight shift in those moth tabs to nice to haves will make a huge difference. They may have some experience in them, but they're not looking at it and going I'm an expert in that thing when they're not. So I think, even just to your point, like just a shift in the narrative slightly. You still have those skilled in the job spec but they're no longer moth tab, bullet point Cause that's the tech box for me and if I don't take that box I'm not applying.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's also another, I think, a big problem and I've heard that as a lot before too, with engineering and then also just differences between men and women in general.
Speaker 1:I think what I've heard in a lot of studies like men are a lot more likely to apply to jobs that they're less qualified for, and just terms of hitting bullet points right I have heard that pretty consistently across numerous studies where women are going to be like looking more at each book have I done all of these things and apparently men are more likely to just say, yeah, there's chances. Yeah, exactly. So I think that is. There's a lot of things in terms of how we write GEDs, where we have to be from a diversity perspective, and every way that that are going to be sensitive to different demographics, and we have to put together and there's a lot to it, and there's people out there that I think are actually experts in that and dedicate a lot of their career to understanding that. I think we shouldn't underestimate particularly how much needs to go into how we're positioning our company to an employer, branding JD like it really does make sense to actually get an expert.
Speaker 2:If you're really committed to it. You need an expert. Let someone tear apart your job descriptions. Let someone tear apart your careers page. It needs to be done Like you need to take a step back. Even though you may have read the reports like probably me and you have I would say that I'm not an expert in that area and I would still have somebody check over my job specs because I need that assistance in that area.
Speaker 1:And I think if you're a CEO or a CPO or VP of town acquisition, you're probably not granular enough into employer branding, recruitment, marketing, writing JDs, because your role is holistic, right, you're doing all of this stuff. So I think what we're saying is get somebody who's dialed into this.
Speaker 2:That's their job.
Speaker 1:That's their sole job. Yeah, that's like their, their, their sole business.
Speaker 2:Like, even, even there are. There is tech out there that will scrape through and remove bias words, as we probably all seen and know about. I think that's a good place to start, and I think even running it past the trusted advisor is another, another good tip.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for sure. But yeah, look, we went over time today. We this has been a really fun conversation, so I've been pushing right up to the limit of our calendar block here. So, anton, I just want to say thank you for joining me today on the show. I think people are going to really enjoy this episode and I'm glad we went longer today and covered a lot more ground. This was a lot of fun.
Speaker 2:Amazing. If anyone wants to know more about ScreenLoop, feel free to give me a shout on my LinkedIn or at aircomesoscreenlipcom. Free access from the 30 employees at the moment. So get it while it's hot and then over. Maybe anyone that listens to this show a little discount will go out to you.
Speaker 1:Nice. Yeah, everyone, we're going to have Anton's LinkedIn profile dropped in the episode description, so make sure to check it out and make sure to continue to check in. We got partnerships going with Jim and greenhouse right now, so their CEOs are going to be coming on a quarterly basis and, yeah, we're going to continue to pump out a lot of value for you. And two, just remember also feel free to reach out if there's specific topics that you feel would be really valuable to you. If there's any town acquisition leaders, people, leaders that you think would be a great guest for the show. If you're VP, head of C level tuning in, then reach out if you'd like to be on the show too, and I'm always looking forward to meeting new people and talking shop. So, anyways, thank you so much for joining us today and we'll talk to you next time, take care.
