Episode 118

Julie Phillipps thinks LinkedIn and AI are must-have in Modern Hiring Landscape

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show today. I'm joined by Julie. Julie, thank you so much for joining us.

JULIE: Thank you for having me.

TIM: Oh, it's absolutely our pleasure. And where I like to start is just to hear a little bit more about the guests just so our audience can start to think about who they're listening to today.

JULIE: Yeah, so I'm Julie Phillipps. I'm probably bringing with me, I'll show my age a bit now, 25 years, potentially, in the HR space. And it's probably split 50/50; half of that was in pure recruitment roles, a lot of that, of course, in the early agency world, moving more into in-house recruitment teams, so on outsourced recruitment projects, and then moving in-house, really. And that's where my career eventually evolved into HR. And yes, I'm now 14 years, I think just over 14 years. In the HR space.

TIM: Excellent. And yeah, really delighted to tap into your expertise today. And one thing I'd like to ask you about straight off the bat, the resume, the CV. Is it dead? Should we resuscitate it? If it's half dead, should we let it die? And if we let it die, what's next?

JULIE: Oh, gosh, yeah. I Yes, potentially. This is a really difficult one because I think you know, in a world where we are seeing a rise in kind of CV applications because that is still the traditional mode and that is still a mode that we're using. For example, in a tool like LinkedIn, when you're applying for a job, you'll see a gazillion applications these days for each of the roles. And that is. also asking for a CV as a typical prompt in order to apply for the role. But I think what that does lead to as well is we know that there are some very cleverly crafted CVs and generative AI CVs that are also, and also some people are just chancing their luck and perhaps seeing whether they might be able to apply for the role. Roles are more accessible, people are remote, and it gives a lot of people accessibility to it, to apply for these roles. So that is causing an increase, the rise in CVs, which makes the recruiter's job 10 times harder.

TIM: And so yeah, the CVS is still there, and it's still central to, I'd say, 99.9% of all jobs are still starting with. someone sending their CV or their resume. I keep getting corrected by Americans because they say resume, not CV. But if, yeah, is it redundant now? Because it's just I'm hearing again and again that it's just being crafted with AI, and does it even represent the person anymore?

JULIE: Yeah, and I think that's where we'll see the evolution of the change. But we're not quite there yet, but I can see I'm reading more about this. I'm hearing more people talk in these conversations about, is, are we going to start to see a change? Actually, we've also seen a change in how people are using their LinkedIn profiles. Before, people were a bit lazy about building their brand on LinkedIn, right? But now, we have to sharpen our LinkedIn profile to make sure of search optimization, for one thing, that we've got our skills and all of our experiences on there. But that's a really useful tool that people will go to first. Before actually looking at the CV anyway. But there are also some really great tools; there are some providers that are really looking at different ways. And this hasn't, this isn't a new thing; this is something that has been around for a while. And I remember in my previous organization, we looked at this, particularly with the DEI lens. Because what we wanted to do was to improve diversity in tech, and that is where this had started. The, the idea of removing a CV and looking at hiring or an application process in a slightly different way, was to remove bias from those processes, right? Those inherent biases that we may have when we're viewing CVs. But actually now, we can see this. These types of tools evolve in a slightly different way and solve other problems like generative AI. And what we see that typically looks like is instead of the CV application, which may still be part of the process, by the way, that might be like a secondary part of it. But you will start to look at more practical. assessments online that they might have to complete a few questions that would really draw into skills and experiences and theories. And someone's authentic lived experience versus just, what could be, some sort of figure or fact on a CV that may or may not be crafted by generative AI at all.

TIM: Yeah, I feel like we need some kind of basic validation layer. And yes, I feel like this has always been a problem. Like my original pain point, why I created our business was. interviewing candidates who seem to have the right skills and experience on their resumes, and it was not the case. So whether they exaggerated or they just didn't have self-awareness around how strong their skills actually were, like a really common, almost like trope in analytics, was you did an hour Udemy course, and then you're an expert in whatever machine learning. And so it's just so hard to differentiate at the CV level who actually had the skills and who didn't. So I feel like we need some kind of. thin validation layer, but not in a way that's alienating to candidates either. Like, we can't ask people to do hours of tests for every job they apply for, because that's not going to be fun. So I'm not actually sure what the right answer is. I feel like we need to find new data sets to make these decisions. I don't know.

JULIE: I think, with the practical assessments, you do have to make sure that it's not too onerous, at that point anyway, because you'll put off, that you will put off quite a lot of people, but from a CV perspective. There are also tools that you can use that you can train through large language models that will also start to, over time, you involve these, and you need to work very carefully with the organization to ensure that you're getting the right prompts and train the system to how you need it in order to be able to start to sift through some of that. Again, it's not a fail-safe way of getting the perfect candidate through the door. And I don't think any of these methods we're talking about is going to be the kind of thing that's ultimately the person we're going to hire. Otherwise, if we did, we're not going to have recruitment, some people making decisions, and we're a long way off making the AI or other methods make our decisions like that. So I think what we're seeing is just an evolution of really sophisticated tools, using either AI-like large language models to be able to actually just reduce the time and effort that it takes at the front of that funnel process, which is weighing every recruiter down at the moment. That doesn't have these tools. Some might have them already, right? But this is a real problem. And this is what I'm seeing on LinkedIn: stories from recruiters or polls. How bogged down are you with the number of applications? This is a real solution to solve that problem. It takes investment. The other side of it is the slight evolution in the recruiter role as well. So are we asking our recruiters to be slightly more technical because of the engineering slant on the role that they're doing now, as they start to really immerse themselves in what AI is and what it can do for them and how it can help them be more efficient, but also language models, right? If you're trying to train prompts on how to get you the right number of CVs or the right quality of CVs, within a process that's going to put on some new skills, right? So there's going to be some real investment needed in us as individuals in HR functions, particularly the recruiters, in order to use these tools efficiently.

TIM: I feel like we're in a weird little spot at the moment where Because large language models developed so quickly to such an unbelievable level of quality and any individual candidate can just pick it up as and when they want it and they adopted it really quickly. But companies, the HR tech systems obviously haven't gone as quickly, which is only natural because it's much more complicated to think about making a decision on how you're going to screen candidates in a business. In a software as opposed to an individual deciding I'm going to use this to apply to a job or to optimize my CV because company has all these other constraints that can't just start automatically filtering out candidates using some system that I don't understand. So there's obviously that's playing out, but I wonder if we just need to wait another 6 to 12 months and then it'll all be fine again. All the ATSs will have some kind of screening technology in them. And then even maybe as a TA, you don't have to get too into the weeds of how to use the products because it'll be in a kind of nice interface where you don't necessarily have to be a prompt engineer to figure it out yourself. Is that how you see it evolving or

JULIE: Yeah, I think that's a really good point because I think what is easy to do at the moment is get caught up in the hype of this, panic, and ask, Am I doing enough? Am I, have I got the right systems tools, right people to do all this stuff? And I think the reality is it is a bit of a journey despite the hype and is recruitment. Gonna change overnight? No, it's not. It's an evolution of that. And I was very intentional in my last company of, when I invested in two UHR systems, we consolidated three into two. But what I made sure of is that there was AI capability, and there was, and also offered us real rich experiences from data and insights in order to really build really decent pictures of skills and the evolution of skills in our business. But it takes time to learn and understand all of that. But I think that's the journey that companies will have to go on is, okay, so what's first? What do I have to do first? And what's the noise? We talk about noise in CVs; there's a noise in the market about how we use AI and how we become more efficient and proficient in our roles with it. And that comes down to the strategy, right? That's working collaboratively with the heads of the business. to really think about, okay, so where is our investment needed? Where's our area of focus to drive down efficiencies and change in this area? Because actually, it's the way the world is going. It's not going away. It's just the how and the when that we need to get on board with.

TIM: Do you have a feeling at the moment for where AI will be most helpful most soon in hiring? Is it that screening challenge of, Oh my God, I've got a thousand resumes. Who are the 10 I should look at? or is there somewhere else that you think there might be more value?

JULIE: What we're going to see, it's the automation side of that. I think that's the most exciting. And actually, there's a lot of ATSs out there that will do that already. The time that it saves when you've got integrations with things like Office 365 to enable calendar coordination is just really streamlined now. And then also rearranging them. The amount of time that could be wasted on scheduling interviews for a single recruiter, particularly in small businesses, is really challenging. So that is a really simple part, just the automation side of it from that perspective. But also what we see in some ATSs, and I'd love to see this more actually, is just the steps of the process that the candidate goes through that we can lead them through, and they have a sense of where they are in the process all the time, and they'll receive a notification of what's happening at the moment, and this is And this is something I'm reading everywhere, particularly on LinkedIn, is this whole ghosting, the perception of ghosting, where people are applying for jobs and just going into a black hole and not hearing anything, right? And these are the people I know that are really talented people in the market as well. People who are passive job seekers as well that are just saying, Oh, I'll just apply for that job and see what happens and just not hearing anything. So something isn't working at the moment. But we're not getting any notification saying, Oh, you're not, you're at this stage, the recruiter's seen your CV, you will hear in two to three days. There's something about the candidate experience that's being lost at the moment in this kind of transition, I think, between more sophisticated and more proficient hiring processes and where we're stuck at the moment. Yeah,

TIM: Point. And if I think about all the ATSs I've used, I don't know, Greenhouse, Lever, Workable, Smart Recruiters, they'd all tend to have for any job rec a set of stages already set up where, as a user, as a recruiter, you know what your stages are. And it makes me think that because that would be very easy for them to then also share that with the candidate in theory, because that data exists, there must be a reason they haven't built that—is it more like a lack of demand from companies? They don't actually want to give that transparency to candidates. They'd rather keep that to themselves. Do you think?

JULIE: That's an interesting one, because part of that is a bit of an unknown to me in terms of what those providers are and what steps should be transparent. There is an element that actually there's a recruiter behind this interface. There's a recruiter looking at CVs, believe it or not; despite everything we're talking about here, they're still doing the bulk of the work. But actually what they are is very busy, right? There's a lot of, probably a lot of roles on, a lot of steps in the process, a lot of calendars to manage, and information to get out. So sometimes it does get a bit lost in that process. It's really hard to keep on top of that work when you're dealing with a high requisition volume as well. Maybe that is. It's partly the recruiter's role to be able to go out and to make sure that candidates are informed. But actually, it's quite an impossible task to keep all of those balls juggling at one stage. This is a real opportunity for automation in these tools, and we will see a progression of that in time to come. One of the things we used was a system called Bamboo HR when I first joined my last organization. It's not the, we didn't, from an ATS perspective, it's not. It's not. the best, right? You can manage candidates in it, but the data out of it is not brilliant, etc. But when somebody signed an offer, you could see that they had gotten the offer; you could see they'd opened it. So what you could see is they viewed the offer seven times, but they hadn't signed it. So that would trigger me to either put in a call or get the hiring manager to maybe reach out to that person. So I think if we start to see some habits and some behaviors in systems like that, we can then click in, and that whole candidate management can start to click into play there.

TIM: Yeah, it's interesting. If I think back over the past six years, I feel like there's sometimes a feeling, particularly among talent circles, that. automation in hiring is somehow dehumanizing or bad, whereas you've just laid out all these no-brainer use cases for unambiguous improvements in hiring with automation. Like, why wouldn't you want to automate the scheduling of an interview? There's no value add to someone calling a hiring manager and calling the candidate and calling the hiring manager and calling, Oh my God, kill me now. So surely we could automate a lot of these time savers and just make everyone's life a lot better. And we should embrace that kind of technology.

JULIE: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. As I said, what we're seeing with AI quite a lot of the time is taking away some of that mundane stuff; it's making us more efficient and effective because we are focusing on the right things. And just because you've got an automated response to say, Just to let you know, we are moving you forward to the next stage of the process. That wouldn't stop the recruiter from having that conversation as well, by the way, so I don't think we're going to. Let's just remove them from the process unless it's necessary. It's not about that. And I don't think that's going to, from a recruiter's perspective, take the joy out of their job as well, because they get a lot of satisfaction from the interactions they have with their candidates. But it just means that it's a little bit more formal, and also it does kind of cement that they're in that process, and it gives that candidate that reassurance.

TIM: One idea I had when I started this podcast initially was, in having these in-depth conversations, we would get to the truth of what actually happens behind the scenes, which I think is especially helpful for maybe more junior candidates who haven't been involved in the hiring and have just had a bunch of interviews and have probably had a bunch of rejections and are annoying. What I'd love to hear from you is almost to paint a picture of what does a TA do in a day? What are they juggling? What are the different tasks that they have? Because I think that would help understand. Okay, I get a lot of the time. It's not like I'm being deliberately ghosted or being deliberately whatever. It's just, oh my God, these people have a lot on their plate.

JULIE: That's a great question. I hope I do it justice, actually, because I'm a long way removed from doing the role myself, but obviously I managed the recruitment and the TA function in my previous role and did the TA job in my company before that. Yeah, I think. Days can look very different, but at any one time, there are multiple requisitions, and every stakeholder thinks that their requisition is the most important, right? That's normal. So prioritization is key. Managing, whether it be creating a new role or having a conversation about a new job, you've got to get your, if you haven't hired before, get your mind around exactly what that person is looking for, what the hiring manager is looking for. And it's actually the skills and experience and where to go to look, all those kinds of things. They will be setting up interviews. If they haven't got sophisticated tools, which not everybody has an ATS like Greenhouse or Workday, they will be doing the manual legwork in interview setup, and we still see this go on a lot. So it's coordinating; there could be multiple stakeholders diaries. It's the candidates time as well that can take a lot of back and forth if you're doing that for eight roles. That's a day's work sometimes, right? It can really bog you down. But then there's also screening of candidates as well. If you're not, if you're not using some of these tools available now, you're doing that front end of the funnel screening. So they can spend a lot of their time. Just in 30-minute conversations, these aren't extensive conversations, but they're trying to get assessed the best fit possible in that 30 minutes, sometimes a bit longer timeframe, right? And there's content switching all the time because different jobs and different hiring managers. So they're having to really switch their brains on a daily basis quite, quite a lot in order to have those—the right conversations, the deep conversations they need to with each candidate. There's managing the hiring manager's expectations, keeping them up to date, keeping the candidate up to date. It could be the briefing of the first, second, or third interviews. It's the presentation, the briefing of the presentation. So it is this constant; you've got to keep everything running and everything going at the same time, and then the hiring process as well. So quite often when they're doing the offer process, they're managing all of that themselves as well, but then there's the onboarding. So they actually have a real responsibility to make sure that person starts in your organization as well. So they're keeping contact, like a keep-in-touch plan, to make sure that person starts on day one and they can answer any questions they may have before joining. So it is, it's an end-to-end cycle, and problems occur within that as well, and they have to go back to square one again and then start again. And then we talk about the pipeline; every company wants a pipeline versus just reactive hiring, right? How often have we heard, I'd love us to build a pipeline for next time"? It's really hard to be a proactive recruiter sometimes as well.

TIM: Yeah, every time I've spoken to TAs, I've always thought, God, that's a tough job and such an underappreciated one as well. I remember. speaking to someone a couple of years ago who was working for a very famous global financial institution, and she was working out of the Italian office the company had in Italy. I don't know. Three hundred, 400 people. She was the only one who did all of the recruitment for the entire company. I was like, I need not to ask them like two or three times to make sure I'd understood what they were saying correctly. Okay. So it was lost in my translation or something. And then she was the only one what, how's that even possible? Imagine the weight of expectations. And as you say, the context switching as well across the roles and then. across the okay, this is I'm rejecting a candidate. This is I'm screening a CV. This is I'm a, oh my God. Yeah, it must be so difficult.

JULIE: And I think the reality is sometimes we see, I've seen it in my organization, is sometimes I would get feedback that, oh, what's happening with hiring? I feel like it's being slow. Honestly, they don't see there's a swan gracefully floating on the water underneath. It's all go. It's long hours. It's really hard graft. It's constant communication with all the people that you're dealing with. It's a really, it's a hard job, right? I have a lot of respect for recruiters. I've worked with some really fantastic ones over my time, and I think, honestly, I'm going to put it out there. I think it's a really undervalued job. And the impact they make is huge. Organizations do not exist without a hiring function, right? They make, they hire the people that make the real impact on the business, right? So it's so important that they get it right. It's so important that hiring managers work exceptionally closely and really respect the recruiter role and vice versa, by the way, in order to create a really collaborative, brilliant process in order to hire the right people.

TIM: Amen to that. And yeah, exactly. That's what any leader would say: pretty much getting the right people is their single biggest goal and biggest leverage point as well. If you don't have the right people, you're in trouble. Now, yeah. On that same train of thought, something that came up in a conversation last week, I'd love to run it by you. I spoke to someone who runs a business now called the hiring school. He's based in Germany, and we were discussing the fact that, okay, like sometimes there's some kind of interview training that interviewers get, which I think is important. I never had any; I figured it out as I went along, so I feel like that's maybe an under-taught skill. But one step higher than that, hiring itself as a skill, it's not really taught that much. I don't think there's much going on in that space yet. It's the single most important thing to get right. Are we missing something in not having, you know, not having thought about hiring in a more sophisticated way, I guess, is one way of saying it?

JULIE: Yeah, gosh, that's a really interesting one, and I guess where my brain's going at this point is how did I get into recruitment? I thought I wanted to do sales, and then somebody said to me, Have you ever thought about recruitment? Because I said I liked people, and I thought, is that sales? And you hear it time and time again that people fall into recruitment. I just fell into it. It's not a chosen career path. And in actual fact, when you go through your career as a recruiter, the skills that you develop from communication, from understanding people, and from questioning styles, you have to have a real intuition about people, and that is a real skill. And I just, yeah, it's a really interesting one. And I don't think you can go and you can get training on certain specifics. We all know that interviewing techniques and behavior and intellectual techniques, that is obviously a kind of a craft and an art that we can all get better at, and probably we'll all, we will still continue to learn, as far as that goes. But it's, yeah, it's not like necessarily a chosen career path. I still don't think I could be wrong, right? I think there may be new generations coming behind us that this is a chosen career path. But I think people become aware of it; I think particularly in agencies, sometimes it could be the financial side of it that's appealing, but actually what you'll find is people who work inside the companies, it's more about, actually, doing the hiring, right? You get to really understand how businesses work; you really get an in-depth knowledge of the skills and experience needed; you know what good looks like for your organization, so you really get real joy out of going through those journeys with candidates and seeing them go through the process and hopefully get hired at the end. So I think, yeah, it's a really interesting question because you're right, I don't think you go to recruitment school necessarily, do you? But it's a career that people opt to do, and it's a really great career.

TIM: Yeah. I feel like there's a curriculum there, like there's enough meat on that bone that you could really do at least, I don't know, a sizable online course in teaching it. If I just think of all the problems I've seen, all the mistakes I've made, and just how to not do those in some kind of consistent. Framework. I feel like that would be interesting, and I'll give you one random example, which popped into my head. So my hiring journey could not have started off any worse. All right. So this is years ago; I think 10 years ago now I was trying to hire an analyst into the business I was working at. I was a senior analyst. I was trying to. To be honest, the hospital passed them some of the tedious manual work that I had to do because I really was sick of it. Okay, and I learned a harsh lesson, which was to not oversell the job because I can remember pitching the role to these candidates as arts. We've got all this interesting data that we haven't analyzed yet. And there's lots of opportunities to do analysis, but in reality, the first, at least, three or four months were going to be a lot of grunt work, automating, annoying, reporting, and shitty spreadsheets, but I didn't really pitch it that way. And so the first candidate who joined quit on day five. I then went back to the heart of the back to the drawing board because I didn't have a second choice candidate or whatever. Because, you got to wait out the notice period, did the whole hiring cycle again, hired the second person, and quit on day two. Okay, so this is my entry to hiring. Eventually, I feel that I kid you not, I feel that I was obviously dejected because we've had two candidates quit; it's two months of effort. And I heard someone behind me, some young lad had come in, had been hired as a temp worker for one day. To do some filing in the HR team, funnily enough, and he was chatting to one of the people there, and he said something I did. Internship at Morgan Stanley, but, oh, okay. That rang a bell, like he's probably at least clever, like if nothing else. And so I took him into a meeting room, had a chat with him for five minutes, and gave him the job as an analyst. He lasted there for 10 years and got promoted four times. So the most random flip of a coin, whatever, actually ended up working quite well in that scenario. But the takeaway for me was yet to not over-pitch roles. Just be honest, be transparent, and don't bullshit on either side. And so that would be a takeaway that I've had since then. It's just to almost put all the cards on the table in that first interview or even in the job ad itself. Just try to be open and upfront because then surely you're going to attract the right candidates that are actually interested in that. As opposed to this weird thing where a lot of companies kind of string them along, try to almost get them in the door, and they go, Here you go. 30 percent of it is this fire that you have to figure out about now. Yeah. What do you think about the kind of transparency thing?

JULIE: Yeah, it's massively important. And I think we've talked earlier about some of these tools that can help you get a decent pool of candidates through using Gen AI. And I think part of that process is to get the right job description in place through the use of Gen AI. That would help not only really hone in on what the reality is, the core skills that are needed, and experiences that would be beneficial, but also what culture add you can bring, what you like to bring into your organization, and also for bias as well, right? So we like job descriptions, not to take out some of those more stereotypical bias-type wordings as well. So I think there's some, whether or not you use those tools a lot, or whether you try and apply those lenses yourself when you're hiring. The reality, the transparency on the job description, is really important. I think job descriptions are still in the market. There's a long way to go when you look at those varying levels of what's appealing. It's sometimes you ignore it and hope that the reality of the company is better than the job description selling. But it's a really difficult one. And I think also then through the process is your opportunity to be really transparent about what the job is as well. And again, that's that human interaction where that becomes really important. And, is there a more effective way to do that? From a process perspective, I think that just comes from people sharing their lived experiences, what it's like to work in the company, and what it's like to do the role. This is how I see the role playing out on a daily basis, and that's really important as well. Yes, I think transparency through the process, being, painting the real reality of how you manage your process in terms of three interviews and assessment day, or chatting to somebody that happens to be doing temp work, that may actually turn out to be the right person in the business, these are all effective ways of hiring. There's not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. to make sure you get the right candidate at that point. But what you want to make sure of is that you've done enough to make sure that, from a role perspective, you feel like there's a good level of experience and potential, but also that, actually, they're going to work well in my organization, and they're going to bring the right attributes that mean they're going to get work done really well with others around my organization. I think those are the things that are really important. And certainly, the organizations I've worked in, those are the things that we really need. Tested a lot because you have to work so collaboratively with people and do things with others all the time. And I think that for me is really important. So yeah, just making that process really effective and then making sure that person at the end of it, the success isn't then making an offer. The success is that they stay with your organization, right? That they get past that six-month barrier or, the day, a couple of days in, in your case, that you really, that's the test for me. It isn't about that. Yes, we can make someone an offer. It's the reassurance that they're going to thrive in your business as well.

TIM: Yes, and given the average tenure of an employee is as low as it's probably ever been and the so-called bad hire rate, maybe regretted hire" is a better way of putting it because that implies they're a bad person. But that regretted hire rate is quite high, and the cost of a regretted hire is so ridiculously high. Surely there's this kind of something missing in this piece. We used to work with a business called Get Your Guide based in Germany. And I was struck by how aggressively transparent they were with the information they gave out to candidates at the application stage. So it's not even information that you needed to wait for the interview to get. But they would give candidates the share option and valuation information. This document, where they had a day in the life of this role, links to the LinkedIn profiles of their teammates, mini bios, and the metrics that they were responsible for in their team, because it was like a product analytics team, and a few other things also, like relocation information, because they source candidates from overseas, like how that all worked. And so they had this big document pack, which they just had available. That at that initial stage candidates got, which I thought is a really good way of doing it because that basically set it up. So to answer 99 percent of questions anyone would ever ask in that first interview. And so they managed to streamline their process as a result of that. So it saved them time, and then it helped attract the right candidates because. people knew what they were getting into now. I guess the reason most companies don't do that is it's just a lot of work to collect all that data, all that information, and package it. So AI could, I don't know, magically do that and get that out. I think that would streamline the process a lot, I think.

JULIE: But is it a lot of work? Because you only have to do it once and maybe tweak it depending on the nature of the role and the person hiring or the team. So I think some of those things you can invest in and take the time and effort to put in early on. In my previous organization, we had a one-pager, which kind of. just said a lot about kind of what the company was doing, where we're going, links to podcasts, and the various webinars that the organization had done just to immerse themselves in what we were doing and where we were going. That isn't difficult stuff, right? So I think, yeah, I think for me, those things are a no-brainer.

TIM: Yeah. And maybe it's also a case of I don't know about you, but I feel like a lot of hiring processes. Get derailed when there hasn't been enough forethought, and you just dive into it. And you're like, Oh yeah, I've got this JD in my folder that we posted three years ago. Let's just reuse that. Because it's close enough when it maybe isn't. And maybe you're like, I just, I want a cookie-cutter data analyst. And you haven't really thought about what exactly you want and why and how they're going to fit into the team and all those kinds of things. And we've just dived into it then. Everything erodes pretty quickly after that. So maybe as part of the same process of just really thinking about what you need, you would naturally create all this content anyway, because you need to know it for yourself, and then you can just share it with the candidates as well as almost like a happy bonus.

JULIE: Yeah, I think that's an interesting one, because I think the other thing is, how prepared are your candidates when they come to the interview as well? And that's part of the candidate experience, because you want to give them the best chance; you want them to be informed and to make the best decisions. Present themselves in the best way possible. So it's a balance because you want to see them react. And in, in that moment as well. But I think for them to be aware of kind of values, competencies, at a minimum, I think is a really nice idea because also, and my background is predominantly tech, but it's very easy to slip into. The tech mode, can this person do tech like I can do tech, but actually, it's equally important that they can work with others and teach others at the same time as well. So actually you're not just looking for the, can they solve technical problems for our customer, but can they work with others and can they actually work with the customer as well and take the customer on a journey. So it's really important that your interviewer and your candidate are briefed in the right way to make sure you're getting the right outcomes from both sides.

TIM: One word that's come up several times already in our conversation has been bias. And I feel like, personally, traditional hiring. is rife with different bits of bias. I feel like often the best candidate doesn't necessarily get the job. I feel like hiring is quite often subjective. And so there's been some really interesting studies using, applying for jobs with CVs that just have different ethnic background names on them and measuring the callback rate. And so you can determine this particular group is discriminated against in this country. They're really fascinating studies. And so that's one side of things, but then we've seen, yeah, there's been a big wave of DEI over the past five or six or seven years. And now there's some quite aggressive pushback against it, particularly coming out of the United States with certain characters leading the way in this. And then it seems to have had a knock-on effect when our company seemed to be scaling back. That's what I'm hearing. I haven't really verified this myself. But that seems to be the narrative. What do you think about this? Is this a move in the wrong direction? Is there any merit in that idea? Will we really be onto a good thing, and should we have pressed her in the advantage in making hiring fairer? I don't know. I'm trying to piece things together myself at the moment, so I'd love to get your thoughts.

JULIE: Yeah. And also in full transparency, I'm trying to piece it together myself a bit at the moment. And there's going to be different opinions on this as well, depending on who you talk to. But yeah, I don't think there's a day that goes by at the moment where you're not hearing about another. These are global giants, right? These are major organizations that are coming out with announcements and how they're scaling back their DEI efforts and programs. And, for me, this isn't about cost-cutting streamlining; there may be, obviously, savings to be made from a headcount perspective, but these are very profitable organizations that turn over trillions of pounds. It's, I don't want to get into the political wranglings of this, in any way, shape, or form, but, in my honest opinion, I have a lot of respect for these organizations. Generally, I have worked for one of the biggest organizations in the tech industry, and I'm pleased to say they're not scaling back from a DEI perspective, but I can't, whilst you'll see some scaling back in efforts, one of the biggest things that we're talking about is they're talking about quotas and metrics around ethnics and these minority groups. So you'll see a pullback on sharing data and trying to achieve quotas in terms of numbers in the organization. That doesn't mean to say, hopefully, from what I'm reading, that they're not still going to be. a target, they're still going to be hiring a very diverse background of individuals, because actually we know, it's reported, McKinsey forms that actually focus on diversity and have diversity in your business do make you more profitable, right? And that's been proven. So I can't imagine they're doing a complete let's scrap DEI, right? What we'll probably see is a little bit of a pivot, and you'll see that some of these conversations and some of these. Initiatives will be woven more into what is just inherently in their culture and their talent programs. So I would, I would hope that you will see, as you're doing, any kind of talent process that you are putting your DEI lens in, but also managing with equity as well. So actually, what is, what makes this person become the next leader is very different from this person, and how do we bring equity into that process and drive that smoothly? Unless you change your HR functions overnight, I think most of our brains are wired quite similarly. And actually we're about fairness and equity and trust in the organization and a very safe place to work. And that's not going to erode overnight. I think there's a perception and a sense—that's what might follow and what might come with it. But I just can't imagine a world that's not. where that is the case, if that makes sense, and, having real solid processes and procedures, policies around discrimination and harassment, and other workplace conflicts that can occur. And real ways of tackling that still have to be, you still have to have a safe and healthy working environment. So I'm hoping that none of that goes away. I'm touching wood; I'm pretty sure that none of that's going to go away. But yeah, it's a real shame. I think, there has been lots of progress made over the years from a diversity perspective, particularly in tech. That's my experience: where we see a true lack of diversity, it has really improved over the years. So to say it's not having a side impact is pretty sad. I think it's a miss. But I don't want us to go backwards. I want us to still progress. But we are where we are with it, and I think it would just look a bit different and feel a bit different. Your thoughts?

TIM: Yeah. So I should make my thoughts clear because it's so easy when discussing this to feel like you end up on sort of one side or the other. And so I have a slightly nuanced view. So one is that So the study I was referring to, all the studies I was referring to earlier, I think would paint a picture. So that is, the studies were, and the University of Sydney did one about three years ago, where they got tens of thousands of resumes and split them into three groups. Among the groups, the resumes were basically similar. The only difference with the names in the first group, all the resumes had an Anglo Saxon first and last name. Second group had an Anglo Saxon first name, Chinese last name. Third group had a Chinese first and last name. They then went and applied to thousands of different roles in Sydney, Melbourne, senior roles, junior roles, white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, HR, sales, data, everything. And they then measured the rate at which those three groups of resumes got a callback. Callback being literal phone callback, an email back, whatever it was. The first group, which had the Anglo Saxon first and last name, they got a 12 percent callback rate. The last group, which had Chinese first and last name, got a 4 percent callback rate. And they've done a really good job at controlling for all these other potential factors that could influence that such that it seemed as though the only reason one group was getting way fewer callbacks than the other was because of their name, which is disgraceful. And there's been similar studies done in other countries in the UK with different ethnic groups in America and Norway and what have you. So this is recent. This is not like this problem has been solved. This definitely still exists. The fact that if I were Chinese, I applied to a job here, and I have one-third the chance of a callback as if I had a white name is ridiculous. That's just racism. And so we have to solve that. So that is really important. What I was going to say was, so that's on one side; on the other side, I was shocked that last year at one point, the University of Technology, Queensland. Explicitly removed any concept of merit-based hiring and said, We are going to hire explicitly based on race and ethnicity, so race. Gender and sexuality, and they now, in theory, don't hire based on merit, and I was struck by that on the other side, thinking that doesn't seem right to me, because that's a pretty slippery slope down to I don't know where, and I was surprised also to see that it was legal; there's like carve-outs in our law where you can positively discriminate in inverted commas, and so I don't feel comfortable with that either. So I feel like there's surely some kind of objective way to do it, where the best person gets the job, where it doesn't matter who you are and you get the job, and that's my current thought. What do you reckon?

JULIE: Yeah. And I, yeah. That is a really hard that's a hard lesson, a hard concept really. But I've, I'm a kind of real advocate for D E I, due to, to be, there's a lot, many reasons why I am. But, What I'm also really sure on is that we, you hire the best person for the job. This isn't about whether you hire more women; it is about hiring the best person for the job. What we want to do, like you say, is to mitigate bias at the start of that process. Then it's about, actually, how does that person show up and demonstrate skills and experience in line? Are we aligned in terms of all of our skills, experience, culture, and all of that kind of stuff? That, I, it's really difficult when you hear this, and I know that obviously they're part of this problem that we're seeing now, particularly this big movement, is because of, it could feel like forced processes in order, and actually that's positive discrimination, like in order to get, hit these quotas of individuals. It's ruined the desired outcome, if that makes sense. I personally have not worked in organizations. Yes, there's been a real kind of focus on diversity from, actually, it's a really broad, diversity is huge, and actually, it's about making sure that everyone has the opportunity to thrive. So actually everyone's welcome in the organization, but also that we understand that everyone brings different experiences, diverse thoughts and perspectives, and we want you to be able to bring all of that and grow in the organization. So it's, for me, a lot more than just having numbers of people in our organization, but naturally that's, if you are in a business where it's predominantly white males or, which we know in the tech industry has been a systemic problem, seeing progress in that area is a really good thing, I think. To be able to make technology careers more accessible to more diverse groups of people, I think, is the right move. But yeah, forced processes and outcomes are not my bag at all.

TIM: Yeah, it's good to have these conversations, and I don't have the full understanding of this either. And it's a difficult topic, and we'll see what happens over the next couple of years. Hopefully it's still a move in the right direction. We don't go back to some. Some worse worlds, and we make things less fair because that would not be happy times. Julie, if you could ask our next guest one question about hiring, what would you ask them?

JULIE: Actually, I'd just be quite interested to know, because we've talked a lot about AI and Gen AI, the impact of AI, when it's happening, but I would just be interested to know where they are on this journey. If they're in a hiring function, leading a hiring function, or a recruiter, then what are they seeing and hearing, and what do they think the priority is?

TIM: Excellent. I will level that at our next guest in the next few days and see what they say. Julie, it's been a great conversation today. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing all the insights and thoughts with our audience.

JULIE: Oh, absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.