Speaker 1: Hi, this is Lewis. Hello everyone, this is Aldo. Welcome to The Recruitment Show. Today we're joined by Adam Gordon, who is the founder of Candidate ID, who specialise in talent pipelining software. Really cool company, and he came in to speak about talent pipelining, so we spoke about the various issues around that. Hello Adam. Hello, and thank you very much for having me. Thanks for coming all the way down from Scotland. Much appreciated. So, I thought we'd speak about talent pipelining, given you have an awesome HR tech firm, Candidate ID, and this topic comes up a lot with clients, talent pipelining and so forth. So how would you recommend they go about linking their recruitment to their business strategy as a starting point for talent pipelining?

Speaker 2: So I think the first thing is it's really important that HR teams are absolutely au fait with what the kind of business plan is, and what areas of the business are likely to grow. And I think it's really important that they understand well in advance what the predicted hiring is going to be. Very very few organisations do that, and I think it's a really important activity. And then I think it's really important to look at how do we ensure that we have got as close to just-in-time hiring, or what I call zero time to hire. If you can generate zero time to hire, you've got an absolutely amazing model, and we've got companies I know that are getting towards that. Really? Yeah, and it's through taking the talent pipeline approach.

Speaker 1: So they're engaging with candidates in the market that will be maybe suitable for jobs that might be coming up, so they start to engage early, so when the position comes up or when they need to hire, they can already start engaging with that pipeline.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. So my definition of a talent pipeline is that only exists when you know who's cold, who's warm and who's hire ready in real time. If you don't know that, you don't have a talent pipeline. So a list is not a talent pipeline, names on a database is not a talent pipeline. You need to know who's cold, who's warm and who's hire ready. Traditional way to do that is to have recruiters regularly calling their candidates to find out how they're getting on, find out if they still like their boss, find out if they feel they're getting paid enough, and try and get a temperature check on when people are ready for a move. Yeah, that's true. If you're managing any more than about 300 candidates on your database, it's just not possible to do it. It's an unsustainable activity, and this is why talent pipelining has never really been done properly. It's never really been commercialized, if you like. And this is why companies talk about it a lot, but very few have actually done it.

Speaker 1: And especially if you're a firm and it's not your day job, you know, I mean, if you're a pharmaceutical company, I mean, you have a talent acquisition team, but it's interesting, you know, when you're a candidate, the firm are engaging with you versus an external recruiter. You know, it's quite hard for the internal talent acquisition team to find out if these people are move ready. If it's competitive information, people are a little bit careful with telling a competitor if they want to move.

Speaker 2: Well, an internal talent acquisition person is normally drowning under about 40 different wrecks. Yeah. So, you know, keeping in contact with people is just not something that they've got time to do. And this is why you need to use technology to automate this process. And you need technology to do the heavy lifting. And funnily enough, it was a pharmaceutical company that I was working with when I had the idea for creating Candidate ID. So we were providing them with candidate research services. And I was in their office and I said, it's one of the world's biggest pharma companies. And I said to them, you keep asking us for the same people, sales people, East Coast of the USA, regulatory affairs people based in London. What are you doing with the people that we found three months ago and six months ago and nine months ago? And the answer was, well, some of them said they're interested. So we, you know, went through a process with them and hired some and didn't hire others. But most of them didn't actually say anything to us. And so we want to kind of keep going back to them until they're ready for a conversation. And I said, so what you're telling me is that you are literally asking us for the same people every three months. One year ago, we were finding one new person for you every two minutes. Now we're finding one new person for you every seven minutes. So the well is running dry. And the other question I asked was, what proportion of the people that we're identifying for you are already on Taleo, which was their applicant tracking system? 70%. Okay, so 70% of our work is that you're paying us to do is really a bit of a waste of time. What proportion of the people coming in from your adverts were already on Taleo? 70%. And I'm thinking, so you're paying us to go and find people. You're paying job boards to bring people to you. You're paying an internal team to go and find people. And all of those, most of those people are already on your database. Massive waste of money.

Speaker 1: It's crazy. The people in the talent acquisition team don't really want to be calling through the people on Taleo.

Speaker 2: Absolutely not. Because it's not, it's almost impossible to search for people. But the thing is, even if it has got good search functionality, even if an applicant tracking system has got good search functionality, you find you're looking for a regulatory affairs manager based in London, you go onto your database, you find 500 of them, who do you contact first? A to Z?

Speaker 1: That's the problem. You've got no, yeah, you've got no idea who's more likely to want to receive a phone call from you. That's where lies probably the biggest challenge in the recruitment industry. It's like time management. So if you can find something that orders that list, then yeah, you solve a massive problem.

Speaker 2: That's precisely the problem that we've been attacking. How does it work? So employers use our product to distribute content to all of their candidates, multi-channel, multi-format. Its superpower really is that it's tracking and scoring each person's interaction. So anytime somebody opens an email, opens a text message, clicks on a link, looks at their video, looks at the hiring manager's LinkedIn profile, every action they take, Candidate ID is tracking it and it's applying engagement points to their record so that you could go onto Candidate ID, go regulatory affairs manager, London, filter by engagement score. Those 500 people are now in order of engagement with our business and our brand. So I can see that these are the 15 people who have been on our career site in the last 10 days. That's the 15 people I'm going to prioritize contacting. Is it linked also to LinkedIn, social media? Any websites that you own, you apply tracking script to the website and that's how you can track around there. Any websites that you don't own, you make sure that you're sharing Candidate ID generated links, which mean that on LinkedIn, you post something that's 10 ways to be a better regulatory affairs manager. When they click on that link, that's tracked. So that's how we're tracking around social media.

Speaker 1: Amazing. And with GDPR now, you can get, I presume you can get permission from these people to stay in touch, which is even more powerful now.

Speaker 2: There are a variety of different aspects to that. The first is we believe that we're providing a technology solution to GDPR because an applicant tracking system, in the case of one company I know, they had 10 million records on their applicant tracking system across the world. That's a huge data risk. So they should not have had 10 million people on there. So with using, if you're able to track and score people's interactions with your business and you can show there's an ongoing relationship and you can claim legitimate interest as the legal basis for processing. So you really want to keep that relationship going and you want to automate that relationship so that you're not having to keep asking people if they want to opt in. So there's a static database, a system of record is really, really difficult to achieve GDPR compliance with.

Speaker 1: What about internal talent pipelining? Can it do both?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Not very many companies have got a particularly sophisticated approach to internal mobility and people get overlooked for jobs all the time. When the hiring manager's instinct is, we need to go out to the market and find somebody with these skills, rather than actually consider, it's going to take us three months to have that person in a seat. We could have trained Sarah or John to do that job in less than three months. So internal engagement is something that, I mean, our customers aren't really using candidate ID for internal engagement yet, but we do believe that that's a use case that will become more prominent in 2020.

Speaker 1: Thank you very much for coming in. Really appreciate it and enjoy the trip back to Scotland. Thanks very much for your time, Lewis. Pleasure.