UNFILTERED: The 4P Framework for ATS Success: What Most Implementations Get Wrong

In this episode of Unfiltered: Real ATS Conversations, Alex Marcus and Vivian Larson break down the 4P Framework from the new book From Zero to ATS Hero: The Accidental Admin’s Journey. Learn how ATS administrators, HR technology leaders, and talent acquisition teams can avoid common implementation mistakes and design systems that actually work.

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Transcript

Speaker 2  2:11  
welcome everybody to unfiltered, real ATS conversations with me and Vivian Larson from the IRD team. We are talking about subjects taken from Vivian's new book from zero to ATS hero, the accidental admins, journey. This is the book that I wish I'd had when I first got it. Got started with I Sims about 10 or 11 years ago, my first implementation. This book just has every possible thing I could have needed to know. And there was so much that I didn't know, that I didn't know. And so we really hope that ATS system administrator, administrators both to use I Sims and also other platforms too. It's it is really a guidance that is applicable to any ATS. So we hope you grab a copy of the book. We are giving them away, one per week at our Friday calls for I Sims customers, system admin insights.com, but today we're going to talk about something that Vivian calls a four Ps framework. Can you explain Vivian what the four Ps framework is?

Speaker 1  3:29  
So we're going to talk to four Ps today, two of the four because we only have an hour. But essentially, they're an easy way for you to start eating the elephant one bite at a time. One of the challenges that a lot of the customers, over 500 plus implementations that I've done in my career always came to the table with, especially the ones that had never done it before, was you literally said it at the beginning of this conversation. You couldn't have teed it up better. I don't know what. I don't know. And so the four piece framework is just a way for us to try and easily help you know what you need to know in order to start from a position of power and strength and this entire journey, you don't know what you're building if you haven't done any internal analysis of all the various moving parts within your organization that will affect the decisions that You need to make throughout the process of implementing an ATS or managing an ATS, if you if you've already been past the implementation portion, and it's already in your lap, and you're managing an ATS as an administrator, and you have not had that role before, or you've not been part of the implementation, which is actually a critical part of the journey of building a system like this. These various pieces can help you understand all of the things that need to be known to properly move forward and manage an ATS or to properly build one from scratch.

Speaker 2  4:54  
Got it. I have a friend who's a math professor at a state university, and they recently implemented. Workday recruiting. And they, I think leadership took the attitude that hiring managers and recruiters will just use it, they'll use it. We told them to use it. They will use it. What my friend is telling me is that actually the majority of his sourcing and recruiting activity happens on math jobs.org, right? And so in the book, you talk about this, this, this disconnect between what leadership thinks will happen by virtue of a mandate and then what real users actually do in the system. So, so what does a real user segmentation exercise look like? Why is that valuable and how granular Do you really need to

Speaker 1  5:39  
get to be well? So the first P is people, and so I use this analogy people as you need to understand the people that you're inviting to use this system, it's like having a dinner party and not even understanding that you have a vegan coming and someone who's only carnivore and somebody with celiac disease, and then you have no idea what you're cooking all of these different people, because you didn't think to ask. So it's it's the same kind of challenge. Everybody says a recruiter. Recruiter is not this monolithic thing. There could be 14 or 15 different kinds of recruiters, a high volume recruiter's priorities and an executive search. Recruiters priorities are not identical. You need to understand the various layers of the types of users that you're going to be experiencing in your system before you design processes and think that every one of them is going to follow the same thing. Now, a uniform process is a good idea, but it doesn't work when everyone is moving in different pieces and moving in different directions, because they have different priorities. So understand the people that are using your system. You also need to understand what level of tech savvy. So the hiring managers are notoriously not going to be somebody that is in the system every day. There's someone who's going to be in the system when they have our acquisition and only when there's something for them to review, because they have other things to do in their day to day job. So using an ATS isn't their primary priority. So you need to understand the tech savvy level of those hiring managers. Giving them an extremely complicated process with multiple steps is most likely going to fail because they're not doing it day to day, so they're going to miss steps, especially if the system isn't designed to force them to take the steps that they need to take. So that's a user segmentation exercise. Break down the rules, okay, so you've got a hiring manager and a recruiter. Where are the variable Performance Points for those two groups. How do they differ in priorities? Is everybody in your organization high volume recruiting? Okay, great, we can build a high volume recruiting system and be happy. Or I have executive recruiters, I have corporate recruiters, I have hourly recruiters, I have recruiters who do long term campus and university searches. I mean, those are just some of the layers that I really frequently see when customers and I start to try and design a system together and they take a moment to introspect and see who's going to be using their system and where their priorities differ. So that's a user segmentation exercise. Sit down on paper and define who are the people that are going to be using your system on a day to day basis, and what are their priorities as far as day to day work and the system that they're interacting with, and at the end of the day, what are they going to respond to? So you built this beautiful system, but if it takes them six months to learn how to use it, and it takes them a whole long period of time to understand all of the moving pieces. They're going to go back to what they were doing before, because it worked, and then you're going to be scrambling to try and find all of the information that you've already been struggling to try and find, which is why you built an ATS

Speaker 2  8:57  
system in the first place. I love that, and when I think about who I want at the table for those conversations, I usually go for the constructive pessimist, right? So the person who has sent over numerous suggestions that may have been a little overwhelming in the moment, but if they were framed in a way that that showed that they were thinking critically and trying to contribute productively to the conversation. I love, actually, I love having a conversation with that person or those people, as opposed to the folks who say nothing because you know that they are just silently judging the process and then doing whatever they want to sign or as opposed to the folks who just send complaints without any indication that they're trying to work toward a solution collaboratively, even if they don't understand the back end, they don't need to, they shouldn't have to, right? But any other tips for who you want to see involved in those conversations? Because if we just guess what they want, we have a very good idea, right? And we probably get 90% there. But. Gap between what we think they want and what they actually need, I think involves a conversation.

Speaker 1  10:05  
Yeah, so one of the things I talk about in the book is that one of the most common mistakes that I have seen made in these system designs is nobody talks to the end users before they build it. And that's a frustration that I've always had, because when we get to user acceptance testing, that's the point where folks would bring in end users, and then they would have all kinds of constructive feedback that this isn't going to work, and we'd have to go back to the drawing board, and it would completely derail our entire project and our timeline, because nobody thought to ask them at the beginning, and so the people who use the system every day need a seat at the table, at the very least, do a survey, have an initial conversation with them about their priorities and what they need in a system that they're going to be using on a day to day basis. Some of them will give you very high level stuff, like, I just need to be able to point and click and do my thing, and others will give you very granular Well, I do very complex salary calculations, and it'd be great if it could do these calculations for me, and I didn't have to go into Excel, you know. So you will have a number of varying answers from your user group, but that's a good thing, because they all have different needs, and if you know them going in, you know, so I've said in the beginning, in our last LinkedIn live and also in the beginning of the book, that you always want to build a system with the 8020 rule in mind, where you're meeting 80% of the needs and 20% of the outliers are things that you can either solve outside of the system or prioritize in different ways, meaning you can build processes into the system for them, but not make them the focus of you know, okay, we can't move forward because we can't solve this portion of our problems. So in this case, you want to understand what 8020 looks like. You want to understand how many moving pieces there are in each one of your individual user types daily roles and how those moving pieces impact their efficiency. Impact your end goal of improving the bottom line. Impact candidate experience, hiring manager, satisfaction, all of those moving pieces you want to understand, where is the pain and what do they think will solve it? And I say that with a you think what they think will solve it with a grain of salt, because what they think will solve it may not always be the final solution. Don't take it on face value. There may be a number of moving parts to why what they think will solve it may not be the ultimate answer. But if you understand what their problems are before you start building. You're not going to compound them. You're not going to make them worse, because you didn't build without conscious understanding of what they need.

Speaker 2  12:48  
You know, it's funny, you mentioned surveys, and sometimes I shied away from surveys because they generated so much information that it was difficult to make sense of it. But this is a great use case for AI, right? If you can use AI at your organization, you can take those survey results, results, ask for a summary of trends and things that people are saying regularly and whatnot, and ask for suggestions, and then condense that all into something that is a lot more a lot more actionable. Yeah. Okay, so you talk about access rights. Access rights. What are access rights and what? What has always happened too late, what goes wrong with access rights?

Speaker 1  13:26  
So I'll tell you a horror story. I had a customer who did not bring this up as a priority throughout their entire implementation, and then when they went live, they had four different business entities in their entire organization. And throughout the process, I was asking, Is it okay that everybody sees everything? Are you find that a manager for X Division can see data from y division? And they were like, yeah, yeah, you know, it's not a problem. There's no reason that we need to think about that, that it's not an issue. So I listened and I moved forward and built their system without any kind of thought process around security and who can see what the probably the first month that they were live, they started having a problem with poaching, where so and so knew that this was someone's best employee, so they went and reached out to them, because they could now get to their phone number and their and their contact information and poach them for a role within their organization. And these are like different companies, different business streams that just knew each other tangentially. And so the customer came back to me with a Oh, crap. We didn't think about this issue, and now we've got our managers all mad at us for using the system, because now everybody can see all of their employees information, and they're cross poaching each other. And so we had to backpedal and find a way to build them the layers of access that we needed ultimately, so people didn't see data that we didn't want them to see. So don't unface value. Go into every scenario when you're building access rights with trust. And I know that's a horrible thing to think about your co workers, but people are going to people, and if they can find a way to use something to their advantage, they're going to do that, and in this case, controlling the narrative in the sense that you control who sees what is so important, because it saves you a lot of pain.

Speaker 2  15:30  
Yeah, you have to assume that people are going to act in their own best interest first, and they don't. They don't work in the central office, right? They can't have that global perspective, and nor is it really their role to and you would like to think that they would understand that poaching internally from a company that's in the same umbrella would be problematic, but they have their own they have their own things to worry about, and they have their own urgent needs that they need filled now, right? So you really do have to control those things at a systems level to make sure that the overall vision of how this is supposed to work is actually realized. Let's talk about hiring managers. So hiring managers, there's sometimes an afterthought in ATS implementations, and then they end up being a point of one of the largest points of friction, because adoption is much easier to drive among TA, because TA is touching this thing every day, but hiring managers sometimes are only touching it once a month, whenever they have a vacancy. So so how do you get useful input from the hiring manager population as a population that doesn't really think of themselves as system users? So hiring

Speaker 1  16:42  
managers are probably 50% of your users in your system, and they get about 5% of the attention. And it's, it's always been a frustration of mine, because I come from an agency background, and the hiring managers were who were ultimately making me successful, because they're the ones that wanted to work with me, the recruiters thought I was competition. So when you look at the way that hiring managers interact with the system, they want things to be simple. They don't want to have to do a lot to find the information that they need. And they ultimately want processes that don't hold them up. So if a hiring manager gives you a referral, they don't want the process to stop the referral from ultimately getting to them. They want the process to help that person get to them faster. And so like this has always been one of those pieces where, again, in the early stages of an implementation, I would frequently talk to some of the folks that would be building it and say, Have you had a conversation with anyone who is one of your better hiring managers, or one of your more frequent flyer hiring managers, or one of your most vocal detractors in your organization? Have you talked to them about what they want, what they need, and has it been something that you've considered, and almost 99% of the time the time the answer was no, or they didn't even think that the hiring managers needed a seat at the table. Meanwhile, at go live, the ones who were making the most noise about how awful the system was and that they didn't want to use it, and being the most vocal detractors to all of this work that this poor person who implemented the system had just put in, were always the hiring managers, the recruiters would almost always knuckle under and be like me. It's a new system. I'm being told to use it. It'll help me carry count my metrics. I'll figure it out. Whereas the hiring managers were like, I don't have time for this crap. I'm not going to do it. And then they call the recruiter and work with the recruiter completely outside of this. Yeah, yeah. So, and I can't count the number of times that I saw that countless times hiring managers are going to be your most resistant user group, because this isn't their day job. It's not their primary priority. Their primary priority is the stuff that they have to do to get their whatever little widget part of their day job they do going smoothly, and then this is just an afterthought to them. So you have to be conscious of the fact that unless you have a very recruiting, minded, hiring minded hiring manager group, more often than not, they're going to be your biggest negative group if it's difficult for them to do what they need to do quickly and efficiently in the system that you give them

Speaker 2  19:22  
and and, let's be frank, nobody relishes a new system, nobody. Nobody's excited. Nobody's gonna throw your party. I remember when I when we went live with my first isoms implementation HR director, threw a little party the HR department, right? But, but nobody in the organization is thinking, like, wow, this is great. Can't wait to get my hands on the new ATS. What they're thinking is, I dislike the last one. Here's, here's some new thing that we have to learn now. Like, they are very rarely, like, enthusiast. I think there was one in an organization of 1200 people. The last time I did this, it was really excited about this, and want to talk to me about it, but, but you should just assume the default state is. Is resistance, right, and and sort of grudging compliance, right? The more you can bring those people into the conversation, the more headway you can make toward making something that they eventually are excited about, but, but your default state is is not one of hooray. Here's a new ATS for me to learn, no.

Speaker 1  20:19  
And one of the other things I'd like to point out, when you're considering people consider how they learn, and what I mean by that is the other piece that is the most frequently overlooked in the building is, how am I going to actually roll this out? How am I going to make sure that I give my folks enough time to learn and understand the new processes. If I am redesigning the wheel and taking away steps that they've been accustomed to doing all along, am I giving them proper documentation and proper resources to understand the why? Why aren't we doing this anymore? And because sometimes the why is probably one of the most overlooked things in change management. If you tell me, I have to do something, but what I was doing before worked just fine for me, and I don't understand why you're making me make this change. I'm going to fight you. And that is human nature. So if you in a change, if you don't if you overlook the change management aspect of any new system implementation. Doesn't matter if it's ATS, if it's if it's a new internal ERP, anything, you're going to find more resistance and less compliance, which makes the system less effective in the long run, if you don't take into consideration how your users are going to learn how to use the new system, and you ignore why you made the change in the first place, being part of your message.

Unknown Speaker  21:47  
Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 2  21:50  
you touched on this. But I want to drill down into this. So the people who use this system every day, they rarely get enough voice in the design process, and we've talked about a few ways to get that voice into the design process, but particularly when you're working with a conventional, top down, hierarchical organization, how do you get people like, how do you approach that? Right? Because the mandate that you know, do this because it's your job, some organizations have a more collaborative, consensus driven culture where they care like I recently spoke to a former client of ours who said they would rather HR have to do more work if the higher man, if it means a hiring manager experience will be easier. And that was great. Okay? I was like, well, you should look at these tools instead, because these tools really focus in on that it may be more expensive and it may be more work for you on the back end to accommodate all of the unique things that can come up and configure it properly, right? But not every organization is like that. So in those organizations where it is top down, like, how do you get the voice? How do you get, how do you pass that voice up in a way that actually results in in in a responsive design,

Speaker 1  22:56  
I think that varies by organization. It really does. So you're not going to have the same kind of effectiveness messaging wise, and healthcare organization that is so siloed and has not even everybody doesn't even have a corporate email in some hospital systems, then you are in an organization that's very remote or very, you know, desk work based or a plant where people are on the floor on an eight to day basis, you're not going to get your message across the same way. So that's something you need to take into consideration. Who is your audience, who are the people that you're working with, who are the people that you're trying to communicate to, and where are they more likely to see your message, are they going if you send an email? You know, somebody who is a plant manager is likely checking their email once a day, if that, and so they're not going to see your message and it's not going to hit home. You might want to consider printing some internal messaging for the break room, because that's where your people that are going to be interacting with the system are actually going to be so first consider the message, and then consider who is receiving the message, and consider where they're more likely to actually receive the message. We have this tendency since the inception of email, to send everything out in an email or a text No, I just expect everyone to read it. And I think that the attention spans that people have have gotten significantly shorter. So if your message is not something that you you want to workshop and put a lot of time into getting into two sentences, you need to give them a lot of detail. Make sure you give it to them in multiple formats. I think when ISIS actually did this really well, when they rolled out Salesforce internally, I got stuff in the mail. I was, I've been a remote employee for almost 20

Unknown Speaker  24:50  
years, mail, mail you really got, yeah, and it

Speaker 1  24:54  
was like a one pager, like a printed, laminated pager on like steps to take to do. It wasn't just an email, and I was really impressed by that, because I was like, why am I getting an email from them, from my employer? And then I opened it up, and it was just this thing on the different steps to take, they also followed it up with an email. There was an email of the same document, but I had a physical copy of it, and it was helpful. Because when you're trying to go through setting a system up yourself, you know, because there were things that you needed to do to get your profile set up, having that physical document in front of me was really helpful, as opposed to, like, flipping back and forth on different screens to a PDF. Yeah. So you know, it's again, who's your audience and where are they going to receive the most receptive to your message.

Speaker 2  25:35  
And I would say, Never underestimate the number of unread emails in someone's inbox. As techy people, I think we have a preference for like, 00, unread emails as a goal yourself. Well, okay, maybe I do, maybe I do, right, but like, but many people do not, and many people, they don't prioritize the bulk emails that HR is sending out to read things. One thing that I did is I put, I put this stuff on the payroll home screen because my reasoning was, everybody has to go there at least every other week, and they will see this, right? They may not necessarily. Hiring Managers weren't necessarily going to the ATS, but everybody was going to the payroll system at least every other week, and they so that helped get the message out a little bit better. Okay, so we talked a lot about the first P which is, people, let's move into process. So everyone has three levels of process. There's the official process, which came over in that email, or maybe you got a letter in the mail, if your company really went the extra mile, there's an actual process, and then there's something called a shadow process. Yeah, let's, let's talk about these three. First of all, what is a shadow process? And then, and then, let's talk about, how do you get people to show you the real processes?

Speaker 1  26:58  
I had a client who came to us, and they were in a nursing home facility, and this was a case of an accidental admin, somebody who had never done this before, wasn't even in recruiting as their primary function, and literally had no idea who did what. So the first thing that I started asking them was, where are your job descriptions. They're like, Oh, I think they're on a whole bunch of different people's hard drives. Okay, how do you approve a new job description? Approve? What do you mean? Approve? We don't approve. Somebody just writes one and we put it up online. So this person and I went through a very long and detailed conversation, initially, what we would call the analysis phase of giving them all of the different moving pieces they needed to explore. Offer was everybody had their own spreadsheet, had their own information on their hard drive, and no universal system of truth, or they didn't have an hrs either. That gave them any kind of idea, like, what is the appropriate range for this job. So they had different satellite facilities, and one of them was constantly getting all of the people to leave and come to them because they were paying $5 an hour more for the same job in the same organization. And so there was no continuity or universal process for anything in this organization, and that's a shadow process. It's a process that exists on paper, in a hard drive, in the background, in someone's head, and it affects your business, because it's how things are actually getting done. And so you can't discount shadow processes. Excuse me, because more often than not, that when I was saying people are going to people and they're going to go back and do what that what they do that works for them, that's what they're going to do. They're going to go back and do their shadow process. If they've had a spreadsheet that's been working for them forever, and they don't really think your system gives them any value, they're just going to go back to their spreadsheet because it worked. So you need to understand all of the different processes that every single person is following and their shadow because you don't know them, because they're happening in the background, and you don't understand them because you have no visibility to them.

Speaker 2  29:14  
So what I love about the example that you gave is that it's very easy to quantify the ROI of bringing that shadow process to light and doing something about it? Because there was a delta between what people were paying in different areas of the organization. So if you're a system administrator, we talk about this a lot. So system administrators, there is an opportunity for them to demonstrate the financial impact of the work that they're doing to leadership, and that makes them look good. It makes ca leadership look good, right? And so anytime that you have access to that kind of information, and you can do something about it and message up the value, or it may just be clearing, making sure that your plate gets cleared so that you can do a project like that, I think it'd be really, really valuable. Have you seen. Any other shadow processes where there might be an opportunity to demonstrate the ROI of because we all like efficiency is something that abstractly, we all agree is is good, as long as the impact of it is not problematic, right? But other examples of where you can actually make a business case for improving the efficiency around shadow processes.

Speaker 1  30:22  
Agency use is probably the first thing that comes to mind. So you have one manager who's had a relationship with an agency for years, and they go off book and call them first whenever they have an opening, and don't even bother to call HR. That's a shadow process all the time. Happens all the time. I can't count the number of times that happened, I was that person that they would call for a while. So like that is agency use is probably the one of the biggest places where you can find ROI in an ATS system is limiting and understanding what the levers are for agency use, because it's just so expensive to use an agency. So because of that, starting to understand how to how people are using agencies, where they're going to agency, what kind of roles are frequently using agencies in every in every process. Improvement, you always want an observation period. So when you first build the system, build the ability to start tracking agency use into your system. Isims has. Isims, the system I've used the most, has a good way to track agencies. You create a profile for them and make them a user, and then they're incentivized to submit stuff to you, because you can track that they actually sent that person. And now, if you hire them six months later, you know that that agency submitted them. So agencies have a an incentive to use your system instead of going off book and sending the resume directly to the manager. So start by internalizing the agencies in your system, and then observe who's using agencies the most, who is spending the most. What kind of roles are those? Why do they feel the need to do that, then this is another place where a survey might be effective. Is there, you know, talk to so a direct conversation is usually ideal, but sometimes that can feel confrontational if you put out a general survey with targeted questions towards the worst offender, essentially asking, you know, why do you use agencies instead of using the our internal recruiting team, what is your what are your complaints about our internal recruiting team? How can they improve those kinds of things? Can definitely help you kind of refine and decrease your agency's what gets measured gets improved. That old adage, if you can actually start to track it and understand why it's happening, and then get the why behind it, and then give effective solutions to have them go and use the internal process. That is usually the way that you can start to move the needle and prove that you spent the money on building the system effectively. Agency access is probably one of the ones that I have most frequently used in customer conversations to say that you've saved million dollars over the course. I've had several more that have saved million dollars over the course of a year in just agency fees, because they were tracking and now they were able to see that that same candidate that they were going to hire through the agency applied six months before and was just overlooked by someone in the recruiting team. And you know, then, why was that person overlooked? But you can track that now, yeah, which you couldn't do before.

Speaker 2  33:25  
This is a tricky one, because it is possible that you'll discover that some inefficiencies are preferred by certain leaders, right? So, and they're probably not going to tell you, you know, you may unearth that. In fact, we don't want to cut down agency spend in this particular area, right? So that's, that's, that's a, that's a sensitive, it's a sensitive topic. Have you ever discovered that where, like you make the you make the case for reducing agency spend, and you find that, in fact, we're good, we're good there, yep, even, even though there's, there's massive cost savings that could be achieved.

Speaker 1  34:00  
I've made those Well, having been an RPO recruiter, someone who's recruitment process outsourcing, I was in this weird little hybrid swim lane where I was an agency, sort of, but I was also an employee of the organization, so it was kind of like cutting off your nose to spite your face, to really give them the numbers and why they shouldn't be spending but I have definitely had conversations with some executives when I was in my recruiting days, around why they preferred using certain agencies because they were much more expensive than I was. In those conversations, like they had a contract with me, and every hire cost the same amount of money from me, whereas the recruiter that they were using was charging 20% of the base salary of the price. Salary of the person from for hiring as their fee. I was nowhere near that. So why wouldn't you use me as opposed to them? And a lot of it boils down to what recruiters are really good at, and that is relationships. A good recruiter. Recruiters are this weird kind of hybrid good recruiters. Are this weird kind of hybrid of a sales person and a HR person, so they have to know all of the different moving parts of hiring and all of the different compliance and regulatory pieces of hiring, but they also have to form relationships internally make that hiring managers aren't going to trust someone they don't know, so they have to foster those relationships with their hiring managers on a regular basis and make sure they understand what a hiring manager's needs are. So I had this, oh, that's a good story. I had this position that I was hiring for. It was a regulatory scientist in Florida, and I had this hiring manager who had this list of demands that was like 50 things deep, and it was a purple squirrel, and this is before AI or the internet was extreme. LinkedIn had just come out. I'm really dating myself here. And so we were really struggling to find the candidate they wanted, because they wanted this very unique set of certifications that conflicted with one another. So somebody that had worked in the field of science that we were trying to find needed a whole bunch of different credentials in order to do them, and two of the credentials that he wanted were actually in direct conflict. So somebody who has one certification would not have the other certification because they were two completely different, opposing studies. And so we were fighting with this manager because he refused to relocate. So literally, there were two people within a 75 mile radius that had even close to the list of demands, probably about 50% and they were way out of the price range. He was also trying to pay really low. And so what we did was we sat down and we actually worked with a couple of agencies to show candidates that had the closest match and show them that there wasn't anybody within a 250 mile radius that matched what they were looking for. We used LinkedIn, we used Google, we used a whole bunch of different sources, and then the hiring manager was still like, nope. This is this is what I want. So it wasn't a successful endeavor, but we essentially, from a data perspective, proved that the person he was asking for did not exist within a 250, mile radius, and he still stubbornly insisted on keeping the requisition open until he got a bump from his higher up, which we might have helped encourage happen to basically say, hire or you lose the budget for the position. Yeah. So, yeah. So sometimes you know, all of the different moving pieces associated with hiring are ROI based in the sense that they are, I have saved a direct cost, but they're ROI based in the sense that if an agency had been able to find this person, the fee would have been significant, and we were able to work with agencies to help us make a case, just basically by asking them to give us the people that were as close to the role as he was asking for, how to essentially say that this person didn't exist, the role that they were looking for within a 250 mile radius, and they needed to consider relocation, which means the budget is higher, which means, etc.

Speaker 2  38:13  
Got it. That's great example. We were talking about material from Vivian's new book just released last week, from zero to ATS zero, the accidental admins journey available in paperback, paperback, paperback and ebook on Amazon. Highly encourage ATS system administrators, whether you use isims or any other platform to get a copy of this book, because it is everything that you could possibly need to think about in this profession. It's all those things that I wish I'd known what got started, all the things that I didn't know, that I didn't know. We're going to talk a little bit more about processes. So Vivian, you have something called the sticky note workshop, which I believe is designed to surface these shadow processes. What does that section? What's that session actually look like? And who do you think needs to be in the room for that

Speaker 1  39:03  
most, biggest example of the sticky note workshop was one that I did for a very large telecom company. We did an on site with them, and we had hiring we had two hiring managers that were some of their highest, highest volume hiring managers in the room. We had two executive leaders in the room, and then we also had five of their recruiting team in the room, and we basically asked them to write out on a sticky note each step that they took in order to from handshake to hire. So we asked them to take a sticky note and just write it out, and then what we did was on a big whiteboard, we took those sticky notes and we put all of the correlating responses in a line, so anywhere we thought that, you know, we might be calling it semantically, just something slightly different, but it's the same step, we put them all in a line and gave them all the ability to look at each one of the. Individual steps, and what we found was that everybody was pretty much following exactly the same process with a couple of outliers. And the reason the exercise was helpful was those outliers were really important to the people who were taking those steps, and then we were able to deep dive with them through further discussion into why those outliers were necessary and what need those process steps solved and find a way to incorporate those asks into the ultimate process that we built for them. In this case, I'm specifically talking about recruiting workflow. So the handshake to hire, I've always said, and this is an analogy that it has been often stolen from me. Everybody follows the same basic steps, everybody sources, everybody interviews, everybody offers, everybody hires, everybody on boards. There are five basic pieces of being, of building any process from an applicant tracking system, but in all five of those, there are 100 million different permutations of the steps that are taken. Do you do one interview? Do you do two interviews? Do you do panel interviews? Do you Do you know for interview stage 3456, do you need to do the background check before the interview stage? Do you do your background check after this interview stage? So there are no consistent commonalities, and this is later when we were going to talk about the best practice myth, which is a chapter in the book as well. There is this perception that because there are pretty much five universal steps to recruiting, that everybody does the same thing, but in 500 plus implementations, I could probably think of 1000 different versions of those five things that people have taken, and they're all very important to each individual organization, which is why there is no one size fits all process as far as workflow is concerned, because every organization has a unique set of challenges. I had a government contractor that I was working with once, and they were hiring CIA agents, so the level of complexity around their process and requiring all of the different kinds of clearance checks that were required, and all of the different steps that it took for us to make sure that nobody else within the system could see these people because it was a matter of national security to segregate them those. That was probably one of the most complex processes I have ever built because of the fact that there was so much sensitivity around the candidates themselves. So you have to think about, how does this impact your business? How does it affect the people that are in your system, and what at the end of the day is the goal? So that's where processes is so important.

Speaker 2  42:38  
Got it. And I'm thinking another AI practical use case here is take a picture of that whiteboard, right with all the stickies on it. Ask people to write legibly, right?

Speaker 1  42:49  
Yep, whiteboard too. Zoom has a sticky notes feature as well. Yeah, great. Well, and so just you don't, don't get tongue up on the flow is the point of the exercise. It's the flow is important, because it did really give us an idea of where all the moving parts were, and that everybody was doing some of the same steps. But it really showed us where the outliers were, and that was important as well.

Speaker 2  43:13  
Got it and how do you determine which outliers are important to prioritize, as opposed to the edge cases that maybe aren't things that you need to formally bake into your workflows.

Speaker 1  43:28  
What percentage of your hires do these apply to? Okay, it's the number one decision maker. If you're talking about a CEO hire you do once every four to five years. Don't build it in. It's not important, because you're going to have to have to jump through a whole bunch of hoops in order to accommodate a single special squirrel, which is we always used to call purple squirrel, or special squirrel. That is not important. What is important is that the repeatable, consistent steps that you're going to need to follow for a significant number of your hires, if it's 10% or more, that's where it's important that you know them and know how to build them into your system to accommodate them. The main reason being compliance, making sure that you are treating everyone exactly the same way, digitally and in person, so that you can you know if you're ever defending yourself from an OFCCP perspective, everybody was treated the same way. They all went through the same steps. And you can prove that AAP another example, so that the primary reason for consistent processes and for making sure that you are keeping those outliers in mind and building to those outliers, if they're a significant enough portion of your hires is to make sure that you can defend yourself at the end of the day, which is, ultimately what most ATS is are really designed to do, is give you the data in order to defend yourself if needed.

Speaker 2  44:52  
Yeah, yeah. We got a deep comment from an attendee. Comment was finding the formula for the best candidate experience. Is, along with getting the strongest quality hire,

Speaker 1  45:07  
that's a hard one, and it varies so much, yeah, so it varies so much by different organization. It varies so much by business. It varies so much by segment. Are you in healthcare? Are you in retail? Are you in you know, it just depends on what your business is. What's the definition of a good candidate? And that's a really good point. Though, the majority of organizations consider their best hires referrals, and so when you're building a candidate experience, you want to make sure that that candidate experience takes into mind where the majority of your best hires are from. And that's been a consistent over the entirety of my career. That's been a consistent data point that referrals are the best hires. They stay the longest. They are the ones who refer more good people. They usually wind up giving the best business outcomes for whatever the role that you're trying to fill is because they don't come in completely blind, and they know the organization culture because their person that referred them gives them that heads up. So referrals are still the biggest way to look at that.

Speaker 2  46:18  
I'm thinking, I'm thinking about intentional friction as a qualifier. This is something that I've had many conversations with recruiters about. You know, if you are optimizing candidate experience, sometimes that can increase your applicant flow, right, but it may not increase quality applicant flow. And so several folks have made the argument that optimizing the candidate experience too much, reduces the candidate experience as a qualifying interaction. That's a tough one, right? Because I think, I think we start with the default notion that the smoother This is, the faster it is. You know, get rid of things that are going to be clunky, the more applicants will have. And then we'll let the sourcing, the the screening mechanisms baked into the ATS take care of getting the right candidates in front of the recruiters, in front of the hiring managers. But what are your thoughts on that, like, Where, where are there? Are there cases where you actually want to increase friction a little bit to ensure a higher quality of hire at the end of the journey. It really

Speaker 1  47:23  
depends on what you're trying to do. From a hiring perspective, if you're high volume, yes, you want to increase that friction, because you don't have time to go back and do all of that work. If you're someone who's trying to hire a very qualified, specialized person, that friction is going to scare them away. So it really depends on what your business model is and what you're trying to do. I will say I'm dialed into a lot of job search hacks and job seeker forums because I always like to see what the output of my work has been. I once did a formula and basically established that in my career with the number of people that I've implemented, I've helped hire over a million people inadvertently or advertently. This was five years ago, so the number is probably significantly more at this point. So my life and my work output has affected a million people. When you are doing this kind of a work or this kind of work, you want to be conscious of both sides of the conversation. I've consistently been on the side of the conversation of the employer, where the employee, the employee or the candidate side of the conversation isn't one that I've inherently had visibility to, which is why I go out of my way to put myself in places where I'm listening to those types of discussions, and where I'm going with this is that candidates, especially right now, feel very much like they're screaming into the void and they're wasting their time submitting 1000s of applications and spending their time refining their resume to fit the job description, and all of the traditional advice is starting to get very hard to follow, because in the world of AI and AI filters and all of the different new new tools that are coming out, AI's candidate facing AI's fighting job facing AIS, which is an article I wrote about a while back, there's more and more frustration from the candidate side if they have to spend an enormous amount of time to get rejected, and so you have to be conscious of the fact that there are people at the other end of this, and your organization's perception in the marketplace is affected by your candidate experience. So there was a survey. I don't remember the numbers off of it. I'd have to go back and look it up, but there was a survey that my takeaway was that if candidates find your user experience difficult or horrible, they're way less likely to ever be a customer. So if you are building them a very friction fill process. Yes, they're more likely to never be a customer of your organization. So if you're especially in the retail world, it's very important that you be conscious of the fact that there are people on the other side of this and that you are not overly taxing their generosity because they're giving you their time for free to go ahead and apply to a job.

Speaker 2  50:21  
Yeah, that's a great call. Outs everything you're talking about is what I like to call empathy for the end user. And the end user is the recruiter, the end user is the hiring manager, the end user is the candidate. All of these things matter, and it can, it can be overwhelming trying to wrap your mind around all that but, but I think that HR technology professionals are particularly well suited to, to to to leverage that talent, because, because they're both techy and they're also they have people skills in a way that is very unique to this profession, and that ability to anticipate, of course, you want to send surveys. Right? We've seen some great pulse surveys. A candidate, FYI showed us a pulse survey that they do during the interview scheduling process. It's great. So survey. Surveys are great, but I think there's also just, it's a it's a personality trait. It is a disposition to be able to anticipate those things and care about those things, and then the technical skills to be able to suggest and implement solutions to improve the impact that our that our technology solutions have on all of the different end user group personas. Let's go to exception mapping. So you've got executive hires, you've got international roles, seasonal surges, at what point do exceptions stop being exceptions and start being a process that you really need to design for?

Speaker 1  51:48  
So kind of going back to what I said before, it's about the number of times the frequency. Is it something that is occurring once a month? Is it something that's occurring once a year? Is it something that's occurring five times a week? So if it is a frequent problem, then absolutely you should engineer for it. If it is something that only occurs in a rare instance, or if you're cyclical, if your business is the kind of business where you go through more hiring at certain times of years than others, retail surging around holidays, that kind of thing, and this friction point is going to cause a lot of pain in that time, then that's definitely something you need to evaluate and solve for. There's a question in the comments, and we are running out of time here. So it's the trade off putting 10 finalists through five rounds of interviews to get the right quality of hire, and rejecting nine or less interview rounds where you didn't qualify enough to select the best hire. It's a matter of finding the right balance for each role. In my opinion, wholeheartedly agree. I wholeheartedly agree there's in any instance, whether it's solving for a problem, or whether it is solving for a process, or whether it is ultimately hiring the right person at the end of the day. It's not a zero sum game. It's not You're not going to be 100% perfect. Everything isn't always going to work exactly the way you designed it. And the best processes are ones that are built with some kind of flexibility in them to give you the ability to step outside them where necessary. So an executive hire is a perfect example of this. I could build a workflow that has 30 steps, that gives me every possible moving part, but that executive isn't going to be the person that needs to go through all 30 of those steps. I need to design a system where I'm not hindered from moving that executive to the right steps for them, which are screen interview offer higher so in those cases, if there's background checks or assessments or other moving pieces associated with it, I have to be able to design a system that gives me the ability to bypass all of the checkpoints and checks and balances that I've put in place so that in those one or two instances where I have a unique situation, I'm not hindered by the technology from doing what I need to do.

Speaker 2  54:20  
Got it, got it to go back to exception mapping Any other thoughts on when exceptions stop being exceptions and start being processed that you need processes that you need to design for. It's the

Speaker 1  54:31  
same statement frequency, yeah, if it's something that is happening on a frequent basis, then it is not an exception. It's not an exception. It's a process, and you need to build for it. If it's not happening frequently, if it's, you know, occasionally, quarterly, monthly, yearly, it is not something that you really need to build a process in for unless there is a compliance caveat to it.

Speaker 2  54:56  
Good call else. So, yeah, well. Somebody who's just very influential in the organization. Sometimes that's just the reality. And they and they push for something, and you have to build it. Politics happen too. Politics happen. Yeah, Vivian, thank you so much. It's been an enlightening conversation. As always, we are talking about subject matter from from zero to ATS hero, the accidental Edmonds journey. Vivian's book just released last week, you can get it in paperback and ebook on Amazon. Thank you once again, Vivian, and I'll see you next time.

Speaker 1  55:28  
Pleasure speaking with you. Talk to you soon. Bye, bye.