High Volume Recruiting Strategy with Paul Norman

Full Podcast Transcript of Paul Norman – VP of TA – High-Volume Recruiting Strategy

[00:00:01] Jonathan Duarte: Hey everyone, welcome! We’ve got a great guest today, Paul Norman. Paul is working with Riviera Advisors. I got to meet Paul through another good friend, Jeremy Eskenazi, from Riviera, one of the founding members. Paul, give us a little bit of background about yourself.

[00:00:16] Paul Norman: I’ve been a TA leader for about 20 years in different industries. Financial services tech hospitality. And healthcare.

[00:00:26] I’ve known Jeremy and the Riviera team for a while. So super excited about what I’m learning and seeing as a consultant right now,

[00:00:34] Jonathan Duarte: what I like to do, at least my perspective in the space having gone to conferences and speaking to all these people, and one thing it’s always hard, at least I find, that HR and TA practitioners don’t get trained.

[00:00:47] And a lot of that’s because they’re not going to the conferences. They don’t have the budgets. They don’t know. And then the information that comes out with all the blog posts is, Hey, you need to use this tool, and that tool, but no tool fits in.

[00:00:58] Every use [00:01:00] case . You’ve got a lot of experience, you came up and now and then you went into super high volume stuff. So those tools have changed over the time. So in use cases, 15 years ago when you’re doing smaller things. They may not be the same tools you’re using today.

[00:01:15] Your experience, like what was the kind of volumes over the last 10 years you’ve been doing so people can get an idea of, Hey, when we’re going to have this conversation, this is what Paul’s talking about. He’s not talking about I’m hiring five

[00:01:26] Paul Norman: Yeah it’s a different mentality.

[00:01:28] To think about volume. It is a TA leader. And a lot of your audience is probably experiencing this. Most of TA is set up to do one by one hiring, and then you’ve got volume components to your businesses, typically.

[00:01:40] Whether it’s a call center, a sales force, or hospitality the resort operations groups. There’s always a volume component somewhere. To give you some perspective on volumes, it’s ranged from 15, 000 a year to, 50 to 70, 000 a year,

[00:01:58] Jonathan Duarte: hires. Those are hires.

[00:01:59] Paul Norman: [00:02:00] Yeah. Realistically, the expectation is starts, cause if I’m a business operator. And TA says I’ve hired this many people, but 25 percent don’t show up, I don’t really care. I need people to start work and be there.

[00:02:13] Jonathan Duarte: That’s why I think it’s so great. And I was always impressed when we met and it’s Paul’s one of the guys who’s actually done this, built the systems and was accountable for it. When you’re accountable for those kinds of volumes, that’s a big lift. That’s a big ownership of, you need to know what you’re doing.

[00:02:29] Paul Norman: It has a big impact on the business. In the volume jobs. When you look at them one by one, it becomes easy to say we miss by one or one class or whatever. But you get down to a granular level, like in hospitality, if you don’t have enough housekeepers on that shift on that specific day you can’t turn the rooms.

[00:02:49] My own personal story of trying to check in on vacation with my family and I’ve got four kids, at the time they were little. I checked in at the front desk and they said your room’s not ready.

[00:02:59] Jonathan Duarte: And four [00:03:00] kids.

[00:03:00] Paul Norman: You’ll have to get out in the lobby and we’ll text you when it’s ready. I’ve got four kids I traveled with on planes all day long right now in your lobby. Is that really good for you or me? Probably not. There wasn’t enough housekeepers to turn the rooms fast enough to get my family into the room on time.

[00:03:16] So you start thinking about the impact on business, whether it’s from a customer perspective or a cost perspective. These high volume hires have a huge impact on the business and then they multiply volume wise very fast.

[00:03:31] Jonathan Duarte: So this is one thing that’s always been frustrating for me.

[00:03:34] How should TA leadership be talking about investment? And how do they back that up and talk about the business case? You’ve got 20 years of doing this.

[00:03:46] What are some things that can take away and just write down notes and say, “Oh, I got to start figuring that part out so I can create my business .”

[00:03:53] Paul Norman: Yeah, it’s easy as a TA leader to get mired into the TA metrics and things that are, are de facto, [00:04:00] time to fill and number of hires.

[00:04:02] And things like this. A business leader might care a little bit. But if you’re running an operation, especially a volume operation, it’s really about occupancy or percent staff to my budget. It’s, I need the talent to meet some sort of business goal. And if I don’t have that, what’s the impact to my business?

[00:04:22] I think really successful TA leaders are able to understand the business that they’re working with and partnering with to then translate the impact and understand. in hospitality as an example, we started moving the business along to where the success metric for TA percent staff to budget.

[00:04:41] Jonathan Duarte: So yeah, that was cool. Like I want to hear

[00:04:43] Paul Norman: I think they’d see levels in the properties and turnover rates and then based on the geography, how long it actually did take to do volume recruiting in those places, we actually migrated to a point where.

[00:04:55] We started opening jobs, TA started opening jobs based on those [00:05:00] factors to ensure that the property was fully staffed.

[00:05:03] It’s a big shift to do that. Because then you start doing things like ” what if the projection is wrong?”

[00:05:10] Do you want to be overstaffed by 2 percent or understaffed by 5%?

[00:05:15] What’s the biggest impact to the business?

[00:05:16] My recommendation to TA leaders is

[00:05:19] You have to really understand ” What are the drivers for the business or the operation?”

[00:05:23] And then, “How does TA, or the hiring you’re doing, affect that?”

[00:05:27] And then have those business conversations.

[00:05:30] To get investment in TA, you have to come with, “Here’s what the return is going to be, if we invest in this new tool.“, “If we invest in X number of new recruiters or whatever, here’s what the corresponding, impact your business is going to be.”

[00:05:44] Versus just, “Hey, we could reduce time to fill by this.”

[00:05:47] You get stuck in the TA metrics.

[00:05:49] You have to translate it to the business things, whether it’s, percent staffed, increased volume in sales, better customer retention, or whatever the driving [00:06:00] impact is for the business you have to figure out what the impact of staffing is on that. And you have to do it proactively as well, Follow the line all the way back to workforce planning. TA has to be involved in that from a volume perspective. Otherwise, you’re just reactive and chasing.

[00:06:14]

[00:06:14] Jonathan Duarte: I know you went through a pandemic staffing and I can’t even imagine. Were you in hospitality during the pandemic? Yeah, I was. tell me about that. What was that like from a TA side? Because it was, okay, get rid of everyone and then bring them all back.

[00:06:31] Or, predictably, bring them back at some point.

[00:06:34] Paul Norman: Yeah, it would have been easier if it was that black and white. It really wasn’t. It’s changing day by day. It’s hey, Hawaii is closed. Literally, Hawaii’s closed. No one’s allowed in. Okay, Hawaii’s back open. And they’re gonna open the flood.

[00:06:48] It was just this constant kind of pendulum back and forth. I think the hard part of pandemic and hospitality was it, it’s people. All of that is people focused, people heavy [00:07:00] work that, can’t be automated or, Replaced by machines. So all of those pendulum swings had impacts on people.

[00:07:06] That was really hard. I think the piece that we tried to find the balance on or make it easier with is we had enough partnership with the business that as the business was looking at things like occupancy projections, and bookings and when people are coming or not coming, and doing their best to predict those pieces of their operations. TA was so closely aligned we already had the models to understand, okay that means that you would need this many people, by this time, and we could do the back kind of the backtrack work. The numbers back. We were able to articulate, we need to start. Pipelining here. And interviewing here and bringing this, and this number of people we would be able to get back.

[00:07:48] The other thing that we found ourselves doing during the pandemic, we took the furloughed employees, and we put them into the TA CRM, in a pool, and were able to communicate with our furloughed [00:08:00] employees throughout the pandemic using the TA CRM.

[00:08:03] Jonathan Duarte: And so that was, I think one of the gold nuggets there is the partnering on their stats, as they were saying their projections on occupancy.

[00:08:14] whether it’s, hospitality recruiting or medical I know you had experience in home health type stuff. If you know you’re opening a region. And you know that in, a region could be Hawaii, or it could be Southern California, or it could be a town, those numbers exist. They may not be perfect, but they’re a best guess estimate that you can use to partner with the business on.

[00:08:38] And you just got to be in conversation with the business leaders to say, what are your numbers? I can model them out, but I need to know what your numbers are. if you don’t tell me, I’m going to be reactive. And if I’m part of the process earlier on, I can start, working with you earlier and figure them out.

[00:08:55] Paul Norman: that partnership and early understanding the business as a true [00:09:00] business partner is really key, I think, especially in high volume, you take, I need 500 hires in a week. And you extrapolate that out to, okay, that means I need at least 2, 000 interviews, potentially.

[00:09:13] And to get that, I need, X thousand screens and Y thousand candidates coming in the funnel, it starts to grow exponentially very quickly. in healthcare and financial services this came up a lot with acquisitions. I was in financial services pre acquisition.

[00:09:31] In 2008, Where it was a lot of acquisition and growth and the market was going crazy and we were moving things around, Or opening centers or consolidating back office, centers. And consolidation meant one place was shrinking, but another place was growing. And so being in touch with the business around, okay, what are those plans,

[00:09:53] When are you gonna tell this group of people that. We’re shrinking that site, But we’re enlarging [00:10:00] this geography over here. TA has to be involved in that, So that we can plan and be part of, how many people do we have to hire by when? And typically with those kind of site migrations, the windows are very short,

[00:10:12] Because Once you notify one place that there’s going to be a shrinking event, you only have so much time to get the other place up.

[00:10:20] Jonathan Duarte: And then, what’s one of the biggest lessons that got you to start thinking? this way, as you were coming up, how’d you make that choice?

[00:10:29] Cause everyone makes a business choice at some point in their career I remember in my, late twenties after I started one of my first companies someone asked me why are you doing this?

[00:10:39] And I go, because nobody else is doing it and it needs to get done. I’ve always lived my life like that. Ever since then, like I know and we’ve talked about the text recruiting stuff. I know it is the future of recruiting, automating, using that stuff. So I don’t care if somebody’s funded or not.

[00:10:57] The idea is I know I can do it. [00:11:00] I know I can help companies.

[00:11:01] I’m going to do it.

[00:11:02] Paul Norman: I wish I could say I was some strategic visionary that a light bulb just clicked. But it’s pain. I think a lot of wisdom and experience comes with pain. you bump into a wall, and it hurts, and then you go, I don’t think I want to do that again.

[00:11:16] We should be doing that differently. in the early part of my career as a TA leader, There was a lot of pain around the reactive, When it hits TA and you have to be reactive it’s really difficult to be successful. what I see now, Even in my short term as a consultant is a lot of TA organizations are in that space, they find out afterwards, as the, here’s the order. Please go fill it. And you push, you just put in a corner. And a lot of groups are great at reacting and somewhat successful at doing that, but I remember, my major first employer where those painful experiences, changed,

[00:11:54] And my mindset changed too. Let’s get ahead of this. Let’s ask the right questions. [00:12:00] Let’s explain why we need to be a partner in this instead of just an order taker, And I think that goes all levels of recruiting. From a recruiter contracting with a hiring manager around this is what success looks like for us together,

[00:12:15] As a partner, and this is what I’m going to do and this is what you have to do, And making that contract around what success is. It’s a similar philosophy, in TA leadership.

[00:12:25] that makes a lot of sense. I was thinking while you were saying this I gotta imagine the title of this interview being, don’t be an order taker.

[00:12:31] in a lot of aspects, if you just think about that, that’s the easiest way of saying, I could be like the person behind the cash register doing the POS, or I could be a partner and say, is that what you really want? what do you really need? I always tell recruiters,

[00:12:45] I always tell recruiters, piss them off early.

[00:12:48] It’s better to have the argument and debate before it happens than after, It’s okay to say, as a recruiter, this is a very difficult search. You’re about $15,000 under [00:13:00] the market. Here’s what I think we have to do. And here’s how long I think it’s going to take.

[00:13:04] And to, and that typically, recruiters have a hard time with that, Because they get friction, but I’d rather have the friction then versus at the end of the process, I think it’s similar with recruiting strategy.

[00:13:17] Have the conversations early, do the contracting early, figure out how it impacts the business early, figure out what you can change to help overcome some of those challenges that you’re going to face. But do all that early, as early as you can, instead of reactively or afterwards.

[00:13:35] You need to find out about them ahead of time, get them on the table, and then tackle them together. But that’s uncomfortable.

[00:13:42] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense these are business problems, not personal problems. Face them like business problems, and just be safe.

[00:13:49] From my experience, here’s the data, we’re 15, 000 under, and it’s going to be hard I’m going to do my best, but I wanted to be up front with what I’m seeing there, so we’re on the same [00:14:00] page. we’ll do our best, but let’s be up front with

[00:14:02] Paul Norman: I always tried to not say no. we didn’t like to say no, but we’d said a lot of yes, however, It was, yes, we can do that, however, in order to get there, this is the strategy, or this is the path, This is what I think we’re gonna have to do together. This is what, We’re going to have to consider

[00:14:20] Jonathan Duarte: I like that. So no, or don’t be an order taker. And yes, however. That’s the summary, the chat GPT summary. All right. So tell me about some of the things that you’ve worked on. I know we’ve talked about Bill before in Processes and systems and, if it’s technology or not, but what have you seen out there now?

[00:14:37] Like what’s the stuff that, post pandemic that really has been changing that people should take a look at if they haven’t been up to speed.

[00:14:46] Paul Norman: There’s a lot that’s different. And then there’s a lot that’s not the word of the day is AI. Everything has AI.

[00:14:53] Jonathan Duarte: I learned how to spell it last week.

[00:14:54] Yeah, like everyone else.

[00:14:56] Paul Norman: And I know you’ve had a lot of discussions about AI. I watched the [00:15:00] one you did with Marin and everybody’s talking about it and trying to figure it out. And that’s the big push. For the last five years, most TA tech providers have been talking about their AI.

[00:15:12] Before it even had AI, they were talking about it being an AI solution. as we figure that out, and as we figure out what the rules are, what the comfort levels are with privacy and data that’s one thing.

[00:15:25] But the other thing that stays the same are You can’t just plug in a technology without having a process well aligned to it. With technology, I think it’s easy to jump on a technology and then try to find a problem for it to solve .

[00:15:38] I’m guilty of it. I used to go to retreats, it was these no vendors allowed retreats. Only practitioners where we’d close the doors and talk about all the secret TA leadership things we were doing. And always the conversation went to tools. what new cool thing are you playing with?

[00:15:56] What thing did you just plug in? It was [00:16:00] always down the road of tools.

[00:16:01] And often we forgot about the process or is that the right thing for us to be solving or does it solve it for the right persona or stakeholder group?

[00:16:13] The thing that I always try to do with technology, especially in the volume space is approach it as ” what’s the primary user?”, “what’s the secondary user?”, “what’s the tertiary user? “

[00:16:23] ” What are the user experiences?”

[00:16:25] A lot of TA technology historically was set up from the primary user ATS is simple. Who’s the primary user of that? Probably lawyers,

[00:16:34] Because they’re set up for a lawyer.

[00:16:36] Jonathan Duarte: Compliance. they’re not a CRM.

[00:16:37] Paul Norman: Exactly!

[00:16:38] We always tried to look at, ” who should be the primary user?”

[00:16:41] For volume experience, the primary user has to be the candidate.

[00:16:45] ” what’s their experience?”

[00:16:46] Is it simple?

[00:16:48] Is it automated?

[00:16:49] Is the first step after I click on a job, please create an account through this 12 step process with my ATS.

[00:16:57] That’s a de facto [00:17:00] path.

[00:17:00] That can’t be the process.

[00:17:01] You have to solve for that. It has to be easy. I want to give you my name.

[00:17:06] I want to do it on my phone. I remember having the arguments, 10 or 15 years ago around not everybody has a cell phone. Not everybody has a smartphone.

[00:17:16] Everybody has a smartphone, like the entire world for the most part has a smartphone and that’s how we interact with things.

[00:17:22] That experience has to be really simple really tight.

[00:17:26] I think there’s an element of how can you provide enough information on the front end so that a lot of self selection happens.

[00:17:33] I’m seeing that trend increase more and more, especially with wage transparency.

[00:17:38] When candidates in the volume space are making a selection of if I’m going to take the job or not, many times it’s not the job or the company.

[00:17:46] It’s the logistics.

[00:17:48] It’s the actual pay rate.

[00:17:50] It’s the schedule.

[00:17:51] It’s some of these things that we should be able to put up front because those are self selection things.

[00:17:57] You don’t have to go through three interviews to get to the [00:18:00] point where you realize. the pay is off by $2 an hour.

[00:18:04] Or, the schedule will never work with my schedule.

[00:18:08] Or, the schedule is just ridiculous.

[00:18:10] It’s like, from three to four… it gets really wonky.

[00:18:13] Go back to the primary user in the volume space? I think it’s the candidate.

[00:18:18] We were early adopters with text, Because pre smartphone. Everybody could text. how can we make this path happen on text?

[00:18:26] Then you went through the chatbot revolution with the TA text providers .

[00:18:30] I always still went back toward text. Because that’s a common platform people know and understand and feel comfortable using, especially in the hourly space.

[00:18:41] We started early with text recruiting and text applying.

[00:18:45] How can I get my information to you via text and start to segment candidates and put them into pools in the backend all through text? that led to chatbots and things like this.

[00:18:56] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, it’s interesting about the I really love the, [00:19:00] who’s your client first. And then, trying to solve for them.

[00:19:03] this is my business and stuff is the texting side is it’s confronting to me how hard it is sometimes to sell this, which it just should be to me, just like a complete no brainer. But they can’t, like a lot of times they just can’t get over the, I’m going to change the process because it’s going to be a candidate process instead of a me first process.

[00:19:26] And, that it’s just what it is. hopefully sometime it’ll change.

[00:19:30] Paul Norman: tried to set it up and my recommendation on, if I’m looking at technologies, who are the users, who are the stakeholder groups that are going to touch this? And then how do you configure it or get the right tool that solves the main problems?

[00:19:45] So what are the main problems for high volume candidates? You need a lot of them. And it has to be easy and the turnaround times typically need to be quick. you also want to be able to see it because with volume recruiting, you really have to be able to [00:20:00] see the conversions.

[00:20:01] And if you can, then you can go solve those with point solutions. Whether it’s, I’ve got all this fall off when they hit this page, or when they go to this step of the process, or I have all this fall off during the scheduling of interviews, or afterwards. And how long is it taking,

[00:20:22] And why, what can we do to speed that up or remove the friction? Or at the very least, provide more information to the candidate around this is what’s happening. This is going to take this long. Background checks, big thing that happens in high volume, even if you set up this beautiful front end, hyper fast, Completely automated process.

[00:20:43] Then you hit background checks and there’s so much out of your control. Because you’ve got, the one manual person who only works Thursday, so it has to pull paper file. That’s a reality. Yeah.

[00:20:54] Yep. And so you do hit those things. If you can combat it with [00:21:00] information, then the candidate at least knows. And on the volume side, that’s a key component to this as well. Here’s what I can expect. We’re going to get you through the interview process. The background check typically takes this long.

[00:21:12] I’m going to inform you Throughout the process with an ETA, You have to engineer that process. You have to decide what you’re trying to solve for. I always like to go for, it’s a balance of, do you find the best kind of point solution tools, or do you try to find the all in one?

[00:21:30] And neither is the right answer that I’ve found. It depends on your environment. It depends on what your current tech stack is. And often, even in my career, I couldn’t change it. we were locked into a three year deal or a five year deal. one instance I’ve said, we’re going to have to write that off for the last year because it doesn’t work for us.

[00:21:50] And I’ve been in the other situation where we’ve said, let’s figure out how to make it work. Because that’s something that is just too intensive to switch that out. And [00:22:00] so let’s help set this up or configure it with the provider or change our process, To make it work for the next few years and build the future.

[00:22:10] Jonathan Duarte: I was in the Philippines over the Christmas holidays, I was there for two weeks in Cebu where I have a team, and I was interviewing people Sway, one of my new employees, we went through this and I would say, can you just send me your resume?

[00:22:22] I have the same mindset like everyone else. Anyone else who’s hiring hourly people and they’re hiring professional workers. I think they have this mindset and this is the one that I am adamant To destroy, which is, as you said, there’s two processes, high volume and professional, they’re very different recruiting processes.

[00:22:44] And so with Sway, I said, Hey, Sway, can you send me your resume? then I realized Sway lives on a phone. Sway does not have a computer. Sway does not have a resume on her phone. So asking Sway to send me a [00:23:00] resume. Is go create a graphic image and send it to me. from a process side, it’s important to understand the users.

[00:23:07] It is really what I try to tell, clients as they’re onboarding and go, look at your manufacturing floor or look at the housekeepers or the back office staff. Are they going home to a 17 inch MacBook Pro to send you a resume? Are they reading email? No, they’re using text messaging.

[00:23:25] They’re using that phone. So how do you communicate on their terms? And that’s totally different from if you’re trying to hire a marketing director. Marketing directors sit behind a computer. You can get them on the phone cause they know they applied and they’re expecting a call or something like that.

[00:23:40]

[00:23:40] Paul Norman: Yeah. This goes back to partnership at all levels in TA. I think it’s important for the TA organization to understand. The roles that they’re hiring. And I don’t just mean the roles, what are the, nuts and bolts of the job, but what are the true life styles, life experience, like what is that candidate [00:24:00] persona, if you will, going through?

[00:24:02] I remember, it was an old book and I was trying to get 60, 000 and 70, 000, a year recruiters to understand the 10 an hour workers that they were hiring, that they didn’t have the same experience. They were not going home to the laptop, potentially, and many of them were working two or three jobs, there was a book called Nickel and Dimed, which was about, it’s a really old book.

[00:24:27] A reporter went undercover, and tried to live for a year on minimum wage jobs in the United States. the experience, was meant to help recruiters understand how that candidate pool is approaching applying for a job, interviewing for a job, deciding if they select a job or not.

[00:24:47] I think it’s important to understand that user experience.

[00:24:52] Jonathan Duarte: So let me say, coming full circle to today, what type of companies you’re working with how do you help companies [00:25:00] at the moment, and what kind of problems are they coming to you with, sometimes our clients, aren’t going to know the problem, so it’s the questions that we ask, that help to say, Oh yeah, people are coming to me with that.

[00:25:14] Like I, in this post I put on LinkedIn today, which was, are candidates ghosting you or are candidates just not responding? And if you’re hiring a TA manager and you hear someone saying, Hey, I’m not getting enough qualified candidates or candidates aren’t responding, it’s possibly a breakdown in the process.

[00:25:33] if you got a hundred candidates in Indeed that applied to a job, but you only talked to ten, is that systematic? Or what is it? So what kind of questions or things are people coming to you guys with where you help them?

[00:25:49] Paul Norman: Yeah, it’s typically a couple different scenarios, but something’s not working or something could work better.

[00:25:55] And There’s often the acknowledgment of we could do something better. [00:26:00] Or we’re not optimized. So and so we work with companies that we help them optimize their talent acquisition. That’s all we do is talent acquisition. We don’t do other pieces of HR.

[00:26:11] We’re not a recruiting company or an RPO and we don’t sell product. We’re a pure play, TA focused management consulting organization. And so it’s typically something’s not working and often it’s back to the business goals.

[00:26:25] Something’s not working in the business. We’re not getting enough staff or we don’t have enough sales because we can’t get enough sales people. Or we have a big we just think it’s clunky and nobody likes the way it works right now. Customer satisfaction internally is bad, So there’s usually some, something, some sort of recognition of something’s not optimized. And what we’re able to do then is come in and advise and do discovery to understand all the different components, from a 360 degree view. What is happening? How are you doing [00:27:00] talent acquisition?

[00:27:01] What’s the structure like? What are the tools in the tech stack What are the processes? What are the stakeholder groups? And what are all of their experiences? And What is their feedback? often what I find even in my short time as a consultant is,

[00:27:17] We don’t ask enough. as a TA leader, sometimes we’re constrained or we won’t get the same truth because it may not be perceived as objective. You need a third party from outside to get people talking, a lot of it is asking what’s working what’s not working and why, and then listening then starting to pull apart some of the themes, whether it’s, there’s not a process.

[00:27:40] Oftentimes there’s not a process I think the other thing I’ve seen is things aren’t always all or none. So going back to high volume recruiting typically should be set up as its own, has a different set of processes, maybe a different tech stack and set of tools, different SLAs, different expectations, different [00:28:00] goals.

[00:28:00] different team structure than other parts of TA. So sourcing as an example, if you set a sourcing team up to do high volume recruitment they’re looking for thousands of candidates typically. A sourcing team for niche is looking for one. And one.

[00:28:17] Yeah. And trying to bring them to the table. It’s a different, it’s a different kind of setup. that’s the other thing I think happens a lot in TA. We don’t segment.

[00:28:26] Jonathan Duarte: you’re speaking my truth there, I think this is why it’s great to, call someone like you, which is, you’ve seen it on so many, you’ve seen it multiple industries, you’ve seen high volume, you’ve seen sourcing, you’ve seen those things.

[00:28:39] It’s different and we may be, I think we talked about in the green room too, it may be a cultural thing in the company that, or leadership changed and we’re still doing the same things that we were doing before and no one maybe has the internal, ability to ask the questions or something’s out there or stopping.

[00:28:59] [00:29:00] Speak to that, like how, like in your experience too, like how do you get over some of those, like just opening the door or having the conversation?

[00:29:07] Paul Norman: Yeah, there’s a couple different paths that typically work. Data always works. Now, I haven’t seen or been part of even my organization’s a place where I have all the data I want.

[00:29:19] We can just walk in and they just push the button. people, data,

[00:29:22] Jonathan Duarte: yeah, exactly.

[00:29:23] Paul Norman: I haven’t seen it yet and maybe one day we’ll find it, but data comes, from talking to people, data from doing focus groups, data from surveys, data. To get sentiment that’s all data as well that informs a decision with some objectivity.

[00:29:41] that’s what we do at Riviera Advisors. when we do a discovery session or the discovery part of our engagements. We gather a lot of data through different lenses. to try to understand the whole picture, but then also to bring that back and say, here’s what we’re seeing, here’s what the data shows.

[00:29:59] Yeah. So we’re [00:30:00] hearing this when we do focus groups subjectively, we theme that. And when you theme that becomes data. If the same theme comes up over and over again so the data really, I think, is important to inform what’s going on, I have to get all of the things in the process and all of the, micro components. I would love to have all that. Sometimes it just doesn’t work. It’s source of hire. We have been talking about this for my entire career in recruiting. How do you get to a better source of hire? It’s really hard because marketing doesn’t work that way.

[00:30:32] You have to touch somebody seven times. With seven different voices or. Multiple attributes.

[00:30:37] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah.

[00:30:38] Paul Norman: How do you say this is their source of hire? You have to get these other pieces of data, to really understand the story. And then turn that back into, what’s the impact on the business?

[00:30:48] we’re not going to add more recruiters just because we think, That will solve everything. There has to be a reason. And is that the right short, mid, and long term solution? Maybe those are different. It [00:31:00] depends on the culture, which you get by asking, pulling out themes, and understanding, how do I get this done in this culture?

[00:31:07] That’s the other thing that, is a big component of this. You can have a beautiful plan, if you can’t execute it, it’s not worth a lot. And a lot of that comes down to culture and sometimes timing. I walked into a company and they said, we want all these things done.

[00:31:21] This is the expectation. I did all the math and said, I need 4 million, I think I got a couple hundred thousand the next year, but we had defined, this is what we can do. This is what it would take to get there, The fallback is going to be here.

[00:31:36] This is what we could Do for that amount of investment, it took a few years, and we made those investments at that organization. Sometimes it’s also defining and figuring out how do I get it executed? maybe you can’t do it all immediately, but what’s the biggest impact investment you can make, in year one or the first six months, and then the second six months, and then year two and year three, so [00:32:00] on.

[00:32:00] So we do a lot of that work. We do a lot of that advisement because we’ve seen it at multiple places.

[00:32:05] Jonathan Duarte: I think that’s the key You already know it. You can bring in somebody who’s got the expertise and may be able to get you farther down that process to two weeks from the boardroom rather than six months to pitch to the boardroom because you got to figure it out.

[00:32:19] Paul Norman: Yeah, and the other thing is sometimes TA leaders just need a sounding board. Quite honestly. I know this, as a TA leader, there were expectations on me to be the person who knew it all relative to TA. And that, I wasn’t that person, I needed help.

[00:32:34] And so we do a lot of advisement in smaller engagements through that where a CHRO or COO will ask us to do coaching or advisement sessions with their TA leader. Just to act as a sounding board and to give some, some, to move one thing along that they’re struggling with.

[00:32:53] Or just to be a validation sounding board of, yeah, that’s the right way to handle this, or did you think about maybe positioning [00:33:00] it this way? we do a lot of that work as well.

[00:33:02] Jonathan Duarte: That’s awesome, because if you’re coming from being a director where you may not have that access and you’re moving into a VP role, you gotta come in with your team, if you’re already telling your management that you’re moving into my team is my advisors, and I have a coach, and his name is Paul, and Paul does this, or that’s how you can, they’re leveraging your ability to find the answers, because they’re not going to assume you know everything.

[00:33:28] But they’re going to assume you know how to find the

[00:33:30] Paul Norman: That’s been my experience both as a practitioner and as a consultant. There are tools available. As you get further in your career and leadership and TA leadership, the expectation is that you deliver.

[00:33:42] That’s the bottom line expectation you get the return on the investment being made into talent acquisition most TA leaders have a lot of latitude to decide how they get there. We’re used as one of those tools in a lot of TA organizations, to provide that kind of advisement.

[00:33:59] There’s [00:34:00] large projects where we help re engineer the whole thing, or maybe there was some business event, reorganization, acquisition, a merger, etc. There are those kinds of things that we do a lot of work on. then we do smaller engagements where it’s more operational advisement we are really struggling with some part of pre-boarding or onboarding and we need help. we’ll come in and do a day or a two day session. To work through that problem and guide the organization through that one thing. Do a bit of that, too.

[00:34:33] Jonathan Duarte: Yeah, it’s amazing what, eight hours or ten hours split between two days.

[00:34:38] Can come up with people who know where to find the answer or how to get to the answer and how to ask the right questions. That limited time can actually create huge opportunities.

[00:34:48] Paul Norman: As a budget holder, it’s a small investment compared to bringing all of these people offline to solve a problem or I’ve done this as a practitioner.

[00:34:57] Your QFA project. We’re going to have a project team. A [00:35:00] kickoff. from now. Six months from now, we’re going to get some readouts from the project team on what they think we should do. You could probably solve that, In a couple of days session. And get a lot farther faster with a little investment in time and having the structure and expectations of what you come out of that with.

[00:35:18] Jonathan Duarte: Paul, how do people find you online and Riviera?

[00:35:21] Paul Norman: RivieraAdvisors. com is probably the best place or LinkedIn or just call me. 407 484 8059. Happy to talk and see if we can help any of your listeners.

[00:35:35] Jonathan Duarte: Thank you so much. I want to say thanks because I know there’s people struggling with this stuff and you don’t have to struggle.

[00:35:43] you just got to find the right people. And that’s all we’re doing in TA. It’s finding the right people, finding the right advisors, finding somebody who has answers. We’re trying to hire them in many cases, but sometimes we just need to hire our

[00:35:55] Paul Norman: it’s a challenging environment.

[00:35:57] High volume hiring, especially right now with the [00:36:00] labor market for that talent set. It’s a really difficult fine for TA leaders and probably a big source of stress. But There are avenues, strategies, tools, a lot of the stuff we talked about today that can make it go better and optimize.

[00:36:15] Jonathan Duarte: Thanks so much, Paul. Great to have you on. Good to talk to you.

[00:36:18] Speaker: Thank you for spending your time here with GoHire Talks and listening to our guests. We appreciate all of the insights and feedback and comments you provide. If you’ve got guests or individuals you’d like us to reach out to and have on the show, please let us know.