[Read Between the Tech: Epi 4] Intersection of HR Tech & Recruitment

• How HR can help build the organization of the future: https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/the-new-possible-how-hr-can-help-build-the-organization-of-the-future

• Make Your Company Values Mean Something: https://hbr.org/2002/07/make-your-values-mean-something

• AI’s impact on recruitment: https://dataconomy.com/2022/08/12/how-is-artificial-intelligence-changing-the-recruiting-process/

Read the Transcription

Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI, thanks to Descript, and has not been edited for content.

[00:00:00] Katherine: Hello and welcome to Read Between the Tech, the podcast that explores how companies can have richer and strategic conversations about the future of their current technology. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, business leader, or simply interested in the impact of technology in a company's growth, this podcast will have something for you.

[00:00:20] Katherine: So join us on this journey as we read between the tech and uncover the real stories behind your organization's technology and its future success. Let's listen in on this episode.

[00:00:30] Eric: All right. Hello everyone. Thank you very much for joining Between The Tech. It's Eric Sugar here, and I'm here today with Virginia Polly, and we're gonna talk a bit about HR Tech and maybe how the two are integrating and how the two are intertwined deeply. And I'd love to pass it over to Virginia for a quick intro and some information about what she does, how she does it, her background, some passions, and get to know her a little bit. Virginia, thanks for joining.

[00:00:56] Virginia: Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. Eric, I'm really looking forward to the conversation today. So I'll give you a bit of background.

[00:01:03] Virginia: I'm the CEO of Polytech talent, a recruitment company that I've run for 17 years. More recently or most recently. I'm also the co-founder of Anthos Talent, which you can think of as the global arm of Polytech talent. And we have teams and offices in five countries. So I've been doing this for a very long time.

[00:01:26] Virginia: I am very passionate about helping companies attract great people and build winning teams and connecting job seekers to amazing career opportunities. When I'm not at work it's pretty boring, but I'm, you might find me at the gym. I also love to cook and I think perhaps my bold this mission these days is just trying to find creative ways to spend as much quality time with my son before he's off to university.

[00:01:54] Eric: That sounds like a lot of fun. And we have a shared passion of cooking. I've been spending a lot of time barbecuing and tweaking and making my own sauces, so cooking's a lot of fun and a good artistic. Yeah, so very good. What got you into recruiting? What started the whole journey into recruiting and tell us a bit about that.

[00:02:15] Virginia: It's a good question cuz I didn't actually start my career in recruiting. I think a lot of people in the recruiting industry fall into it. But interestingly, I started in the restaurant industry. After graduating from university, I opened my own restaurant in Guelph. It was a family business I lived in Kitchener Waterloo at the time. I ran this restaurant for several years and at some point I think likely after serving my millionth schnitzel, I decided to pivot and I wanted to try something completely different. So I moved to Toronto and I applied to a number of entry level corporate positions.

[00:02:54] Virginia: I think one of the rules I applied to was for a recruitment position, but I didn't get that job. I was told that I wasn't qualified. Even though I felt like I was qualified because at the restaurant that's all I did was hire and manage people. And then I somehow landed a job that I was really not qualified for as a software trainer for a company called Knowledge Alliance.

[00:03:16] Virginia: And I'm not sure if you remember the days, Eric, but it was during the.com days. And the tech industry was booming. Companies were spending a lot of money on upgrading their systems, migrating from dos to windows. So there was a huge shortage of qualified tech resources. And the company that hired me was willing to train me to be a trainer.

[00:03:40] Virginia: As a trainer, I got to know a wide variety of organizations. InsideOUT companies would share their business challenges and, I guess what I discovered through all of my experience whether running my own business, a restaurant, or even just supporting these organizations, is that I think 90% of business problems are actually people problems in disguise.

[00:04:04] Virginia: So that's when my passion for recruitment grew, and then I started working as a recruiter and. Sales professional for a couple of different organizations, and then eventually I just decided to launch my own business really with just a very simple mandate. And it's just to help my clients understand the importance of getting the talent piece right and just to love recruiting again, because I see it as a huge opportunity for all companies.

[00:04:29] Virginia: If you find good people and put them in the right spot, then things will run much more smoothly.

[00:04:35] Eric: For sure. Recruiting and bringing talent in is one of the most important things we all do, and it's the biggest possible impact to culture if it's not done and it sounds like you've actually had three different careers, which is pretty neat.

[00:04:47] Eric: Not everyone gets to three, see three different industries. Yeah. Yes. dot.com was crazy. There was lots of it was unusual spending and behavior and lots of opportunity there. That was definitely when I got my start in it.

[00:04:59] Virginia: Yeah, that's interesting cuz I worked on the process side for one company, then I helped with tools and technology and then it was the people side, which kind of brings it all together.

[00:05:09] Virginia: So it's, I think that helps a lot when I go into an organization and for me to understand and get an overview of what some of the business challenges are for them.

[00:05:19] Eric: , so one thing I observe with a lot of our, I'll say mid-market and SMB customers, is that HR is sometimes an afterthought.

[00:05:27] Eric: And we even struggle with that internally at times. We don't probably invest enough in people and culture and I've been using the term people and culture a lot more than hr. . But as you think about people and culture or human resources, how can business leaders best become partners or bring them to the table cuz it's something I think that gets left behind and forgotten, and that's one of the challenges for people growing is finding great people.

[00:05:50] Virginia: Absolutely. So here's my take. I think as we just touched on, I, I believe maybe a bit biased, but the most important part of any business is the people and culture piece, or the HR and recruitment piece. People are the largest expense in a company's budget.

[00:06:07] Virginia: I know for me it's about 70% of my budget. I think HR has to be a partner to the business. Otherwise it's a big miss. The fact that we're still asking this question, like how does it become a partner, I think means that there is a lot of room for improvement. And I would say that it's a two-way street.

[00:06:27] Virginia: I think it has to start from the top. Business leaders need to include HR in all the strategic conversations right from the start. And it shouldn't be an afterthought. And you're right, I do see that across organizations. They don't have. They don't even have a documented process on hiring or SLAs.

[00:06:48] Virginia: There's more process in terms of ordering business supplies sometimes than there is on the hiring side of things. I also think that, in general, it's a mindset for HR and so that they can start to become a stronger partner. Actually it's for any back office really. It's by learning how to run the department more like a business and think the way that the business thinks.

[00:07:11] Virginia: So it's not just about costs, it's about return on investment, right? When you're looking at skills, it's really about performance for the business and finding ways to create flow instead of friction for the company. And so I think the bottom line is that people are the heart and soul of every business and to make it work, the business and HR need to join forces in order to drive success of the organization.

[00:07:39] Eric: What's maybe one or two things that you'd tell a c e o you're sitting with that they should think about as they're trying to, as they recognize, okay, I don't have a great people and culture.

[00:07:50] Eric: Team yet. And I want to start to invest there and grow that out. What's one thing you'd, one or two things you'd tell us to go look at this or go try this?

[00:07:58] Virginia: In terms of putting a team together from scratch? Do you mean Eric

[00:08:01] Eric: they're putting a team together or partnering with someone or learning maybe the learning of how to do it, because most business don't go from the CEO's, the chief of hr. Yeah. To having a built out HR team or people and culture team. They go in stages. What are the couple of stages that would be that first step? So I'm a ceo. I recognize that 120 people, we actually need someone who knows people and culture better than I do. I may know the culture side.

[00:08:29] Eric: I don't. Know the people side.

[00:08:30] Virginia: My recommendation again of course, it depends on the organization and how they're growing, but there's, first off there's an administrative function of HR and things that you need to make sure you're checking off. But in addition, and the larger part that I just touched on is the strategic side of hr.

[00:08:49] Virginia: Investing in it, I think you need to invest in both, but you could even work with a consultant, for example, to start with if you are just getting started. To help you think about the whole piece and be deliberate about how you're building the culture. Being crystal clear on the values, because that of trickles into the way that you hire individuals and the traits that you're looking for, how you onboard them, how you bring them in.

[00:09:18] Virginia: So a combination of things. You don't have to necessarily bring it in-house all at once, but you can work with partners to assist you and then slowly Build out like a plan, a strategy, just like you would in any other back office function. You don't necessarily need to bring, your whole finance team in and you work with financial partners to help you with a strategic plan.

[00:09:37] Virginia: You can do the same thing in HR and then build up from there.

[00:09:42] Eric: And you touched on values and that was where we started our. Kind of people and culture journey. We had nine values that were no one could remember, including myself, and we narrowed it down to three values that really covered all those you like, come, be, do it right, and people matter.

[00:09:56] Eric: But when you think about values, is there any step you'd say go read this book or go try this out to build it. Your values, if you don't have them written down, or if they're so complex that no one knows them, including the c e O.

[00:10:08] Virginia: I think reading them helps for sure. Like reading books, or getting different ideas.

[00:10:13] Virginia: But it does, values are something that has to come from within. And, thinking about them and sometimes they don't happen overnight and that's okay. Like I just, even having a starting point anywhere just. Start with something that does seem to resonate with you, and then over time you'll see behaviors and examples of things that work for your organization.

[00:10:36] Virginia: Ideas that will come to light about. That you noticed that set you apart from others. And I think eventually it starts to ring true and they come to life. Yeah. I, that's been my journey as well, like just trying to talk about it with my team and, there'll be one or two that I feel like are, at the heart of who we are and then others that I'm still working on right.

[00:11:00] Virginia: To discover.

[00:11:01] Eric: Yep .Iterative process. We've been through it. We keep going through it all the time, great. Absolutely. So social technology, LinkedIn. Indeed, the access to candidate information feels different than it's ever been. How is that changing people and culture, both from people being more portable, working remotely, access to talent anywhere in the world that we just wouldn't have?

[00:11:24] Eric: It went from job postings and newspapers to a global platform like LinkedIn in the last probably 15 years. How has that changed what you do and where you do it? And is that maybe part of how the new business started or the new business journey started?

[00:11:38] Virginia: Yeah, good question. Okay. I can speak to how it's changed our industry for sure, and just some general thoughts about it.

[00:11:47] Virginia: To understand the impact that LinkedIn and social technologies have had on the recruiting industry, you have to understand what the industry was like before. LinkedIn and I was around. So in the old days of recruiting companies leveraged recruiting firms headhunters as their go-to way for identifying high level talent because personal information about people was just not widely available.

[00:12:10] Virginia: So companies paid you for your network for the Rolodex of actual business cards that I have saved in a box of the people that I met. It was a lot of hard work to get to know people and they would contact you for positions they could not otherwise find on their own. Of course LinkedIn changed this and then we saw a wave of companies bring the talent acquisition.

[00:12:34] Virginia: Function in-house. But I think the other thing that's happened that you just touched on is that it made it a lot, much more easier for talent to also find new opportunities. So the frequency of hiring has increased exponentially for companies. The average person now changes jobs about 12 times. There's a lot of replacing happening within a lot of cycles, and I think that finding names in a database obviously is just a small part of what like a recruiter can do for an organization.

[00:13:02] Virginia: A skilled recruiter knows how to leverage their network to get a response, to build relationships with candidates, to present the opportunities to high potential candidates, get them excited about the role, move them along the process. There's a, I think over 800 million people on LinkedIn, so Wow.

[00:13:20] Virginia: You still need partners and recruiters to help sort through all of that. So in some ways, I think the social platforms made the entire process a little bit more complex. And I think having local recruiters, and even now that we've expanded globally, we do have local recruiters in each of the markets that understand the market is really critical.

[00:13:39] Virginia: So we're not necessarily leveraging our team from Toronto to find people in Brazil, like we actually have people on the ground there that do it. Again, you can find people, but trying to find the top talent, it's a very different process. Right when you're searching for people. Yeah, no matter how you slice it, I think just hiring right, takes a colossal amount of time.

[00:14:01] Eric: And you went global during the pandemic. What are maybe a couple of lessons learned as you went on that journey and what kicked off the journey to, to expand outside of Canada?

[00:14:13] Virginia: Yeah, so over the years I, in running my business, I've watched the trend of companies moving their work outside of North America, and along the way I also heard about a lot of the challenges these companies were facing when working with some of the larger offshore providers communication challenges quality issues, and so it just got me thinking for a while there just, there has to be a better way. And one day I would, it just hit me. I thought why not? Like we could do it, we could open offices in different countries because we understand the importance of finding the right fit, not just in terms of skills, but also company culture for the companies that we support here.

[00:14:56] Virginia: The other gap that I saw is a lot of the larger offshore providers are not really accessible to mid-size or smaller companies. They lock you into big contracts with minimum project sizes sometimes. Smaller companies may be afraid cuz they feel a loss of control when working with a service provider who's outside of North America.

[00:15:17] Virginia: And as I'm thinking all of this fate stepped in and just before the Covid shutdowns, I had the pleasure of meeting my current business partner. His name is as Chowdry. He's a successful Canadian entrepreneur. He had an office in, he has an office in Europe and he was looking to expand his services in the tech space.

[00:15:35] Virginia: So we got to talking, we hit it off. And then as luck would have it, we, a project came up through my network. We started to work on it together and we had really great success. So from there, more projects came our way. And then with the lockdowns, there was the r the rise of remote work. And there was, companies were desperate for tact talent here in Canada.

[00:15:57] Virginia: So they just started asking me to reach outside of North America, and so I, I had that set up. And it's been an incredible journey so far. We took the plunge and we just started opening offices. Interestingly too, we had to open them. We couldn't necessarily even, some of them we opened remotely because there was lockdown, so we couldn't even physically go to the locations. But so there was a lot of lessons learned. Along the way for sure. PE on the people side as well is just, operationally. And we're still learning as we go. One observation is just really that there's amazing people all around the world. So I think sometimes people think outsourcing means like lower quality service, but you just need a really great recruitment process and good recruiters to help you find.

[00:16:47] Virginia: The right people. And there is a learning curve too when working with people abroad. I naively thought you could just plug people in, but it doesn't work that way. You need to have a strategy for it. There are slight intercultural differences in business and cultures perceive the world differently.

[00:17:05] Virginia: We're always looking for ways that we can best support our new hires and integrate them seamlessly with the companies that we work with.

[00:17:15] Eric: Thank you for sharing that. One topic I've had, I think in every podcast the last little while has been ai. It keeps coming up and I think that's, it's in the news all over the place, but have you started to see AI changing recruit or changing people in culture yet, or is it still early for people and culture?

[00:17:35] Eric: I know we're seeing it out of the parts of our business for sure, on the development side and the customer service side.

[00:17:41] Virginia: Yeah, you're right. I think there's parts of organizations we support that are further along the path and others are not. I think on the HR side, of course, I think it's just gonna change everything, for everyone.

[00:17:54] Virginia: It's on everybody's radar. I'm not, I think a lot of people are just experimenting right now or trying to come up with the right strategy and approach and areas that. They can implement some of the new tools that are out there. For the recruiting industry, I think it's gonna make what we do more efficient and effective.

[00:18:16] Virginia: In my world, we're looking at some of the new technologies that are powered by ai. Of course, it can streamline a lot of our process from even simple things like rewriting, job descriptions, job postings, resumes, but there's technologies that can assist with candidate sourcing. Even how we conduct interviews, reducing bias identifying top talent.

[00:18:40] Virginia: I think what's important is just striking a balance right between the technology and human touch. Especially for our business. I think it's critical for assessing fit and making a final hiring decision. There's, there needs to be still a human, the human side of it. But I do see it as a way to compliment what we do and I'm.

[00:19:01] Virginia: Also just interested in how AI in general is gonna change the whole landscape for work. Jobs, yes. Jobs lost jobs added jobs changed. How it's gonna balance out is unknown, but it's pretty exciting time to be in this space right now.

[00:19:17] Eric: It is a really neat space and the job I keep hearing about and talking about is prompt engineering, so ai, so the people who build and design how to prompt all the large language models and all the generative tech.

[00:19:30] Eric: It's I'm seeing early indicators there. I ask Kevin, who joins. Books, audio, books, podcasts. I love reading, but what's your, what's one book or favorite book you'd recommend out to the audience or podcast or audiobook?

[00:19:46] Virginia: Sure. So I listen, I'm an audio and podcast listener. I don't always have time to actually sit and read a book, but I do listen while doing other things like working out or going for a walk.

[00:19:59] Virginia: And I do read a lot of business books. I like self-help books also things on nutrition, that's. What I'd like to read or positive mindset books I, lately I've been rereading some of the books by Dr. Joe Dispenza. I'm not sure if you've read any of his work, but all his books are about how your mind has the power to heal your body and you can use your mind to create new and positive emotions that will help you reach your full potential.

[00:20:26] Virginia: I think I highly recommend his book or his books actually. But I guess one of them you could start with is breaking the Habit of being Yourself. That's a really good book. In terms of podcasts, I listen to Dean Jackson and Joe Polish. I love marketing. Yep. And I like the Tim Fair Show.

[00:20:49] Virginia: And then if you're a super biohack geek Dave Asprey's human upgrade. I listened to that too. Very cool.

[00:20:58] Virginia: Yeah.

[00:20:58] Eric: And some of those I listened to Dr. David Sinclair is the one I've been listening to on the human hacking side of things. Oh, cool. It's all about anti-aging and reversing aging as treating aging as a disease.

[00:21:11] Eric: And then yeah, cancer, dementia, Alzheimer's are all symptoms of a, of the aging disease. Yeah. So lots of great content out there. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. Thank you. Where can people find you?

[00:21:24] Eric: Yeah, I think I hang out on LinkedIn a lot, so if you Virginia Poly on LinkedIn or my email as well, or my website.

[00:21:34] Eric: So my website is polytech talent.com or Virginia dot poly@polytechtalent.com.

[00:21:44] Eric: Thank you for sharing. Thanks for joining us and thank you to our audience for listening. We'll talk to you again next time.

[00:21:50] Virginia: Thank you, Eric. It's a lot of fun. Bye

[00:21:54] Eric: bye.

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