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This week I have been in Las Vegas for the TA Tech Conference. It’s a community that is helping to facilitate conversations and collaborations among talent acquisition technology and service providers and recruiting and talent acquisition leaders. I hosted a panel session at TA Tech that focused on having honest conversations about how we can work better together. This is the second time I’ve hosted the panel at one of TA Tech’s events and what I love is that each panel has offered new nuggets of wisdom that I have taken away.
Episode 96: How to Build Better Relationships Between Practitioners with Tim Sackett (@timsackett)
The talent acquisition and HR industry is symbiotic. Vendor and service providers need recruiters just as recruiters need service providers in order to do their best work. I’ve found in my own personal experience that a technology implementation, building a new recruiting strategy or testing a pilot with a new HR or recruiting technology startup.
Practitioners and providers are often portrayed in the media as enemies. In my work as a consultant to providers and an advocate for practitioners, I hear of implementation horror stories gone wrong from both sides, pushy salesmen who oversell and practitioners who don’t circle back with metrics, analytics, reporting and feedback.
Tim Sackett was one of the esteemed panelists and it was great to sit down with him for the podcast to discuss some of the highlights from the panel. Tim shares what great collaboration looks like between practitioners and providers in the talent acquisition and human resources industries. Not surprisingly, trust between the practitioner and provider is the most important. Tim says that means opening the kimono a bit and as practitioners sharing big picture about strategy, plans and results with the understanding and trust that your provider partner isn’t going to take advantage of this information and upsell you. As practitioners, we want more case studies and best practices from our peers and would prefer introductions to TA leaders at other companies to give us better insights into their own processes and how we can adapt and adjust our own.
How Do You Measure Success in Talent Acquisition?
In our panel, we discussed about what success looks like for vendor partners and practitioners. What type of data, information and resources are important. Tim talks us through the types of metrics he uses to determine success. What was interesting was how different Tim’s answer on success was from our one of our other panelists, Danielle Monaghan who is the head of talent acquisition for Amazon. Danielle looks at the candidate quality in terms of the number of candidates from a source that pass the initial Amazon interview. Source of hire and cost of hire aren’t necessarily the most important. Quality of hire is and Tim as well as the rest of the panelists called for a standardization of how we measure quality. Tim pointed out that the hiring manager is the one who should be accountable for quality of hire since they are the ones making the final decision on whether to offer a job to the candidate.
How to Sell to HR and Talent Acquisition
In the panel, we talked about how talent acquisition leaders want to be sold to and specifically, what makes us respond to an email and/or schedule a demo. All panelists agreed that the automated emails from vendors and tech companies in our industry are out of control. The key to getting practitioners like Tim and Danielle on the phone and learning about your technology or service comes from doing the research and personalizing the process. Danielle says introductions from peers and industry leaders are the best way to get on her radar to schedule a call, meeting or demo.
Please stop with the automated emails. Tim talks about some of the automated CRM emails he’s receiving. Business development professionals need to do their research and quit peppering practitioners. It’s becoming overwhelming and hurting the professional brands of individuals and the companies they represent. Listen to the podcast to hear Tim and I talk off the cuff.
Connect with Tim Sackett on LinkedIn.
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*A special thank you to my production team at Total Picture Radio.
