How to build a better HR
HR is continually evolving like a Pokémon, and as Hiring Highlights celebrates its 60th birthday, we explore how talent acquisition roles and responsibilities are changing.
Lattice leader on expanding the value of talent acquisition?
In these shaky economic times, we recruiters are understandably keen to demonstrate ‘value’ to our organisations. So for our latest Scaling Stories podcast, who better to speak to than the smart and perceptive Emily Zahuta, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition at Lattice.
Lattice is of course the ‘people success platform’ which, in Emily’s words, “helps companies drive performance and engage their employees to do their very best work”.
In our conversation, Emily makes a compelling case that TA’s responsibilities should go way beyond onboarding, and include certain functions that are traditionally associated with HR.
“I think we’ve gotten away with being on the front line of hiring,” Emily says. “We build the relationships with the candidates; we get them excited about joining a certain role in these companies; we hire them for a price that we all feel is fair, and then we pass them onto onboarding for the most part, and we say ‘good luck. Hope you love it… we’re off to focus on the next role’. And I think there’s a really big miss in that.”
Emily makes the point that TA professionals amass huge knowledge about the candidate, like “what’s important to this individual, what their fears are, what they’re excited about, what their growth tracks should look like based on what we’ve discussed”, but all too often, that knowledge evaporates within an organisation.
“It’s tricky because I’ve worked under leaders who say, ‘attrition is not your issue’... [But] my point is, yeah, it is our job. If we’re saying we’ll build the interview process; we’ll build the panel of folks; in fact, we’ll even tell you what questions to ask then. Why shouldn’t we be measuring if those things are actually successful in hiring someone that does their job correctly?”
As Emily explains, TA should be advising on all things talent related, not just getting those bright sparks through the door. For companies to thrive, TA leaders need to adopt a ‘talent delivery’ mindset, or what you might call ‘total workforce management’.
“In a shaky economy, in a really funky global environment, what we have is a team that really needs to get to the nitty gritty of what the business is trying to solve.”
Emily talks about “expanding the value of what we’re doing”, which essentially boils down to being “better than outside resources” like recruitment agencies.
If you’re a tad nervous about the future, Emily’s wise words provide hope that we recruiters can recalibrate our roles and add value in ever-changing ways.
Check out our blog on quality of hire – a key theme in our chat with Emily – and for more insights from TA leaders, head over to our Scaling Stories podcast page.
Putting the inhuman in hiring
Lattice do a great job when it comes to investing in people, but while it sounds like common sense, we sometimes have to remind ourselves that not everyone sees it that way.
For example, where will you be going on your holidays this year – Paris, Prague or “Pity City”? Get some tips from the MillerKnoll CEO whose tone deaf takedown of bonus-seeking staff has gone viral.
And what about the CEO who applauded the family who sold their family dog in order to focus more on work?
We hiring folks have to think more deeply about what really motivates candidates and employees. If they’re telling us they want more carrots, stop wagging the stick.
“Work’s legitimation crisis”
“Something has gone wrong with work”, declares Erik Baker in this fascinating Harper’s piece.
At a time where we’re thinking more deeply and strategically about how to motivate our talent base, Erik explores an imperceptible mindset shift among the workforce in the wake of economic hardship, a gruelling pandemic and the “creeping sense of social rot”.
Erik traces the journey from the much-discussed Great Resignation to ‘quiet quitting’, but finds that neither fully explains what we’re witnessing.
“Something slipperier is at hand: an inchoate sense of disillusionment.”
“On the whole, people are still working without vocal protest. But something isn’t right. People are still showing up – and yet work has become somehow alien. It acts on us, not through us. It is a nuisance.”
Erik outlines the malaise that occurs when work is divorced from meaning, where work loses any sense of being “conscious, creative participators”.
The pandemic, Erik writes, “forced a wide swath of the workforce to confront, in a particularly visceral fashion, the fact that their work was “non-essential””.
“Our culture has scripts about what makes work worthwhile, not just necessary; not a burden to be endured but an important component of a flourishing life. And increasingly these scripts do not play out as written.”
In the annals of Intrro history we have written before about the importance of brand storytelling, and thinking about your EVP. In a world of upheaval and uncertainty, there are clearly lessons to be learned in how we create meaningful connections and shared goals in our workplaces.
“HR often sucks. Here’s how it could be better”?
If all that despondency and despair makes you want to Quietly Quit, you may be perked up by Pavithra Mohan’s Fast Company article on what “a more progressive HR practice” might look like.
The goal, writes Pavithra, is to “build and sustain an HR operation that not only centres employees, but also strives to gain their trust”.
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Part of the solution lies in embracing internal and external transparency to create a “deeper partnership between top leaders and the HR team”.
And Pavithra offers some thoughts on what progress looks like in practice:
Speaking of Ethena, earlier in the year we had the pleasure of interviewing Melanie Naranjo, VP of People at Ethena, for our Scaling Stories podcast.
And just to follow up on this theme of recruiting teams sucking, here’s Jordan Mazer’s spicy take on how to hire more effectively. “Most teams and leaders suck at hiring,” Jordan tweets. “But they don’t have to.”
“Give more feedback – others want it more than you think”
In a world where TA may take on wider responsibilities, there may be lessons to learn from this Behavioral Scientist piece by Nicole Abi-Esber and Juliana Schroeder, which extols the benefits of giving constructive feedback, while exploring why this is so rare.
“In almost every situation, we found that people underestimated others’ desire for feedback,” the authors explain regarding their study. “And the more consequential the situation, the more people underestimated the desire for feedback.”
Beware false prophets
It’s easy to think that each new trend is going to be bigger than The Beatles, but there is also something to be said for sticking to sound recruiting principles, rather than blowing like a weathervane with each new passing fad. Just like NFTs and crypto, let’s remind ourselves that the Metaverse was once billed as the Next Big Thing until… it wasn’t.
In a world where everyone’s an expert, it’s easier than ever to go barking up the wrong tree.
Basically, in a world of airborne viruses and robots planning their revenge, if anyone tells you what the future holds, take it with a pinch of salt.
Has ‘return to the office’ peaked?
Similarly, much was made of the great Return to the Office, with some commentators anticipating a world where hordes of commuters would gratefully crowd upon train carriages and lick their lips for that Pret A Manger crayfish salad. But as Stanford Economics Professor Nick Bloom points out, it’s not quite worked out that way.
It goes to show that bosses should be properly aligned with their employees’ expectations before declaring WFH to be ‘over’. Either way, we better buckle up for a bump ride, especially as VC David Sacks suggests that commercial real estate is looking distinctly bubbly.
Things you might have missed
Intrro world tour: come dine with us
In May we’ll be reducing our Hiring Highlights newsletter from “every damn week” to “every other week”. That’s because we’ll be busy beavers attending various TA and HR conferences in real life (remember that?).
The Intrro team will be taking in the sights and sounds of San Francisco, New York, London and Berlin. We’ll be hosting dinners in these cities for the talent community where we can share our TA and HR stories, successes, hopes, dreams and challenges over a massive bowl of polenta fritters. Get in touch if you’d like an invite.
We’ll also be exhibiting at the following events, so if you’re attending, come and say hi!?
Recruiting fail
If you’re going to apply for a job as an assassin, firstly – don’t – but also, you might want to check you’ve not agreed to kill someone through a parody account. As per this NPR report, a would-be hitman submitted a job application to a website he believed let people hire assassins for money.
Thanks for reading
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