The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition cuts through the noise in the crowded world of recruitment marketing, employer branding, workforce intelligence, and AI.
Hosted by Graham Thornton, President of Consulting & Growth at Talivity, this podcast brings you unfiltered conversations with industry founders, practitioners, and the occasional contrarian who's actually doing the work – not just selling you on it.
We're not here to hype the next big thing. We're here to help you separate signal from noise, understand what's actually working (and what's just well-marketed), and make smarter, data-backed decisions about your talent strategy.
You'll hear from TA leaders navigating real hiring challenges, founders building solutions worth paying attention to, and experts who see around corners before the rest of us catch up.
Whether you're navigating the AI arms race, trying to figure out your tech stack, or just trying to hire better people faster – this is the podcast for people who care more about ROI than buzzwords.
The Changing State of Talent Acquisition
#57: Employer Branding With Purpose – On Fostering Communal Relationships Across the Talent Lifecycle
This week we welcome Susan LeMotte to the podcast. Before starting exaqueo, Susan held a number of leadership positions in talent acquisition and employer branding, including as an HR consultant for Home Depot, Director of Talent Acquisition at Ritz Carlton, and Senior Director of Global Employer Branding and Marketing at Marriott.
Topics include: the evolution of and current state of employer brand as an industry, reactive employer branding vs. strategic employer branding, why employer brand should “live” under HR instead of marketing, the concept of recruitment marketing as a subset of employer branding activities, transactional vs. communal relationships in marketing, post-hire employer brand touchpoints, the limits of consumer marketing when applied to employer branding, the differences between competition for talent and competition for products and services, how early career and hourly jobs can be more than transactional, the current state of the candidate experience, and why large organizations are sometimes the worst offenders in terms of offering poor candidate experiences
Susan LaMotte
CEO, exaqueo
Welcome to the changing state of talent acquisition, where your hosts, graham Thornton and Martin Kred, share their unfiltered takes on what's happening in the world of talent acquisition today. Each week brings new guests who share their stories on the tools, trends and technologies currently impacting the changing state of talent acquisition. Have feedback or want to join the show? Head on over to changestateio. And now onto this week's episode.
Speaker 2:All right and we are back with another episode of the changing state of talent acquisition podcast. Super excited for our next guest, susan Lamott, ceo and founder of Exactio. Susan, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we're going to start with, I think, a softball question, so we'd love for you to briefly share your career journey today. So what led you to found Exactio, what's your mission and maybe you know, what questions or ideas do you spend most of your time on today?
Speaker 3:So I started my career really at the age of 13, when I lost my first job. I didn't show up for work and I got fired. I was working at the swim club snack bar, and the reason I share that is because, ever since, I've spent my entire career thinking about work, the way we work and how to make work better. I always tell people that I sit at the intersection of where business meets behavior and, at the end of the day, we all have jobs because we are required to work right. Most of us aren't sitting on a pile of money that can fund our lives. If you are, congratulations, but if you're like me, you need to make some money to put some food on your table and a roof over your head, and so that's the nexus of why I do what I do. I started Exactio because, prior to starting the company, I spent the majority of my career in-house, either leading talent acquisition functions, leading employer brand functions or recruiting, and I found that we needed to tell a better story about what it is we want to do as companies when we hire people, how we attract them, how we retain them and what really would make them thrive at our company. So it's not just come work here. It's great, but what is it great for you? And so that's the reason I love working in employer brand.
Speaker 3:Exactio in particular, I founded because when I was at Marriott and running employer brand, I was looking for a particular type of firm to support me and to support my strategy, and I couldn't find exactly what I was looking for. I had a lot of different partners and so I left Marriott to go create the firm I wished that I had when I was in-house that could support me end to end, all the way through from research and deep dive into understanding the depths of my talent in the organization and the kind of talent that I wanted to recruit, but then also all the way through to helping me build strategy, thinking about what my stakeholders and my leaders needed, really understanding my people, but then also getting tactical right, building out the assets that I needed, helping think about the creative strategy and direction, aligning that with my marketing team and my communications teams, and then how do you actually pull that all the way through the entire employment experience. It's a big ask and there was really no firm that did that. So I set out to create Exactio 12 years ago to do just that and that's where we really spend our time now.
Speaker 3:I think there's a lot of firms out there that are agencies and are agents of employer brand and deliver the assets and deliver the technology. Our mission is a bit broader. We're really focused on transforming the employment relationship. We really believe that employment is not a transaction, it's not just a job. We're not trying to sell jobs or just do recruitment marketing. We are here to transform employment, the relationship we all have with employment, and at Exactio we do that through insight, through employer brand and through Canada, and then we're going to be working on it at an employee experience.
Speaker 4:Wow, that might be the best intro we've ever had. I don't know. Well, graham and I will chat later. We're thrilled to have you here, susan, and there's so many different ways we can take the conversation. I kind of wanted to double-click on this idea of providing what might be called authentic employee experiences.
Speaker 4:We had a guest on recently and this actually reminded me of something she said, but calling out the difference between treating employer brand as a tactic versus treating employer brand as a strategy, and her eyes was, or is, rather, that a lot of organizations come to employer brand because it's something they think they have to do and they're looking for very tactical outputs.
Speaker 4:We have empty seats that we need to fill right now, and they're not necessarily thinking about it in a very holistic, strategic way for the organization. It's not that we need to trick people into coming to our organization by putting some appealing message out there. That may or may not be true. What you're proposing, I think, is a lot more strategic, and this doesn't have to be a contrived activity. Like what would it actually mean as an organization if we actually cared about each individual employee and wanted to provide them an amazing employment experience, rather than taking this very hands-off approach of what do we need to say to get people in the seats. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that or if you would push back in any way, but we'd love to hear your perspective.
Speaker 3:I think it's a really important conversation right now, particularly as the space of employer brand has grown tremendously. We did an assessment of the differences in our industry between 2011 and 2022. We just wanted to see how it had changed over the past 10, 11 years and what we found was super interesting. In 2011, there was probably you search on LinkedIn. You can do Google searches to see how many people were searching for employer brand jobs a couple hundred In 2022, at the time that we did that search, there were over 16,000 jobs on LinkedIn at the time with employer brand in the title, and the reason I share that is because what happened is we got reactive, we got tactical.
Speaker 3:It was this fear factor of oh shoot, I've got to go out and promote my company. And when we get reactive, we get tactical and we're focused on assets and creative and we've got to be on a social media channel and we've got to make sure we're telling our story without really thinking more broadly about what story it is you want to tell and why do you need to tell a story. Part of strategy is figuring out what do you even want to do and why, and connecting it to the business, and I think that, to me, is what's super interesting is most employer brand professionals that I talk to right now, the majority of them. When you ask what's your employer brand strategy, they go right to tactics, because they've actually never been taught how to do a strategy. Yeah, they are focused particularly on the execution. So I think it's a really important conversation, one I think we need to have over and over again, especially for some of the new folks in the industry, so they can learn and grow.
Speaker 4:Yeah, wow, there's so much there that I agree with you. Know this distinction between, or what you're saying about, as the industry had. The employer brand space has evolved and we've gotten more people who are identifying as professionals in the industry. The industry has kind of responded in a way that I would argue is what's most common in the industry outside of employer branding, which is to be very tactical and kind of reactionary. You know most organizations, most recruiting functions, are kind of constantly putting out fires. I know there are exceptions, but you know it's a very reactive business.
Speaker 4:When I, when I started this business with Graham is my first for a HR or TA, and that was one of the things that surprised me, it is how reactionary it was. But what it sounds like you're also saying is that we're kind of poised for this next chapter that's probably felt long overdue for folks like you and me, susan, which is that you do think that organizations are starting to understand that yes, as a, as an industry, we've been focused on the tactics and those are all important and good and exciting and that's people get excited about those for good reasons. But it really needs to start with strategy. You're starting to see the conversation shift in a big way.
Speaker 3:For sure, and what we're seeing in particular is asking the broader questions. So, rather than asking the tactical question should we be on tiktok or snapchat, right, because that's a tactic People are asking the broader question of should we even be on social media, right? Which is, if you think about the difference between strategy and tactics. Strategy is the action plan. The broader, what is the action plan for our brand as an employer? And then, what are the specific tactics? But most employer brands, as they're built in an organization, your first hire tends to be someone who is hired as an individual contributor, and so they tend to be someone who is assigned to either through job description or because of their experience. Someone is used to being really tactical.
Speaker 3:The other part of it that's super interesting is when we look at talent strategy right now, it is very reactive, right, the whiplash of back and forth we hire, we fire, and so employer brand follows suit. Let's dump money into content creation when we really need to hire. Let's cut the budget and cut the employer brand team when we don't. We had a client that we worked really hard on helping them build their employer brand and their employer brand strategy. The leader launched the employer brand, did a tremendous job, got feedback and kudos at the board level, which is, you know, the best you can hope for, and then that particular leader was laid off two months later and really disappointing to see because, at the end of the day, they're creating more cost for themselves downstream because they're going to have to hire back a team. They just are looking for the short term gain and that goes back to what investors are valuing right now, which is short term game, and we think the easiest way to do that is through talent, which is really disappointing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I think that there's a lot that we're gonna unpack in this episode, so I'm gonna maybe start high level. We can get into a couple more specific. So you know we're talking about the concept of employer brand, it's evolution. One of the sort of perennial debates about employer brand is really where should it live? Should live under each other? Should live in marketing? You know, I think kind of, you know it's kind of set the stage. In some of your public commentary you come down pretty strongly in favor of housing under each other. I wonder, like maybe that's a good place to start to bounce off here. You know, can you make that case like why is employer brand best position under each other? You know, how, can you know, how can they are build effective bridges, you know, with the folks in marketing who may, you know, feel pretty strongly that should believe under them instead?
Speaker 3:First and foremost, regardless of where it lives, you need the good partnerships. I want to make that really clear. Every successful employer brand ever built or been a part of building, whether in house or, you know, with clients here at exactly there's always the recurring theme of strong partnerships between marketing, hr and coms. So that is, you know, that's a given. That being said, absolutely I believe that it should be an HR. I think it's most successful there and that's because at its core and this is so important to repeat over and over again Employer brand is branding and marketing the entirety of the employment experience.
Speaker 3:Recruitment marketing is a small subset of that. But what exactly are you marketing? Your marketing? Employment and employment in and of itself is not a transaction. It is a relationship and it is very different than marketing a product or service. And we have a lot of clients that come to us because they started trying to do an employer brand with a consumer agency and those consumer agencies are incredibly talented and they did an incredible job with that company is consumer or master brand. But when they try to attempt to apply all the same tactics or all the same philosophies to building the employer brand, they often fail or they struggle and that leads the company to come to us.
Speaker 3:Why? Because building an employer brand is different. Creating that relationship is different. Ultimately, you know, if I go and buy a cup of coffee, that coffee is delicious. It's really important that the coffee company build a strong brand relationship with me, so I purchased it Over and over again. Right, all the marketing things we learned in school. But a job is different. A job puts food on my table, puts a roof over my head it might be the difference between feeding my family or not. And we forget that right, as a lot of white collar workers, where we're not paying attention to our bank accounts because we might not, we have or I should say we have the luxury perhaps of not having to worry about Are we going to be able to pay our bills this month. It's a very different type of marketing and it is very core to understanding the human and creating that relationship. So you need marketing, you need the relationship with marketing, you need to build it, you need their expertise, but it has to sit in HR. I firmly believe that.
Speaker 4:Okay, I'm convinced. I mean, and I'm someone who spent his early career and most of his early career in consumer marketing and market research. So you know, if I have a bias going into this it's probably let's keep it with the marketing folks, but I think you make a pretty compelling case. There was a lot you said there that I wanted to kind of zoom in on a bit. One, I think, is just a point that I just want to make sure I'm understanding you if we see it the same way, because I think it's a pretty profound point.
Speaker 4:You're saying, I think, that as it relates to recruiting and just employment of all kinds, the whole talent life cycle, employer brand is really the container that contains recruitment marketing among other functions within the organization. It is sort of the whole big idea, that organizing principle that everything else should ladder up to. And it's odd to think of it that way, I think, in our industry, since employer brand is a relatively new concept in the business world and we've been employing people much longer and doing recruitment marketing much longer than anyone thought about employer brand as a standalone concept. Is that accurate? Is that how you see it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think part of the challenge is when we created the term employer brand and for those people who don't know, it was created in the late 90s. So you're 100 percent right, it's still a relatively new term. When we created it, we were leaning heavily towards talking about it related to recruiting and most people when they think about employer brand, they're thinking about it from the outside in, because when we think about brand right that and you know this from from- your background.
Speaker 3:That term comes from the external, internal relationship of customer to company. But the brand that you create with your employer, with your employees, start externally but then it moves internally and that's another reason it's got to sit with HR to, because you're managing that brand all the way through the employment experience and every single decision you make in HR makes or breaks the brand. That's a huge pet peeve of mine as we spend all this time an employer brand thinking about all of the things we can do to impact the way that we brand and market to candidates and employees in this really big way.
Speaker 3:We don't think about the offline ways. But, for example, when my boss tells me or gives me information that I don't like, that's employer brand, because that's branding my employment experience. When a new program is launched right Like performance management, they launch a new program, I get the email in my inbox about it that's employer brand. When the benefits packets mailed to my house at home, that's employer brand. When I do my exit interview, that's employer brand. All of those things.
Speaker 3:But we don't typically think about all those things and so we're always on a mission to help companies and employers see it's the whole experience, and where the real value often comes isn't in just the sexy creative that gets to go on your career site. That's all important, but where the value comes is the one-on-one conversation that a hiring manager has with a candidate to convince them to accept the offer. And yet we spend almost no money in our employer brand budget on how to train those hiring managers to pull the brand through. That's, to me, where the exciting future is to you of employer brand and the sort of holistic nature of what our industry really is.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's hard to imagine a marketing department managing employee experiences. That's right, that's a good call out.
Speaker 4:And I think we want them involved because, again, I do think in some way the employer brand exists to serve a bigger brand or a more encompassing brand. This is our reason for being an owner. As an organization, we need people who are passionate about delivering on this mission for our customers. So there's an intimate connection there. But, yeah, it's hard to see how it could live really in a holistic way outside of HR. The other thing I would say about that is I think it does near trends that we see in consumer marketing.
Speaker 4:I think consumer marketing 20 years used to be in a much more nascent state. That's, frankly, similar to the story that we've talked about here, with employer brand growing up, where it was very focused on advertising and converting to sales and people didn't necessarily spend a lot of time thinking about the entire customer experience, support experiences, what is the experience after the order is placed, what happens when someone has a problem with the product? And you're seeing, I think, in modern marketing departments thinking of brand much more holistically like that. One of the fun offshoots of that, I think, is why we get an NPS score email every time you open the Comcast or Xfinity app on your phone. It can go too far, but I think that's super encouraging to see both the consumer side of the house and the employer brand side of the house thinking strategically and holistically about these things.
Speaker 3:You bring up a really important point about the inherent relationship between marketing and HR as it relates to the experience that I think is important not to overlook, and that is that even if HR is responsible for the employer brand and I think they should be and even if they're responsible for the employee experience which I think they should be at their core, employee is, no matter the kind of organization B2B2C they still have to deliver on the brand and deliver to customers, clients, end users, whoever that may be, and so marketing still has an incredibly vested interest in making sure the employee experience is a good one, so that they are equipped to deliver on the brand.
Speaker 3:So, for me, the role of, for example, of chief experience officer there's very few of them, and those that exist, it's debatable whether they're actually working, but this idea that there's somebody responsible for unifying marketing in HR, I think is also really intriguing, and seeing how CMOs and CHROs can build really strong relationships together to partner, I think that's really key. One of my most powerful personal career moments was sitting in a boardroom at Marriott where the CMO and the CHRO were discussing where my function could sit and if you get to that point in your employer brand career. In my mind, that's a huge win, not for any ego reason, because it means that you've actually shown them the value of employer brand, that they both see value in your function to their business. That, to me, is gold.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, that is the must have been a surreal experience. I'm sure there's a lot of people listening who maybe have not experienced that yet in their organization. Sadly, I know this is changing, but it does seem like employer brand is often just shuffled off to someone in a random seat that appears to have bandwidth rather than someone who has, and so there are a lot of people with really good intentions that I think just lack the broader view because they haven't been exposed to it. So I think there is an obligation as leaders in the space to just educate people about how to think about these things. Okay, well, I have one more question about this and then I'll shut up and let Graham speak.
Speaker 4:But I really think it was fascinating what you were saying about how consumer marketers don't. Setting aside the very real issues that I would just discuss about, it's about more than just job applicants and getting people hired. It's about the whole talent life cycle. Fair point, but even just focusing on the top of the funnel, if you will, that the part about getting our job advertisements out there and trying to deploy the tactics to use the term from earlier that will get our brand out there the best. You still said that the consumer marketing folks generally some of them are great, they're great at being creative, but they don't necessarily understand some of the nuances behind marketing to employees, and I wonder if you could just say a little bit more about that.
Speaker 4:I mean, one point you made it seems to be that and this is something I thought about too is that there's a fundamental difference between a job and a product or a service that someone's buying Consumer marketers are really used to. There's really skies the limit. Yeah, you may have an inventory problem and a temporary lack of supply, but really you got a marketing machine that's working. You've got a brand, you want to turn the volume up on it and you want to sell as many widgets as you possibly can, and it's just a very different environment.
Speaker 4:In hiring, of course because that's never true we always have a finite supply. It's a revolving door. Some people are leaving, we're trying to add new people, so there's inherently a fundamental difference there in the nature of this marketing activity. We're trying to cultivate a relationship so when the moment is right, we can get the right people in the seats, but we don't have a product, if you will, to offer it all times. Could you say a little bit more about that, and I wonder if there's just any other color that you could add to help us understand the consumer. Marketing folks Maybe just don't fully understand the task before them.
Speaker 3:I think it's so important to differentiate between marketing and marketing a product and marketing employment because of those inherent differences. One of the visuals that I like to use is one that you just touched on, which is this notion of funnel selling to the many versus selling to the few. And I think in the old days of recruiting, I started my career as a recruiter and we used to use terms like post and pray or spray and pray, which is essentially put your jobs out there and you want to attract every single person you can to those jobs and ultimately, I think in many cases that worked and you got a lot of applications. In the early days I'd get them by facts, if you can believe it, I'm dating myself and you'd go through interviews and hire, et cetera. But now we recognize that the job market doesn't work that way anymore. Not everyone thrives at every organization, and so, in the case of a consumer brand, you're going from a small audience to a large audience. When you have a consumer startup, if I'm selling I use the example of coffee I've got a new coffee bean and I want to sell this I'm going to start with a really small audience with the goal of growing it as large as possible. With employer brand, you're starting with a large audience. You want as many people to potentially to be aware of you as an organization as possible, and then you may be recruiting for one role. So it's a completely flipped triangle. And when you're talking about your competition, it's different. So on the consumer side, there's only so many kinds of coffee beans that exist. It's a very narrow, focused competition. But from an employment perspective, if I'm a software developer, there's thousands and thousands and thousands of employers that I could be employed with, and so therein lies our challenge. More broadly, I like to think about it from a social psychology lens.
Speaker 3:Personally, when we think about buying a product, it's what in social psychology they call a transactional relationship, and that is, you are trading for a benefit, for a need. So I go into a coffee shop, I take oat milk in my coffee. Here in Charleston, south Carolina, where I live, there's a great little local coffee shop called Brown Fox. Brown Fox has oat milk. I get my coffee, I know the barista well, I have small talk, I say thank you, I go about my merry way. They take my money, but if I go back tomorrow and they don't have oat milk anymore, there's no harm, no foul, I'm going to say, oh gosh, you know. Best of luck, you guys. I'm sorry that I can't patronize y'all anymore, but I can't. You know, I only take oat milk, so I've got to go to the other shop down the street. It's a transactional relationship. They can't meet my need anymore, so I can't give them my money.
Speaker 3:But when it comes to the other kind of relationship in social psychology, the one we're all used to, when it comes to romantic relationships, familial relationships, that's called a communal relationship.
Speaker 3:That's where you're in a relationship for a series of common goals. So my husband and I we've been married for over 10 years now and we've been together for almost 20. And we're together not because we trade things or it's transactional. We're together because we have a series of life goals, things we're trying to achieve. When he brings me my coffee in the morning, he doesn't get anything out of that. He does it because it makes him happy to see me happy and he knows that that's going to help my day go a little bit easier and that's going to help us get to our goals more effectively together. And so if we treated employment more as a communal relationship, we would be so much more effective as employers. That's the work we've been spending a lot of time on. It's also why employer brand is just not the same as a consumer brand and why we can't market it in the same way.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I really think that is a key, key insight. I certainly thought before about, well, the difference between what you're calling transactional relationships and communal ones, but I hadn't thought about the implications for that in terms of where you should be housed and who should ultimately be holding the reins, and I think that's probably the most compelling story to tell about it. There's just a lot of things that are of interest in what you just said, a couple of them being this idea of yeah, it is a transactional relationship. As someone who spent a lot of time researching all categories of consumer products, one of the most well, here's one of my stories that Graham served before. But there's theories in consumer marketing where they claim that all consumer decisions are based on deeply held values, and some of this similar thinking to what you're saying. So I used to spend time asking consumers about why did you choose this brand of cranberry juice over another brand of cranberry juice, and then pushing them to tell, to reveal these deeply held feelings and values about why they made that decision. You know, why is saving money important to you and what does that say about you as a mother? And you know you're really leading the audience here in those cases.
Speaker 4:So that's just an aside, but those research projects always reminded me of, like, I just don't think it's this deep. You know, I don't think it's always that deep, whereas employment relationships, yeah, I mean it's a spectrum. If you're taking your first job or a summer job as a college student or something like, it is very transactional most likely. But when you start to think about career and this not just being a career, how you spend most of your waking hours in life, but also the way that you support your family, the way you allow your dreams to come become real in some, in some way, I mean it's incredibly profound, or at least can be. And really like what other? What consumer purchases are remotely comparable to that? You know, maybe a home you know like?
Speaker 3:even that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's hard to think of one, yeah you bring up a really interesting point, though, around the early career right, and is that transactional? I think a lot of people also think hourly jobs are often transactional right, like, oh, that you know fast casual restaurant or you know the hospitality housekeeper, like they're just here for the buck. I would argue not, especially when we think about young people. Some of the most compelling roles I ever had and I counted, I think I had 30, some jobs, something crazy, before you know, before I even graduated college and those jobs can be the most compelling because they're teaching you things for the first time. You know when you get. When I got fired for that from that job at 13, I got fired from another job. Now I'm now I'm really painting a picture of what I was like as a teenager, but I got fired from another job when I was 17. You, those are the first time you feel those feelings as a human being and you're still growing right Like young people are, from an emotional perspective, are much more affected sometimes by those things, and I think they can be really traumatic or compelling or they can really shape who you are.
Speaker 3:A lot of what I learned about managers and bosses and coworkers that all happened from those early jobs. This is super interesting. I there's an entrepreneur here who runs a consumer packaged goods company and she's speaking to a bunch of college students who were interested in being entrepreneurs and she asked them all to raise their hand if they had had a part time job yet and almost nobody raised their hand. She couldn't believe it, and part of the reason that she got so frustrated or couldn't believe it I don't want to speak for her was because she she said look, if you guys want to be entrepreneurs, if you want to start your own company, you need to go, experience, work, you need to figure out what kind of worker do you want to be, what kind of boss do you want to be, what kind of company do you want to create? And you can't do that unless you've been in a whole bunch.
Speaker 3:And so I think that, for all of the, we all have successes and failures as entrepreneurs. You both know this. But I think, for all of the failures and bad mistakes that I've made as a leader, some of the good ones that I've made as a leader or an entrepreneur have come from having that, all of that observational time in all of the jobs that I've had in my career to be able to say like, oh yeah, like I want to be a boss like that or I don't. Or I want to run a company like that or I don't, and that's a. That's a big miss right now for a lot of early careerists Is their very first job, is the one they take right out of college, and so a lot of companies are really struggling to because they're getting these people that have no work experience. So that's another interesting challenge we're hearing from leaders as well.
Speaker 2:You know that's funny and I'm still here, by the way, I'm really your two's conversation. But you know, when I came out of college I remember taking a job at Enterprise like like any good student fresh out of college and you know you really do learn how to work and I think that's interesting. I was talking with a friend of mine who manages a team of 800 employees and one of her struggles that we've talked about is like people just learning to work coming into the workforce over the last three or four years, susan and I think so much of that is. Like. You know, covid is kind of.
Speaker 2:This move to remote work has been great in so many ways, but I think there's ongoing challenges trying to figure out for people that are newly in the workforce and have never gone to a team meeting. I'm not saying we need more team meetings, but we can stand up that people are still struggling to learn quite literally what to do. I think that's one of the bigger gaps that's popped up over the last four years. We've just stopped going to the office. We've done a lot more remote work. Again, broad strokes positive, but it's also created a pretty real gap for just early career folks who have never learned what it's like to have a job before 100 percent.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of it is. I'm an older parent so I had my kids a little later in life. A lot of my friends and family members have kids in high school and college. It's helpful for my husband and I because we're again. We get to sit back and watch and learn and see how they're traversing things I'm seeing a lot of. I don't want my kids to work in high school because I need them to be focused on sports or I don't want them to be exhausted. They've got a lot of schoolwork and grades.
Speaker 3:It led to a lot of interesting conversations around. What does that mean for college? Isn't the whole point, then, to go to college and get a job? Shouldn't they be learning how to work? And is that trig test more important than having a part-time job? I don't know.
Speaker 3:I certainly don't have all the answers, but this all, coming back to employer brand, affects how we brand and market. Because do we want to be branding and marketing employment earlier to some of the early careerists and thinking about how we talk about it? Do we want to be trying to offer them jobs right out of high school Because college now has gotten so expensive? That's where strategy comes into play, and it's not just about marketing what is, but it's helping the function become more strategic and thinking about what are these intractable problems that employers are facing? The employer brand professionals. They don't need to just be creative advertisers and marketers. They can actually be part of the solution and say, hey, let's think about how we're part of a conversation with people who are going to potentially be working for our company. How can we be talking to them now, the same way we talk to customers and learn from them? We don't do enough of that. An employer brand Market research is such a passion of mine and so few companies do it. It's so surprising to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I know Marty will want to weigh in on that, but I'm not going to let him yet. Well, we still have a season. I want to talk a little bit more about the can experience, just in general. So taking a step back before people get hired, it'd be remiss if we left this episode without getting your perspective on the can experience. So we read one of your articles in NPR's Marketplace and I'll paraphrase your quote. He said that some of the world's most successful companies are probably some of the worst actors in terms of offering a good candidate experience, just because they never have a problem hiring. So I'm curious how would you describe the current state of candidate experience? Maybe just broadly? Are things getting better?
Speaker 3:The current state of the candidate experience is pretty terrible. If you haven't seen the talent board's latest global candidate experience benchmark research report, definitely take a look. The talent board is part of ERE, which is a global recruiting media company. They have been doing an assessment of the candidate experience for about a decade. We don't have any relationship with them, we just think that they do great work. They've been assessing just this question and there's a couple of really interesting things I noticed in the most recent report. One is the fact that, to your question, nothing has really changed.
Speaker 3:So when I look at the data from, and they measure it by region. So when I look at the data for North America, which they started measuring in 2014, when they measure what they call candidate contentment so who's got a great experience? In 2014, only 24 percent of respondents said they had a great candidate experience. Between 2014 and 2023, that number only jumped as high as 31 percent and as low as 24 percent. So, on average, about 26 percent. It has barely moved. The number was only at its highest 31 percent coming out of COVID in 2020 and 2021.
Speaker 3:No surprise, right? Because the market was hot. People were so excited to get back to work after being out during that time. So that's shocking to me that that's the case. On the flip side, they measure resentment, too, and who's having a poor experience, and you're still seeing people, even in 2023, you're still seeing people 14, 15 percent of people saying I'm having a really poor candidate experience, which is shocking. I mean, just meeting basic expectations with all the technology that we have is still not happening. It shouldn't be surprising to me, but it is. We also see a lot of organizations that still aren't even investing in getting candidate feedback. So that was another really interesting, I think, data point from their study Only a little over 60% of organizations are even getting Canada feedback, which is shocking to me. Imagine marketers just saying we're going to put a product out there and we just we don't care what you think of it, we're just going to sell it, buy it, don't buy it, we don't care.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, yeah, wow. That is surprising to me too, even though I guess it shouldn't be so really interesting, and even more surprising in light of the conversation we were just having about transactional versus communal relationships. I mean, this is a communal relationship. The stakes of this are incredibly high for both parties.
Speaker 4:In the consumer space, people put incredible budgets in meticulous detail behind crafting these end-to-end consumer experiences. How are they going to feel when they land on our website? What happens if they click here? When they give us their email address? This triggers a drip campaign that's tailored at getting to exactly what this person cares about. Then, once the order is placed, we follow up with them and say here's what you should do when it arrives. This is just an elaborate attention to detail is put into curating these very specific consumer experiences for something that is as transactional often as a pack of gum or any other number of trivial CPG products you could think of. Then it's just mind-boggling. While organizations don't find value in providing even, I mean, we're not even in the same ballpark. We can't even get. It doesn't seem like we can even get big organizations to think seriously about investing in that. I just don't understand.
Speaker 3:I mean there's a lot of reasons for that. I think most HR professionals would break it down in so many different ways. Wanting to provide feedback is a tricky one. One of the reasons there is the legal piece and all of the complicated laws. I think there's a lot of organizations that just don't want to get into giving feedback to candidates in terms of saying here's how you did. That's one piece.
Speaker 3:In terms of asking for candidate feedback, that should be just a no-brainer. We should just always be asking for feedback. The challenge is just the how do you do it? For the companies that ask for feedback, they're only going to do it where it's easy. Where do they do it? They tend to do it on a career site. You all know that when you're on the career site, that's not necessarily the best place in the journey to actually ask for feedback, because many times you're not even necessarily a candidate at that point. If you're getting feedback in the journey, you might also be getting it at a time where you've just been given an offer. You might not mentally be prepared to give feedback in a meaningful and unbiased way because you just got an offer. You're like I'm not going to share anything negative or I might be afraid to share something negative Unless you're meaningfully collecting it at every stage, unless you're talking to people who have exited the journey in all different ways. You're collecting it in an unbiased way and then you're doing something with the feedback, it doesn't necessarily matter. I think the challenge is connecting it back.
Speaker 3:This is where strategy comes into play. It's not collecting feedback just for the sake of collecting it. This is why I say I sit at the intersection of where business meets behavior. On the behavior side, I want candidates to feel like their opinion matters. We want to know what they think, just like customers. You want them to feel like their opinion matters. You want them to know you care about them and care what they think and have to say.
Speaker 3:On the business side, we should know that so we can fix the broken stuff, so that we can be more efficient cost-wise and stop spending money on stuff candidates don't like. We can stop spending money on technology that's getting in the way or not working. That should be a no-brainer, but that's the complicated piece Then. I think the last problem is just our tech stacks. Our tech stacks have gotten so overwhelmingly wieldy and complicated, and that's because all the technology we bought promised us that it was going to fix it for us Again, because we thought that was strategy. I'm here to tell you technology while wonderful is not strategy. I'm going to get a t-shirt that says that Technology is not strategy. I'm going to wear that to HR Tech every year.
Speaker 2:Probably get us courted out.
Speaker 4:I don't want to end on a negative note. I suppose it seems like the state of the candidate experience is pretty dire. Are there any reasons to be hopeful? I guess. Maybe can you share any examples of companies that finally got it. After years of neglecting the candidate experience, someone came in and said yes, let's actually treat our employees at least as well as we treat our customers.
Speaker 3:I think, in general, there's a lot of really good things to see. I will say there's a lot of really good technologies that do exist to make it better. There are technologies that are collecting the feedback. That's a start. I think a lot of the bots that exist on career sites now that can answer some of the questions that you have. You're not wondering where to find something. Those are really, really helpful. I think the experience when it comes to interview scheduling from a technology perspective has definitely made candidates' lives easier. For sure, I think that's incredibly helpful. When it comes to experience, then, we're seeing a lot of companies really humanize the experience too, thinking about the personalization of it. As some companies are returning back to the office, what does that look like? When it comes to the interview experience, how are you greeting people? How are you welcoming them into the interview? How are you escorting them through the interview process? How are you making sure that piece is personal? I will tell you one thing that ExactWio does. We just hired two new people for our team. They started last week.
Speaker 3:One of the things we do is we do a turn the table interview Partway through about two-thirds of the way through our hiring journey. We give the candidates that are in the journey at that point in time a chance to interview us. We purposely tell them that the point of the interview is to assess are we a place that they think they can thrive? We ask them to come prepared. We set them up with another employee in the organization. That's not part of the interview process. We say, please come prepared to pepper this person with questions about what it's like to work here. Make sure you know our values. You can say what does this value look like in practice? What's hard, what's easy? What's the reality of working there? What are the challenges of working there? They have a designated conversation to make sure they really understand the culture. That's purposeful. I think the honesty goes a long way in making the experience real.
Speaker 2:I think this has been great. I think this is the logical place to put a pin in this episode, susan. But I'll speak from Marty already and say we've got to figure out a way to get you back for a second episode, because we barely scratched the surface and what we wanted to cover. Let's end with a super easy question when can people find you online?
Speaker 3:Any time that anyone wants to find us. We are online at exactlyocom that's exaqeocom For me personally, please connect with me online at LinkedIn. I spend a lot of time sharing personal stories about work and home. I'm really proud of being not only a female entrepreneur, but also a working mom. I know a lot of folks out there that are working parents struggle with a lot of those challenges, as I do too. I just love talking about how people are managing those things. I'm always looking for advice and guidance. I'm getting ready to enter the tween years with my older daughter, looking forward to any advice that anyone has there and any ideas. We'll gladly take all advice and guidance in and outside of work.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic. We'll link everything in the show notes, of course. Again, Susan, this has been fantastic. Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 3:Thank you both so much. What a pleasure. Thanks, Susan.
Speaker 2:All right, thanks for tuning in. As always, head on over to changestateio or shoot us a note on all of the social media. We'd love to hear from you and we'll check you guys next week.