Breaking the Traditional Recruiting Mold with Steven Rothberg

Speaker 2: 0:03

This is the Rebel HR Podcast, the podcast about all things innovation in the people's space. I'm Kyle Rode. Let's start the show. Welcome back HR Rebels, Extremely excited for the conversation. Today With us we have Stephen Rothberg. He is the founder of College Recruiter and the host of the High Volume Hiring Podcast. Welcome to the show, Stephen, Excited for the conversation.

Speaker 3: 0:30

Hey, kyle, it is awesome to be with you, thank you.

Speaker 2: 0:33

Well, we are pumped to have you With us today. Special guest, patrick Moran. Welcome back to the show.

Speaker 1: 0:39

Oh, I'm ready, let's do this. Let's jump right in. Let's do this, all right.

Speaker 2: 0:44

Well, really excited for this conversation, we're going to be talking about a topic that we have not talked about on this podcast in the last few years. We're going to be talking a little bit about what we would call college recruiting, campus recruiting, early career recruiting. So, stephen, I think my first question for you is what motivated you to found an organization specifically focused on college recruiting?

Speaker 3: 1:09

Oh, total accident. I think most of us that are more than just a few years into our careers, and even a lot of those at the very beginning, should admit that it's one series of accidental decision after another that lead us to where we are. So I founded a micro business, basically myself and a couple of contractors, way back in 1991, I just graduated from grad school, and I apologize in advance at the University of Minnesota sorry, iowa guys and the little micro business. What it basically did was we published campus maps with advertising around the borders. They gave the maps to the schools for free. They gave the maps to the incoming students for free, wanted to broaden the product mix and so added an employment magazine called College Recruiter. And those we gave for free to career service offices at a couple hundred schools around the country. They gave them to their graduating seniors.

Speaker 3: 2:16

And one thing kind of led to another. There was this thing called the Internet. That came along in the mid 90s and so we added a website. First version cost a whopping $3,000. And the idea behind the website is we literally took scissors and a flatbed scanner and took the ads from the magazine, cut them out, laid them on the scanner, uploaded those to the website. So you could go to the website and you could search all the engineering jobs. Or you could search all the jobs in Iowa, but you could not search engineering jobs in Iowa, not exactly high tech, but hey, it was 1996. And the site has certainly grown and evolved over the years. We're now used by about 13 million students in recent grads a year. People primarily programmatic, early career, high volume. Kind of sits at the intersection of all of that.

Speaker 2: 3:20

That's fascinating. It's funny to hear that. But yeah, that's what websites used to be, right. It was like just take this thing, this like thing on paper, put it on the website and let's see. Yeah, I remember that, and so it's funny to think about that. And then fast forward now to what we're talking about. We're talking about generative AI and all these kinds of crazy technologies in the talent acquisition space the systems where you click on a job and then you get 37 job notifications for the rest of your life. It's totally different now, but you've been doing this for over 30 years at College Recruiter, so you've seen so much change over the course of your career there. What are some of those things that just really surprised you now, looking back as to where we are now as opposed to where you started?

Speaker 3: 4:30

Yeah. So the things that really surprised me as I got into the industry into College Recruiting, university Relations, call of what you May was what a high percentage of the recruiting professionals would say that they were data-driven and what a low percentage actually were. But whole field industry until just a few years ago was very, very much based upon guts, gut feel. Where do we think our best candidates are coming from? There was almost no tracking of when we spend $1,000 or $10,000 or $100,000, what kind of return are we actually getting for that? Most organizations would think about it in terms of school by school. Did we hire anybody from that school? And they wouldn't think about well, this school A, it cost us $5,000 to go there, we hired one person. School B cost us $50,000 to go to and we hired two people.

Speaker 3: 5:44

The way that most of those organizations would think of it was that School B was twice as good as School A because they hired two instead of one and they didn't think about it from a cost per hire standpoint.

Speaker 3: 5:55

They definitely didn't think about it from a productivity standpoint If that candidate from School A stayed with you for seven years and the two candidates from School B stayed with you for seven months, which is a better source of hire, and we're still struggling with some of those issues today. But what I do have to say is that in the last four or five years, I do think that most of the TA people that at least that we work with are far more data driven, and they'll say to us at times this was really surprising to us. Whatever, the issue was that we used to be convinced that this was a really good source of candidates for us or this tool was really great, but when we ran the numbers it was horrible. And sometimes that applies to us good or bad, sometimes that applies to other vendors, whatever but they are using data much more effectively to actually make decisions rather than just to justify decisions.

Speaker 2: 6:57

Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 6:59

I heard that story. I'm sure many of us that have been in the campus recruiting college fair space, even just general recruitment advertising. You can think about all of these stories where it's like, yeah, we spent this many thousands of dollars. And there's a lot of stories where, especially earlier in my career, I don't even know if we hired him. We forgot to ask him on the application, where their source was, that they found out about the job. There's some of that, that as a potential too.

Speaker 2: 7:37

One of the things that's interesting is you alluded to this, but there's a lot of inherent and implicit bias as it relates to the institutions that you actually recruit at. A great example that I think about is the leader that came to me one day a number of years ago and said we need to go to Texas Tech. I'm like, well, we've never gone to Texas Tech. Why do we need to go to Texas Tech? Because it's my alma mater, dingo Right. Well, that brand affinity is great. That's wonderful, but does it actually meet our needs? I think that a lot of times we miss that conversation as well. What guidance do you have for us HR professionals? We're sitting there and we're like scratch on our heads a little bit. Well, that's three states away and I don't think anybody wants to relocate to the upper Midwest, but we can.

Speaker 3: 8:33

The best advice that I ever heard from with an example like that. I think it came from Don Carter, who's now a TA leader at Uber. I believe At the time I think she was within to it. What she said is that she would just turn that back on that hiring manager. It's like oh, texas Tech, great. Tell me a little bit about it. What makes you think it's going to be a good source? If she was convinced, fantastic. End of discussion. Thanks for the great idea. If she wasn't convinced, which was probably usually the case, she would say fantastic, and that's going to come out of your budget Perfect and very quickly.

Speaker 3: 9:14

That potentially fantastic source of hire that school went to the let's not bother pile. A lot of you do hear C-suite people putting a lot of pressure on TA to hire people who, in one way or another, are like them. They went to the same school, they belong to the same fraternity, whatever, and I get it. There are some advantages to that, but at the end of the day, if you're going to spend $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 flying halfway across the country to go to a school that your CFO graduated from in 1957, and probably doesn't even have the majors or the kinds of talent who are going to go to your office in Iowa or Montana or Vermont or whatever, then what do you do?

Speaker 2: 10:15

Side note to all you Texas tech red raiders out there. That's just an example. We love you all very much, so don't.

Speaker 3: 10:22

Well, and they're thinking of course we wouldn't want to go anywhere other than in Texas.

Speaker 2: 10:29

Yeah, probably right. If anybody in Texas tech wants to come up to Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, you just give me a call. We got a place in Oklahoma.

Speaker 3: 10:39

And January is a beautiful time of the year. We're welcome you.

Speaker 2: 10:43

If you've ever seen a Hallmark Christmas movie full of snow, that's exactly what it's like.

Speaker 3: 10:50

It's wonder. Or the end of the movie the Shiness, where Jack Dickinson's oh, let me breeze up.

Speaker 2: 10:56

Yeah, that's actually more accurate. You get to plug your car in, though, when it's super cold, so that's kind of a fun Texas thing. Well, we'll quit picking on Texas for a minute. So I think it is fascinating. It's been interesting to see kind of the evolution of recruiting in general become more data-driven, and I also think one of the trends that's been interesting is, I think, about campus recruiting, as it was called when I started is the fact that there's almost been a little bit of a rebrand, where I think a lot of it probably has to do with there's more competition amongst employers for a more scarce candidate pool. But we're really, as opposed to calling it campus recruiting, a lot of us are calling this early career recruiting, and it's more focused on career. So what is your take on that the shift in approach, the shift in terminology into this early career idea?

Speaker 3: 12:03

Yeah. So let me preface what I'm going to say by saying that I'm a very big believer in higher education. So some of the things I'll say might strike some people as being it's like oh well, he just believes that we should all get to sixth grade and drop out and go into the workforce? Probably not. But college, university, whether that's a tech or vocational school, like a certificate, typically a one-year program, a community college some areas of the country call them junior colleges two years, a bachelor's, typically offered by colleges, universities four years, master's, phd, et cetera. I think that higher education is a great thing. The cost of it can be overwhelming and can be a real negative, and what's happened over the last 20 years or so is that there's been a real shift from people being able to afford to go to school, to go to college, to go to university, and a lot of people simply are economically unable to do so. What's also happened is that a lot of jobs really no longer necessitate that. You know, if you were to go back 10 years and look at ads for car salespeople, almost all of them would say that a bachelor's degree is required. That's just stupid. Why do you need a bachelor's degree to be a good salesperson If you've been successfully selling cars for the last 20 years and you want to switch jobs and go over to some other dealer and the dealer says oh sorry, you don't have a bachelor's degree. That's just asinine. So more and more organizations have taken a good look and have said to themselves okay, historically we've recruited salespeople out of four-year programs, but does that mean that we should continue to do so? Just because we are doing something doesn't mean that we should be doing that. And let's really examine this Now. If you're hiring an engineer, guess what? They have to have an engineering degree. If you're going to hire a doctor, they have to have a medical doctor degree. There are certain professions where you have to have that, but sales most jobs in IT simply not the case.

Speaker 3: 14:23

So during the early days of the pandemic with George Floyd, black Lives Matter, a lot of organizations had a look at a lot of their roles and realized what they were doing by requiring bachelors, sometimes even master's degrees, is that they were undermining their diversity efforts. Some of that's race, some of that's gender, but it's also about disabilities, it's about military veterans who, yeah, there's money for college, but most of them don't go. And it's about geographic representation. If everybody that you hire grew up within 20 minutes of your office and you've got a national customer base, you've got a diversity problem. You don't have anybody there who's going to understand the differences between the culture in Northern California versus Southern Florida and that can help with talking to customers, talking to vendors.

Speaker 3: 15:22

So, as more organizations have moved beyond, you have to have a bachelor's degree. Now they're including people with associate's degrees, with boot camps, just high school. I mean, if you're an IT company you want to hire somebody to build an app, wouldn't you rather hire somebody who's 19 and who has built 38 apps herself for kicks and giggles, versus somebody from a computer science program at Stanford who's never built an app? I mean, who's more likely to be that productive employee for you? It's, you know? Sorry, stanford, I love you, but it's not going to be that one, right?

Speaker 1: 16:06

You know, with our candidate pools and it is being so scarce, you look at the requirements and the skills that you're hiring and you're absolutely right. In most cases not all, but most cases that degree, that requirement, that scares people away, they run off. That is a barrier. It is a barrier whether you have mental health issue or affordability issue. That is a barrier in your shut-in-all a big pool of candidates.

Speaker 3: 16:33

Yeah, and there's an argument that I hear from a lot of people in TA that having a university degree or even a two-year associate's degree, that that is a reflection on your willingness to work hard. And we need people in this environment who work hard, who are bright and whatever, and they're using that degree as a proxy. I do think that there's something to be said for that, but that doesn't mean that the opposite is true. If you don't have a college degree, if you don't have a university degree, does that mean that automatically you're not a hard worker? I think that's a triple negative at you. There. There are loads of hard workers who don't have those degrees. The next time you go to a fast-food restaurant and you're being served by somebody who's a part-time worker and she has three part-time jobs don't tell me she's not a hard worker.

Speaker 1: 17:32

I would say to a TA person who has a group of managers and I've experienced this firsthand that community college isn't good enough. We'd rather see something from a state school or a big-name private school. I've seen that before. What's your take on that?

Speaker 3: 17:50

I'd ask where's the data? Show me the data to prove that. If you're hiring into a department of 20, I'm not saying that you should fire all 20 people in the department that have a university degree and are working well, but maybe the next time you're hiring, maybe actually do a scientifically validated assessment to determine whether that person actually has the skills. So, rather than hiring a piece of paper, a degree, hire for skills.

Speaker 1: 18:25

Right, that makes sense. What would you? You know as you look at campus recruiting and Kyle, you have a much more experience than I do in this area because I'm a colleague.

Speaker 3: 18:33

Is that a compliment or is it an insult, Patrick?

Speaker 1: 18:37

Well, kyle has a story about his exit from campus recruiting that I want to hear. When you're looking at going through the normal channels of campus recruiting, are there other ways you can partner with groups within campuses to diversify your pool of candidates that you're not able to reach and maybe aren't connected to the systems you know? Because we go back to systematic issues, you know how do you navigate around that. As an employer who's looking to try to do better.

Speaker 3: 19:03

Yeah. So one thing right off the bat is I really prefer when organizations call their program and then act consistently with that, something along the lines of early careers, and the reason for that is it gets you out of that box of having to think of your recruiting as being school by school. There's nothing wrong with going to schools like literally getting in the car, driving to the school three miles away, or hopping in an airplane and flying three states over. There's nothing wrong with that. But you don't want that to be your exclusive source of talent, unless there's truly a need for people to have certain degrees. I think that university recruiting really came of age after World War II and in a lot of ways, organizations in 2023 are still recruiting the same way they did in 1953. They go to school, they work with career service offices. About 15, 15% of students actually engage with career services, and that's a very low bar. Do they ever step foot in the career service office? Do they ever register to do a webcast or something along those lines? So you're missing 85% of the students right off the bat. If you are going to a school and you're not getting the traffic, you're not getting that engagement.

Speaker 3: 20:36

Understand that there are a ton of other organizations that are doing the same thing. You are, you're going to a career fair, you're signing up for on-campus interviewing. The students probably don't know you. If you've got a really strong brand, you know. If you're Apple, google, wells Fargo, whatever you're going to attract students simply because you're brand the other 99% of organizations out there, they need to stand out. So if you are in, let's say, you're doing a lot of tech recruiting and you're struggling to hire females, then sponsor a girls that code or whatever that student organization is on campus. It will probably cost you a whopping hundreds of dollars a year. I mean it's. You probably spend more on paper clips than you do on buying pizzas, but if you were to buy that girls that code grew a couple of pizzas every other week for their meetings, you will be their new best friend and they will definitely drive candidates to you.

Speaker 3: 21:42

So whining and dining professors is an age old and good source of candidates, cause the professors know who their best students are. They have teaching assistants. They have people who are engaged in class. Work with the professors, work with career services. Go to the career affairs. Advertise your jobs online to hit the 85% of students who aren't going through career services. So it's, you know, in like energy, we've had politicians talk about an all of the above strategy. I think the same is true of early careers. You put all your eggs in one basket. You're probably gonna fail, right.

Speaker 1: 22:23

I mean, that's no different than taking a client out for a drink or dinner, right?

Speaker 3: 22:27

Yeah, yeah, it's an investment in time. For those of us who are on the introverted end of that spectrum, it can be that can be hard, but you can do things that fit with your personality, are authentic to your organization. I talked with folks from Twilio I don't know six, seven, eight years ago, a telecom company, and they literally their campus recruiting program was primarily things like buying pizzas and they totally made them stand out. They didn't have to fly people all around campus trying to get that purple squirrel. They were there on the ground, day in, day out Brilliant.

Speaker 2: 23:15

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And yeah, patrick is making fun of me, I guess, but I wear my badge of honor. My first HR kind of technically like HR function that I participated in was campus recruiting, before I was in an HR job, and it's because I was young and I could talk to anybody, so they put me in front of the booth at one of my first employers and yeah, so that. So.

Speaker 2: 23:44

But totally agree, we would do the things like yeah, let's buy the pizza, let's sponsor the event let's schmooze the professor, Because here's the interesting thing like, professors are measured on how many of their students get employed post graduation right, that's a key performance indicator for an institution of higher ed. So it's their goal to get students employed, and they want to get them employed and a good employer too, right? So, cultivating those relationships, and then I've you know something as simple as volunteering your time to actually just go present at a class or be involved. You know stuff like that. Like that's where the magic happens. You know, some of the best hires I've had have been people that I didn't meet at a career fair. I met, like three years earlier at a campus event and they stopped by my booth and they were like, yeah, three years ago, you, you know, you you came in, you talked to us about, and I'm like I have no idea what that was or when that happened, but great, you know, thumbs up. Here's an application.

Speaker 3: 24:50

Yeah, you, you, just you're. You're, rather than being, you know, a small fish in a big pond, you made yourself a big fish in a small pond. You're in a classroom of you know 20, 30, 40 people and when you go into that, just a tip, you never, unless the professor really explicitly tells you. So you're not going in there to pitch your organization or your roles, right? You do the typical 15 seconds, you know? You know my name is Kyle. This is where I work, blah, blah, blah. Now let me talk to you about how we're using this tech, how we sell to our customers, how our logistics chain works. You know whatever the topic is and you are a subject matter expert who doesn't want to work with experts, right?

Speaker 2: 25:38

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. You know it's it's, it's a perfect segue. So, patrick, you know alluded to this story.

Speaker 2: 25:44

So you know I, when I first started as a, as a, like a campus recruiter, it was all about sell, like sell the company, sell the organization, you know, make it sound beautiful, shiny, glittery, like like best job ever, and, and you know we had great job titles. So it was like you can come be, you know, like an executive, senior leader, of all things amazing. And you know, like a, like a rainbow unicorn, you know, supervisor, whatever, you know, whatever crazy job title. And that was so much of what it was like in the beginning. It was very, very salesy, which I nobody's probably nobody's surprised that I was okay at that.

Speaker 2: 26:24

But what I've realized a couple of years later is like, like, if it was like unrealistic, these people would like be really angry because they would like come into this job, this environment, and be like what the hell did you sell me Like? You mean, I have to like clean, like like customer, you know, vomit off the floor if their kid gets sick. Well, this is awful, I don't want to do this. You told me I'd be like the senior executive, rainbow supervisor, and now now I'm, you know, just this lowly, you know assistant manager. And so I started doing having really realistic job preview conversations like, hey, are you okay with this? Like this can happen. But what actually ended up happening in my argument is we had a better funnel of candidates, people that were actually like like kind of self selecting. Hey, I want to work for this organization and but I got kicked off the team because I was, I was not as polished as they wished. And then I got into manufacturing and then now it's all good.

Speaker 3: 27:22

So it had, so it had nothing to do with the, the, the tequila party, then right, yeah, no, no, I mean yeah, we'll leave that one out, that one we'll talk about that one. Well, that was me on there, okay.

Speaker 2: 27:36

No, that's just the rebel HR parties. After the fact, Patrick.

Speaker 3: 27:40

Patrick's a layer.

Speaker 2: 27:44

No, but I'll kidding aside, I do think you know so much of this is about it's it's about like finding the right connection right, and it's it's it's about like the right funnel of candidates, the right, like approach, the right, you know, just just putting yourself out there in the right in the right ways. And so I'm curious, you know, as as the the environment has changed, the way that we've we've acquired talent has, has, has changed, I would argue. Not up there, there's still a lot of things that really haven't changed much, because it is still about kind of that, that connection. So so what guidance do you have for us that are kind of thinking about this challenge and trying to figure out, okay, you know, how do I, how do I modify our practices and procedures to fit the new world but still retain kind of this, this, this humanity, in the?

Speaker 3: 28:32

process. Yeah, you know, the smartest TA leaders that I know are are always looking for Opportunities where there's a lot of potential upside and very, very little downside. So we were talking a little while ago, I think you mentioned Kyle like recruitment marketing. So if you're having a lot of success using LinkedIn, don't stop using LinkedIn, but do add in another vendor or two with a tiny fraction of that budget to pilot, continually be testing If you're really happy with well for this conversation, early careers, the campuses that you're going to right.

Speaker 3: 29:25

Don't abandon those in September when you're probably going on campus, but instead maybe add in a few other options, whether that's a job board, whether that's some career fair that's done in a different way, where it's in a hotel and then track students from 12 different schools. Whether that's through some consumer marketing channels like the military are so good at, where they have a booth. That's like state hockey tournaments, stuff like that. Sprinkle in those things and measure them. Notice that great saying that you can't manage what you can't measure. I definitely understand that there are things that you cannot measure well, that still exist, but things like your conversion rates how many people do we need to contact in order to generate a hundred applications and then those applications become 10 interviews and those 10 interviews become two hires or whatever your numbers are. If you don't know your numbers for your existing channels then you can't properly evaluate potential new tools or strategies. So you've really got to know your numbers. You've really got to embrace that.

Speaker 3: 30:51

There are definitely TA people out there where math is not their strong suit. They're not good at statistics, they're not good at measuring, and that's okay. That's where you ask for help and that's where you bring in other people. Math is so much more part of the recruitment and retention process than I think most of us really understood 10, 20 years ago. It is just. It bears an amazing similarity to consumer marketing, marketing, products, services, et cetera. It is different because in recruitment you've got a double-sided marketplace. It's not just that somebody says, hey, I want to buy your product. They have to say, hey, I want to buy your job opportunity and you have to also be willing to sell it to them. Yes, you're hired. So it does make it more difficult. But if you don't know your numbers, you've got to know your numbers.

Speaker 1: 31:54

I think you also always need to look at yourself, to continue challenging yourself to do it a little differently. And you bring up measureables, the data, and I like how you've brought that up a few times. Kyle and I recently did a presentation to a university here in Iowa on just ROI and data alone. If you're an HR, you need to know your data and your numbers to tell your story to your C-suite, because they don't speak like we do and I look at somebody like I'll use Kyle for an example because I'm looking at him. Use your network, say hey, kyle, how are you doing it? What are you doing? This is what I'm doing. How are you doing it? You have, you know professional. You know careers are about networking in a lot of ways. And ask your friends, you know, learn from each other, help each other. Yeah, we're competitive in a way, but we also need to be there for each other.

Speaker 2: 32:45

I always say, you know, yeah, to that point like there's three people that every employee needs to make best friends with in their organization Legal, finance and HR. And if you've got your network and you know you've got your person in one of those you're going to be, you're going to be all right, you're going to be just fine.

Speaker 3: 33:06

Well, in a former life and sort of, when I was still in grad school, I worked for Honeywell, which at the time was a Fortune 50. They did a lot of defense work and controls the thermostats in your homes are probably from Honeywell, et cetera and I was in what was called the HR legal department and so we were like almost like a little boutique law firm that supported HR. And boy I can tell you there were a bunch of HR leaders that were really good friends with us because they definitely they wanted their stuff back quickly and hopefully favorably.

Speaker 2: 33:42

Right, strategic. That's what we call that. We call that a strategic point. This has been just a wonderful conversation. I think, some really good takeaways for folks that are involved in this and it's not just you know. This is much broader than recruiting early career professionals. This is you know. A lot of these are just best practices to be thinking about broadly in the context of human resources. I do want to shift gears. I want to go into the Rebel HR flash round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Fire away Question number one where does HR need to rebel?

Speaker 3: 34:17

They need to rebel by embracing, not just tolerating, the use of data driven decisions that the old. We've always done it this way, so we're always going to do it this way, no.

Speaker 2: 34:35

I've never heard that before. Can you write that down for me, all right? Question number two who should we be listening to?

Speaker 3: 34:45

You know, one person that I just can't get enough of is Jim Durbin D-U-R-B-I-N. Jim's. You can find him linked in everywhere else. Just Google the indeed whisperer. Just about every organization uses indeed in one way or another. For a lot of organizations, it's their primary source of hire. Jim knows indeed better than anybody at Indeed knows indeed. So if you want to understand how to get more out of your marketing budget or however you might be using indeed, that's your guy.

Speaker 2: 35:23

Absolutely All right. Last question here A lot of great content. I guarantee you there's a lot more out there that you're producing. So how can our listeners connect with you and reach out and learn more?

Speaker 3: 35:39

You can email me, steven S-T-E-V-E-N at collegerecrudercom, and every couple of weeks I'm a co-host of a podcast called the High Volume Hiring Podcast. You can find it on LinkedIn Just Google it. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 35:56

And we'll have all that information in the show notes. Open up your podcast player, check it out. Steven, thank you so much for joining us today and being so generous with your time. It's really great to make the connection and appreciate all the content you shared today.

Speaker 3: 36:09

Kyle Patrick. It's been awesome and go-go first.

Speaker 1: 36:13

Oh, you had to do that.

Speaker 2: 36:15

Oh, come on, Jeez, we're just going to leave it right there. Thanks, have a great day. All right, that does it for the Rebel HR podcast. Big thank you to our guests. Follow us on Facebook at Rebel HR Podcast, twitter at rebelhrguy, or see our website at rebelhumanresourcescom. The views and opinions expressed by Rebel HR podcast are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any of the organizations that we represent. No animals were harmed during the filming of this podcast. By by by.