Transforming Human Tactics for the Modern Workforce with Adam Gordon

Speaker 1: 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 Rebel HR listeners. We're going to have a fun conversation today. With us we have Adam Gordon. Adam is the co-founder of an organization called Poetry. They are a recruiter and ablement technology platform, so excited to talk a little bit about that. This is an area that we've dabbled in a little bit, but we're going to go deep into recruiting and technology today. Adam, thanks for joining the show.

Speaker 2: 0:40

Hi Kyle, Thanks very much for having me. It's great to know that you understand my accent because you've got a team based over here where I am in Scotland. Hopefully your audience can also understand everything I'm saying.

Speaker 1: 0:52

I can understand you perfectly Well. It's a nice Scottish lilt. It's not an extremely heavy accent so it's pleasing to the ears. It's certainly better than my Midwest Iowa hometown accent. I guess we'll call it that.

Speaker 2: 1:12

Well, one thing that I've noticed is my Scottish accent is quite popular in the Midwest and it's not as popular in Glasgow, Whereas I'm pretty sure that your Midwestern accent is going to be quite popular in Scotland. People appreciate something different, don't they?

Speaker 1: 1:32

Yeah, they do. It's funny. I'm very fortunate that I get to travel around the world and interact with teams internationally. It is kind of funny to be the novelty accent and to try to understand what people hear when they hear you, because obviously nobody thinks they have the accent. Everybody else has the accent. Then to have them compare you to other Americans is funny. It's like well, there's the Southern accent, the Northeast accent, California accent. It's good fun.

Speaker 2: 2:05

Yeah, I mean, to people in Europe an American accent is pretty much an American accent. They don't necessarily notice the differences. But one other interesting thing I've noticed is my accent in New York City. Nobody even notices it because it's just so international, Whereas in Chicago, yeah, I mean, everybody turns their head. Who's that guy?

Speaker 1: 2:32

Yeah, absolutely yeah. If you were in my town town of like $200,000 in the area yeah, people would notice. But at any rate, thank you for spending your evening with us and for the audience to say Adam was gracious enough to do this twice. We tried to do this once, we were in the middle of a great conversation, but our internet connection was just awful. So, adam, thank you for being flexible on scheduling and spending a little bit additional time with us so that we can really capture some of your work?

Speaker 2: 3:05

No, not at all. It's quite an interesting story that I had Starlink put in. My wife had a Starlink dish delivered to our house and it got set up that day and I was expecting it to be brilliant and it took a couple of days. It was pretty choppy for a couple of days but it's definitely a lot better now.

Speaker 1: 3:26

Good, good, good, yeah. Well, you're coming through loud and clear right now, so I appreciate that. So I want to dive into recruiting enablement a little bit. And by way of background, adam has been in recruiting since 1999. He's worked in agency recruitment, marketing, consulting, pricewaterhousecoopers, icims significant background in recruiting. So I'm curious, with your background and your successful career, what motivated you to step outside of the comfort of a big company W2Job and start your organization that's focused specifically on recruiting enablement?

Speaker 2: 4:08

Well, I'm not a great employee, to be honest. I spent my first 10 years working for other organizations and I learned a lot. I treated it like an extended education session. I wasn't hugely, I just I was a mid-level performer. I probably spent a lot of time doing my job, but actually being effective probably 20% of it, so it wasn't really the right thing for me.

Speaker 2: 4:43

In 2009, I set up a talent sourcing business, just finding people on the internet that companies might want to hire Really desktop research was what we did. And then in 2016, what became clear to me was recruitment technology was lacking certain things that sales and marketing technology had been operating successfully for a few years, and so myself and a co-founder, scott McCray, created the world's first marketing automation technology for talent acquisition. It was called Candidate ID and we built that up while learning how to build a tech company in those first few years and we sold that company to Isom's in 2022. But one of the things that has occurred to me is the gap in the market was not just for marketing automation technology. There's a lot of tech in mainstream sales and marketing, in e-com, in customer success, customer services, which we could really benefit from. So my thesis is talent acquisition is very, very similar to mainstream sales and marketing, and yet we have got a completely separate and different type of technology ecosystem. So I'm quite good at coming up with the idea, launching it into the market, getting the first 100 customers telling the story, and so we're really looking to do the same as we did with Candidate ID, which, at this time, is inspired by the concept of sales enablement. So sales enablement is a profession and a technology which supports salespeople with all the right content, assets and calculators and tools and scripts and objection handling, responses and learning that salespeople need from first stage outreach to a cold prospect right through to closing the deal.

Speaker 2: 7:09

And if you work through all of the 50 to 100 steps in a sales process, there's a lot of parallel between those in a recruiting process.

Speaker 2: 7:20

Sure, our technology in recruiting is pretty much all aimed at managing the vacancy, like getting the people managing the vacancy, managing the onboarding, but actually there's a heck of a lot of other things that recruiters do which doesn't get covered by those technologies.

Speaker 2: 7:46

And in the mainstream sales and marketing area, they've done a great job of filling the gaps and there are countless ways that we can take inspiration in HR from sales and marketing and they're ahead.

Speaker 2: 8:04

And the reason that they're ahead is simply because there's a heck of a lot more sales and marketing people than there are HR people in the world. And therefore, if I've got some world leading tech breakthrough and I was trying to put it into HR, the first VC's that I speak to would be looking at whether or not there is a bigger addressable market opportunity. And if it was something applicable to sales and marketing, then they'd probably tell me to go there first. So it's just natural we're a smaller market, so it's natural that we're not going to get the world's leading innovation. But if we can close the gap because some people in recruiting will say the gap's like 10 years, they're 10 years ahead and I'm not sure they're 10 years ahead, but they're years ahead but if we can close the gap, that's really the space that I'm trying to operate in is how do we reduce the delta? Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 9:06

And I think what's interesting is that, like you said, a lot of this technology it's worked in a certain department. They're like, oh yeah, we should use this for recruiting. Oh yeah, I forgot about that, maybe this will work over here, right? As opposed to having this methodical. Well, here's the actual workflow, here's all the tasks that a recruiter actually does and what's the tool to help them with that. And I think one of the things you mentioned really resonated and it's the management of vacancies versus the actual job of recruiting and it's very different.

Speaker 1: 9:48

But so often, I mean the day to day, I started in recruiting in town acquisition and go hire 90 people for the holiday season now, and so much of our job is it's managing the noise. The squeaky wheel gets the grease right. So it's like, oh my gosh, who's the most upset with me right now? What's the hottest job fill? And it's so easy to forget about, just follow the noise and forget about all the other stuff. That's really really critical in making sure that you kind of strategically address the noise proactively, right. And so, as you think about that and as you're starting to dig through this concept of recruiter enablement, what are some of those really kind of key areas where you see the gap, where there's a need there's not really the perfect type of technology and where are you focusing some of your efforts right now to help these recruiters be more successful with the day to day?

Speaker 2: 10:49

Yeah, there's two specific things. So I spent 200 hours earlier this year in 2023 doing focus groups with talent acquisition people and they started off earlier in the year very open. What are the biggest challenges you've got just now that you don't have a solution for? And then, more and more, it got towards this area of enablement how can we augment the capability of our recruiters? And there was two very specific challenges that I wanted to solve within the one solution, and the first is that when I started in recruiting, the only written content that I ever made use of was when I got my pen out and I got an A4, that's not what you call it in the US, I'm not sure what you call it, but I see a paper and I wrote out two or three sentences on this piece of paper every Wednesday and I would send it in a fax to the local newspaper and they would put that advert in the back of the newspaper or for a Friday morning. That's the only time I really wrote anything. Everything else was using my voice.

Speaker 2: 12:14

It was on the telephone or it was in a meeting with somebody, and so that's a long time ago that I started. It was 1999. But of course we started using databases and email very shortly after that. But the way that the job of a recruiter has gone from being primarily using their voice to primarily using written text is very clear. So recruiters typically get hired because they're gregarious and they've got good emotional intelligence, they're good at achieving influence, and they're not normally hired because they're great marketers. So you know, most talent acquisition teams of maybe 10 or more will have people dedicated to recruitment marketing, but what they're not doing normally is putting into the hands of the recruiters. Here's some job advert templates, here's some social media outreach templates, here's some social media post templates, here's templates for colleague stories, here's templates for emails, here's templates for overcoming objections and so, inspired by sales and enablement technology, I think, putting all of the assets that a recruiter needs, all of the marketing assets, whether that's written content or it's visual or another format, putting that into the hands of the recruiters, making it really easy for them to identify the assets they need, that was the first thing that we wanted to do.

Speaker 2: 14:10

As we got a little bit deeper into it, what became clear was beyond this, there's a lot of other things that are not really catered for. So if I'm a recruiter, I have to go to one place to find policies. I have to go to another place to find processes. I have to go to another place to find interview templates. I have to go to another place to find out like a hiring manager intake template, and actually half of these things don't exist. So I'll go and spend time trying to find it and then get to a conclusion, which is we don't actually have it. So the next one is learning on top of that as well.

Speaker 2: 15:00

How do I use the ATX? How do I use the CRM? How do I do assessment? How do I do interviewing? What's our culture all about? What's our EVP all about?

Speaker 2: 15:10

So recruiter learning is typically aimed at the performance activities. How do I do advertising better? How do I do interviewing better? How do I achieve more influence? It's the sort of thing that social talent offers, or you could be linked in learning but actually the nuanced things about our organization, what is the way that we do it? That's often something that was lacking.

Speaker 2: 15:39

And then the final one was to do with tools. Everybody knows what their ATX is, they know what their CRM is, but do they instantly remember the name of that video solution they should be using? Or that competency-based interviewing thing? Or what was that tool again that uncovers email addresses from TikTok profiles we have to use as recruiters, we have to use so many different tools and assets and bits of content and learning and things like that. A lot of the time recruiters aren't given what they need, and when they are, it tends to be very disparate. So it's stressful for a recruiter to go and find all of the stuff that they need, let alone we call it toggle tax. They're constantly toggling from one tab to another tab trying to get their tasks accomplished. So bringing all of that into the one workspace. What we found is, yes, there are some recruitment technologies that do maybe one or two of those things that I've just said, and we would be aiming for a talent acquisition team to replace eight things with our one workspace.

Speaker 2: 17:03

A lot of the time it's no solution. They don't really have any kind of a solution. Sometimes they're doing it on an enterprise system like SharePoint SharePoint for the larger organizations. It's nearly always SharePoint that they are looking to replace because they've tried to do something on there, but it's very static and it's very static. It's not easy to use. Things go out of date really easily. Maybe they're using Notion or Confluence or something like that if they're a smaller organization. But to build out a solution in a Notion or a Confluence for, like, a Boolean string generator or a job advert generator or a social media post generator or something like that, you can't really do it. You could do it if you combined that with chat, gpt or maybe a bunch of other things as well, but it would be cobbled together. So that was a very long answer to your question, I'm sorry. I'm just excited about the whole concept of enablement.

Speaker 1: 18:05

Yeah, no, I think it's, and I'm happy to just let you run because there's so much. I mean, that's the reality. And I think you commented on the toggle tax. I think that's an important concept and I like that you actually named it something, because it's like there's so much out there. And as I look at human resources in general, the idea of HR is pretty simple Fire great people, put them in the right roles, make sure they're performing, keep them all engaged and try not to let them all quit. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 1: 18:40

But within that, in the recruiting space especially, it's one of those areas that's so incredibly dynamic. There's so much change. I mean every new communication tool, every new social media platform, every type of social movement that's occurring, and now employers are expected to have a perspective or a voice on it. Candidates have an expectation that employers are tooled into this right and I have a perspective on it and it's so much. I personally experience the toggle tax where it's like let's see, which platform am I on today? Where am I seeing engagement from people that are reaching out? Is it linked in? Maybe it's not linked in. Is it linked in my applicant tracking system? Maybe it is. Which one of those systems. Can I text candidates from again? Oh, wait a minute. Did I post my EVP on all the locations yet? Oh, didn't we adjust our vision? Isn't that slightly different now? Yeah, I got a new principal. I got to talk to people, you know.

Speaker 1: 19:46

There's all these things, and what I love about the approach here is the problem is essentially similar to a sales problem. Right, it's making sure you're all on message, making sure you're following the right protocols and tools. But a lot of times recruiters are not necessarily schooled in that school of thought. Many of them did not go to school for marketing. Many of them went to school for human resources or general business and they're just like good at a career, fair right or good with people that doesn't necessarily mean they know this. So, giving them a tool and giving them a structure with the right person that does have that gregarious attitude, that's how you win right. That's how you truly go out and connect the right people to the right opportunity. At the end of the day, it's providing that you know that has service right.

Speaker 2: 20:42

What they don't want to be doing is spending time having to think about what am I going to put in this social media post. They don't want to be spending time having to think about, as you said, which system is it I use to actually send out the text messages. They want to be spending as much time as possible with candidates with the candidates who need maybe a bit of convincing, who haven't yet applied, but they want to get, bring them into the process or doing the. You know there's certain tasks that recruiters get pretty well paid for that they're only spending 20% of their time actually doing. Sure, sure.

Speaker 1: 21:31

Yeah, yeah, it's almost like you know, it's like your recruiter really should be your. You know your best communicator interpersonally to a candidate about why they should work there. Yeah, or at a minimum, at least painting the appropriate picture for a candidate to make an informed decision. Right, you know, maybe it's not the right fit for the candidate. That's a better outcome than, you know, forcing a hire. But you need the right funnel, right.

Speaker 1: 22:01

You've got to have the right people talking to the recruiter at the right time and you don't want your recruiter like sifting through 75 emails trying to figure out, oh, who was this person that I talked to? And digging through papers of like interview notes. And I mean, you know, and I'm guilty, it's like, oh shoot, I forgot to, I forgot which. Which. Which person was this? Was this the person that that was the? Like the volleyball player in college, or was this the? Was this the person that was the? You know, the captain of the debate squad and I can't you know, was this the person wearing the blue shirt? You know, it's like like there's so much noise and like anything to help this there is.

Speaker 1: 22:40

You know the appropriate candidate, the conversation, all those sorts of things. It was really critical.

Speaker 2: 22:45

Yeah, there there is and and if, if we can do something, if we can do something to help save recruiters a bit of stress because it's stressful, it really is stressful trying to remember everything and trying to you know, if we can save recruiters a little bit of stress, then that's that's job accomplished. It leads me to an interesting, an interesting question which is around. There's a lot of talk in in talent acquisition about when does a recruit? Is there a recruiterless future? And if there is, when is it? You know, and so that's a. That's that's an interesting point, because the tasks that recruiters needed to do 10 years ago, a lot of those they don't need to do, but they need to do different ones today and you know, in another 10 years it's going to look quite different again. So there's a. There's a pretty interesting subject in there about who needs a human. Who needs a human, which types of jobs need a human recruiters, you know. Input.

Speaker 1: 23:58

Right, yeah, I mean, I think there's, I think that's a. That's a really interesting thought exercise. You know, I, I guarantee you we're going to need recruiters, but but the skill sets are going to be different, right, like, like, like, 10 years ago, we did not need a recruiter to understand the latest and greatest AI and how to leverage that for social media marketing. Right, like that, that was not in the conversation, no, right, but, but now it's like, yeah, how do you, you know, how do you leverage AI? You know that's one of the questions.

Speaker 1: 24:34

Or, or what's your perspective on on HR technology? Right, I think it's broadly, it's a, it's a really big question, you know, in the marketing space as well, right, and then I think that the other question is as a recruiter, how do you actually stand out from the other recruiters? Right, like, what's, what's the, what is the differentiator? Because there's so much noise out there and and a lot of it's like spam and bots and all this other stuff. That, like, I think that authentic human connection is is almost more important now, because there's so many, you know, technology tools and there's also some skepticism related to that in the in the candidate market. So it's going to be really interesting to see where this. You know kind of, yeah, 10 years from now, where, where we're at.

Speaker 2: 25:17

Yeah, I think that in the executive area it's probably not going to be much different, because it's not hugely different today than it was 10 years ago. Right In the like early career space, the kind of graduate, like school leaver space, it's going to be a complete it. Recruiters are not going to be doing the interviewing people and assessing people. It will be a funnel. It'll be all about mark. It'll be marketing at the top of the funnel and then it'll be all about candidate experience through the funnel, designing experiences that bring people through. And then in that middle level area it's got to be to do with, in the mid-level area, the sort of salaries and US terms of 50 to 150, that kind of level which includes most accountants and marketing people and sales people and whatever.

Speaker 2: 26:24

If it's in demand talent like in healthcare and in tech and engineering and in construction, humans will still be needed to achieve the influence. There's still not going to be enough candidates for the demand for those individuals. I don't think Right. So it's all about supply and demand. I think that's the thing that really makes the big impact on how much human work needs done by recruiters. And now in fact, and in the future.

Speaker 1: 26:56

Absolutely yeah, and I think we see that in those microcosm areas where the skilled labor technical talent, it and tech and coding and there's healthcare there's just that scarcity of talent, and so it really is about marketing and convincing and selling your candidates, versus the pools where there's broader talent, which seems to be on far between. I don't know. I'm curious if there's anybody out there that would say it's really easy to hire right now. I don't know, I haven't heard that very frequently.

Speaker 2: 27:34

Yeah, I mean, there's not, I think partially the brand of the job itself. If it's a job that everybody wants to do, then which there's not very many of those if there's a job that everybody wants to do, then you've got a big advantage. And the other way that you've got a big advantage is if your employer brand is highly desirable, sure, and there's not many organizations that are like that. I think. If you're in tech, the Apple's and maybe Amazon's and Google's and Facebook's, for example. If you're coming out of some top level university, then McKinsey and Goldman.

Speaker 2: 28:19

Sachs those types are going to be particularly desirable, nuanced in the legal world there's top tier firms and in the accounting world there's the big four. But yeah, for most organizations they don't have the luxury of being inundated with the exact right people for all the jobs that they've got.

Speaker 1: 28:43

Right, and I think the other thing maybe that maybe the final thing we talk about the recruiter enablement piece as well is so much of this because you're competing, you get so many employers, it is about making sure you are not missing a step, that you've got this, that you're checking every single box in that process and making sure that you're keeping the candidates warm, that you're checking all the boxes on what the skills need to be, you've got the right message out there in the market and, ultimately, that you're doing this in a really, really efficient manner. So sometimes that just being simply the quickest and most efficient and speediest in the process can land you more candidates, because it was the first offer they got and they took it and they joined you. So that enablement thing both from reducing stress and being effective but also being more efficient is such a critical piece as well.

Speaker 2: 29:43

I agree. There's two solutions that we are offering within our recruiter enablement platform, which are they were not among the first that we created, but they are among the most popular, and one of them is we call it crib sheets, which is not a great name for it. I think we're going to change the name of that solution, but it's basically what's your script, what's your elevator pitch? Yeah, yeah. And there's like companies are adding in their elevator pitch for go-to-market people, elevator pitch for tech people, elevator pitch for product people, whatever it is, and it's a 30 seconds of. Here's why I'm contacting you, here's why you should listen, here's why we should have this conversation and why you should agree to talking to me about this opportunity.

Speaker 2: 30:38

And then the other one that's also popular is the objection handling. My company sells, makes alcohol products and not everybody likes that. What's a good way to respond to that? My company, our company's brand, is far less known than the competition. How do we overcome that? Those types of things, and it's really great what we're seeing is is getting at recruiters team meetings, they're actually ending up having time to like focus on, as a team, what is the best, most convincing way to overcome that objection. So you know, if you can fine tune all of the touch points, then that'll help you to go faster. It'll help you to bring more people through the funnel, right, right.

Speaker 1: 31:30

Absolutely, and make sure you know. I think the other, maybe the most important thing is you're also getting them. You know you're getting them the information that they need to make a good decision so that it can be the right fit, right Like you know it's. It's not just about you know butts and seats right, it's about the right butts and seats. And if you've got, if you've got everybody you know really saying the same thing, saying the accurate thing as it relates to your organization, you're going to have better outcomes in your recruiting as well. So you know, there's so many reasons why it's so important. With that being said, we are coming towards the end of our time together and I'm fascinated to hear your responses and your perspective on the flash round. Are you ready to go? Yes, all right, let's go. Question number one where does HR need to rebel?

Speaker 2: 32:20

HR needs to ignore what it's done in the past and entirely remove all confines of of. This is the way we've done it. This is the way we do it because a lot of what it is doing today was set up in the 1990s. Yeah, and you know, I'm not I'm not suggesting hallucinogenic narcotics here, but opening, opening up your mind to every possibility is a great thing to do, and I would encourage, I would encourage doing a cross functional workshop with the head of engineering and the head of finance and the head of marketing and going okay, this is how we're doing everything. How would you deal with all of this and what would you? What would you do?

Speaker 2: 33:17

I really enjoy tech technical companies. I think that they do HR and talent acquisition really, really well because they're very inspired by engineering thinking yeah and so, yeah, I mean I. I think there's so much room. I don't want to say that HR is doing a bad job, but we've got to acknowledge that HR is a modern discipline. Yeah, it's not. It's not an old thing like accounting or engineering. It's a. You know it's a. It's a pretty newborn discipline and certainly the area that I know best, talent acquisition is very newborn discipline. It's like most companies haven't had TA people for more than 10 years, right? So yeah, I mean like take inspiration for look, sit up and look out, look outside and take inspiration from other areas.

Speaker 1: 34:16

I love it. I love it. I totally agree. You know, and I think I mean you're really preaching the choir here, but you know, so much of the things that we call quote best practices are, I mean, the 90s, like saying that they were like developed in the 90s. That's probably a little bit, a little bit new school for some of the tools that we use. Right, like, like you know something as simple as, like, performance evaluations and performance reviews scores, and you know the scales that so many of us use, like some of this stuff goes back to like the 60s and 70s and it's like you know we are not. This is not the environment that we're operating anymore. This is not what our employees need to thrive anymore, but but it's what we know and and it's like getting out of this like the comfort of what we, what we know and understand, and and asking the question what actually works right and and what, what do our teams need?

Speaker 2: 35:11

So, yeah, it's an interesting paradox, isn't it? Because we're using HR as a relatively modern sort of business discipline. However, we remain using tools that were, that were created long before HR by probably old fashioned psychology thinking.

Speaker 1: 35:32

Right, right, exactly Like, like you know just. Yeah, look at the world of psychology and then ask yourself, okay, which which school of psychology did this tool come from? And I can almost guarantee you that school of psychology is probably no longer like considered relevant anymore. Right, like you know just, the research on psychology and the brain is like like we we're just barely scratching the surface, right, and?

Speaker 1: 35:58

a lot of our assumptions of what we think we know about human behavior has been deep bonked over the last number of years. You know, we could. We could, you know, have a whole nother 16 podcast series about that, but but but the reality is, you know, we've got to be open minded to this, and I do. I would agree that there are some technological tools out there and there's, there's some, some really simple things that we can do that will actually save us a hell of a lot of time on the administrative side of things and help our employees more. Yeah, so couldn't agree more, all right. Question number two who should we be listening to?

Speaker 2: 36:33

Who should we be listening to? Anybody that is an expert around design thinking and anybody that is an expert around experience design. So there are so many disconnected experiences in talent acquisition in particular, like, in fact, in HR in general. So I'm going to give you a talent acquisition example, then a more general kind of HR example. I'm going to chunk it up so I could go onto a company's career site and it looks brilliant. And then I click through to apply. I'm like this looks amazing company to work for. And then I clicked through to apply and I'm suddenly on work day and it's going to take me 30 minutes to register. Right, this is a very disconnected experience and somebody has to go in and stop that from happening. It's just wrong because you are messing up your supply chain, you're messing up your talent funnel, yep. So you can't, you can't. There's no point in having a great career site if you've got a shitty application experience. Yep, you know. So that's that's. That's one example, but chunking it up a little bit.

Speaker 2: 37:57

I personally believe that employee the, an organization's employer brand, should be the absolute, apart from keeping the company legal. For the chief people officer, the employer brand should be up there at the top of the apex as like top, equal priority alongside, alongside. You know HR alone. You know HR laws around keeping keeping the company legal, because, and everything from the way that we hire our people to the way that we train them, to the way that we apply internal mobility, to the way that, you know, we augment our culture, all of all of this, every single, to the way we people get paid, every aspect of this links to the employer brand and I think it's, I think it's deep prioritized because often it's maybe an individual contributor who is responsible for that reporting into a talent acquisition manager, who reports into a head of talent, who reports into a chief people officer. So you know, the whole thing is buried far too low inside the HR organization. But aligned with that, there is often somebody or a small team which is responsible for employee engagement and they have not got the same line management, they don't sit in the same team as the people who do employer branding.

Speaker 2: 39:30

That to me, is utter madness, like this should be one completely joined up discipline, and it's not. So there's something about design thinking and that there's something about the experience design from the first time somebody finds out about your organization, you know, discovers your organization through to the day that they retire and they're no longer working for you anymore. They're an alumnus. You know that should be a completely connected journey all the way through that. More specifically, right, who should we be listening to? I listen a lot to. I listen to I mean, I'm in tech and I listen to the product led podcast and I listen to Saster SW A S T R. They are for people in tech. However, I believe it is rammed with learnings that everybody could benefit from. So again, sorry, that was a long, long answer. There's meant to be a quick fire round, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 40:42

It's good, it's good. Yeah, it's so much important content there and I couldn't agree more. And I think you know this thought of employee experience is such a critical thing and I've been talking about this over the last few years that it's kind of it's almost like considered new school, but it's so incredibly critical. And then taking, you know, broadening our perspective again, going back to kind of what we were talking about earlier, like we've got to be thinking way outside of the HR kind of tunnel, right, like there's there's so many disciplines outside of our, our, our function that make perfect sense to import, right and listen, to learn until, like, design thinking, you know the do. You know continuous improvement, you know engineering, process, process mapping, that's the UX on your website, that's the can't.

Speaker 1: 41:32

Yeah, like, if you don't have a one side note, if you don't have a one click, apply that. That does not require somebody to re enter all of the stuff they just entered, you know, on their on their resume. Like, guess what? There's technology for that. You can take all the stuff on the resume, put it in an OB in there and you'll have all the information you need without making them sit there for 30 minutes. But if you don't have that, you're like I'm sorry, nobody wants to sit there for an hour, fill out application and then hope that they call that. You call back right, like, come on, exactly Good to be more, all right. Last question, just wonderful discussion here. How can our, our listeners, learn more about your organization, connect with you and and get into the recruiter enablement mindset?

Speaker 2: 42:18

Couple of things If you look up recruiter enablement on YouTube, you'll find a channel there where I've recorded over 140 interviews in the last seven months with people about the subject people from all angles of talent acquisition and HR and I'm on LinkedIn. I'm easy to find Adam Gordon poetry. And the third thing is if you go to poetry HRcom, you can sign up there for your free recruiter enablement workspace admin account. Every organization gets one free login for our platform. The real benefit is the network effect where everybody is in the platform, using it and benefiting from each other. But setting up like registering for that free admin account, if you're only a small team of one person, then it's free for you forever.

Speaker 2: 43:13

And if you want to, if you're a bigger team, then you can send somebody in to scout out the environment and determine, like, how you would be using. There's a lot of, there's a lot of solutions in there. It's 28 inbuilt solutions. So you're not going to start with all of those. You're going to start with maybe six or something and then roll them out. You know on a schedule, but that would be the three best ways to connect with me.

Speaker 1: 43:37

Awesome, and we will have all that information in the show notes. Open up your podcast player. Click in. Adam, thank you so much for joining us and for sharing some of your knowledge and expertise with our listeners. Take care, thanks. It's been a real privilege. Thanks for having me 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 Rebel HR guy, 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.