#22 - How To Build Your HR Tech Stack - Phil Strazzulla
foreign [Music] thank you for joining us uh for this week's episode of the recruitment reality podcast I'm delighted to be joined by one of our partners and Phil from select software reviews um I guess Phil as I always say I'll do you a disservice if I do your introduction so it'd be great to just hear a little bit more about you uh probably a bit about your background because you've got a really interesting route into the kind of HR Tech world and now you've obviously got a very interesting business um that gets to see a quite a sprawling overview of HR Tech and what businesses are looking for so it'd be great to just get a quick intro if that's okay sounds good thanks for having me on look for the conversation uh so yeah I uh have a roundabout route to where I am now I started my career off working in Venture Capital doing early stage software investing at a firm called Bessemer Venture Partners always been a finance nerd been investing since I was 12. um still have the same account open at Fidelity uh wanted to start my own business so I went to business school at Harvard Business School um and while I was there I got really sick one week and couldn't leave the house so I started messing around with programming and and sort of over the next like year or so taught myself how to program um started a small HR Tech sass in the important branding space basically helping companies to tell their story you know what's it like to work at our company sort of thing publish those testimonials get them out there on your career site um and then probably like four years ago I hired somebody to run that business for me as a general manager I had some extra time I really wanted to start another business us and I saw that most companies were struggling with tool selection um you know there's I don't know there's like 600 ats's out there I think literally um there there's over 30 000 HR Tech vendors it's really complicated it's uh a lot of money many times and you can kind of make or break your career sometimes with one of these implementations and so I started a Blog called select software reviews where I just wrote up like hey like you're looking for an ATS like here's what you need to know here are the vendors you should be looking at here's why one's good or bad um and that blog started getting traction and so I I decided to try to turn into a business um and now we are a business and around 100 000 companies a month use our research to figure out what tools to buy um companies all over the world big small uh you name it they're kind of on there looking at how am I going to use AI how am I going to get my next hris video interview software everything in between um and we try to give people the tools they need to get the right price get the ROI get the internal buy-in everything can be successful and then the way our business makes money is advertising so we have some phenomenal partners that we have some sponsored listings on our site we have a newsletter that people sponsor Etc but we keep all the content free and we also keep our editorial team completely separate from our sales team so there's no sort of bias bleeding across we're not writing about companies just because um they pay us or anything like that in fact every single week we basically turn down companies that want to pay us to be on the site that just don't need our editorial standards awesome well I think your point about there being 600 ATS is for the life of me I can't imagine why but there's about 600 new ats's a year uh and it's just the most difficult thing to get right and actually therefore purchasing the right one for your business becomes even more difficult right it's just such a such a strange landscape and I think the um much like a CRM for a sales team you really can lose the faith of your uh the faith of your team if you get the wrong one and like I say it can be properly career defining which is quite scary really it is and I think what's you know it's not even just like these one-off events that are career defining it's like are you good or bad at technology um because if you're bad at it like you're not going to be able to get by that long like you're not you know Gonna Fly under the radar unless you work at like some really terrible business that like doesn't need to grow or something like that but like if you don't know kind of what you're doing just like start learning about it um and and you know start with like small implementations like you know get like a a free trial of the video interview software or um you know Implement some other kind of Point solution and just get some reps in so that you can you know do a great job on your next ATS and that's going to help your business and therefore it's going to help you in your career yeah totally so just to sort of dig into the um career defining side of things uh I'm really interested to get your view on on how you've seen since starting the business the sophistication of uh the sort of talent acquisition manager when it comes to their Tech stack and how that's changed over time I think maybe you know things are starting to evolve where actually it has become like a an absolute core competency whereas not that long ago you could get away with just sort of banging in an ATS I'm interested in your point of view on that it's changed a lot so I started in 2018 and I think that the majority of talent acquisition teams were lost in the woods they were buying you know an ATS because their payroll vendor said hey we have an ATS now like you should use this and you already have a relationship with us and yeah it's like the worst one on the market but you know like just do it and people be like okay sounds good I'll use you know it's better than nothing yeah right exactly and it's easy um and I already do have a contract with you and like you know it a lot of these vendors have really good brand names and it's sort of like you're not going to get fired for buying IBM sort of thing um just everybody's gonna curse your name when they log into the system um you're still going to be there but everybody's gonna hate you um in in the last five years I think that there's a couple factors one is um we've seen more and more people on leadership roles who are like Millennials and grew up with technology and it's just been part of their lives like anybody that you know is part of that generation you're just going to be a lot more fastball with it I think that people in um sort of the other Generations upskilled a ton like a lot of people got like really smart they went to conferences they started using these tools the tools got a lot better um it used to be that like most of these tools really sucked um and it was really the creme de la crown that was like oh this is great and now there's actually a lot of stuff out there that is really well designed it's easy to implement easy to get to Roi it's easy to calculate the ROI um and then I think you're also seeing that there are a lot of people getting into Talent acquisition that came from other parts of the organization that were just more Tech forward and they're taking that expertise to TA um so I saw like a CFO who's the head of people operations at a company and you know that you're the CFO like you're you're using all sorts of Technology uh to run the financial aspects of the business and when you get to Talent acquisition or people operations you're like hey how can we leverage Tech to to do something similar um so those three Trends have definitely led to more and more of these teams becoming really sophisticated which is awesome for us because like we have sort of like the base level content on our site where it's like hey like you know what is an ATS like you're buying your first ATS like what should you look for ETC and that's really important and then we have like okay you want to level up like you want sourcing you want CRM um you want automation here's here's sort of that next level system that you can leverage to grow your organization absolutely and I think that what I've seen is the growth of the sort of talent operations director where you would you know yeah it would just be you're a recruiter just recruit whereas now it's like okay let's be slightly more sophisticated and you know those companies like hello fresh plugging in power bi tools into their ats's to get really powerful data that can actually use effectively and it's just changed so much to actually be you know I don't know why but for many many years recruitment did stay relatively still um and it was just about hiring people and you know hiring managers doing it and just get the job done and it's not really part of my role to actually this is a core function of every business and I think that's only going to grow because regardless of what happens with layoffs and the talent and skill shortage is still going to be there still going to be a challenge over time yeah there's not enough people to do these jobs I think one of the funny things that in the anecdote I went to this sourcing meet up pre-pandemic and it was like 2019 or something and I remember there was this guy that came in it was a room full of Scorchers like 100 people and he was like this famous guy in the sourcing community and like literally for like an hour-long presentation could be summarized as send a second email like if you reach out to a candidate don't just send that first email send a second email and he was yelling through like this Gmail plug-in with Google Sheets and all this stuff and it's like that's sort of like indicative of where the world was maybe for recruiters and Sorcerers like four or five years ago and now it's like you use gem you're using a higher tool seek out like all these like really powerful tools that like or you're using like higher fly where you just upload the rack and then they find all the people and they email them and they just show up on your calendar um so yeah it's changed a ton and I think it's gonna I think this AI Paradigm like obviously it's super hot in the news right now but I think you can believe some of the hype on this stuff um and it's going to change things again where you're gonna have and it's gonna be uncomfortable for people but if you're you know sort of like a a traditional recruiter um you got to start thinking about how can you be more strategic in your organization how do you you know this this telling a position Ops or recruiting Ops sort of role that's looking at you know all the different steps and all the different data points and oh we're losing people because we don't pay enough or we're losing people because our employer brand sucks or we're losing people because we're not following up with them quick enough like those sorts of insights are really impactful and so if I'm a recruiter right now and I'm looking some of the tooling that's coming out that's going to make me more effective how am I going to utilize that extra time I'm going to be more strategic about absolutely the business and that's how I'm going to advance my career exactly and actually rather than just doing the action of recruiting taking the decision of strategy basically like the whole point is that isn't it's no longer Talent acquisition and I did a had a chat with uh Ariana Moon from uh greenhouse and they call it uh Talent planning and acquisition and that's the point now is if you're not planning for the future even if you've got no requisitions right you have to plan for them to come because one day they're going to come back and it's going to be a talent shortage and and if you haven't fixed your employer brand like you talk about you're going to struggle yeah um it's a super it's a super interesting Market at the moment and I think obviously with all of the sort of turmoil I mean it's funny because Willow launched in January 2020 there hasn't been a point in time where there hasn't been some sort of turmoil um in our existence as a business which is just like crazy really yeah um it's the new normal for sure it is it is the new normal and that's why you know getting these getting information and data out is so important um in terms of the technological change across that time what are the biggest trends that you're kind of seeing at the moment or have seen over time in in the shift from a perspective of not just like what's the new hottest technology but also like what's the one that recruiters actually really care about the most and enjoy yeah it's a good question I mean I think obviously your ETS like your core system I think that there's some cool stuff with CRM that's like actually being utilized like d Marie was one of the first companies on the CRM scene and I remember like a friend of mine was the head of ta at a fairly large company and they implemented B Marine like nobody used it um you know it was like just too complicated and like people like didn't get it um and now I feel like those those vendors have sort of figured out like how do we make the UI and the ux like so simple or you know there's all these automations and it just like it gives you super powers um so the vendors getting better is is a thing I think the biggest trend for me right now is um the AI sourcing landscape so um I briefly mentioned this company earlier that I'll mention again called higher fly and basically um what these guys are doing is like they have ai where you upload a job rack and it reads it and it's like oh okay like so you're looking for you know a job engineer with five years experience that lives in these geographies and you're like yeah that's what I'm looking for cool and they're like all right I'm I just found like 50 people um do these do these look decent to you and and you say like yes or no for a few of them and it's like okay let me iterate on this list a little bit and then it's like I'm I'm gonna go email all these people you're like oh thank you so much um and so it emails all these people and it's like hey like you know I'm we're hiring at this company would you would you be interested um and then it puts those people on the calendar if they're interested and so as a recruiter it's almost like what a third-party recruiter does except it's not going to be as good right um by any stretch of the imagination but it's a heck of a lot cheaper uh and then as a recruiter like I can handle like four or five times almost more wrecks at any given time maybe you don't want to tell your boss that um right away um you theoretically could because people are just showing up on your calendar and they're the right people and they're interested uh and it's like that saves you like all your sourcing so like that sort of stuff is really cool and obviously there's like the gems and the seek outs the higher tools and um like Greenhouse bought that company Interstellar like there's a lot of these tools where you can kind of like sequence the right candidates and like Source on LinkedIn and that's still a big thing but I think these automation layers are coming and they're going to be great because they're going to do a bunch of stuff you don't want to do and then you can focus on the stuff you do want to do which is like talking to people like hey like tell me about your story what are you interested in well here's what this role is like what do you think about this this and this okay you'd actually be a great fit um like that's fun versus like you know feeling like 100 people literally in searches yeah right growing on LinkedIn and like you know clicking your Chrome extension and like building this list and like emailing those people and like getting people say hey never email me again and and all this stuff like just have a robot do that I'll be worried if you're doing the uh yeah I'm interested and you're doing the secondary conversation and then they're saying please don't email me again that would be pretty embarrassing yeah and you need a new job um yeah so and what what do you think about the because obviously quite quite a lot of a pushback especially with it AI it's kind of sourcing is just around the potential for sort of algorithm-based bias I.E how how did this how does this bit of software actually go out and Source those individuals and go out and find the right places Etc when you're either speaking with the TA Community or technology and how they intersect like how is how are people overcoming that objection and and do you think the objection is a valid one yet or not I think it's valid so the um there's a couple different anecdotes here one is I think that Apple credit card that came out a few years ago was using some sort of algorithm and like it was like literally giving like men like better balances than like their wives who like it's like the same household income like the same everything right um so like there's bias there there's I don't know if you've seen these like online coding tests so like uh if you're a programmer instead of video interview you get a skills test that's like do this algorithm thing and I talked to one of the founders of one of those businesses a few years ago and he was like notice that like women like weren't doing well on the tests um we didn't know why and then like we realized like oh we don't have any women on the team and they like fix that and then they fix the test and like it was 50 50. um so I think there's always you know the threat of bias I think that most of these sourcing Technologies actually have like you know show me underrepresented filters on there um and so there's you know there's in some uh view of the world like there's a potential for like too much um focus on certain candidates um which is kind of you know bombard them and maybe make it a bad experience for them um especially if you get in like a couple of these systems and you've got a good resume you're probably going to get a lot of emails um but we're it's always going to be a cat and mouse game with this stuff and so it's a it's a really valid question it's one that probably should be continuously asked um because at the end of the day like sometimes I lose sight of this like these HR Technologies are they impact people's careers and they and therefore their lives um because your career your earnings your you know what job you're at is like such a big part of your life and so um it's like oh you know like our system is just a little bit broken but it's like yeah but that impacted like you know 10 people on like a very poignant way absolutely so you gotta who are perfectly good for the job but yeah I didn't get it because of you know whatever and I guess my feared with it and we don't have ai in our system because because of this very point we don't think we don't think we can we can develop it well enough or plug in somebody else's you know AI tool be it Amazon or whatever into Willow that we can guarantee isn't going to have some level of bias in it and because it's such an essential decision in both parties lives because if you haven't got them the most diverse you know the best people in your business you statistically are going to do worse than your competition and equally if you're if you're being discriminated against by a bit of AI and nobody even knows it then you're you know you're livelihood as you say you're not paying your mortgage your rent whatever yeah so I think it can be it can be quite scary to the TA world and I think we have to like say keep talking about it and basically challenging it to make sure that people are holding them their own technology accountable yeah um and looking back and saying okay well we need to check these numbers are they representative Etc um so it's it's a super interesting debate I think the main thing for me like from an AI perspective is if you still can't write a good job description like with chat GPT helping you out and all of this all of the tools that are out there like just you should just give up because it's just crazy like there's so many things to help you do it um so I guess switching goes slightly like obviously you know the whole point of your um your business is to help ta professionals essentially find the right technology if you weren't a website and you were just uh Phil having a chat with somebody what would you what would your advice be to somebody when they start looking for this kind of stuff what would the questions that they should ask themselves and and how should they go about it I'm a big believer that you don't want to waste your time or or anybody else's and so you want to make sure you have internal alignment that the thing you're looking for is actually going to happen so if you're if you're looking at tools that cost 30 000 bucks a year or even if it's something that's three thousand bucks a year like you got to make sure that the money exists and you got to understand what you need to do to get that money um because for different organizations it's different and so you can straight up ask a CFO you can go to other functional leaders say hey you got a new CRM last year how did you do that um so that's kind of Step One um step two I always like to get people's feedback so I would get other people internally to kind of help me that ideas um because a lot of times you're trying to solve for like some big problem which is like we need more sales people um and it's like all right like there's there's 50 different things we could do to get more sales people we could one make sure people don't leave um so that's like compensation thing that's an employee engagement thing um we can too we can Source more aggressively um we can have a better employer brand we can have a better recruiting process like all these different things and so it could be cool to get like the uh hiring managers thoughts on these things that the idea is and then be like all right well we actually need is like just more top of funnel so let's let's look at sourcing tools um go out do your research talk to three or four companies um take really good notes it's hard to remember after the demos like what goes where uh negotiate well and then when you implement follow the advice of your account manager so that you're successful um because they're economically incentivized to make sure that you do a good job um because that's kind of how they're going to make their bonus is whether or not you churn yeah and so they're gonna they're gonna have all the tips and tricks to make sure you're successful and just like follow their advice and you'll you'll do a good job yeah very unlikely that you get crappy advice from a customer success manager so if you if you decide to ignore it that you're on Peril the greatest idea yeah your own Peril indeed and what um where where do you I'm this is just me being intrigued really where do you typically see people come to your website where in their Journey are they like is it initial education just seeing what's out there or are they usually quite informed by the time they get to you it's all over the map um I think many people know they want a piece of software and they're like we know we want video interview software what are the ones out there what are the ones that might be good for our business and how should we think about pricing questions to ask on demos things like that um there are people that just want to like get smarter about HR tax so like they'll sign up for our newsletter they'll read our blog posts and there's more like higher level content like you know what what is a modern applicant tracking system and like what are the kind of features and functionalities it can do um or they might watch like an interview that we've done with a TA leader that goes through how they bought a system or how they do I love what you said about the greenhouse woman um like Talent acquisition and planning like we've got this awesome interview with this guy who talks about that I think he runs a TA for a hospital system and what they do is they actually look at like the their talent competitors and their open jobs and they know that like if the hospital system down the street opens up like four nursing racks like they're gonna lose two people oh wow so like so they're doing all this like data analysis to understand like who's moving into the ecosystem who's moving out um and therefore like how do we have to plan so that 60 days from now we don't lose somebody we're like oh my gosh and it takes us another 60 days yeah that's incredible yeah so um anyways yeah people are kind of you know we're trying to do all things HR Tech and just be useful um so hopefully we are and uh you can also check out other people's HR Tech Stacks you know you want to see like what somebody else is doing that's a similar sized business to yours um what tech they're using how they're using it stuff like that so you can do that on select software you can actually uh go and engage with other people in the community and talk about their Tech stack yeah and we've got a bunch of write-ups on our blog um for people that that just like took the time out to write up like here's all the stuff I'm using um here's how I'm using it and uh it's just very it's interesting because sometimes you don't know what you don't know you know oh absolutely so um like in my business like I would love it if there were like five fills that were like hey I'm running some sort of like Niche media business in like a B2B vertical um you know I'm doing like everything related to like customer success technology and here are the tools that we use and here's the process and here's how we put together content all the stuff and I'd probably be like oh wow I didn't know that yeah absolutely yeah I totally agree I I've um obviously talked about video uh software which is obviously our our bag I'm interested to hear what again like what specifically in that vertical I mean it's you can you could literally get super niche in every single part of HR Tech but within video going super Niche because that's who we are and that's kind of what our listeners are thinking about or whatever what have you seen in the change in there and do you think it's going to become like just a stable part like the telephone interview is now is it is it going to replace that altogether for most roles some roles All Rolls you know no roles what do you think I think it's a huge part of the ecosystem so it's kind of funny like when I was working at Bessemer back in the day this is like 2010 I actually one of the deals I sourced was higher View uh yeah wow back when it was like a million dollar business and it was like the only video and they were like sending webcams to people um and even even back then it was like oh this kind of makes sense like most computers in the future will have a camera we can you can get a lot more data subconsciously from talking to somebody uh face to face and also there's this whole asynchronous video interview thing which like can save a ton of time it can be good for the canned experience like all this stuff and I think it's it took you know it took 10 years in a pandemic for a lot of companies to kind of realize that but now I think most companies would say yeah of course we're going to use video interviews like you just get more out of it and and we're just used to it you know what I mean like um we're just used to being on camera for for zoom and so why would we do something different for the interview process um so it can just be good for both sides of the equation and you could even imagine a future um that has some sort of AI and of course there's like the AI like vetting or whatever but like you know imagine like uh a representative from your company that's like basically machine generated that can have a conversation and answer questions around like compensation and hours and interview process and whatever else like maybe that's like a little bit too like you know futuristic but like you could you could see that happening in the next couple years and be a good experience yeah well I mean what's futuristic these days like uh although it is 2023 and it was 2022 and Back to the Future wasn't it so we're a bit behind on hoverboards but uh maybe interactive uh individual AIS I mean there's Olivia and like uh yeah who is it Paradox yeah Paradox yeah so they're doing stuff like that already I can I can just see it getting next level up and and basically like it's things like actually enhancing the candidate experience using AI I totally believe in like things like rejection emails but making them specific to the things that actually you know as a recruiter you click a couple of buttons that that say what was wrong and then AI generates a an actual meaningful bit of feedback that goes to the candidate yeah as opposed to recruiter just ignores them forever and hopes that when they've got another position available that they'll still speak to them um you just got to get somebody buy-in for that because I I used to be a big feedback guy um but I got too many like like feed like responses to the feedback I guess that were like very negative yeah I just always thought that like people deserve to know um and yeah and so I would write like you know a couple paragraphs like hey here's what I thought blah blah blah um just because that that's what I would want somebody to do for me but a lot of people don't actually want feedback um and if you're a recruiter you probably have this where somebody gets angry and they're like you know well you don't know what you're talking about it's like oh okay thanks cool thanks yeah I took a time out to write a few paragraphs for you but um sounds good have a good yeah career I always start my feedback with uh this is just about this moment in time and it's about my opinion at this time yeah that's whether I'm right or wrong it doesn't matter yeah but actually this is what I saw and make of it what you will that's what I always say and I actually do it now with loom videos yeah um because I find that again like the written version of it you know 50 of emails have read in the wrong tone so if I could give any advice it would be like send an email with with a loom video and if they don't want to watch it because they don't want to hear the feedback then they don't even have to ever know what I said um which is quite quite cool but anyway um so look to round up it's been great to have a chat round up it would be really great too I always I'm sorry to kind of put you on the spot Phil but I always ask for like two or three bits of sort of key advice that you would give to a TA person in the current market I guess you can relate that to you know Finding software you can relate it to uh just the market and you know how to hire at the moment but it'd be good to get your I guess two or three top tips that you would give to somebody right now sure I I think uh the two that I'll relay or maybe related um the first is figure out how to become like sort of superhuman with tooling so you know in a very extreme example think about somebody who's like collecting paper resumes through the mail um versus somebody who's using like a best-in-class tech stack the Best in Class person is is probably like close to 100 times more effective and my guess is that you can be at least two to three x more effective if you had the right tools um and then to get the right tools you have to make the right pitch internally you have to show you've done the research how it's going to translate into your increased progress um so you can get the money from your boss I think the other is that like and this is just like the scary reality of the world we live in everything's changing so fast and the last 10 years things changed a lot the next 10 years they're going to change 10 times faster you got to keep learning you got to keep getting better and you got to keep breaking through the wall of like like I know it's like a lot of brain damage to like learn about new stuff but like you just gotta do it otherwise you're gonna become a little bit Obsolete and a lot of people will will be in that obsolete bucket and so if you're one of the people who like learns about how to leverage all this stuff um become more strategic become more of that like recruiting Ops ta Ops person you're just gonna accelerate your trajectory um and if you're if you're listening to this like you probably want to accelerate your trajectory right like you're you're doing some sort of like professional development um you could be doing a million other things right now and so I would just keep doing the stuff you're doing like learn these tools um and just keep trying to learn as much as possible because the world is changing really really fast yeah absolutely it's like the uh halfing the size of a of a chip every every two years or whatever it is yeah this is yeah exactly but it's the it's it's the the TA Tech Law maybe we could call it the film things speed up at twice the rate every 10 years it's probably true and I think also the the appetite for it is increasing every single year like the the awareness of how much money and time you can save by having a good Tech stack is finally reaching for NTA is finally reaching like the top levels and really you know turning into part of the organization so really great really great advice Phil thank you um thanks so much for coming on what do how do people get in touch with you if they want to connect or speak to somebody in the in the team over there yeah uh well you can always go to select software reviews.com check out our research if you want to connect with me Phil strassula with twozies and two L's on LinkedIn and thanks for having me yeah awesome it's been great thanks Phil [Music]
2023-03-07 22:53
