Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Okay, everybody, Today I'm excited to dive into the world of talent acquisition with one of the leaders in this market. Nathan Parrott from Raidency is here. Nathan, why don't you tell us about your role in the company and about Raidency and what you guys do and then we're going to dive into all sorts of interesting topics.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Thanks, Josh. I'm really excited to be here. Thanks for having me on. Raidency is a global leader in talent acquisition software.
We partner with employers to simplify hiring and improve outcomes using connected AI driven platform. And that platform is the Regency Talent Acquisition cloud, which brings together every major hiring channel from programmatic advertising, tech solutions and sourcing via CRM, employee referrals, hiring events, all the way through to screening and scheduling capability which is embedded in the recruiters and hiring managers natural workspaces, which is the ATS and Microsoft Teams. And all of that's powered by our real time data and intelligent automation. My role in all of this is working in our strategy and insights team, bringing our proprietary research and insights and third party research very much like what you produce and any emerging trends and taking that to our customers to help them with their transformation strategies. I also work directly with some of our larger, more complex customers, directly driving their transformation in TA through the strategy, insights and technology and helping shape how we as a partner deliver measurable value and a meaningful impact on the intended business outcomes. I've spent 25 years at the intersection of TA technology, people and strategy. And I guess what gets me out of bed in the morning is working with customers to drive that transformation and build solutions with our tech that makes TA teams more effective and at hiring and more human.
I've been at raidency for 14 and a half years now, and in that time I've seen a huge amount of innovation in our business. But the pace of change and transformation within our customers right now is unprecedented. And it's just getting faster and faster.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Let's talk about that first. So if you go back, you've been doing this maybe longer than me or similar. This particular space is enormously complex. It's very multifaceted. There are many, many tools and technologies, many different hiring practices and different roles that people have different needs for. Where do you think the market is now and what are the current issues that you see in these large organizations compared to when you started?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Well, when I started it was placing ads in newspapers. So that's how long.
[00:02:46] Speaker A: That's right. It was an ad, it was a newspaper business.
[00:02:49] Speaker B: Well, yeah. And you know, even before I started Raidency When I started in the industry, it was a, you know, I was just at the precipice of when Internet recruitment was happening. I even wrote my thesis on it at university as job boards were starting to emerge. And so yeah, it's changed a huge amount. But I think more recently as point solutions have popped up all over the place, delivering solutions to certain challenges and HR tech has had started to emerge, HR teams were buying these technologies and it became a bit of a free for all really. And I think what's happened over the last couple of years, we're certainly hearing this a huge amount now from our customers. And you've written about this yourself, which is this consolidation of technologies in certain parts of the talent value chain. And there are many reasons driving that. There's making sure you have consistent data and that everything's measured in our world. That's initial interaction with a candidate, whether they're actively job seeking or whether they're passive right the way through to the point in which they're hired to be able to then optimize the channels and the sourcing externally as well as internally. And so that consolidation is really key both in terms of driving the data consistency and measurement methodology consistency, but also to drive AI and to make sure that what you're building on and how you're using AI is robust and ethical.
[00:04:19] Speaker A: On this topic of all of the tools. So if I think back of all the years, it seems to me I just was having a flash of memory that when Teleo was around, they tried to buy a bunch of tools and be the platform. Remember that?
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it was minds that.
[00:04:33] Speaker A: This concession thing has happened before, it never seemed to kind of stick.
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I think what tended to happen there, and you know, that was one of the reasons our very first career site solution in 2007 was spun up, was because the ATSS weren't able to really have their jobs exposed to search engines where candidates were starting to search for jobs. And this was, this was even before the times of some of the bigger job boards now. And so our job at that point was really to get jobs out of the ats, indexed, findable on the web, sponsored on with, you know, search engine ads, and then drive candidates back to a destination that enabled us to tell the employer's story at the level of the job, so that we could not just paste a job posting that was stuck in ATS in, you know, 2,000 words of text or whatever it was, but to make it more dynamic and, and more bring the employer story to Life at that level of the job, whether that's telling the story of the team and the benefits.
[00:05:31] Speaker A: One of your customers I talked to the other day told me that as a result of using Raidency, they were able to eliminate basically shut down a whole bunch of the job postings they were paying for because the system could more optimize the candidate flow. Can you explain what Raidency does?
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So the Raidency talent acquisition cloud is a suite of solutions that helps us optimize every channel that a customer can use to go to market with. And our goal really is to help customers not have to spend any money unless they absolutely have to. And that might be because the talent's difficult to hire or maybe there's an employer brand problem and we need to generate additional awareness. So that part is really around using the programmatic ad tech to sponsor job postings, to leverage search engines within that and use AI to generate lots of different types of ads that that can be a B tested quickly to make sure we're giving the right exposure, making sure that we optimize any job slots that are being used. So they're driving effective conversions, not just volume.
[00:06:34] Speaker A: When you go to a new customer or a large company, do you find that they've tried to do this on their own and they couldn't, or they're not doing it at all, or what is the state of understanding of this optimization?
[00:06:45] Speaker B: It can be quite fragmented and part of the challenge if you're not using a central platform for managing the distribution, the budget control and the optimization, and connecting it to downstream metrics, higher data disposition data, and making sure that there's one central platform that's optimizing that your measurement methodologies can be a little bit all over the place. And the different boards, the different channels will have different perspectives on what a click of view conversion is. And so we normalize that and it helps us helps employers then make sure that there's one source of truth through one platform that's optimizing all the channels. And our programmatic ad tech does that. It optimizes the budget control, the budget intelligence. And it won't just optimize that board or multiple boards, it also taking into account search engines and the display advertising. And essentially the solution has the opportunity to it does today turn the Internet into a job board by using display ads to put the job postings in.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: So you're going to get more targeted, better yield, so higher quality candidates. What do you see as this? One of the problems I hear about all the time is floods and floods of resumes from AI generated job seeking tools.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: It's fascinating, isn't it? And part of our challenge is to make sure that we get the right quality. So it's about optimizing that upstream to quality metrics. And the quality metrics are based on what we, what we have downstream in that disposition data and the higher data and then making sure we flow that back up. So screening is one of the huge.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: So you can help companies cut that big noise.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: Yeah, so we automate screening now. It's quite interesting because I have a perspective on this. We hear quite often from customers that one of their goals is to reduce the volume of applications. But the reality is I'm not sure that's the actual problem that needs solving. I think really what they're asking for is to stop recruiters spending too much time with the wrong type of talent. And actually, in a world where we want to help customers save money, what we want to do is help them build an effective talent pool for future hiring as well as today's hiring. And so actually, volume of applications is not a bad thing as long as you're using AI and screening automation to help control that flow. Help the recruiters and the hiring managers deal with good quality talent. And everybody else goes into the CRM for future pipelining. And then we suggest other roles to that talent that might be right for them based on their screening outcomes, based on the cvs. And then the next time the customer, the employer, has a need, they're going into the CRM. It's quicker to hire. They've got an abundance of talent already there that they've effectively paid for before in some capacity. And it just means that they're not wasting money by spending ad dollars when they don't need to. And that's where the CRM, the hiring events, the employee referrals, tools, they're the other channels that really then start to optimize the whole ecosystem. And that's why it's good to have it in one platform, because it means that our platform can then provide the insights on what's driving quality. And that may or may not be paid advertising. It might be your CRM that's doing that, it might be your employee referrals, it could be that, you know, your alumni hiring is the quickest and best yield because they're going to ramp up quicker. They know the business. And so when we look at those business outcomes of speed to hire, speed to efficacy and productivity, using alumni through the CRM and employee referrals and hiring Events is actually a more effective strategy.
[00:10:11] Speaker A: Really brings that all together. Alumni hiring, referral hiring, programmatic advertising, targeted advertising. It's funny, I think talent acquisition for a while was a little bit like consumer advertising where you sign up for a website and they know you're interested in their, you know, yoga pants or whatever it is and they, even though you don't buy them today, they know you're going to buy them eventually. And then somehow sourcing became a little more important. Everybody thought that these Talent Intelligence SaaS platforms were going to do away with all that. That didn't really happen.
[00:10:40] Speaker B: No. And I think there's, you know, there's an aspect of, of needing to make sure you, you look at your internal talent first. And we do that. We, we plug in the internal talent database into the CRM so that if you, you're looking to hire internally, that's going to be a quicker progression. But at some point somebody needs backfilling and, or you may need to advertise externally anyway to keep the diversity of thought and thinking into the employee talent pool. And so that when it needs to be an external action, then that's when you use the raidency talent acquisition cloud to diversify that hiring. And what channels are going to be most effective is what our platform will tell you based on predictions.
And what we're building next is the ability for that to be agent powered.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: Listen, I've talked to some of your customers. It's amazing what you guys do. So where do you see AI transforming what you do and where do you see AI transforming TA in general?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good question.
I mean there's so many aspects to it, isn't there? But I think AI first and foremost should be thought less of automation and replacing people and more of this sort of assistive orchestration layer, a teammate, if you will, copilot that helps teams move faster and smarter and gives them the intelligence and insights that helps them make those decisions. And we see real impact when AI doesn't just predict or suggest, but actually activates and helps the recruiters go from decision to execution in one place with agents. And the best way to adopt that is a, make sure you've got consistency and consolidation of data and information in your tech stack and then focus on outcomes as well. You know, we, we want to make sure that the experience that we're delivering for the users, recruiters, TA users, hiring managers, but also candidates. And we mustn't forget that, you know, we invest quite a lot of time and in our R and D team researching what candidates, job seekers want, what they need, what they expect from employers, because we're building for them as well. And that, that ultimately then has an impact on the employer brand and the experience that they have. And of course it's got to be. Everything's got to be trustworthy and explainable and compliant because AI without governance isn't, isn't transformation. It's just a huge risk.
[00:13:00] Speaker A: You know, I don't know if I've run my super agent story by you, but let me just run it by you on the podcast. In some ways, I think the idea of an agent came from the idea of an AI assistant. And the concept was we're going to take a person's job and we're going to automate the tasks or the steps that they go through so that that person's job could be more productive. And the analogy I use is the power steering or the power brakes in your car when actually optimizing that person's job isn't really the goal. We're not trying to make the driver a better driver or trying to get the passenger from point A to point B. So maybe that job isn't really a needed job and maybe we should optimize the whole process. Is that what Raidency does? Maybe we should think of you as one of these super agents that. As opposed to a bunch of little agents that automate all sorts of little things, some of which you may not need to do.
[00:13:51] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the super worker is, is the recruiter who's part strategist, part technologist, supported by AI to move faster and make better decisions. And in our world, our TA co pilot is that it's enabling recruiters to, or TA users to tell in natural language, tell the co pilot what they need to achieve. That might be hiring a hundred frontline workers in the next quarter, or it might be building a talent pool for R and D professionals for a hub that's opening next year. And they'll engage with the conversational assistant to essentially construct the, the need and make sure that the agent understands what they're looking for. And then they will, the agent will build the hiring plan. It will tell them how much they will need to spend externally on advertising and what that advertising looks like. It will tell them what they can expect to get from the employee referrals because it will know how many employees there are in that team and how they can build a campaign around that. It will tell them how many people are already existing, the CRM that meet that need, that they can Build the CRM marketing campaign to reach out to those people which will be sequenced to make sure that we, we get the, you know, to your B2C analogy just now to make sure that we nurture people and keep them engaged and push them to conversion. It will build the hiring events strategy whether they're virtual or in person events, frontline workers, it might be a hiring event there and then with the hiring manager it could be in person. And so this, this strategy is built layering in the insights that we have from that customer agencies, network data, market insights and then activating that on their command and going and doing it. And that will also include building content on the career site and it will suggest whether there's content missing and you might say you're missing.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: So this, so this is a copilot for the recruiter and really many of the roles in ta.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's why we sort of, we say TA users because quite honestly the, the lines are blurred these days in different organizations.
A TA or a recruiter or an employer, brand manager or recruitment marketing manager might do similar tasks and the remits might get blurred. So we sort of bucket it under TA users. But any one of those traditional roles could use this to activate a reactive campaign.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: So let's talk about the roles for a minute because people keep asking me this, what do you think the roles are going to look like a year from now? Are we still going to have all those different TA roles or is there going to be one bigger role? Or what's going to happen? Are the recruiters going to do all this strategic stuff themselves?
[00:16:26] Speaker B: I mean I work with a few customers where they have very different setups and I think some of them are on that journey already and are leading the change. I think some of you'll have smaller teams that will maybe operationalize the, the management of these agents and then you, you'll have a cohort of talent partners or who spend time with people. That's their job. You know, they can brief a team and say, look, this is the need. The hiring manager may even do it themselves and say I needed your co pilot.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Useful to a hiring manager.
[00:16:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean ultimately that's where the sort of opportunity is really isn't it is for hiring manager to say I have a need. The agents then talk to the agents and activate what's needed. And what we're trying to do here is increase speed to talent. We are trying to reduce the cost, we're trying to reduce the manual effort that's happening across recruiters. So that they can do what they're good at, which is engaging with good quality talent and convincing them to join the business. And for hiring managers, it's about saving them time and making the experience great. That's why when a hiring manager wants to schedule an interview, it's super seamless, it's done in teams and we, you know, we take down what can be a 10 to 30 minute process for a recruiter, a hiring manager and even a candidate down to zero seconds almost.
[00:17:43] Speaker A: I think I know the answer to this, but I'd rather hear you explain it. Given that everybody has a different set of infrastructure tool set, your copilot based integrated platform, does it accommodate. I don't have your scheduling system, I have somebody else's scheduling system. I don't have your cm, I have somebody else's CRM. Is this all or nothing or do you interoperate? How do you guys.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Today we will be building it for our platform. It uses our data set.
If, if we look at the future of we, of course we want customers to use one platform and there's a benefit from that, but you have to be realistic as well. And not every organization is built the same way. Some will be using different tech stacks. And I think the opportunity in the future is for agents. They have to be interoperable at some point. I think, I think we're going to be a few years away from that. As a, as a TA tech cohort across the globe, all the partners you see at some of the conferences, everyone's saying the same thing at the moment. But the reality is no, you know.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Maybe because I know the space pretty well, I don't think everybody is saying the same thing. I think a lot of the technology centric providers are trying to dazzle people's excitement with a feature tool that's more like a feature of talent acquisition than an actual solution. You know, whether it be an AI avatar interviewing agent or some other tool like that, I think the problem companies are going to have is 20 tools, 15, 8, 10 vendors trying to connect it up to their ATS and their HCM. It's just a mess.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And very, we've had a very purposeful strategy around where we, we sit in the ecosystem and how we're building around organizations that do that already.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: Do you think the number of recruiters in the world is going to go down as a result of platforms like yours?
[00:19:30] Speaker B: I hope, I hope what it does is it, it releases them to be able to do what they're hired to do, which is not admin, but focus on having good, meaningful conversations. And you know, I heard it the other day, I can't remember where I heard it. It was probably on LinkedIn or a webinar or something. But recruiters, they love their job, but they hate the day to day, they hate the admin, they hate the multiple systems. And so our job is, is not to give them another tool to use, but to give them the, the features they need to do the job effectively in the environment where they work already, whether that's the ats, whether it's teams, and ultimately that's where, you know, we see the efficacy coming from fewer tools, consolidation of tech stack, consolidation of data, reduced costs because you're using fewer vendors and increased output, increased results. And we're hearing that not just from customers, but the organizations we talk to, the networks that we have. It seems to be a trend that there's this consolidation play happening now. And that fits nicely for where we.
[00:20:28] Speaker A: What have you learned? So, so you guys have been doing this for a long time and you've built this entire platform with a copilot to handle multiple use, many use cases actually. But SAP just acquired smart recruiters Workday just acquired Paradox and hired Score. You know, Oracle's probably going to hire, keep acquiring companies they don't run out of money from building data centers. We'll see how they go, how that goes. What have you learned in your business about growing through integration of multiple technologies that you don't think these other companies will suddenly do? Because what I've seen as an analyst is one of the vendor reactions to the proliferation of the market is you do a bunch of acquisitions and then you change your PowerPoints and everybody thinks you're an integrated solution. And then you take the next 10 years trying to build the integrated solution, but you've managed to do it.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Yeah, we've purposefully built around the big core hcms and their offerings because, you know, we don't want to get into HCM ATS space. That's not our, our goal. But what we want to do is augment TA teams to be able to effectively attract and source and engage externally to hire and you know, those tools can be used internally as well. But you know, the integration's key and making sure that you and I'm talking to customers here, you know, making sure they do their due diligence around the integrations, that they've integrated with their existing core hcms first and that everything plays nicely together. So yeah, it's, it definitely is something that I think organizations paying more attention to.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Maybe the way I see it is because you've been focused on this complex TA topic for so long. It's not just a category of software to you, it's delivering the right experience to solve the problem.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And I think again, purposefully, we don't just provide the technology for customers to get in the car and drive it themselves. We help them with strategy and we help them with the transformation and we give them solutions that are beyond the technology. And I think that's probably one of our differentiators out there. If you, if you look at the size of our platform, it's also about helping customers use it effectively. And that's quite honestly why some technologies fail within organizations because there's no change management, there's no strategy support. And for some teams they're, you know, then they're new to this world and it's important that we, we do that and we bring that, that mind and that thinking that we've got with our heritage and what's in our DNA from a business that, you know, has grown up through those generations of change in recruitment and applying that consumer B2C in a digital marketing mindset and making sure that we, we support them through that. And it worked. You know, it's, it's something that you.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Have very successful customers and so clearly you've been delivering that. Let me ask you one more question that's kind of a forward looking question. Imagine you're talking to a chro and the chro clearly has a talent acquisition function running and is probably unhappy with pieces of it and frustrated with pieces of it and happy with some parts and not others. And the they have been told by the CEO or the cfo, it's time for you to transform HR with AI. I want you guys to integrate all this stuff and automate away everything you possibly can and give me a plan for the next three years. What would you advise that person in the sales process to think about before they rush around and hire a bunch of consultants or us or somebody else? Since you've been doing it for a long time, I want to. How do you advise people to be successful? Because this coming, the amount of transformation that's going to go on now is just going to be massive.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: Yeah, I think they've got to focus on the outcomes. They've got to make sure they keep people at the center of it. And I know AI can drive efficiencies and gains, but there are still people that are needed and the roles might change. And evolve or new roles might be created to help manage the AI and to, you know, QA it and whatever, whatever the AI is being used to do. But you still need people, you still need good people and there are certain skills and activities and we have to think of AI as that enabler to unlock the people, not just replace them. I don't believe that that's the future now depends on how much weight the chro has in building a business case to put that forward. But we help with that as well, you know, whatever that might be. So it's a difficult world out there and I think there's a lot of pressure from focus on the outcomes, not.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: On the cost reduction or the headcount reduction.
[00:25:03] Speaker B: Absolutely, yeah. And if you focus on the outcomes and focus on solving problems and identifying what those problems are, because a lot of time the problems in inverted commas are actually solutions that people want to put in rather than focusing on, well, actually, what are we trying to solve here? You know, and even that first time of saying, well, like the case earlier, I want to reduce the amount of applications I'm getting, that's not really the problem. The problem is you don't have enough humans to process the amount of applications that come through or you're, you've got a quality problem. You're getting too many irrelevant applications. So the problem actually is how do we move something upstream that uses AI, that uses automation, that enables us to test for.
[00:25:44] Speaker A: By the way, another thing I think you guys do that's actually pretty spectacular is if a hiring manager or a business partner can use raidency to preview what this quote unquote job might actually result in candidate pipeline and rethink maybe who we should hire. To me, that's the crux here.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Not just filling seats, but being more strategic about who we're actually looking for or whether we're looking for somebody externally.
[00:26:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's a good point. You know, not filling a seat just to make the hire, but to make the business better and to focus on the outcome of the business, not just the outcome of the hire, which is somebody's in place. And whether they're in place for six months or 18 months is making sure that this is focused on the long term. And that's probably the mind shift that needs to happen, is focusing on the business outcome and not just the hiring outcome, as it were.
[00:26:43] Speaker A: Okay, Nathan, thank you so much for taking some time with me today. We'll do, we'll talk again, we'll do this again when we get into more details. My experience working with you guys is you totally understand this space, and you really have built a spectacular platform. So I hope people, if they don't know who you are, they check you guys out. And I appreciate you spending a little bit of time today on the podcast.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: Thank you very much for having me, Josh. Been a pleasure.
