How to Attract Top Talent and Become a Great Employer – Scott Hirsch

What does the future hold for remote work? Will working from home remain permanently? And how to attract top talent even post-pandemic? Our guest has some insightful observations.

Scott is the CTO at TalentMarketplace, a platform that offers a direct connection between employers and job seekers through an online approach. Scott is responsible for the technology platform itself and he’s currently automating project management recruitment. His work experience combines business administration and computer science, but he’s particularly passionate about enabling business processes through the innovative use of technology.

Scott is happy to adopt the newest machine learning algorithms, but he thinks we still need the human touch, particularly in recruitment.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the future of remote work, why employees want to have the option to work remotely, how to attract top talent, what makes a company desirable for candidates, and the importance of defining workplace culture.

If you want to hear about the do’s and don’t’s of recruitment, tune into this episode to find out more.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Scott Hirsch

💡 What he does: He’s the CTO at TalentMarketplace, a company that helps connect employers with job seekers through an online approach.

💡 Noteworthy: Scott is passionate about enabling business processes through innovative technology. He’s currently in charge of the technology platform, the product, and the integrations at TalentMarketplace.

💡 Key Quote: “The simple answer is the best one. Get it launched tomorrow, even if it’s imperfect, just keep it simple, deliver that value, and then iterate on it.”

💡 Where to find him: LinkedIn

Key Insights

More and more employees want some form of remote work. Remote work is one of the latest trends in the world, and it’s clear why. As we’re (hopefully) getting closer to the end of the pandemic, we have to start preparing for the world post-COVID. That means companies need to consider allowing their employees to work remotely. According to Scott, if you want to retain top talent and attract employees, you’ve got to offer a hybrid model to your workers at least. Otherwise, you might fall behind your competitors. “We’re actually seeing a lot of talent and employees demanding the ability to work from home at least in a hybrid capacity. We’re seeing that employees and people changing jobs won’t even consider a job that doesn’t at least offer some work-from-home option. So there’s a lot more power in the hands of the candidates these days to demand that kind of stuff.”

The hiring process is human-centric. Even with all technological advancements on the horizon, the recruitment process is still very much human-centric. Although AI can help automate some processes and speed up recruitment, it can’t take care of everything. Scott points out that we need always to have the human touch. “What we’ve actually done is pivoted ever so slightly from our original approach to incorporate humans and a human touch throughout the entire process. So we do have machine learning automations and a whole bunch of machines basically that helps speed up the entire process, but there’s human checkpoints along the way to make sure that machines are doing the right things and finding the right people; they’re not biased in any kind of way, and that they’re actually speeding up the process.”

Company culture plays a vital role in the hiring process. If you want to hire the right people for your company, you’ve got to start by defining what ‘right’ means to you. Whether you’re seeking a new project manager or an IT specialist, don’t rush into recruitment without a clear understanding of your own culture. Scott explains why culture is so vital for the success of recruitment. “Culture really plays a really big part in the hiring process. And I’d actually say that that’s one of the areas that human touch is so important, and the machine learning actually falls a little bit short there too. But the really important thing there, what we work with employers on, is defining what that culture fit means. […] What we need to do is sit down with employers quite often and say, ‘Okay, when you say culture fit, what does that mean? Does it mean they fit the communication style or where they come from or what their skill set is or how they solve problems or something along those lines?’”

The most successful companies are the ones that let their employees shine. Employees are drawn to companies that offer good learning opportunities, especially in the technology space. If you want to attract top talent, you have to provide them with as many learning opportunities as possible. Scott reflects on some of the most successful companies that TalentMarketplace works with. He says the key is to provide the ability for professional development. “What the most successful companies we’ve seen do is provide the best learning opportunities, particularly in the technology space, a lot of what folks are looking for when they go into the technology job is the ability to learn, to make an impact, to continue to develop this skill set. A lot of the time, software developers are particularly very curious and technology-focused; they want to try out that new technology or this new technology, so giving them the ability to try out that new technology, implement it, learn, fail, but come back and do it again, is really, really important.”

Top Quotes

“What we’re seeing in the market these days is indeed what you’re hinting at there. More employees are taking the time to revisit their current jobs, considering looking at other jobs. And also just a lot of pressure on the technology sector. There’s a high demand for different types of roles, particularly for software developers and things like that. And employers are really struggling to keep in retain the best talent too.”

“We do definitely see a lot more folks leaving full-time permanent roles to pursue contracts instead. And there are a few reasons behind that. Firstly, contract rates are often a little bit lucrative. You don’t necessarily have the security of the benefits that go along with it. But you’re making 100, 150, 200 dollars an hour you can buy your own insurance, […] When you are a contract worker, you actually have a little bit more availability to work remote. So that’s also just a trend that we’ve been seeing with the COVID pandemic.”

“I love what you said about benefits there too because depending on your life stage, you need some benefits, and you might not need other ones. I’m a young single entrepreneur; I don’t necessarily need dental for my kids, so that’s not something I would place a high priority on.”

“If you’re on TalentMarketplace, you’re looking through these three to 500 candidates, these are all people that are going to respond to you, and they’re all very high quality. So that’s the first way that our automation and our machines deliver value to our employers. Secondly, when they actually have a job that they’re looking for, they post a role on TalentMarketplace and then the machine learning algorithms and the human beings because that essential human touches in there to get to work and that highlights, initially the machines highlight 10 of the best-fit candidates and then our recruitment human touch team goes in, and then they narrow down that list to maybe three or four. And then those three or four are the ones that actually get forwarded to the employer.”

“I can give you another example of this as well. At TalentMarketplace specifically, we had a marketing student work with us for over a summer full time but they went back to school, continued their relationship with us, did part-time marketing for a period of time, went off, worked a couple of years at a big consulting firm, but he still did some like consulting for us on the side kind of thing and now he’s a really big company as well, and he still does a little bit of consulting with us on the side too. He comes back, brings great ideas from his workplace to us and shares them with us, and stuff like that. So it’s a great long-term relationship-building situation if you just support people in their growth journeys.”

“Keep it simple, stupid. But what that really means to me here and for this tip is basically delivering something simple now. It’s very easy for an entrepreneur with this great grand idea, you need this feature, that feature. It won’t be perfect until we get 10 years of development, and then we can launch it kind of thing. No, the simple answer is the best one, get it launched tomorrow, even if it’s imperfect, just keep it simple, deliver that value, and then iterate on it.”

Links

TalentMarketplace