Mastering High-Volume Hiring & Employee Retention

Full Transcript:

James Mackey: Hello. Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show. I'm your host, James Mackey. Thanks for joining us today. We are joined by Avi Singer. Avi, thank you for joining us.

Avi Singer: Thanks so much, James. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

James Mackey: For sure. So before we jump into it, let's go through your background a little bit. Could you tell us about yourself?

Avi Singer: Yeah, absolutely. My career started out in HR, more by coincidence than anything else. I started out working for online technology companies, online advertising companies. My first company was a company called DoubleClick. And back in those days, I ended up there just because my resume was on Monster, or HotJobs, or one of those, and they called me. But I knew nothing about online advertising. But it was a fantastic experience. So I grew my HR career there at DoubleClick.

I went through an acquisition by Google, which also was just an amazing experience for myself. Stayed on at Google for a little while after that, and realized that I wanted to move on to something else. Interesting little factoid about me, I briefly worked for Blue Man Group, the show. I was not one of the Blue Men. I actually worked in HR at Blue Man Group. It was only a few months. The economy took a hit then in 2009 and entertainment is one of the first things that goes at that point. Was there for a few months and then was very fortunate to be hired by a company called Undertone and spent another four and a half years at Undertone, another online advertising company, developing my HR career there.

That was my early days, my first years in HR, and after that I decided to launch my own company called Showd.me, which is an online learning platform. Initially we were focused on peer-to-peer or social learning, and then transitioned into compliance training over the last seven, eight years. So we work with large organizations in home care, skilled nursing, those areas, helping them find great talent, onboard great talent, and then develop their talent.

James Mackey: I love that. So I think that's a good place for our first topic, is to go into talent acquisition possibly for larger organizations that are hiring for high volume roles. Maybe you could share a little bit about some of the challenges and focus points of these employers and what it really takes to hire for high volume roles. We can start wherever you want there, but let's just dive in wherever you want and we'll just start the conversation.

Avi Singer: Sure, yeah. I've had a couple experiences with that. So early in my career I was hiring engineers. So working for fast-growing venture-backed tech company, you're trying to hire dozens if not hundreds of engineers, and that's a unique challenge, and have a culture that you're trying to promote and a certain type of employer you're trying to hire. And at the same time, you're doing it at high volume. How do you balance those?

So it certainly is a challenge, and spent quite some time developing that, and we can certainly get into that further. But at the same time, our clients today are large employers in the post-acute healthcare space who have lots of needs in home care, skilled nursing, and those areas. And again, want to hire high quality employees to take care of those patients, but at the same time, they need hundreds and hundreds of employees in order to meet their needs.

James Mackey: Got it. So most recently, what would you say, how is that landscape changing right now for companies that are currently working on hiring for, let's just skip back to focusing on high volume roles. What are you advising them currently?

Avi Singer: I think the advice is you need to use the tools that are available to you. There are job boards, whether it's Indeed or other, or applicant tracking systems, or different ways of getting in front of the candidates that you want. However, you still have to have a way of identifying those employees that you want. Yes, you want that. You want to be that fisherman with the big net, but you're not trying to catch all the fish, you're trying to catch some of the fish.

So in that strategy, yes, you can post your jobs out there, you can post your positions out there, you can take out a billboard, you can take out ads on subway cars and things like that, and that's fine. But really early on in the process you've got to figure out, so how are we then going to identify, if we're going to get hundreds of candidates, how are we going to identify the ones that match the culture that we have, the type of employees that we want to hire, the qualifications that we need in a very systematic way? Otherwise, you're chasing lots of dead ends, so you need to have a little balance of both there.

James Mackey: What are the best ways to really do that and filter through everyone in a way that, is it really just as simple as that you have to have a massive recruiting team that's being able to screen all these folks? Or you said leveraging all the tools. So I don't know if there's tech you recommend as well, or what do you think?

Avi Singer: I think the tools are technology, but I think you can't just, the advice I always give is don't just post the generic job out there. You have to have specific questions and criteria and predetermining types of assessment and what's specific to us. So what kind of experience is an absolute must have, what kind of qualifications are an absolute must have, and therefore you're already disqualifying many people based on those criteria. And what language skills do they need?

So if you don't have those, if you just post out there, hey, I need a nurse or I need a nursing assistant, or I need a physician assistant, then you're going to get everyone. And the more specific you can get, I need somebody who's a nurse, but has specialties in these areas, is available to work these hours, available to work these locations, who wants to work for an organization that values XYZ, those are things that, yeah, tools, sometimes online tools can filter for that, but also even if you have a recruiting team, they can assess that very, very quickly.

So in the first 10, 15 minutes of conversation, they should be assessing is this person a good fit and not go through all the qualifications for us only to then discover an hour into the interview, oh, by the way, they don't have some of the most important things that we need or require in terms of their knowledge, background, education, culture fit, those kinds of things.

James Mackey: And also I suppose one option, and I often shy away from this, is you can during the application process require them to fill out questions or more details about their experience. Sometimes I hesitate with that because what if they get halfway through the application, it's taking too long, and they go, "Well, I'm just going to apply to jobs that don't make me do all this stuff."

I've seen tools where as soon as you apply, it shares your profile with the hiring team, but then it's like a further application process so you still hold onto that, but that's more of through LinkedIn and maybe tech that isn't as common for some of these higher volume roles. Do you do anything there? Do you recommend adding more criteria to the application process or do you feel like it's better to just capture those resumes versus trying to get them to do too much upfront without them being able to speak to somebody?

Avi Singer: It's a good question. It really depends on the market out there. So if it's a type of role where there are lots of potential qualified candidates, then you want to do it at the outset. You don't want to waste your time. For example, we work with, hospitality or restaurants. Anyone in the world, I don't know, 99% of Americans or anyone is qualified to work in a restaurant. I'm not talking about chef, but as a waiter, waitress, bus boy, whatever the role might be.

But if you have a certain culture that you're trying to reflect in your restaurant, you can ask a qualifying question right at the outset. First thing first, do you want to show up to work every day in a suit or are you available to work from four o'clock in the afternoon to 10 o'clock at night? And right off the bat, you're going to eliminate a lot of the candidates because it's not a good fit for them. You don't want to waste your time. You don't want to waste their time either.

So why have that come up at the end of the conversation where I've qualified this person, they're great, they're perfect, they're exactly what we're looking for, and then you bring in this thing like, oh, by the way, here are our hours, or here's our location, or by the way, remote's not an option for this role or those kinds of things. Then realize I just wasted 45 minutes, an hour of both of our time.

So I think it goes both ways. I think you want to be respectful of the candidate and therefore any of those qualifying things be at the outset, be really upfront about that. And you also want to be respectful of yourself and say, I don't want to have to talk to 500 people. I want to talk to the 50 that are most likely to be qualified and want this role.

James Mackey: Yeah, for sure. So one of the other things we discussed in the prep call was going through the concept of employee value proposition. You don't really see it as much in the blue collar space. You feel like it's an untapped opportunity. So tell us me more about that. Where do you really think the opportunity is, and how can companies get better at this?

Avi Singer: So it's a great question and I think across the board, everyone has a value proposition. And you might think, let's talk blue collar for a second, or let's talk fast food. So what's the difference between working at McDonald's, Taco Bell, Dunkin' Donuts, Starbucks, any of those? And if as a talent acquisition professional or somebody who's developing a tech on a talent acquisition strategy, if that's your thought process, you're missing a lot.

So it may not be as big as back when I was working in tech, and I was like our value proposition with ping pong tables and free lunches and great coffee and things like that. So that may not be the same proposition you're pitching to an engineer or a salesperson or account manager as you're pitching to somebody working in a restaurant. But there are little things that they would expect. So for example, what we find is a lot of people at that level, the pay is super important to them. They're making close to minimum wage and therefore getting paid on time, getting paid accurately is important. So those are little things that can be frustrating where someone would say, "And I felt like I worked 45 hours this week, but I didn't quite get paid for what I was supposed to and there's something inaccurate in my pay. Therefore, I'll just go next door."

The ease of being able to move requires you to be just a little more ... So the value proposition, even though it sounds a little strange, but the value proposition just might be easy to use tools in terms of our clocking in and clocking out and getting paid. Some of the things a lot of our clients are using are access to wages. So we're so used to payroll, you get paid once a week or twice a month or whatever it is, but you have so many great companies out there who are giving earned wage access, and that might be your value proposition. We respect the fact that you don't make a lot of money and it's a challenge, and therefore we want to give you access to that money as quickly as possible. So if you work a day tomorrow, you have access to that pay already, right?

Yeah, it's not the massive things you use as a value proposition when you're hiring for engineers or something like that, but there still is a value proposition. You need to be aware of it, and if you can figure it out, whatever it is, you are going to differentiate yourself from all the other fast food restaurants on that row.

James Mackey: It's like dialing in almost to employee experience.

Avi Singer: Exactly. Exactly.

James Mackey: We're going to make this, remove friction, make your life easier.

Avi Singer: That's what it is. Sometimes simple things, ergonomics, just being able to say on an interview process and somebody may have experience working in hospitality or industries like that and saying, "We care about your health and welfare and we incorporate or use certain tools or things like that to make your job a little bit easier." That might be the differentiator. It shows that you care. It's something that would be meaningful that an employee may need to be lifting on a daily basis or being very active, and it's not a super high cost and it's a serious differentiator.

James Mackey: Yeah, for sure. So one of the other things we discussed was how retention cuts or it ties back directly into talent acquisition. Given the people and talent leadership roles that you've held, I'd love to get your thoughts on why retention is so important, how it is so closely tied to the hip with success of talent acquisition.

Avi Singer: Absolutely. I think when you think about talent acquisition, it's the stuff we just talked about up until this point. It's that marketing strategy, the value proposition, all of that. But if you actually talk to talent acquisition professionals, they'll tell you that a significant portion of their time is being spent on backfilling roles, and that's not growing your business. And I think the retention component of talent acquisition is underappreciated.

And I think organizations before you can go onto this massive marketing strategy and value proposition and promoting roles and all that, if you haven't figured out your retention strategy, you're just going to burn through a lot of stuff. And I spent a lot of my time, and most of my career I've spent talking about this specifically. I've joined organizations where a turnover was high as 20% year over year, and that means for every hundred employees, the first 20 hires you make every year is simply going to backfill those who are going to leave this year.

And therefore, companies are now thinking about their 2024 strategy and things like that. If you haven't figured that out, that means that it could be Q2, Q3, Q4 before you can even start thinking about hiring all those new roles because I'm spending all of my time on that backfill. So I think as somebody who's been on both sides, both the talent acquisition side as well as the HR side, I think it's a big mistake to not recognize what do we need to do to make sure that our retention improves and then be able to then think about, okay, we've got that under control. If we hire people, they're going to stay. That's good. Now we can focus on how do we make sure we hire more people so we're actually growing our business.

James Mackey: And that's all tied into employee value proposition as well, right?

Avi Singer: Yeah.

James Mackey: The better experiences you can create for your employees, the more you can start to market that back to people. And also using tools like Glassdoor, you're going to be able to build that brand out there to the world, that you are able to create great experiences for employees. I feel like retention is definitely a focus, which to me it's like retention is about experience, creating great experiences, and there's of course like a million places we can focus, but it's really just staying close to employees and asking good questions and figuring out where the biggest pain is.

Because when you think about retention holistically, there's obviously so many different areas that you could focus on, whether it's comp or onboarding or training managers properly or capacity planning for managers or ratio from individual contributors to managers, or professional development opportunities, learning development, or promotion pads, all these types of things, to how performance is being managed and measured, a million different things. So I think that it's just very telling. You've just got to dial into, okay, what's almost like the ideal customer profile? What are your customers care about? In this case, your employees are your customers.

Avi Singer: Yes.

James Mackey: Really dialing into what they care about and then optimizing specifically for that versus trying to attack everything at once, right?

Avi Singer: It's exactly that. I always say retention is identifying the gap between why did they join and why did they leave? So I joined for a certain reason. That reason either was never there. You talk about so much turnover happens in the first 90 days. That promise wasn't met, or is no longer there. So maybe somebody leaves after a year or two. And that's why you have to have that conversation. It's like you're surveying employees and saying, "Why did you join the organization?" "I joined for this reason." "And why did you leave, what wasn't there?"

And if you could fix that, then back to your point, you can use that as your value proposition. Say employees join our organization for X, and by the way, we do X. So employees join our organization for professional development opportunities, career development opportunities, and they're all here. So then you turn your entire career page into that's why we have mentoring programs and training and learning, and look, all these employees who started out as interns and then became employees and then became managers and directors. And your whole value proposition becomes around that because we've identified that gap.

It's not as often as people think around compensation. People always say it's people leave for compensation. And they also don't even think that ... The other one that people always say that people leave because of the bad managers. Yeah, people do leave because of compensation and bad managers, but those are somewhat easy to fix. I think the harder one to fix is what we just talked about, is really identifying specifically for your organization, why do people come work here and are we delivering on that promise? And if you are, you're going to have a really great retention strategy.

I have a client, actually one of my clients in the healthcare space, and they've got literally thousands and thousands of patients and thousands of employees, and they have, I believe the number is close to 2000 employees who've been with them for over 10 years. And I'm like, you should do a study except for the fact that they're competing with everyone else. They're not going to let everyone have all that information.

But for me personally, I've talked to them and I understand some of the things that they're doing, and in a space where, again, in healthcare, entry level healthcare, home care, skilled nursing, the roles are so transitional. You can work in one organization, another one with the same certification and not really have to change much. To have that kind of retention is just unbelievable. And it goes back to them really thinking about it, really thinking about why do people join us versus the other healthcare organization, and how are we going to get them to stay? They've done a great job of it.

James Mackey: I love it. I love it. And I feel like this is also, this is a good time to transition into talking about online compliance trainings. I think it'd be really cool for you to share why exactly you started your company and what problem you really solved. What opportunity did you see from the perspective of maybe what was missing? And then I think it's again, it seems like you're primarily partnering with healthcare.

Avi Singer: Yeah, well, that's where we saw the biggest gap. So I mentioned before I started an online learning platform, and it was a peer-to-peer learning within organizations. It's a lot of onboarding orientation. We were approached, interestingly enough, by some healthcare organizations. When I say healthcare, I'm talking mostly post-acute, so elder care, assisted living, independent living, home care, skilled nursing.

And they said, "We have all these training requirements that our employees have to take when they join the organization, as they're staying with the organization. And we haven't really found a platform that works for online training. So we do mostly classroom-based." And I started talking to a few of these organizations. I said, "How many employees?" "I have 3000." I'm like 3000 employees all go through 12 hours of classroom training on an annual basis? Like, absolutely. So I actually went down to their office and I just saw, it literally looked like the DMV, just hundreds of people coming through the door, sitting through PowerPoint presentations, and hundreds of people leaving the door. And it's a constant all day, all day long.

And started to look into, so this, first of all, it's a terrible experience. So just the employee experience I'm talking about, it's an awful experience to not be able to do your job today because I've got to go through three hours of death by PowerPoint, and on a yearly basis, same thing over and over. And it turned out that there was a very significant segment of the employees in healthcare that we are dealing with. The platform wasn't well designed for that audience. So it was designed for maybe a little more of a skilled, experienced audience who had gone through online training before.

We thought it was a great opportunity for us, and we adapted our platform specifically for home care and skilled nursing, which means we made it easily accessible on a mobile device. We made it multilingual, which is a big demand in our space. We made it easy for end users who had never taken our training to get support and the help they needed to get through training. And it became the business that we do today, and we love doing it. It sounds boring, teaching OSHA and HIPAA training to a bunch of people in multiple languages, but we love the fact, and it goes back to what I was saying before, that it's a good experience for them. We're constantly asking our user, "Is this a good experience?"

And I think it then reflects back on the employer. So employers, if you're still out there pulling people into classrooms to do training that doesn't require a classroom, this could be done on their own, that's a poor employee experience. The employee wants to be on the floor, they want to be out there helping their patients, so you have to give them this. So that's what we've been doing. So we do online compliance training, we do onboarding orientation, and yeah, we love it.

James Mackey: And so it's also, it just seems like it'd be a lot more expensive to do this stuff in person.

Avi Singer: Oh, it's way more expensive. But-

James Mackey: …employees' hourly rates or whatever it might be. That's just such a massive time drain for everybody.

Avi Singer: It was. Like I said, there was just this impression that a lot of these organizations had, whether it was because they had tried a platform that wasn't designed for their use case or just maybe they hadn't tried anything and they were thinking, hey, the only way we're going to get this done, and we have to be compliant. The government requires certain things, and therefore we can't risk it, so we have to do classroom training. And that was a little bit of a change management piece we had to go through and get them to somewhat put some risk in there and say, oh, are we going to get our training done this year?

But yeah, in hindsight, they love the fact that ... We have clients who had big training rooms and have turned those into office space and other things because they no longer need the training space. So they're happy to have that.

You're also providing something for your workforce that's helpful, which is access to knowledge information on the fly, as well. So once they learn how to do their training, so now it's also they can access it when dealing with a certain patient or certain situation, or even their own personal professional development. Now log into the system online and learn about something that maybe they didn't know before. I think across the board, it saves money, it provides a better experience. Our clients get to focus on other important things, like recruiting. All of our clients are really in that space. There's a lot of turnover in healthcare. They're constantly recruiting, and they get to focus on that versus making sure that everyone does their 12 or 15 or 20 hours that need to do this year.

James Mackey: I love it. Before we get into that, I would love to really just get your thoughts too, if there's any other top of mind advice that you have when it comes to talent acquisition, and we can continue to focus more so on high volume, blue collar. We can get into really anything else, but just any light bulb moments or top takeaways when it comes to hiring throughout your career that kind of guides how you maybe even hire for your own team these days.

Avi Singer: Yeah, I think some of the stuff we've talked about, so know your organization, know your selling point and spend time on it. I remember back in tech, we spent time on understanding our organization. So again, before you even get to value proposition, what kind of organization do we have? Let's be honest with ourselves. Do we care about people? Are we fair about compensation? Go through that exercise, and you might be surprised and you need to work with somebody who's objective and is going to give you real answers.

Because I know for myself as a CEO, I think our company is great and everything's great and everyone, who wouldn't want to work here, but the truth is many people probably don't want to work here. So you have to be honest with that and you have to go through that exercise with your team. And like I said, sometimes with outside consultants as well. Understand, do we have something here?

And if not, what can we do to change that? So what do we need to do in order to make sure it is an environment people want to come work at and work for? Because employees will see through that very quickly, whether they're candidates, they'll say, "I don't think I want to work here." …you can see that pretty quickly. I think we've all been on those interviews, where you kind of say, "Hey, this probably isn't for me." Or they join and they realize after a short amount of time, hey, this probably isn't going to work for me. And we've all had those experiences.

So I think certainly there'll always be employers out there who maybe don't care as much, but you want to be that employer, if you really want to win the war on talent at any level, you want to be that employer who can show very clearly that you care. And there are little things you can do. For example, and sometimes they cost money, but in the long run, you run your ROI studies on this stuff, it's nothing. So for example, giving employees choice of equipment. Hey, what kind of chair do you want? What kind of computer do you want? Well, we will just make life easier. I don't even have an approval process at our company for things that employees need. Many of employees are remote, work from home, but things that they want, a stand up desk, you want a sit down desk, you want to sit on a medicine exercise ball, whatever it is, let's just not make a big deal of those things because that's the kind of organization that we want to be.

I've been giving my clients, I'll tell you something interesting in healthcare, I've been giving my clients a piece of advice that none of them have taken yet, but anyone who's listening in home care, skilled nursing, take this advice, it'll absolutely change your organization. And I've said many employees in post-acute that we deal with, they're taking subways, they're taking buses, they're walking to work, they're taking public transportation. I live in New York. It's cold.

And I told my clients, I said, "The best possible thing you can do for talent acquisition, retention, even customer acquisition, would be buy every single one of your employees a really great warm, I don't want to throw any brands out there, so we'll leave the brand out of it, warm winter jacket, and you can even put your logo on it, put your logo on it, but give it to them. Give them something really great, and you're going to put your logo on it."

And I said, "And three things will happen. One is that employee will appreciate it. So you want me, you know I have to take the bus. You can't change that. You're not giving me a car. But at least you care about me and you're giving me something that makes it a little bit easier, makes that commute a little bit easier. You're showing others who might see them on that bus or train or subway or walk that you're an employer who cares. And you've given your employees something that, again, it's not a ton, but it's something that's meaningful to them. You've given them a jacket that might have cost 150 or $200 that they would never have bought themselves. Now other employees want to come work for your organization because you care. And you also show potential patients that you're the kind of organization that cares."

But it's a massive investment. It's a big amount. You have 5000 employees, a $200 jacket. That's a big investment. But I've told all my clients, I said, "The one who does that is already going to be like, the ROI on that is going to be immeasurable." And there are ways you can track it, but I think the bottom line is that that's the key thing. If you answer that question, are we an employer who cares? And if we're not, then let's not play games. Let's just do high volume recruit and be fine with that.

If we are an employer that cares, let's figure out what that means and how that translates and how we reflect that in everything that we do, and let's hold ourselves to it. So once those employees start, we've told them that we care about them and we want them to do it and have a great experience and make sure that we're doing everything we can for them to have that great experience.

James Mackey: Yeah, that's great. It's an example of something really thoughtful that you can do. It does add up, of course, for larger workforces, but still the ROI, as you said, across comparison to losing people faster than you really could, it makes a lot of sense.

Avi Singer: Even if you lose those employees, they'll probably still wear the jacket. And they may work in something else, but it's a really good jacket. So you'll get the benefit even if they don't stick around.

James Mackey: Yeah, you're right. And I don't think a lot of companies are very thoughtful about that, quite honestly. That's a really good example. If you can find a way to find that for your business, I'm sure every business has something like that where if you really think about, what is something that's maybe even just inconvenient or uncomfortable, or what's just a little thoughtful thing that we can do that's probably not going to be expected, that's just a gift? They don't even have to make an ask, like hey, let's just do this.

Avi Singer: And you don't have to even pretend about the fact that you're not expecting ROI. Like I said, you can be selfish about it. You're giving people something, and you don't have to be pretend that it's not a talent acquisition or retention strategy. Yes, everyone wants to be magnanimous and say, "Look, yeah, we give out jackets because we want them to be warm." But you don't have to be that way. You can be honest about it as well.

It's the same thing. I remember back in the 2000s trying to convince companies to have coffee in the office and just change people's mindset, and they're like, "Why should we give free coffee? People can get their own coffee. Or why should the coffee be good?" Companies had coffee, but it was usually terrible. It was made in Mr. Coffee machines. And I was like, "Oh, Keurig is coming out. We should get those. All the flavors." Like, why would we do that? I'm like, wait a second. Do you realize the average employee leaves the office three, four times a day for 20 minutes and goes to stand in line in Starbucks? That's 45 minutes, an hour a day. I'm like, if you change that and have good coffee in the office, you're getting 45 minutes back.

But again, it's the cost that people focus on. They don't focus on the ROI. So I think there's so many areas where employers can think about that and say, yes, it's going to cost me something upfront, and I can measure very quickly whether I'm getting anything for it. So if I'm not getting anything, I can always stop it. I don't have to continue doing it. But I would challenge people about their mindset around those things and realize that a lot of those things, if they're meaningful, if they have purpose, if they're things that people actually appreciate, are going to give you a lot more return than what everything is going to cost you.

James Mackey: A lot of those things too, it's not like they're incredibly expensive. There's ways that you can show people that you care that doesn't cost hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Avi Singer: Yeah. Yeah. I always tell people, if you don't like the jacket one, just start with umbrellas. Really good umbrellas, not the ones that people are going to lose really easily. Start with umbrellas and see how those are received, and if the umbrellas go well, maybe you move up to a really warm hoodie and then you can go to that really expensive jacket, but do something.

I think, again, going back to talent acquisition, like we've been talked about, you've got to test stuff. You've got to try stuff. If you're not trying anything, if you're just doing the same thing everyone else is doing, there's no differentiation. It'll just be spending, right? So it gets into your whole SEO strategy and you just outspend everyone else and who's going to spend most for the keyword? Do something completely different and it'll cost you money. But let's face it, you're spending money already on this, though.

James Mackey: Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, Avi, this has been a really insightful episode. I really appreciate you coming on board today and sharing your thoughts with everyone. Thank you so much for joining us.

Avi Singer: Thanks so much for having me, James. Really appreciate it.

James Mackey: Absolutely. Everybody tuning in, thank you so much and we'll see you next time. Take care.