← The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast
The Recruiting Brainfood Podcast
Brainfood Live On Air - Ep399 - The Essential Guide for Increasing Talent Density
01:05:53
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- [00:06]
A
Being short sighted, that is shocking to me because it means I can't hardly read anything at any time without support, which is kind of depressing. But there you go. Anyway. Anyway, are we live? I think we are, aren't we? Welcome, everybody. Hey, what do you think of our specs, by the way, folks, this is the first question for you. Welcome to Brimpol live on air, bringing it to you every week. No fail. Me and Adam are both short sighted and long sighted and now we're needing to wear spectacles and we've both got new spectacles. So first question is, folks, what do you think of our new eyewear? Do you like it or not? What do you think of our ongoing decrepitude? Because we both feel a little bit depressed by this. The need to wear eyeglasses to navigate life. Anyway, I hope everyone's well and I hope everyone's going to enjoy this show. We should do some sound checks. First of all, before we kick off any further. I want to make sure everyone can hear and see myself and Adam. Okay, folks, if you're watching this on Crowdcast, let me know whether the audio and visuals fine. Yes, Jane, we should get sponsorship by Specsavers. And yes, if you're watching this on LinkedIn, any of the LinkedIn lives out there, my LinkedIn, Adam's LinkedIn, Rob Walker's LinkedIn, anybody else's LinkedIn, let me know in the comments there whether the audio and visual is also okay. Idea is, of course, we're going to try and distribute these conversations as widely as we can and make sure that you can watch this in the place of your choice. So you can watch it on Crowdcast, you can watch it on LinkedIn, hopefully you can watch it in any, any place that you think it should work. All right, anyway, let's keep going. We should be in good shape. So Adam Gordon, good to see you. Let's. I guess we should just quickly review the newsletter before we do anything else. Anything interesting that happened last week that was worth us reviewing real quick?
- [02:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, first of all, let's talk about your poll. So for my next hire into my recruiting team, you gave a few options. You're going to be bringing people in from recruitment agency background, from HR background, from sales background, and overwhelmingly over a third of people said from an engineering background. That to me is evidence of the brain food crowd being slightly ahead of the market as always, because I don't think most people would be doing that. But in a couple of years time, mainstream talent acquisition leaders are going to be doing exactly the same. We're going to be talking today about talent density, which is a subject that I find really exciting. And I, in the last couple of weeks have been encouraging both of my kids who are 9 and 12 to go to university and become engineers. Because a lot of jobs in the future are going to be like an engineering background is going to be brilliant for almost every job of the future.
- [03:12]
A
Yeah, you need to. I mean, the world is going to be increasingly about interacting with autonomous workers and if you can know at a deeper level what that looks like and how to make it work, then it's gonna be to your advantage. No doubt. And yes, do we need to start hiring people from engineering backgrounds into talent functions? 37% of Bravefooder said yes, that's the plan. And by the way, if anybody's actually done that, I'd love to hear from you because. And I'd love to hear from those engineers. What's it like working within the talent function? Is that different from working in an engineering function or anything else? But anyway, Paul is in there as well as other good stuff in the Sunday newsletter, so check it. Okay, what else?
- [03:55]
B
Adam, Lessons from Atlassian's AI Journey. I think Andrea Lungulescu shared this with you, perhaps. And the biggest learning was that context gives the real competitive advantage AI models don't. If you've got AI rich organizational context, your knowledge, decisions, workflows, goals are all going to be expedited. They said that AI transformation is more of a business and culture challenge rather than an IT thing because leaders need to redesign work according to like how it should get done and what's the optimal results and not just deploying new tools. So I thought that was fascinating to learn. I mean, Atlassian of course is like deep tech organization and so they're going to be ahead of a lot of other companies. But I found that the core message was quite simple in that if you can capture and reuse what you've learned from all the tasks you're working on, then your company's going to really accelerate with AI than those that are just giving people access to a chatbot with a whole bunch of disposable single use chats.
- [05:09]
A
Yeah, and Atlassian, I think they're kind of making a pitch to be identified as the leading ta, sort of advanced AI first TA function. Their Chro, for instance, is also, I think the AI enablement sort of officer for the entire organization. And I do believe the breadcrumb to this report came from some research. Not a research, but a blog Post from HR Examiner, I think, where it seemed that Atlassian was also, the HR team was also going to be the ones deciding which parts of the job gets automated and which parts they're human. So I thought, okay, this is very, very interesting, let's take a deeper dive. And it turns out they've actually got a guidebook. So definitely go and read the guidebook. You can check it out on the download. Just shared it in the chat. Okay, give us one more mate before we bring on Colleen.
- [06:04]
B
So CEO of a company which I think is maybe in the betting industry or something like that, I'm not sure, but she did an experiment to establish how well LinkedIn does with bots and that type of thing. She created some fake LinkedIn accounts with half naked females in the picture, but people like and used her own company as the actual employer for these people and turned out that she was able to, using some automation stuff, she was able to set these off to go and build networks and go and get connected with loads of folk. I don't know, am I going to get canceled or is this, is this bad for me to say that almost certainly it would have been men who were connecting with all these half naked women. But anyway, the, the biggest concern about this isn't the fake followers, is that you can actually build trust and influence and conversations and gather information using, using bots. So, you know, if she was able to prove it very, very quickly then, you know, with a bit of dastardly tactics, then, you know, it's going to be easier to scam people than ever. So we need to become better at who we're, you know, verifying who we're actually interacting with online. And this is going to be an ongoing challenge.
- [07:23]
A
I think it's going to go the other way. You know, I think we're going to be so skeptical and it's sad that we're going to get beyond sort of the naive trust, so to say, because we're going to end up just being like generally skeptical and everything, like cynic basically. But the cynicism I think is our first protection towards something where, you know, all of the traditional trust signals can no longer be used. And in terms of this particular instance, it's worth bearing in mind the EB damage that this lady had incurred. I don't think she deliberately set it off, by the way. I think what happened was that her company started being infested by these pornographic bots that claim to be employees and it was like unclear as to what the motivation was, but presumably they were using that sort of brand value of that business to try and like, get some more connections and so on. And her problem was, of course, this was like damaging her employer brand. You know, when you're connecting or trying to scope out a business and you see basically pornhub on, on. On your. Your featured sort of articles, whatever, obviously no good. And it seemed that there wasn't a particularly sophisticated way to deal with it, other than causing like a ruckus online and having LinkedIn step in. So. So, yeah, anybody else have a spammer or a bot attach themselves to your employer and to your employer brand? Have you even checked, like, how do you even know if you're, if you're a business that's got a thousand sort of employees or more? Have you diligently audited how many of those people actually have been or are employees? I doubt that we know. So I suspect this is a wider problem than perhaps we are aware of.
- [09:11]
B
Can I just quickly say something, though, just as an aside? One thing I laughed and laughed about this week was the Guy, the tech CEO, who posted on LinkedIn that he's got a fake email address which he copies into customer emails. So when the customer is asked for something, he will reply back and say that he's including, like Johnson from product or something is what it's called. And then Johnson starts arguing that, no, we can't do that, that's not a priority for us. And then the CEO and he goes back two or three arguments with this fake product guy deliberately in front of the customer so that by the end of it, the CEOs got told Johnson he's doing it, this customer is really vital. And the customer's like, excellent. We got red carpet treatment there. Brilliant, wonderful. I absolutely love that.
- [10:02]
A
It's kind of very gray area in terms of ethics, but I think I saw the same thing. It's a clever way of just presenting a white glove service of something that might be quite normal. But yeah, having a fake product person argue against the CEO recommendation as a, as a performance and then having having that product guy lose the bit, lose the argument makes everyone feel better, right? It's like the guy's gone above and beyond. So, yeah, brilliant, brilliant stuff. Anyway, loads of good content happening in Brain Food Live. Make sure you subscribe to the newsletter, you're going to see some more. But of course, Brain Food Live on Air cannot continue as a conversational sort of event every week without the support of our sponsors. So I'm delighted to say this week's sponsor is. I Think a new sponsor for us on the week, and it is Lavalier by Textio. Most of us probably know Textio because if you're being around in the recruitment world for the last 10, 15 years or more, Textio is one of the significant products out there. And it has been sort of in the firmament of our business, of our industry for a long time. They're doing some amazingly innovative things, including bringing out new tools and new branding as well. So I'm delighted to bring on CEO Colleen Gallagher here to join us for a quick chat. And Colleen's actually going to talk to us a little bit about Lavalier, but also join us for the conversation we're about to have on talent density. So, Colleen, great to see you. I wonder whether actually, quickly, could you introduce yourself? Who are you? What it is you do, Colleen?
- [11:44]
C
Yeah, I'll say good morning because I'm actually in San Francisco, but good afternoon. Good evening to everyone joining this. I'm so glad to be here. I'm Colleen, the CEO of Textio. As Hung mentioned, been with Textio for over four years now and have really gotten to see how we're evolving and helped introduce our new product, Lavalier, earlier this year, which really tries to expand our, you know, how we can help folks in the TA space. And I'm just excited to be here and show it to y'.
- [12:17]
D
All.
- [12:18]
A
Yeah, fantastic. Can you give us a high level as to what Lovelier is, Colleen, and why, in fact, you decided to pick this particular problem to solve as a new thing?
- [12:28]
D
Yeah.
- [12:29]
C
So Lavalier is a interview intelligence platform, which sounds like a lot of words, but really what we're trying to do there is just help bring more insights and clarity around the entire hiring process, particularly once you get somebody into the hiring funnel to help not only folks who might not be as experienced as recruiters in interviewing, like your hiring managers, and just the folks on the interview panel. We've, you know, had the benefit of talking to recruiters for so long, and one of the things that became really that, you know, isn't new, but with the evolution of how technology is moving that we have the ability to do now that we just didn't as well a couple of years ago is, you know, moving away from interviews being this black box. We've seen recruiters and TA teams spend a lot of time trying to provide some structure, provide questions, provide a lot of insights to folks. And we also know that getting people to write that feedback that is so important that should, you know, go into the hiring decision doesn't Happen very. As frequently as we would like it to. And I think it ties into the topic today around talent density is if you don't know what the skills are of the people that you're hiring because you don't have any information on them, it really doesn't allow you to get the, you know, development potential, the insights into your own workforce once you hire people. Because we found that we did a large research report last year where we looked at over 10,000 interviews and not surprisingly, or I'm assuming most people won't be surprised to hear, but you hire people, hire who they like and not necessarily the people that are qualified for the role. And so I think what we're trying to do is really bring those two things to the forefront. I think people have to hire people who work well with their teams. And so it's not necessarily to say that you, you know, don't have to have some element of that in the hiring process, but you also need to ensure that they're actually going to be qualified for the role. There was a study done recently, I believe, that looked at turnover and it says 40% of turnover happens in the first year. And to me, that signals that you have a hiring problem. And so there's just, you know, we have to improve how we're doing that. And it's not for a lack of trying. Right. We've talked to our recruiters who have been our customers, and everyone has spent a lot of time trying to make it as easy as possible, but we just have new tools that we can bring and so that's how we got. We got to lavalier.
- [15:15]
A
Yeah, fantastic stuff. And I think, you know, no one listening to this call would be overly surprised to hear about that 60 plus percent sort of figure that, you know, what recruitment, however much sort of effort we've put in previously, typically is kind of a low percentage sort of outcome. But hopefully technology that we've. We've seen latterly is going to help us with this. Colleen, we might have time very quickly to have a look at sort of. Lovely. I don't know whether you've got it or you're prepared to show us, but if you can, then, then let's have a screen share and have a look, see.
- [15:58]
E
Okay.
- [15:59]
C
Sorry, I don't have.
- [16:04]
A
You don't have the permissions, do you? Give me a sec. I need to. I need to change a role. Here we go. Let's make you a speaker.
- [16:17]
C
All right, now I see it. It's highlighted and I can press it. Here we go. Okay. So this is what you'd see when you log into Lavalier. It will give you a good overview of what's coming up. What are the interviews you have coming up? You know, as a recruiter, you could also come in here and look and see what, what is scheduled across your entire organization. But you know, given that we only have a short amount of time and I want to get, you know, get us to the talent density discussion, I'm just going to give y' all a little peek here. The thing that I really love about this that I think is unique versus anything else, because we're seeing a lot of solutions in the market right now. Who will transcribe an interview for you here? And the real thing that we're doing is we're actually providing guidance within the interview itself. And helping make these things much better from the start. And the way that we do that right off the bat is using the intake meeting. So what I'm going to show you here is a playback of what this would look like if you were a recruiter doing a strategy session with your hiring manager. So this not only will record and transcribe, it automatically will turn this right into an entire job spec. You can create a job description. It will structure all of the interview and the questions for you. As part of that, what you will see here is it will prompt you with some prepared questions. But it not only does that, but as the discussion continues, it's going to ask you, it's going to prompt you to ask follow up questions that are relevant and allow you to go deeper. So this is really helpful for recruiters who might be a little bit earlier in their career, who. Or folks who may not be subject matter experts. I know a lot of folks have, you know, focused time on being a technical recruiter, but some organizations, you know, have recruiters that are doing sales roles alongside, you know, technical roles. And so this really helps prompt you with follow up questions, which I think it's probably not. You have to run this for like two minutes before it will actually start because it needs enough context to do that. But it will track all the questions. And as you can see here, it's just filling out everything here to make a really high quality spec. So I'm gonna.
- [18:57]
A
That's a really interesting point you make, Colleen. Just enter real quick. But, but it's true, like sort of if you're a recruiter that recruits up and down the stack of your business, you've got a different set of constraints compared to someone who's like just vertically Focused on singular roles or whatnot. So the tooling that you have access to I think will go up and down in terms of relevance based on, based on your responsibilities.
- [19:22]
C
Yeah. So you can see here it's starting to add more suggested questions as you dig in deeper. I'm going to end this so you can see what happens afterwards. And this usually takes about 45 to 60 seconds. So I'm not going to have you all sit here and watch that. But it does happen quite quickly. So what you would see once that finishes is you can see the transcript if you wanted to take notes as you were doing it, which you can do within the platform. It has all of these things filled out for you. You can mark this ready for interviews and then it's going to give you the whole option to just structure the interview. So what you can see here is you can, you know, generate a job post. But the thing I think is really magical about this is, is the ability to very quickly come up with structure and questions. So if I click on this and this is all real, real time happening right, right away. So within, you know, five minutes of completing that intake call with a hire, with a hiring manager, you can have the job post done and the entire interview loop scheduled, or excuse me, not scheduled, but structured with all the questions. And as you can see here, the one that I clicked on was a technical role. So it's going to give you these very deep questions that are specific to the role based on the intake call that you just had. You can add suggested topics and you can see here we have this concept of deeper questions because we know that this is a technical screen. So we are going to give deeper questions here. You can add things very quickly versus if you came into this recruiter screen, you're going to see the questions that it generates are the much shorter and, you know, higher level for a recruiter screen. So this is just a quick peek of what this looks like. The same experience I just showed for the recruiter intake is the experience an interviewer would have as well, where it's prompting you to ask those questions live during the interview. So it's not just the four or five prepared questions. It will also give you those follow up questions that are, you know, prompting you. Because a lot of times what we see is folks might answer questions at a very high level. And if you're not really a really good interviewer or trained to be very good interviewer, you don't know the right way to dig into that. And lavalier helps you do that. And then the last thing I would show is what this looks like once you start getting all of this data into the same system. So this is a marketing manager role. You can see I've indicated here we are integrated with all the leading ats and this, you know, can pull back and forth. But I think the thing that you will see that's really unique is this concept of once this is once the interview is completed, it will give you indications of how you know whether or not there was signal around this person having the skills that you outline for the role.
- [22:29]
A
Very interesting. I mean, I'm looking at all of this, Colleen, and you know, I can't help but think the tooling that I received when I first started the job of recruiting was literally a stack of printed out A4s which is what we call an interview bank. And it was just a lot of interview questions printed out on paper that had to go out and, and manually pick out. So there's such advancements happening and making your interview more robust is of course one of the ways in which we are going to think about improving the talent density of your business. I mean, if you can increase the quality of the people coming in or the accuracy of the people coming in, that's got to be the ways in which we can improve what that is. Brilliant stuff, Colleen. And you could, everyone could check this out on Lavalier AI, I believe is the correct.
- [23:26]
C
Yeah. If you want, if you want a more in depth demo or just want to learn more, there's a ton of information out there. You know, I, I'm really excited about what we've built and would love to show you more.
- [23:40]
A
Yeah, fantastic stuff. Well done on this. I'd love to see sort of this innovation coming from all kinds of different businesses, but especially for a brand that's close to my heart, like Textio is good stuff. Okay, well, let's get on with the conversation as the three of us are on screen. I want to bring on some of our guests here as we go. I just want to talk about talent density for a moment because this felt like a new term about maybe two years or so ago. I think it was one of the, one of the tech companies that mentioned time density in a viral post and everyone was saying, oh yeah, I get what they this is. And then a couple of critics, myself included in my most cynical moment, said, hang on, is isn't this just another version of a player hiring? You know, we just got to get a players in. And does that not have all kinds of connotations? We don't like. And then I did a bit of research going back and I thought, hang on, is this just another retread of the war for talent? And McKinsey came out with, you know, the idea that 20% of your employees provide 80% of the value, so should you not try and like nudge that up to 21% and of these types of people and that would have tremendous outcomes for your business Anyway, what are your thoughts on this, Adam Gordon? You were shaking your head vigorously on some of those things. So how do you describe talent density? What is it to you?
- [24:58]
B
Well, it's not a player talent because, for example, the world's very best actuary is likely to be an incredibly analytical genius. But that doesn't mean that they can stock shelves faster than, you know, most other people. For example, talent density is about somebody's or an organization's ability to be able to get a lot done because they've got so many people who can multi, who are multi skilled, can multitask, can turn their hand to lots of different things and can accomplish a lot of tasks. So, and my personal belief on this is we're moving towards a world in the next few years where major companies have got less full time permanent employees. They're relying a lot more on contingent third party scope of work, etc to get their tasks done. But a very high percentage of the people who they are employing are more generalist problem solvers that can just get stuff done than they are deep subject matter experts on a particular technical niche. And I use my own company as I'm no talent expert incidentally in saying this caveat. But if I take my own company as an example, I've mentioned this before, there's only three people in the business, but all three of us can do about six, eight different jobs. So we're very, very flexible and we're very task focused. And you can scale that up to a large organization for sure if you've got a culture of talent density.
- [26:30]
A
All right, so I think you've added a couple of wrinkles to this, Adam, which I didn't realize you would do. So basically you're saying talent density refers actually to a more multidisciplinary person. Like, you know, it's someone who's more flexible, more capable, can do more things at high level and you need more of those types of folks. So generalist superworkers is the nuance you're adding into this. Very good. Manjuri and Kim, great to see you both. I think you're both on mute I don't know why that is. I wonder whether you can get off mute. Yes, I think you're off now. Brilliant. Let's do some intros real quick before we get Colleen's take on this. But Manjuri, what's your Quickly introduce yourself. Who are you? What is you do?
- [27:14]
D
Hey Hong. Happy to be back. I think this is second in the months or at least in the last four weeks so. Hi everyone here. Colleen, a big fan of text IO used it in my Zalando days. Implemented in OLX as well. Used to be a very very big fan of the product. I'm Manjari, I head people and culture for global go to market organization for Miro. I think Miro doesn't need any introduction here. Everybody knows and I'm based in Berlin and I take care of global remit. I've been in different fields of expertise and talent acquisition in HR and business. Partnering in org design and talent density is a very interesting topic and I'm looking forward to chatting on it.
- [28:01]
A
Great stuff Manjuri. Always welcome back. Shared Manjuri's link on the chat stream there. Make sure you connect with her. Kim Stringer, Great to see you Kim. Been a while. Wonderful to see you on Brain Food Live. Why don't you quickly introduce yourself? Who are you? What is you do?
- [28:14]
E
Hi, I'm Kim. I come from a HR perspective perspective I guess the people leadership perspective. I work with many tech scale ups and internationally and I do a lot of talent development and org leadership and change and more recently the performance management side which is where the talent management and the talent density kind of aligns with performance management because I would say in the last five, eight years that's actually when the performance management of the team and the talent within the organization is of the utmost importance and I think that muscle hasn't really been used before when there was loads of money flowing around from the VCs and the PE and now you know, people being a bit more considered and careful about the money and where they're spending their money and where they're paying their big salaries. So the talent development is more interesting and more topical. It's more important. I think the CEOs and the C levels are paying far more attention to it and so talent density really is important because I don't know, you know, high flying top talent want to work with those high flying other top talent and they will get frustrated with people who are not on the same level as them.
- [29:33]
A
Yeah, very interesting to get into the the economics of a Kim it's basically because it's all part of this, I guess this last post pandemic era, probably now running into four years. We've had to do more for less. We've had higher cost of running a business. We've had economic, basically slow anemic economic growth. If you look at what World Bank, IMF and everyone else is talking about, and we've had increase of cost of capital, so lots of different things happening, which is quite causing companies that have to operate more lean. Therefore you can't just like hyperscale your way in. You've got to actually be a lot more selective and, and build up your talent density. Okay, Colleen, I gotta bring you in on this because using your background in, in hiring as well, you've thought about this. What's your description of talent density? I mean, I don't mind it being a retread of something we've used before. I think sometimes things do need a rebrand. But is it substantively different from, you know, just hiring better people, or is it substantively different from. Or is it the company that the up or out type of culture in the 1980s where, you know, one of the ways to increase talent density was, you know, make sure that we get rid of people that weren't moving on a certain pace or trajectory. Is it different from that in any way? If so what if it isn't, then, then, then what is it? And if it is the same, then what justifies the rebrand?
- [31:08]
C
Yeah, I don't feel like it's all that. I don't. You know, I think what Adam said around, you have to have people who are more flexible and more generalist is, is probably the right, you know, modifier of it to bring it, you know, out of the 80s and into where we are now. And especially in the context of AI, you know, when we look at what people say are the top skills that they want to hire for right now, it's ability to deal with ambiguity, being a self starter, you know, curiosity. And I hear that from all the TA leaders that I talk with as well in terms of what makes the best recruiter is sort of, you know, being able to think through how they can, you know, not only impact the specific things that they're working on with their day to day role, but how they can make the overall system better. So I don't think the overall concept is new. I just think that some of the nuances around what you define as being, you know, the high quality talent have evolved.
- [32:18]
A
Yeah, I want to touch on this Idea of like getting getting rid of people as well. I know it's an uncomfortable thing. Probably my terminology needs to be corrected there as well. But one of the things you can describe in terms of what density is and if we just think about the denseness of it, you can keep the same number of people that are high quality, but you can increase the density simply by reducing the people that aren't that level of quality. And this forces us to talk a little bit about sort of what our culture should be and you know, this high performance culture and so on. Manjiri, go to you on this. What's your take on it? Miro, obviously high profile company, a lot of people would, would say market leading business, surely they have a high performance culture as well. Do you have an internal sort of vibe? How do, how do you guys understand town density with how it marries with high performance?
- [33:11]
D
The very interesting question and talent density, I think it's not just a recruiting strategy, it's overall a business strategy. And all the context that you provided earlier on the economics of it, you have most tech companies, the highest cost is actually staff cost. So you need to ensure that you have higher caliber people, people are more capable to deliver the business results. In Miro. And this is also attuned to different organizations. For example, when you look at talent dense, you know, people who are coming in or the entire density, when you talk about the organization or the lot of people that you have, it's ask 10 people, they'll have different definitions to it. So it's super important for an organization to first define what does, you know, what does talent density even mean for them. So for example, in Miro we couldn't settle on what was the, what was the definition about a year ago? What is the talent that actually drives us forward in the environment that we are in, in a very super, you know, kind of competitive SaaS market, et cetera. That's where our founder sat down and he wrote something which we call as Miro DNA. And that's the mirror near DNA that takes you forward in our organization, that pivots the organization forward. And these are things pretty similar to what Colleen said, but unique to our perspective. We're a very fast paced organization. Decisions change. We need people who are resilient. We also need people who can get things done. We need a T shaped talent when it comes to functions, functional skills, etc. We also need somebody who'll raise their hand up and take on a project and drive it through, etc. So we have this DNA that Sits as the identifier which we use through the hiring process, also through the onboarding sharpening process and into the talent management process. Talking about these pyramid refreshes which most organizations and having worked with Accenture was a very common thing on refreshing your pyramid every performance cycle. And there would be 5 to 10% of underperformers as such who would be moving on from the organization. However, we see it differently in Miro. We see an opportunity and this is what we use especially in our go to market organization. On the talent density side is for managers. Managers are the custodians of talent density. They are the ones who need to really work on some what we call as the inspect, coach and inspire model where you just don't look at moving somebody out who are not considered to be the right fit or they're not performing up to the mark, but also ensuring that you catch that underperformance at the right time and are able to coach that underperformance up. And that's. That's where you can build that talent density for the organization. You don't always need to move. There could be some aspects, yes, maybe not the right hire or the right fit etc. That is possible. But in most cases you would actually work through to develop that person and coach that person up. The second interesting part home here is earlier we used to always think about A players and you know, the smartest people in the room, etc. And talk in those terms and then call that okay. If you have the A players you can mark 20% or 25% of your talent pool as a players, then your talent dense organization doesn't work like that. It's actually how can you make an environment where almost everybody can become a good decision maker, can create that multiplier effect and can work and collaborate with others in a. In a. In a very smooth fashion. And a lot of organizations forget that this part of the role. They only heavily index on hiring that giant Persona. And then we see so many of these giant Personas who were great talents in their previous organizations suddenly come and shrink in certain organizations. So that environment is also needed to build up your talent density as such.
- [37:18]
A
Yeah, really, really interesting. It hadn't even occurred to me actually Manjuri, that a talent density could be performed or increasing talent density could be performed without hiring anybody. Like you could just improve the people that you have right. And work towards that either reposition them, upskill them, support them more with technology, whatever it might be. So maybe that's one of the things I underestimated because again, I thought it purely on that talent acquisition side of it, but much more sophisticated that way. Kim Stringer how do we measure talent density? We're talking about this, that's great. But where, how do we do the benchmark? Like a lot of CEOs been wandering around there saying, yeah, we're a talent dense business. How does that person know that? Other than gut feel? I mean.
- [38:04]
E
Yeah, so we do. In most of my clients I'm an HR consultant, so I work with the leadership team to really challenge them on. And the definition I think Manjuri mentioned about the definition I think is so important so that all the leadership team agree on what their definition of the high talent is. Because if that's all confused and they disagree and there's kind of biases towards like, you know, someone who's maybe a great, full of confidence, but actually a lot of BS as well. Like, you know, that happens a lot and frustrates the business as well. We. So I did that old sky and it's a bit controversial, but the nine box grid, and that's a great calibration because it gets people in a room and it gets people comparing who they think the high potential, high performers are, who's in that top right hand corner and who needs to be managed out. And then obviously we break it down into numbers and then that actually goes into a scoreboard, scorecard because you just give numbers to each of it. And so at the end that feeds into the salary review and bonuses, etc. So even at the beginning it's a nice, nice pretty colorful yellow, red and amber line box and it in the end it goes into numbers, goes into a spreadsheet.
- [39:27]
A
Yeah. So the key thing I'm learning here is that you bench it against who are already the high performers in your business like they may. And I think all of us would probably know intuitively, instantly, in fact, fact, who those people are. If you said in your team who are the best people in your team, boom, they're going to appear. No, Tim Kim, you're not happy with that?
- [39:47]
E
Well, sometimes some departments are more positive than other departments. So in my experience. So the sales and marketing team are often really, really positive about everybody, everybody financing tech team, people a bit more cynical and negative and it's like they're never satisfied with people, you know, so that's why the calibration is so important. And I remember one marketing director was saying, why is my person never in that top right box? Why is my person never, you know, and it's like, well, you're not doing it properly, you know, because. And so I think the initial stages, those first few years, getting that calibration right is so important. It's really important because the leadership team have to agree. If the leadership team don't agree and they're not behind it, it's going to be really hard for everyone else to know what that talent density and the high caliber is. And the other thing I just want to throw in there is more. Recently I've been working with a PE company and the value creation piece for me is really important. So that value creation plan from a people perspective is really important. And so whether someone is strategic, can deal with change management, can make those tough decisions, can actually be included within the succession planning for the next stage. Are they capable? Even if not now, but if we gave them a project, we gave them a second or whatever, can they move up to the next step? And for me, that is a measure as well. Are they able? And that talent piece. So it's a potential, it's just as important for a fast growing company.
- [41:19]
A
Yeah. And it's possible to be a very good performer that has limited potential. You know, someone who's just brilliant at this certain task or this really important thing that you've got to be done doing. But they may just be very focused on this and they don't have the other skills required to move into different spaces.
- [41:39]
E
And they don't want to lead a team. They're an IC and they want to stay in as IC and they don't want to lead and do that. Those difficult conversations and performance manage.
- [41:51]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Open question for everyone here on panel. If we have, let's say, identified a bunch of people that are high performers or, you know, just, we know they're just brilliant at this job. How do we, is the idea to try and model their behaviors? Like, do we try and like extract behaviors from these people and then say, right, we want more of these behaviors. Two things we're going to do, we're going to encourage these behaviors, incentivize them somehow within the, within other people. And then from an assessment point of view, we're going to try and actively try and look for signals for these folks. Is that the general format of trying to, you know, move it to action when it comes down to increasing talent density. Anybody want to come in?
- [42:39]
D
I think, yeah, a couple of different. And this is also interesting. A lot of folks are interested. We hear this from our hiring managers and our recruiting team have a big challenge Here when hiring managers always look for people who can, you know, literally run the race from day one and are looking at 110% of matching with what they want on the job description, etc. And this is. And what they don't think about is how do you hire that 80% and then get them to the 100% and also mold that, mold those behaviors there. When we look at our high performers, if I may call them or, or key talent in Miro we call them key talent, there are certain behaviors that they exemplify and when we talk to them in stay interviews, of course the you know, effort to retain them, some of the things that really stand out are number one, they want to make, they want autonomy so they want to make their own decisions. They just don't want to be a part of the decision. Second, when a decision is made probably by the C suite or a senior level, they want the context and the narrative and also want to be a part of the narrative that really goes down and then trickles down. So either you have. So that's, that's one second. They want really complex problems to solve. They just don't want to go into an execution. I tell you, this is to be done and execute. No, they want the complex problems to be solved for the, for the organization and clear swim lanes lesser although they are able to handle ambiguity but not chaos. Chaos is where you'll see a lot of frustration coming even from the top performers. So you need to clear the swim lanes, you need to ensure that that person's or that role's remits are pretty, pretty clear. So a couple of these things stand out. It is so interesting that when we talk about people joining and leaving, compensation is usually put up as the biggest element here. But when we have these day interviews, apart from one or two people who have probably genuine concerns and then we look at their comp, most of them actually talk about these aspects and also their leaders behavior, their Skip leaders behavior, etc. And how they are getting the platform. So when we are looking at them, we try to provide opportunities. Number one is those listening and conversational opportunities with the C suite bringing them into decisions. Also an example with this Miro DNA what would usually happen when our founder comes up with the mirror DNA? Of course he shares with the XLT leaders who are C suite minus one. But he did something very different. He actually launched Walk the Talk series along with a set of high performing individuals in the organization and literally reached out for their inputs as well into the mirror DNA. And this was kind of giving an inform signal that hey, this is for you to contribute as well. So show up providing examples. We have these Miro, you're awesome or Mironiya, you're awesome channel where you exemplify these behaviors. Somebody went in and closed an exceptional deal. Then you will actually talk about the behaviors that they exemplified through the process. Not just their amount and the quantity that was closed or the number of years that was closed on the deal. So these are certain steps to take of course. Also giving them external opportunities when we go for our conferences and even our own flagship conference Canvas, to be in front of audience, to be in front of prospective clients, etc. So this is, this is something super interesting. The other thing that we have started measuring that helps us a bit more and we don't have all the answers. We're still there. We, we are still, you know, kind of getting there. It's a very fast paced company there. But what really helps us is recent build on culture Ramp culture amp now just doesn't give you an engagement score. It actually gives you a performance prediction and performance confidence. That means it gives us a quadrant where you can see that and you can filter it by your key talent and see if your key talent is, is actually engaged and is confident about the performance of your organization. So they will perform in that, in that view, are they engaged and skeptical about the performance of the organization? That means the vision is not clear where you're going, it's not clear, etc. Or they are slightly there but disengage, etc. So you actually know where to pinpoint and where to treat your go back and provide that TLC to your key talent with this key talent. It's also too kind of superbly important to know that they're not going to stay with you forever unless you can provide those growth opportunities. And like Kim said, it's not just growth in terms of give them a team, it's also growth in terms of, you know, more projects, scope, etc. Unless you can give them that, they will step into something going forward. So ensure that they can create a succession for them is also super, super important because they, there'll be a point where they grow larger than your organization to move forward.
- [47:52]
A
Yeah. And you introducing that dynamism is important because human beings do change of course. You know, we're not just snapshots and fungible. We. I guess it might be possible to become a top talent. Right. But it may also be possible to, to recede from that. I guess. I mean There'll be times when your performance degrades, you get bored, something happens in your life, you get tapped up elsewhere, your attention goes. You may be very talented, but you may fall out of that top performer bracket for various reasons. Colleen, I think you wanted to say something.
- [48:27]
C
Yeah, there's a couple things that came to mind. You know, one of the, one of the things we've looked at in the past is the performance review cycle. And our research showed that, you know, your top performers get a fraction of the feedback as your low performers. And so there's a, Excuse me. There's a thing here too, where our managers can often just assume that because somebody is doing really well, we don't need to give them as much feedback as we give to other folks. And the reality is, is that people who are high performers are also, you know, very thirsty for feedback and knowledge and ways to improve. To Manjari's point about, they want a path for, for succession and growth within the organization. And we often forget that we, we end up, managers end up spending a disproportionate amount of their time and energy on trying to, you know, deal. Like just think about practically when someone's on a pip, how much time a manager has to spend on a, that type of work versus they're working with their high performers. The high performers are sort of off and that, and that's good. Right. But at the same time, there's some, just very basic things that I think we don't, we don't often think about. And if you want to improve talent density, like, you know, you learn this when you're, when you go through executive coaching or any type of, this is like, focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses. And sometimes I think that we forget that, um, and that can be a really, you know, that's a thing that I, I, I see take away from talent density. When you're spending too much time on trying to get, you know, coach people up versus spending time on your high performers, they just leave.
- [50:15]
A
Really interesting observation, Colleen. I'm reminded of school kids, to be honest. You know, where the troublesome kids, let's say, may, may absorb a huge amount of the teacher's time, whereas, you know, the kids are doing really well. Maybe they get neglected simply because they're not a trouble in the class, but perhaps you're neglecting their potential, neglecting their growth by not giving them attention. But that's a conundrum. Like, you got a limited amount of time, like, how do we play that? Adam Gordon, you got a thought on this, do we brutally just say, look, we've got to accelerate the in and out type of conversation and not waste the manager's time, not waste anybody's time. What are your thoughts?
- [50:55]
B
I mean, certainly it's great that we're having this conversation because as I said earlier, I believe this is the way that naturally companies are going to be going anyway because of how I surmise that the organizational structure is going to look like. But if we've got more people who are task focused and accountable for completing things, then the organization builds faster. And I'm going to be really frank as well. The larger an organization is often the more this is going to be inhumane. This is not the right audience for me to say it, but there's often a lot of people that just hide and don't do anything. In some of the biggest companies, like the biggest utilities companies and banks and stuff like that, there's loads of people sitting and whole teams of people. You don't even know what they're doing all day. So I know that's inhumane what I just said, but I think that is true. It is true. And it just develops a more dynamic culture that the people that are there to actually get stuff done want to be part of. And does this mean there's going to be a real, you know, blue water between the companies that can accelerate with this type of approach and the people that can't? This is where the talent and HR world can really start to make a big impact on organizational enhancement.
- [52:23]
D
Adam, you've actually said something super, super cool. Because I think the whole process of doing a performance cycle and a calibration once a year, that doesn't work anymore. At the pace and the change that we live in, it has to be something like a quarterly conversation where you can actually go into, through talent, inside circle, or look at all your talent. And that's where the point comes in. Who's doing what, who's delivering what, who's covering what, and so and so forth. This also kind of brings up the. And this is not just big organizations, even small organizations, you have imposters who have the hero syndrome and they come in and jump in, but then they disappear when something actually goes wrong. But they're the louder people, so everybody sees them, so think that they are the top talent. When you sit down at a table, calibrate with peer feedback, calibrate with leaders feedback, even sometimes client feedback, then you can really see, okay, who's delivering water. Somebody super quiet might be your key talent. Who doesn't surface up and we need to do this in a regular basis. And this also somehow creates pressure on managers to keep their feedback like Colleen said. Right. Feedback and this one on ones on a, on a regular basis too, because they're more accountable. They have to respond to what is their team doing and delivering at a bigger or faster cadence than that one year. You don't even know what happens. You're probably your business strategy changed twice or thrice in that one year and then you're looking at somebody's performance as a, as a lack factor.
- [53:59]
A
Yeah, it's an opportune time to bring in survey, of course, because we're in a situation where artificial intelligence might actually really support business to better understand individual performance, be better at attribution. You've seen companies being very keen, particularly the AI first companies, be very keen to get every sort of bit of metadata piped into a single system such that you can use artificial intelligence to start spotting things like drop offs of engagement or increases of interest or increases of output put and so on. So are we heading towards a future where like we're going to get more accurate at understanding talent density? So the ambiguity that exists currently in slightly bigger organizations and how people can hide behind ambiguity, that's going to disappear, such that we'll get much more clarity as to who's contributing what and I guess might that just automatically translate into fastest decisions as to who you spend time with and who you decide to let go? I have a think about this before you answer, because I realize we're really close to the end of time, but we have to make sure, of course, that before we go off air, folks, that everyone who is involved in this conversation or paying attention to this conversation is still able to do so even if we go off air, we've got a ton of people watching this, of course. And if you care about talent density and you want to continue the conversation with those folks, why don't you make an opportunity to connect with them on LinkedIn immediately right now? So grab your LinkedIn URL, share it in the chat stream. If you're watching this on Proudcast, if you're watching this on any of the LinkedIn lives out there, just do the same thing. Grab your LinkedIn URL, share it in a comment, and then just connect with everyone else who's done the same thing. Worst case scenario is you're going to walk away with a dozen more people in industry that care about this topic and you might want to just take an offline conversation with those folks okay, going back to this AI and its impact on talent density, is it going to make us better? Firstly, there's two ways, two questions I want to answer here. Number one, is it going to help managers help companies become more talent dense because we'll get faster marker information. And then the second question I want to ask everyone is what is the, what does it mean when you've got AI enabled people and perhaps productivity suddenly suddenly spikes because this person's had a breakthrough moment and then suddenly they look as if they're high outputters and high quality. But you know, two months ago they were actually a laggard. Doesn't that cause us to have a little bit of a problem with our decision making what talent density is? So number one, is it going to help us get faster and better at understanding our level of talent density? Colleen Gallagher
- [56:50]
C
Yes, I think it will and it's going to take some time. I think there's this expectation that we're all of a sudden going to be in the next 12 to 18 months we're going to have it all figured out because AI is going to help us. And I think it's still, it's still the human connection that you have to deal with. And Manjuri, when you were saying hiring managers want to, you know, 110% person and not an 80 out of 100%. I think, you know, and, and selfishly I, I believe lavalier helps with this. But part of the reason we created is because I think it can help with this. It's not the other way around. Right. It's like one of the thing I, the thing, the reason I think some people struggle with that is they don't know where the gaps are with much clarity. They don't really know exactly where the sky skill gaps or the, you know, those types of gaps are when they, when they bring someone into the organization. And so they also don't know where to focus the growth opportunities and learnings for those folks. And I do think with AI you can get more clarity into those types of things. You can make it easier for people to self report on where they think they have strengths and weaknesses. I was talking to a, a VP of TA at a very large organization this week and one of the things he was saying is like, you know, they get a third of their roles filled within their internal hires but they only have 15 to 20% of people who have actually gone into workday and given any insight into their own skills and things like that. And it's all self reported. So it's really hard to follow and understand. So I do think there's an opportunity with AI to have, you know, better reporting around some of those things, but it's going to take time.
- [58:38]
A
Yeah, very interesting. What's your take on AI on sort of having a negative effect from an observational point of view? Because talent density, suddenly people's performance and output might, might change radically based on the latest model that's been rolled out or the latest feature that's come out. Like, how do we, does it disrupt our ability to measure talent density? Your view on that, Colleen,
- [59:11]
C
In terms of like introducing like bias to it,
- [59:14]
A
is that what you're, no, I mean basically like let's say we measured someone's performance based on a certain set of parameters, pre AI. You know, we might understand a salesperson to do X amount of deals in this amount of time. We might, the sort of, our measures probably will not keep pace with the innovation rate of AI. And so that individual might suddenly exceed their capability with some breakthrough on artificial intelligence far beyond everyone else's sort of capabilities in the team. And then would that then disrupt how we consider sort of CAP capability? Because, you know, maybe the everyone else is just a month behind, a day behind. How do we, how do we actually know who's actually good? I guess is the question.
- [60:01]
C
Yeah, I, I, I, I, I could see that be a challenge. I don't know that I have a, a fully formed answer on that right now, but I do think, I, I think what the hope is is you can start seeing why that person is blowing other folks out of the water and, and have more clarity around that to help improve the other folks around them. I think that's the hope. I do think there are still, you know, mechanisms that need to be put in place to identify those things in a, in a more accurate way.
- [60:34]
A
Yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be both plus and minus when it comes down to analytics. I think it's going to help, help and hinder your thoughts on that. Manjuri. I mean, have you, have you, you're probably seeing it in Miro, aren't you, where there's certain people that are suddenly becoming super productive, productive, quote, unquote, at least super outputters, you know, individually they seem to be exceeding what they're doing. And does that then disrupt how we think about talent density? Like do they fall in and out of that bracket based on their capabilities with AI?
- [61:07]
D
So interestingly, Hong, the people who are maxing on AI using it in a productive sense are Mostly a part of the key talent cohort. That's the interesting thing. Second, we've tried to look at the performance side and definitions for hypos on AI with our AI fluency rubric and how they are implementing it on the external side as well as on the internal side. We haven't found direct correlation between somebody maxing out their tokens and really performing super, super high. So I think we are still to get there and also set definitions for that. I think things that will come up in the future and future would be soon, four to six months in our overall industry, not just meo number one, people who will be considered key talent from the AI side would be people who make that build, borrow or buy decision as well. With a lot of things that you can build for yourself. Doesn't mean that an account executive sits and starts building lovable websites. No, we don't want them to, we still want them to go and sell. So that's, that's one of the decisions. And what is already available? What can you borrow? What, what is it that you will buy? The third thing will be the ROI on AI. It's, it's costly. Although we've distributed about per month to Every employee, all 1600 employees have a thousand Claude tokens per month. But going forward it's going to be very expensive. So we want to see who's maxing these out and who's actually using it for value. And that boils down to your functional expertise because if you know what you're doing, you can reach a conclusion in six prompts or seven prompts. But if you don't know what you're doing, you'll take 100 prompts to do it. So that will become a super, super heavy differentiator in the future.
- [62:58]
A
Very, very interesting. Kim, I'm going to ask you the same questions real quick. What are your thoughts on those two things? AI, how is it going to help us sort of do the increased talent density and might it confuse us in some way?
- [63:12]
E
Well, I think we could use it to help us give feedback. And it's something that Colleen mentioned actually, and it reminded me of generational feedback. And I think the newer generation, the younger generation, actually excited, expect more feedback. You know that because they've been grown up with that. Whereas at the sea levels who are older, like maybe me and above, you know, my age and above, like we just got on with it, you don't get any feedback, you just get on with it without much feedback at all. And then you expect the middle managers to Also just get on with it. But maybe they can't. Maybe they need more feedback. So I think using AI you could actually do a, you know, a character of a certain age that wants more feedback and actually really use that in a positive way. Because I think there is this generational gap on how to manage which hasn't really been addressed. We all would like we have there's like five different generations at the moment in the workplace and I think that is a big challenge at the moment from a cultural point of view. So I think we could definitely use AI for that and that will help with the talent density to encourage and boost that talent density and concentration
- [64:24]
C
doesn't
- [64:24]
D
help are the clunky hriss that we use. So I think, you know, I'll gather a lot of love for my hate for workday here. It is absolutely useless when it comes to managers helping out in increasing talent density. So that's where AI can help us.
- [64:43]
A
You know what, tooling, maybe that's a part two for us. Like what, how, how is tooling potentially central to increasing talent density? We know we need to monitor it. I mean in a small team you could just probably do it by simply being proximate. But when your business becomes bigger than what everyone can fit in a single room, you're going to lose visibility. You need to find another way to do it. We haven't even talked about distributed businesses. How do you talent density? There's what about ones that are remotely distributed? Even more interesting. So lots of questions unanswered on this, but that's the perfect way to leave a conversation. Of course it gives us scope to have a second and a follow up. Okay, that's it folks.
- [65:21]
B
We're over time.
- [65:22]
A
Thanks everyone for watching. Thanks, Kim Stringer, Manjuri Sina, Colleen Gallagher for joining the panel. Adam Gordon, thanks for being co host today. Thanks for watching everybody. If you're interested in conversations like this, make sure you follow the channel on Crowdcast. Do this every Friday. If you're watching this on LinkedIn, follow my page there as well because I live stream there as every week as well. Okay, that's about it everyone. Have a good weekend everybody. We'll see you next time.
- [65:49]
E
Thank you. Bye bye, bye bye.