Why Recruitment Is Shifting Fast\n

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to Retained Search, the podcast, where we lift the lid on what it's really like to work retained, discuss the stories we've gathered along the way, and give you all a peek behind the scenes of our amazing community and how they're getting ahead. Hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the Retain Search Show. Today's conversation is for recruitment business owners and search leaders who know that the market is changing and changing quite quickly. AI is changing delivery, client expectations are changing. The businesses that thrive over the next few years will be the ones that evolve their value. And Adrian Beyer is someone who's been thinking deeply and executing very proactively on this about where recruitment automation and commercial strategy are heading. So this should be a really timely conversation for those of you that are listening. So, Adrian, before we get into the future of the industry, which we were just starting to touch on before we started, so um, I'm excited about getting into it. What are you most energized by in your work right now?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

Well, as you said, the top of topic of the uh the conversation, I think change management is what I'm mostly energize, which sounds really boring and prehistoric, but um the whole AI world is is not gonna be defined. I I think um recruitment in general, if we take our industry, but I think any any consultancy, the winners are gonna be who can change the fastest, and therefore it's execution of change management rather than who picks the perfect AI um or automation that will define the winner. And actually, there's lots of you know, you you can read a huge amount of of stuff coming out lately around agility and around how how every company needs to manage that agility is the key.

From Transactions To Paid Value\n

SPEAKER_02 2:16

So nice. Uh such a good answer. And you've got quite a broad view of recruitment and technology, um, but also of commercial growth. Um, what are you seeing in the market right now that some agency leaders are underestimating?

SPEAKER_00 2:40

Um I don't know if it's underestimate, but I think I think people are so scared of it that they're in denial. And I think I see that that a lot. Um I think the reality is, but you you know, we were talking about this right before this, that the shift to value um and less transaction is happening, right? And that that is gonna be if you could if you could just broad brush what is the mass scale change or shift in in recruitment, is people are not gonna pay for the candidate or the transaction that happens, but people are gonna pay for the overall experience, the learnings they get, um, the auditing of the industry they get, the value of information of that specialist being able to really understand things and really change the problem rather than chucking another band-aid on the problem. Um, I think that shift at mass scale is happening because anything transactional is gonna be automated in AI. And and a lot of human touch is not even gonna be a part of that, which in two years' time, the people that are operating that way are probably not gonna blame it on AI and automation, but they're going to slowly say, Oh, they're dropping their pants. Why is it four grand now instead of 10? Well, it's four grand because companies like ours are gonna be able to make 25 placements, not five, in the same amount of time. Um, and that's where it's just gonna drastically hit, and that's where, as we were saying, you know, where you're going tamed is gonna be huge because um you're pulling yourself away, and then your interaction with your client becomes a consultant, not a salesperson, which gives you the opportunity to give broad value rather than a transaction. Um, so that an RPO is gonna continue to climb now, and that those two areas are are going to be this massive, massive shift, along with lots of different platforms that are moving into the more transactional space, brown space. Um, yeah, anyway, I could go all day of what I what I can do.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

Well, that's why we're here, that's why I brought you on. Um I just want to dive into that a bit deeper before I touch on something that a comment that you made there about um how you're doing what you're doing, which is just following on from that, then, where do you think traditional agencies were and who are most vulnerable over the next two to three years?

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Um I think uh when I was talking about agility, I think big businesses um are gonna lose a lot of historic competitive advantages they have. Because with with AI and automate and automation, um you're gonna have a lot of standardization of delivery, right? And the only difference is gonna be the human side, right? And the personal brand themselves, which is obviously personal branding and needs to be a major focus. Um, but when I talk about these big, huge businesses that historically have these crazy advantages because they've got this specialization all over the place. Well, information is getting cheaper by the day. Um, access to information is is ridiculous on what we can all do today that we couldn't do before. And so their databases are starting to drop, their specialization is starting to drop. I was just talking to somebody today that gone is the day that these companies um that you know their claim to fame as we, you know, are the market leaders in legal. Who gives a shit? Do you know? Do you know now it takes well? Uh sorry, I don't know if this uh okay. Nah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 6:42

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

That's the language. But um now in the in the information age, do you know that it takes two and a half weeks for you to inundate somebody with your message, and they forget a time that you didn't exist in their world. So no, no, it's it's crazy. Like, and then you you pull back and look at that science behind that and think about how much power we have. I mean, our one of our support structures that we do is we'll we'll build out the thousand contacts on that desk. We say, okay, you have exclusivity around these thousand contacts. We build out every single way of contacting that individual, including every social media platform they have. Before our new recruiter starts, we have seven touch points from four different platforms that we hit. Yeah? So then the day they start, it doesn't matter whether lead groups are specialists in that sector or not. Now they have the same competitive advantage of the 10-year legal recruitment firm as far as brand equity, I should say. I'm not saying all competitive advantages, but everybody can cheat. You know, it's just like everybody's using ChatGPT on tests, everyone can cheat. And so agility is all that matters now, and that's an example. So I just think that's why I'm so obsessed with change management right now, and how to skip the steps of change management when it takes 13 or 14 weeks to change behaviors, and you see all these massive conglomerates that don't have agility and won't because they've looked at prehistoric barriers to entry and that's their competitive advantage, and now all those are gone. What the hell are they gonna do? Why it's I know people talk about like you know, the um the lower end of the market that that went on you know volume-based, better price stuff like Hayes. They're saying, okay, Hayes is suffering. Agreed, it is, but to be fair, Hayes is so process driven, and maybe if anybody from Hayes listens, I think if I was Hayes, I'm sure they are way ahead of me on this stuff. But um they're so process driven, they're actually set up for clean data, which means they're very set up to shift to automation and shift to um AI and have everything ran. Um, sure, the people side of things, I think they probably need to really dissect their people on who gets to stay there and who doesn't, um, because they probably haven't focused on influence enough. But as far as their segmentation and you know processes of standardization, they're actually in a really clean place to transition into automation. Um so I think I think if they're pivoting that way, they might be okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Um anyway, yeah, I again Which brings me to the point that you made earlier about the firms who will see their competitors or see the industry um get more efficient and be uh able to be more um effective than them for a better value and will complain about prices going down, and that'll be the reason that they you know fail. Um and and in that you also said that firms like ours, um tell tell me a bit. I mean, I know a bit about your business, but I I don't know as much as I'd like to know, and our audience probably doesn't know a lot, if anything. What what does that mean, businesses like ours? Um okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

What were we when we started seven years ago, our lead group started seven years ago, um, we wanted to build something where I surrounded myself by the best recruiters. I wanted to spend years because I'm I'm fascinated with learning. And so, and to be honest, I recruited on a desk for two years before moving into management. So I never got beyond 430,000 in a year myself. So I I learned that through osmosis, I wanted to, you know, pretend I did a million dollars by working with people and helping them achieve their goals. Um, unfortunately, I don't get all the commission, but hey, I get I get the sense of accomplishment. Um, and so for five years we surrounded ourselves by these people, and I've studied on the process and what works and what doesn't, and the industry dynamics and the um the numbers around the average deal and and how quickly the timeline is of turn rates and all this stuff I was very fascinated with. Um, and ultimately, how do we take what makes a great value add, high-achieving recruiter? How can you standardize that with a support system? Now, with all this AI, we can do that so effectively. Um, and so we've made over the last two years a big shift to you wouldn't call a specialized in any way. We're certainly still along the lines of hey, growth through our recruiters. So I'm not, I've never been one that's like, hey, we want to keep adding people and we want to have growth by numbers and standardization of meteorocracy, making the you know, average 20k per head and um a typical growth strategy. We've always been, hey, if we can invest in our people, growth support around our people to propel billings, well, guess what? The company continues to grow through our people. Um, I think that is parallel really nicely in today's world where everybody's saying, all right, head counts. Um, we need to figure out now, with all of this cool leverage, how do we propel our people to continue to grow? Um, so that shifted to the last two years of us just building the standardized support system for every single person or a company, not specialized in one particular space, but understanding that person's abilities and what they naturally are going to work with as far as desk dynamics, and then build a structure around it. So we've been building this employee platform for I don't know, about 14 months. That's so much about change management.

SPEAKER_02 13:09

And so does that mean, Adrian? I think I I know what you're talking about because I've heard you speak, and when you say a support system, like what would that look like typically if you broke that down for one for one for all equations?

unknown 13:23

Sure.

Five Pillars Of Recruiter Support\n

Learning Loops: Influence And AI\n

SPEAKER_00 13:24

Yeah, no, I think I think um I think they okay when we talked about a haze, haze historically got very, very good at standardizing away to 200k per year per person, right? And they then they love that. Um I've been obsessed with how do you standardize 600k or a million dollars, right? And how do you you break that down and how do you build a sort of a sport system or like basically fragment every single key point of of somebody's job and say, hey, if you do all of these things, that equates to that number, right? And I think meteoric is very easy to replicate, um, greatness, very difficult because it doesn't work for everybody either. You already have to be pretty good at your job. So um I broke it down to probably because you can tell I'm my brain's all over the place. I broke it down into five different subcategories of support. What does that look like? Yeah. Um, first is is essentially process and outsourcing. So we have we have a company top or the outsource people that houses a huge amount of outsource headcounts that that drive top of funnel stuff into our into our consultants. Um I say outsourcing and process because process is the only way you can manage an autonomous headcount. Well, sorry, not the only way, the most effective way. Yeah. So you can manage them through having picture perfect little processes so that you don't have to teach they can just run this process. Um really, really important stab, because that then leads to AI automation. If you can build a process that effectively can be managed by somebody who's never done something before from a specialist 10 years in one industry, then it's also very easy to then take their wastage, look at it, and say, hey, this is too repetitive, you're too good for this resource. Let's automate it. Or now let's let's build out AI. We already have those processes, we already have the clean data behind it to be able to flow that through. Um, so those two kind of work hand in hand in that. Um, next step, and probably the key to any any growth organization is the learning behind it. Um and now, given the next two years of the transition we're gonna go through, we have two key pillars of learning. One is influence and one is AI. And I tell everybody in our organization that you better be on one of those journeys or you're obsolete. And I'm not warning you that I'm gonna fire you. I'm saying you're probably not gonna be here, you're probably not gonna get a job with another company. And if you do get a job with that company, that company's probably going bankrupt. And that's why they hired you because you don't have influencer AI. So, so either way, I'm I'm warning you one way or another, um, that there could be a problem, right? And and I know you're supposed to build psychological safety that probably goes against it, but I think I think that's you know a really harsh reality of what's coming. And so, and and if you think about it, when I draw it back to change management that I seem to be talking about so much, that is the first stage, right? The first stage of change management is fear, because fear is the biggest driver. So you have to make sure to start this change, people have to believe that they're gonna be missing out on something and and their life is gonna get dramatically worse, and that will be enough push for them to make that change. So I've been saying this to everybody every week for one year of choose AI or choose influence. If you're not on one of those journeys, you're going backwards in your life right now. Um, and you know, that's so when we tie that to learning every single week. We have AI, so they're doing, you know, our our AI implementation guy is training people on various prompts that work well in recruitment, various different, different AI strategies on how you can use different things, um, whatever that is, he's doing 30 minutes every week. And then I do 30 minutes influence training, where we take one tiny little little piece um of recruitment. I think this week was how do so last week was how do you stop candidates from ghosting you, particularly Gen Z, because we're always all annoyed with them. Um, this week was once they've ghosted you, how do you bring them back from the dead? Right? So it's each little tiny competency, and we take, you know, maybe it's a a 10-minute part of our process uh done you know over and over again, and we deep dive influence and how we can we can build those stages. So I think that learning aspect is is massive, especially in times of change like this, um, which is why we we really go quite hard on that. The operational infrastructure, that is everything the recruiter has no no control of. Um we want to perfect that so that hey, they have to worry about themselves, everything else ultimately, I guess, gets taken care of outside of that, if that makes sense. But I think once you pull back and look at each aspect um of that, um, and sorry, by the way, last is is purpose and environment. So have you ever heard the um uh performance comes from 50% environment, 50% individual um or the employee, right? So I always when I'm working with managers in internally or when I look at it myself, environment's such a controllable, and so you can and and a continued like your company will continue to grow if you just work on your environment, because that's your control, but you can't control the employee, right? The employees either going to be great or not, and if you try to control them, you're just wasting your time. What you can do is make a great environment, and a great employee, yeah, a great employee will thrive in that environment, and a great environment, you will see very quickly the wrong employee. Um, but you the environment continues, and so you it's helped you build a better environment for the next person to come in, so you're more ready. So I think I've kind of subbed it out in those. And when you talk about environment, I'm talking about everything, like building into growth. What 90% is a 90-10 split where people, people 90% of the time you want them to be productive, 10% learning. So in a 38-hour week, we want 34 hours where they're recruiting and four hours where they feel like they're changing and learning and you know, going. And we've kind of bottled all of our learning around that number. Um, so all of that stuff is is there alignment on values? Is there alignment on their long-term journey versus the companies? And do those, you know, do those match up really well? So it's all of that stuff. And then by looking at those five things, we've just deep dived all of that, and we've essentially built an employee platform with all of it. So all of it is driven through that employee platform. So anybody anywhere can log in and they're all looking at the same thing, the same support system, all built that way. And then we have these five different focuses simultaneously to continuously improve that support system.

SPEAKER_02 20:55

Are you enjoying this so far? Don't miss a single episode. Hit the subscribe button right now so you can be part of the conversation that's shaping the future of recruitment. So we dive really deep into the strategies, the stories, and the truth about retained search. So if you want to hear more about it, or you know someone else that needs to hear this, then share it with them. Right, let's get back to the good stuff.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Because I think that support system is what keeps people.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

And that is the rule of the work. It's so interesting and quite unusual. I work and meet a lot of recruitment businesses, and mostly a lot of them are the same as each other, or very similar. And it's so refreshing to uh talk about a different model. Tell me where has it come from? Like what experiences have have shaped this? Like what what what where what's most shaped the way you think and see recruitment and and businesses business in this way?

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Um question right how are we shaped or shaped from our individual learning? I uh um I have actually one of the learning components on on the platform we we give everybody master class subscription blinkist subscription and Harvard Business Review. So if I could say what shaped me, it's those three things because I have had a system for nine years that I listen to four Blinkists a day uh seven days a week for nine years. Blinkist is something that takes a book and condenses it into a 20 minute summary that speaks at you. And so because of that um that was kind of a foundation of my learning. And so and I've not been obsessed with just recruitment. I think actually when I started for the first five years I also KPI'd myself on meeting one business owner per week to learn from and then after the first couple of years I started to look at recruitment companies and I stopped meeting recruitment leaders because they all said the same thing. And so then I started joining different groups of different industries and and KPI myself on meeting one industry leader outside of recruitment now. So I could look at how do you guys view the world um relative to recruitment and which ones apply and which ones don't. So I think that's that's probably shaped my learning's tide of that mixed with my values as as far as trying to grow people right and being obsessed with that that growth is you know I get my drive from helping others achieve what they want. Because I don't really want anything. So um so I think that's probably those combined that learnings or those learnings matching up with your personal values and then me getting getting a cool being in a cool place where I get to build a company around my personal values therefore I get to um build a model that that plays into that so I'm more passionate about it. Right?

SPEAKER_02 24:23

I think all of that kind of my I realize all that's quite gray button so no it was it was a lovely answer.

Subscribe And Share Break\n

What Shaped The Model\n

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Yeah tell me looking back and uh from where you are now what were what were some of the smartest decisions that you made and what were some of the traps that you fell into uh smartest decisions was um sticking to the long-term plan of looking at high achievers and continuously building that because when I look at the company today and there's been been a lot of tough times over the last you know year and a half um of transition and just just stuff that we've gone through and we're kind of pivoted certain aspects of the business um I think that continuous focus of of growing people and consistent focus of like finding really high achieving people and not bending from that the main thing the main thing yeah yeah and even if even in boom times when it was hard to find anybody and you saw these other companies growing because they were adding piles of heads and they were all making money and was just sticking to well if they're not good enough we can't do it I think that was the smartest thing we did. But then the worst thing we did was was believing that we could do everything and diversifying like crazy and I think you know tie that to when I'm talking about the support system what I love about this employee platform is I now have one focus. That one focus can support so many different people in so many different ways but um you know while other companies are saying hey we're focused in you know temp within the healthcare space and then we're focused on perm and construction and we're focused on this and we're focused on this we are too but actually my one focus now is our support system for our employees and I don't focus on anything else even even when you look at the outsource people or Vidora which is an HR tech platform we have that that have taken up my time those are now integrated and built into our platform. Those are also offered in in RPO models through the platform because you can build two-sided platforms in our platform uh with an organization that we build into so then we can for stickiness drop in outsource heads to support our clients and build attempt bullies um or we can offer Vidora which is the HR tech for their low-level labor hire roles as far as training and and various things which is a whole nother thing we could get into but what I've done is condensed everything so I have one focus and every minute that I spend in a day is broadening that one moat rather than me having to choose where do I spend my time and I think I think that that's not one mistake. I made that mistake a hundred times over the last seven years.

SPEAKER_02 27:26

Yeah very great answer.

SPEAKER_00 27:34

Only like this week we've been requested to do special sessions on AI for about six different businesses um it's everywhere like from your pretty knowledgeable perspective what are the genuinely useful uh use cases versus the hype um there's a number like so I think firstly I don't think an individual ai product putting it into your your system there's very few that actually add to productivity unless you build an entire process from start to finish um because if if you don't minimize the friction which means unless you build it into the already daily flow of your recruiters it's proven now it's coming out you know the the change of it and all of that is actually outweighing the productivity that it adds to and therefore it's not helping society. That's why they're scared there's an AI boom and everybody's saying oh did we hype this up so but I think look the I think some of them that are are okay simplistic ones like let's say AI that takes uh the CV formatter and converts that into your branded stuff and and whatever that's a highly repetitive thing it's very very easy to sell the value of it so the change manager of it internally is simple um you're you're spitting out let's say if you do 100 CVs per per week and it takes your consultants 20 minutes and now it turns into 15 seconds um you're giving back so much time instantly and that's a really simple way of of shifting right I think that's that's a big one. When you look at um like Quill AI or or recview um those are where they're they automatically put interview notes into the system I think that in itself adds a tiny bit of value but then when you tie that to being able to standardize where interview notes go, being able to standardize that everybody does interview notes because it's easy and it works into you know when I said frictionless and it works into their workflow, that is incredibly powerful. So I don't think that AI to start with that AI is really a powerful change because people then are starting to um quantify the data and get organized data into their system um and and so just getting that where everybody's putting interview notes in the same way in the same place now you're starting to get real data that actually can be automated and workflows can be built out. So I think that can be an incredible start for people if we're looking for actions and I've just sold those two companies I bet you there's a bunch more I just know we we trialed those but I think those two can be incredibly helpful. I'd say those are the two biggest ones to execute quickly for people that are looking at the landscape.

Smart Bets And Costly Diversions\n

SPEAKER_02 30:45

So where if um AI used badly um what what's yeah what what mistakes do you see people make um where can it where can it actually be a hindrance and be damaging?

Useful AI Use Cases Versus Hype\n

SPEAKER_00 30:59

Yeah so look damaging is is yeah definitely when okay all we see it right all the generic brand posting on LinkedIn now because people are cheating and and you know building inauthic brands then so actually that is damaging like you look at it and say wow I mean we're what's Gary B's thing we're in the attention economy and you are you could not be more generic with your personal brand that is damaging right that's moving backwards. Like you are telling people I have nothing to give here and so I think that's a huge one like I it's slightly off what we were talking about but I think that's massive but then same with same with the cascade you know drip that you'd use where it'd be your LinkedIn your four different LinkedIn messages in a row hello are you still there? That crap. People do it these can be so effective if you build it with influence in mind and actually looking at the psychology of what you're writing they can be incredible but everybody is lazy. So people are using automation and AI as shortcuts and because they see it as shortcuts they don't want to put in the time investments involved and this is with any implementation of AI they don't want to put the time involved so you just which is why it's such a nightmare and it's not productive companies will just you know buy this new thing and say this is going to solve all your problems and then they don't do anything else. And then they get one person of 30 using it and wonder why they're losing money on it. Yes Adrian go on sorry that's cool what what where what are you most optimistic about about the future of recruitment of our industry um I am very optimistic in exactly what I was talking about where the barriers that and and the moats that these huge firms have built are are coming down. I love that because I realized that I represent a company but I love the idea of fragmentation beyond belief where there's one man bands everywhere and everybody just fights for themselves and it just is really fun. Like I I I think that is beautiful and I think in in society in general I think that is um so I'm really excited about that and that's gonna happen right that is happening. The power of personal brand is going through the roof right the power of all these cheap little ways of of building support is is rising every day. I think I'm really optimistic about that um I'm really optimistic in in the fact that this industry and I came from manufacturing before recruitment I joined recruitment to stay in this beautiful country in Australia 15 years ago and I looked at it thinking what the hell like we're charging so much money for so little value is what I what I saw it as which was the transactional side of recruitment and I started realizing okay well people just pay for that but like it's it was such a short term low amount of value that I was giving it was a transactional amount of value so there's no continuation in the relationship. So I am excited for the fact that RPO is going to rise and continue to rise like I said retainers are going to keep going up opportunity for this industry to transition to some other more mature industries where the specialist gets to be a specialist it's less about the transaction and more about the questions and more about the advice they can give on the overall strategy. I think that's really cool. I think if this industry is done right it just goes from recruitment and turns into you know the whole talent acquisition space and all the people that that rise up in that and I'm just really excited because that's been the part of the recruitment industry I've always loved.

SPEAKER_02 35:16

Oh I love that it's actually giving me goosebumps I love it. I love it so much. Yeah I've learned a lot about influence right so I'm trying high impact when I it's working it's working um before I let you go where can people follow your work Adrian or connect with you um like most recruiters LinkedIn great yeah I am you will see and hear a lot of me starting in four weeks.

SPEAKER_00 35:48

So four weeks I've I've got a very strict personal brand stuff that I'm gonna be on because I know this is so important and and uh all the shifts in in my organization will be done and so and I'll have a whole new new growth journey and exciting stuff to talk about. So um definitely definitely feel free to follow me on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02 36:11

Well wishing you all the best of everything in the world you deserve it we've been working together what about a year now we had a fantastic time in uh in Sydney at the conference and I hope there'll be many more of those for us in the future thank you so much for joining us Adrian it's been an absolute pleasure thanks for having me here thank you well that's another episode of Retrained Search the podcast in the bag thanks for listening to our wild tales, LinkedIn controversies and our top tips on how to sell and deliver retained search. Get involved in our next episode send in your questions and share your experiences with us by emailing podcast at retrainedsearch.com and don't be shy connect with us on LinkedIn and come and say hi we don't bite unless you're a track firm that is we want to say a special thank you to our retrained members for sharing what's working for them right now and innovating new ways to grow and evolve. It's an incredible community. If you're wondering what exactly we mean when we mention our communities well we have two separate programs. Our Search Foundation's program is for recruiters who want to learn how to sell and deliver retained search solutions consistently and we have our search mastery program that's for business leaders or owners already at 50% retained or more and looking to scale and grow and structure their search firm. We cap membership back to these programs to protect the integrity of the community. If you want access just talk to us okay thanks for listening we'll be back very soon with another episode of Retrain Search the podcast