Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep 11: How To Recruit Tech Talent

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Matt Buckland Head of Talent at Forward Partners.Tech recruitment is challenging and tech recruitment for start up companies is especially challenging. In this interview Matt and Matt discuss the approaches and techniques that are currently working in London’s Silicon Roundabout. Other topics covered include why you can’t replace a recruiter with an algorithm, Schrodinger’s (stuffed) cat and how to get 25k retweets on Twitter. Subcribe to this podcast in iTunes

Duration:: 22m
Broadcast on:: 05 May 2015
Audio Format:: other

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Matt Buckland Head of Talent at Forward Partners.

Tech recruitment is challenging and tech recruitment for start up companies is especially challenging. In this interview Matt and Matt discuss the approaches and techniques that are currently working in London’s Silicon Roundabout. Other topics covered include why you can’t replace a recruiter with an algorithm, Schrodinger’s (stuffed) cat and how to get 25k retweets on Twitter.

Subcribe to this podcast in iTunes

Support for this podcast comes from RecFest 2. RecFest 2 is the in-house recruitment festival of the summer with an incredible line-up of speakers and the biggest conversation of like-minded recruiters in the world. RecFest 2 is taking place on July the 9th aboard the HMS President in London. Get 50% off your ticket to the conversation right now by going to recfest2.com and using the discount code 'podcast'. There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind at all the ages of history. Hi and welcome to episode 11 of the Recreating Feature podcast. Tech recruitment is always a big discussion point in our industry. In this episode I talk to top Tech Recreater Matt Buckland about the challenges he faces and the techniques he uses to find the best talent for shortage-based tech startups. Recently Matt also briefly became the most famous Recruiter on Twitter with one of his tweets when massively viral, something we also talk about in the interview. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Feature podcast interview. Today I'm in sunny shortage and it is actually quite sunny. Talking to Matt Buckland from Forward Partners. Matt do you want to introduce yourself? Yeah sure my name is Matt as you just said. I am the head of talent for Forward Partners. We're a venture capital firm who invest in idea stage to kind of mid-seed levels. So it can be anything from just a PowerPoint and an idea right the way up to a company that already has some growth and we give them money. We also give them access to development, design, talent, marketing, expertise in-house in the hope that we can accelerate their growth but we're not an accelerator. Ah that's interesting. And we're sharing the room with a stuffed cat. Yes you have to tell us about a stuffed cat. So our room names are supposedly indicative of our culture and we are sort of in Schrödinger's box because it was the smallest room. Looks like a little box and we have a stuffed cat as you would in Schrödinger's box. Yeah. Fantastic. So there's lots of things I want to talk about and you know particularly you know tech recruitment and shortage and all that sort of stuff but knowing with you should start without talking about the recent events that occurred where you briefly became the most famous person on Twitter. Do you want us to talk history of what happens in your what happened in your own words? Yes certainly. So now I will just say that my celebrity has well and truly petered out completely. We are in full decline at the moment so it feels safe to talk about it. It was a normal day as the best summery start and I commute to work in from further east and had an altercation on the train with a chap who thought I had blocked him. He pushed past me and I said sorry in a very sort of sarcastic way and he suggested I might like to go and F myself. As I tweeted standard London commuting practice. Pretty much and nothing out of the ordinary for London commuting for people who aren't in London. That's kind of an everyday occurrence. Then later in the evening I had an interviewee coming in and it was surprising for me as the interviewee who came in was the same chap. Which was fun but before I went into the interview I thought this is hilarious and I tweeted it. In the back 20 past 5 went into the interview came out had 3,000 retweets. The next day it was about 5,000 and I think we're currently around 25,000 retweets so occasionally bubbles up again and then I go and wonder why that this happened. This is the most viral that I've ever beaten. So we went to BuzzFeed, the BBC, front page news of the BBC so there's even the Hebrew times and the China post. But what will pleasing to me obviously is to validate my own stereotypes. The most hatred for me came from the Daily Mail. So that is achieved by the Daily Mail? Absolutely. It was things like I wouldn't take the job anyway look at this expletive. So if I ever had that ego boost they soon kicked me in. It was in the media kind of everywhere. How many countries did you reach? 58 at the last count and I only know this because the best thing to come out of it has been this data set. So then the presentations on you know do you have to pay to grow to get this? No you don't. You just have to have something that resonates. And that's been the most fun for me. That and the collecting the insults. Yes, you've shown me some of the insults of errors and passes. People even emailing your boss to money you were fired. Yes, yes. We have a contact address for forward partners and one chap suggested that I was in the wrong and should be fired immediately. I know that he was going to call the police actually. Wow. Daily Mail reader of course. You can tell. Excellent. So there we are. That's how you're famous on Twitter. Probably unrepeatable I'd imagine in terms of being able to pull it off again. Or do you think you've got your next big viral campaign? The next one tweet. So the other things that I've done that have have been viral I think humour is the great. So they say that it's either anger or humour that you should use to really kind of get this stuff. It's hard to make people angry. Some people just generally are. Back to the Daily Mail. But that humour stuff I think that really goes quite viral. I did a there was another picture of Tim Berners-Lee and Shinging from AOL talking about their job type. AOL's digital profit. Yes. So the digital profit versus Tim Berners-Lee whose job title on on in the television appearance was web developer. Could argue it's the web developer. But put the two and then said next time you use a grandiose title on LinkedIn. Look at this. Yes. So it's funny for us and I thought a small world but even that was sort of six thousand retweets. Wow. And the knock on effect of that. So the audiences can be huge. Yeah and nothing. Yeah. But again not really related to me filling jobs. No which is going by next question. Actually we should probably talk about recruitment. So tech recruitment shortage a huge amount of stuff gets written about what it's like to recruit tech people what the problems are all that kind of stuff. What's it actually like? What's it like on the ground finding talent for your startups? It's tough. It is tough. For different reasons. So if you're a single founder looking for a co-founder it's normally the case you're looking for a techy to help you build something. Yeah. For those people without funding that's really hard. You'll go to meetups and you're basically begging ball at that point come and help me build something for the belief not for money not for anything else just for the belief. And that's kind of like the lower level but people do believe those and you know you do see those partnerships come in. I think the next level is people who receive some funding or have something that they're actually going paid to do at the moment and that gets you a little bit further so you can offer something. But there are people out there who just want to work in startups. So while it's tough to find them if you have a compelling message and you talk to them in the right way people will take salary cuts they will there is that belief in a bright new future or or the way of working that's very different. So in some cases Shoreditch and Silicon Roundabout as people call it has been quite a draw to pull those people out of corporates. Yeah. Because if you're a middling Java developer in an investment bank but you desperately want to work in Scala and you can call yourself a CTO what I wouldn't you want to do that particularly if it comes with greater responsibility greater autonomy all of those great things. I think that the civic around about things interesting because you know it did London for a long time and it's Old Street Roundabout and it's somewhat ugly state but you know I've been in meetups and things like that in New York where people are talking about it and desperate to work on Silicon Roundabout. It's from someone who's outside of the tech sector it's quite interesting in terms of the draw that it seems to have. Exactly and I think the reality is not that at all and the Silicon Roundabout thing is a joke it's almost like adding digital in front of something like there's an analog way of doing something yeah I just there isn't. So it's max of sort of the government's involvement in these things and when it wins votes they'll be very keen to do it when it doesn't win votes they're less keen so at the moment we're all very anti immigration coming up to the election well the Silicon Roundabout would love there to be more immigration of people they could employ of course and those sort of things there are odds with each other and so we would look for at the moment I would love there to be a lowering of the barriers yeah of qualified people coming in admittedly yeah I'm sure that people could get on board with but it would be very different message than you know we're going to close borders with more votes outside of our one mile square radius of old street randomness yeah absolutely absolutely in terms of sort of specific you know sort of specific technology issues what are the where are the biggest skill shortages in the moment if you think in the sector is that it's a type of developer what's the you know where's the current problem for most startups language is fashion okay so the language they use to to develop in becomes fashionable yeah so last year we were all Ruby it was really Ruby was everything and this year not at all so I'm not going to say something outlandish like Ruby doesn't scale because there are proofs that it does yeah but this this year it seems to be Python what we found in house forward is that the Python developers tend to be able they have a better understanding of the the bare bones of computer science so it's much more mathematical than perhaps Ruby is which is more you can be a very bad Ruby developer by stitching things together and it's very much more difficult to do that in Python what we look for is more the ability to be a polyglot so yes you are a Python dev but tomorrow we want you to build a mobile app and the next day we want you to do something different and then wherever language is in fashion exactly exactly exactly it's kind of more core skills yeah and it's kind of like your it's that language acquisition that we look for so if you're a if you're a Java developer a C# developer now you're probably not going to do that in a startup yeah but are all of your open source contributions in Scala, Lisp, Erlang and the hipster languages yeah then hell yeah that's great yeah it's funny actually how it develops something you know back in back in the early 2000s when I was running development teams you know finding people who could do HTML was it was a challenge so it's funny and how how do you go about finding these people how do you know how do you find these experience developers and you know brilliant audiences I've worked in massively large companies as well as sort of now these are recruit for companies in our portfolio which is one person the founder looking for a developer okay so how do you recruit for that how do you recruit for those smaller teams and you have to do so much more it's not a case of often they have no brand at all there is no brand often they don't even exist yet in any real form of course so you'll come and build this what is this it for those it's more about the opportunity so if you can offer for a developer a problem to solve so that can be scale or complexity of the issue yeah so offer someone some amazing machine learning algorithm to build and they'll want to do it whether there'll be any good at it is another question yeah but also then the scale of that so we have people who would be particularly interested in taking something which works for 10 users and making it scale to 1000 okay and that's an interesting problem to solve yeah for them in particular finding them mostly now the good recruitment in shortage and in the east end of London at large is done through community okay interesting it's done through meetups yeah and all this stuff and it's never explicit we kind of play this cloak and dagger game let's start up which is if you have an event space yeah you're you're you have a great benefit because you can invite people in and not explicitly sell to them we are hiring we are hiring instead yeah of course your meetup group can use my event space and they come in and then you go oh did you enjoy that yes don't worry what building are we in oh it's this building right and you just yes yes yes it's there's there's a there's a great kind of psychologically implicit cell that happens which is very different than come and work for me which is more old school yeah of course of course and it's really interesting and I'm I was in Silicon Valley three years ago doing some interviewing there and I remember four square was doing very much the same thing they were a very well-known brand there and they were just hosting they were hosting meetups and providing free beer and literally trying to get people to stay at the end and kind of work and I see it's done really badly because start up you have this certain set of stereotypical needs to quantify what a startup is so I've tried to run meetups at larger organizations and an events manager takes over and before you know instead of a bucket of beer and pizza you've got canopies yes and I'm like wow this feels very strange and then you get several bewildered looking devs looking around going I think I'm in the right place by very uncomfortable with this so it's interesting it's different yeah that's cool you mentioned machine learning algorithms now it's a big growing trend in 2015 to debate whether a recruiter can be replaced by an algorithm so you know I know you've got some particular views on this so can a recruiter be replaced by an algorithm or do what do you think no excellent end of question why do you think that okay so there is a growing need and it's been said by a lot of people that software will eat the world yeah which is largely true in a lot of cases so there are industries which are ripe for disruption and recruitment and its face looks like an industry which is ripe for disruption yeah there's the trope that recruitment is broken and people recite this like a mantra I'm going to solve it I'm going to solve it but the people who create the tools that are solving this problem are often solving for their own edge case so they'll be a developer normally and they'll build a tool which might look like a marketplace where recruiters can come and bid on their skill sets like that's great that solves for your edge case that is an edge case that that's not a generalization about the industry at large exactly and if it works in one company there's no guarantee it will work for another company yeah because you've satisfied the hiring criteria for one person it's like saying that everyone who works for company X is brilliant so we want to steal from company X I'm like no they're brilliant for company X they might not necessarily be brilliant for you then we have a kind of a really naive buyer base for HR tech in the industry at the moment they're not very technical and the word algorithm has become synonymous with problem solving yeah so oh it has an algorithm I will definitely use this absolutely and I think it works it appears to work for very very large numbers so the law of large numbers takes over which is we made 20 hires from this and we make 3 000 hires from this and what we forget in all that is that algorithms are biased too because they are built by a person yeah they are biasing for selection on things they opt to wait heavier than other things which no one really seems to ever comment on that an algorithm can be biased as well like if it's created by someone it has their biases and I think that's an interesting point I think that's because those people don't actually quite think about what it is they don't want it in so you end up with this kind of this weird construction that what the buyer base thinks an algorithm does and what the implementer of an algorithm thinks an algorithm is are completely different things and there's something in the semantics now which is oh we've got an algorithm that must be amazing and I sound like I'm quoting Ken Ward but oh it's got an algorithm you've got to have an algorithm and that's become the thing to have and it's well why is that the case and it's not because that is beneficial to the candidate being hired because often in these cases the candidate is reduced to a commodity which is the worst possible experience if ever you are using a tool and you can mass email someone or you're using software to distance yourself from the real human experience that's terrible you're not ordering toilet paper online that's a person you want to encourage to change jobs that's up there I mean you can move house you can get divorced or change jobs the most stressful things that's very different than just slide that very often in particularly in this sort of recruiting you do your you know it's not just changing jobs it's changing locations or countries or cities or you know it's moving house and an entire lifestyle yeah as well so so in the world of tech and in particularly in startup take a real gamble on this it's not like you're moving from one of the big four to the other big four and you can see your old office from your new desk which is literally the case on the fact that's very strange but oh look wave to your ex colleagues through the window um that doesn't happen here we might be saying take a salary cut we might be saying this is a massive step up we might be saying you'll be learning every day and these are very different things than the old models so an algorithm solves for mass production yeah it solves for a business which is of a certain size and it solves for a business which is of a certain empathy level with the people who apply yeah and in those cases it can look like it works yeah like guarantee you're going to have more people who would never apply for your company again yes going through this process then would say that was amazing because when it's amazing you've over communicated you've bought them on they are uh they are a net promoter these these things exist we can borrow from other disciplines they are a promoter for you and they will evangelize about how great that process was and it won't be because i got a great email it will be i would recruit a talk to me through it they gave me great feedback they were there when i wanted them yeah those things it won't be i did an oblique video interview and it upset me and i answered questions and then they came back to me via email and then i did some online testing and got an email and then i met with a person and it's like the fifth step is that is another human being before then you've just kind of ring fenced them off and kept them away okay so what's next what's next for agreement what do you what do you think is going to happen in the next uh you know three to five years i think one of the uh so i think the more it changes the more it stays the same is the cliche i'll adopt for this one yeah because um as we were discussing before we started there's not much new that happens um technology as an enabler of the recruiter is where i'm interested allow us to do the things we do well faster and better so those are things like uh communication channels um what does uh what a slack look like in recruitment or something like this you know the instant messaging thing that's kind of interesting um i don't think it looks like artificial talent pools i don't think it looks like video recruitment there's a there's a trend of whatever new technology how can we use this for recruitment yeah and i think it stems from people whose only interaction with technology is in recruitment right okay yeah so they whatever new thing comes along it's like let's use pinterest for recruitment and i'm like no pinterest is for interior design hmm that's or i'm planning a wedgie you know yeah it was very useful for my wedding pinterest exactly it was great exactly but what you've got is you're using it as pictures on the website yeah so you could do that better through another medium yeah um so i think perhaps what i'd like to see next in recruitment is the recruiters are okay with the fact that this is a discipline of recruitment is its own unique discipline we're not marketers we're not sales people we borrow from those disciplines but it is a unique set of things that we all have once i think we accept that then we'll be able to use tools better to augment that fantastic at the moment we're just we're trying to use sledgehammers and we should be watchmakers there are there's the quote 140 characters as well that's the next big viral uh there we go not sledgehammers watchmaking fantastic thank you very much for talking to me thank you thanks to Shreda's cat as well for posting us on this podcast thank you and that was matt buckland as ever you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes and on stitcher or in any good podcast app alternatively you can listen to past episodes at www.rfpodcast.com thanks for listening i'll be back next week and i hope you'll join me this is my show. 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