In this episode Matt Alder talks to Jamie Leonard Founder of Reconverse
Reconverse is a successful boutique networking and events company for in-house recruiters that is just about to celebrate 100 round table events. Chairing these round table discussions gives Jamie a unique perspective on the industry and in the interview he gives us his take on the in house resourcing market. Matt and Jamie discuss numerous topics in this area including recruiter skill shortages, what’s new in recruitment technology, categorisation in the ATS market and a potentially terrifying game changer for established job boards.
Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?
Ep6: The Current State of In House Recruitment
There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime than mine, at all the ages of history. Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the Recreating Feature Podcast. In this episode I interview Jamie Leonard of Reconverse. It can be difficult to get an unbiased view of the in-house recruitment marketplace. As a man who has chaired 100 round table events for senior in-house recruitment professionals, I think this is something that Jamie can truly offer us. We had a really interesting discussion and covered a lot of topics which included recruiters, skill shortages, what's new in recruitment technology, categorization in the ATS market and a potentially terrifying game changer for established job boards. So, here's the interview. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recreating Feature Podcast interview. My interviewee for the day is Jamie Leonard from Reconverse. Hi Jamie, how are you doing? Not bad Mr. How are you? Very good. Now, obviously we've known each other for quite some time, a number of years, but other people might be less familiar with you, less familiar with you and your work. So, could you just introduce yourself? Yeah, absolutely, so I run a little company called Reconverse. My background I suppose is predominantly job board sales, so I worked at Monster for a number of years, I worked at Fishfall and a few years at a company called The Ladders as well. Cool, I remember it well, I remember it well. So, you can only run Reconverse, can you, I think it's kind of a really interesting business. Tell us a little bit about how that came about and what your sort of philosophy is around this business. Yeah, of course, you were actually at my first event, I think weren't you? Yes, it was, yeah. Yourself, Izzy, Matt Burnley, Ken Ward, James Smith, so yeah, all the people we still sit at Reconverse today as well, which is always nice, Reconverse from start about four years ago, so it'd be four years in April, we're actually coming up to quite a big milestone, so we're coming up to our 100th event, that's going to be, yeah, March the 25th is our 100th event, which we're really proud of, especially because there was a lot of people that told us we wouldn't last six months when we first started out as most things usually have their criticisms when you're trying to do something different, I got fired basically from the ladders for kind of various reasons, they were scaling back quite a bit and my boss at the time offered me some money to walk away and go and sit at home for a number of months. I was, my wife was currently working at TMP, she was also made redundant over there and we were about three months away from the Bob Platt first child, which puts a level of pressure on you to go out and try and make some money when both of you have just been sort of asked to leave your respective businesses. Yeah, absolutely. We've underbought for sort of three months just knocking about different ideas, having worked within the big sort of job board companies, the approach to new business from the sales reps has always baffled me. It's still very old school in terms of if you make a hundred calls, you might get hold of someone that's relevant and out of that you might get a meeting off the back of it and I've just always thought it's a really bad way of doing business. If you were a doctor and you cured one person out of a hundred, you'd be put in prison. That's a very good point. Yeah, in sales, we sort of, you know, we have this metric that we work to, which is historic and actually not a very useful time. So we spent about three months talking to heads of resourcing that we knew, which was about maybe 10 of them, and just said, you know, why is it so difficult for someone from a innovative little app to get their foot in the door with you as an employer? The big bit of feedback was number one, you know, the heads of resourcing or recruiting managers understood that they had to stay ahead of the game of suppliers. They knew that they had to understand all the latest innovations out there because that was part of their job. On the flip side, they also were getting 25 to 30 phone calls a day from recruitment consultants and from other suppliers. So they were kind of becoming very, I suppose we started to call cold core verse and actually just ignoring everyone, and even the really good people were being lost in the shuffle because they just weren't picking up the funds. So we come up with an alternative, it isn't rocket science, it's a very simple format. We stole the format from speed dating, whereby we would have an event with a given subject, so we cover everything from employer brands, recruitment technology, social media, mobile, and everything in between. And we would have eight suppliers on one side of the table and we'd have eight in-house people on the other side of the table and would give them a limited amount of time to speak to each other. The in-house guys got an opportunity to understand the market and the suppliers got some much needed face time with potential new clients and it was all kept very casual and, you know, there was no hard sell, there was no presentations, it was just a very informal casual effect. As I say, you were at the first one. The weird thing happened after the first event was that all the in-house guys sort of commune together and started just talking and debating and having, and actually what stems from it was this really, really amazing little round table. So that kind of becomes the second half of our event, so to this day event 100 coming up, all of our sort of standard reconverse events are supply speed meetings in the morning, a lunch, we then say goodbye to the suppliers, and then there's an opportunity for the in-house guys to talk afterwards and, you know, for a few hours or so, and that's been a real eye-opener for me having never worked in-house or within-house people until we start to do these events, you know, just spending two or three hours a week sat round with different employers, different sizes, different industries, and listening to the problems that they've all got, which has been really, really interesting so far. Yeah, absolutely, and I think, you know, I think it puts you in quite a unique position because, you know, that's sort of 99 round tables that you've sat through, and I've obviously attended and spoken at quite a few of them, and, you know, you are very much an observer of what's going on and sort of letting people speak and all that kind of stuff, so I'm sure, you know, you must have heard some very interesting conversations and, you know, seen some interesting things, what topics do you think are the sort of the hot topics for in-house recruiters at the moment from what you've been hearing at events? I think it's an interesting market right now, so if you go, if you went back maybe three years ago, it was all about how employers could do more with fewer recruiters, so, you know, how can we get where we had a team of ten recruiters, well, we've only got a team of two recruiters now, and we need to get them to do more, and that's actually quite boring when you're just trying to get people to work harder. There's not a great entertainment value in that at all, but nowadays, what you're getting is because the market's coming back to the market's more buoyant, there are more people, there are more, there's more money, you know, people are hiring more recruiters, which, you know, silent is a challenge, there seems to be a big skill shortage out there of really good internal recruiters, I mean, we get asked literally every other day, do we know a client partner, do we know recruitmently, do we know a resource and manager, there does seem to be a lack of talent out there, so I think that's an issue for most people at the moment, I really don't know why that is, but there does seem to be, there does seem to be a real lack of fundamental core in-house recruitment recruiters in the market, again, not really sure why, but what it has meant for a market which is really exciting is that people are starting to do some sort of more specialist project stuff, which is really cool, so you're getting employees now look at their EVP, they're starting to take social recruiting seriously again, people are looking at mobile, technology is back on a table, so it's a very exciting time again because, you know, that's the fun side of the industry, the bread and butter meat and potatoes recruiting is great and, you know, that's the core of what everyone does, but, you know, when you can start talking to people about, you know, their employer brand or, you know, upgrading their ATS, that's when it becomes quite interesting. In terms of hot topics at the moment, up-skilling recruiters is actually huge at the moment, so, you know, actually how do you make more out of the people you have, how do you create better recruiters internally, fundamentally because there is a gap in talent in the market, and companies like Genium People, who's kind of our part rights lot are doing some really good work in terms of, and people like Johnny Campbell as well, you know, doing some great work in terms of up-skilling the internal or the in-house recruiters themselves. Yeah, two great guys, and they're both of them, both of them very well. Absolutely great people and great businesses as well doing a very good job. So that's the big thing at the moment. I think people are really starting to take a seriously look at their ATS at the moment as well, which is interesting. I think you've got a three-tiered ATS market in the UK at the moment, where you've got the kind of the big incumbent at the top, maybe the toleos and the connectors and those kind of companies, then right at the very bottom you've got the real very, very early on startup companies like Workable and Quandida and those kind of guys. And then in the middle you've got people like Tripad and Harbour and the Aqoo and Vacancy Phillip. And, you know, for me it's the guys in the middle that are really starting to see the benefit of being able to adapt and actually building ATSs that are actually built for recruiters. It's a really weird concept, but building technology that are used for people that are being used by those people. So, someone said the other day, you know, ATSs are brilliant. They're built by techies, bought by HR and used by recruiters in that order. Excellent. I love that quote. I'm going to use that. I'm going to use that. I'm going to, yes, use that everywhere. It's brilliant. Yeah. I think the ATS is always interesting. I remember a lot of your early events. There was always a kind of a discussion going on around the table that actually the best ATS people had in house was Excel or Google Docs. And I think it's also, you know, I think your description of the three tier market is bought on as well. But I think there's some really interesting things going on. I've got to ask someone I know of who's scrapping to Leo and moving to workable, which is really interesting. That's going to be a good culture shock. Yeah. So, it's kind of a really interesting, you know, really interesting marketplace. So out of the, you know, this might be an impossible question to answer, but out of the 99 events that you've done, what was your favourite? I'm going to take the easy option and probably say the first. I couldn't, to be honest, it was, I enjoyed the first one when it was finished. I remember being very sweaty and very tired and probably nerves have taken over. But yeah, you know, some of the best ones have been recently. One of the subjects that I love covering off is in-house executive search. I think that's, it's a real final frontier for the in-house recruitment market at the moment. And you're seeing more and more teams start to take on bigger project work, which is good. And, you know, we have people at PWC come down and talk, and it's just really interesting when you start to look at actually companies like Coca-Cola that are building an entire team around, you know, 500k plus, you know, pounds a year staff, which is really interesting. I love the tech stuff as well for me, anything around recruitment technology is always really fun. I think you've got some real trends that are poking ahead for at the moment. I think video interviewing is, you know, as much as I know there are people out there that say it's a, you know, it's a fad. It really isn't. You know, everyone that's adopting to video interviewing at the moment is really starting to love that technology. Cool. Yeah. And there's, you know, all this arena, what people want to do video interviews, I can show you so many stats and so many case studies, I just spoke to one of our clients a minute ago, and they've got someone on trial and they've had something like 700 video interviews come through over the first two weeks. Wow. It is people are willing to do it as an industry where, sorry, as a culture with so much better sitting down and pointing a camera at our face than we ever used to be, and I think that's having a real big impact referral, maybe in a few years, I just, I struggle with it at the moment. I think it will be a trend in a few years in terms of some of the referral technology. It isn't there at the moment. There are maybe four players in the UK, you know, maybe 20 in the US, it needs to start taking a few steps forward for me to ever be a real contender for a trend. I hope it does. Yeah. I think that's an interesting one, I'm doing some research for a client of mine into it at the moment. It's kind of a bit like the Wild West out there. There were a few players I see that LinkedIn acquired one yesterday, was it Korea? Really? Yeah, and I think they have a referral platform, so that's interesting, but yeah, it's kind of, like all of these things, sometimes they take a bit of a while to develop. So it's sort of a second, second, second last question, last year you ran a great event, which you very kindly asked me to speak at, which was RecFest, and I believe you're running it again this year. So in true kind of chat show, plugging style, why don't you tell us a little bit about it? So yeah, RecFest is born out of my hatred of conferences, I've done so many conferences in the past with different companies, I've done so many exhibitions, and I really don't like the sort of one person, you know, pretty much for the whole day, talking to 200 people and they're being very little interaction amongst the audience themselves. To the point where we actually go on Twitter now while all these conferences to try and have some sort of interaction between each other, which is ridiculous if you think that the people that are actually at your conference are going on their mobile phones, so they can actually engage other people. I like the engagement between people, that's the best part of a conference, it's the breaks and the after, maybe beers afterwards, there's always the interest in part. So RecFest was a concept we come up with, we found it as a festival just because we wanted to be a bit more relaxed, we wanted to give it a bit of a quirky edge and just make it very clear to everyone when they first saw the brand and this isn't somewhere where you're going to need a shirt and tie and shoes, it's much more about flip-flops and shorts and t-shirts, etc. The concept's a little bit different, so we wanted to somehow come up with a way where we could almost guarantee that you'd interact with around about 90% of the total people there. So we have speakers, we have round tables and then every time a round table is finished, we encourage people to get up, move to another round table at random and then start that process again. So the idea is, yes there are absolutely guest speakers there and this year we've got some great guest speakers, RecFest2.com is the website I won't bang on about the speakers, but it's about the interaction between the actual in-house guys themselves. It's a chance to meet potentially 100 other in-house recruiters in one day and listen to what they have to say and that's the biggest thing that comes out of every round table we ever do is that feeling of we're not alone, that's the first thing I always get is what we take away from saying I'm not alone, there are other people in this industry going through the same things I am and if we can get them together and get them talking and get them sharing those issues, well all the better for it I guess. Fantastic, fantastic, yes it was a really good event last year and it was some great, great conversations going on. So last question, what's your prediction for the rest of the year? What's going to happen, what's going to be big? We talked about referrals and video interviews and all that kind of stuff. What else do you think, what's 2015 going to look like? I heard yesterday at Google a launch on a job board so that could be a fairly big thing for a lot of people I suppose. Did you genuinely hear that or was it an article from 2008 recycled? No, no I spoke to someone yesterday that had apparently been approached for the job to run their job board. I don't know what that means or what that might look like but they've been approached by Headhunter to head to go and talk about the job. Anyway, yes, that could be a mess with a lot of people very quickly and change the landscape quite quickly. Hey Bob, I think we can look forward to seeing what happens with that. Yeah, I think people use the social media properly now and people not bleeding on about how it's engagement to the conversation. People are actually using it as a sourcing channel which is great and long may that continue. I think we'll just get better as a marketplace overall. I think we've got some really strong leadership in the market at the moment with people like Jen Candy and Mel Hayes and Matt Jeffrey and these kind of guys. I think there's a crop of recruiters coming behind them that will make incredible leaders for our industry in five years' time and that's good news. Unfortunately, there's a bit of a skill gap at the bottom and we need to feel that, we need to find out where we can find other recruiters that are not just looking at recruitment consultants themselves. How do we bring through a next generation of in-house recruiters? I don't know at the moment but they're certainly going to be chatting for the next nine months or so. I'd say. But yeah, lots of happy time hopefully. That's my big prediction. No more double dip, triple dip, quadruple dip recession and yeah, just happy times of recruitment will be good. Excellent. Well, that's great news. Thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you, Matt. Jamie Leonard from Reconverse There. Thank you for listening to episode six of the Recruiting Feature Podcast. You can subscribe to feature episodes on iTunes or in fact any podcasting app and you can find out more about the show and listen to past episodes at www.rfpodcast.com. Thanks for listening. This is my show. Bye. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]