URMIA Matters
URMIA Matters
Culture Starts with Recruitment
Now more than ever, the culture, engagement, and performance of your organization matters. In this episode of URMIAmatters, host Julie Groves sits down with Sam Bussard, the director of talent strategy at Compass Business Solutions to talk about the intersection of skill fit and core values alignment of candidates, how to enable recruiting teams to help preserve the organizational culture that you want, and how to use your current internal stakeholders to create an outstanding recruitment process.
Resources:
Samantha's previous article on this topic on the URMIA website.
URMIA’s Annual Conference 2024 Agenda (Filter to see Essential Skills track)
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Transcript
Julie Groves: Hi everyone. I'm Julie Groves, the Director of Risk Services at Wake Forest University and I'll be your host for this episode of URMIA Matters. Today I'll be chatting with Sam Bussard, the Director of Talent Strategy at Compass Business Solutions. We're going to be chatting about employee recruitment. Specifically, we're going to discuss the intersection of skill, fit, and core values alignment of candidates, how to enable recruiting teams to help preserve the organizational culture that you want, and how to use your current internal stakeholders to create an outstanding recruitment process. Welcome to the podcast, Sam. We're glad you're here.
Samantha Bussard: Thank you, Julie. I'm happy to be here.
Julie Groves: So, before we start our discussion, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Samantha Bussard: So, as you mentioned, I am the Director of Talent Strategy at Compass Business Solutions and Compass is an organizational performance firm. And kind of what that means to us is we think something extraordinary happens when every individual in an organization knows that their voice is heard, their commitment is valued, and their contributions make a difference on a day-to-day basis. And our team at Compass are passionate about committing to fueling these fundamental employee needs every day. So, we're in the business of people, right? Every business needs people to be successful and we believe in enabling those people to be successful individually enables the business for further success.
Julie Groves: Well, that's very interesting. I think you know, especially coming out of the pandemic, we all want to have that mindset for our, you know, organization and our employees. So, let's just dive right into our discussions. So how can recruiters assess a candidate’s motivational fit to their organization?
Samantha Bussard: You know, you mentioned something before your question, Julie, about priorities post-pandemic and I think a lot of things have changed for both employers and for, you know, potential candidates in our pipeline. And one of those is about motivational fit. You know, I fundamentally believe that culture of firms start with recruiting. And that there are a lot of candidates in the market who could do the job technically for, you know, employers. And there are a lot of candidates in the market who can fit the culture of a firm and we're ideally looking for the people that sit in the middle of that Venn diagram and who do both really well. And so that leads us to, you know, being able to assess both technical and, to your question, motivational fit.
One of the most important questions that I think I ask when I'm having a recruiting conversation, whether that's a screen or, you know, a second or first round interview. It is actually a really simple question, which is I asked my candidates to tell me about the important factors for them in their search, and then I stop. Right? I don't lead them down a path and say, oh well, these are the things that we prioritize, what are you prioritizing? I stop and I want to hear where they take me on that journey. Right? Because naturally, when we have the opportunity to talk about ourselves in general, we're talking about the things that we like. And when we ask that question of what's on your punch list, what do you have to see in order to feel like an organization is a good fit for you. We're going to understand their motivations and then that leads us into the path of being able to assess whether or not what we have to offer matches those motivations.
Julie Groves: So that makes me think of a question here. So have you seen those motivations stay pretty consistent before and after COVID with the exception of everybody wants to work from home or have you found that people's motivations have changed considerably post-COVID?
Samantha Bussard: That's a good question. I think there are a few motivational pieces that have started to boil to the top more and more post pandemic. Obviously, right, having the flexibility in the work schedule. So, whether that's working, hybrid or remote is certainly at the top of the punch list a lot of times. Also hearing a lot about work-life balance, right, you know, how do we take care of ourselves while also taking care of our jobs during the day and prioritizing those maybe a little more equally than we did before? That's another one. The third one is around mission alignment and how maybe the role contributes to the the broader community, right? What am I doing? What's the impact that I'm having on the world around me, my community, the company, the industry, what have you. And I think that those are all byproducts of what we all felt during the pandemic and the opportunity that we all had to kind of reassess and re level set.
Julie Groves: That's interesting, you know, because I do think that probably everyone out there has, you know, been affected in one way or another by that huge shift in employment, post-pandemic. So, you think people want to have flexibility and work-life balance, as you say. And so, you know, people always probably wanted to have those things. Before, they just didn't know that they could ask for them because we were able to really function very well a lot of us remotely during the pandemic. And so, it just became apparent that we can do our jobs from our houses, in our sweatpants. And so, you know, why do we need to actually be in the office? So, that's interesting to hear how that shifted. So how do you think we can share internal HR data with talent acquisition teams for better hiring outcomes?
Samantha Bussard: When I'm working with my clients from a consulting perspective, I'm always encouraging them that right talent acquisition is not a siloed function that sits over here. It's not an order taker function that you come to and you say I need, you know, a combo with fries and a combo with fries comes right back out. Talent acquisition in its best state is an integrated function to our business units, HR operations, delivery, whatever that looks like within your organization. And the more data you feed them and the talent teams, the more informed decisions that they can make in the market, right, because you're recruiting team, your talent acquisition team is the first line of defense to making sure that we preserve your culture, and that we don't let in things that we don't really want internally. And so, when I talk about that type of data with my clients, for example, I want to understand attrition themes. I want to understand stay themes, right? When we have employees of long tenure, why do they choose to stay here? That's the culture that we've built. And then we need to be able to go to the market, represent that culture, and then also find other people who prioritize those same things.
Julie Groves: So, along those same lines, partnering with talent acquisition teams, how can we do that to accomplish our organization's goals?
Samantha Bussard: I think that it's as simple as using the mindset of the talent acquisition business partner, right? It's kind of common in the HR and talent space to talk about the human resources business partner, but what the definition of that business partner truly means is that they're an integrated function, right? You include them on dialogues about your team and about the business and how you're operating the business and what that looks like on a day-to-day basis, right? We're not just handing over job descriptions to our talent teams and say, go find me someone who matches this on paper because they're going to, you know, fit my criteria. It's so much more than that. So, being able to be part of those conversations, to have a real relationship with our hiring managers or our internal stakeholders and to help them understand the value of, you know, right, the more information that you share with your talent teams, the better off you'll be when it comes to accelerating your hiring process, finding the right pool of talent, and then also giving yourself the best opportunity for retention and success once they become employees.
Julie Groves: Do you think talent acquisition teams can help an organization develop its culture?
Samantha Bussard: Yes, I think that's a really important point, right? So, when we talk about culture- culture, by our definition at Compass is, you know, the list of acceptable and unacceptable behaviors within the organization. So right, culture is what we consider acceptable and the things we don't want to be acceptable or the things that go against our culture. And so, talent acquisition can help you do two things and can also, you know, potentially be detrimental in a way, right? Talent acquisition can help you preserve the good things about your culture, right? If things are going really well and people are consistently saying I like working here, I want to be here for these reasons, right? Talent acquisition takes that to the market and kind of touts that. If you're changing your culture, right, our talent acquisition team, right, I'm typically very honest about if we're trying to change culture, what that means in the marketplace to the people who are going to be coming in and seeing that change emerge.
And then being very clear about where we are today and where we want to take that. And then the third piece kind of goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of our conversation about talent acquisition also is the first line of defense. And if we don't do that correctly, if we don't take the time to make good cultural and good technical hires, we risk eroding our internal culture by as little as one bad hire, right? Think about that. If you bring in, you know, one hire that is counter to a good culture, and let's say that person has leadership authority, think about what eroding behavior or eroding factor that has on your internal organization, because this person is kind of swimming against the stream and they're not a champion for the good culture that's been built, and they may be rolling with their own agenda, that's really dangerous. And that's just the impact of potentially one higher. When you magnify that by the number of times you may hire in a year, it's really significant to be a partner in the culture of the organization, starting at the recruiting piece.
Julie Groves: So as someone who does not work at all in recruiting or human resources, this just brings up another question for me because I would think that I might be ignorant, but I would think for the most part a company’s culture tends to somewhat stay the same. But I'm just wondering if you've seen huge changes in culture because of COVID. As we've already talked about, I mean, have you seen companies have to do complete shifts in the direction of their culture?
Samantha Bussard: I've seen evolutions as well as shifts coming out of COVID oftentimes originated in business reasons, but that have ultimately helped them, and I'll give you an example. One of my clients was previously before COVID a 100% in the office team, right? That's kind of how their industry historically worked. It worked for them. They were asuccessful team, you know, that's just how it worked, right? And during the pandemic, in order for them to be able to thrive and survive, they went to the remote model that everyone else went to. And what they found was, as many other people did, pretty quick success in terms of what that meant for, you know, how they operated on a day-to-day basis and also their employees’ satisfaction and so post-pandemic, they had a decision to make just as everyone else did. The decision that they had was, are we going to bring everybody back to the office? Are we going to give them more flexibility than they did before or are we going to let them be remote? They chose kind of the latter two options of let's give folks the options if they want to come back into the office, but there's no pressure to do that. So, if our folks want to be remote, they can be remote and what that did was in their industry, in their market propelled them to the top of attraction.
All of a sudden, we were getting a lot of phone calls and just kind of cold outreach from candidates saying, hey, are you hiring? I think I'd really like to work here because I've heard what you've done, and I've heard how you prioritize the employee experience and work-life balance. And maintaining that post-COVID and it really slipped them into a position of power in the market where now we're recruiting and attracting these highly talented individuals who are coveted in their field and they're coming here with choices, right? They have the choice to make between, you know, this organization and many others and they're picking theirs, because they see the value in that. That's been huge, right? And that's always one of my success stories. I like to talk about coming out of COVID.
Julie Groves: And so, are you finding that companies that- I mean obviously this is all dependent on what a person's job is, right? They may have a very much face to face position, but if they have a job that's more office work or something, have you found that companies that require their employees to be in the office even just a couple days a week versus those who allow 100% remote, are you finding the ‘be there in person’ companies. are they having more trouble hiring people and is it easier for the ‘you get to be remote if you want to’ companies to hire people?
Samantha Bussard: I don't know if it's easier or harder per se. However, I think I've challenged my clients and anybody who I talked to about this specific topic to be able to answer. If we are saying it's hybrid, it's in office, it's 100% in office, is to what outcome, right? It's easier to be able to explain why you asked someone to be hybrid, right? You're looking for some, you know, in person collaboration you might have some meetings or some sessions that you really want to be able to spend time and build those relationships in person. And I don't think we can discredit the value of that ever.
But when my you know when I hear well, ‘we've always been in the office five days a week’ or ‘I want to be able to see them’ or ‘it makes me uncomfortable for someone to not be near me and working’ or ‘I don't trust what's going on.’ Right? That then kind of leads us to a different conversation about culture. And what are your behavioral norms and what are your values as an organization, and really what outcome are we getting by being able to, you know, peek around the corner and see, you know, Susie working all day, what does that do? And was she delivering a different product when you couldn't see he? Or does she, right, when you're out of the office or on vacation or at a client meeting, does that person deliver a different outcome for you? And if the answer is no, right, we've had a lot of good dialogue among my client base about, you know, how impactful flexibility is at this point.
Julie Groves: Well, I mean, like we've already said, COVID really did sort of upend things a lot. And so, we're going to be feeling the effects of that for decades to come. So, if we think about candidates who are, you know, applying for a position, do you have some interview questions that you can share with us that can help us to assess if that candidate might be a good fit for the culture of a company?
Samantha Bussard: Yeah, I have a lot in my my toolbox in my bag of tricks, but I'll direct us to one type of question specifically which is around use cases, right? An example I had from early in my career is that you know, one of the department leaders that I worked with would be the type of person who would come in and drop a lot of information on your lap. And then, you know, have to walk out of the room really quickly. And you had to be able to work in ambiguity, had to be solutions-driven. You had to be resourceful and think on your feet and understand that that was, you know, the amount of information that you were going to get in order to get yourself off on a project. I've used that in a use case a lot of times in the recruiting process because the reality was that was a norm in our organization at that point in time, right? And I needed to know how was someone going to react when that happened, right? It wasn't something avoidable. And if the response from a candidate when I asked, hey, let's talk about if this situation happens to you. If the response was a big-eyed response and that caused, you know, some kind of some internal fears of dread, and you know, I don't feel comfortable with that, the reality was our culture wasn't a great fit for them.
If that person, you know, took a minute and digest it and said, ‘OK, well, I'm going to go do ABC and I'm going to look at these resources and I'm going to ask for some help and I'm going to research everything that I can,’ and then I'm going to go back to that person with, you know, all the information that I found, ask clarifying questions and then keep it moving and that was exciting to them. They didn't view that as something that was, you know, difficult for them personally. We understood that they were going to, you know, at least on the surface, be a good fit for the way our organization worked. And I think that's important kind of going back to culture. What are the acceptable behaviors? What's happening day in and day out at your firm? How do you work? How do you work together and how can we ask questions and give candidates the opportunity to see real scenarios that play through there?
I'll give you another example. Recently my team has built out an inbox assessment that we're piloting to be able to simulate what your e-mail box might look like on a day-to-day basis and, you know, different characters asking different requests and different types of voices with different levels of priority. And we're taking folks in appropriate roles through that to be able to see, you know, how do they work through that? What's your thought process? If you have four options, which of those are you going to select if you have options in front of you? Or if you had to craft a message back to someone, you know, in that scenario, what would you do? And that tells us a lot more about, right, the real-world examples versus me going through a resume. And saying, ‘do you have this skill, yes or no? Do you like working in this type of environment? Yes or no.’ Sometimes those can be leading questions that don't tell us the answers we want.
Julie Groves: So, I think it's just very interesting to hear you talk about the sort of what Compass does and how you really and this is my, of course, paraphrase, but you want employees to feel valued and valuable. And I just also wonder if employees feel more or less that way since COVID. You know, a lot of places, people are overworked and. And they may feel, you know, in some cases more valued, but in other cases, maybe they don't feel as valued as they once did. So, this is an off the wall question. I'm just going to put it out there, but if there's an employee out there listening right now, and they don't feel valued at their job, do you have suggestions for what they can do? Besides, try to keep playing the lottery so that they can win $1,000,000 and quit their job?
Samantha Bussard: I think there's a variety of reasons why an employee in a seat today, right, might not feel whether it's valued or maybe feel like they're in the right seat. And I think that that for me comes down to self advocation. And what does that mean to you, right? Do you need to be able to ensure that you're communicating your value and that people know what you're doing internally? Have you done that and you're not getting the outcomes that you want? Are you hearing one thing, but then seeing actions, something else is happening and you're feeling conflicted about the fit? You know, I think taking into considerations questions like that tell you whether or not you're in the right place, right? And going back to you can do the job, but do you like how that's done every day? Do you like what's happening at the organization? Are you aligned to the mission? Are they meeting your needs? And if the answer to that is no, right, it's OK to advocate for yourself and advocating for yourself can look like, hey, you know what? This might not be the right place for me anymore. So now I'm going to take that into my own hands and start updating my resume, start updating my talk track, update my LinkedIn, start going to some networking events. and really doing some soul searching of, OK if there was an opportunity for me to either move on, move to another department, what have you, what do I need to prioritize? What would make me happy? What would make me feel like I was valued and that I was getting what I needed to feel fulfilled when I come to work every day. And again, sometimes you can resolve that at your existing organization. Maybe a transfer, maybe just a different role, maybe a conversation with your manager and sometimes it's OK to say you know what I've done everything I can do here, and I need to move on.
Julie Groves: Well, this is really very timely information. I think we could probably talk about it for 30 more minutes at least, but I just really appreciate you helping us think through some of these things today. And if someone's listening and they have a question or, you know, want to ask more about what they've heard today, we're going to put Sam's contact info in the show notes. And you can reach out to her. Don't reach out to me because like I said, I don't know anything about HR, but I'll try to help you get the resources you need. We also will have a lot of information and resources in our essentials skills track at our 2024 annual conference, and if you're looking for a job, you know and risk management or finance, check out our Career Center. It's pretty robust. So, take a look at that. So, any final thoughts to add, Sam, before we sign off today?
Samantha Bussard: The only thing I would add before we sign off, Julie, is just, you know, poor employers make sure that you are able to help candidates get a clear understanding of what working at your organization is like and be honest, right? Sometimes you can have a fabulous candidate in your hands who you think is a great, you know, technical fit, but deep down you might know that culturally you can't meet their needs and that's OK to say no, that's a kind thing, right? Compass, we say ‘clear is kind.’ That is a kind thing to say, ‘hey, you know what? I see a lot of value, and this is maybe not the right fit.’ And for candidates I say the same, right? Something may seem great on the surface. You may be hearing a lot of great things, but ultimately there might be some things that are holding you back in a job search or you know when you're looking into opportunities or things aren't matching exactly what you know you're hearing one thing and seeing another.
Be open-eyed. Be honest and the same in a job search if you're in one, right? Understand what's important to you. Assess the company equally and make the best decision for yourself. Because I fundamentally believe the best matches are when the organizations who are hiring have all the right information and feel like it's a great fit and that the candidate has all the information that they need. And they feel like it's a great fit and two puzzle pieces fit together, right? No one wins when one side feels better than the other going into that conversation. And I think that's an important headspace to keep in mind for both employers and for candidates in this market.
Julie Groves: Well, that's very helpful. And I think our takeaway is ‘clear is kind’ because I think kindness matters. And so, I think that's an important thing for us to remember. So, thank you so much for all this information. We really appreciate it. And this wraps another episode of URMIA Matters.
