Isaac Cheifetz - Applying Lean Methodology to Talent Acquisition

[00:00:00] The world of business is more complex than ever. The world of human resources and compensation is also getting more complex. Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources. Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization.

[00:00:25] This podcast is sponsored by salary.com, your source for data, technology, and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Turetsky and Dwight Brown. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I'm your host, David Turetsky, alongside my co-host, best friend and partner who jumps off of ridges, Dwight Brown. Ridges, not bridges. I was gonna say I don't jump off bridges. Ridges, not bridges. Ridges, not bridges. Ridges, yeah.

[00:00:55] Yeah. All that fun stuff. By the way, from salary.com. From salary.com. Yeah. Yeah. But it's not salary.com sponsored jumping. No, thank goodness. Although, I don't know. You're lying on the internet, so. Right, exactly. And you heard the voice of Isaac Heifetz. Isaac, how are you? I'm very well. It's great to see you two again. And it's great to have you on. Isaac, tell us a little bit about you.

[00:01:20] Well, I, like you, I'm a New York born and bred. I spent, let's see, undergrad in history, which I didn't know what to do with. Masters in organizational psych, which I didn't know what to do with. I worked in, as a comp analyst for three years while I was figuring it out. This is all back in New York. Mm-hmm.

[00:01:47] Jumped to a search firm in the very late 80s that did nothing but AI, if you could believe it. So I was immersed in that world back then. Oh, in 1980, there was AI? It is very late 80s. Everyone thinks it's new. No, no, no. In the middle, I was placing ML researchers and list programmers in that era when most people weren't on the internet yet. As a matter of fact, we were on the internet, but the web did not exist yet.

[00:02:14] So we would get resumes from people at Oracle or Sun, but we would have to FTP them. You know? Sure. Yeah. Lovely. And I came out to move to Minneapolis after a summer back country in Alaska and have been here ever since. My career has really been, I've been an executive recruiter two-thirds, three-quarters of my career.

[00:02:41] The other third, various kinds of consulting, mostly talent acquisition, organizational design, operating models, strategy. I'm not a technologist, but I know more about data than your average bear. Hey, boo-boo! Even those smart bears that can catch the salmon, you know? I saw that I was in Alaska. And these days, I basically do two things.

[00:03:09] I do retained executive search, particularly for roles that are evolving new roles where companies want to hire someone with classic blue-chip business experience, but who are also sophisticated about the new technologies, not as technologists, but rather in terms of how to monetize the spend on whether it's AI or digital, et cetera, et cetera. That's a novel concept, Isaac, actually having to have an ROI for it.

[00:03:40] Well, yes. Well, I mean, this stuff interests me and I won't. It's the... I was always very interested in that topic going way back. It's a distraction from what we're talking about today, but it's interesting. And the other thing I do these days is I have an offering called Hiring as a Service, where

[00:04:02] I basically embed myself and companies on a long-term basis for, you know, to be available as needed to help them turbocharge the quality, basically, to hire people better, faster, and stay longer. And the model that we'll talk about today is a piece of that puzzle. So you're the $6 million recruiter faster. I'm more Oscar...

[00:04:30] I'm more Oscar Goldman, but I'll take it. And there's a certain portion of our audience is going... Who has no idea what we're talking about. Yes. If you don't know who Johnny Carson was, there's no way you know Oscar Goldman. Yes, Oscar Goldman was the $6 million man's boss. Yes, he was. Yes, he was. He was a great straight man to all the jokes. So Isaac, what's one fun thing that no one knows about you?

[00:04:59] Well, friends know it because I can't resist telling the story. But the summer after Alaska, I was solo hiking in the Montana Rockies. And I saw... It was in the late spring and I saw a bear on a ridge over me. And I wasn't really afraid... A grizzly bear. And I wasn't really afraid because I'd seen lots of bears in Alaska. I knew how to deal with it. And one of the things you're supposed to do is just walk along and make a lot of noise

[00:05:27] so you don't surprise them. So I'm walking along saying, hey bear, hey bear. And suddenly in front... And I'm walking up a steep incline with probably a 50 pound pack on my back. And suddenly there's a young bull moose standing right in front of me, looking dumb, dumb as can be. Oh. And he wasn't a giant. He was a six foot moose, not a seven foot moose. But it was big enough. And I'd been walking along by myself. I'm a little spaced out.

[00:05:56] Just going, hey bear, hey bear. So I look at the moose and I said, hey moose. And he just stared at me. And so I thought I had to up the ante. So I sort of did my best Rocky imitation and I said, yo moose charged me. Because I guess that sounded pretty impressive. And he charged me from 10 yards away. And he was so fast. And so, you know, they look like they're on stilts. They're so nimble, especially on inclines. He was on top of me in three seconds.

[00:06:25] Fortunately, I was standing next to a big tree. So I just took one step behind the tree. He flashed by me down the hill. I could have pitted him on the head. I didn't. And he goes about 100 feet down the hill. And I'm standing there with adrenaline shooting on my ears. And I don't know what to do. Because I know if I keep going up and he comes after me, he'll be on me again in seconds. But he's just chewing on shrubbery.

[00:06:53] And every few seconds, he lazily sort of does the 180 with his head like Linda, another ancient reference, Linda Blair and the Exorcist. And I realize he doesn't care anymore. He made his point. He got rid of the testosterone in his head. And I kept hiking. And I felt really safe for the rest of the trip because I felt statistically the odds of being attacked by both a moose and a bear on the same trip were really low. So that gave me some hope.

[00:07:22] Well, when I got home and told friends about it, I got a lot of grief for, you know, inciting a moose to attack me. Inciting a moose. Did you get a ticket for inciting a moose? No, no, no. There were no gang people around. I got away with it. I mean, it's not like you went up and kicked it or anything. Right. Nor did you make him go out of the child. Well, that's for the courts to decide, Dwight. No, I didn't. I didn't pick the moose. A jury of my peers will find me innocent, I swear. Yeah.

[00:07:51] What's that phrase? Don't poke the skunk? I thought it was don't poke the bear. Don't poke the bear. Yeah, don't pretend you're rocky when talking to a moose. I'm just picturing you walking down this trail going, hey bear, hey bear, moose. The bear looked at you and went, okay, I'm sorry. Yeah. What genre are we in now? What are we trying to do? Yeah, we're trying to do. I'm getting in the head of the bear trying to say, and the bear as a director saying, what are you doing, Isaac?

[00:08:21] Isaac, I want one scene here. Yeah. One scene. Give me one animal. One character. David, I can't lie to you. I respect you too much. It wouldn't make the top 20 list of stupid things I've done in my life. So I think we should turn it aside and move forward. Okay. All right. Well, that is one of the more unique, one fun things that we've heard in a long time. Yes, it is. So thank you for the chuckle. I think you're up there for the nomination for the Oscar on that one.

[00:08:50] Sweet. You get a slow clap from me. That was good. And transitioning now to talk about our topic. And our topic is going to be fascinating, which is applying lean methodology to talent acquisition. And so, question Isaac. What's wrong with talent acquisition? Is it really broken?

[00:09:21] I hear from a lot of people. I would say that if I think about the three constituencies, maybe three or four, I mean, who are the constituencies for talent acquisition? They're the hiring managers. They're the job seekers. They're the CEOs. And there's HR. And they're the talent acquisition folks in HR. That, I mean, maybe there are others. I don't know.

[00:09:48] I guess legal comes in if you do something really awful, but normally not. There's lots of them. And yeah, I hear from lots of folks that they're just frustrated with each one in their own way. The candidates are frustrated when they apply over and over online for jobs that they're perfect for and don't hear back.

[00:10:09] The folks in HR talent acquisition are frustrated with often having internal business clients who don't take the process seriously enough.

[00:10:25] The CEOs are frustrated that this is that they're just not seeing the consistency of quality results that they would like to see, that they hold other functions up to. So, yeah, I'm not saying it's irrevocably broke.

[00:10:45] Oh, and the last thing I'll put in there is I often give it talk to executive transition groups and I'll often say how many of you found your job at the executive level through online application. And I know this sounds crazy. I've yet to get one. Yeah. Which is which is which is mind blowing. Well, I think you've seen you mentioned social media.

[00:11:09] I think you see the stories on LinkedIn about people getting frustrated, not just by being ghosted, but by actually getting through a process and then not hearing back. And there are just so many stories about the entirety of the value chain or recruiting that is. Just substantially broken. And we've actually had on the program a few talent acquisition experts who talk about, you know, how the process has evolved and whatnot.

[00:11:39] I think one of the tenets of the process, though, is you have a supply of people and you have a demand for talent. And the supply of people has been gigantic. People not only switching roles, but people who are out of work looking for a specific role. And and also you have those internal people who are looking for new pathways. Who are frustrated because they haven't seen growth in their in their roles. So to me.

[00:12:06] One of the key under underpinnings of the process is, I think because of the Internet, there are a lot more candidates. There are there's only a few roles and trying to stick the hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred thousand pounds of supply. Into that, you know, eight ounce bag of demand is is a very, very key challenge. The funnel.

[00:12:35] And you think about the in between between those, you know, you're and that's that's that brokenness is it's like two groups sitting on opposite banks of a river without a bridge trying to get to each other. And jump in the water and the water just sweeps you away. You never make it cold. And it's cold. Exactly. Especially where Isaac is. I have. Yes, I mean, I'm outside Minneapolis and it was five below yesterday.

[00:13:04] It's about 25 now. It feels spring like. But I remember once talking to somebody a couple of years ago and he told me proudly that, oh, I'm doing a really good job on my job search. I'm applying to jobs online 40 hours a week. And I quoted to him the late, great UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, who used to distinguish between activity and accomplishment.

[00:13:33] And I said, I said, it is completely useless to apply online to jobs that you are not a great fit for. It is just it is a bad use of time because you're now competing. At least if you're a great fit, you're competing with some finite number of people who are a great fit. If you're a loose fit or not a fit at all, you're now completing with tens of thousands of people who are doing the same mindless thing you are.

[00:14:01] So I'm a much bigger advocate for I call it peer networking for simply going across your network and saying, hey, let's catch up for 20 minutes and not talk about job search at the very end. Say, hey, if you know of anything, because you'll have a set. And if you do, you can have a handful of those a day. And over the course of months, you'll you'll really stir up your network. I just think that people.

[00:14:28] They get to a desperation point because they see so many other people out of work. Yes. And Isaac, I've been there, too, where you get to a point where you say, I've tried to I've tried my quote unquote best. I'm because I'm an expert in a field to try and get a role in that field. But it seems like I'm competing against myself more than anything else because I don't get anything back.

[00:14:57] I don't get any feedback. And I get ghosted more often than not. I hear that from a lot of people who have absolutely blue chip backgrounds. And honestly, it makes them a little crazy at a certain point. Yeah. Not irrevocably, but it's it's it's it's hard. Yeah. Especially the last year or so, because the last two years, we was both kind of a down economy.

[00:15:25] And there was in this era this notion that AI would replace some large percent of jobs, which it which it hasn't yet, which it hasn't. And I think we probably we probably won't. But at least in the short to medium term. Right. But it really I think there's reason to think that 25 will that there'll be a lot more hiring just because there was a lot that was. Where companies were resisting hiring in this two year period for those reasons.

[00:15:52] When you think about the you think about the impact, number one, you have the impact on the candidate. Number number two, you have the impact on the hiring company. But when you look at it from the big picture perspective, there's a big contingent of people who are unemployed out there who have given up on the hiring process. They've done it for so long and been so discouraged that they've stopped looking for a job.

[00:16:18] And so you actually have this broader economic impact that goes with this. I think a lot of people think, well, it's a process problem within a company. Well, it's it is very much so. But there's a bigger component that goes with the two. Big time. And that I mean, that's probably ultimately I mean, that's a more strategic conversation than the one we're having here today, I think. And it's ultimately a more important one.

[00:16:48] And it's it's probably above my pay grade. But but yeah, you should apply to that role then, Isaac. Yes. See if you can get it and let us know. Well, I'll tell you one of the fun things about my career is because I've I've almost always been working with leading edge business. I mean, yeah, businesses. I don't do much. I've never done much search for technologists, for programmers or something.

[00:17:14] But for business people, but still they're at the cutting edge. So even when they're things are taking a little longer than they'd like to. Yeah. These people are not going to be unemployed in the long term because what they're doing is so central to the future of the economy. So that, you know, when people when companies I work with have massive layoffs, I try to help. But I the human component of, oh, what will this person do next is just isn't the same.

[00:17:44] That's a luxury I have just because I'm at I'm really at the cutting edge of of where things are now and where they want to be. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by Salary dot com. Now back to the show. So, Isaac, let's transition to talk about is there a solution?

[00:18:09] Can we make a change to the function that might improve the situation? Sure. Let's talk about how do we write job descriptions? I was I mentioned I was a comp analyst for three years. So I don't think I'm giving away any secrets. I think the vast majority of us, if we have a new role, if we're if we're in the job design role and we're and we're told to create a job description for role X.

[00:18:39] What's the first thing we do? We we go on. We go to Google. We Google the title. We scroll several dozen job descriptions that have that title. Find the ones that seem well written and closer to what we're doing. We download them. We meet with a hiring executive and basically go through those job descriptions, circling the elements that the hiring manager wants in the role. We cobble it together.

[00:19:08] We polish it. We've got a job, a nice job description. Here's and I used to do this forever. Here's the problem. I realized at a certain point from a process standpoint is it from a distance. It looks like a good job description, but it's it's almost like a Frankenstein monster across the field. It looks like a person. But when you get up close, they're both sticking off his forehead because he's not. He's not a real person.

[00:19:37] He's a tax simile. And and I think it's the same thing here. You can put together a job description that reads really fluidly for that and yet has nothing. Anything it has to do with what you're trying to accomplish in your business is coincidental.

[00:19:56] And that's just not good enough because in the once you hire that person, you know, once you hire a person to that spec, the odds that the job description is incrementally off. You know, 10 percent, 25 percent, 40 whatever are pretty good.

[00:20:18] Well, I think there's a fundamental problem, Isaac, with what a job description really is, because work today is mainly search for information. I'm being flippant, by the way. Search for information, cobble information together and present information for a lot of us. Right. And those are our duties where I mean, some of us sell, some of us buy resources.

[00:20:44] But but the job descriptions that are there are so antiquated. They're they're looking at how someone works in a very old fashioned way. Well, big time, big time. Oh, if you have a job, if you have a job that has existed by title for decades in the company, let's say a CFO. Yeah. OK, you could have a CFO and they just keep hiring against the same job description because, well, a CFO is a CFO. Right.

[00:21:12] And for all we know, that job description was written at the end of the career more. Exactly. Right. Well, that's when the last time the survey was updated. Even though thematically a CFO is the same as it was back then in the sense it's the person responsible for overseeing the metrics of the company and applying it strategically. But where the sophistication of those metrics back in the day, it was gap or equivalent.

[00:21:38] Today, a CFO is half an analytics person. So, yes, that applies to same thing for sales, same marketing. Good Lord. I mean, marketing, marketing today versus 15 years ago, almost unrecognizable. I mean, I knew marketing executives in the 90s who were dirt ignorant about technology. They just they didn't know and they didn't care, had nothing to do with that.

[00:22:07] Today, marketing is two thirds analytics. Absolutely. All SEO. Digital medium. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what worries me, though, is that a lot of those descriptions that people use today are just totally antiquated. They don't really focus on the current set of tasks, duties and responsibilities or educational requirements.

[00:22:32] I mean, most of them still say they they require a bachelor's degree and probably two thirds or 75 percent of the people who are doing the job don't have a bachelor's degree. Or if they do, they probably have more and more insight not having one than they would if they already if they invested the four years to get one. Well, I couldn't agree more, but I'm going to sidestep that topic just because we could do. No, no, no. That's a rich topic.

[00:22:59] And that's very salient to what's going on today relative to higher ed. But we'd need we'd need hours to talk about that one. I got all day. But if you want to bring me back, I'll talk to you about that one. And that's and that's when we just lost all of our listeners just right there. Sorry, I was just kidding, everybody. We will close this out in 13 or 14 minutes, I promise. But I mean, it's true that the job descriptions are probably the most neglected thing.

[00:23:27] I mean, we see it all the time in our work when we're doing market pricing and companies don't have up to date job descriptions. But it makes total sense to me, Isaac, that with the process you're talking about, that would be that's the ultimate starting point. Yeah. So give me maybe three to five minutes. I'll just do a quick dive on the process. OK, please. So, I mean, when I say design for quality, what is design for quality?

[00:23:54] Most continuous improvement methodologies, whether it's TQM or Six Sigma or, you know, whichever variant a company uses, use the concept of design for quality, which is that you are making hard systemic decisions at the beginning of the process as to what, you know, based on data as to what the customer needs.

[00:24:23] And what that translates into in the product. In our case here, what is the product? Well, the product is the design job in a, you know, a just slash, you know, which presents as a job description. Your customers, I would say, are primarily your internal customers, the hiring managers, and secondarily, the candidates. Maybe not even secondarily.

[00:24:49] Um, and now you might think that this is a really complicated thing to do. I've found it's really easy to do, and here's why. Um, all you have to do is take, you don't have to immerse yourself and become a quality guru. Um, you, all you have to do is start with the funded business case. Let's assume this is a new role.

[00:25:18] Let's assume this is a director of sales for your new, for the attempt of your company at monetizing data. As an example, you make robots. You generate data from the factory floor. You want to anonymize that data and then sell it to, uh, to customers.

[00:25:41] Well, this role that you're hiring for is the result of a funded, uh, of a funded business initiative. Someone took the trouble to write an extensive business case that was approved. All you do, you start with that. You review it. You do the classic, uh, gap analysis, current state, future state, gap, and then, and, and you start flow charting.

[00:26:09] And what's beautiful about this is it both helps you be decisive and you show your math. Uh, so what needs to be done in the next year to reduce that gap or to address it? What is this person, this key person need to do to reduce the gap? What experience do they need to have to be able to do this?

[00:26:29] And again, we're flow charting and we're not sitting around just as a group of stakeholders in the hire, uh, throwing out opinions where, we're defining, we're making decisions the same way we would if we were building a call center. And wanted the, you know, defined answer as to what next steps are. And I'll give you an example of where this can be really powerful.

[00:26:57] The question of, do we need someone from within our industry or not? I maintain that you almost never need someone from your industry. What you need is someone from a industry with the same critical attributes as yours. And because after all, think about benchmarking. You benchmark best practices outside your industry in order to leapfrog your competitors. You don't benchmark your competitors.

[00:27:26] And the three elements are a similar product complexity, similar go-to-market strategy, and selling at the same level. And, and, and once you've identified what those quote cousin industries are, now you put yourself in a position where instead of having dozens of candidates, you have thousands and none of them have non-competes. So that's an example of where you can take some chances because they're not really chances.

[00:27:54] They're the result of very concrete analysis where you're showing your math, where someone questions, why are you doing that? You can say, well, this is our train of logic. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think Isaac though, a lot of people who are listening have just, there, there's a lump in their throat saying, wait a minute. Does that mean that there has to be a business plan every time I want to hire somebody? Because the answer is, is that almost never do we have a business plan that supports the hiring.

[00:28:21] It usually is a requisition that got approved, whether it was last year or the year before, or even this year. And now they have to go out and, you know, hire for that. Do people typically ask for that ROI? No, your point well taken. You point very well taken. So let me step back from the, you know, yes, there are occasionally those, those things exist. I'd say the more senior it is, the more likely it exists. Yes.

[00:28:48] If we're talking at the C level, it exists, but at most levels it does not, but it doesn't, you can still do this colloquially. I mean, you're hiring that person for a reason. So you can do this on the fly just as easily. And you can just simply sit there and sit with your internal, the hiring exec and say, walk me, give me half an hour, walk me through it. Where are you at now? What do you want to be in? Where do you want to be in 18 months?

[00:29:17] What is the role of this person in moving you towards this? What is it specifically that they need to accomplish to be successful in enabling what you're looking to do? So you can do it colloquially just as easy and it doesn't take days. It takes, takes a half hour session with, uh, with the hiring manager.

[00:29:41] And I'm not saying it's, it's not, and the good news is here, there's, this stuff is done on such a loosey goosey basis sometimes at its worst that you don't have to get it perfect just by applying, just by using the concepts of lean, even though you're not actually reducing variance in the way, quantitatively in the way you do in real lean.

[00:30:05] There's so much low hanging fruit that the results will still be noticeably better. Does that mitigate? Shoot, shoot back at me on that if you would. So when you identify this pool of candidates, um, we were just talking about, uh, the supply and demand and, uh, the chasm that sits between those. Um, how does this process identify those folks?

[00:30:32] Is it out on the, you know, applications that come in? Where do you identify this pool and then how do you make that connection? I don't have a perfect answer to that, though. It's something I think about a lot.

[00:30:44] I would say that I think the trend we're going to see going forward is that talent acquisition partners, for them to have still more of a positive, of a powerful impact, that it's going, the idea of taking people from line roles or support roles who are subject matter experts and putting them into talent acquisition for a couple of years and making it in whatever, you know.

[00:31:13] In whatever way, a, you know, a high, you know, visibility role that is considered a step up. Because, I mean, what's more important than, uh, than your future, future employees, right? Than talent acquisition. You know, the children are our future. But, uh, the, uh, but what I'm saying, so I think that will. We are the world. Oh, gosh.

[00:31:41] And so I'm saying that, remember, I mean, I'm, I'm, I exist at the, I'm a headhunter, okay? Right. So I make my living at the ground level putting people into roles. This isn't an academic. Everything I preach are heuristics that I learned over many, many searches.

[00:32:02] But I think, but to answer your question directly, yes, I think that the most important thing is to get, move people up to where, um, I mean, okay. I mean, I presume people like David or myself, because we've been doing this for so long, we have the ability.

[00:32:21] If you gave us a stack, a, a three inch stack of resume, we could sort through them over a glass of wine in a couple of hours and just eyeball them and put them into red, green, yellow piles. Mm-hmm. Even if they were a complex spec, because we've done it so often and are knee deep in so many different disciplines, we can do that.

[00:32:44] Most people, it's, it's not, it's not fair to expect most people to be able to do that, but it's eminently doable to have people incrementally get better at it. And the better they get at it, the more they'll be a, it won't, it won't feel like as much of a challenge to sort through those. Now, whether will AI help? Who's to say? I mean, quick story.

[00:33:09] A CEO told me a couple of months ago, uh, he told me that he'd heard, uh, from another CEO that people were starting to use, candidates were using AI to rewrite their resume. To tailor through the spec to the job description and the companies were using AI to assess those resumes. Well, I mean, that's the ultimate garbage in, garbage out, right?

[00:33:37] I mean, you're both, I mean, it's deception at, where are you going to say that? Well, well, Isaac, I'll just, I'm just going to disagree a little bit. One of the things that AI has done on the inbound side is it's searching for certain things and certain patterns. And I applaud people that use AI on the, on the supply side so that they can, what's the word? It's not even gaming the system.

[00:34:06] It's actually utilizing the system for themselves. If they put together the best resume and cover letter possible, they're never going to get chosen because they're being honest. And honesty is not the best policy in this case because the AI is looking for those keywords that the system has set up against them. And gaming the system would be, to your point, writing crap and expecting it to win.

[00:34:32] What the AI is doing is helping them understand how to write the resume and cover letter in a way in which the AI might be more receptive. To me, it's more, not as much gaming system. It's using the system for your purpose. Okay.

[00:34:48] But you're, if I understand, I mean, that makes sense to me, but if I understand correctly what you're saying, you're saying that in your scenario, the candidate is using AI to make their, to, to make their fit more obvious. Yes. I, what I was talking about are people using AI to make it look where they're not a beautiful fit. They're a gentle fit. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we're, we're, we're holding on to parts of the same elephant, I think.

[00:35:18] Yeah. And I think the frauds, the frauds do get assistance here, but the people who are genuine also get assistance. Sure. Yes. Yes. Yes. And again, I, I'm always, yeah, always up for learning. I don't really understand the best practice of filling each job, say on LinkedIn with dozens of buzzwords, because how does putting down business development

[00:35:42] or leadership or any number of dozens and dozens of key buzzwords, that's, that's not enough. Given the current state of tech, it's, it's just so brittle right now. I don't think it, there's enough information there. And, and so with the lean hiring model, I think what I'm hearing is we've still got this brokenness of getting the supply to the, to the demand.

[00:36:10] However, you're building up the supply in a more targeted way that really gets to what the needs of the job are and what the key responsibilities are and the skills that are necessary for that job. It's really about that targeting piece of things. Yes. And I left this out.

[00:36:31] I didn't intend to talk about this a lot of this presentation in the interest of time, because normally when I deliver this as a presentation to HR groups at companies, it basically takes half a day to cover the several modules. But another powerful element of this is it makes it easier for candidates to see when a job is a great fit for them, because you're delineating so much more tightly how the role fits into the business.

[00:36:58] And B, it likely reduces their frustration level with the company transactionally because of that clarity. So that's really, well, I guess what I'm saying is there's nothing else in civilized society that is still done from a process optimization standpoint.

[00:37:18] I mean, no one would ever build a call center or a technology stack or a house with this kind of casual attitude towards process. Yeah. And I once had a buddy who's a pretty fellow you know, Dwight, of a former employer, heavy duty guy, who's a good buddy. And I was describing this to him years ago. And he said, well, yeah, it makes sense.

[00:37:48] But the truth is, I like to have a job 85% described. And then I go out, start interviewing, and I use those conversations to pin down. You know, I learn things and I add things to them. So I said, well, I said, that's cool. I said, tell me this, would you build a new house that way? Right? And the answer obviously is no, because if you said that to your VC, the GC would say, no, I won't do that because some idiot with money tried it three years ago and his house cost 2x and he wasn't happy.

[00:38:16] So no, I need a tied down spec with a bow around it. And, you know, so I'm suggesting that doing that A will, by its nature, lead to a smoother, faster hire.

[00:38:35] And that number two, it also, I think, gives the talent acquisition person a real foundation on which to push back against hiring execs who have, because a lot, let's be honest, a lot, if not most, of the undisciplined ideas about what ought to be in a job come from the hiring manager, not from the HR person.

[00:39:03] And if, but in, you know, me as an external recruiter, it's part of my job to, in confidence, tell the executive, no, that dog won't hunt. Be a lot different if I was on salary to that company. And this is a, this is a tool. If, if one grounds oneself in it to be able to say, Hey, this isn't my opinion. I'm applying just like you do in many areas, operationally of the company.

[00:39:30] I'm applying, I'm applying design for quality principles. I'll lean. And based on that, we need to answer these questions now, not later. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this. Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind.

[00:39:58] Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30 minute call today. Well, but Isaac, how does someone let's, let's kind of start this last question in a very straightforward way. Sure. What does someone do in talent acquisition to adopt these principles?

[00:40:20] Do they have to become certified in like Six Sigma or lean principles in order to be able to utilize those in within their role? That no, no, that would. Well, I'll tell you the short answer is no. Though I would say that if they did, that's probably a heck of a competitive advantage for their career. It is not necessary.

[00:40:44] But if they did it, I think they'd be distinguishing themselves big time in terms of the kind of roles that will be available to them going forward. But no, I mean, I'm actually working on a handbook right now that would be basically paint by numbers for this so that you wouldn't need to know everything about it. So we'll put the, if there's a link available, we'll put that in the show notes.

[00:41:12] So someone who's listening to us could say, okay, so how do I act on this? And if there's a crib, crib sheet version or a, or what do they call the, the, the. Criff notes? Yes. If there's a short version. Well, David, don't act like you don't know what cliff notes are. No. Cliff notes? I know I've never used those in college. I mean, anytime. I don't know what they are. No, but, but we, we can put a link to that in the show notes. All right.

[00:41:42] Perfect. So Isaac, any other salient pieces on this that you think are critical before we close? The short answer is, is no. I mean, there, I mean, you know, there were half a dozen times in this conversation where we stepped back and said, Ooh, that's a fascinating tangent that we don't want to go off on.

[00:42:08] So there, there are lots of emanations to it, but more than anything else, I think I would say that. Okay. Here's one. I would say that historically when technology enables real efficiencies has real ROI. Yeah. It's pretty obvious. And there's a lot of low hanging fruit.

[00:42:28] So anyone, someone comes to you and says, I have magic beans or magic gen AI that will fix this problem. Um, the odds are you're, you're probably really better off focusing on optimizing your processes really tightly. And then once you really understand your processes, looking for modules of them that can be automated.

[00:42:53] But anyone that tells you that they can automate the soup to nuts, what you're doing run away. Okay. So there are going to be a lot of people running and screaming then after this podcast, which, you know, it's okay. Especially if you are running and listening to us as you run, just run a little faster. They will not catch up to you. Isaac, I think we're going to have to ask you to come back and we can spend another at least day or two talking about this topic. Cause it's a fascinating one for Dwight and I.

[00:43:22] Anytime, my brothers. Thank you, sir. Thank you very much for being here. My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Dwight. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for being with us today, Isaac. Definitely a lot more that we can delve into. Absolutely. And thank you all for listening. Take care and stay safe. That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode.

[00:43:52] Stay safe. Stay safe.