Hire Calling
Hire Calling
How to Treat Job Candidates Like Customers With Thad Price
What if you could revolutionize your recruitment strategy and attract top talent like never before? Join us as Thad Price, CEO of Talroo and Ready Set Hire, shares his expertise on transforming the way companies approach hiring. Learn how to turn the internet into your ultimate help wanted sign and treat candidates like valued customers. Thad breaks down the importance of effective job postings and timely engagement, offering insights into how Ready Set Hire leverages recruitment marketing best practices to streamline the candidate experience and bring in higher-quality applicants.
We also explore how tools like one-click apply and conversational AI are making applications and communication smoother, allowing recruiters to focus on the most engaged and qualified candidates. Don't miss Thad's invaluable advice on optimizing the candidate experience from attraction to application!
Additional Resources:
- Talroo
- ReadySetHire
- Candidate Experience Best Practices
- How to Use SEO for Job Postings to Increase Visibility
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👋 FOLLOW PETE NEWSOME ONLINE:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petenewsome/
Blog Articles: https://www.4cornerresources.com/blog/
👋 FOLLOW THAD PRICE ONLINE:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thad-price-2368b/
You're listening to the Hire Calling Podcast. My guest today is Thad Price, ceo of Talro and Ready Set Hire. In this episode, we discuss how companies of all sizes can improve their recruiting and hiring by treating candidates like customers. I gained a lot of insight while speaking with Thad and I really enjoyed the conversation. I think you will too. So let's get to it, thad, how are you today?
Thad Price:Hey, I'm great, Pete. How about yourself? Great to be here.
Pete Newsome:It's great to have you, man. You are a hard guy to get a hold of. You're busy.
Thad Price:It's a busy time, that's for sure, for Tauru and Ready Set Hire and, of course, just helping people find great opportunities and great jobs. So there's a lot of opportunity here in the industry and happy to share some insight with your listeners here today.
Pete Newsome:Perfect, I really appreciate your time. Let's start, if you wouldn't mind, just by giving a brief overview of Talru and Ready Set Hire.
Thad Price:Yeah. So think of Talroo as a platform, a marketplace to help you find candidates that you need and to turn the internet into a help wanted sign to find the right audiences, the right talent audiences wherever they may be. And we use our experience where we built a job aggregation engine a number of years ago Jobs to Careers and one of the thoughts and one of the strategies that we looked at is what if we could open up the Jobs to Careers search engine and help use that search engine for companies to find candidates wherever they may be, with our search engine leveraged by other properties, other destinations, and so when you use the Talroo platform to be able to advertise your jobs, you can get access in a lot of interesting areas where there are talent audiences that you don't really have the time, energy and effort to manage with your day job, especially in job advertising. So that was the genesis of Talroo and the reason why we built this marketplace of talent and a platform to help companies attract and find candidates elsewhere and with Ready Set Hire.
Thad Price:What we learned is as we invested in Talroo and we started to have conversations with customers, there were a lot of customers that didn't necessarily understand recruitment, marketing, best practices and what you needed to do in order to officially attract candidates, because it is an art and science, and so, with Ready Set Hire, we built a lot of the process improvement needed to ensure that we could attract the candidates through great job advertising and create a good candidate experience that would yield higher results, applicant flow and quality applicants at the end of that process and allow companies to simply access and unlock more candidate access than before through scheduled interviews, which is, at the end of the day, what businesses want, right? You want to talk to someone that is ready to work, that's qualified for your job, and our whole goal was what if it was just scheduling an interview? And that's what rallied us around building the Ready Set Hire platform.
Pete Newsome:Now I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it almost sounds like you're saying hiring isn't easy. Is that accurate?
Thad Price:Yes, that is correct. There's a calculus in the hiring and attracting talent and all of these things have to happen right and through that. You can drive a great hire, but if you misstep in one of these processes, you won't have that success. And so, when you think of the idea of creating a job posting, it's still important. It is the first way that you attract candidates to your business.
Thad Price:If you think of that engagement process of applying to a job, it's so important to ensure that you are timely at connecting with candidates and your hot leads or your candidates that are looking to come work for your business aren't sitting there. And the last piece is at the end of the day. You want to have a conversation, you want to communicate and you want to ensure that there's a great conversation with a candidate that can then turn and you can essentially visualize that candidate being a player for your business. And all of these processes are important and, in some cases, very different, and it's important that businesses understand that all of these processes need to be in place in order to have a good end result in form of a hire.
Thad Price:And the last thing I would say to this specific issue is that we really have to think of our hiring process as like a sales process, when you think of closing a lead and you think of what needs to happen in order to attract a prospect to your business, and then what needs to happen, this magical process that is a sales process and a pitch, all of that needs to happen the same way in our sales process to land a new customer as bringing in a new hire and attracting a new hire to your business. And so, if we think about it from that mindset, there's so much process improvement that the industry needs to be successful and be more successful at hiring.
Pete Newsome:One of the reasons I was looking forward to having you on today was to hear your thoughts on treating candidates as customers and the importance of that. That's something that hasn't historically happened, but do you see that is now evolving. Is it becoming more prevalent than it has been in the past?
Thad Price:Totally agree. I think it is evolving. It's more prevalent now and, as business owners, you have to think about it as a small business. We're chief everything officers right, depending on who's not showing up, we're filling in and we're doing a little bit of everything in many cases, especially as leaders, and many businesses haven't had the luxury especially small businesses of a talent acquisition team or recruiting team to ensure best practices when it comes to this process.
Thad Price:However, technology we've seen a lot of innovation in the industry over the last few years, where technology has evolved to actually ensure a better experience and ensure that best practices are followed to ensure that you're able to attract and hire the right candidate for the job. And so what that basically means is imagine if you were, if you were a customer, and you were walking into your favorite coffee shop and you said, hi, how are you today? And the barista in the behind the counter said I'm doing great, how are you? That's the level of customer service that should happen. But imagine if you were a business, if you were a job seeker applying for a job at your favorite coffee shop in crickets.
Pete Newsome:You walk in and that gets ignored and you get completely ignored.
Thad Price:It's completely ignored. This is what we've been doing to candidates for years, right.
Pete Newsome:I love it. That's such a great analogy.
Thad Price:I want to work for you and what would happen is, in that instance, with the coffee shop, you probably wouldn't go back to the coffee shop if that barista didn't respond with something that was as good as your hi, how are you and how you were communicating.
Thad Price:But imagine as a candidate, and what we find is that in many cases, candidates are your customers and that also can impact your revenue, are your customers and that also can impact your revenue, because what happens is the shift happens where you're. You're going to your favorite coffee shop, you're applying for a job at your favorite coffee shop. You never hear anything back. Then, as a customer, that you're doing this calculus. That's basically saying should I continue to? Should I continue to be a customer at that coffee shop because of this experience? That happened? And so customers are your candidates and they are so important to your business for so many reasons, and I think that's an important. I think it's important to remember that when we're communicating with candidates and when we're really focusing on our hiring processes and how we can improve our hiring processes, so you've identified the sentiments changing.
Pete Newsome:Do you think the catalyst for that was really what happened post-COVID, and by that candidates were taken for granted, I think for the most part up until COVID, the most part up until COVID, and then to some degree, candidates started really appreciating the need to have a great job, or have a job at all, when there was mass layoffs and we went through that disastrous time. But on the other side of it, I think everyone in staffing saw that there was so much demand and the companies that weren't prepared for it really suffered and I don't want to assume, but I would expect that's driven a lot of the change in thinking that you're now talking about.
Thad Price:Totally agree. I think that was a forcing function to the industry, that was a byproduct of this huge surge in demand and this idea of hire at whatever cost, because of the impact to my business. And now the companies that are really focused on their hiring process and how they're attracting are the ones that are more efficient than ever before at ensuring that they're able to attract the talent they need to grow their business. And that's another byproduct of this shift, and so it's been interesting. There is a lot of great technology that's being deployed, especially with a lot of enterprise businesses, to shorten time to hire because they've seen how that impacts. The bottom line and I think that's been one of the other interesting byproducts of the pandemic is this idea that great people grow great companies and the ability to quantify hiring in terms of revenue.
Thad Price:And I think that, if you look at before the pandemic, we were always having conversations with what's the cost of not hiring. It was really hard for businesses to get their head around this idea of what is the loss of revenue by not hiring During the pandemic and post pandemic, so to speak, when we were looking to reopen and hiring mass hiring. Still today, now businesses are doing that math and it's important to them to ensure that roles are filled by a certain period of time, because they've been able to understand the impact of their business if there aren't filling those roles, especially in certain industries like healthcare, hospitality and others, which have been really, but for a number of reasons, I've seen this surge in demand.
Pete Newsome:This is a general statement that I'm going to make, but when I consider the staffing clients I've had over the years, generally speaking, the larger the organization, the slower they operate, the less personalization there is when it comes to hiring. There's, quite literally, vendors for those unfamiliar with the MSP industry that sit in between the company and those who recruit, and it just couldn't be more impersonal To put you on the spot here, because you mentioned enterprise companies. Are they coming around the same way? I think SMBs feel it more, but you think enterprise companies are too.
Thad Price:They are yeah, they are focused on candidate experience. There's a lot of investment happening in platforms that help elevate candidate experience. It is very important to how they think about the future of talent acquisition and a lot of these enterprise companies. They're also using AI and conversational experiences to be more intentional on setting expectations of the application process and what that potentially looks like. There are a number of great products in the industry solving that problem, so it is really exciting to see such a movement at the enterprise level at many of these technologies that really help improve the candidate experience across the board.
Pete Newsome:On behalf of everyone. That's great to hear.
Thad Price:So we still have a lot of work to do, that is for sure. Still a lot of work to do, but we are moving the ball forward and I think that's the most important.
Pete Newsome:Touch on AI real quick if you could. As far as candidates acceptance of it. I see demos and products where there's AI communicating directly Sounds human, but everyone knows it's not. What kind of feedback are you getting from candidates as far as their willingness to communicate with AI?
Thad Price:There is a lot of willingness, mainly because it's better than the alternative, which is no communication.
Thad Price:Ideally would everyone love to have a connection to a talent acquisition professional or recruiter is music to the ears of any candidate or any individual looking for a job, of course, right now. But these processes provide a lot of value that is, in a sense, personalizes the experience a little more for the job seeker. Which is welcomed and I think that's how we have to think about it is if we can make it easier for someone to apply for a job, if we can set expectations, if we can sync calendars, if we can do all the things that you have to do that you typically do in a recruiting process or hiring process through systems and technology that would at one point require ping pong, email ping pong to find the right time to communicate. It is being embraced by job seekers and candidates who the alternative is not having that experience, not being able to secure or schedule an interview, and a longer hiring process, which isn't efficient for the company and isn't efficient for the candidate.
Pete Newsome:Yeah, and my take on it is the application and advancement of technology has made the need for more technology to exist, because of things like one click apply, where candidates can just their software that's advertised will help you apply to 200 jobs within an hour. That means if one person can do it, everyone can do it, and so if there's no matching or intelligence that's happening with the technology, then the human recruiters are going to. They are overwhelmed, right, they can't tackle a thousand resumes at once. So it's necessary and, like you said, the alternative is silence. So I certainly I encourage candidates to embrace it and it's accurate, it's right, versus someone who takes a note wrong. Ai doesn't get it wrong. Now, I'm a little biased. I have a car that can drive itself and I think, boy, I trust that over a 16 year old who's looking at their phone. I'm a fan of technology, but do you think that people who are look, I'm Gen X, I'm a little older. Do you think it's a generational adoption or is it universal? At this point?
Thad Price:That's a great point. I definitely think there's generational adoption in how people want to connect, but I think that will be in any movement. Any technology movement that we see, I would say, started being leveraged about what maybe 10 years ago in recruiting? Now we've moved from text messaging as a standard way to communicate, especially in recruiting originally email text messaging. I see conversational AI as just a next version and a next wave in which we can be more efficient at communicating so that we can spend time.
Thad Price:This is how I like to think about AI and recruiting so that we can spend time and focus more of a human connection on the candidates that are willing to invest in the role.
Thad Price:And what I mean by that and I think that's a really interesting distinction is because of how we think about applying to multiple jobs quick apply, all these types of processes that make it easier to apply than ever before.
Thad Price:Because of this, really, at the end of the day, technology should help us connect more efficiently with the candidates that are ready to work, efficiently with the candidates that are ready to work, with the candidates that are qualified for the job, and through that, if we can ensure a great connection, we spend and create a human connection with those candidates, and I think that's how all businesses should think about. Leveraging AI to be more efficient is so we can make those hiring decisions as a human as efficient, and ensuring that we're spending time with the candidates that truly are engaged, that have high intent and are looking to come help take our business to the next level, and I think that's a different way to look at it. Instead, of, ai is going to solve all our problems and automate all this, right? No, that's not how it works. We're in human resources, so it is a business of people and it will continue to be a business of people.
Pete Newsome:I think it's an important way to look at it and an absolute right way to look at it, because there's so many low quality, volume-based things that are necessary now to get to the point where it makes sense for a live candidate to speak with a live recruiter. I'm very sensitive to that as a staffing company owner. Right, we start with a lot of volume and try to get down to one candidate, just like talent acquisition team would. You don't want a thousand candidates, you want the right one, but you need to start with a big candidate pool, and AI and technology is the only way to make that efficient at this point, and so it just makes sense. I think everyone's coming around to it pretty quickly. I want to ask you about how Talroo can improve hiring overall for companies out there. But first, if you wouldn't mind, just touch it on the current state of the market and maybe how Talroo is solving things, given the current state that we're in.
Thad Price:Yeah, absolutely so. When you think of our product Ready Set Hire, what we found was a lot of things over the last year as we've been working on this product. The first thing is that we underestimate the power of the job posting as an industry, and a job posting is marketing. Copy is the way in which we attract someone to apply for a job and to show their interest, and so when we first started thinking about and looking at jobs and looking at how jobs perform in the Tower platform, what we found is we had to create ways to help businesses be smarter recruitment marketers. Right, and the idea of recruitment marketing is very similar to to consumer marketing in that we have to ensure we're attracting the right audience and we have great messaging to speak to that audience, to convert them into a potential customer or, in this case, an applicant, because we're in recruitment marketing, and what we found is, if we just solve the job posting piece, then we still have this middle experience, which is the engagement process and the application process, and so you can't just solve each piece independently, you have to solve the whole experience, and so that was the biggest thing that we've learned over the last year is focus on helping businesses create a job posting that's going to convert, that showcases your brand, ensure that you're surfacing the roles and the responsibilities and the credentials required, and help companies qualify the candidate through like more of a chatbot experience when they're looking to apply.
Thad Price:To ensure great outcomes, then think about the scheduling process, because, at the end of the day, what people want is they want to have a conversation with someone about a job, and if someone is qualified, at the end of the day, if you can just provide an interview, that's ultimately what people are looking for, if the person is qualified for the job, and so that's our job, and so we solve this process through Ready Set Hire for businesses, so that you can ensure you're writing a great job ad, so that you can ensure you're asking the right screening questions when someone applies.
Thad Price:You can sync your calendar so we can fill up your calendar automatically with interviews and we dynamically sync from your existing calendar so that we can. If you've got a couple hours open in a day, we can surface that at time of apply for the qualified candidate and then we can collect resumes and then we can collect we can collect Gen AI assessments based on why you think you may be fit for a job, and all of these things are important for us in rethinking talent acquisition and make it easy for companies to hire. And then what's exciting about that is because of our experience as Talroo, powering a billion job searches per month. Once we have this process that creates a better experience, then we can source candidates, then we can advertise your job in the Tower platform to then drive candidates through this experience, through the billion searches that we power every month of talent audiences, and so that's where we're going, and that was the big idea over the last year of why our new product is so important to businesses build their workforce.
Pete Newsome:So let's talk about who should ideally be looking at taking advantage of this and how they can get started.
Thad Price:So you need help writing a job ad. You're not sure where to start hiring. You can voyage to Ready Set Hire and we have a free trial. You can sign up and then from there you can use a link. If your job is already posted through your applicant tracking system, you can copy and paste a link right into Ready Set Hire after signing up and we will automatically post your job. Or if you need help writing a candidate-winning job ad, we can help you do that as well. On Ready Set Hire, yeah, feel free to check it out and sign up, and we'd be happy to hear what you think.
Pete Newsome:Perfect Thad. This has been great, and I think your message is an important one. It's a timely one, and it's one that the market needs right now, which is how do we create efficiency and get people like you said earlier communicating with each other right? Let the robots do their thing, that they do best, and then let the people do what they do best. I think that's a win. So thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it, and I look forward to having you back on again soon and hearing an update in the future.
Thad Price:Great. Thanks so much, Pete.
Pete Newsome:All right Appreciate the invite. Thanks again.