Tim Sackett (00:04):

Alright, I think we're going to get started. Everybody welcome. I think the attendees are going to start to pop in, so we'll probably use some small talk as people get in here right away. For those who don't know, I'm Tim Sackett and I'll introduce myself and I'll have introduce herself. I'm going to be hosting, we're having this great conversation today about Sports Clips and their journey into the high volume hiring technology space. They were already high volume hiring now they just added some tech on it and I am an offer of the talent fix. I run my own recruiting firm out Michigan. I've been writing the space for a long time, been doing a lot of content work with Paradox for a while as well. So you might've read my stuff or seen my stuff on their site. DeLisa why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself.

DeLisa Atkinson (00:50):

Yeah, thank you Tim. So I'm DeLisa Atkinson, director of Talent Acquisition with Forklift Haircuts. I've been with the organization about seven years in the talent acquisition space, about 20 and prior to joining the Sport Clips team too was in that high volume space too, and a call center recruiting type environment.

Tim Sackett (01:11):

Nice. So give us a little rundown of the demographics of Sports clips, how many locations, employees, what's, give us the picture.

DeLisa Atkinson (01:21):

Yeah, absolutely. So at forklifts we are a franchised organization, so we have about 1,850 locations. We are located in every single state in the US as well as also located in Canada. And we have probably right now about 13,500 different team members across all of our locations in the us.

Tim Sackett (01:49):

Yeah, that's awesome. So we're going to keep this very conversation. You're not going to see a lot of slides. You won't see any slides because we didn't put any together. It's going to be us talking about this, but again, I know the paradox marketing you put in there. If you have any questions that you have throughout, put 'em in there. We'll try to get to 'em. But I'm going to walk down this path and journey of how you get into this space In terms of getting ready, I have a lot of questions and some thoughts and we're going to kind of go through all that. Elise, I wanted to start though with, because now you've been on Paradox for, is it three years? Going on? Three years?

DeLisa Atkinson (02:33):

We've been since 2018. Six.

Tim Sackett (02:36):

Oh wow. So you've been early adopters, you've been on for a long time.

Speaker 3 (02:40):

Yes.

Tim Sackett (02:41):

So when you think back, because I think there's a lot of people, what I see in this space, and you probably do this as well, is if you're doing high volume hiring, and I always put that in low skill, no skill, but for you it's a highly skilled kind of people that have licenses. So it's a misnomer for me to say that. So we'll just say high volume. So if you're getting to hire hundreds of people a month, sometimes it's thousands, 10 thousands, everyone has their own kind of definition of high volume. If you think back before you had technology, you were probably using a traditional a TS system that was built for salaried hiring. When did you know, what was that pain point where you go, we have to do something different?

DeLisa Atkinson (03:24):

Yeah, so I would say it was pretty soon whenever I started in the industry in February of 2017, it was pretty eyeopening, especially coming from a high volume type environment and coming to an environment here where you don't have 200, 300 people applying for a rec, it's completely different. So that was just right off the bat, okay, we've got to do something different. There is a huge opportunity here.

Tim Sackett (03:57):

Yeah. Do you remember coming in, did you get pushback from wanting to bring in new technology? If so, what were the fears? What were those kind of obstacles initially to say? I think that's one of the things we all face, right? I've been that TA leader at Enterprise and you come in, you immediately recognize we have to do something different, but you have all these forces working against you, especially the bigger you are.

DeLisa Atkinson (04:22):

Absolutely. So for us, I actually saw a demo in 2018 and I think that was one thing that really still the deal, not just hearing, getting to touch it, fill it, see it and really get to look at that technology. So right then I was like, okay, we got to do something ASAP from knowing before, hey, we need to do something. And then just once really getting my eyes on it that it really seemed to be the right fit for us. And so of course I needed some reassurance. It was myself, their director

(05:02):

Of acquisition actually at a conference. And so I immediately came back to our VP of career opportunities and said, Hey look, I found this product. We know we've got to be faster with our hiring. We need to leverage some technology, what do you think? And immediately she was on board. She's someone that has been in the industry right out of high school. She has been nothing but in the cosmetology space. And so that was great too, to have her insight as well. And so we immediately took it to our president and our senior leadership team and said, Hey guys, this is something that we really think would be a huge benefit. What do you think? And so we started getting the ball rolling from them.

Tim Sackett (05:48):

Yeah, I usually find this fascinating. I find how we buy software in the TA space. Super fascinating because if I talk to the vendor, so whether it's the paradox of the world or the workdays of the world or whoever, they all want to go to the CHRO. They believe that the CHRO is the one, we need that buyer. And I'm always like, is that really how we find software? You said you found it at a conference. Do you remember what conference you're at?

DeLisa Atkinson (06:15):

Yes, I was actually at the ERE recruitment conference in spring of 2018.

Tim Sackett (06:23):

That's been an entire evolution, right? Because of the pandemic and stuff. I don't even, I think the last ERE maybe had a hundred people at it. So that's always to me the unique conversation of how do we find it, who finds it, how does it go up, the levels. I was at an enterprise retailer probably two months ago, same thing. They had actually just hired me to say, Hey, we're broken. Help us, what's out there? And so we were just talking about all this stuff and I'm like, oh, there's this paradox, right? There's this company, here's what they do. And so it was their first time, they've heard it, they've seen it, but they was like, oh, okay. So now it's another time they're hearing it. But we actually, their CEO just happened to be in the office that day. We're like, Hey, do you have 15 minutes?

(07:10):

And he saw it and immediately the operation person in him was like, well this is a no-brainer. Why the hell wouldn't we be doing this? Because this is how we would treat our customer. Why wouldn't we be treating candidates the same way? So it was so interesting to me because the first time I saw an operational executive see it for the first time going, this makes 100 sense. So then it goes back to again that getting people, everybody involved. So you saw it, you got some other people on your team or ancillary people in the HR team to see it and then you get your executive to see it. Was there immediate buy-in? What was the other conversations that happened from there?

DeLisa Atkinson (07:55):

Yeah, absolutely. It was pretty immediate. As soon as we showed it to him, I'll never forget that day. I mean, he was actually on LinkedIn messaging the CEO to a paradox. And so he was absolutely bought in right from the get go. So then of course our biggest challenge too was getting everyone else on board and of course how we were going to roll this out across such a large organization and especially whenever we are franchised as well.

Tim Sackett (08:27):

Yeah, we'll talk about that because I think that's a different monster altogether. Whether it's one thing to say, hey, we're a 13,000 person company or a 30,000 person company and we make all the decisions on hiring versus hey, we have how many franchisees do you have franchise?

DeLisa Atkinson (08:43):

We have probably around three 50.

Tim Sackett (08:46):

So you have 350 now. People you have to talk into using this technology completely different. So you go to a conference, let's say that's day one, that's when you figure out like, Hey, I just found some technology I think could be awesome for us between that showing everybody getting a contract signed and implementing so that you could actually use it. You remember that timeline, how long that took?

DeLisa Atkinson (09:14):

I do. So I actually went back to look, I was shocked too. I mean it moved fairly quickly, so I gained awareness. It was April of 2018. Like I said at that conference, I had some exposure before through some communications, email, stuff like that that all of us in the talent acquisition they get from vendors. So a little bit of awareness, but again, really that touch feel, get to really see what they were all about whenever I was at that conference. And then they came on site to our office in May, so less than a month later they're here onsite.

Tim Sackett (09:54):

Yeah, by the way, deli's experience might not be the current experience could be, I don't know. I'm just saying it was a different time. They were smaller back then. Nimble, I dunno. Yeah, actually growing a lot. Yeah, they

DeLisa Atkinson (10:06):

Had a few less clients back then whenever we partnered, but we think you'd have the similar experience too whenever it comes to executing the pilot agreement and we really like to pilot things before we roll them out across the system and we really like to use our company own locations to be able to do that. So we executed the pilot agreement in June and we initially tested with 20 stores for a month and then we did a system-wide launch October 26th, 2018.

Tim Sackett (10:41):

So it's like what, six months

Speaker 3 (10:43):

Total? Yes.

Tim Sackett (10:44):

That's pretty, that's really fast mean especially at that level enterprise, I know companies that would keep the contract and legal would have it for six months before it would get out. So again, some of this we control, some of this we don't, but I think it's all about how fast can you start to turn on and test things. And I agree with you. I think the biggest thing is your ability to go. I mean sometimes you just know like, hey, it's the right thing. We're going to go system wide, but to be able to turn it on for some locations to work out the bugs, get the confidence in it really, and even your managers of your locations, to have them feel confident to be able to share those kind of stories I think is just huge. When you think back all those years ago that you've had it now, what do you wish you would've known then that now about the technology, the shift of going to this world?

DeLisa Atkinson (11:34):

So first of all, to really have the realization it's not going to be a hundred percent smooth. I think we all realize that now that there's definitely going to be some pickups and that is why you pilot different things or have a smaller subset of locations also. I mean I wish I would've known even then what there is available now since we've been a partner for a long time too. There's so much more out there now and I wish even at the time we'd have known about what comes to my mind is two-way integration, which is something that we're testing now or even about scheduling. Whenever we would give the candidate, Hey, you can pick between today, tomorrow, or the next day. No, we want them to pick from today, right? We've got to make sure that we're being fast, inefficient. And so that's definitely one thing that I think about today. And too just because it was no not right, it was no, not right now on some various things is

Speaker 3 (12:44):

Not

DeLisa Atkinson (12:45):

A no. I mean you definitely look at technology and how far we've come in the period of time and so that is definitely a big thing that I would say is that keep thinking those thoughts or asking those questions. Can we do this? Can we do that? No, our now, but eventually everyone is constantly innovating and so that's one thing I wish I would've thought a little bit more about at the time because I feel like at times we do get disappointed. We want systems to be able to do every single thing and that's honestly not really reality. So making sure we have those realistic expectations as well as something that's super important.

Tim Sackett (13:26):

Especially what I see with a lot of high volume hiring technology companies or ones that are converting over it is taking pieces of this. We'll start out with the scheduling piece because it automatically just automates self-scheduling becomes this giant thing and it's a big win. It's a big win for the field. For the managers out there that are always stuck in the middle of this thing, it's a big win for candidates, but then little by little you can start to add in all these other pieces to it as well. So like you said, you don't have to go full bore all at once. There's companies that do, especially if they already know, hey, we're just going to go this route based on maybe their industry competitive forces, whatever that might be. When you think about the TA function overall, how has that transformed from 2018 to where you're at today?

DeLisa Atkinson (14:16):

Yeah, it definitely has. Like I say, we really went from picking up the phone, calling all the applicants, trying to play phone tag, scheduling them whenever it was convenient for them. If they didn't answer texting, manually texting, calling one to back then even at the time. And so it really has given us more time and eliminated that phone tag and a lot of the back to back that was happening before.

Tim Sackett (14:52):

Yeah. Walk me through, I'm sure people that are on listening, so when somebody applies to you now, give us the before and after. Obviously before was this traditional kind of a TS environment. They would jump through all your hoops and click apply and wait for somebody to contact them and we all know that the vast majority of us are probably still in that world, right? What does that look like now for a Sport Clips stylist that wants to apply? Give us how fast that moves and what are those steps?

DeLisa Atkinson (15:24):

Sure. So right now we're scheduling or our applicants are scheduling within nine minutes if they are using the paradox tool, we call ours Kenzie. Everyone has their own little name

Speaker 3 (15:35):

For the

DeLisa Atkinson (15:36):

Budget, so you might hear Olivia, but ours is Kenzie. And so what we found whenever we started utilizing the tool and getting away from the traditional picking up the phone, all of that is we really started to where candidates had the ability to text because we know that's something that is super convenient for them. They could text for close to 25,000 to be able to be scheduled for an interview or if they were on our career website, even browsing around and they saw the Kinsey widget pop up, they could go there to be scheduled. And so once they hit either one of those platforms, they were immediately scheduled for an interview based upon the time that worked for them. So that was kind of the first thing that we did that we rolled out right away. That was one of our biggest pain points is making sure A, that everyone is contacting candidates and B, that we're able to schedule them and meet them where they are, which a lot of our candidates are texting.

(16:38):

So that part was super important. And then where we are today to even just utilizing the technology even further and what our process looks like. We did a pilot with our company owned locations. We've got the same pilot now going on with three of our franchisees is two-way communication. So also utilizing our a TS is if a candidate applies but did not interact with Kenzie, did not initially text in or communicate with her via our widget is Kenzie is then reaching out to those applicants that are opted in to text or email and showing 'em a video to learn more about us and then giving them the opportunity, hey schedule right here right now, here's the next three available times that we have to meet with you. And so that's something that we're currently in pilot for right now that we are looking to be able to roll out across the organization here pretty soon.

Tim Sackett (17:37):

It's interesting on the opt-in feature of email and mobile because I think so many companies struggle with, should we ask this from a data privacy standpoint or just from a communication? What percentage of your applicants are opting in for that communication?

DeLisa Atkinson (17:54):

Yeah, we found our percentage was honestly pretty low. We were around 50 or 60% and we changed our language. It was truly how we were wording it on our website. And so now we're around about 80% that are opting in.

Tim Sackett (18:11):

It's interesting because I've seen another paradox client that same thing. They kind of had this initial almost legal ease where it's like, oh no, I don't want to do that. But it was always like, Hey, if you actually want us to communicate with you about it, setting up your interview or whatever, click here and opt in. And then they found this giant percentage, but then when the people even didn't, they had another popup come up that said, Hey, understand if you don't opt in, we can't send you information around your to get you interviewed and you're applying for a job. So they said literally it went up into the high nineties from this of just having these kind of processes. And again, if we think marketers and TA to figure out how do we get people to opt in because then the tool becomes so much powerful.

(18:58):

Like you said, being able to text via mobile and have this communication happening is a game changer. But so often we go back to this mindset of traditional salaried hiring on the at s and not wanting to spam people and all this other stuff and you're just like, stop. Our job is to hire. Sometimes we have to be able to communicate. The other thing I love about the whole side of the change that takes place is a hundred percent of those candidates that apply potentially being able to actually set themselves up for an interview. Now in some instances for you guys you're like, well wait a minute, just because somebody wants to be a stylist doesn't mean that they can't, right? They have to have a license. So there's some screening that you want to take place. There's others that I've found that have gone from, so let's say it's a no skill job. It's like, hey, we just need people who are willing to work to show up and we're going to teach 'em to work in a warehouse or something like that. It's crazy to me that you still have organizations that are like, well, we want to screen them. What do you screen for? Right? They're applying. If they're willing to sign up for an interview and show up, that should be the screen. And so it's basically giving a hundred percent of can us a chance without us layering in this bias that takes place.

(20:24):

How did you guys get through when they set up the interview? Was that interview with the screen with your TA team or was that directly with a manager at one of the Sport Clips locations?

DeLisa Atkinson (20:32):

Yeah, great question. So our screen is very basic and one thing that we found too, I mean really we want to find out just right away are they licensed or are they not? Because of course you have to be licensed to cut hair forest, are they a barber, are they cosmetologists as well? And where do they want to work? Those are really the big things that we want to know and then be able to have the conversation with the candidate. And so our application, once someone does interact with Kinsey will either on the website, off the website texting, et cetera, is it goes directly to the team. So whoever they have set up to manage that, whether it is the franchisee or if it is the manager at the store, they're getting all those applicants in those interviews that are scheduled to their

Tim Sackett (21:19):

Cool. Hey, we had a question come in, so I appreciate that. Are you using separate opt-in or opt out in the process that Paradox offers when they apply? So does Paradox actually have that built into the process with Kenzie for or is there a couple of those where you have one that's ATF kind separate of Optin opting out? What's that? How do you guys do that?

DeLisa Atkinson (21:41):

Yeah, great question. So we have one on our website if the candidate goes in and interacts or if the candidate goes in and applies that way. And then also if they interact with Kenzie, there is the same opt-in and opt-out too to ask them to preferred contact method, text email as well.

Tim Sackett (21:59):

Yeah, I know I've seen it on the chat bot side with Olivia or Kenzie and that's pretty standard of have people being able to opt in or opt out right away on that. And again, it's all about wording you need to test and how that discussion goes because being able to go and your legal team will tell you to board it one way and then it doesn't mean it has to be that way. There's a lot of ways to get people to opt in and opt out. So I would say test a bunch of those and see the difference in terms of that percentage because it makes a huge difference in terms of where you're going from that standpoint. So I know a big change in adjustment, and you and I have because we saw each other in Phoenix and we had had a couple of conversations about this is how we measure success in ta. I want you to go back to 2018 and go, here's how we measured success. And now I want to talk about how you guys measure success today and all the different kinds of things you might look at versus where you were did or how did you measure success prior?

DeLisa Atkinson (23:04):

Yeah, absolutely. So I think we've all been in the same place where we've tried a million different things and what is the right thing? Is it time to fill? Is it hires, is it conversions? What does that look like? And so I would say before with us, we just knew it was taking too long to contact our candidates, but I honestly couldn't even track it for you. We just knew it is taking too long. And so we had our applicant tracking system build a report at the time, and again, it's just as good as we all know as the data that's being put in and the users. So if somebody would go in and say, Hey, I contacted this candidate, perfect, then I would be able to see did they contact this candidate within 15 minutes? Was it a day, was it three days? Did they never pick up the phone and contact the candidate? So that's kind of where we were from some things not really being able to track, which is kind of

Speaker 3 (24:10):

New

DeLisa Atkinson (24:11):

That we needed to be able to track to being able to track things like that. That was super important. Is that applicant response time for us?

Tim Sackett (24:21):

Yeah, I know the time to fill metric is used by I would say 99% of TA teams are globally. Because when you think of data and ta, it's been the one thing over a period of time where you go, well, I know when a job opens and I know when I close it, and then so bam, we have this thing. But the reality is there's a correlation. You could make a correlation to say, Hey, if we go faster, we're better. But there's really no causation always. If I have a chance to talk with a C-suite team, and one of the things I'll tell A-A-C-E-O will say, if you ask your TA leader how they measure success, and if they tell you time to fill or they give you some kind of time to fill metric it immediately terminate them, fire them because they literally are not, I mean here's what happens though, because so often we'll build these measurables and we build our bonuses for the year on those.

(25:17):

And I always just think getting faster is literally zero correlation to actually being better. It eliminates the quality side. But I understand too for you guys like hey, the faster we can put a style in a chair behind a chair, obviously that franchisee or that corporate store going to be making more money. So there's a little bit of business reason why you want to be faster. At the same time, you can be so fast that you could bring in lower quality people that hurt the brand or stuff like that. So there's always this magic number For me, I'm always kind of fill in a success metric. It's a health metric. If the time to fill a stylist is 45 days and sport clips is 90 days, you guys have cancer, there's a problem and we need to look at that. But if we're 47 days or 35 days, we're in the ballpark, we're fine, we're no better, no worse. It's just an industry average. And at that point, now we can focus on some of these others. One of the big ones is conversion. You guys knew by the way, we probably should back up on the ATFs side. Are you using Paradox? Are you using outside

DeLisa Atkinson (26:25):

Atf, outside a TS?

Tim Sackett (26:27):

Who are you guys using?

DeLisa Atkinson (26:28):

So we use a homegrown A TS.

Tim Sackett (26:30):

Okay,

DeLisa Atkinson (26:31):

A little bit more.

Tim Sackett (26:32):

No, yeah, and I think when you guys started Paradox really didn't have their full blown ATF to even launch at that point. So it's like, and then we see a lot of those of Paradox clients, whether they're using Workday or Oracle, SAP, iCIMS, a lot of them are doing that. Combined, we knew we were going to go off topic, so I'll go off topic with this one. So when you do high volume, you're not only high volume, you also have corporate hiring, IT, purchasing all this other stuff that happens and we start to see this split in the stack for ta. We start to see, oh by the way, this kind of traditional a S environment's really good to hire salary people, but then 90% of what we hire is this kind of high volume, so we need a different kind of technology. So you guys layered in obviously paradox. Do you use paradox for your salary stuff? Are you testing that or how does that work?

DeLisa Atkinson (27:27):

We don't, but we do use

Tim Sackett (27:28):

A different

DeLisa Atkinson (27:29):

ATS

Tim Sackett (27:32):

Position. It's becoming very common. It's just one of those things. I always think it took us so long because when you think of the two decades that you and I have been doing this, no one even questioned it. We used this very traditional a TS salary kind of process and we jammed all these high volume candidates through this and made them do this. And even to the point where we would put kiosk in retail locations and stuff because you're like, no, you have to click into this A and put this crap in. And again, we'll jump through that as salary workers, but as hourly worker doesn't happen very often. I'm going to keep going down the F. Are you guys going to layer in the self-scheduling thing is huge, right? Would you use Paradox to do that for salary or do you

DeLisa Atkinson (28:22):

We don't today. Possibly in the future. Hey,

Tim Sackett (28:26):

Paradox sales team get on this upgrade.

DeLisa Atkinson (28:30):

That's right. They've been waiting on, right. But I will tell you too, I mean we do have another brand as well. It's a smaller brand too, but we do use Paradox too with the scheduling as well. So yeah, it really is interesting the different sides of the business that we use it for and the ones that we

Speaker 3 (28:49):

Don't

DeLisa Atkinson (28:50):

Use it for, but especially in our organization too, whenever we think of the support team too, pretty low volume.

Tim Sackett (28:59):

Oh, for sure.

DeLisa Atkinson (29:00):

Yeah.

Tim Sackett (29:00):

I mean we see that quite a bit where you'll go to somebody and you're like, how many hires do you make a year? And you're like 2000. You're like, how many of those are salaries? They're like a hundred, but we designed an entire process for those 100, but we hired 2000. You're like, that's insane. So I'm going to get back to the data. So conversion is a big one when you have somebody hit your career site or however they get to that point. So they actually turn into a full blown applicant before Paradox. Did you know that number? And you know what that looks like now?

DeLisa Atkinson (29:31):

No, we didn't. Honestly, we say our conversion rate is probably around 15, 20% is the best number that we have based upon the data that we have from the job board we interact with, et cetera. Where we're at today,

Tim Sackett (29:50):

That's where you're at today, right now by the way, people might be on this going, oh my gosh, that's super low. That's actually three times better than industry average. The industry average conversions around 5%. And people, they don't believe it until they actually start to measure it and they go, wait a minute. For every person who shows up on our career site, for every a hundred people that show up on our career site, we only get five of them. And then you turn on this kind of interaction with Olivia or Kenzie or whoever that might be, and immediately you're getting 3, 4, 5, sometimes 10 times the amount of applicants based on just this difference in how you allow people to apply so much easier. To me, that's the number one thing we should start looking at. Do I know my conversion? Because otherwise you're just blowing money to Indeed and LinkedIn and job everything. You're just without even knowing we just need more top of funnel and you're like maybe the reason you don't have more top of funnel is because you make it so painful for somebody to apply from that standpoint. And then you said the other one was obviously time right to apply,

(31:02):

Which is huge time to actually schedule. What other kind of metrics are you looking at differently now?

DeLisa Atkinson (31:10):

Yeah, so the big one that we really started measuring off of this pilot because we were really trying to determine how are we going to measure this, right? Are we going to measure hires with us reaching out to those that haven't interacted with her? It's like, well, that's probably not the best metric to use because we had probably still hired them anyways. We were just picking up the phone and calling 'em. So how are we going to measure this? And again, it could be based upon the time thing that we do have more hires because we are contacting 'em faster than we were before, could absolutely be a correlation. But then we also talked about, okay, let's talk scheduled phone screens. Let's look at that metric and then we determine to, okay, that's not the right one because people can schedule phone screens, right? But do they always

Speaker 3 (32:05):

They show, yeah, do they come?

DeLisa Atkinson (32:08):

Unfortunately it doesn't happen. And so the metric that we're really looking at today is completed phone screens. So we said, okay, let's go look at what are our completed phone screen rates versus to us picking up the phone and calling those applicants that haven't opted in to text or email that we have to pick up the phone and call. And so what we've seen in tracking this is we are 17% better and have a higher completed phone screen rate of those that scheduled through Kenzie. So that's absolutely telling us, hey, they want to do that.

Tim Sackett (32:50):

So talk to me a little because one of the things that the power of that is they're actually getting nudges like, Hey, by the way, you have this phone screen coming up in an hour and if you need to reschedule, here's a link to reschedule. To me that's game changer because if someone's actually choosing themselves and then they're getting text messages, it reminds them but also reminds them, hey, it's okay if you have to change. We're not going to think because so many people just go, yeah, I know I scheduled that for Friday, but either I have a sick kid or I have a car problem or I just decided to take another job and they just never canceled. So having that happen becomes the ability to actually reschedule or cancel to me is huge because that completed phone screen or a cancel phone screen is just as good, right? Because you're like, Hey, Lisa didn't show up or block time on my calendar to have a conversation that never took place. That's so powerful. Yeah,

DeLisa Atkinson (33:43):

It is. And it truly gives our recruiters or managers, whoever's doing the interviews time that if someone cancels and I have my calendar set up like, Hey, if somebody cancels right now, I only need an hour notice. So they could go ahead and fill in that time spot for someone that's already canceled this afternoon. So meanwhile, in old technology, we'd have still been trying to pick up the phone and call them in between phone interviews, et cetera. Or if someone wanted to cancel, they weren't sure how they might have needed to call you, they left you a voicemail and when you have us check all of our voicemails right away. So that was something

Tim Sackett (34:22):

Else. But I think it's the coolest thing because I do think to me that's the anti anti ghosting piece of the software because you can also test, you could say, Hey, we send out, let's say somebody self scheduled three days from now, we could say, Hey, 24 hours from now we're going to send 'em a reminder and then the morning of or five hours or one hour before and we'll give 'em a cancellation link. But that's just kind of out the box. You can actually ramp that up and do a lot more. You could send them a video that says, Hey, by the way, you're going to talk to this person and you could do all kinds of stuff to figure out how do we ratchet down that kind of ghosting from that standpoint. I know a question came in on they had the conversion rate, it's three to 5% is the average conversion rate of literally we're talking millions and millions of applies across a lot of the at S world, it's very consistent. So whether you're high volume, high tech, low pay, high pay, three to 5%, most people if I ask them, will think it's anywhere from 50 to 70% conversion and they won't even believe you when you say three to five. So that you got to 15% again is giant. We've seen paradox clients get as high as 40%.

(35:45):

The nice thing is if you don't have this turned on, you can work with your A TS vendor, you can work with your CRM vendors, you can work with all this stuff that you have and say, look in your IT team and go, look, I have to know, and by the way, your marketing people actually know this for your customers. They're the ones that already have this stuff turned on so they can turn it on for your career pages. But to know when somebody actually clicks where they came from, where they left you when they decided to abandon your application process becomes huge because you can make these changes and little changes in tests that you do turn into this 5, 10, 15, 20% difference in conversion and all of a sudden you go, gosh, we don't need to spend more money for more candidates. We just have to give them a better experience to do this. So I'm not saying it's easy, it's work, but it's not work you're going to have to do physically, it's somebody else is going to have to do it for you. It might cost them money, but the ROI ON this is so huge when you finally figure that out.

DeLisa Atkinson (36:48):

I'd say with that, just real quick, Tim too, I mean we did a lot of things too with Google Analytics. I mean looking at everything too on the backend, like what pages? Redefining our pages, looking at our application process is your application process too, is it one pages? Is it three pages? Are they clicking? Because we did have a process, it didn't matter if they didn't complete all the steps. We really needed that initial one where we got their contact number and email address, but we found a huge drop off on that second page. And so of course we eliminated it, we combined the information that we really needed and just made it one. So I think two, it's not easy, but really looking at those types of things, how easy is your application process for your candidate? Really using those analytics too that your team has on the backend to be able to see is it a particular page that's driving conversions? Is it a page that's really not driving conversions? And then we also look even at things like whenever it comes to conversion, the different job boards that we use, and we also look like at employer brand ads, I mean

(37:58):

A variety of places,

Tim Sackett (38:01):

And you're starting, that's that evolution of going from time to fill to really looking at things that drive better ta. When you start to go, wait a minute, not only do we want to know where are our best hires coming from or where are our hires coming from? Then to be able to start to go next level and go, Hey, because you guys measure A S by is, it's basically the amount they're making per is per revenue. Is it per week or per, how do you

DeLisa Atkinson (38:27):

Yeah, per week. Yeah. So we say assign.

Tim Sackett (38:32):

So give me a good revenue producer on a weekly basis. Is that 2000 a week? Is that

DeLisa Atkinson (38:36):

What let's just say 1300 a week,

Tim Sackett (38:38):

1300 a week. So if you would go out and you can pull that data out of your sales thing and go, Hey, here's all of our 13 hundreds. Let's go back and actually find out where we got them hired from and then here's all of our eight hundreds and where did they, and do we start to see the differences? That becomes now all of a sudden you have the C-suites coming to you going, wait a minute, we're driving revenue in a really big way because we know where our best people come from and we're focusing more effort and time there. I think that's a giant evolution to where you get to just from a data standpoint. I think that's pretty good. Awesome. So we wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about now that you've kind of made this transition, what's next? What do you wish you had that you don't have? Or where do we start to see, especially with all the AI stuff, and again, don't get us wrong, paradox is ai. There's a lot of AI built in and they have more AI that they're building in. So you're already using ai, but what do you wish you have or have now or what do you wish you could get that you don't have?

DeLisa Atkinson (39:44):

Yeah, that is such a great question. I was really thinking about the talent acquisition and just, I mean, it's evolving rapidly every single day, especially all the conversation around ai. We know paradox two is really at the front forefront, but of course there's always room for innovation in this industry for sure. And in fact, just thinking back, I mean we were the first franchise client and just thinking of all the innovation within the last six years as well, but honestly, especially in our industry, if I could wave a magic wand, I want a database of every licensed stylist, barber, their contact information, everything in one place, that would make my life so much easier as well as our franchisees. If I had that

Tim Sackett (40:33):

Dea, I've actually spoke to some of the HR technology, TA technology like people that are out there with startups and things. And even the ones who have been around for a while, they truly believe we're not that far off of having understanding, especially when you have licensees. I did pharmacy recruiting for a long time and every single state to be a pharmacist, you had to have a license and I could buy that license. It's public information. And so again, it shouldn't be that difficult for somebody to create these databases with AI to be able to go into every state, scrape this information, whether that's on a monthly basis, a weekly basis, whenever. And then again now how do we actually nurture to those people and tell them we're the best company to come work for? If we can imagine it, it doesn't seem like it should be that far off because all the pieces are there.

(41:24):

We just have to figure out. And again, it does get into when my UK friends hear they freak out privacy, all this other stuff, which we're definitely trailing in the US around that, but I still think that we can get there. It seems like the point of technology now is like it's one thing if I'm trying to sell them terrible fraudulent life insurance, I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to offer them a job, so I should be at least have access to offering that job and they should have access to be able to say, no, I'm opting out. I don't need to hear from you. As long as it's relevant to them, I'm not going out to an engineer and offering them a stylist job, but somehow CareerBuilder feels completely fine to continue to offer me RN jobs because I was the head of TA for a hospital. I'm not an rn. Stop doing

DeLisa Atkinson (42:16):

This. Absolutely. I mean, if we can even get some consistency whenever it comes to the list, because some, I can just get names, others will give you everything. And then even if you purchase lists, we know those lists, they're not accurate. They're not the full list. So that's something that immediately came to my mind for the industry is really wanting that. And then I was thinking too, just even on the paradox side, taking it a step further, again, we're really utilizing the tool right now for scheduling has helped us tremendously. We also have not just like, Hey, apply here or schedule your interview here a video that makes it fun, learn about us. But even taking that further, what if it could be even a day in the life that we could also use the technology to, Hey, click here. Maybe it's a virtual salon tour or meet one of our team members here or the day in the life on the next screen. Something like that I think would be really interesting. And then from an overall TA perspective, and that would make our life easier too, is just really if there was something that could predict future talent requirements based upon market trends, industry

Speaker 3 (43:37):

Trends,

DeLisa Atkinson (43:38):

Company growth, because we definitely see that, especially in our space for sure, with schools closing down, things like that, that would just be super helpful.

Tim Sackett (43:50):

To me, that's like you've reached the pinnacle of TA metrics when you can get to capacity metrics when you go, and it can be because if you have the funnel and you're measuring, Hey, here's how many type of funnel candidates we have and here's how many screens and here's how many interviews to offers to blah, blah, blah, right? Eventually you go, well, we know it takes us 12 candidate 12 on the top of the funnel to get to one hire, and I have 144 of these in the top of funnel. I know I have predictive 12 hires in funnel. But even saying that, almost nobody uses that or knows that they just don't. But yet our CEOs will come to us and go, Hey, we want to open a hundred locations next year and we're going to need 200 or 500 more stylists. And we go, we don't even know what's in our pipeline potentially or what levers we have to pull to increase the amount of top of funnel to get to that, the ultimate number of 500 hires.

(44:49):

And to me, having the capacity metrics would be giant. And I've talked to so many TA, CRM technologies, a TS technologies, high volume hiring technologies, and for whatever reason, they just haven't gotten there yet. And so I keep waiting. That's my wish is will you tell us and predict us and give us what's in our pipeline already? And we know it's not going to be perfect, but if you could go and say, Hey, by the way, you have another three and a half hires in your pipeline at least, and I know I need 12, I can go to somebody and go, look, we're going to not make this right. We're going to be short from that standpoint. I also, I don't know, when you were at Paradox, did you get to see their employee experience on generative AI like they were working on?

DeLisa Atkinson (45:39):

Yes.

Tim Sackett (45:41):

So I saw it from that side. I'm like, that's cool. So basically for those on here, it's AI that can actually have a real dynamic conversation back and forth with an employee. Employee could be working a shift and they have an issue, they have an HR issue, and then all of a sudden they can actually have way better than a chat bot conversation. It actually is pretty good. What I would say from the TA side, what I would like to see is, can you imagine somebody they go and apply through Kenzie, Kenzie self schedules them, and then the next kind of text message they get is from the hiring manager who is AI having this great, Hey, my gosh, I just saw that you're on the calendar for Monday at 8:00 AM I can't wait to see you. If you have any questions, just text me directly.

(46:27):

But it's all AI driven, but it seems so real and conversational. But again, to me that makes that immediately that candidate feels welcome. They feel wanted, they feel desired, and they're more than likely going to show up. And so I want to see that kind of evolution. And I think, again, I think it's so close to being there that we can have real kind of dynamic conversation. Alright, I know we have a couple of questions, so let's get into that before we get out of here. So are you measuring conversion from lead to hire or from lead to screen interview and are these available via Paradox? So I guess talk a little bit about the data that you get on the backend for Paradox.

DeLisa Atkinson (47:08):

Yeah, so I'm actually measuring both of those. And so yes, some of the data is available within Paradox. There are customer reports too that you can have created for you. And then of course there's some standard analytics as well. The big thing that I would say here that makes it a little tricky and why I'm doing some of the manual as well is that it's based upon what Paradox considers a completed phone screen. Because how do they know if someone didn't show up or not, maybe we need to go in there, Hey, they didn't show up. So it's not counted as a completed phone screen. So I'm really trying to use True Metrics whenever I know that they showed up to the phone screen.

Tim Sackett (47:52):

And one of the differences between having it layered into your ATS and using Paradox as an ATS paradox would have much more data capability

Speaker 3 (48:00):

If

Tim Sackett (48:00):

You're using them for the full process. From that standpoint, the metrics mentioned available in Paradox or they have to be built separately. Again, some of these are definitely measured. The more you use every aspect of paradox, obviously the more data they're going to have. Or a lot of times, depending on the a TS that you're using, especially like a Workday and the integration bidirectional, they're being able to pull a lot of stuff. And I know SAP, I think they do a lot of stuff with them and also I think Oracle, but so yeah, the conversion stuff that we're talking about, they can measure when it hits your career site to, again, from a scheduling standpoint, like you said, if you're using them for the interview side, you'll actually be able to do that as well. If you're not, and you're doing that separately, they would actually either have to pull that from your at s as a custom report or you'd have to figure that manually from that standpoint.

(48:57):

But I don't know what you think within your ats, I just think the ATSs in general have failed on the reporting stuff for so long. And it's like some of this I know is because it's, again, it's not easy to go and say, Hey, we're just an ATTs and we're just going to be really a layer into your career site. But to be able to start to measure the conversion or when somebody actually hits your career site two all the way to hire, there's a lot of pieces of technology that have to respond to that and hit. So it's not easy, but there's a lot of TA analytics software out there that can pulls in all this disparate data and gives you really great dashboard. Again, if you're using Paradox as a full compliment, and I'm not their salesperson, so don't quote me on any of this, but obviously you'll get better. The fewer pieces of technology you have to use the layer in, the better data you're going to get from that standpoint.

DeLisa Atkinson (50:01):

And I can tell for us just real quick, I mean we measure within the tools that they have today, like the capture complete, how many of them are having that conversation too? We interview what percentage of them are being scheduled because just because they go to the conversation doesn't necessarily mean to that they're even going to schedule. So we take a look at that. Also with Paradox, you can do even a satisfaction rating. That's something that was really important to us as well as to understand

Tim Sackett (50:30):

This is candidate satisfaction, right? Yeah.

DeLisa Atkinson (50:32):

Yes. Candidate satisfaction. So we're tracking that and then we're looking from the scheduling side, from the time that I capture the candidate, how long does it take for the interview request to be sent, how long does it take for the interview to be scheduled and how long does it take to be completed? Kind of a start to finish on that as well. And generally, I mean, we're less than a day for all that to be done.

Tim Sackett (50:56):

Alright, I'll get you out with one last thing. Any final advice to anybody looking to make this transition from, I'll say traditional hiring at high volume to this new conversational AI driven hiring process? What advice? Anything that you haven't given them?

DeLisa Atkinson (51:15):

Yeah, the biggest thing I would say is, I mean, you just have to make sure that you have the buy-ins and that your team understands the why. I think the biggest pushback for us was, Hey, but I just want to pick up the phone and call. You still can we still want you to, even if a candidate, let's say, scheduled an interview for tomorrow and you've got some availability today, still pick up the phone and call, then it doesn't mean that we're taking human out. And I do feel like sometimes people do have that misconception or misunderstanding. And so really just if you are looking to roll this out, again, just making sure that you do have that buy-in and everyone involved in the process really understands those why and the benefits that it's going to bring to not only you but also to the candidates as well.

Tim Sackett (52:05):

Yeah, I think it's such an important point that you make because I do think it's, we tend to say, oh, we're going to automate everything, but really what this does is allow us as humans to actually have the capacity to spend time with the people that need time, right? For the first time because you're not trying to do all this stuff. So I always figure out in that process, where does the human have to be in that loop? And now we have the capacity to actually do that. Alright, cool. So for those who didn't want to answer a question live, Lisa, where can they find you? What's the easiest way to get ahold of you?

DeLisa Atkinson (52:36):

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. Absolutely. Feel free to go there. I'm more than happy to answer any questions, respond to any messages that are sent my way.

Tim Sackett (52:46):

Awesome. Well, I appreciate you coming out and sharing this. I appreciate paradox for giving us the platform to have this conversation and I hope you have a great rest of your summer and I'm sure I will see you this fall around the conference circuit.

DeLisa Atkinson (52:59):

Thank you.

Tim Sackett (53:01):

Thanks everybody.

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