Compass Group has been utilizing AI in recruiting before it was trendy. How do you view AI’s place in talent acquisition?
Shay Johnson: I think the biggest thing is just keeping it simple. We're not trying to view it as, "Oh, my gosh, let's use AI to solve for everything." We try to keep it simple and say, "Hey, how do we have a great AI experience on the front-end, something that is actually helpful, something that actually serves the needs and really does help a candidate or a hiring manager or a recruiter?"
We're not trying to use AI the way that I think a lot of people talk about in the mainstream media where it's an all out discovery war for productivity. We’re not necessarily trying to make people 10 times more productive and replace a bunch of tasks with AI. I think that's more of a tertiary outcome of using AI to create better experiences, simpler processes, and easier access to information. It’s about helping people that are dealing with a poor experience. When you're using AI with that mentality, you're going to get increased productivity, speed, and efficiency.
At Compass, we've already got lean teams, and we're always trying to focus on doing things at scale so we don't suddenly need 100 more people. We don't need to focus on using AI to try and reduce headcount. It's more of how do we use AI to keep our headcount relatively stable so our business can grow, our revenue can grow, but our overhead and our resources don't necessarily have to grow relative to that. With AI, we can pretty much stay at almost the same team size or 1% growth while the business grows significantly faster YoY.
How do you make the case for the TA function to be more involved in business strategy?
SJ: Coming out of the pandemic, it was an all out blitz in terms of returning business and new business activations. For a little while there, it was very reactive. An example is someone who came to us and said, "Hey, we just acquired this new piece of business, we need to hire about 150 people." And we said, "Oh, that's great. When do you go live?" And they said, "Last week."
Proactively including the Frontline Hourly TA team was sometimes an afterthought because our business leaders knew our team was really efficient. So we raised our hands to get more involved as early in the process as possible alongside our sales teams and our operators. It's just been a win-win for everybody. It's also a win for the candidates, because we've got our stuff together so we can actually help them through a process thoughtfully. So I just think it's better candidate experience, our operators are in a better place, and we get off on a really great strong start with a new client, which then in turn helps you win even more business.
AI is evolving fast. What's your advice to someone struggling to keep up?
SJ: I would say don't just go looking to add something, look at what you could possibly simplify. If you think about the pieces of a recruiting process, the biggest pain points are going to be either an application process or screening and reviewing applicants at scale. And most notably interview scheduling.
Anything that is transactional and based on data can be the perfect use case for AI. Interview scheduling is one of the easiest things that you could leverage AI for because it truly needs zero human interaction or intervention, or very, very minimal. So I would say, just solve for the stuff that is absolutely solvable. Do it as fast as you can and work your way from there.
Finally, absolutely partner with your Legal and IT/Cybersecurity teams to ensure you’re in lock-step on AI legislation compliance practices. We have a great relationship with those teams and are getting better every day in terms of how we proactively anticipate the AI compliance landscape and do things the right way without hindering our innovation progress.
Don't just go looking to add something, look at what you could possibly simplify... Solve for the stuff that is absolutely solvable. Do it as fast as you can and work your way from there.
A lot of enterprise orgs have developed "implementation fatigue." How do you beat it?
SJ: It's especially a challenge for us because we have over 30 individual brands, and every single one of those has their own CEO, HR team , and brand identity, so they all have competing priorities. So for us, we had to wrap our arms around it a while back. We have really consolidated our approach and started to look at technology more in terms of prioritizing the partnership and solution before the technology itself. Anytime we're trying to solve a challenge, we go to those partners first and try to understand if they can solve it, or if they have something on their roadmap that could in the near future.
So I would just say for anybody that has that implementation fatigue: stop implementing. Try to really focus on prioritizing good partnerships with your vendors and doing your due diligence to have those discussions, solution design and ideate with them, and just work through every possibility that you can with an existing partner.
It’s 2024, and budgets are going down while hiring demand is going up or at least staying the same. What’s the strategy for navigating that?
SJ: Yeah, it's tough. If you feel like you're not getting the love you need from a budget perspective, I would recommend spending more of your time building the business cases and being able to deliver clearly on ROI. If you're already working with a constrained or limited budget and you're having more demand put on you, then you need to have that mentality of “We're not going to be given more, so we've got to do more with what we have.” And what that looks like is optimizing your microbudgets and your line items. So if you want to think about that in terms of technology or advertising or resources or whatever it may be, you'll realize there are ways to repurpose resources in different ways. One approach is if you’ve got a pretty manual process, figuring out how to automate a lot of it with technology. That’s usually an easy way to save money when you’re limited on human resources.
Advertising optimization is another huge thing. That's something that we've looked at this year: “How do we make advertising much, much more purposeful? Let's really optimize it to where we're getting the maximum amount of return and value out of it.” We're constantly looking at doing as much as possible with that advertising budget in terms of everything from posting practices to what boards we’re prioritizing to what data visibility we have centralized. So even if the budget doesn't grow, the business can grow, the demand can grow.
I think a good talent leader looks at the budget as a challenge to solve for. The same way that a really good contractor or designer would say, "Hey, I've been given this budget. How am I going to build or design the best thing possible for this client in their home?" Maybe you’re being given this budget because that's what the organization says you have in terms of operating expenses or profit margin, and so it's your job to figure out how to do as much as possible with that money as you can.
