Check out the TTEC career site at TTECjobs.com
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Vicki Steere:
This is Vicki Steere, Executive Director of Global Talent Acquisition Marketing for TTEC, and I'm next on the RecTech podcast.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world, along with recruiters who'll tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell.
Chris Russell:
All right. Welcome to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology inspired conversations. If you want to know about the latest tools and tactics for finding talent online, you've come to the right show.
Chris Russell:
Today's episode is a recruiter edition. This podcast is sponsored in part by Adzuna, the quality obsessed jobs search engine that's taking the market by storm. Adzuna wants to get America hiring again by allowing businesses to zero in on the right candidates. Cut your cost per application and engage with high quality candidates with Adzuna. Go over to adzuna.com/hire to get started.
Chris Russell:
And by Emissary, the text recruiting platform built to make candidate engagement and recruitment automation easy. Their AI recruiting software empower recruiting teams, HR departments, and staff firms with efficient tools that work in harmony with any ATS or HRI system. Featuring one-on-one text campaign, shortcodes, and even chat bot, Emissary's platform will speed up your creative process. Head over to emissary.ai and book a demo today.
Chris Russell:
My next guest is a seasoned talent acquisition, HR, and marketing executive. She has developed and successfully executed talent acquisition, human capital, and organizational development strategies, marketing plans, and budgets for operations in North America, Europe, APAC, and Latin America, and currently heads up talent acquisition marketing for TTEC. Vicki Steere, welcome RecTech. It's great to have you.
Vicki Steere:
Thanks so much, Chris. It's great to be here.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. Looking forward to our conversation today. You're a high volume hirer, so really curious about how you guys recruit overall, but first tell the listeners, what does TTEC do? Give them an explanation.
Vicki Steere:
Sure. TTEC is, well, if you look at the marketing materials, we are a customer experience company providing technology and engagement for the customer experience. At the end of the day, what that really means is pull the curtain back, the Wizard of Oz curtain back, and we're the largest company you've never heard of, but we power the customer experience for some of the world's most iconic brands. So at the end of the day, we do technology consulting and contact center experiences across the globe.
Chris Russell:
I imagine you're probably one of with top hirers in the country for customer service people.
Vicki Steere:
That's right. We've hired almost 50,000 people already this year, globally. I'm about 25-30,000 right here in the US.
Chris Russell:
50,000 so far in 2020, is that correct?
Vicki Steere:
Correct.
Chris Russell:
Wow, that's a lot. Do you sleep at night? I mean, that's a lot of hires.
Vicki Steere:
It is a lot of hires. Luckily we're built around being a recruiting machine, if you will. We have a high advantage there. The vast majority of those numbers... It seems like we run the gamut certainly from a hiring perspective. The vast majority of those numbers are in the direct customer contact field. In the old days it was called call center. It's no longer a call center because there's so much more than that. There's certainly voice, there's email, there's chat, there's social media. It's any way that you're engaging with the companies that you're working with.
Vicki Steere:
Going into COVID, like most companies we were expecting to lay off and just the actual opposite happened because we already had work at home technology and have been doing so for 15 plus years, our clients came to us and said, "We need you. We don't know how to do this thing." And so we started hiring and started hiring fast.
Vicki Steere:
But in addition to that, we also hire, as I mentioned, we also are today doing technology and consulting, and so we're hiring everything from data analysts, to AI professionals, to individuals that can really work in sales force. There's a technology component, a consulting component, and all of the support functions that go with that massive amount of hiring and managing people.
Chris Russell:
That's a pretty big machine you got a rolling in there. I think you mentioned on the pre-call that you're going to be hiring a lot of people also in the fourth quarter, I think it was something like... Was it 20,000 you said?
Vicki Steere:
Yep. 20,000 globally.
Chris Russell:
Globally.
Vicki Steere:
About 15,000 of those are in the US. Literally in October, I just got the numbers in, we hired nine 9,600 in October alone. Many of those positions, there's a whole gamut, there are seasonal, there are temporary, but there's also full-time regular, and again, the vast majority of those numbers are work at home type customer service roles. And we're doing that globally. Up until 2020, we've pretty much just did work at home in North America. But we literally pushed 75% of our global workforce to a work at home environment in a matter of weeks, and then they continue to work. So we several thousand in Mexico and 17,000 working in the Philippines, in a work at home environment.
Chris Russell:
In order to hire that many people, Vicki, you must have a pretty fast/efficient application process and hiring process. Can you kind of walk me through that? I'm curious how long it takes and what are some of the steps that are involved.
Vicki Steere:
Yeah, sure. So, other thing, because we're a customer experience company, we also consider the candidate experience. And while we have to go back and forth and absolutely think about how to optimize and be efficient and fast and quick, there's also that we constantly keep the candidate and the employee experience in mind.
Vicki Steere:
What that looks like essentially, my team is, as you mentioned earlier, in global talent acquisition marketing, and my team is about, if you will, the top end of the funnel, what can we do to brand the company, drive candidates, work with their... My team, I also support any of the social media when it comes to employee experience and the candidate experience. So my team acts sort of like an internal recruitment advertising agency, thinking about all the strategies to drive the literally million plus applicants that we've had so far this year into the top end of the funnel. And I have people that work for me globally.
Vicki Steere:
We also then have a group that is, as I said, we're recruiting machine, the talent acquisition folks for the mass hiring are "on the ground." And I say that because they're more local. They're obviously doing everything virtual today, but they're the ones that are at the backend. They're the ones that are, instead of doing a full life cycle recruiting, they're more working with the candidates on a giving them that final personal touchpoint. And so everything feeds into what they do on doing the interviews and making the offers and doing the post offer.
Vicki Steere:
But we have this whole group in between because we want the TAs to have that personal touchpoint, the talent acquisition folks, to have that personal touchpoint. We also turn back and look at, what else can we outsource? What can be done or what doesn't have to be done on that last candidate experience? What is process driven?
Vicki Steere:
So we have a third group called the Global Talent Acquisition Services Team, and that team is really about that process. So they are experts in our applicant tracking system and moving people. We also have many, many automated processes. So when I say that, and it depends on the actual program, but we've automated workflows to enable that candidate experience.
Vicki Steere:
When somebody applies the first step or the first thing they get is an email that says, here's the assessments you need to take, whether that be a technical assessment, a tech check, which might be actually interviewing your computer for a work at home environment, any assessments, et cetera, that's an automated automation. We've automated that in our APS so they get that automatically.
Vicki Steere:
Once they've done that, they pass, the systems are built to check whether or not they pass. And the candidate is then invited to come to self schedule themselves for an interview.
Vicki Steere:
The automation is there and we've also added in the touchpoints when we need to. So if some reason, somebody doesn't go on to the next step [inaudible 00:10:25] our shared services group might then get involved and say, what do we need to do to help you through that next step?
Vicki Steere:
The time to hire for a typical associate could be as little as, from application to, if everything goes really smoothly and they complete all the steps, from application to interview to offer could be as little as three to four days, and then we can put them up and started within a week.
Chris Russell:
Gotcha. How big is your recruiting team overall? Once they do get into the pipeline, how many recruiters are there servicing those applicants roughly?
Vicki Steere:
I'm going to say the entire team globally, remember we're hiring 50,000 plus people this year, the entire team globally of all three groups, it's about 300. Just under 300. But that's a global number. US talent acquisition, the final file group is probably several dozen. I'd have to check.
Chris Russell:
Ball park was all I was looking for there. So a million plus applicants, you said, per year, I guess that's about a 100,000 a month. How do you drive those applicants? What are you doing from an advertising standpoint? If you could kind of drill down a bit on that.
Vicki Steere:
Sure. I can say, have we done it? The answer is yes. We obviously, over time, and when you look at it, it's a relatively short period of time. I'm a boomerang to TTEC. I started in 2011, left in 2014, and came back in 2017. But if you kind of rewind back to 2011-ish, the company's digital strategy was a single job board, and should they do this job board or that one? It wasn't a question of doing both.
Vicki Steere:
That's obviously evolved very heavily. So my team, again, is focused on what are not just the best job boards or the best sites to go to, but what is the best in B2C marketing? So we take marketing concepts and apply them to talent attraction. So when we look at that, obviously our number one source globally is the big old behemoth of today, which is Indeed.
Vicki Steere:
But when you look at it, it doesn't represent 100% of our hires or 50% of our hires. It represents about probably 25% of our hires globally. But we also are in literally every job board and I could name job boards in every country that we work in, that we're on and we're there. We do a lot of what we can do to automate that where we're doing scraping and pushing partnerships with organizations like JobSync, to be able to automate some of that.
Vicki Steere:
The growth today, again, back in 2011, newspapers were still still a thing, believe it or not. We don't, I would say, as far as the channels go, marketing channels, the big three is absolutely number one is the internet job sites. Number two is referrals. We have a very, very, very robust referral program. And then number three in the growth channel is social media. We are seeing social media as being a... I always say, use a little play money, have a little set aside for not just what your top three sources are today, but what is the next source?
Vicki Steere:
Remember in 2011 or 2010, people were saying, what is this pay-per-click thing? And how much does an Indeed cost? Now it's, just 10 years later, it's a natural, it's part of what you do. I had to fight to use Indeed in 2011, but it was the emerging source. So I see social media is the emerging source. And I don't just mean Facebook, I mean everything. So we're using Facebook, Twitter, TikTok. [crosstalk 00:15:17].
Chris Russell:
You're using TikTok?
Vicki Steere:
Yes, we have ads on TikTok. [crosstalk 00:15:23]. We have both organic and paid in TikTok, and we're doing quite well [crosstalk 00:15:30].
Chris Russell:
[crosstalk 00:15:27] on TikTok, that you actually push out video [crosstalk 00:15:32]?
Vicki Steere:
We do. It's @ttecbite. So our social media strategy is a little different, in that we don't just hammer a particular channel with just jobs. We look at social media as, the organic side of social media, as being, hey, let's look at... Social media is, in my mind, it has the opportunity of giving a small company a brand, but giving a big company a personality. And that's what we needed. People don't know TTEC. So what happens is we want to, again, pull back the curtain and give them a little picture of what it's like to work there.
Vicki Steere:
We use the organic side of social media to share our employee value proposition. What is it like to work here? Certainly testimonials, but also just, hey, an image of here's some fun. We've had people's pets on there for the past couple of months because people are spending a lot more time with their pets in an at home environment. And then, oh, by the way, we're hiring. But we get a ton of people that are now literally using DMs to apply to us.
Chris Russell:
Really?
Vicki Steere:
Yes.
Chris Russell:
What do they do, send you their basic contact details on a DM and say, Hey, I'm interested?
Vicki Steere:
Yes. I'm interested. And we work with that conversation. Again, that's the beauty of having that machine, where we have the global... The shared services team answers those people and actually uses it as a chat functionality. So we have just recently been able to add them to our social listening tools and have access to their information, and they will literally have a direct message with somebody back and forth and start their application for them and have them complete it to be compliant.
Chris Russell:
What's kind of your cadence on social media? Do you post every day? Do you post a couple of times a week? Do you have a sense of that?
Vicki Steere:
It's much more than that. So I have about eight people globally that work on my social media team that is particularly focused on the employment brand. There is also some people on the corporate marketing team that really focus more on the B2B side of it. But we post pretty frequently. It's of course, different by channel. You don't want to spam somebody on a Facebook or an Instagram, so it might be a couple of times a week on an Instagram or a TikTok, but it's usually a couple of times a day on Facebook, and it's much more frequent on Twitter for instance. And I'm personally pretty active in my LinkedIn feeds and other things like that, just sharing and encouraging others to share just stories that are of interest, because we're all brand ambassadors. Whether you're in recruiting or not, just the fact that you're talking about what's going on at your company is supporting the recruitment efforts.
Chris Russell:
I love it. I mean, you're doing exactly what a company should be doing on social media, which is showing off life, getting people interested, and then eventually they'll know the name TTEC and they'll think about applying at some point. So I love what you guys are doing there. [crosstalk 00:19:33].
Vicki Steere:
Just one other thing about that in particular. My social media manager is amazing. So on our TTEC channel, every other Thursday we actually have a TTEC live on LinkedIn. We do Facebook lives all the time, but she does a show called the Talent Show Powered by TTEC. [crosstalk 00:20:00]. I would encourage you to go look at it. She uses the video streaming software behind the scenes called StreamYard, really inexpensive, like $20 a month. And it allows us to actually produce a live broadcast and she does it. We have it set on a particular time and she features different interviews and a job from a global perspective. It's about a 15 minute show, just like this podcast is going to be, but she does it on LinkedIn and it gets ongoing play and interest.
Chris Russell:
Nice. I wanted to ask you, you mentioned B2C marketing tactics. What's one example that you could share with the audience as far taking that marketing concept and applying it to a job marketing concept?
Vicki Steere:
Sure. So I look at it from not just how to post a job. Let's look at it from what is your employment brand. And just like a company like a Coca-Cola is selling a product, your company and the employment side of that is a product. So every message that you put out there needs to be a cohesive message. It doesn't have to look the same. Doesn't have to be 100% the same, but when you go down the road and you look at different things about Coca-Cola, you know it's Coca-Cola, right? So there has to be that cohesiveness.
Vicki Steere:
We look at it as a product. Certainly where the channels and the tactics that we're going to do may be more directed towards employment, so certainly job boards, but social media isn't necessarily just employment. It's how do we convey our employment brand using a more mass consumer channel like that?
Vicki Steere:
From a general perspective, that's why I say B2C marketing, because what is best? How are consumer brands getting their name out there? And how do we learn from those rather than just how do we learn from other people that are hiring? What are some of your favorite brands? And do you get that same warm fuzzy feeling no matter what the touchpoints are around it?
Vicki Steere:
I'm a Starbucks fan. I don't drink coffee, believe it or not, I'm a chai. But you go into any Starbucks anywhere in the globe and they're going to look slightly different, but the feeling is the thing. And so I want any touchpoint that happens with someone coming across TTEC, that they get a sense of our culture and our feeling of what it's like to work there without actually having to read a job description.
Chris Russell:
Very cool. You talked about a million applicants. I'm curious, do you know what your conversion rate is in terms of clicks to apply? Once they hit your website, your career site, what that number is, any idea?
Vicki Steere:
Sure. It's about, well, I mean, it's slightly different because we have some people that just completely bypass our career website. You have to think about it like the companies that are scraping us, like an Indeed or a CareerBuilder or whatever, or other companies globally, we're sending them directly into our ATS, so they might not ever touch our career website, but it's about a four to one. We have about four visitors to someone that actually clicks through and applies.
Vicki Steere:
Obviously with COVID and that conversion, we have seen an increase in the applicant hire ratio. So the conversions have actually gone down from an applicant to a higher ratio. So we're actually having to drive more applicants. Obviously, my conversions previous, if I went to previous years, were about a 10% from an applicant to a hire ratio, but yeah, I've had a million applicants so far this year and about 50,000 hires. So that tells you right there what my ratios are.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, definitely. So from a tech stack perspective, you said Taleo is your ATS [crosstalk 00:24:36] your career site, and you also you use JobSync. I imagine you had to tweak Taleo a lot to get it to where it is today. Can you just talk a little about how you use it?
Vicki Steere:
Sure. I'm not a Taleo expert by any means, I'm the marketing person, and I should mention we are moving to ORC, Oracle Recruiting Cloud, within the next 12 to 24 months, depending on where in the globe, but yeah, Taleo has been with the organization for more than a decade. We have a number of experts that work in it. And again, wherever we can create automation or automated workflows, we do. So there's a lot of customization that's happened and over the years our application has gotten shorter in order to improve candidate experience and our automation has gone up. Just to kind of give you some of the brief ideas there.
Vicki Steere:
Again, we are moving to ORC next year. I'm pretty excited about it because obviously Oracle had stopped supporting Taleo on a heavy scale, and so there's some features that we're really looking forward to in the coming [crosstalk 00:26:05].
Chris Russell:
Talk about JobSync for a second. I guess, explain what that tool is. I think it's a great tool. I'm actually going to ask to have their CEO on the show in the next few weeks or so [crosstalk 00:26:19].
Vicki Steere:
Alex Murphy, he's become a close friend, if you will, because we've had to work really closely together. What I liked about JobSync, and we've implemented it in some areas and still have some other areas to go, but JobSync in theory is really about a native application.
Vicki Steere:
There's two ways to apply in most job boards. One, you can hit the click apply and the system emails your resume, et cetera. The other is to do a redirect. And companies like ours have had to use those for years, redirecting candidates so that they can apply within our applicant tracking system for both compliance as well as because we need to optimize that process for so many thousands of applications.
Vicki Steere:
JobSync is supposedly designed to take the best of both worlds, to emulate your application that's in your applicant tracking system, but put it into a native environment so that the candidate that's in the job board or in the job site completes the basic applications that is all of your information that's in your applicant tracking system, but in that native environment so that they don't click through [crosstalk 00:27:58]. You don't lose them in that click through process.
Vicki Steere:
We are primarily using JobSync today, or we started with them for Facebook. They're doing two things for us, one that they're allowing candidates to apply through that and they're distributing our jobs to Marketplace. Marketplace has been a huge applicant flow for us. So Facebook Marketplace is today's Craigslist, if you will.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, it really is.
Vicki Steere:
They have facilitated that for us and we're driving applicants that way. They obviously have relationships with many of the other job sites, the major ones like Indeed or CareerBuilder, et cetera. And we are adding to that where they're helping us today and they're helping to build some of these out for us today.
Vicki Steere:
Some of the international job boards do not have the option to do a redirect and so they're working on a product and it's pretty close to finish development where they can take an email application, if you will. So OCC in Mexico is one that pulls it up, or JobStreet in the Philippines, are a couple of the big ones, and they don't allow us to do a redirect, so there is a manual process that we're trying to get rid of and facilitating getting those candidates into our applicant tracking system where we can work with them at a much faster pace.
Chris Russell:
Very interesting. I know you wanted to also mention you're doing some contract tracing for organizations and you're using LivePerson for that.
Vicki Steere:
TTEC actually has a partnership and we're using it for many of our consulting avenues, as well as we're doing it ourselves. So in today's COVID world, it's not just governments that are doing contract tracing. Contact tracing, for those that don't know, it's an old practice. It's the idea that you've come in contact with someone that has the disease and letting others know that you might have come into contact with that.
Vicki Steere:
We've worked with an organization called LivePerson and we are partners with them, and essentially the automation... You've heard about these where your cell phone goes into an area and knows that there's been a high population of people in that location that have come into contact with others with COVID and it can do more of an automated piece. So we're using it ourselves, because you can imagine with tens of thousands of employees globally, we have employees that have been impacted by this disease. And it's something that we're very, very focused on ensuring that the health and wellbeing of our own employees are not negatively impacted.
Vicki Steere:
We do still have centers that are open or that are working and so we want to protect them. So that's actually a product that we've been using ourselves as well as we've partnered with LivePerson to utilize that as part of our consulting practice with companies that are looking on improving their own experiences.
Chris Russell:
Sure. Diversity and inclusion is in the news a lot today and I know a lot of companies are looking at that as part of their overall employee engagement experience. How are you guys handling diversity and inclusion at TTEC going forward?
Vicki Steere:
There's a lot of things that are going on. Obviously we've had some really positive momentum. I love it because our CEO has always been passionate about diversity and inclusion. And by the way, with Veteran's Day this month, I want to say thank you to everyone that has served, but that aside, one of the new things that have come within our organization from a training and development that I just loved as byproduct. This is a quick fix, if you will. We do our own AI. You talk a lot about on the show, I'm sure, about AI in employment, but we do a lot of AI as well in learning and development. And so that might provide different situations on how you interact with someone and how you do so in a positive way.
Vicki Steere:
Again, a product that our amazing learning and development team created for our own employees, we have... Our AI product for learning and development is called Real Play. But one module that they created out of this actually walks someone through how to have those difficult conversations with someone about diversity and inclusion and some of the angry things that have come up and how do you handle some of those situations with someone that is passionate about some of those areas. So how do you have some of those difficult conversations both internally with your employees as well as with our customers.
Vicki Steere:
It's really been a nice byproduct. Obviously we've done a lot more from diversity and inclusion. I'm proud to say we've expanded. We had a number of affinity groups within our organization already, but they've expanded that and have built a global diversity council that is driving some of those efforts, and how, again, do we have these conversations?
Vicki Steere:
Another one on our LinkedIn, if you go through our old LinkedIn feed, there is a great conversation with our learning development, one of our leaders in learning and development, who actually was instrumental in creating Real Play with having the conversation about what is to be black within TTEC with our CEO. Really just a phenomenal conversation.
Vicki Steere:
What I appreciate about the whole social movement this year is these conversations were happening, but they are louder now, and I appreciate that.
Chris Russell:
Well, this has been a great conversation, Vicki. To me, you sound very passionate about your job. It really comes across in the interview here. And I appreciate all the knowledge dropping you gave us today, all the stats and the tech. I mean, it's really great stuff. Thank you, first of all. Tell everyone where to go to learn more about careers at TTEC, and also are you hiring and recruiting at all?
Vicki Steere:
We are hiring and recruiting, and I also have some roles, both in the US and in Mexico for some of my team members, Global Talent Acquisition marketing. So if there's other professionals out there that have a leaning towards the marketing side of talent acquisition, I have some roles. But you can find our jobs, all of our jobs globally, at TTEC, which is T-T-E-C, jobs.com. It's TTEC, T-T-E-C, jobs.com.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. Well, we certainly appreciate that. We'll put that link in the show notes. Well, Vicki, you got your first podcast done, how do you feel?
Vicki Steere:
Thank you. I appreciate it. No, I've done a couple of others and this was a good one. As you can tell, I am, as you said, I am passionate about especially technology in recruiting and how do you bridge the gap.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. Well, thanks. Vicki Steere from TTEC. Thank you very much. That will do it for this episode of the RecTech podcast. Be sure to follow us on the socials, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, at the @rectechmedia handle. Thank you again to my sponsors Emissary and Adzuna, check them out for text recruiting and job advertising. Thanks for listening everyone. And remember, always be recruiting.
Speaker 2:
Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisRussell, or visit rectechmedia.com, where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech Media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcasts, webinars, and articles, so be sure to check out our other sites, recruiting headlines, and HR podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.
