I always like to have real practitioners on the show, and today is one of those episodes. My guest today is MaryAnne Pelland, head of TA for Citizens Bank, headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island. Citizens is one of the nation's oldest and largest financial institutions with more than 17,000 colleagues nationwide. You can check out their career site at jobs.citizensbank.com.
How many people do you hire each year?
So, Citizens hires about 6,500 people a year. 40% of those are internal or referred by internals and something that we're fully committed to is looking at our colleagues first. Additionally, we have external opportunities, including our consultative and advice-based sales support and the ever-demanding roles around tech and cyber, digital, data and agile.
And this year, we were lucky enough, Chris, we were building out our private bank, and so we brought in about 150 incredibly talented salespeople and support people to build that out. So, it's exciting times!
How big is the TA team there at Citizens?
It's 89 people.
Do you have a big sourcing team there as well?
We have sourcing in specific areas, Chris. So, our wealth space especially has sourcing, mortgage, our tech space and our digital space have the most sourcing support, but it is not across the organization. As we move to a proactive approach, right? With skills changing and evolving and the speed in which skills and talent is changing, we're going to need to think about how we're more proactive in our recruiting efforts, which will require sourcing to do that long term.
How do you feel about the push towards skills-based hiring as just a theme in recruiting among that, but are you starting to practice some of that at all? If so, how?
We are, and it's a multi-step journey. It's not something you do overnight, but we are working in launching a talent marketplace in 2024, which will help to accelerate our skill-based efforts, so that we can inventory the skills of our current colleagues and match them to new opportunities, whether that be projects or new careers, but that is one of the many things we're doing to advance our skill-based efforts.
I was on your site today before the call, and I see you guys have Paradox in there as your chat bot.
We've been with Paradox quite a bit. We were their first financial services organization, Oracle organization that they partner with. We work with them, we call her Jamie, but she's known as Olivia in Paradox. She answers questions for candidates so that we can get them the answers they need more quickly. She also does our interview scheduling, which has saved us a ton of time and has been a great advancement. So, Paradox has been great for us. Great partner.
The interview scheduling, is that for more of the retail positions at the banks, things like that?
Yeah. And we started initially with just interview scheduling with the recruiters as part of their initial screen, but we have now pushed that out this year to the management and have been using that across almost all of the organization.
So, as a candidate, I can go in, apply to a job, go through some screening questions, I assume, and then get scheduled via the chat bot?
That's right.
That's right. “Jamie” (name of chatbot) will reach out to you on your cellphone, let you know available times, you pick them, and it's all in an effort to candidate experience, right? We know that we've got to drive a distinctive candidate experience and speed is important in that process. We have a principle around ensuring a high speed, high touch, high quality candidate experience and Paradox was part of that journey for us.
Were there any challenges around implementing that in terms of just getting the schedules right with your teams and the candidates?
Yeah, for sure. It's getting comfortable ... The manager's comfortable with Jamie just putting something on your calendar based upon availability. As you know, sometimes you have things scheduled during your day, but it may not be on your calendar. So, helping with the education and the change management of this new practice, but it was quick and it was brief, and I think everyone has seen the great advantage of doing this and getting the best talent in front of us as quickly as possible has outweighed any of those challenges, for sure.
Do the hiring managers have to block out certain parts of their day for the interviews, or is that part of it?
They actually keep it open. So, instead of blocking it, they keep those times open.
Let's talk about your other HR tech. If you could maybe just walk me through your tech stack there. Besides Paradox, what do you have in place there for hiring and recruiting and internal stuff?
So, we just in December of last year, went to our Oracle Recruiting cloud from Taleo, so we upgraded to our cloud-based ATS. We're still working through that and making progress. We're looking forward to all that comes with cloud-based technology. We know that AI matching is on our roadmap. Hopefully, in the end of this year we'll have been able to test some of that.
We use assessments. We're moving to a new vendor in our assessment space that will help with video interviewing as well as helping assessments in the high volume space as well as skill-based assessments in our tech space. Additionally, we use Tableau for reporting and to ensure that we're making good investments.
Any recruiting marketing tools or social media tools at all?
We use Sprinklr to help get our word out across our colleague base. We also work with Radancy who does a lot of work around branding our roles, following people in the areas in which we think they're visiting, to let them know more about Citizens and using algorithms to make sure that we're hitting the right people at the right time who would consider working for Citizens. Or if they've visited us before, finding them again and reminding them of what a great place Citizens is.
Are you using employees as ambassadors as well to push out recruiting content, things like that on social media?
Yes, for sure. So, that's what we use Sprinklr ... Probably the biggest lift in Sprinklr is around the recruiting efforts and why you would want to work for Citizens. Sharing the culture of what it's like, right? The candidate experience is just an expansion of the colleague experience, and so having our colleagues tell people what it's like to work here is most authentic and genuine way to do that. So, we definitely double down on that.
What's on your radar too for maybe next year, things like that in terms of HR tech, anything you want to mention?
So as we talked about, we're going to launch the talent marketplace. That I am incredibly excited about. It's our commitment to our internal colleagues and moving that talent across the organization. So, that will be a big one for us in 2024. Additionally, we want to look at what generative AI can do for us. I think everybody's eager to see how this will show up, right? Especially in that TA spaces, there's lots of opportunity in the branding and in the sourcing. So, we currently have a committee in place that's looking at all of the generative AI opportunities and how that can work here.
Additionally, I think we need to upgrade in our CRM space as we look at what's going to be challenging in the years to come is identifying new skills and talent within the marketplace and being able to nurture that. And the CRM and the ability to have one place for recruiters to go to help cultivate and nurture those relationships will be really important.
Going back to the talent marketplace for a second, who will that be with? Are you using Oracle for that?
No. We went with Fuel50.
One of the challenges of an internal marketplace is getting your employees to get in there and they have to self-describe themselves, right? How are you going to incentivize your employees when it comes to implementing something like that?
So, I think Citizens has been a very strong culture around always learning, right? And always wanting to advance and develop oneself. We're a learning culture for sure. So, I think from a change management standpoint, it's helping colleagues understand the value of creating their profiles and understanding what career opportunities ... We've done a lot of surveys internally, also externally, about what colleagues want, right? And a lot of the reason that people look for jobs outside of their current company is because they don't feel like they have the development or career opportunities, and this really democratizes that.
And so, I think from a colleague standpoint, it's much easier to go in and determine what's best for you and to really have a view of everything that's available to them, whether it's projects or a new opportunity. So, I think we're hopeful, but we think that that is a very good value prop for going into the talent marketplace, for sure.
MaryAnne, what are some of the biggest hiring challenges you guys have right now, just in terms of the job market itself today and the challenges of bringing people on?
It's an exciting time. Anyone who's passionate about talent acquisition sees this as just an amazing opportunity. The candidate demand and the requirements of what candidates need today is so much different than it's ever been. The skills evolution, we talked about that Chris, and that technology is advancing so quickly and skills are evolving so quickly that there's just not enough of that talent in the marketplace, and so it requires you to either build it or borrow it. The ways of working has changed. A significant majority of people have gone into gigs or project work.
And so, how we look at workforce planning is so different than it's ever been. Now it's not just either you recruit it or you mobilize talent, now you've got to think about the future skills. How do you get the right people built in your organization, or what are those pipelines you have to build externally to have them ready when they start? And do you only need them for a period of time or do you need them long term? So, that's a great project or problem to solve.
And then, you know that laws and regulations continue to change and really determine the path in which we'll take, and so those people who can solve all of that will have the upper hand in the talent market, for sure.
Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned gigs. Gigs are like this new phenomena you're competing with for talent with, right? As a kid, I can go out today and I can make a living on Instagram or Instacart and Upwork or DoorDash, things like that, and you haven't had to compete with that in the past, so it's definitely a challenge out there. I also think too, that I think more companies are going to add more gig workers to their platform. Do you guys have a lot of contractors and workforce like that?
So, it's not a significant part of our workforce yet, but I do expect it to be. I know that gigs have been traditionally, at least the most recently has been Ubers and Instacarts, but I think you're going to start to see that in the more professional space too, where you opt in for project work based upon the specific skills you want to use versus a role.
And so, I think as we see the skill-based evolution happening, you're going to start to see more of that professional level gig work underway. And you see ... Of course, I'm going to forget the name of the company now, but there are particular groups that are doing that now. A lot of the executive search firms have these interim executives in gigs as part of that.
Have you been affected by job ghosting? And if so, how do you look at that and are you trying to minimize that in the process?
Yeah. I mean, I think they say now almost 80% of people considering an opportunity with you is considering something else. Right?
And I do believe that's where candidate experience is so critical because how you make people feel is a deeper connection. And people don't typically ghost when they're feeling good about something. But if they don't feel like you care, then they won't care either. And so, I think it's really important that candidate experience not only is about speed and where the technology comes in, but there's also a human connection that's required further down the pipe.
But we're not immune to it either, Chris, we have ghosting as the market is in the favor of the applicants and they've got lots of opportunity. They have other options, and so sometimes they take it. But my recommendation is if you build meaningful and genuine and authentic relationships with your applicants, because they may be you're hired today or you're hired tomorrow, doesn't mean that just because we don't hire them today, they're not someone who would consider us in the future, or in our case could be customers of ours too. Ensuring a great candidate experience is pivotal.
What do you guys look for as far as just the future here in terms of the workforce planning? I mean, it seems like there's going to be a talent shortage for the near future, but what do you guys think?
Yeah. I think part of the evolution of talent acquisition or the modern talent acquisition organization will require market intelligence and understanding of where we're going. Talent acquisition has traditionally been a reactive organization based upon the immediate demands of the organization and filling those immediate demands.
The future talent acquisition organization will have to have a pulse on where things are going so that we can be more proactive in building pipelines of that talent, either internally or externally, because the skill shortage is going to continue. At least that's all what the research says.
Talk to me about your DEI strategy. What's the driving strategy behind that and how you guys are implementing it today?
We use lots of platforms to help broaden our sourcing capabilities, and we build effective partnerships with some of our core organizations and associations. We have a DE&I team. We have Business Resource Groups (BRGs) that are phenomenal in building our networks and deepening our networks with talent. And we also have a higher commitment in which our slate of talent for our leadership roles have to have 50% of diversity in an effort to help ensure that there's representation across those leadership roles. And that has been an effective strategy of helping to build further and deepening the diversity of Citizens.
We also use SeekOut. We have found SeekOut to be a great partner as well in that space. But Indeed definitely helps in that high volume area, which is another place that we're looking to automate and build speed as much as we can. Like, how do you get to high automation in the front end of the funnel, into those deeper connections and relationships later on in the funnel? And figuring out how from an Indeed and LinkedIn, from the internet, how can you source all of the talent you need as quickly as possible and feed them into our system?
I also wanted ask you about Indeed too, because they made that switch to pay-per-performance. Did you guys embrace that move as far as your budget goes?
We found it more efficient. And again, we use it in our high volume early career type roles and it's been an effective tool for us.