FULL TRANSCRIPT
Neil Shmuely:
This is Neil Shmuely, VP, Head of Talent for the Americas at Contino, 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:
Welcome to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology-inspired conversations. If you want to know what the latest tools and tactics for finding talent online, this is your show. This episode is a practitioner edition. This podcast is sponsored in part by our friends at Adzuna, the quality obsessed job search engine that's taking the market by storm. Adzuna wants to help get America hiring by allowing businesses to zero in on the right candidates. Cut your cost per application and engage with high quality candidates with Adzuna. Visit adzuna.com/hire to get started.
Chris Russell:
And by Emissary, the text recruiting software that will supercharge your recruiting efforts. Americans spend 55 minutes a day texting on average. That time represents an enormous window of opportunity for recruiters to get the attention of candidates that are otherwise distracted and hard to reach. Head over to emissary.ai and book a demo today to learn how their texting platform will help you connect with your candidates faster and more efficiently.
Chris Russell:
All right, today's guest runs talent acquisition for the Americas at Contino, a tech consultancy based in New York with other offices around the globe. He's also a listener on the show and he messaged me on LinkedIn recently, and let him on the show today. We'll get his take on how they use technology to hire talent. So Neil, welcome to RecTech. How's it feel to be a listener turned guest?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah. It feels really great. Very thankful for the opportunity to speak to the expert in all things rec tech. And really, really to share Contino's story as well.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. So tell us a little about your company and what you guys do, and also, what do you guys typically hire for?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, absolutely. I joined a company called Contino about seven, eight months ago now, in February, so slightly pre-COVID. And Contino is essentially a transformation consultancy that helps large, heavily regulated enterprises become more fast, agile, and competitive. We've got offices in New York, London, Atlanta, and in Australia in Sydney and Melbourne. And we were acquired by Cognizant back in October of 2019. And we do end to end transformations. So we go into these large, heavily regulated enterprises and help them become more nimble companies of the future by transforming their DevOps practices, cloud infrastructure, and that fun stuff.
Chris Russell:
Okay. So I imagine you're hiring for a lot of tech roles?
Neil Shmuely:
That's exactly right. With respect to internal hiring, we're a bit non-traditional when it comes to that front in that we're always really recruiting and pipelining for a few key roles, DevOps engineers, cloud infrastructure folks, tech engineers, technical principles, and all of that fun stuff. So our recruiting practices are really dynamic and unique. And then another really interesting part of what we do is, when we go into these large enterprises to help them with their transformations, we do so in a very wholistic way. We're transforming their tech, yes, but we like to say that we advise, we build, and we up-skill. We do help with their talent practices and their technical recruiting challenges as well, and that's another really, really intriguing part about what my team and I do and how we operate at Contino.
Chris Russell:
Very cool. I want to get into your unique recruiting practice in a second. You came on about seven months ago, right before the pandemic, but what was your priority in terms of coming into the company at that point and working in recruiting? Did you have certain mandates that you wanted focus on?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, absolutely. First, I was very lucky to come into a really strong team, some of the most talented people I've ever worked with on both the talent and recruiting side and in the business. And our biggest challenge and opportunity was shifting away from a just in time ethos and moving to a pipelining strategy. Given the fact that we're constantly recruiting in a niche space, in the DevOps and cloud space that's growing rapidly, we're always on the lookout for top talent.
Neil Shmuely:
Rather than having an open rec and filling it, we're constantly building that talent community. And as we scale, it was really, really important for us to nurture that community and just change a bit of our ways of working. But I was really, really excited and happy to have some talented people to be able to do that with. But that was the main opportunity, Chris. Move away from that just in time hiring. We have a new client, we need to hit the ground running, and we all of a sudden need to hire a bunch of people to hit that initiative. If we're able to consistently build and nurture that talent community, it would leave us in a lot better spot.
Chris Russell:
Okay. Definitely want to ask you about that. And how big is your recruiting team, Neil?
Neil Shmuely:
Recruiting team here in the US is a team total of four. It's myself and three really, really talented recruiters. And then we have two other talent teams in EMEA and Australia as well.
Chris Russell:
Has remote work helped or hurt your recruiting efforts during COVID?
Neil Shmuely:
I would say that it helped overall. We're, at the end of the day, a consultancy. And typically we would be delivering on site for our clients with respect to helping them transform. But obviously both Contino and our clients are now all remote. So it's broadened our talent pool a little bit from some limitations that we once had in the past. So I'd say that the pool of candidates has certainly expanded, and it's very much helped in that respect. I wouldn't say it's hurt in some areas, but I'd say some areas were affected in that the interview process of getting somebody on site for that final interview, a little bit of that has gone away. But we've actually seen, I would say, an increase in quality along the way over the course of the past few months.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Very cool. All right, so you mentioned that you're moving to more of a pipeline strategy and constantly recruiting. What does that look like? Give me some examples of how you move from just in time to more of a continuous recruiting strategy.
Neil Shmuely:
Absolutely. As our recruiters are progressively sourcing, we're not only sourcing for what we need tomorrow, we're sourcing for what we might need in three months, right. We're constantly working with our business development and our sales team to see what prospective deals and skillsets are required for things that might close a few months from now, and we're progressively pipelining there. And being very open and honest and transparent when we go to market to these candidates, and saying, "Hey, we want you to join Contino's talent community. We might not have a role for you tomorrow, but you look amazing on paper. We want to get to know you and we want you to get to know Contino."
Neil Shmuely:
And we're very transparent that the demand might be one to three months from now as opposed to one to three weeks from now. And we've seen them truly appreciate that. And to give just a very real-time micro example, we just executed on three hires that were all in the pipeline for over two months. I think, actually, COVID has given us greater ability to do that as well, Chris. Candidates are very realistic with respect to how the market is moving, and I think that's afforded us a greater ability to operate in the way we're doing so now as well.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. What has been the feedback from candidates during all of this as you're recruiting them? Are they much more understandable as far as just the dynamic changes of recruiting in this environment? What kind of things have you heard from the candidate side?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, I would say that they most certainly almost all are. Obviously there are candidates who might've been affected by some big tech reorgs and downsizes that certainly are keen to get into their next opportunity really, really fast. But the overwhelming majority of candidates understand and are simply just appreciative of us reaching out to them and considering them for opportunities. And we've seen them react really, really positively to both Contino and our ways of working.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. When it comes to sourcing tech talent, Neil, what are some of your go-to primary sources? Is it more of just leveraging Boolean searches? Is it a certain job board perhaps, or other resource? Can you give us any thoughts around that?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, absolutely. It is mostly leveraging Boolean searches. It is also about optimizing how our adverts and our postings are positioned to ensure they're reaching the right target audiences. So an overwhelming majority of our hires do come from direct sourcing efforts from our team of recruiters who are really just amazing, again. I said it before but I'll say it again. Over 70% come from that channel... And over 65%. I'd correct that. And then about 20% or so will come from the employee referral channel, which we've had some really great success with, especially recently given our community. While it is ever expanding, Chris, it is a relatively small community of DevOps and cloud professionals.
Neil Shmuely:
And then the rest are from a combination of direct applicants and other ad hoc sources. But we have been... One of my other charters when we came in is optimizing how are our adverts and our employer brand was positioned in the market. And we have seen increase in flow and quality in that we are working, especially with LinkedIn and Talent Insights, to proactively promote talent campaigns directly targeted to folks in the DevOps space. And we're able to utilize their tool to curate the audience that we want to target, and we've had some really great success doing that.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. How would you describe your employer brand? Could you sum it up for us?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, I would say our employer brand mimics our brand, our technical brands when we go out to clients as well. We take care of the transformation process from start to finish. We don't just do technology, we focus as much on our people and our processes as much as the element of technical transformation that we focus on. And that really, really speaks volumes to our prospective what we call Continis. I think our employer brand, once people hear and do their due diligence about Contino, they fall in love with us rather quickly. It's all about expanding our employer brand at this point. Reaching avenues we might not have marketed in before, going after a more junior talent pipeline who might not have as much as experience in our space as we once did is something that we're really looking to the future to do. We haven't done that yet.
Neil Shmuely:
But I would say our employer brand is strong and we have an amazing marketing team and a head of employer brand in EMEA who does incredible work creating content for us. And again, people fall in love with us really, really fast. It's just about getting our name out there and making Contino a bit more famous as we move forward.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Very cool. All right, let's talk about your HR tech stack, Neil. You mentioned on LinkedIn, we were messaging, that you've got some existing technologies in place. What are those? Let's start there.
Neil Shmuely:
Absolutely. Our main HR platform is Bamboo and our ATS is Workable. We obviously use some other tools to go out and source talent, LinkedIn Talent Solutions and LinkedIn Recruiter is always our biggest from a utilization perspective. And then we intend to branch out a little bit more and some more niche sites to go source for talent such as Stack Overflow and even mining talent through GitHub, which we see a big opportunity to expand where we're searching for talent in an unexpected way. We're at a crossroads a little bit right now in that we're about 400 folks globally with just under 100 here in the US, and while Workable has really done its job for us, we're at a point where as we move to that pipeline strategy we need a tool with an expansive CRM that has capabilities to even further optimize that process.
Neil Shmuely:
So we're at a point right now where we're doing some due diligence on some new tools as it relates to an ATS and some sourcing technologies as well, as well as expanding from a diversity hiring perspective. And I loved your blog the other day about all those diversity hiring tools. Reached out to a few based on some of the recommendations. We utilize job boards such as Women Who Code to seek women technologists and other organizations and areas to seek folks from underrepresented groups. That also has been and is going to be a big charter for us moving forward. So that's my rambling answer there, Chris, on all the tools and what we use and where we're at within our scaling lifecycle and how those tools support us.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. I think adding some kind of CRM into the mixer will help you nurture more candidates in the pipeline going forward and really help keep that pipeline full going forward.
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, I completely agree. I completely agree with that, and I'd like to add actually two things that your comment sparked in my mind. We've actually been really lucky. We were looking at some interviewing scheduling tools the director of recruitment on my team, she partnered with one of the engineers to build an in-house scheduling tool that we utilize.
Chris Russell:
Oh, really?
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah. We're really, really proud of it. It's worked well. It integrates with Slack and Google Calendar and allows our existing Continis to set their availability for the week ahead and give that insight to our talent and recruitment team of who and when is available to interview for the coming week and has been really, really great. And we are also working, we look for a CRM to ultimately optimize this, but we also created what we call a candidate engagement funnel with our marketing and our ops team, where any candidate who ops in upon application to that funnel receives ongoing collateral and content with respect to what's happening at Contino, if you will. So in addition to the recruiter reaching out and nurturing them throughout the entirety of the process, they're also receiving email communications on our latest webinars, our white papers, our fireside chats. So they have engagement with our brand and what we're doing in the marketplace.
Chris Russell:
That's good to hear you're doing stuff like that. Is that being run by someone on your recruiting team or in marketing, or how is that-
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah. Our marketing and ops team. Our marketing team organizes the content and curates it, and our recruitment team enters the information into a portal, and then our ops team will then siphon that off to the distribution platform that is created by our marketing team. The content within is created by our marketing team, if that makes sense.
Chris Russell:
Nice. I was going to ask-
Neil Shmuely:
It's definitely a partnership across the board.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. That's great to hear. More companies should be doing stuff like that overall. I wanted to ask you about your onboarding and can experience, Neil. First, how do you handle onboarding remotely? Just walk us through that experience if you could.
Neil Shmuely:
Yeah, absolutely. We have a great people ops team as well, who we work closely with with respect to onboarding. As soon as the candidate accepts their offer letter, they receive a really nice automated congratulations message and our people ops team reaches out to them directly to get them engrossed with our process and our background check process as well. And then from there, it's all about welcoming. We let them know what their first week is going to look like. We send them a welcome to Contino video that we create, individualized for each of our new hires, which is a cross section of different Continis from their work from home stations and their home offices welcoming them to Contino. And it's pretty simple from there. It's just about asking and answering questions. Our people ops team usually runs with that and loops us in wherever need be.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, that's nice. Anything I didn't ask you?
Neil Shmuely:
No, nothing you didn't ask me. Just to elaborate on that, not too much has changed from the onboarding perspective, actually, in that we were really geographically distributed throughout the US anyway. The incoming Contini would typically come to our US HQ in New York for their first week to get that, in-depth, in-person feel. But we've recreated that experience. They'd have meetings with each department and attend all of what we call our squad calls. We operate in a squad model for their first week, they're just doing so virtually rather than in person.
Chris Russell:
Yeah. Neil, there's a lot of talk about recruiting automation and as a trend and tactic out there. I'm curious where you stand on adding automation to the recruiting process overall, particularly since you're creating high level tech candidates. Where do you see that fitting in overall?
Neil Shmuely:
It's interesting. I think automation has its place, but I think that when you're really focusing in on quality of hire, especially internally. When we're hiring internally from Contino it's very important to have that personal understanding of the depth and [inaudible 00:20:49] of a project. We certainly use automation every day as it relates to Boolean and keyword searches. But understanding the level of depth someone might have with respect to engineering or building out pipelines, I think that personal component is very much needed. And I do see automation playing a really big point as it relates to content distribution and employer brand, and I think it has a purpose in some technical skills assessments as well.
Neil Shmuely:
But I think to really understand a candidate in depth and really appreciate the investment an enterprise or a company is making when they bring aboard a candidate, I do think that 100% automation sometimes can be a detriment to bringing on the right talent. There's no doubt that automation will play a big factor in every piece of recruitment moving forward, but I do think ultimately strong recruiters and strong hiring leaders wind up hiring the best talent.
Chris Russell:
You mentioned assessment there for a second. Do you use any kind of assessment tool to give to your candidates?
Neil Shmuely:
We don't. I have utilized assessment tools in the past, prior to joining Contino. But we're lucky to really have the best DevOps engineers at our disposal internally here to have those what we call tech screens and tech interviews with candidates live, where they're going through engineering challenges and technical assessments directly as opposed to sending out tests, et cetera. We do sometimes ask candidates prior to those screens, and in our recruiters' screens and outside of them, to technically self-assess so we can better match them up with the appropriate interviewer and the appropriate project, but we don't utilize a service to do a technical assessment at this point.
Chris Russell:
Got you. You use the human assessment tool.
Neil Shmuely:
Exactly. That's exactly right.
Chris Russell:
Nice. Well Neil, I appreciate your time today. Thanks for coming on the show. And tell people how to connect with you.
Neil Shmuely:
Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. I really enjoyed it and look forward to listening to the pod as it evolves.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate your time today, Neil. That will do it for this episode of the RecTech podcast. Be sure to follow us on the socials, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn via the @RecTechMedia handle. We're also on YouTube, by the way. Thank you to my sponsors, Emissary and Adzuna. Be sure to 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.