Erin Stevens is a Corporate Recruiter with MasterBrand Cabinets based in Jasper, Indiana ...She Serves as the talent leader for sourcing and building talent pipelines and recruiting leadership positions.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
So as she said, Erin Stevens is a corporate recruiter with MasterBrand Cabinets, based in Jasper, Indiana. She serves as a talent leader for sourcing and building talent pipelines and recruiting leadership positions. We've had her on the show before, couple of years ago, if you remember her. And she's got some new projects going on, so we're going to bring her onto the show today and get her take on what's happened last year and what she's looking forward to this year. So Erin, welcome to the show. How's 2021 treating you so far?
Erin Stevens:
Well, so far, six days, in we're pretty busy. So I guess I can't complain. I'm ready to see what 2021 holds. Hopefully it's better than 2020.
Chris Russell:
How many emails did you have when you got back to work this week?
Erin Stevens:
Well, considering I did keep checking in, I'm a bit of a workaholic in that way, and I don't like my email inbox to be filled, it wasn't too bad, because everyone was pretty much out of the office the last two weeks. So I was left to my own self, to keep myself occupied.
Chris Russell:
Did the candidates leave you alone during that time? Were they bugging you?
Erin Stevens:
No, I actually have to joke. The last two weeks of the year is normally the time that I get the most work done. I can actually get in there and clean everything up, see what's going on and get prepped and ready. And I say that because I'm one of the only ones that doesn't have children. So everyone else is spending time with their family and doing that little Christmas-New Year thing, I'm being my double income, no kids-self, and just trying to catch up on everything and prep myself for the new year.
Chris Russell:
Just tell the audience about what kind of jobs you recruit for and also where those jobs are as well.
Erin Stevens:
Yeah, so I recruit in mostly in the United States, North America, our company has about 20 plus plants and six distribution centers across the US, Canada and Mexico. Normally I focus on the manufacturing operations side, assisting our plants in recruiting anything from production supervisors, all the way up to general managers, engineers. I also assist out logistics side with sourcing, anything that falls under the materials managers. Then I also do our HR-recruiting. We separate everything into customer groups. So HR is one of my customer groups, as well as our accounting and finance, and then occasionally I get some random stuff, like product or marketing roles. Then my coworker handles a lot of the customer service side, sales side and IT. Thankfully he handles IT, and I don't, that's not my favorite group, just because it's IT. I mean I'm nerdy, but it's hard to speak nerd all the time.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, so that's a broad swath of roles there.
Erin Stevens:
I know, it's a lot.
Chris Russell:
So in manufacturing, so tell me what 2020 was like for you in terms of recruiting, and how you dealt with COVID and filling manufacturing roles? I assume you're busier than ever at the plants?
Erin Stevens:
[crosstalk 00:04:23]
Chris Russell:
But give us, what that was like for you and some of the challenges you face and obviously, how you overcame some of those?
Erin Stevens:
Yeah. So this time last year, like I said, I was doing now, getting ready to prep for the next year. We had been going through our own little lean journey. We had some changes in management, and with that, you change focus a little bit. We were bumping, I mean, we were at the time looking at getting a contract recruiter to work with us, because we had quite a bit of projects coming up. One of them being our new applicant tracking system that we were going to implement in 2020. So lots of roles, lots of moving and grooving, started to get through January, February with getting prepared for college recruiting and all that fun stuff too, when COVID hit. Of course, those, anyone who does the [FTNA 00:05:16] or the financial planning side was like, "Wow, wait? Global pandemic, how do we pivot for this?"
Erin Stevens:
So come March, everything froze. We decided to hold on filling some roles, we wanted to see what was going on when everyone slowed down for those first two weeks. Well then we figured out the two weeks was going to be a little bit longer than that and started really pivoting and moving, figuring out what we needed to do to keep our plants running. So, pat your HR-people on the back, they had a hard year, with a lot of stuff to do. So we slowed on recruiting, which was good for me, in the fact that then I could start working on some other stuff in prepping for the ATS-implementation, what our processes look like, what we want to change, what we need to go to. So got to do that project work, which was awesome.
Erin Stevens:
And then from there, things started to pick back up because, we make kitchen cabinets and everyone's at home now, and I guess they're like, "Well, if I'm going to be home, might as well update my cabinets, and do some projects around the house." So we just kept going, it was insane. We kept getting orders in. So from there recruiting picked back up, pretty much full steam ahead throughout the summer. Got into the fall when we started our implementation. And then it was weird, I haven't recruited in the last four months and I just started again. So it's like getting back into my groove of interviewing and what that feels like, and, "Oh, I guess this is my job. So I guess I better do it." But yeah, that's what it was. I mean, we never stopped, it was weird. It was a weird year.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, how many would you say, overall, you hired during the year, [inaudible 00:07:11]?
Erin Stevens:
I'm not even sure, to be honest-
Chris Russell:
Hundreds? Thousands?
Erin Stevens:
No, we, I would divide it up. We have production roles, which are, production recruiting is pretty constant. I don't know if that's fair. I'm not ... Let me see if I can find that, let me see if I can find that out for you, that's something that I need to look into. I know for me personally, I just did my review. I think I had about 50 or 60 requisitions per year. So if we multiply that, I'd probably, 300 plus maybe? Across, a lot of our office, hourly and above, positions don't turn over too terribly much. So it sounds about right. But I'll see if I can find that out in the course of this call.
Chris Russell:
How did MasterBrand handle hiring at the plants? In terms of just interviews and that kind of process [crosstalk 00:08:09].
Erin Stevens:
Yeah.
Chris Russell:
... wear masks and stuff?
Erin Stevens:
We do a lot of open interview dates, so we hit pause on that for a minute to decide, "Hey, okay, what does the CDC recommend we do? What do we need to do, to do that, [inaudible 00:08:24] set up again?" We did one of the first things we did, was drive through-interviewing ... Obviously [Matt 00:08:30] ... Yeah, I know. Because we have larger parking lot [crosstalk 00:08:34]-
Chris Russell:
Do you get fries with that?
Erin Stevens:
Yeah, fries? Yeah right. Come and take my order, one production role coming right up. So yeah, we would do that. We would have drive through, that way they can stay in their car. We would sit back, we can talk with them. Part of the ATS implementation was so we could go paperless too, so I expect to see more of that coming within the next year, but they would do that. We would also post, we're following CDC recommendations, if you want to come and sign in, sign in, we'll call you when we're ready to come in and interview, we did temperature checks for those individuals as well maintain social distancing. We basically kept a lot of the same processes, just altered them to make sure that they were safe. So, I mean, it's just pivoting and figuring out, "Hey, we're going to do this, but how can we do it safely in the way that it needs to be done?"
Chris Russell:
Yeah, I read some stories about the companies holding drive through a job fairs, things like that. Thought it was a great idea. Did the the candidates like it as well?
Erin Stevens:
I got good feedback. So no one really complained they were wanting a job, which is great. So yeah, it's just that pivot. And change is hard sometimes, so you have to, especially with everything going on in 2020, but we got it done, which is great.
Chris Russell:
Niece. Well, let's talk about your technology a bit. That's our focus here on the show, is your recruiting technology. So you changed the ATS's this year. So I got many questions around that. So what did you take out and replace it with first? And secondly, what other ATS did you look at as well?
Erin Stevens:
Great question. So we previously, had iCIMS, I think, since 2013. The reason why we moved and looked at a different ATS system, is we have a parent company, which is Fortune Brands Home & Security, and then we also have sister companies, which we call Outdoors & Security, and then the plumbing, Global Plumbing Group, GPG, as well as we just recently acquired another organization. We've always had talks around how do we better share talent? Because we all have similar roles, manufacturing managers, sales roles, and we'd have sometimes people that would apply with us and then they would apply with somebody else and there just wasn't really good communication there. The other thing is our contract with iCIMS was coming to an end at the end of last year, and we wanted something, they just couldn't provide for us what we wanted, and what would go across all of our operating companies.
Erin Stevens:
So we started the RFP process. We looked at obviously SmartRecruiters, we looked at, I believe [Jobvite 00:11:25], we looked at SAP or SuccessFactors, obviously reviewed iCIMS, and then Workday, because our [HRIS 00:11:34] is Workday. We currently have a mixture, so us and, what we call, our Outdoors & Security-section, we're on iCIMS. Parent company and the Global Plumbing Group we're using Workday Recruiting. So we wanted something that we could all use and that also needed to integrate with Workday HRIS. So SAP SuccessFactors, I think, immediately took themselves out, because they want us to integrate with SAP as our HRIS and that wasn't going to happen. So that helped us narrow things down.
Erin Stevens:
We also had some non-negotiables like we want to be able to text our candidates, if possible. We want self-scheduling for interviewing. Interviewing is always a pain, looking at people's calendars and schedules. We also wanted something that was extremely easy for people to apply, and user-friendly, great candidate experience, and also had to be extremely user-friendly for our HR managers that are out in our plants. Something that's really good with high volume recruiting.
Erin Stevens:
Those were our non-negotiables. So we went through that process, lots of demos, lots of notes, lots of conversations, because it wasn't just MasterBrand going to an ATS, it was all of us coming to a new ATS-system, except MasterBrand went first. We were the first ones to implement it, to get this off. The best part, was we had four months in which to do it, which was, it was a crazy timeline. But we got it done. So I think that answered both of your questions. Who did we go with and why? Okay.
Chris Russell:
Great. So what's a lesson? So, what one thing should another recruiter know about picking an ATS like this and going through this process? You have an idea [crosstalk 00:13:27]?
Erin Stevens:
Yeah. So, I think, if you're a recruiter that is in a customer-facing type of role, especially myself. So again, I'm working a lot with our HR field managers. You need to know what their pain points are. You need to know what makes their job harder, so that you can make their job easier in the end. Because they're not ... Them being more independent, them being able to work on their own and recruit on their own and also giving them the power to do so. So one of the things, to give an example about it, what our HR managers were having to do in their team, was manually enter every single new hire. There is no way that we could pass those new hires electronically. They would have to manually enter every single hire. And as you know, with production recruiting, that's a lot of data entry, that's a lot of time spent. There's time ... And that's what we looked at with time savings, what could we do to enhance and save time for them?
Chris Russell:
No you can send data from Workday, right into SmartRecruiters?
Erin Stevens:
Well, for in, yes, it's a-
Chris Russell:
Sorry.
Erin Stevens:
... so we can send, yeah that's fine. So for production, we create what we call a true evergreen requisition in SmartRecruiters. And every time they hire someone, they can hire multiple people out of one requisition, and we just have to put where we want to put them in Workday, we just put that in, hit, "Confirm hire," all their onboarding now is done electronically. It's awesome. They don't have to manually enter. They talk to each other, it sends it over. It's great. That saves a ton of time for them as well.
Chris Russell:
[crosstalk 00:15:03]
Erin Stevens:
The other thing what we ... Oh, go ahead?
Chris Russell:
Do the candidates still get to sign all the paperwork electronically as well?
Erin Stevens:
Yep. So what they do, and if they don't have ... That's the other, and that's one of the things that came up, if they don't have access to a cell phone or a computer or something, they can do all that day one when they start, through a company provided laptop. But yes, they can do all of their onboarding via their phone, et cetera.
Chris Russell:
Okay, as far as the installation went, first of all, how long did it all take? And then what did you learn about installing an ATS like this, as a high level theme or a piece of advice there?
Erin Stevens:
Do all the pre-work, do as much pre-work as you can. Know exactly what you want ahead of time, what you want it to look like. We installed this, we started this project right after Labor Day, and our go-live was December 11th. So that was right at four months. We were meeting every day, all day, doing calls to discuss what we need to do. Our project team was great. They knew their product inside and out. They could tell us what we could or can't do. The other thing is, have a really good relationship with your technology team. So we have an HR-technology team, not only here, but also at our other operating companies. We were all talking together, and for us, it was creating one process and agreeing on what that process would be.
Erin Stevens:
So we have a governance committee that meets, if we want to change anything, we have to have everyone clap hands on it and say, "Yeah," because if we change one thing, it changes for everyone. So, but the pre-work's so important, knowing your process inside and out, knowing what you want to change, and if you can change it, and just having really good communication. For me, I learned a lot about, for myself, just everything that goes into it and how much back-work there is. I also learned that, I don't know, maybe one day I want to do HR-technology at some point, because it's just so process-oriented and that's how my brain works. I'm like, "Oh, if you do X, Y, and Z, it affects this." I didn't realize how many things affected something else. I think that was cool to learn as well. Also, I became a master at PowerPoint, there's so many PowerPoints that has to be done as well. It's just, yeah, it's crazy. It was a crazy schedule. I'm glad it's over. I'll totally do it again.
Chris Russell:
How involved were you with the workflow, setting up the workflow is one of the bigger things with an ATS?
Erin Stevens:
Yeah.
Chris Russell:
So if you can talk about that a little bit?
Erin Stevens:
So the best thing about that, is that we went pretty simple. So, what, and we looked at it through the lens of candidate experience, hiring manager, HR experience, and then that onboarding. Luckily we had a major workflow of onboarding already built into Workday previously, that we used for office hires, and we just converted that for production. So that piece was simple. Then I would say, even for us, we knew what we wanted the process to be, and we divided it into production hires versus office hourly and above. So for office hires, we're like, "This is what they need to do. This is what we want to have them experience. Do we want to build this in? Yes or no? Are they getting communication?"
Erin Stevens:
The other thing was communication. Previously candidates with us, God love them, didn't get a lot of communication, depending on who was working, what role. So we built in a lot of automatic notifications with this as well. But that came, it actually came with SmartRecruiters, which they built a really nice product, which is one of the reasons why we chose them too. And the fact it's web-based, it's easy to log in. The other thing too, is they have a mobile app for hiring managers, which was a huge thing for us, because most of our hiring managers are production supervisors. They're out on the floor. They're not next to their computers every day. So the fact that they can just pull up their phone, which usually is company issued, and click on an app and be able to see where their candidates are in the process, as well as be able to interact with them through the Apple app as well. And for us to be able to inter interact with them through the app is just phenomenal-
Chris Russell:
[crosstalk 00:00:19:39].
Erin Stevens:
... it was huge thing for us too.
Chris Russell:
I used SmartRecruiters back in 2015 at one of my jobs, and they came out with the app back then. So they've been out, their app, they've been app-focused for a while now, which is nice. They're definitely one of my top five.
Erin Stevens:
Absolutely.
Chris Russell:
Really great team.
Erin Stevens:
It's great. Yeah. The fact that I could sit on my couch the day that we went live and be able to pull up the app on my phone, on my couch and disposition candidates and send them, "No, thank you," emails, with a delayed, two day delay or whatever was awesome.
Chris Russell:
Yeah, very cool. Did you, another question I have, was your previous, iCIMS, did you have to, did you take all that data out, put it into SmartRecruiters? If so, how did that go?
Erin Stevens:
So yes and no. So we did, we had a cut over-plan, and a lot of the stuff we actually extracted manually out of iCIMS. But luckily since most of our requisition start in Workday, and we were setting up the path, we were, it was just like, we went through and said, "Okay, these are requisitions we know we need, right? Okay. We'll delete the ones we don't." So we did a major cleanup. We turned off the path to iCIMS and then turned on the path to SmartRecruiters. So that was pretty easy. A lot, I'll tell you, with the candidates we had on iCIMS, we didn't bring any of those over. We chose not to do that. And just wanted to just start new. It was a lot of data and we were like, "We'll just start new anyways." The other reason why we did that, and which is what I also like about SmartRecruiters, is that they are very big on consent and privacy.
Erin Stevens:
So, and that got us thinking too, like, "Okay, if you apply in SmartRecruiters and you don't give consent, your information gets deleted after a certain amount of time. What's telling us that we're okay to take this data out of iCIMS and put it into SmartRecruiters?" We were like, "No, let's not do that. Let's go with consent. Consent's great." So we decided not to do that. We did have to manually extract some forms, like offer letters of current employees and agreements that we had stored in there. Again, one of those days, I'm glad I'm not in HR-technology right now. So they figured out how to do that. We did do a lot of that, some of that manually as well. But yeah, I mean, we didn't pull a lot. We pretty much started from scratch.
Chris Russell:
Nice. Along one of your jobs now, graphic design, in [inaudible 00:22:14] Texas, it says, "I'm interested." It doesn't say, "Apply," it says, "I'm interested." Why does it say that? And what happens if they [crosstalk 00:22:21]-
Erin Stevens:
I know, isn't that cool? As someone who has a psychology degree, I have to laugh, that it says, "I'm interested," because it's much less committal than, "Apply now." You're clicking ... I know, right? Think about it, you don't always, everyone likes their options. And if you click on, "Interested," that's just something that SmartRecruiters had. That's not something we chose. That's just the way it's set up for them. So clicking, "I'm interested," and then they just immediately go in, and it's like, "Oh, I'm in now, I've got to give them my information, my resume."
Chris Russell:
Yeah, I clicked that form, it's got easy apply, it says I can upload a resume, I can sign in with LinkedIn. I guess they have their own smart profile too now, if you have another SmartRecruiters account, you can log into that. [Crosstalk 00:23:10] diary manager, which is nice.
Erin Stevens:
Oh, I love that feature as well. And it's good, because that's a good place to give some explanation or, "Tell me a little bit more on you." But the best part is it's a two, it's a two-step process. You go, you click the, "I'm interested," you can upload and it pre-filled, or you can do what you said, LinkedIn, Indeed, whatever type of profile you have, the next step is you answer maybe five questions and that's it. That's the whole thing.
Chris Russell:
Nice, is it a lot faster than iCIMS's apply was at this point?
Erin Stevens:
Oh my God, yes. Yes, so much yes. On average, an application for, in iCIMS, for a production individual to complete, it was anywhere from five to 10 minutes and this, you can do it in less than two, and our, if you were applying as a ... Here's the other difference, reason why we chose SmartRecruiters, most other ATS is you have to make a profile prior to applying. With SmartRecruiters, you, it only asks you to make a profile after you've already applied. So you can apply, and then it's like, "Hey, do you want to continue with making a profile so you can track your application status?" Whereas with everything else, it's [inaudible 00:24:27], so it gets them to apply much quicker and faster and commit to us that way.
Chris Russell:
It's a great point. You have to convert them first before you can make them-
Erin Stevens:
[crosstalk 00:24:36].
Chris Russell:
... register and things like that. That's where a lot of the old ATS's went wrong when it came to applying. So that's a nice touch there from SmartRecruiters. The texting a piece of it, when and where does it happen within the SmartRecruiters platform. Can you touch on that?
Erin Stevens:
Yeah. So again, with consent, you, what we do is we have a little tab, from the recruiter's standpoint, that says messages, after they apply. We have to click on them and send them an initial message. It's like, "Hey, here we are at at [BHS 00:25:11] or Master Brand, we'd like to be able to send you text messages," and they have to opt in. And then from there we can text back and forth.
Chris Russell:
Okay. Well, it sounds like a pretty good transition so far, and it's now live and working. What other tools do you have in place there at MasterBrand, as far as recruiting goes, use anything for video interviewing? Sourcing tools?
Erin Stevens:
We do not currently. Now there is some sourcing built within SmartRecruiters as well, which their search function is great. But of course that relies on us getting our candidate-base built up within the thing. Eventually we are going to turn on that employee engagement, that recruitment, marketing side as well. That will be through SmartRecruiters, at some point. Again, we've got to, we keep saying, we've got to walk before we run. We actually didn't look at a whole lot this last year or the year before, because we knew we were going to be implementing a new ATS. We wanted to see what they would offer. We use of course, LinkedIn Recruiter as well. But other than that, we really don't use a whole lot in regards to other sourcing tools at this point in time. Let me tell you, there's been so much change too, within the last year of companies getting acquired and moving and all this stuff. Sometimes it's hard to keep up-
Chris Russell:
Yeah.
Erin Stevens:
... with all of them.
Chris Russell:
SmartRecruiters bought Jobpal a few months ago. So expect to see some more chat bots [crosstalk 00:00:26:41]-
Erin Stevens:
They call it Smartpal. I've already done a webinar, they renamed it Smartpal. So yeah, I did see that.
Chris Russell:
Very nice. Well, we appreciate your time today, Erin. It was catching up with you, we're friends on Facebook and love to see your pics. And how was Mexico [crosstalk 00:27:01]-
Erin Stevens:
Mexico was great. I mean, except I came back home with COVID, but-
Chris Russell:
Oh, you did?
Erin Stevens:
Yeah, I did. Got that out of the way. I'm actually open to see some sun, as long as travel and the pandemic permits, some safe travel in the next couple of months as well. So yeah, just stay safe, wash your hands, wear your mask, and we'll all be okay.
Chris Russell:
Awesome. Well, we'll have to get that drink at some point in the new year, , at some point, hopefully.
Erin Stevens:
Yes, we just see each other again, in person.