Ready to unlock the complexities of talent acquisition? Join us as we engage in an in-depth conversation with Brianna Rooney, a seasoned expert from TalentPerch, who unveils the intricacies of strategic recruiting within VC-backed startups. Brianna shares some hard-earned wisdom about the common pitfalls founders and talent acquisition teams encounter, honing in on the often-underestimated roles of HR and TA. She also delves into the latest trends in executive search roles, the mounting influx of applicants and the absolute necessity of a thorough review process.
Moreover, we take a journey into the process of strategic recruitment, exploring the art of creating effective job descriptions, understanding roles, and the vital role of ROI in hiring. Brianna also reveals her unique approach to client pitches and illuminates the current trend of hiring for senior and staff level roles, including the biases many companies hold towards early Uber, early LinkedIn, and other high-profile companies. We further explore the array of technologies available for sourcing candidates and the importance of ensuring a diverse pool of candidate. So buckle up as we navigate the labyrinthine world of talent acquisition with our insightful guest, Brianna Rooney.
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Ready to unlock the complexities of talent acquisition? Join us as we engage in an in-depth conversation with Brianna Rooney, a seasoned expert from TalentPerch, who unveils the intricacies of strategic recruiting within VC-backed startups. Brianna shares some hard-earned wisdom about the common pitfalls founders and talent acquisition teams encounter, honing in on the often-underestimated roles of HR and TA. She also delves into the latest trends in executive search roles, the mounting influx of applicants and the absolute necessity of a thorough review process.
Moreover, we take a journey into the process of strategic recruitment, exploring the art of creating effective job descriptions, understanding roles, and the vital role of ROI in hiring. Brianna also reveals her unique approach to client pitches and illuminates the current trend of hiring for senior and staff level roles, including the biases many companies hold towards early Uber, early LinkedIn, and other high-profile companies. We further explore the array of technologies available for sourcing candidates and the importance of ensuring a diverse pool of candidate. So buckle up as we navigate the labyrinthine world of talent acquisition with our insightful guest, Brianna Rooney.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Welcome to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That's what we do. Here's your host, William Tincup.
Speaker 2:This is William Tincup and you're listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Breanna on from TalentPurch. We'll be learning about the business case, the use case, for TalentPurch Breanna. Would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and TalentPurch?
Speaker 3:Sure Thanks, William. Yeah, I am Breanna Rooney from TalentPurch. Also have the YouTube millionaire recruiter and TalentPurch is essentially just your on-demand strategic recruiting solution for everything. But what we really want to focus on is sustainability, because I think that is a massive topic right now that if you want to get into, you can get into. But we offer both sides. We offer an embedded staff augmentation approach or also a contingency approach, and we can also build TA from scratch. So we want to just move with the client.
Speaker 2:I love that Any particular industries or roles that you all fill that are kind of niche-y or anything like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've lived in SexyTech for the last 15 years, which I deem the Bay Area by the way Right my own thing, yeah, all VC-backed stuff. I love Series A, series B, because you get to really be strategic there and have, I think, a lot more fun and people aren't just numbers at that point. And, yeah, we've been doing that for a while and then, most recently, we've been living in the exec world, which is super interesting and it moves a little bit different.
Speaker 2:Yes, it does. It's interesting We'll get to that in a second. So VC-backed where do you see? I guess at this point founders make mistakes when it comes to talent acquisition.
Speaker 3:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:How long do you have William?
Speaker 3:Sorry.
Speaker 2:In alphabetical order oh my God.
Speaker 3:So I think there's so many issues. One we're still don't care to understand it, I think, which is a problem. You get really lucky sometimes when they start to build with DEIB at the beginning, because that's its own separate issue, and I would say they don't align what needs to be done, meaning, do we need this person full time or do we need, could we outsource this? How long do we need this person? And I think generally, people think if we want something done faster, we'll just hire more people, and I think it's the complete opposite. I think leaner teams do more things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's, I think, along with not really understanding talent acquisition, they don't understand the role that HR and TA play. It's obvious to me, especially with some of the downturn stuff that we've had the last couple of years, it's like people gutting their TA teams. I'm like this is the perfect time to actually fix things. I know this isn't the moment to gut. This is the moment to go and figure out, reconfigure your tools, your process. This is actually the time to have your team, because they can't do it when the car's moving.
Speaker 3:I know, and people try to do it and I'm like things fall all over the place. I actually spoke to someone who went from what he was a team of one in TA and then went to 13, and now he's back to one. I was like, oh my gosh, talk me through this. And he's yeah, I now do headcount and I'm like an HR VP. I do org development capacity planning. Oh, yeah, I do top subscriptions. I'm like oh, my God.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine how difficult to be successful at that job. Some of it's you never have the same day twice. Okay, that's, I could see that being an upside, but also it's never done. Like you like the lease with recruiting. When you fill a position, it's done for that day. At least there's a moment of completion. Right In that job there's no moment. It's just you're going from one fire. Really you should have a fireman's hat put together because you're going from one fire to the next fire, to the next fire.
Speaker 3:Not to mention keeping. We're brand ambassadors, we're project managers.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, good point. Oh yeah, and they keep adding to the list. Oh, by the way, you gotta make sure our culture works. Oh, okay, great.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, oh. By the way, our retention is really crappy, oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. We just laid off 10,000 people, so I think morale is going to be down for a week or two and then we'll come back to that. So you said something about executive search being a little bit different kind of animal. I've obviously you've done this for a long time. You knew that already, but what shocked you about it being different?
Speaker 3:Actually I think it's a trend right now. I'm curious if you see it or other people on your podcast see it. But I think there was a time where we didn't see a lot of exec roles posted and we have just been seeing a slew of them lately, which is really interesting, and then to see 100 plus applicants on these roles is like wild. So I don't think that. I think just applicants in general. I talked to one company that was like our application rate went up 200%. I'm like okay, that's not sustainable. You can't look through all those people, right?
Speaker 2:No, they think that's a good thing. The volume was a good thing a long time ago, not now. You want those thousand people to apply to your job opening.
Speaker 3:Yeah, definitely not now, and so it's wild to then see like companies be like oh my god, we posted an exec role and it was like the biggest mistake ever, because that's the stuff that, like you, do really have to be very I hate to use the word strategic all the time, but I guess intentional.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 3:So I would say what's interesting is that a lot of the top isn't agreeing with who they need in these spots, so I've been very careful to take on roles that, honestly, haven't been open for a little while. So I'm sorry that have been open for a while, so meaning like they've already got it wrong and now we're ready to get it right. So I've been really careful with that, like I don't really want to take on new C-suite roles unless they've been there done that before.
Speaker 2:Do you have to do the the because you've actually searched for years. Head hunting for years was done in the shadows. It was done what I'll just say mostly men, mostly white, mostly country club and golf courses and stuff like that. It's just like clandestine. I remember my dad in the 70s told me about yes, his headhunter took me out and when he said headhunter, of course I'm like headhunter, he collects heads. What the hell is.
Speaker 1:He's a recruiter, he's a recruiter.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, just came out of the amazon. He has all these heads collected around his neck but he, literally he said no, he's just, he's a recruiter, he's just trying to help you find a new job and this and the other. He's got a bunch of different opportunities. So I'm like, but it was so clandestine to hear you actually talk. Yeah, no, people are using the deed, which is interesting in and of itself because you're putting it out there in front of a much larger audience, but that's going to attract a lot more people that are just applying to a thousand jobs in a day type stuff.
Speaker 3:Yep, it's very interesting. So I love when they're like okay, now we're ready for a firm. And then your take on this is I'm not really big into retained searches for me. I love contingency and I know that on paper, on the P&L, retained is the way, better way. I love contingency because I get to spread my wings and do my thing.
Speaker 2:It's how you came up too. It's like you didn't come up with this the luxury of retained. I think retained is closer to corporate in the sense of, hey, it will happen or it won't happen, we still get a check, whereas and again, that's built for a lot of people that's fine. But for people that like to like I have a friend here in Dallas who started with AeroTech and then built his own firm, sold it, etc. Like he likes to hunt, like he like having a check every month that he wants to hunt, he wants to find a person, he wants to do the placement and he wants to get the fee because there's something in that, that the whole full circle. That really is the juice.
Speaker 3:I think it's really motivating and I think then you care a lot more about who you find Right and like the conversations can be a lot richer. And you know, I tend like people look on the outside and be like, oh, a continuity, it's just transactional, but I actually think it can get really like intimate.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love it.
Speaker 2:Hey, it doesn't have to be transactional. It can be. If that's their desire, then that's probably not a good fit for you. If they're basically putting it out with five or six different people and it's all contingent, so that's okay, but at the same time it's, you don't mind competition but at the same time you want to have a relationship with the people. Now you mentioned people that have had the job open for a while are a little bit more. Maybe they're at the place where they finally get it that the 1200 resumes isn't a good idea, et cetera. What do you coach them to? Is it reformatting and rethinking what the job is or what they want out of the job?
Speaker 3:I think it's more of what they want out of the job, like, what do they want this person to accomplish, and they all have to agree, and I think that's that tends to be. The problem is that maybe the higher up doesn't agree with the person that this person's reporting to, so there's just things that are broken. And I think that when a company can talk to me about, hey, this is what this person's going to accomplish in 90 days to a year, this is what we need, then I like light up, I'm like, oh, yay, okay, so you get it. And then also I even love when they narrow it down for me. Or it's like, hey, I want people from this industry because it translates, because of this reason, that's the good stuff for me, and I think you have to get it wrong first in order to fully figure that out.
Speaker 2:There's some marriage advice in there for everyone that's listening. First of all, the accomplish deal, which is what I like. That is really. It's agreement, permission and agreement, getting all the whomever the team is involved, and in saying, okay, let's take the job descriptions as it's currently and put it off to the side. What do they need to accomplish? And then they then better, they better, around the 15 different things that they have to accomplish, they go okay, that sounds reasonable. What are the three things they have to do? And getting them to agree, first of all, I can see that it's fun, but how do you get their time? How do you get them to agree to give you 30 minutes an hour or whatever? Are you doing this on site? How do you get them in the room and to agree? I could get the agreement part Because basically, I hear what you're saying, helen. Ted, I hear what you're saying. What if we said, like pulling them together, like I get that part? But I also see these people being really busy and not wanting to necessarily help.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I like to ask them, like what happens and what doesn't get done? If we can't do this, we can't hire this person.
Speaker 1:What deadlines?
Speaker 3:do you miss? What projects do you have to let go? Are teammates upset because they're overworked? What communication fails? Like stuff like that I keep. I always go back to the business line here, like the ROI, like what happens when this person doesn't enter your company in three months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Do you find?
Speaker 3:I don't want to waste their time and so I think I do a really good job and I make sure that my employees do a good job with this. Isn't that moment to think oh, thank you so much for meeting with me. No, this is. This goes both ways. We're super busy, you're super busy. I don't want to sit here and go back and forth. I just want to figure out how we're going to make this work.
Speaker 2:Once you've got the agreement their agreement on what the position is what's your next step? What do you do?
Speaker 3:after that, so I like to go over it again.
Speaker 2:Here's what we all agreed to. Yeah, all right, good, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Actually I'm really transparent in this part, whereas I have what I call a client pitch, phone pitch, whatever you want to call it where I have all of this information, everything that we agreed to, everything they're hiring, the salary, the equity, like anything, and everything that they want, and I actually share it with them. So I'm like, hey, great, these are the notes I took. Here's what my team knows, here's what, canada Experience wise, we're doing. Here's the interview process you've already committed to. If anything's wrong, you got to let me know now, because this is it's going to go south Every time we change things, like it's going to take one more time and it's no one's happy about that.
Speaker 2:And then we got to have another meeting and everyone no one wants that. No one wants another meeting. These are certain positions that you'll thrive in right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I would say we're seeing a lot of senior and staff level roles, like the tippity-top ICs. Essentially I love that stuff, I think that's really fun, I love that path. As opposed to managers, I think we're seeing less managers, less leader roles, because I think again it's like we let all these people go. Now we need to pick projects back up again, so then I'm sure then they'll go back into hiring managers and it'll be this. Yeah, I would say stuff, level engineering AI, of course is mega.
Speaker 2:Oh, my God yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Everybody's divested of some of the bets that they made in the years past and Web 3.0, and Metaverse and Blockchain whatever and they're all switching to bets on AI and generative AI in particular. We don't have enough of those people available in the world, much less like recruiting them is not going to be easy period.
Speaker 3:I just saw this report. I can't even think of who it was from, but anyways, I just read this, basically talking about the different salaries that AI engineers are starting to get and by and stuff. It's freaking mega. So the question is, are we going to hire up all these people again and then?
Speaker 2:have a layoff 100%, 100%. This is what we do, and it's not just Silicon Valley. This is actually what we do. This it's so emotional where it's like a bit of FOMO, totally.
Speaker 3:I think, exactly right.
Speaker 2:If we're Google, we're just going to gather all of them together and we don't know exactly what we're going to do with them yet.
Speaker 3:But we're going to have them just in case. But we don't want.
Speaker 2:Facebook to have them, or we don't want to pick somebody else to have them.
Speaker 3:It's a pissing war, like all the time it is it is it is.
Speaker 2:So a question, two questions. One is around do you find some folks that you're interacting with that they love talent that comes from, let's say, Salesforce? It's a great example. So I love people that have been at Salesforce. Just because they were successful at Salesforce doesn't necessarily mean they'll be successful elsewhere. Or pick Facebook Doesn't really matter the idea of it, but do they already come with? I like people from this firm or this industry.
Speaker 3:All the different biases yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 3:I would say, if I were to pick one strong bias that everybody has, they definitely want early Uber, early LinkedIn, stuff like that. But it doesn't seem to be current companies anymore, not like it used to be. I used to get asked all the time oh my God, if you get Airbnb? And they wouldn't say early Airbnb, it was just Airbnb. But now I think companies are getting very specific early people from high profile companies is who they want.
Speaker 2:Is that because they understand scale?
Speaker 3:Exactly. They want to understand the growth and the scale problems.
Speaker 2:And how fast things change. Because those people again, just because they did it doesn't necessarily mean they want to do it again. Yeah.
Speaker 3:For sure. Okay, something that I've learned in the last couple of years, like with the remote life, and I'll be very honest, I don't love it. I could change that.
Speaker 2:You're kidding Really.
Speaker 3:I hate it.
Speaker 2:I'm going to go out on a limb. You remind me of a woman in New York that owns a staffing firm and she was going to bat shit crazy during COVID Because she was just like I have to go to an office, I have to, I can't stay, and she's got an apartment in Manhattan. I'm like, dude, you live in a life. This is great. No, this is not great. I hate this. I hate this. She's extrovert. Most people that thrive in recruiting are extroverts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I dig the energy, I did it. There's so many like you call it, like water cooler conversations, but I get inspired from all over the place and it comes from people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and if you're going from Zoom call to Zoom call, it's a little bit harder to do that. Turns out.
Speaker 3:Oh, it's exhausting, Like people will be like, hey, do you want to do?
Speaker 2:a regular call? Yes, yes, let's do that. You mean on a phone? Oh wow, let's try that, let's do. Do you have a landline? Oh my God, that'd be great.
Speaker 3:Hey, I have a landline for my kids. I want you to know I do.
Speaker 2:Here in this part of the Hiddon Museum is what we call a rotary phone. Yeah, two things. One is around knockout questions. What's your take on knockout questions?
Speaker 3:I don't mind them. Sometimes I feel like I don't move as fast.
Speaker 2:With clients. Do you have them? Do you navigate them towards a place where there's okay, what's something that's a non-starter?
Speaker 3:Oh, I get what you're asking me. I thought you were going to give me fire questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're good, it's the firing round. All right, brie, let's go. They must have worked at NASA, like period in story. If they haven't worked at NASA, we can't. They just can't work here. Stuff like that, it's a true knockout.
Speaker 3:Oh, okay, I like to I take it a couple of different ways. Like when I say, hey, who's your hit list Like where do you want people from what we just talked about? And then I'll say, who do you not want people from Like, where do you not want people from Like? Every single time they've come in you're like, oh God, not these people. So I've actually had companies be very specific with this.
Speaker 3:So, if you remember, like when Microsoft bought LinkedIn, it was like this big deal and I think a lot of companies got super excited to grab people from there and then all of a sudden it was like this one era of LinkedIn, like when they must have gone through a hyper growth stage, which they got a little sloppy, and so I started having companies literally list out years.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 3:God, don't get these here.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's fantastic. From 2010 to 2015,. Yeah, nobody, they're just that no.
Speaker 3:It's just hilarious. It's like who comes up with this and how many people went wrong in order for this to be.
Speaker 2:Uh-huh, and who is running the ship? That's what I want to know. Like, who's out there now with a book or a podcast or doing a bunch of successful stuff talking about an era that really was an abomination? That'd be pretty quick to know. What do you think about diverse slates of candidates? Like and then pass the theoretical? Like can you work in a harder area in the world? Try to find talent that's hard to find, okay, check and then getting it in front of people, et cetera. Like I could see it being really easy to put middle-aged, paraphrased white guys in front of most of your clients maybe younger, right, so that'd be a little bit easier, but that's not what you want to do, that's not what we need you to do, et cetera. Like, how hard is it to? Then I got a slate of candidates. I got three. They're really good, but they're all the same.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now I can put them in front of them, or I can wait another two weeks or a week, and I could probably have some diversity there.
Speaker 3:What's yeah, so I send as I get them. Oh, okay, I don't like to send in batches. I like to have a lot of urgency there and I like to just see what I do when I do it. But with that said, yeah, the diverse side, I like to start. But when I do my search, I do them a few different ways. I like to tangent source a lot and I like to make sure that once I find let's just say once I find this amazing woman candidate, that I do a tangent on this profile and find as many others just as wonderful as she is and I do that reach out first.
Speaker 2:Oh cool. What technology, what's? I ask a recruiter what their favorite. Sourcing technology is dangerous on so many levels, but you've got a favorite for right now. So what's your favorite right now?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I'm still an old school LinkedIn recruiter girl.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I love that. I think there's just so many great ways to do that, but I will say that, as far as pairing it with Covey getCoveycom, covey Scout is like bonkers. It is AI and normally anything that messes with my sourcing. I'm like get out of here. I can do this, I can do better, but it's the brain of a recruiter. I'm doing a search right now where it asks you to put in all of the different categories, the different industries, company sizes, scale, for example, someone who's managed B2C companies, but please reject Google or Microsoft. Wow, you can say that stuff to this bot instead of Googling it all and finding out different Boolean ways to do it. It's freaking cool, so that's my favorite.
Speaker 2:Right, I love that. I love that. I've always seen it being used a couple of times, but I love just the premise. By the way, I just love the premise of how it is. And again, LinkedIn Recruiter. Everyone complains about LinkedIn Recruiter, especially on the corporate side. They complain about LinkedIn Recruiter, yet everyone has licenses.
Speaker 3:I know.
Speaker 2:This is the craziest thing in the world to me. I'm like if you complain about it, you should probably stop using it. I don't know, I'm just gonna throw it out there.
Speaker 3:That is funny. But I will say I know I hear people knock on it all the time but Always. But it's good yeah.
Speaker 2:Especially for specific types of talent. If you're trying to get truckers in Arkansas, okay, maybe LinkedIn Recruiter's not the way, got it Fair enough. But outside of that, and maybe even some of the nuanced talent that you go after, maybe a Stack Overflow or GitHub or some other types of communities might be a better. But still, by and large, again, I think it's super. I think it's more helpful than it gets credit. I think it's a lot. I think so too.
Speaker 3:It moves and grooves and if I'm gonna go off LinkedIn like fully off LinkedIn I don't know if you've seen this yet, but Better Leap is really cool so, for example, if I want to get people off of Stack and GitHub and stuff like Better Leap sources off of it. It sources all over the place.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's cool.
Speaker 3:So that's really cool too. It's newer so. I want heavier search capabilities. But yeah, it's definitely cool to search off LinkedIn because you feel I think you feel like justifying oh, I really found this person. I don't think it matters where you find them, that's your problem?
Speaker 2:Not at all. That's the thing is no one really they'll ask. Somebody will at one point care about source of hire, but by and large, most executives couldn't spell source of hire if you gave them the letters. They don't care, they just want the person to take an interview and then make sure they make a good hire. That's all they care. I wanted to go back to. Something you mentioned at the very beginning is sustainability, because we don't talk about it enough. So what's your current take on sustainability in recruiting?
Speaker 3:Oh, I love this subject so much. Again, this goes back to the business Like you can't have sustainability if your recruiter or head of town or whoever you have, isn't at the seat of the table. I don't think that they ask those hard questions. I think you really could build such a great forecast. You could talk about ROI, every single person that you have, and how long it takes for them to ramp up. If you want to bring learning development to this, how much faster you could do things. I think everyone wants things done quickly. And then they're like oh wait, what about this? Oh wait, what about this? And again it goes back to what I said in the beginning, where it's like hiring more people doesn't mean you got the job done faster or better.
Speaker 2:That's right. It's when you're talking. It reminds me of IBM used to have this project management strategy where they would think about the product for a third of the product so let's say it's a three month project. For a third of that, for 30 days they just think it planned and make sure they really thought about all the things that are tied together. Then for a third of that, they'd work the plan and go do the project and then on the back third they would revisit what they thought of and what they did and where they need to make changes in the future.
Speaker 3:Well, I thought.
Speaker 2:Isn't it genius?
Speaker 3:Wait, why did they get rid of it? You said they got rid of it.
Speaker 2:I don't know if they got rid of it, but I just I love the idea of you give yourself some time to think on the front end about what could happen, what needs to happen, and then you learn which is the true learning which, again, in both HR and TA, we don't give ourselves enough time to learn.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just in general, just hard stop. But even when it's about a particular search, like we go through it. We run through it fast, done, completion, and it's more on to the next thing. It's pause and breathe. And then what did you learn? How could you institutionalize that learning and how could you share that with other people on your team, et cetera. So yeah, Brian, I could talk to you all day. And left unchecked, I will. You got like a job and stuff like that. So thank you so much for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you. I love the questions. I love where you're going. It's very thoughtful. Recruited in TA. I like it.
Speaker 2:There you go, and thanks again for coming on and thanks for everyone listening, until next time.