Hi everyone, and welcome to this podcast episode! I'm Robin Choy , CEO of HireSweet . Each week, I humbly tackle recruiting issues about recruiting outreach, interviewing, employer branding, career management, and anything else that could be helpful to you as an aspirational recruiter (whether you are an in-house recruiter, an agency recruiter, a freelancer, or the founder of an early stage startup). Thanks for listening to A-Players! Subscribe now for free How to show the value you bring to the...
Jan 26, 2023•33 min
Hi everyone, and welcome to this podcast episode! I'm Robin Choy , CEO of HireSweet . Each week, I humbly tackle recruiting issues about recruiting outreach, interviewing, employer branding, career management, and anything else that could be helpful to you as an aspirational recruiter (whether you are an in-house recruiter, an agency recruiter, a freelancer, or the founder of an early stage startup). Thanks for listening to A-Players! Subscribe now for free The zero-cost strategy to build a stro...
Jan 19, 2023•32 min
Subscribe here: 👉 Apple . 👉 Spotify . 👉 Deezer . About this episode : Why are many recruiters trapped into hiring as many people, as fast as possible, again and again? Maybe because KPIs are wrong. Everybody uses the same (us included) and I actually never really challenged this. It makes a lot of sense though: optimizing for time-to-hire pushes to close hires as fast as possible and move on to the next one. Also, why the urgency to hire within 30 days, while most hiring managers don’t plan m...
Dec 01, 2022•32 min
Building a culture of recruiting early on in your company is critical. Miss that step and everything will get harder as the company grow: -harder to hire top performers. -harder to reach your targets. -harder to... simply grow. Matt is an Operation Partner at Human Capital, a VC firm based in SF, in addition to being a former sourcer at Google. In this episode, Matt explains: -how to use your sales skills to recruit your first employees -why and how to log every conversation you have with potent...
Nov 24, 2022•32 min
I often see recruiters addressing recruiting content like this: -a video by there -occasionally an article -possibly a LinkedIn post. All a bit random (and me the first!). Why? Because we were never given a simple, clear and efficient framework to know which type of content to do, and how to schedule it. So I wanted to find for you a playbook to get there finally. This is the topic of the latest episode of my A-Players podcast, where I’ve invited Matěj Matolín, an employer branding and content c...
Nov 17, 2022•29 min
Everybody talks about search in sourcing: Booleans, X-Rays etc. But finding candidates is not as valuable as 10 years ago. Because now almost everybody is on LinkedIn. The real valuable expertise? Getting people to reply: copywriting, personalization. That’s what I believe at least. The thing is… Balazs Paroczay believes the complete opposite. Balazs is a legend - a multiple speaker at events like SourceCon and Sourcing Summit, with more than 15+ years of experience. We had a 30-minute debate to...
Nov 10, 2022•29 min
Christine had a very interesting challenged: engineer the Financial Times’s tech employer brand. Of course the FT is famous around the globe for its business publication - but when Christine started working on it, the employer brand on engineering & tech roles was close to 0. The way she improved the employer brand on engineering & tech at FT was actually very close to how any startup could do it - and I wanted her to explain to us step by step how to steal her playbook. In this episode,...
Nov 03, 2022•31 min
« Recruiters should personalize their messages to candidates to increase their reply rates.” Ok. But what if we can’t personalize because we have to send messages to hundreds of candidates? In that case, you’ll need a more advanced technique: making your messages stand out. Writing messages that are not personalized, but that have super high response rates. Jonas Waloschek, Senior Technical Sourcer ar MANTA, and ex McKinsey, is the expert of this technique. So I invited him on my podcast to talk...
Oct 18, 2022•28 min
Yelling at your recruiting team “be better” will never make them better. Having a right-minded coach above them, will. I’ve been wanting to do an episode on this topic for a while: how to coach your recruiting team well, to make them outperform. So I decided to bring Chris Ahsing on the podcast. Why Chris? Because in addition to having been a recruiter at Google and Dropbox, he is also... a football coach. In this episode, Chris Ahsing reveals us : -the first principle to know to be a good coach...
Sep 21, 2022•30 min
The baseline experience for candidates is terrible - most companies don't really prioritize improving it. That's a blessing for companies who do, because a very small investment into candidate experience can turn into a strong competitive advantage! Troy has been in the war for talent for years (previously founded a recruiting CRM called Resource.co ), and recently launched a company called Guide.co that focuses on improving the candidate experience. He's one of the best people on earth to talk ...
Sep 15, 2022•39 min
“In recruiting, trust your gut”. B******t. Any recruiter worth his salt knows that it’s the best way to fall into every possible bias. Doing structured interviews is actually the ONLY way to recruit accurately. Now the question is how to do it. Good news for you: I invited Adam Redlich, one of the first recruiters at Google back in 2003, to talk about it with me during a podcast episode. Throughout his career, Adam has helped dozens and dozens of recruiters become better at their jobs. And for t...
Aug 25, 2022•30 min
Too many companies believe sourcing is an entry-level job. This is the worst way to look at a very critical function. Sourcing is NOT an entry-level job for recruiters! And Garrett is as convinced as I am. Garrett joined Google when the company had 35,000 employees and left the company 7 years later when they were 180,000. Today, he builds the tech sourcing team at Grammarly. So who better than Garrett to reveal to us in this episode the secrets of how to build and manage best-in-class sourcing ...
Jul 21, 2022•31 min
In that episode, we decided to address the specific challenge of DE&I in companies below 200 people. Step by step, the challenge increases. Here's Claudia advice for companies at every step (0-20 people, up to 100 people, 100-200). Claudia actually wrote an entire outline of this discussion, with links to all the resources she mentions in the recording. Here is it: https://bit.ly/3NSz4hr -- To follow Claudia on LinkedIn, click here . To follow me on LinkedIn, click here Finally, to learn mor...
Jul 07, 2022•38 min
I’m convinced that nurturing your past candidates to finally hire them is a powerful strategy. And Lance Sapera is as convinced as I am. He is so much in favor of past candidate nurturing, that his team made 48 nurtured hires the last year at @Talend. Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode: How to reach a target of 10% of hires coming from nurtured candidates Why they are incentivizing each recruiter with a day off for every nurture hire they get How 83% of candidates that don’t get a job a...
Jun 30, 2022•31 min
In this episode, I welcome Larry Anderson, Senior Recruiter at connect RN. Larry reveals to me how to greatly improve your conversion rate and candidate satisfaction as a recruiter, by organizing preparation calls and debriefing calls with candidates. Here’s what we talked about: 1/ Why organizing prep calls and debriefing calls helps improve conversion rates 2/ The 3 parts of a perfect prep call: logistics, process explanation, coaching. 3/ The question Larry tells candidates to ask the hiring ...
Jun 23, 2022•31 min
Discovery is key in the recruiting process. A good discovery will save so much time later during the recruiting process, help you increase your closing rate and internal satisfaction. Discovery is two-fold: Job discovery (aka the intake meeting) and candidate discovery. In this episode, James shares his tips on how to run a proper discovery with both sides - he even goes further and shares the link to his actual intake meeting for everyone to read: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hIivRKWdAI2...
Jun 16, 2022•34 min
In this episode, we talk with Mike Cohen, CEO at Wayne Tech, about employee retention. And you’ll see that Mike is brutally honest. Mike talks a lot about it’s own company culture, and why he thinks that strong, unique, and no-b******t values are the key to employee retention. Here are some of the topics Mike developed: -The Start-Stop-Continue rule -What Gen Z is seeking in its job -What does Church teach you about employee retention -Why employee hours is b******t -Why being truly vulnerable i...
Jun 09, 2022•46 min
Talent acquisition is hard: you get overwhelmed with tons of notifications, open hundreds of Chrome tabs, send dozen of outreach messages. And sometimes get no reply at the end of the day. That candidate who was sure a sure hire suddenly declines the job offer. You lose purpose. A purpose and intrinsic motivation are so important in recruiting - much more than targets and metrics. That's why a lot of Talent Acquisition Managers wonder: “how can I inspire my team, give them an inner sense of purp...
Jun 02, 2022•30 min
I get questions about employee referral programs all the time: -What’s a good target for our referral program? 15% of hires? 25%? 35%? 55%? -What should be the reward? If it’s money, how much? -How can I communicate with my team efficiently? So here's a podcast to finally answer those questions! Mostly people understand the value of hires coming from referral (they close faster, perform better and stay longer on average), but don’t know how to drive more referrals. I went on the hunt to find the...
May 26, 2022•30 min
For episode 6 of my podcast “A-players”, I received Shannon Toomey, who explained to me how to be a good first recruiter in a startup. Shannon was a Senior Tech Recruiter at Dropbox, and was also most recently the first recruiter at Descript, where she had to hire 50 people in 1 year. Here’s what we discussed (among many other things): -What are the 3 key questions to ask to be sure a candidate is a good fit? -Why you it’s not always efficient to use scorecards to assess candidates? -What are th...
May 19, 2022•38 min
Having Hung on my podcast was a dream come true. I'm a personal big fan of all his content, from Recruiting Brainfood to This Week in Recruiting (links below). For our discussion together, we tried to address a topic that we felt was not enough covered in the HR world, almost a taboo: How to deal with politics at work. Should you take a stance as a company? Should you ban all discussions related to politics or social issues? We see that there is no easy solution - but we can take some inspiratio...
May 12, 2022•28 min
Prior to being VP of Talent at Gusto, Emil was a recruiter in a recruitment agency, and an in-house recruiter for Zenefits, Okta or Lyft. And his mission today at Gusto is to grow the company from 1100 employees to 3000 in one year. So who better to talk about capacity planning and forecasting in recruitment than Emil! In this episode, we discussed (among other things): -how Gusto is able to recruit so many people without having any full-time sourcers -how to do your capacity planning when you d...
May 05, 2022•30 min
A lot of people enter the world of recruiting by accident, then develop a passion for it and go on to have exceptional careers as recruiters. This is the case of Ginny Cheng, who started her career in PR and marketing, then discovered recruiting at Microsoft, before ending up a few years later in charge of recruiting for the M&A team at Facebook. Today, Ginny is the Global Head of Talent Acquisition at Oura Ring, and does career coaching in her spare time. In this episode, Ginny tells us how...
Apr 28, 2022•29 min
Closing candidates is an art & science. It’s one of the biggest-leverage activities in recruiting - get better at closing and everything else just falls into place. Less sourcing, less interviewing time, and better internal satisfaction. So I brought in the best expert on the topic I could find! Jose has been doing recruiting for 15 years, working for startups like Nebula, Edmodo, Dropcam, or large companies like Google and Cisco. Jose has also worked at Andreessen Horowitz (helping on recru...
Apr 21, 2022•39 min
Chime is a leading fintech of 1,500+ people, they raised $2.3B in total funding since their seed round in 2013, 3.7M users, they’re now valued at $25Bn after Forbes. Huge. Jeff shares his first-hand experience from scaling the recruiting team to 50 people in 3 years, his learnings from 20 years working in recruiting, from the early days to running a recruitment agency, to Chime today. He covers how he built his team at Chime step by step, the importance of specializing sourcers vs recruiters, an...
Apr 09, 2022•40 min
Hiring is but the beginning - now you've built that team of A-Players, you need to create the perfect ecosystem for them to thrive. Learn how to get, give and encourage both praise and criticism, organize 1:1s, develop their careers. Kim Scott is the author of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing your Humanity . She led AdSense, YouTube and Doubleclick teams at Google and worked with Sheryl Sandberg. Hear from a management coach p...
Mar 16, 2021•31 min
Jon Stross is co-founder at Greenhouse, a leading Applicant Tracking System that built a very interesting framework: the Hiring Maturity Curve. 4 stages (Chaotic, Inconsistent, Systematic, Strategic) that every company needs to complete before achieving recruiting greatness. Wherever you feel your company belongs, listen to Jon's battle-tested recipes and escape your current stage! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes,...
Feb 08, 2021•30 min
Sultan is co-founder at Beamery, which they launched in 2016, having started working on the problems and space in 2012 at the tail end of the financial crisis. Now in face of a new enormous crisis, the recruiting industry will adapt and evolve even faster. Sultan shares his vision on what will change in the next few months - not the next few decades. He covers DE&I initiatives, candidate personalization, privacy, nurturing of talent pools. 30 minutes to make sure your company won't miss the ...
Feb 02, 2021•28 min
Chris' story is intertwined with Reddit's. From its early days in 2005 to its sale to Condé Nast Publications in 2006 to the come back of the founding team in 2016. Listen to how the early website operated by a 4-person shop turned into one of the most-visited websites in the world with 52M+ Daily active users (and growing!). His story is one of rapid scale in the engineering team, of building skills as an engineering manager and of becoming a better CTO. This is a public episode. If you would l...
Jan 19, 2021•26 min
Rocki knows the recruiting field in & out and she's now the Chief Diversity Officer at a leading Talent Acquisition Software. She has a very clear view on why to improve diversity in any organization (and numbers to back) and how to tactically operate that improvement. In this episode, she discussed with me the 5 main reasons that might be preventing companies from hiring top performers from diverse audiences: lack of commitment, their brand, the sourcing strategy, the hiring experience, and...
Jan 12, 2021•29 min
