LiveHire – The New Frontier For Talent Communities

 

Trevor Vas here talking to Nick Bailey from LiveHire, how are you going Nick?
                                                                                            

Very well thank you Trevor.

 

Nick I’ve known you for a while, and you’ve had some quite significant positions in the recruitment industry. Could you give our delegates a thumbnail sketch of your background please?
                                                                                            

Originally from the UK, I spent about 10 years in the recruitment industry in search and selection, working through companies like Norman Broadbent, Harvey Nash, and then Korn Ferry. I then played a part in the launch of Future Step – the first corporate venture really trying to take advantage of the emergence of the internet back in 1994. I then moved across to Australia, I was marrying a lady from Melbourne and it gave me a great opportunity to follow future step across to Australia. Then most recently, I’ve gone through a couple of maturations moving up the value chain to look through the RPO business with future step, and then most recently as Executive General Manager of client development for Chandler Macleod. With responsibility for all of their separate business units and our client strategy for that business up until it was sold to Recruit Holdings.

 

Significant positions you’ve held. Nick you’ve joined a start-up. How do you sort of move from those very large organisations to a start up?
                                                                                            

It’s probably not quite as hard as it sounds. I certainly enjoyed working for big public companies in Korn Ferry and definitely Chandler McLeod. My interest has always been to look at innovation and how we can improve the value proposition to our clients. There has been a number of corporate ventures or start-ups within those bigger businesses, this time I just thought it’s time to join that digital revolution. And rather than trying to bring in innovation and on sell it, I actually wanted to be part of the creation. It’s a great opportunity to join a business that I think is right at the leading edge of the HR Cloud, and total work force management.

 

So Nick, would you mind just describing what LiveHire is for our audience? Just so they’ve got an understanding.
                                                                                            

LiveHire is an agent technology company. We have created two solutions, a market place for talent where individuals can digitise their profile very quickly and easily on mobile, tablet, desktop in literally two minutes. That enables companies, really SME’s, to search our live market and connect with people directly. That then was the starting point for creating deeper and richer talent communities for individual companies, and branding that technology as a hosting platform so that companies could build, manage and host live talent communities, and then these two solutions end up working together in a fairly symbolic relationship. Ultimately our goal is to give clients access and visibility to their past, present, and future workforce.

 

So what is it that a deeper richer talent community gives as a value proposition for a client?
                                                                                            

Clients are asking us to solve a number of problems. We don’t understand our people? How can we connect with our people more directly? And by people, I think they’re starting to see that the demarcation between internal and external talent is becoming really quite blurred. You look at millennials; you look at the multi-generational work force. People are looking for different work preferences, being much more flexible, so people they need to connect either with their future employer before a task or role or opportunity is made available. Soon companies can solve that problem of, if it’s an internal individual how do we understand when they’re ready to internationally relocate? How do we understand that they require certain training? Or they have a preference to undertake a slightly different career trajectory within a business? Being a data technology company that captures not just a CV, but asks people to give us real insights into their personal motivators, that all illusive conjoint analysis of are you interested in a more senior role, more money, a different location, changing from FMCG across to Retail. If we can understand what really makes people tick and then quickly and easily share that really valuable data with a future employer, or even their current employer, we will achieve that goal of connecting people with opportunity in the most direct way possible. Being quite a disruptive play to the recruitment industry, but more importantly it just enables individuals to have a more human style interaction with companies. You’re having a conversation rather than going through a selection type process.

 

Sounds amazing. Nick I know that you’re working with some very large organisations, and some of these organisations have got very large data bases of candidates, are you actually taking their entire data base and cleansing it or portions of it?
                                                                                            

It is something that we’ve really started to productise using the talent community solution. As a data company really you start with an empty vessel. Great functionality to find and filter people but clearly you have to put quality talent in, to put quality talent out. And a great way of doing that is to look at the assets that companies have built over time, quite often there is a lot of legacy data sitting within an ATS, someone’s Inbox, an excel spreadsheet, I am sure you are very familiar with all the different ways internal recruiters have of maintaining their own sort of talent pipe lines. It suffers that Achilles heel the data losing its integrity and decaying over time. So we have gone to some quite large organisations who have built up several million profiles of individuals but are getting less and less return on that investment because it is going out of date. And inviting people that have expressed interest in a brand or in a position to re-register and opt back in to follow that brand within their dedicated talent community.

 

Sounds Good. And last question Nick, given the future direction of the recruitment industry both in terms of internal, RPO and agency, how do you see LiveHire living in that future world?
                                                                                            

That’s a great question. We are evolving very rapidly, our talent community solution is probably 8-10months old, and we are looking to keep pace and maintain our cadences. We developed this platform with both RPO providers, internal recruitment teams, but also the trend of total workforce management where recruitment is probably becoming more and more decentralised. And every hiring manager is becoming more of a talent scout for their business unit or their brand, and they need something which enables them to go back to our original vision – how do we connect people with opportunity quickly, easily and the most direct manner possible? So I think it doesn’t really matter if you’re representing a company, you just need to be able to access quality people who are interested, available and aligned to that role, to that location and to that brand. And ultimately that’s exactly what LiveHire does.

 

Nick Bailey from LiveHire, I thank you for your time. I’ve got a wealth of information about what LiveHire does and I look forward to working with you in the future. All the best.
                                                                                            

Fantastic, Thank you, Trevor.

 
 

Join leading sourcers and social recruiters including Shannon Pritchett , Chris Hoyt, Bill Boorman, Martin Warren at Sourcing Social Talent #SST15 in Auckland in November. Register for the event now.

 
Sourcing Social Talent 2015 Banner
 

Related articles

Leave a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Sign up to our newsletter

Get a weekly digest on the latest in Talent Acquisition.

Deliver this goodness to my inbox!