Trevor Vas interviews Moses Bar-Yoseph, at #ERE14

Trevor Vas (@trevorpvas), Director at ATC Events, and Moses Bar-Yoseph (@mobaryo) AVP Talent Acquisition for Sun Life Financial, sit down at the US #ERE14 Conference to talk about the value of knowing the source and quality of your talent pipeline.  Moses also tries out his best Australian accent, and Trevor tries (but fails) to focus the camera on Moses’ face.
Trevor’s video skills are available for Weddings, Birthdays and Bar-Mitzvahs.

Lessons from Moses Bar-Yoseph

• Don’t mix your metaphors when talking about your talent channels, and your type of channels. You want to focus on your type of channel that is the source of your candidates.

• It’s vital to look at the quality coming into your pipeline beforehand, rather than rely on lagging indicators.

• There are 3 types of candidates who result in the highest quality of hire; alumnai and rehires, referrals and internals.

• An average-large-sized organisation has these 3 types of candidates accounting for 40-50% of the funnel. So half of the pipeline is already quality.

• You can then implement targeted programs aimed at improving the intake of each of these 3 sources. By doing this you can aim at 80% if the funnel being quality, and hence only 20% of your hiring population is unknown.

• This typically guarantees faster, better and cheaper quality candidates, with minimal risk.

Watch the video interview or read the transcript below:

Moses: I’m currently the head of talent acquisition at Sun Life Financial, which is a predominantly US Canadian and US based insurance and investment company. I’ve been recruiting for 15 years plus and have enjoyed the corporate side of it, as well as the agency side of it, as well as the campus side of it- so I know a little about recruiting from a number of difference facets.
Trevor: Wonderful. I heard that you speak about some of the things in relation to referrals and how you can sort of leverage up your recruitment function from a quality perspective. Would you mind sharing that with our Australian audience please?
Moses: When we look at channels, and often times recruiting leaders and recruiting managers will mix their metaphors and talk about channels and types in the same breath. The reality is that channels would be things like your job board and your career site, but types are really the source of candidates. So when we think about quality, frequently Trevor you’ll say “the senior leadership of an organisation is demanding better quality of hire” but how can we predict that? Usually there’s a lagging indicator that tells you after the fact whether they were quality or not. But, there is a way to look at quality coming into the pipeline beforehand, there’s quite a bit of evidence that suggest that three types of candidates: those are the ones that come by referral; the ones that are alumni or rehires who have worked there before; or internal transfers, those three populations of people tend to be higher quality. That quality is measured by engagement scores going up for both the new hire and people around them, it makes sense intuitively as these are people who are working with: their peers and their friends, so they’ve sort of got a stamp of approval so they’re better quality that way. You’ve got internals, so they know the systems, the processes, they have good relationships and they tend to have a shorter time to productivity and do better on the job; and then rehires, people who have already worked there, you already have performance data on their capability and keeping in touch with them is really relevant so you can bring them back at the right time for their career.
So, really the challenge for recruiting leaders is to think about their pipeline differently. If you look at your pipeline and say “where are all my candidates coming from?” most research indicates that 15-20% in the average-large-sized organisation are coming from referrals. The same 15-20% are coming from internal transfers through jobs, and about 5% are coming back. So somewhere between 40-50% of the funnel is already quality candidates, or pre seeded quality candidates.
Here’s the wonderful part, the rubber hits the road when you say that each of those spaces can be manipulated. Each one of those populations can have targeted programs that would allow to improve the intake from those. So best in class organisations are saying 15% on their alumni re-hires, 30% or more on their referrals, 30% or more on their internal movement. When you do that and you aggregate again, now your funnel looks like its been preceded to roughly 75-80% on quality. So as a recruiting leader not only are you guaranteeing typically faster, better- certainly better in the quality- and cheaper, you also have less risk. Only 20% of your population for hiring is an unknown; coming from your website, coming from an agency what have you. Those are pretty good odds I think for anything.
Trevor: Moses, it’s been a really enlightening interview, I thank you for your time and I value your friendship. 
*View more of Trevor’s Q&A Hot Seat interviews from #ERE14.