What software are high-volume hiring employers using and what results are they seeing? with Phil Strazzulla of Select Software Reviews.

Welcome back to another episode of the High Volume Hiring Podcast, the podcast that features news tips, case studies, and interviews with the world’s leading experts about the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to high-volume hiring. 

The High Volume Hiring podcast

In this episode, host Steven Rothberg, College Recruiter’s Founder and Chief Visionary Officer, interviews Phil Strazzulla, Founder of Select Software Reviews, a free and unbiased source whose goal is to provide HR-related advice and make it easier for HR leaders to find the best vendors.

Software recommendations for high-volume hiring employers

Phil joins this episode of the High Volume Hiring podcast to talk about recruitment technology. He covers some of the best HR tech options for high-volume recruiters based on specific hiring needs. Looking to reduce your time to hire or to attract more high-quality candidates? Phil’s got you covered! Tune in to hear some of these recommendations so you can find the most qualified candidates as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

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Transcript:

Steven Rothberg 0:13
Welcome to the High Volume Hiring Podcast. I’m Steven Rothberg, the founder of job search site, college recruiter at college recruiter, we believe that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. This podcast features news tips, case studies, and interviews with the world’s leading experts about the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to high volume hiring. Thanks for joining us. Today’s guests is filter Azula, the founder of select software reviews, which makes it easy for HR leaders to find the best vendors for a given category, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, and providing the advice HR needs to make the right decisions. Their research is free, unbiased, and based on the opinions of hundreds of industry experts and practitioners. Phil, welcome to the show.

Phil Strazzulla 1:02
Thanks for having me, Steven, I appreciate it.

Steven Rothberg 1:04
Cool. So before we jump in with, with some questions that I have for you, what didn’t I tell people about Phil, who are you? What, what makes your boat float?

Phil Strazzulla 1:16
What a question. So I guess I’m mostly a finance nerd, I started investing in the stock market when I was 12. And worked as a professional investor for a second as a VC to an early stage software investing, but very irrationally, have desire to build stuff. And so did the whole entrepreneurship thing and built an HR tech startup. And the thing I loved the most about building that was just like, talking to HR leaders and sharing what I’ve learned in videos, mostly on LinkedIn. And I thought, I wonder if I could make that a business. And it turns out that if you make them about the right stuff, you can you can monetize it. And tools is definitely something where people are kind of struggling, they need education. And there’s also sponsors there too. So I was lucky enough to kind of do something that I really liked to do, which is share knowledge and get paid for it.

Steven Rothberg 2:13
Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. So so much of what these folks buy, they buy, maybe once every three years, sometimes even just once a decade. And, man, if you haven’t looked at key piece of software, like an ATS and 567 years, your the research that you did 567 years ago might have been awesome. And it’s just useless now. So it’s great that they have places to go and see, not just from their own perspective, but from from others, you know, what they like? I’m I’m a big believer in review sites, you know, just trusting one person’s opinion at some other company that maybe is somewhat similar to yours or not, it’s kind of risky, maybe they may have a bad day and just lead you down the wrong path. So what why don’t we dive in? And the first question that I wanted to ask you is just the kinds of tech that you’re seeing that high volume recruiters are using, specifically, what what are you seeing out there right now.

Phil Strazzulla 3:19
So it’s all about decreasing time and friction. I think that whenever I think about high volume recruiting, there’s a guy that I know fairly well here in Boston that runs a firm that recruits people for call centers. And he said something made that really resonated a long time ago, which is, you know, most of you will be hiring, they’re looking for a job there, they really view jobs as commodities, commodity products, you know, this isn’t wooing a software engineer over the course of three months with, you know, the right employer brand and the right perks, etc. It’s somebody who, for whatever reason, went on Indeed, one day and said, I need a job, I’m gonna apply for 10 rolls, and I’m probably going to take the one that gets back to me the fastest. And so a lot of this technology is really geared around that speed and decrease friction. There’s obviously sourcing technologies that can integrate with your applicant tracking system, I guess, some of the most basic would be just sort of job distribution, getting it on the right job boards, maybe some smart job distribution, like programmatic advertising, and now we’re seeing more and more tools that will allow you to inject jobs into social media in places like Instagram or Facebook or Tik Tok, even as well as some direct sourcing so perhaps some some text recruiting some email recruiting to relevant talent pools, that might be third party talent pools that you haven’t touched yet or might be ones that you’ve already engaged with, and they’re in your applicant tracking system and these tools are just sort of helping you mine your your Gold Mine, I guess, find the gold and in your mind that already exists, sort of thing. And so top of funnel, it’s, you know, the sourcing stuff. There’s definitely an assessment layer here, most of which happens over text or mobile, and is super basic sort of knockout questions, you know, can you work on the weekends? Can you carry 50 pounds? Are you okay to work in the United States, etc. And again, this is sort of contrasted maybe with a bit with the corporate recruiting where, if you’re going to hire that software engineer, you’re going to probably have them take a coding test, or you might do psychological assessments, etc, behavioral assessments, more in depth skill assessments, this is really just, you know, can you do the basic stuff that we need you to do to show up on day one? And then how do we get you to that next phase, and that next phase might be? Congrats, you’re hired? Please, you know, fill out this paperwork and show up, it’s probably going to involve some sort of background check. It might involve talking to somebody. But again, it’s, it’s how do we get that person who applies to that stage in as few minutes as humanly possible? Because every, you know, especially if you’re shaving off days, but even down to the minute because your competition is probably going to be as sophisticated as you are looking to be, it actually really matters because you’re you’re fighting, you know, your job looks exactly like the other job, for the most part to this applicant. And so how do you win, you’d be fast, you decrease the friction, you do it mobile first. And you hopefully get that person in the door. Very, very soon.

Steven Rothberg 6:37
Yeah, awesome. You know, a couple of times in there, you really hammered away at the issue of time. And for Well, for a very long time, employers that talked about time to hire, or other issues of time, they weren’t talking so much about the number of days between when the candidate applies, and when they get an offer, when they started their focus for a long time was on does it take 20 minutes to get through the application process? Does it take 40 Does it take three. And that’s important, right. And in high volume roles, if you if you send somebody through a 40 minute application process, you’re not going to be left with too many applicants. But what I think you’re saying too, is that it’s also just the number of days and I think even said, like rate, even just sort of down to the minutes, if somebody’s applying to 10 Different call center jobs, they’re probably going to take the first offer they get. So if you can put them through that process in a couple of days, and they can start a couple of days later, you have a huge advantage over your competitors. So I think, correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s that’s probably a lot of what you’re seeing out there right now from from the high volume hiring employers.

Phil Strazzulla 7:55
I think that the most sophisticated companies, that’s what they’re doing, and what that allows you do is decrease your costs throughout the rest of your funnel, right? Because if you’re spending the same amount on your job postings, if you’re spending the same amount on your recruiting Head Staff, or headcount, sorry, you, you can hire a lot more people if you have a higher conversion rate. And so I think, you know, best in class companies, they’re probably going to hire around 10% of applicants, which is obviously, you know, massive compared to most most corporate recruiting, which is maybe like 1%, or less sort of thing. But if you’re doing a good job, literally 10% of applicants, and that includes people you knock out through background checks through the screening questions, etc, should come down and actually start at your company. And yeah, the way you do that is time and then also to your point around the time it takes to remove an apple to to actually go through an application, I do that almost more of like a friction thing. Because you know, 40 minutes in the in relative to the time to fill of maybe 10 or 15 days is not that much time, but it’s a lot of friction for somebody, and especially somebody has to do it on a desktop application, or, you know, they have to upload their resume, they even have to have a resume in the first place. What you really want to do is focus on meeting people where they are, which is on their phones, you know, inject something into their social media feed, convert them into a SMS based chat application with a bot, be transparent that it’s not human, get the right information, get it into your system, get them to that next stage, whatever it may be, as quickly and seamlessly as possible.

Steven Rothberg 9:49
You touched on something that I heard a little while back. I was at the Rec buzz Amsterdam conference in September and one of the presenters was the CEO of Sonic jobs, which is a lot bigger in the UK than it is in the US. But what they do differently than I think any other job board is that 100% of the applications happen on the sonic Jobs website, employers that require candidates to go over to the ATS to apply cannot advertise their jobs on on Sonic jobs, which is interesting. And they’re definitely reducing their addressable market that number employers that they can work with, but they are creating a much better experience for the candidate. But that aside, what I thought was very insightful and like to get your feedback on this, that that the CEO of Sonic Jobs said, is that he views friction at times as being good. And at times that being bad, there’s good friction, and there’s bad friction. The bad friction, in his view, is the I think that candidates should go through a 40 minute application process because if they won’t spend 40 minutes, then they’re not serious. If they’re if they’re if they’re going to apply too quickly, then they’re not going to be good potential applicants for us, it’s unlikely that they’ll be interested, accept an offer, stay with us whatever. He said, It’s that’s just a that’s an example of bad friction, creating unnecessary obstacles. On the other hand, he talked about good friction. And I think you were kind of touching on that, that if somebody is absolutely fantastic, but they’re located in Norway, and your company requires that person to be located in the US, you probably want to have a knockout question. Do you do you see is that is the employers that you’re talking to the software that you’re working with? Is that becoming more common, where they’re sort of differentiating between good and bad friction, trying to increase the good decrease the bad,

Phil Strazzulla 12:02
I think that probably most people aren’t thinking about in as nuanced away, as this person put it, which I really liked this framework. But it definitely is very valuable. And without a doubt, bad friction is, you know, this, like 40 minute apply, where I upload a resume, and then I you know, retype all the information that’s in my resume into an ATS. The point of a good friction actually reminds me something that’s like, very unrelated, but there’s a guy that I’m actually talking to in an hour who posted on Twitter, why can’t you just submit a offer on Zillow directly? Why do I have to like go through the broker and like, do all this stuff, and the CEO of Zillow actually responded to this tweet, and was like, we actually tried that. And the problem is, because it was so easy, people would just submit all these random offers, and they weren’t really that serious, and a lot of them were low balls, and the brokers were just going crazy. And, and so you need to have some sort of buy in, before somebody submits an offer, you know, for for a house. And I think that’s the same thing here where you need to have the right people and in this case, I think it’s, it’s really the employer is being proactive and asking people the right questions, to make sure that that they are the right person. And then you might also want to have some other layer of sort of buy in, and that might be, you know, doing a background check, and might be having a phone screen with somebody, etc. So that you’re pretty darn confident that they’re actually going to show up on that first day. And of course, there’s some economic ways of making sure people show up and whatnot, but you don’t want it to make it so easy that they can go on a website like Sonic jobs, or deed, or whatever and use their kind of built in apply and thing bang, bang, and maybe get four job offers and maybe show up to one of them. Is that

Steven Rothberg 13:49
right? Yeah. You know, the the ability to apply to a lot of jobs very quickly, without any real thought is does create the problem that you say it leads to a lot of unqualified applications, people. It’s like pray and spray. Is this what is an expression I’ve heard? For the listeners who have done sales or marketing work, they’d be familiar with the expression qualified lead. And at college recruiter, one of the things that we had struggled with for years, was determining if an employer came to our site and submitted a form that basically said, I’m interested in buying from you can I meet with a salesperson? Can I have a demo? We did a really bad job for years of figuring out who the salespeople should actually be spending time with. You don’t want to open up your calendar and have that calendar controlled by everybody else in the world. You want to have some control so that you’re spending the most amount of your time with the customers or potential customers that matter the most. And if somebody is just not a good fit a good potential customer, you’re wasting your time and you’re wasting theirs. So better to head that off at the beginning, we found, because we do so much work for high volume companies, we boiled it down to two questions. And the two questions are how many people you’re looking to hire. And over what period of time, none of nothing else matter. Nothing size of company where the company was located, what your job title is, what your budget is, how soon you’re looking to hire people didn’t matter. If we just said how many people you looking to hire, we would get back answers of hundreds, well, hundreds, over five years, is really different than hundreds over five days. And so I think that some of those good friction questions can lead to much better qualified applicants, applicants that your recruiters will want to spend time with. So I’m glad that you’re seeing some of the same stuff. And for people who aren’t familiar with Sonic jobs, happy to introduce you the their CEO, like you said, Phil, very, very nuanced presentation, very thoughtful, smart guy. And I think I think in the US, we’re gonna see a lot more of them. So last question, is the tech that you’re reviewing, that you’re getting feedback on from people that is used by high volume hiring employers? How does that differ from somewhat similar tech used by employers that maybe were only hiring a few dozen people a year?

Phil Strazzulla 16:40
It’s a good question. I think that for the most part, the high volume stuff, it’s almost all mobile first, you’re empowering, usually somebody who’s a hiring manager to make these decisions, because many times you have to make like very much like real time, like, somebody’s not coming in tomorrow, or, you know, whatever the case may be sort of decisions, and it can’t go through this whole hierarchy of talent acquisition, etc. And I guess, yeah, it really is just based on this paradigm of speed, and a commoditized job offering, unfortunately, which is, you know, it’s kind of like a bad thing to say, and maybe you don’t want to admit it. But at the end of the day, like many of these jobs are fairly commoditized. And they have really high turnover. And that’s just sort of the bottom line versus perhaps, you know, a company that’s hiring a couple of software engineers a year quarter during sales reps, or talent acquisition professionals are people that are going to want to stick around for a while. And there’s different screening technologies that are going to go more in depth. There’s less focused on speed and mobile first, it’s more about finding the right fit between two parties for the long term. And in a more complicated fit, versus Hey, can you do these poor things? Great. You got a job?

Steven Rothberg 18:07
You know, I said, that was the last question. I lied. There’s this. There’s another one, employers that are doing high volume hiring if if they come to your site, are they able to distinguish easily between, say, an ATS that’s really good for high volume hiring employers versus those that aren’t? Is there? Is there filtering or something? Or is it clear in the reviews, hey, if you’re hiring 1000s, this is a great tool for you,

Phil Strazzulla 18:32
we try to make it as easy as possible. So there are certain categories that I think are much more relevant for people doing high volume hiring, like HR chatbots. And then within something like ATS, you know, we try to say, look like, you know, fountain career plug, like, these are the solutions that are really designed for these, you know, retail jobs for franchises for high volume hiring. I hope we do a good job, if we don’t let me know, go on the website and say, Hey, Phil, you, you know, you think you’re doing a good job, but you need to yell at your editorial team. But um, we try to make it simple. Because just like to your point, you want to sort of qualify, leads, you know, this whole, like sales and marketing thing. As a professional, I want to make sure that I’m going to spend my time on the right stuff. And I don’t want to go, you know, spend a lot of time talking to Weber, about high volume hiring, it’s just going to be a waste of everybody’s time, I want to make sure that I’m spending with the right folks.

Steven Rothberg 19:31
So for listeners who want to learn more about you, Phil, or about select software reviews, how should they do that? Sure.

Phil Strazzulla 19:39
You can find me on LinkedIn fillister Zillow with two Z’s and two L’s I’m the only one out there and then there’s select software reviews.com. If you’re looking at tools, we’ve got a community you can join and we even have a job board for people that are looking for, you know, their next sort of like people ops talent acquisition role. So we got a lot of resources, I hope. I hope it’s useful for you.

Steven Rothberg 20:05
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today on the high volume hiring podcasts. I’m your host, Stephen Rothberg of job search psychology recruiter. Each year we help more than 7 million candidates find great new jobs. Our customers are primarily fortune 1000 companies, government agencies and other employers who hire at scale and advertise their jobs with us. You can reach me at Steven at college recruiter.com. The high volume hiring podcast is a co production of evergreen podcasts and college recruiter. Please subscribe for free on your favorite app, review it five stars are always nice and recommended to a couple of people you know who want to learn more about how best to hire at scale. Cheers