Why ‘More Tech’ Isn't an Effective Talent Acquisition Strategy

Linda Brenner:

Those of us that grew up in HR have been conditioned to believe that hiring managers, managers in the business are our customers. They are not. The customer is the top talent in the marketplace that we have to win, and we have to work in partnership with the hiring manager to win that talent.

Sarah O'Melia:

Welcome to Don't Get Played, a podcast from Cisive.

This show is for talent acquisition leaders and people managers who care about trust at work. How it's built. How it's measured. And how leaders design systems that hold up when speed, risk, and accountability collide.

I'm Sarah O'Melia, VP of Learning and Employee Communications at Cisive.

Most organizations have invested heavily in hiring technology. New ATS. Better integrations. More vendors. And yet the results haven't changed. Candidates aren't showing up. Quality of hire is flat. Hiring managers are frustrated. The problem almost never lives in the software. It lives in the absence of strategy, process design, and clearly defined roles and responsibilities underneath it.

My guest today is Linda Brenner, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Talent Growth Advisors LLC. Linda has spent her career diagnosing what's actually broken inside enterprise talent acquisition functions and building the business case to fix it.

Today we get into why hiring managers dictating the process is one of the most damaging things happening inside TA right now. We talk about how to segment roles by criticality and talent availability and why that changes how you hire. We get into what it takes to get the CHRO and executive leadership to own the problem. And we talk about what a quick win actually looks like when you're trying to move speed and quality of hire fast.

Technology is rarely the issue. The system around it almost always is.

Let's get started!

Linda, welcome to the podcast.

Linda Brenner:

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Sarah O'Melia:

So I just wanna kick it off with the real core of the discussion here, which is companies are spending more than ever on hiring technology, but aren't necessarily getting the results that they want. So why isn't that translating into better outcomes?

Linda Brenner:

Great question. Foundational problem. I think the problem becomes the technology is not solving the issues. So someone buys a technology, they go to great lengths to do an RFP and have a selection process and work out integration and bolt in the solution. But what is often neglected is why are we buying this technology?

Who is gonna use it? How is it gonna be used? What data are we putting into it and what data do we expect to get out of it, and what does good look like? So as obvious as all that sounds, the swirl of enthusiasm around the slick features and benefits of these systems overtakes in some cases just logic to figure out, okay, is this, who's gonna use this even, so, I hate to say this, but we get some of our best work when a giant platform has been implemented and it doesn't work.

Sarah O'Melia:

So, is this a new problem, right, with AI and the speed of everything, or have hiring processes always been this broken? What's changed?

Linda Brenner:

It's not a new problem. I mean, I worked at Gap and Pepsi and Home Depot before starting this business 20 years ago, and from the old days of PeopleScout and Taleo. And you know, certainly now with Workday, which is, you know, most common among our clients, the technologies are really mature. Workday is an incredible, Workday Recruiting has incredible features and functionalities. Even though a lot of TA leaders and recruiters will fight me on that, the problem is it is often implemented without strategy, process design, roles and responsibilities and metrics and reporting thought through ahead of time.

Sarah O'Melia:

Got it. So they have this new tech, but they're really not leveraging, they don't have the roadmap to get them where they want to go.

Linda Brenner:

Exactly. And then it becomes, and this we hear over and over again, Workday's horrible. Workday can't do anything. We need a new ATS. In fact, recently we were approached by a big company that was very unhappy with how recruiting was working. So lots of noise from hiring managers and others about, it's not fast enough, it's not good enough.

Candidates aren't showing up on day one. The ones that we hire, you know, are not good, and they were pretty adamant that Workday was the problem, and even the head of IT, who obviously had a lot of very critical hiring needs that were going unmet, became convinced that dropping Workday Recruiting out of the whole suite and bolting on another ATS was the answer.

And I said at the beginning, and this could be because I'm old and bitter and cynical, but I said if you're looking for a consulting firm to come in and say, pull Workday Recruiting out and let us do an RFP for a new ATS and then make a recommendations for how to implement it, we're not your guy. We can't do it. We will not be successful. So.

Sarah O'Melia:

So in that instance, when you and your consulting firm are walking into a large organization and you're starting to look at and diagnose the talent acquisition function, what are the first signs that something is not just inefficient but fundamentally broken?

Linda Brenner:

That's a good question. We are hired because something is fundamentally broken. No one, I mean, that's true 70% of the time. The noise is so great. The shortfalls are so pronounced, meaning speed and quality. And when I say quality, I mean do the candidates show up on day one and do they stay longer and perform better than previous candidates?

That's how we define quality of hire. And those shortfalls are so evident and problematic that sometimes parts of the business can't even function because they're missing key team members and new hires, and there's all kinds of problems. So that's often why we get hired in the first place. 30% of the time we're working with very high performing organizations that truly just want an objective, expert, third party to come in and say, this is what you could be doing to get from here to here.

But that's not always. So we do a disciplined, documented, comprehensive audit of talent acquisition people, process, technology, metrics, vendors, spend, stakeholder experience, candidate experience, the whole thing. I will say one theme that often emerges early on, that you're just always like, uh oh, here we go, is each manager is dictating the process.

Each hiring manager is telling the recruiter what they want him or her to do with respect to how they wanna see applications, how they wanna receive them, how they want candidates screened, if they want them screened, if they want to do interviews, and how many interviews, and whether it's a panel or it's a this or it's that, and how many times they bring 'em back, and this is always based on their beliefs, habits, or whims.

It is never based on data. So what happens then is you've got five or 10 or 40 or 800 recruiters that are working 20 or 30 different processes for every single hiring manager they're supporting. And that in and of itself means nothing is optimized, and certainly the technology is not optimized.

Sarah O'Melia:

So I wanna dig into that a little bit because that's all around having a consistent recruiting practice, right? Regardless of the hiring manager, regardless of the department. So what would that look like on the ground to create something like that? Is it a training problem? Is it a manager problem? Is it something else?

Linda Brenner:

It's a really good question. I mean, in the end it's gotta begin with strategy. What are the talent implications of our business plan? Where is this business going and what does that mean from a talent, specifically talent acquisition standpoint. So we have those kinds of roles. So we kind of segment it into four different types of roles based on criticality of the role.

And a brand manager at Coca-Cola would be an example, a research scientist at Merck, a merchant at Home Depot. These are very critical roles based on what they're making, the promises they're making to shareholders. And then the work that supports that are roles like, you could argue this, finance, marketing, assistant managers, you know, those kinds of roles.

And then we also look at it by availability of talent in the marketplace. So it's a four block, availability of talent is high or low, meaning it has nothing to do with who's applying to your website. It is literally an assessment of in the market from which we're hiring, is there a ton of this talent or is there very little of this talent based on supply and demand?

So there's a ton of nurses in Atlanta, there's not enough given the demand. There is not enough cyber analytics, there are not enough AI engineers. There are plenty of call center reps. There are a lot of business analysts, candidates and people working in that field. There are a lot of HR coordinators, there are a lot of sales reps, depending on the industry.

So that's how we segment it. And this is a very exhausting answer to your question. We then have four different talent acquisition processes. You don't have unlimited resources, so you can't do everything for everybody, and you don't need to, you don't need to have the same hiring process for a call center rep than you do for a registered nurse, an OR nurse, or a cybersecurity manager.

It makes no sense to have the same process. So we all agree on that. But the process for hiring what we call the high talent availability jobs, sales reps, cashiers, restaurant workers, whatever those might be, and some of them are higher level jobs, I would argue HR directors are often in that bucket, or maybe managers or whatever, we can debate this, but that should be a highly technology-optimized, focused hiring process. You are gonna post a job, you're gonna get a ton of applicants, and we've got to use technology to screen them and present the best to the recruiters to move on in the process.

These, what we call box one jobs, critical and limited availability of talent, let's call it our cybersecurity director or our executive strategy VP of strategy or an AI automation engineer, it doesn't matter what level they are, we have to go at it like an executive search. Because the people doing that work out in the marketplace, they don't know about our business. They're not thinking about our business. They're not certainly not applying through your exhausting application systems. We gotta go out and find that person, build a relationship, and compel them over time to consider us.

And that is hard to do. It takes a great deal of recruiter skill. It is truly like an executive search function for some roles that are not executives.

Sarah O'Melia:

So let's say that somebody's listening to this and they say, Linda, I hear you. I completely agree that we need a more consistent process. What's the most effective thing an organization can do to get more consistent without sacrificing their flexibility?

Linda Brenner:

To get more, well, it's got to be role specific. So you've gotta look at what jobs are the hardest to find. And any HR person, any recruiter, any business leader can say, oh, these three roles, they're killer. Like if we lose somebody in this part of the business, you know, everyone's reaction is just like, oh, it's gonna be so hard to fill.

So even if we use that as a litmus test, we have to talk about how do we want this to work and who does what in the process, and I'll get on my soapbox. Those of us that grew up in HR have been conditioned to believe that hiring managers, managers in the business are our customers. They are not. The customer is the top talent in the marketplace that we have to win, and we have to work in partnership with the hiring manager to win that talent.

And again, if it's a cashier or a call center rep, it's gonna be a very different way to win that best talent. The best cashier, the best sales rep, the best call center rep. It's gonna be a completely different proposition and approach than winning that AI engineer here in Atlanta. It's just a whole different process.

So I actually don't care that a hiring manager is like, well, I wanna see every resume. I don't want you scheduling anybody on my calendar until I've approved it. That's the stuff we have to end. There is no other part of the business, no other part where a manager can dictate how it's all gonna work based on their beliefs and their whims, and it's degrading the ability of businesses to function.

So we love kind of pulling that all apart. That's what we're, that's the bread and butter of our business. Building the business case. The financial analysis to show what is it costing now, what's the cost of this and what it should be. So it's great.

Sarah O'Melia:

I love that, and I love that you are sort of like you said, pulling all of these things apart and looking at them more closely, right, than someone who is in the daily grind gets the opportunity to do so. You mentioned...

Linda Brenner:

It's impossible if you're in the middle of it. Yeah.

Sarah O'Melia:

Right? Exactly. So, you know, we talked about the recruiting process and then you've mentioned sort of this role design and definition. So as a foundational gap, how often do you find that organizations are screening and selecting for a role that was never really well defined to begin with?

Linda Brenner:

I am gonna need you to pass the vodka. No, I'm just kidding. I'm not drinking. That is a very common problem. That is a very common problem, and I mean, nobody is acting out of maliciousness here or incompetence. I mean, what we find is recruiters are literally putting in Herculean efforts to do their job.

They might have 30, 40, 50, 70, 90 recs and servicing 20, 30, 40 hiring managers. You know, very often recruiting teams are stretched very thinly, and hiring managers do not make the time, and it's part of a, it's the opposite of a virtuous cycle because recruiters are often under-resourced and overwhelmed with requisitions.

They don't have time to force more advisory type discussions with the hiring managers. So the hiring managers who are already also overwhelmed because they're short staffed will just say, Sarah, just fill it. Same thing as last time. We've been through this three times. We filled this job three times. Well, I don't wanna keep doing the same thing. We've gotta pause, we've gotta talk about, and then often we're so desperate that the standards just sink.

And we have literally heard recruiters, certainly, and sometimes even leaders say we just, you know, forget it. We don't need any work experience. We'll take anybody. Or we need people, they can't even fill out the online application. It's like, what? What are we talking about? So the solution is not lowering the standards. The solution is defining the role better and really nailing the minimum and preferred quals, and figuring out how to suss those people out of sometimes hundreds and hundreds of applicants we're already getting. But if the role isn't defined, we're screwed from the get go. Cannot be successful. It will not work.

And the other thing we hear alarmingly frequently is, well, we just don't wanna put any constraints on who could be the right fit, because there's so many different types of people that could do this job, which is just another zero sum game. It's impossible. No, we know exactly, you're trying to hire an assembly worker. We can literally, within three weeks, look at the data to identify who, what are the characteristics of the people that have been most successful in that role? Over time, they've performed well, they've stayed longer, and like a job analysis, figure that out, and then put together a screen, a recruiting and screening plan to identify those people and compel them to get into these jobs.

It can be done. The answer is never, let's just open it up to anybody and have no framework for what good looks like or what we're striving for.

Sarah O'Melia:

And you mentioned something that when recruiters are working with hiring managers very often the onus sort of is put on the recruiters, so what does it take to get those leaders and those hiring managers to own the role design problem? Because it feels like it has organizational politics sort of baked into it.

Linda Brenner:

I think so, but I do think that is a poison pill currently, but I don't think that's the hardest thing to solve. We learned long ago when we are engaged to complete a TA audit, we will not do the work unless there's an executive steering committee in place, and that might be, it ranges from four people to, in one very big global brand, literally 24 executives were on the executive steering committee, because hiring had become such a problem everyone really wanted to be a part of it.

Without the CHRO and his or her peers involved, it remains an HR problem. And we used to do this back in the day. We'd work for the head of HR, the head of TA, we'd do the audit, we'd come up with the solutions and inadvertently we left those HR leaders holding the bag to then explain and defend and get funding for, and support for dramatically changing the way hiring works throughout the organization.

So probably 15 years ago, we realized we have to have a steering committee in place, and then it becomes, because we blend finance and talent expertise, both my partners are former CFOs. We ground everything in the business plan, talent implications for the growth plan, and what it's costing the business to do hiring the way it's being done, which is undervalued, underutilized, under, you know, lack of credibility, low cost resources maybe.

And that costs the business. Always. And depending on the industry, they're using a ton of contingent workers. They're using all kinds of outside search agencies or external recruiters. They are often paying millions and millions of dollars in unplanned overtime because if I'm working an hourly job and Joe doesn't show up and I'm about to get off, I can't leave necessarily. So then I just end up working 2, 3, 4 hours of overtime. So some of that of course is planned, and some executive search spend is planned, and it should be. And a lot of contingent labor should be planned, particularly for high tech jobs, certain types of roles, but a lot of it is just, it all boils down to, hiring can't keep up.

So when you look at that and you look at shortfalls in sales and revenue and profit, because we don't have key people and high quality people in the right roles, the amount it costs the business is staggering. And when the executives and the CHRO together see that, it's really a very important aha. With data they know, but they've never seen it pulled together in this way.

Sarah O'Melia:

So we have the leader's responsibility, right, the executive board. But when we talk about recruiters, right, you're talking about they're capped out, right? They are doing the absolute most. And I wanna talk about sort of the skills that we focus on because I feel like professional skills in most areas are constantly shifting. But many companies treat recruiter skills as a fixed input rather than something that needs to be built and maintained. And why do you think that is?

Linda Brenner:

Well, I think in a lot of places recruiting is seen as a giant burden, and it's a necessary evil, and leaders do not really understand it and don't want to deal with it and feel like it's the first place to cut. And I think they do have in their mind, well, we can always use external search or we can always go to RPO.

I think a piece of this, I've thought about this for a very long time. It is true in our experience very few heads of HR have ever come up through recruiting. They are, you know, employment law, leadership development, IO psychology, HR generalists. They almost never have had recruiting responsibilities.

So I think when they get to a certain level, they are like, oh, this is great. Like, now I have recruiting and, you know, I'll fill this gap in my expertise. But they quickly realized this is a beast. It is so many moving parts. It touches, so it touches everybody in the organization, internals that wanna move to a job, hiring managers, senior leaders, everybody. And it is very hard to discern which lever to pull. Should we pull employment branding? Should we get a new technology? Should we get a new vendor? Should we go to RPO? Should we centralize, decentralize? Should we add more recruiters? Should we cut more recruiters? Should we go to AI? Let's put in AI.

It's really hard. It is the hardest function to run, and it is often the least valued, invested in and credible function. So it's really, it's just a matter of time where it grinds the business to a halt, especially in this economy.

Sarah O'Melia:

So all of this is phenomenal, and if I'm a TA leader and I'm listening to this right now and I'm recognizing everything that you're describing, I see this in my organization, right? The role design, the executive buy-in, right, the cross-functional buy-in, recruiting skills, recruitment consistency, right? All of this is resonating with me. That's a long list, and a lot of these are really big items. So where would they start?

Linda Brenner:

Wow. Okay. That's also an excellent question because I'll be completely candid, we almost never get work from TA leaders. There are some exceptions, especially new TA leaders in role and in some industries. And I'll tell you why. I ran talent acquisition for Home Depot. I would not have wanted to fight to get a team to come in and audit my entire function. Would not have happened. And the vast majority of people are just human. They're running it. They've built this. They've become like family with their team. They work every day with their team. So hiring us to come in and do either a talent acquisition audit, or we also do a skills assessment, a simulation-based series of skills assessments for talent acquisition teams, it's not gonna happen the vast majority of time.

So our client is the head of HR. But with that said, there are TA leaders that tee us up to the head of HR, and we do an audit in 60 days. Yeah, if you have a full-time job and you're running a whole TA team, you can't also audit yourself. You just don't have the time. You could certainly do what we do, but we come in and we have a 60-day, unless it's a very big global company, it's a 60-day project. And we have three report outs to the executive steering committee, and we do a very detailed, comprehensive, documented audit.

And then the whole point of it is not to say, wow, your cost per hire is this, or your time to fill is horrible, or whatever. That's not the point. We calculate all those baselines. We show them against benchmarks. We roll up themes and stakeholder feedback and the findings about technology and AI and all that. But what people are paying us to do is the so what. So that you can have this differentiated process, that you can have this number, literally down to the number of recruiters, how they should be organized, how many recs different types of recruiters should be holding, what metrics and measurements and governance you need, how we recommend you optimize the technology or add onto it. All of that, and a roadmap.

And the most important piece to our clients is the investment analysis, which again, is how much is the current state costing the business. Certainly, what is your cost per hire? We always calculate that, but the bigger number is what I mentioned before, the unintended use of contingent labor and outside recruiters and overtime, and sometimes signing bonuses and sponsorships. All of that is the real cost to the business, and this is what it should be costing, and this is how much it's gonna cost to fix it. And the cost to fix it is minuscule compared to the identified savings, and usually within 12 to 24 months. This is not like years and years down the road.

Sarah O'Melia:

Right. So with those changes, what, like from your experience, what's a change that you've seen organizations make that has had a disproportionate impact on hiring outcomes? Like what's going to move the needle the most?

Linda Brenner:

Well, during, when we wrap up the audit and make our final recommendations, we almost always identify what we call early improvements or quick hits, and these are things that have a stunning and immediate impact on speed and quality of hiring. And they range from simply using the technology to screen, you know, high volume candidates, to sometimes adjusting the background check matrix or packages.

Sometimes it's, frequently it is stopping doing things that I just call like terrible wallpaper. Like you have this horrible wallpaper, but if you're like me, you're like, I don't even look at it. Like I can't even deal with that. I don't even care. It doesn't bother me, but it's like, okay, and I don't even see it anymore.

It literally in 2025, 2026, right now, some companies, managers are still requiring that hourly workers have a resume. Or they won't be seen, or they can never have worked at this particular other company, and not for competitive, you know, intelligence, proprietary reasons, but just these rules and sacred cows that are just ludicrous and antiquated. Arcane. And so some of the quick hits are pointing those things out, and when those changes are made, it really makes people think like, okay.

The other thing we do is we always will fight for a pilot. And it almost always happens. Everybody agrees, a pilot, but a pilot with one leader who is a big supporter and a big believer, an executive leader in their department or function or geography. And what always happens is that the speed and quality of hiring changes so fast, improves so much, so quickly that other people start saying, wait a minute, why'd you do him? Like, why didn't you do me? And then it's like it kind of takes off. It becomes a pull rather than a push. And that's the key. It just can't be something we in HR are like, please, you guys sit down and do an intake session with me, or tell me what you think about those candidates. No, we're not doing that anymore.

Sarah O'Melia:

I love the metaphor with the bad wallpaper, right? And so when people are trying to figure out how do we fix this, right? Do we simply have to pull the wallpaper off? Do we have to paint? Do we have to blow the whole wall down? So when we're thinking about the magnitude of these changes, is there a version of this that's fixable without a massive transformation initiative, or does it have to be for real change to occur?

Linda Brenner:

It really depends on where a company is in the current state. If they have minimized, dismissed, underfunded, unexamined talent acquisition for a dozen years or sometimes decades, it takes a big dramatic series of changes. That's just the reality, and it's hard. And the companies that hire us, they're at the point that they know they have to do it, and in fact they kind of welcome it because they've been iterating and iterating for so long.

To your very first question, they bolt on this technology, they added a couple of contract recruiters, they hired a new VP of TA, they move this HR person over to TA, none of it works because there is no alignment and definition about what is our strategy, how should we be doing hiring, what does good look like in the way of data and metrics and reporting and governance. You know, what are other companies doing? How can we win more than our fair share of good talent? Until those conversations happen, it doesn't get fixed. So it often is a big, it is a big engineering effort.

But when we do it, an audit is 60 days, the future state process design is 60 days, implementation, a pilot should be six months. Again, we're not talking about like, oh my God, I could be dead by the time this is done. We make really quick progress as soon as a TA audit is done. So we're very impatient, and every single person on our team comes from Fortune 500 backgrounds leading either operations, finance, talent acquisition, talent management, or some combination. So we are very practical and grounded and ready to go, and that gives us an edge over other consulting firms.

Sarah O'Melia:

Amazing. To wrap us up, Linda, is there any other areas that we wanna delve into? If we have a listener here, what's the one thing you want them to walk away with today?

Linda Brenner:

I would say the other piece that has just really blown up, it's part of at least one conversation I have every single day, is the role of AI in talent acquisition. And I will just quickly say that AI can be inserted in many different places depending on the maturity of the current state and the processes, but at a minimum, if recruiters are not using AI, copilot, whatever is baked into the tools they currently have, LinkedIn copilot usually, to help them craft emails to candidates or marketing messages to candidates, to update hiring managers, to look at themes in the candidates that are applying, there's very simple ways that it can be used.

In fact, we have a blog up recently about how it's mostly focused on HR in general, should be starting to use AI, and it's gonna get shoved down our throat if we don't jump on board. And it is a very important tool to start using. And for those companies that are already using it, to constantly assess how can it help with process improvement and continuous improvement and results and reporting management. So that's the last piece I'll say.

Sarah O'Melia:

Absolutely. And Linda, I have to say like, this is such a complex process, or it has components and multiple people needing to be involved and informed. And I just appreciate you walking us through this in such a straightforward, clear way that sort of lifts the veil from the complexity.

Linda Brenner:

Good. Thank you. I'm so happy. We have two books about it. Anyone can buy the book and just do it on their own. Seriously.

Sarah O'Melia:

Thank you so much, Linda. Really appreciate it.

Linda Brenner:

Contact us. Thank you, Sarah. It was great talking to you.

Sarah O'Melia:

Most organizations keep trying to fix hiring by adding things. New tools. New vendors. New headcount. But none of it works if the underlying process was never defined in the first place.

The hiring manager is not the customer. The top talent in the marketplace is. And until organizations stop designing their recruiting process around what hiring managers prefer and start designing it around what it takes to win the best candidates, the dysfunction doesn't go away.

Getting executive buy-in is not optional. Without the CHRO and their peers at the table, recruiting stays an HR problem. With them, it becomes a business problem worth solving. And the financial case for fixing it is almost always staggering once someone does the math.

Thanks to Linda for bringing that perspective. If you're a TA leader who sees your organization in this conversation, share this episode with the person who has the authority to act on it. And subscribe to Don't Get Played on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube so you never miss an episode.

We'll see you next time. And remember, in the meantime… don't get played.