How to Make Hiring More Human…Even with Limited Time

Josh Tolan
Alright. Well, Juliet, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me. To get things started, it’d be great to get a little bit of a background on yourself and the company you are currently with.

Juliette Dupré
Sure. Hi. Yeah. Thanks for having me. I’m very excited to be here. I’m Juliet Dupre with Other Side Entertainment.

We’re a video game development company studio one of our games we’re working on, Thick of Thieves, you can see here on my shirt. Small, less than fifty people, and I am the chief people officer and interim COO.

Josh Tolan
Great. And how did you wind up there in the gaming industry?

Juliette Dupré
Right. Well, I started out in the legal field as a litigation paralegal and worked in product liability and also started doing some arbitrations in employment law. Then I became later for that firm, the director of recruiting, attorney recruiting. So that’s kind of how I ended up transitioning into HR coming from sort of the legal side more than anything, but became really interested in the people experience, the experience of work, the experience of work in our capitalist context in the West and how we can balance those things and, you know, in an ideal world make it so that everybody gets what they want, which we don’t see a lot of, but I don’t think it’s not worth continuing to try.

So that’s what keeps me in it. And growing up, I was a huge fan of video games, and I am still a huge fan of just all forms of digital entertainment. So digital entertainment, I’ve I’ve spent a lot of my career in. I also worked in esports and other forms of video game development, mobile games, and so forth.

So that’s sort of my background in a very quick nutshell.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. Very cool. So you said the company’s little less than fifty employees. Tell me about the HR function. Is it solo? Is it you running everything? Or how does that look?

Juliette Dupré
I have my right hand, Andrew Alcott, who I love working with and does a lot of our recruitment and helps me with communications and just we kind of coordinate together. So Andrew’s fantastic. But, yeah, it’s just the two of us and doing operations as well. So other elements, finance elements and so forth. It’s exciting, but we’re small enough that we know everybody, know, we have personal relationships with all the staff, and I think that’s really something very special about this size of the company, And, yeah, I think that’s it.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely the advantage of being in a smaller organization and working on the people side of things is you can get to know the people, which then has all sorts of, you know helps in all sorts of ways even as you relate that to hiring because when you know the people better, you know what you should be looking for more and the people that you’re getting in into the organization.

But also as a lean team, I’m sure that presents many challenges when hiring is just one of the things under your responsibilities, which is in your case, broader HR, but then also even broader than that, like general operations of the business. So how do you balance that when you have all these things to do and then all of a sudden some hiring processes have to be run? How do you and Andrew navigate that with all those other responsibilities?

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. So he is he really was brought on to help a lot specifically with recruitment and that’s sort of his background. He’s been broadening more since joining us so that we both do a little bit of everything. But since that’s sort of his main function expertise, he can and he’s very he’s very experienced.

He can lead a lot of that on his own quite well. But we do partner when needed, know, it’s sort of a spinning plates and sometimes putting out burning fires kind of situation. If something needs attention, we have to reprioritize. So it’s sort of a, you know, I have like a big cam end board of all the things we’re trying to do at any given time.

And every week we meet and look at like what needs to be moved up in the priority level, what is maybe what maybe we thought it was meeting where it was and now it’s a high because something’s falling behind or because there’s some contextual reason that it and now it’s more important. So we’re always kind of looking at all the puzzle pieces and figuring out which area of Board needs more attention right now. And when it’s recruitment, which is often the case because those are such critical areas and the type of talent we’re looking for is very specific and very, it’s a little bit unicornish, I’m not going to lie.

It’s something that we have to kind of stop other things that we’re doing or slow down other things I’m doing to put more attention on it.

Josh Tolan
Yep. Yeah. And that’s just the reality is, like, you push one side of the balloon in, another side of the balloon pops out. That’s like Yeah.

How it is working on a lean HR team. But it’s challenging because especially when you’re hiring, like, you have a plan, you have a process that you want to run, you have a certain type of candidate experience that you want to deliver. Oh, yes. And hiring might be the in more.

We’ll definitely talk about that today in hiring. You know, like you said, we have these critical openings. It’s a top priority, but then something else can come up within the business that all of a sudden is urgent. And so exactly, you know, you start this process with the plan, you start with how quickly you want to get back to people and then things come up and all of a sudden the things you wanted to do today from a hiring standpoint have to get pushed to tomorrow or the next day just because there’s so many things that are going on.

So yeah, I have a lot of empathy for that. You know, I think that’s something that’s often overlooked by the general hiring market when it comes to like smaller businesses is like usually hiring is just part of what the HR function is doing. And like there’s so many moving pieces that things can get pushed around. So it’s important, you know, on one side for candidates to be adaptable and understand that and empathize with that.

But also, that means like even more reason to have better processes, better organization and all those types of things on the HR side to still make sure that you can hold up the commitment that you want to keep to candidates that are in the process.

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. Yeah. We, you know, we do practical things to try and ensure, hold ourselves accountable, such as tracking time and stage. So we do have a relatively consistent process for interviewing.

It’s nothing that would shock anyone. We have the resume review stage, then the hiring manager for that role takes a look at the narrowed down resumes. Then there’s a screening call for those selected candidates with our recruiter. Then we have the, you know, an interview stage with the hiring manager and either some form of panel or some, you know, some interviews thereafter with team members.

And we track the time anyone sits in any given stage before either getting a rejection notice or getting moved to the next stage, because we want to respect people’s time, we want to make sure that we’re not sitting on candidates, etcetera. We report on those numbers every month in our monthly all hands to the whole company. So our employees know what kind of experience we’re giving people and we’re very open about that. And if something gets in the way, like we had a couple of recruitments over the holidays, we do close our business for I mean, I shouldn’t say we close our business, but we have a vacation period at the end of the year.

Andrew and I, we still are online. Be totally honest with you. We try to model vacationing for others, but at the same time, you know, it comes to candidates and people who are sort of waiting on things, we’re not going to ignore them completely. But there is a delay there because we can’t do interviews while the teams are on vacation.

So our numbers take a hit for sure. And so we have to sort of give that context to people. Well, why is this stage sort of now that the waiting time is now looking like it’s averaging two weeks? It’s because we were closed for an extended period.

And so we take those, we’re very sort of like on top of those numbers and knowing like how long are people waiting. To me, obviously one of the most important ones is the incoming resumes, how long any candidate waits for a response. And of course, we haven’t touched on this yet, but what kind of response they get and how do we actually communicate with people in a way that’s as humane as possible.

Josh Tolan
Yep. I love the idea of reporting out in the all hands meeting. I think oftentimes the all hands meetings, you get reports on top line metrics of the business or a really strong emphasis on the go to market rhythm, like what’s happening with sales. And obviously, that’s all important.

But I think what you report on is very indicative of what you as an organization are showing matters to the organization. And so for you all to be reporting on time spent per stage with candidates that shows the rest of the employees like how much you care about people. Yeah. Not just people within the organization, people that might join the organization or might not join the organization.

But I think it really speaks to core values of the business. And so that’s one side of it. I think that reinforces some great things internally from just like a values and culture standpoint. But also as an HR team, it really makes sure you’re accountable.

Like, it’s one thing for the sales board to be visible and an organization. And it’s like everybody could see when somebody makes a sale and they ring a bell or where they are at on the leaderboard.

Juliette Dupré
They’re not making sales. Or when they’re not. It’s hard to be up there and expose yourself. Yeah.

Josh Tolan
It yeah. And so I think it creates it. It’s that it creates that accountability. Yeah.

In a smaller business, as you mentioned, like, hiring managers are very much a part of that too. So sure. Yes. HR is reporting out on it.

Juliette Dupré
HR Yes.

Josh Tolan
Owns it.

Juliette Dupré
We own the process.

Josh Tolan
Exactly.

Can’t do without

Juliette Dupré
is a team effort recruiting as a team sport.

Josh Tolan
Yes. Yes.

Juliette Dupré
That is a whole other area. I mean, I’ve definitely in my career because I also come from recruiting background. Andrew and I have both worked with hiring managers with various levels of experience and understanding. And there is a curve, there is a journey that most of them go through that is relatively predictable of having no real concept of the effort and time it takes that it’s going to demand from them to be a part of a process that respects the candidates they’re asking to talk to. And, you know, getting them to the point where they when they rely when they’re asking for an opening, really understand and commit to that time.

The biggest challenge and it’s an understandable one for anyone out there listening who’s been in a position of having a headcount open on their team. That’s usually a point where you feel like you’re a little underwater already. That’s why you’re asking for more talent to be added. We understand this.

So the recruiting team is there to help you take as much burden as we reasonably can off the shoulders of the actual hiring manager so that they can focus less on the administrative work. But there still has to be some amount of time and it’s not trivial to look at reasonably qualified candidates and make decisions and spend time interviewing. So we’ve had to have over the course of my career many, you know, I wouldn’t say difficult conversations, I would say like coaching conversations, like really educational conversations with people in positions of hiring authority to help them understand you will not get the outcomes you want, right?

First and foremost, what is of interest to them? They want to hire someone. So you won’t get the outcomes that you’re looking for if you can’t invest the time to actually meet the people and you’ll lose the best candidates. The best candidates will not likely be on the market that long.

The best candidates will even in a terrible job market like the one we’re experiencing will not be inclined to accept your offer if you’re one of the companies that have treated them with the least amount of appreciation and respect for their time.

And with regard to candidates who may not ultimately qualify for that role, I think there’s obviously the recruitment team, your HR team has a vested interest in making sure that the brand of the company is protected in that experience. And when excessive delays put the company’s reputation in a position of embarrassment, and take that very seriously.

And I get that that’s maybe not the highest priority to hiring managers. I would always share with them sometimes is that you never know who knows who. You never know who knows who. So if you’re thinking this person is not relevant to me, who cares if they have to wait, I’ll get back to them later.

I’ll get back to this recruiter later about what I think. I promise you, you’ll be shocked how many times that person knows someone who will impact your career later or, you know impact another hire that you want to make later or has an incredible reference for that role or a future role that you’re going to either lose out on or will be you know speaking poorly about the company from their experience to later. So if that’s all the only last card I have in my pocket for motivation for committing to the hiring process, will use it because it’s true. It happens all the time.

Even I once had an intern application for it, this young talent that was really not the right fit for the role that we had. We always treat even those applications, which most companies would think of as worthless as with as much respect as we can and because it’s the right thing to do, okay? But at the end of the day, yes, oftentimes those are the kids of CEOs and presidents and people of very great influence who want to make sure that you’re not later hearing from those people saying, my kid applied to your internship. It was treated like dirt.

What does that say about you that, you know, that’s how you treat, you know, talented up and coming people. So I’ll get off my soapbox with that. But it’s one thing that it takes time. I think hiring managers are the same people who when they’re looking for a job are like, is it so long? Why don’t I hear back from people? And then when they’re in a position of hiring, it’s usually they’re the bottleneck.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. And look, that’s why I have so much empathy for everybody in the process. And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges in hiring in general is there are many different stakeholders at play from the candidate to the recruiter to the hiring manager, so many other stakeholders within the organization beyond the hiring manager.

Everybody has different motivations.

But also the hiring process is a very, let’s call it, like an emotional time for a lot of those people that are involved in the process for the hiring manager. As you mentioned, the anxiety of the open role, the stress of needing to step in to fill gaps on their team, the stress of like, I’m not going to hit targets if I don’t have this team member. So there’s this like forced urgency on we need to hire faster, we need to hire faster, creates a lot of pressure on the recruiter of like, yes, we want to do this as quickly as we possibly can. But also we want to get you to what’s the best possible outcome for your team in the big picture.

Juliette Dupré
The right outcome.

Josh Tolan
Yeah, exactly. And then the candidate is, to your point, is sitting there like, why is it taking so long? I’m stressed. I want to get job.

Juliette Dupré
It’s What are they doing over there?

Josh Tolan
Exactly. So it’s highly emotional for everybody. So I have a lot of empathy for that. And then on the hiring manager side too, yeah, like you mentioned, they’re they’re really busy with things that are going on, so we can certainly empathize with that. Also, most times, they’re either people that have never hired before or they’re just infrequent hirers in general. They’re not, like, doing this all the time.

But that doesn’t mean that they can’t be part of a great process. And I think, you know, that’s what you really alluded to, which is if we can just get them to understand why these things are important, but also lean in and be empathetic about what we know they’re dealing with. It’s like, let’s work together to figure out Yes. Know what we need to do. So let’s just figure out together how do we get that done. Yeah. Because there is no alternative.

Like, we know that’s what needs

Juliette Dupré
to happen.

Josh Tolan
So let’s just figure it out So, yeah, I think, you know, that’s honestly, like, I get you know, I go to a lot of conferences, talk to a lot of different people. Hiring manager collaboration is probably, regardless of what the employment market looks like, is the far and away, like, top challenge people will always reference when they talk to recruiters is like, oh, yeah, like hiring managers just not knowing what they want or hiring managers just not doing what I need them to do when I need them to do it or hiring managers have these types of expectations.

And I think all the those challenges are valid. But again, it’s like, okay, so what do we do about it? And that’s really what that’s really what matters.

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. I think if it’s helpful for anyone out there who’s like, I don’t know how conversations, the hiring managers I work with are so politically powerful. I don’t think I can have those conversations, which is a position that I found myself in when I was recruiting on the just more focused on the recruiting aspects earlier in my career. That’s one of the reasons I started tracking time to hire because I didn’t just track time to hire on my side.

I tracked what were the stages and who was holding it up. And when I could show numbers, our CEO coming to me saying in one company or another, why is this taking so long? Oh, here’s the track. Here’s what takes so long.

I’m asking for stuff from the hiring manager and I’m getting them stuff in forty eight or seventy two hours maximum, sometimes usually twenty four, and then they take seven days. And I still have to run it down. So that’s the bottleneck.

I’ve asked them to be faster, they say they simply can’t. So you need to tell me what we’re going to do with this. And that’s when it was sort of like, you know, I’ve been a part of more than one conversation with a CEO essentially, you know, or a COO, who is then saying, oh, oh no, this will not, this dog will not hunt. We need to sort this out.

And if it means I need to get involved and have with a hiring manager, that’s what we need to do. And you know, I’m not saying the hiring manager is not caring, being negligent, it all comes down to what I said before. They’re usually not asked or given budget to hire someone until their department is underwater. So then it’s a question of what do they get to pull back on so that they can have the actual time they need to participate in this process?

Because if the business isn’t prioritizing the hiring, by giving them room to actually do that work, all the begging and pleading in the world from that recruitment department will not matter. And the numbers that you shouldn’t see, need to translate into, well, what are we gonna do to make space for the sign manager actually do that work? Because right now, they don’t have it.

Josh Tolan
Yep. And that’s the reality at a small business is most hiring is reactive. And so you get into those situations where the hiring manager has this urgency. And because of that urgency, it’s like, let’s skip all these steps that are needed to align on how we’re going to run a good process because, like, we just need to start getting candidates.

But as a recruiter, if you know that hiring manager will be the bottleneck because of all these other things we do, it’s like, well, we need to align on this process. And there might be changes we might need to make to the process or how we screen candidates or how we put people in front of you so we can create capacity and make sure you’re spending your time wisely. Right? Like, yeah, if a hiring manager is underwater, we can’t be loading them up with interviews with people that like, you know, they have a really low acceptance rate of, right?

Where it’s like, okay, nine out of ten of these interviews were were not the right fit. It does. That all comes back to the the beginning and aligning on that process. And our CRO says uses this phrase all the time of slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Juliette Dupré
Oh, I just said that yesterday.

Josh Tolan
Oh, did you? Yes. There we go. I love it. And that’s and that’s just and that’s just that’s just how it is. But I think you you brought up a really good point that I haven’t thought a whole lot about, but it makes so much sense is if you’re in a small business and maybe you’re an HR department of one, like you’re a HR generalist, HR manager, hiring is on you, plus all the other hiring responsibilities.

All the best practices in the world about how to collaborate with your hiring managers, how to get buy in, how to make them accountable.

Don’t factor in the fact that the person, the hiring manager you might work with might be somebody in a position of power organization, a VP or C level person in the organization. And there’s this discomfort there of like, well, how do I how do I hold this person? How do I tell them they’re not doing what I need them to do? And so a lot of it is whether you’re going to somebody else in leadership to help you with that conversation or going directly to that.

What people do understand is like tangible numbers. And so when you can put those metrics in front of them, it changes the dynamics of the organization. It’s just like, this isn’t about you. This isn’t me like asking you to do these things because I want to be a pain in your butt about these things.

It’s because look at how long candidates are sitting in this step of our process. And as a result of that, we’re having candidates drop out.

Juliette Dupré
having Drop out.

Josh Tolan
Top candidates aren’t moving to the next step because they’re gone by the time we get back

Juliette Dupré
to whole process the whole length of the process is gonna cost is gonna take too long.

You know? Our tracking of an individual candidate’s conclusion as well to get all the way fully for those who qualify and end up through every stage all the way fully through all the stages. You know we have an expectation that that takes only three maybe four weeks maximum for scheduling delays. That can be delayed oftentimes it’s delayed on the candidate side.

I’m going on a trip, know, people doing things outside of the U. S. Because they’re unemployed and they’re so they’re using their time and so they’re delaying the interview process from their side. But on our side, we really try to make sure of that cycle for every individual as well.

It’s a different metrics of the full cycle. But getting back to your point on slow is smooth and smooth is fast, the other element that we use temporally metric wise is the clock for time to hire and time to fill start when the JD is finalized for us and the recruitment team. So we partner with that hiring manager and with that team to create that JD. However, while we encourage interviews to have an iterative effect on the job description, any substantive major change, we restart that clock and say, oh, okay, you have substantively changed.

If we’re going to reach if we have to change our sourcing search, like our Boolean significantly or something like that, we then say, fine, you’re deciding there’s a whole new skill that’s needed or something we were missing or something you’re adding now, we’re going to restart this clock.

Your time to hire now starts here. And the reason for that is because we want to accurately track how long it’s taking us to find a particular profile. And if the profile is fundamentally different than what we were first asked to find, we will be reporting improper numbers if we just start from the beginning, from the original JD, which is wrong. This also matters because honestly, a lot of times, again, a CEO will look at the hiring team or a hiring manager and say, hey, why is it taking three months to find this role? And so if we have tracked that accurately, we can say, actually, it took us a month to find qualified candidates for your first JD that made it through the process. But then after we got to the end of the interview process, the hiring manager decided this was not the right profile.

So actually, the JD we’re currently operating off of has only been in play for six weeks or whatever.

Josh Tolan
Totally conversation.

Juliette Dupré
Exactly. Totally different conversation, right? It’s easy if you don’t have that data for there to be a lot of finger pointing that amounts and no real meaningful improvements. And so this has made it possible for me multiple organizations to tighten up and get everyone’s buy in on the importance of designing that JD. Don’t expect it to be perfect every time, but we can’t be here. We need to measure twice and cut once, at least twice.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. Agreed. And I think what it also helps illuminate when you restart that clock and almost treat them like different processes is at the end when we’re doing the postmortem and when we need to, like reiterate to the hiring manager the importance of getting aligned upfront, it’s like, we got to a good outcome and we hired somebody for the JD we ended up on. But really, are one for two. We were fifty percent. And that’s because we had to run two processes for one role.

So now that’s why it’s so important to

Juliette Dupré
spend resources.

Josh Tolan
Exactly. Like the extra hour on a meeting before things start to make sure, like, we’re totally dialed in. And, of course, to your point, like, calibration does happen. You’re going to see some things come up in the process.

We’re like, okay, maybe that’s not a must. Like we have a little flexibility there or maybe this thing is a must and we need to elevate that in terms of what we’re looking for. Yeah. Doesn’t fundamentally change what you’re looking for.

But if you’re finding that you’re fundamentally changing, it’s like, yeah, we were one for two. Yes, we got to a good hire and time to hire once we nailed the process was strong, but really we were one for two. So we wanna make sure that we go one for one every time. And that starts with like aligning upfront.

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. And it’s easy for a recruiter to know when this is happening because you take a profile, you go source a bunch of people, you find exactly these profiles. And then the hiring manager is like, these aren’t what I’m looking for. And you say, well, why not? It’s exactly what’s in the JD. They say, actually, can we make it this and this and this and this instead?

And you’re like,

Josh Tolan
yeah.

Juliette Dupré
So just it it just tracks all of that. And really, it’s so helpful for the career development of these hiring managers. It’s so essential because they don’t even know what they don’t know. And this really clarifies for them these skill sets involved in hiring and building a team that are critical for their success as much as the company’s and yours.

Josh Tolan
Yep. Yep. It’s it’s funny. We’re talking about this. I I literally ran this yesterday with somebody in our team.

So one of the things I worked on is like a side project is in chat GPT, building some custom GPT is to help with, like, the intake process and getting clarity around a role that we’re trying to hire for so we could refine a job description as the ultimate output to, like, kick off a process. Right. And the GPT will tell me, like, this job description is not clear enough. Like, you got to go back.

Basically, I did with this hiring manager, we tested this out literally just yesterday on one of our goals was we had a legacy job description for this position that came open. So initially, I put that through one of the GPT’s I built to help prepare for the kickoff. It gave me a list of questions of like, here’s what we should dig into in the intake with this hired manager to learn more about the role and get more.

Juliette Dupré
That’s awesome.

Josh Tolan
We did the call, took the transcript of the call, put it now into the GPT that says, okay, here’s what you all talked about. Here’s a legacy job description. And it kicks out. It spits out basically like, here’s some more clarity.

Yeah. Here’s an update. But here’s also like some things are still unclear about the job description. And so, like, we were able to go back and answer some of those questions.

And all in all, between our call and using the GPT, like, probably took an hour of time.

But the output like that we got to from a job description standpoint felt so much better than what we started with, is what most companies do is like, let’s pull this off the shelf from two years ago when we hired for this position and just like, yep, let’s do it again. And like so many changes, so many things have changed in the business. So many things have changed about what you now know about what it takes to be successful in that role or skills and the behaviors and everything that’s needed. So it’s like, spend that hour to get that clarity, whether you use like AI or not to do It’s like just have the meeting, talk through it, you know, ask open ended questions, ask why, ask, you know, more and more questions to go a layer deeper than just like, yeah, they need this many years of experience.

It’s like, okay, what about those years of experience help them in this position? It’s like, could just keep unpacking it and you get to a really good, you know, like transcript that has so much rich information that you can now pull from and like refine the job description. So I go back to the hiring manager and say, does this this look better?

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. I think AI and intake is for recruitment is one of the most useful pieces that it’s given us.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. Because it’s, like, it’s all about structuring thoughts is what I find. And it’s, like, the hiring manager is short on time, and it’s so hard for them to go onto a blank piece of paper in a Google Doc and be, like, tell me what you’re looking for. Yeah.

Like, yeah. I don’t know. So just get on a call and record it, get the transcript and then help use AI to help structure some of those thoughts for what they actually said versus like giving them a blank piece of paper. I thought I’d share that.

It was super helpful. Love it. And that we did recently. So I want to pivot a little bit.

So just reference AI. And obviously, that’s a big thing in the hiring market right now.

What a lot of employers are seeing and what they’re using, there’s a lot more automation, a lot more AI. We’re also seeing that used by job seekers, which is all these things on their own, I feel like are a good thing. But it’s also created these converging forces of like, okay, well, now we have a lot of people in the hiring process. A lot of things look the same.

How do we make sure that we get through the process? How do we make sure that with all this volume and all the things that we’re being asked to do when we’re being asked to do more with less, especially in a small business, like how do we still deliver that candidate experience that feels human and personal and not let these things like volume get in the way of that? Right. And all the things I have to do to get in the way of that. So I want to pull something up and you know what I’m pulling up. And it’s a letter because you pointed me in the direction of this letter. And I want to share my screen here.

Juliette Dupré
And credit where credit is due. This is a post on Reddit. I am on Reddit a lot, not an excessive amount, but a lot of my time on Reddit is spent listening to and reading rather the posts from people who are in the job market and just miserable out there and their thoughts and feelings and, like, what they’re experiencing because it really helps. It has always helped me to refine my process.

There are lots of people and recruiters out there who really don’t care and I want to be clear that like I recognize that’s a thing. I don’t want to gaslight everyone out there and say no recruiters all care. A lot of us really care a lot and a lot of us don’t care at all, and that’s just a reality out there. But, yeah, I read about the experiences people are having, and someone posted this historical artifact that I thought was just fascinating.

Josh Tolan
Yeah, I’m going to I’m going to read it. So for the people that are just listening to the audio version of this, this letter is dated September twenty fifth, nineteen fifty seven, and it’s to a job candidate. And it says, Dear so and so, I’m sorry to say that due to no fault of your own, that job is dead. Plans have changed, and a salesman type will be engaged to contact our members.

And at the present time, we don’t have enough money to hire somebody just for writing. I am closing a check of seventy five dollars for you, which I hope is some, recompense, I guess, recompensation for the trouble you have taken. Cordially, Rion, I can’t read the last name because there’s a handwritten signature on this letter, But this is from nineteen fifty seven. And I’m gonna stop sharing here.

We’ll definitely share a link to that Reddit post when we put out the article so people can check it out on their own.

But when you share that letter with me, I was like, wow, this is just so eye opening of what hope, you know, people were doing back in the nineteen fifties or some people are doing to deliver a good candidate experience.

And I think a lot of us would look at that letter and say, Okay, well, there’s no way we would do that now or we could do that now. A handwritten letter and closing a seventy five dollars We have way too many candidates. We don’t have enough time, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And maybe you’re not going to do the seventy five dollars check with the letter and all that type of stuff.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t preserve that same sentiment in your hiring process and still deliver similar sentiment to a candidate. So when you came across this letter, like, was the first thing that jumped out to you?

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. I mean right. I think I was shocked and did not realize that at any point anyone would have actually sent funds back. I love the word that you were reading there, recompense is, you know, essentially the spirit of it is, it’s archaic.

It’s archaic. The spirit of it though is like to make you whole for your troubles you know. Sorry for your trouble let me make you whole for that. And so I thought that was just so beautiful and thoughtful.

The relationship dynamic is completely flipped on its head, right? At some point and it happens from time to time in the market, right? Like we all remember not so long ago when the hiring market was not in the troubled position is now, it was troubled in the opposite direction. And you know, the sort of during COVIDpost COVID period where employers were desperate to attract people back to the workforce.

These cycles happen, these pendulum swings happen. For my part, I’ve tried to maintain regardless of the situation, sense of humanity. I think that’s what comes through with that letter.

I think it’s very difficult at volume, and I will say two thoughts about that. One is you can either use that as an excuse or do what you can to come up with imaginative ways and creative ways to continue to treat people like people.

And my other thing I’ll say about that is it gives an advantage to smaller employers like us. Yes, we deal with almost the same level of volume. We get thousands of resumes for our jobs.

And also it’s just two of us behind the scenes here. And the candidates that we do process through our interview experience, it’s just again, it’s just the two of us. It’s not a team of like tons of people. You’re getting passed off from this person and that person.

So we do have an advantage and I will take that advantage because we don’t have tons of money and resources as a smaller company. That’s what the larger companies have. I think a lot of them are investing blindly right now on automations and AI experiences that don’t improve candidate experience. And that’s a choice.

And they get to make that choice and I get to make mine. I’m not using AI. Anyone who’s read any of my writing or is familiar with other interviews I’ve done and so forth knows that I am in favor of technology and AI. I’m not in favor of using it in ways that dehumanize candidates or companies for that matter, right?

I think if you use AI to interview people, you’re dehumanizing the company as much as you dehumanizing the candidate. I’m not in favor of AI interviews. I doubt that I ever will be. And that has nothing to do with a sense of Luddite, you know, spirit.

It has to do with it’s just not the outcome that I want. The experience that I want to design for the people that we are, you know, may potentially work with or who are out there trying to understand who we are as a company.

Josh Tolan
Don’t find

Juliette Dupré
that a useful tool.

I love it for things like you just described. But yeah, it’s the humanity. I mean, I could go on, but I think that letter really says a lot without anybody having to prevaricate on it.

Josh Tolan
Yep. And I think it goes back to, you know, part of what we were talking about related to hiring managers is like, have to problem solve. Yes. The market is very different than it was in nineteen fifty seven.

And like when we were talking about hiring managers, yes, they’re very, very busy. But if we know what we want to deliver in the hiring process or the sentiment of that, we have to problem solve a way to do it given the constraints and the conditions that we’re dealing with today. So it might what we do might not look like what was done in nineteen fifty seven, or it won’t just because things are so much different. But that doesn’t mean that we still can’t give the candidate the same feels, right, that that letter achieved in nineteen fifty seven.

We just have to figure out how to do it. And in a lot of cases, the bar is really low.

Juliette Dupré
I love that you said that because I couldn’t agree more. You know, sometimes I feel like people are out here just making it easy for us to look good. But we want something that we developed, Andrew and I, and that I kind of threw out there and said let’s try this and has been received extremely well is that anytime we have to regrettably reject a candidate, our notice has an assortment of resources for how to find jobs industry elsewhere.

So that’s kind of crazy by sub standards, right? Why would you point people to your competitive employers? Why would you point people, you know, to other places? Most rejection letters say, and this is how I started out when I first started developing this in my career and I learned from that, oh, if you want to find out more about our company, just you know, here’s our Twitter, here’s our gosh, I’m really X, whatever it’s called.

Here’s our LinkedIn, here’s you know, here’s how you can stay in touch in our Talent Connect. Yes, have a Talent Connect network. You could do that too. But here’s to shout out a buddy of mine, Amir Satbots, video game industry, games and jobs website, where you can find out more about how to, you know, get connected with all the other roles that are out there that may not be listed on LinkedIn.

Here’s, you know, other just tons of different resources, anything that we could find mental health resources as well for job seekers and things that we just think are of value. It’s so hard out there. There are so many wonderful qualified people that we cannot take in because of one little missing piece of the puzzle or because there’s someone else who’s just got a little bit more. And I hate the idea that anyone would experience a rejection from us and think that it’s that our opinion of their particular fit for this particular job is any kind of relevant judgment on their value as a person or on their future career, which it just doesn’t, that, you know, I kind of approach it from how can we mitigate that experience of rejection, which is so tough on the human spirit.

It’s so extra tough in the job market like it is today. So, yeah, we’re always trying to think of ways to kind of make that experience a little bit more humanizing and empathetic and to honor all these wonderful folks who have taken the time to apply to our roles in a way that is not just throw away. You know?

Josh Tolan
Yeah. Totally.

Like, you like, the the typical, like, mass rejection thing, you know, email that sent of, you know, thanks for applying, but

Juliette Dupré
no We found someone else.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. Bye. It’s like it’s like akin to, like, the like, that’s what the candidate’s getting in the evening.

Juliette Dupré
Right? It really is.

Josh Tolan
That’s that’s that’s the signal it sends. And Yeah. Again, to your point, a candidate, it can be really demoralizing because you don’t know where the candidate’s at in their job search, how long they’ve been looking, how bad they need this job. Like there’s so many factors at play.

I think on the flip side, again, without without giving candidates information, it’s like you you leave the candidate to make those assumptions of why they weren’t chosen. Right. I think, you know, you see a lot of messages. I see this all the time on LinkedIn.

It’s like, I applied and I I on paper, I am perfect for this role. Know you’re gonna on interview.

Juliette Dupré
Exactly what you said. Yeah. Exactly what you said you wanted.

Josh Tolan
And and and, yeah, like, you you you didn’t get interviewed, but there’s there’s things that are happening at the business that you might not know about. And it’s not because you didn’t get interviewed because you weren’t qualified and that you wouldn’t have been a great fit for the role. But, like The company might have had people in an offer stage when you applied. So, like, just bad timing.

Juliette Dupré
It’s a lot.

Josh Tolan
There could have been

Josh Tolan
Yet all the time, there’s so many variables at play.

You know, the reality is candidates are left to make assumptions when you don’t communicate with them. And, look, I’m not I’m not saying you’re gonna reject somebody that just apply. You know, three hundred people apply. You gotta get back to them and say, like, hey. We just hired somebody. You’re not gonna give each person the conditional response of, oh, well, you applied on this stage, and this person was over here. Like, you’re not gonna give that.

Juliette Dupré
We do try to let people know if the job literally filled before they got through the process. I think that’s worth sharing. If we have that information, we share it.

Josh Tolan
That’s a good point. Yeah. So, like, I mean, I guess, yeah, that is something you could say. You could look at if you have a bunch of candidates sitting in early stage, you could look at, okay, stage specific messaging. And it’s like, okay. Well, what makes the most sense?

Like, how can we give It’s

Juliette Dupré
It’s not hard to do.

Josh Tolan
Like, the most transparent reason as to where they were at and what happened. And then to your point, add some value, add some resources Exactly. Show you’re a person. And, again, like, it takes some work, but the bar is pretty low because most people just ninety percent of employers aren’t gonna do that.

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. And as you said, to show you’re a person something that and this goes back to the advantage I mentioned of being a smaller company. Andrew and I, we actually put our names on our emails. We don’t send notes out from a no reply email address.

Josh Tolan
No.

Juliette Dupré
Understand that’s not something other companies feel, oh my gosh, I would never do that. Fine, we will. I’m with a smaller company, we will do that. And you know, and that’s an advantage that we have I’m completely willing to do.

And it’s one of the reasons why I feel more comfortable to some degree there are certain advantages to working for a smaller company. This is one of them. Because I get the choice to be a little bit more human than I am working for a much larger company. That’s not really a realistic choice necessarily, but we do that.

We also put our names on our job descriptions. So if you want to know, you know, on LinkedIn, of course, they have this option where you can say this job is posted by so and so. But independent of that, we put our own name on it. You know?

Josh Tolan
I I think that’s a great Yeah. Yeah. I think also people tend to make something actually a problem. So to use your example, we could never do that. We have Right. Five hundred people applying.

Imagine all the people that would respond and

Juliette Dupré
ask for You’d be surprised how few people do reach out.

And when we do hear from people, it’s usually to say, wow. I can’t believe you actually put your name out there.

Josh Tolan
The the good far outweighs the extra work that it might create. And the extra work actually probably has some benefit back to you and the organization anyways.

But it’s like people will avoid the thing out of, like, it’s not scalable.

And it’s like, well, have you

Juliette Dupré
tried it?

Or it’s just not done. Right?

Josh Tolan
Yeah.

Juliette Dupré
That’s crazy talk, you know?

Josh Tolan
Exactly. So I think

And that and then to your point, that’s an advantage of a small business is like, okay, well, let’s try it. Yep.

And if it is a big challenge and we have two hundred people reply, great, this works in terms of candidate engagement. But now how do we deal with how do we how do we figure that out? So Yeah. You know, that doesn’t bog us down from all the other things. Just like you just take one problem at a time and you don’t make something a problem before it’s actually a problem.

And everybody’s so worried

Juliette Dupré
about that.

Josh Tolan
This doesn’t scale. And it’s like, Exactly. See first.

And then we’ll figure it out. And then we’ll figure it out. Yeah, exactly.

Juliette Dupré
And that was basically yeah. That’s basically how I ended up stumbling into a lot of this stuff is working for companies where either I was the only sort of HR asset or I was in one case I was working for a much larger company and they just were not really paying attention to what we were doing at all. My oversight was just not existent. So I just started trying things asking you know for forgiveness instead of permission and it worked out.

And one of the things I discovered was this, if you you put your name on a job description, you’d be shocked how many people actually don’t reach out. And when they do, it’s complimentary. Have I been run down by people who were so mad that they didn’t get the job that they cursed me out through email? Sure.

And I’m very sorry that they were sad and that they felt that level of emotional, you know, overwroughtness. I think that if I can be there to be someone’s punching bag now and again because of all the numbers of people that I have had to reject my career, I’m fine. I can live with that. And if maybe it helped them get through their day, it’s fine.

It’s an email, I can read it and delete it, it’s all right. You know, so there is some of that to it as well. I’m not going to sit here and say that like we’ve never had people reach out and be nasty when we thought that we did everything we could to be respectful with the process. It’s still going to happen.

Josh Tolan
Yeah.

Juliette Dupré
Alright. I I to me, that’s a price that’s worth paying.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. And it’s I I hate to say, like, well, don’t you know, it’s not personal. Don’t take it personal. I I understand.

Like, it’s hard to not take something personal if you get an email back that doesn’t speak highly of you back

Juliette Dupré
to you.

Like, then no And they may need it personally. I still don’t take it personally because I know what’s really behind that.

Josh Tolan
Exactly. And that’s the that’s the context is it’s like, yeah, if you just lead from a place of empathy and understand, like, okay.

They’re entitled to their opinions.

They they also, like, are probably going through a lot like

Juliette Dupré
that’s the truth.

Josh Tolan
Yeah, I can be I can I can feel empathetic towards that? But also, it’s not going to stop me from delivering all the positives that I’m delivering to candidates by running this process. So I think, yeah, again, like in terms of people, some people will make the problem before it exists a scaling problem. Some people will do it out of fear of like, well, what will they say back? And it’s like, but does that matter if ninety percent of the other candidates are feeling so great about what you’re doing and how you’re treating them? It’s like, to me, it’s like that tells you you have a better experience and that candidate might just be dealing with something and that’s okay. Exactly.

Juliette Dupré
I’m sure they are. And to me, I think it’s bigger than that. It’s sort of like, does it really matter if it’s the right thing it’s the right thing to do to be a human? You know, does it does it really matter in the grand scheme of things if if someone tries to hurt my feelings a little bit one day?

Really, what this is about maintaining a level of humanity in a system that has gotten so, forgive the expression, sort of metastasized into something very gross. Like, can is it the right thing to do to just try to maintain some level of humanity? I can pay the cost, you know, to a point of those kinds of interactions pretty easily. Yeah.

And they’re so rare. Like I’m talking about like in my career two or three times, and when I tell you the volume that I’ve seen, it’s astonishing that it hasn’t been higher if you ask me. Not that I’m inviting it folks, please don’t.

Josh Tolan
But I think

Juliette Dupré
Beat me up.

Josh Tolan
You’re right. Like, that’s a great way to look at it is, hey, if value delivering this type of experience and and being human and making sure I treat people with respect, if that’s like one of my personal core values, then regardless of the responses of the one percent of people maybe that respond negatively to the to the fact that they didn’t get the job. Again, it’s not negatively to the fact that you’re communicating with them. It’s negatively to the fact that they didn’t get the job.

Juliette Dupré
They didn’t get the job.

Josh Tolan
But Yeah.

Regardless, like, if I value those things and I’m doing it and I’m doing, you know, what I believe is the right thing, then at the end of the day, I can look at the mirror and say, I feel I feel good about the

Juliette Dupré
work.

Exactly. So Yeah.

Josh Tolan
So if you okay. So here, I wanna wrap up on this. So, like, a lot of people that listen to this are on lean team, sometimes a team of one, but lean team similar to yours at smaller organizations.

A lot of people might be listening to this and saying, like, okay, I I want to do what you’re doing, but I don’t know what place to look at in my hiring process. Like, where should I start? Because I can’t do everything. But as we said, the bar is is kind of low. So, like, doing a couple things is a really good first step. So what would you recommend to people in terms of where to start, what to look at so they can point themselves in the right direction within their own respective organizations?

Juliette Dupré
Yeah. I mean, without being too I don’t wanna sound too negative, but, like, look at the complaints you’re getting. You know? Where are they coming from?

Do you have hiring managers complaining, CEO complaining about times? Do you have, you know, candidates complaining, or is it evident from lack of engagement with candidates that the experience for them isn’t that great? Do you you know, I think one one easy thing with most ATSs nowadays is you can send out little surveys after you reject or finalize or send out an offer to people. Not everyone’s going to respond to that, but we do track a candidate sort of EMPS as well.

That can be really valuable. If people are kind enough to take the time to give you any feedback, look at what that says, you know, and try and see what people are telling you. What is, you know, sort of so problematic in your process right now that people are actually raising it to you. And maybe there’s nothing and that’s great.

So then you can just start by measuring things, looking at where some of the areas are that you might not even realize that are too slow or that are causing issues that you might not even realize. I think it’s not that hard in most cases for recruitment teams to identify a list of things that they want to fix. The hardest thing is deciding how to prioritize it all. So you have to just be strategic and think about what are the biggest pain points and what areas might have the bigger impact for the lightest lift.

Go after those. For me, that was early on, you know, some of these things like changing the messaging of the rejection email and playing around with that. It’s so easy to change that template and to add things in. You might have three, four, five different templates that you’re dealing with depending on the stage someone’s in and what what type of role it is or whatever.

But it’s not that hard to change those templates and to make them more human and maybe God forbid add your name to the signature.

Those types of things are pretty low lift and they can have a shockingly humanizing impact to the process for people.

Yeah, I don’t have a it’s not a one size fits all. You have to get in there and start listening and looking at what is really in front of you.

Josh Tolan
Yep. Yeah. I totally agree. And I think to your point with some of these things that are pretty low lift, but could have a dramatic impact on the way that your hiring process is perceived by candidates. It’s like that could be done and done in an afternoon.

The hardest part is getting started in some cases. And that’s where it’s like to me, just put some points on the board to build some positive momentum where it’s like, okay, we changed a couple of things like we have, like, you know, upped the quality of our hiring process as a result of that. And it’s like, then you can just keep going layer by layer then chart a path to like, do this very methodically. Not everything has to be done in one day, because the reality is, as we talked about the bar is quite low. So if you start doing these little things, they stack up over time. And so just don’t focus on getting it all done at once, and I feel like you can make a pretty significant impact.

Juliette Dupré
I completely agree. Yeah. And something that I can’t really share, but I wish I could, and we did a cute little all hands presentation of it was all the thank yous and, like, special, really personal notes that we got from candidates over the past year.

So every year, we kinda look back through that and do a slide where they all kind of, like, flood the slide and introvert

Josh Tolan
that to campus.

Wall of love type of thing.

Juliette Dupré
It was spectacular. It was spectacular. It really meant a lot. And look, these people are a lot of them are still out there looking or they didn’t join with us.

But, you know, just knowing that, hey, we’re all out there trying to find good talent. They’re good talent. They’re just looking. But in community as part of the industry together, we’re all sort of on the same page with respecting each other and they felt that.

It was really it’s really it’s very special.

Josh Tolan
Love it.

Juliette Dupré
Give me hope. Yeah.

Josh Tolan
Yeah. For sure. Well, you’re doing great work, and thank you so much for sharing all of it today. I know everybody that listens to this is gonna take a lot of action Pleasure. Way, and hopefully, I’ll start working on these little moments that really make a big difference in the eyes of candidates and, you know, ultimately back to the organization. So thanks so much for your time today.

Juliette Dupre
Thank you. Yeah. And if anyone out there listening has questions or wants to ask about how you know, deeper questions about any of this stuff, hit me up on LinkedIn. Send me a note.

Josh Tolan
Great. Thanks.