Turning Candidate Care Into a Competitive Edge: The TA Shift with Stef Nikitas of Ace Hardware Corporation

Speaker A: From the questions we ask in the intake, to how we phone screen, to the questions that are asked in the different level interviews, to making sure decisions are made in a vacuum, managers are not looking for reasons to say no, they're looking for reasons to say yes. So there's a lot of education in there, things they shouldn't ask. Like really a 360 playbook for everyone in the process. And then for 2026, our focus with this. The reason I bring this up, the RDQ alignment and the ACE wave hiring is because we're shifting away from quantity towards quality.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to the Talent Acquisition Leaders podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Dull. And on this show we interview today's industry leaders in Talent Acquisition to discuss challenges, best practices and what the future holds. If you are working in Talent Acquisition and have always wanted to sit down with your peers at other companies to exchange ideas and learn, well, this show is the next best thing. Join us each week as we bring you a new expert interview and extract their expertise. This episode is brought to you by SageMark HR. Transform your recruiting practices with Leading edge technology. Selecting the right recruiting solutions to enable your strategy is one of the biggest challenges leaders face today. You know technology will help, but searching all the options to find out what will work best for your specific needs can be both overwhelming and time consuming. At SageMark HR, we make selecting the right recruiting technology easy. Our proven process has helped companies such as 3M, um, Comcast, Stryker, Walgreens and many more. Reach out to us at SageMark HR for a free consultation to learn how we can help you improve results with less stress and confidently change from reacting to leading.

Speaker C: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Talent Acquisition Leaders uh, podcast. I'm, um, your host, Ryan Doe, and today I have a fun conversation with Steph Nikitis. Steph is the Director of Talent Acquisition at Ace Hardware Corporation. Steph, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Hi Ryan. Nice to talk to you. I'm excited.

Speaker C: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. We've had some fun conversations leading up to this and so why don't you we get started and just share a little bit about your background, how you got started in Talent acquisition and maybe some roles that you've held leading up to your current role at Ace Hardware.

Speaker A: Yeah, like a lot of us, I fell into Talent Acquisition, but it's been a fantastic wild ride. So I am currently the Director of Talent Acquisition at Ace Hardware Corporation. Been with the role for a little bit over a year and a half. Ish. But with Ace a total of 10 years. So have done a lot over the last decade. But my first job was actually as an office assistant at a janitorial company in Germany where I grew up when I was just 16. It's a very different world when you grow up in Germany. The uh, career path and schooling is just completely different. But in that role it was a three year apprenticeship program. I handled some basic HR tasks, things like onboarding, payroll, even filing workers comp claims, taking some applications, nowhere near what I'm doing today. But at the time I didn't realize it. It was already the start to getting into hr. And then once I finished that apprenticeship, I lived in Germany for another two years, was in a call center environment, completely different, and then moved to the United States. My husband was in the military at the time, so that's how I came here and uh, got a job at Pier 1 Imports Distribution in the D.C. and was the HR assistant. So that was really my first. I call it pre gaming into recruitment because in that role I really found myself loving helping the people. I was again doing a lot of the onboarding applications and the pre evaluation from a recruitment standpoint at that point everything was paper and running payroll and doing productivity entries and stuff like that, all for the workforce. Again. I really liked it. So it filled my cup and then from there went to work for a huge conglomerate in the manufacturing space, Robert Bosch in the automotive aftermarket division. And actually was hired as an executive assistant to the president. And in that role it was a very good professional environment for me to really grow up as a person. And it gave me a deeper view into corporate life. Being the right hand to the president. I got to learn a lot about how he leads, how he evaluates, how he compensates, incentivizes and a little bit on like employee relations and holding people accountable. And then just seeing the dynamics of how managing people at that top level really works. And I was like, it's something that I'm really interested in. And uh, so at that point I really decided let's go back to school and go to college, which is obviously a foreign concept coming from Europe, and decided to major in human resource management and worked full time while going to school part time. So it took me seven years, but I did it. I got my bachelor's degree and then right up in time for the graduation, I was offered a job at Bosch. They called it corporate employment Specialist at the time. And it was basically a fancy title for recruiter. And what was great about it, I already knew the organization and I Knew the players. So it was really great transition into full time recruitment because I really had to only worry about learning the job and already knew the people. And then from there recruited for about a year ish on all things within the corporate environment. So got to really learn about accounting, uh, and IT and finance roles, hr, legal, whatever the case is. And then unfortunately they put it out to rpo. So it became an outsourced function and then my role got eliminated but I moved on to into a nonprofit. I became a recruitment manager for Lions Clubs International. Which was quite the culture shock because going from a international, very well funded manufacturing environment to a international nonprofit, not only was it different that the focus was now on helping people and doing a lot more with less. So I really learned how to maximize on what I can do in an environment like that and the impact and effect that you can have on the recruitment function. And then about two years in I had my son and decided to stay home. I was going to give the whole stay at home mom a whirl. But about six months into it I really got the itch to go back to work. I'm one of those people who needs to have balance of both in my life. So I was looking for a part time role and ACE came knocking. They actually had a part time position open and it was exactly what I needed at that point in my life. And that was the beginning of where I am today.

Speaker C: That's a great background. Thank you very much for sharing that. Let's talk a little bit about Ace Hardware. I'm sure it's a very recognizable brand to the audience, but maybe share a little bit about the organization, the size of the organization and ah, maybe a little bit around the size and scope of your team.

Speaker A: So Ace Hardware, Ace the helpful place everybody knows from a retail standpoint, which is really interesting because that's what I've always had a challenge with from a recruitment standpoint. One thing that a lot of people don't realize when it comes to Ace Hardware, all of our stores are independently owned and operated. So my team particularly doesn't recruit for the stores themselves. Our focus is on hiring for the corporate office and our subsidiaries. So we have a wholesale division, we have an international division. And then our newest and fastest growing vertical is our Ace Hardware Home Services division. And then within corporate we also have our distribution network. So my team right now supports all those verticals and then I have a dotted line into the team that supports the 15 distribution centers all in. We're somewhere in the ballpark of 2728 talent acquisition professionals that support the enterprise. With the exception of retail. Because of the independent ownership, every store is responsible for managing their own recruitment, hiring and firing processes. So we from time to time get asked for advice and best practices or sharing resources, but execution and everything else is basically on the local level at each store. That's the hard part, because a lot of times when we go out into the market and we do things, people think we're representative of the stores. So I always start with that.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's a very. A unique structure. For sure.

Speaker A: It is. So the biggest challenge with that is that we face brand awareness beyond the retail stores. Right. Because Ace is such a familiar and trusted name on the brick and mortar. Candidates often don't understand that we are more than just a neighborhood store, that there is a whole corporate engine behind it. There's a distribution network behind it with a global footprint and multiple businesses like the ACE wholesale division, which operates under a completely different name called Emory Jensen, that nobody. Over the years, I would say we have done a good job of really educating and branding ourselves to that, but we still get a healthy amount of candidates who don't understand it until we start talking to them. Uh, so there's a lot of education.

Speaker C: Sure. Under your, uh, responsibility or purview, with your 28 TA professionals, what's an average year look like from a recruiting volume perspective?

Speaker A: Yeah. So between those four or five verticals, we hire probably somewhere around the ballpark of 4,500 to 5,000 employees a year. Obviously, a big part of it comes from our distribution network. So for them alone, we probably hire roughly 4,000 to 4,500 employees a year. And then the rest comes through the other populations or verticals, I call them.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's great. So let's talk a little bit about maybe some initiatives that you're, uh, proud of or that you and the team have really focused on for the last couple years. Take it anywhere you want as far as key initiatives or results or, uh, capabilities that you built. Anything that you're particularly proud of?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot. Like I said, a decade. Right. You would accomplish a lot. When I think back to when I first started centralizing hiring for all of our verticals was probably one of the big ones, because when I came in, we really didn't have a recruitment function. Like, I was the og, the guinea pig, so to speak, to recruitment. Our HR business partners at the time owned recruitment as part of their role, and they all operated in silos, and it was very much they had their own process, their own way of doing it. There was no consistency. There was nothing. So for me coming in, that was like a big thing to not only showcase the value of what I can bring to the table as a, uh, dedicated recruitment resource, but then showcasing. You're going to need more than just me, and you're going to need to centralize this function so that you can really create like a center of excellence to have a consistent, fair, and really structured hiring process across the board. Because a lot of companies don't operate the way we did back in 2015 when I joined. So that was the first thing. And then recruitment process optimization followed very quickly after we centralized in, uh, really looking at how do we recruit and hire talent into the organization was the next logical step in that. And then we operated under that for probably, I would say the first five years, which was a good run, like what we needed and what we had at that time. And this is all pre Covid. It was great. It was fine. We finally had like a centralized system. We utilized workday. We had some budget to advertise jobs. We had some resources, like LinkedIn for example, and for what we needed at the time. And we were small but mighty team of. At that point, I think we were four. It worked. And then Covid hit. And let me tell you, when Covid hit, the whole world changed, not just for all of us, but in my little bubble at ace, it changed drastically. We found ourselves very quickly, I would say, within the first, probably 60 days in a situation that the needs to bring candidates and people into the pipelines and hire, like, drastically improved. So in our business, we have cyclical seasons, typically towards the end of the year for Christmas. And then we also have peak seasons more towards the summer, where we have to get our distribution centers full of inventory for the upcoming Christmas season. And depending on the region, that can start in January. But the bulk of them, um, are usually between, like April, May, June and July is when the peak season starts. And for us, peak season means we need to pull all of our resources together. We need to advertise at the highest level. And we are basically, I call it speed dating. We're speed dating our way through getting to our desired staffing levels. Covid started that peak season in March of 2020, and it lasted for three years. It was nonstop. Because like everybody else, we went through every shortage in the book. We went through every COVID wave that everybody else experienced. We were an essential business. Everybody was remodeling their homes, they were working on their Gardens, they were updating their decks and their backyards and doing barbecue upgrades, whatever the case is, because we, none of us could go anywhere. So from a business perspective, it was fantastic for us. But from a recruitment standpoint, it was a non stop 3 year peak season where we really had to all deliver. And through that. So in the beginning of 2020, when we first started getting into this mode, we pulled all of our HR resources and everybody. Like we basically put corporate hiring on a hold and we dedicated everyone to help support our distribution center network. Fifteen DCs that needed to hire a lot of people in a very short period of time. And primarily it's CDLA drivers and warehouse specialists is all we hired. And I want to say about a year into supporting that effort, we pulled together a team. We love weather references at ace. It was called Project Hurricane because it felt like a hurricane. And in Project Hurricane we pulled people from all across the organization. There were people from corporate, there were people from marketing, we had people from senior leadership, people like myself from recruitment, we had people from the H R S front. And then we of course had our leaders represented from across the distribution center, network and supply chain. And in this committee, our focus was, okay, what do we do moving forward? How do we centralize our efforts and make sure that it's in a consistent, structured manner? And the big focus became candidate experience, like a lot of companies did during COVID So that was the start of really what catapulted my team and my career into what it is today. With COVID with this Project Hurricane, it was this special committee. And that kind of was the end of my recruiting days of day to day. And I stepped into what is now known as a talent acquisition operations function. And we created what is now called for us the ACE way of hiring process, which is basically that standardized, consistent hiring process that starts with a standard operating procedure. And then everything that goes into the process, from what I call rec to check, and through that created, uh, more of a centralized team even beyond what I shared initially with those four people we pulled in the distribution centers, we expanded the team M into what it is today. So again from those four to those 29, and then really created all the things we have today. We have recruitment automation in place via Grace that we rolled out in 2022, or I should say via Paradox. We call her Grace and she's the only one that has that name across all our recruitments. So, uh, everybody always knows when we talk about Grace. It's our recruitment chatbot. And her job is to in essence provide candidate care, answer questions, guide candidates to help with job search and then help them with their application and then throughout with scheduling and kind of follow up, uh, follow through all that. And she has become a game changer for us because during those initial Covid days, whenever someone applied, if you didn't have a human looking that application, they fell into what I called a big black hole. Right. And they were there until a human looked at them with grace. A lot of that is now automated and a lot of that is instant communication. It doesn't matter if that candidate has a question on a Sunday night at 3am in the morning or if they're asking on Christmas day. Right. Somebody being grace is available 247 and will respond. And that was for us a huge game changer. It cut back drastically on candidate no shows and ghosting for us. And then it also helped with just pure candidate engagement, period. And then I would say beyond standing up the TA operation with that we brought in reporting dashboards, metrics like actually measuring our progress. Are we bringing ROI to the table with the investments that we're making? Is our process resulting in success on the hiring front? Those things. And then we centralized our budget. We made sure that our SOPs were aligned. We made sure that we had recruitment marketing support, which we never had before. We put a huge focus on our employer brand as a company because it was very disappointing jointed before when everybody was in the silo. So now we made sure we had one voice, one brand for all of our candidates. And then we started to really build partnerships across our HR shared service model, particularly with our organizational development group and our HRIS systems group. And then build up on that with our TA tech stack from there and manage those relationships moving forward. So it really became more of a well, uh, rounded function than just recruiting because there's so much more to talent acquisition than just interviewing people, which a lot of people think, right?

Speaker C: Absolutely. That is a tremendous amount of work and change and transformation and leadership on your part. So thank you for sharing that journey. I think that's spectacular. You had mentioned a little bit about metrics and performance and things. If you wouldn't mind, dive a little bit deeper on that, on um, what is important to the leadership team at Ace Hardware Corporation as it relates to ta. And then also like how do you think about performance or success as it relates to ta? Inside of the function there's a couple

Speaker A: of iterations of it, I would say initially, like everybody else, we looked at like time to fill and number of candidates and where's our money going and what is it bringing to the table as far as like hiring sources or applications? But I would say since then we have really evolved more towards wanting to measure quality. So one of the big metrics which is really hard to measure and stand up that we're in the process of rolling out right now is quality of hire. And it's a long term metric really to measure. And it starts with there's a couple of things that I factor into it. It's the time to hire, it's the amount of candidates that have gone through the process, it's the offer acceptance rate. Then there's the feedback component, not just from the hiring manager, but also the candidate. What did they think throughout the process? Right. And it also helps us refine as we go. Are we doing the right things in the process for the candidate and the hiring manager? Because in essence, both of them are just as equally important to us as the recruiters because one can't go without the other. Right. So we measure that and then we look at, we do internally through organizational development, succession management reviews once a year. So to really measure the impact of a hire is to get them to that first succession management review of what we call SMR and see are they going to be listed as a potential successor and are they ready three to five years, one to three years, or one to two, or are they ready now? And that becomes an indicator of a quality of higher metric. To really see, are the people that we're bringing in not only performing well in their jobs, but are they able to move somewhere else in the organization in the future? And that's when we really know, yes, we hit the jackpot. We hired the right person. They're not only able to do the job right now, but they have potential to do more in the future. So that is one very important metric that we have evolved to. And I would say the other piece of it is your traditional offer acceptance. Is the candidate internal? Are they external? If they're external, did they apply or were they sourced? That's another thing I'm looking at because we're spending a lot of money on providing sourcing databases to our recruiters. So we ought to make sure are they being utilized and are they resulting in actual hires? We're looking at number of candidates interviewed, uh, within a certain timeframe. How long does it take the candidate from when they apply to getting an offer. So time to fill. But different with candidate, time to offer is what I call it, because time to fill. There's a Lot of things you really can't control. But candidate time to offer, that's the person who gets the offer. How long did it take them to get through that process? So we measured those types of metrics right now from a recruitment marketing standpoint, knowing, uh, the biggest chunk of my budget goes towards recruitment marketing, I'm looking at what I call an upside down funnel and what that for me is how many clicks and impressions am I getting for the dollars that I'm spending in which sources or places? Is it a job board, is it a digital media, is it search engine marketing? Those types of things. And then within those channels, how are those clicks converting to applications? How are those applications becoming quality applications? Meaning we touch that individual, we have a conversation with them, meaning they are qualified, That's a quality application for us. And then those quality applications, what's the ratio of going to hire for those? And then through that I'm able to calculate what's my cost per hire, my cost per click, my cost per quality application. So we're keeping tap on those things as well to really make sure we maximize the dollars that we're putting out into the market that are resulting in those hires.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's great. That's a very detailed way to look at it and I think everyone hopefully is taking notice to that. On, um, the level of scrutiny you should put to your marketing dollars for sure. You want to make sure that those dollars especially that the magnitude of the budget that it us that you're getting value for, that there's return on investment that you're looking at those ratios, like how many of these are leading to the conversations and then what leads through the process to hire, um, and what's your cost per hire for the marketing dollars? I think that's really critical. So kudos to you and thank you for sharing that.

Speaker A: Thank you. Yeah.

Speaker C: Next thing I'll shift into a little bit as you look forward. So from now out, maybe the next 12 months, what's bubbling up is some key priorities or the key priority for you and your team?

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot. This year we relaunched our career site. Just a month ago we completed a RDQ alignment. So I looked at all the roles. RDQ stands for Role Description Questionnaire. Basically a fancy title for like the job description of a recruiter. We have four different levels of recruiters and they were initially the one that I was in was created back in 2015. Then they created separately another level and then filled in kind of the two levels in between. But none of them talk the same language, follow the same method or madness of what a senior does over an entry level recruiter. So I looked at those jobs and actually utilized AI to help me with this, to really look at what should an entry level recruiter do and know and what should they be responsible for. All the way up to a senior talent acquisition partner which should be way more strategic and become more influential to the hiring manager. To really be able to become a subject matter expert on the market, on the job and being able to guide the manager as opposed to an entry level recruiter is a little bit more like an order taker and has a little less obviously experience but also knowledge as far as how to guide that manager. So I looked at that career path and really aligned that to what I call the ACE Wave hiring process which we're about to roll out for our corporate, wholesale and international division. And that process in essence really dictates how we recruit, who is responsible for what and who's accountable at the end and how do we measure success. So it's really like a holistic, what I call recta check process and everything that goes into it. From the questions we ask in the intake, to how we phone screen, to the questions that are asked in the different level interviews, to making sure decisions are made in a vacuum. Managers are not looking for reasons to say no, they're looking for reasons to say yes. So there's a lot of education in there, things they shouldn't ask. Like really a 360 playbook for everyone in the process. And then for 2026 our focus with this. The reason I bring this up, the RDQ alignment and the ACE Wave hiring is because we're shifting towards away from quantity, towards quality, which I think a lot of organizations are doing right now, especially with AI coming into the picture. So for us with Ace Wave hiring, our new recruiter expectations and the metrics, I want to move our teams towards more quality interactions with candidates and hiring managers. Really elevating us from that traditional order taker that uh, recruiters are unfortunately known for into what I call talent advisors. Making sure we have a seat at the table and making sure that our team demonstrates subject matter expertise from the intake meeting to do what we do best. Knowing the market, knowing the candidate and knowing the hiring manager to really bring that best talent into the organization. Yeah, that's to round all of that out. The last thing that I'm planning on doing, I got approval for recruitment CRM um, next year. So we're starting the RFP process right now to really help us in that effort to allow the recruiters for more quality conversations with those recruiters and then using the CRM as a tool to assist them with candidate communications, with sourcing, with targeting, retargeting and just education on the brand. Right. Using the system really for what it's made for communicating with the masses and again, allowing the candidate not to fall into a black hole, but having that re engagement as they go through the different steps in our process.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker C: Last question I would have for you is what's a piece of advice you would have for someone else in the talent acquisition space?

Speaker A: Yeah, I. I, uh, get asked that from time to time and I try to put myself like in those shoes 10 years ago, 20 years ago, when I first started. What would I have appreciated if I knew? And I think it's honestly really simple. What I would tell myself today is be a sponge. Say yes more than you, say no. Learn everything that you can to really prove that you have a right to be in this space, in this job, and good things will come your way. Don't try to do it all at once. Do it small but with steady steps and you will eventually get there. But at the same time, don't wait for others to tell you what to do. Be in charge of your own development. Choose your own destiny. I know it sounds corny, but it's really, you're in the driver's seat and if you know what you want to do, do those things and I think the rest will follow.

Speaker C: That's great advice. Steph, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing all the detail on your unique journey with nta. It's very impressive and I really appreciate you. So thank you for joining me.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker B: We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Talent Acquisition Leaders Podcast. If something we said today resonated with you, please subscribe, rate and download our podcast and share the episode with your network. Ready to transform your recruiting practices with Leading Edge technology? Just like our other clients at three um, M, Comcast, Stryker and Walgreens. Then reach out@sagemarkhr.com for a free consultation.