Internal Mobility w/Irene Santos

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. Welcome to the recruitment flex with Serge and Shelley. I'm Serge.

Speaker C: And I'm Shelley. And we talk all things recruitment, starting right now.

Speaker B: Bonjour, and welcome to the recruitment flex. Shelley, 2024 has been amazing because we've traveled a lot and we have met some of the smartest people in TA across the country, across North America or even the world. Uh, in. Yes, is the perfect example of someone we met and we were blown away by m. Absolutely.

Speaker C: I can't even believe that we got her to come on the show and talk to us. And again, our travels. Like, in what world did I ever think that I would have this incredible opportunity to meet some of the thought leaders from around the world? So let me not delay any further. Our guest today is Irene Santos, who is the vice president, Global talent Acquisition with TD Bank. Welcome to the show, Irene.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you, Shelley. And thank you, Serge. What? Lovely, lovely. Welcome. I'm delighted to be here with you today.

Speaker C: So, as our newest friend, one of the things we always start with and being recruiters at heart, right. Endlessly curious about people's backstory. So share with us just a quick bio of you and talk about your journey into talent acquisition.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'd be happy to. So I've been in the financial industry for three, over three decades. It's a lifetime, Shelly. Right? Over two decades. Love it. Um, oh, my goodness. The first 15 years I was combination of part time, going through school and full time, but I was really on the business side and I loved everything about being on the business side the next 20 years in human resources. And in human resources, I have pretty much touched almost everything. I've been a business partner, I've been in employee relations, I've created HR service channels, I've led contact centers, you name it. And of course, now I have the privilege of leading talent acquisition at td. But one of the common threads through my whole career has been my passion for talent. So in the business and in hr, I remember being in the business, my first people management role and starting to have to pick talent, starting to identify talent. And at the time, my first people manager role was in a branch in a trust company. And I'd go to any kind of retail environment and I'd get great service and I'd give them my business card and I'd say, hey, call me if you're looking for an opportunity. So I've loved to look for talent and love to nurture and develop talent. I love the fact that I've been a td for so long that I look at individuals, colleagues that started with me when they were very junior and today they're senior executive leaders at the bank. Seeing them flourish, their career is just something that is so incredibly rewarding for me.

Speaker C: I love that story because I think as a recruiter, for me, having been in corporate as well, I feel the same way. It was seeing people grow in their career. Yeah, there's just nothing more rewarding, for sure. Uh, what an impressive career you've had at td. And you touched on a couple of things that really have been incredibly passionate for you and rewarding. But is there any story that you could share with us that was like one of those proudest moments in Talent Acquisition?

Speaker A: Oh, my goodness, I have so many problems. I often say that I could write a book once I retire. But all the.

Speaker B: Maybe you should.

Speaker A: Maybe I should. There's been so many amazing things and all, of course, relate to teams and colleagues that I've, uh, had the pleasure of being with. But I think there are two things I'm really proud of within Talent Acquisition and really both of them revolve around the teams. One is helping the team, the Talent Acquisition team, evolve their own capabilities and grow and develop in their careers. One of the things that I found when I first joined Talent Acquisition, which was about three, three and a half years ago, was that the majority of the team had only been in recruitment. Whether they started a TD in recruitment or somewhere else, that had been their primary area. And some of them loved that. And that's the space they forever want to be. Others were saying, I don't know that I have as many opportunities to do something different. And so that was a piece kept on coming up, career growth. So we started embarking on an initiative of creating secondments in the team, special assignments. So taking a recruiter, putting her in the process optimization team, um, where it's been transformational because it's a win. The recruiter is providing great insight into recruitment, which is a specialization and really important. And what they're receiving from the process optimization team is learning how to work in the project, how to develop an initiative, how to create a better process, how to undertake change management. So when they leave that secondment, two things happen. One is they feel like, wow, I've learned something great and I can actually use it at work. Because now when I'm trying to identify talent in change management, I actually understand what they do better. Or two, I've actually found I've got another passion. I love recruitment, but I think I want to be A, uh, process engineer. So it's been great for the team. So we're going to continue to do that as much as we can. The other one is around creating diversity within the team. So when we started thinking of who we're going to bring into the team, we also started thinking, how do we create diversity in all its aspects from a capabilities perspective? How about bringing people in that might not have started recruitment be a bit maybe like me, because I didn't start in recruitment. So we brought people in with just business background. They actually have never been in HR or finance. We've got somebody from marketing, we got people from engineering. And the diversity of capabilities that we now have a significant impact in our ability to serve our customers, our organization. Right. Because we understand different capabilities, different segments in a different way. And also in the way that we collaborate and that we look at problems. Right. And how we're going to solve them. The different perspectives, the more diverse your perspective bars around the table, the better outcomes you have. And so realizing that. So I'm really proud of those two things, both relating obviously to my team.

Speaker C: Congratulations. That is amazing.

Speaker B: I'm curious just judging by your past experience and you've been in HR for a long time and you've been talent acquisition for the last four years, we often say that the skill set needed to be successful in talent acquisition is different than the skillset needed to be successful in hr. What's your take on that? What have you noticed coming in and managing a team of talent acquisition compared to HR business partners or whatever you were managing before?

Speaker A: So I don't know, Serge, that it has to be different because I believe that to be a really strong, and I'm going to call it a strategic talent acquisition advisor. Right. So that's also what we're doing. We're changing the language from a recruiter to a talent acquisition advisor. It's not so different from being an HR business partner or, uh, an HR advisor in another area. You have to understand the business. You have to understand your customer needs. You have to make sure that in understanding that, that you're matching their needs to what the solution is that you're trying to provide them. In the case of talent acquisition, it's all about matching the talent, right? So the more they understand the business, the m more they understand the skill sets and not just the current ones, but how the business is evolving. What are the emerging skill sets that the business is starting to show that they will need? The better you know that the better you're identifying the appropriate talent to match that need. And I don't think there's much of a difference. It' really around relationships. It's listening, it's all those core soft skills are important whether you are in total rewards, talent acquisition, learning and development. I think, uh, the soft skills are really transferable across all those, those practices.

Speaker B: I really appreciate that perspective because it is different than what we hear all the time. Thank you for that. So I'm curious, TD is a massive bank. It's in the top five banks in Canada. Obviously you have operations across the world. How is your talent acquisition structured? Where do you have them? Do you have different roles? Like how is it structured overall?

Speaker A: Yeah, happy to share that. So we have some components that are kind of your traditional talent acquisition, but I'll share some that aren't so traditional. So on the traditional side, of course we've got your early experience and executive delivery teams, you've got your new hire operational team. So you've got some of the ones that I think all of us in talent acquisition typically have. But we've been evolving a couple of things. One on model, so we've always been aligned to business segments. Meaning if you're a recruiter, you're assigned the portfolio that you're hiring all for branch banking, for example, or you're recruiting, you're hiring all for wealth management. And we've been evolving that into more of a capability alignment. So instead of hiring for a specific business segment, you're hiring for a capability, let's say data and analytics. And the advantage of that is that now that means that regardless of the business segment, data and analytics is something that is required across the organization in various segments. So when you're looking for talent with that particular expertise, you're actually fulfilling it for several segments at the same time, you're building pipelines for several segments, you're also not competing. Right? Because, uh, let's say you're in branch and you're hiring somebody with one skill set and you're hired the same skill set for another business segment, you could be competing. Well, this just creates a pool of talent with that capability that you can draw on and you can then provide it to various businesses. So that's been a real change for us and we're continuing to do that. The more capabilities, the better. That's one piece. Another one that we've done, and one that I'm particularly excited about is we've established a calling journey within talent acquisition. Uh, it is the first one in the bank within the human resources practice. But it is not uncommon in the bank because we have customer journeys and basically think of them as teams that come together with various capabilities and they really look to understand and serve customers needs and experiences from end to end. So we're doing the same thing. So the colleague journey we call ours attract hire and onboard colleague journey and basically it really is looking at the candidate and colleague experience from the moment that we're trying to attract them through the whole hiring process. So the whole selection process through how we onboard them and it looks at it in terms of how do we improve that experience from the candidate, whether it's internal or external, how we improve it from a hiring manager's perspective and also how we improve it from a talent acquisition advisor's perspective. So all of them are important in the experience and so how do we create a more effective, more efficient, just a better environment? And it's been a game changer for us. I will tell you. We've been able to modify processes, eliminate irritants at ah, speed that we didn't naturally do before. And one of the main reasons for it is that you've got a set of individuals working in an agile way within these journeys. It goes back to what I said about different capabilities within my team. So you've got the change management lead sitting there, you've got the process engineer sitting there, you've got the recruitment specialist and they're all together collaborating to solve the problem at the same time rather than them having to go and meet somebody to solve this part and that part. So I feel that it's transformational and it's really having an enormous impact on our ability to be successful and support our organization.

Speaker B: You know what? I can hear people listening to this, writing notes and trying to rewind this and be like what is she doing this? This is amazing. I love this. I think it's a really cool approach, very innovative. So I am curious, when we were talking before this interview, one of the things that I was going to ask you is about like you must be using a ton of technology. You get over a million candidates coming in applying to TD Banks, but you pretty candid in saying you leverage very limited technology. How have you been able to manage such a high volume of applicants? Give me your insights there.

Speaker A: No, for sure. I know that's always a surprise and I appreciate that because we are such a large organization and one of the impetus to having something like a calling journey, to be very frank, is the ability to really quickly assess what are our needs and how do we move at speed to Realize what we need. And so, yes, you are right. We get over a million applicants. We're very fortunate in that respect. And we're still screening through the old traditional way, which you know what that is, right? Recruiter pulls the resume and reviews it and so on. But through the colleague journey, we're developing now, our path, let's call it our technology roadmap of what do we need to do, what tools do we need to start creating more effective, efficient environments? And so screening tool is at the top of our list for sure, given the number of applications we have where it's just in the exploratory phase. But I'm very optimistic that in a very near term we will have some additional technology in our tech stack that we don't have today. But, uh, we're definitely zeroing in on that.

Speaker C: So screening makes complete sense because the volume. I almost wanted to cry at the thought of manually. No, really. I could feel sand forming in my eyes having to read that many resumes. And I am one of those geeky people who loves reading resumes. I have my whole career, so I know Serge is just shaking his head. It's like, who? So screening, absolutely, because that's the top of your funnel, is making sure that they have a good experience. And I love the tie back to the candidate experience, but also the colleague. Right. What is the recruiter's experience? Is there any other ways that you're considering enhancing or using technology, but more specifically to help your internal team, your TA team, that will help the recruiter be more effective?

Speaker A: Yeah. So, Shelley, one of the things that I'm not sure if I had shared with you, but we just actually, which is going to probably be a bit of a surprise too, but we just implemented workday recruit. So up until very recently, our, uh, talent acquisition advisors are actually having to manage through two different systems to be able to do their work, which obviously, as you can imagine, not the ideal. So now at least they have one system which is great and we're adapting really well to it. That helps in some ways, but there are still elements that we need to help them with. One actually that we're also quite, uh, down the path on, hopefully delivering is a scheduling tool. And. And I know that seems like incredible, right? When you think that you can pretty much with anything, your dentist, your spa, you can schedule anything. Right. Even our customers, they can schedule appointments with us seamlessly. But. But on this front, we still don't have that. So we're definitely working on that. I know that it's Something that the recruiters are absolutely excited to know that they're going to receive. So that's one way that we're helping them through technology. We're helping them in other ways outside of technology. Just in terms of how, again, you're going to hear me going back to the colleague journey quite a bit. But the colleague journey is also looking for how we can help the recruiter, the talent acquisition advisor, be able to do their job more effectively, spend more time in the things that matter by eliminating a lot of the irritants. So that is definitely an area. And we know that not everything can be technology. So we're looking at what are things that will help them. And sometimes it's small things, right? It's really small things. It's just whole processes that haven't been looked at for a long time and that need to be streamlined and cleaned up. Increasing their capacity to focus on the things that matter is a key focus for us.

Speaker C: Awesome.

Speaker B: I am sure your recruiters are like, thank God we're getting a scheduler. Because I'll tell you, as a recruiter, it's the thing that I dislike the most of my job. So kudos. Your team is probably very excited. You mentioned earlier you talked a little bit about screening and a lot of the screening tools right now, and we've had a lot of them on the show, are AI based. And I'm really just curious, as far as a bank with so many regulatory challenges and scrutiny, how are you evaluating AI tools for sourcing or screening? What is the process?

Speaker A: That is a really great question. And you're right, that's the talk, right? AI, AI, everything.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Um, but you know, the idea of automation, machine learning, AI, artificial intelligence isn't new within our industry. And in fact, within the customer space we have digital personalization capabilities that are powered by AI. So we are already using that. In fact, in 2018, TD actually acquired an AI startup called Layer 6. So this is back to 2018, how fast everything moves. So we've had them and, um, even from an HR perspective, we partner with that group still that's now obviously embedded within td. But one of the comments that you made, regulatory environment, we're a bank, right? And so highly, highly regulated. What we're doing right now is really looking to develop a set of guardrails to really understand them and to really set guardrails that will protect our candidates, our colleagues, our customers from any potential risk. Because what we know is we know two things about artificial, uh, intelligence. We know all the great things that it can achieve. We hear, like, it's so exciting. Right. I mean, it gets me really excited too. I'm like, oh, my goodness, how amazing to do all these things. But then you hear the other side about some unintended consequences as a result. So we've got to be diligent. And so we're going to explore AI for sure. We're going to make sure it's ethical, fair, transparent, and that it does benefit our candidates and our colleagues, of m course, our customers and our communities. We are absolutely assessing and looking at it. Including the screening tool. Right. We're looking at how can the screening tool be AI powered. But I would say we're still in the exploration stage.

Speaker C: So I'm going to switch the focus a little bit here away from technology. Banks are in a very unique position in that it's almost like grocery stores. You got to have one. Right. So any potential candidate could also be a customer. So you've got a really powerful consumer brand being td. Everyone knows who you are. Yeah. And it's really interesting how that can either cause candidate blindness, because that's my bank. I don't work there, I do business there. Right. So share with us your take on how your employer brand interacts with such a strong reputation and brand as TD bank, how does it weave into the prospective candidates market?

Speaker A: It is definitely weaved in. That's the right word, for sure. Shelley, we're so lucky because we do have such a strong brand. You're absolutely right. Everybody recognizes td, our, uh, green shield. And even if you're in the us, it's amazing if you're in the east coast, you walk into a restaurant in Manhattan, as I did recently, and the pen that the person gave me was a TD pen. So it's quite cool. But I would say, like, when I interview candidates or when I attend any event, I have forever done the same thing of asking, like, why did you choose td? I'm always interested in kind of what they say. And actually going back to New York, I was just there a couple of weeks ago and I attended an early talent event. So I was interacting with new interns that just joined us. And so, again, going M from table to table, asking the same question, why did you choose us? And what I find is the responses are pretty consistent and they have been pretty consistent through the years. They're also pretty consistent and amongst the groups, whether it's early talent, experience, even executive talent. And so one actually links to what you said, Shelley, which is, I'm a customer of td. I'VE been a customer for TD for years. I've always felt well treated. I felt like I mattered as a customer. I enjoy going into your branches. I enjoyed seeing how your employees interact with each other. So that comes across many times. And so that told me that if I feel so good there, there must be something special there. Many will reference our commitment to diversity. A lot will talk about that. They'll talk about how they appreciate that we live our promise. They see diversity represented at all levels in our organization and that means a lot to them. The contributions we make to communities is another big one. It's interesting. The early talent, they really double down on that. Your diversity and your community involvement, the purpose that's important to them and they see it. And then there's others that will say, hey, my family, my friend has been working for td. They've been there for a hundred years. And so that certainly is a testament as well because we do have a lot of long tenure colleagues and especially the new generations, they're in awe of that. Sadly, sometimes when I'm speaking at an event, what I get is people going, wow, I was never even born when she started. But it's, but it reflects again that there is this culture. It's a culture of care, culture of growth, a uh, culture of impact that is part of our colleague brand and that matters to prospective candidates. And so that's why we're able to, you know, achieve over a million applicants being interested in us, which is great.

Speaker B: It definitely helps. I'll say that I want to go a little bit into metrics and uh, sometimes in talent acquisition we get blinded by the metrics, right? Like time to fill, cost per hire and we forget what's really important to the business. You deal with a lot of executives as well. And what do the other executives when it comes to talent acquisition, like what metrics do they want to see?

Speaker A: You're so right. Because there's the essential talent acquisition metrics that we all talk about. Cost to hire, quality of uh, hire, time, productivity, retention, engagement. But I think if you're just distilling that to a leader, like what's going to matter to you? And this is not going to be surprising, but it really comes down to do I have, have the right talent at the right time? That's really important, right? Like uh, when I need them, I need them and when I have them, they have to be the right people for the job. Another thing that is also important to leaders today, and uh, I think it's really important too is this talent that I'm getting what's the potential for this talent for the future? Because things are changing, they're evolving so fast. So you can't just get me somebody that is great for the job today. You got to get m me somebody that actually is going to be growing with us. That's so important. Right? Because skills are, are changing so quickly. So that's I think really important to our leaders today as well.

Speaker B: How are you quantifying that?

Speaker A: Glad that you asked that because again, I told you I'm going to use the colleague journey a bit. But we're actually embedding the colleague journey, a pillar around data. And really the goal is to try to determine what are the future KPIs, what do we need to measure and how will we measure them? Do we have the data? How will we get the data? And how we remove noise. We have the traditional ones, but how are we going to be measuring the future? And again, this is one of those areas where we know AI could make a difference. Right. So another place that we'll be investigating, could AI help enable us to determine the right KPIs for the future here?

Speaker B: I love it. I think we have to do a case study or an episode just on the colleague journey because I would love to know every detail of it. So Irene, I'm giving you a magic wand and you can get any wish that you want to fix or enhance your talent acquisition department. What is that wish?

Speaker A: You know, again, it's probably not going to sound very unique. Probably a lot of us in talent acquisition are saying the same thing. We want that optimal talent intelligent platform. Right. That enable us to use data driven insights and really improve our talent acquisition and our talent mobility processes. That would be great to have. And I think we have components of, uh, but I don't think we have the whole thing yet again to answer what the leaders want from us. Right?

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: The right talent at the right time with the potential to continue to grow.

Speaker B: I feel a little bad for you Irene, because after we aired this episode, you are going to get probably a hundred calls from vendors in this space being like, I can fix that, uh, problem. Your wish has been granted. Irene, this was fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us. The insights were incredible and I love these conversations with folks that are doing it on a day to day basis, seeing exactly what's going on. So if anyone wanted to get a hold of you, find out more about you, what's the easiest way to get a hold of Irene?

Speaker A: So certainly through LinkedIn is one way. And if they wanted to reach me through my email. Irene.santosv.com well, are you sure you want to do that? Are you sure they can? For sure? For sure.

Speaker B: Perfect. And obviously, go TD bank the career site section. Check out all the jobs, but also your story that's in there as well. So Irene, on that note, thank you so much.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. Serge and Shelley, it's been a pleasure and you've got such a fabulous podcast. So thank you so much. Thank you for inviting me today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker C: Thank you so much, Irene. And I hope to talk to you again real soon.

Speaker A: Sounds good.

Speaker B: Shelly, let's face it, texting candidates is the easiest way to hire quicker today. But your cell phone doesn't connect to your ats. You're sharing your personal number with strangers. That's pretty scary, right Shelly? And it's not even legally compliant. Mhm.

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Speaker D: Do you love news about LinkedIn? Indeed. Google and just about every other recruitment tech company out there. Hell yeah. I'm Chad. I'm Cheese. We're the Chad and Cheese Podcast. All the latest recruiting news and insights are on our show, Drip in snark and attitude. Subscribe today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. We out.