Belonging, Leadership, and the Future of Talent with Eric Knauf of BelongHQ

Speaker A: Welcome to tribod, the podcast brought to you by Proactive Talent, the flexible extension to your talent acquisition team. Empowering your growth through smarter hiring. Hosted by me, Matt Staney. Each episode will explore the topics transforming the way companies attract, hire and retain top talent. Ready to get ahead of the curve? Let's jump in. Welcome to Tripod, the podcast where we explore the art and science of talent acquisition, leadership and innovation. I'm your host, Matt. Matt Staney. Today's episode is an extra special one for me. Joining me is Eric Knoff, a longtime colleague from our SAP days, advisor to HR tech startups, a dynamic leader in the talent space and someone I've had the pleasure of working with on numerous projects over the years. Eric is now the founder and managing partner at Belong hq, a talent management consulting practice where he is continuing his work in reimagining talent acquisition, leadership, building belonging and leveraging the power of connections, as well as the author of a soon to released book on belonging. Eric, welcome to Tripod. It's great to have you here. Let's start with your journey. What brought you into the world of talent acquisition and what has shaped your career to this point?

Speaker B: Thank you for having me. And uh, and as, as you mentioned, we have a journey that's serpentine together. Yeah, some amazing successes over the years, things to look back on and, and some of my proudest moments you've been involved, so it's wonderful to be here. I'm an accidental recruiter. I came by it honestly. It is part of my DNA. I was born this way, so to speak. The intent was to follow in dad's footsteps, get a PhD in Organizational Psychology and then become an organizational consultant. He ultimately went on to become a uh, chief hro. And I thought that was my trajectory. And I got this job right out of college with a HR consulting firm and I'm like, sweet, I can bypass the whole PhD thing. Turns out it was a researcher for a recruiting firm. And it just so happens that it was the right place at the right time. There are some amazing folks that have come through there. The former head of TA at um, uh, Riot Nike, uh, Eaton Corporation, uh, Rocky Howard came from this organization. Um, so it was the right place to really learn the craft. And you know, within a couple years had a fairly substantial client with the organization as a, as a legit headhunter. Old school, pre technology. Everything was recorded on index cards. And if you going through their phone

Speaker A: book and all that.

Speaker B: Right, that's right. If you tripped and spilled your box of index cards, which I saw a colleague do. It's like your database crashing. Things have evolved. My timing was not necessarily magnificent. Um, did a tour of duty through Lean Consulting, but came back to rpo, uh, where I led corporate recruiting globally for a, uh, Goodyear. I ultimately made my way back into

Speaker A: tech at Ariba and that's when we met towards the end of that tenure. Right, this was the days of SaaS. And I was at SuccessFactors. You're at Ariba. And then we both got acquired by SAP.

Speaker B: But they liked us more than they like you guys.

Speaker A: That's fair. We were uh, an interesting acquisition.

Speaker B: Yeah. Our worlds came together and, and SAP was wrestling with this notion how do you go from this on prem behemoth to something that's far more agile, cloud based.

Speaker A: And they needed what the companies we were working at and hiring people for were very good at. Right? Yeah.

Speaker B: And ah, you guys did it. You, Mike Leary and company. Some really good people have come out of that organization but we, we work together. And how do these two organizations come together? Much of the leadership for SAP globally came from our organizations.

Speaker A: Uh, we were the first ones to go over and I got pulled into building SAP's global employer brand. It was a wild ride, I would

Speaker B: tell you, but it's not what I signed up for. I love the agility that we had at Ariba. It was. And that's something that I, I came to that became my. It's not that it was a safe space, but it's something that I was very familiar with and frankly I love, I love.

Speaker A: Um, I found it frustrating, you know, I was at this fast growing SaaS HR tech company where my ideas were looked at to this very large bureaucratic company and I got frustrated pretty quick and then went into the, into the startup ta leadership realm at Glassdoor.

Speaker B: And I went to Commvault, the chief HR there was a former guy from SuccessFactors. Yes, I joined him and uh, you and I talked about joining my team at commvault.

Speaker A: I ended up just starting my own firm and you hired me as a consultant many times after that.

Speaker B: Best job you didn't get frankly at Ariba. We nearly doubled in size while I was there at commvault, we nearly doubled in size while I was there. All organic growth had to build out global teams, infrastructure, technology, redo branding. Everything needed to be redone at Commvault. And frankly we adopted some of the same things that we used at ah, Ariba, including the notion of value stream mapping. What is it that the customers Internally and externally actually care about? How do you eliminate waste? How do you eliminate the stuff that they don't care about? How do you let metrics drive conversations? That's a place where I think we really got it right. Um, I joined a company out of Sweden, out of Stockholm, and we grew 42% within six months only to discover that we were lacking this crazy thing called effective headcount planning.

Speaker A: Yeah, everybody else was terrible at it back then. Still not great.

Speaker B: Yeah, uh, I'm glad you bring that up because that's something that you're right. We still don't have.

Speaker A: Sort of the bane of our existence. The last 15 years in recruiting, hasn't it been because at least for me, as, as it know, high growth tech TA leader like a Twilio, for example, my headcount plan was changing all the time. They didn't know what they wanted, what they needed. Right. Because they're just growing so rapidly. It's really hard to think how do I stay agile and flexible in my team. I think that leads me well into this next question. You've been at all of these impactful places and as a talent leader in different environments at various stages of tech maturity and innovation that we've seen over the last few years. You know, how has some of these experiences influenced your perspective on talent leadership? How is talent leadership different today than when we worked back at SAP or trade shift?

Speaker B: I mean, I would throw a work rise in there as well, right?

Speaker A: Oh yeah, that was a wild ride. Right.

Speaker B: You know, we, uh, they had just raised $300 million with the intent to ultimately have a million people on their platform. A Tucson delivery marketplace. So to think what is the requisite talent for success in that type of environment? We didn't know that. And uh, it doesn't have to be a $300 million investment to have a million people on the platform to call it out as a need. Ah, it could be a much smaller organization. You still need to understand what does success look like? B. What is a requisite talent force? What does that look like? And now I want to go one step further with a skill based market internally and externally. What does that really mean?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're hitting on a really important thing here. Uh, and for our listeners to think about too. TA leaders before were a bit of order takers. You know, they say, here's the reps that you've got approved for. This is the quota I want you to hit and we have to put butts in seats. But what you're saying now is we have to either be empowered or empower ourselves to get involved in talent planning so that we can proactively do that. Or what is a talent leader today? If they're working at a company that is not great at uh, uh, taking that business plan and translating it into a hiring plan and succession planning, does that mean TA gets more heavily involved in that now?

Speaker B: Absolutely, for a few reasons. One, we are wired to understand competencies. We are wired to understand critical success factors for roles as part of an intake. When we conduct an intake, one of the most important questions what does success look like? How are you going to determine whether or not this person was successful six months into the role? Right. And theoretically that recruiter, that sourcer, when sitting down with that hiring manager, is breaking it down. How often have you heard hiring managers say I want somebody with five plus years of experience doing xyz?

Speaker A: I've heard them say that. And then the XYZ is something that hasn't even been around five or six years.

Speaker B: Yes, that's where I'm going with this. There are different tool, there's tooling out there that allows uh, a recruiter to sit down with a hiring manager and actually talk about what that universe of talent looks like based on the skills.

Speaker A: You had a really good keyword there earlier, which is competency. Can they do the work? I don't know that years of experience in the age of generative AI even matters that much anymore. It's like, do you have the business context? Do you understand? And then can you leverage technology to get it done? Are you competent to do this well and better than the other candidates we're talking to? Sometimes somebody who's been doing something 10 years isn't the best person because they're kind of stuck in their ways.

Speaker B: When you ask the question, what is a requisite talent needed? What does that mean? So miss Hiring Manager, what do you need to have done? What has to be accomplished? And when you talk Gen AI, when you talk machine building or working in a um, injection molding environment, what do you want that person to have done if they could define for you? I need this project to be completed my OKR. This ties back to organizational alignment. Ms. Hiring Manager, what are the OKRs for your team? Do you understand what they are? If not, then you have a bigger problem. And that's where you take the conversation up in the organization. How is that team going to be managed or measured? How is that hiring manager going to be measured? And ah, then how is the effectiveness of this hire going to Be measured?

Speaker A: How are they deciding what recs to open? You've got a plan. We want to grow X number of revenue. Next year we're going to launch X product. I just don't understand how companies can make plans like that but then not have TA at the table to help them translate that and give a market snapshot of the talent needed to accomplish that and then co creating a hiring plan based on that business. How do we get into the business conversations?

Speaker B: This goes all the way to the top with the Chief hro. Actually it goes to the very top with the CEO. Let's start with. Right. There's a phenomenal book for your listeners if they have not read it.

Speaker A: Um, no. We love sharing books on here, but Talent Wins.

Speaker B: It is absolutely one of the most impactful books that I have read. I have shared this book with numerous CEOs, numerous chief HROs. I go into an environment, one of the first things I'll do is buy a stack of books and start handing them out. Why Talent Wins. They talk about a three legged stool. It's the CEO. It is a cfo. It's a Chief hro. I would argue that in a tech environment it might also be the Chief Product Officer. The CEO is responsible for the allocation of capital to fulfill the mission of the business. The CFO is responsible for the allocation of financial capital. What is the other form of capital that is one of the biggest line items? Talent. Right?

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: And the allocation of talent, the effective allocation of it. So yes, HR has to be part of that conversation. Some organizations call it the G3. I might expand it to include the Head of Product, but it goes back early on when you're defining the objectives of the organization. The Chief People Officer absolutely has to be part of that conversation.

Speaker A: In my experience in TA leadership and talking to thousands of other TA leaders over the years, what has been the blocker to what you're describing happening in reality? Why so often is either HR or Talent specifically left out of the planning phases? Is it because all these CEOs think they are hiring experts themselves as talent acquisition, not understanding business at a level to where they could be in those conversations? Because I feel like that's where most of the issues in hiring come from, is that they're just this disconnect between what the business is doing and putting talent acquisition in a place to actually help them, uh, plan for the right talent and understand what it takes to get that talent.

Speaker B: Uh, a CEO for one of the organizations I work with was highly responsive to the role of people but to get there, I needed to articulate from a business perspective the why. Mhm. Yes. It's the ability to understand what the business model is all about. The input that talent has, the output of talent, how that gets measured and how it translates to the bottom line.

Speaker A: Showing the ROI of it, like calculating the cost of unfilled jobs, you know, showing the missed opportunity as well as the, you know, calculating things like average revenue for per employee. So we can show the, the revenue impact that talent isn't just a cost, uh, center, but literally the main revenue driver of an organization. But is that changing it? Is the role of TA leader evolving now? Because we're seeing headlines like 25 or more of Google's code is now AI. Now all these companies are investing in a lot of AI and automation and reducing their workforces. So our CEOs finally getting rid of some of the complication of human and moving to more technology solutions. Do TA leaders need to now be more savvy in AI and automating their organizations as much as possible? What does a talent acquisition leader look like today or need to look like today?

Speaker B: Let's go back to one earlier competencies. You nailed it. Uh, I was at HR Tech this past year and the two letters that ruled the roost were AI. Yeah, every, every solution there, yes, it was a tech environment. Every solution featured AI in some form or fashion. Whether it was effective or not is a different conversation. But it, it is, it is. Uh, the question is getting back to the conversation of having that seat at the table. It's one thing to use technology, uh, a bot to scrape data, to automate transactional or administrative tasks. Recruiters can actually use AI. Sourcers have done this for years for source to identify individuals. But the question TA leaders need to be asking is how exactly is it that competency that skills align to output and there is an opportunity that we have, AI gives us that to be able to help close that gap. Um, uh, i4CP just had a end, uh, of the year wrap up in December. One of the things that they called out was that organizations that embrace AI are truly outperforming those that aren't.

Speaker A: Yeah, they say the same thing on an individual level too. You know, professionals that are leveraging AI to do more and to amplify the skill sets they have. People who aren't.

Speaker B: Yeah, careers are, are twice as likely to grow as those that don't. So yes, embrace it. But there was something else that came out of this.

Speaker A: But can you overdo it? I mean, I feel like we could automate ourselves into a point of view amplifying bias. Automate ourselves to a point of removing the humanity of business.

Speaker B: We're going to come back to that in just a second. That's something that I'm pretty passionate about. But the other piece that came out in this conversation with i4CP was successful organizations AI.

Speaker A: Oh and for those who don't know, can you explain who i4CP is?

Speaker B: Institute for Corporate Productivity. So it's a research organization that has, they do research and it's fantastic. Their findings are amazing. They actually have a talent acquisition board. Danny uh, Monahan, um, who now Expedia, I think she co chairs it. So they have some really good thought leaders that pontificate on what works, what doesn't work. But they found that. So yes, AI matters but there's something else that matters as well and it is probably a precursor for it and that is acumen around change management. Mhm. And the ability to be agile. So if you are a TA leader that wants to be far more effective with executive leadership, enable organizations to be

Speaker A: more agile, be a change agent in

Speaker B: those organizations, have meaningful solutions that are backed up by data.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: So yes that can be done. Now coming back to your question about can we over rotate on uh, tooling. If you think about machine learning and what it's learning on the data set, unless you are doing something to improve upon it, to expand it, it's just going to be regurgitating the same stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, it's called cross validation and I think it's super important that tailors understand this. I went back to school and in for a post grad program on machine learning Engineer just so I could really get the underlying um, understanding of this to better evaluate some of these AI solutions. And I think the most important thing about some of these AI solutions coming is what were they trained on, what data were they trained on and how do you know that it can in my company's situation and environment and industry be as effective to whatever your data set that you built your solution on. Right. How can you be confident and show me what your cross validation that says that this will work well without bias in the real world. And I uh, think that's still a question that's hard for some of these AI tools to answer.

Speaker B: I, I would, I would absolutely agree. The whole world got to know ChatGPT. Right. And, and ah, it's now coming into its own. I mentioned what I saw at HR Tech but this has been in the works for quite a while.

Speaker A: Uh, and they have stiff competition now, too, with Perplexity and Gemini and so many LLMs out there.

Speaker B: That's right.

Speaker A: Some better at certain use cases than others. It's growing and becoming more.

Speaker B: This is a whole conversation we have on this. Oh, yeah, I remember back. This might be 2015ish. So it was before the 16 election. I was giving a presentation on disruption in, uh, Singapore, and I asked the audience, what is the most disruptive thing we could expect in talent acquisition? Somebody's hand shot up. I still visualized. He sat, uh, right on the aisle, second row. He was eager to be picked, so I picked him. He said if a hiring manager, once you identify a slate of potential candidates, you could use LinkedIn to do that. You could go to Facebook, and if you know that a hiring manager is a cat fan, you could find candidates who are also into cats and marry those up and share them with the hiring manager. Keep in mind, this is before we knew about Cambridge Analytica. That's a whole separate thing. Right.

Speaker A: I remember when Facebook's open graph came up and I was teaching recruiters how to do some pretty creepy things, like, oh, you want to know where all the sales account executives in the Bay Area that work at Salesforce go and have happy hour? I could tell you that was my job to figure out how to. And it was creepy. They've since removed all of that ability.

Speaker B: Right. Here's where I went with the guy. I said, okay, I hear you. And I, uh, repeated what he said to me. Congratulations, you're out of a job. And I said, here's why. What you just conveyed was an algorithm.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And in the future, technology is going

Speaker A: to do what you just said automatically.

Speaker B: Right. Just like that.

Speaker A: And now our social feeds are geared and tailored towards our interests and things we've engaged with in the past.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: We're seeing it come into our recruiting technology, these algorithms that are being built to understand skills. I feel like if we don't create some sort of unifying language around skill sets, because they can be very subjective. Right. AI can help us find more universal connections in competencies and skill sets to jobs. And I think that's what a lot of these HRT vendors are building. Right. This type of job is highly related to this type of job, and they're doing this skill mapping with artificial intelligence.

Speaker B: I'm a big fan of Kevin Wheeler. I used to go to his Future of Talent events. If your audience is interested in a mindful perspective of the, uh, journey we're going to be on with AI as It relates to talent. He's somebody worth checking out. We've had some conversations, sometimes disagreements on this. My reply to that guy in the audience that day in Singapore was the most disruptive thing of all is to be uniquely human. So what is it that we do professionally that is uniquely human? And I would come back to your question about over rotating on technology and tooling. How do we future proof what it is?

Speaker A: What does a TA leader competency look like today? A TA team today.

Speaker B: And when technology is in a position to ask meaningful questions in a way that can connect dots, can create Venn diagram, intellectual Venn diagrams that actually mean something in business for hiring managers, for founders, for CEOs, for chief HROs, it's when technology is not there yet. We have the opportunity as leaders in talent acquisition to connect dots. AI can help us do that. But it is incumbent on us to know enough about the business to have

Speaker A: the context, to know what questions to ask the AI.

Speaker B: The most effective leaders have context. So how do we get the seat at the table? We have to have context, full stop. Secondly, it is the way in which we bring ourself to the table, to the conversation, to bring humanity to it that matters. Now we're just talking about engagement with leadership. When it comes to cultivating teams, we are but one person. It's our team that delivers the result.

Speaker A: Leaders need to be space creators creating space for their teams to be successful. They need to have the better business context and be able to translate it, know how to leverage AI to automate maybe some of the redundant, repetitive administrative task of hiring so that their teams can really focus on the human elements of the job that really matter. Being that consultative talent advisor to the hiring managers, being that great candidate experience ambassador throughout the hiring process and give candidates more of a personal touch. Is that kind of where you're going with that?

Speaker B: I'm thinking of a whole new article that's begging to be written on. The role of a leader is the equivalent to the executive chef. A restaurant. In a fine restaurant.

Speaker A: Mhm. Serving up talent. It.

Speaker B: It's serving up and having an opinion on the menu. Right.

Speaker A: Time.

Speaker B: Yeah, right. Where's their flexibility? What are the specials? What are the roles that people play in the restaurant? Right. The waiter. Uh, is that partner. And the best restaurants, the best waiters ask the right questions.

Speaker A: To me that sounds like they ask the right questions to get the information you need to be the most effective. It feels to me like the TA leader being the internal company connector and having those executive relationships and then your Recruiters, being a, uh, connector from the market to the company. Right. And that takes a lot of work. Something I've heard you speak about in the past is being a Super Connector. Can you explain what that means and why it's such a valuable skill in today's workplace?

Speaker B: There's some research going on right now with unio, a company where I'm an advisor and a, um, researcher, Emily Yarrow. She's done some fantastic work out of Scotland on the nature of what Super Connector is. So these are those individuals who are nodes in the network. They're the ones that everybody knows. They're the ones who seem to know how to navigate organizations. It doesn't necessarily mean it's a title. It's a level, uh, of seniority in the organization.

Speaker A: It's more of a skill set. Even someone lower on the totem pole could have this skill set.

Speaker B: They're the ones who know how to make things happen frequently. One of the most effective Super Connectors that I've ever come in contact with was the EA to the CEO of Commvault. If I needed anything at all, she was the person that could get the answer. She might not have the answer, but she could get the answer. These are the individuals that are culture carriers. These are the individuals that have the capacity to transmit knowledge. If you care about change management, if you care about knowledge management. I have a brother who led knowledge management strategy for um, KPMG globally. He said one of the biggest challenges is identifying who are those individuals in organizations that could facilitate change.

Speaker A: If you're going to who's a linchpin, who's. Who's like a major and you're not talking about connector. And like they have a lot of social media followers. You mean connectors. And like they just understand the wiring of a company. And who. So would you say that this skill set is one of a political nature? They know how to manage and drudged through corporate politics, or they're just really good at developing relationships in their high eq. How do you explain that Super Connector skill set?

Speaker B: Part of this research, and I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes, is are they made, are they wired to be this, or can you cultivate this type of individual? What motivates them?

Speaker A: I feel like the best recruiters I've worked with, they are really fall in this category.

Speaker B: That's the best.

Speaker A: They just can't help but connect people. They see the dots. Like they may have a conversation with this one candidate and then a business leader they worked with 10 years ago. And they're like, oh, you know what, you guys need to meet or, uh, I need to connect you guys.

Speaker B: Their motivator isn't the reward.

Speaker A: The reward is just connecting to people that they know need to talk or, uh, could do something together.

Speaker B: That is exactly it.

Speaker A: The matchmakers of the business world. I talk about that a lot. The employer brand people in our field are called the storytellers, but the recruiters, they're the connectors. And I don't think AI algorithms are going to replace that. You need people who innately know people and are empathetic themselves.

Speaker B: It's not just bits and bytes that they connect.

Speaker A: Executive leadership, what they view. If you're going to work at a company as a te. Probably a brilliant question to get answered in your hiring process. Whether you talk to the CEO, Chr and others, how do they view recruiting? Because if they see recruiting as this transactional thing, you're gonna have a harder time getting a seat at the table versus if they understand the nuance of recruiting is a uniquely human aspect of business. And about connecting culture, mission and skill set and this relationship web of connections they've made over their career to build highly functioning and successful teams, then you got an organization that understands the power and human nature of ta.

Speaker B: Amen. So I. There was a quote that I saw yesterday. Lar Schmidt posted.

Speaker A: Yeah. Just had him on the pod.

Speaker B: He post. He. He posted something from Laszlo Bach. It was so good. If your hiring process seems mediocre, don't be surprised if your talent pool is mediocre.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: Right. I had a call earlier this week with the CEO of a manufacturing company. He just stepped in and doesn't need to drive change. This is old school manufacturing. I shared that quote with him and he said, how do we make something that's not mediocre? I need better than mediocre.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: How do we hire in a way that's beyond mediocre?

Speaker A: And what a competitive differentiator that is for a company in. In an old industry like that. To build a better process, you have

Speaker B: a unique opportunity to redefine the market.

Speaker A: Yeah. And completely take all the talent too, if you're doing it right.

Speaker B: I am passionate about belong. That's so, uh, hard.

Speaker A: That's actually what I wanted to get into next.

Speaker B: If you can create an environment where people actually want to be part of it, you will outperform. You will be the market, hands down.

Speaker A: It's such a holistic thing, belonging and the attraction side, you know, it comes out in your employer branding in your actual process itself.

Speaker B: You know, reduction in, um, turnover. If people feel like they belong. Visual performance goes up about 56%. Right. Corporate productivity goes up about 35%. People take fewer sick days more than, uh, it's like fewer sick days if they feel like they belong.

Speaker A: So let's talk about it. Let's define it. I'm really liking this term belonging. It's becoming more widely used in an age where terms like DEI have been m, you know, called a bad word.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And it's sad to see the, the slowing of those types of programs. I think it's important that we define what we mean by belonging and how that ties into the broader DEI efforts in the workplace and how it might be different.

Speaker B: There are some folks that have said some really good things about belonging in the past, like Pat Waters. Check out her stuff. I mean, she, she's phenomenal.

Speaker A: I also really am loving the work by Brittany, uh, King, who I'm going to have on the POD next, actually, with. She was longtime consultant with my firm. She was over at Kraft Heinz and Facebook and DEI roles. But now she has her own firm, Amplify Allyship. Really focused on belonging. I need to connect you too. If y' all haven't connected in the past, you are.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: You two would really get along.

Speaker B: Uh, diversity, equity and inclusion.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Research shows that it has a direct impact on organization performance. Belonging is something that is far more foundational. It is core to human psychology. It is directly tied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Speaker A: It's a broader and more inclusive way to talk about the fundamental human need to feel like whichever tribe you're a part of, your home, your family tribe, your work tribe, you feel like you belong there. And you're welcome.

Speaker B: So the book that I am working on, there are two books. One is scale this and that is about organizational growth in a mindful way. It's written for founders. Belonging is, um, going to be coming out first. I already have it on my website on, uh, belonghq is the belonging standard. So what is belonging? It's rooted on five core principles. Psychological safety, inclusion, support, connection, and purpose. Those are the five I love that definition pillars that define what it is. Do employees feel valued, accepted, uh, empowered to contribute authentically. It bridges inclusion and engagement. And you can actually drive it. You can actually measure outcomes. I even have a, uh, maturity model for belonging based on those five pillars, and those could be measured. It is, uh, like I said, foundational. It is hardwired. We as humans thrive when we belong.

Speaker A: Does that mean we're also building cultures that are defined enough that some people could look at them and go, oh, uh, I don't belong. I know that's like. It seems like that's what we want.

Speaker B: In fact, I put out a post not too long ago. Based on the words that organizations use internally and externally, what can be discerned about belonging, the words that we choose to use, what we choose to address, what is on our website.

Speaker A: Somebody done this. Have they done a study where they scraped job descriptions and they were able to determine a sense of belonging at each of those organizations?

Speaker B: Uh, you could actually scrape postings and based on those five pillars, take a look to see is their purpose. Do they weave purpose into the description? Do they.

Speaker A: Is there evp, uh, uh, in their, in their recruitment, marketing, reflective of a culture that's founded and belongs to.

Speaker B: Yes. Even in the posting itself. In the job posting. For the person who makes this, you know, I have a job, you know, on a line, I'm an operator of a machine that makes these things. Are they conveying the purpose, the value, the impact that this product is going to have on the customer? But where I'm going with this is it could be cutting code, it could be selling software, it could be a technician. But are you addressing in the posting itself purpose? What is the purpose? Aligning the contributions to the mission and the impact, whatever that is an impact

Speaker A: of the company needs to be more than making our shareholders richer. Has to be also, like we're, you know, this is a company that's doing ESGs and is getting back to the community. I wrote a blog not too long ago around social giving more ESG programs. And it was actually the chocolate company that I found that were doing this so well. Like they had this big mission around taking child labor out of the chocolate industry and how 10 of the proceeds go into it. And I thought, wow, what an amazing sense of purpose they're giving people. Because they could just be another chocolate company. Yeah, uh, you want to come work this chocolate? But, but people are saying, do you want to end child slavery? That's what, that's what we're doing with chocolate.

Speaker B: If you want people to feel like they belong to something, if they identify with that, sign me up for it.

Speaker A: And every company ideally, uh, exists because it creates value somewhere.

Speaker B: So for someone, so we can get

Speaker A: better at telling that story.

Speaker B: And that's. And T8 it starts with us and it's in the posting on our landing page.

Speaker A: In a career, they need to convince those people that they need to be a part of this mission. Right.

Speaker B: So are we even talking about her? You mentioned esg? Slight tangent. Deloitte. Um, Sue Cantrell leads a group at Deloitte that focuses on human sustainability. M. And what does that mean to organizations? And part of that is, I mean, one of the things she's looking at is the power of connection between individuals, but it's also connection to purpose. Much of this, it comes back to what we are doing around belonging has a direct impact on human sustainability and ESG programs. The words that are used in postings. What do people hear in interviews? Do they hear during an interview process that they have the capacity to build meaningful relationships and have a sense of community at work? Is that something that recruiters talk about? The the hiring manager talks about? Do managers. When you talk about support, are you supporting them? Are you enabling them with systems and tools so that they could be better at what they do? Are they included? Actually, I, uh, put out a post on the trust credit that new hires extend their employers when they accept an offer. They show up day one with the expectation that they belong on day one. On day two, they go into the office and hear that their colleagues went out together after work. They weren't included.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Do they belong when they talk about on Monday what they did together on the weekend? If they weren't included, they don't belong. It could be as simple as a group of people coming back from getting coffee together.

Speaker A: So it's actually removing the high school politics from the corporate environment, uh, and treating everyone as adults. So you belong here. And it's the subtle little experiences that employees have that either validate that sense of belonging when they started or invalidate it over time. And that's why you lose talent.

Speaker B: That is exactly it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it is the biggest a sense of belonging can. There's a 50% reduction in attrition when people feel like they belong.

Speaker A: I love that last question because I know we have definitely gone over as I expected as we look towards the future. What Hm trends or changes in talent acquisition and leadership space are you most excited about?

Speaker B: So I am thrilled about technology eating the industry. Right now we're having this conversation. It's being recorded. There's going to be a transcript. Mhm. There is tooling out there now that will record interviews and marry that transcript up with the job description and look for ways that candidate for fits or does not fit.

Speaker A: The exciting thing is we get to work smarter and not harder. We're kind of getting rid of the things about Our jobs that we actually didn't really like doing.

Speaker B: No, it's bring an interview. Nobody makes decision making around who to hire. That much more impactful guy. Uh, completely geeked out by where the ship is headed.

Speaker A: I'm excited by AI too, but also wary of it. I almost know too much now. We're going to hit a point though where it's like the excitement's wearing off and we gotta get to the reality of telling the true ROI stories. We're starting to get those stories coming out and the truth of the matter is we're just not going to need as many recruiters as we've had in the past. But we still very much need recruiters. Yeah.

Speaker B: It enables them to actually be what they're best at. Yeah. Freeing them up to actually use gray matter.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'm excited about that. Cause you know what it does too is it gets rid of, let's be honest, our industry was full of a lot of people that were in it for the money. And we're fine to push process and do the stuff that AI now does and spam candidates and just play the numbers game and treat recruiting as a transactional process. But a lot of reasons why businesses see recruiting in a transactional light, uh, and easy to automate away. Maybe we'll have less of those folks because recruiting won't be as simple as that part will be automated. It's really being someone who can influence and have business conversations with candidates, with hiring managers about their business and translate that through talent. I'm excited about that.

Speaker B: As deep down as I am about technology. The conversations that I had with the founders, with the CEOs of uh, HR tech companies in Vegas. And I was on a podcast that came out earlier this week with uh, session getsession uh.com and the founder Pernilla said, Eric, it sounds like 2025 is a year of belonging.

Speaker A: I'd love to see that.

Speaker B: I think if we as leaders can double down on the role of humans. The role of humanity

Speaker A: sounds a lot like what I've been talking about for a long time, which is that businesses are communities.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And communities thrive on a sense of belonging. If companies aren't building a sense of belonging and actually having it show up in the true experiences that employers are having, they're going to have a hard time building a community that can stay intact.

Speaker B: We've been aligned for years. Yeah, you need to be aligned going into the future. And it's a marriage of technology and humanity is sort of what we're talking about 100%.

Speaker A: I think that's what business is going forward. Mhm and I, but I think we may be trying to figure out as an industry, as a society right now is what do we give to the machines and what do we give to humans? What can the machines really do right now that elevates the skill set of humanity, not replicates or replaces how does it make us superhuman and amplify the skill sets that are uniquely human but not necessarily needing to replace it? Really interesting conversation Eric. You and I, typically when we talk it's long because we have so much to share and always bounce off each other. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on Tripod. Thank you. Always being a friend over these last 15 years, but also always believing in what I'm building with Practice Talent. You're my biggest repeat client and I've always enjoyed working with you. I hope we get to work together again this year. Thanks for coming on Tripod. Your insight on leadership, belonging and connection are always inspiring to me. But before we wrap up, how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your work at Belonghq?

Speaker B: The website is www.belonghq.com. perhaps the easiest though is LinkedIn. Find me on LinkedIn E K N

Speaker A: A U F thanks again Eric, uh, for sharing your expertise and your stories with us and to our listeners. Thank you for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe to Tripod and leave us a review. You can also connect with us on Practice Talent, uh our website practictalent.com we're on all the social medias at Practictive Talent. Until next time.

Speaker B: Take care. Thank you. Later.