The Use Case Podcast – Storytelling about hireEZ with Shannon Pritchett

Music: (00:02)
Welcome to RecruitingDaily’s Use Case podcast. A show dedicated to the storytelling that happens, or should happen, when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better, as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That’s what we do. Here’s your host, William Tincup.

William Tincup: (00:23)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is William Tincup, and you are listening to the Use Case podcast. Today, we have Shannon on from HireEZ, and we’ll be talking about why her customers, prospects, and everyone chooses HireEZ. Formerly known as Hiretual. They’ve done a wonderful rebrand and relaunch, and all kinds of good stuff that we’re going to get into. You might have known them formerly as Hiretual, but with the rebrand, it’s HireEZ. With that, we’re just going to jump right into it. Shannon, would you do us a favor? Both introduce yourself and HireEZ?

Shannon Pritchett: (01:03)
Sure. I’ll start with myself, because that’s more difficult. I’m Shannon Pritchett. I’m the head of marketing for HireEZ. Formerly HireTual, as you said. I’ve been in this industry my entire career, over 10 years. I don’t want to date myself exactly, but I have a LinkedIn profile that will give it away. I’ve held just about every job in this space, and so now I’m doing marketing. I love it. HireEZ, the company we are, is an AI-powered outbound recruiting platform. Simple as that.

William Tincup: (01:37)
That’s it, done. Did you ever think you were going to work in marketing?

Shannon Pritchett: (01:40)
Never. Matter of fact, I’ve intentionally avoided marketing at all costs, which means subconsciously I probably have always enjoyed it.

William Tincup: (01:51)
Oh, there’s no doubt. There’s no doubt. There’s so many parallels. Obviously, you’ve been deep into both recruiting and sourcing. There’s insourcing, there’s messaging, where you’ve got to engage the people in recruiting. There’s all kinds of employer brand recruitment marketing. The world’s collide, for sure.

Shannon Pritchett: (02:10)
Yes. A lot of overlap.

William Tincup: (02:13)
A lot of overlap.

Shannon Pritchett: (02:19)
I know the industry, and that helps. Everything else, I have slowly caught up. I have told a lot of people this in the past: I perform well when I am taking on a job I’m not qualified for, so this definitely. To be head of marketing. I had zero marketing experience, and so that’s why I think I’m performing well, because I have a lot to learn, a lot to prove. I like that pressure, so it’s fun.

William Tincup: (02:48)
Well, you’re a competitor. I mean, I remember this. One of the first times that we met, you were telling me about your swimming career, and I’m like, “Dang, she’s really competitive.” This comes from somewhere, you know what I’m saying?

Shannon Pritchett: (03:06)
Yeah, don’t work out with me at the gym.

William Tincup: (03:09)
Bad idea, bad idea.

Shannon Pritchett: (03:11)
Yeah. My husband and I, we’ve gone on a few runs together, but it doesn’t work out well. Because in the middle of it, I’m like, “Let’s race,” and he’s like, “Why?”

William Tincup: (03:20)
Yeah, yeah. “We love each other. We don’t need to do that, we’re going to go to the same house.” Like, “No, we don’t have to do that.” You’re like, “Later.”

Shannon Pritchett: (03:30)
I know. It’s just, this is ingrained in my mind. Prior to this role, I never thought of marketing as being competitive. Sure there’s that creating demand and competition, trying to mark yourself over, but I guess that shows how little about marketing I knew before this. And so, that is probably one of my favorite parts. The second piece is that we are an entirely data driven marketing team, and that’s where I really shine. When I can look at numbers and make decisions that way, right? So, I really like that part where we can measure every little thing we do.

William Tincup: (04:07)
That’s nice. I mean, there are points in marketing that’ll be more challenging, that are harder to do. When you’re doing an email campaign, it’s pretty easy to run the math. You just rebranded, so you just went through all these exercises, but when your message is off and your sales team doesn’t believe. For whatever reason, they’ve lost momentum, they’ve lost belief in your message. It’s hard to put an ROI. It’s hard to put data behind that. You know what I’m saying? There’s certain parts that are art-

Shannon Pritchett: (04:41)
Yes.

William Tincup: (04:43)
… and there’s a whole lot of it that’s science.

Shannon Pritchett: (04:46)
You’re right. When we were doing the rebrand and we were coming up with this new category for outbound recruiting, everything I read to prepare me for this and all that stuff was saying exactly what you just said. If you can’t get the rest of your company in line, then they were going to be detrimental to your brand. That was one of the things that came together so beautifully, was that everyone was super excited about our new mission, the new category, and then the rebrand, because you can name a company anything. Names are very subjective, right? Not everyone loves the name. I was surprised how well over this went, because we weren’t… [inaudible 00:05:29] how bad our old name was I guess, right?

William Tincup: (05:34)
No, I don’t think it was that bad. I’ve rebranded a ton of firms, so I’ve been through the painful process of doing this bit. I like the name Hiretual. For me, it wasn’t the name change that was… I mean, it was nice that it was in parallel, but I think it was the mission that was really what I found falling in love with. Is like, “They’re going to go and do something really innovative, and do something different, and talk about it differently.” I think, for me, that’s what stuck. Again, you could have stuck with Hiretual. I like the name, but again, I think HireEZ… It’s actually better, but again, I fell in love with the mission. The change in attitude, the change in the language that you’re using, and things like that. Now, I’ve also… VP of marketing at a company. I probably can’t talk about it, but she went through a rebrand and got fired.

Shannon Pritchett: (06:48)
Yeah, it happens.

William Tincup: (06:50)
She nailed it. It was actually Stepstone, and they rebranded Lumesse. She did that whole thing, went through market research. The color palette was gorgeous. Literally, a documentation. Everything was gorgeous. People didn’t like it and she got fired. I’m like, “That’s, A, unfair, because it was gorgeous.” I mean, she did everything literally by the book that you would do, and she got fired and I just thought it was completely unfair. We’ll get off that subject, get over to something more positive. Tell us about outbound recruiting. What is outbound recruiting for those listening for the first time?

Shannon Pritchett: (07:32)
Yeah. A lot of people associate outbound recruiting with sourcing, and sourcing is a huge part of it. I like to compare it more to outbound sales. If you’re building up your team of sales professionals, are you going to want an inbound sales professional or an outbound sales? Everyone’s going to say, “We want outbound. We want the sales person that’s going to go out, prospect, and find business for us.” TA is the same way. Outbound recruiting is combining more things than just sourcing, right? It’s engagement. It’s a shift in your mindset, from being reactive to proactive. It’s being data driven and using analytics to help guide you and move you to the right candidate.

Shannon Pritchett: (08:17)
It’s using DE&I best practices. Most importantly, it has lot to do with integrations, right? Outbound recruiting, it sits on top of the funnel when it looks at the entire process. I just want people to know it’s a lot. The shift in the mindset, I think, is the most proactive. From reactive to proactive is the most important part. But also, it’s all the other things that come together to make it successful. Sourcing has been a part of TA since TA has been around, but I think it’s evolved a lot. That’s why we’re not saying, “We’re the sourcing category.” We’re saying “outbound recruiting”, because it encompasses more than just finding talent.

William Tincup: (09:03)
Right. These are the building blocks. I wrote down engagement, data driven, DEI, sourcing, and integrations. These are some of the building blocks of what would be a great strategy for outbound. Is there anything that I missed?

Shannon Pritchett: (09:20)
No. I mean, that’s the main component of it. What I’m seeing a lot, the mindset shift is the hardest thing that we’re overcoming. It doesn’t surprise me. When I look back at the newest, latest players and when they’ve entered the market, I think they’ve all had that same mindset shift problem. What I mean is: recruiters are creatures of habit, and it’s very hard to teach an old dog some new tricks. We tend to get set in our ways. When we become complacent, we get used to using the same thing and going through the same routine over and over again, that is the hardest thing to drive, right? That adoption. I mean, you see this anytime companies implement any new technology and recruiters have to go outside their normal routine. I think that is the biggest challenge for us, that shift in mindset, and that’s something that we’re going to be tackling with this new category for probably many years to come.

William Tincup: (10:29)
It’s funny. When I talk to companies that I advise… It’s a trick question, but I always ask them who their competitors are. They’ll list software companies, and they’re like, “Who do you think we compete with?” I’m like, “Yeah, take all those people. None of those are your competitors.” Again, it was a trick question. It’s a part of our trick. The bit is just what you said. It’s the status quo. It’s doing it the same way you did it yesterday, and that’s what you’re fighting against. It isn’t another company, another software company. But we get competitive, especially ATSs. You and I joked about it pre-show. ATSs, they’re very competitive. Payroll companies, very competitive. PEOs, very competitive. Some categories of software. They’re not just navel gazing. They’re literally trying to hurt the other competitors. Yeah, but there’s a whole massive amount of the audience that doesn’t know either of you.

Shannon Pritchett: (11:43)
Right. Such a good point.

William Tincup: (11:47)
Guess what? The largest HR tech software company in the world is Microsoft Office.

Shannon Pritchett: (11:55)
Yeah.

William Tincup: (11:56)
That’s who you’re competing against, Excel. No one wants to hear that, and you know this. No one wants to hear that. So, how do you coach people through? How do you think it’s the role of HireEZ to coach people through this mental shift of really thinking, as you said, from reactive to proactive? What’s the coaching philosophy?

Shannon Pritchett: (12:20)
It’s not just, “Oh, let’s get with our users and show them how you can be more proactive.” Right? It stems a lot deeper than that. Tell any recruiter right now that they need to be more proactive, and they’re going to give you the middle finger. It’s the craziest market we’ve seen with more demand for recruiters that have ever existed. They will tell you, “Okay. Well, we’re using outdated technology systems to find candidates, so be more proactive.” “Okay.” To me, it’s more fundamental than that, right? When I talk to TA leaders, and I ask specific questions, right? Do you allow your teams to be more proactive? The main thing that I get in return is, “No, how? How do I do that? How do I tell them to stop recruiting and take a couple steps back? How do I tell them to pipeline better? How can we forecast positions in the future when we’re constantly backfilling.” How do you proactive with roles that are constantly backfilling, right? Especially when you’re understaffed to begin with. It’s extremely hard.

Shannon Pritchett: (13:36)
Are you going to let go of your metrics and KPIs for recruiters to experiment a little bit? How do you know you even have the right metrics and KPIs? I have seen so many talented recruiters get let go from very large brands. Recruiters that I say their name, everyone’s going to know those names. Get let go from major tech companies, because they didn’t fit into the KPI metrics box that the rest of their teams did. They still had more hires than anyone, but they weren’t hitting all the KPIs to get there. We’ve seen this problem often, right? That’s just the first part. Then the overwhelming part I see is that, when I talk to TA teams, a lot of them simply do not measure anything to begin with. That’s a huge problem when you’re talking about a shift in mindset, because you don’t have a benchmark to begin with in the first place. Any marker would want a case study from a large enterprise company, right? Those are gold. I will practically give away my product for free if I can get a good testimonial, right?

Shannon Pritchett: (14:43)
When I go in, I say, “How are you currently measuring your team? What metrics are currently using to track everyone?” Nine times out of 10, these companies don’t measure their teams and they don’t have those KPIs. If they do, they’re not related to the product they’re purchasing in the first place. Which is frustrating, because how are we going to show our ROI? Off of feel? Does it feel like I recruited faster? Does it feel like I was more successful? When you don’t measure it in the first place. And so, I think there’s a fundamental problem higher up, with both HR and TA teams, of addressing, one, how they’re measuring their teams currently. Which, if you’re not doing that, how are you setting yourself up for success in the first place? I think that’s the next thing. Two: if you are going to measure, are you giving your recruiters the flexibility and the freedom to be creative and to experiment a little bit more?

Shannon Pritchett: (15:39)
I can relate that on the marketing side. For example, when we get overworked and we’re just focusing on the metrics, the numbers that we need to hit, I noticed that there is a huge decline in creativity. It’s almost like sometimes we get robotic. We saw this with the rebrand, right? A rebrand is a lot of work. It is 12-hour days, seven days a week until we can get it done. Then we came out of that closer together, because we were all working very close and tight knit. But what happens after that was: there’s still a lot of work to be done, so we kept going through the motions and the quality of our work just plummeted. I had to look at everything, all the campaigns we were doing. I threw 75 of them out and said, “Hey, guys. Let’s start to focus on bringing more emotion into our work, more creativity.”

Shannon Pritchett: (16:30)
I’ve never seen a TA leader come into their recruiting team and say, “You know what? You’re recruiting on too many positions. Let’s slow this down. Let’s give you some freedom and flexibility.” It doesn’t exist in this type of industry. I think it should. I don’t have the magic solution for it, but those are the type of things that we are constantly fighting when we’re talking about shifting a mindset. It’s like, “We have this product and solution, but are you really structured and set up enough to be successful, and to know you’re being successful when you adopt it?”

William Tincup: (17:06)
I love that. A hundred years ago, I was training for a triathlon. I actually didn’t do it, but I was training for it, because of the swimming. I can’t swim to save my life, but the swimming instructor said something to me that you’ve probably heard a million times. It’s, “You have to go slow to go fast.”

Shannon Pritchett: (17:34)
Yeah.

William Tincup: (17:34)
He was just like, “William, just get your fundamentals. Don’t worry about speed. Don’t worry about that, just get your fundamentals down. Work on your fundamentals.” The advice that you’ve given HR and TA is just great advice. Again, if you want folks to be innovative — first of all, you want all of your folks to be innovative — you got to give them the space to be innovative. Again, if you don’t, it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity, right? They’re just going to keep doing the same thing. Don’t expect anything different from them. So, I love your advice on giving people space and letting them have the freedom to make mistakes. Throw some things against the wall, try some things. Knowing full well that might not work.

William Tincup: (18:25)
Okay. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. You do something different. No one died, so it’s okay. The two things I want to unpack with you is your vision of the funnel, and also your vision of the KPIs. When you talk to people and advise, because you give people a lot of advice. When you say, “Okay, let’s take a look at your funnel,” what are you looking for them to have? If they don’t have something, that’s cool. Then you’re actually modeling it for them and showing, “Okay. Here’s the basics of what your funnel should look like.”

Shannon Pritchett: (19:04)
Right. I mirror so much to the sales and marketing process with TA. It’s uncanny how, as we just said, all three of our industries compliment each other so well. When I look at the funnel, right? Let’s talk about the top of the funnel. Inbound and outbound work so well together. Our marketing business will tell you, “Out is in, and in is out.” Right? That’s our way to promote our product, but our research tells us that outbound recruiting is so much more successful when there’s a strong employer brand, right? But I always think: when it comes to employer branding and stuff like that, it’s like, “Are the recruiters responsible for that, or can you leave that up to a marketing team or a branding team?”

Shannon Pritchett: (20:03)
Not everyone has employer branding teams. I think those two have to work so well together. Brett Coin from Okta and I. I love him. I love to hang on to his philosophies, because he is the only TA leader I know that wants to build his recruitment team exactly like a marketing team. With inbound, outbound, [inaudible 00:20:28]. All that stuff. Email marketing, et cetera. I was like, “God, that’s so freaking brilliant.” I was like, “You’re going to see some success with that.” Top of the funnel, I would say, first and foremost, you got to have some kind of automation. An AI-powered technology to help save you time, right? I’m amazed how many TA teams are still, one, relying solely on inbound, right? As in people applying to jobs to come to them, which in this type of market, a candidate-driven market, is not really the recipe for success. Unless you’re Southwest Airlines and you’re looking for a flight attendant, right? You have the luxury of 10,000 people applying an hour, but then you have to go through all of that.

William Tincup: (21:14)
That creates a different problem, but yes.

Shannon Pritchett: (21:23)
I just don’t get the whole mindset. That we’re stuck in this philosophy where we only have to use one tool, and we have to use that tool over and over again. Why can’t you expand your repertoire a little bit more and be able to pool from multiple sources at once? That’s why I think recruiters are going to be a lot more successful the more options that they have, and that shouldn’t tie back into more data sources is more time, right? Our product is one that combines 45 different data sources into one, so you can search all that stuff in one. Our product compliments LinkedIn very well. There’s a lot of overlap between our products, right? As in if your profile is publicly listed on LinkedIn, odds are it is going to be within our system as well.

Shannon Pritchett: (22:10)
Again, LinkedIn is one of the 45 different data sources in our platform, but where we shine is the automation piece. It’s as easy as uploading the job description to our platform. Boom, there are candidates matched to you. Then the AI behind that, through machine learning, can help find the right candidates that are going to match your position, right? That’s just the first piece, right? That’s the attraction piece. I don’t know if everyone needs a CRM. I’ve seen people brilliantly use CRM with different sequences to make sure it’s going to be used correctly, but I think whatever you’re using up front in the top of the funnel, as you move down the funnel, needs to integrate well with the next step. I look at companies like Humanly. I really like their approach. They’re like the gong for recruiting, where they’re recording interviews and they are using AI to help power those. Not like mistakes that we’ve seen with some interview companies using AI. They’re using it to benefit the recruiting team and the candidate team.

Shannon Pritchett: (23:20)
I look at that and I’m like, “Wow, that’s cool.” I think you need to integrate from: Whatever source you’re pulling in data needs to go to the engagement piece next, and then, again, to the interview stage, and then completely go down the funnel from there. From automatic assessments to whatever matching technology you want to use to the ATS in general, et cetera. Right? There are probably dozens of different touch points, but you got to make sure everything is talking to one another as you go down the funnel. I think that is the most important piece, because data and information will get lost. The biggest valuable asset with any single job nowadays is time. And so, if you’re not going to integrate all that, then you’re just wasting time. You can’t get that time back, unfortunately.

William Tincup: (24:10)
Nope, nope. So, your favorite part when you show HireEZ to someone that’s never seen it? Maybe they never saw Hiretual, then you show them HireEZ. What’s your favorite part to show them?

Shannon Pritchett: (24:25)
The most oohs and aahs we get is just how large our database is. It’s over 800 million candidates in there. 840 to be exact. And so, people are just amazed at how large it is. Then the second piece is the insights and the data that we have with it. We have the numbers at the top that slowly go down when you add keywords, et cetera. As you nail your search, and you start to let us know which candidates match or don’t match your search, or what you’re looking for. When you massage our machine learning a little bit, our insights get updated in real time and people absolutely get blown away.

Shannon Pritchett: (25:08)
If you’re really savvy, you can even use our underrepresented talent features to automatically power your talent pool with those underrepresented talents, or to only look at the candidates that typically don’t get included into a search as well. You have the ability to search openly, or you can focus on a particular diverse setting. Again, our metrics correspond with that as well, so you can see how diverse your current pipeline is. I think that’s just unbelievable data that typically recruiters don’t have as they search.

William Tincup: (25:46)
Sorry to interrupt, Shannon. As a hack for the audience, one of the things to think about is, this is collaboration software. In a sense of: If you’re a recruiter or sourcer, and you’re working with a hiring manager and they’ve given you a list of the 40 things that are important in this job description, you can actually get and show them while you’re adding those keywords, while you’re adding the things that are important to them, how that whittles that number down. Shannon can speak more eloquently to this than I can, but a lot of hiring managers, they just have no idea. They have no idea. When you can show them, literally get on a Zoom call and literally show them. It’s like, “Okay, you want them to have worked at NASA? Okay, cool. Then, what else? PhD from University of Texas? Yep, totally understand. Got it. Three years at Boeing? Okay, good.” You can just see that number, in real time, just going bip-bip, boop-boop. Yep, there’s four of those people. Good.

Shannon Pritchett: (26:53)
Our product is so easy, you can almost… I mean, I have a recruiting background, but when we’re about to open a new position, I always do a little bit of a… run some searches and give it to the recruitment team. Like, “This is the persona I’m looking for.” This is the last presentation I gave, this was the advice I said: “Recruiters are the gatekeeper when it comes to labor market trends and data. We’re hiring managers, or the gatekeepers, when it comes to the persona that’s best going to meet their team.” Right? They can come up with those 40 different characteristics, right? That they’re going mold that unicorn out there, and you have the ability to say, “Hey. Sorry, that doesn’t quite fit the mold. Here’s why. Here’s what we can do.”

Shannon Pritchett: (27:36)
It’s really setting those expectations up with the hiring manager, and I think that’s going to help for a more successful recruiting product. The good thing is, with our product, we talk to hiring managers. You can pull up anyone. They don’t have to have a license, they don’t have to have an account. It’s as easy as just clicking on a button and seeing everything real time. We try to make it as painless as possible for the hiring managers, while keeping all the control with the recruiter, the TA team. But yeah, that is so important. Also, William, the ultimate success for intention is when you set those realistic expectations from the get-go, because that gives recruiters a more realistic idea of who the person that they want to bring in, which is going to help them be a lot more selective when they’re trying to bring the person on that’s going to match that mold.

William Tincup: (28:29)
I love that. Okay. Last thing is I want to get your take on is buy-in questions. You’ve bought software. You’ve demoed, God, thousands of different products. Used a bunch of different things. What are questions that you love to hear? That you just know they get it when you’re asking these questions. The opposite is also true. What are questions that just make your skin crawl? They either don’t get it, or they’re not ready yet. Whatever.

Shannon Pritchett: (29:06)
Yes. The number one question I love: How can this improve my team’s metrics? My team’s KPI, right? How is your product going to help us with time to fill? How is your product going to help us increase our email response rate? When they come to us with those data-driven problems, that’s the questions I like, right? Because those are something we can speak to and address. Again, we don’t get those very often, because we don’t see a lot of people measuring their teams, right? Typically, what we see is, “Hey, your tool is out there. We’re seeing it everywhere. We really liked it and we need help sourcing. How can you guys fit in.” Right? That’s a pretty generic question. Typically, what we’re getting, where it’s not going to be successful, is when, questions I hate, “Oh, let’s just take a couple seats, and let’s try it before we buy it.”

Shannon Pritchett: (30:09)
Now, I’m a hundred percent for pilots and stuff like that. “Let’s have a short-term pilot with 30 recruiters,” or something like that. “See if it’s successful.” But if it’s not going to be widely adopted and widely used by multiple people, then we’re not overcoming that mindset, right? I think a lot of TA leaders are so quick to purchase LinkedIn, HireEZ. Any competitor that’s out there, right? Anything that’s shiny, because the budgets went up a little bit. The problem with that is: You’re giving recruiters such a wide range in selection of different products and services that tweak a little bit of everything. To me, you’re not setting yourself up for success with that, right? First off, are all the products talking to all of your ATS and your CRM? Doubtful.

Shannon Pritchett: (31:03)
If I have this huge database of different tools and stuff to use, I’m going to do the same thing that I always use. Case and point, when I work out, right? When I go to the gym. There are a ton of different equipments that I can change from, right? To get my workout in. All I care about is that I burn X amount of calories for that given day, but what do I always do first? I hop on the same treadmill. I injure my knees and I injure my hips every single time, because I know I’m not supposed to be doing that. That impact stuff, right? Tall girls are just not meant to be on treadmills, but I do it over and over again because it’s what I know, and I think recruiters have that problem as well.

Shannon Pritchett: (31:44)
If you’re coming to us because LinkedIn is becoming a problem to you, then you might have to give up that LinkedIn license to be successful with us. Typically, I feel when people just purchase, purchase, purchase and give their recruiters a choice, you’re not setting them up for success, because how are they going to adopt and get to know that product? How do they know if that product is going to be the ultimate one for them when they have so many different options?

William Tincup: (32:13)
Drops mic, walks off stage. I wish you had a magic wand and you could just make this happen, because you’re absolutely right. I mean, at the end of the day, if people don’t whole just buy in and they just go all in, you’re going to get… Some people will adopt and love it, but others won’t because we’re creatures of habit. Shannon, thank you so much for your time today. I absolutely love the rebrand. I love what you’ve done. I love the mission, love the name. Everything you’ve touched has just been gold.

Shannon Pritchett: (32:48)
Well, thank you. I appreciate it. It’s my privilege. My best part of my day, being on with you. I’m looking forward to seeing you at the next event.

William Tincup: (32:57)
Awesome. Thanks for everyone listening to the Use Case Podcast. Until next time.

Music: (33:03)
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