Talent Automation

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[00:00:43] Hi there, welcome to episode 613

[00:00:47] of Recruiting Future with me Matt Alder.

[00:00:51] As I've said many times before, automation in recruiting an HR is inevitable.

[00:00:57] This means that every TA and HR leader should be thinking strategically about automation,

[00:01:03] its implications and, most importantly, the value it can add.

[00:01:09] So what are the benefits of automation?

[00:01:12] And where and how should talent functions be automated?

[00:01:15] My guest this week is Brandon Samoot, Chief People Officer at Zappia.

[00:01:20] Automation is in Zappia's corporate DNA

[00:01:23] and they're successfully using it to drive their talent density strategy

[00:01:27] through automation in recruiting, onboarding and skills development.

[00:01:32] Hi Brandon and welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:36] Thank you, good to be with you Matt.

[00:01:37] An absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

[00:01:40] Please could you introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

[00:01:43] I sure we can.

[00:01:44] I am Brandon Samoot.

[00:01:46] I serve as the Chief People Officer at a company called Zappia.

[00:01:51] Zappia is in the business of making automation work for everyone

[00:01:54] and we do that by providing no code tools for people and organizations

[00:02:00] to build much of their businesses at Zappia.

[00:02:03] Fantastic, give us a sense of how many people in the organization?

[00:02:06] The team at Zappia today has about 750 folks

[00:02:09] and one of the distinctive things about Zappia, a 13-year-old company

[00:02:15] is that it started as an all remote company,

[00:02:17] meaning that we could hire and collaborate with teammates from all over the world.

[00:02:23] And so practically today, that means that our 750 teammates live in over 40 countries.

[00:02:29] Now I know that a real focus for your business in terms of the talent that you have

[00:02:35] is talent density.

[00:02:37] It may be a phrase that some people listening to the podcast aren't familiar with.

[00:02:41] What does that mean in the context of your organization?

[00:02:46] At Zappia, we think about talent density as the extent to which people and teams

[00:02:51] are fully living into their accountabilities in the organization.

[00:02:55] And specifically when it comes to things like productivity or performance

[00:02:59] that they're able to do that per person in a way that is atypical.

[00:03:05] So if you take someone in customer support or on sales for example,

[00:03:09] we ask the question, what would need to be true for an individual customer support person

[00:03:14] or individual sales leader to be able to do more, produce more measurably

[00:03:21] than if they were doing the same job in another organization?

[00:03:25] And we think a lot about the different levers that we can pull to enable folks

[00:03:29] to be unusually impactful in their work.

[00:03:32] And it could talk a little bit later about why that matters for us.

[00:03:34] Yeah, I mean, and that's obviously super interesting.

[00:03:38] What has been your strategy for achieving that, for building that within the business?

[00:03:43] Well, there's one thing that we believe that is part of the anchor for this talent density strategy

[00:03:47] and it actually starts with Zappia's mission.

[00:03:49] Right? Again, Zappia's mission is to make automation work for everyone.

[00:03:53] We believe that things like automation can abstract a lot of tedium out of so many jobs that exist today

[00:04:01] so that what's left for us to do are the things that are more uniquely human,

[00:04:06] the things that people do best.

[00:04:08] And what personally motivates me about this talent density strategy

[00:04:12] aside from it being like an unusually good fit with what Zappia's out there doing with our customers

[00:04:17] is that it is a talent strategy that, yes, like can help the business operate more effectively.

[00:04:24] It will help a business operate in a more financially efficient way.

[00:04:28] But when you think about what a talent density strategy can do for people's work,

[00:04:32] the amount of learning and growth that can come with that

[00:04:34] when more of the job are things that are like uniquely human to do.

[00:04:38] You think about what that means for employee engagement and retention.

[00:04:42] You kind of get doubly excited because if we're going to lean into this strategy effectively,

[00:04:47] we are going to operate as Zappia that is more successful in serving our customers

[00:04:51] and we are going to run a company that isn't unusually growth oriented in amazing place for it.

[00:04:57] Fantastic stuff. And how does that kind of strategy reflect in the way that you recruit people,

[00:05:02] the way that you sort of do, the way that you develop people?

[00:05:04] What are the, what are the kind of the levers that you can pull to kind of realize it?

[00:05:08] Absolutely. Well, let's start at the kind of the beginning of the employee life cycle

[00:05:12] when folks are first starting to get to know the company.

[00:05:15] So we do a couple things there at the recruiting stage.

[00:05:18] One is we try to be unusually transparent about what it is like to work with Zappia.

[00:05:23] Again, Zappia is an all remote company and even though many of us worked remotely during the pandemic,

[00:05:29] even to this day, very few of us in the workforce have ever worked at a,

[00:05:33] at an all remote company. Certainly not one that started that way.

[00:05:37] And so Zappia works in some fairly distinctive ways.

[00:05:39] We work across time zones by doing a lot of work asynchronously rather than having more of a meeting heavy culture.

[00:05:46] Just as an example, it is also a fairly writing heavy culture because writing things down

[00:05:52] as one of the best ways to make sure information is available to everyone all over the world

[00:05:56] no matter when during the day they are working.

[00:05:58] And so there are some things that are distinctive about what it's like to work at Zappia

[00:06:01] and we really lead with those during the recruiting experience.

[00:06:06] You know, we don't believe that Zappia or any company needs to be the perfect match for every candidate.

[00:06:11] We just want to be really clear about for whom we might be a good match.

[00:06:16] And so, you know, to create really a two way decision, you know,

[00:06:19] there's a lot of focus on, you know, the work of the company to decide whether to offer to a candidate.

[00:06:25] But we try to put an equal focus on making sure that the candidate can make

[00:06:29] a really informed decision about whether they want to join us if we make an offer.

[00:06:34] So it really starts there in terms of alignment.

[00:06:38] And that relates to talent density because if you hire folks in the company

[00:06:42] who whose experience is different what they expected, you know, that can impair their engagement.

[00:06:47] It's okay as they just practically impair their ability to do their job really well.

[00:06:51] And so we start there.

[00:06:53] There's another thing that we do during the recruiting stage increasingly

[00:06:57] around assessing the extent to which folks operate and what we would call a T-shaped voice.

[00:07:03] And what we mean by that is you think about, you know, the letter T, you know, that vertical bar.

[00:07:09] You know, we talk about like subject matter expertise.

[00:07:11] If we're hiring a marketer, we're certainly looking for, you know, domain expertise in marketing.

[00:07:17] The top of the T, the broad horizontal area is the other piece of the pie.

[00:07:24] And with that, we're looking at, you know, yes, we're looking for someone who is a subject matter expert in marketing.

[00:07:29] But can they do some copywriting?

[00:07:32] Can they do, you know, what are the adjacent skills that may not be like squarely in the typical job description for that role?

[00:07:38] But where if we can find someone that conflicts a little bit adjacently,

[00:07:43] they can actually do more and not have to like hand things off quite so much to other folks.

[00:07:47] There's a lot of kind of coordination tax or time loss and handing things off from one person to another to another.

[00:07:54] And so where we reasonably can, we're looking for what we call T-shaped talent

[00:07:58] so that folks are able to take more complete ownership over their work,

[00:08:01] which in addition to being more satisfying for folks that can do that,

[00:08:05] also again reduces handoffs and therefore some of the coordination tax of running a large organization.

[00:08:11] So that's just the recruiting stage.

[00:08:13] We'll pause there to see if that evokes anything.

[00:08:14] Yeah. No, I think that's definitely really interesting

[00:08:18] and that sort of makes a lot of sense in terms of kind of how you build that within the business.

[00:08:23] I mean, how does it go from there?

[00:08:24] How do you sort of with the changing sort of nature of skills that are out there at the moment

[00:08:29] with skills going out of date so quickly?

[00:08:31] How do you sort of follow through and make sure people have the skills they need to do their jobs moving forward?

[00:08:36] Absolutely. Well, you know, I'd be remiss if I didn't name automation as one of the ways that we're building talent density.

[00:08:43] And so we don't it is we do actually have a bigger amount of folks apply to jobs in Zapier

[00:08:48] who are in fact also customers of Zapier.

[00:08:51] And that can be really interesting for a variety of reasons.

[00:08:54] One, they already kind of understand the mission, what we're trying to do in the world.

[00:08:57] They're familiar with the product, which is helpful in many of the obvious ways.

[00:09:02] Like if you're doing customer support, for example, it's great to come in and already know how to use the product a little bit,

[00:09:06] although we don't expect that thing in sales and many other roles.

[00:09:10] The other thing that's helpful, you know, whether you come in with those skills

[00:09:14] or we develop them once you join Zapier is that we use a lot of Zapier at Zapier.

[00:09:19] Automate things that otherwise people would be doing by hand so that they can use more of their time to do the things that are uniquely for people to do.

[00:09:27] And we do a Zapier's onboarding experience just to give an example, pretty extensive.

[00:09:33] It lasts really six months in total.

[00:09:36] And a lot of those kind of like training moments that happen throughout those six months

[00:09:41] are also automated based on like timing or different triggers in there for six months of the employee experience.

[00:09:47] It's a remarkable program.

[00:09:49] I went through it, you know, scarcely two and a half years ago and it really stood out for me and a lot of respect for the team that maintains it here at Zapier.

[00:09:57] But to get right back to your question, one of the next most important ways that we build talent density is by making sure that our team has the skills to use automation

[00:10:08] and, you know, these days AI and their daily work.

[00:10:10] And if you're curious, we could talk a little bit about that because we made a pretty concerted effort on AI skill development about a year ago.

[00:10:17] That has produced a really useful result for the company.

[00:10:21] No, fantastic. Very keen to dig into that in a second.

[00:10:24] I suppose before we do, I just want to dig a little bit more into some of the things that you talked about in terms of automation.

[00:10:31] Very familiar with Zapier personally, you know, I use your product and it is amazing.

[00:10:35] It's almost magical in terms of some of the things that it does.

[00:10:39] So it's not surprising that a lot of the stuff that you do is run on that system and is automated.

[00:10:46] You mentioned the onboarding there and that being that sort of automated process.

[00:10:51] How does it feel to go through that?

[00:10:53] Because I'm guessing that some people who are listening might be thinking that this is being managed by robots.

[00:10:59] It's not personal.

[00:11:00] You're taking the humanity out of the process.

[00:11:02] What's the experience actually like?

[00:11:04] It's a really good question because it brings us to a really important point.

[00:11:09] The best applications of automation that I have seen in the Zapier onboarding experience is a good example of this.

[00:11:16] Actually makes things more personal at scale, not like.

[00:11:20] And here's what I mean by that.

[00:11:22] If you're doing a scaled new hire onboarding experience, for example, if you were doing it all by hand,

[00:11:27] it could be hard to like personalize training modules or content for each individual and to create these custom agendas.

[00:11:34] And I know this because I've done this in the past.

[00:11:38] In another organization, it's meaningful if you can do it because again, like someone joins the company and they can see that real

[00:11:44] consideration was put into their experience.

[00:11:46] It's not all entirely cookie cutter.

[00:11:48] That can be hard to maintain at scale, especially if you're running a lean team,

[00:11:53] which is the case for so many organizations that we work with.

[00:11:56] And so by using automation, you can actually automate the personalization of a new hire onboarding agenda.

[00:12:04] And so the received experience for the new hire, it looks and feels very personalized.

[00:12:10] Someone thought after me when they were creating this, but we're able to do it scalably with help from automation.

[00:12:17] And so we think about automation in so many ways across the company, not as a replacement for people doing the work.

[00:12:23] We have a brilliant leader who continues to maintain and design and scale our onboarding program, for example.

[00:12:29] But as a helper and ironically, a helper in ways that sometimes can take things that are hard to personalize at scale

[00:12:35] and actually unlock the ability to actually personalize those things.

[00:12:39] Which again, from a received experience on the front end, you can actually feel more human,

[00:12:43] although ironically on the back end, there's a lot of automation powering it.

[00:12:47] And I suppose the interesting thing about that is when we sort of talk about automation,

[00:12:51] it's always about automating these processes and things like that.

[00:12:55] But there's obviously been a huge amount of experience, design and human thought

[00:12:59] and empathy that's gone into building that process.

[00:13:02] Oh, certainly. Absolutely. And this is where again, and we think about AI in a similar way as like automation AI

[00:13:08] as the heroes cape as a co-pilot.

[00:13:12] And with our customers, we end up in a lot of similar conversations,

[00:13:16] which is how do I take the team I have today?

[00:13:19] How can I use something like that for your AI to make us capable of more together?

[00:13:24] Rather than as a substitute for human creativity.

[00:13:29] And does that work back through the time acquisition process as well?

[00:13:33] Are there levels of automation within your recruitment process?

[00:13:37] A great deal.

[00:13:38] And then to your point from like Music Center design,

[00:13:40] we try to be thoughtful about the places where we're going to apply automation and AI

[00:13:44] to help in the places where we will not.

[00:13:47] And so in our talent acquisition workflow, for example,

[00:13:50] we use plenty of automation to automate sourcing of candidates,

[00:13:54] which then we have a kind of a human touch working through everything.

[00:13:57] A human is that you're still reviewed 100% of applications of the company.

[00:14:01] So there are products these days where you can use AI to do some,

[00:14:04] you know, automated screening ahead of the week shows and not to do that for us personally

[00:14:09] for the kind of the type of reviews that we're trying to do.

[00:14:12] We don't think the technology is there yet to inspire the confidence that we would need

[00:14:16] to automate that particular workflow.

[00:14:19] But we do use it for everything from scheduling to certain types of outreach and follow-up.

[00:14:23] And we can customize a lot of that using automation as well.

[00:14:26] But actually another great example of how you can actually create more personalization

[00:14:29] using automation than what a team would ordinarily be able to pull off

[00:14:33] doing it entirely by hand.

[00:14:35] But at Zapier, all applications are reviewed by humans

[00:14:39] and all assessments are done by humans.

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[00:15:54] You mentioned earlier about the kind of skills that you've identified them in working on

[00:15:58] in terms of what people will need or what people do need in a kind of environment of automation and AI.

[00:16:05] And I know that lots of people listening will be looking to the future

[00:16:10] and looking at automation and looking at AI and how it's changing things like time

[00:16:14] acquisition and HR and wondering what are the skills that they need to work on

[00:16:19] or develop to continue their career in this changing world.

[00:16:23] What have you found?

[00:16:24] Well, I think you just said one of the key phrases which is in this changing world.

[00:16:28] Just to give an example, a year ago we declared, we called it an AI Code Red.

[00:16:35] It was an AI call to action for the entire company and we've been building with AI

[00:16:39] in our product for some time.

[00:16:41] But with Gen AI coming to the forefront culturally,

[00:16:46] there was a real opportunity for us to go from kind of dabbling

[00:16:50] to really putting it towards the center of how we were building for customers

[00:16:55] and similarly how we were thinking about upscaling the Zapier team itself.

[00:17:01] And it was a somewhat jarring experience for a lot of the company at first.

[00:17:04] Zapier had never done kind of a call to action quite like this before

[00:17:08] and we had to be really clear about what the opportunity was,

[00:17:13] what we needed from folks and also importantly like when you're doing

[00:17:16] a call to action like that, what it's not.

[00:17:18] We weren't trying to create alarm or fear or anxiety

[00:17:21] but we were trying to create focus and purpose on this topic.

[00:17:25] And one of the things we did practically around skilling the workforce

[00:17:28] in generative AI and prompting in particular is we said, hey, at Zapier

[00:17:33] we have a tradition of everyone in the company having personal growth goals

[00:17:37] in addition to performance oriented goals.

[00:17:40] And so for some length of time last year we said for the first time

[00:17:43] we're actually going to ask everyone to have the same personal growth goal

[00:17:47] and that personal growth goal is to find at least one meaningful way

[00:17:51] to put generative AI to work for you in your daily work.

[00:17:56] And we're all going to do that from Wade, our CEO,

[00:17:58] through our executive team all throughout the organization.

[00:18:01] We were all going to learn together.

[00:18:02] We created a company-wide Slack panel where folks could share questions.

[00:18:07] No questions off the table or no silly questions on how to get started

[00:18:10] with Gen AI and we had a variety of folks that were further

[00:18:13] in their skilling journey answering a lot of those questions.

[00:18:16] We created a kind of repository of knowledge around use cases

[00:18:22] or ways to put it to work for you in your job.

[00:18:26] And we went from there and what's interesting then we also started measuring

[00:18:29] asking folks whether this is actually happening.

[00:18:32] Like are you now able to use AI in your daily work?

[00:18:36] And the last time we measured this was fairly recently.

[00:18:39] 70% of the company said yes or a strong yet to being able

[00:18:44] to use AI in their daily work and 70% is an 100%.

[00:18:48] But if we dialed back to a year ago,

[00:18:50] that number would have been in the single digits.

[00:18:52] So meaningful progress there.

[00:18:54] And when you look at the examples of how folks are using it,

[00:18:56] you do get that benefit that we talked about earlier.

[00:18:59] You can see folks using it in ways they're enabling them

[00:19:02] to increase their overall performance or productivity.

[00:19:05] But then when you talk about what it means for them

[00:19:07] in their daily work, right?

[00:19:09] Like they're able to spend more time doing the things

[00:19:11] personally, like they enjoy doing more.

[00:19:13] It can help folks actually reduce anxiety at work

[00:19:16] by removing things like writer's block

[00:19:18] or translating content from one language

[00:19:21] to their first language and so on.

[00:19:23] So there are all kinds of really interesting applications here,

[00:19:26] but that has been a big focus for us.

[00:19:28] So obviously you're a company that's on the cutting edge of this

[00:19:32] and that's reflected in your talent strategies

[00:19:34] and what you do with your people.

[00:19:36] Where do you think this is all going?

[00:19:38] What's the future of work going to look like?

[00:19:41] What are we likely to be talking about

[00:19:43] if we have this conversation again in five years time?

[00:19:46] You know, the truly vulnerable answer on that

[00:19:50] is I'm not sure, but I can tell you what I think it will depend on.

[00:19:54] One thing I think it will depend on is regulation,

[00:19:57] mainly around AI.

[00:19:59] So if we end up in a highly regulated environment,

[00:20:03] I think that points to like a different

[00:20:05] and maybe narrow set of opportunities

[00:20:08] than if we have a lighter approach.

[00:20:11] And I don't know what...

[00:20:12] I don't know what the right approach is

[00:20:14] because I think we're all still getting our heads in our hands

[00:20:16] around what the technology can do.

[00:20:19] And part of the reason I think that's interesting

[00:20:21] and challenging right now

[00:20:22] is because the answer to that question

[00:20:23] fits, it feels like on a monthly or quarterly basis.

[00:20:26] That's really fast.

[00:20:28] So the regulatory environment feels like a big question mark

[00:20:30] and I don't have a good sense of where that will go

[00:20:33] and I personally don't have a great sense of what I think

[00:20:35] a good answer is, but I think that we'll have a lot of influence

[00:20:38] over which applications of AI are ultimately allowable

[00:20:42] and therefore how that influences folks.

[00:20:45] I also think there's a big open question around

[00:20:47] who comes out ahead with AI?

[00:20:50] You know, a new technology sometimes can shift

[00:20:52] the relationship between employees and their employers

[00:20:55] and sometimes it can shift the balance of power

[00:20:57] either from employers to employees or vice versa.

[00:21:00] That's something I'm paying a lot of attention to.

[00:21:03] But again, a big question mark there.

[00:21:05] Brandon, thank you very much for talking to me.

[00:21:07] It's a pleasure, Matt. Thank you.

[00:21:09] My thanks to Brandon.

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[00:21:59] Bye.