Brad Goldoor, Cofounder of Phenom People

Brad Goldoor: This is Brad Goldoor, co-founder and chief people officer at Phenom People, and I'm next on the Rec Tech podcast. Announcer: Welcome to Rec Tech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world, along with recruiters who'll tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell. Chris Russell: That's right. It's time for Rec Tech, the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology inspired conversations. Today's show is a vendor edition, but first, the Rec Tech podcast is sponsored as always by our friends at Hiretual, the recruiter's best friend. Hiretual's AI engine is a personal sourcing assistant that works for you 24/7. You can conduct email marketing campaigns, source candidates automatically much more through the new version three interface, so if you want to source more candidates, check out Hiretual, find them on the web at hiretual.com. CONNECT WITH CHRIS: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmrussell/ Chris Russell: As the chief people officer at Pennsylvania-based Phenom People, Brad Goldoor manages the talent acquisition team and talent development functions, including interviewing, onboarding and employee engagement. Before that, he spent several years as their VP of business development. Phenom has recently secured $22 million series B funding from investors such as Axa Venture Partners, but today he's on Rec Tech. Brad, welcome to the show, it's great to have you. Brad Goldoor: Thank you. Chris Russell: I'm curious, I want to start the conversation by asking you about your transition from biz dev into talent acquisition, not a typical career path, but what's that been like so far for you? Brad Goldoor: Absolutely. You know, everybody in an organization, in my opinion, is always selling, they're always selling something, whether that's internally or externally. I took the skillset of selling our product to our customers, and started using that skillset to sell the company to potential candidates, and selling all the benefits and our growth trajectory and our innovation, and everything that's unique about our company and our culture, and putting those sales skills to the test on, again, selling the opportunity and selling the company to those potential candidates. Chris Russell: Yeah. Like recruiting is sales and marketing, as they say. What did you learn from working in biz dev that really serves you well in your recruiting role now, would you say? Brad Goldoor: Sure. It's all about people, as I had said earlier, and it's being able to read those people, and being that chameleon in changing as necessary to the different personalities, and making sure you're catering to those different personality types and changing your pitch accordingly. That's been a natural transition, to move that over to recruiting. Chris Russell: Gotcha. Just to set the stage for us, how big is Phenom People terms of employee base and what's the size of your GA team there? Brad Goldoor: Yeah, we're 350 global employees, and we have a global team of seven. Chris Russell: Seven, okay. This wasn't on my original list, but besides your own software, Brad, for what tools do you guys have in house for sourcing or using other parts of the recruiting process? Can you name a few for us? Brad Goldoor: Sure. We do use Glass door, we use Comparably, we of course use LinkedIn as a sourcing tool, and as you had mentioned, of course our own tool. Chris Russell: Do you guys do a lot of sourcing internally overall, is that a big function? Brad Goldoor: Yeah, we do do a decent amount of sourcing, we've been able to leverage a lot of our news and press, and use that as a tool to attract talent. By promoting a lot of the awards we win, we find that's a very effective sourcing tool as well. Chris Russell: Yeah, I do see a lot of your press releases out there in the ecosystem, so that's interesting. Press releases could work, I guess, right? Brad Goldoor: Absolutely. We have a very large depth of content for a company of our size and stage, and we've been able to use and leverage that working closely with marketing. Recruitment is marketing, in my opinion, and so leveraging all those marketing efforts and all those awards that our marketing team that has helped us win at this point has been a really effective tool and draw, in that people are attracted right to good news and growth and big things happening, and so we've been able to leverage that very nicely. Chris Russell: Yeah. Just curious, do you use one platform for the press releases, in terms of publishing them, or what do you use for that? Brad Goldoor: As far as the press releases, we do use a PR firm to push them out, and so we rely on them to get that out into the appropriate media outlet. Chris Russell: Gotcha. I was reading some of your site and some releases before the call, you guys describe yourselves as talent relationship management, TRM. Is that a way to kind of differentiate yourself in the market from your competitors, who are just going to call themselves, you know everyone's using the term CRM these days, or candidate relationship marketing. Tell me more about that, that phrase, that acronym that you're trying to define for yourself. Brad Goldoor: Sure. Yes, you know we're bringing a unique and differentiated innovative product to market, and we are also choosing a different name along those lines, and it is actually talent relationship marketing. We believe that this function is being disrupted, and a behavior change is in place to start looking at analytics and campaigns and conversions, similar to marketing. It's a broad category for recruitment marketing, but we're pointing it as talent relationship marketing and taking our tool to market in that way. Chris Russell: Okay. Tell me more about how the Phenom platform helps employers become better marketers at their jobs. I know you've got about five different products in this suite there, but let's go a little bit deeper for me, and tell me more about how it actually works and what it does. Brad Goldoor: Sure. We start by attracting candidates in a personalized career site, giving them that Amazon-like experience on the front end, and as a result, we find the candidates are willing to stay longer, share more data, and have a more engaging experience. As a result of that, we're able to collect more data and make that data meaningful on the back end for recruiters and hiring managers. Then we leverage that into an analytics tool so they can start to look at source attribution, you know time of stay, digging into those analytics and making some data-driven decisions based off of what they're seeing in those analytics. We then move over to the CRM module of it, which allows you to push out proactive nurturing campaigns and target passive talent, somebody who may have come and visited the site, used their LinkedIn profile for some personalized recommendations. Brad Goldoor: Though they didn't apply to a job, we can now take that audience and segment it and market specifically to those people who came and showed some intent but didn't necessarily apply, and nurture them through the process, and again, look at more analytics on what's converting, what's not, and how those results end up. Then the last piece to the platform, we take that internally to an internal mobility module where we're hosting an internal-only career site, and enabling and allowing employee referrals to be done from that part of the platform. Chris Russell: Going back to the career site for a second and the Amazon experience around the apply process, do you kind of have more of a one-click apply or an easy way to apply to job these days? It's kind of a big candidate experience a problem out there, but how do you guys handle it? Brad Goldoor: Microsoft is actually one of our