Serge Boudreau, Manager of Talent Acquisition at BURNCO

Serge Boudreau is the Manager of Talent Acquisition at Calgary based BURNCO Rock Products. With his job board background he is revamping their recruitment process from a marketer's perspective. LI: post mentioned: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6620785258625409024 Serge Boudreau: This is Serge Boudreau, manager of talent acquisition at BURNCO Rock Products, and I'm next on the RecTech podcast. Speaker 2: Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who will tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now, here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell. Chris Russell: All right. You're listening to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology-inspired conversations. We're all about the new tools and tactics to land more talent. Today's episode is a practitioner edition. RecTech Podcast sponsored in part at our friends at Emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. You want to get superstars in demand and on the move, Emissary is the easiest way to connect with them faster and more effectively wherever they are. Each recruiter seat you get on Emissary gets their own phone number to use as their primary phone number for candidate conversations. All those conversations are stored in the text inbox on Emissary. You choose the area code, so each of your recruiters will get a 10-digit the candidate sees when they receive the message. They can have the option for call forwarding to their cell or office line. Go to Emisarry.ai, self-schedule a demo, let them know you heard it on the RecTech Podcast. Chris Russell: He's at the top. Serge Boudreau runs talent acquisition for BURNCO Rock Products out of Calgary, Alberta. He's also a listener of the show, so I'm extremely glad he's about to make is RecTech debut. Serge, welcome. Serge Boudreau: Thank you, Chris. I'm very excited to be here or talking to you. Definitely, I've been listening to your podcast almost since the inception, so for you to ask me to come onboard was very exciting on my end. Chris Russell: Awesome. I always love it when I get a listener on the show itself. So appreciate that volunteering there. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile before we get started today. You got an interesting background overall. I want to start there, I think. You've worked time at Kelly Services. You worked at Indeed Canada and also Workopolis. I'm assuming you were there at Workopolis when the takeover happened by Indeed. Would that be a correct assumption? Serge Boudreau: Actually, no. Chris Russell: Oh. Serge Boudreau: I was at Indeed when Indeed purchased Workopolis, which was very interesting. Chris Russell: Okay. So the reverse, okay. Serge Boudreau: Yeah, I actually had joined Indeed already. It was interesting. Like you said, my background is quite varied. I actually started my career in talent acquisition as a recruiter. Then got promoted in through a different recruitment manager roles. Then decide to really go on the vendor side and go at Workopolis. During that time, Workopolis was very dominant here in Canada as far as the job site of choice. I think it was really Workopolis and Monster had quite a bit of market share here as well. I had the pleasure of being in charge of sales and operation for Western Canada and Quebec for a while. I do speak French as well, but spent quite a bit of time there. Unfortunately, when Indeed came into the market or fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, it really took a lot of market share and really hurt Workopolis. Serge Boudreau: Eventually, pretty much led to Indeed acquiring in that point, but a couple factors that happened is here in Western Canada, especially in Calgary, it's very oil and gas focused, the industry. So in 2014 when oil and gas just crashed, also did the recruitment aspects of it. It really put Workopolis in strain in Western Canada, hence I moved to Kelly Services, which was actually my first foray in a staffing firm. I learned a lot, both on the permanent placement, but mostly, we did a lot of contract for contract workers for large oil and gas. A lot of the workforce became a contract workforce as they were hiring just based on the economy. Serge Boudreau: Then had the pleasure to do a very similar role at Indeed where I basically led the Western sales team here in Canada. I did Quebec for a while as well there, so it was kind of going back to my old days at Workopolis. Then one day, we acquired Workopolis, and it felt like the old Godfather line, "When you think you're out, they pull you back in." It's how I felt. I have so many great memories and everything at Workopolis, but, obviously, Indeed in the Canadian marketplace and also in the US has been very dominant. Chris Russell: Yeah. Rumor has it that ZipRecruiter was also trying to bid for Workopolis. Do you know if that's true or not? Serge Boudreau: I've heard similar rumors. Yeah, there's a couple of other. The other rumors I've heard, there was also other Canadian players that were looking to basically going around Workopolis. In Canada, just to give you a landscape, there was Workopolis. Obviously, the normal American job board, so CareerBuilder, Monster, but there's a Quebec job board that's making a lot of inroads in Canada was Jobillico. There was rumors they were potentially trying to acquire Workopolis. Obviously, Nubo or now Talent.com, there's rumors they were in the picture, but I don't exactly what happened in the end of the day, but I'd be shocked if ZipRecruiter was not part of that conversation for sure just because Workopolis brand was so strong in Canada. Chris Russell: Yeah, totally. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for that history lesson there, Serge. Tell me about more about what you guys hire for there at BURNCO and I'm curious to talk to me a little bit the size of your recruiting team there, and how many people they are, and how many recs you guys are looking to fill this year, and things like that. Serge Boudreau: Yeah. No. BURNCO Rock Products is an interesting business. We basically take big rocks and make them into small rocks to really simplify what we do, but a lot of people. We operate in Canada and the US. In Canada, concrete. So you've seen those concrete mixer trucks. We do asphalt aggregate, which is basically the foundation of construction for highways, anything like that. We also run supply, basically landscape supply, landscape, hardscape supplies to retail stores for contractors and for basically the weekend landscape person that's coming in to get a bag of rocks or get some landscape stones or whatever the case is. In the US, we're heavily focused on concrete and aggregate. We have operations in Texas and in Colorado. Serge Boudreau: The great majority of what we hire and the biggest challenge, as you're probably well aware of, is drivers. Our drivers in Texas and Colorado, it's a massive challenge as everyone is seeing in the industry of all type of driving jobs. In Canada, very similar, but we also hire in Canada anything from head office. We do from IT roles to anything across the board. Our structure is a little bit different as far as how much we recruit. In total, we hire around 550 people a year. Very small team. When it comes to recruitment, it's a little bit of a structure. How my role falls into play is basically I'm responsible for the creation and the governance of our whole talent acquisition strategy. The great majority of the actual execution is done by our HR business partners that's responsible for each business division. I do have a team of coordinators and also recruiters to assist, but the lead on the intake on the role from the hiring manager is done by the HR business partner or the HR manager in that particular location comes to us. Serge Boudreau: The biggest part of my