Recruitment Down Under: The APSCo Australia Podcast
Recruitment Down Under: The APSCo Australia Podcast
Transformative CRM strategies with Joe Duffy from TargetRecruit
Welcome to Recruitment Down Under. This episode features Joe Duffy from TargetRecruit Australia. Joe and APSCo's Lesley Horsburgh discuss the CRM market, Salesforce benefits, project management, collaboration, AI in Salesforce, and overall recruitment trends.
This episode is packed with expert advice and practical tips for those looking to successfully master their CRM projects.
Welcome to Recruitment Down Under. In this episode we hear from Joe Duffy from Target Recruit Australia. In this insightful one-on-one conversation with APSCO's Leslie Horsburgh, Joe discusses a range of topics from the CRM market to the benefits of Salesforce and managing implementation projects, and the benefits of Salesforce and managing implementation projects and the art of collaboration. Of course, we discuss AI and the opportunities and capabilities that exist across Salesforce and some other general trends. So thank you for listening to Recruitment Down Under, and now over to our host, Lesley Horsbrough. Host Lesley Horsbrough.
Speaker 2:Joe hi, Thank you for joining me today and welcome to our podcast. How are you?
Speaker 3:Not bad, lesley. Thank you very much. Good to hear you and Joe Rogan, I'd imagine up on the top of the podcast. Yeah, very close.
Speaker 2:It's neck and neck at the moment.
Speaker 3:I think I'm delighted to be on the show. We are the first one we've ever done.
Speaker 2:To be honest, I know, I know, first yeah, first of many maybe yeah hopefully.
Speaker 2:See if you behave yourself. So, for the benefit of everyone that's listening to this and we've got listeners far and wide, because our podcast is is out there for for all who care to listen and we know we've got regular listeners listeners, excuse me, in um europe, uh, south africa, canada, um, obviously, uh, all of asia pack. Um, it would be great for you to just give us a little bit of introduction to yourself, but also a little bit of background about Target, recruit and, of course, salesforce.
Speaker 3:Wow, ok, no problem. Yeah, so I suppose myself I'm an Irish guy who's obviously lived here for a number of years. I did try and go back and live in Ireland for a few years and I just missed the weather, so I did come back.
Speaker 2:the start of January so my background is recruitment.
Speaker 3:I've been a recruiter for a number of years in Sydney. Then I pivoted to software sales. I worked for the likes of Oracle, I worked for Kong and I worked for Salesforce over a number of years and then, when I came back to Australia, I got an opportunity to join a business that was looking to establish its presence in the region, which gave me a really good opportunity. So I left Salesforce and moved to Australia and set up a division for target recruits in Australia, which is good. So in terms of target recruits, know, I'm really excited about sales force, by the way, so I'm a very passionate salesforce advocate and so I'm extremely biased, just so you know. Um, target recruit is an applicant tracking system that's built on the salesforce platform. Right and we. It was set up about 15 years ago in the US to facilitate a lot of complexities around traveling nurses around the US. So the business won a lot within healthcare, allied health, doctor recruitment, nursing over in the States, and that's just grown since then.
Speaker 3:We've got some really great people in our business um, chris jordans, our cto, we led robert half through their salesforce implementation. We've our vp of sales now has spent the last 15 years at allegiance. So we're um, we're growing quite fast globally. We've set up an office in the uk and one in in australia, so, um, things are going really well. I've set up an office in the UK and one in Australia, so things are going really well. I've set it up, as I said, it's an applicant tracking system and CRM built on the Salesforce platform, and that just means that all of the infrastructure, the platform, the tool that Target Recruit sits on, is all Salesforce. So we get to leverage a lot of their innovation, a lot of their amazing tool set and and we build an application on top of salesforce and that covers their recruitment and staffing industry in terms of their workflows and their technology. So, um, yeah, it's, it's uh, there's just a lot to it. I'm really enjoying it so far.
Speaker 2:Right, that's good. So I'll ask you a bit later, or get you to talk a bit later about, I guess, the compatibility between Salesforce and our market, our recruitment market.
Speaker 2:But first of all, let's unpick this mammoth beast that everybody perceives Salesforce to be. Look at, you know what is it really? Who is it for? Is it only for the big boys? Because I think that is very much a perception out in the marketplace. You know, for people that are not in that enterprise level, you know large end of town, what can it? You know, for people that are are not in that enterprise level, you know, large end of town, what can it? You know what. Why should they even consider it? Because I think there's lots of, perhaps, myths around salesforce and who is who it's actually applicable to yeah, yeah, interestingly enough, um, it is a bit of a myth.
Speaker 3:Um, salesforce does have a bit of a reputation for for em know, for being used by large global multinational organizations, and I've actually looked into this a little bit and there's a bit 49% of Salesforce entire customer base, which quits to about 75,000 customers that are under 50 users. So half of their customer base is less than 50 employees and they've about 10 is a thousand plus, and the rest is that mid-range between 50 and a thousand users. So it is a system or a platform uh, that that is. You know that's being used by smaller organizations for its um ability to scale. If we kind of bring it back to the bare bones and to be really simplistic about it, it's a really good relational database for storing customer information and it's really good for capturing profiles of people, whether that's consumers, clients, candidates, whoever it is. So we see it being used in every industry. You know, retail, if you go buy a handbag, or if you're buying a car, or if you're purchasing an airline ticket or banks, they're all doing the same thing. They're building a profile of that person in order to improve, you know, their customers' experience and to make more money out of them. Essentially, and that's the same, it couldn't be more true to recruitment, because that's essentially what you're doing You're capturing all of the conversations, all of the information that you gather on both clients and candidates, and you're storing them in a really good relational database.
Speaker 3:The second element is that Salesforce is incredible at business. It's like a business process optimization engine. So, you know, it gives you a huge tool set for you to be able to build and automate and integrate and configure and customize, and I think just the the depth of their platform gets people a bit afraid, do you know, gets people a little bit overwhelmed. But essentially, you can start getting your business onto the salesforce platform. Uh, you know, it would take 10 licenses of target recruit and your business is using the salesforce platform because it comes on it.
Speaker 3:So it's, it's um, it's something I feel is just a bit overlooked and people tend to just, I would say, for an easier way of looking at it would go down the route of well, let's just look at something that's either out of the box versus a platform, and I think that's been a challenge in this region and I think they haven't really undressed a lot of the pains that comes with that avenue. So, yeah, I think it's something that's growing. I think, with all of the things like data security, data regulation, data privacy and just giving the customers the ability to control and change and amend things, I think it's a really exciting space right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and what if you had to kind of summarise why it works so well in recruitment specifically? I mean, obviously you've talked about that profile of candidate and client. Is there anything else there that you would say was like the golden nuggets of?
Speaker 3:Well, typically we start if we're speaking to a customer, we they typically have challenges around. They have so many subscriptions I don't know. Customers have 15, 20 subscriptions. They have tech that doesn't speak to each other. Uh gets a lot of complaints around.
Speaker 3:Siloed, uh, so lots of functions where they buy lots of tech to cover those functions, but nobody has the vision to decide on how all this tech gets integrated and speaks to each other in a scalable way. So a lot of the conversations start by consolidating all of the tech stack that they have and bringing everything into one environment so they can gain control of it. That's one thing, and then being able to pick and choose the applications and technology stack that suits their business in that present time and giving them the ability to then scale up. So just, I feel like the whole concept around capturing information and residing it in one place is really important going forward. Interesting fact that the last two years, salesforce has spent over 10 billion re-architecting their entire platform to facilitate AI and to facilitate, you know, I suppose, a whole new metadata infrastructure and also to facilitate unstructured information. So the data we collect typically in CRMs is structured information, you know, information that's in a column or a field.
Speaker 3:Being able to capture unstructured information such as phone calls, resumes, emails, conversations, audio files, and store that in the same crm in an organized way is really beneficial to uh companies. So then you know, when everything's in one place, then we can start to really talk about ai. And then when we talk about ai we just really just leverage a lot of the work that salesforce have already done in paving that you know pathway. And so the simple facts, simple stuff of we have a talent demand captured on a crm which is all of the jobs and the the work that we get, and we have all the candidates information stored in that same crm. So ai effectively should be able to look at all the talent that you have and start to match it with jobs.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 3:I've seen quite a lot of stuff come through recently and that's becoming more and more realistic. When we talk about candidate search and accurately matching candidates, is that usage of AI? So I think from a you know. And then we talk about the infrastructure side of things in terms of where is our information sitting, how secure is it? All of that sort of stuff is quite important. Yeah, that's the kind of element. It's a mindset. It's either we jump from one applicant tracking system that's typically out of the box or we decide right, let's just spend the money and build our own, let's tailor it on the Salesforce platform and let's make it something we can invest in over the next 10 or 20 years, rather than something that you know, yeah, it's interesting when you talk about these different you know subscriptions and sort of siloed systems that are not, you know, talking to each other or integrated, and then you've got that other um behavior that you know, we hear it all the time.
Speaker 2:we've just, we've just implemented this ats didn't quite do what we thought, or it hasn't worked out that well, or it's been a nightmare. So we're now moving on to this one and you know, I think when we spoke the other day, you you referred to it as ats hopping yeah it seems to be quite prolific.
Speaker 2:I'm, and I'm not sure why. I'd love to hear why you think this trend persists and then what you do to kind of solve that problem, because it's a lot of money people are spending to move, yeah, yeah yeah, like the way I kind of I don't know you could even I don't know if you'd use um.
Speaker 3:You know, I don't know if you'd use a house analogy or something, but you basically are moving from one out of the box, off the plan house. You are going to run into a limitation at some point, whether that's can't integrate with X system or we can't. We want to. A lot of it is basic. We can't, we don't have visibility because there's so many disconnected elements we can't integrate as a common thing and we can't customize it. So if you're this recruitment business and you wanted to have a persona you know a persona experience for a candidate manager, you don't have the configurability to make to make that experience for that candidate manager. It's like. It's also like I have a division of health care. I want that health care division to work differently than my it division or my permanent recruitment processes versus my contract recruitment processes across multiple divisions, and they don't have that, you know, control to change things yeah um, and they, they end up, I feel like they end up feature chasing.
Speaker 3:They get sold on a certain amount of features and they jump and they jump and the upheaval I feel, the disruption and the cost in going from one out-of-the-box ATS to another out-of-the-box ATS is huge and very detrimental to their business. I would prefer to see them take that money and chuck it into the same system every single year, every single three to five years. You're spending the same money, but your business isn't being disrupted and the stack that you're building is getting better and better and better. So, like I know, salesforce, it is something that you would invest in consistently. It's built to change.
Speaker 3:It's an iterative type of system so you know, I feel when you jump from platform applicant tracking system, applicant tracking system, you're, you're always going to find these types of limitations, unless you really sit down and design a platform sort of tech strategy and an architecture that's going to fit your business for, for you, and then there's the whole other end of that conversation, which is the people that are using it.
Speaker 2:I would imagine that if you keep changing your ats, you're going to get a level of apathy from your people to say, god, another one, or you know, the last one didn't work, and I think it has to generate some level of cynicism, or at least resistance, to keep moving on to something else, or you know?
Speaker 3:yeah, I think the. I think that's also the. You know, a challenge I see now is because the market's a bit slow at the moment. You know it's a bit of a downturn. Companies don't want to change because they don't want to chuck more stress onto their um recruiters, you know, in terms of changing systems and disruption there. So I can see that. But then I see other companies that say, well, you know business is slow right now, so you know we might as well do it now, get it out of the way. There's going to be disruption. But yeah, all the disruption happen now while business is slow. Then the disruption happen when business is flying or when there's a boom.
Speaker 2:You know so many companies are yeah, when people are too busy too busy to uh go to the training or whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah, so let's talk about the big kind of. I guess often the challenge is the delivery of the project and you know, timelines blow out, cost might blow out, it might become, you know, like you've talked about disruption, the disruption might become, you know, quite unmanageable yeah what do you think businesses should be doing to take the reins back in terms of controlling that and how do you specifically that target kind of manage it?
Speaker 3:yeah, good question. I'd imagine people you know, maybe listening, have gone through these types of implementations and can feel feel the pain, and I do think every any crm implementation is typically painful, no matter if it's a sales first one or not. I think people need to look at it as in, not as we're not just replacing our ats because we have a renewal up and we want to align it with the renewal and just swap one in and one out. They need to kind of see it as this is an investment um, it's a transformational project and they need to spend the time, you know, and in some cases the money and I kind of get a little bit critical to spend the time you know, and in some cases, the money and I kind of get a little bit critical with companies because they, you know, for it's nearly like the cost of a few placements do, you know, in terms of an upfront implementation, you know to get something up and running but it could change their whole entire business um structure and and you know the goals that they're trying to hit as a business, it's really transformational. So I think there's an element of one know your own business processes and where you want those processes to end up. So I feel like there's a big exercise that customers can do to help in terms of just mapping out their current processes, getting completely across it and then optimizing the hell out of them so when they come to the project, they've got a good idea of where they want to end up in terms of business process, whether you get outside help or you spend a bit more time at the start of the project gathering feedback from your entire team and then putting it into some sort of a document, because there is a bit of an expectation that target group will come in and they'll understand our business in detail and they'll know our best practice processes that we want to implement, and that is not always the case. There there is a we are experts in sales force, some are experts in sales force within recruitment, but every business is different and they operate different, and so I'd say there's an element of getting your ducks in a row with uh, with business processes. I think there's also, I think there's a managing expectations element from you know, from the sales people as well. I think that has to be called out to be able to say what we're demoing is is the outcome of a six to twelve month project, which you know, which has plenty of ups and downs. It's not, this is what we're demoing. You're going to get this after six months. This is, this is a thing. It's a Salesforce project, is the outcome of a collaboration between you know six to 12 months of the customer and target recruits. So that's one thing.
Speaker 3:I think data migration is a pain in terms of. I feel like you need to go and get a good understanding of where your data sits, how much of it there is and what kind of formats it sits in, and then come to the party a little bit prepared around how much data you have to to migrate, because that's a, it's always a, it's always a hot topic. We'll say, um, you know, and then the the only other thing that I'd really say to that is um, give a certain amount of time. I feel like you need to treat it as a, as a you know, not not put an end date on it and say it has to be up and running by a certain date, otherwise everything will crumble. I think we need to um, we need to really map it out, and that's what we try and do with these projects is try and map out some milestones to say you know, if we have this integration up by this date, are we happy with phase one. You know, then we split it out into multiple phases.
Speaker 3:Other thing Les you have to highlight is that when you get into a Salesforce project, it's like kids in a sweet shop. They start to figure out, oh, look at what we could do if we have that piece of automation. And then they start building out scope in the middle of a project. It's like that wasn't really. But once they get into the project they understand Salesforce more, they understand the potential and the ceiling and then they want everything. And we have to, as a project team, have to control that and manage people's expectations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's hard because often you don't know what you don't know right. So you know you might look at, like you said earlier, you know you need to understand what it is you're trying to, what goals you're trying to reach, and sort of tick in terms of processes or your, you know your business, but then there might be some new shiny stuff that excites you, that you really feel like you have to have it.
Speaker 2:Um, so how do you kind of counter that and make sure that's maybe a conversation earlier on, or is it a case of okay, don't get distracted, keep your eye on the prize and that's phase four, or whatever?
Speaker 3:yeah, it could be tricky enough. Like customers want tend to want everything up front and you know as soon as possible. Um, there is a little bit of a negotiation when we get into the project and and, uh, you know how to phase these things out and what, what are the must-haves, the critical elements? And salesforce will say is a is a project or a process of iteration? So typically it's if we just have, if we're not able to, um, if we're able to transition what you're able to do now into a salesforce environment for phase one, it's like nearly like saying a lift and shift.
Speaker 3:Customers tend to not be that happy with that. But if we can replicate in a better way, you know, with better processes, what you're able to do now into Salesforce environment for phase one. In my view, you're now using a Salesforce environment. Your ceiling has just got massively high and then you start really honing the benefits of it then in phase two and phase three. So I feel like I feel like one of the things that we should do as a, as both a company that owns the software and implements the software, is we agree to the milestones and then we'll say you know, it could be an integration with astute, or it could be an integration with health pass, or it could be certain different elements that are real key and we typically don't want the customer's experience to drop. So you know they can't have less functionality. Yes yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, when they start their new CRM. But also there's a big change management piece in there as well. What is your team expecting? Are they expecting to pull a red ribbon and everything is working? 100 automated, you know? Ai all over the place.
Speaker 3:It is a process of iteration yeah so we, even you know what we typically do is six to twelve months, we get you live, get used in the system, and then over the next few months, we're tweaking it, we're getting your feedback, we're adjusting it, we're updating it and it's a constant project. Uh, that goes on for anywhere between 6 and 18 months and, as I said, it's it's iteration after iteration and then you're left with the tool that you can then iterate yourself. You've got control of yeah, you've got. You might have an administrator, you might just lean on target recruit um, but you're up and running on a salesforce environment which I feel has so many benefits.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you talked about collaboration earlier and to make that collaboration as fruitful as possible, given the fact that you said earlier on in our conversation, a lot of Salesforce's users are SME size firms, if you haven't got an internal CTO or someone that's kind of across the tech and perhaps dedicated and resourced to this kind of project, which is a big kind of time suck, yeah, how should you approach that? What? What's the ideal structure in terms of resourcing that, so it doesn't become such an incumbents on the business that you know other things start to fall away and you know you've got someone that knows what they're talking about yeah, I think, um, yeah, so typically we'll assign a project manager and we'll also assign a tech consultant, and then we've got a data migration expert, and then we've got a team of people.
Speaker 3:So we have a team of people which are the engineers, that's your side.
Speaker 3:Yeah, all on our side Team of people. We've got a data migration person, we've got a project manager and we've got a lead tech consultant. And then on the customer side, uh, you know, you can always hire as many people as you want. You know, we hire project managers, higher enterprise architects, higher salesforce experience. We feel the best approach.
Speaker 3:Um, it's just somebody who knows the processes of your business really really, really well and is quite passionate about making them better.
Speaker 3:It's typically an operations person or, um, you know, sales ops.
Speaker 3:You know somebody who's who's really passionate about the business and I feel like they have to have some sort of skin in the game in terms of making the project successful.
Speaker 3:I think the more people you add to the project, sometimes it's too many chefs and they all fall over each other. Somebody who can go to different parts of the business, collect their requirements, understand their processes in detail, come back and communicate that to my team. Somebody who's really responsive in terms of responding to the you know the homework or the tickets that we give them in order to collect requirements work, or the tickets that we give them in order to collect requirements, because a lot of delays happen is mainly because the customer has either not gathered requirements that they were supposed to, and then, like, one delay leads, leads a one day's delay leads us to delay the project, and and then we'll get the blame for that in a way. Um, so I just feel, in summary, somebody who knows the business really well is passionate about it, and not the person who's who has a full-time job to do as well.
Speaker 2:You know what I mean. What about their level of technical competency?
Speaker 3:uh, not really. Again, salesforce is is incredible. Yes, uh, giving you a learning platform to up your skills as an administrator, but that's that's something you don't need starting off. I think you just need to understand how you want your processes to run and then just be receptive and work with our team and we'll be the experts in Salesforce Over time. You can look to hire an admin if you want, or you can upskill people in your business to do 20% of the administration, the basics, and then the rest you can reach out to the likes of Targo Recruit.
Speaker 3:And then there's also thousands of Salesforce consultants in Australia that can help you too. It's not just you're wedded to Targo, recruit support or professional services. Salesforce is a huge ecosystem.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So let's continue on the AI topic, because it's huge. I can't get away from it. It's massive and everybody's talking about it. I think there's there's lots of still. You know I've said this many times you know lots of variants in terms of where people are at with it, their understanding of it, their appetite for it, but what do you see as the kind of um, the? You know the golden opportunities and the capabilities right now with, with salesforce um, so I would encourage uh, I encourage you to go onto youtube.
Speaker 3:Whenever you finish here, leslie, and type in agent force. What is agent force?
Speaker 3:yeah what is agent force and just check out a bunch of videos and in your mind, when you, when you read, when you're listening to those videos and the presentations and the bits and pieces around agent force, just think in your head how that would apply to sales or to recruitment. Um, because it's really exciting. And it's only they've only been announced now, recently it was since dreamforce, which was a couple of months ago um, so the way, like, in a nutshell, I think we're all running around building small little ai pieces, which is which is first of all the bots, which is basically just the if statements. If this happens, do that. Right, it's just basic bots. Second is the co-pilots. So, uh, you know they're assisting you to summarize resumes or to create emails or to create interview questions or marketing candidates out. So it's the basic, everybody's used to it. Basically, chat, gbt and then bringing that into your salesforce environment for various small use cases. Right, that's basic.
Speaker 3:But now Salesforce has took it to another level, which they've released this agent force piece, which has taken the co-pilot piece and making it fully autonomous. So not only you give them instructions, it gives you a basic framework to build your own autonomous agents, which is like a robotic, automated system where you would tell it the instructions of what you want it to do, you would give it the guard rails to work within and you would give it some grounded information to be able to say this is base your knowledge or base your actions off this, and then it'll go off and do work physically, do work in the background. So a couple of examples is you could program your own AI agent to do all of the leave and expenses requests within your business, because you can tell that this is what the systems I want you to manage and to integrate with. Here are the workflows, here are the guardrails, here are your instructions and because it's all housed in Salesforce, it's covered by all of the security and the protections that Salesforce has, and this is one of the benefits of sitting on the platform. So I'll give you another example which I thought was cool the guy.
Speaker 3:I seen an interview with the guy, the VP of operations and AI at a deco and they're deploying agent force to engage with intelligently and autonomously with 300 million candidates a year. So they get 300 million candidates reach out million candidates a year. So they get 300 million candidates reach out to them a year and a lot of them don't hear anything back. But they now have the capability to intelligently interview, speak to, pre-screen, engage with you know, and then take action. So ask a bunch of questions, analyze a resume based on the job description. If certain criteria is hit, go and set up an interview, stick it in this person's calendar, you know. So it's actually creating actions and I thought that was really interesting.
Speaker 3:So we've got use cases now through agent force around, pre-screening candidates at mass, getting back to people and compliance use cases. So mine your database, go in and see if everybody has up-to-date compliance, and then also you can create an SDR, like a sales gen or SDR type role which would proactively go and reach out to your customer base and try and gather some leads or engage with candidates, engage with clients. The use cases are huge and, um, it's only. I feel like a lot of companies in recruitment have evaluated ai, but but, uh, it kind of went nowhere because they're too worried about the infrastructure. You know the, the security elements, um, but with salesforce, they've just after invested a ton of money in it.
Speaker 2:So we, we get to leverage that, which I think is really exciting yeah, absolutely it's um, it's a game changer when you think about you know, communication has always been a bit of a um, uh, a hurdle for our industry, particularly at the candidate end you know.
Speaker 2:So if it's not just you know, hasn't I'm I'm thinking the ability to not just communicate with successful or matched candidates, but candidates that haven't been successful yeah giving them feedback, making sure that they're you know, they're retained or they're kept or is is, you know, communicated to, could solve a big question interesting oh, look at the.
Speaker 3:I feel, um, I think we're only scratching the surface of that, and I feel that the, the projects companies should be thinking about, is how to get their data set up to be able to accommodate ai rather than, rather than, what fancy features does ai do it's more? Are we set up as a business, as our infrastructure secure? Are we able to house structured and in unstructured data in our, in our systems? And then you know, and how clean is is the information that's in there? And then I feel, once that's done and you have, um, you have demand coming from one side and you have supply coming from the other side.
Speaker 3:I feel the whole conversation around candidate matching and you know an agent going in trying to match candidates with open jobs I think is very powerful. The other thing that I want to highlight as well is all of our conversations now have been transcribed and stuck into the CRM. So you know we're getting summaries and all of our messages or WhatsApps, or calls or conversations are all being captured, which means that the whole concept of just giving recruiters more information in real time. So I've seen some use cases around. We have a whole history of communication with this client and while the recruiter is talking to that person, the system's surfacing really relevant, insightful information to help the recruiter have a better conversation with that person.
Speaker 3:I thought was really cool and even real-time, um objection handling. So you, the AI agent, is listening to the conversation and you get an objection and it's throwing up to you objection handling. You know solutions to overcome the objection in real time because it's monotone. I think that's fantastic. So the AI, I feel, is just going towards making recruiters have better conversations. I think that's how the only way we're going to differentiate longer term is through our conversations, and if we can use AI have better conversations, I think that's how the only way we're going to differentiate longer term is through our conversations, and if we can use ai to better those, then I think that's where it's headed yeah, no, that's really interesting.
Speaker 2:Um, it's like having your own little internal coach there, isn't it? Yeah?
Speaker 3:yeah, that's, it's a sales coach and the way salesforce has set it up um, you've got these out of the box agents that you can say that I want a sales coach and the way Salesforce has set it up, you've got these out-of-the-box agents that you can say I want a sales coach out of the box, I want my expenses agents out of the box, I want my pre-screening agents. Or you can take that agent out of the box and configure it and edit it, maybe select whatever model that you want the information to work on, and then feed it exclusively, if you want, with your own data. So these agents are not just the same across the board. They they learn from and are they work based on, uh, the information pertaining to your business specifically yeah, yeah I know it gets complicated, I'm not going to lie, but uh, check out agent force on.
Speaker 2:I'll check it out, I am keeping up, I think, just. But I want to talk about something that's probably very prevalent in the Australian market and certainly, I guess, close to APSCO's purpose, which is about compliance and that level of security that you've touched on already. And what do you think Australia looks like compared to the other markets that you might have had exposure to? Is there anything that you feel is particularly exclusive to us?
Speaker 3:I feel like there's an element of complexity around how we manage rates and awards and how we pay people in this country, which the feedback I get from my team globally is. This is by far the more complex. Yes, you know so and I always came in here being truthful, you know, pushing the health care. So a lot of our customers are health care. 60 percent of our customer base is big health care recruitment agencies. Um, globally, and coming in here and understanding the different rates and awards and the calculations and that has been tricky to get my head around, to say the least, and you know the fact that their element is different regionally around the world is definitely a challenge. So that's one thing I noticed.
Speaker 3:Um, I think we are in for a little bit of a interesting ride around the uh privacy, uh bills that are and the reform that's on the way.
Speaker 3:Um, there's a lot of change has been now I don't think initially they've gone that mad. I think there's about 25 or 26 different parts of it that they will implement, but initially there was like 117 changes that the position that they'd make. So there's a lot of catching up to do around how we manage, how we secure and how we look after our customers' data, and that's never so prevalent then in recruitment, because I'm speaking to companies and I bet you they don't even know what information they're capturing, they don't know what they're storing, they don't know what type of information it is, whether it's sensitive or not. So I think, um trying to adjust your infrastructure to facilitate the changes around privacy and and the legislation that's going to come in um is a challenge and I think and also I think that is a really good area to to think about how are we going to use our tech systems and our tech platforms to facilitate all this change, similar to what they did in europe with gdpr, because it's obviously going that way yeah, yeah and so that's that.
Speaker 3:That is something I think every business is going to have to face up and deal with over the next year or so, and, um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be positioned salesforce and target recruit to try and fit the bill there too. So that's another string to my bow that I'll be pushing.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. So generally, if we talk, you know general trends. Now what do you think is going to shape the future of recruitment CRMs?
Speaker 3:I think we have to look at it as an industry thing, you know.
Speaker 3:I feel there's a lot of like. Even just automation is still underutilized in many industries, just not even AI, just intelligent automation, and I've seen it within high volume industries like healthcare, labor hire, where it's a race. So I feel like speed is the number one thing that these companies seem to be looking for. They're in a race against a lot of competition and they want to capture and they want to just make placements at, honestly, less than a minute of time, and the only way they can do that at scale is through speed. So that's a big emphasis in terms of how do we use technology to get pools of candidates, to get them compliant, to get them into some sort of a list that we can slam them into shifts, into some sort of a list that we can slam them into shifts. You know from that element that's. That's very different to um, to then the other industries, to, I don't know, exec search, which is completely different workflow altogether. And are we using different text systems or not for exec search?
Speaker 3:like you could be um so. So I think, uh, I think the role of a recruiter will become more persona based. So you, as a persona, if you're a recruiter in health care, you're going to have a very tailored, optimized, you know tech system for your job. Specifically, if you're a candidate manager in the same sector, you're going to have a. You're going to have a similar but different experience. If you're a salesperson for that business, you're going to have a different experience. If you're a salesperson for that business, you're going to have a different experience.
Speaker 3:And I feel like you know how many, how many tech systems do do we need to be able to facilitate this type of uh recruitment. So I feel like it's industry-based and it also depends on the types of recruitment you do. If you're a generalist, then I highly recommend looking at something like you Salesforce setup. Compliance is just getting more and more prevalent. I was at a convention or a forum a couple of weeks ago in healthcare and it was just an ever-ending amount of compliance that has to be managed. And there's also a thing I feel is really interesting around checking compliance, you know, and eyesighting them and using AI to see if somebody's passport's there or if they've got the right background checks, because there's a huge amount of manual effort going into that. I see another trend of companies trying to automate stuff and saving money in terms of workforce and administrative staff.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know. So are we sending the administrative work overseas, are we offshoring it, or are we trying to automate it? I think that's an interesting conversation, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So I feel there's, I think compliance is pretty big. I think, um, I think the first business to really uh, to really dive into the ai piece and try and use, you know, use it to automate placements within, you know, high volume sectors, sectors will do really well. And I think those that are still using spreadsheets and manual compliance checking, I think there's going to be a bit of a shock there, because there's companies investing a lot of time and money into this type of tech to find interesting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really all I think in terms of trends, um, that's quite a few yeah, I know I'm forever that's good, um, I want to ask you a question that I ask everyone that I uh, I chat with um on our podcast, which is basically, you know, if you have your top tips, key advice for anyone listening today and obviously, in the context of implementing a CRM successfully, effectively, as smoothly as possible, headline items what should they have their eye on?
Speaker 3:items. What should they have their eye on? Um, I think, uh, I think they need to spend a bit of time planning it. I like I don't mean bring a consulting company in and pay them a fortune, I kind of just I still mean, uh, they need to map. Like, have you ever looked at any sort of digital transformation book or or course? Yeah, well, they basically say that you should align your tech strategy uh, to support the, the business strategy and and in some cases, in many cases, the, the digital strategy, drives the, the business strategy. So, um, I feel like a business obviously has to have objectives and goals and where they want to get to and what industries they want to go into. And then, when they agree on what the objectives of the business are and what they're trying to achieve over the next five to 10 years, then carefully map out what sort of a technology stack could get you to, could support that journey.
Speaker 3:I think people don't really did. They don't. They think they have plans, but then they just use, you know, they. Just I don't think they think deep enough about it. So one of the exercises that we typically carry out is we start listing out the functions of what a recruitment platform would need to cover for your type of recruitment and what you're trying to achieve. And in some cases I've had a company have 25 to 30 different subscriptions and in the bigger companies a lot more. So we try and map out the functions and there could be 30 to 40 to 50 different functions within a modern recruitment system and then try to to cover off what technology can cover that. Do you know? And that's why we push salesforce, because we can see that across all of these functions, I can nearly map out pretty much every single function that could be carried out within the salesforce or salesforce environment. And that way, you know, you're starting to limit your, your technical debt, you're environment, and that way, you know, you're starting to limit your, your technical debt, you're starting to limit your apis, you're starting to make it a little bit more of a one single platform type play um. And then I would uh, you know there are people out there that will give advice on this sort of stuff, like I know, the likes of andrew roger, and that will come in and do a full assessment and give you some advice on what, what direction is best to go. So I think, um, it's okay to go and ask people for advice and help. Uh, you know I'm happy to have a conversation with people and advise them, uh, which direction to go.
Speaker 3:I don't always recommend salesforce for companies, um, you know, not all the time. I think it's definitely a horses for courses type scenario. But I think proper planning, know where your business is going to get to in terms of your goals, your strategy, and make sure that you know if you've got a business that's set up for high volume recruitment you know there's other industries that you could potentially look at. There is other elements to recruitment you could add to that system. You know it doesn't have to be just recruitment, so maybe there's a consulting arm or a training arm or some other arms to your business, um, so I would say careful planning and then, um, obviously have good people who know your processes inside out and can translate those processes to an implementation team.
Speaker 3:Um, and then don't, you know, I think there's a, there's an element of um. Try and put your money into something that you can consistently put your money into in terms of building it and building it, rather than ripping everything out and starting from scratch every single time. Yeah, yeah, I think that, other than that. I'm happy to have a chat with anybody, leslie, obviously, and it's an exciting time, I think, for recruitment technology. I just um, it's an exciting time, I think, for recruitment technology. I just think there's an overwhelming amount of options for people and and they just need some guidance and advice on, you know, the best path to take, and sometimes you don't get that from the sales people of that particular vendor, so you need somebody agnostic, to give you some honest advice, and I know those, a bunch of those people that I can put your listeners in contact with.
Speaker 2:Fantastic, excellent, joe. Thank you very much. It's been really interesting talking to you. This feels like a bit of a conversation that could just go on and on and on. There's so much to it. But yeah, I think I've learned a lot. I'm going to go and check out Agent Force later on. Yeah, yeah, I think I've learned a lot. I'm going to go and check out Agent.
Speaker 3:Force later on. Yeah, yeah, so I will come back.
Speaker 2:But yeah, thank you very much for your time today. It's been great chatting with you.
Speaker 3:Leslie, thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to Recruitment Down Under brought to you by APSCO. Join us next time. If it's happening in recruitment in Australia, we'll be talking about it.