#23: State of the Industry—Talent Acquisition Leadership in the COVID-19 Era

The Changing State of Talent Acquisition

This week we welcome Richard Carsley to the podcast. Rick has led talent acquisition teams at a number of well-known brands, including Farmers Insurance, Bankers Life and Casualty Company, TSYS, IKEA, and most recently, Freedom Mortgage, where he currently serves as Director of Talent Acquisition.

Topics include: the superiority of Wawa pizza subs, the FinTech recruitment landscape during the 2020 pandemic, the synergies between mass market consumer brands and their talent brands, the differences between “awareness” marketing and job-specific marketing, how (and why) recruitment marketing lags consumer marketing in its approaches to truly understanding its target “customers”, how job boards have failed to adapt to the explosion of remote work opportunities, why posting remote jobs nationwide may be counterproductive from a cost/efficiency point-of-view, the different challenges posed by too-many and too-few applications for a given requisition, how to effectively deploy gamification to automate assessments at scale, the double-edged sword of employee referral programs, how employee referral incentives can undermine the value of NPS as a employer brand health metric, and the future of industry conferences and trade shows.