Building a TA tech stack one priority block at a time - Ward Christman from HR Tech Advisor


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Feb 16 2021 29 mins   2

Max: Hello, welcome back to The Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today on the show, joining us from, I believe Philadelphia. Ward, Christman. Hi Ward.

Ward: Hello, great to be on. Thanks for having me.

Max: My pleasure. So, are you in Philadelphia? Did I get that right?

Ward: That's the, the general area. We're about almost an hour west of the country somewhat, but yeah.

Max: In the pine trees somewhere?

Ward: Actually not that many pine trees around here mostly of the big leafy kind that people love raking up and fall.

Max: Okay. Well I met Ward a few years ago, in Boston, in an event organized by HR tech tank, where we were a strategic advisor. But today Ward is the co-founder and chief advisor for the HR tech alliances, which you can go on hrtechalliances.com and works with as an advisor to HR tech vendors around the world. And so, I hope we'll take this opportunity to talk to, to share some of your insights on the challenges felt by the buyers, which are the TA directors, and the TA departments all over the world. When dealing with vendors, and the fact that the HR stack keeps growing and growing, and it becomes more work to manage the integration, than it is to manage the vendors, actually I imagined at a pretty fast rate for some of them. So that's the direction in which this conversation will go. But before we go that word for audience, I'm sure they'd love to hear a little bit about your background and where, how you ended up being this matchmaker for the HR tech world which is quite a niche role, but I believe you're, you were a long time ago you were an engineer, and then an entrepreneur, an HR tech entrepreneur as well.

Ward: That's right. Yeah, engineering was great building plutonium factories and all kinds of weird stuff, but actually it wasn't for me. But somebody introduced me to the internet back in like 1989-99 range. And it was just text based and I thought this might go somewhere so I actually left engineering and started one of the first job boards. Before the web was even commercialized so I told them. But, yeah, it's coming up on 30 years and I ran a job board for, gosh, how many years was it nine years and then the.com crash.

Max: I am logging into your LinkedIn profile, it says, from 92 to 2001 year you ran jobthat.com, so yeah that's nine years.

Ward: Yeah, it was a great run and got a couple, you know, master level I think degrees out of it, you know, how to raise money what not to do, especially when the.com crash or 911 type activities.

Max: Perfect timing.

Ward: Yeah, exactly. So it's just like, you know, the COVID pandemic and all that stuff it's like yeah I kind of feel like I've been through the wringer a few times so we actually grew last year and you know it wasn't by accident, because there's just different ways to take on things but from a talent acquisition leader standpoint, obviously, those of you that are lucky to have your job, and are able to keep your technology if your budgets didn't get slashed that's wonderful. If you didn't, you know we're doing now to maybe rebuild it or is it with the coming recovery let's put it that way are you going to rebuild your tech stack and what are the what are good approaches or bad approaches we've seen it all over the years and you know it's it's great to have a chance to kind of have an open dialogue about how.

Max: I think nothing is completely new,every mistake has already been made. And so you're, you're reminiscing without giving us specifics on some of the mistakes, you did a jobnet.com, a few decades ago. Coming into what was at the time, Armageddon, the end of the world, the.com, boom bust which was just when I was graduating from school, by the way, so I entered a market with high unemployment, no prospect, and everybody in my MBA was talking about the paradigm shift and the internet economy. And then as soon as I graduated, I mean I was talking like one of those startup guys but there was no startup jobs to be had anymore.

Ward: Yeah. But they're, I mean they're out there now for sure and as you can imagine, in recruiting tech. I mean how many of those are started by a staffing leader. If not internal and certainly a recruiting company or staffing company right. We're like, oh can do it better than bullhorn or whoever and, and then they build it and guess what the tools are so much easier every year. There's more and more tools that you can build your own thing. And some companies as we know, build their own ATS and stuff like that. Yeah, we have 457 ATSs that we are tracking down in our database, and I'm sure we're probably missing half of them on a global basis. So, why would a company build an ATS cheaper to go buy one especially if you wanted to own it.

Max: It'd be cheaper to buy an ATS company you mean.

Ward: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's so true. But, you know, I remember a few years back, Facebook recruiter called me and said hey we're building our own ATSs once you know your background and product and the product projects before IBM took over. Do you want to consider for this job and like you're building your own business to take out the market. I mean if it's take out the market. Yeah, talk about just gonna build it and run it in the house. Why would it. Why would you do that? Of course, you know, Facebook has a few engineers, I get it.

Max: Yeah, they could build anything they want but

Ward: And apparently you know the TA leaders are like, Well, why should we settle for whatever we can build around and they did it. I don't know if they're still good actually but

Max: Google built their own ATS and Microsoft will probably end up buying an ATS so that was, that was the rumor that was being circulated by Chad and Cheese on their podcasts.

Ward: So these things yeah they continue to happen. And, I mean, I remember six years ago I was running. I was on the blog squad for what was HR tech world now on leaf in Amsterdam and they're like oh hey we want to interview some, we want you to interview some of the folks here at the conference that are speakers and influencers today. Okay, great. And, again, why don't you interview Jason Averbook, and Josh Bersin, like, thanks a lot you know my first time to this event, gives me the two biggest names in the industry to interview on camera. It went great. But I remember talking to Josh Bersin I'm like hey, let's talk about consolidation for a minute right you got big fish even though the small fish. The way I see it, it's gonna keep happening but I see a future where there's more point solutions kind of being assembled in a way that people can use that they don't have to necessarily buy that pre canned giant offering that has everything in it. Right and he totally agreed he said he thinks it's going to get much much worse but more choices more

Max: More fragmented.

Ward: Yeah some of your listeners were like exactly right it's like well, all I need is a chatbot in our current providers is not on the roadmap for another year or two, we need it now. So where do we go look, you know, there's all these choices and there's new ones popping up all the time. That's just one tiny sliver of TA tech stack is help...