Alex Moore

▶0:00HostWelcome to the Built by People podcast, where we share the stories and insights of the world's top HR leaders. Join us as we dive deep into the minds of HR executives, uncovering their strategies, challenges, and triumphs in shaping today's workforce. I'm excited to welcome Alex to the Built By People podcast. Alex, thank you so much for joining us. And as a starting question, I always love to ask if you could share a little bit more about your career journey.

▶0:49GuestAbsolutely. So to begin, thank you so much for inviting me to be a part of this podcast. What I think is somewhat unique to my story is I actually got into our profession through my college athletics experience. I was a student athlete in college, and one thing that I didn't realize was an unwritten expectation was you not only had to compete for the school, but you also had to recruit for the school. So you essentially had to help your coaches get the next generation of talent excited to join your team. Each year, a big focus throughout the fall was to bring in recruits from all over the country and help them excited to join your team. I got really competitive with that. I was very passionate about where I went. I thought it was the best, and I wanted the best athletes to be on team, and it turned out I was pretty good at it. As I was getting to the end of my college experience, I realized that recruiting was actually a profession that I could pursue. The rest was history. I decided to start my career in recruiting and recruited in a really wide variety of industries, from renewable energy and traditional power to the startup and gaming scene. And then I landed in consulting for quite some time, so as I really established myself in recruiting leadership, I started to realize that I was really passionate about helping candidates experience what we were talking to them about as we were recruiting them through the recruitment process. I wanted to make sure that what we were selling them on, if you will, about the company that we obviously believed was true, I really wanted it to be what they experienced, that they could really find a great career with us. And so I started to take on a little bit more scope outside of recruiting a couple of years into my recruiting leadership experience. Experience specifically through taking on diversity, equity, and inclusion. So I know that was a bit of an odd change of scope, but at the time, my president at the company that ended up becoming the CEO, he asked me to partner with him and co-lead DE&I with the company's best intentions in mind as we were navigating a lot of the really big stuff happening in the world, and we really wanted to mature the DE&I function quickly. And this really was a transformative experience for me. I truly loved playing a role in how we shaped specifically how we showed up for people inclusively. So I felt like I could see really sense of belonging increasing at the company, as well as really helping people experience greater learning development experiences through their involvement with our DE&I efforts. And I was hooked because I really felt like I could have a greater influence on the greater employee experience through this. Since then, I was able to take on a greater scope of the talent spectrum. So corporate learning development, performance management, culture engagement., but I feel like I've always been able to stay true to my roots in ensuring expectations set in the recruiting process are truly met and ideally surpassed by every employee joining the company that I'm serving in my role.

▶3:44HostAlex, can you share a specific example of a time when setting clear expectations during the interview process significantly impacted employee engagement and retention at your organization?

▶3:55GuestSure. So the consulting firm that I spent a lot of this time that I'm going to be referencing was a boutique consultancy that originally targeted career consultants for all of our openings. And we realized that this strategy really limited our candidate pool, especially because we needed to quickly scale our technology consulting practice. And the talent that we needed rarely had extensive experience in consulting, and honestly, they rarely had interest in consulting as a profession. So due to this, we thought it would be wise to reassess our candidate personas and identify what experiences we felt would actually translate well into consulting. So after we went through this exercise, we built out an interview process to evaluate candidates through work-in-work sample testing that could actually simulate client projects, even if they had never done client consulting work before. And as a quick sidebar, we pulled our inspiration from the Schmidt-Hunter hiring study. So this study, I believe, may still be the most comprehensive assessment of evaluation strategies to identify which ones are actually the most predictive of job performance. And so work samples in this study are in the top 3 of the best predictors of job performance. And that's why we anchored to the strategy to open up our candidate pool. So as we really got the interview process set up to really assess talent and broaden the scope of talent we could bring in, we also encouraged our recruiters to develop messaging that would resonate with technologists who had never done consulting before, really focused on highlighting the fulfillment that comes from solving challenging problems for clients, for candidates who likely hadn't considered consulting a career worth pursuing versus a more traditional industry role for a technologist. In partnership with our hiring teams who simulated project work during the interview process, and then afterwards in the Q&A part of the interview, they would help candidates get excited about technology consulting and helping them understand how success is measured and how career growth is achieved. And in my opinion, those are some of the most important elements to expectation setting in the interview process. We were able to hire at a scale that we had never seen before. And then thanks for the intentionality of the interview process, we were actually able to set consultants up for success and growth in our consulting model.

▶6:08HostAlex, how do you go about designing an onboarding integration program that aligns new hires with organizational expectations? And what have been some of the key challenges and successes you've encountered along the way?

▶6:22GuestSo one thing that we found to be really effective was partnering with leaders in the business, specifically those that could put on learning and development hats to ensure that these programs were effective from day one for new hires. Previous roles in organizations, these L&D leaders, if you will, were actual consultants doing the work that the new hires would do, but they wore this hat in partnership with our team as either a leadership assignment or a stretch role or some version of an extracurricular. So they would leverage the framework that our team built for both onboarding. So the first 1 to 2 weeks and also the integration, which we consider to be the first 90 to 120 days, filling in the intricacies of each practice's core offerings. A depth of knowledge was shared that my team would never have been able to ensure was included if we'd been trying to build out these onboarding and integration programs on our own. And we also made it a point to discuss our performance review process corporately as a part of the onboarding process. So everyone joining knew exactly what to expect as it relates to understanding how they're doing, getting that sort of evaluation feedback, when it happens, how it happens from day one. But then we also made it a point to address it at the practice level or the departmental level for new hires to know where to go to review expectations of them and their new roles. And we found that giving them clarity around the documentation of all of this so they could go reference it at any time as things started to click. And if they just wanted to revisit expectations, this really gave them ownership of any follow-ups needed as they settled into their role and the unique ways that they were really trying to come to our standards and expectations. And then finally, we assigned what we called a career coach who underwent extensive training on how to be effective and what specifically to spend time with new hires on in their early days in their roles. And then after folks integrated, once they become more established, how to spend time with them on aligning on expectations, especially if they start to seek stretch assignments or opportunities to prove next-level readiness. So success-wise, we received a lot of buy-in from the start because anyone that's going to assume that career coach role to help with onboarding and integration work has likely started a new job at some point, and they understand how critical expectation alignment is for employee engagement. However, I would say that as relates to the success of the programming, although it was really successful overall, it was not always effective 100% of the time in setting diverse hires up for success in our model. Because like I said, as we got a little bit more into strengthening our recruiting process and opening up the talent pool, we had such a diversity of talent entering into our company. Hit rate of success, we constantly assess program shortfalls. Looking for opportunities to strengthen how we evaluated talent, how we provided clarity of expectations provided in the interview process, and then in early onboarding and integration efforts, as well as really fine-tooth combing through any sort of trainings that we offered to make sure we weren't necessarily skipping any details or leaving anything out that would really help a coach who is really in the role of ensuring success of that new hire. We really wanted to make sure we were equipping them with every tool that they needed to play this really significant role in the employee experience, especially in their first 90 to 120 days. A big thing for me is always be open to iteration, and I would say that was really helped us overcome any sort of short-term failure or short-term opportunities for improvement that we identified when we rolled this programming out.

▶9:57HostAlex, can you tell us about a time when you overhauled a performance review process to better align with employee expectations and growth? What strategies did you implement and what were the outcomes?

▶10:09GuestSure. So after I spent quite a bit of my career in consulting, I took a leap of faith and left that space to get into real estate where I am today. Coming from consulting into my new industry, I knew the value of the performance review process, and I also didn't want to over-engineer what I brought to my new company. So I really focused on starting with basics. Especially because performance reviews are really big in that space. People are always trying to challenge the thinking and come up with new ways of working and success metrics for effective performance review processes. And so I had a ton of background on what to do and also what likely not to do to make sure I brought a really thoughtful performance review process to my new company. So where we started is we developed specific performance expectations for every single position. In categories that we consider to be important to our company, things like client service, communication, team effectiveness, recruiting, anything data-driven as it relates to KPIs. We also included a gradient to accommodate anyone that was in the role at more of an entry level, at more of an established level, and also at a senior performance level, because we knew that someone who was in a position for 6 months to 12 months would likely be performing a little bit differently than someone at that 5-year mark in the role, and we wanted to really celebrate, but also encourage anyone based on where they were in their journey in that position. Then we layered on company-wide expectations to really hold employees accountable across the business in a standard of excellence in things like professionalism, administration, inclusion, and things of that nature that could really be applied to all positions. We built out a conversational format of performance reviews, specifically considering that a lot of our leaders had never had a framework to follow. To lead performance-driven conversation. Then we leveraged a technology to standardize how we scaled the process across the country, but we kept the actual delivery of feedback verbal to ensure messaging was tailored to the conversation and not adhering to the rigor of the review process. We received some pretty incredible feedback in our first innings of rolling out this performance review process at our company. When I joined, one of the biggest things that I heard was people just wanted to know where they stood. They wanted to know, am I doing a good job? We all really do need to be told evaluation feedback along the way. And because there wasn't really a standard of how this was happening at our company, it just wasn't happening in a way that really helped people feel secure and really set up for success or long-term career growth at our company. So I would say that people have been very quick to let us know how much of an impact we've made on the business with this process. And we're still iterating it, of course, but we feel like it really has made a huge impact in the way that we really align align everyone in the company on their expectations to be effective in their roles.

▶13:01HostAlex, when was a moment in your career where you had to adapt your recruiting strategies due to an unforeseen challenge, and how did you navigate this situation, and what were some of the key learnings?

▶13:14GuestYeah, so when I jumped into my new role, I was over the recruiting organization, and we were using one applicant tracking system to manage the entire recruiting process. And I was actually really excited because This applicant tracking systems happened to be one of my favorites. And so as I watched Jess and became a student of the business in my early days to just figure out how recruiting was going, what was working, what wasn't, I realized that a one-size-fits-all recruiting strategy for my company was not going to suffice. And a lot of time applicant tracking systems are really set up to be really great for one type of recruiting strategy. So. I came to find that we actually were deploying multiple strategies for efficiency and operations, for complexity of the business and how we operate, and then varied ways of working across different business units and platforms. And so I've always been a big believer in using technology to ensure adherence. I came to realize that one technology platform was not going to work for the variance in recruiting approaches being utilized at my company. So as I continue to be a student of business, I made it a point not to rest on what I believe to be the best ways to recruit and evaluate talent. And then I explored alternative solutions to my favorite technology platforms that could uniquely meet my company's needs in a way that I've never really had to deliver on in previous roles and different recruiting strategies that I deployed in the past. So the result was actually an ATS system of recruitment with both ATSs being thoughtfully selected and designed to serve our interview teams and optimize for everyone's best and highest use of their time being spent on process responsibility. And from this experience, I've learned to keep an open mind in problem solving and not anchoring to what I've seen work in the past. And I really found that this made all the difference in coming up with the best possible recruitment solution for my company.

▶15:08HostAlex, what parting advice would you like to share with our community?

▶15:12GuestI would say never stop pursuing learning and growth. So I have confidence that this audience is committed to self-development because they're making time to listen to this podcast, but I can't stress enough the importance of never becoming complacent or confident that you figured everything out. I really believe our profession is ripe for evolution, and the only way we'll all evolve to be better people and functional HR leaders is by challenging ways of working and thinking that no longer serve our companies. So, I've come to find that learning from peers and those doing the work is really important, but also it's really important to pull inspiration from multiple sources. So, in my time, I feel like I've been able to hone in my craft and really sharpen it by professionals with different skills and scopes of work than me, just as much as I have by leaders I admire in the space.

▶16:03HostAlex, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶16:08GuestThank you again so much for your time. I really enjoyed our conversation, Dave.