Matt Bazen

▶0:01SpeakerWelcome 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 Matt to the Built by People podcast.

▶0:47HostMatt, 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.

▶0:55GuestYeah, well, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Yes, I've worked in a variety of different functions within HR. Really back in college, I started going into hospitality and tourism and found out that I had more of a passion for business and HR. Found myself drawn to the more internal customer base. Hospitality and tourism with, you know, their focus on customer service is a value, a core value for me is that customer service, but I found it more closely aligned with the internal customer base and changed into HR there. I started the career in HR and employee relations. So that was investigations, lawsuits, employee misconduct, poor performance, you name it. After doing that for about 3 to 4 years, I got tapped on the shoulder and they said, we need somebody to lead the recruitment team. And I, it's kind of funny, I looked over my shoulder and I said, who, who are you looking at? You know, I, I'm the guy that kind of does the other end of that, you know? Uh, but I had an amazing mentor and they saw some potential in me and I, I found there was a lot of fun strategies for predicting turnover, different alternative pathways to people to get into the field that I worked in, which was education. And, uh, was able to then move into managing a business partner team after about 3 to 4 years doing recruiting. Put in about 12 years at that organization before moving to Choice Schools. As the Chief Human Resource Officer, and Choice Schools has been a great organization to work for. We have 15 charter schools located across the state of Michigan. They follow 4 distinct models of, you know, Montessori schools, classical schools, environmental schools, or scholar schools. And the team has been fantastic and great, and it's been just a joy to work here.

▶2:39HostThanks for that great introduction, Matt. I want to dive in and first cover the topic of employee engagement. And I'm curious to get your definition of employee engagement and also what strategies you found to be effective in fostering a highly engaged workforce at places like Choice Schools.

▶3:00GuestYeah, for sure. To define employee engagement and talk about it to our employees is there's a difference between employee satisfaction and employee engagement. We always start there just to, to make, you know, what do you mean when you say employee engagement? So Satisfaction is the stuff I get, right? The benefits, the employee perks, all those things you need to be an employer you want, but engagement goes a little bit deeper. It's the, I love to come to work because I love what I'm doing. It's meaningful. It's impactful, right? It has purpose. And I like to explain it kind of a story about engagement. I was actually going to do an engagement presentation with one of the HR generalists on my team. And we were going to to do this presentation and talk to this school about their engagement. They had just taken the engagement survey that we send out and we were going to do some engagement planning with them. I love talking about engagement. It's my passion, you know, to talk about this. I, you know, doing this podcast is not work because you get to talk about topics that I love talking about. But that particular morning when I was getting ready to go do this presentation at the school, life happened at home. I had a sick child. Family members who, babysitter who backed out of babysitting, trying to shuffle kids around to different family members. So yeah, I was quite frankly, maybe a little grumpy, a little bit flustered trying to make this, pull this all together and go hour and a half out of town to do this. But the minute I got there, I was completely engaged again because it was content I love to talk about. It was working with people to make them feel more engaged in the work that they do. So I always say engagement is if I won the lottery tomorrow, I would come right back and do the same job because I like what I'm doing. And that's really what we are striving to get our employees to feel like every day. So secondly, you kind of asked how, how do we do that? Like what levers do we pull? We do a biannual survey just to set that benchmark because you have subcultures and we have 15 different locations. Even if you have different departments within your organization, you know, there's going to be subcultures that Some people are going to be more focused on autonomy. Some people are going to be more focused on different rewards that other teams aren't. So we get that benchmark data and then we really do some intentional planning. Wins with that is you really get employee connectivity. They feel like they're heard. They feel like they have that voice and get to share what's ultimately driving them. When we did our most recent engagement survey, we found out we've really was a great time for us to celebrate things. I looked at our leadership team and I said, everyone, our people, the top scores are they like to work for us, they like to work for their managers, that their supervisor scores are really high. They say we're listening to them when they give us opinions. I said, I don't know what else we could really want, right? It's just a great foundation to start on. So it's not always the bad stuff. It's also celebrating the good. And then overall, when we just asked, How happy are you to come to work? They were rating us 4 out of 5 stars. We make the survey really fun by doing it like a Google review, so it's fun and enticing for them to take the survey. So we're 4.1 stars out of 5. So it's a good thing even to do when your engagement is high, just to celebrate that as an organization.

▶6:17HostMatt, you talk about leveraging tools like surveys to assess the employee pulse, and then also your personal experience in feeling fulfilled and engaged in the workplace. Love to get your perspective of an employee engagement initiative that you've implemented that has had an impact on others and driven their engagement within the organization.

▶6:42GuestYeah, I'll go back to the autonomy I mentioned earlier, right? Sometimes it's what kind of autonomy can you give to your people? Sometimes you, you think as a leader, right? Especially in HR, you have to do everything for people and you find out that, you know, they want to own certain projects, giving them that ownership and that autonomy. Working with a team found out we can divide and conquer all of these different tasks. Say it's a specific project, right? Assigning different people to this project. They can run with it. They can own it. Then you're actually less work for yourself and for others, and you've got individuals owning it. And then we talk about they're owning their, not only their engagement, but their work, right? So they're invested in it. And it's less of that transactional, you know, not just extra food in the break room, right? But it's meaningful work that they, they're excited to come, not just because there's bagels every Friday, you know, they're excited to come because of the specific project and task they're working on.

▶7:44SpeakerMatt, you've got a lot of experience

▶7:46Hostin the recruitment world as well. Curious to understand your approach for ensuring a positive candidate experience, even for those who don't get the job?

▶7:57GuestYeah, so the experience is definitely key in Other Passions. We want to ensure that every candidate that we hire or don't hire, they've had a good experience with us. Think of that, you know, roll out the red carpet every time they come on site. A couple of things that the team is really focused on here recently, we're focusing on speed. Overcommunication, not overwhelming the candidate, and also making sure the candidate can interview us, right? So when I talk about speed, you don't want our process to be too long. We want the process to be quick so we don't lose people. Some, a 3 to 4 month interview process, that's too long nowadays. People want that urgency and that speed. When I, overcommunication, kind of that second, you know, part 2, to ensure candidate experiences. When they apply, when they're coming for an interview, after you've had the interview with them, it's constant, consistent follow-up by our recruiters, right? You know, a good recruiter is even preparing the candidate for the interview. Like, hey, I'm going to talk to Dave today, right? And I know he really likes X, Y, and Z. And make sure you talk about that. That, that's setting the candidate up for success. And some people will say, well, Matt, aren't you just trying to get that candidate hired then? So yeah, but a good interviewer is going to pose questions that, that a candidate can't get around, but you're also then getting the real answer from that candidate and really driving into their experience. Also, not overwhelming the candidate. That's a big thing. Some teams want everybody to, to be in the interview, right? They want everybody's opinion and feedback. And that's fine. If you want to do that so the candidate can understand the culture they're getting into,, but we always try to stick it to small groups of people, 3 to 4 or less at a time. Otherwise, the candidate doesn't even know where to look. They're looking around the table. They don't know who to answer the question to. So that way, it's scary. It's intimidating for people to come on site sometimes and interview. So how do you, how do you make them feel less intimidated? Also, make sure the candidate interviews you. You hate to get somebody in your organization and find out it's not what they wanted. It's not what they expected. One of the tactics I've always loved to use is when I'm bringing somebody on my team, my team knows this, we're very transparent, right? So they will interview without them and I'll tell the candidate, all right, now's your opportunity to ask anything you want of my team about me. Here's my flaws. I'll list those, ask them about that. And, uh, I said, and I, I, you know, they're going to give you the full, you know, they're going to give you the full opinion on that. So, uh, that's always a nice thing to do as well. Uh, that way they feel like it's not just a one-way street. We're making sure it's a good fit

▶10:45Hostfor them as well. Love that approach, Matt. I want to switch gears and talk about data-driven approaches now and how you're using data-driven approaches to refine your recruitment strategies and improve hiring outcomes for your organization.

▶11:00GuestYeah, one of the things, obviously, just candidate flow, right? We want to ensure that we're tracking the number of candidates and almost working backwards, right? If we know that we have an open position and we know it takes roughly applicants to apply before we narrow it down to that one, right? How do we get 30 applicants for those hard-to-fill jobs? That might be that direct sourcing, you know, that direct finding out there. So trying to look at the applicant flow. Making sure we have enough applicants that apply, you know, looking at how do we leverage different job boards, social media, that social sourcing aspect to get there. Another thing that for data-driven approaches, it, like in many industries, the teaching industry, especially in our state, there's not as many certified teachers. The data that we look at from the colleges and universities has seen dramatic decreases, some up to 80% even. In the colleges of ed graduating teachers. So there are strategies we've employed to say, let's look at alternative routes, kind of in other industries it might be called on-the-job training, right? So there's alternative pathways for teacher certification and there's that in every industry, right? Leveraging those and helping pay for that through any way we can to build and grow your own talent. When you see that candidate shortage get so high so that you, you know, if we can't find the people, it's almost like we have to make the people, find others that could go into that profession and convince them that it is a rewarding profession.

▶12:36HostMatt, you got a lot of schools under your management. How does your company balance the unique challenges that come with managing multiple charter schools while maintaining a consistent organizational culture?

▶12:50GuestYeah, so we have a vision and our vision is everyone thrives here. And it's not just a vision that we put on a wall and look at, it's something that we really live by. We actually celebrate the uniqueness of each of our schools to help fulfill their unique mission. You know, and you can do that with various departments as well if you, you know, but we, we celebrate the uniqueness. And yeah, it can be a challenge with all these subcultures, right? But we're grateful for our incredible leaders at the locations to help us drive and connect them to the overall choice, but also work and champion that individual school culture and unique vision so that everyone can thrive there at that location. We then come alongside of them, partner with their school community, their school boards, those students, to help empower and equip them to fulfill that unique mission and vision that they have. We actually want them to be unique because that unique culture is what's best for the community and the community they serve. And we meet and support them where they're, where they're at. So they know they're unique, but they're also part of that bigger Choice Schools organization.

▶13:59SpeakerMatt, what parting advice would you like

▶14:01Hostto share with our

▶14:04Guestcommunity? Yeah. I, I probably need all the advice as well that you guys that, that that everybody else has given, but if I was to give some recruitment advice, I would probably say it's the sales arm, right, of HR. And typically HR people are not salespeople, so they hear that and they kind of cringe a little bit, but sales is the lifeblood of the organization. You need to have that strong candidate experience to bring people in, you know, and your recruitment process has to be tight to bring people into your organization. Engagement, I would say engagement is, is the key, you know, not, not like satisfaction, happiness, all that's important, but engagement is key. So, you know, and that looks different to different people, right? So make sure you're willing to ask and make sure what you're asking, you're willing to change so you can increase that engagement. And then I guess overall, just HR has worked so hard to get a seat at the table. We're no longer that backroom function, but with that, You know, comes a lot of responsibility, so you have to be that strategic thought partner.

▶15:06HostMatt, thank you so much for joining us on the Built by People podcast. It was a pleasure to have you involved.

▶15:11GuestThank you so much. I appreciate it.