At Optimizely, building a TA strategy around “understanding and sharing others’ feelings” lead them to be named number four in Silicon Valley’s best places to work—and it didn’t cost them anything.

Lurie returns to Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco!

In talent acquisition—a profession that is people-centric by nature—it’s easy to forget that employees drive business success, especially when pressure to boost efficiency and cut costs dominates conversations around company priorities. However, a little empathy goes a long way, with examples of how Facebook or Pandora adopted more inclusive hiring practices for the better being well known. And the results show that employees and candidates value these practices now more than ever before. According to Businessolver’s 2018 State of Workplace Empathy study:

• Ninety percent of employees are more likely to stay with an organization that empathizes with their needs.

• Eight in 10 would be willing to work longer hours for an empathetic employer.

• More than two-thirds of employees in tech, healthcare, and financial services reported they would be willing to take slightly less pay for a more empathetic employer.

The report highlights that 68 percent of CEOs say that the state of empathy at US companies needs to change, up eight points from last year. But executive leadership is unsure how to facilitate that change, with 45 percent of CEOs reporting difficulty in demonstrating empathy in their daily working life.

Couple that with the fact that 92 percent of the employees surveyed who believe that empathy is undervalued, and it seems that today’s workplaces need a holistic reboot. To speak more about culture at large organizations, and how empathy can—and should—play an important role in the hiring process, we invited Sandi Lurie, Senior Director of Global Recruiting at Optimizely, to chat with Luke Lightning, Chief Evangelist at Good&Co, at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco.

Both Luke and Sandi turn conversations around human capital into discussions about people and what motivates them. At Good&Co, Luke and his colleagues design personality assessment tools “to help companies seamlessly add the right talent to high-performing teams without sacrificing productivity or sabotaging chemistry.” Their mission is simple: to create happier, more productive workplaces.

Sandi Lurie’s impressive CV boasts major tech companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, and Medallia before her current role at Optimizely, where she oversees the business’ global recruitment function. According to Lurie, hiring is “a team sport,” with recruiters as the captains, “responsible for candidates’ emotional experience.”

This is why Optimizely recruiters participate in interview training programs that teach them to “start at a place of yes, so candidates walk in knowing that we want them to get the job.” Lurie explains that Optimizely aims “to build long-term relationships that result in a hire,” but even in those cases where the team rejects a candidate, “we want to own the decision whether we make a hire or not.”

To this end, Lurie and her team constantly refine the company’s hiring process to maintain a high level of empathy. Each year, Optimizely conducts surveys to evaluate its success in building relationships and offering a positive candidate experience. According to Lurie, some of the findings aren’t all that surprising. “It’s all about their experience and how nurtured they feel through the process,” she says.

However, what was a revelation to the team was how positive experiences didn’t require expensive gifts or swag on an employee’s first day. “We didn’t have to spend a dime,” explains Lurie. “Our success was really about training the teams to be prepared for interviews and how the recruiters prepared candidates.”

With candidates and recruiters primed before an interview, more time can be spent discussing what the candidate brings to the organization. “We talk a lot about culture add rather than ‘fitting in’,” says Lurie, as “‘fitting in’ doesn’t create a diverse workforce.”

This attitude towards company culture reflects a larger shift in recruiting strategies across organizations, many of which move away from biased concepts like “culture fit” towards diversity and inclusion efforts that improve company image—both internally and externally.

As companies look to make better data-driven hiring decisions, Lurie argues that “right now, the data we need is really the human experience data.” From what Lurie and her team have gathered through experimentation and candidate feedback, attracting the right talent comes down to how applicants view the hiring process. What matters, Lurie claims, is empathy.

“Candidates are not looking for an efficient experience,” she says. “They are looking for a compelling experience.”

Sandi Lurie, Sr. Director of Global Recruiting for the digital experiment platform Optimizely – knows, when it comes to recruiting, sometimes it takes a bit of trial and error.

When Sandi Lurie started out as a recruiter she was turned down three times before getting the job she wanted. Call it ‘having a vision’ or just sheer stubbornness, but she knew what she wanted and kept at it. Today, she expects the same from the recruiters she works with.

And now, after more than 25 years in TA, she’s not as green with her errors but she certainly hasn’t backed off the ‘try until you succeed approach.’ She’s just taken her experiments to a new level.

As Sr. Director of Global Recruiting, Sandi walks the walk of her company by continuously experimenting with her own practice.

February 26-27 she brings what she’s learned working with Optimizely – the startup who has made a name for itself enhancing the consumer experience of digital products – Hiring Success 19 – Americas, in San Francisco! Register now!

Find out what happens when you replace guesswork with evidence-based results and learn why it hurts business success to view HR as timid.

If you could go back to your first job and give yourself one piece of advice what would it be?

I would tell myself that your best learnings will come from the mistakes you made.

Speaking of mistakes, we heard finding your first recruiting job was pretty rough, tell us about it.

My first agency recruiting job was given to me by Joan Castelli… after she turned me down three times. Each time she said no, she would invite me to check back with her in the future. I continued to follow up and after three months she finally made me the offer.

Later, she told me that it was my tenacity that made her give me a chance even though I was so green. I ended up working for her for five years and looking back she is my biggest professional influence.

How has that experience informed your job?

When I’m interviewing recruiters or talking to aspiring recruiters, I look for that same tenacity and persistence. You won’t be as successful or enjoy the work you do every day unless you want it bad enough to be turned down three times.

What does the concept of Hiring Success mean to you?

Who we hire, has a direct impact on the quality of the product we create and our ability to sell it. So, to me, Hiring Success is synonymous with business success. One doesn’t exist without the other.

What is one overlooked aspect of recruiting?

Recruitment is key to bringing in talent, relying only on inbound applications and employee referrals won’t scale your company. Having a team of recruiters that are only good at managing the hiring process won’t get you the top talent needed to be successful.  Recruiters need to be great salespeople, know how to hunt and evaluate great talent and understand how to close the best candidates.

Do you think experimentation is underused in recruiting? Why do you think that is?

Yes! We are gaining great insights just looking at the analytics around quit rates on our site. It is helping us create our new careers page and recruitment marketing work.  I don’t think it’s been easy or a priority for companies to build experiments into their career sites. I am lucky to work at Optimizely where our platform makes it easy to create and measure experiments in real time.

Does the fact that you work in HR for experimentation company change the way you do your job? In other words, how do you practice what your company preaches?

Working at Optimizely has allowed me to expand my thinking of what is possible. It has enhanced my job as I can quickly gauge if something is working or not and make quick changes. We are just scratching the surface of the different types of experiments and what we can measure.  Whenever someone has a new idea, the culture says “Let’s run an experiment” it’s very freeing and allows us to keep trying new things.

What is an experiment you have run in your department, what did you learn and how have you changed?

We just kicked off an experiment on conversion rates through each part of our careers site.  We are creating multi-variations to be tested and will use this data on a rebrand we are working on to launch later in Q1.  We have learned that our site is too long and are working to keep everything up top and easier to navigate.

What is the role of technology in recruiting?

I am going to start with an old-school answer that says, picking up the phone or walking to someone’s desk overrules technology every time. We have gotten to a place where we don’t leave our desks or have the live conversations that are critical to building relationships and creating a real business partnership.  Having said that, technology is key. We are constantly evaluating new tools and resources to make us successful.  Whether it’s a new sourcing site, using SR as a sourcing tool, running experiments on our careers page, something to build our diversity pipeline or getting survey data to improve candidate experience we need to stay up to date and leverage the tools to make our jobs.

HR is often thought of as a timid branch of business, do you agree with this perception?

I don’t’ agree. The coaching that comes out of HR to all levels of the business has a direct impact on their results. There are companies that don’t leverage that opportunity but I think it’s incumbent on the leaders to keep HR at the C level.  Where it is timid is when HR acts as a business partner to the Executive Team, not the company.

How do we keep recruiting human and personal in the digital age?

It’s all about personal relationships. If you only work via digital means, you lose your ability to influence in a meaningful way. You are managing a process along. If you want to be thought of as a strategic partner you have to learn how to speak up in meetings, offer your opinions when making hiring decisions and build trust with the business.  I have a rule with the team that if you are about to reply to a reply on an email you have to pick up the phone and call or walk to the person’s desk to have a real conversation. This also applies to an email that can’t be read without scrolling down on your computer or phone.