Talent Acquisition Futurism w/ Matt Alder and Mary Shea

Mary Shea (0:00)

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. My name is Mary Shea, and I'm your host today for The Higher Quotient Podcast.

And with me today is Matt Alder, and I'm absolutely thrilled to have you, Matt. So welcome to today's session.

Matt Alder (0:18)

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here.

Mary Shea (0:21)

So I always like to start with where in the world is Carmen San Diego? Where are you located today, Matt?

Matt Alder (0:28)

So I'm based just outside Edinburgh in Scotland, just on the beach.

And as we were saying before we started, it's a lovely sunny day in Scotland, which is not something you get to say very often. So I'm very much enjoying it while I can.

Mary Shea (0:43)

Well, I'm glad we could provide you with the opportunity to talk about the sunshine in Scotland.

I'm here in Portland, Maine. We've got about eight inches of snow coming down. So I think it's gonna be a great day to have a show and get a lot of work done. So for those of you who don't know me, my name is Mary Shea, and I'm a go-to-market advisor for HireQuotient. Been working with the company for multiple months now. And I have the distinct honor of being a guest host of this show.

And I'm thrilled to introduce Matt. Matt has an amazing background. He's a strategic consultant who focuses on innovation in the HR space, primarily leaning into technology and looking at acquisition of talent.

He's also the host of Recruiting Future, one of the world's most popular talent acquisitions podcasts. And over the past 20 years, he's built a reputation as a global thought leader, working with employers on digital strategies. And you're the author of two books, one called Exceptional Talent, which was written in 2017, and the other called Digital Talent, which was written in 2022 Matt, like myself, likes to travel all over the world and deliver keynote speeches on the world stage. So we're thrilled to have him here today. So Matt, before we dive in to some of the prearranged questions, I'd love to just know personally and for the audience as well, tell us a little bit about the two books you wrote and what is different from, you know, within talent acquisition in 2022 versus 2017 How are those two books different and what's the value to the audience today?

Matt Alder (2:24)

Yeah. I mean, that's a really interesting question. So I co-authored both books with my good friend, Mervyn Dinnon. It would be unfair for me to miss him out. I always forget to mention him, but I definitely should. So we wrote Exceptional Talent in 2017 because we were noticing how the whole world of talent was evolving. And our starting point with that was very much the experience that people have at work.

And actually, how you experience your job is very joined up. So you experience a recruitment process, you experience working for a company, you experience leaving for a company. And that, to the human consuming it, is a joined up single experience, basically. To the employers delivering it, certainly then, and still to some case now, very much delivered in silos. So you have talent acquisition teams doing talent acquisition, talent management teams doing talent management, L&D teams doing L&D, lots of silos within HR, within companies. And what we were writing, if you truly want to get exceptional talent to your organization, talent that shares the values of your business and can really drive your business forward, you need to be much more seamless in your approach to it. So that was what exceptional talent was about.

A few years later, we wanted to follow up because things were moving forward, particularly with the technology that was coming onto the market, but also the pace of acceleration in digital transformation. And the fact that so many companies were looking for people with digital skills or needing to recruit people who could have skills that hadn't even been invented yet to move their business forward. So we kind of revisited that model. We started writing it just before the pandemic. We had to then kind of revisit it and rewrite it because a lot of the things we were writing about had kind of already happened.

And so yeah, so it came out last year and it's really about digital skills within business and how companies can make sure that they have access to the skills they need as their business is transformed digitally. But very much based on the original kind of methodology that we had about delivering this kind of seamless process.