Our guest on #WorkTrends this week is Chad Fife is the VP of Marketing for Talview. He’s an entrepreneur and global marketing leader in Ed tech, HR software, and SaaS, with experience building $10M-260M businesses and bringing innovative products and programs to market with early adopters.
Chad’s got a unique perspective: he’s a hiring insider who’s fluent in tech as well as marketing — but he’s never lost his passion for finding standout talent. We discussed how to make hires that thrive and help your company thrive — and how to engage the new generation coming into the workplace right now. He shared a few stories of his own on hiring successes and not-so-successes, and two must-know hiring secrets as well.
Listen to the full conversation or read the recap below. And don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss an episode.
[06:52] 72% of job seekers say they need to understand a company’s work culture before accepting an offer
[10:45] I think the second reason why you need to hire someone with passion over skill, is because they have something called the R Word. They’re going to have resilience.
(23:45) With video interviews, there’s a way to change an algorithm that’s so much easier than changing a person’s mindset that’s been in a job hiring people for 20 or 30 or 10 years.
Talview’s Chad Fife talked to us about what factors really work for hiring today — and weighed in on the endless debate between hiring for skills and hiring for passion. Spoiler alert: his very astute response on this may close the book on that question for good. As VP of Marketing for Talview, he’s been involved in the intersection of tech, marketing and hiring for long enough to qualify for true insider status in our book. Here’s what he had to say:
High-Pressure Hiring
The hiring climate is tougher than ever — the tech sector leads industries as far as turnover rate at 13.2%, and among employees age 25 or less, the general turnover rate is 8%. So we need to hire more and we need to hire better — and that means leveraging all the innovations we can. Further, a lot of teams are becoming remote: and Chad himself is managing a substantial one via a combination of digital tools and understanding how best to adapt to different communication styles. He also spoke candidly about his own hiring process: he just made a remote hire that is really changing how he thinks about proximity versus excellence. He goes with the best now, not the nearest.
The R-Word
Talking about passion over skill, Chad advocates for passion, citing the R-Word — resilience — a quality today’s workforce needs to have plenty of. “I love more tactile definition of this word, which is able to recoil or spring back into shape after bending, stretching or being compressed,” Chad said. “We don’t think of our work life like that, bringing it back into shape, but every time there’s a deadline, every time we have a conversation with our boss, every time we have a customer that says they’re thinking about leaving you … every time you look at your whatever goal paradigm you have, OKR’s, KPI’s, whatever … you need to be able to bounce back the next day, the next week, the next hour.”
Real-Life True Tales
Sharing examples of what makes a good hire, Chad explained the value in hiring someone because they’re clearly passionate about their work, and hiring someone based on a clear picture of who they are. And that picture is gleaned from a whole range of different channels, using skills and behavioral digital assessments, and getting a sense of who they are from social media. Even Twitter can convey potential fit, he explained: “I could tell just by looking at their social media, just the presence they had, tweets, what they talked about. I could tell they would fit our company.” Another indispensable tool for the global, remote age of hiring: video. Creating job preview videos not only gives potential candidates a great feel for the job, it may also separate the wheat from the chaff by clarifying exactly what the job entails. And that is going to make everyone’s lives easier, not least of all for the hiring team.
There’s a lot of great intel in this podcast with Chad that I think you’ll really enjoy. It’s a great way to kick off the new year.
Resources Mentioned in this #WorkTrends Episode
Chad Fife on Linkedin and Twitter
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
