Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Thank you for tuning into this episode of the How We Interview podcast. In this episode, I had the absolute pleasure of chatting with Liza Boticki. Lisa is the CEO of MXA Talent Solutions. Before that, she's worked for some of the biggest brands that you see and interact with every single day.
It's a pleasure talking with somebody like Lisa because she appreciates the craft of recruiting, she understands of craft for recruiting, and that passion comes through in this discussion 100%. So with that, enjoy.
I have today with me a friend of a friend, a friend of the podcast, Lisa Vodice.
She came to me via Thea Neal, who we both have worked with in the past, which shows what a small world it is. But thank you for joining us today.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Oh, so excited. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:55] Speaker A: Of course, of course, Liza. For those of you that are not Liza aware, I'd love it if you could walk through your background because it's super rich and really interesting.
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Sure.
So I started in recruiting before we had computers on our desks. I will date myself to that extent.
I started as a staffing specialist in the temp world, moved through various iterations of placement and working in large companies and small companies and sales and all of those good things. Moved into rpo, managed a large RPO cross border Canada and the US for BMO Harris bank, and ultimately landed at Coca Cola Bottling Canada as the director of recruitment and in that role had to build a recruiting team that did not exist and we were reporting into the US So really a lot of cross border stuff that had to happen, I learned a tremendous amount, ended up in the North America role out of Atlanta. So I was commuting to Atlanta for three years as the vice president of TA for the Butler and the marketing team and then ended up at Royal Caribbean as the head of global talent acquisition where we would hire about 22,000 people a year from 120 countries and then Covid.
So in a little side story, no tears here because it was an awesome experience and, and it was a gift. Had to deal with cancer during COVID and came out of that knowing that I had more to give than what any corporate job was ever going to let me do. So MXA was built out of that time when I had a opportunity to reflect on what I'm passionate about and what I want to bring to the world.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a lot. I mean, just going through Covid alone and then dealing with like a personal health crisis on top of it. I do, I do love the clarity that that gave you. Can you talk a little bit about mxa?
[00:02:45] Speaker B: Sure. So when I started to really think about and it was really that opportunity, and that's why I say it was a gift, I had the opportunity to heal and think and be at peace, that I really understood that my gift was in transforming recruiting functions into truly integrated parts of the business, aligning TA to the business. And I started to develop the recruitment maturity index. I knew at the time that I was leading global, I had a really hard time understanding where we were at because there's so much perception around recruitment, especially in the big corporate organizations where they think recruiting does this or they don't know that recruiting does that.
And from that I started to develop my own maturity index. And I'm just very proud to say that it's taken four and a half years to birth this baby, but we're finally live with it. And it's a TA leader tool built by a TA leader. So that was how I started mxa. And really what happened was my clients started asking me for search. Could you help us with this? Could you help us with that? So now I have a team of seven across both the US and Canada. And we do. Search is about 50% of our business. I do fractional TA leadership when there's a need.
And we do consulting. We help to transform. We did a huge project with MGM Resorts where they had a new VP of ta. So I was her right arm for six months and helped her to do the transformation so she could keep the wheels on the bus and I could do all the data analytics and org structure. So that's sort of that, you know, we're an all things TA boutique hotel.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: But led by somebody that's led some of the most amazing brands, which is unique because sometimes, you know, when you're in house, you're getting it up constantly by new tools, new vendors, new technology startups, you know, established companies. And then when you really start to press, they don't really have the TA background to be able to effectively help move their pro, their, their product or their process along. And I find myself in a lot of ways, and this is, this is not me bragging, but like I'm helping them get there because they never actually sat in the seat before being on the other side. Now do you find. Because you get to, you get to not only kind of bake the cake, but you get to, you get to do everything along the.
How satisfying is that versus like being in house and just doing that one piece?
[00:05:10] Speaker B: Sure.
To me it's very satisfying because it gives me the opportunity to really help change some minds. In my humble opinion, TA is the most strategic aspect of human resources. Without the right people in the right jobs at the right time, you're not meeting your business objectives. And until you're able to tie the results of talent selection to the business results, leaders don't get it.
They just don't understand it. So having the opportunity to work with TA leaders and give them the data and the information and help them understand it, often TA leaders, I'm not going to point fingers or name names, but there are a tremendous amount of companies out there that have people leading TA that know nothing about TA strategy. So they'll pick all the fancy shiny objects and they have every tool in the book because they got lots and lots of money and nobody's using it. Yeah. And it's not being developed in a way that actually supports a process that drives a fair and equitable hiring practice, but also drives better talent selection. We've spent a decade at least teaching leaders in these leadership development classes. And I use air quotes because that's how I see them. We teach them how to deal with multi generational workforce. We teach them how to hold a proper meeting. We teach them how to do a proper performance review. But do we ever teach them how to hire properly?
Rarely.
And we don't teach them because they don't believe it's strategic. They don't see it as a place where they should be spending their time. And my, I wanted on my tombstone she made them believe 100%.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: And I think it's, it's this notion. We both work for some, some really large organizations and everybody can staff how they're going to staff. But I've worked in situations where somebody from an adjacent department, maybe even outside HR was brought in to lead ta.
[00:07:06] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: And maybe they're a super gifted leader, but they don't know that. We called it a craft in our pre call and I still think it's funny, but I'm going to roll with it. And I think this evolution into thinking and I want to say selling ta, but positioning TA as a revenue generating part of the business is where we need to go and how we need to be talking about the work we do.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: For too long it's been a cost center or a liability and the, if we can get more butts in seats, generating revenue and then, you know, kind of closing those gaps where we have staffing issues, that's going to make the company more profitable.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. And so aligning the TA Strategy to the business strategy was one of the foundational reasons for creating the Recruitment Maturity Index.
And it generally. So, so I'll just give you, I'll do a little, a little tap dance for myself here because I'm so proud of it. But the survey asks key stakeholders, your TA people, your HR people, your hiring leaders. It asks them a series of questions on the five key criteria for ta what TA should be doing?
A, it says, how are we doing at this? And then it says, how do you do? You consider this a priority, rank it as a priority. So what happens is you as a TA leader, get the results back and you see that your business. I'll use this as an example. Your business leaders don't think the campus recruiting is a priority. Meanwhile, you've put a ton of money into it because you think you need to build a campus recruiting function.
So you've got a disconnect.
So as a TA leader, I now know one of two things I haven't communicated properly. The need for this or the strategic advantage of it, or B, I've completely misunderstood the direction the company's going in. And that leads to conversations and that leads to the business actually having strategic conversations with you. And the minute you start having strategic conversations with business leaders about their line of business, about what their priorities are, you suddenly become the expert again.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:02] Speaker B: It truly drives a different result.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: It does. And it changes the perception of. You talked about this earlier too. A change of perception of recruiting as a strategic partner versus just an order taker.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: And I think what's fascinating about what you're saying is, is it kind of bridges the gap. You talk to a hundred organizations like, how's your recruiting team doing? Oh, they're meeting my recruiting targets or they're meeting the goals of the organization. But if they're not doing it well or efficiently or strategically, it's either costing too much money or it's caus word churn or your, your attrition's way too high or maybe you have disengaged employees. Those are all symptoms of a bad recruiting team or a recruiting team that's not being strategic. I think what you're doing is so important because it allows you to not only recruit better, but do it in such a way that's better for the long term growth of the company.
[00:09:49] Speaker B: Sure. Exactly. And I mean, how many times have we heard TA leaders say, oh, we're not responsible for retention.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Right?
[00:09:55] Speaker B: No, you're not, because the hiring manager does own the decision. But if you haven't taken the time to calibrate and have bullseye conversations and debrief with that hiring leader, then it's on you. Yeah, because you need to lead them through this selection process because they don't know how to do it and they don't even know what their own unconscious biases are.
So they're making hiring decisions in, like, because they're comfortable with someone versus because that person would be great for the job.
So I always say to my hiring managers, you know, when you're interviewing someone, it's not a quiz. You're not there to quiz them. You're there to open the door and let them show you who they are. And that's how you discover whether or not this person is going to fit in your team and actually pushing them and challenging them to say, well, who's on your team? You've got a couple of drivers, like type A personalities over here. You got someone that's a little bit more introverted over there. What do you need to balance that out?
Because when we're looking for competencies, it's not one book. And how many companies. And you know this, Aaron. How many companies build competency dictionaries?
[00:10:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
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[00:11:52] Speaker B: I mean, when they first came out, Campbell's soup had 100 pages of competencies with descriptors. I remember because I went through the training and I was like, oh, kill me now. Like, how am I going to know all of this? So understanding what competencies are and then applying them to the role, not just based on the role, but based on what you need to drive your team to better results.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, you're in trouble when you're talking to a vendor and they ask you how many competencies you have and you go, yes, 118. And they start to like, you know, we may not be the solution for you. That, that is usually a pretty good hint that you've gone too far.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:12:27] Speaker A: Those conversations before, I guess I'd be remiss to ask because we're in the people business, right? You and I have been doing this long enough where we've seen, you know, trends and fads come and go. And so now we are in the throes of AI. AI kind of had a false start like seven, eight years ago where everybody wanted like on screen, virtual assistant, whatnot. And I really think it's taken hold. How do you, with MXA kind of balance the need to leverage AI to as efficient as possible, but also humanize the work that you're doing and the work that you're trying to enact with your clients?
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Sure, I think AI is a great tool, but AI is not the harbinger of recruitment. It is not going to hire people for you and it is not going to change culture.
So that human to human conversation that takes place, that discovery session, that takes place when someone is looking for a new hire and spending the time understanding what it is they're looking for from a, okay, a competency perspective, but experience and education, although that to me falls a little bit lower on the scale past. You know, I think experience comes first, but also how, you know, what is, what is, what are the drivers, what are the motivating factors? Why should this person work for you? Those are all the things that should come out in a discovery session. We use AI when we're doing searches for our clients in a way that, that helps to augment the recruiter's work. So to help the recruiter, and I think that's the best way to apply it. So we use a tool, transcribes our interviews. So when we're interviewing, we're transcribing the interview so the recruiter isn't missing anything. And that gives the recruiter the time and space to make notes to themselves, to remember certain things or aspects about how that person interviewed and how, what their language patterns were, what their body language was like, which can't be captured by AI. You're going to be looking at that person to pick up on those nuances, right? And those things tell you everything. If somebody is sitting there with their arms crossed in front of their chest and they're answering, you with a smile on their face and they're saying yes, but their head is nodding no, then those are things you need to. AI isn't going to get that. Not yet anyway. Maybe one day.
Then we take that transcript and we put it into ChatGPT and ask it to just summarize the interview. We'll use ChatGPT to summarize our interview and then we'll go back in and edit it and add our notes and our perspective on it.
We also use ChatGPT to take our job description, our discovery session, and input that into CHAT GPT and ask it to give us five key questions we should be asking in order to drive those responses. So we use it as a tool to add to our, our, our. Our book of tools or our toolbox in order for us to be able to be more productive and more. More in depth.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Yeah, you mentioned, you mentioned how long we've been doing this. I used, I think back of a leader would come to me like, I need six fresh job descriptions. Can you write those? I remember physically writing them out and like, it would keep getting pushed to the bottom of my list because, like, I don't have the mental capacity to write six unique job descriptions. And now that could be done in minutes. It's. I know it's amazing. And honestly, I fancy myself an okay writer. I could not touch like, like my relationship with Claude AI is one of the strongest relationships in my life and it opens me up to do other, Other things, other work. And you're right, it, like anything else, it's a tool. And I feel as though sometimes I talk to people and I'm like, I. You know, my fear is, is we quit having unique thoughts because we start relying on the tools so much, we. We lose perspective. And that's, that's where it gets scary for me. But I'm 100% in agreement with how you all are leveraging it. And it just frees you up to do more cool stuff.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, we know our candidates know that they're being recorded for the purpose of being able to transcribe the interview.
If anybody doesn't want to, then okay, that's fine too.
It just saves time. It allows us to spend more time with the person and less time writing or typing. And I always found, even when we, when we started doing things online. So at Coke, we had our interview guides all on our system, so we could pop up the interview guide in the requisition and we could type in the answers. But if I'm typing, I'm not listening. Yeah, right.
So training yourself to just type gibberish, you know, and then go back and correct it after was, you know, time consuming. So this, this takes, you know, load off. But I have heard, I've been on too many webinars where I've heard this expression skill based hiring. And you know what?
Really? I, I want to say a bad word, but I won't. To heck with that.
[00:17:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:08] Speaker B: I mean, yes, skills are important and there are some jobs where it's strictly skill. If I'm going to see a neurologist, I want to know that he went to school and got, you know, degreed in neurology.
But if I'm hiring a salesperson or a customer service person or an EA or a vice president of marketing, what I want to know is who are they?
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: Yes. I want to know they've done it. I want to know they have experience. But learning agility is a key component of making a good hire.
Right. And so if I'm not looking for learning agility coupled with experience and skills, then I'm not doing, I'm not doing myself any favors.
[00:17:48] Speaker A: And I think a lot of leaders will want to make recruiting more science than art, and I don't. And there is probably some roles to your point, neurology, data analysts, where, where there is a, whatever you want to call it, fundamentally they need to be able to do the job. That said, the human element, which we keep circling back around, like if that is missing, if they don't have the soft skills, if they don't have the traits are going to make them successful or happy in the role, then like, what are you, what are we even doing?
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Right, Exactly. My, one of my sons, I have four boys. One of them is a crane operator. You don't want somebody five stories in the air, you know, swinging a few thousand pounds of concrete across a roadway who doesn't know how to operate that machine.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:38] Speaker B: And they don't care.
Like, he does have a good personality because he's my son, so obviously. But, but he will tell me stories. A lot of the guys that work there don't. And it doesn't matter because they, what they have to do is very specific.
But typically that's not what you're hiring for, for. And you're right, many managers want to make it more art, more science than art. And that's again because they don't understand the strategic element of making a good hire versus making a bad hire.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: So again, on my tombstone she made them believe. Right. That's that's where I'm going.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: We'll get T shirts made. We'll. We'll send.
[00:19:14] Speaker B: Yes, we'll get T shirts made. The right people and the right jobs at the right time. It's all over my website. Everything I do, I take, I repeat that. And that was my boss 20 years ago who said that to me.
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Yeah, actually, I'll say that too. Right people, right time, right place, doing the right thing. Right?
[00:19:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: Yeah. 100%, Lisa. This has been delightful. If somebody's listening to this and they're like, I want to learn more, I want to hear more about the Maturity Index, what's the best way to connect with you?
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Well, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. They can go to our website. We have a contact email there. And I get that. That gets forwarded to me if anybody has any questions about the rmi.
Our search services are both in Canada and the US So anybody looking to augment their recruiting funct.
And then I do fractional leadership contracts throughout the year when people need, you know, have a need for a TA leader in the interim.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Excellent. I will Link to your LinkedIn profile. Link to your LinkedIn profile in the notes and also put a link in for Mxa as well. This has been delightful. Thank you so much for your time.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: I'm so glad to have met you, Erin. This was really a lot of fun. We should do it again.
[00:20:18] Speaker A: Likewise. 100%. Thank you.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: All right, thank you.
[00:20:23] Speaker C: Thanks for listening to this episode of the How We Interview podcast, brought to you by Reemby. Head to our website@how weinterview.com to find the show notes and links mentioned in this episode. While you're there, subscribe to the podcast through your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. Leaving us a rating and review also helps us reach more listeners interested in learning from other talent acquisition professionals.
