The Workforce of the Future: Emerging Trends That Are Here to Stay

RippleMatch’s 2021 Fall User Conference was filled with information-packed sessions and workshops on the future of campus recruiting. The conference concluded with a Leadership Roundtable moderated by Andrew Myers, RippleMatch’s CEO and Founder. He was joined for the discussion by Cindy Loggins, the Director of Global University Recruiting and Programs at eBay, Bruce Soltys, AVP of Talent Acquisition Sourcing Strategies at Travelers, and Stephanie Turner, Campus Sourcing Leader, Talent Attraction and Acquisition at EY. 

During the roundtable, these three campus recruitment leaders shared their thoughts on the early career recruiting landscape and the future of the workplace. Here are the top discussion points from the panel.

 (Note: Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.) 

Click here to view the full panel discussion.

Which changes to the early career recruiting landscape do you think will endure post Covid?

Bruce: 

There’s a tight labor market right now, so the changes that are really going to stick are the ones that benefit candidates and employees. It’s important to make sure your brand stands out in this kind of tight market. We work with our employer branding team to ensure that all of our communication is authentic, transparent, and engaging. We use digital platforms, but make sure that our communication is still personal. We’re a relationship-based entity, so that human connection is critical, even when connecting digitally.

Cindy: 

In the past, we were limited to which campuses we could physically be on. We could only be at that one place at that one time. Virtual recruiting has really opened up a lot of doors for us. We’ve done virtual interviews for quite a while, since it’s much easier from a logistics standpoint. But COVID really gave us the opportunity to take a risk—because we had to. 

What’s critical throughout all of the changes, is that we stay true to ourselves. Once things get back to more of a normal reality, we can’t just completely switch how we’ve been doing things. Whether we’re recruiting on campus or virtually, we have to do things in a way that fits our company and our culture.

Stephanie:

I think what's here to stay is change itself and the pace of change. Gone are the days of workforce planning that looks out 12 or 18 months and dictates your targets for next year. Gone are the days of a fall season and a spring season. I don't know that we will have recruiting seasons anymore, so the strategy will have to evolve. We’ll have to be more responsive, and we’ll have to iterate more frequently. We can't post roles in September and not post again until February. 

Gone are the days where recruiting timelines are defined by a school or by even an academic calendar. We used to look at summer like it’s hands off because nobody's on campus, but now we don't have to worry about who's on campus and who's not. Because of platforms like RippleMatch, we can engage with them any day of the week, any week of the year.

I think opening up our application, putting it on our careers page and increasing accessibility to the organization is going to be the way forward. Gone are the days of this really closed application, this closed school model, where you had to have gone to that school, or you had to have known someone and been referred to the organization. Opening things up and posting our positions so that anyone anywhere can see it, I think, is a pretty significant change stemming from all of this.

By opening up our application, embracing digital strategies, and leveraging these new technologies, we’ve seen great results. The pipeline is far more diverse than it was before we engaged with students digitally, and in a very significant way. I think it has reaffirmed for us that virtual recruiting is absolutely essential.

We were already seeing a shift to hybrid recruiting before COVID, but the pandemic accelerated the shift. What do you think the future of hybrid recruitment is, compared to just on-campus or virtual recruiting?

Bruce:

I think some of the initial touch points will be digital, and you’ll see it shift to in-person later on in the process. For candidate engagement or information sessions, where we meet candidates early on, we’ll do that digitally. As they get further along through interviews and reach the final round, that's where you'll start to see a little bit more of the in-person aspect take hold, with on-site visits and campus tours.

Cindy: 

It depends on what the students want. Do the majority of students want to come back and do full round interviews onsite at an office? I don't know. If we want to bring them onsite for any particular reason, we’ll think about: is it efficient, does it serve the purpose of what we're trying to do, and is it going to help the candidate make a decision? 

We have been tossing around the idea of possibly continuing to keep everything virtual from a recruiting standpoint, because we’ve had good engagement in the recruitment process. Once a candidate has been given an offer, then do we bring them in for a match day or some sort of experience where they're able to meet the people of eBay?

We may have a plan, but we better have a plan B, and figure out a way for our teams to be flexible whatever we choose. I'm trying to learn as much as I can from the people that we're trying to hire: What works for you, what resonates for you, what are you caring about?

Stephanie:

Internally, we've started to use the phrase “moments that matter” to distinguish between what we devote time and energy to in-person and what we continue to do virtually. Can we still make that moment important and meaningful in a digital setting, or does that really need to be done in-person?

I think about the example of the all-campus career fair where you're going to meet students from every different major and every different graduation year. They might not even know what EY is, or they could be coming up to ask us about our tech consulting practice but they get stuck talking to an auditor. That could be done so much better with some front-end planning digitally. We would know that that student was interested in tech consulting, we could pair them with someone in that practice, they would get more than 15 seconds to speak with them. It’s more personalized, AND they wouldn't need to get dressed up to stand in one spot in a gymnasium, building up all this anxiety.

I think we just have to look at, what is the goal of this event, what is the objective, and what are we trying to achieve? I would argue that there are many interactions that are more effective when done over a digital platform or conducted virtuall,y and I think we've got to lean into that where we can.

We all work at these big companies where you can have 100 different jobs—to think that we could just magically pair the right people up in-person was foolish. It takes data. I think so many times people associate data with being impersonal, but when we use the data to make the experience more personal, we're using it for the right reasons. We're using it to better the candidate's experience, and to enable them to learn something that they want to learn, and to talk to somebody that they want to talk to. Ultimately, we want them to walk away feeling like that was a really good use of their 15 minutes.

With the increased shift to remote work, and the challenges that come with it, what do you think the future of work will be?

Cindy: 

I think this is going to differ on a company by company basis. Even within companies, some departments might be remote while others are in-person. It really depends on what’s right for each company. Of course, that can lead to challenges as recruiters. If we don’t have an all or nothing policy, it will be more challenging to communicate, but I think as long as we continue to prioritize what is most important to us as an organization, and continue to be flexible, it will be okay. 

We had a soft opening here, and a lot of interns decided to come on campus. Because there aren’t a lot of people here, they’re actually getting face time with the CEO, which is a unique experience they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. I think ultimately the preference will vary person to person and company to company, so you have to stick to your values with whichever choice you make, and communicate the decision in an authentic way.

Stephanie: 

Some people want to be back in the office, some people prefer to be at home. The biggest takeaway is that we cannot lean into a one size fits all approach, and it will also require that we set aside the preconceptions or our past traditions around how we've worked. We will all have to be open minded about what this looks like.

We're listening to our clients, and we're trying to understand what they're thinking to determine how we can best serve them, since that's what we do in our business. We also want our people to work from the right place at the right time and for the right reasons. When they're going to see a client or they're going into an office, they should be going with intentionality. They shouldn’t go just because they think they should or because someone told them they had to, but because there's a bigger purpose there. 

We're really trying to take this opportunity to think about how we deliver our work, and what that means for our people in terms of experiences. I think we've historically been a little bit constrained, whether that's by our organizational structure or geographical boundaries, and what we've learned from COVID, is that those constraints were self imposed. We have demonstrated that we can work outside of the organizational structure, we can work outside the office, we can work outside of geographical boundaries. We have to figure out how we can keep doing that, in a way that benefits our people and in a way that delivers more diverse experiences for them.

Bruce: 

We have to make sure there's a forum right for feedback and that there's an opportunity for employees to share their opinions. Whether their thoughts are on accommodations or hardships, we need to listen, adjust, and adapt as necessary. One size doesn't fit all, and that's playing out within Travelers across different functions.

Different functions have different opportunities for flexibility, so to have one end-all solution is certainly not going to work. I think just making sure that anyone within your workforce has an opportunity to share concerns about accommodation needs, hardship needs, and creating a communication mechanism for them to do so is really important. It’s going to have an impact on productivity and mental health as we go into the next year.

What advice would you share with others in the campus recruiting space?

Cindy: 

I know what works for me, but I am not going to assume that works for anybody else. I constantly remind myself to be an active listener. Everything could be great one day, and not so great tomorrow, so I’m okay with that and recognize that really, truly listening and partnering with them on solutions is key. 

As a leader myself, I don’t always come to the table with a solution, because what may work for me may not work for somebody else. Do unto others as you want done unto yourself, and you that's how I request feedback. That's how I work with my leaders. We're in this together, and there's not going to be a single bull's eye answer. We're here to support each other.

On a different note, if I find a candidate that I think is a rock star, but perhaps you know, has a passion for EY, why wouldn't I send that person to Stephanie? We’re one community and we’re here to support each other and our candidates. We all want people to be at our companies because they believe in what we're doing and what we are about.

Bruce: 

Transparency is key. Not being afraid to say, “I don't know right now.” I think sometimes there's a lot of hesitancy from leaders to admit that they don't know something. But we've all said, “you know, we can't predict the future. I don't know what’s going to happen in 6 months, but here's what I know now.” I think the ability to make decisions with the information that you have at hand is key. We've all in the past 18 months had to make decisions, like whether or not to go remote, or cut our internship short, and we had to make those decisions with the information that we had at that time. It’s very easy to be indecisive during uncertain times, but as leaders we have to make the best decisions we can with the information we have.

Stephanie:

I think one of the silver linings of the pandemic is that we’ve been able to put people back front and center. We’ve seen our coworkers’ homes, their children, their cats—we’ve seen that everything is just a part of life, and we spend a portion of that life working. We've moved away from positioning life and work in opposition. 

We need to strike a balance, and that’s been big from an empowerment standpoint. I asked my team to take risks, big risks that could fail. And if it does, I want them to know that we're going to dust ourselves off and get back up, and we will learn something important from it. I want them to know that we’re all humans, we’re all going to make mistakes, and it’s okay to make mistakes as long as we learn from them.

To see all of the Fall User Conference video replays and presentations, click here.