Alright. Hello, and welcome. Thanks for joining and spending, an afternoon with us. We're excited to have you here. I wanted to give just maybe ten seconds for everyone to join, and then we'll dive in and get you to to meet this amazing panel and have conversation about topics like talent talent acquisition and player branding, talent attraction, AI, and a lot more. Just some administrative things as people are coming in. If you have questions as we go, feel free to put them in the q and a box in the Zoom meeting, and we'll keep an eye on them. If we aren't able to answer them all, we'll follow-up with you after, but happy for you to to throw them out there. And if it makes sense, I'll go ahead and and throw the question at the panel as we go. We are recording, so you'll get a recording of this afterwards, and feel free to send it to others that you think it might add value to. But thank you. Thank you so much for taking your precious time to join us today to talk about recruiting and talent attraction or talent acquisition priorities for twenty twenty six. So with that being said, why don't I introduce myself, and then I'll pass over to the panels. My name is Andrea McCartney. I am an account executive with PageUp, based in Utah with my husband and, now six year old twins, but excited to be here with this amazing group. I will pass to Jackie to talk about who you are, your role, your organization. And if you were to use a song to describe your year in talent acquisition, what would it be? Well, hi, everyone. I'm Jacqueline Velez. I lead talent acquisition at the University of Central Florida. UCF is one of the largest public research universities, located in Orlando, Florida, and we serve about seventy thousand students. In my role as associate director, I manage a team of sixteen recruiters, and we're responsible for hiring all administrative, professional support, and temporary positions across the university. If I had to pick a song well, I actually googled songs, that were about perseverance because this year, we had to work really hard to onboard all of the remaining colleges and divisions into talent services into our model. So with that, there was a lot of growing pains, and we've also focused a lot on growing our, employer branding. So with that, I also wanted to pick someone that my team would recognize and know of, so Miley Cyrus, the climb. Alright. Thanks, Jackie. So glad you're here. I will go to Alex to answer the same questions about yourself. Yeah. Hey, everyone. Alex Her, formerly of the EV space. Got a got a new and upcoming community ready to announce here pretty soon. But, also, I'm the head of global employer branding at GoDaddy dot com. And I lead a team of two, soon to be three. So if you're in India and you or you're looking for an employer branding position, please feel free to hit me up. But outside of that, you know, I I was going mighty Cyrus, and we're talking about that. But, like, I was thinking mighty Cyrus mighty Cyrus wrecking ball. But if I had I I just I gotta go half and half. Right? Let's go mighty Cyrus wrecking ball. Let's also go with Sia Unstoppable. That's that's my go to whenever I'm ready to go out for a public speaking gig. So that's it. Good choices. Love it. Alright, Kristen. Definitely, last but not least, go ahead and introduce yourself. Great. Thank you so much. So hello. I am Kristen Jacobs. I am the talent brand and marketing manager with Ancestry. So we're the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, and we're headquartered in Lehi, Utah, but I do work from home in central Minnesota. Let's see. I've been with the ancestry for three years, by the way. If I was to pick a song, I picked eye of the tiger by survivor because I really feel like it represents all of our recruiters and our our talent attraction teams as we are kind of ready to battle for the best tech talent in the industry. Yeah. No. That's also a good one. I love it. Well, each of you have a different taste, which is great. Alright. Let's dive in. So we I have a series of questions that we're gonna go through and and ask and answer from this panel, and I think you're gonna enjoy the content from today's conversation. And the first one is more of a reflection. So in reflection over the past eleven months, right, so in twenty twenty five, what has been your biggest challenge as a TA leader? And secondly, what has been your biggest strategic win? Before I dive in and ask the panel, though, let's get your opinion. So let's do the poll. We'll have it up here on the screen so you can pick. We're curious to see your thoughts on biggest TA challenge, and then we'll hear from the panel. Got some answers coming in. Definitely, then well, I was gonna tell you what the most popular one, but that might jades the data, so I should probably be quiet. We need that Jeopardy song to to play in the background while this goes off, don't you think? I'll be perfect for it. I know. Right? Alright. Thanks for answering. I think let's go ahead and share those results. So the biggest TA challenge of twenty twenty five, first, thirty one percent high applicant volume and quality. That's interesting. We that definitely came up in our preparation for this. Second being retention and internal mobility, so keeping the people you have. Third, the skill shortage followed closely by candidate experience. That I think that resonates, wouldn't you say, the to the three of you with what you were thinking? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Perfect. Alright. Well, let's shift and hear from the panel. So, again, what is thinking about twenty twenty five biggest success and the biggest challenge? Kristen, did you wanna kick us off? Yeah. I can kick us off. That poll definitely resonated with with me. Our applicant volume is volume is is very high, and we have very little paid advertising. So it's not like we're intentionally bringing that flow in. So our recruiters are still reviewing all of our applications. We're not using a ton of AI to necessarily reject candidates. We are reviewing them. So that takes a lot of time. So that that candidate, the quantity and maybe the mixed quality has definitely been a challenge. We're also seeing an issue with fake applications, and we've even seen fake interviews. I think that's gonna be a hot topic as well in trying to really combat that. I think our biggest strategic win this year, personally, I'm more on the branding side and the recruitment marketing side. So for me, it was really starting to utilize the workflow functionality in the clinch platform where our career site sits. We have implemented workflows, for event registrations, as well as our talent community and really specializing some hiring initiatives with our talent community by using the workflows. So I think that was a big win for us really being able to take advantage of the platform in ways we hadn't been before. Love that. Thanks for sharing. Jackie, what about you? Gotta make sure I go off mute. One one unexpected hurdle, as Kirsten mentioned, has been the rise in fake applicants, either using false identities or fabricated credentials. It's unclear why they apply, what if they're just trying to gain access to our system or if they're just bots and no one's really behind, mass applying to our roles. What it's become a major issue for for me and for my team because we do, review all of the applicants, also manually, and so it has become a huge bottleneck. And what we try to do to kinda resolve the fake applicant or all of the applicants that we're seeing that we suspect are fake applicants, is, we've added the email confirmation, when they're applying, and, also, we've added the captcha. So we're hoping to eliminate, like, the fraudulent submissions. Another, issue that we've seen is we use the one way interview one way interview platform, and, we use it for efficiency, you know, scheduling complex. And it's been a great tool in that respect, but we're seeing a lot of candidates using AI generated responses. And so what we've tried to do is, you send them an email before in advance letting them know, hey. We wanna hear your personal experiences. And, you know, the the wanting to be perfect in the interview, I think, overshadows our advice in the in the email. But a win that we've had would be, we when we have strategy meetings, we take notes, and then we, provide we put our notes into a prompt that we created for our copilot, and it then generates a summary of, what the hiring manager is looking for. It has, red flags, green flags, defined criteria. And so if a team member is unable to join the strategy meeting, or if a team member later is assisting with sourcing or screening, they can review those notes, and it really just highlights all of the information. So that has been a huge win for us. I love that. Fantastic. I'm noticing a trend in these conversations. Alex, you wanna share? Yeah. Yeah. I think, definitely the trend there with AI and bots, and I know we've seen an uptick in that. I think that's probably across the board for everyone in TA. But specifically for us, definitely employee efficacy. It's been a huge one for us. I think we've we've dived in and see some really, really good results with that specifically. And then focused content marketing, just really hitting home on what we do best here, you know, doing a lot of that stuff internally. We're very much a shop that does that on our own. We we've seen the best success that way. And, specifically, TikTok has been, know, just a game changer. Outside of something that I love, doomscrolling for, you know, many many hours, to say the least, it is a great platform to, just push out a lot of great employer branding content and just engage with different talent across the globe. It's a good tip. TikTok is a is a good option. Alright. Let's shift and similar but different. What strategies or initiatives delivered the most impact this year? So we'll just go round robin each of you just one quick thing that was really impactful, and maybe what the impact was. Let's go in a different order. Let's start with Kristen in the middle. Is that alright? Sure. Alright. So biggest impact, one of the things that we rolled out just actually this fall was SMS. So, we've talked about it for a while, but really being able to roll it out specifically for early careers and students. We've used it for event activations. We've had around two thousand messages sent so far. It's been really effective as far as, getting more student engagement as well as getting people to attend events, those little last minute reminders. Again, early careers, especially, really responding well to the SMS messages versus emails where they may check less often. So looking at our virtual history makers event this year versus last year, now using SMS, We saw about a thirty thirty percent increase in the number of people who showed up, not just registered, but showed up. So that was really exciting for us. That's so important. It was the five generations in the workforce right now being really intentional about how they receive and consume. It can impact your player brand and the effectiveness of that. So well done. Alex? Yeah. The most impact has been definitely advocacy. Advocacy and the full tracking from the first click all the way into the ATS. You know, not not a shameful plug, but it has been made extremely helpful with, the ability that, I know that I have as a, I guess, you could say, like, a web web owner of the career page. We're able to track that in ways that I've not been able to do at, you know, any other any other stop or with any other vendor. So that has been something that's been good to do and something we've seen an impact with. But, also, when it comes to efficacy, it's always it's something great that I think there's a lot of chatter on LinkedIn about that, but there's not a lot of data to show exactly how well that's going. Right? I think if you have that down, everyone's just kind of kind of guessing at this point, but having that tracked down and just being able to show the not just the the value, you know, the impressions, the clicks, but the monetary savings, the ROI behind that, that's been significant for us this year. Yep. That's amazing. So going into the Clinch platform and using the data all the way from visitor to the ATS to track impact of the sourcing strategies that you guys are implementing at GoDaddy. That's cool. Amazing. Jackie. So we launched our UCF talent newsletter this year, and we targeted prospective external candidates who've either created a job alert or joined a talent network or applied for a position. This year, we sent out three newsletters featuring our articles on, like, real employees and the work that they do, UCF major UCF events that really speak to culture here at the university along with, like, a recruiter tip, and we highlight a benefit. And this has been one of the most impactful strategies this year for two reasons. Right? It's a passion project for all of us. We've been and we've also been seeing measurable results. For example, in April, the newsletter we sent, we sent it out to approximately thirty four thousand recipients. Of that, ten percent completed an application, and of that, fifty nine percent, were viable candidates. So they moved along the hiring process beyond submission, and then we were ultimately able to hire one hundred and eighty six from that newsletter. So I thought that that was great. It's it's been a proven powerful, tool, and it really is connecting, authentic stories with employees and really converting interest into successful hires. Well, it speaks to what Alex just said. You just literally recited the candidate funnel and then being able to then go back to your leadership and say, yes. We spent time on this newsletter. This is what it did, and this is why we're gonna keep doing that strategy as opposed to, like, throwing a dart against the dart and saying, I think it worked. I don't know. So that's that's the value there. Amazing. That's so exciting. Alright. Let's focus forward. So we talked a little about twenty twenty five. Let's think twenty twenty six. I wanna open up another poll and to give those attending a chance to speak. So what are your top three priorities for TA in twenty twenty six? So as you think for the next year, what are you gonna focus on? Spend time on, try to solve problems within whatever however you wanna interpret that question. I'm curious to see if the priorities shift from what we said in twenty five. Are they gonna stay the same, or are they gonna be That's what I'm curious about as we look at the answers here. So give you a minute to respond. Perfect. Thanks for responding. It helps to get a sense for where you guys are all at. While we talk, we have a question for you, Jackie. What does your newsletter idea what does it include? What do you send out? So there's usually about three articles on there, with employees, and it's varying, levels of employees. So we've showcased, our new chief of police. We have also, individuals who, have worked for since they were a student and now have kind of grown their career. So it's just it has, a ton of, true employee stories, and then we also include, like, events. We had a a walk for suicide prevention and awareness that we showcased. We also showcased we have for home homecoming, we have a spirit splash event that we do, so we also wrote a story about that and why, like, ducks are so important for UCF. So just, you know, things to really help engage with prospective candidates and really have them take a peek at what it would be like working here. Absolutely. Good ideas. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. Alright. Top TA priorities for twenty twenty six. So it shows sixty seven percent said quality of hire, and then fifty seven percent of you said candidate experience. So those are definitely the winners in the top two priorities, I would say, for TA. And then from there, we get they're they get pretty close. Employer branding, internal mobility, embedded AI, and automation are right there kinda grouped together with the skills based talent strategies being in last place. So interesting perspective to see where you guys are all at. I have one more poll for you before we dive in and talk a little bit about AI. We wanna get your opinion on AI. So let's go ahead and do that. As you think about AI for TA in twenty twenty six, how do you expect your talent acquisition teams to be leveraging AI in the upcoming year? We got that whole spectrum. I was talking to someone today this morning. They they described themselves as AI curious, so maybe you fall there. Or maybe you're on the complete opposite end, and you're, like, using it all, pushing the limits. So let's see where people fall. And then we're gonna talk to talk to the panel about where you guys are all at. Alright. Give it five more seconds. Alright. Let's take a look. So with when it comes to AI, most of you are exploring or testing AI tools. I love that. That's a good place to be. And then many many others are using AI for specific tasks. So sourcing, screening, scheduling, or other portions of your recruitment process are definitely the biggest areas. That's cool. I think about I'm sure you all can think about this too. Just a few years ago, we would have had more than half the unsure. Right? So it's definitely dramatically shifted quite quickly in the opinions there. Alright. Perfect. Well, let's talk to to the panel. Alex, a question for you. So how would you summarize your experience with AI so far? I I would say between curious and getting more comfortable with it. I mean, I I use it quite a bit, but I think there's experts out there who who know far better than I do. But I I I've just been using it quite a bit just for, like, very practical use cases for employer branding. I also like to take, like, a, like, a kinda like, you know, talking like, if I'm talking to one of you here, like, as a as a with a local practitioner and just bouncing ideas off of each other, I found that's been, like, one of the best use cases because sometimes you're sitting there and you're, like, you got a brain fart. You're not sure if this is gonna land or not. And, you know, when you converse so much with whatever AI tool you prefer, like, it it starts to know you a little bit right. It can also help you clarify some of those thoughts versus sitting there and just, you know, spending hours at a time doing something. And I think that's just been that's been my experience so far. Oh, that's good. Definitely. It's a time saving tool for sure. Jackie, over to you. How has your use of AI in the talent acquisition space evolved over the past year? Any things that are standing out as far as wins or key takeaways, things you've learned? Yeah. So we are still learning and trying to utilize AI at the university, and so that has been kind of a, you know, push and pull conversation at the university, regarding using AI. But, as I mentioned earlier, we do have, an AI prompt that we use for our strategy meetings and our per our notes that we've taken there. And with that, we're able to also, like, define the criteria of the role, get some really good preferred qualifications, and just get a sharper picture of what it is that is desired for the position. On top of that, we utilize it to generate tailored, interview questions based on the criteria, and we share that with the hiring managers. And that really helps with keeping interviews kinda consistent and focused, and it just also makes it easier for us to share meeting insights, with the rest of the team who couldn't attend the meeting. It reduces the need for extra follow-up and keeping everyone informed. And it really has just overall cut down meetings, and it really helps us to really partner with the hiring manager in getting that, you know, ideal, candidate pool and ultimately hire. Yeah. That's great. Alex, back to you because when we were chatting, you were saying AI for you allowed you to analyze data, provide maybe trends within the analytics. Tell me more about that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I think we we all work in data, but sometimes you only know what you know. Right? So you can see your amount of applicants, impressions, clicks, but, like, what does that mean? How do you determine your bench? You know, what's trending? What's up? What's low? That's been extremely helpful to understand that and just, you know, almost have, like, put on a reporting analytics type of hat and better understand exactly what it is that you're doing because a lot of the stuff that we do is very external facing. And you know it's good. Right? It's qualitative, but I need the quantitative data. And I gotta I gotta take that up to leadership. And while there's great vanity metrics that are that are good to me, you know, good to recruiters and rest of TA, why does that matter to leadership? So that's been extremely helpful there. I think it's, it's helped out infinitely, which has taken something that I know has been key across different events or campaigns, drop it in there and there at a, you know, at a level where, you know, the c suite can understand in the form of the MBR or QBR and really have that make an impact because I think it's it's easy to, know that we're doing such a good job with things, but with AI being in place and then just with the need for showing more of, you know, how we're impacting the bottom line when it comes to the work that we're doing, I wanna make that matter more versus just being a call center. Yeah. For sure. Good good perspective. Alright. Let's see here. When I come I'm gonna jump back to Kristen. So what impact on sourcing, screening have you seen, or do you think AI could have over the next twelve months? Well, I guess that really depends on how you use it. Based on the tools, I think it really depends on where you fall, how how much your team and you personally are utilizing AI through your tools as well as independently. But I really see it being able to wipe out a lot of busy work. Like Alex was saying, something that could kinda take you all day. Maybe you can tighten up that timeline and get things done more efficiently with the assistance of of AI. So wiping out the busy work, tightening up the funnel, really getting down to using AI to create personas and really hiring strategies that are very specific to the needs. I also think we can make the candidate experience a lot more personal. There's so many opportunities to really connect with candidates in a a more meaningful way versus everything just being copy and paste. I think that's gonna be really good. But for sourcing, I think we're gonna have some, some improvements in faster shortlist, really trying to find, the right kinds of candidates. I also think it's gonna help with having a a more diverse candidate pool, really being able to use that in that way too. Screening, I think finding hidden talent was one thing that really kinda stood out to me, being able to find those skills using the skill based hiring and using AI to find the the people, individuals with the skills that we need, and then also decreasing the number of fakes that we have coming in. So the fake applications for that. Fake interviews, all of that, I think I think that could really help there. Exactly how, I don't know yet, but that's definitely something that we are on the on the look for. That's fantastic. Well, you've mentioned candidate experience, so maybe let's let's take a look and talk more about that. And I'll ask all three of you. Maybe we'll just start with you, Kristen, and you can keep going. What are you doing differently to create meaningful candidate experiences? Yeah. So one of the things when I first started Ancestry that I noticed is we have a lot of really great social media that talks about our product and feature celebrities, but it really doesn't show who we are and what we do. So it's kinda like the the wizard behind the curtain and the wizard of Oz. Who's doing the work? What does it look like? Are they fun to work with? You know, all of that. So we really weren't telling that story very well besides maybe on our website, but how are we building that brand to people who aren't coming to us? So we did create a couple of new social channels this year, called Inside Ancestry, so both on TikTok and Instagram. And then, of course, we also manage our our LinkedIn channel. But early careers, that works really, really well for us. But just in general, it it's helping us showcase our employees and and who we are in our culture better. We just created a new series of videos that we're gonna roll out in the New Year. So we're gonna build some additional content on our web on our website, our career site, as well as on social that I think will really help create a more meaningful experience. Really talk to the candidates, talk about who we are, help them decide whether they're a good fit for our culture. But the other thing that I I made note of as far as creating a more meaningful candidate experience is our workflows. Again, being able to, like, have regular touch bases, regularly connect, give updates to candidates in a way that isn't that's a little bit automated, but it's still customized to their preferences, I think, is really, really important. So those are a couple of the ways. Yeah. And I'll pass to Alex because he was not even set, and I know from conversations prior, you both have them in common. You're using clinch, the workflows, the automation to to deep do a deeper dive in the personalization level that you're offering candidates. But tell me more about what you're doing for within the candidate experience now. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I definitely need to be, connected with Jackie offline to learn more about, you know, her CRM usage. That's something that we've been diving into pretty pretty heavily here this year. But, using that and and, you know, comp combo with the, like, local events or webinars that we're attending and automating that process because we have been you know, it's it's we've been attending a lot of events at most, you know, most do. Right? And then there's always the post event workup to be doing, speeding up the process. How do we, you know, share those attendees or candidates, potential candidates that we come across that how do we get something right in front of them and keep them warm but make them feel like they're important? And I think, you know, the the workflow feature has just been phenomenal. You know, by doing that, it can you know, you find out exactly what they're interested in. You shoot something out to them as well, very personalized email, get them into your ATS, plus still keep them there, you know, where they can be part of a static or smart list, and then push them over to an overall talent community. That that's been a game changer for us, and it's been something, you know, we've experimented with here, like, the last three to four months. But, also, I do have the great benefit of having a phenomenal candidate care team here who they they do a great job of, you know you know, I've I've created the pages here with my team, but they're they're coming up with the great ideas where, okay, let's showcase the interview process from engineering to the, you know, the corporate team to the care and services team. And then from there, okay, let's get in front of things. We know AI is gonna be there, and this comes from the top down from leadership. Okay. Well, let's show that to them. You know what? We have a page dedicated to that specifically. You're welcome to use AI, but we're also gonna be using AI as well. Let's all do it, you know, ethically and in the best way possible. Yeah. I I love that. Alright. Let's pass to Jackie to talk about candidate experience. I really like what Kristen and Alex both are doing. One big change that we made was to create a more candidate more meaningful candidate experience is, we implemented a chatbot, on our website that is able to respond to prospective candidates, questions that we added onto the clinch site. We added all of our FAQs, questions that we typically get in our talent inbox. You know, we tried to pull a ton of questions so that if candidates had, questions at any time of the day outside of office hours, they can just get a response and it'd be consistent and accurate. And we've been you know, we've seen a decrease in our talent inbox because of, implementing chatbot. And on on top of that, we're able to run a report to see what questions are being asked and, you know, if we have a response, if you know? Sometimes the the question, the way they ask, it may not have, like, an accurate response. So we're able to tweak it based on, that report, and it really is meeting the need. Right? We're seeing, more applicants completing applications, and we're seeing less emails coming into our Talent Inbox. So I think that just being able to have, the chatbot there, I think, has really improved the candidate experience. I love that I love that you're all of you are using different components of AI and automation to streamline, save time, and improve the candidate experience. I'm sure all win win wins. Alex, you were talking about events and event follow-up. I was talking to another customer of ours that's using that, and we were just conversing about the long tailed impact of the work that you do. Right? I mean, this is just an example for all of you. It's not just that they got an email after an event or Jackie that the chatbot answered the question immediately. That is how they think about your branch forever. Right? So if you go to an event and you talk to them and you never follow-up with them afterward, there there's a part of them that remembers that years later. It doesn't matter what age you are, and you're like, right, or the opposite. When it is a really impactful follow-up, that brand now has reached a different level when it comes to prominence in potential future career pathing. So all of this work kind of builds up and has an impact over time significantly. Agreed. Alright. Let's chat about, employer branding. I know that's close to all of your hearts, and I have a few questions for you with that topic in mind. So, Jackie, I'll go to you first with this one. How are you seeing the role of TA evolve? Oh, no. I'm I'm skipping down. I'm reading the wrong one. Talent talent attraction is starting to look more like marketing. This is definitely coming up a lot. It's not just recruiting. It's recruitment marketing. How are you seeing this play out in your organization or your higher education industry? And I apologize. I think we're gonna go to Kristen. I'm reading my sheet. Okay. Yeah. No problem. Okay. So talent interaction, I think, is definitely adopting the principles around marketing with strategies and technology, but I don't think that recruitment marketing is really anything new. I think it's, you know, at least a couple of decades old of really starting to treat our candidate like the consumer and our EVP like the product, and that really kinda helps tie everything together. And I think it also helps better speak to the business about what we do. Right? If we're if we're operating like our marketing team does, our product team does, and finance teams do, then we are able able to kind of communicate our value, I think, a little bit more. But, applying those traditional marketing strategies as recruitment marketing strategies also really helps us see where we might be having gaps or missing ways to connect with candidates or potential candidates and build our employment brand in new markets. So, overall, I just think it helps us be more proactive versus reactive. You know, you don't hope someone buys a product and then and then, you know, create it. You you market it. You sell it, and that's kind of what we're doing. Fantastic. Alex, did you have any follow-up comments on that one? Yeah. I love that. I mean, I could have said it better myself. Think, like, when we explain what we do to people who don't know what we do, I think a lot of times, you know, we don't wanna, like, lay it out the way that Kristen did where the EVP, the people, the culture, that's our product. Right? Because when I'm talking to relatives, we talk we're talking about Thanksgiving before jumping on. And, you know, when you tell them what you're doing, they don't know what it is. You say, okay. Recruitment. And if that relative or friend has additional questions, then you kinda lead into, okay. Our product is like, you know, the iPhone to Apple. This is what we do. We sell that or we try to promote that. But, no, I think it's spot on. I think it's helpful to have that perspective and to use that as an example because so many times you're talking to different teammates or leadership, you know, they're expecting, like, bottom of funnel conversion. Right? And where where we play our game best is, you know, top of funnel, we lead them there. And that should look it down there, but then we're putting people on a silver platter. And the hopes is, you know, from there, those are those are candidates, those are leads, and it's their job to make the decision. Right? We we don't influence that, but we can influence how they get there, when they get there. The rest is up to the the team hiring them. For sure. Absolutely. This has come up already a lot. So when it comes to, candidates becoming they're becoming more skeptical. There's a lot of research that's showing us, which makes sense. Anything that you're reading, there's this, like, is it true? Which is definitely something you have to fight against when it comes to employer branding because you can have this amazing fancy career site, and everyone's looking at it through the lens of, like, where are the real people? Stop giving me your polished people, your fake people. And so how how is how are you responding to that? I know you've already talked about employee voices and the different ways that you're incorporating them to build trust. What is that looking like for you at GoDaddy, Alex? For us, we we are fully on board with being as as authentic as possible. So if we're gonna have people across different locations globally, I am very much an advocate of, okay, we gotta have some folks who are based out of India, Romania, the states, the UK, because we we can't say that, okay, you belong here, and we don't have you in the photos or videos. Right? It's very, very, you know, hypocritical of us to do that. But I will say that I don't wanna, you know, shoot down anyone's hopes of, like, you know, if you're starting very small, right, like, we we're very fortunate to be a pretty big company. There are smaller organizations that they don't have the luxury. Right? So maybe they have to go with, you know, some polished stock photos or maybe they have to go the AI route to get things going. So there there's a spot for everyone, but at least for us, it's gotta be as authentic as possible. Yeah. Absolutely. Kristen, anything to add? I just think it's really about showing the human side of your brand. If it's too polished, it doesn't look human. You know? Everybody knows as you scroll through your phone right now, you see something that looks amazing, and you're like, okay. That has to be AI. It's it's too good. Right? It doesn't really make sense. And so that's kind of that polished employment brand. It looks too good, and then you wonder what's really going on or or what the reality is. So people are definitely more skeptical now more than ever, I think, because of that. But, I think that's where using social can really help by having real employee voices, by, connecting connecting people with who's who's doing the work and what the teams look like. I think that's the biggest thing to to really kind of combat that. Yeah. Absolutely. Newsletters, TikTok, you know, all the things. Alright. Let's shift and talk about analytics. So, Jackie, let's go over to you. How are you seeing the role of TA evolve, and what does this mean for how your team is working today? Honestly, the role of TA has changed a lot. It's no longer about filling positions as quickly as possible. It's about being a true business partner. So we're looking at talent through a strategic lens. How do we help the university meet meet its goal of attracting and hiring top talent, not just for today, but in the future? So for my team, that means a few things. First, use data to guide decisions, things like understanding where our best hires come from and how can we improve quality of hire. Second, investing in employer branding and candidate experience because attracting the right talent starts long before the application, as you say, Andrea. And third, we're working much closer with business leaders. Right? Almost like cons well, we are consultants, to understand what skills they need, down the road and how we can help support that. So That's amazing. Alex, anything you wanted to add on this one? Yeah. I love Jackie's response, and I think that's it's definitely where we're going. I know when I got into employer branding about eight years ago, it was, you know, employer branders kinda do their own thing. They may have business partners, and there's TA. And then TA, you know, you you had a few folks who were TA leaders who could connect with the business that way, but not across the board. And I think it has shifted in a good way. Right? I think for the best for all of us because the more that we work closely with the business that Jackie had mentioned, the more that we're aligned, actually delivering on what their goals are. But we're also letting them know, hey. This is the value behind having us here. Like, you know, if we're sourcing this way, we're saving money. If I'm doing, you know, all the, you know, all the callbacks or all the due diligence here with the analytics and everything that AI has given us now, that's gonna help us out. We're gonna lower time to fill, which means butts and seeds quicker, projects worked on, more profit coming in. We can connect the dots, right, versus just sitting there waiting and, you know, not not being proactive. So I think it's it's gotten a a million times better than eight years ago. Yeah. Absolute. No. I completely agree. There's a lot more connection of the impact of someone not being in a seat, right, like you just talked about, especially when we have less people to do more work. And so when when we take one person out, they go get a job somewhere else. The team feels it, the people that are there. And so there's this pressure to find the right person as fast as possible and invest in technology and longer term nurturing plans to increase employer branding promotion to make sure that's an ongoing objective for your organization as opposed to just post and pray and hope it works, which is definitely where it was before. Right, Alex? You're correct. So, Alex, I'll go back to you. How is your organization measuring TA success today? Are you seeing a shift from traditional KPIs, like time to fill and cost per hire to more business aligned metrics, like quality of hire, retention, performance. I know it came up in that poll, which is interesting. Yeah. Yes. I can only speak from an employer branding perspective, but I do, you know, sit with MTA. But I think, you know, you still have your your traditional KPIs, which are still very much relevant, but that is being tied more and more closer to, you know, the business aligned metrics. You know, actually, it's all all funnels down downhill in a good way. So you can actually show whatever you're doing, you know, say if my team has goals next to maybe another recruitment team or kind of care, it all aligns. We're we're working together as one team to to accomplish one of the, you know, the business goals that we have for the year. So that's that's been something that's, you know, been great for me because it's not something that I've really had the opportunity to do with other companies. I know when I got into doing this, you know, many many moons ago, you're kinda doing your own thing. We're figuring out Facebook and everything else. And then, you know, you had metrics there, but they did not align back to the business. So it's I think it's at first, it's a little it's a little scary and uncomfortable because you're not sure how that's gonna work out. But, I mean, I I've seen more pros and cons with going this route, and I'm glad that we we've gone that and others are doing the same too. Yeah. Absolutely. Alright, Kristen. When it comes to proving TA's value to the c suite, what have you found most effective in securing budget, influencing strategy, and ultimately getting talent acquisition a real seat at the decision making table? And we have a little bit of time. So if there's others that wanna jump in after Kristen on this question, feel free. Because I know you've all done some work on business cases and, influencing to to get the resources that you need. Kristen? That's kind of the never ending question. And like Alex, I said more in the the branding side of things, so it's a little different. But, again, working very closely with our TA team, I definitely can see how they are how how they're handling it. So I think it's really about shifting from, you know, HR metrics, hiring metrics necessarily, like I said earlier with recruitment marketing as well, to more business outcomes. So if you can tie the recruitment marketing to the same type of language and metrics as marketing does, same thing with HR. Can we tie it to business outcomes? And I think that then helps us, like, directly translate what we're doing to business strategy to show that we do make an impact, and then, you know, coming at it strategically. So, for example, we have a contingent workforce planning program that sits within our our team and really being strategic about that. Like, what do we really need right now? Do we need a job done? Do we need a role filled? Where does this sit? And so rolling out a contingent workforce program has really helped us be strategic about growth. Where do we actually need to grow, and where do we just need to get something done for the time being. So I think that has has been big for us as well. But, overall, it's all about the relationships. So we have, you know, TA. We have our people partners, our HR group. We have, know, the marketing teams. We have so many teams. So it's really just building those relationships and then, you know, connecting connecting to our hiring partners and leaders. Yeah. Absolutely. Alex, Jackie, either one of you, when it comes to proving employer branding, talent acquisition, recruiting value to leaders, any tips? Oh, I'll let Jackie go first. I was gonna say, I I usually let my AVP handle that, and it doesn't seem to be listening. So I chuckle for her. She's really she's the mouthpiece, when it comes to getting budget. But I think for for us, it's really trying to figure out what is that data, what is that metric that really will speak to leadership to show what our talent's value is and, you know, trying to shift their focus from time to fill to something that's more impactful. Right? So what can that be? Is it quality of hire? Is it retention? Is it, you know, promotional and, you know, where they're, you know, hired and, you know, moving or staying in their role or or and and I think my main focus recently is, looking at the candidates we've screened and, whom we've identified as, you know, recommending for an interview. Are they the selected candidate? And if so, what does that percentage look like among all of the selected candidates, for the year or for the quarter? And, if if that if that narrates value, like, we've saved, you know, so much time, We've lifted that, review off of the hiring manager's shoulders. It speaks to trust and reputation and, being a subject matter expert. So we are trying to look at data and being able to kinda shift the story. Yep. Absolutely. Alex, do wanna pass back to you or move on? Yeah. Yeah. No. I can't avoid the question anymore. But, definitely, quantitative data, I think, is is a must have. You you're never gonna get a bigger seat at the table or more budget by saying you simply need more budget. I think prove you know, give a experiment with stuff. We're we're very, very big on experimenting here. And, you know, if you you want budget with something that you need to be that, you know, if you you wanna go out to more events next year, yeah, you wanna get a an external partner to assist you, agency work, advocacy tool. Well, why don't you try that first? Try an experiment. See what value you can show there. Because I've had the best luck possible by just showcasing what I can do, my team and I can do in house, how we can actually save some money there and apply funds elsewhere, or just the, you know, the impact that we have with the work that we're doing. And that has opened up many more doors and, you know, gotten us, you know, the time and day to to be, know, to have to work side by side with leadership, to have them understand our work instead of have no idea of what we're doing. I think that is something that I think has been super effective. I think that's a good point. And then before I go to the last question is just and this is relevant to anywhere that you are is doing being intentional about advocating for the work that you and your team are doing consistently, and building credibility as yourself as a leader to have a voice at the table, but then just not being shy of using data to show results kind of ongoing, telling stories. Right? We talked about telling stories and the impact it has of promoting your employer brand and selling your organization to prospective candidates. It's no different when it comes to talking to your c suite. It's telling the stories of the impact that you're having or the impact of doing nothing, to get tools or resources that you need. Alright. So we're we're here. We're wrapping up. Just a few more kind of wrap up questions for each of you. So firstly, what do you think will be the biggest change for talent teams in twenty twenty six? And which trend tool strategy would you bet on that you think you'll see maybe rise up this next year? Anyone wanna go first? I'll go first. Great. I think the biggest shift, for twenty twenty six will be, balancing technology with human element. So AI and automation will continue to grow, but the real distinguishing factor will be that, relationship and Yeah. Building that candidate experience now with candidate, but also with the hiring manager. I think the trend, will be skills, labor or skills experience and really, looking at tools that can show internal mobility. It's not about the title, but about the skills that they've acquired, and providing opportunities, for within, our internals and the skills experience. Fantastic. Kristen, Alex? Yeah. I think moving from AI automation to more of a agent type of AI is going to be the biggest shift. I think everyone's dabbling right now. And as we get a little bit more efficient, and let it take on more of the work, I think it's gonna really free up recruiter bandwidth. Anybody who knows a recruiter, they're always busy. Right? And if you can take some of that busy work out of it and kind of let AI take some of the administrative and sourcing offload, you're gonna open up recruiters to work on really the high impact and high value work, which I think also is gonna go back to being able to communicate to your business leaders because you are really working on that high impact work. The more you work on it, the more you have time for it, the more value you're gonna bring. So, you know, really, the the, like, complex candidate negotiations, I think, closing candidates, really, you know, sealing that deal, and then building those higher level relationships with hiring managers. I think that's gonna be the biggest shift. It's kinda taking some things off the plate, letting, letting bots, letting AI, letting you know, setting up those systems correctly to really let you do do your job. Amazing. Alex? Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree with you, Krisna. I think it's I I think the biggest thing, the biggest advice or challenge that will will be different for TA leaders or anyone in within TA is kinda getting out of their own way. Right? Because I think the biggest hurdle is there's gonna be so much that's gonna change with AI. I mean, we we experienced quite a bit in the last twelve months alone, but it's gonna be okay. What can you what can you automate? Because just because we've always done it this way, we always have, you know, five people do this one task that we know we can automate with AI. Like, what can we we can can we automate that and then have them do something different? And I think that opens up everything you mentioned and just being much more strategic. I mean, that's that's at least the way that I look at that. I think, you know, there's a lot of things that I would love to get to. AI has opened up that door to be more strategic and do that. I've seen that happen with other, you know, individuals, either in employer branding, recruitment marketing, or TA. But I think having that approach to just try experiment, try something different, switch it up. I mean, it can only it can only benefit you by doing that. Well, and you have the data. Right? So it's kinda fun to test things out, do AB testing, find out if what works. If it doesn't, shrug your shoulders, move on, you learn something. So gotta be agile. Alright. Last question. I know we have six minutes left. So what advice would each of you give a talent leader, employer branding leader, as they prepare ahead for the next year? Who's got their answer ready? Can go. Can I go ahead? I'm just gonna go off what I said before. They're really strategically, integrating AI and then, like, future proofing your your team, you know, really helping them move away from the transactional tasks, and then upscale all of us. I mean, I know at Ancestry, we're really challenging every single team within the company to really, embrace AI and find those ways that we can really utilize it and not wait to see what everybody's doing, but to really get in there. So upskilling your your TA professionals with, you know, data analytics, recruitment marketing, for sure. Like, get that mindset going, not just with, like, someone in my role, but everybody really think about it that way. And then, you know, advising hiring hiring managers on the current landscape. Like, they're learning too. They know what we're doing, but who are we hiring? We're hiring people with these new skills that we've never really looked for before. How do we find them? So I think, those types of skills, if our our TA teams can focus on those skills, I think they'll be really successful. Good tips. Alex, you're off mute. Yep. I would say, one thing to look at because I definitely agree with everything Kristen has mentioned. I would look into the GEO of the job descriptions and career pages because I think everyone is so focused on SEO and sourcing, all great stuff. I'm not saying to forget about that, but you wanna make sure you're appearing as you want to appear as a company and employer brand in the search results if you're looking on, you know, OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google, which is displaying AI first. So your generative engine optimization has to be key. And if you're not focused on that, it's something you should start working on immediately. It's a good one. I love that tip. Alright. Jackie, you're up. Alright. So my advice would just be stay adaptable, invest in your team's ability to learn. The pace of it's changing for talent acquisition. It's only accelerating. So whether it's new technology or candidate expectations or shifts in the labor market, so building strong partnerships with your business leader and just aligning business strategy. Finally, for me, I think, my advice, it's more for me than for everyone, but but also is just the power of data. Right? Start small if you need to, but use insight to tell the story and show the value that talent brings to your organization. Totally good advice. Thank you all for your time. Thank you for the tips and the reflection on twenty twenty five and the advice for twenty twenty six. Can't believe that we're almost in a new year. And thank you everyone who joined. I will say if you if anyone has questions about the about PageUp, about Clinch, they feel free to go to our website, and you can click on request a demo, and we'll we'll set up a time to have a conversation there. But, yes, if you wanna put your LinkedIn and connect with each other in the chat, I see a couple people have done that, or maybe find the panelists on LinkedIn and connect with them as well. But have a fabulous holiday season, and welcome to twenty twenty six. We'll enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you.