Just how much do your hiring practices scale? In this episode of “Hire Quality” we speak with Mindfield Chief Operating Officer, Heather Psyklywec about the fast-paced world of high-volume recruiting. From leveraging programmatic advertising to utilizing sophisticated technologies for candidate engagement, Heather’s shares valuable secrets about how to do talent acquisition at scale the right way. And as an added bonus, she’s discussing how she strengthens sourcing engines to enhance the candidate experience, and how to simplify interview scheduling to take some burden off your hiring managers. There’s a lot to get through and a lot to learn in this episode.
Key Takeaways:
Jump into the conversation:
[04:02] How mindfield provides high-volume recruiting solutions.
[09:06] A challenging job market requires strategic recruiting.
[17:29] How to improve advertising efforts and career sites for more efficient recruitment.
[20:30] Large organizations fear departing from known practices.
[00:00:00] Devyn Mikell: what are those things that, you know, off the bat, like these are the areas that make a huge difference when you're trying to optimize for high volume.
[00:00:08] Heather Pysklywec: So number one is you need to have a really strong sourcing engine. number two, is you need to have the ability move through high volumes of applications easily to create exceptional candidate experience. And number three is you have to take the burden off the hiring manager with the simple step of, Scheduling
interviews.
[00:00:31] Devyn Mikell: Hey, I'm Devyn Mikell, and this is Hire Quality. The show where I sit down with the movers and shakers of talent acquisition to hear their talent triumphs, their hiring, horror stories, and genuine opinions about the recruiting industry. So today I got to talk with Heather Pysklywec and she's the Chief Operating Officer at Mindfield.
Mindfield is an RPO specifically for high volume recruiting and companies that are kind of struggling with that. And what I really loved about this episode is that she dove into very practical tips about how to optimize for [00:01:00] high volume. So if anyone is really just struggling with high volume or trying to figure out how to make their recruiting the best in class, this is the episode for you, because we go into really practical tips, like step 1, really practical tips about how to get better about high volume and still be great at the other positions within an organization as well.
All right, let's jump into the interview.
I'm excited forthis conversation because obviously we sort of live in the same space. actually do live in the same space of, of highvolume, especially. but before I jump into all the good things that we're going to do and unpack high volume, unpack all the, what I'll call, The wrong views or the right views, whatever it may be.
I want to talk about you. who you are, where you came from, what your background is and how you got to where you're at right now as the COO of Minefield. So let's take three stepsback. Tell me about you. Tell the audience about you, where this all began for you.
[00:01:56] Heather Pysklywec: All right. So, my name's Heather. super happy to be [00:02:00] here. currently live in Ottawa. I've been living in this city for
two years. Before that, I was in Vancouver. not born or raised there, but spent about 10, good years there. so I'm married, have a seven year old daughter and, one dog, love everything to do with, life. So having fun, exercising, cooking, uh, friends, family, good stuff, you know, from a
professional standpoint, I've been in talent acquisition like well over 15 years.
I started with Randstad in Calgary, um, doing
some recruiting. It was sort of like my
mini taste of high volume, working in an
industrial support recruiting there. and then
I moved into an RPO, after being with, RADSTAT for about five years, worked with them for about three years and then got tapped on the shoulder by Minefield and been with them ever since.
[00:02:47] Devyn Mikell: Nice. I mean, Randstad is at least in my mind is gigantic.do you miss being a part of such a big company at all?
[00:02:55] Heather Pysklywec: No, I don't. Um,
[00:02:58] Devyn Mikell: She's like, oh, baby, [00:03:00] baby.
[00:03:00] Heather Pysklywec: I have nothing but amazing things to say about Randstad and I also worked, uh, the RPO that I worked for at the time was with Aon, Aon Hewitt, we all know who Aon is. It's a massive organization. And I definitely could go back to a large organization. I'm
extremely grateful for what I've learned about how well run organizations.
Both of those are,
and the access that you have to learn from just really incredible leaders and colleagues. And, I definitely would not be
here had I not worked for either one of those organizations. But there's something great to say about being
able
to, to call the shots and dream your dreams and see if you can put them into play.
And I, don't know if I would have that opportunity if I
worked for such a large organization.
[00:03:43] Devyn Mikell: Gotcha. How long has minefield been around?
[00:03:46] Heather Pysklywec: Almost 20 years. Yeah,
[00:03:51] Devyn Mikell: eight years, right?
[00:03:53] Devyn Mikell: okay. So minefield has been around for 20 years. You've been there for eight years. tell us about what minefield is, what you do. and if [00:04:00] that's evolved from the beginning to where they are now.
[00:04:02] Heather Pysklywec: So minefield is a recruitment process outsourcing company and what we offer and where we started and what we still offer is high volume recruiting solutions for employers across Canada. and we have work in the United States. our niche has been within retail
and the hourly space. So hourly being individuals that are, working in warehousing, uh. retail call centers, those sorts of things, we have not really strayed from what we've done since the beginning,
our process, has refined, obviously labor markets have changed, technology has
evolved, lots of things
have impacted
slightly, what we've
done,
and
also the needs of our
customers. What I will
say is we are the same. We still do high
volume. That's where we do the
best. But what we're seeing now with the labor
markets is there are, more and more needs for organizations who have higher volumes of skilled labor
that they need to [00:05:00] find. And we're really starting to get some great opportunities with clients across country who need support there.
[00:05:06] Devyn Mikell: I always say to different people, it's like high volume means different things to different people at the end of the day.
when people normally hear high volume, they think like, I don't know. I always use like McDonald's, as an example, but like very easy entry jobs, that's high volume.
But in reality, you might have a company that needs. Thousands of software developers. That's high volume still.
I think that's a really cool
evolution. for sure.
[00:05:28] Heather Pysklywec: for us, we were wondering, well, can we still provide the same level of
service when we're going
to that next level of skill set with candidates yes. Like, you're running the same process. You just need different people to be able to go and dig in and find that next.
So that's what we've learned. That was a pandemic learning for us. So
[00:05:46] Devyn Mikell: Have you seen like, I would imagine it's kind of like a supply curve almost, where the higher the skill, like the lower
the supply. And then is that proven? It sounds like maybe not, but like, does that make your [00:06:00] service level a little different? So,
[00:06:04] Heather Pysklywec: supply, so when you say service level, for us, it just means we establish a
metric with our customer, and that metric is really focused around,
time to deliver a full candidate slate. And then we also want to make sure that the ratio of success.
greater than 80 percent for every job that we open, like more than 80 percent of those, we want to be filling with hires. so if a client that had a high skill requirement came to me and said, Hey, Heather, I want you to fill this job at seven days. I would say I can try. However, I don't know if I can do this consistently across the thousand,
2000 people or 2000 jobs.
And so, We want to be consistent against the goals that we set right off the bat with the customer. And the goals for extremely
skilled
is definitely different than the goals of, entry level positions. of our clients that have different skill sets within the hourly range.
So like when we have customers that have, for example, I need three [00:07:00] years of experience of retail. It's harder for us to find great people like that than it is for someone that's looking for their first job time changes. Yeah.
[00:07:08] Devyn Mikell: maybe you've heard this. I have heard this
and it's probably going to strike a nerve And I'm not trying to, but maybe you haven't, maybe you
have, but there's a lot of voices in the
room, that are RPO.
[00:07:21] Heather Pysklywec: Yeah,
[00:07:22] Devyn Mikell: So what is your, I know your
stance, obviously you work for an RPO, but like, what do you say to a, naysayer?
Of RPOs, first of all, why do you think people that are against it are so much against it? And then what do you say to those folks in defense of that stance?
[00:07:41] Heather Pysklywec: first start with why I think RPO is a no brainer. so RPO, when done well, is you are actually an extension of a department that really enables, , an organization to bend and flex with the of, of
their [00:08:00] organization. and
Is it cyclical? Is it skill based?
Is it project based? And being able to have that
tool in your toolbox belt, To be able to pull out and leverage is from my perspective, a no brainer. The way that we do business
is we go to market branded under our client's brand. We live them. We know them. We practically feel like we are them.
So there's not really that distinction between us and them,
in terms of, How we offer our service on the other side is expensive, you know, the company
comes with a ticket. So we need to have players in there that understands the long game around, the flexibility that an organization will have to access our technology,
our processes.
and then also the real, the resource investment on their end to say, listen, we want to be able to. Put this budget to the side here to allow our team to knock it out of the park. Our internal team knocked out of the park with our most important jobs. And then we want our partners to be able to go in and leverage new tools and [00:09:00] processes to do a high volume churn. we're working through that. So.
[00:09:04] Devyn Mikell: what are those companies look like where the most important jobs are those churn jobs and what in those
situations do you become The recruiter for that company period. they just don't have recruiters.
They're like, Hey, we know if we keep our high volume positions filled, then our company is going to do well. So we're just going to hire experts or is it usually
kind of a wrestle? you're like trying to fight for those jobs. Cause like, Hey, these are the jobs we're really good at. And you're struggling.
what does that look like when the most important thing in a company is that frontline or hourly worker?
[00:09:39] Heather Pysklywec: you want to know, like, in terms of, an organization, the way that's set up where, say, for example, 70 percent of their employee base would be frontline employees
[00:09:48] Devyn Mikell: Yeah. You mentioned like a company might say like, Hey, we want our internal team to focus on really important jobs. And then you guys focus on those hourly frontline [00:10:00] turnover positions. what if those are
[00:10:01] Heather Pysklywec: Oh,
[00:10:01] Devyn Mikell: the same?
[00:10:03] Heather Pysklywec: do have clients that do that. And we also have clients that want to do that with us.
well, we work with volume. our sweet spot is volume. we
are way cheaper, the more volumes you do with us. And we're really proficient once we started working
with a certain pace of job.
So there's
some organizations that we may or may not partner with
because we, don't think that we would be able to help them. but in all reality. if your TA team wants to go and, and fill and use your internal resources to be able to go and fill all those, hourly positions, then that's okay.
Like we can help you with these other jobs. We're gonna run the same process that
we would do with the hourly, jobs, but we will always be happy
you on the back for those hourly jobs too. Because it would just be from our perspective. We know we can do it. We've got the business case. We've
got multiple business cases that we can just come in do that for you.
but of course, we want to respect what our clients do and why they do it. it's generally very strong professionals and play that's making those decisions for their companies.
[00:10:59] Devyn Mikell: [00:11:00] I know those individuals very well. let's get into the nitty gritty. So when you talk to companies and they're coming in, they believe they have a high
volume issue that they want you to solve, like where are most
companies getting it wrong? let's say they are trying to do it themselves, or maybe there's a company that's like, Hey, we're
trying to We're not ready for a minefield,
but we do want to learn from you.
like what are those things that, you know, off the bat, like these are the areas that make a huge difference when you're trying to optimize for high volume.
[00:11:30] Heather Pysklywec: So number one is you need to have a really strong sourcing engine. number two, is you need to have the ability move through high volumes of applications easily to create exceptional candidate experience. And number three is you have to take the burden off the hiring manager with the simple step of, Scheduling
interviews. in our world. It's programmatic advertising. It's a strong CRM
or communication tools that we enable our team with
or a [00:12:00] team with
to communicate quickly and easily with candidates. And the third one is being able to get documents through to managers, package on the date that they're going to be interviewing a candidate that they've done no work themselves to set that up with. generally there's going to be a large bottleneck somewhere.
Or, know, a section of the organization won't be following the process and be getting completely different results.
[00:12:25] Devyn Mikell: It's funny how
simple you laid it out. I mean, that's literally what I hear.
It's, I mean, you see it
all over the LinkedIn too. It's like the hiring manager bottleneck is so real. And I've always
been a believer in like, I don't really understand why
the hiring manager is required to do anything before an interview, but, you know, I've seen, and you've probably seen many times customers or
companies will, do the recruiter interview and then they'll pass notes to that hiring manager for them to evaluate and then decide who
they want to interview.
I'm like, well, you just lost half of the candidate pool [00:13:00] right there, right away.
[00:13:01] Heather Pysklywec: I was going to say, oh, there's that step alone. That just takes too much
time.
[00:13:05] Devyn Mikell: right. Cause they're working like they, they have a whole job that
they're doing.
[00:13:09] Heather Pysklywec: They do like recruiting is like literally 1 percent of what they need to be doing, but it's like almost 100 percent of how they're going to be successful in their job.
[00:13:18] Devyn Mikell: Right.
[00:13:19] Heather Pysklywec: So if we're
able to just facilitate the whole process and just get great people in front of them easily, it's going to make them more effective in their role.
[00:13:29] Devyn Mikell: So speaking as the recruiter, listening to this podcast, the response I would have is like, okay, I love this, but my hiring managers are pushing back on that idea. Like they want to have their hands in there and they want to make more decisions. They want to be more active. Like, what do you do in that situation as the recruiter that's kind of stuck or even the recruiting leader that's kind of stuck?
[00:13:51] Heather Pysklywec: Well, that takes buy in from a cop. So usually that would be an organizational decision that
we want to be able to [00:14:00] facilitate
day of the manager. We believe that our managers, the most important aspect of their world is directing
and leading people. And in order to do that, we need to remove as many administrative tasks out of their hands.
the process that we run with this is that when we enter high volume relationships with customers, we will sit down and there will be planning sessions that generally occur for about 30 days, where we understand all the profiles against each one of the roles
that we're recruiting against. we will set up Core interviews and questions against that and we run tests for the
first few months to make sure that we are effective
in terms of presenting the right candidates to those jobs.
We also run education with hiring managers, because we still have managers that want to be able to do their own thing. We all want a little bit of control and sometimes there is a little bit of give and take, but it really does need to be mandated from the top.
and the hiring managers need to believe
in the quality that the recruiter is [00:15:00] offering I'm not gonna say that we're perfect at this because there's times where, candidates are presented and they should not have been presented
to a hiring manager and that
fractures the relationship of, well, now I'm going to want to look at every single candidate and now I want to decide whether or not we're actually going to sit down and have a chat with
Meanwhile, all these people have now gotten a job.
[00:15:19] Devyn Mikell: You mentioned the, the sourcing side. I hadn't never really thought of it. I knew obviously having a sourcing engine is important, but
like, I didn't think of it as priority. Number one, mostly because of the job titles typically from what I've seen have, like they drive pipeline, just by the nature of the kind of demographic that they target.
But how do you set it up
to get maybe, let's say like quality pipeline through or candidate pipeline? cause I feel like a lot of people are spending a ton
of money on the big, Three or whatever you want to call it. job boards. Right. And so maybe they're getting a lot of flow, but
maybe they're seeing like 10 percent of it is even viable.
What does it look like [00:16:00] for you all? And
not asking for insider secrets or anything, but like, how do you think
about sourcing engine? Cause I think people hear sourcing and they're like, Oh, I got to do
like direct reach outs to everyone and go source like a sorcerer. what are you saying when you say
like, Hey, first, let's get a good sourcing engine in place.
[00:16:16] Heather Pysklywec: our business was always built off of the belief that sourcing and, that candidate journey was key to ensuring that, we did not necessarily have to rely all the time on a job board to net results. So. Any large organizations building a large database of candidates all the time and core to our process is ensuring that that database of candidates is, engaged.
you understand where those candidates are, who they are, what pools they sit in
and why. and that's our base foundation. from there, it's really about understanding where do we need to be able to top up our pools. With programmatic ads to drive in the right people. So, you you know, we've [00:17:00] recently made, deep decision to, to partner with Jovial from a problematic advertising perspective.
And it's been a game changer for us, because we have now learned. When we need to post where we need to post our job titles are optimized for certain markets at certain times. That's allowing us to get quality candidates in rather than 600 applications into one job when, only five of them are good.
So our relationship with Jovio has changed the quality of our advertising and now just moving into that next step. Having a career site, second of all, where people are spending time, they're looking at the different opportunities. They're researching, they're applying, on organic job postings, also important.
And then we just pick that all up with our database strategy. That is really about
recruitment, marketing, you know, right time, right place kind
of thing for, for our candidates and,
and it's huge. and then a part of that, [00:18:00] like every
time our recruiters. Although some applications have a job,
they're not just looking at the applications.
The first thing that they're doing is they're
assessing, okay. So I know that I've got thousands of
other applicants that I could bring up, so it's an immediate text campaign,
email campaign that says, Hey, I've got this opportunity. What are your thoughts? So sourcing is huge.
[00:18:21] Devyn Mikell: I feel like that's something that companies could be doing now. some of that is like, you got to work with minefield for that. but the, the piece about like, Hey, I got a new job. I think in normal motion is like, let's post it and see what comes through.
Meanwhile, you had like Hundreds of people that were sitting from another job that was really similar that didn't get hired. And I feel like,
that to me
is the goldmine.
cause like the beauty of jobs is it's not
always this, but like a hundred applicants, one person gets through.
Right. So like 99, you're not going to tell me all 99 were bad. Right. So being able to utilize that
That pool that's already [00:19:00] existing, I feel like is really the game changer too, for any company that's not doing something like this. Like that's an easy next step. to get into the, the sourcing engine world,
[00:19:10] Heather Pysklywec: It's huge.
that traditionally ATSs are a little clunky and it's hard to do Boolean style searches inside of them, but it's not impossible. And if your organization does not have a sophisticated piece of technology that allows you to search, to work with it so you can export candidates from old jobs and call them. People that have applied at the same job in the past or similar jobs in the past You've already won with them. They're already interested in the company. They're already interested in that style of opportunity.
Just reach out to them, you don't need to pay for them again.
[00:19:45] Devyn Mikell: Right. that's the thing. when I hear about the amount people are spending on these.
[00:19:50] Heather Pysklywec: So much
[00:19:52] Devyn Mikell: And it's going up from what I hear, it's going up because they know they have the market, like they know they have the captivated market. So, that's one of [00:20:00] those examples where normally I am like pro, I'm always pro recruiter.
I'm, I sell to them, but sometimes I'm like whoever's making the decisions is really just like doing what's the easiest thing. Like the easiest in front of you thing is a lot of, think what a lot of recruiting leaders will do sometimes not to say they're lazy. It's just like, that's what they know.
[00:20:22] Heather Pysklywec: know what's really interesting is it's hard for us to, specifically in Canada, 'cause Canada's very different than the United States in
terms of
the maturity of, recruitment. Like large organizations like ours doing full outsourcing. Is there's a fear of departing from what we've already known.
I can't post on any one of these large job boards and I will get 400 applications. So I'm just going to keep doing that. And I hope that we can find the people, but there's so many other ways that you can do it, that's cheaper. Or if you just move your money around a little bit differently, you'll get
better, better out.
[00:20:53] Devyn Mikell: is everything that you have, like, as far as minefields infrastructure, is it homegrown for the most part?
[00:20:58] Heather Pysklywec: No, so we've got [00:21:00] part homegrown. So when we first started, we really wanted to have like
a unified set of data around how our performance was
against our customers. So we built
what's called minefield hire portal. So all jobs get
ingested into that hire portal. And then we broadcast that through a
CRM, and career sites. So the CRM is with Jovio and the career site is Jovio and Jovio
is also our programmatic partner. So that whole sourcing partnership comes through, Jovio and then everything that our customers would interact with would be with Salesforce.
[00:21:34] Devyn Mikell: gotcha. Nice. how do you have it set up? So you have your RPO, like your recruiters that are in, one, do they report to like the company's director or do they report into? And have meetings with you all internally. How does that work?
[00:21:50] Heather Pysklywec: the way that we interact with our clients is we've got account managers.
our client is structured that. We've got an account manager that's dedicated to that. I will sit on weekly calls to [00:22:00] understand, the overall relationship, how things are progressing. Are we
on or off track? Let's get creative on solving some problems, those sorts
of things. Our recruiters interact
with hiring managers.
And with us
internally. So for example, the team that faces the senior level
client will come back, communicate things on a weekly basis to
the recruitment team. So everyone's fully aligned. and,
the recruiters then take that information and service the hiring managers that they've got
their relationships with
[00:22:29] Devyn Mikell: That makes sense. I meant to do this earlier, but to give like a quick trust point, cause I feel like people don't know the scale of which minefield is operating at. whatever the best way to quantify, we're doing a lot here. Like we know our
[00:22:42] Heather Pysklywec: We're doing a lot. for example, like, just one of our clients could do, 13, 000, we could process 13, 000 to 15, 000 hires with them. so, you know, you extrapolate that with all the candidates that are applying against 13, 000 jobs. there's a lot of conversations that are [00:23:00] occurring on a daily basis.
[00:23:01] Devyn Mikell: what's your recruiter? I don't know if this is a thing for you or not, but, recruiter rec clubs capacity.
[00:23:09] Heather Pysklywec: No, it is a thing. It's almost the secret sauce of like, how are we managing work benches? really depends on the time of year. so the ideal, if we want to
be like providing, we're talking 5 star
exceptional service, I don't want to see more than 35 reps at a time on my recruiters plate.
that is not what always happens.
[00:23:33] Devyn Mikell: It goes over. You're saying, gotcha.
[00:23:38] Heather Pysklywec: know, for example, next week we were supporting really large opening project for a customer. There's, 4 different locations. They need to hire 120 people per
location,
in different parts of a province,
in Ontario. this video. And so that means that we have to be
presenting
them, each location is going to be getting about,
300 candidates presented to it.
[00:24:00] and that has to happen over a 4 day period.
it's all happening at the
same time. So, there's like 1200 candidates going out the door in four days.
[00:24:10] Devyn Mikell: I guess the, the beautiful things potentially is like you get to use because you have so many places and it's Canada, right? So I'm assuming there's a few hotspots like a Toronto, for example, my limited knowledge of Canada, but, You get to like maybe have a few clients in a similar area that when you're building applicant pools for one, you're kind of building maybe for multiple and then utilizing the nose from one to be yeses potentially for others.
[00:24:39] Heather Pysklywec: Yep. Yeah.
[00:24:41] Devyn Mikell: symphony.
[00:24:42] Heather Pysklywec: Yeah. It is a symphony. And so our rule is, is that if you've been, hired in one location, you are definitely not going to the other one. been X amount of years and you're no longer working with said client. So will never share people that have just been hired with another client, but absolutely like, that's a [00:25:00] beautiful thing about a database, you know, is that, for example, if you apply for McDonald's, but you know, now I've got Wendy's open
You can still look at those people and say, Hey, are you interested in this? And a lot of people are
interested.
And they're grateful to, , to receive a message and say, Hey, yeah, I actually am still looking for work.
[00:25:19] Devyn Mikell: Exactly. It was super cool. Very cool. I have so many questions. like sometimes I talk with, other leaders. I'm like, I'm learning all about what your space looks like.
I at least know what this space looks like a little bit. So it's, it's a more, a more, uh, Invested. But, when you think about, obviously minefield is doing a lot of things correctly and killing it, but sure there's always challenges to fix and always things that you're like, what's the next thing that's broken?
what is the thing that you see as like, Hey, this is kind of holding us back right
now. or just like, I want to optimize here even more. What are those things that you're trying to improve upon?
[00:25:58] Heather Pysklywec: So I [00:26:00] love this because it's the first time I'm going to be able to say, I've just put in place a plan that is the optimized plan and it's starting to
work.
[00:26:09] Devyn Mikell: Hmm.
[00:26:09] Heather Pysklywec: so I'm not going to touch
anything right now. I'm just going to sit back and watch.
it's funny because there's been different cycles that we've had and every
time that you think you need to start optimizing something, it would always come back to the same
core issues is number one, do I have the right people in the right seat? Number two, if I've got the right people in the right
seat, am I giving them the appropriate workload?
They've got those two things, and still things are not happening correctly. Is
there a misalignment with our customers in terms of what they're
expecting that we're not offering them? And if that's not there, it comes down to where are the candidates?
Is this a solvable problem or an unsolvable problem?
And more often than not, I've seen there have been breakdowns in terms of how our team leverages our technology. At the right time.
we work at a very high volume, it's high pace, know, it [00:27:00] takes a special person, and the people that come in, they need to be fairly agile in terms of the different systems that they're working in and how they think and how they're going to approach problems to solve.
it's not for everybody. so it has to be that person that wants to be in kind of like that flow state with a variety of different things coming at you all at one time. And you just accept. Yeah, this works. No, this doesn't work. I'm now going to pull this lever.
I'm going to execute on this campaign I'm going to call this person and if People aren't able to do that. That's generally Going to be an issue So earlier, well, late last year, I, I swapped out our technology, that our recruiters were working with and, I've seen a huge lift, so the change of the technology was great, and then just settling down and creating core accountabilities and metrics in behind that for the recruiters that we're talking about every day is really where it's at.
Yeah. And I am in those meetings. Like day, every day I drop into what we refer to as scrums. We have, [00:28:00] 15 minute meeting around what's happening in that account that day, where everybody at have a little, chit chat,
do jokes, few laughs. And then let's get down to business. Understand like what's on the books for today.
And, whenever I see things are getting off track, it's because somebody's process, how they're leveraging our technology. isn't aligned or how they're leveraging the relationships with the hiring manager has a
little bit of a stump.
My team is
great.
we've got an awesome team. So right now, all people, right people, right
seat.
[00:28:31] Devyn Mikell: Let's transition into the hot seat segment. So Who's one person that has changed your life in talent acquisition?
What did Cameron Laker
[00:28:41] Heather Pysklywec: well, he
hired me, number one. number two is, he is a visionary. He understands his space incredibly well. fully ahead of the game. and has been since I've
known him around technology and the impact of technology
within the space And, how it was going to impact us. And, he continues to do the same [00:29:00] thing every day.
[00:29:01] Devyn Mikell: Shout out to Cameron. Alright, most challenging role you've ever had to recruit for?
[00:29:05] Heather Pysklywec: a mid market commercial banker in Northern Canada. Um,
[00:29:08] Devyn Mikell: It's cold up there. Where do you go to stay updated on the latest trends changes in the TA landscape?
[00:29:15] Heather Pysklywec: constantly consuming. So really right now, all I'm thinking about is AI. So where it's coming in and who's talking about that. And there's some pretty impressive, TA people that are thinking next steps in terms of what AI can do. whatever they're thinking about everywhere.
I'm sure that's a bad answer. Yeah.
[00:29:34] Devyn Mikell: interview question? If you could only pick one.
[00:29:37] Heather Pysklywec: of like, I want to know what you want to do years.
I really am
interested in understanding what people see in five years because things move so quickly now.
And it gives me an insight in terms of like, why are they applying for this job? What value do they see? And you know, what, what is on their vision board? do I think I can offer that to them? Probably [00:30:00] not, but it's really
interesting to see and peer what, what somebody's role is like. I'm more intrigued in terms
of how they think rather than where they want to be.
And if I can And if our organization is going to fulfill that, it's just like, What volume of Dreamer are you?
[00:30:13] Devyn Mikell: it. Last question. What's a common talent acquisition activity that needs to die?
[00:30:18] Heather Pysklywec: Like, in depth reviewing of a resume before you pick up the phone and contact the person. don't read it for too long, just
[00:30:27] Devyn Mikell: I like it.
Get to the phone. I might use that as our slogan. well, Heather, it's been,
it's been awesome. absolutely appreciate this. I think our audience is going to really appreciate this one too. so two
things. Where can they go to find
you? I think everyone stands to continue learning from you. I have learned from you on LinkedIn.
I've learned from you here, but where would you like people to connect with you? Kind of moving forward.
[00:30:53] Heather Pysklywec: just check out LinkedIn.
between myself, my own
profile, Ken's profile, and Minefield, you're going to hear [00:31:00] a
little bit more about what Minefield's up to and what we're thinking about, what I'm thinking about. I've got a project, in the wings here. So, if you follow me on LinkedIn, then you will hear about my other project where you will be able to follow me there
[00:31:13] Devyn Mikell: Are you writing a
book?
[00:31:14] Heather Pysklywec: then, LinkedIn.
[00:31:16] Devyn Mikell: Well, awesome, Heather. It's been great. And then audience, if you're, loving this. episode as much as I am, make sure to follow, like, subscribe, whatever you want to call it to Hire Quality. we're going to continue to pump out episodes just like this one every other it's been great. I really appreciate you. And Yeah, let's get to it and I'll see you when I see you
[00:31:35] Heather Pysklywec: Yeah, it's been fun. Thank you so much.