CareerXroads & Mike Chonko: Live from The Shaker Vision Lab at UNLEASH America

[Music] All right, everybody. Welcome back uh to the recruiting community podcast. I am Chris. I am your host for the next 20 minutes. Uh we do this weekly. We try to bring front insights from TA leaders in the form of a conversation. As you may have noticed, uh once again, we are not in the studio. Uh this week, we’re actually at our friends uh spot here with Shaker Recruitment Marketing. They have been gracious enough to give us a place to sit and have some conversations with some pretty impressive leaders. I happen to have a pretty impressive leader sitting here with me. Do you want to do a quick intro of yourself? Sure. I’m Mike Chano. I’m the director of talent acquisition at Rosendon Electric and I’m responsible for all talent attraction engagement and hiring um for Rosendon nationally. All the things. All of the things. All the things. All everything. All All the places everywhere all at once. Yes. however that goes. Definitely. So, uh, we’re at the Unleash event. We’re on day whatever. It’s a little bit of a blur in Vegas after I think it’s three three. Uh, have you seen anything? Have you seen anything kind of pops out at you? Any trends you’re noticing you want to share? Um, this AI thing is kind of a big inconsistent theme. There’s AI. Apparently, it’s the new thing. All right. Yeah, everybody’s talking about it. I love it. Yes. Um, one of the interesting things I to me is kind of the voice AI on the front end to interview candidates. And I’m like heard a lot of presentations and that’s that’s intriguing to me because part of my maybe I’m a little old school but that candidate engagement and getting on the phone not just texting or emailing things like that is really important. So I’m interested to see if this from a candidate experience sure feedback how will it work versus talking to a human and yes the 24×7 by 365 all of those things getting that first pass done sound really exciting until the candidates’s like this doesn’t work for me. So that’s it’s intriguing to me but I’ve got to do a little more digging before I embrace that. I think so. I think it’s really interesting to hear you say that because I think if you were coming at it with a lens that is um I’ve got too many things to process, I don’t have enough budget. I don’t have enough headcount. I’ve got to solve for this. Yes. I think your your take would be a little different. What I love about what you just said though is like you’re worried about the candidate. You’re worried about that candidate experience and you’re like, well, this is great. Sure, this will save me some money, but how’s the candidate going to feel? Yes. And especially Rosenin is growing very quickly. We are well positioned in the data center space. Okay. And so we are landing projects and with each new project comes oh we need 35 to 40 of these people which are highly skilled, highly experienced construction project managers. We also need thousands of electricians and the IBW, we’re an IBW partner. Yeah. And they are doing a great job of attracting, but when we go to a small town in West Texas, Yep. Y um they’re going to need our help. And so finding those skilled folks that may want to travel, once we get them on the phone, we can’t lose them. And so that’s kind of that well if we only have 50% fall off with this are we getting more candidates because of the AI or are those 50% the 50% that my team could have engaged in close. So those are the kind of things that I need to dig deeper for I’m so curious if you can’t answer I get it. So so at one point in my career I was responsible for all occupational hiring. Yes. At a telecom company uh for an in and a union shop. Yes. All right, we’ll leave it at that. Uh, yeah. I I find myself kind of wondering I wonder how the the shop would feel with this this um uh emergence of technology that helps with selection or helps with assessment or helps with even identifying and attracting attracting identifying that talent. Is there are those conversations happening with the union stewards or with the the captains or the what we’re doing when we’re working with our locals? Yeah. We’re talking to our superintendent and then talking to the local reps and my team will say do you have do you need help? And if they’re like no, we’re like awesome. You run it. Yeah. Business is happy. We’re great. But in some of these bigger projects and they were like well we’ll see. because they didn’t believe the numbers that we were talking about and it’s like we’re going to need 700 or 800 and they’re like in 6 months I are you sure and then all of a sudden boom and then the 30 calls come out and so they find 20 we complement with the additional 10 we hire 30 organize 30 that week that are going to work on the project. Yeah. And so it’s kind of this eb and flow. And so we’ve been sharing this is how we’re going to market and doing things because we don’t want to compete with them either. Well, yeah. And so it’s more complimentary. And so I came here to collect information and I need to process this and take it to my leader and go, okay, if we do this, then we’re going to have to share and make sure they’re on board with it. So yeah, there’s a number of layers to this craft recruiting. It there there there is some complexity when you’re talking about hey I need 900 service technicians in 5 months that comes out of the blue. Yes. Right. Which was not uncommon when I was doing this. Doesn’t sound like it’s uncommon for you either. No. You need to be able to react. Yes. And our I mean our business leaders are doing I think it’s the best company I’ve ever worked with where they’re like hey heads up. We’ve got this project but then it’s okay. We’ve been working on the contracts. We signed the deal, but now it’s not breaking ground in 10 months. It’s breaking ground in three months. And so we’re going to need X number here. And you got to go. If you get people, we’ll hire them early. That’s the one thing I appreciate, too. We’re now in a position where we don’t need to wait until just in time to onboard people. They’re willing. Bring them on. If the project gets delayed, we’ll just put them on another project and ramp them up, which is making My recruiters are like, “Okay, so I can go and get aggressive, which is great.” Yeah. Is there a is there a t and you got plenty of peers and colleagues here? Yes. Is there a tactic that you think other TA leaders are maybe maybe missing or or could be doing better across the board to sort of help themselves and certainly in the field of selecting maybe the right partners that may or may not have AI, right? I think candidate, everybody talks about candidate experience, but it is kind of this path of least resistance and we talked to some of our young hires and if they clicked on an apply button and it went to a website Yeah. they were like, forget it. They would just back out, especially on like an Indeed or Zip. Yeah. It was like, I want to click and I want to apply. I don’t want to leave. So they will just click back and keep scrolling and I was like, “Oh, we need to solve for that because we’re directing everybody to our careers page.” So that was something that interesting. We were able to name drop sol with job sync and that really really helped with our click-through rate of 1%. Yeah. 2%. Then we got programmatic and all a sudden it went to 10%. And now we’re averaging 15 to 25% click-through rate. So Oh yeah, that’s fantastic. That’s driving a lot more applicants and lowering our cost too. Yes, you’re running that. Well, it’s super important. Is there anything from a from an attraction strategy uh that maybe you’ve made an adjustment and not not necessarily on that candidate experience side, but like just philosophically, is there an approach you’re thinking about differently with with all of this new tech? Yes. Um the first thing is we built a good relationship with our marketing team and kind of clearly defined okay Mike and TA are responsible for this list of things which includes job posting things like that marketing you’re focusing on the brand and we’re going to piggyback off that but when you send out you know Rosan did just won this new project we’re going to piggyback with and here’s a link to apply to this new data center build in okay Alabama or Texas etc. Yes. And so that’s been a a nice change because at previous companies and I’m sure a lot of companies deal with it. It’s that well it’s my money. No, it’s my money and if you’re taking a customer and we’re taking a candidate, I think you had mentioned it earlier that you’re taking from me. So, it’s that could be a compliment. I think actually it can be a little bit of a right or wrong. It can be a little bit of a turf war in a lot of regards and that’s that we we were talking earlier that buy button that you kind of distract from. But I think we’re also seeing a lot of organizations uh move the marketing and branding person over in to the communications or the or the marketing side out of TA which is super interesting to me. Yes. And leave a dotted line. Uh, and that helps to sort of seems to help sort of strengthen some of that partnership and and that’s definitely how we we have it set up that our communication rolls up to our senior director of marketing and then she rolls up to the same leader I do, our chief admin officer. Yeah. So we have the same senior leaders but you know we know which sandbox and when we have questions we now just jump on a call and the two directors will make a quick decision and go it’s yours put in for the budget or we think we can handle it. Are you okay with this as long as we maintain the brand and all that other stuff. Well, it sounds like you’ve got some mutual trust established and that mutual respect piece in there which is key to to any of that shuffle being successful. It is. It definitely is. Yeah. Good for you. Thank you. Well, I might we ask everybody this as we as we kind of wrap up a couple of questions. If you were going to write a book about your headsp space today, like what’s going on in in our industry too? If you’re going to write a book about it, what what would the title of that book do? I think the title of my headspace right now was I was running at a good clip on the treadmill. An AI just maxed it out. I’ve got a I am maxed out. Chasing the next thing just to keep up the incline. That’s a long title, but if you’re not constantly moving forward in recruiting. Yeah, you’re flying backwards off the treadmill. Yes, there’s a title. It does feel and you will show up on YouTube or one of those in a short app. Yes. Where Oops. It’s thrown off the track off the track. My friends are laughing at me. Nobody ever helps the person up who felt they just I know. I know. That’s That’s why I’m going to keep running. I just need to get new running shoes and I figure out Yeah. What’s this AI thing all about? I think well I think I know it feels like that and I feel we were talking with another leader earlier who said it feels to them like we go in cycles. Yes. Uh we hit these things and suddenly it is the most important thing in the world and we are racing to keep up. I would argue that with this AI piece and you tell me if you’re discreet that I think it’s 10 and I know every time this happens we say it this really does feel like it’s moving faster than anything has ever moved from a from a TA and HR tech space today. Yes. I agree with it because some of the folks it’s like okay where is AI right now and then you sit in another session we’ve been working on this the last four to five years and our product is already serving big customers and I’m like we’re either way behind but we’re cautious but it it does feel like the acceleration is just going crazy. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. I just Oh. Oh, I got to ask you, who’s going to get the first signed copy of your book? Uh, probably my wife. Smart man. Yeah. Yes. I love it. Mike, thank you so much. I know you’re busy and you’re running around. We really appreciate you joining us. No, I appreciate your time. Good. Look, uh, you want to catch past episodes, you want to see what’s coming up next, at cxr.works/mpodcast. Uh, and we we’ll see you next time we do this. It’s good stuff. Thanks for joining us.