If employers want to do a better job of hiring, especially when it comes to finding diverse talent, they need to change their approach. “If you think about it kind of like sales, your candidates are what you’re going to market for, and finding new channels for those candidates means that you’re taking a risk,” said Albrey Brown, VP of strategy at Joonko, a diversity recruiting service. “You’re not going back to the same schools or programs that you typically would go to if you’re diversifying.”

Business leaders now need to look for labor in wider pools and consider reskilling or investing in education for their employees. Brown spoke on a panel of experts discussing ways to boost recruitment in a panel entitled, “Improving the Talent Pipeline, From End to End,” which took place at From Day One’s recent Silicon Valley conference. The panel was moderated by Megan Cassidy, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Flexibility and learning are not only important to the current workforce but are also vital for hiring teams. Staying nimble and aware of employee needs allows companies to flex with the demands of a changing labor market. In talking about the shifting tides of recruitment, the speakers cited the “Blue Ocean Strategy,” a marketing concept originated by INSEAD professors W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne.

“This ‘blue ocean’ concept is about finding untapped markets for candidates,” said Kristin Major, the chief talent officer at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “finding places where you're not competing against all the other big fish in the sea, trying to recruit. ‘Red ocean’ is where there are lots of different companies competing for the same group.”

“You have to change the way that you go to market,” said Pamela Rodas, global senior director of talent acquisition at the tech company TELUS International. “As recruiters, it’s not only focusing on the skills and competencies you need to recruit for and convince the candidate, but the strategy has to be different every year.”

Rodas advised giving prospective employees the “right message” to ensure that they know why they should be working for your company. To that end, she created a “global innovation center,” which involves a series of project managers with differing expertise who focus on how they’re going to attract talent in a variety of ways.

“Never stop thinking on how we’re going to differentiate,” said Rodas. “Not just compete on overpaying, spending three months looking for that talent, when you can recruit within three weeks if you build the right strategy with the hiring manager and explain the added value of the type of candidates that you’re offering.”

“The things that we’ve been doing are probably not what we need going forward if we’re going to find this sort of ‘blue ocean’ of new talent,” said HPE’s Major. “We’re going to get a better candidate, we’re going to have a more inclusive company, we’re going to achieve our goals around what we want in terms of a diverse workforce. It requires a fair amount of courage to do that.”

Joonko’s Brown suggested adopting a “build, measure, learn” mindset to overcome fears and obstacles to pioneering collaborations. “These new channels that you’re starting to invest in [will never] produce the same type of talent at the same volume [or] quality as the ones you’ve been investing in for 10, 20 years,” said Brown. “You have to incubate these new channels in a way that allows you to grow these partnerships over time so that they can mature.”

Recruiters will likely need to make other adjustments to open up the hiring process. “Taking away the bachelor’s-degree requirement is a way to allow folks who may not have had the chance to get a degree but have the skills, mindset, and character to apply for your roles,” Brown said.

“We invest a lot on long-term strategies [for] developing our talent from the beginning,” said Rodas. TELUS International operates an onsite continuing-education program where team members are taught sales skills, customer service, coding, AI, and data science, “even if they’ve only been a business analyst.”

Hiring teams can partner with training teams in the organization so that companies have a solid strategy–short-term and long-term–to develop talent. “As a recruiter, you need to ensure you’re providing data all the time to the business on why that's important,” Rodas said. “Do they want to overpay for talent that’s going to leave in two years, because they’re already overqualified for the position?”

Rodas said hiring managers often want to recruit candidates with higher qualifications than the ones they need, which she feels is a mistake. Instead, her team gathers data and assessments based on competencies and skills. They then constantly assess the profiles of their hires on who performed best after the first 90 days, six months, and a year.

“More often than not, it was the ones that didn’t have experience,” Rodas said. “It takes time and persistence. But as recruiters, we are salespeople, so there’s nothing better we can do than continue insisting that [talent development] is the way to go.”

Rather than trying to find the prospective employee who fulfills all requirements of a position, developing an existing workforce may be more cost-effective and encourages retention in the long term. Rodas calls the potential candidates who want to build a career with the company “priceless.”

“Skills leveling-up is not expensive,” Rodas said. “We can look for startups that want that opportunity and partner with companies to enhance skills fast. And that way, we focus on building pipelines externally from candidates that have the willingness to learn. We can assess that through specialized assessments, vs. just looking for that ‘unicorn’ candidate.”

Megan Cassidy, a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle, moderated the panel

“The social-impact program is where we really think about how we engage communities,” said Leslie Lai, director of social impact for Roku, “especially high-school students from underrepresented backgrounds or other resource communities at an early age—and provide them access to resources and exposure to our industry.”

Roku’s Change Makers program involves partnering with a nonprofit to mentor about 250 students across the US, teaching them how to make short documentaries over six weeks. Students are told to highlight someone in their community who’s making positive change.

“It’s a great way, not just for students to get access to a very traditionally opaque industry,” said Lai, “but just see the work come alive in a real place and get credit for it.”

Similarly, Joonko matches underrepresented candidates with roles at companies that are similar to where they recently interviewed. The process uses AI, which Brown cautions can be biased when it comes to recruiting. Hiring leaders must consider where these technologies are being used in the process to make sure they’re being used ethically. “As much as it is about how you build the algorithm,” said Brown, “it’s about where you place the algorithm. So we use natural language processing only when it comes to skills matching, understanding what keywords someone uses to describe the role they’re going for, what keywords they use to describe their accomplishments at a company.” Those keywords are then matched with keywords that other companies might use.

“Typically, companies hire about one out of eight of the candidates that we refer,” said Brown, “which is a very good application-to-hire.”

At TELUS, Rodas utilized technology by building the whole recruiting experience in a virtual environment. The project started as a way to overcome screen-centric boredom during the pandemic lockdown and engage her team. “What I didn't realize is we made it a more inclusive experience,” said Rodas. “When they build their avatar, they show us who they really are. All types of generations–Centennials, Millennials, Generation X–were having fun, you could see they were laughing, and it relaxed them. It was fun. And it actually showed why they wanted to apply, what’s in it for them.”

Samantha Campos is a freelance journalist who’s written for regional publications in California and Hawaii, with forays into medical cannabis and food-justice nonprofits. She currently resides in Oakland, Calif.