STOP IT! Technology Isn’t Always The Answer! | @MarvinESmith on The #SocialRecruiting Show

Technology? No your brain is your most important tool!

Katrina posted that this week’s guest had more recruitment industry experience than our combined experience; for this reason, Marvin Smith is essential listening as he has witnessed vast and extensive change across the agency and in-house recruitment industry. On the show, he joins us to talk more about the balance of technology and human interaction and why we should STOP IT! – Technology isn’t always the answer!

When Marvin graduated from college, he was “thinking about going to Law School to be a champion of the underdog”, however, his curiosity and drive to

“Understand what motivates people and what makes them tick” led him to his first job in recruitment.

Fast-forward to 2019 and he has now worked for brands such as Microsoft and Blackberry and he has even worked at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation before joining Lockheed Martin in 2012.

We open the show by asking Marvin about his career to date and he tells us, “if I trace a thread through everything I’ve done, it’s really about talent engagement”. As we delve into his transition from agency-side to in-house, the main question for him was,

“Could you take the tools and techniques you learn in the 3rd party (agency) world and take them into a corporate environment?”

We are all lifetime learners

On the show, we cover topics such as recruitment training and Marvin tells us “you start by learning some foundational kinds of behaviours and activities that will make you successful”, however, he focuses his learning by spending “most of my time reading marketing blogs”.

We address the subject of how to be successful in the recruitment industry and he thinks we need to be asking the question,

“What motivates people, why do they leave jobs, why do they join companies, also to get meaningful candidate engagement through effective messaging, you need to be aware that it’s not about us as a brand, it’s about them as an audience!”.

One memorable part of the show for me personally was when Marvin talks about the use of NLP; “NLP has really taught us about listening to the body language of a telephone conversation” and with this experience, we need to “take the science that is there that tells us about people and add a way that we can better communicate” and then we will ultimately “get a better message across”.

If that wasn’t enough, below you’ll hear Marvin talk about:

• Building talent communities 
• Tools for crafting meaningful emails
• Creating balanced recruitment teams
• The impact of talent sourcers networks  
• Using pilots to advocate recruitment technology change 
• Technology vendors – are they using their own products?