The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations

EP 180: Leveraging Data to Find the Perfect Candidate

• James Mackey: Recruiting, Talent Acquisition, Hiring, SaaS, Tech, Startups, growth-stage, RPO, James Mackey, Diversity and Inclusion, HR, Human Resources, business, Retention Strategies, Onboarding Process, Recruitment Metrics, Job Boards, Social Media Re

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Jonathan Lau, Director of Talent Acquisition at Super.com, joins us to unpack how in-house recruiting can bridge the gap between talent strategy and business goals. With years of leading experience, Jon explains how elevating quality of hire over speed reshapes value, the importance of data collection, and candidate experience creating the first touchpoint of influence. 


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SPEAKER_01:

Welcome to the show, John. Everybody tuning in, we got John Lau with us today. He's the director of talent acquisition over at super.com. John, thanks for being here. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Very excited to have you here today. I know our audience tuning in is really looking forward to learning more about you. And I was hoping you could share a little bit about your background and who you are.

SPEAKER_00:

So I'm John. I'm up here in Canada. I'm not sure how many of your listeners are in Canada, but I'm in a city called Calgary, which is close to the mountains. In terms of career, I have mostly been in recruiting for scaling tech companies. So almost all in kind of the mid-size. I've been on like SaaS, B2C, a whole bunch of different companies. But I've been fortunate in seeing like a lot of growth during these last probably 10 years of recruitment. I would say something that makes me like a little bit unique in the way that I got into recruitment is that I came up very homegrown. So a lot of recruiters did their original stint in agency recruiting or like an RPO model or something like that, and then moved into in-house, or vice versa. There's plenty that have done vice versa. But I've never had kind of a taste of agency recruiting, which is probably both good and bad. I would say like after having both worked with and had team members that have had experience in both, I think what I've been really fortunate to learn about these different roles that I've been in is that I've had the fortune of being a true like business partner with a lot of these companies that I've helped hire for. But I do lack kind of that hunger and volume and like intensity that I've seen like a lot of agency recruiters have in the past. So it's been really fortunate that I've gotten to work with a lot of them in the past because I've learned a lot as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, yeah, that's it's always good to have a blend of experience and backgrounds. And I think, as you put it, there's value to both. I think starting in-house definitely has its value too from your very first experiences in town acquisition. You're really thinking probably a little bit more deeply around quality of hire and the impact of the hires that you're making versus just thinking buttons and seat for commission, right? Believe me, I know that there's a lot of great contingent recruiters out there on the agency side. Of course, I run an embedded recruiting agency, right? So we're a bit of a different model, we're more RPO. But I do think that on the agency side, there does tend to be that emphasis on sales and closing the deal as the placement versus in-house. It's when you make that transition to in-house, or in my case, like embedded, it's like really more so outcome focused from like a quality of hire long-term perspective. I am curious that maybe we can talk about your first position in talent acquisition and what going directly in-house, what you think that taught you from day one and kind of formed your perspective on how to fast forward where you are today running a TA program for uh from what I could tell online, a company scaling very rapidly, very well funded, very successful. Going back to those early days, like what you learned in those experiences, right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So I mean, my first thing into moving formally into recruitment was when I was at a local SaaS tech company called Benevity, which I originally started in the customer success team. There's a very large overlapping Venn diagram between customer success and recruiting, I think, when you think about what like candidate customer experience looks like. And so something that always interested me, and I think drives like a lot of recruiters in general, is the goal of both creating an amazing candidate experience and also finding like a dream job for a candidate. Getting that like initial hit of someone else getting the role that they're looking for gives you this kind of drive to keep it going. And so when I was first starting as like a junior recruiter or kind of stepping in, that's something that is palpable right off the bat, is being able to see them. What is really fortunate again about being in-house is I now get to work with these people. And so I get to see them perform in the roles, I get to see them lead teams, I get to see them kind of make an immediate impact. And then as I continue recruiting, I'm still working with these folks. So whether they were candidates that have now become my hiring managers, I can kind of see what that like long-tailed performance looks like. And so later on my career, you get super focused on the metrics of quality to hire. You look at the actual organizational impact of the folks that you hire. Even when you're just like starting out as a recruiter, um, you have that data point of who is still here and who is not still here over a period of time. And you can start collecting this data, you know, on your own of who are the types of folks, um, skill set-wise that that are really working and are making sense. So I say, like when I first moved into that first role, that like candidate experience, really seeing candidates land their dream role was the first hit. But I think as I evolved into recruiting more and been in an IC role longer and longer, the second hit of it is how the talent you brought in is evolving the business that you are, you know, recruiting for as well. Sometimes if you've been at an organization that's scaling fast enough and you're hiring senior enough level roles, you might hire half the people in the company. And so there's, you know, the company is completely different from what it could have been before you joined. And you have a huge contribution to that. Hiring managers ultimately make the decision. The executive team ultimately is deciding the trajectory of the company. But the level of influence that you have from being a TA partner or recruiter into the talent that joins an organization, I think is underrated as a whole.

SPEAKER_01:

I think so. I see almost the talent acquisition role, lead recruiter or uh director or VP. It's you're almost like this investment manager. You have this massive eight-figure, often for growth stage tech, eight-figure budget to bring folks on board. And you're deciding who gets in front of the hiring manager and who's ultimately going to build this company. These are millions and millions of dollars in investment. You're making decisions on uh who's gonna be staffed up in these roles. And I think that that's a lens or perspective that is really important for founders and CXOs, really, any anybody working alongside talent acquisition to know it's like, look, the people you have in talent are really driving and managing the largest investment that you're making, that they're making, and are gonna impact business success more than anything else, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

And like I think with the strong caveat that no one is ever always going to get it right. And so, you know, cautioning that like while there is this degree of influence, it's not like we're not prone to making mistakes at all levels. So whether it's the TA partners, whether it's the executives themselves, all those kinds of things, you know, you've seen the positive that comes from uh a hire that is perfectly aligned to the organization. And you've also seen kind of the opposite happen where like you can tell quite quickly when someone is is not gonna work under the organization. And so, you know, making sure that those expectations are set from the get-go is is is gonna maximize your success.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, yeah, for sure. I think um, you know, recruiting is never gonna get to 100% success. Like, I mean, you can do all the work uh on the interviewing and analyzing, but there are just so many factors. I mean, it's a people business, right? And to some extent you can't predict things with a hundred percent uh accuracy, but there's certainly trends and best practices. And I think it's really your growing up on the in-house side is really valuable. And I want to just like go into that a little bit further. I do do any like realizations come to mind or light bulb moments as you were in that town acquisition for maybe a few months or a few years, but that really started to shape your perspective on hiring even more. Maybe it was the success that you had or a challenge you had or a conversation with a leader. But um, I'd love to learn more about what has shaped your perspective into the the town acquisition leader you are today.

SPEAKER_00:

I think what's fortunate is that as you kind of continue growing in the TA space, you're obviously speaking to hundreds and hundreds of candidates all the time, which are all data points that you gain. But you also are speaking to hundreds and hundreds of internal stakeholders all the time, whether it's at, you know, at your current company or just over your career, you are in this fortunate position where you get to talk to both sides of the stakeholders like constantly. Your job is basically like calibrating both sides of it. And so as I've learned more and more of the businesses that I've been a part of to how folks think about hiring, um, you actually learn a little bit more about how not a lot of people know a ton of stuff about hiring, that everyone's kind of trying to, you know, make the best ways work. Everything is trying to make science out of art in the same way. And I'm not saying that there isn't a way to make it a lot more um systematized, the hiring process, but you're also dealing with people at the same time. And so for all the different types of folks that you work with, whether they are chief people officers or they're chief technology officers and CFOs, you know, everyone's trying to make sense out of something that like is really hard to make sense of, which ultimately is like matchmaking, uh, talent and roles that you're hiring for. And so that challenge, which, you know, as of today and in 2025 has not been solved, of exactly how to find the right people, you get this extraordinary ability to experiment all the time. And not treating it from a sense of like using folks to experiment on, but that you get to try and constantly improve. And I think that that's where being in the tech industry also has been very fortunate is that because of the speed of growth, um, and because of, I think, the risk tolerance of a lot of these types of organizations, there's a big favor of experimentation and innovation. And while we're doing it with products, we're doing it with data, we're doing all of these kinds of things across the business, why not also do it in talent as well? And so find new ways of assessing, ask more questions of candidates, find better ways to create the experience better for all parties. And I think that like unsolvable challenge to date is the thing that has made recruiting continuously enjoyable. I think some folks early in their careers burn themselves out in recruiting because they think of it as just entirely cyclical. All it is is just finding a role and filling the role, and then you move on to the next one and it can just like burn you out real quickly. But if you approach it from like solving an overall problem or really trying to build the business from the talent perspective, I think there's just like constant opportunity to be able to make a difference and make changes. And that has led to like a lot of fulfillment in this space where I've been in the career for, you know, approaching 10 years now. And to date, like I'm constantly finding new areas that that I haven't explored that that are opportunities.

SPEAKER_01:

That's great. That's great. And then um, you know, I wanted to talk about fast-forwarding to where you are today. I was doing a little bit of research before our call. Um, I it looks like super.com is a late stage company with over, I believe I saw 150 million in funding. Uh, pretty significant growth and but not mistaken in the fintech space, is that right?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, we're in like the travel and the fintech space, but it's a consumer, it's a consumer product. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01:

Consumer product. Okay, yeah. Well, I'm I'm familiar with it uh a little bit. And um, it sounds like things are moving really fast. And my assumption would be is that this is the type of role you're in that's really pushing you to expand and to break through and to uh find solutions to scale, right? And staying on top of everything while it's moving so fast. I would love to get a sense for what it is that you're looking to accomplish over the next 12 months from the perspective of building out a TA program, enabling your team to hit growth objectives through hiring. Like, what are you up to? What are your goals? And then we can kind of dive into how you're thinking about solutions and overcoming challenges. I'm looking forward to hearing more about that.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. So, you know, I I've been at SuperDocom for like about a year, and and previous to this, I had been at other scaling organizations here in Canada. And I think something that I've learned at this stage, now at like my fourth kind of uh larger tech company is, or sorry, mid-stage company is that it's so easy to think that you can recreate what you did previously, where it's like, I've been part of a growing organization. You know, I've hired a ton of talent, I've doubled the org, troubled the org in X period of time, I can do it again at another organization. And I think like as a side note, a lot of hiring managers think the same of candidates that if they have done it before, they can do it again, and it's going to be the same. What I have learned myself is that every single time it has been incredibly different. Um, and even though if you were to look at them all on paper, the same things happened, which is essentially we added a lot of people in a short period of time and like seen a lot of success, and the quality of hires have been good. The way we did it had to be really different because everything about the product and the executives and the leadership is all entirely different. And so when I came in here, I think I had that, you know, I think confidence about me where I was like, it's gonna be fine. Like I'll know what I'm doing. I'm gonna be able to do exactly the same thing that I did at Neo and I did at Well Simple and all of this kind of stuff. And then when I joined, it was entirely different. And so I think something that like I've been really focused on here over this last year has been getting like incredibly curious with the executive team because learning the philosophy and the approach to growth is what dictates how you're going to build it in line with their vision. And so I have been with organizations in the past where recognizing also it was at a point in time. So when Wealth Simple went through their incredible level of growth, it was also in 2020, 2021, where the entire talent landscape was entirely different. And so the way we grew then is gonna be very different than 2025, where, you know, talent teams in general, executive teams in general are so much more conservative. And so, how do you act in line with what the investors as well as the executive team are thinking about? And what is their like, what is their interest and buy-in to technology? What is their interest in buy-in versus of like full-time permanents versus like there's all these these like strongly held beliefs that don't really have like a lot of foundation, which is like, I believe like full-time permanents are stronger than contract uh or something like that. And then that will kind of dictate how they want to see growth. And it's kind of up to you to think about, you know, how are we leveraging data to make it make sense to how we should be growing as we continue? So maybe there is a right mix of contractors that we should bring in that will give us more flexibility down the road. Maybe there are this subset of FTEs that like make the most sense to like make this mix the highest performing organization as we can. And so I think this year has been really great. And then I've learned a lot around how to build an org for super.com. I think like as I look in the future, as AI, of course, has been like growing up dramatically in this last kind of couple of years. I'm still learning around how it's going to work. And so connecting with a lot of other TA leaders, you know, having a lot of conversations and learning how other folks are doing it is kind of key to dictating how your strategy is going to grow as these years kind of progress.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I think it's um that makes a lot of sense to me, right? Every culture is going to be different, executive teams are going to have different approaches. And there's no substitute for time spent, right? Uh having those meetings, discussions, like figuring out what's important, right? I'm assuming also to figure out what's worked historically, what hasn't. How much time do you spend with your executive team? Maybe it's it's shifted as you're now at the organization over here, but just to put that a little bit more context and guidance to other leaders tuning in. Like, is it are you meeting weekly? Like how often do you spend time with the executive team?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I would say I'm really fortunate here in that I get to spend a lot of time with the executive team to the point where I got uh I was able to partake in like our leadership team offsite that just happened a couple of weeks ago, um, where I get to be in the room where a lot of kind of higher-level discussions happened around resourcing as well as business strategy, a lot of that. And, you know, I have been part of organizations where that wouldn't even be a conversation where like having a TA person in the room at that point like just doesn't have a lot of value. I think I've been really privileged in that that level of insight has given me so much more influence around how we are resourcing and where we are resourcing to be able to be that much more effective. I think I think I mentioned at the very beginning that like, you know, I can't overstate how much of an impact hiring the right talent into the growth of the org is going to make. And so, like, what is the cost of giving more insight to TA leaders into business strategy and growth? I would say it's fairly minimal. Uh, you know, I'm not like coming in and I'm just asking a million questions and distracting and derailing the conversation. I think I'm like a participant at the table, which um helps influence how we are growing. And I would like to say that it has been extremely successful. I'd it's easy to recommend to other TA leaders to try and be part of those conversations, but really where it comes from is showing them what the value is that you can provide. And so how can you articulate it, whether it's through data, whether it's through being a strong stakeholder with them, all of those kinds of things are what are going to kind of like earn you that credibility internally.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you have any specific examples of that throughout your career where you needed to gain influence or you needed a shift to occur in order to help the company achieve their goals? And how you approach that with the leadership team or how you were able to get their uh buy-in to give you a seat at the table, right? Anything because I think that that's probably a common enough obstacle that sometimes town acquisition leaders find themselves in, particularly at these like at scale-ups, right? Things are moving fastly. The TA motion is needs to evolve really quickly. And it goes from maybe a function that really isn't thought about too much, or the founders are directly managing hiring to where now it's like, okay, we're scaling, and it we need a more sophisticated or uh approach, or we need something that's a little bit more established. And it's a big transition, right? So any stories or or wisdom that you can share in terms of how to what you did in the past specifically, I think through a story kind of helps, right? If if you have a specific example.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, I think I mean this is going to be pretty rudimentary because it's fairly common knowledge at this point. But earlier in my career, Organizations, I mean, some still do, is they live and die by time to fill, which is just, you know, how quickly can we get talent in the door? And there's so little consideration around the quality of the hire. And so, you know, early on when that was the metric that we were all measured against was time to fill or volume of hires, finding a way to articulate the ROI around the time and the energy that you're spending to make a hire versus their success in place is a big feat to be able to show it. It requires a lot of data to be able to collect and it requires a lot of collaboration as an entire HR function. I think like talent often can be considered an asilo as part of HR. But your tie to the rest of the people organization, um, specifically like the business partner and know the performance, long-term performance over time, is going to give you the full loop of feedback that you need in order to show ROI of the types of metrics that you use. So if time to fill, or, you know, a lot of I think organizations like to talk about number of volume of candidates at certain stages of the pipeline. It's so kind of one-sided of a data point versus really emphasizing what finding the right talent or like putting the work up front to get the right talent through the pipeline will give you. And so how would kind of say that in in very short order is basically like collect all of the information that you can around what time to fill looked like or the volume of hires, and then look at the success rate of quality over time. And then look at the kind of the correlations of the people that were the highest quality, what are the common traits that they had over a period of time? So something that is really interesting about super.com that they had done, actually, this is prior to me joining, was looking at the success rate of source candidates versus inbound candidates, and actually found the inverse of what people mostly think, which is that, you know, people love source candidates. They're just obsessed with source candidates because they feel like they're better. And that, you know, that can be true in some cases, but like I don't think that there's like a unified truth to source candidates being better. And we found that over a period of time, our inbound candidates and applied candidates perform better. I think there's also like an HBR cast that that proves the same thing, which is that, you know, inbound candidates are more mission-aligned, they tend to be not overly comp as comp competitive as source candidates, and will be more bought into the organization over a longer period. And so if you're able to just even show that metric, it completely turns on your head, uh on its head the the philosophy that a lot of executives think, which is like, I want talent that I can't have, which is sourced source candidates. And so that's a really good example of being able to use data to create that credibility. And then it influences your hiring strategies moving forward. Maybe you don't need a sourcing rate, you know, is the one that you're kind of going off of. So um, yeah, that's just kind of like one quick example.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, yeah, that's a great example. Um, I appreciate you sharing that. That's definitely something that's top of mind for a lot of folks. And um, you know, John, I would love to go through some uh our our rapid fire uh segment with you and go through some different uh questions that uh I think a lot of people are thinking about right now, or also just insights of what's impacted you or influenced you rather uh throughout your career. So I got the big question for you, the fun one that's I've been talking through with all of our guests is uh will AI replace recruiters?

SPEAKER_00:

I I don't have a crystal ball, so I won't say strongly that I know or not because of how much AI has changed. I would say if I was to look in like the next year or two, the approach I think is that a recruiter in combination with AI will vastly outmaximize AI by itself, but will also outmax maximize like a recruiter by themselves. So I think the recruiters that are able to adopt AI up front now, as well as just really get themselves up to speed on how to leverage it, are going to be vast and more successful. I will say that I'm already starting to see that AI is really replacing that coordination layer, which is going to be a challenge as we continue to grow because you know, what does the succession plan of recruitment look like as we continue to grow? Um, you might have to now start moving directly into being an early recruiter versus going through a coordination path. But I do think the way that is progressing, like coordination is definitely starting to get squeezed.

SPEAKER_01:

That's a good answer. I love it. What is the best piece of career earned leadership advice you've ever received?

SPEAKER_00:

This is like very, very early in my career. So, you know, this is going back probably longer than I'd like to say. And it's oversimple, but I think I want to stress how much it's influenced the decisions that I've made, which is that when you think about how you are treating others, it is really just it's a really small world. So it's a small world out there. You might have certain audiences in mind when you're communicating certain things. You might think that, like, you know, how the experience that you give someone versus you give someone else is going to be a one-and-none thing. But people come in and out of your life in so many different ways, whether it's personally or professionally all the time, that like the way you treat people is how they're going to remember you. And so, you know, you can use that for candidates. Of course, candidate experience comes to the forefront. But hiring managers, leaders, other folks that you've kind of networked with in the past, it's a very small world. And I don't mean that you got to be inauthentic in any certain kind of way. But ever thinking that, you know, this person or this experience won't matter to me in the future, I think is like short-sighted. I think always thinking about how small the world is important. Agreed.

SPEAKER_01:

That's solid advice. What is the one book that has had the biggest impact on your life or career?

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, this is a book that we read organization-wide um when I was back at Well Simple, but it's called Unreasonable Hospitality. And it is by Will Ghidara. He was the previous, I believe he was like the general manager of Eleven Madison Park, which is uh like a Mission One Star restaurant in New York. I've never been there personally. But a lot of it was around how they're treating their guests at a given time. And even though I'm not in the industry, I'm not in the restaurant industry at all, I think it's about creating that elevated experience and thinking about every kind of small detail as like outweighing the impact that it gives is something that like has kind of come up in different ways, especially when we're in this external facing role of being NTA, of every little element down to how you were emails, you know, how the career page is set up, how you're having your conversations, every single part of it is so impactful and can change someone's life in any given way. And so, you know, I'd highly recommend that book.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, that's smart, right? It's like the compounding. It's like if you make little microimprovements along the way, it's like that compounding effect of when they add up, it's actually creates a big difference, right? Yeah, absolutely. Love it. And the last question we have is what is the skill every recruiter will need five years from now?

SPEAKER_00:

I would say not five years from now. I'd probably say now is a skill that that is underutilized by recruiters, is probably their level of data insight. Um, I think data in conjunction with AI is just moving this role and this entire industry. I think we've seen a lot of change over the last couple of years where folks in HR or people functions haven't been at the forefront of data. But I think there's huge opportunity to uh develop the skill set and become like, you know, a dual threat of being able to both deal with the IQ and the EQ side of things that we would kind of pride ourselves in. And so from a recruitment lens, being able to really leverage your, your, your pipeline data, being able to kind of look at quality of higher metrics, all of these kinds of things and just getting yourself up to speed to it will really just result in a huge return. Agreed.

SPEAKER_01:

That's really fantastic advice. Um well, look, John, this has been awesome. I really appreciate you coming on uh to the show today to share your insights. I know our audience is going to gain a lot of value from it. So thank you very much. It's really, really great to have you here. Yeah, thanks so much for having me, James. Of course. And for everybody tuning in, we will see you next time. Take care.

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