Susan LaMotte - Unlocking the Power of Custom Insights
42:27 Share

The world of business is more complex than ever. The world of human resources and compensation is also getting more complex. Welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast, your direct source for the latest trends from experts inside and outside the world of human resources. Listen as we explore the impact that compensation strategy, data, and people analytics can have on your organization.

This podcast is sponsored by salary.com, your source for data, technology and consulting for compensation and beyond. Now, here are your hosts, David Teretsky and Dwight Brown. Hello and welcome to the HR Data Labs podcast. I am your host, David Teretsky, alongside my co-host, best friend and partner in crime at salary.com, Dwight Brown. Dwight, how are you? I am good, David. How are you doing?

I'm tired. We had the daylight savings time spring ahead this weekend, and this is the Monday after. So I feel like I have a hangover, even though I don't drink. Yeah, it does feel like one of those kinds of Mondays. It does. But today is a Monday. You know why? Why is that? Because we have with us Susan Lamott from Exactweo.

Did I say that right, Susan? You sure did. That's the best thing that's happened to me all day other than being on the podcast with you. Well, I'm glad to hear that right back at you. I'm excited for this conversation. Thank you.

We are excited. So Susan, give us a little bit of background on you and ExactWEO. For sure. So I'm Susan Lamott. I'm the founder and CEO of ExactWEO. We are a employer brand experience and consulting firm. And what we focus on is the employment relationship. So for the companies that we're lucky enough to work with, we're focused specifically on how do we strengthen and sustain the employment relationship so that they can attract and retain talent.

And that's usually through workforce insight, rich data to better understand their current and future employees, through strong employer brands, building and maintaining those brands, and creating exceptional candidate and employee experiences. Those all sound very laudable and wonderful. How about you, though? Oh, for me. So I sit at the intersection of where business meets behavior. And I've been sitting there for a little over 25 years now.

I see on the one hand how companies have to run a business and they've got to be efficient and effective in doing so. But at the same time, humans are humans and work is not a transaction. It's a relationship. It puts food on our table and a roof over our heads.

And so it's really important for me and in my career to find that intersection, paying attention to what's important to business, but also recognizing that employees and candidates are human beings and what their behavior means to us and to our businesses. Okay. But now we want to learn about you. So what I'm going to do is ask you, what's the one fun thing that no one knows about you?

Oh, the one fun thing no one knows about me. It doesn't have to be fun. It could be insightful, interesting. All right. Well, this is maybe not something that no one knows, but I haven't shared in a really long time, which is I had 16 jobs before I even graduated college. Wow. So I got my first W-2 at 14, which I'm famous for talking about, but I've had almost 30 jobs in my lifetime. Wow.

And I think it's really important if you're going to write, talk, speak, advise about work, that not only are you working with clients in all different industries and backgrounds, but at the same time, you've had all of those experiences. I was lucky in that my parents said, hey, if you want to buy something, you need to work for it.

And I am so glad that they gave me that experience, knowing how easy it is now for kids to not have to work for things. They can just go to chat GPT and get all the answers. Well, we couldn't do that. You realize that sometimes Gen AI lies, right? So this is a message saying, don't trust everything you read from Gen AI.

Well, see, that's strange because up until now, I've been believing everything I've read on the internet. Oh, gosh. Newsflash. Wow, that's a moment we've never had before on the HR Data Labs podcast.

Well, that's really exciting. Although I'm sure that you didn't have all 30 jobs at the same time, right? Not at the same time, but I did have several. I did have several at once. And that's, you know, I do firmly believe that everybody at some point in their life should have to work either retail or service. Oh, absolutely. And that should be required of all human beings. I think there was somebody who said one time that everybody should be in the restaurant industry, you know, be a waiter or...

bus boy, whatever you want to call that service job have to be either that or a line cook. So do you really understand what so many people go through and you're not rude to them? 100%. Totally agree. I think one of my proudest moments as a parent is watching my kids who are now seven and 10 and

order for themselves and go into a restaurant. My daughter will ride her bike up to Starbucks and get her own drink or whatever. And I love seeing them emulate the behaviors that I've created for them. I'm certainly far from a perfect parent, but I love seeing them treat service people with kindness and respect. It makes me feel like I'm doing something right.

Well, you're in good company, Susan, because none of us are perfect parents either. So we try to be, but we aspire to be, but not quite, not quite there yet. Almost just about perfect. Yeah.

So our topic for today is one that's near and dear to the heart of the HR Data Labs podcast and has been since the beginning, which is the importance of custom data for HR in the future benchmarking or the lack thereof. So Susan, from your perspective, what are we missing in HR when we actually swim in so much data on a daily basis?

So the interesting piece for me is that everyone thinks data and insight is the same, but it's not. We have a lot of data, but we don't have any insight.

And insight comes from two places. One, it comes from emotion and that connective tissue, right? Which we get largely from qualitative data. We don't collect very much qualitative data in HR. And then two, we don't connect the dots. I have so many clients that say to me, I have dashboards after dashboards after dashboards, but what does it mean? How do I make sense of all of this? So to me, that's what's really key is that behavioral piece is

and the ability to have insight more than just the data itself. Yeah, I mean, when we've been talking about data since day one, and because we are awash in it and we surround ourselves with it, people think that just by having those dashboards that, you know, you have everything you need. And it's just not there yet. It's just, you do need, and that's why I think what, when people say Gen I is going to take over,

Gen I can't take over because it doesn't have that context. It doesn't have that ability to bring it all together yet, yet. And so we still need the humans to do that interpretive piece along the way. Not only the interpretive piece, but it's interpretive for your own custom situation. You know, if you look at engagement surveys, for example, they're predicated on this idea of a benchmark, right? Where am I compared to my peers? But in the business world, there's really no peer, right?

Because at the end of the day, you've got a different set of goals than any of your competitive organizations. You're also in a different environment. I mean, even if everybody, and we know everybody, is going through an HR transformation, right? It seems like... All the time. All the time. Right.

But your environment is different. You might have a longer tenured or a shorter tenured CEO. You're in a different geographical part of the world. You've got different challenges from your stakeholders, your investors, all of these things that make it impossible to compare apples to apples. And that's where the insight comes into play.

Plus, only you inside your organization know exactly what you're trying to achieve and what all the political ramifications are and the nuances. And that also makes you really different, again, where the insight comes into play. And, you know, unless you want to put all of that into a prompt, Gen AI still can't replicate that kind of insight for you.

Yeah, I mean, we've got to remember, too, that just because we put data in front of somebody doesn't mean that they'll know what to do with it or even the right questions to ask to get that context that's needed. Unlike the three of us who are probably all data geeks, there are plenty of people out there that are not. And so you can't just plop down a bunch of data and think that they're going to be able to draw good conclusions out of that.

I think that's so important. It's such an astute observation because it's also a reminder that data is a single point in time. And so if you don't have the experience in connecting the insights, right, and bridging those gaps, and you're not recognizing data is a certain point in time, then you're blinded by headlines or you're blinded by a number. Even if you look at the unemployment data, right, most people don't realize that gets edited. Right.

So, you know, they just put out the numbers for the end of February 2025. They'll go back and revise those numbers, maybe once, maybe twice. And few people go back to say, what did that mean? How did that change the headline? Because we're all looking for that immediate answer, immediate solution right now. And that's dangerous, particularly when it comes to the addition of Gen AI to this, you know, this conversation. But Susan, even in the context of the dashboards you were talking about before,

we know that the data in HR isn't perfect. And what happens is, is that

Transactions get entered inappropriately, they get entered late, they get changed. So even in the context of a dashboard, you'll see a headcount number and then it gets revised. You'll see a turnover statistic and then it gets revised. It even happens with HR and HR data. So I'm with you on the headlines. I'm with you on the revisions of things.

But that's just the way data is. Data is never, I mean, especially with effective dating in HR solutions these days, we can go back in time and see, you know, what was that earlier number that piqued our interest? But nothing's perfect. And to your point, I think we have to be trained on knowing that this may be the truth today, but tomorrow it may be changed.

Yeah, I think one of the things that our colleagues in marketing do so well is they recognize that exact sentiment. And that's why they're collecting data all the time so that they can make constant insights into

allocations about this data. So if you think about any product that's in your house or on your desk or in your office, right? Chances are the consumer marketer or brand manager behind that is collecting regular data, qual and quant, on that product, whether usage, popularity, what price point it's selling for. We don't do that at HR. A lot of the data that we collect is single point in time. We're not revising the data. We're not looking at the trend of the data.

And even if we are, we're not connecting it to how people think and feel about the data. And, you know, it's interesting because I think one of the biggest measures of employee sentiment satisfaction, right, for everybody is the tried and true engagement survey.

But engagement surveys are lagging indicators. Yes. And so what happens is we measure, we spend millions of dollars to measure how our employees feel. By the time we get the data and even the insights, if we're lucky enough to have an engagement survey provider that actually provides insights instead of just data, then it's, you know, perhaps a year has passed.

And the environment has changed. The world around us has changed. And people, that's the most important part, that human element, have changed in that time. Yeah, I'll give you an example of one of those things. There's a bottle of hand sanitizer in my hand right now. When we were in February of 2020, you could have bought this for $1.79 on any shelf in any store around the world, probably. Of course, exchange rates and whatnot. Yeah.

And then in end of March, early April of 2020, that same bottle probably went for $5 because, you know, scarcity as well as being chosen as the path for us to combat a disease. In that same vein, we had unemployment take a rocket ship, probably more so than we've seen in a long time, maybe since 9-11.

And those statistics we saw were real-time indicators. And any trending that you would have done on anything in HR was upset dramatically by those singular events in time. And any measurement before or after had to be excluded.

Because anything that we were doing was actually just knee jerk. Well, in the same vein, you know, we are dealing right now with situations where trends are very important, but economic news coming out on a daily basis is going to impact our hiring as well as our, our salary increases and things like that. So to your, I think this is your point, which is that you need to keep a very close eye on these trends because

And not just take the knee-jerk reaction of the data at a point in time. Am I interpreting that correctly? Yeah, 100%. And it's why one of the things that's so important to me personally is looking at the employment relationship when you're measuring and looking at the state essentially of your workforce. And the reason I care so much about the employment relationship is if you think about any relationship in your life, it's really important to

to measure it over time, right? Think about a marriage and where you were at the beginning of a marriage. If you're lucky enough to be married a long time, you get to see how that transitions over time. Or on the flip side, if you've had a relationship break down, being able to track why it broke down. Anybody that's ever gone through a divorce will tell you, it's not a flippant decision. You're thinking about it. You're trying to determine, can this relationship be saved?

But my point is, particular for human resources, we did this thing where when we were struggling with the lagging indicator of engagement data, the industry said, oh, well, we need data real time. So they went 180 degrees and started doing pulse surveys, which is great. You're getting a quick read, but you're not getting any human insight.

It's just a pulse. It doesn't tell you have the things you've put in place really made any measurable difference. And you don't have any way to triangulate that pulse because typically you're not collecting deep dive qualitative data on what's happening externally. And you can't compare it with how candidates are feeling. So you can determine, okay, my employees feel this way, but candidates don't have any perception or understanding of us.

So for me, that's why the data question is a hard one because it's got to be a large data set that we collect on a regular basis like our friends in marketing do. And it has to be both qual and quant. And we have to be looking at both leading indicators, but also collecting a baseline so we can actually measure improvement over time. And to whatever extent you can, that ongoing piece that you can measure. Ongoing piece is really important for sure.

Yeah. And that's hard data to get at a lot of times. Sometimes it's easy, I suppose. But, you know. I think it's hard because organizations don't make the investments.

In the course of my career, I've seen a lot of organizations make that investment and say, okay, we are going to look at this data on a regular basis. We're going to invest in having a regular read. But that requires not only the investment of dollars, but it also requires having the right resources on your side, people who can actually make sense of that data, triangulate it, give you the insights that you need.

and to be able to have leaders that see the value in that. We see the value in it for customers. I always struggle with why it's so hard to see the value in it for collecting that regular insight on our people. Like what you hear so far? Make sure you never miss a show by clicking subscribe. This podcast is made possible by salary.com. Now back to the show.

Let's transition to question two, which is kind of going to where you're headed right now, which is how do you go about actually achieving and getting that insight?

Getting insight really comes from two pieces. One, it's getting the right data, right, and the right set of inputs. And that comes from both qualitative and quantitative data. So on the quantitative side, using the right methods. So it's not just, you know, surveys, but you're also looking at how do we get the right representative sample of people across the board? And then doing it at a regular cadence so you can track that data over time.

On the qualitative side, it's much more nuanced. It's not as simple as saying, let's get HR to put a couple people in a room and we'll do a focus group, right? Who wants to talk about our organization? It's more complex than that. You've got to make sure you've got people who come from all walks of life in the organization, people who aren't the most vocal.

but maybe are not vocal at all. And so you want to get their insight and that you're using different qualitative levers, whether that's interviews, whether it's diaries, whether it's focus groups.

And that you've got trained facilitators to lead those groups. That's really important. If HR is sitting in the room, people won't be as open and honest. And then the other piece, in addition to getting the right mix of methods and data, is actually interpreting it on the backend. So not just pumping that data out into a dashboard, but actually breaking that dashboard down so that you can pull those insights out.

So at a macro level, the data that you're getting, how do we connect it to what's happening in the world around us, right? So if your employees are behaving a certain way or they're feeding back a certain way, what's happening in the world at that point in time?

And then at a micro level in the organization, what's going on in the organization? Did you make a change? Did something happen with one of your leaders? Did you announce something that's going to drive how people feel? And then the very last piece is the personal piece. Whether we like it or not, people bring their whole selves to work. And I don't mean that in the sense of you should come and tell everybody everything about your life. Not at all. You can absolutely be a private human.

But if there are things that are happening to you personally, right? Like my dad is in year 11 of Alzheimer's. I went and visited him this weekend and it's on my mind. Every time I leave him, I think, is this the last time I'm going to see my dad? Right. How do you shake that on a Monday morning? You can't. You can't. And so we don't account for that.

We don't pay attention to how people actually feel and the fact that they can't close the door on their home life when they come to work, regardless of what job they have. So that's why insights on the human are so challenging to get when it comes to the workplace, but they're so important to get so we're not making these snap judgments that could cost us millions of dollars.

but also in some ways they're regulated as well. Some things we can't tell. Some things we have to keep that wall between us and work. And so there is a very...

intricate dance that is played as an employee as to what do I share and who do I share it with? Because we've all seen cases of people oversharing and then getting terminated for it. We've also seen cases where people share and it's a violent share and it's bad. So,

There needs to be that human element to HR of recognizing when something's not right, but not going too deep and not probing too hard, but just enough for risk management and security. Sure. And yeah, I hear you. The things you mentioned, though...

scaling for a very large organization are very difficult. Being able to do pulse surveys is easy. Being able to do the check on the leading and lagging indicators is, I wouldn't say easy. It's not as hard because you have the HRITs to collect the data seemingly and seemingly you have people to interpret them. That third piece is very, very hard because it's, it's,

It's using observational skills. It's also asking people to be a little bit more forthright, which they're not apt to do. I think it's hard if we look at it at the individual level, right? So anybody that works with me and has for a long time knows about my dad, right? And they might know or they might, you know, even be connected to me on Instagram and can make that personal connection. What I'm talking about is much larger.

If you know you've got a segment of your population that is in parental caregiving age, right? So I'll be 50 this year. So it could be people between 40 and 65 that might have a parent they're caring for. You can set up surveys, right, to branch questions out to get at some of these issues without getting at the personal one-on-one identification. Right.

So that you can identify, okay, what segment of our population is currently dealing with these issues? And what could we do to help make things easier for them? So they might not be able to, and I wouldn't expect an organization to have the responsibility to deal with my one-on-one personal need. But what they can do is see, and this is where the business intersects with behavior, they can see what segment of the population is facing this particular struggle, right? And how can we potentially address that?

And the same can be said for any number of issues that's happening, any age of individual, any issue related to what might be happening politically. How is that affecting people? How are they feeling about it? You might not do anything about it as an organization, but you can then look and say, did our productivity go down at this particular time in the organization? Or did we see issues with performance issues?

and start to think about what are the things we can do as a company to address those things. So you can take emotion. I think that's a misnomer. People think, oh, we can't deal with the emotion. We can't deal with the personal needs. Yeah.

you can actually quantify those things. It's just you have to have the skill and experience to understand how to do that. That's where the methodology is and why I love this idea of the employment relationship and why I've been studying it for so long because really nobody else is. So that's what gets me excited about the future of our space is bringing these things together. Human behavior is never going to go away, you know, and that's so important.

to how we behave at work. Even if we've got AI taking over parts of our job, there's still humans that have to deliver service and they're still going to be human. They're still going to have good days and bad days. They're still going to have issues affecting them or on their minds. So we've got to find a way to figure out how does that affect work and how can we make it better? You mentioned the 50 plus, right? And we are getting older.

There is a huge bubble demographically of not just us, but our parents who are still alive, which is a very large population from the boomer generation. And being a Gen X and baby buster, you know, just like you, I'm taking care of my mom or I will be moving back to New York to take care of my mom. And, yeah.

you know, we're going to have a lot of stress and a lot of need. Well,

One way that can be alleviated or at least addressed is through elder care programs or being able to set up a paid time off program that enables you to take care of your parents just like you would if you had a baby. It's funny how on the beginning of life and in the end of life, you know, we have to take care of people who rely on us and that stress is real and it's going to become larger.

And as we get older, one of the things we're also going to have to worry about is our job security, which now is probably at risk more so than ever. Not just if you're a federal government employee or a state government employee, but in the workforce, being older. And, you know, again, this can happen more often than not now, being employable and being worried about whether your job is next.

is going to create that also that undue stress. So there's a ton of things that we, the over 50s, are going to start concerning ourselves with that we never had to worry about before. And that maybe the entire employment world never had to worry about before.

Not in this way, at least. That's where the custom data comes into play, right? Because if you're using, if you're relying just on your engagement survey, if you're relying on data sets that are comparing you to everybody else, it doesn't take into account your unique workforce. And I love to get at the nuance of data in particular geos or with particular demographics in an organization. Yeah.

Because that's where you can really make measurable difference. It's not just about the sweeping change, but being able to share insights. Let's say you're a field-based organization. Being able to share these insights at a particular geographical level gives the manager of a field office the ability to have some control and flexibility to

to make changes or choices that can affect the productivity of his or her office, right? We're such a competitive workforce. When you think about things like sales or regions, we're always competing against each other. What if you gave leaders, if you use these insights to give leaders the ability to either recruit more effectively or to retain people more effectively? But we're just not at that level because everything that we've created around HR data has been for the masses, right?

right? It's the SaaS software model of let's get as much data as we can from all of our customer organizations. Let's compare them to each other. When really what you should be doing is comparing to yourself. Where do you want to be as an organization and where are you? That's what, you know, certainly consumer marketers are looking at their competitors all the time, but they're also setting goals for themselves and saying, where do we want to be and why?

I had a CEO one time say to me, Susan, I've already told the board that we're at the top benchmark. And I keep telling the board the same thing. So why am I spending a million bucks every year on my engagement survey to keep telling them this? You got to keep measuring it or you're going to be the last and then you'll be the first to know you're the last. But if they didn't measure it, right, that doesn't change anything for that organization. They're still doing what they're doing.

So it's how do you measure it in a way that's not about comparing yourselves to everybody else and being in the top quartile, but rather what are the changes we're trying to make as our organization is changing?

So that's great that we're top quartile for engagement, but we might be getting ready to do a transformation. We might be implementing something new. Let's see if that investment we made in this program or service is actually moving the needle. And instead, we keep asking the same questions. Do you have the tools and resources needed to do your job? Do you have a best friend at work? And that kind of vague data doesn't give us a lot of custom insight to actually move the needle inside our organizations.

Couldn't it also be said that, you know, there's a there's an art and a science that goes with the data. But part of that art and science also is knowing knowing when not to do something with the data or when to stop collecting the data. I mean, to the point of the CEO you talked about.

Is there that point at which we say either, hey, this is what the data is telling us, nothing that we're going to actually take action on in any way or another. So, you know, but we've got that realization and insight or also another scenario where we say this data point has run its course. It's time for us to look at something different.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think marketers do that all the time when it comes to a product, right? And the actual feature of a product. Our organizations change. We should be changing the questions that we ask.

I'm a big fan of a combination, of having a baseline, right? Year over year. So you've got some things you're consistently measuring, but then also every time you go to measure, whether that's monthly, quarterly, at a minimum quarterly, you're at least being able to tie some of these custom measures to what's happening either at that micro level, right? Inside your organization or the macro level.

what's happening in the world around you, or even the emotional level. What are some of the things that we know we're starting to see, we're hearing about, right? From our HR business partners, all that sort of talk to say, a lot of people are complaining about elder care. Should we do something about it? Let's put it into our custom question set.

And see if this is just complaints, this is just a couple one-offs, or is this a real problem and really something that matters? Because it might be people are complaining about it, but they don't want any solution from their organization. That's where it gets complex, right? HR sometimes is very reactive. Oh, shoot, candidates want this particular thing. Let's give it to them.

They may want it, but do they want it from you as an organization? Is that your responsibility to provide it? Right. Hey, are you listening to this and thinking to yourself, man, I wish I could talk to David about this? Well, you're in luck. We have a special offer for listeners of the HR Data Labs podcast, a free half hour call with me about any of the topics we cover on the podcast or whatever is on your mind.

Go to salary.com forward slash HRDL consulting to schedule your free 30-minute call today. So let's transition a little bit to the now the art of the possible and the next question, which is what can you ask to get the data we need? As I think about what's most important to ask, whether it's employees or candidates,

I break it down into the full life cycle and the journey that an employee follows. So from the time that they understand your company even exists, right?

Right. So before you even start asking questions to candidates about the experience, most candidate experience data starts on the website. But the reality is if you're starting there, you're missing a whole swath of people that might not even know your brand exists. Or maybe they heard of your brand or your organization. They've written you off.

So following the journey of the employee from the time that they even are aware your brand exists all the way through from searching, awareness, consideration, that sense of belonging into the employee experience and actually managing their careers, growing their careers, and then transitioning either out of the organization or into a new role.

So if you break your question sets down, your discussion guides, the data you're collecting across that whole journey, then quarter over quarter, you can determine what are the baseline things we need to measure across the whole journey so that it's a holistic picture of the experience. And then what are the things that we need to change?

right? And some of those things might be immediate. So let's say you adopt a new candidate-facing technology. You're going to want to measure that right away when that gets launched. So other things might be over time. Maybe you're phasing out a certain thing like, you know, in-person interviews and you're moving most of that to virtual or online. That'll happen over time. So maybe you minimize the questions and they go from just, you know, they go from three or four you ask about the interview experience to one or two.

That's where that nuance comes into play, but you've got to follow the entire journey. The other thing you have to ask to get the data is asking about the whole self. So what are the things people value personally and professionally so that you can get a sense of their personal values, what has to be emulated in the workplace? Outside of the organization, where are they spending their time? Because we're so focused on, you take recruitment marketing, for example, we're so focused on a digital footprint right now

We're putting so much energy and emphasis into advertising on social media, online. We forget about the local Little League and the sponsorships there. People are getting off their devices. People are, yes, we're glued to our phones. There's no doubt about it. But if everybody is advertising on a digital space, where's your competitive advantage?

It's not on a Facebook or Instagram or TikTok anymore. It's going to be in that creative experience or experiential strategy you're creating.

So again, our marketers are ahead of us there, you know, focused on not just out of home, but the personal one-on-one. Those are some of the things I think about when it comes to getting the data you need. But Susan, don't the marketers especially close the loop and do analyses for their, not just retention strategy, but their acquisition strategy? So they're very good at testing at the end what channel the person went through to get to them, right?

So we don't do that really well. We don't close that loop. We don't make sure that the investments we made in that elder care program are paying off. We don't test to see whether people actually not just use a dental care, but they like our dental care program.

Yeah, and I think it's because, again, it goes back to what you said earlier, David, about being lazy and this idea that if we have technology to collect data, we're going to rely on that. What does that mean? That means with candidates, we are only capturing data from people who are in our flow.

And so right away, there's a bias there, right? People take the job. Maybe they're getting asked for feedback and orientation. There's already a bias there. You're not capturing all the outflows. You're not capturing the people that looked at your job description and then decided not to apply. Right. You have no idea why. You're only capturing people who moved forward.

The other challenge is we think about that too, is you don't have the baseline over time. Again, that goes back to the insights. So you can't just look and say, okay, we got a lot of candidates from this particular digital platform. So we should keep advertising there.

You're not tracking that over time and looking to see what else might be influencing that. I am long said, I'm like a broken record about it. There is no such thing as source of hire. It does not exist. It is source of influence. You have to be able to track the between eight and 20 influences on someone to take and keep a job.

And you've got to be able to measure the degree to which those things are influential. And therein lies our challenge with digital. It's really great when your digital marketing rep gets on the phone with you and says, look at all the traffic I'm sending your way. But did that traffic come from them? Or is that just the conduit? Was that just the pipe? Were they influenced to go to that platform in the first place? Did someone say to them offline, okay,

We do a terrible job of tracking that. But that's what I love. That's where the richest insights are, are in the things people don't track elsewhere. But it's hard to get that data sometimes. And it's expensive sometimes to acquire that data. It's also outside of our realm. So HR getting access to it is a, why do you need that? And a, we don't have the money right now. We'll get back to that at some other point in the future. I would argue it's actually not hard at all. It's expensive. Yeah.

It's easy to set up your data processes. It's easy to determine who are the audiences that you want to reach out to and go back to those audiences over time. Marketers do this all the time. It's the investment. Yeah, right. If you look at, I once worked with a very large organization. The difference in the amount of spend between marketing and HR on ad buy was a billion dollars to a million dollars.

And this was a service organization. So you could argue that if people are really the difference in delivering on your brand and your competitive advantage, but you have such a financial difference in the investment you're making, not only in advertising to those individuals, but also into understanding them.

No wonder you can't leverage your people. No wonder you're still seeing turnover. You've got to be able to invest in that data in order to see the return. And often I'll tell people easiest way to do that is to shift the dollars. Maybe you start small in a particular segment of the business that's just really struggling and they've got dollars. Shift some of it from advertising to insight.

Shift some of it from engagement survey over to an insight-based approach instead. There's lots of ways to do it. Is it expensive? It is. Is it hard? I don't think so.

Well, it's hard to get the dollars. I would agree with you there. Beg, borrow, and steal. Exactly. I remember a time during the pandemic when, and Dwight, you remember this too, when we were seeing supermarkets and Amazon fighting for people on TV. They were advertising for hiring people. We were like, wait a minute.

HR or recruitment, getting ad spend, that's crazy. But there were two things that were happening to your point, Susan. One was the perception of the brand caring about people, going out on a limb and saying, hey, here's who we are and here's who we are exactly. And here's how we care about our people. That was a dramatic change.

a very, very dramatic change in their marketing strategy for HR, but also for their marketing strategy so that it wasn't just about you can get eggs for, of course, this wasn't during the pandemic, so eggs were $2 a carton, but it was also about, and here are the people who take care of you on a daily basis, even despite the fact that they could get exposed to a deadly disease. So we had the investment then, right?

We definitely don't see that investment now. I think it's reactive. You know, right now, the data that marketers are using, particularly as it relates to people, I spent a long time working in hospitality. And so, you know, just think about the reviews that you get online. So you can see when people become a problem and that marketing turns to HR and says, we need you in order to hit our goals. But marketing's got that regular data. Yeah.

Years ago, probably in 2010, I was working in-house at Marriott.

And we were one of the first brands to heavily leverage social media. And I was using social media in recruiting before they were even using it on the consumer side. And at the time, we were testing all of these review platforms. It's hard to imagine a world before reviews existed. But I would get on all these calls as the lone HR representative. And by the end, all my marketing colleagues were laughing. They knew what was coming in every one of these demos. I would say, do you do this for employees? Yeah.

And the answer was always like, oh no, we haven't thought about that or we don't do that or maybe in the future because it didn't exist yet. Well, it's also because of the purse strings, right? Because putting that kind of investment in HR was always a, yeah, yeah, it's a great idea. Exactly. Good job, Susan. But yeah. Yeah. But if you get ahead of it,

For me, that's what's so exciting, again, about this intersection of business and behavior. If you can get ahead of these trends, if you cannot wait for it to be a problem like it was in the pandemic, as you talked about, if you can get ahead of it, if you're tracking the data on a regular basis, you're triangulating those insights, you can be predictive, just like our friends in marketing are. You can get ahead of some of these things and you can put solutions in place to address them before they become a problem.

That's where the dollars come from. And then it's scary. We're making quick decisions. It's reactive decisions to solve an immediate problem. It's the band-aid. It's not a strategy. And to me, that's probably the best differentiator between data and insight is data causes you to act. Insight drives you to be strategic.

And I think that's a drop the mic moment right there, Susan. I don't think you could have said it any better as an ending comment on the topic today. Perfectly timed. Exactly. So thank you very much for being here. Thank you for having me. And Dwight, thank you very much for being here. Thank you. And thank you for being with us today, Susan. Of course. My pleasure. And thank you all for listening. Take care and stay safe.

That was the HR Data Labs podcast. If you liked the episode, please subscribe. And if you know anyone that might like to hear it, please send it their way. Thank you for joining us this week and stay tuned for our next episode. Stay safe.