Hiring Became Our Edge w/ Kristen Reilly

Hiring 3,000 People Without Losing Our Minds

"We went from 34% fully staffed to 96% fully staffed on Day One." When your business relies on placing 3,000 part-time coaches onto school grounds in a chaotic six-to-eight-week summer sprint, missing your hiring targets isn't just an inconvenience it's a operational nightmare that damages client relationships and drowns your staff in administrative chaos.

In this episode, HR’s most dangerous hosts, Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman, sit down with Kristen Reilly, the SVP of Talent at Elevo Learning. Kristen shares the incredible story of how Elevo flipped the script on their massive seasonal hiring bottleneck. By tossing out archaic, manual workflows and going "all in" on conversational AI technology, they completely transformed their talent acquisition strategy.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• The 96% Pivot

• An EMPS Skyrocket

• The Next Frontier

• Expansion & Growth

"We’re bringing in AI technologies so we can utilize the skill sets of our teams to be people first." - Kristen Reilly, SVP of Talent at Elevo Learning

Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTduBhNfa8I

PART 2 - AI Helped Us Grow

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Joel Cheesman: We are the Chad and Cheese podcast. I'm your cohost Joel Cheesman, joined as always, Chad Sowash is here as we welcome Kristen Reilly, SVP of Talent at Elevo Learning. Kristen, welcome to HR's most dangerous podcast.

Chad Sowash: Elevo, Elevo.

Joel Cheesman: Is that "I-A, I-A, I-A, Elevo"? I don't know. We're working on, are we, are we white boarding some marketing strategies here today?

Kristen Reilly: Or worse, we're writing Elevo's new jingle.

Joel Cheesman: Why not? Yes. So for those listeners and viewers that don't know you or Elevo, give us the elevator pitch on you and the company. I see what you did there. I see what you did.

Kristen Reilly: The elevator for Elevo.

Joel Cheesman: It set you up perfectly, didn't it?

Kristen Reilly: That was great. Yeah. So as an organization, our goal is to transform the lives of students so they look forward to coming to school. We primarily work in the state of California and we support before school, after school programs, daytime support, student wellness, mental health programs, things like that to really benefit the communities that we're serving. I have been with Elevo for about five years. My career journey there has been an interesting one. So I actually started on the sales side of the organization before moving over to operations where I oversaw all of our operations in California, and now here I am on the talent acquisition side of things.

Joel Cheesman: And all the people.

Kristen Reilly: And all the people.

Joel Cheesman: And you're on the Chad and Cheese podcast.

Kristen Reilly: And I'm on the Chad and Cheese podcast. I was going to say uphill. I mean, it's feeling real good right now. I'm peaking now.

Joel Cheesman: It's downhill after this. Sorry.

Kristen Reilly: This is it. This is the end of the road.

Joel Cheesman: Sorry to let you know. And you're a proud Chicagoan, a Bears fan we found out beforehand, so.

Kristen Reilly: I am. Born and raised. Yep. Yep. Bears and Cubs.

Joel Cheesman: This is their year, right?

Kristen Reilly: This is their year. Last year was a good one, though. It was fun. It was a fun season, though.

Chad Sowash: Well, after the few years before, any year would have been a good year.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, that's true.

Chad Sowash: With that being said, tell us about how many, how many hires are you doing a year? How many people apply? Like, give us a sense of the numbers you're dealing with.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. So we hire about 3,000 part-time people every single year. It is a very high-volume, short timespan to do the hiring. So we usually are hiring those 3,000 people in about a 6- to 8-week period of time from...

Chad Sowash: Why, why is that?

Kristen Reilly: Because we, we follow the model of, like, the school year. Okay. So most of our programs run from, like, when school starts, so like middle of August to, you know, the end of May, beginning of June. And so we're doing the hiring for all of those programs, like middle of June through that mid-August. So it is a very, very high peak time when we are attracting candidates for these roles. And then we hire probably about 50 full-time people per year on top of the part-time hiring that we do do.

Chad Sowash: What kind of talent are you hiring in that short amount of time?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. So the demographic of what we call our coaches, so these are our team members that are, like, out on the field and supporting the students day in and day out. Depending on the program that we are hiring for, they are usually about 18 to 25 years old. So either, you know, just kind of start at college or recent college graduates, people that have a passion for working with children, have a passion for, you know, bettering their communities, perhaps are going into education. We really look for people that, um, you know, maybe have coached a sport before. We're really big on movement, so learning through movement. And so we really look to people that have experience in that area.

Joel Cheesman: So I notice that you guys do a lot of job posting. At that age group as well, you're looking into social media and other outlets. What are, what are some of the best performing marketing channels that you see? Say TikTok, say TikTok.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. You know, I will, you know, we don't, we don't do that much posting on TikTok, crazy enough. We do Meta, so we do a lot of Instagram posting. But I, you know, crazy as it is, most of the talent that we do recruit comes from Indeed and Handshake. So, you know, Handshake being that platform that really utilizes partnerships with colleges and universities, and because that is the demographic that we're really aiming to attract, we have found that about 70% of our candidates, even if they do apply through Indeed, have had some sort of contact with Handshake.

Chad Sowash: So knowing that, obviously, you're going out there and you're pulling in a lot of candidates. You can't hire them all. Is there, is there kind of like a time frame in which that candidate just isn't going to be good for the organization anymore? So like, is it like a two-year kind of like wash-out period or what is it?

Kristen Reilly: You know, it really depends on the region of it all. It's so crazy how vastly different the demographic is from each community in California. You know, going from like Southern California to Northern California, Central Coast to the Central Valley, very different. Um, but we've had coaches with us for 3 to 4 years. Okay.

Chad Sowash: So that's a long term then. 4 years is...

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, it's long term. But I would say on average it's about a 2-year life cycle before they either, you know, have grown their career and move on to, you know, somewhere else that we've helped them flourish into, or they will be promoted into a full-time role within the organization. So when we look at our full-time roles within the company, over 60% came from coaching roles originally.

Chad Sowash: Now do you see the track for a lot of those, let's say, let's say just from a persona standpoint, are they going toward their teaching, teaching degree, or are they, you know, like you'd said, coaching sports? I mean, what's, what's really the sweet spot that you get most of your really good candidates?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. You know, it's, it's such a mix, but some of them, yes, are going towards their teaching degree. But really mostly they just have a passion for working with children, and whether they're going into like psychology or whether they're going into early childhood development or elementary education or para-educators we see a lot come through. And then people that are really passionate about coaching. So we'll get like a lot of soccer coaches or baseball coaches or basketball coaches. But then we'll get, you know, stay-at-home moms that want to support the children in their after-school programs or people that are teaching during the day and then come and support the after-school program or the before-school program as well.

Joel Cheesman: Okay, so you're getting a lot of success with Handshake, Indeed, some other channels. What was the catalyst to look at Paradox, to plug that technology into what you were doing?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. So actually, my predecessor is the one that brought Paradox into the organization because she had been using it previously at the company she was at. Um, and I, and what really was the most appealing about Paradox was the amount of administrative time that we could reduce for our recruiters so they could do the important thing and actually get in front of the candidates, um, and ensure that like we were putting like people first and not spending hours and hours on like the backend to get the qualified people in front of our teams.

Chad Sowash: So say more, what are those things that you could actually take off their plate that technology could actually do instead?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. Yeah, so a big part of before we had Paradox was that a recruiter would come in every morning and they would have to scan all of the applications that came in, they'd have to scan all of the resumes that came in, and then they would do reach out to those people to schedule interviews.

Chad Sowash: Manually.

Kristen Reilly: Manually. So that was at least 3 hours every single morning that was taking place. And then you had to deal with people actually answering their phones or calling back to schedule the interviews, and then how long is that going to take for people to do that? Paradox has completely wiped all of that out for us. So now a recruiter comes in in the morning and their calendar is stacked with all of the interviews that they're doing day in and day out, and they're not having to go and review all of these candidates and review qualifications because Paradox has done that for us. Um, and then they're not managing having to reach out to people to schedule interviews because again, Paradox has taken care of all of that for us.

Joel Cheesman: One of the things I found fascinating on your career site is you are all in on Paradox.

Kristen Reilly: Yes.

Joel Cheesman: It's not, it's not a little widget on the side. If you go to job postings, it's a, an Olivia job posting. If you click apply, you actually go to the chat window. Was that like pulling teeth to get that done? Was that an easy sale because you also have, I think, Jazz HR is doing your ATS? And that's still on your Indeed postings. So you're sort of splitting that and that's really interesting to me. Talk about those decisions.

Kristen Reilly: So we originally were going to go all in with Paradox and leave Jazz HR behind. Um, but what we found is because of the size and scope in which we were building out the Paradox implementation, um, focusing it on our part-time hires seemed like the right thing to do right now. And so we kept Jazz HR in the background for our full-time hires because as an organization, we had launched a lot of new tech stacks last April. We migrated completely from Google to Microsoft, we went into ADP, we were launching Paradox, we were launching another software called HR Cloud. So...

Chad Sowash: Change management's hard.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. It was like tech stack saturation. So people were, were drowning, and so the idea of having to now launch a new system on how we did full-time recruitment for hiring managers seemed a bit, a bit too much. However, as we move forward, we will be bringing Paradox into all components of hiring. But right now it's just on the part-time side of things.

Joel Cheesman: And that'll be your ATS as well going forward?

Kristen Reilly: Correct. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: Can you compare and contrast the Jazz experience with the Paradox?

Kristen Reilly: Oh, I mean, it's, it's, it's like it's comparing, you know, you're talking about something that is so elementary compared to what Paradox can do.

Joel Cheesman: Is that drastic?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. I mean, there is no, Jazz HR is all manual. Um, there was a moment where we were doing all of our part-time hiring, we were using HubSpot, which is not designed for recruitment. We were using Jazz HR. And every piece of it was manual, every single piece. So it's like, you know, comparing, um, you know, like roll-down windows to power windows and like, you know. It's like, it's like, it's like, it's like a tech...

Chad Sowash: Analog.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, no. And you know, like VCRs to what we're doing now with streaming.

Chad Sowash: Well, let's dig into that in the actual tech itself. So, uh, you're using an, an older, you know, applicant tracking system, right? And it is very manual, so you have to go in and it's form-based and so on and so forth. And everybody's been through that hell. Right? So I think anybody listening or watching knows what we're talking about. What is different, because you said it's, it's, it's totally different, night and day, tell us, tell us how it's, how it's different.

Kristen Reilly: Well, I think just even the user experience alone is so simplified and so...

Chad Sowash: Candidate side?

Kristen Reilly: On both. On both. On both, on the candidate side, on the organizational side. So from a candidate perspective, and especially for the demographic that we're recruiting for, so it's that age that is like they are on their phones. Like that, that phone is, you know, a part of who they are. And so now we use, with using Paradox, it's like right there on their phone, they're text messaging our Olivia, who we call Maya within our organization. They're texting Maya to apply for that job, then they're texting Maya to get their job offer, they're signing it right there. Jazz HR, that was all manual work. It was emailing, too. We weren't texting through Jazz HR. So now we're working with a demographic that's so used to being on a phone and saying, wait a second, now you have to go into an email and then you have to figure out how to DocuSign this offer letter that we just sent you or somehow upload it, which is very foreign, you know. Um, and then hope that you're gonna get that offer letter to us before you start going through your 189 million steps that you have to do to onboard with our organization. So Paradox has eliminated that completely is just the ease of application. And then for recruiters, it's the same thing. They're not manually now trying to find offer letters and sign dates. It's all right there for them. Mhm.

Joel Cheesman: Frictionless. And another thing that stood out to me on your site, you are also all in on DEI.

Kristen Reilly: Yes.

Joel Cheesman: Which personally is refreshing because that has, that's almost in the past for most comp, for most companies. So kudos, kudos to, to embracing that as well. Curious about your thoughts on that. I assume that's who you're recruiting and that's your, that's your constituency. But to me, the Paradox system is inclusive. Everyone has a phone. Everyone has time to, to bang out an application on the phone. Did those two seem to intersect? Was that part of the thought process?

Kristen Reilly: Absolutely. Yeah, that was definitely a big part of the thought process. And even as we've adopted to Paradox and we're looking at virtual interviews versus phone screens, like what we wanted to make sure is that even if we do a virtual interview versus like a phone screen, that we have, um, the ability to amend that and say, you know what, if you don't have the, the resources to get on a screen, like that's okay, we can do it as a phone screen because we really want to make sure that we aren't limiting application applicants to apply because they might not have the technology or tools because they could be the best, they could be that best person um, for those children in their communities. Yep.

Joel Cheesman: Any metrics around completed applications versus the old system? Rejection rate versus...

Chad Sowash: Yeah, like, how are the numbers issue?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, numbers have, have drastically improved, and not only from, for me when it comes to like an application completion rate, um, because we're getting, it's like, and I'm going to throw out some numbers here that could be a bit off, but we're getting I want to say about 30,000 applicants. So we're talking about a lot of applicants that are coming through. Um, and what was happening is those applicants weren't even being responded to half of the time because... Black hole.

Chad Sowash: Yeah, who, who's going to have time to respond to that? Right, right.

Kristen Reilly: But now everything's all set up in Paradox. So as they move through their dispositions, we have workflows set up with different messaging. So even if they don't move through the process, like they're still having a connection to Elevo, we can still build brand awareness, um, so in the future if we need more roles or we can get to them, um, it's all built out right there. And then we move them into talent communities. Uh, so I would say that that has been huge when it comes to like application flow. But then once an application is signed, they have to move into onboarding.

Chad Sowash: Yeah.

Kristen Reilly: And that is where we have struggled a lot as an organization is just all the steps to go through onboarding. And while we don't onboard through Paradox, the simplicity that Maya has given us to focus then on getting applicants in that the other teams now can really focus on onboarding and creating that bandwidth has really changed, um, how many people that we can actually get through our...

Chad Sowash: Is that the next step? Is onboarding the next step?

Kristen Reilly: That's the dream. Okay. Um, so in a perfect world, Paradox would be doing all of our recruitment as an ATS system and our onboarding. We're not there yet for several different reasons, um, mostly because our onboarding is, is really complex. However, we're working right now with the Paradox team to see if we can build it all out because if we can take Olivia through that whole experience, I mean, we're talking about thousands upon thousands of hours that can be saved every year in manual work. And again, putting our team in front of the people, which is most important.

Chad Sowash: Yeah, and, and talk about that. What, what kind of response, because we talked about what the recruiters would have to do. I'm sure the hiring managers, all that, there was just a lot of admin work. Yeah. Right? What was the response? How, how during the change management, because usually change management management sucks. It does. Yep. How, how have you gotten responded back to by recruiters and hiring managers around now this tech from an adoption standpoint, mhm. and are they embracing it?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. Oh, embracing it is, is an understatement. I think it's changed their lives. Um, interestingly enough, whether Acne cleared up. It's like everything. Whether you want to look at like EMPS because Paradox was brought in, but um, when we had done our employee engagement surveys like pre-Paradox, which was also, you know, you know, different, different people leading the team, though, like we were looking at like a 16 for our our EMPS. When, since, yeah, ouch is right. Um, we've obviously changed leadership within the team, but we brought in Paradox. That EMPS is now sitting at a 68. Oh, wow. So we're seeing like, can you say that again? It went from... From a 16 to a 68, and that is in a year's time. A year's time? A year's time. Yeah. So we actually went from 16 to like 42, then 42 up to 68 over the past, you know.

Joel Cheesman: Is it too early to translate that into retention numbers, even if it's anecdotal?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. Well, I would say we have, our attrition is very low from a full-time perspective. Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: And do you trace that back to the initial experiences that they have?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that while we can look at other reasons, of course, that people are happier in their, in their roles, there's so much more like ownership of making a difference now that that manual lift is out of the picture. Because I think there's a lot of um, there's a lot of debate and there's a lot of concern sometimes that that people think, okay, well AI is going to replace me, right? And you know, we're bringing in this technology and you're going to no longer need the recruiter, you're no longer going to need the team that's onboarding. But it's actually the exact opposite of that. We're bringing in AI technologies so we can utilize the skill sets of our teams to be people first, and we want that human interaction and we want the people to be meeting who are, who's coming into our organization. And now we're giving the ability to actually do that in a way that's meaningful and powerful. But the...

Joel Cheesman: The job is different, though. It is, yeah. The skill sets are different. Talk about that.

Kristen Reilly: I would say, you know, skill set's different kind of, but I, I think that the biggest shift for our team is the fact that they can now spend more time in front of people, and that is what they're really passionate about. And when you ask anybody about admin time, or it's like that's what drains them, right? That's kind of like that's what's sucking the the energy from them, right? Their life.

Chad Sowash: Yeah, giving them that acne.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, exactly. And it's... Skin spots. Yeah, the grey hairs. And it's, it's being in front of the people that's like energizing and filling their cups. And yes, can that be exhausting? Of course. But that is why, you know, you go into talent acquisition is for the people. And so now we've taken the, the quote-unquote busy work out of their days and given them the actual things that they enjoy to do. And, and what's been really cool to see is we just launched Paradox last April, right?

Chad Sowash: Really? Yeah, so it's not... A baby.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, it's just a baby. We're in our infancy with Paradox. We've grown in a year. Yeah. Yeah, and so what happened was if you think about us launching in April and then we go into peak hiring June, okay? Yeah, ooh. So when, and I had just moved over to talent acquisition in February, so this was all very new to me, too. So there was a lot of learning that had to be done for myself, for my team, um, understanding the systems. But what's been so great is we learned so much through that like first peak that the team has actually come together as a recruitment team and we've put together these um working sessions where they've really designed like how they want to see Paradox and recruitment work going into this peak season. They're a part of it. And they're a part of it, and because they're a part of it, they're so invested in what they're doing and they're so excited to like showcase the work, and then we have had such an amazing Paradox team, though. I mean, they spend, they spend a lot of time with us. I think, um, we've spent probably been in Paradox meetings for 2 hours a day over the last 3 weeks working through a new process that we needed to get in place by April 20th, and the support that they've been giving us is is the reason that we've been so successful with using it as our ATS.

Chad Sowash: So have you taken a lot of this information, a lot of these stats, uh, to the executives? Yes. What, what, what's, what's their feedback and what, what is really sticking with them? What are they coming back to you and saying, that's the point that matters to us?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. Well, um, you know, I am fortunate that I report directly to our CEO and founder, Chris. Um, we have co-CEOs and founders, so Chris and Nick, and I, I sit on the executive leadership team. So what's really great is seeing this last peak season using Paradox, we launched our programs at 96% fully staffed, which when you're thinking about that rate and 3,000 people needing to be placed in programs like that is a very significant number. We look at the year before, we launched our programs at 34% fully staffed.

Chad Sowash: Whoa. Stop it. You went from 34% to 96%? Yes. So what does that actually mean? I mean, obviously more people can get more stuff done. But what does that actually, what does that actually mean to the, to the workers when you only have 34% doing the work versus having 96%? What is that...

Kristen Reilly: Changes everything. So, you know, if you think about, you know, we are making commitments to our schools that we are going to be there on day one and we are going to have these mentors that are trained in our accredited curriculum and all of our um programs that we do and they're going to be there to support your kids in your community. Yeah. And then we launch a program and we say, you know what, you're supposed to have five people, but you're only going to have two to start, and then we're going to have to pull all of these full-time people to help support these programs. It causes so much stress on the organization, on relationships with our districts, on operations, on talent acquisition. And at the time I was in operations, and it's just smoothing out all of that when you have a rough launch season is very, very tough. And then you've disappointed people that you have really, really long, deep-rooted, lasting relationships with.

Chad Sowash: And these are your customers.

Kristen Reilly: These are our customers.

Chad Sowash: And you are now able to deliver... Yes. ...to your customers.

Kristen Reilly: Yes. Yes.

Joel Cheesman: So let's pivot from customers to your executives, and you mentioned your CEO. I, I assume your conversations with them are different now that you're having those kinds of results. Yeah, they're easier. What are those conversations talking about, you know, for the future and growth of the business, right? Now that you have that certainty. Are we talking about growth and strategic thinking that has never been there before?

Kristen Reilly: Yes, absolutely. And, you know, as an organization post-COVID, we skyrocketed in growth, right? There was um a lot of funding that was put into the state of California to support the after-school and before-school programs, billions of dollars through the ELOP funding source. Um, but it takes, you know, we're the type of organization we're very agile and we're very quick, and we want to be able to deliver on what we do. But when you're seeing results like what, you know, I was speaking of like that 34%, it's very hard to have the confidence to like how are we going to keep growing and how are we going to deliver on this. So now that we're at this rate where we've proven success, it's like we want to continue to grow even more because we know we have the foundation to do it, and we've decided to also expand out of state now. So we have hired a a sales team to be in Texas, and we'll see how it goes. I'm just don't want to touch the table, but knock on wood. Um, but yeah, so expansion is definitely something that is um...

Joel Cheesman: Has been spurred by these results. That's exciting.

Chad Sowash: So, and again, this goes back to, as we always hear, you know, the AI CEOs talking about, well, this is going to expand jobs. And it's like, and they never, and they're asked, well, what jobs? They have no clue. These are the types of jobs mhm. that could perspectively be expanded. I mean, to to other states. And these are two states. There's, there's plenty of expansion that could perspectively happen here. Yeah. So this is a great example of not only using AI to allow your staff to be more human because they have, they don't have to play with admin anymore, but also expanding and growing job roles.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah, absolutely.

Joel Cheesman: Dare I say hiring more recruiters.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. There you go. No, it's true, though. Hiring more recruiters, hiring more um the team that like onboards the the coaches. So it's growing the team in general.

Joel Cheesman: Amazing. Amazing. And I assume that that such growth, you're, your executives are saying, how can we do more of this? How can we give you more budget to like expand this? And we're here at this, we're here at this conference talking about Yeah. white boarding ideas and brainstorming things. What, what are some of your goals here this week? What are some features or maybe not even relegated to Paradox, but other technologies that you're looking at outside of that to help grow this uh business even more?

Kristen Reilly: Yeah. Well, I think the onboarding piece is really something that's important. So now we've we've gotten the recruitment piece done well, and we've gotten it down. Um, always growing and and making shifts and changes to improve on it, but, you know, we're in a good spot. Now we need to get there with onboarding. So as we move people into onboarding, we're seeing about a 30% attrition rate in onboarding. Yeah. And they go from Paradox into HR Cloud, and again, it's very much like going from from Paradox to Jazz HR, right? So it's like we started really strong in Paradox and now we're like, okay, HR Cloud. Better than what we had before, but doesn't have the potential to take us where we need to go. Gotcha. So I think for me, that is one of the biggest priorities I want to look into um after this launch season is what are we going to do from an onboarding piece. How are we going to bring AI technology to support our team through onboarding? So, again, taking away this manual lift that's happening uh through onboarding and putting it into a Olivia and and seeing how we can have one journey through application all the way to on the field.

Joel Cheesman: Well, Kristen, thanks for hanging out with us today and uh telling an an inspiring story.

Kristen Reilly: Yeah.

Joel Cheesman: Inspiring story, that's great.

Chad Sowash: I'm uplifted. I'm ready to go. My acne's cleared up, let's go. Take you on site with me one day, see what we do. Yes, yes, that's been uh the Chad and Cheese podcast. This has been Kristen Reilly, SVP of TA from Elevo Learning.

Kristen Reilly: Thank you so much for having me today.

Joel Cheesman: Go Bears.

Kristen Reilly: Go Bears.

Chad Sowash: We out.

Joel Cheesman: We out.