Revolutionizing Talent Acquisition with Seamless Workflows and User Experience

Poornima Farrar Transcript

Intro - 00: 00:01: Welcome to Beyond the Screen: An IONOS Podcast, where we share insights and tips to help you scale your business's online presence. Hosting genuine conversations with the best in the web and IT industry, and exploring how the IONOS brand can help professionals and customers with their hosting and cloud issues. I'm your host, Joe Nash.

Joe - 00: 00:22: Welcome to another episode of Beyond the Screen: An IONOS Podcast. Joining us today is Poornima Farrar, the Chief Product Officer at Rival HR, formerly known as SilkRoad Technology until very recently. After graduating from Buffalo in 2011, Poornima's career has had a clear upward trajectory through the world of product management and strategy for SaaS organizations and startups. I'm looking forward to hearing your insights today on how evolving technology and analytics are helping evolve the roles and workflow of IT and HR professionals. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining me.

Poornima - 00: 00:53: Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much for having me. Great to be here and to meet all of your lovely audience.

Joe - 00: 00:58: Yeah, absolutely. Well, so in terms of meeting our audience, I want to get you well introduced. So to kick us off, you mentioned some of your career beats there, but can you walk us through your career so far, some of your highlights and your motivations along the way?

Poornima - 00: 01:12: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, you know, as you mentioned, I graduated with a PhD in Linguistics at Buffalo. But prior to that, I actually started off my career in computer science and then started to get more and more interested in sort of the application of language, both from a world knowledge perspective, as well as technology perspective. And so it kind of brought me to this interesting balance of how to think about how language evolves as technology evolves. And that's really been on the forefront of the early part of my career in terms of natural language processing and a lot of the technologies that came in to play at the time with B2C. But from there, though, I've been very fortunate to work for a lot of amazing hyper-growth companies going from Series B to IPO at Alteryx, where we focused on data analytics, as well as spent a lot of time thinking about the millions of users that are leveraging HR tools every single day. And so across the board, I've really been fortunate to kind of think about both the data side of technology, as well as the people side, and bringing those two together. Now at Rival, which has a pretty rich history, as well as a great set of products that serve our customers.

Joe - 00: 02:18: Perfect. Yeah, hearing your background, you know, the natural language processing element. Does it feel like you're very much in the right time, right place right now with LLM bringing that into the everywhere, I guess?

Poornima - 00: 02:27: Well, I mean, you know, there's always a luck piece to it. I will say I've been very fortunate to have amazing mentors. I've also really enjoyed emerging technologies, especially in the early part of my career. And so because of that, I've really seen that growth, if you will, in terms of NLP, AI, machine learning, the role of IT evolving from sort of focusing on the back office into more of the front office, as well as the broader employee experience engagement and how that evolves, the role of HR and workforce planning evolving. So at the end of the day, while I love technology, I'm truly passionate about customer and driving value from technology into customers. And so that's, I think, been the balancing act, if you will.

Joe - 00: 03:09: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, one of the companies you mentioned was Alteryx, which their whole thing is bringing a whole lot of backend processes to the front end. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I guess I want to dig a little bit back into that past, back to your PhD, as you mentioned, University at Buffalo, because it just, you know, that topic you covered, text analysis of Latin scripts and that kind of stuff just sounds really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Poornima - 00: 03:29: Yes, for sure. So Buffalo actually has a pretty rich history in terms of really thinking cross-functionally about cognitive science, language, technology, as well as how we can really interconnect all of that together into a single unified view and how we can really build that perspective in place. What's exciting about that is that when we bring that into our day-to-day, generally speaking, one doesn't really think of language as a science, if you will. But in reality, it's not just what we say, but what we mean with what we say. It's not just what we do, but what we intend based on what we do. So the interconnectivity, if you will, between language, psychology, and then how that is then changing and evolving as it grows into a more technical, modern digital world was kind of at the beginning of the early 2000s. And we were really able to learn and think about a lot of that based on that training. My PhD in particular focused, actually, more on the theoretical side of that, in terms of South Asian languages and how we use language differently in terms of even the basic things that you might think about, such as give and take. And I found that the more you learn about those things, the better your nuanced understanding of how the world can be both same and different. And that then really, I would say, helps me become a stronger product manager. And also then to develop that customer empathy that is really helps me think more broadly about our product suite across all of my career journey.

Joe - 00: 04:59: Very cool. You preempted the question I had earlier, which was, you know, how does that link through to your current role now as a chief product officer? So that's really awesome to hear. So I guess to get on to where you are today, slightly less in the past, obviously, we're seeing an accelerated moment right now of integration of various AI technologies and such into all manners of IT and especially HR technology. What kind of trends are you seeing that you think are important at the moment on that space?

Poornima - 00: 05:23: Yeah, super interesting time for us. I would say if we kind of took a step back and looked at the bigger picture, you know, in the early 2000s, as well as all the way through the 10 years subsequent to that, we really saw, especially in the HR world, people starting with point solutions and then starting to consolidate them. So you would start off with recruiting and then you would add on learning or you would start off with thinking about one part of your product area and then really think about how does it all kind of come together. It's really evolved since then into a bigger picture thinking around, let's consolidate all the platforms, especially with the rise of cloud. What was interesting about that in, I would say, 2010s and beyond is that as that started to become more of a table stakes, the layer above that became about experience. So not just the why do we have to consolidate all of the platforms, but it's actually draw value back to the end user, as well as to IT and HR professionals. So training in terms of the technology implementation, as well as the end-user experience, all of that becomes very important and critical. And so what we're seeing is that while this started to accelerate, the true moment of change came with the digital transformation that hit most companies as part of COVID. And the digital transformation era really, I would say, earnestly kicked off at that point. SilkRoad, I would say, had been kind of at the forefront of that by a decade or more, but it became kind of a broader need across all the markets. How do you think about remote? How do you make sure remote employees actually are really focused on the same needs? Now, with the post-pandemic volatility, we're coming into an interesting moment again, where it's actually about looking at how do we reduce the repetitive tasks? How do we think about the importance of not just consolidating platforms, but also about ensuring that we have the right workflow automation in the right places? And that we're not waiting, if you will, twice a year for a company to release software, but actually having more iterative conversations with the users, more follow-up in terms of the use cases, as well as thinking bigger picture about the rapid changes that are happening. So two years ago, we were worrying about rate resignation. Now we're worrying about quiet quitting. A year from now, it's going to be something else. So it really all comes back to the core trend is the need for agility and stability. And so at Rival, we call that, stable agility. And we see it as wanting to bring the IT and HR needs at the forefront in terms of focusing on eliminating those repetitive tasks, thinking about the bigger picture of the end user's needs on a day-to-day basis, as well as providing the analytics and insights that are needed across the board. It's a little bit of a different approach than what you would hear in the market, because a lot of AI discussions are more about, let's just provide people co-pilots. But we view it as the technology layer should help take care of as many of these gaps and challenges as possible, while also helping balance out the needs of the users in their day-to-day, regardless of what changes might be coming their way one day to the next.

Joe - 00: 08:34: Right. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. So obviously, you mentioned the long history of the organization, then Silk Road, now Rival. For folks that are less familiar with your offerings, what is it fundamentally that Rival is offering and what's the key problems you're looking to solve? I guess you've given us a very high-level picture of reducing a lot of the repetitiveness in the day-to-day work of recruiters and such. But yeah, it'd be great to get a product-level view, I guess.

Poornima - 00: 08:57: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So Rival actually started off in the SilkRoad era as a digital onboarding tool. And at the time, it was really thinking about, I mean, you know, if you ever started a new job, it's a question of what is actually available in terms of the bandwidth of the manager, the bandwidth of the IT. You're sitting at a desk, filling out all the paperwork. And a lot of that has changed and evolved, I would say, in the modern era. But the SilkRoad was a true disruptor back in 2003. So the company DNA has always been about thinking broadly about challenging the status quo, if you will. Our product offering today is a talent acquisition suite that goes across sourcing, attracting, retaining, hiring, engaging, training, as well as offboarding talent into it. So we offer kind of the entire journey. And what is really cool is that while that particular piece, you'll hear a lot of people in the market talk about, our underlying technology is also an employee workflow automation layer, more service now for HR, if you will. So in the context of really thinking about, let's say that you want to have thousands of people merge from one company into another, how do you actually go about doing those kinds of momentous events that would usually be once in a lifetime are now so commonplace? And even offboarding, for that matter, right? How do we actually make that graceful? How do we make that thoughtful? How do we think about the needs of compliance or training for people as soon as they join? So our product offering is really about kind of that end-to-end suite, but also then having that workflow automation and integration layer so that we can talk to any system of record and plug and play between those.

Joe - 00: 10:40: It's really interesting. And yeah, I can immediately see the need, but the examples you mentioned there, you know, I've been part of acquisitions where it feels like long after the paperwork is dried we're still two separate companies and everything all the other things separate. And then equally off-boarding where for months after there's still stray IT systems kicking about and all kinds of things. Yeah, absolutely. So, that's I think a really good overview of the founding vision and some of the problems you've solved. Since I see more recently just at the time of recording we're just into the new year. But late last year in November, you relaunched, I believe Rival Recruit.

Poornima - 00: 11:11: Yes.

Joe - 00: 11:12: Which one of the top lines from the press release was given the ability to provide access to millions of candidates instantly. Which I think comes into a lot of what you were talking about earlier about making a lot of the repetitive tasks easier or disappear. Can you tell us a little bit about that relaunch about what's new with the new release?

Poornima - 00: 11:31: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. That was actually a pretty wonderful moment for us in terms of, you know, being able to rebrand the company. It's a task that as an executive team, we took very seriously. We spent a lot of time thinking about kind of the end-to-end structure there. On the product side, what was really exciting was to not just be able to talk about the launch of the company, but also to say simultaneously, we're also relaunching our product. And the exciting thing about Rival Recruit is that it's got deep, deep feature functionality. It really thinks about the recruiter's needs, candidates' needs. The capabilities are really all in one box for recruiters, if you will, and recruiting managers who are thinking about how to build their entire workflow while maintaining their budget needs. Rival Recruit is a very powerful solution. That being said, we had also made an acquisition with Intello the previous year. And Intello had its own rich history and patented technology that had really focused on the needs of the front part of the recruiter funnel, really thinking about how do you actually attract good talent? And the interesting part of that is that that need never goes away. It just changes based on the business needs themselves. So, in a moment where you're seeing hundreds of applicants within the system, you need to be able to understand how to get to the best candidates as quickly as possible. In a moment where you're not seeing enough candidates, you need to be able to find the ways to source those candidates better. So, for us, this ability to really bring in this ability to have the millions of candidates into the system was a way to make that top-of-funnel pain easier. We are the first ATS in the market that really offers this. It allows our recruiters to be able to come in and look at the system and say, I have this need. It is in this particular geo. These are the skills that I'm looking for. Here's my job requisition. All of that is already preloaded into the system and we go in and quickly source those passive candidates. It's as fast as a click of a button. And we're working very closely with our clients to really continue to refine and improve those. I mean, that's the nature of product management. And the early feedback has been very positive and humbling, right? So, we've seen the value that we're adding, but at the same time, we're also seeing all the ways in which we can continue to grow and improve it. Most notably, it's clear in the recruiting trends across the board that there are industries, with high volume, and there are industries with low volume. If you think about it, there are industries where everyone wants to go work right now. And there are industries where people are quiet quitting. They're not showing up after a week. So, while we're filling the need on one end with Rival Recruit, we're then bringing the needs of the other end with our Rival onboard product and kind of having the different systems talk to each other to really build that end-to-end journey.

Joe - 00: 14:22: Fascinating. Okay, awesome. You mentioned a couple of things that I would love to dig deeper into. So first of all, you mentioned some target user groups at the start. So I think you said recruiters, hiring managers, and even candidates, obviously. How do you go about, as a product manager, as a CPO, ensuring that the product is designed with all of those different, and in some cases, groups there with almost competing needs, recruiters and candidates to the opposite ends of the incentives spectrum on this product? How do you design a product with all those groups in mind?

Poornima - 00: 14:50: Yeah, you know, I think it always comes down to trusting your team and leveraging the insights internally and externally to really understand and see how the end users are using the product on a day-to-day basis, doing product discovery, thinking about the product less in terms of, if you will, the capabilities that we offer and more in terms of the pain points and the needs that we're solving. And so that, to me, has always been at the forefront of any product that I've worked on. The neat piece, if you will, about talent acquisition is that it's such a symbiotic relationship, right? Like without the right candidates, recruiters are not able to focus on their roles. Without the right recruiters, candidates get frustrated with the company before they ever even hear about them. So for us, then, we think about really elevating the user experience off those touch points, the communication and the collaboration. For instance, one of the things that we're really working on and delivering right now is just the overall of our career sites and the ability to really send personalized messages to the candidates that are branded and coming directly from, if you will, the recruiting managers and the recruiters to the candidates. While that may seem like a small piece, it's actually massive in terms of the ability to really get in touch with the end user needs. And it may not be as press release-worthy, but super important in terms of solving that pain point.

Joe - 00: 16:13: Fascinating. Okay. And then another part you mentioned, obviously, when the product came out and you mentioned the feedback cycles and that kind of thing, leading up to relaunching the product and the company, I imagine there was a huge laundry list of things you wanted to address and issues that you wanted to improve. How did you go about doing the research and market analysis leading up to this relaunch and in development of the new product?

Poornima - 00: 16:35: Yeah, great question. Both conversations internally, as well as with our customers. We had a beta program with our existing clients. We did a lot of market research, assessed competitive analysis, you know, and it takes a village, right? So I'm very fortunate to have a fantastic team that really thinks about the client needs. Very strong engineering team on the talent acquisition area that has been with this product for almost a decade. And that amount of time really helps you be able to solve problems so much faster as soon as you hear of them. And our clients keep us both energized and humble. They are wonderful in terms of bringing us feedback. Not a day goes by at rival that somebody isn't talking to our customers and bringing that feedback to someone on the product team. And that loop is probably the most critical part in terms of, you know, us really thinking about the needs and how we've built this. So while a big focus was the rebrand, in terms of the press release, as well as everything that we talked about there, on the product side, it was really about kind of the bigger picture of how do we address client needs? How do we really go out there and talk about our overall product itself and showcase the capabilities that we have while mitigating the client's pain points?

Joe - 00: 17:49: Perfect. So hearing about the features and some of the ways you're thinking about things, I guess one of the things that's standing out is really, I guess, like a sense of scale, right? Like, you know, millions of candidates, smoother onboarding, getting through these processes. So a question, one area I'd love to dig into is like, how do you help your clients? Or how do you think about, in general, scaling a business's HR offerings? Like, how do you approach that difficult topic?

Poornima - 00: 18:16: Absolutely. It starts with really understanding our ideal customer profile and the buyers, our head of marketing calls it the voice of the buyer. So for us, it's really stepping back and looking at what are the needs and the pain points that we're really seeing there. The number one thing that we're seeing in the market today is that while on the one hand, there's a lot of work going into platform consolidation, on the other side, there's a lot of pain points in terms of experience. A lot of the existing tools and technologies are not going away. So what do you do, right? You have to find some way to bridge those gaps while also providing that experience layer. And so we're a very unique, if you will, solution in that perspective that we sit across HR, IT, as well as operations often. Because when you're thinking about part-time workers and they're onboarding, it's more likely for that to sit with operations as opposed to HR. So for us, then we're really thinking about what are the ways in which they're having those conversations, not just internally within their teams, but cross-functionally. And the office of the CHRO comes in looking at this from the perspective of employee experience, talent development, talent management, whereas the office of the CIO is often looking at it from the perspective of automation, looking at the ability to control their destiny, if you will, made budget perspective, as well as the integrity of data and the validation of the data needs that are happening across the board before tools are actually deployed. So our ability then to integrate with various systems, in addition to offer our own solution, sets us apart in terms of how we're really serving those needs.

Joe - 00: 19:55: So I guess as a follow-up, so part of helping businesses grow and expand, you know, through their HR offerings or otherwise, is addressing the growth opportunities and thinking about long-term expansion strategies. And you mentioned some C-levels there. And what I heard in talking about what they're looking for is, you know, angles that may get them on board with long-term expansion plans, which may be expensive or require investment that they wouldn't otherwise be necessarily looking to put up. So I guess I wanted to ask as kind of an expansion to that. As you're thinking about a company's future, and as you're thinking about your products and positioning them with that company, what are your strategies for winning over all the directors, those C-suites, those CEOs and getting them on board with that scale-up?

Poornima - 00: 20:36: You know, we are here to rival the status quo. We are really thinking about how we can help organizations do more with less. It's a very interesting time in our world because there is this school of thinking of everything is going to be automated with AI. We know that's not going to be the case. We've seen that hype before. Workforce planning does not go away. The need for employees to feel connected to the company does not go away. The need for them to learn or connect with their managers or different people in the company does not go away. So our approach here is really to anchor to the automation of the workflows where they make the scale needs really take place so that HR organizations, IT organizations do not have to think about that. We are here to plug and play and engage with our clients as well as our partners in terms of how we can integrate with various solutions. And that is a differentiator, especially in an environment, where there's an expectation of consolidating platforms with then the gap of not necessarily being able to provide all of the full feature functionality that you would expect if you were to maintain your other systems. And we're really here to be a solid, robust solution that can offer that stable agility in terms of not just the short term, but the mid to long term for our clients.

Joe - 00: 21:58: Perfect. So, you know, we started off talking a little bit about AI and you mentioned along the way that incumbent technologies aren't going anywhere. And so I obviously want to ask, what are the upcoming technological innovations in your space or otherwise that you're most excited about?

Poornima - 00: 22:12: Absolutely. I'm very excited to see the combination of machine learning and AI continuing to become super important. Large language models have absolutely changed the nature of the game. I think that combining that with edge computing and the opportunity to really not just think about how we're deploying the use cases, but also the infrastructure layers across these, super important. I think that the one area that I'm very passionate about bringing to HR is the analytics and insights layer and how AI, as well as, you know, the broader machine learning capabilities, as well as the robustness of having all of these data integrations come together is going to help there. Put differently 9 out of 10 times, HR organizations are not able to answer questions that are being asked of them because the data is in disparate systems. Or even when you have an analytic dashboard, there's no way to actually get to the answers that you're looking for because as soon as you ask one question and receive one answer, that creates 10 more questions. It's just the nature of analytics. So really having then kind of that view into what does that look like and how we can deliver insights along the way in terms of whether that is the day in the life of a recruiter. Helping candidates figure out what are the best jobs for them. Identifying touch points in a learning course that are very hard for end users to be able to understand and how we can improve those. I think all of those would really come into the forefront with the combination of user experience, AI, as well as the overall journey of having an organization think about how to plan for their talent itself.

Joe - 00: 23:48: Awesome. As a Chief Product Officer, you have the unenviable task of having to understand if it's going on at the product level and also keep an eye on the vision and the future. Are there any books, websites, podcasts, resources that you follow yourself to keep up to date on these latest developments in the industry or otherwise that you'd recommend to other people?

Poornima - 00: 24:06: Oh, great question. There's a ton of great content now on LinkedIn. Some wonderful, I would say, growth leaders. I'm fascinated by PLG. There are several folks on sort of that front. Shreyas Doshi, Aakash Gupta.

Joe - 00: 24:19: PLG as in product-led growth.

Poornima - 00: 24:21: Well, I would say that Aakash is probably more in product-led growth and Shreyas is broader, but essentially, you know, some great product management leadership coming out of their posts and content there. Marty Cagan, obviously, Women Who Tech have a wonderful network in terms of how they're sharing a lot of content to AD Group. So across the board, I think, yes, there's a lot of work being done to offer templates, offer content that is really going all the way from, here's how we want you to action the thoughts that you have. And that action layer, I would encourage product managers or designers or tech writers, all of whom will look to me, to really think about and look at because it allows us to really focus on the cross-functional communication that is required for an organization such as product to really be successful.

Joe - 00: 25:09: Perfect. Awesome. That's a huge list of wonderful names. I agree. LinkedIn has been a real special place since the whole Twitter to X transition. I think it benefited a lot from a lot of great folks. Even over there for content, for sure.

Poornima - 00: 25:21: Yes, I think it's replacing doom scrolling with learning about content is a great way to stay excited and energized. Podcasts such as yourself, right, the work that you're doing to really bring a lot of the cross-functional lens in is, I think, also super valuable because my career, as you mentioned, has really been an interesting journey going from language to data and analytics to people. But I can see a common thread across these. And that's one of the reasons why I oscillate, if you will, between people, products and people products. And at the end of the day, I think we can learn so much from our environment. The best book on this ever is actually from a British author, James Burke, wrote Connections. And he really talked about how essentially gunpowder impacted the Industrial Revolution. And just the threads that he would pull were kind of a wonderful way of thinking about the broader nature of how the world works.

Joe - 00: 26:19: Awesome. I'll have to check it out. And yeah, that just leaves me to say thank you so much for coming on and sharing, as you say, your very interesting and varied career and your insights for us today. It's been a huge pleasure.

Poornima - 00: 26:29: My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me and looking forward to staying connected.

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