Talent Acquisition and Retention

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Steve Lucas

Korn Ferry estimates that by 2030, 80 million high-skilled jobs will go unfilled globally. This means companies will have to compete for talent—more than they already are. Yet, the CEO of ICIMS says there’s currently a lack of qualified employers. What does CEO Steve Lucas mean? And, what does he think companies should do to attract high-quality talent? 

Steve Lucas joined the VOE Podcast to talk about talent acquisition and retention, and what ICIMS has to offer. With 25 years of leadership experience, Lucas has a strong message for fellow leaders, employees and students: Be curious. 

The VOE Podcast is an extension of Voices of Experience, the signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Keep tuning in each month for more business insights from Daniels’ alumni voices of experience.

Transcript:

Kristal Griffith:
Hello and welcome to the VOE Podcast,

Nick Greenhalgh:
An extension of Voices of Experience,

Lorne Fultonberg:
The signature speaker series at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business.

Kristal Griffith:
We’re your hosts, Kristal Griffith,

Nick Greenhalgh:
Nick Greenhalgh, 

Lorne Fultonberg:
And I’m Lorne Fultonberg from the Daniels Office of Communications and Marketing.

Kristal Griffith:
We’ll be unpacking topics at the intersection of business and the public good with CEOs and other business leaders from the Daniels community.­ Let’s dive in.

Joining me today is Steve Lucas, CEO of iCIMS. Steve has extensive leadership experience in companies like Adobe, SAP and Salesforce. Before iCIMS, he was the CEO of Marketo. In his many leadership roles, he’s been a great partner to the Daniels College of Business, consistently recruiting our students, providing feedback on curriculum and sponsoring student projects.

If you’re not familiar with iCIMS, it’s a recruiting software, so we look forward to visiting with Steve about his perspectives on the labor crisis. Steve, welcome to the VOE Podcast.

Steve Lucas:
Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kristal Griffith:
Let’s start with your background. You have more than 25 years of leadership experience with cutting-edge software companies. Tell us about your journey to become the CEO of iCIMS.

Steve Lucas:
Every time I hear I’ve got more than 25 years of experience, I’m genuinely terrified. I don’t recognize myself anymore. But yes, it’s been fantastic, journey-wise. I started my career working for Microsoft and my title, which was a big deal, was demo rep. And so it was kind of the “Let’s name the job, exactly what it is. Demo rep.” And I demoed the heck out of software, but actually I demonstrated compelling Microsoft titles, like Microsoft Dogs and Encarta, which was a CD-based encyclopedia before the internet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so all these years later, now you’re probably thinking, “How is this guy, a CEO.” But I’ve always wanted to be a CEO. And I love software. I feel like I get paid to play baseball. It’s just so fun. And for me, I’m a naturally curious per person and anytime I’ve been thrown into a situation, I’ve always wanted to understand more than just, “What’s my job? How does it work? Why is it this way?” These are just the innate things that well up within me. And it turns out there is a really good job for that. It’s called CEO.

Kristal Griffith:
That’s terrific.

Steve Lucas:
And so my journey’s been Microsoft. And then I worked with an amazing company, Crystal, which made Crystal Reports and then Business Objects, Salesforce, SAP. I jumped in as CEO of Marketo back in 2016. And I worked with a private equity firm, Vista Equity Partners, to take Marketo private, which we did for $1.6 billion. My job was to grow the company, improve it, build the software. And Adobe acquired the company 24 months after I started for about $5 billion. So we did a good job in terms of growing the company and returning equity to our shareholders. And so then I jumped in at iCIMS.

Kristal Griffith:
Wow. Okay. So let’s talk about what iCIMS is. Our big topic of the day is this labor and employment crisis. It seems like nobody can find enough workers. So what exactly does iCIMS do? What is talent acquisition platform and how does AI play into that?

Steve Lucas:
Well, so our technology, what we do, we have this solution that we call the Talent Cloud, and it’s really quite simple. We help the best companies in the world find and hire the best talent in the world. Now, that sounds simple, but we all know hiring even one talented person is really, really hard if you think about it. You have to go first find the person. Then you have to convince them that your company is the company where they want to build their career, they get excited about it. So there’s attraction, there’s engagement. Then there’s the interview process, bringing together the team, making sure you ask the right questions, get the right feedback, come to the right decision. Then you got to issue an offer. And if that person lives in a different country, what are the forms and the data and what can you manage. Then there’s onboarding that employee. Then there’s obviously ensuring that they stay.

We do all of that. One simple platform that makes finding and hiring talent scalable, because our customers, they’re not just hiring one person. They’re hiring thousands per month. One of our larger customers, Amazon, they’ve hired over a million people using iCIMS.

Kristal Griffith:
No way. I didn’t realize that. So do you think there is a lack of qualified workers or do you think companies aren’t doing enough to attract great talent?

Steve Lucas:
Well, you know what? I think there’s a couple things. Number one, I think there’s a lack of qualified employers. I think in the world that we live in today, it’s not about, “Well, let me just come up with a nice job description and put it on a piece of paper or online, that’s heavily edited by legal and someone great will just really show up.” You have to engage with people at an authentic level, meet them where they are. We’re not just reading this boring job description going, “Yeah, I’m all in.” I want texture about your company. I want to make sure that your values and beliefs align with mine before we even get to salary. And the problem is is that companies skip over those things. And it’s just a different world. And especially in a world where we’re hiring remotely more and more and more. Today iCIMS has probably 40% of our employees would be considered remote.

So how do you engage and unpack texture about your company when someone’s never going to come to your headquarters? It’s just a different world. And so, for me, I think it’s about employers first and foremost. Getting their heads wrapped around the competitive hiring environment that we’re in, the new world of talent and what people are looking for. And this is not a Gen Z comment. This is an everybody comment. This is what we want. And so that certainly makes a difference. But I will say, if you look at data from Korn Ferry, as a case in point, they say by 2030, globally, 80 million high-skilled jobs will go unfilled.

Kristal Griffith:
Whoa.

Steve Lucas:
80 million. So, yeah, there is a shortage of talent in the market. 

Kristal Griffith:
It’s my understanding your data team sees industry trends way before anybody else does. So what kinds of things are you seeing or can you share?

Steve Lucas:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting, because if you look at how the labor report that comes out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from the government, what they are typically looking at is something called payroll starts. For everyone listening, a payroll start is literally someone started at a company, they’re getting payroll that’s reported to the U.S. government, but that’s a lag indicator. It tells you what happened last month or last quarter. So you’re really looking at the health, if you will, of the labor market a month ago. And really what you want to look for is, “Well, companies that are posting new jobs, what’s that lead indicator that says, “Yeah, are the economy starting to look good three quarters from now, or six quarters from now?”

What I can tell you, job postings are still growing year over year. So you can hear NASDAQ this and Dow Jones that. The reality is employers across every industry are looking to hire. What you hear in the headlines is “Oh, well this tech company, crypto bro blah, blah.com is letting people go well.” Well, yeah, they are, because they over-hired, they don’t manage their company with discipline. They’re not profitable. And now that the lean times or leaner times come, the. They have to shed their employees, but most companies that are disciplined, durable and well managed, they’re hiring.

Kristal Griffith:
So you gave us this example of Amazon earlier. I’m wondering if there’s any other examples you can share with us, like how does iCIMS help these specific companies? What kinds of things have you been able to do that maybe a different talent acquisition company couldn’t?

Steve Lucas:
Well, for sure. I think, first of all, our goal is to help any company find and higher talent end to end, as I said. So that’s everything that you need. Some companies use different pieces and parts of our platform, but I’ll give you a case in point, if you were to open up a browser and just type in Uber university recruiting, just Google that. Or type in Target university recruiting, like Target, the retailer. Go to that website. You’re going to see these videos pop up of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of employees, real employees from Target or Uber talking about their experience.

It’s like TikTok. Literally, they use an application from iCIMS, hold up their phone and they answer a question like, “What’s it like working here? What’s your experience in engineering?” Or even as a cashier and people are being authentic and real. They’re real selves. And then they click submit, we ingest those videos. We organize and categorize. We even translate them in real time into 16 different languages. So you get close captioning and you get instead of this boring career site where you’re just reading this really long job description, you’re getting rich videos that feel like the consumer experience you get with TikTok. That’s how you connect with human beings. And that’s what we’re doing today.

And you know what? I’m not knocking Apple. I’m just using this as an example. They’re not a customer of ours. They should be. But if you go to Apple careers and you click on job search, this is literally the most valuable company in the world in terms of market cap. It’s whatever trillions of dollars. So they pretty much have infinite money. And they’ve chosen to just have these very boring job descriptions, because they’re relying on, ‘Well, it’s Apple. Everybody wants to work here.” I got bad news for Apple. Not everybody wants to work there, number one. And number two, the companies that engage in an authentic manner with people going forward, they will win the war for talent.

Kristal Griffith:
Oh, I wholeheartedly agree with you, because I think to your point, companies used to just be able to sit back and relax and let people come to them are now like, “Oh, game on. We’ve got to recruit. We’ve got to be out there. We can’t just sit back and trust that everybody loves us.”

Steve Lucas:
Exactly. Unequivocally.

Kristal Griffith:
I know you have locations globally. iCIMS is in Paris, Dublin and the U.K. So what are you seeing globally with the workforce and how does a global company account for cultural differences when trying to attract  employees?

Steve Lucas:
Well, you have to think through, first and foremost, the core values that you as a company want to convey as an employer brand, globally. Then you have to go down one level, an altitude, and think about how will that differ country by country? There are certain countries where healthcare is a universal right. And you don’t have to advertise it as aggressively, as a case in point. There are other places in the world where it’s less about compensation and more about long-term job security. Here in the U.S., we tend to be a little bit more of a transient market. It’s like, “Well, I can work here. Then I’ll just jump there,” whatever it may be. But what we do is we generally engage with employers and we talk about brand, we talk about authenticity, we talk about engagement, but then we also talk about what are the means and mechanisms across the world that are the best ways to find and hire people?

For example, in Asia Pacific, number one way to engage people, WhatsApp. If you go to Europe and actually here in the U.S. largely engaging through text messaging, not email, is 10 times more effective. And yet most companies rely on email to communicate with their candidates and applicants and the like. And so as you go country by country, there’s technology fine tuning there’s approach fine tuning. But the beautiful thing about this is human beings have a lot of things in common. We want to be secure. We want to be happy. We want to take care of our families. Then we want meaningful work, because we spend more time at work than we do at home. And so those things will never lose their appeal, but it’s how you unpack and convey that to people that makes all the difference.

Kristal Griffith:
I love it. So Steve, I’m going to transition a little bit to talk more about you and your leadership style versus company or the industry in general. So what unique challenges do you feel like you face as a global leader and what management techniques do you use to be effective across the globe?

Steve Lucas:
Well, I started in this CEO job March 1st of 2020, which would perfectly align with COVID. And on top of that, we were a hiring company or, sorry, we are a hiring company. And in 2020, the U.S. alone shed 22 million jobs. So there is the what do you do as a new CEO when there’s this unprecedented pandemic that I didn’t go to pandemic 101 in college. They didn’t even offer the class and I’m sure they do now, but there’s no playbook for that. All you can do is lead and rely on your instincts that you’ve built up over time, as well as the data that you have at hand. And what I knew then, and as I know now, is that crises come and go, but it’s the commitment that you convey to your team, the values that you build into your organization, those are the bedrock elements that you lean on.

And so for me, having continued to learn lessons throughout my career, what I generally tell people is, number one, if you can choose between focusing on your employees or focusing on your customers, I know this is going to sound horrible. Focus on your employees. Companies that are employee-focused are profoundly more successful than companies that say, “We put our customers first.” It’s not a matter of not caring about your customers. We love our customers. They are amazing. But if you aren’t taking care of your employees, they’re just going to leave and that will have a more profound impact on your customers than anything. So that’s number one. Number two is I tell my team to be curious. It is a true story, when my mom left me alone at home one time with some of my brothers and sisters, I decided to take apart the dryer, like the washer dryer, take it apart. I didn’t know how to put it back together, but I just wanted to know how it worked. And I will say this to my credit, at 11 years old, I got most of it back together.

But being curious matters in your job. Be curious about how your customers work. How do they feel? How is what you are doing translating into outcomes. Customers aren’t buying your software, because they love software. They’re buying your software, because they want shorter time to hire. They want a more talented individual. So be curious. So first is care about your employees. Second is be curious. And third is just be real. We live in a world where too many CEOs create this, I’m just going to say it, this weird, fake persona about themselves like, well, they weren’t born. They just wrote down from a mountain on a unicorn and they’re smarter than everybody else. And they’re just these self-elevated human beings. And it’s like, oh, we all forgot once upon a time you were a goofy teenager. Just be real with people. And it’s tough, because you get into this, “Oh, I’m CEO now,” blah, blah, blah. But I think this world that we live in now, people gravitate towards authenticity. And it is authentic leaders that I believe will be successful.

Kristal Griffith:
Yeah. I totally agree. On that note, Daniels is known for teaching ethical leadership and dedication to the public good. So your values as a leader is important. So how do you feel you conduct business responsibly? What do ethics look like in your line of work and what do you have to be conscious of?

Steve Lucas:
Yeah. Well, first of all, I love the approach that Daniels takes to developing leaders. I think it is the absolute right path to put young people on, number one. Number two, partly because I think my upbringing, my parents instilled a lot of ethics in me, but I have a deep core belief. I will not sacrifice my own personal ethics for money. I won’t do it. And from my point of view, I think we need more people in business, in politics that just stand up for what they believe in. And they’re just consistent about it. It’s really actually not that hard to just be ethical. It’s really not. The challenge and the temptation is the pressure that’s, that’s heaped upon leaders and the demand from markets for constant success and constant growth. And my argument is if the markets start valuing durability over a short term gain in performance, I think you’ll see a change in behavior, but we need that. So my perspective is always as whoever’s leading or as aspiring leaders listening to this, pick those two or three principles that you believe in that you stand for and never let them go.

Kristal Griffith:
I love it. On the topic of public good, also I understand you’re a type one diabetic and you’ve served on the board of the American Diabetes Association. So talk a little bit about that, your passion area, and why do you feel it’s important to give back in that way?

Steve Lucas:
I got shook pretty hard in my early twenties. It was just when I was diagnosed with type one diabetes and I knew nothing about it. And I thought that was something that you just were born when you were a kid or some later in life type thing. And it just happened, out of the blue, out of nowhere. So you could safely say the wheels fell off the truck. But I learned a lot through that process. I learned that, number one, there are no guarantees in this life and you have to run your business, run your life, your home, your family, like “If today was my last day, am I proud of it?” That’s number one. Number two is as I learned about type one diabetes, I learned that it’s actually a very manageable thing. As long as focus on good habits, you’re working out, you’re eating right. You’re doing those things. It’s very manageable.

But very often and the reason they call it juvenile diabetes is because it generally afflicts younger children. It’s genetic. You’re born with it. And I’ve met kids as young as one and two years old that have to somehow grow up fast and manage insulin. And what a terrifying thing. And so for me, I felt really blessed to be diagnosed with it in my twenties, where I was aware of it. I could manage it. But the passion area for me comes from, as much as I’ve learned about it, is helping parents of very young children that have to deal with this incredibly challenging chronic illness and how to help them overcome the fear and anxiety of getting it right.

And then for kids that are in their teens, there’s this stigma of “Well, you’re less,” because you have type one diabetes and people don’t understand it. And so it’s helping them understand they can do anything. And I think that goes across really any differently abled person in any way, shape or form is drop the stigma, go after whatever it is you want in life. And just know that you are of the same value and merit as anybody else on this planet.

Kristal Griffith:
Yeah. Amen to that. Amen to that. So you may have answered this already, but I’m going to ask anyway, as a voice of experience, is there any motto or lesson you want to pass on to others?

Steve Lucas:
Well, I touched on it already, but I’ll touch on it again. Be curious. Whatever you come across in this world, the rules that are presented to you, that’s just something that somebody thought was a good idea yesterday or a year ago or 100 years ago. And we need to treat this world and treat the country that we live in as an ever evolving, but always maturing, environment. And some people in this world, they want to take us back 100 years, but the things that worked 100 years ago don’t now, but we’ve got to be curious. We have to figure out maybe there are new rules that we should be playing by in this world. So just don’t accept the world that’s presented to you. Make a new one.

Kristal Griffith:
Great advice Steve. Steve Lucas, CEO of ICIMS. Thanks for being on the VOE Podcast. 
This has been the VOE Podcast,

Nick Greenhalgh:
Produced by the Daniels College of Business and sponsored by U.S. Bank.

Lorne Fultonberg:
Music by Joshua Metzel, music composition graduate student at the Lamont School of Music.

Kristal Griffith:
Join us next time for more business insights from our community.

Nick Greenhalgh:
In the meantime, visit daniels.du.edu/VOEpodcast

Lorne Fultonberg:
And please remember to like, follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.