Episode #47: Allen Chilson - Total Talent Management Leader - Danaher

Allen Chilson, a recognized leader in the talent industry and frequent keynote and panelist speaker, joins Hiring University to talk about the importance of defining and defending company culture, AI pros and cons, and his win/loss prediction for his beloved Dallas Cowboys!  This is an episode you don't want to miss!

"The last thing I want to do is totally rely on the data that I'm getting without having a conversation. Because if it's a fiercely competitive market to find the best people and you're throwing out those that are the outliers, you're missing a huge segment of the population. I think that is the risk and you're talking about some of the legal issues that the profiling and where the origin of the AI data is coming from that is going to get some people into trouble."

- Allen Chilson

For more Hiring University episodes tune into your favorite podcast player or visit us at www.ursusinc.com

Transcript

audio1928057275

[00:00:00] What's up, everybody? Welcome to Hiring University. I'm your host, John Beck, . Boy, do we have a good show for you today. Alan Chilson, Total Talent Acquisition Leader, I'm going to ask you what that means, that title, at Danaher, joins the show today. Alan is what you would consider a lifer in our industry, and that is a good thing, by the way.

Prior to Danaher, Alan led talent at BASF. AstraZeneca and a bunch of other companies. Alan, welcome to Hiring You. Hey, thanks, John. For those who are not familiar with Danaher, first of all, shame on you, but tell our listeners about the company and your role yeah. So so Danaher is a science and technology innovator.

When I was researching for the job before I took it I found the Wikipedia definition to find Danaher as a conglomerate. So Danaher currently has you know, we have 17 different operating companies working in the life sciences, diagnostics, and And biotechnology areas, right? All kind of related.

All could be grouped together as being life sciences. But all of them do some very different [00:01:00] things within those industries. And and down to her is that parent company or holding company above them. I sit within talent acquisition, so I'm our global TA leader for vendor management. So within my remit is working with our overall strategy and process for using search firms.

RPO vendors and I partner with procurement on the management of our MSP program. I want to start our converse. Thank you for the overview. I want to start our conversation by chatting with you about culture, which I know is something that is important to you. Especially with a company that oversees 17 operating companies.

I've talked on this show repeatedly about the fact that culture is an easy word to say. It's easy to throw in a PowerPoint, but if you're doing it right, it takes it a tremendous amount of effort. You should be tired at the end of every day. It's a practice and you need to be mindful of it. You posted an article today by Mark Murphy talking about the four mistakes that he believes companies make when hiring for culture.

Tell us more about the post and why that resonated [00:02:00] with you. Yeah, so I mean, you know, it, it definitely did resonate with me and, and, you know, having spent as much time in talent acquisition that I have and, and a lot of times we're, we're assigned an interview guide, right? And we assigned that interview guide to the managers and they're told to go interview with behavioral interview questions.

But I think culture is one of the most important things that you have to find, right? So a behavioral interview battery may not. Actually, figure out if somebody is a good culture fit, right? You're, you're asking them questions about their past experiences, their past successes. You know, you're basing how do they, you know, how did they make their judgment decisions in their job?

But we don't often ask a lot of questions to figure out if their culture fit. And, and one of the things that caught my eye on that article was, you know you know, Mark mentioned a bit about companies sometimes grabbing the keywords that their competitors are using in job descriptions. Or, you know, that upper management would be assessing for one factor of culture, but out in the business, it's very different, right?

So you know, my comment to that was when I posted it is, you know, are you really even looking for your culture versus your [00:03:00] competitors culture? You know, versus something that really isn't your culture. So I think I think it's a, it's a buzzword, right. You know, and people can say, Hey, we want to find people who are a good culture match but if you actually ask those people to define their company's culture, they may not be able to do it, right.

Or they're going to tell you their impression, but it doesn't really mean it's the workforce's impression. And I can say with Danaher, I do think Danaher has done. A great job of really, you know, so we're, for one, we're built on what we call our dinner business system, which is our set of Kaizen principles.

Right. And so similar to the Toyota total quality management and, and things like that, but then we've done, you know, and I say, we People beyond me have done extensive work really looking at our culture, looking at what are those key success factors. So so we can factor those in both to, you know, how we look at assessing candidates, but also how we look at assessing our workforce.

Right. And are you living those core values through your workday or your work year, right? When we sit down and look at the end of the year. And that's what I mean by it being a practice and having to work at it, because [00:04:00] I'm, I'm the, I'm the head of a significantly smaller company than Danaher, and I have to repeat to our team what we stand for, provide examples to it, defend it when things aren't going wrong.

It's a practice and and it happens not just from the top and somebody saying it or, or publishing it or a keyword. It's the all the interactions that happened within the hallways or through virtual communication one on one that really builds and promotes it within. How do you do that across 17 companies?

I mean, that's a whole year of challenges. I mean, I think that's a great point. I mean, that is part of where that, that DBS, you know, Dan Hur business system does come into play, right? And every, every one of our, the people at our operating companies all see that common theme, right? So speaking to those ties and principles, speaking our core values, those, those are consistent across all those companies.

So then her may acquire a company. And and actually it's been a common practice, right? We, we don't have them change [00:05:00] their financial systems, right? So we may have a dozen different systems out there for paying an invoice right now, because. We've not told each of those companies when they came in the portfolio.

Hey, you have to stop using system a and use our system. Talent acquisition is one, one thing that is an exception, right? So we've just went through the exercise over the last 12 months of centralizing our TA model globally. So every bit of hiring for a full time associate here at Danner is going through corporate TA right now.

But you know, a lot of other things are not centralized. So they are all working with workday recruitment through us. All employees have to go into work day HRS. So there are some core systems, but the other piece really is, I mean, I think the work that our talent management team does and just executive leadership and making sure people understand that those Dan and her core values and the DBS system are also.

You know, basically non negotiables. I don't feel like they're presented that way. But the repetition is there, they're available. There's tons of content on our intranet. Like I said, it's part of our our P4G, our performance for growth process when we do our year end [00:06:00] goal setting for the upcoming year and reviewing how you did with your goals for the previous year, they're all themed to sync up to those core values.

So I think, like you said, it's, it's practice or it's rehearsal repetition. I think the hard part is too, though, too, because when you bring in a new worker, right they've worked other places that may have talked the same game but didn't really live it, right? So when you say it the first time, they're like, yeah, my last boss said this too.

So they're, they're going to have to hear the repetition from you and actually see it, right? You know, see you living it, see others at the company living it, and that starts to reinforce it. And I think, to be honest, if somebody's not comfortable in that environment, once they see it, that's when you're going to have early turnover.

It's going to be like, hey. You know, I can't, I can't live this way. But I feel like if you're transparent about it ahead of time, and Danaher, certainly, there's so much out there about our DBS system I think somebody, you know, knows what they're getting into, and I have to say, me knowing it, and knowing I was going into a heavily Kaizen focused environment when I was taking the job, I was like, [00:07:00] I don't know if I've ever worked someplace where you've I've worked places where I recruited for people who did Six Sigma and other kind of continuous improvement initiatives, but I've, I've never seen that actually transfer over to the HR environment and the procurement environment yet here at Danaher.

And I can tell you our, our global VP of HR, and I may not be quoting her exactly right, but she basically said to all of us in HR on a town hall meeting, you know, I don't want you to be HR professionals who happen to practice some DBS. I want you all to become DBS professionals. Who happened to focus on HR, right?

So, so she wants us to think about the DBS and the Kaizen principles first, and then our, our HR deliverables. Yeah. Not easy to do. Because there's a lot of trust that the principles are going to drive the behaviors, which is drive the results. And most companies looking at the opposite way. Think about results first and the other stuff is an afterthought.

So I love it. Let's talk about another buzzword. It is the buzzword. You can't have a podcast, let alone a conversation without talking about AI. And I'm going to [00:08:00] ask you about AI in two in two veins. One is About a I as it relates to life sciences, because I think there's amazing things happening there.

And of all the industries, life sciences is really taking advantage and seeing just monumental gains. But the first one I ask you about is about talent acquisition and I I get, you know, as many suppliers call you in a week, I get vendors calling me saying they're going to solve my recruitment problems.

Are you, first of all, are you using it in any part of your talent acquisition chain and where do you think it fits, if at all? And I guess this is a three part question. Can AI identify and help promote or even see culture? Three part question. So so I'll start with, I mean, you know, us, I mean, I, I know we're exploring, right?

So are there ways we could leverage AI to make our team more efficient? I think there's some simple things out there, right? If you think about You know, A. I. Assistance. Maybe they can help with candidate interview scheduling or or other kind of tasks, right? Similar to how these [00:09:00] computers that are sitting on your to my desk have replaced what assistance used to do for us back in the days, right?

So it used to be every every person got into a manager role had at least one assistant who took care of a lot of the operational and organizational and administrative tasks. So can you leverage it for that? Right? And and You know, and can you get a system that can actually dial into the whole interview teams calendars and find the right day and right time, right?

So, so there's that there's I mean, I've heard of the companies using, you know, advanced chat bots and those sorts of things, and possibly to do even screening of candidates, right. To ask them questions related to their resume. That part gets a little scary. I think I'd like to have some human rationalization.

So I would never want the machine doing the whole thing. And when you talk about machine learning and AI. The machine can also learn the biases of the managers who say no to this resume and yes to this resume. So I think I worry about that coming into our space and I I do hear of a lot of staffing agencies Part of their pitch is hey, we're using ai and That's not going to make me answer their email, right, any quicker because it worries me, right, [00:10:00] because I, I don't know if they're using it in a validated way.

And I think possibly similar to that that industry that popped up after the Microsoft case to help us all avoid co employment. I'm pretty sure there's going to be some legal or compliance people popping up in industry to help us all be compliant with AI, right? So, so there I have drifted into a little bit of thoughts, but yeah, we're looking for ways we can use it.

And, and basically internally, the main use I've seen so far is they set us up on our intranet with a system called safe GPT, so a behind the Dana, Dana, her firewall version of a chat GPT. So I personally have used that to translate some documents that my colleagues in Asia have sent me. Right.

So I asked them for their agency lists with, you know, fee structure guarantees and payment terms. And they sent it to me and it was in Japanese. So, that was a simple enough document. I was able to put it into the SafeGPT. And I got a translation and it all seemed to make sense. And then I confirmed it with my colleague, right?

So, I think there's some tools like that. That could help me get the information I wanted during my time zone. And then I sent the email to confirm it. [00:11:00] And waited until the next day to get an answer before I took action. So I think there's that. And and what was the, the last part of the question that I know was gonna be a tougher one?

Well, I think that the question, and you sort of answered it indirectly was can AI identify cultural fit? And I'll give you an example first. I'm sure you have plenty as well, and it sounds like you get solicited by the same similar companies that I do, . We were talking to a technology partner that we're interested in doing some work with and they continue to hammer on their use of AI and, and how effective it was to find the right candidates and screening and.

My personal belief is that there's some benefits and efficiencies you can get at the top of the funnel, which we've leveraged today through our ATS system and have before they even calling it AI. But they use an example of, well, they can find, you know, if there's 10, 000 eligible candidates, they can find the dozen or so that really hit the mark.

And I said, well, let me challenge that. That's great. But if there's not somebody that's still having the conversation, because Take those dozen, half of them are lying about what they've done, let's just start there. [00:12:00] And the other one is keywords and even summaries are, if they're generated by AI, are going to be saying the same things and there's so many nuances.

When did you do the work? Did you leave the work? At what scale did you do the work? And most importantly is when I talk to a person, even if they're in the most qualified and come from the right companies and look fantastic on paper, do I like them and, and want to work with them? Humans buy from humans and they certainly hire from people.

And if you talk about team and culture, Those are ephemeral concepts that are really difficult to define unless you feel them. And I think so much of our industry is rushing to streamline and save time and money when they're missing the point, especially at the higher end skillset jobs, that it's so much about the soft skills and the human skills that AI will never be able to, sorry, be able to replicate.

That's my end rant. No, and I agree with you, right? And I don't think AI is the answer to that. I mean, I do think there are some, there are some assessment tools out there, [00:13:00] right? For sure that have been created by, you know, industrial organizational psychologists and, you know, so people who understand the human mind, understand our workplace.

So could AI be trained to maybe take the learnings of those people and the learnings of those assessments to conduct a similar survey? But if If you already have an assessment tool created by ABC company, it does assessments and can score it for you. Why do you need AI to do it? So, I mean, when I was at BSF, we were using some assessment tools, even in our in our manufacturing workspace to really try to screen out the risky individuals, right.

So who, who had, who had safety concerns who showed the you know, that they were probably gonna have attendance issues, some of the basics. So just so we could knock out the high risk candidates and then focus our, our Recruiter screenings on those who at least passed that high risk, but we were very precise to not knock out too much of the population and to really see that our vendor had validation right for for how they and and we actually did a monthly business review to make sure we weren't seeing too many people, [00:14:00] you know, being flagged out and and that sort of thing.

So I think You know, so probably what I'd say with that is we need to have the watchdog over the right. So how are you going to audit its work? But I also think as far as culture, you could probably already find an existing assessment proven, you know, by years of use and years of scoring that maybe I'd rely on more, more I'd consider more reliable.

For a culture fit match than, than turning it over to machine learning and ai. Still reliable, but not always the case. We've done it internally. We've done personality assessments to see if there's common threads amongst our top performers and people that fit our culture. And, and yes, there's some common threads for sure, but there's outliers.

And the last thing I want to do is totally rely on the data that I'm getting without having the conversation. Because if it's a fierce competitive market to find the best people and you're throwing out those that are the outliers, you're missing a huge segment of the population. And that's, I think the risk and where you're talking about some of the legal issues that the profiling and where the origin of the AI data is coming from is going [00:15:00] to get some people into trouble.

And I would agree. And I mean, I would say even if I think there's the right place to use assessments, it's, it's maybe pre interview and that you have assessment that says, Hey, this person shows they might be a high risk individual. Ask them these couple of extra questions to validate that. Right. So, you know, so put a flag up, but let me still is the assessor, the hiring manager, whatever it may be speak that person.

I think you're right. There's it's and it's very hard when you're trying to use any kind of an assessment or an AI tool to figure out those common threads that. That lead to a great employee. There's so many things below a person that you can't necessarily assess right with the tool. Because we all come with our, our unique background, right?

And what makes us a person. And all those things factor into how we decide to react to a situation. Alan, let's talk about the job market. And first of all, acknowledging that you have oversight globally. I want to talk about the U. S. specifically. Before we started to record, we both agree [00:16:00] things are a little slow.

They have been for the last 18 months. You and I are cautiously optimistic about Q4 in 2025. But my question to you is, you know, we're, we're in a downturn and there's macroeconomic things happening, but there's also a lot of trends. post COVID, you know, hangover that we're still going through the quiet quitting and quiet resignation and, you know, people not willing to go back to the office.

There's a bunch of different movements, which I think are sometimes underestimated in terms of why the labor market is struggling right now. First of all, do you agree with it? And do you see any of those trends still having an impact going forward for the next year, as you think about hiring and finding talent?

So I think, I mean, at least one, one recent observation on a trip up to Saratoga, right? So I made my annual trip to go up to the horse track up there with one of my friends and the hotel restaurant we were at, the, the servers were working their butts off, but the first morning I [00:17:00] ate breakfast there, there was only one lady there taking care of the entire restaurant with one cook in the kitchen.

The next day there were two ladies, but it was. Friday morning instead of Thursday morning. Tons more people. So I think we're still going to see things like hospitality and the restaurant industry struggling to be fully staffed because unemployment is so low. And I do think we had people check out of the workforce.

Some retired for good, right? When the pandemic hit others may have just changed their motivations or they're just not willing to work those jobs anymore. Right? And work as hard as those ladies were. So I think we're gonna see some of those what you consider the lower level jobs or maybe entry level jobs.

We may still struggle to find people for you know, and then I think when you start just looking more broadly than that and start looking at other categories you know, I just read an article recently talking about the shortage of workers for the life science industry. Right. And if you look at the major life science hubs there's probably a drought or shortage of workers and every one of them.

And if you think about where we used to get a lot of not necessarily entry level, but where we used to get people to work some of those Low to mid level was immigration, right? [00:18:00] And we've, we've changed our number of visas available over the years. And so we're not replenishing that workforce either.

So so I think we're going to see some challenge in certain industries that have relied upon foreign talent in the, in the, in the past. And I think there's just that challenge, right? Because I do think, you know, people's worker preferences have changed. And I don't think managers have adjusted to the new worker preferences, right?

And I've I've said that before in places as I am. And, you know, B. S. F. is a little more of a good example, right? I mean, we were hiring hourly workers to work in chemical manufacturing plants, not the safest environment. Definitely not the sexiest environment to work in sometimes doing 12 hour rotating shifts, right?

So most people won't fit your lifestyle. People aren't willing to do that anymore, right? And, and, and those shifts that they work in manufacturing plants are based on these Dow DuPont schedules that were around for years. And granted, the plant managers grew up in those schedules, but they're not willing to break away from them yet.

And yet the worker preferences [00:19:00] have changed and workers aren't willing to work those schedules. So how can you run a plant if people won't work the schedule that you want to run? And if there's other opportunities to go down the street and make similar salary working eight hours a day. Do you think that's generational though?

Is that work ethic? Not to sound like the old guy, get off my lawn, but do you think we've lost some of that? So we're both getting old enough to sound like the old guy, right? But so I think partially it is, but I think partially, I think some of it was changing right before the pandemic, even when the George Floyd uproar came around and, and that was a totally different thing.

It wasn't about the workplace, but I think it was just people just decided, Hey, we're not going to take this anymore. Right. And, and, and therefore their preferences change. And then the pandemic came and. People were told they had the shelter in place and some people couldn't go to work, even though they wanted to you know, and I think people just rethought.

Right. And what am I willing to do for an employer? But I think generationally also, and it does sit with the managers though, right? Because you have managers who are in those plants that are [00:20:00] probably in their fifties, maybe even sixties that they stayed in the workforce. And like I said, right. This is the way it's always been for them.

And they're just not willing to change. So it's, it maybe is going to take a cycle. And that may even be when I talk about the hospitality and, and restaurant industry. Some of that may have to change too, because those people often work long shifts and they have to base their, most of their salary on tips, at least in the restaurant industry for servers.

So, so that, that industry may have to change to, to where it actually becomes beneficial for somebody to take a job waiting tables. I think you're, I think the word that you use cycle is the right one and, and COVID was like an accelerant to so many things that were in motion that then just sort of took off and a lot of it due to frustration and that we're already, you know, in motion that we're going to have to.

Reconcile over the next couple of years and it may take a generation for people to figure out how to actually make it work. And, you know, we touched on three macro things we could probably spend hours on it's fascinating. But the after effects of COVID are still very real for sure. We're living for sure.

Alan, let's [00:21:00] take a couple of minutes to go through a personal round here. And ask you a couple of, of shotgun questions. The first one I got for you is what's your number one pet peeve? In this industry, number one thing that just bugs you. If you ask the 100 people on the buyer side, you'd probably get a similar answer from at least 95 of them, right?

So, so to me, it's, it's, it's a business development or lead generation person, just doing their job. But the fact that you feel you can just lob a general email into my mailbox and I'm going to say, sure, I need to talk to you because your company is better than the other 10 that may pitch me today, or the ones who send you a LinkedIn invitation and you accept it.

And then the first response isn't like, Hey, thanks for the connection. But Hey, I need to talk to you about how my agency is going to solve all your problems. . What are you most excited about as it relates to the industry trends, technology, what, what are you excited about? You know, so I'd say probably some of the [00:22:00] collaborations or partnerships I've seen popping up recently, right?

So I know both beeline and Kelly OCG. So my VMS and my MSP have both just recently made a partnership with Upwork. Right. And I think the freelancer population may be one of those missing components that a lot of us in corporate roles haven't found a way to integrate into our programs yet. Yet I can guarantee all of our businesses are out using freelancer platforms and paying for them on credit card or maybe by invoice, 

so I think that's a piece that may be missing. Just from how we've chose to manage programs, you could, you know, Ursus could go find me a freelancer consultant type and bring them to me. Except that if you're doing it through my MSP, I require you to put them on as a W2 employee, which they may not want to do.

That's right. So, so you may not really be able to acquire the level of talent my manager wishes because of the program rules I've put in place, which means the manager has to find a way to go work around you and me and Kelly OCG and doing that. So I think these partnerships and I can tell you, and, and, you know.

If somebody from Upwork [00:23:00] watches this broadcast, hopefully they won't be mad, but years ago when I was at BSF and we were first looking to bring freelancers into our MSP program there like Upwork wouldn't talk to you unless you signed an NDA with them. They weren't willing to be flexible at all. It was like, Hey, this is how we work.

We'll give you a login. You have to come in and look for this. We're not letting your MSP come into our system. And now they're partnering, you know, with Kelly OCG. Right. So so I think there's that that's an evolution and it's part of the ecosystem that needs to be integrated. But I also think we.

As program managers have to figure out how to change our programs as well. So they don't need to be vendor neutral anymore, right? They, we could have preferred suppliers and we, we need to figure out the legal way to bring in freelancers so that they're there to support our managers, but they're visible to us.

They're compliant with our processes and the spend, you know, the costs are controlled and I'm not a procurement person, but I'm starting to speak like one when I talk about costs. Right. But I think, you know, there's, there's still that much potential. So to me, what I'm excited about is, is finding those.

Those partnerships, and what that can bring to the [00:24:00] ecosystem. I love the answer and you're absolutely right. The world is changing. It's changing in our industry and you can either, deny it and be left behind or be part of the solution because there's different options out there now. We've done the same thing where we look at things that may others deem as a threat or competitive as we want to embrace in a new channel.

So I love the answer. If I threw you in the way back machine. And I could take it back to the point in time when you started your career with all the knowledge that you have here sitting talking with me today. What one thing would you tell young Alan that you know today that you wish you'd known back then?

So it's funny you asked that question because I was just on a so we have a career week, which is really a career month going on where we have different people from talent acquisition, talent management talking to the broader community of talent acquisition, right? Really kind of helping some of our people who may be like at mid level in their career.

Do some career pathing, right? What do they want to put on their development plans and learn about? So so somebody was on today and somebody asked [00:25:00] them when they opened it up for questions at the end. What would you do if you could go back 10 years and tell yourself something about this career journey you just told us about?

So I think the funny part is, or when you really think about it, I mean, You know, I went to college and got a marketing degree. I went to the business school at my college because I wanted to be a business person. . And once I got into the business school and I had to pick a major, you know, it was management.

It was finance. It was accounting or marketing and marketing was the most interesting subject. So I picked marketing. And, and my career since then has proved that, you know, like, I've never done a marketing job itself. I mean, I've done some employer branding or recruitment attraction. So maybe I've kind of used a little sprinkling of what I learned in college.

But probably what I go back and tell myself is that, you know, you, can't be afraid to take the chances and, and you know, don't try to have a perfect plan for where your career is going to grow because it's not going to go in the direction you think it will. 

So I. I found my way to what I enjoy, right? But it's It's never the path that you you paint the picture of if somebody asked you when you were, you know 22 where are you going? Very [00:26:00] rarely. Is it a straight line to where you wind up? That's for sure That was a long answer that could have been really simple.

But no, it's good. But it's good But you're sharing the context, right? I mean, I think it is I mean we we all do this long long strange trip we go on last question for you This is either going to be a really easy one or really hard one the question I have for you alan is Over or under 11 wins for the Dallas Cowboys this year.

Oh, that is a tough one. Let's see if we factor in the number of distractions, like, you know, your three top players all needing new contracts. It's, it is a tough one, but I'm going to say over 11 wins. I'm going to say this is the year they not only win the NFC East, but hopefully win a playoff game.

The eternal optimist. I am, but you know what? We'll see. I'll see how they look when we're in Dallas and I get to see the game there live, but you know. They broke my heart many years since the nineties when they were, you know, dominant. I'm going to keep you honest on that. And we'll check back in January, I guess.

Alan, write it down. Yeah, I will. We got it on tape. [00:27:00] For those interested in connecting with you, assuming you want them to what's the best way for them to do so? Oh, they can definitely reach out to me on LinkedIn. I do try to keep up with my invites there and and definitely drop me a message and let me know you're reaching out because you saw me here on this podcast.

Cool. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to seeing you and and our listeners at CWO Dallas in just a couple of weeks. For our listeners, as always, thank you for tuning in. Keep grinding, keep safe, and we'll see you next time on Hiring University. Thanks, Allen. Yeah. Thank you.

Take care, everybody.