Kathryn Matz Of ‘Hands On’ On How To Identify and Engage The Best Talent For Your Organization

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Research the broad marketplace where your talent may reside and target your efforts accordingly. Once you have a clear understanding of the role, responsibilities and full set of hiring requirements, research the marketplace for areas from which to source candidates. This could be avenues such as academia, industry, professional associations, social media, local communities and employee referral networking. The important points to note are that you can’t do an effective and efficient job at candidate sourcing until you truly understand what you’re looking for — plus, you want to cast your search as broadly as possible to ensure you source a diverse set of candidates.

Companies are always on the lookout for exceptional talent in today’s work environment. In addition, the perks needed to keep talent have changed as people are not simply running after a paycheck. They want something more. What does a company need to do to identify and engage the best talent for their organization? In this interview series, we are talking to HR experts who can share ideas and insights from their experience. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kathryn Matz.

Kathryn Matz is a senior partner at Hands On — which she and her partners created as an alternative to ‘big consulting’ focused on learning & organizational development. She is an experienced People & Culture leader with a strong mix of both corporate and consulting expertise, delivering best-in-class solutions that help organizations harness, optimize and retain their talent. Kathryn specializes in leadership development, capability development and internal talent mobility across industries including Life Sciences, Technology, Consumer Goods, Financial Services, Retail and more.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before diving in, our readers would love to get to know you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this specific career path?

I actually started out in engineering, but quickly shifted to my passion, focusing on organizational psychology and development. People are intrinsically complex and what I find particularly fascinating, prompting my career pivot, is understanding how to fully engage them as well as optimize their capabilities and contribution, all the while scaling at the organizational level.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you first started? Then, can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I can’t say it was funny at the time, but I guess in retrospect, it was a humorous early-career blunder. I had around four years of experience post-graduate school, and I was thrown into the deep end at a pretty senior level, in an in-house HR role, leading talent acquisition for a 10,000+ employee organization. I hadn’t been there long and was asked to present a hiring strategy to the executive team with very little notice. I was relatively green though, and therefore took this in stride, not realizing how high the stakes were and what was expected of me. (I, of course, wouldn’t do that today!) As one might imagine, my presentation was terrible — it was messy, not well thought through, not researched, not strategic — I was ill prepared, to say the least.

I remember this like it was yesterday. I even remember what I was wearing and the faces of everyone in the room. That’s how much that experience has stuck with me. What I learned is that you often have one shot to present your best thinking to others — particularly in formal presentations — therefore, you need to prepare, prepare, prepare whenever you can.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote” and how that was relevant to you in your life?

I have two that are both really important to me. “Make hay while the sun shines,” which is something I learned from my father. He said it over and over to us as children. It really drives me to recognize and capitalize on opportunities — that could be work-related, career-related, or simply helping someone else realize their aspirations. The other is “Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.” It’s great to accomplish a lot in one’s career, but we are part of a broader community, and we must care about others and how we help them as well as be empathetic to their circumstances. We all go through good and bad times and it’s the relationships that help us through both.

Are you working on any exciting new projects at your company? How is this helping people?

Yes, there’s a lot of exciting new offerings at Hands On — the learning and development organization I oversee as Senior Partner. Hands On is committed to and passionate about helping companies attract, develop, retain and optimize their talent. We’re always looking to elevate and expand what we do while ensuring we’re meeting the needs of the companies, leaders and teams we serve in a timely and targeted manner. One thing we’ve been working on and continue to develop is a more targeted approach to next-generation leadership development. For example, we prepare future leaders for their roles, enabling them to anticipate and react to what lies ahead. We recently formed a partnership with Advantexe Learning Solutions, a company specializing in business simulations. There’s a lot of opportunity in this specific realm, helping companies develop their next generation leaders through business simulations — where we put real scenarios in the hands of their future leaders, allowing them to cultivate their skills in a challenging, yet safe environment. We’re also partnering with authors who have codified their contemporary leadership books into learning programs. Participants get direct access to these authors throughout the sessions and gain deep business insights — with a focus on developing a wide range of capabilities.

The other innovative approach we’re taking is addressing critical gaps in life sciences-specific learning. Life sciences can be very technical in many areas and yet most employees have only one area of specialization through their academic studies. We’re developing a series of learning programs that address a broad array of cross-functional capabilities that life sciences organizations and leaders need to be successful. Their success is also the success of patients, their families and their providers. And we are thrilled to be part of that broader solution.

Wonderful. Now let’s jump into the main focus of our series. Hiring can be very time-consuming and challenging. Can you share with our readers a bit about your experience with identifying and hiring talent? What’s been your most successful recruitment-related initiative so far?

I’ve been working in this area for over 30 years. My very first leadership role was as a head of talent acquisition for a mid-size organization working across a number of countries and in very different businesses — from finance, to retail, to shipping and more. Since that time, I’ve both overseen talent acquisition as a head of HR as well as consulted with over 500 different organizations on how to optimize this function.

At Hands On, we’ve had a lot of success helping organizations strategically and pragmatically identify (and specify) their talent requirements, and then translate that into aligned, repeatable and scalable practices that ensure timely talent identification (talent sourcing), while broadly canvassing all the right sources (e.g., to ensure diversity). Additionally, we also handle the downstream activities such as interviewing, candidate experience, hiring practices and onboarding. So much of doing this well boils down to knowing what talent you need and when as well as ensuring everything else is streamlined and showcases the organization’s strengths, while being honest and transparent about where the organization is still learning and improving. It’s like a lot of things in life, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, how would you find it? There’s also nothing worse than being a new hire and feeling like the organization you’ve just joined is not what you thought. Organizations are made-up of people, so they are just like people in that we each have great and not-so-great attributes. It’s important to showcase organizational strengths while being honest about developmental areas.

I strongly recommend that organizations consider building tools, like very clear hiring profiles, highlighting what you’re looking for, and harnessing technology at each step of the way. By harnessing technology, you’re better able to conduct internal hiring, which fuels talent mobility.

Once talent is engaged, what’s your advice for creating a great candidate experience and ensuring the right people go through the process?

First and foremost, be prepared, specific and exacting at each step in the process. This means that organizations should carefully map their candidate experience in an end-to-end manner, specifying these steps and looking at these both from a candidate and organizational perspective. There will invariably be things that can be improved. The focus should be on simplification, over-communication and clear messaging around what the organization needs as well as what the candidate can expect at each step along the way, including if they become a new hire. It’s important to put the organization’s best foot forward while being honest about what life will be like if the candidate joins. I’d say there’s a lot of similarities with dating in that honesty, transparency, clarity and empathy will go a long way in establishing trust early on. Giving candidates an early sense that they can trust you and the organization is incredibly important. Equally essential are streamlined processes and tools, including information about the company, the role and employment at the organization as well as a mindset of over-communication.

Based on your experience, how can HR and culture professionals work with the broader organization to identify talent needs?

First, HR and culture professionals need to know their organization. Second, they need to act as trusted internal consultants to leaders. Third, they need to act with urgency and know their stuff as people specialists.

As it relates to knowing their organization, I find a lot of general and administrative (G&A) professionals (not just those handling HR) often don’t really understand the fundamentals of their organization (the different functions, their roles, hiring requirements, etc.), nor are they very familiar with their organization’s strategy, competitors and the evolution/dynamics of their business’ broader marketplace. If HR/culture leaders don’t know what their organization does in an intimate manner, why that’s important and where they’re headed, it’s difficult to help the business identify talent.

Most leaders know their business better than anyone else. When HR/culture professionals spend time with them to understand what they’re trying to achieve and how that fits within the broader organization, versus what talent they have today, it puts them in a good position to help them. But again, you have to be knowledgeable to be credible. To me, being a trusted internal advisor is always acting as an internal consultant, helping leaders see what they may not see and also helping them elevate their approach to talent, by having a clear talent strategy and roadmap to achieve that strategy. To do this though, you need to know your stuff and understand organizational systems and be a systems-thinker.

Is there anything you see that recruiters, internal or otherwise, do regularly that makes you think, “No, stop doing that!”?

Yes, they too often over-sell and under-communicate. Going back to one of my life lessons quotes “Do unto others as you would wish done to you,” over-selling a company or a role will only create unrealistic and therefore unmet expectations. This is a recipe for early disaster, meaning this is one of the main reasons for early disengagement, low productivity and early exits from the organization. The other thing that happens routinely is there’s high engagement and communication with candidates when everything’s going swimmingly in the process, and when there’s a bump, the communication stops. It’s simply not fair to treat people that way. Even if recruiters need to pass on not-so-great news, such as the hiring process has been stalled or another candidate has been chosen for a particular reason, it’s important to communicate regularly and clearly with candidates. So many internal and external recruiters go “dark” in the communication cycle and that’s not professional nor is it respectful of others.

Ensuring you’re attending to the basics is more important than a slick, glossy dossier on the company, or some snazzy recruiting event. Trust is everything, and if it’s broken early on, it’s hard to recover.

With so much noise and competition out there, what are your top three ways to attract and engage the best talent in an industry when they haven’t already reached out to you?

For most organizations, unless you’re a brand new, very small start-up, your first strategy should be internal recruiting. You’re likely to already have the talent you need, and this is also how you retain talent (which is a twofer!) — by giving them new, exciting and challenging opportunities, while demonstrating your loyalty to the team you have today. This is the most under-tapped strategy we see. Therefore, ensure you have robust yet streamlined processes, roles and technology in place to enable scalable internal talent mobility. Many organizations just assume that employees are aware of new opportunities — the reality is, they often don’t know about them. Or for some reason, organizations “hide” opportunities from their employees, this is one of those things that lead to disengagement quite quickly.

In parallel, in looking externally, there’s some things you can do to stand out from the pack. Ensure that your end-to-end talent acquisition process is in tip-top-shape — streamlined for ease of everyone involved and flexible enough to withstand pretty much any circumstance — whether that’s high-volume hiring or recruiting for highly technical roles. If you find great candidates and your process is broken or even just sub-par, you will lose candidates to other organizations.

The other key thing to do is be out there as an organization supporting the communities in which you work — being a force for good. People want to work for organizations they like. This will be more important than money. Part of this is also having a strong employer brand — who you are, what you stand for, and how you act as an employer — while also having a clear profile of non-negotiable attributes you want to see in any employee, such as linkage with your values and culture.

Once you’ve done the above, it’s then about canvassing the different, wide and diverse sources all around you to identify and recruit stellar talent.

What are the three most effective strategies you use to retain employees?

First, have a structured and systematic approach to internal talent mobility. This means you have to have a documented and clear story around all the different functions across the organization as well as a total skill inventory across all functions. Your functional opportunities and skill inventory then go into a technology backbone that is linked across the employee lifecycle. Employees are then educated on how this system works — particularly for future job openings, but also learning programs and resources, mentoring and more. This is also a great tool to talk about with external candidates, as it’s something that sets your organization apart. Employees and external candidates need to see that your organization puts a priority on internal recruiting first and foremost and ongoing employee learning and capability development. One of the primary reasons employees leave is because of a lack of, or a perceived lack of, career growth.

Second, invest in leadership development as a recurring (not one-time) effort. One of the other primary reasons employees leave is because they have bad leaders. Effective leadership should not be assumed as something everyone will naturally have. Most leaders will benefit immensely from understanding the dos and don’ts of good people and team leadership.

Third, place an enduring emphasis on employee engagement. If employees feel like they belong, they are less likely to leave your organization. This is something that has to be real — that is, it cannot be fabricated with words that don’t match actions. There are a variety of questions to think about when considering employee engagement. How do your values match your actual culture? Does your organization look like your customers — are your employees as diverse as the customers your organization serves? How does your organization create a sense of belonging for all — do you actively build team spirit and cohesion? Volunteering and community activism that is ongoing and authentic is one of the key ways to build and sustain employee engagement, but there’s so much more that goes into this. Spend time to evaluate how your organization approaches employee engagement and team culture today and then be purposeful about strengthening this — and that is more than a periodic employee engagement survey.

Can you share five techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill?

1. Document job responsibilities. Define the role, before you define the requirements. The hiring requirements should be based on what someone in the job will do — their responsibilities. (I find that at this very beginning point, things already start to go awry because hiring managers start thinking of who they need before they take the time to be clear on what the role will do.) Example — often leaders think they need to hire a software engineer who will be part of their AI team. But, they already have many people on their AI team. Question is, will this new role be doing the same work or something different? This needs to be documented first, before determining if an engineer is needed with X number of years in AI/Machine Learning.

2. Specify the full range of hiring requirements but stay flexible. Not just X years in Y field or Z specific education. We already know that highly restrictive hiring criteria not only lessens an organization’s ability to hire more diverse candidates, but it also automatically shrinks your candidate pool in such a way that it may be close to impossible to fill the role. Remember that people are smart and can often flex their capabilities in adjacent or related areas to do something new or different than what they’ve done in the past. Also, beyond the hard or more tangible elements, like education and experience, be holistic around what other capabilities are required, such as ability to influence without authority, proven track record of effective stakeholder management, collaboration, effective presentation of technical information, etc.

3. Research the broad marketplace where your talent may reside and target your efforts accordingly. Once you have a clear understanding of the role, responsibilities and full set of hiring requirements, research the marketplace for areas from which to source candidates. This could be avenues such as academia, industry, professional associations, social media, local communities and employee referral networking. The important points to note are that you can’t do an effective and efficient job at candidate sourcing until you truly understand what you’re looking for — plus, you want to cast your search as broadly as possible to ensure you source a diverse set of candidates.

4. Showcase your organization’s pluses but be real. When you source candidates, you are promoting your organization as much as you are looking for the best candidates for your open role. It’s important to recognize that this is a two-way street — it’s not just about finding the best candidates who fit your role. In order to do this well, you have to have a strong employer brand — people have to understand who you are, what you stand for, what you provide employees and what sets you apart as an employer of choice. That said, you also cannot create expectations that won’t be fulfilled. So, showcase what’s great about your organization while being truthful about the experience candidates and new employees are likely to have.

5. Treat all candidates with the utmost respect. Word gets around when you don’t. This is another basic tenet of recruitment and employment in general. Some of the key things that often lead to a sense of disrespect or distrust even among candidates and employees are things such as not respecting their time, or rather wasting their time with unnecessary or extraneous meetings, information, paperwork, etc. Or the reverse, under-communicating important information or keeping them informed along the way. It is unfortunately very common for organizations and/or recruiters to not inform candidates why they are being declined. The communication simply stops and candidates are left to infer what happened/what didn’t work in their favor. It’s okay to decline candidates, and we all know that you have to, as not everyone will be offered employment. But to not communicate when this decision is made and why is not respectful and people talk — so they will share that experience with others, and you may not even know that’s the case.

There’s lot of other creative and high-tech things you can do. But when faced with my top five, these are key techniques and they are the basics. Simply said, if you don’t tend to the fundamentals, none of the bells and whistles that you throw on top will make a difference. Sometimes, the old school is the best school.

We are very blessed to have some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a private lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this.

LeBron James. I just love him! I love his passion, energy and commitment. Of course, I also love basketball. I also love that he so wholeheartedly gives back and clearly is absolutely in love with his kids. My son would also be super impressed with his mom, plus he’d be very jealous!

How can our readers continue to follow your work online?

I welcome you to follow me on my personal LinkedIn and Hands On’s LinkedIn page for the latest news and updates.

Thank you so much for these fantastic insights!