Serge Boudreau, Manager of Talent Acquisition at BURNCO

Jan 27, 2020

Serge Boudreau is the Manager of Talent Acquisition at Calgary based BURNCO Rock Products. With his job board background he is revamping their recruitment process from a marketer's perspective.

LI: post mentioned: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6620785258625409024

Serge Boudreau:
This is Serge Boudreau, manager of talent acquisition at BURNCO Rock Products, and I'm next on the RecTech podcast.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to RecTech, the podcast where recruiting and technology intersect. Each month, you'll hear from vendors shaping the recruiting world along with recruiters who will tell you how they use technology to hire talent. Now, here's your host, the mad scientist of online recruiting, Chris Russell.

Chris Russell:
All right. You're listening to the only podcast that helps employers and recruiters connect with more candidates through technology-inspired conversations. We're all about the new tools and tactics to land more talent. Today's episode is a practitioner edition. RecTech Podcast sponsored in part at our friends at Emissary.ai, the text recruiting platform. You want to get superstars in demand and on the move, Emissary is the easiest way to connect with them faster and more effectively wherever they are. Each recruiter seat you get on Emissary gets their own phone number to use as their primary phone number for candidate conversations. All those conversations are stored in the text inbox on Emissary. You choose the area code, so each of your recruiters will get a 10-digit the candidate sees when they receive the message. They can have the option for call forwarding to their cell or office line. Go to Emisarry.ai, self-schedule a demo, let them know you heard it on the RecTech Podcast.

Chris Russell:
He's at the top. Serge Boudreau runs talent acquisition for BURNCO Rock Products out of Calgary, Alberta. He's also a listener of the show, so I'm extremely glad he's about to make is RecTech debut. Serge, welcome.

Serge Boudreau:
Thank you, Chris. I'm very excited to be here or talking to you. Definitely, I've been listening to your podcast almost since the inception, so for you to ask me to come onboard was very exciting on my end.

Chris Russell:
Awesome. I always love it when I get a listener on the show itself. So appreciate that volunteering there. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile before we get started today. You got an interesting background overall. I want to start there, I think. You've worked time at Kelly Services. You worked at Indeed Canada and also Workopolis. I'm assuming you were there at Workopolis when the takeover happened by Indeed. Would that be a correct assumption?

Serge Boudreau:
Actually, no.

Chris Russell:
Oh.

Serge Boudreau:
I was at Indeed when Indeed purchased Workopolis, which was very interesting.

Chris Russell:
Okay. So the reverse, okay.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, I actually had joined Indeed already. It was interesting. Like you said, my background is quite varied. I actually started my career in talent acquisition as a recruiter. Then got promoted in through a different recruitment manager roles. Then decide to really go on the vendor side and go at Workopolis. During that time, Workopolis was very dominant here in Canada as far as the job site of choice. I think it was really Workopolis and Monster had quite a bit of market share here as well. I had the pleasure of being in charge of sales and operation for Western Canada and Quebec for a while. I do speak French as well, but spent quite a bit of time there. Unfortunately, when Indeed came into the market or fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, it really took a lot of market share and really hurt Workopolis.

Serge Boudreau:
Eventually, pretty much led to Indeed acquiring in that point, but a couple factors that happened is here in Western Canada, especially in Calgary, it's very oil and gas focused, the industry. So in 2014 when oil and gas just crashed, also did the recruitment aspects of it. It really put Workopolis in strain in Western Canada, hence I moved to Kelly Services, which was actually my first foray in a staffing firm. I learned a lot, both on the permanent placement, but mostly, we did a lot of contract for contract workers for large oil and gas. A lot of the workforce became a contract workforce as they were hiring just based on the economy.

Serge Boudreau:
Then had the pleasure to do a very similar role at Indeed where I basically led the Western sales team here in Canada. I did Quebec for a while as well there, so it was kind of going back to my old days at Workopolis. Then one day, we acquired Workopolis, and it felt like the old Godfather line, "When you think you're out, they pull you back in." It's how I felt. I have so many great memories and everything at Workopolis, but, obviously, Indeed in the Canadian marketplace and also in the US has been very dominant.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. Rumor has it that ZipRecruiter was also trying to bid for Workopolis. Do you know if that's true or not?

Serge Boudreau:
I've heard similar rumors. Yeah, there's a couple of other. The other rumors I've heard, there was also other Canadian players that were looking to basically going around Workopolis. In Canada, just to give you a landscape, there was Workopolis. Obviously, the normal American job board, so CareerBuilder, Monster, but there's a Quebec job board that's making a lot of inroads in Canada was Jobillico. There was rumors they were potentially trying to acquire Workopolis. Obviously, Nubo or now Talent.com, there's rumors they were in the picture, but I don't exactly what happened in the end of the day, but I'd be shocked if ZipRecruiter was not part of that conversation for sure just because Workopolis brand was so strong in Canada.

Chris Russell:
Yeah, totally. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for that history lesson there, Serge. Tell me about more about what you guys hire for there at BURNCO and I'm curious to talk to me a little bit the size of your recruiting team there, and how many people they are, and how many recs you guys are looking to fill this year, and things like that.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah. No. BURNCO Rock Products is an interesting business. We basically take big rocks and make them into small rocks to really simplify what we do, but a lot of people. We operate in Canada and the US. In Canada, concrete. So you've seen those concrete mixer trucks. We do asphalt aggregate, which is basically the foundation of construction for highways, anything like that. We also run supply, basically landscape supply, landscape, hardscape supplies to retail stores for contractors and for basically the weekend landscape person that's coming in to get a bag of rocks or get some landscape stones or whatever the case is. In the US, we're heavily focused on concrete and aggregate. We have operations in Texas and in Colorado.

Serge Boudreau:
The great majority of what we hire and the biggest challenge, as you're probably well aware of, is drivers. Our drivers in Texas and Colorado, it's a massive challenge as everyone is seeing in the industry of all type of driving jobs. In Canada, very similar, but we also hire in Canada anything from head office. We do from IT roles to anything across the board. Our structure is a little bit different as far as how much we recruit. In total, we hire around 550 people a year. Very small team. When it comes to recruitment, it's a little bit of a structure. How my role falls into play is basically I'm responsible for the creation and the governance of our whole talent acquisition strategy. The great majority of the actual execution is done by our HR business partners that's responsible for each business division. I do have a team of coordinators and also recruiters to assist, but the lead on the intake on the role from the hiring manager is done by the HR business partner or the HR manager in that particular location comes to us.

Serge Boudreau:
The biggest part of my job is more in the recruitment marketing side to make sure that we are doing everything out there, especially in the recruitment market to get enough candidates and enough qualified candidates so we can actually fill those roles. I'm going to brag a little bit, but hiring 500 roles and really having a tiny recruitment team is something I'm really proud of. A lot of that, coming in is I had the opportunity to create a really robust team, but I decided to look at how we can be efficient. We really automated a lot of our processes, a lot of how we're going out to the market from... Basically, if we can automate it, we're automating it. I really want the recruitment and the HR business partner focus 100% on relationships. I really do strongly believe in the candidate experience and our hiring manager experience is the two things I really care about.

Serge Boudreau:
When I first started, to give you an idea, we were still accepting resumes. We didn't have an ATS. We had zero technology. Basically, I was guided to a filing cabinet with all the resumes we'd received over the last 10 years, which I was kind of shocked to see.

Chris Russell:
Filing cabinet, huh?

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, exactly. And just the word fax. I'm not that young. I'm not that old, but in reality, I didn't know fax machines still existed in the corporate world, especially coming from pretty innovative companies like Indeed. So we completely revamped what we did. I feel today, in our market, in our industry, we're definitely highly innovative in what we do, and how we go to the market, and how we actually get our employees. So quite a big of changes, but it's been lots of fun in the past year. We've accomplished a lot.

Chris Russell:
Yeah, it sounds like it. We're going to dive into that. I'm going to give you some props first though because as a recruiting marketer, I like to see people like yourself out there doing unique things that are unique in terms of social media stuff. You posted something yesterday which I called out and threw it up on my LinkedIn recruiting marketing group, which is basically just a job post. Now, when I typically see job posts on LinkedIn, it's all same thing. It's all we're hiring, right? With a simple link and maybe a small-

Serge Boudreau:
I hate we're hiring, by the way, not to cut you off.

Chris Russell:
So do I.

Serge Boudreau:
But I just hate that phrase. Anytime I see it, it's a massive turnoff. Sorry. Go ahead.

Chris Russell:
Everyone's hiring. Who cares what the-

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, exactly.

Chris Russell:
What the job seeker wants to know is why should they come work there or something unique about that employer itself. Let me just read for the audience what you wrote here, and I'll put a link to it in the show notes as well. It says... Well, let me describe it first. It was a picture of a bunch of trucks lined up. It looks like it's at a rock quarry, but it's from 1950s, it looks like. There's a bunch of old trucks sitting there.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah.

Chris Russell:
Looks like old cement mixers. Are those cement mixers?

Serge Boudreau:
They are, yeah. That's 1940.

Chris Russell:
1940, okay. So I go back even further. You've got the BURNCO logo in red there right on top, so it stands out pretty well. First of all, I think the black and white photo is unique too for one thing. That's going to catch my eye, number one, and your logo there is right there on top in red. You can't miss this thing. Audience, it says, "Judging by the picture, we need to hire someone to do some better financial planning so we can update our equipment. I'm kidding, but we are hiring a finance planning and analyst profession for our Texas office. Click on the picture to find out if this opportunity, an iconic 107-year-old family business, is the right place for you." I love that, Serge. That's a great example of how to use social media right when it comes to promoting a job. So kudos to you and great job there.

Serge Boudreau:
Thank you. What's interesting in looking at what our value proposition as an employer is and looking at how we're going to go to the market, I think there's a couple things that I looked at is we're 107 years old. We're a fourth-generation family business. In an economy, especially in the Calgary market, where I wouldn't say it's doing really well just based still on oil and gas and the Canadian market, people are looking for a little bit stability, companies that have been a long time. I do a mixture of either people that are genuine people that work within the company and are still here, and they're happy. The other is when I'm doing equipment or anything like that, I love the vintage stuff. I think it stands out. I think it's our unique proposition to the market that we've been around forever. We have a lot of history. That picture is from 1940. I have pictures actually from our inception, which was in 1912. Our CEO is... Like I said, he's a fourth-generation Burns, so it's been in the family. It's a unique proposition.

Serge Boudreau:
I leverage social media quite a bit. We have our own social media site that's just dedicated towards the employee side of it, what it is. It's also my recruitment marketing launchpad, but I'm trying a lot of different things to see what resonates better in the market. Some of it generic, just like, "Here's my job. Here is the 100 list of things that I need you to be able to do to hire here," just it doesn't attract. I know it from working plenty of years at a job board, and understanding what works, what doesn't. So I'm always testing from witty to straight up.

Serge Boudreau:
I try to stay away from the faux employer brand. What I mean by that is try to be authentic with what you're doing. I get caught in it sometimes, and I put buzzwords or things that really are too corporate-y. Our employees that we're hiring are true, what I call, salt of the earth type people, hard workers, and they don't want the corporate BS that a lot of job postings are out there or how we're targeting it especially. I do a lot of Facebook targeted ads. I try to do the same thing there because it's really hitting the demographic of the people I'm trying to start-

Chris Russell:
How are those working for you, Serge, because they changed their ad restrictions there? Were you affected by that? Because it seems like now it's a much broader set of people you can target with that ad, and it's going to lessen, I think, the overall quality of click-through rates in some of these ads there. Tell me what you're seeing from your standpoint.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah. I hate it, first of all, because I was able to target. I think it's doing exactly the opposite of what they were trying to do. I get it. I get the reasoning, but I get the challenge because, in certain cases, it really has affected the way I can target from... To give you an idea of that is I was able to target specifically ads in either a different language or specific demographic or even in some cases, I am actually physically targeting a minority group because I want to hire them. Now, I'm caught in the situation that it's a lot tougher to do.

Serge Boudreau:
So right now, I can't be as targeted. I really have to spread it out to everyone, which is fine. I have actually had success in some ways because I'm hitting the husbands of people that could work for us or the wives, and they're sharing it to their network, which if I was really specific on my targeting, I maybe not would have hit them as much. So I'm not totally pissed off, but it's made my job a little bit harder in how I approach Facebook ads because I think they're a great tool for recruitment. I think especially I'm hiring a demographic that spends a lot of time on Facebook, so I need to be there more than I need to be on any other tools out there.

Chris Russell:
Are you-

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, it hasn't been great.

Chris Russell:
For your ads on Facebook, are you doing legion ads where you just capture the contact info or are you actually redirecting them back to your job somewhere?

Serge Boudreau:
I leverage ViziRecruiter. I don't know if you've ever heard of Vizi, which it's basically how it's leading to my... Basically, I take the Vizi ad, and then it's basically driving it to apply directly to my career site, but there's not many clicks. It's they see the job description. They click on the ad. They see the Vizi, which, in my opinion, it's really cool. It's probably the thing I get the most complement-

Chris Russell:
Yeah. Describe ViziRecruiter for the audience, if you could. Tell them what it is. I love the product as well.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah. So-

Chris Russell:
I remember when it came out a few years ago and I was like, "Wow. This is what every career site should look like basically."

Serge Boudreau:
I agree. I think the biggest challenge that I have I'm a horrible copywriter. I try to do my best, and when I looked at my job ad coming in, there's a big difference between a job description and a job ad. So I was able to really focus my job ad, but Vizi just brought it to the next level where it basically takes your job ad. It creates it in a really nice-looking format that's easily digestible with nice pictures. The key highlights are really easy to read as they're kind of in a... not in a bullet point, but I don't know what the exact word is. It's basically laid out in very visual way.

Serge Boudreau:
Instead of creating an ad for every time that I'm doing any type of social media campaign on my own, I'm just taking the link from Vizi. It's already done. Vizi is something that I've had a lot of compliments from job seekers, from my counterparts in the industry as how cool it looks because it does look... Not to advertise anyone. They're not paying me, but I definitely recommend if there's any practitioners out there to take a look at Vizi because it's made a big difference in the look of my ads.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. Listeners, go out there, search BURNCO careers. You can see some of their jobs there. It's a very visual. It's basically a visually-stunning job description overall. I like how I click on the Texas drivers here and the shot of the cement mixer pans in on itself. It's very colorful and definitely eye-catching overall. There's no paragraphs of texts. It's just blocks of images or, sorry, blocks of elements here with some icons, things like that. So I do love the overall visual-ness of the job. I think every job ad should look like this overall, but I shall there... so you mean-

Serge Boudreau:
It does make it stand out. You described it way better than I did, so thanks, Chris, but it does make it stand out. It really differentiates. It helps you, like what we talked about, as far as what your actual imagery is going to look out there. I'm always a believer that the most important thing in a job description is the physical content of what the job is.

Chris Russell:
Will Vizi... Will it suck in your ATS jobs and then kind of-

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah.

Chris Russell:
... create the ad automatically? How's it work?

Serge Boudreau:
So they scrape my jobs from my ATS. They basically automatically update on their backend as far as what it looks... They create each one individually, but they scrape my job so any updates that I do, usually, the new Vizi, I call it, is updated in the next day. So around half a day turnaround, so it's fairly quick.

Chris Russell:
Nice, nice. Did you see a jump in applications or conversions when you switched to Vizi?

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah. We actually did quite a bit of research to see how much it would affect it. You got to put in perspective, my number one source of candidates right now is still Indeed, and my jobs are flowing automatically to Indeed as the quick apply in the background. But my jobs in Indeed are not being converted into Vizi just because of how their format runs, but all the other sources of social media and looking at what the conversion was before and after, we saw almost a 25% up-lick on our conversion. With the amount of volume that we do, which is not large... Obviously, we're not an international or a national business, but for our volume, that's a huge uplift. What I noticed too, I found a little bit deeper, we actually hired more from the Vizi than we did from any other sources outside of Indeed, which was definitely interesting. What that tells me is the quality that we're getting is higher with Vizi than it was before.

Chris Russell:
Interesting. Very interesting. Okay. Your ATS there is Workable, it looks like, which you-

Serge Boudreau:
It is.

Chris Russell:
... which you put in last year at some point. Just in the initial thoughts on Workable as an ATS, how do you like it?

Serge Boudreau:
I really like Workable. When I looked at different ATS, there's so many different alternatives and I went through... I'll give you an idea of where I got to. I shortlisted to three ATS. Those were Jobvite, SmartRecruiters, and Workable. Jobvite and SmartRecruiters are amazing ATS in the context, but our hiring managers are quite involved in the hiring process overall. And what I want to make sure is it's very easy for them to use. I found with functionality as far as the intuitiveness of Workable was impressive to me and what it could do. I felt that it wouldn't take me really long or anyone in my team to be able to train the hiring manager on how to access Workable. It's basically a five-minute conversation. It's done. They get it. That's a challenge with most ATS. Imagine trying to train hiring managers that's never used any software used in the field on Taleo. Not to bash Taleo, but that would be really difficult.

Serge Boudreau:
The other aspect that I found really key with Workable, and most ATS now, I'm seeing that change, is how easy it is for applicants to apply. Workable has a mobile-first platform, extremely easy to apply. So that's critical to me. I've heard on your show many times, I think you're a big proponent. Actually, your last one, your idea is we should have one quick apply for every ATS and every ATS should get onboard. I'm 100% behind it.

Chris Russell:
Thank you, Serge.

Serge Boudreau:
I do believe though, not to sound... It's a little bit of a pipe dream in some ways, so-

Chris Russell:
Yeah, I know.

Serge Boudreau:
... I don't think they'll coordinate-

Chris Russell:
A man can dream, can't he?

Serge Boudreau:
Exactly. I think you're 100% accurate, but, hey, I got to take care of my own and I got to work with what I can control. And Workable definitely has that aspect where it's easy to apply. It's quick. It's a mobile type of platform. I don't even have to ask for resume. To give you an idea, in certain markets we're in, really tough to get drivers. I want to remove any friction if possible. So I'll ask them, "What's your name? What's your email address? What's your phone number? Write in one sentence why you're a driver." That way, I'll call them then get the... or someone will call them and get all the information. So anything that can remove friction from the system in applying is great. I also like they integrate with a lot of tools that I was planning to use anyway.

Serge Boudreau:
The one complaint, and I've told this to Workable many times, is their hesitance to work with programmatic advertising. I've had quite a bit of challenge getting Appcast or any other programmatic players integrated with Workable. They put a lot of roadblocks behind it. As you know, right now, programmatic is probably the hottest thing in HR tech. If you haven't looked at leveraging programmatic as an HR or as a talent acquisition practitioner, you're behind the curve because it definitely is a true course of candidates. What I'm trying to do is really go away from my reliance on Indeed like more practitioners in Canda just because of their dominance here. I have nothing against Indeed, but it's never a good business decision to have a reliance. So I'm really looking at programmatic to get the next level. We have to figure it out workarounds with Appcast and with other providers.

Chris Russell:
Could you give Appcast your feed or something like that and have them push out the jobs? Is that-

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, yeah. We've created a backend solution, but it's not ideal because sometimes, I need to go to directly to the Appcast feed to get the candidates. And anytime you're adding layers in a really, pretty tight, efficient team, any more steps can cause a little bit of growing pain. That's the only complaint. So Workable, if you're out there, you've heard me. You need to do this. You need to work with programmatic.

Chris Russell:
There you go. All right. What else is on your HR tech deck, Serge? It looks like you got some referral stuff here. I guess that's also Workable.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, I'm actually using Workable's referral tool, which has worked really well. We had a very, very decentralized type of how we handled referrals. So we had spreadsheets, which ended up, we forgot to pay most of the people because spreadsheet wasn't updated. We had a different program in Texas, Colorado, and then in different business divisions in Canada. So it wasn't standardized. It was really tough to follow. It was tough to get our people paid on time. So Workable referral is actually really good on that end. They basically centralize everything for me.

Serge Boudreau:
Really, my long-term plan with Workable or any type of referral programs that I want to run, I eventually want to get away from paying any referral bonus. I think if you're a really good company to work for, people will actively go out and refer people. But in the meantime in going away, because we've always had a referral program. It's always been somewhat lucrative. Just dropping the ball initially and saying, "Hey, we're not going to do referral bonus anymore," could have had a negative effect. So I think the program and how we handle it right now will never change, but how we pay, that might change dramatically in the future as well.

Chris Russell:
Gotcha. Let's take a quick break, listeners, so I can talk about our other sponsor, of course, our friends over at WorkHere, WorkHere.com, the geofencing ad platform. They help employers reach people through online ads with pinpoint precision where they live, work, and shop. WorkHere is going to advertise your jobs on the screens that candidates use the most, of course, their mobile phones. Messaging is then delivered in the social mobile apps they use more often. From them, a chat team will qualify and engage them, send them back to ATS via SMS, email or redirect. So head over to WorkHere.com and tell them you heard it on the RecTech Podcast. Serge, on your social media profiles, how often are you posting? Just give me a general sense of the types of content you're posting up there as well.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah. We're not posting enough. That's something that working really lean and having a lot of recs has been a... I'm a believer you need to be putting out like 10 to 15 pieces of content almost a day to really keep the candidates engaged, but what we've created is basically what we call Inside BURNCO. The purpose of it behind it is to really give... WE obviously have our BURNCO consumer, social media accounts out there, but Inside BURNCO was really created for two things. It was, one, a place to launch all our social media recruitment campaigns. So like the ad you started at the end, that's some of the type of contents we'll reach out. The other is just to give a little bit of an insight of what it is to work inside BURNCO. We'll profile different employees, if we have events. That's one of the places that we put it on social media.

Serge Boudreau:
I'm looking going in 2020... A lot of it was controlled by me initially as a new concept, as far as I was the physical poster, but also with the limitation of time, it's been a challenge. So I really want to focus in 2020 putting a lot of content and looking how we can accomplish that. There's obviously a couple different ways and how we schedule with different tools out there. So I'm looking at that now, but I want it to feel authentic. I want it to feel real. I believe in automation, but I also believe in having a real clear message that's authentic and it feels like it's a real person in the back actually creating those posts. And it is, so it's just how we schedule and how we can make sure that we have enough content that is interesting and people want to follow because I see it as a way to keep expanding our talent community. When I say talent community, it's... Drivers is a perfect example. I always want to be nurturing a new pool of candidates, so when we need them, they're ready to go. One of those aspects is keeping them engaged through our social media channels.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. Very cool. You're also one of our Rejobify clients, so I want to thank you again for signing up for that service, so you can Rejobify your rejected candidates. I'm just curious from your perspective, Serge, why do you think that's such an important thing to do in terms of the candidate experience for every candidate that comes to your company and tries to apply?

Serge Boudreau:
I am a big believer that candidate experience is critical. That's from the minute they see their job ad to them not getting the job. Let's put in perspective is most people don't get the job. We get over 30,000 candidates a year, and we hire 500, so in reality, the great majority doesn't get a job. I heard somewhere actually in the last couple days, and I thought it was brilliant, is we're in the business of goodbyes. We're kind of breaking-

Chris Russell:
Rejection, yeah.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, rejection. We're kind of rejecting-

Chris Russell:
We're in the rejection business, yeah.

Serge Boudreau:
We are in the rejection business. It's kind of breaking up with a lot of people. In a lot of ways, it's telling them that it's us, not them sometimes because there's so many great candidates, but we can only hire so much. I have been blown away, and I'm not just telling you this but, obviously, you being involved in this service. This has been a fantastic tool for us. It's been something that has... Because I've been trying to figure out how can we help our job seekers in any way. A couple of ideas I come up before this tool was, well, maybe... We run landscape, our retail stores here in some parts of Canada. I'm like, "Well, maybe we give them a discount on the product as a thank you." And something that, obviously, I think for a lot of consumer brands that are everywhere, I think you should look at that and I think it's something that probably could be integrated with Rejobify, but when-

Chris Russell:
Yeah. We have a retail client, in fact, that gives a discount as well as part of their page to their eye care centers. They can take advantage of that in addition to the stuff on Rejobify, so it's a great idea.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah. I think it's a brilliant idea for companies that are doing it. I decided, because we're not at where... and the type of roles that it's something that we will be potentially doing, but this is really if one person gets a job from the advice or the tools that Rejobify is giving them, it's a big win for us. It's interesting because you shared on LinkedIn yesterday one of the rejection emails. I loved it. I was actually going to comment, but then I got busy. Do you have any clue of what the candidate did? Did candidate respond to that? I'd be curious to see what the candidate said actually. That-

Chris Russell:
I don't know. Again, I found it online somewhere. I printed it out, and it was sitting in my stack of papers. When I was doing some cleaning over the holidays, I discovered it again. I was like, "I got to blog about this," so it was printed out in tiny, little text. I had to sit there for a good 20 minutes and type it out, but, yeah, I'm not sure what the candidate thought of it or not. But to me, if I'm-

Serge Boudreau:
Well, it gives you-

Chris Russell:
... reading that, I'm smiling at the end of that thing. It's a kind of a neat way to-

Serge Boudreau:
100%.

Chris Russell:
... let down.

Serge Boudreau:
Well, it's interesting because 99% of the responses I get from candidates by... because I try to customize messaging in a very non-corporate talk. Obviously, it's customized, but not customized because I'll be sending out the message to say 300 people at once, but where ATS, obviously, their name and my name is stated, but I try to put it in real talk. I put the Rejobify offer as part of that. I would say 99% of the time, the feedback is amazing.

Chris Russell:
Have you gotten-

Serge Boudreau:
There is always that-

Chris Russell:
Have you gotten candidates that replied back and said, "Hey, thank you for this?"

Serge Boudreau:
Yes.

Chris Russell:
Awesome.

Serge Boudreau:
Plenty of examples.

Chris Russell:
Awesome.

Serge Boudreau:
I've also had candidates or very few. I had one yesterday that was insulted that they needed help as a job seeker. This was the second portion of the email because the first part is, "I'm fully qualified. I can't believe you're rejecting me." I get that. It's really frustrating. You look at a job. You think you're qualified, and you get a rejection email. It does hurt the ego in some ways. If I'm getting 200, there's chances are I'm going to be rejecting people that are qualified for the job. But they did it in a very, I would say, rude way and basically called our company unethical because she deserves an interview, which I'm like, "Well, maybe you should look at self-awareness."

Chris Russell:
Okay, yeah. Probably not the right candidate for BURNCO then.

Serge Boudreau:
Exactly, your entitlement. So I responded nicely to be like... Then she responded back. She's like, "On top of that, you think I'm not a good job seeker, so you're giving me these tools to help me look for a job." I'm like, "Yeah, you probably need it," but aside from that, the feedback has been great. You see the numbers of people that I send. It's a 30% conversion rate that they sign up, which is fantastic. I've really enjoyed it. It's something that's going to be part of my, I guess, tech stack for as long as I do because it's really cheap too.

Chris Russell:
Yeah. I guess that's a win-win for both.

Serge Boudreau:
Cheap is not the right word. Very inexpensive.

Chris Russell:
Cost-effective.

Serge Boudreau:
Yes, exactly.

Chris Russell:
There you go. Awesome. Well, Serge, we certainly appreciate your time today. I guess my last question for you as we end up today's podcast is what are you dying to try as far any kind of new HR tech or some other kind of marketing tactic for 2020 here?

Serge Boudreau:
Well, part of my 2020 was getting really hardcore metrics for a company that had no metrics. So we launch all our metrics through a partner, webTactics, here in Canada for... Everything is to Power BI, so everything that was spreadsheet is now automatically sent to Power BI. So everyone has access too, every executive. We are just launching Click Boarding here for our onboarding, which directly integrates with our ATS. So I'm very excited about getting that onboard because we don't have a great onboarding experience right now. I was not a believer in video interviewing. When I say video interviewing, it's the normal interview tools. I've been converted and-

Chris Russell:
You have. Wow.

Serge Boudreau:
Yeah, I have. I have because I think if you do it in a particular way, if someone just applies to your job, and you just send them a video, and there's no personality to it, it's like applying to a job and getting a assessment tool that basically takes 45 minutes to do. That's just a bad experience, but if someone on my team calls you, does a basic screening, be like, "Hey. We're going to send you a video interview to go through a little bit more detail," not too lengthy, it's actually cut our screening time dramatically. I also include a very personalized message from either the hiring manager or myself in that video. I let them do retakes, at least a couple of retakes. I think that's the biggest challenge sometimes is you get one shot. It is awkward. Video interviewing is awkward, but the flip side to it is on my... where I run a really efficient and small team for what we hire, it's a tool that's actually from what I've seen... I've just launched in the last couple weeks, has saved me a lot of time because I've been able to do that screening that would take me quite a long time over the phone. It's helped me shorten that period.

Chris Russell:
Nice. It just struck me too as we're talking is you're probably the one company that could use the company rockstar in their job ads. Serge Boudreau from-

Serge Boudreau:
We haven't. Okay? We had that internal discussion, and I decided not to because... I still go back to it. I'm like, "We should use rockstar."

Chris Russell:
There's probably a funny way of doing it somehow.

Serge Boudreau:
We should use it, but I just hate those titles like ninja, rockstar, all of them. But I could use it. You're right. You know what? If I do-

Chris Russell:
Yeah. I say it jokingly, but yeah.

Serge Boudreau:
If I do end up using it, I'm going to put it on you say, "From this podcast that you're giving me justification to do it."

Chris Russell:
There you go. The one company that can use it is BURNCO. There you go.

Serge Boudreau:
Exactly.

Chris Russell:
Awesome. Well, Serge, thanks again for joining me today. Tell people where to connect with you and BURNCO.

Serge Boudreau:
You can find me on LinkedIn, Serge Boudreau. I'm pretty easy to find even though it's a French name. For BURNCO, please check out our social media site so at Inside BURNCO on Facebook, Instagram, potentially TikTok coming. I'm pushing hard on that. Also, BURNCO.com/careers. You can see all our jobs. You can see everything we're doing with Vizi. Come check us out.

Chris Russell:
Awesome. I could talk to you all day, Serge. Again, thanks for your time.

Serge Boudreau:
Thank you.

Chris Russell:
That will do for this edition of the RecTech Podcast. Thanks again to my sponsors, WorkHere and Emissary. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcast. If you're an iTunes subscriber, leave a review, and I'll be sure to thank you on air. Thanks for listening, everyone, and remember always be recruiting.

Speaker 2:
Another episode of RecTech is in the books. Follow Chris on Twitter @ChrisRussel or visit RecTechMedia.com where you can find the audio and links for this show on our blog. RecTech Media helps keep employers and recruiters up to date through our podcast, webinars, and articles. So be sure to check out our other sites, Recruiting Headlines and HR Podcasters to stay on top of recruiting industry trends. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you soon on the next episode of RecTech, the recruiting technology podcast.