[Reshare] Building Internal Mobility to Improve Hiring and Retention with Dr. Kalifa Oliver @ Ford

How does internal mobility impact employee experience?

Dr. Kalifa Oliver, Global Director in Employee Experience (EX) Analytics Strategy at Ford, joins Shannon to discuss how internal mobility influences not just hiring efficiency but long-term culture building. With a background in neuropsychology and people experience at Ford, Dr. Kalifa brings valuable insights into the intersection of talent acquisition and employee development.

She highlights the challenges recruiters face in making internal moves feel as seamless as external ones and the impact that transparent, fair mobility systems can have on employee retention. Kalifa also shares her thoughts on the importance of giving employees room to grow within the company and the role that recruiters play in facilitating that growth.

Key takeaways:

1. Internal mobility promotes retention: It’s about building long-term career paths.
2. Treat internal candidates as you would externals: Fair treatment is key to employee trust.
3. Mobility systems should be built for scale: Ensure fairness and transparency as companies grow.
4. Recruiters drive the employee experience: Their role goes beyond just hiring.

Timestamps: 

(00:00) The importance of a human-centered mindset

(00:17) Introductions

(01:54) Guest profile: Dr. Kalifa Oliver

(02:38) Why candidate experience is the foundation of employee experience

(05:31) Defining internal mobility

(09:20) Making internal candidates feel seen: a recruiter's responsibility

(11:48) Treating internal candidates with care

(15:46) The impact of internal mobility on DEI

(17:39) Gen Z, transparency, and the end of silent pay gaps

(21:45) Writing job descriptions that actually support mobility

(24:58) How fear-based layoffs damage productivity and well-being

(31:08) Designing soft exits that strengthen your talent brand

(36:09) What hiring excellence means to Dr. Kalifa

(37:22) Recruiting hot take: There are no shortcuts

Transcript

Kalifa Oliver (00:00):

Hiring excellence for me means that you are seeing this person as a human being from the very beginning of the process. And so you are designing your process to treat that person as a human being.

Shannon Ogborn (00:17):

Welcome to Offer Accepted, the podcast that elevates your recruiting game. I'm your host, Shannon Ogborn. Join us for conversations with talent leaders, executives, and more to uncover the secrets to building and leading successful talent acquisition teams. Gain valuable insights and actionable advice from analyzing cutting-edge metrics to confidently claiming your seat at the table. Let's get started. Hey everyone. Shannon Ogborn, your host back here. If you haven't caught our episodes this summer, we're resurfacing episodes that feel especially relevant, and internal mobility is front and center in today's hiring conversations. With more scrutiny on every hire, companies are increasingly leaning on internal candidates as a lower-risk, higher-context option. Our talent trends data backs this up as well. Internal applicants are advancing through the funnel at some of the highest rates even as competition overall intensifies. In this episode, Dr. Kalifa Oliver, people experience strategist, executive coach, and director of employee listing strategy at Ford, really gets into how internal mobility supports not just hiring efficiency, but employee retention, growth, and long-term culture building.

(01:28):

She covers the unique role that recruiters play in both candidate and employee experience, how internal moves, preserve institutional knowledge and create meaningful development paths and how to build internal systems that are transparent, fair, and built for scale. If internal growth is on your radar but you're not sure where to start or you're looking to strengthen your talent pipeline without starting from scratch, this episode is a great place to begin. Alright, let's get into it.

(01:54):

Hello and welcome to another episode of Offer Accepted. I'm Shannon Ogborn, your host, and this episode is brought to you by Ashby, the all-in-one recruiting platform, empowering ambitious teams from seed to IPO and beyond. I am here today with the incredible Dr. Kalifa Oliver, an expert in all things people experience, currently, director, people analytics, employee listing strategy at Ford with a background in neuropsychology. That's actually how we met. Kalifa was one of my professors at Clemson, so really grateful to have this continued relationship and she brings an absolute abundance of knowledge to the podcast through experience on both the people side and the recruiting side of people operations. Kalifa, thank you so, so much for being with us today.

Kalifa Oliver (02:36):

Absolutely. Thank you for inviting me.

Shannon Ogborn (02:38):

You've had a really good variety of experience on both the employee experience and recruiting side. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the big challenges you've seen at that intersection of recruiting and employee experience?

Kalifa Oliver (02:53):

I think we don't see people as employees enough when they're the candidate or they recruit at the stage. We have this tendency to treat them so differently when the employee experience is a complete continuum. So one of the ways I typically tell recruiters and just talent leaders to think about the employee experience, it becomes the minute somebody puts in an application for your job because protected by laws. So if you think of it from a practical standpoint, they're protected by all sorts of laws. The minute they entrust you with that information, that is the point at which the employee experience matters. Candidate experience is a part of employee experience even if the person doesn't get the job. That's something to think about. It's all about the employee value proposition that organizations are making. Your employees value proposition is essentially that product of employee experience that you are selling and you're putting out there and you're promising to people who decide to accept an offer from you. And so one of the challenges I see is that gap, we see them as two different things when they're not, it's just a continuum of experience.

Shannon Ogborn (04:05):

Yeah, that's such a valid point. You're validating the experience during the process that a candidate would have internally once they join. So if you can't sell that to the candidate upfront, they're definitely not going to believe that it's going to happen internally either.

Kalifa Oliver (04:22):

I mean that's so true, and if you think of it from a practical perspective, when somebody has a not so good or bad experience and they still decide to take the job and there are multiple factors why somebody may not have the privilege or the ability to not take the job. Maybe they really like the job and they're really hopeful, but it's a little bit of a trauma. It's a trauma experience and all you do while you're in the job is constantly wait for the other shoe to drop to validate your feelings at the beginning. And so we don't want to keep validating those feelings, especially when it's bad at the beginning. You know what I mean? You really want people to come in with hope and really the hiring part is supposed to be the best they ever treat you. If you really think about the candidate experience and the hiring experience as a part of your employee experience and your employee value proposition, then it should be this is probably the best stick on a treat. This is the most room I might have for negotiation. But I also believe once I get in, I will have the fruits of this experience. That's the part where there's not enough of a through line. You know what I mean?

Shannon Ogborn (05:31):

Definitely. And I know one of the other things that we had talked about was the internal mobility experience and how that can play a role in employee experience. Can you walk me through a little bit about how internal mobility is defined and how you think about the connection between internal mobility and employee experience?

Kalifa Oliver (05:54):

So internal mobility is really interesting because there's some strange rules that companies have when people want to move from a job in a company to another job in a company. And it's weird because you also don't treat people who are external like that. You don't have the information you have on that person and you should always think about it like that. Internal mobility is just somebody's ability to move through the company career-wise, whether it's a lateral move, whether they're trying to go into a promotional position, whether they're trying to get a new experience. The aim is to keep the people in the job, keep each people in your company, especially when they're highly talented people. One of the biggest things with mobility, we often don't see that person again at that point as a candidate, we just see this as a person who's an employee who's trying to move. So we don't give them all the special treatment, the love, you know what I mean? We don't roll out a red carpet. We say this was your salary.

Shannon Ogborn (06:49):

The prep, internal mobility people rarely ever get prepared to interview for a role.

Kalifa Oliver (06:54):

Right? Absolutely. You're like, oh, this is how much you make. I'm going to just look up your employee file. And it's like, no, you cannot do that if I was an external candidate. So treat me like we're starting from zero, right? Treat me with a blank slate approach. And it's also something when you think about it, these rules for internal mobility often are what perpetuate issues with DEI, issues with inequity, issues with inequity in pay, inequity in treatment, growth and development. And one of the biggest things about talent mobility when you think about it is that's how you lose a lot of your best talents when somebody internal is ready to move and they've indicated they're ready to move and they don't get hired into an internal position. And let's think about it, this person might've been like top two. You're losing the second highest, most qualified person to the position. Chances are when people don't get a job and an internal mobility moves, they probably leave the job, the company within the next three months or so because it just feels awkward because we don't have enough support for internal mobility. So it's almost like you're making this choice, I want to leave you. And I'm like, don't ever try to keep somebody where they don't want to be and give people the grace to explore their options. It always works out better at the end.

Shannon Ogborn (08:18):

A hundred percent. And what always surprises me is, so when I was working at Google, we would often work with candidates from other competitor man companies. We worked with candidates from competitor companies and there were other certain companies that candidates would come to interview with us because they had let their manager know at their other company that they were interested in moving. And then the manager had essentially blackballed them from all other teams from doing work on their current team. And that approach to me just feels so not right, I just don't...

Kalifa Oliver (08:56):

It's foolish. I'll say it.

Shannon Ogborn (08:57):

I've never...

Kalifa Oliver (08:58):

It's foolish. It's foolish and counterproductive. It's anti-talent and it's dumb. We'll call a spade a spade. Dumb.

Shannon Ogborn (09:08):

I'm with you. Yeah, I've never quite understood it, but I am curious what you feel like the recruiting function's role is in internal mobility.

Kalifa Oliver (09:20):

I think with internal mobility, one, I think a lot of companies need to assign recruiters into the internal mobility function. I think it's helpful. There was one organization that I know of that did a really, really cool program. If an internal candidate applied for a job and didn't get it, they were immediately assigned a recruiter to help them because the aim was to keep them in the company especially. And it was mainly if the person lost, it was in a final two and they lost out. And so they would be immediately assigned and a recruiter would help them figure out what are other opportunities within any organization. And the recruiter would then follow up with them later to say, Hey, there's some new opportunities that seem to match. That way you don't lose the person. That way you don't feel like you are being pushed out.

(10:11):

The recruiter's role, I believe, internal mobility isn't leveling the playing field, helping this internal candidate feel like you would make any external candidate feel as well, and don't make them feel secondary because they're internal, because it's easy to not think about the person because you already have them, right? It's easy to do that and I think the recruit's job is to treat them like everybody else that you make feel bright, shiny, new, be honest with them. That's one of the advantages of internal. You have the advantage of being able to access them in a very different way than you can access into candidates. And I think the role of recruiting is to help make that experience much better. And the recruiters have this really special intersection role there of candidate experience and employee experience because now I'm a candidate, but at the same time, this is part of my growth and development journey in this company. That's a big role for recruiters to play, and it's an important role, especially when you're dealing with specialized talent where they got options, lots of 'em.

Shannon Ogborn (11:26):

I think one thing that people don't think about in this internal mobility capacity is there's this myth that internal candidates are so much more preferred treated so much better when a lot of times internal candidates will just get, here's your interview times and that's the only communication that they get.

Kalifa Oliver (11:48):

Yeah, I mean in many cases I found that should be the opposite, that the external candidates are treated way better. And even when you think about the times when companies used to fly people in to attend interviews and stuff, you didn't get all that red carpet treatment. They just told you come by the office at some… Why not give them the experience? But I want to be clear that I don't think that this is just under recruiting fellowship. We've got to train managers to not take people's decisions about their own careers personally. You could love a manager but recognize that you want to try something new. You could love a manager but not like your work. You could hate a manager but really like to work. But it doesn't have to be personal.

(12:34):

And I think too many managers take it personally that somebody wants to leave and it's like I'm not leaving you, I'm not leaving this job in this moment. I'm making a decision about me, about what I need to do because the worst thing you could do is handcuff me in this situation. I'm going to be the worst employee you've had. And now we are going to talk about things like pits and performance and all that stuff. Because that's the other thing a lot of managers do unfortunately, because you're mad, because you’re in your feelings, because you're not grilled. Now at the next performance review because that person wanted to lead. Now what are you doing? Now you're creating a hostile situation for them. Now you're not giving them opportunities. Now you're giving them a difficult performance rating. So again, a lot of this is not on recruiting. This is about creating an employee experience that pervades across the company that is a part of a growth mindset and a growth culture that really believes in continuous learning and development and really believes in doubling down on the employee experience.

Shannon Ogborn (13:38):

People certainly shouldn't be penalized for willing to do what's right for them. It's still about me and my desire to make a change that's going to be in the best interest for my career, my mental health and all of that. And I know that you had discussed one issue that presents itself with internal mobility, which is this disproportionate issues with DEI. Do you want to expand on that and give any other examples of what you've seen to be issues with internal mobility?

Kalifa Oliver (15:46):

Yeah. Well there are a couple of things. Companies that don't do well with DEI as a whole, if you only do a lot of internal hiring, what are you doing? You're perpetuating what's already existing in the company. So again, you're not creating role to grow teams or to get different perspectives and backgrounds into the organization. So you really should look at a mix, knowing what your company actually needs. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you have so much more information on the person. So you have to show more care. And I mean so much more information, you know all about our demographics. You can go look up this person in a very different way and I'm not talking LinkedIn look up. I mean look up this person.

(14:53):

And when you think about that, you have people who are making decisions based on characteristics that they would never use for external people and that includes their salary. Because in that moment, that becomes part of their demographics, their salary, you have access to what level they're at, at making a decision. You know what I mean? The other thing with internal mobility DEI is when you're making decisions to limit somebody's career, we do a lot of our own biases when we're like, I want this person here because they look and see like me, they make me comfortable. And so as much as it can harm DEI, it harms it in two ways. One, you want the safety and that person wants to move and the other way you're pushing them out.

(15:42):

So it's one of those things that will push-pull that doesn't always work, but it's affected regardless. DEI is an issue. And of course I'll get back to the idea of salary. If I started off making a lower salary and women and people from historically marginalized groups, they typically don't negotiate well on salaries. And there are two things: they often don't negotiate well and also typically they're offered less to begin with. So the negotiation often starts off when they do negotiate at a lower level. So I'm in the organization, I've already started at lower level, now you're making an internal mobility hiring decision based on my salary. You're not closing a gap, you're not paying me. And I've seen the policies where you could only move like 10%, but you have… 

Shannon Ogborn (16:33):

I don't understand that at all. 

Kalifa Oliver (16:34):

So much more that you can pay. And I'm like, that's dumb because you will constantly have this person behind. So the only way that somebody can actually move into the correct salary range or a competitive range is to leave. You have to leave the company and come back. It's the only way and you're subjecting your internal candidates to something that the external candidates are not subjected to because you are depending on them to tell you what their salary range is. And that's why I'm really happy about a lot of laws that you can't ask it anymore, but for internal candidates you can go look it up. So that law doesn't protect the internal candidates. And so we've got to think about how we make those decisions. And so we got to get away from that foolishness and that mindset.

Shannon Ogborn (17:24):

In your more recent experience, have you seen any trends of people are trying to move internally, looking at those ranges and saying, Hey, this is the range and you're trying to pay me under the range. Have you had that experience at all so far?

Kalifa Oliver (17:39):

Salary transparency means accountability. And so what I've found now with salary transparency is people make decisions about their career and where they want to be. The minute they find out that why am I the lowest paid person here. And the whole idea about negotiation now? It doesn't work with this younger generation. I'm doing the same work. Our negotiation should not have been that far apart. And again, it just puts accountability back into the system. And let me tell you, I secretly love it. I think we need more accountability in this system. I'm always so floored just to hear younger people just talk about their experiences and their salaries in the most open and transparent way. And I'm like, listen, I'm loving this. This is the shake that HR needs, these shake that organizations need. You got to try something new. We got to do something different. We got to think about people and how we design work.

Shannon Ogborn (18:36):

I feel like there's plenty of recruiting and people leaders that are ready to innovate and evolve. So I really hope that we're going to start making more meaningful movement to that because the workforce is changing significantly and you have to adapt and meet people where they're at so that your organization doesn't suffer. And a big part of that is creating programs and capacities for people to move internally so that people can try new things, grow within your company and provide different value than somebody else.

Kalifa Oliver (19:14):

Exactly. And I think the most important thing that I want to underline and bold that you said is meet people where they are. We spent too many times, too much time, I should say, just pushing people into places that they're not ready for or they should not be in. Meeting people where they at sounds like it's a lot harder than it is. It's not. It's about asking yourself the question, key question of people-centered design. If I make this decision, if I change this rule, how does it affect X group? What is the impact? What is the downstream impact? And it's your design. And I've found in many, many cases the design edits is not that bad. It is actually simpler than having to try to correct it down the line. And I think we spend too much time being responsive and corrective versus really just trying to create a better system from the get-go. And I think that's where we are now. We need to break the system and create new things and new paths right now.

Shannon Ogborn (20:24):

That's such an interesting point and I think really goes well to this other question of what can companies tangibly do to create better internal mobility? And one thing that you and I had talked about previously was really upskilling people to get them eligible to make movement. I think that's, coming up, going to be more relevant than ever with the rise of AI and AI use in roles. Can you tell me more about sort of tangibly, what are some steps companies could take to help their employees upskill to get them eligible to make movement?

Kalifa Oliver (20:57):

I think one, we need to change the conversation around what we are looking for a job. I don't care if you have a bachelor in math, that's good, but I don't care where you got a skill from, can you do it right? I think we have to talk in terms of skills, competencies, what gaps are we trying to fill. What are things that somebody can learn on the job versus what are things that they need to come in to? What are things that I need you to have right now 'cause we need to run? How much running in you and what much walking? How much lead time do we have? So that's the first thing. Change the conversation. When you change the conversations, please write better job descriptions. I go sometimes on LinkedIn and just look at job descriptions and I'm like, what is this? What is this foolishness?

(21:45):

And then you get mad when you get a whole bunch of applicants and nobody knew what you actually wanted and it was play. You didn't know what you wanted and now you're mad because nobody could read your mind. Companies need to better understand the jobs that they're hiring people for. There's no guarantee that the job won't change or that it may not be a shift, but sit down and really think through what you are looking for and communicate that very clearly with your recruiter. And I think recruiters also in a position where they need to push back. Recruiters know the market a lot better, they also know the internal market a little better. And sometimes it's like, I don't know that we need to open this externally. We have a whole team of people that we would just thinking about restructuring, but they have X skill, Y skill, Z skill. I think if we think about talent mobility, even in conversation about layoffs, a whole bunch of Talent Acquisition people who also have talent skills. You know what irritated I often am when I see a company's laying off a whole bunch of Talent people, but hiring a bunch of Sales people and I'm like, you recognize some of these are transferable skills, right? Because you are looking at job titles, you're not looking at job skills.

Shannon Ogborn (23:08):

And they likely know the company, they know the product and it's not always a one-to-one match, especially if it's for a short time or a trial period coverage until the recruiting team needs more function. Again, you should be able internally to flex people into spots. And again, it doesn't always work perfectly, but it would actually, if people took a little bit more thoughtful approach, would reduce them having to rehire, which I feel like is another thing that companies don't really consider the cost of, right?

Kalifa Oliver (23:50):

They don't consider the cost of losing talent. They don't consider the cost of rehiring, they don't consider the cost of employee experience. And I say that because it's sometimes difficult, but you see it, right? In my own experiences and experiences of people I've talked to, we traumatize a whole bunch of people with layoffs and then you further traumatized the people who are your survivors if you will, and everybody's working with a gun to their head because they don't know when any next round of layoffs are. The level of production performance, loyalty goes down the level of money that you're paying out to people's health and wellness because of how stressed people are right now, I don't think they exceed the connection as all your employee experience and you're not seeing the connection that you're making. So you are leaking money from bad decisions, just leaking money because you've decided to traumatize your entire company and then hold everybody around them.

(24:58):

People will not be scared for so long and if they can't get out, you know what they do next. You're just going to find me then because you could only make that threat to me so many times that afterwards what I do is called equity theory in psychology, you're going to get what you get. I'm going to give you what I believe that you deserve from me because even if you don't think of it from a intentional perspective, they don't have as much to give you. They're spending their time that could be spent being productive, worried about whether their family's going to be able to eat in a month, worried about their friend who hasn't gotten rehired. They don't have as much to give health-wise, right? Because you've decided that scaring people works. It's like if you put a gun to my head and tell me work after a while, you just don't have to shoot me, right? It's not a sustainable way to work. After a while if I'm scared, that's all I have, I don't have anything else because I'm spending my time trying to battle share. If I'm trying to battle share, I'm not working to my up mouth capacity. And that's why wellbeing is so important because wellbeing means that people can be more productive, they can find more meaning.

Shannon Ogborn (26:20):

Long term.

Kalifa Oliver (26:22):

And so we got such a long way to go. We made a lot of strides during COVID that unfortunately I can see that being received just reversed off of mere foolishness right now. And I hate to see it.

Shannon Ogborn (26:35):

That's what I feel like especially internal mobility in all of these programs that a lot of companies built previously when the market was really strong are now caught slipping because they're not having a lot of turnover. So they think, oh, we're not having turnover and so we don't need to do these things. But this moment the market turns.

Kalifa Oliver (26:55):

And it will always swing. It'll always swing. It's swung back to employers. You think it's not going to swing back to employees? It'll swing. What you need is balancing market, but if we keep taking these wild swings, it's going to swing back just as wildly and you're not going to be ready for it. Just what, a year ago y'all were talking about quiet quitting and all this foolishness. You think people are staying, you think that's the long-term plan? If you treat them badly? Come on. People are planning. They're planning. The market is terrible. So they're plotting. People are trying to be safe. Survival. It's the thing I tell, people don't like to change jobs and people more certainly do not like to change companies. It is easier to do internal moves because you are already within a safety of something you know. So when you find that people start leaving your company instead of looking at jobs within your company, problem is practice out. The problem is you. The problem is your internal marketplace. Your problem is the lack of transparency. The problem is the dumb rules that exist for no reason, that stop people from internal mobility and we got to do better about stuff like that.

Shannon Ogborn (28:13):

Yeah. Last sort of thought on this, I'm curious if you were a people operations recruiting leader and you were trying to sell the idea of implementing a strong internal mobility program with executives, hiring managers, other stakeholders, what would you be using to persuade them to take this advice and start an mobility program?

Kalifa Oliver (28:37):

Well, you know I'm a data geek, so the first thing I'm going to talk about is your data, like general sentiments on growth and development. And I look at retention numbers and really how much people are leaving the company, how much people are moving within the company. What's the average 10? You have people who actually move with any company. I think you really need to lean on data to tell the story because I think one of the mistakes a lot of people use is they tell this story and then try to find the data to fit it. But data's out there just with the story, this is what's happening. This is what the market looks like in a short term. This is probably what it want to look like in a longer term. That's what I would use. I would use data. You could use all the other things to target at people's heartstrings and all that foolishness, but the cost of internal mobility moves is actually cheaper than external hiring.

(29:27):

That's just the truth. The predictability of the talent that you get from internal mobility moves is higher. You have much higher levels of predictability. You better understand the talent. You have a shorter onboarding period, so you have that resource, which you have better transition planning, the ability to maintain institutional knowledge, right? It's not leaving the company. And I think these are some key reasons why having people grow and stay within a company is extremely important. And not only that, when you have higher levels of internal mobility, you attract more people because it becomes part of your EVP because fundamentally people do not like to change jobs. So if they feel like they can join a company in which there is more internal mobility options, they would more likely join that company because we like to move. It's annoying. You got to relearn people, relearn policies, relearn programs onboard. Again, nobody likes to change jobs. I don't know why people think people like to change jobs. Nobody likes to change jobs. It's just a survival thing that we've all created in our system and now that's just what we do.

Shannon Ogborn (30:46):

A hundred percent. And I actually lied because I have a follow-up question to that question. If you were to be starting an internal mobility program, should you also be thinking about and implementing ways to recognize where there is no movement that is possible and help people exit slowly while helping the business find someone else?

Kalifa Oliver (31:08):

Slowly? I believe in soft-exit programs. 'Cause the way businesses work is as you grow up, as you move up in the organization, it's like a pyramid, right? There's less opportunities as you go up, so laterally people could move around, but as you go up, there are just less opportunities. That's just the truth. We don't have in a company of 60,000, you don't have like 5,000 CEOs. And so I think after a while, it is harder to get a position moving out. I believe in soft landings. If you and your manager are able to discuss this, nowhere for you to go or grow and you really want to move and do more, you want to be a senior software engineer, but in no senior software engineer roles probably won't be one coming up to the next year or two then help them exit. It's fine because two things can happen.

(32:09):

They're not leaving angry, they're leaving supported. I've seen some companies where they will pay you money to exit, right? You just let them know and then you have like three months and all they ask you to do is help them transition and hire the next person free job. And it's not a bits and this, it's just a recognition that we don't have anything right now, but if we do, you are not on a list of people. We won't call if this ever comes up. So you have that relationship. One of the good things about that is you get a lot more boomerang employees, they will come back because you treated them well at the end, right? A lot of companies, EVPs honestly, are demonstrated during the most critical, crucial, hardest decisions. A lot of companies showed what their real EVP was during layoffs. That is a critical, crucial time. And you showed it. How do you really treat your employees during times of change and challenge in a very public way. And so I think the other thing...

Shannon Ogborn (33:08):

Sorry, for those who don't know, can you expand on what EVP means?

Kalifa Oliver (33:13):

Oh, employer value proposition. So it's essentially what are the elements of this company that make it attractive to work for, and that generally is the elements of employee experience. And so one of the issues that I've come up with a lot of companies is that the EVP is what they write down, but what the actual EVP is what you find on Glassdoor and Blind, and you're right, that's what people are actually saying versus what they say and they've marketed as the EVP. And you always want your EVP to align with the reality of your organization. And companies have shown that proposition that they've been selling did not work because you know how you treated people in times of crisis. The other thing is when people have soft lands, they also remain ambassadors free company. And so they are now talking to other people about how good the experience was with this company because they don't have that trauma that you've given them.

(34:12):

They know that they would advocate for you. You now have somebody who has become effectively an alum of the company, an active alum of the company who's willing to go back. But the practical ability to grow in a company had just come to an end at that time. But I think soft exits are so important. We don't think about exits enough. We don't think about the trauma of an exit enough. I think we have to, if nothing else. I think layoffs have taught the workplace trauma lesson in a way that people did not understand it before. And a traumatic ex is tough because what you have is traumatized people going to get new jobs and carrying that trauma to the new job. And now you have traumatized leaders, traumatizing other people in different companies, and it's just a virus that we can't get rid of. You know what I mean?

Shannon Ogborn (35:06):

Human to human. We need to do better about that. At the end of the day, this is humans impacting other humans and there's bad situations, but there's certainly ways to do it, right? And the concept of the soft landing, I think, is a really meaningful way to make people ambassadors for your company even after they left. Because I think we've all been reached out to on LinkedIn before where someone sends us a message and says, Hey, I see you used to work at this company. I see you recently left this company. What was your experience? And so on and so forth. What happens offline that matters exponentially more than what a company is saying?

Kalifa Oliver (35:50):

What they're marketing. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Shannon Ogborn (35:54):

Yeah. Well, taking a step back to look at things a little bit higher level, one thing we like to hear from all of our guests is what are your thoughts on hiring excellence? What does hiring excellence really mean to you and encompass?

Kalifa Oliver (36:09):

Hiring excellence for me means that you are seeing this person as a human being from the very beginning of the process. And so you are designing your process to treat that person as a human being. And so you're thinking through what does my application look like, my reach out to that person if they don't get it, how I treat them? I think that is hiring excellence to me. It's not simply putting butts in suits. It's being a doula, if you will, for the organization. You know what I mean? And ensuring that if that person does get the job, they land. Well, if that person doesn't, they don't hate you, right? That's hiring excellence to me because when you do that, you're setting people up for success immediately. That's excellence to me. That's what excellence is.

Shannon Ogborn (37:06):

I love that. My very last question, and I feel like you have a lot of good spicy takes, so let's hear it related to this topic or otherwise, what is your recruiting hot take?

Kalifa Oliver (37:22):

That too many recruiters think that because they recruited for a long time that they can recognize talent and talent is evolving, talent is changing. Everybody's different. So cut off the nonsense shortcuts and stop making all those stupid posts on LinkedIn like you know all the answers. Just stop it. Stop it. Hiring, recruiting evolves every single day. So stuck with the shortcuts because all you're doing is taking biases and spreading it and telling people it's the truth. That's one of my hot takes in recruiting.

Shannon Ogborn (38:01):

I feel that. And I also have seen a couple of times where folks who have been in the industry for quite some time, and they've had a very respectable career and they have a lot of knowledge in certain areas, but there are folks who are newer to the scene who are doing really great innovative work. And I think sometimes really senior folks can talk down to folks who are a little bit newer but still innovating. And so I think we can all learn a lot from each other. And just because you've been doing something a long time, to your point, doesn't mean that's where the market is at right now. And I think that's also the importance of upskilling and evolving ourselves as professionals, because that's what's going to keep you employed, quite honestly.

Kalifa Oliver (38:56):

You can't be narcissistic enough to believe that you understand everything about the changes in the market. You have to spend time and be intentional in order to do that.

Shannon Ogborn (39:06):

Definitely. I think we are coming up on our time here. Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?

Kalifa Oliver (39:14):

So I'm usually on LinkedIn. That's where most people find me, but I'm on most social media platforms. My, what do you call it? Like handles now? I'm getting old. It's @KalifaO, so at K-A-L-I-F-A-O. So you can find me on TikTok, on Instagram, on Facebook, and then you can go to my website, kalifaoliver.com.

Shannon Ogborn (39:35):

Amazing. Well, Kalifa, thank you so much for joining us on Offer Accepted. You have incredibly valuable insights, and I know that our listeners are going to get such great value out of this. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time. This episode was brought to you by Ashby, what an ATS should be: a scalable all-in-one tool that combines powerful analytics with your ATS, scheduling, sourcing, and CRM. To never miss an episode, subscribe to our newsletter at www.ashbyhq.com/podcast. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next time.