Tom Hacquoil: Welcome to Talent Talks, quick five questions to get to know leaders in recruitment. I'm Tom, CEO at Pinpoint, and today I'm joined by Phil Strazzulla, founder of Select Software Reviews, a platform to help buyers choose the right software for them and frankly save a ton of time.
The way I think of it, having worked with Phil and Select Software Reviews for a very long time, is it's like a good mixture of the best of both worlds from G2 and Gartner, right? You get like lots of stuff to go look at lots of detail to dig into. But you also get really valuable insights, research pieces, deep dive reviews actually written by Phil and his team. And so do go check that out. We'll put the link in the show notes. His personal LinkedIn page is similarly a goldmine of tips and advice including training videos and other content for HR leaders. So he is a real expert in the TA tech space and we're super lucky to have him with us. Phil, thanks so much for joining us.
You ready for the 10 quick questions?
Phil Strazzulla: Let's do it. Thanks for the kind words.
Tom Hacquoil: No sweat. Cool. Look, I've tried my very best to describe what select software reviews is all about, but can you give us a sort of 60 second summary from your side?
Phil Strazzulla: Sure. Our mission is to help HR and talent acquisition professionals find and buy the right HR technology. Most of us are really good at our jobs, but we don't need to also be really good at finding what technology to use.
And that's where our team comes in. You can read our reviews on our website, or if you want bespoke tailored advice, you can book a time with somebody in our staff who is an HR or talent technology expert, and we will tell you exactly what tools you should be using. We can make introductions to those vendors and just be there throughout your journey to give you advice, help you with internal stakeholder management, pricing, et cetera, and it's totally free.
Tom Hacquoil: Amazing. Thanks. We're going to touch on recruitment and that's going to be the focus of the conversation, but I think obviously I know you personally, and I know your background. I think it's always useful to get some perspective. I think it'd be great just to get 10 seconds on where you were and what you were up to before you started Select Software Reviews. And then also to get a sense of if you weren't in the talent space today, what you'd be doing.
Phil Strazzulla: Sure. So I started my career off as an investor doing early stage software investing at this company called Bessemer Venture Partners, everything from SaaS companies to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Shopify, some of these big companies that we know today.
And I always wanted to start a company. So I went to Harvard business school to get my MBA, taught myself how to program and built a couple of different products, one of which became an HR SaaS that helped companies to market themselves to the potential employee population. And after five years running that business, I hired somebody to run it for me as a general manager.
And I just saw that most HR teams are struggling with what software to buy and so I started SSR. I think the sort of curve ball, what I might be doing. If I wasn't in the talent space, there's like a small probability that I would be a wrestling coach. I was a state champion wrestler back in the day.
I'm still super passionate about the sport and it's got a place in my heart for sure.
Tom Hacquoil: Cool. I have known you for a number of years, probably five at least. And I did not know that. So I'm glad we've had this conversation. Cool. Back to the recruitment stuff, I think. You talked about it just 10 seconds ago, right?
You said you talk about the different role that you play in helping HR folks choose the right technology and help them with that process. I think it'd be good to start on where the mistakes are, right? So when you're talking to these people and they're coming to you and asking for advice, what's the biggest mistake you're seeing folks make when they think about evaluating new software?
Phil Strazzulla: I think, unfortunately, there are hundreds of potential mistakes. I'll throw out a couple here. One is I think a lot of folks use a pre-existing vendor. So the canonical example of this is somebody does our payroll and we need a applicant tracking system and we just buy their ATS because we already have a relationship with them.
And nine times out of 10, it's not a good solution. And that's actually that vendor's strategy is just to cross sell stuff at you. And it doesn't have to be good. They know they have the beforehand, they have the pre-existing relationship. So that's probably the biggest one.
I've seen people just have the wrong valuation criteria. We've seen people pick a tool based on logo colors, based on, silly things that happen in the sales process. I was talking to somebody yesterday who is very adamant that they want something that they're going to install on their computer with a CD ROM. Sometimes people need to just open their eyes a little bit and seek out the advice of other people in their organization, an organization like ourselves and just do a little bit of homework and learning. Because this is a really impactful decision that is going to make or break, your employee experience, your candidate experience, and it's going to have an impact on your personal career as well.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, I agree. I'm sighing internally as a result of some of the comments that you just made, but the thing I'd say anecdotally is we really believe in the work that Phil's doing at SSR because it's great for the buyer, right? It's really genuinely value add for someone evaluating new tools, because the guardrails are there, there's great advice there, there's useful content.
It's also selfish that they're really good for us as vendors because two things happen. One, by the time we speak to a buyer that's done some research through SSR or spoken to the advisory team, the conversation just flows much more freely because it feels like a much more focused and educated interrogation almost, right? Like you know what to ask, you know what you're assessing us on, and that's great. But also because you help us avoid poor fit customers, right? Oftentimes folks will go to SSR or a comparable platform and look for tools, and we aren't the right tool. And actually we don't want to take up your time unfairly there either.
We want to focus on the customers we're well placed to serve, and you want to not waste time as a buyer. And I think actually it adds value to both ends of the market, which I think is often underappreciated. We focused a little on the bad and the backward. Can you think of some examples on the flip side, like what are organizations really getting right when they think about buying tools and what's the sort of patterns you're seeing in really sophisticated organizations?
Phil Strazzulla: Yeah, I think that the best professionals are having a very clear business case for why are we doing this, what is the state of the world right now? Why is it broken? What could it look like in the future? And why is this the right way to get there? And there's probably some numbers associated with that, right?
Around time to fill, retention, onboarding, cost per hire, whatever the case may be. They're socializing that internally with internal stakeholders to get the people that own the budget that might have a part of implementation or evangelizing new tool to get on board. And then they're doing their research and they're explaining the research that they did.
They're saying, 'Hey, we talked to these four vendors, here's our criteria, here's how they stack up. And this is why we want to select this one. And this is the timeline. And this is what we think will happen in the future'. What I love to do is encourage folks to build this little business case out and then put a calendar reminder for six to nine months in the future to go back and revisit it and say, what actually happened, right?
We thought our implementation go live would be X and it was Y before that or after that. And why was that? We thought time to fill would change this way. We thought cost per hire would change this way. We thought that the ability for recruiters to have X, Y, Z capacity change. And understanding why you're right or wrong can be really impactful for your own personal development.
Tom Hacquoil: Sure. No, that makes a lot of sense. We have conversations with folks all the time that run these processes and get promoted afterwards because they've had such a successful implementation that it's really moved the needle for the business. I think equally, if it goes wrong, it reflects really poorly on the way that you approach that process and how you manage the relationship with the vendor.
And so stakes are high and it's just worth spending the time to get stuff right. You guys produce a lot of content and a lot of kind of actually useful analysis, industry insights, et cetera. And I called that out at the beginning. I think you recently put out a kind of HR trends report, right?
I guess anything you'd pull out of that as particularly interesting trends or insights.
Phil Strazzulla: There are a couple of things that came out. One is your average HR team is absurdly overworked. And I think this is something that happened that always happened historically. Cause most companies are like, Hey, this is a cost center.
We're going to give it as few resources as humanly possible, which is very unfortunate. And then COVID just made it worse. There was a million problems with COVID with, remote, and mental health issues and all these things, changing priorities, scaling up and down workforces. And I don't think it's changed.
I think we found that like 42 percent of people have to work more than their typical hours just to tread water. And so that's a huge theme. They've got too much going on. I think another is that, and we talked about this a bit before we recorded, but last year, it wasn't the boom time for HR technology buying, and now we're seeing that market come back a lot.
So people are buying more technology. The HR tech vendors are growing. You look at the stock prices of the publicly traded companies. You look at the employee counts for the private companies, everything's trending in the right direction because people are coming back. They're saying, hey, there's more stability.
We know we're not going into this horrible recession that we feared. We're back out of COVID the economy's going well, and we need to tool up. We need to have the right stuff in place to keep growing and hit our goals.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, all good points. I think I will just call out as a complete side note, I do a lot of these and normally I speak to the person I'm hypothetically interviewing for about 35 seconds before we hit record. Whereas Phil and I are both extremely late now because we spent 30 minutes chatting about random industry trends and things. And that is another reason why I would encourage you to actually follow the content he produces because it's genuinely useful. Cool.
Look moving on. I think we talk about challenges. We talk about thematic trends You've alluded to a bunch of those in your answers to the past couple of questions, right? But as we look forward to 2025, I think what do you think are the big hairy, scary challenges on TA team's minds and how should they be thinking about it?
Phil Strazzulla: I think that the biggest challenge that we're gonna see is an influx of AI generated applications, and I think it's just gonna clog the systems pretty substantially. You know, our inboxes are blowing up. Our phones are blowing up or you know everything because it's just so easy to create this human- esque content and we've got a couple open recs open right now, and you can just tell that many of these applications, cover letters, et cetera, are written by some sort of LLM.
And so I think it's going to be hard for TA organizations to figure that out. And I think it's going to be really important to figure out what level of AI augmentation is acceptable and maybe even preferable from candidates. Because obviously you want people who are leveraging these technologies. You just don't want them using them to spam the world and apply for thousands of jobs at once.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think, interestingly, I had a conversation with a really senior TA leader, our client earlier today, and they're trying to get buy in from leadership to roll out and try and experiment with some of these kind of new AI focused tools on the TA side, on the recruitment side.
And I think they weren't getting much buy in and they said the thing that flipped the switch and actually got the leadership teams to take it more seriously was they essentially framed the problem as the candidates are already using a lot more AI than us. So that we can't afford to be scared because if we, as an organization, are behind the AI adoption of the candidates that we're reviewing, we're screwed, bluntly, right?
And I thought that was a really clever way of framing that conversation. I'm gonna steal that and use it elsewhere, because everything you've just said makes, makes a great deal of sense. I think maybe piggybacking off of that, what is your advice for TA leaders who want new tools, whether it's ATS, HRIS, really anything in their ecosystem, and they're not getting buy in, right?
Like how would, you talked a little bit about commercializing the business case and things earlier, but do you have any kind of takeaways for folks struggling with that?
Phil Strazzulla: I think you have to think pretty hard about why are you so convicted that this is the right thing to do? And how do you articulate that to the powers that be?
Your gut, you're taking in data all day long from candidates, from your work, from your colleagues, et cetera. And if you think we really need a new ATS, there's a reason for that. You just have to put it into a bite sized presentation, conversation, communication that a super busy fragmented other human will understand.
Because even if somebody is the CFO of an organization. It doesn't mean they have an unlimited attention span. It doesn't mean they don't have 8,000 things flying through their head around. I got to pick up my kid. I got to make that presentation for the board. I got to do all these things. And so it's just really all about communication.
And what I would recommend is if there's somebody in your organization that you've seen this do really well, take them out for coffee, get their feedback. The other thing is that if somebody is in your organization who's just like an ROI, like finance sort of brain, get them involved as well, because chances are, you haven't built a ton of ROI models, but the person who leads strategy or FP&A or has the MBA has. And they can really help you in an hour or two put something together that's more compelling to a CFO type of brain.
Tom Hacquoil: Cool. Look that's really useful advice. And I think actually a really good place to wrap, because that advice is really practical, it's really actionable and super valuable. So Phil, thank you so much for joining me today. Folks listening, you can follow Phil on LinkedIn.
You can check out Select Software Reviews, speak to the team there about buying your next HR tool. I will put links to all of those things in the show notes, but Phil, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time.
Phil Strazzulla: Yeah. Thank you.
Tom Hacquoil: Thanks a lot.
The way I think of it, having worked with Phil and Select Software Reviews for a very long time, is it's like a good mixture of the best of both worlds from G2 and Gartner, right? You get like lots of stuff to go look at lots of detail to dig into. But you also get really valuable insights, research pieces, deep dive reviews actually written by Phil and his team. And so do go check that out. We'll put the link in the show notes. His personal LinkedIn page is similarly a goldmine of tips and advice including training videos and other content for HR leaders. So he is a real expert in the TA tech space and we're super lucky to have him with us. Phil, thanks so much for joining us.
You ready for the 10 quick questions?
Phil Strazzulla: Let's do it. Thanks for the kind words.
Tom Hacquoil: No sweat. Cool. Look, I've tried my very best to describe what select software reviews is all about, but can you give us a sort of 60 second summary from your side?
Phil Strazzulla: Sure. Our mission is to help HR and talent acquisition professionals find and buy the right HR technology. Most of us are really good at our jobs, but we don't need to also be really good at finding what technology to use.
And that's where our team comes in. You can read our reviews on our website, or if you want bespoke tailored advice, you can book a time with somebody in our staff who is an HR or talent technology expert, and we will tell you exactly what tools you should be using. We can make introductions to those vendors and just be there throughout your journey to give you advice, help you with internal stakeholder management, pricing, et cetera, and it's totally free.
Tom Hacquoil: Amazing. Thanks. We're going to touch on recruitment and that's going to be the focus of the conversation, but I think obviously I know you personally, and I know your background. I think it's always useful to get some perspective. I think it'd be great just to get 10 seconds on where you were and what you were up to before you started Select Software Reviews. And then also to get a sense of if you weren't in the talent space today, what you'd be doing.
Phil Strazzulla: Sure. So I started my career off as an investor doing early stage software investing at this company called Bessemer Venture Partners, everything from SaaS companies to LinkedIn, Pinterest, Shopify, some of these big companies that we know today.
And I always wanted to start a company. So I went to Harvard business school to get my MBA, taught myself how to program and built a couple of different products, one of which became an HR SaaS that helped companies to market themselves to the potential employee population. And after five years running that business, I hired somebody to run it for me as a general manager.
And I just saw that most HR teams are struggling with what software to buy and so I started SSR. I think the sort of curve ball, what I might be doing. If I wasn't in the talent space, there's like a small probability that I would be a wrestling coach. I was a state champion wrestler back in the day.
I'm still super passionate about the sport and it's got a place in my heart for sure.
Tom Hacquoil: Cool. I have known you for a number of years, probably five at least. And I did not know that. So I'm glad we've had this conversation. Cool. Back to the recruitment stuff, I think. You talked about it just 10 seconds ago, right?
You said you talk about the different role that you play in helping HR folks choose the right technology and help them with that process. I think it'd be good to start on where the mistakes are, right? So when you're talking to these people and they're coming to you and asking for advice, what's the biggest mistake you're seeing folks make when they think about evaluating new software?
Phil Strazzulla: I think, unfortunately, there are hundreds of potential mistakes. I'll throw out a couple here. One is I think a lot of folks use a pre-existing vendor. So the canonical example of this is somebody does our payroll and we need a applicant tracking system and we just buy their ATS because we already have a relationship with them.
And nine times out of 10, it's not a good solution. And that's actually that vendor's strategy is just to cross sell stuff at you. And it doesn't have to be good. They know they have the beforehand, they have the pre-existing relationship. So that's probably the biggest one.
I've seen people just have the wrong valuation criteria. We've seen people pick a tool based on logo colors, based on, silly things that happen in the sales process. I was talking to somebody yesterday who is very adamant that they want something that they're going to install on their computer with a CD ROM. Sometimes people need to just open their eyes a little bit and seek out the advice of other people in their organization, an organization like ourselves and just do a little bit of homework and learning. Because this is a really impactful decision that is going to make or break, your employee experience, your candidate experience, and it's going to have an impact on your personal career as well.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, I agree. I'm sighing internally as a result of some of the comments that you just made, but the thing I'd say anecdotally is we really believe in the work that Phil's doing at SSR because it's great for the buyer, right? It's really genuinely value add for someone evaluating new tools, because the guardrails are there, there's great advice there, there's useful content.
It's also selfish that they're really good for us as vendors because two things happen. One, by the time we speak to a buyer that's done some research through SSR or spoken to the advisory team, the conversation just flows much more freely because it feels like a much more focused and educated interrogation almost, right? Like you know what to ask, you know what you're assessing us on, and that's great. But also because you help us avoid poor fit customers, right? Oftentimes folks will go to SSR or a comparable platform and look for tools, and we aren't the right tool. And actually we don't want to take up your time unfairly there either.
We want to focus on the customers we're well placed to serve, and you want to not waste time as a buyer. And I think actually it adds value to both ends of the market, which I think is often underappreciated. We focused a little on the bad and the backward. Can you think of some examples on the flip side, like what are organizations really getting right when they think about buying tools and what's the sort of patterns you're seeing in really sophisticated organizations?
Phil Strazzulla: Yeah, I think that the best professionals are having a very clear business case for why are we doing this, what is the state of the world right now? Why is it broken? What could it look like in the future? And why is this the right way to get there? And there's probably some numbers associated with that, right?
Around time to fill, retention, onboarding, cost per hire, whatever the case may be. They're socializing that internally with internal stakeholders to get the people that own the budget that might have a part of implementation or evangelizing new tool to get on board. And then they're doing their research and they're explaining the research that they did.
They're saying, 'Hey, we talked to these four vendors, here's our criteria, here's how they stack up. And this is why we want to select this one. And this is the timeline. And this is what we think will happen in the future'. What I love to do is encourage folks to build this little business case out and then put a calendar reminder for six to nine months in the future to go back and revisit it and say, what actually happened, right?
We thought our implementation go live would be X and it was Y before that or after that. And why was that? We thought time to fill would change this way. We thought cost per hire would change this way. We thought that the ability for recruiters to have X, Y, Z capacity change. And understanding why you're right or wrong can be really impactful for your own personal development.
Tom Hacquoil: Sure. No, that makes a lot of sense. We have conversations with folks all the time that run these processes and get promoted afterwards because they've had such a successful implementation that it's really moved the needle for the business. I think equally, if it goes wrong, it reflects really poorly on the way that you approach that process and how you manage the relationship with the vendor.
And so stakes are high and it's just worth spending the time to get stuff right. You guys produce a lot of content and a lot of kind of actually useful analysis, industry insights, et cetera. And I called that out at the beginning. I think you recently put out a kind of HR trends report, right?
I guess anything you'd pull out of that as particularly interesting trends or insights.
Phil Strazzulla: There are a couple of things that came out. One is your average HR team is absurdly overworked. And I think this is something that happened that always happened historically. Cause most companies are like, Hey, this is a cost center.
We're going to give it as few resources as humanly possible, which is very unfortunate. And then COVID just made it worse. There was a million problems with COVID with, remote, and mental health issues and all these things, changing priorities, scaling up and down workforces. And I don't think it's changed.
I think we found that like 42 percent of people have to work more than their typical hours just to tread water. And so that's a huge theme. They've got too much going on. I think another is that, and we talked about this a bit before we recorded, but last year, it wasn't the boom time for HR technology buying, and now we're seeing that market come back a lot.
So people are buying more technology. The HR tech vendors are growing. You look at the stock prices of the publicly traded companies. You look at the employee counts for the private companies, everything's trending in the right direction because people are coming back. They're saying, hey, there's more stability.
We know we're not going into this horrible recession that we feared. We're back out of COVID the economy's going well, and we need to tool up. We need to have the right stuff in place to keep growing and hit our goals.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, all good points. I think I will just call out as a complete side note, I do a lot of these and normally I speak to the person I'm hypothetically interviewing for about 35 seconds before we hit record. Whereas Phil and I are both extremely late now because we spent 30 minutes chatting about random industry trends and things. And that is another reason why I would encourage you to actually follow the content he produces because it's genuinely useful. Cool.
Look moving on. I think we talk about challenges. We talk about thematic trends You've alluded to a bunch of those in your answers to the past couple of questions, right? But as we look forward to 2025, I think what do you think are the big hairy, scary challenges on TA team's minds and how should they be thinking about it?
Phil Strazzulla: I think that the biggest challenge that we're gonna see is an influx of AI generated applications, and I think it's just gonna clog the systems pretty substantially. You know, our inboxes are blowing up. Our phones are blowing up or you know everything because it's just so easy to create this human- esque content and we've got a couple open recs open right now, and you can just tell that many of these applications, cover letters, et cetera, are written by some sort of LLM.
And so I think it's going to be hard for TA organizations to figure that out. And I think it's going to be really important to figure out what level of AI augmentation is acceptable and maybe even preferable from candidates. Because obviously you want people who are leveraging these technologies. You just don't want them using them to spam the world and apply for thousands of jobs at once.
Tom Hacquoil: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think, interestingly, I had a conversation with a really senior TA leader, our client earlier today, and they're trying to get buy in from leadership to roll out and try and experiment with some of these kind of new AI focused tools on the TA side, on the recruitment side.
And I think they weren't getting much buy in and they said the thing that flipped the switch and actually got the leadership teams to take it more seriously was they essentially framed the problem as the candidates are already using a lot more AI than us. So that we can't afford to be scared because if we, as an organization, are behind the AI adoption of the candidates that we're reviewing, we're screwed, bluntly, right?
And I thought that was a really clever way of framing that conversation. I'm gonna steal that and use it elsewhere, because everything you've just said makes, makes a great deal of sense. I think maybe piggybacking off of that, what is your advice for TA leaders who want new tools, whether it's ATS, HRIS, really anything in their ecosystem, and they're not getting buy in, right?
Like how would, you talked a little bit about commercializing the business case and things earlier, but do you have any kind of takeaways for folks struggling with that?
Phil Strazzulla: I think you have to think pretty hard about why are you so convicted that this is the right thing to do? And how do you articulate that to the powers that be?
Your gut, you're taking in data all day long from candidates, from your work, from your colleagues, et cetera. And if you think we really need a new ATS, there's a reason for that. You just have to put it into a bite sized presentation, conversation, communication that a super busy fragmented other human will understand.
Because even if somebody is the CFO of an organization. It doesn't mean they have an unlimited attention span. It doesn't mean they don't have 8,000 things flying through their head around. I got to pick up my kid. I got to make that presentation for the board. I got to do all these things. And so it's just really all about communication.
And what I would recommend is if there's somebody in your organization that you've seen this do really well, take them out for coffee, get their feedback. The other thing is that if somebody is in your organization who's just like an ROI, like finance sort of brain, get them involved as well, because chances are, you haven't built a ton of ROI models, but the person who leads strategy or FP&A or has the MBA has. And they can really help you in an hour or two put something together that's more compelling to a CFO type of brain.
Tom Hacquoil: Cool. Look that's really useful advice. And I think actually a really good place to wrap, because that advice is really practical, it's really actionable and super valuable. So Phil, thank you so much for joining me today. Folks listening, you can follow Phil on LinkedIn.
You can check out Select Software Reviews, speak to the team there about buying your next HR tool. I will put links to all of those things in the show notes, but Phil, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate your time.
Phil Strazzulla: Yeah. Thank you.
Tom Hacquoil: Thanks a lot.
