Chief chat with Laura Mazzullo

Laura Mazzullo is a seasoned recruiting professional who has worked in the field for nearly 20 years. Since founding her recruiting firm, East Side Staffing, in 2013, she has been solely focused on staffing for the HR world, but training and developing internal recruiters is also part of her wheelhouse. “There are a lot of hiring managers who don’t know how to hire as well as they could, and there are a lot of internal recruiters who are never given opportunities for their own growth,” Mazzullo said. She shared with HR Brew how she trains and supports hiring managers.

How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR?

I help companies learn how to hire better, and help organizations hire HR talent.

What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you've worked?

I worked for a search firm that had 11-hour working days with zero work–life balance and [I] made a change ensuring people left at reasonable hours for whatever they wanted to do outside of the office! The old way of working made zero sense for the modern world.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

That it's just finding résumés. Hiring is really complex, so it’s not just finding the person for the job. That’s one part of hiring. But there’s also the part of coaching the hiring manager through the journey and making sure they’re overcoming their biases, that they’re trained on candidate experience and candidate care, that the interview has been fleshed out…There’s a more thorough strategy to hiring than just, “I’m going to go search for the candidate.”

What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?

Helping executives see their areas of development and giving them the aha moments that help them learn to hire better. The greatest compliment I’ve had clients say to me [is] “Thank you for shepherding us through this process. Thank you for guiding us through this process,” meaning that I’m there to illuminate their areas of development, but I’m letting them grow. I’m not doing it all for them.

What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?

Trend towards more humanization, flexibility, and unique solutions, versus how we always did it. Because I believe human beings want what’s best for them and their community and don’t want to be beholden to everything their employer demands of them.

What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?

Too big of a push towards automation, because it may potentially remove the human aspect from what is ultimately a human profession! When you listen to complaints of candidates, which I think we should be doing more of, they’re annoyed by automation or annoyed by [automated] rejection emails when they apply. I know it’s difficult for internal recruiters to be able to customize messages to every single person, but there has to be some hybrid between a robot who just replies en masse to total white-glove service, personalized service, and I think that’s the balance we all need to find.

Tell us one new or old HR tech product or platform that’s made your life easier, and why.

Well, Twitter isn’t one, but it’s the best, because it’s helped me build community. I have built relationships with recruiters and HR leaders all over the globe there. There’s a real sense of community that we follow each other in certain hashtags. There’s Twitter chat. There’s lots of DMs…Zoom and Twitter are really helpful to me in this moment, but I don’t know if a year from now, there’s gonna be something even better and newer, so I think we have to be willing to continue to shift.

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