At Legacy Health, talent acquisition is shaped by data, experimentation, and a deep understanding of people.
In this episode, Travis Trautman, Director of Sourcing and Talent Acquisition, shares how his team uses mini-experiments to improve hiring speed, candidate fit, and decision-making across a highly regulated healthcare environment. With a career spanning banking, education, and healthcare, Travis offers a rare cross-industry perspective on what truly moves the needle in TA, whether it's reducing time-to-fill or building trust with hiring managers.
You’ll learn:
Connect with Travis on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travistrautman
Connect with us:
💻 All Episodes: TalentAllStars.com
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ziprecruiter/
💼 Dave’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davetravers/
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ziprecruiter
🎵TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ziprecruiter
Enjoyed this episode? We’d be grateful for a rating or review on your favorite podcast app.
[00:00:00] Travis Trautman: Once I had more exposure to data and information, or information systems is we didn't have to guess. All of a sudden, a lot of the guesswork that I think talent acquisition had to do over the years started to fall by the wayside, and we could let the data, frankly, guide our work.
[00:00:15] Dave Travers: So what does it really take for your business to attract world-class talent today? I'm Dave Travers, President of ZipRecruiter, and on Talent All-Stars, we shine a light on the people and the day-to-day processes behind recruitment and retention at some of the world's most influential businesses. My guest today is Travis Trautman, director of Sourcing and Talent Acquisition at Legacy Health, a nonprofit healthcare system serving communities across the Pacific Northwest.
Travis didn't grow up in healthcare. In fact, before joining Legacy, he spent nearly two decades recruiting in banking and education, highly regulated industries with tight labor pools and complex requirements. We talk about what it's like to break into brand new industries. How Travis's team uses data and many experiments to guide their work, and the one recruiting tip that stuck with them for the past 20 years and still shapes the way he leads today.
Travis Trautman, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:13] Travis Trautman: Yeah, thank you. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:14] Dave Travers: Thanks so much for being here. We have so many topics to choose from here. You've done a bunch of different stuff, but I wanna go back. To the beginning, and just talk about you've, you've hit in your career at several different parts of HR and played several different roles, but it seems like you keep coming back to talent and recruiting. Is that right? And if so, you know, what keeps drawing you back in? What is it about TA?
[00:01:36] Travis Trautman: Yeah, no, great, great observation. It's actually hard to admit, Dave. I've been doing this work for 20 years at this point. Still trying to figure out where all the time has gone. I've seen a decade-long journey here. The interesting part I'll say is I'm sort of an anomaly.
I feel most times you're at a happy hour. You're talking to HR, talent acquisition professionals. Everybody's like, I fell into this work. It sort of found me, I didn't find it. I think I'm a little bit of an oddball here that I actually took some courses in college or my undergrad, intentionally wanting to seek out a career path in HR, wandered into an HR rotational program at the bank.
And I think I was on my first or second rotation in the HR space, and I touched on this thing called talent acquisition. I didn't even know what, and then somebody was like, it's hiring people. It's like, okay, cool. That I get, as I got into it, I'll say there were two things that immediately jumped off the page to me, I would say it's the opportunity to meet new people.
I am more on the introverted side than the extroverted side. Recruiting in the recruiting space, say outside of the career fairs and the big networking events, you really get a great opportunity to meet people one-on-one in a personal setting, getting to know them personally and a little more deeply. And that was great.
I was like, this feeds my soul. I love this. And you can connect people to great career paths. I think the other, probably the other big opportunity, and you gotta go back in time here with me, to, to being a, a person in their early mid twenties and then into their thirties. I realized pretty quickly actually talking to my father and my parents, like you have access in this industry to work with senior leaders, executives, even board members at times, and you're talking about things that are gonna shape the future of an organization and how if you hire the right people, what that does to unlock the strategy and the success of the business.
And I was looking around at folks, either. Some operational work or some other, I'm like, this is really rare. I was mentioning some personal conversations I was having with senior leaders, and you'd see others' eyes open up at family gatherings or at work, and they're like, you know, so and so. We're like, oh yeah.
Not taking it for granted or casually, but it was this kind of eye-opening moment of this is really special. This is kind of cool, and I get recruiting and talent acquisition. Gives you that room to have those relationships.
[00:03:47] Dave Travers: Totally. And so I loved how you said feeds my soul there. So I was wondering if, is there one story or activity that time and again that sort of scratches that itch for you, that fills your bucket and is the, you know, helps you push through the harder days? Like, I think that sort of feeds my soul. Part of a career is something that a lot of people miss. What is that like for you?
[00:04:09] Travis Trautman: Yeah, great question. So I kinda, a difficult one to answer too because I, you know, I wish I could just give you this very clear kind of career trajectory and journey, although it's, I've switched now in this 20 years to three different industries, which will probably come up as we talk about recruiting topics or recruiting solutions.
I'll say. So it. The things that fed my soul at, you know, 20 years old, maybe 30 years old, are very different as I've got a family, and that's grown and evolved. So on a very personal level, I'll say the banking world where I got started it was fantastic. When I was first getting going in my career, I traveled a ton, lived in the us, actually moved to Canada for a little over two years.
My youngest was born when we were there. All of that was incredible. And I would say, though, at the bank, I was also traveling a significant amount. I was on the road every week, every two weeks, every three weeks, traveling around the us, traveling around Canada. And that was great at one point in my life.
But as I would come back home and kids of all at that early age over span of a week or two, and they were like, they were different people when I would get back. So what fed my soul when I got started in this absolutely changed doing something different. And that was around the time I made a switch to the education field.
It was something that I could come back home and talk about. I was traveling less, which was cool. I was based more in the Portland metro area, but I could also talk to my family about things, and I would say it made me. A better parent. I knew how to engage with my children in a better way. I knew to ask them about their day and in ways that they would just say more detail than the standard generic, like, no, nothing.
I didn't learn anything at school today. So I would say early part of my career, definitely switched there and then, David, to kind of take it a little bit closer to home. I've been in healthcare now for a couple of years, and been with this hospital system for two years. I actually think in August, at this point, things have continued to evolve for me personally, right?
My kids are older now. I've actually got one that's driving, my parents are aging. Got a mother with multiple sclerosis who navigates the world in a wheelchair. I have a much different view on life and what it takes to, you know, be healthy, have preventative healthcare, have mental healthcare. So, sort of long-winded way of saying, I think we just need to pay attention to what, again, what feeds our soul, because that's gonna change and evolve as we not just get older, but as we have different life experiences and things change around us.
So for me, it's enough. It's a long journey.
[00:06:28] Dave Travers: We don't have to be a static self. It's okay if soul food changes over time. I love that. Okay, so you've now been at Legacy Health for a couple years, as you've mentioned, and healthcare is not the field you've been in the entire, your entire career as you went through.
Talk about what makes healthcare different, and for those who haven't been in it or haven't been out, maybe have been in it and ha haven't been outside of it. What's truly different about healthcare, and what's maybe a perception that people think is different, but hiring people is hiring people?
[00:07:02] Travis Trautman: Yeah. That's a fantastic question. I think we all know our interactions with healthcare, and typically, it's the clinical side of things. I was more often than not, our first entrance into the world is gonna be in a hospital system. That's where we'll go for regular checkups and appointments. So we have these assumptions around the medical side, and when you really get into the fact that we're, some of our locations, we're running really a small city in a hospital.
So when you think about the facilities and the maintenance, keeping clean air, pressurized air, low humidity air, when you're thinking about the safety and security in our buildings. We take it very seriously, and we have the security screening. When you're entering into our facilities, when you're looking at all of the human resources and the aspects that run a hospital system, it's a much larger endeavor than I think we probably know just on the patient or the consumer side.
I will say, though, the transition in, so again, I've been doing talent acquisition for long enough. There's things that I know, there's some truths. I'm still learning and evolving with all of that, but one thing. I think most people can probably relate to that do this work is we learn in talent acquisition that skills are transferable, talents are transferable.
For those of us that have been in different industries and made the move, you see how industries are stronger when they learn from each other, and they get out of that silo of just retail, just healthcare, just banking. And I think that's been really helpful. I would say while healthcare is drastically different than banking or education, where I've spent most of my journey before moving over here.
I think that the key theme, if you kind of tie it all together though, these are highly regulated industries. These are also fairly conservative industries. There's a heavy legal and a compliance component. There's a heavy auditing component, and then from a talent perspective of who we're needing to hire and bring into the organization, there's this sort of predefined, finite pool of people, whether that's, again, banking or education in healthcare, that's sort of set up for us.
And I mean, there's, there's licensing requirements for who we can hire. There's different stipulations that a federal government or state a regulatory agency will apply on who we can move into these roles. And the constant, I would say, across all three industries, too, is that those are shrinking workforces in a lot of cases.
And whether that's family demands, whether that is aging workforce. And so there's this kind of constant, uh, need to replenish the workforce and make sure that we're a part of a talent solution and not just clearly in talent acquisition, we're hunting, we're bringing people in, and that's a big part of our work.
That's a sourcing effort, but at the same time, we need to do our part in give back and make sure that we're growing and developing that next generation of people too.
[00:09:39] Dave Travers: I think growing and developing talent is a huge theme, not just in healthcare, but elsewhere too. But obviously, in healthcare, given the demographics of shifting nature of the workforce and shifting nature of our population and healthcare needs is like a huge topic.
The other thing that's been really interesting about your path is as we touched on, you haven't been in recruiting the entire time, and so I'm wondering when you're working closely with the talent team and the recruiting team, but you're not on the team. If you've been an HR business partner, you've helped manage the technology infrastructure for hr, et cetera, et cetera.
How does it look when you're a little bit on the outside versus on the inside? What did you bring back to talent? Having seen the perspective from a different angle?
[00:10:25] Travis Trautman: I think in any of the roles I've had, I've always tried to keep a foot in recruiting in some way, shape, or form. So I will say, even as in my last role before coming over here to Legacy Health.
I still had a little piece of talent acquisition the entire way, but I also had HR systems and some other HR operations work, and I think there's. So we start to think about, I think the nature of the question, the things that really keep this sort of grounded, I'll say there's a heavy, there's a heavy data component to our work, which we'll probably have an opportunity to give some examples around it a minute.
So I think bringing data into the talent acquisition space is really important. Bringing that ability to analyze business problems and how we can apply operational solutions. I think a lot of that has been a pretty important part of it.
[00:11:08] Dave Travers: Yeah, absolutely. So you touched on data there. Most people when they decide to get into recruiting in talent acquisition, they don't come in and saying, data feeds my soul.
That's why I want to get into talent. But often, once they're there, they realize data is very important. So how do you think about embracing that? If you come into it as a people person who loves to meet people and loves to connect people to opportunity, and then you're faced with the realities of your role, you've gotta be knee deep in the data, and the data's always changing and growing.
How do you think about that? How do you evolve into a data leader, not just a people leader?
[00:11:42] Travis Trautman: Yeah. I love the question when, I'll say that, that time with an HR systems team, it really lemme strengthen that because we did have people data, people analytics wrapped up into that work. I will say that. One of the biggest observations that I had once I had more exposure to data and information, or information systems is we didn't have to guess.
All of a sudden, a lot of the guesswork that that, uh, I think talent acquisition had to do over the years started to fall by the wayside, and we could let the data frankly guide our work. I'll say my, in my last role, one interesting example, as it kind of relates to this, is that we had. This incredible way to assess, and this is to give you kind of a real-world example here of data guiding the work versus making the assumptions.
We had this great way of assessing talent that was coming into the organization, candidates into sort of three talent assessment categories, which would indicate who's gonna create the best learning environment, the best kind of most engaged environment in a classroom setting for students or children, and that work was great.
It could easily indicate the best sort of highest quality teachers from a performance standpoint. But I had this assumption coming in that if you'd hired great people, get 'em into the role, tenure, turnover, retention, all of that would take care of itself. And what we realized pretty quickly using data and using the insights that we had available, that wasn't actually the case.
We were finding it would almost backfire. We were hiring amazing people, but we weren't putting them into a similarly amazing environment. They would actually jump out faster. Those that stayed. So it's one of those where I will say it needed a talent acquisition piece. We're obviously hiring the people, but when you dig into the data of who's staying, who's sticking with us, who's growing and developing over time, really started to shine a spotlight on other areas where we had to influence within the HR teams around things like retention, around engagement, around performance, around leadership, strengths and qualities.
So, it's kind of an interesting one where I thought I had my work cut out for me, of I'm gonna find you the best people, get 'em in quickly. But that could backfire if we weren't taking care of the other part of the equation is how are we onboarding and training and kind of growing their careers. But again, data was the. It is a single thread that runs through all that to help us out.
[00:13:53] Dave Travers: It's the connective tissue that gives the stories of human connection to opportunity and getting people great jobs and all that stuff. The anecdotes are what people remember, but it's the, it's only trusted by those who guard the resources if there's data to support it.
So you can't have the one without the other. So shifting gears here, you along your journey, not decided at some point that. I'm, I see myself or others start to see me. Maybe in some order, I'd be interested to hear which one came first as a leader, not just an individual contributor. So when did that journey, a part of the journey, come for you, and do you remember a specific moment where you were like, Hey, this leading people thing, not just being the doer alone, might really be something that I would love.
[00:14:42] Travis Trautman: This is more of the stumble into it part of my career than the intentional me seeking it out part of my career. To be fully transparent, we were in an interesting time. If we go back earlier in my career, when I was at the bank, actually, that's when I got my first start in kind of management and supervisory work.
We had an incredible team of recruiters. I think when you get into a team of talent acquisition folks, there's often this shared experience that's this bond. There's this recruiting can be a very difficult, often thankless job, quite honestly. Um. Leaders will have an amazing idea. You help enable and set that up with hiring the right people.
And then a lot of the leaders that you're supporting will get the credit for all the great work that's been done. So as a team, you need to celebrate and support each other and really rally, and that's that. So I think you have such a strong bond and camaraderie as a group. So take that as a little bit of the context that we were in at the time at the bank.
We had a wonderful team that was working well together. We had a leader that we loved who took another opportunity outside of the organization. Then we went through three or four pretty quick rounds of external hires that had come into our department, and our team really didn't figure out the way to navigate the organization and how to make it successful.
And we were all like, we were like, this is great, new boss. We'll help make you successful. And they just kept fizzling out. So one day I got a call from I guess boss's boss at the time, she's a phenomenal human being. She said, Hey, we just need to stabilize this team for a little bit. We've had a couple failed searches.
We're not entirely sure where we need to go. Can you just step in and kind of oversee things for a little bit? It was almost positioned very casually, so that was my stumbling into it. I was like, sounds great. I talked to a couple of my colleagues. I was like, Hey, does this sound good to you if I could do this?
I didn't even think about the idea of going from a peer to a manager and all of that. Fast forward first week in the job, get a client escalation complaint. That's more of a performance situation, and I'm like, here we go. This is apparently what I just signed up for. So kind of an interesting journey of just having a great group of coworkers to help with that.
But then also taking some of our internal training sessions and brushing up on my own skills that ultimately turned into a permanent opportunity. I ended up staying in the role, transitioning from there outta the country with the organization. Moved to Canada for a couple years with them, as I mentioned, and just kind of stayed in the management world ever since then.
[00:17:02] Dave Travers: And so as you have grown then in the management world, what are the skills and abilities that have been most important to you to sort of be successful in doing that? So you told your story and your journey in a very humble way, but you wouldn't keep being asked into these positions if you weren't doing something effective.
What is the key to being effective as you keep taking on more and more people? Management responsibility,
[00:17:27] Travis Trautman: I will say a couple of things that I started to talk about at the, you know, earlier when we're talking about meeting people, I mean, I have a genuine appreciation and curiosity for individuals on my team and just, I would say, human beings in general.
So there, there's the, you'll find this genuine interest in connecting and getting to know people personally and professionally, to what their dreams and aspirations, and motivations are in the world. So that is a part of it from a team perspective, I think that comes through loud and clear with anybody that's worked for.
I think transitioning from that to the other part that we have to do is advocate for the team, and we have to ask for resources. We need budget for things. We need to innovate. We need to try and experiment. Early in my career, I got introduced to a gentleman, so I think I was still recruiting at the time, but it was around that point.
I was just starting to get into supervisory work. John Blasko with Recruiting Toolbox, got to know John through a conference that I was attending and heard him speak. Talked to him briefly afterward. He helped me understand. And in different words, that I'm hoping he still talks about to this day is it has been so impactful and stuck with me for nearly 20 years at this point.
The things that get approved in an organization that I've found, projects that get budgeted, the areas that command attention for leadership teams in the recruiting space, it almost always can be tied back to a case on hiring faster, improving the quality of hire, lowering cost, or diversifying the workforce.
I will say when the work that we're doing is connected back to those things, it's stuff that organizations typically value. Leaders that are overseeing budgets and deciding where we're gonna allocate those investments. They care about those things. It often is sort of the underpinning of very successful business results and business strategy.
So that's a little bit of my shout out to John. That's, that was tips and advice that I got 20 years ago that's kind of carried me all the way through.
[00:19:18] Dave Travers: That is great advice. And one of the, you know the first one you mentioned there, speed is a great one, for example, because it's impossible to imagine ever going into your boss's office or anyone's boss's office and being like, I just feel like we're being a little too responsive to the business's needs.
You know, like, I just wish, you know, there's a little bit more time that passed before we decided to be so responsive. No one ever has that experience for good reason. So let's talk about speed for a second. How do you take a principle like that that's really powerful and universally true? And you then apply that to a specific situation.
How do you think about, and you mentioned, you know, in healthcare sometimes there's regulatory, legal, you know, there's all sorts of things to think about. How do you impose the speed principle upon a hiring process?
[00:20:09] Travis Trautman: Yeah. Love this discussion. And this is another one that I'll build, sort of plagiarize from my conversations with John since it did come up.
And I think this is almost a direct quote, what I'd heard at the time, early, again, early in my career, and career speed is the love language of hiring managers. And that is like it is burned into my brain from a long time ago. So I think that was emphasized though, and, and what I've found was it relates to speed.
That is one of your quickest ways to get credibility, to show impact. To show that we can go quick, that we're listening, we're acknowledging. The one piece that I would touch on here is, I noticed speed of hiring and acknowledging what you're sharing. It is gonna be relevant to the industry that you're in.
It's going to be relevant to maybe a specific team within the industry that you're in. So there is a little bit of cultural sensitivity to this or awareness, and in the context, is gonna be important too because I'll say I've got friends and colleagues in the height or you know, a tech startup space, speed means something very, very different than it does to a recruiter in a banking space.
The speed or the pace that some of those organizations work that have no history, standing it up a little bit of maybe initial investor money to get things going, it's gotta be like right now. And so, you may run into things that are relevant there, where a one-and-done interview process is perfect.
That's what works for that organization. That's great. Um, I will say as it relates to speed and more regulated industries where there's the re legal compliance may be more conservative. I always like to make sure that our speed matches or mimics an organization's decision-making process. So, as an example, you send me a contract and we're working on it, and I need five levels of reviewers, and it's gonna take three months.
There is some version of that where it's okay to have an interview process, not necessarily take three months, but having kind of multiple levels of decision maker hierarchy. That's our culture. If somebody's frustrated with that, great. I'm not saying it's legacies, but I'm just giving you an example. If that's who you are and how you structure things, perfect.
If you're more of a place that quick conversation, quick legal review, and it's done, you might be getting away with kind of a two-round interview process and wrap it up. So, summarize speed's very important. Managers love it quickly get credibility, but you also need to make sure it's right for your organization's needs.
[00:22:26] Dave Travers: I think that you have to both ground yourself in the business realities that you know you can't hire overnight for certain types of high-skilled roles and highly regulated environments, and at the same time, questioning with a, you know, sort of approaching a problem with a blank sheet of paper sometimes, rather than accepting, you know, the three-month reality that everyone's accepted forever is also maybe not the right way to do it.
So I love that balance. Okay. As you think now about the future of your organization and for healthcare in general, there's so much different stuff happening. So much technology entering the fray constantly about what's gonna change and be different. How does that get back to the TA team? What are the skills that are gonna be different that are necessary in the next three years than they've necessarily been in the past?
For you as a TA leader that you're looking for, for your own team, like what do we need more of to be able to adapt to the future better?
[00:23:28] Travis Trautman: A couple of things that I learned going back to the work we were talking about earlier time with an HR systems team and connected to a talent acquisition team.
I'll say there are times that we're aware of, maybe we're pitched, we're sold on the dreams of a product offering or a service or solution that can be technology in, in most cases, there's a technology underpinning or a backdrop. So I'll say no, no stranger to how technology solutions can be sold and all of the things, all the problems that they'll solve for you.
What I have grown in my career to understand and appreciate is that a lot of the times we are, we're starting to look at the solution before we've really identified what's the problem that we're trying to solve. And so that, that's maybe to answer the question, that's probably the first place that. I think it's very important that I apply to my work and as as a leader in the talent acquisition space, or a leader even in the HR system space, it's really figuring out what's the situation or what's the problem that we're trying to solve, and then how is this a solution that that helps us meet that need.
So the other thing that we'll do sometimes to make it pitched or run into or read an article about one particular technology product offering AI is obviously very, very intriguing to everybody right now that can open the conversation to thinking about innovation and how an organization has used it.
But I also still like to go through a pretty thoughtful process of saying, just 'cause I ran into this one thing, or I heard about this one thing at a conference, that may not be my right answer or my final answer, are there other product offerings that should be considered at the same point? So as much as I'll get excited about something, I like to surround myself with people that can do the kind of the thoughtful approach.
Make sure that we have the mapped out. What that solution's gonna be applied to? Otherwise, I will say the times where I've rushed into something that's been more of an emotional decision, or I just got really excited and kind of tried to experiment with it. It didn't last as long, or it wasn't as successful.
[00:25:18] Dave Travers: Yeah, there's sometimes the demo doesn't translate into the reality after the fact, and really mapping out how are we really gonna, you know, what's the end user? How are they really gonna use some technology? So talk about that in you referenced AI, that's the hot topic everyone wants to talk about for very good reason.
Right now, we're all inundated with supervisors, colleagues asking us how are we using AI? Can we be doing something smarter? There's hundreds of vendors out there talking about all their AI. How do you navigate that? That field of rapidly changing and evolving sets of questions and pressure in some cases to embrace the new thing.
And how do you discern then? You know, we're not gonna do a hundred new things at once. How do you decide what's right and when?
[00:26:07] Travis Trautman: And this is where I would say that the benefit of having some tenure in the industry under my belt helps quite a bit. I'll say this feels eerily similar to what probably happened in the first stage of my career, which is the big data boom.
Now, has the big data gone away? No big data has not gone away. It's infused in everything we do. But it's definitely positioned different than it was at the outset. Transition outta that kind of era. Then we got into the blockchain era. That was the big thing I was gonna change, you know? I was gonna revolutionize the world.
I don't think I've heard about blockchain in a sales pitch in a couple of years now. Now we're getting into the AI revolution, and there's things that I was using previously in my career that are now repackaged and marketed as an AI solution. I'm like, it seems that's kind of interesting. That seems like the same thing we used to use before.
We call it AI. So I think to answer your question on maybe the discernment part or the assessment, I think a little bit of a little bit of this is take it in strides. I think it's another piece where I've talked a little bit about the emotional reaction. I mean, we never wanna fall behind, we never wanna never wanna let our skills and our talents and our careers start to become the fax machine.
That's what, so, you know, we wanna avoid that for sure. So I think there's this doubt in the back of our heads, if we're not paying attention, we're not trying and experimenting with it, we're going to slip. And in some cases that's true. You see that? A lot of that with certain technology businesses that have popped and then have wrapped up their operations.
So I really like to take the learnings and what's out there and again, back to the idea of make sure we're applying a solution to a need in a leadership role in an organization. Now, I think the other thing that's been really valuable is spending time looking at almost the readiness of where we are for some of these solutions.
So at certain points in my career, I've noticed it with a lot of colleagues. They get excited about the new shiny thing that's being talked about, maybe purchase it or start to explore it, and their organization isn't ready. That's a fundamental truth of the organization needs to be ready. Your team and department needs to be ready if you haven't spent time getting your job descriptions in a place where they're marketable with a good value prop.
There's some foundational things that I think we right before pramid. The tip of the iceberg are really exciting things, would be my personal opinion. With that said, though, I'll just, the kind of last piece on i,t though, I really do value the readiness piece would be stabilizing certain things and developing and continuing to grow, and then running little experiments on the side to test this stuff out.
Cause inevitably, you're gonna find that gem that works great, and that's the one that needs to be scaled, and it needs to be scaled quick. You're also gonna find the things that just. It was a great idea, but it wasn't implemented, right? You never just wrap those up quick and then move on the next thing, but it's kind a balance stabilization and why you're still looking to innovate.
[00:28:53] Dave Travers: There's a great book called Little Bets that I think really supports that, which is the idea that, you know, making a few large, we're just gonna do one massive implementation at a time, take a couple years, and it's very hard to predict. How well that's gonna go.
And if you do it a little bit at a time, get a little real-world feedback, and can do 10 times as many experiments, the end result feels messier when you're in the middle of it, but the end result is often very clearly better. I love that. So, Travis, one thing, as you've described about experimentation and making bets is.
You need a whole system, a whole infrastructure, an organization that is willing to go along for the ride. For you, what's the key to knowing you have the ability to take a risk on, in a constrained, smart way to try some stuff out, and not every single one's gonna be a 10 out of 10 success?
[00:29:47] Travis Trautman: This is a question that I'd actually ask when I was interviewing here a couple of years ago, to make sure that this was gonna be the right environment for me to be able to apply.
All of that. And when you're in the interview process, you hear the things, but then you actually need to be in the environment to see if what you had heard is gonna be supported. And so two things that I'd heard, which I've now experienced after joining here the last couple years, I would like to acknowledge, and that is credits to Legacy Health's executive team, and the senior leadership team as a whole.
There's a couple of things that this organization has done that. Give me that space and give the organization the space. Frankly, whether you're in the clinical side or here, there is this culture that's been established, which is built on safety. It's built on respect. It's built on trust. We have a heavy emphasis on psychological safety and professional safety.
You actually hear that being referenced in meetings, and if we know we're walking into. Say a difficult conversation. Those are actually words that you'll hear around. Let's create a psychologically safe space, a professionally safe space, so that we can have those ideas. You're not fearing kind of a risk or the implications of that.
And that is a cultural thing that I believe a leadership team needs to set. Create and, and we absolutely have that as a foundation. So heard about it in the interviews. Definitely have experienced it when I join.
[00:31:07] Dave Travers: Okay. So that's amazing. And if you walk into and inherit an organization like that, incredible.
We all, I think whether those exact words are used, we all want feel like we can go into a meeting and brainstorm ideas and decide, let's, let's try something. But if you have not done this before, if you've not put your organization to this test, give us some advice. How do you be a leader and create a little bit of this space, or invite the organization along for this sort of space? So you, too, as a leader in a different organization, can take some of these little bets and experiment.
[00:31:39] Travis Trautman: It's a great place to dig in. That is just so I acknowledge too, that is a privilege and a benefit to have that which I do not dismiss.
From a team perspective, though, I do think there's two parts. First, it's important for me, I think about this actually quite a bit. I need to make sure that I protect that culture that's been established or that expectation that's out there, and I can protect it by making sure. We're modeling and living those behaviors in the team that we're actually reinforcing those.
But also every morning we do a 15-minute team huddle in my group, and we'll go through any escalations or things that are outstanding from the previous day. We just do a quick check-in. I absolutely make sure that is a discussion around, and we encourage around giving honest opinions. That's about around respectfully disagreeing, that's around, making sure there's shared accountability.
[00:32:23] Travis Trautman: I love the morning huddle because if I have something that I was supposed to get done or a barrier that I was supposed to remove for the team the previous day, that morning huddle is the, have we done those things? Are we feeling like this is on track or not? So I think, to answer the question again, acknowledging the privilege of walking in and inheriting that, there's still an important responsibility to protect it too.
[00:32:44] Dave Travers: Okay, we always end these episodes with the lightning ground, so I want you to imagine you're bumping into the CEO of Legacy Health, and there in the, you know, in the cafeteria. And the CEO says, Hey, Travis. I was thinking you are the expert on this, and we have 60 seconds while we wait in line here. I interview people all the time, but you're the pro. What's your one best tip to become a better interviewer?
[00:33:08] Travis Trautman: I think this has been a key theme, which is, I can't avoid, so I'll bring it up one more time. Care about the people you're meeting. Don't fake it. Genuinely care about them. I think we spend so much time on active listening. There's different ways of communication, all of that.
I have found that if you're caring about the human being in front of you, the experience and the story that they're telling, and also asking sort of probing questions to make sure and understand that fits with what you need, again, back to that's a solution to a problem, then you're gonna be in great shape.
I think it makes it, one of the easiest things that you can do is actually caring about a human being that you're spending time with. You get some of your best hiring results from it.
[00:33:47] Dave Travers: Travis Trautman, head of TA at Legacy Health. Thank you so much for taking the time. It's clear why you're a talent all-stars. Thanks so much for joining us today.
[00:33:56] Travis Trautman: Love it. Thanks, Dave.
[00:34:01] Dave Travers: That's Travis Trautman, director of Sourcing and Talent Acquisition at Legacy Health. We'll put his LinkedIn profile in the episode description as a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. And if you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentall stars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All Stars. See you right back here next week.