What if your talent team was the key to unlocking tens of millions in revenue?
At Lockheed Martin, that’s not a hypothetical. John Heyliger, VP of Talent Acquisition & Workforce Transformation, shares how his team recruits high-stakes technical talent at scale—while avoiding costly hiring mistakes and proving their value in terms business leaders appreciate.
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[00:00:00] John Heyliger: Take the time upfront. To really assess the role, what are the outcomes that you expect? So if you hire this person, you could say, best hire I've ever made. Sometimes we try to skip steps. I gotta get this person hired. You gotta take the time upfront because what happens if you don't? The rework happens, or even worse, you hire the wrong person.
[00:00:19] 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 leads talent acquisition at one of the most advanced companies on the planet, where the stakes are high and the pace is fast.
John Heyliger is the Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and Workforce Transformation at Lockheed Martin, a global leader in aerospace and defense technology. John's responsible for recruiting specialized, highly skilled workers quickly and at scale. And today we're gonna see how his team does it.
So let's bring him in. John Heyliger, welcome to Talent All-Stars. Thanks for having me. So excited to have you. Okay, so, so many interesting parts and journeys in your career, and obviously incredibly impactful global role you have at Lockheed now, which we'll get to. But take me back to closer to the beginning. And when you were recruiter and first time starting to get pulled into leadership roles or the first time leading a team kind of era of your career, when did you realize that being a recruiter and working in talent acquisition might not just be your current job, but it might be a career or a calling?
[00:01:40] John Heyliger: Yeah, it's a good question. There are a couple points. One, I started recruiting when Y2K was a thing. We had to. All of the business systems had to get set up for that flip over to the year 2000. So ,the craziness of finding talent, I started in a staffing firm, Aerotec,h as a recruiter. So they trained you, you didn't have to have any experience.
And I learned I was pretty good at it. But I think the, probably the most pivotal point was in grad school. So this is shortly after a couple leadership roles and a strategic finance class I was taking, which was really. About mergers and acquisitions and the valuation that goes into that. And our professor, who actually was at one point ran a consulting firm where he turned businesses around.
So he taught us what goes into valuing companies that purchase. And we did a lot of our work was around assessing former acquisitions like the Gillette acquisitions and others. And there was a point in the class where he said. At some point, the most valuable asset that will be carried on financial statements will be human capital and culture.
So the hard part is actually figuring out what the value of those assets are. And that was probably the moment I said, well, that's what I do. I go and find talent to bring into the organization. And you find the right talent and critical skills, can do amazing things to that business. And so it's, and what we talk about, how important it is. How companies grow and what companies they acquire. That was a really interesting point for me, where I realized like what I'm doing actually matters.
[00:03:14] Dave Travers: Yeah. What's interesting about, I think a lot of people who lead big talent teams share with you the background that they started out as recruiters and they were pretty good at it. What's different is not everybody took a strategic finance class, and is that broader business training, including finance, is that useful to you today? Was that impactful as you sort of rose through the ranks and became a leader?
[00:03:35] John Heyliger: Yeah, that's actually why I pursued that. I luckily had a boss that really push for development and if I wanted to take things outside of work that he thought would help me. And so it was a few conversations that led to MBA, uh, focus in finance, strategic finance, knowing that if I had that business acumen, tying talent acquisition outcomes to business outcomes, it was huge.
I still use it today in many cases, and it's not just time to hire and other TA metrics, it's sort of that we used to call when I worked for an RPO firm and sort of those tier two metrics. It takes it up a level, and you actually see how HR or talent outcomes tied to business outcomes.
[00:04:17] Dave Travers: So gimme an example where you're, you know, you've, you've just come across a new process, a new piece of technology, something you need to change, where now you need to advocate for resources, dollars, or time or what have you.
So you can drive down time to hire as an example or some other metric, you know, how do you utilize some, a background in strategic finance to successfully advocate for something that's gonna drive an important business outcome?
[00:04:42] John Heyliger: Good example of that is, this is actually about six years ago. Our business went through major cuts. So we were, they were trying to cut overhead, and of course, much of our budget is in overhead, if you will, and we knew by doing that we weren't gonna be able to fill positions as efficiently. And so we made a case. To not only avoid the cuts, but actually grow the function. And we tied it to what we call accelerated revenue.
So in our business, it's like a consulting business. So you bring on people, you can charge the customer. For what we call cost-plus programs, where they pay for labor parts, everything to build whatever it is, like a satellite. And the faster we could bring talent in, the more we could realize or accrue that revenue.
So we tied a day of cycle time, a day of hiring faster, to a revenue figure. Now, if I remember correctly, it was something like 120,000 per day. Faster we could. Add to the bottom line. The number got pretty significant. And so if we even reduced by 10 days multiplied by the number of folks you bring on, you're talking millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars. We worked with our finance team to come up with that, but that was something that really resonated the business, and we still used it today, so we accelerated revenue. Accrued revenues are some of the metrics we've adopted.
[00:06:04] Dave Travers: So what's so powerful about that is you didn't just skip to the end and say, well, we made a case for tens of millions of revenue, like to make a compelling business case like that. It is so powerful for audiences, whether they're finance audiences or throughout the business, to start with the unit economic, getting one person to come one day sooner or one month sooner. What's that worth to the business? Now let's multiply that by the thousands and tens of thousands of people who would be impacted by being hired sooner.
And that really brings it to life and makes it much more credible and believable, 'cause they understand the understandable unit before you start get to so many zeroes. I love that. Okay, so now take us to your current role, Lockheed Martin. You've been there over a decade. You guys are putting satellites into space building, fighter jets, doing so many amazing things.
But to do that, you have to hire people with very specific technical skills and experiences, and that's an area you come from. You've been a technical recruiter, and now you manage this huge technical recruiting function. What is the key to. You know, think about somebody who's starting earlier in their career, taking on a new job where they're, you know, hiring, technical recruiting. How do you get really good at finding super-specific skills when it's not something where they're just a million people out there who know how to do exactly that job?
[00:07:23] John Heyliger: Well, I, so I, talent acquisition is sales and marketing. You, you have a product to sell, a job, or, you know, a career or a brand, and you have to be able to make a compelling value proposition, if you will. You have to start with what the business is looking for. I think to look for niche, really highly high demand skills, you have to understand what the role is. So we've done a lot with success profiles, digging into what are the first year objectives of the role, what does that person have to deliver to be able to say that you hired the best talent out there.
And then you can sort of back out a reverse engineer into what skills are needed, experiences. So we actually a story, an example of that is. When I actually started Lockheed Martin, we were moving a facility from one city on the east coast, Newtown, Pennsylvania, to Denver, and we had RF engineers. These are folks that designed the payloads on satellites, whether it's a communication satellite or a, you know, weather tracking satellite.
And so we knew that to be able to fill those positions, the folks that wouldn't move, we had to understand the labor market. So we built these success profiles. We identified key skills, we understood what companies were doing the similar work. We looked at what locations they lived in. We pulled LinkedIn data and basically looked at, well, here's our talent supply. And at one point there was like 140 people that could do these high-end payload RF architecture on satellites. And we knew what companies they were, were looked at career paths they took. What they were being compensated. All these things to look at, like, here's our opportunity market. And then we built a whole recruiting messaging, outreach plan.
We had sources, researchers, almost like you would do an executive search where you were looking at all the potential players, and then we did personalized targeted outreach. Some of them preferred text, email. So we tended to learn about that and we monitor that. What was our success rate of the 140? How many were responding? Those that weren't responding or weren't interested, what were the reasons we made sure that the whole selection process, managers were a part of from the beginning helping sell the role? Talk about career paths. We also looked at compensation structure, where we're gonna be competitive in that space.
What was our entire value pro is not just comp, but perks and flex time, vacations, all those things. And so that all went into that approach to be able to sell those, those candidates, we had to fill 60 of them. We ended up filling 50, I believe it was 55. The other five, we, we actually upskilled and promoted folks from the thin, so it was a sales and marketing approach, is probably the simple way I'd put it. You have to understand your labor market, what, what buying decisions they typically make and then you go after them.
[00:10:14] Dave Travers: I love the idea of thinking about it as a sales and marketing approach, but I want to, I want to go back to the beginning where you talked about, I think you were very intentional with your words. You didn't say, I figured out, or we figured out which skills were required or which experiences. You said you built a success profile. What's the difference between identifying required skills and building out a success profile? What's the difference between those two things?
[00:10:36] John Heyliger: Well, I think sometimes you, we as recruiters tend to rely on, oh, here the, here's the manager, here's the job description, and I post and pray versus ask the whys. Why is this role open? Why is it needed? What are the business outcomes that and or product outcomes that this role is gonna contribute to? What's the team look like? What kind of decision authority, like all the things that go into it? Because when you talk to these candidates, they're not gonna apply to jobs.
If you post the job, they likely they're gonna see it and apply to it as very low. So you have to go. Not only find them, hunt them, outreach out to them, and have a compelling story from the beginning. Like, even the title of the job, what the email says. When you do that initial outreach, what are the compelling taglines that you need to hit on?
Are they on social media? Those kinds of things. So it's not just, here's the job spec. We need 10 years of experience in these areas. And that's what you go off of to do the search. So it takes into all those factors.
[00:11:37] Dave Travers: I love that idea of the success profile and really thinking through the full picture of what somebody who's gonna be successful is gonna look like. I think that's a super powerful framework to use. Okay, so now you've advanced in your career to this big global position, and you're not just the successful recruiter. You're not just, you know, thinking about sales and marketing. You're managing hundreds of people. In your function and you're now the people manager and the functional manager for a very big important role within a company, what's the difference or what's the set of skills or journey like to go from that successful recruiter to now somebody who's leading a huge group of people with different needs, et cetera, like, you know, think about people who are earlier on in their career who see somebody who's made it to where you've made it in your career. What's the stuff that's making me a super successful recruiter, now what am I gonna have to do to get where you are today
[00:12:31] John Heyliger: At first? So I guess starting off as a recruiter and then your first leader role, I learned early on that you have that you're only as good as the team you build. You're only as good as your recruiters. I knew I had to hire really good people. Luckily, over the last few years. It's been easier to find talent anywhere 'cause recruiters can work remotely. When I first started, they needed to be in the office. They need to be working with their client groups. They need to be visible, but they also need to know those talent markets that they're recruiting in and have the skills that they're recruiting for have that, you know, be a level of expertise, if you will.
So I learned early on finding the best recruiters. Required. Okay. What's success profile? What kind of skills should they have recruited for? Can you teach 'em those skills? Are they, do they have the talent advisor mentality, which I think we might get into in a little bit? Not just transactional, here's the job, post it. Here's some candidates. It's understanding the talent problem that they're trying to address. Building that profile, all those things. So I had to build that myself in terms of how I went and recruited, um, selected and hired recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators. It was also a matter too of how you structure that model of recruiting.
Do they need specialized sourcers? Do they full life cycle? Kind of depends on the business that you're in. If it's high volume, you can tend to have full lifecycle recruiters if it's niche. Like the RF engineer example, you probably want them paired a sourcers. So it was really trying to understand that model, but I knew early on that I had to hire really good recruiters.
And then, as you shift to leading leaders, you almost have to pivot to building a function that's grounded in purpose. Why does this function exist? And then psychological safety with that vision to drive that speed and quality, and how we recruit. So what I mean by that is at Lockheed Martin, our purpose is hiring the best as fast as possible. It's a simple way to put it. Co-creating that purpose with those teams so that we are now grounded in why we exist. And then you build everything off of that.
[00:14:30] Dave Travers: Talk to me about this idea about being grounded in purpose, and why does this function exist? Like how do you apply that to a function like the sourcing team or to the A function like the coordinator team?
[00:14:41] John Heyliger: You don't have to overthink talent acquisition. It's pretty simple. We have to go find and recruit. Convert them. It's pretty simple, but I think we often overlook the true purpose of the function and tied to the business. So at Lockheed Martin, we win a program. We have to hire people as fast as possible with these niche technical skills.
So speed and quality are paramount. It's not always about doing it at the most cost-effective way. And so we started our purpose around those concepts, the speed and quality piece. And I think if teams understand why you exist and the purpose in which you are operating under everything else, you can link back strategy, outcomes, objectives, their goals, right?
So if a sourcer knows I've gotta go find these people fast, or I've gotta engage them early and often, even before, and you'd happen, happens, that adds to speed. So they can make that connection to that purpose in their day-to-day work. We're often measured in talent acquisition and time to hire. I think what's even more important is helping the business.
I have a lot of passion around is workforce planning. So, how do we know what our demand is years, months, ahead of time, so we're not waiting for a requisition to open for us to actually do anything with? So there's a lot I know in there. So, partnering with the workforce planning team is paramount. But again, using that sourcer example, you can tie. What they do to that purpose statement?
[00:16:06] Dave Travers: Speed and quality is such a great purpose statement because in a world that is in flux, where the roles you're hiring for are changing, where the tools available to the sourcer team, in this case, are changing, it's very hard. Amidst all the uncertainty that all that creates, it's very hard to envision a world in the future where.
It doesn't matter to hire people quickly, and it doesn't matter to have high quality, like those are north stars that feel like a constant where a lot of the details and a lot of the how might change, but those feel as purpose statements, you know, very, very safe and very unlikely to, you know, change and be able to navigate around.
I love that. So let's think about, you talk about these success profiles and mentioned a little bit about how the jobs will be changing in the future. Talk a little bit about what. A recruiter is going to need, if you're hiring today, and what's gonna make them successful, hopefully 2, 3, 5 years from now, what are the skills? How's that job gonna change? How's that success profile changing for individual recruiters across your team of hundreds?
[00:17:08] John Heyliger: I think when we think of AI, it's gonna change how we operate in two ways, making us more efficient and allowing us to improve the ways that we find the right skills for the right roles. You can use the, I think a common thing that our us in this profession realize the right, right skills, right place, right time. You could use that as well. Talent acquisition can be highly transactional, especially in regulated industries, when you've gotta follow all these steps in the workflow and you've gotta have these checks and balances to be compliant.
And so you have to obviously balance that and the risks and legal requirements tied to that. But AI is gonna allow for process automation. Infuse that predictability when it comes, and intelligence when it comes to candidate skill matching. That goes back to the success profile examples where you have to truly understand the need of that particular role or roles of the business.
Be able to build a plan, not only just in terms of how you're gonna go out and search, but the selection process, advising that manager. 'cause we know how important the manager partnership is. You can have the best recruiter working with the managers that's not engaged. They don't know what they want, they're not responsive, and candidate, we lose the candidates in the process because they, you know, they're getting picked up by other companies and moving faster.
So it's really a shift to that, that advisor mentality of understanding the problem that they're trying to solve. Go slow to move fast. Build that success profile, build the plan of how you're gonna select and do the outreach craft the job ads that we know Gen AI offers today. You can write job descriptions a lot faster.
Build the marketing and outreach plan and how a whole process is gonna go through. And then there's really the how do we work more efficiently? What processes can we automate? Some of the ones that we've been talking about are things like interview scheduling. Now there are tools out there that allow for that, but you almost have to consider where AI agents can play in, you know, tools like ChatGPT can allow for recruiters to spend more of that time. On being that talent advisor. And I think a shift, if it's not already happening today, where you can shift to being that candidate advocate and career coach. I know recruiters today, their feedback and the way that their success usually is tied to is manager satisfaction and the manager's happy with their service level.
But I think that has to pivot to the candidate. So, a Lockheed Martin, our operating model, not just grounded in purpose, is candidate at the center. They are our primary customer. It's not the manager. So we use that as our trade-off decision. We're not, we're just building a process, but building the technology. Does this serve the candidate or the manager? And in some cases it can serve both. But those are trade-off decisions we're having to make on whether we use AI, AI agents, chatGPT, using and deploying a new applicant tracking system. That candidate being at the center is paramount. So I, like I said, just to kind of hit on the two examples, the process efficiency, obviously what that technology now brings, but also how can that allow for recruiters to shift their time to being this that candidate advocate.
[00:20:13] Dave Travers: I think it's so interesting to hear you talk about being a candidate advocate and a career coach and a talent advisor because part of your role is not just the global talent acquisition, but also you're responsible for workforce. Transformation, and a lot of that applies. I would imagine that same philosophy applies to transforming and reskilling, upskilling constantly your own workforce. How do those two parts of your job fit together, and how does that philosophy apply to both sides of your role?
[00:20:41] John Heyliger: It's really fun to be in this space I'm in, and here's why I'd answer your question. We're trying to shift our entire business, not just hr. Two, not just common tools across. We have four separate business areas that at least been operating separately for a certain amount of time.
Last several decades. You know, one area we built fighter jets, another we built satellites, and or helicopters. So they tend to hold their own P & Ls, but we can operate the business under common ERP solutions. You know how we buy parts, supplies, materials. Same goes for people. So we have common critical skills across all those businesses where we could leverage how we go out externally to recruit, how we develop them internally, how we move talent across those businesses.
So common systems and processes are huge for us. That's part of this whole transformation effort. So it's common processes, more efficient common tools, enterprise-level tools, and then how do you start infusing AI and process efficiency in those? And so it's translating into what we've adopted in hr, which is this talent marketplace concept.
How do you allow for candidates and employees to see their future? Here's where I want to go. What skills do I need? How do we set up learning systems, credentialing how we post jobs and opportunities in a way that they can see that as a part of the career path they wanna pursue. On the other side, you have leaders that have talent.
You have programs that need skills. How can they see the full supply of talent? Internal, external, know that when they're gonna have a need. Coming up through forecasted talent demand that they can, they know that those skills are gonna exist, or they can take action to develop or recruit those. It's this whole marketplace concept.
So it's not just talent acquisitions, talent development, it's total rewards. It's all those things. And it's kind of leads me to a key pivot. We know in HR we need to make is not just how do we fill a job or how do we develop this person. It's a systemic HR, or what we also refer to as integrated talent solutions.
So it's not just. Like I said, I have a job to fill. I'm gonna go fill it. Let's look at the, you know, the broader talent supply and demand issue. And we use cyber as a big skill. We, you know, we look in security, it engineering, so we actually have an integrated, what we call a product team or a talent solution team.
What we're looking at comm structures to attract them. What talent demand are we gonna need? Does the external market supply those or do we need to make sure we double down internally to upskill, remove them? So it's taking the transformation, common processes, core technology, leveraging AI into this talent marketplace concept so we can deliver a model and HR to support the business in that, that integrated talent solution concept.
[00:23:27] Dave Travers: I love the idea of the integrated talent solution that marries. The evolving needs of the business in the marketplace of the evolving skills and capabilities of both potential workers and current workers. I think that's a great framework for thinking about the multiple parts of your role. So, John, as you've seen the recruiting function evolve over your career and thinking about what's important now that wasn't as important, you know, when you got started, what have you seen evolve and change, and where do you think things are going?
[00:23:54] John Heyliger: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there are four things I'm seeing happen that I think are gonna push us whether we like it or not. Into this shift, and I think it's, well, number one is we're seeing a global talent drop happening. You're seeing some countries where their populations have decreased. You're seeing retirements outweigh folks entering the market. Number two, I think TA and HR as a whole needs to think systemic. I talked about systemic hr, integrated talent solutions, and thinking about talent issues holistically versus TA just focusing on filling a position. Number three] is this increased focus on manufacturing skills.
Even more importantly, is the traditional manufacturing is now gonna blur or blend with engineering. So think model-based enterprise, how you start a product digitally throughout before it's even built. So now you have a skill shift when you think of tech companies in the tech space, especially manufacturing.
Where there's this blend of skills, and how do we change the way we think about that from a recruiting perspective, from a job architecture to how we pay them, to how we develop them. And then I think the number four, and this came up in a podcast, actually, I wish I could credit them, but they talked about talent acquisition.
Plus we've, for years of full-time job, build a full-time job. Now it's about gig workers, freelancers, free agents, project-based work. How does TA play in that space? How do we recruit gig workers, project-based work? How do we help the business determine this is a six-month job? You don't need to fill a full-time role with it.
So it's a shift that I don't think our function is used to yet. There might be companies doing it more effectively, and then I think maybe it's number five. You've seen companies like Palantir talk about college is dead. So this four-year degree, it takes too long. It's too expensive. Students are inheriting this debt coming out that they may never pay back. And so how do companies help develop talent differently themselves? Back to the speed conversation. How do they develop them faster? Do they even need to go to college and get a degree anymore? So those are fundamental shifts that are gonna change the way that we do talent acquisition.
[00:26:04] Dave Travers: John, we always end these episodes with a rapid-fire sort of section where I want you to imagine you're getting in the elevator at headquarters, literal or figurative elevator, and it's just you and the CEO. All of a sudden, you walk in there and it's just the two of you of Lockheed, and the CEO turns to you and says, you know, in the 60 seconds as you're going up to the top floor, John, hey, you think about talent all the time. How should we be measuring our talent function and the talent we have in the building, and how we're doing there over the next couple years? What's your answer to that?
[00:26:39] John Heyliger: Number one, I think workforce planning our ability to forecast, demand, assess that supply, and fulfill that critical skill gap or skill gaps. The, our ability to do that with speed is probably number one, and I would say sort of an offshoot of that is speed to productivity, speed to hire, speed to skill readiness. If we can measure those and be able to use those to figure out how we do that faster and have that workforce supply and demand predictability and accuracy. I think those are the two big ones.
[00:27:11] Dave Travers: Yeah. There are very few business leaders out there who are not gonna like an answer that involves going faster. So I think that's a, that's a guaranteed formula for, for success. Okay. One more. Same situation. Rapid fire, CEO scenario, and getting in the elevator. Hey. John, you're the expert at talent acquisition. I spend a bunch of time interviewing senior leaders, interviewing people internally. I'm thinking about for their next role. Gimme one tip as the pro, like, make me a better interviewer. What's your one tip to make me a better interviewer?
[00:27:44] John Heyliger: Take the time upfront to really assess the role. What are the outcomes that you expect? So if you hire this person, you could say, best hire I've ever made. So be really prescriptive and thoughtful around what those outcomes, this role, and this future person you're gonna hire needs to produce.
Tie that to business outcomes, all those things, and use that to back into everything from not just how you're gonna write the job description, how you're gonna sell the job, how you're gonna market the job, but that's all built in to the interview and selection process, which means you might realize, Hey, I've gotta have a skill assessment.
Because my behavioral interview only gets me so far. And assessing somebody's capabilities. So the next job you have, take that time upfront. And I know sometimes we try to skip steps, gotta get it posted. I gotta get this person hired, the person I had just left, or I just won this new business. You gotta take the time upfront because what happens if you don't, the rework happens.Or even worse, you hire the wrong person.
[00:28:44] Dave Travers: John Heyliger. If I were building a success profile for a head of talent acquisition, I've, I've got some new ideas based on talking to you. You're clearly a Talent All-Star. Thanks so much for taking the time today.
[00:28:55] John Heyliger: I appreciate you having me. Thank you.
[00:29:01] Dave Travers: That's John Heyliger, the VP of Global Talent Acquisition and Workforce Transformation at Lockheed Martin. We’ll put his LinkedIn profile in the show notes below. And just a reminder, we publish video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also. Just head to the official ZipRecruiter channel and look for the Talent All-Stars playlist.
If you've got feedback for us or ideas for guests, send us a note at talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com. I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars, and we'll see you here next time.