Hollie Delaney didn't set out to work in HR. She wanted to train dolphins. When that didn't pan out, she landed in a casino job that turned into an accidental HR career, one she almost walked away from entirely before Zappos changed her mind about what the job could be.
Hollie is the Chief People Officer at Power Home Remodeling, the nation's largest exterior home remodeler, where she leads people strategy for more than 5,000 employees. In this episode, she talks about the lesson from Tony Hsieh that changed how she thinks about failure, why she tracks turnover instead of retention, and why listening might be the most underrated skill in talent acquisition.
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Connect with Hollie: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hollie-delaney-573b89a/
Learn more about Power Home Remodeling: https://powerhrg.com
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[00:00:00] Hollie Delaney: And he called me in, and he's like, "Listen, if you don't fail, I'm gonna fire you." And I said, "Why would you want me to fail? Like, what are you talking about?"
[00:00:10] 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. Today's talent all-star is Holly Delaney, Chief People Officer at Power Home Remodeling, a people-first home remodeling company with more than 5,000 employees.
Before that, she spent 14 years at Zappos, where she helped rethink HR around what employees actually need. Her path into HR was anything but planned. Early in her career, she found her way into the field after an executive spotted her potential during an interview for a completely different role. Holly Delaney, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:00:57] Hollie Delaney: Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:59] Dave Travers: Delighted to have you. Okay, so many places to go. You have s- a fascinating background, but I wanna, I wanna go back before you got to all the interesting things you've done recently and became a chief people officer and all the things. Let's go back to the beginning.
When did people, and working in the people team, start to feel like something that like, "Wow, this could be a whole career for me. I could envision myself really doing this"? When did that penny drop for you, so to speak, that this is a thing?
[00:01:29] Hollie Delaney: Yeah, so it was a long time ago. I started my HR career in 1996, and it was totally by accident.
It was not a planned thing at all. I was actually gonna be a dolphin trainer. That was what I was gonna do. I graduated college. I moved to Hawaii to go train dolphins. Found out very quickly that I wasn't a dolphin trainer. So I moved home, and I got a job at a casino. I'm from Lake Tahoe, and so I worked at Caesars Tahoe, and I got a job as a concierge/selling tickets to concerts, and I, that's what I was doing.
And my dad's like, "You gotta go get a real job. I didn't pay for college for you to sell tickets to concerts." And I said, "Okay." So I was gonna then go out, I went out for the management trainee program in hotel management, and I said, "Okay, that's, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go into hotel management."
And I got to the final two candidates, and they did, like, big panel interviews in front of all the execs. Ugh. And so I was standing in front of all the execs. They're shooting questions at me.
[00:02:33] Dave Travers: Makes me nervous just to hear about it, yeah.
[00:02:34] Hollie Delaney: Exactly. It was horrible. And, um, I didn't get the management trainee position, but the VP of HR was on the panel.
[00:02:42] Dave Travers: Hmm.
[00:02:42] Hollie Delaney: And so she came to me and said, "We really liked you. Have you ever thought about working in HR?" And at that point, I didn't even know what HR was. I was like, "Is that where I put in my application? Like, I don't know anything about this." And she's like, "Yes." And I'm like, "Okay. Is it a real job? Will my dad get off my back?"
She's like, "Yes." "Okay." So I went, and I started, and I worked at their front desk, and I screened applications, and I did new hire paperwork. I printed ID badges. I filed, and I guess I was good at it 'cause people kept giving me promotions, and so I just kept getting promoted to do other things. I worked my way up to an HR manager.
At this point, I worked at Caesars Palace in Tahoe, Caesars Tahoe, and then Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and then worked at a couple other places, and I got all the way up to an HR manager, and I realized that I didn't like HR at all, that it kinda sucked, and I didn't wanna do it. Uh, but it's all I knew how to do at this point, and I needed a job.
And I remember I was very disgruntled at the job I was at before Zappos, and I was like, "I just need a job." And I applied at, like, every open job in Las Vegas that was looking for an HR person, and Zappos was one of them, and it was a very small company at the time. And I'm like... I interviewed there for, like, four days, and I said, "Okay, this company's really cool.
Let me just get this job, and then I'll change my career, because I like the company." And so I got the job, got hired there, and I went in, and I said, "Okay," like, I went to Tony Hsieh, who was the CEO, and I said, "I wanna switch my career." And he was kind of like, "No, we hired you because you don't like HR. We want you to do it different."
I'm like, "Oh, so I can do things differently?" And he's like, "Yeah. That's what we want from you." And I'm like, "Oh, okay, cool. Then I can do this." And then I got to switch from being kind of the policy and procedure police to really start building, building a people department that was focused on what the people actually needed.
So there was always this talk back when I did the job, and that was back in the early start of HR, where it's like HR needs to speak the language of the business, and the language of the business is finance, basically, and these people don't know the numbers and blah, blah, blah. And I was very much in the camp like, "No, the language of the business is its people.
You have finance. You have a CFO to speak the numbers. Like, you need to have somebody that's speaking for the people. That's the language of your business." And so we always took that approach. And fast-forward, I got to do that for a long time. And then when I decided to leave Zappos, I thought I was done for any other organization, honestly.
I was gonna just, like, go, when I needed money and check groceries or work at Starbucks or Costco and check the receipts or something. And then I got a call from this cool company in Philadelphia, and they're like, "Come out and see us." And they had this great culture and this great company that was really people-first and cared about people and cared about the experience that they were going to have.
And I was like, "If I'm gonna do this, if I'm gonna do a big job again, it's gonna be for a company like this." And so I decided to come out here and take what I've learned and try to implement that here to help, you know, Power grow as they're growing
[00:06:14] Dave Travers: Amazing. So one, one of the striking things about that story, like clearly you had a clear sense of things, whether it was dolphin training or doing HR the old way, like of things that weren't gonna be a fit for you, and it was a very clear sense of direction for yourself.
But one of the things that like is obvious from looking at your career objectively is that you've risen through the ranks. You've gone from being that plucked out to just be an individual HR contributor in after your big panel interview to now leading huge teams. And so, like, leadership sounds like it sort of came naturally along the way in that telling.
Was it natural? Was it easy as you took on the leadership part, or was that a stress or a challenge? How did you think about it?
[00:06:58] Hollie Delaney: I'm gonna say it was easy and hard. I would say the easy part for me was I was always somebody that I was never going to expect somebody to do something that I wasn't willing to do myself.
And so that's always been the way I looked at things, you know? So I was always very involved, even in the day-to-day stuff, where most leaders are like, "You don't need to be that involved in things." I'm like, "Yeah, but if I'm gonna expect them to clean the bathroom, I need to clean the bathroom."
You know what I mean? Like, it's... I have to know what that is. I have to know what it's about. That part always came natural to me. The hard part was I was always a very hard worker, and when I came to being an individual contributor, I worked really hard, and I was able to get things done usually pretty quickly and efficiently.
The hardest part for me becoming a leader is giving that up to allow somebody the space to do their process to get something done. It was very hard for me to look at something and be like, "We can do that so much faster. I can get this done so much easier. I can't let you do it." But then what I found is I was ruining their learning process and not giving them the opportunity to learn and figure out what they needed to do in that process.
So that was harder for me, to really release some of that individual contributor control over the things that were going on and allowing people to do things their way. But when, once I learned that skill, then putting those two things together became, like, really useful and really good for me because it helped me integrate with the employees that I was working with, and it helped me allow them their process.
And by allowing them their process and watching that and seeing what they were doing, I also learned a lot of things that I never thought of, and so it was really good to do.
[00:08:48] Dave Travers: So one of the interesting things about, as you tell that, is that, like, as I'm listening to th- that amazing story as a rising individual contributor who wants to follow your path and become this huge leader, is that one of the places I notice people struggle, and it sounds like maybe that was part of it for you, is if they're really good at doing the tasks themselves, it's almost harder when you're first becoming a manager to watch someone else do it imperfectly when you know so well how to do it yourself.
How do you develop in someone who's taking on management for the first time? H- how do you develop the skill set of saying, "Oh, I know when to let someone figure out their own process and figure it out," and when do I say, "Oh, nope, that's outside of, of like, I need to step in now and correct that"? What... How do you build that confidence? How do you do that?
[00:09:35] Hollie Delaney: What I learned is most of the time if something is safe enough to try, meaning, like, what, what's actually gonna happen if it doesn't happen right on time or if it doesn't happen right the way, the exact way that I was thinking about it? If it's safe enough to try, give the person the opportunity to try, and then course-correct along the way.
It might take a little bit longer, but that person is gonna learn a lot more. There are times, though, not a lot of times, but there are times, though, where it's not safe enough to try. And when you're in these roles, you start to learn what those things are. And if you really sit and listen and observe what's going on around you and in the meetings you're in, 'cause a lot of times when you're in those things, people wanna talk.
They want their voice heard. They're not really listening and understanding what's going on. But if you take a step back and really listen and understand, you will quickly realize what are areas that are safe enough to try and what are areas that it's like, "Listen, we don't have a lot of runway here, so I'm gonna have to jump in here and be like, 'This is the direction we're gonna be taking,' because if we do that over here, this is gonna harm us."
It took a little while to understand that. You have to forgive yourself for making mistakes, you know what I mean? Because that's the other thing about being a high-performing individual contributor is you want perfection, and you think everything you do is gonna be perfect, and when you mess up, you're super hard on yourself.
And the other thing I learned, and I learned from Zappos, from Tony Hsieh, actually, was I remember him calling me in, and that's how I was. It was like if I messed up, I was super upset about it with myself, so I always was trying not to mess up And he called me in and he's like, "Listen, if you don't fail, I'm gonna fire you."
And I said, "Why would you want me to fail? Like, what are you talking about?" And he was like, "If you don't honestly, if you don't fail, I'm gonna fire you, because if you don't fail, you can't grow and you can't learn. And if you don't grow and learn, you're not valuable to me and to this company. And, like, you need to take chances, and you need to do these things.
And if you fail and you learn from it, that's great." He's like, "I don't even want you to think of it as a failure. I want you to think of it as an experiment." And when he told me that, it kind of shifted my mindset to be like, even as I was leading people, to be like, "Okay, what are the things it's okay for us to fail at, and what are the things that aren't?"
And I just started to really listen and internalize that and understand that. And as I experienced the process of failing and learning and going through that process and not getting super upset with myself, I also was then able to help, you know, the people that I worked with do the same thing.
[00:12:26] Dave Travers: So Holly, two of the amazing companies you've worked for, uh, both Zappos and Powerhome, have this visceral sense of culture when I've had the pleasure of walking into the building in both places, in both companies, and, like, immediately you could sense that there's a real sense of identity and culture.
How do you think about, as a chief people officer, how do you think about creating a culture like that, and how do you think about, you know, maintaining and growing? How do you experiment around such a powerful sense of culture?
[00:12:59] Hollie Delaney: Number one, it's about really understanding the values of the company first and foremost, and understanding what the company wants to live and breathe every day, and then leaning into those things.
So having that strong base of the values of the experience that you want to set for employees and, you know, how you want employees to feel and live from day to day. And then it goes into really starting to figure out what employees actually want. So this is a part of HR that I think gets missed a lot, at least in the old days of HR.
Like, HR should really be about the people and what makes them most successful, not about trying to manage to the 3% to 5% that are gonna get something wrong, so everybody has to pay for that. It's about managing to the 95% that are going to get it right, because they are, because m- most people wanna do a good job, and people just make mistakes.
And if you manage to the people that get it right, and not worry about the few percentages of the people that get it wrong, and you look at those on a case-by-case basis, you start to develop a culture that people feel like they, they can be a part of. And then as you start to do that type of stuff, and you really listen, listening to the leadership, listening to the employees, listening to what people really want to happen and what they want from a workplace is also very important.
So just because it's something I want doesn't mean it's something everybody else wants, right? So I have to understand that when I'm looking at these things. And what I think is best doesn't mean that that's what's best for the person that's doing the job every single day. So I can't make an assumption that I know better.
I have to really listen and understand from their perspective. Like, what are the things that they need to provide an environment that makes it special every day for them? And if you can really do those things and put those things into practice and balance it with what the business needs, then the environment becomes not a place that you dread going into every Monday, or you dread going in every day.
It becomes a place where you wanna be. Because we spend so much of our time working, like, I never wanted to work at a place that sucked. It's like when I did, I quit. And I went and found another job. And it's like you spend so much of your time in a company; it takes so much of your life. Why should we as employees not expect higher from our employers?
Like, because we're giving them our valuable time, and that's the way I kind of look at it. If all these people, these 5,000-plus people right now here at Power are gonna give us all of their valuable time and effort to make our company better, I have the responsibility to try to make this the best place possible that they can work.
[00:15:53] Dave Travers: I love that 97%/3% framework. Like, I think that is so powerful. It's so easy in designing any system to say, "Oh, we have to minimize the problems, and so we're going to make everyone who's not a problem endure all these checks and processes and safety controls so that, you know, that becomes slow taxes and drags on their everyday life to manage for the small outliers."
If I'm a leader, a people leader hearing this who that resonates with so deeply, how do I start the process of being like, "I've got to shift from managing the 3% to the 97%," but how do all my systems and processes, you know, have been oriented in a different way? I have legal and risk management and finance concerns. How do I start this process of saying, "I'm gonna shift from the 3% to the 97%"?
[00:16:42] Hollie Delaney: The first thing I would say is what is the real concern? And when I say what is the real concern, like, really what is the concern? So the way I look at these things are there is what we call best practice, right? And best practice kind of lives up here, and it's what some actually don't know who defines best practices, but somebody in the world has defined best practices, and they say this is what it is, right?
And it has been this process where companies have been like, "Well, this is best practice. This is what we need to do," because, like, I don't know if it's these consultant companies that go out and define these, like, whoever, but they've said that this is what it is. And then there's law, right? There's employment laws.
Those are here, right? And it's understanding the difference between what the law is and understanding why the law is in place to begin with, and what the best practice is, and what does the best practice actually do? And if the best practice doesn't actually work for your environment and your company, don't go with the best practice.
Don't break the law But don't go with the best practice. Live in the middle, and live in the middle and design your structure around what works for your company, because a lot of people mistake best practice for law. Best practice isn't law. It's just what a group of people somewhere has decided how a function should run.
And then also really understand what the law is and what the risks are when you're talking about how you want to run the company; then you also can decide where you want to take risks between best practice and law and how you want to do that, and does that risk outweigh the best practice or violating that, or does it not?
Is it more rewarding to do it, or is it not? And when you think about it in that way, and you ask those questions, and when you're working with your other leaders and ask those questions, it's like, "Okay, why do you want to do this? What do you think you get from it?" Like, let's get to the reason, and then when we get to the reason, and we say, "Okay, if we do it this way, this is the risk profile.
If we do it this way, this is the risk profile." But then, if you look at the outcomes, what is the outcome that we achieve doing these? And if they're the same outcome, you can choose which path you want to take. It's harder to do because you have to think through more things, um, and you have to really listen and pay attention and learn all those things.
You have to know the rules, so you know what rules you can break.
[00:19:11] Dave Travers: That's so smart. I think the idea that a framework to question best practice, for instance, to think like, the reason this is considered best practice is because it takes our risk from zero point one percent to zero percent, or is it because it is best for the ninety-seven percent of people who are really paying the bills and making this place magical.
I think that is a super smart way of thinking about it. I love that. Okay, now let's apply that sort of thinking to the world of technology, where Power and, before that Zappos and so many other companies are thinking about the constantly evolving technology that is available and increasingly capable around us, AI, and all the other things.
How do you think about, how do you think about what in the cacophony of all the different, you know, things that are possible and available and we're all being pitched on every day and the pressure to implement more AI, how do you decide what's the next thing that you and your team and Power take on for the people team?
Where's the next piece of technology we're gonna implement, and where are the things that can wait that's not our top priority now? How do you think about that?
[00:20:21] Hollie Delaney: Like I said, I've been in HR for a very long time. You know, I'm not, not a young person. Um, so like I've seen every avenue of technology be developed.
Like I had to buy things on my credit card when there was no credit card machines. You had this little thing with the piece of paper that you ru- you know, rubbed it back and forth. I didn't have cell phones growing up. I didn't have that type of stuff. In HR, when I started in HR, there was no HRIS. There was no applicant tracking system.
Like, we had to carry boxes of paper applications to job fairs, and we'd had to load them in trucks, drive to the job fair, and then take them all out, set up the filing cabinets, and pull out paper applications for everybody that came. It had to all be alphabetized, blah, blah, blah, all that type of stuff.
And so I've seen every iteration of technology as it's come in, and one of the things that I've found is every time some new technology thing happened, everybody was so scared that it was gonna take their jobs, and they didn't know what was gonna happen, and it was gonna be so horrible, and blah, blah, blah, and it didn't.
Everybody still had their jobs. Their job was just different because you had something that helped make it more efficient. I look at AI the same way. I look at it as there is this tool that we have that can move things forward faster. So, like if I'm looking at it for us here at Power, I'm looking at I can use AI to get to every applicant that applies for Power faster, and I can get them to understand the company a little bit better because I have this tool that is much more efficient.
That doesn't mean we're not gonna interview people. Of course, we're interviewing people because we're a people-first business. We have to have that connection. But I can make sure everybody has an opportunity that applies for us to understand who we are in an easy, more efficient way. I also have the ability to now have a tool that can analyze data so much faster than I can myself.
So instead of sitting there and trying to pull the numbers in and do the analysis and the formulas and blah, blah, blah, I can give information to AI. They can put together a full analysis. Now I can read that analysis, and now I can start thinking about how can I move this forward faster because I'm seeing this should possibly work; this hypothesis can work.
What can I do to move it faster? Blah, blah, blah. So instead of all that buildup that can take two or three months before I can even get started, what took two or three months can take two or three minutes, right? And now I can start to move these things faster. What that does, it actually, in my opinion, it creates more work because nobody's ever, ever has a lack of work.
I've never heard anybody say, "Oh my God, I have nothing to do," right? Everybody's like, "I'm overwhelmed. There's too much work. This is too hard," blah, blah, blah. There's never a lack of work. So this is gonna take some things, and it's gonna make them more efficient, but it's going to surface the next thing that we need to work on, the next thing that we haven't been able to get to, but now we have time to do that.
So it starts to pull some of that stuff out of the parking lot. The other thing that I think is important, though, is as we start to use AI, AI needs management also. It needs people to watch it, people to understand it, people to make sure it's doing the right thing. It's different than managing a person But we have to learn how to manage AI bots.
We have to learn how to manage what that looks like and what the next iteration of that is for the business. And so it opens different opportunities, right? It opens like, in my mind, it opens different leadership opportunities that we haven't even started to think about yet. And so I think there's a ton of opportunity with it, and I think it's us really sitting down, doing the same process as I talked about with the other stuff, really sitting down and analyzing what works for us and how do we use this tool to make our company better for the candidates that are coming in, for the people that work here, and for the customers that we serve.
[00:24:30] Dave Travers: Yeah. Well, I think that is such a smart way of thinking about it. And one of the things that really stands out as I hear you walk through that is that at the last two companies you've been at, including Power Now, what's really interesting is that you've gotten and been able to make the case to build some tools internally in both cases, whereas a lot of companies would just say, "Okay, there are three vendors that do this.
Let's choose the best one." And you have uniquely been able to make a business case to say, "Actually, none of these three things are perfect. Let's do it ourselves, and let's dedicate the internal resources." I think that is a dream that many people leaders would love to be able to successfully make cases like you have.
How do you do it? Like, unlock the secret for us to making a business case, getting the resources, and seeing a project like that through.
[00:25:18] Hollie Delaney: Sure. So everybody fights for tech resources, so it's also about understanding, do I need somebody to do it all? Do I need somebody to do a piece? And again, it goes back to understanding what the tools do in the first place.
So back when I started to do this at Zappos, before I came to Power, it was with Workday, and Workday was just out. It was when, I think the owner of PeopleSoft sold PeopleSoft and then developed Workday. It was when that just happened. And when that happened, we really didn't have an HRIS at Zappos at that time.
And so I'm like, "Okay, if we're gonna implement an HRIS, I gotta understand what it is." So I remember I went to Workday's headquarters, and I spent a week and a half just learning how to do this. I learned from the Workday staff how I didn't learn how to code, but I learned how to set it up, what all the different pieces were, what it meant.
Then when I had a clear understanding of what it could do and what it couldn't do, then it was easy for me to go back to my leadership and be like, "Listen. This is what we can get from this tool, and this is what'll help us and how it'll help us. This is what we're not gonna be able to get. And so what I propose is let's use this for this, and then I want a team of developers, whether they're internal or contractors, I want a team of developers that are gonna help me build this piece because we need this for the employee experience, or we need this for, you know, to really live out our core values, and tying it back to how it's gonna help the business And so again, it's understanding the business, it's understanding what they need, it's understanding what tools are available that don't pull resources in the wrong direction and how they're gonna help you, and then what they don't do, and that's where you need to focus the energy for the internal builds.
Because we did use Workday at Zappos, but then we built stuff outside, uh, that didn't work for us. At Power, Power is uniquely different, and they have a business technology team that are dedicated for us building our own technology. And so I don't have to make the business cases the way I did before because that innovation mindset is already here.
So now the big problem is how do I prioritize all the stuff that needs to be done? Like, how do I get people to understand that the tech doesn't work unless we tell it what to do, right? Because a lot of people also think, "If I just implement an HRIS, my life will be better." Not always the case, right?
Like, you have to tell it what to do. You have to have all your business processes set up. You have to know what all of those processes are, and you have to program it and tell it what to do, how you want it to do it. And so that now is what we do. Like, one of the things I tell my teams now who want to get in the priority stack of getting things built, I'm like, "Okay, you don't get into the priority stack until you can show me the manual business process that you've run and that you've tweaked out all the things that you don't want to happen and that it's actually working.
And once you can do that, and you can show to me this is what you wanna do, and you have that business process worked out, then we'll put you in the priority stack to build the tech to support it." And it also gets people to think differently because now they're thinking about what process do I actually want these things to go through?
And then they become a lot closer to the work itself and how it's connected to the company.
[00:28:49] Dave Travers: You, uh, you force people to become the customer, become the user before they commission the work to be done. Very smart. And you, you, you have a customer mindset out of somebody who's asking for resources. Super smart.
Okay. We always end, Holly, these episodes with a rapid-fire section. So I want you to imagine you're, you know, making a cup of coffee in the kitchen and one of your, one of your two CEOs walks up to you, and, you know, you have 60 seconds before you're both walking back to your next meeting. And so one of the CEOs says, "Hey, Holly, you know, I've been thinking about something.
I've been thinking about how do we measure the people team. Like, what are the metrics we should be thinking about over the next twelve and twenty-four months? Like, what's the right way to measure the people team?" What's your answer to that?
[00:29:32] Hollie Delaney: For me, the biggest one is turnover. And a lot of people say retention.
I'm not a retention person; I'm a turnover person, and turnover for a specific reason. And you have to know all the different things. Uh, you have to know what regrettable turnover means and what your regrettable turnover is and what isn't regrettable turnover. And you also have to understand turnover in its entirety because it's not just about the number of people that stay; it's about how many times that one seat turns because your talent acquisition team has to keep filling it.
And so you have to understand the wear and tear of that on your system, which retention doesn't always give you. And so that's why turnover specifically is very important to me, so, and understanding the regrettable turnover. And if you understand those two things, you can also understand, like, why are people leaving?
Is are you providing the environment, which is basically like hiring and retention, hiring and turnover are our two main focuses. We need to find the right people, get them in the door, and we want them to stay for as long as we can have them here because we have a great place to work, right? And everything leads back to those two things.
And if you think of it in that manner, you can look at a turnover metric, and you can get all of the things that you actually need. And it's also a super easy metric to put in place. It's not, it's not overly complicated, and it gives you a lot of information.
[00:30:56] Dave Travers: The regrettable versus non-regrettable part of that is super interesting because I think a lot of people don't have that data to start with.
And so if you were starting the process or coaching someone on starting this process of tracking regrettable turnover, how would you start collecting that data to feel like we know what's regrettable and what's non-regrettable?
[00:31:16] Hollie Delaney: One of the best practices that are out there is if somebody's rehireable or non-rehireable, right?
And then is it a voluntary or involuntary term, all of those different types of things. People don't take it though to the next level, right? Why did they leave? What was the reason behind that? Because everybody's ready to move on to the next thing. Are they rehireable or not? Sure. But are they really rehireable, or are they not?
Like, what if they're not? Why are they not? If they are,why are they? You know what I mean? And really start to get deeper and dig into the next level. And if it's, yeah, they were rehireable, but it's still like, you know, it's kinda eh, they were okay. Um, so yeah, I'd hire them again, but they're not the person that's like I would dive and save if they had to leave.
Like also being able to make that distinction, and working with your leaders, and being like, is this a person that when they leave, there is a big hole, or is this a person that was good, but if they leave, they don't leave a big hole. You'd hire them back again, but it's fine. Somebody else can come and do the job.
[00:32:21] Dave Travers: There's a huge distinction there. The, the question of would you consider rehiring someone is very different than would you rehire them and then figure out the next day what you're gonna do with them because we absolutely want them in the building. Those are two different categories. Yeah. Love that.
Love that. Okay, one more rapid-fire. Same thing. The co-CEO comes up to you in the, in the kitchen and says, "Hey, Holly, you know, I've been thinking about recruiting and talent attraction is such a critical part of our business." For that team in particular, the team that's bringing in our lifeblood of more talent into the building, what's the skill that team needs more of over the next couple years than we have today?
What's that next skill if I'm an aspiring talent superstar that I need to develop that's the next need for a great talent department?
[00:33:09] Hollie Delaney: Listening, really listening. Not asking a question and thinking about your next question, but asking the question and really listening to the answer and learning how to ask the deeper question if you don't get the answer to the first question.
So listening skills, true listening skills, are very important for somebody in talent acquisition, and being able to hear and decipher, like, what is a surface-level answer? Did you get what you're really looking for in that answer, or do you want to dig deeper to really see what's going on? And if you, as an interviewer, as a recruiter, aren't moving to the next question after you answer the first one, and you're taking the time to listen, then you'll be able to do those things.
If you're just looking at your day like, "I got to get through these 10 questions," and so it's just like bam, bam, bam, you're not going to get the information that you need. And that is, to me, the difference, going back to the AI conversation, between AI and a talent acquisition specialist, and the difference between doing those two jobs.
If I'm just going to go to these 10 questions, I can do that with AI, I can do that with a video, I can do that with a lot of different things. But if I'm really listening and then digging to the next thing and digging to the next thing, that's what's going to give me what I need to know to make not only the best decision for the company, so the best decision for Power, but help the candidate themselves make the best decision for them.
Because a lot of times you'll get in that situation, you'll have an understanding that maybe this environment is not what the candidate wants. So maybe I want the candidate, but maybe the candidate's not going to like me. And that is also extremely important to flesh out, because if the candidate doesn't like working here, that's not what we want either.
We want to make sure that the candidates understand who we are and pick us as much as we pick them.
[00:35:03] Dave Travers: Amazing. Holly Delaney, it is very clear why you're a talent all-star. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.
[00:35:09] Hollie Delaney: Thank you very much. It was great to be here.
[00:35:15] Dave Travers: That's Holly Delaney. She's the Chief People Officer at Power Home Remodeling. We'll put her LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And as a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube, also on the official ZipRecruiter channel. If you have feedback for us or ideas for future episodes, send us an email at talentallstars@ziprecruiter.com.
I'm Dave Travers. Thanks for listening to Talent All-Stars. See you next time