Jason Munoz didn't choose a career in recruiting. He was “voluntold” into it after years running operations in the field, and it ended up shaping the next 26 years of his career.
Jason is the Director of Talent Acquisition at Entergy, a Fortune 500 energy company that generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to more than three million customers. In this episode, he talks about how his operational background taught him to run recruiting like a business, why he ties every investment to a measurable outcome, and how the childhood habit of taking things apart to see how they work still shapes the way he approaches people and problems today.
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Connect with Jason: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmunoz/
Learn more about Entergy: www.entergy.com
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[00:00:00] Jason Munoz: I manage the recruiting function like a business. I need to be able to show the return on everything that we're doing, and if I can't explain it, scale it, or repeat it, we shouldn't be doing it.
[00:00:11] 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 Jason Munoz, the Director of Talent Acquisition at Entergy, a Fortune 500 energy company that generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to more than three million customers. Today, he'll share how being voluntold to move into recruiting revealed a passion that would shape the next twenty-six years of his career, why his operational background taught him to manage recruiting like a business and connect every investment to measurable outcomes, and why his childhood curiosity about how things work continues to shape his approach to people, leadership, and business problems. Jason Munoz, welcome to Talent All-Stars.
[00:01:06] Jason Munoz: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
[00:01:09] Dave Travers: Awesome to have you. You have an interesting background 'cause you started out more on the operations side than on the recruiting and talent side. What drew you in? What called you in this direction toward finding and talent and bring more people to the organization? How'd that work?
[00:01:25] Jason Munoz: Well, it was more of a voluntold. Um, you know, it's, uh, in operations, coming through that, as I was moving up into different leadership roles, um, the organization I was with in oil and gas kind of had, you know, a couple paths that you went down to round out leadership, which is both. One was an HR path, the other was a health and safety path.
I had done a bit of the health and safety, and then they were like, "We need you to, you know, go into recruiting." And my response was, was fairly colorful. I was like, "I have no idea what they're doing. I don't know how to recruit, don't wanna be a part of it. I just know that they don't understand what we need in the field."
And they go, "Well, that's why we want more folks from operations to come in and recruit. We'll teach you how to do that." And in the process of doing so, I found a passion I didn't know I had, you know, and that's led to twenty, about twenty-six years in the talent space. And I do what I do now because I love doing it and not because I have to do it.
[00:02:22] Dave Travers: Amazing. So, so do you remember, as specifically as you can, do you remember that moment when you realized you had a passion that you did not know? What was it that made that come alive, or that realization come alive?
[00:02:33] Jason Munoz: I can remember the first couple hires that I had made. I think the one that really stood out to me is I ran into the young gentleman.
He came out to the field. He was going through his training, and I happened to be in the same location where he was. And he came up to me, and he goes, "Man, I can't believe you." And I said, "What?" And he goes, "Everything you told me," he goes, "I thought that you were lying." He goes, "You were telling us we're gonna hate life some days.
It's gonna rain upside down and snow sideways. You're gonna be in the dirt and mud, and you're gonna earn every single dollar that you make." And he goes, "But you said to me, 'If it's in your blood, you're gonna love it.'" And he goes, "It's true." He goes, "I've been through everything in these first few months."
And he goes, "And I love what I'm doing." And he goes, "So thank you for being honest about it." He goes, "Uh, my eyes were wide open And at that point there, I think it helped me realize that coming up through operations, and I think part of the reasons why I had this premise that the recruiters didn't understand anything that we did is 'cause they never came out to the field.
They didn't truly see what we went through. And every person that we have on the team plays a real critical role. We're in a zero margin error. We're in a high-risk environment. Safety, performance, the cultural fit, they aren't optional. It has to work because we have to work together as a team in order to achieve a function in a high-risk environment.
And I think at that point, I started realizing I can take that and I can adopt that knowledge from operations into how we recruit, be transparent, be open, but also start identifying where individuals would best fit into the organization based on what they love to do, what their background is versus what we need for those key skill sets in the field and in, and in the corporate environment that we are hiring into. And I think that led well.
[00:04:23] Dave Travers: I feel it as you describe it, what that's like to have somebody connect to a job that they, you know, where they realize that this is, you know, if it's in your blood, you love it. Like, uh, that, that is, um, just feeling the feeling of knowing you were a part of somebody finding that yourself along the way is even better.
[00:04:41] Jason Munoz: And I still keep contact with some of those, and I've watched some of those careers flourish.
[00:04:46] Dave Travers: Yeah.
[00:04:46] Jason Munoz: I've watched them in as an entry-level engineer out of school, and now they're CEOs of companies that are there. And some of those that I hired, I had conversations with, and we mentor and champion each other through the years in different circumstances.
The impact that talent and recruiting can have on an organization is critical. We're the tip of the spear. We're the gatekeeper, so to speak. So the more that we can speak with the business, understand the pain there, the better we can relay that to potential candidates and ensure that we have the right ones coming into the right job at the right time.
[00:05:21] Dave Travers: So they're not the only ones whose careers have flourished. You've flourished. You've gone from being the recruiter to the, being a leader to a leader of leaders, and at multiple companies leading a big function. How has that been, that journey been from being that one who connects to that person who discovers the, that it's in their blood and they love it, one job at a time and doing that as a recruiter to now being a leader of a function? What has that journey been like? What's different? What's been surprising?
[00:05:50] Jason Munoz: In every role that I've been in and inside of recruiting, I always wanna peel it apart and understand how everything works and why, and you're always pressed to do the best of what you can do. Put a lot of pressure on myself to ensure that I'm not letting others down, and in turn, I don't let myself down.
And I think when I look at the executing of hiring as a leader and coming through it went from, you know, how do I build the system and the team that enables being able to scale and execute and hire as a manager to being able to let go, that I didn't have to have my stamp on every single thing and own every single outcome that was in the organization.
That was the hardest part is to let go of perfectionism. We have black and white i- in what we need to do from, you know, laws and regulations and that, but we live in the world of gray because we work with people. My job now is to kinda set the expectations at large, but also the conditions of satisfaction.
It's not just what we're going to do, but it's how we do that. I need to remove the blockers and measure the right things that have true outcomes, both for my team but also for the organization. And I think that that has been the biggest change of going from that individual contributor that, that is working to make things happen, to the manager that is now learning, okay, how do I have people do that?
How does the business operate? To now being a part in that voice, sitting around the table, building strategy, thinking about what's next, what do we need in five years, not what do we need tomorrow, and helping others learn and understand not only the recruiting side of things, but more importantly, my team understands you can't recruit from the side of your desk.
You gotta get out. You gotta understand what's happening with our stakeholders and bring that back, and let's build real solid strategies. Can't do it alone. Yeah. Need to build strong teams to make that happen.
[00:07:45] Dave Travers: Yeah. And it sounds so different than being an indivi- individual contributor. You, you outline some of the, the stan-- the sort of differences there.
But what, as you've made this transition and now have other people who see your arc and wanna mimic it, you talked about when you switched to recruiting, you were voluntold. You know, as you move up from being an individual contributor to a manager to a leader of teams, is that something where you get voluntold for, or do you put yourself out there and say, let your boss know, like, "This is where I see myself going. How do you help me?"
[00:08:19] Jason Munoz: I think I'm at that stage now where, where I'm putting myself out there. My response is, you know, generally is, "If you need help, let me know. I'm here." At Entergy, where I'm at now, we went through a couple transitions. I've been here just over two and a half years, at looking how we can optimize the COE functions, but also HR on a whole.
And part of that was a full alignment of the talent, total talent function underneath one leader with the individual directors and all that underneath that in those teams. By doing that, it enables us to have that total talent field, 'cause someone's gonna be an applicant once. They're going to become an applicant again, right?
And when we look at growing careers and that coming through, for me now, the excitement is, how do we look at when that person's coming back in, or how do we proactively identify what the individuals can do and not necessarily what they are doing, to provide opportunities that maybe weren't there?
And I think a lot of that has happened for me, where it's being approached of, "Hey, have you thought about this? Would you be interested in learning about this?" And I'm a sponge, you know. It's, I wanna go out, I wanna understand, I wanna learn. I've been in the game for a little while, but the one great thing about the talent space is it's always evolving.
It's always changing. And getting that opportunity to either learn, hear from others, but also share the knowledge in that, it's great. So yeah, there's some voluntold pieces.
[00:09:43] Dave Travers: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:44] Jason Munoz: But it comes with a bit more of a smile now because now it's like, okay, let me, let me dig into that and see what we can do.
[00:09:50] Dave Travers: Yeah, I love that. I love that. It's a little bit, it's a little bit of both. I think that's exactly right. So one of the clear arcs that becomes apparent as you transition from ops to HR and talent, from an individual contributor moving up in the world, and then talking about how you're a sponge and you're learning all the time, and challenges are changing, is that you are a learning machine.
Like, you have, you, the skills you described to connect that first couple hires to their next great opportunity were one set of skills. You know, creating that framework where there's the gray area for people and the black and white of the rules of HR today, that's a different set of skills. That learning piece, that desire to learn, is that innate?
Is it something you look for innately, or is that something that somebody who says, "I want to be successful. I want to rise through an organization," um, I can, I can learn how to learn and be curious and hungry to get the next skill?
[00:10:47] Jason Munoz: I think it's a combination of both. I think if you can do what you love doing, the learning piece comes naturally. The curiosity is built into that.
[00:10:57] Dave Travers: Yeah.
[00:10:57] Jason Munoz: I mean, from when I was a little kid coming up, I'd always taken things apart. I loved being in the yard, being in the garage, trying to figure out what's what. TV's working, well, how does that happen? You know, the radio, things like that. And I think that that's just moved on.
When I first went into operations, my goal and my ambition was I wanted to learn how to run every piece of equipment that we had. I believed in doing so, number one, personally, there, that increased value, but also professionally it increased value because the versatility comes in. I think that this past weekend, I was fortunate enough to go to an event, and we had a couple new nuclear engineers that were at that event, and they had asked me the same thing.
And I asked them, "Well, what do you wanna do?" Right? And they're like, "Well" ... And the two nuclear engineers had different mindsets. One lived in Oregon, the other one lives up in New Jersey. One wanted to become an astronaut to look at how do we get these new modular and micro nuclear power plants up into space.
The other one was, how do we drive this renaissance back for clean air energy in areas that have kind of shunned that, in some of the states and some of the countries that have shunned that, and how can I be that advocate for that? Two different things. And I asked them all, "Why is that?" Right? One of them went back to he loved Star Wars, he loved, you know, those movies that were there, and fantasized about looking up and going, and he had family members that had been pilots and things like that, and it just...
He just loved it. The other one loved nature, loved being out there, loved seeing it, but also had power go out all the time. And so the two of them are looking at that past on things that they liked personally. That is what I always try to say to somebody, "If you want that natural learning commitment, learn the one thing about what you're doing that makes you smile every day, and then expand on it," you know?
And I think that that is something that is not always talked about, you know? And that's what I try to point out is what do you like to do?
[00:12:54] Dave Travers: I love that. The motivation or the passion for learning more can come from different places, but it's some- you gotta tap into some reason why you wanna turn over the next rock and learn the next thing.
[00:13:06] Jason Munoz: Yeah.
[00:13:07] Dave Travers: I love that. I love that. Okay, one of the things about being a leader as you've grown and led across multiple organizations, and now Entergy is sometimes you have to ask for resources, and that's not necessarily a skill you develop as an individual contributor, and it's daunting. As you're thinking about the next piece of technology you need to adopt or the next team you need to form to help make all the other teams more efficient or deal with the new regulation or whatever the case may be, support the new business unit, how do you advocate for resources when you see an opportunity, I wanna get something done, but I'm part of this big organization.
I got a, I have finance, I have different stakeholders. How do you go out and effectively do that when you haven't done that before?
[00:13:48] Jason Munoz: You have to start with the business problem, right? It's not a recruiting problem, right? When you're looking for finance, um, I mean, reality is that We're a money suck on an organization, right?
We're a shared resource, so everything that we do comes off the bottom line. So if you can't tie the need for new technology, growth of a team, retraction of a team, whatever that may be, to a business outcome and an ROI, you're kinda dead in the water. They don't wanna hear about, you know, if you walk into a room, you go, "Our time to fill is sitting here, and I just need to put this in, and that'll help."
Well, how's it helping me? What's that going to do? When you approach that of coming in, of going, "You know, our time to fill is at a critical stage right now, and we've maximized our capability and stuff, and technology that we have right now is slowing us down. We're currently sitting at X days. If what we anticipate is if we put in this new technology or we enhance the team or the budget to go out and say what we're doing, we anticipate that we'll be able to reduce our time to fill that position in time to start by X days.
That, in turn, equals to X days of time to productivity, and that savings to the organization is X," and we can quantify that. That comes off it; that means something to an organization because now you're telling me you're gonna get somebody in here sooner. I'm gonna be able to do what we say we're gonna do with our customers.
That means that I've got a greater return and that our customers are more satisfied with what we're doing. It's not about me. It's about how are we solving the business problem. Yeah. And that's where you truly need to spend time to understand what that is. And the business acumen from that, I think one part about coming out of operations is that I manage the recruiting function like a business, right?
I need to be able to show the return on everything that we're doing, and if I can't explain it, scale it, or repeat it, you shouldn't be doing it. And that, I think, is the one piece that makes the difference, so that when we sit down the table, it's not recruiter speak. It's business speak on what the outcomes are gonna be.
And then it becomes a common goal, and we're both in it together to make things happen. I think that is so smart, and
[00:16:01] Dave Travers: I love how you talk about business speak as opposed to recruiter speak. You have to learn, before you're gonna successfully advocate for something, you have to learn the language of the person listening to you, not explaining it in your own language.
And so if you're talking to finance, you gotta be able to talk a little bit of finance. If you're talking to legal, you gotta be able to talk a little bit of legal and, like, seek to understand first, like, what's important to them? How do they think through an issue like this? And then frame it in their way. I think that's really smart.
[00:16:30] Jason Munoz: It's come through, and I try to coach and mentor the teams around me coming through with that, right? Get out, see more, understand more, but more importantly, ask the questions: What do you think we need to do better, right? And be transparent where we are. When you go out and you say, "We need a better ATS 'cause ours is outdated," it doesn't really mean anything, right?
But if you turn around and go, "Our recruiting platform is slowing us down. It's not enabling us to go out and get those people that you need now in a quicker fashion. We need that," right? I think it's a difference, but at the same time, it shows that you've got skin in the game with them. You're vested in them.
Their problem is my problem, right? So it becomes a we and not an us and them.
[00:17:16] Dave Travers: You also, as you communicate that the second time in business speak, you strip out the buzzwords. Like, if you're not in TA, you might not know the acronym ATS. So you gotta, you gotta put it back into the language that doesn't cause them to get stuck on, like, "Oh, now I don't know what it is we're talking about."
I love that. That is super smart. Okay. So now you manage this recruiting function. You've got to make these ROI cases sometimes. You've got all these different teams that need to speak the language of the business. What are the important metrics or KPIs you think about in managing the team? Like if someone comes to you, if the, if the boss comes to you or somebody from some other division and says, you know, like, "How do we, how do we measure your function in talent acquisition?" What's the right answer to that?
[00:18:01] Jason Munoz: So that's outward-facing, right? So outward- Yeah ... facing to them, the important part is when's the person starting. So there are three metrics that, that I measure, but the most important one, I think, is what is your time to fill, right? And time to fill that I clarify that from is from the day that we post the position to the day that the person's cleared for hire.
And the reason why I don't go to that time to start, I measure time to start. The reason why is there's a period of time that we have no ability to influence. Well, we don't have the autonomy to make change, and that is notice period, right? That's how long, or where they are, what's that gonna take place.
But all those steps in between, we can layer in the accountability in each step, both internally as a recruiting team, but also as we partner with our hiring leaders on how much time is spent in each one. So as we get to that time to fill it, um, period, and they're cleared for hire, we have all done our part.
We've all been accountable to reduce that time as much as we can. So I think that the more that we can measure that accurately and be transparent about it with our leaders, the better. I think the other metric that comes into play is more of the long play, and what is that: turnover in the first six months, the first nine and 12, and then looking out two years.
Is that quality of hire there, right? And that's how you truly measure that. I think quality of hire is always so subjective. Everybody looks at it differently, and I look at it plain and simple. If we bring someone in and that person leaves in the first 90 days, that's a bad hire no matter how you look at it.
We either didn't do what we said we were gonna do, or we didn't properly vet the individual coming in to be able to do what we needed them to do And there's no recouping that money, right? That's lost. It's gone. But as we measure out further in time, and we see the stick value of someone coming in, and now they're starting to progress, they're returning in the organization, that's true value because that means that we're not constantly having the churn of backfilling roles.
We've raised the bar, we've brought in quality, and we're ensuring that we can sustain that as we go forward.
[00:20:09] Dave Travers: Yeah. So smart, so smart. I think, um, again, you're speaking the language of business, and it's intuitive to somebody from operations or some other part of the business as to why that's important to them.
Now it's not just somebody else's function. This is now important to me, and back to your point, it's about us. Okay, another part of being in the energy business, in the utility business, is if you're recruiting talent from outside of energy and utility, sometimes they might not know all about the business, and they might have a certain impression of what a utility company is or what a power company is.
On the flip side, you have this incredible story to tell. Like, we're in the middle of this AI revolution. If you ask people in the middle of Silicon Valley what's gonna hold us back, they don't say it's chips, they don't say it's software, they say it's electrons. Like, are we gonna get the power we need to power this revolution?
If you talk to, you know, medical centers, they wanna make sure their uptime isn't five nines; it's one hundred percent. All the things that people care about that is gonna drive us into the future, it always comes back to power. So you have this incredible story to tell, and you have talent out there that might not know about your industry and might not know how exciting and meaningful it is.
I think other people, not just the utility industry, finds itself in that situation with a great story to tell, but maybe not the starting point. How do you tell that story? How do you start to build that employer brand or tell that story when people don't start off with that frame of mind?
[00:21:36] Jason Munoz: Well, you just said it. You need to tell the story, right? I think historically, it doesn't matter what part of the energy sector you're in, we've done a really poor job about talking about all the really cool things we do behind the scenes, right? The innovation that you see inside the energy sector, it's really astonishing that we have not gone out and shared that more.
You can walk down the halls and see the patents and see everything else. And when we look at trying to attract people in, if you're in the utility sector like we are, right, if the lights stay on all the time, nobody talks about you, right? Yeah. The lights are on. But as soon as the light goes out, oh, everybody's talking about you, right?
And, and it's usually not in a positive way. And what they don't see is what's happening behind the scenes, the control centers, the, the technology that goes into seeing when the grid comes down, in what area, what street, what house, the crews that, that are mobilized to go out and assess and make sure it's safe to actually work on that, and what is it that we need to do to ensure that it doesn't happen again in the future.
And when you're trying to attract in talent, you know, younger talent right now, they wanna work on the future, and when you talk about things like, "Well, we wanna, you know, harden the grid or, you know, make it more reliable," or coming in, they're like, "Well, that sounds kind of boring," right? Well, look at the technology in behind.
Look at the design. Look at the engineering that needs to take place. You look in certain areas where you may have been affected by storms or continuous outages, and it might come down to the pole that's sitting in the ground if you have one, right? Or the relay that's below the ground in that substation that maybe isn't best for that environment.
So do you need to put up a cement pole? Do you need to put up a carbon pole? Do you need to get rid of the pole and bury in some areas? And there's a lot of cost that's in that, so there's a lot of design and engineering that goes into making that happen. And then when you start talking about, you know, the new server, data centers and farms and industry that's coming back in to spark up manufacturing again, warehousing, all this, they need that power, and that concern and that perception that goes out is, "Well, that's gonna cost me more money as a consumer I am also a customer of the organization that I work for, so I care for the same things, and we hear that.
But we need to talk about the innovation that keeps the cost down. We need to talk about the partnerships that are actually giving back to the communities in which we work and play in, and we do a lot of that. And we can be humble about it, but we need to be proud to show that we work, play, and live in the same places that you do as well, and we're customers too.
Um, and I think that that's forgotten sometime. And when we can talk about the innovation that drives things, the data centers and that that are going up, everyone associates that with just AI. It's you and I talking right now. Mm-hmm. It's the banking systems. It's the music you like to stream. It's your iPads, your iPhones, your Android working seamlessly when you're not looking at it.
In order to do that, there's a lot of technology behind that, and we're looking for individuals to come in with new ideas and fresh ideas. 'Cause what we did yesterday got us to where we are today. It's not necessarily gonna get us to where we are tomorrow, so we need that fresh intellectual capital to help drive the future.
[00:24:46] Dave Travers: I love it. Recruit for the future when you're recruiting young people. I think that is dead on. Okay. We always end these episodes with a lightning round, so I want you to imagine that you're fixing a cup of coffee at headquarters or getting in the elevator, and all of a sudden it's just you and the CEO next to each other, and the CEO says, "Hey Jason, you know, I've always been meaning to ask you, because I think all the time as I talk to different managers about what skills we need for the future in their particular division.
I imagine you think about that too. But when it comes to talent acquisition, what's the skill we're gonna need more of in the future than we have today as this function evolves?"
[00:25:28] Jason Munoz: So AI is going to be in the question. And for me, the part that I say is the team needs to be equipped to be AI enablers, and they need to become, you know, success managers, right?
And what I mean by that is engagement specialists, right? So we're in the people business, and we forget that sometimes. I think we're so connected, we're disconnected now, and we're starting to see that we need to look at how can we leverage AI and new technology that comes in to take away the transactional pieces that truly don't add value, but just add time in our day so we can free up the time to become interactive, engaging, and spend more time with what we're truly trying to do, which is attract the best talent at the right time, and then grow that talent. You know, a total talent cycle keeps repeating. If we're buried in day-to-day tasks that are very administrative, if we don't continue to modernize with our outside surroundings and everything else, we will continue to get stuck in that, and it'll pass us by.
So for me, it's a team that's equipped to understand the new technology, understand how to utilize AI properly, whether it's an agent in their day-to-day or something that we layer in our process, but more importantly, how to become successful leaders in ensuring that the people that we bring in the organization, we're gonna do what we say we're gonna do.
We remove the barriers for them to do what they need to do so that we ensure that tomorrow is as seamless and flawless as possible.
[00:26:56] Dave Travers: Jason Munoz, it is so clear why you're a talent all-star. Thanks so much for taking the time with us today.
[00:27:01] Jason Munoz: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
[00:27:07] Dave Travers: That's Jason Munoz. He's the Director of Talent Acquisition at Entergy. We'll put his LinkedIn profile in the notes below. And just a reminder, we put the video versions of these conversations on YouTube too, 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 right back here next time