Steve Bonomo

Roy Notowitz: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to How I Hire, the podcast that taps directly into the best executive hiring advice and insights. I'm your host, Roy Notowitz, founder and president of Noto Group Executive Search.

Steve Bonomo is a sports enthusiast, a recruiting nut, and a man living his dream job. Steve has over 20 years of experience in recruiting, strategy, and global talent acquisition.

He's currently the Head of Global Talent Acquisition for Twitter, where he leads a team of over 200 recruiters and talent acquisition specialists. He had a similar-sized team at Adidas where he was the VP of Global Talent Acquisition. Prior to Adidas, Steve worked in a search firm and was also a Recruiter and Recruiting Manager for TaylorMade Golf. 

Today, Steve will share a behind-the-scenes look at what a Global Talent Acquisition leader does, how he builds his own team, and how they implement world-class hiring strategies at scale. 

Steve, thanks for being here. It's fantastic to have you on the show. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:00:59] Yeah. I'm excited to be here. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:01:01] Steve and I have gone back a really long time. In fact, I almost joined Adidas. [Laughs] 

Steve Bonomo: [00:01:05] I tried to hire you!

Roy Notowitz: [00:01:07] Sometimes I regret not going there. It would have been fun to work together that way.

Steve Bonomo: [00:01:11] You've got a good thing going. You got your own podcast, c'mon!

Roy Notowitz: [00:01:14] [Laughs] First of all, I guess you know for most people they might not know exactly what a Head of Global Talent Acquisition does on a daily basis.

Can you tell us what you do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:01:27] Sure. I think it also depends a lot on the situation that the organization is going through at the time. Like, if I were to look at my two larger experiences, one with Adidas, it was very different. I was, I was the first person ever hired into that organization back in 2002.

I was there for about 16 and a half years. Had the opportunity to gradually sort of grow that organization. So, I think the expectation of me and what I was doing was extremely hands-on. In general, a lot of it was easing the, the nerves and the concerns of the very senior people in the organization quite often.

I tend to joke with people sometimes and say when you're leading a function, whether you're leading finance or recruiting or you know, the janitorial services. It's like, it's the same type of work, you're dealing with people who have questions, need information, and you tend to be catering to them a lot.

Now at Twitter it was a bit different when I started. It was kind of a combination of a turnaround and scaling and everything all at one. I was the sixth person to lead that function in about six years. Nobody had been there for about 18 months and when I came in we were dealing with 35 percent turnover of the team. We couldn't attract people into that organization too well and everything needed to be done.

Roy Notowitz: [00:02:55] When you say, "attract people to organization," you mean into the recruiting and talent acquisition organization? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:03:01] Yeah, we had a slightly different challenge, you know in the engineering organ stuff like that, but I'm referring specifically to recruiting. I took the approach that the first thing we needed to do was put the right culture in place, so people wanted to come and people wanted to stay because I've always believed that if, as the leader you're not doing that, then you don't have a chance of achieving anything else because you're going to be starting and stopping with people. 

But the short answer to your question is, we spend a lot of time dealing with stakeholders. Recruiting is something where there's lots of opportunities for lots of different things to happen.

Communicating information, calming people down, and then also really working with the team to get them to think a little bit differently and, and try things in a different way that maybe other companies haven't tried before. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:03:50] What are your accountabilities? So, you know when you started at Adidas, you had the benefit of coming in more as an individual contributor moving up into management ranks and sort of learning how to be a strategic talent acquisition expert along the way, I'm assuming, and I'm interested in learning more about how you did that but going into Twitter having had all this experience from Adidas, you know, what are the accountabilities?

What are the things that you're measured on? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:04:16] Yeah. So in any technology organization a big part of how your evaluated is going to be on how you're hiring engineers into the organization. So, initially, I was responsible for building up a team that could scale hiring, you know, literally doubling hiring.

We're hiring twice as many engineers as we did about a year and a half ago. The initial focus was on: how do we produce more hires? I think as we started to really put that in place and put it in a good spot, we became much more focused and I was held much more responsible for operational excellence.

So are we crossing the T's, dotting the I's, limiting mistakes, really putting the right processes in place? Because what you want to do in my role is try to eliminate as many of the reasons as possible for people to. Find something that they're dissatisfied with because quite often as a recruiting person you hear about the things that people aren't always pleased with versus the things like, "Hey great, we made this incredible hire, you're wonderful. "

You don't hear that as much as, "Hey, someone didn't call this person back." 

Roy Notowitz: [00:05:29] So, how do you ensure that you have the processes and systems and people in place to make great hiring happen and to do it at twice the rate that you did before. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:05:39] Yeah. So at Twitter, I've learned a lot, right?

They have a lot of different tools and skills that are very important to them that we've applied. So, when you're in a company that can't measure things, you often find out about issues and errors and mistakes through somebody being pretty upset, whether that be a senior executive or a hiring manager.

At Twitter, what we're putting in place are a lot more measurements and analytics so that we can anticipate when things are going to happen in order to be able to avoid those. So, to use a very simple example, if we see that there's a lot of people sitting in a new application bucket and a week or week and a half or two weeks are going by and they have been responded to, ultimately that's going to lead to some phone calls one way or the other.

So how do we detect these things early? So I think it's really about being able to measure it because you don't want to be looking over everybody's shoulder, but you want to try to figure out exactly how you can avoid those type of situations, you know in the future. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:06:40] When you came from Adidas and working in the athletic and sporting goods arena and then going into Twitter, were there any surprises-

Steve Bonomo: [00:06:49] Yeah.

Roy Notowitz: [00:06:50] -making that transition and what have been some of the, the biggest or more interesting things that you've learned? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:06:56] Oh, geez. I don't even know where to begin on that. I mean the tech industry is, is something very different. I think when you look at a company like Adidas or being in the sports industry...

If, if you want to work in sports, there's really a couple of companies to work for. A couple of big companies, right? If you're a designer for baseball shoes chances are you're going to be looking at Nike and Adidas and maybe there's a couple of others out there. When you're talking about software engineers, there are startups.

There's big tech companies or small tech companies. There's mid-range tech companies, like everybody is looking for this person and the competition is absolutely fierce. They say in sports- if you're a quarterback in college, right? You're playing D1 college at wherever, Ohio State, and you're watching the game and by your senior year you're able to anticipate what's going on, but then you go into the NFL.

Right? And they say, "Gosh everything's moving so fast. I don't know what's going to hit me in this corner that corner," and I think going into the tech industry is kind of like going into the NFL. You're going to take your lumps. You're going to figure things out as you go but things move so tremendously fast.

You're constantly humbled and constantly looking at, okay, well that happened. How do we find a way to prevent that from happening again in the future? 

Roy Notowitz: [00:08:14] Mhm. And so what percentage of people that you're hiring are- would you consider at the executive level, like VP and above leadership team hires? And what's your approach to that versus the software engineer and staff level position?

Steve Bonomo: [00:08:28] Yeah, if we're talking about, you know at Twitter. It's not a huge percentage. It's not really a very top-heavy organization at the exec level. Probably five percent of the roles, maybe eight percent of the roles that we're hiring are that senior. At Adidas, it was a bit more, it was probably 12 to 15 percent of those roles were what we would call director level and above or executive level roles.

It's a fair portion of those. I think the difference between Adidas and Twitter is the amount of care that you have to put into executive level hiring at Adidas was significant. It's probably similar to the amount of care that you need to put into almost every engineering hire when you're at Twitter due to the competition and the fact that any engineer you talk to probably has four other offers at the time you give them yours. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:09:21] You know, what's the difference in terms of what you look for at Twitter versus Adidas on the leadership level in terms of selection- leadership capabilities things like that. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:09:30] Yeah, if you look at technology in general. Right? You've got a lot of extremely brilliant engineers, you know, people who may have started up a company and it's been acquired and now they're leading a pretty significant function and they're still sort of going through the learning of the cycles of of what people need to go through in order to continue to become a stronger and stronger people leader.

So I think where Twitter is headed is they've done a really good job of bringing in some more experienced leadership into that organization. So that they can help kind of coach and guide some of these brilliant people who may not have been exposed to that. The tech industry is very young, right? And I don't necessarily mean that from the age of the people, but just how long it's been around.

So I think relative to some of the bigger more established companies, you might not find leadership development in place or these different programs. So you want to tend to bring people in with more of an emphasis on that. At Adidas, it was a bit different because when you're looking at it from a leadership level and you want somebody who's going to oversee U.S. Football Footwear, there's probably two or three or four or five people you can choose from at the end of the day. 

So you're looking for somebody with that functional level of expertise and ideally, you know as well, they've got some strong leadership skills that are going to fit in well with your organization, but the number of people that did cleated footwear for NFL was pretty small. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:11:02] Interesting. Which do you think is harder? I'm guessing- it sounds like technology is harder than consumer. Just based on what you're saying. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:11:09] I think that they both have their challenges to them. Right? I think when you're talking about the sports industry. It's just the fact that depending on how specialized you're looking for, there are only a handful of people that are out there that can do that job.

I think in technology, it's got its own challenges where you might see a lot of different engineering leaders that are ultimately out there, but it might be difficult to really be able to hone in on the skill set that you need. It's just a completely different game. Neither of them are easy I would say.

Roy Notowitz: [00:11:48] So let's talk a little bit about part of your responsibility and I'm assuming that part of your responsibility is building hiring capabilities internally. Helping hiring managers learn how to hire better or how to make good decisions around hiring.

How do you do that? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:12:03] Yeah, so we're doing a lot of that right now actually. As I mentioned, year one was really around building up our ability to scale as an organization at Twitter and year two is about how like, how do we go about doing this in a way that's going to be efficient and effective and bring the right results. In addition to the hiring managers we're teaching our recruiters how to do this as well.

But from a hiring manager standpoint, it's critical that you identify the people in the business that are going to be champions. Right? And I'm not specifically saying this is the case where I am right now, but quite often people feel they're really good at hiring, right? You know, I've got this team together, like, I've done an amazing job, like, I'm really good at hiring.

When you're looking at them and perhaps, you know, you have everybody who's kind of the same right or you're lacking diversity in the team. There's a lot of factors that you ultimately need to look into to determine whether somebody is strong. So it's important to have a champion in that part of the organization that helps you communicate to that particular group.

But a lot of the work we're doing is through more of a coaching mindset, whether it's the recruiting manager or the recruiter at the time of the search because you're not going to get people into a classroom not checking their phones paying attention looking at a PowerPoint presentation on you know, "How to Interview." 

Roy Notowitz: [00:13:22] So what do you think are the elements?

What are the three key things that you have your recruiters communicate to the hiring executives around how to make better selections or decisions around hiring. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:13:34] Yeah. The first one is always about the experience that they're creating for that particular person. You know, I always ask people when I'm interviewing them, like, "What are the things that you're looking for when you select your next employer?"

Especially in an industry like tech, it's not just about, do you want to hire that person into your company, but, do they want to hire you as their boss, right? Or, or the company as their employer. So I think it's really important that you really emphasize creating the right experience that you need.

Secondly, I think it's really, really important to go into it with the specific things that are going to ultimately differentiate whether this person will do good at the job or not. Like, what are the focus areas that you need in your team that are going to complement the rest of the team to be successful? And go in prepared to you know, know the information that you want to get out of that meeting because quite often people could derail you, right? They start talking about their favorite sports team or- that's my weakness, right? But they start talking about something like that.

And before you know it the 45 minutes is up and you didn't get the information that you need. So I think it's really about going in there preparing to get the info you need, creating the right experience, and absolutely at the end of it giving them an opportunity to get clarity on the facts they need to be able to make their decision as well.

Roy Notowitz: [00:14:59] So you've hired a lot of recruiters. I'm going to flip the question.

Steve Bonomo: [00:15:02] Sure.

Roy Notowitz: [00:15:02] What do you think makes a good recruiter? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:15:05] Yeah, when I got into recruiting back in 1998, I accidentally got into it, right, like, like the majority of people. But, my brother was like yeah, you should try this because he was doing it and I'm like, well, what do you need to do to be decent at it?

And he's like you just need to set expectations and deliver into those over and over again and the longer I've been doing this, the more I realized that's exactly what you need to do. Whether it's a hard thing to tell a person like, "I know you want me to do this, but I'm not going to be able to but here's when I can," if you don't do that, you're just setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment and probably constructive feedback. 

So, you know, I want people who are not afraid to be very straight setting expectations. They can continuously deliver into those expectations time after time. I also want people who are extremely curious and want to get to know the person that they're talking to on the other end versus, you know, just to checklist of requirements.

Because I think motivations and things like that are really big when selecting a person into the org. And then lastly I just want people to think outside the box. Recruiting is something that, yeah, there's new technology that's out there, but we've sort of been doing it the same way forever. Is there a better way to do it?

That's what we're trying to figure out and I want people who are willing to challenge the status quo. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:16:28] Are there elements of just like, old school recruiting that you bring to the table that you instill into your recruiting team? Or are you learning new things that they're teaching you around the tools and technology?

What's the balance between those two things? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:16:43] I would say it's definitely both, right? There's always that question out there, "Will artificial  intelligence replace recruiters someday?" And you know people get very heated about that discussion, right? Here's the way I look at it: the tools that are out there allow a recruiter to do the things that are most important and what I mean by that is the more things you can automate in the background so you can focus the majority of your time talking to candidates and talking to managers and really building those connections with them, that's what's valuable.

Anything that pulls two people away from talking to each other to me is counterproductive. So if you can use technology to make that side significantly more efficient and you can spend the majority of your time just engaging with people. That's what I believe is most successful. So, I try to get people not to rely too much on, you know, LinkedIn or different technology but like go out and talk to people right?

Roy Notowitz: [00:17:42] When you think about your team, I'm sure you have more than just recruiters.

Steve Bonomo: [00:17:46] Sure.

Roy Notowitz: [00:17:46] You have other people in the organization, in talent acquisition, who are playing important roles.

Steve Bonomo: [00:17:51] Yep.

Roy Notowitz: [00:17:51] One of them is our friend Steve-

Steve Bonomo: [00:17:53] Yeah, yep.

Roy Notowitz: [00:17:54] -Fogarty for example, so tell me a little bit about some of the other things, projects, things that you're working on that are kind of cool within your organization that helps Twitter.

Steve Bonomo: [00:18:03] Yeah, so as I mentioned, Twitter was a built-from-scratch type thing. So there's probably not a whole lot of things we aren't working on right now to put in place. A few of the areas that we're working on right now is really drilling down the most efficient process that's possible, and I know it seems so mundane when you think about a hiring process, but it's really the backbone of every single thing that you do in recruiting, for the most part, but it's more than just about defining step one through eight.

It's about what do you want to achieve over each of those steps? How do you measure whether or not you've achieved that? How do you create a unique experience for anybody that's involved in that? So, we are putting a lot of work into that. We're also looking at the technology that needs to go in place to support that.

So we're looking at a new technology that we'll introduce next year. We're digging into referrals. I don't think we're where we should be at, but, what companies often do is: referral program sort of sits on a shelf and collects, you know some hires, but if there was one thing that you could do that could lead to 35 percent of your company's overall hires, like, you'd want to invest a lot of time and energy into that.

And then perhaps the most important thing that we're doing now is literally focused on diversity and I think we've had some start and stops in this area from the standpoint that... Is it a sourcing issue, right? Like, what are the things that are creating the challenge to be able to do what we call inclusive hiring in the organization and I think the more things you try the more things you uncover as opportunities to be more effective at that.

So we've got some really intelligent people in our organization, some are brand new, some have been around for a while, that are helping us really continue to uncover the things that we need to do as an organization to create the type of environment that people want to come to from all over the place.

Roy Notowitz: [00:19:56] So, aside from creating an environment, are there other things you can do or that you are doing to help improve the amount of diversity within your organization? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:20:05] Yeah, I mean our founder's very bold, right? And he's also extremely pragmatic in a lot of ways and one of the things he said is, how do we expect to recruit the best talent that's out there in the world, the most diverse talent, if we're going after people in- all over the world and saying, "Hey we want you, but you need to move to San Francisco."

Right? So for example, I'm sitting here in Portland, Oregon right now. Jack firmly believes that we need to go out there and find the best talent and not require them to move away from their family or their support groups or whoever it might be and when you create an environment where you can go out and find people from all over the place, it's going to greatly increase your ability to hire inclusively in the org. 

So that's just on the hiring side. I mean, I will say I'm extremely impressed with the effort, the passion the focus that Twitter has put behind this, you know, are we where we would love to be? No, but I think that's something that you continue to evolve and grow as you go and I think we're thinking on the forefront of this topic. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:21:09] So, speaking of recruiting tools and technology,  how are using Twitter to recruit at Twitter? [Laughs] Is that's something that's useful, I mean, can you recruit everybody through Twitter at Twitter? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:21:19] I think it's an opportunity that we don't maximize enough to be very honest.

We do have some handles out there with a ton of followers where they can get information, but the other Steve that you mentioned just a moment ago, when we came into Twitter he said, "Gosh, we use Twitter more for recruiting at Adidas than they do at Twitter, right?" So actually in the coming weeks, you're going to see some pretty big changes to how the service is being used to attract people.

So time will show on that one. But I think it's a great opportunity for us to leverage it to get the messaging out there because we have a captured audience that already understands and appreciates what we do. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:21:59] That's really interesting. Speaking of technology, you know, are there any things that you think in the next five to 10 years that will transform or shift the way that we recruit talent, you know, what are the biggest trends right now in recruiting? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:22:11] I actually... And maybe this is a technology industry thing, but, your ability to get data and analytics is driving so many decisions, is easing so many minds, is answering so many questions. I mean, there's simple things and tools out there that you can get, you know, easier scheduling process and all of that, but I really think we're recruiting is going is to a very, very data-driven, you know, model.

We need to understand why are people falling off? Why are offers being rejected? Why is our pipeline not as diverse as it should be? Why is this recruiter experiencing less success than that recruiter? The days of saying well, I think it's because you know Susie is doing this like, you can't work that way anymore.

It's like what are the factors? What is the data telling us about that? And then how do we use that to help coach and guide and change our processes to make things better? So that's where I think it's going.

Roy Notowitz: [00:23:09] So data. Any other trends or things that you think will surprise us five years from now, 10 years from now?

Steve Bonomo: [00:23:15] Yeah, you know, I think that the whole virtual communication will continue to grow. In my last company, if you walked into a meeting room, and you were meeting with two other people and they weren't sitting in there, you're like, "Huh, they didn't show up for the meeting." At Twitter, it's very different, you walk in, you have a meeting with two other people, you just click on the TV and they're there.

I do think with globalization, with remote workforce, any technology that's going to facilitate people being in the same room without being in the same room and being able to communicate more effectively across borders or countries is going to be huge in recruiting because Twitter's on the- early on with this sort of virtual workforce deal but I think companies are going to all be forced to do that in the near future. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:24:02] So what are the biggest talent acquisition challenges that you think tech or consumer brands will face in the future? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:24:09] What I'm most impressed with today is the power that people have, consumers have over a company, right? Not only from a buying standpoint, but from a reputational standpoint and an influencing everyone's opinion. People have a huge say in that. So, companies need to do things right, right? 

When it comes to hiring, being able to go out there and have a workforce that reflects your customer group from a diversity standpoint, from a thinking- how they think, all of that standpoint is going to be huge and I think it's going to put a level of pressure on organizations to do things very, very differently because it's hard to find talent, right? 

Period especially in technology. It's extremely hard to go out there and find the talent that you need for the organization. The good talent is highly sought after they're well compensated, they're well taken care of in most cases in their companies, but you want that talent.

So how do you go out there and get that and then, add also diverse talent into that, you know looking at technology again. It's the company's ability to go out there and get the right mix of talent for the organization to continue to move forward is only going to get significantly greater because the pressure that's put on them to build their organizations in the right way is far beyond and far more important than a goal but it's about what the world feels about you as a brand or a company that's going to ultimately determine the success of your company. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:25:45] So you're talking about stuff like connection to purpose and- 

Steve Bonomo: [00:25:48] Exactly.

Roy Notowitz: [00:25:49] -doing world-positive things. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:25:51] Yeah, and there's plenty of examples and I won't name them right on here.

But there's plenty of examples of companies, recently, who've taken massive hits based on their reputation and I think that trend will continue. Probably also because of things like Twitter where anyone can express their opinion or social media, like, you can't hide anymore when you do things you shouldn't be doing or you're not doing things you should be doing. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:26:15] Right. So with consideration of your employment brand, how do you go about selecting an executive search firm partner? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:26:22] Yeah, I've always felt one way about this and it hasn't really changed since I've gotten to Twitter. When you're dealing with a lot of companies, they offer a lot of the same basic things, right? 

When you're working with an executive search firm, they're going to offer you search services, they're going to offer you perhaps assessment and maybe they offer you research on occasion. To me, it always comes down to the person that I get to work with, right? Do I trust them? Do they take the time to get to know me? The organization? Did they do what they say they're going to do when they're going to do it? Do they call me out when I don't do what I say I need to do?

So for me, it really comes down to the individual relationships with people- assuming that they offered the basics, right? Which is also why I prefer to not work with a lot. Like, if I have trust with an individual, I want to work with that individual. If they go from this company to that company, then I'm probably going to go from this company to that company.

I do think that there are a lot of people out there who say, "I got hired by search firm A, so they must be the best because they found me and we're going to work with search firm A from, from now on." But I actually still firmly believe it's about the people that you deal with at that company and not as much about the brand name. 

Roy Notowitz: [00:27:39] Are there any things that you're working on, projects right now coming up, things that you'd like to share with the audience? 

Steve Bonomo: [00:27:45] When I started at Twitter we had about 100 people in the recruiting team. We've grown that up to currently about 180 we've probably got another 25 people to hire over the next month, month and a half, two months. So, we're doing a lot of building our team across the U.S. and internationally right now. 

But I feel that when the other Steve and I left Adidas, we went there because Twitter was small enough where I can move quick: 4,000 people in the company and there was enough opportunity to change things and openness to change things that we'd be able to do things in a different way.

So ultimately, I hope that you see and hear about things being done a little bit differently over there. We're not there yet. We're still building the foundational pieces. I want people to look and say, "Gosh, how did they think of that and how did they get away with that? But what a good idea." Like, that would be my goal at the end of the day is that people like, "Man, like, that's pretty interesting. I want to try that." 

Roy Notowitz: [00:28:46] Steve, tell us why the best recruiters should come work for you at Twitter. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:28:50] People have the opportunity to come in and get a broad scope of work to do. If you like pressing the same button, you're not going to love being there. But if you like continuous challenge, continuous change and you want to learn a lot, I think it's an incredible place for people to consider.

Roy Notowitz: [00:29:08] You heard it here, if you're a top recruiter and want to work for Twitter, you can tweet to Steve Bonomo at @stevebonomo, and he will respond [laughs].

Steve Bonomo: [00:29:17] Absolutely.

Roy Notowitz: [00:29:18] Steve, it's great to see you and so interesting to learn about your work. Thank you for being on the podcast and for sharing how you hire. 

Steve Bonomo: [00:29:25] Thank you.

Roy Notowitz: [00:29:27] Thanks for listening to How I Hire. Do you want to know more about our show? Visit HowIHire.com. If you'd like to share your thoughts, questions, or feedback, please leave us a review wherever you listen.  

How I Hire is created by Noto Group, executive search for leading consumer brands that support healthy, active, and sustainable lifestyles. To learn more about Noto Group, visit NotoGroup.com. 

This podcast was produced by Anna McClain.

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