Episode 03: COVID Hiring, DEI and the Future of Talent Acquisition, with Sean Barry of Walgreens
On this episode, Sean Barry sits down with us to share his recruiting expertise and career experience over more than 20 years in talent acquisition. He’s currently the senior director of TA at Walgreens, leading talent acquisition across the organization. In 2020, that meant filling 135,000 jobs across the corporate call center, distribution center, and field networks.
Sean dives into how he approached his first charge at Walgreens — creating an organizational structure allowing the team to expand and contract as needed while still providing a consistent candidate experience. He also describes changes they made at the beginning of COVID-19 to ensure faster hiring and onboarding, as well as what the company has done to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the hiring process.
In sharing his reflections, Sean also points towards what he sees coming for the future of talent acquisition, eyeing opportunities for differentiation in empathy, candidate experience, and anticipation of market needs. That future, he says, will be largely bolstered by technology. To future talent acquisition executives, he advises: “Learn as much as you can about technology. I think that the way you communicate, the way you engage with people, has evolved tremendously. And it’s only going to continue.”
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Learn more about Sagemark HR and consulting services around human resources technology at sagemarkhr.com.
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This episode is brought to you by SageMark HR.
Sagemark HR can help you:
✔ Improve your talent practices and make better, more informed people decisions.
After 20+ years of experience leading Recruiting and Talent Acquisition across a wide variety of industries, I've seen enough hires (over 100,000 to date) to know that hiring decisions truly can make or break an organization.
✔ Identify opportunities to not only improve your talent practices, but also delivering tangible business results.
We understand every organization is different, and there’s no one-size-fits-all magic solution. So we listen first and identify the gaps and sticking points in your current process before ever recommending a solution.
✔ Bridge the gap from “traditional” to modern recruiting, without the painful learning curve.
We believe recruiting, talent, and HR technology is a deep well of untapped business potential, and our mission is to help you identify and implement those hiring tools in a way that works for you.
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