Season 6 • Minisode Episode 7

Successful teams work hand-in-hand, understanding and supporting their mutual business goals. For human resources, that success starts when the disconnect between OFCCP compliance and recruitment is eliminated. In this minisode, Mike Bazinet, Director of Talent Acquisition at Affordable Care, shares the importance of aligning business goals, examples of how he’s done this in both his current and previous roles, and how others can use this strategy for successful compliance outcomes and workforce diversity efforts.

About DE Talk

The DE Talk monthly podcast features honest and open dialogue between powerhouse industry experts on a variety of HR topics ranging from OFCCP compliance advice to emerging recruitment marketing trends, equal employment opportunity initiatives, and insightful solutions that help infuse new life into your HR strategies.

Episode Guests

Episode Transcript

DirectEmployers (00:00):

Get ready! The DE Talk podcast starts now, insightful conversations and dialogue, helping you put the human factor back in HR.

(00:09):

Picture compliance and recruitment as a Venn diagram. Two circles that seem separate, but have a powerful sweet spot where they overlap. That intersection, it’s where the magic happens shaping fair and equal workplaces. While these two functions may feel worlds apart, they’re actually more connected than you would think. In this episode of the DE Talk podcast, Mike Bazinet, longtime Member and advocate explored why compliance and recruitment shouldn’t just run parallel. They should work together. When these teams truly understand each other, the results are game changing, stronger compliance, smarter hiring, and a workplace that thrives. Give us 15 minutes and we promise it’ll be worth it. You may even want to attend DEAMcon for more inspiration too.

Mike Bazinet (00:51):

What an honor to be up on this stage in front of all of you, and thank you to all my veterans out there and my brothers and sisters in arms. Thank you for your service and thank you for all of you who support them every day. So let’s get right into this. I have about 15 minutes, right? And I’m just going to talk to you a little bit about something that’s really, really important to me, and that’s the relationship between a recruiter and a compliance expert. I’m going to try and teach you that through my story and how it happened to me. So hopefully you’ll enjoy this at least a little bit. Let’s get some housekeeping out of the way. My bio read it, okay. It’s just a bunch of fluff. People wrote some crap down and put it on a piece of paper and that’s it.

(01:35):

All you need to know about me, the only thing you need to know about me is I’m a simple recruiter. That is all I am. I have been a recruiter for 26 years, and I think I actually was put in this world to do that because I love talking to people. I love training recruiters, I love everything about recruiting. So if you know anything about me or want to talk to me, just know I’m just a simple recruiter. That’s all I am, and that’s all I ever will be. My first DEAMcon was over a decade ago. I came to this event, and I’ll tell you what, I say this all the time to Member companies and to the Association and to everybody. I know that this event right here is the biggest event in the I get out of this event, the most of any event I go to because we really get to talk about what we’re doing and we get to learn from each other. And that to me is what a conference should be, and DEAM does that. So if you’re a first timer here, please talk to me. Talk to anyone on the board, and I think you’ll hear from all of us. Say the same thing.

(02:41):

If you would’ve told me though, that I would be up here today on this stage, I literally would’ve laughed you out the door. I might’ve kicked you out the door. And there was a reason for that. Like I said earlier, I’m a recruiter, and to be quite honest with you, I didn’t like you. I didn’t like compliance people. I just didn’t. Were ruining my life. See, I was just a recruiter that wanted to put people in the company, and all of a sudden you’re telling me what I got to do. No, I didn’t like you. I’m sorry. I’m just being honest. And if I offend you, I’m so sorry. It’s not really what I want to do. But there is some good news. The good news is I like you now. I do. I honestly do. I like you. People are awesome, right? So my recruiters in the room. Can you all stand up? If there’s any recruiters in here, stand up. Come on, don’t be afraid.

(03:30):

Thank you. Recruiters. I’ll tell you this. I’ll tell you this. Recruiters, you are the first tip of the spear. You are the ones. You are the ones that are meeting people talking, and you are the ones helping us drive this program that we call compliance. And that might scare the bejesus out of you because it scared me when I heard about this and compliance experts, I was that recruiter. I was the one that kept you up at night. I was the one you were having dreams about. I was the one that said constantly, why? That’s stupid. What do you mean? I can’t look at that resume? I just want to hire the person. How hard can this be? I was him, and I’m sorry for that and I apologize to you. But along the way, I learned something and I learned that I needed to understand this business if I was going to be successful in it.

(04:21):

And I took the time at that time to start really doing something. And what would happen here is when our compliance expert would come down, she came from another building and would come over and everybody knew when she was coming because what would happen is the door made an odd sound when she opened it up and I could never mimic it myself. And it was click, click, click, click. And when we heard that click, click, that’s what happened to the recruiters. They would just hit the road and I’d be, what the hell is going on? Where did everybody go? And I learned two things. I learned one, my recruiters were cowards because they kept running away from her. But the second thing I learned was I’m really slow. I have absolutely no reflexes. And I would sit there and go, what the hell? My feet would be frozen to the ground.

(05:12):

I’d be looking around for help from recruiters. But you saw where they went, they hit the road, and I would slowly turn around and say, you talking to me? And the dark angel would be there saying, Hey. I was like, fine. What disposition did we do wrong? Did we not give you enough outreach? Did we not tell you the contact name? What else did we do? And it was always something, and it was never good. So every time we heard click, click, we knew we were in trouble. It was never going to be good. And recruiters, come on. You know what I’m saying is true. You have to be a little apprehensive sometimes when your compliance expert comes in a room.

(05:51):

That’s how we were. Now, of course, I just a little bit and my daughters would say, dad, you’re so dramatic. And I am right? But that’s kind of how I felt that every time she came down, I got defensive. Every time she came into the building, I was geared up. And every time she came in, because I was geared up, I lashed out. And I have to be honest with you, I learned more about compliance from that individual than anyone else. But I knew I needed to do something. I needed to learn this business. So what did I do as a recruiter? I attended DEAM. I went to NELI. Now I’ll tell you, I went to NELI and first of all, I sat in a room with a bunch of lawyers, very, very boring, very boring. They have really big books that I didn’t understand a damn thing.

(06:40):

But I was there and I was just listening and I was networking, and I was learning different things. I attended conferences. I went to ILGs, I read pamphlets, I read books. I did webinars. I did everything for one reason because I was ticked off. I wanted to know more than her. So when she came down and that dark angel went, click, click, I wasn’t going to run. I was going to stand my ground and say, you’re wrong, dang. But I couldn’t because she was right. And that really made me mad. So I learned it though. And through that time I had this evolution and I went to ILG in Charlotte, North Carolina. And I went to a course and it was AAP 101. And as I’m sitting in there, I was like, I could teach this course. And as recruiters were in there with me asking questions and right, there’s no stupid questions, but these recruiters, that was a dumb question.

(07:36):

How do you not know that? Come on. And I realized something that all of a sudden this coat of compliance was on me. And I tried taking it off, but I just couldn’t get it off. And I was like, damn it. I’m a recruiter. What is happening? What is going on with me right now? But I got it. And I went back to Raleigh, North Carolina, and I went up to my compliance guru’s office in another building. And as I was walking down the halls of hell thinking, here we go, here we go. I got to do this, I got to do this. And I walked in. I didn’t dare step over the threshold. I knew if I did, I wasn’t coming back. So I stayed outside our door and I said, Hey, I get it and I’ll do whatever you need me to do to help you push this program across the line. I was an informal leader of the recruiters there. I was the person as I was turning it around to walk away. And this is what’s remarkable. As I was turning around to walk away, she said, wait. And I’m like, damnit.

(08:36):

I said, what’s up? She said, I understand you too. I was like, what? I did not know as I was learning all this, and by the way, this was an evolution. This didn’t happen overnight, right? This took months and months. She also was taking the time to understand me and my responsibilities as a recruiter. And she said, I took on 10 requisitions down at the plant. I was like, what did you do? I wanted to know what it was like to be a recruiter. I wanted to know what you went through. I wanted to know what you guys felt. And I get it too. And I could not believe it. That heaven me, the angel and the devil all of a sudden came together. Together. We formed a great team. We really started. We realized something that happened there. We knew we couldn’t do this in a vacuum.

(09:28):

We had to work together. We needed to come together, but we needed to understand each other’s role, and we needed to understand each other’s responsibilities. And when we understood what that was, we realized that if we came together as one, we could crush it. And we did. We did killed it. I took the time to learn her world and she took the time without me knowing to learn mine and not just indebted me to her. So not only am I indebted to her for what she taught me and how she ticked me off to learn compliance, I’m indebted to her that she took the time as a compliance expert to get into my world, my life, my recruiting journey. And I credit everything to her today. I really do. Don’t ever tell her that, ever. So I’ll never mention her name. But what we did was we got together in a room and we developed our process as one.

(10:27):

We worked on disposition codes together because there were so many times disposition codes would come out for me and they meant nothing to me because I never ran across that as a recruiter. Why the hell is it? It’s not going to ever happen. Can we work on some that maybe I am going to see? And can we figure out a way to get those in and work those out? So if you have to get into a padded room and just lock the doors, white walls and everything, I implore you to all get in there and do that and build your program together. I really implore all of you to really come together and work together as one. And recruiters, you get something out of this. I know you probably don’t believe that, but you will be a lot better off at this. Two things in recruiting.

(11:12):

I talk a lot about recruiting and I love recruiting in this environment, but two things that recruiters I think need to know, efficiencies and outreach. When you break it all down, that’s really what it is. It’s nothing more than that. Now, of course, there’s things underneath each of these words, but it’s really becoming efficient with how you work and how you do your job. And it’s about outreach, which is the fun part of recruiting outreach to me, is when you get out from behind that desk as an Air Force recruiter, when I was recruiting for the US Air Force, the Air Force called it getting stuck behind a desk. Don’t get stuck behind a desk, get out there, talk to people. And we did. But I understand also how hard that can be in high volume recruiting. I know it’s not easy. I know it’s tough.

(11:59):

Timing is everything for us. And when we’re on the road, we’re not on the phone, we’re not making contact, we’re not doing anything we feel in our hearts, but we really are doing a lot and we’re spreading the word. We’re trying to get out there and recruit the right way into areas that don’t know who we are. Areas that need to hear from us, areas that need opportunities, we need to go out to them and talk to them. But that’s all it is. But what do you get out of that? Recruiters, I promise you this, you’ll be a better recruiter for it. You’ll be more well-rounded and you’ll be more marketable. Before I came into this space, I could recruit in small companies, I could do things like that, staffing companies, I could do that. But when I became a recruiter in this space, thousands of opportunities opened for me as a recruiter.

(12:45):

I was a better recruiter. And I will tell you now, the recruiters I trained at Grifols, I will take every single one of them and stack ’em up against any recruiter in the country because they’re efficient and they know how to outreach and they do it effectively. And when I came to Affordable Care, I took a team of recruiters that knew nothing about compliance, and they are better recruiters for it. And they wanted to come here today, and I wish they could have because these were recruiters who had no knowledge of what we do. And today they’re more marketable. And I would stack them up against anyone again too, because they’re efficient and they know how to outreach. You’ll lower your time to offer your time to fill your quality. You’ll have quality hires coming in the door if you do this, if you work together and you become, I say expert sources here, but a friend of mine said something a minute ago that you’ll become a talent advisor.

(13:34):

And that’s what you need to be as recruiters, not recruiters. You need to be talent advisors. And you can’t advise if you don’t know this. So I employ you all recruiters to learn it. Compliance experts, what do you get out of this? Ready for this confidence in your recruitment program, confidence in your recruiters that they’re doing the right thing every single day. Confidence in data management techniques that they’re following them. You don’t have to worry. They’re happening. They’re following the processes. They’re dispositioning candidates the way they’re supposed to do because you worked with them to build that. So recruiters now have an understanding of why we’re doing what we’re doing. Improved outreach. Come on. How many of you want us to do document outreach better? We know it’s one of the things we struggle at, but if you work together and I have something, buy me a coffee out there and I’ll tell you a trick on outreach.

(14:21):

And I promise you, if you hear this trick, your recruiters will be outeaching all the time. And I think my predecessor, Dana, when she got up here would tell you that even her recruiters are doing more outreach. Now, it’s not hard. It doesn’t have to be, but if you teach recruiters the importance of it, they’ll do it for you. And successful audit outcomes, that’s what all of you want, right? We need to work together. So what I’m going to ask all of you to do, and my last two minutes is this. I know many of you together recruiters and compliance experts throughout this conference. I’m going to implore you to not sit with your compliance guru, if you will. Recruiters sit with another compliance expert and compliance experts. I’m going to ask you to not sit with your recruiters. I’m going to ask you to sit with other recruiters and talk to them about what they’re going through and what they do.

(15:15):

And you will find common ground and compliance experts when you’re talking to other recruiters from different teams. Listen to what they’re telling you. If they tell you the same things your recruiters are telling you, guess what? It’s real. And we might want to change. We might just want to think about that. If I heard it from my own team and I’m hearing it from this team of recruiters and that team of recruiters, maybe I need to get together with mine and have a conversation with them and think how we can work together. And recruiters, when you’re talking to those compliance gurus and they’re telling you the same thing that your compliance expert is telling you, maybe you should listen to and maybe you should internalize that and think, okay, how can I work together? How can we come together and work as one? That’s really what I want to ask all of you to do.

(16:07):

My journey in this space has taken a long time. I went from that recruiter to a person standing in front of you now imploring you to come together, because if you do that, we will all win. Every single one of us, our audits will be smooth. We’ll be recruiting better. You’ll come to work happier. It’s all kumbaya, and we can have a nice old fashioned sometime tonight. Okay? So please come together, work together as one. Thank you. I’m here all day. Find me. Talk to me. I’d love nothing more than to meet all of you, especially if you want to talk about recruiting. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful conference, and I hope to see you soon. Thank you.

DirectEmployers (16:50):

This conversation is just a glimpse of the powerful discussions happening live on the DEAMcon stage. Don’t just listen. Experience it for yourself. Join us in Scottsdale, May 21st through the 23rd for even more expert insights, networking and game-changing strategies. Secure your spot and stay up to date on event programming by visiting DEAMcon.org. That’s D-E-A-M-C-O-N.org.

(17:16):

Thank you for tuning in for another episode of the DE Talk podcast. Stay connected with DirectEmployers on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin, or subscribe to receive updates straight to your inbox by visiting DirectEmployers.org/Subscribe where you’ll receive notifications of new episodes, webinars, events, and more.