Broadcasting from the Shaker Green Room at RecFest USA, Chad & Cheese get the lowdown from Darnell Hill, VP of Talent Acquisition at AAA Mountain West Group. They talk about everything from rebranding beyond "the people who fix your flat tires" to how AI is shaking up recruitment—slowly, because humans are still scared of robots taking over. Darnell dishes on trends you didn’t see coming in 2024 and what’s next for hiring in 2025. Spoiler: It’s not about finding people with 10 years of experience using tools that came out last week. Tune in for insights, laughs, and a dose of snark!
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
Podcast Intro: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HR's Most Dangerous podcast. Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion and loads of snark. Buckle up, boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese podcast.
Joel: Who are you and why are you here?
Darnell Hill: My name is Darnell Hill. I am the VP of talent acquisition for AAA Mountain West Group. I am here from a talent management perspective just to pick up on what other companies are doing, how to have an impact. I had a panel on quality hire, so I did a speaking engagement on that. And then overall, again, just networking. I think it's a great opportunity to do that.
Joel: Nice, nice. So if you had one piece of advice, just one nugget for anybody in our space, what would that be?
Darnell Hill: Stay ahead of the technology as much as possible. Embrace it. It is going to advance, what we do on a day to day basis so fast. It already has. Right. It comes with a little bit of bias, you know, bias in, bias out. But if you stay in front of it, I think you have the opportunity to truly enhance not only your day to day space, but the talent acquisition space in its entirety.
Joel: So I'm gonna be brutally honest and tell you that when I think of AAA, I think of my parents getting directions to wherever we were going on vacation, having it mapped out, having flat tire. You call AAA the hookup...
Chad: Security. Safety right there.
Joel: That brand must be a challenge, but also an asset in terms of employment. Talk about how you tackle that.
Darnell Hill: Yeah. So with the traditional brand, you have 120 years of just backing. Right. That brings that level of longevity that draws people in. Your parents, my parents, our grandparents, so on and so forth. And I think what we've done now and how we've tried to expand it, it's not just emergency roadside service. Right? In my division alone, there's a home alarm division, commercial alarm division, called AAA Smart Home. We have club owned auto repair facilities. So when your car breaks down, we can take you to a AAA approved shop to get that repair done. They do a little bit of everything. They're incorporating some of the advancements with the Teslas and the auto battery operated vehicles. Yeah. So they're incorporating a lot of that into the day to day in the repair space. But outside of that, we have a number of divisions. We have an innovation lab where we try to look up things to stay relevant, stay ahead of the competition. And so I think that's been great. I think, you know, our vision is how do you transform AAA for the next 100 years? And that's where it's going because we know the millennials are doing what? Less car buying and more ride sharing.
Darnell Hill: Right. And so where does the rubber meet the road? And so continuously trying to find ways to engage with them. We had a division that was kind of a ride share division. We're sunsetting that business. But what it allowed people to do was utilize an app based technology to get a vehicle and go wherever you needed to go, provided it was in a geographic footprint. And so that worked out really, really well. Reaching out to millennials and trying to again, advance, get more of the younger people into the fold of the day to day.
Joel: Get those kids in there. So in 2024, still got a little bit left and still a lot going on. Right. What has surprised you the most about what has happened throughout this year?
Darnell Hill: I think what's surprising to me is the enhancements that are happening in the space and the hesitancy for large organizations to adopt them. Right. Everybody's kind of playing it slow. It's like AI took off, ChatGPT took off, some people ran, didn't realize there was bias incorporated into it. Backed up a little bit, and then now technology continues to funnel into the day to day. And so companies are a little bit more cautious about how they go about doing things. And so that's surprising a little bit. What's great about it is if you look at a lot of the vendors that are even here, most of their platforms utilize AI in some shape, form or capacity. And so that's going to get us to where we need to be in 2025 and beyond.
Joel: Yep. Also as a brand, I know you're getting pitched by a lot of vendors and we're here at an expo with a lot of startups and companies. How do you make sense of the flood of sales calls and what do you look for in new technologies? How do you filter that out? Is there a process? Is it just something that's in your gut, like talk about that process?
Darnell Hill: Yeah, sometimes it's just like I gotta turn it off. Just being, you know, completely honest. But more often than not, for me, it's the relationship piece, it's this, it's the networking and it's getting an understanding of a vendor that can truly be a business partner in the everyday sense and not just a vendor that's looking for my business. Right. So somebody that's going to be an extension of AAA and everything that they're doing and trying to be the same for us in return and saying, hey, this is what you want, this is what we have product wise out in the market. How can we incorporate that into the day to day for you to make your journey that much easier?
Joel: So looking forward now, 2025, it's coming up quick. It's coming up quick, what's gonna be your major priority in 2025?
Darnell Hill: It's gonna center a lot around AI, right? And taking the technological advances to get into some of the things that I talked about on the panel today, measuring quality of hire, I think that's huge right now. We've all talked about the candidate experience and what that journey looks like for a team member coming aboard from day one to the life cycle of their tenure. But what we haven't done a good enough job of focusing on is the quality of hire. We all know if we hire a highly qualified individual, the output from that individual is going to be higher, they're going to stay longer. I always say if you invest in your people, they will invest back in you. And so from that perspective, you gotta figure out what motivates team members. The AI is good about doing assessments. And so we take the information from the assessments to better understand who you are as an individual. And that helps us kind of advance that day to day, the relationship building to better understand what makes people tick.
Joel: So that's a great tool to bring people in and the right people in. We're hearing a lot more these days about upskilling. Take the person here, bring them up here, bring it in house. Are you guys doing anything in regards to upskilling? Learning programs, getting someone to the next level?
Darnell Hill: Oh yeah, the learning programs. You know, we've adopted that philosophy of the micro learning. You take in things in small bites. You tend to retain them a lot better than sitting in training for 60 minutes at a time. You always circle back around to those individuals two weeks later and say, hey, what'd you retain from that training? Very little. Right? Like 5% of what they got. So the micro-learns have been great up. Upskilling is across the board something that we're heavily focused on. We used to recruit for experience directly related to the role. Now we're recruiting for 60% of the experience. Because when you're new on a job, you're going to learn anyway, right? And so that's where the training and the development piece really come together. So that's been great. It's opened the candidate pool a lot. So we're not solely focused on finding that one individual that's, you know, kind of that subject matter expert that's gonna come with everything. You find somebody that's got a mindset and a willingness to wanna learn and then they apply what they learn on a day to day basis.
Joel: It's all about learning.
Chad: There's hope for me.
Joel: I wouldn't go that far. Darnell, thanks for joining us, man. So if somebody wants to connect with you or maybe they wanna check out jobs at AAA, where would you send them?
Darnell Hill: Yeah, you can go into your search engine and type in Mountain West Group careers. It's going to refer you back to the Cal state site where all of our job postings are placed. You can look at LinkedIn, indeed, all your search engines out there and you will find AAA Mountain West Group.
Chad: Excellent.
Joel: Thanks for hanging out. Enjoy the rest of the show.
Darnell Hill: Appreciate you guys.
Podcast Outro: Wow, look at you. You made it through an entire episode of the Chad and Cheese podcast. Or maybe you cheated and fast forwarded to the end. Either way, there's no doubt you wish you had that time back. Valuable time you could have used to buy a nutritious meal at Taco Bell, enjoy a pour of your favorite whiskey, or just watch Big Booty Latinas and bug fights on TikTok. No, you hung out with these two chuckleheads instead. Now go take a shower and wash off all the guilt. But save some soap because you'll be back like an awful train wreck. You can't look away. And like Chad's favorite Western, you can't quit them either. We out.