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TheHide.TV : Everyday Sniper Podcast Colorado Gun Control  This crazy, they want you to buy your gun rights back. No way, I am leaving this Communist Stronghold, I cannot do business here. So I rant a bunch on this episode, I am also Live on Sniper's Hide, X, and YouTube so if you want to see this, you can.  We video the episodes as well as record.  In this episode I talk:  Colorado Gun Control  Picking a New State to Live  6 ARC AR15 Results  6 ARC vs 6mm MAX  It's a fun episode, lots of interaction online with the Live people so enjoy this conversation. Less Squirrel, more Focus.  Thanks for Listening, Thanks for Sharing, Thanks for being a part of the Everyday Sniper podcast and Live  Lowlight, TheHide.TV 

IntroAt the gracious invitation of AI Safety Twitter-fluencer Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse, I appeared on the very first episode of her new podcast “Consistently Candid” to debate moral realism (or something kinda like that, I guess; see below) with fellow philosophy nerd and EA Twitter aficionado Max Alexander, alongside Sarah as moderator and judge of sorts.What I believeIn spite of the name of the episode and the best of my knowledge/understanding a few days ago, it turns out my stance may not be ~genuine~ moral realism. Here's my basic meta-ethical take:* Descriptive statements that concern objective relative goodness or badness (e.g., "it is objectively for Sam to donate $20 than to buy an expensive meal that costs $20 more than a similar, less fancy meal”) can be and sometimes are true; but* Genuinely normative claims like “Sam should (!) donate $20 and should not buy that fancy meal” are never objectively true.Of course the label per se doesn't really matter. But for a bunch of reasons it still seems wise to figure out which label really does work best.Some definitionsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Moral realists are those who think that, in these respects, things should be taken at face value—moral claims do purport to report facts and are true if they get the facts right. Moreover, they hold, at least some moral claims actually are true. That much is the common and more or less defining ground of moral realism (although some accounts of moral realism see it as involving additional commitments, say to the independence of the moral facts from human thought and practice, or to those facts being objective in some specified way).Wikipedia:The robust model of moral realism commits moral realists to three theses:* The semantic thesis: The primary semantic role of moral predicates (such as "right" and "wrong") is to refer to moral properties (such as rightness and wrongness), so that moral statements (such as "honesty is good" and "slavery is unjust") purport to represent moral facts, and express propositions that are true or false (or approximately true, largely false, and so on).* The alethic thesis: Some moral propositions are in fact true.* The metaphysical thesis: Moral propositions are true when actions and other objects of moral assessment have the relevant moral properties (so that the relevant moral facts obtain), where these facts and properties are robust: their metaphysical status, whatever it is, is not relevantly different from that of (certain types of) ordinary non-moral facts and properties.And to settle the matter, here's what some LLM have to say.My prompt:Suppose a person believes the following:1: Descriptive statements that concern objective relative goodness or badness (e.g., "it is objectively for Sam to donate $20 than to buy an expensive meal that costs $20 more than a similar, less fancy meal”) can be and sometimes are true; but 2: Genuinely normative claims like “Sam should donate $20 and should not buy that fancy meal” are never objectively true.Is this person best categorized as a moral realist?ChatGPTGiven these two beliefs, the person's stance doesn't align completely with traditional moral realism, which typically asserts that there are objective truths about both moral facts (like the goodness or badness of actions) and moral duties (what one should or should not do). However, it also doesn't fully align with moral anti-realism, since the person believes in some form of objective truth regarding moral value.One possible categorization for this stance could be a form of "value realism" combined with "normative anti-realism" or "normative subjectivism." This would mean that the person believes in objective truths about what is better or worse (value realism) but thinks that what one ought to do (normative claims) is not a matter of objective truth but perhaps of subjective judgment or societal conventions.This position is quite sophisticated and might be best understood as a hybrid or intermediate position in the landscape of moral philosophy, rather than fitting neatly into the category of moral realism or its standard alternatives.Great, so much for trying to fit things into nice little buckets.Claude, fortunately, is more definitive:No, the view described is not best categorized as moral realism. Here's why:Moral realism is the view that there are objective moral facts or truths. A moral realist believes that some moral claims, including normative claims about what one should or shouldn't do, can be objectively and mind-independently true.The view in the example accepts that there can be objective truths about relative degrees of goodness or badness (claim 1). However, it denies that there are objective normative truths about what one should or shouldn't do (claim 2). By rejecting that genuine normative 'should/shouldn't' claims can be objectively true, the view denies a key commitment of moral realism - namely that moral claims can state objective normative facts. At best it allows for objective evaluative facts about goodness/badness, not prescriptive facts about obligations.So this view would be more accurately categorized as a form of moral anti-realism like non-cognitivism or error theory. It does not qualify as moral realism because of its rejection of the existence of objective normative truths that could make strong normative claims justified or true. The commitment to objective evaluative facts alone does not sufficiently qualify the view as realist in the metaethical sense.In summary, the view accepts objective "good/bad" facts but denies objective "should/shouldn't" facts. This combination puts it at odds with core commitments of moral realism, so it is better seen as an anti-realist view.I'm gonna disagree with Claude here, at least in that the bolded claim above (objective normative facts are a key part of moral realism) just seems…wrong? Like all the definitions could replace the term “moral fact” or “moral claim” with “normative fact” and “normative claim” but they do not!So I really don't have a great answer to which label works best. One of two ~human level chatbots giving me a definitive-sounding “anti-realism” answer is too much evidence for me, whose only formal philosophy training is an undergrad minor, to rule that one out. There are also good arguments, I think, for the “realist label,” as well as for “neither” (i.e., ‘secret third thing'). In fact all of these seem pretty similar in terms of argument convincingness/correctness. So, in sum,

* Follow ⁠Max on Twitter⁠* And read his ⁠blog⁠* Listen here or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts * RIP Google Podcasts

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If you are interested in stopping compulsions using attention control, this is the episode for you.  I am really excited for this episode. This was a deep dive into really how to fine-tune your mindfulness practice for anxiety and OCD. Today we have the amazing Max Maisel, who is an OCD and anxiety specialist here in California. He came on to talk about these really nuanced differences of mindfulness, where we might go wrong with mindfulness, how we can get a deeper understanding of mindfulness, and this idea of attentional control. The real thing that I took away from this is how beneficial it can be at reducing mental compulsions, putting our attention on the things that we value, putting our attention on what we want to put attention on, not in a compulsive way at all. In fact, we addressed that throughout the episode, and it's just so, so good. I'm so grateful to you, Max, for coming on, and I just know you guys are going to love this episode. Now, we are talking about some pretty difficult things, like things that are hard to do. I even roleplayed and explained how hard it was for me to do it. I want, as you listen to this, for you to please practice an immense amount of self-compassion and recognition and acknowledgment of just how hard it is to do these practices and how we can always learn more. Hopefully, something in this episode clicks for you and feels very true for you and is hopefully very, very beneficial.  I'm going to go take you straight to the show because that's what you're here for. Have a wonderful day everybody, and enjoy this interview with Max Maisel.  Kimberley: Welcome. I am so excited for this episode, mainly because I actually think I'm going to leave learning a ton. We have the amazing Max Maisel here today. Welcome. Max: Thank you, Kim. It's really good to be here. I'm super excited for our conversation. MINDFULNESS FOR OCD  Kimberley: Yeah. Okay. You know I use a lot of mindfulness. I am a huge diehard mindfulness fan, but I love that you have brought to us today, and hopefully will bring to us today, some ways in which we can drop deeper into that practice or zone in, or you might say a different word, like how to focus in on that. Tell me a little bit about how you conceptualize this practice of mindfulness and what you use to make it more effective for people with anxiety and OCD. Max: Yes, for sure. So, I'm a major proponent of mindfulness practices. I use it myself in my personal life. I integrate it in the clinical work that I do with clients with OCD and anxiety. But one of the concerns that I've seen in my clinical work is that mindfulness is such a broad concept and it covers so many different types of psychological suffering. The research behind mindfulness is just like hundreds, maybe even thousands of studies. But when it comes to very specific and nuanced concerns like OCD and anxiety, it could be a little bit confusing for people sometimes to figure out, “Well, how do I apply this really healthy, beautiful, amazing tool to how my own brain is wired in terms of like sticky thoughts or just to engage in all sorts of compulsive behaviors.” I like to think about mindfulness from Jon Kabat-Zinn's definition at the core—paying attention to the present moment in a way that's non-judgmental and with this curious intentionality to it. But then within that, there's some really nuanced details that we can talk more about how to make that really relevant to folks with OCD and anxiety. THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATTENTION & AWARENESS Kimberley: Tell me a little bit. When we're talking about mindfulness, we often talk about this idea of awareness. Can you differentiate first—and this is using some terminology just to set the scene—can you differentiate the difference between attention, awareness, and even a lot of people talk about distraction? Can you share a little bit about how they may be used and what they may look like? Max: I love that question. I think in a good OCD treatment, people really need to have a good solid understanding of those differences. I'm actually going to borrow from a neuroscientist named Amishi Jha. She's this incredible professor at the University of Miami. In her research lab, they look at the neurological underpinnings of mindfulness, and that very much includes attention and awareness. I highly encourage anybody to look up her work. Again, it's Amishi Jha. She talks about attention or focused attention. If you imagine there's a dark room, and if you turn on a flashlight and you shine that beam of light into that room and say that beam of light hits a vase on a table, again, what happens to that vase? What's different compared to all the things in the background? Kimberley: Is that a question for me? Max: Yeah. If you imagine a beam of light, what goes on with that? Kimberley: You would see the front of the vase, maybe it's a bit shiny, or you would see the shadow of the vase. You would see the colors of the vase. The texture of the vase. Max: That's exactly right. From this vivid and detailed, you can see all the different descriptions of it and it becomes privileged above everything else in the room. That vase is that beam of light. And then somebody might take that flashlight and shine it to the right a little bit, and then it goes from the vase, let's say, to a chair next to it. All of a sudden, that vase is still there, but it's fallen into the background. We might call that our awareness, which we'll talk about in a second. But then that table that we shine on or the chair is now privileged over the vase. That's how you can think about focused attention, is this beam of light. Whereas awareness, instead of a focused beam, you can think about that more as a broad floodlight where it's effortless, it's receptive, and you're noticing what is present in the moment without privileging one thing over the next. We're not focusing or hooked on anything particular in that room, it's just observing whatever comes up in the moment. Does that make sense? WHAT IS DISTRACTION?  Kimberley: It totally makes sense. Excellent. What about distraction?  Max: Distraction, when we think about that broad floodlight of awareness, where again, where what's privileges the present moment, distraction is trying to get things out of that. It's trying to suppress or not think about or get something that is in your awareness, outside of your awareness. But unfortunately, the trap that people fall into is in order to get something out of your awareness, what you need to do first is shine your beam of attention onto it. Inadvertently, while it might seem like a good idea in the short term, especially if it's something really scary, that pops up in your awareness like, “Oh, I don't want this. I want to get this thing out of my awareness.” But in doing that, you're literally shining your attention. That flashlight is right on the scary thing. The very act of trying to distract, trying to push it away actually keeps that thing going, which is why it can be so easy and so tricky to get stuck in these pretty severe OCD spirals by doing that. Kimberley: Right. If we were talking about mindfulness, and let's go back to that, are attention and awareness both parts of mindfulness? Give me how you would conceptualize that. Max: That's exactly right there, and that's what I was talking about where mindfulness is such a beautiful, helpful practice and term. But oftentimes when we say just mindfulness, people don't understand that there are really relevant parts of mindfulness that are actually applicable skills that we can practice getting really good and solid without shining that beam of light and focusing flexibly on aspects of our experience. We can get good at letting go of that focused attention and just being with what pops up in our awareness, which are very relevant practices when we have OCD or anxiety. But if we just say mindfulness as a whole, paying attention to the present moment, we could miss these really important nuances and actionable skills that are different parts of mindfulness. Kimberley: Let's go deeper into that. Let's say you have OCD or you have panic disorder, or you have a phobia, and your brain-- I was talking with my son who has anxiety and he was saying, “I keep having the thought. No matter how many happy thoughts I have, it just keeps thinking of the scary thought.” That's just a really simple example. How might you use attention versus awareness or attention and awareness for folks who are managing these really sticky thoughts, like you said, or these really repetitive, intrusive thoughts? Max: It's such a good question. OCD, I always talk about how clever and tricky it is. In order to get through OCD, we need to be even more clever, more tricky than OCD. One of the ways OCD gets people to fall into its trap is by confusing them. It gets people to try to control things that they cannot control, which is what pops up in their awareness, but it also blinds people and gets them that they can't see that there are things that are in their control. That will be really helpful, powerful tools, and OCD gums up the works a little bit.  MINDFULNESS & ATTENTION TRAINING To be more specific, there's an aspect of mindfulness that we can think of as attentional training or attentional flexibility. What that is, it's strengthening up the brain's muscles to be able to take control of that flashlight, of that beam of focused attention. OCD, what it's going to do, it steals it from you and shines it on the really scary stuff, like with your son, “Oh, here's a thought that you really don't like,” or “Here's a really uncomfortable sensation.” All of a sudden, that beam of light is shining there. What attention training does, it really teaches people to be able to first notice, “Oh, my beam of light is on something really scary. Okay, this is a thing. This is a moment to practice now.” But then more importantly, to be able to then take power back and be able to shine that flashlight in flexible ways that are in line with people's values and goals versus are in line with OCD's agenda. But attention training, it's not only getting really good and powerful at shining that beam of light on what you want to shine, but it's also the practice of letting go of control over the stuff that's in our awareness. We're going to practice and allow those scary thoughts and feelings. I treat them like a car alarm going off where it might be annoying, might be uncomfortable, but I'm not going to focus on them. I'm not going to pay attention to it, because otherwise there's going to be front and center.  It's both. It's awareness, it's being able to flexibly shift between different aspects of our experience, and it's also allowing things to go, and you're like that broader floodlight of awareness. I always find it really helpful to practice the skill of attention training on non-OCD, non-anxiety neutral stimuli. It's not too triggering. And then we can start applying that to anxiety. If it's okay with you, Kim, I would love to walk you through some quirky little easy exercises that just help you maybe understand what I'm talking about and hopefully your listeners as well. Kimberley: I was just going to say, let's do it.  Max: Let's do it. Let's dive in.  Kimberley: Let's roleplay this.  ATTENTION TRAINING EXERCISE Max: Okay. I want you to roleplay with me and if your listeners would like to roleplay as well, more than happy to follow along too. Again, these exercises, I don't see them as like coping skills. I see them as like creating an understanding of what we can control, what we can't control, and being able to just feel what that's like in our bodies and know that this is something that we can do.  For the first one, what I want you to do is put your thumb and index finger together, like you're making an okay sign. Put a little bit of pressure between your thumb and index finger, but not a whole lot of pressure. Just take a couple of seconds and see if you can put your brain into your thumb and your index finger and just notice what that feels like. Notice the sensations. Let me know when you feel like you've got a good sense of the feeling. Kimberley: Yep, I got it.  Max: What I want you to try to do is shine that beam of attention. Really focus in on the pressure only from your index finger and see if you cannot think about not engage in the pressure from your thumb, allowing that to be there. See if you can really find and identify what your index finger feels like. let me know when you've got that. Again, not thinking about your thumb, just focusing on your index finger. Kimberley: Yeah, that was hard, but I got it. Max: It is hard, right? Because what we're doing is honing in that beam of light that we're paying attention to. What I want you to do now is switch. Let your index finger, let that feeling go, and switch to your thumb. Again, only focusing on the pressure from your thumb and allowing your index finger, allowing that pressure to be there without thinking about it or controlling it. Just letting it exist, and then focusing on the pressure from your thumb. Kimberley: Yeah, I got it.  Max: We could do this for five, ten minutes. I won't make you do it right now, but you can see there and there's like a bump. There's a shift where you go from one to the other. It's great. It's not about getting into details, it's about noticing, “Oh, I can pay attention flexibly. I can focus on my index finger, allow the thumb feeling to be, and then I can switch to the opposite side.” That's one way that people can start understanding what I'm talking about, where we can flexibly pay attention while allowing other stuff to exist in the background. Kimberley: Let me bring up my own personal experience here because, like I said, I'm here to learn. As I was pushing, I actually had some pain in my thumb. As I was trying to imagine the top finger, that index finger, that was really hard because I have a little bit of ligament pain in my thumb. I had to work really hard to think about it. What was actually getting in the way was the thoughts of, “I won't be able to do this because of the pain.” What are your thoughts on people who are fighting that? Max: It's such an important piece of this because oftentimes what prevents people from practicing are these thoughts and beliefs that pop up. The belief of, “I have no control over rumination,” or “I cannot pay attention.” I'm saying this, and where we're stepping back and noticing these are thoughts, these are stories as well. Part of the practice is, can I see them as events of the mind? Can I see them as stories? Allow them to be in the background, just like we're maybe allowing the sensation of your index finger to be in the background while maintaining focus on that one part of your experience, your thumb. Again, we want to treat pain, thoughts, feelings, sensations as best as we can, allowing them, seeing them as mental events versus as distinct parts of who you are as a person while maintaining as best as you can that focused beam of attention on what you choose to. Kimberley: Right. This is really cool. Just so I understand this, but please don't be afraid to tell me I've got it completely wrong. As I was doing it, I was noticing the top of my index finger, doing my best, and in my awareness was the thoughts I had and the pain that I had. My attention was on the top, but there was some background awareness of all the other noise. Is that what you're saying? Max: That's exactly what I'm saying. The trick with OCD or anxiety is, can we allow the stuff in the background? Because a lot of people get annoyed or frustrated. And then as soon as you do that, that focus goes from your index finger to the stuff that you don't want versus if we can let go of control. Another way to think about it too is if you're looking out of a window. Focused attention would be, you are immensely engaging in this beautiful oak tree in your front yard. I don't have an oak tree, but hopefully, somebody does. Imagine you're really focusing on this oak tree, and that is what you're paying attention to.  Now, there might be other things that come and go. There might be birds flying and bushes in the background. There might be houses and a bunny rabbit running by. You could choose to then shift your beam of light from the tree to one of those things, but you don't have to. You can keep paying attention to the tree and allowing all this other stuff to exist. That would be what we're talking about and that's the practice you could do with your fingers. And then with that same metaphor, broader just overall awareness would be looking out the window, but not intentionally focused on anything. Just letting your eyes wander to whatever is present. “Oh, I notice the tree and I notice a cloud and I notice a bird. Oh, I noticed a thought that I've been looking out this window for a very long time.” We're not questioning, we're not ruminating, we're not judging, we're just simply being there with what's present. That's that broader awareness piece to this.  Kimberley: Okay. I love it. For those who have probably heard me talk about this, but not using this language, or are completely new and this is the first time I've ever logged in and listened to us, how may they apply this to specific intrusive thoughts that they're having? Can you walk us through a real example of this? You could use my son if you want, or an actual case of yours or whatever. Max: Yeah, for sure. If we think about it in this way, also, it's like a little bit of a different approach than maybe how some people think about exposure and response prevention. Because in this way of doing things, there's a really hard emphasis on the response prevention piece, which in this case would be not ruminating, not engaging in the mental compulsions. It's doing the exposure, which is triggering the scary thoughts and the feelings, and then accessing awareness mode, like being with what's present.  An example of that, let's just say somebody has an intrusive thought, a really scary fear that they might hurt somebody. They might be a serial killer or they might do something really bad. Let's say we want to do an exposure with that thought and we choose a triggering thought of, “I am a murderer.” Normally, when they have that thought, they do all this stuff. Their focused attention is on that thought, and they're trying to convince themselves they're not a murderer. They're trying to maybe look for evidence. “Did I kill somebody? I did not.” They're engaging in this thought, doing all this sort of stuff that OCD wants them to.  One way that we might use this difference in attention awareness, doing exposure would be to first evoke the scary thought. Maybe really telling themselves for a couple of seconds like, “I am a murderer. I am a murderer, sitting with the fear and the dread and all the stuff that comes up.” But then instead of focusing on it, then letting go of any engagement. We could just sit there and actually do nothing at all. We just watch and observe. Like you're looking out that window and that thought “I'm a murderer” might pop up, it might go away. Another thought might pop up. But we want to take this stance of, “None of my business.” We're going to sit here, we're going to observe, and we're not going to mentally engage in the thoughts. It's really accessing this more of like awareness mode. We can actually do something like that.  If you want to, Kim, we don't have to use an intrusive thought, but we can, again, practice with a neutral thought together and then apply what I'm talking about. Usually, what people realize is that what happens to their intrusive thoughts is what happens to 99.9% of all the thoughts they get in a day where it comes and then it just goes away when it's ready. If you think about it, we have thousands and thousands of thoughts per day. Mostly that's what happens because we're not focusing our beam of light on it, because we're not doing all this work that inadvertently keeps it around. It's exposure not only to sit with the feelings, but to practice the skill of letting go, of focusing on it, of letting go of any mental compulsive behaviors towards it. ATTENTION TRAINING VS DISTRACTON Kimberley: Right. I know this is going to be a question for people, so I'm going to ask it. How does attention training differ from distraction? Quite often, I will get really quite distressed messages from people saying, “But wait, if I'm being mindful on the tree, isn't that me distracting against my thoughts?” Can you talk about, again, differentiating this practice with distraction or avoidance? Max: Yep, absolutely. I like to think about it as an attitude that people take where we're willing to have whatever our brain pops up at us. With distraction, we're unwilling. We don't want it, we don't like it, we're turning away from it. But that's actually like, it's okay too. We call it distraction, we can call it engagement. It's okay to live your life to do stuff, but we have to first get really clear on, can I allow whatever my brain pops up to be there without then keeping that beam of attention on it? Because all mental rituals, all sorts of stuff that we do starts with focused attention. Summons, rituals are pure retention, but a lot of them like analyzing, reassurance, attention is a major part of them. If you can notice when our OCD took that beam of light and shined it, then we could practice taking the light off, allowing it to exist, allowing it to be there, but without engaging. If you want, Kim, I'm happy to maybe do another experiential exercise, not to throw too many at you today.  Kimberley: No, bring it on. Max: So maybe you and your listeners can understand that piece to it.  Kimberley: Yes, please.  ATTENTION TRAINING EXERCISE #2  Max: Okay. Lets start with attention training exercise #2. What we're going to do is we're going to practice engaging in what we might think of as a rumination, analytical way of thinking. Again, rumination, mental compulsions, they are a behavior. They're a mental action that we're taking that we could turn on, but we can also turn off. We want to be able to turn off mental compulsions throughout the rumination, but allow any thoughts and feelings to exist without doing anything about them. I know it sounds heavy, so let me show you what I mean by that.  Kimberley: Good.  Max: What I want you to do is think about a vacation or a trip that you either have coming up, or it might be like a dream vacation that you really want to take, and just take a second and let me know when you got something in mind. Kimberley: I got it. Max: You got it. That was quick. That was a good thing. What I want you to do is start mentally planning out the itinerary for this vacation, thinking about what you're going to do, all the steps you're going to take, just like doing it in your mind. And then I'll tell you when to stop. Okay. Stop. Now what I want you to do is let go of that engaging analytic way of thinking and just sit here for a couple of seconds. We're not going to do really anything. If the idea of the vacation pops up in your mind, I want you to allow it to pop up. But don't think about it, don't focus on it. Allow it to be there or not to be there. Just don't do what you were just doing where you're actually actively thinking about it. Are you ready?  Kimberley: Mm-hmm. Max: Okay. Again, we're just going to sit and we're going to observe. Whatever comes up, comes up. We're going to let it hover and float in your overall awareness without focusing on it.  Waves washing on the beach or just letting your thoughts and feelings come and go. We're not engaging, we're not thinking about them. We're just observing.  What I want you to do one last time, I want you to start thinking again, planning, going through the itinerary, thinking all the cool stuff you're going to do. As you're doing it, notice what that feels like psychologically to go from not doing to doing. And then start thinking about it, and I'll let you know when to stop again. All right. We can let go of the vacation. Again, just for five, ten seconds sitting. If the thought pops up, allow it to pop up, but don't engage in it. Don't manipulate it or actively walk through the itinerary again. Just notice what that's like.  Okay, Kim. I'd love to hear your experience walking through, turning it on the analytical way of thinking, and then turning it off and playing around with it a little bit. Kimberley: Okay. Number one, I immediately was able to go into planning. I think because I do this, this is actually one of the things I do at bedtime. I've planned my 91st birthday, my 92nd birthday party. That's what I love to do, so it was very easy for me to go into that. When I went back to more awareness of just what I noticed, I was actually able to do it really easily except of the thought like, “Oh, I hope I don't have the thought. I hope I'm doing this right.” Max: That's such a beautiful way, and the mind is going to do stuff like that. We're going to start thinking about thinking, and I'm curious how you respond to that thought. What you did next? Kimberley: I was just like, “Maybe I will, maybe I won't. What else?” And then I was like, “Well, there's Max and there's my microphone.” That was the work. Max: Yes. That's exactly what I'm talking about. We're not like, “Don't think about this vacation.” Because if we did that, what do you think that would do to you if you're just sitting there in that moment of awareness and be like, “This is not a good thought to have, I can't think about this upcoming vacation”? Kimberley: Well, I had more of them and I had distress about them. Max: Yeah, exactly. That's what I mean by we're not distracting, we're allowing, but we're also not analytically thinking about it. Now that we're talking about this, I think this is a really important piece on where mindfulness can get maybe especially confusing or even contradictory for people. Again, to preface this, I'm a huge mindfulness advocate and fan, but one of the issues about mindfulness for OCD, in particular, is that mindfulness is really in a lot of ways teaching it, it's about coming back to the present moment. I'm going to focus on my breath. I'm going to refocus to my body. I'm going to ground myself. Again, overall very healthy things to do, we should practice that.  But the problem about that is if applied directly to OCD mental compulsions—and again, just to be really clear by mental compulsions, I'm talking about anything that people do to try to feel better, cope with, resolve a scary, intrusive thought. Kim, your six-part series, let's say, on mental compulsions that you did is one of the best OCD contents I've ever seen. I think everybody should go back and listen to that, whether you have OCD or not. So, all this mental stuff that we do in response to a scary thought. Mindfulness can be really helpful in noticing when we get caught up and again, like flexibly shifting. But at the end of the day, sufferers of OCD really need to understand that you don't need to focus onto the present moment to stop doing mental compulsions. Because it's analytical, it's a behavior, it's a way of thinking. Just like you did, we can simply turn it on and then we can turn it off.  Now, I don't mean to say it's as easy as just don't do it. Obviously, it's not the case. This is complex stuff. There's so many psychological factors that lead people to ruminate and to do compulsions, but it's a simple idea. People need a foundation to understand that mental compulsions are a behavior that we have a lot more agency over than your OCD wants you to think. I like to think about when you look at more traditional, like contamination OCD, people might wash their hands a lot. It's the same thing where there's the behavior of washing your hands that you could do or you cannot do.  Now there's entire treatment protocols helping people chip away at that to not wash their hands, so it's not just like, “Don't wash your hands.” But people understand that the goal of this treatment is to, “I'm washing my hands too much and now I'm not washing my hands.” If you apply the same mindful logic to rumination, it would be like, “Oh, we're going to wash your hands, but you cannot wash your hands. You're just going to have to use wet wipes forever.” It's like, oh, I'll get maybe a step in the right direction. But people need to know that the goal here is to not wash your hands. Just like with more Pure O rumination type of OCD, the goal is to learn how to not ruminate. Learn how to step out of that. Kimberley: Yeah. I think you had said somewhere along the way that it's a training. It's a training that we do. What's interesting for me, I'll use this as solely example, is I am in the process of training myself to do what I call deep work, because I have two businesses, things are chaotic, and I can get messages all the time. When I sit down to do something, I'm being pinged on my phone and called on my computer and email bells, so I'm training myself to focus on doing the thing I'm doing and not give my attention to the dinging of the phone and so forth as a training. I'm trying to train myself to be able to go longer, longer, longer periods and hold my attention, which at the beginning, my attention, I could really only do like 15 minutes of that and it felt like my brain was going to explode. Would you say that this is a similar practice in that we're slowly training our brain to be able to hold attention and awareness at the same time and increase it over time?  Max: Yeah, absolutely. I think everything with OCD and anxiety is a process. First, it takes awareness, and that's where mindfulness can be so helpful, where the practice of mindfulness is about being more aware. “I'm aware, I'm ruminating. I'm aware of that. I'm doing some sort of compulsion.” That itself could take a very long time. I think it's all about baby steps.  Now, I will say though, Kim, some people, when I explain them these differences and they're able to really feel what it's like to be ruminating, what it's like not—some people click and they can do it really fast. They're like, “Oh my gosh. I had no idea that this is something I was doing.” Some people, it takes a very long time and there's a spectrum. I think everybody always needs to go at their own pace and some people are just going to need to work at it harder. Some people, it's going to come really easy and natural. There's no right or wrong way to do it. These are principles that live in the ERP lifestyle. We want to start taking little baby steps as much as we can. Kimberley: Right. For those listening and for me too, where it clicked for them, what was the shift for them specifically? Max: The shift was understanding that while it felt like rumination—again, a lot of this is like, think about OCD, there's this big unsolvable problem and they're trying to solve it. They're analyzing it, they're paying attention to it, they're focusing on it, they're thinking about it, for them to really feel that, “This is something that I am doing. I know there's reasons why I'm doing it, there's beliefs I have about the utility of ruminating, including beliefs that I can't control this, when really, we can't control it. Beliefs about how helpful it is.” There's a lot of reasons why people do that, but to recognize, “Oh my gosh, this is a thing that's a lot more in my control than I thought.” When they experience that stepping back and allowing their brain to throw out whatever it does without having to engage with it, game changer.  Also, in terms of classic mindfulness, think about mindfulness of breath. The instructions generally are, we're going to focus on, say the breath, the rise and fall of my belly. My attention goes, I'm going to come back to it. I think if we do that with a very specific intention, it could be so relevant and so helpful for OCD. That intention is seeing your brain as a little puppy dog. When you have OCD, that puppy dog is full of energy. OCD is like this mean bully that's thrown a tennis ball and getting that puppy dog to go.  What mindfulness of breath can teach you, if we're aware of this, we go into it like, “This is what I'm going to work on. This is how my OCD is getting me—it's getting me to follow these lines of thought.” When you're there sitting on your breath to be able to notice where your thought goes, be able to look at it, “None of my business. Come back to my breath.” To me, Kim, that is actually exposure and response prevention. You expose yourself to discomfort of not following the thought, which is really hard. For people with OCD, without OCD, that's hard to do, but like you said, that is absolutely a skill that people can get better at. STOPPING COMPULSIONS WITH ATTENTION TRAINING  Kimberley: Yeah, and it's response prevention. It's the core of that. Okay, I love this. I love this. Now, as we wrap up, is there anything that you feel we haven't covered here that will bring us home and dial this in for those who are hearing this for the first time or have struggled with this in the past?  Max: I think we did a pretty good job. I mean, it's very nuanced stuff. I like to see this for people that feel like their OCD is well enough managed, but there's still work to go. This is like icing on the cake. Let's really look at the nitty-gritty of how this works. Or if people are feeling really stuck and they're not knowing why, hopefully, this can shine a light on some of these less talked about principles that are really important.  But I guess the one final thing, going all the way back to Amishi Jha and her neurological research on mindfulness, really fascinating studies out of her lab show that 50% of the time, 50% of her waking day, people are not aware. They're not aware of what's going on, which means 50% of this podcast, people aren't going to be paying attention to. We can't take offense to that because it's 50% of any podcast. When you have that coupled with OCD's tendency to steal that beam of focused attention on scary stuff, it can be so devastating and so stuck for people. Hopefully, some of the stuff can give a sense of what we do about that and how we can start making moves against anxiety and OCD. Kimberley: Yeah, and compassion every step of the way. Max: Oh my gosh. I think everything needs to be done, peppered with compassion. Or maybe peppered is too level like in the context of full radical compassion. That's such an important part of all of this work. Kimberley: Yeah, because it's true. I mean, even myself who has a pretty good mindfulness practice, I was even surprised how much of mine was like, “Am I doing this right? What if I don't do it right? Will this work? How will it help me?” All of the things. I think that everyone's background noise, like you said, is very normal. I so appreciate you bringing this to the conversation, because again, I talk about mindfulness a lot. One other thing is, I will say when, let's say, someone has a somatic obsession or they have panic, and so they're having a lot of physical sensations. When you say “Come to the present,” they're like, “But the present sucks. I don't want to be here in the present.” What are your thoughts on that?  Max: Somatic OCD and panic, I think out of any themes or content when it comes to awareness and attention, those are the most relevant. If you think about somatic OCD, where people come obsessed about different parts of their perceptual experience, it's all about people trying to not be aware of things that they can't control, and then therefore they're aware of it all the time. I think this is especially spot on for those. It's helpful for all forms of anxiety, but that in particular, that's going to be-- we tend to not do exposures by hyper-focusing on what they're afraid of because that's compulsive. That's we're focusing on controlling more. This process should be effortless. When we're ruminating, when we're compulsing or paying attention, that's like you're on the treadmill. You're doing work, and just hopefully, people experience some of these exercises, all we're doing is getting off the treadmill. We want to be doing less, if anything. OCD is making you work for it. It's making you do stuff. We want to identify that and do a whole lot less. And then you'll forget about it usually until you don't. It's like, “Oh crap, here it is again.” And then, “Okay, cool. I just practiced. Let me do it again,” until it loses power more fully. Kimberley: Yeah. I so appreciate you. Tell us what people can hear about you. Max: I run a practice in Redondo Beach. We're called Beachfront Anxiety Specialists. We have our website. Again, my name's Max Maisel, and people can feel free to Google us and reach out at any time. Kimberley: Amazing. Thank you. We'll have all of your links in the show notes. I'm really, truly grateful. Thank you for coming on and talking about this. It is so nuanced, but so important. As I say to my patients, I could say it 10 times and sometimes you need to hear a similar thing in a different way for it to click. I'm so grateful. Hopefully, this has been really revolutionary for other people to hear it from a different perspective. I'm so grateful for your time.  Max: Thank you. It's such a privilege to be here with you and your listeners and I really appreciate you having me on today. Kimberley: Thank you.

Podcaster, pop-culture writer and three-time and reigning Ms. Noir City AUDRA WOLFMANN joins us to talk about defending her Ms. Noir City crown, and one of her favorite sub-genres: Beatsploitation. We kick things off with Seijun Suzuki's psychedelic yakuza noir, TOKYO DRIFTER (1966). This isn't Beatsploitation per se, but there are plenty of dudes in mod suits and the film is so incomprehensible that it's gotta be poetry man. Plus it's got jazz, rock and roll, 60s bubblegum pop, and haunting Japanese torch songs. Audra asks if this movie is really a noir, and Bob wonders if it's actually a musical. Either way, Cory gets it right when he says it's a "trip factor 10." Our next film is Roger Corman's dark, beatnik satire A BUCKET OF BLOOD (1959), where Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) becomes a coffee house arts sensation by killing pets and people and covering up his victims with clay. It's one of Roger Corman's best and Hollywood everyman Dick Miller's only lead roles. We also talk about the unexpected dominance of Gweneth Paltrow's new weed brand, the return of Taco Bell's Volcano Menu, how Covid drove Bob to binge on Hostess Ding Dongs, and how the movies are back baby--but at what cost? Audra also discusses her history with Noir City, her all Weird Al burlesque troupe, and her podcasts: SPEAKEASILY VS. THE 80s and RETROPHILIA. If you're digging OMFYS, you should definitely check out and subscribe to Audra's amazing pods: http://www.audrawolfmann.net https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/retrophilia-the-90s-in-music-film-culture/id1598247675 Philena also joins us later on for "The Strike Tok Report," a now regular feature on OMFYS until those cheap studio bastards pay the actors and writers some decent wages and royalties for keeping our asses at home watching Netflix, Hulu and Max (It's not HBO; it's just Max). We had to shelve our BARBIE EPISODE because Philena is a SAG AFTRA member and there is no more struck work than BARBIE. We'll be sure to post this ep as soon as the strike is over and it's no longer relevant. Yay. Join us in August as we keep things jazzy with ALL NIGHT LONG (1962) and KING CREOLE (1958). Special Guest: Audra Wolfmann Hosts: Bob Calhoun, Cory Sklar and Greg Franklin PHILENA FRANKLIN IS ON STRIKE. Trailers and movie audio courtesy of ARCHIVE.ORG. Twitter: OM4YStoners Instagram/Facebook (Meta): oldmoviesforyoungstoners Contact: oldmoviesforyoungstoners AT gmail DOT com

In the world of mergers and acquisitions you see a lot of teams...but you also have your own team.Today's guest, Max Friar, runs Calder Capital, a firm he started ten years ago. He's built a team that helps business owners sell and entrepreneurs buy. On this episode of The Clarity Advisors Show, Max and host Ken Trupke discuss the challenges of building a team, and what Max is seeing in the businesses he advises. Timestamps (01:04): History of Calder Capital(02:19): Buy side vs. sell side representation(03:56): Off-market deals(04:54): Building the team at Calder Capital(06:20): Learning from mistakes(08:57): Success stories(12:33): Explaining a non-disclosure agreement(14:59): The evolution of the merger and acquisition business(18:08): Advice for leaders on growing their teams(24:14): Recommended reading and listening(26:30): Who should connect with Max Friar and how  Episode Quotes “Our desire is to help every seller get multiple competing offers so we can give them choices.” (Max)“It's a numbers game. A lot of people say they want to buy and a lot of people say they want to sell. But at the end of the day, only a small fraction of those actually work out.” (Max)“We have to reach out to a lot of companies because just because you're interested in having an initial conversation does not mean you are ready to sell. You may be years away from that.” (Max)“Everyone needs some sort of balance and we have to be respectful of being able to blow off some steam. So, take some days off, make sure you hang out with your family, make sure you hang out with your friends.  Go out dancing, go camping … whatever it is that lets the air flow through your brain and recharges you.” (Max)“Good people want to contribute and they'll work really hard, but they have to have a chance to recharge. And I think you have to respect how their energy ebbs and flows.” (Max)“If you make a mistake and you bring someone on board that isn't a cultural fit or isn't a fit for their role, I think moving on quickly is important.” (Max) Recommended ReadingBooks by Dale CarnegieBooks by Jim RohnBooks by Timothy FerrissBooks by Anthony de Mello Connect with Max Friarmax@caldergr.comCalder CapitalMax Friar on LinkedIn

Max's Journey to Success: A Neurodivergent Story of Overcoming Challenges and Finding Belonging -- Max shares his unique journey of overcoming autism and his path to success. He talks about the tools he used to thrive in life, from the Listening Program app to extra-curricular activities. His vulnerable story is full of insight and inspiration, teaching listeners the power of determination and resilience. Max also reflects on his childhood and the experiences that shaped him. Hear his stories and learn from his advice in the Secret Life podcast._____If you or anyone you know is struggling with addiction, depression, trauma, sexual abuse or feeling overwhelmed, we've compiled a list of resources at secretlifepodcast.com._____To share your secret and be a guest on the show email secretlifepodcast@icloud.com_____SECRET LIFE'S TOPICS INCLUDE:addiction recovery, mental health, alcoholism, drug addiction, sex addiction, love addiction, OCD, ADHD, dyslexia, eating disorders, debt & money issues, anorexia, depression, shoplifting,  molestation, sexual assault, trauma, relationships, self-love, friendships, community, secrets, self-care, courage, freedom, and happiness._____About our guest, MAX KORTEN - Max, a former research and assessment coordinator at Lincoln University, is an assessment specialist at Strayer University. He hopes that his TEDx talk will inspire positive change within others.Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/max_korten_living_beyond_your_invisible_letterhttps://advancedbrain.com/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJi3xu5OOMM&t=6s_____Create and Host Your Podcast with the same host we use - RedCircle_____Get your copy of SECRET LIFE OF A HOLLYWOOD SEX & LOVE ADDICT -- Secret Life Novel or on Amazon______HOW CAN I SUPPORT THE SHOW?Tell Your Friends & Share Online!Follow, Rate & Review: Apple Podcasts | SpotifyFollow & Listen iHeart | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Amazon | PandoraSpread the word via social mediaInstagramTwitterFacebook#SecretLifePodcastDonate - You can also support the show with a one-time or monthly donation via PayPal (make payment to secretlifepodcast@icloud.com) or at our WEBSITE.Connect with Brianne Davis-Gantt (@thebriannedavis)Official WebsiteInstagramFacebookTwitterConnect with Mark Gantt (@markgantt)Main WebsiteDirecting WebsiteInstagramFacebookTwitterTranscript[0:00:00] Max: I did not like having autism. And I think in a way, I was almost trying to, like I was trying to, like, push myself out of autism.[0:00:15] Brianne Davis: Welcome to the Secret Life Podcast. Tell me your secret, I'll tell you mine.Sometimes you have to go through the darkness to reach the light. That's what I did. After twelve years of recovery in sex and love addiction, I finally found my soulmate myself. Please join me in my novel, Secret Life of a Hollywood Sex and Love Addict, a four-time bestseller on Amazon. It's a brutal, honest, raw, gnarly ride, but hilarious at the same time. Check it out now on Amazon. Welcome to Secret Life Podcast. I'm Brianne Davis-Gantt. Today I'm pulling back the curtains of all kinds of human secrets. We'll hear about what people are hiding from themselves or others. You know those deep, dark secrets you probably want to take to your grave are those lighter, funnier secrets that are just plain embarrassing. Really? The what, when, where and why of it all.[0:01:14] Brianne Davis: My guest is Max. Now, Max, I have a question for you. What is your secret?[0:01:27] Max: When I was growing up, until I left for college, I was extremely abashed for having autism.[0:01:37] Brianne Davis: So you carried around for the longest time that you had autism and you didn't share it with anybody?[0:01:43] Max: Well, I was diagnosed when I was 18 months old, and this was in 1995 when autism was fairly new. But my family knew that I had autism. Some kids knew that I was a little off, but they didn't know the term right, because I definitely did stick out what's that phrase? You stick out with a four thumb.[0:02:12] Brianne Davis: Yeah. But I do want to ask, how did your parents know at 18 months? That's so young. So what were the signs? Because I know nothing about autism. I'm so glad you reached out. I'm so glad you're coming on, because I really want to be educated and my listeners to be educated. So please, any information.[0:02:33] Max: So I'm not 100% sure, but from what I vaguely remember, from what they've told me, I was not talking. I actually didn't learn how to speak until I was four. I was having sensory issues. And I also think that I'm not 100% certain that I wasn't really playing with other kids. Yeah, other kids around my age. So I think those were the things that I'm not 100% certain.[0:03:11] Brianne Davis: Yeah. Because I have adhd and my mom knew from a very young age as well. I talk about it. I could not learn the alphabet, like, to save my life. And she was so frustrated. So I always felt other than right on the outside. Did you feel that way growing up?[0:03:29] Max: Yeah, very much so. I did not really understand growing up. I didn't understand how kids communicated or I didn't really get the social and teenage jargon of how kids communicated. And because of that, I did have some brains, but I definitely felt like a bit socially isolated for my peers. This happened more so when I was like, in 3rd, fourth and fifth grade when anything horribly happened and it kind of came out of the blue, or if it was off routine of my schedule, I would just have a tetra tantrum.[0:04:25] Brianne Davis: Because you felt out of control or like, things were out of the norm for you?[0:04:29] Max: Out of the norm, yeah. But I really like having, like, a very stringent and stoic schedule. And any time that went off of track, then it just messed with my psyche.[0:04:51] Brianne Davis: Yeah. Do you think it was like because I love structure. Like, there's something about structure. When you have structure and what through your day and it's planned, that there's a sense of calmness and that you know what's next. So if anything deviated from that, it was, like, anxiety driven.[0:05:11] Max: Yeah. So individuals who have autism and some others who have adhd like yourself, or even Add, like structure, and when structure is, you know, off balance or gets thrown out the window, there are diverse individuals like myself tend to really just can't handle it. As I've gotten older, I've gotten much more used to it. I've gotten a lot of behavioral therapies that have really through, like, ot, occupational therapy, speech therapy, cbt, and just joining activities that have helped my brain and my autism to get structured to everyday life. But when I was very little, like eight through twelve, it was really difficult for me.[0:06:12] Brianne Davis: Yeah. Can you take us back to that difficulty? And I also wanted to ask, did your parents have difficulty as well? Like I said, my mom it was very hard for my mom, god bless her, I love her, but they don't teach parents how. There's no manual to how to help your child when they're struggling. So how did your parents handle it?[0:06:36] Max: So actually, it's weird. I've never really asked my parents how they handled it.[0:06:41] Brianne Davis: Really?[0:06:43] Max: No.[0:06:44] Brianne Davis: Oh, my God. Let's get them on.[0:06:49] Max: Just some backtrack. My parents are actually divorced. They divorced when I was like, eight or nine. But even though they divorced and I think they did a fairly good job with trying to structure things and trying to keep me occupied. And both of my parents remarried, and my stepparents my step dad and step mom are really helpful and are still really helpful with me and getting acclimated to my autism. If I were to guess, I'm sure it was pretty stressful for them, especially when I was in elementary school, because they were trying to help me. And I have a younger sister who is 20 months younger than me, like two babies.[0:07:42] Brianne Davis: They had two babies at the same time. Oh, my God. God bless your parents. That's a lot of just one baby is hard enough. When people have, like, two indictments at the same time, it's like, oh, my God, god bless you.[0:07:55] Max: But yeah, I actually didn't understand the concept of divorce when I was nine. I just thought they were kind of doing what I considered in child's terms, like a rum springer.[0:08:09] Brianne Davis: I don't know.[0:08:09] Max: I just thought it was like a rum spring in my mind. I thought they were just taking a break. And it was when I was, like, ten years that I was like, that I learned the concept of divorce and whatnot. I just didn't get it. My dad moved out. Well, it helped him move things to his apartment. And I don't know, it just didn't really affect me. I don't know.[0:08:39] Brianne Davis: Interesting.[0:08:40] Max: I don't know why. Again, I think it was just this idea of a rum springer. Like, my dad was just taking a break and moving out the house. That was just, like, the first thing that came to mind for me. Like, at eight years old.[0:08:54] Brianne Davis: Nine years old, right. Okay. So there's your sister, and you and your parents are separated. And then how soon after did they get remarried?[0:09:05] Max: So my dad and my step mom got remarried when I was going into 7th grade.[0:09:14] Brianne Davis: Okay.[0:09:16] Max: My mom and stepdad met when I was in fifth grade, and they were cohabitated for a while, and they just actually got married five years ago.[0:09:29] Brianne Davis: They waited they waited longer.[0:09:33] Max: Yeah. My stepdad has been presently in my life since I was probably eleven.[0:09:39] Brianne Davis: Can you tell me some of the things that you had to do differently from other kids? Just so I can, because I had to do flashcards. I had to go to tutors. It was really hard for me. I was so embarrassed on a daily basis at school. Like, I couldn't read in classes. If the teacher asked me, I'd be like, no, thank you.[0:10:02] Max: So I had an eight until I was in 7th grade, I think. I think it was 7th. And I also had, like, academic enrichment. So that was a combination of that that just helped me with study skills and managing my homework. And I have something called executive processing. So executive processing means that when someone says something or when someone is talking, you might not be able to code all the information at a faster pace as a neuro typical person does.[0:10:45] Brianne Davis: Right.[0:10:46] Max: So executive processing was an issue. I would say those were, like, the big three, like, organization, executive processing, and definitely, like, managing, like, my mood from, you know, like, if anything was, like, off balance, just, like, trying to manage my mood.[0:11:08] Brianne Davis: So what are some of those tools that you learned? Can you remember?[0:11:15] Max: One of the things for executive processing that I guess I could say as a life saver was when I was 16. So my sophomore year, my mom is really my speech therapist had found that there was this thing that came out, and it's called the listening program. And it was like this brand new how do I say it's? This brand new technological system that helps integrate the two parts of your brain to communicate with each other.[0:11:50] Brianne Davis: Okay.[0:11:50] Max: So what was happening was before I was 16, the left and right side of my brain were not communicating with each other. And that's why I was struggling with reading. I wasn't really struggling, but it was taking me longer to understand reading passages or trying to organize my essays or even just and it also goes back to communicating with my peers. Like this listening program, I've been doing it for twelve years. It helps me communicate with my peers because there's different levels in the listening program, and it involves executive functioning, processing, and communication. And also I think there's like a part where it involves motor skills. So like motor ability. So not falling down. Yeah, and I started doing it when I was 16. Essentially what you do is that you listen to these headphones. When I got them, it was through an ipod, because this was back in 2010, and it was the structured headphones with the ipod. And you essentially listen to orchestra music. Oh yeah, you listen to orchestra music and you're listening to different instruments, but basically you're listening to different instruments at the same time.[0:13:30] Brianne Davis: Okay.[0:13:30] Max: And what it does is that it helps the two parts of your brain, your left and right brain, to communicate with one another. There's actually an app for it. So I just have the app on my phone and I listen to it through these Sony headphones that I have here.[0:13:48] Brianne Davis: Can you share the app in case anyone yeah, if anything's resonating, let's share the app to help. What is it called?[0:13:56] Max: It's called abt listening program. Yeah, it's an app. I'm just looking at it now. It's called the listening program. By advanced brain technologies, I believe. And I'm not 100% sure. I think it's when you start it's $35 a month.[0:14:19] Brianne Davis: Okay.[0:14:20] Max: That's what I currently pay. I think when it first came out, it was a lot more expensive because you had to get the actual kit and the ipod. I don't know if they have that anymore because technology has evolved last twelve years, but there's like an actual website for it and their headquarters are in Utah. I would 100% recommend it. I guess you could say it was a lifesaver because I've been using it for the last almost 13 years.[0:14:53] Brianne Davis: Yeah, I would say it's an effective tool if you've been using it for 13 years. But when you just said reading comprehension, all of that literally my entire body was like, I know how that feels. So would you be in class in school? Did other kids know you are autistic? Or did they just think you had a learning disability? How did you handle that stress? Because I didn't handle it well. I really like, shut down as a human. I let my learning disability kind of run my life. But it sounds like you had such great support. So how was that for you?[0:15:30] Max: I think in middle school and early high school, it was very difficult because I really wanted to have friends and a cohort of friends, but I didn't have that. And the other thing was, when I was in 7th grade, I moved I moved to a new town. So moving in middle school middle school is awkward in general, but moving middle school is torture.[0:15:58] Brianne Davis: Torture.[0:16:00] Max: It's awkwardness on top of awkwardness. So I moved at a very, I guess you could say a very bizarre time in my life. 7th, 8th and 9th grade were pretty awkward. I think the main things that really helped me were when I started running in 7th grade. And that really helped because when I was doing an extracurricular activity, I had done swimming before, but this really helped my social emotional behavior because I was doing a team sport. So I did cross country track, and I did that competitively for ten years. I did it for 7th grade until my senior year of college. So that helped me be part of.[0:16:59] Brianne Davis: A team, be part of something other than yourself. So that would be like, if you have a child, maybe getting them into a sport that they enjoy, obviously not pushing it on them, they have to enjoy it. But that might be something, because I didn't do that. I didn't join any sports or anything.[0:17:15] Max: Yeah, okay, so I joined a sport. I don't know how your high school was, but my high school was very competitive, and when I got to high school, I don't know, I kind of just hit the ground running. I really wanted to do well in high school for myself, so I pushed myself, probably pushed myself a little bit too hard at times. So I did track and cross country.[0:17:47] Brianne Davis: You were overachiever.[0:17:48] Max: Yeah, I was an overachiever.[0:17:51] Brianne Davis: I was not. I didn't want to go to college. I didn't want to do any of that. I was, like, not interested.[0:17:58] Max: I was hardcore over achiever. I just choir. I was in the National Honor Society. I did a couple you thrived.[0:18:08] Brianne Davis: Maybe you should be doing this and I should be coming on, talking about the secret of my learning disability and being bullied. You thrived like, you really did.[0:18:18] Max: Yeah, I took five AP classes. I was in the National Honor Society, people. So, yeah, to say, like, I was an overachiever was an understatement. But again, I went to a very competitive high school. Like, people in my high school went to ivy League schools in, like, Stanford and georgetown and emery, so, like, those very top niche schools, and I wanted to fit in with my peers.[0:18:53] Brianne Davis: Well, here's the thing. It's like when you're saying that right now, it's really beautiful because you took something that made you different and you got the tools, and it sounds like your parents really supported you and got you what you needed to keep succeeding in our society is whatever you want to call it, but you really just thrived. And it almost gave you this upper hand of your unique in a beautiful way. Because I believe people with autism are learning disabilities. Our brains work differently, and there is a very beautiful thing I see now, but I still have residue of being bullied. Did you ever get bullied or no?[0:19:34] Max: A little bit in 8th grade.[0:19:36] Brianne Davis: Okay.[0:19:38] Max: But I actually went to the guidance counselor because I was getting bullied because I was not happy. But the thing is, Brian, I did not like having autism. And I think, in a way, I was almost trying to make myself try to be neurotypical. So while I was really thriving and pushing myself, I was almost, like, trying to I was trying to push myself.[0:20:09] Brianne Davis: Out of autism and run from it. Like, keep it a lie almost to yourself a secret almost to yourself. It's not there. It's not there. It's not there.[0:20:19] Max: I basically was telling myself, by the time I graduated from high school, I have to be cured or get all my support out. I think it was something along the lines of, like, I can't have any more support after I graduate. These are the four years that I have to crunch down and grind and make sure that I can be independent and self sufficient by 18. But I think I took that almost a little bit too personally and literally because everyone had support services beyond high school. And, like, I wish I had known that because I don't think I would have stressed myself out or would have stretched myself in all the time, because I think I pushed myself. I'm glad that I pushed myself, but I was almost pushing myself in a way to survive.[0:21:23] Brianne Davis: Yeah, it is, like, superhuman effort. It's like this superhuman effort. And then you get to what, graduating high school and then did you just give up all your support system? What happened?[0:21:36] Max: When I graduated high school, I was actually kind of burnt out, to be honest.[0:21:42] Brianne Davis: You think, jeez, I'm burnt out. While you're telling me everything you were doing. I'm like, can I take a nap? Like, I'm tired.[0:21:50] Max: Yeah, I was definitely burnt out a little bit. But back in 2012, the expectation was to go to college.[0:22:00] Brianne Davis: Yes, but now they say you shouldn't go to college. Just so you know, like, new studies are saying you can actually do better without college.[0:22:08] Max: Yeah. So I wish I had taken, like, maybe a break or maybe taking a semester off just to chill out a little bit. But I was still in that go go attitude and, like, wanting to thrive. And when I got to college, even though I could utilize my support systems, I could get extra time on test, and I could take a test in a quiet room. I wasn't using that at first. And looking back on that, I kind of think I'm the biggest idiot because I was shooting myself on the phone.[0:22:47] Brianne Davis: Yeah. No, I did too. Like, taking the sats and tests. I didn't use those extra tools I could have because I didn't want to feel different from anybody else.[0:22:57] Max: Yeah. So when I got to college, I was trying to essentially trying to be like the typical college student that you see in TV and media, and I was shooting myself in the foot, and I'm like, I can't do this. My parents are paying a lot of money for me to go here, and I want to do well. And what made me feel more comfortable about myself when I got to college is unlike high school or even like the K through twelve system, I think how people in college tend to be a little bit more open about their vulnerabilities. So that's what I talked about in my Ted Talk was that people had these invisible letters. So for me, my invisible letter was A for autism. But I had met people, whether it was like, my track team and I was also in Greek Life or through other organizations who are going through these insecurities, and you would have never known it. So it made me feel like, less alone. And that's when I realized I had to be more authentic to myself.[0:24:16] Brianne Davis: So what do you remember, like, the first step doing it, doing the Ted Talk? Was that like, the moment you felt a freedom from that bondage of self, or was there a moment you can remember that you're like, aha, that was like, the thing that something switched.[0:24:34] Max: So I guess you could say, like, I started to reveal that I was autistic in little baby steps. So I reveal to my classmates I had autism in my senior year because I shared my college speech in a class. And I remember that was like, the first time that I had done that. And then I think it was around like, my sophomore year of college, that's when I started to, like, meet people. It wasn't really a specific person. It was just like different friends or acquaintances who are kind of just going through different vulnerabilities that you would have.[0:25:16] Brianne Davis: Never life struggles, things.[0:25:18] Max: Yeah, and that's what made me reveal my own insecurities and what I had gone through.[0:25:27] Brianne Davis: Here's my question, though. Did you have any backlash? Did anybody ever make you feel bad? Or was it just this warm, like, we accept you for who you are?[0:25:41] Max: Everyone was accepting. I had one teammates, and I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about this. He just did not like me for personal reasons and essentially was trying to bully me. But that's just like another therapy session, you know?[0:26:02] Brianne Davis: I love a good therapy session. Come on. No, but that's what I'm trying to teach my son what you just said. I said not everybody's going to like you and you're never going to understand why some people are just not going to like you.[0:26:14] Max: Yeah, at that point, I just didn't care and I didn't need permission for him to like me. But, yeah, I felt very welcome and it helped me succeed in college and I eventually did very well. I got this very prestigious award my senior year that was only given to, like, I think, 20 students. I went to graduate school and got a master's in higher ed, and currently my background is in research and evaluation. That's what I do for my current career.[0:26:55] Brianne Davis: Wow. You're still an overachiever, but that's a beautiful thing. It's like your autism didn't slow you down. It probably even made you even have more life experiences and learn more things in a different way. And you're actually making me proud that I have, like, a learning disability because for so long I kept it such a secret and I was in so much shame for sure.[0:27:20] Max: No neuro diverse people. They are like their own little what's the word? Their own little creature happened. You're an actor and you're starting this podcast. You have so much to be grateful for.[0:27:36] Brianne Davis: I know when I wrote a book and it was best seller and I was like, oh, my God, I did that. I built to this day, and I did that. What? Do you ever have those moments where you're like, I did that, like your Ted Talk where you're like, I did that. Well, thank you so much for coming on, but I do have a couple more questions before if there's any parents out there or anybody that's like, oh, my God, this is hitting a core of something going on with my child or even with myself. What would be your first advice for them?[0:28:09] Max: Don't freak out.[0:28:12] Brianne Davis: Don't go into panic.[0:28:14] Max: Don't freak out. I think my best well, the one thing I would recommend is looking into the listening program. I mean, like, to say that was a lifesavers and understatement. Okay. Get your child involved in extracurricular activities. Obviously, they have to enjoy it. If they're not enjoying it, then you don't want to push them too hard because then they're going to get acclimated, like you said, into doing something outside of themselves internally.[0:28:51] Brianne Davis: Well, thank you. And we will link that learning app and learning program below so people can go to it and see what it is and all that. Is there anything else you want the listeners to know about your journey, about releasing yourself of the secret and baby steps throughout the years? Is there any closing words you want to say?[0:29:12] Max: I just want to say thank you to my family and friends who believed in me when there were times I didn't believe in myself.[0:29:21] Brianne Davis: That makes me want to cry. Where can people find you if they have any questions or anything.[0:29:27] Max: Yeah, so they can email me. My email is Maxorden korten, 26, at@gmail.com. I would also say for people, because there's also been a growing trend of adults being diagnosed with autism. There's a LinkedIn group that I follow. It's called Non neurodivergent. I think that's the name of it.[0:29:55] Brianne Davis: Okay.[0:29:55] Max: But it's for professionals who are neuro divergent, and just trying to navigate the workforce really helps me because when I started working, I really didn't know any other nerdive, urgent individuals in the workforce.[0:30:14] Brianne Davis: Thank you so much for sharing that and thank you for coming on.[0:30:19] Max: Thank you, Brian.[0:30:20] Brianne Davis: If you want to be on the show, please email me at secretlifepodcast@icloud.com. Until next time, thanks again for listening to the show. Please subscribe rate share or send me a note at secretlifepodcast.com. And if you'd like to check out my book, head over to secretlifenovel.com or Amazon to pick up a copy for yourself or someone you love. Thanks again. See you soon.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

MaxHello, everybody. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And for my first guest of 2023 I'm delighted to welcome Gustavo Serbia who is the head of talent - correct me if I'm wrong. Yes, I got that. Head of talent at Haircuttery, one of the leading salons. I mean, beauty and hairstyling salons nationwide. Please -  Actually I'll let Gustavo introduce what the group does but they do a lot of haircuts; I know that much yet. And so we're gonna get into the art of hiring stylists and understanding the art of recruiting hairstylists and stylists in general. What can you do to attract this particular audience and to avoid making hiring mistakes? And talk about how that practice may be disrupted by technology, of course. Gustavo, thanks for joining. And - yeah, please; what did I get wrong? In my intro?GustavoWell, I'm the head of HR for Haircuttery. And I oversee the entire HR function, including recruiting. I have a wonderful team that works day in and day out to try to find a stylist. Yes, we are a salon chain. It's a privately owned salon chain in the US - 500 salons in 10 states and about 5000 employees as a whole. And, you know, I like to also give a little bit of framework that while we're in the business of finding stylists, some of the audience may not necessarily find that relatable because they're not looking for stylists, because it's so specialized. But we're really in high volume. So we are in the high volume business of hiring. We just happen to be hiring - 99% of our hires are really stylists that are working at the salon, cutting hair, colouring hair, etc. And as you can see, hair is not required to work in the company. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here.MaxFor those audio listeners here, Gustavo has a very shiny cranium.GustavoYep, yeah.Max Probably set up the lights just so you have a third eye.GustavoExactly. Yeah. So it looks like a halo effect.Max Right? Well. So, to put us in the mindset of what a hairstylist is, and does, I mean, we are talking about somebody who is holding a knife next to someone's face for 8/10 hours a day chatting… And so it has to be - I mean, these are skills that are sort of interpersonal communication skills, character skills that are very hard to capture in the written form, right? So a resume is not going to tell you that much. So what are you looking for? Exactly?Gustavo Yep. So it's a combination of number one, you got to have a license, if you don't have a license, we can't consider  you. You have to be licensed in order to perform what we need. And number two, we're looking for personality, we know that they're going to be behind the chair interacting with a guest, so they have to have personality that allows them to connect with the with the with a guest. Give me a second. Give me a second hold on the recording. Got it? Go ahead. Okay,Maxso he asked me the question. Yeah. So you said you're looking. So I'm gonna ask the question again. We'll take it from the top. Yeah. So yeah. So hiring hairstylist, who we looking for? I imagine that the skills necessary you remember the question, I asked her the question about blah, blah, blah. It's not something you can get on paper. And then you started your answer. And we'll start over again from there. So I don't have to ask the question again. Are you looking for scanning now?GustavoYeah, so number one thing we look, obviously you got to have a license. In the US, you have to be licensed in order to cut hair. So that's number one thing. You don't have a license, it's going to be hard for us to consider you. After that -Max Hold on; if I'm a - if I wanna be a hairstylist and get the license, how long is that process? Is that something you can just apply online or how does that work?GustavoNo, you have to go to school. You have to go to cosmetology school. There are a number of hours that have to be completed depending on the state. Some states have 1000 hours, others have 1500 hours. Yeah, and they have to pay.Max  It's a higher bar than getting a driving license.GustavoYes, yes, definitely. Well, you know, obviously, we want to protect the consumer. But each state does it slightly differently on how they go about it. Like there's not a consistent application across all 50 states. So we have to understand what the requirements are in some states versus others. So, once you have a license, or if you're in school, and you're going to graduate, let's say, within 90 days, you're going to obtain your license, we want to talk to you. And then the second thing is personality, right? You know, a lot of the stylists that go into the industry, some of them do it because they're exploring what they want to do. Others like the whole idea of the creative process. But regardless, if you're the creative kind, or the one that is looking for a job, or the one that is exploring what to do in the future, you're going to be talking to people. And because you're going to be talking to people, we give you commissions, in our case, but in the industry, it's very common for you to get commissions out of product sales, you have to have the ability to interact with the client.Max Yeah, it must be the nicest people in the world who want to work in that profession. Because, you know, as you said, like you're interacting nonstop, although, I mean, you have to be able to read the room, sometimes I go get a haircut, and I really don't want to talk to somebody, but they still chat me up.GustavoYes, we tell our stylist, you gotta read what the guests want, right? Some, this is a very intimate interaction, if you think about it, I'm in your space for at least 20 to 30 minutes, perhaps longer. I'm touching you. So you have to be conscious of the space, you have to be conscious of the body language that the person is giving you. But it's also a relationship that can be lasting years, because you may decide to go to the same stylist; my mother went to the same stylist, I mean, since I was nine years old, until a couple of years ago when her stylist passed away. That's the type of relationship that we're hoping our stylists are going to create with a guest. So that guest comes back to us instead of going somewhere else. But outside of that; obviously, we'll look at availability, where can you work? Because you know, we need to accommodate when the guest is there. We don't look at work, where have you worked, to make a decision. It's really irrelevant for us, your work history, from the standpoint of: you have a license, you have the capability? Let's put you behind the chair.MaxYeah, see if that works. And are there some - you talked about character being important. So I gather from that, that you don't want a hardcore introvert for a job like this. You want somebody who's able, who enjoys interacting. What are some other sort of personality traits that you'd be particularly on the lookout for? And follow-up question, how would you measure for those in a systematic way?GustavoYep. So the measuring part is the hard part. And collaboration would be one. Right now, because of the talent market being what it is, we've eliminated any type of assessment to look for those traits. It's so competitive to find stylists, that the more barriers we put - while it may give us exactly what we're looking for - the challenge is finding the number of stylists that we need to satisfy the guests' demand, but collaboration -MaxYou tried that in the past, you tried the assessment thing in the past, and it would eliminate a chunk of your talent pool that you just can't afford to eliminate anymore. And -GustavoIt's a catch-22 because you want that profile. But what we've done is we've extended and said look, we have to extend the profile. Now, the hiring managers ultimately make the last decision as to whom to hire. So they have to assess those individuals and say, you know, I can live with the, let's say, the lack of training that this person has, because they're a recent graduate, or this person is very well established, has a book of business that they can bring to us. But I may have to work a little bit with the self-centeredness that this person may have because they're established and they have a book, right? Versus automatically saying this person does not display this collaborative nature. Therefore eliminate them. No, we have to work within certain boundaries, but we've expanded those boundaries simply because there's a shortage out there. Now some people are going to argue they're not a shortage of talent. It's just how you treat - no, there is a shortage of talent in addition to the fact that you may have a shortage, because of how you treat people. The reality is that the demand for hair stylists is much higher than the supply is out there right now.MaxIn most franchise operations, the final hiring decision is left to the franchisee, so that - because they want to have that ultimate control over the quality of the service delivered. And you know, they're there on the ground. So they can see with their own eyes who they're hiring, so it makes sense. They can give them the contract in person. But, of course, for the consistency of service and of the brands at a global level, it would make more sense to have everybody basically be - all the hiring decisions be centralized. And for the franchise to receive - You know, the tickets they are - by the way, this guy is coming to work with you on Monday. And you've never spoken to him before. But he's approved by corporate so let's go ahead. Yeah, so where does Hair Cuttery stand on that sort of spectrum? And what are your thoughts on where the industry is going?GustavoSo for us, because all of these salons are privately owned by the company, we really allow the hiring manager to make the decision. Meaning the recruiter finds the talent, presents the talent to the hiring manager, the hiring manager conducts the interview, the hiring manager makes the decision. If there's a disagreement between the recruiter and the hiring manager as to why this person is not being hired, they discuss it and use that information for the next potential hire. Right? Now, it really - now we have processes in place to try to achieve as much consistency as possible. You know, if you think of Chick-fil-A, Chick-fil-A may have that level of control. I don't know if they have the control at the corporate level. But they have very rigorous requirements that regardless of the Chick Fil A - the food but they're also known for the service. So in order for you to hire the quality of people that you want, they may have -  it'd be likely to have a much more structural approach to the hiring. MaxAre you a Chick-fil-A guy? GustavoI like it. I'm not a huge fan. I used to be - I loved the milkshakes, but I don't go as often anymore, because I'm getting older. You gotta watch out for that.MaxI've never tried it. So maybe I'll take down an action bar after this call. Yeah. So yeah, I'm imagining like, the, in popular culture, the hair salon is a real place for the community to hang out. And as we were saying, you have to be friendly, with your customers, of course, you also have to be friendly with your colleagues, who you're gonna have to spend a lot of time with. So it must be an environment where the human bias is hard at work, where you know, the salon, the hiring manager like you said, he's gonna have a mental picture - he or she is gonna have a mental picture of who they want to hire. So it must be hard to fight that, particularly in a very litigious environment such as the US. But it's, I guess it's part of the magic, right, because you want to have a team that gets along. And, you know, if the hiring manager is stripped away from their decision, on who they can work with, they're not going to be quite as happy to come to work. So Hiring is, it works on both ends, you have to make the candidate happy, but you also have to make the hiring manager happy.GustavoYeah, it's no different than any other industry in that regard. If somebody wants to, if somebody is saying we have to collaborate, right, and we have to be good stewards of each other's needs, then you have to have a conversation about it, you have to get parameters; you know, in our case, we talked about the values of real, respect, responsible and we always use them as a triad. You cannot be real, without being respectful. You cannot be real without being responsible. So you have to use all three. So when somebody goes outside of that parameter, let's say they're just being disrespectful in the process, then we have a conversation in the context of that, not necessarily in the context of the decision. It's how you went about the decision, not the decision itself, because the decision may be valid, but you were a little bit of an ass in the process. So you can't do that. Having said that - it is not a perfect process, because the moment you insert humans, we have biases, or tendencies or preferences, and we want those to be heard and known by others. And now you may have a push/pull - I describe to my team all the time, we are going to always have a push/pull relationship with our operation counterparts, because we have a need to hire, but they also have a need to retain. So how do you create a balance between the two? I'm not saying that we're right and they're wrong; it's simply saying we have to do both “and”; rather than saying it's one or the other, because if you're hiring left and right, but you're losing them out the door, on the other end, at some point, your hiring is going to be affected. So we talk about the fact that it is okay to have a push/pull, where it's not one side winning and the other one losing, but rather saying, what are your needs? What are my needs? And how do we compromise to achieve the common goal? It sounds utopian, but the reality is that the alternative is an infighting that at the end of the day is not going to get you the hire that you need or retain that person if you end up hiring them.MaxYeah, it's - you're talking about infighting as a negative, but you also say that that conflict, that friction is necessary. So, it's a fine line, because in Sales - Sales will always complain that Marketing isn't delivering enough leads, and Marketing will always complain that Sales is not converting them well enough. And if you don't have, if you don't have both sides having an argument at some - you know, maybe there's a better word for it, but a discussion, or fight - one of them - if there's no conflict, then there's no tension there, then they're not doing their job, like, I mean, they stopped caring about, achieving maximum performance. So it makes sense that there would be, yeah, there'd be tension there. And that your job would be to make sure it just doesn't get bloody. Nobody bruises their knuckles.GustavoRight, put some parameters around it, but you have to let that play out. Because the alternative is indifference, lack of interest. Then I just go through the motions and try to, you know, quiet quit, I guess, quiet quit behind, you know, behind closed doors, because I don't want to bother anybody else because I feel that nobody listens. There have to be those discussions. Now they're not comfortable all the time but they got to take place.Max Going back to the more - the technical, the not soft skills, but the hard skills of stylists, the certification, you said is really the main criteria. But then does it ever get to, you know, sort of field testing? Or, you know, here's a bunch of hair, cut them for us. How do you validate this in the field?GustavoYep. So we do a tech - what we call a technical interview, which is really bringing you into the salon. And you can either bring a model, which means that you bring somebody whose hair you're going to cut, or we provide a mannequin, which is actually an actual head, or a skin, it's called a skin, which is actually something that you wrap around a head that has hair, and then you can kind of cut it. So we evaluate your ability at that technical interview, primarily with the idea of where you're at. If you've been in the business for a while, we may have a discussion of what about that technical; we ask you questions to ensure that you understand what is required to let's say, apply colour, or do certain haircuts. Because there's very - that's an area I mean - you can mess people's hair. So people need to know the technical aspects of, for example, mixing colouring chemicals, which is ultimately what they are. So we evaluate that, but what we've been working on is evaluating that in the context of how can we train you up. Versus how can we eliminate you from the process, right? Again, that's a harder conversation. Because that means somebody has to be training these individuals then. If Max comes in, and Max is not good, let's say, at cutting men's hair and needs some training. How do you protect the brand to ensure that Max is not botching people's hair by cutting them poorly? But how do you also elevate Max to be able to cut men's hair? So we also have ongoing education that we do on a regular basis. Because that's the way you grow. Once you get the license, it's not like you go back to the same school to learn more. You really learn by doing within the salons; by the education that you get from the company that you're working for.MaxYou mentioned that you hire some professionals who go there because they want to have an artistic mode of expression. They like styling, and they have - yeah, it's a form of expression. So, it's hard I imagine, to codify, you know, how to style properly? If you have some artistic vision in conflict? Take - Have you had some instances where it's just easier to hire somebody a bit younger? Because then you can show them the way you want it done here. Whereas somebody who has been at it for 30 years would be like, no, no, I'm going to use that much hydroxide on all the hair. And that's just the way I do it.GustavoYeah, we actually have not encountered those instances. You know, more experienced stylists may decide that they would prefer on their own. Yep. But in the instances where we've attracted, experienced stylists, they still abide, by the requirements - the fact that they're dealing with chemicals. Now, some may be a little bit more liberal than others, but they all know the consequences of, you know, burning somebody's hair, for example. But you would think that if I am that experienced, and I just want to do it my way or the highway in its totality, chances are that you would prefer to go somewhere else where you can actually do that on your own. But, we do encounter some of that; particularly our high producers - high producers that are producing because they have a book of business. We - Our main requirement is that you can't do anything that is illegal, you can't do that. And you have to be a good co-worker. And from time to time, there're still challenges because there's egos in the process. I have not heard in the two and a half years that I've been here, of instances where somebody was such a prima donna, that they wanted to do it the way they wanted to do it without consideration for the well-being of the individual, meaning of the guest. Yes, there's always the oh, I can go on my own and make more money, or I don't want to abide by your dress code - we always have those. But it has never been in the context of, oh, I can get away with just not following chemical protocol and be okay.MaxThat no, no, no, it's more “personal expression; and I can make more money elsewhere.” I get it.Gustavo Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.MaxOkay. Yeah. So that sounds like a pretty traditional interaction with - from any employer-employee kind of context.GustavoAny employee-employer. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. No different.Max All right, great. Well, I'd say good luck with the prima donnas. You know, I'm sure that we live in an age where the prima donnas, who want to start their own salons and their own home practice could find employment on the internet and find their clientele, but you said something that really caught my interest when you talked about people coming with their own book. So it's - there's a process for that. If somebody has been in the industry for 5/10 years, and that's kind of like - it's not; they don't have a resume, but they have 100 clients that always come to them, and they can bring that to your organization, and then they get a commission on that. Is that how it works?GustavoYep. Well, because you know - Yeah, in our compensation model is based on commissions. So they get a commission and the more experience you have, the higher your commission percentage. So when you have a book, which is basically a conversation between the hiring manager and a prospective stylist, what is that book of business? And what can that translate in income for the individual? Because at the end of the day, compensation still rules, meaning I gotta be making money. If I'm not making money, I'm going to be looking, where else can I go and make money, particularly when you are an experienced stylist? So that book translates into X amount of dollars. And because we are commissions based, we can know exactly how much they will be making. And then they can make a decision if that is something that aligns with what they want to be making. Keep in mind that, contrary to being on your own, as you know, you started your own business, it's not as easy as people sometimes think it is. So when you go on your own, be it on a private salon or a salon booth. Now you're responsible for all the financials, you know, the overhead, the legal processes. With us - You gotta buy product, inventory, all of that. With us, we provide you everything. So when you come to us, all you have to do is show up, cut hair, and bring more guests. So people have to consider that as part of the equation.MaxYeah, sorry, I sorry for the interruption. I'm saying I have a friend who is my internet was a little bit down. Can you hear me clearer now?Gustavo Yep, I can hear you.Max Sorry, I had a small small lag here. No, I have a friend who works in a hedge fund, who has the same kind of arrangement where she's a trader, but she doesn't want to have to do all the license work and get a Bloomberg terminal and get an office and whatnot. So she's a trader inside a bigger hedge fund inside a bigger organization. And, and she feels like she's got her autonomy. So you know, it works at different levels in different industries.GustavoYep, yeah, yep. Yep. I think it's not unique to our industry, I think it's just individual choice of what your preference might be.MaxFor these skilled workers - it's kind of like doctors, lawyers, stylists, they all have their book of clients. So you gotta manage those. All right, well, final question, I asked this to all my guests. Recruiting is fraught with mistakes. And we are all full of biases, as we discussed. So sometimes we make terrible mistakes. Not to - this is not a confessional. And this is - I'm not a Catholic priest. I just want to know, if you could share with our audience something wrong you did in the recruitment space, and what we can learn, a mis-hire you have done in the past.GustavoYeah, I can give you a few. But the one that I can think of is I was working in a different industry. And we were hiring manager-level employees to oversee regions. And we flew a candidate in who on paper had all the - but there was something about the interaction that was just not working. And we could see it. The CEO could see it; because the CEO was involved. I could see it. And the recruiter manager could see it. Yet, we were so desperate, that we decided to move forward.MaxYou could see it, but you couldn't describe it?GustavoNo, no, we all could describe it. But we convinced ourselves that we still needed to proceed because we were desperate. And before this person started, we kind of realized, this is a mistake. But now we have to withdraw the offer. The person has resigned the other job. And the person went - online presence just started. I mean, lambasted us and rightly so. Right. And what I learned at that time is it's, it's one thing for me to say no. And for you to say yes. But when there's three of us say no. And we still proceed. Desperation cannot be the reason why. And I know it's hard for people to process that. Because when you when you're in that, when you're bogged down by doing the work of others because you have that vacancy open and you see somebody that can come in, you need anything, oh, I can now turn it over to this person - doesn't work that way. It takes time. And I tell you from that moment, anytime that I've had the instinct; because most of it is gut instinct. One thing for me to have my gut instinct, but when two other people or at least another person have the same, we have to be very careful that we're not proceeding out of desperation, and really make a decision that we're not going to regret. There will always be bad decisions. Right? But if you're seeing it, others are seeing it and your only reason to hire the person is well, but we need someone right away.MaxThis person can do it on paper. Yeah.Gustavo Yeah, yeah. MaxOh, good. Yeah, sounds painful. And of course, one should doubt his own instinct, but if your instinct and the instinct of a couple of other people are coming at work, then Mother Nature is telling you something; run away.Gustavo I always say it is okay. If you're doubting your instincts. I start with the premise that I know I'm biased. I have my tendencies, my preferences, my way of seeing things and that doesn't make me right. It simply makes me believe something that I have to question to keep it in check. Not a sense of insecurity, but our sense of understanding that In order to work in the environments that I work; I have to work with others. So just because I see it one way doesn't necessarily make me right. Although I may pursue that anyways. But when others are involved, don't go that route, because now you're all in alignment, that you shouldn't do it and you still decide to do it, that - it was stupid. I mean, transparently speaking, it was stupid. We paid for it. It was a pain to deal with it. It didn't get legal too much. But I mean, social media, she put us out there. Internally created a little bit of discomfort. And it was all out of desperation.MaxOkay. Well, I'm sorry you revisited that for us but maybe it'll save someone from experiencing your pain sometime in the future so thanks Gustavo for opening up and for your insights on that unique industry. Really appreciate you coming on to the Recruitment Hackers podcast.GustavoAbsolutely. Thank you for the invite, Max.Max That was Gustavo Serbia from Hair Cuttery giving us a peek into the world of recruiting for hair stylists, a world where you have to sometimes put hair on a mannequin to test technical skills. And where you have to manage the sort of chemistry that works within each salon, where the hiring manager needs to get along well with the team, while at the same time trying to build a uniform standard for hiring. So an interesting balance there at work. Hope you enjoyed it, and that if you're interested in the beautiful world of high-volume recruiting and automation, you'll be back for more, please subscribe and share with other practitioners.

Max: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, dialing in from Johannesburg, South Africa, I'd like to welcome now to the show Vanessa Raath, who is a global talent sourcing trainer and our paths almost crossed in London a couple of weeks ago. She's a world traveler. And we're going to talk about the difficult art of planting doubts in the minds of unsuspecting candidates and talents. And how do you turn a passive job seeker into an active one? How do you mess up their world?Vanessa: How do you play with their minds?Max: That's it. How do you play with their minds? So Vanessa, thanks for joining me for this, hopefully, entertaining discussion.Vanessa: Sure.Max: And before we get going, could you tell the audience a little bit about your background? How did you end up in this recruitment function? And as a global talent sourcing trainer? What was the journey to get you there?Vanessa: Awesome. Well, first of all, Max, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Always nice to be a guest on a different podcast. So my journey was an interesting one. I've done quite a few things in my career. I'm actually a qualified teacher, which leads into me working now as a trainer and helps immensely. I've also worked as a scuba diving instructor in Thailand. So you pick it up and pretty much done it.I've taught unruly school kids in the UK, taught unruly holidaymakers how to scuba dive in Southeast Asia and in East Africa, came back to South Africa and kind of fell into recruitment like everyone does. Went for an interview at a recruitment agency, and they said, why don't you think about recruitment, and I was like, I'm not sure whether I've got the wardrobe, but I'll give it a bash and see how I go.Vanessa: And the rest is history. I did 13 years working in both the recruitment agency space as well as finishing off doing internal head of talent acquisition for a tech company, and that is where I pretty much taught myself how to source because I realized I couldn't find tech talent, just relying on job boards and LinkedIn anymore. And it was time to actually branch out, look for passive talents in different places where they were spending their time.And yeah, getting into the psyche of your reach out and persuading people to leave jobs that they were probably really happy in in order to come and join your organization. So three and a half years ago, I launched my own business, and that's what I've been doing ever since. So yeah. Good times. I'm very happy.Max: It sounds like your background as a teacher would be perfect training--Vanessa: Absolutely.Max: -- to go into training. And then, of course, your natural curiosity. And what I heard is like you were driven by the needs of the business like we need to go--Vanessa: Absolutely.Max: --go beyond Indeed and LinkedIn, which is a lot of what your training is focused on, I gather. So if people want to find out how to source talent outside of the beaten track, they should come to you rightVanessa: Yes.Max: --for new ideas. Now, let's talk a little bit about those passive job seekers, people who are maybe never heard about you before, and didn't even know that they were looking for a job.Vanessa: Until I found them and told them that they were looking for a new job.Max: You are like, hey, I've got news for you buddy. So the transition from the awareness stage to the consideration stage, which is one that I guess, if it happens smoothly, in a perfect world, you would just send a job description, and they would fall in love with it. And then they'd be like, well, great. Yes, I love the package. I love the job description.Vanessa: Now you see that sounds like recruiting was 10 years ago, and it was super easy, and we all should have worked harder, and we all should have made more commission and retired sooner. Now the game has changed. The goalposts are different because sending a candidate a job description isn't good enough anymore, because you first got to persuade the candidates that they need to leave the job that they're in.So you're now selling to both candidates and clients. Because before, it was easy enough to go and find these people on job boards, they were on the market, they were putting themselves out there, but now the landscape of recruitment has changed, and now everyone's kind of passive talents, which has made our jobs so much more difficult.Max: Yeah. The fact that they were maybe less actively looking, is that observation based on data? Because it seems like everybody's on, in my world, everybody's on LinkedIn all the time. But I guess it depends on the kind of talent pools you're going after. Because I'm dealing with HR professionals. So of course, they're on LinkedIn.Vanessa: Beautiful. So you and I are both so lucky because our target database is HR and recruiters and those people are on LinkedIn all day, every day, right? So when I'm trying to sell my training to recruiters, that's where I'm posting. But if you've got someone who's a Java developer, why would they go to LinkedIn? The only thing that's going to happen is that they're going to be harassed by recruiters trying to recruit them.That's not going to enhance their career. If a Java developer was to spend some time on GitHub, and they could look at other people's code, they could learn from other developers, that would be much more beneficial to them and their careers. So that's what we've got to think about, who's on which platforms more than others.Max: So, maybe walk us through the journey of engaging with somebody on GitHub. For example, somebody who's not looking for a job, because it sounds extremely creepy to me that I'm an engineer trying to inspire my work. And randomly someone is contacting me a little bit out of the blue. So how do you make it less out of the blue?Vanessa: This happens all day on LinkedIn too remember, it's not a platform thing. So my training is all kind of like, try and find someone's email address, because I prefer to send someone an email than in-mail. So on GitHub, for example, you can't actually even connect with developers, they've taken away that functionality, you cannot message someone through the platform. So you have to find an email address.So for me, when I reach out to a candidate, I'm never going to say, I just saw you on GitHub. I'd maybe say, I saw you on GitHub, I had looked at your Twitter feed, well done on something you'd achieved, and also watched your training video on YouTube around how to build a new repository using Java, something along those lines. So it's more of a holistic view of, I've really done my homework about you, I've looked at you on all of these platforms, let's start chatting. And that kind of gets a lot of attention and a lot of response from candidates because I've gone the extra mile.Max: Personal.Vanessa: Yeah, and I've personalized my outreach message. So first of all, we've got to work on getting a better response rate from passive talent, which is something that most of the teams that I'm training at the moment are struggling with. So for me, it doesn't matter which platform you find people on, always have a look at them across multiple platforms, because that will help you to personalize that outreach for them.Max: Are there tools that you use for that, or you're just basically researching them on these platforms to see if their names come up?Vanessa: So what I generally do is I use an X-ray technique, where I go to Google or one of the search engines. And I will write a Boolean search string and our X-ray into one of these platforms, in order to find people who potentially have the right tech stack that I'm looking for, for one of my clients. I predominantly source in the tech space. But you can do this on several platforms using the X-ray technique. And then what I normally do is activate some chrome extensions in order to be able to find people's contact details, like email addresses. Because emails, let's face it have a far higher response rate than in-mail.Max: In-mail?Vanessa: So I'd rather choose that route, yeah.Max: Okay. And what if you were able to get their phone number, does that happen?Vanessa: You know what? When people sign up for these platforms, they're generally signing up with an email address, not a phone number. So it's actually easier to find an email address, and you can find people's phone numbers, it's possible. It's not impossible, but it's just not as easy as finding an email address. And let's face it, you're going to find an email address with more regularity than you will a phone number.Max: Right. So it's more scalable and I also suspect that sending a cold email will be more, well, it's a bit intrusive to make a cold call these days, because most of them are telemarketers--Vanessa: Or financial advisors.Max: Right. So but I suppose you could also do that. And then the reason I asked about phone numbers is because the phone numbers also open some new windows such as WhatsApp, so you could also use WhatsApp for engagement.Vanessa: Absolutely. Max: Yes, you use that.Vanessa: Yeah, yeah. I do. I mean, WhatsApp, it's really popular through Africa and Europe, but I actually found Facebook Messenger a lot more effective in the US. So it's just understanding which platform works better for people. A lot of my friends in the US also prefer signal or telegram to WhatsApp, because they're not supporters of Mark Zuckerberg and Meta who owns WhatsApp. So yeah, it's just understanding the psyche of where you're going to find people.Max: Yeah, I'm on all of them just in case.Vanessa: Me too. That's what we do as recruiters.Max: No secrets for Mr. Zuckerberg--Vanessa: Yeah, he's welcome to listen in on my conversations really.Max: You too?Vanessa: Yeah, I don't really give a shit.Max: Great. Well, so that initial email, where you show that you've done your research, you personalize the outreach, then when do you get off email into a phone call? How far can you use the written form in bringing them into consideration for a job? Like how long are these correspondences? How long would you be recommending that a recruiter goes into these correspondences considering that well, we all have limited time and, I guess it's like, in sales, you have to know when you've lost the deal. So you can move on to the next one.Vanessa: Yeah, exactly. Max: The same thing. So of course, you can always advocate for more engagement, more personalization, more emails, more everything. But we've got a finite amount of time and resources. So how do you know when to stop? What's the right amount of correspondence? And how do you know when to stop?Vanessa: So basically, my best should I say tip around this is to automate this process because we all don't have enough time for this. So what I do is I advocate putting candidates into a five or six email reach out a campaign, where a lot of recruiters, I've been training on this, this morning, and we'll send a very long email upfront, and then a second or third email saying, hey, did you read my email with that kind of passive recruitment that's going on.Where if you break up the information that you would put in that very long first email across five emails, or six emails, of breaking it up into bite-sized pieces, thinking like a marketer, you actually get a better response rate. So I normally use my tool for automating emails is something called SourceWhale. I use that really all the time whenever I'm trying to get hold and source new talent. And I usually run it over 10 days.So I send people five emails over 10 days, at varying times of the day, varying days in between each message. So it's something that I don't really need to think about. Because as soon as I get the new role, I've set up the campaign, I don't know the personalization that needs to be added in. And then the campaign runs in the background. So I literally can be delivering like four hours' worth of training and finish the training and I come back to a whole lot of responses. And there are people who've answered the automatic email that's gone out from my outlook with my signature looks like me to them. It's brilliant.Max: You can go scuba diving, in the meantime, come back--Vanessa: Absolutely.Max: -- inbox full of candidates.Vanessa: Yeah, there we go job done. So for me, the trick is to automate because you're never going to remember who you've messaged, and who you need to message again. Those kinds of things.Max: And these, you talked about personalization, and then automation. And sometimes these are in conflict. If you're automating everything, then there's no personalization. Vanessa: It depends which tool you use  Max: But there is some customization you can do on those email templates where you have certain fields that you can fill with tokens.Vanessa: Yeah, absolutely.Max: So that is automated. I mean, it feels personalized, even if it's somewhat automated. So to illustrate that, it sounds like that's what you're doing, right?Vanessa: Absolutely, yeah.Max: So what are some of those fields you might be using?Vanessa: So for me, like one of the fields would be that maybe where the person's currently working? What is their current job title? What is the qualification? Their certification? Maybe something I could find out about what hobbies they do? I could relate it to maybe it's something similar that I do, they could go and verify that by looking at my social presence online, and definitely the person's name, I think we tend to forget about that one.That's also a good custom field that you can fill in, and maybe a link to like a GitHub repository, if it's someone who's in the tech space, YouTube channel, whatever I can find on the person, I'm going to tell them that, hey, I took the time, I did my research, I really want you. So one thing I'm definitely not going to do in my reach-out message is say, if you know anyone else that you can send my way, please let me know because--Max: Oh, really? I do that all the time. It's not a good idea?Vanessa: Not a good idea because the feeling coming back from candidates is, why do recruiters always ask me to do their jobs for them? So if you know the candidates, and you've placed them and you've got a good relationship, by all means, pick up the phone, phone them, who do they know? But if it's in your first reach out to them, or in your reach out campaign, I normally will end with that in my last email. So if I haven't elicited a response, at least, it doesn't harm in asking, but I wouldn't ask for anyone else, because I want that person to feel special, I want them to think I want them.00:15:27  Max: And sending these hundreds or maybe 1000s of emails every month, you must be getting a lot of responses?Vanessa: So first of all, I'm not sending 100 or 1000s of emails a month, because I recruit in a very specialized tech industry, and they aren't that number of people that are around. I don't agree with that kind of just bulk spamming people with templates. So yes, I'm getting loads of responses, but it's manageable.Max: Okay. Yeah, it's not in the 1000s. And I was going to ask you, how do you capture that on the way back because I think that we're actually at the infancy of what the technology will be able to do where you'll be able to read the email, read the response, organize the data semantically.Vanessa: Well, basically SourceWhale does that. So SourceWhale reads the email, and it tells me whether it's a positive response or a negative response. And then I can respond directly from my email accordingly. So I could say, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I could say, well, let's meet, here's my Calendly link, let's make an appointment. So I think these things are far more intuitive than we give them credit for. And they keep on pushing out improvements out there. So it's one of those things that always amazes me, it's very intuitive, it's using a lot of AI, and makes me think that maybe one day robots will roam the Earth, I'm not sure.Max: No doubt.Vanessa: -- maybe not in my lifetime, but--Max: I'm working on that with my colleagues.Vanessa: Yes, please keep me posted.Max: We've talked about the technology, the automation, which is so important. But now let's get into a little bit of psychology. So an answer you should be getting for most of your candidates is thank you very much. I'm not looking, I'm happy where I am. And that's human nature, we get comfortable with the familiar and we want to stay where we are. So where do we go from there?Vanessa: So for me that response is good because any response is good. Let's face it. Someone's going to respond, you've elicited that response by what you've said and that's amazing. So if they say they're quite happy a lot of the time, it's because in the tech space, people are working on a project, and they've still got a couple of months left on their project. So what I would go back to with them and say, how much longer do you have on this project? Is this a long-term thing? Please shout as soon as you hit into the support and maintenance phase, which everyone in the tech space hates, because they know that their skills are stagnating, and they not learning anything new. So you kind of play to the doesn't get stuck kind of people. But if it was--Max: The innovation pace, how fast are you innovating right now? What are your big milestones? Are things moving fast?Vanessa: Exactly, exactly. For someone who wasn't in the tech space, just to give you an example would be, when is your next round of bonuses or grades, let me know when you can chat, and then I'll tell them something that they couldn't refuse. So I'd know something from the hiring manager, that would be a potential hook.So something that would be unique to that company. If you ever want to learn this new skill, or you ever want to work internationally, or you want to get asked to sponsor you for this international qualification or certification and like, global techs, whatever, whatever, then you just let me know. So as long as you've got the response first, you can go back with any of those kinds of hooks that would entice people to want to come and work with you.Max: Yeah. Sometimes we'll engage engineers who are working in a service environment where they're doing project-based work and say, wouldn't you be interested in moving to the product side where you're working on a product for a long time? So actually, it's kind of like the opposite of what you were describing. It's like saying, don't you want to do service and maintenance on the same product for a long time, because it's not necessarily boring for everybody. It could be fun.Vanessa: Exactly, exactly.Max: Great. Great, great, great. What about some dirty tactics? Like would you plant a seed in someone's mind on the quality of the company they're working in?Vanessa: Like, I think that's a bit of a low blow, to be honest. I don't know whether I'd be brave enough to go there. But what I would probably do is play on the fact that surveys at the moment are showing that people want to work for companies that are making a difference. So they don't want to just sit in a bank where they're going to make the bank loads of money.I'd rather say, this is a startup, we focused on solving global world famine, and we would love you to be a part of that because that really is going to be a role where there's going to be a good purpose behind it. And I think I would maybe use the reverse psychology to say, not just to say, actually, you just making a bank more money, but come and work somewhere where you're going to add value and actually have an impact on the world.Max: Yeah, because everybody's got a moment of doubt, where even if they're comfortable in their job, and the money and the people, they'd be like, oh, what should I do with my life?Vanessa: That's a big picture exactly. And you want to like kind of tap into that.Max: Okay. Well, all great stuff, gold, I hope the listeners are paying attention and taking notes. I end my interviews, usually with the same question for everyone, which is one of the mistakes that we have made in the past on the hiring front. And ideally, in order to illustrate that with one specific case of someone you hired, which didn't work out, for whatever reason, and as painful as that was to walk back on the origin of that mistake, and then what we can learn from it?Vanessa: Sure, okay interesting. So I mean, it does happen. I'd actually rather have someone not start, then someone starts, and then be appalling. So there was a situation when I was working for an agency, and I was tasked to go and find someone who was going to be a housekeeper. And I interviewed this lady, and she seemed great and she was battling. She hadn't had the most, should I say, stable medical history. She'd been in and out of the hospital but assured me that everything was fine.She was in remission, she had actually suffered from cancer. And she'd got the all-clear. And my gut kind of was like, I don't know about this lady. I don't know whether I'm giving my client a forward pass here. And she actually started with the company. And within two months, the cancer was back and she was back in the hospital. So I probably shouldn't have put her forward for the role, but she was desperate for work, she had medical bills to pay off.But there was always that niggle that something else was going on wrong. And what actually transpired was that she didn't actually have cancer, she had a drug dependency issue on prescription medication. So for me, the niggle that I didn't follow through on was my gut feeling of there's more to the story than what I'm seeing. So it was early on in my career when I was still working in an agency. One thing that I kind of carried through for the rest of my career was, if there is a niggle, if there's a gut feeling, go and dig deeper, maybe do that extra reference check on the candidates.And, maybe don't be so generous and give candidates the benefit of the doubt. And if you do something that I have done, and what I learned from it is that one's guts are actually never really wrong. And that's probably why we work in the industry that we do because we have a good gut feeling of our people and we know who we're going to connect with and who's going to do a good job. And we sometimes kind of push that to the side because we've got deadlines, and we need to put a bomb in the seats and things like that.Max: Oh, the innocence of people who have never worked in recruitment, we we'll never have that again.Vanessa: No, of course not that I'm sure everyone's got a similar story. They were all duped by someone, given a story, but this is something to remember, I think.Max: I mean, and that does happen very often. Candidates, they're not stupid. Often some are smarter than the recruiters, and they know what not to say and what truth to hide. And got to pay very close attention to those details.Vanessa: Yeah.Max: Thanks, Vanessa.Vanessa: My pleasure. Thank you.Max: Well, where can people get a hold of you?Sure. Guys I'm not difficult to find on the Internet. So I'm on any other social platforms. My website is vanessaraath.com--Max: Double-A.Vanessa: -- And yeah hit me up. If you want to talk about talent sourcing training. I would love to work with you and your teams.Max: Thank you very much.Max: That was Vanessa Raath who was reminding us of some of the beautiful technology that is available at our fingertips to create email sequences and treat the passive candidates like something that should activate you rather than you being passive in front of it as well. I hope you got something out of this interview. I certainly did. And that you'll be back for more to listen to some of the hackers of the recruitment industry.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I am your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome someone who is a veteran of the industry. Sorry, Steven, it has to be said. The Founder, Chief Visionary Officer for College Recruiter. We'll give Steven a chance to introduce College Recruiter and what they do, but I'm excited to have a conversation with Steven about what is happening in the world of campus recruitment and university hiring and all of those activities that kind of used to require a travel budget.And so what, what happened over the last couple of years, what's gonna come to us in the future, and how do we keep hiring young talent without breaking the bank without it costing what it used to cost, basically. That's what we'll be talking about. So, Steven, welcome to the show.Steven: Well, thank you very much, Max. I think the word veteran is code for extreme age. Okay but that's cool. With age comes wisdom, and at some point, I'm hoping to have both, not just the former.Max: Age is just surviving, surviving everything that could have happened and all those buses that could have hit youSteven: All those I've tried have to dodge.Max:   So yeah, it's a compliment of course. You've been running college recruiters since, your LinkedIn says since November, 1991. Pre-internet so well, how did you end up in that space? Cause I saw from your background that you come from the legal, from being a law clerk and studying law and being a law graduate. Right? So you're a lawyer.Steven: Yes. I like to say I'm fully recovered. Family members would definitely disagree and that's fine. I'll Sue them.So in 1991, I had graduated from law school and was clerking for a couple of judges. And it's a pretty common thing recent grads from law school do. It's, kind of almost the equivalence of like a residency program for positions. You know, you go, you get that formal education and it kind of gives you like an internship kind of a year, but you're paid for it.You're paid pretty decently for it. The work is really interesting but during that year, a friend of mine reached out to me and tried to get me to join his small business, which I had actually started the small business when I was in college, when I was in undergraduate school, he took it over, tried to get me back in and that kind of got my entrepreneurial bug going again. And so in 91, while I was working full time as a law clerk, I got the business that college recruiter grew out of started part-time and what it was for a few years, it was publishing maps of college and university campuses and selling the advertising around the borders to restaurants, retailers, et cetera.That then led into publishing employment magazines, where the magazines I gave them away for free to career service offices. They gave them away free to students and grads. And the revenues came from employers paying to advertise their jobs. And then in 96, this thing called the internet came along. And over the next few years, we gradually got rid of all of our print publications. And so since 2000, it has been the job board, collegerecruiter.com.Max: Right. I'm gonna show my age by telling you that in 2000 I was working for a company called Zip Davis and I was working for a computer shopper magazine. So I was there for the slaying, the final days of computer list, people buying computers on listings and you know every month we would lose advertisers. But I'm sure the CNET networks was able to recuperate some advertising on the other end, but yeah it was a time of just destruction, all over the place. And I guess there must have been one year when you went from 80- 20 to 20-80.Steven: Yeah, 1999 was the year that we shut down the maps, which were ridiculously profitable. You know, I think in 98, the maps provided something like 80% of our revenue. Sorry. I think it was 80% of our profit with only 20% of the revenue and about 5% of my time. It was painful to give that up, but the writing was on the wall. It's like, you know, you give this up now and work from a position of strength and cannibalize your own sales.Or somebody's gonna do that to you.Max: And fortunately, you were young too.Steven: Yeah. I was young and, and I mean, my wife and I had a couple of kids at that point. We ended up with three, but, it is a different situation at that point than, you know, when you're still fairly early in your career, you're, you're better able to take on risks. Uh, everything else being equal.Max: Yeah. So, college recruiter has been, is it, can I call it a job board? A market?Steven: Yeah, Max: I know it's not a sexy term, but like a marketplace for young talents?Steven: yeah. You know, it's not sexy, but one thing about job boards, is that they work. Yeah. They, really deliver, the good ones, they deliver really great value. They've been around for a long time. Without a doubt, the industry has its haters. The haters, the most vocal ones tend to be those, with skin in the game, the ones that are competing against the job boards for the same budget. And so you see third party recruiters talking about how awful job boards are and how nobody uses job boards and blah, blah, blah.It's like, well, okay. If your whole focus is on recruiting C-suite executives, then yeah, job boards are not the place for you, but if you're recruiting a lot of relatively early career talent at scale, there aren't too many more efficient ways of getting that opportunity in front of the candidate. There are loads of ways, including Talkpush of then taking that candidate who has discovered the opportunity, who's discovered your organization and converting them into an applicant or converting that applicant into a hire. There are loads of ways out there that do that better than a job board would. But that initial, “I don't know who I wanna work for”, “I may not even know what kind of position I'm looking for”, I don't just don't think there's anything better out there than job boards for that.Max: mm-hmm yeah, I've been a promoter of social media for sourcing at high volume for a long time. And, I think it's effective, if done right. And, you know, depending on the geographies, but if you're in a college town and you're targeting a specific age bracket, I think it can be very effective for jobs that are suitable for a large trench of the population.But instead of taking it from the employer's perspective and we take it from the job seeker perspective, then yeah, the benefits of this sort of virtual career fair that you get in a job board is it's unmatched. The only thing that was close to it maybe was Facebook jobs, but they shut down in March that I think that was, that could have been a good, uh, Yeah, maybe another job board killer.I know there's been a lot through the, over the years who have come and gone.Steven: yeah, I was a fan of the concept, and I think if they had more focus on it, I think they could have made it into a real success. It'll be interesting to see five years from now when the truth comes out, why it was really killed, what the reality was. I suspect it had to do with privacy laws that they were gathering or needing to gather a whole lot of information about job seekers that just doesn't play well with laws like GDPR.Max: Yeah.Steven: And, better for them to focus on their core. You know, serving basically display ads than job postings, resume searching. It's different. It's really different.Max: It was poorly monetized. Um, it was driving traffic out to sort of clunky and ugly career websites and ATSs. And, it was opening Facebook to a world of pain, which is the regulatory employment laws. So. Yeah, sad to see it go myself. But, anyway, there's plenty of other venues.So for people who want to find out more about College Recruiter, they, I suppose, where should they go and read more or find out about your services?Steven: Yeah, so they can go to collegerecruiter.com. We're very transparent about who we are, what we do, if they wanna reach out to me directly, they can do so on LinkedIn is a good way. linkedin.com/in/Steven with a V uh, Steven Rothberg, or just email me Steven@collegerecruiter.com.Max: And then, there's your podcast, that you co-host with? I forget his name.Steven: Yeah, Jeff, Jeff Dickey Chasins, that's the job board doctor, he and I last September launched a podcast called the job board geek podcast, and it's about the business of connecting candidates and employers. One way of doing that is through job boards. There are loads of other great, technical tools out there too that do the same or similar thing, usually just kind of in a different way and reaching different kinds of candidates, different points of engagement, requires different kinds of tools.Max: Would you consider that your number one customer is the employer or the student?Steven: So we are, my answer to you is neither. Okay. Neither and both, if that makes sense. So neither in the sense that we don't look at either the employer or the student or the candidate as being the customer, we're in a double-sided marketplace. That means that we have two different customer groups. We have the employer and their intermediaries, advertising agencies, job distribution companies, et cetera, that act on behalf of the employer. And then we have the candidate for us. That's going to be a, somebody who's currently enrolled or graduated within the last three years.So shorthand, zero to three years of experience. If we serve one far more than the other, the whole thing crumbles. You have to serve both. You have to balance the interests of both. For example, if we were to say the candidate is all that matters and we need to do what is in the best interest of the candidate, where that would lead us would be to provide the home phone numbers of our employer customers to the candidates. That's not a sustainable business model. I don't think we're gonna have too many employers that are thrilled if we were to do something like that. On the flip side,Max: Total transparency is not gonna please the ones who are paying for the service. Yeah.Steven: Right. And then they'll stop, and when they stop, then how are you helping anybody? Cuz now there aren't any employers that are using your platform to hire. So then the candidates who are using your platform, then can't get hired that way. So, and then the same is true in reverse, you know, if we were to be completely loyal to the employer and sort of disregard the interests of the candidate, then we start treating candidates like inventory.And again, we start providing the employers with a bunch of information that maybe we know or find out about the candidates that the candidates don't want us to be providing. You know, why did your boss really hire you last week? You know, that's something that should be between the candidate and the prospective employer.That's not something that an intermediary like a job board should be revealing. Now, again, it's different if it's an executive recruiter, because the executive recruiter is then acting on behalf of typically the employer. Not always, but typically, and they're essentially the agent, but we're not the agent of the employer. We're not the agent of the candidate. We have to balance both interests.Max: Yeah. Yeah. Well that makes sense. So let's talk about the interests the students, the college students. Yeah. how did the college students fare from 2020 to 2022 on, on the plus side?We still have very low unemployment, so there's high demand, plenty of jobs available, checks coming in the mail, getting a lot of bad press for what it's doing to the hunger and drive of the new generation. But, so overall it seems like they're doing all right, you know, but of course we know mental health issues, blah, blah, blah.You know, all of the hardship that comes with the pandemic and being locked at home, not being able to socialize. Let's put all of that aside. Just focus on the college stuff yeah. On the hiring, on the hiring problem. How did college students get hired in the last couple of years?Did they switch entirely to video and zoom calls and was that the primary channel for college hiring?Steven: Yeah. So just for a little bit of context, you know, COVID really hit hard, the us, you know, March of 2020. By March in any year, the vast majority of the hiring of students in recent grads is complete.By basically February, the very, very beginning of March, employers, just aren't on campus interviewing. They're not reaching out to students as part of their college recruiting programs, which are increasingly being called things like early talent, or early careers or something along those lines. Employers are kind of broadening it. We can get into that later if you wish. But so. The graduating class or those who were looking for internships that first year of COVID were not greatly impacted in terms of finding jobs, applying to them, getting hired. Fortunately, that first summer, the summer of 2020, most large employers did a really fantastic job of transitioning their workforce from being in-person in offices, to being fully remote, working at home. And so, although the students who were interning or those who were new grads lost that in-person experience, along with it mentorships. You know, good management, et cetera, only a small percentage of them lost out on their jobs.Most employers did not rescind their offers, but the programs were definitely highly adapted. We saw a lot of things like employers taking a 12-week internship program and making it four, rather than in person, it was virtual and they would do a lot of zoom-based training, and they would create projects.So that rather than that student working side by side with her manager instead, she would get a project and kind of report back to me in four hours or 12 hours or 20 hours, or, you know, however long that project might take. Okay. Most students, a large percentage of students worked for large employers and it was the large employers that had the resources and the know-how to do that adaptation, small employers were the ones that really didn't. So, the students that kind of got their offers rescinded or showed up and the door was locked, I literally heard that one time, they tended to work for small employers, loads of exceptions though. The next year's graduating class and the students who were looking for internships in the summer of 2021, by then vaccines were already coming out. And you had a lot of employers who were starting to hire back really quickly. It's kind of hard to remember. It was only a little over a year ago, but it was like, wow, vaccines are coming out. Life is returning to normal; people are starting to travel again. Isn't this great.We made it through and then Delta hit, but Delta didn't really hit until July, August, you know, in most areas of the country. So again, it was kind of fortuitous a difference of a few months would've made a big difference. But the students by and large, already were interning, most of it was remote. The new grads were already working, most of it was still remote, but you were starting to see some hybrid. So, it didn't have as much of an impact on the labor market as it would have if the change had come in, say September, October, when, when the bulk of on-campus hiring's done. Um, and by this year, things were pretty much back to, I guess back to the new normal, if that makes sense.Yeah. So one of the big differences between say 2019 and 2022 is that we've all learned how awful on-campus career fairs are. Any employer that still thinks that that's a great way to hire is an employer that probably has a brain injury. It is excruciating for the employer and for the student, the only real reason that they exist is because they always have existed. And because the career service offices use them as a primary way of generating revenue. So career service offices will say to employers, quite literally, if you want access to, “my students”, they own them. Yeah. Then you have to spend a thousand dollars and come out to our career fair, even though it's gonna be a complete waste of your time.Max: I rememberSteven: That's ridiculous.Max: I remember being asked for money to advertise on campus, but it's yeah. I mean, the argument is just to weed out the employees who are not serious. Yeah.Steven: Yeah. And those without money to give to the career services, but who might have great job opportunities for the students. Right. At the end of the day, the career service offices are there to serve the students. Not To use that relationship in order to balance their budget, they should be getting their budget from student services or somewhere else in the university. I mean, not from employers, you, you wouldn't, you wouldn't go to an employer and say, Hey, if you wanna park in our parking lot, you gotta pay a thousand dollars. And if you don't pay a thousand dollars, you're not gonna recruit students. You know, the parking lot has to be paid for, but they're gonna pay a nominal fee to park there they're gonna pay 10 bucks or whatever that money out ofMax: That's a conflict of interest Steven: Yeah. it really is. It does a massive disservice to the students. So what a lot of schools did during the height of COVID was that they shifted that whole business model online. If you thought in-person career fairs were bad. Wait till you see virtual career fairs. And some organizations did them well, but most didn't.  Most of the virtual career fairs, and again, there were definitely some that I looked at and I said, Hey, this is done well, but most of them were basically glorified zoom calls with 60 people in a waiting room.And so you want your 30-second chance to talk to that employer. You're gonna, you were sitting there and you were waiting often for an hour or two to have a 30-second conversation. And then the employer would say, well, for this reason, or that reason, we're not interested and moving on or thank you very much, go to our website and apply online. And the student is sitting there, like, why did I just spend an hour here? I could have just gone to their website and applied.Max: So with, or without the pandemic and the fact that people, it was harder to meet in person, harder to travel and so on, would you agree with the statement that campus hiring is a very imperfect way of connecting employers and students and kind of keeping, you know, actually closing off a number of opportunities for students who are at a stage when they should be opening their mind to all kinds of possibility. Perhaps, it could be argued that it has a detrimental effect because they end up thinking that you know, the workplace is represented by these, know, 10 employers that is Accenture and, BCG and, a couple of other, you know, management, you know, PWC and that's it. That's, that's my landscape.I imagine that most students have more imagination than this, but still, it should be enabled rather than limited by these physical barriers. So, care to comment on this?Steven: No, I totally agree until campus recruiting in 2019. So before COVID.Basically looked the same as it did in 1952, you had mostly large employers flying recruiters and hiring managers around the country, staying in nice hotels going on campus, and interviewing wining and dining professors. And. Not so coincidentally very often arriving on campus right in time for the homecoming game and getting tickets on the 50-yard line. So there was a lot of I don't know, feather betting or quasi-graft, kind of going on in that world where those who were in charge of the budgets often greatly favored the school that they went to or a school that had a really fun party kind of an atmosphere that they could take advantage of when they went there.Then often, the employers would often make excuses about not being inclusive. So there are about 7,400 post-secondary schools in the U.S. There are about 3000 4-year colleges, universities in the U.S. And basically, other than the U.S army, no employer goes to all of them. Right. So how do they pick and choose? Well, they, you know, it comes down to budgets and need and you're gonna favor a school that's close to you rather than a school that's far away from you that all on the surface makes sense. The problem with all of that is that it's anything but inclusive. So, you know, one of the other things that happened in 2020 was the murder of George Floyd.And all of a sudden, all of us were really forced to come to grips with what are we doing to improve diversity, equity, inclusion. And saying to students that the only way that you're gonna be hired here is if you happen to go to one of these 12 schools is not inclusive and because it's not inclusive, it's also not equitable. And it's, you're also not enhancing your diversity and employers started to understand, some already had. But I think a much larger percentage really grasped it, that the more diverse their workforce was, the more productive their workforce was. So I think for the first time, employers really, really started to invest in DEI, not just for compliance purposes, but to enhance their productivity.And that meant they had to go to a lot more schools. So in one sense, having to use virtual career events and zoom and other tools like that, job boards to advertise your roles in one sense, felt like a step back for employers because they got, they lost out on the fun football games and they lost out on staying in, you know, a nice suite at a Marriot hotel in their favorite city, and going drinking with their friends on the weekend when they got to stay over and they lost out on all the miles that they would use to take their families to Europe during the summer. And there was a lot of that. Max: Doesn't sound too bad, you're right. Steven: Yeah. But on the other hand, they no longer had to literally plan 14 months ahead. For how many people are we gonna hire into what kinds of roles and where are they gonna be located throughout our organization? Now hiring manager calls up and says, Hey, we just landed a new contract. I need 20 electrical engineers, and I need them in three months. Right now you can do that. You can't do that when you're doing on-campus recruiting because it just takes too long. So employers very quickly were forced to, and then saw the value in shifting their resources from flying a bunch of people around the country to doing it what a lot of them call virtually. Which is just, you know, using this thing that basically was invented in the mid-nineties, that's the internet. So the ROI on recruiting somebody online is way better. The studies are showing that the productivity's actually higher than recruiting people on campus and the cost of hiring somebody is way lower.This isn't about college recruiter. This is probably the same with just about any sourcing tool. But when we talk to our customers, their cost per hire are usually measured in the hundreds of dollars, right. NACE, which is the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the association for basically campus recruitment just before COVID. They said that the average cost of recruiting a student through on-campus recruiting was $4,600. It's like $4,600. It's like, but we only spent $200 at a career fair. It's the travel. It's the staff time. When you start flying a team of recruiters around the country. And they can go to a campus maybe once a day, probably every other day, cuz of travel time, and they meet with couple, a dozen students and maybe they hire one of them maybe they don't, it's frightfully expensive and it's not at all diverse. And so I think that one of the few positive things that have come out of COVID. is that employers of students have started to take a better picture. They're looking better at their ROI, not just their cost of hire, but also the productivity.Max: I love the positive spin on the last two years. And I do think it is a more inclusive world, in that sense that you, you no longer are bound by geographical, material boundaries on how you're gonna pick your talent. And that's an enormous boom for mankind because it means we're gonna make better hires. Productivity's gonna go up it's good across the board. But in a more literal and direct sense; was it good for business for you? Like do you, did the travel budgets that got canceled, did they convert into ad spend on college recruiter.com?Steven: Yeah. Our revenues have been up 30 to 50% a year, year over year, the last few years.Max: Nice.Steven: And we're growing and we're doing it profitably. Our headcount has basically doubled in the last six months. Max: Cool. Steven: And it was very overdue. We basically had to make sure that this was real before we started hiring a bunch of people and then we didn't wanna start, like laying them off three months after we hired them, but it was overdue. We put way too much stress on our staff by not hiring quickly enough. And we still have a couple of open roles. So, you know, max, if you're looking Max: Quite inspiring, 20 you're 20 years, how many years? It's 25 years into this business. 30 years?. Steven: Yeah.Max: Yeah. Yeah. And then you have this two years with 25, 30% year over year growth. So, it is never too late to have a record year.Steven: Yeah. And, you know, like, I think a lot of businesses in our space where it's primarily technology-based, you sort of, it's not the same business it was three years ago. So we made a huge shift towards pay for performance, like pay per click and programmatic before COVID. We started to really shift in like 2014, 2015, 2016. So it's not like we saw a pandemic coming. It's like, oh, well we better do programmatic and pay per click because there's gonna be COVID. No, it was, we were fortunate. We had the right products in place. Our entire platform has really evolved since the mid-2000s, since like 2015-ish to be really good at high volume hiring. Employers that are hiring dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands. That's basically what college and university hiring is. The vast majority of students and recent grads go to work for large employers, that's the way they hiredMax: When I was coming out of college, my master's degree, and it was in 2000. So you know, it was not a great year to be looking for work. So I spent a lot of time on monster.com and I, you know, I'd applied to like 10 to 20 jobs a day like steady for a month. Is that quite characteristic? I mean, in terms of the volume of jobs that the average student would apply to, do you have a way of quantifying that?Steven: Fortunately, they're smarter than you were.So what students are counseled to do now is to do a lot more research upfront about the kinds of jobs that they're looking for, really much better understand what kind of a job am I looking for? What kind of organization offers that? And then to really zero in and apply to five to 10 jobs. And when you apply to a far smaller number of jobs, you're able to do a much better job up front, making sure that they're the right jobs to apply to. And that, you know, there are still loads of job seekers out there who will apply to any job that moves and, and employers complain about them all the time.And I think for good reason, you know, if somebody applies to hundreds of jobs, the likelihood of you hiring that person is really low. The likelihood of that person really not having any kind of qualifications for your job is pretty low, but that's also where technology can play a role. So yeah. You know, any employer that says, oh, well, you know, I have to sift through hundreds of resumes in order to find a good one, that's an employer that's investing too much in manpower and not enough in technology because technology should be preventing those people from applying to begin with to dissuade them, to basically say, Hey, you know what? No, you're not well suited for this role. Maybe there's another role over here, or we just can't hire you at all.You have to be a U.S citizen to work for us because we require a security clearance and you are a citizen of, you know, God forbid Canada, or you know, where I grew up. You know, you definitely don't want to hire Canadians, can't trust any of them. They all smell like maple syrup. Yeah.Max: Well, yeah, I mean, I, I think you're on the side of the market where the marketplace could become intelligent and advise your students to apply to a different, better-suited job. I'm on the receiving end. My company, we process applications coming in from all kinds of places. And then we can go on and ask some qualifying questions to the candidates. Are you sure this is right? Are you sure you've got U.S citizens so you can do it on both. Can you tell us about some of the employers that are inspiring you in 2022 that really have nailed it when it comes to hiring students this year, that have done something nice because it's really hard to do a, virtual career fair, it's very hard to do a good candidate experience when you're doing high volume. So maybe you've got, a case study for us to think about?Steven: Yeah. So, you know the shiny examples year after year after year, and it really COVID didn't change this would be, you were talking earlier about someone like the big management consulting firms, you know, the Deloittes, the PWCs, the Ernst & Youngs all over the world. So they have a ton of money, they hire 10,000 plus students in recent grads a year. They're very, very sophisticated about what they do. One of the things that those organizations do along with lots of others that a few years ago, hardly any were doing it at all is pre-application assessments. And you know, when I was a recent grad, if somebody had said assessments to me, they were probably talking about some BS thing, like Myers's briggs, or if you could be a tree, what kind of tree would you be?And somehow that was supposed to show them that I was gonna be a productive employee. And now there are loads of assessments out there off the shelf or companies as little as ours we built our own because we couldn't find one to assess developers, if they had the right skill set, if they had the right experience with the tech stack that we use, it's not that hard and not that expensive any more to have every candidate go through this assessmentMax: There's a lot of solutions online, so much stuff. So if you don't have you know, budget to spend tens of thousands of dollars or more on assessments, you can go and build your own these days. Right. You don't need to be an engineer.Steven: Yeah, exactly. And, and so I'm seeing more and more and more employers doing that. Now, partly what excites me about that is from the employer's perspective, It does a really nice job of greatly reducing, not eliminating, but greatly reducing the number of unqualified applications, which means then that they can spend more time on the qualified applicants, which means they're gonna hire more of them. That's best. That's good for everybody. It's also good for the candidate because wouldn't, you rather know 30 seconds into a process that this is not a job that you're ever gonna get than 30 days and five interviews later?Max: It weeds out candidates like me in 2000, then I wouldn't have had time to do 20 assessments a day, half an hour assessment each. I mean, it would've beenSteven: you probably would've modified your behavior. You would've applied to fewer jobs. Yes. And that also would've then led you to do probably better research to which jobs to apply to. Max: Yeah, my life would've been better. I would've had a way better life than the one I had. Steven: Yeah. It's, you are a cliche that people talk about is hunting with a rifle instead of a shotgun, you know, you know, you're, you're going and it just tends to lead to better results. The other thing that I think it does, that I know it does is that it helps to diversify your workforce because under the old system where a recruiter would look at your resume and they would see, it's like, oh, Max went to X, Y, Z school and that's a really impressive school. So I want to interview him, you know, and Cindy went to some school I've never heard of, so she can't possibly be well qualified, so we're not gonna interview her. Now it's based upon your actual skills. Yeah. Maybe you did go to an elite school, but you probably spent all your time playing Frisbee. Where Cindy went to a third-rate school, but had three amazing internships. Who would you rather hire? The person with work experience?Max: No Frisbee. The Frisbee guy, Frisbee guy. A hundred percent. Steven: Well, yeah. I mean, it depends. I guess it depends. If you're the Frisbee corporation, then yes, you'd rather hire the Frisbee. If it's like a Frisbee golf tournament then, yeah, the Frisbee guy. But, otherwise, you're just going to, you're just gonna end up being like a podcaster and an owner of like a workplace tech company. And that's not a good living. Max: No, no,that's rough. Okay. Well that I agree with a hundred percent that, you know, skill-based, assessment-based hiring is gonna be more meritocratic and more fair and more, I don't know if it necessarily falls into diversity.But it can help certainly. It's more diverse than just hiring at the University of Wisconsin. That's for sure.Steven: Right. And as a graduate of the university of Minnesota, I can definitely say that you do not want to hire people from the university of Wisconsin. Actually, my wife who's, our CEO went there and despite that,t I love her.  Max: Okay. Okay. Give faith my regards. I wanted to, uh, end on the question I ask all my guests which is - we all make hiring, and with that, we all make hiring mistakes. Thinking back about your long journey as an entrepreneur and all the people you hired, can you walk me back through one particular hire you made, where you missed the mark and did the service to yourself, to the hire, to the organization and then without giving names, of course, but just giving us the moral of the story, what can we learn from it?Steven: Yeah. I'll just give you their social security number. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. You know, there was a common thread. So, Faith became our CEO in 2008 and so I have not led hiring since then. And, probably about five or so years ago, I really haven't been involved in interviewing or whatever. It's not something I'm good at. That said, in my role, I will talk with candidates before they're hired, if they want to, to sort of get a better picture of the company, but I'm not evaluating them, it's helping them evaluate us. But to answer your question, Max, about sort of people we've hired that have not been a good fit.I think a really common thread. Would be two things, two real common threads. One would be, I used to hire people that I felt that I liked and I could trust. And liking somebody and maybe trusting them, that kind of thing leads you to hiring people yoou know, people who are friends of yours, people who are family members of yours, and you're hiring them for the relationship and not what their skillset is, not what their career aspirations are. We've had a couple of people that we hired that way that were, that were great, but they were the exception. Repeatedly, we ended up hiring sort of good people who just were not a good fit for the work and, you know, right person, wrong seat kind of, kind of thing. The other real common thread that we found is that, and this is a little bit unusual for us.We've been fully remote since 1997. So before it was cool before it was often legally required, we were fully remote. There's a huge difference between hiring somebody who's gonna work shoulder to shoulder with their manager versus hiring somebody who's gonna work halfway across the country or even halfway across the world. So we've gotten really good at hiring people who are gonna be working remotely. And we've tried to share a lot of that knowledge on the college recruiter's YouTube channel. But basically, you've gotta manage that the burden falls on the manager. It's not actually so much on the employee.The manager has to be really good at managing by outcomes. Yeah. So if we've got a manager of that department, who's really good at managing by outcomes, it makes hiring a lot easier. If the manager struggles with that, then we have to pay particular attention to the employee's ability to manage up, to communicate with their manager, hey, when do you want this done? What resources am I gonna have? What's the priority of this versus the other 18 things you've already given me? And a lot of people, they can't do that. They just won't or can't manage up. And so that's been an important factor for usMax: Great. Well, I won't add anything to it. We're over time, but I agree with all that Steven said on the managing by outcome, and how important it is and that the onus is on the managers. So thanks a lot, Steven, for joining and for sharing your unique insights into the world of campus hiring, college hiring,  early careers hiring.We'll talk about labels next time we get to do a podcast interview together, maybe on yours, if you'll have me.Steven: Absolutely. Well, we're gonna get some dates on the calendar. Max has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. Max: Thank you.Max: That was Steven Rothberg from College Recruiter. Hope you enjoyed the interview. He really made me think it doesn't always happen overnight. You can be running a business for 30 years as he has and a technology which is 20 years old, which is the job board market, and still have your best year. In fact two of his best years back to back are 2021 and 2022 because the market is shifting and because the old way things are done, they take a while to break down and the old way of hiring on campus where you have to send an army of recruiters and post a stand and pay the university for an entrance fee, well that's on the way out. So, never underestimate the power of technology to change behaviors over time. If you enjoyed this and would like to come for more, please subscribe and please share with friends.

Max: Hello. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And, today I'm delighted to welcome Peter Weddle, who is the CEO for the Association for Talent Acquisition Solution, also known as TAtech, which you can find on TAtech.org. Peter has been leading this association which gathers vendors, practitioners, and who is a real futurist as well. He has written some books on what the future holds for humanity and how to prepare our future generations for the impending rise of the machines. So, I'm excited to talk to him about some of the trends that are shaping this year and perhaps how to prepare not for the next year, but for our next generation of recruiter, how our recruiters are gonna look like, and what they're gonna do 20 years from now? We'll have a bit of a discussion on that. Peter, thank you so much for joining.Peter: It's great to be here, Max. Thanks for having me.Max: It's a pleasure. And, always love your newsletter. I love your content. So, maybe we'll start with that. What is TAtech? And, how can people get plugged in?Peter: TAtech is the trade association for the global talent technology industry. So, that means that our members span the spectrum from job boards and aggregators and job distribution companies to conversational AI solutions, programmatic ad buying platforms, recruitment advertising agencies, marketing companies. Basically, any company that uses technology to design, develop and deliver a talent acquisition product or service for employers.Max: Okay! So, there's a lot to unfold there. But we're talking about basically the cutting edge of talent acquisition. And, I… you're based in Chicago right?Peter: Actually, we're based in Stamford, Connecticut.Max: In Connecticut. All right. Great. And the…but with a membership that is global. But, I think a lot of the investment is coming out of the U.S. right? That's really the hub of the TAtech industry.Peter: Well, we do a number of things as a trade association but we're probably best known for our conferences. We certainly do one in called TAtech North America, but we also do one in Europe called TAtech Europe. And, that's for the whole EMEA region. And, I think it's safe to say that, yeah, there's a lot of investment, probably more money flowing into talent acquisition technologies and products than H.R. products largely. But, that's not only true in the U.S. now, it's increasingly true across Europe, particularly in the U.K. There's a lot of really fascinating developments of new companies springing up in Europe and in U.K.Max: Yeah! Absolutely. I think actually that when it comes to recruitment, recruitment has more domestic localized elements. And so, you know, a lot of the leaders have come from Europe or from different parts of the world and then from India, and then they eventually make it to the U.S., which is the biggest market. So, it's quite an international community, I would say. But the capital certainly seems to be coming out of the U.S. in majority.Peter: Well, we're very fortunate that we, as you mentioned earlier, we do have a global member base. So, we have the advantage of being able to look at not only new developments, but also where the current trendsetters in the industry are going into the future. And, we can look across all of those trends globally because, you know, the fact of the matter is that increasingly we have a global workforce. So, companies may be based in the U.S., but they're hiring all over the world and vice versa. Companies in India are hiring in North America and so forth. So I think it's important to recognize that, you know, geography is still important, but geographical barriers are not.Max: They're coming down. Yeah. And, increasingly now there are some behaviors that are… I mean, whether you're in India or in the US or in France, you are witnessing how fast the world is moving,how fast things are becoming, the consumerization of just about everything. And so, that's going to affect, of course, the recruitment because the way consumers behave globally is pushing recruitment in the same direction, you know, in all corners of the world. So, yeah, it's a good fine balance between these local and global trends. But before we talk about the future and those…or about those trends, Peter, how did you…how does someone end up being the CEO of the TAtech? How did you end up in recruitment to begin with in talent acquisition?Peter: Well, I was a partner in the Hay Group, so I… my roots are in the H.R. field. But, I got the entrepreneurial bug and bought a company called Job Bank USA in the early 90's. This was pre-internet but we were arguably one of the largest companies to use computers to match people in jobs. And, about five years later, I sold that firm and fell into a gig writing a bi-weekly column for the Wall Street Journal about this new thing called the Internet and in particular the employment space online. And, I bought that basically until Murdoch bought or I did that until Murdoch bought Dow Jones. So, I got to go over the shoulders, meet and interact with all of the early players in online talent acquisition. And, by 2007, it just seemed to me that the industry had matured to the point where it needed a trade association and an organization to help set standards, to help identify best practices, to make sure that customers, employers were getting what they paid for those kinds of things. So, we launched TAtech in 2007, and the first thing we did was create a code of ethics because we believe, you know, that technology needs to serve the individuals that are using it, not the other way around. So, we really focused on that first. Since then, we've developed a whole range of products to help our members do something that is very simple, make more money at the bottom line.Max: I admit to you and to our audience, I have not read the code of ethics yet but I'm going to do that as soon as our conversation is over. And, I am on board because I have read all of Asimov's work and I know that we have to set the rules early in the game before the machines take over. So, I am on board and yeah, it's amazing how far we've gone in those 20 years where…Well, 15 years you've been running the association, and to think where we were in 2007, right? Where it was basically the first SaaS companies like Taleo going IPO and success factors and early days of ATS. Do you…are you as excited today as you were back then about where this industry is going after all these years?Peter: I think it's fair to say I'm more excited. You know, Kurzweil, the head of engineering at Google, has said that we will see 10,000 years of progress in the next 100 years because the pace of technology, technological invention, and innovation is accelerating. And I think, you know, it's hard to wake up on any given day, walk into the office and not find something new. So, our challenge as a species is to learn how to leverage the advantages of this technology, this development, and also preserve some space for our species so that we, you know, lead fulfilling lives.  Max: Mm hmm. Then, there are some concerns with the pace of technology being such that people can't keep up, that the jobs that are more menial and that do not require, you know, too much thinking. The non-thinking jobs are gonna disappear and be replaced by mechanical robots and yeah, I mean, there's perhaps a concern about whether there'll be jobs for all of humanity. And, I think you addressed that in the past in some of your book. I forgot the title. Perhaps you could reminded me what the title of that book was?Peter: It's Circa 2118. So, it was written in 2018. And, what I was trying to do was to forecast the impact of technology in general but especially artificial intelligence 100 years later. So, 2118, Circa 2118 is the title of the book.Max: And, to predict 100 years ahead is an impossible task, I think. But, you show, I mean, in 2018, we felt pretty confident there'd be no more truck drivers by now. They're still around. But certainly by 2100 that jobs should be replaced or automated, right? You would think… Can you make some predictions on what the job of a recruiter might be, you know, 10-20 years from now? You know, how that might be chopped off or changed and morphed into something else?Peter: Well, if you don't mind, I'd like to begin with where we are now, because I think you said earlier and it's exactly true. We humans, all professions, including the recruiting profession, may well have surpassed our gulp rate in terms of taking all this new technology on board and using it effectively. And, I think one of the reasons that we are struggling is because we only address half the issue. You know, we are increasingly good consumers when it comes to buying tech products. We do our homework, we talk to our peers and experts in the field. We get a sense of, you know, what are the top two or three options similar to what we do when we buy a car and then we go out and we make a purchase. But unfortunately, that's where things end.And with technology, particularly today's state of the art, that's when the challenge actually begins, because integration or implementation is the single most important and difficult part of buying a new tech product. And most recruiting teams today don't have the priority. They don't have the leadership attention, they don't have the budget, and they don't have the staff to really implement these tools effectively. And when that doesn't happen, you know, you get first of all, you get the recruiters who are upset because the product doesn't work as advertised. Sometimes it destabilizes the other products in the tech stack, and that makes their job even harder. You upset the IT department because you're complicating their lives. I mean, it just kind of cascades into this really unpleasant and oftentimes disappointing situation.So, you know, I think that one of the priorities for the recruiting profession in the near term has to be how to get better at, how to acquire the skills and knowledge of technology implementation. Yeah! You want to be a good consumer about buying the stuff, but you also want to be a good implementer as well.Max: Mm hmm. Yeah. I obviously completely understand the pain you're describing I mean, basically, the harder it is at the beginning, the better I sleep at night because it means that they understand the magnitude of the challenge, because there's a lot of change management that comes with it. And, it just changes people the way people work.So, right now, we're in the middle of eliminating a lot of the first human interaction, which is the phone interview where you call a candidate and you do a first phone screen. My company is focused on eliminating that piece for the majority of the volume, and we're making progress. So, I feel like it's certainly…we're moving the needle. What are some of the other tasks besides that first phone screen that do you think are gonna disappear, you know, in the next 20 years? If you agree with my premise that phone screening will disappear.Peter: Well, I think that we will, for the next 20 years, so for all four generations that are in the workforce currently, and maybe even Gen Z coming on board because we still have some baby boomers in the workforce for all of the extant generations in the workforce, we will continue to see hybrid kinds of interactions.But for the kids and grandkids of the generations in the workforce today, I think they face a very, very different future. And, I think that recruiting is one of the fields where it's likely to be completely automated. It's not to say that what the humans are…human recruiters do isn't important. In fact, sometimes the most important tasks get automated. But, I think the fact of the matter is that technology, you know, I mean, right now, the way the paradigm is set up, you have…it's a bipolar distribution.You either believe that technology, we stick our heads in the sand, technology is going to go away. There are just some things that humans do that machines cannot be taught to do. And, then there's the other extreme, which is terminators. And my God, they're going to destroy the human race.There is a third way or a third path, and that is that we want to apply technology everywhere we can. And, at the same time, think about what kind of world that's gonna create. What are we going to do for the humans who will find themselves not only unemployed, but unable to be reemployed because there just aren't enough jobs to go around? And we need to begin thinking about that now, because it's going to cause a huge structural shift in society, in education, in the way that you and I spend our days. Well, not you and I, but certainly kids and grandkids can spend their days. Yeah!Max: Yeah! The people who are the superstars now and who are driving, you know, the content and the media industry are gamers and, you know, sort of virtual characters with avatars rather than 3D faces. And so, you know, will we need to…Will recruitment still be human-led? You're saying machines will do a better job at selecting who is right for the job.Peter: Well, what I'm saying is two things. First of all, as more and more jobs in the enterprise, let's just talk about recruiting. As more and more of the jobs in the enterprise, not just blue-collar jobs, you know, robots on assembly lines, but increasingly we're seeing machines take over huge swaths of the professional workforce. As that happens, there will be less need for recruiters because there will be no human showing those jobs. So, demand will go down. And, you know, we already have examples of machines being evaluated by humans as being more empathetic, more understanding than their human counterparts.There's a machine at a retired living community in France that goes around and attends to the people who live there. And that machine gets higher marks than the human attendance because it's there 24 hours a day. It always responds. It's been taught how to be empathetic in a way that the people appreciate, and that's a very rudimentary example of where we are going.So I think, you know, I don't know about you, but I think the prospect of losing employment, not work, that's different. Losing the requirement for paid employment to have a meaningful life is a good prospect. But it means we need to think about, you know, a basic income for all people. I mean, these are the kinds of things that we kind of shovel under the rug and we don't talk about very much. But ultimately, if we really care about the future, we're going to bequeath to our kids and grandkids. We should be thinking about that stuff now because it is virtually inevitable that we're going to get to that point.Max: I think you've taken us a little bit further than 20 years ahead, that we still have a couple of decades of, you know, filling jobs with actual humans but…Peter: Well, and that's why I begin with, you know, let's worry about using the technology where we have today effectively. Let's implement it well, let's buy it well. Let's implement it well. Absolutely. And today's recruiters have nothing to worry about. They are not going to be replaced by a machine. So, yes, that's why I called my book Circa 2118. We are that's way down the road.But today, you know, I think the other challenge that we have for people in recruiting is just being aware of what's out there. You know, it's very hard. If you'd go to an H.R. conference, the vast majority of the exhibitors are going to be H.R. Technology companies. They're much bigger, the much better funded. And frankly, H.R. pays much more attention to them. And talent technology is sort of relegated to second class status. It's sort of shoved off in the corners. And in my view, that puts the cart before the horse because, you know, you can't manage the human resources you don't have.So, the number one priority should be to buy talent technology and getting those people in the door, the talent that you need for the jobs that you have, and then worry about having the H.R. technology to manage them and develop them effectively.Max: Amen. More money for the industry. I have to get behind that. But, I would say that I imagine a world, you know, many years from now maybe there won't be companies employing humans to drive trucks or to, you know, to build machines or even to provide health care services. But, they'll be a new breed of services that will arise that will require the inventiveness and creativity and the ability to multitask and the human sensitivity and almost, you know, sort of the soul, the soulfulness of a human to do to create and deliver them. And, they'll be a perhaps recruitment software to help those tribes build themselves. But I cannot …for the life of me imagine what kind of services they will be providing. I hope we'll still be busy. That's all I'm saying.Peter: Oh, I think we'll be very busy. But you know, I've written a book since Circa 2118 called The Neonaissance. It's a play on the term renaissance. Renaissance was a look backward. It was returning to the glory days of Rome and Greece. The Neonaissance looks forward. And, what it's all about is in a world where we've done two things. We've solved what humans need to do or can do or should do in a world where technology does almost everything for them. And we solve the climate crisis.If we can address those two issues, then we are in a period called a new birth of humankind, which is how do we create fulfillment for humans, which is the one attribute that no machine and no animal can aspire to. How do we create fulfillment for humans in a world where you don't have to work for a living? Excuse me, you don't have to be employed for a living. And, you know, I think that's the future we have. I mean, I think it's gonna be a tough road getting there, but it's going to be a very exciting and fulfilling future. And, I believe in it so strongly that I'm giving that book away.So, if people want…if you listeners want to get that book, again it's called The Neonaissance. It's on a website called onestoryforall.com. You can download the book for free. It's probably more than you've ever read several hundred pages, but at the end of the day, it says, yeah, we've got a tough road ahead of us for the next period of time with getting agreement about how we're going to solve global warming, how we're going to solve the impact of technology on the workplace and workforce. But, once we get through those challenges and that's the good thing, that's the thing one thing that humans are really good at, solving challenges. Then, we have this new period the Neonaissance to look forward to.Max: I think humans are also pretty good at competing with each other And so, hopefully that does not end up in a nuclear war or in destroying all of our available resources and that we can compete on with paintbrushes or with other ends and create an artistic future.  But, I want to come back to Earth for 2 seconds and to our listeners who are in the recruitment space. And, I always ask this question, Peter. Think back to a time when you hired somebody and you made a hiring mistake. And walk us back through this mistake without giving names necessarily, but telling the audience, telling me what we can learn from that mistake and how can we avoid a similar one being made in the future?Peter: Well, I'm living, breathing proof of the findings from a University of Michigan research study done a number of years ago. But it found that hiring managers are only 4% better than flipping a coin when it comes to picking the best person for a job opening. They get it right 54% of the time. And the reason they have such a miserable track record, it's because they don't hire the person who will perform best in the job. They tend to hire the people they like the best, the person who interviews the best and so forth.  And that's the mistake I made. I hired a person that I really connected with during the interview process. I had almost a visceral reaction at this person and I were really of two identical minds, and I was really swayed by the fact that I had this strong reaction to, you know, his outlook, his vision, his way of looking at the world. And, what I didn't do is pay enough attention to his skill set and to the kinds of talent he would bring to the job. He was great, you know, was a great guy and a great, you know, individual in the workforce. He just wasn't the right guy for the job I was trying to fill. And, I should have paid closer attention to what the job actually required because what I ended up doing was putting him in a position where he could not succeed and that was unfair to him, as well as unfair to the organization that I was representing.Max:  And it makes you wonder almost whether if you'd like someone, if you could answer in the affirmative the question: Would you hang out with this person outside of work? Maybe that's a red flag, you know, like, maybe you shouldn't be the one making that decision, that hiring decision. Because if this person is likable enough to you that you would want to see them outside of work, and how could you be unbiased?Peter: Well, I know I'm going to get some pushback from the people who say, hey, you know, you want to have…you want to hire people who have sort of the same cultural mindset. And that's true. But in my opinion, that has to come second. First is, can the person do the job and perform at his or her peak? And then are there cultural fit with the organization? And, I reverse those.Max: So, you're saying the right order would be… First, can you do the job and then maybe afterwards? Yeah, the cultural fit. Somebody just gave me on this show told me that it should be going the other way. You should first establish culture fit because if you have technical fit first, you're gonna completely ignore…If for some jobs where it's very difficult to get technical fit, job fit, then you'll be too skewed to ignore the cultural misalignment. So, I guess it depends on the ratio. Like if it's very, very hard to get an engineer and they fill the job, you know, they fill the job description perfectly, then you'll, you'll look past the cultural misfit.Peter: Well, there's plenty of research that shows that would be a fatal mistake, because that person is ultimately going to end up either underperforming or leave, you know, within the first 90 days of being in the organization because they don't like it there for a whole host of reasons. But at the end of the day, I think no matter how tough it is to fill a job, you know, cultural fit is important. And, I think when somebody says, well, just focus on skills and because that's a hard job to fill, you know, kind of let the candidate slide on culture. I think what they're really saying is our recruiting process and practices are substandard and we are not adequately sourcing for this particular opening. So, I don't… I mean, look, there are plenty of… no matter how difficult the job is, there are plenty of applicants out there. Are they tough to find? In some cases, absolutely. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.Max: Yeah! You can expand the search, especially these days, is when you don't have to hire in your vicinity for a lot of these specialized jobs.Peter: Exactly.Max: Now, I would end our discussion now, but since I'm talking to a technologist and we are talking about cultural fit, which is very hard one to nail down. What are some of the technologies that you've come across that you think are gonna change the way we establish culture fit? You know, what do you think works these days for matching a talent with a particular company culture?Peter: I don't know that I have a good answer for that…Max: …Maybe that's a question for ten years from now.Peter: Well, yeah, I'm sure there are some technology products out there that help recruiters assess cultural fit, and I suspect that they are very helpful. I have found that cultural fit is a challenge in two respects, no matter what the products are. The first is, in some cases, not many cases, but at least in some cases, organizations don't have a good handle on what their culture really is. They have a culture. They have a good fit or a good fix on what they aspire to be in terms of culture. You know what the CEO says they're all about. But in terms of the genuine, authentic culture of the organization, they are too often clueless. And, that comes to the fore when you look at the distance between an employer brand and an employer's reputation based on review sites and so forth. That's where you see that play out.The other is that when you introduce technology, not all technologies, but at least some technologies, you're going to change culture or you're going to at least disrupt culture. And, you need to think through how to deal with the change in things as simple as practices and procedures, but also, you know, in sort of the role of the recruiter. I mean, we've been talking about that a whole lot. And, as technology gets introduced, recruiter roles will change and adapt over time. And, you need to think about that in advance rather than after the fact.Max: Mm hmm. Now, what is the culture you want to prepare for five years from now when your industry will be completely different? And how do you know what kind of… what's the composition of your team then? Of course, everybody who went fully remote has probably gone towards hiring more introverts, for example. And, I don't know if they did that precisely or it kind of happened organically, but probably a common trend.Peter: Really? I had not heard that. And I would have thought exactly the opposite. You know, I'm an introvert and getting in front of a camera and talking to someone that I'm having a hard time reading their body language with, it just makes it that much more intimidating. An extrovert, I think, would flourish on Zoom. We introverts kind of cringe into the background.Max: Well, I don't ask my engineers to switch on their cameras.Peter: There we go.Max: All right. Well, thanks a lot, Peter. And again, TAtech.org and the website again, the URL for downloading your latest piece of fiction.Peter: Well, fiction, in fact, it's got 180 footnotes. So, it's not as if it's not well researched. But the name of the book is The Neonaissance and it's at onestoryforall.com.Max: All right, onestoryforall.com. Thanks, Peter. Thanks for coming on.Peter: Thanks for having me, Max. Appreciate it.Max: And that was Peter Weddle from TAtech.org, reminding us that technology doesn't deliver on all of its promises in the short run unless we're very tight on implementation. But it usually goes way beyond our imagination over longer periods of time. And it's time to prepare for new generations and to think about the role of technology in an ethical context and in the future of mankind context. So, obviously I really enjoyed this chat. I hope you did too, and that you'll go check out his books and TAtech.org to become members of the association. Thanks for listening.

Welcome back to ArtBeat Radio!  This week's installment features the collaborative efforts of students at AAW ART Center and San Diego Center in their unique musical and theatrical stories about the beach.  The first piece A Day at the Beach Feeling Fine and Sandy, features a musical story about a class field trip to La Jolla; written, recorded and produced by Service Users in San Diego Music Therapy class.  The second segment is a comedic scene called Seashells in San Jose; written acted and recorded by students in Playwriting class at ART Center.  We hope you enjoy listening and following along on this journey! Musical Beach Field Trip Story IntroductionJillian: This is our Musical Beach Field Trip story called, Day at the Beach; Feeling fine and Sandy. I hope you enjoy it! Reid: We wrote the story by brainstorming ideas together and taking turns adding words. We worked on this together in San Diego Music Therapy Class.  Stephanie: In this story, we are taking a road trip, seeing sights, eating lunch, enjoying music on the radio and enjoying each other's company. -Stephanie Max: In the background, we created a “Soundscape” by adding environmental sounds like ocean waves, cars, and elephants. We thought about what to say, and recorded our singing parts over Zoom.  Renee: It was nice to be able to take part in creating a song, interesting to write our own story, and cool to use our imagination. We hope you enjoy it.Musical Beach Story Lyrics (written and performed by Jillian, Reid, Stephanie, Renee, Juan Marcos, Max, Sarah, and Brian)It was a sunny Thursday morning, the sky was so blue, the air felt coolThe mood was so calm among the Able Arts Work Crew.  Stephanie said“We're all together at last, Isn't this great!”  “So much to do” Jillian sang, “I can hardly wait!”  Reid exclaimed, “let's seize the day!” Renee said “I want to tap beach balls and play!” Juan Marcos said, “this is too happy to miss!” Jillian said “I think we should take a Class trip, let's go the beach! So, they all hopped in the car and headed to La Jolla with their baskets.  Pumping that Art beat radio music on the way made them feel included,and through the window they saw the biggest coast that they wanted to draw. Sarah was excited as she exclaimed “I'm going to swim today!” Max sang out “We're almost there, I can smell salt in the air!”  Stephanie said, “let's stop here, I can tell fun is near… it's time to explore!” When they arrived, they were excited.  The beach was so empty!They noticed a group of elephants   eating lunch, and “thought that's so random”Then Juan Marcos got hungry, and said “I want some food.” Reid smiled and nodded, and said, “Hey, I'm hungry too.”  So, they all opened their bags, and pulled out a brownie and salad                      Poured out cool jug of water, and said cheers to the day, this has been great! Seashells in San Jose IntroductionDaniel: Wow what an awesome journey to the beach!Jillian: My favorite part was when we saw elephants; I thought that was really strange!Reid: It was amazing! The elephants were eating lunch, that's so random.Renee: Speaking of lunch dates, up next, we have a cute scene about Mickey and Minnie having their first date on the beach, titled Seashells in San JoseJuan Marcos: This script was written, acted, and recorded by students in playwriting class at ART Center.  Max: It was an exercise to learn about playwriting, so we came up with characters and settings, plot twists to turn our ideas into a story. Stephanie: We wrote it as a comedy, so we hope you have a good laugh- Stephanie

Max:Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Ambruster and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show, Cynthia Owyoung, who is the author of a new book “All are welcome - how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results.” And we're going to be speaking about, well, the results, mainly, and how talent acquisition can drive that. And how the field has changed over the last 20 years. Because Cindy has been in the space for a long time and has seen the world change. So, Cindy, welcome to the show.Cynthia:Thank you so much, Max, for having me. I'm excited to have the conversation with you.Max:Yeah, thanks for coming. And congrats on the new book. Before we get into the book and the lessons, could you share with me and with my audience, our audience, your curriculum and how you ended up in the beautiful world of inclusion?Cynthia:It's a great question, I did not have a very straight path to it, it was a little bit roundabout and curvy. I started my career actually in marketing, I worked for ad agencies doing consumer research and strategic branding. But after a decade of that, I decided it wasn't that fulfilling. And I wanted to do something that would feed my soul a little bit more than just selling products to people, that sometimes they didn't actually need. So, I went to grad school intending to start my own nonprofit, because I have a brother who is developmentally disabled. And, you know, being Asian, and having a disability in the Asian community, culturally, that can be very taboo. And so, you know, my brother being an adult, he had aged out of a lot of services that are given to children under the age of 18. And I…still on my life plan, I'm still going to do a nonprofit that supports adults in the Asian community with developmental disability.But I decided to put it off because I met some folks who did diversity and inclusion work inside companies. And once I heard what they did, which was you know, I mean, they work to create access and inclusion for everyone and equal opportunities. I thought to myself, well, that's what I want to do, right? That's something where I can make a positive difference in the world, employ people like my brother, and really open doors, instead of being the one that knocks on them all the time. So, I made the switch. I got my first job in diversity management at a company called Intuit, which does financial tax software, and have been lucky enough since then, for almost 20 years now to work in several types of tech-companies, media, global, startup, gone into financial services. And now, written the book.Max:Yeah. And because we haven't dropped all the names after into it, but I will mention them, Cindy worked at Yahoo, GitHub, Charles Schwab. And most recently Ability Path and in Robin Hood, so quite a resume. And many beautiful companies, I think that have had, you know, leaders in their field. Of course, not everybody can afford to have a Head of Diversity and inclusion, can have an officer like small company like myself, 50 employees, I think, I have to be the Head of Diversity myself. So, yeah, is there a way for companies that are on the smaller range, side of the range to, to think about, okay, what do I do about diversity and inclusion? And who should be in charge? Should somebody be in charge? And I what point do I hire? Can I afford to hire someone?Cynthia:Really good question. So yes, absolutely. And you know, it's funny that you mentioned that you should be the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at your company, because yes, you should. And you actually find a lot more leaders these days are taking up that mantle from…in a very official status, right? The CEO of Nielsen, which is a marketing measurement company, here in the US, that I think operates globally as well. Their CEO announced a few years ago that he was the chief diversity officer for the company. And that's definitely a growing trend, others CEOs have made very similar kinds of statements. And it's important because it's important to have the senior most leaders of any company, whether you're small, 15 people or 100,000 people, really committed to supporting diversity and inclusion, because your employees take their signal from that, right? If they hear that you care about the space, then they're going to be more accountable to supporting the space.And you know, any company like you don't actually have to have a dedicated person, you don't have to necessarily have a huge budget for this, like, there's lots of low cost ways to incorporate this into your company, whether that is taking advantage of free training and online seminars that are out there, or even just like buying things like my book, right, and having a book club to have a conversation about different concepts around diversity, equity and inclusion, you know, thinking about who you're hiring, and where you're hiring from. Any hiring manager has decision making power over that, right? And I can really think about how to incorporate that diverse lens into how they're sourcing for candidates and how they're considering competencies in the space and who they want, to what perspective they want to add to their team. So, all of these ways are ways in which the, you know, no cost, no real like, you know, effort to do other than being intentional about it.Max:Great, well, let's get into recruitment since that's our focus on the show. And so the intention of you set on sourcing, as well as on the selection front, you know, being more opening the door to other groups. The sourcing question is difficult, it's a little technical, because on one hand, you could say, well, I'm going to open the door by basically communicating jobs to as many people as possible using popular channels like social media to just get the word out, and so that we're not really restricted to word of mouth referral networks. Another approach would be intentionally to say, okay, I'm going to go look for people who are hearing impaired and neurodivergent and, you know, work at home moms, and all kinds of categories, and that, then that becomes like, a very difficult endeavor, because you don't necessarily find these pockets. I don't know, I perhaps…Pardon my ignorance, but I don't know if there was even such marketplaces available to recruiters where they can go and pick by category by category if they wanted to do so.Cynthia:Not quite like that. But there are definitely ways to, I think you can actually do both, right. I think it's important to like get the word out to as wide an audience as possible, right, so that you can find the best talent from the available pool, right? I mean, that's everyone's goal, right? They want to hire the best person, the most qualified person for their jobs. The question is always like, have you actually put out a wide enough net to capture the interest of the most qualified best person for your job? And do you define, you know, an effective sourcing process, as you know, looking for diversity within that? I do, I think most companies should, right. And what you can do in terms of like, sourcing, specifically for people of very, you know, specific and different backgrounds, is you can look for organizations that produce pipeline around that.There's lots of technology platforms these days that actually provide matching algorithms for people from diverse backgrounds to different jobs. Some of them are targeted by gender, some of them are targeted by race, others are targeted by disability, and others for you know, even, you know, people with military backgrounds, right. So, there's a wide variety of those types of companies. You know, depending on the events that you might, you know, want to recruit from, if you're looking for something is very specialized, right, lots of tech companies, as an example, go to tech conferences. And there are conferences that are very dedicated to like, you know, Afro-tech is for the black community, Grace Hopper, which is a worldwide recruiting event for women technologists, right, like there are definitely if you do your research, there are different places that you can go to, to really find and target the diverse set of backgrounds who might, you know, be sources of talent for your roles.Max:Yeah, that's that, you know, those resources, of course, there's a lot more of them in North America and other places. So, again, I think maybe those marketplaces and those talent pools aren't so and technologies are a lot of them have been designed with the North American market in mind. But as we were saying before we started recording, every country has its own battles to fight, and they're different from market to market. And so, you might not have as many resources available in other parts of the world, but you can still fight your local battles. Can you share some of the battles that you've had on the global scene and how that's different than the ones you fight back home?Cynthia:Yeah, you know, it's a, you know, mind you, like, over the course of my 20-year career, I've seen a lot, right in different places, and a lot of positive progressive change as well, that has come, for instance, I remember, you know, back in 2008, right, like in India, as an example, LGBTQ being LGBTQ was against the law. Right. And so, people didn't feel safe to be out. And so, one of the things that we tried to do, our company that had offices in India, was to make the office a safe space for people who were LGBTQ, and where they could be out and be their authentic selves. Yeah, at least within our community, even if they couldn't be that outside of it, right. And, you know, there's lots of places around the world where it's still against the law to be identified as LGBTQ.And so that's like, one very tangible way that people can define that and then look for, you know, those networks of folks that you can have as your support communities, but also as your hiring pipelines, right. Because we all know that, you know, one major source of referrals for jobs are people who are in our networks, people we know, people that we can refer in. So, the more that you can get connected to different communities, no matter where you are in the world, the more likely you are to be able to find the talent from diverse backgrounds that you need.Max:It's got like, you can kill two birds with one stone. By getting connected with these communities, you make the new hire, feel welcome and included, but then you're also perhaps reach their friends and increase the referral. Yeah. The referral pipeline.Cynthia:Absolutely.Max:Yeah. And would you, would you agree that there's been a lot of progress made over the last 20 years and that the champions of inclusion have achieved great results already? I mean, the results, that's in the name of your title. So, I suppose that's what I want to shine the light on the fact that while a lot of the talk is about, oh, we should do better, we should do better. But also, to celebrate some of the progress that's been made so far. Would you mind sharing a few examples in the, you know, for I don't know of company specific examples, but maybe numbers that illustrate the progress that's been made?Cynthia:Yeah, you know, I think progress can be defined differently, you know, in different segments and in different industries. Right. So, I think that when I look back over the course of the last 20 years, and I see progress, even though it's been slow, it's probably not as much progress as most people want to see. But there has definitely been progress in terms of like, the raise level of conversation dialogue around diversity issues in this space. You look at what happened in the wake of George Floyd's murder here in the US in 2020. And how that sparked global worldwide protests in different countries and cities around the world, which was amazing to see. You talk about like the stop Asian hate movement, right that started early last year and really started kind of when the pandemic started to you know, blame people of Chinese descent for the virus because it or you know, seem to originate from China. And so, you started to see like anti-Asian racism, not just spread in the US, but in other parts of the world. And so, you know, a lot of this is no longer a within border conversation, it has to be a much broader international conversation and set of issues.And so, you know, companies are more dedicated to it, they've committed hundreds of millions more dollars to it in recent years. So that's one result. You see companies adding more women and people of color to their board of directors, which is another amazing result. I mean, if you look at State Street, which, you know, made a very intentional commitment, asking companies that they invested in to diversify their boards, over 862 more boards now have at least one woman on their board as a result of their singular initiative. Right. So that's a huge result. And then you take it down to the company levels, right companies that have been focusing on this, there's lots of studies out there, McKinsey puts out a great one called why diversity matters, that has examined companies across industries globally around the world. The ones that have more diversity from a race and gender standpoint on their leadership teams perform better financially, right, up to 35% better financial metrics in their results, so there's lots of good evidence out there that shows people that we are making progress, right, companies that do focus on this are making a difference. And I think it's important to, for people to keep that in mind, even though…Max:It makes sense. On the results of the top, you know, higher performance, if you have a more diverse workforce, it just makes sense. Because it's kind of correlated with, okay, you're hiring on a broader pool, probably more merit-based than, you know, the network. So, you're a little bit more, you know, you're smarter about it, really, if you're opening up your talent pool, and considering more people for the role than your competitors, then over the long run, that will impact your performance, that will make you better and stronger. So, you know, without doubt, I would imagine that would be positively correlated. But it doesn't necessarily need to stem from an inclusion initiative, it can just come from just good business sense, right?Cynthia:You know, you have hit the nail on the head with that, absolutely. Because it really is, like I talked about diversity, equity, inclusion belonging work, as really, it's just good, like good business practice, it's about creating an effective as effective an organization as you can have, because I truly believe like, effective organizations have more diversity in them, right? And so, when we talk about modifying hiring processes, to be more inclusive of people, everything that we're doing is actually to help mitigate bias in that process. So that you can hire what you want to what you're setting out to do, like the best, most qualified people, right, and not just like going out and getting your neighbor to apply to this role. Or having your best friend right, it's about…Max:Oh, I don't talk to my neighbors, don't worry. Not happening. But there's been a lot of work in your field around making sure that people use the right language on job descriptions and you know, as you said, make your workplace more welcoming. I want to focus, you know, one level above or a few levels above the job description, which is the company values and the mission statements and those big guidelines that companies set, have some of these guidelines and visions and values been a little too masculine in the past, where they would, if you kind of trickle them down to individual job description, and then interview questions, it would encourage companies to hire basically, dudes hypercompetitive dudes. And they've had to be recrafted in order to create a more inclusive workplace for women?Cynthia:Definitely, I think, you know, anytime you see companies that put out statements like, you know, we're an incredibly dynamic and fast-paced workplace… that that can be perceived as, you know, kind of this code for not women or family-friendly. Right. And so that would discourage or could potentially discourage more women from actually considering your workplace. It's similar like when people say things like, you know, we value rockstars we're looking for the best of the best in the field, right? And because that's typically, you know, been define, like rock stars is a very brings to mind a very male masculine image.Max:You don't imagine Atlantis Morrissette first thing?Cynthia:That's right. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, when we talk about like…Max:Toriyama's Rockstar.Cynthia:And they are both rocking it. Right, you know, even like the best of the best of the cream of the crop, like if you look at that, traditionally how that's been defined, it's always been like, majority male and white. Right? So, those are definitely ways that you start to kind of limit how people perceive whether or not this is a workplace that I can see myself applying to let alone like actually working.Max:But we are fast-paced, we are dynamic, and we do want the best people. So how do I frame it in a more welcoming way?Cynthia:You know, I think, first off, go look for some of those inclusive language tools online that are available and start to type in some of these words, because it will tell you if they are more gender defined or gender-neutral. And usually, they will also suggest for you, you know, more effective terms that won't necessarily prop up some of these connotations that are very genderized. And they're free, even better. Like anybody can find them and use them. And I think specifically, like if you think about how do you describe your workplace, as you can always balance it like, yes, if you are a fast-paced, I get it. Right. It's better to be open about that than not, right. But then how do you balance that with? And, you know, we value balance, right? We want people who, you know, like, we're very community-minded, or, you know, I don't know what the quality might be that aptly describes you, but like, how do you make sure that you also signal things that are more family-friendly, right? And I think that that's a really good sort of principle to follow in terms of just having people on your team just like, even review what your communications are, and get that perspective, like, does this…Max:Can I say it helps a lot that I became a father? And you know, that kind of forces me to be a little bit more family-friendly. Because it does change your perspective on life and things. So, you know, I don't know if my people have noticed, I hope they haven't. They don't think I've become too soft. But change your perspective, in a good way. Of course.Cynthia:That's right. That's right. And, you know, I mean, soft is not bad, necessarily. And also, I wouldn't frame it as soft because like, being a parent is one of the hardest things in the world to do.Max:Sure. Sure. No, I mean, you know what I mean. Cynthia: I do. I do.Max: Yeah, I like to ask you, where can people get a copy of this book? And yeah, who is the perfect audience to buy “How to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results?” I suppose, you know, that could attract a wide audience of HR professionals. Who do you want reading your book? And where can they find it?Cynthia:Definitely any HR professional will benefit from this. Any business leader will benefit from this. Any employee who wants to support more diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workplaces, but doesn't know how would benefit from this. And so, I encourage people like it's available on across all major online platforms. So, if you go to Amazon, Barnes and Noble, indie bound bookstore, bookshop.org, right? They all, you can order through any of those platforms. And all of that can be found on my website, cynthiaowyoung.com.Max:Okay, great. And one question I asked all my guests is, is a question about a hiring mistake that they've made in the past, and then usually I find this to be more insightful if you have a specific person in mind that you hired, and it was the wrong person. And walking through kind of the mistake that was made so that our listeners can benefit from the lesson learned with that, because we all make hiring mistakes all the time.Cynthia:Yeah, you know, I thankfully, haven't made very many hiring mistakes. The one that stands out to me is I was making a decision between somebody that I had already worked with, right, an internal candidate who was a known entity and who I thought, you know, absolutely could do the job, and was great, but was comparing to this external candidate who had had like, incredible bells and whistles in their experience, right? Things that, you know, I mean, and I don't want to describe specifically, but like, you know, Olympian level type of stuff.Max:Big numbers, all the right keywords.Cynthia:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, literally, you know, there are people out there who have like, Olympic athletes on their resume, like, this is one of those like kinds of people. And I …Max:We all want them on our sales team.Cynthia:That's right. And I decided to go with the Olympic athlete type of person, and…Max:Good for you. Good for you. I would have made the same mistake.Cynthia:You know, it turned out to be a mistake, because what I discovered was that, even though the person had like incredible drive and ambition, that the way that she approached the work that we were doing together, like we were just never on the same page. And so, we could never agree. And it was a really difficult working relationship that ended up you know, with her leaving the company, but you know, that's a good example of like, not being, not letting sort of the bells and whistles of a resume kind of overshadow like the actual, like skills and competencies that you really need to be able to work smoothly together.Max:You know, I couldn't misinterpret the story as one where you know, you should have listened to your gut, but I know that is the wrong language to use when talking with an inclusion specialist as yourself. You should be like, no, don't listen to your gut. Listen to the interview, listen to the candidates, and don't follow your instincts compulsively either. Yeah, but yeah, maybe more broadly here we're seeing, you know, the resume was better. But the other candidate, the internal candidates, you would have had better results with because you know what you were dealing with.Cynthia:That's right. Exactly. Right. Yeah.Max:Great. Great. Well, lovely chat. Thanks for coming on. And if people want to connect with you, should they jump on LinkedIn or?Cynthia:Absolutely, they can find me on LinkedIn. You can follow me on Twitter at Cindy Owyoung is my handle and or connect with me on Facebook.Max:Great. Thanks, Cindy.Cynthia:Max: Thank you so much.And that was Cindy oh young author of all our welcome how to build a real workplace culture of inclusion that delivers results. If you enjoy the interview. Get ahold of the book. For me, it was a reminder that inclusion and diversity initiatives do not have to be experienced as a new set of rules. I'm quotas to abide by, but can be defined at each country and each company's level as a journey to find a new competitive.the search for talent. Some segments of the population are not currently considering a job at your company because of the language that you use or the message you portray, rethink about rethink that communication in order to attract more and better talent, because that's, what's going to help your company perform the best.I hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe it.

Max: Hello, welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. And I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today, I'm delighted to welcome to the show, Fahad Subzwari, who is Director of Shared Services for ibex. in Pakistan. If you don't know ibex., you're not in the BPO industry, because it's a global player with operations, and I think in Africa and Europe, in Latin America, in the Philippines, and Pakistan, all over the world, and they've got thousands of people, and they hire about 8000 people a year in Pakistan. And the reason Fahad is on today's show is because he was recently awarded an award at the Global BPO TA Awards for the Most Inspiring TA Leader. It was the popular vote on LinkedIn, with hundreds of people voting from all over the world and some fierce competition pegging Fahad against, I think, some people, some stiff competition coming from the Philippines. But yeah, I guess Pakistan can be proud, they pushed you over the edge and got you the award. And well, good to meet you again, Fahad. Welcome to the podcast.Fahad: Thank you, Max, thank you for the introduction. It was a great event, by the way, I enjoyed a lot. And yeah, hopefully not blushing right now.Max: Oh, wow. That was a few weeks ago already. So, I'm sure the blush has gone by now. But it was great to see. My marketing team, you know, this could be a tip that could be applied for recruiters, my marketing team talked to me about doing a competition on LinkedIn. And I thought, oh, it's gonna make too much noise. I don't want all this attention. And then we saw in a matter of two weeks, the number of followers on our LinkedIn page, which is really hard to get, it went up by 50% in like two weeks, considering we're a 7-year-old or 8-year-old company is quite a rise. So, yeah, basically, marketing was right and I was wrong on this one. Fahad: That was a great idea. Brilliant idea. What I've noticed is that these kinds of events now even on digital medium, you have now ATL and BTL activities at the market here. So, this is kind of a big deal activity you do and it does pay off and it's great. Whoever came up with the idea, kudos.Max: Yeah, and then it got to the award, too. So, double bonus and an opportunity to talk a little bit about ibex. And before we go there, perhaps tell us how did you end up in the beautiful world of talent acquisition?Fahad: Okay, so I've been associated with the BPO industry for almost 20 years now, 19 plus. I started with the operations side of it. And before that, I was in hospitality industry. So, in about nine years ago, I was given an opportunity to run the Shared Services, which started with different control functions, then the recruitment and training was also added to it. So, it was a turning point in 2014. And that's when we decided that with the global BPO focus increasing towards Pakistan, we need to have changes in our different support functions. One of them was recruitment and marketing side of it. So, we started from there. And it's been an innovative year, year after year. The changes are definitely, I mean, division was right, for [unintelligible] a year that changes are happening very fast. And we actually still are learning and, you know, change is a constant factor every year for us. So, that's how I got into TA.Max: How big was recruiting volume in 2014 when you got started in Pakistan?Fahad: So, if I just speak about international, it was probably around a couple of hundred people in a quarter, you know. Now we're taking about 4000 a year in just international demand. 8000 overall in BK, you know, so it's a big chunk.Max: You kind of came into recruitments not the traditional way. You came from operations and kind of running a good shop and making sure you have a high productivity organization. And you didn't have to sit through thousands of job interviews, recruiting and interviewing candidates. You were able to skip that step and kind of go straight into the orchestrator role. Fahad: Yeah, well, so I did have some experience on this in terms of when has been decided to always involved in the recruitment process. So, the interview and mechanics of interview and the profiling aspect was already there as a requirement aspect, right. But yes, from the TO workshop itself, it was not there, right. So, the business experience did help me, the operational experience still help me run an efficient workshop, develop the processes. I'm a process guy. So, it helped me build the processes that were missing. The framework, required overhaul, the past experience helped me build that. So, it is not a typical [unintelligible] that's for sure. I mean, that's the disconnect that, I guess, comes when we look at the BPO industry recruitment process, and the ATSes available in the market, right. And that's where I think the normal recruitment process doesn't hang up the BPO industry recruitment process, in my opinion, just because of the sheer volume that is there.Max: I agree. And I think, for having met a number of professionals who came to talent acquisition, for the BPO industry in a high-volume world that did not come from HR, I have found that they can be very effective. And because they're not tied to certain practices, and they don't have preconceived notion on how the information will flow. I know that ibex is one of those companies and there's, actually you're in the minority, but one of the few big companies that have decided to build their own ATS, applicant tracking software, as opposed to purchasing a solution from one of the big vendors like Workday, or SuccessFactors or iCIMS. That's a decision that as a technologist myself, I've often challenged and said, No, that's, that's crazy. Why don't you use what the leaders have already built? I'm sure that that's been a consideration for you guys. So, I really like to dig into that topic a little bit. Because I think we're gonna find some common ground on why the ATS is not great for what you're doing, and why you felt the need to build something in house.Fahad: Okay, so two major reasons. One, was the disconnect that I feel is there in terms of support for the industry, I'll explain that aspect more in detail. The other is obviously the cost factor. And that was there. We had the leverage of having in house development team and utilizing them. So, it was an initially into [unintelligible], it was a no brainer that we should build our own. The main aspect that I spoke to you about earlier, the disconnect, was that the solutions that were available, they were only evaluating one aspect of the whole framework, right, which was the when the candidate is either assessed at any of the point of the process, right?Max: And that's the stage of the process where they're already at the assessment stage.Fahad: Exactly, right. There's a communication aspect of it too. Whether people are talking to them, or engaging them or, you know, monitoring the… in the digital age, it's more on the social media now than anywhere else. Right. So, that communication aspect and it's monitoring is missing in most of the ATS and, for me, it is hand in hand, you can escape a lot of processes of physical on all the assessments by having more of a communication side improved or integrated, whether it's, you know, WhatsApp, Facebook, Zoom, Skype, chat bots, etc. But all this combined can meet to show the flow of the candidate, right, the lifecycle of the candidate, whether it starts from the inquiry and converts into an employee, that whole journey needs to be monitored and mapped. And I think there's a break, that happens, right, so even right now, the top of the line ATS have the assessment, but the communication is happening separately on the Zoom, or somewhere. So, from the efficiency perspective, being an operation guy, yeah, I think that that is a critical factor, because I need to make sure that there's efficiency in the processing too, right. So, that because that all, just like in customer service, is linked to the experience, candidate experience, customer experience, right? It's like sales, you have to take our guy and convert it into a sale.Max: In ibex., you obviously know a lot about customer care. And you said you're coming from operations. So, it's the same kind of approach of managing the customer through its entire lifecycle. And you said you had some technology resources in house. So, were you able to pull some of the technology practices and know-how that applies to Customer Care, and reapply it to talent acquisition? I imagine that you said also that ibex. had some internal resources to build its own tech. So, did you use the same kind of software technology and methodology and best practices from Customer Care, building CRMs to handle Customer Care, and reapplied to recruitments? Is that how this project came about?Fahad: In a nutshell, yes, that's correct. So, the main idea was to move from all manual work, or ad hoc automated system to a system that could track all the customer journey, right. And I call them customer [unintelligible], we need to make them our customers, internal customers. So, that's what the idea came from, we will know where they're coming from, which channels they're coming from, what they were talking about, what was said during each phase of the interview, how to do them the assessment, etc. All that has to be recorded, right, including the conversation that happens with our talent acquisition people. So, just like a call center, right?Max: I think it's right. It's a very obvious observation. I mean, it seems obvious once you make the observation. Maybe it's not obvious to people who are buying ATSes today, but how come it doesn't record the phone call? How come it doesn't know when I'm on Zoom with somebody? How come I don't get a transcript for every one of those calls? Yeah, I suppose those companies are going to build it if they listened to us, and I'm sure they thought about it themselves. But yeah, it is surprising that they're not built as communication platforms. That's one shortcoming of the ATS.Fahad: Agreed. And I think everything links to that, because your candidate experience is prime, right? And with the technology age, you need to make it easier for them to be accessible to you. Whether you're on or not, right, and that's how it should be. We're not there yet. I'm not saying as an organization, we're there yet. That is something we're working on. And it's a long journey, a constant evolving journey. You have to stay ahead of the technology and that's a tough task.Max: So, as you adapt to new behaviors from candidates, what were some surprising trends that you notice in 2021? Is the candidate in 2021 a little bit different than 2020 or 2019? Are you seeing that their behavior is changing, conversion rates are changing, some channels are picking up, any new trends you can point us to?Fahad: Yeah, well, I wouldn't say from 2020, but from 2019, definitely. The COVID era has given everyone a new horizon, where they're open to working from remote locations, they were open to having better internet, they're open to, you know, this becomes more of a necessity than a luxury, especially for developing countries, right? So, people are now not apprehensive of saying, Oh, they're not calling me an interview, and they want me on, you know, remotely on the Zoom, etc. It's more preferred now. And over the last one or two years, they have now more focused towards WhatsApp, and other communication channels that are instant, right, they want instant gratification, they want instant update of what's happened to their applications. When they can come in, when they can have interview. So, that's a change that has come up during the last two years.Max: In fact, when I hear some BPO companies who say they've got a recruitment process that, you know, takes like, a month or six weeks, how can you can be competitive with these kinds of timelines?Fahad: Even beyond one day is someone you might lose. I mean, our process is not very efficient in that matter itself right now, that is something a work in progress, right? We want to make sure that candidate experience, the wait time is less, the interview time is less, the number of steps are less. So, that's what we're working on. That's our 2022 goal.Max: So, the joy of hiring 8000 people a year is a feeling of a job well done. The recognition of your peer is the feeling of a job well done. And your team apparently voted you as a somebody they like working with. Talking to Fahad the manager and the people manager, what are some of the philosophies or best practices that you abide to as a manager that helps you to manage a team of talent acquisition professionals, and keep them on their toes, engaged, excited? Can you point us to, you know, some of your philosophy on this topic? And maybe if you need to refer back to references, there's some books or, you know, literature that has guided your management philosophy?Fahad: Yeah, well, more than books, I think it's something you have to, one thing for sure, that you have to understand your own self, you have to understand what's your own shortcomings, right, first and foremost, before you can help anyone else, right. So, that's a constant activity, it never stops, regardless of the age. People say you cannot learn people's management. I say you can. It's up to you as long as you can decide to it that you want to, right. So, obviously, I don't remember the book that I read a long time ago. There are three types of you know, management style, there was autocratic, there was democratic, and there was networking type. So, I always want it to be a blend of situational one, right? It all depends what the situation is. And it's stressful, you have to back off, let them be a bit approachable at any time. And during the technology era that has helped a lot. Being available remotely, anywhere at any time of the day is the key. My phone is always available to them at any time, and to anyone, it's not just my team, you know. Since I worked in operations, people have my alumni that has gone out and develop themselves in different organizations, I'm approachable to them too. So, I think being approachable at any time is the key factor. And for that it's not just communication part, it's your reaction to the situations too, right, how you react? So is your response time. I'm sure seven habit is, I once have gone through that. So, one of the key factors, the response aspect. And the third is the how you come up. Because in a stressful situation with 8100 people, you know, odd hiring, there's multiple conflicts that come up, right. And talent acquisition is kind of a role that always has the gray area, and a lot of arguments happen. And it's the nature of the game, right?Max: And it is, it's time sensitive. So, it's gonna create, yeah, some territorial disputes.Fahad: Yeah, and a lot of stress, right. And that's where I say anyone who has done BPO industry hiring can fit into any of the organizations, talent acquisition, because the sheer volume makes you ready within a quarter for any kind of height, right. And that's where you have to have the conflict, you need to be able to provide that third solution, the [unintelligible] cannot just be on, you need to be neutral. And think about the business, think about how it, you know, impacts the overall ecosystem, right? Not just individual or one side, the solution needs to be a blended one. So, it's a tough thing and I'm not always right. But that's where the first part of it comes in, where you realize that what you did wrong, and not to repeat it, right?Max: That's a good toolkit. I actually wasn't familiar with it. But as you were speaking, I was Googling it. Maybe this is what you're referring to. Kurt Levin, the father of social psychology, with three types of leaders, laissez faire, authoritarian and democratic. And Laissez Faire is like, yeah, let the situation resolve itself, authoritarian, and democratic is more you get everybody's consensus. So, when faced with a management decision, decide which hat you're going to wear and have…Fahad: It's a situational one, yeah, you cannot be on one. You cannot just be one side; it has to be situational. The people have changed them. Generations have changed, you have to adapt.Max: Alright, great. And one thing that our audience can learn from is hiring mistakes. It's a question I ask everybody who comes to the podcast, is to think back on a particular individual hire that was a mistake, and where did it go wrong and what can we learn from it so that we don't make that mistake again?Fahad: Now, regardless of your experience, you will make that mistake, let us be honest with that, right? Max: Forget about it, you're screwed. Whatever happens, you're gonna make that mistake.Fahad: You cannot judge what the person is going to do in the next one year or two year in a half an hour interview. And there's no assessment, regardless. You can find someone with a high EQ or IQ, they will still mess up on the real time, right? So, the idea is that whoever you hire are for the attitude, the energy they bring in, during that half an hour, right? And then you can, I mean, it's not rocket science, regardless of the job other than very technical ones, you have time to groom them, you need to give that time, right, you need to be ready to groom and develop them. You need to give your 100% before you decide, okay, now this was a bad decision. You cannot decide in that half an hour, you cannot decide three months after that, that's why the probation period is there, right? I think that's the right thing. Even after that, if you feel that you haven't given enough from your end to develop that resource, then you're equally at fault, not just in the decision, but also getting them ready for the floor. So, just own that decision and obviously, you'll have some biases when you go into the next hiring. But again, the key is that your objective and your approach and keep the basic that you're hiring this guy to develop a person, to develop into your backup for that matter or your, you know, main cheer or main resources, someone who can be in a future leadership role, right? And that doesn't happen…Max: That's very Zen, very Zen philosophy, Fahad. Whatever happens, you're going to make some mistakes, accept it's coming in, coming into the hiring profession, and do whatever you can to make their experience as positive as possible to give them something good to remember you by.Fahad: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.Max: Well, I can see why you're so popular online.Fahad: Appreciate that. Thank you.Max: It was great catching up and thanks for sharing some of your tips and thoughts. I think you've got a great website coming up, and so if you want, if our listeners want to go and check out the work of ibex. and on the career website and the candidate experience, where do they go and apply?Fahad: Okay, it says talentibex.com and it's a new launch. We are also going for an app development right now. So, they will have multiple channels available for them. You can also search us on our Facebook page, and we are there for you. Come join us.Max: There you go. And don't copy the website or if you do, send a thank you note to Fahad and his team. Alright, thanks again.Max: That was Fahad Subzwari head of shared services at IBEX, Pakistan, and winner of the 2021 BPO talent acquisition awards for most inspiring TA. And you can see how he is thoughtful about everything he does from the way he interacts with people on a daily basis, whether he wants to be less airfare or more authoritarian or more democratic and thoughtful about the systems that he used and the eventually choosing for IBEX Pakistan to build their own ATS hope that was good food for thoughts.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, delighted to introduce to you, who don't know, Mr. Alex Murphy, CEO and Founder of JobSync. JobSync is a technology partner that can help to speed up the application process and improve the candidate experience, notably with marketplaces and job boards, and its very cool technology, which is trying to connect two worlds, marketplaces and ATSes. I'll let Alex explain it a lot better than me. But we'll talk about job board and about Facebook and how the sourcing world is changing. Alex, welcome to the show. Alex: Max, thanks for having me. Much appreciated. Max: So, did I represent what JobSync does decently or you want to take another stab at it? Alex: No, I think you did. I mean, we are, at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is we're trying to help companies, specifically employers, create more efficient recruiting processes, right. So, it sounds fairly generic, most of us are trying to do that. The way we go about trying to do that is we are connecting the various systems that they use in the recruitment and talent acquisition process. So, as you said, between job boards and applicant tracking systems, this means enabling the candidates to apply while they're on the job site. So, whether that's on Indeed, and Indeed Apply, ZipRecruiter, Zip Apply, or anywhere where they may be, to use the applications natively on those job board platforms or job board marketplaces, and to not have to leave, but for the employer to still get all the questions that they need to have answered in that application, and then delivered directly into the applicant tracking system, just within a few seconds. And then the recruiter can start the recruitment process immediately, as opposed to waiting for some period of time or recognizing and seeing a huge fall off. So, the end of the day, we're helping companies get more out of the recruitment advertising spend than they were previously. Max: And to put a visual on it, I mean, I'm thinking back to the days when I was a jobseeker, I was unemployed, a long time ago, and I would go to job boards like Monster, and I would have applied to 10, 20 jobs a day because, you know, I needed a job. And in that context, I would, of course, be more likely to complete an application if I didn't have to bounce around from website to website. And so, I think job boards have now recognized that and this is what you're describing with the Indeed Apply, Zip Apply, and others. That's the candidate experience improvement in a nutshell, right? Alex: Yeah, I think it's interesting. There's a lot of talk about candidate experience, there's actually an award, right, the Candidate Experience Awards, the candies. And what that's really gets that side of the world kind of gets hyper focused on is what is the experience like after I apply? And unfortunately, for a long period of time, there hasn't been enough focus on the applicant experience. Right? What is the experience before I apply? Or will I even apply? An interesting kind of side note, a recruiting benefit that we have is we talk about in our job ads for when we're recruiting new people that come work with us, we talk about fixing this application experience. And we're speaking to the people that are literally going through this really bad application experience, at which point, they get really excited about being part of the solution to this problem, because pretty much every job seeker has had this experience where they are on a job site, they leave the job site to go to apply to a job. They're viewing the job for a second time because they already viewed it on the job site. They view it on the company's career site. They're then redirected to the applicant tracking system, they probably been presented with two different places where they had to sign up for some newsletter, join a talent community, they finally get to the applicant tracking system. They click Apply for the third time. And now they're presented with a login form. And they're kind of like, what is this? A login form? I haven't created an account. And that's an immediate path for that candidate to leave and go to TikTok and start watching videos, right? Like nobody wants to go through that experience at all. And so, when we communicate to prospective candidates ourselves about fixing that, it resonates pretty highly because everybody is having that same really terrible experience as an applicant. Max: Talent acquisition is always running behind on a smooth experience, but yeah. Of course, in 2022, where everything goes so fast, and you can get everything done and delivered to your home in just a couple of clicks, you would want that application to be just the same, if not better. And well, before we talk about the market, Alex, how did you end up creating JobSync to begin with? It's an insider's trick to activate JobSync in a booming marketplace, kind of working at the frontier of different tech giants. So, you need to be an insider to do what you're doing. So, I gotta ask you how you ended up in that area. Alex: So, I have a co-founder, John Bell, he was the founder and CEO of a company called Boxwood Technology that he sold in 2014. Boxwood, was a job board software platform primarily for associations, they had over a thousand associations and he had started that back in the 90s. And I actually credit John, I think, with the real observation about what happened between I'll say 2002 and 2012, which was the experience for applying to jobs changed fundamentally. In 2002, virtually all applications online took place on job boards, and the application was delivered by email to a recruiter, and in the early 2000s, and then kind of really taking hold by about 2006 and 2007 in the US market, in particular, with respect to the EEOC questions, companies started to require the application process to take place on their ATS. And what John observed was this massive decline in conversion rates, and what used to be 40% conversion rates or better, meaning, if 100 people viewed my job posting 40 People would apply, had tanked to sub 10%. And in a lot of cases, with really arduous applicant tracking systems, that conversion rate might be 1%. So, one out of 100 people would apply. And so, he observed that. In parallel, I had been job.com as a co-founder there in the early 2000s, was at Beyond for eight years, as part of the traffic and business development teams, was observing the same thing happening as from the operator side, that the product that we're selling is deteriorating, right, like we are not able to generate the applicants that we once were. So, fast forward, and I left Beyond John started a company, and we brought a bunch of different ideas together in 2019 around creating this integration platform that was focused on connecting the job boards and applicant tracking systems to make it so that we could emulate the application on the job board that was taking place on the ATS, so as to improve conversion rates, and on Indeed, their data shows that you get a 4X increase, meaning 400% improvement in applications. That's like a 400% improvement in your recruitment when you return on ad spend. That has massive implications in terms of not just your ROI, which is great, but really, at the end of the day, the thing that you're really getting more of is you're getting access to candidates that would otherwise drop out, which typically are going to be the most sought-after candidates. And so not only…Max: Candidates like me, 20 years ago, they need a job. So, they're going to apply to a number of positions, right? I mean, those are not bad candidates, they're hungry candidates. Alex: They are in what I would say though, is that, you know, there's a lot of things that are odd in the world, right, and you could say that they're bad, right. So, like, people that have been out of work and kind of, you know, you can call it like a gap shaming or what have you. What I will say is this, though, is that if you are looking for somebody in a position that requires some level of experience and expertise, then those candidates, those people are the ones that are generally the most difficult to get at, most difficult to find, and the most difficult to actually get to follow through, right? Like, they're not as motivated to go apply right now. Right? Like, the thing that pushes them over the edge is they had a bad interaction with their boss. I like to say, like, the moment when somebody is most likely to apply is when they walk out the door of their boss, and the boss just gave them a lot of grief, right? [overlap]Max: …around, indeed, and they'd be like, screw this place. And they'll go look for a couple of options. But they don't feel like spending 20 minutes going through application forms, creating a username, profile, password, all that. Alex: That's exactly right. I call it the subway application, you need to be able to complete the application in the time that it takes for the train to come into the station, Wi-Fi turns on, I get a job, I see it, click Apply, and before the train leaves the station, I need to be able to finish it. Right? So, that means that…Max: I thought we're talking about Subway sandwiches, but that takes about the same amount of time, I guess.Alex: Yeah, no doubt. I imagine they probably does, so.Max: Okay. I love that native applied concept, and I've been promoting it to my customers for years on social media saying, if, in your case, we're talking about a disgruntled employee who is spending a little bit of time on Indeed, exploring what could be. That's not a very captive audience. But even less captive audience would be somebody who's just browsing TikTok or browsing Facebook, they see an ad, they click on it. I mean, those guys, they certainly don't have, you know, they don't have the mindset, they're not in the right frame of mind to start applying for a job for 25 minutes, because they were just kind of like having fun, killing time. So, it makes sense to keep the experience as native as possible for those even more. And so, as a historian of the space, Alex, you're saying that the space kind of moved in the late 90s, right, and 2008 or so when everybody moved everything to the ATS and completion rates dropped considerably, are you saying that we're shifting back now, that the share of applications that are completed without the ATS is increasing? Alex: It is. So, you know, I think that what's happening is you're seeing, like, course corrections, so to speak, right? And there's a little bit of maybe call it something like the Goldilocks zone, right? So, we write about this where, you know, there's this concept of a quick apply, which might be like the name, email and CV of a person. And when a recruiter calls that person, if they can even call them, because often it doesn't have a phone number. So, they email them and they say, Hey, would you like to set up an interview? They get nothing, right? Or maybe they get an interview scheduled, but the person doesn't show up, right? So why is ghosting up? Why? I don't understand why did ghosting go up? Well, the person doesn't even know what they apply to. Because they had to just check a box, they may have checked 20 boxes and hit submit. Right? So, is there enough interest? I like to think back. Like, let's not just go back to 2002, let's go back to 1986. The level of effort to apply to a job: you open the newspaper, you had to find the fax number, you had to send that, you had to write out your cover letter, and you had to make that resume perfect and you had to print it and then you had to get to a fax machine, as most people didn't have fax machines. You had to sneak into the office and get it through the fax machine before somebody else saw you putting a fax through to somebody else, right? Like the level of effort was really, really high. And that meant that when you got a phone call, you reply. And today you can send out 4000 applications with a click of a button, remarkably different. On the other end of the spectrum in 2008, the recruiter said, Okay, now we have the power. And what that meant to them was I'm just going to ask you every question that I would ever need to ask and force you to spend 35 minutes going through this application. And people have just gotten fed up with it, right? They're not willing to go through it. The answer is that there's something proper in between. Five questions, seven questions, on a drop-down, simple screening questions actually can decipher, is this something that you should be interested in? We want to talk to people to come work for us that are interested in being part of a startup, being part of building a company, which means that there isn't a lot of structure yet defined, because we are defining it as we go along, right, that proverbial build the airplane in flight. So, if somebody wants lots of structure, and we can discern that in a screening question, then we can we can help save everybody time and pain and anguish, right? And every company in every job has a set of screening questions that should be asked to ascertain is this a good position for you or not? And that type of experience, I think, will go a long, long way to helping everybody get at what it is ultimately that they want, which is to have, you know, really worthwhile conversations for both candidate and recruiter. Max: It's crazy sometimes that it feels like the different partners in the space are fighting for eyeballs and for the time of the candidates, you know, and like job boards, or protecting their candidates from spending time in other platforms, and vice versa, when it's to no one's advantage to hold the candidate up. We just kind of want to get through those applications as fast as possible and give people quick answers. And I think what you're doing is going to help a lot of time save, a lot of savings for the candidates when they needed most, which is when they're looking for a job. We spoke a little bit before recording about the recent announcement of Facebook jobs and your read on this situation. For our listeners who don't know, Facebook Jobs has invested for the last few years in a marketplace where millions of people have logged in and applied for jobs all over the world. And I know they generated a lot of traffic for us in different parts of the world, from Brazil to the Philippines and to the US. But that marketplaces are getting shut down, unfortunately, for all that free traffic that it was generating. But perhaps there's a silver lining with that announcement. Alex, you were saying that this initiatives maybe solidified Facebook as a great place to source? Alex: Yeah, well, I mean, I think so. First and foremost, I'll just say for the record, I think it's unfortunate that they've made the decision that they made. They introduced the Facebook jobs marketplace as a response to what their users were doing, which was they were searching for jobs in the search bar within Facebook. And they were having a really bad experience. And so, the idea that the jobs marketplace would go away means, you know, without seeing what it's going to look like on the other side, I would imagine that it's going to go back to being a bad experience. So, that's too bad. The silver lining sort to speak, as you put it, in my opinion, is there now are hundreds of thousands of companies out there that recognize that Facebook has people that go look for work, and that should be a no brainer to most people, right? Like recruitment advertising should go wherever the people are, right? We are trying to reach people where people are. And people are on Facebook, they're on Tik Tok, they're on Snapchat, they're on Reddit, they're on YouTube, just like they're on job boards as well. But they're on these social platforms at a much greater investment of time, if you will, than they are on the others. The question is, can you do something to pull them in to engage with your recruitment ad, right, and this is where you were talking earlier about having that kind of more native experience. The person has to leave Facebook, right, and a tremendous amount of the activity on Facebook is happening on the mobile app, right? If they're supposed to leave Facebook in order to engage with your brand and to become, I'll say, a lead or an applicant, then the likelihood that they do so is really, really low. And so perhaps there are companies that recognize, okay, I should take my brand and go to where the candidate is, and then engage with them where they are, rather than trying to force them to come back to me. And if they do that, then there's a lot winning strategies. And you guys are one of the leaders, if not the leader, in recruitment at reaching people through Facebook ads, and really activating that audience and getting them to turn into applicants and employees, right, because at the end of the day, 9 out of 10, people are active on Facebook in some way, shape or form, Simply as a matter of reaching them with the right message at the right time in the right place, which is often that timing thing for…Max: I love about the Facebook job was the fact that the timing was there, right, because somebody will not go into the marketplace, if they're not looking for a job. And advertisers on Facebook don't have the option of targeting specifically job seekers, like, there's no tag for that. And I was, you know, I think advertisers would really benefit from getting that data points. But it's a sensitive data that I suppose Facebook couldn't extract or couldn't share with its advertisers. But it's still, you know, the most rich advertising platform of all in terms of targeting. I mean, you can target any job title in any location, and all kinds of other psychographics that can correlate well with your talent pool. But, when people hire there, they say, Well, I'm only hiring one or 2% of, you know, the clicks, the leads that I generate. So, it's really a bad quality, I can't, I can't manage, but I think that's the wrong way to look at it, right? If it's 1%, but the cost is, you know, is 1% of what a cost for a lead is in Indeed, then that's fine, as long as you've automated the front of the funnel. I think the cost per lead needs to be broken down into what a lead means. And I suppose what you do is you're going to take those job board leads, and then they maybe have two or three different stages of how qualified they are. Right? Alex: Yeah, so I think, you know, just for one other thing that's really important in there is, you're reaching people that you otherwise wouldn't reach. Right? I mean, if you're, you know, think about like somebody like a nurse, right? How many nurses are there on Indeed, right now, eight, like, worldwide, like, it's not, there aren't a lot, nurses don't really need to work very hard to go get a new job. Most of them are leaving their jobs. And you know, that's like its own tragedy all on its own at the moment. But I can tell you that a lot of them are on Facebook, looking at what people say, thinking a lot of different things about what that conversation looks like. And if you have an ad talking about, you know, we pay you full time, but you work 30 hours, I'm making something up. Right? We have mental health facilities, we limit you to six-hour shifts, we have, you know, half an hour breaks every two hours or whatever, like, I'm just totally making stuff up. Max: We have a cocktail room in the back. Alex: Exactly, right, exactly. We do shots at the start of the shift. You know, whatever your benefits are. Those things are speaking to that person where they are when they're just trying to kind of unwind. And that's a way to pull them in, invite them in, to engage in a dialogue. And if you try to get them to go answer 42 questions on your, your 25-minute application, that's going to fail, right. But if you say, you know, we'd love to just chat for 10 minutes, when you've got time, if you're interested in looking for a new opportunity, that's the kind of thing that pulls that, you know, pulls up on that thread, if you will, and gets them to come engage. And all of a sudden, they start to engage, now you're in a dialogue, that's a discussion, that's how you convert. And that's the kind of thing I think that the presence of Facebook jobs for the last five years, for better or worse, and it leaving, at least hopefully, some people saw that Facebook brings value. I always love this story, our first customer, their first hire was a data scientist off of Facebook. Right? It's like, you'll say who's on Facebook. I'm like everybody, every person type, every personality type, every job type everywhere in the world, there is representation on Facebook. It doesn't mean every person's on Facebook, but every type of person, every type of role can be filled with the right ad presented the right person right time on there. And that's true across all social platforms. Max: Tw billion monthly active users, two billion plus. So, if you can't find your candidate there, then might as well forget about it. Alex: Right? Well, in all likelihood, the candidate probably doesn't exist, right? Like you have to go train and hire right? And so always love those stories, right, where it's like looking for somebody that has more experience than the technology has been around, right? We had a joke about iOS developer job in 2012, that the minimum requirements were 10 years' experience of iOS development. iOS have been around for five and a half years. So, it's like, that's probably not a realistic expectation. Max: Open your talent pools to people with less experience and more desire. And you'll see small miracles happen. Alex: That's right.Max: I'd like to ask Alex to drive some of the listeners to check out JobSync. What are the quantifiable problems that you are solving for them? I believe it's the conversion rate from job board to application? That'd be one of the, if you have a low conversion rates, and single digit, like you were saying, that that would be one area where they should reach out to you. Are there other, yeah, does that describe it well and how do they get ahold of you? Alex: Yeah, so first off, if you go to jobsync.io, you know, come and see us, I'm active on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn handle is amurphy59. I think, you know, at the end of the day, the thing that we're solving for is when your recruiting team is doing a lot of manual effort, or conducting a lot of manual effort in order to run your recruitment programs. And that's not just limited by the way to job boards and ATSes, right, it could be with any of the other systems up and down inside the stack. So, we connect to your text messaging platform or your career events platform or your assessment platform, and automate the messaging in between, so that your recruit recruitment teams are not having to manually do that work. I'd say that the number one metric that we kind of think about the most is really around reducing time to hire. So, you know, the consistent metric across all of our customers, when they start with us, they're really struggling to get applicants into their job postings at enough scale to take that job posting to an extended offer and into an actual start. And by putting our program in place, you get a lot more efficiency across the spectrum, you get more efficiency out of your ads, and your recruitment team, you get exposure to better candidates. And those three things combined means that you're going to reach you know, a slate of candidates or your kind of final five that you might want to take to final interview and offer much more quickly than you would otherwise. Max: I think that that will connect with a lot of people. Non-job-related question, but one that I asked everyone on the show is a personal hiring mistake that you have made, so that our listeners can draw from that experience and avoid making the same mistake. Can you think back to somebody you hired and it didn't work out and you messed up somehow and you're able to kind of, you know, mea culpa on your mistakes, so that we don't commit the same one again? Your eyes are glazing over, you're seeing ghosts. Alex: I am actually, it's like a roomful of them, right. I mean, we all make a gazillion mistakes over time. I would have to say that my number one mistake that I've made in the past, and I can say that we actually had the opposite experience recently, was set up a process to screen people out because there are minimum thresholds, right, saying this is our standard and that needs to be our standard and I want to believe in what the person on the other side of the conversation is saying to me and they didn't pass a check in the assessment process, and I let the person pass, and then that came back to bite me pretty hard. So, I would say, adhering to a process that you predefined is really the way I counter that. And I would say the mistake was not sticking to the process that I had predefined.Max: You were bending the rules that you were setting yourself, for yourself?Alex: That's exactly right. Yeah. So, we just recently went through this where we set what the standard was, and the person came through and had all sorts of good reasons why things didn't work out, and why he was underneath of the bar. And we said, look, this is just the way it's going to be, it's a really high profile, really important position, and we stuck to our guns. And so, I feel really good about it having made that mistake in the past. Max: I sense that there's something about job hopping that may upset you was that related? You're looking for people, job hoppers. Alex: I'm perfectly fine with job hopping. I mean, I think that, you know, a lot of the things that are memes today around, you know, call it Twitter conversations. You know, if a person left three jobs in the last nine months, you know, I want to understand what is it that's making you make a bad decision about whether or not you should go work someplace, we should spend an extra couple of weeks making sure that you get to know everything about us, right, set your expectations on what life's like here before you come. Because the last thing in the world that I want you to do is to come and leave. But, you know, I think it's really important that we all look at that the people that join our teams, they're here, like, a) to make a paycheck, b) they want to make an impact and make a difference. But the impact-difference piece is about growing themselves in their career to set themselves up for their next gig. I'm not ignorant to that, that's been my background, my life, right, that should be everybody's life. I want them to get the best of what they're gonna do next, and if they've been hopping jobs, something happened there, I wanna understand it. But it certainly isn't a glaring red flag, in fact, it means that they're gonna stand up for themselves and that they're gonna leave. I'd rather have that person than somebody who's gonna stick around and kind of create chaos in the background for 8 years. Max: It's more of a red flag if somebody stayed in the same job for 10 years without changing them.Alex: Yeah, if somebody's been in the same exact role for 8 years, are you really ambitious? For our company, you probably' wouldn't be a good fit because our world is gonna change 16 times in the next four years. So, it's about finding that right fit. At the end of the day, that's tough, and we all make mistakes in the process. I like to look at it as just one big gigantic conversation, certainly in our stage.Max: Great. Well, amurphy59 is the LinkedIn handle, if you wanna continue that gigantic conversation with Alex. It's been a pleasure chatting with you about the industry. Thanks, Alex. Alex: Thanks, Max, appreciate it. Max: That was Alex Murphy ofJobsync and some interesting perspective on how the pendulum is swinging from marketplace and job boards to the ATS's is where should the candidates spend the most time and how do we adapt to the changing candidate behavior? And the changing ecosystem that they live in.Hope you got something from this interview I certainly did. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe. 

Max: Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'm delighted to meet again somebody I met a few years back in Cape Town, South Africa, Rudé Alley who is the Managing Director and Founder of the Surgo Group, which is a BPO business or contact center business. Feel free to requalify that, Rudé. Based in Cape Town. Welcome to the show.Rudé: Thank you so much, Max. Thank you for the introduction. You had it spot-on. Surgo is a business process outsourcer based in South Africa.Max: We recently reconnected because Surgo was in competition for the Global BPO Talent Acquisition Awards on the category of the Most Inclusive BPO and voted by a panel of esteemed judges from the BPO industry. Surgo won the votes of the judges in competition with many global BPO brands. I think in part of recognition that Surgo may not be a globally recognizable brand just yet, but you don't need to wait until you're a giant corporation to start investing in inclusion. I think that's what won their hearts. We were one of the sponsors for this event, I've congratulated you and your team before, but tell us, me and our audience, what diversity means for Surgo in the context of your company's history and the community in which you work. Rudé: Thank you for the introduction and also winning the award with Talkpush and BPESA was really an incredible thing for us. We were very excited. The whole group just got together, and we were watching this online, and we were very happy to bring the award home with us because I know that we are not necessarily a very big recognized name internationally, but it means a lot to us, especially locally because we have been on the outsourcing industry for about 12 years. Surgo has been in operation for about 8 and winning an award like this is really good for us in terms of scratching more visibility in terms of what diversity really means in the workplace. So for Surgo… [overlap]. Sorry, MaxMax: It's so common for people to talk about diversity and inclusion that it almost feels like it's in everyone's mission statement by now, especially in the BPO industry which is traditionally very inclusive. And so I suppose it's hard to differentiate that factor as an employer brand because everybody says they're very inclusive. My subjective opinion is that actually most BPOs are very inclusive generally.Rudé: That's very true. I think that the key was in ensuring that you're creating a work environment that is such inclusive for a diverse workforce. It's one thing to say that you're a diversified company and that the employment equity or affirmation or transformation is one of your key areas of development, that you focus there on that. But does it really boil it down to the race of your business? Do you have the buy-ins in your senior executive teams, your manager to frontline managers? I think that the idea behind diversity in the workplace is all about inclusion, and that's probably the key that we''re looking for when we're talking about diversity. South Africa is such a diverse country already that if you don't have a diverse workforce, I'm always asking the question is why don't you have? You have to look so hard and to not have a diverse workforce than to just really accept and embrace the diversity that's already in the country. Max: Yeah, absolutely. If I remember my trips there, it's people from all over the world and all the neighboring countries working there. Yeah, it'll be a melting pot. I'm thinking of my first trips in the Philippines in the BPO sector, I also saw the LGBT community heavily represented. It was an eye-opener for a country which is a traditional, Catholic country to have an industry so prominent and where inclusion is so strong. How is the South Africa brand helping your business on the international scene when you're promoting Surgo and the talents that you have access to?Rudé: You know when it comes to diversity and having a diverse workforce, I go to employers for our client's competitors as established in inclusive workclass [unintelligible] employees. So we're looking at some stats, according to the Lloyd's, diverse companies enjoy 2.3 times higher a cash flow per employee. Gartner found that inclusive teams improved their performance by up to 30% in higher diversity environment, and in a BGC study, companies with a diverse management team has had a 19% increase in revenue compared to the list of its counterparts. And I think that any investor would probably be very interested to look at companies that have this because if you're looking at the stats, the numbers speak for itself. So, you're looking at increased productivity, improved creativity, profits reduced attrition, which we spoke about earlier before we started the podcast, and then improved company reputation, a wider range of skills, and an improved cultural insight. So it really just makes sense to focus on having a diversified workforce. But, the thing is it's not necessarily a strategy for us, it's really just about lives. It's part of what a company and a country is about. It's about the diversity. The key is really to just embrace that and then to ensure that you can have workspaces that is conducive for a diversified group. For example, if you have people from very poor areas that don't usually have access to certain skills and education coming into your workforce, what are you doing as a company to ensure that that person is successful in your workplace. You can't just necessarily exclude those marginalized groups either. People from very poor, very far, essentially from very rural areas, what are we doing for those type of people?Max: You were talking about Impostor Syndrome as something that you can feel as a business owner. Of course, you can feel as an impostor even if you're not a business owner, if you're an entry-level, new in the workplace, particularly if you come from a family that never had a white-collar job for instance. Perhaps that's the strongest way in which you can be inclusive, as an encouragement to people that nothing is gonna hold them back. Why don't you try to be the boss, take the manager's job, and promote from within people who themselves couldn't articulate the ambition if left to their anxiety of their cultural background.Rudé: Absolutely. I'm actually getting goosebumps as we're talking about this because it's something that I'm very passionate about and it's something that is such a prevalent thing in our country. We're a third-world country, even though South Africa has been voted as the number one outsourcing destination in the world, but when we have people who were going into the workplace, we have people coming from very poor areas. I think that as part of your talent management strategy, it is also important to establish a sense of belonging for everybody. I've been in call centers working as a group agent management before where people come to work, they don't have food to eat, they're all wearing the same clothes three days in row. They're poor. And that money that they're making they are taking it right back to their homes and they're feeding their grandmothers and grandfathers and their uncles and their aunts and their children. So, that is a very very important point that you have raised because of course, I even suffer from Impostor Syndrome, and I have no need to suffer from Impostor Syndrome, but when you have people from those backgrounds coming in and mixing with also a diverse group of people, there is that inherent fear. And again, fear is something that pulls away from each other. So, it's important to have also empathetic leadership is very important. So, if your managers, again, aren't buying into the idea of diversification or diversity, then it's gonna be a recipe for disaster. You're gonna have high staff churn, you're gonna have employee unhappiness, and the people are not gonna feel like that they belong in the company.Max: You've talked about fear and concepts like equity, affirmation, and transformation. I think some of this vocabulary is perhaps particular to South Africa, but I think the concept of fear obviously is, unfortunately, universal. Can you teach me a little bit what you mean by fear and about killing fear or addressing fear?Rudé: Basically to answer this, the one side of it is obviously marginalized groups feeling fearful that they're going to, the LGBTQ+, for example…Max: Suffer violence.Rudé: Suffer violence, yes. The Stand Against Violence Against Women in our country is also a very big thing, also a part of the marginalized groups. And then, so the fear of retribution, I guess. The second part of fear is that people are wired to react with fear and distrust when their beliefs are challenged, that is the other part of fear. So, you'll have people in the workplace that don't initially have Impostor Syndrome, they're living in great areas that don't have issues, but when you challenge them based on their beliefs, that's where they react with fear and distress. So, there's two parts of that equation that you have to be cognizant of when you have a diverse workforce. One is a rehabilitative way of looking at it, so you'll have to have a sensitivity training with your employees, or you're going to have to have very courageous conversations about various sensitive topics and then manage how those people react and respond. Because if you're preaching about diversity in the workplace, it also means that you cannot discriminate against religion, political beliefs, age. So, you have to also be cognizant and very careful how you approach that. So it's a very tricky journey, I think it's something that is always a work in progress, but it's two aspects of fear. Max: I get the feeling that you talk about it with passion and with a sense of purpose where you feel it's ingrained with your mission, it's a serious matter. Whereas I try to take the other approach with my team where I'm like, we don't take ourselves too seriously, we make fun of each other but not in hurtful ways. I try to take a lighter approach. I don't know if it's gonna work. Do you have any thoughts on that whether some things can be laughed about?Rudé: Of course. I think that's the premise of it, it's that, I know that there was the Black Lives Matter movement recently in America, for example, and that also challenged my outlook on life a little bit because I always said, I don't see color. And i realized that saying I don't see color, I don't really recognize the person as their culture or their color or whatever they may be. So, it's always to see the differences in people, and once that you have gone into that step where you are now rehabilitated, then it is okay to make light and talk and have fun. Because then the other person knows that you're seeing them as a person. It sounds very heavy; I mean we're not sitting in our business talking about diversity and inclusion all day. It's all about creating that culture. It is a safe environment for us to jest and to joke and to celebrate each other's differences or joke about our own cultures. So that sense of belonging, that sense of safety, then culture. It synchronizes that sense of… it's okay, maybe you're getting it right Max, I mean that's why you guys can jest and joke and it's just an easy environment.Max: That's a good outcome but of course, a joke can always be misinterpreted in the wrong context. So, these are tricky, dangerous ground. I was thinking about it because you're talking about inclusivity for religious belief and the political element and the social media element have defined the camps of the debates so clearly that it seems impossible to have on one hand, a progressive, and on the other hand, a conservative person, sharing the floor and having a nice chat about it these days. So, I always try to make the two sides feel welcome, but it's a hard one. Rudé: Yeah, you have an integral role in creating that culture in your business or that safe environment in your business. People take or your employees take, they take from the leader and the leadership teams. So, if you're creating an environment where it is easy and it's okay, then people are going to feel that it's easy and okay. I've always said in our country, specifically, we've got a leadership problem. I'm not talking specifically about our government because it's easy to say that's the top leadership in our country, I'm talking about anybody in the leadership position should be able to create and be ethical about diversity, especially if you're living and working in third world country. For example, if you are a housewife and you have a domestic cleaner working for you, it is your ethical responsibility and duty to treat her the same that a CEO of a large company would treat their employees. That's what I mean when I said we got leadership problem. Any leadership position where you are in a position of interest, it is your responsibility to ensure the safety and the diversity or have those courageous conversations with your people.Max: Amen. Rudé: I wasn't preaching.Max: I'm an atheist.Rudé: Me too, but it's okay.Max: Well, I can go on all day, talking to you about this topic, but I wanna keep to the format. So. I'll move to what is my penultimate question which I ask everybody on the show. Walk me back through a hiring mistake that you've made. Particular individual that you hired and wasn't the right hire and you had to think back about, walk back the steps, and figure out where did I go wrong. And from that then we're trying to say is try to avoid for some of our listeners in making that same mistake. Because they are all hiring right now, and if you can avoid one hiring mistake through your example, that will be saving a lot of pain for some.Rudé: That's an interesting question because hiring for my business or hiring for my clients?Max: I know you don't make mistakes because you got 3% attrition rate.Rudé: It's not that. We make mistakes, but I've made a few hiring mistakes in my career, but I have always turned that hiring mistake into something else. So, it's difficult for me to pinpoint and say I hired this person, they were so horrible, and so they can go. But in terms of when it comes to hiring for a very specific position, I've made mistakes before where I would hire a person that would perhaps not have the necessary skills, or they would initially buy into the position, or they would say they'd perform. But then what I would do with that person, I would take penultimate accountability for that hiring mistake because I believe there's no such thing as a bad employee, only bad managers. So, if that person was hired by me, I would make sure that I replace that person in a position is more suited for them. But obviously, when it comes to hiring for clients, there are always opportunity for mistakes, but the only way that you can curb those mistakes is to make sure that you ask the questions before you start hiring and that you checks-and-balances their employers before you place that person. I remember very early on in my career; I placed a medical aid institution and we had lost reference pending for her. We couldn't do the reference because she had to restart it with the client. And once we did the reference, it turned out that she had been lying and that she stole money from that company and it was a whole thing, we lost a client. And so, they are very early on learned that you need to ask those questions and close those gaps and make sure that you've got all your checks and files before you place someone in a high-stake client.Max: It's a numbers game. Eventually, somebody is gonna try and con you past a certain number. You might get away with ten, twenty, even a hundred hires, but hundred and one was gonna con you. Rudé: [overlap]Max:I don't know if I wanna leave it on this note because it'll be hard for people to sleep at night. My other question was for those who want to know more about Surgo, what are your areas of strength and how can they get in touch with you. What kind of business would you like to welcome to Surgo.Rudé: Oh, nice. that's a great question. Thank you for the opportunity. So, we're obviously a business process outsourcer, so we, specialize in the call center industry, specifically customer support and tech support, but we also have a few other areas in our business. So, we do recruitment selection as well, pre-employment services too. We've got an HR department, so we do HR outsourcing, payroll outsourcing. We do learning and development. We've got an LMS that we recently bought, and then a management system. We're basically finalizing our language assessment tool, so if you wanna send your foreign language through our assessment tool, please do. So that's basically what we specialize in. And then obviously, we're looking for clients that align with our values. So, if there's anybody out there who wants to contact me, you can reach out through our website, www.surgo.co.za and that's about from our side.Max: Well, Rudé, thanks. Congrats again to Surgo and for the rapid growth that your team has experienced over the last couple of years and continued success.Rudé: Thank you so much for the opportunity, Max. It's really great to see you again and good to see that Talkpush is really crossing borders and stretching boundaries. I'm happy to reconnect with you again. Max: You're too kind.Rudé: Thank you.Max: That was Rudé Alley from Sergo reminding us that diversity is not about beautiful websites and aspirational statements. It's really about building a management team that wants to get people to rise to their full potential, regardless of where they came from. And for that, you need to create an environment which is inclusive, where fear is diminished or where trust is built and it's not easy, but as the best that we can all do, hope you enjoyed it. And then we'll be back for more, remember to subscribe.

Max : Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Alison Kaizer who is head of talent at Lunchbox, and Lunchbox is a company that helps restaurants get better engagement and more sales. Alison will tell us about a little bit about that exciting startup or technology company. And we'll talk as well about the transition to remote hiring and how to reinforce how to establish strong connections remotely during the recruitment process and how to communicate employee culture in the recruitment process so that people are not walking into a company that feels strange and foreign and disconnected to them, which is the game that I guess most of the world is trying to figure out right now. So a hot topic. Alison, welcome to the show.Alison: Thank you for having me.Max: Thanks. Thanks for joining. So tell us a little bit about yourself to begin with. How did you end up in the beautiful world of recruitment?Alison: It's a funny story, actually. I feel like no one decides that they want to go into recruitment, everyone falls into it. Max: It's an accident Alison: …by accident. But I have a background in business. I worked in management consulting for a little bit. I worked in advertising. And then I ran my own business for some time. And when I decided I wanted to go back into a more formalized kind of office environment, I sent my resume to a recruiter. And she basically said, I think you would be an awesome recruiter, based on your background, you have experience in the industry from multiple facets. So I went through an interview process with this agency, and it was fantastic and ended up deciding to kind of take the plunge. And I really haven't looked back for the last seven or eight years that I've been recruiting.Max: And what she liked about your background is the fact that you were working in marketing. Correct? And I think I keep telling people that, you know, recruiting and sales, and actually recruiting is marketing because it's more and more about managing big digital media spend, and large funnels. And it's, you know, I think it's even more of a valuable skill right now to be able to buy media than it is to study psychology, which has been traditionally where a lot of recruiters come from.Alison: Yes, definitely. And also really understanding the subject matter expertise that you're talking to candidates about adds so much value. You can be strategic, and you have a lot of empathy for their position as a candidate. So it's a great entry point if you're interested in becoming a recruiter to, you know, enter an era and a function that you know a lot about.Max: Well, I'm glad that you're part of this industry. I also fell into it by accident. And well, let's say what about Lunchbox. What is Lunchbox? And why? What makes it an exciting challenge from a talent acquisition standpoint?Alison: Yeah. So Lunchbox is a really incredible company to work for. It's incredibly disruptive in the restaurant space. And basically, the premise is allowing restaurants to compete with third-party platforms. So the door dashes and the Uber Eats of the world are charging significant fees to restaurants where they end up breaking even or losing money on their orders. And they also don't really have access to their data, in order to make strategic decisions that impact the business moving forward. And so what Lunchbox does is it facilitates that digital experience for restaurants completely holistically, but allows them to maintain all of the control as a first-party platform. So we help with web orders. We can do mobile. We help with loyalty programs. We even have an in-house studio that helps with all of the marketing that restaurants need to drive the customers directly to that first-party platform that we're facilitating. And then they also have access to all of their data, which is incredibly empowering. So it's almost like a Shopify, for restaurants. And from a talent acquisition perspective, I think the challenges are very similar to what so many other tech companies are dealing with, currently, especially at an early stage. It's so competitive from a talent standpoint, particularly around engineering, sales, and marketing. We're growing incredibly quickly as well. So just the sheer volume of our recruiting efforts. When I joined in early March, we were about 60 people and now we're about 250 people, we've hired almost one and a half people a day on average. And so building a scalable process where there's a lot of alignment and allowing us to be competitive, but also very measured in our evaluation of candidates is a significant challenge for any talent leader.Max: Sounds incredibly expensive to be growing at that pace. In this from March 2021, onwards, when the cost of… Yeah, the cost of hiring has gone up, basically, across the board and in marketing in particular. So well, maybe could you share a word about what your marketing mix looks like from, you know, recommend marketing spend?Alison: I'm sorry. I don't totally understand the question like, “What are…[overlap]Max: Where would you spend most of your ad money? Is it the traditional channels like Indeed and LinkedIn, or are there other new ways to connect with people? I mean,  I don't want to spill the beans if you have a secret sauce you don't want to send to the competition. But just to get a feel for where you operate.Alison: Now that I can definitely answer. So from a recruitment marketing perspective, I think we're really lucky because one thing Lunchbox does unbelievably well is branding and marketing. In general, if you take a look at our careers page, it's very advanced, the brand is excellent. The career page is extremely robust. There's a very clear tone of voice. And so we've invested a lot in our marketing in general, as well as our employer brand, which allows us to cut through a lot of the noise. And so we actually spend very little money on marketing from a traditional kind of sense. We do have some LinkedIn job slots that we leverage, and we use Greenhouse so it allows us to post all of our jobs on LinkedIn in general. But a lot of the traction that we get is just, you know, us all being very active on LinkedIn, and having very strong recruiter networks, making sure that we have really strong outreach. And that's really speaking to our employer brands and our culture. So a lot of our active outreach, gets positive response, and just focusing on having a great culture and brand. So when people hear about us, they're excited as opposed to using a lot of the more traditional marketing tactics.Max: Alot of word of mouth and yeah, positive feelings that generate enough talent and enough applicants. I believe that-- obviously, it's working for you so I'm not gonna tell you it's a good strategy. If it's working, that's all you need to know. You don't need to hear it from me. But I do believe that when you get to a certain size, maybe like five, 600 people, you kind of hit the wall in terms of how much referral, with the share of hires that you can do through referrals at some point. Those, I think, numbers go down a little bit when you get to a bigger company. But…Alison: Alot of our hires are candidates that we actively sourced. I mean, more than 50% are people that we actually go out and prospect-- that don't find us we go out and we had on them. Alot of our roles are very niche, and we're looking for a very competitive talent. So just having kind of a strong recruitment team that's able to really leverage a powerful employer brand. And that outreach drives conversion. We do get a lot of referrals as well and a lot of inbounds but it's mostly active headhunting.Max: Okay, well, let's talk about those. Those people that are actively being headhunted. They don't know. They don't know you. They go to your website. I've just been to it after what you said. And it's true, it really is a visual experience. It's a very unique employer brand. So I'd recommend people to go and check it out there listening. And it looks reads a little bit like a comic book for me. And I love comic books. So it works for me. But, you know, beyond that those first impressions, which are critical, of course, what are some of the other things that you've built into your recruiting process that helps a complete stranger feel less so?Alison: Yeah, it's a great question. And so I think, from the get-go, our outreach is very much written in our tone of voice. And it's very colloquial, and it's very light. And it's funny, and it's very clear that this is not going to be a boring conversation and Lunchbox is a brand worth engaging with. And then as a talent team, I think we've been very intentional about the recruiters that we've brought on board, making sure that they're all strong representations of our brand. We're all very startup-y. We're very casual. We all you know, really kind of represent the lifestyle and the culture of what you will find when you join a company like ours, and we're all very open and ready to answer any questions that the can candidates have. Create a very kind of dynamic and partnership-based experience. This isn't a place where if you interview, it feels dictatorial. And we're kind of grilling you, but always very much focused on matchmaking and ensuring that there's alignment and, you know, looking for collaborative folks. So really fostering that dynamic throughout the interview process is important. And I think the other piece is having a heavy focus on culture throughout the entire interview process. So even in our very first initial screens, telling people about what it's like to work here, and making sure that we really dig in on what they're looking for, from a cultural perspective, is a key part of our interview process. And something that continues to be top of mind in every stage that someone goes through. So that focus on culture, and being human-centric is something that's very prominent from the first conversation that you have with someone on our team.Max: Let's get into it. Because culture is such a general term to describe so many things. So perhaps, to illustrate this with some examples, can you tell me about some of those key elements of your culture and how you would assess a fit for those? Specifically, if you have interview questions that can show us how you work around that, because when you hire people in sales and marketing, for instance, and you said that such a chunk of your hires, they're always so adaptative, you never know, you never know if they're selling or not.Alison: 100%. And so I think our culture is very much a startup culture, we're not a nine to five. First of all, we're incredibly flexible. We're quite casual and laid back but very, very collaborative. We look for extreme ownership. We look for people that run toward fires. We look for people that can move very, very quickly. And so we're actually incredibly transparent with people and we allow them to opt-in or opt-out, and some people opt-out. And that's absolutely fine. I can give you a few examples. Like we're looking for talent folks. Generally, I'll talk to them about the number of wrecks that we have at any given time, and the time to hire that we generally tried to maintain. And with every person on my team, if you reached out and had a conversation with them, they tell you that I showed them my calendar, which at that time was from 8am to about 7pm. And we were incredibly busy. And I spoke to them about the number of calls I was doing a day and the kinds of conversion metrics I was looking at. And I would explain, you know, if you're looking for a nine to five, if you're looking for something that's incredibly structured, that's absolutely fine. And there's nothing wrong with that. But this isn't the place. If you're looking for somewhere where you're going to learn and you're going to be very challenged, and you'll be able to look back at the work that you've done and say, “No, that wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for me. I really built something there. And I had an incredible amount of impact.” It's a wonderful place. But it's incredibly rigorous. And this is what you can expect things to look like. And some people opt out of that and the right people opt-in. But just you know, being very honest, are at the process, I think is important. And so another example is on sales. We look for folks that aren't actually just focused on sales targets. It's really important to bring people into this team that are builders, and if something doesn't exist yet, or it's not working, they raise their hand to fix it. And so we'll often dig in and ask people about projects they've worked on above and beyond their sales goals or times that things were broken, or they weren't working and that individual raise their hand to fix them. Because if someone wants to come in and just sell all day and wait for things around them to be fixed or built, they're definitely not going to be the right person for this team. And so we over-index on those kinds of questions.Max: Almost like you're answering the question, my question, but taking it from the other angle that I would have expected. Where I would have expected you to talk about, you know, all the great, how wonderful it is because of XYZ. But actually, you're kind of putting the spotlight on here are all the reasons why you should not join. Yeah, right. It's not going to be so wonderful. Are you still up for it so that you could get some people to eliminate themselves from the process?Alison: Totally. And at the end of the day, from my perspective, recruitment is about matchmaking, and solving those problems is going to be very exciting for the right people and it won't be for everyone. But the last thing I would ever want is for someone to join and say that the experience is not aligned with what they were expecting, and it wasn't what they were looking for. That's, I think, a big waste of everyone's time and a huge failure from a cultural perspective. And so the best thing that we can do is communicate the truth and the benefits and the fun, the opportunity to work with incredibly smart people, the opportunity to really learn, and to have fun, to have impact, to work for a company that's incredibly mission-driven and a product that's really having an impact on an industry and, you know, folks that are really interested to join.Max: The way you portray start-up culture, because I think that there was there was a for a little while in San Francisco, the feeling that it had become very entitled and that, yes, we would have, we would have the no shoe environments and the casualness and the great benefits. There was, yeah, all of those were granted, but nothing was expected really in return, when the origin there is a higher pace, and higher expectations, working in high tech.Alison: I will say… I have to tell you that one of the things that drew me here is I met this CEO. I actually wasn't looking to leave my previous role. And the CEO, his name is Nikhil Unger. He's a Top 30 under 30. He built his way up to CMO of Bareburger before starting Lunchbox at a young age. And he said to me on our initial call, that nothing mattered to him more than people, which I don't think it's a very common thing for a CEO to say. And it's proven to be absolutely true. I've never met a more people-centric person in my entire career. We invested in a director of culture. So we brought someone on and her entire role was fostering incredible remote culture as a Series A, which is a very early stage investment. We encourage people to take time off when they need it, and build teams that are focused on supporting those that are out when they're out. Our benefits are fantastic. We have weekly team meetings around culture and a weekly update, where we explain the state of the business in full transparency. Our Slack is so active. Everyone spends so much time together. So it really is a nurturing and familial environment. I would say Lunchbox is like the antithesis of an entitled environment and really focused on retaining amazing people.Max: No wonder you're growing so fast with this kind of leadership and investment so there's no surprise there, I would say. You know, some leaders are made to build large teams more than others. So well, thanks for sharing all that, Alison. I like to ask a question to all my guests, which is around hiring mistakes, and particularly if someone if you can go back into your history, your long history or seven years as a recruiter and find or maybe even before that, and think back to a specific hire that you made, that was the wrong hire. And when you've reflected on what mistakes were made at that time, so that our audience can learn from those mistakes and avoid them in the future.Alison: It's a tough question to answer because there are so many examples. Obviously, I've made a million mistakes. But when I think back on one hire that I made, that was the wrong person. There's someone that I had a long-standing relationship with, and we developed a very close friendship. And so I was operating under the assumption that that would translate well into work. And because we were close, and we had great rapport, and this is someone that I'd worked with as a vendor, that that would translate very well to an internal relationship. But ultimately, as I just mentioned, Lunchbox is very rigorous. It's not for everyone. And so when that person joins, although they you know, were extremely hardworking and very bright, they didn't have that kind of startup experience, nor do I think they were really seeking that kind of rigor. And it ended up being misaligned, even though our relationship was so strong. And so recognizing the difference between someone that you may really like on a personal and even a professional level and fit for the larger organization was a key takeaway from that experience.Max: Thank you, Alison. Yeah. So those ties can take years to build relationships that take years to build that could be destroyed in a matter of weeks if you put them in the wrong wrong job. Yeah, so not a risk worth taking.Alison: Luckily, we still have a great have a great relationship dynamic. He went back to his previous employer and just went right back to where he was and we've maintained a friendship but yeah, learning experienceMax: Great. Well, I've already been on the Lunchbox career site. lunchbox.io/careers I'd recommend all the listeners to go and check it out. And if they want to get in touch with you, Alison, what's the best way?Alison: Yeah, definitely you can shoot me an email. My email address is alison@lunchbox.io. Or you can definitely connect with me on LinkedIn if you want. My name is Alison Kaizer and I will definitely get back to you.Max: Go. Thank you, Alison.Alison: Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure.Max: That was Alison Kaiser from Lunchbox reminding us that when it comes to communicating culture, you should start by sharing what turns people off about your company rather than what turns them on that will make sure that the candidates can self select themselves. They can opt out of the process if they're not a good fit.And we'll ensure that you can preserve a strong culture where people are okay with all your flaws, hope you enjoyed it. And you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe.

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show I'd like to introduce you to the CEO and co-founder of Truss, Mr. Everett Harper. Welcome to the show, Everett.Everett: Hey, thank you. I really appreciate it and thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it and hope the listeners get a lot out of this one.Max: I'm sure they will because from what I've heard, you've implemented some very innovative strategies in order to attract and retain talent, notably around the sharing the transparency around salary information, an information that is typically kept very very secret and that nobody wants to have leaked. And you found that it could be used by some organizations willing to make that leap as a competitive advantage in the world of talent. So, that's the conversation we're gonna have, if that's okay with you Everett, but first for our listeners who are not familiar with Truss, what do you guys do? Who do you hire?Everett: Sure. So, we are a human-centered, purpose-driven software development company. What we do is solve really complex problems for large government agencies, such as Department of Defense, Center for Medicaid Services. We're one of the groups of folks who helped repair and helped save healthcare back in 2013, for example, for those of you who are familiar with that. On the private sector side, we have several Fortune 200 companies, and we will address issues such as supply chain software issues or how to enable military service members to move without many of the hassles that they normally experience by developing software that's really about being human-centered and human-focused. At this point, we're about 132 people and we are a remote-first company, so we are in, people in about 30 different states across the United States and have been that way since 2011. So, we have a lot of different things that we do with our company, and we'll get a lot more into that as well, but that's just the summary.Max: Thank you. Thank you. So, you hire engineers, mainly.Everett: Yeah, so good. Thank you for bringing that up. So, the people that we mostly hire are actually across a range of disciplines. From research and design to application engineering, infrastructure engineering, product delivery, because you can build a thing but you gotta be able to stand it up and make sure it delivers to the customer, as well as a lot of the support and operational disciplines as well. Max: Okay, and the remote culture since 2011, well, great for you for having that foresight, but now that great competitive edge is gone, everybody is doing remote so you can't use that as your main selling pitch anymore. Although of course, there are different levels of remote, and if you've been at it for 10 years, you're gonna be Level 3+. What are some new tricks or hacks that you have worked on recently to give you a new competitive edge, considering that remote isn't enough to stand out anymore?Everett: Yeah, so I think the main one is that there is a difference between somebody who's just doing remote, who's had a very strong in-office culture. It takes a while to figure that out and we have built this up to solve various problems for a decade now and so, the communications structures, the documentation structures, how we hire, who we hire from, the networks that we can hire from. All those have been a decade established. So, there's still a lot of built-in knowledge and mistakes that we've made that we can deploy as far as a competitive advantage. It's things that people will feel in some ways with regard to other companies. In terms of things that we do that might be, I wouldn't call them hacks, but as solutions to challenges, we have a really strong documentation culture and it sounds real boring until you think about how many things were in your office that you sort of just picked up because it was on a whiteboard somewhere or you could lean over someone and get a synopsis of the last meeting, or you could overhear it if there was an open office. If a documentation culture isn't established, who is gonna take notes, how is that being done, where are those published, are they done in a way that everybody can understand, are action items really clear, and are deadlines really clear? You can all of a sudden have a meeting, yeah it was all great, and then nothing happens. And it's probably because there's some missing pieces with documentation, so I can't emphasize how important that is for anybody, for any company, but that's something that we're practiced at. So, I think that's just one off the top of my head.Max: Yeah, yeah. When hiring remote first, you would think you need people who are warm and great in front of the camera and fun to hang out with, but as it turns out you need people who are good with pen and paper and a keyboard and who are very meticulous about notetaking. I've found the same thing, my company is also fully remote and yeah, it's absolutely essential because it's asynchronous communication as well, you're working on three different time zones, so you might save a lot of time this way. Everett: And even to go further, whne you say you broaden it to talk about asynchronous communication, that's visual communication as well, can you draw diagrams and so forth that are easily shareable to show process steps. So, for folks who are in talent acquisition, clearly, it's a pipeline. How is that visually represented so that different groups can understand and plug in at the right time? We go through a lot of iterations of that. Max: So, the transparency theme, before we get into the touchy subject of salary, you talked about documentation. So, I assume you also sharing with candidates everything from the leave policy to benefits to how you guys run meetings. You just dump it all on the internet and let them kind of sift through it?Everett: Um, well.Max: Maybe dump is not the right word.Everett: No, no. It's available to them. What I would say though is, we do have, you know we have GitHub repo where we have a lot of our policies people can read through and so forth. But I think one of the things that we do explicitly is we put our values and we put our operating principles on our website. My co-founders and I spent six weeks every Wednesday after work for three hours a time, honing those values really early in our history. The reason is because we knew the benefit of having strong cultures. And a good, clear, actionable value statement or operating principle statement is such a foundation of a great culture, in my opinion, and in particular, it repels the wrong people and attracts the right ones, before they ever get into the pipeline. And I mean repel the wrong people is people who aren't a good match, they may be brilliant at another company but not for us. Everybody needs to know that as early as possible. So, we have the benefit of people seeing and say hey this is a place that I want to be.Max: Who are you trying to repel? It's a hard one. Because I know you're coming from a point of view of inclusivity as well, and so, who you wanna repel sounds like a gotcha question. Everett: Yeah, no no not at all. I'm happy to answer that. People who aren't interested in communicating. In a remote space, great communication written and verbal, and now visual, but written and verbal, is really important because it's highly collaborative team environment. We work with clients, so if someone can't communicate very well or doesn't want to communicate very well, they probably aren't gonna be very successful. So that's one type of person who might be successful in a different environment that's less dependent on…Max: So, if we're talking about, let's say, an engineer, it's somebody who says things I value that most is being left alone and not having to have too many meetings and something like that, would that be an indicator that this is somebody who is not a strong communicator, those kinds of signals?Everett: Yes, very much so. And again, they might be successful in a different place, but the ability to persuade, to engage, to take feedback, et cetera is critical for us. And so...Max: The engineers, they'll get a job. We don't have to worry about them, they'll find work. So, sharing everything on GitHub, policies and so on, sharing who you don't wanna hire, of course, sharing your values. Those Wednesday evenings discussing values with your co-founders sounds like they were probably a lot of fun to go through anyway, right? It was a happy-hour Wednesday?Everett: Yeah, no, actually it was after that. We were the facilitator and we worked really really hard. Max: Oh, it wasn't beers at the pub?Everett: No, sure wasn't actually. That's a less sexy story but it was in a breather room that didn't have any windows, and us just slugging through.Max: Oh boy. Everett: It's the things like that.Max: This goes to be an insight into your company culture that I'm a little uncomfortable with, sounds like a lot of work, lot of whiteboards. Cool. So, let's get into the thick of it. The sharing, the transparency on salaries, which I believe is what you're doing, right, and I've heard other companies experiment with that with mixed results. Is that what you're doing, or your salaries are open for the public to share or open internally to share?Everett: Good question because it's important to clarify that. So, the first thing is our salaries are transparent internally. Buffer did it externally, we wanted to make it transparent internally. So, that's a clear distinction. And maybe this is an opportunity to say why we even embarked on this in the first place.Max: Yes pleaseEverett: We, as a black CEO with my co-founders being a white male CTO and a white female COO who is also, both of whom are highly technical, we had a diverse founding team to begin with, and so we were very committed to having a diverse company as well. And we knew there were great people, engineering, design, product, etcetera, across the spectrum of all different kinds of backgrounds. So, we committed to that early. One of the things we noticed and one of the things that's well-documented is that there's still pay disparities with the same job between men and women, between black and white, or Latina, Latino, Latinx, and white, et cetera. All those are out there. And I heard stories as we're thinking about this, that even well-intentioned companies, if someone negotiated 5% higher than the next person for the same job, happens all the time, if those two people performed at exactly the same level and got bumps proportionately from their salary, in five years, you'll have a very big disparity and what would happen is people would find out, people would inquire. There were lots of stories in Google and other places where people looked around and realized that they're being paid a lot less. That's bad for everybody. And the notion of being at a company where you're working really hard shoulder-to-shoulder with your colleagues, but you're not sure whether they're being paid the same, more, or less, that creates some energy that we wanted to avoid. We've been part of those situation before.Max: It's also perfect in the remote environment where trust-building is harder to do.Everett: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that but that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. So, we really started to do a lot of investigation, we started to do a lot of research and tried to figure out well how would we address this equity issue. Is it about making sure people can negotiate differently, is it about trying to attract different types of people? We found that the thing that we wanted to land on was just make the pay equitable to begin with and if we made a mistake, how do you make sure that it's transparent enough that you can correct it. So, we did a lot of research, and I can tell you about the process, but that is really the origin story of salary transparency. It's about trying to create an equitable working environment for everyone.Max: I remember the guys at Buffer who had experimented with it, I think they had applied a ratio based on location, because cost of living is smaller in Oklahoma than it is in San Francisco, and people wanted to be, yeah. And I find the argument to be a little bit flawed in the sense that for a lot of work, like who cares if you're in Oklahoma or in California. But from the employees' standpoint, of course they do care. The taxes are different, cost of living is different. I guess there's a debate to be had there internally. How have you resolved it at Truss?Everett: We pay various salaries, mostly because we originated here. But the same argument is true, if you're contributing and you are at the same level and you're creating the same value, why would I pay you less because you live in a lesser cost of living. It's not about where you live it's about what you can contribute. And we have some marginal hire cost basis as a result, and I think one of the things they'd consider is whether folks living in areas where it's a lower cost of living, that's pretty attractive. And being able to retain those folks, and if they have a network of people that are in that area, and say hey I'm being treated really well, my salary is transparent, I'm being paid in San Francisco rates, and it's a good company I work for and we have really interesting work, you all gotta come and check them out. That starts to develop these local networks and we found, in fact, over the last couple years that that has been an embedded strength of ours in certain areas.Max: You paint a rosy picture, has there been some push back internally when this was released and if somebody wants to embark on this transparency journey, what kind of obstacles that they need to prepare for?Everett: Sure. So, I'll deviate slightly and say that I write a lot about this. I have a book coming out, called Moved to the Edge, Declare it Center, coming out on Wiley in February or March 2022, and I go through the process in detail about how we came to this decision, what process we used, and what the outcomes were, and what we did to make it systemic. So, Moving to the Edge is about moving to the edge of knowledge and uncertainty and unknowns in complex situations and Declare it Center is about how you create systems around those learnings so it then becomes a part of your normal operations. It just becomes a fish describing water, it's just normal. So briefly, the whole thing took about 10 months, and the first thing we did was to figure out what is the area of highest risk. And the area of highest risk is everybody's gonna leave, so let's just ask that question. If we made salaries transparent, would you leave or how did you feel about it? Basically, all but one person was very curious and very up for that journey, and the other person who wasn't was like, I have some questions but let's keep going. So, what we did was basically start to look at what is the next area of risk. Okay, are we figuring out the right problem? Is this the right problem? And so that's where a lot of the research happen. Then we went to, okay we are solving the right problem. What's the next step? Well, we have to have good ways of making things equitable across different positions. Oh, we need a performance rubric. That took the most time, months. Because ours was junk, it was just not good enough. And that's hard if you're doing that for the first time. And we have to map salaries to that. Mapping salaries to rubrics, I'm sure everybody knows, is not cheap and not easy. The key thing we did during this stage is we involved employees. So, it wasn't just the leaders, it was people from all different groups across practices at different levels. So we had committees going out and researching certain pieces of this. One the advantage is they have different perspectives, and they can bring different questions. Second, they get engaged in the solution. So, if you participated and you know that you've had a voice, raised your concerns, or raised advantages, you're more likely to be able to be down with whatever...Max: Be onboard. Everett: That's right. Max: I imagine this becomes a selling point for your company amongst the people who are seeking fairness, who are particularly have fairness as a high value for them. Any other ways in which this has affected your recruitment. This transparency value, how do you quantify its effectiveness?Everett: Not sure if quantify is something that we've attempted to do, although we're fairly data-driven about things, but I do think that we, there's sort of, people talk about being transparent in their culture, we do transparency, and salary transparency is one way you can clearly demonstrate there's a commitment to this. Reflects in a bunch of places, but we're putting our money where our mouth is. I think the second aspect that is quantifiable is, so towards the end when we were trying to map salaries and then we had to say, well where are people relative to where their bands are, what salary are we paying them now, and what types of salary should we be paying them? In some cases, we were under, awesome we get to pay them more, that's always great news, right. Everybody celebrates when that happens. There's some we were overpaying and so the choice becomes well should we move the down or not. We said, look if we overpay them that's on us, as the leadership team, and that's not their fault, that's our fault. So, we're gonna hold their band, we're gonna make sure that their performance catches up to where their band is, but we're not gonna penalize anybody for being overpaid because of our mistake. Max: This had a financial impact, obviously, initially. But you're getting that money back in a way, that investment that you've made you're getting it into differentiation, as an employer I imagine. Everett: And I think in retention as well. I mean obviously we all know that people leaving for any reason as a particular cause, so they extend to which people are participating in a solution that is benefitting them and benefitting others with a lens towards fairness tends to have people be willing to stay at the company.Max: Everett, how do you set your salary?Everett: Same, and actually this year has been us really thinking about the leadership rubric because as we've grown the definition and the expansion of leadership roles has been something we were a little bit behind on. So, we did the same thing, we set up from market standards and figure out where we are on assessment. We do a self-assessment and then we have managers or peers do assessments and then map it like that. Max: There was one thing I was thinking of maybe implementing in my company which is what the Singapore government does is it sets the salary of the prime minister based on the average salary of the top five CEOs. Everett: Oh, no kidding, I didn't know.Max: Yeah, because they wanna equalize between the private and the public sector and that way it's transparent and they're very well-paid. I wouldn't do that obviously, I'd be like, the average of some of the top salaries in my company, maybe, would be one way to do it. But anyway, that's for another discussion. I'll get to my final question which I ask everyone on the show which is everybody makes hiring mistakes, and I won't believe you if you tell me you haven't, but if you could focus on one example in particular that broke your heart at the time, and help some of our listeners avoid such heartbreaking mistake by recounting the steps.Everett: Yeah, I would agree with your assessment, if you can't think of one, then hmm. So, the one that's coming to mind is more recent, and as I said we expanded the company, we had some new exec hires coming and we did not, well, they left before we thought they would otherwise, in one case couple months, another case a little under a year. And given the investment and given the time to get them onboard and to find them in the hopes of really being a different part of the company, that was incredibly disappointing, and to me personally, embarrassing. What we started to realize was, and this was the core of the mistake, we under-invested in onboarding, we under-invested in the type of onboarding. So, one across all of our positions, we weren't as consistent about saying, here's what the company's about, here's where you fit in, et cetera, but doing it on repeat because people come from different places and different cultures. And it takes a while to kind of un-school the previous assumptions about the way the world works and get people addressing and reacting to the way this world works. That's multiplied by a hundred with a leader. And we were measuring onboarding with a few meetings, a couple weeks of training, etcetera etcetera, and then basically you're good, right. And that's big, big mistake. As I've talked to other CEOs and other folks, they're saying, you know, you're measuring onboarding in quarters not in weeks, you're measuring onboarding relationship team to gel in a year or 18 months, not in quarters. That changed our focus to make it longer, changed our focus to being much more embedded and much more personal time to really understand where people are, what they're challenged by, et cetera. The other thing that we have learned is we have to make sure that the rest of the organization is also onboarded to the presence of a new leader. You're getting a new leader to take you to the next level, they're gonna bring and do different things than we had done in the past. What you got here, doesn't get you there, right. That means there's some change that has to happen, so there's some change that has to happen. So, there's a change management component that we completely underestimated for the culture and for the rest of the organization. So those are the things that I learned very much the hard way. One onboarding much longer and much deeper with your leadership team and then the change management process with the rest of your company, both are critical and do it over a long period of time.Max: No shortcuts there. Just because you're talking to an experienced leader who's done it a hundred times before doesn't mean this time's gonna be the same. So, very good lesson. Thanks for sharing, Everett. Thanks for coming on the show.Everett: You are very welcome, and thanks for your questions. And again, I'm learning how to do this, give a plug to a) Truss, we are absolutely hiring, if you like what you hear, and then second, the book is coming out, it's called Move to the Edge, Declare it Center, if you wanna hear more in detail about how we went remote and how we did salary transparency, I laid that all out in the context of making decisions in uncertainty and unknowns. Max: Right. I'll put the book in the links when it comes out or for pre-orders if it's available with the show. Thanks, Everett.Everett: Thank you. 

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today on the show, I'm excited to welcome Bas van de Haterd, and not the way he was referred to by the great podcaster Chad Sowash as, well, I don't know, you tell us Bas, how he butchered your name, but Bas, hopefully I get it right. Bas is a professional snoop, is his title on LinkedIn and how he introduces himself. He's a consultant for the talent acquisition professionals who are looking to revisit and improve their process, and today, we agreed we were gonna have a conversation on the world of assessments. And notably, assessments, everybody's been looking into assessments in 2021 and deciding, is this the right time to revisit? So, we wanna dig into Bas's brain to find out when is the right time to change your assessment strategy and what are some case studies that we can learn from. So, welcome to the show Bas.Bas: Awesome to be here, awesome to be here, Max.Max: And sorry to hear about your American friend Chad butchering your name. You were telling me, Bas, for those who don't know your work, you're very present on social media, so, maybe, where can they meet you on the internet? Where's the good place to interact with Bas?Bas: On personal interaction, it's usually LinkedIn. If you just wanna listen to my views, The Talent Savvy Podcast is a great one to subscribe to as well. And of course, I am avid member of [unintelligible] Recruiting Brainfood Group by Hung Lee which we've also digitally met before, Max. I tried to keep it down a little because I was too active there according to some people, but it's a great source of inspiration for me and I try to add a lot of information on assessments and strategies. Max: In valuable resource, I've made it a mandatory reading for anybody in my company as well. The Recruiting Brainfood by Hung, great source, and also an active community on Facebook. So, great place to interact with Bas, and what was the name of the podcast again?Bas: Talent SavvyMax: The Talent Savvy Podcast, so you can find Bas more for more insights there. So, let's jump into the topic and let's talk about assessments. That's a hot topic in 2021, as I was saying, because it seems like a lot of companies have decided to deal with numbers, finally. The balance has changed a little bit, we have more candidates and less recruiters during a part of last year at least. And so, naturally, assessments came to the fore and people, a lot of vendors have also appeared in the last couple of years that are credible vendors that can do all kinds of assessment. I've had a few of them on the show. So, what's been your, you are like, from a consulting standpoint, are companies revisiting the way they do assessments and are they coming in and asking you for help, of that sort, or do you have to really shape those discussions good that you're just happier with? What works, don't break what works and we have an assessment based on it and we need to change. Are you pulling or are they pushing?Bas: No, I'm usually being asked, you know, can you help us? The downside is usually in the budget there is no room for an external consultant, so, I'm most often get asked for free advice and as soon as I'm like, well, how am I gonna make any money off this, and they're like yeah, we never thought of that. But you do see a lot of companies now revisiting their assessment strategies. I actually do see a lot of difference in there. So, in my home country of The Netherlands, a lot of governments are looking at it, both national as well as in the local level because they've now read so many stories in part published by me and a lot of other people, how assessments done well can actually help your diversity and inclusion and be more fair in your selection process, and for governments that's of course very important. So, there's a lot of governments who have actually done amazing cases which is really interesting to see. You know, the most traditional organizations you'll probably think of being the most innovative and piloting cool, proven, and new technologies in a really smart way. And actually, now also, and I love that about them, they feel the need to also go externally with their data with their knowledge, and just share what they did and share what the results are. So that's how case studies are coming out. A lot of them government related. I see, interestingly enough, Scallops don't see a mis-hire as being part of the process, they see a mis-hire as something they need to improve. A lot of Scallops are ditching the resume as their first point of entry very quickly because they have one or two mis-hires, and they're like, yeah this cost us a lot of money and we have a culture in this company that if something fails, that's not a problem, but we should learn from it. So, they don't consider mis-hires as something that is part of the process, that's unavoidable, like a lot of recruiters do. They see it as, okay how do we prevent it from happening again? And you really see an awesome development there and so small companies are implementing all kinds of assessments. Sometimes good, sometimes not, because as you said there's a lot of new vendors on there. A lot of them are awesome, some of them are complete and total crap, to be honest. Max: I'm totally fascinated by what you just said on governments jumping into the foreign, like, innovating, initiated by a consciousness and an awareness on fairness and inclusivity. So, some strong innovation has been driven by this sort of alleviated political discussion which has therefore push the buyer to say, okay well we're gonna remove some of the human error. Bas: Yes, and a lot of them, most of them, let's be very honest, try to do it the traditional way. Oh, we'll do a gender-bias training, and that will at least check the box. But in some cases, for example one of my major clients is the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they now have a Head of Recruitment who isn't originally from HR, he just got in there, he worked in an embassy for 25 years. And he was just looking at the selection process and said to me at an event, listen I think it's really strange how we do it, and I'm like, yeah, I totally agree with you. Okay, cool, we're gonna redo this. And he was looking at it with fresh eyes, and of course, there was some push back from the recruiters at first, but we've always done it like this. He's like, does that mean that it's good, the fact that we've always done it? So, he asked all the questions which you should ask. History doesn't mean it's good, it doesn't mean it's bad either, but we need to revisit our original thoughts and they were basically sending the last candidate to an assessment, because they said, listen we need to have an assessment in there et cetera et cetera.Max: Like a QA check at the end of the production line.Bas: Exactly. And he literally said like, listen about, almost nobody gets rejected by the assessment, so we're basically spending a lot of money. I'm getting an external company to sign off on what we've already decided. Max: That sounds like governments, sounds just right.Bas: Yeah, and this guy, although he's been in government forever, he said, now you're telling me, because he saw one of my lectures when we, it was pre-covid when we were still able to go to events and stuff like that, and he said, and now you're telling me boss that by moving it to a different part of the process, basically putting it all the way up front, for the same amount of money, or maybe even less, I can have two or three or four times quality? I'm like, yeah pretty much. He's like, let's do this. Let's do this. He says, I have no idea what it's about. People in my team, if they had an idea, they should have spoken up a long time ago, so obviously they don't have an idea. Please help us.Max: You raised something very important here. You said, for the same price or maybe less. I think that's one of the reasons why people have been quitting the assessments at the end of the line is they say, well I pay on a per assessment basis, so I don't wanna spend that kind of money. I don't wanna spend 10, 20 dollars for a candidate. Is that changed? From your experience, is that a good way to save money?Bas: It depends, which is a very [unintelligible], but we've got a lot of suppliers who now say, listen  we're gonna charge you depending on the number of hires you make in a year, and we don't care about the number of applicants, or we're gonna charge you a fixed price anyway, or we're gonna charge you based on a number of candidates which you are never ever gonna be reaching, so who the hell cares? You've got those, and you still got more the traditional suppliers who moved online and they're like, still --Max: Like Berlitz and things like that.Bas: Yeah, and interestingly enough every country has their own set of suppliers because there's a lot of, there's actually interestingly also a lot of bias in a lot of assessments, which the suppliers will deny, but I know which assessments have which risk for bias. And those are also nationally.Max: You know their [unintelligible] once.Bas: I'll give you a simple example. If you do a Likert scale that's like 1-5, a Dutch person will always answer a 2 or 4. We are never on the extremes, we are never extremely bad, we are never extremely good. If you make us choose between two things, we will never say we are not able to do one. If you ask an American, it's always a 1 and a 5. They're either great or terrible at something. But, if you start using this data to match with applicants, you've got a cultural problem in there.  And the interesting thing is people with a bicultural breakarm from countries like Turkey and Morocco where we, and The Netherlands have a lot of them, have the tendency also to go to the 1 and the 5. So, despite the fact that that test itself isn't biased, the way people read the test or used the test could be biased or is biased, and because by law it's not allowed to ask somebody for his ethnicity in Europe, you can't correct for that. And funny thing is, every major supplier corrects based on national levels, yet never tells that in public against their clients, to the clients. And they can't do it internally. We know that an Italian will fill out, with the same characteristics, will fill out a test differently from a Swede. That's just, that's been registered a million times. Yet, what about the Italian living in Sweden, that means you get a wrong test. So, those are --Max:: Sounds like an impossible conundrum, I don't think we'll have time to fix it on today's discussion. But give us, can you share, I know you've prepared some examples of people who did a before and after and who had an assessment system that they thought worked, and then they revisited it. So, let's jump into those if you don't mind, Bas, and you had an example from, what was the one that you want to start with? Help me out.Bas: I think the one which I really like because it's the most simplest of assessments is from the Dutch Post and they did it for, basically, for package delivery people. You know just the people driving around in a van all day. And they simply changed from asking a lot of data in a resume to sort of a structured questionnaire, interview-like assessment, application process. First of all, they looked at the questions they were asking, and it turned out that some of the locations were asking, how long do you have your driver's license, and others were asking, how many kilometers a year on average do you drive. Turned out the last one was a lot of more predictive, so they were simply looking, and a lot of applicants actually feedback, because they interviewed recent applicants as well, and they said, listen we get the same question two or three times in the process, which we're annoyed about. Sometimes, in the first interview, the phone screen, they would be asked, how long do you have your driver's license. And then in the interview they'll be asked, how much have you driven this year. For them it's the same question. And they we're like, well if the first one isn't relevant, why is it still in there? So, they made a basic set of questions, both on applications as well as in the phone screen, and they were able to, they piloted it which I loved about their case and that's why I'm sharing it. They started saying, okay, we've got 15 locations in The Netherlands, 5 of them are going to use the new system, 10 of them will continue as is for now. So, they had the perfect quality control of is this really better or is it --Max: Like AB Test?Bas: Yeah, perfect AB Test. And the pilot locations saw the early attrition. So, people leaving within six months of signing up the contract, which is really expensive, dropped from 17% to 12% in a quarter, while the other one saw it increased from 14% to 23%. Because the market was tightening, early attrition was increasing everywhere except for the ones where they did the new selection assessment strategy. Max: So, in this case, they really just changed one question and --Bas: No, no, no, they changed a whole lot. I'm just giving one example, they changed -- Max: That was the one question that made a big impact.Bas: They changed the entire process from basically letting the recruiter decide what questions to ask to having a structured interview for everything and looking at the relation between the questions and being able to tweak it. Max: They centralized the screening process and standardized it rather than leting the recruiter set their own questions, that makes sense. [overlap] It's the same question, like how long you've been driving and how many kilometers you do every year. But one is obviously better because it's gonna, you know, it's closer you to what the job actually is. Nobody cares about --Bas: Exactly and especially if you notice that one reason for early attrition was apparently that people didn't like being in a car all day, which is something you are if you are a package delivery guy. So, another really cool case study comes from completely different market, a stock market trader, and the reason I love this case is that they actually, the good thing about financial institutions is they have a lot of money, so they were able to simply run two assessments side-by-side for two years. And seeing you know, what's the predictive value of [unintelligible] they already had a process. The thing about the stock market trader, you gotta understand Max, you can't really have a bad hire because it's potentially can cause you millions of dollars. They're trading on their own accounts so you really can't make any mistakes. And what they did was they had a more traditional assessment with questionnaires, with cognitive tests, et cetera et cetera. That was pretty good, but it also had a price per assessment. So they're only recruiting from the top universities like Oxford, Cambridge, INSEAD, and if you hadn't been there, you shouldn't be applying. They had to do a CV check which they knew had no predictive value whatsoever. They literally said like, we're hiring students, except the school you went to, what could possibly be on there? Absolutely nothing. But we need to do something because too many people wanna be a stock market trader because it's still a job which inspires a lot of people because you can make a lot of money in a short time. And they, basically, they went parallel in their test for two years and because of all the feedback they had from, okay, this person was hired, we didn't let him go really quickly, this person was hired we let him go. And I'm especially saying “him” because they actually never hired a female stock broker until this year. If you're talking about diversity, they just hired their very first female stockbroker because now what they're doing is they're making brain profiles, as they call them, which is basically a next generation cognitive test by a company called Brains First. They're able to, they've gotten an insane amount of really interesting game-based cognitive tests. I always call it like four different shooting games, I actually love playing them. Yes, they're long, they're 45 minutes, but when I finished, I was like, what finished already? While if I'm doing a 20-minute questionnaire, in 10 minutes I'm like, oh god I'm only halfway there. That might be my gaming background. I know I listen to your podcast with the guy from Activision Blizzard, you have a gaming background too, I know you'll love this game, Max. Max: Okay, I'll check it out. I'm on their website right now, Brains First. Forty-five minutes for an assessment seems like an awfully long time but if you have the kind of career that attracts a lot of candidates that they just want to work for you, then why not? You know, you have that luxury, it doesn't work for every employer.Bas: It doesn't work for every employer but in their case, it worked really well, and they were now able to, first of all, screen everybody so they're seeing diversity, especially in their case, the diversity of all the universities they're recruiting from increased. They now actually, and I love this about it, they say, listen on our career site, there's a button, check if you have the brain of a trader, so you can actually check if you're going to go to the second stage of the process before you actually apply. I mean, isn't that cool? You can take away the anxiety of an applicant like, okay you're good enough or not. And like I said they, for the very first time, were able to hire a female trader this year.Max: I think going back to the, you know, great example and people should check out Brains First if they're hiring for people who are quick, you know, they need a quick mind, right, there are quick reaction time and resilience, so that could be a good solution for them. We started chatting about what's a good time to rethink your assessments. I was thinking some of the symptoms of maybe this is the right time, is when you see examples like HR treating the assessments as a necessary step to get through and like when they're, sometimes you can even see recruiters who are coaching and preparing the candidate before the assessment because they really wanna get through it. They want them to pass, right? So, they say, oh yeah this is how you're gonna pass and then that way we can get over this thing. You know that's a pretty clear sign. Are there other kind of signals people gotta look out for that now is the time to revisit or what's the cadence at which one should revisit his assessment strategy?Bas: Well, I actually think that by definition you should revisit your process every couple of years at least. But right now, what I've been hearing a lot is we can't find anybody. You know there's just not enough good people out there. I've seen a lot of case studies also with these assessments where you're not lowering the bar but you're opening it up to an entire audience which you never would have thought of. I'll give you an example, air traffic control, which by the way, also uses Brains First, and I'm not at any way affiliated with them, but they just have awesome case studies and they publish them, so I love them for that. In the air traffic control, it used to be that you needed an academic degree, then they said college degree is good enough, and now they're actually saying if just finished high school you can apply because with our test, we're able to actually assess if you're good enough. And for example, one of the things which is really important for being an air traffic controller is stress resilience, that's something which isn't tested in college or in a university. And they opened up this entire pool for people with much lesser or no education while, and this is the beauty of it, while increasing the quality of hire by 120%. Max: It's a beautiful time to be in HR and to be in [unintelligible] in recruitment. To have access to these kinds of insights. To say, I'm now hiring an air traffic controller because that person stays cool under pressure, and I can measure that scientifically. These things didn't exist ten years ago. So, for probably the majority of the jobs, if you haven't revisited your assessment strategy in a while, you should do so regularly because it's moving so fast.Bas: I'm not saying that the resume or experience have no value because for some jobs, I love the fact that if I'm flying, my pilot has a pilot license, and I love the fact that if I'm in the ER that the nurse is a registered nurse. I'm not saying it works for every job, but I've seen awesome cases also on hiring recruiters who never got a chance and who are awesome at the job with assessments. I recently saw one where, at one of those cities, one of the local governments, and they said, okay, for this job basically 95% of everybody doing it is gonna retire within the next five, ten years. It's really an old man's job. So, they were like, well we can't hire anybody with experience because then we're gonna be hiring somebody again in a few years. We're only postponing the inevitable, but we have all these experienced in our company, in our organization now. People who are retiring who don't mind sharing their knowledge, who would actually love to share the knowledge, but there's no official education for this job. They call it the digital archive person, basically. It sounds like the most boring job in the world, but a lot of people love it. You're basically the digital librarian of a city, knowing where I can find all the information on who owns what plot of land, what was there historically, could it be contaminated ground. All those kinds of stuff.Max: Sure, some people are like that. That's a job for someone. Bas: Exactly, but, and what they're now doing is also assessing. They're just telling people like, okay, I don't even want your resume because we know you will have no experience which is relevant for this whatsoever because it's such a unique job. These are the qualities we expect from you, here's the test, show us you've got the quality, and the best five from the test will get invited for an interview. They recently did this one and they hired a 24-year-old woman, which was the first woman in that organization doing this job ever and it was the first person under 50 in a long time. Max: Oh, wow. Bas: And everybody is now saying, which is interesting, because of course just hiring at diversity doesn't mean hiring quality, but the feedback from within the organization is, wow this is such a fresh of breath air [sic]. And she learns so quickly because she was screened on having the ability to be able to do the job. Now she's not able to do this job yet but that's why there are like five old folks training her to do the job. Max: It's a lot of optimism I think I get from your stories, and we can avoid a lot of heartaches and hiring mistakes as well. Going back into your personal career, if you think back, somebody you hired or recommended for hire that was a mistake, I don't know if any kind of person comes to mind if I asked you that question. Would you, could you recount us the mistake and what you learned from it and maybe whether an assessment could have prevented it. Bas: Actually, an assessment is now preventing it. Yeah, I actually made the same mistake twice. Basically, hiring somebody I knew, a friend, who was first of all, apparently, not really fit for the job and it took me a while to figure out what qualities were necessary for this job. It's basically a researcher position, but a very simple researcher position. Twice I hired a friend on there. One was really, he just didn't have the cognitive capabilities and the other one was really hard to motivate, and if it's a friend, it's even harder to kick somebody's ass, basically.  And they're still friends, but as employees I would never rehire them. Max: You're still friends but 10% less. Bas: No, no, no, no. Max: 100% [unintelligible]Bas: No, no, no. We're still friends but I would never rehire them, and they know that. And they --Max: And the assessment that could have prevented it?Bas: Well, I've actually developed a few tests now that are preventing it. So, for this research, I used to have, I would hire four or five people every summer to do a certain research for me, students. And now, I've got a few tests which is basically measuring your information processing speed, your scanning speed because you're researching websites, you're looking at --Max: And it's a test you built yourself, a home-built?Bas: Well, I took the academics which I knew measures the cognitive traits I needed to have and yeah, I had it built in by a [unintelligible] developer in Russia, because that was so much cheaper than actually buying one. But that's because I actually knew, the moment I realized the qualities I needed in my employees, because I'm an assessment expert, I immediately knew this test, this test and this test would work, and I was able to really --Max: And you're able to put it together very quickly.Bas: Yeah and I mean it's just three really simple academic tests. To give you an example, if you wanna know if somebody can scan a website really fast, you just give them a 20x20 grid of letters, you say there's one x in it, find the x. Max: Two seconds, boom, yeah.Bas: Well, yeah, and you've got two minutes to find these many x's as fast as you possibly can in different situations.  Max: That correlates well.Bas: And that correlates really well, and of course, I checked if it correlated, and it did. And since that moment, I introduced and I've got three tests and I've hired better and acceptable people, but I have not had a single one completely misfire and before then I had at least one mis-hire every year.Max: There you go. Great. Thanks for sharing. I'm sure you've given us, our listeners, reasons to rethink their assessments strategy, maybe build their own home tests, because it's not that complicated to build your own tests or go out into the market to find what's available, or reach out to a consultant like yourself, Bas, to guide them to that decision and remember to pay you not all free advice. So, again, the best place for them to get ahold of you is on LinkedIn, Bas van de Haterd, and maybe you wanna share an email?Bas: It's my first name @ my last name dot N L. So bas@vandehaterd.nl you can reach out there, you can reach out on LinkedIn. If you wanna know more about assessments, do a vendor selection, output implementation, or if you wanna build one yourself, I usually don't recommend it because there's just so many awesome tools out there which are usually scientifically much more validated and you really need to know what you're doing in order to make it scientifically sound and there's a lot of law, especially in Europe coming up where you will be held accountable if you are using an unvalidated or not perfectly correct assessment, an AI system.Max: Proceed with caution. Don't try this at home. Okay.Bas: Well, yeah. Max: Okay, great. Thanks a lot, Bas. Thanks for coming in on the show.Bas: All right. Max: Hope you enjoyed my conversation with Bas. There is a lot more of Bas's conversations on Facebook and on LinkedIn, if you joined the white groups and and I think if you don't revise your assessment strategy and you don't take another look at what's available in the market every couple of years, you're definitely going to be missing out.So feel free to turn to Bas for advice or to turn into this show, we also feature a lot of assessments on the show and please subscribe to receive more.

In this episode of the Real Strong People Podcast, host Dana Santas sits down with Max Newlon, President of FocusCalm, a company that offers a revolutionary neurofeedback wearable to help manage stress. In their conversation, the two explore adopting a growth mindset and what it means to flex your autonomy. Don't forget, you can get $50 in instant savings on FocusCalm when you use the promo code: mobilitymaker. This episode of the Real Strong People Podcast is sponsored by Thorne – a leading provider in personalized scientific wellness. Sign up here to receive 20% all Thorne supplements. During this episode you'll learn about: Max Newland background [1:00] FocusCalm [1:56] Understanding the real Max [2:55] Being a public speaker and an introvert [4:00] Public perceptions vs. our true selves [4:47] Introverts vs. extroverts [5:00] Overcoming stage nerves [5:36] Recharging our social battery [6:00] Max on defining strength: Ownership during adversity [8:25] Overcoming adversity when starting out career [10:38] Forging your own path [11:41] Owning your choices [12:30] “Flexing your autonomy” [13:49] Understanding healthy pressure [16:00] The importance of prioritization [17:08] Max: We're always going to be challenged [20:30] “If you have enough resources, take the next step” [21:09] Dealing with failure [22:00] Staying committed to our goals [25:26] Carol Dweck and growth mindset [27:23] Changing fixed mindset to growth [27:55] Max: You are separate from the outcome [28:19] Answering, “What do I want?” [30:00] The concept of “feeling” what you want [31:29] Expressing gratitude [33:40] Viktor Frankel and adopting different perspectives [35:43] Being grateful for the lessons and opportunities we've had [37:26] Max: It's all about growth [38:21] Where to follow Max and learn more [39:00] Resources to topics mentioned in this episode: FocusCalm FocusCalm Instagram Mobility Maker Dana's Instagram Save 20% on Thorne supplements Save $50 on FocusCalm with Code: mobilitymaker * These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster, and today I'm delighted to welcome on the show Alison Daley. Alison is the founder and CEO of Recruiting Innovation, a business focused on helping recruiters who don't know how to speak to engineers and don't know how to confidently assess them. And if you know in 2021, I think just about every company out there is promoting themselves as a tech company and mentioning that hiring engineers is their number one bottleneck. So, there's a huge demand for people trying to figure out how to interview engineers intelligently, and this is where Alison is gonna be able to help us, I hope. During our conversation we'll cover methodologies and techniques that can be applied to technical recruiting. Welcome to the show, Alison. Alison: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me, I'm glad to be here.Max: Delightful to have you. And I think you didn't grow up wanting to be a technical recruiting trainer. So, what happened? How did you end up doing what you're doing today?Alison: That's my favorite question to ask recruiters or people in talent space is like what's your origin story of how you got here because most of us didn't have dreams of working in recruitment, let alone study for it. I actually call myself the accidental recruiter. I've fallen into recruitment four times, and I've kicked it three times and I think it's just that at this point now I'm all in on recruitment and being an extrovert, as extrovert, this is definitely my industry. And at this point, I've recruited for Fortune 500s, boutique [unintelligible] firms, hydro start-ups, and you know I cut my teeth on the top 5 staffing firm in the world. So, I've seen it all at this point and part of where I got, how I am where I am today is that I actually chose to come back into recruitment after I've left it where I thought was gonna be the last time, for real this time. And the story behind that was that my last recruiting role at a hydro start-up here in Colorado, I kind of was burning out. As an industry, it can be a tough industry to stay, you know, fulfilled in, and especially if you don't feel like you're growing professionally or growing up the ranks, and that was kind of my situation. And so, I had decided I was gonna take my people skills and pivot into user-experience research. I used to be a dedicated UX, user-experience recruiter, and so I used to live vicariously from my UX candidates that's such a great blend of analytical and creative skill set and I did a UX boot camp. I actually landed a role very quickly as a Junior UX Researcher because my network was so big, so strong after being a UX recruiter and got on a software development team and became the person tasked with figuring out who are our end-users, where are they, get them to talk to me, follow the UX methodology of sort of assessing, you know, what were their goals related to the product, their experiences, their frustrations, and synthesizing those stories back to the team to make informed product decisions. And I had this aha moment, maybe 9 months into the role, where I realized that this methodology that exists in software development within a user-experience umbrella, to systematize talking to these end-users, getting their stories, and then sharing them back to the team, I thought, oh my gosh, what if we could take this methodology and we'll bring it to the recruiting space, especially in tech recruiting where it often feels like we're navigating in a foreign language. Having a methodology to follow to have these conversations would not only give recruiters a leg to stand on with technical talent and learn to speak their language, but it actually would make us more effective at our role. And looking at the market, no one was really out here solving for the very known issue that recruiters don't understand what software development process is, who those different roles are, and how do I engage with them effectively. And so, one year in to my UX role, after having left recruitment in the dust, of course, I actually quit the role in UX and then came back to save tech recruiting.Max: To tackle a bigger problem. Alison: That's right.Max: Yeah. You mentioned that, you know, your traits include being an extrovert and communicator and high-energy person. I suppose you meant by that that recruiting typically attracts these types of psychological profiles as opposed to perhaps engineering which would be more likely to attract introverts. Just to set the scene a bit, would you say that the majority of tech recruiters are not engineers? I think that's a fair statement. Alison: That is totally a fair statement, yes. Max: So, I've done a lot of tech recruiting myself and sure, I never had a single one of them where I felt smart. You know you're looking for a certain set of keywords and the interview is over in like 30 seconds when you've gone through them. Alison: Yeah, I call it keyword-jousting, when you're just trying to match the keywords from their resume to the keywords in the job description, yeah. That's sort of what we're rendered down to doing if we don't understand the background of what these folks are doing and how to get a story out of them. Max: Yeah, yeah. So, I'm your target audience, right? People like me who dread coming into an interview with the sense that they're gonna feel stupid. Alison: Yup, been there done that. I mean that's the thing too about our industry in general. As an industry, we really believe in a sink or swim ethos to new hire onboarding, and honestly, I think that that's an old era. We gotta think about what is recruiting look like in the 21st century and that means that we need to be prepared to train and enable our recruiters to meet the insane moment that we're in right now. And so, it requires cohesive training and onboarding. And so, that's the goal of what I've built is to help recruiters sort of, and teams, circumvent the unnecessary need of just throwing people in the deep end and hoping that if they talk to a few candidates and a few hiring managers, they'll suddenly know that Java's not short for Java Script and, you know, basics like that. But I think having a cohesive training is the way of the future, that's for sure. Max: C++ isn't the latest version of C, and stuff like that, yeah.Alison: Right. Max: But those are very superficial examples. There's never, I mean an engineer is gonna be proud of what they know and proud of the knowledge that they've accumulated, and quick to judge somebody who doesn't ask the right questions as well, so it is a tricky audience. Is your methodology going to go deep into teaching, you know for example all those different languages and those frameworks that developers use so that you can kind of jump from one tech to another while you're doing interviews, or is it more of a general approach that you can apply for any field of software development?Alison: What we're gonna cover today is the latter. So, what I'm gonna be able to fit in to 10 or 15 minutes today will be specifically around how to have conversations that's sort of an agnostic general foundational level with any type of technologies on a software development team. But my company, Recruiting Innovation, we offer an online tech recruiter certification program where the course includes the framework that I'm gonna kind of highlight today, the alignment framework that I developed. That's what I call the tool kit I developed from the UX tools. But then within the tech recruiter certification, we take that same methodology and then we work with technical experts to become our instructors. And so then, you have a UX designer downloading their workflow and their tool kit and their things, you know, everything that you need to know to recruit someone like them within our model. And so, we combine both the general agnostic, how to have a conversations and do your job. Element of alignment framework that we're gonna cover today, and then we partner with technologists so then you learn specifically about front-end back-end dev ops, UX design and product management, from technologist themselves. And so, it's like a two-prong superpower at that point. Max: That is, that's actually very appetizing, I must say. For me, like I'm thinking I need to sign up myself because, you know, I don't like sounding stupid and I have so many times. So, for today, the framework, the foundation, how do you speak engineer and how can you ask questions just on the back of a resume or a LinkedIn profile that can carry a conversation where both sides are talking for 40 minutes to an hour.Alison: Yes, yes. and that's what's cool about this framework is that it's role agnostic. So, what I'm gonna go through here in a moment is the workflow of people on a software engineering team, and I'll transition to that in a moment, but you can have comfort in knowing that everyone on a software development team, regardless of whether they're a data scientist, a front-end engineer, a UX designer, a product manager, everyone follows the same five-step workflow of software development. And so, once you understand that key workflow approach and then how to ask questions to touch on each of those stages of the workflow, you're off the races, and now you can have engaging conversations and ask good questions and get things back in a story form that a) not only establishes your credibility and actually starts to establish a connection with that technical candidate and get them excited to work with you, but part of our job is always presenting and positioning these candidates to our hiring manager and so this model actually gets a really rich story from the candidate and then it actually, 70% of our write-up on the candidate is done just by facilitating the interview in this way. Max: Okay, great. Well, yeah, feel free to take it away. Alison: Should we do it? Okay.Max: Yeah, let's go for it.Alison: Cool. The way I like to position this is with the alignment framework, so our proprietary training model, the alignment framework teaches recruiters the language of technology and how to talk tech. And so, knowing your audience, you know, you have Europeans, you have Asians, you got people in the US, probably, Africans. You have a global audience, okay? So, most of the people that listen to your podcast speak at least one and a half languages, if not more... Max: For sure.Alison: more fluently. And so, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna ask everyone to put on their learning a new language hat. So, we're gonna learn the language of tech today. And when we're learning a new language, there's two parts, right? There's grammar, so how to have conversations, how to structure our sentences. And then there's vocabulary, so once you've got the grammar down, it's all about learning as much vocabulary as you can, start populating the sentences, right? So, what I would like to do is first we're gonna talk about the grammar of technology and then we're gonna get into some vocabulary. So, when we're thinking about grammar and the structure of conversations within technology, I really wanna anchor this thought process into a workflow approach.  So, everyone on a software development team has this a similar structure of workflow, same with anyone on a recruiting team has the same structure of workflow. So, bring at home recruitment. Our workflow kicks off when we get a new rec, right? So, that's when our process starts. And then we follow either five or six steps depending on your opinion about it, but I say it's six steps. Now, six-step workflow of a recruiter is you have your new role onboarding kick-off strategy meeting with your hiring manager, also known as the intake, sometimes. So, you have your intake with the hiring manager, then you go out and source, looking for candidates. In tech, you have to do outreach messages, that's not true for every industry, but outreach messages is definitely a step in the workflow. And you've got your phone screen as a recruiter, and you got your team interview, and you then you have your offer and higher stage. And then, once they accept, the role is closed, and your workflow is complete. [unintelligible] right? And so, as I'm going across those stages, I am doing and thinking certain things to solve for each problem of the process, right? So it's in, yes please?Max: Okay, great.Alison: Okay. So, taking this workflow approach, right? We have our discrete set of steps to complete our goals and we're doing and thinking certain things to solve for each of those stages, and in recruitment, that's our same process whether it's a marketing role, an engineering role, or ops role, you name it, that's our workflow. Now, in technology and on software development, it's the same thing. It's a very discrete workflow process. A lot of recruiters, if you don't know any better you think that there's some black box where magic happens, and software comes out. Not the case, I'm gonna take the mystic out now. It's a five-step process that everyone follows when developing software. So, yes. Max: In recruitments, sometimes you do have specialization where there's like one team that does the [unintelligible] to job description and does the job posting and another team does the interviewing and the screening. And so, when you're hiring engineers, are you finding that they're also just focused on one part or they do the whole project than to end, or is it mixed?Alison: They have their own flavor of what they do and how they do it, and depending on sort of the methodology of the team. Some things are emphasized over others, but if anyone, you know, any of your listeners have ever seen that sort of famous image of waterfall methodology compared to agile methodology, that's where we're gonna anchor our thought process around today, and I'll elaborate a little bit on that, answering your question on that part, Max. So when you're thinking about waterfall versus agile, so thinking of the waterfall image, right? So, waterfall methodology has its anchor in manufacturing where you start at the beginning, there's a beginning, a middle, and an end to produce an end-result, right? And back in the day, when they're building software, you know, it would be 18 months projects. Well, with the onset of agile methodology, things sped up and projects got smaller and faster and innovative development happened. But, looking at those images, both waterfall and agile have a five-step process. Those five steps are: research, design, build, test, and deploy. And so, technologist on a software development team, regardless of their role, when they get a new rec for, let's say, a new feature, they are going to follow that process: research, design, build, test, and deploy. And as they're going through that process, they're doing and thinking things, like I said, to solve for each of those stages. So, what I would like to do today is kind of talk a little bit about what are each of those stages and then how do we go back through and ask questions against each of those stages to really get a full technical story from a candidate in a very confident, structured way. How does that sound?Max: Yeah, that's perfect. And then, to make the interview fit within a normal timeframe for a job interview, you wouldn't have time to cover every project. So, first before you start going into describing the work on a specific project, you gotta pick the right project, I suppose. So, how do you get there in the course of the interview? Because you know if they're working like 20 different projects in the course of a year. Alison: We like to lean on within the alignment framework we use a tool called the contextual interview. So obviously behavioral interviews are the gold standard in recruiting. Past behaviors predict future behaviors and has a value to know but it doesn't help us dig deep on the technical skills. Contextual interviews are designed to get us into the context of the story that the candidate or end-user is sharing with us and that teaches us how to ask 360, who, what, where, why, when questions to get a good big picture view of what, how they moved through their process as they solve for the goals that they had. And so, when we train recruiters to do tech interviews, we train them to launch with the contextual interview, anchor question. So, our anchor question is, "Walk me through a project that you're most proud of or that was particularly challenging. What was the goal of the project and how did you go about solving it?" So, we're helping, we're asking them to just highlight something. Take one project, we're gonna go deep on one project. And so, that's how we start the conversation.Max: It's much better than a leading question like, "Tell me what you did on this or tell me what you did on that." Yeah, go. Alison: Right. Max: Pick something that you really really sunk your teeth in.Alison: Yeah, and then they'll light up, right? Because developers, they love what they do. And through all the research I've done, they genuinely wanna have really good relationships with recruiters. They wanna get connected to awesome jobs. But half the time they feel like they have to like throw out the baby with the bath water, right, because it's just they have such a bad experience. But what we're doing with the alignment framework is we're just putting the interview on its head, and so, you know understanding that there's a workflow, there's a research, design, build, test, deploy process for everybody, right? So, I ask that question, “Walk me through a project you're most proud. What was the goal and how did you go about solving it?" 9 times out of 10, our candidates, our technical candidates are gonna talk about that build stage right in the middle, right, they're developers, build build build. And if you don't know there's a discrete process, your wheels are already starting to spin off and you start fumbling for follow-up question and the next thing you know, you're asking how long have you Java'd, right? Java's not a verb. So, what we do is we teach recruiters to say nothing. If you ask nothing else, after their first response and to say, “Interesting, walk me through your research process. How did you know React JS was the right framework to use?” You will feel the candidate shift in their chair because you've now established credibility as someone who understands their workflow. And so, what we do is we teach recruiters so that the model is, you know, and I can actually probably tell you what each of the stages are as I share follow-up questions through each of the stages we'll kind of put it together. So, you know, you ask that question, they talk about build. You say, “Interesting, walk me through your research process.” Right? “What was the requirement that you had to design for?” Okay, so, if we're gonna think about this, research as it sounds, we're trying to figure out what is needed from this new feature, who's gonna use it, what's the code requirement, does it need to fit within the code that we already have? right? Start trying to figure out everything that they need to know before they can move on to that next stage which is design. And so, within the research phase, some of the questions we can also ask is “Who did you reach out to when you were researching? The requirements of the project. What research went into your design decisions? Where did you start and then what was the process of finding out what you needed to know?” Next question, all around designing, right?Max: I love those because I can imagine myself asking those questions and already being back in the driver's seat. Like, okay, now he's thinking and I'm sitting back and listening. Alison: Right.Max: He or she. YeahAlison: That's right. It allows us, what I like to do is I say it gives us a roadmap to have these conversations and so we don't need to feel like a deer in headlights like we're trying to think of something on our feet because every step is laid out for us. We know there's five steps to their process. We're armed with questions to ask for each of those stages. And let's say, you know, they start talking about a distributed build system, right, their dev ops candidate. I might not know what a distributed build system is and actually I would even argue, you know, we don't need to know everything, but because I have roadmap to follow, I can ask these questions, get a full picture of it. I might only know about 70% of what that candidate ends up sharing with me, but because it's in a story form, who they interacted with, how they problem-solved, the technology they used, when I go and position the candidate to my hiring team, we know that they'll understand a hundred percent of what they said. And so, it really allows us to get, you know, a full picture from that candidate through the process. So, in this case, so the candidate talks about the research phase, who they interacted with, what was the use case that they were designing for, what are the requirements it had to meet? And then they move on to designing a solution so then these are some of the questions we'll ask to get a feel for how they designed. It's like, “What dependencies did you have to consider when designing for the solution? What was the primary use case? Right, is it a check-out flow? What was the secondary use case? Like, what were these users trying to use this feature for? And then also importantly, who did you collaborate with when you're designing the solution?” ‘Cause the days of solo genius in the basement building everything are over. You have to collaborate, and a lot of collaboration happens at design. So, now we're starting to get a good feel for who they're interacting with, how they problem-solve, what they're thinking about. And then linearly then we move on to the build process, right? So, you can even say, “Walk me through your coding process. Were you solo-coding? Were you pair-programming? Were you building from scratch or were you able to reuse existing code? And what was the time frame that you had to build this new feature?” Right? And you can hear how these questions are pretty agnostic, you can ask anyone these questions and they will have answers for you. Max: Excellent, okay. So, we're done with the build and then moving onto, if my memory serves me right, is the test to deploy.Alison: Yes. Yup, gold star, you're listening Max. Thank you. So then during the testing phase, as it sounds, this is a period when they're testing what they built to make sure there are no bugs, that it's not gonna take the system down, that it actually solves the problem that were identified in the research, right? It solves for the requirements; it solves for the use cases. And this is a really good question because every dev team is a little bit different, right? So you can ask about, “What was your build and test cycle like for this project?” Because in agile which is the modern methodology for development, design, build, and test can kind of happen concurrently, so it speeds it up. So, asking, “What was the build and test cycle like for this project?” also establishes that you know that there are different methodologies. You can ask how “How involved were you at testing or was there a separate QA team?” And then there's also a thing, there's to, you know, to learn add in some acronyms, there's also a thing call TDD which stands for test-driven development. TDD means that once you have established the requirements in the research and design stage, you actually build the test first and then you go and code it. So, it's sort of like we already wanna sort of define what good looks like and then we'll build against that, that's called TDDs. You can say, “Were you using a TDD environment?” Or there's a thing called continuous integration, continuous deployment. And that's like dev ops, you know, 5000, right? CICD, which means like you're, as you're building code you don't have some big deployment hoorah. It just it passes its test, it automatically gets deployed. So testing is often an overlooked part of the process, but it's so critical. And so, during the testing you wanna understand how involved to testing they were, what kind of testing environment they were operating in. And then, once we understand those things, we move on to the deploy, the last stage before, you know, as the code goes live into the world. And again, some teams, depending on the teams, there's a different team that does actually the deployment. So, you can ask, “What was your involvement in the deployment stage?” Right? These are all agnostic; it shows that you know what you're talking about without speaking too much. ‘Cause I think sometimes we get nervous and we say some things and then we actually don't make sense. So, just asking, “What was your involvement at the deployment process, or what sort of release cycle were you working within?” And then, last question we like to ask is, “Who was responsible for the code once it was live in production?” The end, yes. Max: I imagine that especially when you get to the test and deploying phases, a lot of engineers will express frustration with an imperfect environment because it's, as you said, there's different levels of excellence for testing and deploying code, and I think it's a shared responsibility for most engineering department, so they'll be like, “Well, we don't have this, we don't have that. It's not ideal.” And then this could be an opportunity for the recruiter to put on their sales hats and say, “Well those frustrations you have in your current environment, you know, we know them as well, but we've addressed them already and so you would join a more mature organization where you can spend more time building less time testing.”Alison: Right, and I will say on that note, this model that I'm sharing with you on the alignment framework for the technical interviews, we do the same model but then flipped side with the hiring manager and how to ask questions to get a real rich understanding of the open role that you're being asked to fill. And what is the testing environment here, how is deployment facilitated, what is the build process here, are people pair-programming or is it solo-coding, how involved with research will they be, do they get to help design a solution? And so, you can see it just allows us to understand the components of the software development process and ask intelligent questions both of the hiring manager about the open role as well as of the candidate about their experience. And because it's the same model, you can see how it really starts to blend and just gives us a floor to stand on, basically. And what are the roles I'm open at recruiting for, and then who are these candidates that I'm talking to. Max: Okay, enough methodology talk. Let's talk money. Let's talk business.Alison: Get it.Max: I'm a 25-year-old. I wanna move out of my parents' basement. I wanna make some money. Can you help me?Alison: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Max: How fast can you turn me into a credible, technical recruiter?Alison: Well, it depends on how hungry you are, that's for sure. But I would say, you know, if you're asking me with my business hat on, the way we work at Recruiting Innovation is with the tech recruiter certification. It is an all-encompassing, one-stop shop for fundamentals of recruiting. We have a Recruiting 101 class, and we have our alignment framework course, which is this, you know the communication bridge I like to talk about, I call it. And then we partner with the technologists to then download their specialties. So, then we, and the UX class, you hear the UX designer say this is what I'm doing across research, design, build, test, deploy. So, we would say that if you have, you know, 5-10 hours of training, right now it's $695USD for the tech recruiter certification and, you know, recruiting is such an approachable industry. I wish we have more of a PR globally. I mean, demand for recruitment right now is as high as it is for software engineers, it's blowing my mind. But, as an industry, we're not really equipped to the onboard of ton of new recruiters because everything is sort of like one-for-one, you know, take time off the senior to show you, you know, what a tech staff is, if they even know, kind of scenario. And so, what we do is we, Recruiting Innovation becomes that digital onboarding partner for scaling recruiting teams. And I will say, while we're speaking of it, we are almost going to, we're soon to launch the 2.0 of our tech recruiter certification program, it's due in mid-November. Inshallah, that everything, you know, comes through correctly. I'm doing my own product [unintelligible] development, so I'm experiencing it myself. But, with that, we're gonna have front-end back-end dev ops UX design and product management courses in addition to the alignment framework course. And then the prices go up, from then it becomes 849USD per person. But anyone that wants to get on a 1.0 price, we're doing a promo through November to lock in the $695 price to get the old 2.0. And actually, I also wanna share with your audience, you wanna get to see this in real life, I have some handouts for you. So, if you want to take down this URL, go to the URL, download the handouts, you'll get not only the template for the technical interview, but then you'll get the handout that has all the follow-up questions to help you get up to speed. So, if you're interested in getting your alignment framework handout, it's a bitly link. So it's B I T dot L Y so bitly, forward slash talk technical. T A L K T E C H N I C A L. (bit.ly/talktechnical) And so it will take you to a landing page where you can download our handouts and you can learn more about our certification if that's up your alley and then otherwise, you know, I would love to hear from folks how they're getting on with trying out the handouts. You can always find me Alison Daley D A L E Y on LinkedIn.Max: Fantastic. bit.ly/talktechnical.Alison: That's right, that's right. That's all we do is we help recruiters confidently talk tech. We like to say, “Stop the awkward, start the conversation.”Max: Perfect. And I do think that there's a world of opportunity there and people who can have control over their schedule and build a very profitable careers, helping companies hire engineers. and you're right, it's very accessible once you shake off the awkwardness. So, wonderful work that you're doing to help shake off the awkward. And one question I ask a lot of my guests is to take us back to a recruiting mistake that they've done in the past, where they hired the wrong person and try to visualize, you know, a specific person that you hired that wasn't a good fit and share with the audience what you learned from that experience so that they can learn from that mistake. ‘Cause we've all made a ton of hiring mistakes in the past.Alison: Yes, yes.Max: Is there someone that comes to mind?Alison: Well, yeah. I mean if I, just thinking on my feet. It was actually for our own team, we were hiring an HR Generalist and we ended up hiring a former schoolteacher who was a really lovely person, super kind and friendly, gregarious. I expressed a little bit of concern, but I didn't make it very big, but I thought that he was a little bit more creative and extroverted which would suit him more toward a recruiting role than an HR Generalist role, ‘cause they are very different positions and they tend to, you know, attract and require different personality types. Obviously, broad strokes, not true for everyone. I know some amazing introvert recruiters who just get the work done. But he didn't do that well. He wanted more quickly from that position, and I had a feeling that he would. He really wanted to work at the company, which I couldn't blame him. But you could just see overtime that he felt like he was bumping into walls and then it's kind of like by-the-rules HR Manager didn't really like his kind of creativity-slash-free spirit. So [unintelligible] there is a lot of dissatisfaction on both sides that, I mean, a lot of times it's like it's a really awesome person and you could see them in the company but then you kind of shoehorn them into the position that's available and that's just not a good fit for everybody in the long term.Max: Yeah. Don't try to force a hyper-creative person into a very structured environment where they're just gonna make enemies all day long. So, that's a great anecdote. Thanks, Alison. And of course, we're not saying it's anyone's fault there, of course.Alison: It happens. It really happens. Max: Well, you've shared a lot of insights so thanks for coming on. And again, bit.ly/talktechnical for people to sign up and check out Recruiting Innovation and launch their and get rid of the awkward when you're interviewing engineers. Thanks, Alison, for coming on the show. Alison: My pleasure. I hope you all found us useful, and I look forward to connecting in the future. Thank you so much for having me, Max.Max: Yes.Max: This was Alison Daley from Recruiting Innovation, teaching us how to get rid of the awkward when interviewing an engineer and how a non-technical recruiter can get out of these interviews not sounding like an idiot. Hope you enjoyed it and if you want more tips on how to get better at recruitment from people like Alison and from technologists, please subscribe and share with friends. 

MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show I've got Ashleigh Anderson, who is the VP of global talent acquisition for Credit Karma. Ashleigh, welcome to the show.ASHLEIGH: So happy to be here.MAX: Thank you. Thanks, Ashley, and well to get started, perhaps, could you give us a quick intro to Credit Karma.ASHLEIGH: Absolutely. So Credit Karma is going to be a full-scale financial platform to help our more than 110 million members, improve their credit, pay off debt, and plan for the future. We want to democratize financial information. So everyday terms that mean we're gonna help you find a credit card when your credit score goes up, that has a better interest rate, help you refinance your mortgage, and even help you find better car insurance. So, save 1000s of dollars a year. MAX: Nice, and this is focused on North America, the US, and Canada?ASHLEIGH: We also have an office in London so we do have a product in the UK. MAX: Okay. So before we jump into the talent acquisition space. Can you give us some of your industry perspective on how debt is evolving in America, because I believe everybody got checks in the mail and that they don't need to borrow anymore?ASHLEIGH: I don't know that that's necessarily the case. I know that you know a large percentage of Americans still don't even have more than $400 in savings for an emergency, which is a quite scary fact and that's why we're here to help champion financial progress for everybody.MAX: Yeah, of course, it's a big cultural thing, credit. It does change from place to place. I'm calling in from Hong Kong, China where there's a strong savings culture here. Everybody's got a few years of income, tucked under their mattress somewhere. So it's different cultures. Great so you've been in Credit Karma for three years now, and what a busy time. Maybe we'll talk about what's happened over the last year and a half with the changes that your team has been through, we talked a little bit before the show about the fact that you had to move some of your team internally while recruitment was on hold. So that's where we are going. But before we go there, I'd love actually for you to tell our audience a little bit about your background. I think you've been in recruitment for a long time, and particularly in tech recruitment for a long time. How did you end up, early days, how did you end up in talent acquisition?ASHLEIGH: Well, so as we know nobody goes to college to be able to recruit, and there is no degree in recruiting. I applied for my first job at Microsoft in 1998 for a marketing job, and they call me, had that first interview, they're like, Hey, do you want to fly in Seattle, I'm like okay great, that's awesome. And the recruiter was like hey this is a recruiting job, and at that moment, I had no idea that there was a career in recruiting. I thought hiring was done by hiring managers. So I went out had that interview, loved everything that I heard and my first job was as a college recruiting team at Microsoft. And it was an incredible place to start. So, tech recruiting became what I loved and I stayed in that, after Microsoft I went to A.com during the .com boom. Of course, that blew up for most of us. After that, I went to a Microsoft partner company then started my own business, then went back to Microsoft in their response team. I ended up working in games for 10 years, was early at Jenga. Helped grow Jenga from 300 people to 4000 people in about four years that was an incredible experience. And then recently decided to get into mission-driven work, and went to a company called the Planet Corporation as head of recruiting. And worked there for four years and then got the call for the role at Credit Karma. My first interview was with Ken, our founder and that was what solved me.MAX: That's a lot, a lot to unfold. I think the fact that Microsoft interviewed you coming out of college, and asking you to go into recruitment. I think recruitment is a great place to learn for people who are entering their career. But you would think that Microsoft would be more geared towards hiring experienced recruiters rather than people straight out of college. Going back to those days, what do you think of the program back then. Could the program that you were you were part of back then, still exist today, or was it a completely different world?ASHLEIGH: I think it could. I think that it should, especially right now is it's hard to hire recruiters.  I think that if you find driven passionate people who have high potential, mold them into the recruiter you want them to be, hire them right out of college, give them the tools that they need to be successful.  It's really hard to hire a senior recruiter right now.  I think Microsoft had the ability to make great recruiters, and I think recruiting leaders need to focus on that right now.MAX: I believe you.  I'm thinking about my early days as a recruiter and how much you learned.  Like the first time, I was asked by my manager to pick up the phone and call a candidate, believe it or not, was a very scary moment for me.  But, now I wouldn't think about it twice with bat an eyelid.  And, you said you were working in the gaming space for a while, that's with Jenga?ASHLEIGH: So Xbox teams and Jenga.MAX: And were you hiring some of the creatives on the gaming side?ASHLEIGH: I was, game designers, artists, publishing folks, you name it, also engineers, product managers, really whatever it takes to build a game we were working on them.MAX: And do you find that it's a very different approach hiring these creatives and these designers than hiring engineers or quality assurance people and more, let's say, you know, I am thinking of it from a sort of right side versus left side brain people.  Was there a separate recruitment team depending on the hemisphere of the brain that they were targeting?ASHLEIGH: Definitely, I think the approach obviously was very different, the way that you frame an opportunity has to be different for those types of posts.  I think when you don't work in games you're still dealing with creative people, UX designers, for instance, those folks are interested in talking about different things, about product design and development than an engineer would be.  So I think you're always having to wear a lot of different hats talking to different people. MAX: Yeah, we had somebody from the gaming industry before and said that it was a small world, that everybody at the executive level, it was very much network-based.  But, made a career out of it.  Let's jump into Credit Karma, if you don't mind, I'd love to see how things have evolved over the last year and a half, which has been turbulent for most.  And you were telling me before we got started that you were able to retain that everybody on your team and all the Credit Karma employees.  There were no layoff plans, and to ride the storm.  How did you do that?ASHLEIGH: Well, I think, Ken, the leadership team, Coleen, the head of people, decided to prioritize people over profit.  And they said, Hey, we have really great people whose jobs are going to be affected, but we know they are smart, they're driven and they have transferable skills, and we're going to find whatever roles and other teams and other departments where they can be contributing to Credit Karma still.  So, some of us spent many weeks kind of being the internal matchmaker so a new flavor of internal mobility, taking a look at what was needed in the business and who was on the bench and the recruiting team and some of the marketing teams as well.  And it was an incredible experience and I'm sure like you a lot of us watched LinkedIn were companies, whether they were 100 people or 10,000 people were laying off full recruiting teams, and we didn't do that.  It felt really good to actually live values.  I think some companies talk this talk and they're talking about the values that they live by and people first, and then when things get tough, that gets thrown out the window, and money really is a motivator.  And it just meant a lot to me and the rest of us, that Ken calling in the leadership team really decided to put people first.MAX: Right.  Yay, Ken!  I am glad you could keep everybody.  So was it bitter-sweet selling your recruiters to other departments, and have you lost some of them permanently?ASHLEIGH: So I'll say this, I laughed as I'm old, obviously.  I just told you that I've been doing this for 25 years.  A lot of the people in my team were early in career and mid-career and I said to them, Hey, this moment is why my dad has tried to get me out of recruiting since day one.  There's not a better job than I have than a recruiter when the economy is great but this moment is why.  And so I said I want you to take this opportunity to see what role I put you next could really be a career change for you.  And I'll celebrate that right.  I love everyone on my team, maybe, finding a new role was actually a better fit for you.  And we did have some of those success stories and I was super happy that I felt like, Hey, I still really have my recruiter jobs right.  I did a good match I found this person a great role.  A lot of folks didn't come back and we tapped them on the shoulder, but I was happy for that handful of people that stayed in engineering, marketing, product management.MAX: You manage to put them in engineering and product roles, though that's not a natural fit.  I would think they're doing sales and marketing.ASHLEIGH: No, test engineering, product management, like a true PM role.  We have technical project managers, we have people who recruit marketing managers.  It was across all functions.MAX: Fantastic.  Snd those are positions in product management are very hard to fill so killed two birds with one stone.  ASHLEIGH: Yeah, exactly. MAX: And so what happened in talent acquisition now is we went from nobody.  Now there are no jobs for recruiters, there were no recruiters in a matter of six to eight months.  I think it was an opportunity for a lot of companies, to ask themselves, are we right staffed on talent acquisition.  What can we automate?  Were you able to automate a few things during this period to operate leaner?ASHLEIGH: Well, I would say that we definitely implemented quite a few new technologies into our systems.  I'd say tech is every step of our process from the job description generation, all the way down to the offer acceptance.  So yeah, we were able to really look at how we were operating in every step of our process.  We say, how can we do this better, how can we make this faster, how can we take the people hours out of this.  So I was really happy with the tools that we decided to implement and how that has been going.MAX: Yeah. I don't know you went to this level of automation but we've seen some of our customers go basically all the way to an offer letter without an interview. ASHLEIGH: Wow!MAX: Yeah, scary a little bit I'd say, but it would have been a joke three-four years ago, as a gimmick.  But they've rolled it out effectively with language or communication screening automated, and plugging in a few different solutions as part of the process.  And basically, the human touch is only at the very end just to say congrats.  ASHLEIGH: Wow! We are nowhere close to that not going in that direction but that is impressive that they could do that.MAX: No, no, it's scary but it's for a different kind of industry.  It's for really high speed, high churn kind of positions.  Okay and then you created a new role at Credit Karma, the head of the talent enablement.  So we're always looking for new ways to name all things to reinvent ourselves.  And so, what are you reinventing with talent enablement, or is this brand new?ASHLEIGH: I mean I would say that it is the operations function on steroids.  I would really make an analogy of let's say you're a traffic controller of talent.  It's building the connectivity between all of the pieces and functions that are involved in hiring and onboarding someone, and it's really important to us right like we have such an incredible culture at Credit Karma.  We want to ensure that we can run faster than we have and scale quicker than we have in terms of hiring but not lose any of the connectivity between the experience and the teams that contribute to that experience.  So that is kind of the core of what the enablement will handle.MAX: And could you illustrate that for me, you're talking about speeding up onboarding.  Are we talking about basically workflow automation with certain tasks that get assigned automatically?  These kinds of tools?ASHLEIGH: Yeah, so right now, this team has built over 50 dashboards that are self-service dashboards for different partners in the business to understand all of what is happening in recruiting and model out what we're doing what the future state will look like in terms of hires.  Everything from top-of-the-funnel metrics down to dashboards that enable IT to ensure they are curating the right amount of equipment for people.  So it's really like taking all of the data from all of our systems and putting it in one spot so that we are making sure we'll have the information they need in order to do their job faster. MAX: Okay.  Is there one tool, it sounds like, that's a big project with 50 dashboards connecting the different parts of the operation.  Is there a recommendation you can share on a tool that is a central part of this strategy?  Are you using Taleo or Power BI, for instance, or is there some tech recommendation?ASHLEIGH: Yeah, so we are using the data tool and G-Suite.  We are a G-Suite company.  And so that is essentially pulling out a greenhouse, out of the workday, serving into that.  It's been a game-changer.  I think for us, and the head of the talent enablement, he is kind of a wizard with building the data dashboards.  We talk about what would be best to serve out in terms of insights, and he's able to kind of magically create all of these things quickly.MAX: So another name for this head of talent enablement could be talent analytics.ASHLEIGH: Part of that yes, talent analytics also runs operations, as I said tools, coordination team.  We actually will be building a research team underneath them to do a lot of insights and building so we can go to our managers with really clear expectations on what talent pools look like, what they can expect in Geography, and in terms of seniority of talent.  So really anything that can help us do things better and make things go faster, head of the enablement will deal with all that.  And it doesn't stop there right so it's training and development really build and deliver not just team-based training, but personal training.  We have an entire professional development plan where we get $5,000 a year to help you learn and invest back in your career, so tap into that.  Align programs and projects across all of the talents, all the way from a brand, referral, mobility, DEI, you name it.  And then, of course, he and his team are HRVP whispers, this is what I call them right.  So you're making sure that we know how to interpret organizational needs into work design and then how do we go find those people to fill the work design.MAX: It sounds like a very cerebral role that maybe is not what somebody had in mind when they came into recruitment in their early days.ASHLEIGH: No, for sure no.MAX: That is where it's going for sure.  Keeping recruiters on their toes and then adapting to really becoming tech masters in different domains, connecting all these dashboards as you said, is very challenging, but the core of recruitments is still dealing with people and sometimes following our instincts, instead of our cerebral/instead of the grey matter.  And those instincts can lead us astray.  I like to ask, most of the guests on my show, if they can tell us about a recruitment mistake that they've made in the past, without naming anyone, so that we can learn from that mistake and try to avoid making the same one again.ASHLEIGH: Okay, I'll have to think about this. MAX: Doesn't have to be at Credit Karma.ASHLEIGH: I mean, so many I'm just trying to choose the right one right it's not that I haven't made any mistakes.  I've made so many mistakes but I want to make sure that the one I choose is good.  I think I pride myself now on being very detail-oriented.  And that is because of a few snafus in the past, right.  And I don't know if it was this one moment but I do remember, pacing, on the phone in my daughter's bedroom, for whatever reason, and was talking through an offer with the candidate listening obviously about kind of what was still one of their objections or whatnot and giving them the numbers, and looking at my computer wells or pacing is not a good idea.  And I looked at the wrong offer and gave incorrect compensation information.MAX: Received too much.ASHLEIGH: And it would have been fine if that number had been lower than the real number, but it was not of course because the universe would never let that happen.  But I think my snafu with my learning is to tell everyone, just pay attention, don't pace, don't walk around, like make sure you've got the right numbers in front of you, be detail-oriented.  Guess we are in the people business, we talk a lot it's a lot of conversations, a lot of relationship building, but at the end of the day, the details do count.MAX: So important, yeah.  You get a little confidence when you hire 10 people in a month, and then you think you can do that in your sleep between two meetings.  No, that's when mistakes happen.  That's a very good reminder that overconfidence can read complacency and that could drive terrible mistakes.  Stay on your toes, folks.  Thank you very much Ashleigh for coming to share, and I'd like to ask if people want to get a hold of you, what's the best way, or if they want to look at jobs at Credit Karma, I suppose.ASHLEIGH: Yeah ping me up on LinkedIn.  Send me a message and I am happy to answer any questions and creditkarma.com/careers, we're hiring anything and everything that has to do with product development in the tech sector, all the way from member support to machine learning engineers.  What I can say about Credit Karma is we do as I alluded to have this incredible culture when we do put people first.  We are on a mission to help our 110 plus million members enable them to find financial progress.  So it's a great mission and we're a very good company.MAX: Awesome. Thank you, Ashley.MAX: That was Ashley Anderson from credit karma, reminding us if need be that recruiters are a great talent pool for other departments. That's what credit karma did when they had a hiring freeze. She helped to repurpose and redirect some of the people in her team to other departments and they're still working there, it was a success. So maybe inspiration when the next recession comes along, hopefully in a few years. Not too soon. Hope you enjoyed it and then you'll be back for more, remember to subscribe if you did.

MAX:  Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast.  I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I'm delighted to welcome you to the show Robin Linn, who is the senior director for creative recruiting.  What is creative recruiting, you're going to find out, for a company called Activision Blizzard, one of the leaders of the leading publishers of games, and Robin, welcome to the show.ROBIN: Lovely to be here. Thank you for having me.MAX: Pleasure.  I was raised on video games and cartoons, and as an adult, I would love to find out what you guys are up to, in the adult world, because I am a big consumer of the output, and you are the factory, you are the input.  So, well, first of all, I need to ask you, Robin, for the audience, maybe not all of them know what Activision Blizzard does.  Could you tell us a few words about what your company does, to get an idea of the size and the kind of people you hire?ROBIN: We're about a 9000 seat company right so it's a fairly large video game company we've been around for many years, our game titles that might be most widely known are World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Call of Duty, Overwatch.  And we're also associated with King, so if you've played Candy Crush or Crash Bandicoot, those are also titles that we produce. MAX: Wow, if you add those up, I think it's like half of mankind has played one of your things.ROBIN: We think so, right.MAX: Especially the candy crush one.  I remember that it was like half the planet on that thing.  It was like a drug.ROBIN: Right casual gaming, right, that is just, it's addictive. MAX: Oh! I'm trying to shake away my old addiction, thinking about it, and what an unusual world to be in.  We've all left the cartoons behind us, and the games behind us, many of us have, unfortunately.  But you managed to stay involved and we want to know the secret.  How did you end up in this industry?  Could you walk us back?ROBIN: Sure, we'll start back with where I grew up in Orange County, California, which was right next door to Disneyland.  Right next door the ashes from the fireworks would fall upon our roof every summer night.  And I think you grow up next to a place that's based on animation and based on escapism, it can't help infect you a little bit, and I fell in love with animation, early on, because it's the most liberating medium out there.  Anything can be turned into an animated character.  There's been a brave little toaster that took a vacuum cleaner and a toaster and an electric blanket and sent them on a journey.  And any number of anthropomorphic-sized animals and other characters have populated animation since its earliest days, and that freedom intrigued me. I was raised in a very traditional home so the fact that characters were rebellious, and they were rewarded for being rebellious.  You think about the early Mickey Mouse cartoons.  He's not the polite little corporate spokesman that he is now he was, you know, he was quite a little rough and tumble character.  And I think that appealed to me early on, and then I was exposed through Saturday morning movies right after the cartoons, you'd have the movies come on that were those that had Ray Harryhausen stop motion animation.  The Sinbad movies, Jason and the Argonauts, where you could see what you knew were animated characters, right.  I knew that those skeletons weren't real but they felt real.  And to see them interact with live-action actors was just so fascinating for me, that I got drawn into it.  I was lucky enough in school to have a teacher who gave me a box of clay and said well you're not very good at drawing, maybe you can sculpt.  And it turns out it could, and I spun that up into a career and I joined Hanna Barbera cartoons in the late 80s as a meerkat sculptor, someone who was sculpting animated characters.  This was pre CG.  This is back before CG was even thought of.  We'd sculpt the statues that the animators could then hold up and see the character from various perspectives to help them draw their drawings.  And I did that for a couple of years and then CG came along, Jurassic Park and Toy Story, and that kind of spun the industry on its head a little bit.  And I left traditional sculpting and went over to a studio called Sony Pictures Imageworks, which was one of the founders of computer-generated imagery, and worked on Anaconda and contact and then Stuart Little.  And while I was there as an artist I had a manager come to me and said, you have a background in management, because I had been a bank manager, million years ago, and he said you're an artist, so we'd like you to be the artist manager.  Okay. And part of being an artist manager was recruiting talent.MAX: That's the hardest part.ROBIN: Yeah.  And when I started the group was about 25 people and I left here about 320, and loved every minute of it and went to work for a couple of smaller studios to get experience there, and then gaming came along, and I thought well I'm not done gaming.  And, it's the interactive version of what I love so much in animation, let's give that a try. So I went to Riot for a bit.  I left Riot and went to Netflix because when Netflix comes calling, you've got to see what that circus is about, you've got to go figure out what that is.  And then, this past fall, the boss I had at Riot, he had left there and gone to Activision and he called me up and said we have a position here of recruiting creatives, what do you think? and so I made the jump back.MAX: Awesome.  So, from that childhood flame, you skip the part where you ended up working in a bank for a couple of years.  I guess that was less memorable.ROBIN: I graduated high school, unfortunately, economic situations were such that I couldn't go to college.MAX: You had to take a real job, it happens.Robin: I had to take a real job and I thought banking is a real job where you wear a tie. I remember I was given a gift of a briefcase, right, because I'm going to carry my, I don't know what I was supposed to carry.  I carried my lunch in it primarily.  Yeah, and that was it.  But yeah I did a number of years in banking and I was pretty good at it.  I was about to be promoted to be an assistant vice president of operations at a small bank.  And at that same time that was coming together, I got that offer to be a sculptor and Hanna Barbera cartoons and I'm sorry.  You know when that lands in your lap, the banking just kind of fades away.  I ran from finance.MAX: It faded away, but you mentioned in your story that they looked at your resume and said, Well, you've worked at a bank, therefore you can manage people, it's funny how that association works because why would somebody who is coming from a bank, know how to manage creators, it doesn't make much sense.  But I suppose management for some people who are so in love with their craft is considered a chore.  And something that I don't want to deal with is the admin type, I don't want to have to deal with people, I just want to be at my desk making beautiful work.  And, and so, you know that created a gap in that team.  I imagined that's how it played out.ROBIN: Yeah, well I think it was more than the fact that I'd written performance evaluations in the past and nobody likes doing those so at least Robin knows how to do them.  Although, reviewing a bank teller, and reviewing an artist are very different animals.  Just the way you speak with artists is very different than you would with an engineer or with you know another type of candidate.MAX: Yeah, well, let's get into that.  We're here to talk about recruitment, not cartoons.  So I would love to get some tips from you on when you're at Activision, or Netflix, or even Riot Games, you have a huge brand behind you, anybody in the industry would know who you are and your reputation would somewhat proceed you.  But if you remove the brand and we can talk about the brand later, just focus on the art of recruiting, which is the mano a mano battle between recruiter and candidate.  Yeah, how do you appeal to that creative audience, and how do you put together a team with creative people who just want to jump on board.  Is it all about getting them excited about the vision of a project or, is it more about creating the right environment?  How does it differ from let's say hiring for a bank?ROBIN: Well I think we have to go back to the foundation, the fact that I came up as an artist before I moved into the recruiting space I think gives me a little bit of calling it street cred for lack of a better.  We're sitting down you're talking with an animator about what it's like to work on a deadline.  Most films are budgeted on a 50 hour week, so there's overtime going into it, there's crunch time coming out at the end of it where you might be working 60-70 hour weeks.  If you can sit down and talk with the candidate and through your language and your sharing of whatever they understand that you sat in that chair, that it's not abstract, you're selling a product that you're familiar with, that you have already have used you.   You've been on a production that's gone haywire, you've been through working on weekends to have your shot canceled.  I think that that lends a little bit of again credibility to you as a recruiter, as opposed to someone who may have come up through an agency, who has been a professional recruiter all of their time in the industry may not have that understanding.  At least that's been my experience.  And it also gives you a vocabulary that you can talk to a candidate in such a way that they know you know their role, right.  I'm probably cursed or it's unfortunate to me that I can't sell an opportunity that I don't have a complete in-depth understanding of.  Like if you were to put me in front of an engineering role I would struggle at being able to sell that because I just don't have the in-depth understanding of it, but even coming in front of art and animation and visual effects and gaming, and the creative spaces in there, and I'll have either the experience myself or I'll have worked closely with people who have, and be able to have that same vocabulary resume.MAX: I think whether you're in your industry or others, it's something that we can all get better at.  I do hire engineers and I'm not an engineer myself and I've often felt that I could get a little bit deeper into it so I could describe the environment better.  If you're a recruiter, you're not necessarily going to maintain that relationship, post the point of hire.  But you are that first impression and so, should sound familiar enough.ROBIN: It's interesting you say that because I still keep in contact with people that I recruited 25 years ago.  Social media has made it so much easier now.  But it's rare that a week goes by that I don't exchange an email or a text or something with people that I have hired early in my career and early in their career and we both kind of advanced up.  You'll reach back and share more stories or whatever.  I think because you're recruiting for lack of a better term is an intimate process.  You get to know somebody very well over the weeks you may spend with them because you're talking about where their challenges are.  If you're a good recruiter, you don't go in saying, this is the great stuff about the candidate, you have to go into your hiring manager and say these are the challenges, this is where this person is going to need to support.  And the only way you can find that is by having really in-depth conversations with that candidate in developing trust.  On top of that, the financials are right, you're going into that knowing what that person makes her living which is, in many cases their significant other may not even know that.  So you develop a friendship is probably too strong of a word. We should develop a relationship with these candidates that certainly is kind of the bedding for a friendship, it's bedding for a relationship that will spawn up out of that.MAX: You need to bleed a little bit and worry a little bit about if this is gonna fit, otherwise, this is gonna hurt my relationship, and we will suffer from it.  Whereas, in the high volume recruitment space, it is a one-time interaction so it's a very different world.  ROBIN: Yeah. So we were talking before we started recording.  The talent pools that I'm working within are very finite.  If we're talking about Academy Award-winning visual effects supervisors, there are 60, maybe 70 of those on the planet.  I cannot letter bomb all 50 of them with a templated email and expecting a response back from any of them because they'll delete it before they even get-go.  So you have to have the ability to understand what these people have done, what their background is, what the connective tissue is, who do you know who knows them that can introduce you.  It becomes much more of a social game at some level than just reaching out with a cold email.MAX: The Netflix culture made a lot of noise emphasizing accountability and performance in the early days.  I haven't heard that much about it since.  I suppose that would resonate relatively well with creatives because there are also very autonomous people who want to get things done, and who have a strong drive for personal accomplishments.  Would you say that's a fair statement or that people kind of rejected corporatism?ROBIN: Well I think we can't paint with too broad of a brush, this is appropriate for everyone.  My experience with the Netflix culture was that it was a great kind of litmus test, right.  Every call that I had when I was working there for the three years I did, started with, have you read the Netflix culture memo, what are your thoughts on it?  And also sharing that with there were things that were written on that document that was like, Oh, I don't know if I agree with that.  I don't think anyone can lock step in with all 52 points that are made on that document.  It was a great opportunity, like a conversation icebreaker to talk about where they didn't align.  It's one thing and I'm sure you've experienced that in recruiting as well.  At some point, with certain levels of candidates, you stop talking about the benefits of the job and you start talking about the challenges, right. You don't say oh this is the best place in the world to work, you start saying, this place has got some challenges we're broken because that's why we need you to come in.  That's why we need you to help fix us.  That's for a certain type of candidate, the fact that everything is running smoothly is like red meat to a tiger, like, I want that.  I want to come in, I want to leave a mark, I want to make a stand, I will make a difference.  I want to feel like I've contributed.  And if the workplace is seamless, there's no opportunity to do that.  So the more challenging an environment is, the more intriguing and interesting that will be to the right level of a candidate.MAX: Yeah, well let's talk about the recent challenges of your industry where, my mental image of the creatives and the developers, everybody's living in basements, drinking Mountain Dew under green neon lights, and having sleepless nights of coding and gaming.  I'm sure it's not exactly like that, but that doesn't sound very COVID-friendly.ROBIN: No, and I think what this situation has taught us, especially in animation, and in gaming as well, is that the artists no longer have to be in-house, right.  They can operate from home, and produce work safely and without there being too big of a hit on our production cycles.  For recruiting this means that our talent pools are no longer geographically locked, right.  I'm no longer looking for people who are necessarily in Los Angeles based in or in proximity to our studios, and the campuses.  It opens the world up, right, especially if you're looking for people to come in and do contract work where we might need seven or eight paintings done or we might need character designer or prop design.  All of a sudden we can start looking on a global scale as to where those people are located and track them down and this is when it becomes all-important to candidates to brand themselves.  When we started this conversation talking about branding, candidates have to be forward-facing.  They have to put themselves out there and they can do that.  It's so much easier now than it was in the older days before to the web where you had to send around a portfolio just so you can get work.  Now you can create a website, you can utilize social media channels like Tik-Tok, and Instagram to put your artwork out there.  You can follow recruiters, and recruiters have Instagram accounts.  You can find them, you can follow them, you can interact with them, you can share your work with them, ask for feedback and they won't necessarily give it but it's always good to ask.MAX: Is there unemployment in your space?  Are there animation artists and game developers that are sitting on the bench?ROBIN: Always, right.  A part of that is because we're a finite industry but schools keep graduating students.  And that's just, I don't know, in the best of yours we could absorb everybody who's looking to get into the industry.  It just doesn't happen.  There was a stat, years ago and it was probably still the same, that there were more professional football players in the NFL than there were professional working animators.  And that's a fairly accurate parallel because the desire to do something, the desire to be an animator, the desire to be an artist, the desire to be a game developer does not guarantee you employment in that space.  MAX: That's right.  Not enough to want it, I don't know what you need, what do you need?ROBIN: Talent. You don't have the talent to.You can want to be an actor, and you can study all the lines, and you can memorize everything and you can know where to stand, and where the lighting is, but if the performance isn't there, you're never going to be an actor.MAX: So how do you measure that?  Are there some exercises you can submit, for the younger crowd? When you seem to get older you can see their professional outputs but for the younger crowd, are there ways for you to evaluate that talent that can be applied by others?ROBIN: Certainly.  The web has made all this so much easier because you could find, you can type into Google, animators reels, or if you're a prop designer, professional prop designers worksheets, whatever it is, you can type it in there and find examples online of what good looks like.  And odds are you can find somebody who's willing to teach, right.  Or you can find tutorials that someone's already completed for you, then it's up to you to do the legwork.  We're not necessarily concerned about where you go to school or where you have a degree or if you have an advanced degree.  We're more concerned if you have talent and you can do the job.  And there are a million different pathways to get to that result, you don't have to just go through formal education.MAX: But those reels, that are online, that's going to be the basis for your evaluation, there's going to be the first interview, get to know each other and then afterward, somebody is going to evaluate your work on its creative merits?ROBIN: Yeah, normally what we do when we're looking for an artist is we'll go on to Instagram or go on to YouTube or any of these media channels.  And we'll just start vetting art, we'll start looking, we'll put in a search engine, right.  So we're going to search for you so if you create a profile, you're going to want to use keywords that we can find.  That's how we're going to find you.  So you can put in animation, you can put in character design, you can put in prop design.  Build those out so you're easily searchable.  And we're going to gather those up into a database.  We're going to then go through that database and that candidates, and it's one of the sad realities that just the mechanics of the process of vetting candidates means we only look at your artwork, for maybe 10 to 15 seconds.  Right, so you have to make a fantastic first impression because you won't get a second opportunity to make that work.  If we like your work well we'll watch it longer, we'll look at it longer if we don't like your work if your work is really bad, we'll also look at it a bit longer but for a different reason.  But that's it, 10 To 15 seconds is all you get.  We'll boil those lists down.  I think the ratios that I'm comfortable speaking about, for every 50 websites or 50 reels or 50 portfolios we look at, we may find one that we advance. MAX: Okay, so 2.5% conversion rate.  ROBIN: Right.MAX: I've seen worse.  ROBIN: Yeah. MAX: And you get to browse Instagram all day, that sounds like a Millennials dream job.ROBIN: Yeah, but I'm not looking at cat videos necessarily.MAX: Or other robots or other monsters.ROBIN: We'll gather those up and we'll take those to the supervisor in that particular discipline and ask them what do you think, and out of that list of 10 or 15, we may get one or two that they like.  And then we'll do a phone screen, we'll go grab a phone call with the candidate and just talk to them and try and get a feel for who they are.  We've already assessed craft we know you can do the work, then it's about who they are as a candidate.  Are they brave, are they timid, just all those things you started looking for because we're casting.  Right, that's what we're doing at that point.  We're trying to see what's the deficit on the team that I'm looking to fill and how does this person fit into that.  Candidates need to understand that, especially first-time emerging talent.  But we often hear from emerging talent or when we talk to them is oh I want to be a sponge I just want to come in there and I just want to learn and I just want to be like, I just want to take everything and just take it all in.  And that's great, but what are you bringing right.  What do you bring to it?  If I'm making this meal over here.  Right, what's your addition to the menu.  How are you going to make us better by your presence, and that can be in your talent, that can be in your feedback, that can be in your personnel.  It's a number of factors that they bring, or they can bring to the team to improve that, it's not just their ability to create, especially with emerging talent, we hire primarily.  We've seen that you can do it, we don't know if you can necessarily do it again but we hope you can.MAX: In engineering, there are some fields that are extremely hot, and if you get in early, you will find jobs, you will find work.  If you're one of the first developers to build on AWS, and it took off, I'm sure you would find a job in that field if you're one of the first developers building chatbots, your salary would go up by 50% the first year, etc.  That there must be still some pockets of grade gaps where somebody has done that and then they get picked up.ROBIN: It's the less glamorous job like everybody wants to be an animator because animators are actors.  And it's performance-based very sexily to see your character come to life on the screen, but there are a number of disciplines.  I won't even say support. I almost did it and caught myself.  They partner with animators to make that performance possible, right, character riggers that actually take a static model and input the controls that allow it to move, that allows the animator to drive that performance.  That's a great career path for somebody who may not have the acting chops, they may not have made the best acting decisions, but they're more technically minded and they have a sculptural mind, they understand that when you bend a finger this is what happens to the skin, and they can duplicate that using technology.  People who are proficient in software called Houdini, which builds visual effects, right, now all the visual effects you see out there.  All the new kinds of AR and VR technology.  So if you can animate or you can work and build visual effects in that new space.MAX: Does that Houdini software cost an arm and a leg?ROBIN: Yeah, pretty much.  Like real-time, we can't find real-time visual effects artists, that's always an area that just drives us crazy.  So further if you can find joy in doing something that someone else doesn't want to, you will never be unemployed.  And I think that holds true in our industry as well.MAX: Yeah, those are good last words. But before we part ways.  Robin, I have a question I always ask, and it's kind of shitty of me to end on a sad note but I always like to ask about hiring mistakes made in the past and what we can learn from them.  And so I'd ask you to think about one person, without giving a name.  One person in particular, where you made a mistake and blew up in your face and in then their face, and what that mistake was?  Could you walk us back?  One coming to mind?ROBIN: Sure.  Oh immediately.  I think every recruiter got like a handful of these like Oh yeah, that one.  I'll start with this.  If you love chocolate it doesn't necessarily mean you want to work in a factory that makes chocolate.  Right.  You have to be able to distance yourself from the process of making the product, what the actual product is.  And I remember sitting down with a candidate, and his significant other who came into the interview with us, and that's fine.  This is a business where the animator is going to be away from home quite a bit working on these projects.  And I remember her saying in the course of the interview, to me, Oh, I'm so happy he's done with animation school because the hours were so long and now he'll just have a regular nine to five job.  I was young in my recruiting career, and I should have just gone, wait, let's talk about that because that's not the case.  And I didn't and we hired him anyway.  And I think the first time he went on a 60-70 hour week, it may have put some strain on their relationship that I felt in some way responsible.MAX: Okay, yeah.  We all put our heads in the sand sometimes when we hear something and we just brush it over, that'll be fine.  ROBIN: Yeah, that's a ghost that haunts me. That's one of those 3 am thoughts like god why.MAX: Well, if their relationship survived it, then it'll be stronger for it.ROBIN: So the good news is I hired him subsequently a couple of other times and they're together and have kids everyone's been great.  Man, you do learn from those experiences, never to just skip over something lightly in an effort to make a hire.MAX: It was very kind of you to come and share with us the wonderful world of gaming, and studios, and animation, and on the off chance that Houdini developer.  Here's our conversation, where can you be reached? Can people connect with you on Instagram or what's the best way to connect?ROBIN: LinkedIn, I'm old school, right.  My Instagram is filled with gardening pics and videos with my grandchildren.  But, LinkedIn is the best way to get hold of me and I try to respond to everybody on there.  This was my New Year's resolution this year to be very active on LinkedIn so I try to post something every couple of weeks that's related to recruiting and getting a job in animation and sharing whatever I picked up over my 30 years.MAX: Thanks for sharing with our audience, Robin. ROBIN: My pleasure.MAX: Good luck with hiring people from all over the world and making the dreams of these young animators come true.ROBIN: It's the most fun I've ever had.  It's just been the most rewarding career to do that, right.  I feel very very fortunate to have had the years I've had.MAX: That was Robin Lynn, who is in charge of creative recruiting for Activision Blizzard. And who reminded us of how important it is and how useful it can be for a recruiter to know to have sat in the shoes of the candidate and to know their industry jargon and so on.  It does make everything  go better and the trust builds faster.So a good reminder for all of us recruiters out there to really know our industry deeply. Hope you enjoyed it. I certainly did. And you'll be back for more, please follow us on the recruitment hackers podcast and share with friends. 

Everything you put out as a brand should be interesting, it should be relevant to your consumer, and you and your employees should be proud of the final product. So why then are so many brands finding that the people who work so hard on and actually create the marketing materials aren't sharing the end result? Max Summit is a marketing consultant who has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world — Adidas, Lululemon, Athleta, the list goes on — and regardless of the brand, whether they sell online or in brick and mortar, Max knows that true connection with customers start with the connection to the internal employees. On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Max discusses all the ways that brands should be doing internal pulse checks and reinventing their mission in order to make their marketing materials hit home with consumers. Plus, she explains how brands should be thinking about ways to become resources for customers beyond just being a provider of goods and services, and she gives examples from her days at Lululemon that any company can learn from and where VR and AR can come into play. Enjoy this episode!Main Takeaways:Who's Sharing What?: To gauge the health and success of your company's creative, doing an internal pulse check is necessary. Are employees sharing the work they have produced? Are they proud and willingly talking and posting about the latest project they are working on? Do a post-mortem to gauge how a project went, what aspects were wins and where things could have gone better and allow everyone to share freely and openly how they really feel.Who Knows What?: The boots on the ground at retail stores are often the people with the most knowledge of the consumers and what they want. Brands need to create a more connected communication structure that allows everyone in retail to interact with HQ and the ecommerce team to paint the most holistic view of the customer and then create products and marketing content for them.Who's Engaging with What?: One of the biggest struggles brands face is getting consumers to engage both initially, and long-term. So brands have to hook a consumer quickly, and keep bringing them back with an interesting, exciting, and valuable experience. Virtual and augmented reality experiences are a recent way that brands have been solving this problem, and the creativity and utility that VR and AR offers sets the table for it to be a major way that brands and consumers interact for years to come.  For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.---Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Respond quickly to changing customer needs with flexible Ecommerce connected to marketing, sales, and service. Deliver intelligent commerce experiences your customers can trust, across every channel. Together, we're ready for what's next in commerce. Learn more at salesforce.com/commerce---Transcript:Stephanie:Hey everyone, and welcome back to Up Next in Commerce. This is Stephanie postles, CEO at Mission.org and your host. Today on the show we have Max Summit, who is a brand marketing consultant. Max, welcome to the show.Max:Thanks Stephanie, I'm really happy to be here.Stephanie:I'm happy to have you too. So with you, I want to start back in your personal story. Growing up in Brazil, you have a very interesting story around medical issues and growing up in this very creative household, very intriguing household. So, I want to hear just your background before we dive into what you're doing today.Max:Sure. Absolutely. Let's see, the elevator pitch here. So I was born in Boston, but actually raised in Brazil. I am the proud daughter of a ballerina turned designer my mother, and my father was very musically inclined, he had a lot of passions around art and music even though eventually he really poured I think the majority of his time into tech and entrepreneurship. But my upbringing in Brazil I think was anything but traditional.Max:My stepbrother and I, we used to spend our summers down in the beach barefoot on the sand, falling asleep to the stars at night. My granddad would sometimes pick us up after school on a Friday, we would drive down to the beach and we'd spend the weekend on the boat, which was awesome and really lovely. I think as a child, you take in these experiences as they come but when you live as an adult, you oftentimes, I think, look back and reminisce and you think, "How can I also provide that for the next generation or for myself and my own kids?"Max:So yeah, I think it was a very interesting upbringing, very dynamic, I think absolutely it was not traditional by any means. I think that existence and that relationship that I was taught at a young age to be embracive of nature and be embracive of human experiences I think ultimately led me down to this path in brand marketing unknowingly, but that's where I am today is just really embracing, I think, storytelling and identifying the unique patterns and behaviors of organizations that can really communicate something to the world and to the people around them in a way that I think makes sense for today's audience and today's consumer.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. I love that. I'm just having an entire movie playing out in my head, imagining you on the beaches also now I'm like, "I need to go to Brazil. That's the next step for me?"Max:Yeah, it's funny. I'm definitely painting a more poetic existence, I definitely think my brother and I, we were quite mischievous as well as I think that playful character and that playful nature, I think also lends itself well for a role in marketing. Although sometimes in a leadership position, you can't be as playful as you like to be, but it's definitely I think helped me get to where I am today, for sure.Stephanie:I love that. And tell me a bit about, I know you had a medical scare I think it was around 15 or something. And I was reading a quote where you're saying, "That changed the way I thought about everything," and I wanted to hear a bit about that because I'm sure it's impacted even where you're at today.Max:Yeah. Absolutely, as I said I grew up in Brazil, sports I think is very much a part of the culture and the DNA there. I did everything from soccer, to swimming, to [inaudible], and eventually I think I really found my place in volleyball. That was really the sport where I felt most comfortable. Again, I had great mentors and great coaches who identified long-term potential and I think saw an ability for me to do it even professionally at some point in my life and my family and I really invested a lot of time and energy going to games, getting the proper coaching, the proper training. And I was in a final match, a pre-qualifier for you to be on the national team.Max:And I came down from a jump serve and I remember hearing this massive, shattering pop that went from my ankle all the way down to my hip. And essentially I ripped six ligaments on my leg, my achilles, my hip tendon, my ACL and my MCL, you name it and eventually it was just one go. And it was in that recovery phase where in post-op I went through surgery and I was recovering, and we're flying back from Brazil where my leg really began to swell and the pain intensified over the course of the plane ride.Max:And when we landed back in Boston, it had really gotten to a place where it felt extremely uncomfortable and my mother and I, of course back then there wasn't a lot of research and knowledge around clotting and how that happens postoperatively and how flying can sometimes intensify that. So, I think we were really uneducated around some of those medical complications that you can face, so we shrugged it off as it was a 13 hour plane ride, your leg is probably swollen from the compression or decompression.Max:We didn't really think much of it and we went to bed, and I woke up in the middle of the night really screaming, had really intensified pain, not really understanding what was happening. And I remember my mother was really rushing up upstairs because I was calling for her, I was yelling like, "Mom, mom, mom, something's wrong." And when we pulled the sheets over, my leg was gangrene. It was blue, black, every color that you can imagine I think all the capillaries were just exploding subcutaneously.Max:And one of the last things that I remember was actually my mother grabbing me by my shoulders to try to calm me down. And this feeling of almost, I would say I think I'll use this on the interview as well, like a champagne cork when it explodes, it just happens in an instance. And when that sensation happened, everything just melted away and what we found out weeks later when I woke up in the hospital, was that the expansion of the leg was really what's known as a DVT, a deep vein thrombosis.Max:And the clotting had literally originated from my ankle and had gone all the way to my knee and a piece of it dislodged and went into my lung. And when that happens, your body's deprived of oxygen and it shuts down, and I experienced all of this at age 15, which I think for a normal 15 year olds everyone is planning prom, everyone's playing around their first boyfriend. If they're lucky, maybe they're celebrating their one year anniversary with their high school sweetheart. And for me, I spent the majority of my 15 years in a hospital bed at Mass General in Boston.Max:I think the realization of life and how fragile it is and how limited our time is, and it can be on this planet, I think was reintroduced to me at an age where most teenagers aren't thinking of that. And I think it's allowed me to move through the world a little bit more intentionally, and in a way I think I've been seeking a greater sense of purpose since so that if I were to find myself in another hospital bed hopefully I won't have as many regrets or as desires as I thought I had at age 15.Stephanie:Wow. Wow. I have goosebumps with your story right now. I feel like we could just make that the entire episode, talking about how to live an intentional life. Oh my gosh, that's wild. Yeah.Max:Definitely. I think if anything too, COVID has in a way, I think shed light for a lot of individuals. I think a lot of families, a lot of my close friends and even professional mentors, I think everyone has used this as an opportunity to self-assess and to reevaluate and really measure the scales of lifeStephanie:That's amazing story. So, I want to dive into the brand aspect of things. You said an interesting quote early on before the interview, that you stumbled into it, you did not plan to get into this world, but when you look at your roster of brands that you've served, it's wild. So, first talk about how you got into this world and also some logos just to show people you know obviously what you're doing.Max:Sure. I'm definitely lucky, I'm going to say I think luck is a big aspect of it. But yeah, essentially I studied philosophy and English in college which is so bizarre to think that someone who studied those two fields would eventually end up in marketing. But I think the way everything cascaded and fell into play was really at the root of it was just having fantastic leaders and mentors who identified my potential, who I think understood the reward that comes with molding someone and bringing them into the process and giving them the right opportunities that I think really shed light on their personal aspects, but also their professional aspirations.Max:And the way I fell into this industry was, so actually I started in non-profit worlds, really volunteering, taking gigs as they came mostly in the creative parts. I did a lot of pre-production post-production work then I eventually went into graphic design, I did a graphic design residency for about two years and then eventually got pulled into copywriting then from copywriting I did video. So, doing the gamut of all the art functions and I realized in that process it actually sucked at all of them. I was like, I was good enough to have a general understanding at introductory level, but I very quickly on realized that I was never going to be the director of copywriting or the director of photography-Stephanie:Which is a beautiful thing, because it answers a lot of questions for you. I've had many of those experiences where I'm like, "Well thank you life for showing me that's just not my thing and I can move on now know."Max:Yeah, and also it takes a lot of vaping gut too, to tell yourself, "I suck at something."Stephanie:I'm going to own it, I suck.Max:And I need to find something else that I enjoy, but I knew that I wanted to be in a creative function. But I think ultimately what was missing, I think from all those experiences was the afterthought. So, the strategic side of it and I got my foot in the door actually as a freelance graphic designer working at Adidas. And the way that happened was really through networking. So, when I said that I was really hustling and trying to get gigs on the side, that's literally what I was doing, I was identifying meet and greets that's right. I used meet and greets, which back then was meetups.com at work in my local community.Max:I would raise my hand, any volunteer opportunities for races or local community events. At the time I was living in Boston, and Adidas was a big sponsor for the Boston Marathon. And again, I raised my hand and said can I do any graphic design work? Do you guys need help as a volunteer, it was just saying yes until someone and something was willing and ready to bring me on board. And I started as a volunteer graphic designer and from there that role quickly became a little bit more robust in nature. So, one project led to another, it went from being freelance graphic design to, would you like to support us at a photo shoot? Would you like to do some post production work for us, some casting?Max:And things just fell into place, and it took a very wonderful mentor and a very lovely boss like I said, to really identify that potential in me and tapped me on the virtual shoulder and said, "Hey, I think your place is actually in brand, it's not in creative," which like I shared with you guys I knew that already, I sucked at all four fields. But I hadn't yet gotten that golden offer, that golden ticket to come in full time and he offered me a job. He said we're starting a new division at Reebok.Max:At the time he was moving over from the Adidas side onto the BU classic side I'll be overseeing the division there and we need a brand manager would you like to take a chance on life and take a chance on this opportunity? And needless to say, I said, yes. And things really cascaded and fell into place after that. And just to throw some logos out there like you asked from Reebok, I went to lululemon, from lululemon I then joined a much smaller, but reputable brand in Canada called Lolë. And then from Canada, most recently I was the director of marketing over at LA Athleta, which is a [inaudible] company.Stephanie:Wow. Yup, yup. Awesome logos of course, which is why I was like, "You have to name drop them." That's a really fun story about getting that invite and having someone bet on you before you even knew if you could enter into that world. I want to talk about brand in general and defining a strong brand, because you've worked at some amazing companies now who have done just that and they've been able to develop this following and stay true to brand. And you just see the cohesiveness when you look at what they're doing everywhere, you get it instantly. So, what do you think defines a strong brand today? How do you go about building that?Max:It's a great question and it's definitely evolved. I think when I first started my career in this journey working in performance sports, endurance sports, I think it was very much benefit led marketing. So, it was really about the best shoes takes you on the longest run. Sometimes you got the occasional, this is the shoe that was designed by Michael Jordan. There's a little bit of that celebrity persona aspect of it, but when I really began this journey, it was very product marketing. It was very benefits led, it was a very simplified message.Max:I think there were very little brands that understood and promoted, I think mission driven content and purpose led communication. Nike, I think was one of the first in the industry to package that up and present it in a way that was digestible to the consumer. I think where we're at now today is most brands if not all, I think need to have a purpose led message or at least a mission driven DNA aspect of their brand. I think consumers are demanding more out of brands, I think that now more than ever they're equipped with knowledge and the tools to actually do the research.Max:Which I think before, oftentimes again, the brands really held that power. They could really decide if and when to release messages around sustainability, messages around diversity, equity inclusion everything was very much calculated I think 10, 15 years ago in marketing. Now, if consumers can't find that information on day one on your website or through your social channels, they'll walk away and they'll go to another brand whose mission and purpose is more overtly available on site as well as in their social channels.Stephanie:So, when you're approaching brands that maybe don't already have this, how do you go about it in a way that keeps it authentic? Because, throughout all the things that have been happening in the past year or two, maybe you see brands quickly trying to lean into something and be like, "Oh, we're in that space too, we're doing that well." And then a lot of them end up one week later, two weeks later or whatever it is it's gone and that can actually do more harm probably than not having anything at all. So, how do you approach that, because it feels like a tricky space to play in?Max:It is. And I think it's definitely a hard question that you have to ask yourself and your organization, what are you as a company uniquely qualified to give to the world? Because, I think it is that unique nature that me as a brand marketer can package up and I can create a strategy behind and a communications and really elevate that and present that to the rest of the world. I think the brands that are struggling like you mentioned some were having to pull back.Max:Other brands that aren't having those honest conversations with themselves, I think their desire to want to jump on something that is currently mainstream but not necessarily an element that trickles down back to their DNA and their structure and their organization. It doesn't take long before it's a domino effect. It doesn't take long before you see all of the pieces falling at the same place. But I think really identifying what you as a company are most uniquely qualified to deliver to the world and to your customer, I think that is the hardest, if not the most important conversation that you can have and you can also give to your marketer.Stephanie:Yep. Yep. How do you go about measuring how a brand is doing? So, I'm thinking about what consumers say versus how they really feel, a good quote, maybe not a quote, but a summary from the CMO of UPS, they came on another show of ours and they said that they had really good brand recognition, people trusted them, but a lot of their consumers saw them as an old and stodgy company so they had to rethink their marketing because of that. But I'm like, if you would've just heard the first piece of oh, we have a great brand, recognition and trust, I'm just going to stop there, I'm good. Versus, getting into the details of, and it's a yes and they also think this, how do you go about measuring a brand's performance or how the consumers actually view them?Max:I love that quote too, taking a soundbite and turning it into an actionable insight. I will probably say something's that's a little bit more controversial, but that's in my nature.Stephanie:Yeah, I love that.Max:I love internal employee pulse checks. I think for me, the true measure of whether your work is adding any value or is exciting people is whether or not your employees are naturally promoting that work. Very often it does not happen, you would be shocked how many times even sitting in a marketing function living it day in, day out going through the blood, sweat and tears will team members refrain from posting. I think it's just there's very little work that I think is being put out into the world today where employees take pride on wanting to showcase it and really wanting to advocate for it.Max:So, my way of measuring success is if you can take a head count around the table, and if every member from your team posted, shared it, communicated, was proud to wear it as an emblem, I think you've succeeded in your role first and foremost, if you're just relying on that customer, if you're just relying on that external feedback again, I think you failed as an organization and as a mentor and as a leader internally.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. I love that. That's really good. I'm thinking about different types of companies that probably definitely have an easier time. I'm thinking the non-profit world, people go there, maybe not always getting paid the highest, but they are there for a mission versus maybe other companies where people are there for the money or it's a trend. How do you think about actually getting that feedback? Are you literally going around the room being like, "Did you share, did you share?" Or how do you do it at scale if it's a team of thousands?Max:It's so great, I love internal surveys. I think anytime I always loved doing postmortems after a campaign or after we deliver an action, because sometimes it doesn't have to be a piece of creative content. It could be a public commitment, that you as an organization decided to make and that structurally made sense. And I've actually found that oftentimes employees are more willing and ready to share public commitments than they are with pieces of content, but anyway to answer your question, I'm a really big advocate of doing postmortems and in those postmortems, I think an internal employee pulse check with a survey I think is most often the best way to conduct that type of review process.Max:I also found that allowing employees to share feedback anonymously, I think helps exponentially and I think people are always more hesitant to put their name behind the feedback, but I realized very quickly in my review process that the moment I allowed people the freedom to actually say what they really thought without having to put their name behind it, I think the amount of feedback that we got was just astronomically higher, I think by nature.Max:I also really love when we are speaking about obtaining external feedback, I think social media has done a great job with that. Depending on which channels your organization is most active in, for me Athletic Apparel socials the epicenter right now, over all the community activities happening. I love doing pulses and customer surveys on Instagram. I think it's such a great way for you to get feedback in real time, which can also be very eye-opening right. Max:So, when you capture your audience's attention, you have a brief second to really engage with them. And if they've already made that first move, I think that to me is a lot more telling for a brand and organization than if you were to conduct customer insights and this extensive six month interview process where you're most likely bringing in individuals that aren't actively engaging with your brand. But on that aspect, I will tip my hat to Instagram I think for introducing that feature a thousand times over again, I've actually used it numerous times, not only for feedback on creative and campaigns that we've brought to market, but also as a way to guide our strategy.Max:So, I love doing polls where we basically ask our community what content would you to see us produce more? And sometimes the answer doesn't have to be very philosophical, it can be very direct, it can be very simple. And the responses that you get can actually dictate the course of almost an entire season. And I definitely have done that before.Stephanie:Yep. So, are you doing that for some of the brands like Athleta, and how did you structure the polls to get actionable feedback?Max:Yes. I think Athleta is a great example, especially during COVID right. It's hard to think back where I was a year and a half ago, but I remember having just moved to San Francisco for the job. I think I was in the office for a total of seven and a half days. The city just shut down and no one knew what to do. The organization didn't know what to do. I think as employees, I think everyone was in a standstill, but again, the community and our audience demanded responses, they demanded actions. And I think our social media team, I think definitely held the grunt of that work, they're at the battlefields, every single day whether it's delivering good news or tapering and bad news.Max:And so, I think there was a lot of immediate and actions that we took and we really utilize social, I think, to dictate the course of how we would, I don't want to use the word market, but really communicate where we were as an organization, because everything was at a standstill for 30 days. And it was really through that engagement and those backend DMs, those poll surveys, and I think we really found power in the voice of our community and we also understood what it really meant as a brand to show up for your community.Max:So, one of the things that quickly became evident as the city started shutting down was that the majority of our members at Athleta were business owners, female owned businesses, which some of that meant that they own their own studios, yoga studios, gyms studios, and those were the first to be impacted by COVID. And so, how do you as a brand support that community in a way that isn't related to product and I think for Athleta, being under the umbrella of Gap Inc we decided to really create a financial resource for a lot of these female owned businesses, where as a member of the Athleta community, you could apply for a grant or a funding that could really for some moms and for some women could really help keep their business afloat for the foreseeable future, which is where we were at the beginning of COVID.Stephanie:I love that. And did you find out more about who needed that help or what help they needed through social media, like you said, through those DMs?Max:I would say a combination of social media and our retail teams. I think especially working in the Apparel industry, we forget that retail is not dead. And if you have a retail structure that is highly connected to your community, they oftentimes know more about your consumer than you do sitting at HQ. And it's really that share-ability from the boots on the ground, I hate using the word bottom up, but I think that's really the mindset.Max:So, let's [inaudible] this top-down mentality and really about what are you hearing? What are customers saying when they're coming to your door? What's the feedback that you're receiving in store? I think that's really pivotal and I think that was really the feedback that was necessary for us to translate that into actionable insights as I call it.Stephanie:It seems there's still going to be so much work around getting those insights and incentivizing the employees to share that, but now consumers are basically coming to any retail shop expecting the same thing that they can get from online. It's like, yeah, of course I should be able to have this. Of course, I should be able to see inventory, talk to you quickly get what I want, but I see there's that catch up to even just going in different stores around Austin right now and being like, "Oh, this still feels like 2019 right now. What are we doing here?" How do you see that evolving?Max:It's also fascinating too, because you bring that up. Your store experience in Austin will probably be much different than a store experience in San Francisco. And even under the context of COVID, I think that's going to feel a lot more amplified as well in today's industry. I think what that touches on is really what I love to refer to as a decentralized model, where I think what we're witnessing in marketing and in omni-channel experiences and retail experiences is these little pockets, these little hubs of community oriented messaging and team structures.Max:So, a retail store is no longer just a retail store, it's actually a space for you to welcome members of your community, I think it's a space for you to engage with local businesses. That was actually an aspect that I love the most about working at lululemon was just how they really understood, I think the power of community and how a retail store could actually be an extension of that local market or that local demographic. And it didn't have to just be a place for business transactions, it didn't have to be a place just for you to go in and buy stretchy yoga pants as everyone likes to say.Max:For some, it could be a resource. I took a trip down to Key West Florida, of course this was before the pandemic happened. And I wanted to know what yoga studio to go to, what coffee shop I should go to, and the first place I went was to a lululemon store and ask their community members, 'Where do you go to work out? Where do you go to get coffee?" And it's just amazing how I think retail environments have become a source of information for a lot of members of the community. And I think the brands that are adapting to that mindset, I think are the ones that will really in the end come out winning and will be stronger I think in today's industry.Stephanie:I love that, such a good example. How does a company do that though? How does the brand pull a piece of the playbook from lululemon and create that community, do it in a way that people actually want to engage with, they trust it where they'll go and ask advice like where's the best coffee shop and buy from it. You essentially nailed every aspect of what every brand probably wants, but what do they do differently to get all of that?Max:I think it comes down to the original question that you asked me, I think a few minutes ago, which is, I think it's just having that honest conversation as an organization as to what are you most uniquely qualified to give to your audience? And I think for lululemon, again, I'm probably not in a place to speak about this because I wasn't there in its inception, but I can only imagine that when the founder sat down and analyzed that exact question, I think they knew that the power rested in community, so they made a conscious choice to really embed that in the organization's structure, as well as their brand DNA.Max:And I think from that brand values the mission statements evolved and it serves as a filter, as you grow and expand, I think for a brand that maybe is not rooted in community and is wanting to maybe shift into that world, I will continuously say that, I think you need to ask yourself are you in a place that you can authentically play in that ecosphere, because if you can't be authentic then I really don't think you should invest the time. I think you should really, really embrace what makes you unique and what it is that you can deliver to a customer in a unique way.Stephanie:Yep. Yep. I love that. So, earlier you were talking about Instagram is where it's at, it's got all these amazing features that can help a brand learn about their audience, answer all the questions they need. What else are you betting on? What other platforms are you bullish on right now?Max:VR, virtual experiences augmented reality. I am so excited for that future. I think if anything, COVID and remote living and brands having to force themselves, how else can we engage with brands that is interested in ecommerce platform and think have really forced us to reconsider other ways to bring customers along the journey and the creative experience. And I think augmented reality has certainly put us in a place I think of a lot of excitement.Max:My favorite to date has really been the Billie Eilish and the Moment Factory partnership, they created an out of this world, no pun intended experience where they really transported her audience and her fan base into this imaginary world. And the question was really what happens to you when you fall asleep? So, it was really this dream like state and it was just, I think, a beautiful representation of what the future of content can look and feel like. And at the same time, I think it really challenges this archaic notion that digital experiences don't create meaningful connection.Max:Which I actually think having VR and having augmented reality has really challenged that way of thinking, because it can absolutely transport you into a different world. It can absolutely create an emotion and it can also create an action. And I think that universe excites me tremendously, and if I could shift my focus and my attention, I think it would really be in a place where I'm playing day in and day out with that type of environment, for sure.Stephanie:Oh, I love that. This is something I've been looking into more from the crypto side and the cities, same, same though. I was learning all about these digital land sales and getting in there early, they're building this entire world and people go and interact there and do essentially commerce in this world, but to think about it from a brand perspective, how can a brand play in VR because Billie Eilish, I get it concert go somewhere to a different land, I love the idea, but if I'm a brand, what opportunities do you see right now?Max:Well, I always think back to yoga of course, because I worked for one of the best yoga brands in the world, but I think again, not wanting to go back to COVID, but I think COVID really shed light on our inability to go outside, and again, be in studio and being in environments that felt very natural to us. And again, I'm speaking in these terms assuming that you're probably the athletic person who does yoga, but if it's not yoga, it could be you wanting to go to a restaurant or a concert or whatever it is.Max:But in the context of yoga I think there were a lot of studios that were actually introducing this notion of virtual reality in which that even though you couldn't physically be present in the yoga studio, you could absolutely be transported there. And I think, again, it was a way to just create that connection and create that meaning and really bring people into one digital world that really felt physical visually.Max:And I think the brands that understand and harness that power, I think they'll start using that as a mechanism potentially to either create content. So, one way that I could think this coming to life, and actually it was one of the first big projects that I worked on at Reebok. At the time Google and YouTube had just started partnering on VR experiences and we did an entire documentary campaign experience, where we brought audiences basically along the ride for four emerging athletes.Max:And it was really a way again, for you to be transported into the physical spaces in which they train day in and day out. And I think for a customer to have that behind the scenes look, it's really one of a kind. If you can imagine this in an era of a Michael Jordan, to have that unfiltered access to an athlete before or after, or even during experience, I think that's a great place to be in, in terms of VR experiences and building that digital world and that digital infrastructure for at least athletic brands, which is where I operate in.Stephanie:Yeah. I can imagine so many different experiences to leverage [inaudible] not just from shopping, that's just the after effect of bringing in customers from all over the world and at the same place, instant way to build community, meet people. I think that's what COVID taught everyone, is we were in our own little bubbles and we'd gotten to this place where the only time you maybe saw people who didn't live near you, was in work meetings. And then all of a sudden you're like, "Oh, but now I need more community."Stephanie:And now it's actually my work friends I need. And so, starting to broaden that, going into a whole different world and being able to have an experience together, you vet your community and then you can also shop while you're there and maybe even change the experience as well, where it's, try that on for me. Oh, I'd like to see a model showing me this outfit who looks like me, this entire thing of shaping where you're at and be able to control it too.Max:I love that. And I think Warby Parker did that.Stephanie:Oh, did they?Max:Yeah. I think before any other brand caught onto that, the idea of essentially creating a virtual experience in which you could try on the products. And I think that notion that you, and I think you actually said something that gave me goosebumps, that idea that you could in real time see the product on someone that looked and felt like you, I think that's really important as well. And I think that's a shift that we're seeing more and more. And I think if anything, I would give credit to VR for building that and putting that at the forefront of conversations and marketing, for sure.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. We're going to be looking back and be like, why did we just look at, oh, this model is 5'4 and 100 pounds. And me being like, okay, so that's not me. So if I was much taller and bigger, how would it look on me? How would it flow? We're going to look back and be like, "Why did we ever buy things based off of one picture? I want to see how it moves and fits and looks on someone." And I should be able to choose that experience if I'm not going in the store and trying it on every time there should be no return rates from our products.Max:I love it, do you want to work in marketing?Stephanie:Let's do it, I'm down. So many ideas I realized on the show, I'll just give everyone ideas and maybe someone will implement one of them. Every one of a thousand is an okay idea of mine. Super fun. Yeah. I love thinking about that stuff. All right. The last thing I want to touch on was what brands are you watching to keep an eye on the industry? Who's doing a really good job when it comes to branding where you're like, "I keep tabs on them every week to see what they're doing?" Maybe someone you've worked for.Max:Oh my God, that's such a hard question. It's interesting, I think I'm going to go outside of my respected industry. I'm really fascinated by what Spotify and Netflix have done, I think to the industry. I think Netflix has really capitalized on an audience-based as well as on a perpetual habit that I think we as consumers are starting to have more and more of in this digital age, and they've just managed to build this empire that I am so in admiration of, I also love what they're doing as a platform in terms of exposing younger audiences to different types of content with documentaries being at the forefront, I am a huge advocate of documentary.Max:In fact, one of my first experiences was working in post-production for documentaries. And I think I give them so much credit for just having that vision, having that ambition. When I think back from where they were 12 years ago or [inaudible] first heard their name and where they are today being nominated for Oscars and just the amount of insights and data that they have on us as an audience and as a viewership and how they translate that data into building out specific content programs and building out specific platforms on their channel, everyone else is chasing them and I think that was a gift.Max:To me, they're the Kleenex of the, they're probably going to hate hearing that, but they've defined online streaming. The idea and the notion of online streaming did not exist before Netflix came into the picture, and all brands now are chasing them and they want to compete. And I think that's a brand that I go to, I think, as a source of inspiration, which is weird to say, maybe it wasn't what you were hoping to hear.Stephanie:Oh, actually, when you said that I'm like, oh, obviously you're watching Formula 1. You're seeing the brand and the content angle and then you can go to the whole platform play, which also equally is inspiring. We've written entire stories of mission around Netflix and how they basically killed off their entire revenue stream to bet on another big one and inspiring all around. So, I love-Max:I agree. It's thinking big, bold and audacious and just watching the ripple effect happen. And I think they're definitely a brand that I go to inspiration. And another one is Spotify, again, I think the brands that excite me are the brands that understand their customers and they're catering their business decisions based on that understanding. There's no better brand that exposes and showcases that as Spotify, even the types of content and the marketing campaigns that they're putting out there all originally from their customer insights comes from data. And you got to give credit, I think, to a tech company like Spotify, where they're consistently operating in this multi dynamic world.Max:Because, if you can only imagine between licensing music rights and managing talent and branching into podcasts as well as music, it's got to be a living nightmare. Every time they have the opportunity to put a piece of campaign out there, a piece of content it's so powerful and you can see it from a share-ability aspect, from an engagement aspect, people are excited, people are waiting for it. Again, it's so simple their marketing but it's so effective and it's done in such an authentic way. Again, it comes back to that topic that you and I were talking about. It's authentic in nature to who they are as a brand, as well as a business. And I really admire them for that.Stephanie:Yep. Yeah. I love it. Anyone who wants to hear more about Spotify, we had their old CMO on, he's not their CMO now, but Seth, it's a good marketing trends, the podcasts it was really good. I think we did two parts with him and he was epic and you're like, now I know why the company is where it's at now and all of the decisions that were made to get them where they are now. Cool. All right. Well, let's move over to the lightning round. Lightning round is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud, this is where I ask a question and you have a minute or less to answer. Are you ready?Max:Yeah, I'm prepared.Stephanie:Okay. Get amped up. First one. What's up next on your reading list or your podcast queue?Max:Oh, great. Where the Crawdads Sing.Stephanie:Where the crawd... I have not actually heard of this one, I'll have to look at that.Max:I have it right there on my shelf. Yes, I bought it two years ago, It's collected dust, but I've made a commitment to finish it before the end of August. So, that is on my reading list for sure.Stephanie:Wow. Good reads a million votes, 4.8 stars. That's very good one. Cool. All right. If you were to have a podcast or show, TV show, movie, whatever you want it to be, what would it be about, and who would your first episode or guest be?Max:I think I'd have to do a podcast that is centered around people, places and products and how each of those define the course of your existence and how they really shape who you are as a human. And I feel anyone could speak or relate to any one of those elements and [inaudible].Stephanie:I like that. Who should be the sponsor for that? You already probably have a couple in mind.Max:I don't know, I've actually never been asked as a question. I don't know, maybe something will originate here.Stephanie:Yeah. There you go. Here comes the show, anyone who wants to sponsor it, Max is ready for you. What is the biggest disruption coming to ecommerce over the next year?Max:Hands down, virtual experiences.Stephanie:Love it. We already know your love for VR, so that makes sense. Next one, what is the nicest thing anyone's ever done for you?Max:I've had a lot. I was working at Reebok, I had a really tough day, it was the first time I cried in a bathroom. You know when you just want to hide your tears, you go to-Stephanie:I've been there, corporate life.Max:And I stumbled across someone who worked across from me and she asked me what was wrong. And I said, "Nothing everything will be okay," as we usually do. And the next day when I showed up, she bought me daisies, which she knew were my favorite. And she had a little bouquet of daisies there, and with a little note, and I had only interacted with this person once. And I thought it was just such a genuine kind gesture, and I've carried that moment since.Stephanie:I love that. That shows how such little things can literally impact someone's entire life. And this person listening, I hope they're out there so they can realize well-Max:[inaudible] bad-ass now, so you snagged a good one.Stephanie:I love that. That was great. All right, Maxwell, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all your brand knowledge, where can people find out more about you and maybe even hire you?Max:So, they could visit me at maxsummit.com. Yes, that's right. I've basically bought out everything that has my name on it.Stephanie:That's a good brand.Max:It was my little own brand marketing.Stephanie:Love it.Max:Yes, and my website you can visit at maxsummit.com. I'm also on LinkedIn again, Max Summit you can always find me. If you Google Max Summit, I'm probably Max Summit, Instagram, Max Summit LinkedIn, Max Summit Twitter, Max Summit at Yahoo, Max Summit at Gmail.Stephanie:There you go, Myspace, all the things.Max:Yeah. I'm Max Summit everything, but I love connecting with people, I love building stories. Even for virtual connects or coffee, it doesn't have to be business related, I'm open and I'm here.Stephanie:I love it. Thanks so much.Max:Thank you.

MAX: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today, I'm delighted and honoured to welcome the VP of talent acquisition at Lowe's companies, one of the largest retailers in the world, certainly in the US but also big enough that we can say it's a worldwide leader and DIY. DIY equipment is how I would describe it as an outsider.ROBERT: Yeah all home improvement but at this point it's anything for your home.MAX: Anything for your home, that's ambitious. So I didn't yet introduce you, Robert. It's RobertDaugherty, VP of TA for Lowe's, thanks for coming on Robert.ROBERT: Happy to be here MAX. Thanks for having me.MAX: Pleasure. Before we go into the Lowe's story, you've been there for a year and a half now so it must have been an unprecedented time.ROBERT: Yes it is.MAX: Tell us how you ended up in the field of high volume recruitments. I suppose that all began back a long time ago.ROBERT: Yeah a long time ago. My hair was much darker at the time compared to the greys and the bit of weathering.MAX: All those candidates have depigmented your hair.ROBERT: Yes, that's right. So yeah I've been recruiting now for almost 25 years and I've yet to meet somebody in recruiting that intentionally went into recruiting right so I got my degree in finance and statistics. Started out in commercial banking for about eight months and realised I didn't like it, and met a guy and I'm like what do you do?, he said I am a headhunter, like what the heck's a headhunter, and ended up having lunch with the partner of the small boutique firm, and I've been in it ever since, moved over to the corporate side a little after 911 back in 2001, and here I am still surviving in this race of TA.MAX: So after you jumped into recruitments I saw stints in the logistics space, health care, then the insurance base, and then more recently at American Airlines. I guess you jumped ship at a good time, American Airlines. You left just before the crisis. And, the bulk of the hiring there at American Airlines must have been a cabin crew?ROBERT: Yeah it was, I had a little bit of everything. I wish I could say I was smart enough to have the insight or foresight to leave American Airlines in January and jump over to Lowe's but it was definitely some blind luck. But yeah at American Airlines, we had what I thought at the time was high volume with about 15,000 hires a year, both from cabin crew but certainly gate agents, our men and women that were on the ramp. So it was, it was across the board, but I truly found out what high volume was when I made that switch to Lowe's about a little less than a year and a half ago.MAX: And American Airlines business has been around for such a long time, good year or bad year, the volumes don't fluctuate that much right.ROBERT: Correct, yeah they went through a down phase obviously after 911 and then about almost 13 years before they started hiring again. And one of the things about my background is, I've somehow fallen into a niche that I tend to love which is going into transformational projects where it's either building something from scratch or Turner out. If somebody wanted me to go somewhere, it was like hey,everything's perfect to steer the ship straight, definitely wouldn't be the right role for me because I'd be pulling levers and breaking stuff so going into somewhere where things are broken or the rebuilding and that's why it wasn't they hadn't hired really since 911 until the merger with US Airways and then it was okay full steam ahead with two different RPOs, three different applicant tracking systems, none of them had been really touched in probably eight or nine years, no processes. So it was a fun kind of rebuildingthat organisation or you know post merger.MAX: And the RPOs are probably gonna have a good year in 2021 as people are rebuilding as well. But,they can be a symptom of an organisation that has kind of given up on its core duties.ROBERT: Yep, absolutely. Yeah, I think RPOs really play a strength right as anytime you've got that seasonality to your business, where you've got those fluctuations of kind of busy season and non busy season to where you can really be able to scale up, scale down. I think that's really critical to have that at least as a strategy in your back pocket versus kind of that static organisation that you're kind of tied to,where you're either almost always under worked or overworked and you very rarely get it perfectly right.MAX: So you were talking about the seasonality of hiring and I suppose at Lowe's you have holiday season, and maybe the back to school.ROBERT: Yeah. Actually our busiest season is the spring. So, we're recording this one day afterMemorial Day weekend is our Super Bowl. So, we think about all the honey-do lists spring cleaning, all the people have been cramped up all winter and want to get out and start doing their projects, focused on their yards flowers, plants, this is the busiest time of year for us so we've been in in full hiring mode really since the end of January.MAX: And I think correct me if I'm wrong that your space has also had a record breaking year where everybody's home and spending more time at home and therefore, investing with the money they have into their home.ROBERT: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, so once COVID hit really back in, in March of 2020 and everythingstarted to shut down, right, those honey-do lists grew for a lot of people. Alright, it's time to repaint this room, all these little projects just to keep people busy, and Lowe's as a recognised an essential employer, our business took off. So we started seeing sales go through the roof, we had to hire a lot of people, and we hired 280,000 external people in 2020. So, in the first four months this year we're already over 120,000. So, our fiscal year starts February, but yeah about 120,000 our first four months, so we were well on pace to continue to hire a lot of people to make sure we can take care of our customers.MAX: Okay, well, you must have a lucky star to have moved into such a high growth. I mean I don't know if it's a lucky star or not. You said you'd like to change so I suppose that kind of stress to the organisation should keep you entertained.ROBERT: Definitely, yeah. There's always new problems to solve every day right and and going from 2020 was so interesting because nobody obviously planned for that as you start going into the pandemic and the availability of workers was a lot higher. Now fast forward to 2021 and between stimulus,enhanced unemployment, and all of these companies the demand for hourly workers. I don't know if it's ever been higher, right, and the supply has gotten a lot lower. So as your demand starts to really outpace that supply, it really creates some interesting dynamics around what companies are doing, how they're trying to attract candidates, focused on some of those, employee value propositions, leveraging dollar sign on bonuses. I mean there was a fast food company, I saw a sign the other day that it's basically come work here, we'll give you a free iPhone. So, I think everybody threw in there and everything but the kitchen sink, trying to entice workers to come up to them.MAX: Okay, so that's interesting: the Battle of giants, we got the Burger King, McDonald's, Lowe's,Amazon, all fighting for that hourly worker. And so, in this war for talent. How do you stake your claim and what was the EVP that Lowe's is going to try to get ahead of the game, particularly I'm wondering, I mean I don't know if you can expand on demographics but I suppose you have a few candidate personasthat you're working around.ROBERT: We do, yeah. And having been here for just over a year brought in the leader of talentattraction at the beginning of this year who were starting to work on really building out what that EVP looks like, building out those different personas. So most of it we haven't quite rolled out yet, but we're starting to get a better idea of what we're looking for, or what makes successful workers and as I really start to think about what differentiates us, so much of it is really evolving around I think career opportunities. So we don't have a lot of limitations as it relates to, you have to be in a certain role, you have to be here for six months or here for a year. And so many of our most senior leaders started their careers as a retail associate, whether it be a cashier or a seasonal worker. We have people in our C-suite, right, or at our EVP levels or SVPs. Yeah they didn't go to college, they grew up in retail learning the operation, built strong leadership skills, and that's really valued, so I think as we really started to look at things like, bachelor's degree and master's degree and it's really challenging to know if that is something somebody truly needs or not. And if I've got somebody who's a good worker who's motivated,who can learn, how do we develop them, train them to figure out where they want to go in their career.MAX: Okay, so have you managed to do away with the resume entirely for some of these positions?ROBERT: Not yet. We're working towards it so it is kind of a year into this transformation and really starting to get to the point we're starting to implement technology and look at that TA tech stack. We went through an HR transformation at least with moving to our core HR system, 2019, but we didn't touch any of the TA tech. So right now we're in the process of implementing an AI solution. We just finished an RFP for ATS, CRM. So we'll be continuing to look at those but everything is a plan right now by summer fall of 2022. Full new tech stack and then continue to build out from there but Lowe's has been great. We really value talent and to go and get a very large multimillion dollar investment from our leaders to go and really address the TA technology of moving us into modern day is really important. So they've been open to ideas and I think going through that moving past the resume will be something thatwe've got on our radar in the future.MAX: Yeah, so the traditional providers of talents and resumes, which are Indeed and ZipRecruiter perhaps and then of course your employee referral programme which I'm sure takes the lion's share, you don't have to confirm that. I imagine it's typically like 25-30% of hires.ROBERT: Yeah, well so as of today we don't have an employee referral programme, so we don't have we don't have technology that can track it, so it was starting a little bit bare bones with some of the stuff that we're walking into.MAX: It was going to be 100,000 hires.ROBERT: Yeah it was a lot of grind I will tell you, so we did 280,000 hires with certainly not the greatest processes, we've got some opportunities that relate to a candidate experience for sure. And that's where moving down this path of being more mobile based, be more from an AI candidate engagement, just being more focused on what that experience looks like. We had three and a half million applicants last year, every one of those were a customer of ours, and on the vast majority of them we probably did a pretty poor job of being able to stay in contact with them. Just because of some of the limitations we had technology wise and that was something we walked in right away and said like we gotta go fix this.MAX: So three million plus candidates, that sounds expensive but I suppose it doesn't have to be if you've managed to activate all your stores as sourcing channels, is that where a bulk of the applications were still coming through, like, people coming in and applying at the store?ROBERT: Yeah, when we started to look, we just had our big national hiring day about three weeks ago, and through that I think we ended up with about a little over 20,000 hires, the two biggest drivers from a source, Social was number one, and In-store signage was number two, right, so being able to make sure if people are shopping right they see the now hiring banners, we've we've got some things around the stores, there's still a lot more opportunity to get more consistent with that branding message but so much of it is just, people will see that and be like, oh, my son or daughter's coming out from college, they're i'm looking for a job or somebody who's retired and it's like, I'd like to pick up some hours on the weekend. I've always been interested in tools or gardening, whatever it is. And I think just having them see the signs and stores is really important.MAX: And has the battle for the talent in the younger generation shifted the messaging, a little bit towards new. Are there other new demands in terms of employee value proposition from younger generations. You've never had to deal with these in your career, you were doing retail, maybe a long time ago. No? Not even this time? So this is a new audience for you?ROBERT: Yeah. This was my first retail gig, you got it.MAX: Yeah, and so, are you seeing some shifts and expectations from the hour resegment in particular,are their expectations higher or lower than 10 years ago?ROBERT: Yeah I think one of the big differences especially in retailers right. We've got four different generations in the workplace right now, right from Baby Boomers to Gen X, millennials, Gen Z, Gen Y, I don't know what's coming next right, whatever that next wave is behind them. And, because at a company our size right I do believe there's something for everybody right. There are selling points for people who are retired and want to pick something else up and for the person who's it's their first job to come work, seasonal employees. So you know how you start to market and target specific audiences,right.MAX: And that's where the concept of personas come in.ROBERT: Yeah, you got it. Where do they hang out?MAX: So, maybe a good chunk of your hires will end up being people in their 40s, or 50s, who are looking for something a little bit more permanent.ROBERT: Yeah it's such a mix. We've got such a diversity not only from a demographic but when you just look at I think who we are, how we serve our communities, Lowe's has always been very big in serving our communities. Some of the best stories that I hear about are, when there's hurricanes right and what we call the 'blue bucket brigade' and the people who will drive for hours and hours and hours to go be on site to help these people that have literally just have their worlds torn apart and to help rebuild, to provide shelter, water, whatever that looks like, I'm amazed by it. And, it really just starts to look across from generations demographics, it's really, I think, a unique place where we value diversity and inclusion. But really that focus on belonging, and trying to find that larger purpose of somebody who wants to just come, like we talked about pickup jobs, but I think really one of the areas for us from a focus on is getting people to understand, you don't have to know about home improvement to come work at Lowe's, right, you don't have to know different kind of drills, you don't have to know about concrete ordrywall, you just have to want to come in and take care of people and work for what we're trying to build is the greatest retail company in the world. That's what our goal is, it's making sure that we provide right.Good talent is good talent, I can train you with product knowledge, it's harder to train you to seek out a customer because you want to help.MAX: On things like seeking out customers' empathy, listening skills. How much of that do you think can be automated in the screening process and how much of that has to remain with a live recruiter interview?ROBERT: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's one right. I know there's several assessment companies out there they're trying to figure that out, whether that be around how their facial recognition as they answer questions and I can tell you at least as of right now our legal department, we're pretty conservative still as much as I want to sometimes be on the bleeding edge or Trailblazer sometimes they want to let somebody else kind of figure that out first, at least as it comes down to some of those things that are a little bit harder to validate. But I think for myself if you just start looking from a science and technology perspective on where things are going, the more that I can bring an objection into the interview process, the better right. We've got 1730 stores, in between each store there's probably fivepeople who are decision makers, between store managers and assistant store managers, so that's quick math right, 8500 probably different interview styles and different questions that can be asked and how they assess so if I can get down to the point where I'm leveraging technology and science to start to say hey, here are the characteristics, here are the behaviours, these are the people we should at least be talking to first. I think that really starts to get things a lot more consistent because if you think of companies, I always use Starbucks as an example, hopefully I can use a company as it doesn't matter where you go, you have the same experiences as a customer, right. So, whether you go to one here in North Carolina, or I go to a Starbucks here in Hong Kong where you're at, for the most part it's the same experience right. You've got the barista, they're gonna ask you what your order is, take your name, you step to the side, wait for your name to be called etc.MAX: I finish my coffee and I walk out of the store. I get nervous and jittery, I start calling people, way too fast, same spirit.ROBERT: Exactly. Yeah, so how do we kind of do the same thing where I can get that repeatable process because I'm hiring the same type of people with the same expectations so it doesn't matter what mode you go into, you're gonna get great service, and be able to find what you need.MAX: So you didn't quite answer my question on screening for empathy or listening skills, customer centricity, what I gathered from your answer is that you're trying to do a first level filter, but afterwards you still need those 8500 decision makers to be involved and to be included.ROBERT: Yeah, as of today, I would say, yes. So we're trying to actually centralise at least that high volume recruiting of really starting to take that off of the hiring manager's responsibility. So having a centralised team that's making those hiring decisions internal within TA to bring that consistency. And I think one of the big benefits from the business is, it gives those 8500 people time back to go take care of our customers, take care of our associates, and to focus on running the business, and let us take some of those hirings. So I'm anxious, I'm looking forward to at some point being able to leverage some of the science to focus on empathy and some of those things but I think as of today, having a good well educated talented recruiter can probably pull that out a little bit safer and better.MAX: Yeah, and then you've got it, yeah. I am always wondering how the hiring managers at the store, some location managers would resent being told who to hire, of course, and there could be some pushback there. But, ultimately it's a decision that a company would have to make based on output.ROBERT: Yeah that's exactly right, but some of them are like, heck yeah, take it, you go do it, I'll focus on the other stuff. And then others don't want to give that up but it all comes down to being able to have the right data and then being able to tell the story, right. To be able to say and do it in a way that even though I would like to say at least better than well into the high 90% that my team can do it better because this is what they're trained to do. There's always going to be some that think they can do it better.MAX: And maybe they are right in some cases.ROBERT: Yeah, they're probably great at it but to what level right, and is there time more valuable spent on doing other things. And when you look at a company our size, right you just kind of have to go off the economies and scale and say okay hit 95% of the time this is going to be a better situation and we'll live with the other 5% based off of what we're doing or what we're getting.MAX: Yeah, the rate of coverage of your stores has such a big impact on sales right.ROBERT: Absolutely.MAX: It's not negotiable. It's like you have the ultimate power to say, now we've got to fill this position atall costs, or at very high cost if necessary.ROBERT: Yeah, I can tell you exactly how much every time we've got openings, what that cost our store in sales.MAX: Okay, that's huge. So one question that I love to ask, and we'll make the last one Robert, is a question around hiring mistakes, and if you could go back in time, travel through your 25 plus years of recruitment history, and think back about a regretful hire that you made directly for yourself, for your team, or potentially for one of your stakeholders. What was the mistake there and what did you learn from it?ROBERT: Yeah, there's two that come to mind. I think one of my first ones and this was, I would say probably earlier in my career. And I went through and I wanted to go one direction from a hiring perspective, my boss thought I should go in another, I followed his path instead of trusting my gut and it turned out poorly, so I'd bring that one up because that was one of the most painful so there's a little bit of a lesson of trusting your gut, going in right if especially if it's something you think you do well.MAX: Unanimous decision on recruiting is something that I think is generally a good practice like if there's five people who interviewed somebody and one person doesn't like him or her. Usually that should be the end of the debate but it rarely is.ROBERT: True, very true. Well, and again sometimes it's hard to get, if you and I and three other people trying to figure out where we're going to go grab lunch, it's tough to get consensus on where you're going to go eat so I think that was one of the learning experiences for me is listen to all the feedback but still kind of trust my gut. And the other one was just not digging hard enough into some questions right, the person was incredibly engaging, it was a fun conversate like this is the type person I'd love to go out, let's go to happy hour sometime or you know just a great engaging person, and at that time in my career justdidn't have probably enough experience on my side to be able to really dig into, okay can this person really do the job that I need them to do, really likeable but can they actually do the execution piece of what I need to, and yeah, turns out it didn't. So we definitely can't get them all right.MAX: Right, and if anybody's listening and wondering, how do I remove the location manager from carrying the load of course these kinds of anecdotes will come back to support the case that everybody can make mistakes, everybody can hire someone based on, and it's funny how your two examples are like, one is where you were with your gut and the other one you didn't go with your gut and your gut was right, half the time.ROBERT: That's right, that's right.MAX: So, yeah, we'll have to figure out maybe we'll do a special show or conference around the role of the gut.ROBERT: That's right.MAX: And we'll invite some gut specialists, and so on. Well, Robert it has been great to get to hear your success stories at Lowe's, and in a time when a lot of people are still waiting for the lockdowns to be lifted and for retail to come back, wonderful success story for your organization over the last year, which will get people excited for other industries, perhaps what's to come over the rest of the year. Thanksagain for joining.ROBERT: I appreciate it Max. Thanks so much.

Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. Today I'd like to welcome on the show, Manjuri Sinha. Manjuri is the Head of Talent Acquisition for Technology for the OLX Group. Thanks for joining Manjuri. Manjuri: Happy to be here. Max: Manjuri is dialing in from Berlin. One of my favorite cities in the world.And over the last few years, Berlin has become a tech hub, certainly in the startup space. But I think also beyond which is how the OLX group ended up setting up shop in Berlin. You were telling me?Manjuri: Absolutely max. So I think this was pretty much the reason, the talent market.So  let me also give a little bit of context on what OLX is. We are a classified platform my lovely friends  in Germany, you can, maybe relate to it with EBA, Klein and Diagon. That's something for the emerging market. So classifieds for a resale of cars, a resale of anything. If you talk to someone in Poland they literally tell you that from their phone to their cupboards, to their cars, to the apartments they have sold or purchased on OLX platforms.Of course we have different brands that front-end us but  that's why exist. Yeah, across countries and being in Berlin is definitely due to the tech talent market that we have. And Berlin is our OLX Europe's tech hub. And in terms of usage we pretty much you know, have more than 20 brands.Also we have around 300 million active users. As well as you see, the number of people is 10,000+ a strong employee sprint. And of course, we're part of the overall process group. Which is one of the biggest investment companies in the world Max: I imagine that building marketplaces in all of these emerging markets means you need to have teams everywhere, all around the globe, right.And that you want to have designers, product managers, marketers. Living in each of the markets you serve is that part of your remit or you're purely focused on the tech, which is more centralized perhaps?Manjuri: Yeah. So  my remit is product, data, and technology.So yes. All that you mentioned actually falls in that bucket. So designers, UX, researchers technology. When I say technology it's engineering. And data is everything to do with data science data analytics, as well as data engineering. So this is the world, and this is the gamut. Of course, we also have the offline part of the business where we have, you know, car inspectors and people who really look at when you do the, you know, inspection of a car before it's resold, et cetera, et cetera. So that's another world, warehouses, car inspectors, et cetera. So yes, and we do need to have presence in our markets, for sure. So even our tech hubs are distributed accordingly, Max. We have a huge presence in Poland, in Portugal, which are bigger markets as well.Now we have stepped up on our building up of a tech hub in Romania and Ukraine. That's what we are doing at the moment. Super busy. India is a major tech hub in the Northern part of the country. We have a home office as well. And then we have Latin America where we have tech teams based in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.Max: Do you find that hiring managers have moved past  the reflex, that habit of associating a job with a location and that now it's you know, they're not thinking that way or I mean, how fast are we moving in the other direction where everybody's remote and you can hire anywhere.Is it moving fast and as fast as you'd like? Or would you actually, maybe you prefer to go back to a localized hubs?  What's your position on this hire anywhere or hirer somewhere? Manjuri: I would still say so there were two parts to your question, Max. One is how do we see hiring managers actually reacting to this?I think for hiring managers, they need that seat to be filled. That's one of the basic you know, really important things for them. Yes,  they do feel that there should be some proximity to their teams. However, the understanding with most technology teams that we are hearing is either we go remote first.That means that you don't have a partial thing, that you have 10 people sitting in the same room and a meeting room. And you have another 10 people sitting in different blocks because that's what is not good for the culture. So if you have a remote first team, everybody should be remote. And if you come together for a workshop, then you commute for that workshop.But you shouldn't be divided half and half. The second aspect that you asked about hiring anywhere, hiring anywhere is a wish and a luxury because what we have not been able to kind of crack, and I think it's the same with all organizations is insurance, taxation, and so on and so forth. So we do stay close to our hubs.We do hire remote in Poland. We hire remote in Romania. We hire remote in Portugal, but because we have hubs in those countries, we can. You know, basis that paperwork, et cetera. So I think that's one of the challenges for sure. We see the demands. I mean, I was just looking at a report just yesterday from this organization called Talent International and they were talking about this, I think the second, most important point that all of their survey respondents talked about in changing jobs, what will they consider? Is flexibility.And this flexibility is around whether they can work remote, whether they can work from home or they can work from anywhere. So this will become, this will come from the pandemic push. And I think the second aspect will be the candidates demanding this also going forward, especially for the tech market, because that's a candidate driven market.So what we would have to look at flexibility and hybrid ways of working that is definitely here to stay. You might have organizations saying, Hey, you know, it's three days. Come to office two days, work from home. I heard yesterday, Revolut has given a two months option to all employees saying that two months in a year, you can work from anywhere.So every company is working different working out different ways of keeping their folks happy and keeping their ways of working flexible. And that's the way to go. That's what we will see in the future.Max: It's moving slower than I anticipated really. I mean, we've been working from anywhere  for pre-crisis and I thought that by now everybody would be this is it. I love it. Yeah, I guess people. With this new cycle are also a little bit tired, and we would like to just kind of turn the page and that means going, the office, they'll do it. I found myself actually reminiscing and thinking, wow, I really miss commuting. You know, cause commuting was the time when I would switch off from one world to the next.But I've learned how to commute while staying indoors. Manjuri: Absolutely. You made a very, very correct point, right? We are not what is happening right now. Right. You know, I'm sitting at my living room and at my dining table, you see a fake background behind me, but this is where I am. This is not working from home.So this is the pandemic push of making me stay at home. Right. That's a very different thing. I don't get to meet those 10 friends that I would love to for the after-work drinks. But within the real world, post pandemic world, working from home  will be different. That's what I can relate to when I was working with Accenture way back.We used to work from home a lot because of the model. You know, I had colleagues distributed all across the world. So if I had to commute to office, which would be two hours in a car in India, I would rather work from home. And it would suffice because everybody was kind of, you know, co located in different countries, et cetera, et cetera.But that was working from home. You would work through the day and yet meet your colleagues may be for after work drinks. So the socializing is there. Also in setups where you have children, your children are going to the kindergartens, the children are going to school. So they're not all at home. This situation is not working from home.So it's a way different situation that we're in. And a lot of that increase as you pointed out. Max: Well, how is it different? It's just because it's forced whereas before it felt like an option,Manjuri: No, because you had a human interaction. And what I crave at the moment is, you know, kind of going back to the office and having those conversations while filling my coffee mug, et cetera.Because also, because I don't have other human interactions right. Based on the rule, I can only meet one person, another household, et cetera. So I'm not having those social interactions and yeah, that's where it's a little different. Max: Yeah. I imagined that part of the job that we were talking about, which is influencing the job description, influencing the job, which is an expansion of the traditional job of recruiters and talent acquisition.Where traditionally you would think the hiring manager describes bullet point by bullet point what they want, all the keywords and off you go that's your spec sheet. She'd go to work, come back to me when you've got 10 resumes or 20 or a hundred. And it's a bit of a one-sided dialogue. And you're trying to move it in the other way.You're trying to say, we're going to change the type of profiles that we're hiring. We're gonna change where we're sourcing them from. That job, that part of the work has become much harder now that you can't force somebody into a coffee break or a longer conversation.Manjuri: Absolutely. I mean, I think the rapport building especially, I mean if I, again, take an example here for myself, I joined OLX in 2019, December four months is when I got to literally travel around the world and meet my team as well as meet my stakeholders. But post that everything is on zoom.Everything is on you know, calls, et cetera. So the rapport building you don't have that. But anyways, when I'm on video, there is a bit of conscious feeling and so on and so forth. But you have to work with it and make do with it. It is what it is and that's okay. That's a challenge for sure.The influencing part and building that relationship, building that trust takes a bit more time than it would in a face-to-face communication.Max: It takes a bit more time. Okay. And can you tell me more about the I'm not going to say the mistakes, but the inherent bias that you've managed to eliminate in some of those job descriptions or some of those job specifications.How have you influenced you and your team have influenced the direction for OLX where they were going to hire a certain type of people and you were able  to change their perception. Can you walk us through an example and some tools that you use? Manjuri: Yeah, absolutely.Max, I think  that's a very good question. And it is an extension of what I was saying, right. It's typical to build those relationships. And that's where data helps you to make your story along with validating it with data that really helps you. And that's the example that I like to take.So it is definitely a collective drive. And for OLX we see hiring as a problem for everybody. So it's an ownership for everyone. So I'm partnering with my engineering, leadership person, it's a similar ownership that we have. So that's one, the collaboration is very important.Second, I think the things that I've learned through my experience, and this is not just OLX. Many a times in a TA function, we take the plans as is. We are, you know, the person we are the team that comes after the workforce planning activity happens. So you take a whole load of roles and saying that, okay, these 200, 300, depending on the organization, or maybe 700,000 people have to be hired by so-and-so date in these locations.And then you have to chase something which has been planned without your consent, which has been planned without your inputs, et cetera, et cetera. This is one of the biggest mistakes. Most TA professionals and TA teams also make. Also not saying no, or also not going back and saying that, okay, this is maybe something that we need to re-look at.An example would be we did have a situation where we were kind of struggling to hire talented folks in Lisbon onsite and this where we sat down. First of all, we looked at LinkedIn insights. We looked at what there was definitely, you know, when you're hiring you start getting a hunch.As a recruiter you hear from candidates, how the market looking like, et cetera. And numbers that we wanted to hire. We needed people coming from really good product companies as well. And of course, if I'm sitting in the Berlin markets, it's a very different scene, but the Lisbon market is still maturing and getting there.You have a lot of services companies, but the product companies are yet to mature with their seniority, et cetera. So yeah, we couldn't really relocate a lot of people, but we did have to hire and so on and so forth. So we got the data. What does the market say? How has the market responded in the last two, three years?We looked at other reports from local providers, which also talked about the salary increases, which are, you know, on the lines of 18%, 25% and 35% Max: in Portugal?Manjuri: In Portugal for certain. It's a very, very hot destination. Manjuri: It is. It is. It's absolutely. I saw a similar trend when we had gone and with our Zalando office in Lisbon and had to actually close it down after some time.So  that was there. Okay. I can talk about handshakes and talk about experience and so on and so forth. So we collected all the data and say that this is what the data tells us, and it actually tells us that there's excellent talent sitting in Porto. There is talent sitting in Puembra. If we can go remote in Portugal, we can hire all these people.We can bring them into the pipeline. We can see a bigger pool of talent and we can still hire in Portugal. And this is the discussion that we have with our engineering leadership team. And they were also very upbeat because they actually saw the data. This was not the time when we were talking about our hunches and experiences.We have actually showing data that if we are looking only at Lisbon, this is a talent pool. This is already what we've sourced. So what next? Right. And then we also talked about, okay, let's look at the other part. One is remote. Second is let's start hiring trainees and grow with them from there.We don't have a lot of product companies, et cetera. Max: And you come from the BPO sector, Manjuri.You also have that background where you've seen this industry, which went from tier one cities to tier two cities, to tier three cities and now anywhere applied for let's say the more high volume environments.And now you're, you're saying especially with this remote work or work from home situation. That flexibility that is now global. Everybody should take another look at those second and third tier cities, even if you're hiring for more professional level hires more experienced hires. Manjuri: Absolutely. There's definite potential.  There are a lot of you know, people that we've kind of maybe overlooked previously with the talent and  this, and this also helps us Max, in increasing diversity.  We've seen situations where everything goes. I mean, it definitely goes beyond binary gender, but if I just take example of binary gender as well, we've seen situations where women don't move a lot, right.Because they have responsibilities and  they would rather move countries for their spouse, et cetera. Now, if we say that, hey, move your life from Porto to Lisbon. That might be tough. But if we tell her that. You can stay in Porto and  work for us, remote.  I mean, that's one of the best things again.So even your diversity aspect, how you can make your pipeline diverse that also gets pushed. If we can look at more markets tier one, tier two, I mean  those steps, right? That's it. I know where this is coming from. It's mostly how we do in India. Look at tier one, tier two, tier three and everything.Max: Yeah. You don't want to use that language in Portugal. You're going to start a civil warManjuri: And I know you can relate to that. But yeah, we used to have, even back in the days with the emphasis with the BPO sector, our voice processes would be front-ended from tier one cities, but our Non-West processes  ere also supported. We used to have a lot of people moving in from different cities.They're in my roster and coming and really changing, you know, cities, et cetera. So. Max: Yeah. In a way, you know, if you're hiring for a sales job or voice job you know, in the customer care world, you want to have that hungry young person that moves to the big city. But if you're hiring someone technical who works on more long tasks and can work in isolation, maybe that person is less likely to move out of the, you know that birthplace, or like you said some demographics or could also be less mobile than others.Manjuri: Yeah, absolutely. Max: Yeah. So I think they've given me and probably anyone who's listening, some ideas on let's look a little bit broader into those cities we haven't looked at for a while. So that's a really great takeaway.  One question that I like to ask  is you Manjuri, to go back to a hiring mistake that you made for your team or for your customers.And tell us what you've learned from it.Manjuri: I've made so I would say I. This is actually for my own team. A couple of years ago, I did make a hiring mistake. I would say I was about to make a hiring mistake, and I kept on doing that by not hiring certain people.So I had this, you know, this was bias for a very long time. I had to nurture this bias of, Hey, you have to, you know, I'll also, maybe it was conscious, unconscious, personal bias because I had done a lot, strived a lot to get my MBA, et cetera. So when I was looking to hire for a particular role for my team, I was looking at the qualifications.I was looking at the degrees that the person had accomplished and so and so forth. And I was actually prioritizing candidates in that pipeline who came with an MBA degree. You came with a higher degree of masters, et cetera.  And I was overlooking certain people. Whereas when I came back and realized that, okay, I've interviewed maybe more than 24 people, but somehow they don't, on the functional side, still didn't come close to what we were looking at. And finally, we were slightly about to make a mistake and I was about to make a mistake and maybe hiring someone. I don't know whether that would have been a mistake, but then I looked into my own team, existing team, and then I saw people who were, necessarily did not have those degrees, but they were exceptional performers.They were exceptional team players. They were people who would go beyond. They were people, like you said, they were hungry to learn. And then I started scaling back then I looked at okay, the resumes that had not been selected, shortlisted, maybe those are the resumes that I would pick up. And then the person that I hired, she was amazing and that was a learning for me. And I also took that learning after that, even in my conversations with hiring managers, that let's not reduce our talent pool by putting four or five degrees requirements and qualifications, because that doesn't always indicate that  this person will be the highest performer in the team.Max: Yeah.Manjuri: That's definitely a learning  that I've had. Max: And there's two lessons there, right? One with  the inflation of the requirements. And the second one, look within the team and you were able  to create some internal mobility. EManjuri: Exactly. That's definitely max for short.Max: Great. And well it's been a pleasure. I have tons of more questions, but we'll do it another time and jury.  Thanks for coming on the podcast. Manjuri: Thank you. Thank you so much, Max. I really enjoyed this.Max: That was Manjuri Sinha from, OLX reminding us that if you don't have to come into the office every day, If socializing with your teammates can be summed up to gathering to once a week or so once a month, perhaps it's time to expand the radius of your search and to go look outside of those cities where your offices are and start looking at commuting times that are two, three hours long because that's just a once in a week or once in a month. Okay. Hope you enjoyed the interview. I certainly did. And I invite you to follow us for more and share with friends.

Max: Hello. Welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome Bob Mather, who is a private investigator, as well as the founder and CEO of one of the leading. Background checking company, Pre-Employ, Bob, welcome to the show. Bob: Hey Max, how's it going?Max: Going strong going strong. We in the introduction introduced you as a private investigator. Is this how you stumbled into the world of technology? With long rain coats and you know, stalking people in their private lives. Bob: Wow. You have really just painted quite a picture.No, but close. Even though at one time, I didn't have a rank though. I did have one of those coats. It was probably 20 years ago. I started out my career specializing in embezzlement for retailers. So I would be the guy in the company that they would hire when they were missing $10,000, $20,000, whatever.And then  I would bring in a forensic team or a surveillance team and would try to put the pieces of the puzzle together and find out who was embezzling. And then I would also help. Yeah. I would help with the prosecutions. If there were criminal charges, advise them my opinion on what they should do and how they should do it.And then also work with civil restitution recovery. Max: Wow. That's great. This is the great foundation, right? Because you have seen the crimes committed and with your own eyes, so you can really empathize with your customers. Bob: Yeah, well, yeah, I've done thousands of interrogations for the specific embezzlement type cases. I also work with employers when it comes to workplace investigations and always have whether it be discrimination of sexual harassment other types of things, my team and I will come in and put the pieces together and show what really has happened with all of the emotion out of it.But when I first started doing this was in the early nineties and background checks really weren't a thing then, and back in the nineties and you know, there wasn't even an internet. Really, the internet had just started. We had Netscape. Right. We had this world of background checks that was done, when we did do a background check, it was very expensive and it was done by paper.And you might call the local sheriff or even try to get you could walk into a courthouse. You couldn't, there was no technology then. And hiring. If you wanted to hire someone you needed a background check on them. It could take a month. it just was the way it was, had been done forever, but with technology and I was an early adopter in technology, you know we started doing background checks.What happened was I was doing embezzlement investigations. And in one region of the United States, I caught, I investigated, prosecuted, and put a person in jail that was stealing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. About a year or so later, another company called me and said, hey, We're losing thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.And I said, well, okay, I can schedule to be down there. I'll start the investigation, but can you send me your employee list? Let's see who's working there now. I'd like to see. And there was on the employee list they sent, there was the same guy.And I said, well, you know, If they only would have known, you know 400 miles away, he just got out of jail.Max: you know, all the great embezzlement guys that should be working for you.Bob: Yeah, no, no. When you work that type of work, the only embezzlement guys and girls, I know are the unlucky ones or the ones that are not that smart. The good ones I've never met. Max: I was just thinking, yeah maybe there's a limit, right? If you embezzle $500, you never get caught.If you're inbezzlel, half a million, obviously you're the venture you'll get caught pretty soon. Maybe there's a sweet spot there. I don't know. Bob: I think it's like playing blackjack or gambling. If you quit, you might get away with it. But the longer you play, the odds are against you. Max: Okay, great.Well I suppose yeah, millions of dollars are being saved now by the retail sector because of providers such as yourself.  Have you been able to quantify that you know, for the industry or how do you put a number on it for your customers at the beginning of those discussions?I suppose now it's not so much.  I suspect someone is taking money from you, it's more, standardized, right? Bob: It's more standardized now. It's for safety, is really the big concern right now. Safety of customers, safety of other employees. And as the industry progressed in the early 2000s, I mean, basically it was this.If the company. Whether it was a hospital or a retailer down the street did background checks and you didn't, you only were really sure of one thing. The people that were afraid to get their background checked were not applying at the guy who does the background checks. They were coming to you.And we actually would see that. So when we would get a new client. We would do background checks on all the employees and to do that, they would have to sign a form. Well, we would get people that would just leave. Like they wouldn't come to work. It was over. And then once we looked into it further, we could see that they had, you know, quite a background and then they would go to the next company that didn't do background checks.And, and today it's 90%, 96% of employers in most industries do background checks. Max: I was thinking about that. So for those 4%, that's that don't do, you know, maybe they have a wonderful opportunity, right? Because then they really have to pick up the litter. They can choose between anybody who has a criminal record, they can choose between them and they can take the best ones, the ones that truly want to reform their lives and, you know, start fresh, the ones that quit like a blackjack.Bob: Yeah. Or the ones that had a type of crime that really doesn't have anything to do with the position. So in the world of finance, for example obviously embezzlement would be a very big concern. It would be a killer of any opportunity, but not necessarily let's say a bar fight or where you got drunk driving.Right. So You know, the industry has changed and it's still changing,  Now there's not only a demand.  When we first started out  in the 2000s and 2010s, there wasn't the emphasis on speed as there is now, or talent acquisition leaders now are driven by the need to hire and to hire at scale.You know, we've got a starting class. We need to have X number of people. Hundreds of people are coming in and I need these done now. And for a lot of organizations that can be scary because the person who's ordering and overseeing the selection of what company to use is in such a hurry. And it gets bonuses and it gets financial payments for getting people through the system.They don't necessarily care about the quality like it used to be. It's a strange relationship. Max: It's commoditized and it's looked as as a necessary, a mandatory step, as opposed to something, a selection that you make purposefully, just like you said, like someone, you should also select a vendor very carefully.And of course, nobody is very as educated on the art of selecting. A background checking company as they are on the art of selecting a candidates. And I suppose every vendor will propose the most thorough checks at the most competitive price. And I don't,  I've never personally gone through the tendering process of selecting between different vendors within your position.Bob: So many hidden, there's so many hidden secrets in it. You know what most talent acquisition and HR leaders, or procurement leaders don't realize is that we can draft a background check based on what you demand from us. You want it super cheap. Don't worry. We can do it. It's like walking into an ice cream store.And if you said to the person behind the ice cream  store,  I want an ice cream sundae, but I only want to pay $3. But I need it big and they're like, okay, well, they're probably going to select the ingredients that makes you happy, but it's not really the best. So there's things that background check companies do that the type of tools they use to find where a person has lived.So in the States we use a social security number, and a social security number is put into a database and the database then says, look, Max has lived in seven places around the world in the past seven years. And so we would send investigators or do our, have our technology going to the courthouses. In those seven geographic areas.Well, if your employer is demanding fast, they don't care. It's fast. They want fast. We can choose between one and probably 35 different social security number, locators, or address locators, including some that bring back, it will probably show that you lived in two places. Right. The quality of what a background check company does in the hiring process is actually negotiable.And it's demandable and you can put together service level agreements and demands that look, we need the best. We want to protect our employees.  What is the price going to be? Or most people just say, I want a background check. I want an ice cream sundae. It's the same thing. It's a commodity. Right? Give me one. Max: There's some of this background checking that is still being done in house. And then I guess increasingly it has been, I don't know, is it increasingly done? In-house are increasingly being outsourced?Bob: It's going more outsourced now. But you know what it is,  what a lot of recruiters do do, it's now starting to be outsourced. Is and most, and a lot of recruiters and a lot of  talent acquisition won't admit this probably let's see what next time you get some of your next guest, ask them if they've ever looked at Facebook or a social media profile for one of their applicants. Most of them secretly do. It's not part of the background check.Max: Oh, of course you have to. I mean if you're a hiring manager, that's what you would do. I would imagine. Yeah,Bob: But think about that. Is that part of the background check? Max: No, it's just, you know, curiosity. Yeah. Bob: That's part of the background check. It's part of the interview process that no one knows is going on. In the background check industry it's actually becoming a formal part where with technology, we go through your profile and look for keywords or phrases that may, that gives it brings back a score that says this person may not meet your profile. Based on 17 times using this word,  which is deemed offensive to most people.Right. Now there's a big argument if that's right or wrong, but that's really what's that, like you said, of course it's happening now. It's just now coming forward and becoming more I don't know, just more efficient.Max: Yeah. It's unfortunate that it's seen through the prism of basically the background check as a veto power to say no to a particular person, if they use a particular type of language as opposed to being a sourcing engine where you would match the tone of the people in your company with the tone of the people outside your company and find some commonalities and culture and attitudes. Bob: That's where it's going. I think I have one of my divisions, my background check it's called it's pretty simple. It's my background check. Because if you think about it, Max, what we do in the world is crazy.Talent acquisition goes out there and we pay a ton of money to put ads. To put out things saying, please come to work for us. So you have an ad that says, hey, I'm looking for someone like Bob, and I see your ad. And I'm like, hey, I might like working for you Max. And we start to do this relationship dance.You say, hey, here's my benefits. Here's what I'll pay. Here's the working environment. I say, look, here's my resume. Here's what I've done. I say, Max, I really like what I see. And you say, hey Bob, I really like what I see. We should form a business relationship and we should spend 40 hours a week together for a common goal.Let's do this. I'd be like, all right, let's do this. And then you say, Hey, stop. I want you to go pee in a cup so I can search your urine for drugs. And I need your name, your date of birth and your social security number. So I can search your background. It's a crazy world. It's like, I'll be like, Ooh,  max, wait a minute.Max: I just thought we were friends.Bob: Yeah. I was excited. Think what's happening and what we're doing with my background check. And I think over the next five or six years, you're going to see a flip in. What we're going to do is lead the charge to make a background check mine. And it's part of my resume.I'll show you a copy of my degree. I'll give you the name of my employers and I'll show you my background check. You can verify it, but let's get this done at the beginning. This is who I am. And you know, I had a DUI or I got in a bar fight, but this is who I am. You want to talk about it now?Max: Yeah, the first baby step was let's move our resumes to LinkedIn, which everybody did 20 years ago.Still, you know, 90% of the welders is not on LinkedIn, but of course, for me, it's more valuable to look at a profile, which is publicly available with, you know, references where, you know, I mean, I'm sure you can lie on LinkedIn, but it seems like you would lie a little bit more on the resume, right?Just you have a little bit more artistic expression? I like freedom.Bob: I can tell you stories, Max. Trust me. Max: Okay. We'll get there. They're bobs. But the point is, yeah, the baby step is  more validated content through third parties. And of course rather than making it awkward for you as an employer to ask for my urine sample, if you need to have access to it, why would I refuse it.I mean, I suppose some people would, by the way, if anybody feels they've got something to add to my company at Talkpush, but they don't want to take a urine test. They're welcome to join Talkpush, we don't check for that.Bob: What about background checks, max? Do you do. Max: We do not.But I'm not so proud of that. I suppose background checks do have a place even for a tech startup. Bob: Yeah.  you have to go with what, how you feel, what's right for your company. Max: I mean in our case, it's you know, we try to mimic what you just described, where it's a transactional approach to 40 hours a week and just , build trust on that and on outputs rather than background. But yeah. You seem like, I do think that there's some pushback. I mean, it is the world's plugging into not red state blue state, but you know, privacy, non privacy maniacs whereas some people will just, even though they have nothing to hide, they just refuse on principle to take part in some of these investigations?Bob: We don't see a lot of people who refuse to take part in investigations, but in the States we see a lot of legislation that is being pushed forward to do things like delete somebody's criminal record, once they're done and to  reduce access for an employer.But look if you've applied for a job, you probably need the job, and there's a compelling reason for you to comply with what the new employer is going to say. But you know, background checks to me, background checks should be part of the discussion, not a speed bump to recruiting. not something where you say, stop, I need to go dig into your background.And then you come back after we've spent all that time getting to know each other. Now I come back and say, oh, sorry that you know, this probably isn't going to be a fit because of this or that. It should be at the beginning of the process. You know, you wouldn't, interview me if I didn't put in an application.Right. If I just, if I walked up and said, hey, I'd like here, CFO job. You're like, all right, can I see something like, ah, no. No, we'll talk about it later. Let's why don't you waste your time and interview me? And then later I'll tell you about my experience, once we get into it. Max: So , you're an advocate of putting as much of that at the front of the funnel.Bob: I think somebody, yeah I think it's my background. I think it's my background check. I own it. And  I should share it with who I want when I want it to do it. And by the way, that's probably going to save you. It's going to save businesses about 9 billion a year in background checks, and it's going to speed up hiring Max: that's the size of the industry.Bob: Yeah, roughly it goes back and forth. No one knows for sure. Max: Yeah, it's big. We know it's big. It's probably bigger than the recruitment software industry.Bob: And that's big too though, but yeah, in a different way. Yeah. A different SAS model. Max: Yeah. Great. Well let's go into the horror stories.Bob: What do you want to know that I can talk about. Max: Well, we don't have to give names, but I, what do I want to know? I don't know what I want to know.  What's gonna keep me up at night?No, normally I ask the guests on the show to talk about a hiring mistake that they made. And it has nothing to, I mean, the stuff that's come out has generally not been tied back to background checking, but rather with, I mean, indirectly with, I didn't really check their qualification or I picked a friend instead of picking somebody who is right for the job, things like that. And well, I'm sure as you're a decade, plus, as an entrepreneur, you've made hiring mistakes too.Bob: I have, I've definitely made hiring mistakes. My biggest hiring mistakes have been salespeople that have sold me that they can sell and they can't. What happened? You sold me. I'm like, yeah, you are easy. If I go, well, I can, you at least call Max wants and see if he wants to do business?I've heard he doesn't do background checks. Max: That's universal.  We've all made those hiring mistakes. Bob: What I see from my clients is first of all, 99% of the people in the world are great people, you know, and their background and a background check mistake they've made in the past,  really has nothing to do with who they are now or who they're going to be.But there also are the career criminals and the really, really, really bad people. If you do a Google search right now, you'll see a Florida babysitter that was on several nanny websites, who was a child molester and was a teacher, another one that was a teacher for two year olds. And I think maybe five-year-olds. These are people that are predators, that have to go to a place that doesn't do a background check. The end. You can't, if you are a predator and in this case, a sexual predator, you can't have access to children for a place that does a background check. If you are a career criminal from embezzlement, you can't get access to cash, unless it's a place that doesn't do background checks.If you are a prescription drug stealer, we see this actually a lot. They'll find a place where they have access to elderly for home care purposes, and that they will do horrible things to elderly people besides stealing their prescriptions or part of their prescriptions. Max: Of course, all of this makes sense, but there's also a sense of futility about it because you know that 80- 90% of crimes and theft and you know, misdemeanors and all those actions committed are unrecorded. And that there's no trace left behind. Bob: Correct. Right. Yeah.Max: I mean, that's my estimate.Bob: Great. Thanks Max, now I'm depressed.No, you know, but for business reasons, there's also that if you don't do it, you're going to have tremendous lawsuits when something bad does happen that you could have prevened. Yeah. So there's not only that, you know, a lot of business, people don't necessarily care if they sleep good at night, they don't care.It's what's the bottom line and you can save a lot of money if you don't do background checks, or if you do cheap background checks, but the litigation that can come and the damage to your reputation and your company's reputation can be significant. Max: Well, of course, 9 billion in revenue didn't come out of nowhere. Obviously people can see the ROI. Bob: Yeah, and it's also can be used as a preventative. So, like I said, the bad people move on and you know, you can sleep a little better at night. Max: Okay. So. It doesn't make you a bad person to use these background checks.  It just makes sure that you don't end up with the leftovers, the people who self-select out of those companies, that'll be more vigilant.So look at what your peers do and at least try to align, unless you have made a conscious decision to attract a certain breed of  dangerous characters. Is the message from Bob. And where can people get a hold of you and connect with the Pre-employ.com? Well, you can find me on LinkedIn or my profile is accurate.And it's Bob,  M a T H E R. Or you can get a hold of me at any of my companies, pre employe.com or my backgroundcheck.com. So you can also find me on Twitter at @BobMather. Max: And then me as an individual I can create my background check Bob: Yeah. Max: Oh, great. So I can decide how much I want to share and decide my medical history or this history or that's and the other.Bob: Yeah, well we don't delve into medical history, but we do into you know, the background check, the verification part.Have you ever applied for a job that you had a background check done? Max: I don't know. Bob: It's an unnerving process. I'm telling you. It's unnerving.  It's weird. It's like this secret investigation and people sit there and go, what are they going to find? Are they going to call my mom?Like, what if they call my mom? Oh my God. My mom knows stuff that I did, like calm down. Because we deal with applicants who call us and they're like, what are you? You know, I did this in high school. You 15 years ago, like, no, we're not going to report anything like that.Yeah, it's a scary process for applicants. Max: So with my background check is it possible for an employer to direct, a candidate to my background check and say, just share with us what you're comfortable with sharing with us. We'll take care of the rest. Bob: Yeah, it is.Max:  It's more of an opt-in processBob: Depending on what country you're in. What state you're in in the States, what jurisdiction, if it's legal or not. To require that as an applicant, but basically yes. And that's my end goal. My end goal in five or six years, as the majority of people will want to know what's in their background check and really want to make sure it's accurate, you know, to make sure that somebody didn't put the wrong criminal record when my identity was stolen three years ago.What if someone did a crime with that name? You know, we find people, we have helped people all the time that have arrest records. That they said that's not me. Max: That it takes forever to get that wiped off. Right. Bob: You can't, it's almost impossible because there is a criminal record with your name, your date of birth, your driver's license. They stole your identity. You stopped your credit cards. That was smart. Good job. But then they walked around with a whole new identity and can do almost what they want. It's crazy. Max: Well, if that doesn't keep you up at night.All right. Thanks a lot, Bob. Thanks for scaring the bejesus out of us. No, thank you for setting up a nice direction for the industry where people  can have control  over their identity and all the best to Pre-employ.com.Bob: Thanks Max. It's great meeting you and I hope to meet many of your listeners.Max: That was Bob Mather from Pre-Employ, reminding us that a background screening is not strictly about who you want to employ proactively, but it's also a way to define who you are as an employer with regards to your competitive landscape. If ever yone of your competitors is screening for a particular type of criminal record, but you're aren't, you're most likely to end up with a talent pool filled with criminals. So look at your competitors and calibrate yourself accordingly. Hope you enjoyed the conversation with Bob and that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe to the Recruitment Hackers podcast.

Max: Hello and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show, I'm pleased to welcome Diana Trasolini from Paladin Security, Vice President of People and culture at Paladin Security, which is a company that hires, well as the name suggests, hires in the security sector, and has over 16,000 people working mostly in Canada, is that right, Diana.Diana:  Canada and the US.Max:  Canada and US. So, welcome to the show.Diana:  Thank you very much for having me, Max.Max:  Pleasure. I'm excited to find out about how to hire security, and what are the specific challenges around that. But first, perhaps, tell us a little bit about Paladin Security, what do you do, and what kind of people do you hire.Diana: Yeah Paladin Security has been around for a while since 1976. I've been with the company for just over 10 years, so for a pretty long time and I would say that the company has been growing extensively since its inception, but also extensively over the last 10 years. So really fast growth for both organic growth and through acquisition. So since I've been with the company, it's been about eight times growth. And it's been fun to be a part of that. We do obviously specialize in physical security so security officers or security guards. We also have several other companies that fall under the Paladin name, so Paladin risk solutions which does investigations, emergency management and risk solutions, we have a parking company palette of parking. And then we also have a US company, PalAmerican security. So, again, all these services on the US side of things. So, yeah, kind of sums us up on what we do,Max:  What is the bulk of your hiring? What kind of positions?Diana:  The majority of our hiring is at the security officer level for sure.Max:  And that service, I guess the private sector mainly. You were telling me before the interview about the work you're doing in the healthcare sector and hospitals. Is that a big, big industry for you, and what are the other industries you serve?Diana:  Yeah we serve a variety of different industries, so healthcare is a big one. A lot of the hospitals, care facilities across Canada, we provide security services for. We also are in commercial, retail, business centers. We do mobile security so security officers in cars do mobile patrols. Yeah, pretty much anywhere that means security, we provide the services.Max:  So, last year was good for business, business kept growing, as you said, eight times growth in the 10 plus years you've been there so from a few thousands to 16,000 people today. Congratulations on driving that enormous growth. Do you miss the old days, you know, just 2000 people? I mean 2000 is still too big where you can't really remember, you can't really remember everybody's name, but now 16,000 like, you probably don't even know everybody on your own floor.Diana: Yeah that's a great question. I mean it's been so exciting to be part of the team that's helped with the growth. Do I miss the old days, I would say in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. You're right it is, you do miss knowing almost all of the employees by name, but to be part of this big organization that still managed to keep a very like small company feel. It's been fun to be a part of that and to build the culture around how to be a big company that still maintains personal touch to everything that we do.Max:  Yeah. I noticed the word 'culture' was in your job title. It's obviously something that after being in a company for 10 years, people will come to you to answer culture questions. But culture is a living thing, has you has your culture evolved recently or have been challenged with the events from last year?Diana: Yeah COVID definitely, it shifts things, but I think when you have a strong corporate culture, it helps that that foundation helps the company persevere through difficult times like COVID. So, yes, of course it's been tested and tried with having to shift people working from home and having security officers who are working in certain healthcare facilities during a time when there's a worldwide pandemic. I mean, it's tricky, and we have to be fluid and flexible and be able to shift within our culture to make sure that we continue to meet our employee needs and I think that's kind of been the key is to foundationally, you stick true to your culture, but you're also fluid and flexible enough to move with the times.Max:  Yeah the shifts to accommodate the concerns you said some of the security guards did not want to work in the health care sector in your hospitals. I've heard that from other people that it was really difficult to hire in the healthcare sector during this time, due to all that's going on and the coverage, the crisis. But let's talk in a more general sense about those security guards, like, I think a lot of us have have watched, unfortunately, the mall cops movie where we imagine sort of a comfortable job where there's not that much happening, but you do get to wear either a gun or a taser. Is that the bulk of security is mostly just maintenance and kind of like making sure everything is okay and surveillance, or are there other similar like squat teams that are a little bit more action oriented?Diana: You know what this is a good topic to discuss you need to know. You talked on what really is the crux of what causes our recruitment challenges in security is the stereotypes. Max:  Yes, I am great at those.Diana:  Yeah, and you knw what everyone is, it's not just you, but the security industry has the worst stereotypes and that makes it so challenging in so many ways, but I can tell you, lots of like lots of companies I would say yeah sure like maybe stereotypes come around for a reason, and lots of companies maybe have those minimal standards. But I mean for Paladin, that's something that we as an organization are pushing so hard to set the bar higher and to do things differently, so that we can rip those stereotypes so that we can show the true value of security. And it's really does start at like the onboarding and hiring level but all the way through our organization, I mean, we pretty much have no sites for our work. Well first of all in Canada we don't carry a weapon, so no guns and tasers unfortunately. But also, our security officers are often embedded in our clients programs, so we're not just maintaining status quo, and walking, we're often embedded in their health and safety, embedded in their concierge and customer service. We provide such a tailored approach to the services that we offer. And then on the security officer side we provide such extensive training for everyone coming in and then ongoing training to ensure that we don't just have bodies, the mall cop stereotype. That's just not not really how it is for us. Max:  But I guess, I apologize for the stereotype, somewhat, didn't want to say there was anything wrong with kind of having a surveillance, more passive approach to security. Because, obviously, it's one of those things where you're there, you have security for when things get bad, but 99% of the time, things don't get bad, right. And so, I would imagine that it is a career where it's not going to be filled with day to day excitement, and that you also need to hire for a personality type that can adjust to an environment where 99% of the time, you have to stay alert, but also you know, it's not an action movie. Diana:  Yeah.Max:  So, do you look for people who are not too action oriented, I guess. And would that be a hiring risk if somebody who would apply for a security guard position. And I know you said there's no weapons but I was gonna say everything especially trigger happy. Diana:  Yeah, I mean, to be honest, as a company we tend to steer away from contracts that are 99% nothing jobs. Of course, we have some of those in across the country, we're going to have some of those contracts, but like I said if our security officers are more embedded in the actual work that our client does, it's very infrequent that they're static and have nothing to do. When it comes to hiring, are we looking for someone specific who could do that static work, because we have such a vast contract base at a variety of different sites. Really, if we say post a job for security officer and one person is, really action oriented, Go Go Go, and one person is a little more passive and, has a different skill set, we could easily hire both of them and stick them, it's a matter of at that point, figuring out where is that person, and we do this through, we have a very extensive hiring process. Where is that person going to be best suited for success, because if you put this what you call the trigger happy person or just someone who is more action oriented at a very quiet site, they're going to be miserable. And alternatively if you put a more passive person at a very high action site, they're also going to be unhappy and that's just going to cause turnover. So I think it's more about hiring the right person at, not necessarily a skill level, we can hire that or we can train that, but hiring a person who has the values, and is a cultural addition to our team and then figuring out where they fit. Max:  Okay great. Well can you tell us a little bit more about exactly how you would interview somebody for for one of these positions?, some some interview tips. If I have never interviewed, I've never hired anybody for my own firm and security, so I'm really coming from a place of ignorance. I would imagine it'd be, you have a few questions around different scenarios how you would respond to that and understanding how they would maybe create some protocols around certain situations, to see how they think around that, and maybe you mentioned a little bit about values. So identifying what the kind of world they want to be part of. Am I on the right track?Diana: Yeah, we have a little bit of of all of it. So we obviously, well there's a fine balance between, especially in an entry level position in having a short enough interview that keeps the person engaged, but a long enough, interview that you're getting all the information you need and also allowing that candidate to get to know the company a bit. So, for interview question specifically we have a few questions to get to know the candidate. So a big part of it is going to be experience they don't necessarily need security experience to work for us. But what experience do they have, do they have gaps in their employment?, have they been terminated from previous positions? So all of their employment history questions, any red flags, kind of digging in a little bit there. And then you're going to want to go into like behavioral questions, so you know tell me about a time when, how did you react in this situation. And then, of course, we'll do a couple of scenario questions, so give them a specific situation that really might come up in the everyday work that they do, and then see how they react or how they would react in a situation like that.Max:  Can you give us an example. I mean, I know you're interviewing 1000s of people every month, I don't want to give up your secrets to trade secrets, but.Diana:  Let me see if I can think of a quick scenario on the spot that we might ask. Okay, I'll think of something really simple and basic. So, say you're a security officer and you're on patrol at one of your sites so you're doing an exterior perimeter patrol of the site, and you find a wallet on the ground, and you're, you open it up then there's an ID in there and there's a whole bunch of money in there. What do you do? so something simple like that where you can kind of dig in and figure out does this. First of all, is this person like well, I don't know it's going to the 'lost and found'? Well, in most situations in our sites security handles lost and found, or is it like, take the money and run. You know what exactly would they do. Can they problem solve, or are they going to call the manager and ask them what to do. There's so many different ways that a person can go in so many different ways that you can kind of probe and find out this person's ability to problem solve a little bit about their morals. So it can be as simple as that, where you can dive into things a little bit. Max:  I love that question because it puts me in a great mood. Like, when's the last time I found a wallet full of money. It just kind of like puts you in a good mood and I want to continue the interview, kind of, what else you got for me. Incidentally, I have left my wallet in a food court. And I came back for it and an hour later, it was still there, but that was when I lived in Singapore, which is the safest place in the world. But I think like half half of the country is undercover cops, so it helps. That's great. You talked about hiring for more junior roles and younger staff. That's typically the space where more automation happens, as people become more senior, they expect to have a more personal approach, high touch approach, but in for young and college or high school graduates, they would expect. First of all they are a little bit more technology friendly and they go through a few more hoops to before the interview, typically. What kind of automation were you able to do on the recruitment front to help you with either sourcing or pre screening?Diana:  Yeah that's a great question. I think a big part of cutting down on time comes around recruitment metrics, It's a big one. So making sure we're optimizing the time and the money that we use by tracking metrics on everything that we do with regards to recruitment. So track the source of hire, to optimize the spend, to track conversion rates so we can eliminate unnecessary steps in the process, create multipliers, so maybe it's a referral bonus or something where one candidate becomes three or four candidates. But yeah, those metrics are key figuring that out so that we can optimize that approach. So any sort of software, whether it's a recruitment software or in HCM, that's tracking every step of the candidate process, metrics is going to be a key one. Through COVID obviously switching to video interviews. That's obviously going to be big and I think we're gonna see that more and more, even pre recorded videos, we're going to see that more in the interview process where candidates are pre recording answers to questions and submitting those.Max:  You said background checks are, I mean they're obviously very important in your industry. Is that something that is typically outsourced to a third party?Diana:  Yes, so well, yes and no. All of our like criminal record checks and those kind of checks have to be done. We have to do those internally, but reference checks, and those types of things it's done a little bit differently depending on the province that we're in. Some of them are done third party and some of them are done by our HR teams directly, so a little bit of both, but we definitely see obviously more efficiencies with outsourcing that.Max:  Yeah. I was thinking about the fact that you're doing those video interviews and asynchronous video screening. I believe some companies have moved to the place where they can authenticate someone through video, and their documentation as well. An automated and semi automated manner. So, gradually I guess this is where it's going. Though unfortunately, there hasn't been sort of a crypto passport that would tell all employers, this person has been verified, and that could be used throughout. There's only the LinkedIn profile, but I don't think there's any security equivalent to a LinkedIn profile, right? Diana:  No. Max:  No. I'm sure people are trying to build that over the years, you must have heard of few pictures.Diana:  Yeah. I don't think so. Max:  So it' not something that we like to think about in our own time but usually but there's terrible hiring mistakes we've made in the past. It is an opportunity for the audience to learn from each other's mistakes. Can you take us back to a hiring mistake that you've made in the past. And what lesson there is to learn about that hiring mistake?Diana:  Yeah that's a great question. I would say that that any hiring mistakes that have happened, obviously there's been a few. In my time in HR, it usually comes down to the battle between being under a tight timeline and rushing the process. So you know you hire someone on and you skip a step or you rush a step or you don't follow the standard process and you end up with someone who is a bit of a bad egg. And then you go back and you look at your process and you're like, okay, I can see exactly why this happened. And you get the organizational time crunch where this position needs to be filled now and that's the priority and you budge on your HR best practice or in your standards that you've put in place to make sure that you're hiring the best people. So yeah I think that's kind of what I learned is, at the end of the day if it means the position is open longer than I want it to be or then someone else wants it to be, the most important thing is kind of sticking to the process to make sure that all of our ducks in a row when it comes to hiring person because a turnover is more costly than leaving a position open a little bit longer.Max:  And there's a conflict, inherent to your position, because you went into HR because you trust people, you love people, you love psychology, but you have to be that process person who is going to drag things out sometimes.Diana:  Yeah totally. It's a constant battle between as HR being a part of the business so needing to understand the strategic objectives and day to day operational needs, but also meeting to understand how the people approached things and sometimes they don't go hand in hand, that the processes don't necessarily match the organizational needs so it's figuring out how do we work with the organization to make sure that we're safe and sound and everything that we do, but the needs are also being met. It's a challenge.Max:  Yeah. And then the particular challenge you also alluded to when you talked about making sure people have good morals good values that they align with Paladin security. That must be difficult to extract in the interview process. Is that a standard thing? Is that just part of the interview guideline? Or how do you validate for values?Diana: Yeah, I mean, there's several ways, like I mentioned, you can kind of embed questions that will give insight into a person's values, you can embed those questions into the interview so like I said, asking someone about a wallet. I mean, not very many people even if their values say I'm going to steal the money, not very many people are going to see that in an interview so that's a little bit tricky.Max:  It's not stealing if it's on the floor. I guess you can tell what I was gonna say if you asked me the interview question. Diana:  Yeah, you are definitely not hired. You can ask a person directly, what are your values, what do you stand for. But also I think in a lot of the questions that are embedded in like, you asked them, if you're going to be late for work, what you do or what is your process?, and you can kind of see, are they someone who kind of takes accountability. Are they someone who's like, well, I've never been late for work in my entire life or are they someone who's like, well, I feel terrible I'd call my manager right away.Max:  Panicking.Diana:  Yeah you can kind of sense a person's values based on the way they respond and the way they react. But also I guess if you ask them directly. What are your values, what do you stand for, you can get a sense of get a sense of who they are.Max:  I can tell you in HR, the tendency for people who have attendance issues is to really over communicate on their medical condition. Diana:  Oh boy!Max:  TMI.I've been a recipient of many medical reports, but.And probably have some good stories to go with that. I don't know, I try to forget. But you've given me and our listeners a lot of great tips on the use of situational questions to get to the psychology and the morals of someone, obviously critical for the security industry but I think applicable across many other industries. And so thank you very much, Diana, for sharing. And what's a good way for people to get in touch with you, or find out more about Paladin?DIANA: Yeah I mean to get in touch with me, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best way you can find me on there. Paladins obviously on LinkedIn as well or the website paladinsecurity.com. You can find out everything there.Max:  Fantastic. Thanks Diana. Diana: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.Max: That was Diana Trasolini from Paladin insecurity group.  Two good lessons for me from today's discussion one, the important role in HR and talent acquisition to force everyone to follow the steps, every step of the recruitment journey to avoid making hiring mistakes. Because when you skip steps that you start making mistakes and the second one, if you want to get to the values of your candidates, instead of asking them what are your values?Ask them. How would you react to a certain situation, but then in a situation and ask them how they would handle it and you'll get a lot more value out of it. Hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like more of the same, please subscribe and please share with your friends. 

MAX: All right, good morning, welcome back everybody to the Recruitments Hackers Podcast. Today on the show I'm delighted to welcome Wagner Denuzzo, Head of Capabilities for future of work at Prudential Financial, who has led some initiatives at Prudential around the future of work for the transformation of talent, is working on talent mapping for the future at Prudential. And we'll talk about organizational developments at Prudential and maybe go back to some of your work at IBM before, if you're willing to walk us down memory lane Wagner. WAGNER: Thanks so much, Max. Nice to be here, and I'm looking forward to the dialogue. Thank you. MAX: Thank you. So now future of work, I feel like nobody knows what it means. So perhaps you could start by telling us how this came about at Prudential Financial the decision to create a future of work group. WAGNER: Well it's interesting because if you ask your audience, 'how many of their companies are going through a transformation?', probably everybody's gonna raise their hands. So transformation now is a continuous process of finding differentiation in the marketplace anyway. So Prudential embarked on a major transformation we knew we had to accelerate the way we engage with our customers, the way we offer services and start creating experiences for them. So that logically lead to, we need to focus on our people, do we have the capabilities to go through this transformation to be successful, what are the new ways of working, what are the new ways of designing your organization, what are the new ways that we can engage the right talent out there to come join us. So, all this came into fruition in the future of work. Today people say what's the future of work. To me, the future of work is nothing but creating the capabilities, to create a future-ready organization and future-ready requires you to be adaptable and be conscious that things are continuously changing, so that's the future of work.  MAX: I mean we all have the same, we have a joint future hopefully. And our future, I think, is all kinds of pushing the marketplace towards the same types of talents, digital, good with numbers, creative, nimble and quick, these are universal qualities we look for. So, how much of that search will be recruitment lead versus development lead, because it's kind of like nature versus nurture debate. Are you adapting the organization, by changing your hiring practices, or is it more around training and development. WAGNER: That's very interesting that you say that because in my view, everything is contextual. Prudential has a long history of employee-centric policies and strategies. So of course, as we evolve, as we create new capabilities, as things evolve and we need to shift to new higher value skills. We need to focus on upscaling and rescaling. But that does not necessarily meet our needs for fresh thinking and fresh skills that sometimes is much better for us to buy or borrow than build. So I think what you're saying is recruitment plays a key role here because now at least at Prudential we have a strategic workforce planning process that we are implementing now we're piloting phases, but it's very critical that the TA team starts getting acquainted with what the business needs are in terms of the capabilities they are building, because the roles are changing. My team does grow reimagining roles so we are deconstructing roles, we are rebuilding. There's so much technology now, that helps to rebuild roles based on skills and valuing skills. So even those traditional surveys that we use for TA, they are going to be outdated very soon, if we don't keep up with reinvention of roles, job descriptions are going to change. I always say in HR, for example I come from HR and I think we need the talent systems architect. What is that? I would create a job description immediately because I think we need it. We need a digital-savvy HR leader, we need an HR leader who is a synthesizer of analytics, we need an HR leader who is strategic in their thinking about the outside in. So, to be honest, it is a prime time for recruiters to reinvent themselves.  MAX: Yeah. I think the recruiters that I'm coming across now, very different than at the start of my career when we were looking for pure sales guys, hustlers, people with charisma, the ability to remember people on a first-name basis, very naturally fluently and to go on. I live in Hong Kong where recruiters are working at the bars, basically exchanging name cards to create a portfolio of customers. Well, the bars were closed most of the year and today most of my customers, I see that they're more likely to be working on automated workflows, Excel sheets, can I deep thinking work, of course, it's also because it's the different nature of recruitment when you're doing with high volume recruitment versus the more white gloves service you would get in the financial services. But basically, I think it's the rise of the introspective deep thinking recruiter which I witnessed. Is that similar transformation that you're seeing at Prudential? WAGNER: Yes, you know why because as you're speaking I was thinking, how important it is to create the right candidate experience nowadays, right. We can no longer just pretend that the candidate experience is not relevant to us because at least for Prudential a candidate that comes through our doors and is not hired, that's a lost customer if they don't have a good experience. So the idea that customers, the market you're serving, your candidates, your employees, they are one community thinks this way. We have one community of people who might be coming in and out of your ecosystem. So this creates a lot of complexity, and then deep thinking. If we talk about deep thinking I think about the tele marketplace. Every company is thinking about the tele marketplace. If you're not thinking about the marketplace you better accelerate your thinking, because we have about six or seven top-notch vendors out there, and they're all using machine learning, AI to really enforce skills and compliment the recruiters' savviness, right. You talk about the quality of the recruiter. Today a recruiter has to be a little more analytical in their approach. They need to understand the algorithms that are helping them source their candidates. So all this is very exciting but at the end of the day, you cannot benchmark your future, I truly believe in that. If you want to differentiate yourself, you go forward with something that is innovative and you build the future you want. So, I think digital platforms now are allowing us to do this. We enable ourselves with technology, with platforms, and then we create a special engagement. What I say is that systems of record are there, systems of insights are there now. Now it's time for us to create the systems of engagement, they are going to create a differentiation.   MAX: The role that you just talked about earlier. WAGNER: Talent systems architect? MAX: Talent systems architect. That sounds good. I think I've seen a few of those but they were more like HRIS Manager, which is the old way of calling things I suppose. What I saw in the last few months from my very unique perspective, unique as in biased, from my angle of the world, was that with shrinking budgets for many companies that were going through cost reduction, came a desire to reduce all the fats in the system including all system integration, and to consolidate their spend with one or two vendors, one or two system of records. And so the architects that were populating the world, I guess had less budget to work with and so I had to consolidate their spending with a few number of vendors. So, I think it was a good year for really big systems of record, and maybe a more difficult year for the smaller tech vendors that were not a must-have. WAGNER: Yeah. But that's a good point too because the challenges that we face with less budget in a more constrained environment leaves you a lot of innovative thinking. And to be honest I think the advantage of smaller vendors and partners, I call them partners, is that if they are in front of you in the right time with the right products things go very fast. That's the other thing. Things can go very fast, if you are in the right place in the right time in the right context, but it's hard to find those niche, but I think that the curiosity that we have to apply, we're always curious about new vendors, new partners, because sometimes you'll find something that is really genius and you need to go with it. MAX: Yeah, a real differentiator. WAGNER: Exactly. MAX: Yeah, I've got a couple of aces up my sleeve for next year, for this year. I wanted to go back to IBM. I know IBM is a while back for you already a couple of years but it's got such a reputation and you've spent 10 years there almost and it's got such a reputation as a place where talent is being developed, as a place where you spend your entire career. I was hoping you could walk us back on what workforce planning meant at a giant like IBM, and what their philosophy is around talents, because, I'm going back to my MBA days and all the case studies were about IBM this place where you create an extremely competitive environment and manage to attract the best engineers in the world. WAGNER: Yeah. Actually, it's funny. I'm so fond of IBM, once an IBM always an IBM or by the way, but what is striking to me is how amazing it was in 2008-2009 with Transform HR. We started creating strategies that were so ahead of the time, we had the influence of skills, we had already applied our algorithms to the propensity to learn, who are the people who had propensity and curiosity. We had so many streams that helped us create an even bigger strategy into our point. Why IBM has its own philosophy of talent because actually, we enable the people to own their careers. We always talk about owning your career or your career is yours, you make it, but if you don't enable the talent, you don't have much to promote that growth. So at IBM you have the tools you had all that but beyond that, it's important to have clarity. I keep thinking about this, in a world that's so crowded, think about clarity creating capacity, capacity to think, capacity to strategize, capacity to focus on the priority you have, but think about capacity, always comes out of clarity. If you have clarity don't waste your time confused. So at IBM it's very clear what we stand for. So we had our clear strategy, career velocity for example. We understand that you want your career to go fast. So how do we enable you to think that way? So all this creative leadership we had this at one point, all this based on skills. And this is the funny part right. Now today everything is skills based but we are doing skill-based everything in 2009-2010 so now it's been 11 years of skills as a currency. Now we are evolving to capabilities and now we are evolving to what are the enduring human capabilities. So, recruiters now have a responsibility to actually not only serve the managers hiring the talent, but actually we have a consultative approach to that, because actually the recruiter could play a big role in identifying what are the nuances in the capability you're looking for that actually you didn't describe being or description. So it's interesting how the recruiter is now in a great position. And to your point, your company too. You had to accelerate the experience, people don't have patience to wait for phone calls back from people and all this. If you have a platform that interacts with candidates in the onboarding like you said. I love the idea that you could have a frictionless onboarding experience. I love that. IBM has been doing that for a long time, but because we have technology. MAX: I suppose that you want to hire people who are ambitious, want to progress their career rapidly as you did in IBM. It wouldn't be suitable to have a recruitment process, which would be longer than your competitors. Say, hire slow fire fast. I always try to counter it by saying, no it should be the other way around. I mean, hire fast. WAGNER: I agree. MAX: But maybe fire fast as well, but definitely hire fast if you can make the right hire fast, rather than the right hire slow. So, if somebody is listening here and falls in love with the idea of working for IBM. How could they self eliminate themselves, what would be somebody who would not be happy at IBM, because I used to work at SAP, 70,000 maybe more now employees worldwide. And I felt a little bit like a nobody in a really big ocean like a drop of water in the ocean. And so it wasn't really right for me. I guess IBM is gonna be a little bit the same, like you need to be very group-oriented. WAGNER: Okay, I can't talk for IBM because I'm not there right now. However, I'll tell you how I got a job at IBM, this is interesting. I didn't know anybody at IBM, I had my own practice as a consultant, executive coaching trainer. I did everything in HR consultancy, and I moved to a place far away from New York City, and I was right next to IBM, and somebody said why you're going to sit every day, go work for IBM. I said, why not. And I found the name of the head of talent there in diversity. And I called the assistant to job three to meet today. I called the second I talked to him now? No sir, can I give him my resume? No sir, can I get his email? No sir, go through the regular process. Okay, that's not going to work for me. So I knew somebody from New York, in our HR community that was at IBM, in the suffix of their emails was us.ibm.com. So I got his name and I remember writing fifteen combinations of his name nr.glovaglova rn and I kept doing combinations, one of them went through. And he said, interesting resume, I will pass through HR. I said okay everybody there says they will pass through HR. And two weeks later I was sitting in front of HR. He says I'm interviewing him because he asked me, but what am I gonna do with you. I said I don't know but I can't be your greatest cultural evangelist for IBM. So you can consider me one of your champions. In three weeks I had a job offer, and the rest is history.  MAX: Nice. WAGNER: So it's really interesting right how things happen. But if you want to be disqualified, talk about expecting predictability, expecting predictable work, or expecting certainty. So you know that's not a place for you because IBM evolves quickly and we are always still dynamic there. It's really cool for somebody who wants to grow capability skills, it's incredible. But not for somebody who is looking for certainty and predictable work. That doesn't work that way.  MAX: I think that's a great insight. I would have expected the opposite, actually. I would be like IBM which's so organized because that is my mental picture. So I would associate that with predictability but I understand it's different. And with Prudential Financial, what is the type of profile you would encourage not to come? It's like the opposite of employer branding, who do we not want to hire.  WAGNER: Don't tell us how good you are. Tell us how good you want to be because we are very much into the learning phase of our history. We are becoming a very learning culture, and it is really taking hold. We're talking to our leaders about learning, being curious and it works, because we are hiring. For example, we are hiring for propensity to learn for capabilities that are ahead of your role. We are asking people to tell us how they envision their careers progressing because if you want a vertical career path that's not the place to be. I think we want people to experience as much as they can because we depend on the diversity of thought, we depend on your experiences being diverse because our customers are expecting different offerings. We can't do things in silence any more. So if you expect to come to a role in progress to become the senior vice president in that role in that vertical, that's not really a good thing to say. MAX: You also have to own your career and be ready to move. WAGNER: Exactly. Be ready to move across everywhere.  MAX: Nobody wants to get financial advice from somebody who'd be saying the same thing for 10 years in a row. WAGNER: Exactly. Very good point.  MAX: Great. Well, one question I love to ask is about traumatic experiences around talent. We've all made bad hires in the past. Can you walk us back memory lane and tell us about somebody you hired, where well it was the wrong hire for the role.  WAGNER: What I tell you it actually ended up being a success story, Okay, I'm very into taking bets on talents. So, when I was transforming management development at IBM. I got a call from somebody who was in Mexico and I said interesting as I got one international mindset and really multicultural thinker but was a catastrophe. She arrived and actually she was so stuck in her old way and she was so afraid because her experience in Mexico was really not great and her maturity wasn't there yet. So, I was so close.  MAX: And she had done a great interview. She nailed it. WAGNER: And she had done a great interview. She was so excited about the dynamic ways of doing things. She can't wait to try new things. I say okay, I like the raw material. The raw material comes with a dose of consequences, and buddy good news is this. I don't give up. I was this close to firing her, I have to say. However, I said you know what this is my challenge. As a leader, this is my challenge: how can I make her successful in a different role, somehow I am gonna make her successful. It took me three months to turn something around. Today she is still at IBM and she is the Head of communications, one of the communications leaders there. I love that story because we're still friends and we laugh about it, how hard it was in the beginning because it was horrendous but at the end of the day, you know what I could have fired her but I didn't. So don't give up on talent that quickly. MAX: Okay.  WAGNER: It was dramatic though. It was dramatic because I needed somebody. MAX: It was dramatic. But if you could do it a bit differently would you do it differently? WAGNER: Oh yeah, well I would think about capabilities, like I said before, you need to think about capabilities, you have to explore what are the capabilities people bring. You can have certifications, you can have diplomas, you can have experiences, but tell me how you're bringing all this together to build capability and value. And I think that's the next frontier of interviewing.  MAX: That's like capabilities more like skill-based?  WAGNER: Skills plus abilities plus what's your intention. How do you merge skills, capabilities and abilities into this capability of actually creating value, and that is something between skills and abilities, that is the art of interviewing that you find. But it's funny, I love this because it's not concrete, but I think it's real.  MAX: And then you had to go in panic mode and basically upskill her. WAGNER: Yes completely, was coaching one on one every day. It was good at the end. MAX: All right, so even if you make a terrible hiring mistake if the desire is there, don't give up. There's still a route to salvation. Invest reinvest in the person, give it a few months and maybe. WAGNER: You see now you said something interesting, maybe why because the person needs to be willing. She said help, this is the problem, that's the differentiator. I would fire her if she said you are the problem, but she didn't, she said I know I'm the problem, help me and I took that bet. So it was very cool.  MAX: Okay, I've got a few names, running through my head about who needs help. I think everybody has got to be thinking about that all the time who needs help. Great, well Wagner it was delightful to get to know you and to learn a little bit more about the future of working is today at Prudential. I mean we went down memory lane a little bit more than you probably wanted, but thanks for sharing. Where can people get a hold of you, if they want to find out more? WAGNER: You can find me on LinkedIn, you know I love interacting with people on LinkedIn Wagner Denuzzo on there and I'm open to new connections, it's fun.  MAX: Great. Thank you again. WAGNER: Thanks, Max.MAX: And that was Vagner the New so from Prudential financial reminding us that even if you make the wrong hire, if that person is aware that they're not, I'm quite ready for the job, you may still salvage the situation and you may still work with them to make it work.Hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll be back for more. Remember to subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast.

Max: Alright, welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show I have Kimberly Carroll, who is managing principal at IA, you're really welcome to the show. Kimberly: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. Max: My pleasure to have you. And what does the IA stand for. I know AI, but IA? Kimberly: We were not Internal Audit. It used to be called Inflection Advisors and we shortened it to IA because nobody could spell or say it. So, Inflection Advisors. Max: Inflexion advisors. That's good. Well, Kimberly, let's get right to it. How did you end up? So Inflection Advisors is an advisory group that helps companies, I guess, manage inflection and notable change, not only in the HR, including the TA space. And you don't become a managing principal of an advisory group, right out of school right out of the gates. You need a career to prepare yourself to get into that space. So tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up being in this very specialized field. Kimberly: Absolutely.I have an economics degree which is not anything to do with HR, but when I started my career, I always wanted to help people. So I worked at Fidelity Investments for a little over 13 years, all in a variety of different roles. I implemented the HR payroll outsourcing business. I also worked in systems where I configured the platform itself. And then I also ran their shared services organization. And that was probably the most influential job I've ever had. Because you learn a lot about what to do and what not to do as part of running a shared services organization. I also managed a global outsourcing business. And then I met Mark, who was the founder of IA, and we had hired him to come over and do some work for us. And then once I figured out that consulting wasn't all bad. And that I really liked consulting and helping others. I moved to IA for about eight years, working with a ton of different clients from anything, from looking at their HR processes and making them better or selecting technology to help them implement their change or building vision. So we do a whole slew of different things at IA and just I love it. I love what I do, and so my career has been all around helping people. Max: I mean I can see, for me as an entrepreneur I could see the joy of moving from managing and shared Services Center, which is all about process and repetition, get everything ironed out to being a consultant, moving from client to client and being in charge of your own schedule, which suits me very, very much. But it's not necessarily a transition for everybody.  Kimberly: No Max: But I guess it's for that stage of your career also where you're more about, you know, sharing experience and maybe resolving conflict people do people bring you in when there's battles within? Kimberly: Absolutely. We not only battle with them but battles with their technology partners and stuff like that, so we do help with guiding our clients through the changes that they need to make. We're not shy consultants and we don't have a playbook. So we have processes ourselves but we are ones that we will come in and we don't say yes yes you should do this or we tell them this is what you should do. And it's a little bit different from a consulting process and one of the things about IA that's a little,is that we actually want to work ourselves out of a job. We would like to teach and leave and go to the next client because our role is to help all, as many clients as we can. But if we get stuck at a client for a long time, that keeps us from helping other clients. So for us we do. Max: That's the model of like Accenture or the Lloyd's to create enough role or enough work for everybody for the next 20 years. Kimberly: Yeah, we're not, we don't want to do that that's not I mean that's not what we want to do. And it's not I mean it's that's just because when I got into consulting I had that fear of getting into consulting, because I didn't like consultants. So I mean I hate to say that, but it's just one of those things for me that I feel like if I can influence a couple people or a couple clients or a couple companies to think differently to really move forward to, to not just do it because that's the way that you've been told to do it, is to start thinking for themselves and get us out of there, then, that to me is the is the important part of what we do. My first client at IA They're a fascinating client. They clean slaughterhouses, I mean so that's what they do but they're quite large. 16-17,000 employees. They had a hard time with recruiting, they had because their turnover was 150%. They did not have technology. Max: So they were not able to retain people in their slaughterhouse jobs? Kimberly: They were not. Max: Do you think that if you're willing to take the job by that point you're going to keep it because I kind of made the mental leap that I took and retain them. Amazing.  Kimberly: Now, are you really shocked? I'm not shocked. So, but what's fascinating is they were my first clients. They had no automation, no nothing. They had a lot of paper based processes, all of their applications were still paper based. So we finally got them automated on some systems and stuff like that to really get them so that they could make that turnover quite a bit. And to be able to get them to not have so much paper, but that client is still a client that they will only come back to us, they will. They've told us we will not go anywhere else. And it's not. I mean, and I'm not doing work with them all the time it's just a call for Mark says I'm the worst consultant because I give free consulting all the time because they will call me at the whim, and just ask questions and I will turn them down to say no, I'm not gonna answer your questions and so anyways I love that part of what we do is that we build relationships with our clients and their lifelong relationships and that's what we need to do, but that client was one of my special clients because of the work they do.  Max: It sounded a little bit like you were that story where you said they had high turnover. We replaced the paperwork with systems and how is that supposed to resolve turnover issues. How would you, how do you connect the dots here? Kimberly: How do I connect those dots, is they are able to do better with the automation that they put in place, and in the States, you have to do e-verify, to be able to support it with that automation they've been able to then detect the people that are not able to work in the United States, so that turnover even though it's still high, so they had it like 150%, their metric was to drop it, and I don't remember and I apologize, but I think they dropped it to like 120% which is a pretty significant drop for them, but they were able to with automation, be able to get those employees or those candidates in the system faster. Interviewed through the work verification process, and on the floor and be able to, and the people that they were hiring better suited or legal to work in the States.  Max: Right, right, right. When you speed things up you have less of a dropout when you, when you wait longer candidates, the hires that you're left with at the end of the process, are the ones that are also a little bit less desirable.  Kimberly: Yeah. Max: I suppose.  Kimberly: Yeah, absolutely. Max: So, your Fidelity Investments. I know it's a long time ago now, but that was your last big corporate role play and that was running a Shared Services Center. One way to describe change management and change in HR is is a process of centralization and decentralization, and the two are always happening like sort of on balance and counterbalance the arguments for centralization and having a Shared Services Center are well known it's specialization, get really good at something and reduce costs that way. In, in a recruitment context or in an otherwise context, have you sometimes taken the other side of the argument, where you've argued for decentralization and let's do away with a shared service. Have you been in these situations? Kimberly: Yeah, so I love putting it in the hands of the actual leader, so I am not as I'm not a lover of centralizing shares of putting a shared service together for recruiting. I'm not as much of a lover of that. I just have had a couple of clients that have gone down that path and mostly because to be honest with you if they don't trust their managers and I don't understand that I mean, you're hiring these people, trust your managers to do the job that they're supposed to be doing. A lot of them from a retail perspective, a lot of the time what I hear is, well we don't want to take them off the floor because that's money that you know they're trying to sell they're trying to do all of that and I'm like. But if you make it easy for them. Right, so you get them a device you give them something. The process shouldn't be that hard. So, I am not as I said I'm not a fan of centralization of the talent acquisition process. But I understand it, from where they're coming from because they want to be able to utilize resources that are not trying to sell their products, to be able to do it, then I'm not a fan. I think you should put it in the hands of the hiring leaders and train them and teach them and give them tools that actually help them through it.  Max: Yeah, I had this argument with my head of HR just yesterday where she was saying, let's get it done, because we have a graduate hiring program right now and so this is going to dominance, this is hiring these people, and then she was like we know we need the hiring managers involved, we need them to be to be talking to them otherwise, they're not going to feel the responsibility to take care of them properly. So just from, from that perspective, having the hiring manager involved in the decision, even if it's at the very end I think has obvious benefits for retention and onboarding.  Kimberly: Yeah. Have you ever taken on an employee that you'd never hired? That's me that's hard when you, when you have to now manage an employee that you did not get to interview, or you weren't part of that process. And now you're  Max: I had one of those who didn't even speak English. So that's even harder. Kimberly: That would be really, that's really hard. So, yeah, I think that managers should be involved, they have to manage those people, you have to build a connection with your employees or your team members or whatever you call them, you have to build that connection and that's how you do it at the beginning and then you talk about onboarding. I have a hard time with onboarding. Yes.  Max: Everybody has. I mean we can centralize some things right like running the ads on Indeed, and getting as many candidates as possible but still do the interview on site on store, and make it easy for them to minimize the time off before the course. What are some examples that come to mind for accesses done in the service services where people have tried to take it too far outside of the recruitment space actually. Do you have examples where you've had to deflate the show services?  Kimberly: Well, I think that one of the things that people think about shared services is that they're just the transaction they should just do whatever you know the COE says or the manager or whatever they should just take on the transaction no matter what. And that's a misnomer, like, that's not what Shared Services is all about. Shared service is about good repeatable processes and as soon as that process is no longer repeatable and that can just be done, it should be pushed back out to whoever owns that business process because shared services that own the business processes themselves. Typically the COE or whoever they, they, they dub as the owner of the business processes should develop processes that make sense, shared services so that's when I seen good Shared Services actually in good Shared Services leaders push them back out I have an example of a process that we had at Fidelity and HR wanted us to start terminating people manually in the system for them. When the manager should be actually terminating them. And it was because of a one field in there that for an executive it had to be pushed that you couldn't do it because there was a rule in there that you couldn't push their health and continuation date past six months. Well for an executive you can go however long they wanted to. So they wanted to push us to term all executives because they couldn't enter this one field. And I push back and push back hard on them, I said, No, we are not taking on that process because it's not repeatable and the manager should be able to do it, there can be a ticket open for us to update that field for you but we're not going to be taking on the whole entire termination process because you all think that the fields can't be entered. That's where shared services should be, they should be able to say no to their business partners, but then it should also go push back to their business partners when things are not when they're asking for requirements that don't make sense from a business process perspective. Max: I think, psychology or groups, groups like to grow,growth is always something that is appealing to a team and is kind of, you know, washes away problems and things are growing then everything else is kind of sort itself out. And so far shared services organization, or for any organization I think the temptation for growth is always there as well, where. Well, the customer said so are the internal customers that suppose I'm just going to do it, and resisting that temptation must be. I mean I guess systematically it's impossible. So, It's hard to argue against it but yeah I guess you're doing. Well it's about process ownership, and then, you know, reminding the operations of their responsibility to build something unique something that's there.  Kimberly: That's right. And they own it, they need to own it. And to add services can help support, but it's not the owner, and they should be able to have leverage to say that and a lot I will say that I've known a couple companies that have rolled out shared services, and it wasn't a dictated model, like you didn't have to. And you could just opt in, which I think is a huge mistake. You either do it or you don't, you don't halfway do it. And I've told that company that multiple times and it hasn't resonated quite yet with them but I will continue to push them on actually putting it in there because you got to think about shared services. It's almost like you're outsourcing to a third party, but you're internally doing it, which is great. But it's still a cost center, and it's not making money for you as a company, but it's supporting you making money. And that's what people have to remember. It's not, you should always do it.  Max: Is it possible to turn our shared services into a profit center? Have you seen these examples where it started out where we're servicing internal customers and while we're so good at this let's start selling stuff to the outside world.  Kimberly: I haven't seen it successfully done. But I've seen it, where companies like they do the Manage processes so like the Alliance, the PwC, they actually manage business processes and outsource so they, you know, maybe they started as a shared service but they go into the Manage business processes outside but not an internal. What's funny is, you always think that you can do that and you could build these processes to go out outside of your company, most of the time you can't. I don't think you can, because your processes are typically not that well refined, that you can do that. Yeah. Max: Also people involved.  Kimberly: Yeah. Yeah.  Max: Do you in HR, there's a very strong local and regulatory component to dealing with payroll benefits, even hiring. So, how do large shared services handle that today, unable to have like one global shared service or is it done for our country. I mean, you know I mean if there is some tension there.  Kimberly: There can be. So typically what I see is that you regionalize, the shared services they all report under one, but to get closer to your local you would regionalize those, so Europe might have one the North America could have one and then EMEA  those would be local, but we're also seeing a lot especially if the company has little volume or little employee a smaller population of the employees. That's where you'll see another technology come into play and that they actually do and a more tiered model where they actually outsource some of that servicing to another provider that has local resources that can help them with that. In the United States, you typically see a centralized service. But in other countries it just depends on the volume of employees that you have, like I have a client that has maybe like 10 people do you really need to put a shared service in for 10 people, or do you manage them via a tiered model.  Max: Okay, so you're gonna have your main business supported by a shared service and for the geographical branches. That's when you bring in the consultants or third parties. Kimberly: Yeah.  Max: Yeah. And I do a lot of work in the offshore call centers space, and it seems like 2020 was as good a year as any, work continues to grow, and, you can say, American jobs keep going abroad.  Kimberly: Yeah. Max: Does that sound about right or is there or because sometimes once in a while the industry talks about jobs coming back in and so I'm wondering if you experienced the 2020, same way I did when, basically, not much has changed their transmissions anyway.  Kimberly: Yeah, I think that trend will continue, especially as companies outsource, some of the business processes, outside of their company. I think that a lot of companies are starting to do that more and more. It was a trend that slowed down, and then the trend started coming back because I think that people are realizing or companies are realizing that there isn't a need to have that type of resource in house right so payroll right so take payroll. Payroll is one of the biggest ones that gets outsourced because it's such a pain in the butt process to manage internally. And so that's one that gets outsourced quite a bit, but I think it just depends on the company and what they're looking to do. We're seeing a lot of shared services coming in internally, and then some of the companies that even they they build the shared services they're like, you know what, we're now going to outsource it because now we built the shared service now we should be able to, we have now cleaner processes, we can now outsource it. If you can't outsource if you have to say a bad word, terrible processes. Was gonna come out of my mouth.  Max: You can manage what you cannot do ideally, with a few exceptions but generally, trying to manage somebody's process. It's gonna be horrible. Kimberly: Well, you can automate processes via robotics now so I mean, you might as well start looking at that and if you can make processes easier then why have a person doing it when the system can do it just as well. So. Max: Yeah and most of the business process outsourcing industries is all about selling that expertise there, they start with the robotization conversation, and then oh yeah and by the way we also have 100,000 accounts that can help you with everything that cannot be automated.  Kimberly: Right. Max: Really change the pitch. Okay, cool. Well, the one question that I really like to ask for my guest is to talk about some of the traumatic experiences, regarding hiring mistakes. I want you to think back on your assignments at Fidelity, or another place where you hired somebody, and it blew up in your face, and it was, there was blood on the wall slaughterhouse style, and if you can relate for me and for listeners, what you learned out of that hiring mistake, why you made it, or what you got out of it.  Kimberly: Yeah. So, one of the challenges I have with my hiring is that I am very, I'm not as strict as reviewing a resume and I don't typically ask for it. I want to get to know people better. One of them actually it's not even with Fidelity it's with IA. We hired somebody that used to work for me and another company.  Max: It's like fresh wood. Kimberly: It kind of is. And the problem with doing that sometimes is you expect them to understand how to move into a role that maybe they're not prepared for and that was my biggest mistake is I, you know, did they did a great job at another firm, they were very good, but coming and doing this type of work. Not everybody can do it. And for me, what kind of sucked about this was I almost lost a friend right so, I really knew this person and you almost lost this person as a friend. And that is my mistake. I should have thought through and probably been a little more forthcoming not forthcoming about the work but more forthcoming about asking questions about how she would handle or they would handle the work, and give her examples and, and I didn't do that and I think that that's a mistake and we're a small company. So losing a person in the middle of, you know, a project or something like that that's a huge loss. And I think that was my  mistake and I don't live with regret because I don't think you can, but I can learn from what I did. And so the next hire I do, it's not it's not always going to be somebody I know because it's going to be somebody based on the work that we need to do.  Max: Right. So I think, probably, anybody who's hired somebody they know has dealt with that. Kimberly: Yes and I've hired others that I know that are great. Max: If anybody's listening and wants to work for Kimberly and you know her. Kimberly: Not over yet not giving up on it it's just gonna grill you a little harder I think.  Max: I think we're in for time to get to know your business. I'm talking about shared services. Thank you very much for joining us today.  Kimberly: Yeah, thank you so much, I appreciate it. Max: Bye. Kimberly: Bye.Max: It was Kimberly Carol reminding us that even if you decide to go with a shared services center for all the right reasons, you should remember that the operations own the process, especially for talent acquisition, but also for all businesses.Hope that was insightful for you as it was for me. And please subscribe for more and share with friends.

Max: Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today I am delighted to welcome Katrina Collier. Katrina is the author of the Robot-Proof recruiter, which I think, it could be retitled-how to protect yourself against the chatbots or how to protect yourself against Talkpush, like the company I started. But that's just me being paranoid, perhaps. Katrina, welcome to the show.Katrina: Thanks Max. I think that's the best introduction I've ever had. Please protect yourself from my business. That's not technically what's written in there. You know that. You've read half of it, maybe you've not gotten to your bit.Max: So I read this book and it's a wonderful reminder to everybody that if you are working in recruitment, you're working in an extremely, I'm not gonna say tactile but extremely high touch human environments, which, if you list all the jobs in the world recruiter should be the last one to go almost, you know. The last one to be fully automated of the jobs that we operate today, like who wants to be hired by robots?  I mean I don't know anybody who would put their hands up. I've seen a couple of case studies here and there, but actually I don't think employers even want to showcase that, they're not that proud. Katrina:  I know we talked about this before we came on. It's just like this book is very much aimed at people who are recruiting people who are in demand. So my whole background is IT recruitment. All of the clients I've ever had have been in IT or health in general it's been a few other things obviously, it's always those people who are to recruit. However, there are examples for high volume there and one of those is Yodel who is a courier company in the UK and all they recruit is drivers. Therefore, actually they can automate it. There is a chatbot on their site that pops up and goes through the process of can you carry a 35 kilo box? no you can't, tell WordPress yes you can proceed through, and they can actually get someone through the application, because they realized their recruiters were on line nine to five and applicants were coming in at 11 o'clock at night. So in that respect when it's the same role, over and over and over and all you really need to know is that they've got to claim a driver's license no criminal record, and you know, they're gonna turn up. Actually you can, but really for the rest of us. Oh my gosh, put a human in please. Max: There is a recruiter and there is recruiters.Katrina: Really and love it. Yeah, and actually if anyone's been following me on LinkedIn lately, I've started the college recruiter revolution which is because the clubhouse has appeared. It's just a conversation in the clubhouse. Yes, it's iPhone snobbery if you can't get on there. But the idea being that like please if you don't love this job that we do please leave the industry, because it's so important we play with people's lives. And I just think so often that's forgotten. Just like you said how we can automate when we play with someone's life which you know I take Max and I put him in the wrong job. He fails. Three months later is out the door. We're in the middle of a pandemic. What happens actually serious case of that someone last night we were on the kind recruiter revolution as I'm calling it was talking about the fact that actually he was hired, and then the person that hired him basically had a meltdown, and said I can't do this job I can't cope I can't bring on someone new right now I have to let you go. And he turned down two other jobs to take this job, has a pregnant wife at home and is now in the middle of a pandemic trying to get another job. And you're like, we can't do that stuff we,playing with people's lives. So that's the book was off the back of that please stop saying tech can do what we do, it cannot.Max: Well taking your example. I would say this person was put in the wrong job because we didn't do all the checks and balances and the psychological assessment and if we had done that if we've done the psychological profiling we could have identified a risk and mapped it against a bell curve and said, spotted something that the individual recruiter might have missed. You can be more thorough when you have an endless battery of tests available to you and you could just plug as many as you'd like.Katrina: Yeah. Or it could be that actually this is an experience, none of us have ever been through before, so no amount of testing would have said that particular team leader was going to meltdown when having to homeschool having to work remotely having to manage your team remotely having to, like you were saying, you're an extrovert you can't wait to get out. I'm an introvert. I'm very loud and by the way if anyone wants to argue the case with me, those that are listening that know me. No, she's not. No, I really am. But I'm really happy in these four walls. I'm missing traveling, but I'm not missing it that much that I could, I could do this for another year or two, but other people are melting down because they're missing. If they've got a close family bond they're missing that so, I don't know I agree, it could have helped. But I also think. Yeah, it's a really interesting example obviously but.Max: I can continue on this example and to say, well, perhaps this person was hired because the recruiter at hand only had five or six profiles to choose from. And because you can only invest so much time in sourcing. But, if you really ramped up to your sourcing and you use. Let's say social media and increase the pool of candidates tenfold or a hundredfold, then you could have eliminated a much higher portion of ice because well.Katrina: Oh sorry, this wasn't about the person that was hired. It was the team leader that melted down and let the person they hired go. So they hired them and let them go in three days. Max: Oh!Katrina: But yeah, absolutely. I think I agree that we need to have a bigger pool of people that we recruit from, and we need to get the hell off LinkedIn. Like, everybody is on LinkedIn going after the same pool of people. Now, most regular people not recruitment, not sales not entrepreneurs not marketers. They're not on LinkedIn every day, like a message one of your mates on there who works outside the industry. Will they get a reply no but if you send them one somewhere else like messenger or WhatsApp, boom they reply. It's like, get off, go. I agree, get off and find for your high volume recruiters obviously you're like, oh my god, no more applications no. But for those that are seeking people who are in demand, please go. You know, go and ask the people in your business if you're in house, go and ask for candidates if you're an agency where are you, you know what social networks do you use. Max: One thing that really got under my skin with the whole AI wave was there was 2017-2018, when you had all of those movies that came out, like Her, and Ex-machina, and a few others like the western TV show in virtual reality. Anyway, I ate all that stuff up. I really loved it, as entertainment but in a span of just a few years. It went from people asking me, oh you're creating a robot that interviews people? What a stupid idea? like nobody will ever do that to like in literally two years people, the question went from that to. Oh that's cool, can you robot tell if the candidate is lying, can your robots, you know, the expectation just inflated all of a sudden there was a complete change of expectation, and perhaps, your book was born out of a backlash right as a reaction to the inflation around expectations. Katrina: Yeah. I was actually asked by Kogan Page who's the publisher, Katrina, would you like to write a book. First, if that doesn't happen so that literally blew my mind, and still blows my mind and sometimes I literally look at the book and god I can't believe I wrote this book. And then it was like, Oh my god, yes, we're going to write about this. Okay. Asa Bien. Right. Humans recruit humans; it's as simple as a requirement that's the case. And what we do is so important because we woo, and we use empathy and compassion and kindness and curiosity and all of that stuff to pull you through the process right. I don't believe technology can replace that. However, I wanted to go. Okay, so in this part of the process. This technology here, that puts the human first because it's supporting you, but the technology is supporting you. And it's freeing up your time to deliver a better human experience. And all the way through the book that's what I'm talking about. So in this particular part of the process I tried this, which would do this, which will help you have more time, again, to deliver a better human experience. And a few people that were surprised when they've read it and they go you talk about tech so much. Yeah, because it can help you. I'm not saying not to use it, I'm the biggest user of technology. I've been using it like I've been working at home for 11 years. So I've been using so much technology to deliver my business for so long, so of course I'm an avid user like everybody, but use the right technology. And on that it's like getting technology where a recruiter had input in creating it or created it, because they've done our job they understand what we do so they understand where we need support to save time and effort and frustration to deliver a better human experience and that's experience for the hiring manager who I'd like to call partner, because I'd like them to partner with us. Now the conversation, the recruiter, and the candidate is everybody so important.Max: And enabling the recruiter to design experiences. I think that's the new role of technology. And so, you know, you can call it robots and not robots because I think robots is kind of a dangerous word because immediately people think Terminator. But think just a robot as in, you know, press button command begins, and then boolean search send a message, you still got a human at the wheel and increasingly technology companies that are doing well now are the ones where the human creates the loop, there's a human in the loop there's an opportunity to send personalized message and so, I don't, I actually specifically picked this area to work in because I thought we've got a ways to go we've got many years before. Yes, industry will be completely poof, disappeared. I don't think it'll ever happen.Katrina: I don't think it'll disappear. But I think that then the recruiter can become more of a talent partner, become more of a, working more to understand what the business is proactively finding out what's the future of that business within your agency or in house, and really almost doing workforce planning, if you will, and pipeline building and all that kind of stuff. But the one thing that nobody at all, ever talks about when they're like AI can do sourcing for you AI can do your messaging all this kind of stuff. Nobody ever talks about a human's inability to write a CV or a LinkedIn profile. During this pandemic thousands of recruiters have lost their job and whenever I've had the opportunity to look at one of their profiles and provide some feedback which some have not wanted but they've got it anyway. Max: Thank you.Katrina: It means you have no achievements on your profile, you don't use the word recruiter you're not going to come up with a search.You spend your day looking at CVS and you have these really bad profiles. So for recruiters and sources and talent acquisition and whatever you want to call us cannot write their own profiles, or CVs, how are we expecting normal, regular people to do that. I shouldn't call them normal, regular people sit outside the industry.Max: You can call them normal.Katrina: It is a massive massive problem. What are we actually what data, are we feeding into these AI tools. And this has always been my issue with the sourcing buttons, it's like, what are you sourcing from because people can't write their profiles. Developers are the worst at writing. Max: So, yeah, there's been a shift away from, the resume has had a bad name for the last couple of decades where people say do away with a resume and I tend to agree with that because I find that if somebody gives me a resume, I'll look at it for exactly three seconds to see if the person stays in the job for more than six months, you know. But then, the first thing I want to do is hear what they have to say. And anyway, I'm just.Katrina: Your high volume recruiters are squirmed and gone. Yeah, no, I don't want to hear what I have to say I've got to get through 100 CVs every time, every hour. Max: My high volume recruiters actually get to hear the candidates. If they want to, because we know we can collect with our robots voice and video, but I feel.Katrina: Okay so I get like what you mean. So then, the issue is uptake. So the issue is, who's comfortable doing that. So you and I before we came on air, you went, I don't feel like I need to prep you will be fine and like no you don't because I have been talking on video for years, as someone of my generation so I've been talking about for years it's quite something. So it's like I'm really comfortable. I'd happily sit here and just talk to this screen and come across as normal. As most people like the second you put a voice video, they go eh ah. First of all generations of all age groups and that's the issue. So, I agree it would be fabulous, but then you've also got to get around the recruiter resistance, and then the old school hiring manager that I just want the CV, don't make me listen to something. You got somewhere to do, like I said, we're not going anywhere. We've got to overcome all these different resistances. I'm not saying it's not valuable. It's just whether you can get people to use it. Does that make sense? This podcast has now been deleted for insulting the host. Max: No no no, it doesn't make sense from the standpoint of everybody's sending videos, spending time on Snapchat, spending time on TikTok, you know, what is the percentage of the population that does not record themselves on videos on a regular basis?Katrina: Massive. What I do if you ask me.Max: Here to great 20 to 30 year olds. Katrina: Okay, so my nephew's actually asked my brother how old they are, isn't it embarrassing. They're 28 25, and they absolutely do not. They are there but they're not there. Because I wrote Happy Birthday to my oldest nephew in brackets so it I don't think you actually see this, and she said oh no I do, I just look like I never, and he said I see all your Instagram posts that he never does a video of himself, or video, oh I'm at a rock concert or I'm at a sporting event. Max: Yeah, so granted, it's good to give them the options and then we do you know we tell them to video if you can if not something else is fine. Katrina: And I think that's it, use it as part of the toolkit that I'm all for it. And if I was a job seeker, job seekers listening to this absolutely stand up. I mean I just follow up, send a video follow up, all that sort of stuff. Absolutely agree with you. Max: What do you think about this technology that is coming from the higher views of the world which gave sentiment analysis on facial analysis on video? They've kind of toned it down in recent years because of some bad PR.Katrina: I'll go with backlash about the bias in the algorithm. Max: Something about the AI doesn't work the same on different skin tones, which.Katrina: Oh gosh!Max: Yeah so, I always thought that was, I mean I think I'm on your side on that one, that it was absolutely inflated, and that there's no value to it. But, and to your point, there were some early studies saying that some people are uncomfortable in front of the video not trained and they don't perform as well as they would face to face, and I've even met somebody who from the retail world in France, who does a lot of thousands of hires who told me.Katrina: Yeah.Max: I know my recruiters are biased, I know that they're racist at some degree. Yeah. And, you know, as we all are. We all have different levels of racism in us. But when they meet someone face to face for 30 minutes. Maybe that'll kind of go away, you know like, the in person experience will make you realize that it doesn't matter, you know, because now you're listening you're looking in their eyes, and it's about content and not about what you see on paper, and in a way it's easier to express your biases in a hidden room where you're just flipping through resumes but in person it's harder. Katrina: Yeah. Unfortunately, we are just naturally biased and everything that happens in our world. So if I go to gender bias. I was, I just recently did a piece of facilitation that where I work with HR talent acquisition and hiring managers to get to the facilitation discovers where all the blocks are and actually create some solutions, it's all design thinking around like what's going wrong with the recruitment, and they had a big gender issue,technology company. And interestingly, I won't tell you what like French hiring managers were thinking about female applicants. But being that you're from France, I'm sure you know what they'd be up against. But I was talking to people about generational stuff. So my mother was born in 1938, and in 1959, when she got engaged to her first husband, engaged. She had to leave the bank. She wasn't even married, and she wasn't pregnant. Max: That's crazy. Katrina: She was engaged. So you think about my eldest brother and sister who are boomers, who are looking at this kind of role model of, well you know mum does the cooking and the cleaning and the, you know, well did your mum worked really hard, but that was the role, and then there's the husband's role and mum gets paid less for the same job as now because that's just how it is. And we've sort of seen that. So even just to the gender bias and like every other bias that exists in our upbringing. This is what we've seen. So for us to sit up and go why should I that's not right, and some of it's subliminal sometimes it's women doing it to other women as well like when the market is put out something that's very putting people in boxes and we just had a big backlash here that the government put out a, stay home, keep your distance thing for COVID, which was like a nice something from the 1950s that literally had man sitting on the sofa women doing household chores and homeschooling. Yeah, oh yeah social media kicked off thank god social media in that respect, that it's like, so if you just think that, here we are, we're trying to get people in an interview to just change everything they've witnessed and heard as they've grown up and it's passed on. So, my parents would pass it on to my brother and sister and they've passed it on to their kids. Not intentionally it's just a thing to go okay right now you need to. This is on behavior and achievements, just ignore all of it's just hard, we're humans, we're flawed. But until then we can create algorithms that are not flawed which was the big problem with the hireview video tool. I'm sure there was a huge thing in the US about that, you're welcome to correct me if I'm wrong, but the algorithms can be biased because they were created by humans. It's like you have stuff going on. Max: Yeah I think that, trying to address missed biases is a good intention. And I think that you know from a technology perspective, I want to minimize my liability, so I'm like, it's dumb it's not my decision. It's your decision. By the way, did you know that you're 20% more racist than your neighbor. If I could just inform the recruiter. Katrina: Exactly.Max: Yeah, just around that stats like that and then let them self adjust, educate them. Katrina: That's where the tools, the brilliant. That's where it's great. That's where you start going okay right we need to do something about this, what can we do and then there are options out there for people who are far more experts in bias than I am. I'm an expert in discovering where the problems are in your recruitment process. I'm not the expert in fixing it I'd rather you put in the experts to then fix. But it's that you know you're doing the same thing you're going Hey, are you aware in comparison to. And I think that's really important, and we have so far to go because the 1950s was not that long ago. If you think about, like, a lot of the racism and the gender biases all stems from around that time, it's not that long ago. Max: And there are some of these biases that could be also by choice, you know, a group or company can decide I want a particular profile. And if we're not talking about profiles that are where adverse it affects their ability to to stay within the law. And of course, you're perfectly allowed to hire only beautiful people or only massive jerks. I mean there are no laws. Yeah, to regulate that.Katrina: Yeah. You also get the, I call it the eye roll. So, you know, I run events here as well, sorry, ideas, when there wasn't any pandemic. I ran events here in London, because I can't see my screen when we're on a podcast. I've got my London view going on zoom. And I would work really, really hard to make sure that it was gender balanced. It was in house to consultant balance. It was like I've got everything, disability, ethnicity, everything I could possibly think of. I was putting a lineup that reflected the audience, that was always my aim and in some cities that was easier than in London, are harder than in London. But, you kind of saw myself and a few other event organizers have taken to calling out other recruitment event audience organizers. If they just have what we call the pale, like a pale male lineup, a metal, if you will, and they usually a boomer aged or male or white, or middle aged men. Max: Of my age?Katrina: You're not that old. Nice try mate. It's kind of a compliment, I think. And what happens is you will get the white boomer male he'll go, oh well then you're just being discriminatory against us you know we've got a right to be here it's like we've been heard for a really really really long time, and we're not saying you're not going to be heard. You might just have to wait a turn or two, but you get that exact resistance and that exact comment every time. And it's just like No. Does it really hurt if you've got a male and a female and you can wait one term and speak the next one. every time. So we've got work to do. I think it's really important that we look and go. Gosh, I really am just recruiting people like me. When was the last time I recruited a load of men for example I probably would be more inclined to recruit women. I may have a bias that way. Thank goodness I'm not recruiting at the moment. I have to check. Max: It's very, very dangerous to start talking about our personal biases on camera. I'd rather not. Katrina: I do when I react to people and I think it's because, and I feel very open about this I have, I'm a survivor of child abuse, I have done a hell of a lot of therapy and life coaching and I bring that into the mastermind that I've created off the back of the book as well. It's amazing. It all comes in. So I've learned to like to listen to that voice when I, and I react to somebody. And I do go, that's really interesting now am I reacting to their behavior or am I reacting to what they look like. And it's like, you have to really think about it, and I think most of us are just going through our day was far too busy to go. Oh, what are you thinking about Max, that's a bit strange. You know.Max: Oh no, we don't have time for that.Katrina: Yeah we don't have time for that we're too busy.Max: How often have you read, and maybe even said yourself, and all you have to follow your instinct. Yeah, it would be extremely presumptuous of us to think that, you know, we should just switch off all instincts. It's like what you're saying I mean, when you're saying the robot proof recruiter. Yeah, if we decide to eliminate all biases what is left of us. There's almost nothing.Katrina: Yeah, absolutely. Because at the end of the day where we are actually going from a hundred applications to one person that we actually have to. I know it's a balancing act. But I did talk about when I got to the interviewing chapter and I know someone called me out for this because I never said I was gonna talk about that, like you really didn't go into like what questions we should ask in an interview I'm like, No, because I'm a really bad interviewer. I will literally go with intuition. I like Max. He is lovely, can we hire him, that is. And so when I got to that chapter I focused purely on the technology side and how it could or couldn't help. And I was like, I didn't want to go into this is how you conduct an interview, but it was more about like you've done the interview, how to record the feedback or how to know how to use the tools to save your time.Max: You're not selling this book well at all right. It has a ton of very practical tips on how to not just protect your career and future profit but also. Every step of the journey from promoting yourself, talking to the hiring manager, preparing your sourcing effort, everything. And you can tell, you know, decades of experience, poured into that. Katrina: Yeah, yeah, yeah I mean I'm not joking about I'm a bad interview, but they. What I realized when I started writing this book was how different it was from when I started in recruiting, because when I started in recruiting the internet hadn't gotten the way technology hadn't gotten the way it was. I Max is in my database. I call Max and have a conversation with you about the role and you go, yes or no, no, it was easier. I didn't send you a message you look at me and God I want to talk to you. You didn't get inundated with all of the jobs that you could say it was like, the world has really changed. But what really got to me was when I realized, chapter five, that is all about the intake strategy session, that is the most crucial thing. If you don't get the right information from your hiring managers. If you don't get them to partner with you. If you don't shift your attitude so they do partner with you. All of the recruitment becomes really really challenging. And I think any recruiters who are working off a job description that they just got thrown via HR, that is three or four years old. They should be going to forget it, unless you're going to give me an hour upfront with the hiring manager, so I can partner with them properly to fill this role. Then don't do it, and that was that to me the whole crux if you get that wrong, then everything goes wrong after that, the interviewing, the pre boarding, the onboarding, the employee experience, the reputation of the company, and then it comes around in a cycle of bad reputation.Max: Same for when you're building software if you're doing a project it's all about requirement capture. I've got a question I ask to every one of my guests so recently because it's emotional, and it's back to a time when you made a, terrible mistake, hiring mistake and identify the room, go back to those days, think about that person visualize that person, and share with us how you got there and how can our audience avoid making the same mistake you made at the time. Are you crying?Katrina: No. I just literally can't think of having made a bad hire.Max: Oh wow!Katrina: I can tell you a different experience, which was not so I can remember the time I didn't give somebody feedback from an interview there was one person I've never given feedback to from an interview and I still feel bad about it. That one person. No, because it was never my, I was not the person making the hiring decision. I was interviewing them and shortlisting them, handing them to a hiring manager who made that decision. So, I've never had a chain. However, I worked at this IT consultancy which is really early on, and the search allergist just says in house I don't really talk about it because it's so toxic in the end. And I brought in people for this. It's quick, do you consultancy so it's really new technology they wanted people who've worked on billions of rows of data, it was, I was bringing people in all over the world. And they decided without any input from me to hire a sales director, and the sales director couldn't sell. And I watched the bench starting to fill up with these IT consultants and I watched the projects not being renewed and the COO was the narcissistic piece of poop. And when I was going. We're going to implode. We are going to implode. He fired me, and he fired the delivery director who was saying the same thing. And sure enough, that's what happens. And it was all because they hired the wrong Sales Director, they hired someone who couldn't sell, and then they didn't manage them properly. And it was absolutely heartbreaking watching the first year it was more than that, that I brought in from all around the world to London to work at this company, and to watching them one by one lose their jobs, was the most heartbreaking thing and then I wasn't even there, I was watching them from afar. So in that respect, I've seen how damaging it is, and how we play with people's lives. And if we get it wrong, my god did we get it wrong but when we get it right. Wow, I know I have somebody it's now I think 17 years since by chance I changed his life, and he will just message me periodically and go dude I'm still so grateful for you, you just put me on this career path and I love it. So we can do either side. So, yes, it is arrogant as you found that of me to say I haven't done that but I haven't because I've only been at the prescreening side.Max: You didn't manage recruiters directly.Katrina: Oh no I have. I think it takes a hell of a lot of self awareness to sit and go, I would be the world's worst manager. I am the world's best, I would not do it. I have no tolerance for it. I have the most incredible virtual assistant who basically self managers or that would be that literally is one person. She is fantastic. And this whole world that she's in Johannesburg. Sorry I think she's in Durban she's in South Africa. This is the world like it is. It is yeah no I could do that kind of robot but what I'm doing isn't like copy and paste stuff. She does all sorts of bizarre stuff for me. But I think it needs self awareness to know that. Max: Thank you, Katrina and I, again, advise everybody who's listening to check out the robot proof recruiter. Katrina: Can I just say one quick thing about it?Max: Yeah. Yes, please. Katrina: Yeah. Max: Where can people get a hold of you? and where can people get a hold of the book?, and I believe this charity is behind. Katrina: That's what I just wanted to make sure I said yes. I have been to Africa and seen firsthand the work of hope for justice charity. They aim to end modern day slavery which impacts 14.3 million people around the world. And I guarantee there are people in slavery in your vicinity wherever you are in the world and it's a massive problem. And I donated the royalties from the robot proof recruiter to that charity and they're really struggling like everybody else's in this pandemic. So, every purchase not only will you get the most incredible book that has contributions from 74 of your peers around the world. You will also get to help end modern day slavery so I cannot recommend that enough. You can get it in all the usual places like Amazon, Kogan page directly, of course, you can get ebooks, you don't have to just get the paperback, personally, I grab both because you want to write one in New Zealand and quick links but I'm biased. And finally oh my gosh Google me, I'm everywhere. I'm very easy to find.Max: I'm Katrina Collier, I'm very easy to find on Twitter and LinkedIn. We'll put the links on the books.Katrina: Yes, please. And if you're in the clubhouse come and join the con recruiter revolution, we have a chit chat might be a bit late for HR actually thinking of it, timewise but we're having fun with it. Max: Awesome. And if you're a Talkpush customer and your favorite chatbot is starting to take too much room in your virtual virtual space. That's the book. That's the book you need to read to to fight back against the robot. I don't think it's a real fight, I think it's good enough for you for joining and looking forward to listening to your upcoming podcast. Katrina: Thank you very much. Thanks Max.

Max: Hello everybody and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host, Max Armbruster. And today on the show, I'd like to welcome somebody who's dialing in from Switzerland. Suzanne Lucas, who is the owner, and chief writer of a little place called evilhrlady.org. Suzanne: Yes Max: evilhrlady.org, go check it out. Welcome to the show Suzanne. Suzanne: Thanks so much for having me. Max: Thanks for joining. So, where do I begin? How long have you been evil for? Suzanne: Well that's kind of like a bad pickup line. I have been the evil HR lady since 2006, which it doesn't seem that long ago until you do a math in your head and then you go Oh boy! It's been a long time. Max: I love the website it does have that 2006 vibe a little bit, you know it's got these, you know when we were all building our own websites too and and just the format, it looks just a little bit like going back in time I must say, but it has an edge because of it. In fact, I've always thought the best websites are the ones  from that era, like, in terms of layout, nothing has ever been drudge or the eBay for evolved and so on. Even though I'm in the business of changing interfaces but for those who are listening and not on their computer. What can they expect if they go on to the evil HR lady, what audience are you attracting to your website? Suzanne: My audience is a lot of HR professionals and then, a lot of people that are trying to figure out how to handle situations at work. So it skews strongly towards the HR professional but there is a good contingent of non HR people as well that are just either interested in the topic, or they are literally coming to find an answer to their question. Max: Right and I see there is plenty of ways to kill time here there is a big red button that says show me a random post, you click on that and then you can go right into some serious topics. The one I got was enforceable severance clauses, so serious questions for HR folks. Suzanne: Okay, so maybe that's not the most exciting as post. But that's the type of thing that you know you don't know about unless you've been through it, and a lot of people need that kind of information and I hope to be able to provide it. Max: And from your background, obviously, you got into this space because you were a practitioner at some point, and you're a consultant on Labor and Employment Law. How long have you been in Switzerland? Is your background more focused on US law or do you also cover international markets? Suzanne: My focus is the United States that's my main focus. Of course, I've been in Switzerland for almost 12 years now and came for two years and a little bit longer. But, you know, I have my finger on the global market but I'm certainly not an expert in like Swiss employment law. I feel confident in saying, I'm an expert in US employment law, but I'm not really an expert in Swiss law or anything. My audience skews heavily towards the US. And that's where my focus is I do intend to return to the US someday, about 10 years ago. Max: Yeah. And when it comes to employment law. I mean I guess the US has a reputation for being one of those markets where it's relatively deregulated compared to Europe, but when it comes to employment law, it may be actually the opposite. My perception, purely from talent acquisition is that it is more litigious than Europe. Is that in agreement with your views? Suzanne: I mean I think that American culture is far more litigious than European culture in everything. Like my Swiss neighbors would never think of suing anybody for anything, you just don't do that, that's just not something that you do, that's not what comes to your mind. Whereas in US culture is very heavy on the law suing in the court, attitude, so that's a very very different cultural thing. US employment is different from a lot of the world because we have almost always what's called outwell employment, which means that I can quit and you can fire me and nobody's required to give notice on either side. And that's something that's very very unusual, especially in the Europe. I mean that's just, that's not something here, in Switzerland and nobody is that out well employment you know you've got a minimum. But after you have a probationary period but then after probationary period, they have to give you three months' notice before they can terminate you, whereas in the US your boss can walk in today and say, Thanks so much, Max but today's your last day. Max: So, by that. By that formula, employment would be easier in the US. Are there some ways in which employment is harder in the US? Suzanne: You know, I am a huge fan of the outwell employment, and when I say out well, keep in mind that you can't terminate someone for an illegal reason. So I can't walk in and say, Max, you're a white male you're fired. That I can't do. I can fire you but I can't fire you because of your race, your gender or your religion any of those types of things. Max: I thought that you could make an exception for a white male, but okay. Suzanne: You can, lots of people think that you can but you cannot. Max: It means I am protected too, yes. Suzanne: You are protected too and if you're over 40, then you have another layer of protection.  Max: Oh! Suzanne: But I know. 40 is not officially old in the US employment law. Yeah, right. Max: So when you're on the wrong side of 40, go to the US you are protected there. Suzanne: Although in Switzerland, when you're over 40, then they have to give you six months notice before they terminate you. Max: It's lovely. Suzanne: Because you come to Switzerland. Anyway. So the nice thing about this and people don't realize this so much but the easier it is to fire the more likely people are willing to hire. And so, you know, if you're in, say, Germany where it's almost impossible to terminate anybody.  Max: Hmm Suzanne: You're going to be so so so cautious about hiring, and you're going to use temps and contractors, as much as you possibly can.  Max: Mhmm Suzanne: Because once you hire someone if they are not, you know, completely you know i don't know burning down your office building. You're stuck with them until they retire. And so people are very very hesitant to make hiring decisions in in those cultures where it's very difficult to terminate, whereas in the US, because I know that I can get rid of you tomorrow, if I want to. I'm much more willing to give you a try and I think that's a real advantage and employment even though, when someone gets terminated for no fault of their own it's a really big bummer. But the fact is is a lot of those jobs wouldn't exist if. Max: So it's more of a red market. Yeah, does the sacrifice, you have to make you create a more competitive market so that there are more opportunities, but maybe we're getting too specific detail but it's in California i think that i mean in many states I guess there's also a state level protection, where you cannot Fire at will, or rather there. Isn't there some sort of compensation for tenured employees people who've been on the payroll for a long time? Suzanne: There is not Montana, the only state that doesn't have outlaw employment. Now there are protections. California is especially bonkers and very employee friendly. I say bonkers because I would never want to be an HR practitioner in California. Max: Too much paperwork. Suzanne: It's a lot of paperwork and there's a lot more restrictions, ultimately it's still an at will state but there's a lot of things that are gonna come down on you more. Like California says, specifically that terminating somebody because their salary is higher than other employees is illegal. So if I'm doing a layoff and I just want to get rid of my high dollar people. I can't do that. Now, I can eliminate their whole department or whatever but I can't just say, you know, here I have two accountants one's earning $10,000 more than the other, so I'm going to choose the highly paid one. I have to be able to give another reason. Now I can still terminate that person but I have to have another reason, and the reasoning behind this was actually not salary protection but age protection because who tends to earn the more money is older people. And so, by saying you can't fire people just because they're the highest earner. Max: White males also. Suzanne: Well, there you go. Max: All the white males, yeah. Suzanne: Then you're protecting your, your older workers. It's kind of bonkers as I said, you know when I was working as a labor and employment law consultant for a big pharmaceutical company, we had, you know, we had sales people in all 50 states of course, and we have three attorneys that handled that, and one handled 24 states, one handled 25 states, and the third handled, California, you know, that's just how California is, it's just so complex. Max: The complexity that I was alluding to when I said the hidden cost of employing in America, is the lawsuits around the Equal Employment Opportunity law. And for me on the tech side, you know, in the US you have a few more layers of data that you need to collect about everybody that you interview, and it just it's always, you know, an awkward moment for employers in most of the rest of the world including in Asia to be asking people if they're obviously you know a US veteran or what their ethnic origins are because that's not how it's done in other parts of the world. Suzanne: Yeah, that's something that frequently bothers job applicants too. They'll be like, why, why are you asking me this and like they don't want to ask it any more than you want to answer it, it's just required to for our reporting to be able to say, this is what we did. Max: Okay, so do you advise people who are moving into the US for the first time making their first hires there, you to be ready on this front or is this is this more of a nice to have. Because, I mean, I guess if it's a small business, keeping track of everybody's profile is maybe a little bit easier than when you're a big corporation. Suzanne: Well, I mean, the reporting requirements really depends on your business and your business size and if you have any dealings with the US government, and more companies than you would think work with the US government. For instance, my brother is a real estate appraiser he works for a small company, maybe 20 people altogether. They only do property in, you know, Southern Utah, but sometimes that property is government property, which means that they that are a government contractor, which means that they're subject to some of these reporting requirements. So, even though you would think, Okay this is a tiny business and they're not like Lockheed Martin or whatever selling jets to the US military or whatever you know they're appraising land but sometimes when that land is owned by the federal government then they become this government contractor. So, you know, there are these regulations but not everybody is subject to them. And some of the things are ridiculous like you have to be able to report on, you know, the race of all your applicants but what if I don't tell you my race, then you have to guess which is so ridiculous. You know, if we meet face to face, you see me face to face, I am as white as white can be, and with red hair, although the red hair is fair. Max: I couldn't tell. Suzanne: But if we don't meet face to face, then you're gonna be making a judgement based on the stereotypes of my name and my accent. You know, that's. Max: I mean I'm really good at that. But I'm not gonna do it on the air. Suzanne: I'm guessing you're probably gonna get me right because you can't see me. But, you know, that's something that I find bizarre. But we're not the only country that does that. The UK has this completely. Huge recommended list of questions that you ask for demographics, like, How were your parents married when you were 14. What's your parents income level, what's your sexual orientation. Have you ever been on welfare and people see these questions and they freak out and they're like, what does my parents income, why does it matter if my parents were divorced, then why at 14, I could be wrong about the age but it's like a specific age. And they're trying to gather this demographic data, and their goal is to be able to do these long term studies where they can look at upward mobility and it's got a nice goal to it because if I if I can say look you know I was super poor and I was on welfare when I was a child, and now I'm, you know, a marketing manager and I'm making 80,000 pounds a year or whatever. Look at me I've really come up in the world. But when people get these huge questionnaires, they're like what in the heck, and the first time I saw when I was like this is wrong and so I start googling and I'm like, Oh, well here's the government office that gives you a form I'm like okay this is real.  Max: Yeah. That reminds me, I think I had a similar form to come in as a tourist visa for India-is my parents, my parents marital history religion, just making sure I was not from Pakistan, no matter what. So that was, that was that experience but, yeah, I think it must be reassuring actually for somebody who is not based in the US and hearing you say that this employment. What's a call outwill determine at will, protects them means that, you know, we can start hiring tomorrow, start hiring in the US tomorrow, there's not going to be that much paperwork and, you know you're not if you make a mistake, you can still mend your ways later on. Suzanne: Absolutely. It's a really great boon for businesses, and in a roundabout way it's good for employees too because there's just more jobs. I mean, even now, are the unemployment rate in the US. As of, like yesterday was like 6.7%. Max: Yeah. Suzanne: Which, for most of the world that's super low in non pandemic time. For US it's quite high, because of the pandemic but for the rest of the world that's, you know, incredibly low like if you look at like Portugal and Spain, they're always hovering between 20 and 25%. They also have incredibly strong protections for employees, so nobody wants to hire. Max: Yeah. 6.5 is remarkable. I just googled vacation on your website. It's a subject which is dear to my heart because we've had in my company or culture where we've said, We want you to take a vacation, but we also don't really have time to monitor it so take as much as you want. And we've realized that they don't take any.  Suzanne: That's correct. Max: So, can you advise me on me and anybody who is in the same predicament as I am, on what should we do in terms of forcing people to take a vacation. How can I impose vacation on people, which is, I can assure you a very weird thing coming out of my mouth but It is coming in, I'm saying it earnestly. I do want people to take a vacation, but it took me a while to get there. Suzanne: Yeah, well you do and there are lots and lots of reasons for it and this is something that was a big culture shock moving from the US to Switzerland because, by law, everyone gets at least four weeks of vacation here whereas in the US, there's no required minimum vacation, you can have zero if you want. Most places offer vacation but definitely not four weeks. And a lot of people the higher up the food chain you are, you're likely to have six weeks of vacation. And there's a big cultural shift there. But I'll tell you why you should enforce vacation. There are really nice warm fuzzy things. When your people have a vacation, then they're rested they have time off and they have time to recuperate and everybody needs a break and that you already know. But vacation also reduces fraud. And one of the US banking regulations it's, I guess it's not technically a regulation it's strongly recommended. And every bank I'm aware of actually does this, is that every employee has to take at least one week off completely with no contact. No phone contacts, no email checking, no access to any system. And the reason for this is fraud because if you're running a fraud thing. You really need to take care of it. And so, if you go away for a week and you can't even check your email or your voice mail, or log in at all, someone else has to do your job. And as a result, you uncover fraud, and you prevent fraud and it's even better if you do two weeks and you may say, we're not banking, we don't need that. If you would be surprised at the number of people that embezzle from companies, and here's the other thing about the embezzlement. They're not like you know in the movies or whatever where it's someone takes the job with the plan of taking over. It's usually someone that gets behind on their credit card bill or something and they just front themselves $200. And then they pay it back, you know. And then next time it's $300 and they pay it back and then the next time it's 500 but they don't have the money to pay it back. And it's Max: It's because they gambled! they gambled it all off. Suzanne: Or whatever, it starts out, generally accidentally not I mean, obviously, you embezzle on purpose but you know they don't intend to a lot of these people, and having this vacation time this mandatory vacation, actually prevents that fraud and catches that fraud. So from you as a managerial perspective you trust your employees they're awesome, but vacation actually prevents fraud. Max: I mean even if they're not, you know, dealing with a financial transactions. If they really have to switch off, it forces your system to be ready to function without them, which is continuity one on one. You know what would happen if I get hit by a bus. Suzanne: This is also true. This is also true because you've got to do that cross training, you've got to be able to have someone be able to step in and handle you because you may get hit by a bus I mean, fingers crossed, nobody's getting hit by a bus but I mean it happens. And what happens when the guy that gets hit by the bus is the only one with the passwords to your system. That's what you know that's something that you really can't have happen and so there's just so many good reasons, besides the ones that we always think of like you know everyone needs rest and relaxation but everyone does need rest and relaxation, absolutely do. Max: To change the topic and thinking back about 2020, which is the time when everybody left the office, and it was bye, bye everything work from home doesn't matter where you live. Everybody can work from anywhere I have some friends who were working in the US that were Europeans and that they basically moved over to Europe and said well I'm still drawing my salary into the US and US dollars but I'll be working in Europe for the time being until dot dot dot. Have you noticed in your practice, these, these shifts and a lot of your customers are permanently moving towards work from home, and kind of higher from anywhere, or is everybody still thinking of going back to the way things were? Suzanne: You know, I think everyone in everyone. Almost everyone is leaning towards a little bit more of this flexibility model people really like the opportunity to work from home. Now I say that, but there are definitely people that hate working from home and don't like it. And there are definitely jobs that can be done from home but they're much better when you're in a better collaborative environment.  Max: Hmm hmm Suzanne: But there are some things that you have to think through before you make this a permanent thing and a lot of this depends on your employment law. Nobody really has a problem with I'm going to go, you know, back to my home country for a month to help my mother who had hip surgery, and during that time I'm going to keep working. You know, just remotely. Nobody has a problem with that, you know, tax authorities are going to come after you or whatever. But if you say, I'm going to move to my home country. Then suddenly, it's a different deal. And then your business needs to register in this other country you're subject to that country's employment laws. Max: Your tax Suzanne: Your tax withholdings and things like that. And, even within the United States. There are 50 different states and different states have different laws as well and you'll need to start registering in those states if people aren't coming into the office at all anymore. And so that can really limit what you do, certainly people do it, talked with a guy who has like 11 employees and they're in seven countries. But, you know, you can do it, you absolutely can. But there are things to consider on it, it's not as easy, you know, if you want to chair globalization, this would be a way to do it and be like hey let's make it easier for people to work everywhere. Max: Yeah. I think it's there, yes there's some work to be done on filing and registering in a new country, but by offering that freedom for a lot of the white-collar jobs is there and where I intend to take advantage of the global talent pool for sure, personally. Suzanne: Yeah, absolutely a great thing. I mean, look at us. I'm sitting in Switzerland, you're sitting in Hong Kong. And we're having a conversation like we would if we were in the same room. Max: It's a miracle. Yeah, and, and last year I hired somebody in the US, and all I did is I sent him a contract and I started sending him money. And then he did work, and it was just that simple. But I walked into it, you know, with a lot of fear in my heart, because I'm European originally and I just thought it'd be way more complicated than that. But turns.  Suzanne: And if you probably didn't hire him as an employee you probably hired him as an independent contractor. Max: Yeah, but in California I was told that doesn't make a difference. Suzanne: It does make a difference. Max: I was told by the person I hired, so I guess that's why. Suzanne: We can talk later. But, yeah, it's pretty easy and that's what you know I most of my clients actually all of my clients but one are in the US I have one client in Paris. But I work as an independent contractor, which allows them to hire me when I am sitting over here.  Max: So yeah they don't have to worry about where you file your taxes and so on. Suzanne: Right, I take care of all of that. Right. Max: Great. When you started your blog in 2006, you pick the word evil HR lady. Can you take us back to that moment in time when HR was evil, what did you mean by that. Did you mean that this is, this is how people perceive HR, because HR is always getting in the way that that sort of that old notion of. I have to go through HR it means I did something bad. Suzanne: I wouldn't say an old notion.  Max: You think it's still alive. Suzanne: It's still alive. I mean think about it, if your boss calls you in, and you walk in and sitting there in his office is the HR manager. How is that meeting going to go? You already know it's gonna be a bad meeting. Nobody calls HR in to say, Gosh, Max You're doing a great job I just really wanted to give you feedback clients love you your employees love you I just think you're great. They're not calling the HR manager in for that. HR shows up when there's a problem. And, you know, one of my favorite definitions of good HR comes from my friend Kate Bishop she's an employment attorney and an HR consultant and she says, Good HR is like the CIA. When we do a good job. You never know we were there. You only know when we mess up. And that's, you know, really true we're like this secret operation that goes on behind the scenes and when HR is functioning properly you don't think about HR at all. It's just like, what is that I don't know who that lady is. But when things go badly, then you're aware of them. So people still have this really negative attitude towards HR, and you being in the recruitment space should know this, that recruiters have a terrible reputation. Everybody blames the recruiter for everything that goes wrong in the hiring process. Some of it is the recruiters fault, some of it is the hiring manager's fault and some of it is that you were just a terrible candidate, but nevertheless who gets the blame the recruiter. What, are we done for the day? Max: I've heard some bad things about recruiters but you know I mean, at least recruiters are have something to celebrate right. This quarter win that they hired somebody. So there's a lot of upside there. It sounds like HR is a little bit more bitter where you're just, you know, you'll never be celebrated if nothing happens. But you'll be there when there's drama. And so, you must need a particular psychological build, to be able to do well in those conditions right to, you have to be able to have a very even calm temper. Suzanne: It would be a good plan. Does everybody have that? No they don't. Do we all have cats? Yes we do. Max: Did you all study psychology? And then no, a good chunk. Suzanne:  My degrees are actually in political science so that's a Max: Not too far, not too far from psychology. Suzanne: You know, you deal with bureaucrats that's a charm. Max: Yeah. Great. Well, I've already given the name of your website. Is there a better way to get ahold of you than to visit evilhrlady.org. Suzanne: There's so many ways to get ahold of me, there's my website, evilhrlady.org, I have a Facebook group called evil HR lady that right now we have about 6000 members and we discuss all things HR, and we share all the best HR memes. So, anybody is welcome to join that if you're smart enough to be able to answer our entry questions which are, why do you want to be here and if you just write yes I'm going to reject you. So you have to be able to at least put a sentence together. And that's a good way to reach me, I'm on Twitter at real evil HR lady, and I'm on LinkedIn every day. Max: I guess I still don't know if you're evil or not but I'm still very thankful for   Suzanne: I am good and Holy. Max: Holy? Okay, so there's the two sides of the coin there. Thank you, Suzanne It was a pleasure to have you on the, on our show. And we'll see you online.  Suzanne: Alright. Max: Looking forward to those blog posts. Suzanne: Absolutely. Max: That was Susan Lucas, also known as the evil HR lady. That's not the title I gave her. She gave it to herself. If you want to get an idea for the kind of articles that she writes, you can find articles labeled or titled how to get your boss fired or I'm in trouble for working too hard. Or president Biden's fire on the spot policy is a bad idea for your business. Another social commentary and commentary on HR practices. The main lesson I got from this exchange was that it's important to make sure your staff takes holidays. And the best way to ensure that is to start tracking it and enforcing it with, or without regulatory mandate. It is the best thing to do in order to keep the same workplace. I'll be implementing those immediately. I hope you got something out of it too, and that's, you'll be following us for more. On your podcast platform of choice.

Max: Hello, welcome back to The Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster, and today on the show, joining us from, I believe Philadelphia. Ward, Christman. Hi Ward. Ward: Hello, great to be on. Thanks for having me.Max: My pleasure. So, are you in Philadelphia? Did I get that right?Ward: That's the, the general area. We're about almost an hour west of the country somewhat, but yeah.Max: In the pine trees somewhere?Ward: Actually not that many pine trees around here mostly of the big leafy kind that people love raking up and fall.Max: Okay. Well I met Ward a few years ago, in Boston, in an event organized by HR tech tank, where we were a strategic advisor. But today Ward is the co-founder and chief advisor for the HR tech alliances, which you can go on hrtechalliances.com and works with as an advisor to HR tech vendors around the world. And so, I hope we'll take this opportunity to talk to, to share some of your insights on the challenges felt by the buyers, which are the TA directors, and the TA departments all over the world. When dealing with vendors, and the fact that the HR stack keeps growing and growing, and it becomes more work to manage the integration, than it is to manage the vendors, actually I imagined at a pretty fast rate for some of them. So that's the direction in which this conversation will go. But before we go that word for audience, I'm sure they'd love to hear a little bit about your background and where, how you ended up being this matchmaker for the HR tech world which is quite a niche role, but I believe you're, you were a long time ago you were an engineer, and then an entrepreneur, an HR tech entrepreneur as well.Ward:  That's right. Yeah, engineering was great building plutonium factories and all kinds of weird stuff, but actually it wasn't for me. But somebody introduced me to the internet back in like 1989-99 range. And it was just text based and I thought this might go somewhere so I actually left engineering and started one of the first job boards. Before the web was even commercialized so I told them. But, yeah, it's coming up on 30 years and I ran a job board for, gosh, how many years was it nine years and then the.com crash.Max: I am logging into your LinkedIn profile, it says, from 92 to 2001 year you ran jobthat.com, so yeah that's nine years.Ward: Yeah, it was a great run and got a couple, you know, master level I think degrees out of it, you know, how to raise money what not to do, especially when the.com crash or 911 type activities. Max: Perfect timing.Ward: Yeah, exactly. So it's just like, you know, the COVID pandemic and all that stuff it's like yeah I kind of feel like I've been through the wringer a few times so we actually grew last year and you know it wasn't by accident, because there's just different ways to take on things but from a talent acquisition leader standpoint, obviously, those of you that are lucky to have your job, and are able to keep your technology if your budgets didn't get slashed that's wonderful. If you didn't, you know we're doing now to maybe rebuild it or is it with the coming recovery let's put it that way are you going to rebuild your tech stack and what are the what are good approaches or bad approaches we've seen it all over the years and you know it's it's great to have a chance to kind of have an open dialogue about how.Max: I think nothing is completely new,every mistake has already been made. And so you're, you're reminiscing without giving us specifics on some of the mistakes, you did a jobnet.com, a few decades ago. Coming into what was at the time, Armageddon, the end of the world, the.com, boom bust which was just when I was graduating from school, by the way, so I entered a market with high unemployment, no prospect, and everybody in my MBA was talking about the paradigm shift and the internet economy. And then as soon as I graduated, I mean I was talking like one of those startup guys but there was no startup jobs to be had anymore.Ward: Yeah. But they're, I mean they're out there now for sure and as you can imagine, in  recruiting tech. I mean how many of those are started by a staffing leader. If not internal and certainly a recruiting company or staffing company right. We're like, oh can do it better than bullhorn or whoever and, and then they build it and guess what the tools are so much easier every year. There's more and more tools that you can build your own thing. And some companies as we know, build their own ATS and stuff like that. Yeah, we have 457 ATSs that we are tracking down in our database, and I'm sure we're probably missing half of them on a global basis. So, why would a company build an ATS cheaper to go buy one especially if you wanted to own it.Max: It'd be cheaper to buy an ATS company you mean.Ward: Yeah, exactly. Right. It's so true. But, you know, I remember a few years back, Facebook recruiter called me and said hey we're building our own ATSs once you know your background and product and the product projects before IBM took over. Do you want to consider for this job and like you're building your own business to take out the market. I mean if it's take out the market. Yeah, talk about just gonna build it and run it in the house. Why would it. Why would you do that? Of course, you know, Facebook has a few engineers, I get it.Max: Yeah, they could build anything they want but Ward: And apparently you know the TA leaders are like, Well, why should we settle for whatever we can build around and they did it. I don't know if they're still good actually but Max: Google built their own ATS and Microsoft will probably end up buying an ATS so that was, that was the rumor that was being circulated by Chad and Cheese on their podcasts.Ward: So these things yeah they continue to happen. And, I mean, I remember six years ago I was running. I was on the blog squad for what was HR tech world now on leaf in Amsterdam and they're like oh hey we want to interview some, we want you to interview some of the folks here at the conference that are speakers and influencers today. Okay, great. And, again, why don't you interview Jason Averbook, and Josh Bersin, like, thanks a lot you know my first time to this event, gives me the two biggest names in the industry to interview on camera. It went great. But I remember talking to Josh Bersin I'm like hey, let's talk about consolidation for a minute right you got big fish even though the small fish. The way I see it, it's gonna keep happening but I see a future where there's more point solutions kind of being assembled in a way that people can use that they don't have to necessarily buy that pre canned giant offering that has everything in it. Right and he totally agreed he said he thinks it's going to get much much worse but more choices more Max: More fragmented.Ward: Yeah some of your listeners were like exactly right it's like well, all I need is a chatbot in our current providers is not on the roadmap for another year or two, we need it now. So where do we go look, you know, there's all these choices and there's new ones popping up all the time. That's just one tiny sliver of TA tech stack is helping roleplaying come to market. One of they needed referenceable clients so it helped them get their sales strategy set up and get some of those references with clients. I remember one of them. Because Brad is with Informatica. And like I said he really liked what he has to offer you know how's that gonna fit into your stack and I was expecting you know we've got five or six pieces right he said yeah we got 32 TA tech solutions today in house. This will be 33 a month we'll find a plan like are you kidding me. They were maybe 1000 people or something. How do you have 32? It's unbelievable how many solutions are out there. And that's not even the best.Max: But that's a testament to how easy it's become to buy and to start using, I mean, that would be impossible 20 years ago, when everything was on prem on premise to have 2010 solutions.Ward: Oh yeah, absolutely. Max: And most of our tracks are not a hard logs right so if they were not useful these 30 Solutions would probably lose the contract within the next year.Ward: Well, that's, that's one thing i mean he liked, he liked to play with new tech kind of guy which is great and he commanded the budget to play and that's wonderful. So many early stage companies love to have that. But if you're on the consumer side you're the head of talent acquisition and you're trying to figure out stacks a little wobbly why is that what his issue was in most is how do you get them to talk to each other so you're not doing double entry or triple entry or the data is flowing at the right time or if it's filling in. What we found that one of the reasons we exist, advising the vendor executives is a lot of mark don't even know they're supporting the same client, let alone working together. So our mission in life is to help them discover that. Who else is there supporting that client and get them to play nice in the sandbox, because there's always overlap right. And if there is overlap, how do you keep them from trying to point fingers at each other, and then anybody listening system errors. Like, oh yeah you go call one vendor and complain that hey that data is missing where to go or it didn't get there, while they're gonna say well it's somebody else's fault right and then you ask them and they're like well it was their fault,Max: Yes those meetings are happening all the time. And what's the overall trends that you're seeing the sort of five year tenure threads, is it that the vendors are becoming more often are more closed? Are they are they trying because, in 2020, there was consultation people wanted to, to become more essential for their customer, because as budgets were being slashed. They tried to hold on to, as much business as possible and so, in that, in that environment I guess it does not favor a very collaborative mindset because if the pie is shrinking, then everybody wants a bigger slice of it.Ward: Right.Max: But maybe that's maybe that's a bump on the road. Generally a more a more collaborative mindset and trend or am I being, or is that wishful thinking.Ward: Well, yeah, you're right, there's some people panic in the wrong place and I think, you know, last year taught many of us anyway. He had a strong partner network and if you're a consumer buyer these systems. If your vendors aren't playing nicely together in the sandbox. It's only going to get worse when stress levels go up, or if you do have to cut, you know, how do you how do you know what the cut, if anything, You know what's gonna. If it's like Jenga or something and you pull out the wrong piece, the whole thing could come collapsing right and so it's not easy but reality is yeah there's definitely some consolidation, driven by the buyers and I don't see that changing necessarily but what I also do see on the flip side is with more options for better point solutions, more mature point solutions ones that can evolve more quickly. I mean that's the main reason that big fish, eating small fish because they can't, the big ones can't innovate, they're like, Titanic they're, they're great at cruising across the ocean, but they can't maneuver like a smaller boat, that's where the point solutions can really showcase innovation adapt to the environment more quickly. And the only way the big ones are going to get that typically is through acquisition, consolidation. That just leaves a vacuum frankly for innovation to bubble up and take shape.Max: Yeah, it seems to me as technologists, that when I, when I hear about this consolidation that happens, and these mega mergers, from a couple of years ago from K1 and jobvite. And I think you were saying you were involved with withdrawal points. Be familiar this one. That's the the size and ambition of this is that this is a sales driven consolidation like I don't think any engineer came up with the idea. Let's bring all these things together, and it'll be a beautiful product at the end. The engineers will probably still, still wondering, what the hell happen to them, you know, right.Ward: Well, actually, we've been talking to a number of different investment groups lately. We're seeing the same thing they're where they're looking at that solution stack and think how do we stuck together solutions that can be an offering in the marketplace right and that's certainly what the job I roll up meant at least to me is how do you fill the gaps without building sides by your partner like some buying going on. Their partner strategies have always been kind of rollercoaster rides from what we've seen. Lot of opportunities I mean Alison, a lot of opportunity for them to really revamp their partner network and make a difference for the customers. Instead of trying to build everything and take tends to take longer than finding a partner. And your question earlier about openness versus closed, definitely seeing a trend more towards the open API's and different ways for the vendors to collaborate share the data, and sometimes invisibly to the customer which is maybe a perfect scenario right where hey if I hire somebody I just want that data to flow through our various system. I don't need to know exactly how it happens or what happens, it's gonna happen reliably save us time and effort, get people on board you know into the company.Max: And have you seen some of the employers talent acquisition, folks, start to build in-house system integration teams to serve as the glue between all of these systems is. Does, does a TA director and 2021 need to have an engineering team.Ward: They could, and the vendors don't get their stuff together. They might be the only way to fix it. Especially the bigger companies because they've got long term contracts they can't just rip and replace things so easily right, even with open API's and all that. There's a lot of investment, which is why legacy systems need to be named they're still chugging along. You look at the benefits, space, my goodness, they're still sending data back and forth, flat file CSV files. So recruiting, kind of, often the leader of the pack when it comes to using leveraging technology and open API's, butMax: It's a little bit more playful, and then perhaps because you're dealing with candidates instead of staff, so you have a little bit more freedom, but also perhaps because you're dealing with the markets, which is every town for every geography has its own dynamic and for the buyer, an opportunity to play and say, Well, I respect our global tech stack but here in dot dot dot, we do things differently, and I have to go. Because they have the budget to spend on advertising and if you can buy an ad in a local newspaper then you can also buy a support service, the same budget. So, That's something that we've been leveraging at Talkpush.Ward: Yeah, no, it's, it is charted. Now, more so than anything with work from home policies right we are becoming more global organizations across the board. And not at all HR tech are built to work in all these different local geographies and so forth, local laws all this stuff that varies from state to state sometimes let alone country to country so. And that's what's interesting too, you know, when, I used to do more consulting directly with the employers. If they were on a global footprint my recommendation is that if you need a system that's global, you might want to start looking at solutions built in Europe or something that are kind of more of multicountry enabled out of the box. Max: Yes, yes.Ward: Because that's how you operate, whereas in the US, it's like, oh yeah, you know, we got a 100 clients and it's English only, it's only domestic and going to other countries, it becomes a much bigger task than let's say European company I think often coming here to the states to support that.Max: Yeah that is actually a lot of European software company in our space which ended up going to the US, right, I mean a lot of the TA tech and HR tech spaces with entrepreneurs from America who are now Americans, but we're not always American, the CEO of Smart recruiters mountain, the founder of Phenom, you know a lot of companies. I'm sure more than half of the CEOs come from abroad, but they end up building American companies. And what I mean by that companies is that have the regulatory framework of US in mind, specifically on the candidate side. A lot of this is around the law employment opportunity, and diversity hiring, which does not work the same way outside of the US. You know, it's very strange for me to, I just took a survey. And  I was asked about my diversity metrics and I'm like I don't know who is the minority in my company, I don't even know I think I'm the minority I don't know. It's also it's just a different narrative outside the US. Ward: Yeah, remember we were trying to figure out who was the client. They had trouble getting all their resumes parsed properly and we had a good parsing partner it was nothing wrong there but all their resumes had pictures on them and the birth date. This was the golden role in that country you know that's just how it was done.Max: For sure.Ward: The parser wasn't expecting these kind of things yeah so yeah that's it is the global world. You have to really accommodate into one size fits all good luck.Max: I can't keep track anymore, which countries are we putting the pictures in and then which countries are we not putting the pictures in, and it's hard to keep track sometimes. Ward: Right. Yeah, yeah, no, it's it's different. So from a consolidation standpoint, certainly we're seeing a lot more we're even, whether it's consolidating or growing, you know the acquisitions sometimes it's the market share. Right, so, others have been buying companies abroad. And I think it's hard actually compared to investing a lot of money in developing new teams to try to make those relationships regarding to sell especially at the enterprise level and in any enterprise level type TA leaders listening is probably the same thing like hey if our abroad type operations want to make their own decisions about their solution if  it works for them, and we still get the global like metrics or whatever we need. Why not have a different ATS in every region or something if that's what it takes to get the right results and maybe aspire to consolidation but. And there's some interesting new groups coming out right now that are continuing to push the envelope of vendor collaboration and data analytics is a great example of one we just had a collaboration done in December on that, and some great innovative solutions presented to influencers in the industry and there's some interesting results from the scores and all that but the feedback that came in was was amazing from a competition standpoint, they realize hey, we've got, whether it be geography or industry or business units. You look at the bigger the company is the more likely they're going to have different systems running in house. How do you get that data across actually need to actually prove results, especially in talent acquisition.Max: Yeah.Ward: Third Party perhaps even just to help figure out what's there, what do we need to measure, what can you measure, what can you ask to be anonymous. So many rules. But if you don't measure it you can't improve it. Somebody's got to be paying attention.Max: Yeah, I really liked the analytics as perhaps the central function that needs to work with every country every geography and bring it all together. You of course also need to have a central employer branding function, low, you would also want to have a local element to that and of course you would want IT to have a central policy around data privacy and personal data for the company. But beyond that, I think, I think a decentralized model probably works best in talent acquisition. That, that's my opinion, and I will keep sharing it with everybody who's willing to listen.Ward: Yeah. It's hard to get it right everywhere so stick with best things you have and try to make them work together and you're listening and go for our vendors don't, they don't work together with each other. I mean that's the problem that we try to solve platform level for alliances and partnerships, but also on the advisory side because if you want to keep your customers you got to know what their situation is and the situation is they've got other systems in house, doesn't matter workday Oracle or any of the big shops it's even more so than because there's a lot of holes they know it and even if they don't have the holes that they think they have or don't you know they do they have more than they think they have and their partner networks, need to be strong and plug and play and as I said they can't deliver that companies are going to start, either hiring their own integration experts in house which is sad to see but if that's the only way to solve it so be it.Max: And to ask for help or advice on these tricky topics which no, no recruiter, got into recruitment, to do system integration and talk about alliances, like it just happened. So, a lot of them are probably asking for help but how do they get in touch with you.Ward: Yeah. So, I guess. Probably the best start would be Linkden but not the only word Chrisman I don't think on Linkedin but pretty easy to find. Yeah, it's, again, our job is to help vendors better collaborate with common customers and get a better result. So if you have vendors that are collaborating well and you want some help there let us know and make an introduction, we'll see what we can do.Max: I've a list. I've a list. I'll send it to you after we're offline. And before we part ways, I wanted to ask you one of my favorite questions is for you is to not think about your current job but think as a practitioner of somebody who's hired people, and as a manager and go back to the days when you made a terrible hiring mistake. I don't want names. I don't want to instant fix, I just want to know what was the terrible hiring mistake that you made and what can we learn from it.Ward: Wow, okay. Max: You got a few names I see your eyes are glazing.Ward: Yeah so yeah everybody has their own strengths or weaknesses. Right. But I guess one of my bigger mistakes was just believing that somebody had the technical skills that they said they did and just didn't totally fabricated and took a while to uncover that, delayed this was years ago butMax: Still remember it. Ward: Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like, I mean that's always the challenge how do you know until they get in front of you but thankfully these days there's so many wonderful tools that can either help assess their technical prowess, at least from a capability standpoint. What do they actually know and there's almost too much information out there now right so good tech partners that can help kind of cut through the details.Max: There are some engineers out there who are way better on paper, than in person, or in fact in reality so a good reminder for more to don't skip the technical assessments. It's absolutely time well spent. Even if it's, you know, if it's gonna avoid you one mistake out of 20. That's still a good investment. That's a good investment so add that to your workflow for every position where it's applicable. Right, thanks, thanks Warren. Great to have you. And, well, I'll send you that list of all my naughty partners very shortly.Ward: Sounds good, enjoy it. Thanks so much Max. Max: Thanks.Max: That was Ward Christman from HR Tech Advisor and HR Tech Alliances. You can connect with him on LinkedIn if you have one of those tech stack headaches they're trying to solve. And of course as you've heard from Ward, there are many companies that are dealing with dozens of different vendors. He was quoting one that had more than 30 different existing software providers on talent acquisition. And so I like to think of it as a trend which will continue to evolve and to enable our audience with more ideas and encourage them to try new tools. But when you do so, to always favor those providers that have open API, good documentation; otherwise you might be accumulating what could be called interoperability debt. That's the word I'm looking for?And just like you can have a technical debt, you can have interoperability debt, which is the concept that if you work with vendors who don't play well with other vendors it will end up costing you a lot of money. So I hope you enjoyed that.And if you did, please follow us on your podcast player of preference and share with your friends. Thank you.

Max: Hello and welcome back to The Recruitment Hackers Podcast, I am your host Max and today I am delighted to welcome Jeff Wald. Jeff Wald is the author of two books including The end of jobs, The rise of on demand workers and agile corporations hot topics, kicking off into 2021, Jeff, welcome to the show.Jeff: Max, thank you so much for having me.Max: It's a pleasure. And we're at opposite sides of the planet Jeff is logging in from Florida, I'm in Hong Kong. But I think the world is smaller than it has ever been. With so many of the so many of those jobs being kind of remote, being advertised as it doesn't matter where you're, where you're hiring you know it's anywhere in the world as long as you've got the skills. So, it must have been a busy year for you, promoting the cause of the remote worker and the on demand worker.  I'm even more excited about the international dimension of that, as opposed to, let's say, the creation of a new job category. I just like the fact that now the talent pool is universal and global.Jeff: I agree, I will say this man. Let's not gloss over this small little fact that you're sitting in Hong Kong, I'm sitting in Florida. This is mind blowing to me if your mind's not freakin blown by this anyone that's listening to the fact that the two of us are sitting on literally opposite sides of the planet. That is amazing. You know pre pandemic I'd said a bunch of times in the book down the hall, on another floor, down the block, or halfway around the world. You don't need to be in the same place to be on the same team. And that has become all the more true during the pandemic or I should say all the more true, it's always been true. Over the last few years it has been all the more aware than people become of that. And this is exemplified here I mean we had a wonderful conversation, prior to you know hitting record here, as if we were colleagues on a project, just working and it to me there was no difference the conversation we had then are having now than you, me sitting in your office.Max: Yes, yes, Well all the mess in my office is outside of camera view. It looks a lot better. Actually, I  control this environment better. Jeff: I'd probably be wearing pants. Those are all things that are slightly different than if I were in your office. But still, it's all amazing to me.Max: That's great. So far listeners out there. Jeff is pantless.Jeff: Allegedly, allegedly!Max: Well. So Jeff, maybe you start by telling us a little bit about yourself, before you became an author on the topic of employment. It's probably not what you grew up, dreaming to become a kind of happened with life. Can you walk us through the main steps in your career. Jeff: Sure, I started my career in finance with JP Morgan,moved to venture capital, which was just an amazing, amazing experience working with entrepreneurs, and getting to see men and women that were just trying to change the world. So exhilarating that I left and started my first company, that failed miserably and basically bankrupted me. But that's the thing with entrepreneurship, pick yourself up dust yourself off and keep going. Second company we built up, and eventually got sold to Salesforce and that was a good outcome not a great outcome. And then this last company Work Market, founded 10 years ago. Work Market is enterprise software that enables companies to organize manage and pay their freelance population, raised about 70 million from Union Square ventures SoftBank and a few others sold the company to ADP almost three years ago. So it's been a great, great journey and the sale to ADP specifically gave me the space, Max to finally sit down and finish this book because I've been working on it for like four years prior to the purchase of ADP. Max: Okay. Well, congrats on that entrepreneurial journey. I haven't read that. After you sell your business, there was a moment. It's a moment where most entrepreneurs kind of struggle with depression. Suddenly a drop, drop in activity and energy. But apparently, you made the most of that sort of drop.Jeff: That's super super interesting. I guess I understand it conceptually. It's one of the silliest reasons to be depressed, not that I wish to ever make fun of depression. I will tell you having your business fail and going bankrupt. I'd say bankrupt as bankruptcy is a technical term. Have your business fail and virtually going bankrupt. That is something that did in general did a lot of depression in me. And, you know, having not leaving my apartment for some time. As I was super bummed out by that, but I had no experience like that with the sale of joy upon  joy and gratitude and fortune. Max: Yeah. Good, I am really happy to hear that because you know who knows maybe one day I'll have to sell some of my shares. And I'd like it to be a happy moments as well. Jeff: God will. God will.Max: So, your new book, The end of jobs, The rise of on demand workers, I'm excited about this topic, because it is all of our, our mission in the corporate world and the enterprise world, to, to create a performance driven culture, and an output driven culture where people are measured on, you know what they produce, as opposed to you know how why they smile. And I think that the transition towards task base job assignment, as opposed to job descriptions, is one for the best because it actually gives more freedom to be able to just get the job done in as much in as little time as possible, which is giving people more freedom to run their lives the way they want. I mean it could be looked at. It could be looked in that way it could be looked at on the opposite side of the spectrum as like a cold market driven approach to employment. Instead of where many employers to position themselves as we are family. But I think the 'we our family' message is a bit outdated personally. How do you feel about that transition? Do you think that we're moving towards a world which is, is that what's covered in your book?Jeff: So there are a number of things that are ever covered in the book about the future of work. The first and the most important is to look at the history of work. I wrote the book because I get very frustrated with people that make predictions about the future of really anything quite frankly without evidence, specifically in the world of work. We have the history of work and how companies workers have come together to produce goods and services throughout different societal changes different technological changes. So let's study those. And the second body of evidence is data. What does the data, tell us how to data trends and patterns, play out. Currently, and obviously through history as well. The third is how companies actually engage workers. You know a lot of people think the labor resource planning meeting goes like this, CEO walks in and says, 'All right, what are we gonna do ot her workers. Let's hire the cheapest ones, meeting adjourned'. That is actually not how those meetings go, there's a lot of variables that go into that equation. And so understanding how companies actually engage workers, understanding the data and the data trends and understanding history, and how society has coped with some of these struggles before. That to me is a very thoughtful way to think about, or start to make predictions about the future of work and that's what we endeavour to do with the book.Max: So the book has a historical component that goes back to the the history of work. I was excited when I read about the time of Abraham Lincoln when they were talking about what's it called wage slaves, or where it was considered that every man should be his own employee, there was a vision that was articulated at the time that you know you were to be on a regular wage is somehow less envious, that everybody should be self employed as kind of coming back a little bit right from one or two years ago.Jeff: It certainly is coming back to the whole idea behind freelancing is the idea that you get to have flexibility and choose your own path that is a very very powerful thing it's something very encoded in our DNA to want to have control of our own destiny, of course, and all the things that the freelancer faces are starting to permeate the full time workforce. So, like called the book The end of jobs the rise of on demand workers. That is not to say I think everyone's going to be a freelancer, that is to say that all the things that the freelancer deals with task based labor, personal responsibility, algorithms, allocating work data driven HR all of those things Max are permeating the full time workforce and all workers are dealing with kind of things.Max: Okay, so, everybody who's looking at Uber drivers thinking, I'm glad I don't have an algorithm, looking over me. Time is coming up. Yeah,Jeff: it is coming. No question. It is coming.Max: Okay. From a talent acquisition perspective which is really my focus. How does this affect recruitment How does the rise of the on demand worker affect recruitment? Do you think that. Are you noticing that they're, they're being hired in a different manner than the permanent staff?Jeff: Well I think there are a few ways that all of these changes impact recruiting. The first is the recruiting is that tip of the spear right your listeners are the first people out there that are dealing with the changes and how companies are structuring their workforces. We need more of X we need less of Y. We need more people in this geography, fewer in that geography. And so recruiting is seeing in real time, the shifts in labor resource management, and that is super super interesting in and of itself. And we can spend some time talking about the types of recruiting they're gonna be more important as we get into skills based labor, and more remote work, and more on demand work and how robots and AI are going to impact the workforce with large. That's one conversation set that is a very interesting conversation to be had. The other part is how does that specific function change, given all of these things is more recruiting going to be done in an on demand capacity? is more recruiting going to be done via robots or AI systems going to be doing more recruiting? And that's another very big impact that quite frankly we don't know how that's going to play out yet. You know there are just way too many variables and it's way too early in the game, but we certainly have seen some trends around on demand recruiting. And we've certainly seen some trends around some of the tasks inherent recruiting starting to be done by machines.Max: With the start of the new year. Are you talking to companies who are setting targets around. I'd like to move, you know, 10, or 20% of my workforce to on demand, does that come down from the board to the operational level?Jeff: Short answer is, look from the board down the answer to that is usually No, that is. You'd hope, but boards, I don't think, sitting on a few public boards myself boards don't get involved that tactically even though I would argue it is strategic and they should be having that type of conversation. Those conversations are very nuanced very complex, and so I've never seen somebody come down and see any point out. When I was running Work Market because if you wanted to increase your usage of freelancers there weren't any really other places to go, if you wanted to manage a large freelance workforce and Work Market. So, I would usually get that call. And I will tell you we very very very rarely got the labor force transformation call. The call of a we're getting into the change how we're doing things we need to bring in, and we're frankly, what I would get those calls, I kind of was like this is going to be a two year conversation, this sucks, but it usually, the call will come from real big companies so you take it and start having obviously if we could work with fortune 50 company we're going to do it. What the call, we would get Max, the calls that we would get all the time is we currently manage a freelance workforce. It is a very large part of our labor force strategy and it has been for years or decades, in some cases, but it's a mess. We don't know who's where who sent what legal Raymond who is working on what is good and what we need a piece of software to help us efficiently and compliantly manage this workforce, that call, I would get all the time. But the idea that, whether it's on demand work or robots and AI, that there's going to be some huge shifts that data doesn't support it. History doesn't support it, and how companies actually engage workers does not support an argument that oh my gosh all those jobs are gonna go next year, 10% of those jobs are gonna go. Labor force statistics and labor resource planning happens very slowly and very methodically and that's that's just the reality. So it's that reality that people should be mindful of when thinking about the future of work.Max: And there's a huge regulatory component where a change in the law, and how easy it is to hire and fire will immediately impact the percentage of the staff, which is on demand right because it drives a lot of the demand.Jeff: It is a incredibly powerful maybe the most powerful, powerful variable and what I call the labor equation, very complex equations series have a system of equations, I should say that guide how companies actually engage workers, and the regulatory environment, especially when it comes to freelance workers, I would argue is the biggest variable in that equation. And the problem with that variable is that that variable itself is all over the map. It's very different how you engage worker in California than what you do in Louisiana. Workers comp board in Wisconsin has an entirely different point of view than the Labor Department in Portugal. So you got to be super super mindful of how complex it is and that's why most companies go, oh my god it's too complicated just keep everybody employed. Obviously that's a bit glib of an interpretation, but it's not that far from accuracy.Max: Yeah. Yeah, I believe it for sure. For me, I experienced it the other way I was like oh my god it's so complicated I have all these full time employees and be better I'd just have contractors, but either way. Either way, the decision towards a simpler way of doing things. I mean, I imagined that it's a little bit easier to decentralize, the compliancy, meaning. Instead of putting the onus on the employer to be in charge of everybody's, you know, being compliance is to say to the on demand worker, it's your responsibility. And by the way, here's a little bit of money to help you file your taxes or, you know, manager, your stuff.Jeff: That is a really good point there. A increasing number of companies out there that are helping the freelancer set up a corporate structure, which really makes it a vendor relationship, and that stuff certainly helps shield the company, but in no way can the company. And I would not pretend to understand laws in China, or anywhere else. But in the United States, you can't pass that liability down to the worker. So when the State Department of Labor comes, you can't say well I, you know, they all signed these legal agreements indemnify me the department labor's we go okay I don't care. There, we view them as your employees, where is our back payroll tax? Where's Social Security payments? Where's unemployment insurance? let's go gimmy gimmy gimmy. They couldn't care less. But there are ways to your point, that companies can certainly mitigate their risk.Max: Great. Well, what else can corporations think about your talking to you know it was in your title the Agile Corporation. What are some of the trends Do you foresee in 2021 for companies who want to become more agile, Besides that, besides work market. What other what other tools or methodologies do you recommend?Jeff: Well I don't anticipate a huge increase in the size of the on demand workforce. But the on demand workforce as a number shrank. So there were over 240 million workers in the on demand workforce now there are high 30 million workers in the workforce, but the labor force as a whole film. And so we're still trying to parse together, did the percent of the on demand workforce shrink grow or stay the same? My guess is that it probably that stayed about the same. So I don't anticipate in 21, a huge movement back. I think it will stay about the same. percent of the labor force, because companies are just focused elsewhere, right now, right they're trying to make sure their teams are safe they're trying to make sure that their supply chains are safe and trying to make sure that their employees are being productive and they're not thinking about labor force transformation and 21. 22 might be a very different scenario. And as we discussed earlier regulation I think it's going to be the biggest variable in that equation. But when we talk about agile Max there there are a host of different ways in which a company can be agile. The best way is managing an army of freelancers. They are completely agile. The next you know you can move into temps and the vendors to other types of relationships. The biggest change that we saw in the labor market unquestionably in terms of how work gets done, I think the biggest change was unemployment and obviously horrific impacts on labor because of the pandemic. But the biggest change in how work actually gets done was clearly remote. It was moving to remote work and does that make a company more agile? of course it does. Allow your workers to be able to work where they want how they want is a very important step in kind of breaking that bone of the one office one manager 9-5 job. And that's the job by the way that is referenced in the title the end of jobs. Robots are taking all of our jobs, far from it, they are not, that is a very clear conclusion from the book. But this idea that you have one office, one manager, you work 9-5 that job is dying and it gets replaced by people being nomadic people having flexible work arrangements, people working in different contexts so that certainly on demand. Temps of freelancers and all that jazz. Those are the kinds of changes that were sped up by the pandemic as companies had to become more agile, there was no everyone's got to come to the office from 9-5, that wouldn't happen in almost anywhere in the world, in  April of 2020. So, that is a huge step forward in the Agile corporations.Max: Actually, to your last points on, I've noticed the same trends and of course but the 9-5 aspects, there are still a bunch of companies that still look at the nine to five hour. And, and there's a strong case to be made for for the work life balance to say, yeah, starts at nine five so you don't invade people's lives, but on the other hand, it does remove you know to do so because you, you say we want to create boundaries and we want to create overlap or people working at the same time. It does also mean you're removing a little bit of freedom from your employees, from your staff, let's say, to decide when they work. Jeff: Of course.Max: It's not that great right, like. I would argue like work whenever, and we try to minimize the number of conference calls if we can.Jeff: That is a fine way to think about it, but when we're thinking about 164 million people in the US labor force actually 154 million now, 164 at the beginning of the pandemic. That is not the way all of them are gonna work. If you have a shift at H&M. That's when your shift is, there's no hey I want to work from Barcelona this weekend no no your shift is here in the store and that's when your shift is, if you're working on the line at Volkswagen your shift is nine to five, or maybe, whatever it is, there is no a I'm going to you know come in late. And I'll stay later, I don't know, that's when the shift starts like you have to be there. So it's important to think about the full context of the labor force. When we have conversations about the future of work it's easy to slip into this idea that everybody works in these remote first type jobs that are very enabled by remote work and digital work and all these other things. The reality is most people don't, that's just not the reality for most workers in any labor force.Max: Agreed. Agreed. And I work in these industries where people do have to physically come a lot of the time, so I know that's the case, but I guess, for the knowledge worker. I still see, I still see people trying to cling on to this office. You know way of work, sure where, whereas all communication, eventually, as much communication as possible should be moved to the asynchronous. So because we can read faster than we can sit through a meeting.Jeff: I completely agree. But to your point, some people do enjoy it. And there are tremendous benefits to it. I saw a study that 93% of remote workers still live within a commutable distance of the office. Because going remote doesn't mean you never go to the office, there are benefits to having everybody come together and have brainstorming sessions and do small talk. Those serendipitous encounters at the watercooler, they're actually incredibly good for productivity, do they need to be every day? Of course not. Can we allow people to flexible work arrangements, those that want it and those that can do it. Sure. But here's another important thing 42% of the US workforce can work remotely. That's it. Max: yeah.Jeff: And the US by the way is the highest percentage of any workforce on the planet that can work remotely. But another way to say that is 58% of workers, cannot do this digital lifestyle, cannot work remotely their jobs won't allow it. So we need to be mindful of that when having these types of conversations.Max: Alright, so it was a bubble 2020 bubble and the narrative, to a certain degree that was not really supported by hard data. In fact, most people will still be coming into the office and, and the on demand worker or while it's an ongoing transition. We haven't seen a huge rise in the percentage of the workforce that goes on demand. And the robots will now take our jobs. I'm sure that there's a lot more depth to this book, than my cliff notes here. How do people find your book, I'm gonna put a link to where do you want to sell, are we selling through Amazon or is there another place?Jeff: There are tons of other places but 98% of the books that have been sold have been bought on Amazon and, you know, certainly when the book came out in June, there was almost no other place to buy the book. That's not true actually was on barnesandnoble.com, a few other web sellers but it's funny I'm down here in Florida now and Florida's COVID restrictions are much looser than my normal home in New York, and I passed the Barnes and Noble today. As I was going school, get my office set up down here. Home Office, and I'm super excited to go tomorrow and see if my book is there, so hopefully it is in bookstores where it's supposed to be but it'd be the first time I get a chance to go into an old school Barnes noble I'm super excited. Max: All right. Don't forget to put on your protective gear for that Barnes and Noble experience.Jeff: No question. No question.Max: And, well, how do people get a hold of you? What's the best way to reach you?Jeff: Well, you can certainly follow me on twitter at @Jeffreywald, that's the only place that I go by Jeffrey for wells I go by Jeff, but I couldn't couldn't get Jeff Wald, and LinkedIn, I'm always I will always accept connections on LinkedIn and Amazon is certainly the best place to find the book.Max: Wonderful. Well thanks Jeff for sharing your insights and coming on the show and. Well, I look forward to my FREE copy in the mail. No, I'll go and get myself a copy I've got a bunch of books,I am a little bit behind on my reading, and I'll go get myself a copy right now.Jeff: I appreciate it thank you so much. It was so great to chat and I look forward to listening to many more episodes of this podcast.Max: Thanks, Jeff. Jeff: Thank you.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello, welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster and today on the show, I'm delighted to welcome. George LaRocque who is SVP of insights for unleashed. Welcome to the show, George. George: Thanks Max. Thanks for having me.Max: Pleasure. George and I met in the real world, a real world event with real people you can touch and feel, right? Well you're not supposed to touch him, but that was in 2018, I think. And, back then unleashed was, I think the leading events company in an HR and TA tech, or one of the leading ones. Anyway, I mentioned you've had a pretty, shocking year. George: Yeah. That's to say the least, and I'm sure everybody who's receiving this podcast will nod in agreement. When we met, I think I was partnering with unleash, and my involvement has increased over the last couple of years. So I actually jumped on board in the middle of this craziness, as unleashes moved the business to the media, given that we get to your point, we can't get together physically at the moment.Max: Right, right. And can you tell us, for the audience, a little bit about your bio, how you ended up being a voice of TA tech? For many of us knowing. Are you a practitioner basically? George:  Yeah, I've been in this market. It's just over 30 years now, which is crazy. I spent the first 10 as a practitioner, I came out of the staffing world. Like many people make their transition. I moved from the agency side, where I was working in tech just at the end of the eighties, early nineties, and then moved over 10 years, moved on to  what would have been the client side, into the employer side. Then started a consulting firm. What would have been now called an RPO in the Boston area, focused on internet startups and our customers were all involved... Customer was called the monster board. We did all their hiring  in the Boston area for sales. ThreeComma, a Datacom company in the US back at the beginning of like, you know, TCP, IP and networking protocols.And we did engineering for them, but through that, I jumped onto the tech side. So I spent 10 years in HR technology and I was employee number 10 or 11 at a company called Brass Ring and took them through to 50 million. I had a couple of good runs and  another one people might recognize, I ran global sales for Bull Horn, through their first big VC ramp. Yep. And then I was a general manager at telemetry, which actually was Higher Desk and turned into telemetry and now they are part of Jobvite. And, 10 years ago I started in this advisory and analyst world. And that's what brings us here, it's been an evolution, up to date. And so that's where I am. Max: It sounds like you've had some pretty stressful jobs. You were well-prepared for 2020, for a stressful year. Because you were there when beating salesmen Bullhorn was going through its rapid growth phase, I guess from 10 to 100 or 10 to 50, maybe. George: That's about right. And you know, to go from, you know, zero customers at brass ring to 50 million in a few years. Right? Yeah. And then to watch the bubble burst in 2000 and be right in the, you know, like sitting on the bubble when it burst then the financial crisis of 2008. I would say the thing that prepares you just in a general sense is stress, but also you get instincts for a down market, you know, that's the part that we've seen before. But even that's different here. It's spotty, like your people are either drowning in. You know, overwhelmed with business, or they can't find it. And there's very little in between. So this is unusual, but yeah, I would say, it didn't make me any more confident than the next person, but I felt like I had some instincts to fall back on.Max: Yeah. Yeah. I guess, in March and April, I was trying to, yeah. Some up those memories from 2008 because I was a business owner back then already. And I remember the bad news just kinda following each other. It was bad news  like for six months straight.You just never see the end of it. And so 2020. I think most people knew if I head back into March that, okay, this isn't going to be a bad year.  It's going to stay with us for a while. And, you know, it's hard to know exactly if we're out of this yet, but  it teaches you to be more conservative. I'm sure people have had enough of the gloom. I hear about those businesses that can't keep up with demand. You mentioned some companies are doing super well right now. What are they focused on? George: I would say, well in the HR tech space, there are two types of companies that have done well. One, would be those tech providers who were really exclusively marketing into a really large enterprise, and had an established brand, established product. The larger employers have while they may have furloughed or had a reduction in force, you know, within recruiting or HR, some percentage of their workforce. They've also invested in some digital transformation. So we're seeing that, and that's just a fancy way of saying they're upgrading their systems, in some cases. Max: So the guy from the eighties, it's coming back. George: There you go. Yup. They've crossed the chasm. So there was definitely a tapping of the brakes, you know, April, May. Big companies weren't buying software at that time for a moment. And then, I think as we moved into later in the spring, early summer, some of the vendors that are in that segment had some of their best quarters, deals were accelerated or deals came back to life.The other type, even where you would expect companies that were marketing into the SMB or middle market would have been hit hard. And that's true. If they were focused with customers, if they were lucky enough to have companies in industries that were, let's say a grocery or a healthcare, or logistics or tech, they did better than they should. There were some vendors who cut staff and then grew at a rate greater than they expected,. and which is, you know, it's been such a difficult time for everyone but a lot of folks, a lot of vendors we're really at an early stage, they didn't have any momentum, maybe the product wasn't mature, the point solution. There were some really, tough tales to tell that came out of... There's just bad timing, for them, they weren't able to get out into the market and get that momentum, to sustain. Max: You kind of have to be past that certain level of maturity to survive a crisis like this. You are a young team perhaps, and I don't mean like literally more than 12 years old. I mean like, you know, to a point where you have a solid base of customers.George: Yeah, absolutely. Max: And we've seen, in the industry, a lot of consolidation, I guess not everybody in my audience is going to geek out on TA tech news and find out who gets bought by who. But that's your world and, maybe you can tell us, what are some of the negative trends we're seeing. On my side, I saw that there was a lot of movement from companies that were doing video. Video  used to be a category. But I think now video is more of a feature that everybody has. That was my main takeaway. George: Yep. I'd agree with that. I think the reason I tell practitioners or leaders in talent acquisition, they should watch both, what's happening in investment and with consolidation is to have a sense of what's coming their way. So if you're looking for the emerging technology, I'm not even talking about the specific vendors but, you get a sense over the period of, you know, a few quarters as to where investments are going on emerging tech, emerging solutions. It might not be emerging tech. It might not be that it doesn't have the bells and whistles, like something conversational, but you may see that, for example, right now there's a lot going into analytics and process management around recruiting.You might see not a lot is going into job boards anymore at the moment, or marketplaces which surprisingly have led the category for years. You'd see a lot going into internal mobility and matching  and those areas. So you get a sense of what's coming at the same time for consolidation if you're using point solutions and platforms, you particularly get a sense of what those capabilities are at a platform level. So if you're using an ATS, what moves are these vendors making? And if you're thinking about your tech stack in the next one - three years, I think it's a good Indicator for trends and you need to solve the problems that you have and seize the opportunities that you need to seize and look for the Cape. And it's not one size fits all out there, but these are things that I think are helpful. In that way.Max: A lot of the practitioners got into recruitment for the same reasons you did probably. To be on the sell side and busy dealing with people. And, you know, buying tech came as an add on,  not the main thing and a bit of a chore. And, I think last year, people were still. They had a little fun budget that they can spend on where they can try a few initiatives every year. And then some of those customers would sign on because they needed to show initiative. They needed to show I'm going to try something different this year and it looks good on my resume. And this year, maybe that's not so important anymore. It's more about doing more with less and asking more from your existing vendors. George: Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. Another good reason to keep your eye on tech and what's happening, in our market and outside of our market, you know, what's happening in the world of technology? And I'm not one to ever recommend that you would modify, let's say a solution from outside of recruiting, into recruiting. That never goes well, it never scaled. But yeah doing more with less  is something that as I mentioned, you know, there have been a lot of layoffs. There are probably fewer recruiters in any given company and those recruiters are asked to do more and, having a sense of what's available to help accomplish that goal is a good thing. And it tends to look like, I think companies are either forced to address the need to automate tasks and what would be administrative to get the recruiters and the leaders in TA focused, you know, where they need to be. On with candidates, candidate engagement, working within the organization, with managers, working the process you know, they're forced to do it because they're doing more with less, or they're taking that step back.I think a lot of larger organizations that are investing in technology right now, it's, it's a way to justify some of the headcount that they're keeping they're implementing these technologies, evaluating these technologies but at the end of the day it's the same goal, which is, you know, how do we get to where freeing up the recruiters, the operators, to be on  that process and driving that process and not drowning in it. Max: Yeah. I can say from my experience, on our side, that the volume of candidates and leads process for the recruiter has tripled over the last six months. And obviously you just can't do this same thing you did before if you have three times the volume you did before. You have to change a little bit, the way you do things, because you adapt to your  environment.You were saying job boards, the big hits, I think most suppliers there and with the compounding effects of Facebook and Google driving also traffic, at least in the high volume space, the driving traffic, a lot of those traffic is free. I imagined, 2021 is probably not going to be an amazing year for indeed, and zip and those guys. Yes, there'll be some recovery. Right. I saw that Zip had some recovery in Australia in Q4. But I want to go back to, you're telling us about your early story. You're not in Boston anymore. Are you? Geroge: No I'm in New Jersey. Like most people in New Jersey, I'm, you know, 40 minutes out of New York city. Yeah. Max: Boston, for those who don't come from Boston, it's not necessarily seen as a tech hub, but I found out over the years that there was kind of the TA tech hub of the world 20 years ago. And I guess still today. Can you tell us about how'd that happen and give us a little bit of the history?George: Sure. So it really, back in those days, you know, Silicon Valley's was always the hub, right? It was always where it all sort of exploded, but there used to be maps that had, it was a map of the US and it had Boston and they shrunk the rest of the country. And then it had Silicon Valley. And you had  your tech belt. It was the highways that went around, the two highways, one 28 and four 95 that went around Boston and all the different tech shops that were either in... Cambridge was a hub for a lot of startups. MIT is in Cambridge, Harvard's in Cambridge.And then out toward the suburbs, you had a lot of larger campuses for tech shops and a couple of the larger, employment advertising shops were out. Emerging shops, innovative shops were out of Boston. And I would say that the first one to really explode and drive traction around HR tech was Adyen, the founder of Adyen was Jeff Taylor who started Monster. And so, I was at that point running a consulting shop. We had about 60 people all around Boston. And, we were dealing with some really some of the first e-commerce shops. And, I mentioned three common others, and Jeff Taylor would show up with a salesperson. Carol McCarthy was her name and they would offer us, you know, we partnered with them and we would bring free postings to our customers. And we would argue with them at the time about you've gotta be on the internet. You've gotta be on the web. And they wouldn't. It was a really fun time because we took employers to the web.We created their career sites and we. Hook them up with, places like what was called the monster board back then. and at that time, the ATS market was run by a couple of shops called Resumex and Rex Track. They own the large enterprise and larger middle market on-premise software and you had a brass ring, which came out of the Boston area. It grew out of a resume processing company. So all the job fairs, all the resumes that came into employers were on paper. And you had these systems like Resumex and Rex Track and others. You would literally go through a factory process that gets scanned optical character recognition turned into data, uploaded in a total QC process.And then, as the web was emerging or able to take applications to the web. That's where the Brass Ring emerged. And there were some other shops on the West coast  that emerged, but didn't, you know, Taleo, which was recruitment software, came out of Canada and then came down. I want to say through Chicago to, ultimately to Silicon Valley, but it was, yeah, the Boston area was teaming with, you know, early job boards early recruitment technology, this was 97, 98 to 2000.Max: It sounds like Monster had a key role to play in that. George: They really did you know, like any success story. It was a combination of vision. so they could see where the market was going and how this was going to evolve before really anybody was seeing it. And timing, they were there, and hard work. Right. And they had some good ideas. Where do they end up going? And that's a brand people love to hate on and that's fine. But they were a major player and they really helped  create the space.Max: They got big and then other problems appeared. But I mean, at the time in the late nineties, They picked that weird grand, they called themselves Monster. Everybody had a much more corporate sounding name back then. The internet was just getting started, all those dotcoms  and, I think they did it a little bit on purpose  to say, you know either you're with us, the incident folks or you're against us, you're part of the old guard. And we don't need you as a customer. It was a bit of a, you know, the boldness, the choice of brand. George: Yeah, we would do all their sales hiring.  They were on the, their first office was, the second floor over a Chinese takeout restaurant. And you know, we'd go on site, spend an hour. A couple of hours with them, with the consultants we had there, you'd leave. And you'd just smell like Chinese food from being in the office. And then as he started to grow, I remember, telling people that they would have to, you know, don't worry they're expanding. They're going to have a facility, but there are two trailers in the parking lot for now. And then just those, you know, these sorts of things that, I'm sure there are people out there somewhere that worked in those trailers. Well we put them there. Max: Yeah. And so with the universities and then maybe circumstance having this gentleman's at Taylor and starting this company in Boston for no other reason than he was there. And then, many of the alumni that moved on to start their own companies. And today I think there are a number of companies that are there, including your old employer of Bullhorn. I think phenom people are quoted there. And then a number of other companies. Was SmashFly as well in Boston?George: Yep. They were founded there. In fact the original founder of SmashFly, Mike Hennessy, was probably employee number three or four at Brass Ring. And so we worked closely together for several years and, you know, like any of those shops. And there are still people that when I've...Back in those days when we could go to events, Brass Ring is now part of IBM. And, if I go by the IBM booth, I see old friends and they've really never left. They've just gone from Brass Ring that connects to IBM. But we used to joke and say there are probably, you know, 300 people that are like the core of the industry. And they just move around and a lot of other people sort of come and go, but there are a lot more than that now, I think.Max: That's true. You do see that. And we hear that in your story is that these companies don't just die, they just merge and they move from one animal to the next. And this is sort of a Darwinian experience. Right. So it's see how it evolves. And they changed names. Like Hot Jobs do you remember that one? George: Yeah. HotJobs got acquired by Yahoo. Max: Oh, yes. George:  And, you know, it was Yahoo hot jobs and Dan Finnegan, who was the founder of Jobvite, I know, was involved with Yahoo hot jobs  and I believe the founder of, Avature came out of one of those groups. You know, early on, when you look at Brass Ring, it had, newspapers behind it.So the newspapers were, they had Excel partners out of Silicon Valley, very small stake, but over a hundred million came in from the Washington post, the Tribune companies can net newspapers, which is USA today. So newspapers were hedging, their bets against, you know, the classified business was starting to dwindle.They were looking at how that was going to go online. They also created an advertising network, which Knight Ridder became a part of. Which is where career builder grew out of, which is also where, Dan Finnegan came out of that Knight, Ridder group. So you've got different camps from the late nineties like the Post's Tribune camp and then the night Ritter camp, and then a few big brands that came out of that, that were all different. In some cases, the same newspapers in different investing groups that were putting their chips on the table, sort of hedging their bets based on what they were expecting to see with changes, and impact on their classified ad revenue. They didn't do any of it fast enough or go hard enough as we've all seen. But  that's an interesting subplot to the whole, the whole thing as well.Max: With your unique perspective of seeing people moving from place to place and companies evolving, it makes sense that you would be working in automation now. Which is, you know, a great networker and a place where the industry meets.And I think your story is one that can serve as inspiration for people who end up in recruitments and say that I don't want to be interviewing people for the rest of my life, or I don't want to be doing the same thing over and over again. Yeah you can move into technology. You can move into sales, you can move into media, and touch a lot of things and it prepares you for a rich career. And, and if you stick around long enough, then you can see the same faces over and over again. George: Good, good point. You know what? I used to think that, but it was just my great timing. You know and of course there was some of that, I entered the space and the internet was emerging and the web emerged and on demand, you know, cloud-based technologies emerged and I'm passionate about technology. So I was in the right place at the right timeAnd the other thing that's true is that I think the profession has evolved and emerged. What technology has done and what, you know, changes that all businesses have experienced is it really demonstrates how I think recruiting can really have a massive impact.And I think if you look beyond the matches that you're making and the interviews that you're scheduling and if you sort of step back and think about the impact you can have on the business. And if you pursue that internally in your current role or in your career, moving to the next role, there are a lot of places to go with that.If you can see the impact that recruiting and recruitment technology and talent acquisition can have on the market and on any given employer. I think  that's another thing that I was, there to see was sort of how this all, you know, has unfolded and I've been lucky to watch.Max: It's so important to go back to that feeling of I'm helping people get a job and, you know, a good year, a bad year, and you know, God knows 2020 wasn't a great year, but it's still up to this, you know the industry and our people to think: I'm going to help somebody get their next game.George: Yeah.Max:  I guess that's why when you go network with people who've been in the industry for 20 years they're nice folks to be around because they have that purpose in their career. And I hope for the listeners who are in the early stages of their career they can see that, it's not that easy to find purpose that once you have it and you sort of hold onto it, George: Yeah good point.Max: To wrap it up, I'd like to give you a chance to maybe promote some of your upcoming events perhaps with Unleash or tell people how to get a hold of you. George: Well, you can find unleash at unleashgroup.io, and you'll find me there. And the HR winds was my previous brand. It's still there. There's still content there, reports there, unleash is really, for the foreseeable future. It's all about media and content. So everything's there. So the. content about recruiting, about recruiting technology and the rest of the employee experience and HR spectrum, is there as well.  So I would encourage people to go take a look and I'm sure they'll find something interesting if they're listening to this podcast.Max: Absolutely. I go there myself. George interviews some of the industry leaders and has unique data on how the market is changing. So if you want to be ahead of the curve and know what's going to hit you a year or so now that's the place to go and check it out. Thanks so much, George, for joining us and for reminiscing on the old days. I am actually quite happy to know that there's now a record of those souvenirs about the Boston era that has, you know, foundational importance to the world of TA tech saved on our blog.George: Excellent. Thanks for having me. I had a lot of fun.I hope you enjoyed my interview with George as much as I did. George is a real historian of the talent acquisition tech space and from the evolution and meanderings of the industry, we can all get inspiration to constantly reinvent ourselves and renew our industry. If you enjoyed it and you're up for more subscribe to our podcast and please share with friends.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Good morning. Good afternoon. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today I'd like to welcome the show Aarthi Rajasekaran from VDart Inc. Aarthi, did I pronounce that right?Aarthi: You did Max!Max: Okay, cool. Awesome. So Aarthi, please introduce yourself to our audience. I believe VDart is in the recruitment space, helping companies who are, doing contingent hiring, in the technology space. Does that sum things up correctly? Aarthi: Absolutely. Yes. Now VDart is an information technology, staffing and solutions company. And we incorporated back in 2007 and from then our growth has been exponential. We are a global firm and our customers are the ones that have taken us to spaces. I served them as their director of procurement and strategic sourcing. So record that recruitment is very near and dear to me as well. Max: The procurement in your case is  sourcing talents, right? And sourcing talent through third-party vendors. Aarthi: Right. Max: Okay. Aarthi: I base, I manage the contracts, the compliance, all those mandatory components that keep us going. Max: Okay. 2020 was disruptive for everybody and perhaps, for some of the traditional staffing firms that were more reliant on their Rolodex and maybe more reliant on events and doing things in person, you know, which is maybe like the old way of doing recruitment. Those, those probably suffered the most because when you could not meet in person, then what do you have left? And I believe you do... you're a global company with offices everywhere, but you have a good portion of your hiring that takes place in India, right? Aarthi: We do. Yes. Our hire operations are from India. We have close to about 600 people based out of India who are our engine. They are the ones that are pumping in resumes for us day in and day out. About 500 of them are just recruiters who are the backbone for our company.Max: Those recruiters, a lot of them are physically based in India, but are they organized by geography, focused on different markets?Aarthi: Right. That's how we operate. All of them are based in India and there is sometimes a need for our customers to have local presence as well. So we have recruited all over, but the majority of our recommendations are based on India, and they are based on geography. The time zone is for that particular geography. That's how they will operate. Max: Well, I guess  you look at the micro dynamics of 2020, and now this, this kind of business model works great. You know, it was harder to do business beforehand because you were competing with people who had the boots on the ground, but now everything is remote. So you can work from anywhere, that gives you a competitive edge, I guess. Right? Aarthi: It does. It's always been a competitive edge for us specifically because we had the vision of bringing in fresh talent, fresh out of college and groomed them, and trained them in recruiting. Those are fresh blood that always have the thirst to learn and achieve. So that model always worked for us really well. That operation is based on talent from Richie, which is a small college town in India, in the Southern part of India. And our recruiters are either from the town or from a neighboring town, nothing beyond that. It is very unconventional for a staffing firm to have its base in such...Max: I'm sorry, I interrupted you. It's very conventional for our staffing firms to be close to the uni? So you say? Aarthi: No, it's very unconventional for a company of our size to be operating out of a small town. Max: Yes. And I think that, probably that unconventional choice served you well, because for the big metropolis, the top, the big cities have become impossible to live in. Right? And it's, you know, I was there in one of the last trips I took before we were all locked down. I was in Delhi and Pune,  it's a little bit cloudy and foggy down there sometimes. Aarthi: You are talking about the north, I'm talking about the Southern tip of India. Max: The North was very polluted. Anyway, it was hard to travel on. I know some employers were using the fact that you can live in a second or third tier or a smaller city that would improve their quality of life. And that was one of the selling points. Less traffic, less smog. Yeah. But going back to those 500 recruiters, so you like them hungry, young, curious, energetic. And then, you were talking to me before we started the show on the importance of knowing your local markets. So is that part of the training that goes into these young young minds? I'm kind of imagining in my head, you have a team dedicated for Latin America and one for Europe and one for the US. Is that how it works?Aarthi: Yes. That's how it works. Max: Okay, cool. So, then you teach them the cultural differences. Aarthi: We do. We teach them the cultural differences, how to talk, how to address people. Everything goes up, it plays a major role when you're talking to potential candidates. You need to understand their culture. You need to respect what they believe, and you have to keep them engaged. That's how you build a bond that you are gonna deliver a candidate to a client. That way the intern  may choose to work for you.And it is so important to create those candidate experiences. I mean, that is the industry buzzword these days, unless there is a good candidate experience, people these days have so many opportunities. So they always value who treated me better, and that is the opportunity they lean towards. So it is so important for us to impart that knowledge in each and every recruiter of ours on how to understand the cut-up candidate.A candidate is no less than a customer to us. So treat them with respect, give them what they are asking for, answer their questions, be respectful. Those are the basics, we want to keep talking about them. That way it does not get lost over a period of time.Max: It sounds, from listening to you, I feel like there's going to be employment for many decades for recruiters. The kind of work that you're describing is not one that will be automated and replaced by robots anytime soon. Is that your feeling?Aarthi: Absolutely not. I mean, at the end of the day, people buy from people, people don't buy from robots, so it is important to  have human connections. Although sourcing can be automated. I mean, AI's an RBA has been playing a large role in automating certain features, but taking the human element out, I don't see that happening. It is so important to have that touch point, human touch point for you to really feel connected. It is so important to have the connection between an employee and an employer before somebody comes on board.Max: Since you focus on your, let's say, your external family, your extended family, the recruiters that are not directly working for you that are part of your suppliers. Give us an idea. Are we talking about, 5 suppliers, or 50, or 500? What's what's the range?Aarthi: A little lower 500. So the way we work with our suppliers is, any contract that we signed with the supplier we do not want that to be a one-time gig. How is it that we can optimize a particular supplier? Understand what it is that they bring to the table? Are they unique? Do they have skills that we often sought out for? Are they good in training and deployment? Are they specializing in any niche technologies? Based on that, we evaluate our suppliers and try to partner with them on a larger scale. So we have suppliers, who signed up, during inception. And even today we worked with them. We know who to reach out to for what technology, and as we grew, our suppliers grew along with us.They get first shot to fill out requirements. If they have candidates, they reach out to us. We cross sell skills, whatever they have on their bench to our clients as well. Sometimes even before we get a requirement from a client, they can foresee that there is going to be a job opening coming up and it is easier for us to save time and effort.Max:  Does that work under what's described as the MSP (managed service provider). Where you'll hold a master contract and then there are some sub contracts? Aarthi: It's technically not MSP. It is more on a vendor... The terminology used is corporation to corporation engagement. Max:  Okay, great. You said you've worked with some of your suppliers, that you have hundreds and hundreds of suppliers, and some of them you've started working with them from inception. You've seen the ones that have grown. Which ones have suffered in 2020 after this pandemic and which ones did well?Aarthi: I would say this is such an unforeseen situation we all are in and everybody has taken the plunge. It is not easy to say that some did not suffer and some suffer. Everybody had to come together as a staffing community to help each other out. When there were layoffs happening. We were trying to figure out if there is any other engagement that we could take the candidate from the supplier and put them on. We all partnered in it together. Everybody did well. Crisis called and everybody was ready to help, ready to work along with. The rates were reduced. Suppliers were okay working with us on that. They did not put their foot down. Everybody  did their fair share and everybody came through with flying colors. We are so agil we can make things happen!Max: Okay. It sounds like generally it's been rough for everybody, you're saying. that, but then which are the vendors that are best positioned for tomorrow. That we're able to come out, winning some market share. That have a bigger market, a bigger share of the business today than they didn't 10 months ago.Aarthi: Quite a lot of suppliers. We are running a preferred supplier program now as well. We are in the third phase of the launch. So we are handpicking a few suppliers for one particular engagement based on how they performed on the previous engagements.So based on the evaluation, certain metrics went into the evaluation and we are going to be handpicking about a hundred suppliers exclusively for this engagement to be working very closely with us. Max: Yeah. So it's all performance-based, it's you know, I guess a fill rate, time to fill, cost per hire, that kind of stuff. Aarthi: Everything plays a large role. Maybe their SLS is what is important. Whether they are delivering on time. Those are a few key areas that also go into a vendor evaluation. Max: Aarthi, if you were in the seller's shoes now, you are no longer holding that wonderful position of power, director of global procurement, but now you're one of them. And you have to start your own firm today. You're just starting from scratch. It's just you and maybe your husband, and you are starting a business together. What kind of a recruiting business would you start today to give yourself the best chance of success? Aarthi: It's my personal opinion. I wouldn't get into recruiting. Max: Okay. Okay. Aarthi:  There are a number of companies that are in recruiting. Identify what is the niche that is missing in the market. A product, it could be software. It could be a RPA. So those are the kinds of damage that I would take. I am in the recruiting space, my husband is in the technology space. So probably a hybrid of something of that nature is what we would be doing. Max:  Okay. Yeah. Your earlier example of picking a hot area, hot technology like RPA. I guess, you know, you were saying earlier that sourcing is something that can be to a great degree, automated. There's a good amount of sourcing that can be done automated. So if you and your husband are starting a recruiting technology company tomorrow, you're saying, we're not going to be in staffing. We're going to be actually going into recruiting. I'm imagining that's the area in which it would go, but let's focus on the staffing world per se. And because we did say there is a role for humans, there is that human connection, and that will not be automated. So within that world, you know, which staffing firms are going to perform better. Are they going to be the ones that are focused on the right keywords? Or the ones that are focused on the right geography? Aarthi: I would say it is more on the people, that is how a company can stand out compared to the other. It could be the large recruiting stacking companies, which have done well, but a smaller company could change the industry by giving the experience of which a candidate never had. Currently, the market is not the same, like what it was a decade back. It's not just apply, apply, apply. Now it is more on a candidate picking a company to work for. They want to see what the company does. Is there a purpose? Is it a purpose driven organization? The millennials and gen Z, they are all focusing on what is it that the company would do for me? If I go for them, is there a vision for me? Do we have any common ground? Those are key things that need the human element as I said. Unless a human connects and talks to a human about, Hey, this is the purpose of a company. This is our vision. This is what we do. It's not age and people are going to be selecting companies based on their experience. I would say companies would succeed if they are focusing on the right candidates, giving them the experience that they are looking for and connecting the right person with the right opportunity. Max: Is the candidate experience better this year than it was in previous years? You know, the fact that now people are not expected to physically come into an office. Has that improved the experience for candidates?Aarthi: It has. I mean, the industry has shifted a little bit. Organizations, which said no remote work, or work from home, have adapted to remote work. There has been a shift, but has it changed the candidate experience? Well, to an extent, yes, because these are technologies, the space that we are in is primordially technology. So talking to them about what the company does, what the project is about. It inspires them to pick the opportunity. And a little bit of empathy in the conversation goes a long way. Trust me. Max: Right. Yeah. I've heard a lot of recruiters say, empathy, care and you know, showing how they care about the employees around the coronavirus has become a key communication strategy for most employers. I've also heard that in India in particular, staffing firms have struggled to have lost market share compared to the overall size of the market. A bigger portion went to work, you know, without stepping from basically hired directly, because more hiring was happening through digital, less events and career fairs. Do you confirm these trends? That 2020 has shrunk the market a little bit in India for some of the staffing industry? Aarthi: Not to my knowledge. I mean, There are certain organizations that have done well, in fact, V Dart, we did not have any layoffs. In fact, 2020 was the peak of our hiring. We've got talent that we always wanted to be a part of our company. It was easy for us to bring that talent on board. I would not say that has been common for every organization. It is the organization's approach what makes the difference.Max: For the kind of talent that you're hiring, high-tech talents. It's always going to be quiet in high demand? I understand that, but I imagined for... Maybe the reason I got this news from the industry is because it was a little bit more on the high volume side and entry level and for staffing firms that were working more in the high volume space where the margins are smaller and the margins got even smaller this year. It became even harder to do business. But you know, at the higher end of the market for more experienced staff, I guess things remain competitive. Aarthi: Indeed there is talent available. Of course you have to pay the pretty penny for the right talent. The market did change and margins have shrunk, but for organizations who have the muscle power, it is more of an investment that they are doing for their 2021 plan. That's how I would put it. Max: Yeah. Did you change the way you work in 2021? Did your company roll out some new process and new technology to respond to the changes in the market.?Aarthi:  Well, we have been doing everything that we planned for 2020. Of course there was a little disruption early in the year, but that hasn't slowed us down. We are in the midst of our product launch as well. We are developing softwares which we plan to do for 2020 so 2021 is going to be a launch for the new product as well. So yes, our growth has been consistent and our plans are going through, although there was a little slow down, we are still on the right track. 2021 looks fantastic for us.Max: For listeners who are... Most of our listeners are in the talent aquisition space, and some of them may be considering a career in… You know, preparing the bang themselves for the future. What would be your advice to advise somebody who is a new recruiter or talent acquisition professional, in their twenties, what kind of training should they be seeking in order to stay on the cutting edge and be competitive in the next 10 years?Aarthi: The first thing is, learn about the requirement that you're going to be working on. Do not just blindly dive into the market to find the talent, talent is available. All you have to do is understand what is the skill all about which the industry is using? Just to get a little insight about the project. So when you have a conversation with a candidate, it's going to be more of a meaningful conversation and you don't have to be spending hours on the dice and monsters to identify the right candidate. You just have to understand the requirements, go to the market, have a meaningful conversation. You'll be able to figure out. Always be hungry. No knowledge is unimportant. Everything is important. Talk to your peers. The requirement that you work in could be different from what the other person is working on. Have these conversations. It is important to have those conversations. Max:  Yeah. It gives you an edge, and it also prepares you for the future. And next time, you know, every requirement that comes in, there's the immediacy, it'll probably come again. And so the deeper your knowledge, the more you're prepared, so stay very curious about the areas. It's impossible to know everything. So specialization, I guess, is also good advice. Right? Okay, great. Aarthi, It has been a pleasure. We're up on time and I'd like to ask you. How can our audience get in touch with you or with V darts? What's the best way?Aarthi: They can go to our website and fill out the contact form. I would get an email and the consent person will be responding based on their area of interest. Max:  Okay. www.vdarts.com?Aarthi:  That is correct!Max:  Okay, great. Well, thanks. Pleasure meeting you. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. Aarthi: Thank you so much for listening. Thank you so much, Max, for the opportunity. Happy recruiting. Max:  Yeah, recruiting never stops.That was Aarthi from VDart, a  director of procurement and strategic sourcing, telling us about some of the secrets of our business and reminding us that from here on out it doesn't matter where you're based. As long as you put in the time to adapt to the culture of the market you serve, you can serve all global markets from any location in the world.And her business has done a great job. Of bringing young talent into the industry, teaching them about recruiting and teaching them about different places, different markets. Hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to hear more, I've got more interviews coming your way on recruitmenthackerspodcast.comSo please subscribe and share with the friends!

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast, a show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello, and welcome back to  the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm your host Max. And today I'm honored and pleased to welcome on the show Miss Mary Meston from Concentrix. Mary, welcome to the show. Mary: Thank you, Max. Thanks for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. Max: Great to have you. So Mary is the VP for talent management at Concentrix. Concentrix is currently part of the Synnex group, but they're separating at the moment. I hope I'm not divulging any confidential information. Mary: No, you're not. It is public knowledge and we've reported out, and the board recently approved that. So we're still projecting we're about a month out from spinning out and being on our own and being our own entity. And we are gonna miss Synnex. We're still very, very close, but we're all very excited. Max: And you were together for a couple of years only?Mary: No, Synnex actually, if you look at where Concentrix came from, it's been out for 16 years. It was a small little group. Concentrix has grown by acquisition. Substantially. And now we are substantially a large player in the industry, quite a large player, and absolutely would like to be on our own. And it just makes business sense. You know?Max: Well, It is indeed a huge company. I am today working with some of your entities, but I understand Concentrix globally is, well, over 200,000 headcount, maybe 300,000, maybe more. Mary: We're North of 250,000 right now. And with you helping us there in, certain divisions could be 260 for all I know right now. Max: Yeah. It changes every day. And then certainly around this time of year there is always a big ramp up before the Christmas holiday, lots of hiring going on. But you're not in those trenches anymore Mary, I think that our audience will get something a little bit different today. Mary is working more on the executive development and talent management at the executive level at the moment. Well, tell us a little bit more about your role in Concentrix. Mary: I'd love to thank you. Yes. I've been in the recruitment trenches. It was called recruitment then, and now it's talent acquisition. So that ages me quite a bit. Max: You were saying head hunting before. Mary: I know head hunting. I think about that now it's like, so politically not correct. Right?Max:  It used to be fun. We used to take our rifles and go out and hunt for heads. Mary: That's a really aggressive talent acquisition strategy, right? Yeah, I progressed through all of the focuses in HR. I mean, I started as a benefits clerk, a payroll clerk, actually moved into recruiting and helped establish a number of firms many moons ago. Some of the first, software development firms and actually H1B hiring and really focusing on that. I worked in California, and progressed through all the phases and all the functions in HR and I really love the fact that I've been able to bring all that together and really we're focused now with our executive set. Really working on optimizing our talent because as we all know how difficult it is to find that right person, let's talk about time, process, costs, all of that. Once you have them, you don't want to lose them. Right? And it's really important to continue to develop them. Not only helps employee engagement, but that helps move a company forward. Right? If you can grow all those quote unquote human assets, it helps the company move forward. And that's one of the levers in our innovation. Is grow your talent!Max: It can be so heartbreaking as a business owner when you lose a top talent. And I'm sure it's heartbreaking even if you're not the business owner, the heads-up, you've got somebody who you've invested so much time that leaves, you know, I'm now in my forties, but 20 years ago, I remember thinking my allegiance is to my career and I need to keep moving. Every two, three years, go get another job, expose myself to something new and keep growing. And I think studies have been made that that's one way to optimize for salary growth, especially at the early stages of your career. But now I have a bit of a different perspective where I think, you know, life is too short to be sending out resumes every two years. What do you think about sort of job mobility for people as they get to maybe the middle of their career or their golden years? Mary: Hopefully the middle isn't the golden years now, because come on the new 40 is 60, so let's move the scale up. Yeah, I think about it very much. You have spoken about the time in one's career and what the best strategy is, and it is very true. I did this one in my younger days, to jump every two to three years. Some of it, I lived in the Silicon Valley and worked in the Silicon Valley during the  dot com days. And if your company wasn't purchased or purchasing someone every two years, you know, that provided that career growth, that career jump. And that was really a strategy. I too am a believer. Mid-career when you kind of top out and we have a really solid set of expertise, then it's great to find a place where you can grow and grow with the company and grow that expertise with the company. And not necessarily just look for the next, you know, 5% increase. There's much more of a different strategy. And then when I talk with people early in their careers, they're in a learning stage. So you're learning, growing, get what I can, let's move on. If I'm not getting the growth, I'm going to jump! Then there is the kind of mid career people. I call it the listening stage. As where you start listening to yourself, as well as listening to those you work with. So it's the listening leader approach. It's key to being a really successful leader. Being able to hear others be collaborative and to be very self-aware. And then there's the capstone of your career. I call it the legacy and that's what I work with really senior executives, not necessarily just in age, but in career. Where they're like, I want to leave something behind. What does that look like? And in working with senior executives that are at that stage, and it's not necessarily an age issue, but it is more about what they feel they've accomplished. That's where it's really a great time to work with senior executives to that's where they're, I want to leave an innovation. I want to change something up. I want to make a difference, you know, and that's, it's a great place to, at least for me to spend with these senior leaders, because there's, that's where some of the most influential, even simple decisions are made. Max: That legacy translates. I often imagine an ideology, like a vision that they want to materialize.Mary: Absolutely. You're in a longer time to learn your skill set and you've performed and you know what you do. What do I want to leave that's beyond me? Being an ideology, an impact, and innovation. I know particularly, In the space we're working with now and with the BPO industry. I mean, because we are such large groups, what we do impact so many more, it's kind of that ripple effect. So it's very important to be very aware of the choices. And we have a number of senior leaders that are very into that legacy space about, you know, we are a community, as we treat our employees, they impact the world.So it's a very significant place to play. And you're very conscious of your choices, particularly, here in the States, you know, with the diversity, equity and inclusion, or I guess globally as well. And the unrest that's been going on, there's a huge, renewed focus on the importance of the inclusions of all. And it's a matter of community. And that's a very interesting space to be particularly with our leadership that is very focused on that. Max: Yeah. I've heard that. I had somebody on the show recently that was telling me about PepsiCo and how do you connect the people at PepsiCo with a sense of mission and purpose? And I made one of my nasty comments about, you know, how do you get excited about selling sugary drinks? And I was, I was told that for them, the mission was more about the people, about the people at PepsiCo and growing the business and that, you know, it has nothing to do with the amount of sugar inside of the drinks, that it gets them excited.And so you've got to find that environment where you're going to carry that ideology or ideology maybe is a two way radio term, or just a set of principles and beliefs that you can put into the world. And I imagine that sometimes you've got people who will get promoted because they're super performers. And maybe they're not at that stage yet. Right? They don't, they're not thinking legacy. They're just thinking about performance and you know, where am I going to get my next raise? Perhaps you, can you suss them out immediately? Mary: Well, you can find them. I mean, in some of that it's, where they're at in their career? What they're seeking?  I find that in people when they're just trying to get into the listening stage. I call it the learning stage when you're learning your function and you're becoming known and branded. It's the me stage, and the listening stage shifts to the we stage. And that's often, typically middle management-ish, depending on the job titles, but that's where you have to become responsible for the we, not the me. And some make that shift better than others. Some never tear the peer principle of topping out. When someone just can't get that next rung on the ladder. And what do you want to be? There's the me and we, there's something in there. Max: Yeah. It's sad when I hear you. I hear you talking about children development stages, almost. Mary: Well, you know, we are all children at heart aren't we, it's just our bodies don't look at as we age. And, you know, development is in stages. It's developmental stages, right? And we can talk about people we know, or public figures that get trapped in adolescence. Let's talk about political climate, right? Max: I watch a lot of comedy online. So I love watching those people who never grow up. And, I think they're very entertaining. So I think, yeah, it's precious to preserve that child inside. But, I'm here wearing a suit and a jacket and trying to look the part for my job. Mary: You're doing a good job.Max: Thank you, Mary. I know I need a haircut, but don't tell me about dressing for success. Is that some part of your job in talent management or is that something that people come to with questions?Mary: Well, that's a really softer side of the corporate world, but we did have a chat about how important it is and how different and how much it's changing now with this world of work at home, or the zoom land, or COVID land, or Corona land, or whatever we want to call it. The next normal, you know, the having to dress to look the part is less and less important.And I've seen it. I've been around for several decades now where you look the part to be assumed you could do it. And now I really work with folks about being who you are, be authentic. I mean, within the appropriate, you know, aspects and parameters, but just dressing the part rarely at senior, mid- senior and senior levels that doesn't.Max:  It doesn't matter anymore! Mary: It doesn't. Think of some of the names out there and, you know, Steve Jobs was known for his look. We've got the Elon Musk look, I mean, think of these people and they're not necessarily the suit and ties, are they? Max: Well, I mean, they have a brand and we can talk about the authenticity and the brands. The way Steve Jobs dressed was part of his brand. It was, you know, I'm so passionate about finding the right design that I'm not going to take off my turtleneck. I don't know what message that actually sends. It's like, it doesn't matter how I dress as long as I've built nice pones, I guess. Mary: Well, I understood while reading some of his stuff that he wanted to reduce the cognitive load about having to think about what he's going to wear. So he can put all that energy into the design. Max: That sounds like such bullshit. Really the cognitive load of how much... I mean, if you're a guy put on a shirt and a suit you're done! Mary: Maybe I'm speaking from a female perspective or more of you, my generation, where you had to worry about if everything matched, right? And you can't have the same top within two, every two weeks.Max: My wife at home, you know, before she goes to the office, she asks me, even though I have no clue, what's  to tell her. But you know, I figured it's better to have an opinion than no opinion. So I do, I do comments. Mary: And you're still standing. So you didn't say you have a good opinion. Max: You're saying it looks wonderful every time, then it doesn't sound correct. You have to mix in a little bit of criticism. I'm sure in your practice as well, the most exemplary leaders also expect you to push back a little bit and criticize.Mary: Absolutely. I mean, when I engage with executives, one of our initial conversations it's about, you know, we set the parameters of our relationship. And as I'm not your best friend, I'm not your yes man or woman. I am here to help you achieve what you want to achieve. And I'll be your sounding board. I'll be your mirror. I'll be your coach. And some days I might actually be the person that's pushing you. So I expect some resistance or it's not working. And just to prep them ahead. And, you know, you can tell those that really engage and want to, and those that are just kind of glad-handing, and just going along for the long cause they don't want to step in something. Max: I mean, and there's, I suppose, an awkwardness with the fact that you are an employee of Concentrix and therefore, you know, it's not like you're a psychologist, right? There's no obligation to keep everything secret from you.Mary: Interesting. You bring up a really important point in the role that I'm doing. And there have been some discussions about, you know, keep someone external to the firm or bring them in. And it can go either way. In particular, I'm very fortunate. I get to report directly to the CEO and our parameters are that I share nothing that is of confidence. If someone needs to share something with you or you with them, I will coach the two of you to speak. So we have some really clear boundaries, which is essential for this to work. Max: Yeah, absolutely. But nobody's going to come and tell you, I want to kill the CEO. Mary: Well, I would hope not because, one, that's illegal! It's really scary. That's a reportable event. My HR is going to come all out. Max: No, I mean, you're dealing with people who are a little bit more mature, than to express things this way. I'm sure they'd find a better way to. But some advice from our listeners, some of which are not, at the executive level, you know, who want to bring the vision of who they want to become to live. At which point in your career is a good suit to bring in a coach? Let's say, you know, you're starting out. You're a talent acquisition professional, and you want to, I don't know, end up VP of HR, should you get a coach? What kind of coach? Where do you start? Mary: That is a really timely question. Thank you. Because recently there's a gentleman within our larger company. He is starting on the path, he's in talent acquisition, and his goal is to be VP of HR. One of our values is to be bold. And he just reached out to me. He says, you don't know me, but I would love to have a mentor. I would want to be you someday. Will you talk to me? Max: Nice. Mary: So when do you start? Whenever you have that question, when something's telling you to do it, you need to answer that whatever the answer is. And many people go, well, I don't need a coach, or what is a coach? Coaching is different from therapy, you know, I'm not licensed to do that. And in therapies dealing generally with the past, I like to frame coaching as dealing in the present and moving you to the right action, whatever that is, depending on what path you choose. And so when to get a coach? Whenever you feel that in the key things you are feeling stuck. I feel there's more, I know I'm not doing something quite right. Something's unsettled. And fourth is, and hopefully it doesn't happen to you, but if some, you get feedback that certain XYZ performance manners behavior isn't working for you, I mean  that's kind of a key when you can reach out to them.Max: Okay, sweet. I had a different idea because you're describing someone who is ambitious, but has problems they want to solve and they want to address. I thought that you have to be, you know, a super positive, optimistic person. Everything is going right. And then you've got all this space and now like, you know what, I want to go even higher and I'm going to go hire a coach because my life is in order, but I want to reach one more.Mary: You know, it can be both of those. It's and again, it's about goal-driven. So if people look at my credentials, I'm certified to do some curriculums called high-performance coaching. And in that space, if that's how we frame that engagement, it is about just having more consistency, higher performance at a consistent level.Yeah, my life's awesome, but I want it to be better. Most often, even those that think they have everything dialed in. There's something amiss. I mean, life is real. We're real people. Not every day is perfect. Not every conversation's perfect. Not every choice is perfect. So how do you manage that? So you can do coaching at that stage too.Max: Certainly. Mary: Coaching is not necessarily remediation. Max: Talent acquisition is one area where it's impossible to reach perfection. You're talking about, yeah, areas for improvement and it is  impossible to have a perfect track record of work movements. I think I can say that without… I mean if somebody can prove me wrong, I'd love to meet them.You know, I've never made a bad hire. I've never heard anybody say that. Although that would be, you know, if that person exists, I would love to interview them for the show.Mary: Yes. I would like to meet them as well. Either way, we're saying in talent acquisition, there's no perfection. And I was going to ask you, what do you scope is perfection? And you're saying a bad hire. So we could talk about what's a bad hire. There's different ways of saying that, you know, they didn't work out. They didn't fit in. They didn't succeed. They didn't bring in the numbers, whatever that is. But, I don't think there is perfection in anything. Other than a hole in one in golf. Is that perfect? Max: Yeah. And you know, even if you do make a good hire, you're going to always find there is probably a better hire out there. I mean, it's hard to measure those things, but I think, retention is a good metric and the beacon side to the performance of the hire. Of course, that's great as well. When you're doing more high volume, the cost per hire is a good metric. But having, you know, with your long experience in TA and and HR, I'm sure you've been exposed to regrets and regretful hires. I'd like to ask you if there's a hire that comes back to mind, and of course I don't want the name, job title or even a company name, but if she could go back to that moment where you hired this person and didn't work out. What can our audience learn from your mistake?Mary: Okay. One definitely comes to mind for me and I will work my best to cloak the identity. If you notice me already kind of shifting here, but I'm going to kind of share the blame in a weird way. So, VP of HR in a startup, we were hiring a key sales person and through my process, I was like, this is a no go. And it wasn't what they could do. It was going to be about their fit, much more cultural fit. Right? And I was a solid no, senior team members were a solid yes, because they were looking at what he could do and has done for others. And I'm like, this is going to destroy the firm. Anyway, he was brought on and our numbers popped for a short while. And then, unfortunately he kind of crossed some boundaries with people, as well as markets. And he left the firm in a worse state than when he started with us. Yeah. So it was a long, hard lesson in one trusting your gut to look at not just what they can do but also fit. And taking a longer view of what is success and what your mission is. Max: I have a lot of names that come to mind where I know the same description and speech would have been easily applicable to this situation. Do not hire based on resume, do not hire based on track record because somebody who's done it before somewhere else does not mean they're going to be able to replicate it or that they even want to do it in the new place, you know, maybe they're a different person.They're not interested in doing the same type of work. And, it's just not going to relate. So a track record is not enough. You have to have something else. Mary: Yeah, that that is very insightfully put because it's very true. I mean, while we do need some, I know you can do this or you have the history of this, it's really about, you have to meet that person in the here and now. And it's pretty safe to say that in very rare cases, one's performance really fits in with all else that's going on in the context of the company. Right? Place, time, people. So just because they did it once doesn't mean you're going to replicate it. Because that would be almost kind of scientific and cloning, right?Max: Yeah. We're not robots just yet. Mary: Not yet but I hear they're working on it. Max: Yeah. So we are. And to wrap up our discussion, Mary, and to put it in the 2020 context. This year has been testing for a lot of people and for organizations, I believe Concentrix has done huge progress in transitioning to work from home, and work from anywhere perhaps. Can you share with us, some success stories from your executive team on how that transition was handled? And, you know, what hidden talents this challenging year may have, you know, put before and revealed in your team?Mary:  Yeah. Awesome. That is a great way to kind of wrap this because I think this year, and I think everyone can attest to this. This year has been one of the most difficult for any business you're in. I mean, global pandemic and then in certain businesses it's been a bigger issue. We are global, obviously, we have 250,000 people, so that's a big footprint to manage.Max: A quarter million!Mary: Yeah, quarter million is kind of scary. Right? So when you think about it, we went from an industry where it was primarily cubicle work in an office, to work from home almost overnight. Our senior team, I have to say, they worked incredibly well together to get very clear. We knew what the mission was, get everybody working from home as quickly as you can for our clients and for our people, while staying safe. Because of such a strong culture built we have and buy into the culture, the team worked incredibly well, and I can't share data, but quote - unquote, almost overnight, made that happen. Right? Just imagine what that takes. Here we are, eight months after COVID really kind of started. Having the vast majority of the group still working from home where possible. Actually, and I think this industry I'm speaking up for, I don't know for a fact, seeing this I think this industry may take a look at work from home. It's going to become more popular. Or more the manner. I don't know if it'll ever be the only way, but I think that just shows we could remain in business and we didn't have to have everyone contained in a cubicle or in an office. And I wanna, you know, think and even express, you know, gratitude from so many, you know, 250,000 of us, to the senior executives who are pulling together so quickly.And really being clear on that purpose. it's amazing when you're someone who is clear on a purpose, and you have a group also clear on that purpose, you can move mountains, right? Or you can actually move a hundred thousands of computers like that. Max: Yeah. It was beautiful to see what happened to the industry this year. It was difficult of course, for some people, we've seen divorce rates go up, suicides rates, alcohol consumption and other indicators that show that those stressors on the market have been felt. with the commuting time being reduced to zero, however, we can look at it as, perhaps the day is less and less crowded with waste. Maybe it's a little bit more purposeful. Is that how your executive team is experiencing it? Because I know at the management level, managing people remotely takes probably even more time than doing it in the office where you can have everybody in a room. So are they feeling, are they feeling the weights of those extra hours or they're enjoying the freedom from commute? Where's the balance? Mary: Where's the balance? Well it's an interesting balance. The vast majority, because we are global, a lot of what we did was, you know, via telecommunications. It wasn't necessarily as in person. But for those that have the in-person experiences initially was very difficult, a lot of us miss and who doesn't miss that contact, that said, people are finding and it's going on two different camps here.They're actually working more because they're in their home. You know, you don't have to get up, commute, change. All that logistical stuff has gone. So you just fill your work into that space. So whereas we talk about setting boundaries, right? Others have actually found, instead of working in that space, that they're getting really good about boundaries and really finding that they're more of themselves, both in work and home. So I've had others go the other way. It wasn't necessarily divorce and suicide, but more family time, more presence. I'm not on the road. So I wouldn't say it's one or the other. It really just depends on individual cases. I think we can speak to this around any firm or anyone. I mean, this year has been loaded with work, add COVID as a stressor, and then add business as a stressor, add personal schooling. And if you look at all those stressors, it's a stressful time for anyone wherever you're at. And so that is going to impact the greater population. Max: Well, I'm, I'm taking a lot of positives from your answer, where people have been spending more time at home. And being able to put in more hours and, you know, and so important work as well. And so obviously top executives will respond to challenges with a good level of resiliency. And, it sounds like they have, and they've done a good job of transitioning the company at a scale that nobody could have imagined.Thank you for sharing those stories, Mary. I wish you and your team much success in 2021. And, thank you for coming to the show. Mary: Well, thank you, Max. Awesome. Here's to everyone's good 2021.That was Mary Meston VP of talent management at Concentrix reminding us to create space. That's what she does for the executives at Concentrix and what she reminds us to do for ourselves. I enjoyed it as I hope you did as well. If you did, please follow us, please follow the recruitment hackers podcast.And if you'd like to be on the show or know somebody who I should interview. Remember to reach out on talkpush.com I'm always looking for more interesting people to talk to. Thank you.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. Today. We are honored to have on the show, Mrs. Susan Hanold PhD, who is also the VP and the ADP Strategic Advisory Services Group. Susan, welcome to the show. Susan: Thanks Max. Great to be here. Max:  Susan  was named top women in HR technology by Recruiting Daily, and works with ADP's clients to build out their recruiting strategies. So tell us a little bit about ADP and then we'll go into our usual round of questions about how this industry is changing. Susan, I will let you talk about ADP, you will probably do better than I can. We were talking before the show that ADP does a lot more than payroll, and through acquisitions has moved into the RPO world. And into the technology world. Can you give us a quick summary of your universe? Susan: Sure. So interesting to me about eight years ago, when I was first hired at ADP. I came in as a talent strategy expert. So it was like you, I thought, Oh payroll! It's only payroll, but it's not. It's a full HCM human capital management company. And it's been in business over 70 years. And you know, over the last eight years, our talent ecosystem has grown. You know, eight years ago we started our RPO business. We have talent management, talent activation, you know, you have to put different words on all the different types of talent products. So activation is kind of a new area. That's an engagement, and performance area,  talent management, and you've got talent acquisition.Max: You've got my attention with this talent activation. We'll come back to it later. Susan: Yeah. So, you know, to me what's exciting is that, it's a global organization, it's got 140 countries and, you know, of course we're known for payroll and that's very core to us and we have 58,000 employees. And for me, you know, like you Max, as we were talking before, my day job was traveling a lot, I lived on an airplane and what was most important to me was satisfying our clients and helping them build out their talent strategy. And so I was basically traveling around trying to be in person, getting to know them and their businesses. And so that has switched a bit here now. Max: Well, we have so many hours in the day now. I understand that you're investing some of this time that you got back from all that traveling around the world, into helping  your community and working with the University of Texas in Arlington.Susan: Yeah. So I felt one of the ways to give back is to share those experiences and what I'm learning right now in my day job and the real life experiences. And I just feel like they are really enjoying that. They love hearing, you know, balancing the book work if you will, with the real life application.Max: Yeah i could make a nice segway on the world of recruitment. Hearing more about the stories and about the book, hearing more about the candidate than about the resume, which is something I believe we must move away from in recruitment. Move away from the resume. Tell us. How, how did you end up in talent acquisition professor? Susan: Well, it just happened naturally. I mean, I didn't say, Oh I'm going to go into talent acquisition. I am just a sponge for learning. And at ADP, I was given the opportunity to really keep learning and building and learning more about what they offered from a talent product perspective, and ourselves, and our services. And I started off in talent management and then it just naturally evolved to talent acquisition. And with the model that we follow which is attracting, engaging, and retaining. So many times I'll have clients that'll say, well let's talk about our turnover. And everything comes back to let's look at the whole ecosystem. So let's start from the beginning and come all the way through the talent life cycle. And so I just started expanding my conversation and learning more. I'm so very thrilled to be talking about it today, Max:  I've been asked by a number of companies to look at retention and you know, for me, it's the ultimate success metric for the company. Are you a people-centered company? It should be measured by whether you can retain your people or not. And the unfortunate thing is you cannot really give that number, the retention number, you cannot let any one department own it. Because it really starts even at sourcing.  If you source a wide enough audience, a big enough talent pool, then  you'll be able to be a lot more picky and find people who have a better culture fit, which should certainly increase retention, logically. So, I think these arguments are a little hard for me  to carry on the sell side. To say that recruitment helps retention and sourcing helps retention. But I do believe that fundamentally and in principle.Susan: Well, it's interesting, how did you know of the email I was just looking at before our conversation, because I had just got a request from a client that wants to have a turnover workshop. And that seems to come up quite frequently. And you know, in my role, my goal is to help our clients. So I'm external focused and help them with a lot of advice and insights. So I'm not really necessarily executing on a product, but it's looking at the whole people process and technology and in my role in product agnostic. So when the clients are coming and asking for help, like hey I've got a pain point of turnover. It's like exactly what you said. It's really having to dig in and look at the bigger picture. And where is it going to, where's it really coming from? And I'd say about two or three years ago, our team got together and we were hearing a pattern of turnover retention coming up and we're like, well we just need to start at the basics. What is it? What data do you need? And then we actually put a diagnostic together and it sounds really fancy when you say, well, I put a diagnostic together, but I honestly started going to key stakeholders. And businesses and saying, what data are you gathering? What are you measuring? And start pulling this together. And I hate to use the word HCM, but it truly is. It was a full human capital management list of questions. And I said, hey, here's a great list of questions. That you as a recruiter, or you as an HR leader can take to your CEO and say, if you say no to any of these questions, then you don't have a comprehensive turnover retention strategy.And so I just kind of knew exactly what it said. I started adding more and more questions to it. And it's wider. It was outside of recruiting, it went to performance, it went to communications, it went to marketing, and they all have an impact. So, anyway, I ended up with a good tool out of it.Max:  Yeah, the diagnostic, you can repurpose it? Susan: I sure can. Max: I mean, with a PhD  you can turn any worksheet into a methodology. Right? There is a way to commercialize that for sure. And I want to go back to that word you used earlier, talent activation, is that a new fancy word for onboarding?Susan: Not really. Talent activation is really activating talent. So it's really engaging the talent, checking in, keeping their productivity up. It's really a connection to right now. To the resiliency that we're seeing with the pandemic. So as a leader, how are you able to react to adverse situations? So how you act, you activate yourself.And it's also how managers are working with team members, other individuals or subordinates. To really engage them and keep them aligned to their goals! So that's a whole nother piece of it, which it does. You know, there's acquisition, activation and management. You've got to love how we put all these words to things, these new names.Max: I'll stay with onboarding. I've got enough words in my vocabulary, but thanks for that. Let's go back in time a little bit. And, well actually, on the top of retention, and the fact that it's in your inbox right now makes me wonder. Are companies preparing for 2021 thinking? Well, we kept our staff in 2020 because everybody was holding onto their seats and holding on for their life. And we'll have a wave of, you know, we have to be ready for a wave of turnover insurance. In the coming months you know, do you feel that, going on in the market that there's a little bit of anticipation and fear in that direction? Or is that just in my head? Susan: No, I don't think it's in your head. I think it's a very real situation. I mean, I think that you have the companies that you've, you know, that are not sure when to bring staff back, so they don't want to have to furlough or lay off again. So you've had some of those companies that have had to go through those situations. And then I was just working with, you know, one of our newest RPO clients that can't hire fast enough! Because they just can't find it. They're actually, you know, doing some of the COVID testing, but in sense their sourcing is extremely high, yet being able to keep and retain, you know, back to your turnover and where your retention is, and I even mentioned onboarding.  So how do you get all of that lined up so quickly? You scale up so quickly and do not want to lose somebody and still need to keep that whole candidate experience high. Because somewhere it's going to fall through the cracks, so I think that piece is... But there, I definitely think that there is  a sense of some folks that are very worried, right? So you have people that are wanting to keep their job, but yet I'm seeing some people, you know, go ahead and say maybe business isn't where, I want it to be. And I'm okay to jump. I'm going to be a job hopper right now, but I still think there's some unpredictability to headcount needs, where some businesses are fluctuating and that can cause a little bit of a roller coaster.And, you know, I even saw it with our own organization where some departments were busy. So people, you know, employees took a temporary job-hop over to another department to leverage their skills. So it definitely is a little bit uncertain, but that cloud. That fearfulness. I still think that's still there.Max: Yeah. That's going to stay with us even post election. I think there's still a lot of uncertainty in the market. But, I mean the recovery in Q3 has been very strong in North America anyway. And I guess that ADP should have a strong 2021, on the RPO business and technology, of course. So, you've got your finger on the pulse of the economy.  Can you give us, our listeners, some insights on how the wind is blowing? Susan: Well, you know, we do a lot of labor economy, market calls and so forth. Of course we're known for the unemployment report, but we also have something called the, workplace vitality report, which you know, is a quarterly, real time data or site, If you want to call it that,  where you can quarterly know what's happening with compensation. What's happening with unemployment? Is it a job hopper market? What's the hourly rate? What's happening part-time or full-time? And so by that, I'm definitely up to date on what's happening with the market, the trends, you know, really month to month, I look at this and how I can slice the data in different ways.But I think that's only one piece. I think the other piece that I look at to kind of know what's going on in the market is, what am I hearing from our clients? And, what kind of work are they asking for? And one of the biggest things that I am seeing is just keep it simple. Like since a lot of people are trying to make it easier for the candidate, for their employees and not trying to disrupt or come up with a lot of new stuff right now, new projects.But in doing this. They're trying to look at cost containment, process optimization, and really trying to say, how can I make my recruiting team as efficient as I can? And still have that high impact candidate experience and get that quality candidate. And so a lot of times I honestly have been spending a lot of time, right now, in workshops going through processes, looking at the current state, looking at the future state and saying, what are some best practices and recommendations to make things better?Max: And you know, I mean balance of what do you keep in house and what do you outsource in town's acquisition. I think that there's always going to be pressure on both sides, on both ends of the spectrum. And you'll have some mild fluctuations that are driven by the economy.So in 2021, probably it'll be a little bit more outsourced than usual, simply because people are a little fearful of hiring in house. But there's never going to be a state of balance or a winner takes all kind of situation. There will  always be that tension, right? Between the two. Susan: Well a lot about it, I think, is how open-minded you are and how educated you are to know just what your options are? You know, If I was the CPO five years ago for the people of our chief HR office, I may create my HR team very differently than I would today. And knowing, you know, what are those outsourcing options? And many times it's like, just give us a chance, let us run a business case for you. Let me give you a couple of menu options and then figure out where in your culture it's going to work best.Sometimes you just need to get somebody who's got the open mind to say, I'm willing to change my structure or change the... Or it doesn't even have to be all or nothing. It can be a hybrid approach. One of the clients I'm working with now, they have a recruiting staff and they have some outsourced. To me, it's just, you know, don't stress yourself out, right? Like you can go at this at baby steps too, right?Max: Yeah. Yeah. And, in this model and, you know, thinking about this customer that you just mentioned, you're referring to us. Is there a division of tasks or what's an ideal division of tasks for a mid-sized customer view?I'm curious because I see RPO is coming in for executive level hiring volume, hiring for digital sourcing. And I suppose  the area which remains in-house then is most precious for the companies to retain. Is the onboarding experience where the closer you become to being an employee, the more, that experience needs to be in-house and managed internally, I suppose. And that would mean like the front of the funnel is perhaps easier to outsource, but maybe that's just a wrong thing to do.  It's not the business I'm in anyway. Susan: Well, and if you just look at the market right now with unemployment, you know, of course recruiting teams are getting more sophisticated, right? But employees we're finding or having reluctance to change jobs. And so some may be leading for 25 cents an hour or not so sure anymore that their jobs are gonna exist. So, you know, now when they're comparing their employment to maybe some security, that is causing a little bit of a challenge right now. So I feel like knowing your compensation... I get a lot of questions from folks that, you know, from accounts that are saying, I don't have really good compensation, pay structure. I don't have benchmarking data. Help me figure this out. And a lot of times we'll just say, well, either two things are happening. One, they're truly off on wages but they need to do the analysis piece. Or secondly, it's an easy thing to say, well, it's wages, right? It's compensation. And I really need to look at our benefits, or I need to really look and dig a root cause analysis. And so, you know, I find a lot of times where I'm helping them find, how do I get good real time data? That's, you know, is not survey data, right? From somebody else to know what your compensation should be. And then also helping them to dig deeper just to ask them so thoughtful questions. Because many times they're not even doing exit interviews. They're just hearing it by hearsay cause they can't keep up or they don't have a consistent process to get that feedback. So that's just another way of saying this. Another thing I'm hearing a little bit about. Max: And, when it comes to this compensation data, I suppose the ADP is in a very unique place, right? Where you have more data than anybody else. Susan: Right!Max: I mean, this data is private. I'm sure.  But if you don't put the name of their customer to it, you can analyze it, right? Susan: Right. So we have two things that have been coming out. We have compensation, benchmarking and then also pay equity. And you know, what we're able to do is take the 30 million employees and 90,000 organizations and take that pay data and aggregate it, make it anonymized and be able to have it filtered so we can get that data to be able to say, here's what the what your benchmarks are based on your industry, your size, and, you know, be able to run that. That's been very helpful. And the second piece that's trending now for me is, you know, we had pay equity. We created that several years ago, but now because of what's happened within the market is that the whole diversity equity inclusion topic. And now all of a sudden that's been a whole other elevated topic.Max:  And this year, I mean, it's gotten even more intention than usual. And where North America leaves, the rest of the world follows, for a lot of things related to systems. I've read and I could be wrong, but I've read that more than half of the world's enterprise software is purchased out of North America.And that includes most probably, recruiting software. And, and so, doctor I've heard a lot of companies complain about having to build systems, which are very US centric, which asks all of this data, needed to be asked to be in compliance with the US equal opportunity law. And that it's creating sort of artificial barriers for candidates outside of the US where some of these questions are not required. Have you come across these kinds of queries yourself? What is your recommendation for companies who want to be on one hand compliance in North America?Susan:  You have asked a very difficult question and I could write a book and then get the answers to you. And maybe I'll be a millionaire, but, I definitely think that. Being able to have technology that is simple to use that can be used across a lot of boundaries definitely key. And I also believe that you have to play to all the different compliance rules, you know, one of the things I know that we've been looking at is just, this is very new, you know, it's a very hot in discussion right now. It is, you know, diversity dashboards.And what information do you, and can you even share, right? And then how do you include unconscious bias, into this, you know, inclusion sentiment and what do you do with self identification? You know, all this is out of my expertise, but it's definitely playing into it. And the other piece is where do you have the human connection too? Where do you have the human in this whole candidate experience? And when do you start to leverage your artificial intelligence, your texting? You know, all that experience with your ATS platform. There's a lot happening there for sure!Max:  And these tools do help diversity because they expand the pool of people who can get in touch with you and, you know, just make it easier to be able to apply. And I think that ultimately serves the purpose of, expanding the town pool and creating opportunity for people you wouldn't normally consider, or that the hiring manager wouldn't consider.But well, my 2 cents is that there are more demands coming out of North America than any other market when it comes to capturing this kind of data and protecting against you know, let's say, setting up rules to protect the employer against liability, and it creates inefficiencies, outside of North America.And so it may be. You know, with the internet global markets being large enough now for any company, including ADP, maybe time to consider having, and implementations and different systems. One for global, one for North America to optimize the candidate experience. Susan:  You're helping me with the product roadmap here. But you know, I do a lot of speaking and research around the remote workforce and the work from anywhere, the WFA. And since you mentioned kind of across borders, I think that is also the bigger question. And you talked about increasing your candidate pool and your talent pipeline. Well, you know, that whole diversity piece is definitely a part of it.But also right now, I can't tell you the amount of conversations I've had with organizations. You're trying to do business cases right now to say, help me know from an ROI perspective if I have a certain part of my population that stays remote, or I phase them in longer, and I know you've probably heard this you're smart and I can see you now saying, I've heard this before! But just truly the trend of what it could do to getting your top talent. Because, I mean, I just saw a posting the other day and it said New York or something, and I'm like, well, do you have to be there in New York, but why do you put New York? If you don't really have to be in New York? Why is the job description saying New York? So either. You know, clearly communicate that you're shifting or the jobs descriptions just can't keep up with it. Max: It's almost like the Y2K bug, you know, where they're like, we can't update the machine. But most ATS's and job boards and CRM's. They don't know how to list a job as remote. I mean, I should know. We just built that in ourselves just this year, when we've been hiring remote workers for years. But it just doesn't compute. Susan: But I really hope, in a positive light that this truly would allow people who are interested in positions seriously, and for whatever reason don't want to move. Or they feel like now that, you know, you've tested the times, you're like, hey I've done this! Do I have the networks within the organization? Do I really need to be physically present in that city? And I hope that you at least have a conversation, right? A strategic conversation that somebody wouldn't eliminate me, but please still consider me. I hope that continues to broaden and happen and evolve.Max: Talking about the work from home and compensation to our areas of expertise for you Susan, I don't know if you saw the news, but  Reddit this week announced that they're going to eliminate cost of living payment compensation. And basically what this means is it doesn't matter if you live in, you know, San Francisco or in Idaho, you're going to get paid the same. You know, we're going to pay you based on performance only, because everybody's working from home anyway. Are you seeing other employers follow that model where we'll pay you the same regardless, and we're going to stop, you know, pegging salaries, on cost of living?Susan: I personally have not seen a big trend in that yet, but I definitely, I tell you Max, you must know my calendar. I've been trying to talk to our compensation director because I'm, you know, trying to get a little bit of a handle on... we had essential employees, you know, paying hazard pay and all these different types of pay differences that we've been going through.And I think compensation's going to get challenged. So I am all for rethinking our processes. Don't just assume everything's going to be the same, you know I love how people say, when we go back or, you know, whatever this new normal is, the new error that you reset and you rethink, you just don't go back. You actually can do things different. And I'm a proponent of that for sure.Max: I'd like to ask you some practical tips on how employers and recruiters can stand out in today's markets. We talked about the fact that people are holding still a little bit of this time but clearly the employment market has reheated and companies are hiring again.And so there's going to be more offers, coming on and a lot of choices. What do you think are the defining traits of a winning talent acquisition strategy as we're entering the end of 2020 coming into next year?  What are your recommendations for our audience?Susan: Well, you know, standing out and in a competitive market is always important and I always believe how people are treated during this time, they're going to remember. And if my manager cared for me, if our company did the right thing, they're going to remember. And I think that ties back to culture. And culture I can see is going to continue to be very important from a recruiting talent acquisition position.So I would really think about the bigger impact you can have with your recruiting strategy when it comes to culture. The second thing I would think about is, you know, there is a shift in evolving skill sets. So think about how you were investing in the development of your people. So normally we don't see those two necessarily two connected.But I think when it goes from organic growth, do I invest in you and provide you the training or source the talent? But a shift, definitely an evolving skill set, you know, ADP did some research and a few weeks ago they shared that one in five positions. The way they are today will not exist. So one in five, it's like 22%. So if jobs are shifting that often that they're not even gonna exist, keeping up with the skillsets is definitely going to be a challenge in how important development is. And the last one I'll leave you with is that the focus on branding, you know, around safety and employees first.So that is going to still be very critical in the upcoming months, to focus on building out that brand and the value proposition. That the recruiters all have the same message and just, what are you doing? Is it through videos? However, you're going to communicate that.I've seen a lot of good companies that have been doing a great job of saying, you know, this is what the environment looks like we're going to share it with you through video ahead of time. We're going to give you vignettes, whatever it is, but we're going to give you a snapshot of what it is for you. And that's how you're going to keep me either as a customer or even as an employee. So those would be the few tips I would have. What do you think Max? Max: Well, I think I've got some work to do. I certainly haven't communicated enough on safety and health, internally. I'm a bit of a Maverick myself and I have not been very precautious. I hope I didn't offend too many people. I certainly think that's, you know, personal health and safety is mostly a personal responsibility. But obviously the world is changing faster than I am. And I think your rights, employers would be well advised to follow your tips on that one.And of course to continue to invest in the employees, invest in your culture, all strong themes. So, well thank you very much, Dr. Hanold for spending a little bit of time with us. Susan: I have enjoyed it!Max:  Thank you! How do people get in touch with you? Susan:  Sure, they can connect with me on LinkedIn, Susan Hanold, or through Twitter app, Susan Hanold. And happy to be a resource to anybody if they've got any follow up questions, Max. Max: Fantastic. Well, I hope we reconnect, sometime next year under a new world! And, well, have fun today. I think today is election day. So I'll be watching the results at the American club here in Hong Kong, a few hours from now.Susan:  It's going to be a long night!Max: Entertaining for sure!Susan: Yes. Well, thank you so much, Max. Max: All right. Bye-bye.That was Dr. Susan Hanold, from ADP and their strategic advisory group. Lots to unpack in this interview. Lots of great tips, notably, how do we adjust our messaging in 2020 and next year around the employee culture? And how does it take care of safety and employees first? I hope you enjoyed it. And that you'll come back for more. Subscribe to the recruitment hackers podcast, and please share.

Welcome to the recruiting hackers podcast. A show about innovation, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello, and welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. Today I have a very special guest on the show. I normally talk to people from the practitioner side. But today  I have the pleasure, the awkward pleasure of talking to what may be perceived by others as a peer or competitor as the chief of staff for Wade and Wendy.Wade and Wendy is one of  the early companies that got into the conversational AI for recruitment space and I first heard about this company, I think five years ago at the very beginning. Dave Mekelburg is the chief of staff and joining us today  for chats, which will be a little different and a little bit more about, I suppose, about chatbots. Right Dave? If that's okay with you. Welcome to the show!Dave: Great to be here. Always excited to talk about chatbots. I don't get to do it enough. Especially in this context. And I will say, you know, I cheat a little bit. So I'm our chief of staff and also our head of people. So I am technically a practitioner.I do oversee our recruiting and hiring. So I can speak a little bit to that. So I won't be a total foreigner, but I'm very excited to talk about chatbots and talk about, you know, what's happening in the recruitment mission: “hacking”. Max: Awesome. Were you the guy who came up with a job title conversational designer?Dave: Oh, that's a good question! Max: I picked that out from a blog post. By your CEO. And I saw that conversational designer and I fell in love with it so much that I immediately posted for that job, myself at Talkpush, you know, within a week. And I started collecting applications. We hire a bunch now, and it has taken off, and I always thought maybe you guys came up with the term.Dave: Oh, I would love to take credit for that. Let me think where we first probably encountered it. So there were some early, going way back in time, like PullString, which was like a Pixar backed, conversation design platform. We had met their team and they had somebody, they call it a conversation designer. I think Apple, in Siri, I think a lot of this Siri team was starting to use that phrase. But you know, certainly when we posted that job it got some ice, because people were like, conversation designer? I've never heard of that. Max: Yeah. We got the same thing. And I also... One of my heads of conversational design, she said that when she changed her job title from product manager to conversational designer, the volume of interest she got on LinkedIn also showed up. Considerably. So it's, it's not a good retention strategy, maybe a good hiring strategy. Conversational designer. Great place. A great way to advertise, but also not a great retention strategy because people will come out and try to hire them away from you.And so maybe if I'm lucky, I'll find out who came up with that term. And I'll be on a goose chase, Dave  I'll start looking at the people at Siri or at Apple to see if I can find the person who coined that. But yeah. Definitely chatbots have been around for longer than we've been around.Dave: That's definitely true, but they've, It's the rate of change... And I think you've probably seen us over the last few years. The rate of change has been astronomical and just in terms of the penetration, the familiarity from the average person that's interacting with the chatbot. When we first started, we were doing user testing and, you know, having people chat with the bot about work. Like talk to me about what it is you want to do and what it is you'd like to do.And it was such a novel experience for people. And now, you know, really up and down the... You know, across the country, in every corner. Everyone has some experience with a chabot, whether it's, you know, through a bank teller or through a customer service bot, you know, the depth of penetration has gotten beyond people that are interested in technology or people that are interacting with, you know, the hot new FinTech startup, things like that. And really gotten into the hands of the average person so that, you know, when we started, we built so much into the experience to make sure that this was intuitive and, it didn't scare people that, you know, might have some emotional, anxiety about talking to a bot about AI and automation in their lives. And get them to put, you know, trust in helping us get them the right opportunity and we're in between them and, you know, the right job.And that's the responsibility that we take really seriously. And we had to build an experience where people would trust and believe that we would guide them appropriately. Given that it's a technology experience. And I do think over the last few years, that comfort, that familiarity just looking at the feedback that we get and things like, that there's way less like, wow I've never  seen this before, too what a high quality conversational experience. We get feedback about the conversation design and that's just something that I think a few years ago, your average, you know, sales person and applying for an entry level job wasn't leaving feedback about our bots conversations design. Max:  I got completely thrown off. You're putting me back to 2018 or 2017, I was in India meeting with, I think it was Expedia, and I was presenting our technology chatbots for recruitment. And this gentleman, this engineer that I met started showering me with questions about natural language processing and how intensely have we mapped that out? And what is our taxonomy of not being tense? And I thought, where did I step into, I don't know, half the words he's using. But I haven't had that experience too often. Still most people  they're past the point of, I've never worked with a chatbot before. They still feel like it's a bit of a dirty word, and that it may ruin the candidate experience, but obviously if they're working with us they are past that as well. I guess it's a bit of a marketing job to change the perception and say, well it's not a chat bot, it's a conversational agent or, you know, it's a virtual agent, just different ways  of renaming it.  Our system is very much built on the handover to the human and having a hybrid experience, I think, and this is perception. I haven't really tested your product, but I think Wade and Wendy comes from a deep tech expertise where you have PhDs who work in your company. And so you're building intelligence that works without the human intervention, perhaps. Dave: Yeah. So, the notion of human intervention is a really interesting one. So let me lay out for you, a little bit of how we approach this problem. Right? And where we started from. We started from a place of recruiting that we saw. Our CEO and founder is pretty adventurous for deep tech and wearables for manufacturing and farming, you know, deep marketing tech in the early days of that industry. His first job out of college was as a recruiter, and he felt that pain of I love the problem. And everyone at our organization to a T, it's something that we screened for in our hiring process, is really excited about solving the hiring problem. Which is getting people the right opportunity as fast as humanly possible.And that experience kind of started it, you know, it is what bubbled this up. And there's so much wasted space when it comes to the recruiting process. So much time spent looking up email addresses and a dozen tools. And you know, spending all your time on LinkedIn, crafting the perfect email, you know, having the same 15 minute conversation over and over again, only to find out that the candidate, actually moved two years ago and they're not really, you know, they're not open to working in your location, all this kind of running in place.And you're never sure when you're a human recruiter connecting with a candidate, if this is the right fit. And as a candidate, you're not sure, like is it worth my time to even connect with this recruiter? And you have this kind of core problem in place, that we wanted to take that deep tech and automation approach to, which was, we want to clear out all of the road recruiting tasks that get in the way of humans coming together. So, when you say human intervention, our goal is to have as little human intervention in the bot, the chat experience itself. So, you know, in terms of what we do, our platform helps automate. And for an enterprise company it helps automate three core functions. Sourcing. So identifying a candidate for a role, engaging them in an informational interview. Getting them excited about the opportunity, a few basic qualifying questions, and if they're a fit, bringing them into the hiring process. Screening, so somebody applies to a job. They go through a first round, deep dive interview with our bot, all kinds of written texts.And the last is coordination. So scheduling, messaging, you know, don't forget your interview is tomorrow at 1:00 PM that kind of work. Our goal is to do all that. So recruiters can come in and see, okay, this candidate is excited, they check off all the boxes. Here's the AI recommendation that is leading to me to believe they're a fit. And I'm sure that this candidate is worth my time. Now let me as the recruiter, build a relationship, guide them to the hiring process and, you know, help get them across the finish line. We do believe that ultimately recruiting is still always going to boil down to a human decision making process. On the other side of the equation, we have a candidate facing a bot. So Wendy works at the enterprise and Wade, we put out into the world as kind of an AI career guide, and you chat with Wade about what you've done in the past, what you'd like to do there, and personality tests. So you can get a real sense of who you like to work with, how you like to work, why you work?Is it a matter of, I just want to grow my career in whatever way possible. I want to maximize my salary because I want to be able to take... Max: Wait, wait… Is this Wendy or Wade?Dave: This is Wade. Max: I would actually open up more to a Wendy than I would to  Wade but fine. Dave: So this is one of the things. And, I'm going to ask you a question, which I hope is not too uncouth because, you know, I'm on your show. One of the things that we saw from the beginning, which we were not ready for was. There's something about when you know you're chatting with an AI personality, and I know for you and for us,  that's key to the experience. Is letting people know, hey, this is not an immediate personality.There is a level of trust, people don't feel judged. And not everyone wants to open up to it necessarily, but we had in our early days, we had candidates sharing stories that recruiters, you know, that have been doing it for 20 years had never heard. People surviving, you know, terrorist attacks, people going into depth about a personal tragedy that they had overcome, and how it related to the job that they were applying for. And these really deeply personal stories. And when we would conduct, you know, surveys and user interviews afterwards, there's this theme of, you know, I wasn't sure about this, but once I started talking, I realized, you know what? I can just tell my story. And I can get it out of the way, and there's no judgment.And, you know, work is such a personal, specific context. Right? And I would love to hear from your side of the table, like what do you see when people are interacting with Talkpush? Like, how do they feel about it? Max: Well, first, to your points, I think it's a good medium for getting stuff out that would be sensitive. So, an exit interview would be a good medium to use chatbots because, you know, you're talking to an AI. And so you can say things as they are a little bit more, perhaps than if you're talking to HR. Because HR can pull back your salary, but the AI is not gonna hold back, hopefully.And on the matter of people opening up. We do, you know, very large volumes and most of it is you organizing, and sourcing, and screening, and coordinating. But really, we try to keep the sourcing bids, which is like asking questions directly to the job as lean as possible.And then screening is also quite lean and this is the bulk of the volume. And we collect answers that are text, but also audio and video. So a video is the chance for people to express their creativity and we see some nice things there, of course. And on text it's usually a little bit faster, because people are on their mobile phones and they're not going to go on forever.So yeah, that's how I would describe it, but there are  different pools of population because we work in eight or ten countries that have different reactions. So in some markets, the people are more warm and they try to convince the bots to, you know, treat them nice and put them at the top of the list. Then there's more flowery language. Dave: Yeah. I'll never forget. The first time we had, you know, Wendy the chat bot personality that is doing the interviewing basically, “she's the recruiter”. And, we had somebody go through an interview and at the end, you know, we have a little wave emoji and Wendy says, you know like, thank you so much the hiring, you know, the human hiring team will get back to you. Something like that, something from the early days, whatever it said. And people were responding, Thanks, Wendy. Hope you have a great day! And people know Wendy is a robot. We had like robot jokes in some of the early chats, like people knew. But you know, there's that notion of, well if I'm going to chat with it, I'm going to treat it like a, you know, like it's a thing, like I'm going to call it by its name. It's Wendy!Max: We got the same thing. I mean, it got to the point of like, Oh I really hope that you're going to get back to me sooner because I really need this job because blah, blah, blah my daughter needs a surgery something like this.Dave: Oh my goodness. Yeah...Max: At the end of the application process. Which, you know, I mean it makes my heart bleed, of course, but the bot doesn't have a heart! Dave: Sorry. There's nothing in our evaluation algorithm about, you know…Max: Additional circumstances. Dave: Yeah.Max: All right. Well, let's switch gears a little bit, and maybe it sounds like we should have a separate podcast where we put our bot people with your bot people and sharp out stories. That would be fun. It would be for a different kind of audience, my audience are mostly TA professionals, and  they could get a little bit bored. So, one thing that... We kind of started at the same time, right? So when did you launch a Wade and Wendy? Dave:  Wade and Wendy started in, you know, like on the couch, like a dollar and a dream idea in 2015. And we've been building ever since. Max: Yeah. So around the same time, I may be a few months older, but we only did our first text bot in 2016. After our initial run was doing IVR voice collection over the phone. Dave: Awesome. Max: And sometimes people ask me, are you still a startup? And I don't know what to tell them because, yeah, the company is more mature five years in, but people want to work in a startup because it's cool and exciting. How do we keep it cool and exciting by, you know five years in, when we have not yet totally taken over the world? Certainly our numbers are very high and, you know, we have purpose around that, but yeah, what are your thoughts on how to keep it fresh? And I'm also curious, you know, to extend a little bit the conversation, on the retention number, which is too high. Dave: Oh, interesting. Max: Because I think like the company from 5 years ago did not need the same people as it does now.Dave: Yep. So that's... What a question! I'll work backwards. I'll enter that first because I think that will help inform sort of, how do you keep it fresh? You know, I think. I completely agree with your point, which is that, you know, at every stage of a company you need different types of personality.The reality on the ground was really different. When we were tackling an incredibly difficult idea in an immature tech space and market, you know, in 2015, 2016, really up until probably like early 2019. It was when we would talk to prospective clients, we had to explain what a chatbot was, what AI was, why HR was going to benefit from AI and what that even meant. When it came to the problems that we were solving and  just the ability to manage a chat conversation and what that took. And understanding from a design and conversation perspective, through the hard tech of, you know, how do you build for the future with this? It was so much open field, just an empty meadow with grass in every direction. And we had to walk forward. Right? And that is not for everybody, that level of uncertainty of rapid rate of change, of you know, chaos to a degree because I'll never forget when we went live with the first customer, because you know I'd been on a zero to one startup journey before, so I had a distinct memory then of what happened and how disruptive and special having a client like was to, you know, an organization that was, you know, under the hood, trying to solve these deep tech problems.Certainly we had user testing all the time, but it's so different when you're actually live. So you know, the person that is engaged and excited, with that chaos, and certainly we do have a chunk of our core team that has been with us from those early days, you know, when you get to a level of, okay this is a thing, and there's still so much green grass and there's still so much to do, but there is a clear pathway and the people that we have now, you know, there are people that I think if they had joined the organization four or five years ago, it would have been miserable. You know, being the fifth person on a team, trying to solve this as a really different lived experience than, you know, being an employee 12 or 15 or 20 or whatever it is. And that changes as you go.Max: Some people would be addicted to startup after startup after startup. And you see those resumes where people spend 6 to 12 months and, you know, you're thinking, okay either this person has serious ADD and is not reliable or perhaps, that's just the way gear. They just have to go at the earliest stage and just keep doing that over and over again. Dave: I call it. I have this notion, that we talk about a lot, which is startup time. And the earlier you are at a startup, both in terms of company size and like development life cycle, if it's a tech startup. Those early days, every month, you should count as six months!So, you know, six months at an early stage startup, when it's five people, feels like three years of sort of life experience. And as the company grows, as things become more predictable, that starts to flatten out. We're like, okay, five years at, you know, a late stage tech company is five years. But if you're part of that first year, there's so much emotion and complexity and raw hours that go into those early days that it's almost as if you're operating on a different calendar.And certainly there are people, you know, that were on our journey for six months, you know, we have a couple of those, especially some junior folks that were interns and things like that. And you know, to this day we have relationships as if we've worked together for a decade, just because those six months really forged that time. And it was a really wonderful kind of moment for all of us. Max: So, your alumni, your best alumni, they stay in the startup world for the most part? They moved on to their own thing? Dave: It depends. And we've watched people go to a giant company and then realize like, you've been at it for long enough where a couple of people now in the second thing afterwards, worked for, you know, a fortune 50 company for a couple of years, and we're like, no I missed that! So most went on to start ups, in some capacity, but a handful went to the big places where everybody else is.Max: Yeah it paid the bill!Dave: Yeah, what motivates you is different for everybody. And if it's an awesome paycheck, which you can really get at a giant company, then, you know, by all means go after it. Max: I think so, right? I was saying conversational designers will find jobs and you can go work for Microsoft anytime, and probably get something there. Well, other tips, that I can appropriate, on how to keep the excitement strong? Especially in these troubled times where we cannot see each other in person? Dave: So this is the advice that I got.  Hopefully you can use it. Both you Max and you felt listener at home, or wherever you're listening to this. You know, when one of the things that... The entire employee life cycle is tied together. Right? So from the first time you hear about a company that you might work for in the recruiting process to, you know, 20 years down the line, when you're an AVP and just continuing to kind of move up the ranks, whatever it might be.But the best organizations that I've seen, really do illuminate their entire process with that organization's mission. Right? And, you know, I think about, you know, companies where I've gotten to see this up close are organizations like, you know... And I'm not... Some of these are clients, some of these are just companies where I've gotten the chance to talk to leaders and hear what they have to say. But I think about companies like PepsiCo or Comcast that have a real kind of message infused in what being an employee there means. And what the goals of that organization mean to kind of the broader world. Max:  wait a minute! PepsiCo, is the mission to sell more sugar? Dave: So it's, it's fascinating. PepsiCo has a wide range, and I have no affiliation with PepsiCo. So, I've just heard people at PepsiCo speak about their culture. So PepsiCo's internal mission is really oriented around diversity and personal development. So yes, they are selling corn chips and sugary drinks, and, a whole bunch of other things, which is, you know these are the complexities in the modern world, but internally in terms of their company's culture and what they do. They are deeply engaged with bringing their workforce into the community with service projects. They are one of the most diverse, leadership organizations. The fact that I even know this stuff just tells you see how, and again, I have no connection to PepsiCo whatsoever.The way they communicate that brand, the way it filters out throughout the organization keeps people, you know, not just engaged and motivated in a kind of transactional way, but in a deep way, people are committed to the development of the organization. Now selling sugary drinks isn't necessarily what drives me every day, you know, but for us, we're lucky and I'm sure you feel the same way. We're oriented towards this really powerful problem. Right? Every day I get to come to work and I get to work on. Chipping away at the massive unemployment crisis that is affecting, you know, hundreds of millions of people across the globe.I get to work on issues of representation and diversity by trying to remove bias in the hiring process. I mean, if your work, if you're a recruiter, if you're a TA person and you're thinking about your team. Your team is on the front lines of some of the most important decision making that human beings make. where do they choose to work. Where they choose to spend their time. Max: It affects society.Dave: It's such an important thing. And, you know we do a lot to remember that. And to talk about that, we have an internal mantra, that we call 60 to 6, which is, today the average job search in America, and it's different the world over, but the majority of our team is based in the US. So this is the number we use.The average job search takes 60 days. So when you're looking for work, whether you're unemployed or you've decided it's time for a change, the average job search takes 60 days. We want to create a world where it takes 6. We want to make hiring 10 times faster, where you're not spending all your time searching and trying to eliminate the right and wrong job. We want the right job to come to you, and you are able to just opt in. For the recruiter, they don't have to spend all this time searching for candidates and putting people to the process. You just get the right candidate, you know they're the right candidate because you have all this data to suggest that it's the right candidate, and how it maps on to their future work at your organization. This notion of 60 to 6 and removing, you know, 54 days of not knowing how you're going to pay your bills, not knowing what you're going to be doing with yourself, just going crazy, sitting by yourself, like that is so powerful and illuminating. And, you know, I think that really helps keep things fresh. And for a startup, this is a little more specific to startup context, you keep hitting milestones along the way, right? You're never done. It's never like, okay, this is over. It's like we got this contract, or we're able to release this functionality, or this thing that we've been talking about for five years, since this was an idea on the couch, is now about to go live because of the work of dozens of people across the globe.That is so cool. and when you get to celebrate those kinds of victories, you know, it's just a reminder of why you get up and do all the unglamorous things that being at a startup requires. Cause it's not, I'm probably making it sound all, you know, sunshine and lollipops, but you know, it's a lot. And there's a lot of work that a big team in money can solve that you have to be scrappy and you have to find your clever way around it. And just one at a time. Max: Yeah. I think we're lucky or maybe not lucky. We picked the industry we chose to go after. And that was one of the reasons I would personally not be motivated to sell sugary drinks. But, you know, I'm gonna use what you said about PepsiCo and go chase some sponsorship money from Mountain Dew for this podcast. Dave: Yeah. A really extreme podcast!Max: Yeah. Great. Well, we could go on all day on these topics, and maybe we'll talk again, and maybe we'll have our bot people have a separate chat, but it was a real pleasure, a real treat having you on the show. Dave, thank you so much for sharing and, all the best  to you and your 60 to 6 mission! I'll see if I can tweak it and personalize it for my team.Dave: I would love that. Look, this is a, you know, one of the things that we talk a lot about, is that this is a community, right? And, you know, if you're solving these problems, these problems are bigger than any group, any company, things like that. And it's always exciting to talk to other people who care about these issues.So thank you so much for having me. I am excited to get to talk with you about this in this setting. And yeah, hopefully people are ready to chat with a bot about work now.Max:  All right. Awesome. Thanks Dave. Dave: Thanks Max. Max: I had such a great time interviewing Dave Mekelburg Chief of staff.Head of people at a Wade and Wendy. It's often an experience running a startup, which is very competitive, where  you're trying to grab the headlines and grab market share from your competition. And it's so refreshing and so nice to meet the competition. And remember that you are working on problems that are much bigger than your own. And much bigger than your own company. And then we had so much to learn from each other. So thanks Dave for participating. I hope you enjoyed our conversation, and I hope it didn't get too geeky for you, that you'll sign up for more on the recruitment hackers podcast.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platforms. Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers podcast. I'm your host Max Armbruster. And today I'm welcoming Zac Engler, who is the head of talent acquisition for a company called PaR Systems, which he'll tell us all about. Zac, welcome to the show. Zac: Hey Max, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.Max: It's a pleasure. When I saw that you moved into this new company  I thought that was a real good match between the kind of recruiter that you are, a tinker, somebody who likes to play with tours and the kind of business that PaR System does. But for those who don't know you, perhaps, tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you come from? How did you get into recruitment? and then we'll talk about your business next.Zac: Yeah. So, thank you. I started off with a career in more of an HR generalist capacity at Target headquarters. Transitioned over through to, more of a retail leadership slash talent development and recruitment person while in my time at Apple. And that's really where I got my taste of full-on recruiting. And from there I just realized that it needed to be a hundred percent of my job. I landed an opportunity at Amplifon, the world's largest provider of hearing care solutions, and I oversaw the build-out of their North American talent acquisition team. And from there, you know, was really on a great pace in terms of exploring new technologies and bringing new capabilities to recruitment.When PaR Systems came along with really the dream job for me, as you said, I'm a tinkerer. I love all things nerdy when it comes to space flight. When it comes to nuclear reactors, when it comes to nuclear energy, when it comes to robotics and automation, and PaR does all of those things. So it just was one of those once in a lifetime opportunities that I got to capitalize on, and they're slated from some tremendous growth over the next few years. So they brought me on as a head of talent acquisition to really help grow out that capability and scale the team. Max: I believe this company has a few hundred people today. Zac: Yeah, we have 450 people. We have locations here in Minnesota, in the Minneapolis area. We have another large location in Brunswick, Georgia, and then we have satellite offices around the world. Some of the locations are in the United Kingdom, South Africa, France, Japan, but overall, the biggest locations are Minnesota. Max: Minnesota and Georgia. Okay.  And PaR Systems, hires a lot of engineers then, and finds what it's looking for in Minnesota. Zac: Yeah. 75% of our staff is either engineers or highly technical positions, a lot of the projects and products that we design and build are one of a kind or first of a kind solutions. The robotic crane system currently tearing apart Chernobyl is one example of something that had never been done before. That we designed and built. But yeah, as far as the engineering talent that we're looking for, a lot of that is based here in Minnesota, whether it's applications engineers, controls engineers, systems engineers, mechanical engineers, electronics engineers, you know, we are looking for them all And so getting into those work streams has been a unique challenge for me as well. Max: Yeah. I think you're the man for the job but, these roles seem like perhaps you would find them in the sort of fundamental research university sector, find these kinds of profiles, because if you said it's first of a kind, you're not going to find people who have, you know,  nuclear crane on their resume much. I'm sorry if I'm misquoting your example. Is your funnel focused on more general traits? And then, you know, you need a solid engineering background and then general traits of the tinker? Or you know, can you learn on the job kind of thing?Zac: Yes, our team full heartedly believes in, in training and development and mentorship. A lot of the people that come into our organization in a junior position are given a mentor almost immediately, and are set on a path for development. And one of the nice things about joining the PaR team is that, you know, if you would go join a larger organization, you might be assigned as an engineer to work on a piece of the widget that's a bigger part of the project for the next two years. Whereas at PaR, you get assigned projects almost immediately that you get to own, you're giving guidance and support as you work through those projects. But you can almost think of us like McKinsey or Deloitte in a way where we're not the company always necessarily turning out the product. We're the ones helping other companies design, then build the things that will go out and make their products. So it's really fun to be at that very leading edge of the production line.Max: I see. And working on the production line, so from design to production and then figuring out how to optimize there. Zac: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Max: Cool. So as part of their recruitment process for you, when you were being considered for this job, did they ask you to show the toys you've been building? I remember you were one of the first people to experiment with chatbots for the world of recruitments, was this part of the selection process?Zac: I think it helped my case. But yeah, in the 10 interviews I went through, it was definitely a great exposure to the organization to learn all the different quadrants that we work within, whether it's material handling, crane and nuclear work, whether it's military, marine. Whether it's aerospace and aeronautics or alive sciences automation, those four areas. I got a chance to work with those folks and share my story of how we streamlined candidate workflow through automation to allow us to actually connect with the person behind the resume, and get to the best candidates more quickly, if we're on the sourcing side of the candidate funnel. So there was definitely a lot of hope and positivity around that aspect of the work that I'd done in the past. Max: Well in North America, in 2020 people are complaining about the fact that in spite of the highest unemployment rates in the history of the country, practically, it's still hard to find people. It's still hard to find enough talent to go work. And even entry-level jobs like retail and call centers. In your space, I suppose the impact has been lesser, both for the talent and the employer, because engineering keeps on engineering. There hasn't been a massive impact. So two part question, first, hoping my assumptions are correct. And secondly, what can you do to expand your town pool if it is, you know, the ongoing hustle that it has been to find enough engineers? Zac: Yeah, for sure. So I think your assumptions are spot on. You know, with the baby boomer generation moving in towards that retirement age. You know, we have 10,000 baby boomers retiring each day for the next nine years here in the US, and as they vacate these skilled positions, they're leading openings that we won't necessarily have the talent to backfill. And I think one of the unique things that we're challenged with at PaR, is figuring out what are some of those pathways from skilled trade to STEM, right?How can we bring in people who maybe don't have a four year degree in an area, but have an associates degree. And train them up, and train them into those other types of roles and positions within the organization. And this doesn't have to be just engineering. This could be, in my prior world of hearing care, in pharmaceuticals and nursing, for example, right?Zac: There's a lot of entry points to those other types of businesses where you can enter in, as a pharmacy tech, as a nursing assistant. And go through schooling and get support as you then train yourself up to those higher levels within those businesses. It's getting those tracks in place and making that easier for companies to do, that I think will definitely be helpful.There's a local organization here called Make It MSP or Greater MSP that is focused on drawing talent to the Minneapolis and Minnesota region, and some of the work that they're doing is focused on just that. How do we create more visibility and opportunity for a diverse candidate set that did not always have the privilege of going to university, for example?Max: Yeah. And so explain to me how that imaginary perfect candidate would look like? Are we talking about a technician who was doing mechanical repair work on, I don't know, air conditioning units? Because he needs to, you know, put food on the table, feed his family, his or her.Although I have never met a female air conditioning technician, I'm sure there are plenty of them. And, so I had a mental picture. So this person would have the intellectual curiosity and the ambition to move into the engineering space. And then start to receive more fundamental training into these, let's say, into the nuclear field, does that kind of transition can happen?Zac: In certain instances. Absolutely. And you know, I think women are now a bigger part of the collegiate population in general, in the United States anyway. So, targeting, empowering and creating visibility to these types of opportunities, I think it's one area that businesses in STEM fields would benefit from. Right? Because a lot of times we're just running into this situation of, It's not top of mind for students, whether it's high school or college students, they don't know that they can become a shop floor technician with only a two year degree, that pays $50,000 a year, right out of school. They don't know that they could become a pharmacist or tech or a hearing care professional right out of school, with minimal training and certification and so creating that type of awareness for students. I think it is a cultural shift as well for us to get through it, because I think that the baby boomers did a great job of, you know, propagating college and saying college college college. Whatever you do. Just go to college. It doesn't matter. Just go! Max: They got away from the real work. Zac: Right. And we shifted and pivoted from college being the emphasis, to now I think we need to just figure out where are the priorities for economic success and how do we align that with people's passions and desires?Max: No, I totally get that.  Now that we've put the blame on the boomers, I totally get it. Zac and I are both. I believe gen X. Zac: Not at all. Max: No?Zac: I'm an elder millennial, we'll say. Max: Okay. So, elder millennials  and young fresh gen X-ers like myself. There's a very high chance that we were raised in a family where our parents did not work in industrial work, right? Because, our parents' generation, they're the ones who... Well the industrial work turned South for most of Western economies. And so, I guess, yeah, you've to start from scratch to show a new generation of people, that there is this kind of work available.Zac: Exactly. I think organizations can also, you know, work harder to create that visibility for those opportunities. And even if you just look at some of the technology that's in place that a lot of major corporations, you know, the ATS can either be a great tool for companies to use, or it could be the bane of everybody's hiring experience, right?Like there's still sadly, so many companies. That just let the ATS be this never-ending pool of people applying and getting responses. There's also some really great examples of companies diving in and creating those personal connections. Those career networks and giving people, support mechanisms after they're rejected, like what a concept that we would, even though we're saying no to you, we would help you out and give you thoughts and advice and areas to investigate that might be better aligned with your skillset.Max: Yeah. I think the ATS stronghold is also because in North America in particular, there's a legal concern of compliance for EEO, OFCCP, FCRA guidelines. And, for a tinkerer like yourself, maybe I can ask you, is there a way to be compliance with these guidelines without using the ATS? Are our town's acquisition people making a big thing out of something that doesn't need to be?Zac: I think that the ATS definitely has its place in the recruitment process and in the talent acquisition process. I don't know that we're able to get past that, per se, but it's like anything, how you use it should be the focus of every business, and using it just like we're focusing on diversity and inclusion, just like we're focusing on championing women leadership capabilities. We should be focused on creating a highly engaged, personal process for every candidate. Max: Yeah, I feel like you're dodging the question a little bit. The question I'm trying to get at is, can we do compliance without asking the candidates to go through the ATS? And I think the answer is yes, but I'm happy to hear your opinion on this topic. If you think I'm wrong. Zac: If we're able to get to the information we need to know to be compliant, then my answer would be yes. Maybe there is a chat tool out there that could help people get to that spot within the process to streamline that candidate flow. The thing I would caution there is just, are you still gonna ask the same question that you would, when people are clicking through the 15 Taleo steps, right? Only just now, they're having to do it on SMS with their thumbs. Not to throw them under the bus, but they're an easy target. Max: Right. Yeah, the question it's still gotta be there, if I understand your comments on the chat, you obviously know which angle I'm coming from. I am not  an advocate for chats interface all the time, for everybody. And if we're talking about a long checklist of tick marks you have to fill in, I do think that an actual forum UI is more appropriate than a chat. But  I also think it's a shame. If what you're trying to build is trust, if you're trying to build engagements to get all of this compliance and all these checklists done at the front of the funnel. Might dilute your message. And you might miss out on some good candidates. You can take them from cold to lukewarm or very warm before you have to go through the compliance stuff.Zac: Yeah. I think that's where automation can definitely step in. How are you finding the best fit for your organization quickly? And how are you teaming that person up with another person as quickly as possible? Because I am a little bias that a recruiter who's looking at a job holistically from start to finish, will be a great, what I like to call a talent liaison, for the company and for that candidate, so that you can build trust with them throughout the recruitment process, so that you can have a true rapport and understanding of...Even if this particular role doesn't work out, there may be other opportunities that align in the future. and that person will be more likely to participate as well because they had a confidant at the organization teamed up with them, rather than a siloed experience where they got passed off from person to person, or had they continuously apply through this, you know, stale old process, to not get any results or traction with  their application, even though they might be a huge promoter of the brand. Max: And, when somebody changes jobs and moves into a new company like yourself, like you did a few, a couple of months ago, it's usually an opportunity for the new company to like pick their brains and get the best ideas from, from the new, the new person. What are some of the early initiatives that you've been able to implement coming into the new role that you can share with us?Zac: Yeah, one of the first areas we're tackling is our job posts, actually. To this point, we are just copy pasting job descriptions onto our careers page, and as you may have heard me say in the past, too many bullets kill people. So let's say, if people aren't going to read the full thing or you're only going to pick out a couple bullets that are relevant and then apply anyways, that doesn't help anybody in the process. Right? It doesn't help the company or the candidate. So we're trying to, pilot and pivot to a performance-based job posting. Methodology, which will tell a story about the role. It'll give you a sense of what your first 90 days or first year are going to look like. It'll also tell you what you're going to get out of joining our organization and not just say like, you will do this for us, but here's what you'll get out of that experience.And, it's our goal to use that as a lever, to set us apart from the competition. Looking at 30 or so different competitors that we have in our industry. Maybe one or two of them is taking a similar approach. If that. But it'll also help us increase our diversity inclusion efforts as well. Because as you know, some job descriptions can be inherently biased and that can shy people away from the application process.Max:  All right. And helping get a visual around that. We're talking about, you said, I guess less bullet points and more of a journey. So does it look like a slide deck where you move through a few  images of this is what your job would look like. This is what you'd be doing.  Is it like a slide deck or am I being a management consulting nerd?Zac: No, no, no.  You're just fast forwarding from what I want to implement in the next six months. But, it starts off with storytelling and really, if you check out Lou Adler, he's got some great... He's really been the pioneer in this space, that I've molded our approach off, both at Amplifon and now here at PaR.So it really is that storytelling approach to encourage people to self select out. Once they start reading and understanding that this isn't a fit for them, and to really accelerate the interest of somebody who it is a fit for. And then yeah, down the road, having those more interactive and engaging job posts, video job posts or video advertisements around virtual job descriptions is on my roadmap for next year.Max: Well, one thing that, sourcing teams, challenge, you know, are challenged with. Is “Oh, that sounds great”, you know, what you just described, but we don't have enough leads. So we don't have time to build more information and more screens you have to go through in order to get to the applicant stage.So I was thinking. You know, the salvation may come from changing the main metric from cost per lead or number of leads to a more complex metric where you would only measure a lead if it's qualified, it's interested, it's shown where the first 90 days are on the job, and after all of that, it says yes. Have you had to change a little bit the way you track and you measure effectiveness and TA, or is that part of the plan?Zac: That'll be a part of the plan. So we're on month two and establishing a core set of KPIs and metrics that will be happening here as well. And I think having that ability to capture the candidate where they live is an ideal place for us in the future. So that somebody, browsing Facebook, browsing, LinkedIn, or just browsing the web. And they come across an ad from us, and they're engaged in our brand either via a chat system, or via an interactive job posting that is more likely to draw their attention than just the standard boiler plate. Right? Max: Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what comes out of Zach Angler's school of talent acquisition and tinkering. Congrats on the new role. And thank you for joining me on the podcast and sharing your insights with our viewers. Where can people get a hold of you?Zac: Absolutely Max, thanks for having me on. If people want to learn more, they can visit, zacengler.com for a little bit more about myself. Some of the radical ideas I have around AI, as well as the children's books that I've been working on. And people could visit par.com to learn more about our organization. Max: Children book as well? Did I hear that right? Zac: Yes. Yes. there is a children's book I've been working on for the last decade. If you have little ones, check it out, it'll bring a smile to hopefully anybody from Age 9 to 92. Max: You'd been working on it for a decade. Wow. Zac: Yeah.  It's about a family of dung beetles. Max: Dung beetles. Okay. Well zacengler.com we'll go check it out. Thanks again for being on the show.Zac:  Absolutely. Max. Thank you. Max: That was Zac Engler from PaR Systems, who I've always known to be a tinkerer and an insatiable mind. Very curious. and isn't it great to see him find a company where he gets to work in robotics. And nuclear technology and other, I think there are very few areas, functional areas, like talent acquisition that allow for people to go into these fields and an opportunity to learn about the areas that they're passionate about, without having to have formal training in this domain. So, I'm sure Zac will make the most of it and be an inspiration for us to always look for the company that aligns most with our values. Hope you enjoyed this interview and that, you'll come back for more at the recruitment hackers podcast. Thank you.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the record hackers podcast. This is Max and I'm today with Mr. Trent Cotton, director of talent acquisition at BBVA dialing in from Atlanta. Hi, Trent. Welcome to the show. Trent: Hi, Max, glad to be here. Max: Pleasure to have you. So, we were discussing with Trent, some of the big changes that happened in 2020. And we'll talk a little bit about BBVA's new policy on diversity and talk a little bit about AI and the recruiting sprints that you're running for your team. I think. There's a lot to learn for our audience there. But before we get into all of that, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to where you are today?Trent: Sure, sure.  I converted to the dark side of HR in 2004. I spent the first part of my career working through college as a banker, and in 2004 my daughter was two and a half, almost three years old. And, you know, I just got tired of lending. It was like, a loan, a loan, a loan.And, at the time I was managing four States for a mortgage broker and had, I think, 48 people that I was managing. And I said, you know what, I'm going to make a pivot. And took a contracting job with the bank, working as a recruiter and was trained by six, I'm using air quotes, recruiters. But they were technically like HR people that just did recruiting.And, I think that their sole purpose for six months was to convince me that I would not like recruiting. I wouldn't be successful, and they almost got to my head. But the difference between me and them is that I could sit with an executive, a banking executive and talk about, you know, the size of the portfolio, yield spread, about the changes in the market, all that business stuff.And then also, because I used to manage, I knew where to go and find the people. So just like that, I just kind of progressed and it's been a fun ride. I've done a lot of banking recruiting. There's nothing in the bank that I haven't recruited for. I've done some tech recruiting for a tech firm, and did some healthcare recruiting, but now I manage a fantastic group of 28 people that keep me on my toes and keep me innovating. So, like I said, it's been a fun journey. Max: Yeah, recruitment it's kind of like where people end up, after sales hasn't worked out for some people, but  there is a wonderful element of delivering someone, a career, a stepping stone, a next step. But in your case, you know, your timing was pretty good. Right? Getting out of mortgages in 2007. Trent: Oh gosh! It was providential, very. And you know, that was the other thing that I realized, that I loved sales and at the end of the day, that's all recruiting is. Just like a salesperson you need to have a pipeline, you need to manage a portfolio of talent, and you've got to be able to close a deal working with both your internal client and the candidate.So at the end of the day, we are salespeople. I just think a little bit more highly refined. And what we do  it's harder, because it's not like I'm trying to sell you a TV or sell you a product. I'm selling you an opportunity. And there's a certain level of domains and intelligence that I think is paramount for somebody to be successful.But I agree with you, whenever I'm looking for people to add to the team, the first thing I look for is, do they have that sales mentality? And that portfolio management and development of a pipeline? And if they have all of that, I can teach them the rest. Max: Well, I'm a startup CEO of building talent acquisition software. And when people asked me: How do we innovate? My answer is maybe a little bit uninspiring, but it's like, we just look at what sales and marketing does, and we know that it's coming into recruitment in three, four years from now. So we start building it now and we'll be alright. And continuing on your sales analogy, you know, you were saying, that recruitment is sales. Which I agree with.In the sales universe, the size of the deal that you make will affect the composition of your team and the marketing to sales mix. How much are you doing marketing? You're going to do more marketing with products that are a little bit cheaper. And you're going to do more sales, more hand holding when the product is a little bit more expensive.And so, if we apply that to recruitment, you know, the sort of white glove recruiting service would only work up until a certain level, and then for everything else you would have to have a different workflow, and a different sales to marketing mix. Does that apply for you at BBVA? Trent: It does. It does. So we've got the high volume on the branch side and then we've got the professional and executive, and even within the professional executive side, we've got kind of entry-level positions. So usually if I bring someone in, maybe they were a banker, and they want to get into recruiting or HR. I'll take them on and either have them work in retail, which is high volume, or kind of a higher volume on the professional and executive side. That way they can get used to all the things that as recruiters  we've got to be aware of. The HR laws, what to do, what not to do, to build up a process. And then as they progress, and as they learn to source, and as they develop that acumen, to me, there is a different level for the level of search that I work on versus someone that's working on maybe a mid level. There's not a lot. I mean, at its core, it's the same, but how I have to go about it is a little bit trickier. Because most of the time, if you're trying to get an executive, there's a different type of wooing that you do than someone that's a middle executive, you know, to me it's just a different rapport. So, it's almost like, of course sales is not a good idea.Because I was trying to think of, how would you market it? But I do think that maybe core sales is kind of your run in the middle basic model. There's a client out there for it, and you need to market it to them, specifically to that audience. But if I'm selling Bentleys or something like that, I have a totally different target market. Totally different networking. And that's a different level of client, a different ego that I have to deal with versus someone that's just coming in and: Hey! I just need a car. It doesn't have to be new. You know, it doesn't have to have even powered windows. It just needs to crank and to get me where I need to go.So, it's all about knowing your audience. And I think at the core, that's what sales is all about. Knowing your audience and being able to find the right need for them at the right time. Max: You and I have a commercial brand. And so, if we ever start looking for a job, you and I Trent, I mean we're just going to use our sales experience. Right? We're going to start looking into our network and like finding the job that's right for us. At the level that you're describing, you know, these kinds of bank executives, I would assume that they would also be able to like, find their own jobs to a certain degree. Do you find that to be the case or, you still need to do a lot of hunting?Trent: I still need to do a lot of hunting. They can go and  find their own job if they want to, because it's a very tight knit network at the top. The difference is that sometimes they're so busy or they're so entrenched with their own company, that my job is just to get them to lift their head up and say, okay, is there something else that you might want to do?Or are there competencies that you're doing in your current job that could be transferred over into this job that you never even knew existed? Or an area that you never even thought about exploring? So, a lot of mine is selling them on the opportunity. And then once I sell them, then I've got to evaluate them and make sure that they qualify. Where I think it's a little bit on the flip side, on the entry level, you don't necessarily have to sell them on the job. It's making sure that they meet the qualifications, that they are a good cultural fit, and that it's the right time for them to make a move. And then you sell them on the brand. So it's a different sales process in my opinion, or at least that is what I've seen.Max:  Well, I'm thinking  you might start something in there. I had a career shift and they may not end up working for you, but they may still take you up on your advice, if you do it well. That could be like a side metric. What you could start tracking is: How many of those people we're having conversations with we've managed to influence their career?I went off track but, you were saying before we got started. You were talking about the AI and ML, transformation initiatives that you're working on. In my company, we apply AI mostly to engage with candidates at the front of the funnel and answer their question and direct them to the right opportunity. And then pre-screen them. In your world of managers and above, how can you apply AI there? Trent: That's interesting. because you know, you and I kind of geeked out a little bit about AI and ML prior to talking and the first bias. If we were talking about this 18 months ago and I brought AI and ML up to maybe senior management and said: Hey! this is something I want to do.I would have to get over the first hurdle of explaining what it was, and explaining the efficiencies. So fast forwarding to today, they understand the efficiencies, but the questions you just asked is the first hurdle that I have to jump because they go, well, what if a senior executive applies to a role and they get this AI thing?You know, that's not the kind of experience that we want for them. And I mean, it all depends on the product. I've seen some products that are incredible, you know, whenever you interact with them,  you actually forget that you're dealing with an AI. You know? So dealing, I guess I struggle because most of the time that there is... Once you get to a certain level, having people applying to that. Yeah,  it's very rare and I guess maybe I'm so cynical that whenever they do apply, I'm going, okay, what are you running from? You know, I kind of like the thrill of the chase, but most of the time we're going out and bringing that talent in. And we can actually introduce them and say: Hey, there's going to be an AI that's going to ask you some followup questions. It can also answer any of the frequently asked questions about benefits, you know, any kind of onboarding stuff.  So it gives them an extra layer of that white glove treatment that's available 24/7.Max: I like that. Yeah. It's easy to think that just because somebody has got 10 or 15 years of experience, that they have all the answers, but they've just probably got as many questions  as the juniors. And they, you know, they may be even.. The juniors would ask the question because you know, they don't know. And vice versa where somebody a little more experienced might be a little bit embarrassed to ask. But the questions are just as important. So the AI then would service the same. You know, primarily a candidate experience and engagement layer, to prepare them for the possibility of working at your company.Trent: Yes, definitely because it's still part of the branding experience.  And that's the thing that's been so impressive to me, doing some demos with AI assistants. Just trying to kind of explore over the next 12 to 24 months: How can we as an organization implement this, to increase the efficiency, but also enhance that candidate experience?And I think that whenever people are talking about AI and trying to sell it internally, or even whenever the companies come out to me, and want to do a demo. You know, I always say, you know, do you ever bring up the fact that this is a fantastic candidate experience? You're missing a golden opportunity if you're not, because that's a huge selling point for me.In my mind, I own the candidate experience for everyone who applies with my firm. If I have an AI out there, that's constantly showing them videos, you know, messages, and maybe they started the application process and they stopped because they need to go cook dinner or something like that. And that assistant goes and continues to engage them. That in my mind is a fantastic experience for the candidate, but it also creates so much efficiency for my team. Because I cannot wait for the day that the 20 people on my team come in and they have a day that's been booked for them while they were asleep or enjoying their family. The job just posted, that AI goes in and parses out the necessary information sources internally, and externally evaluates them. Once they're ranked, you know, we've set up a minimum limit so that anybody that makes 85 and above, AI goes ahead and books them on my calendar. I mean, how cool would it be?You know, to think that, 10 years ago, this was just like farfetched, but we're in the grass of being able to have recruiters come in and have seven or eight qualified. I mean, not just qualified candidates booked, but also to be able to have a 360 view outside of the resume. I mean, it's just absolutely intoxicatingly exciting.Max: I wasn't a recruiter like you in 2005. And I don't know what attracted you to... Trent: We didn't have Google! When I arrived here we didn't have google! Yeah, I heard some of my new team members. They were like, this googling stuff is so hard! I was like, Oh good God. I had a phone book. I remember getting new jobs, because we had a large footprint, and so part of my intake was asking them to send me a phone book. So that way I could cold call some of the realtors to get mortgage bankers, or some of the banks, or whatever. And you know, now you've got all kinds of things that provide all kinds of contact. I mean, it's sitting right there and it's just mind boggling to me, the transformation that has been done in 10 - 15 years. Max: Yeah. Yeah. And then that adrenaline and dopamine hit that you used to get from finding a profile that might be a good fit. But, I do think that that's going to phase out over the years because sourcing will be more and more automated and that dopamine hit will have to come from a later point in the process, which will be, yeah, the candidate expresses an interest, says, yeah, I'm going to take the offer. I don't know. It'll come just a little bit further probably, because the volumes  are just constantly increasing. The easy access of data is increasing. And I imagine that your bank has also experienced an increase in applicants over the last few months. You're tracking that?Trent: It's been rather steady. Believe it or not. You know,  in the U.S the impact of Coronavirus has been… It depends on the market. You know, we have some markets that... they aren't like Corona doesn't even exist, it's business as usual. And then we have others that were hotspots. Max: And Georgia was a little bit like that. Trent: Yeah,  Atlanta we got to shut down, I think  three or four times under like an executive order. And I think it was a fun two weeks where the governor said the state's reopened and our mayor goes. Nah! And so there were like all kinds of means, but, you know, what is it? Our dad said I could go outside, and our mayor is female, but mama said no. The rest of Georgia was out traveling and the rest of us, you know, in Atlanta, we were just locked down.Max:  How confusing! You know, mommy and daddy arguing. Trent: Oh yeah. So it was quite fun just to kind of sit back and watch, but we're starting to see candidate flow increase a little bit, but we did not really see a major impact in the amount of candidates. What we have seen as an impact is in some of the critical areas that we need to hire, the marketers became so incredibly competitive.In the banking world, from an economic standpoint, in the U.S, mortgage is hot right now! And I mean, an underwriter in the U.S, a mortgage underwriter could just about name their price. And if they're good, a bank will pay out and probably give them a bonus. And that's some of the compression that we're seeing in the U.S, not the applicant flow. We're really having to go out on the hunt, and we can find people who are qualified, but then we're competing in things that sometimes are... I mean, I've seen offers and I just go: What? They are offering what? You know, how is that bank even making money? So there's a little bit of a frenzy and some of the key competencies. Max: Yeah, I have certainly heard a number of sectors where the volumes have gone down, like in retail, and in healthcare, and where people don't want to come to a physical office for health concerns.Trent: Right. Max: And I think that there's also limited mobility because people are, you know, kind of looking for safety and security and so less likely to hop jobs right now, which may limit your ability to do your work. Right? Trent: Very, very.  Max: Hoping it will get a little bit more rosy post-election.Trent: Yes, yes. We'll see after the election. And then I think we'll see it after the first of the year. But the thing for us is, you know, kind of how we do recruiting. Corona was a fantastic stress test for us. Because it was working. We had just rolled it out throughout the entire bank and then Corona came and it really forced our clients to rank in terms of priority, which jobs are most critical over the two week period.And so I guess that's why I stumbled a little bit about candidate flow and all of that, because  how we view metrics are completely different because of how we recruit. So, whenever I'm on. You know, certainly whenever I'm talking to people in TA, you know, they go, what's your time to fill? And I'm like, I don't know. It's not, I mean, we measure it, but it's not, it's not the driving metric. And it's, especially if we're on video, I like to kind of watch their mind, it's almost like looking at a computer, you see the little time clock turning. It's like they're trying to process, wait, time to fill.  You don't even look at it? No, we don't. We look at the priority roles and how many we close within the priority, or excuse me, within the sprint. What we found in, I think it was 2018. You know, I've been in recruiting since 2004, and it was one of the first times since I got into recruiting that I actually stopped. And I said, am I doing what I need to be doing? You know, is this really? Am I passionate about this anymore? You know, I was dealing, I was managing a smaller team at the time. I was dealing with the same customer comments. You're not getting enough candidates. Not enough qualified candidates. It has taken too long to fill. And then, you know, the recruiters are going, the managers aren't doing this. And I felt more like a daycare owner than I did, you know, a team lead for a recruiter. And about that time, our bank was going through an agile transformation. So I got to spend a week learning the Kanban, or Kanban depends on how you want to say it. Learning that process.Max: I don't speak Japanese.Trent: Yeah? haha.Max: So applying Kanban to recruiting, right? Sorry I interrupted.Trent: Applying  Kanban to recruiting. So that was kind of our beta, but then I went through the agile methodology training for about a week and a half and listened to Jeff Sutherland's book on Scrum. And I was doing like a four or five hour drive and I was listening to the book and there were so many times I went, Holy shit. There it is. You know, that's what I've been looking for! And so as a group, we identified that there were four pitfalls in traditional recruiting. Everything's a priority, which means nothing's a priority, the lack of feedback, the over analysis, paralysis, FOMO, whatever you want to call it. Whatever the hiring managers have that makes them want to interview 25 people for, you know, an hourly job.We were also misaligned with our client, because there were so many times I'll sit down with the executive and go, we filled 48 jobs in two weeks. Or, you know, 48 jobs last month. And on average you only have 16 openings. Why are you complaining? Well, those weren't the most critical ones. Well, how do we know which was critical, which wasn't? So there was a lot of misalignment. And then two, we instituted WIP limits. So work in progress limits. And what that did is that it allowed us to be able to kind of keep that process going. So now whenever our team comes in, they've got a dashboard, they're open regs. Every two weeks we meet with them.  We call them sprint owners, product owners, whatever, they can be the executive for a line of business or their designated.Max: But its not. A sprint owner is not going to be, someone from your team. It'll be the hiring manager, typically. Trent: It's the client, the client drives the priority.Max:  Yeah. Makes sense.Trent: So, the four principles are feedback, is kinda like the gas in the car, it keeps the process going. WIP limits, keeps us focused. And then the business drives and the priority. And what we do is we, you know, I'll sit down and go: Hey, Max! Your entire department, you've got 20 openings. And we're going to go… The other thing that we instituted of course, was a sprint. It forces a lot of efficiency. So, Max, you've got 25 positions, you've got a hundred points or a hundred dollars, whatever you want, however you want to think about it. Over the next two weeks. What is mission critical in terms of jobs that I've got to fill? And so what you'll do is you'll go through, you've got 25 jobs. You can't do like four, four, four, four, because we won't let you, we usually say we need at least two jobs that equal, you know, North of 35 or 40 points. So that way, we're forcing them to say, what is most critical? And so you'll go through and you'll prioritize. Now those that are without points, we still work them, but it's in order, we're going to work that, you know, the 50 pointer first. The 15 next, and then the next 10's and then 5's. And then once we have everything going in the right way there, then we move on to the others that don't have points. So as a recruiter, I can come in and I can look at my dashboard and let's say, I'll cover seven different divisions, and it can be incredibly overwhelming. For each of those seven divisions I know what their priorities are, and it's already stacked up on my report. And so what I'll do is, I'll look at my 50 pointer.  Where am I in that? And so that's where the WIP or work in progress limits come into play. So we created three different swim lanes. The recruiter interview sourcing lane, the hiring manager submitted being, I just submitted your resume. I'm waiting on feedback. And then the hiring manager interview. And so what our goal is, is to have a max of five interviews with the manager, five waiting on them to have some kind of feedback, and then maybe have two or three in my back pocket. Once I hit that WIP limit on that 50 pointer, I move on to my next one.And so whenever COVID hits, you know, we shut down our branches to drive through only, and a branch manager. You know, we did that for, I think, about a month and a half. And. It was interesting to me because this is high volume and we came to a screeching halt, but it really forced the executive to say, okay, I need a minimum of four people in that office for it to run this office over here has two. This office over here has three. So this one is a 50, that one's a 40, and the recruiters were able to spend more time on the critical roles than just trying to take some easy hits. Max: It would have taken them three, four months to adapt to the new normal.Trent: Easily! Max:  With this advance it was clear, you know. How do we keep the lights on, and change everything real fast to change the priorities without having to hold every project? Trying to centralize the decision-making. Trent: Yeah, but what's cool is that we didn't change the priority. Our client owns that priority. Our job is to execute on it. And so I always tell the team, the point is to define success in the eyes of the client. So what we do is we'll track, you know, what percentage of points do we get? So if the budget's a hundred and we closed 45, of course, it's 45%. We want to see an increase sprint over sprint. And if it decreases. Then that's where, I mean, nobody can hide in sprint.So, if we've hit our WIP limit and the managers have not given us 48 hours, or they have not given us feedback in 48 hours. We have rules of engagement where we go to the client and say, you are becoming an obstacle. How do we work together and get this done? Same thing on my side. Yeah. If an executive calls and says, you know, we don't have any candidates.If I look and I see that we're at our WIP limit and I go: No, we actually do! Have you talked to your manager? This is what I'm showing. Or, yeah, you know, you're right. That's a 50 pointer, I need to get with, you know, Susie Q who's a recruiter, and find out what's wrong, is there a sourcing issue with the candidate flow? Do you need more resources?So we were able to move quicker, of course more agile. It's kind of cliche to say, but we were a lot more flexible. So in our critical areas that had a huge hiring volume, we had others that were normally kind of our main stage. They had stopped hiring and they were kind of violating budget. I was quickly able to move a lot of resources over and make sure that we were able to keep that level of client service that we want.And for the most part, we have a couple of glitches, but for the most part, it worked. And the thing that I loved is watching. Yeah. Cause all 28 people report directly to me, which can seem overwhelming if you look at it in an old chart, but it's not because they'll look as a team where are the points? And if I've got capacity, I'm going to reach out to Veronica. Hey, are there any sprints, any jobs that have points that you don't have time for that I can take? And then they take it and they run with it. And so there were several times I'm in one on one. Yeah, yeah. So that to me has created a lot of efficiency.So now my eyes are going even more so to the AI ML, and looking at products and saying: how can we increase that funnel of candidates? Do it by eliminating the bias? Which is one of the things I love about AI, is removing that bias that all of us have. So increasing that funnel, but then also increasing that candidate experience and thus increasing the efficiency of our recruiting team. So to me it's just like hand in hand. You can't have one without the other. Max: If operations are running, and the clients are kept happy then you've bought yourself some room to do automation and to reinvent your process next year. And  that makes a lot of sense. It sounds like you have a lot more to say on this sprints recruiting, and this means applying the agile. I myself have been thinking about different environments where we could apply it outside of the banking world, and how it would be adapted, maybe even in a high volume recruitment situation where clients are of a different nature, perhaps.We can have a follow up discussion on this topic, if you're interested, but in the meantime, working people could work in finding out more about the sprint recruiting methodology. Do you have some, some visual resources, that you can send them to?  Trent:  Absolutely. So they can connect with me on LinkedIn. It's really easy. linkedin.com/trentcotton and, I've got a blog out there, blog website, sprintrecruiting.com, and I share a lot of bots, you know, things that we've discovered... Yeah, you know, I try. And I'm actually, I'm writing a book and my goal… If I keep up with everything that I should be doing, I should have, in the editor's hands, the first part of December and ready to release in January.But to your point, I've actually talked to a lot of companies outside of banking, and you know, they ask: How can you apply it? And, you know, is it the same? So for me, It's kind of a curiosity of going, okay, well this works here. I wonder if it works in a different industry? So, you know, I'm kind of doing some consulting on the side with them. You know, just how do they implement it? And try to understand their recruiting process. And for me, it's fun because I also learn how somebody outside of, you know, I've worked in other industries, but you know, how does healthcare takes sprint recruitment and apply it? But then, what is healthcare doing that maybe we should do?You know there are some things that, you know, some complexities that they have that we don't, and they're able to get around it. How? And, how can we apply that competency, here at the bank? So to me, it's just fun. I like to geek out whenever it talks about talent acquisition, you know, the leadership development within TA and of course, AI and ML.Max: Let's book another call, another interview to talk about the idiosyncrasies of hiring heads and hiring managers in different industries and the different ways that they can make us miserable. Trent:  Yeah.Max: Trent, thanks for sharing on the sprint recruiting methodology. And guys, you can connect on sprintrecruiting.com, if I got that right, and on LinkedIn, Trent Cotton. And, looking forward to reconnecting, Trent. Trent:  All right. Sounds great. Thank you so much, Max. Max: That was Trent Cotton from BBVA, telling us about sprint and recruiting.And you could practically feel the excitement, the fact that there was too much to communicate in a 30 minute window. So I hope we'll get Trent back on the show, and I hope you investigate this sprint recruiting concept and how it can apply to your world. If you enjoyed it, subscribe and share. We look forward to seeing you back on the recruitment hackers space!

Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello everybody. And welcome back to the recruitment hackers podcast. I'm Max and I invited today to our podcast, Mr. Craig Sweeney, from WilsonHCG. Welcome Craig. Craig: Hi Max. I'm glad to join you today. Max: Thank you. Thank you for joining and putting yourself in front of the computer on such a beautiful sunny day. I can see the weather is unusually balmy in Manchester.Craig:  It really is. Yes, this is the one day of the year the sun comes out and it's not cloudy and raining, which anybody who's been to Manchester before would know is the usual lab, usual blend of weather we have here. Max: Amazing, amazing. Here in  Hong Kong, we are locked at home, unable to go to work because of a tiger flu. So,  it'll come your way. It should get there in about three months time.Craig:  Stay safe.Max:  So Craig tell us what you do, and what your company does! Craig: Okay. So, we'll say HCG, for those of you who don't know, is an organization. We are a talent consultant firm largely built around RPO solutions, but then more broadly around anything really that links to talent acquisition, from a consulting perspective, from continuing workforce solutions, as well as our kind of core RPO solutions.My role is within the business areas, as part of our executive team, I lead everything around new plan engagements. I've got a global team that stretches from Japan, Singapore, through Europe and then into North America. And within my remit is our new business growth team. We've got our solutions team and then our implementation function. So essentially my group owns everything before a client actually goes live and becomes a client of ours. Max:  Okay. New solutions team, you call it. Right?Craig: Yeah. So we've got a technical solutions team that helped to architect the solutions that we're actually putting in place for clients, both commercially, but also in terms of their structure. When they're complex global solutions, it takes some detailed kind of building out to have the right capability. And particularly when that's encompassing things that aren't just, you know, one type of hiring. It may be that we're hiring for specialist roles, high volume roles, graduate and internships or within the same solutions. Building that out and making sure we've got the right team to deliver for our clients when it's on a kind of medium or large scale, is often quite complex.Max:  I guess, the bigger, the volume, the more technology seeps in. And then the lower the volume, the more an organization like yours will be competing with maybe smaller staffing firms.  Is that a fair statement? Craig: I would say increasing technology is important in most scales of solutions that we build out. Because, I think even for those organizations that are maybe just recruiting in the, you know, in the hundreds, rather than the thousands. Having the right technology in place to help fulfill their critical business impact in roles, through whether or not last through engagement attraction, or building our future talent pipelines is all really important.Creating a great candidate experience and making sure we're out competing some of the other businesses that  are trying to hire the same talent is super important. Max: Well, you may have seen in the news that there's been a little bit of M&A this year in the technology space. Just last week, there was a company called Elio that was acquired by HireVue. There was a Sunroom in the UK that was aquired as well over the summer. It seems to me that video.  I don't know if it's hot or not, because sometimes, I mean, it's definitely being talked about a lot in the age of remote hiring and work from home hiring, as the killer app, you know, 15 or 20 years after its conception. This is a first situation. But at the same time it looks like those companies never really got to the next stage. And I'm thinking, I'm thinking about it because you're talking about, you know, hundred of hires and I guess with these kind of environments, video interviewing, even then, you know, for an executive hire, you don't know if you're going to use video interviewing for an executive level hire, basically, right? It's going to be a little bit awkward to do an asynchronous video interview. Craig: Yeah, I think  it's interesting, you know, video interviewing and as you say, it's been around for many years. I think right now, everybody  in this short space of time with everything that everybody's gone through over the last six months, eight and months, yeah. Video technology has just become part of everybody's life. You know, if I'd ever talked to my parents about doing a video call, you know, a year ago, they would have gone, wow, that's crazy. Or, you know, people actually thinking about doing interviews over video, they would have said that's not possible but actually now.I think it's just crept into society and that's when you really start seeing, I think, change happened very quickly when it just becomes accepted that this is a way that people operate. So it doesn't surprise me that, you know, video is kind of the core of some of those acquisitions right now.Max: But now these companies have to add other things. Right? Because video is so omnipresent and everywhere that it's just not enough to do just video. Right? Craig: I agree. Max: That's the realization. And so, are the big guys, like the big enterprise software companies like SAP and Oracle, do they have a live video native solution? Do you know? Craig: I don't believe so, but whether or not there's products that are in development, possibly, Max: They can always do bargains anyway.Craig: Yeah, exactly.Max: And so, this is a very general question, for an RPO recruitment process outsourcing specialist. You're  asked to deliver a number of hires. Right? A number of hires and then retention after that. Probably those are your two key driving metrics. With that,  do you also get certain targets around? Like we want you to replace. You know, we want you to change this process and we want you to change this piece of technology? Or it's more of a, you know, deliver the heirs at whatever cost you want, and using whatever technology you want we just want the results?Craig: Yeah. I've been in and around RPO since, before it was called RPO. It was, you know, before it even took on that title. And I think if you look at the history of how RPO has evolved and developed. If we were talking 15 years ago, RPO was very much a transactional solution for most organizations where it was around. How do we deliver on a certain volume of hiring and just do that quicker and more effectively and often at lower costs than we're doing it ourselves today? I think over the course of the last five years in particular, maybe slightly longer, the strategic capability of RPO's has just exponentially grown.So I think,  although those measures that you mentioned before are still a component part of what we have when we're delivering for our clients. So it is still around, you have avoidment of firing  and some of those key metrics that we have to operate to and that, but actually it's a much more holistic solution now where we are looking at technology that we're bringing to the table either to provide a better candidate experience, provide better capabilities to be able to pipeline or engage with talent, create the best candidate experience, provide better data, to be able to kind of tell the story around what's happening with hiring, but also process redesign. And the measures that we are now looking at, in terms of the measures that we're measured against. Aren't just on volume they're on things like, DEI. So how we can help drive better, diversity in organizations as well as just actually deliver the candidates, and make the hires. So it's a much more,  sophisticated business impact solution rather than a transactional solution RPO started out many years ago. Max: It sounds like it's getting more complexity. Maybe one area where things are getting a little more simplicity would be that in 2020, there is consolidation, at least on the tech stack and some companies merging into others. And perhaps that'd be a little bit of a relief for professionals in your field, that instead of having a hundred solutions to choose from, now we have 80. Is that a pain in your back? To walk into customers and every time they've got, you know, I don't know how many TA tech solutions they usually come with. What's the typical number that you walk into?Craig: Yeah, well, in terms of, you know, if we've got just the baseline applicant tracking system then yeah, we work with  most of those and have done it at some point. But again, our role is to kind of look at those, make sure they're operating effectively. Clients never liked their applicant tracking systems.Max: Is universal!Craig: Yeah it's universal, but often it's because  they've been installed or implemented. And they no longer kind of build, they no longer fit around the processes that have changed, but the technology has not changed to keep up with it. So they're trying to put a square peg into a round hole. Part of our role is to help actually either reconfigure the technology or redesign the processes or both.But your point on what technology we bring, that's unique to each solution that we're building out. And, you know, I think what we avoid doing is just implementing technology for the sake of technology. There's got to be an output there. There's got to be a reason why technology is put in place. It has got to have a benefit and that's going to be different depending on the type of hiring, the locations, the language and various other things that might impact the type of technology that we're building out. But yeah, fortunately, we've got an internal innovation team that does a lot of the assessments around technology and then advice and guidance around what technologies would fit into a particular tech stack, if there's an existing tech stack, because again, not all technologies fit into every tech stack and integrate well. So I think the challenge is less of a challenge for us. It's actually a benefit for us to have that team to advise our clients. And the reason we have that team is that internal TA factions often don't have the luxury of being able to have people that are technology specialists, and with so many technologies on the market right now doing various different parts of the end to end TA process, choosing the right ones, becomes increasingly difficult. Because they're actually, there are a lot of good technologies out there and the list is growing almost week over week.Max: Yeah, well, maybe not this week, you know, but most weeks for sure. And your role would entail a lot of traveling, you know, pre 2020, I presume.Craig: Absolutely. Yeah. So I probably spent maybe two thirds of my time traveling, or at least 50% of my time traveling over the last four or five years, both to around Europe and North America and Asia as well. And yeah, this year has been very different. No planes, no trains. it's all been, yeah. Working from home and I've enjoyed it. Enjoyed the time because it's just given you time to kind of reflect and think  in a way that when you're traveling so much, it becomes difficult to have that time to do that reflection. And I look forward to the day when I can go and do that again, but I don't wish for that to come too soon. Max: I had the opposite reaction where initially I thought, I don't have any more time to think because I used to think while I'm traveling, when I'm on the plane in the air. But I do have a tremendous amount of time though, that was created by eliminating travel. And in your line of work, I imagine that's been replaced by double the amount of zoom meetings and teams and all that. Craig: Yeah. It has  and that was kind of part and parcel of what I would do in my role every day. Anyway, because we're a global team, we're not kind of spending our days in the same office. We're often in parts of the world, in different time zones. And so Zoom was pretty familiar prior to this year, but certainly became more so over the last few months. Max: I'd like to, to dig a little bit, deeper into the art of sourcing, which is perhaps the area where your clients would, you know, the pain points where your clients would first come to you and say, we're not getting enough quality candidates. Can you bring in the experts? Because our internal talent acquisition team is just not finding the talent. Is that part of the business? I have two questions here. One part is if that part of the business changed in 2020? and how? And then, maybe a word about, you know, how much sourcing can be automated, or rather, what are the limits of automation when it comes to sourcing? What still needs to be done manually? So I blurted out my two questions in a row and you can answer them in whichever order you'd like.Craig: Yeah. So, in terms of where technology and sourcing are kind of crossing and the benefits is I think, you know, technology can be used really effectively to outreach and do the initial engagement, with candidates. And take that through a certain element of the process of actually initial engagement. But I think it's more effective in certain roles than others. I think it's more effective at doing that with high volume rather than more niche skills. Because I think, in the market today, even though we're seeing high levels of unemployment in lots of different places,  I think there's still a higher demand for highly skilled talent.Max: Yeah. Craig: And often it's a human interaction and human contact. I think that helps to make that engagement more effective in the first instance. But certainly engaging candidates through the recruitment life cycle, technology can have a great impact there because I think being able to access and get responses 24/7 at a time that's convenient for the candidate is really helpful. Through whatever platform that might be. But certainly on higher volume hiring where it's maybe, you know, lower skilled, often, like I said, larger scale, candidate pools, there's definitely a greater element of technology being able to manage candidates through that sourcing cycle.But again, I think, where we look at that is not necessarily taking humans out of the process. Is maybe freeing up people's time through technology to have a greater impact, at a further point in the hiring process because quality engagement is still really important. Max: And, the first part of my question about whether the sourcing activities have changed in 2020, you said, that the jobs that are hard to find are still hard to find. So we'll be thinking typically engineers and data scientists and the likes, and then industry specialists. And so that, you know, the nature of your business has not really changed much in that sense from 2020, from the source design. Craig: I think one of the things we've definitely seen in the last quarter is, I think what's happened with COVID and the economic kind of downturn that we saw occured from March, April onwards, is TA functions were heavily reduced. Often down to bare bones or nothing at all. So we found that as the kind of return to work and that bounce in the economy started to happen, those organizations that don't have a capability at all, are looking to kind of give them a sourcing arm that can be very flexible and built around their needs so it can ramp up quickly. It can scale, but it can also scale back. And I think right now that's important for so many businesses, cause they still have uncertainty in the future. Max: And i've read that. You were there maybe, that 2009 - 2010 were good years  for the RPO industry. Craig: They were. Yeah, I think, you know coming out of the economic, the financial crash in 2008, a very similar scenario where, you know, organizations were very uncertain about what was to come. And particularly in places like Europe, where if you're employing people on a permanent basis, it's not easy always to kind of make those adjustments to your business and reduce the workforce if you need to. Because the labor laws don't allow that, but having a partner that can scale up and build around those needs and scale further if needed. But scale back if the hiring ramp slows down.Max: So those cuts have been made and they would typically have been made in the areas where automation was most feasible and according to your reasoning. And I agree with it, most that automation would be more on the high volume side of the business, and there would be more opportunities for RPO vendors and perhaps vendors like us to do more in the high volume space, the high volume of space should be a big opportunity in 2021. Craig: My prediction is that all hiring is going to be at an altitude in 2021. I don't think it will be limited to high volume. I think it will be hiring, right across the board. And certainly, you know, one of the areas we're seeing a huge amount of activity right now is around sales hiring, that's from enterprise sales right away through sales consultants across clients.  And that's because people are trying to call back their losses that they've seen in the early parts of the year. And I think that will kind of drive through, into next year's plans as well. Max: For me some of these recruiters will be able to reconvert themselves into sales people. Craig: Yeah. Quite possibly. Max: Not that hard of a transition if you're good at it. Right? And, okay. Well we've talked about, you know the kind of customers that come to you and which kind of scenario. Would you have any thoughts to spare on the kind of customers that you do not want to work with? And maybe, we don't have to share names, but customers that have broken your heart or broken your spine, and what went wrong there? Craig: Yeah I think we have some really great customers that we've talked with and I used that word really purposefully. They are great customers that partnered with us. And I think when we've historically maybe had relationships that haven't worked out as well as we would've liked. It's where there's an expectation that we are there as a delivery arm to the business, rather than the operator. Max: You're going to blame it on the sales guys! Of course.  Oh, it's their fault. Craig: No, not the sales guys I think it's just about having the right expectations set, you know, for hiring to be successful whether or not it's pure intel or whether or not you're working with a partner like us, there's got to be kind of a skin in the game and there's gotta be, an upside for everybody to want to work together. And that is the way that things kind of land really well. It is when we're operating in that kind of  true partnership, where we have the same goals and outcomes that our clients have.Max: Well, I'm trying to read between the lines here. So the nightmare scenario is you're being kind of pegged against an internal team.Craig: No, not pegged against an internal team. I think it's where we're being asked to deliver on something where we maybe haven't had the ability to shape or build or give input into, to how something should be delivered.  Or when we have stakeholders that don't have an upside  from our success. And the stakeholders need to benefit from us doing well for it to work. With the vast majority of the clients and the partnerships we have in place. That's absolutely the case because we build all our solutions. Max: I have tried to sell automation, sometimes to the wrong HR professionals. So I think I can relate with that kind of scenario. And also the scenario where people don't adapt their process, where we would say, no we are an engagement tool at the front of the funnel. Do not ask the candidates 10 video interview questions on messaging, like it's going to break. And no!  That's what we want. That's what we're going to get. Okay. You know, we wasted so much resources trying to please people sometimes, it's rare, but it does happen. Craig: Yeah. I think like yourselves, you know, where there to be advisors that's our role is to help resolve people's challenges and their problems with better solutions. And I think there's, again, where we do that and it's successful is where the client actually wants to listen and adapt to our guidance and important advice. Max: And, what's the customer you've been working with for the longest time? Or you don't want to say names? Craig:  Oh, wow. Yeah. We've got clients today that were the first clients that we ever started working with. So, you know they've been relationships for, you know, decades.Max: That's nice. Well, I hope they had a decent 2020, and that you're right about what's coming this year, and all of that business coming in. Thank you very much, Craig for participating and sharing your insights on how the RPO industry has shifted or it seems like it has not shifted that much. A little bit less traveling for you, but overall, it's been a good year and things are heating up  at the European market in Q3.Craig: Great. Thank you, Max. Have a good rest of your day!Max: Thank you, Goodbye Craig!That was Craig Sweeney from WilsonHCG, giving us hope for tomorrow and the big rebound of the recruitment at RPO industry. Hope you enjoyed it. Subscribe if you did. And if there's somebody that you'd like me to interview as part of the podcast, you can send me their names too directly to hello@talkpush.com and I'll contact them directly and invite them to tell us their secrets. Thank you for listening and see you soon.

Welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Good morning, everybody and welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast with max  from Talkpush. Today I'm excited to be welcoming Paul Noone, who is CEO for HireIQ and someone who is in technology. And I've, we both focus a lot of our energy on the call center and the BPO market and service this industry, which is always hungry for automation and innovation. So we both love this industry and we can exchange our thoughts on this topic.Paul, thank you so much for joining me on my new podcast. Paul: Hey, thanks Max, I'm thrilled to be here actually. Max: So our audience, some of them will recognize HireIQ. And some of them will probably recognize you, but they probably don't know the history of how you ended up starting this business, or how you ended up with HireIQ.Perhaps you could walk us through that journey. Paul: Yeah, I'd love to. HireIQ is an interesting technology and we're very focused on the call center. And because the call center has this outsourcing process that's associated with business process outsourcers.Most of the organizations don't realize that, while Fortune 500 organizations, anybody with a product or service has a requirement to support through call centers or through service locations, they also do a lot of outsourcing. So they're organizations like BPOs, the large ones in call centers are Teleperformance and Alorica and Atento and Sutherland and 24[7].And those are the organizations that we help with  in the talent acquisition, part of this, you know, max, you and I probably talked about this before, but recruitment is the term that we use. But we're in sort of a special place in recruitment. We're in the engagement with the candidates, the acquisition of all the data that we aggregate as much data as we can in a shorter period of time.And then we provide it to the recruiters in such a way that they can quickly make a decision, because we're talking about maybe 10 interviews for every hire, we're really known for our efficiency. And then we're also known for the AI associated with how we do that. How do we tell whether a candidate it's going to be particularly good at this particular role in collections or in sales? Or in support?We do a whole lot with that. I actually got here about six years ago through the investors. So I had just, I was working with another technology company on disaster relief, and just sort of an interesting aside, Max, we had built a product around disaster resource management and that's where these large scales or, when you guys experienced the typhoons and we have the hurricane season from June through November and, being able, you know, the shift in technology, the shift to phones, being able to locate all of the things that you need when a disaster strikes is a really interesting use case.So we had gone pretty deep into that and acquired some large customers, the U.S Red Cross, but we were looking to move from the Red Cross division of emergency management and we were looking for additional investment. So I was on sort of a roadshow talking to investors and ultimately a lot of people made the decision that it, and it's a function of that market. But, without disasters, if you have a good year, meaning no disasters, you're getting no money into that particular part, the Red Cross every now and then they literally go almost to zero. So they actually need engineering, Max: Pure disasters once in a while. Paul: And oddly, when you're in that business, you start to hope for bad things to happen. So there was something wrong, but the investors didn't buy. Max: I think it's not just the disaster people. I have a feeling that a certain class of politicians also relying on a good disaster once in a while. Paul: Well, so there's politics in there, the weird thing about funding ,and how funding shifts, and things like that.I think that actually is what scared investors away, Max, and it's a shame in some ways. That what we were doing was, you know, enabling, with the Red Cross, for example, we found a billion dollars worth of resources that had been sort of lost, and it hadn't literally been lost. It was in firehouses and it was in other locations.And that sounds like an inventory management issue, but it's not when something bad happens in one part of the state. And then you realize that through a quick app, you can find it. Where everything is: shovels clubs, protective eyewear, and N95 masks, for example. Imagine that you put in an application, you find a billion dollars worth of resources, really through crowdsourcing your own people.Anyway, that app is lovely but the investors didn't think it was an investable market at the time. And so I just finished this and I had met with the investors here and I called them back and said, you know, so we'll probably shut this down. And they said, great, because we have something we'd love to share with you.And they brought me into HireIQ. I have a background in call centers. I was with Genesis as they were starting out on sort of the part of the first team. I want to say pre-revenue, but I want to say Genesis is a $2 billion organization right now, 20 years ago when I was with them we had less than $10 million in revenue. So building that to a public company and then moving on, but coming here was lovely in that the technology was solid. But it was  a function of focus. We were trying to do too much. By focusing on call centers and BPOs in particular, we ended up, turning into, from being a typical technology company where we might be losing money quarter after quarter to being one that was profitable, really understood what we were doing and then have been very zeroed in on that use case around language proficiency, around understanding our customer's needs and really, more than anything else, making sure that they're succeeding.So closing that loop and making sure that they succeed. Max: Your star product is the product called Audiolytics? Paul: Well, so Audiolytics is really the technology that underlies the audio processing that we do. So at the heart of what we're doing is, the origin story really comes around. While I submit my resume in a recruiting, in an interview process, what that does is it strips out my personality and my voice.It strips out the narrative. I moved from the disaster resource management effort into HireIQ, why did that happen? All of those things that you get to tell people in an interview process. So the origin story is really about how do we add a narrative to what's a two dimensional piece of paper that's supposed to represent me.And so with that, we started to create a platform that would say not only here's the resume and here's some qualifiers about me, but here's my voice. Max: It used to upset me so much when I started on my career and I would go and socialize, go to a bar anywhere and someone would ask me, so what do you do?And, you know, I didn't want to tell them my job title and the company I worked for, because I didn't feel like it represented anything about me. And it would always come up with some weird answer I would say, oh, what do I do? You know, I roller skate or, you know, or something, just so that I could come out and shine and that wasn't a social environment in a work and job search context.Also, what do you do? Should be the first question or rather who are you? rather than a resume. Paul: Tell me about your expense in this particular business is an open ended question that a lot of our customers ask, but asking open ended questions, which is an old interviewing technique and a valuable one really allows people to tell them more. To talk to the narrative. Tell me about your experience in this particular world. Tell me about your understanding of customer support. Tell me your understanding. Tell me about an experience that you had with your boss that may be positive or negative, but being able to do that and being able to do it asynchronously when, you know, we could collect lots and lots of those became really the most important thing.But Audiolytics is actually the parsing of that. The audio data in order to get a really good and different understanding. So Max, what it doesn't do, is it doesn't convert voice to text and then parse it that way. But, it literally is looking for tone. So it's in these frames of voice, it's saying that's a positive, that's a negative, that's a happy emotion, that's a sad emotion. We're looking for things that we know are important for a good employee, but are particularly important when you're dealing with call center agents. That they're engaged, they're alert. They're more active than passive. They're not expressing boredom. Which is really interesting when you can pick up boredom because when a recruiter gets this information, they're going to see an Audiolytics score that says, you know, this person is probably not someone you want to spend a lot of time with.And I would say more than anything else we're not dispositioning customers. What we're doing our best to do is to give them an idea of priority. Talk to Max. He's got a great score. He's good with language. He's got good scores with data entry and even chat. Max: I didn't know that your technology was able to detect boredom. That's remarkable. Would it be influenced by geography and how do you factor that in? Because you live in Atlanta, people are supposed to speak a little bit more slowly, perhaps have a drawl. You don't, but nonetheless, you know, would the software, not pick up on the intonation and think maybe somebody from the South is bored?Paul: So it's really interesting. What you're doing is, so engagement doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dialect. And in fact, the tool itself is just sort of mentioned there's no conversion. It's listening for something that would be appropriate for the cohort of folks who are taking it ,interestingly enough.It's actually self adapting, because the same tool is used for engineers and salespeople and support people — all should have a different dynamic in their voice. And so it actually has to adjust based on the people who are taking the interview. The people who are successful in expressing themselves in that interview, as well as the questions.The questions and the people are really the dynamic that you're looking for, but boredom might be expressed differently by an engineer, or by somebody from, a Latin expression. But, the cohort itself helps to define that. And so ultimately you have not only our recommendation, but you also have the answer.So what's interesting about it is how closely we track to what a good recruiter would do. In the initial testing, after we did the machine learning on it. So can we in fact pick these up at a high rate? So can we, in fact, identify that Max is more happy than sad? Can we identify that when he's taking this test he's more bored? When we do that, we match Max almost 97% against a recruiter who would be listening to those particular things. So imagine that the technology itself is so wildly accurate in a lot of ways. But you know, to that end, that's what Audiolytics does. We're really sort of the platform is HireIQ, and it's a whole series of ways to basically create a recipe of assessments to understand more about you more about whoever you're interviewing — at speed. So we're trying to get the recruiting experience to be three, three and a half minutes. So you don't spend a lot of time with these individuals unless you're really digging in on them. And then with the candidate experience should be less than 20 minutes.Max: So the questions are not picked from a standard list. Since you're working with open answers, you don't have to use the same questions with every customer. Paul: No, in fact, they're different in virtually every customer.  There are some that seem to be universal people do want, need, to understand what your experience has been with customer support.So, if you're going to be in that customer support role, you're going to have to have some experience in sales, right? That has come up. Max: Yes. For me, it's like a yes or no answer. Have you worked in this industry before? That's usually how they ask that question in a chatbot environment. Paul: So that would be a bad question for us.What we're always going to do is ask a question that asks you to elaborate on something because we do in fact, need enough content to understand the profile. We need to have enough of Max telling us about Max to understand where Max's orientation is in terms of sharing, communicating. For the question, is he too verbose? Meaning he may be struggling with answering a particular question and trying to overanswer a question, or is it too short, meaning maybe he doesn't have the skills to think through and is that enough for this particular customer? So there are all kinds of metrics, there are cohort determined, sort of thresholds. It's really fascinating. And now we've done about, you know, close to 5 million interviews with it. So we have a really good base of understanding of how effective it is when matched with outcome data.So it's really fun stuff. Max: Does it replace, let's say the first phone call? I mean, if you're going to look at the standard recruitment process to hire it replaces the first phone call. Paul: So really what it's designed to do is give you a complete understanding. So we have customers who might do it for the engaged at the front end.We have customers for who it represents the entire interview process. So  once they've engaged, they've completed it. They have the scores, they meet thresholds. Then it's appropriate literally for the recruiter when they engage with them to close them.  You've probably experienced this, particularly with BPOs is that there's a real machine, there's a supply chain and with the attrition rates that exist, what you're working your best to do is fill training classes. And what we're doing, of course, is trying to identify people who are going not only achieve the right goals, the metrics that they're looking for, but we're also looking for folks who have an orientation, which would suggest they're going to stay longer.So that's one thing that we're doing, but because there's such a speed element, to this we are really careful about, trying to do as much as we can in a shorter period of time, giving you a complete understanding so that that particular recruiter can sell when appropriate and be restrained also when appropriate.So somebody does, you know, in the U S we have to answer, we have to give everybody the same interview experience. So that means that if you answer the first question horribly, Max, I still have to give you an opportunity with the next 7 questions I'm supposed to ask in an interview. It's a fair interviewing process, even if you disqualief yourself right out of the gate.And so one of the things about being able to acquire this information, offline and, online, as opposed to in front of somebody, it gives that particular person, the ability to advance quickly through that particular candidate and prioritize who to sell and who to, again, disengage with.Max: I understand the benefit for the candidates to do a short interview and a short assessment and get through those things faster, but it sounds like it's more than just, you know, I mean are you doing it because you get dropouts when ,people are held up more than five minutes? Or is it at the request of your customers? What's the driving force behind keeping it just two or three minutes long?Paul: Oh, I'm sorry. So the interview itself for the candidate will be as much as 20 minutes, but we're trying to keep it under 20 minutes, really because there's a falloff Max. 20 is about the cutoff. If you've seen some of the older, you know, The 1950 based assessments that had a lot of triangulation, right.You're asked one question one way and then seven questions later, you're getting the same question phrased differently in order to validate that the first question was like the second question and your answer was consistent throughout. And if you know that that's going to be an hour and a half, you really start to wonder, is there an easier way to get a job? For this wage.. Max: But time is speeding up, right? People have a lot shorter attention spans. They have multiple conversations going on asynchronously with five friends at the time. And so I expect that the 20 minutes would already be beyond the comfort zone for some people who are remote.Paul: It's very, very close. And you see what we're trying to do. It answers that question: is it enough? What we're trying to do is the open ended questions seem very much like what a typical interview would be. So tell me about yourself. Tell me about an experience that you had. What would your last employer say about you?Those kinds of open ended questions are the things that seem conversational. And allow you to expand upon yourself, but in fact are dense with data for us to help make a decision. And so the tone, the tempo, and in fact, the content is even important, but only when you know that that petitioner has an alertness and an engagement that pleasantness that you're looking for now go back and listen to those questions.Is there even more data that we can mine there? And that's why on average, it's about three and a half minutes. Because some you're just going through they didn't meet any of my language proficiency thresholds or whatever. And now we can spend a little bit more time with the particular person that I want to hire.And that would extend, you know, that's when you advance candidates and things like that, but it really is. I agree with you. I think what you're asking in that question is how do you give the candidate an opportunity to advance themselves, to tell their story? And not be too efficient in the process, that would eliminate me being able to tell enough about me. And so I think this is sort of the best of both worlds. Max: Yeah. I get the sense that 20 minutes would be annoying if I'm sitting at home and I'm applying to 10 different jobs, but yeah. If I had a sense that this company could be a fit, they are interested in me, then, yeah. 20 minutes is no problem, easy. And certainly easier than traveling physically to sites. So, have you seen the same thing as we have at Talkpush over the last few months? We've seen an increase in the volume of job seekers, an increase in volume of candidates. And how has that played out for the rest of the recruitment funnel?Is it,  becoming a problem where it just means we have too many candidates and not enough jobs to offer? What kind of dynamics does that create for your business? Paul: Well, I think for both of us, what I would say is: volume is important because volume breaks process. The more, you know, we got to a point in the U.S, our unemployment rate was down to 3%, you know, at times probably lower than that in certain places.So it was in fact hard to get enough people to interview, you know, recruiters spent most of their time trying to pull people out of other companies. And then in a matter of weeks, as we all know, it went from, you know, less than 3% too, you know, a lot. And then we're talking about 52 million people at its height, out of work needing to quarantine and work from home. So all of a sudden the opportunity to interview was greater, but the importance of identifying somebody who was really looking for that job and really engaged and would do a good job with both the hard skills and the engagement that we're looking for.What everybody's looking for, to be committed to that particular role, over the long term that became even more important. So a 100%, I agree with you that the volumes changed. And I would say, you know, in the first, because of the way we're set up and because of the way people leverage boards, that we might've seen a doubling in the first month, which probably created some concern on our part. There was actually a cost every time somebody does an interview with HireIQ, rather than it being a, you know, we do a lot of processing…Max: and because we're doing processing servers, AWS, bills go off, Google bills, come up. I had all of that happen as well. Paul: Yeah. So, that sort of evened out a little bit. And while I would say we're up. We're also going into that season, which is a ramp, right? So we're looking for a lot of holiday seasonal workers right now. So I would say we're probably, closer to where we were maybe a little bit higher, but not as dramatically higher as we saw in the first quarter after the quarantining.And we're seeing some alleviation of that. I think we're seeing some go back to physical work, but, the other part, Max's you may have an opinion on this as well, is that I don't know that a lot of people were willing to let go of their jobs. So are people artificially staying where they were highly mobile in the first quarter? All of a sudden now they're thinking, you know, it may not be as easy to get a job in the next place. So, there may be a false sense of  retention taking place at the same time. Max: Well, yeah, I guess when things heat up again, we'll see whether all those new hires in the BPO sector from the last six months, are meant to stay in those industries.I guess it really depends whether they like working from home. If they like putting on a headset and getting in front of a camera, and working on Slack, maybe it'll work out and maybe they won't to go back into the field. Like, I do not have a crystal ball for that, but, I think that some companies are making a shift towards hire anywhere and opening the talent pool so much that they're going to be able to build a very unique group of people which have defining traits, which if you remove the geographical constraints and you say, now I can have such a broader group to choose from. Then you can create new constraints.You can say, I only want people that think that way, or that have this hobby or that are very meticulous or, you know, you can be very specific and that could create, you know, some very bizarre groups of people and  that could give the economy some lift perhaps.Paul: So Max, this is an interesting thing. I absolutely loved the whole train of thought. So I have  a couple of data points on this. I had a company at one point in which I did a lot. The company had lots and lots of training, and we started to do a model, which we were trained from anywhere this go to meeting in a WebEx type zoom.It was technology, but we were sharing screens. Let's configure it this way. Now this is how you do this. This is how you do that. And one of my employees came to me and said, do you mind if I do some work? So his passion, interestingly enough, was kimonos. So he did he sold, these beautiful kimonos. He invested in them. And what he wanted to do was be able to go to these shows in Asia where all of the best would be there, he'd be able to sell his kimonos. They'd also be commercial. I said, Sam, Do you think I care where you go to a meeting or a virtual training takes place, go do what you want to do.And by the way, then being skewed 13 hours is in your best interest. Now go spend a day there and carve out the two hours you need for that particular training. Just make sure that it doesn't affect your ability to do that particular piece of work, but I just so loved this and that whole concept of displacement.If we can, and  it's happening more and more in some of our customers. Assurion one of the groups that I heard speak recently, they're doing gig work now, Max, meaning you can opt in to when you're available, you know, you've got to schedule, but sometimes it's via social media, they'll say we've got surge paying.You've got a surge wage based on how much people, how much traffic we're going to have, you know, based on, on questions, we need to answer about the Assurion products. That to me, being able to opt in, to be able to do what you're passionate about and have that feed your work day is something that I think is really important.And I think that's where you get energy, you get energy by, you know, middle of the day being able to take, you know, take a swim in a pool. I get energy. I did something recently where I went out and I hit golf balls. First time since March, I used to play golf all the time. I'd say 10 years ago.I went out and, Max, doing something physical, like that, changed, I swear it changed my brain chemistry. So I think this whole concept of displacement is one of those things that's also going to enable people to do and maintain their passions. And because of that, we may be in, you know what we're doing with call centers and delivering work to location. I literally think that's the future. I don't think  the future  like I thought the future was cell phones. As soon as you don't physically have to go pick up those yellow slips, you don't have to answer a physical phone. You don't have an extension that's tied to a location. God, the world changes and in such a great way.Max: Yeah, you were telling me how you got to enjoy more time with your family in recent weeks. Somebody was telling me recently, an article about this reverse migration, which is happening, where people are leaving the cities, and going back to where they came from, to their hometown because of this pandemic and supported through the technologies of remote work. We are seeing basically these shifts happening everywhere and people spending more time with our family. So, on a bizarre way, family values, family traditions  we'll see a resurgence as a response to this crisis.Paul: Well, I don't want to be overly optimistic. Look, I think everybody's been through a trauma. And so, one of the things that I'm doing as a CEO, I'm sure you're doing it is giving people some room. Right? I want people to make sure that they... look, I have an employee who has three kids at home, all under the age of 10, who she's starting zoom meetings with, in three different rooms for children.There's a kindergarten class going on. There's a second grade craft class. There's a third grade class, all her room, she and her husband are working at the same time. It is insane what we're piling on people at the same time.Max: And the bandwidth. Paul: That's exactly right. So that's the other thing right? We didn't talk about this, but it's interesting. I read an article last night about why this is different. And this particular article was why New York city would never be the same. Because just as you said, there's an exit, maybe a million people have left New York city. The rates, the rental rates, the buildings that are empty relative to where they were.But, we saw something like this in 2001, with 911, we saw something, you know, we've had these, national crises in the U.S. 2008. And the contention was why this is different than those other times is because bandwidth exists right now. Bandwidth exists like it's never existed before.So now you have private equity guys that don't physically have to be in New York City, because it doesn't matter that you're physically there to run into somebody because that person may in fact not be there. So when people were telling me, and in fact, during this period, they said, they'd be traveling. I said, well, that's good that you're traveling. Are people willing to meet with you? Which is the other side of the equation, right? It's one thing for you to be willing. It's a second part altogether once you land in a city, are people willing  to meet with you? That will change. There's no question, but, I think some of the positive of that and believe me, I'm sure if you're a real estate magnet in New York city, you're super concerned about this. But, I think the freedoms that it provides for individuals is particularly engaging. It's an interesting thought. Let's put it that way. Max: Oh, if you're, if you're a real estate magnet in the suburbs, well, you're doing well. Anyway, we're going to a more realistic conversation because that will alienate my audience 100%. Paul: But the other part to that, but I would say, listen,  the thing that I get excited about is the options it provides. The reality is I think so you can follow those kinds of things in any direction.The reality is we need human interaction. You and I like to do what we do. I want to meet you. I want to run into you, I want to see you compete at a technology showcase. Those kinds of things stimulate me. So I don't think there's any chance that we don't go back to some more normalcy and sooner than later, more 2021.But I think taking a moment and understanding the lack of distraction. Which really is the way I described it early in this was, there was no sports. There were no, you know, the activities themselves that would typically take me off center or off of focus were gone. And so now I had family to focus on.Now I had what's next for the business. Now I had what's best. So I think the lack of distraction helps us to focus. Max: Yes. I see. I think that you were talking before we started the interview about the fact that, you're going to look for a different type of worker the call center worker working from home needs to be self motivated, autonomous and so on.If someone is now at home unemployed and is able to find, well, by force needs to find employment of that sort and then by force needs to build certain life habits around that. And then actually it gets through it and realizes, oh, this works. I can put in 5- 10 hours of uninterrupted work in a day if need be.And now you've unlocked something in him or her that they can carry for the rest of their lives, potentially that sense of autonomy and that ability to manage your day. That becomes something you can keep Paul: It's a freedom and it's magnificent. So rather than your work being dependent on your relationship with your employer or your boss in front of you, you're focused on becoming valuable, is your ticket to the next role that you have or greater responsibility or in frankly being as engaged in your passions and things outside of work could in fact, energize that in a way that we might not be able to today. I promise you, nobody's complaining about the lack of traffic.Max: Well, one thing, one thing I do complain... I still hear some people ask me, Max, you've got so much experience working with remote teams, distributed teams. How do you check on them? And like you just totally missed it. You don't. You're rethinking about what your job is as manager. But that question still comes up so often.Paul: Here's how I keep in touch with them. I engage with them on how do we make what you're working on better? How can I help? And then they'll tell me. Max: Yeah,  there are certainly a few ways.I'm sure some, some of my employees will listen in and think that's too engaging. But, it's great to see how your business has evolved over the years. I hope that we can be part of this bright future. And have more of these partnerships as we've had with some of our customers where they integrate your assessment platform with our, conversational chatbots and engagements to take care of the whole workflow.So if anybody's listening you want to match our two technologies. They work very well together and thank you very much, Paul, for joining me today. Paul: Maxm I love it. And I appreciate  your engaging in conversation with this. I love Talkpush, I always have, and I love in particular the fact that you're doing what many other people would be required to do.So being able to get out in front. Engage those people to make sure that they stay in touch and then keep that information about them. Just, you know, in a way that really becomes a system of record for employment. So, we're thrilled to be working with you. Thank you very much for your time today. And, we're partners, so anything that we can do to help you we're available.Max: Thanks. Paul, we'll both continue burning resumes and replacing them with conversation. Paul: There's a whole discussion about bias and all of the other things that we really should talk about it some time. But, I think the answer is engagement and we're both doing everything we can to enlighten people about who they're talking to and why they'd be a good fit.Okay. We've got the topic for our next interview, it will be about bias. Maybe we'll wait a few months for that one. Paul: And so we'll give people some time.Max: And the topic may be a little bit less dangerous in a few months time. Paul: Yeah. I think there'll be more light at that point.Max:  Great. Thanks Paul. TPaul: Thank you, max. That was Paul Noone from HireIQ, a company, which has figured out how to measure the empathy, warmth, and care of a voice and allows employers in the call center industry to evaluate those voices in a scalable way. If you liked the interview and you'd like to hear more about some of the movers and shakers from the high volume recruitment industry, please subscribe to our podcast and share with your friends.

Welcome to the Recruitment hackers podcast show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry. Brought to you by Talkpush,  the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Okay. Hello everybody. And welcome to the recruiter hackers podcast by Max Armbruster. And today I'm pleased to welcome on the show the global talent acquisition capability leader at Accenture, Jason Roberts. Welcome Jason. Jason: Thank you. And thank you for saying all of the words in that title. I know it's a lot. Max: Can we mix them around? We can move them.Jason: You got it exactly right and t's a bunch though.  We were just talking and it's a whole lot of words. I'm not sure that it says anything. So, What that means is that I have a pretty fun gig and that I'm responsible for processes and technologies and how we do recruiting for Accenture's customers. And we will do that for large organizations where we hire several hundred thousand people per year.So we get to try out lots of technologies. We have a pretty nice clean standard process that we work from. And I get to, to be a part of that and work with smart people every day. It's good.Max: Yeah. Fantastic. You said a few hundred thousand people every year. And I guess that number is getting bigger than ever now where the industry is kind of figuring out how we're going to get these 30 plus million people back to work in North America and I don't know, it must be hundreds of millions worldwide. So the pressure is on to, to deliver you know, I'm gonna say a good, maybe a decent experience for most of them. Jason: Well, what's interesting is what I worry about with, with COVID is that candidate experience will stop being a priority because candidate experience is a big deal when you've got 3% unemployment and it's necessary in order to, to achieve the hires that you need to achieve. But when there's 25% unemployment or 20% unemployment, you don't need candidate experience, people just need jobs. So it's, it's one of those things where if I'm worried that we might lose ground in the candidate experience side of things. I think we all want to be in a position where we treat people well, and we had started seeing real improvements in that space. And it was because companies were making investments in the right things in order to make it happen.  I'm hoping we get to continue that, but there's a, I think there's a real risk that we'll take a step backwards in that space. Max: Yeah. I've definitely noticed that people are not getting back to candidates as fast as they should be and positions are being kept open even though they're not real. And so it's kinda like candidates sending beautiful offer letters and resumes and hearing nothing back, hearing crickets.On the plus side, the candidate experience is improved by the fact that companies are not defaulting to asking people to come physically in person. And when you consider how time consuming that can be and demanding, that can be, well.. We were meeting in person. It was a lot of work for me. I mean, I had to take a plane to come and meet you. Jason: Well, no, you didn't have to. I was always great with being on video if you want to do that.  I found that suppliers really wanted to meet in person. And I've worked remotely for over a decade, probably 13 years now, something like that, that I've worked remotely. And I was completely good being on phone and people would just would want and meet, man. Okay, well, I'll meet with you. You know I actually had an office for the sole purpose of meeting with suppliers when they came into town. That's the only time I went to the office when I met with somebody that came in town to meet me.Max: I remember that office. It was, it was a, We Work Jason: It was a We Work, We Work, right. That's why I only went there every once in a while. I just, I would reserve a conference room. And I think you, you came back to the actual inner sanctum. You saw the actual office. Yeah. Max: Yeah. Well I know you have a very cool job with Accenture today and you had a very cool job with Randstad before.  Can you tell for our listeners, give us a quick overview of, where you come from and how you got into this space? Jason: Oh, gosh. Yeah. So I started recruiting, my age will show for sure. 1997. Was my first,  my first piece of recruiting work.I was, I had a person, a friend that I knew... The internet was still pretty new. Right. So,  like I got email for the first time in 1994, I think.  So it was, it was still relatively new and a friend of mine said, Hey, I'm a recruiter. And I, hear you can find things on this internet thing. Can you help me with that? I said, well, yeah, I can help you search the internet. So I became an early sourcer and it was with a staffing firm and,  that sort of, I progressed over a period of time so that, so that ultimately, I, I worked for the staffing firm full time then,  did some consulting then I spent about seven years with Cisco systems and started out as a recruiter. I recruited Sales and sales engineers for them. Ultimately we built our own applicant tracking system back then there were no web based ATS everything was client server. So we thought, okay, well we're the backbone of the internet we should probably have something that's a web based deal. So we built our own and it was my job to be sort of the functional expert on that. And I worked in HR IT for a little while, built my own ATS with Cisco. And that was fun. Max: 2003 ish around that. Jason: Yeah. That's about right before Taleo showed up.Max: Yeah, it must have been frustrating to see the startup Taleo pick up all this business thinking... Jason: Yeah you know what, we built my module and of course dot com bubble burst along the way. And things slowed down a little bit in recruiting. And we built the module that was basically how we take job orders and approve things and we hadn't built a lot of the candidates stuff yet. And Taleo came out and with a few other things there and and we were like, Oh, these things are way better. Let's not build the rest. Let's just find a way to connect to these other deals. And that's what we did. We never finished, we just did the sort of requisition piece. It was called cafe rec, was the tweaks that..Max: Back then recruiting happened mostly in Starbucks. Jason: Well, apparently  that's how it worked. It was a good thing. And, I learned a lot. Along the way, I became a certified project manager and it was great and then I had a boss that told me, you know, I'd become the operations leader for Cisco. And my boss said, you can either have my job, which I don't plan on leaving anytime soon. Or go to a place that does recruiting for a living. And I said, Oh, that's not a bad idea. And I'd outsourced our recruiting along the way. And I was responsible for the relationship between outsource company and Cisco and I played that sort of client side role. So the company that went through the RFP process, they actually told me no, they said, yeah, I don't think we can help you much. What you're trying to do is, is really not exactly the right thing.And there were a hundred percent, right. Like it was the, the worst conceived RFP and a terribly conceived sort of a model that we had designed and the only company that came back and said, this is a bad idea, we're going to bow out. We wish you luck and we'll help you with something else the next time. It was Accenture.I thought, man, that took a lot of integrity to do that. So, when I went to look for a job, they were the first people that I called. And, they made a job for me. So I went to work for Accenture, loved that, did that for six years in various roles. And then went to Randstand Source Right. And I loved Randstand Source Right. That was a good time. I, I went over to lead operations for them. And I did that for a number of years, uh, moved on to the, Senior Vice President of Strategy. Uh, it was Strategy and Standardization because a big part of the strategy was to standardize. Um, so that was that. And then, um, ultimately I ended my run there as Head of Technology and Analytics, uh, around the globe and, uh, Accenture is a funny place, man. It, uh, it calls you back at some point. There's lots of us that are boomerang. So we've come back. That's the role I'm in now I really, um, I really like. I remember the guy who had the role when I was here before and, uh, I loved what he was doing and we where he got to spend his time.So I, when that was open, I said, all right, let's do it. I came back back to Accenture. Max: Now, if you could go, you know, you go back 15 years. Um,  um, would you do what I'm doing and start, uh, an ATS company. I started one in 2008, 2009. I was, I think, a few years too late, uh, on my first run. Jason: You know what? I do look back and think, um, I wish I had been a founder.  I have a lot of respect for the founders that I know. And I look back, I think that quite a bit, um, I was, I had a family very, very young, uh, so, uh, we had our first child. I was in that spot. So the gamble wasn't my gamble. It was the whole family's gamble. So I, I never did it. And if I knew, then what I know now I might have, like, I understand the venture capital space. I understand how that all works. And I did, I was just so clueless back then. I had no idea. Um, but, uh, who knows? I have an idea. Maybe one of these days, I'll get to try it out. I do have and idea.Max: Oh, don't do it. Don't do it, Jason. It's the worst, worst thing that can happen to you. No money. Uh, no, uh, I don't recommend it. Jason: Ok, that's good to know! My other founder friends are like do it, do it today! I'm gonna wait until we're not in a, you know, a crisis.Max: Apparently recessions of the best time to start a business. Jason: Well, you know what a bunch of people that did that, did well doing that.  Max: Yeah. Um, it, it sounds like, uh, throughout your career, while you were not an entrepreneur, you were able to tinker and build things and build toys. Um, and I picked up on the job title you shared with us. You said it was a Standardization in it. That doesn't sound too sexy, but there were also, um, some more creative exercises that you were involved in. Um, you were telling me before we started the video that you, learned about the limits of automation and where the humans were needed in an experiment that you ran a year or two years ago. Um, could, um, could you elaborate on that? Jason: Yeah. Well, we're actually experimenting with that right now, even. Um, so the technology exists to fully automate the recruiting process, especially at the, in the lower level jobs. So think retail, uh, warehouse workers, things where you're not making big decisions on the skills and capabilities, but it's more processing someone through with a very low threshold of qualification. So we call those high volume, low skill. And so for those roles, it's possible to fully automate. There's not a lot of discernment involved that needs to be made, a human doesn't need to make that decision on “Do we hire this person or not?” Everyone is qualified if they hit some basic knockout questions, like, can you lift 50 pounds? Literally, “can you have work boots on your first day?” Um, those are the sorts of things you have to, you have to ask them.  So when that happens, uh, I remember I went to one, one interview center for massive distribution, uh, site, uh, one of the biggest in the world, I think. And, um, There's a building for interviews.And I sat down with a lady who had been interviewing in that building, interviewing candidates every day. Um, for, uh, I think it was six years. She had interviewed candidates every single day. And I said, well, how often do you say no to a candidate? And this lady said, “Oh, I've never said no.”She had never said no. She had interviewed for six years and never said no. So when that's the case, that you don't need the interview anymore, right. That discern was done necessary. So we tried this with a fully automated process. And what we learned is these sorts of roles. You always, you have dropout rates at certain points. You know, you're going to have a certain percent that fail the drug screen, way more than you would think if you do white collar work. You hear the failure rate, it would surprise you if that's all you've ever done. Um, But there's a failure rate of drug screen, you know, you're going to have, and then there's a certain number of people that just won't ever show up for the job.And, um, what we learned when we fully automated is we could get people all the way through the process up until the day they're supposed to start and they just didn't show up. They didn't think it was real. Some of them would get nervous when filling out the background, check paperwork, thinking it might be a scam because they're asked for, you know, personal information, social security, and so forth, even though it was from a reputable company, they're worried that it's a scam. So in order to ground the position, we are experimenting with the right place to insert a human contact. So where do you insert a phone call to ground this, to be that it's a real position, a real job for someone? Not because you need to say yes or no, but because they need human contact to feel good about the job.Max: Well, that's what the lady was doing for six years, right? It was, uh, she wasn't saying no, but she was saying here's, here's a human contact. Jason: That's it exactly right. That's what she was doing all the time. Max: Uh, yeah, I I'd like to insert more video in the process where you know, that human contact could be, Hey, check it out You know, here's the, the warehouse where you'll be working. You know, do a little phon, recording, and say, we can't wait to see you on Monday. And that, little video can be, it can feel personal, but it could be actually general, you know, you could send it to everybody. Jason: Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're exactly right. And we're seeing more of that. In fact, we're seeing, um, seeing a shift to video interviews for certain, um, a lot of companies are just using zoom or Skype or not Skype, but Microsoft teams, the Skype, Skype got replaced, uh, Google meets for some, but they're, they're using sort of their conferencing platforms to do that instead of, uh, instead of the the formal sort of modern, higher and higher and things.  But it's a little bit broken, right? When they do that, because they don't have the formal scoring, they don't have, they don't have the staff, the they're not able to what's happening like the candidate, your platform. Um, they it's, it's not as strong of a solution.Um, so I was talking at one point with, uh, With one of the founders of another one of these companies. And they said, they said we're running into companies that have sort of the scrappy solution. And  they're using zoom. And then the ones that are, that were prepared for something like this, um, the adoption rate just skyrocketed.So people, cause video, I always had trouble getting people to use it and getting people to actually lean into it because you still have to review the videos. But once we, um, once we hit this pandemic, everybody seems way more comfortable or, you know, it's become a necessity in their world at least.And they're accustomed to it. Max: Yeah. Yeah. We've, we've done a lot of zoom and team integrations and then, um, have the live video call asynchronous video. Um, I still, I'm still a luxury for, a lot of positions they're more interested in getting people through binary, you know, outcomes or multiple choice questions and getting them to move to a human interview through a phone call. Um, and also still a lot of markets where asking people to log in for a zoom call would be too, um,  demanding on the bandwidth. So they do phone calls instead. And, uh, you know. Jason: Well you're, in markets that where that's a significant challenge. Right? But you guys have WhatsApp integration, correct? Max: Yes. Yes. WhatsApp integration allows for collecting video, but asynchronously, you wouldn't be able to do a live video call connected through the business API. You can do it person to person, in the consumer market, but it's not yet supported for businesses. Unfortunately. Uh, same way that, uh, Facebook picture, you know, otherwise. Yeah. I mean, all those companies, whether you're, you're an ATS and CRM, um, uh, social media or a communication platform, you all have video now and everybody has it and everybody can switch it on and it's relatively cost free. So I don't understand how the Highervues of the world are going to stay in business if their story is we're good on video. So is everybody else.Jason: Yeah, that's true. No, it's true. Max: Yeah. Um, Very commoditized. Jason:I thought they needed to do something different. Um, but yeah, we're we are seeing more video. Um, SMS is big for us in the US um, of course, different mediums elsewhere as well. So, uh, we're seeing a lot of that shift as well.Max: The, um, uh, continuing on what we were talking about, the lady, um, that says yes. Um,  um, do you think her job will still be around in, uh, in 10 years time? Or do you think that, uh, eventually, you know, um, we can go to a full automated process with no human contact. Jason: Um, I think probably not. I think probably her role probably doesn't exist the way it is. What I think we'll end up with is, you know, instead of a 40 minute actually interview candidates were scheduled for an hour, an hour time slot to come in and do your interview. I think we're going to have 10 minutes, um, basically, uh, uh, Welcome calls. They're their introductions. We're welcoming them to the company. “Oh yeah we're ready to make you this offer. It's already been sent to you. Welcome to the welcome home. And here's your, here's all the stuff you need to know. Here's where you show up what you do” but it's a 10 minute make somebody feel good call, um, and not an interview. Max: Yeah, that's a big productivity gain potentially there.Um, and I've seen, uh, for, uh, some people doing group interviews as well. Because then you have that human factor, uh, you know, you were saying, is it real? Well I mean, there's 10 other people logging into the call and I can see their faces and it's probably real. Jason: Yeah, I saw I was, um, there's, uh,  uh, one of the big online retailers, uh, they were doing this thing where they would do a drug swab. This was years ago. This is before I came back to Accenture. Um, they were doing a drug swab. Yeah, as a part of their interview process. So they would have these massive hiring events. They still do it right now, I think. And, um, basically you go, you sit down, you watch a video about working at this, at this place.If you're good with it, um, they have like a long Q-tip. You swab your cheek, it's a drug test. You put it back in the package, you seal it up. You sign an offer letter and you're done, like, that's it. That is the whole, that is the whole process you've been processed and the way that they were paying their suppliers was based on the number of return offer letters and, uh, drug screens that they got.Max: Wow. Well, I mean, I just had to do my first swab, uh, coming into Hong Kong  to check, they were checking for my coronavirus. Uh, yeah. Um, but that uh,  sounds brutal. And I guess these drug tests have had to, I mean, those are private enterprises can ask whatever they want. Right. it's they can decide what drug tests they ask. There's no, restrictions on state law or anything like that. Jason: No, it's strange. You'll have more stringent drug screening requirements for Businesses than the States in which people live. Yeah. So there might be a state where marijuana is legalized, for example, but it's not legal for the drug screen.Well, tell that to the, you know, 18 year old warehouse worker that they're interviewing for those warehouse job, you know, they're really just picking up boxes. They've been moving them from point A to point B. And I'm not sure that whether or not they smoked it makes much difference in that, but that's there oftentimes there's rules that say, yeah, you can't hire themMax: After a stressful day of carrying boxes.Jason: It may be, I don't know, but it's, there are these more stringent things, but if it's legal in your state is if it's legal where you are, I guess nine, 18 year old, usually usual is 21. So 21 year old warehouse worker, I guess she could have a problem. You could, you, it's not as big of a deal in my mind, but the 18 year old, shame on them, they should wait till 21 based on that wall.Max: It should be the other way around. Absolutely. We should have a world where it's illegal in the state, but it's legal as soon as you come inside the company. You know,  Basically an office where we only accept people here who smoke cigarettes all day long. Jason: So you joke, but, um, one of the big tobacco companies I did work with years and years and years ago, um, And the first time I walked in there, I saw the ashtrays on the desks, the whole thing.So, yeah, I don't know if they still do that, but this was way back when. But yeah, it's the only company I ever walked into with ashtrays on the desk, because that had sort of gone by the time I made it into this line of work. Max: Yeah. Well uh, I've experienced that as well.  I've had business meetings with cigarettes, um, in Asia. So  it does feel, uh, like you're, traveling in time when that happens. Jason: Well, I've had business meetings with cigars.  That's a different story. Max: Yes. Yes. I don't get invited to those then. Okay. Um, before we wrap it up, Jason: Max I'm pretty sure that i invited you to one at some point along the way.Max: With cigars? Jason: Yeah. I'm pretty sure along the way. Maybe when we were in San Francisco, but I don't know. Max: Oh, I missed it. Well, okay. Talking about the, uh, the current events and where you see the market going a few months ago when, uh, the world uh, was collapsing. You, told me that the RPO industry had rebounded strongly in 2008 and 2009 and had its best run right afterwards and gave me some hope for your industry, our industry. Uh, coming out of the coronavirus pandemic, um, um, has your, um, yeah.  Are you on track with your predictions or, um, or you, uh, surprised with, uh, the pace of the slowness of the recovery, I guess, um, how do you anticipate the next few months will pan out for people in staffing and in the RPO world in particular?Jason: Um, so yeah, uh, I don't know what the starting point of the sort of rebound is. Right? So coming out of the 2008 slowdown, um, 2009, when companies started bringing you back. Uh, employees, um, the recruiters came back first, right. And, uh, when the recruiters came back, the ramp began very quickly. And a lot of times they said, okay, well, let's bring people back, but via outsourcing. That's why outsourcing grew so much at that time. What's difficult about this one is we're not yet at the place where I think we're ready for the rebound. I think  um, we're still sort of in the low point. Uh, and we're, nobody's really sure when, we sort of swing out of this thing, I'm confident that we will, right?I'm confident that yeah. Eventually everybody gets to take off their mask and go back to their jobs. And there are some hurdles that have to be reached along the way for that to happen. So I'm confident that the world will go back to what we were accustomed to one day. Um, but it's not something that happens, you know, in three months or four months, it's something that happens, uh, over a long period of time.Max: There's a cycle to recruitment. And normally, you know, end of the summer, everybody gets ready for the big shopping push towards the end of the year. Jason: October. Yeah. Max: Yeah. So now is when people need to, normally when they start ramping up and start you know, setting up the machine. You're saying well, maybe it's taken a little longer this time.Jason: Well, what's funny is the online machine is ramping like you wouldn't believe. So the people who do your online shopping through, and then who fulfill those orders on the back end. Yeah. That that's going strong. It hasn't slowed down. In fact, um, It's where we're seeing the most competition for workers, uh, warehouse workers are right now.Like it's like a software developers and Silicon Valley in the early two thousands. Max: No, I don't know if I want to go into a, you know, carrying boxes or data science. Jason: Seriously. What I think is going to happen is those wages are going to start increasing really significantly. Much to the chagrin of my customer base, but they, I think that, um, you know, we're, we're being asked in some cases to monitor, um, uh, to monitor salaries or offers like what the, the offer that people are making to candidates on a daily basis. Because Amazon, when you drive past has billboards that say I'm offering X number of dollars per hour and they change. And sometimes they'll change uh, there'll be a different number when you go into the office from versus when you come back and yeah. Yeah. If that's how fast this, this thing is moving and it's not going down, it's all going up. Uh, and the reason that we think that is that, um, These jobs used to be the jobs that were, you know, the next level, they were the good paying jobs. If you didn't have an education necessarily, um, but uh, you wanted something that could actually pay your bills. Um, it's sort of the, the first job that was able to do that most of the time, um, you know, just above you would see the grocery stores and things paid just above minimum wage. And these jobs were always several dollars per hour or more.What's happened is Target, Amazon, even Walmart now have pushed that based salary up to, you know, if anyone wages somewhere in the eight or $9 range, they've pushed to 13 or 14, a minimum wage, the California minimum wage, I think through the end of this year, end of next year. Uh, it will be $14, right? Max: So they as high as high as, as a logistics or, yeah.Jason: Right. So it's, it's now you can, you can either, you can either work in a really, uh, challenging environment in a warehouse where you're lifting things a bunch and you're, um, it may, it's probably climate controlled. They've all added climate control, but there's these big Bay doors. So where the trucks have to pull in. So, uh, it's you can't get that completely cool or, uh, completely warm in the winter time. Um, so you've always got to deal with the weather to some degree when that, when that happens, you can't have total climate control. So you've got those jobs that are uncomfortable and require more physical activity versus, you know, the, the grocery store chain, the, uh, big box retailer, those, those other ones paying the same amount of money. So all those people that have to work with your packages from the Amazon people who have to load them to the, uh, delivery drivers, to the, uh, uh, you know, the UPS guy, whoever, um, all of those, workers, um, they're in great demand. Cause there's more, we need more of them, but their salaries are deeply compressed because of what's happened with all of the retail salaries. Yeah. Max: Yeah. Well I'm, um, you know, from an economic standpoint, I think increasing minimal wages, does uh, accelerate the pace of automation and ultimately, um, force companies to automate more. Uh, so that's probably the response as well as, you know, um, in the short term an increase in, uh, and paper hour, but we know that, um, it's going to drive more automation and will eventually, potentially cost a few jobs. Uh, but if those are the hard jobs, um, that may not be such a bad outcome, it's just that, as you were saying if you have no education, um, and you need to pay the bill, those jobs are very precious. So I don't know. Um, I'm not, uh, a policy guy, but, uh, um, it sounds like you're in the right market. Even though you're fighting some, uh, difficult trends. Jason: It's fascinating, right. If it were easy, the clients wouldn't call us to help. Right? They'd be able to do this themselves. Max: So many times after eight hours in front of my webcam I'm like, Oh man, I wish I was outside doing physical work and I always thought that that would be like a good employee branding employer value proposition. Come in to work in our warehouse and check out, our guns, you know?Jason: You know what you need to do? You need to go, and I don't know about tha EVP, but the next time you feel that way, go dig a ditch and see how you feel afterwards. Because one time I at one  was hiring people who would bury the lines for the phone company and they literally were ditch diggers and I could not think of a worst gig. And they, uh, so every time I, when I look at this, I think. I could be doing that job. That would be terrible. Yeah, it's exhausting by the way. Max: I, uh, when I was, uh, 16 years old, I had a chance to go work in, um, an, a modeling agency to just to do intern work. But then my mother insisted, I go instead, go work in our plastic factory so that I would understand the cost of physical labor. And so  I did end up going to school afterwards and pursuing an education. Jason: Wow, How old were you when you could go to the modeling agency? Max: 16. Yeah, peak of my purity. Jason: At that age. I think, I think your mom might not have done the right thing. Max: Um, I'm pretty sure she will not be listening to our conversation, but, uh, if you are, I'm still so grateful for, uh, for your choice, mom, and I'm very grateful for your time, Jason. Today and in previous conversations, helping, helping me understand the macro trends and the limits of automation. Uh, thank you very much for joining us today, uh, on this podcast and looking forward to our next chat. Jason: Happy to do it. Thanks. Max: A treat talking to Jason Roberts from Accenture and, and learning about the new dynamics of the marketplace currently shaping, uh, North America with the pickers and the people working in logistics in higher demand than the engineers of the Silicon Valley.Who would have guessed? And if, uh, if you liked this interview, please subscribe for more on recruitment hackers, podcast, and share with your friends. Hope to see you here again soon.

Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast show about innovations technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform. Max: Hello everybody. And welcome to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. I'm your host Max and today I am delighted to be welcoming you on the show  who is Senior Vice President of recruitment at Teleperformance, Preeti. Welcome.Preeti: Thank you, max.  Pleasure to be here.Max: Pleasure to have you. Last time we met was a few years ago in Mumbai. I believe that at the time you were working for a company called, Intelinet,, but now it's part of Teleperformance again. Can you explain to us a little bit,, how you ende, up in your current position as the senior vice president at Teleperformance?Preeti: Certainly. So, firstly, thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure, always to speak with you. I think every interaction with you has been very, very enriching and very rewarding. So, thank you again. Let me take a, maybe a step back, down memory lane. When I started off, this was back in 2001, as an advisor in a call center, that's what we used to call them back then.This was before the term BPOs and business process outsourcing and BPMs came into play. Back then it was plain vanilla call centers, and that's when I started. So that was my journey into the BPO spectrum, as an advisor, part of, a semi tech process. We used to handle calls with customers.That was my first experience of understanding that we can actually service customers to another country with them having no idea. We're not really in the country from where they're calling. So that was an exciting journey. And I think that was my first interface with technology and how it's making in the world really small.It didn't matter where I was sitting. I could still speak to a customer actually, and resolve something that was work related. Personally, obviously you could make calls to anybody you wanted, but this was work related. So that was an exciting journey for me when I started in 2001. And, I think from then on I never really looked back.I've had an extremely roller coaster ride in the BPO segment. I've done multiple shades of roles starting from being an agent to taking on some roles in the operations teams, as an assistant manager, as a manager, And that's when I folded into recruitment. I wouldn't say that it happened because it was something that I dreamed off or something I had planned for myself.I think it was just a natural course of journey for me. The best part was that the organization was open enough to adapt and absorb someone who didn't come with that background into a leadership role. And I think those are things that you will only find in the BPO segment, where we're so open to allowing people to explore their potential.And we're not fully so bogged down with experience. We know that people have potential. We allow them to take up roles and start delivering and sometimes experience does not really become a limitation for you to pick up something new. So I guess that was an interesting learning point for me.Max: I've seen a lot of people in talent tech position and the BPO sector that, that have that first experience as an agent, or that first experience in sales and, at the same time, often the industry is a little bit old school where they say, oh, we only hire people with past PBO experience and you could see why it's because they've got a very high dropout rate right in the first three to six months on the job. A lot of people give up, but for those who stick around, then, they can adapt. They're tough. Right. Preeti: When I joined Cytel, that was my first experience. I still recall those days, the first time I joined the organization, I went with the mindset that I'm going to probably stick around only for six months.Because at that time it didn't seem like a career opportunity. It just seemed like something you do until you figured out what you wanted to do. So it wasn't something that I was planning for myself, but I guess the industry just grew on me. It gave me the opportunities to learn, to grow. To do stuff, which, I would've otherwise never planned for myself.So whether it was learning how to manage, to work with people, to work with data, to work with processes, and to work with a certain kind of discipline. I think the BPO industry just grew on me and I guess I just chose to stick around. So as I progressed, I think the talent acquisition piece came as more of a... And I'll not go too much into the details those are pretty boring, but yeah, I think the talent acquisition piece also started with a similar experience that let me try this, you know,  it's different from what I've been doing for the last four, five years, let me try and do something different.So the opportunity was there. I picked it up and, from then on, it's been 10 years now. And things have just looked better and better. And today I'm able to at least reflect back and say, what was it like 10 years ago? So, yeah, I think Teleperformance as an organization, while we're really, really large, I mean, we're 300,000 people today and we're spread across the globe.We've got a footprint practically, you name a country and we exist. So I think for us, today, there's no limit to what each one of us can and will be able to do considering the fact that we're part of such a large organization. So, prior to Teleperformance, even when were Intelinet, we were about 50,000 people strong and, I guess, with India being such a strategic partner in the entire scheme of things with us now being taken over a large organization, like Teleperformance, the best part has been that nothing's changed in our DNA.Nothing's changed as far as our values are concerned. I guess because these two organizations were so similar in their value system, it didn't seem like there was a takeover or there was a company buying out someone. That didn't feel like, I would say, at the ground level, you obviously have the more legal changes and the more backend changes.But as an organization, we just seamlessly transitioned into Teleperformance.  Considering the values were a match, the people were a match. The direction we were heading into is a match. So, I guess everything looked the same. It was just the fact that we changed our name. I guess that's what it seemed like to people on the ground.Max: Yeah. In Teleperformance you said 300,000 people worldwide. A decent amount of turnover, a decent amount of volume, really big volumes in some cities and in some countries I think in India is probably your biggest market in terms of headcount?Preeti: Maybe not anymore, actually. We're neck to neck with Manila. The English world. We write ourselves here. We're fairly a decent size. I think if I were to just refer to the India headcount we're close to about 80,000 people today. Spread across nearly 14 cities in India. So we're pretty much there from the North to the South, to the West, to the East. So yeah, we're pretty much everywhere in India.Max: Okay. I think you, you touched on this topic a little bit. You said, you know, you, weren't thinking about talent acquisition and you weren't thinking about HR. And when we think about these functions, often people, I imagine somebody who studied sociology or psychology and was interested in doing competency mapping and working in training and learning and development.And I think in your industry, we have a different kind of profiles that go into talent acquisition, slightly different, and a little bit more numbers driven, a little bit more aggressive. I'm wondering how that's evolved over the last five, five years. And if you're seeing some new competencies that are becoming more critical for the success of a recruiter in this space.Preeti: if I go back 10 years and if I reflect on how, and maybe I can compare to what we were as talent acquisition, in our own family, versus if I compare ourselves with competitors, I think, yes, you used the right word, we're a fairly — talent acquisition is a fairly aggressive setup by default. it is about numbers.But I think the way we've evolved today is that we've not limited ourselves to numbers. We've instead started focusing more on experience. We've started focusing on being able to deliver, so while time seems to always be the most critical attribute as far as acquisition is concerned, because if you do not have people at the time when you need them, you're gonna derail everything that's coming up ahead. You're the first piece in the value chain. And if you differ, if you default, you impact the rest of the value chain down the line as well. So that makes talent acquisition a really critical piece in the whole train.If I say running a train, then we'd probably be the one right up ahead, you know, steering how that train is going to move and whether it's going to reach the destination on time or not, Maybe that's a good analogical thing. So essentially we have transport.  It is the engine. I mean, not to say that other functions don't matter, butI think talent acquisition is what kick starts, everything. It's being more, I would say more, um, collaborative. Considering, you know, we need other functions to feel important as well.Max: Well, the audience should know that we're talking on a Saturday and so the other functions are probably sleeping right now.Preeti: Recruitment is working today. Recruitment was working late night yesterday. And recruitment's going to be working tomorrow as well in some of my teams. Max: I don't know if that's something that's gonna attract a lot of talent to your team, this 24/7 kind of activity. And so the experience, huh? So you're talking about,  people who are building, I mean, designers, people who design a candidate experience onsite or digitally, that stands out. So people who are more about,  crafting a design rather than simply processing interviews.Preeti: Right. It's not enough to just, you know, allow a person to feel that someone who's coming, looking for a job. It's no longer just the employer's market. It is a job seeker's market as well, which means, the job seeker is now that much more vocal about the company they want to join. And sometimes the experience of recruitment can also be a deciding factor for them to take us as a premier opportunity or not, and no longer can we assume that if I have to hire a hundred people I'm going to get thousands of them who are vying for that position. That's not going to happen because if I need to get a hundred people, I'm not going to have the luxury of time and effort to be introduced, to hire, to interview and screen maybe tens and thousands of people because firstly tens and thousands of people don't exist.Max: Even in India?Preeti: Even in India. So it's not such a factor of population versus people available for the right kind of job. Because today, as much as we believe that, you know, people who go to work in a BPO, anybody can do that. It's not going to be that easy anymore.There's so much more that we take out from an employee who is servicing a customer. There is so much more that's being put on that person's shoulder to harness those responsibilities. Of how do you take care of customers? How do you take care of stakeholders? How do you take care of your metrics? How do you take care of so many other things that it's no longer, just someone who can walk in and do the job, even if they don't have the skills for it.And hence, it's important that if we do not invest, in a good experience for that employee or for that candidate who is still deciding our effort. But sometimes determine whether he or she is going to take up our offer or not. And it's not enough to just say we're offering a job. What do you want?Max: Of course, the experience begins and often ends with, having a good interpersonal contact and, and being, courteous and being on time and all those basics, there are bare necessities, but those are not really technology trends. They're just good behavior. Are there some changes that have happened to the digital landscape that you've had to take into account in order to be more centric and offer a better experience?Preeti: I think the whole pandemic has kind of turned our lives upside down, as people. And what we have come to realize is that when you're able to speak. And I think this isn't new. I mean, this is age old, you know, communication strategy where you seem to communicate better when you're with people and when you're talking to them in person, because there are so many nonverbal cues, there is so much about your body language transferred as part of that communication.And in the digital world, there are going to be so many moments when none of these nonverbal cues are going to be available to the person you're speaking with. Which is going to mean that everything that you do is going to start to be that much more important and not enough of what you see. You can do the same interview in person.You can do the same interview on the phone. It's going to have radically different outcomes. And that's why traditionally recruitment's always been, I want to see the person, no, I want to meet the person. They've never really warmed up to doing something remotely or digitally. And hence, culturally, traditionally, I would say recruitment is a function, no matter which country everybody wants to see the person.No one wants to assume that if I've interviewed someone digitally, I'm not satisfied. That's generally the feeling inside. You still feel, maybe if I meet the person, I may have a different perspective. Having now transitioned into a work from home or a digital environment. The recruitment team as a whole is having to go through that transformation where they're going to have to be convinced that if I am interviewing someone on video, or if I'm interviewing someone digitally, that's good enough.Max: It's such a psychological thing, right? It's almost like, if you can, if you couldn't bother to put on a suit, take the bus, come to the office, come and meet me, then I can start to trust you. This was a barrier before now, we have to come up with a new barrier in order to ask the candidates to demonstrate how much they want it.Because if you start giving out jobs to everybody who raises their hands, then it's going to be very hard to get a real sense for who really wants it.  How do you measure today? Whether a candidate really wants the job compared to before, considering that, you know, it's so easy to just jump in front of a camera and start to do an interview. Maybe you end up with a lot of candidates who drop out or, or are not going to be that motivated to join. Have you seen the volume of dropouts and people who try and after a few months increase as you moved towards to work from home?Preeti: Let me answer that in a different way.Let me say,  we're still in the middle of the pandemic. There's a huge, I would say influence of how the pandemic has affected people around the country. And there's been a mixed bag of situations where people have lost their jobs. There are some who are on the bench. There are some who are still trying to figure out if they're going to have a job or not.So there's a fear today that exists. And until we move away from the pandemic situation into a business as usual, where we work from home is offered as an option, not as a driver because of the COVID situation. I guess then metrics and numbers will look probably more different, but if I were to stick to the here and now, yes, we've seen a surge of people who are applying for jobs who probably may not have done that pre-pandemic because this wasn't the industry for them.There's such a huge shift in the kind of people that are applying today. They come from all different industries. And unfortunately the industries that have gotten impacted significantly because of the pandemic, have let go of staff. And obviously those people are now looking for options. The BPOs do seem to offer a good option for them because it was the customer service or it was support there.They're still able to see themselves working in the BPO sector. And hence, we're starting to see a lot more flux of people coming in from different industries and from different backgrounds. People who are willing to try and start working all over again in a different industry, even though they never would have thought about doing that maybe a little before March, that's when India went into a lockdown.Max: That's a great opportunity for the industry to. If you can afford to hire them, and they're quality hires from other industries and they're willing to overcome their natural sort of reticence towards the industry then, yeah, you're  planting seeds for tomorrow.You're hiring people that were outside of reach. We've seen it even at our level as a small tech company. We were able to hire over the last couple of months, people that would not have been available otherwise. Preeti: So if you look at it, I mean, let's say, let's say if we name industries, we know travel got impacted significantly.We know the hotel industry got impacted significantly. Obviously they will bounce back. Now the decision that lies with the recruitment teams in a BPO is do you invest in this talent today knowing that they may also be here for a temporary period of time? And chances are that tomorrow when their industry bounces back again, they're obviously going to prefer them over us.Now with that being the confusion in the mind of a recruiter, I think that's the part where we're trying to fix to experience because there's a possibility that some of them will still maybe go back once hotels come up once travel starts again, I guess people will shift back, but there will still be a huge population of people that we can hold back with us.Only because of the experience that we were able to get. So those would be people who work from their previous industries to maybe the BPOs. And I guess that's what makes our job that much more particular. If we fix the experience and not just focus on the numbers, because we get the numbers today or we get them tomorrow, but if we can fix the experience, then we can hold these numbers back and not make them a stop gap arrangement.Max: Alright, bouncing from the topic of experience, to the topic of the Indian market and specifics, the powerful position that vendors and staffing firms have in the Indian market. Do you think that the current pandemic has tilted the market in favor of the employer so that the employer can control more of the experience compared to before where a lot of the vendors, the staffing agencies would really control the entire candidate experience until the point of hire.But maybe that sort of monopoly or that dominance in the industry is starting to crack  a little bit given the new dynamics. Preeti: If I were to give a one word answer to that I would say yes. If I were to explain why I say yes. So India in a huge number of cities has been extremely dependent on external agencies or partners who would recruit for us, but the basic grounds or the premises on which the design of that hiding was built was that they would bring people into their facility.And because they're partnered with multiple organizations, their value proposition was that if you walk into my office, I'm going to make sure you walk out with an offer. It could be company A, it could be company B, because they're obviously contractually working with so many firms. Now with the entire premise of can I walk into your office now? With that piece shifting to can you make sure that you can still give me that same value proposition, but not make me come to your office? Now for me to be able to hold on to an audience without physically bringing them to my facility, I guess that's a challenge that every organization is facing, because sometimes it seemed very simple that people would just walk into your office for an interview.But just that simple activity seems so much more difficult now because everybody wants to see, do you have something on the offering, which does not force me to come and physically walk into your facility? And unfortunately, the agencies or the vendor partners weren't prepared for something like this, because they were always dependent on bringing people to their offices because that's their way of securing an applicant or a candidate and giving them that assurance that we will make sure you get an offer somewhere. Now with everybody shifting to a digital platform. It's an open market today. If I can attract talent by virtue of my organization's name, then yes, the dependency on me sourcing through external partners is going to go down, but it's never going to go away.And the reason being that an agency in a recruitment set up, always works as additional capacity. Max: Yeah. You need that. And then to do some backup and to do some pointed search and sometimes competitive work, you always need to have that middleman, but, I mean, it can go down from being 70% of your volume to 7%, over a period of 10 years or something like that.When I interacted with Teleperformance a few years ago in India and they told me that they were advertising Jaipur as a really great destination to go to because of the great weather and lots of access to greenery and not as polluted as Delhi and Bangalore and I had a very different mental picture than what I saw when I came to Jaipur.Jaipur is a big city. There is a lot of traffic jamsPreeti: But if you compare Jaipur with Delhi, you have the benefit of not traveling beyond a certain distance. So you would always have the opportunity to compare distances, but you know, if you actually meet people in Jaipur, they're going to make that little distance also sound an inconvenience.So someone living in a big ground is always going to feel that traveling for 40 minutes is okay. But if you were to place those 40 minutes for someone living in Jaipur, they're going to be like, nevermind, I don't need this job. I'm going to look for something closer to home. Max: Well, it makes sense. I think I'm on the side of the Jaipur people on this one, that commuting time needs to be cut, cut to 10- 15 minutes.I like a little bit of commuting time because it gives me a moment to stop thinking about home, start thinking about work and vice versa. But, maybe there are tricks. You can also create that commute time within your home because you're stuck at home. But I was thinking about Jaipur.I was thinking, When I went to Jaipur last year, I did not find that beautiful, full green place with birds singing and and pink palace. I thought it was still quite, quite rough. And I was thinking maybe I need to go to an even smaller city, to go see, you know, a more untouched part of India and less industrialized.Is it possible today for your agents to work in even third tier or smaller cities than that? Or are you finding the infrastructure is still too much behind? Preeti: So that's an interesting one Max, and maybe I can spend some time explaining how we've transitioned into having a dependency on moving.And if you see the erstwhile, traditional cultures in India, people would generally move away from their homes to bigger cities. Because the bigger city offered the opportunities, the infrastructure, there's so much more that used to be tied behind a big city. And there was generally a feeling of growing up, just for the lack of a better word. A child would feel that, you know, once I'm done with college, I'm grown up, I can live independently and hence I'm moving to a bigger city for seeking a job.Now, not that shift has now happened in a way where people feel that, yes,I have to go, but I don't want to go.To the earlier impression where people were, we used to look forward to moving to a big city, because it seemed like a new experience for them. Now that shift has happened where people are being forced to move from their families, move away from their natives, purely because they don't have opportunities that exist in smaller cities.And hence they have no choice, but to move. Now, the fact that the willingness is in question. There is always an option where people feel that I'd rather go back home. I'm going to work for some time, but my heart is still to go back home. Nobody wants to live away from family.  India is very heavy into family.We want to be together with our families for as long as we can. And that's one of the pull factors where people feel that I get something where I live, where I have my family. Then I would want that. And, fortunately, or unfortunately, obviously the pandemic was an unfortunate situation, but the fortunate activity that came out of it was the multitude of options where everybody was willing to explore a work from home culture, work from home opportunity, which made sure that the recruitment team was able to reach out to a person with a value proposition saying, look here. I have an option for you. You don't need to move from your home. You don't need to walk out of your house for now. You're not allowed, but at the same time, anytime you can continue living with your family and you can still choose to be part of a large global organization. And how am I being able to do that? Obviously, technology is supporting me. A person just needs to make sure he or she is having a system. They have internet connectivity, which is pretty much everywhere they are today. And I'm connected. I do not need to move to a big city, I don't need to leave my family behind. I don't need to go and find a place where five people can live together because I can't afford to live alone.And all of those things have gone away and it's just been a matter of four or five months. We've not seen this transition over years. We've just seen this transition in the last four or five months since the pandemic hit. And it was a quick and, you know, swift shift into moving people into a work from home option.Max: Okay. I guess that's been the massive positive that's come out of this. And, and to tie back, to close the loop on where you began your career. Did you make that big move when you were coming out of college and moved to the big city? Preeti: Actually, yes, I did.  I've lived in, in multiple cities. I've lived in another country before this.So when I grew up as a child, I lived in the Gulf. I've lived in Saudi Arabia. That was where I grew up. That's where I did my schooling, but I shifted back to India sometimes in my high school, when I came back to India and I lived in two different cities. And then I finally settled down in Mumbai, thinking that's where I want to do a job.And yes, and I've lived in Mumbai ever since, I guess it's been a really long time. So, I guess you have Mumbai as being my workplace, my dream place, you can call it whatever you want, but yes.Max: I like the city. It's got a beautiful architecture. The recruitment offices were a little crowded for my taste before, but,  I'm glad to be here india embraces the work from home revolution and what it might do to keep families together. And to expand the talent pool, to change the culture of the whole country. I'm excited about what's to come.  I'm gonna come back as soon as travel is allowed.Thank you for sharing your story with our listeners and we wish you all the best in continuing the revolution and making the best out of a difficult situation with the pandemic. Thank you very much Preeti.Preeti: Thank you so much, Max. I'd like to just close off by saying, it's such an interesting conversation, always with you.I guess we in India seem to be looking very promising as a hub where work from home opportunities are going to grow multi-fold; it's not going to be a stop gap arrangement to cater to the pandemic. And, the only message I'd like to give to the entire recruitment fraternity is to never say no to any person who's applying for a job, because you never know who's going to stick around and who's not.Sometimes those traditional biases of this isn't the right profile or this isn't the right fit. As recruitment, as organizations, we need to learn to trust our instincts on potential, on people's ability to adapt to a job, not just by virtue of what they bring to the table, but by virtue of what the organization has to offer as well.So as much as people need to shape up and fit into a skill or a competency matrix for us, I guess the organizations also need to start being more adaptive and open to exploring so many more profiles. So many more people who are seeking jobs outside today. And I think we can safely say that for Teleperformance.You know, everybody matters to us, every interaction matters to us and we're very hopeful that people will look at us as an employer of choice. And we're working very hard to become that. Max: I don't doubt it. I've seen the content on social media. I've seen your CEO promote this work from home revolution and  I'm with you. I think this is a transition which represents an enormous opportunity for talent acquisition professionals that could very much be something we look back on as the best thing that could happen to our industry. So, thanks again, Preeti.Preeti: Thank you, max.Max: I had a great conversation with Preeti, which went on a little bit longer than the usual interview and went on after we stopped recording because India is really going through an exciting time, exciting revolution with people working from home, changing the landscape for the whole industry. Hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please sign up for more and subscribe to the podcast here and share with your friends.

Welcome to the recruitment hackers podcast. A show about innovations, technology and leaders in the recruitment industry brought to you by Talkpush, the leading recruitment automation platform.Max: Hello everybody. This is Max for another episode of the Recruitment Hacks from Max and today on our show, we have a personal friend of mine who I've known for over a decade, Mr. Darcy Lalonde. Darcy, welcome to the party. Darcy: Thanks max. Good  to chat. Max: Good to chat and I'm sure people will appreciate that from one entrepreneur to another entrepreneur, we have a lot of different hats to wear, but today I'm going to ask you to wear the hats of you as your Recruiter in Chief for most of your companies, even though your responsibilities have been much broader and wider than that. And we're talking about more than 20 years of experience in HR related roles, human capital, human capital technology and HR tech, and oftentimes in a leadership role at either the foundation, the start of a new company, or when that company was scaling, going from a few hundred to a few thousand people.And so we'll try to find out how you build those engines to understand, for somebody who also wants to scale up, you know, maybe find some tricks and ideas on how to attract more and better talent. So, there's a lot to cover in that 20 year history, but perhaps tell us a little bit about what you are to now… and yeah, let's go back a little bit in time. Tell us about how you, how you  started in HR and HR tech. Darcy: Well, it's interesting coming from a former ice hockey player, who became an accountant, got into IT and somehow got into human capital management, which I guess is a lesson learned for many of us, is that as a small child growing up, I had dreams of playing ice hockey. I never had dreams of being an executive in Human Capital. But it's funny how the different roads and I think one of the things that sport taught me was the importance of team, the importance of people, and one of the interesting things is that I've always found it to, you know, to often be the captain of the team and things like this as a kid.But, what really makes things, I think rewarding is the people around you. And, I think that was one of the things as I got into my career, that the people and the teams and the folks that work with you are so important. I've been I must say, over the last 20, 30 years started up a number of companies of which, you know, I'm very proud to say from a lot of the people that have actually joined those companies after another but have been the times of our lives.You know, I think that's part of creating the culture of your business and your ecosystem. Is that you know, you do have fun. You have a passion, you work hard, you play hard. You create loyalty. and you know, just one of the things that I very much enjoyed was the people aspect.And you know, I came through as an accountant and ended up in IT. And I guess it was interesting that I used to be very critical of human capital and HR professionals as being relatively non-effective. Not at the board. Max: I'm thinking about your introduction. This is very nice. And telling us about your story where you're talking about the competitive edge and your background in sports. And I guess the perception from the outside world is you know, HR and Talent Acquisition, Human Capital, all of that's not really for the competitive. Yeah. You know it's more of a support function where it's more about you know, making sure that everybody's taken care of as opposed to going out to win, is that what you're referring to when you were saying,  I didn't think I'd end up in that space? Darcy: Yeah. I guess, you know, one of my challenges that I've given many HR professionals over the last 20 years since you know, is really getting in the HR space in 2001, when I joined Arinso, you know, I'm a supply chain guy. I'm a finance guy.  you know, we have supply chains and value chains and activity based costing and all these things that drive and show, you know, qualified and quantified benefits. HR people, they go for coffee. They chat with people, you know, and I'm being a little bit facetious here obviously, but I do believe that…Max: That's the perception for sure.Darcy: It is the perception. And I don't think it needs to be, I think in today's world more than any time, the HR professionals have the opportunity to step up and really drive business and drive business benefits. Drive, you know, people, because you know, again— and I've been around a long time and, you know, people are our most important asset. That's been on everybody's webpage for about 10, 20 years now.But, do you really have an executive at your boardroom table who is strategically driving the benefits that your people can bring to your business? And can you as an accountant quantify that? Can you actually show the benefits? And at the end of the day, the financial impacts on the bottom line, top line and ultimately sharing.And I will say that's one of the things that I'm very, very big on is sharing the rewards of the company back to the employee. So that there's a direct correlation that says I make profit. I share it with you. I don't make them up. I can share it with you. Max: This challenge you say, more important now than ever. I think that some of that is because we're looking for people who are competitive in a world where maybe there's a generational shift where people often criticize millennials as being… Asking too much and giving too little. At the risk of sounding very old, what do you think about this  generational shift, do you think that it's true? Do you think that it becomes harder to find people who are willing to, you know, go to battle with you in this environment?Darcy:  Yeah. I guess I'm the edge of the baby boomers.Max: I thought you were gen X. Darcy: No, no, I just caught the end , but you know, it was interesting because I came into the business world when we were moving from mainframes to files, server computing, and I remember when I first came in as the young buck, they all found me very abrasive, very pushy,  very millennial.  I would say, you know, these crazy people that are going to work with, you know, local area networks and email and Microsoft products. You know I think at times it is a little bit oversold, the whole millennial concept and again, coming back max to recruiting and you really need a personal touch now to grab people, I mean, the attention span and  the ability to be very smart and have access to Google. My kids are smarter than me. Right. And they're 12 years old because they out-Google me. That's I think one of the things that you have to now be able to digitally connect to your people. And is that some of your first time points are reaching out digitally, but then you're trying to bring them in and get that, a little bit, that you are special, you are somebody that I'm actually targeting and focusing with. And I still believe people have the same inherent, you know, behaviors and needs Max: It's overblown. Basically. We think people make too much of a big deal of the generational gap. I tend to agree, but I also think that somehow, one of the reasons why you've been successful for 20 plus years is because you have found a way to attract a more competitive, more hungry group of professionals. You know, people who are just like in a hockey team they want to win. So, is that something that is built into the culture post on-boarding, or is that something that you figured out a way to do at the recruitment stage. Darcy: Yeah. Well, I, you know, I think the first meeting is that first touch, that first moment is a very important moment. And I guess I've hired people that ended up being some of my most successful executives over the phone. Didn't see them. All I heard was a voice and this was, you know, we didn't have zoom back 10, 15 years ago. You know, and I would have somebody fly in from Sydney flying to Manila show up for their first day.And it was really about, you know, having that feeling and just having somebody passionate and you know, talk about things. Like, look, I need somebody who just wants to get on a plane, do whatever it takes, but I'll tell you, when this thing takes off, then we're all going to have a heck of a rocket ship ride.And frankly, that was, in Asia, which was my second company Arinso. Starting up SAP, HR,  in Southeast Asia in the year 1999 sounded like the craziest thing in the world to me. SAP, very expensive, you know, Southeast Asia, particularly not investing in certainly human capital solutions, they were more focused on at that point, supply chain, finance, procurement things like that.And, you know, just going in and, having, my partner at the time, Josh ended up doing very well in life with our exit of Arinso.  I guess it was 12 years later. But coming in to AsiaMax: So from, from zero to a 50 million revenue plus business, something like that.Darcy: Yeah. I mean, it was funny because I was a Canadian living  in Asia and between Singapore and Manila. And I say, this fondly, this crazy Belgian guy Josh Slice, kept phoning me up and saying, look, we need somebody to start up this, you know, Asia. And he called it the far East. We need this far East group to be started.Max: For people who don't work in Asia, there is no such thing as the far East. It's not a real region, right?Darcy: No, I was still looking for the far East.Max: Yeah. We're talking about like 12 countries that speak 12 different languages with 12 different regulations and laws and so on. Starting North gate Arinso in Hong Kong and then into the Philippines, you had to hire across the far East as they call it in different countries. Recruitment was very different in different parts of Asia? Did you have to adapt your process or was it more, you know, company culture trumps everything and we'll worry about localizing later?Darcy: Yeah I think back then it was really sponsored by SAP coming into the region, so I had very good connections with the SAP community and there's a guy by the name of Les Hayman. Who's the head of SAP APJ. And Les is no longer with us, but it was just a fantastic man. And again, a great leader and an inspirational leader. And I guess my point is that I do believe that kind of leadership is something that, you create.I guess this was back when I had really long hair and I was even a bit more eccentric than I was even today. I went to Asia and got introduced to a few people and hired people. Frankly, those people still work for my companies today, a lot of them.So, but I think in those days you could really, word of mouth, it was a bit less of a mature market, so the competition was less. And I would say SAP HCM professionals in Asia, pretty well, every single person I almost see with, with 10 years of experience have worked for one of my companies. So it's something I'm very proud of, but also very proud of  that management group that I've created that, some of my best friends in the region.  But I think it really was word of mouth and less digital. And this was 20 years ago. Now on the recruiting front, we were doing things like Taleo and you know, some of the big,  enterprise stuff with Arinso. So that was really the infancy of it was the late 90s was really that whole targeted recruiting stuff was just coming in. Max: It sounds like a lot of that is relationship based and, word of mouth and that perhaps even though you are a technologist and you did sell these technology platforms that in your case, you know, what really drove recruitment marketing and talent attraction, was more around executive hiring and more around finding people who are passionate  and the human factor. Would you say that still holds true today that people, you know, we have vendors like Talkpush and others that make a big deal of the candidate experience, but the human elements is still King. Darcy: Yeah. I mean certainly think you have to frame a storyboard that, you know, brings an edginess to it. Again, the millennials are looking for that maybe more than they were in my generation. You know, my kids will say, dad, you met Richard Branson. Yeah, I did meet Richard Branson. I mean, stuff like this, people want to work for some of these types of people andMax: Right, you could put a picture of Richard Branson on your website and get a few more candidates perhaps.Darcy: Yeah. Well, I have pictures beside Bill McDermott and Jen Morgan and all these kinds of people, I think Les Hayman over the days, Hasso Plattner... I've been very blessed to…Max: I kind of know those names, but I don't think that millennials will care so much.I mean, it might help you attract a couple of executives. But, thinking about your time at Shore Solutions, where you went from 200 to 2000 call center agents in a period of two years. Those names would not have meant anything to those guys.Tell us about that strategy, how you did the ramp up there and the cool factor that you were able to build in order, to multiply the size of your business by 10 and in a short period of time.Darcy: Yeah. And I guess that's an example too, of having moved from professional services with SAP and consulting and, exiting that business. And then really I lived in Manila. So, if you're in Manila and you need something to do, you know what makes sense to do? Well, you do a call center. so that was you know, one of my objectives. And again, I think in terms of focus and target, obviously the call center industry is another completely different industry. I think it was very, really interesting for myself from a Human Capital Management Executive who had all the answers to all the best practices and processes. And now to take that from a more enterprise view into a contact center or BPO.  Which is all your recruiting particularly highly competitive market. Everybody's stealing from everybody and very much again, how do you create that vibe that creates the loyalty? You know, and, to be honest, I guess my people formula is what I like to call more of a waterfall, which is,  getting those top managers in  your leadership team, they have to be also the ones that create that vibe down to the next level and the next level and the next level.And, you know, we were, I think lucky enough, in the short that, you know, had a kind of, and I think I've framed him. He's this big Australian guy, John L. Smith, and kind of a rugby, big guy. So you got him and me and the hockey…Max: They sounds scary. Yeah, it sounds like they would scare the candidates away, not attract  them.Darcy: Well, you'd be surprised. There's this we're gonna, hang with these guys.  And I shouldn't say guys, cause I, you know, Shore was another one of the companies where I created I think one of my strongest management teams and I think you've met many of them, you know, the Tanya's and Lenny's and, and Jerry. We had  just a phenomenal group of people and not only were we hugely successful, but we had a ton of fun. We did stuff that, you know,  and again, Shore was also, you know, I think one of the best blends, cause it was two years, 200 to 2000. Max: So the fact that he had a ton of fun,  for our audience, mainly Talent Acquisition people. Were you able to put that into words or images in a way that it would attract people, how do you convey the message? You put pictures of your parties on the wall?Darcy: Yeah.  I mean, I think we did have  you know Tanya, who was my marketing lady at the time, did a great job of creating these sound bytes and clips. But it's also again, when they have those interviews and they have those touch points that you've got the right lead in, that, you know, you grab them quickly. Reputation then quickly takes over. And the reality is I don't like to overpay people, but I certainly like to pay people what they're worth. So it's another concept where, you know, I want people to have good lives, so I don't want to have the lowest salaries in the business. I want to have  people that can build and grow  and certainly the Philippines. Again, that's one of the most rewarding aspects. I think of being an executive there is, now with my 20 years of being there, I can count thousands of people that have changed their lives. And some of them from the poorest situations,  They work hard, they got passion. It's not always about which college they're from.  I liked the underdog. I liked the people that never got a chance. Yeah, and again, I think maybe from a sporting side, but what you want to do is maximize people's strengths, minimize their weaknesses, build on… You know, a team can't have all superstars.you need to respect the plotting accounts payable clerk, you know, it's okay to be a plotting accounts.. Max: Give everybody some love, pay them well, hope that the word of mouth and the positive sort of company culture resonates. And that generates some positive word of mouth, some referrals, and it sounds pretty simple when you say like that.Darcy: Yeah, it does. Max: There's no secret sauce. I feel the same way that it's better to pay a little bit over market rates and reduce attrition. And, then focus on everything else. And well, you don't have to promise the moon to anybody, you just build a good environment and hope that positive word of mouth carries you. Because really, if you get 20 or 30% of your hires through referrals, employer referral, that means you're doing a good job, right? Darcy: Yeah. Absolutely. And, again, the call center, you know, human capital market is  you know, again, I think where you do need to some degree focus on the nicheness of the marketplace. So you can't have one style fits all. When I'm recruiting an executive, it's going to be different than a volume recruitment. But, I guess the story should still be the same, right? The vibe of the company, because that's, you know, again, I think the challenge of trying to get it and you know, back 20 years ago I was much more involved with the operational side.So I was at the parties. I was at the coffee. I was at the lunches. I was in the middle of it… as I guess I've taken on more entrepreneurial and chairman roles and less operational, I need my team to be able to take that passion and, it can't be that you know, we're all disappointed because Darcy didn't come to the meeting. You can build that out in, and that could perhaps be a, you know, there's a certain size of business that I frankly don't enjoy as much as you know, I, I love them when we've got 10 people. A hundred people, a thousand people, when you get to 10,000, somebody else should buy my business and take it. And they should really get rid of me because I'm unmanageable. It's time to move to the next level. And, and, you know, I don't think I guess I don't take offense to that whole concept. I'm a bit proud of it. I guess that's my rebel side that says, you know, I'm good to a certain point. And then I can let some of these big, more corporate enterprise folks who are much smarter than me, take it over and take it to the next level. Max: Well, there's so many different definitions to intelligence. I don't know if they're smarter than you, but maybe  they're a little bit more political. Talking about the ideal number for a team. I've been doing some research on, you know, what would be happy. And I think that 2000 is already way beyond where I could foresee myself in the sense that I can not remember 2000 people's names. There was research done on the cognitive limits on the number of people that one can remember and be friends with in the community it's called Dunbar's number and numbers like around 150 to 200. I could see myself, you know, working with that, but it's different for everybody, for sure.But I think, some great advice there Darcy about enabling each of your leaders to become the engine for recruitment, rather than try to put it into a formula. Every team needs to have an inspiring leader that wants to create a fun environment in each o their teams and it's something that everybody can take away  from our conversation. What's in store for you in the future? I'm going to continue to, by the way for the listeners, Darcy was kind enough to give us a chance because he loves the outsiders so much that he decided to be my first customer at Talkpush some six years ago. And will  continue to advise Talkpush in its next phase of growth.What are you working on next? What are you working on now? Darcy: Well, I guess as you know, Max, I, was sure we had a small SAP group, which when I sold that to an Australian company and then we took the SAP piece, that share piece into something called Synchrony, which was again a company that about a year ago I sold to Rising, which is a big U.S partner. So, you know, put in a good year. I had a nice transition. I'm very proud to see that, you know, we became number one in Asia for SAP success factor partners. Within 12 months, we were named the number one partner in the region, which I couldn't be more proud of. And now they will become and they are probably the biggest global partner in the world. And that's what I set out to do. And I'm happy that you know, Rising will take it to the next level. So I guess I'm settling in the whole Corona thing, I guess COVID stuff is... Certainly created a challenge for all of us, which is just another challenge on the road. It's a tough one and when we go back max to the millennial discussions and things that, you know, I think we could argue, this generation was fairly entitled with very little resistance to their success. I think now ...Max: Think this will teach them a few lessons?Darcy: Well, I think I didn't have World War II. I didn't have a lot of the tough stuff that you know, our generations before us had. And boy, now we've got our World War III, literally, that we're going to have to deal with,  I'm looking forward to as we go through ….Max: So Darcy, thank you for sharing these cool insights and to wrap up our conversation, would you have any practical tips for employers today on how to stand out in a crowded group? You were competing for talent in some of the most crowded markets for talent across the BPO sector in particular in the Philippines and in Asia.How did you manage to stand out? And what tips do you have for talent acquisition professionals to build a different brand that doesn't look and sound like everyone else?Darcy: Well, I think number one from my perspective is to have a passion, love what you do, have the passion, the drive.  I think, you know, again in today's world, you have to digitize that. So again, it's to create the edge, you know. I build businesses, I start businesses. One of the things that I have learned over the last 10 years, particularly , and that was a great example was Shore was that you have to digitize that cool factor. And you know, as an entrepreneur, I think that is really the, absolute key is to lead by example, have the passion have the drive, bring in people that share that, then be able to digitize that because that is really how you can scale yourself and move yourself.And get the attention that, you know, in the old days might've been,  you could do that in events and whatnot. You know, frankly now you do this digitally. But , you know, one of the things, is a warning that I have is don't digital spam. Because I see companies right now. Gosh if, If I see another one of their LinkedIns they're  spamming everywhere.Max: LinkedIn is the worst. It is the absolute worst when it comes to spam. I mean, I don't know how they manage to do that, but it is mayhem out there. Absolutely. So, digitalization, we didn't spend too much time on, but obviously that's been a core theme running through your career is first build a great management team that's going to communicate the employer value proposition and then digitize it so that you're not overly dependent on individuals, I guess, to get the message out.Dacy: Yup. Yup.  I think in today's world again you know, I've always been able to manage multiple countries without being in them. At one time I managed 15 countries with the Arinso Middle East, Asia, Canada, delivery centers, and you know, I used to call it management by email. Because I, you know, again, that was the digital side 10 to 20 years ago. If you've got the right on the ground, what I always found was that at least with an email, the same message came at the same time to the same people.I'm not a big believer on conference calls and having calls for the sake of calls, because I've often found that my management team went away and they all took a different message out of it. Somehow. Probably tailored a little bit to their own benefit to a certain degree.Max: Yeah, you pick and choose. When it's black and white, there's less room for confusion. Saves a lot of time with calls. I've been trying to do more written asynchronous communication, which is another fancy way of saying email and spending less time on calls myself. That's a very powerful. Yeah. Alright, well, we're about done on time. Thank you Darcy for spending this time with me and with our listeners and looking forward to seeing what's next in store for you for the next entrepreneurial adventure.And thanks for all your advice throughout the years. Darcy: Okay, thanks max. And looking forward to seeing Talkpugh get to that next level. Keep up the good work buddy.That was Darcy Lalonde, friend of Talkpush, serial entrepreneur, who told us about how important it is to build a core executive team that's going to help to drive recruitment and share the fun of your company culture. Thank you, Darcy. Hope you enjoyed the interview. If you want to hear more about recruitment and how it drives business, please listen to some of our other episodes.If you liked it, leave us a review and subscribe to this channel. Hope to see you soon.

“I was doing a perfectly good degree in quantum physics, I had a girlfriend, I had lots of money, and from an exterior point of view, this was the perfect life. But I was so miserable...” — Max “It's not that hard quitting. I thought about it for five months, but once it was done, it was done" — Max Is it possible to connect with anybody at all and have a conversation that enriches our lives? I'm Andrew Riis and welcome to the experiment. I believe there is depth, beauty and inspiration inside everyone when we take the time to connect. This podcast does just that. Each episode is a conversation with someone that is or used to be a stranger. Perhaps we don't need scholars or celebrities to create a meaningful podcast... Maybe some of the best stories are tucked away, folded into the pockets of random passers-by, of people who may have just never been given a space to tell their story. Listened to the conversation? Now it's your turn. On the other side of hello, anything is possible. Who in your life is similar or different from Max? And, if you want to get connected with another random listener somewhere in the world, head to hellostranger.fm/connect. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference. For show notes, transcripts and past guests, please visit hellostranger.fm Join the FB community: facebook.com/groups/hellostrangerfriends/ Follow the podcast: instagram.com/hellostrangerpodcast Follow Andrew: instagram.com/andyriis If you really must connect with Max Ravier, you can find him on Instagram @maxravier Music: Sundown by Joseph McDade

Today on Keepin' It Real, I've got my homie Max Maxim and we talk all about mindset and social skills.  Max is an online dating coach and works with Get Better Game to help entrepreneurs find their high-quality girl. Max helps improve your social skills to help find you the perfect girl and up your business game.   We go deep into getting better socially, rejection and making money. Check out this episode to up your social game.    The BIG Takeaways From This Episode:  About Max [0:37] Why online dating? [2:00] Beliefs and getting girls [5:09] Becoming a high-value man [7:17] Network = net worth [11:19] Max's motivations [15:40] Getting comfortable with your girlfriend [21:46] His view on money [28:00] Gamifying life [31:24] Treating others with respect [38:00]   Memorable Quotes:    “You need to be confident, have social skills and have high-value - cause girls only date up.” - Max “It's not about having something in the moment, it's about getting there.” - Max “Ambition is attractive.” - Splashman  “Your network is your net worth.” - Max “If you're good with women, men will respect you and keep you around - which will propel your business.” - Max        How To Keep The Momentum Going:  To get those relationships that you want, remember to wake up and try to improve at least 1% of each area of your life: health, wealth and relationships.  If you put your mission in life first, then girls - you'll become more attractive to them.  If you got value from today's episode do me two favors before you go: 1. Subscribe to get notifications on when new episodes are released. 2. Tell us what you thought of the episode and what you want to hear about next by leaving a review.    Up your game with Max:   Follow Max on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maxmaxim.official/ Get help with social skills and women: https://www.instagram.com/getbettergame/   Come Join The fam…  mintaveinc.com 

S05 E06, “Wexler v. Goodman”: -> Slate: The Americans 610. Bald Move: Better Cast Saul 506. Saulcast 506 instant talk. Breaking Goodman 506. Saulcast 506. Peta - Meek Mill, Roddy Ricch 2019 Down Below - Roddy Ricch 2018 West Coast Project 506. Better Call Saul Insider 405. Oliver Hunt, Readtrepeneur: Leonardo da Vinci 2019 Angels - Nilüfer Yanya 2019. Bacc Seat - Ty Dolla $ign, Roddy Ricch 2019 Film Schlubs 207. Better Call Saul Insider 407. Better Call Saul Insider 506. Almost Cancelled 506. Daily DVR 506. Afterbuzz 506. S05 E05, “Dedicado a Max” It’s Saul Good, Man 209. Better Call Saul Insider 404. Better Call Saul Insider 304. Better Call Saul Insider 408.

This week, the Pitchy Boys are on summer vacation and Dylan plans to spend those 104 days remembering all the greatest podcast memories. ••••••••••••• Timecodes ••••••••••••• 47-2:29 = The Evolution of the Intro 2:29-5:31 - “Re-Pitching About ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ & Pitching About ‘Avengers: Endgame’” 5:31-18:19 - Relationship Advice with Josh 18:19-20:47 - “Pitching About ‘The Batman Complex’ (Ft. Christian Jeppson)” 20:47-22:49 - “Pitching About ‘Dead Rising’ (Ft. Christian Jeppson)” 22:49-29:45 - “Pitching About IMDB's Top 50 (+ 1) Movies (Ft. James Figueroa)” 29:45-32:22 - “Pitching About ’The Keepers of Five’ (aka ‘Cult Mixer’) (Ft. Liz Reehle)” 32:22-36:49 - “Pitching About 'Flynn and Max: It’s Goin' Down For Real’” 36:49-39:15 - “Pitching About 'Starwars Fallen Jedi/The New Age’” 39:15-42:06 - “Pitching About 'Victor Hugo' & 'Terminated' (Ft. Matt Garnier)” 42:06-42:23 - “Pitching About Pixar's 'Desserted’” 42:23-44:02 - “Pitching About Copeland's 'Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi' (Ft. Nathan Copeland)” 44:02-46:51 - "Pitching Our Thoughts About 'Avengers Endgame' (Ft. DJ Farley) (SPOILERS) (Duh.) 46:51-48:22 - “Pitching About 'Heaven's War' (Ft. Danny Carrales)” 48:22-52:48 - Julio Nandez ••••••••••••• Get Your Copy Of Heaven's War ••••••••••••• https://www.christiancinema.com/digital/movie/heavens-war •••••••••••• Music By ••••••••••••• 'In A Pensive Mood'' ‘Love In The Air’’ Jay Man - OurMusicBox http://www.youtube.com/c/ourmusicbox ‘Star Wars Main Title Theme (A Cappella Cover)” - nmckaig http://www.youtube.com/nmckaig Adam Vitovský

In this week’s special episode, Coach Sam and Coach Maximilian Mormont have a riveting conversation about Max’s myriad adventures & world travels, poignant turning points, mastery & family, and… Coach Sam makes an important announcement and commitment to Max. Parable #1: Blood Money In 1996, an accident that claimed the lives of two of his college friends became a turning point for Max where he began playing the ‘fuck you’ game. “God, you saved me…but, why?” He began putting himself in harm’s way after receiving settlement money from the accident and poured this ‘blood money’ into drugs. For a time, he traveled the U.S. dealing drugs and spending time with high-level athletes until deciding to return home to his mother. QUESTION How does this resonate with experiences in your life?   Parable #2: Turning It Around Max’s choices after returning home led him from the possibility of facing involuntary manslaughter charges to probation and ultimately to be in the position of wanting to turn his life around. He became a bartender, went back to school, got into bodybuilding, personal training, coaching, managing major gyms, helped develop CrossFit football, and found his way into Olympic weight lifting. QUESTION What has been a turning point in your life?   Parable #3: Mastery Sam: “It’s four years of your fucking life dedicated to two fucking movements day and night: clean and snatch. That’s mastery!” Max: “It’s 10,000 hours. And if you really look into the mastery of 10,000 hours of something, the reality is, you actually have to put time into something. QUESTION Where in your world are you devoting time to becoming a master at something? Parable #4: Train For Something Sam had an experience with Max’s wife, also a coach, where she instilled in him the necessity to train for something vs going to the gym or working out without having a target in mind. Max: Training for something doesn’t necessarily have to be training for fitness or health, it could just be discovering and understanding how your body works and taking ownership of it. QUESTION What are you currently training for?   Parable #5: Cyclops As Max entered Warrior, he began wondering, “What the fuck am I doing here? Everything’s pretty good in my life; what do I need to fix?” What Max discovered was a spiritual path, unlike anything he had experienced up to this point in his life. After the men had been directed to draw Light & Dark Warrior in their journals, Max drew a picture of Cyclops to represent his Dark Warrior. At first, he wanted to erase it until he realized that his drawing was the perfect representation of himself with the one eye mirroring his laser focus once he hooks onto something. QUESTION What does your Dark Warrior look like? Parables from the Pit: “When I first met Max several years ago, I was a sedated mother fucker who traveled the world with my Blackberry and suitcase and had a feeling of significance.” —Sam Falsafi “People want to get strong until the weight gets heavy.”  — Coach Maximilian Mormont  

How do you become a strong leader? How do you encourage your team to be not just good, but great?  My guest today is an expert on managing sales teams and the author of Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers: A Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team Through Collaboration. Max Cates is here to discuss why sales managers should focus on continuous improvement, what separates the good managers from the bad, and using the Six Sigma process for eliminating defects and improving your team. Episode Highlights: How Max Cates got started in sales management Discussing Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers Why sales superstars make poor managers Implementing a tactical plan for your sales team The millennial sales team Six Sigma for sales The McKinsey Issue Tree Setting good stretch goals Resources: Seven Steps to Success for Sales Managers: A Strategic Guide to Creating a Winning Sales Team Through Collaboration by Max Cates Six Sigma McKinsey Issue Tree Connect with Max Cates on Linkedin Quotes/Tweets: “Great salespeople usually make poor managers” - Max “The lone wolf manager can’t manage a millennial sales team. They like collaboration.” - Max ‘It’s a lot easier to be a successful leader than it is to be a poor manager.”- Max “Stretch, but don’t overstretch when you’re making goals” - Max