Evan Sohn - The Future of Recruiting

Foreign.

Once again. Hey, we're talking about people and what's changed with people and hiring and recruiting and all that.

Today we have very special guest and it's a great topic that's been top.

Of mind for a long time but it continues, continues to go through changes. So that's the subject of our conversation.

Today with Evan Sohn. Stay tuned.

I'm just going to pause here and.

Have a little dance break for myself, everybody. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business podcast. Our show comes to you every week with a leader, an influencer, a CEO, someone else to share something of value in growing and scaling your company. So whatever it is, whatever it takes to grow, grow and scale your business.

We'Re all about that.

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So all that.

More like subscribe all that there you know what to do. ScalingCoach.com is our website. So Evan Sohn, welcome to the show. So glad to have you on.

Thanks so much Bill for having me. We got the message about check shirts so that's good. We're good to go.

My wife says today you look like you're ready to play golf. You've got all of a very golfy looking shirts and which is funny because I'm far more interested in surfing than golf.

What I, what I play resembles golf.

Resembles golf.

I don't really play golf. I play what resembles golf.

So, so for our listeners, our viewers, you all should know that Evanstone is chairman and chief executive officer of recruiter.com so it's got an awful lot of visibility into who's hiring, what applicants are looking for, what's happening in the job market and that kind of thing. And I think there's a lot of value as people try to figure out what's happening right now, where's it going? It's definitely, we're seeing some changes, it continues to evolve and so on. So he's also, you know, regularly on CNBC and other major media outlets around business. So again, Evan, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us to share about this conversation.

So yeah, that with that intro, you know, we could be here for a really long time. So let's, let's, let's break that down into different segments and pieces. Right?

Yeah. Well, so let's just talk about what's happening right now. So the supply side, like employee candidate pool. Our, our audience is mostly business leaders. They've been really like, God, we need people, we need people, we need people. And then the pandemic happened and for a brief time, people laid off a lot of people and there were a lot of that. But, but ever since then, like the constraints, like airlines can't get enough people, restaurants, hospitality can't get enough people, like, what do you think is happening right now? And where's it going?

So let's break this up into three. Three, three segments. Right, Right. Well, what was happening?

Yeah. Okay, good.

What is happening and what's next? How's that?

Sure.

There was, you know, before the pandemic, we were at record low unemployment levels. Record low. It was actually the highest employment of ex convicts. Was before the pandemic, Right. Why? Because if you need a Java developer, who cares, right? I'll hire everybody. I need to fill those roles. And you're right. Pandemic came and there was all of a sudden this wack, really, really serious wackiness, right? Because all of the remote jobs went shot through the roof, right? So companies, they adjusted, they shifted, etc. The factories shut down and so many things started to happen. And, you know, the word unprecedented was used every 15 minutes.

Unprecedented number of times.

An unprecedented number of times. That was a layup, man. That was a total layup, you know. So I think what was really fascinating to see is that in September of last year, so September 21st was the highest number of employee identification numbers ever given in American history. So think about that. More people started a new company last September. Now, they weren't opening up a bagel store or a jewelry shop. They were probably an LLC for DoorDash or Uber or something else like that. So you really started to see just a really weird dynamic actually happening. So then all of a sudden, I actually became CEO in June of 2020. I sat down with the board and I said, hey, when this whole thing is over, this pandemic. And to me, the pandemic was not the virus, it was the shutdown. The job market's going to be in absolute disarray. Believe me, Bill, I had no idea how much of a disarray it was going to actually be in.

So now you start to see, I.

Can'T find the labor. And let's break that down. Why can't I find a restaurant worker, right? Why can't I actually do that? So you start to see, you know.

Let'S go with the premise.

There are a few premises that we have to establish. One is everyone in this country is worth more today than they were three years ago. As, as a, as an employee, right? Everyone, the, the factory worker, the restaurant, the person willing to walk into a restaurant, the Java developer, the chief product officer, everyone. It was, is more, is more valuable today than they were three years ago because someone's willing to pay them more money. And we start to see wage inflation across the board, people getting their people over hiring. What's caused more and that's really on the knowledge workers, et cetera in the factories. You saw people walking across the street for an extra 25 cents, right. An hour or better donuts, right? I'm walking across the street. Things are happening so quickly. One of the things that was really coming, right?

So let's actually look at what was happening before in Silicon Valley.

And I actually spent about three years out there before joining recruiter.com you had people having four jobs in 12 years. That was a normal thing.

It was normal to see someone on their resume. In fact, if you saw a software.

Engineer that was at four companies in 12 years or three companies in 12.

Years, you would say that's an awesome software engineer. Right, that's an awesome software engineer. In fact, conversely, if you saw a software engineer that had been at the.

Same company for 12 years, you would.

Probably say again, and it's not Google.

Or Microsoft or Facebook or one of.

Those others, you would say stale. This person is stale. They're probably not a good software engineer.

They're not up on the latest, whatever it is.

So that anything that's happening has really been multiplied significantly by the pandemic. So what else was happening?

We started to use Zoom more and more and more and more.

So Zoom replaced the in person interview. So if you think about what was it like to interview pre pandemic, right. What was it like, Bill, you brought a suit to work, you had to tell your manager that you are going to a funeral, Right. Or someone's in the hospital. You had to take the afternoon off and go on your interview.

Right?

That was the process. The expression it takes, it's a full time job to find a job was not written in 2022. Right. That was written 20 years ago. Because finding a job is complicated. It's really a hard thing. You got to fill out resumes, you got to do a cover letter, you can got to do interviews.

Yeah.

What is interviewing today? Click, click, click, click, click, click, Click right. You know, I'm 50, almost 55 years old. In my day, you found really cool paper to put your resume on, right? Thick stock resume, right? You probably some of your audience is smiling and you wrote up a cover letter, customized cover letter, hey Bill, how are you typing it all up there, etc. And if you mailed out 20 resumes, you were considered a monster. Oh my God, I milled out 20 resume. Oh my God. Today if you apply to 30 companies, you could do that in 15 minutes. Click, click, click, click, click, Click.

One.

It's like going on Amazon, right? One click apply. One click apply. One click apply. So if I have made it simple to interview, all the jobs that were not remotely geographic, that were non geographically desirable, are finished, right? And interviewing is now not a cumbersome burner burden. It is a 15 minute Zoom or Skype or, or, you know, whatever it, whatever it is, Google video. So the only thing that was missing was the stigma of leaving a company too early, right? The only thing that was keeping you was that was the thing that our parents or grandparents told us, suck it up and work. You got to be there for at least four years. Hey Bill, I know you don't like the job, but suck it up for at least four years. And now you have Kevin O', Leary, Mr. Wonderful ten months ago, saying, please stay at a job for at least 18 months. Please stay at a job for at least 18 months. Recent survey, I think had like 40% of millennials willing to leave the job. Like the numbers are, are staggering of how 20% were willing to leave this year. Like it's just crazy, crazy numbers. So we're not going backwards. Every macro change that's happened in this country that's affected the job market has never returned to normal. One example, we were all outsourcing it for Y2K. Have we taken that back? No, we've changed, we've evolved and changed. Right. Call center operations left the US in the 70s and 80s. Business process outsourcing started in the early 90 recession. All these things have really never come back. So are we now that we're back to normal, are we going back to where the average person is working at a company for 20 to 25 years? It's just not going to happen. So the new normal is that people are not going to be at the same company for that extended period of time.

Now with the wage inflation, with all these things, we're still. What's going on today if my process hasn't changed, right? As a hiring manager, that could be the hiring manager at a company. It could be the CEO. If I'm doing the same thing I was doing three years ago. Let's. But I'm doing it online. Hey, let's look, let's think. Nice to meet you, bill. I got 14 other people I'm interviewing. You know what? I really don't have time today to interview. I really want you to meet Steve. But Steve's going to be out for two weeks, so let's work him in in two weeks when he's back in the office. If you. If, if that. If I'm still doing that same process where it takes 40 to 50 days on average to hire somebody, and you're applying to 30 jobs every week, if I really want you, I gotta jump on you. I gotta change that process. I have to move you through their process immediately. I have to say, lock this person in, right? How do I lock this person in? Otherwise, you're gonna walk away. And what's interesting is that. And I was meeting with a CEO of a very big staffing firm today, and she was telling me, you know, we spend all this time talking about customer feedback, right? What's your NPS score from your customer? Oh, my customers love us. Our average customer value. How long have I've had this customer for this many months? And what's my lifetime value of a customer? All these things associated with the customer. And no one is on an earnings call saying, hey, what is your churn? What's your employee churn? And how has your employee churn changed this year from last year? And, Bill, if all we ask, if we keep talking about our greatest asset is our people, right? We talk about that all the time. This is a podcast about people. Our greatest assets about people are people. And all we do with the HR is go, oh, we're going to do a survey and make sure that people are happy. That's the extent of what we're doing. Are we actually. Have we defined the metrics by which we're deciding? Are we running a successful company with our most important asset?

No.

Clearly, you know, all of that premise has changed dramatically. And yet sometimes I wonder, I mean, right? There's some jobs where you could bounce around a lot, but there are other jobs where somebody's like, oh, you know, they've been here six place six months, there six months, and they seem a little schizo. And you wonder, like, how much did you actually accomplish? For sure, there are lots of jobs you could learn and impact very quickly. But when you think about some of the more interesting jobs. As your career advances, it takes time to learn to accomplish anything. So not only maybe you haven't learned that much, but you also haven't accomplished much if you're only around for a few months. But the recruiting process being so click, click, click. And the attention shortage. And if you haven't redesigned your recruiting process, you're not using tools. You're like, people are blowing past you and they're getting hired before you've even decided who's moving to the next stage. Right?

Yeah. You know, I heard an interesting podcast the other day and they were saying that one of the, one of the, the institutions that are threatened now by the, by the way, the changing world of work is really entry level jobs. Right. And the reason is, hey, look, let's assume that you're running a successful company and you have a data entry person that you hire. And you've had this. You have three people doing data entry all day long. And they're zooming in because you're letting them work from home because there's data entry. They're not really client facing. They're just doing data entry all day long. And you're paying them, you know, you're paying them $50,000 a year. Well, you could do that same job in South America for $20,000 a year. So why do you care if they're never coming in the office? What are you doing? Right, Right. They're gonna leave you routine.

Things are getting outsourced, offshored, automated, faster and faster and faster.

That's right. So entry level jobs. So I think we're going to start thinking about, you know, the Net. The next segment is what comes next. Thinking about what type of company are you. Are you a company where we are. Are we a teaching company? Right. Do we want to be a company where people are going to learn? So JP Morgan, very proactively, they, Jamie Dimon said, thou shalt return to the office. You got to be in the office. You got to be in the office. We're grooming the next generation of bankers and we want that to be in the office. Totally understand. Totally agree. I'm not arguing whatsoever. So Jamie Dimon has decided that, that for Chase to be successful, they need to be a teaching institution. They need to be a place where people learn how to have a job. They have to learn how to interact with people. They have to learn how to manage meetings. They have to learn how to write memos. They have to learn. Right.

That is.

And let's go backwards. Is it a. It's a learning institution. That's where people go to learn how to have a job. If you are running a high growth startup and you are focused on capital preservation and fast growth, do you want to be investing where people have to learn or do you want to be investing in the people that have already learned?

No, very often, right, you're, you're hiring people who know how to do something already. That's right.

I don't want to have to be.

So if you're in a startup, you don't want to be in a situation where, okay, I've got all these entry level people and I'm teaching them because that's actually expensive. You know, a $50,000, 40 to $50,000 entry level role here cost you probably something like. So let's assume that that's $6,000 a month all in Latin America, that's $2,000. Again, you know, same time zone, et cetera.

And again, forget the dollars and amount for a second. As an institute, as an organization, you.

Have to decide are you an organization where people are going to learn how to do their job, learn how to.

Do the next job or you're an.

Organization where you are focused on delivering results. Here are the results.

I need.

Here are you're going to be in this role, you're going to help us get to those results, you're going to be part of that mission and all this other stuff.

Our mission is not to teach people.

How to do their jobs. You know, our mission is to help.

Companies of all sizes hire talent faster through a variety of our software platform.

And our recruiting platform.

You know, that's our mission.

Our mission is not to create a.

Bench of the next generation of software development. That's not our, that's not our mission. Right, that's, that's just not, we don't have, we don't have to burden that responsibility.

Right?

We, that's not, that's someone else's responsibility. That's not our responsibility. And I think you're going to start thinking about, gee, you know, unless the government starts to come up with some sort of, you know, subsidy for entry level jobs and college, you know, college placements and all these other things, or apprentices or you know, unless there's some sort of benefit to a startup, to a high growth company to use entry.

Level people, it's going to be a.

Tough sell going forward.

Well, as we see companies scale up and they try and we work with companies from fairly small to larger, but it's still very much mid market. But when we see people go from a few hundred to thousands of employees, they start to have more of that. And when they think about where they're going to recruit from, some think, okay, we want to attract fresh people with fresh open minds ready to begin their career. So we want to be a place like it. There's a strategy there in attracting people.

As I said, look, kudos. Like we need, we as an economy need those companies, right? We need companies that say, Look, Mr. Employee, I'm going to teach you how to be great at your job. Right. I want you because you're a high potential person, I'm going to teach you how to be great in your job, but I need you to stay. Right?

Yeah. And that is the, that's the real kicker that we hear from CEOs a lot now is like, wait a minute, do I want to invest in people who are going to leave me? And of course, the opposite is also true. Do you want to not invest in people and have them stick around? But there is kind of at what stage you hiring people, how well they know their job and are you incentivizing them to stick around and for how long?

Right. And, and I think that this is going to be the next conversation that Wall Street's having with companies. I think the next conversation, you know, we made this prediction in December of last year that the U.S. economy will spend $50 billion more in 22 on hiring and retaining above 2019. And we track it every month, we report on it every month and it's happening, right? So, you know, you think about when you hear about people quitting and you hear about 4.3 million people quit, 4.6 million quit. There's more people getting hired every single month also, right. Than we're being hired in 2019. So more people are quitting, more people are actually getting hired every single month now. And there's, there's statistics on what it costs to hire an employee, et cetera. And I think that the conversation next, right? So we, you know, the conversation today is really about recession and how do I fill roles better. We saw companies earlier in the year stocking up on employees. It was actually really interesting. You know, I have 10 slots open. If I hire 10 people, I'll end up with seven after three months. So why don't I hire 12 people and I'll end up with nine or 10. So. And that was actually causing crazy hiring numbers as well as wage inflation, right? Because if Goldman Sachs needs to hire 13 people, not 10 next, you know, everyone's getting more Money and all this other stuff, etc. Everyone's got to compete. You know, there's a flood there. So you start to see these recent layoffs as really being a right sizing of these companies. Right. They hired too many people thinking they were going to keep growing. They stocked up on employees and now you got to clear out the shelves, if you will. But I think the next conversation Bill is really around, what sort of metric are we going to hold our HR departments or our employee, our culture to? It can't just be about, I love the place to work, right? Oh, you won bet. You know, happiest, happiest company. What does happiest custom company mean? Oh, you're voted best company to work at because everyone really likes you. Like, we don't say, hey, great job, sales department. You closed 80% of the deals that were really good deals, but you didn't close the ones that of course, you know, we've, we've, we've, we've created metrics that are non, you know, non. We need to change the definition of metrics around HR to make them very consistent and a company. And look at the beginning of the year, you saw I mentioned Goldman Sachs because at the beginning of the year they had, you know, they had reported a very, very huge expense in employee, in employee hiring and retention. Above, beyond. It was a surprise number for them. Starbucks reported their training costs were higher because they were, they were churning more people who needed to get trained.

You know, so I, I think that.

As companies start to, as, as, as.

People start to ask those questions, right? If you were, if you were going.

To go work at a company, you'd probably say questions like, so what's the average 10, you know, what, what's, what's the compensation? How your numbers doing, etc, you know, is an employee asking, hey, what's your average tenure?

Right?

How long have the people been here? Right?

What's your promotion plan like now?

Again, I don't know if that, how much that comes up. The career growth comes up, comes up all the time beyond this job, right? Do I have a place to go to next?

That's right.

That's right. So, you know, when I interview someone, I usually say to them, when you're done with this job, you will be able to do X, Y and Z. And this is why this is a.

Great job for you because you're going to be doing things that you've never.

Done before and you're going to be able to do X, Y and Z.

You know, I was musing around with the, the global head of talent of a major tech firm.

And I said to him, you know, you should consider actually telling people this.

Is a 36 month gig.

Hey, come work for me. They're actually out in Silicon Valley. Come San Francisco, come work for me. This is a 36 month project. Now when you're done with 36 months, we're going to pay you oodles of money.

Oodles, right?

You'll get your bonus, you'll get your options, all those other things.

And he actually chimed in and said.

And if you take another assignment inside the company, you'll get a 30, you'll get a 30 day vacation. Right. Take 30 days off like as if you had.

In between.

In between you'll take another assignment. I'll give you 30 days off. In between. I spoke to another company that has.

I think in reality a lot of people would have trouble. Like they'd say it and when that other thing came up, had come up as something and they wouldn't line up and they wouldn't really have 30 days because the reality is so many companies and the staffing levels, it's just always everything's urgent and they wouldn't get the break.

I get it. You know, it was more conceptual than anything else. It was kind of interesting. You know, another is, hey look, you know we have another client. They have know offices around the world. They have clients around the world. I said to them, you should be creating like a junior year abroad. Hey, you work here? Hey Bill, I see you like to travel. So I, I, I heard you like Italy. So look, after three years we actually have a big client in Italy. You stay here for three years, for the fourth year you'll go work there.

So I hear, I hear in this like ideating on how do I create something to buck the reality right now of short gig folks who are moving on for some next thing. You create the next thing at the outset so that they're pulling into that thing, setting a marker out there in the future for them to do and then what they progress into beyond that. So using whatever you got like the next project, the next product, whatever it is.

That's right.

And I think that you know, for your clients that are larger thinking about holding your the same way you hold your accounting department to a day sale. Days sales outstanding number. Right. You know what, what's our accounts receivable? Aging receivable like and you hold them to that and you, they don't say, well you know, it's really 32 days for the clients we like, but it's really 87 days for the clients. We don't, you know that. We don't, we don't let anyone mess around with those numbers. And the reason I pick on that is there's a term in, in, in, in HR called voluntary churn versus involuntary churn. Right? Oh, we really, we like that person. Oh, we didn't, you know, Bill quit. But you know what? We really didn't like Bill anyway. We coached him out. It did. It wasn't working out. Why do I, why do I, why am I allowed to do that? Why am I allowed to, you know, I had, I had a. Worked at a company a thousand years.

Ago person that way. Sorry, you mean classify them as.

Yeah, you know, I remember, I remember. I remember I worked at a company a thousand years ago and they lost a very big deal in Paris in France. And the line was we didn't really want that client anyway. Right? So really. So you spent all this time, you know, you spent all this time to get it and you didn't really want it anyway. Oh, it's a good thing we didn't get it. Like, come on, you know, and so the answer is, if we're investing all of this money into our personnel, then we want everyone to stay. We actually want that to happen. Or we want to change the model.

And the model is people often aren't firing fast enough. Right. We know for a fact that there are people in companies that others are having conversations about behind the door, that Evan, what are we going to do about him? How are we going to develop him? And so there's been conversation, whether Evan's privy to it or not for a while about how Evan's doing. They may or may not be good. And then the person leaves or whatever. So we go, well, that was, you know, we were okay with Evan leaving. That was great, you know, because we didn't have to fire it.

No, I, I get it. Right. But look how much time they spent getting Evan up to speed. Right? Look, how much time was there? And I understand it. The question is, do we start, you know, do we start doing things more around Try and buy. Right? You know, hey, look, you're on a 90 day probationary period. I'm going to outsource. You know, you're going to get paid X dollars for the next 90 days. Here's what I want you to accomplish. And after 90 days, then, hey, I'll pay you a lot more money after 90 days than I will before 90 days.

Right?

So, hey, Bill, I know you want to make X. Guess what? I will pay you X plus, plus a bonus. And here's the package and here's everything you're getting. However, you got to graduate after 90 days. We have a bootcamp in 90 days. You prove to me that you're actually worth it. And there you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a very different thing. And I think. Well, we. So I had a conversation recently, very, very recently with a CEO group and half the CEOs in the group were complaining about the wage pressure. Look, we're getting squeezed on comp. People are leaving for a few bucks more here and there and people are getting coached easily. And so we had a conversation around it and we talked about the metrics that they're using and what they're doing. But. But one of the things that came out of it, a lot of it, is how. So two things really. How is it that the other companies are able to offer more and it's working for them and they're growing and you're constrained and under assault and being poached. So what is it that they're doing that's differently? Is their strategy? Is their execution? Is there something different about them? So one is looking outside and thinking more strategically. And the other one was, what is it that you're not doing in terms of engaging your employees that they're so susceptible to a small, in some cases a fairly small comp increase that they aren't clear that they're part of a very different kind of company. A company that's up to something, a company that has a unique culture, a company with a great boss, a company with a great environment. And so why is that even the focus? So that ended up being more about the conversation about shifting.

Look, I, I agree. You know, one of our clients was telling me the problem with remote work is my life doesn't change if I leave the company. Right. My, my email changes. Everything else stays the same.

Yeah. You still go over to the same corner of the house where you do your work all day.

That's right. You know, I worked at a company for about two. I worked there for probably seven months longer than I wanted to because they were seven minute wait, seven minutes away from my house. Right. So the commute was ridiculous. It was amazing. It was fantastic. So. And I like the people where people were good. I should have left there. Right. But I stuck around for seven months longer because it was an easy commute. What if there is no commute? It was no commute.

I had the exact same thing for a number of years. I'm like, I work in this place, it's 10 minutes from my house and all the likely jobs that I'm going to have are like an hour plus away. Do I really want to do that?

That's right. And so you think about what keeps.

You out of company.

I love the people. The people are great. The coffee, the commute is simple. I made friends at work. We go out for, for, we go out for pizza once a week. But if that starts to dissolve. Yeah, it's just too easy, right? It's, it's really just too easy. So it's, it's really hard to do. It's hard to create a culture remotely. You know, how do you do that? Now it's working, right? Because Airbnb's gone remote and Shopify has gone remote. You know, there are companies that have gone remote. And by the way, you know, I.

Come from the sales background.

We've always been remote, right. You know, you don't want a sales guy in the office all the time. You want them out and about, you know, in the field doing their stuff. But you know, you, you show up, you, you, you wanted them in for.

The Monday morning sales meeting, you wanted to turn in orders on Friday, right? That in the classic sense, that's what it is, right?

You know, you're on the road anymore, you're on the road three days a week, you come, whatever it is, right? And you know, but I think that the, your, your, you know, the roundtable that you did, creating a culture over zoom, right? Virtually, it's done, it's being done today. And but what you have to do is do it differently. And I think that, you know, going back to recruiting just for a second, you got to make sure. So part of why, part of why we're in a, in an exciting time is that three years ago or two years ago, you had to be all things to all people, right? J.P. morgan, let's, let's move the clock ahead. Three months from now, they're not, no one's going to J.P. morgan unless they want to work in an office, right? Three years ago or two years ago, oh, no one wants to come back in. I wanna, I nervous. Oh, that's gone now, right? So all of a sudden they're actually telling their in house recruiting team or the recruiters, only find me people that want to work in the office. It's really, really that simple. Shopify, on the other hand, is saying, only find me people that want to work remotely. You know, so it's actually a very, very interesting time where, where companies get to sort of think about what they want to be when they grow up and hire the right people. Right? Because hey, look, if I'm worried about culture, then don't hire people that require a culture. Or hey, here's the culture. Or hey, I'm gonna let people work from remotely, but we all get together once a month. So I need you to be X, Y, whatever that is, right? You get to decide the company that you want to build. And by the way, getting back to the person who talked about investing, that's why when I was talking about, you know, outsourcing the entry level roles in a company, it's because, hey, we've decided that we're gonna prioritize the mid, the mid. The, the management level. Right. I want to make sure that I'm, I'm compensating them as much as possible and not because I'm t. I'm spending time teaching people along the way.

Yeah, well, you know, the thing we see are seeing right now is a mix of things, right? There are, there are companies that have mostly in place like they're delivering services, they're performing things, they've got location based workforces. But some of those companies that also have management leadership teams who are less location dependent and they're ending up being able to recruit from everywhere. But those people don't always feel connected to the operation. So the operations are happening in physical locations and then leadership is dispersed. And so we see a mix of that kind of thing. Then we have companies that are all in person and all dispersed. And I think you're right that, that how do we create culture and create something unique and connect when it's mostly like this is also though challenged those all remote companies by the fact that not everybody has like extra space. You know, I have a home. That's because my kids are grown and that kind of thing my stage of life, I have extra space around the house. But we'd known people for the last little bit and even now who struggle with where do I work, right. So they want a flexible place or some other thing that they could go to to get some work done even if it's not necessarily around everybody else. So having that, I would agree.

Look, you know, I think history will tell us what the optimal balance was or what the optimal balance is. Is it, is it three days a week? Is it two days a week? Is it, you know, three days a week for most people, but one day a week for some. Is it, you know, two weeks? Is it 10 days a month? You pick the 10 days, like history will figure out, because each company is going to sort of run their own, you know, their own trial, you know, to figure out what's easiest, what's best. You know, the answer is living, you know, in the Bay Area, the traffic is horrendous. Unless you live in a very expensive neighborhoods where the offices are, you're going to spend an hour plus commuting. Who wants to spend an hour plus commuting?

Ratchet. Yeah.

You know, no one really wants to do that. You know, I, I, you know, the number of times I've gone on an airplane for a one hour meeting, I, I don't even, I can't even count how many times now. Is that efficient? No. Yeah. Is it?

I don't, I think things probably gone away now. Right. I get on an airplane all the time now, but it's to meet for a day or two. It's not for a one hour meeting.

Yeah, that's right. So you're going to fill your docket up. It's going to be, you know, but by the way, people really appreciate you coming out there and meeting them now, but we all know it's not as efficient. So look, I think it's going to come back slowly, slowly, slowly. Look, the recession has really not helped returning things back to normal. Right. So, you know, we, we survived on Zoom for meetings and quarterly get togethers, and now, gee, if I want to cut something out, maybe we'll keep the quarterly get togethers quarterly, because we were planning to do them every other month, you know, once Covid's over. But you know what, do I really want to drop all that money, you know, to bring everyone together every other month? Let's just keep it the way it is now. Hey, Bill, do you really want to go fly across the country? Can you just do it on Zoom?

Because.

Let's go save some money. So I think that companies are going to get to figure out where they want to invest.

Yeah. So we definitely see that now. And even in traditional things. So I have a friend who's got an automotive business and multiple locations, and so he's got rent and he's got equipment and advertising and things like that, and he's got the staff and he recruits people to work in those places. But a couple of weeks ago, my windshield was broken at a hotel by the hotel garage. And so they're going to pay for it and, but they couldn't find somebody to fix the Windshield there in the limited time I was there. So I'm in Canada and they break the thing and I, so I drive down and we try in a couple that we're on a road trip and it's not until I get to Arizona that somebody goes. But I still don't take it to a garage because I'm leading a Zoom call all day with a team in New Zealand. And on that day, a technician comes, two different technicians come to my hotel and they replace the windscreen on my car in the parking lot of the hotel. And then somebody else comes and calibrates all the sensors and stuff that make the self driving features work and that kind of thing. So all that stuff happened, that's auto mechanic work and of a technical nature. And it all happened at my hotel location or at my home or office or wherever I would have happened to have been that day while I was doing other things. Right. While I was leading a Zoom session with a team in New Zealand.

You know, as my wife likes to say, we're all going to get really fat because we're just going to sit around in our homes, you know, we're going to walk up, we're going to walk either up the steps or down the steps to our office. Everything comes to us, you know, like the movie Wall E, right? You know, we, we, we order doordash to bring our food. We, you know, Uber takes us, you know, two blocks away because who wants to walk? We don't, we don't walk to the office. We don't park. You know, what was it? There was a movie a couple years ago called Super Size Me, right? It was about a guy, right? And he said the average, the average American walks 2,000 steps a day. That was like the average American and was. Because not exercising, it was walking to the car, driving to work, getting out of the car and walking to your office and walking around the office was 2,000 steps a day. Imagine what that number dropped to in the pandemic.

Yeah, well. And yet, so for a while, you know, we were all home and nobody was wearing pants and we're all in our slippers all day long and that kind of thing and not going out. But then we started to go out and do more kinds of things and, and I went on a road trip this month instead of an international trip because I got sick of my flight cancellations and delays. But I ended up surfing several dozen times over the last little bit. So I got in a lot of extra exercise and even now I could finish most of a Day with a session with a client and then go out, or I could do a day of podcast interviews and then I could go out to the beach and, you know, and do my thing. So we are getting an interesting blend of lifestyle improvements from people who've found a way to kind of take advantage of the things.

You know, if you ask me, let's go back to the job mobility and the job hopper and the. And the prioritization of work life balance, right? Because these are the things that we as, as CEOs and business leaders have to deal with, right? We have to deal with the fact that the teams that we're creating want to have a work life balance. They want to have more available time. They want those things. They prioritize those things. You know, we prioritize. You know, we all grew up in a world that said, all right, there's nothing that money can't solve. Well, what if that's not true anymore, Right? What if it's just not true? You know, I saw a great statistic that there was some survey done. Like some crazy number of people would rather not have a job than be in a bad job. Now, that's either indicative of the fact that they know how easy it is to get a job, or they're living at home and what's the difference in terms of overall costs, et cetera. But I think these are interesting things, right? The whole, you know, just shut up and work, right? Here's more money.

Go do your job.

Shut up. At the same time, I'm kind of envious about that, right? Aren't you envious of people that want to make a difference? They want to get meaning out of their job. You know, we spend more time working than we do not working. So, yeah, it makes sense to want to be at a company that's fulfilling those things. At the same time, you know, I heard a great interview with a CEO who said, yeah, here's the culture I built. I decided I'm an engineer, I don't really like people. I'm an introvert. So I surrounded my company with other people just like me. We come into the office, we code, we get our job done, we go home. Like, no beer parties, no pizza. Yeah. But again, that's the culture that this CEO created.

And I find it's fine.

It's really, really fascinating to watch. You know, what is the culture that you want to create? And I think the message I think I'm delivering really is, you know, in this scaling podcast is really figure out what you want to be you don't have to be all things to all people, but really, really figure out what type of company you want to have, what are your priorities, and make sure that you're finding candidates that fit those, that, that fit those, that fit those criteria, that fits those priorities, that aligns with what you're trying to accomplish.

And by the way, just because a.

Person looks good on paper, if they don't want to work remotely, then don't hire them.

Right.

Because they're, they're not. And you're only remote, you know, only in person. Like it's not going to be a fit.

Yeah. Find the right fit. So I hear a couple of things in this. One is the workforce is changing. Seems obvious, right? Recruiting is changing, worker habits are changing. I hear an opportunity to decide what kind of company you want to end up and then start to tie your recruiting practices to that. I also hear making sure that your culture is a match for that and is expressive of what you want and gets you out of the just dollar for dollar trade of time and money so that there's more of a connection to the person, the job. And then I also hear recognizing the reality that people have become very comfortable jumping jobs and setting aside your complaint or moral thoughts about moral judgments about it and actually dealing with it, like creating some picture or some incentive of the future that keeps them around for a while that extends what might be the predisposition to just jump off. Right. I, I had somebody working for me a few years ago who sent me a text one day and said, I can't do this.

That's right. Amazing, right?

And I had somebody else on a senior position who gave a two week notice. I'm like, in reality, they worked with me in a longer transition, but for a critical role like whoever. There's not like a two week notice in a policy manual somewhere that isn't like a thing. That's a thing that we made up in our heads, but exists. And so how do you want to your employees to think of you? How do you want to think of them? How do you want to create that relationship?

I'm hearing a lot about that.

Yeah, I, yeah, I think you did a, you did a great recap there. You know, what we've tried to do internally is really establish here's where I want you to be in a year. Right. Here's the next milestone. Here's the next milestone. Here's the next milestone. So when we did like employee reviews in December, it was, look, here's your January increase and here's your July increase. Like, I'm letting you know, if you stick around, here's what's going to happen in July.

Yeah.

Why is that good? It's good because I don't want you picking up the phone. You know, we used to. I used to have this expression that you as a salesperson, you picked up the phone, meaning you took the call from a recruiter. When you question the probability of success, right. You left the company when you recognize that the probability of succeeding in the new company outweighed the risk of leaving your old company. But here's the interesting thing. You know, we used to talk about candidates as active and passive, right? Is. I think these two worlds are really going to blend very, very quickly, right? If everyone is leaving their job. And again, I don't use the word everyone. You know, if people are leaving their jobs, on average, every pick a number, 24 months, 18 months, you know, I don't know what the average is, right? There's some average number in your organization every 36 months, whatever that is, you got to be saying to yourself then you know that, hey, that's going to happen. Right? So what am I doing? What. How am I. How am I setting myself up for that known reality, right? Or as a candidate? Does that mean that they're always looking for the next opportunity? So is. Is, you know, the open for. Open for work used to be a LinkedIn, you know, a LinkedIn monocle, right? You could say I'm open. Open for work. Isn't everyone open for work? Right? You know, think. Like I said earlier, it's just too easy. It's too easy to say, hey, Bill, I have an opportunity. Are you interested in it? No, not really. Oh, look, it's a gig. I need you for like five hours a week, et cetera. So, you know, I think part of the culture thing that I think we're gonna. What I want to see happen is we.

We.

I. I've talked about it internally. We haven't been able to execute on it yet. Maybe no one's wanted it. Is. I really thought that an 80%. I called it the 80% job. You know, we're. Let me break it down for a moment. I think people are very, very connected, right? They're. They're overly connected. They're. They're scared. They get a slack message, they gotta reply to it. And everyone's nervous and checking emails and all this other time because it's this, there's this preconceived notion that if you're not in the Office, you should be connected all the time or someone's gonna assume you're not working, right? Again, this fallacy that if you're in the office, you're working and if you're not in the office, you're not working, right? And I come from sales and I didn't know, I said, you don't care how much I work, as long as I bring in the numbers, what do you care what I'm doing with my time? I could work for one hour, work for 100 hours, what's the difference, right? I think that, you know, if, if I said to you, hey, Bill, you're an incredibly experienced individual, but guess what? I have a role that is 80. I'm going to pay you 80% of this, of this salary, right? Here's the salary, but it's 8. I'm going to give you 80%. 80% bonus, 80% salary, 80% stock options, 80% vacation, all that other stuff. But guess what? You only have to work 80% of the time. So I expect you to work. You pick it. It's 32 hours a week, or you know, three days a week, four days, it's four days a week, you pick it. You want to work Monday, Tuesday, half of Wednesday, half of Thursday, Friday, you never want to work Friday, etc. And I think that as we start to create these, hey, look, we have this mode here. And look, if you found people that wanted that job, what a great job, right? Hey, you know, if you, because now when someone offers you a job, they're going to say, hey, Bill, do you want to come work for me? Well, I work 80 hours, I work 80% here. Well, this job is a full time.

Job because I don't care, I really.

Don'T care whether you work 80% or 100%. I actually care about what you get done. So why don't I change the metric of what you're getting done and make sure that whatever you can get done to get done in 80% of the time.

You know, I hear a couple of things there. One is, as an employer, are you asking for specific kinds of results to be produced or are you looking for time? You want somebody to staff a desk and smile at people or pick up the phone, right? Those are very different kinds of things. Paying for specific results. You may maybe don't care as much about time. But then through all of these things, where's the team connection time? Are there days? This is what we're seeing and we're reading about right now in the news with Apple. And with others they're saying, okay, maybe there's a few days we need to align on. Like everybody's got to be in on Tuesday and Wednesday and so on. But you could choose the other days that you have and get flexible. So creating some places where people are, can work, you know, at the same time synchronously, and then other places where they can just focus on the results. And that's different though than people that have to staff a desk, answer a phone, like hit specific time based things, you know, make dinner, happen in a restaurant, etc. Right. Team connection, time, specific time constraints and then results. And if you're thinking about just time for money, that's a different conversation in many, many jobs right now. And then the other thing I think I heard in the background is as a leader, if you are interacting with people 247 and not managing any balance and shift out, you're probably impairing your own creativity and quality of work and.

That kind of thing.

But you're having a huge ripple across the company and fostering that anxiety where people feel like they have to be connected, have to monitor their thing and then they never really have a date night and they really never get a good night's sleep and they're always like, all their family time is effed up because they're always monitoring slack or what, you know, or whatever your, your communication channels are.

That's right. And, and what I was thinking about with this like 80% thing and, and the, the, my, my framework for it really was my wife, my wife worked at a very cool son was born. Her CEO said to her, look, you know, I watched my sisters rise up the ranks at these big companies and then leave when they had kids because they couldn't work out the balance, you know, and I needed to make it work for you. What do you want to do? She's like, I want to work four days a week. It goes great. And he created this model where she worked four days a week. And by the way, she probably got.

More done or, or they work all, all mornings. I've had people.

Yeah. And so she never felt like, hey, look, I don't work on this day, I am not working on this day. And she was able to really compartmentalize herself and, and not do it like, oh yeah. And by the way, she did check her email. She still did it. But there was none of, none of this, like, oh my God, you know, I, I don't want people to be frantic if they're, see if the bo. If Their manager is frantic. They shouldn't be frantic. Because the answer is this work life balance that people want that, they want that. Now, whether they're in the office or not in the office, whether they're hybrid full time in an office or remote. How do you do that? How do you create this work life balance? Because I think that what's, you know, we started to see and we track every month and we do a recruiter index every month where we sort of survey recruiters, get their sentiment, get their candidate segment, check their workloads, what industries are hot, it's. Etc. And we started to see candidates were saying they're leaving their job for compet. You know, they're leaving their job for compensation, but they're taking a job for benefits. And what's happening is that they used to be they left their job for compensation, that they took their job for remote work. Remote is now a benefit. Hey, what benefits do you have at your company? Oh, one of our benefits. We have a healthcare plan. We have a 401k with matching. We allow full remote work. We, you know, one day, like that's now part of a benefits package, right? It's becoming part of the conversation now. Oh, I need more X. All right, no problem. We'll add that to your benefits package. But your benefit is you get to work from remote anytime you want, you.

Get to do whatever it is, et cetera. You know, there's, there's something fascinating about that morphing into. And we saw the number, we saw candidates talking more about benefits. They're not talking about better health care. They're saying that now part of benefit is what's my work life balance? What benefits are you giving me? Oh, we allow you to take off.

Time for, you know, please.

Our culture says please go take off time for kids. Showcase your children again. I find it fascinating.

Yeah, well, we've talked about so many things and we're gonna lose everybody's attention in our time slot here in just a second. I think the workplace is evolving. And then if the style of work and the worker is evolving and your recruiting processes are not evolving to go along with it, you're going to have a real problem. So that's where tools like recruiter.com take advantage of the changing workforce, the changing recruiting environment. So you want to check out Evan's company, recruiter.com there and, and see what's relevant for you because it's got to evolve along with it eventually. If you're doing in person work, you're going to interview someone in person. But for an awful lot of jobs and a lot of things, you're going to want to use a lot of online tools to streamline that process so that you can recruit and hire fast and and take advantage of that. So all that and more recruiter.com reminder to all our folks and our listeners viewers that our scaling up tools, our programs, all that stuff@scalingcoach.com now five years of a show like this every week. So lots of things around, everything to do with people, strategy, execution, cash and leadership. You what you're doing to create all the good things and the bad things in your company right now and how to shift that to make it easier, have more fun and enjoy the process of scaling, growing the company. All that and more. Big shout out and thanks to author and creator of our whole scaling up framework, Vern Harnish, my friend and mentor and to Wanda Mitchell who produces our show, gets our guests scheduled and gets things out the door every week. The folks at Podfly Productions who are editing our audio and making us look and sound good all the time. So Poply Productions, Albert Burge and the team over there and want to remind everyone to like subscribe, download, give us a review if you'd like to do that. If you want to drop us a note, give us some feedback, you'll get that at info at scalinggoach. Com. That's an email that works for us is info at scalingcoach.

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