Tali Rapaport — People and Time

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective and really well done. I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G. Again, that's doxatant.com Bill G. One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G. Check it out. Today we're talking about People in Time. Hi again everybody. My name is Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast. Our show comes to you every week with something to do with scaling your business and your leadership and getting your stuff together along the way. I'm joined today with Tali Rapoport. Tali is somebody that I've met through an indirect I'm sitting on an airplane and I forget where I was going somewhere to somewhere. And I'm sitting next to this engaging young woman from Tali's team, Alyssa, who like started talking to me about their company and what they did and Tali and I'm like, oh, that sounds like a great topic for our show. And so we deal all the time with people and getting attracting the right people and doing a better job with it and dealing with whether the economy favors the employer or the employee at any time. People are by far the hardest thing. And then all of that, like it takes time to do stuff and they have a great solution for that. And so that's why Tali's on the show. You should know Tali is the co founder of this company called puck careerpuck.com and they have a people first recruiting CRM. They tell stories that helps people connect with brands. She'll tell it better than I do, but she's a past VP of product at Lyft for about four years and she is a Harvard grad. And where I'm going tomorrow actually to be with a group of our CEOs learning about how to scale valuation. And so she's been featured and talked about in fast companies, 100 most created people. And I'm sure there's lots of other groovy things. She'll also talk to you about being a mom of twins, I'm a grandpa Five months old is my granddaughter, Izzy.

Oh, that's great. Five months is a, is a sweet spot. They're not moving too much yet.

Not on her own. She's very vocal, has a lot to say about a lot of things. And watching our son and daughter in law like navigate being parents for the first time and us be grandparents way younger than I thought I was going to be is a fascinating thing.

Well, congratulations. Grandparents are great. They get the fun times without as much of the day to day lifting.

So, so true. It's funny. Our son, he's the. What? He's the principal research scientist for a company called Midjourney AI and two days before the baby arrives, they release their like version five of the software. I'm like, oh my God, you must have just been so stressed. And then dealing with the after release kinds of things that'll happen.

Yeah, yeah. Thankfully the baby. Babies evolve on different timescale than releases. Hopefully he's getting some sleep.

On their own time. Yeah, they're managing pretty well. I'm up in Seattle today. Tali, where are you right now?

I'm in San Francisco.

You're in San Francisco, where I normally live. I've been here more in Seattle because the grandparent duties and then tomorrow Harvard. But let's talk about you and your background and that kind of thing. And you've got great stories to share as we identified in preparing for the show. And um, I'd love for you to, to start talking about working at Lyft and what you learned. Cause I think all of that kind of plays into this.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks Bill. Thanks for having me. And, and glad the, the stars aligned and. And you ended up sitting next to Alyssa, so.

She's awesome. She, she gets, she gets a little a dinner at least out of.

So I think at Lyft, I was there at a time when the company onboarded a million drivers. And so helping those drivers get onto the platform.

Wait, wait, wait, pause. Yeah, when the company onboarded a million drivers. Right. Like wrap your head around that. And I like, I had a company that was grappling recently with hiring 400 people a month and then not losing so many of them so they didn't have to keep doing that always. And that was like way beyond what most of our companies do. And I have another company right now that's intending to hire 1,000 people over a year. Right. But that's nothing compared to a million.

Yeah. And at that point it's almost 1% of the labor force in America. And so you just get this, you know, it's everything. It's super important to the company, onboarding these drivers and their experience. And, you know, one of the things you do at products, a lot of my job is to try and understand how to make this experience better. And so I ended up talking to a lot of drivers. And there were two things that stuck with me. One was so many of them were trying to figure out what they wanted to do. There was this idea that 9 out of 10 folks you would talk to were not driving because they were going to have a career in driving, were driving because they were taking care of a family member. They wanted some flexibility in their lives, and they were really trying to figure out what they wanted to do. And so I had all these conversations with people and I kept asking, so how are you going to figure it out? And people kept saying to me, well, I'm going to talk to someone I know. And then they would mention a friend, a person they'd overlapped with. And it was just. First of all, it made me super passionate about the labor market, but it also made me realize how much people navigate the world through the people they know. It's not like they were saying, we're going to go to indeed, and we're going to put in the salary we're looking for and have this really systematic approach. That's just not how people figure things out in life. And so just hearing people talk about the human side of looking for work made me really passionate about working on recruiting technology. And that led to Puck. And there's one other thing in there that was really interesting. People weren't sitting down and looking for work at a computer. I know that sounds really, really obvious, but actually they were doing it on their phone. Unsurprisingly, they were exploring their career on their phone. And, you know, 70% of people actually start the career search process on their phones today. And if you look at the options companies give you, even just to apply to a job, it is not geared towards doing it on a phone. I mean, you'll see companies I would talk to folks about it, they were like, oh, well, I couldn't finish the application. I didn't have my resume on my phone because I was on a break, getting gas, or I wasn't anywhere near a computer, and they just couldn't apply to a job. And there is a huge gap between the ability of someone to sit down at a computer and finish an application and what sort of employers today are still asking for folks to do. And so I think those two Ideas. How do you make something that really works for someone on a phone where they can scan a QR code, where they can use people they know to help them find work? Those are sort of two of the ideas that just got us thinking. Hey, there's gotta be. There's an opportunity to do things better.

I think it's really useful and good to remember because there's often a significant generational gap between employer and employee, especially as it goes larger. And I do a ton of things today on my phone, but I do way more on my phone than most people my age do. And if I look at younger people that I'm hiring and interacting with, it's all mobile, mobile, first and last, like mobile and in between. And we were staying at a friend's house a couple days ago and they. One of their kids was gone and off and they left behind their laptop and their iPad. And I'm like, how do they go for a week without those things? Oh, they just have their phone. It's fine. Like, they don't need anything else. They don't need a whole slew of devices with. They just have their phone. And it's, it's a really interesting thing today, especially if you came from and grew up using a computer, if you were Windows 95 user or before, right? Yeah, it's hard sometimes to wrap your head around.

Yeah, I think it's hard to wrap your head around. And also even the experience of folks where they sit down at a place and they have great wi fi when they're in an office in an environment is really different than someone who is stopping at a gas station to apply to a job. You know, where they're on their data connection, you know, the page may or may not load. You know, all of that. You have a different data service. And so I think, I think there's still an unsolved gap there.

Well, I think getting in the head of your target, whether it's a customer prospect or an employee prospect, like doing things in their medium, in their timeframe and that kind of thing is, is. And what's normal for you? Like, I see people walking around social situations and everyone everywhere. I was looking at a table across from us at a restaurant a couple nights ago and I saw the kids sneaking look at their phone under the table and I. And then I looked over at the other side of the restaurant and I saw a young couple out for like date night or whatever. And they're both like, look at their phones. I'm like, oh my God. Like, look at Each other. Like, are you, are you texting somebody? He's really cute.

I definitely have that reaction when I, when I saw, I really like technology and. But when I saw the ads that Apple put out for the new virtual reality headset where the father get worried at his kid through, through his goggles, I thought, seems a little dystopian.

That's going to happen. It's going to happen and they'll get really different. I remember being in Tel Aviv in the 90s and I had long been a mobile phone user. You know, car phones and pocket phones and the brick phone and all that stuff. And I looked at a table at this cafe and there's a group of like, I don't know, seven or eight young Israeli women and, and I'm like trying to eavesdrop on them because I speak Hebrew and or at least I understand really well. And I'm like, oh, they're hardly talking, like somebody will say something. And everybody went, look back their phone, all of them were texting people. And it was the first time, it was awfully very early. And I'm like, how like it's just mind boggling. They're all at cafe texting other people. And Israel had been early in having essentially low cost or no cost texting far beyond like everyone else. And so it had just taken off like it was a way to communicate.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that even there's places in the U.S. i'm in San Francisco, there's pretty great cell service. But one of the things that is super helpful about Lyft is to take it outside of just the commute hours and places that are longer trips or often it's a replacement for getting a rental car. And so you will see a lot of rural usage and folks are looking for jobs in all sorts of places. In fact, there's this interesting thing that happened on that topic of geography during the pandemic. A lot of people moved, right? They left cities and they went to different places. And one of the big issues you found in the labor market is the remote workers moved. But what about the doctors and the teachers and the veterinarians? The people that are sort of, their jobs are never going to be remote. There's a huge portion of that that's in person. And so you saw these pockets of America be really difficult to recru in. You can see it today. There are places where you just can't hire a vet, you can't hire a hair colorist, you can't hire a nurse. And they're often in rural spots or locations that are hard to fill. And that is a great example of you're not going to have as great and consistent WI fi. And so there's a real location component that was top of mind at Lyft that I think now that we work with companies hiring, we see, we see it all the time. Like how do you deal with that? Really hard to fill places and you just need a little bit of a mismatch. You just need one missing doctor in town or one missing nurse to end up sort of feeling it in the system. The other interesting thing about Lyft that I saw is the role of recruiting has changed. Originally a recruiter was just someone that helped a candidate through the interview process. But because there are these places today where you don't have enough people to fill open roles, a recruiter's job is now also in sales and marketing. They're no longer just doing one thing. And I think at Lyft a lot of that was built up. The marketing team helped on driver onboarding. But how many recruiting teams have a marketing team that's attached to them? You know, and so this, you end up in this place where there's, you're playing a little bit of whack a mole with time, you know, because the root cause of why folks can't don't have enough time to make it through their process and fill their open roles is often because there's just too much to do. And so I think there's a lot of like root cause of. How do you, how do you figure this out when the job descriptions really changed?

Well, you know, I, I noticed two things, both in my own experience hiring and then with our clients on just an ongoing basis. The first one is not enough candidates. Like there's times when you really want and, and you've got crickets, no, nobody answering and applying for your job and, and then the other one is you get a deluge of response and it's just overwhelming. I, I posted an ad after the Great Recession, roughly 2010, and it wasn't for any particular fancy job. You know, one of the jobs on our team and we got like 800 some replies and my brain went into like, oh crap, how am I going to deal? How do I even sort through all that? And, and that forced us to develop processes, to score and evaluate all the things. And because we hadn't built it in, we had to hire a contractor to help us sort through things. And, but later, now we'll engineer to get a thousand or more applications for a job, but we will then score and sort through them like, super rapidly.

Yeah.

And then you get people who, like, are applying just scattershot for things that don't even apply versus having people, you stand out and getting really powerful applications because they hear and they connect to something real.

Yeah, yeah. I think. Well, you're. I'm not surprised. You get a thousand applications, you've got a great presence. And I'm sure a ton of folks hear the content and think this would be a fun thing to work at, but a lot of organizations are not in the content business. They're not in. They're not media. Right, right. And so think about what their ad is. It's like, you know, I don't know if you remember these 501 jeans, Levi's 501 jeans pocket. When I was a kid, this was a really popular button fly.

501. Exactly.

Levi's 501. Exactly. And I'm in San Francisco and I look at Levi's and I'm like, there was a. They really nailed it. The ads. That's an ad. The ad is, you know, there's a secret pocket for a key. You know, there's something exciting about these jeans. The way people advertise jobs. It would be if the ad showed the little label in the jeans with the care instructions. I mean, it's the opposite of a traditional ad. Right. You know, you're advertising kind of the fine print. And I think that works okay when you have a deluge. When you're. When you're bill and you've got a fat. You figured out how to nail a thousand applicants for every open roll. But if you're a. If you're a restaurant or, you know, a gym or a hospital in a rural town, who doesn't have enough applicants advertising with the, like, you know, care instructions on the jeans, that's. That's a tough. A tough situation if you don't have enough people.

Well, our client that's in big hiring mode right now is. Is a part of the Crunch Fitness Group. And. And they are doing a fantastic job. But they're. They're selling the brand, right? They're selling the brand, the experience. They're talking about what's it like to work for Crunch? How's Crunch different from every other gym out there? And what's it like to be part of our tribe? And the operator is called Undefeated Tribe. And they. It's just different. Like. And they're selling that different with real people and real stories. And you can actually tell, okay, this is like, I can connect. It's not just some bullet points that don't connect anything to me. Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Story, emotion, feeling, reality, authenticity.

Right, yeah, that. That's. That sounds right. That's what. That's what motivates people to. To do things. And if you kind of line up the motivation, you end up in a better spot. In business of recruiting or in any aspect of your business, you kind of fix the goals, fix the incentives, and then all the pieces sort of fall in line.

Incidentally, that's why we do our show live. I like the pressure and the reality of it. So I say stupid things. I mix up things. We have technical hiccups sometimes, but 95% of the time it works out. And it brings an immediacy and a reality to the conversation that you don't get if you try to script every. Everything and edit it back. Crazy, right?

That's really cool. I didn't know that. That's really interesting. Well, I'm not surprised. You're a pro at this, sounds like. And you're also, you know, you're prolific. You've been doing it for a while, so you've probably honed your craft over time.

Well, if you listen to recordings of me As a radio DJ in my 20s, it's a very different.

Really.

I have compassion for my younger self. I'm like, oh, my God, you're such a dork.

I have. Yeah, I think. I think a lot about my. My journey and. And how I started and kind of got into this compared to. To where I am today.

So take. Use that talk about Professor Peter Rogers and your water study at Cambridge, and that's a good place to go.

Yeah. So, yeah, back to. Back to your trip tomorrow. Actually back to the future. So. You know, I originally started studying water when I was an undergrad. And one of the things that was interesting, I read an article one day in a newspaper that there were fish that were switching. There were. They're like hormones in the water were changing the fish patterns or changing. It could be an article out of today. I mean, I think chemical runoff is as popular in 2023 as it must must have been in 2004. But, you know, and so I wondered. Boston is this huge pharmaceutical town and a huge medical town. There's a ton of treatment of patients. And I wanted to. I went to see if there was runoff. And the thing that I was looking at is if there were antidepressants in the water. And the reason this is really Interesting. And the reason I was looking for antidepressants is because, you know, in a lot of treatment of people that are ill, they often accompany the treatment with an antidepressant. And so the levels were supposed to be really high around the, you know, the sort of metro areas with a lot of hospitals and Boston has a lot of hospitals. And I loved working with Peter Rogers. He had looked at water in much more dire situations than Boston. He had looked at it in India. He looked around the world and, and worked with the Army Corps of Engineers. And so I ended up going to a friend whose parent lived near school and asking to test the water supply around their house. Then their parents were like, yes, but only if you tell us everything you find, Which I agree to. And, and tested the water supply and we did find levels of antidepressants, but we didn't do enough of a repeat. I think when you do one study, you actually need to go and take 10, 20 samples to get statistical niffians. So we didn't write an article about it or anything like that. But I just became totally fascinated in how do you take what's going on in the world and, and discover opportunities. In this case, I was looking for research opportunities. How do you stay current with what's going on and use that to inform where you look for opportunities? I think I was lucky to find that opportunity. Interestingly, it's now resurfaced as a really popular topic today. But I think in business, I think about this a lot. It's really hard to make time for the things that are important but not urgent when you're running a business that's scaling. But if you only do the things that are urgent, then you never pick your head up to see what's important and to take the time to see where there might be opportunities that you weren't thinking about. And so one of my changes over the last 20 years has been to make sure to make that time for, for sort of, you know, looking around in the world and staying really informed. And you know, as I became a mom, this became even more back to the twin mom. It became, you know, even more important.

So we want to talk about twin moms. We want to talk about how, what you notice. But I think it's interesting, like, you know, you see a pattern like, like observing what's happening in the world gives openings for moves with strategy and interacting people. But the thing that you're most observing is harder than studying fish and rivers. It's studying people which are the weirdest, most Difficult to grapple with individuals, especially as they get older and they get nuttier. Like kids are fairly simplistic. Right. How old are your twins?

They're seven.

Seven. Oh yeah. That's kind of cool. Age seven, eight. I started to really enjoy our kids that age because we could say, hey, we're going to Tahoe this weekend, so just pack for three days and bring some warm things. And so just remember that three underwear, three whatever. And, and, and they could like take care of stuff. And it was like remarkable.

It does feel remarkable given where they came.

Yes. There was no more packing strollers and car seats and every other thing and inspecting it. Like I could just do a quick check of what they had at the end of it and go, okay, you're missing your ski bibs. Go get them.

Like, yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. No, there's like, there's also a good thing you build confidence as a kid when you do stuff on your own, like, like packing, you know, or even walking to the grocery store. It's that my, I was talking to some of the teachers in my kids school and I think one of the things they've seen as a trend is kids have had less independence over time in the last, you know, 15, 20 years. Every year kids kind of get a little bit more. We get a little bit more strict with how much freedom we give our kids. And I think one of the things that seems so important is to have areas where they can be independent and demonstrate mastery. Like packing.

Yeah, well, like all those things are kind of basic beginner things. Talk to us. Well, I, we'll come back to the video thing in just a second. But talk about twin moms since we're on that subject. Right. Like what have you noticed and how has that affected.

That changed?

Because I think like a. Nor like I accomplished some things long before I had kids in business. And then I had the kids and I went through some of the things and then all of a sudden when new business problems cropped up, I'm like, yeah, I got this. This is nothing compared to worrying about your kids survival. Right. Or being exhausted for a week dealing with a sick kid or.

Yeah, totally. I mean that definitely resonates. I think the other thing that really changed, I remember I was at Lyft. It was, you know, I had my twins and you know, I couldn't understand before I had kids, well, what I would, where the time would go, you know. And then I had kids and all of a sudden, you know, I absolutely had kids to, to, to be with My kids and to spend time with them. And I really. There were a bunch of things I did professionally that I stopped doing. And. And I actually did a better job of hitting my goals. And that was a total.

Because the pressure. Right. The forces of focus that you really.

It totally changed my focus. I think, you know, I maybe cut 10% of the things that I didn't think I needed to do, and I became three times more efficient in the time I was. I was working the rest of the time. And that, yeah, that focus, I mean, I think our most valuable asset is our focus. It's like that's what everyone wants, is our attention. Right. That's what kind of a lot of social media today is geared towards taking and entertainment. And so I think we have to guard it at work. You know, I work and I keep my phone in another room. And, you know, there's all these little things that you do when you're trying to have some uninterrupted work time. And I think that, I think that I. So one change is that I stopped doing some of the things that were less important and I became much more efficient. And then the other thing that changed when I became a parent is I realized because I was focused on efficiency, I started doing these infrastructure projects at work. I started taking time up front to make more efficient time later on. I take time up front to fix something, don't let a broken thing keep going and actually fix it. Take the time to fix it. And that was incredibly important. It's important in technology infrastructure, but it's important for a lot of things in a business to kind of take the time up front to do something. And I saw that and I started applying it to my personal life. And I would all of a sudden do these things that I never thought I had time for before, like exercise, have family photos. And then I really felt like, okay, if I, you know, if I can't find time to exercise, if I can't find time for the basics, I haven't kind of paid my way correctly. And so it felt like a really big win to understand in being more efficient how important it is to prioritize some of the upfront changes that make life work better.

Yeah. You know, it's one. I get overwhelmed with my email all the time. A lot of people get overwhelmed with their email. Right. And. And yet I'll like, click away something instead of unsubscribing it. Right. And so now I just have to click away that same BS tomorrow and the next day, until one day I go, well, maybe I should unsubscribe this list because I do not ever need to hear from these people.

Yeah, yeah. I. Email is one that I, I haven't fully mastered. But my favorite tip on email is to learn all the shortcuts so that you can quickly.

All the keystrokes.

Yeah, all the keystroke shortcuts. I started out using pine. There was no mouse and so I started out losing keyboard shortcuts and now it's a big. I'm a big fan of that. My other personal productivity hack is to look at True Bill and see the things that I have subscriptions to but didn't realize.

I tell our smallest entrepreneurs, here's a clever hack. You can't do this as your company really gets big. But if you've got a lot of SaaS subscriptions on your credit cards for things you're not using anymore, just call your bank and say, hey, I'm concerned about this thing. Would you send me a new credit card? I'm going to tear this one up or I lost it and please send me another one. And they'll cancel that card and issue a new card with a new number and then everything has subscribed to that will have to email you and say, hey, we're missing a card. And you can decide one by one whether, whether you want to keep any of them.

Yeah, that's a. I love that. I unfortunately, without wanting to, had to, to use that when SVB was our bank in March.

So yeah, we had a couple companies with svb.

Yeah. Yeah. We now have many banks, but, but, yeah, or a few. But that was, that was not the things you don't plan to be.

Yeah, I'm not sure we're done with banking issues because we have a lot of empty buildings and those empty buildings are owned by landlords who have loans with banks. And where's that all going to end? That's, that's another conversation.

Yeah, yeah, I agree, that's a hard one. But you know, it's, it's an interesting. I don't have a, I don't know where that one is going to end. But one of the things that I did find, but I do think there's still space to be kind of creative. One of the interesting hacks I've seen companies do where they haven't been able to find full time people or people that want to work as many hours is they've offered unpaid time off and then added one extra or an extra unit of person. They sort of, you know, Offered everyone a little bit more time off and added an extra sort of man in that spot. And in some ways where the businesses couldn't afford, it's been totally budget neutral to them and everyone's happier, they have better retention, things like that. And I, I, it's, of course, an interesting strategy. We've helped some companies think through it, where it's where they had that requirement to be budget neutral and wanted to give everyone more flexibility. I'm waiting for it in the real estate space. Like, where is my option to, you know, rent a. Rent a space where I'm not really on the hook for all five days? So where are we?

Well, that is kind of the we work idea. Like. Yeah, but they're running into some issues now.

Yeah, yeah, right. And I think, you know, we're like, so many companies really hybrid or really leaning into hybrid, which I think is super helpful for a certain type of business. But it is nice to have your own space. I think a lot of the wework space is like, you're in there with other people.

I remember visiting a WeWork space in San Francisco years ago and thinking, wow, this place is really stylish and fun and the energy's cool. And. And then I had them tour me around it and I'm like, okay, so if you wanted to have one of those private offices over there, they're like, oh, yeah, that tiny little glass private office is 2,500amonth. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, there's phone booths that are bigger than that place and you're getting how much for that? So I can go, you know, have your coffee in the other room. I don't know about that.

Like, but it's a tough, the pricing is not quite right, I think, for.

For not a good value always. But people wanted to be there. They created the experience. And I knew a few companies who were like, part of their recruiting strategy was, hey, we work in this place. Come check it out. Right. And the idea that you could do that now recruiting, it's like, hey, you can work from home. Most days you're going to get more candidates than you are if it's, if you've got to come to a place.

Yeah, I, I think. Right. I think location makes a huge difference in where people want to work. One of the other things I learned is just how people are expecting different things from their office space. It seems like one of the bigger trends is that where there's corporate offices, people want to have collaboration in the office and outside of the Office. So cubicles and private single person offices are a little less common in, in some industries are not needed. And so I think, you know, not being afraid to make the case for change.

It's all got to change now rapidly. I mean, I know lawyers who love their offices in downtown San Francisco now and who work entirely from home and on the road now and almost never go into those offices anymore. Right. So much moved to zoom in so many realms or some equivalent and people have started work now. You still, there's still time and, and when people come together like oh my God, it's so great to see people and yeah. And some businesses require. Right. You can't have a rental car business or a hotel or restaurant without coming physically. You can't have a doctor's office. Not everything can be done by telemedicine. Right. That's a terrible mole. You should get, cut that thing off. You're not going to go in the other room with a, a sharp blade, snip it yourself.

That's, that's scary, truly.

Right, so let's talk a little bit about career puck for a minute. Like so you're building and helping to market the companies and the jobs and that kind of thing. Talk about that work and what you did and how that's evolved and what you saw with video, audio and.

Yeah, yeah, we're, we're basically. I mean, that's exactly right. We're like a marketing front end on top of an applicant tracking system. So we are the way that companies kind of market their open roles and then how they communicate with candidates through that process. And one of the things that we did at the beginning is we tested out a few different technologies for communicating with candidates. You know, video interviews were on the rise and we tested video. And one of the things that our companies wanted to do was to create content to help market their open roles. We help them actually kind of produce these better job ads, ad units rather, and then cut it up into lots of different jobs. And so we tested video and we tested audio and it was totally fascinating. Basically 95% of people are happy to hop on a call to talk about their role. I mean almost everyone is very comfortable to have a 15 minute conversation about themselves and their own open roll. And if you ask folks to hop on a video, you know, that might drop to 10 to 20% and, and then they need to schedule it to make sure that the lighting is right and the environment and they got their clothes clean that day. And you know, it's just a really big ask for folks. And when we asked, went back to candidates and said, okay, well what's important to you? Do you want a video of your co workers or what do you really, you know what, what's really important to you to. If the job, if the role was in person, they absolutely wanted to see the location, but that was really pictures. They didn't need a video, but they sort of felt like video versus audio. You know, it was about a wash and so it was really interesting and I think some of that is that people are not looking for actors. And you know, if you go out to the Internet saying you look at the quality of, of the media that's being produced on TikTok, I'm, you know, on TikTok or I'm not on all of these services but Snapchat or Be Real, you know, we see the content that's being produced, the authenticity is really high, the production value is really low. You know, people are used to very low production value video and in their personal life. And some of the super produced videos that folks were making on, on the recruitment marketing side wasn't resonating as much.

No, it just seems like canned crap. It's like clip art or. Yeah, it's like stock footage. It's like, yeah, there's a professional actor who you've perfectly lit and look everything like that and they said everything perfectly against a teleprompter and yeah, yeah, it.

Just doesn't, it doesn't resonate with folks. And so audio is like this, this sweet spot where great you get to hear from people. It's authentic. It's not canned and produced. But video has this really weird bar where either it's Barbie, you know, it's the highest production value video that's been made in the year.

Right, right.

Or it should be Snapchat or TikTok or something that's super authentic and is not scripted by a company. And that's, that's really uncomfortable for a lot of organizations that are trying to grow. It's like, you know, that's hard to encourage in an easy way. And so I think that was one of our lessons and you know, one of the things that we've learned and applied.

So you ended up doing both or how does that work today?

Yeah, so we ended up doing. We do a lot of, A lot of the content production that happens on our platform is audio and then a lot of the videos that come out are not videos of folks faces. They're a location. They're the one. It's still video. And format, but it's not a talking head because that bar is just too high. But the other thing that we ended up doing is back to this location part and the environment. Spending a lot of time on in store job advertising. You know, you're already in a location people, increasingly the company needs people at that location to grow. And so I think physical, actual physical advertising for jobs is one of the big opportunities that a lot of businesses with physical locations see today. And because people are on their phone, it's easy if you make it so you don't need a great WI fi connection. So that kind of what we call it is like in store. In store job advertising also lends itself really well to pictures and audio. You know, try and stream a video to someone's phone where they don't have a great data connection and it's a painful experience.

Yeah, you stop, you don't get all of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really interesting insight thinking about how do you reach out to people and can you strike that balance? And it's interesting also to me that now, you know, a few years since the video became even more important with work, that people don't have studio lights or good lighting or they don't know how to sit relative to the windows. I got a window over there, I got two studio lights over here. I got a little bit of light behind me. Right. But it's just always set now. It's my work, so I took the time and energy to do it. But, like, why haven't more people done a little bit of that? This mic's a little bit more expensive. It sounds great, right?

Yeah. I mean, you're, you're a pro, Bill. But, but I think for a lot of people, this might be the only two things. One, they haven't been doing. They haven't been added as long as you have. There's a little bit of investment that's required for sure. And, and the, and I also think that, you know, it doesn't. I think that it's tough to have the situation that you need for recorded media be the same as what you need for a zoom call. You know, I don't think people ran out and tried to put their best face forward on zoom. There's great filters. They would, you know, they change their backgrounds. But, you know, it wasn't. I don't think people made a huge investment in, in their home studio. Maybe nobody expected to be doing it for as long as we've been doing it, but it just wasn't a big trend. And so to do it just for one thing feels like, well, I really need this.

Yeah, but you do increasingly need to communicate with people. As the leader of a growing organization, you've got, or one of the leaders even not the ultimate leader, but you've got to connect with people here and you've got to be effective at it. And people can't get distracted by the fact that your background's weird or you're. Or it's always virtual and you've got all these artifacts around your edge of your face.

And like, yeah, I think it's a good, I think it's a great investment, but I think it's, it's really different from the type of investment people are making when they're creating, you know, sort of videos on social media. Because there the setup is, the backdrop matters a lot more. And often I think the other reason is in a professional context, you want the backdrop not to be distracting. I think, to your point. And actually, you know, there are some setups, I think it's really popular, have kitchen videos and things like that. There are some setups where people, where people's backdrop isn't necessarily what they want to put in the workplace.

Right, right there. Well, and giving just a little bit of thought of that. And it's not everybody's kind of work, but just for comparison purposes, because I know some of our listeners also view sometimes and they follow some of our social feed. But so this setup that I'm in right now is, if you happen to watch this now or later is about fifteen hundred dollars of extra equipment and a little bit of effort to set up. Right. So camera on a stand, not the built in camera, lights on stands, mic on a boom ear monitors the background setup. So that's about the extra. My main studio back in the Bay area is about $15,000 and that's definitely like, I look like I'm on CNN or whatever. It's a lot more of a bump up.

Yeah.

And that's definitely not like, not for everyone, but it depends on kind of the, the size of your organization. If you're leading thousands of people around the world, maybe you should have a little TV studio.

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's absolutely right. Right. The setup matches your situation.

But then the social things. I just shoot on an iPhone with a mic. Right, Right.

But it is different. And so I think that's one of the reasons folks haven't made the jump as quickly. I also think it's a little bit, you know, what you talked about the technology for the studio setup. Reminds me of something, you know, that we see companies get into a lot which is trying to get the latest tools and the latest technology. And I think AI is a great case, you know, a great example of this. It's sort of, you know, the hot trend of the moment. And there are some cases where kind.

Of important in my family.

Yeah, super important in your family. Actually midjourney. But midjourney is mostly used by, for imagery. Right?

Yeah, it's all images. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but. And then in our business, we now use ChatGPT4 for doing strategy work with teams. It's super effective. We, we, we synthesize research and employee input really rapidly and distill out key things for company strategy.

Yeah, that's really cool. And you know, we actually see a ton of teams and work with them on GPT for, for creating job descriptions and interview plans because you know, you don't, most companies don't want to start.

From scratch and give me some questions along this and whatever. We'll feed in a bunch of customer input and then we'll say, okay, what are the four most important things about this brand? From a bunch of customer feedback. And instead of paying somebody and taking two weeks to do it, we get it done in two minutes. And like, okay, here are the insights. You know.

Yeah, I think there's, there's a, there's a ton of, of benefit and more mileage to be, to be gotten out of, out of AI.

But in the chat you just throw it in though you're going to be.

But that's. Right, right, but it is. And specifically I think in the text situation where there's sometimes where you really need it to be 100% right. You know, like that I think is a little bit risky. And also I think from a, you know, from a, an experience perspective, I'm a big believer that you don't want to replace people's converse interpersonal interactions. With AI, I think AI is like a tool that can make everyone more efficient. Right. But I think replacing some of those frontline conversations which help sell candidates with a chatbot, you're not going to get the same, you're going to get higher ghosting rates. You know, you're, you're not going to get the same kind of experience.

You could tell almost right away I'm interacting with a stupid chat bot.

Right.

That's saying formulaic things to me. It's like trying to get all your marketing done. With chat GPT you're going to Get a bunch of watered down, bland, middle of the road nonsense. Even if you put style prompts in, you're going to get watered down bland nonsense. Done with a voice. Right. Like a flare. And there are good uses from it, but not like just the surface thing that like I'm interacting with a chat on that there. It's just like calling in somebody's VRU phone system and it's like, your call is important to us. Please stand by. No, it's not important to you. You hate that I'm calling. If it was important, you'd hire some more damn people.

Well, and actually it's interesting you brought up calling because. Because scheduling is the area where I think that this technology is often the most misused. The advent of pick your own slot and you see a bunch of slots is exactly how most people want to schedule something. Right? They want to see a bunch of slots.

If I ask for it. Yes, if you ask, you're trying to reach to me and you're going, hey, I'd love to connect with you. Pick a time on my calendar.

I'm like, you know, I agree, I agree. That's like, that's, you have to, you know, you say one works for you.

Right? Right.

But I think what people have done instead of giving you a bunch of slots is said, okay, we'll interact with this chatbot and talk about when you want to. It's like replacing sending someone a text message with asking them to call the phone tree and kind of enter in through an IVR what their scheduling preferences are.

Yeah. We are so coming up at our time right now. We've covered some great things and we've gone long and great conversation. Careerpu.com so if you want to know more about their work and that kind of thing. We talked around a little bit but like get better and smarter at connecting with the right people in a time efficient fashion. That's careerpuck.com be the front end on your APS, your applicant tracking system and get in a better quality, better connected candidates. That's the company, Tolly's company. And then just being smarter about connecting with human beings is going to make you more time efficient and doing a better job of focusing on the right people in the right way, not chewing up cycles, applying technology poorly. So did you hear that phone ring? Did that come through? That's awesome. Like loud as hell my phone ringing. Thanks everyone for watching, for listening, some shout outs. Thanks Wanda, for getting our show ready in the background every week. Thanks to my friend and mentor, Vern Harnish who I'll see tomorrow at Harvard and who crosses created the whole Rockefeller habits and the scaling up framework that we use. And then to the folks at Pop Fly Productions who get our show out every week. Thanks again to everyone for watching, for listening. Keep watching. We'll talk to you again next week. Keep scaling up until then. Bye bye. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Elan Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app, you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth both in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with Scoreboard by Aligned. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill G One more time aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.