This recruiter went from 30% to 100% fill rate (by changing one thing)

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit, where me and my twin brother interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secrets to their success. Today's guest is Jay Lucas. Jay is the owner and CEO of a heavy equipment recruitment firm over in the US. He's an absolute master at his niche and he's a brilliant recruiter. Today we're going to be speaking about how Jay collects data and then uses this data to pitch to clients to increase his close rate. Jay is going to be telling us about a point in time when his lack of financial acumen nearly destroyed his company, and Jay's going to be sharing with us how his company went from a 30% fill rate to a 100% fill rate by changing one thing. Guys, we hope you enjoy this episode as much as Ben and I did, and as usual, grab a cuppa or glass of wine depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we? Hey Jay, how you doing?

I'm doing great. Awesome. How are you doing?

Yeah, I'm really good, thank you, mate. For people that don't know, Jay, we've been working together. I hardly ever— I think we've only ever invited a client on once to the podcast.

So I'm honored.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I think— I don't think, I know after speaking with you and understanding how you run your business and your knowledge of being a business owner, we had to bring you on. So thank you so much for jumping on today. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm glad to be on. Hopefully I can add some value.

Awesome, dude. So we always start the pod with this same question, which is what's the number one tool in your toolkit, whether it be a mindset, strategy, or software? What would you say to that, Drew?

Hmm, well, I love technology, but I think, um, I'll stick with a mindset, uh, response here because, uh, technology is only as good as its user. I, I think what I found for myself is a natural curiosity. And, and this, this, I don't know, tireless pursuit. So the harder a search is, the more I will dig in. Like, I'm just not gonna let a search beat me. Just not gonna happen, you know? So, uh, so that, that sort of unrelenting, never-quit mindset coupled with this natural curiosity is, is what I think is probably the, the big difference. Love that. And, and too, I mean, I think, um, like the— what's your purpose? So for me it's, it's not just about filling a job or putting a fat commission check in my pocket. Um, it really is wanting to deliver a great experience for everybody in the process. And so, you know, that sort of sets the stage for everything else, because now if my objective is a 5-star review, I need to make sure that everything we do is deserving of that.

Yeah, it's funny, we were interviewing a business, a recruitee, I think it was a couple days ago, Jay, and he said something similar to you, that we are, as recruiters, we're in the experience game. Like, that you're not in the recruiting game, you're in the experience game, because every moment you're providing experience to a candidate or client, which then impacts how they feel about you and whether they want to continue working with you. So if you Just interesting that he said something similar.

Yeah.

I would love to get into this story, Jay, because I think there's just so many lessons and just cool things to take away from this. And it was, we did a post about this actually many months ago and it was about when you set up your company, it was not knowing whether you were going to make payroll a few times because you didn't understand your financials. Can you just talk us through that journey, like what happened, and then yeah, I would just love for you to share that with the audience if that's okay.

Yeah, I think, um, the interesting thing about recruiting in our industry is the barriers to entry are really low, which basically means pretty much anybody can be a, you know, firm owner. And so I had, you know, been working in the industry and was working for a big company and knew that my career path was going to be stunted because I didn't want to move, I didn't want to travel, which really seemed to be the only paths for me in terms of advancement. So, you know, um, eventually I decided just to go out on my own. Um, the, you know, sort of the pieces on the chessboard all lined up so that it made sense for me to be able to do that. Um, but I had not managed finances before. I mean, I didn't like reconciling my own checkbook, you know, back when that was a thing. These days you log in and you can pretty much see everything. But, um, I started the business and, you know, I'm a revenue guy, I'm a sales guy at heart. So for me, it's all about top line. I figured, all right, well, as long as there's money coming in, you know, there's sales, um, then the rest will be fine. And I, you know, I think that just probably depends on how fast you, you can spend your money. And so I didn't really understand accounting. It was my least favorite class in college. You know, I had to get a tutor for it. It just didn't make sense to me. And so I was outsourcing my accounting to a CPA firm. They were producing quarterly financials for me, and then they were also my tax accountant. But I mean, goodness, quarterly financials. I was a small business at the time. But ultimately, you get to a certain point where if you don't know your financials, you know, and you're chasing revenue typical of a sales guy, I mean, you can drive unprofitable revenue. You can hire people to help you achieve, you know, your desired results. And be overstaffed. So when I say how fast you can spend your money, I'm not talking about on vacations or, you know, trips to, you know, the, the local pub or furniture store or whatever. I'm talking about, about even if you're being diligent and wanting to grow your business and you're hiring people to help you achieve this, you know, this, uh you know, success that you're chasing, you can overstaff. And if you don't know your numbers, you can find yourself in real trouble. And for me, the output here that was, I got myself into some financial trouble in a couple of ways. Biggest mistakes, overstaffing and not having data or insights to manage my people in a way that I knew when to cut ties and signing a long-term lease for real estate. Those are the two biggest mistakes for me. Well, ultimately, a lease is a legal agreement. You can't get out of that. So, um, so if you sign a lease— so my advice to anybody would be, and, and it's, it's advice that I stick to today, is No long-term contracts. Avoid them if you can. You know, these days you don't really need an office. Um, we don't have an office. I actually work from an office, but I'm the only one that comes in because the quality of life for my team is better being able to work from home, and I'm not going to disrupt that. But, um, no long-term leases. So my office is a month-to-month, um, and then And software again, month to month, very few. I think LinkedIn is probably the only product that I have a 1-year agreement. That's the longest that I've got. But those 2 things. So, you know, you get to a certain point where you've got a line of credit and you've got cash coming in. And if you don't know your financials and you're, and you're overstaffed, you have 1 or 2 bad months. You get a couple of searches, and this is back when we were doing just contingency recruiting. I don't do that anymore. But, you know, you're expecting revenue to come in and your 1 or 2 candidates that you got in play for, you know, whichever jobs you're working don't pan out. They get an offer, they decline, they don't get an offer, client puts the position on hold, competitor comes in and fills it, you know, any number of things. And all of a sudden that revenue you think is just about to line your pockets has just disappeared.

Do you remember where you were, Jay? Like when, when you realized you weren't going to be able to pay payroll, were you like, oh, like, do you remember the day or the moment when you were like, oh shit?

No, no, no, I don't remember the day, but I will tell you this. There were periods, um, where, where I knew I didn't know my financials. I didn't want to tell anybody. So this is probably the better lesson here is Don't let shame about not knowing your numbers keep you from figuring it out. Because for the longest time, I was afraid to tell someone because there was this appearance of success. I mean, Jay's got a business and he's a business owner and he seems like a pretty smart guy and seems pretty enterprising. And for me, I was afraid that if I showed my cards, which was I don't really know my numbers. I don't know what is— I don't know how to read my financial statements or interpret them, or are they even set up right? And I actually did find out later after, you know, listening to someone or talking with someone that I needed to restructure some of my financials because I wasn't tracking my direct costs the way I should have. So it gave me— I didn't have the insights to know how much money I was going to have every month to pay my bills anyway. So, um, so I was at this, at this place in my life. I was on a board with, um, other, uh, Christian CEOs. It was a paid membership. It's a way for us to leverage each other's, uh, you know, capabilities and to be an encouragement to each other. And, and, you know, even in that group where you think it would be safe to reveal that you really don't know your stuff Yeah, you're still pulled back, you know, and you're still a bit of, of, of, uh, shame about not being better. But when you get to a certain point where that's not an option anymore and you go, I'm, I'm in trouble, you guys, like, I've drawn on my line of credit, I, I don't know what to do, I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to make payroll, um, and it's not just payroll, but, but now I've got not only not pay my people, but I've got no other sources of income or revenue or debt that I can pull from to help me figure this out. Like, I had used everything up. I had gotten to the very end. I had maybe $20,000 on my line of credit out of— I think I had a $125,000 line at the time. I got $20,000 My payroll is probably that every, you know, couple weeks, um, when you factor commissions and all that kind of stuff in. And man, um, I remember sitting in that room and those guys— there were like 3 guys that were just really good with numbers, really good with numbers, and they were running much larger businesses than I was, um, not in recruiting. And, um, So we sat down and one of them in particular just started asking me questions and he wanted to understand, you know, my costs and like, what's this and what's this and what's this? And it was in that conversation that he helped me, you know, move some, some what were expenses that were in operating expenses into the direct expenses or cost of sales or in some cases cost of goods sold, same thing. Well, it was then that I realized revenue is not that— I shouldn't be chasing revenue. I should be chasing gross margin because it is, in essence, your revenue less any cost associated with generating that revenue. It's what's left over that you have to pay your bills. And as soon as that really simple math kind of like clicked in my head, It was like all of a sudden, I understood for the first time. Pretty impressive. And at that particular point, now, you have some insights and you can look at your numbers and see. And then, obviously, now, I look at my financials on a rolling 12 so I can see trends over periods of time. AI is brilliant today. You can feed your financials into AI and say, "And analyze this for me and tell me what you see. What are the 1 or 2 things that you would encourage, uh, this business owner to do based on these financial statements, or what. And, and it's, it's pretty impressive what it, what it can do. And you, you could even say, you know, create some graphs for me that, that, that tell a story, you know.

Yeah, that's a really good— I didn't think about using AI to— but that's— so that's really, really interesting story, Jay. The biggest things I get from that is like releasing the the ego in a sense to then just learn, but also surrounding yourself with a group of people that were there to support you, like a mastermind. Um, those are kind of the two biggest, biggest learnings I got from that.

But, but it's, it's, it's those two together. Um, so if you're willing to be honest and you kick the ego out the door, but you don't have anybody who's going to tell you the truth or, or come alongside you that's not good. If, if your ego is high but you've got other people around but you're not really being honest with them because your ego's in the way, that's not good either. You have to have both.

Yeah, definitely, mate. Totally agree. I would love— thank you for sharing that, by the way. I'm sure there's so many business owners that will just love to hear that and relate to that as well. Um, I would love to get to the next, because when you told me this, I found it really fascinating. There was a point in your business when you brought in, um, someone, um, I'm not even going to try and say the Six Sigma analysis thing because I've never heard of it before you even said it to me, but he did something spectacular and you guys managed to, uh, solve something with this guy coming in. Can you tell that story please, just so the audience can understand?

Yeah, um, so some of the recruitment work that we had done in the past was centered around continuous improvement. And Six Sigma is a continuous improvement or quality methodology. It's been around for a long time and it's really revolutionized a lot of businesses. It's primarily known for manufacturing, but it's since been applied in, in service-based business, healthcare. And so I had gotten to know they have different levels of training. So you have like you know, white belt, yellow belt, green belt, black belt, master black belt. And, and so you can achieve these different levels like in, you know, taekwondo on the quality side. And the whole purpose is to figure out how to eliminate waste and, and increase productivity and, you know, basically improve. It's a continuous improvement. Methodology. Well, I knew a master black belt. And we were, I was introducing him to do consulting work for some of my clients on a project-by-project basis. And, and so we were seeing the work that he was doing. And then he said, well, let me come in and take a look at your business. And so he started asking me some questions. And at the time, I was just strictly contingency search. And one of the questions he was asking was, well, you know, what are some of the— if you could solve one or two problems, what would you solve? And I said, well, you know, our fill rate is like 30%. So I have to bring in 10 jobs to fill 3 jobs. And so he's like, okay, great. Well, we— I tracked certain data points in our system. Like, did we fill the job or did we not fill the job? And if we didn't fill the job, why didn't we fill the job? And so like, did the client fill it? Did a competitor fill it? Did it lose funding? You know, like, so we tracked kind of these, these little data points. And so what he did was he got into our applicant tracking system that we provided him data around our jobs. So we pulled probably a couple years' worth of data on how many jobs we had brought in. We were bringing in, I don't know, a couple hundred jobs. So you figure we were filling 60, 70 jobs a year, roughly. But 200 jobs to work on is a lot when, you know, you're only filling 60 or 70 jobs. And so, and so he looked at that and said, okay, well, let's take a look at the jobs that you don't fill and let's try to figure out. So he, he was looking at those, those jobs by industry, what industry was the client in, He was looking at it by the size and scope of the job, like was it director or VP or staff level? He was looking at it by the job type. Was it an accounting job or an IT job? And we were expecting to see some pattern in the data that, that told us the jobs that you don't fill, this is your lowest common denominator. And then we flipped over to, well, let's look at the jobs you do fill and what's the lowest common denominator. And oddly enough, the lowest common denominator of success had nothing to do with the type of job, the size or scope of the job, the industry that the client was in. There was zero rhyme or reason to that. The only thing that was true on all the jobs that we filled was the relationship that we had with the client was a partnership. We, we, they wanted us to be successful, and we wanted them to be successful. And we worked well together. And so we trusted each other. And those were the jobs that we filled, that was the lowest common denominator. So for us, we were like, okay, wow, how do we select clients based on partnership? How do we do that? That was the beginning of us moving from contingency search to retained search. I have a story to tell now.

Yeah, please, please do, Jay.

Well, yeah, right. So my, my, you know, the client that, that wants you to work on, you know, that you've been working contingency for years is, is telling you, hey, we want you to work on this job. And, and it's not, it's not an on-off switch. It's, it's, it's more like a valve, and you slowly begin to close it.

Yes.

Okay. And so, and so we knew that there were certain clients that didn't have partnership mentality. Every job they had, they would call out to every single agency at the same time. They weren't great about providing you feedback. So you'd submit your candidates and they'd incubate those candidates like a hen on her eggs for 2 weeks before they get back to you. You know, you're like, what are you doing? You know, if you're telling me you want me to fill this job for you and then you're, you're not doing your part, you know? And so we realized then we're like, okay, look, if these are the reasons you don't give us feedback, you change your scope of your job, you defund the position, I'm competing with your HR team. Like, you ask me to come in alongside you and help, but then you try to lock me out. Your HR and recruiting teams are basically trying to compete with me. It doesn't make sense. That is not a partnership mindset. And so I would basically tell them like, look, we don't do contingency work. We're happy to work on this, but You know, we're asking for you to give us a retainer. And let me tell you, let me explain to you why we're changing and shifting to this model. And I would explain the whole fill rate thing. And I would tell them, the reason why recruiting fees are so high is because recruiters, if 70% of their labor is wasted, then they have to recover those costs, which means that when they charge you, that what they do charge you is inflated because they have to cover the losses on the jobs that they don't fill because you do these things. You don't provide us feedback. You change the scope of the job. You know, you, you know, promote somebody internally, you know, whatever the case is. But those all lead to lost labor on our part. So we now have to charge you, you know, 25 or 30%. And so I might give them an incentive and say, all right, give me a retainer, and I'll reduce your fee. But if I could move from 30% fill rate to 100% fill rate, think about it. Instead of working on 100 jobs to fill 30, I can work on 30 jobs to fill 30. What would you rather do?

What's your fill rate now?

100%.

Yeah.

If we don't, if we don't fill a job, Um, it is, it is because the client defunds the position. Like, they change the— they, you know, and that's happened a couple times. Like, just recently with tariffs is a good example. Companies that are feeling optimistic about things, and now all of a sudden you have to start having tariff conversations, and they're not really sure how that's going to impact their business. And they're like, you know what, we're not going to add any more staff right now. We need to figure this out before we do anything. Like, that would be an example. But any, any search that doesn't go, you know, that isn't defunded, we fill those. The question is how quickly. And the answer to that is, is it depends. It depends on the client. And, and there are the two factors that we've learned impact our ability to efficiently and effectively fill a job. Location and money. Those are the two biggest. Yeah, those are the two biggest. Yeah.

And so, question, sorry. Yeah, I just wanted to know what, what impact has— because going from, um, 20 to 30% fill rate to 100 is like massive, you know, significant changes. What impact has it had on the business, Jay? Have you like— have you saved more time? Has it just been more profitable? Like, what, what noticeable impact has that had, do you think?

Well, yeah, so we go back to the financials and, and how I wasn't able to make payroll I mean, part of that was because I was carrying the salaries of people that weren't justifying their existence because a good percentage of their labor was basically just being burned up on nothing, on jobs that didn't convert to cash. And I didn't, again, I didn't have data or insights to know. You know, I mean, I see my team, they're all working hard. I like them, they're good people. You know, they're not profitable. Well, they're not profitable because we're not bringing in the right work, you know. And so what is my option? Move everybody to, you know, 100% commission? Well, that's not— that's an incentive few people that I really found to be high quality want to jump into. And so I should probably say that wasn't— like I said, that wasn't a switch. We gradually turned that off.

Yeah.

And, and the reality is having the data was helpful, but then also moving and transitioning to more of a niche where you are an industry expert, where that industry or skill set, whatever you choose, you know, so like IT, some people that say, well, I'm an IT recruiter, I'm specialized, like, well, no, you're not really specialized because you got infrastructure, you've got project management, and you've got application development. And you go, okay, well, I'm an application development recruiter. Like, you're still not specialized because you've got all kinds of developers out there in different languages. Like, okay, now let's say, okay, well, I'm an application developer specializing in MicroStrategy and, and, you know, Java. And, and I, I'm niche in fintech. Okay, now we're talking, you know, or I'm just an SAP ABAP developers. That's all I do is just ABAP developers. That's it. Or just Python Django. Okay, great. Awesome. That's a specialist. That is a specialist, you know, or all I do is, is programming, you know, dev managers. All I do is dev managers, or just project managers in IT, tech project managers. That's where you become really expert. So what happens is, is you can then say, well, look, I mean, I can help you fill this. This is my network. You're generally getting referred. So there's already some degree of trust because somebody is being referred to you because of some success that you've had. Or in a lot of cases, it's that, that, that particular manager has been promoted, is now a director, and they need to backfill their spot. And so, you know, but here's what happens if, if moving to 100% fill rate improves my cost structure because now I can eliminate 70% of my— let's say I had a million-dollar annual payroll. $700,000 of my payroll was waste.

So crazy.

So now here's the other thing. You're a recruiter. And I'll back up. Let's say you're playing catch with your dog, fetch, right? And you got a tennis ball. Let's say 7 times out of 10, you fake him out. You think he's going to want to play catch with you? Your recruiters don't want to do that either. They don't want that. When a recruiter puts their sweat, blood, sweat, and tears into something, they don't want 7 times out of 10 to not get something in return. And so it's frustrating. It's, it's, it's, it is soul-crushing. It's It takes you to the very depths of the, you know, sort of the free fall of the emotional roller coaster of recruiting. You know, it's just, it's like agonizing. And so, that kind of schizophrenia, that schizophrenic feeling of, wow, I just filled a job to my two candidates that I thought one of them was going to get an offer, just backed out on me and I got nothing, or my client you know, tells me that they've filled it internally, or I can't get this client to— like, if you could even out the roller coaster, the emotional roller coaster for a recruiter, just by making sure that whatever they're working on, they know they're going to actually convert, you know, with a high degree of, of, of success, then you've just likely solved an attrition problem. So now all your training, all your sort of little trade secrets that you use to help develop your team, you're— it's not walking out the door because your recruiters are— their job satisfaction is high. They don't have to work 60 hours a week to fill 3 jobs out of 10. They can work 40 hours a week and fill 100% of their jobs. So their job satisfaction, their quality of life All that is improved on top of the fact that I'm not having to now manage more people because 70% of— if I had 10 recruiters, I could get rid of 7 of them in theory, right?

Yeah.

So yeah, there's a huge impact across the organization, not just financially but culturally. And when you are able to retain recruiters and and develop this, this, you know, high-level recruiting acumen and you communicate well together and there's high trust and they see that you're taking hurdles down for them, they stick around. And ultimately that leads to better customer experience because if your recruiters are constantly churning and your customer that calls you has got a different recruiter every single time they call in, You know, and you're in that person's at some, you know, different level of maturity in terms of your training and development of that person. Like your customer experience is going to suffer. And like I said, for me, you asked at the beginning, what's my mindset thing? Well, 5 stars, 5 stars. This helps with 5 stars. My recruiters have a 5-star experience. Um, my clients have a 5-star experience. The candidates that we recruit have a 5-star experience. Just, it just works.

Love that, Jay. I would love to now get into the data, Jay, because, um, I've known you for a year plus now, and we've had many conversations on the amount of data you track. And I have to say, it's very rare to find a recruiter, an recruitment business owner that tracks any data. Let alone the amount of data that you track. So, um, I would love to know the important metrics that you track and then also how you use that in the pitch, because you told me that you bring data into the pitch a lot of the time if clients need to see evidence. Can you just explain to the audience a bit more about those things, if that's okay?

Yeah, so, um, I mean, we obviously— the, the fact that previously we would track certain things, it's, it's— I think every recruiter tracks Then it's how do I leverage that? How do I take that data and turn it into insights? What does this mean exactly? And can we stop and say, what's my problem? What am I really running into and why is that a problem? And really asking that question, you get to the root and you begin to say, okay, well, let's track these things. How do we track it? So for us, you know, we create fields in our applicant tracking system, track certain things like, and some of these things we don't even have to create, like they're just a normal part of the process. We look at, so we started with tracking fill rate, right? We wanted to know, did we fill the job or did we not? And if we didn't, why didn't we? So like that was a starting point for us. You look at, you know, call time or the number of recruiter screens, you know, again, these are insights. They're simple, you know, but what if I'm looking at how many recruiter screens are done every week by a recruiter? And let's say a recruiter has 25, you know, they have 5 a day. And is that really a good data point? What if, what if everybody, what if that was your measure of success and every recruiter was making 25 or having 25 candidate screens every week? Could I be sure that that was going to equate or translate to revenue? So that wasn't really the right data point. Maybe the better data point was screens to submissions. What's that ratio? Because if I have a recruiter that's talking to all the wrong people, then is that— that's just wasted time. What if it's okay? What if my recruiter is taking 25 candidate screens a week and they're submitting 20 of them? We're like, wow, That's, that's quality. But what if none of those people get an interview? You know, I mean, so you start looking at it, and, and a lot of this stuff is, okay, what are we really here for? How do I get 5 stars? You ask yourself that question, and then you can work backwards and reverse engineer your process. Like, what do clients really want? They want speed and quality, and they want a return on investment. So how do you give them that? And so speed is, is one thing. Quality is one thing. And return on investment is generally the result of those two, honestly. And so, so we started looking at, you know, the other part of it too was If you start looking at the number of conversations that you have with a prospect and they have an open search, well, you can't— how many of those calls convert to a proposal and how many of those proposals actually convert to an actual job? That's the front end of the pipeline, right? Marketing. I mean, you guys are I'm brilliant at developing content. Well, how do I make sure that my content converts to a lead and that the lead converts to an opportunity and the opportunity converts to actual income or cash or work? And so that's on the front end. Once you get the opportunity, it's what kind of conversation do I need to have with the client so that I can improve my close rate? So what are the things that, that give them some concern? How do I present my answer in such a way that, that I can eliminate or reduce that fear or that doubt? And data is really good at that. So when, when I know that speed and quality is important, well then what speed? We look at time to submit because for me, I don't have any control after the submit. I don't have as much control. The client begins to take ownership of the process from there, and some clients just have a really cumbersome screening process, interview process, and more power to them. They need to understand the downside of that, but it's still their process. I can't tell them how to run their business. I can certainly encourage them to speed it up and that if they don't, there's some downsides to that. But if those are risks that they're willing to take, who am I to tell them how to run their business? Fine, go ahead. You know, I can choose at that point if it's interfering with my profitability to not do that work. You know, but if they run a really long process, well, then I can't really track time to hire or time to offer. I mean, time to offer is a measure we track, but let's take one. What is time to submit? And then what's our submit to interview ratio? So I start having a conversation with a client about, okay, great, look, what are your— what's your greatest concern? About getting me involved? Like, what can I really help you answer right now? And they might say, well, you know, I want to make sure that, you know, you do a good job and, you know, whatever. Sometimes you ask them this question and really thought about it. There is this internal fear or doubt or, or thing lingering question. They just haven't really, you know, figured out how to verbalize it yet or really, you know, put some, some color to it. And so you try to help them do that because, again, That needs to be real clear. They need to know what their fears and doubts and worries and concerns are. And so do I, because only then can I begin to address those things. But we've done it enough times that we kind of know, okay, this is it. So we talk to you about time to submit and then what's our conversion ratio and then what is, you know, what's our success rate. And then we start talking about, okay, now let me show you how that's possible. So when we talk to our clients, we'll, you know, if I'm prospecting somebody and we're, there's an opportunity or proposal out, I'll actually walk them through a demo and show them how we actually manage a search for them, the data that we track, the amount of, the amount of activity. So take a search, we look at, okay, well, how many candidates typically do we produce in a search? Generally, we're averaging about 125 candidates. Okay, so if we manage 50 open jobs, then we're managing about 5,000 or more candidates at any given time who are in some stage of the recruitment process. So, you know, we look at that, but then we go, okay, well, what percentage of those candidates are passive job seekers? We track that. How do we know that? Well, if they apply to a job, they're not passive, they're actively looking. If we source them, then that's a passive candidate. Now, maybe that candidate is actively looking and we just don't know it. But I can't track that stuff. So we pretty much track— so we know that our talent pipeline, 90% of it or better, is going to be depending on the job, is going to be passive talent. And then it's a matter of, okay, here's how many contacts, here's how many outreach messages that we have to send out. And we have that data, we can look at how many emails do we send per job to candidates? You know, what's our open rate? What's our reply rate? And these are data points that we just, we just, that are naturally occurring within our process. And then it's just a matter of extrapolating that. And so, you know, some systems will do that for you. Our system, we've actually built it. We have stuff that we do outside of our system that's pulling that data, that's aggregating it, and then doing the calculations and converting that into actual numbers. And then, we just have to make sure that it's accurate. And so, we're constantly testing it just to see, are these numbers right? You know, are the formulas still calculating correctly?

What happens, Jay, because I'm really fascinated when you show clients the data, Like, what is their typical reaction? They're like, do they typically come around and they're like, oh shit, I didn't expect you to, to like show me all of this? Or like, what typically happens when you show them all this stuff? Because in my brain, that's like a massive— that's amazing sales technique.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, look, software sales guys, they do this for a living. They demo their software and that's just a natural part of their thing. So So we're, we're basically not— we are in a way demoing our tech stack, not a particular product, but a blend of technologies, a stack with process behind it that then answers the biggest questions that the client has. Can you do this for me? Can you do this successfully? How long will it take? Am I going to be happy? And so, so yeah, I think generally there's 9 times out of 10 you get the holy shit, I feel like I'm in The Matrix right now. And then you get some that are— they, they just don't care at all. I mean, it's, it's, it's a bookend. I mean, seriously, one end of the extreme, and you can generally tell, um, if, if it's pretty easy to tell who's, who's disengaged.

Yeah, yeah.

Who really, who doesn't— they don't— they're like, I don't care how the sausage is made, but just, I just want some sausage. Okay, I love that.

That's so good. Um, Jay, I can't believe how quickly this pod's gone, uh, dude. I literally— the 40, 50 minutes has just flown by. Is there anything that we haven't spoken about that you want to leave the audience with? I think we've covered most of the stuff, if not all of it. I just want to make sure that there's, um, that I haven't left anything out. If there's any final words that you want to say before we bring it to a close.

No, I can't. No, I don't. I mean, just, um, I don't, I don't know. I don't know. I don't think I have anything necessarily. No. Um, I mean, just, just, just words of encouragement, you know, stick with it. Yeah, don't give up. You know, the same mindset that you use to find your people, that, that, that, you know, never quit mindset, you gotta— if you're a firm owner, use that same mindset, that never quit. You know, you're constantly trying to figure out your little mousetrap. Like, just don't give up, and, and eventually, you know, and, and don't— obviously, don't give up means don't have too big of an ego to be honest with yourself and with other people about the fact that you may not know what in the hell you're doing. If you don't start asking, if you don't start being honest, then you can't really start making progress. The whole concept around Six Sigma, that quality methodology, is that you have to have a data point. You have to define, like, what is define, measure, analyze, improve, and control. Well, for us, you know, we— same thing, like, we, we have to figure out what it is that we want. And then, and then you go, okay, am I there yet? And if the answer is no, you ask yourself why, and you be real honest with yourself. And then, and then you can begin to make changes and improvements. So, but just, you know, keep up the good work, keep up the— keep— give up the fight, don't quit.

Thank you, Jay. Lots of wisdom bombs. Thank you so much for coming, dude, and it was a pleasure to have you on. Good.

Great to see you both. Appreciate you having me.

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