Aaron Brown! Live On Shally's Alley

Hey party people! All right, so really awkward situation. You ever hit the wrong button and start the live stream a minute before you meant to? Uh, that's exactly what happened today. I was about to show off something on this live stream tool and it, it went live instead of pausing, which was not what I wanted to do. So sorry about that, Aaron. You're probably sitting there thinking, wait, what?

We're going live? I guess I'll save that question, right?

Yeah, save that. You were in the middle of asking me a really important life-changing question, and of course nobody will ever know now. Um, but you are now live on Shelly's Alley. It is October 18th. We are halfway through the month of October and almost to the end of the year. Like, I can sort of see the end.

There's a little light, right? That's right, there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

The problem is I think that might actually be a train coming in direction.

Um, or, you know, I was just thinking, I was racking my brain before we got here. I was like, man, when was the last time I talked to Shelly? It's been a hot minute, hadn't it?

You know, it's, uh, it's been a crazy time. Um, I did a little bit of bouncing around and definitely stopped traveling for sure. That was like a big deal. I was traveling way too much. So, um, I haven't gone to a lot of the conferences and events and, and so on You know, for a few years, I'd say probably 3 or 4 years, like a lot of us have it. Yeah. Well, even when it started back up, I didn't start back up so much so that I pathetically lost my status with my favorite airline and, uh, literally had to go to the back of the bus and wait in the, you know, wait in line with everybody else and pay $35 for my baggage after flying with this airline for nearly 3 decades and being just short of a million miler. Um, I just all of a sudden, like, just they dropped me like a— oh no, like a sad sack. And now I gotta work my way back up again.

I was trying to think of when you and I first met, and yeah, I go back, my head, my head goes back to what, IQPC and SHRM conferences?

And that might have been it.

That was back, uh, what, John Sullivan? And we were following John Sullivan and Jeremy and, uh, and probably, uh, Kevin Wheeler in those circuits, you know, talking about talking about our favorite topic, right?

So yeah, it might have been IQPC. That was definitely turn of the millennium. They had just swapped the dial out, right, on the, you know, Y2K situation and all that. But yeah, you've been having a pretty interesting— it has, you know, yourself.

Yeah, it's been a journey. Um, and before I go any further, man, I don't want to forget to congratulate you. On, uh, on, on joining Riviera. That's a, it's a great coup for you.

Oh yeah, I think it's a great place for you.

Um, I've known Jeremy for a long time. I think back to his Walt Disney days. Again, we're on that speaking circuit together, but there you go. Um, good for you. Just wanted to congratulate you on that.

Yeah, good team. Yeah, real, real management consulting, you know, it's, it's kind of my sweet spot.

So it certainly has been a journey. Um, it's, um, you know, I've, I've been you know, privileged to have great mentors, you know, along the way during my entire career, whether it started off as a— I mean, my story is I started off as a mechanical engineer by education, you know, and I fell into recruiting like, like so many of us, you know, and learned the art of recruiting in a draw versus commission, you know, um, headhunting firm, small boutique headhunting firm for the semiconductor industry. And then I got my break into the staffing world in Southern California and And that's where Martin Marietta hired me.

I was in Marietta, right? It wasn't— yeah, exactly, Martin Marietta, right?

Dating myself now, right? I was providing, um, uh, I was providing, uh, you know, software and hardware engineers to the Fleet Numerical Oceanography Center, FNOC, up in, uh, Central, you know, Central Coast California. And they said, hey, we like, we like what you're doing and the quality people you're hiring. Would you like to come aboard? And they brought me aboard. My first assignment in Martin Marietta was at JPL in Pasadena. And, uh, that's when, um, that's back when they called us, uh, those— anybody who was in the field rather than headquarters back in Denver. I mean, this'll date you. It's, uh, I was an offsite personnel administrator, right?

Personnel administrator, right? Exactly. Also known as recruiter now.

Also known as recruiter, right? In my first ATS, you know, uh, a Unix-based system. Smart Search 2.

Oh, wow. Okay. My first ATS was a filing cabinet.

Well, of course, right? Or the greatest technology we had in the office when I first started was the old drum fax machine, right? Or the other word processor that the office—

I went copy and paste, or copy paste had a whole nother meaning. Like you had a pair of scissors in your desk.

But then, as you said, yeah, I mean, 15 years with what became Lockheed Martin. In '96 with the merger of the two behemoths and had some great times there, culminating with the establishment of that regional recruiting center concept we had for recruiting. Unisys.

One of the first centralized, large centralized teams, global.

Yep. Unisys, SunGard Financial Systems, Genesis, Avadex, you know, that brought me down here to North Carolina. 8 years ago. And, uh, yeah, it has been a journey. Um, and, uh, I think I've always prided myself in taking on those unwanted assignments by anybody else, you know. Um, you know, trying to do something completely different, you know, revolutionary. And, uh, well, while there's some risk associated with those, and some of that risk paid off— I mean, sometimes it didn't— but, uh, it's always been fun to take on those tasks that everyone was afraid of.

Yeah, the ugly ducklings. Yeah, you and I both, man. I always took on the searches that nobody else wanted to do.

Yep.

Um, you know, because it took too long or because they didn't have— they didn't have the patience, or you had to, you know, dig really deep. Or in some cases they were easy to find but they didn't respond to you, right? Which seems to be the case now most of the time. Like, people are easier and easier to find, easy— more and more difficult to actually get in touch with, you know?

Yeah. What was, what was the most difficult search?

Oh man, ever, ever, ever. Okay, that's a, that's a great question. And, um, I would have to say it was power linesmen in Western Australia.

Wow.

Okay, these are the people that walk the power lines between, you know, the, the city and the provider. So these are the extremely high voltage lines. And of course, they don't have any electronic device or anything metal. They wear metal— they wear a metal armor, like mesh suit, so that the electricity can conduct right around them. And they actually walk on the cables to go to the— to check on, you know, the connectors and things like that. And Western Australia, being the most remote state in the country, is also not exactly the most populated. And they only had a small population of like 27 or so people that were certified licensed power, power line repair technicians. And the, um, organization that won a— won the government bid to renew their power grid needed to hire 60 of them in order to complete the goal, but there's only 27 in the state. So it was like, well, What was challenging about it is there wasn't that many people in the country to begin with. And we really had to start to get creative on how to find them. They're not on phones. They're not on the internet. They're not really— they don't have LinkedIn profiles. They don't have email or anything. You're not going to find them on Facebook or social media. Yeah, exactly. Their job is as far away from technology as you can imagine. It's basically, you know, electric-proof. But we— when I say we, I ended up finding a way to locate them because They were very frequently brought in to provide expert testimony during cases of insurance where homeowners or business owners were trying to get, you know, collect on their insurance policy because of destruction caused by the elements, you know, so-called act of God or whatever the equivalent is. And And they were, um, basically relied upon by the power companies, all, all of the power suppliers, to come in and say, hey, I've got it. Here's, you know, I am so-and-so. I am— I walked this line. Here's my logbook of I was there. It's repaired. So, you know, the power company has done everything it can to keep the line maintained. I certify, testify that, you know, as a licensed power line worker, everything is, is, is in order, therefore it's not our fault, right? So whoever, you know, the insurance company would be like, well, we want to blame the power company. Okay, it wasn't that. Why we want to blame the guy? You got to try and get their, their money's worth somehow. But these were all documented in court records and their names were provided. And once you have a name, that's kind of really all you need, you know. It took a little bit of creativity sometimes calling somebody else that knew them, but We got close and we started hiring people from— the good news is that the licensure was transferable or reciprocal. So if you were in Northern Australia, you could work in Western Australia, which is— that was lucky.

Those laws allowed that back then, right?

Yeah, that's a lucky stroke because in the railroad business that doesn't work. Their gauges are different from one railroad to the other. So imagine if you were going from New York to New Jersey, had to stop at the border to go from a quarter-inch rail to a half-inch rail.

Yep, yep.

That's what it is there because they're—

it's just like— I've seen documentaries on that, like going from China to, you know, uh, the power lines, people, railroad gauges, right?

They were okay. So that's gotta be— what— your turn. What was your hardest search ever?

You know, there's one that comes to mind, but I, I'd say nowadays I'd have to say maybe, maybe 3, but the toughest one was photoresist scientist, um, for a, a bioscience company in St. Louis, Monsanto. And this was in the very early stage of my career, and it wound up being a 40% fee. They were willing to pay that much because, uh, because it was just, you know, you couldn't find them, and there were maybe 4 of them in the world. And I happened to find one, um, you know, through a lot of diligence at AT&T and in Bell Labs in Murray Hill. And, um, and we just could not convince the guy to leave the East Coast. It was one of those where, you know, we got to an offer phase, you know, he interviewed, brought the family out to, to, um, to the location, and just wouldn't, wouldn't leave. You know, it was one of those personal things. And I think my supervisor ripped that file into a million pieces. We lost that 40% fee. But, you know, I'd say more modern times Um, I'll probably shock you with a couple of them. One, I mean, you know, I mean, in, in the last tour I did at, uh, an aerospace contractor was basically we served the intelligence community. Yeah, finding people, systems engineers, uh, systems integration folks, uh, doing that type of work for the intelligence community who are clearable, and you're talking, you know, some pretty interesting tickets. Um, That was really difficult. And on a volume scale, part of the job I had was not only— I had all of HR, you know, staffing operations and talent operations and HR ops, which meant I had rewards and recognition, I had even medical reporting to me, but I also had what we call the awaiting clearance department, which was 300 people we had awaiting their clearances, right? And you had some people in there, they were in there for 6 to 18 months. And one of the challenges we had was, was also trying to find them billable work.

So there's something with us on the bench. Yeah.

But the one that would shock you is more recently when I worked for a healthcare company, just trying to find an LPN in remote places like Salisbury, Maryland, or Conway, Utah, right, you know, for a SNF. You know, center that we would have there in the middle of COVID Um, probably some of the toughest recruiting I've ever led, you know, is, is those LPNs and RNs and CNAs, those people who just never get enough credit, you know, uh, in the middle of COVID when your company also issues a new edict that, uh, hey, it's going to be mandatory vaccinations. So, I mean, you may turn on every single sourcing tool you have and uncover every rock. And you may get one person that applies, you know, in some of those locations. And you got to roll out the red carpet because, man, if you lose them, it's going to be a while before you can find them. And then if you don't, then you got to bring in those travel nurses who, you know, at that time were getting, what, $120, $150 an hour or pay OT. And, uh, and that was, you know, ironically, you know, I have to say, as I look back over the decades that I've been in the business, That probably was some of the most difficult recruiting ever.

I can relate to some of those experiences with some unique businesses, but also with what you would consider or expect to be pretty normal recruiting, um, recruiting requirements, but for some bizarre circumstance like the case in Australia, or, um, you know, looking for diverse talent in an area of the country that basically has like next to none, or, you know, just somebody that does this particular job. You know, good example is that they— this company was looking for someone to run the operations and logistics for a large manufacturing facility. And in this particular town, this town was built on that manufacturing. Everybody in the town in one way, shape, or form, this was the big employer of the town. Everybody either worked for them or worked for somebody that, you know, did something for them or worked for supplier or in the service industry or whatever. And, you know, and it was 200-300 miles to the next town that had a significantly large manufacturing facility. Um, and these are the kinds of jobs that people don't really necessarily want to relocate for because usually there's more than one manufacturing facility in your town. Uh, and it's just like, this would be normally, this would be a pretty easy job to fill under circumstances where you have more than one manufacturing facility in town, but not in this case. So yeah, some pretty strange requirements like that.

You just reminded me of when I had to, you know, I had, you know, I had paid my dues, you know, whether it was, you know, Richland, Washington with Department of Energy or going to the Cannon Point tracking station in Oahu, you know, and done some, you know, some garden spots as well as some tough spots. But when the time came that I had to send someone, an old recruiter of mine, Steve Smith, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, out to the Dugway Proving Ground, you know, in Utah. You know, you knew he was in trouble when he had to walk across the street to the truck stop to send you a fax. Okay, I'm glad it was you rather than me, buddy.

I gotta send you a fax. Hold on, I'll be right back. I'm gonna go play Frogger for an hour. I'll take a shower, you know, I'll get my weekly shower in, you know. Oh man, that is pretty remote. Yeah, yeah.

I don't think he ever forgave me for that one.

I don't think I would either. Also, I don't think I would've stayed there that long. Um, I, I do like some peace and quiet, but not like that. That's not like that. Oh man.

Then another one. Yeah. Speaking of that kind of point tracking station, we had a, we had just won the, uh, the NSP program, the Network Support Program for the Air Force, which is the operation of their 13 remote satellite tracking stations. And, um, the HR manager, got a name of Bill Tucker, you know, at Colorado Springs. He was handing out the assignments, you know, which. You know, team of two was going to go to Wichita Summit, whether it was New Boston Air Station in New Hampshire or the Seychelles, uh, Vandenberg Air Force Base, you know, Thule, Greenland, wherever. And, um, and, and I'm thinking, I'm screwed, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm going to get to Iceland. Yeah, I'm going to get Iceland, right? And he hands it, he said, I'm going, you know, I'm going to— I find out I'm going to Camp Point. And, um, and then a good friend of ours, one of our colleagues, um, was a guy named Herman Ford. He gets stuck in Thule, Greenland. And I mean, this is, you know, cinder block dorm type, you know, place versus, you know, staying on Waikiki and doing the hour drive. And I don't think he ever— he's to this day swears I stole his ticket, you know, his airline ticket. And Cheryl does and I, we would send him care packages of sunglasses and suntan lotion and, you know, postcards. I wish you were here type of thing.

Whether it was here, wish you were great.

I don't think he ever forgave me for that one either.

Oh man, sounds like you have a few, uh, a few fans.

Oh yeah.

So speaking of, uh, wacky industry stuff, I'm very curious to, to learn a little bit about your thoughts on how to make this racket recession-proof, because it is like— I mean, and just to give some context to people, for those of you that have not been around as long as our, uh, our guest and myself, who are a bit long in the tooth, um, and have survived nearly 3 decades in this business, we, we can both tell you with certainty that there are lots of different cycles, ups and downs and highs and lows. But, uh, every one of us that's out there that's been in this long enough to survive a second cycle can tell you that these cycles need not happen. They are completely unnecessary. It's almost as if company leadership thinks that recruiting is something that can be turned on and off like a light switch, and they will turn it off at the first sign of, you know, wavering economy, not realizing that there are a lot of other things. You know, here's, here's my two cents on this, is when you're busy, when you're slammed, when you've got a lot going on, you're just, you're filling racks, you're, you're working on, you know, you're working as fast as you can, as hard as you can. Because things are moving really quickly. But it— that's when you tend to cut corners or leave some things behind. And when things slow down, that's when you're supposed to go back and do the cleanup. Well, what I think happens a lot is they hire a bunch of recruiters during those peak times, and as soon as it slows down, they let them go, and the cleanup never happens. And that's how we end up with some of the systems that you and I have seen that have so much garbage in them that they are practically— you might as well just hit the Ctrl+Alt+Delete button. So I'd love to get your take on how we can de— how we can rabbit-proof this, I guess.

Yeah. You know, funny you said 2 instances of downturns, right? I counted them up the other day, Charlie, and in my career—

no, I said after 2, you'll know the pattern.

Yeah. I mean, okay. Um, I've been, I've been through 10 economic downturns in my career. You know, I was in Southern California, you know, for a staffing company serving the aerospace, you know, industry when the Challenger accident happened. I mean, just wiped that industry out, you know, for, for, for years.

For a while.

Um, you know, uh, Persian Gulf War, you know, started when I was at, uh, at Lockheed Martin, and all the money for those press— those special projects and, and products went to support, you know, the, the war effort for, uh, for, uh, for, for Persian Gulf. Um, you know, then we remember, you know, I started in the industry when I got out of school as a mechanical engineer, and the oil embargo, you know, was in full force, you know. And, and the, the best job I could find, uh, was a PCB assembler as a minimum wage, you know, uh, job chopper working for Sperry Flight Systems.

Yeah.

And that's when I fell into recruiting. And, and the guy goes, um, I'm interviewing, I answer an ad for a headhunter, I have no idea what I'm getting into, right? The guy looks at my resume at the end of the interview, Bill, Bill Licking goes, and I see you play baseball in college, you know, our softball team could use a left fielder. So, you know, and I've been doing it, you know, ever since then you go through what, 2008 with the financial crisis.

You know, how, and then you go through anybody that's out there that's listening, that's a recruiter. That was not— that did not live through the 2008, that was way worse than now. Yeah, yeah, way worse than—

way worse than now. Um, uh, you go through, and then you go through, through COVID. So, you know, I chuckle, you know, when I hear, you know, people just entering into the industry, you know, get frustrated hearing, what is wrong? What, what's going on? Why am I not getting, you know, callbacks? Why am I getting ghosted? Why am I not able to—

happens every 7 or so years.

And it's like Buddy, I mean, I, I feel your pain. I've gone through this 10— I mean, I've been in a situation where I've had to lay entire staffs off. Um, I, I was the last one to shut the, you know, the lights out, you know, myself, a couple times.

Yep.

Um, if, if you're in— if you have chosen this craft, you have had to have become callous, you know, um, or by the second time around you would.

That's what I'm saying. If you, if you survived the second time around Yeah, you've gotten calloused or you're out because it's, it's not. Yeah.

I mean, I have my, I have my theories. Yeah.

What's your, yeah. So what's your theory on how to rabbit-proof this thing? Because I think sitting on the seat, like I've been, I've been externally as a consultant and I can tell you that as an external consultant, even in the worst downturn cycles, there's always somebody else somewhere that's hiring. You can, you can squeak by. It wasn't, it wasn't the best of times. but it wasn't the worst. I didn't starve, but I did have to do some side gigs, like, you know, do some mortgage inspection. And in the best of times, you get so much business, you can't, you can't even do it all. But it's still, either way, it still feels like it's completely avoidable. Like it just, people didn't plan right after COVID ended, quote unquote ended, and they started, you know, opening things back up again, every hiring manager known to mankind all of a sudden opened all the recs they ever had.

That was back during the Great Recession when we were— oh my goodness, we were, um, I mean, you had 2 jobs for every person who was unemployed back then. You know, some of the lowest— you know, some of the highest unemployment we've ever had. But I guess I would say this, um, hey, you know, there are— and it probably needs to be broken up into a couple pieces, right? I mean, every company goes through some type Oh, right.

There's company cycles, but I'm talking about like massive cycle.

Hey, we, we, we've, we've, um, you know, we're going into the fourth quarter and, and we haven't hit our financial targets and, and we've got to, you know, do some, some restructuring. And you go into a hiring freeze and you say, and you're like, please, please don't do a hiring freeze because it's going to kill the brand that we have invested a lot of time and resources and money into that job seeker marketplace. And it's just going to kill any type of forward momentum we have. But they still go through it. So, um, I mean, you're scrambling to find out, um, hey, what are some things I can do with these resources? Um, can I hide them in the business? Um, can I hide them in operations? Do they have skills that I— that are transferable to another role someplace within the organization? And some of the best folks I ever saw do that was a guy in New York, I think, working in the ad tech world. You know, uh, he took his entire team, and during COVID hide them, you know, in the organization somehow, because he convinced leadership and they were receptive to the concept that it's going to come back, right?

You know, I don't want to have to rebuild my entire team.

I'm going to lose all that intellectual property, you know, all that time, all those people that can— that know the business acumen. I'm gonna have to rebuild that from scratch. So they allowed the guy to, uh, to hide them in the organization. And sure enough, when it came back, It was just like, you know, they just turned the light switch back on. But my theory is, is, is this, Shelly? I know this is going to sound— it's going to sound horrible, but I think we've done it to ourselves. And back when, you know, I don't know when the tendency started, but I think it happened when HR became, you know, with the advent of the specializations. Of the roles in human resources, you know, and we became compartmentalized, right? You went from that personnel, you know, specialist to a generalist, employee relations, and then even within TA, you had recruiting coordinators, you had sourcing specialists, you had TA leaders, you had managers, you had supervisors, you had team leads, you had technical recruiting, you had administration, operations, enablement, TA operations. So, I think combination of the specialization of our crafts or our career paths, along with those fluctuations that the business went through. I mean, if they weren't hiring, you know, or they were going through a freeze or just a sustainment, it's easy. We're not doing any hiring. So let me pick off my recruiting team.

So I think that's wrong as a, as a long-term business philosophy, it would be similar to saying, we're not making any money, let's get rid of all our salespeople.

And it's probably happened there too. I mean, I get intellectually, you know, where you and I are both coming, we both know that it's wrong. But that's the jumping point for my theory on how to make ourselves more recession-proof, which is—

which is what? Is this— is this a CFO problem? No problem. You're saying it's an HR problem?

I think it's, I think it's, I think it's, it's by fault. We have got to claw back a lot of those things that we as recruiting generalists have given up over the years. We gave up onboarding, right? We gave up new hire orientations. You know, we've given up just on the front end. We've given up manpower forecasting, you know, all those things that we did before because we went into hire-only mode, just fill the damn racks. We've given up all those secondary responsibilities to generalists or someplace else. So now we're going to call those back to make ourselves more valuable to the organization.

Got it. Okay.

I think it's— and I think there's one other piece to it. And again, this will probably be controversial too, but I hold some of our HR leaders accountable for not convincing the C-suite why talent acquisition is so important to the business.

Shouldn't everyone know that though? Shouldn't you not need HR to tell you that recruiting is your lifeblood?

Well, man, I mean, I've had HR leaders and executives who were former recruiters. Right. And you knew, okay, you know, they're going to have my back, you know, because I understand the value, even in dollars and cents, that we are bringing to the organization. There's no other function within HR, Shelly, that can— that adds more to the bottom line than recruiting.

There's no other function in the entire company that adds more to the bottom line than recruiting. So honestly, those have employees if you don't recruit them.

Exactly. I mean, those HR folks, those HR executives get it. You know, they'll have your back and they will convince, you know, it should be a fairly easy argument. Tell the rest of the C-suite or the business leaders why we got to keep TA going. I've even thought about reasons of, hey, let's, you know, let's sell— not sell out, what's the word I'm looking for? Let's kind of get in the professional services business. Okay, we got really good recruiters here. You know, I don't have any recs for them to work, but let me lend them out to other companies. You know, almost turn this into a profit center, right?

Uh, I did that actually. Funny story, I did that when I was at a very large organization and we had shrunk our team down to literally bare bones. Myself and two other people went and formed an internal skunkworks recruiting team that would go into companies that we had heavily invested in. So, the employer, the large Fortune 10 company had investments in all these smaller businesses, some of them startups that didn't have their own internal recruiting teams. And we went and said, "Hey, we're with the mothership. We can help you fill these jobs. How much is it going to cost?" Nothing. We work for, you know, we own you. Like, we're your investor.

I'll give them to you at cost or at least cover 75% or 50% of their cost. Cost, right?

You know, yeah, I mean, we just started out doing it for free and it worked and it was really great and it went a long way. At another organization, um, I— when things got quiet, I pivoted to workforce planning and analysis. And, um, but you know what though, that, that requires a mindset, a change in mentality from the point of view of the career holder. In other words, you're responsible for your own destiny. If you can go out there and hustle and find yourself a different skill set or transfer, you know, to a different skill set, that's not exactly a common skill. So I think we need to come up with a protection for the industry that doesn't involve, uh, individuals having to literally reinvent themselves in order to stay employable, because that's, that's an option, but it's a rarity.

Yeah, yeah. And, and, um, you know, I mean, it's, it's, it's a rarity that you find the HR executive who is able to do that for you. From another perspective, I think we—

why are we the first to go and the first to come back though? Like, you know, I talk to investors sometimes and I tell them we're a weather vane, right? When recruiting starts to get cut, you know, the industry is going to take a dump. But also like what's happening right now, And you see it everywhere. People are saying, oh, I just got a new job, I just got a new job. When recruiters are starting to get hired back, like right now, we're 3 months from a boom market because companies start hiring recruiters about 3 months before they start opening up their coffers again. So they— it's— we're— I can tell you that the industry is recovering.

It's not a hard decision, you know. We got people that want to— yeah, they, they want the shortcut. You know, um, sure.

So get rid of me in January and, you know, and you save yourself my $150,000 salary for a year. But when you have to hire me back, you gotta wait for me to get retrained, re-onboarded. You gotta wait for me to learn the organization. You gotta wait for, you know, it's gonna cost you more in the long term than the amount that you saved by downsizing in this case. Now, in other cases, If your business is taking a completely different direction and you're dropping the manufacturing of widgets and instead have, you know, become a service company, then I get why you need to let people go that used to do the thing that you don't do anymore. But talent acquisition is not something that you don't do anymore. It's something that you don't do right now, but you're going to do it later. You're always going to do it.

You're always going to need it.

Right. So why cut it?

Yeah. I, I, you're asking me a question that I don't know the answer to.

So why?

Other than that, it's easy, requires the least amount of resistance. You know, we're thought of as a commodity, you know, in the resource world, right? I could say that, hey, during those upticks, I mean, how many people flooded into recruiting because it's easy? You know, right? And it's an easy way to make money. So we were artificially inflated by people who really don't have—

all those people found out it's not easy about 6 months later.

Yeah, because it's not just Phil and Rex, as you and I know. It's compliance. You know, look at the, look at the new laws that have affected, you know, uh, or governed how we do business. Um, a big part of our job is keeping our hiring managers in the business out of trouble. Yep. And it's even getting worse. I mean, AI, I mean, pay transparency, I'm just talking stuff in the last couple years. You know, between pay transparency was scaring the hell out of me, you know, a year or two ago. Now you've got, you know, Mobley versus Workday. You've got, you know, all kinds of new things that you got to continue to pivot in. What are the changes I got to make within the business to keep my company you know, out of trouble. Um, there's so much more that we do, and, and I think there's so much more that we could do. Like I said, clawing back some of those things that we used to have years ago, you know, so that we can sustain those, those little dips in economy. I mean, we were the person that, uh, it takes us, what, 6 months maybe sometimes to build a relationship with a candidate before we can get them aboard. You know, uh, they're the person that or we're the people that they trust, you know, during that— I mean, we got, we got their career in our hands as we're going through that very personal and professional transition for them. You know, during the offer process, onboarding, I mean, we're the ones that they trust. So why aren't we doing that first, you know, post-hire 30-day interview with them to determine their stability or flight risk? You know, the things I think we can continue to do.

So what you're saying is Get back into the— what normally people would call, I guess, peripheral parts of the job, you know, the early stage, the late stage. Extend yourself beyond just recruiting to add value and, and, and make your job a little bit more stable. Um, have other skills to fall back on, like analytics, for example. That's another one. And then the third one would be make sure that you're advocating with your leadership team the value that is provided outside of just filling seats, right?

I'll give you, I'll give you another cool example. Um, years ago, you know, working for the tech services division of Lockheed Martin, I mean, we were about 20,000 people. It was a merger of RCA and GE Aerospace and Martin Marietta Technical Services, and we're about 20,000 people. And at any given moment Um, we had about 1,000 open positions, you know, and I would get up on my soapbox and I would kick and scream and fight for, for budget. Um, because as you know, I mean, recruiting is not cheap. It's just not. Um, you know, there's an investment of resources and money to, to get the job done the right way.

And, and if you do it right, there's a long time.

Years. We just couldn't convince people, you know, and, and the people who held the coffers and the budgets that that we needed more to fill those 1,000 jobs. And one of my old mentors, Ken Diskin, was the HR leader at the time. He goes, you know, we're not talking their language. It's like, well, what do you mean? He says, we're going to talk in their language, which is dollars and cents. Okay. And those 1,000 jobs open at any moment equated to about $60 to $80 million worth of unrealized revenue. You know, and then you add on top of that, you know, the award fees, and then you lose the, the profit associated with that, which is probably $6 to maybe $8 million. And then you go, now you want to hit the guy really, you know, below the belt. You go, you know, because you were understaffed and you're getting dinged by that by the customer, now you have affected your, your, your profitability and your utilization, which means that you personally are going you're going to get hit in award fee and, and your own, um, uh, and your own bonuses. And then the light went on with them. It was like, you know what, you're right, you know, we need to, we need to give Aaron what he needs, you know, and his team what he needs to get the job done. And but you got to learn their language. You got to know your audience and speak to them in the language they understand. And, uh, that's a big one. So we have to also, to your point, in addition to just filling reqs and being at, you know, being good at what we do, you got to be a good data analyst nowadays, and you got to be a business manager. You're going to be a business person. All right. And those are skill sets that just— I mean, a lot of, a lot of these, pretty well around, a lot of our brethren don't, don't have, right?

Well, with— yeah, if they have been kind of in a narrow-focused position. But I think what you're saying is seek to get out of that.

Yeah. Um, push the uncle. I mean, expand the parameters of what we do in that entire employee lifecycle.

Get involved in more than just the filling of a requisition. Get involved with the hiring managers, the hiring manager leadership, the onboarding side, the, you know, the front end of it, attraction side, marketing. Yeah, the analytics, the reporting. That's an area that I—

And with the technology that has come along, so much of that is much easier.

It's easier, but it's still, you know, what do you think about this? What I've found is that the technology is there to get the data, but painting the picture is still hard.

Interpreting, converting, it's IT 101, right? You know, what raw data am I using? How do I translate that into information that I can then use to make informed decisions?

And what are the suggestions? Because if you just give them the, the charts, they're like, what does this mean?

No, you got to be able to interpret it, you know, give your opinion on what is the story that it's telling, you know, and, and what are we going to use this, what direction are we going to go in, what are we going to refine, what are we doing right, what are we doing wrong. Um, that takes an analytical mind to do that, and that's where you see these data analysts getting into the TA organizations right now. And man, that may be one of the most valuable valuable people you have on your team is being able to interpret all the data, all the metrics, all the KPIs that we have at our disposal now, because everything we do is measured in an ATS. Being able to tell that story.

Maybe to a fault, right?

To a fault, yes.

Measuring things we probably— they have little meaning.

All right, let me rephrase that. Measuring meaningful metrics.

Yeah, exactly. How about that? Yep. That reminds me of a funny anecdote that I use in training when I I'm talking about metrics and the, and the errors that you could make in measuring. Um, I relate the story of a case study or situation where an employer was, um, concerned that the efficiency, uh, was going down. And so they instituted a mandatory— just see if this relates to anything that's happening right now. They saw that the productivity and efficiency of the department was going down, so they instituted a mandatory 40-hour work week requiring people to be in the office for a minimum of 8 hours a day. In other words, they were basically saying people have to work their full 40 hours. And they started looking, you know, checking people when they arrived, when they left. And after a month of doing this, productivity continued to slide and get worse. And they started having other issues, like people actually you know, threatening to leave and stuff like that. Well, the solution that they wanted to implement was essentially force people to work by saying it's mandatory, it's required. Well, of course you're getting paid for it, so yeah. But the root of the problem, which they failed to, to recognize, was that the reason the productivity was sliding was because a very key person had left the team and left behind a gap that wasn't being filled. And everybody else was carrying the workload of that person. So instead of productivity having gone down significantly because of the absence of that one person, everybody else carried the weight and productivity only slid a little bit. In other words, they were still getting almost everything done, one person down. But when they started enforcing this, you know, policy of having to be there a full 8 hours, they started becoming unhappy and didn't do the extra work to carry the weight of the missing person. And productivity kept going down even worse because now they were really feeling the absence of the person, plus people actually doing less than they were supposed to do because they were resentful.

And I'd say one other— I say one One of the— I mean, my mind immediately goes to think about the irreparable damage they have done in their culture to trust.

You've now started kind of like mandating people going back to the office after saying that it's okay. We hired you and said it was okay to be remote. Now we're telling you that you can take a hike if you don't want to come into the office.

Where the real message is, you know, I mean, you can interpret the real message is you don't trust me anymore.

The real message is take a hike. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We had a comment from a viewer on LinkedIn, uh, asking if you think that the business could transfer recruiters into business development or marketing before, before offboarding them. Um, and that's an example of a transferable skill set. I mean, if you're a recruiter who's had a lot of work, you know, experience with talent attraction, there's definitely work for you in marketing or perhaps business development. Um, so yeah, but, but they just don't. They'd rather just let them go than, than give them a chance at that other job. You know, even if it's a job that's literally very similar to recruiting, such as, for example, calling, um, prospects to, to sell them an opportunity. Gee, that sounds a lot like recruiting, doesn't it?

One of the, one of the better recruiters I had down here in Raleigh, uh, transferred over to sales. He's doing very well in sales. And then eventually left the organization and is now over doing business development at, uh, at Lenovo.

Never came back into recruiting though.

Never came back into recruiting, you know. And that was a decision, but he identified that as a transferable skill, you know, and, and, uh, and wanted to explore where that might take him. And man, as a leader, you got to go, you know, I did a great job of preparing this kid for, for doing something else, you know. And if it's with the organization, great, because that means we've retained somebody, you know, while making a move internally. And if we can keep them under the same house somehow, that's a win-win for everybody around. I've seen so many colleagues who get upset, you know, when a recruiter wants to leave the organization or transfer to human resources. I mean, given what's happened, given the 10 downturns, you and I have talked about, can you blame them sometimes for wanting to make that exploration? You just can't.

So that's right.

Anyway, no.

So that's—

I mean, it's a— yeah, I think the— I don't know. Did we answer that question?

Yeah, I think so. You're saying some of it is in your hands, some of it is in your leadership's hands, and some of it is in the business leadership hands. And it's kind of like a happy, or maybe not so happy collision of 3 very potent forces. You know, we did it to ourselves. Our leaders didn't back us up. And business leadership doesn't have the necessarily the long-term vision to recognize that there's A, transferable skills, or B, we'll be recruiting again. And it's going to be just as expensive or more to hire a whole bunch of new people to do that job. But I think there's a 4th piece that's, that's not I think there's a fourth piece that's not talked about enough. And you talked about offending some people. I think this is definitely going to offend some people. And that is that we tend to sometimes hire people to do the job of recruiting without any experience or without any training because these leaders think that it's such an easy job to do that they just bring in somebody that has no experience. And not only that, they also don't really give them the training. Yeah, it's, it's almost like, well, anybody could, you know, it's so easy, anybody can do it. The reality is, yeah, anybody can do it with the proper training, or without the proper training, it takes a certain kind of, you know, um, let's just say fortitude to stick it out long enough to learn through the school of hard knocks. And that means going through a couple of these down cycles if you pretend to have a career on it. So I think that other piece is sometimes there's a, there's a, there's a misconception in the mind of leadership on just exactly what recruiting really is. And they think of it as an entry-level job in a lot of ways.

Well, I mean, I think you're, I think you're onto something there. I mean, if the maturity of your recruitment and hiring model, you know, is, is very immature, you know, then yeah, I mean, anybody can do a match of keywords on a job if you have a knowledge base to transfer on of keywords on a resume. You're right.

But you have to have well-written interview guides, you have to have documented workflows.

That's where I was going with it, right? You know, but, you know, have we trained them to do, you know, what else will be expected of them, you know, should they continue down this path, whether it be the ability to take, okay, what have our hiring trends been? You know, have we done an age analysis of our workforce to determine where are flight risks and what departments, you know, what manager, you know, has, has, uh, had done a horrible job of retaining employees, to be able to predict where those— where our staffing plan or workforce or manpower planning is going to look like. That then dictates the budget, that then dictates, you know, what kind of talent, you know, mapping we may need to go do, or what kind of talent pipelines we need to build. I mean, that is an art in and of itself. It's just the whole front end, and that's before a wreck is even created. Then you get into the just training. I mean, there's a training element. How do I train my managers that there's a heck of a lot more to recruiting and compliance, you know, with laws and internal policies and procedures? They're going to get us in trouble if we're not compliant with it. Part of it is educating them on that. Yeah.

And along the same lines, hiring managers are not always experienced either. They're new to the job of hiring as well. So you got—

I almost wonder whether hiring manager is an oxymoron. You know, I mean, they're a manager, you know, I mean, God knows how many times I've had this discussion, which is, yeah, they're managing a project or a product or a service requires a different skill set is hiring, you know, and retaining. I think we solved that issue in Valley Forge, when we came up with the role of what was called a BURM, a business unit resource manager, which is you took someone from the line, someone who was well-respected and someone who had the knowledge of what the business was looking for.

And you assign them to your recruiting team for the job of interviewing and qualifying.

Exactly.

Who might be able to help you pivot in a moment's notice.

Hey, we don't need this over here, but we need that over there this week. That's where our concentration needs to be. Or a hiring manager missing an interview. This BIRM could step right in and do that. Or during the regional recruiting center days, you know, you would go into that, that, you know, that day in that war room decision meeting after you've interviewed 15 software engineers in the morning and 15 software, you know, systems engineers in the afternoon, and you were going in to make a decision to hire based on all the interview input, and that hiring manager couldn't show up, the BIRM could step in and make that decision on behalf of the business. I mean, that was such a critical role to recruiting efficiency that I think has kind of been lost. Along the way is that resource manager job.

Yeah, that's a good point. Some organizations have this thing called, uh, like a leveling interviewer, or at Microsoft they call that an as appropriate. Um, and these are interviewers that are not going to be the person's hiring manager, right?

Um, in their professional assessors of talent, right?

They're professional, right? And they may not necessarily be in the talent function, right? Although sometimes they are, you know, higher-level executives and, you know, director-level and VP levels in talent, but sometimes they're also from the business. And their role in the interview is to kind of be a bit of a tiebreaker, right? Like, if you've got, you've got a couple of finalists and you're not really sure which one, which direction, they're, they're very comparable, they come in and go, all right, fit for the organization, fit for like potential, uh, you know, development, um, career future, uh, overall contribution. And, and they're looking at more than just this job. But that's not something that exists in less mature organizations. I don't know if that kind of— yeah, I mean, you were lucky. That's a highly mature organization. Microsoft had it, Cisco had it. But maybe we need something like that, a calibration interview, or even at the medium-sized companies to help with that risk, because it is risk. I mean, recruiting is risk. There's always risk. There's no 100%.

You're doing the best job you can to predict that person's performance.

You could have the absolute best possible candidate, and that still may not be the right fit for that job.

You know, funny you should say that. Um, I remember we were hiring, um, our leader for our HR shared services organization conversation one time. And my HR leader decided to— hey, we're gonna have 3 different panels. We're gonna have a panel of who that person's customers or clients might be, of the other colleagues in human resources. Hopefully we're gonna have— we're gonna— yep, we're gonna have— it was all just 3 interviews. It was panels, right?

All right, all right.

It was a panel of peers, or a peer panel, and then it was a panel of subordinates. You know, and we happened to pick the old administrative service center, you know, the admins of the organization. And I'll tell you, man, I mean, it wasn't like we put them through the wringer, but the best assessor of that person's, you know, ability to join the organization and contribute immediately and assessor of their not only their talent, but them as a supervisor was that admin group, you know, the subordinates, you know, to that person. I mean, they really get involved with so many, you know, they were going to work with that person on an everyday basis. And I remember us all kind of looking at each other afterwards, hey, maybe did we just stumble into something? But it just emphasizes the peer interview, you know, have another subject matter expert, you know, what you're describing at Microsoft, have someone else who's doing the job. Why don't we let them, you know, participate in these interviews? You know, someone who can be an onboarding buddy, someone who can keep it real for the person considering that job. Why aren't we having those people, you know, is one of the primary and most important people during the interview and assessment process.

Yeah, that does require a different level of maturity. So I think there is definitely— I mean, I've got this like maturity chart. How mature is your recruiting organization? That I use in workshops.

I'll compare mine to yours. We should do that.

Um, and you know, I, it's really just an instrument to help with like, how do you go to the next level? Right. Because I like to say you can't get there from here when you don't know where here is.

Yeah. Yeah. So you got to find what's, what's good to look like. Right.

Right. It doesn't matter if you have the highest loftiest goals, you can't get there if you don't know where to start. So step one is where am I? And then, and then how do I get there? It's kind of hard to do how do I get there if I don't know where I am.

Yes, exactly.

You know, so I use that as a way to like, okay, if you're doing these kinds of activities, you know, block and tackle, heads down, inbox processing, and not a whole lot of, you know, meetings with hiring managers, regular cadences, contributing, you know, uh, value that way. Or if you're doing actual sourcing, or if you're doing, you know, there's these kind of activities that if you're already doing, then it puts you in those levels of maturity and it shows you a better, not a better, but it shows you like what the next level up would be in improvement. But it doesn't always necessarily fit every model. Sometimes you have diversified recruiting models where there's, you know, continuously at the same organization, you have a centralized and a decentralized. I've seen that where you'll have like centralized recruiting for some jobs, but then in the field, decentralized recruiting for other types of jobs.

And you've got StaffAug, you've got RPO, you've got—

And in those environments, the maturity is different between the two, you know, two different recruiting organizations with two different levels of maturity in there, in the kind of the path. But there's not like a— there's not like if you're an A and B company, this is what you do, because they're too disparate, you know, the way of whether it's outsourced or not. It's too different between the—

You and I should compare notes because I'll bet you that our two staff, what I call a staffing maturity model, you know, probably very similar. Um, one was based on the old concept of the CMMI, you know, Level 5 rating, right? 1 through 5 rating, which was, um, and I had all the internal data available to me. We were the first company in the world with CMMI Level 5 rated for systems integration. So I just took that as the framework and applied it to staffing. So it started with, um, And then, you know, level 5 is do I have, you know, processes that I'm optimizing that are repeatable and sustainable, that allow me to predict what my future results are going to be? That's the highest level you can achieve. So yeah, if that was a barometer that we all used in the talent acquisition world to measure, you know, the maturity of our staffing process, I think it'd go a long ways. That truly is becoming— now you're starting to exercise your consultative skills. This is— and isn't that really our objective? How do we become a consultant to that hiring?

People talk about it.

First people they call when they have a need, before they call, you know, a headhunter, before they call an RPO, before they call their HR business partner, you know.

And if we've established ourselves as being that subject matter expert, then yeah, we should be the first person to do more towards becoming a talent advisor or talent partner, they call it. But it doesn't matter what the name is. The point is, you call it whatever you want. The point is that you're actually being more proactive in giving advice to the leadership and to the hiring managers in the organization that are, you know, your, your end customer, rather than just filling a rec, which is kind of what we talked about before. But I don't know if there's a common language for that. I mean, we just think about things like time to fill. There's not even really a common language for what it does. Time to fill start when you post a job or when you approve it, or when you—

because we all define it differently to make ourselves look better.

I mean, so even something as simple as how long does it take to fill a job, which looks straightforwardly very simple, is measured in different ways, such, such different ways that the numbers are not comparable from organization to the other. Um, and this is not, you know, not, not, not like a free plug of any kind here, but the ISO, International Standards Organization, attempted to create a common language for like, what is, what is time to fill? You know, when does it generally start? When does it generally end?

Was that Andrew? Who, who led— was that what, Andrew Gadomski? I forget who that was.

I was in the ISO along with Jerry Crispin and a few other people.

Sure, you guys in Sherman tried create that, that definition of cost per hire, right?

Exactly. But the ISO was doing it globally with 142 participating countries, and it was, um, not just the metrics but also some of the definitions around what the different, you know, as you said, workflows are, right?

You know, I could— I mean, I could spend an entire hour just talking about metrics. And, and, you know, here's— I learned so much about meaningful metrics, um, from one of my old mentors, a guy named Brian Krieger, when we were at Unisys. And it was so much— unfortunately, we, we default— so much of our, our brethren in TA, you know, default to the metrics that monitor the performance of our recruiters, right?

Well, actually, more accurately, they— we default to the measurement, not the measurement.

And the point I'm making is, are those KPIs, are those goals what matter to business. I mean, they're not going to care about that stuff.

Um, um, so, so look, it's a very simple definition. A measurement, a metric, and a, you know, KPI, whatever you want to call that, that the last one is. The measurement is essentially a number, right?

Yeah.

How many wrecks you filled is a measurement. A metric is that number over some other kind of dimension. So how many wrecks did you fill this year? That's a, that's a metric. But how many wrecks did you fill is a measurement. Yeah, so when people say number of recs filled, that's not a metric, folks. That's a measurement. The metric would be number of recs filled this quarter, and even better, number of recs filled this quarter compared to previous quarter, compared to same quarter last year, or, or compared to what the demand is, or compared to— yes, which is staffing rate.

Take it to a whole new level. Now, how do I turn this metric into something that's important Now you're talking about a metric that is actually talking to an actual objective, and that's different.

That's a— that's a meaningful metric.

Again, talking the language that the business understands. I gotta link my KPIs and my goals to what's important. How do I help my manager achieve their goals and objectives through the results of talent acquisition? I'll give you a perfect example. I think the most abused metric out there— this probably goes all the way back to Saratoga Institute, right? You know, is, is time to fill, like you brought up before.

Um, second most abused cost to hire.

And the worst abuse of that is the example of hiring a college person, right? You know, an entry-level, an entry-level hire. When do you open that rec? You open in August or September of the prior year. So why isn't the— why isn't the better metric, you know, instead of time to fill, the closest to the pin of when the need date is, you know, how close do I get to that date?

Or, you know, Brian, time to offer accept, from, from interview process start to offer accept. Right. Brian came up with a debate this, yeah, all, all night long. But it doesn't really tell the story that the company wants to achieve. That's the real, yeah, that's a real meaningful metric is what is the company's goal, what is the objective, and can you speak to that objective, uh, with what you're doing. You know, I, I use the, I like to use the analogy And in my PowerPoint slides, I have an Uber driver, right? I like to use the analogy of an Uber driver. If you're the TA leader, you're the driver of the Uber. And the leadership team is your CEO, is your passenger in the back. As the driver of the Uber, you need to know where you're going, what the traffic is, the wind velocity, your gas consumption, how much gas is left in the tank. Your velocity, your speed, your brakes, your brake fluid, your engine temperature. Your CEO doesn't need to know any of that, right?

Right.

They just need to know, are we gonna get there on time, right? That's literally it. Are we gonna get— you know, when do we get there, or are we gonna get there on time? They don't need to know about the wind velocity and the heat of the temperature of the air inside the tires. You may need to know that more so if you're a performance car driver, but the passenger doesn't need to know that, and the passenger is the one that's paying the bill.

Yeah, yeah. And that's— you just, you just cracked the nut.

Yeah.

So that's, that's how we— that is how we, we answer the first question we came up with. How do we know?

There you go. At least we solved that one.

Recession-proof by delivering results to the business that's important to them, that's important to the— yeah, to the passenger of the Uber, or the Uber passenger, to use it now.

Awesome. Couldn't, couldn't think of a better way to end it. However, I can't let you go just yet, even though I said I was only like only going to keep you here until— okay, I do have to ask you, I'm being held hostage now. Yeah, you're being held hostage because there's always two questions that everybody gets asked, uh, and you're no exception. Um, the two questions are, number one, who should be our next guest?

Hmm, okay, who should be our next guest? You know, um, coincidentally, yesterday I participated in— I mean a really interesting brainstorming session of some top HR and recruiting leaders about AI. Um, and it was, you know, why doesn't HR or talent acquisition have a seat at the table, you know, on, on artificial intelligence? And they were breaking down, uh, Mobily, for example, versus, you know, Workday, and what impact is that going to have on our world right now. And it also relates to what you and I've been talking about— how do we make ourselves more recession-proof when see jobs in TA disappearing because of technology. Like the recruiting coordinator job, totally automated now, it's gone, right? Um, but I would say somebody from that committee, um, that would, um, be able to— for example, the Secretary of Labor, you know, who was in a conference earlier this year that was, you know, talking about it from a legality perspective. You know, um, I just don't know that anybody— you know, Dave Pollack is bringing— is, is talking about this right now, and he was the one who— he and Frank, um, um, he and Frank were both the hosts of that discussion yesterday. And, uh, someone like Ronnie Smith and I who were participants, we got off the phone like, wow, that was a fascinating discussion, you know. And, you know, if someone's going to move the needle and, and look out for our best interests, you know, as it relates to AI and what effect it could have, it's going to be someone like this because we just don't see it happen.

I don't— so who's the person you're recommending?

Um, someone like— I mean, I would start with someone like Dave Pollard, who this seems to be a really passionate discussion for right now, who's got a vested interest in it and has reached out to colleagues across industries to start the discussion.

All right, uh, he'd be really Okay, and then the last question is, um, give us something that we should think about over the weekend. Something to think, something to chew on and think about for ourselves.

So I'm going to circle back to, um, about anything.

Doesn't have to be what we talked about. All right, um, what should we be talking— what should we— what should we be having an internal conversation about? Right now?

You know, it's this, um, we've talked about metrics and how do we improve the speed of recruiting and the cost of recruiting. Um, you know, I've made presentations to people on, you know, how do we, how do we, um, really improve, you know, um, the services that we're offering to our audiences. And what strikes me is I looked at the data and some of the research I was doing to kind prepare my mindset for this. Um, you know, we can talk about the size of the workforce, we can talk about unemployment, we can talk about, you know, how many jobs there are for per person. But the one thing that struck me as I was going through on this is that I don't know that there's enough emphasis being placed on the process itself. And what I mean by that is this, um, uh, if you look at the, the 3 3 reasons why people are declining offers, you know, whether it be during the, you know, the Great Recession or the Great Quit or when recruiting is at its peak, you know, um, there's 3 reasons why people quit on the process, um, or withdraw from further consideration, right? One is a lack of, of communications or delayed communications, right? Yep. Um, the other is little if any transparency into the selection decision and process. And then third is the time that it takes for the interview. So if I were to check the interviews, to complete the interviews, I mean, we've all heard the horror stories, right? You know, I've gone through a third, fourth, fifth, sixth round, and I'm two months down, or the guy who was here at Blackstone six months ago submitted his application, gets a call six months later. Well, that isn't timely to when the need was. So I guess I would challenge all my colleagues, you know, that, you know, you know, let's, you know, let's, let's also take a hard look at the process and how it's affecting the candidate experience, because that's the thing that I'm probably most passionate about.

So our question is, what improvements can— what improvements can we make in our own, in our own workflows? Workflows to not help improve, to not cause people—

we are overall being evaluated and assessed as a function. I think in the haste to do, we sometimes take too long, we forget about what's the impact on the candidate. There's a horror story that came up in an HR networking team meeting yesterday. About a gentleman who, you know, was, was not down on their luck, but, you know, been out of work for a while, like so many, like so many folks in recruiting. And, um, you know, they finally got a hold of an old supervisor, you know, worked for before for 5 years. And the guy said, well, you know, um, you know, we, we, uh, he had tried calling to stay in touch and keep the network going, right? And the person, well, we tried calling you 3 times, but you didn't answer. So you know what, you're no longer the type of person that we want. In our organization.

I was on vacation. What are you talking about?

Vacation, or my phone got disconnected, you know, or I couldn't pay the bill or something like this.

Just be—

show the empathy. Go back and look at your process and like, okay, did you try to reach out to the person, you know, via an email? You know, did you try and, and, uh, you know, send them a text message? I mean, did you— we jump to that conclusion so quick and it's like, where's the empathy? Where's— what are the mistakes in our process?

I'm wondering that right now.

So anyways, that's, that's my—

All right. Well, that's very good. That's a good— Yeah. Where's the empathy? I think that's an even better question. Where's the empathy? Exactly like that. Exactly. Oh, man. Thanks. It's been a blast having you on the show.

Thank you very much, man. It's been a blast.

Yeah, it absolutely has been. For sure. And so for those of you that might be willing to come back next week and listen to more of this. I've got Joe D'Antonio, and he is an expert in RPO and client management, if you will. So hopefully we can see you back here. Um, 1st of November, we don't have a Shelly's Alley because, well, it's really, really close to my birthday. Happy birthday to me! But also, I'm gonna be in an airplane. Um, so we'll see you next week, and then after that, we'll skip. And as usual, be kind to