Batman (Mike Cohen) live on Shally's Alley

1 PM-ish, still on, you know, still on Latin time here. With me today, I have none other than the darkest of superheroes and of course the wealthiest of superheroes. I think— I'm not sure if he's the only wealthy superhero, but certainly the wealthiest one. Mike Cohen, welcome to the show.

What's up, man? Hey, Shelly, it's going, uh, it's going awesome, man. As you said, it, uh, it is Friday afternoon, which is great. Um, life is, uh, I'm sure for all of us, right, like crazy busy, but feeling blessed to be in this industry. So, uh, and really excited.

This is my first time ever being on the show, right? You know, Thursday's a new Friday. Of course, you know, that means Monday is actually the new Tuesday. So yes, that means we all work Sundays now, right? That's exactly— yeah, that's exactly right.

Everything's just delayed.

Yeah, nothing really happened, nothing really changed, just the names of the days of the week.

Yes.

So a lot of people that tune into this show are in, you know, strategy positions, they're leaders, they're, you know, in different parts of talent acquisition, and I don't really know if they know why you have the name Batman. They probably know you because you're a fricking rock star, but they probably don't know what Batman means and why you go by that, 'cause it's on your handle, it's on your LinkedIn, it's on your— people go to your website, it's all over there. So here's Wayne, by the way, Wayne Technologies, that's not Wayne-ette, that is Wayne Technologies.

That's so, Nikhil on my team does that all the time. He's like, I always read it as Wayne-ette. I'm like, Wayne Tech, that's the name of the company we work at. Yeah, great. Yeah, great question. So this was like 7 years ago, right? And I was thinking like, all right, I want to brand myself. I was working for another company at the time and I'm like, I want people to like want to work with me, right? And I'm like, all right, Michael Cohen. All right. Michael is one of the most common Caucasian names on the planet. Cohen is a very common Jewish last name. I'm not even Jewish.

You are. You told me you are.

That's right. Half. Yeah. My dad. Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm like, you know, great job, mom and dad, you guys are killing me. So I was like, what do I do? MC this and that. Right at the time Trump was running for office the first time. And if you remember—

The name Michael was already taken, right?

He had a lawyer who was fairly well known and not for anything great. So I realized like the name Michael Cohen, I'm never going to appear on the front page of Google. So I never read a comic as a kid. Man, I read my first one when I was 19, and it was Batman: Long Halloween. And I kind of fell in love with like the juxtaposition of the superhero versus the hidden identity that is different than all of the other, most of the other superheroes. And so that and the general psychology behind being like the world's greatest detective, it's how he started in the '30s. I'm like, I'm a sorcerer, that's perfect. And so I tried it and I was like, let's see how this works. And it just stuck. I just started now, everything's branded, which is great until I get a C&D from Warner Brothers, and then it won't be as branded.

Well, that would be, that would be good news because that means that you're famous enough for them to give a fuck.

Yeah, exactly. Double-edged sword.

Think about the positive side of that is if you do get that, then that means that you're actually a threat to their brand.

Yeah.

So, okay, you know, yeah, I would be okay with that. That's, that's, uh, that's a good time to change your branding. And by then I don't think anybody's gonna give a crap about the other, um, Mike Cohen.

Yeah, yeah, I hope so.

So it's like, I always thought that you called yourself Batman because you were really rich and really dark and mysterious.

You know what, Shelly, you nailed it. I am really rich and just thought to myself, you know what, I, you know, it'd be a great thing to do for less— recruiting. I think that's where I, where I want to sell. No, I don't want to buy an island and a yacht. I want to do recruiting.

Um, that way people don't know that you're really I love this.

I love that.

They're gonna believe it. They'll be like, what? He's got a lot of money? No way. But he's a sorcerer. How is that possible?

I love this. Warner Brothers is gonna send me a C&D, and then in the next Batman movie, they're gonna cast somebody from like a teen rom-com and have them be a recruiter on the daytime. That'll be perfect. Perfect, perfect cover story. Yeah. Um, that's why— that's right, that's right. Uh, an investigator. So very awesome, very awesome. How are things with you, man?

Uh, things are great, man. I, I'm in a really good place, you know. It's, um, family right now is kind of a big deal. It's that the kids are at that age where one of them is, is maybe just a few years from not even needing me anymore, and the other one is entering the stage of like this is probably one of the more influential parts of, you know, of his formative years. So it's a really good time to be able to spend time with the family. And, um, coming out of this whole COVID thing, it was just— it was a disaster. I mean, you know, having, having two younger kids staying at home for school and doing homeschool is just crazy. I mean, I don't know how other parents did it. We, we we really had a hard time with that. Um, it's— it was, it was tough because, you know, they didn't have a social life. So I think that there's a little piece of growing up that they just missed out on for a couple of years. So we're trying to, you know, and that's— it's, it's retarded. And I mean that as in like it's been delayed.

The actual—

yeah, yeah, the actual word. So because, you know, now they're in the teen years, but they never had that like tween period where they had awkward, uh, social relationships because they had none. It was like, you know, you can't go anywhere, sorry. Yeah, I think we're sort of making up for that, doing some stuff like taking family vacations and things like that. I'm gonna be taking them back home. I'm, I'm actually— I already bought tickets and got the passports and everything, so we're traveling to Cartagena, and I'm showing where I grew up, Barranquilla, and all that. Gonna spend a couple weeks down there. It's gonna be pretty life-changing, I think, for them.

Dude, that'll be awesome. That'd be awesome. Um, my, my nieces are, uh, you know, in their, their younger years, right? 3, 6, 7. And they missed out on those like years where you're transitioning from, you know, like preschool into, you know, first grade. And, you know, my, my sister was equally as worried and like, how do you teach those skills then that you've learned during that time period, you know?

We did all right. We came out of it on the other side, but now it's a good time. So that's where I am as far as, you know, between that, my job, and the foundation, the Sourcing Institute Foundation, that's kind of, that's it. You know, I'm still very passionate about that and doing really well. We, um, we honestly, the big, the biggest thing is with the foundation, we need money. And, um, because it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's a nonprofit, but there's so much money being spent on other I don't want to say more important things, but, you know, with the war and the pandemic and all these— so people don't really think about donating, um, to a cause that, that gives people jobs and career opportunities because it's not a life-or-death situation. Not right now anyway, right?

Yeah.

But we do save lives. I mean, you know, the most— one of our most recent graduates is now, um, you know, was previously unemployed, completely blind, 100% blind. Previously unemployed, really couldn't— I mean, he had tried a bunch of jobs, but there's not a lot of jobs where you can be blind and have like a career path and be successful. There's a lot of barriers. Now they can do it, but the unemployment rate is like 85%, and I mean voluntary— sorry, involuntary unemployment. In other words, they want to find a job, but they— it's 85%. And he's now working, making a pretty decent wage. you know, and on his way to— he's supporting his family, no longer on government benefits. So that's a big deal because that is a life that is being affected permanently, right? But it's not in the news. It's not, you know, people aren't dying from it. So it's kind of— foundation's going through a weird, a weird stage. That's really the biggest thing that worries me is being able to sustain that so that we can keep going. We, um, we're pretty transparent about, you know, what we do. Run rate for the foundation is about $3,500 a month. So if we had a source of income that was $3,500 every month, we would be able to produce 20 graduates a month.

$3,500, that's it?

That's it. $3,500 a month is pretty much all it takes. That's, that's to pay— because we don't have a physical office— that's to pay for the server and the the, um, LMS where we have the training, and to pay for some of the, the coaching time for people to, you know, actually be able to help train them through doing intake sessions and all that stuff. So it's really not that much. If we had more money, we'd have more graduates, but to produce about 20 graduates a month, um, it only takes about $3,500. And so right now we're barely producing 5 or 6 graduates a month.

So, you know, I've actually had this question for a while, if you don't mind me asking, is how did, how did that become like a focus and a goal for you? Because you've been, you've had the Sourcing Institute for longer than I've been aware of sourcing, probably. How did, how did that become like a focus for you?

The foundation?

Yeah. Helping, helping the visually impaired. Like, how did, where did that come from for you?

This blind is Blind is okay. Blind and visually impaired. They identify as blind when they have— when they're basically legally blind, what they call legally blind, which means that they have zero visibility. Visually impaired is another categorization where they can see with assistance. So it could be like they have partial vision, but they can't, say, operate a motor vehicle because they can't see enough to read street signs, things like that. So it's like a— different classification. Not that it matters, but the same thing with deaf and hearing impaired. They also make that distinction, and we work with them as well. Another group that we work with are returning citizens. You familiar with that?

Second chance citizens? Well, that's—

they don't like that. Yeah, returning citizens is what they like.

Got it. So then, yes, yes, yes, I am, but not by that phrase returning citizen. I'll have to, uh, okay.

But basically what it means is people who have, um, committed some kind of crime that they paid for according to, you know, society laws. They went to prison and did their time and have paid their dues to society and have now been released. And they have a very hard time, not as hard as people who are blind, the unemployment rate there is 85%, but with returning citizens, the unemployment rate is still pretty darn high. And it depends on the class of crime, right? Because sometimes they can answer, you know, where do you still have the box? They can answer the box, yes, I've been convicted of a felony and still pass a background check. But in other cases they can't. And so the ones where the background check comes back and gives them a lot of trouble are the ones that are violent offenders or drug offenders. And ironically, those are our best students, what we found over time. I did the same thing that you're doing right now. When I started working with, what do you call 'em? Second chance.

Second chance, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, started working with returning citizens. My original idea was, well, let's work with people that have done white-collar crimes or financial crimes. Nobody's gonna be afraid of working with them, right? And it turns out that they have the highest recidivism rate. White-collar criminals tend to commit more white-collar crime 'cause it's easier and, you know, they get away with it sometimes. And so I was like, what? That doesn't make any sense. I would've thought they would be the ones that would reform. But no, actually, as it turns out, those that went to prison for murder or, you know, drug crimes are actually, they have a higher reform rate. So one of our first graduates is a historic case was that he was the first person in the state of California ever to be released after 3 consecutive life sentences. That not 3 simultaneous life sentences, he had 3. So he had 3 consecutive life sentences as a conviction and was released after 37 years through a a pardon, a governor's pardon. It was the first time that that ever been done, um, as, as part of a new program. Now the thing is, he had committed murder in when he was 17 or 18 years old, and it was one of those like completely— I mean, he, he regrets it every day of his life. He's paid his dues. He knows exactly what happened. But it was one of those like, uh, undeniably just bad situations. It was bad all the way around, and it's, it's a tragedy. It's unfortunate. He's never going to do that again. There's never going to be a chance for that to ever happen again, right? He's now a successful recruiter working in the business, making money. He's even got a business on the side, so he's doing well enough that he's got his own little business and he's got a job, and he's doing great. And he's a really good example for some of the others. Our second graduate that came out was a drug, multiple drug offender. So had been, had essentially got out, couldn't get a job and couldn't, couldn't get employed anywhere, had no family. The little bit of family he had turned him away because they're like, oh, you're, you know, you're a prisoner, you're a con. Like, no, I'm not. I'm an ex. Like, I don't— I did that. Like, I'm, you know, I'm ready to— and nobody helped him out. So he ended up getting essentially re-recruited, right? But unwillingly, it was like he was just because of his situation, practically homeless, ended up in a bad situation and got caught up unintentionally in another drug bust. And now it's his second offense. So he was one of those that got like triple the penalty because it was a second time. And then he also got out a second time. And was headed in the right direction. Like, I'm going to be right back in the place where I'm going to be in the right place, right, right time to go right back into jail. So he made a decision that I'm going to get— I'm going to leave town, I'm going to go to another city and, you know, try to start anew. This guy ate so much humble pie, he started working as a laborer and all this stuff. Still, man, I mean, the, the statistic says something to the effect of like every 3 months that they're out the probability that they'll, they'll go back in increases by some percentage, like 15%. And so by the time they're out for 2 years, it's like a 70% chance that they're going to go back in prison because of the drug. Now, this is the drug crimes, not the murder. The murder, the murder, you know, violent crimes, murder and manslaughter and things like that have a very low rate of recidivism. But the drug offenders, a lot of this has to do with environment. So he knew what was going to happen. He made every effort to get out, um, and we picked him up. And now again, he's, you know, he's making a living. He's right. So it's huge and it affects everybody, you know. It affects the tax system, it affects the Social Security and everything. But it's really hard to get people to pay attention to it and donate money.

So, uh, how could—

because how did I get into it? Yes.

Yes.

Well, short story is this, um, what— with the Sourcing Institute has been around for a very long time, and when I was really heavily involved with, uh, the Sourcing Institute, we would take on one or two apprentices every year, people who didn't really have the means to pay for the education. So they, they were in a tough situation Classic example, there was this guy that was introduced to me by one of our employees, a friend of one of our employees, who is a former Minuteman, like had the finger on the button of launching the missiles in the Air Force, got out and had a full career, you know, 20 years in the Air Force, got out, started a print business, grew it to like 7 print shops in the Atlanta area, was doing really well, and then basically the print business, you know, just like boom. It just— so he just lost everything, lost his house, was homeless, his wife divorced him. Um, it was just— he was literally— he doesn't mind me sharing this— he was literally suicidal. Like, he was trying to, you know, end his life and all that. And so my friend was the employee, was worried about him, and he was like, you know, let's take a look at this guy. So we brought him in, and he couldn't afford to paid for the classes, even though it's only $3,500 or whatever it was. He couldn't afford it. So we took him in and we taught him, you know, we apprenticed him, and he took— it took off. Now he's making $120,000 a year running a search firm. Well, a branch of a search firm. So it's like, you know, we had all these stories and 2 or so of these, 1 or 2 of these every year for about 7 years. And then my partner Rob and I were talking one day, we're like, we need to make this legitimate. I mean, we're basically doing this I don't want to say as a favor because we were doing it intentionally out of, hey, we really think this person has a chance to do this. And, and sometimes we would hire those people that we put through the training program. Sometimes they would get jobs elsewhere. We didn't do it intentionally to get them to work for us. We trained them so that they, you know, would go out and find a living. But we weren't doing anything official. It was like just haphazard. I mean, it was like 'Somebody tried to buy the training and couldn't afford it, so we took a chance and gave it to them for free,' that kind of thing.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah. And so basically my partner and I were like, 'Yeah, let's, let's like legitimize this,' and we went and incorporated a 501(c)(3), then started working with, um, I think our first partnership with a company— not a company, but another nonprofit called, um, the Starfish Foundation. And that's when we met— starfish are blind, as you know, they have no eyes. So this foundation was working with blind people. So that's how we got into that, had good success. We worked with another organization that helped military spouses, and we had really good luck with that. So these are, these are spouses of people that are deployed, men and women, right? And, um, they essentially have to, they have to declare that they are, they are possibly going to be redeployed. So if a military spouse is living in some base in Germany or, or Japan or whatever, and they were to try to get a job, they would have to tell that employer, hey, at any minute I might actually end up— and so employers are like, yeah, we'd like to hire you, but yeah, of course, that's kind of risky for us, right? So they, they have a hard time getting, getting jobs. So we started working with them. We had a— we have two successful graduating classes from there. Unfortunately, um, what happened with military spouses was we had some spouses that ended up essentially finding— so they went through the program and graduated, and 3 out of the 7 ended up finding like other jobs anyway. So they still got a job, but it just wasn't with us. But not with that— not with— not— I mean, it wasn't in recruiting, so they, they went through all the training and then got a job that wasn't in recruiting. And 2 of them decided to just not work. So we had a very low success rate on that one, although 2 is not bad, you know, it's lower than the other ones. And then we worked with returning veterans that had, especially with female veterans, because one of the challenges with female veterans is they often get discriminated against twice, actually 3 times. They get discriminated against because they're women. They get discriminated against because they're soldiers. And they get discriminated against yet one more time because they don't have any skills, right? A returning male veteran, they go, well, why don't you go work for the post office? How many times you hear that? Why don't you go work as a security guard? Like, like that's all you're qualified to do, right? Obviously not, but at least they get something, you know. The, the women are, they're like, well, we don't want to tell you to go be a cop because women can't be cops. So it's like, yet again, so it's a triple, it's a triple whammy. So we started working with, uh, returning veterans, exiting, exiting veterans, right, that were women. So it just kind of took off and we had all these programs. But I gotta tell you though, the hardest working people, the highest success rate are blind, and the second highest are the returning citizens. I mean, they're, you know, if we put, if we put 3 blind people into the program, all 3 of them graduate. And, um, you know, 9 out of 10 times, all 3 of them will get jobs in recruiting. Some of the other ones, they sometimes switch careers and stuff like that. I think it's because there's really not that many options for someone who's, you know, completely blind. There's not a lot of options. And Think about it. This job doesn't require you, especially nowadays, to go somewhere.

That's right.

So mobility is actually no longer a problem. Tough time trying to tell somebody that they have to come into the office to be a recruiter these days.

Yeah, yeah, good luck with that. Let me know how long they're there.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, like, really, why? 'Cause I mean, I've been doing this job quite well for the last 2 years without going into an office anywhere. And not only that, but also, and this will shock you, they can read faster than us.

I mean, faster than me for sure, 100%.

Faster than the average sighted person.

Really?

The average blind person reads faster than the average sighted person. Incredibly fast, like some ridiculous number. And I've actually listened in on, there's a program that, there's several programs, but one of them is called JAWS. That reads things on the screen. And what it does is it doesn't just read the text like Siri would or Dragon Dictate or whatever, it's reading the UI. So it's telling layouts, buttons, headline 1, headline 2, subtext, all this stuff. So it's reading it all to them. But it sounds like if you listen in on it, it sounds like Chippendale drank a gallon of coffee and smoked a vial of meth and did speed all at once. It's like, and they understand it completely. That's why they're talking to you. So they're talking to you and in the background you can hear it sometimes because you can hear it through their headphones. Speaker comes out a little bit into the mic, you know, so you can kind of hear it. It's like, what is that? Oh, that's my screen reader. And it's like, what, you understand that while they're talking to you? It's incredible. They really, really fast.

So that is cool.

We were pretty impressed with, with, with the success rate there. And that's kind of why we— it's, it's, it's really just a practical matter of like we have really high success rates and what we're trying to do is make the most difference we can make with as little— you know, we don't have a lot of resources. So if we're going to spend time and energy and money on 3 people, we want to have the highest possible success rate. Sure.

Yeah. Um, all right, Shelly, ready? Where can people go if they wanted to hire these folks that you've now trained? Because it seems like they'd be very, very employable based on what you're saying.

So like, oh, they are. Yeah, they are.

Yeah. How would, how would people find this?

Sourcing Foundation. Yeah. So basically put it, it is sourcingfoundation.org. Yeah, right there.

That's wild. Yeah, cool. I just figured like the people listening probably are looking for sourcers because isn't everybody right now?

I'm like, right, yeah, definitely hire these people. They will— they're not all blind, but that doesn't matter. We won't tell you. We're not going to tell you when a graduate comes out. We don't tell you if they're, you know, um returning citizen or they're blind or whatever, it's up to them. They— it's their business to disclose what they want to disclose. That's right. But we guarantee that they have done the job because one of the things that we do is we have a capstone course where they do the job of a sourcer for 2 weeks under supervision from an actual recruiter that gets paid to be recruiting for a real rec. Only challenge is we have to find wrecks that are not taking food off the table from anyone else. So it's got to be a wreck that isn't with a staffing firm or, you know, somewhere where it's competing. So it's, it's literally dead wrecks, like wrecks that have been open for a long time and they've had a hard time filling in. They work on those really challenging ones, and a couple of them have made some placements. So that's cool when they get out. So we know that they could do the job.

That's awesome. That's really awesome.

Yeah, so one of the questions that I was going to ask you, you probably don't remember this, maybe, maybe you do, but we, we were, we were talking about when you were thinking about hiring somebody because you've had this Wayne Technology company for a while and it was just you, you were, you were a solopreneur, and you said, Shelly, I, I need to, I need to hire some, I need to hire somebody. I think you, you said I need to hire at least somebody to like help me with my business because I've got more business than I can shake a stick at right now, and I'm overwhelmed. I'm working too hard. I want to hire. So this is the first time that you were hiring somebody.

Yep.

And I turn around and 5 seconds later you've got like 10 employees. So between how the hell do I hire somebody to I now have 10 employees and I can't hire anymore because I'm full up, what happened? Did you— yeah, did you make them? Did you do what I did? Did you train them from like you took somebody that didn't have any experience? Okay, so tell me about that.

Yeah, I love this conversation. I love this topic. So yeah, it was, it came about exactly as you said, right? Like I had the opportunity for business and I had just make the choice, right? Do I want to do this? And I know we talked about this, like I hate management, hate my, all my crew knows this already, right? I love leadership. But like hate management. So I realized, oh, yes, yeah. And all the operational stuff that goes— it's just not— it's not my jam. And so I decided to do exactly what you had said, and I think you do as well, which is hire people with the right human skill sets and then train them in the methodology, because the way that we work is inherently different than most companies out there. And B, like, I don't want to have to retrain people. That's way harder than training, right? So hire entry-level or very junior folks. And these are all sub-4 years of experience. Most of them are sub-1 year of experience in recruiting at all, let alone sourcing. And then train them and realize there's going to be a 2 to 3 month ramp-up period and just accept that and focus instead on retention, because that's, that's the tradeoff, right? Like, you're either going to pay more money and get people who can do the job and they're going to come in. And if they leave, that sucks. But like, you know, you can hire somebody else who can come in and kind of hit the ground running, or you're going to hire people at a lower salary with a lot more upside, in which case you need to focus on retention because 3 years in, right? Like, like Nikkei, my first hire, I was 21 years old and Google's reaching out to him about a sourcing role and it's like, how the hell do you keep somebody in that case? So yeah, I think that was my general approach and then focusing on the culture itself and like the reasons to stay.

But I guess I wanna know how you found them because That's the biggest, you know, that's the biggest challenge. Now, for me, in the Foundation, we cheat because one of the things that I determined really early on was that we didn't want to be— in the Foundation, we didn't want to be responsible for selecting or deciding who was deserving, right? In other words, we decided that we were going to specialize— the foundation was going to specialize in providing the skills needed to do the job, not in determining who should be selected. Okay, we left that decision up to our partner organization. So Project Starfish was responsible for selecting the first group of people based on their criteria for who they thought was ready to learn a job, because they provided them with basic skills like business skills and professional skills, and they taught them how to use screen readers. Some of the earlier graduates had become blind. One of my favorite— one of my— actually, the first blind graduate is— lost his sight at age 54. So he had been sighted his whole life, had a fully fulfilling, normal, everyday career like everybody else had, like a regular life in, in career and business and everything, but then lost his sight through some kind of, um, some kind of disease. I remember exactly what this was all about. And, um, they had to relearn like how to read and things like that. So we, we didn't want to be the ones deciding, okay, he gets foundation, but, you know, but we relied on our partners. So in my case, I get to cheat because I, I get the organization that is already supporting these people to tell me which ones have the, the drive, the— whatever it is, I don't get involved in it. They say these 5 people are ready. We then do an interview to determine fit for sourcing, not fit for whether or not they deserve, but fit for sourcing, right? And then we make a selection from there. How did you pick out of 360 million possible applicants this one person?

Yeah, uh, yeah, this is a good question. I think it's two-part, right? Um, first goes to a general philosophy, right? Which, you know, it's a role.

Who's your wife's second cousin from—

Yeah, exactly. I'm just going through the family tree. It's like when you get that job like Cutco selling knives, like, list everybody you can sell a knife to. I did that. I did that. Yeah, you know. You know that job. It's awesome. Anybody watching right now who's in our age bracket is just like, oh no. So it's two-part, right? One is I really do put a strong focus and have a belief, a company belief in individual that like giving back to the community pays dividends significantly higher than people anticipate, right? So one is in doing that, it's built up a network for me and a little bit of a following. So I just posted on LinkedIn, and for anybody who read it, you know this already, but it was basically just a download of like, hey, here's the job, here are the cool things about working here, here are the bad things about working for me, right? Like I'm disorganized, I swear a whole bunch, I get snarky, and like, it's just like, it's laying it out there, right? Like here's why you'd like working for me, me, here's why you won't. And then just asking for referrals, right? So first hire, Nikhil, his dad Nathan Hill referred him to me and I was like, I love Nathan, might as well try. Second, Julia came from Dan Lockhart and was a personal referral. And then the remainder came from the posts online. So one was getting the name out in the network, right? And you can only really do that by providing value to the community. As a whole. The second is I have a crazy interview process. I tell people this is literally it, and people are like, what the hell are you doing? So the first interview is with me, and we start the interview and I'm like, hey, here's the deal. I don't care about your resume. Your sourcing background and recruiting background are not super relevant for me because I'm going to train you from the ground up anyway. I need to know you as a person, and I start off saying, we have an hour to talk. We're going to start with you telling me any and everything about you and your life that you think you want me to know or is relevant in any way. You can take the full hour, you can take a minute, doesn't matter, whatever you want. And so let them talk and kind of hear like what's important to them, like what are their values, what things stand out in their mind. Then I say, hey, you get to ask me any 3 questions you want, personal, professional, It doesn't matter. Nothing is off limits. I will answer anything you ask me. And it gives me an idea of like, hey, how curious are they? And are they curious in a surface-level curious way, or are they curious in like a deep diving want to know more, right? Like Kirsten or Huntress, who I hired, is a single mom veteran, right? She's freaking awesome. And one of the questions she asked me was, What's the most magical moment you've had in your entire life? And I was like, whoa, hang on.

Like, right now?

Yeah. It's just like— so I take a minute, right? And so we go through the 3 questions, I ask whatever. And then the last part of the interview is a vulnerability section where I ask typically 2 super vulnerable, like hyper vulnerable questions that I answer first.

If they're bulletproof, then they're hired.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You either need to dodge this, deflect this, or it needs to bounce off of you. We've lost a lot of applicants. So I typically am asking like hyper-personable, vulnerable questions, and they have the option of like passing, asking for a different question, or saying, hey, I'm uncomfortable, I don't wanna do this. That's fine. But like one of the questions I ask is like, hey, in your life, What's the one thing you regret having done the most? And what have you done about it since then? And then I answer the question first, right? So that way it's not like this person out on an emotional island by themselves. And I wanna see their ability to go to that place, whatever that is for them, right? It's different. Some people cry, some people like really take a minute and get contemplative about it. And just seeing like, hey, how human are you able to be and how comfortable being uncomfortable are you? Because sourcing in the beginning is really uncomfortable because you're just failing constantly. And so like, how do you deal with that?

That happens all the time.

Still happens. I was trying to be like, don't worry guys, it eventually— no, it doesn't. You just fail in different ways. Yeah, that's right. It's different failure. And so So that is my initial process for deciding who the person is. From there, they talk to Nikkeo and Julia, who go through more of the traditional, like, tell me about your sourcing, walk me through your passions, your motivations, blah, blah, blah. And then we have a happy hour with the team where everybody comes together. And if you drink, like, have an adult libation, if you enjoy other things and whatever, I don't care. Show up as you, right? This is a yoga pants, t-shirt type of interview, and we all just hang out for an hour.

So they're all there? You don't have any remote workers?

No, no, we're all remote. This is all over like Zoom.

They— oh, gotcha. It's a Zoom happy hour.

Yeah, yeah. And that way it's, uh, it just want to know like, hey, how do you communicate, right? Are you a wallflower? Are you somebody we have to pull information from? Are you somebody who's like, oh, there's going to be an ego here, we need to like be really mindful about this? So, um, it— that's, that's a general process. So for me It's honestly about the people themselves at their core. Who are they? You know this better than I do by far. You can train just about anybody to do this job. They may not be great, but like at a base level, you can teach somebody to be a sourcer.

Right.

Yes, yes. In which case, are the tactical skills as important? And like, dude, the Sourcing Foundation proves this. Like, no, it's not. You don't even need to cite. To do this job, let alone an experience with spreadsheets or math and stuff like that. So yeah, that's, that's how, man.

It's honestly when we, when we're looking for, when we're vetting them for sourcing, again, they've already been vetted by the program from which they originate. So we're not looking at like, is this person professional? Is this, you know, not— that's already been done. When we're vetting them is we're looking for the 7 core competencies. One of those is creativity, and another one is tenacity. It's so— which is— there's, there's others, there's a few others. There's 7 of them altogether that we look at. But creativity and tenacity frequently don't go together. And I'm not saying that they usually don't go together, I'm just saying that you can find tenacity without creativity. You can find creativity without tenacity, but finding creativity and tenacity along with some of these other things is the right combination. Because as you said, it— you're gonna get punched in the teeth 50 times a day, and that's not— it doesn't slow down. You just get better at maybe dodging it or preparing for it.

That's right.

You know, or becoming, you know, or losing your teeth or whatever it is that you got to do. That's right. But then at the same time, it's you have to come up with other better ways to solve problems and that has to change constantly. So when somebody comes to me, the absolute worst question that I ever get as a consultant and as a trainer is, what's your best sourcing technique? You ever get that one? Yeah.

Oh my, yeah. What's the best tool for sourcing? The internet, I guess.

The brain.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, that's— I always give the example, Shelley, of like—

So much that— Yeah. Yeah. That creativity is necessary.

You talk to somebody who's building your house, right? And you're like, what's the best tool for building a house? Can you imagine if they're like, a hammer? Like, you're fired. Right?

Well, you can definitely hang windows with a hammer.

That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. I want to— yeah, I want to see you pour the foundation with a hammer. I mean, how that goes.

Scoop the cement with a hand.

The back end. Your house is going to take 17 years.

Um, so yeah, that's, um, yeah, we had a question from someone on LinkedIn. What do you expect when you're hiring, when you're training rock stars? I want to say to Brett, first of all, I gotta tell you, Mike does not train rock stars. Mike trains people who become rock stars.

Thanks.

But now that we've got that straight, Yeah, what do you— let's answer Brett's question. What do you expect when you're, when you're training?

What's, what's the, um, yeah, what's up BBR? Good to see you, man. Um, what do I expect? Um, this, you know, I tell everybody this, which is if you're working hard, like you're really trying hard, and you have a commitment to doing the right thing by your colleagues, the company, and the community, you will always have a job at Wayne Tech. Always. We'll shift that around however we need to, but you'll always have a job. So what do I expect? I expect that you're going to try, and I expect that you're going to care, and I expect that when you fail, which you will, that you're going to get yourself back up and take another step forward again. Right? I think it's that tenacity piece for me is huge.

Tenacity, creativity, problem solving. Yeah. Which would you call lateral thinking, which is different than creativity.

Lateral thinking.

Yeah.

Can you, can you explain? I'm gonna, I'm gonna play the dumb card here.

Lateral thinking is, um, essentially, uh, connecting dots that don't necessarily look obviously connected, or making logical leaps, seeing kind of a pattern where not one exists, or at least is visibly recognizable. So it's, um being able to extrapolate and guess, uh, this might go here, this looks like— because to, to me, and, uh, Brett makes the case of critical thinking. So lateral thinking and critical thinking are related, but critical thinking can be either inductive or deductive, and critical thinking allows you to essentially kind of root diagnose, right? Or come to your own conclusions because of the information that's available, or to find information to fill in the blanks. That's all critical thinking. Lateral thinking is a little bit different. It's more about— here's a perfect example. When Benjamin Franklin— I think it was Benjamin Franklin— invented the filament for the light bulb— they say he invented the light bulb, but that's not the case he invented the filament for the light bulb. Um, I think it was Benjamin Franklin, am I— yeah, yeah, Franklin. It was that he had in his laboratory, at least from what I understand, and I read this, uh, somewhere a long time ago, so maybe I'm not 100% accurate, but he had a lot of these different chemicals and substances that he had tried and combined together to make various materials, metals, uh, other types of solids. And he had tested all of these out But many of them would burn brightly and then, you know, flash, right? They would burn, flash, they would— or they would not be bright enough or whatever, until he finally found this tungsten whatever it is combination that was just the right amount of combination that resisted the electricity enough to glow and become bright but didn't melt on itself. Or, you know, or at least it lasted longer. I don't know how long light bulbs lasted back then. But the point is that he didn't just go down to his laboratory, put this with this together and create a light bulb. He went down to his laboratory day after day after day and tried every combination of material that he could think of, and none of them worked. So in sourcing, just like with, with Ben Franklin, you sometimes— it's not— there is no eureka moment. Very frequently.

That's right.

There's usually a, I wonder what happens when I do this.

That's right.

Uh-oh, that didn't work. And then I wonder what happens if I try that. Well, if that worked but it wasn't great, what if I do this? And then I try— and that is lateral thinking. Because if you try to do systemically a— and the scientific method does say that you want to, um, you know, create a hypothesis and then test it out, have a theory, and then, you know, et cetera. And so it says try everything, you know, until something, um, until something works. But with sourcing, you have to take shortcuts. So it's like, okay, I tried this, it's kind of like that, maybe if I make this look like that and put these two together, something will happen. Glenn and I very initially, um, worked on some projects where we sat behind the computer screen and just hit our heads on the wall so many times that we couldn't figure something out. And then we'd go away, come back the next day and try something, and it would work. And it was never a eureka moment. It wasn't like, I know I can do this, and then discover, you know, a formula. A lot of what we did in the early days when Glen and I would, would break some of these systems, like for example, um, with, with Google, the, the very first Google cheat sheet that I produced, I don't even know how long ago it was. There was no documentation for Google. There were no commands. There was no help file, it was just a search engine. I had, through trial and error, discovered a couple of characters that had different effects, and I put them together and I started playing with those and eventually arrived at a formula that I then created the cheat sheet with. And fast forward years later, Larry Page saw me teaching this class at the Google campus, and he's got an eidetic memory. He basically took exactly what I had put on there and put it on the Google cheat sheet. you know, website or on the help file. But that didn't exist before. Even arguably the inventor— I don't know if he invented the search engine or if, you know, Sergey did or what. I'm not quoting that historically accurately, but even the person that created the search engine or was part of that, you know, creation team for the search didn't think of putting this out there. It hadn't been resolved that way. So it's the creativity of that there's got to be another way. Another example, Glenn and I were working on how to identify profiles off of LinkedIn way back. I mean, the site: command in the early days didn't work because you would get all this other content. And so we tried to figure out what were the patterns. And before there was a /in, there was a /pub as well. And there were other profiles in other formats. And so we had to figure out what appears in every profile and find the commonalities. That's lateral thinking. Right? What is it that brings these things together in a way that you don't really put together? Because you can't just go to the website and figure it out from there. Okay, there's no direct line between, you know, you don't go from here to there. And this is, by the way, one of the biggest differences between a recruiter and a sourcer is recruiters are systemic. They have to be. They have to follow a process, a workflow. In many cases, a corporate recruiter has a lot of scrutiny, right? There's, there's 11 different laws in organizations that affect recruiting, not just EEOC, but also ADA, OFCCP, Sarbanes-Oxley. There's all these different things that you've got to look for. Most recruiters aren't even aware because their ATS handles a lot of it. But the fact is that there are laws and there are things that you have to do. There's— there has to be an applicant flow log. Sure, your ATS handles it, but that's why we have to disposition candidates. That's why we can't just reject a bunch of people and say not best qualified, because we have to prove that. Otherwise somebody would audit us that has authority, and in the case of the EEOC, can actually send you to jail. You can do prison time, right? None of the other bodies can do that, but you can— your company can be fined, you can be fined. So there's a lot, which means recruiters have to have rules. Well, sourcing, not the same. Sourcing cannot be systems thinking. Sourcing has to be the opposite of that. That's lateral thinking.

I love that. I love that. That's cool. That was a cool explanation also between the, the two in terms of the, the differences from a brain thinking logic pattern perspective. That's a cool way of looking at that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna use that moving forward.

We look at when we're, when we're evaluating candidates for, for the program. But, you know, keep in mind we already have some of the other problems solved that you're— you have to solve for those problems too, right? Is this person going to be reliable? Are they going to show up to work? We don't have to worry about that because the organization that we're working with has already done that vetting.

Yeah, that's cool.

Brett said it was— he didn't succeed one time, he failed thousands. I think he's talking about Ben Franklin.

Ben Franklin. Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. Totally true. Yeah, it's interesting, right? When you and I were playing around last year with like the Twitter searching, X-raying searching of just going back and forth of just like, you're like, oh no, there's a better way to do that. Boom. And I was like, oh, well, what about this? You're like, what about this? Like, eventually you came back and you're like, got it. This one achieves the best results.

We're like, huh, okay.

Yeah, love that.

That's that multiple iterations and and guessing. You guess and then you try. There's really not a formula that you can say, I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this, then I'm gonna do this. It's like, I'm gonna do this. Wow, that was bad. Remember one of the searches that we did came back with like way too many results and you got excited. You're like, oh, this has the most results. And I'm like, stop. That's not good. The most results can actually be bad. And you're like, what do you mean? It's got the most. I'm like, no, it's got the most bad results. Duplicates and irrelevant stuff.

Yeah, that's right.

And then you're like, that's right. And then I was like, all right, let's start over. We gotta throw that one out because we went the wrong way. That's right, in the wrong direction, and put something up that was like just a joke. It was garbage. And that happened, you know, you get a list of, uh, you know, 10,000.

It—

this was worse back in, in the day than it is now, but you would go to Google and you would type in a search and you would get 1 million results, right? Well, back in the day, you could actually scroll through the million pages of 100 results each and drive yourself crazy. Now they stop at 299, so you can never go past that. So it's not as— it's not as big, but still, people go to Google and type something in and see a million results, and they think that's legitimate.

Yeah, it's not. It's right. That's right.

Yeah, it doesn't know finance. Oh wait, they do.

That's it. Yeah. Oh, earnings reports. Uh, that's right. That's right. Anyway, that's awesome. I think I saw somebody ask the like, what is— what do we think sourcing is going to look like in 5 to 7 years? A new emerging skills. Yeah, I'm actually intrigued to see what you're going to say also. But so for me, I see sourcing heading down the technology research path of becoming significantly more data-driven. And so I believe, and then this is a leap I believe that the best sourcers in 5 to 7 years are going to have technical backgrounds. So like people who can do light coding, right? Like you've done this whole thing with Power Automate, right? I use Integromat, which it's Make now, right? And understanding the actual tech, like being able to build light tech, right? Not like Andre Bradshaw, but like a, you know, a level or two before that. And I think I think it's going to be, as opposed to more recruitment heavy, it's going to be more data research heavy, right? So people coming from like, you know, the Cantars and Forrester and stuff like that where your goal is to find things online as platforms who shall not be named lock down their data more and more under like highly paid subscriptions that people people are going to have to understand, like, how can you not like subvert them, but like how can you acquire data without having to pay these astronomical funds? Or if you are paying these astronomical funds, what is the best means to do that? And it's not the manual profile by profile and look and project and email and like that's not it. And in 5 to 7 years, if what you're doing is jumping on one of these AI tools or using just LinkedIn Recruiter to run a basic search and then in-mailing. I believe they're gonna be able to replace that like base level, like what I would call like the mindless searcher. So you're not even a sourcer at that point, like the mindless searcher job.

It's just a task. Yeah.

Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah, I think the interpretation, the technology, the tools, the analytics, that's all here. I mean, that's what we're seeing. You know, my team now isn't even really— I've got 3, 3 people that don't even have LinkedIn accounts at all. Like, they don't even use LinkedIn. One of them operates almost exclusively on Slack and a couple of other, you know, Discord and a couple places like that. That's all they do. Which, by the way, is what I did in 1996. Not Slack, but when I started recruiting and before I had invented sourcing before anybody even called it sourcing or knew what sourcing was. I was, uh, getting my butt whooped at work because all the other recruiters had long-standing relationships and they had a Rolodex, a bit, you know. And here I am, total rookie. I was going on BBSs, if you even remember what that is. Bulletin boards.

Oh wow, okay, is this in the AOL days, like the ICQ days?

This is before ICQ. This is a 14 baud modem that would connect to a dial-up that would then call on some kind of bulletin board, which was a green screen chat group that, you know, where you would add— and that's what Slack is today, let's face it, you know, the ability to do video calls. But that's it. So I have a couple of team members that don't do any LinkedIn at all. Because the people that they have to find are not gonna be— they might be on LinkedIn, but they're not gonna be approachable. And very frequently we don't even see them on LinkedIn. If you have their name and you try to find them on LinkedIn, they're not even there. So that's one type of sourcing. And then the other type of sourcing is the, like you said, technology usage of it, right? So what kind of things do you automate now? You don't have to, I don't want you to spill any, you know, obviously proprietary—

Oh no, I'm not.

But what are the steps that you are speeding up through technology.

Oh yeah, no, no, I'm, I'm open source on this one, similar, similar to how you are on your stuff, right? Like you share your dashboards and everything with people. So we actually have it automated right now. We use, we use Make and client fills out an intake form for a role. It automatically pulls data from two data stores. One is our internal about the account manager. Another is from the client, from their client onboarding form. And then it creates a copy of our spreadsheet template that we do all of our work on. It fills in data in individual fields to make sure like we have all of like the intake form data and the sprint number and all that. It creates a copy of the deliverable that we send to the clients. It creates all the formulas to pull from the, the original form. It updates the dashboard and then it creates a task in our project management tool, ClickUp. It creates the subtasks for all the deliverables we have. It messages us on Discord to let us know someone has filled this out. And then it even connects to QuickBooks. And if they're not already a client in QuickBooks, it creates a new client. And if they are, it then creates an invoice for that sprint and sends it to Melio, our, our tool. So it's literally all like that operational stuff that you and I are not like huge fans of. It, uh, it takes care of a good chunk of that.

And somebody supervises it. So when it does, doesn't do it. Yeah. Right.

Bingo. That's exactly right.

What about on the, what about on the side of the communication with candidates or prospects? Is there anything going on there? Yeah.

Yeah. So I use Sourcewell as my tool of choice on the messaging side. I've used InterCellar, I've used Gem, I've used Lemlist. List. Sourcewell is my preference. And we create the 5 email outreach to candidates, and we have a general methodology. It's all in my messaging training. I think it's on YouTube.

Is it texting too? So you can, with this app, you can send text messages?

I think you can send text through there, and it also has the reminders for the in-mails where like you click it and it'll auto-populate populate, right, just like most of the tools do. Yeah, yes, we don't text in our campaigns initially. Reason is we've had very mixed reviews of finding phone numbers that are actually the right people, right? 'Cause if they're a more junior candidate, they may still be on their parents' cell phone, in which case when you find a cell phone number, it may be their mom or their dad, and like, it's led to issues. So for us, if we don't hit our response rate guarantee 5 emails that we send, we then will move to text messages. If we still don't hit it, we'll move to in-mails and then we've never gotten through that and not hit it. So I don't actually don't know what we do. I assume move to some other social media platform at that point.

Yeah, that's unfortunate.

Yeah.

Yeah. I was trying to, you know, when I was still trying to run my business and trying to solve for that, I was trying to solve for the automated in-mail, came up with a way to do it, which was I saw Glenn here talking about UiPath. There's, well, you probably saw some of the videos on Microsoft Power Automate. So we were able to solve it with Power Automate, but just connecting the data between, transforming the data between the CRM and email and back to the CRM and then the texting system, which was TextNow, and then back to the CRM. And then, you know, and then you add to that, we had to send out Facebook messages, Pinterest, Snapchat, WhatsApp, and I was just like, forget it.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And it's, you know, it always— this is— I'm not blowing smoke, shall we? You know, I'm the first person to tell somebody that I think that they're not doing this right. Your base of knowledge for me is silly when I hear you talk about things. Like, my natural reaction earlier when you're talking about, like, the filaments with Ben Franklin and the difference between the two different types of critical thinking, I'm like, where the— do you get this knowledge? Like, well, like, where does— and also, how does your hard drive hold all of that? So, like, That's one. But two is the interesting way that I find that you're able to balance your time. And I know you're in-house now, so it's a little bit different, but like you've been doing this since you were running HireForce, like the balance between delivering for your clients, right? You had a bunch of repeat clients, probably most, right? While at the same time finding the ability to discover these new things. Like, I know you're super technical, you speak code, like I get that, but like there's no way that Power Automate was exactly like what you were doing before, which means like you had a ramp-up time of learning this new piece of tech. And like, how do you find the time to do that? It's unreal to me. It's unreal. The combination of the retention of knowledge and the time to—

That's really the short answer is I don't have time to do it.

I love that.

Honestly, it's too— even today, we find ways to work around We use Greenhouse as the ATS, also CRM. Did two different buckets in the same thing. And we have to find ways to work around the limitations of an ATS and CRM with automation 'cause it's too slow.

It's too slow.

It takes us too long to do things. Not because, I'm not saying Greenhouse is too slow. I'm saying the process.

Yeah, the manual process.

It's just click, do something, do over here, click, do something, do it. Not to mention it's so tedious. So we've got to find ways to, you know, and it starts with download a spreadsheet, edit it, upload a spreadsheet. Starts with that. But then it goes from forget the spreadsheet, let's do this real time. And then it goes from like forget real time, let's do it predictively, you know, and just evolutions. Yes. Lateral thinking.

Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. I love that. Very cool.

Well, I've kept you for an hour and 49 seconds, which I think you can send me a bill for. This is going to be extraordinary.

I love it. I love it.

What I need to do is get you back on the show another time.

Would love that. Would love that. This has been, this has been just super enjoyable. It's felt like just a conversation that you and I would have if we were at a conference together, honestly.

It's like what I— that's what I like to do.

I love that.

Most of Most of my shows are like this when they work. And when they don't, they only last about 15 minutes.

You know.

So any parting words for our friends out there in cyberspace?

Yeah, just be a good human. Support everybody that you can in life. And be a part of the community, not in the community. There's a difference.

Be a part as in like don't get—

Nailed it. That's exactly right. Yeah. Contribute to the community. Don't just be in it.

The A part of it.

Yeah, that's— yeah, yeah, the A part was good.

All right, well, thanks a lot, man. It was fun to have you. I'm serious, pick another time, man. Pick a date in August and let's go and do this again.

Would love that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I will do that. This was awesome.

All right, guys, thanks. Take care, everybody. Have a great Memorial Day weekend. Stay safe.

Yes, enjoy. Be safe.

Bye-bye.