Bob Bachtold live on Shally's Alley

Hey, Friday of December! It is Friday, December 2nd, and it's 1 PM US Eastern Time, so that must mean that it's time for Shally's Alley again. So here we are, and today I have a guest as usual, but this time very, very special guest, Bob Bechtold. You might not know him unless you're a huge music fan. Because Bob actually is a studio musician with about 250 albums to his credit, if you can believe that. That's a lot of albums. So unless you're a huge music buff, um, you probably haven't seen or heard Bob, or unless you're one of his many tens of thousands of candidates. He's, uh, he's played the drums— I think he mostly plays the drums— and guitar, bass, and keys. Keyboards, but you're usually doing drums, right?

Yep, primarily drums.

And you have your own little, uh, soundstage recording studio in your own house, right?

I do indeed, as most pros do, especially after the pandemic, right?

Must have been a big boom for recording equipment manufacturers, huh?

Yeah, it was great for the studio side. It was horrible for people that were into the live side, of course. Everything was pretty much on hiatus for over 2 years. But yeah, the strong persevere, and we have survived and we're flourishing again.

I heard about— there's a, there's a band, or what was it, first started out as an artist, but then it kind of became more of a, of an eclectic band, ad hoc band here in Atlanta that started out as a Zoom meeting. And the, the artist was basically doing like live Zooms because they, they couldn't go to venues and they just started doing live Zooms from their house as a Friday night concert or whatever. And it gained a bunch of momentum and a bunch of other people, other musicians joined in. And before you know it, it basically became a band, like a pickup game of, you know, a pickup game of basketball, but it was a pickup jam session and they would jam out on Friday nights. And now actually they're a live band and, you know, not touring, but whatever, hitting the Atlanta scene.

Yeah, it's happened in a lot of places. I have a lot of friends down in the LA area where I used to work and in San Francisco Bay Area and who have done exactly the same thing. Some of them were already bands and then proliferated and kept things going on Zoom. Some actually started on Zoom. I mean, the technology is there. Why not take advantage of it? Use it to get together and play music with great musicians and good friends.

Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. Myself, alto sax. That's pretty much it. That's the limit of my musician skills. And I, you know, I know a few songs, but mostly it's just a memory. I'm a memory player, you know, I don't, I don't read music very well or fast anyways. So, but I hear rumor has it that you got into recruiting because of music. Through music, or I just got you into— what's the story behind that?

Well, the short version of a very long story, as you can imagine, is, um, our, uh, our female keyboard player's sister had been in the business for many years, and, uh, when the band was kind of winding down a bit, we're looking for other things to do, um, what happened was is that the guitar player actually ended up, uh, getting into the business in one of her old companies where they had an opening. He proliferated at it, did really well, and suggested we both also try it, which, you know, within about 6 months to a year, we both did, really liked it. And so I had a dual career for a while. Then I put the music on the side until I did a bunch of studio things for many years later on. But the live side kind of went away and I got into recruiting. And it turned out that a lot of the people skills and negotiating ability and ability to assess talent and actually interface with humans at a deeper level. Those skills are all very applicable to the whole recruiting business in general. Also on the—

So your talent scout got you into your musical talent scouting, got you into technical talent scouting.

Well, it was the skills were directly transferable. Yeah, exactly. In that sense. Now, the other side of the coin is if life had turned out slightly differently with my educational career, I would have probably become one of the people that I ended up placing. I have a great affinity for technical people. I understand the arena really well at a high, you know, at a high level. I'm really interested in it. And so it turned out I was actually, you know, not only willing but able to talk to some of these people who, as you well know, can be, you know, not the easiest people to interface with, you know, being really technical and geeky and We know all the terminology and all the factors, but to be able to talk to these people on a level that makes sense to them is a very useful skill and vitally important to being able to get into these people's lives. I mean, if you think about it for a second, whether you're sourcing or whether you're recruiting, your full lifecycle or whatever, we're basically trying to get people to voluntarily do the third most difficult thing to do in people's lives.

I've heard about that.

Yeah. Yeah. As determined by psychologists worldwide. And that is change jobs. We're getting—

Yeah. The other two, by the way, are move, like move houses and marriage.

Marriage or divorce.

Marriage and divorce, move houses and then change jobs.

Change jobs. I mean, think about it. If you look at it from that sense, what we do is almost insane. I mean, you know, voluntarily change jobs. What's with that?

But well, what you do is insane. What I do is perfectly sane. No, I'm just kidding. It's definitely insane.

And then, of course, as we, as we both know from years of experience, as well as our audience, you know, it's, it's all about the quality level of the people that you can contact and interface with. You know, if you don't put great people into the top of the recruiting funnel from the sourcing function, you know, you're not going to hire the best people because they're simply not in consideration. You have to be able to go where they are, identify them, be able to then reach out and converse with them and actually engage. I mean, that's the signal. Yeah.

Get them to be interested, especially in today's world, which is—

which has been one of the biggest changes in recruiting in the last decade that I've seen is that basically real-time sourcing and real-time communication and sourcing has gone away. We used to reach people on the telephone. We used to reach people.

Well, we still do, but yeah.

Yeah, but now it's almost exclusively later in the function, you know, later in the funnel. It's not top level funnel, you know.

No, what my team does and what I still, you know, teach or preach or whatever you want to call it is a combination of email, text, and call. But you know what, the calling part of it is really a— it's a step. It's not the final destination until you actually get the response. But as a step, calling and leaving a voicemail increases the response rate of email and text.

Oh, absolutely.

They don't pick up the phone, but because you left the message and they see your name next to your— you know, they— you texted them, so they see your name in the text, and then they see you left a voicemail. So yeah, we still call, but you're right, we don't actually— there's not that real-time they answer and you talk. That's true, right?

And so what's happened in my experience is that The sourcing function specifically in recruiting has become, you know, almost, you know, like very much like email, direct mail reach out, you know, where you're communicating again, non-real time, but your communications have to be succinct, effective, compelling. You have to get people to want to engage because they're— I mean, you got to figure out some of these top people in their various fields. I've been spending the last few years primarily recruiting in cutting-edge software and artificial intelligence, AI. ML, cybersecurity, those kind of things. They're hounded with offers, mostly from incompetent, in my opinion, spammy type of—

yeah, that's right.

Yeah. You know, we used to call them in the old days of the telephone, you know, the 'I want a job' people. 'I want a job.' 'I want a job.' 'I want a job.' They have no time for this.

I mean, if you ask the general populace, is 'I want a job' the recruiting equivalent of the dating Hey, what's your number? Or what's your sign? Yeah, what's your sign, baby?

It's horrible. And, you know, I spend a lot of time talking to people that I engage with, you know, for different positions and actually get to converse with them. You know, what compelled you to answer my communication, my email, my text, my voicemail, you know, and really refine that because that's going to make the difference because it's all about the conversion. I mean, the conversion stats today compared to what they used to be with direct reach out via telephone, you know, in previous decades. Basically, we've gone to almost what we used to get in direct mail responses. One of the adjuncts I don't talk about a lot in my recruiting side is I had the good fortune back in the late '80s, early '90s of befriending one of the world's most amazing marketing people. He's the strategic marketing mind behind Tony Robbins and Daymond John. Ramit Sethi, you know, hundreds and hundreds of people, is a gentleman named Jay Abraham. And I've had the honor and pleasure of knowing Jay for, for a few decades now, and actually working with him on projects as well as, you know, learning from him and being mentored by him. And so understanding how direct marketing works at that level has really enhanced my ability to recruit and to, and to, and to basically, you know, get that engagement happening. Yes, you can reach out all you want all day long. And it basically means nothing until you get traction. And the traction equals engagement. And what is it going to take to get those people, that talent that you have carefully identified and vetted and all those sorts of things, hopefully for your, for your clients? You know, how do you actually get them engaged? And that's a very big deal because once you get them engaged, then you can actually start to work on the recruiting process.

Recruiting doesn't start until then. Yeah. So is it fair to say that you, you source by ear?

I do source by ear. I also source by, by, uh, you source peripatetically? Yeah. Oh, by research. I mean, I spend tons of time online doing research. I mean, I think a great sourcer has to be, you know, part talent scout, part detective, part sleuth, part, you know, I mean, you've used all these terms in your career as well as I have in mine. In trying to describe what it is that we do and make happen for clients. And, and it's a, it's, it's a difficult job because it's a really integrative kind of thing where you have to have not only the skill set, but the mindset, the approach, the ability to develop rapport very quickly, very effectively, and to reach out to people in ways that are meaningful to them, because that's the people you're trying to engage with and to get them you know, really on board with the recruiting process for your client.

Yeah, that's right. Yep. Somebody from LinkedIn is commenting that, you know, they were on a webinar of mine and I talked about using the phone as we just talked about, and it didn't make a lot of sense to them because they tried the phone and people just aren't picking up. And that's right. They really aren't. It's just a way to increase the trustworthiness. Because if you're, you know, think about it this way, if you get a spam email, the people who spam email you, they don't call you. If you get a telemarketing call, the telemarketers, they don't email you. So if somebody emails you and calls you, it kind of jumps out as, okay, this person is not a spammer, they're not telemarketer. Same thing with text. So if you get an email, a call, and a text, that person that's trying to reach you is probably not a spammer or telemarketer, you know, well, that's kind of the reasoning behind it. Right.

And it also, you know, the thing is, is that I, so many times I hear from people that become candidates that I've sourced, you know, and, you know, successfully go on to change positions and go to work for my clients and such. I hear it all the time. Well, you know, I was so busy, I just didn't catch your first two messages. I'm glad you sent me a third one.

Or that's right, I— thanks for the reminder, right? But the other one that I get a lot is, I never got your first message. Like, I got this one, but I didn't get the other one. And I looked— I even get people that's like, I look back to my— I looked at my email, I couldn't find the first one. So sometimes I'm like, hey, no problem, here's what I've originally sent. But, you know, forward the message. But it's like, hey, thanks for telling me. I don't know where it's going. It's going to some kind of email eating vacuum somewhere. But, um, speaking of some huge wins, um, am I right in, in that you were the person who placed Ben Horowitz from Andreessen Horowitz into his last regular straight job? Is that true?

Oh, the next to last position. Yes, it is actually.

Next to last.

Okay, Ben was a, it was a strong up-and-coming technical product manager. I mean, he had a strong technical background, strong marketing background. But when he was a candidate of mine, you know, at Lotus CC Mail back a few decades back, he was clearly the junior candidate on the roster.

Right. You said he was the dark horse candidate. So what does that mean?

Well, what happened was, is that the, you know, the job spec called for a certain level of seniority, certain level of experience and such, you know, He had all the right experience, but not a lot of it. Okay. But he also had something that I try to identify in candidates is he had, he had that spark and he had that rampability, the ability to ramp quickly, that whole idea of being able to come on board and find a way to contribute effectively as quickly as possible. You know, he was what we call a fast-track candidate, fast-track But on paper, he wasn't the obvious choice.

So, hiring managers would have practically looked at—

Well, they asked me, why did you present this person? And I'll tell you why. His references said this. His background indicates this. I will project that he is going to be able to do this and this for us very quickly. In fact, probably twice as fast as the more senior candidates were who were more set in their ways, the marketplace at the time. Time was shifting slightly. And, and so not only he had the requisite background, but he also had a few other intangibles that weren't on the job spec, but were important based on my conversations with the hiring director to, you know, manage.

I refer to that as like, you got your macro commonalities and your micro commonalities, right? Exactly. The macro commonalities are obvious. They're on the rec. It's The job title's product manager, the experience is 10 years, you know, all the candidates that qualify have these macro commonalities, but the micro commonalities are, I don't want to say hidden, they're just not, they're not obvious. And finding that is really, I think, the key to the sourcer's job is finding those micro commonalities that are not immediately visible or obvious, like you said, on paper. Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. And there are indicators for that in all kinds of places, rarely on the resume. But if you see who they've worked with, who they went to school with, how they jumped from position to position, again, like you said, these micro, you know, points, and they all contribute to developing a story about somebody's background, where they've been, on what they're most likely to be able to do. And one of the things that's important for a lot of my clients, I found, especially early on, was what I come to call technological lineages, or how people came up. They have a certain way of thinking and approaches about certain kinds of functionality. And how will those interface with the team? Because ultimately, unless you're hiring just for a, for a one-off position, that's a special project, the with just one person on it, you're building a team. Okay, so how's that team going to build?

There's no point in having—

right, there's no point in building it.

What are the different players' strengths and positions and roles that they play? They're all not identical. Yeah, they all have, you know, right. What are you trying to do?

Well, it's about building synergy. The whole point of building a team is to get maximum value out of the group of individuals working together to create, to achieve a goal, whatever that goal happens to be, whether it's write a great new piece of code, enhance a product, sell it, do whatever. The thing is, why build a team unless you're going to maximize the value of the team, which is all about the synergistic function of how the people interact. And the sum is greater, the output is greater than the sum of the parts. And to be able to figure out what that kind of person is going to be. That's why communication at a deep level with the hiring manager is always critical for really effective sourcing and recruiting. Because if you don't know all those intangibles, the micro factors, as you just so put it, you know, it's just hit or miss. You're just putting people into a funnel and hope.

Right. And letting the hiring manager do that job, which, you know, is part of the value that you add, you know.

Well, exactly. You know, you're basically like identifying those I mean, if you want to look at it at a really high level, it's all about time. How fast can we do this and do it effectively? You know, it's, you know, there's no such thing as perfect because it's not a static world. It's constantly moving, it's constantly dynamic. So how can you find the best person that's going to be right for the position right now and moving forward? Because it's not just, you know, the person— people don't come on board just to do one thing and then stop. You know, it's an evolving process. The market space is evolving. The company is evolving. The group is evolving. And so to be able to see where someone is and be able to project where they're going to be able to go, you need to know those micro factors to see how they're going to not only work as an individual, but how they're going to work as part of the team.

This is how you are. This is how you're a hiring partner, not a robot or machine. And I don't mean to interrupt you. But there was a question I didn't want to let go from Jonathan Atkinson about the combination of emailing and texting and calling. And his question is, would you cold text, or are these active applicants or warm candidates? And I think it's related to what we're talking about is the cycle of email, calling, and text where you're contributing to the response rate by combining them. And, um, I think the, the, the, the context of cold text in this message or this question doesn't mean that the text message is the very first thing that you're doing with someone that's not expecting that. It's, um, the fact that you're texting someone who's not aware, you know, who's, who isn't aware that you're reaching out to them. So it's, to me, a cold email and a cold call, and in this case, a cold text. Bob, maybe you disagree with this, but to me, in recruiting, there's never such a thing as a cold email, cold call, or cold text. There's always some sort of warm-up to that because—

Well, yeah, you're always making your communication as warm in this.

Right, exactly.

So, I have cold texted. I'll say that. But it's got to be a very specific kind of scenario. You have to realize first of all—

So, in answer to Jonathan's question though, Does that— I have not.

I have cold texted, but only to typically millennials, people who rely almost exclusively on texting as part of their communication. You can build a dossier of sorts on people before you even reach out, and you can make quick calls on what is going to probably work appropriately for that. Exactly. More senior, more senior talent. They're probably not relying on their phone quite as much for texting as an initial method of communication, only for people that they've already got in their quote unquote inner circle of people that they're dealing with at that particular point in time. So it's about appropriateness. It's about knowing your audience, knowing the generation of person that you're reaching out to. I mean, again, we're in a shifting space at this point in time, highly dynamic, where you have to reach out to people in ways that are meaningful to them. In some cases, you have to make a judgment call or a value call. Well, will a person respond to a cold text? Rarely do I usually do it as a matter of course, but I will do it in specific cases because I know it will cut through. And I'll usually reference, hey, you know, Bob Backtold here from whatever client.

Uh, exactly.

Whatever reference. Did you receive my email? You know, something short.

That's why, Bob, I don't think it's a cold text. So if I emailed them and I leave them a voicemail, that's what I do. I email and then I call and leave a voicemail. I know they're not going to answer. Then I text, and what my text message says is, hi Steve, I just left you a voicemail, or I just sent you an email, want to make sure you saw it. So it's not cold. And, you know, in that way, what usually happens is they will email me back or text me back, or sometimes call me back, but it's different. You know, I text and they call, I call and they text. It's weird like that. But there was another follow-up to that is some people frown upon calling someone at work. Now, my first question would be, how do you even call anybody at work anymore since everybody works from home? But let's assume you have their work number. What do you say to that?

I would make sure that if somebody listening in on that voicemail would not know what the call was about. That's my general rule of thumb. You don't want to put anybody in an embarrassing situation, but you want to be effective in your communication. So, for instance, one of my more recent clients, MosaicML, I call it calling from MosaicML. About our AI/ML learning program. You know, I left you a voicemail. Please return my call at your earliest opportunity. You know, and so there's a reference to it, but not necessarily anything about recruiting or job or work or anything of the sort. Again, you don't know what's happening.

You don't know if that's their mobile number necessarily or their work number.

Right. You don't know if it's mobile. You don't know if it's the office. I mean, most of the time it is mobile, but you don't want to embarrass somebody. Somebody may have it on speaker in their office and their boss is standing there when they listen. You know, what's that? You don't want to be able— you don't want to put people—

hey Steve, I heard you were sick of your boss and looking for a job.

That's the extreme, but yeah, yeah, you want to avoid that.

My voicemails are, you know, if it's a mobile phone or, or, you know, a work line, whatever, voice over IP, whatever, they're always the same. It's essentially 'Hey Steve, I shot you an email yesterday. This is Shelly from, you know, whatever. Give me a call back if you get a chance.' Again, short, succinct, appropriate. 'It's me calling you, call me back.' That's it. And then that doesn't leak any information they don't want leaked. By the way, the same thing with email. In the email, I don't overtly state my intent, just like you were talking about, what was that you said? I got a job. I got a job. Yeah, I want a job. Yeah, I don't do I want a job emails either. It's not I want a job. It's, hey Steve, I found your information on LinkedIn. I was looking for somebody that has this kind of background. I was wondering if you had a few moments of your time. That's it.

I don't—

because who knows if it's going to work? Who knows who's listening? People's work email is not personal.

We're reading over their shoulder, you know. Yeah, you, you do not know. And so it's about being a pro. I mean, here's the really overriding consideration that I always apply to a scenario when doing initial reach out. You know, if I were that person, to the best of my ability to put myself in their shoes, what would I want to see? What would I not want to see? And don't do that. You know, it's all about appropriateness. We're reaching out. I mean, think about it. We're interrupting people's daily lives. You know, how are you going to interrupt effectively and appropriately and make it informative? I mean, one of the things I love about working in tech is that 99.99% of the time you're dealing with really smart people. Okay? And really smart people got really smart because they're constantly learning. They're constantly trying to figure out new stuff or hear about new things or whatever. So what if you were that really smart person How would you tolerate or even want to be interrupted? And that's what you do. It's about being able to again insert yourself temporarily into somebody's life and make your communication relevant to them. That's the whole thing. Otherwise, you don't engage. Otherwise, you're just sending emails out or texts or phone calls, whatever you want to say. But You know, if you don't get traction, if the whole point of your communication is not to establish engagement, why are you even doing it?

You know, you know, I often think of sourcing different than recruiting in, well, in a number of ways, but in particular this way. I always think of sourcing as being more of a peripatetic existence. And if you don't know what that term means, peripatetic is like Someone who does a lot of traveling around, living in different places, but for a short period of time. So not nomadic because a nomad is like, you know, constantly on the go. Peripatetic is more like, you know, live here for a few months, live there for a few months. And the reason I'm associating that is because we sort of, if we're recruiting for software engineers, we live in that community. It's Ruby engineers. We're living there for a little bit. Whereas I think a recruiter typically develops a very strong knowledge on a particular industry function, but the sourcer is kind of living in this community for a little bit, then they go to the data science one, and then they go to the Python one. And they, you know, so that's kind of how I see it, more of a temporary resident in the community. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. And we become, you know, temporary experts, you know, through, through osmosis, through approach, through involvement, whatever. But, you know, we insert ourselves in so we can understand that particular niche or micro niche even, you know, well enough to be able to talk to people coherently about it and be able to approach them with You know, with our opportunity that we're presenting, the company we're representing, those sorts of things. And it's really a matter of having done the background work to know what's most probably going to work, be able to adapt on the fly, and work within particular conventions, which at this point vary from generation to generation, via vertical to vertical. Say, if you're working in sales, people are more likely to utilize the telephone, for instance, because they're more used to doing that. If they're coding and in engineering and doing a lot of research work or things of the sort, they're typically sitting at their desk being paid to think, you know, and then apply that thinking, you know, to improving product, creating product, whatever it happens to be. And so it's a whole different— again, you have to do your homework, in my opinion. You know, you have to really know where you're at, find out about, you know, the talent base, what's going on. You know, ask, adapt, find out what's worked and work off of that. But again, there's certain overriding factors. A, people are really busy. I don't know anybody who doesn't think they're busy. Okay. Number 2, you're basically interrupting their daily routine, life, whatever it happens to be.

Right.

Make that interruption short.

Make the interruption less, yeah, less interruptive. Less disruptive, right.

Meaningful. It has to be meaningful. You know, if I— if somebody interrupts me with something that's not— I determine at that moment in the first few seconds, is it meaningful? It's gone, right? Because you just don't have time. So is your communication meaningful to them? Potentially interesting? Something they might want to file for future reference? I mean, back to my direct mail reference a few minutes back. Yeah, it's all about the subject line. Okay, people don't open emails, the subject line doesn't work without the subject line.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, I come from a background in direct mail where you test everything, okay, including headlines, subject lines, all those kind of things.

What Bob means by testing, by the way, is A/B testing. So, you know, send this message with this subject and that subject and see which one does better, and then do it again with the— you know, constantly keep experimenting with A/B testing. Yeah, that's, that's so true, right?

And again, you have to realize that a lot of the, of the email threads that people will get you know, in their inbox, you know, they all look the same. So how does yours look different? Why did— what caught their eye? Why did they decide to open it now or file it for opening tonight when they're maybe not as busy as they are in the middle of the workday? You know, so it's about being able to, to hook them, but in a way that works for you, works for them, but also facilitates your process. But again, it's all up to them. If you don't engage, you know, you didn't succeed. So it's all about trying to drive that engagement.

Now, you had mentioned that you've seen or are feeling some massive shifts, some momentum shifts in the marketplace. What's going on? What is this? Can you tell me more about that?

Yeah, well, not only in the marketplace, but also as far as the entire technological base that we use I mean, we're basically, for the most part, working online these days. There is in-person engagement at conferences and meetups and those sorts of things, user groups, whatever it happens to be. But we're relying on online tools. I mean, who doesn't spend a good portion of their day on Google, on LinkedIn? Perhaps you do some separate searches on Bing, and there's some really good reasons to use Bing because Bing has a little bit of functionality that's not on either of those platforms. But the whole search business at this point in time, as I'm sure most sources have noticed, is actually, without anybody actually coming out and saying it, is moving away from Boolean. It's heavily affected by artificial intelligence, AI developments, the advances in that whole general field, and things are going semantic, which is basically the computer is trying to figure out what you're trying to say. And so that is sort of defeats, yes, almost Boolean, which is you telling the computer exactly what you want, right? And so it's trying to interpolate what you're trying to get. And sometimes it works. And believe me, a lot of times it doesn't, as I'm sure you found out. So how do you work inside that shifting technological environment? Like knowing the differences between how does Google handle a search And a lot of these things are not documented. You have to actually try, do trial and error. I don't know how many other sourcers out there run routine searches just to see what's happening in the engines. Because of course we don't have access to their algorithm directly, even though I know a number of people at Google and a lot of people probably know insiders that give them advice on how the engines are moving and such. But it's about knowing how to get the results you want when you need them. And how many times we plugged in what we thought was a standard search and it worked last month and we put it in now and I'm not getting anything. What do I have to do here? You know, what's, what's, what's going on? And so by staying up on the industry and what's actually happening technologically behind the scenes, this is radically affecting what, you know, our effectiveness and the ability to deliver the best possible candidates, you know, for, for the people we're working for. And it's really important to stay on top of that. You know, we share information internally within groups and such, but it's really, you know, understanding the tools you're using and how they're evolving. And they're not necessarily broadcasting this because that would cause massive shifts that people don't want to have to deal with politically or, or in the market space or, or whatever. And so Really staying on top of that, I think, is really vital. I mean, one of the things that why I'm still in this business after decades is I really love it. I love being able to talk with people. I love being able to offer them opportunities. I love the whole detective side of it, trying to, you know, you know, find things. I love the whole search function, being able to go out and find things. And so being motivated to stay on top of the, you know, the whole business itself at an underlying level, I think is vitally important and will become more so as more and more AI comes into the equation, whether it's visible or not. But you'll see it in the results for sure.

Hmm, interesting. Yeah, I'm not a— I've been very vocal about not being a believer in what people call AI because It's really not AI, quite frankly, if you look at it from a scientific point of view. But I understand what you're saying.

And I agree with you on that point.

Yeah, the context is semantic, basically semantic search, machine learning. It's using technology to identify patterns and what the Google guess or whatever, I don't even know what they call it, but when they when they try to guess what you mean, um, uses a lot of contextual, um, information. So like, for example, I, I, I like this example that to explain kind of the difference, right? Back in the day, air quotes, the, the Google search, if you would, if you put in the word apple, would bring you back every web page that had the word apple on it because there were only a few million. Now there's hundreds of trillions of, I don't know, petaflops of pages that have the word Apple in it. So what Google does is it looks at who you are, what you've searched for, and it interprets. Does this person mean iPhone Apple, or this person mean fruit apple, or is this person a Beatles music fan and they mean Apple Records? And so It shows you information on that, so you don't have to put in apple and fruit. So it tries to guess, but it's not really smart or artificially intelligent. It's just looking at patterns.

And I think that's what you're talking about. Underlying it, of course, is pattern matching and being able to extrapolate. But the whole AI/ML, for for short, is about trying to have computers figure out what you really want. And sometimes they do a good job.

What you mean, yeah. What are you really asking?

Well, exactly. And that is really affecting our business at a very profound level. And it's only going to be more so. So being able to work with—

I think it's good. I call it natural language, right? So to me, I've been doing natural language search for— I can't even— it's been so long, I can't even tell you— because of what you're talking about. You know, it's not functional or useful anymore to use Boolean at all. It just doesn't— it's— it sometimes doesn't even work the way you would expect it to. So I've used natural language, and I'm finding in every case— not in some cases or many, but in every case— natural language beats Boolean hands down. It also is usable in any database, in any system. You can use natural language techniques in your Outlook or your Gmail, and it works. What you need to look for is what exactly appears in context, and that's the, that's the, that's the key. That's how we need to change our thinking. So Bob, what you're saying is we— the technology shifted, so we as sourcers have to think in a different way, which is to think natively. Think like, think like the person you're trying to find and identify what is it that they are writing about and what and how those phrases go together, and then look for those phrases.

Because trying to look for keywords, no, it's, it's, it's almost meaningless at this point in time.

It's meaningless. It's a needle in a stack of needles.

World's largest needle stack and you're looking for the smallest needle, you know, right, you know, or in some cases, you know, gold tip titanium needles, you know, or something of the sort that show how, how rare they are. But you mentioned a key word, not that keyword, but a very important word about a minute and a half ago, which is contextual. That's a great way to think about what semantic is supposed to mean but doesn't actually describe. And that is, think of what you're trying to do in context. Right? How is the person going to write about themselves? How are they going to be found? How are they going to be referenced? How might you best be able to find out? How are others going to talk about them?

Are they writing about themselves, or are they being written about?

Yeah, that the last one is a big factor. Because invariably, the best people in any, in any niche or micro niche They leave breadcrumbs. That's a Hansel and Gretel kind of thing.

In different places.

Yep, exactly. And to be able to assemble that, and again, the whole idea of pattern matching, creating patterns, seeing patterns in vast amounts of raw data becomes critically important to be able to put together an effective search in a timely manner.

So you're recreating the slice of toast from the breadcrumbs.

Well, exactly, you know, or, uh, there was a— there was an old game on a game show on TV years ago called Concentration where they had a background picture that was all of a pictogram, and as the, uh, and as the puzzle pieces were turned around, you could start to see pieces of the puzzle. So it's like a really advanced version of, you know, Wheel of Fortune or something like that, which is strictly textual, but to be able to put together the picture by all those little pieces, parts, and to get a picture on the individual you're looking for or the type of individuals. How are you going to find them? How do they show up in those sorts of things? And again, being able to assemble those patterns in a meaningful way. Very important. Got it.

There was a question about natural language, so I'm going to attempt to explain it in short form so that we don't take up a lot of time. Natural language essentially is phrases. It's using phrases instead of keywords. So phrases allow you to search by using the everyday common language that people use, and instead of having a single keyword like Java, you would use maybe not a full sentence, but several words together in the native language of that context, as if you were speaking to another human. And then the computer interprets that search to add the extra context. So it's a difference between natural language versus keyword search are two concepts, right? Keyword search is Java, C++, software engineering, natural language is, I wrote 100 lines of code. So somebody puts on their resume that they wrote code, there is no other possibility than this person is a software engineer, because only software engineers write code and say, I wrote code or wrote lines of code. So that is an example. Now, if it's an accountant, there's, you know, I filed quarterly taxes, or whatever. They all have— every sector of the industry, every role has several keyword combinations that are these natural language phrases. So you have to kind of get into the mind of the candidate and understand what they're talking about in their everyday conversation. And almost like— almost think of it as like Siri or Alexa or Cortana. It's like you're asking a question of—

Yeah, it's an interesting point you just mentioned there with Alexa and Siri. That's people's most frequent interaction these days, probably with the whole natural language functionality, which is based on AI/ML. But that doesn't really tell what it's about. It's about being able to determine contextually what you're trying to say. And how many times have you told Alexa or Siri something and it misinterpreted?

Why? Yeah, well, sorry, I can't find baked frogs. And you're like, what? Whatever.

And so it's about being able to, again, utilize the technology in the state that it's in today, which is constantly evolving, right? But knowing that that's having direct relevance on our business. I mean, I think if you probably polled 100 sourcers and say, you know, do you start off with doing Boolean search, I'm going to say probably 2 out of 3, 3 out of 4 start with that. But, you know, you're starting off with something that's completely out of date for the most functionality at this point in time. And so how do you actually adapt the way you work to generate the results that you need to generate? And so you kind of have to go, yeah, yeah, part of it's empirical, part of it's research, part of it's keeping up with the times of the industry. I mean, I stay on top of what the search engines are doing all the time because it's a constantly evolving landscape. And it's— you can almost think of it as the foundation of what we build our modus operandi and our workflow on. And you can't base it on something that's basically going away. You have to stay current and be able to, to approach your— the whole search for talent in a way that takes advantage of the technology that's currently out there and doesn't try to fight it.

Oh, I just realized we're 15 minutes over the 30 minutes. I promised I would keep you, but it's It's been, you know, you lose track of time when you're having fun. Absolutely. What do you want to leave people with? What, you know, really parting words of wisdom? We already have a couple of really good ones, but anything else you want to leave the audience with today before we go into—

Parting words of wisdom. Try to get inside your potential prospects and candidates' heads. Figure out what's going to make sense to them, figure out how to best approach them using existing technology methods and communication mediums, and construct short, succinct, to-the-point, but appropriate messaging and apply it systematically. Shelley's idea of being able to first maybe do a LinkedIn send out, then an email, then a text, then a phone call is a good standard way of approaching it. Approaching things. You will have to adapt depending upon your audience and who you're trying to reach and their, and their particular generation and what their particular communication preferences are. But, you know, it's all about adapting the, the meta process to the existing technology, the talent you're trying to reach. And basically, you have to always keep in mind the goal is not just to reach out to hundreds or even thousands of people. The goal is engagement with the right people, the right people that are going to—

you might need to reach out to a lot of people, kiss a lot of frogs to get to the right people, but ultimately the goal is to get too much, too much emphasis in the, in the sourcing management business on quantity.

It's about quality, because if you don't get any engagement, what's the point, you know. So everything has to be viewed from that standpoint, even though, you know, it is a numbers game. So, you know, how you always keep that in mind, keep the— be able to shift from the, from the macro to the micro and be able to keep things appropriate, flowing, and, and functional.

Thanks for that, man. All right, everybody, have a great weekend. Take care of each other and take care of yourselves. And we will see you next Friday for another Shelly's Alley. Bye everybody!