Brian Fink Live on Shally's Alley

All right everybody, happy Friday, May 19th. That's, uh, halfway through the month of May, and for many of you that might be in southern school districts, probably the last full day of regular school, um, as in like maybe next week you've got finals or whatever. So your kids are going to be home next week. How about yours, Brian?

Well, Shelly, first, thanks for having me on the program. Uh, Maddie's last day of school is next Thursday. Yeah, I am, I am excited. We have got a fun, action-packed summer in front of us. We have cheerleading camp, we have dance camp, we have dance travel camp. We have a lot of dancing going on.

And oh my, that sounds like a lot of dancing. Yeah, so, uh, you got a bunch of things planned for, uh, for when she's home. That's fantastic.

We got a lot of things planned. We're trying to pull together one more summer vacation, uh, plan, um, minus a trip to Miami for a wedding at the end of the summer. We don't really want to call that a vacation because, you know, Maddie doesn't really like to wear formal clothing, so no tuxedo for her.

I mean, who does really, you know? It's so restrictive.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, for those of you that don't know who this is, surprise, it's Brian Fink, the Finkster, the Finkmeister, the Fink Tank. Get it?

I like that.

You like that one? That's a pun on, uh, words there. So, uh, so, uh, Brian is a, uh, not only a really good friend of mine and someone that I admire greatly in the industry, definitely a sourcing rock star, but also a very funny guy. And a repeat offender on the show. I don't know how many times you've been on the show, but definitely this is not your first time. So welcome back. Apparently I did not offend you enough last time, so let's see if we can remediate that situation today.

Okay, let's get offensive. Um, uh, let's get offensive. Let's, uh, well, no, we're not gonna be cruel and crass. That's not our—

now let's not be—

that's all right.

Let's just be— let's be kind and offensive at the same time. Can we do that?

I think we can handle that scandal.

Let's talk about something that I was talking about on the last show, and I think, uh, it's worth bringing back from, from the— it's definitely worth, uh, flagellating the deceased equestrian.

Oh, beating the dead horse.

Beating the dead horse, that's right. Hiring climate, and specifically recruiters, um, and what is going on right now. I am hearing all kinds of bizarre from every job that I see is $22 an hour— that was last show— to, um, all kinds of like merged job descriptions that are like recruiter and sourcer, where clearly really just need one or the other, and then they just kind of mash together two. What are you hearing? What's out there? You have a lot of folks that you, um, that you used to, uh, supervise at your previous job that I'm sure are coming to you for, for help and advice. So Fill me in. What's, what's, what's the scoop from your point of view?

So real quick, Shelly, I just want to extend this invitation to anybody who might be listening. I do office hours on Friday afternoon from 2 to 5 PM where I meet with recruiters to help them in their job search. And what I mean by that is having an interview is an awkward conversation because we're usually on the other side of the fence. So if you want to practice interviewing from 2 to 5 on Friday afternoons, hit me up on LinkedIn, hit me up on Facebook. I'm happy to make time with you and share my Calendly link. Number 2, I'm not a resume expert, but I'll be more than happy to put eyes on your resume and say where I think there are some things that you could improve upon. But to answer Shelly, and I'm not doing that for charge or whatever, I'm doing because it's the right thing to do and to give back to our community. There are a lot of people's shoulders that I've stood on and who helped me through their connections to get to where I am. And I wanna be able to do the same thing and pay it forward.

That's really cool. Yeah. How do they find that?

Seriously, I usually just make a post about it on LinkedIn once a week, and whoever DMs me, I send you the link and we get set up for chat on Friday afternoons. That's what I'm passionate about doing is really helping lift our community. That's one of the reasons why I participate in events like HRTX, which we have a recruiter and sourcer summer camp that's coming up on June 15th. Which is going to be a great opportunity for people to up-level their skill set and to network with other recruiters. But to answer Shelly's question, what I'm seeing is I'm seeing a mashup. There are no pure sourcer jobs and there are no pure recruiter jobs, right? And I'm also seeing a wage depression. I'm seeing that people are offering $45 an hour for somebody who has 5 to 10 years of recruiting experience. I know personally that that's that doesn't pay the bills and that doesn't pay the bills that we've, that we faced previously. What I'm also seeing though, is I'm seeing a resistance from some recruiters that they're being offered the opportunity to be consultants or fractional or to go in-house and, or not go in-house, but go to an agency. And rather than go to an agency, they're saying it's gonna get better. These jobs are gonna reappear. I don't think that the 13,000 jobs collectively that have been lost in the recruiting. Pull that number from the amount of recruiters that have been lost from AWS and from Amazon, from Facebook and a lot of these big organizations. I don't think things are coming back in big numbers for the foreseeable future. I usually am the positive guy, I wore pink, right? Because I like it to pop, I like to be positive. But just like, you know, I'm going to events and one of the things that I noticed when I was at an event like Unleash is I would say probably about 20% of the people that I met were there looking for a new opportunity for new, for a new job, that they didn't have anything, that they had made the trek to Vegas to see what opportunities existed. I'm seeing a lot of consolidation in the tech school, in the tech tool belt. You know, there's the constraint that people are pulling back on what their spends are, and people aren't going out and learning how to use new tools. This is an opportunity for us to up-level our skill set, and that's one of the reasons why, like, if Shelly's teaching a class, I know that it's It's $200. If you can't afford that, reach out to me. We'll find a way to make it work, right? Or HRTX, which is a free event. We will find a way to make it work, or I will see if I can get you a free pass to Recruit DC, which was an awesome event.

Just learn. Yeah, if you're idle, take this time to learn and improve your skill set. And I wanna add to that, I would say if you're not idle, if you're currently working, you should be looking for a job.

So I think you should be, I think you should be networking all the time. I'm looking at these job postings that are on LinkedIn and I see that they're up for 2 hours and they have 2,000 applicants. There's no way that anybody can go through 2,000 applicants in 2 hours and do them justice or do the justice that you deserve for the career that you've put in and that you've built. Yeah, Ronnie Bratcher, my house, 2 to 5, drink bourbon.

I'm—

I've been sober for almost a year plus, but I've got plenty of bourbon left in the cabinet. So if you and Shelly want to roll on over, bring it on down. We'll take care of it.

Yeah, we'll clean you out, man. Ronnie may be little, but he's not a lightweight, I'll tell you that. And we do enjoy, you know, some nice bourbons. But I think you're right in so many ways. For one, it's not— you should, you should never stop networking. And I'm not going to say you should always be looking for a job because that makes it sound like I'm saying like you should always be exiting from where you are. But if you know that things are getting rough and you, you see the signs on, you know, the painting on the wall, companies doing layoffs, stuff like that, it doesn't hurt to get your feelers out because what if you get affected? Now, not that you want to leave, but that you're ready if it happens, or at least you have something. Um, and so don't just stop looking, and then don't stop learning too. You know, those two things are something that you're always gonna be able to rely on, um, no matter what, you know, you know, even during a good economy. But I want to ask you about this whole, like, So the wages are low, and I get that, and probably people just won't take the job, and that's okay. But you said that it's, it's not going to come back the same way. Now what about this? What about— there were a lot of folks who got hired into Google and Facebook and Amazon as entry-level recruiters and entry-level sourcers, and they only had a year of experience when they got laid off. Those are people who migrated from another job, right? They, they switched careers. Um, sure, that, that may be the— that may be the unfortunate fallout is that they might not get jobs as recruiters or sourcers. But what about the experienced ones? So what I'm saying is, I kind of— I can see how an industry that was impacted in some weird way might, uh, lose jobs net, like total, like maybe there used to be more jobs than there are now. Um, but if you've only been in the industry for a year and you have other skill sets, maybe those people won't come back, you know what I'm saying? Maybe they just are like, well, I'm just going to find a different kind of job. And then the seasoned ones amongst us that don't have another— like, this is our career, we don't— we can't just go switch jobs. Uh, well, we can try, but you know, there's a lot of obstacles there. Um, maybe it'll be okay for us. I don't know, what do you think about my being— I'm trying to be kind.

No, no, No, I think that you, I think you're being optimistic and I think that optimism breeds action. So let's talk about that action and those actions that we can take. An argument that I commonly get into with people is I don't think that recruiting belongs in HR. I think we're more akin to marketing. I think we're more akin to sales. I think that by going in—

We don't belong in sales. Hell no, there's no way.

Okay, so we agree to disagree on that.

I mean, if you're doing agency, yeah, but like, Corporate recruiters?

Well, corporate recruiters, here's the thing, is that companies rely upon two things to keep their momentum going. One is money or capital, and two is human capital or people, right? So what happens to happen is there has to be an exchange between capital, human capital for financial capital, and we're the brokers that make that happen. We're a two-sided deal marketplace, right?

I get that, but that maybe puts us under the CFO, not the salesperson. Not the chief, not the CSO, right?

Okay. Maybe the CFO. That is a, that's a good, that's a good point to bring up. Or chief operating officer, right?

Something like that. But I get what you're saying. It's definitely not HR because there's really not much. And in fact, if you go to a SHRM conference or lots of these HR conferences, even though they say recruiting is a part of it, it's not covered very much. It's a very small fraction of what's displayed in the booths. The talks, there might be, you know, 1% or 2%. So, even HR people acknowledge that recruiting isn't really HR because there's so many things that as a professional recruiter, you really don't do. For example, you don't do employee relations, or payroll, or compensation, or benefits, or legal, or— right? So, that's true. I think HR is not the right thing. But what about companies that have a people team? Right? So Chief People Officer, then they have an HR, like VP of HR and VP of Talent. What about that? That's not reporting into HR; that's reporting into the People Officer.

Oh, I like that. I like that arrangement. I think that that makes a lot of sense. And Shelley, to your point, to the question that you brought up earlier is, what else can we do for those of us who are a little more seasoned, or the Outback Special, when it comes to recruiting? Is that I think that where we can go deep is we can go deep in our toolkit when it comes to employer branding. And L&D. And the L&D element is probably the part that stands out as being the weird portion of this. But I would ask, how many recruiters do we know that are also career coaches that are giving this advice to people about how to plan their career? Why isn't L&D part of the mix as well? Also, let's go deep inside of our organization before we go outside of our organization. Let's focus on internal mobility. Yeah, maybe the best—

somebody commented on that. Jobs Emerging TA and TruHR. So I'd like to hear more from Chelsea about that, but go ahead.

No, no. Well, I mean, think about it is that, you know, how many times have you been an external agency and they say, oh, we found a candidate internally for the role. That's great. That's a story that should be celebrated, right? But how often is that not the case? How often is that the exception to the rule when we should be focusing during the great stay, as ADP put it in their white paper that they published on Tuesday, Right? If this is the great stay, what are we doing to make sure that those employees that are staying, that are sticking around, what are we thinking about talent management, Chelsea? Absolutely. Getting embedded in the organization and figuring out who those players are on a team that can contribute either immediately as a leader on that team, or they can make a lateral contribution to another department in that organization are in that company. And I think that that's where true talent partnership, right? We want to be perceived as a talent partner, a talent advisor, asking the question to the hiring manager, I know you want to open up this rec. Is there anybody on your team that could fill it? You've got some, you've got some up-and-comers. Where's the disconnect? Where's the skills gap that we have to almost be a conscientious objector to saying, let's go look outside and focus our search internally.

Is there a little bit of pushback though sometimes from organizations where it's like you're sort of poaching from one department to another, like that department's gonna have to then backfill that job, you know, the domino effect?

There definitely is that, and organizations are territorial like it, but when I think of great organizations that have done a really good job of managing their talent, you have organizations like an AWS or an Amazon that when it comes to retaining their employees, And by the way, about Amazon and AWS, you know, I heard a brilliant statistic from Seth Godin the other day that they lose over 30% of their hires in the first 90 days, contributing to one-third of all profitability being lost on that talent turnover. What are we doing from a retention standpoint should be modeled upon what's happening when you establish a flywheel in an organization where you put an emphasis on promotion, and accessibility of those different roles throughout the organization. And I think that's something that AWS, I think it's something that Google, I think it's something that Salesforce, all big organizations did really well. And there are opportunities for us to learn from them as individuals are displaced and are quote unquote able to speak more freely about that without that semblance of corporate governance over them.

Yeah, but check this out though. There are a lot more, there's a lot more money And there are a lot more employees in small and medium-sized companies than in all of the large companies combined. True.

Very true.

If you took the entire Fortune 1000, it would still not amount to anywhere near the number of people who work for small businesses and medium-sized businesses. And the reason I'm bringing this up is I think there's an even greater opportunity to transition careers in smaller businesses, medium-sized businesses, because in those organizations, oftentimes, they can't afford to have a very specialized function. So people wear multiple hats, right? So if you're part of a— right, exactly, more fungible. If you have a company with only 50 employees and you happen to be the person who knows computers and social media, you end up being the, you know, recruiter because of that. Like, it just— that's how some people got into recruiting. Or, you know, you end up getting into supply chain or procurement because you had to learn it on the job. So I think The opportunity might be stop looking at these, you know, don't, don't go to work for Facebook and Google and, and Amazon. Go to work for the small and medium-sized companies that where there's going to be more opportunity. They may not pay as well, but they're probably going to give you more breadth, uh, like you'll have more, more agency. Yeah, exactly. That's a good word for it, more agency. You'll have more free agency. You'll be able to do more with within the organization and learn other jobs and get into other careers. So that might be an interesting way to transition for those of you that are looking for a way out.

Well, I mean, you just hit the nail on the head. Like when I was at Rent.com, Rent was a company that was sub-1,000 employees. It was about 700 or so individuals. And I was drawn into conversations about employee benefits. Like, does this make sense? Does this look good, right? Is this competitive in the marketplace? I was drawn into that social media conversation about how do we reach candidates on social? How do we make that conversation an active conversation? Right. So, Shelly, yeah, I've been there. I'm sorry that I was kind of falling asleep on that one for a second.

No, no, not at all. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately because I actually sat down with— and I'm going to brag a little bit, not about me, but about this individual. I was introduced to them by one of the board members of the foundation, and she was listed top 10 most powerful women in journalism. And I sat down with her yesterday exploring a possibility of putting together a PBS, one-hour PBS special about people reentering the workforce from displaced situations. And this foundation normally works with people that have been displaced because their jobs have essentially been eliminated. Not the jobs being eliminated, but their function, right? Like, think of an extreme like coal mining, right? It's just we don't do it anymore, and there's a lot of people that just lost their jobs because mines got closed. Um, I'm sure that the, the, I'm not a travel agent, but I'm sure travel agents went through a similar thing where there used to be a lot more. Now there's still some, but they're not nearly as many. So there's these jobs that have been categorized, you know, running a printing press, for example. So that's the kind of work that they usually do. But, um, the conversation turned to what else can we do and what's invisible. And I said, you know what, diversity is almost always overlooking people with disabilities. Like, diversity looks at the, the major— of course you can have major impact In different— let's face it, 51% of the population is female or identifies as female. So if you want to make a massive impact by the numbers, impacting gender equality and gender diversity is going to be huge, right? But consider that for every time that you push a diversity program towards one particular protected class, whether it's female or ethnically, whether it's Black or Hispanic, that's leaving less room for some of these other more marginalized groups. And the one in particular that came to mind was people who are blind. No pun intended, they're almost invisible because in many cases they want to work, but they don't even try to apply for jobs because the moment they show up to an interview with a, you know, a cane or with dark sunglasses, it's almost like interview's over before it even starts. They may be highly qualified and very competent, And there's been, you know, Daredevil, right? There's your perfect example there, right? There's been many people that have been successful. On my board, Kirk Adams, very successful blind at birth. So I'm thinking this whole small to medium business, companies that could take a risk on hiring someone who's blind, that person will go out of their way to meet the challenges. The government will provide accommodations. You really don't need to provide accommodations. What we need to get rid of is this prejudice that blind people can't do this. This. Like, for example, well, we're hiring an accountant. There's no way a blind person can do that. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Some of the blind graduates from our institute read faster than you and I could.

Oh, Shelly, I remember, I remember when we were in Washington, D.C.

3 years ago before the pandemic, and he was there. Yep.

Yeah. And I was, I was, I'm gonna sound ignorant when I say this, but I was blown away by like I was just blown away by like the aptitude in which he sourced. And I was like, when I think of sourcing, I immediately think it's a visual thing and that I personally couldn't, right? And it was just like, holy—

yeah, see what I mean? So, so small and medium-sized companies don't have the budget to buy a recruiter license, right? They can't afford the half a million dollars. They don't really have the money to post on you know, the big advertising destinations, particularly because if they're, if they're truly a small business, they're not posting jobs nationally. They're, they're posting— they're not even posting in Atlanta, Brian. They're posting in Peachtree Corners because they have jobs that are local. And, you know, not everybody gets the chance to work remotely, but people with disabilities make much better long-term employees because they're historically much more loyal. They tend to stay with the employer. So that's what got me thinking about this other thing that we were talking about here. A company that, you know, a small business that takes on that risk, they're going to invest everything they got into that person, and they want them to stay. And so you have a much better opportunity of expanding your career in those types of organizations than you do in a big company where they post the job internationally, and they'll hire, you know, the most qualified person, even sometimes not even looking into it. They don't even sometimes post the job internally, right? So career mobility seems like it's a big company issue, but I think the solution isn't big companies. Maybe it is a big company issue, but the solution isn't, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. What if somebody told Stevie Wonder that he couldn't read music? Yeah, you're blind, you can't— how could you read music? Well, he didn't need to, apparently. I think he did okay, you know.

Um, Srinivasa has an interesting take on diversity recruiting or diversity hiring, how it's taken a back seat, um, to, uh, during this economic downturn. Shelly, I don't know about you, but, you know, my organization— we're— so I'm at McAfee. We're currently working really hard to make sure that our BRGs, or our employee resource groups, or business resource groups, um, those communities don't suffer any kind of financial calamity, if you will, or line item cut from the budget. So I'm a bit of an outlier, but I did come from an organization where one of the first things I did come Most recently from an organization that we'll call a small social media company.

It's small.

It's a small social media company. Their footprint has decreased. Don't tell Tucker Carlson that.

Starts with a T, ends with a T.

Is that one of the first things they did, unfortunately, is they cut the BRGs and they cut diversity initiatives. There used to be a great webpage that was diversity.twitter.com, which showcased our commitment to elevating all voices and making sure that they were heard equally, that they weren't just invited to a dance, they were invited to dance and to partake. And those statistics were reported in real time. That's something that I'm really proud of that we did. But Srinivasa, I don't know if there is a universal deprecation of diversity initiatives. I certainly do know that disproportionately when companies have made recent layoffs, that there were individuals like at IBM that they let go of a lot of their customer service professionals, and those disproportionately were people of color. So it looks as if there has been a divergence in their commitment to diversity. I don't know if that was the intention.

That was the intention, or if it was just a repercussion.

Yeah.

Right? Like, they weren't trying to divest diversity, they just had to reduce costs all over. And yeah, that makes sense. I, I see what you're saying. Uh, yes, Srinivasa says that, um, diversity may be taking a back seat, but I think all hiring is kind of taking a back seat for a little while here. It's— I think it's going to come back very, very, very soon. I see the— I see the increase in job postings, the volume. I see the volume in people, you know, chattering about the employment market. And these, these things are changing. I also see the other thing that I've noticed is the layoffs have slowed down considerably. In fact, I think March was the peak of layoff activity. In April, it was much lower. And already in May, halfway through May, we're trending even lower than April. And by lower, I mean fewer layoffs.

Hey, don't forget the good people at LinkedIn. They let go of 700 people the beginning of May. I just want to call that out.

Well, yeah, like I said, it's less, not gone. It's less, it's not gone. Fewer. So better meaning fewer layoffs or fewer people being laid off. Yeah, Facebook have two more. Okay, wow. Yeah, so.

Wow, that's impressive. But hold on. So maybe that goes back to something that Shelly said. We've always thought that maybe there was security in a big organization. Maybe there is in fact more, more security in a smaller organization. I'm not saying that we can, you know, that we can behave badly in one organization and that's not going to be detected or picked up. But when you're in a smaller organization, like, you know, my dad, my dad is a small business owner. He has less than 20 employees. And when somebody, when somebody is sick, it affects the entire office. You know, it changes the dynamic, the culture of what needs to be done. Right. And I think that when you're in a small office—

because everybody's wearing multiple hats, it's just that's the nature, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely. We have somebody saying only true security is working for yourself.

I don't know, man, I fired myself.

So I was like, I was like, I've fired myself a couple of times, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, security is one of those things. There, I sat in a room, I sat in a classroom. Hopefully I'm not coming across as being ancient here, but I sat in the classroom one night and at university and Chester Carlson came to the class. This was a class about entrepreneurship. And for those of you who have no idea who Chester Carlson is, every time that you make a photocopy, you can thank him. He's the person who invented, um, he was a physicist and he invented the process of electrophotography or dry copy, or essentially basically photocopies, right? Um, he— his story was— I'll start with the, with the end here. His lesson to the, to this group of entrepreneurs was stability is if you can fix it, make it, or sell it. If you can do one of those three things, you have, you have a chance of stability. If you can do 2 of those, much more improved. And if you can do all 3, that's, you know, that's the best. So what he did that demonstrates this is he invented— remember, he was a physicist, not a business person. So he invented this process and he thought, you know, this would be a really good— this would be a really good thing for IBM because they could make copies of documents. And they're all about, you know, they had the electric typewriter and stuff like that. And IBM said, no man, take a hike. Why would anybody want to make a copy of a document when there's carbon paper and you can type 3 copies at the same time? Okay, so he went somewhere else and he went to Kodak and he said, this would be great because you could take pictures of documents. And Kodak was like, who would ever want to take a picture of a document? People don't want to take pictures of documents. So then he went to Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC, now Hewlett-Packard or whatever, and ended up happening. And same thing, he said, you know, electronic documents, and they said, we have computers. So everybody had their own, you know, uh, rose-colored glasses, right? And so he said, all right, well, I'm just gonna start my own company. Um, and so this is someone who didn't give up. He had the perseverance. But, but what really stuck with me was, if you can make it as an inventor, fix it, or sell it, you have job stability. So I don't know if necessarily having your own business— as someone who had my own business, um, you know, I could sell it, that, that was stability enough. But I think that is the key, is, is finding a way that you can contribute to one of those three things that are always going to be in demand. I think make it, fix it, or sell it. What about, um, tell me about this, uh, AI thing. I, I, I think—

are you talking about that article that somebody shared this this morning in HR Drive that like, so real quick, LinkedIn is getting into the artificial intelligence business.

Are they though? Are they really?

Well, I mean, you know, I feel bad now because like I feel like I'm now beating up on LinkedIn and that's not my thing, right? Like that's the other—

No, neither am I. I'm just beating up on AI.

Yeah, so now they're saying they're going to write the message for you to, to engage with candidates, which I guess means that in the words of Steve Levy, we are gonna automate in Molling.

Right.

Look, here's my desk. I have a book from Phenom People where I'm taking notes, and I also have Mike Wooford's "The AI Recruiter" book, which I am going through and I'm feverishly taking notes. I open up to a page where there are no notes, but I'm learning how GPT or generative AI is going to change recruiting, right? And I'm trying to use it for the better. I'm trying to use it when it comes to— I don't think it's that good at writing Boolean strings. I don't know how good it is with gender diversity in job descriptions, but I'm trying, right? I'm trying something new. And I would argue that as a recruiter, we should ABC, we should always be cultivating or we should always be curious, right? And that goes with testing the job market and seeing what is and isn't happening. But it also means picking up books like this from Wooford or attending, uh, attending a conference to get the— to figure out what's next with AI. But do I think that LinkedIn— that LinkedIn has a silver bullet that's going to allow us to use AI? No, no, it's decision training.

It's— yeah, all of this All of this stuff about generative AI is not AI. It's not even remotely close. What it is, there's language models and they're using machine learning, which is machines can learn a lot faster nowadays than they ever could. And so they're basically just absorbing all this information and trying to make patterns. It's a pattern engine, but it cannot ideate, period. So it's not going to create anything new. It's not creative. Okay, generative is not creative. So the problem that I have with it is it's going to be the same old boilerplate recycled stuff, and we already have a problem with junk mail that, that is all just recycled stuff. But here's my biggest issue with in particular this, this example of it, which is LinkedIn's, and that is if they haven't ever given us the ability to use more than first and last name as a merge field in a message How are they going to all of a sudden jump into personalization? The article that you're talking about says, we know how important personalization is. Do you really? Because you don't even support any other fields besides first name and last name. Why haven't we ever had the ability to include the person's company name or their job title or their location in a message in LinkedIn? And so all of a sudden now, with generative AI, quote unquote, they're gonna personalize it even more.

How?

They don't even think that way.

They don't even have the inbox figured out, okay? The fact that I have to archive messages and then hit refresh so that I can then archive 8 more messages is ridiculous, okay? They don't have a— they don't. And real quick, you've seen me on Twitter talk about this. This isn't If they can't fix a simple thing like the inbox, how can they— what are they going to do to automate it? They're going to make it worse. They're going to fill it up with more shit. Sorry, Mom, I know you're watching. I cursed. All right. Um, dollar to the swear jar. I apologize. But, but I mean, that's really what, what we're seeing here is that they have a product that they're layering on top of that is not a performative product as it stands today. So rather than take it apart and rebuild it, they're simply bolting on a solution.

Right. And by the way, Magical already does that. Magical.

I love Magical. Love Get Magical.

It did that already, and it does it in your Gmail, not just on LinkedIn. It does that in your email. It does that in Facebook. It does wherever you want because it's using the information that's on the page. So that's really not even anything new. But if you don't mind, I want to kind of share something about this whole generative AI and this whole concept of AI. Let me see if I can share my screen in a minute here and see if it's even possible to do that. Okay.

All right. Well, while you're looking to do that, Yeah, uh, uh, TRK, uh, Thomas, um, thanks for your comment about crafting in-mail messages from scratch because the name limitations that Shelly's talking about. I'm curious, does the in-mail belong to you or does it belong to LinkedIn? Is this just another instance where we are the bacon and they are going through and they're finding out what works so they can do it at scale, right?

Yeah.

Like that is a use case to me for generative AI to absorb the message that you've written that's been successful, that's got you a 78% response rate, and then say, we're gonna duplicate this for every customer on the platform. That scares the shit out of me.

Well, here's another thing.

Number 2.

Here's another thing that may scare the bejesus out of you. Let's see if I can pull this up. Here we go. Are you able to see this, uh, this window? It's a ChatGPT. Yeah, you can. Okay. Yes, it might not be, uh, very centered. I think it's a little off. So let's see if this is better.

Uh, this is better before.

Better before. Okay, well, can you see me typing down here?

Uh, no, I can't because you're Your picture is blocking it on my screen.

Oh, interesting. See if I can turn that off.

Okay, now my pic— we're free of blockage. I'm shutting up.

Yeah, I had to turn your audio off for just a second, so I think I'm gonna do something else here. I'm gonna go maybe a different route, see if I can make it work. There, okay, you might be able to see that up there, hopefully. All right, so I'm gonna type something here. Check this out. How many E's are in the word beetle. Check this out. You see that?

I gotta blow it up on my screen, but yeah, I, I— there's a— there's one E in the word beetle.

Yeah.

Well, that's scary.

And that right there, my friend, is my problem with AI. This, this is not— there's no I, okay? This is not intelligent in any way. My children, before they went to school, could tell you that there were more than one E. They might have guessed two, but they certainly didn't say there's only one. Your brain is thinking, isn't it?

It— well, I mean, it's we're gonna have to train this thing. We're gonna have to become the prompt engineer. We're gonna have to become, we're gonna have to, I mean, this is a good conundrum to have.

I could go further with this example. For example, I could say, no, there are 3 Es, and it would correct me and it'd say there's only 1.

How many Es are there in the word 3?

I don't know, I can type it in and see what it says. How many E's are in the word 3? It's thinking really hard. Oh, they're saying— now it's saying there are 2 E's in the word 3. Got that one right. And I just picked Beetle randomly because I— because it's one in— you know, I'm— English is a second language, so for me, Beetle was one of many challenging words because of the way it's spelled doesn't really make any sense. There's two Es on three, but beetles is, yeah. I mean, everybody's going to go try this and try to debunk me or whatever, but what I'm telling you is ask it to do something like that and it's supposed to be smart enough. I'm afraid that we're going to rely on this, but really the reason I was telling you about this or asking you about this more importantly, is that I've heard— this is a suspicion— that there are bosses out there that are using ChatGPT and similar technologies to try to find ways to eliminate jobs.

So I think, I think that you just proved it's going to be a job creator, is that the jobs can't be eliminated.

That's what I think.

And there are going to have to be, quote unquote, those trainers who are gonna teach AIs.

That's right.

What I'm worried about, and I had this conversation with Justin Hill, Justin, shout out to you, Justin Hill and I had breakfast and we were talking about AI this morning, is that I'm worried that it's gonna get rid of people who have relied on being able to do low-code as their workload, and instead it's gonna get to really progressive, deep, low-level coding, not low-code, but low-level coding. That we're going to expect of our software engineers and our prompt engineers. And instead of software engineering taking a boom like it's done in the past two decades, it's going to become hardware engineering that's going to become, is going to be the boom industry to go into.

Well, let me tell you, aside from Chester Carlson, the other second most important lesson that I learned in college was that creativity is everything. And there's one thing that we have in abundance, and that's creativity, imagination and creativity. And I'll tell you another thing that really, really, really I think is important here is the biggest motivator in my opinion, and this comes from somebody that has lived in some pretty lonely places, like for example, in the middle of the rainforest in the Mosquito Coast of Central America. And I can tell you that the biggest motivator To creativity is boredom. So why am I sharing this with you? Because I seriously do not think that generative AI or whatever the heck this is, models are going to replace jobs. And if you're trying to replace your humans with one of these things, you're the problem. It's not going to replace us. It is a tool. Like when we invented electricity, it became a tool and made life easier. When we invented the chainsaw, it became easier to clear dead trees from your yard. When we invented, um, I mean, the wheel, whatever, it's technology. So it's an invention, it's a tool that we should learn how to use, definitely. But it's not going to just eliminate our jobs. What I'm afraid that it is going to do is it's going to eliminate our creativity. It's going to make people think that they can go there and have it right for you because you don't need to exercise your creative muscle. And as it is already, I'm very afraid for my children because I feel like my children's creativity is dampened or poisoned by social media. Not that social media is bad, but they are spending too much time not being bored because they have social media. So those— that hour bus ride when they normally would sit there and stare out into space and, and imagine it and create things, they're bored, so they get on their phone, um, and it gives them something to, you know, be entertained by. But unfortunately They're not bored, therefore they're not being creative. So that to me, ChatGPT and those tools, when they suck the life out of your creativity, that's the risk. Because that's the biggest advantage that we have in this country, specifically talking about the United States. Our biggest advantage over other nations has been ingenuity and creativity. It hasn't been population. There are countries that have more people. It hasn't been wealth. There have been other countries that have had more wealth. The biggest advantage has been solving problems, right, with ways that haven't been solved before. That ingenuity and that creativity can be stifled when people have a ready answer for everything and don't need to think about it. And on top of that, they're already completely entertained by their mobile devices, so they're never— there's never a time when they're sitting there staring into space or looking out a window or hanging in a hammock because they're either getting the answers from a generative AI or they're being entertained by Twitter. That to me is the real challenge.

So we talk about that entertainment that takes place on the device, right? So as we're talking about that entertainment, you know, there are AIs that have already been, there have already been AIs that have been working to figure out what they need to do to keep us more attuned or more tuned in to the content, right? By sharing or showing, you know, images of puppies or for me it's penguins, right? Because I'm constantly liking content about penguins. It shows me content about penguins. We're kind of penguin obsessed in this house. We may or may not be having a penguin birthday party in the next couple of days.

Talking about the tuxedo-wearing flightless birds, right? That is correct. Not the villains from DC Comics, okay.

No, not the villain from DC Comics, no, we are not. But I use this to say AI is something that has been at its very infancy. It's been a playground that we've been playing in, or decision treeing has been a playground we've been playing in since we first logged onto Facebook some 10, 15 years ago.

I think it can also—

This is nothing new. It's a time suck.

Yeah, it is a time suck. Yes, it can be. It can be a distraction, and it can be used as a distraction. And sometimes you need a distraction, right? Sometimes you don't want to be in a creative space when you're waiting for your doctor to, you know, call you back into the office and you really don't have anything else to do. There are, you know, there are reasons for us to want distractions. But I do like what Mark Hamill says, which is he's, he's saying that he's more creative now because he's been writing prompts and expressing his creativity that way. Now that's the right way to go about it. The right way to go about using generative AI and these other tools is to use them as a tool. And you, it is all about the prompt. I mean, you saw that ChatGPT class that I taught. It's literally, I spent 15 minutes just talking about prompt engineering, because that's the skill set. But that requires creativity. And if you don't have enough of it, like Mark said, you have to— that he's developed— he's gone to the gym and developed his creative muscle. So use this for that. One of the best uses that I found for ChatGPT— or it's not— I don't even think it's ChatGPT, but I use a news reading app on my iPad. You might be familiar with Flipboard. That was my go-to for many, many, many years, like very long time. But recently I've been playing with another new app that's called, I think it's called Artifact, A-R-T. Artifact, yeah. Yeah, are you on Artifact? Yeah.

I am on Artifact. The icon, because—

Like an asterisk?

It's like, yeah, it's weird asterisk. It's like one part of it's kind of bent and it has great curation of stories.

Um, that is— that is an AI tool. So, um, it's machine learning tool. What it does is it learns from what you look at and the length of time that you stay reading an article and the kind of articles that you read, and it serves more like that. And you can also say, I don't want to see this kind of thing, and it'll serve less of that. So it's a recommendation engine for news. It's still news, but it's showing you more of the news that you want to know about, and you don't have to manage your subscriptions. Like you do with Flipboard, where you have to specify, I want this kind of news. And the thing that I like about it the most is when you open up an article in Artifact, at the very top there's a little button that if you click on, it loads 3 bullet points that summarize the entire article. And it's using this kind of language model, but it is not creating anything. Just to be clear, it is literally creating a very succinct summary of what's in the article. You cannot learn from the article by reading the 3 subject lines. What it does do is it tells me whether or not I want to read the rest of the article. So sometimes I start the first paragraph and I'm like, wait a minute, click on the summary, see the summary and go, okay, what I want is in here, or, oh, I'm glad I did that because now I don't want to read this anymore. So it's really useful in that way.

So do you know who, do you know who is the mind behind Artifact?

No, blow my mind. Tell me.

The founder of Instagram.

Oh, okay. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah.

Well, anyways, I think that's the kind of, you know, the right use for it. Um, it is as an acceleration tool to save time, save labor, like a lot of other robots, right?

And that's what it is. It's a robot. It's there to be a time saver. I think it's there to automate menial tasks, not to do super duper heavy lifting.

And not to be your friend.

This is not the version of her.

Yeah, that's what I heard. I saw that there was an article about somebody that said that one of the apps, it's not WhatsApp, it's one of the other apps, has now has a friend, like a robot friend. Oh, what was it called? Maybe—

I don't know. I thought you were alluding to the fact that like somebody has taken a Synthesia AI and they've married it to a prompt engine. So you've got a picture of a female talking to you and being your friend. And you are kind of navigating a weird space of having a conversation with an AI.

And the weird space is that it's not really real.

It looks like a human. It looks like a human being, but it's just like something that looks like a human being that's talking to you.

We need a new uncanny valley. You remember the uncanny valley when they were talking about how robots sometimes are too creepy because the closer they look like humans, the creepier they get until a certain point, in which case they get really close to humans and they're undetectable. And then it's not creepy anymore, but there's like that uncanny valley. We need an uncanny valley for this. There's got to be like an uncanny generative model thing. That's just a terrible word, but you know what I'm talking about, right?

Yeah. I mean, for a kid who grew up on the uncanny X-Men, I totally know what you're talking about.

That's right. There's those animations that are just a little bit too realistic, but not realistic enough, right?

Right. It's like when I was at SourceCon and I showed off that one tool that will generate, that will do generative AI of pictures. And I said, show a picture of people having fun at a recruiting conference. And they all had smiles on their faces, but their eyes were just lifeless.

Right. And they all had 7 fingers.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I wasn't counting.

So check this out. I'm going to show this background, see if it actually works. Let's see. Oh no, I have to, I have to turn off all the, uh, unfortunately I have to turn off all the videos and all that other stuff. Anyway, I, I tried to create— I used one of those things to try to create a background for this, um, and it made something that looked actually pretty decent. I'm surprised. However, it's a still life. It doesn't have people in it. That's the thing I learned, is if you add people to it, it all of a sudden becomes just weird.

Okay, okay. I'd like to think that maybe, maybe just adding people to the world makes the world a weirder, better place.

Well, in a better way though, right? Like, weird good, right? Like, me being weird is good, right? But not this other creepy weird. That's the, that's the word we need, is creepy weird for, for automated, um, text, text-writing robots. But so anyway, go too far off center here. The, the point of this was I was shocked to learn about this person that shall go nameless, whose boss is essentially asking them to research ways to replace their team without saying that. So they're not saying, I want you to do this, but they're saying, can you find out about this, find out about that? And he put— he's an intelligent guy, so he put these things together and he thought, oh, I think I know what— I think I know what they're trying to do. They're trying to replace people. And that's just— shame on you. I mean, that's not— it's not going to work.

No, I mean, you're—

you— I think that spend your time figuring out how to make it, you know, your team more efficient rather than, you know—

I think you can replace knowledge, but I don't think you can replace intelligence. Or intelligence is— yeah, well, I think wisdom and intelligence are what you do with knowledge, right? Like how you apply it. Like we talked about the curiosity— or we didn't talk about the curiosity, we brought it up on the screen— that Junius, um, hey Junius, what's going on? This is like second time in 3 days that we've hung out. About covering topics and making them more accessible to individuals. And what I'm worried about in an AI world is that there are going to be those individuals where content is accessible to them, and there are going to be those individuals where content is not accessible to them, kind of like internet access is distributed unevenly throughout the United States and throughout the world. Okay, that's what I'm worried about.

Okay, well, we got a lot of worries now. Worried that our children are losing creativity, um, worried that some people might try to replace others with generative AI. Oh man. Anyway, so on a positive note, we did talk about how we can perhaps try to expand our career options. We did talk about the companies that might be hiring are not the ones that are advertising. Because they can't afford to put in, you know, they can't afford half a million dollars.

Wait, can I drop a plug real quick?

Please, yeah.

Okay, so, you know, Shelly, you said go small. There is a job board for startups. It is called ycombinator.com/jobs.

Y as in the letter I?

Letter Y, yeah. Y-C-O-M-B-I-N-A-T-O-R.com. I recommend going there and looking for your next gig because those opportunities are ones that are published routinely. Yep, YCombinator.com/jobs. If you click on the jobs tab up at the top, it will not feature recruiting and HR jobs. But if you go down and to the, to the right, there will be a tab that will say recruiting and people ops. And if you check on that, it will show you startups that are looking for recruiters. I think that when I looked at it this morning, that—

small businesses, small and medium-sized businesses. That's right.

Yeah. And if you think about it, you can go there and it can be you and a team of 2 recruiters. You can be the director of recruiting. You could be that manager of a team. You could build the recruiting function from scratch, right? This is a— yeah, Albert, what's going on, my man? WellFound. That's a good— that's a good one too for startups that are that are out there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

And those are jobs that are not showing up on Indeed, right?

Right. Yeah. And I mean, they might have— some of them are probably free to post. And so, you know, a startup's not trying to do things on the cheap. It's just that they might, you know, they might be a Series A or very small startup and they're not flush with money and they're not going to be able to afford to pay for these big job boards. There's a lot of those jobs out there that are not, you know, just not posted in the mainstream, basically.

Well, they're not posted in the mainstream because it's almost like a membership, right? Like Y Combinator is where Sam Altman was the CEO before he left to work on OpenAI. It's a school slash accelerator slash funding platform for startups, right? So you're looking at organizations that are trying to scale. You can also look on, I mean, yeah, like I don't know who this user is who put Okka.

Probably SweeneyBuzz.

Yeah, you could look there. These are some interesting places that you can go and you can look for, but I wanna remind recruiters that nothing beats good old-fashioned networking Hey, David Marr, what's going on? David, hey, shout out to David Marr. This guy is posting jobs all the time for recruiters. He's trying to carry an entire industry on his back. Thanks, David Marr.

Yeah, I see those every day, forward them as much as I can. Um, yeah, that's really good. I just actually had a chat with him the other day. Um, yeah, that's, uh, that's really cool to be able to, to support folks in the industry. We're actually a little bit over time, I think, here. Just realized we're past the hour. But thanks a lot for being back on the show, Brian. I'm gonna get the news out on some of these job sites on my LinkedIn and give you a hat tip. I think that's a good idea.

Well, thank you so much, Shelly. I appreciate the opportunity afforded me by being here to be in your community. You and Ronnie come on over bring David Marr down and you guys can rate my bourbon cabinet.

And Seth Davis.

Seth Davis too. Seth Davis from Atlanta, the SourceCon Grand Champion.

That's right.

Yes, that is awesome sauce.

You know you can't leave until you give us one thing to think about. What's Shelly's Alley's famous— something to mull over the weekend, deep thought.

Okay, what kind of bourbon do I got? I have a lot of bourbon because like I kind of gave up drinking at and just like didn't throw anything out. So I've got plenty of bourbon, but one thing that I think that you can think about to have a great weekend. Hey guys, if you get a chance, pick up this book, the Dick Porcello autobiography. It's about a guy who started Portillo's Hot Dog Houses in Chicago, how he built himself from nothing. And I think that's what we got to do today as recruiters is we got to start at zero and we got to go from zero to one. And I think this is a great story. I was glad that I got— that I picked it up. It was a recommendation from somebody I go to school with. That's it. Maybe just figure out how to go from zero to one.

I'm glad you didn't say that we need to do hot dog stands because I was gonna—

hot dog stands, everybody!

I'm a fan of a hot dog stand, but all right, Dick Portillo. So how's that last name?

P-O-R-T-I-L-L-O. Portillo's.

P-O-R-T-I-L-L-O. All right, thanks so much, my friend. Pleasure to have you on the show. I'm sure we'll do this again. Everybody have a good weekend.

Real quick, real quick, every time I talk to Shally, I learn something, and today is no different. Thank you.

Oh, thanks. Well, have a safe Memorial Day weekend. I think it's an extended weekend for some folks, so, um, if not, I think— is it this weekend or next weekend?

It's next weekend.

Next weekend. Okay. All right, we'll do this again on Friday before that. So take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

Thank you.