Building Sourcing Teams with Ben Solomon Live on Shally's Alley

Hey everybody, you are live on Shelly's Alley. It is finally September, just in time because the weather is finally reasonable here in Atlanta. I don't know about in Dallas or in Chicago where my friend Ben Solomon is located, but at least here in Atlanta it has returned to some semblance of humanity. Uh, let me put it this way, Last night, burning the midnight oils, I was working late and I opened the window, which in— if you know anything about Atlanta, you know that we have mosquitoes here that are the size of birds and, uh, they could be really dangerous. So I have— I put a brand new, um, mesh screen on that window and, and for the first time in a long while, I was actually able to like listen to, you know, the night sounds and get some fresh air from the outside that wasn't hot enough to bake a freaking turkey here in my office.

So Ben Solomon, it's probably the first time in months you've had a window open, right?

Yes, absolutely. It's, it's oppressive heat. Yeah, yeah. So Ben, what's up in— what's up in Chicagoland?

Uh, it's getting a little cooler here, which is nice. Uh, finally September, like you said, finally Friday. As well, which is exciting.

And then you guys go into like the whiplash of like it just freezes over.

Yeah, we have, we have a warning, no nothing, a short fall and a short spring, but they're nice.

Well folks, uh, super excited to have Ben on the show. Uh, we've, we've crossed paths a few times, more than a few times. Ben's been in the industry for what, going on, I want to say 17 years?

Yeah, it's like 17, 18, something like that.

Something like that. And you'll be surprised to know that, unlike a lot of folks in our industry, just the nature of what we do, Ben is actually one of the longest-standing, you know, sourcing leaders at the same organization. So his first job as a sourcer was with— is it Object or Objective? Objective Paradigm?

Objective Paradigm. Objective Partners. Yeah.

Objective Partners. Yeah. So that was— he started out in sourcing and then grew up in sourcing and grew up watching me on TV and then one day became like me. I mean, he's been there for his whole career, which, uh, which is highly commendable. And it's great that, you know, you, you're, you're happy at an employer like that. Um, I'm just pointing out how unusual it is because a lot of times, you know, recruiting is— has an ebb and flow business, and especially corporate, where, you know, a year or two they're, they're growing and then they stop growing. And, you know, and Be that as it may, I don't want to play into the whole politics aspect of things. But where you work, actually, Ben works in a firm that is a partner that has multiple lines of services nationwide for various industries. Essentially, it's a search partner with some different models, you know, contingency, RPO, and things like that. And so, a company like that has a need for a dedicated team. You were on a team of about, what, 18 people or so?

Yeah, so 17, 18, 19 people on the team, something like that.

So every year of experience, you get another— like, when you— yeah, 18 years, you get an 18.

I never thought about it, but you're right, those do just about line up. That's interesting.

Happy birthday, you get a new headcount! That's awesome. I like that. I wish somebody gave me that for my birthday. I've inherited teams of the, the single largest team that I'd literally inherited, like, here you go, was 23 people. And that was direct reports. And that was— I didn't like that so much.

That's a lot of direct reports, period. And a lot of different reports to inherit, for sure.

Yeah, it's a lot of direct reports. And it wasn't like I was, you know, a VP and they were all directors. I had, you know, 23 line people, like, out in the, you know, doing the job. That was, that was the biggest team I inherited. I've built teams that were bigger, but as, you know, growing and then with managers and everything like that. Um, so it's definitely fun and exciting, and that is actually kind of the, the nature of the topic that I wanted to talk about. Folks are probably interested in, you know, some of the, some of the nuances of building a team and scaling it up like that. I mean, you've, you've spent over a decade building and leading sourcing teams. Um, what— one of the things I wanted to ask is, what do you look for when you're hiring a sourcer? I get asked this a lot. What do you look for in a sourcer? And I guess part 2 of that, what do you look for when you're hiring them? But also, how do you differentiate between someone who can source and someone who can lead sourcing?

Yeah, so I think there are—

sorry, it's a two-part question.

I'll go to the first part, then maybe you have to remind me the second part, but we'll start the first part. So there are a couple things I look for, right? And a lot, a lot of the, the hiring I've done over my time here has been entry-level folks and training them from scratch to be sourcers. We have now—

that's good because you're looking for some raw ingredients that can become You're not interrogating them on their sourcing technique.

Definitely. And we have more in the past couple years started doing sort of a mix of both types of hiring, but a lot of my experiences have been hiring entry-level folks. And, you know, what I'm looking for is, and for the entry-level folks, it's great if they have some experience with some kind of CRM or some kind of database, which is doing, it's the organizing of information, the retrieval, of information and how their mind works around those things, right? And, um, we often have had success with people from, you know, a liberal arts background, right? History, English, sociology, anthropology, you know.

Why is that? Because they're used to like research.

Yeah, it's just that— it's just that research and organizing, synthesizing information. And I was a history major and I graduated college and I had no idea what I wanted to do and found my way into this industry, and we've had other success stories like that. You know, we've, um, someone on my team who, uh, before they became a sourcer was an archaeologist, right? And I like that because it's kind of the same kind of thing. It's not digging, digging for, you know, fossils and artifacts versus digging for information, kind of the same mindset. And then another thing that I see, I, that often works well is if people have experience working at museum or an archive or a library, right? So higher entry-level folks, if they've worked at their college library or college campus museum or archives or things like that, that is often a good signal to me, like, oh, they, they have this ability to really dive deep, drill down and, yeah, down and think about how you're gonna organize information. And then sort of from a more maybe, you know, soft skills or work style perspective, people also ask me what makes a good sourcer. And one thing that I always say is you have to be able to really focus on one thing for an extended period of time, but also be able to shift focus, really focus without getting bored or burnt out. Like, you might go into today, okay, like, I've got this search, I'm gonna go on LinkedIn, I'm gonna spend all day doing Boolean searches on LinkedIn and really digging through profiles and finding the people, and I'm gonna enjoy that versus being, you know, bored or burnt out by it. But you also, you have to be able to have that sort of hyperfocus, but but also shift it, right? You start the day thinking you're gonna do that, then, oh, that role's closed. We can just shift to this other role, being able to shift that focus somewhere else without taking it personally or getting attached to what you were doing and being able to move on to the next thing.

Is organization— so I talk a little bit about this when people ask me about it, librarians, researchers, especially with the raw skills that then become investigative skills. Is organization a part of that though? Because like what I've always thought is the research mind is problem solving, puzzle solving. It's curiosity. It's the endless, there's got to be an answer to it. You know, that's the drilling down. But the more I think about it, and I guess the older I get, which also means the more my memory deteriorates, the more I realize that There may be a lot of tools out there for us, but there's a lot of tools, there's a lot of websites, there's a lot of techniques, there's, you know, is, do you look for organization skills like information management, even though they may not have gone to school for information management, but do you look for that or is that just something that comes with the, what you described?

Yeah, I mean, it can definitely be helpful. I think you made an important point about that. Like there's so many tools and there's always new tools coming out, like one of those skills you have to have is, is I have a better term for just being a fast learner, right? Being able to jump into any tool or software.

And that kind of comes with the territory you just described at the organization.

Yeah, I'm going to figure out how I'm going to use this. And, um, and so that's a big piece of it. And being, being curious, being inquisitive to find that information. Yeah. And then I think the piece of organizing it because You're searching for candidates, searching for data, whatever, and then you do have to put it in a spreadsheet and putting it in the ATS and putting it here and putting it there. And that's something that we expect of sourcers too is not just finding the information, but the organization and the delivery of the information, whether it's building lists, whether it's delivering market data to clients, like that's a big part of it for sure.

Yeah, I mean, where do you go? All the places you could go. What do you do when you get there? Templates, search, commands, search strings, um, you know, pitches, all that stuff. So, you know, I use— I, I've been a, a— and I'll admit I'm probably overly emotionally attached— a big user of Evernote since it came out. I was the only person in our industry ever to get Evernote certified. And so I want— I mean, I went all in on this tool, and it's been my second brain. I use it a lot. Uh, I use it in ways that it probably wasn't even really intended. And then I tried OneNote and it was okay. I had to use it because the companies that I worked with only had Microsoft. Um, but I've heard about Notion, I've heard about Obsidian. Barrier for entry is really high. What do you— you might have maybe some team tools as well. What do you use as your knowledge base or your PKM?

Yeah. So my, for me personally, my external brain is Google Docs. Like both in—

Oh, right. Yeah. I was just, yeah, that goes with, that's true. Good point. Evernote is the notebook, but all the files are on Google Docs. That's right.

Yeah. And, and so both, both for work where we're on, on Google and, and in my personal life, like if I have a thought that I wanna write down, it's, it's Google Docs and it's, it's really become a muscle memory of, you know, Command+T to open a new tab and you type docs.new into the bar and press enter, it opens up a new tab, type what you want.

That new—

yeah, exactly, sheets.new, slides.new, and then it saves it. And then, you know, searching, name it something so I can find it later, and like building lists and, and information in Google Drive is really how I offload stuff from my brain into, into somewhere else. And I think for everyone it's a little bit different, um, and again, I, I care less about, um, how they're organizing data, what tools they're using, just if they have a way to do it. And that's actually— that's a, that's a question that I ask in all of my interviews, almost all my interviews.

See, there you go.

And it's just, it's how do you keep yourself organized? Yep. Either, you know, work, school, personal, whatever. Like, are you a Post-it person? Are you in your phone? Are you in your head? Are you write it down with paper and pencil? Are you Google Calendar? And that, I like to see how that gets people talking about what they're doing. And if somebody says, well, I keep everything in my head and I never write anything down, that's probably not the right profile.

Unless they happen to have an eidetic memory. Right. I'll just never know about that stuff. But yeah, so that was, that was why I was asking about that. So you don't really have a system that you impose on your team or say, here's the way we keep stuff. You just expect them to be able to have a way to organize.

Yeah. I mean, we, to, to, there's some system, right? Depending on the project, either, you know, this is what I expect you to do in the ATS, or we might have, you know, right. Or you have a Google Doc, a Google Sheet.

Yeah. Right.

With a template, you know, candidate name and here's when you reached out and here's when you did all your follow-ups and here's the status and that kind of thing. You know, we do, we do have that kind of structure.

That makes sense. Yeah. So that, that was a big question that I had was around, you know, just managing information overload really quite literally. Have you played around at all with NotebookLM since you're a Google shop?

A tiny bit and not really. Folks on my team have been playing around with it.

Really impressed with it. Really, really impressed with it. As a Pro user, uh, you can add 300 documents, source documents. And what really stands out, what distinguishes NotebookLM from everything else, is that it is, uh, a unique, um, it's, it's a good RAG tool. You can actually have your own content in there, and so it's canonically correct, and you have your own information. You can verify where it comes from. It doesn't generate So there's a lot less hallucinations and things like that. It is a micro model though. I mean, 300 documents is not the size of like a ChatGPT's large language model, but it's the 300 documents max. And I don't think I have any notebook that's bigger than like 180, 200 documents. What it does though is it's able to synthesize that information, make connections for you, and draw like, automatically draw mind maps and give you, um, you know, a deep dive analysis and make suggestions and things like that. So what I like, what I really like about it is it's basically like ChatGPT but for a, a microcosm of documents that either are mine or that I selected. Think, for example, uh, rec and some candidates, right? So you got 50 resumes, you can drop them in there and ask questions about the resumes, or you got spreadsheets and things like that. So it's worth checking out. I'm, I'm, I'm writing a, you know, kind of lesson plan for my at TSI University where I teach people about this kind of stuff. I'm writing a lesson plan about NotebookLM as a tool for free. You only get 50 documents, but that's still, that's pretty fun. Yeah.

And that's a really good point is like the AIs now are gonna become these like external brains or these systems. And personally, I think it will be interesting to look at like, like for us, for me, okay, I've got all these docs, whether Evernote or, in Google Docs, whatever, I need the AI to feed on those. I think for people coming into the industry might just be AI from the get-go, right? I'm just putting any information into the AI itself to remember, hey, hey, remember this or, or, you know, save this for later. And then, you know, having that, and then that's a great example, like the idea of, hey, here's 10, you know, outreach messages I use that have worked in the past. Please look at these, please look at this new rec and tell me what message I should write. And we've found it really, you know, everyone on my team's using ChatGPT or other tools and it's a great tool for, again, sort of those first drafts of those messages and getting started. And, you know, as everybody knows, AI is not perfect and there are things you, you know, you don't wanna just copy paste. Add your voice and you wanna add your voice. You don't wanna copy paste blindly and send it, but it can be a great way to kind of kickstart that process of writing outreach or doing some of those things.

But you know what though, like for me it's, It's very different. So the large language models, they have their place. The RAG tools have a different place. It's more like you said, the brain. I would, I would love to have Evernote tied into one of these RAGs. Um, yeah, but I haven't found that. That's why I'm kind of looking at Obsidian, just trying to, I'm thinking about maybe just kind of starting an Obsidian on the side so that I can use it for automation. Things like, for example, the emails, um, it would automatically be able to add things to Obsidian and then add from Obsidian to the NotebookLM and keep, uh, or it, it can organize things automatically into like, if it's emails, it goes into the emails folder and then look at which emails got the most responses and start giving me, you know, cuz we talk about A/B testing all the time, but the analysis of the, uh, the outcome of the A/B test is, is sometimes a little murky. You know, you might have a, I have a 50%, 60% chance of, of getting it right that the B is better than the A. but you don't really have a way to systemize that unless you have something like this. So that's kind of what I'm, that's where my mind is going is running Obsidian on like Claude code and then having the emails auto-populate into Obsidian so that it can run an analysis. But anyway, I geeked it out. I could geek out about this.

No, I mean, it just, it lets, so A/B testing is a good example of like what it lets us do, what it lets us do at scale that we were never able to do at that level of scale before, whether it's outreach, the A/B testing, like the possibilities are really fascinating.

Yeah. You have to rely on your CRM providing you with the outcome analysis of, all right, this one got X% better responses or whatever.

But that's sort of the dream is like the system that can plug into anything, both from like a personal perspective.

Like, that's what I was reading.

Read every email I've ever written, read all my tweets, read every blog post and just like become me and be able to answer questions as me. That's insane. Write my emails. And then also like, you know, plug in, look at every single record in my CRM and just figure out what to do with it and go do it.

Yeah, you nailed it. Um, I'm, I'm, I've gotten partially there with N8N. And so there's a lot of functions that I can automate with N8N, self-hosted, so it's completely free. And the reason I like Obsidian is cuz it's also self-hosted and which means I get to keep all the data, but I'm just a little afraid of the, like, you know, it's kind of like the deep end of the pool and especially having been. Pretty much married to Evernote for so long. Um, it's just going to be one of those things I have to like dip my toes in there. But that's exactly what I wanted to do, is be able to bring together these multiple streams. I can do it with N8N, but here's the problem: it takes some cajoling, it takes some, you know, pushing and prodding and trial and error, where the, the, the, the external LLMs like Claude are able to organize things already because they already have this systemic organization. We had a person from the chat that asked a question about hiring. I'm going to try and show it on the screen. It may not fully show, so I'll read it. When you have an interview with someone who is maybe just out of college for a sourcer role, um, what questions— and, and they're, they're mentioning STAR: Situation, Task, Action, Result— what questions might you ask to learn about their researching skills? So how would you How would you ask them to identify their research prowess?

Yeah, so there are a couple questions, and then the other piece of the, of the question was cut off is how do you, how do you find out if somebody is, um, keeping touch with new tools, new sites. So some of the questions I like to ask you, especially for people coming out of school, I'll ask, um, tell me about a favorite project that you worked on in school. You know, ideally that is a research project, then I'll kind of dig into— because you get— you're gonna get the best answer to that question when something that they're passionate about or something that they really enjoyed. So, hey, tell me about your favorite project. Okay, how'd you— how'd you start the research for that? How'd you dig into X? How'd you dig into Y? And that can lead down a really interesting path. Um, and I also like to ask people, you know, it's kind of similar to the how do you keep yourself organized, is how do you approach learning a new— a new tool or a new piece of software, right? Um, are you, uh— I got all kind of prompt with different styles. Are you, uh, just figure it out on your own? Are you gonna ask for help? Or you go to YouTube and watch videos? Like, how do you approach it?

Right. Are you a show me or let me watch you? Or are you like, let me do it and mess up and then correct me? There's those different learning styles.

Yes. And then you're just kind of looking for how deep their answer goes, right? Is it, well, I just kind of figured it out. Or is it, oh, I went to Google and that led me to some YouTube videos and I found this channel that, you know, talked about this version of the tool and just like, you know, You can start to kind of get to tell how their, how their mind is working with those kind of questions.

What's funny though, how often people actually say, I read the owner's manual, or I, or I read the, you know, the user guide. Like, that's rare. Most of the time people don't do that. I don't know why. It's like, I was, I was at a, um, I was at a client where I was implementing some fixes, some hot fixes for their, their CRM, and one of the people that was, you know, kind of like in charge of the CRM, like, they were like, oh, I consider myself an expert on this. I won't name it CRM, but, um, like, I've never seen anybody do that. How did you figure out how to do that? And I was kind of like, I read it in the instruction manual. So they've never done that. They're like, really? I didn't even know it had an instruction manual. I'm like, wow, it's— if you go to help and then go to the, you know, documentation, it tells you what all the commands are. Oh wow. And they're like, I'm gonna learn this now. I'm like, you've been here how long?

Shelly, that's really funny because I have almost an identical story.

No way, awesome!

And, and I'll, and you know, not to toot my own horn, but it's a good example of, I think, the, the value that sourcing can bring to, to TA. So we had, we had a client and we were doing a little bit of consulting helping them implement a new ATS. And so I was, I was in a meeting with them, you know, walking through some things, and they were talking about, oh, we have, we have this issue, we haven't been able to figure out how to solve it, we want to set it up this certain way. And I was like, what if you click over there? Okay, what if you click on that? And then what if you click on that menu? Oh, well, what if we change this? And then that solved the issue. And they're like, how did you know how to do that? Like, have you used this tool before? Like, no, I just kind of looked at it and figured out what would be the most likely way to get to where we want to go. Like, I hadn't used that.

20,000 tools like that.

I've used lots of different tools. I never used that one in particular, but I've used lots of different ones. And like, that's again one of those skills that you're looking for is can you pick up that tool quickly and just sort of through intuition, oh, like, I think if we click on settings, Oh, I think we need to click on, you know, this menu, this submenu. Let's scroll down. What does this do? Oh, maybe if we change this to that. Oh, that did the thing we needed. Cool. And they were kind of a little bit blown away on the solution to this problem they've been trying to solve. And I was, I was like, what do you mean you hadn't figured out? Like, it was super easy just to figure out where to go. But, but I think that's a really good example of kind of that mindset. It is. But that, that's so funny that we both have the similar sort of experience. Yeah.

Peeling back the onion. What if— I, I tell people all the time, especially when they're like, how did you discover all this stuff about, you know, search and sourcing and everything? And they're like, you must have all these techniques and methodologies, you know, for discovery. I'm like, listen, uh, most of the time it's, um, it's— there's not like an aha moment where I'm like, I wake up in the middle and I go, you know what I should do? I should go run this on that. And it like idea, you know, ding, like that doesn't happen. There's no eureka, at least not very often. More often than not, it's, I really think that there should be a way to do this. I wonder if I do that. What if I do this? What if I do that? What if I do? Oh my God, if I do this, look what happens. And then that's when I, you know, it's not eureka, it's what if. It's exactly what you described. There's all these what ifs.

It's trial and error. And it's—

Yeah, he did a lot of error.

Being curious to wanna go down those paths and not getting frustrated and not wanting to quit. And it's, you know, it's, you know, I use the example of going down the rabbit hole, you know, looking for a candidate's email address or something, right? Clicking around, looking at their blogs or Twitter. Oh, this has a link to this, this link's broken. But if I edit the link, I can get to this other place. Their GitHub sends me to this and just like having fun following those paths. And that's one of the things I like is that it's sort of about sourcing in general. There's a creative piece and a logical piece, right? There's this creative piece of how am I going to, you know, follow this path? And then the logical piece of the Boolean string, that's a true/false, yes/no. And I think I really took to that just the way my mind works and building up those strings and figure, okay, if I move these parentheses around, if I take this term out, what's it going to do in that trial and error of finding what didn't really work?

Yeah, yeah, definitely lots of, lots of just making mistakes and, you know, um, trying to figure out how to undo it sometimes.

Yeah.

So I told you there was a part 2 to that question, um, as you know, when we were talking about how do you select people who could source, especially if they, you know, they're new to even recruiting. But the second part of that is how do you determine if they can lead sourcing, you know, if they can take initiative and be like a, I don't know if you have sourcing leads or team leads or whatever, but like that's a different skillset in my opinion.

Yeah. And, you know, we do have folks who have taken on some more sort of lead type roles and it's typically not something I'm looking for in an interview, right? 'Cause it's something that they're gonna grow into later down, right? In the role, but you know, Part of it is just seeing if they take initiative, then that tells me they have initiative, right? Like, um, another, another signal is if I see that there's, um, somebody is becoming somebody that other people on the team go to with questions, right? Like, they can always come to me, but I often say, oh, well, you know, people are going to X person with, with Y type of questions. That's, that's interesting. And we have, um, We have weekly team meetings where everybody gets together and talks about challenges or new tools and just speaking up in those meetings and talking about, and it doesn't necessarily have to be, hey, here's this new awesome thing that I discovered everybody should be doing. It can be, hey, I've got this challenge and I could use help from the team to kind of brainstorm ways to solve it.

We don't do that enough, man. I've set up, I've called them a bunch of different things, jam sessions is what I'm calling them now, but situation rooms, war rooms, And those have been some of the best, those have been some of the most fun and interesting and also productive activities. But we just, everybody can get together and just kind of throw in their problems out in, you know, in the meeting and experimenting because everybody thinks differently and they have different perspectives. And yeah, but we really, I don't think we do that enough. There's maybe there's this feeling that I don't know why, But there's this feeling that you don't want to work on somebody else's wreck. Like, you've got your own problems. You don't want to, you know, I don't know if that's the deal or not. I mean, if you work at a company and you're all teammates, that's fine. But I think as an industry, we don't really do that. Wouldn't it be awesome if at a SourceCon we did like, bring your wrecks and just brainstorm on a wreck and like everybody work on this wreck for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and see what we can do? And just document it. I've done that in my own teams and it produces really cool results. It's also really fun. It's like everybody, you know, you play some music, everybody throws out ideas. By the way, in case you're curious, I start usually with some kind of bizarre, wacky, like, task, like a purple squirrel hunt. Or one time I said, I, there was a, there was a manager that everybody liked to kind of, you know, pick on a little bit. I'm like, you know, whoever finds the first picture of this person with a mullet will be able to choose the, the place we get lunch from. Right.

Yeah.

So it's, it's not really, I mean, I was going to pay for lunch anyway. It's not, I'm not really giving anybody like money, but they get the bragging rights and they get to choose the lunch venue. And everybody gets to make fun of their favorite manager to make fun of, you know what I mean? Yeah. In a playful way, not a disrespectful way.

I think the more knowledge sharing, the better. And I think in the first couple years of my career, we felt a little bit differently. We were kind of like, we don't wanna give away the secrets, right? Like we've put together the best tool stack and we've got, you know, the best skills at Boolean and like that's our secret sauce and that's why the clients are gonna pay us money and we don't want everybody else to have, but But then there's been sort of a mindset shift of like the more information sharing, the better. SourceCon and other conferences, like the more we can all share what we're doing with each other, that's just gonna help all of us grow. So I 100%, I 100% agree.

Yeah, I think the jam session is a great idea. A few times I've had it where I, you know, set it up and nobody had a write they wanted to work on and that can backfire.

Yeah.

So if you're planning on— listeners, if you're planning on doing this and just doing kind of like a jam session with your team, bring at least one— like, come prepared with one req that you're gonna throw out there to break the ice. That's the reason I did the puzzle, is to kind of break the ice, and then people were not shy after that. But I've even had situations where nobody had a req that they could work on.

Bring something. It's definitely the req move. And I'll just— I'll throw in A little plug there for the upcoming Recruiting Innovation Summit SourceCon Hackathon that we're running, because that's exactly what we're doing is those, those puzzles, the sort of wacky research challenges. That's what the hackathon is, is those sort of fun internet, internet research challenges. So if you, if you like that, check out the hackathon.

Oh yeah, yeah, those are usually kind of funny too.

Yeah, I remember we try to make them fun.

Fun and funny. Fun that is also funny. So, we talked about leadership. Now, you bring in these rookies and you've got some Play-Doh that you need to basically mold. You know, you molded yourself and other leaders in the industry. I can name quite a few. Glenn Guttmacher, for example. Tim O'Connor. People that I've mentored. And through my career, Jim Stroud, people who I've, you know, I've had a very strong influence on, they also started out molding themselves. But if you're going to hire rookies and you're responsible for them, you're going to have to imprint them with fundamentals. So how do you, I guess, training philosophy question, right? How do you balance teaching fundamentals versus like bright shiny object syndrome, which we all seem to suffer from when you're training some sourcers, you know, in an environment where technology moves so quickly. How do you balance like, okay, let's play around with this stuff and try all these new things. Yeah, cool. But we also need to sort of stick to some basics that we know are going to work. Like, how do you kind of work around that in training, in a training setting?

Yeah, the fundamentals are super important, you know, Boolean and all the other stuff, and we try to pair that with the training on the tools, right? So they're— we're not overwhelming with tools. It's really about the fundamentals, and it's, hey, let's practice the fundamentals using our ATS. Okay, then let's practice the fundamentals on Bullhorn— so Bullhorn ATS, and then on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Recruiter, and we have sort of a structured training that we put a lot of people through of we're gonna learn how to, you know, research and find information in the database. So I'll give an example. We have, you know, some trainings to go through. Here's how to use the search in ATS. And then there's some questions they have to answer. And those questions are really structured to look at not just how are they using the tool, but for example, attention to detail. So for example, there's a question, tell me how many people in the database have the first name Merlin. And, you know, simple search, but there's also somebody in our database with the name Merlinda. And sometimes they'll get an answer where they'll include the Merlinda in their count. They'll just look at the count and not really look through the answers after they typed in Merlin. And there's, you know, 7 people total, but 6 Merlins and 1 Merlinda. And do they catch that? And if not, okay, we'll train. Okay, you should look for this. And just sort of training on that attention to detail and some of those other things. And I think a lot of it too is it's just repetition, right? It's like, it's a, it's a muscle.

Okay.

It's a muscle that you can build, like going to the gym, like you're, you're building the SARS-C muscles in your brain.

So you provide them some scenarios, basically.

Yeah, it's, it's, here's a, here's a rec, build what you think is a good boolean string, go run that string on whatever tool we're looking at, give me some, bring some candidates to the table, let's talk through the profiles, why they're a fit or not good, and we're going to repeat that a bunch of times with a bunch of different, you know, recs from different clients that we work on and The more recs you look at, the more profiles you look at, you start to build those connections in your brain. And I always tell people, like, when I first started, I remember agonizing over whether somebody was a good fit, right? I'd have a resume and go, oh, how do I decide if this person is a fit for this job or not? And really kind of agonizing. And then just the more you do it now, you know, it's just yes, no, yes, no. Like, you can look at things that— profiles sort of scary quickly and decide whether they're a fit for what you're looking for or not because you've looked at so many profiles and looked at so many jobs. Sort of built those connections in your brain.

Do you have a manual? Like, I have a book?

Not really. I mean, we certainly have—

we just have some Google Docs.

Yeah, we have some notes for sure. We have some Google Docs. We certainly have material that we've built up over time.

Things you've done, right? Your library of knowledge. But you don't have like a, here you go, day 1, flip to page 1, you know.

Yeah, there's, there's no sort of official, official manual.

There's no recipe book.

Yeah, the, the most there is, the most structure is like a manual for myself when I'm training people. I kind of have a script of like, okay, let's go. Here's, here's what we're gonna do.

What do I need to cover? Yeah, right. Oh, that's a good point. Yeah. So, um, interesting. AI, let's switch a little bit. And talk about something we've already sort of touched on it a little bit. I mean, NotebookLM is kind of not exactly, it's not really an AI, it's a, it's a RAG tool, but it's still, you know, kind of in the spectrum, right? I know you, you, you, you're pretty hands-on with AI tools with that. Basically it's, it's, it's in the best interest of anybody who is a recruiter, much less a sourcer, to stay up to date with what's going on. And I know you're definitely out there in the forefront, hands-on with everything that's kind of coming out and, you know, what's been, what hasn't been. Where do you see what we call AI, so generative AI and LLMs and machine learning and the, you know, the kind of like ChatGPT and Claude of the world and all that stuff. What do you see that actually enhancing sourcing And where do you see it becoming distracting, smoke and mirrors, noise that people are just too eager to, you know, to play around with and procrastinate with? Like, what, where do you see that? Where is it going to go that's going to help and where is it going to go that's going to hinder us, basically?

Yeah, so there's no doubt, obviously, that AI is going to be a huge part of the future of sourcing, just like any new tool that comes out, right? Whether it's email, job boards, LinkedIn. Yeah.

AI and the internet became, you know, part of everything. And so AI is the next internet. It's eventually, it'll be part of, you're gonna be using stuff you don't even know has AI.

100%. And, and so anybody who's in the sourcing world needs to make that part of their, of their tool stack. Mm-hmm. And there's, I think, I think right now we're very early obviously in how AI is going to, come into the space and there's, there's definitely that, you know, shiny new tool syndrome that even before AI, I think it's easy for sourcers to get caught in. Oh, this tool is cool, that tool is cool. And you could, you could end up spending all your time looking at cool new sourcing tools and not spend any time sourcing, right? And I think AI multiplies that just because there's so many different tools. I think we're in this, in this period or in this early period now where it's hard to know who the winners are gonna be. And there's not a, you know, because of AI, there's not a huge barrier to entry to creating a decent AI sourcing tool. And so the market is flooded a little bit with a lot of tools, both for bigger companies and from startups. And everybody's got, hey, we've got this AI sourcing platform and it's gonna solve all your problems. And that's—

But you know what though? I mean, it's exactly what you're saying is exactly right. There's really no barrier for entry, which is two things. First of all, it leaves a lot of opportunity. For there to be stuff. But it also means that there's a lot of noise. There's a lot of vendors that just literally are just taking ChatGPT and putting a skin on it.

100%. And people just slapping AI on their tools because that's the buzzword. Is it really an AI or is it just an algorithm?

Right. I've actually only seen maybe 3 or 4 different tools that I truly have MML— sorry, ML LLMs, like machine learning LLMs. And I can name them with one hand. But the point that I'm asking, or the point that I'm is the question is, um, where is it? Not, not which vendor, like I'm not saying who's the company that's going to win, but what is the solution that it— what is the, the, the enhancement to sourcing that AI will produce hopefully soon, in your opinion? Or one of them, there's probably going to be more than one.

Yeah, so we mentioned a little bit is like the scale, right? It's going to allow one force to do what we're doing, but at a much bigger scale, right? And there's always going to need to be that human, that human touch, but the ability to use AI to automate some of the, some of the outreach and some of the sourcing, I think, I think it's really exciting.

So you're thinking enhanced productivity velocity, you're thinking, you know, efficiency, right? Well, that's already happening. And I, I'm coming out with a— next, next Tuesday I'm coming out with an article that's going to ruffle a lot of feathers.

Looking forward to it.

Yeah, not yours, but a lot of other people's feathers. I think you'll be surprised. Um, something that nobody's really talking about that's, that's vital to this movement towards automation. But what I'm saying is I hear you, and I think that's really what it comes down to, is it's not, it's not a do-it-for-you. There really is no do-it-for-you. There's do some things, there's do some of it for you. But it's like, I was having a conversation with somebody about, about automobiles, cars, right? You, you don't necessarily work in your car. Some people do. Police officers, they call it their shop because they're in there and that's where they do business from. There's people who drive for a living and so on. But generally speaking, most of us use automobiles as a mode of conveyance to get to work. So for us, a car is a way to get to work so we can do our job. We would have needed to go to work if we walked, rode a horse or bicycle, or took the bus or the train or flew or whatever. We would have needed to get to work anyway. So the car isn't really substantially significant. It's just a faster way to get there. And what you're describing is exactly the same. It's— this technology is going to be like the car was to get to work. It's going to get you the results faster. And some cars are self-driving, maybe, whatever, I don't care. The point is, these tools, some, some of them have, have some self-driving, but the reality is you still have to, um, get there. You still have to decide where you're going. You still have to have a plan, what time you're going to leave, which route to take, or whatever. And even if all that is semi-automated— I'm rambling. I'm just trying to say, I totally agree with what you're saying. And I think that's something that's lost with a lot of people that are hyper in tune, or like, I want to call it mass hysteria. They're hysterical about AI and how it's going to do everything. It's going to replace everyone. It's going to, you know, it's so unbelievably over the top that it's unbelievable, right? What I believe it's— what I think is believable, sorry, is what you said. It's going to help us get there faster, right? That's definitely one thing. Where is it going to get in the way? That was the other side of the question is what's the bad side? What's the— you know, the internet had a lot of good things it brought into the world that created businesses, but it also destroyed some. It created opportunities, but also created things like, you know, social bullying, social media bullying, and other things. So there's, you know, there's a downside to it. What's the downside to this?

Yeah, I think a big one is as companies start to use it to automate outreach, for example, it's just not gonna be targeted very well, right? Companies are gonna start putting these systems to place and be like, oh yeah, this is the solve for everything. Turn this on and great. And like, even just from my personal experience, the number of recruiting spam text messages I get to my phone every week over the past, let's call it a year or 2 years, has gone up from 0 a week to 4 or 5 a week, right?

More like 4 or 5 a day.

I'm getting texts. And it's just, it's just, it's, and then, and then people, it's almost like we're, we're destroying the utility of it before we even get started because we're doing it badly. And people are just going to stop looking at any text messages from numbers they don't know. And the people who might want to be more deliberate of building new systems and setting things up correctly and really targeting their markets and building these automated outreach campaigns, by the time they get there, they're not going to be as effective because everyone's turned on their spam filters and is not looking at text messages because people turned it on too early and sent out thousands of spam messages and candidates just ignore them because they're not good. So I think that's a good example of how it can really get in the way.

Noise. Yeah.

Noise. Creating more and more noise.

Resistance. Yeah. You think it's actually gonna give us a bad reputation, which, you know, some would argue it's hardly possible to do because we already have such a bad reputation anyway.

But, you know, yeah. I mean, everybody hates recruiters until they need a job, but I think it could, right? Just because it can increase that volume. Look, I'm, I'm neither AI, like, super optimist or an AI doomer. I think I fall somewhere in the middle. Pragmatist. But I do, I do think we're going to go through some kind of cycle of these tools coming in, right? And there are tools for sourcing and there are tools for candidates to write resumes and there are tools for hiring managers to make decisions. And it's going to become a cycle of just AI tools, of AIs fighting each other. And then people are going to want to bring the human element back into it. I think maybe we need to go through some of that pain to rediscover like, oh, to really get some of these things probably shouldn't have been automated.

Yeah.

You need to figure out which parts should be automated and which parts shouldn't be and where you need the human sort of tweaking, tweaking the process and running, running the process.

Yep. Did you see that video or I thought it was a meme, I'm not sure about the, uh, two AIs talking to each other.

Yeah, I've seen some of those for sure.

They're, yeah, they're both like customer service reps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, Finn or Nice or one of those. And, you know, they don't realize each other is an AI until part of the way in the conversation when they all of a sudden they're like, oh, are you a digital assistant or something like that? Yes, I am. Are you a digital? And then all of a sudden it like devolves into they start talking this like language that is almost like code.

Oh yeah, I've seen that one.

Goes right off the deep end. Like, and so you're like, you know, the candidate is going to have the AI write the resume, complete the job application. The recruiter is going to have the AI evaluate the candidate's application and resume and then have an AI do the interview and then have an AI make the decision. And then every, you know, it's all going to come full circle and people will be like, why is this not working? Gee, I wonder why.

Yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna be really interesting to see how all that plays out over the next couple years.

You know what my favorite quote is about this? Robots do exactly what they're told, and that's the problem. They do exactly what they're told. They're gonna— if you say go that way, they're gonna go that way until something else says go somewhere else, which may involve them running into something they're not supposed to or running off of something they're not supposed to or whatever. So that's hilarious. Um, let's talk a little bit about something that is, I think, more, um, unique to your setting where you're working. You have centralized sourcing, which is unusual for an external firm. Um, you know, there's not a lot of larger firms like that that have centralized sourcing. They usually have dedicated teams for specific clients, you know, stuff like that. So you have this environment where you have a mixed bag and you have sourcers that work on multiple recruiting, I don't know, objectives or plans or whatever. What's the biggest mindset shift in order to get the most value from your sourcers when they're switching? You know, because for me, I get— I'm working with a client, I get to know the client, and it's like I'm, you know, I got my blinders on. I see things from the client's perspective. But switching then to, you know, if I was working for 10 clients and I had to like switch every, I don't know, day or hour, I don't know how I would handle that. What's the mind shift or the mindset shift that people need to know about to do that?

Yeah, and we do, we have both, right? So on our— Dedicated? Okay. Our consulting side, people are typically dedicated to one or sometimes two clients at a time for, you know, a long period of months or years. So that's a little bit different. And then, and then on the agency, but on the agency side, they're acting, you know, they're working with the agency recruiters and they're working on, you know, multiple jobs, multiple clients every day. So it is, it is, um, it's definitely, you know, we call those roles both, both sourcers, they're both on the team, but those are definitely kind of different, different mindsets. Where on the, the RPO side, you are able to, you know, plug into one client for a particular period of time, and that's really about learning their processes, learning their systems, and how you can sort of plug in and contribute there. And then on the agency side, it's really about that hunt, right? And just going out and finding— and it's less about learning, you know, you learn about the clients, but you're not dedicated to one client. So it's really about, okay, how can I figure out how I can as quickly as possible look at a job description, figure out what we're really looking for, build that Boolean string that I think is going to get me good people, go find those people, put those candidates in front of the recruiter, do that calibration, you know, what's good, what's bad, and, and do that cycle a couple times. Um, so you're right, it's a different, a different mindset between those, those two things for sure.

So is that like a muscle you train or something?

Actually, I think, I think a lot of it is about confidence, like just deciding, yeah, I can do this. And that's something I see that people need to build is like, yeah, I can take a job description and go find kick-ass candidates because that's what I do.

You do need to shift that.

I think just sort of building up that confidence piece of it is part of it too.

Got it. Got it. What advice would you give somebody that's maybe thinking about, especially, you know, with a lot of corporations cutting down on teams just because they're not hiring or just slowing down hiring, what advice would you give someone who's in a corporate setting before they, not before, but like what advice would you give them if they're considering moving to an agency or an RPO partner? Perhaps they haven't done that in the past.

Yeah, I think one is just, you know, and this is true for anybody, just always be learning, always be trying out, you know, be curious, be inquisitive, be trying out new tools, be playing around with different AI tools, figure out how to build your personal tool stack in a way that works for you. And then I think that moving, you know, specific to moving from corporate to agency, I think sometimes on the corporate side, a lot of it, a lot of the role for resources or recruiters becomes about process, right? Moving people from one stage to the next, shepherding that process. And it can be a change from Going into the agency role was like, okay, you got to make X number of outreach per day. You got to be on the phone if you're recruiting.

Got it. Yeah, there's some quotas or whatever.

There's more kind of that production environment, and there's more rapid-fire, like switching between. 100%.

Yeah, right. Okay, that makes sense. That's— that makes sense. Uh, well, I, I actually only had one other question for you from my list of prepared questions, but then there are my two, you know, capstone questions that I always ask. So we're almost there. Thank you for, for bearing with us here. After being a leader at OP's sourcing function for most of your, you know, 14 years, most of your careers, you got a lot of time, time in as an, as a sourcing leader with one organization. Um, and this is maybe a little bit of like, you know, open the kimono. What's a mistake you'll never make again when it comes to building or scaling a team, a sourcing team. Like, never ever will I ever again. And obviously, you know, something you'd want to admit to but is not— you're like, I don't want— I don't want to, like, embarrass yourself. But something that you learn from, you're like, I definitely can't do that again. Learn the hard way. I got a lot of those. So remember, we were talking about making mistakes, a lot of mistakes. That's, that's me.

Yeah, so the, the, the first thing that comes to my mind, this is just more sort of a general leadership thing, I guess, is just like trusting your instincts, especially when it comes to hiring. Because I can think of a couple times where it's like, you know, I'm not sure about this person, but let's give them a chance, or we need to hire somebody right now. And whenever there's that initial, I don't know, that usually ends up being true, right? And it usually ends up playing out the way you thought it could, or the way you were like, yeah, this could end up going south, it usually does, sort of some sort of trusting that instinct. And then another thing that I think deserves a lot of attention is the sourcer-recruiter relationship and managing what that should look like, managing egos, managing the handoff, managing ownership and credit. And there are times that I've gotten that wrong in the past.

And that's a tricky one.

That's something that, that I think people don't always give the amount of thought to that they should.

Yeah, especially, I agree with, with recruiters that are experienced recruiters and are coming from another environment where they didn't interact with sourcers and they have a misconception, which a lot of people do, that sourcing is a junior entry-level job. Now, um, you can be entry-level in sourcing. You can also be entry-level in recruiting. But the function of sourcing is not entry-level as a function. There are definitely specialists, just like there are specialists in recruiting and marketing and legal. And so you're right, if there's that misconception, which happens quite frequently, it could create imbalances or favoritism or the opposite of that.

I've seen places where the recruiters refuse to use the leads I was just gonna say that like they think, oh, I don't want to use, I wanna use my candidates, not their candidates cuz it'll make me look better. Look, we got sometimes like, no, we're all on the same team. We're all aiming for the same thing. Yeah. Like there's a division of labor for a reason. You're gonna have one person doing the sourcing research and then you get to spend more time on the phone building relationships, networking, selling. And like when you have those engines running the right way and working together, like that's what really works. And, Sometimes that's a good point.

Wow, thanks a lot, man. A lot of insight here. I learned a lot, certainly. I'll be posting some— I'm going to use NotebookLM, by the way, to post some excerpts about this here down the line. We're pretty close to the end of our time here. There are two things that I always ask my guests. The first one of those is, Who should be our next guest? I'm not putting you on the spot. I mean, you can give me a name and they won't even respond to me. Like, just, just because I'm calling them, inviting them to the show doesn't mean they're definitely going to do it. But who would you love to see on the seat here?

Have you had, um, Sarah Goldberg on before?

I have, yeah.

What about Erin Matthew?

I've invited her multiple times. Uh, she was unable to go because of her employer previously, and in her new job She's more able to go but also has to go through, uh, comms, so she's working on that.

Those were, those were the two I had off the top of my head.

Great minds think alike, and fools seldom differ, right? Um, I would definitely reach out to Goldberg again though because, uh, it's been a while. Anybody else come to mind? Um, or how about anyone you wish you could put on the hot seat here? Like, I don't know, a particular type of role. Somebody once said they'd love to see a product manager from an AI product on the hot seat. I've been working on trying to get somebody for a while. They don't really want to come on the show and sit on the hot seat for a while.

Here's something that I think would be interesting. And again, most of my career has been in technology recruiting and sourcing. There are are technologists who become recruiters and there are recruiters who become technologists.

Yeah.

And I think those are both interesting conversations or having, having a double interview with, with one of each, someone who went from recruiting into technology and someone from technology into recruiting. That could be a fun conversation.

Okay. I think I know a few people. Like it would be a good panel, right? Someone who went this way.

It'd be, it'd be an interesting panel for sure.

Double. Yeah. 3 people on the show. That's awesome. I like that idea. All right. And then the last question is, a lot of folks watch the video or listen to the podcast. So give us something to chew on. That's, that's a, it's a thought-provoking question. So what should we be asking ourselves introspectively about anything that you're passionate about? Doesn't have to necessarily be what we talked about today.

All right. Well, it, it, the first thing that comes to my mind. Yeah. Going back to, to AI is like, what happens if AI doesn't turn out the way everybody thinks it's going to? Like, what if there's a, what if we're in an AI bubble and there's a collapse and it never really gets that much better than it is right now? People think there's gonna be this exponential increase in the, the power of these models. And, but what if we've really gone through whatever exponential growth there's gonna be, and there is, you know, the rest is just incremental. Like, how do we plan? How do, 'cause I think everybody's kind of thinking the other way. It's gonna keep getting better and better and the models are gonna be able to do more and more and automate more and more. And yeah, that's probably what'll happen. But what if it doesn't? And how do we plan for that? And how should we be thinking about the next 5 to 10 years if—

Gotta think about the other fork on the road, right?

If the bubble pops.

That's lovely. Yeah. So what are you gonna do if the bubble pops or turns out to be, I don't know, whatever. Is not what you expected. Love it.

And again, that's, that's, that's ability to focus on, hey, we're focused on AI right now. If we need to shift, what's the next thing? Cool, we can shift to the next thing because that's what we do.

Absolutely. I, for one, I, you know, I've always been in the back of my mind, I've always been thinking about what comes next as far as technology because there's going to be, but, you know, uh, Kurzweil or whatever his name is talking about the singularity, whether that happens not. But then, you know, think about the possibility, right, of this, of this singularity happening. Then what comes after that? Uh, what are we going to do? I can think of a few things I would do, but, um, honestly, I don't think any of them have to do with recruiting, just because I've been, you know, it's been 30 years, man. I, I think if I had a good reason to do anything else I wanted to do because technology got to the point where I don't have to do whatever anymore. Um, there's, there's a couple things I would do. One of them for sure would be go back and get my PhD in semiotics. That's something I've been dreaming about for a long time. But, you know, getting a PhD while you're raising a family and have a job—

yeah, yeah, it's a lot of things to do at once.

Yeah, but that would be like, that would be my next thing, would be maybe go back to school and just to learn, just to learn. Like, there's not like a career opportunity for, for that on the other end. There is for people who do that for a living, but like, I'm just thinking about doing that, you know. So anyway, well, dude, thanks a lot for taking the time out of your Friday to hang out with us here, folks. Uh, hopefully we will see you back here next week. We have Diane Prince. This is a lady who has built from scratch and sold staffing firms for tens of millions of dollars. She's an expert at scaling and has a lot to offer. If you're, if you're somebody who's growing a business, it doesn't matter what kind of business, whether it's recruiting or not, she's, she's excellent at helping you scale. And then after that, we have, uh, coming back again, Steve Bartell from Gem. And if you want to nominate someone, please do. We are always looking for nominations. If you want to nominate a guest, um, you can go to the, the srcn.co and there's a link to nominate right there. So srcn.co. Hopefully we'll see you guys back here next week. Until then, be kind to yourselves. Take care, everybody.

Thanks again, Shelly. It was an honor to speak with you.

This was great. Thanks, Ben.

Thanks, everybody.

Bye.