Carmen Hudson Live on Shally's Alley

Oh, hello everybody! It is Friday, March 15th at 1:15 PM, and, uh, that's a little bit late, but that's on me. I had a little bit of technical difficulties. By the way, how do y'all like my new shirt? In case you forgot my name, right, right there, and it's got my logo on it. I call this my work shirt because it's time to get to work.

Well, sometimes people need a little help.

Yeah, exactly. I'm the mechanic.

It's not memorable.

That's right. Well, for those of you that cannot recognize the lovely face and voice of the amazing Carmen Hudson, let me introduce you to one of my longest time friends, Carmen Hudson, who's been with me since the— since before the millennium.

That's, uh, well before the millennium.

Before the millennium. Yeah, isn't that crazy? That is crazy. So a long, long time ago, Carmen recruited me into Microsoft. Many, many—

that's it, I remember that.

Yep. Yes, I was, I was sourced as a passive candidate by none other than the, the, um, Amazing. And Carmen Hudson, for those of you that might not know, she has a brand new book. I'm going to put the link up there that just dropped, just dropped on Amazon, The Corporate Recruiting Playbook. If you need a playbook, play-by-play, that's definitely the book to get. She has— Carmen has led corporate recruiting teams. She's built recruiting software. She co-founded a recruiting conference, Talent42. That is now part of ERE, I believe. She's been doing training and working with hiring managers and consulting. I mean, just all over the industry, up one side, down the other. But she's always been really, really passionate about candidate sourcing, no matter what her role. So call it, you know, call her an entrepreneur, a technology startup, whatever you want. I think at heart, Carmen's always been a hunter, and now you've got a new company— well, it's not that new, but you've got a company now called Recruiter Hunt. Is that right?

Yes, that's the, that's the website that I've run for years where I just document recruiting tools.

And so, um, you went— so you were, you were the founder of TweetyJob.

That was me.

And, um, then, you know, then the conference, and then you worked at Recruiting Toolbox for a while. So, so what is ExtraHop?

ExtraHop was, or it is, uh, a, a firm that I work for here in Seattle. They do, um, tons of networking, uh, security. So, uh, well known in the industry. I was there for a short time last year, or 2 years ago.

Oh, okay. All right, so now you're full-time dedicated to The Recruiter Hunt, to Recruiter Hunt, to consulting, to writing, and to, uh, I guess talking about my book. Talking about the book, which is— so by the way, speaking of the book, let me go ahead and put that up here so everyone can get it. I shortened the Amazon link because it is— by the way, I am not getting a commission. I'm literally just pasting a link to the Amazon thing, and I didn't know how to make it shorter because it was, you know, you know, one of those long URLs. So if you do srcn.co/chbook— now that I see that, I kind of see that the H and the B are a little blurry, but, um, yes, CH as in Carmen Hudson book. That should take you there, and you can, uh, give that a whirl. So what did you write about? What is Corporate Recruiting Playbook about? I see the COVID right there on your screen.

Absolutely. And, and, uh, you, you're not getting kickbacks, but I will send you a free copy. How's that? All right, that's Good enough for me. Um, it was for me. Um, and I, I started, you know, writing parts of this years and years ago and got sidetracked. And, uh, I finally, after leaving my role 2 years ago, I decided that it was time for me to put together everything that I knew about recruiting. Because what I've noticed in our industry is that there is not one place to go to learn how to get a little bit better at what we do. There are very few college programs that exist. There are a couple now that, that exist, and I think you have been instructing one of them, but it's very hard for people who are not— who are new to the industry to get well-versed. So I just decided I'm going to share everything that I know about recruiting, leading recruiters, um, how to set yourself up for success, um, and throw it in a book. And now it lives somewhere that someone can, can, um, actually, you know, well, I gotta, I gotta call bullshit on something here.

Hold that book up and show me the, the side view of it.

Side view?

Yeah, there's no way everything you know is in there.

Okay, but editing is hard, and no one—

I know, isn't it?

No one wants to read that. No, no one wants to read that. So I gave you the bare bones, and if you want more, we can talk more. But I really—

it's the playbook, right? So it's not the encyclopedia, it's the playbook.

Exactly. It is not. And really, it was just to get people started. And my hope is, and I write this in the book, that a ton more books are written, that people actually spend some time thinking about and writing down what they learn about recruiting, because there's so little knowledge that's out there.

So there's definitely It really is. Yeah.

Yeah. This is my perspective. I called it the Corporate Recruiting Playbook because I didn't really include a lot of my experience doing third-party recruiting. I really wanted this to be focused on corporate recruiting. And what's interesting is we're going through major change, right? Yeah.

In the industry.

And so writing this, I was very aware of what would I tell someone no matter what the scenario looked like? What's important to know? What's important to do no matter what? So, um, yeah, so I spent a few months really honing that and writing it and editing it and finally pushed it out earlier this year.

Isn't writing a book kind of like, in some way, um, it's almost like it's a compulsion? It's like a disease. You just can't get it out of your head until you— especially when you're— when you've written the main part of it and now you got to come to back to editing, right? Every time you go through, you're like, oh, that— gotta change that. Oh, I gotta change that.

I don't know how many times, and I think, oh, I need to rewrite the whole thing, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I even hired Carmen— I hired an editor. I hired a professional. This, this guy touted himself as a professional editor, former attorney who, you know, writes contracts and has like, you know, perfect attention to detail, blah blah blah blah. So I paid him a ton of money at least for me, and at the time, and I got back a copy, uh, that was supposedly edited, and I still found mistakes. Oh yeah. And I was just like, come on, your, your book is your book.

And, and for me, you know, I've been in my mind, you know, I write fiction too, so I have a—

I didn't know that.

Yes, but I haven't published anything, and I've been working on my magnum opus, my blockbuster book, probably for close to 20 years.

I didn't know you write fiction. Oh, I gotta hear all about that at another time. Let's make this about your current book. But since you brought it up, um, there are other books out there, and, uh, one of them is mine. So I'm gonna piggyback on yours here because I think the two books actually make a really good pair. Your playbook And then I've got my, my little book is about the actual act of, you know, identifying and engaging with talent. So you'll see both of them right there, CH Book and TSM. But since you brought it up, you said things are changing. Can you pick up on what is it that's changed? What is, since you started writing the book, and when you went to publish it, you felt there's been some change? What has that been?

So, um, so first of all, this— I don't want to forget to mention that I do mention your book. I put it in, in, in the appendix because, uh, I think it is important to, uh, hone your sourcing skills and to understand how to do this, to do it well. And so I didn't go into a long, you know, um, I, I didn't tackle sourcing as completely as I could have or should have, um, but I did share sort of my opinion, my approach to sourcing, and we can talk about that at some point. But I did mention, uh, your book because I think it's really an important skill, and it's the skill that will help you move to other areas within corporate America if you decide to do that.

Definitely. It's something you can use for sales too, sales lead generation, and 100%.

And And here's the deal. And that's, that's really what is changing, right? That is, that sits at the really at the center of what is happening, how we find candidates, where we find candidates. That is, we've got to be a lot better at that, a lot faster at that. We cannot skip that piece of it. And every, every bit of recruiting is going to be touched by AI. We are seeing it. There are products that are being built. Some of them are better than others. But they will get there. AI will get there. AI is not what it— or is not— or machine learning is not what it will be right now. But it is getting there. It will get there quickly. And what we're finding is that organizations are going to depend on this. They are rooting their recruiting teams. There are so many people, good people on the streets job hunting. I hear from them every day. And a lot of this is because I think companies are— they are hoping that AI fills that gap and eliminates a lot of that cost, especially some of the larger companies. And in Seattle where I live, it's pretty apparent there are some great recruiters that are on the street. So if you're looking for them, thinking about bringing additional recruiters on board, please, please, please. Reach out to folks that you know in the community, reach out to me. There are so many people that we can recommend. But I think that what we need to do is really be well-versed in how to move this process along. I think we need to think about reshuffling people in our organizations. So actually interviewing them, understanding their skills, understanding the depth of their skills, and then thinking very deeply about where else they might belong in our organizations. And we're going to have to do that not only for recruiters but throughout our organizations because there are jobs that are quickly leaving. I've read 3 articles in the last couple of weeks about companies that are pretty much eliminating most of their customer service teams because they figured out how to do it on AI. And I was talking to, to William, to my husband, and he was laughing because he just installed a new HR system with someone that he was working with. And he had been going back and forth with customer service and he thought it was a person and his sales rep told him no, it was not. And he was, he was really complimenting the kind of customer service that he was able to get. That's great. But what does that mean for all those people who might have those jobs?

Well, we've seen this before. You know, what it means is it means that you have to adapt and do things differently. You know, technology, technology has been in many ways an enabler of laziness. And I think if you are complacent, or if you think that this shift in the market is just a fad that's gonna go away or whatever, You know, that's unfortunately, you're the one that's gonna get left behind. So you've gotta learn and adapt, but I will tell you something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, which is in, at the fundamental base of what we call AI, which is not really AI, it's, as you said, machine learning, and it's utilizing large language models. This is a baby step. Okay, so these are just language models, they're words. That's all that we have right now. We don't really have decision-making. We don't really have anything that's prescriptive. It's all just analyzing and reordering, right? So none of these systems can actually create. All they can do is reorganize, which looks like it's creative. They're good tools for helping you brainstorm, helping you think about ideas, but this is literally just the baby. This is the online bulletin board days of what's out there, right? The next models that come out are gonna be just exponentially better and capable of being able to actually help you make prescriptive decisions. So you'll be able to, you know, these models will be able to say, okay, based on everything, here's what I think you should do, and actually give you recommendations as opposed to just rewarding stuff. So it's going to be a huge change. And at the bottom of that, the very base foundation of that, it's learning how to talk to the machines, which sourcers did in 1997, 1998. If you are the kind of sourcer that's capable of talking to Google and Bing and creating search strings, the way that you create search strings, Carmen, tell me if I'm wrong here, where you're changing a term, adding a term, using this unit, that is literally prompt engineering.

That's absolutely it. I do think you're right on that point. Like we have had experience talking to computers in the way, but I was reading an article yesterday where, And I won't do this article justice by talking about the— that we're moving away actually from querying computers in Boolean language, right? That we are actually giving away that privilege to have the recruiters— I have the computers actually go out, gather the knowledge, and then serve it back in whatever way that we have determined that we want it served back to us. I think—

But it's the querying that's changing. It's still queries. It's just not Boolean.

It's still queries.

It's now prompts.

It's just that we're not creating the queries.

We're creating the prompts that then kick the queries off. That's exactly right. There's going to be a— what I predict is there's going to be a shift where this no longer is about manipulating language, and it's actually about, you know, really doing processing. But still, we are as sourcers well equipped to be able to fill in the gap of doing that engineering because we know how to think that way, which is, you know, what if and what happens when I do this, if I change that. It's the trial and error as opposed to systems thinking, which is very much by the book, follow the rules. Well, the by the book, follow the rules, that's what robots do really well.

Yes.

But what sourcers do really well is not by the book, follow the rules.

Here's what, here's what interests me is at what point will we continue to be able to make those decisions? And at what point will those who create the software, if you will, make the decisions for us?

Right. Ethically, we have to have human intervention.

There has to be at some point, but not all, not all the way through.

Right, right. Not all the way through. That's right.

That's it. And so that's what, you know, if I were to worry about something, that's what I would be worried about.

I would be worried that it made the decisions without some kind of human supervision. Yeah. But then, you know, even then, if you have a model where you've got transparency and you're communicating what it does and where it gets the information, at least it can be checked and balanced. Yeah. It's the, black box, or the, like, we don't, you know, we don't know where— we don't know how it works. That's the scary part, because it's like, what if it goes rogue? And, you know, Amazon got in trouble for that. And, uh, you know, we don't know. We don't know. That's right. Yep.

So it'll be interesting. At the very least, I think there will be fewer players. So that's what it's all designed to do, is to eliminate the number of players required to, to do this, to do that work. But, um, those who decide to hitch their wagons to it will have an interesting ride. I, I think this is a critical time for those who are in recruiting to think very deeply about whether or not they want to be in recruiting, because I don't think, um, this will be— and it's always been a resource-constrained profession, right? There are never enough recruiters. Uh, you know, they've— there are still companies out there that believe that recruiters should hold on to 50 recs. It's always been that. And, you know, at some point AI will, machine learning will take over a good portion of what we do. All of our software providers are trying to figure it out, but yeah.

All of the tedious tasks, all the repetitive tasks, all the things that don't require the human touch. Yeah, so I think as long as the human touch is in there as a point of supervision and a point on escalation, will be okay. It's when you try to set it and forget it that you have huge risk that, you know, and because unfortunately machines do exactly what we tell them to do. Yeah. And that's actually, you know, a problem because we can make a mistake and tell them to do something unintentionally that we didn't really mean for it to actually do, you know, like we forgot to tell it to go left and it falls off a cliff. You know, those kinds of things. But what— so besides, let's just call it automation. There was a LinkedIn user that said we saw this with RPA, robotic process automation, which I was experimenting with some time ago, you know, 6, 7 years ago. Besides automation, which is the, the elimination of the friction points, the elimination of the repetitive tasks, do you see any other major shifts in the market with what's happening right now?

Absolutely. Diversity.

Diversity.

Diversity.

And let me, let me ask this question. Are you seeing the death of diversity?

I'm seeing that in some places. And I'm seeing smart companies who realize that diversity is not just something that companies woke up and decided we want to do good and do well in the world. And so we want to—

we're going to put that banner on our web page.

Exactly. That's not it. It's actually that there are population shifts. And so US companies and globally companies are thinking about, okay, who are the people who are going to buy our products? And we have to make sure that we are appealing to them. There are some companies that are thinking very much in that way. It is a business-driven decision. I have worked closely with a client that does— they do all kinds of cosmetic Cosmetic and fashion and those kinds of things.

Got it.

Very global, global conglomerate. And they are thinking about diversity. They have been for the last probably 5, 6, 7 years. And they are not cutting their approach to looking at diversity because their customer base has changed. Right. It's changed in that 5, 6, 7 years.

I mean, diversity in the United States is one thing, but diversity internationally, it's a whole nother thing. I gotta tell you, it is. Let me, Let me share an interesting anecdote and a lesson. You know, I've always been very open with the lessons that I've learned about, first of all, my own prejudice. You know, when I was working with my nonprofit and I had this preconceived notion that wouldn't it be great if we can get people who are deaf or hearing impaired to do sourcing and people who are blind and visually impaired to do recruiting. And, you know, that was a misconception. And the rude awakening as I started working with those communities, was quite the opposite. In fact, the hearing impaired and deaf population did great on the phone, and the visually impaired and blind population did great with sourcing because they could read faster than I could. And it just, you know, blew me away. So even with my own, you know, misconceptions, I'm guilty of that prejudice. But the story I want to share with you is I did a project with a company in the Middle East where I had to go out there and never had I ever encountered in the workplace what the true meaning of diversity was in the way that I did here. This company had to contend with 14 different mother tongues, main languages, and also 7 different religious organizations or religious schemas where people had— some populations within the company had Friday as their holy day, others Saturday as their holy day, and others Sunday as their holiday. So this company's employee population worked as a whole every day of the week because to some Sunday was their Monday, and to others Saturday was their Friday, their Sabbath, or Saturday was their Saturday, their Sabbath. And so they had to have coverage because If my religion prohibits me, or not prohibits me, that's not, that's too strong. My religion recommends that I take Friday off, then I don't want to work Friday or Saturday or Sunday. And they had to have people covering for all that. And when I realized what that means, you know, here in the United States, it's, it's Saturday and Sunday.

We don't have that.

And we don't even think about that.

And we have to think about our, our younger population. Who at a certain point will actually have a little bit more control because there are fewer of them and we are going to be competing for the talent that we want a little bit harder than perhaps we've had to with, with our generation. So thinking about how do we accommodate that? And I thought we were on a path, you know, throughout COVID and people figured out, oh, how do we work? Online and how do we hire people from different areas. And in the US, that opens diversity completely.

By— correction, that opened diversity, and then we got slapped, and then we got back into the Stone Age.

But I think—

what's your take on why we're going back? Where are we regressing?

Well, here's the deal, and I just heard a thing this morning on CNBC. Real estate companies have invested quite a bit of money in real estate.

Yeah.

And that industry is in peril.

So many other industries are in peril. Recruiting is in peril. The travel industry was in peril.

It could start a trickle-down effect where our economy ends up tanked because we've got all this commercial real estate that isn't being used.

So you're telling me that big corporate America is, is, is requiring people to go back to the office for the benefit of mankind? I'm not buying that.

No, not for the benefit of mankind, for the benefit of their own pocketbooks. And cities are asking— cities are actually asking— I live in the city where remote work is absolutely possible for many companies, right? Uh, and quite frankly, I will tell you this, it will swing back because when I led talent for an organization here, I, you know, we had a policy of we work from home and we'll always work from home. And that allowed us to hire from employers that perhaps we would not have been able to attract. Right. Early.

Guess what? Diversity. Hire the best of the best wherever they are. Wherever we are.

And that is, and that is really how we're going to put our arms around diversity. And I get there are going to be organizations that can't take advantage of that because of the types of positions, retail, et cetera. Right.

There are jobs you can't do remotely. That's, that's always going to be the case, but there are lots of jobs. Listen, Carmen, you cannot tell me that I can't do sourcing remotely when I've been the best sourcer in the world since 1997 remotely.

Well, I have almost all, all my career worked remote.

Yeah. So don't tell me you can't do it from, from remotely.

After I left my last corporate job in— when was that? 2008, '09, something like that. I worked remotely. I've worked remotely every, every day since. So that doesn't mean that I haven't gone into the office. That doesn't mean that I haven't visited. It doesn't mean that I haven't traveled. But I do think that, you know, having some sort of remote policy is going— what's going to attract your brightest stars. And so companies are going to either have some sort of secret policy where their brightest stars get to work from home. That's probably not going to work. So it is a balancing. I was a little bit strident on the fact that everyone should work from home. But then I started to understand this real estate issue and I thought, OK, we don't want our cities to end up tanked and trashed. And so we got to figure that piece of it out. But I heard, I heard this morning they were talking about, you know, New York really moving some of its office buildings to, to individual dwellings, which is not very easy to do. But they're starting to talk about it.

That's a big shift. Yeah.

Yeah.

So, okay. So there's a big chunk of this reversal that has to do with real estate. Is that, is that really it or?

Well, you know, we want to hold on to what we know. But I know that I'm sitting across from you and I can look at you every day. Quite frankly, you go into the office, if you go into any office, you'll have people who are in the office having video calls.

Video calls with their own coworkers.

That's it. That's it. So we really need to think deeply about it. We have to think about how we bridge the gap, how we bridge the gap with the property piece of it, but we also— how do we bridge the gap between— and quite frankly, we proved throughout COVID that, um, it's not that hard to do. We could all do it. We all learned how to do it, and we had one of the most profitable, um, years on Wall Street that we'd had, uh, ever. So it's not impossible. It's not an impossible task.

No, it's not. And like I said before, we learned from past, um, you know, changes, right? There was a change in the travel industry when Internet came online and you could buy tickets from a computer. And that put a, that, you know, that changed the world of a travel agent. As you know, there are fewer travel agents, but guess what? There's still travel agents.

There are still travel agents. There are fewer of them. And the ones that do exist realize that they have to provide a different level.

And they add value. That's right. So that's really what it comes down to is find a way to add value. So I think that that's the answer here to the fears around automation and AI, what we call AI now, is it's an assistive tool, right? I mean, when the assembly line was invented, people were afraid. When the television was invented, people were afraid. When the internet was invented, people were afraid. So, but these are all shifts that moved the economy forward. So there will be a movement forward with the economy. We just have to adapt to it, um, in, uh, in ways that we didn't expect. So I think it's a, it's an elasticity of the mind. It's an elasticity of what you think, how you define yourself. What, what, one other thing that I want to say is, um, gig work. What do you see? I, I have thoughts on that, but I wanted to get your opinion on where do you see that going? I— let me ask, let me ask you first before I, before I spoil the, the thunder here.

Um, I— here's what's interesting, because I am a— I, I use gig work. A gig worker designed the COVID for my book because, um, it's easy because you're not a designer of book covers, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know how to— I have no skill in that. And, uh, she did a fabulous job, and I would recommend her to do all kinds of other things. I think that we are going to reach a time where we are not going to hire as many people as we have.

You mean hire as in full-time job benefits?

As in full-time?

Yes.

Corporate America is just not going to support that. Corporate organizations throughout the world, it's just, it won't be necessary. So, but that, but we all still need to make a living. We all need to figure out how to, how to do that.

The work needs to get done, even if it's not going to be done forever.

That's it. That's it. So I think there are some of us who will be skilled enough and understand the system well enough to offer gig work, and that's great. But, you know, you don't want to hear my, my spiel on universal basic income because I think there's— there are countries that are experimenting with that right now. There are people who won't be able to plug into, plug into our corporate worlds. And so what does that mean for, for a really probably large, probably less sizable than I imagined, but probably more sizable than collectively we're thinking about? What do we do about that? And how do we—

Yeah, no, I think you're, I think you're onto something there. So, you know, thinking just myopically about the United States, you can, you can make generalizations like, well, everybody could do some form of gig work, uh, you know, DoorDash or whatever. Not everybody can drive, not everybody has a car, not everybody wants to drive, right? Um, right, you know, so there's all kinds of— you can be a dog walker, okay, not everybody likes dogs. I mean, there's, you know, you can't make a universal statement about that, but universally throughout the world, there are communities that have solved this in very creative ways. And so, for example, I'll give you Something that I found when I was traveling to India that I found really fascinating was the concept of the dalwala. Do you know what I'm talking about?

A little bit.

The dalwala. So for those of you that are not familiar with this, and I'm horribly mispronouncing it, I'm sure, but there is an entire industry, job family of people whose function, whose work function is to take the food from the home to the office for people that go into the office. And essentially, it's, it, you know, the DoorDash before DoorDash even existed. And the way that it works is, um, the family that, you know, whoever it is that's, that's at home makes the lunch at, you know, an hour or so, 2 hours before it's, it's lunchtime, and they then hand it off to a porter or a carrier that comes by and picks them up, like the mailman or the mailwoman, the mail carrier. And then that person, that carrier, takes it to like a, like a hub where they go on bicycles, and then they take it to another hub where they go on a truck or a bus, and then they go to the work areas. And all over the city, from one side of the city to the other, this is happening. And it's tens of thousands of individuals that carry the lunch bucket from short-term to short-term, pass it off, and then that all of a sudden ends up into the office. So you're an office worker and your lunch is delivered by the opposite end of that dhalwala connection. Within an hour, it crosses the entire city, and these people are gig workers. That's what they are.

That's it.

Now they do apprentice and they learn it. You have to learn the color coding system and all that, But they're not W-2 with benefits, right? You know, they're gig workers. And so that's a solution for a very real problem. I want to take my lunch to work, but I can't, you know, by the time I get to work, it's cold and I don't want to, you know, so that, that, that's a solution, right? Um, so just like Uber disintermediated the whole like getting a ride system, there's going to be all kinds of other things. Like that. But why I'm connecting the dots here is I think that sourcing, uh, whatever we end up calling it, whether it's sourcing, recruiting, I don't really care about the job name, but the function of finding people capable of doing the job that the company needs done is not going to change. It's still going to be the same. We're just going to be finding different types of people. So right now, most of us find people for W-2 salary you know, jobs. But we may very well have to shift to making the connection between the dhalwala and the lunch, uh, luncher, the lunch person, you know, the lunch eater, you know what I mean, right? So we'll be sourcing for gig workers, we'll be sourcing for, um, you know, products, for materials, for you name it. Back in the day when I first started talking about sourcing and '97. The reason that I, by the way, my original, you probably know this, my original name for this job was Cyber Sleuthing. But that had a horrible end when I found out that there was a whole nother industry that I, yeah, so that one, that one went down the tubes in about a year. But then I was trying to connect the dots, thinking to myself, well, what is it that this job really is? Because remember, nobody did this back then. A recruiter did it for themselves, but there was not a job for what you know, what you did and I did and Amy Beth Quinn did, there wasn't a job title for it. So I thought, well, how is this like something somebody knows? Yeah, research, right? But you did research as part of recruiting. So I thought, well, in a, in, in a factory, you have material that you need to make the widgets, and, and that person is procurement. And what they do is they do sourcing. So they source the raw materials. And that's what the light bulb went on. I'm like, well, we source the raw material for, you know, and that's how I made the connection. So that's still what we're going to do.

We're just going to do it for kids. I think in the short term and probably medium term, we're going to turn our attention to what do we already have as an organization? And instead of turning people out into the streets, thinking about are there places that we can redeploy people? So that's That which goes back to sourcing for me, because it requires that you really do understand the jobs for which you are recruiting and you really understand if you're making that match internally, bringing someone— what is really about, what it's really about. And, and a lot of us have done our jobs without really knowing that. Um, it's pretty easy these days to source or even recruit without deeply understanding the role.

Yeah, that's a good point.

And so that's what I talk about when I talk about sourcing. That's what I talk about, really understanding what it is that you are recruiting for and understanding those skills and being able to, uh, be conversant in, in that. A lot of recruiters— you, I, I do this all the time, uh, if you ask a recruiter what is it that you're recruiting for, they'll give me a job title. Well, what, what does that person do? And they'll start spouting some things from a job description. What is that really? How does that help the company? How does that help me, the consumer?

Right.

And that's where it breaks down. And I think that's what we have to— and I talk about how do you actually get yourself to the point where you have to— where you're able to take any position. Takes a little time, but understand exactly what it is. Talk about it in plain language. Talk about it in a way that excites candidates. And, and then be able to determine whether or not the person has the skills, the abilities, the ability, capability.

And that's in the playbook.

And that's the playbook.

Asking those questions and thinking about it. So it's kind of like, I'm going to— I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, just trying to kind of reformat that in my own head. It's kind of like getting to the— how does this position directly connect to the bottom line of the company? Like, tell me what that does.

That's it.

And if you can do that, then it doesn't matter what the job title is.

Doesn't matter what the job— and having that discussion is going to make you a better recruiter, better sourcer, because you can have that discussion with your hiring manager. And right now, I see so many conversations where the conversation's just the hiring manager's talking about this. As a recruiter, I'm thinking about, well, I just don't— I went to LinkedIn and And there weren't many people who did that. So they don't have that as their job title. And really, the idea is get beyond the job title, get beyond what's written on that really horrible job description and deeply understand. And that's how we're going to redeploy people in our companies, because we're going to understand it requires this skill, but we can teach that skill. It requires this way of working.

It requires skills that we can teach, skills that we can't teach. Here's what we need to— here's what we absolutely, you know, can build ourselves. So I want to interject with something Amy Beth wrote here. She's on the internal chat here. She said, thanks, Amy Beth. She said, that's where GPT tools are going to dumb down our industry is, you know, that it's going to make it so you can just kind of ask that question and get an answer. But you have to have, Amy Beth is saying, you have to have some basic knowledge going into prompting the tools to know whether or not you're getting fed a load of garbage. She's being very polite. Basically, I think the translation is you've got to know when the GPT is lying to you or giving you some bullshit.

It almost always is. Every single question that I ask GPT, I ask at least 3 times. By the 3rd time, I get an answer because I start it, just by playing around. And I asked GPT to tell me about Carmen Hudson. And it came back with—

I don't know who that person is or whatever.

No, no. It came back with lovely long paragraphs that were false. It attributed beliefs to me that were completely false. I don't know where it gathered this information from, but I said, I know Carmen and I don't think she believes that. So it came back and said, oh, I'm sorry. I think she believes more of this. And it was closer. And by the third time, they got it right. I want everyone to go out there and try it. Just get GPT.

But the problem is, what if they don't know what you believe?

Well, that's just it, right? But they're gathering from whatever. And I think what it was, they took maybe another Carmen Hudson. There's a Carmen Hudson out there who's a romance writer. So if you look for my book, you might get the romance writer. Who knows? Who knows? There's another Carmen Hudson who's a recruiter on the East Coast. Who knows what it did? It drew from, but it was not close to being the truth. And I think, you know, as time goes on, it will get a little better. But every time it's introduced to something new or different, I don't trust it to be right. At least not now. At least not currently in the state.

No, no. And again, what these models are doing is manipulating words.

So that's it.

You know, it's not really even gotten to the point where Even, and even software, where you think it's impacting the recruiting industry, it's impacting the software industry in some really, some really deep ways that we haven't even begun to feel yet. Because again, software is essentially rewording.

Yeah, we are. Well, we're feeling it a little bit here in the Pacific Northwest. We're feeling it a little bit.

Oh, yeah. It's going to continue because it's going to get— yeah. You know, and don't even get me started about things around copyright. And, you know, before you know it, it's going to be quoting your book and not even giving you credit for it.

100%.

Yeah. And so it's like, all right, well, where, you know, where does this all go? I think, I think the next level, so piggybacking off of what Amy Beth was saying, the next level for us is going to be learning how to, as you said, cut through the garbage, learning how to ask the right questions, learning how to evolve these tools to our, to our own benefit, to help us be faster at what we do. Essentially, it comes down to, like the assembly line, helped us produce machines faster and welcomed the Industrial Revolution. Like the internet welcomed the knowledge economy. You know, there's no knowledge— there's no Seattle without the internet, right? The knowledge economy is based on us being able to do things with computers and, and the internet. So this is another evolution like that, and we don't know what the next Microsoft or the next Google is going to be, but it's definitely coming out of this, the shift in how we leverage tools. So what we have to do is stay informed and practice our skills and experiment with it and keep learning about it, instead of just saying, "Oh, that's not going to affect me," or even worse, saying, "This doesn't work." I mean, I'm putting together some slides for a presentation that I have to do. I recently did a talk on ethics. In AI. And I gotta tell you, just as a side note, I am, I am shocked at how few organizations have actually even begin to think about ethics policies around AI. I mean, not even think about it, but that's just a shocking realization. So I put, I'm putting that together with this other thing. And I am talking about what the fears are. And I think the biggest fear is companies are just saying it's dangerous, don't do it. So I've heard companies like, it's banned, you're not allowed to use GPT, it's banned, it's completely— don't do it. And I know where it comes from, and I know that there are some risks of leaking important information and things like that. But there's a huge difference between, oh my God, don't do it, and okay, how do we do it correctly, ethically, without— you know, there's a, there's a big jump there.

As we were talking about, it's— we've been here before with the internet. I remember—

oh my God, don't do it! Don't get online!

It's dangerous! '97, that's it. And it was— it was, um, there were two people in our office that had the internet, and I was like, I gotta get me some of that. I don't know where you get it. I have to get some of that. And it was a big scary deal, and there were some companies that were saying, we'll never have the— we'll never use the—

we'll never use the internet, right?

So how did you two meet?

We met online. Oh my God, you met online? That's so dangerous.

But we do need to— we just, um, I just, I'm thinking about the case of the attorney that was fired because they went to ChatGPT and wrote a brief. Of course it was all wrong, and so they were, they were immediately fired. But we have to think about how do we use these tools and provide some guidance and training to folks like You're gonna use this, we get this, this is what we expect from you. This is, um, here's how to use it, here's how not to use it.

But we do some don'ts.

We've been there before.

Yeah, definitely. That's part of what I'm presenting on is, uh, all right, so let's get it, let's cut through the fear. What can you act— what can it actually do? And just because you can do it doesn't mean you should, right?

Right.

So what should you do?

Because it's there doesn't mean it's right. That's right. Not there yet. So don't trust all of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Do you remember back in the day when we first started talking to candidates or, you know, emailing candidates telling them how we found them? And I don't know if you ever heard me use this example before, but I made the mistake of sending out an email. I was actually, I was actually working for the same company that, you know, you recruited me into. And I sent out this email that said, Hey, I found your information on the internet, and I got— do you remember this? And I got this response from somebody, from a candidate that said, oh my God, how did my information get on the internet? Take it off right away. I'm like, hey lady, I didn't put it on the internet. I didn't— I can't take it off.

My brother-in-law, after learning that I worked for Amazon, take it off the internet. The assignment to get him off the internet.

Right, get me off the internet.

Exactly, just get me off the internet.

Exactly. And then I changed my messaging to say, I found you online. Nobody had a problem with that, right? So it's okay to find me online, but it's not okay to find me on the internet.

I'm not on the internet. Not on the internet. That's— that, you know, that is, uh, it's— we will go through that with AI. We will come out the other side of that, but That's, that's exactly where we were. I was working for, um, an executive search firm, a well-known executive search firm, and the head of the office— I was just working late one night— head of the office came back and there was someone that he wanted to find. And so I, um, he said, can you help me? I'm like, sure. So within minutes I was able to get the person, like, a whole dossier on the person. And he looked at me— this was probably '90s '98. He looked at me like I was literally the devil working in his office because he's like, how did you— I'm like, it's the internet. And he just, he had no idea, uh, running a search firm, that all of this was even possible.

So that was the beginning of the end.

Yeah.

Yeah, man, we haven't slowed down since, have we?

No.

Oh man, what a blast it's been to, um, catch up and, and learn about you. Uh, we're, we're getting close. We actually passed the hour. Oh, here. But, but that's okay. This was absolutely fantastic. I think we need to do this again. I'm gonna, I'm gonna put you in my repeat offenders list here. Meanwhile, send people over to get the book, read the book. If you have any questions for Carmen, reach out. She's always been very good about, you know, connecting and, and so on. But before we go, I always— there's these two questions that I ask everybody before we end the show. And I'm gonna put you on the spot with both of these. I know, I know we're friends, but sorry, I gotta do it. The first of them is, who should be our next guest?

Oh wow, wow, wow, wow. Let me think about that.

Now, just because you think it's our next guest doesn't mean I'm going to be able to get them to come on. You can suggest somebody and I might reach out and they'll go, oh hell no.

I, I want you to be able to, to reach out, and I want them to be part of the show. So I will do some thinking about that. I'm sorry, I wish I would have come up with, uh, an idea, and I probably will the minute we snap.

Yeah, yeah, I like putting people on the spot because I want to know what the first person that they did— whoever is the first person they think of is usually like, you know. So, all right, I'll, I'll let you off the hook because we go way back. So definitely send me somebody that I can bug to be on the show.

Amy Beth is on your list, right? Amy Beth is on your, on your—

yes, she's on the list. But actually, she's here right now. So maybe she can tell me whether or not she can do it. So sometimes I ask people, and it's not that they don't want to, but I've had some folks that have said, as you've probably worked for some of these companies, that their company won't allow them to appear. And so, you know, there are— I'm not saying that's the case with Amy Beth, but I have had people say, oh, you should definitely talk to this person. And I reached out and they're like, I can't right now. And, you know, I'm not allowed. And it's because the company has some sort of policy. But Amy Beth, if you're still listening, send me a note if they, um, if you have permission to appear on shows on your own as your own person. This is not a sponsorship, uh, opportunity. This is just two people chatting. Um, okay. And so then the other question is a lot of, a lot of folks watch this later on. I mean, our live audience is not as big as the people that watch it, especially over the weekend. And so I like to leave them with something to think about. Not, not words of wisdom, but a question that provokes thought. So what would you like the audience to think deeply about?

I would like them to think deeply about who isn't working for their organization, Why aren't those people, that person, whomever working for your organization? And what could you do differently to attract them? That's what I find. That's when the ideas around recruiting and talent attraction and talent acquisition open up. Is when you start to think about who are those people who we'd like to have working for our organization, but they're not here.

Who's not here? Why not?

Yeah.

What can I do to get them here? OK. Yeah. I get that. That's huge. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot for that. Excellent. Well, we will probably see you back on here. OK. Sometime soon. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Oh, yeah. Amy Beth says I should be able to. So, all right. We're gonna— I'll say, Amy Beth, I'll send you a note.

Awesome.

Um, on how to, how to get on the show. So we will see you guys back here next Friday. Gwen Silverstein is going to be our guest. And I also want to thank our sponsors. Gem is, uh, has very generously sponsored the show. And, uh, really they're not asking for anything. It's just, uh, they wanted to help out because it cost me money to actually do this Restream thing. So they're essentially paying for, you know, our rent basically. And, um, very generous of them. It's a great product, so, you know, check it out. Um, and again, thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to Carmen for being here. Everybody be kind to yourselves, and we'll see you next time.