Chris Rosenau Live on Shally's Alley

Hey guys, welcome to Shally's Alley. You are live. It is April 19th. Oh, are we getting an echo there? No? All right, so it is April 19th and this is Shally's Alley. Before we kick off, I want to say thank you once again to Jem for being generous enough to essentially pay for my Restream to keep the lights on. Uh, as everyone knows, this is a volunteer effort I don't make any money on it, but it does cost money to run the show. So, um, really appreciate that platform. Is a great tool I've used in the past, so I wouldn't endorse it if I wasn't part of it. So thank you, Jim, for doing that. And the next up, our special guest today is Chris Rosenau. You may have seen him around in, uh, you know, industry events and and so on. But I wanted to bring Chris on to talk a little bit about the future of sourcing careers in the enterprise, industry outlook, and maybe dive into some metrics and what he's been seeing out there that is, is most helpful. Chris has a long career going all the way back to Microsoft, which is where we— I believe that's where we— did we meet at Microsoft, Chris?

Yeah, we met at Microsoft, and I'd been at Amgen and PwC before then, and— but we connected at Microsoft and spent a few years there chasing folks.

Yeah, and you used to be a program manager, um, which is an interesting job. I wanted to, you know, see if we could tell people a little bit about what a program manager does. But then you went to Amazon and Zillow And then, um, I think you spent some time at a recruiting firm, right? And now you're at Flawless.

Yep. So it was a coupang after Zillow, and coupang's a South Korean, uh, e-commerce, essentially the Amazon of South Korea, APAC. And, uh, in '22, I had the opportunity to join Flawless Talent, which is a consulting firm and placement firm, um, and been there in a couple of iterations of them. They merged with JobMobs and Recruiter.com in spring of last year. So now we're underway as a, I'll say, an umbrella company under the JobMobs flag. And it's Flawless Talent, JobMobs, Recruiter.com, and Golden Hive, which just came aboard as well, and some other M&A activity happening that keep an eye on.

Wow, quite a mix. Yeah, I remember recruiter.com when it first started out and it was just a website. They got sold and sold again. Uh, whoever, you know, whoever got that domain originally probably made some money on it, right?

Yeah, it's, it's made its way and now it sits with JobMobs and Jesse Tinsley is our current CEO.

Nice, nice. Well, I'd love to kind of introduce the whole idea of a program manager to our audience. Not everyone knows what that job entails in talent acquisition. So this is within the realm of TA, within the realm of recruiting. When I got to know Chris, that was his role. He was a program manager. Well, actually, I think you became a program manager, but yeah, you were a staffing manager that moved into that role. So tell us, what exactly does a program manager do in TA?

I think, I think it depends on the size of the company and the business challenge at hand. When I moved from a staffing leader into a program manager role at Microsoft, the scale was, you know, 19 different applications running across the TA platform. So in that capacity, it was really the essential pieces of a a pure program manager job are requirements management. It's understanding what's the requirements of the customer, what are the requirements of the internal participants or the internal stakeholders, and then the practitioners, and then figuring out how to mesh those together in a way that your highest and best solutions will cover the kind of the core business challenge. So, um, at Microsoft, a program manager was largely maintaining existing programs and making it— change management becomes almost the most important piece. And sometimes that's introducing change in a thoughtful way so that, you know, introducing a new country into the mix. GDPR was coming up while I was there, so we had to understand what are the privacy requirements and how do you delete records from a database that has millions and millions of records in it without causing turbulence. Um, in a smaller setting, a program manager might be the, the person who runs in TA the reports or the dashboards, or it might, might be a referral program. So, um, so let's take the, the example of, uh, an employee referral program that they oversee the entire employee referral program.

Got it.

Yeah, so you'd be responsible for, okay, so what are the What are the objectives of this program? What are the constraints of it? What are the day-to-day realities of how does a recruiter tag somebody as an employee referral? So essentially you have to understand from the very first step of systems. Yeah, you've got this practices and the systems bit. And then, and then you've got the people bit. How do you get the right people in the room and understand what it is that they do? On the desk level with regard to an employee referral. And then how about the HR team and how do they get into the HRIS and how does payroll get involved to pay the referral to the person who made the referral? And then you have policies, which referrals are eligible.

Policies, practices, programs. Got it. I'm starting to get the picture.

So you essentially have to be able to take all the 3 Ps, policy, platform, people, 4 if you include price and budgets in there. So you've got the, the challenge of not just saying, yeah, we should do that, that's a great idea, but how much and, and how and when.

And so there's essentially like project management skills involved in that.

Um, yeah, and I'd say project management is a subset of program management, right? Um, that, that a lot of times you'll see PM I think a good, good question for anybody to ask these days is, are you talking about program management, project management, or product management? Right, because you might have a product manager whose job is to manage the application and the service that runs the employee referral component, and their job is to get that thing over the finish line. But the overall program is more than just the app or the service. So those are key distinctions to make.

But I'd say that a program manager might have multiple products, or a program manager might have multiple projects, correct? And may not directly manage those projects but manages the, like, the aggregate, basically, the connectivity, the sinew between them. Yeah.

And I'd say that, you know, if somebody's interested in program management, they should think of project management as a core skill set Yeah. And then, and I think within that you've got change management is the, the second thing that becomes the rate-limiting ability to get anything done kind of at a small organization or a big organization. And I think that understanding the requirements, fully understand the requirements, and then solving for, you know, they call it the, the MVP, the minimally viable product. Um, I think that's it. If you don't know about that, read up on it. It's essentially what do we need to get out the door for this thing to be deemed a success? And then how do we not let that creep and become a much bigger program or project than we anticipated?

Yeah. And delay launch or not launch. Yeah. Oh man, believe me. So I think maybe I might have been a program manager in my previous life.

You might have.

I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, but you know, interesting. So you've been in a position where you've connected the sinew between systems and technology and budget and, you know, from the requirements gathering to launching it. You've also moved into some execution roles and now you're in a consulting firm. What's your perspective given that whole sort of trajectory? What is your perspective on the industry outlook? Where, where are we headed near term?

Oh wow, you know, I think after '22, uh, I think the hope was that TA would come roaring back in '23, and a lot of us crossed over from December of '22 into '23 ready for workforce plans to open up. And, you know, the messaging kind of inside corporate and outside corporate really turned into, well, we're not sure yet. And I think, you know, we'll know at the end of this quarter. And then it was the end of Q2, and then it was the end of Q3, kind of before—

yeah, like the headcount wasn't released until like Q3.

Yeah. And I think we've seen pockets. I would say the climate right now is In some ways, it's the strangest climate that I've seen since I've been in TA, in that there's so much angst and terror on the corporate side about how are we going to execute business plans? We don't fully know what our cost of goods are and how many resources we can apply to this project, or if we're even a go. At the same time, we can't just sit here and not move. And so there's this phenomenon of companies standing on the gas and the brake at the same time. They're just kind of this—

doesn't that usually result in spinning the wheel?

Exactly. You know, or burning out the motor in terms of burning rubber, but not in a good way. So I think there's the corporate side. And then on the TA side, you've got so many talent professionals that are kind of loose and free in the market still from from layoffs, and you've got the folks in-house who may be saying, you know, typically in a market, I feel comfortable putting feelers out and starting a search and moving out. And I had a sense for what that would look like if I wanted to make an individual job change or if I was trying to help somebody else make a switch. That feels precarious and bizarre now too, because there's so many folks that you see applications that are getting just completely swamped with applicants. Some are overqualified, some are underqualified, some are qualified. You kind of had this 3-level problem jamming into every application that you see. And there's this corporate fear of, I, I need to hire just the right person because I only get one bite at the apple this year, so I'm going to be super picky about that hire. And they might be hiring for qualifications, they might be hiring for cost. You know, it's like, well, geez, there's so many folks, I can get somebody who's a little lower on the price scale and make an investment in them rather than get the person who's immediately ready to go. But then I got to train them. So there's, there's some of the same fears that you'd always see in, in, in company hiring, but it just feels super amplified. And there's a kind of a picky and moving slow factor on some of those recs.

Definitely feeling that. But wouldn't, wouldn't you say then, based on what you just said, that this would be a— it's, it's a perhaps a good opportunity market for someone who might not have had a chance at that, at that bigger role because of what you just said. So they might get hired, um, because they're at a lower level and they're trainable, and that would be a good opportunity for some folks. Or likewise, if you're going to go through this very rigorous process that is even more selective than normal, maybe, you know, if you, if you get hired now, this might even be a stronger opportunity, right? Because it's like people are being more careful. So isn't there an— isn't there a positive outcome that is like this? Maybe it, you know, they're, they're definitely trying times and challenging times, but if you get the right job now, this may be a much better job than, say, I'm going to go out on a limb here. The people who took jobs in 2022 where they were just throwing money everywhere, and you took that for the money, and then you ended up, guess what, on the street. Because sure, it paid well, but then, you know, those companies that were paying high dollar, um, they're not around anymore, or they're the ones that got late, you know, had the layoffs. So maybe there's an argument that this is a better opportunity. It's harder, but it's a better opportunity. What do you think about that?

I, I think, I think you're right. There's, there are kind of like, I call the three-level problem, you know, that there's the regular population of folks that are always kind of shooting up for their next job, right? And there's, and there was kind of always this level of constraint that you were expected to show, um, or restrain or accuracy as you were shooting up, um, that if somebody saw your profile or your resume and they're like, okay, you're not qualified, like, why are you applying to this position? I think that's happening more broadly now. And I think people are, are a little less discriminate and a little more desperate, frankly, on, on some of those attempts. I think there are more opportunities for folks to, to, to apply up. And I think there are more opportunities or more occurrences of people applying down just because the, the more senior jobs or the next senior, more senior job is also filled or not opening. So from my standpoint, it, it could be a better time. I think the key is what do you communicate in your resume and, um, and your correspondence that helps a recruiter or sourcer understand why you're putting yourself out there in front of folks. So if you—

oh, you're saying address the— address the—

the gap—

you're overqualified objection before it even comes up.

Yeah, I think, you know, uh, I saw a post the other day on LinkedIn. It's like, what can job seekers do to stand out? Um, I think if, if somebody's just putting an application out there, that's not going to stand out. And I think as sourcers and recruiters, everyone understands, I'm gonna get killed when I open this rec, and I'm— I need something to help differentiate. So I'd say the key that somebody who's kind of reaching up, across, or down into a position, you've got to try and get a hold of the recruiting organization or the recruiter directly and help them understand why you're a fit for that job, even if it's not an exact match on paper. Because if it's just running through the ATS, it's going to be a tough, tough challenge or tough prospect. To pop out of the mix based on just a BQ search.

Interesting. Okay, so I think it comes to, you know, it might be a great time to reach out, there might be better big reward, or eventually you might end up in a, in a less, less desirable job just because you kind of have to take a job to make a living, right?

Yeah, yeah. There's— and I think understanding the platform that you want to and need to stand on at any time is is, is part of that. Like, you know, will I take a contract gig where I might not have taken a contract gig before, just to have a platform that I can go then use that to go look for a longer full-time engagement? Right, right.

Might be not a bad time to use those COBRA benefits and do contract for a little while. Yeah, even though COBRA is expensive. So let's shift into the future of sourcing then. So going from that like the industry outlook in general, specifically jumping into sourcing in, you know, large enterprise, like what's changing there and kind of midterm outlook, if you will, as opposed to the short term?

I think, I don't know if it's specifically changing yet. What I see that the need within a sourcing environment, whether it's large or mid or small, is I think people have to get specific in their postings and their outreach and their job descriptions. Like, if you have a broad, vague JD that says that I need somebody with 5 years of experience in this domain, you're going to get absolutely flooded. Um, you know, if that's the most precise that you put out there is kind of the general umbrella requirements, um, and you're not able to speak to more of the skills and, and attributes component of what's the success criteria, you are going to get a lot of applications. You're going to have to wade through those, which is, which is going to take more time and bog you down, and you're going to be less responsive and less effective as a sourcer and recruiter. So it's, it's in your own, our own best interest to be very clear about what we're looking for, given the fact that we're kind of at a sort of top of the funnel overreaction that over-applies.

Okay. Yeah.

I don't think it's AI that's going to make sourcing better right now. I, I think it's being very good at spearfishing as opposed to big net fishing.

Well, that's kind of how I define sourcing, so yeah.

Well, I mean, there are sourcers who just throw big nets with a LinkedIn search or, oh right, you know, Boolean, and then they, then they just try and wade through, you know, what comes in. And I think, you know, good sourcing is good detective work, and I think there's you know, have you written a compelling business case for someone to join your company versus I like your resume, we should talk. You know, I think that that craft work up front will become more and more important as we go, partly because there's also just so many people in the market who can do large volume search and just churn and burn that that's not a differentiator professionally right now.

Okay, so it's the ability to find that needle in the stack of needles, which Once again, I mean, that's practically how I started my third book, is my definition of sourcing. What about the outlook for enterprise sourcing specifically? Like, you know, the big FAANG-type companies that hired 1,000 people. I don't think that's going to happen again. Do you?

I don't know that it can. You know, they say history repeats itself because nobody listens, right?

Maybe like down the line, but it might.

I think the, the phenomenon that I saw in FAANG and in tech, at least, and I think this is just kind of a human phenomenon, is that if you have a swimming pool filled with 100 fish or 1,000 fish, and you've got recruiters that have a responsibility to hire a certain number of of those fish or find a certain number of those fish every month. You know, the, the business is saying, please bring me more fish. The, the business response over the past 5, 10 years has been, okay, we need to put more fishing poles in the water. Um, and so you increase the number of recruiters standing around all vying for the same number of fish.

Guess what the fish do? They swim to the other side of the lake.

Yeah, they're like Let's chill, right?

Like, it's too busy for us.

Yeah, it becomes kind of a Shark Tank melee. And so the— and, and the phenomenon was, especially in tech, oh, we just need more recruiters, to the point where you couldn't even get near the pole. You're just basically throwing a line from 50 feet back trying to get it into the water. And, and that, that phenomenon didn't add any more fish, it just increased the number.

You know, that is really bad leadership. I'm sorry, it just is. You know, throwing more people at the problem is never— it's just never a good solution. You don't, you don't win by just having more people in, in any job, in any industry. You've got to get smarter about it, give people better tools. And I think that's what we're seeing now. That's my opinion, is that what we're seeing now is finally we're paying attention to the quality of the tools and the utilization of them where it used to be, I remember companies would just buy everything and you would go in and as a consultant, I would go in and they have like 17 different tools in their tool stack and they got 2 recruiters that use one and 3 recruiters that use the other and most of them aren't even really well utilized and it's like, let's just hire a bunch of people and give them all these tools. So now you got a bunch of recruiters, a bunch of sourcers and a bunch of tools And still nobody's really doing a really good job. So just adding people, you know, let's just hire more people to hire more people. That doesn't— that's never worked, especially now, but it just never worked. So it was bad management to begin with. It's really bad management, especially because all they did is just cookie-cutter work, you know, very repetitive assembly line. And look, don't get me wrong, I am very much pro the assembly line. But when you have an assembly line, you also have to have things very well organized. And that's what I wasn't seeing is these assembly line type of recruiting that were in constant contact collision. You know, 1,100 recruiters calling and emailing the same people without any regard for what that says to the candidates about the employer or the candidate experience. Candidates getting bombarded with emails from multiple people in the same organization. That's not organized, right? Yeah, like trying to do an assembly line where everybody's doing the same job.

Yeah, with either with different tools or different dimensions.

Yeah, no specialization. Exactly. No nothing.

Yeah. And I think, yeah, that, you know, the, the net walkaway is either I, I need a different hook and bait setup to distinguish, you know, or be more effective in that setting. Because if everyone's using the same model, then, um, you know, it's a pure probability problem, and it's a brute force probability problem, and you're not increasing the craft, you're just increasing the calories spent on the same routine. So I think as recruiters, you've got to figure out, okay, how do, how do I either target better Or how do I be more attractive? And from the standpoint of what's the worm on my hook, to use the fishing analogy continuing. But, you know, if, if it's just doing the same thing over and over expecting better results, there's, there's an old saying about that. So insanity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we have a question, um, from Devin. She wants to know what is a better prompt to use in place of years of experience. I think I want to ask for a little bit of clarification on that, but do you have an answer for her?

Uh, I'm pretty sure I know what she means, but, um, go for it. I, I think, you know, usually it's like, well, I need 4 years of experience. Um, I need somebody, whether it's in tech or whether it's in finance or whether it's just G&A, I need, um, 5 years experience. Like, what, what happens at 5 years experience? What is—

I think it doesn't happen at 4, right?

That doesn't happen at 4. And I— my, my personal take on this is usually it's about 3 years into a career path before before somebody realizes I'm good at this or I'm not good at this. So I think you've got that first big hump of core competence that takes place at like 3 to 4 years where somebody is kind of figured out the craft, they understand how it works and they're going to be good at it. And they can start applying problem solving kind of to the next level at that space. And then I think after like 5 to 7 years, you start to see a differentiation into There you go. Into a specialization where I'm not just in finance, I'm in, you know, planning and analysis versus I'm going to head more towards accounting because I realize that's where I spend time, where I'm better at it. Or in tech recruiting, a great example, you know, are you focused on backend generalist or you focus on, you know, full stack or kind of web dev? And then, you know, what is it that I really enjoy doing versus what am I really good at? You know, Benjamin's comment, not all experience or years are equal, that's correct. So I think what you're looking for, instead of just saying, well, I need 5 years of experience, I think we're looking for, I need somebody who is fully competent in the core basics of this profession. If you've got, uh, specialization areas, I'd love to know about those. And in fact, I need that in this area. I need UI engineering recruiters who have specifically gone out and hunted for design and UI recruiters from corporate parallels. That's what I need rather than I need 5 years experience in recruiting. That doesn't help me.

Yeah. So translate the years of experience into what that looks like in action phrases, right? So what does someone with 5 years of experience or that level of senior experience, what do they do differently How do they differ? And so ask the, you know, question or the prompt or the search keywords that are related to those outcomes.

Yeah, I think this is the same for the intake meeting, right? When I'm talking with the new hiring manager, if they tell me I need somebody with 5 years experience in this, I'm like, why? Like, what do they have to be capable of doing? What are they going to do inside your shop that somebody else isn't able to do or you need more of. So, you know, if our, if our job descriptions just say 5, 3 to 5 years experience in this field, it's like, well, what do I really need them to be able to perform? Do they have to be able to do a specific type of task, or do they have to understand, like, encoding? Can they actually do their own manual memory management? That's a word mouthful right there, but can they, do they have to do that, or can they rely on codebase and libraries to do those things. Those are the things that you've got to get at as a recruiter, especially a tech recruiter, that, that make that differentiation so that you, you don't get so many wrong candidates applying with, with sincere interest in a position they think they're qualified for.

Yeah, so, uh, I'm gonna tackle this two different ways. One is actually taking it literally as a prompt. One of the things that I like to do with these generative AI models. I keep 6 of them open on my desktop at all times, and I'm constantly comparing them. But here's a question that I use is, what does a blank do that— what does a top blank do that ordinary blanks don't do? So what does a top software engineer do that ordinary software engineers don't do? What is the top a supply chain manager do that ordinary supply chain managers don't do? And these large language models are good at extracting the little bits and pieces from a very large amount of text. So they come back with good recommendations on like, well, here's what to look for. You need to look for these 3 or 4 things that make someone stand out. So that's a good place to start. And then the other way is to be more literal as opposed to the prompt, but actually in the concept around search is to look for trajectory, right? So yes, the competency and the predictability of success. I'm not gonna get into company fit. That's a little different. But if you're looking at their progression through job responsibilities, right? Someone who has been, let's just say, a staff accountant and went to another job where they were a staff accountant and went to another job where they were staff accountant, you know, like that's not demonstrating any progression. It doesn't have to be progression from one company to the other, even within the same company, but looking for someone who has taken on additional challenges, more responsibilities, is someone that is growing and is learning those competencies. So I would rather see someone that has 3 years of experience, but each year got a promotion versus someone that has 5 years of experience doing the exact same thing, never changing. Right. So that's kind of the— that's what I mean by trajectory is looking for progression in, in outcomes, progression and responsibilities, progression in the workload, those kinds of things.

Yeah, I would typically agree with that. I think post-COVID kind of blew that up because you saw so much turnover in folks.

Yeah, that's still change that is still in the right direction, though. I see what you're saying. But I mean, I'm not So yeah, some of us took step backs, you know, in our career, maybe went from a VP to a director or from a director to a manager. I get that, but still, let's at least say lateral movements and specialization, right? Like, yeah, they learned another skill, they applied themselves a different— so their experiences become broader. Even if it's just more of a different kind of experience, I'm still looking for that. Versus essentially doing the same thing over and over and over again. I mean, that, that doesn't show a lot of progression in any way.

Yeah, I think that's the key. Then you got to get inside of that experience and say, like, what was different between this gig? And I think, you know, what are people's major motivators for change? Is that understanding— that's a key, I think, recruiting skill set is like, why did you make that switch? And it's like, right, there's usually the stock answer, which is, well, you know, it's time to move on, or blah blah blah. Like, I want to get inside their head and figure out Why did you think that next Tuesday was going to be better at that job than this Tuesday at this job?

Right.

You know, and switch. So I think, yeah, so I think trajectory just got weird, um, over the last—

yeah, maybe it's not upwards, maybe it's lateral, or yeah, maybe a step back instead of linear, right?

You know, are you trans— are you looking for opportunities to transfer those skills as opposed to just take the core block and be like, okay, well, same title, same position, same kind of company, I'll go move there. So yeah, makes sense.

Makes sense. Hey, um, I wanted to ask you one other thing and jump into metrics, but there was a question about what are the best resources for a new recruiter. You must have done a lot of recruiter enablement, getting people set up, uh, you know, training them and, and just, you know, supervising their onboarding and everything. So do you have it? Do you have a I hate to say it, but like a stock answer for what are the, I don't know, top 3 or 4 things that you would tell a new recruiter as far as resources for them to go to?

Um, I would say I don't have a specific stock toolkit. I think it kind of depends. I think for, for Jesse's question, um, well, I would say if you don't understand Boolean logic, um, I'd say for a new recruiter, figure out Boolean logic, find a mentor who's really, really good at it. Because it's not just about building search strings.

It's about searching your email. And it's looking for— yes, it's logic. Yeah, right.

It's logic. It's Venn diagram management, basically. And if you, if you don't understand the principles of, you know, thinning a pool versus expanding a pool and inclusion by ANDs and exclusion by NOTs, those are, those are important things conceptually because you have to be able to mind map where these people are. And sometimes that's about, you know, Jesse's question, is that paramedics? But is that paramedics with a certain type of background? All these, all these things, the world, and say, where's, where's the population of people that I need going to come from? And is that a geographic basis? Is that a an organizational basis? Is that a professional or educational thing? So I'd say understanding Boolean logic is going to be really important. That's a key, key piece. And I think having a good set of detective tools, um, are, are going to be important, whether that's— I would say LinkedIn Talent Insights is, is a good, you know, mapper. There are great tools, SeekOut and Hertool and some of the other ones that are really great at top of funnel review and analysis, um, and then really understanding how that tool works in the talent pool.

Basically ways to— resources to help you understand what, what you're— which I think is a really smart response to the question because I wouldn't necessarily point to any one particular tool as much as a toolkit that includes the ability to, um, quickly understand the talent pool, right? So there's multiple There's a company called Public Insights that has a product called TalentView that's really good at getting a market snapshot of geography and what keywords are on resumes and things like that that are great intel. But whatever the tool that you use, what you're saying is first, learn the logic of how to find things and Venn diagramming. And then second, learn where the talent is, like how to find where the talent is because the tool itself, like you said, it's the fishing pole, you know. Yeah, analogy. If you're, if you're using a fishing pole to try to catch catfish, that's probably not going to work as well because, you know, they go to a different part of the pond than the regular fish, you know, that kind of thing. So yeah, the tools are going to vary, but if you know where the talent is, then you can figure out the tools.

Got it. So Jesse's clarification is my recruiter is a paramedic that's learning how to recruit paramedics. So I would say they've already got probably one of the most important skill sets or key points is they understand the mindset of a paramedic and they understand the matriculation path of, okay, do they have to come from a certain educational corridor or can they come in laterally? Um, the other piece that I think recruiters sometimes miss, or it takes a while to figure out, is I don't want to just know where these people are in the market. I want to know how they got there. So if I need— definitely, I need a recruiter that has 5 years of experience, then I want to look at those companies that have other recruiters or other paramedics with 5 years experience. But I also want to know who they hire from, where they came from, where they were made. Yeah, yeah. So right, who hires the 3-year paramedics And where do they hire them from? So understanding your food chain, you know, in that sense is super important. And I think your toolkit keeps you from just wandering out in the wilderness being like, are you a food chain? Are you a food chain? You know, I think that you can spend all day on searches that don't yield viable candidates. He is, you know, and if everybody else is looking for 5-year paramedics and you're in this shark tank with all those folks jumping to that next layer up and then catching people who are at 4 years or 3 years and are ready to move, then, then you don't lose those paramedics to your 5-year employers for another 2 years, right? You're, you're catching them before they make the move that is going to lock them in for 24 or 36 months into their next gig. So you're your investment might need to be a year up the food chain. And I think having a new recruiter understand that they have to be a detective before they can do anything. They've got to be curious about where those people are made and how do you catch their interest. And can you convince your employer that this person's worth a bet a year early or 2 years early and we cook them in-house instead of trying to buy them later.

You know, I wanna add to that and say something. This might be a little controversial, but you— I like that you have to think like a paramedic to find paramedics, but you don't have to be a paramedic. So correct. Just, just think like, I mean, lucky, lucky this person already is, so they probably easily can transition to thinking like one. But even if you're not a paramedic, you can think like a paramedic. But here's the thing that I was gonna get to is the moment that you jump into a ready-made database, you're already at a disadvantage because if you're using a ready-made database, that those tools are designed to expedite. In other words, they're designed to make your job easier and faster, but they're not designed to replace you. Or even if they try to, they're really not capable of that because there's so much more to recruiting than just finding a name in a database. So don't assume that there's going to be a source that you can go to in any industry that is the answer. And this is the biggest— in my 28 years of doing this, this is the biggest mistake recruiters have done generation after generation is to become dependent. And when I say dependent, I want to be very straightforward. Addicted. Okay. Addicted and dependent on one source and one source only. It used to be Headhunter.net, then it was, you know, Hot Jobs, then it was CareerBuilder, then it was Monster, then it was Indeed, then it was LinkedIn. If you become dependent on one tool, what happens is when that tool deteriorates or is taken away or goes out of business or when it's saturated with competitors, you no longer have a competitive advantage. So there isn't one single place that you go to. It's more around the lines of learn how to make your own tools first. And it's slow. It's not— you're not going to learn how to make your own tools from day one. I think of it as, um, you know, start with your hands, right? If you're gonna be a carpenter, start with a, with a, with a pocket knife and a stick of wood and work your way up from there. Don't expect to start with the, you know, Master Craftsman $50,000 kit that has every tool. Guaranteed you don't even know half those tools or what they do. So, you know, build your toolkit a little by little, and someday you'll be able to afford the Master Craftsman toolkit, and then you'll be able to do so much more so much faster. But you can't just jump into the Master Craftsman toolkit from day one. Reach from the pulpit, but I just see this too much.

Yeah. When I think that the, the risk is for a new recruiter who goes into a really robust toolkit, it's, it's possible for them to operate not even really understanding what is happening under the hood, right? And so then they never learn kind of the discipline of how to, how to be a searcher or how to be a detective and then appreciate— and I think this is the, the beauty of AI is that If you go into AI and you don't know what it's doing and you don't know how it's working, you take the results and you believe that they're accurate without understanding the risks of how it built that list. And so I think understanding what is a tool is actually doing, you know, part of that's prerequisite on do I understand, like, again, that search logic of how this thing includes or excludes people based on my criteria that I give it. I think, just want to amplify your point that to be a good recruiter of paramedics in Jesse's cases or anybody's case, Devin had the comment about transferable skills. It's that I just, I don't need to know how to be a paramedic. I need to know kind of where they come from, how they think, and what makes a great one versus a good one. That's part of my differentiators. And that it's not a matter of, a hiring manager telling you you can't be a good recruiter if you've never recruited paramedics before. If I'm a great detective, I can transfer over that. So I think the, the key pieces there are know how the tools that you have work, you know. Don't, don't start subscribing to some—

start buying tools and then—

yeah, right, method of it. Because, because essentially I might have a brilliant carpenter who's got a fantastic set of tools. They need to be able to work with a hammer and chisel if that's all they've been given. And a recruiter who only can work within Talent Insights or SeekOut or some other platform and it— who becomes completely handicapped or crippled in their professional advancement or even getting a single job done because they don't understand or they're not able to replicate it. Like give them a phone book and a phone and see if they can recruit used to be the test. And I think to some extent you still have to go be able to go back to that conceptually to be a good recruiter.

Yeah. One of my, one of my good friends is someone I've actually hired multiple times. My friend Amanda is fond of saying you can do this job with a crayon and a piece of paper.

Yeah.

And Yes, you can. It's slow and it's hard to do it that way, but you can. So think about that, right? You don't really need all the fancy tools if you kind of know how to do the basics. It's the same idea behind teaching kids how to multiply even though they know they're going to have a calculator computer pretty much in their hands, supercomputer nowadays in their pocket. You still need to know kind of how that works. So I think the long answer to this is Learn logic. That's a good tool. Learn how to find the talent pool. That's a good tool. And then start building your toolkit a little bit at a time.

Yeah, yeah. No, no, how to fix— if I think the trick is, can you know how to fix something that's not working? And that's pretty funny, Jesse. It's like, what's a rotary phone, right? I'm sure that there are some people who might hear this and be like, what's a phone book? Yeah, um, you know, what's Yellow Pages? Um, but the days of smile and dial are over, you know, right? And I think Devin commented on transferable skills. I think that's, that's kind of absolutely key. Um, and I think that comes down to it— if, if you're not doing a solid intake with either your client or your hiring manager and really tearing apart the job for you know, the requirements and asking why. Why do they need that? What are they gonna have to accomplish? And who else hires these people? And what does 3 years get you versus 2 years? Those, those less than thorough intake meetings are going to have you playing the bring me a candidate game for weeks.

Or the why can't you find what I'm looking for game.

Yeah, and I'll know it when I see it game, you know.

Oh man, I hate that one. I know, no one will see it. Just keep bringing it. I want more. More what? More resumes. Really? You want more resumes?

Yeah. And I think also it puts— it helps you stay out of a spot from where a hiring manager says, yeah, I love that candidate, we interviewed them, but I saw— I want to see a couple more. It's like, why? Yeah, you know, that's the other piece is that if you have, if you have a vague or kind of imprecise definition of, of what that candidate success criteria looks like, then you have no counter to that. You're like, okay, well, I'll bring him a couple more and let him see if he feels better about those. It's usually an emotional response to a candidate interview rather than a logical, this candidate has the skills that I need, or this candidate doesn't. You know, they— my, my gut is you should always be able to decide whether a candidate is hireable or not, whether you've seen 1 or 100.

It's hard to do, you know, it requires expert training to be an interviewer. Um, like, not every hiring manager— I mean, let's face it, hiring managers, generally speaking, have maybe 3, 4, 5 hires a year. That doesn't make them experts. So that's a tough ask.

I think it is. It is. I think they're the ones who can tell whether the person has the capabilities or not to do the job. I think the recruiter's job can also be to kind of counsel them or guide them through the decision, not being emotional about it, not having Yeah, the unconscious bias.

There's so many different ways that you can bring in unconscious bias that don't even have anything to do necessarily with racism or sexism. There's unconscious bias of all kinds that will affect people's ability to make a sound judgment. Before we get too far down the road of bias, I did want to ask you that one last thing that I wanted to bring up was the evolution of metrics over the years. How do we measure success in recruiting and sourcing? And it's sort of like a quick history of how it's evolved and what today's most helpful metrics are. And I want to clarify that there are measures and there are metrics. Very many people get this wrong. Measuring something is a particular number that doesn't really tell you anything. So I'm just gonna come straight out and say it. People hate me when I say this. Number of hires is not a metric. Number of hires is a measure. It's a number. It's a number of hires. When you turn that into a metric, you have to add a dimension to it. Number of hires over time, number of hires this quarter compared to last quarter, or same quarter last year or last year or whatever. But that number of hires number is just a measure. So with that in mind, what are, what are the metrics that have evolved to become important now and what are those like? I don't know, top 2 or 3. So sort of how do we get there? Are they?

Yeah, well, I think over the years there was an increasing and a decreasing focus on cost per hire. And I think that's one that's kind of, I would say, in a general sense, kind of come and gone. I think the realization was that to really track cost per hire, it's so hard to feed the machine that will keep track of all the variables that would do that well. It doesn't have a payoff. So I think that's one of the things that's, kind of evolved in and out of it. I think, you know, where we're at now, I would say that the, the key ones that I focus on are offer accept rate, kind of working backwards on the funnel, time to interview. I focus a lot on dwell time. That's how long are people staying in stages before they move to the next one or they move out. Right now, like, good faith among candidates is super important for recruiters. And everyone talks about candidate experience, but the candidate experience isn't a measurement unless it comes through a survey and gets turned into a metric. But how do you build good faith? How do you create a good candidate experience? Is you minimize your dwell time that candidates are spending in the process, especially floating between stages. So That's one that I think is important to pay attention to. I think the number of screens that candidates are running— hang on a sec. Oh, that's you.

All right.

Over the top of my notifications. Weeks to get to the throughput, I think. I skipped over interview-to-offer ratio. Sorry. So I'd back into that as well. And then at the very top of the funnel, I'd pay attention to not just the number of outreach that somebody's doing, but what's their favorable response rate. How many of the candidates that somebody's reaching out to, um, are responding and interested in talking with them and deemed qualified? So I think, uh, you know, the— there's probably 4 things that I 4 or 5 things that I would pay attention to as, as a recruiter or a TA leader that ultimately tell me, is my engine running well? And I can do that pretty much on any search, on any profile.

So, um, offer accept rate, obviously that's going to help you with, um, both ends of the funnel. It's good, it's going to be higher quality in, and by quality I mean better match to the requirements, tighter intake process. Tighter process in general is gonna reduce your offer decline rate. Higher matches is gonna increase your offer accept rate. Everything from like better comp or better complete packages, all of that is gonna help. So I love that one. Time to interview is a really good way to measure your recruiting process and time and stage. What I really like about that is that you are now in that time and stage, you are holding Hiring managers accountable. And what I hate to see the most in metrics is TA leaders that are punishing their recruiters by using only metrics that are related to the recruiter, right? Like how fast can you source? How fast can you— all these measures that are being applied just to recruiting. Time and stage is also the responsibility of the hiring manager. And I think we need to include at least one metric that holds hiring managers responsible for their end of the process. So I really like that you have that in your top 5.

I think the other, the other important aspect of that is the organization may not have the capacity to run at the speed that they're saying they need to. So if they've— if they're saying, hey, we need to just flood this organization with interviews and hires because we have objectives that need to be made. And that could be a, you know, that's a relative term. Flood the organization might be, you know, Allison can only take 3 interviews a week before she goes underwater. But if you're scheduling, you know, 16 candidates in advance, that means that Allison is going to have to wait for a couple of weeks to get booked up. And those candidates are waiting 2 weeks in the process. So time, time and stage can help you also diagnose that you've got a capacity problem, not just a—

I like to call that interviewer saturation. So, you know, one of the things I do with the hiring managers, I work with them initially to get an understanding as to like, what is the absolute maximum number of candidates that you would want to interview in a given week? You know, so I try to block out some availability if possible, reserve some time because their calendars will get busy. But I also want to have a hard number to stop at. You know, if they say, well, we can— I can interview maybe 10 people a week. Keep in mind, that's, you know, you're taking a lot of time off of that hiring manager's schedule. If it takes an hour to do an interview and they're doing 10 interviews a week, that's a quarter of their 40-hour workweek. We all know they're not doing 40 hours, but it's still a significant chunk of time. So if one hiring manager can only do 10 interviews, but you're sourcing 500 people and submitting 300 people and they're supposed to be interviewing 200 people, how's that going to work?

Yeah, like you just— there, there's just not enough there there sometimes, and, and you need to be able to winnow that out. And, and if you've got, you know, the other thing is if you've got folks that are moving through quickly and you see dwell times that average, you know, 5 minutes either you've got a super responsive organization or they're killing everybody just on-site. So you're trying to— it'll help you kind of figure out where your anomalies or your red circles are. So I think, you know, there's that. And are we sourcing accurately? And then quite frankly, a lot of organizations can be best improved by handling the candidates that they do have better.

That's right.

Rather than just trying to go add more sources to the top of your existing resources. Yep. Yeah, thin out your funnel, or, you know, sharpen it so that your top of line is closer to your bottom.

That's a, that's a really good point to drive home. And actually, I would say really good point to end our, uh, our show on. But before I let you go, I gotta ask these two questions that I always ask my guests. And the first of those is, who should be our next guest? Keep in mind, they may not accept the invite. Not everybody wants to sit on a call with me, but, you know, if you name a person or two, I'll go out and ask them if they'd be interested in being on the show.

I, I would think that, um, somebody who's in a TA leadership role or a, or a technical recruiter role at an AI company like some of the folks over at OpenAI or any of the other folks. If you ask somebody in the industry, how are you using this product to change the way you do your craft? I'd love to hear about that. I think there are other folks in industries right now that I can't imagine how they're dealing with some of the challenges. The folks over at Boeing, like how, how are they adjusting their recruiting strategies based on what's happening? That— and that's like, Boeing's fantastic company. These are some big ripples that are hitting them business-wise. Like, that's, that's probably a conversation you're not allowed to have for a couple years yet. But I think that's, that's, that's fascinating.

Do you know anybody that, uh, that I should reach out to in the AI space?

Not that I put them out there right now. Um, on the AI space, I do know one recruiter. Let me get back to him and see if he's still there and we'd be able to do it. I think it'd be a lot of fun to hear how AI is using AI for recruiting. And I think the other place is healthcare and somebody who's at a TA spot either over a healthcare management organization or within a large hospital organization has to be just sleepless nights. Um, and then I think supply chain and logistics is, is a really challenging space. So I— let me think if I've got a couple names there for either healthcare or supply chain, because I think, um, trucking, shipping operations, logistics, they never slowed down through COVID. They became more challenging and more, you know, problematic. But certainly as industry sectors, they're hiring a lot of folks who sloshed out of tech over the last few years. And I think not paying attention to those spaces is probably a detriment. Um, yeah, so those are my thoughts on, on who. Good, good, good, good.

So, and the last question is, is for a lot of folks that watch the recording, uh, unfortunately, you know, even though we try to get most people to show up on Fridays at 1, not everybody has that luxury, and also in other parts of the world. So what I like to do is leave them with a really good thought-provoking idea. So is there a question that you would like the audience to ask themselves to start? You know, something for them to chew on and think about. Not an answer, but a question for them to think about.

This is about their craft, anything about recruiting, about anything.

What would you like people to really sink their teeth into and think deeply about over the next few days?

I would pose the question, are— do you really have a craft? Do you have a method to your work? Are you— have you replicated something else that somebody taught you and you're just doing that over and over again, or do you really, do you have values and reasons why you do things the way you do?

So what are those, right? What are your values and reasons?

Can you identify those? And if they're not there, if you're not sure why you're doing something, but that's how you learned it, really question it. And I would say, you know, And how organized are you in that process? Because I think brute force and speed can sometimes give us the illusion that we're being productive.

Right, spinning that wheel.

Yeah, motor sounds cool, but so really kind of thinning down your method.

Well, thank you, Chris. Lots to think about. Great conversation. Very, very nice to have you. Appreciate you giving us an hour out of your, I'm sure, busy schedule. Thanks to all of you. What's that?

It was my pleasure, and thanks to the folks, uh, online who asked the questions. And, and, uh, hope to see you around soon.

Absolutely. We might have you back on the show if you'll have us. So, uh, thanks to everybody for participating, and we will see you next week on Friday. Our guest is going to be Adam Gordon, founder of Poet HR, which is a recruiter enablement company. This is someone who has been influential with some pretty big ideas in, in the tech space, uh, tech for recruiting, so recruiting tech. So really excited to have him. See you back here April 26th. Thanks a million to Gem for helping us keep the lights on. And to everybody out there, please be kind to yourselves. Take care. See you next weekend.