Christine Hampton Live on Shally's Alley (Encore!)
In this live conversation on Shelly's Alley, host Vital‑Baritone interviews healthcare sourcing specialist Christine Hampton of Rogue Hire. They explore the fundamentals of sourcing versus recruiting, emphasizing the critical distinction between raw measures (e.g., number of hires) and actionable metrics (e.g., sourced‑to‑interview throughput, take‑rate). The dialogue outlines five core purposes of sourcing—decision support, capability amplification, talent quality improvement, strategic alignment, and talent‑sharing—and explains how to select SMART KPIs for individuals and teams. They discuss common pitfalls such as over‑reporting activity counts, the importance of velocity relative to role similarity, and the “full‑plate” mindset for hiring‑manager engagement. The conversation shifts to AI, arguing that AI is a tool that accelerates personalization and data‑driven outreach, while warning against over‑reliance and the need for human oversight. Finally, they describe the mindset of an effective sourcer—problem‑solving, curiosity, tenacity—and contrast sourcers with recruiters, noting the transition challenges and the unpredictable nature of sourcing. Throughout, the tone is conversational, occasionally humorous, and the sentiment ranges from enthusiastic about sourcing value to critical of mis‑aligned metrics and deceptive practices.
Chapters
Hey, hey, hey, what's up everybody? You are live on Shelly's Alley. It is April 11th and we are here today with a repeat offender. Couldn't get enough of Shelly's Alley last time when we were, you know, all kind of bumbling about blindly in the dark alley, and so she decided to come back and accepted my invite to return. Christine Hampton from Rogue Hire, a specialist in all things healthcare sourcing. And Christine was just telling me she's built a lot of the sourcing teams in healthcare at hundreds of organizations. So yeah, I was really curious to start asking her some questions and then she turned the tables on me.
Yeah, it's okay. But let me correct it. I've helped build, right? Everybody's got a leader on site that's building these sourcing teams and taking all the gruff. We just here at Rogue Hire, we just like to stand aside them. But yeah, I will tell you, Shelly, you, you, you're the OG and you have thankfully given us all a platform. But you know what, you got popular and famous and infamous because of—
I don't know about popular. Yeah, I quickly changed that to unpopular.
Because of everything that you have gifted the industry, and I've learned from you. And although you give us this luxury to talk to you every week in Shelley's Alley, it's been a long time since we've heard from you and grilled you in the hot seat. So we're flipping the script today a little bit, I think. And I still— I want to take this opportunity to grill you a bit, right? And see kind of what you think. Um, you know, our industries are different. Me and healthcare, and I know a lot of technology groups, and gosh, everything's different, right?
Healthcare as well.
Yeah. Okay, so it's kind of interesting to see what— where everybody's opinions are at on this lovely, lovely, lovely industry that we call, um, sourcing. So you ready?
Yeah, let's do it.
Okay. But the very first question, for those of you who don't know anything about Rogue Hire, we are a healthcare data company. And we are fortunate enough to be able to work with many, many clients in the healthcare industry and help them with their data, all their talent metrics. Specifically with sourcing, though. Sourcing hasn't been around super duper long in healthcare corporations. Yeah, 10 years.
More like 20.
Okay, so See, that's why we need you. That's why we got to talk to you. So what would you say are the most important things that a sourcing manager should be measuring when it comes to their team? What should sourcers be measured on?
Uh, well, okay, so there's really only one measure that matters, and— oh, we lost you. What happened?
Can you hear me now?
You dropped off. You disappeared. Wow, I haven't even started talking and I already offended you. Damn.
You can blame AT&T.
All right. Yes. Oh, okay. Is that what it is? Okay. Um, so there— this is a, this is a very loaded question because there's a lot of push and pull from, um, and I'm just gonna go ahead and say it, from people that don't understand metrics.
Yep.
They don't even, they don't even know what a metric is. They're, you know, they're, they're employing metrics and they're, um, leading teams and measuring teams. But so I think that I want to, I want to just kind of preface this by saying that there's a very big difference between measures and metrics. A measure is a number that you get from a measurement. And I know that sounds almost like ridiculously basic and, you know, derivative, but it's the problem that a lot of folks just don't get even in higher levels of leadership in our industry. Oh geez. We have an unstable connection here. You dropped again.
Every, every time it says I go away, I'm still here. I still hear you. So if it happens again, just keep talking because I see and hear you.
Keep bringing you back on? Okay. All right. No problem. So yeah, so, um, as I was saying, measures are numbers that are derived from a measurement. So for example, what is a measure? Time, distance, speed, length. Height, right? Those are measures. How tall are you is a measure. Um, a metric is a calculation between measures that has some sort of vector, so it has directionality or it has a percentage of completion. So I'm just going to be very clear here and say number of hires is a measure. It is not a metric.
I would— so far I'm with you.
I would agree. It's a measure. So if you said, how tall are you? And I said, I'm 6 feet, that is a measurement. It does not tell you if I'm growing, shrinking, or whatever. And it is an absolutely worthless, ridiculous measure for anything that is trying to predict outcomes. If you want to predict an outcome, which is the only reason you want to measure this stuff is to be able to determine, do we need more people? Do we need to speed up, slow down, spend more money? What, you know, where are we going? I mean, you're steering this vehicle that you call sourcing and you need to know where to go. That's why you're measuring it. So if you don't, if you're not measuring a vector of some sort, then, you know, like, so for example, how fast are you going? Well, I'm going 55 miles an hour. Great. Are you in a 25-mile-an-hour zone or are you in a 75-mile-an-hour zone? Are you above the speed limit, below the speed limit, right? And are you accelerating or 80s? Are you right now 55 miles an hour? Are you going to, uh, continue remaining at 55 miles an hour for the foreseeable future, right? So these are all, um, metrics that come from the measure. Of speed. You measure the speed, but it's not a metric. You measure the number of hires, but it is absolutely not a metric. And it is completely and utterly worthless as a measurement and a metric, because it isn't a metric in sourcing. It is worthless. It is worth zero. If you told me— hey, Christine, you know this really well. I mean, I was in the healthcare sector and I've been doing a lot of work with companies over the last 30 years in different industries. If I was to ask you what is a typical number of hires for a recruiter in healthcare, you would say what?
For a recruiter, probably, um, a month, 15 to 25.
No, a year. Sorry.
Oh, a year, like 250?
Yeah. So if I said, if I said my clients expect their recruiters to make 300 hires a year, you would say, oh, that's a little aggressive, but it's, it's, it's on track, right? Right, right. Yeah. Guess what? If you're in a technology company and you go to them and say you're supposed to make 300 hires a year, they're— they will evaporate. There's no way they can do that. They'll just combust in place, like just sublimate in, in their, you know, talk about mind-blown. They'll be like, uh, no, poof, just gone. So there's a huge difference between 300 hires a year in healthcare and 300 hires a year in, let's say, computer software, or in, um, let's see, the highest levels of research where you're doing, you know, working with people that are postdocs that have such a distinct specialty that there's only 7 of them in the world. Yeah. How in the hell are you going to make 300 hires in that space, right? And you would— you don't know retail, and you don't know of the financial industry and banking sector, in both of those, if you said 300 hires a year, they would laugh you out the door. They'd be like, you're slow, because they'll make 1,000 hires a year. They will place the same position 3 times a year. That same job opening will be filled 3 or 4 times a year. And that's normal. That's not high turnover. That is normal. Bank tellers, cashiers, okay? So it really is absolutely worthless. Now that I've told you what is the absolute worthless measure, then let's talk about what really works. If you want to track an objective, which is, are we hiring the people we need to achieve whatever outcome our CEO or our board of directors have given us as a strategy? We as an organization have a leader. That leader and whatever the leadership team has determined that we are going to grow, expand, launch a new product, increase sales, increase customer service, whatever that is. It doesn't matter what that is. We have to fulfill that from the point of view of identifying the natural resources needed for those positions. That's why I called this industry sourcing 30 years ago. Actually, I called it cyber sleuthing 30 years ago, but 28 years ago, I realized, I realized that was a bad word in some places. So I changed it to sourcing because sourcing is the same in industry, which is procurement of the raw materials. Sourcing of the raw materials required, okay, to make a hire. So if you want to increase sales, you got to hire salespeople, or maybe not. I mean, if you can increase sales without hiring salespeople, great, you don't need us. But if you need to hire salespeople, you need us. And it's not going to matter if we make one hire or 1,000 hires. It won't make a difference whether it's 1 or 1,000. It makes zero difference. It's got to be the right 1 or the right 1,000. It can't be just a number. It's insane to measure that. If you want to measure the outcome, are we meeting 100% of our sales objective? And if not, we need to hire people to meet that objective. And our metric becomes the percentage of roles that are filled because of our effort. That's how you measure the outcome. So let me put this into perspective of a car. Let's say, Christine, you are the Uber driver. As the driver, you're in control of many factors, including, for example, the steering wheel. If you have a stick shift, You have the gears. Even if you don't have a stick shift, you might still have gears, whether it goes into four-wheel drive. The speed, the velocity, the braking, the air conditioning inside the car, the tire pressure, the engine temperature, the amount of coolant— all of these are factors. And some of these are represented in front of you in what's called a dashboard. Hello, everybody. Wonder where the dashboard comes from?
It's an Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Yeah.
So what's a dashboard? It's the thing in front of the pilot that drives the car or the pilot that drives the airplane. That's the dashboard. So that is right in front of you and you need that in order to determine where to go, how fast to go. And so you're the one that's in control of all that. That's for your performance. But the CEO or whatever the head of the company is, they aren't driving the car. They hired you for that. They're in the back seat, maybe, maybe in the front seat. I said the point is they're not driving the car. They don't need to know speed, average velocity, fuel consumption, tire pressure, engine temperature. They don't need to know any of that. So why in the fuck do we tell them that? Why do we sit there and make these reports where we show them all of these numbers that are literally measures, like number of emails sent. Who gives a shit? Reply rate. Okay, now we're getting into something kind of qualitative. But anyways, so back to the objective. What metric, which is a combination of a measurement and some sort of calculation, which could be percentage completion, a direction. You're the CEO and I'm the chauffeur. You want to know when are we going to get there? Are we going to get there on time or are we behind? In fact, you might not even want to know if we're going to get there on time or not. You're expecting to get there on time. So you just want to know when are we going to get there? It's up to you to determine, do I need to go faster? Do I need to go slower? Do I need to put more fuel in? Do I need to change to another vehicle? Is this the appropriate form of transportation? The CEO doesn't even care if you're driving a flying car or a submarine as long as they get to where they want to go. That's their job is to take the company where the company wants to go. So how do we measure that outcome? So first thing you have to ask yourself is what are you trying to accomplish? Then set clear definitions of what sourcing does. What does sourcing do? Sourcing does not and never will make hires. We do not make offers. And if we do, we're recruiting. We do not convince people to join a company. We do not even make the decision on whether or not a certain individual joins a company. We can't say yes and we can't say no. We can sort of say no because we can exclude certain people if we don't want to include them in the funnel. But that's not really saying no. That's really a choice, not a decision, and I don't wanna get into semantics, but the point is the only thing that we're doing is we're driving the car and we're determining what kind of fuel, maybe sometimes what kind of car, maybe, you know, whatever, but that's what we're doing. We are not the ones making the hiring decisions. And so why are we being measured on the tire pressure? Why are you measuring your sourcers based on the type of fuel they use and the engine temperature of their car? Do you even know what an appropriate engine temperature is for what car? Every car has a different engine temperature. Do you see what I'm saying? Every company has a different— yeah, industry number of hires is absolutely ridiculous. So yeah, what does sourcing do? Sourcing does 5 principal things. Number 1, and most importantly, which also happens to coincide with recruiting, this is where sourcing and recruiting are twins, sourcing and recruiting's both number one singular top of the line. Nobody can disagree with this is we provide decision support. That's all we do. We help the decision maker, hiring manager, right? Make a decision. How do we do that? By providing them options.
Would agree with it.
Yeah. Give them options. They make a decision. We don't make the decision. We give them options. We support their decision-making. We may inform their decision-making. We may advise, but we do not make the decision. All that informing and advising, we are the consigliere to the mafioso. We are not the mafioso. We are the advisors, talent advisors. All of these words start making sense, don't they? Right? Yeah. Okay, second thing is we increase the capabilities of the recruitment process. Whatever environment you're in, if you have no sourcers, then sourcing increases the recruiter's capability. Can't disagree with that.
Right.
Irrefutable. If you don't have a dedicated sourcing team. Now, if you have a sourcing team, great. Then the sourcing team enhances the capabilities of the recruiting. Why? Because the sourcing team doesn't act independent of the recruiting. If your sourcers are acting independent of recruiters, they're recruiters. Newsflash: if your sources are doing everything a recruiter does, then they're a recruiter. If your recruiters aren't doing any recruiting, they're not recruiters. So if your sources are doing the recruiting and your recruiter doing client management, they're not recruiters, they're project managers. But whatever, semantics again. So we increase the capabilities of the recruitment process. 3, we improve the overall quality of talent in the organization. How do we do that? We do that because we find candidates that are better suited to the jobs than, generally speaking, not trying to offend anybody, generally speaking, we find candidates that are better suited to the job than those that apply. Yep.
Absolutely.
They're very well suited. But the reality is that every candidate that applies is not well suited to the job. And every candidate that we source may not be well suited to the job, but by and large, the majority, my— we're getting to the metric, and believe me, we'll get there. But my opinion is that there's a certain percentage at which your tank is full but not too full that makes it possible for you to run lean but doesn't make you hungry or fat. And that's the percentage that we're going to get to in a minute. However, back to my point is we improve the overall quality by giving the hiring managers a slightly better choice in that decision support. If all they have is applicants, then they are limited to only what's available, not what's best. If they have what's available and what's best, recruiting and sourcing, inbound and outbound together, then we're giving them an appropriate choice and we're providing that decision support and we're improving the overall quality of talent. So sourcing supports decision-making, increases the capabilities of recruitment, and improves the overall quality of the talent organization. Those 3 things are law. They are absolutely undisputable, indisputable, right?
Agree completely. Yeah.
A bit more tenuous. We do have some disagreement on that. And that is the 4th one is we link recruiting to corporate strategy. Because recruiting is not linked to corporate strategy. Let me tell you why. If you have to educate your CEO, you have to educate your CTO and your CFO about what the value of sourcing is, then they don't understand recruiting. Just like they wouldn't understand manufacturing if you had to explain to them what supply chain does, right? I'm sorry, but if your CEO doesn't understand supply chain and demand and supply and demand, then How are they a CEO? And guess what? Talent supply, talent demand. Now you see where talent advisors get talent supply and talent demand? It's all coming together, isn't it?
It is.
Right. So, some people might debate that sourcing doesn't link recruiting to corporate strategy. And here's why. Because they think that recruiting is strategic. It's not. Guess what happens when you turn recruiting off? You stop hiring. But when you turn sourcing off, a majority of their work continues for quite some time. It's— it does peter down and it does sort of fizzle away, but sourcing is a discrete capital investment. That means that what you do in sourcing, the money that you invest in sourcing, it takes a while for it to pay you back, and then it pays you back for much longer than the $20 that you spend on a Google ad. That's a flash in the pan. You spend a million dollars on Google ads, you get some hires, Stop spending on Google Ads, you stop getting hires. Hire a recruiter, you make some hires. You fire the recruiter, you don't make some hires.
You are all putting it together because even the, the word talent sourcer— sourcer is, is taken from supply, some supply chain.
That's where I invented it from. Yeah, I invented that.
Yeah.
And yeah, I'm gonna take credit for that because a lot of people don't give me credit for that.
Yeah.
Okay, that was sourcing. That was what people didn't know what to call this thing. When I first stepped out of the staffing industry where I was breaking every company record this organization ever had, a very good organization, 32 branches, I broke every record that they had. And when I stepped out of that industry, it was because I knew that I was doing something that everybody else wasn't doing and I wanted to sell it.
Yeah.
And people were coming to me asking to buy it. They wanted to buy what I had to sell. But this was a long time ago. This was 1997, 1998, 1999. Back then, I still called it cyber sleuthing because there wasn't a name for it. It didn't exist. People would laugh when I told them that all I did was find candidates. Isn't that the recruiter's job? Yeah, basically, but guess what? They're not doing it. Because when I was in the staffing firm, what differentiated me from everybody else was I was doing the thing that they weren't doing. And I was doing that because they weren't doing it. And so it had to get done and they were doing what they usually do because that's what they always do. And that's what we still do. What we always do. But anyways, let me go back to the fifth one.
Wow.
Facilitate the sharing of top talent across all of the organization. And that is where a lot of these organizations that say they do sourcing fail. But by the way, sometimes sourcing fails at the very, very, very top, which means they don't treat sourcing as a decision support tool. They treat it as, uh, like placing an ad. I pay for sourcing, I get a hire. If that's what you think you're doing, stop and fire your entire sourcing team today.
Yes.
Because you're not employing the sourcing team for anything worthwhile. You might as well spend that money on Google Ads and you will get way better results. So if you're not using sourcing for decision support as a way to increase the capabilities of your team, improve the quality of your organization, and linking recruiting to corporate strategy because sourcing can be a long tail, because sourcing can be strategic, then you're not doing sourcing anyways. But that's the fifth one. Facilitate the sharing of top talent. If that's what sourcing does and you want to have SMART KPIs— I hate KPIs, by the way— but if you want to have SMART, specific, measurable, achievable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. SMART KPIs. If you want to have SMART KPIs, then you need to measure measurements, the things that matter, that contribute towards the goal. And you want to measure the measurement that is approaching the completion of that goal. That's the metric. So what is the metric that you have control over in sourcing, absolute control over, that you have absolute control over, that can contribute to that goal? What is the one— this is the answer to your question. You ask me, what's the, you know, what are the best metrics? There's only one. There's one metric. Now I'm going to separate this and I'm going to say there's one individual metric. There's also a team metric. So don't forget that we work as part of a team. If you're a solo sourcer and you're the only one, then you don't have a team. But if you're more than one person, then you have a team. So there's a team metric and there's a performance metric for an individual. What is the one thing that you can absolutely control? In all your years of experience, what can you absolutely beyond a shadow of a doubt control 100%?
I'm afraid to answer, but I certainly— my attitude and effort.
No, not really.
No. Okay. I can't control your attitude.
Okay, so we're gonna talk about sourcing. I'm talking about sourcing.
Yeah, you can control who— somebody help me out in the chat. You can control, I mean, who you're reaching out to, who you— maybe not even who you submit your round of.
Yeah. And all that comes down to, um, it's throughput. It's throughput. It's not your activities. It's not how many hires you make. You can't control that. You can control how many people you reach out to, but does that contribute to the goal? Again, it's the bottom line here is everything that you do can be measured in the dashboard. Your speed, your engine temperature, your direction, you know, all that stuff, right? But the one thing that you can absolutely control that directly controls The outcome has nothing to do with your activities. You can definitely control your activities, but it doesn't result in the outcome. Let me explain why activities are actually not a metric. Activity is a measure. It's how many emails did you send? Hey man, I could have sent 10 million emails. Does that make me the best sourcer in the world?
Nope.
I could have made a trillion phone calls today. Did that make me a better sourcer? Nope. It's that one call that matters.
Yeah.
So it's not your activity. Never report on activities to people that are above the manager level. Directors don't need to see activities and above. They don't need to see— they're paying you for that, or they're paying a manager to measure that for you if you're the individual. So it's the throughput that is the quantitative and qualitative combined measure that is the only measure that matters at all in that big objective, which is, are we there yet? So you're the driver. The leadership is in the back seat and they want to know, are we going to achieve our— let's just use sales. Are we going to achieve our sales target this year? Yes or no? If yes, and you contributed to that, then measure that. How did you contribute to that? And you contributed to that through the percentage of people that you submitted that were accepted and interviewed. So basically it's the sourced to interview throughput ratio. That's the magic. Sourced to interview. How many people did I source that made it to interview? You can't control after the interview. You can't control offer. You may, but I mean, the reality is that we really don't. You can't control background checks. You can't control— you can't even control sourcing necessarily, because you can only source what exists. If it doesn't exist, you can't source it. So you can't control the supply, you can't control the demand, but you can control what happens in the middle, which is the percentage of people that you found that got interviewed.
Absolutely.
Yep, that's it.
We do like a submit-to-interview ratio, a pre-screen-to-interview ratio.
Submit. So engagement to accept it is a component of that, right? If you really want to break it down and you want to have— I recommend never to go beyond 5 metrics unless you've managed those 5 metrics and you know exactly what they are. If you have more than 5 metrics, you're over-measuring. It's like if you're driving a car, you have a lot of information around you, but there's only 5 metrics that you're really watching, right? One of them is the speed, another one is the direction. You get where I'm going?
Yep. Yeah, yeah.
What are the 5 metrics in, in our space? Take rate is definitely one of them. It's a submittal to accept because it shows the quality in the middle of the process where we're finding people and the recruiters are accepting our candidates, the hiring managers are accepting our candidates. But really, it's the interview that matters. So recruiters can accept every one of your candidates, but nobody gets interviewed. That's still a flop, right?
Yeah.
And this is where I come in with my not so Um, let's just say it's a little bit controversial. I'm a member— lots of folks have heard me say this— I'm a member of the full plate club. Where I grew up, and, and the culture where I grew up, if I ate all of the food on my plate, more would appear on the plate. So if I cleared my plate, that wasn't a sign. It may be in other cultures, but not in mine. If you clear your plate, you're done. No, not in my culture. If you clear your plate, you're hungry. They would slap on more food on that plate.
Oh, my house too.
Yeah. Leave a little bit of food, not a lot, because if you left a lot, then what's the matter? You didn't like it? You didn't like the food, right? So you can't leave a lot. You've gotta, you've gotta eat almost all of it and leave a little bit, and then, okay, I'm full, I'm really full. I subscribe to the full plate club, so I believe if hiring managers are full, there's a small percentage of the candidates that they don't accept. But if they're accepting every candidate you're giving me, giving them, they're starved. So that's not good. And if they're not accepting any of the candidates you're giving them, then they're not hungry. So, you know, I want a 75% or 80% empty plate. If I send you 10 people and you interview 8 of them, or I send you 5 people and you interview 4 of them, I'm happy. That's good. I don't want 5 for 5. I don't necessarily think that that's a good idea. I don't think that that's healthy unless you're absolutely genius at the job and do the job better than anybody else I've ever met, you would never really have a 1-to-1 ratio. There is one recruiter that I've met in my life that has a 1-to-1 ratio, but it's a very time-consuming process. They'll take 4 or 5 months to find somebody.
Um, I want to address Stephen's question here in the chat because I get this question from sourcers all the time saying they can't control hiring managers, they can't control the recruiters. Um, I've got my thoughts on that. What do you think about the sourcer who feels like they can't make the hiring manager do anything?
What are you trying to make them do?
To get them to look at the resume and look at the candidate and schedule interviewing?
You can't—
I believe me, I try. Yeah.
Listen, here's the thing.
He's saying they're not hungry, Stephen.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I'm saying either they're not hungry, or you, you're giving them the wrong food. Here's the thing. I get a lot of complaints about Hiring manager feedback. And my— I've personally built a large amount of teams and I've advised and consulted over 1,000 organizations. And I still currently right now, I'm in process of like today advising 3 organizations that are building sourcing teams. And I get this every single time. Hiring managers always complain that the recruiters don't send them enough resumes. And the recruiters and sourcers always complain that the hiring managers don't give them any feedback. You would think that those two are incongruent, right? Hiring manager wants more resumes, recruiter is not getting any feedback. If you look at it microscopically, yes, they're incongruent. But if you take a step back, It's not incongruent. It's the same thing. What they're saying is they're not getting any quality. And what you're getting is that they're not getting any quality. In other words, the fact that they're not giving you any feedback on your candidates is the feedback. That's the feedback. If you send them a candidate that they like, they're moving on it. If you send them a candidate they don't like, They're gonna ghost you. Do they have time to give you feedback on every candidate? Eh, you know what, I would like them to, I ideally would. And I think the problem that you're facing is that they're saying, these recruiters and sourcers are saying, I would like to know how I'm doing. It's not that they want the hiring manager to look at the candidate. It's not that you're forcing the hiring manager to look at the candidate because that's never gonna happen. You can't force them to do anything. That's not really ideal, you know? Especially if you're going to go out on a date. You don't want to force anybody, right? So why are you trying to force them? But if you're giving them candidates that they like, they're going to look at them, and they may or may not give you feedback. I want feedback, but the way you get feedback is by giving them candidates that they like.
Well, and Stephen, I, I experienced some, some of that too, when they're just not moving fast enough. And that's kind of a universal problem, but they are teaching You know, I say this all the time for anybody who know me on here. This is my, my one quote from Oprah that I always say. Oprah says, you teach people how to treat you. And we got to be teaching these hiring managers that if you don't move on this candidate, I'm going off. I'm moving through. Yep. So I'm moving through the next to the next one. And then when your plate is empty, they will come for you.
Right. And what you do is you document it. You keep track of every person that you sent that they didn't respond to. And, you know, when they come back and say, I'm hungry, you don't feed me, you can say, well, here are all the dishes that I have served to you. And they'll say, oh, I want that one. And you'll say, I'm sorry, that one already went bad because we left it out too long.
Yes, Jen. Yep. Jen, the difference between active and passive candidates, right? What do you send over a passive candidate? What's the first thing they do? So why did you apply? Right. Yeah. So there's that. That's offensive to somebody who you reached out to me. Yeah.
Yeah. But there's a question about the team metrics.
Oh yes.
So with, with team metrics, you have objective and you have subjective. What you would want to measure as the one true metric is an incremental increase in velocity relative to similar roles. And that's not speed to hire. That's an incremental increase in velocity. In other words, you're looking for improvement. Is the team overall improving velocity relative to similar roles or not? Sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. And in this case, this is the foot on the gas. So if you got your foot on the gas, do you need to push it harder or do you need to let up a little bit? Because there is such a thing as too fast. If your team is operating too fast, then hiring managers are not able to respond, right? You have And this, I've run into this when I have turned around a recruiting organization because the hiring managers weren't getting enough people and now they're getting too many people. It has literally gotten to the point where they have too many interviews and they can't do their job because they're interviewing too many people. Then you have to let off the gas. So it is a constant. You don't want to always increase velocity until you reach the speed of light. You want to increase velocity until hiring managers are full and then you back off a little bit and then you stay at that 75% range. right? That's the ideal situation. But it's that overall improvement, or I shouldn't say increase. Let's say the increase or decrease in velocity relative to similar roles as observed by that goal. So if you're going to meet the goal this year, then you want the team to increase the velocity and get to there quicker. If you're over, you know, overclocking or whatever, you want to slow down, pay attention to something else. but that's the team measurement. I would say that with a team, you also want to look at holistically, and this is a larger team, not a team of 2, but a team of, you know, more than 5. You want to start looking at holistically utilization of channels, and that's because you don't want everybody fishing in the same pond within your own organization.
That's right.
Yeah, we're already fishing in the same pond as everybody else, but within your team, you should have some diversity in utilization of channels and technology and methodologies and So that's the other thing is that, you know, you should improve that. But really that adds to that velocity, um, as well. So I'm looking at that basically being an improvement over— for the same role or very similar roles. You don't want to measure nurses hiring versus, you know, software engineer hiring the same way, basically. But yeah.
All right, well, that was an excellent answer and an education that the entire occupation needed. So excellent on that. Uh, yeah, so a little, little round of applause there.
Do I pass?
Yeah, so far, so far you get the job. Yeah. All right, so here's a question. Um, is AI helping or ruining recruiting or sourcing? Is AI helping or ruining sourcing?
Sourcing. Sourcing. Um, it is absolutely 100% fundamentally helping sourcing. It is a really valuable tool, just like I used to do sourcing before the internet, and I still do sourcing now after the internet, and the internet didn't get rid of me. Um, many folks probably on this call— I'm definitely dating myself a little bit here— many folks on this call probably don't remember when the Online Career Center—
I do. Yeah.
And what did they become? What did OCC? Monster.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Wasn't it Headhunter first? All right.
Well, Headhunter was first. Yeah. So Online Career Center and Headhunter.net, they were contemporaries to a certain degree, a little bit of overlap there, but yeah. Headhunter had the big brand. Monster became the big brand when it switched back. The whole point is you are old, dude. Both of them. Yeah. Thanks. Both of them. Said that they were going to eliminate sourcing. That was 20 years ago. I'm still here.
Yeah.
And by the way, there's 1.1 million sourcers in the world. 1.1 million. And so I don't think it's been eliminated. AI has the same effect that the internet does. Um, the internet helped us find people that faster and got us to conversations faster. With the internet, we were able to make a call that was warmer instead of cold. The cold call really kind of disappeared somewhere around that time period in the late '90s, early 2000s. People still call it cold calling, but it really isn't cold calling because you've warmed up the call with texting or emailing or you know, whatever. There's been some prelude to that. Most of the time, calling the first time and never doing anything else, just cold calling, it just literally ends up in voicemail. It's unusual for people to pick up the phone on the first call. It happens, but it's unusual. But if you email or text and then call, it's a lot more likely they'll answer. And even today, there's a lot of organizations where recruiters don't even pick up the phone. I've met some recruiters and some sourcers that don't even know what a phone is. I show them a picture of a phone and they don't know what it is. I'm not talking about an iPhone, I'm talking about—
Yeah, I've forgotten how to use it, but I know what it is.
Yeah, I don't know if you've ever seen this experiment where they, they have a video of a bunch of teens sitting around a table, and on the table they have an old-fashioned rotary phone where right? And there— and the challenge was, okay, the first one to successfully place a call wins a pizza, right? The first one to make a pizza— to make the call, uh, gets a pizza. And they are all trying different things to make it work, but all of them are doing the same thing, right? They're all dialing the number first, then picking up the receiver. You remember that? You got the tone and then dialed the number.
Yes.
And then when cell phones came around, you dial the number and then send the tone, right?
Oh, that's funny.
The opposite. But anyways, I digress. Um, yeah, my point is that it is, um, just a tool that helps us get faster results. When the internet came around, which I was, I was the point I was trying to make, is the internet came around and I was able to make a call with a little bit more information. I was able to send an email and tell them a little bit about the job tailored to a little bit about what they do. And it allowed me to do personalization, warm up those calls, and I got more results. And it's exactly what AI is doing. It's allowing me to do personalization once again at a higher level in a faster scale. Instead of sending an email that I haven't published this yet, but I used to talk about 7 points of personalization. Which is 7 things inside of a message that are personalized to that candidate. And people always look at me cross-eyed or in total, like, disbelief. That seems a little stalkery if you're going to say 7 things.
I love hearing that because we do 4 points of personalization and some people think that's too much. Yeah, I love the 7. Yeah.
No, it's actually really easy and you can do it all in one sentence. Yeah, that's the look I get. That look.
No, I don't mean to. Yeah, I don't mean to.
That's the look I get.
So you, you could— okay, so you could do— yeah, you could do their name. You could do—
hi, Shelly, happy Monday. I found you on LinkedIn. I noticed that you're in HR, uh, as a recruiter at Cisco. I'm looking for people in Atlanta, or in Atlanta, I'm looking for people in your area. That's 7.
You mean I'm not supposed to say hello? I found your resume on LinkedIn. I thought you would be a great fit. Not supposed to do that?
No, you're also not supposed to say, please link, click now. Yeah, that one either. So, 4 sentences? No. Hi, Shelly, comma, I found you. Yeah, the introductory sentence. But I'm not going to debate whether it's 3 or 4 or 5. The point is, I used to do that. I don't anymore. Why?
Because he was ready for a fight.
That's what's changed. So I used to have to have those data points. I used to have to have job title, function, location, title, company in my database in order to do merges so that the merge fields included that personalization. So it came across more personalized. And the big part that people forget about with personalization is you can send out all these personalized messages, but when they reply, you got to respond. That's the other part of personalization, right? If you send them a message that's personalized and they reply within 5 minutes and it takes you 3 days to reply, you totally lost it.
Yeah, but I like your ad though, of even noting the day. Yeah, noting the day shows people that you're a real live person talking to you directly. Yeah, today we're just messing with—
they get it tomorrow, but they see, they see it tomorrow, but they know I sent it yesterday. You know, it's today. Yeah. And it's not today. It's the name of the day, right? Anyways, so what's changed is that with AI now, I have the ability to rewrite each message using my voice. So I've trained the robot to understand my tone, my voice, my style. I have trained it to use a specific type of humor that works for me because I'm the kind of person that not only in conversation— when I talk to candidates, they laugh. And when, you know, I'm talking to people in an audience, they laugh. So whether I'm funny or not is a different story. But I use humor and it's using my voice, my tone, and it's adding not just these elements, but other elements that it can generate live that I'm not able to do in a mail merge. I only can use the data that's in the columns at the time, but with AI, it is going to their profile and reading up-to-date information that I may not have. That robot is capable of browsing that file and looking for an update to use updated information. So it's dynamically updating those fields, but not just those fields. It's also tailoring it to my voice and it's also using an illustrative example from my background to connect to them. So one of the prompts that I put into the AI is to make a connection between something I do and something they do. And so it injects something like, I notice that you like scientific journals. I read some journals. Which ones are your favorite? Stuff like that. You could personalize that with a column in Mail Merge, but it's a little bit more challenging. And it's also a lot more challenging when you look at the freshness of the data. For example, I noticed that you went to JavaCon 2003 and it's 2025. And they're like, really? You just noticed that I went to JavaCon 18 years ago? Yeah, it lets us do that. But it's a lot more than that. It's also a lot more about like, yeah, I just I actually posted a brief posting about this on LinkedIn because I think it's kind of— I hear a lot when I'm presenting, I hear a lot of people are still skeptical about AI. They're worried, they're concerned, they're skeptical, they don't trust it.
That's why I ask.
Yeah. And so I posted this because I thought it was pretty timely. If you're suspicious about ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Here's what it's really, really good for that you can do right now, today, for free with zero risk. There is no risk in you doing this. You can use this AI to learn and answer questions. You can use it to plan, write, and edit. You can use it to generate ideas, make recommendations, and brainstorm. And you can use it for language assistance, translation, etc. So those are things that you are asking AI to do for you. You're not providing AI with any information. That it's going to use against you when the, when the robots take over. You're asking for it to give you answers to questions about science, technology. What does this person do? So one of the things that I like to do is I put the resume in there and I ask the AI to explain this resume to me in terms of the REC. And it knows what the REC is because I load the REC to it and I say, this is the, this is REC number 7, right? And then I give the prompt, rate this resume and explain it to me in terms of REC number 7. And then it tells me what the resume is doing. It analyzes the resume and it's good at that because it's good at analyzing large amounts of information. Do not provide candidate information, just the resume, not the email address and all the other stuff, um, just the body of like experience, right? But even if you don't want to do that, you can still ask, explain to me what, uh, what does— what is the difference between a MIG and a WIG welder, whatever that welder— MIG and TIG. Explain the difference between MIG and TIG welding. And it'll give it to you in a sentence, you know?
Yeah.
So that kind of stuff, writing emails, drafting emails, improving your content. But I will warn you, competitive intelligence.
Yeah.
You always have to scrutinize what it comes back with. Always scrutinize. And number 2, never do both the beginning and the end. Start with AI for brainstorming and idea generation and then finish it yourself. Or do the idea generation and write most of it and then have AI polish it. But never have AI start the idea and polish it at the same time because that's how you end up with bland, generic things that are literally like you could detect that they're an AI immediately. So it's helpful for a lot of things. It's helpful in speeding up my process. That's really what it's good for right now. Will it do more?
Yeah.
There's a lot of talk about agentic AI. I have not seen that yet. There's some products out there that have been advertising a lot lately that they do agentic AI. I've seen the product, I've demoed it, I've watched the videos. It's not agentic. It's the same exact thing that we're talking about. It's a logic tree with, you know, what it's done is it's compiled a lot of activities into one. And so you have one central location where you do all the activities, but you're still doing the activities. There's no agent doing that for you. The agent part of it is it's bringing all this information together and you can do that yourself. You don't even need that. I was doing that with Power Automate before ChatGPT came out.
It does. This does all remind me of like when computers came out, right? And, and, you know, you bought a PC for your home and you thought it was going to change the lights in your kitchen. Yeah. Or, and then like you went and remember like when you'd like clean up your files yourself and it would do that little thing where it would click all these things. Anyway. It's like you have to kind of get in here in the beginning, that because all the changes are going to happen fast. And in the last 6 months, look at all that has changed. It used to be just one slide in our Recruiter Academy training. Now it's almost a whole session. So it's changing fast. I think people need to get to, to try it now, work on your prompts, get using it now, use it for, for all your AI sourcing that you're using. What was the question that came up? I missed it. Sorry. Yeah, I thought there was a question that came up, so sorry if you asked a question and we just missed it. Put it in the chat again. All right, one, one, uh, one last question here that'll probably, um, take us to time, but what are some of the characteristics that you think makes a great sorcerer?
Well, that's an easy one. Um, The best way to answer that is there's a certain mindset that is kind of natural to someone who has a tendency to enjoy sourcing and do well at it because they enjoy it, and that is essentially puzzle solving, problem solving. So some people are problem solvers naturally and some people are not. Whether or not you use technology or whatever to solve that problem is irrelevant. Whether— if you're completely technology ignorant, you can still solve problems. So it's that problem-solving mindset. Some people don't want to— they don't want to tackle the problems. They want to just do the, the thing that they know how to do that they know works. Other people run away from problems, but sourcers will run towards problems. It— the best thing you can do to keep a sourcer up all night is give them a problem they can't solve. So I think it's that particular, which you might say includes curiosity. Sure, it includes curiosity because in order to solve the problem, you might have to employ curiosity. But really, it's about solving the problem. It's not about endless curiosity because if it were, searchers would be, you know, constantly browsing new information, new, new, new, new, new, new. And that's not exactly what we do. We are curious. We also are very tenacious. So I think that's another part of the problem solving. And that comes into the fold because we don't give up when we don't find an answer. I know that's a double negative, I get it. English is definitely my second language, but what I'm trying to say is if we can't solve the problem, that isn't the end. You know, we continue going. And so that's tenacity, but it's again driven by that problem solving. So I think problem solving is the big one. Whether or not you're a technologist doesn't really matter. There's some great— they use a phone and that's all they use.
Yep.
They use a phone and then they have a crayon and a piece of paper. You know, they'll write with anything anywhere. They'll work out of a cafe with a pencil and an napkin. It doesn't matter. And so then there's others that are extremely technical and know how to write code. You don't have to be either one of them. You can be a combination of both or neither. And so it's not that. It's really just not taking no for an answer, but in a different way than recruiters don't take no for an answer. Recruiters with tenacity are good at persuasion, negotiation, making offers, managing expectations, working with hiring managers and candidates. Sourcers are not taking no for an answer from the problem. They're saying, there's got to be an answer. This has to be out there somewhere. There's got to be a way. And so, it's the constant continuous what if, that experimentation that differentiates. A sourcer from a recruiter. Recruiters are systems thinking. Systems thinking means they follow a process. There are laws, there are rules around recruitment that you have to follow. There are steps that you have to follow. There's an order to things. And this is a system. A system is any collection of tasks. System doesn't necessarily mean software or technology. For gaining muscle mass is, you know, going to the gym or whatever. That's a system. It's not technology. So, recruiters are systems thinkers. They have to follow recipes because that's how things get done. You've got to find the candidate. You've got to put them, you know, interview them, present them to managers. These are things that they have to do. Sourcers by definition cannot be systems thinkers because when things don't work, when the system doesn't work, sourcing starts. So, we're not systems thinkers. We're thinking about how do we solve this problem outside of the existing constraints that the system has. And that's where sourcing comes in, and that's problem solving.
So can, um, us— uh, can a recruiter ever become a good sourcer?
Absolutely, if they like solving problems and if they're okay with not systems thinking. Absolutely.
It is a hard transition.
I always say that about the, you know— yeah, the rule, right? Yeah.
I— somewhere around 6 6 weeks into sourcing from a recruiter turned sourcer, they realize something clicks inside their brain and they realize, I gotta think differently about this.
It's different, right? It's very different. And if they don't, then they're still a recruiter. Is the opposite is also true. Can a sourcer become a recruiter? Yes, a sourcer can become a recruiter, but then they have to follow processes and track information differently and order their operations in a more predictable way and be more predictable. Basically. Sourcing is really inherently unpredictable. You don't necessarily have a way to guarantee any kind of response rate or any kind of, you know, when people say, I can control my activity. Yeah, you control your activity, but you can't control what you find. What you find is not absolutely under your 100% control because sometimes it doesn't exist there. You have to go somewhere else. And that's the thing is people ask me, what's the best source for candidates? Like they want one single answer. Yeah, it is completely different from one job to another, and in many cases it isn't what you think.
That's a great answer because that's true.
That's what sourcing is. Yeah, thinking about what you didn't think. So yeah, you can become a recruiter, you just have to kind of give that up, right? And to me, that's just not worth it. I've, I've been offered the position of recruiter sometimes in, in cases, uh, where it was actually like save it, like either get fired or be recruiter because, you know, layoffs or whatever, right? I thought really hard about getting fired because I just was like, yeah, I don't know. Thankfully I've been saved from having to do that, um, but I've only had to recruit a couple of times recently. And you know, when I do it, I still like it because there's nothing better than that feeling when you find somebody that is unfindable. The hiring manager goes, where in the heck did you find this person? And the candidate goes, how did you find me? And then they get hired and then you're like, wow. And there's, and they're happy. The candidate loves the job. The hiring manager loves the candidate. It's like, you're just like, you know, the matchmaker, right? And it feels good. That's a really good feeling. It's a really good sense, a good sense of achievement, but I'm okay without that. In other words, I can live without it and I don't really want to pay the price to get to there. Of having to deal with lies and deceit. Hiring managers that don't tell me the truth. Hiring managers that tell me that they haven't contacted a search firm for this and then I get a search firm candidate. Hiring managers that tell me that they need it tomorrow and then they go on a 6-month vacation. I mean, you know, the lying and the deceit and the candidates that are lying about stuff and it just, you know, there's a really, really great match that's made I'll just give you a quick anecdote since we're on the topic. So extremely highly technical architect-level software engineer in Golang, the kind of person that was contributing to the source code of Golang. Okay, a couple hundred people that did that. So this was, this was a search. They literally needed the grandfather of— not the, but one of the grandfathers of, of this source code. And I found somebody. I found somebody. I talked to them. I engaged them and they interviewed. They loved the company. The company loved them. And then we had a company social about 3 months into this person being on the job as a very highly paid fellow, like the highest level of engineer you can have. They come to the social and they blow it. At the social, they get completely shit-faced. I mean, beyond, like, passed out on the side of the street kind of drunk. But on the way there, they, they made a lot of enemies. They sexually harassed some people. There was even some physical violence involved. And it was like extremely, you know, it was extremely toxic. And they were fired on the spot that night, that night of the event. And I felt so bad. But my chief people officer said, you can't feel bad about that because we did everything. We did the background check. We interviewed them. You interviewed them. We checked references. We did everything. We had no idea that this person was going to turn into Mr. Hyde at a party when they were 27 gin tonics in, you know? So it's a great feeling when you make the right match, but then there's that. It's kind of like that. I don't, I don't like that. I don't like that part of it. And I don't like the lying and the deceit. So I'll stay where I am.
Well, thanks to all those who have listened in.
This is—
I'll let you do your, your ending here, but I did want to say on behalf of all of us in this occupation, the sources on the, on the line here, and for those of us who call ourselves sources, thank you for this occupation.
And thanks always for, um, for defending the occupation and keeping all four of the people that are still on the channel, the ones that didn't hang up and go, what the hell?
Oh yeah, this is great.
Yeah, well, yeah, nobody's ever turned the seats on— actually, I did have one person that asked me a couple questions, but nobody's ever completely turned the seats on me like that.
So we've got to do it more often. And I'm glad you love your job, Stephen.
You, you're saying I should invite people to grill me?
Yeah. Yes.
Yeah, instead of, instead of me interviewing you, it's more like, come grill, shall we?
Every once in a while. Yeah, let's do a Shelly roast.
All right.
All right, a couple times a year.
Well, it was fantastic to have you back again. Um, I hope to see you back here yet another time on the next rotation, but thanks so much for sharing your time with us. Uh, you know, normally I ask people who should be our next guest, but since you're already— you've already been a guest, um, I don't— I'm not going to put you under that type of pressure.
But don't think about it.
What do you want people to— let me ask you this. What is that one hill in sourcing that you'll die on?
I, I think sourcers and recruiters need to take off their HR hat and start thinking like the applicant. If they can do that, they're going to be 25% ahead of the game. Just, they— something happens when they turn on the switch and they walk into work and they just become robots. And they've got to remind people, think like the candidate, right? Think like the candidate. You're going to be just a little bit ahead of the game.
That's good stuff. Yeah. All right. That's great. Thanks a lot. Well, with that, folks, we leave you for this week. Please tune in for Michael Bagelman, and he will be bringing his bagels. He is a founder of a tech company in our space that does analytics called Claro Analytics. Brilliant thinker and, and fun guy to talk to. So bring your questions about anything related to analytics. I'll let you know a little secret. His company does a lot of the original data crawling, so they're not one of the analytics companies that data— they, they source the data for themselves, which is, uh, which I think is pretty brilliant. It's a hard way to do it, but yeah, he'll be on the show next week. So until then, be kind to yourselves. Bye, everybody.
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