Dan Piontkowski, Global Head of Talent Sourcing, on Shally's A…

All right, happy Friday everybody. It is 1 PM on a pretty cool Friday afternoon and I am super excited to have a very special guest on the show today, my friend Dan and I go way back to— I can't even remember, like, I think they didn't even have LinkedIn back then. Dan's a pretty cool guy in a lot of ways, you know, off the camera and outside of work as well. But I wanted to have him on the show because he is starting or putting together a global strategy for a very large enterprise organization. Can't tell you who. And he's thinking about some really big questions around sourcing. Plus, on top of that, Dan is a Marine and also was a recruiter with the U.S. Navy and has experience working with companies in the retail space like Amazon and in consulting, like I think Booz Allenwright and KPMG, BearingPoint, and big staffing firms like Randstad. Also, Dan does some volunteer work with Military Mojo. Dan, what is Military Mojo? Can you tell everybody what that is? Yeah.

So first, hey, thanks for having me on here. Like, I always watch this every Friday and I always just pick up bits of knowledge. So hopefully somebody gets some bit of knowledge from me or, or I learned something new about myself just talking to you. So thanks for doing this. So Military Mojo, right, one of my favorite organizations out there. It's a, it's a job fair series that focuses in on military veterans. Um, really those in transition, right? It's, it's open to all veterans, but it's a, it's a way for employers to connect with military veterans. And they do 3 or 4 job fairs per year. And I should say, this is all pre-pandemic. Um, we're hoping to be able to get it kicked back up again, uh, soon. But it's just a— it's not the giant oversized convention center job fair. It's just the right size with a lot of access given and relationships, relationships forged between the two sides, uh, because it's a two-day event. So there's a lot of just get to know you, here's who we are and what we do.

Real networking. It's not just a booth fest.

Yeah, the, the booth fest is probably the the smallest part of the whole thing. It's— got it. My favorite twist that they, they do is the first day is the companies making pitches to the candidates, right? Classroom style. We're company ABC and this is what we do. And, and to watch the eyes light up and say, you know, we only think about jobs and companies of what we see on the store shelves a lot of times. Right, right. The first, the first one's visible, that first touch. When in reality, right, major companies do a lot of, a lot of different things that need a lot of different people, and you don't realize they have these jobs or need certain skills until you actually hear from the company or even realize where they're located. You know, global companies, everybody knows where the headquarters is, but often we, we think past all of the other offices and locations that they have that, that are opportunities, opportunities for us. So yeah, it's a good time. I love supporting that group.

And so it's, uh, is it free for employers to participate or how do people find out about it?

Uh, way to find out about it, you can visit the Military Mojo website. It is a nominal cost, definitely worthwhile to, to attend. Uh, and I, and I do mean nominal cost. You know, it doesn't hurt the budget much at all, and it gets you out.

Militarymojo.com, right?

Uh, yeah, it's been a bit since I visited the site. Yeah, but yeah, it should be militarymojo.com or militarymojo.org.

Oh, okay, right. It's— that's right, it's.org. Militarymojo.org. Yep. And they're still having events right now, still through the—

uh, yeah, they, they just announced, uh I think the next one is going to be in April in Charleston, South Carolina.

Cool.

Normally this time of year, this, this date worked out perfect because normally today would be the event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, because tomorrow is the Army-Navy football game.

I know you're pretty excited about that.

Go Navy, beat Army. And so yeah, they would do a job fair 2 days prior to the event, given that all the service members are heading to Philly to go watch the game.

Yeah, for those of the folks that are listening and you saw the little poster that I made for Dan, there's a, there's a "Not College" t-shirt banner there. Folks who, you know, who are outside of kind of the military sphere might not know what that is. Can you tell us what "Not College" is?

Yeah, so it's a funny joke that anybody that wore a uniform will probably pick up on the The N and the star is the logo for the Naval Academy. You know, it's a little bit of a different 4-year academic institution in college. So it's kind of the un-college, just given the stuff that we get to experience there. So yeah, the funny joke—

It's a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek irony. Yeah. Cool, cool, cool. So I can't share where you landed, but you recently took on a pretty big job. And you have to basically make sourcers. Where are you getting sourcers? Yeah, it's like a worldwide shortage right now.

Yeah, there's a shortage in everything. And, you know, and this is a challenge that I think everybody in— everybody that's in any type of manager or leadership role in a sourcing or TA organization struggles with, right? This should be our worry is where is our next generation of talent coming from?

Yeah.

Uh, you know, we do a really good job of pitching to our hiring managers that you're not going to find a candidate that's a 100% fit and we've got to make some, some adjustments and expectations, behaviors and raw talent and create your new dream team member. And then when we look for our own talent, our own recruiters and sourcers, one of the first things we say is they need to have 6 years of experience doing X.

The same thing that they're going to be doing here, right? Yeah.

So yeah, I am, I am forever a fan of growing my own talent, right? I think that it's strength.

Where are they coming from? Like, okay, so they weren't sourcers before. What were they? I agree with you. That's my last few hires have been, I hired a teacher, a math teacher with 2 master's degrees, super smart, very techie, never even considered that, you know, and she's doing great. Hired a guy who used to be doing customer support for, like, it's like, it's customer support, but it's techie because it's like not a help desk, it's troubleshooting. Um, you know, people would call in, the client, the business client would call in and like, my software is not working. So it's a little bit more than like PC support, it's more like servers and something like that. So that he's doing great. Somebody from experiential marketing, so they're all over. But where are you getting them?

Um, really the all over. I am, I'm kind of agnostic in where they were before, but what I look for the most is that behavior, right? One of the biggest things that I want to see out of a future sourcer is that I think is the most important, a natural curiosity to learn, right? We think about all the tools that are out there that are at our fingertips, and when we look at sourcers oftentimes just in the industry right now, we can look at sourcers and say they're great, they're good, they're average. And I think the great ones are the ones that are curious enough to start to dig into tools and understand how they work. Right? I'll toot your horn here. When I, years ago, when I saw what you, the way you can search Facebook for things.

Yeah.

Right? Nobody taught you how to do that. There's a natural curiosity that you looked at something and said, Let me dig in and understand how this works so that I can take it and manipulate it to do what I want it to do. That line of that curiosity, because there has to be a way, right?

Like, it's—

yeah, right.

There has to be a way to do it.

We've got to be able to deconstruct it. That curiosity, that exploration is critically important in hiring future great sourcers.

But, but you know what, what else? I mean, for me, it's not just that curiosity is a big part of it, but it's also, um, at least in my case, extreme laziness. And you and I agree on that. We've talked about that before, right?

Our Von Hammerschmidt, uh, moment.

Yeah, you, you've told me, I don't want anybody who works hard, I want someone who's really lazy. It's like the opposite of what you would think. Right. Yeah.

It's, uh, you know, I think, I think a lot of times we confuse— we can't confuse lazy as a 4-letter, as a bad 4-letter word, right? There's a difference between lazy and just sloth-like, right?

Right.

Lazy.

You combine lazy with, with curiosity and you combine lazy with like, uh, creativity, right? And now you have someone that's gonna just— yeah. So, all right, so we got curiosity and creativity.

How can I get the best possible result with the least possible effort? That's lazy, right? The guy that invented the remote control for our TVs was lazy. He didn't want to build—

right?

He didn't want to get up off the couch and walk to the TV to change it. So he figured out a way to do it. It's brilliant and lazy. Right?

That— And everybody else is like, come on, you're not— why don't you want to just get up and walk to the TV?

Yeah, right.

I don't want to do it. There's got to be a way. He probably had a stick that he used to like poke the— twist the knob or whatever.

I laughed and said, I'll never do that. I can get up and walk the 10 feet. Now we can't even imagine. Like now we've got voice commands even, right?

Right. You don't have to push the button anymore.

Gosh, no. I want to speak it. It's so much easier. Um, but yeah, right, that, that attitude and mindset of how can I do this better so that I don't have to work as hard? And it's not even as hard as intense, right?

We want to say— for me, it's a matter of I'll spend an hour trying to figure out something that would take me 5 minutes to do manually, but I'm going to spend an hour trying to figure out how to automate it how to streamline it because I only have to spend 5 minutes doing it now, but I know that's something I'm going to have to do 100 times and that—

Bingo.

That's 500 minutes, right?

So that's something that I learned. I probably, I never appreciated that investment aspect, right? We want to— you had mentioned it last week with Mary about the right level of effort on something or the right amount of technology. But what I never appreciated till I got into the high volume space and the really enterprise-level sourcing efforts, 1 minute of time, right? One process that you can shave 1 minute off of, if you have to repeat that process, you know, if you're a 50,000-hire-a-year organization, 1 minute on 1 step, that adds up.

That adds up a lot.

It adds up fast. Just like, just like your pennies do, right? Even pay-per-click campaigns and programmatic ad buying, you know, figuring out how to shave down 2 cents off of every click, that adds up at the end of the year to some significant amounts. It doesn't feel like it while we're doing it, but it adds up. And you've always gotta think in terms of scale like that when you're at a big organization with a lot of hires.

Yeah. So what else? We got curiosity. So we got creativity combined with laziness, proficiency, uh, technical aptitude, technical tendency, and even that, the willingness to learn, right?

I think, you know, when we started sourcing, being able to write a Boolean string was a litmus test. If you can't write a Boolean string, get out of this chair because you're not interviewing anymore. But now there's so many shortcuts and apps that you can just, you know, you put in the two keywords you're looking for and the Boolean string will write itself.

So they don't have to be a technical wizard, but they need to be comfortable with technology.

Yeah. You know, that the other thing I enjoy in good sourcers is being able to spin multiple plates at the same time. Like a circus performer, right?

Okay, we multitasking.

Yeah, we all do this every day, um, you know, a million different things going on all at once, and you've got to be able to prioritize.

But it's priority, it's prioritization, right? So like, do you, do you believe that, that there is such a thing as multitasking? I don't. I think it's, I think it's rapid linear tasking.

That, that's a great term. Yeah, you know, multitasking just means, you know, we're busy. It's being able to control the things going on and control when it happens and how it happens sometimes and the order it happens that is really important because some things require a great deal of intensity and energy, right? You just can't get around it sometimes. So you've got to be able to focus. Yeah, time management would be a great one, right? Can you arrange things so that you can apply the right amount of pressure and energy on the things that need it, right? It's, uh, you know, even decision-making in the heat of the moment, right?

Knowing tactical boots-on-the-ground decision-making.

Do I need to decide this right now, or can I wait, or can I right, later and how much effort, you know, that, that type of stuff. I don't, I don't think there's any difference, at least in just in my opinion, you know, introvert versus extrovert in the world of recruiting, because I think they both have their strengths that play well into the world of, into the world of sourcing. You know, it's, it's, uh, it's weird. There's no barrier of entry in the sourcing or TA.

Not really, no. Just the, just the time, the learning, right? Um, you don't have to have the, these, these hard qualifications, but you have to be willing to put in the effort and learn it.

Somebody wants to, you know, really just lean forward. If you're willing to lean forward Somebody out there is probably willing to hire you in that role because who doesn't want a go-getter? One of the things I think that we as an industry can probably do better, better with, right? I think back to all the interviews I've done to hire sourcers before. One of the things I was focused on is career pathing, right? Where do they go? Yeah. And that's a question of every candidate that's really motivated is All right, what is it? What do I do 2 years from now? What does a career path look like?

And I think what's different between a sourcer and a recruiter, at least in the mindset, at least when you're looking at someone, you know, I, I was an entry-level recruiter once, believe it or not, so are you. And the difference in the mindset of a person who would, would become a career recruiter versus person who become a career sourcer is the the interest in problem solving versus the interest in people. If people are more interesting, relationships, building relationships, if that's more interesting, that tends to be more on the recruiting side. If the puzzle is more interesting, that tends to be more on the sourcing side. So someone who's got that puzzle mentality and becomes a sourcer goes into that space. They may not necessarily want to be a recruiter.

Yeah, and you know, I think that's something that is really important to point out, right? Because I guess in the grand scheme of industry, sourcing is still a baby, right?

That's true, it's only years old.

Yeah, kind of like, you know, humans are, are still just a speck of dust in the, in the universe. Sourcing is still a baby in terms of maturity of our career paths and our place in corporate America, we're evolving yet. And years ago, right, it was you're hired as a junior sourcer, you turn into a senior sourcer. Then if you work really hard, you could get promoted to recruiting coordinator.

Now, not so much anymore.

Yeah. Now we understand that the technical acumen that goes with that high-level sourcer And the career progression is, is not changing lanes to a different task entirely. It's, it's growing that task to get even better at it. Um, you know, they, they diverge. They both fall into that TA umbrella, but recruiting and sourcing, very different, very different functions.

Um, yeah, it might, it might, it might be— you're right, it might be in the baby infancy stage still, but, um, If you go on, uh, just on LinkedIn, you'll see that there are 20,000 people that have that job title, and that's just sourcer. You know, there's a bunch of other— oh yeah, you know, job, job titles and names for the, for the role. So it's, it's definitely— yeah, it's new, but it's happening.

We're, we're still not universally defined.

No.

By what we do, the way an accountant is, or, or some other, you know, well-established career track and title.

Um, yeah, it's kind of like, uh, like product manager, or, you know, it's— product manager is so many different things. It's, it's also a pretty new job title, right? There weren't product managers 100 years ago in the, in the rise of the manufacturing industrial revolution. Um, so that's— it's similar to that. It's like a— there's different ways of describing product manager.

Yeah, we are, uh, You know, that flexibility, that adaptability, that's how you stick around in the industry for a long time and get to do new things and grow yourself, right? I'm sure you've had the same moments I've had where I could sit and stare at a screen and a problem, and it's not until I throw away everything I believe to be true and just throw it away and then look at the problem again and go, okay, this is easy to solve.

Because I was shifting your paradigm. Yeah, yeah.

I was stuck in preconceived ideas of what is and isn't possible and what does and doesn't matter, and I was boxing myself in.

And so that adds to our— so that's, so that's tenacity, that's grit. That's another, you know, we'll add to the curiosity, the creativity, the technical aptitude, the, the discomfort with the status quo, time management, prioritization, and tenacity or grit. Yeah, we've added to the list of core competencies. Yeah.

Right. We solve the sourcing, the sourcing issue right now of where to source candidates. And, and, you know, the great thing and the worst thing about that is all everything we just talked about is found in every industry.

Right.

You can't define it by, you know, salespeople at X company have this. So that's a great place to hire.

It's just, yeah, some salespeople have it, some salespeople don't. Exactly. Yeah. That's why I was saying I found somebody that was a college professor that had it. It's not a unique set of skills, but it is a set of skills that only exists in some people. So, you know, not everyone has it, but in every industry, I think you can find them. That's a pretty good point.

It's, it's, yeah, it's an individual. They just happen to be in that industry. They could have been in any other industry and they still have those same traits and behaviors. So yeah, it's, it's neat. I think that's kind of the fun thing about looking to hire sourcers is you never know where you're going to find them. You just don't know. And it forces us to be at the top of our game when we're looking for talent, right? We've got to really know what we what we want so that when we do accidentally stumble across it, boom, there it is. I mean, even my own entry into the world of recruiting, like everybody else, accidental. I was a math and engineering guy while I was in the Navy. You know, I was running around the engineering department on the ship figuring out, you know, how does the engine work? Then I got stuck on a a recruiting duty tour.

Oh yeah, right.

And I, you know, 6 months in, I was like, this is the greatest thing on the planet. Oh my gosh, I love this. Uh, and learned everything.

That doesn't happen to everybody, by the way. I know some people that, that, you know, there is a tour and they're like, get me out of here.

It's pure bliss or it's pure misery, right?

Exactly.

And a lot of it, right, there's a number of factors that, that go into that, but I fell in love with it. Just the process of it and the impact you have every day. And you get to see what happens in that next chapter of someone's life. And I just, I enjoyed it tremendously. And then I found out that that was a real job in corporate America, right? And I was gone.

Hey, I could get paid to do this. Yeah, more. I could get paid more to do this. So, all right, so we found the, we found the people that are going to be sourcers. Now, how are we going to hold them accountable? How do we measure them? And you and I also agree on this one thing, which is very often leaders forget about the sourcing organization's accountability, right? There's a lot of talk about how do you measure a sourcer, the metrics that you use to measure a sourcer, but there's not enough, I think, conversation around the sourcing org. How do you know if a group of sourcers, a team, is productive? Why don't we start with that? What's the difference between them and how would you separate them and what would you do for the team that's different for the recruiter, the individual?

The analogy I always use is a football team versus a track team, right?

Okay.

Team has 11 players on it that are all working in unison They all have their own role and own task of who to block and who to tackle and who to catch. They all do their own job, but they function as one unit. Versus like a track team, it's got 11 people, but each one goes out and does their event. There is no influence from the rest of their team on their performance. And then they all just total up, you know, okay, I got first, I got second in this, and they total the points up and that determines the team victory is combination of everybody's individual performances over the day versus the football team that has to function all as one, all at the same time. And yeah, we get— I think a lot of times I've been part of this growing up in sourcing, right? We are so focused on what each individual sourcer is doing that the— for the organization to have it A good result means every sourcer had to have a great day and, or, or some sourcer knocked that out of the park that week that lifted everybody else up. We've got to think about the health of the organ— our entire team and how we impact the entire recruiting team and the rest of the business. One of the ways it means being closely tied together with the recruiting side of the house. One of the things that I, you know, every organization is different. We have to use the measurements that work for ourselves and the environment we're in.

Right. So how you're connecting to the strategic vision and the direction of the company, right? Of course.

One of my favorites to look at is time to fill.

And the individual or for the team?

For the, not for the individual, for the team. Okay, and not just our portion of it, but it's something that, right, if— and it's not, it's not that there is a number, a number of days that is good and a number of days that is bad. There is no, oh, you know, we were at 40 days time to fill a year ago and we're at 30 days of time to fill now. That number by itself means kind of nothing. It's the change month to month that I keep an eye on, right? If I— if last month I was at 40 days time to fill across the organization, and this month we're at 60 days time to fill across the organization, that is my canary in the coal mine, right?

You just— so you just stumbled on something that I have, I have been trying to communicate to people for I don't know how long. It gives me a migraine, and it's the difference between measurement and a metric. Everybody says metrics, but what they mean is measurement. The time to fill— I'm sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Time to fill is not a metric. Time to fill is a measure. How fast your car is going is not a metric. How fast your car is going is a measurement of speed. The time to fill is a measurement of speed. Right? The metric is the change in the measurement, the delta between the two. Take two measurements and the difference is— that's the metric. And everybody gets it wrong. It's just such a pet peeve.

If it's on an Excel sheet, it's a metric, right?

Oh man, if you can measure it, it's a measure. If you can't measure it and you have to have two measurements to use it, it's a metric.

Yeah, it's, it's that speed is a measurement.

Acceleration is a metric.

Oh, oh, we're getting into physics. I love it.

Well, because, right, I mean, that's— I know that's your thing, and I, I was a physics scholar early on before I went into computer science. But yeah, it's the difference between the speed is instantaneously, right, we take a reading on the speed right now. Time to fill is an instant reading of what is time to fill right now. And what you're saying is that's not as important as what was it last month, And what are we going to— where are we heading? Like, are we the same as last month or different? And what does that mean? And why is it different?

Caused it, right?

That's right.

We see a huge increase, right? We can't even solution what caused it just seeing the increase. But what it does is, right, we're talking about hundreds, if not thousands of hires a month. So there's that, you know, there's weight to that. To that number, right? We know it's not just, well, one person had, you know, one rec that took a year to fill. There's weight, there's enough mass there to get an accurate reading when you're talking about hundreds and thousands of hires a month. So if my time to fill jumps up 10 days, that just tells me something is— that gives me reason to start digging, right? I know something, something is happening What's causing this? Now I have a reason to go find out. We're all, we're all busy. We've all got a lot of stuff going on. We're all loaded with work. If time to fill is the same month over month, that tells me things are working as normal and as expected. Why? I can't create hours in the day. Why am I going to go running around looking to figure out what's wrong when there's nothing wrong? So yeah, that's my canary in the coal mine.

And I know a lot of people out there don't like time to fill and it's an irrelevant measurement, but it's, it's that if you just use, if you just use this average and the average time, people don't like it because the average time to fill doesn't tell you anything. If you take the average time to fill across an entire year, it's, it's sort of a static number. And in reality, if you, if you plotted a scatter chart of actual time to fills, you took, you took every rec in the organization, you got 5,000 positions that you filled and you put it on a— you plot it on a scatter chart, you're gonna find a whole collection of dots somewhere here in the 0 to 7 days because there's all these reqs that got opened and closed the same day because you had a candidate you literally put into the req. Then you have all these reqs where you, you know, posted the job and there was a referral internally. So all these little collections of 7-day or less time to fill. Then there's going to be a few scattered throughout, and then there's going to be some in the 60s, 80, 90-day But the average is 45, which means there are no RECs that are being filled in 45 days. They're either being filled in 7 or less days or 90 or more days. So 45-day time to fill means nothing.

Yeah, it's, uh, you know, yeah, I would use that. And month by month, if there's a change, find out why.

And it did go up, why did it go down, why?

And it's interesting because you find out, right, you're forced to find out the values your inputs into your formula to come up with it. Right. So you can find out that, you know what, the US mail shut down and drug tests were not being delivered to, you know, or county courthouses were shut down during the pandemic. Background checks can't be run.

Right.

That causes a delay in hiring. So just seeing a change in time to fill, it doesn't automatically mean that, well, sourcing did a bad job by not getting us enough enough candidates, or recruiting did a bad job not screening candidates fast enough. Um, we've got to find out the reason why and be able— and we can justify it, you know. Yeah, then we—

it's like going to the doctor. You go to the doctor, one of the first things that they're going to do is take your blood pressure. They're going to listen to your heart and they're going to take your blood pressure. If you have a blood pressure of whatever over whatever, that right there doesn't diagnose anything that you have. But if it's high or if it's low, then they start asking other questions. Okay, it's high, let's see what else is there. Is there a high this? Let's do some blood tests. It's not like the heart rate or the blood pressure instantly says this is the problem. Same thing with the time to fill. So yeah, absolutely right. I think that everybody needs to know that. What else besides time to fill, what else do you use as a way to measure the health of the— and I'm asking this because time to fill can be an individual metric as well. So what else do you use as a team measure that is not an individual?

It depends on the organization and in how they do things. You know, another one I look at is— I'll throw this one out there, right? Strip away the names of the sourcers. Don't even look at who the individual is on there, and instead look at your results based on the line of business that they're supporting. Some way to differentiate, right? Look at it from the business perspective. You could have You know, you support 4 different lines of business or 4 different job families in your efforts. Take away the source name and just look at the results for the business unit. You can look at— I always look at speed and quality, right? And we can lay out the metric of did we submit 4 candidates within 7 days of when we got the request? And that's a yes or no. And did— how many times did we do that to get an overall percentage? But don't look at it as sourcer A did this, sourcer B did this, and then if everybody's over 70%, then we all won as a team. Look at it from the business perspective. Ignore who the sourcer was because that'll tell you if you have the right amount of resources on your team, right? If one— or there's other challenges that are in the way of your sourcers performing. Performance, right? If one line of business is significantly lower than another line, now, okay, what's causing that, right? Are, are we not— are our positions not attractive enough to the candidate, or is the sourcer not performing what they need to do for that line of business? For that line of business?

Yeah, compared to another line of business. But what about the jobs question? Yeah, I get what you're saying, but what about the jobs, the type of function, right? Like one line of business may be in hardware and another line of business may be in services, just thinking out loud, right?

Yeah, right. IT is its own entity all by itself in a lot of cases because it's different than every other industry out there, right? So that's why you've got to set appropriate, appropriate expectations, right?

So lines of businesses that are comparable. Yeah, not too far apart from each other.

Yeah, they shouldn't be too far apart from each other, but, you know, it's got to be able to support that line of businesses, their operations, right? Did we get what we said we were going to get? Not, you know, you opened X-Rex and, and we got Y candidates on them? Did we do it fast enough? And it, you know, let's come out and say it doesn't matter if it was one sourcer doing that or if it was 4 sourcers that it took to do that. What the business cares about is, did you get me the candidates that I need to keep running my business? So, so, you know, when you report out to the business, you're reporting at that level of my organization is supporting your organization. The business probably doesn't need to worry too much about whether you have 3 sourcers or 4 sourcers supporting them.

Yeah, right. They're not gonna—

did you get me what I need to keep running?

Outcomes, right? It's outcomes. It's the results, right?

Yeah. From there, then you can take a step further down and peel the onion back another layer. And your sourcing manager is going to be right there on top of the sourcers. Are you, you know, where's your individual performance? Show me your individual performance because that, you know, it all adds up to the whole. But yeah, from an organizational level, I like to look at it at the business line.

Yeah, that's interesting. Much bigger with a line. Yeah, with aligned business lines, as long as there's that. All right. So how about let's talk about the individual sourcer. What do you look at? And I would challenge you to say, what do you look at that's going to help the sourcer get better? Because there's measurements and metrics that just, you know, that just give you a rating. You're an A or a B, whatever. Like, I'm not interested in that. I want to know what's going to help that sourcer get better at what they do.

Hardcore numbers. So individual sourcer speed and accuracy at submittal, right? I don't like to see sourcer's performance tied to whether or not the candidate got hired.

I think that is highly unfair to the sourcer, and it's doubling up because as a recruiter, you know, you're measuring two people for the same outcome.

Yeah, right. And, you know, it's, we have such an old school line of thinking in recruiting where your, your worth and value and performance is measured on how many hires you made, right? It doesn't matter who you are in recruiting, that's how we judge our worth. And I think we've evolved beyond that, but we're still hanging on that, right? How many hires did you make this month? There's so many people involved in the hiring process. That it's hard to say.

It's not anyone. Yeah. It's like measuring the hiring manager for how many hires you made this month.

Yeah. And, you know, and really it's, you know, it's that credit for finding the candidate that really causes some of the issues. You know, years ago, I was in an organization where we did that. If you found the candidate, you got credit for it. What that credit got you at the end of the month, I'll never know. But what you had was sourcers going out and looking for candidates, submitting them to the recruiters, recruiters going out and looking for the candidates, because you only get credit for the hire if you found the candidate. So recruiters would go look for their own candidates, push the sourcers off to the side because I want mine to get hired so I get credit. Well, the sourcers realized this was going on, so the sourcers would then leapfrog the recruiter to get to the hiring manager to say, here's my candidates. Hire managers say, recruiter, why do I need you? Because—

so why do we— yeah, exactly.

So we now have two recruiters, competition, and yes, I mean, the two people that were supposed to function together as one and share the work, uh, and each do their part in the process. Um, so getting back to, right, measuring a sourcer, it's—

yeah, speed and accuracy, you said.

Yeah. Did you get enough candidates in the right amount of time. And right from there, and you know, another good indicator is did, did your candidates that you submit get picked up to interview? And this is where I always pause and say 100% is not a good answer there, or not a good result.

And also, did they get picked up to interview with any position?

Yeah, that too. 100% rate, we all, hey, I had 100% submittal, you know, to interview acceptance rate. That's awesome. Yeah, it's good. But it also says that you didn't push the envelope at all. You didn't find a candidate that maybe didn't have all 92 different validity points that the hiring manager said they wanted, and you didn't take a chance on that up-and-coming candidate, that candidate from a diverse area that maybe doesn't read the same as what was expected but can, but can do the work and do it well, that you took a shot, right? You said, hey, here's the, here's 3 that fit what you asked for. Originally, yeah, on these, I found this one more that it doesn't look like the other three, but I talked to them, um, I checked everything out, they're gonna be just as perfect as the other three, right? And then, you know, and they say, you know what, I like the— I like the three, I don't like this one, I'm gonna reject this one. That's not a bad result. That gives you a 75% acceptance rate though. And we look at that and say, ah, you know, it's not 100%, maybe they're not doing right. It means—

actually, I like 75% is actually— that's my bar, right? So that's how I measure my sourcers, is a 75% accept rate is— that's, that's good. That means you're doing great. I mean, you know, if you, if you're at 70 or 65, it's not like you're at risk of losing your job or anything, but 75 is good. I'm not expecting much more than 80%, because of that. I mean, it's not—

Yeah, right. We want to encourage the sourcers to take a chance and push things, right? Find new talent. We are living in a world that celebrates diversity like it never has before. And to do that means things aren't always gonna be 100%, right? That's neither good nor bad. That's the way it should be.

That's actually—

Right.

That difference is diversity. Diversity is, yeah, is celebrating the differences, but celebrating the differences, but focusing on what brings us together, right? So two different people, two different backgrounds, perspectives, points of view with the same objective.

Yeah, it's, uh, you know, it's sometimes in sourcing, I've fallen in this trap, uh, many times, right? We try and pinpoint the hire at the point of sourcing. And we pass on candidates because we're worried and focused on the one that we think is going to get hired and then wait for them to get through the interview gauntlet before we worry or even consider looking at more candidates. That there's somewhere along the way, I fell into this many times over, right, that, that quest for perfection, right? If I have a 1-to-1 ratio, I'm an awesome sourcer. So how do I get a 1-to-1 ratio? I only submit one candidate, right? That one gets hired. Let's just—

that's math. That's, that's a really good point. So a good friend of mine, AJ, who works with me here, you know, uses the, the phrase that perfect is the enemy of efficient. Yeah. Oh yeah. You know, focusing on like that perfect match means you didn't submit 5 candidates. To translate what you're saying, but you know, in her own words, perfect is the enemy of efficient, because sometimes you just start spending way more time on getting it right. And sometimes getting it good and getting it good enough, you know, gets the work done and you can move on to something else.

As you said before, right amount of technology, the right amount of pressure. To get the job done.

Sometimes you do need perfect, but, but sometimes good enough is good enough to move on to the next thing, and it's not something that requires, you know, 100%, um, whatever, you know, or zero tolerance for error. Not everything— we live in this Six Sigma world— not everything, not everything has to be Six Sigma, right? Some things can be, yeah, you know, good enough because they're not affecting other stuff that, that would be, you know, clogging up the process. So, um, and then you're— what you— to add what you're saying is that, you know, to add to that, as you're saying, we're also probably ignoring diversity if we're focusing on, you know, such a narrow definition of the perfect candidate.

It's, uh, you know, it's part of that, uh, we don't want to be just an order taker, right? We've got to know our business and know what good looks like so that we can go find it. And sometimes it comes in a different shape or flavor. It's, it's still good, right? It met that definition of good. It doesn't matter what it, what it looks like, how tall or short it is, anything. Um, it's good, and that's what we want. We want good. So, so let's, let's take it. Uh, you know, even getting into the— I'll segue into where we source from.

Okay.

Right. So often we're, we're focused on, it has to be a passive candidate. I only want to see a passive candidate for this role. I don't want to see an active job seeker for this role. That's something that I've, I've read and seen throughout life a couple of times, but really why? And, or, or that the candidate only counts if if we found it with a very fancy Boolean string, right?

Right, shiny object syndrome, sort of, sort of like, yeah. Yeah.

The candidates that applied, not worried. I need to go find one. There was always, you know, there was an old cartoon about where we need to hire 100 people, where are we going to find them? And somebody says, you know, why don't we hire the 100 that are standing in line for the job right now? And they throw the guy out the window for his outlandish idea. Uh, you know, simple is, simple is effective. Simple is good. Um, but you know, I think we need to be a little bit more agnostic, uh, in our sourcing from, from the, and help our sourcers perform better. Right. We've got, we invest millions of dollars in employer branding campaigns, the best place to work, to attract the best talent. And when we do attract them, right, they're attracted organically a lot of times because of that. They're going on our careers page without even— without a sourcer reaching out to them.

And then we're not considering them because they're active candidates is what you're saying.

Yeah. So yeah. Right. Is that part of sourcing? Some organizations, yes. Some no. Right. I enjoy the idea that sourcing covers the entire, entire candidate pool, right? Doesn't matter where they came from. We're sourcing candidates. And if we can set up, uh, you know, work with employer branding to drive organic traffic, if we can work on job distribution and media orchestration to constantly be out there and attract talent while we're not at work, while we don't have our fingers on the keyboard, while we're home enjoying time with family, but we're still driving candidates to the sites by being the job they see when they decide it's time to go look for a job and they apply on their own. You know, to me, that's still part of the grander scheme of sourcing, and we shouldn't overlook that, right? Our human source—

that's what you talk about, you know, you call that scale or scalable or scaled sourcing. Right? Because there's the, as you mentioned before to me, the individual find that one perfect candidate or find that one, you know, maybe it's not the perfect candidate, but find somebody that can do this job and there's only 12 people in the world that can do it. There's always that kind of sourcing, but you're talking about the type of sourcing that increases applications and it's not, they're maybe not necessarily passive candidates, per se, but we are having an impact in applicant flow, right? So that's— it's, it's still sourcing. You're, you're finding people, you're somehow engaging them, and you're directing them, and you're directing that traffic. It's still sourcing. Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, it's, uh, you know, kind of like employee referrals, right? It's timing. Timing is the— timing is everything in the world of hiring. Right. Probably even more than, than perfect fit between candidate and job, timing comes down to a lot of stuff.

Yeah, right. I'm not available right now, but then it happens to be that they're available and somebody else hires them.

And so yeah, the job isn't open anymore. It comes down to timing, you know, so getting them in the system and when we try to differentiate, well, you know, they found this candidate on LinkedIn versus they found this candidate in the ATS already. Um, there's some great data and insights to be gained from that at a grander scale. But when it comes down to that individual candidate on that individual position, I don't think it's as important as so many other points that can be made around who to hire, where they come from. Today, today's age of technology, I've probably got 7 to 12 different touchpoints with your organization before I've even applied. Can I really tie it to just one source?

One source of hire? Yeah. That's been that way for a while though. But yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, and from the sourcing side of the house, right? This is where I pick up— I take insights and wisdom from outside of sourcing and bring bringing it here, right? Because I went to job board X and didn't find a candidate for my job, it doesn't mean in the future that job board X is pointless to go to, that I shouldn't go waste time there because I didn't find somebody that one time, or the candidate I didn't find said no to our offer. So I'm never going to use that job board again. Um, I think that's That's not the smart way.

If that was true, then nobody would use LinkedIn.

Yeah, it's, you know, we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket and we don't want to close off any doors when it comes to sourcing because, you know, it's the methodology, right? The step-by-step. Is the job description good? Is the job title good? Do we get it out to the locations to be seen? Track that step by step.

And that changes.

And then, yeah, right. And sometimes, hey, sometimes job board goes belly up and it doesn't exist anymore.

Great.

We can finally take it off our list. Um, you know, or the difference of do we post it manually or do we set up XML feeds? Um, even though maybe it's just this one job, we need to think about scale. It's easier to just do the XML feed and get every job up there. Rather than just this one job up there. Yeah, pick up free stuff.

But you know what though, I mean, so, you know, I brought, I brought LinkedIn into the world of recruiting, right? When I was first on LinkedIn, it was 2004. I was, you know, one of the first 50,000 or some odd people like that. There was— it wasn't being used for recruiting, and I basically dragged them into recruiting kicking and screaming. The 2 of the 3 founders I was, you know, messaging with, um, Constantine and Patrick, and I'm like, you guys got to get in this industry. This is like, there's recruiters are starving for this kind of like— and they're like, no, no, no, no, no. A couple years went by and finally I dragged them into the industry kicking and screaming, and I introduced the world of recruiting to LinkedIn and LinkedIn to the world of recruiting. And they'll fast forward to today, and just to play to what you're saying, The mentality of recruiters is people are asking me, what's going to replace LinkedIn? What's next? And so if you think about the question that they're saying is, what's the one channel that's going to replace the one channel? They're not asking what else is there besides LinkedIn. Like, the question isn't, hey, Shelly, what else is there besides LinkedIn? The question is, what will replace LinkedIn? And it's like, wow, folks, you know, nothing, nothing is going to replace LinkedIn. Lots of things are going to replace LinkedIn. It's like, you know, and even today it's not just one source. I remember when, you know, you and I were rookies and we're working off of Hot Jobs and Computer Jobs, you know, that we still had, we had NetTemps. I had like 5 or 6 job boards that I paid for. I never had just one job board, not even when Monster was it. I still use Dice and, you know, 5 other job boards. And, you know, so it's the mentality of, hey, what's going to replace the one place we go to? If you're only fishing in one pond, eventually you're going to overfish that pond.

Yeah, you're all— you're already on the endangered species list, um, because you're fishing in the back.

Yeah, right, right.

Because so is everybody else. And, you know, so then, you know, really what it comes down to, what makes you different? But where are you getting new candidates, right? As big as LinkedIn is.

Instead of finding another pond for yourself, you want to go to the same pond everybody else is going to go to and overfish that one. It's— yeah, yeah, hive mentality, I guess. I don't know.

Yeah, that's cool. You know, I found a great hire on this job board, so— sorry, my obnoxious ringtone went off there.

No worries.

I found a candidate on this job board with this Boolean string. So that's what I need to use for every job just like this in the future. And maybe it works and maybe it doesn't, but you don't want to isolate yourself like that and box yourself in. Even just Boolean searches themselves, right? It's not a— you don't want it to be perfect on the first try. You can't ever really write the perfect string and fire that one bullet and get the one candidate. It's gotta be that living, breathing, constantly adjusting string because you're gonna— something that I would teach new sourcers in our team, right? You start broad and just like our candidate funnel, start broad and just slowly narrow it down.

Whittle it down. It's a lot harder to go the other way. It's a lot harder.

Don't even think about reaching out to candidates in the first 3 layers of that search. Wait until you get it down to a manageable amount, but you can see what causes your population to whittle away, or what employer, or what experience grows or shrinks your pool of available sample set.

Yep. And my number I always talk about is, uh, 300. And that's because if you look at 300 results and you have a quality of about 50%. So if, if half of the 300 results are, are viable in some way, shape, or form, that's still 150 leads. So, you know, you can take 150 leads, reach out to some of them, and hopefully end up with 50 or 40 people that, that you can connect with. So 300 is a pretty good number, much more than that. And, you know, also incidentally, when you're doing searches on Google 299 is the maximum. They won't show you a 300th page. So there's also that, but that happened after I started talking about 300.

So you're saying Siri and Alexa and Google are listening and saying, let's mess with Shelly, right?

Yeah, paranoia. Only the paranoid survive, right?

It's, uh, but you know, that's— this is what makes sourcing so much fun, right? Yeah, do take actions on incomplete sets of information.

That's right, a lot of ambiguity. That's a big part of it.

It's going to change tomorrow.

All right, we're adding to the list: comfortable with ambiguity. Now I've got my 7.

Yeah, it's, you know, it's— yeah, right. You want it— you want to find it. Who's going to be the good sourcer?

Like, yeah, they got to have curiosity. This is a great way to wrap up, by the way. So who's going to be a good sourcer in the other room?

Into the fire. Hire them. If they run away from the fire, let them keep running, right?

Yeah. So, okay, so curiosity, creativity, um, technical comfort, right? Aptitude, comfort, whatever. Time management/prioritization, um, and then comfortable with ambiguity. They can make decisions and take actions based on incomplete information. I think we have our, we have our 7 core competencies that will allow you to hire someone that could become a sourcer despite whether or not they're doing that job now. I love it. That's a really good way to summarize our talk for today. Yeah, we did it.

We did it.

Yeah. Well, thanks so much for being on the show, Dan. Really a pleasure to have you here. I hope we can do this again when you are able to reveal your employer someday. Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Me too, right?

It's fun. New organization. New learnings, uh, you know, just reconfirming all over again that the only thing constant is change, right?

Yep. So let's revisit in a few months, uh, you know, yeah, 6 months or so, something like that, and we'll have you back on the show. Awesome.

Well, hey, thank you very much, Shelly. I loved it. And everybody watching, go Navy, beat Army.

All right, bye, Dan. Have a good weekend, everybody.

Bye-bye.