David Marr Live on Shally's Alley

You ready for another Shally's Alley? It is Friday, of course, May 12th, and today as our special guest we have David Marr. David and I go way back to, uh, well, let's just say we've been around for a while and, uh, have crossed paths a few times, worked for some of the same companies. David's background is interesting. He, uh, has worked in some confidential type roles. He was at Facebook for a while. He worked at Indeed for many years, 5 years or something like that. And that Indeed, he was one of those people that was like contributing to the sourcing side of it. So sourcing strategy— there's not a lot of sourcing strategists out there. A lot of people are just sourcing. Now that it's just sourcing, but you know, one thing is the day-to-day sourcing and sourcing strategy is a little bit different. Same thing with recruiting, right? Day-to-day recruiting is different than recruitment strategy. So David's got a little bit of, uh, experience in that. I think when we met, you were at Walgreens, is that right?

Yes, that's correct.

Long, long time ago. Wow, those were the memories. Yeah, I remember at Walgreens, I, I had to interview— I didn't have to, I wanted to. Part of my, part of my consulting engagement was to interview the different stakeholders like the recruiters and the hiring managers to try to identify where there might be some gaps in the recruiting process. And one of the questions that I asked all of the recruiters was, who's got the best sourcing chops? And everybody pointed to David Marr except for David Marr. David pointed to somebody else, and I thought, that's pretty cool. So, um, Definitely tell us a little bit about what sourcing strategy means as opposed to, you know, the job of day-to-day sourcing.

Sure. Uh, so I think sourcing is very robust. There's a lot of different ways it can be leveraged. But when I say source, when I think of sourcing strategy, I think of the research and the different potential sourcing approaches, the strategies that you can, you can try to source for different skill sets. So in some cases, you'll do initial research and identify, you know, a conference that the people that you're recruiting for— sorry, sourcing for— congregate at. So that might be a strategy. You may find a forum that they talk shop on. It might be another strategy that you basically develop over time. And then as you come up with an X number of strategies, you basically execute them all. And then you measure the, you know, the results of those and then kind of basically create a knowledge base that when future roles on that team come about, you know, you and/or your sourcing team and/or recruiting partners have a knowledge base that basically grows over time. So it's basically building that knowledge base from a foundational level and then adding to it and continuing to grow it so that way it adds more value and you're not starting from scratch. You know, that could include like things that you find like job boards, you know, looking at where your most recent hires came from, where people that have left your company that work in those roles, where did they go to, where did, what companies did they work for before they joined your organization. It kind of, look, again, just capturing a lot of different data points that you can then utilize for future decisions, strategies, or future strategies?

Yeah, so for, you know, I lecture on this subject a lot. People tend to kind of mix up strategy with tactics. They feel like, or they use the term strategy, like for example sourcing strategy, when what they really mean is sourcing tactics or perhaps even sourcing operations. So I always like to clarify when people talk about strategy, I like to clarify what those three sort of, you know, strategy, tactics, and operations mean. Strategy is the big picture. Um, the best way to think of it is strategy is the why or the where. So why are we going there and where are we going? Where are we going is our strategy. How we're going to get there is our tactics. And cranking the wheel, turning the wheel, or taking the steps is operations. So where are we going? Where are we going to source? What you just described. Where do we source these candidates? Where do we go to source these candidates? How do we source these candidates is the tactics. And that's what you're saying is the strategy informs the tactics. You put together a knowledge base or a spreadsheet or a cheat sheet or whatever. Those are the tactics, the playbook, the guidebook. That's the plan. That's what people call the strat— the sourcing strategy is actually a sourcing plan, right? And then the operations is step by step going through all of that. And so, you know, folks sometimes have a hard time with those or just it gets confused, you know, for that. So why and where, right, versus short-term focused on the, on the business of, you know, the process, right? And then operational is literally day to day.

Yeah, agreed. Yeah. And I think kind of all stems down from what the company's mission is and what the objectives are that, you know, the company is trying to work on at that period of time. And then basically taking that information and breaking it down into, you know, your space that you're working on.

The outcomes, what happened.

Exactly.

Is this working? What can we do more of? What should we do less of? Yeah. So we were chatting before, you know, we've had many conversations over the years. In fact, I called you out of the blue a couple of days ago. But we were talking about the economy and I found out recently you hit the road and you're available for hire. So too bad I don't have that job opening anymore that I had before, otherwise I'd be picking you up. But for those of you that are looking to hire a very talented sourcer who can also do sourcing strategy, please reach out to David. Here's his LinkedIn profile. But the point I was trying to make is when we talked for a little bit, you were explaining that there's— you have this take on the economy right now being better in some ways. And, you know, a lot of people are saying the economy is worse, it's bad. So I really appreciate the fact that there are some ways in which things are better. Yes, things in some ways are also not better. But I kind of like to think about, you know, the positive. We talk about the negative too much. So can you tell us what is better about today in, in the economy? What is better about this environment?

Sure. So if I was going to compare it to 2008, which is the previous time that, um, I experienced a similar situation, there was literally just not recruiting and sourcing job postings. Uh, they were very hard to come by, period. Uh, in this type of— in this economy, this time, there are openings And there are still good companies, you know, or jobs that excite me that I'm seeing. I am seeing a disconnect with some of the salary ranges and things, the way that jobs are being advertised.

Yeah, I'll get to that a little bit. That's interesting. Yeah, a little bit more about that.

Yeah, sure. So for example, they'll say that they're looking for a senior person, and then in the job description it'll say 1 year experience. The other thing I'm seeing is there are companies that have sourcing job titles or job postings with the title that are sourcing roles. And then, and some of them treat them like junior recruiters.

Yeah.

Um, which I think is a stigma that still exists because there are sourcers that, that want to become recruiters, and in those situations that type of arrangement makes sense. But to think of sourcers as, you know, junior recruiters, I think is a mistake. And then on the flip side, you also have a lot of recruiter postings that when you read through it, they really want a sourcer. They're just using the term recruiter. So there's a lot of ambiguity in the titling.

Yeah. Or I think mixing it up. Yeah.

Well, I think it's— there's a lot of corporate speak at different environments. They always try to come up with fancy, you know, snancy titles. You know, it's like, for example, to differentiate. Sure. Like senior acquisition talent. Sorry, senior town acquisition partner, you know, instead of researcher scout. Yeah. Or, you know, purple, uh, purple squirrel hunter, uh, you know, ninja unicorn, all those types of titles that are kind of dated and, you know, send the wrong message, you know. So I try to take it like what I'm trying to do as I'm doing my own job search is I'm trying to help my former colleagues from Indeed and the greater community that have been impacted by the waves of you know, the layoffs, is basically sharing the leads that I'm coming across in a, you know, I see that vetted process where people can quickly go through and respond. But even, even though I'm trying to do it every few days, um, in some cases the positions are posted and they're shut down or taken down in hours. So, um, you know, obviously everybody's on LinkedIn.

So, so can you tell us about the jobs before they get posted?

Uh, in some cases, but that, that takes a lot of networking. So I'm trying to spend most of my time networking and, you know, a small portion of my time, you know, on job searching. And then, of course, preparing for interviews is another major part of what I'm trying to do right now.

Yeah, I hear you. So a little— I think a little bit of that confusion, you know, is they— they— the job describes the function of a recruiter. But the skills of a sourcer are in there. So essentially, they want a sourcing recruiter, or a recruiter that can source, which kind of goes back to the beginning, you know, a long, long time, many, many years ago when I started talking about this whole industry. And, you know, when I started, um, telling people about the possibility that sourcing can be a dedicated job, I always got the feedback, and I'm talking about, you know, '97, '98, right? I always got the feedback, well, shouldn't that be something a sourcer does? And that's right, if you're the solo recruiter— I mean, the recruiter, sorry— this shouldn't sourcing be something the recruiter does? And my response was always, if you're the solo recruiter, absolutely you need to do this. If you are, you know, a small team and you, you can't have a headcount dedicated to exclusively sourcing, then yeah, this is the job of the recruiter. But when you have the room to specialize, that's where it breaks out. So it seems like we're going backwards to the, shouldn't a recruiter be able to do this because we have fewer headcount? In other words, we don't have the headcount for sourcers. So we're all, we're trying to like, we used to have two headcount, a sourcer and a recruiter. Now we only have one. So it's kind of like, well, let's put both recs together into one rec and, you know, Yeah, that happens with every job in the world where they, they're trying to hire an engineer that can do backend and frontend, so they put, put the position as full stack, and backend engineers apply, frontend engineers apply, but not very many full stack engineers apply, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, and I think, I think, you know, source sourcing really, I think, is an extension of recruiting. So, um, if you are a good sourcer, you really can complement and partner with small recruiting team. So it doesn't have to be a 1-to-1 ratio, right? Um, you know, you could support, you know, multiple recruiters. Um, at Walgreens, because we mentioned that, you know, in some cases I was supporting, uh, a lot, like 10 recruiters.

But that's predicated by having a team of recruiters, right? Again, if you only have 1 or 2 recruiters, and yeah, that's, that's right. Then the other thing you were saying is that these, um, posts that you're seeing for a senior sourcer have like an entry-level wage attached to them. Tell me about that.

I think it has to do with people that are trying to, to, um, you know, attract people that are on the market right now, and they might be consulting roles, so they might be through a subcontracted type of format. So, you know, the bill rate may be ciphered off a little bit as it gets down to the subcontracted firm. So I think that's why. But I think they really just want people that are less experienced, and they just want to try to attract them by using a senior title.

You know, I think I, I'm gonna step on it here, but I think right now is not the time to hire people with less experience if you have limited headcount. So let me explain. If you have, you know, a full contingent, you have, you have full headcount and you can afford to hire a senior person and you can, you know, and you want to maybe use your, your headcount and hire 2 junior people that you can sort of train up. That's smart, that's long-term, that's strategic. It's, hey, let's build our own, right? Let's kind of raise our own talent. And I, I do that myself. But if you, if your headcount has been reduced to where you don't have a lot of headcount and you only have room to hire 1 person I don't think the answer is to go cheap. I think the answer is to hire someone that can do the job of many people. And that's, you know, in engineering they call that a 10x engineer. There's a lot of argument about whether or not there is such a thing as a 10x engineer, but the philosophy is some individuals, some exceptional individuals, can produce more quality and volume than majority or than the average. Everybody produces a certain amount. You need all kinds. You can't just have a world of nothing but top producers. That's not going to work. You can't have an entire basketball team of Michael Jordan. I mean, that's not a team. That would be, I don't know, that would be weird. But the point is, you can hire someone that is a multiplier. And instead, they're— you're seeing these jobs that are like, they're looking for somebody that— I wouldn't take a job at $22 an hour. In fact, I don't even know what the, um, poverty line is these days, but $22 an hour seems like it hits the bottom of that line considering inflation and everything else that's going on. So you might not even be able to sustain your family at $22 an hour, you know, if you, if you've been in the profession for a while. If you're entry level and this is your first job and you're single and, you know, you live in an apartment or something, maybe, I don't know. I don't know what I'm saying here, but the point is it seems like it's too low for what they're looking for, for even an entry-level recruiter, even for a trainee, it's too low.

And I think also it's kind of what you said about certain folks being able to produce the results of an entire team, basically. I think if you hire someone that's experienced and that has those abilities, even if you have a small team, they will, you know, amplify your existing team x-fold. Um, because if they're supporting, you know, 10 recruiters, we'll just say, like I mentioned previously, and they're covering all of their openings, you can— the sourcer can partner with each individual recruiter in the ways that they need, whether it's building a pipeline for a specific skill set or, you know, sourcing candidates for a particular niche role that takes longer to fill, or doing name generation or talent mapping of a competitor for a different role, you know, just basically using all of the different skills and tips and tricks and tools that exist to be able to do that. Um, because there's many different ways I think that sourcing can add value to companies.

And that's beyond—

yeah, yeah, because, because really, in my opinion, because I came from the agency world first before I got into the corporate world and consulting. And the, the best practice, uh, the sourcing is basically the best practices taken from the agency world and incorporated into a corporate environment. Um, and it's breaking down the workflows and functions down into basically just like there's the software development lifecycle, there's a recruiting lifecycle, and the biggest part that takes the most time is sourcing. Thus, having a sourcer or sourcing team in your talent acquisition strategy, I think, is a very, you know, can be the right role. But in some cases—

It provides more time for downstream for other ideas.

But in some cases—

That's what specialization is.

Yeah. But in some cases, you don't need a sourcer. The right approach might be to bring in a researcher or research team that does the research for the recruiters and then provides it to them, and then that empowers them to do what they need to do, right? Just depends, I guess, on the dynamics of the team and the experience level and the industry.

Yeah, the company structure too, right? Centralized versus decentralized. Um, you know, if you have the budget, for example, I mean, if you have an organization where there's a centralized budget and HR pays for all of recruiting, that's— it's a little easier to make an argument for a sourcer. But if you have a budget that's tied to departments vertically, right, and essentially recruiters are departmentalized, right, we have the recruiter for this silo and the recruiter for that silo, then where do you hire the sourcer? Who's going to pay for the sourcer? And if Silo A pays for the sourcer, then you know Silo B is not going to be allowed to use it. Yeah, because they're going to be, oh, we're not— we're paying for it, we want dedicated time. So it depends on that as well. And it also depends on the type of roles that you're recruiting for. I run into this a lot in conferences when I'm presenting and I'm asking for examples from the audience. In two sides of the industry, you've got engineering and tech and science. So these are highly specialized roles, whether they require education or certification, but there's not enough candidates to go around and they're hard to find. That's one kind of sourcing and recruiting. And then on the other side of the spectrum, you have there's a lot of candidates, but there's not enough time to like go through them because there's so many. Those both are, you know, realities for recruiters. Some recruiters carry 300 recs. Some recruiters fill 350 jobs a year. Others can't even imagine what that's like. It's not the same job. You're not— Hiring 350 software engineers, if you're doing 350 placements a year, it's in a different industry. But sourcing still has a contribution to make in any one of those models. It just depends on, like you said, is it research only and you hand off the research? Is it research plus outreach and you hand off the interested candidate pre-phone screen? Is it research plus outreach plus initial phone screen where you hand off the phone screen pre-hiring manager submittal, or is it all the way up to hiring manager submittal and then hand off so that if the hiring manager likes the candidate, the recruiter picks up? There's different stages where this transition happens based on the organization. And at the same time, that means that there's different volumes. If a sourcer has to go all the way to hiring manager transition, then they can only handle fewer recs. Right? But if they're doing the research and somebody else is doing the outreach, then they can handle a lot more recs because they can do the research for a lot. So a lot depends on in, in the environment, the structure. And I know you've seen several of these, yeah, um, different structures, but it depends on what the deliverable is that you expect. These $22 an hour jobs though, I can't imagine that it's any of the above, like I don't know what that job would be like if it's—

I'm guessing it's probably just pipelining.

Yeah, but then you have to hire somebody that knows how to write well. And will somebody that makes $22 an hour and is entry level really the person that you want writing your emails, or are you just giving them templates to use? And if that's the case, then why don't you use an offshore team?

Well, yes, I was gonna say sometimes offshore RPO, um, in some cases, like for example at Indeed and Facebook the sourcer would basically get the initial screen set up, and then when the candidates passed that, then we would hand them off to recruiter. That was kind of like the handoff point. But in some cases, I've observed that companies are hiring less experienced people and they're bringing in technology, and they think that they're going to get, you know, they're going to take, you know, entry-level skill set and amplify it by using tech. Now you'll definitely make an average, we'll say average recruiter more productive using tech, but it's not gonna be, it's not necessarily gonna deliver the type of results that they're thinking it is. And even with AI, AI I think has a lot of great potential and use cases, but I don't think it's going to, you know, like people are afraid it's gonna take recruiting jobs away and things of that sort. I don't see that happening.

It can be the great facilitator, but it can also be the great debilitator too. I've seen that happen. The other day, and this is by the other day, what I mean is yesterday, I was going through the data in our ATS and I came across a pattern that I didn't really understand. So I started digging into it, you know, applying my curiosity and my analytical skills to try to get to the bottom of it before I draw any conclusions, you know, before I ring the alarm and go, OMG, what is going on here? Let me poke around and see if it's true. What I found was there were an inordinately large amount, and by inordinate, I mean like 70% of all applicants had no company name for recent employer and no job title. So in their profile, you know, present company or recent, whatever, you know, most recent employer blank, And recent job title blank, location blank. And I thought, well, that's weird. Why is that blank with so many people? Then I started looking at where they were coming from. Well, they were all easy apply by LinkedIn. They were LinkedIn easy apply. And so I went to LinkedIn and I tried to do an easy apply and I realized that LinkedIn is not passing my current company and my current title and my current location to the ATS. It's expecting the ATS to have that as a forced question that you have to type in in order to— right? And it doesn't even autofill it. So I thought to myself, is Easy Apply a good idea? Because what it's actually doing is it's giving me a bunch of candidates that I can't even like search their job titles or search their company names or even their location. Think about that, right? Location is a basic thing. So I ended up having to turn on forced fields. So now when someone, even with using Easy Apply, when someone tries to apply for a job, it— the company and current or most recent employer or most recent job title are now required. Yeah. They just can't complete the application without it because I have to have that information. You would think that LinkedIn would pass that.

Yeah, I think, I think what their intention of doing it is good, but I think that they need more— the integration with the, with the employer ATS systems, I think, is, um, is where the, the bottlenecks are right now.

Because I don't think that this is Easy Apply issue is, is an ATS problem. I think it's an easy apply itself, is just dropping that, you know, connection, and it really isn't doing any of this other stuff. There's a new product that they're, that they're putting out, by the way, that is addressing this. So that there's a solution for what I just described, and they're ahead of it. Um, it just— I, I'm kicking myself for not having like figured this out before and, and ending up with a bunch of candidates that had no information. But I don't think it's the implementation side. I think it's just simply a product that was designed to make it one-click to apply.

Yeah, I was, I was referring to the integration, um, basically the backend APIs where they communicate with it is not carrying over the fields like you said.

Yeah, that's right. I love this, this quote: anything that touts easy is never as easy as they say. Exactly, that's right.

The easy button The same thing is true as if people aren't able to take complex topics and break them down where a child can understand them. Usually that's—

you know what, you bring up a really good point. So I think that's a learned skill. Maybe not. I think that's— I had to learn that. So in my experience, that was a learned skill. It may not be for other people. But for me, it was something I literally had to work on and get really good at. Oh, this, I wanted to see if we can, I'll read this question to you 'cause it's not showing up on the screen. What do you think? Is the ability to synthesize and simplify something so that you can better explain it, you know, quickly and universally, is that ability something that is inherent or is something that is nature or nurture?

I think something that people learn and develop. I would say that when I started training, doing training, or being an adjunct professor briefly— I taught some IT classes for a while because I come from an IT background— and then also teaching, doing training internally at previous employers and, you know, on the circuit, if you will, it forces you to really learn the material and take that, those complex topics and translate them down.

So that's a good point. That's where I'm teaching it, or by— yeah, through the act of having to teach it, you are synthesizing it again in your own head. Yeah, that's practicing the ability. Okay, yeah, I get that. So, so I guess, um, for those of you out there that are struggling with communicating ideas in a succinct and, you know, easy to understand manner, try to teach a class about it. And that'll help you. I think that's what David just said, basically. Yeah, try to teach a class and that'll teach you how to teach, how to synthesize. I love that. It's a really good— that's a huge takeaway, like gold star for that, man, for sure. All right, so this, this question is, uh, two-part, and actually it was a little bit too long to fit on the caption here. So somebody, um, from one of our listeners from LinkedIn is saying, jobs that have so many applicants that the reviewers are more likely looking for a way to reject people How would people stand out better? So in other words, I think the situation is— I see this often where they're, you know, the job is posted and overnight there's 2,000 applicants. And obviously, you know, that's, that's just too much. So I think the question is around that. How might people in TA better stand out? So you, you're applying for a sourcer job that is open for 24 hours. And in that 24 hours there's 2,000 applicants, you know that you're not gonna— I mean, there's no way nobody can look at 2,000 resumes in 24 hours. So how— the question is, how do you— what would you do to stand out amongst those 2,000 applicants?

Um, I think the best approach is to focus on— right now, 5— normally what we say, the 10-second glance you have, I would say right now you have a 5-second glance. For people that are actually eyeballing your, you know, resume, right?

Right, right.

I believe in this type of economy, the best, best resume format to use is a one-pager. The reason I'm saying that is it forces you to use the real estate wisely and showcase your knowledge base, skill sets, but ultimately your accomplishments and successes. That ultimately is the reason why the interviewer or reviewer wants to interview you.

Okay, so very briefly and very clearly at the top of the resume say, I did this, and then read below about the details.

Yeah, like, like pull from, like have a section on there that talks about like select accomplishments that clearly articulate relevant experiences and accomplishments, right?

Like placed the job, 30 engineers in one year. Yeah, it's 37, right? And then, and then like, okay, now read below. So I see that's, that's good advice. I like that.

And then the other thing is to have like a core competencies area, 'cause having gone through the resume exercise again after not doing it for 5 years, you know, there's things that you realize that you're doing and that you're really good at and that are important and you kind of just list them out. Like I have resumes that I'll never send anywhere just so I can recall the information at a future date that I then use those examples. I also recommend that people make a list of your accomplishments and keep that on the list as well. That way— and do it while you're working, right? So because it's gonna be easier.

Achievements notepad.

Yeah, like I keep— I still have— I keep a notepad basically of my— it's like a running log and wins. Well, not only wins, but like you're— what you're working on, like conversation notes, important information. And I just kind of keep it in like, like a text journal, like a notepad or a text editor.

Of just the summary. I get it. Not transcribing every conversation, but actually like, you know, the bullet points of the— yeah, that's good. Because then you can always recall when you need it later.

Yeah.

Without leaking any company information, putting anything in there that's sensitive. Yeah.

And you can search it too if you have to. Like when you're trying to find examples on, you know, filling salespeople and, you know, you put sales and boom, and it'll pop up the relevant content from, or accomplishments from that perspective.

I'll piggyback on that and I'll say the one thing that I always advise people, especially sourcers and recruiters, just to stand out in the, uh, in the mire of applicants, um, is listen, you're a recruiter, you're a sourcer, source the person who posted the job and approach them directly. There's no recruiter on this planet that's going to be put off or offended by you doing your job and recruiting them. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah.

Like, that to me is just like— is it— this has happened on the other end to me. I've had people where I posted a job, um, not many, but they found me and they texted me and called me directly and were like, I'm really interested in this job. And so I went into the ATS and, you know, elevated their, their resume to the top of the pile. I'm not gonna be like angry that that happened. I think that shows initiative. I'm not saying that, you know, in other jobs may not be the same, but in recruiting and sourcing, we kind of, we kind of have to resp— you know, hats off to somebody that could do that, right? Like in sales, same thing.

Yeah. The other thing that I think is a great strategy in economies like this is most, most companies have an employee referral program, and in some cases employees are incentivized for the referrals. So if you can find If you can find the recruiter, great, but if you can't find the recruiter, you may have a neighbor or relative, a former colleague, someone in your community that you know that works at that company. And if they can refer you into that, then you're going to get further up the chain, the line, if you will, cut in the line, get towards the top, where people will screen you. Now, doesn't mean it's gonna work for everything, 'cause we all know who worked in recruiting and sourcing that sometimes you get referrals and they're clearly not qualified for the position you're looking for, right? But you still screen them because it came from the VP or whatever. But as far as a strategy, I do think that is a great way to do it. And then also track, if you can't find the recruiter, see if you can find the hiring manager.

Yeah, exactly. Or just somebody that can, you know, give you a boost internally.

But even, even if you find them, like, you still want to, you know, have a succinct reason why, why they should interview you. Right.

Right. And yeah, and that's what goes on the top of your resume.

Yeah. And just like when you're messaging candidates, you know, your resume really should be tailored to the positions. Best case scenario, You customize it to every job you apply to.

I personally just have a resume for a recruiting job, a resume for a sourcing job, a resume for, yeah, management job.

Yeah, but that way you can quickly cut, paste, and modify and tailor it to that job specifically.

Just have sections that you can move around and, you know, expand and contract as needed. There was a second part to that question, which is how can we use AI, which, you know, there is no such thing as AI, but what people understand as AI, which is this, this machine learning, deep learning kind of language model stuff like ChatGPT, how can we use that to our advantage in, in looking for jobs in this industry as a recruiter, as a sourcer?

The best use cases I've seen from people and just messing or just utilizing it or experimenting with ChatGPT is, you know, try taking the job description and having it write a resume for you, see what it does.

Okay, I love this from John. Because I did this, the effect was this. I love that. That's a good way to put your, your, your achievements in that, you know, I did this, so this happened. Yeah.

And if you think about writing your resume in like the STAR technique pattern, which is basically situation, task, action, result, you'll basically be doing that every time. But if you did it in bullet points, and you quantify using conservative measurable facts, figures like statistics, statistics, dollar amounts, percentages, etc., that's a good way to go about summarizing the accomplishments.

Hard numbers. Yeah, yeah, it can be, it can be tough to come up with hard numbers when, um, I mean, you know, it's to me putting something like I hired 30 engineers on my resume doesn't necessarily translate to how hard it was to do that. You know, I need to explain it a little bit. You know? Yeah.

But I, that's why I think if you put down your accomplishments and like talk about the metrics or kind of like rec load, like, right. Like the volume that you worked on, I think those data points, which, which, which, which, that, right. Those data points help you be in a vacuum.

Hiring 30 engineers doesn't sound like it's necessarily an accomplishment, right?

But if you have to do it in, I don't know, 20 days, it could be a huge accomplishment, right?

Or if you had to do it in a, you know, hypercompetitive or in, uh, North Dakota, you know, where the population is, is, is not very dense, you know, stuff like that. So you say most of the JDs out there are horrible. Yeah, yeah, we know this, we know this. You know, I still— every day I run into people that say that they want to see the, the job description, and what they mean is the job posting. But so like, the job description is a multi-page document that describes what you're gonna do when you get the job. You shouldn't post that. The job posting is not the job. They're very different things. I mean, yeah, you know, I, I have to write the job description to get HR to approve the headcount. And in the job description, I've got to write, you know, how is this person going to be measured? What is it? What does success look like? What does good look like? What are they— what are their specific things that they're going to do. Um, why do we need to hire somebody? You know, it's like there's a lot you put into a job description, but if you posted that, um, it would be better than anesthesia, I think. So the job posting and the job description are completely different. It still baffles me today that people want to say, send me the job description. Uh, yeah, no, I'm gonna send you the job posting because I don't think you want to see the job description. Not yet anyway. Not to mention it might be confidential. Yeah, at least until you get the job, you know.

And plus, you know, a lot of job descriptions are very verbose and, you know, just, it's like, you know, you'll, you'll tail off and you mean job postings, job descriptions, or job descriptions are very verbose.

They have to be.

And a lot of them, like, if you, if that is what's posted, then people are gonna, you're gonna lose, you're gonna lose your audience because people are gonna read it too long, didn't read.

But I think especially if it starts with all the things that we need, Yeah.

And, but with job description, which I— sorry, with job postings, what you could do is you could take the job description and translate it using an AI tool like ChatGPT to write a job posting that you can then post.

Very summarized version. Yeah, shorter. And with it, here's what a successful candidate does, so that the candidate can look at that and go, oh, I do that. Okay, so I must be a successful candidate. There was Steve here about Julia Levy saying that candidates often skip the, uh, majority of the must-haves because they only see the one that they can relate to and then they ignore the rest. I think that's— there's a lot of truth to that, honestly.

Yeah, my general rule of thumb is if you meet, you know, 75% of what's on there, you know, then it's worth applying. Because if it's— if they're not a government contractor, there might be some wiggle room, right? So for example, if you have 4 years experience and it says 5 years experience but you have, you know, the rest of the skills, then, right, that would be an indication of a role I would probably likely apply to.

Uh, you know that, that, you know what's interesting? So I was speaking with the CEO of Fairy Godboss. You know Fairy Godboss?

I've heard.

It's a, it's a— I don't want to say job board, that's not— that doesn't give it justice. It's really a career networking site for, for women to, to promote women, um, leaders. And, you know, so it's, it's more than just— it's more than just jobs. There's, there's a career advice and all kinds of other things. But, um, going back to my point is she told me something. I found it hard to believe, but since then others have told me this and it's— I've seen it substantiated. She said according to them in the surveys that they've conducted, women generally apply for jobs if they meet all the requirements, not just 75%. But what you just said, apply if you meet even 75%, is correct. You should, you should apply even if you meet 75%, but women technically don't. They, they prefer to have all of it, whereas men sometimes apply even if they don't even have 50%. So it's like this very big discrepancy that might explain why there are fewer— why there's a gender gap in applications, because more men boldly apply when they only need half the requirements, and fewer women incorrectly don't apply when they meet 75% of the requirements or even 90% of the requirements. So You know, advice to females out there, take David's advice. If you meet at least 75% of it, you should take the chance because there's wiggle room there.

And the reason I'm saying to do that also is because the, what's the 25% or whatever percentages that you may not have, that could be your growth areas. And somebody made reference to an article.

Get the job and then grow into that.

Yeah, exactly. Somebody made reference to an article they posted on ChatGPT about the job description.

Yep.

There is an article I found yesterday that I shared that has 100 use cases for HR professionals on how to use ChatGPT. And I highly recommend you review it because it's very insightful and gives you lots of good examples that you can then build upon or use for different ideas and use cases.

I'm gonna put it right here. I think this is the one you're talking about. Did it go up? Yeah, there it is. Yeah, that's the one, 100 ChatGPT idea prompts, prompt ideas.

Yeah, pretty cool.

Yeah, man. So, um, well, it's been a fun ride. We usually don't, uh, don't go over 30 minutes, but we have some episodes that go quite a while. I apologize for keeping it a little bit longer than usual, but thank you for being here. And I know time is the most valuable thing that you have. So, I really appreciate you sharing that time with us and with our viewers. Time is way more valuable than money. So, thank you for that.

Absolutely.

In wrapping up, if you've seen the show in the past, you know that I always like to close out with some kind of deep thought or words of wisdom or just something for people to mull over during the weekend to think about. So, this doesn't have to be an answer to anything. It could even be just a question. But something that you want to leave the audience thinking about.

Sure. I would say that don't ever stop learning. Try to take time every day to learn something new, whether it's a data point or a skill or things that you want to work towards because the only thing that's consistent is change. Change will never stop. And if you don't adapt and continue to grow your skills and knowledge base, you'll find yourself at some point in time as being like where you'll feel behind, and that will make it harder for you to accomplish your life goals, especially in the employment side, and it'll impact other areas of your life. But I know that when I got into this industry, Shelly, you were one of the first people I read, And I, I just fell in love with sourcing, right? As I was living or learning and living sourcing through your articles and your experiences and so forth. And, um, you know, I continue to do that to this day. I'm constantly in webinars, on webinars, um, you know, giving webinars and, and sharing knowledge. And it's the, the beauty of the sourcing recruiting community is it's kind of like a hive mind and I've learned a lot, so much from so many other people in our industry that now I'm at the point where, you know, and through conversations and getting to know you and other folks that have been, you know, regulars on the training circuit, kind of like stepping up. And now I'm actually trying to identify people that have the potential to help them as well. It seems like there's the same people over and over in some cases. So I'm trying to identify people that—

yeah, may not be faces.

Yeah, not young necessarily, but faces, but to show, to show the, um, you know, the diversity in our community. And there's a lot of really good, um, a lot of good talent out there. So, um, so I've been encouraging some people to do that.

Yeah.

The other thing I wanted to mention, which I see you have it advertised there, um, is the Sourcing Institute. If anybody is looking to get into sourcing or recruiting and wants to upskill their game, upskill their abilities, um, the Sourcing Institute has a phenomenal program that you can go through. Um, I saw— I haven't gone through it, but I've seen the curriculum because I'm trying to see the outcome of it.

Hired some of them, I think.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm trying to see the, uh— and I've seen the curriculum, so So definitely something I would encourage you to take a look at.

Thanks, man. Once again, thank you for your time. Everybody out there, have a fantastic weekend and be kind to each other. Take care.