Dec 1: Jonathan Duarte Live on Shally's Alley

All right, all right, everybody. Happy Friday, December 1st. One more week left in the year. I mean, we're, uh, we're pushing on, yeah, 2024 pretty much. Um, well, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to Shelly's Alley. Our guest today is a longtime friend of mine, Jonathan Duarte. Currently is, uh, has a company that he started. I guess, I, I guess it's fair to call you a serial entrepreneur.

Yeah, third one.

And man, we go way back. I just like, how, how long ago was it that we met?

I'd say like the early days of even, um, Recruiting.com and recruiters networks, so probably like 20 2010, around there, maybe around there. Definitely a long time.

Even before that, huh?

Yeah, could have been like in 2007.

Yeah, it's, it's been a while. I remember we, um, we met at one of those EREs, I think it was.

Yep. Yep. One of David's groups, wasn't it? I, I think so.

Yeah.

And that was all pre-SourceCon.

Yeah, so it had to be before 2010, probably like 2000 or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I've been in the— I'll give you like my, my quick little— I used to call them Twitter bios, but so my like path, I started one of them. Yeah, exactly. Um, so now it's my X bio. I started one of the first job boards in '96 called GoJobs.com. Built in that process, built software for job distribution that I don't even think you know this. We used to send the technical recruiters like your AOL discs in the mail so they could upload their jobs to us and then we jump, you know, post those jobs to multiple job boards. So if they wanted them to go to the Monster, CareerBuilder account, etc. We would distribute this, the software, and then we distribute their jobs. And we built the largest job distribution network back in the day. Um, and then I, you know, that was literally 1999, we had that up and running. And then in 2003, very, not many, very many people know this, but, um, AppCast was actually built on the GoHire platform, or like GoJobs platform. So, uh, everyone's talking about job distribution and programmatic. Um, I worked out a deal with Chris, uh, Foreman, and they built a front end and he went after the market. He wanted to do a, you know, MVP, which is fine because he was going to a different market. So he built the MVP on our back end for the distribution and he built the front end, which is now, uh, Appcast. You know, obviously been very successful with it.

Wow, no, I did not know that. That's pretty cool. So GoHire has evolved, right? And so GoHire now is a texting and automation platform for, um, for front-end frontline workers.

Yeah, yeah. And it's, it's a kind of a combination. So everyone knows some of the big players that are doing recruiting automation and chatbots and recruiting AI, all these different kind of ways of saying the same thing, is we're all trying to figure out a way to leverage messaging as a way to engage candidates quicker. Uh, like if you try to send an hourly candidate to, uh, like imagine trying to send— and this happens all the time— imagine trying to send an hourly candidate to a Workday talent acquisition website. It's just not— they're not— you're, you're going to lose too many candidates. I think you're only converting like 5% on average on a website. So it's terrible. So the other thing where we've really, I think, is coming along and people now getting it, especially on the corporate side, is that texting that we've done for the last 6 years has really been, you know, one-on-one texting or group texting. But it wasn't until a couple years ago that we tied in scheduling because the biggest, you know, issue or a lot of time that's spent as a recruiter or hiring manager or HR manager is the back and forth with the candidate to schedule. And one of the things I found out, having done like, I think, over like 500 interviews with HR managers over the last couple years, is that We're currently seeing, um, in a distributed frontline recruiting model, which is, you know, a retail situation where you've got lots of different recruiters out there, or hiring managers or HR managers, they're only talking to about 20 of 100 people they reach out to. And so what that means is, um, say you post a job on Indeed 150 candidates apply and 100 of them you think are qualified. So you want to reach out. So you're going to make phone calls, you got your headset on, you're going to make phone calls, you're going to send emails. Well, in the frontline space, candidates aren't reading email, and then secondarily, they don't pick up the phone. So I always use a story of Chris, a forklift driver who would, you know, from a safety record experience, he would get a gold medal in the Olympics. I mean, great candidate, right? But if you try to call Chris at 9:30 in the morning while he's driving a forklift, he's not picking up his phone. In fact, most hourly people don't even have their phones on them while they're at work. So the model of hiring via using the phone, like as if we were hiring, uh, knowledge workers, doesn't really work in the frontline space. And so what we're finding is that all of the time that is spent to try to get to these 20% of the people who are responding. If you just send them a text message that says something like, "Hi Shelley, hey, this is John. I just saw you applied for a position for Acme Company. If you'd like to speak with a recruiter, respond back yes, and you can self-schedule a time that works for you." So 80% of the candidates are doing this and within 24 hours. So our clients no longer send emails and make phone call follow-ups with candidates just because it's just not worth their time. Plus they're converting 400% more candidates to a screening call, um, and they get to choose the candidates. Of course, like, you're looking at a candidate's resume, um, or application, uh, it doesn't matter if it's your ATS or say Indeed, If you text them, they're going to respond back within a day, and 80% of them will self-schedule themselves. And so the idea is, how do you get these candidates, you know, moving into the next process, the next stage? If the next stage is having the candidate schedule themselves or get scheduled, That's gonna save you a whole bunch of time as a recruiter because you can spend more time talking with more candidates, but you're gonna get higher conversions. And then at the end of the day, you're getting more qualified candidates sitting to talk to the hiring managers. And on your side, Shelly, do you guys use texting very much on your side? Hey, shall we do a drop or something? Did it drop out? Looks like we may have had a technical difficulty. Let's see, see if we can track them down. Hey, there you are. I can hear you. Actually, hey, this is Ashley. Hey, Ashley.

So yeah, Shelly was having some problems.

Yeah, it looks like he's still coming on. He's gonna try to be able to come on again. Yeah, he's gonna come back in.

Um, just let's, let's pause for one second.

Yeah, no problem. I knew you got the controls over there too, so There he is.

I don't know what happened. I got kicked out.

Wow, out of your own podcast.

I know. At least you're still here.

Yeah, yep. Sorry. So are you gonna be— can you, can you edit after the fact too with Restream?

I can, yeah, but we're still live.

Oh yeah, yeah, I figured that. So, well, welcome back to your own, your own podcast, shall we?

Thanks for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Yeah, I was just saying, I, in, in the off time there before you dropped out, I was just saying the use case, like texting candidates so that the, um, and, and giving them a link to your calendar, it just is the most efficient way to get them on the phone and literally just get on your calendar whenever they're free, and then you can talk to them. Yeah. So then as a recruiter, or HR manager, you're just picking up the phone with the guys that scheduled.

Yeah, right.

And of course, you still use the reminders. And, you know, there's, in our system, it's automated reminders about, you know, hey, you have a meeting coming up and stuff like that too, for the candidate. But it just saves the recruiter the time from you know, remember, you know, trying to reach candidates constantly, you know, like Chris on his forklift, and then trying to get, you know, a free 15 minutes of Chris's time to even see if they're qualified, right? Yeah.

So it's basically a matter— and how does the automation work on, on the, like, backend? So you just basically add them to the, to the— you add the contact information, the person's name and phone number, and hit send, and it just texts back and forth, are you, you know, are you available? Or is it just like a link to a calendar? Or how does that—

I'll give you a walkthrough. So it's a great question. The, um, so our, the message that we send to a candidate, and the recruiter literally clicks two buttons, they click on a Chrome extension where we see a phone number, we put a little go icon And then when you click the go icon, it pops up a window, which is a Chrome extension, and we have it pre-programmed. If you click the little calendar, what it's going to do is it's going to send this, what we call a text invite. And the text invite says something like, hey, Shelly, this is John, a recruiter at Acme Company. I saw you applied for position. Would you like to schedule a call? Reply with a Y, right? And then when we get the Y, We go to the recruiter's, we're synced to the recruiter's calendar, the person who sent the text message, but it, you know, there's configurations you can do. And ultimately, so I would, we're going to call into Shelly's Outlook, if you will, find out what, you know, if it's 15-minute increments and then respond back and give like 3 options to the candidate and they can get more options.

1, 2, and 3.

Yep. 1, 2, 3. So They only type yes or Y, and they get— then they choose 1, 2, 3, and they're scheduled. They only— it's 2 conversations. And here's what's crazy.

That's easy. Okay. Yeah.

That's why you get high conversions. It's not like, even if you send— a lot of people are using Calendly, which is— it's a great tool, but, but you're sending a link.

They have to click on the link, then they have to—

it opens a browser. Yeah. And, um, it still works. I mean, it's a great tool. But, um, in our system, if the candidate— like, if Shelly, if you don't actually schedule, um, an event, our system knows that. So we just say, hey, like the next day, 24 hours later, hey Shelly, we're still really interested, we're gonna— we're interviewing right now, would you like to schedule? So you can do automated notification because that's what a recruiter would do, right?

Right.

If, if I didn't get you on the call.

Whereas with Calendly, you send them the link, and if they don't click, you never know.

I mean, and then, and then imagine you got 100 candidates, right? How are you going to find out who's scheduled or not? There's no synchronization.

We even click the link. That's—

yeah, exactly.

Brilliant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's one, like, that— I think that's a big tool. Like, when you're doing stuff with sourcing and stuff right now, are you— and because I'm sure, uh, of course with, uh, sourcing, but I know you do a bunch of other stuff, but sourcing, you're trying to find really hard-to-find candidates. Are you also blending in texting to new candidates?

On the outreach, yeah, it's basically a blend in the sequence. So some people call it sequence, some people call it campaign. What we found works so far the best is, well, first of all, let me back up and say, we've noticed that it really takes about 7 different points of contacts to really get there, right? The first time out, it's an email. And we've noticed that there is a lot of drop-off on the email where people just don't actually get it. They don't receive the email. So we resend the same email again 24 hours later. So whatever the email is, "Hey, Jonathan, I, you know, I saw that you were at this conference, you were at HR Tech, wanted to chat with you for a few minutes." 'Would you be open to that?' And then we send it again. 'Hey, Jonathan, I sent you a message yesterday. Wanted to make sure you got it, because sometimes things get dropped.' Repeat the message, right? Like embed the message below. What we're noticing is that there's a lot more response to the second first email. It's still the first email, but it's the second one.

Yep.

Because it's kind of pushing it through the— like there's some— there's like, I don't know, a quarantine period or a delay period. Where if you've never sent an email to this server, the server is like, this is spammy, I'm gonna hold on to it. But when you send a second one, then the server is like, oh, this is not spam because spammers only send one-offs. And, you know, so this, it gets delivered. Yeah, technically that's 2 emails, but it's really the first message. Then we send the second and the third email. So really that's 4 emails, although it's Just 3 messages. And the second and the third emails, we add content. We don't just— what I noticed doesn't work really well is, uh, hey, I'm still waiting for a response, like that I'm still nagging, or I want to bubble this. All that stuff just annoys people, and it ends up with people like saying no thanks or deleting. But the second message is, I'm following up on my message, wanted to let you know that we also— or here's some interesting bits, or whatever, you know. I think this might be a good opportunity because of You know, and then the third message, and then, so now we're at email 1, email 1 again, email 2, email 3. That is when we do the text, and it's just one text because we don't have an opt-in at this point, right? They haven't said whether or not it's okay. If we don't get a response to that within a certain period of time, um, any response, right, then usually 72 hours, we trigger an in-mail. If they're on LinkedIn, if they're not on LinkedIn, then it's the second message. But if they are, a second text message, sorry. And that's it. So that'll be 4, 5, 6 technically. If we don't have LinkedIn, we don't want to send. But if we do have LinkedIn, then we do, uh, 5 and 6. Now, if we don't have a mobile number, then 5 and 6 aren't in mail. So it'll be like email 1, email 1, email 2, email 3, text, LinkedIn, or text, text, or LinkedIn, LinkedIn.

Yeah. And so for your recruiting, is that— what types of roles you run in that kind of campaign for? And, you know, I'm sure because your audience, a lot of people understand exactly what you're doing, but for other folks that may not, what kind of recruiting are you using that kind of sequence of emails and phone calls for, or, uh, text messages for?

So what we found is that With technical roles, it works. Engineering, software, all of the, what you would consider, you know, IT, computer-related, it works really well, especially the combination, because they're often not on LinkedIn, or they're not, or they are on LinkedIn, but they're not getting the, they just don't get the message. Yep. For sales and marketing and product people that are a lot more on their email and their, just by, by nature of their job, more responsive. We don't even need to go that far. We literally just do 2 emails. And we get responses a lot faster with those types of roles. With senior levels, so once you get into director and executive, no matter what, we titrate it a lot differently. It's then usually, we'll do an InMail that is a simple connection request. Hey, I'd like to have a, you know, conversation with you. So as to keep it off of the business channel. And then we'll follow it up with a quick email reminding them of the InMail. And it's a lot more spread out. So it's still a combination, but it's different timing. Most of the difficult jobs to fill where engagement is an issue for us is engineering.

Yeah.

The other ones are simply a matter of like finding the right person. So don't get me wrong, there are plenty of very difficult sales and marketing jobs, but the problem is, Here, I'll give you a really good example. There's a particular marketing platform. You're probably familiar with HubSpot.

Yeah, that's who we use.

And Marketo and, yep. So there's a technology or an application called Braze, B-R-A-Z-E. Ironically, brazing is also a metallurgy technique. So when you go out there and you look for people with Braze, you get people that are email marketing technologists, like software engineer of email, Or welders in the medical industry, right? So what we found is that with something like that, even though it is, we're looking for someone to be like an email marketer or, and they're a lot more likely to respond. The challenge is in getting them to engage because what they're getting bombarded with are all the wrong types of jobs. If they're into this very narrow niche, and they're getting messages about content marketing, all this stuff, they're bombarded with the wrong thing. So we have to very specifically drill down on why this, and the subject line in this case is really key. One of the best performing subject lines was, it's essentially a play on words of like Braze Wizardry kind of thing. It was very specific to that. And they responded to that because that's what they're into. And that could also apply to engineering as well, if they're into some new technology. But generally speaking, with sales roles, it's like, um, it's, it's really hit or miss. If you're not in the space that they're interested in, they just don't respond.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. And what software are you using your campaign? What are you doing your campaigns on? Are you using like an Avature or something like that for CRM with the campaigns?

Uh, and actually Gem, Gem is, is the, I don't want to say CRM because, well, it is a CRM. It is, it is a CRM, but really what we use Gem, the, the, the best use of it is the sequencing. Yeah. Um, but we also have to do some automated in-mails. And so we have to do that off of Gem, not on Gem, because what Gem does is it reminds you to send an in-mail, but then you still have to pull up the right. And now you can easily copy and paste, makes it easy, but it's still one at a time. So to automate the in-mail follow-ups, we will go through the email sequence and then move everything into a LinkedIn follow-up. Um, so let's say we send out 100 contacts and 30 people reply, then 70 who didn't reply go to the in-mail one.

Got it.

And then come back.

So there's still a lot of many manual processes even in that, but you're— those are— these are, again, for your audience, this is— these are high to, uh, hard to find candidates, high, you know, sourcing. So you're putting VIP time into this versus in our side, which is high volume, or less— that my experience I've had with texting, high, high volume hourly. If you get 80% response rates, and this is what's, what's just a complete change, is that in manufacturing in the Rust Belt states right now in the United States, they're only getting— when, when a recruiter puts an ad on Indeed and say, just for number's sake, they get 150 applicants, um, and they reach out to those 100 via phone and email, they're only talking to 10.

That's— I mean, what— why is it—

oh, it's simple. They're using— they might as well be sending carrier pigeons.

They're on the wrong channel because of the— it's the channel. Okay. Yeah.

So it's, it's, it's that simple. But as you know too, Like, my job really, it's— my job is no longer technology. It is educating HR managers because they don't get trained. Um, they have, you know, you have to get in front of them to say what you're doing right now hasn't been working. It's been going downhill. Like, the numbers keep going down and they're saying, hey, management's saying, hey, what can you do? Like, what, what are we gonna do better? They spend more money on Indeed. To get more candidates. But if you're not— but that's not the problem. The problem is the gap between candidate applies and scheduled time. And that gap is that black hole that we've been talking about for years, that 20% of candidates never get a response. It's true, if you're trying to send a carrier pigeon and the pigeon gets shot, you know, that, that is not going to work, right? You might as well be sending faxes. Because you've got to be on the channel where your candidates are.

No, that's a really good idea. And I'm sure it's not just— I'd like to also kind of define frontline workers, right? If recruiters that are, and, you know, leaders that are on this, watching this podcast, that work in technology and some of the, the higher-end, you know, one-off kind of recruiting where every, every rec is a purple squirrel, or a unicorn or whatever. Like, you know, every single rec is like completely different. Whereas we're talking about here, frontline workers doesn't necessarily mean that they're in a warehouse or, you know, it could be blue collar, but it could also be white collar. What it really means is that these are positions that are very frequently filled. So it's kind of— it doesn't even have to be high volume. But the description of the job is very much standardized, right? Like if you're a commercial driver with a CDL.

Exactly.

You know, there's— that is a very specific set of skills. Not everybody has one. There's some, you know, specialization, like do you have OSHA and, and those kinds of things. But generally speaking, right, you don't have to like explain what the job is. I don't have to explain to them that it's writing code for this kind of app. You know, a CDL driver knows what a CDL driving job is. Yep.

Yeah.

And it's not that— this is not selling it. It's It's different. It's—

yeah, this is, this is trading. Yeah, and when you're sourcing, you're building a relationship, um, and you have to move somebody. In this case, most of the candidates are preemptively, um, in the market. Like, they— I wouldn't say all the time because you do have to move candidates to get into the market as well, like in any role, but these are candidates that have even applied into your I'd say even started an application in your ATS but never completed it.

Ah, right. Okay.

Right. So there's, there's— and, and then it goes to a nurse. Yeah, you would say yes, nurses sometimes are hourly, sometimes they're not. Um, they could, but they don't sit behind a computer during the day, at least one that's going to give them access to—

they have computers, but they're not on their Gmail. They're not— yeah, the computers are for medical information, and they're very, yeah, they're very specialized.

Yep. And then if you look at your—

think about occupational therapists.

Yeah.

Home health technicians.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rad techs. It's, it's probably 70% of our workforce does not use a computer on a daily basis that they have access to non-company stuff, if you will.

Right, right, right.

But even like, I've, I've heard from other teams now Sending out text messages, not doing to the level of the campaigns that you're— you guys need to use when you're trying to source. But, you know, you're trying to hire an accountant, sometimes it's just easier if they've applied to just simply send them a text because they may not be able to— they're on their company computer at, you know, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, they're probably not going to be looking at their Hotmail or Gmail or whatever, but you can get them on their phone. And if you have a call to action that says, yes, I want to talk to a computer— to a recruiter— and they only have to click the letter Y, they could do that real quick and go back to work.

That's just really sweet.

Yeah. Yeah. And so what, what the— what types of, um, uh, roles you've been hired for now? Are you, are you, um, mostly doing the sourcing and the engineering on defense contractors type stuff?

No, no, we don't. The company I'm with doesn't work on defense contractors, but I have worked on that before. No, it's a lot of cloud-based technology. You know, it's e-commerce front-end and back-end technology that enables transactions. And it's, it's a very rapidly changing business, you know, in software. Sometimes folks don't really understand the difference between kind of like what I, what I would call like shrink wrap software versus things that are run behind the scenes. There's a lot of software that you never see. It goes into your car. It's a— I mean, Teslas are like, you know, massive. Yeah, exactly. They're exactly— but then there's also, there's also applications that you could literally buy like for your Mac or your or your iPhone, and they're very different. Um, so this company is actually on both ends of that. There's some backend stuff that connects to the cloud and servers and helps enterprise clients connect directly with audiences, and none of that is really ever seen by a user.

Yeah.

Um, and then there's the frontend stuff that is very much, you know, you people logging into an app on their phone.

User experience stuff.

Yeah, and everything in between. So there's all of that, but what's really, what's really interesting, um, outside of just software engineering is getting into the, the space of, um, the new ways of marketing, the new ways of commerce, influencer creator-driven commerce, and learning how to measure that. So there's a lot of data science, deep data science. Let me, let me give you a, like, just a little taste of how different it is than what people perceive. Most of the time people think, oh, it's a shopping app, right? And oh, e-commerce is, it's like Amazon, kind of, sort of. But let me, let me put it this way. Take a guess how many products are in the product catalog at Amazon? No, at this— at LTK.

I don't know, I was working with a friend and just a yoga studio that's opening, she had 90.

90 products.

90 products. And you, you guys probably got tens of thousands.

2.4 billion.

Yeah, and keep the SKUs and everything So that is the scale, right?

So when, when I talk about data science, this is a massive data lake of proportions that it's every product at Amazon plus every product at Wayfair plus every product at Target plus every product at Walmart. I mean, it's 7,000 different retail names, brand names, all in here. And not only do the consumers The shoppers have to be able to get to it quickly, search and recommendation, but also the creators that are selling things need to be able to figure out what to sell and all that. So the scale is immense in data science and insights and marketing and analytics for that is a really cool space.

Oh yeah, and I know we could totally geek out on it, but just from the hardware, you know, to pull that kind of stuff off, is just insane.

It's a, it's a lot of transactions.

Yeah.

So yeah, and that's a lot of, um, people just don't realize it. We, especially when we talk to candidates, they're like, oh, it's just e-commerce. It's like, uh, yeah, you guys are like, you guys are like, uh, uh, Snapchat or, or TikTok or whatever. No, actually, we, you know, we use Snapchat and TikTok as an endpoint, but that's one of a bunch of different endpoints. And, you know, it's, it's lot more complicated.

Yeah.

But you know, something that I wanted to talk to you about is, I think you have your ear on this as well, is internal mobility. I've been thinking about this a lot, especially as I know that there's a lot of talk in the industry around, well, what are we going to do when things slow down and there's not, there's not a lot of open jobs, you know, when things kind of stabilize and we're not growing anymore or whatever, because it's the talk of recession and all that. Whether or not that's true, I don't want to get into whether or not, but whether or not it's true, it's still, it's still top of mind to me that there, there needs to be, um, a way to use technology and sourcing and recruiting for internal mobility. And that hasn't really been connected yet, has it? Or what do you—

yeah, I think it's, I think it's just starting. And I don't know all the vendors in the space, so I know there are companies out there selling solutions to this. But it— I'd almost say, and there was a lot, there's a lot of, I wouldn't say a lot, there's a seed of consciousness starting about this topic because in, especially in the hourly space, but it could be knowledge workers, of course, you know, we want to get upwards mobility across the business, but typically it's recruiting gets a candidate into a seat, and then HR is responsible for quality of hire and then keeping the candidate on and within the company, right? Yeah. So if we look at it as one's recruiting, the other's retention. Now, when we had the COVID and then post-COVID boom, and now we laid off a bunch of recruiters because we don't have the open positions, but we still have massive churn What do you do? How do you— any size of business, how do you retain those candidates? I think this newer software that can do matching can actually transcend from just our HRIS that says, hey, here's Shelly, and Shelly's been a sourcer for a couple years at us. What is Shelly doing now, and what might Shelly be interested in doing? So there's two things: what's the present-day Shelly, and what does Shelly want to do? So if you can get that info and you can do surveys or whatnot, you can marry that up with the old resume and Shelly's new LinkedIn profile. Or, um, so I think that's what's happening. What we're trying to do, or what the market's trying to do, is say to actually get quality of hire, which has been this kind of ghost number that no one can predict, and it's everyone to find it.

It's hard to measure or figure out how to—

yeah, can't get done, right? So And who's responsible for it? Ultimately, the HR leadership is. But, you know, if you can't define it, you can't be accountable for it either. So they're accountable for churn and the cost to bring new candidates on. But that— and they know retention, staffing rate, killing, filling jobs, right?

Yep.

So if you can get recruiters and their tech and their understanding of the candidate plus retention stats and merge this with technology too, then you could have candidates that we're hiring for retention, because then we know what the model looks like. Like, why does Shelly stay and move in the company?

Hire them for this job with an eye on what they can do when this job is finished, per se.

Yep.

Or, uh, where they can grow into. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. And, and I, I get a little bit of pushback about internal mobility because there's the sense that hiring managers don't want their people to be poached. But to me, it's like, here's, here's what happens.

The hiring manager's candidates— the— it's the—

it's the employer companies, right? And what happens now is people unfortunately have to leave to get promoted.

Yeah, they make more money, they get promoted, they get a better experience. They're— most people, of course, this hasn't changed in years.

They learn something different.

Yeah. And they get new experience, but people leave because of their boss.

Yeah, that hasn't changed. No, that's—

yeah, you know, so if I, you know, this is— I, I think we're trying to get to an ideal state, and the technology usually has to understand what the ideal state is. And I think I, I— one of my main jobs right now is to educate people on what is recruiting automation. Or workflow process. And so if we're trying to do recruiting plus retention equals better business outcomes, um, what's the actual process? If you can't define the process, don't even start thinking about how you're going to automate something. Like, if you don't have— like, you just, you just talk through your sequence, right? You can automate that sequence. But if you, but if you can't tell me If you got 10 recruiters, everyone's doing however they do it. Yeah, you don't have a process, you don't have an asset. That— and if Shelly's your recruiter and Shelly's pumping numbers but there's nothing documented, Shelly leaves, now you're 10— way more than 10% down. So if you can automate what is Shelly doing, what are the steps, Shelly will probably tell you and put it on an email, a board for you, and say, this is why I'm effective at doing this.

So really, the first step is documenting what's working. The first step in the steps, right? Documenting the, the workflow in a way that can be explained, and then you can explain it to automate it. You can explain it to the automate.

Exactly.

But connecting the, connecting the dots between sourcing and recruiting and internal mobility, um, and automation, is it— is this now a question of like, uh, because you said what does Shelly do now, what does Shelly want to do, so is it a question of matching capabilities, matching skills, because right now it's a combo of soft skills plus interest.

So, um, if, if I don't know what Shelly wants, there's no way I can even, you know, begin the conversation, right?

So for recruiting, we need interest for recruiting.

Yeah, no, I'm talking about like as an employee. So Shelly's an employee in my company and I'm not If I'm doing once a year annual reviews, well, right there, you're never going to know what Shelly wants because Shelly's, you know, may have been called by 300 recruiters by, you know, in a year. So it's really about like, what, okay, Shelly sees, hey, there's this cool division that's starting up with a company, or I think I'm kind of stagnated, or, you know, if you're asking those questions and they're anonymous, like, to their manager because that's really the company. You're— that's where Shelly is the employee of the company, not the employee of the manager. So if we're surveying the, our employees and say, are you looking— even frontline workers— are you looking to be, um, to raise up and become a manager? How can we help you? Um, but if you don't know if they're interested, you can't do retention anyways. So you have to have this kind of survey to understand what an ongoing survey to understand what your employees are trying to do. So that's interesting.

So it's not even, you're saying separate from the performance review, or are you saying iterate the performance review faster, more times?

I think so. I've talked to companies that are doing them once a month. But you want there, 5 questions. It takes 2 minutes. Like, hey, are you interested? How's things going? But in, if we look at even on frontline stuff, you can do it now where you can automate a text message with just a 1, 2, 3, 4 and says, hey, how are you feeling? Are you getting trained? Do you want to take it to the next level? Um, you know, I know you've been here 90 days, so guess what? We know on their start date, 90 days later, send them a text message. Are you looking to advance? Just, you know, click 1 and then fill out, and then we'll respond back.

The computer responds, right? So I mean, something as simple as 90 days later, have, have, has the job that you're doing met the expectations that you had, you know, for the job? Like, are we, is this job meeting your expectations from when you applied? Yes or no? And if it's like, yes, okay, great. Maybe ask a follow-up on that direction. If it's no, then, you know, where are we missing 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 other, right? And then at least you have the data. Then you can take the employee aside and ask for a meeting or whatever. But at the very least, you collect the data. So you're saying use this. So you need to change the name of your company, man.

Oh, well, well, yeah, I'm going in a huge different—

I mean, you're using this internally for, yeah, employee satisfaction, for retention, for mobility. I think we're Stay higher instead of go higher.

Yeah. My ultimate goal is a workforce messaging platform.

Yeah.

And it's across globally, multilingual. You can communicate with any candidate, any person, a candidate, so a non-employee, because, you know, they may be, they're probably not using Teams. So you have to communicate with GDPR for non-employees. And texting is getting more and more complicated because of compliance issues. And then you have artificial intelligence and conversational AI. How do you use all these tools together to take, you know, if we call like from first impression to alumni, and you take them through recruiting, then you take them through onboarding, then you have engagement. Are you getting trained? What's next? And then you have retention, similar types of things, um, all the way through an exit survey and even a 6-month after, um, are you interested in coming back to work? So if you look at each one of those life cycles of an employee, um, we probably only communicate, and we don't do a very good job of it generally, at recruiting. The rest of the time, there's pretty much no re— no communication other than a hiring manager talking to, or a manager talking to the candidate or the employee. And, and then you don't have a system. If you don't have a system, you can't automate it.

Yep. If you don't have it documented, yeah, a system is any collection of tasks, basically. So yeah, yeah.

And then you have to have a system, uh, or a computer system that can duplicate that. So that's ultimately what we're building is a Messaging platform that work for recruiting, for onboarding, for engagement. Um, like if you have an hourly workforce but they have to take, um, a, a video, they have to watch a video for the training to become a fry cook or, you know, or something like that, they could still be sitting there at the company but you say, hey, I need you to take this, um, um, the next step and here's a link to the video. So they're still going to be on company time, but you can get them and remind them about different things you need. Even, hey, benefits are coming up, here's a link to schedule time with HR, or here's a link about renewal, right? Yep. Or, and schedule yourself to talk to the HR person, and it could be a Zoom call at corporate, but you're in, uh, you need to talk to somebody about, uh, you know, enrollment in in open enrollment.

You need to talk to somebody? No.

Okay, great.

Yes. All right, here's a conversation, right?

Yep. Yeah. So I look like the whole thing of that we're doing is we're creating, um, the platform is about how to message. Let the candidate or the employee choose the messaging, um, uh, platform of choice. Is it email? Is it text? Is it, uh, WhatsApp? Is it Messenger? You choose, and it can be multiples, right?

Then, like Slack, a lot of companies use Slack as their internal, you know, texting can replace— or, sorry, other way around. If you don't have, uh, mobile numbers for all your employees, but you have Slack, you do this exact same thing via Slack. It's still a question with a yes or no answer, and you can use—

or Teams, doesn't matter.

Yeah, so the back—

the automation doesn't care. Yeah, right, right. Like, whoever's writing the message should not care about the channel at all, about the delivery channel. Yeah, at all.

And where is all this stored? Is it stored in a— like, is it like an employee CRM? Like, what is that called?

Well, so, right, I mean, everything's internally, of course, in our system, right? But right now we don't even have a platform. We have an ATS, and most ATS texting platforms are basically one-to-one, which isn't scalable because that That's only ATS, so that means it's recruiting, which means HR doesn't have access to it.

That's my point. Yes.

So then you have human capital management systems or HRIS systems, but guess what? They don't actually— none of those systems even—

they're not set up to handle questions about whether or not you're looking to be a manager or if your job is meeting your expectations. That's not— that's why, you know, people are using survey tools for that, and that's a completely different—

and, and that's not in the HRIS.

It's not connected to anything. It's separate.

It's Yeah, log in, just like the exit interview questions, or that's another database.

So, so there's a, there's a need for a technology that centralizes this, like, uh, life cycle of an employee information that is not tied to their, their, um, HRIS, you know, payroll, taxes, benefits, and all that stuff. This is a separate system, or maybe the same system, but it has— it's configured like you said, one-to-many, where you can send out a message to all people who have been here for a year. All people, yeah, after their 30-day, after their 120, right?

Yep. Yeah, yeah. So if you, if you have a franchise and you own 20 stores, um, and you probably have 20 managers or maybe 15 or 10, whatever, um, and, uh, it's coming up for open enrollment, and say you have 10 employees at each of these 20 stores, chances are you have like 20. So now you have 400 people. So if you got 400 people, how are you gonna get the message out about open enrollment? Hopefully the managers will communicate.

Yeah, right, right.

And if they don't, HR's stuck making phone calls, sending emails to people who are not— never going to listen to them.

One-on-one texting. Yeah, it's open enrollment.

Yeah, and it just takes the managers to do this, or you just click a button. And the managers don't have to waste their time.

And you know who's responding, who hasn't responded. You can have managers involved after nobody's responded or the person hasn't responded or anything like that.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, and it's not just, you know, text messaging to employees and things like that. It's just the overall— if we were talking about retention and engagement and like a candidate who's been working at the restaurant for, or an employee has been working at the restaurant for, uh, on their 89th day, um, and you typically know in your company that candidates don't, or employees don't stay around after 95 days. Well, you better start your retention engine early and text them and say, hey, it's your 90th day, you know, uh, um, since you started. Here's a 15% off, bring your family and friends. Something like that at the restaurant. So that, that kind of stuff can happen because we're just not even communicating at all in most cases, at least from a corporate side, you know. And then systematically we're not. So I think that's where the overall thing's going, is not just recruiting but engagement, retention, but messaging across the board. And, um, it does get very technically comp— complicated.

It's the automation. That's the key. Because manually, you can't do it. It has to be at scale. You have to be able to automate this. Otherwise, it's— yeah, yeah, it's untenable.

Yep. Just like you said before, like, if a recruiter who's figured this stuff out leaves the company, whatever you figured out, well, you paid them, is not an asset to the company.

Now you're gonna have to— you're gonna have to figure it— somebody else gonna have to figure out again, if you didn't retain it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Fascinating. That's a really good point. Well, man, we are getting pretty close here to the top of the hour. And there's always 2 questions that I ask my guests.

All right.

As you might already know, the first of those is, as folks watch this, I want to give them something to think about. So can you leave us with a question or a thought-provoking idea for us to sort of mull over the weekend? Like, you know, it doesn't have to be a deep thought, but just something to, something to think about.

This, all right, this is a perfect one. So again, we talked a lot about automation and things like that. Um, my question, it doesn't matter if you're a TA leader, you're a sourcer, you're an individual recruiter, HR person, or a VP, what is critical in your company that's being handled by being done manually that if you owned and you could systematize, you'd be better off across your teams? And it could be your own things, like you're making phone calls, you're, you're sending text messages. If you could systematize that, what would it be?

Okay, so what do you have inside your organization that is being manually done that you could own, systematize, and slash automate to make life better for everybody?

Yeah, because a lot of those things that we talked about, right? Yeah, a lot of them are just rote stuff that, you know, can be automated. And recruiters hate, you know, just sitting in the phone call, just call, call, call, call, call, and no one answers. That, that didn't add any value.

It's always been— I mean, I've talked about this on the show many times. The toughest thing about automation, the toughest thing about automation is not creating the automation, it's ideating what should be automated.

Yeah. Yep. Yep. And I'm happy to help people just—

you have an answer to that walkthrough. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think, I think you have a beautiful answer to that, which is the first step is to just Document your steps. And if you have that, then you can start thinking about which ones can you automate, which ones can't you, or should you, or shouldn't you, right? Can you? And if so, should you? And then you can automate. Like, people just get stuck on, what should I automate? Oh, I don't know. I just— write down your systems first. So I love this question because it's basically saying, what is it that you're doing manually that you could easily You know, write it down, think about it.

Yep, yep.

And my last question is, who should be our next guest? Um, it's okay if you have a couple of names.

I—

yeah, I'd say find out if they're interested or available.

But yeah, this would be interesting. Madeline Larrano. Oh yeah, I don't know if she's been on before, but Madeline I know her from way, way back. Yeah. Yeah. So Madeline knows— she talks to leaders, she talks to recruiters, she gets a lot of great info, does tons of great reports, but she has the word on the street too. Yeah. So she's a very, very interesting analyst, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, she's an analyst, but a lot of analysts, you know, you think they sit in the ivory tower and they talk to the CEOs and they don't really actually get what's going on on the street.

She's on the street.

She's— yeah, she's on the street. She's talking to people constantly. Does a great job.

Great. Lovely. Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, man.

Yeah, this was fun, Sean. Yeah. All right, well, have a— have a great, uh, Friday too.

That's right. Have a great weekend, everybody. We'll see you next Friday on Shelly's Alley. And be kind to each other. Bye-bye.