Jeff Hunter Live on Shally's Alley

Hey, all right everybody, you are live on Shelly's Alley. It is February 21st, 2025. I got to say that because later on when I do the transcript, I've got to remember which date this was. Oh, anyway, so super fun times. We have a very special guest today. There's, there's some history here, so I've got to, I've got to kind of explain and slash intro. So, Jeff Hunter, who's our guest for today, and I go way back to— I don't even want to admit like how far back we go. But a couple of things that you need to know about Jeff. First of all, he used to be in our industry and now he's transitioned to learning, I think. Is that my— the learning industry executive? Okay. So, that's kind of an interesting trajectory which we want to talk about. And then the other thing is, way back in the day, Jeff put on this conference in the industry that was really cool. It was really one of a kind. I don't think I've ever seen anything kind of like that ever again. The, uh, the Unconference. Now, did you only ever do one of those?

Only one.

Yeah. And that was, I mean, that changed a lot of, uh, a lot of minds and it was a really cool event. Um, so anyway, I've known Jeff for a while since back in the day when he was at, uh, I think EA, is that right?

That's right.

Almost, yeah, before that. Okay, gosh. Um, and since, since then he's made the transition to— after spending some time at, uh, at Dolby and a couple of other places, Bridgewater Associates, he made the transition and started his own firm called Talentism. They, uh, the fun fact that I wanted to share with everybody and Jeff's completely unprepared for this— is, Jeff, I gotta come clean to you and I gotta admit something.

Okay.

You, you, Jeff Hunter, are the reason why this exists.

I don't know what you're pointing to.

Shelly's Alley.

Oh my goodness.

Yes, this whole podcast series. That's right, it is all your fault. I have nothing to blame but you.

Wow, I am happy to take credit for something that's so amazing. Thank you for, thank you for that, Shelley. I, I doubt that's true, but I'm very happy to take the credit.

No, it's true. I got, I got evidence. I got evidence. So after the Unconference, I think we, we exchanged some messages, and then you moved on to Dolby and Bridgewater, and we, we worked together, um, at Bridgewater on a project that hopefully eventually ended up being successful with, uh, Ray Dalio's, um, I don't know, replacement slash whatever that was. Um, and then I reached out after you had— you started doing some nonprofit work with a, um, the opera or symphony or something like that.

Probably. Uh, I don't specifically recall, but let's go with that.

Yeah. And so I reached out and we had a conversation and you said something that sparked that was literally the spark that lit the fire here. You said, you said to me, you said, Shelly, I wish you would do something more. I wish you would, you would, the position that you have of prominence in the industry, um, you told me, I wish you would actually like take the lead and do something more than just promote your business, promote yourself, promote your, um, you probably don't even remember what, what it was that you said exactly. Maybe not even remember this conversation at all, but the takeaway for me was I need to do more with more with sharing and more with specifically, you said, holding other people up. So in other words, I think the advice was I should use my position, my elevated position in the industry to elevate others. That's kind of the gist that I got out of it. It sounds like something you would say, right?

Yeah. I imagine people listening who know me would say I've said similar things to others.

Yep. It was really good advice.

Yeah, well, look at that. Advice did nothing unless people take it, and you took it and ran with it. So all the credit goes to you.

Yeah, so, you know, it took me a while, but then I started this podcast, and one thing led to the other. And eventually the podcast format used to be more training, like I was like, show you how to do stuff and stuff. But then that, that message in the back of my head, elevate others. And so I was like, you know what, I'm gonna make this podcast about my guests. So you are on the hot seat. This is your show today. And what I wanted to ask you about, the first question that I wanted to ask you is, what is a learning leader? On your LinkedIn profile, if you look Jeff up, his job title I guess is learning leader. Now, is that like a leader of the learning? Or am I interpreting that correctly?

I think learning leader is intended to be more, you know, a thing than a description of a type of leader. So, you know, what I was trying to say with that and what we say at Talentism is there's a type of person who asks others to follow them. And the first person they have to ask is themselves. Which most people don't. They sort of like ask everyone else to get with their program, but they won't get with their own program. So it starts with a sense of personal responsibility. It starts with self. And then the biggest thing that's standing in the way of becoming great at anything, including being a leader, is that you have to get better at being yourself. You have to figure out the one square foot between your ears, which by far is the hardest thing to do in all of humankind. And so So, a learning leader is a person who compulsively or habitually commits to continuously improve themselves by learning about themselves. And that starts with them taking the responsibility if they're asking for followership of going first and saying, like, if there's a problem, I'll take responsibility. If there's a, you know, if somebody else does something great, I'll recognize them. So, there's a certain humility that that comes with it as well. But that's what we mean to say with a learning leader is there are people we run to out in the world. We work with thousands of people now. And some people are naturally learning leaders and some people never will be. But most people can learn, can learn, and they just don't know the way, the path. And so that's what we're trying to do.

Well, I think it's awesome. I wasn't able to elicit and explain it very well. So I want to make sure that you had an opportunity to do that because I thought it was— when I first read that, it's unique. I don't think I've ever seen anybody else have that as their thing. You know, job title is not what it is. So, and so I wanted to make sure that it was made clear, at least for me, if not for the audience. Most of the people who listen to the show are, you know, they're in the talent industry. Sometimes in HR, but frequently in the people business. So, they're either in TA or people or something like that. And you left us in a way because you left the recruiting industry and you started your own company. And I wanted to ask you what was the spark, like what lit the fuse on you going out on your own and hanging your own shingle and starting a company?

Well, you know, I got into recruiting because I was pissed off and I got out of recruiting because I was pissed off. So what I mean by that is I had started not in the world of recruiting or talent, but in being a software entrepreneur and had started and sold a couple of software companies. And I just became obsessed with this how you build a business through talent is really what it came down to. You know, like, uh, I really believe that for most companies, the entire value of that company walks out the door every night to go home to their family. So, um, so I had— I became obsessed with that. And this was before you and I met, before I had started a comp— I co-founded a company in '97 And, uh, there was this one moment we, we got, we secured our first big financing, our Series A, and we were so proud of ourselves. I think it was like a $6.4 million raise or something. And it was really big at the time, you know, a raise that size.

Yeah.

In '97 was really big. And we were so proud of ourselves. And we heard, I think like a week later that these two kids down the street had raised $25 million. It was like two kids named Sergey and Larry, and they were starting a company called Google. And, uh, pretty quickly they had 4 times as much capital as we did. It was the famous $25 million seed stage round. And, uh, and so I knew we, we didn't compete directly with them, but my co-founder was a, uh, you know, a leading light in the search industry, and, and he sort of knew of them and they knew of him, and we competed for the same talent. So I, like most entrepreneurs, I realized I was at risk because they just had a lot more capital, they had a cooler product, they had, uh they had a better brand, all kinds of stuff, and I was going to not win. So I became obsessed with how I could turn $6 million into $25 million worth of value. And 100% of that to me is just the people. Like, how do you unleash potential?

So you ended up in recruiting directly, even though that was not your—

Well, that was indirect. You know, as a CEO, I was trying to think about how do I hire the best? What's culture? How do I unleash their potential? And then eventually, Um, why I say I got, I got pissed off is I started to realize that a lot of recruiting was based on stuff I didn't believe in. Um, so I, I realized like there's this, there's two weird things in recruiting. One is the recruiter's always blamed for a bad hire, but I don't think they're ever really at fault. And the second thing is most people assume that because somebody went to a fancy school, or they went to, they have some cool degree or they worked at a hot company that they must be talented. And I don't think that's true. And so what happened is the people who went to the cool schools got paid more and got more offers. And the really talented people often got overlooked. That's what pissed me off. And I don't think that's because recruiting, I think that's because hiring managers don't know what they're doing.

Yeah.

And I think when recruiters do know what they're doing and try to educate hiring managers, hiring managers don't listen usually because hiring managers sort of treat recruiters like McDonald's. Like, I didn't come here for your opinion about what a good Big Mac is. Just give me a Big Mac, right? Um, and so I just— that was my experience, and I just felt like I wanted to change that. And so that I went after selling that company and then starting and selling another company, I went inside Electronic Arts. They gave me a great opportunity inside the world of learning and development and recruiting. And it was such a cool place. I'm always grateful to Cindy Nicola and rest of your roof, Gabrielle Toledano. They really gave me an opportunity to try some cool stuff. And that's where you and I met because I was working with a guy named Sean Rader. Who's still, I think, is still around.

Still around, still innovating. Yeah.

Yeah, still innovating. And one of the things I'm proudest of is I went to him and I said, you know, I really think recruiting needs to think more like sales and less like procurement. It's not like you got to bid and you got to figure out the lowest cost provider. It's like you got to create something super valuable and get the right customer to come to you. And so that's what led him and I to go to Salesforce and start working with Salesforce. I think we were really the first external— EA was the first external company to start building recruiting software on Salesforce platform.

I was doing it at Google. What year was that?

This was 2005.

Oh my God, that was around that time.

Really?

Yeah.

Shelly, you were always so far ahead of me.

That was right around that time, and I was bumbling around blindly. I wish I'd known because I would have— I could have used an ally. Yeah, it was the only thing we had. I mean, that was like, they, you know, Google at the time— I don't know if they still do, but they had MoMA as their internal, uh, system. Yeah, um, which was a homegrown, you know, of course they're engineers, so they would do that. And one of the functions of MoMA was the, the applicant tracking system. But there really wasn't— it was an applicant tracking system, it was project management, it was not a contact management. You know, you couldn't add contacts to it. People had to apply.

That's right. Yeah.

So, and they were like, well, you could use Salesforce. And I'm like, Salesforce is for sales. But I— but yeah, that's awesome. Oh my God, I can't believe that.

Yeah, that was— it was a great time. And Sean— that's when Sean and I ran into each other, and Sean was invaluable in setting all of that up and continues to innovate on that, etc. And so, um, So that's why I got into recruiting because I wanted to change all that. And then the reason I got out of recruiting is because I was head of recruiting at Bridgewater. And without going into a lot of detail, I was like, yeah, this problem of bad hiring managers, recruiting is never going to solve it.

It's just going to perpetuate.

It's just going to perpetuate. And that's the problem I want to go solve. So, yeah, that's what led to Talentism is really a an entirely new way to think about management and especially people management and talent and how to bring that into market-leading companies and get them to actually start changing the way they think about hiring and managing and all of that.

So, you did very much is still in the talent industry. It's just not in recruiting directly. It's, it's at the higher level conceptually, you know, it's the entire ethos of including, you know, training and onboarding and all that other stuff. So your business is an advisory? Is that a good—

No, no, it started that way. First of all, it started as advisory. I had all these things.

Oh, okay.

After I left Bridgewater, I locked myself in my attic for 6 months and created a whole bunch of new stuff like different ways to map talent and think about you know, management and everything. So it started as advisory, but pretty quickly, you know, a lot of success is so much luck. And I, I just got very lucky because it was around New York City right at a point when the New York startup scene was really booming. And I— people would say, hey, I appreciate the advisory work, but what I really need is a coach. And I had never coached before, so I was like, what's that? How does that work? And I just, you know, I kept getting asked and eventually ended up turning Talentism in the very early days. We've been around over 11 years now, but in the early days, turned it into a coaching company. And because that gave us the most trusted position to really help people understand this thing I talked about, which is how their blind spots, motivations, et cetera, stand in the way of success, especially when you're hiring and working with with others. So that's where it got started is we built a proprietary coaching methodology and started extending that and started training lots of coaches that we've trained hundreds of coaches on that. And then through that, which was wonderful, and it just got to work with incredible people who have built Fortune 500 companies. It was just a great experience. But again, I was left sort of dissatisfied with it because I could see, given the thing we had created, this diagnostic tool to figure out where companies were going to succeed or fail and all based on through the lens of people, through lens of management.

So an actual diagnostic, that's pretty cool. That's impressive.

Yeah. So yeah, we built a diagnostic set, a couple of different tools that would actually predict future operational and financial outcomes based on people's psychological states. And it worked. It really did all these predictions very well. And I couldn't get the people I was coaching to change anything. Like they would look at it and go, okay, sure. I see if like I'm managing this way, it'll cause this problem. Or if I treat people this way, I'll get this sort of failure. But I couldn't get them to change anything. So then we moved from coaching and diagnostics into technology and sort of putting all that into a platform. And so really, we've got a number of different products now. We work with a whole bunch of different companies all over the world. But I'd say the thing that where we really thrive is we're like the world's best drop-in people managers. So companies, you know, like Duolingo and a lot of companies come to us and say, hey, can you provide us with this like add on, we've got good people managers, but we need great people management, or we need a way of thinking about that. Can you drop in some resources and fly by our side? Really, I think of it, you know, we're trying to innovate that the same way I think AWS was trying to innovate cloud computing. It's like, why build all that stuff yourself? Why not go to people who live, breathe, and eat this every day and are innovating it every day and, you know, collecting thousands of data points through our systems and our software and improving every day of people management? It's not something on the side. It's everything we do. And that's proven to be very successful. So it's got all the pieces to it. It's got the diagnostics, it's got the learning and development, it's got the coaching, it's got, you know, dashboards, it's got all kinds of stuff in it. But it really is just this idea of fast-growth, rapid-change companies. I think their competitive advantage is the quality of their people management. We're out there banging that drum, making that case. And if people management is really what makes or breaks you, you can either like try to figure out how to do that yourself and build that from the ground up, or you can call in the experts who can just drop in the solution, you know, within a week.

And maybe both, right? Or do it yourself and then get some help.

Well, yeah. And then the companies that we're doing is we're, we move it inside. So because we don't want to be, you know, like outsourced the entire time, what we want to do is teach them this new way of thinking about people and these diagnostics and everything. So over time, companies absorb and adapt, adopt our methodologies in our software and everything else. And yeah, so we're, we're all about like changing the world through excellent people management. That's really where we're at. And recruiting continues to be a part of that.

We don't recruit, but we work with a number of really Your managers recruit the people you work with. They're recruiting for themselves, for their teams, and they're—

That's right. And then we teach them how to do it. Yeah, we teach them how to take responsibility for that. Remember that frustration I had where hiring managers were blaming recruiters? I was like, look, if you make a bad hire, it's because you're a bad hiring manager. That's who's responsible for making the hire. And so anyway, it's given us the position to actually change the thing that got me into recruiting in the first place and sort of pissed me off and, and now has gotten me into this.

Well, I've been certainly admiring from a distance, I've seen, you know, the, the website change and when you put up the, the operating system, which I think is, I probably should have described that better, but that's the whole components of the assessment and the learning and the coaching and the growing together. That's that operating system. So I've been watching admiring from a distance, and you've definitely been doing some, some great things. I wanted to ask you, what would you say is the most transformative change that— and, and I, I'm going to refer back to the statement that you made, which is we can't fix it from recruiting. You're right, we're not— you know, recruiting is, is a position where we are constrained, if you will, by two sets of relationships, not just one. You know, in a lot of business, there's— it's a— it's, you know, people sitting across from a table from each other. You have a buyer and a seller. You know, you have negotiations. But in recruiting, it's a— it's a triad. And so, it's very difficult to— to kind of fix things from a love triangle, if you will. So, I agree— I agree with that. But my question is, What would be the most transformational thing we could do within recruiting to alleviate, even if we can't fix it, you know, maybe we can take some Tylenol. What's the, what's that? Is there something that we can learn from your experience in the last dozen years in growing teams and coaching that as you seek to answer that question that we can actually put to use practically in our limited reach as recruiters, as TA leaders? Is there one thing that we could cling on to?

Well, let me give you two. Oh, even better. Because I have one more value. So, the first thing I'd say simply is recruit for the future. So, remember when a client creates a specification, what they're actually doing is responding to the past.

Yeah.

There's some pain they're going through or some, something that they're experiencing, and they're like, I need a body to like fill that gap.

Yeah. And here's everything that person used to do.

Here's everything that person used to do, or here's the thing I'm in now. But we all know even an excellent recruiting process is probably going to take 60 to 90 days, maybe up to 180, and things can change a lot in that time. And then you onboard someone and I mean, hopefully they're productive within 30 to 60 days, but it's probably more like 180. And so you could be up to a year between the time you create a specification and the time you're getting productivity and the time like that person's great in the job and they're solving. At the very least, you're at minimum 4 months. So 4 months to a year. So much can change in that period of time. So the first thing I would say is when you're sitting down and talking to a, talking to a client about what they're hiring for, you got to take them through what we call a pre-mortem exercise. And that is rather than having them, like, you know it, right? You know what the pre-mortem is?

Of course you do. I'm laughing because I never called it that, but when you said that word, it popped into my head like, oh my God, that's the word for it.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's Kahneman. I didn't come up with it. But the pre-mortem concept is, and I could geek out for hours about the cognitive biases and everything, but basically what you're trying to do is jump ahead to success or failure and then look back and say, what do we need to do now to make sure that success happens and the failure doesn't happen? So the first thing practically is like I'd go through that exercise and I would have them redo the specification based on that. Every single time I've run that, every single time it's changed the spec, every time. And remember, recruiters are evaluated on bad specs.

So like, right, no matter how many wins they get.

Well, no, the customer, the client says, I need this, you know, I need to hire, I don't know, like a software engineer, whatever. And then you go run the search and you make the hire. And then eventually, you know, 6 months, years, a year later, the client comes back to you and says, I had hired that person. It was a terrible hire. And they're either they're directly or indirectly blaming you for it. That's— I've done the analytics on this. It's because of a bad spec. It's not because of a bad recruiting process. So recruiters get blamed for bad specs, even though they don't write the spec. So they should take control of that and run a pre-mortem exercise to get that spec changed. That's number 1. And number 2 is, you know, again, having run tens of thousands of data points and analytics on this, at Bridgewater, at other places here at Talentism. If you look at a failed hire, it's probably because there was a chemistry misread. It wasn't a hard skill problem. We kind of know this, but I hate that the term soft skills and hard skills, because it turns out cognitively, the soft skills are much harder than the hard skills.

Yeah, I think the term really comes from like the fact that you can You know, write it down and say, you know, this is— writing code is a hard skill because you can write it down. You can easily explain it. I think that's where it comes from.

Yeah, I believe, and I think talentism has proven you can write down the soft skills too.

As well, right?

Yeah.

I'm just saying that may be the origin of it.

Yeah, I get the point. So, the chemistry thing is First of all, how well does the hiring manager know themselves? Most hiring managers cannot tell you what they like and dislike. So you have to drive them to like the last person you fired and why you fired them. And then they're going to give you lots of bullshit. Sorry, they will. And then you got to really get underneath that and be like, okay, yeah, yeah, I understand they came into work late, but really what happened, right? And then you need to make sure that's involved in the spec. And when you're doing the assessment after the sourcing, you need to really assess people whether they've got those attributes or not. Because once you put somebody in front of a client and they do that fall-in-love thing, even though they're like a match made in hell, then you've lost the ability to convince them. So you're going to have to screen that out before you put somebody in front of a client. And when you screen that out, you really got to figure out like, actually what this person, you know, what this hiring manager hates is people who speak back to them, something like that. Okay.

Yes. You got to find that.

That's right. You got to find that thing. And you got to prevent that thing from getting in front of the client because they won't test for it. They won't acknowledge it.

And then they'll make the hire and then they'll blame you and it'll fail, right? Or it'll succeed despite them. Because that one thing worked the other way around, right?

The low probability bet.

Accidentally, yeah, right. That's when it accidentally works.

Sure, there are lots of, lots of incredible hires that are low, low prob— what we call low probability, high volatility bets. And I encourage everybody to have that. Like, I think of talent as a portfolio. And so like, you got your bonds in the portfolio, uh, you know, that's your stable income. And then you've got your like weird-ass seed stage investments and that's your long shot, like if it pays off. I believe in your talent portfolio, you got to have your long shots and you got to have your, your sure things. If you only build an organization based on sure things, you're not going to be competitive. If you only build it on long shots, you're not going to be productive. So, so you got to have that portfolio. But so I do think you should have some long shots, and that's where a lot of potential gets unleashed and incredible people get discovered.

But, uh, so thinking higher for the future and hire a portfolio, I like that idea. Just like you invest in different, you know, high risk, low risk. So it's, it's almost like an investment. Well, it is an investment strategy in your, you're investing in your organization by investing in your team and you want to have a mixture of those, um, like you said, you know, high risk, high reward and low risk, but they get the work done. Right.

Yeah. I mean, one of the beauties of spending 3 years inside the world's largest and most successful hedge fund, at least at that time, is you start to understand talent as an investment. Right. When I was at EA, I understood it as a sales game. And then when I was at Bridgewater, I started to understand it as an investment game. And there are a couple of truisms about holding equities that are the same about talent. One of the things Ray used to say is, Every day you hold a stock is the day you would buy it, which when you think about it is sort of surprising, but it's true, right?

Right, right.

Well, every day you employ somebody is a day you would hire them.

You would hire them.

Um, and so, so like, that's kind of interesting. It's interesting to think about that, the portfolio approach. Like, how do you, how do you trade balance all this stuff to make sure that you don't have too many high volatility bets and you don't have too many sure things? Like, there's a spread there. How do you get behind your investments? The thing where talent is different than investment strategy is you can help talent become a better investment, right? You can't— if I hold a share of Meta, there's nothing I can really do to change that company. But if I'm employing someone, I can help them get better.

Absolutely.

The value of that talent and it's a return to me. So it's— I think it was just— I think too many hiring managers either like they're just doing a bunch of wild stuff that ends up with organizations that are completely dysfunctional, or they're constantly playing to the past and playing it safe, in which case like the rare talent, the rare find, the diamond in the rough, the people that truly transform organizations never get found because they because the contrarians here— another thing Ray taught me and many, many other people is like, if a, if a stock is bid high, it's because a lot of people want it, right? That's why prices go up. But that means the more people who want it, the higher probability that they're going to be wrong eventually. It's the contrarian who figures out when they're going to be wrong, who actually makes the a big win in talent. When everyone is betting against somebody and you bet for them, you have a possibility of getting a huge return. Um, whereas if you're just holding something like you, you're paying, I don't know, a million bucks for the Harvard grad because they're a Harvard grad and everybody is bidding that up, that's probably a faulty talent strategy long-term. Uh, you'd be way better off paying $100,000 for the kid that everybody's overlooking. But, you know, could potentially pay off 40, 50x compared to the Harvard grad. And my family mostly went to Harvard, not me, so, uh, I'm certainly the— I'm sure they'll love that analogy, the black sheep.

Yeah. Um, yeah, well, yeah, yeah, I think, I think I definitely was. Definitely. We're, we're, we're going to start our own little, uh, black sheep family here. Um, So let me ask you something to dig a little bit deeper in that. And I know you've challenged me a lot over the years, so I'm going to return the favor because I think this might be a difficult question to answer because not for you, but because of the subject matter. You know, part of the reason why we can't solve necessarily the problem with recruiting from within recruiting is because we often in TA, you know, recruiting and acquisition of talent, we become either complacent or get stuck in, or sometimes just get shoved into a very reactive order-taking mode. You and I don't do that. And other people don't do that as well. But it's an easy place to go to, especially as you're coming up through the ranks and not getting, you know, excellent coaching yourself. And you just sort of respond. The hiring manager demand is that you just go do it. So we're very— we as an industry tend to be more reactive than we really should be. That said, how can we position or reposition ourselves so that these— your customer, these business leaders— how can we position ourselves so that they see us as indispensable and give us the chance to help them in that goal rather than sending us back to our reactive corner?

Yeah, it's a great question. Well, the first thing is you got to understand when somebody's got a headache, stop telling them they need a vitamin. And so I thought you were going to say they need an aspirin. No. So I think a lot of times what happens, not just in recruiting but HR overall, I see this all the time, is like you want to have the— you want to— I would call that the strategic conversation, right? Like, I want— like, we should be doing something more than just being an order taker. Being more than reactive. Well, you don't hold a strategic conversation, which is sort of like an eating your vegetables conversation.

Like, oh, you have a headache, eat your vegetables. I got you, right?

It's like we choose that we often want to— they come to us and say, oh my God, I'm dying. I need somebody. And you're like, well, let me tell you how to think about this. Like, it's just not going to work. And so to me, the problem is how do you create create the space for a conversation when that need isn't there, when they don't have a headache, when they want to get healthy, right? So you take vitamins when you want to get healthy. You take an aspirin when you want to get rid of pain. Don't recommend a vitamin when somebody's in pain, but wait until they want to have the get-healthy conversation. And the thing I know about recruiters, really good recruiters, is they have a way of burrowing their way into a customer's mind, into a client's mind. The people— this is true across everything, like retain, contingent, hourly, all that stuff, but I've especially seen it in retain. But if you become the trusted go-to source of like, you can solve that pain problem, then when you ask me to have a broader sort of vitamin conversation, like, you know, I should be strategic, we should be talking differently about hiring or recruiting, um, you're going to get that chance. And so, you know, it's very hard for recruiting. Well, when I left, when I left Bridgewater, everyone told me go start a recruiting firm. Everybody, they're like, you're the head of recruiting of like an iconic—

that happens a lot. It's almost like It's almost like the wrong answer, you know, like you want to start a business, go do recruiting. But I say recruiting gives you access to so many different parts of business that having been a recruiter, you probably know more about business than most business people, right?

Well, that's right. But the, you know, for me, I didn't want to go into recruiting because I didn't want to get the aspirin call. Um, I, I wanted to get the vitamin call. It, but to be honest, like, that took years. That took years. It's like, people called me because they were in pain. They didn't call me because they wanted to think differently. It took at least 3 years for them to start calling me when they wanted to think differently. And the only way they started calling me is first I took away their pain. So like, I think the trick for a recruiter is, if you have aspirations of really being a strategic lever, and really being somebody who can help change the business and change leadership and all all those things. Can you execute against the bid in front of you while at the same time keeping your eye on that future? And as you said, a lot of times if you're just executing every day, you get sucked into that, right? You lose the bigger vision. You're just like, I'm just making money, you know, I'm, I'm turning racks, it's all good. Um, and I think that that's the hard part, is like, how do you keep your eye on that future, win the credibility to get into that conversation? Because I I think it's a, it's a grind.

So is there a practical way, man? I'm, I almost, I want to ask the, I'm going to ask the question and I think I'm, I think I'm walking into it, but you know, you, you're saying wait until you can have the vitamin conversation and then you can, you know, work with the hiring manager to have that. Is there, is there a way to um, gently steer these leaders towards the vitamin conversation so they realize that they might need some vitamins? You know what I'm trying to say? Is there, is there something we can do to help them see that?

Yes. Uh, so you play the portfolio, and what you do is if they say, I want to see You know, I'm picking on Harvard here. I feel like they've got it coming. The, let's say the hiring manager, and I had hiring managers say this to me, only show me Ivy League grads. Just show me Ivy League grads. I want smart ones. Show me the Ivy League grads. And I'd say, okay, like, I'm not going to fight that battle right now. But what I'm going to do is if they want 8 Ivy League grads, I'm going to show them 6 and put 2 in who I think are sleepers and awesome. And I'm going to advocate for them. And so the two, like this, you know, this, this person is from San Jose State and this person's from South Indiana, you know, and I've talked to them and they are amazing and they are worth your time. And so you become an advocate for that talent. And then if, if, if the hiring manager will give that talent a look, and they start to get excited, then you use that and say, the reason I did that— you know, now you're excited about that, that, you know, developer from San Jose State or whatever it is— the reason I did that is to show you that there's better, higher quality, lower price talent in other areas. That's my strategic lens. You don't have that lens. I have that lens, and I can actually help you across a wide variety of things. So you, you use the opportunity to prove it to them. Right, without having the conversation. You win the right to have the conversation by doing some things they don't expect that actually pay off for them. You don't go in and say, hey, I can be successful as a recruiter if you just change who you are as a hiring manager, right? You just— you can't— you can't make that pitch. But what you can do is, you know, slide some things in. Chefs do this all the time, right? Like you go in for fine dining and you expect steak and potatoes or whatever.

Not that that's fine dining, I get it, but they're giving you a taste of that.

And all of a sudden they give you this piece of dried passion fruit and you try it, you're like, oh my gosh, that's really good. Then you're like, okay, well, that's because this place is really about broader than steak and potatoes. Um, so that's what I would do is win the opportunity to have the conversation by giving them a portfolio of options and then take the outliers in that portfolio and advocate for them. So that they start to understand how your perspective could give them benefit.

That's a, that's a really practical answer. I very frequently, when I'm coaching recruiters and when I'm, you know, training and teaching and leading these functions, I very frequently use the sandwich analogy of provide the client, the hiring manager, with kind of like, you know, a high and a low and then something in the middle. In other words, if they're saying They want Harvard, then, you know, get them like a very Harvard, then a community college, and then someone from a pretty good school that maybe doesn't have the reputation, you know, so you kind of give them more than what you had. So that's a very practical— you're taking it, of course, much more strategic as far as having this be a portfolio, not just me with one hiring manager and 3 candidates. But the other thing that I'm going to admit, as you were saying that, I have these memories of probably my top 2 or 3 happiest moments in my work as a recruiter in talent acquisition, doing the job of recruiting, which I still do to this very day. I've never left. I always feel like if I'm going to tell people how to do this job, I need to be able to do the job. So, I'm still doing it, you know, 30 years later. But I can tell you that there are these 3 hires that I just hold very fondly in my memory. My first one, then another hire somewhere in between. And then recently about— and I say recently, about 5 years ago. And what's in common between all 3 of those, as you were talking, is I just realized that all 3 of those people were completely and entirely not what the specifications called for. All 3 of those people were people that I went above and beyond for advocating because I knew that they had what they needed to have to do the job, despite the fact that their resume and the job description were not even in the same universe together. And those are my happiest moments. And also, those are those candidates' happiest moments in at least my experience in finding a job that recognizes them for their value and opportunity to grow that they would never have applied for. In all 3 cases, these candidates would never have applied for that job because the job description doesn't speak to them. So that's a— yeah, I think that's a really good takeaway from this conversation. Well, can I not have the opportunity to do it all the time? You know, I get that as a recruiter, sometimes you just have to fill a job. Yeah. But whenever you have the opportunity, this is how you do it.

Well, let me, let me speak to that because I love that. And I spent, you know, time talking here about what I didn't like about recruiting and all that stuff. I think the ultimate high is getting somebody a job who other people would overlook. To me, that's how recruiting changes the world, right? Recruiting changes the world when it goes off the beaten path. It doesn't accept the conventional wisdom. It doesn't go take the Ivy Leaguers and all that stuff, but it finds somebody who didn't believe in themselves, never would have had the opportunity. Take somebody like that and shows that they've got the capability and they have the merit to be able to succeed. Because this whole meritocracy system we've got where if you went to the right school, you must be better, is complete utter shit. So as you can see, this gets me really fired up.

No, I think it should, because I, I saw that a lot.

You finding those people and hiring those people, that changed the world, my friend. That is beautiful. And I'm proud of you for doing it.

Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate that. The— I'll share a little detail about the mid-career one. When I was at Coca-Cola, the position was essentially a very elevated executive assistant, an EA. And I don't mean like an administrative assistant. I mean, the type of executive assistant that if you've— you probably go to I go into CEO offices all the time. You walk into the CEO office or maybe it's the C-suite, right? Where you have the CFO, the CEO, and there's that one person in the middle of the floor that like dominates what's going on there. They're the EA. They're the one, they're the gatekeeper, they're the facilitator. So, it's a very critical job in a C-suite environment that isn't, you know, a coordinator, right? You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, of course. Well, I took it on myself for this role because I had seen that all the other EAs 90% of them were female. I had said to myself, wouldn't it be great if the executive assistant to the chief legal counsel, who also happens to be head of the PR organization, and, you know, wouldn't it be awesome if they had something that was off the beaten path, right? And so, I set up on myself to go out and find a diversity hire for this. And in this environment, a diversity hire was a non-female. What I ended up finding was something very, very, very non-traditional. I found a master sergeant. If you know anything about the military, you know that a master sergeant is basically the highest enlisted rank. And it is a very rare, very elevated position. He had retired as a master sergeant and his position was working directly with the C-suite at the Pentagon, the CEOs of military as their executive assistant. So he was a male active duty veteran. So what warfighter, right? And over 50. Yeah. A veteran. Male over 50, and they loved him. They loved him because he brought another— it's the portfolio, it's exactly that. He brought another kind of energy. Um, there had nobody in that floor had been military, so he had that military, um, I don't know, ethos, discipline, whatever you want to call it. You know when someone has been in the military, and it was just a very well-rounded, uh, hire that contributed greatly to the culture of the C-suite in ways that nobody asked for. Nobody said, shall we find a diversity person? So that, that really elevates, um, me. It makes me feel high, like you said. I wanted to not say high. Yeah, definitely.

Yeah, if we could all be doing all that all the time. Uh, unfortunately, most places the problem isn't, uh, Most places the problem isn't there aren't enough guys, but I like—

no, this was very rare in that it was like 90%, um, you know, highly experienced women. And the only reason I went for a guy is because I wanted to kind of break the mold and shake things up a little bit in a way that would be beneficial to the team. Um, but what I started out with was, was veterans. So I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna hire a veteran for this. And I thought it would be great to bring somebody in that has that kind of organization He worked in logistics his entire military career. So I started out looking for a veteran, found a male veteran that had done the job, and I was surprised that that was the job that they were doing. But, um, they were in fact doing that job. So that's a really, uh, that, that makes me smile.

Thanks.

You always, you always bring these awesome ideas that are inspiring and energizing. Thank you for doing that.

Well, it's my—

I want to acknowledge that.

Thank you. Well, thank you for saying that. It's a— I've always loved our conversations. So thank you for looking for me and asking me to chat. I'm grateful for it.

Well, glad to have you. We only have a few minutes left, and I asked you the 3 big questions that I wanted to ask you, which I think have contributed a lot to the industry. Hopefully people will watch this in the future and do more portfolio hiring, um, and take more vitamins. If you don't know what that means, go back in the transcript. Um, but everybody that comes to this show has to answer these two questions that I always ask. The first of those is, who should be our next guest?

Who should be our next guest? Oh, there's so many cool people.

Hey, I'll take more than one. By the way, I'm gonna invite them, doesn't mean they're going to accept, right? But I have brought some.

Huh, how about Dart Lindsey? I think Dart's brilliant. All right, um, listen, the person I think you should get, if you could get them— I don't think you can— but, uh, is Rusty Roof. Rusty was the, uh, first chief— I think the first chief people officer at Electronic Arts. To this day, still, I think, what a shining example of what, what that can be. It had a great recruiting mindset, great people mindset, strategic, creative, just great. Um, Gabrielle Toledano, if you can get her. Cindy Nicola, who I think is now head of recruiting at Databricks. Um, I mean, they're all very impressive.

You know, you mentioned Sean. I might reach out to Sean and see if he's—

Yeah, Sean, you should reach out to Sean. I love him.

Yeah, well, that's— as always, you overdeliver. Um, I asked for one name and I got five, so thank you times five again. The, the last question, um, is a philosophical one, and I, I like to end with asking What would you ask us as we're listening to this podcast? A lot of folks don't catch it live. What would you ask us to ask ourselves? So, in other words, give us a question to ask ourselves from your case of wisdom examples there. What should we ask ourselves?

I believe the most powerful question that exists in humankind is a very simple one, and it's, what am I missing? The more confident you feel, the more you should ask that question. The more you're down on yourself you feel, the more you should ask yourself that question. Most of the time, our brains are messing with us. They're messing with us because, again, I can spend hours going into this, but our brains are telling us things that aren't necessarily true. And you want to develop the habit— it's a habit I developed long ago— of when I feel absolutely certain about something, I'll say, what am I missing? And often it's, I'm missing a lot. And if I can take just a couple of minutes to ask myself, what am I missing, and fill in some of those blanks, I always make a better decision than before I ask myself that question.

Wow. Once again, you overdelivered because I said one question, but you've given us a question we can ask ourselves all the time. So we'll get a lot of use out of this one question. What am I missing? The more confident you are, the more you should ask yourself, what am I missing? Because you probably missed something because you're that confident. That's right. And if you didn't miss anything, great. But at least you asked yourself that, right?

I mean, Well, you know, you know this, the better and better you get at something, the more you realize how much you're missing. Oh yeah. When you first start out, I don't know about you, but the first day I was in recruiting, I was like, I got this.

I work easy. Yep, exactly.

And then you spend a lifetime in the industry, like, oh man, I could— I am missing so much. That's right. I think that's called the Dunbar effect. It's like when you don't know a lot, you think you know a lot. And when you do know a lot, you think you know a little.

That is so true.

So you— what am I missing is always a great way. And by the way, at a certain point when you keep asking yourself, you're like— some days I answer that question, I'm like, I'm better at this than I thought I was. That's an okay reason.

That's a good thing, right? You've affirmed something, right? Maybe you were in doubt about it, but you're definitely affirming it. That's beautiful. All right, man. Well, I can't thank you enough for being on the show. I'm really happy that we were able to catch up, uh, and honored that you were able to make it here. So, um, with that, it's, it's a wrap-up for us. Thanks everybody, we'll see you next week on Shelly's Alley. Be kind to yourselves, take care.