Junius Currier Live on Shally's Alley

You are not in a galaxy far, far away. It's just that you have two uber geeks that are both Star Wars fans. For those of you that recognize the background behind me, this is an X-wing, and I swapped it out for my regular jet fighter in honor of our very special guest today, Junius, who is also a big Star Wars fan and has a— I don't know what planet that is.

Not sure about the planet. I'm just more interested in the Darth Vader back there. That's right, being menacing as ever.

That's right. And we have, and we have established yesterday that you're— you shall now formerly be known as Darth Sorcerer.

Yes, that's right, that's the moniker I'm going by from now on.

Awesome, awesome, awesome. So, uh, welcome everybody, and I'm glad you're joining us. I'll tell you a little bit about my friend Junius here. So Junius and I, we've known each other for probably, what, 4 or 5 years, something like that? Yeah, and, uh, I knew him in a previous life. He recently got a new job as the director of TA for all IT at a secret undisclosed government facility location that I can't tell you, but he is essentially running TA for one of the major most profitable divisions of this government contractor and has to deal with a lot of secret cleared candidates. In the past, Junius has been my go-to person when I've had questions about exactly that. Now, I, I actually teach a class on cleared candidate sourcing, and, um, Junius participated in that class and was like, oh yeah, I know all that stuff, and they started teaching me some more things. So just to show you how much more he knows about that space than I do, um, and that's given the fact that I've actually worked with all 16 clandestine organizations. So think about that. Now, Junius's challenge right now is basically to define what sourcing is. So I thought that was a really good topic to talk about and basically obtain or like get credibility from management to establish a sourcing function. So since he started in this role, he was tasked to build a sourcing team, started doing that in January. Now we're a couple months in and I, uh, was going to, you know, just ask some questions and talk about basically the objective and the obstacles and the, the trials and tribulations that you face when you're starting a sourcing function from scratch. So, um, with that in mind, what has been your biggest hurdle that you, that you have already overcome? So the biggest hurdle when you, you were tapped on the shoulder and somebody said build a sourcing team, and the first major wall you ran into was what?

Yeah, um, I'm trying to think through, like, if there was any wall. Like, I was pretty fortunate that, you know, I had leadership that was pretty supportive of the idea and kind of had the same vision. And that was partly part of the reason why I was brought on, was they knew that I had had previous success with launching a sourcing team and kind of managing that process, as well as having had experience with full lifecycle teams as well. So the, the, there was, so there was a lot of like, I would say, excitement about, okay, we're going to do this. But my primary objective, the first thing that I wanted to do was identify, well, what does success look like?

Uh, okay.

Um, and I think that's super important, right? Like, I didn't want to set up a team to just go out and find people but not be able to ever report on, okay, how do we know if we're doing a good job? How do we know if we're being impactful? So I would say probably the first goal I had was to develop a reporting structure to be able to communicate to the business how this particular sourcing function leads to other areas that they're more historically, uh, you know, knowledgeable about. Of, oh, this means success to us, right? Like, when you think of talent acquisition, you know, you're gonna hit— you're gonna hear about, okay, how many starts do we have this month? How many hires do we have this— you know, how many offers went out? Those sort of things, right? Well, the sourcing team, um, they're, they're, they're focused on the top of the funnel, like, you know, really generating candidate pipelines that feed to the recruiters, right? But so what I wanted to do was say, okay, well, I'm not going to have, you know, sourcers tied to a hire goal or anything like that because they, they, they don't really have full autonomy to impact that. Um, because at some point they hand off, and at that point it's between the recruiter and the hiring manager to kind of convert those candidates. So, um, my focus was developing the metrics you know, the KPIs for the team to focus more on number of productions or number of submittals and then also identify, okay, what does quality look like for us, right? So we developed a benchmark of, hey, here's how many of your submittals should convert from, you know, being a submission to accepted by the recruiter and then from accepted by the recruiter, here's how many of, you know, those submissions should be accepted. By the hiring manager.

Okay, conversion rates.

Yeah, conversion rates, right?

Okay.

Um, and I think those are more things that, um, those are things that are truly in the control of a sourcer, um, because they have control over how many people they submit and they have control over the quality of the people that they submit, um, by determining whether or not they are a good fit for roles. So, um, but I do tie sourcers to offers, meaning I don't hold them, say, "Hey, you need to have this many offers," but I do report on how many offers they are responsible for. So that way, for other business leaders who maybe don't necessarily understand all the, you know, the details about what goes on in talent acquisition, they can see like, "Oh, okay." So we have these people and they were responsible for identifying these individuals as a source of hire. And so that's usually kind of— so that was one of the methods that I, that I was pretty intentional about when I created the sourcing team was developing, hey, how are we going to evaluate the team and show that they are being successful, you know?

Right. So what kind of, what kind of conversion rates are considered quality and what's the, and what is the peak measure, right? So like when I, when I talk about metrics and measurements and a lot of folks may already know this, but I actually for many years sat on the American National Standards Institute's delegation to the International Standards Organization, ISO, and we created the— well, we revised— it was already created, but it was out of date. We revised the recruiting standard and the recruiting metrics and also started working on a sourcing standard. So speaking from someone that has been around lots of other, you know, international leaders in, in this area, one thing that I learned that was a big lesson for me was you gotta boil it down to like something, 1 or 2 or 3 things that you can really measure consistently. So you can have 10 measurements, like, you know, you're, you're the boss, you have your team, right? You're leading your team. You can have 20 measurements, you can have 100 measurements, measure whatever you want. But when it comes to metrics and reporting metrics and dashboards and scorecards, it's a good idea to have like a key metric or a couple of key metrics. Have you identified that yet, or is that like you're still measuring, so you haven't?

Yeah, we're still kind of, yeah, we're still kind of, you know, kind of filling it all out, because like I said, I mean, there, there really was no sourcing function at the organization I was with like this before, right? So the, the first metric that we identified was, hey, well, let's create a submission goal, right? So yeah, so we can at least get some cadence as far as Okay, you know, weekly production to develop pipelines. And then from there, that's when we talked about the conversion rates. But as far as like, we don't, you know, right now we're just in the process of trying to gather enough data to be able to say, okay, what are the historical trends? And so that's something I was planning on looking at over probably about the 3-month time to be able to kind of see, okay, here, let's take a look at all of the production and in the areas that we've been successful in, and let's start to like peel that back a little bit to identify, okay, what are the appropriate benchmarks? Like what truly makes sense, right? So at first to get started, I just kind of had to kind of develop what I thought was a fair, some fair assumptions, which is, you know, set like, hey, for every submission that the team submits to, that every sourcer submits to, you know, recruiter, we want, you know, if you submit 4, we want 3 of those to be accepted. So 75% acceptance rate. And for every 4 submissions that the recruiter sends to the hiring manager, we want the hiring manager to accept 3 out of 4. Now whether that will stay the same, you know, that, that's up for debate, but it's a good starting point. Um, that I thought was fair. It's not, you know, too high off the, uh, the deep end where we're saying, uh, you got to have 99% conversion rate or something, you know, uh, ridiculous like that. But, you know, I think it's reasonable to say, hey, if you send 4 people over, um, you know, if you're, if you're really aligning them to the role, um, you know, you— 3 of them, uh, should be accepted by the recruiter. I think that's fair.

Yeah, I agree with that. It's actually— that's actually about right. In my opinion as well. Because if you, if you approach 100% acceptance rate— in other words, if, if the, if a sourcer is sending 10, um, submittals or 10, 10 profiles of people that have been pre-qualified, whether it's to the recruiter or to the hiring manager— and let's say to the hiring manager, um, because sometimes the recruiter and the hiring— and sorry, the recruiter and the sourcer are aligned and the sourcer is sending them directly to the hiring manager with, you know, the knowledge of the recruiter. So let's say it's going right to the hiring manager and the hiring manager accepts all 10. I'm, I'm a, I'm a member of the clean plate club kind of belief system. So in my family, if you cleared your, your, your plate, if you ate everything on your plate, what that effectively meant is you're hungry and you want more. So you haven't had enough. So you had to leave a little bit as an indicator that I'm good, you know. That was, that was my family, and I'm sure other families have similar traditions like that. So what I'm saying is, if the hiring manager cleared their plate, they probably want more. And so that tells me that, um, we may not be submitting, as you said, the right quality or the, the right quantity. So if I have more like, you know, 80 out of 100, or 8 out of 10, or 7 out of 10, That tells me that the hiring manager is full and they're, and they feel comfortable saying these are, these 2 or these 3 I'm not going to look at. That's good. I want that. I don't want 100%, right? Because it just, it means, it means we're probably, I, well, it could also mean the hiring manager is accepting everybody and not really looking at them. That's another problem. But, but it probably means more than likely that the sourcer is not sending enough people or, um, you know, it, it may not really be an indication of 100% quality is what I'm saying. Right?

Yeah, no, I could, I could, I could definitely see that and vice versa, right? Like if you, you know, if, if, if the sourcer is submitting, you know, a large number of people but the, the acceptance rates are low, then, you know, that, that could be another issue that we need to take a look at. So I think, I think focusing on quality is an important aspect of evaluating a sourcer's effectiveness. Just like I, I, I, and I was really happy about, um, really more so aligning the sourcing team like as a source of hire, um, kind of like as an internal, uh, agency, right? Like we're— they're partners to the recruiters, um, and, uh, strategic partners. And, you know, one of the other things, uh, that's probably— and every enterprise is a little bit different, but we also We're, we're, and like I said, we're just in the phase of really ramping up this team, but we, we also have our sourcers that also in the government sector, if you're a government contractor, there's a segment of recruiting, you know, which is that, you know, business development, proposal recruiting, trying to go after new work. And so our sourcers actually support some pre-award activities there as well. And you're familiar with Todd Davis, right?

Yep.

Yeah, yeah. So in his, in his organization, I think he's part of what, the executive team, where they do like some really top-notch like executive search, developing like personas of like, you know, strategic hires for the executive C-suite. And that's a function that I think we would be able to, uh, take on as well. And I just think, um, what's really cool about Sourcers, uh, and the Sourcer team is, to me, they've always been kind of like the SWAT team of recruiting, right? Like, they're, they're like the top of the line, you know, um, you know, they, they have all the tools, they have lots of knowledge, and, you know, really they're just— they're real big on research. And I just think that there's some possibilities that we could impact the organization even further than just filling top of the funnel, but finding new ways to provide value. And I think that's like the biggest determinator— determination of, uh, success in sourcing is like how many creative ways can you establish that you can bring value to the organization that they don't even know exists, that they haven't even thought of, right? 'Cause that's one of the things that I've come across a lot with business leaders is that they really don't necessarily understand exactly what we do in talent acquisition or in sourcing. Like they don't get that. So, you know, I'm constantly having to have conversations of educating and really identifying exactly what the value is of our department Yeah, and how we impact the organization, uh, at an operational level. And it is a little bit easier in the government contractor world than in some other, uh, businesses because—

is that because everything's tied to like a billing code or something like that?

Well, I was going to tell you, like, so at the end of the day, if, if— so like my organization, we're a staff augmentation, uh, organization. So meaning, you know, we, we win a contract, um, you know, let's just say it's a, uh, firm fixed price contract or a T&M, time and materials contract. We win that and, and essentially we said to the government, okay, our deliverables are gonna be, here's the people that we're gonna hire to do this work that you need us to do. So, uh, if it's firm fixed price, you have to have a certain number of people, uh, um, based on the contract to fill the labor categories in order to be in compliance.

Okay.

You're right.

Got it. Yep.

If it's time and material, every single person Uh, every labor category that goes unfilled is either lost revenue or revenue that's actualized. So we can clearly show if we fill positions for the organization, guess what we're doing for the organization? We're helping generate revenue. So, so it— so in our— so even for sourcing, you know, um, where maybe in the past that particular organization has had a pattern of utilizing staffing agencies. I can clearly come in with a sourcing team and say, hey, these positions would have cost this amount of money had they gone to staffing agencies. But because we haven't—

doesn't that go back to the hire again? So that's like, you know, the sourcer and the recruiter together getting credit for the same thing. So how is sourcing specifically contributing to that?

Well, sourcers are getting credited as a source of hire. Not, not as they're tied to a hire goal.

Is it a, uh, uh, percentage of all hires, right? Like of the 100% hires, some percentage of it were sourced by sourcing? Is that the overall like team metric?

Well, that, that will be, uh, but we haven't gotten there yet. But eventually we're gonna try to identify like a certain percentage, right? We're gonna look— so like this first year is pretty important to be able to like fully map out. Yeah, yeah, what happened at this stage, and then we'll be able to kind of forecast from there. Um, you know, yeah, you have no idea what you are going—

what it's going to look like until you actually do it. You know, it's hard to— it's hard to create a measurement without actually having the data. So first you have to get the data, then you can create the measurement. Now, um, real quick, this can get kind of heady and be a pretty intellectual conversation. And some folks might be tuned out to it. So I just want to clarify. And by tuned out, I don't mean because they don't have the capacity. What I'm saying is it might be boring. Okay, that's what I'm saying. It might be boring to some people. So let me make this a little bit more interesting. There is a very big difference between a measurement and a metric. And I see people making this mistake all the time, especially when they're young in the function, when they're early in the function, and they're just starting to be asked, can you tell me what your team's success is? Define success for your team. And they make the mistake of assuming that a measurement is a metric. And that's not the case. The measurement is the number specifically. OK. So, my waist size measures 30 inches. Yeah, it doesn't. But, you know, let's pretend. My waist size measures 30 inches. However, that is not a metric. If I'm trying to lose weight and I'm using my waist size as the metric, then the metric isn't 30 inches. The metric is how many inches of change have been made in a defined period of time. So, if I say I want to lose some weight, I can say in this year, in a 1-year period, I would like to lose 2 inches. The metric is how many inches per year, not the measurement. And this is a very important point. No matter what, even if you're being measured, it's important to understand that because the metric itself— and by the way, the reason I'm bringing this up is I often hear people saying the number of contacts found or the number of contacts added to the ATS is a metric. No, It is definitely, most definitely, absolutely not a metric. It is a measure. And it matters because if I every day add 10 people to the ATS, that doesn't tell anything. That just tells me I've been doing the same thing over and over again. So if you want to measure success, then you have to say the increase in contacts added to our ATS over time, over what period of time? Right? So that's important. If you're gonna say we are gonna measure success based on people being added to the ATS, then you have to say people being added to the ATS per week, per month, per year, compared to what? Compared to last year or compared to a different department or, right? So that, that is the metric. So just wanted to interject that cause it can, it can derail quickly with people saying, well, you have to add— uh, this actually is a true story— you have to add 1,000 people to the, to the CRM every, every month. Okay, well, um, guess what? I did. I added 1,000 people to the CRM. Heck, I added 2,000 people to the CRM. Meant absolutely nothing. You know, those two people were like—

that's the first thing I was thinking of is, okay, well Uh, you do that, but what, what's the outcome of that action?

Outcome. I love that outcome. That is it right there. That is the, the outcome is what you want, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And, and that's kind of like, you know, um, the, um, I guess the analogy is, you know, beginning with the end in mind, right? Like, you know, what, what are we trying to accomplish? Well, for me, the sourcing Team, what I'm trying to accomplish is an internal, you know, center of excellence of a function that can build, you know, talent pipelines and, you know, lower our aging requisition numbers and be a significant, you know, source of hires within the organization for some of the— for the most challenging, most difficult positions to fill. That's the outcome. So for me, I just need to be able to capture enough data in order to set appropriate benchmarks to know that as we go through this process, that we are trending in the right direction to accomplish the outcomes. So, great.

Bez pointed out that in his comments. So definitely go back and read that for those of you that are watching online. He pointed that out. And going a step further, also saying that if your leadership is saying that you have to contribute X, make sure that the organization is capable of onboarding X, right? So, this happened recently in an organization where the team as a whole, TA as a whole, was tasked with hiring a particular number of, you know, a headcount, right? So, you've got to hire X amount of people. In this quarter. And what ended up happening is we hit a sort of hit a wall where, uh, hiring managers didn't have enough time to interview and onboarding was overwhelmed and everything. So we, we really should not have tried to meet that goal in retrospect. The thing is, we met it, but then we had to pivot and we decided, okay, we've gotta, we've gotta slow this down. We can't do this again. Because it caused a lot of repercussions in order for us to jam those hires in there. Everybody wanted the hires, but the organization itself wasn't ready to onboard. We didn't have enough laptops. We didn't have enough people that, you know, so that is a very good point that the— sorry, Prez. I don't know what— yeah, that's your new name, buddy. Prez is pointing out. So absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. It's a good point.

So I looked at a couple of things. I look at things like the percentage of people who were contacted that replied, and I'd like to have some sort of number. And so I start with taking a look at, okay, how many people have we contacted that we replied? And if that's, let's say, 20%, then what I'd like to do is I'd like to increase that by 5%. So start out with, in general, 20% of the people we contact reply. Okay, so improvement this year will be to increase that number to 25%. That's your metric. Makes sense?

Yep, absolutely.

Then, you know, of those replied, percentage that were screened, of those screened, percentage that were submitted. These are smaller, you know, these are smaller steps. Now, these are, by the way, these are the things that I would put in a dashboard They are not the things I would put in a scorecard. In the dashboard, percent contacted who replied, percent replied who were screened, percent screened who got submitted, percent submitted who got accepted, right? That's the dashboard. You can think of it as a funnel or whatever. Yeah, but the scorecard doesn't show any of that because the scorecard is going to show the one that is the big measure. It's what I was asking you about before, which is percentage of people submitted that got accepted. Because that tells the hiring managers about our quality and our process. And then the second part, or the second dimension, is that percentage that were moved forward. So percentage that got accepted, as in, I like this candidate, I like to talk to them. And then the second part of that is percentage that moved forward past that point.

Yeah.

So, you know, 7 out of 10, the hiring manager said yes. And so that's 7. Out of those 7 2 of them, like, were nos. And so, 2 out of 5 got nos, or the other way around, 3 out of 5. Sorry, I said 7. 5 out of 7 move forward. That's the other one. And then, that's about it. So to me, sourcing— respectfully, I don't know what you're doing— but to me, sourcing kind of ends there. When the hiring manager moves the candidate forward, maybe that's a test, an assessment, on a phone screen, whatever that is. My team in sourcing doesn't really have a whole lot of recourse to impact that anymore.

Exactly.

You could argue that we can increase the quality, um, because, you know, if some people aren't passing the test or whatever, but there, there comes a matter of culture, subjectivity, compensation. You know, I'm sure that in your space you probably have some very specific compensation guidelines related to the cost or profitability of the project, of the contract.

Yeah, for sure.

God bless you for having the ability to do that. Some of us essentially have to go to our teams and go, listen, uh, nobody that's doing this job right now is getting paid that low. And have the team say, well, you know, we need to do a salary comp. Yeah, I'm sorry, uh, to all the analysts out there, of which I count myself one, these salary comps are horribly out of date. Yeah, they're out of date right now. Yeah, everybody that used to be making $350,000 after graduating from college and having one year of experience is probably looking for a job right now. Or maybe not, and maybe they're lucky. But those salaries of, you know, skyrocketing proportions are, are very quickly being normalized right now. So if you have a, if you have a salary analysis or a salary comparison right now, it's probably from December of last year, last quarter, because it hasn't even been a full quarter in this year yet. Not yet, Jennifer. Yeah, almost, you know, in a week, right? So even something like that, you know, yeah, I really appreciate that you have the ability to do that, but it's just not—

well, and some— well, sometimes it can, uh, it is nice when it's priced correctly. So, you know, because they're, you know, because there's different variations of contracts and, you know, um And so it's actually important for operations to bring in recruiting, and that's actually, you know, for business development purposes so we can provide input as like, hey, I hear— because they're going to bring us in from a— from their— they're basing their proposal around solutioning and cost, right?

Oh, wow. So what happens if— what happens? I'm just going to make something up. What happens if you win a contract that your company has to provide, I don't know, 10 million servers or something like that. And in order to do that, you need to have 100 network engineers to build out this 10 million server. I'm totally making this up, by the way, but like they need to have 100 engineers. Project starts and you only have 80.

Well, depending on the contract, it could be fine. Like if you firm fixed price and you're meeting the threshold of—

Okay, you get time to like—

you're, you're fine. And some contracts, there is a, um, you know, there's a transition period so you can, you can get up to speed. Um, so there's all different variables, but what's that— but what, what really is like a bad thing is if, um, a contract is won, they didn't include recruiting, and, um, they, uh, underbid the contract. Oh, so now, so now you've promised the government that you can fill this contract with these individuals at a rate that you can't find anyone at because that's not what the market is bearing.

I didn't even think of that.

Yeah, so when that happens, that causes a whole different set of problems. So, so it is, you know, I've been doing this for a while, so it's really important. So, so that's one of the reasons why we are involved in kind of like the, you know, we would call it business development or proposal recruiting.

Uh, wouldn't that be awesome if that was the same case everywhere? So, you know, the leadership team went to the sourcing leader and said, hey, sourcing leader, we would like to plan next year's headcount and we would like to get some assistance from you in figuring out what the market, you know, availability is. But wouldn't that make sense? Uh, yeah, I've been talking about that for a while now.

Yes.

Yeah. So get this, I probably shared this story before, but, you know, so Sorry if it's repetitive, but there was an occasion at a company that I was working with, not recently, but some time ago, where the VPGM, which is essentially the president, for all intents and purposes, of this division, had a— during a meeting with other leaders, and I was in that meeting, had a question for the other, their peers. That was essentially, we would like to, we would like to close this facility because it isn't producing the number of widgets that we need. And we would like to outsource the obtainment of those widgets rather than making them ourselves, we'd like to just buy them. Does anybody have any ideas? And I was like really nervous, but I spoke up because, you know, these are all VPGMs and I'm, I'm just, you know, I'm just a sourcing leader, right? But I'm like, I have some data. I said, I have some data that might help. I said, what if we can identify the reason why the facility isn't producing? Is it one of staff? Is it one of leadership? Could we potentially identify competitors in the area that could either A, be acquired to augment the production, or B, recruited to come and lead this facility to improve production if that's possible. So I suggested— this is, it was a lot briefer than this, but they asked questions and we got to, you know, um, long story short, right? I suggested, okay, at the end of the, the brief discussion, I said, what about this? What if we can figure out what other facilities do the same thing nearby and what they produce, right? So we can see, you know, first of all, are there other facilities that can do better? And what talent is available in that general market locally? Because we know we didn't want to go do a, you know, nationwide search and everything. And they said, okay, we'll hold off on making that decision until you can come back and do that report. Wow. Okay, great. So now it's like on me, right? So I go out and I do the research, I come back and I send an email and I say, to everybody. All right, this is what I found. There are 3 other organizations that have similar facilities for widget manufacturing of similar footprint, size, etc. There are several others that do similar things that don't make the same thing, but that have leaders that are, you know, facility leaders that could easily, um, come over and, you know, be brought in to like turn things around. And then these are the situations. And so based on that email, The VPGM called the meeting and said, we are going to fund this facility for 3 more years. Wow, dude.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that was huge. Remarkable. Yeah.

Yeah. That was huge. And I was like so happy for sourcing at that moment because it really proves the value of competitive intelligence.

Yeah.

Um, ultimately they ended up going with option B, which is they basically, instead of buying another one, they, they hired on someone that would oversee the facility locally. What was happening was one person was running 3 of these widget-making things, and there wasn't enough time on the ground to really, you know, run things, um, to improve things. So they hired someone to come in and be the local boss of the widget-making, and it did turn things around. And all I can tell you is that the result of that is in your wallet. Right now. Yeah, almost everybody listening to this has an item in their wallet that was made by this facility. So, um, by the way, I am not— this is not me bragging. This is me telling the importance of having information at your fingertips. So if you have the opportunity, speak up, because at the very least, my fundamental belief is that our value— yours, mine, everybody that is leading not just a sourcing team but also a TA team, our number one value, our number one contribution is decision support. We are not really the decision makers. You may be the VP of TA and you may make decisions about your team. Obviously, I make decisions about my team all the time. But when it comes to business strategy, that's above, you know, that's the CEO, maybe the board, not usually, usually the CEO and the executive team are the ones that are setting the strategy. I'm tasked with executing it. But if we are able to provide leadership with a better decision, that made a difference. So Junius, if your sourcer produced a candidate that made it all the way to interview but didn't get hired, however, they were the second candidate, and the first candidate who did get hired was the only candidate I'm pretty sure that hiring manager would not have hired that candidate because they would have felt like they don't have a choice, right?

Yeah.

If I only have one candidate, unless it's literally a match made in heaven and absolutely perfect for every measure, I'm probably not going to just slam dunk it. I'm probably going to say, I need to compare this, right? So if you provided the alternative and they went with the first choice anyway, your job has been done. They didn't get hired, but that manager is now confident in having interviewed two very equivalent candidates and hired the right one because of your contribution. So even if you don't assist in recruiting, if you don't assist to the hire, we still contributed. And that's just one aspect. What about the other aspect of, you know, headcount planning and things like that? There was a lot about that in the, uh, call yesterday.

Yep. You know, so headcount planning We're actually— and I think this, it doesn't necessarily fall underneath TA per se, but, you know, I think any great organization should also have a pretty good plan, especially in the contracting world, of how they can shift their employees around from expiring contract to other— so talent management, redeployment. Yeah. So we're currently going through a process as an organization focused on that. Um, because, you know, that's just such a waste, right? Like, talk about a waste of resources. Like, um, you know, you spend all that money bringing people into the organization, you know, and a particular contract ends. Um, you're like, okay, thanks, right? And then, you know, another opportunity—

goodbye, thanks for all the fish.

Would you be interested in coming back? Instead, like, the longer term, um, solution is, okay, let's identify a strategy, you know, internally, that when we have, like, you know, um, expiring contracts, what, what are, you know, what are the kind of contracts we should be going for?

First of all, yeah, like feeder contracts, uh, yeah, if maybe there's another contract, this one's ending but another one's starting, —exactly—

just go redeploy.

But you need to know, like, what kind of things would you need to know? You know what the skill set is. Well, and that's part of forecasting, right?

That's part of that.

No, I'm sorry, I mean for the, for the team that you're deploying. Like, yes, you know what that skill set is, but you don't know what this skill set— well, you need to know both, basically.

Exactly right. You need to— so, like, and that, and that's one of the benefits sometimes of, um, being in the government contracting realm is that you really can kind of shape your workforce around the kind of work you go after. But I think the same principles would apply to any line of business, you know, depending upon what your lane is. You, you know, you can kind of build in those escalation, um, you know, um, you know, career tracks within your organization. So you have kind of like a feeder system to, you know, and I know it sounds kind of like weird, like, you know, the terminology I'm using, but, but you just want the capability of being able to say, okay, like, for instance, I'll give you an example. We have these contracts where they're like secret level. Well, what if, what if we went after some contracts that are not secret level? Because we want— we know that the government historically has had a hard time of processing clearances, and most of the contracts in the cleared world You have to have people who already have that skill set. What the problem is, is that there's supply and demand issues. There's more cleared work than there are cleared personnel. You have individuals that are retiring. Okay, so what is—

what if you could compartmentalize the clearance levels so that whatever the work is that requires clearance is done by one individual and the rest of the world, that the work is done by non-cleared individuals because those, those those tasks don't have, uh, access to the compartmentalized, cleared, uh, information.

Um, well, it's all based on, based on the contract, right? So some, sometimes— okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So sometimes you have that flexibility and sometimes you don't.

It's not the work— okay, gotcha.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But what I was going to get to is like, well, a strategic initiative would be, well, how about we as an organization go after some non-cleared and then bring in people, um, and then get them— they're billable, so they're, they're not— they're contributing to the organization.

Let go until we— what—

and then what we could do is we can, as people perform and they're top performers, we could start putting people in for sponsorship for clearances. So when a vacancy comes available on a cleared contract and we have some people who have been cleared for the, uh, for a clearance, we can then move them as a career track into that. Talent development, bro.

I mean, it's not training because they're not— they have the skill, they just don't have the one, you know, checkbox, but you're still developing them into that. That is brilliant. I love that. That's like pre-sourcing, right? Like, I'm thinking Minority Report, you know, uh, what's his name, Tom Cruise, is like pre-crime, like this person is gonna commit Yeah, the opposite of that, right? This person's gonna become cleared, so let's, let's get him out, and then he's here. I love that. Yeah, I love that. Oh yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, I was going to say, I mean, you could even, like, if you wanted to get into the weeds on it, you can even say, okay, well, we want to make that part of our, uh, you know, uh, uh, DE&I initiatives. We want to make that part of our military veteran outreach initiatives, our early career I mean, there's so many ways that you could implement a strategy like that that could impact the organization at scale in a very big way. And you would be like, and then to have the ability to go back and look at, okay, you know, what are the impacts of having this kind of, you know, strategy built into the organization, right? Like, you know, as far as turnover, as far as, you know, meeting some of our social initiatives, like, I mean, there would be so many different of things that you could be able to speak to that would bring value to the organization. And that's one of the things I think is so important as a leader, or even when I was a contributor, is I was always thinking, and I'm still constantly always thinking, how can I bring value to the organization? Because I truly feel that talent acquisition and sourcing, they are revenue generators for companies. They are not cost centers. Now, I know they might be labeled as a cost center. But I think if you implement the right strategies that always tie to the outcomes that we're looking for, that align with the business goals of the organization, it changes that paradigm. You know, what are we going to say, Shelly? Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

What you're saying— I'm like deep thinking all this— what you're saying sounds to me like a measure that's been established by the ISO that is a legit measure. Called Impact of Hire, right? So it's not necessarily Source of Hire because whether it's sourcing or, you know, you made, you made a comment and I know it was just a comment as you were processing your thoughts that, you know, TA or sourcing. I don't think that's an or. I think TA includes sourcing, but I know that's what you meant. So TA in general that is contributing, you know, people into the workflow shouldn't be measured just on the hire because meeting the goals, like one of the, one of the classic measurements is how many people we hired. But that, that again, going back to my beginning, how many people we hired is just a measurement. It is not a metric because if you hired 1,000 people but you needed 2,000, you failed, bro. You're done, you know. So hiring 1,000 doesn't mean anything. But the measurement is how many people do you hire. The metric is percentage of positions filled or fill rate or staffing rate. People call it different things. I get that. But that is really only about recruiting and hiring. It doesn't really include onboarding. It doesn't include some other parts of the process. That's why the ISO has this impact of hire. That disregarding or without regard to the source of hire, the people that are hired have a certain contribution. And it's kind of related to quality of hire, but not the same, because quality of hire is often measured in the long-term impact. So, our quality of hire improves if the people that we hire stay here longer. Right? 30-day, 90-day drop-off, promotions in 1 year, promotions— these are quality of hire measurements, but this is impact of hire. So, think of it as— I've used this example before, so I'm gonna try and see if I can— I can't remember the name of the dude, but the dude that invented the iPhone. Okay? Literally like invented the— legit, there's somebody who did this at Apple. They actually invented the iPhone. I'm sure that they were standing on the shoulders of giants. I'm sure they give credit where credit was due and they, they, you know, talked about Windows and UI and even the Palm devices or the BlackBerry or whatever. But at some point, this dude made the iPhone. And that iPhone, heck, that changed the world. But forget about the world. Let's talk about Apple. That made Apple some money right there. That's impact of hire. But in the world of TA, that's one hire.

No, it's not just one hire though. He's hired one person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it— yeah, to your point, yeah, absolutely.

But the impact was huge. Yep. Right now, the opposite of that, okay, make a hire and that person has a very negative impact on the organization and tanks the company, right? So I think impact of hire The ISO established it as a recommended measurement and metric, but I don't think I see it very often. It might be just kind of challenging to measure. Yeah. Because it's not about revenue necessarily. I mean, it can be, right? Oh yeah. Somebody just posted here. Oh, there's, yeah, I saw in the corner of my eye. I was like, yeah, income generators, right? That obviously makes sense. If you recruit salespeople, you know that they're generating revenue. Yeah. But there is a way, I think, and maybe have you thought, do you have this where you can look at the impact of hire even if the person is not tied to revenue, right? Or revenue, uh, lost. Because there's, there's people who make money and then there's, there's people who save money, um, in procurement. They're similar to sales. Procurement officers are often measured on how much money they save the organization and how much money they save more than last year. And they're even bonused like a salesperson is, uh, for commission. They're bonused for commission on how much they save. So making money and saving money are just two sides of the same coin. There are people that don't have anything to do with money, um, but they still save the company. Like, for example, in your business, Are they saving lives? I'm not sure. I don't know exactly what it is, but like, are these people actually saving lives, protecting our country from evil, protecting our world from evil? So that is a significant impact. I think that, you know, the sorcerer who found the candidate that created the defense system that protected us from some kind of nefarious evil attack, that's a significant impact. It doesn't necessarily tie back to revenue.

Yeah, but you bring up a good point though, right? Like, which is like really doing the work to identify the impacts of talent acquisition to the enterprise at large and doing a good job of being able to communicate. Okay.

Yeah, not that higher, but like, I gotcha.

Yeah, yeah. To communicate, you know, and that's something that you hear quite a bit. Like, you know, we've all been on the forums and seen people say, you know, you know, we don't have a seat at the table, or, you know, that kind of stuff.

Um, and I had a seat at the table, but right as I was sitting down, somebody pulled it out from under me and I fell. Yeah, yeah.

Uh, but no, I, I think that you, you mean you had a great, uh, illustration there. And, and certainly, uh, that's actually one of the things that's so kind of cool about working in the government cleared sector is like You know, we have a program that we work directly, you know, we're at the Pentagon and we're doing some pretty impactful stuff to protect, you know, our networks across, you know, whether it's CONUS or OCONUS, the enterprise, and we're doing some stuff that, you know, it's not just dollars and cents, you know, we're impacting not just our organization, but we're impacting lives and American citizens, right? So, um, so, but it— but if you don't tell that story, or if you don't do the research to figure out, go down that rabbit hole a little bit to be able to tie, tie it back to the mission of the organization, and when you have the opportunity to brief on these things, if you don't say these things, then they don't— you know, it's that your business leaders, they don't connect the dots because this is not what they do day in, day out.

It's not visible to them. Yeah, it's, it's They hired somebody to take care of this. So exactly. Yeah.

So it really is, it really is incumbent upon the leaders to communicate and share that story, right? No matter what line of business it is. So that way they can understand the value. Now, again, I've been pretty fortunate. I've had some forward-thinking, you know, leaders that I've been able to work with who, you know, they looked at talent acquisition you know, in a very positive way. But I'm not naive and know that there are instances across, you know, the American landscape where that's not always the philosophy that's held dearest to all C-suite leaders, right? So, but I do think that that is an area that I've always tried to figure out is, okay, what's the mission of the organization and how can we tie operations to mirror that and be able to communicate that value?

Yeah, that's huge. You know what that makes me think of? And this might be something I can do some research on, bring somebody on the show. It would make sense to me that people in the healthcare— and I don't just mean hospitals, could be cancer research and stuff like that— must have this figured out, or someone, because, you know, that everybody knows a hospital's mission is to save lives. I mean, that's literally what their job is, and to make people's lives better through healing. So I'm gonna look into that. But the, as you were talking about that, the other thing that I thought of as well was one step below the mission is the overarching strategy of the organization. And so, for example, when I talk about metrics and measurement and, you know, talking to the C-suite, I use this analogy that it, let's say the leader says, "Our mission this year is to," penetrate a new market. Let's say, you know, we're a US-based company. This year's strategy is to enter China and establish our business in China, for example, right? So TA can tie their outcomes to that. That, I don't know, that's not a mission. That's more like a strategy, right? Yeah, but you were talking about underneath that, right?

Yeah, that's, yeah.

So The mission is there, but this is like, okay, this year we're going to do this. So, TA can say, well, you know, regarding the establishing ourselves in China, here's what we've contributed. And so, that's like a very direct way of being that, Bez's favorite word today, trusted advisor. Yeah. Because you can then contribute to that goal of establishing business in China through a very direct way, which is—

Yeah. And it's part of the strategic plan.

Exactly. We're hiring X amount of, you know, we have 100 openings in China. We're hiring for those openings. And that's not just vacancy rate, that's vacancy rate in China specifically to our mission.

So yeah, absolutely. Hey, uh, I, I wanted to ask you, uh, Shelly, just because, uh, since I have you, uh, uh, all to myself here, what is your favorite, uh, like, I, I, I shouldn't say favorite, but what, what, what's kind of like the, the new thing that you've been like you, you really utilizing a lot? Like what's like the hot thing that you are just enamored with as far as like sourcing, whether it's technology, whether it's a tool or like what, what, what's something that you're like engrossed in right now?

Can it be two things? Sure. Yeah. Okay. Um, I, in the past I had looked at Gem as a CRM and had found it to be very lacking in some areas. And so I dismissed it. I looked at it very seriously at my previous job, and it had one gap that was just, I couldn't overcome, um, unfortunately, based on that workflow that we had that I established for that organization. So again, I overlooked it. This year I looked at it again, and I, they had overcome that gap, and they have made a lot of other changes. They've made a lot of improvements in other areas as well. So I wanna say I'm really impressed and I've become an advocate of Jamf because they have overcome some of these things in the past that I, you know, I look at it every time and it just wasn't there yet, but now it is. So I'm a fan of Jamf for a number of reasons that include their ability to enhance existing systems. For example, we use Greenhouse And Greenhouse has some very well-documented gaps that they themselves say, hey, we are good at this. This is an area where we have an API and we don't just, we don't do that, right? So Gem has found a niche in that they connect very well with Greenhouse and enhance it. They connect very well with SeekOut and enhance it. So that's one. For that reason, for its ecosystem compatibility abilities alone, and then there's all the other things that it does. But that was stopping me before. The other one is ChatGPT, but not for the reasons that you would think. I'm finding ChatGPT as a very succinct and quick way of summarizing information. Even when I'm looking at a page, I have to read a lot, and I often miss things, and I have to go back and read it again, and I don't have time. I don't have focus for that. So it's helpful in using its summarization capabilities to give me an advanced, uh, you know, summary. When I teach speed reading, what I, what I teach is read the first sentence of every paragraph when you pass the speed reading test, then try to answer the question that's asked by the headline. And if you can't, then read the last question of each paragraph. And if you still can't, then you have to go in and read the whole thing. I think— I don't think that's how ChatGPT works, but it's doing something like that. So it's actually doing the speed reading for me. I'm not relying on it. If I want the details, I go back to the original article. But I am finding that it is that first speed reading pass. In another area that it works really well is in answering questions very quickly. It doesn't always get them right, and it doesn't always have an answer. But, um, my mother is hospitalized in Florida. And I know this has nothing to do with work, but it's an example. And I, you know, normally I would never have gone to anywhere for this. I would have just done my own research. But I was like, I wonder what ChatGPT has to say about it. And I went there and I said, can you provide me a list of all the advanced nursing facilities? They're called different things in different states. All the nursing facilities in Broward County. And ChatGPT said, no, I can't do that because it's not, you know, I should have known this. They don't have current information. For 2021, but it said, here's 3 websites that do. Hmm. And I know I could have gone to Google, but I guarantee you, in fact, I probably should do that now. If I had gone to Google for that, I probably would have gotten a bunch of ads and some semi-ads and some SEO things, and probably would ended up with some places that are trying to sell you services to find facilities. Whereas this pointed me to like literally 3 government websites that have directories of Oh, that's awesome. Oh yeah. So yeah, short time saving.

Yeah, that, that's one of the things that I've, I've kind of, um, really, um, has been a revelation to me too, is just thinking through all of the ways that it could help us to become more efficient in what we do so that way we have more time to continue to drive value adds. Like I've seen You know, I think you mentioned yesterday during your presentation about how you used it to enhance— I think you said the slides, right?

That you used. Yeah, they didn't write the slides for me, but it— yeah, it enhanced them. I gave it— sometimes I gave it things like, how would you put this in a PowerPoint slide? And then it was like, here's a bullet point or here's a header or things like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, so, but that's what I'm saying. Like, those are like— I mean, it's like anything. Like I tell people all the time, like, the tool is only as good as the user. That, that's implementing the tool, right? But I, so I think having a good grasp of how you would be able to, you know, really leverage something like this, it could really be a differentiator, I think. Still, you know, like, you know, I'm not one to just kind of go into like the hype about like, oh, this, you know, I don't really worry about like AI taking our jobs or anything like that. I just think that's, I think that's a little far-fetched. Um, but I, I do think that there's so much that we can utilize this kind of technology, and I'm excited to see how this continues to expand into the future because, like, just some of the things that people have already explored doing. Um, and this is a free tool, so, uh, who knows how long it's free, but we'll see, I guess.

I'm excited about that. I have kept you for, uh, an hour now, and I know that you probably have real work to do. So yeah, I'd like to— I'd like to just kind of wrap things up, but I want to make sure that I am consistent about this. I like to end our, our talks, as you probably know, by dropping a, a little bit of wisdom on our listeners and viewers to, you know, think about over the weekend. So is there something What, what, what words of wisdom or a question or something you want to leave, an idea you want to leave people with as you're closing today, you know, that you want them to, I don't know, think about?

Yeah. I would just say continue to just invest in yourself and understanding that, you know, in talent acquisition, we have a significant impact on organizations. And, you know, as you continue to invest in yourself by learning as much as you can learn about the profession, increasing your, your, your capability and your knowledge, it's going to empower you to feel comfortable to really become that business partner that hiring managers need, that they don't even know that they need, right, or even business leaders need. Right? Because, Shelly, you made a great point, which is, you know, you talked about how, you know, you, you know, we're there to help the organization make better decisions. And this happens all the time on the front lines in talent acquisition. And you'll see it a lot, a lot more with senior recruiters or senior sourcers who have become very confident in their voice. Where they, where they're advising, you know, they're not, they're not order-taking. Like, they, they are driving the engine that's helping, uh, the heart— their, their, their business partners get to the outcomes they're looking for. So I would just say, those that are out there listening today, uh, try to really take that approach, right? Like, do what you need to do in order to continue to invest in yourself to get to that level. But once you feel confident in, in what you bring to the table, you know, definitely drive that value by partnering and providing advice, uh, and providing alternatives and solutions to even problems they haven't even thought of yet. Um, because when that happens, they're like, wow, they're taken aback and they're appreciative.

Value add big time. Yep. I love it. That's a really good way to close. Thank you, my friend. You are beautiful. And I, I, this is, we gotta have, we gotta have you guys back on here at some point. So, um, I know we're definitely over time. Apologize for keeping everybody a little bit on. Have a great weekend and be kind to each other.