Katie Gentry on Shally's Alley

It's Friday, August 12th, and pretty close to 1 PM US Eastern time. So that means it's probably time for Shelly's Alley. Welcome to Shelly's Alley, Katie.

Thank you. It's good to be here.

It is so awesome to be here. You are always such a positive, high-energy person that it's contagious. You know, it's contagious in a good way. There's a lot of other contagious things, but in a good way. Well, I want to introduce you to everybody. Everybody, this is Katie. Katie and I go way back. I don't even know how far back, but I think we met at a conference or something like that. And I said, hey Katie, you want to present at one of these? And she's like, what, me? No, I can't. No way. And then she did. And then the rest is kind of history. So Katie right now is in charge of sourcing excellence at AMS. For those of you that don't know, AMS is, uh, I think it's formerly called Alexander Mann Solutions. It's not— it's now AMS, just AMS, right? Right. And are they the biggest RPO in the world, or certainly really big? Big?

Yeah, I, I probably should know that if we are, but, um, but I don't. I'm pretty new to AMS relatively, um, and new to the RPO world as well.

Yeah, right. Yeah, you grew up in pharmacy recruiting and sourcing and real, real research. I'll explain what I mean by that. But yeah, you came up through a different environment. AMS is pretty much like globally recognized as an RPO. They've been doing internationally RPO for many, many years. So I don't know if they're the biggest or whatever, but they're definitely up there. And they have a lot of different, like, you know, they work in a lot of different areas, not just geographically but also functional areas. So it must be a pretty fun and exciting, um, time right there.

It is. It's, you know, it's really different from corporate TA, obviously, and that's what I was hoping for, is a role that would have a lot of diversity as far as geographies and businesses and functional areas. And there has been no shortage of that diversity here. It's been a lot of fun.

So a long time ago, um, you, you're what, you're one of those rare birds that actually got into recruiting out of college. And that's a fun story. So you actually studied human resources and you went right out of school right into recruiting. You know, a lot of, a lot of people in our industry say, oh, you never, you never graduate from college saying, oh, I want to be a recruiter. But actually you did. So I'd love to have people hear the story of like how you got into recruiting. How did you get into recruiting first and then actually made the transition into sourcing?

Sure. Now I'm happy to share that, and I'll tell you, I, I view myself as a practitioner. I've always loved the work and have really sought roles where I could continue as a practitioner, or that at least that that was a really fundamental part of what I would be delivering. Um, but yeah, I went to Auburn University, which is here in Alabama, in Auburn, Alabama, War Eagle. And, um, I was really involved on campus, and I found that, um, I enjoyed the interview process where a lot of people really kind of dreaded those on-campus interviews for different, you know, clubs or organizations. And so I would help people get ready for their interviews and coach them on this is how to put together your resume, this here's what to wear, here's the questions to ask, and just get people ready for their interviews. And that morphed into getting people ready for their on-campus job interviews. And I had a business contact, I guess, through the business school who met with my class and we were all talking and his suggestion was, you know, you should look at recruiting. And to me, I thought, that's interesting, but no, I'll never do that.

Yeah, thanks but no thanks. Now, why would he go and make a suggestion like that?

Yeah, well, because of the, just the amount of outreach and, you know, really kind of natural recruiting I was doing already. But to me, recruiting was recruiting college students, and I knew I knew nothing, and I didn't— I wanted to make sure I was learning and learning from others. So I didn't want to recruit other college kids or college campuses. I wanted to do, you know, real work. Um, so I, I kind of turned my nose at it. Yeah. Um, but then of course learned more, and this is telling on myself for age, this is around the year 2000. So all of a sudden there was a, you know, there's all of the Y2K, what's going to happen, um, And, um, you got into tech recruiting at Tech Systems actually because as I found out more about recruiting, it really started to sound like a career where it wasn't just recruiting college students, but you could— goodness, anything and everything needs to be recruited as far as skill sets. So, um, started there and, um, you know, 20-plus years later, here I am. Um, but I worked in financial services after Tech Systems and spent about, I think, a little under 15 years there. And then most recently worked in pharma and fell in love with pharmaceuticals and life sciences. Um, just a tremendous amount of purpose from the work there.

Saving lives, like, literally, right?

Yeah, yeah. It's— I mean, as a recruiter, it's, it's really interesting and fun to be able to see the outcomes of your work. And I think within pharmaceuticals, there are some very direct outcomes from the people that you hire, how different pieces of work, different clinical trials, safety, how all those things shake out. So it is, I think it's really impactful work.

So we talked about this some time ago, actually several times, about how in, in the roles that you had in the past, I'm sort of going backwards in time here, you were in a real research capacity. And, and I wanted to explain that. I mentioned it earlier when I introduced you. I wanted to explain that for folks that might be listening in. Um, the difference is that there's various specializations within sourcing. When sourcing was an early profession, you know, many years ago, this didn't really— it didn't really exist. But as it evolved, sourcing, talent sourcing became more and more specialized. So some folks went the way of like using robots and tools and automation. Some folks went the way of like social media, um, you know, and so on. And one of the areas of sourcing— there's telephone sourcing, there's— one of those areas is, is deep web research, where you are going online using search engines and other tools to like really dig up, um, people that are not in the, not in the mainstream. So, um, one of the things that, that, uh, Katie did back then was looking for, uh, research papers and people that, that had written in professional scientific journals and things like that, which was, you know, way out there. I mean, that's a lot more common these days. So that's what I meant by like true research. How did you get into that? So, you know, at the beginning, recruiting was just recruiting. When, when you got into it, it was match resume, you know, match candidate to job. Which is oversimplifying what we do, but it was pretty traditional. And then you sort of said, I like this, I like to go dig deep. Like, what got you going there?

Sure. You know, I remember this is— to me, this is one of those things that I think it's funny that I remember it still, but I remember the feeling. And it was— I attended Tech Systems training. It was a 2-week boot camp training, and then you can go back a couple months later if you're really into recruiting and you're really, you know, that's the path. And I did that, and, um, I loved it. I just— it made sense to me. I love the problem-solving aspect of it. But, um, I really vividly remember, you know, sitting in, in the pit, and we were looking at the recs, and I had a candidate for a job that we've been working on for a while felt like we'd kind of exhausted the talent pool, and I found somebody. And I remember my manager saying to me, what did you do to find that person? And my comment back was, well, I did an OR search. I was looking for this or that and just applying it, you know, a different logic, a different view. I think there's so much talk about Boolean language and search strings, and to me, it's— be sure search strings find you what you're looking for, but it's that foundational understanding of Boolean language, and it's just, it's math, you know. How do you express clearly and succinctly what you're looking for? It doesn't have to be really fancy or complicated, but rather it just has to get to the heart of what's most important for your search.

So you recognized the need, you recognized the, the need, the opportunity and the need, and also within yourself that there was— it appealed to you. Okay. And then you just kind of started doing it and just grew from there.

Yeah. I mean, worked there and we had a database and then of course we were adding people to the database all the time using Monster, you know, using the tools that you used, which was somewhat tech tools at the time, but then a lot of, a lot of Google search and just kind of figuring it out. LinkedIn was still new, um, and a lot of people weren't on it because it, it felt kind of— I don't know, I don't know if I'm— I wouldn't have a social work presence, right?

It wasn't really in the recruiting field yet, right? Yeah. So what was your original LinkedIn number? Mine was like 150,000 or something like that.

Yeah, I think it was— I wouldn't say it was like 7,000, um, It was pretty early, early on. Yeah, I think I might have also abandoned the profile, like, and then—

yeah, that happened to me too. Yep, I had one and then I, and then I just left and came back. And so I don't remember what my original number actually was. It was, it was before that. Yeah, that's funny.

Different space.

So no kidding. And so now here you are, all grown up and in charge of global sourcing excellence for a global RPO. And I just have— I'm dying to know, what exactly is sourcing excellence?

It's a great question. And I do think it's a title that I kind of strive to live up to. It's kind of hard to, at least for me, I think I'm a pretty humble person, but describing myself and the work as excellence day to day feels pretty lofty. So definitely have to drink my coffee each day and be ready. But for us at AMS, sourcing excellence is, you know, a constant, a constant focus and evolution on the strength of our skills.

Okay.

Working with, you know, people, process, and tools, making sure that our people have the best training and are equipped to do the work that's meaningful and impactful for our clients, and in doing so with processes that make sense and And evolving those as, as the market evolves.

Yeah, so not falling asleep at the wheel or not being satisfied with like, oh, this is just the way it's always been done, but rather, yeah, continuing to evolve. So evolving not just to keep up with the times, but evolving to get ahead, evolving to challenge, um, you know, the, the process. And I would, I would say maybe optimization, right?

Sure. You know, what I see is that there's this huge fundamental piece of sourcing that I think is so valuable because it's what you build from for your skill set of just understanding what you're doing. So not again kind of that Boolean piece, like I'm not— my goal isn't to have a complicated Boolean string, it's to find exactly what I'm looking for. And that may take a lot or it may take very little. In the same way, looking at the tools that we use and making sure that you understand fundamentally, if I do X, I get Y. This is how I use this specific tool. And really the maximization of what the tools can bring. I mean, we have incredible tools today to be able to find people compared to what we had 20 years ago. It's a market where there was no market. Before. And yet I think that there's a huge opportunity for, for us to be more diligent and be great users of the tools that come up, because, um, you know, good outcomes and a robust candidate pool is going to come from great usage of the tools that you have. If you're just scraping the surface, then you, you're literally only scraping the surface perhaps of the candidate pool back as well.

So you're, you know, I guess you get stuck in that cycle of paying for a tool, then not really leveraging it, using it, um, and it's kind of, it's a waste of resource, a waste of time, and you're also, like you said, skimming the surface. So you're competing for the same people everyone else is competing for. So it, it, you're— what I'm hearing is Sourcing Excellence is also about not necessarily buying tools or the right tools, but more so about using what you got in the most— or making the most of what you got, right? In the Peace Corps, we were taught about appropriate technology, which is, you know, if you're going to go out in some remote part of the world and you're going to teach people how to just have basic hygiene, like washing your hands. Well, obviously you can't go out there and be like, hey everybody, you need to use alcohol— what are those called— alcohol gel or whatever, because that's hard to get and it's expensive. So what's appropriate technology there? It's, it's your basic, you know, boiled water. It's, it's, it's soap and water, right? So appropriate technology doesn't mean go out and buy the most expensive, fanciest tool you can afford. It means If you have a tool, use it and, and get the most out of it. And if, you know, if you can afford a better tool, then great, but don't worry about going out there and buying the top-of-the-line tool until you know how to use the ones you got, right?

Yeah, no, I think it's easy to get swept up in, oh, this, you know, this is really cool, or look at the outcomes it could bring, you know, let's try it. And I mean, I I love working with sourcing technology, and always I'm trying to kind of dig in and figure it out and see, you know, see where it breaks. But you, you have to have— I think you have to have a willingness to become even just a great, you know, a great basic user for these different things, and not just, again, not just skimming the surface of what it can do, especially if you're looking at having multiple tools. To me, it's just crazy to add you know, add a whole lot of layers when you might be able to accomplish what you needed with one tool if you just were a better user for it.

Yeah, without giving something away, I know that, that, you know, there's proprietary stuff and there's a bit, but what would you say is an indispensable category of tools without naming brands or whatever? But you know, what, what would you say is an indispensable area of tools that that sourcers should at least aspire to be able to master?

Sure. I mean, to me, and maybe this is old school, but my indispensable tool is Google. There's, there's very little you can't find, public and private info. If you're a good user of Google, you pretty much can find everything else that you need. It's then how do the tools enable you to use that smarter. And, um, I think that's where— I mean, of course LinkedIn Recruiter is, is so ubiquitous and we all use it. And why is that? Well, it gives us, it gives us a platform that's easy to, easy to apply, easy to implement, and you've got a direct way to reach your candidates without having to link something to your email, or it sends and connects through your Outlook. I mean, I think there's great advantages to having things that connect and, you know, work natively with your systems. But there's also some beauty to something that can be plug and play and a really low barrier of entry and perhaps a low barrier to success if you are diligent and use it the right way.

Okay, so not just search engines, but Google.

I know, okay, and that's, that's probably a controversial thing to say, but But I view myself as being pretty simple. And, you know, I'm able to get a lot with Google. I occasionally will use Bing more often when it's served up to me versus maybe when I choose. And then I, you know, I know about the different ones, DuckDuckGo and whatnot. But I typically use Google because I feel like I'm, I feel like I'm getting to the answers that I need.

Quickly. Right.

And it works the way I expect it to, you know, it recognizes the Boolean language, I guess, that I speak. So I'm used to it.

It works. Cool. Well, that's a, that's a great answer. I'm glad you didn't say the internet because that's what I would have said. What's the most indispensable tool? The internet. Like when the internet goes out of my house, I'm like, oh shoot, I can't do anything tonight.

Um, our boys went back to school this week, so there's a lot more bandwidth to get.

Right, that's good. That's a good way to look at it. So thanks for that answer. I, I want to kind of go keep going in that direction and ask you about the configurations. You've had experience with teams that do pure research, um, teams that do kind of a hybrid, and now you've, now you've got some experience with a, with a very large organization that has lots of different configurations. In your opinion, just your opinion, not any, not officially any other opinion, but just yours, what would you say are the, the best top 2, top 3 configurations for a sourcing team? Like how, you know, the how to organize them or align them, what would you say are the top 2 or 3?

Sure, so I think the alignment that's crucial is one that's going to yield credibility to sourcer for the type of work and the type of results that they're being asked to bring. And that credibility comes from connectivity to the hiring manager and the recruiter. And, and I view and do a lot of talking here about the hiring team and understanding the hiring team, not just, okay, here's the requisition I've got and here's how we're going to fill it, or here's how many candidates I think I'm going to need to interview, but rather what questions is the candidate going to have about why this is open or the project? What are they going to connect to that makes this different? And why would they want to do this work here? But then I always kind of laugh and tell the sourcers that I work with, and I remind myself as a practitioner, you know what, we all, we all have a manager. You know, what does my manager need to know that I'm being successful? What does my hiring manager's manager need to know to know that they're successful and making whoops, sorry, that they're making steps towards, you know, filling a role on their team that if perhaps they don't fill it, they might not get the budget for it later in the year. Um, you— I think you have to think about, um, that you're not the only one that's, um, you're not the only one with stakes on the table. Yeah, or presenting information back. But you have to understand the questions that others are being asked, um, so that you're setting everybody up on the team for success, not, not just yourself finding the candidates but really for the full hiring team.

So is that a configuration where there's— to get that sort of credibility, which has to do with connecting sourcers and hiring managers and recruiters, is that achieved through aligning sourcers more with the industry vertical or the functional area or the geography? Or just the hiring manager group?

Sure.

Like some combination of the above?

Yeah, no, definitely have a preference. So first, you know, as far as being part of a team of sourcers or working directly with a recruiter, I think it depends on just, um, it depends on the volume that you need to bring back and the relationship between you and that recruiter. But then as far as alignment, um, I typically think being able to speak intelligently, um, and, you know, have the opportunity to become a subject matter expert in any kind of industry vertical or function is going to aid that sourcer in, again, establishing credibility not only with the hiring team but with the candidates. And, you know, what I think is really cool about the sourcing, really just, I think, discipline, is, um, it's a lot more about your ability to learn and, and communicate back what you've learned And you can kind of be a chameleon. You know, I've worked in finance and I've worked in pharmaceuticals, and certainly the subject matter is different, but the, you know, the routes that you take to find the people, it's ultimately just kind of making sure that you understand and can communicate back, you know, back to the hiring manager that you understand what they need, and to the candidate, maybe not that you have any kind of mastery of the skill set or the subject matter, but that you have a willingness to step into their space, and the questions you don't know that you're going to find the answers for. But taking the effort, and I found especially in pharmaceuticals, the more effort I would make to understand and be able to speak to the science, even if I was kind of speaking about it in a way like, you know, like giving directions outside, like turn right here and turn left there, you know, you don't have to be driving on the road, for the directions to still make sense in your mind.

Yeah.

So being able to communicate that it's as important to you to find the right person and dig into some of those details, I think people appreciate it and it just adds some authenticity as well.

So based on the volume you said, and kind of to rephrase, I think what I understand you're saying is So it should align vertically by industry, but you said based on the volume. So am I correct in the assumption that a vertical alignment by industry is appropriate when the volume is low? Um, as in, it's like we have, we have a need for fewer candidates, but they have to be spot on, the rare skill set, hard to find people. Is that, is that the correct alignment? And so if so, then what would be the alignment for high volume?

Sure. I mean, I think with high volume, um, well, I mean, comparing the two, um, yeah, the volumes matter because you have to understand what, you know, what's that funnel look like? How many people do I need to present to get to a hire, you know? And, and not only how many do I need to present, but How many do I need to contact?

And even above that, how many I need to find? Yeah, yeah.

How many do I find? How many do I look at? I don't know that we talk a lot about, um, before you ever start contacting, you know, how many kind of profiles did you view before you got to the number of people that you actually wanted to contact? And that's usually, you know, it's gonna be an order of 3, 5, you know, magnitude of just what you've looked at before you got to the point where you were ready Pre-COVID, I can tell you pre-COVID what it was.

Um, things have shifted and moved around so much during COVID they— and they kind of went all over the place. But pre-COVID, it used to be around 350 profiles that you would look at, you know, that you would click on. 350 that you would click on that arrived you at some measure around 100 40 that you actually followed through with. So out of the 350, 140 were, were yeses, and you attempted to reach them. But out of those 140, only about 40 responded positively. So there might be other responses. 140 means I contacted. There are— there could be 40 that responded thanks but no thanks, and 40 that responded yes please. So it's that 140 to 40 yes please. Then out of that 40, you get on the phone with about 20 of them.

And you're lucky.

Yeah, right. And half of them you screen out because you're— part of your job is to determine the quality. So now you end up with, you know, roughly about 10 screened and qualified, and you might get 7 submittals out of that. So, you know, used to be 350 to 7, basically. And that varies a little bit. There have been some environments where it went all the way up to about 500. To, you know, to the same ratio. But during COVID the numbers just went crazy. I had 1,200 to 1 at some point for a few searches, and for others I had like 20 to 1. It's just very broad differences. So I don't think there's any more industry average right now. Things are probably going to settle out a little bit, but yeah, That, that's a very good point. How many, how many results, how many search results do you need to be able to view? How many profiles you need to view to be able to contact? How many profiles you need to contact to be able to get the responses, to be able to get the phone screens, to be able to get the interviews, to be able to get the hire?

Yeah, well, this is really simple, but I mean, again, I think there's, there's so many of the simple but maybe overlooked steps of getting, you know, getting someone to respond to you and thinking about kind of that, um, if you're trying to shift someone's behavior, what do you need to do? And I hate to— I hate to talk again about LinkedIn, but on this I'll talk about profiles. So I talk a lot to our sourcers about creating a story for your candidate to follow, and that story starts with your profile view. You view them And, you know, I would challenge anybody on the line to say, you know, one of the first things that you do when you open up LinkedIn is you see who's looked at your profile. And then when you see that, you start putting together a story of why did they look at my profile? Well, the industry makes sense, or, oh, I've worked with them before, or I heard something about this organization recently. And that's probably why we as humans put together a story of the why we see what we do, you know, we frame it all up in our heads. So you have to start telling the story sometimes before you ever reach out to that candidate. So in telling the story, if you're going to contact somebody, make sure you look at their profile and then send them a note, you know, send them an InMail, send them an email, maybe send them a connection request as well. So it's not, it's not transactional. Yeah.

Or omnichannel, whatever you want to call it.

Yeah, like it just shows the depth of, again, kind of that depth of research that you've taken the time to know that they're actually the person you want to talk to. It's not, you know, it's, it's not super complicated. I think it's just really logical, but, but making sure that you have the diligence to go through those logical steps so that you're creating a story each time with the candidate that the candidate can follow and Oh, this is why this person is contacting me. I saw they viewed my profile and now I see a note from them. And you're building to that social currency of them wanting to respond to you.

Right, right, right. Each interaction increases that possibility, that viability. And that— it's, it's interesting, you touched on something and I think we kind of glossed over it. So I want to jump back to that real quick. You talked about simplicity. I think in— I don't want to be controversial here, or maybe I do, but in sourcing, um, we tend to overcomplicate sometimes. I don't know why. I'm not sure if it's just because of— well, I don't know why, honestly. It, it, and it's something that I've noticed happens a lot. Um, a good friend and colleague, someone that, that used to report to me at a couple of different jobs in the past and someone I, you know, would hire again anytime, whose opinion I really value, put it very succinctly when she said, um, when she said, "Perfect is the enemy of effective." Like sometimes we overcomplicate something. Maybe it's our search string. We try to create a search string that encompasses every possible variation of whatever, or, or we try to have a search strategy that like covers every piece of ground. Like sometimes doing it perfectly and doing all of it is just not conducive to getting results, and sometimes it's better if you just do something simple that works to move the needle forward. Nothing wrong with, you know, the 80/20 rule, the Pareto principle, principle, if you will, of 80% of your time focus on the simplicity stuff that works, and then 20% go experiment and test stuff out. But we, we tend— I see a lot of sourcers get caught up in the overly complicated and not do the simple stuff, right?

Well, listen, the more complicated your search string becomes, the more variables that something to be returned has to meet. And so if you have a ton of variables Again, thinking like a candidate and knowing that there's probably a ton of things on my LinkedIn profile that I do, but maybe I'm not involved in every day. Or maybe there's things that I do every day and it's so routine that it's not stuff that I bring up on a profile or a CV or even within research. You've got to think about people are on par. Not great resume writers, not great profile. You know, it's hard to— sometimes it's hard to write about yourself, or, or you're not, you're not writing it so that someone can find you necessarily. Um, so if, if you as a sourcer or recruiter are making, you know, kind of a lot of variables that someone has to meet, your chances of finding anyone, you know, become really slim. So you've got to, you've got to expect that people are going to have skill sets that they're just not going to mention. And if you're only searching by returns of skill sets, then you're probably missing a lot of viable possibilities.

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. It's— you're missing— you're, by trying to be too perfect, or complicated or whatever, you are also leaving things on the table that you might have overlooked. I like that. That's a good point.

I think so. I mean, plus we're not, you know, generally we're sourcing and recruiting for fields that we haven't worked in before. Maybe, right, we don't do the job well, right? But, um, but I— if I'm searching for every type of you know, every type of skill that someone might need, but really, you know, day to day they use like 5 of the 17 of them. Again, you're not kind of, you're not getting that full, that full view of the possibilities because someone's going to have to be a really great resume writer to come back in your search. You've got to expect that people are only going to be decent, and that's, decent is good.

So I want to ask you a little bit about something that— and I hope you can share. If you can't, let me know. But you said that part of, of your role, um, off camera, part of your role is investing in sourcers or, or leading— I guess not necessarily you personally, but like your, your center of excellence is also, um, partly responsible for their enrichment and investing in your sourcers. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means, that we can— what can we learn from that?

Sure. So this is personal to me because this is how I came up through recruiting. Tech Systems had an amazing training program and I was able to learn the field. And, you know, here I am. I still love it. It created that for me. And I think what we have the opportunity to do at AMS with a group now of within our Center of Excellence, 1,500+ sourcers, is, is create value for them and in them and in their careers. We, we have programs that can take someone with a tremendous amount of experience and help them to become even better and stronger, or people who maybe are entering with very limited experience but great skill set, great motivation, kind of that great that want to and can learn. And we invest in the training resources, both from an external market as well as things that we develop internally. And that's not just perhaps looking at the sourcing skillset only, but also looking at industry verticals.

Okay, right, gotcha. So it's not just enriching their or investing in their sourcing skills, sourcing ability, but also in their knowledge of the industry. Like, uh, knowledge of software development or knowledge of, you know, um, electrical engineering or, or whatever. That makes sense.

Yeah. And we— so recently we started, um, we were having weekly and now we're moving to every other week, um, because I've been laughing that I felt like— well, kind of like you, Shelley— I felt like I was a radio show host and I was making content, um, except my, you know, my, uh, my show was 4 times a week, covering 4 different regions. I felt really proud of myself when I could get the same content across all 4. That, that was a big relief. But we created what we call the drop-in clinics, and this— my goal was to have time that was informal and fun and informative, and not informative of, oh, I might want to know this, but informative of Okay, I can take exactly what we talked about today and apply it. And really having information and just things to share that people can walk away with and be stronger, you know, immediately, as well as shining a spotlight on the great work that people are doing around the globe and making sure that we take advantage of the great ideas and the great execution of different groups. And apply those strategies to other areas and within other industries in any number of ways. But I think it's important to have fun. I think it's important to create teams where people can have fun and work closely with one another. Sourcing isn't necessarily a role where you think about it being a team sport. It's pretty individual. But I think if anything, you know, post-COVID, having these places where you can connect to others, even if you're not working on the exact same requisition or same thing, but making sure that you have spaces and places where people connect and share ideas and be able to do so, you know, informally in a safe zone. That's what I see is just a space where we can come together as sourcers, share what is really cool and interesting to us. And learn from others. To me, that's always the kind of environment that I want to participate in, or the types of calls that I'm going to prioritize. And so that's what I hope to create here.

And is it— is that information then captured in some sort of a library, or it's just— yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. So that is essentially a center of excellence. That, that is exactly what that is. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's not— it doesn't have to be a formal learning management system with courses or whatever. It's just a an oracle of knowledge that continues to evolve and, you know, like a shared library of search strings and things like that. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot.

We had a hackathon not too long ago. Oh, great. No, I mean, it was, it was, it was smaller scale, um, but I wrote the questions and I was proud of myself that some of them were, you know, big stumpers, and some of them were really hard and no one answered it. So I thought I'd kind of you know, I've made it fair. Um, but no, it was great fun and it was a surprise. So, um, we had a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to see how people responded, and it's really cool to see who kind of surfaces from activities like that because, you know, sometimes sourcers are not— they're not out and in your face.

And yeah, we can be a bit of a shy crowd. Not always and not all of us, but we can be. But you know what, we definitely like our puzzles. That's for sure. Yeah. So one last question. I know I've kept you a little bit over the promised time. I tend to do that when I'm having too much fun. But I do have one last question for you. In these, like, sharing moments and center of excellence kind of library or whatever, you also task yourself with finding some content to share with the team that's not always your own content, because obviously it would be like it would be too draining and impossible to just constantly originate new content. Believe me, I know that after 25 years. Where do you find content to share with your team that you can, that you can share with us? Like, give us a couple of sources of content that you share with your team.

Well, so I mean, this is gonna be, um, they're not top secret, my list of luminaries. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I, I'm always going back to the articles written by Irina, articles written by Glenn, you know, things that you've published previously. Um, it's because it's sound, and, um, it's, it's less about the kind of tool that you use and more about how you use it and the thought process. I think it's that sourcing thought process that is the value of the skill set, you know. Yeah, understand how to how to look for people and then how to get them to respond, it doesn't matter again kind of what you're searching for because you're, you're focused more on, um, the logic of getting the return. I mean, it's, it's math. Um, you focus on how it's done and I think you yield great results. But I mean, there's so many people who contribute to this space and there's many ways to get it done. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I, I find myself reading, studying. I mean, man, Irena's stuff I typically will print out, highlight through. Okay, here's, here's how I would do this. Um, but I think that there's incredible minds, um, that work in our field and contribute so much to kind of that overall library of how we do this work. Um, but a lot of times I'm, I'm reading and applying and practicing and then bringing that to bear. From a content perspective back to the teams.

So to recap what you just said, it's not a place you go to, or there's no necessarily, or there might be, but what you just shared with us is not a, you know, www.gohere.com, but rather finding some people that you, whose principles you align with, and you follow them and, and read what they have. It's like your favorite authors or That makes sense. So you just kind of look for whatever they do wherever they happen to be, which may or may not be LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever. Yeah, that's a smart way to do it. Yeah, I appreciate that. So for those of you out there, you know, make a wish list of, of, uh, names of people who you want to be, you know, you want to, you want to read their stuff, and then just maybe create some search alerts about, uh, with those names. And, you know, hey, what is, what is Shelly have to say? What's new with Shelly? What's new with Glenn? What's new with etc.? Okay, cool.

Wow.

Well, thank you so much for coming. I know you're super busy. Your, your job is, uh, quite a behemoth of a job. I don't envy you that, but I do envy you such a good, uh, position and opportunity that you can, you know, really get to stretch your wings. So I'm very happy for you. Thank you so much for coming on our show. Do you have anything that you want to part with that Any last words, if you will, for the group?

Goodness, you know, I don't know that I do. I don't find myself to be like this really dynamic, like, flashy sorcerer.

So we were waiting for some sort of like reveal here.

So apologies, you know, to those who thought I was going to drop like this.

Really inspire us.

Yeah, sorry, sorry, that wasn't available today, but here I am. No, I think it's, it's, um, you take a sound look to what you do and, um, and don't overlook that a simple answer might be your best answer.

Yeah, I like that. That's a really good takeaway. Yeah, Occam's razor, essentially. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Katie. Hope we can have you back in the show sometime soon.

You're welcome. It's great to be with you.

Yeah.

Visit.

So, always fun. Thanks everybody. Uh, by the way, if anyone is looking, I am hiring a sourcer. Don't tell anybody on your team, Katie. Um, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna push a link out here in, um, in just a minute on the screen here if you're interested in looking at an opportunity working directly with me. Just go here and come on, I'm supposed to be able to do this quickly.

It never works that way. Anytime you're demoing, you have to expect, right, it's going to find a way not to work.

There we go. Now it's sharing. I know what happened. It was the other, the ticker symbol. There we go. So there you go, srcn.co/LTKSourcer, and connect with Katie at LinkedIn.com/KatieMGentry. And with that, thanks everybody. See you next Friday. Bye.

Thanks, Nelly. Bye-bye.