Lara Lawson on Shally's Alley

Shallies Alley! It is Friday, June 3rd, and pretty close to 1 PM. With me today, I have a very special guest that I'm gonna, I'm gonna introduce you, Lara Lawson. But I also want to tell kind of a little cool story. So Lara used to live in Bogotá, Colombia, which is where I'm from. And, uh, well, not Bogotá, but I'm from Colombia. I used to live in Barranquilla. That's where I grew up.

I love Barranquilla.

It's a coastal city, but Lara moved down there to Colombia, lived there for 7 years, and recently, in the last couple of years—

yeah, last year—

moved to Cancún, essentially Playa del Carmen. For those of you who don't know where that is, it's south of Cancún in the same county or province called Quintana Roo in Mexico, and runs a consulting business and sourcing as a service solution down there. So we have a lot in common. We both speak Spanish. We both spent some time in Colombia. I spent a little bit more time in there, but that's okay. And, um, I love Cancun and been there multiple times. So I wanted to bring her on the, on the show today. And Lara actually had an interesting suggestion from the Facebook group. She said, why don't I ask you a bunch of questions? Because I'm trying to build a sourcing team and I'm training someone. I think you hired someone that, um, you're trying to train. Lara has a training background and has done that for a living as a consultant, but it's usually other people trainees that aren't going to be working for her. So this time, this time it's personal and she's training somebody for her own team. She had a bunch of questions about that and I figured, you know what, what a great opportunity to talk about hiring somebody with very little experience and training them because I recently did that myself as well. So we have that in common. Yeah. So welcome, Lara.

Thank you. I really appreciate the chance to be here and kind of get to pick your brain for, for a little bit of time.

Well, considering that you could actually be here and chose to instead come on the show. I, I think, uh, yeah, we're the ones that should be grateful for you coming here. I wish I was there right now, although I'm sure the weather's not that great since you've got some hurricane systems hovering over you.

Yeah, it's been pretty rainy lately, but, but usually gorgeous.

So Lara tells me that, uh, this, this week's show is brought to you by the Headless Chicken. So we put a logo of Mike the Headless Chicken there because both Lara and I feel like we've been running around like headless chickens this week. I think it has Something to do with the fact that we didn't work on Monday, at least I didn't. Yes. That was the reason.

I actually took a day off Monday, I don't know why.

Yeah, so basically that means Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday have been 12-hour days. But you know, like me, you probably only work half days, right? There's 12 days in a— 12 hours in a day, so we only work half days.

Right, right, right. Yeah, so this week has been crazy. I've been— this year has been insane. The company that I am branded with right now, Avia Consulting, we've grown 41% since January. In headcount. So, um, so yeah, it's been a little bit crazy. I'm still, um, creating job descriptions for people I've already hired right now. That's how backwards my process is.

So what am I gonna do here? Well, I don't know. Hey, let me figure it out. I'll send them a memo.

Yeah, like, listen, someone will tell you what you're gonna do. We'll put it into writing later.

Yeah, just come in the morning and we'll let you know.

Yeah.

So what do you want to start with? What questions do you have for me about, you know, uh, Training a new sourcer, building a new sourcing team?

Yeah, I guess for me, I learned sourcing like as a necessity. Someone was like, well, you need to recruit people. And I wasn't getting responses from job ads. And I joined LinkedIn literally the year it was created. I'm aging myself there. So began really sourcing like then and just learned what I needed to know to be able to be successful, right? So I feel like sometimes my own sourcing education is a little bit, um, not well-rounded, um, if that makes sense. Like, I've, I've only been in pretty technical roles. I've done a lot of tech sales, I've done engineering, I've done IT, um, some management, but mainly technical management, project management, things like that. So, um, so Yeah, I would just really like a holistic view of sourcing from you. So like, if you can just tell me, what is sourcing? What does it encompass for you?

What is sourcing? Okay, let's, let's start with that. That's, that's, that's a reasonable question. Sourcing is finding and engaging with candidates that are not coming to your jobs already organically or by whatever you consider traditional means. So your regular engine, your regular recruitment engine is not enough or is not working for these jobs. And it's not every job, although in some companies it could be. But let's just say, you know, to kind of clean that definition up a little bit, normally you post jobs to whatever job board and you get enough candidates, but for this job or for these types of jobs, you don't. And there's a couple of reasons why that happens. So overall, it is the solution to the problem of we don't have the right kind of candidates or we don't have enough candidates because everything else that we normally know how to do didn't work, hasn't worked, isn't working.

Right.

Makes sense. Yeah. So that can happen because of— it could be a regional situation. It could be in every other place that we've ever posted this job, we get plenty of applicants, but this one time in this one city, in this one region, we didn't. It could be we're getting the wrong applicants. Everybody that's applying is not qualified or is otherwise qualified. It could be because we're getting way too many applicants and it's pretty challenging to figure out which one of them are actually, you know, get to the second stage. So there's, there's a number of reasons for it. It could be it's a, it's something that we've never done before. It's a new technology. We don't have any talent pipeline. We don't have We don't even really have anybody here that currently does the job. It could be an acquisition, it could be a merger. So there's lots of reasons for it. The bottom line is either you know in advance that this job posting is not going to get results or it is running into challenges after the fact, right? You've opened the wreck and now you can't fill it for whatever reason.

All right. So what does that translate to in the day-to-day? Like if you're sourcing 100% of your time, what does that day look like? Okay.

I think, hmm, what does that day look like? Let's call it the workflow, right? We'll call that the sourcing workflow. Okay. So the first step would probably be to define what it is that you're going to do for the day. So what is it, you know, what am I, what are my priorities? So prioritization would be the first part of that, and that can be done a couple of different ways. So if you are the sourcer that is taking, um, you know, requirements from other people, then you pretty much know, hey, this is, these are the reqs that I'm supposed to be working on right now. But in a case like, I'm assuming your environment where either you're the leader or you have lots of first priorities, sometimes the first thing that you need to do is figure out which priorities are the most urgent, the most important, right? So I would start with number one, check your priorities. Now the way we have it is we have a dashboard, and that dashboard is powered by an algorithm that escalates the urgency of reqs based on a collection of factors. It's a, it's a formula that looks at a bunch of different factors. I can bore you to death with details, but basically it tells me out of the 400 reqs that are open right now, these are the ones that have the highest priority for a number of factors.

Yeah.

And then, you know, that's, that's how I can tell my team to manage themselves because I can see, I can give one of my team members 10 jobs and say, here's your 10 jobs. And they can self-prioritize by looking at that dashboard 'cause they can see what's going on. You know, how many interviews, how many interviews have passed, all that stuff. So number 1, check your priorities. Then number 2, I would say conduct pre-search. Now pre-search is the gathering of intelligence before you begin sourcing. And this is typically done when you onboard a new assignment, but it can also be done when you're struggling with an assignment. It's been, you know, you've been working on it for a little while and you have to kind of reevaluate, revisit it. You need traction again. So that would be the second thing would be pre-search. If it's the first time, you might have to do pre-search and an intake meeting. If not, just pre-search. And then you can begin sourcing. But before I actually go out and start sourcing, before my team goes out to start sourcing, they plan a little bit. They plan, for example, create a list, create a folder, create the contact templates so that you're ready when someone replies, you know how to reply, you know where to send them to apply if that's part of the job, you know how to track them so other people aren't calling and contacting the same candidates. So the dashboard and prioritization, the pre-search, the planning for your search, and then executing your search. Then sending out contact messages, outreach, you know, calling, texting, emailing, and then responding to those messages. So that would be taking calls perhaps, or sometimes scheduling calls for later on. You know, we use Calendly and there's other solutions like that where, you know, candidate replies back to our outreach and they say, sure, I'm interested, tell me more. Well, tell me more, it's an open invitation for a conversation. And so it's not like we're going to be necessarily able to talk to them right then and there. I mean, we can say, hey, how about now? But if they're not available, right, here's a link to my calendar and, you know, then they can choose a time at their convenience.

So I've got to say, Calendly is like the best thing that's happened to me in the last 5 years to help you get organized, right?

Yeah.

And create some rules around all the back and forth of scheduling is like gone. So much stress out of my day.

Absolutely. So that would be— that would be— I think at that point you know, the calendly, the scheduling and all that includes the phone screen. So you've done the planning, you've done the research, you're doing the outreach, and then you're getting the responses. Now you're doing the phone screen and you're handing things off to a recruiter or a hiring manager. The only last little bit is the cleanup of, you know, tracking and learning from your workflow, what needs to be adjusted and so on. So big picture, I would say that's kind of the, that's the whole process.

Okay. So what are some of your favorite tools for sourcing? And I think I want to clarify my perspective here because I feel like a lot of sourcing goes on at really large companies where you have the budget for all kinds of tech and automation and all that fun stuff. So for, let's say, an individual agency recruiter out there or someone like me who's working for very small entities who are not going to use massive amounts of automation, what are some of your favorite tools for, for a sourcer?

Thanks for clarifying because, you know, there is— sourcing, although we just defined it as finding candidates and engaging with candidates that aren't coming to you through traditional means, can still have lots of flavors. There could be pure research, there could be pure outbound, there could be social media, there could be automation technology and all that. So in the context that you gave me, running a consulting shop, a solopreneur, or having a small business or small team, even if you're a small team with 2 or 3 people, you don't necessarily have the luxury of all the automation. I would say we— I hate to kind of put this into such simple perspective, but you could do this job with a pencil and paper. You really could.

You could.

It's not— that's not the question that you're asking though. So I would say if I had to pinpoint a tool I would say it has to be Google, right? Or your favorite search engine would be right, because it's free. And if you put in the work, you can find just about anybody. And with, again, a search engine, you could also find contact information. And so that would be the least expensive. However, also more than likely the most time-consuming.

Yeah.

So the less time you want to spend, the more involved your tools, the more expensive they get. So spending the money has in great part something to do with saving time and saving money. You could say LinkedIn, but that would not be a really good answer either because LinkedIn can be very expensive and it can also be very inefficient. Even if you use LinkedIn for free, it wouldn't be expensive, it would still be very inefficient. And also not everybody's on LinkedIn. We're finding more and more people are actually leaving their accounts or don't even, aren't even registered. It used to be when I ran a research department that was doing work for consult as a consultancy like you're doing, I would get lots of clients, you probably get this too, where they would say, we don't want you to find anybody on LinkedIn. Don't use LinkedIn. We already know how to do that. We already search on LinkedIn. Okay, fine. So what you're telling me is that if I found someone, no matter how I found them, using the world's most expensive and sophisticated method, and you type their name into LinkedIn, you don't wanna see that candidate because they have a LinkedIn profile. Okay, let's think about that for a minute, right? But nowadays I'm actually okay with that because more and more people are typing their name into LinkedIn and they're not getting a profile. Yeah. So it's happening. So I wouldn't say it's LinkedIn. So next to Google, if you want to save time and, you know, do things a little bit faster, that's where I would go with one of the aggregators. There's a bunch of choices out there. My favorite aggregator by a long shot is something called SeekOut. There are competitors to it, but the main reason that I like SeekOut is for the price. It isn't inexpensive. I mean, it is a significant investment, but remember you're doing this as a way to save time and effort and multiply the productivity of your team. So if you have one sourcer, using SeekOut, you could argue that's a multiplying effect. So it's, is it worth that money for that? And the answer is yes, because it has a lot of other features that I don't see executed very well elsewhere. It has built-in messaging and, you know, the sequencing of messages. So that's, that's there, but there are other tools, even free ones that do that. So that's not a huge, distinction. The biggest distinction, in my opinion, are filters. And most importantly, the filters that you create yourself. The ability to create your own filters, which are so specific that it can accelerate your sourcing very, very rapidly. You can get to the results that you want for anything that you do repetitively or more than once. And if you're doing a completely unique search every time, the filters are still handy. Yeah, it's handier when you have the same search that you do, you know, repetitively, because then you can customize it. But the amount of detail you can get to with the filters is staggering. So that would be one of the biggest differentiators. The second one, if you have anything to do with diversity, SeekOut has a pretty strong diversity filter. Now, normally when you think of a filter, you think eliminating candidates. And you know, so what does a filter do? You put something in the filter and the good part that you want comes out and the bad part stays behind, or the bad part that you want comes out and the good part stays behind, but that it's separating the good part from the bad part.

Right.

In SeekOut, you can have that kind of filter that is separating, but you can also have a different kind of filter that highlights. And so it ranks results of diverse talent in two different ways. One is a blind way where it simply is diverse talent and they take care of all the categories for you. So it's not singling out any particular category. And the second way is to specifically go after a category, a protected class, if you will. So you can do general, just diverse candidates, or you can say, I'm, you know, we have a specific need female talent, we have a specific need for Latinx, we have a specific need for veteran talent and so on.

Right.

So that's the second thing, which is, which is the filters. And the third is the contact information that you can acquire. They go out of their way to buy, pay for, legitimately pay for email addresses and phone numbers from the top sources. And I've run some comparisons with I would say close to 30, maybe even actually closer to maybe like 35, 37 different contact, um, finders, databases, yeah, contact sellers. And I can tell you that in my experiences, even though this is deteriorating industry-wide, the quality of content is deteriorating, yeah, in, in other words, the bounce rate and bad emails are definitely increasing, it still beats almost everybody else. So what I do is I actually use SeekOut first And let's say generally speaking, I'll get from 50 to 70% of the email addresses that I need. So that leaves me with, let's think positively, 30%. Then that 30%, I'll go to Swordfish and that'll give me another 20%. And then that 10%, I'll go to Kendo app and that'll get me another 5%. So between SeekOut, getting the bulk, Swordfish and Kendo, I'm getting somewhere in the 75 to 90%, 95%, and there might still be a few that I can't get to. I choose to do those manually if it's really, really, really, really, you know, if I want to spend my team's time and, you know, my team might cost me $10,000 an hour if I include all, you know, so do I really want to spend $10,000 an hour to find, you know, an email address? Well, maybe, maybe not. So now I have to make that decision.

But that depends on whose email. Yeah.

What the candidate is. Gotcha.

Yeah. So actually, that brings up a couple of questions for me. I'm curious about what you think of diversity sourcing in general, because maybe I have a skewed perspective there. And then, yeah, let's talk about that first. That's a whole big conversation.

What do I think about diversity sourcing, as in how to do it or whether or not to do it? Is it good or bad?

I guess one of my main gripes with it is like, I went to an HBCU. You searching in HBCU is not going to necessarily get you the candidates that you want, right? Or like people who don't have the means might not have gone to an all-women's university. So I see a lot of diversity sourcing focusing on like, well, we know that these education institutes target certain people, so let's use those as filters. So I'm really curious, like, school Right, exactly. Like, what is the technology behind this stuff that can tell you? Like, if I didn't have a rainbow next to my name, there's no way that anybody would tag me as gay online necessarily, you know? So like, how— what do you think is the current state of what they're using to determine whether or not someone is diverse?

Well, I have actually— I'm responsible for diversity recruiting and sourcing now, and I've been responsible for that before. Believe it or not, I actually was, um, doing diversity. I was doing diversity sourcing. I built the very first diversity sourcing team. And this was at Google a very, very, very long time ago, 2003. So I understand your question, but here's my, here's one part of my response to that is you can say the same thing about LinkedIn. So, okay. It's not, you know, you can make the point that Just because I went to an HBCU doesn't make me a diversity candidate. Just because I go to LinkedIn doesn't make me a diversity sourcer. Just because I'm not on LinkedIn doesn't make me, you know, there's, you can make the same argument about the number, arguably the number one source. So there's pros and cons to everything. The other answer to that, the more complete answer to that is that sourcing. So we're talking, we're very specifically here talking about sourcing. We are, I wanna be clear, we are not talking about diversity efforts, you know, equity, inclusion, we're not talking about all the other HR side, 'cause I know you're a consultant and you know this space really well. I'm talking about specifically finding candidates that are not mainstream, okay? The sourcing part of it. So when it comes to sourcing, the answer is to be as inclusive as possible. So you could include HBCUs, but the problem is if you limit it to HBCUs, Okay. So here's the trick. If you only source on LinkedIn, you are actually having a very negative adverse impact. Yeah. Because LinkedIn very much discriminates. It is very discriminatory. There's a couple of reasons for that. Let's just use the most shocking, most extreme example. If you are an Arab woman, it is not allowed in many cultures, in many of the Arab cultures, it is not allowed for you to share your likeness on a public page. You cannot post a picture. So not having a photo on your LinkedIn profile deprecates your profile from being found in search results by an immense factor. So just the fact that you're an Arab woman means that you're going to be discriminated against in search results on LinkedIn. And you know, as well as I do, that when somebody does a search on LinkedIn, they're gonna type in 2 or 3 keywords. They're gonna look at the first page of results.

Mm-hmm.

If you're an Arab woman, you're not gonna be in that first page of results unless I did something intentional to include that.

Okay.

Because the default is gonna be the popular pictures.

Okay. So your, the, your approach to diversity sourcing then is that it should be, um, you should be adding candidates, not necessarily like subtracting.

Okay. That's right.

So then how do you—

But add them. That's right. So you cast as wide a net as possible in the non-traditional areas. So essentially it is the same as sourcing. Sourcing is finding people that you can't find by other means. Diversity sourcing is finding people that you can't find by other means. You're just expanding the definition of sourcing. A normal sourcing effort might include going into the deep web to identify candidates that have a very rare skillset like I can't even come up with, you know, some very obscure skill set. Okay, well, you're doing the same thing, but now you're doing it to increase the top of the funnel for candidates that are underrepresented for a number of reasons. However, you have to be very careful to be inclusive. So don't just limit it to educational institutions.

Yes.

Right? Whether it's an HBCU or not, just don't limit it to educational institutions. You can use affinity groups, you can use natural language, you can use. So what are some of these solutions that don't work? What some of them use is a filter that is essentially targeting affinity groups and HBCUs and a couple of other things. That is gonna be very limiting. SeekOut doesn't stop there because I can show you now, there are, with SeekOut, there are some positive and negative results, meaning that you can get false positives using a search with one of their filters and get a candidate that comes back as a result to that query that you, let's say you asked for specifically Latinx and you get a candidate as a result that is very clearly not Latinx. Well, first of all, you don't know that.

Yeah.

Right. And secondly, it could be a false positive and that happens, but you are still doing a good job of including more Latinx people because you're adding more to the top of the funnel. So what SeekOut does that's different is they're looking for a lot of other things that are patterns that help us identify. So you mentioned we may not be able to tell from your profile whether or not you are non-binary or gay unless we have a, you have a rainbow on your profile. Well, having a rainbow on your profile could be a search term. Actually, icons could be search terms, but there's also organizations that you join. There's also language that you use, words that you use, and those are some of the things that they look at, but that's still not the end and, you know, the end. You can say beyond SeekOut, you can still do a lot of other things to identify candidates that are diverse by, let's say, for example, networking, right? So one of the things you could do is network with Anita Borg and Grace Hopper. And now I'm specifically talking about female engineering talent, female and engineering, because both of those are engineering organizations, but there's the same thing. There's the Black Accountants Association. There's, you know, the Black Lawyers Association, right? So you can network Um, and again, I may be a member of the Black Accountants Association, whether or not I check the box. Yeah. So, you know, don't filter out.

I appreciate that because I feel like a lot of, a lot of times when we talk about diversity sourcing, um, A, we're only talking about race and, and sex or gender. Um, and so that's a problem in general. Um, And too, I see Patty actually mentioned on Facebook something about neurodiversity. So while you're talking about what search terms are available, I do want to let people know about the AU search term, or the AU tag on the end of someone's name will generally mean that they are autistic or neurodiverse. And so that's another thing that you guys can throw in there if you want to search the rainbow icon or you want to search the AU after someone's name.

Those are all good search terms for finding people who are self-identifying on social media as There's also other keywords that you can use to identify people that are not self-identifying.

Right.

But again, here's the—

I think that's where these tools come in, right? It's like—

Some of them, yes, but you also have to do it yourself, right? You have to— this is something that you have to do manually. Here's the— here's where the trouble starts though. If you increase the top of the funnel and then filter out, you're being discriminatory. So if you're going to increase the top of the funnel and you see someone in your search results that may or may not fall into that category, you have to leave them in there because what you're trying to do is you're trying to increase the funnel, not, you know, so reverse discrimination isn't good.

Yeah, I know. And I don't know anybody who wants to make their own job harder or their own jobs harder to fill. So I hope there's not too many people out there doing that. And yeah, because yeah, no one wants to feel tokenized anyway. All right, so going back to tools. Let's talk about some of the little things in sourcing. Like, I would not be able to do this job at all without a good scraping tool, right? What are some of these little tools like scraping tools that just make life easier for sourcers?

Well, there's a lot. It really kind of comes down to your personal preference, right? There are a number of— let's just call them base. I don't want to know— basic's not a good word. Easy Automation techniques that you can use to accelerate. Think of anything that you have to do repetitively. There's a lot of ways that you can automate repetitive tasks. And some of them don't cost a bunch of money. I mean, we're talking about SeekOut and Swordfish and Kendo, which costs money. And those are, they're not necessarily all that expensive. I mean, Kendo's credits are pretty wildly inexpensive. So it's worth it. So, you know, as I was saying, what's your time worth? If it's gonna take you, 1 minute to find somebody's email address manually, and your, your hour is worth $100, and you're spending $1 on an email address. Well, if you're spending 10 cents to get that from Kendo, there you go. You're saving 90 cents. Okay, let's, let's cut it down to that. But then there's other things too. Like, for example, I, I would say these are some of my must-have Chrome extensions because Chrome extensions are generally free and they're generally very easy to use. Otherwise, they, they shouldn't be a Chrome extension. I mean, if a Chrome extension is really complicated, it's software now, right? So Link Clump is one that I use a lot. What Link Clump does is you can highlight a section of content on a page and it will gather up all of the hyperlinks on that page. So this could be done with search engine results. This could be done with a list. This can be done with all kinds of content that you can imagine that has hyperlinks in it. And it'll extract it into either a CSV, your favorites, or the clipboard. So it'll, you know, write to a spreadsheet, write to your favorites folder, or write to the clipboard. And it can extract either the address, the name, the HTML, just the URL, the tag, or any combination of them thereof. So it's very powerful and very useful and very easy to configure. What do you do that for? Well, let's say that you're building a custom search engine and you found a— here's a list of the top competitors, scrape, right? There you go. Boom, it goes right into. So that's an example. There's a— here's a list of speakers, scrape, right? And that's very easy. Magical. The magical, I believe I actually had that in here. Let's see if I have that. And yep, right there. This is magical. So Magical is a, a copy paste tool that works like magic. It's a copy paste tool that allows you to, to do a lot more than copy paste. For example, set variables on a page. And one of the most impressive things about it is that when anybody, let's say you configure a Magical formula, that formula is then available for that webpage to anybody else that's in the community. Oh, okay. So for example, I use Greenhouse. I created a dozen or so formulas for Greenhouse. Now anybody else who uses Greenhouse, they, they don't access my data. They just are able to see the pattern because of the, the code. They can now use those formulas or they can create their own, et cetera. So what it can do is, for example, extract variables from a page and put them into a merge field. So if you're on LinkedIn or on Greenhouse, one of the biggest impediments to LinkedIn in mails is that you cannot use customized fields. So all you have is first name, last name. There's not title, company, locate, none of those things. But with Magical, I can extract first name, last name, company, location, how many connections we have in common, when was the last time they updated their profile, how many groups they have, what's their most, you know, most, what's their number one group on there, all that. And I can put it into a merge field with 2 or 3 clicks of a keyboard.

Okay.

So I can send a message to somebody on LinkedIn that's an InMail that is extremely customized with 20 or 30 customizations. And I can do that in 2 or 3 seconds. Go to the next profile, click, go to the next profile, click. I can fully automate that if I wanted to, but I don't want to because if I fully automate that, then I may be sending messages to somebody I already contacted or I shouldn't be contacting. So I'm still looking at the profile. I'm being intentional about it.

Yes, I—

99% of the labor is done.

Yeah, I do not agree with fully automated outreach. Like, I want to hit the button that says start the outreach because I want someone reviewing that profile before that outreach goes out. So yeah, definitely makes sense with that. I feel like every time I talk to you, I learn more technical stuff. I accept Power Automate Desktop. I never got the hang of that. It just frustrated me and I threw it away. But especially data scraping, I've learned so much from you on that.

Next week. No, not next week. Hold on a second. Tune in, man. Now, June 17th. Mike Santoro, I was told by Glen, is a genius at Power Automate, much smarter than me, probably can give you easier ways. I may have just totally overcomplicated it.

No, it's just that it's a frustration tolerance thing. Like once something doesn't go right, I'm like, screw this, I want to throw my computer What I'm saying is he might take that away, right? Yeah, there we go.

Unfrustrate yourself.

Yeah, I thought like maybe learning Python would be easier.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe. I'm not sure.

Yeah, so, um, speaking of that, like, how important do you think, um, there's a lot of sources who code, right? And then there's a lot of us who don't, um, or do some weird hybrid of the two. How important do you think that it is, uh, to code, if it, if at all? And then like, where do you see that going in the future?

It's not important at all. Okay. It is like any other skill. So if you, if you develop the muscle that, you know, the muscle of making cold calls or using your telephone as a sourcing tool and social engineering and, you know, like Maureen Sharif, for example, who is a genius at calling one number and getting 50 names, you're going to get 50 names that way.

Yeah.

If you wanna write code, you're gonna get 50 names that way. So it, it's, it's akin to saying what's better, a hammer or a saw?

Depends on what you're doing.

Or, you know, or more importantly, should I use a hammer or should I use a saw? Is it important that I master the hammer? I don't know. Are you, are you gonna nail a lot of things or are you gonna pour concrete? Cuz if you're gonna pour concrete, hammer's not gonna be very useful. You know, are you a framer? Then yeah, hammer, right? So it's, it's not important because it is one of the skills.

Okay.

If it's something that you have an affinity for, I would say the first step would be to learn to read code.

Yeah.

Because reading code and writing code are not the same. Very much like, for example, I'm sure you're perfectly capable of writing a book, but not everybody can write a book. Almost everybody can read one.

Right.

So reading a book and writing a book, right? It's the same thing with code, reading code, understanding what's going on with the code and being able to like at least make it determine what it does.

Yeah.

You're not gonna be able to fix it. You're not gonna be able to, but you can understand it. Start, start with that. And then if that clicks, then go for it. But if it doesn't, that may not be the hammer for you. Maybe the hammer for you is the telephone. Maybe the hammer for you is automation. Maybe it's social media. Maybe you have deciphered the code of how to get people to respond to your emails and you have a 90% response rate. Right. If you source 100 candidates and I source 100 candidates, but only 10 people respond to me and 90 people respond to you, you have 80 more candidates than I do.

Right. Yeah.

And you didn't have to use sourcing code or writing code or whatever, right?

Yeah. And that kind of speaks to one of my core beliefs about KPIs and recruiting as well. It's like if somebody gets hired at the end of it, I really don't care how many phone calls we made or, you know, things Yeah, so I'm glad that you mentioned the phone call sourcing too, because I am again old enough to have gone through Morgan Method training back in the day. And one of the things Pete used to make us do is just sit there and call, you know, till we got a hold of somebody in HR who gave us, you know, 20 names. And then once we had a decent organizational chart, we could hang up the phone. And so yeah, it's, it's, that stuff still works to some degree, not so much in the, in the remote workforce.

It's a little harder to do and it's a little slower. It used to be faster, but if you combine that with other skills, then it works better. The same thing, you know, if you know how to write code and you know how to get good response rates to emails, then you're, you know, you're increasing your effort. Now, can you master all of them? Look, I've been doing this for 25 years. I don't think so.

You gotta figure out what you're good at.

Yeah. After 25 years, I, I can tell you there are some things I'm very, very, very, very good at. I get some pretty good response rates. They're not the best, but they're pretty good. I would just say average to maybe above average. I can find people that nobody else can find, and that's my superpower. I can find somebody that nobody else can find. Finding them to me is what I like. It's the challenge that I enjoy the most. So the, the joyful moment for me is I found someone that was impossible to find. Right. I don't like the contacting part. I do it, but I would really rather give, I would really rather build a spreadsheet.

Yeah.

And hand it over to somebody that's really good at outreach.

Yeah.

That like crushes it on outreach. So, and, and I do that when I build teams sometimes too, because like, for example, the team that I had at Microsoft, we had somebody who was just fantastic on the phone. We used to, please take this with a grain of salt, this was very much clean, not dirty. We used to call her the call girl because she could make the calls. I mean, it was just amazing. Anytime she dialed the number, it was like it worked, right? And she could find people that way. And so, but she hated it. I mean, she did not want to sit next to it. She would rather be on her mobile phone with a notepad out in the backyard dialing all day and be nowhere near a computer. So I paired her up with somebody who doesn't like to be on the phone. They sent her the spreadsheet, she turned it into literally gold, but she couldn't have done it with him and he couldn't have done it with her. You know, so find what works. Now, can you do that and can you source and can you get high response rates and can you do social media? Yeah, you can do all of it, but are you gonna be the absolute best at every single one of them? Probably not. So I can find somebody that nobody else can find, but I may not be the best person to engage them, get them to respond, right? I may get them to respond half the time. All right. Now I can interview people really well. So if I find them, somebody else puts 'em on my calendar, I can interview them really. So, you know, but, but then again, right? So I guess pick your poison.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit about like, let's say you get a new requisition. Something you've never done before, you don't have an existing pipeline. What's the timeline? What's a realistic expectation for your client before they have someone sitting in front of them who's been properly screened?

What's the timeline? What's a realistic expectation?

Right. So you get a new job order, they're like, hey, source me a bunch of people, I'm ready to interview tomorrow. How many weeks is it going to be before they're actually in an interview?

I, okay, let me put it this way. If it's a typical, I wanna say typical, this is kind of tricky. If it's a typical search, what is a typical search? That's gonna be the next question, right? If it's a mainstream role that you've been recruiting for a while, and you know the specifications, you don't have to do a pre-search, you don't have to do an extensive intake meeting. You kind of already know the profile. There may be some nuances and flavors and things like that, but let's eliminate the pre-search. Let's eliminate the intake meeting. It's, I need Shelly, I need another one of those. Yeah. I need another one of those. Okay, let's do that. Then my expectation is that my team will have a, one qualified, interested, and available candidate that the hiring authority will accept within 7 days, by the end of the 7th day. But if they don't have one by the end of the 5th day, they are instructed to send flares. Because if you don't have one by the end of the 5th day, even if you did the most aggressive outreach on the 6th day, you might still miss that deadline. Right. So on the 5th day, they pull out the stops, they bring in somebody else that, you know, we accelerate. And then on the 6th day, if we don't have anybody, we let them know. We let the client, the hiring manager know because tomorrow is the deadline. We let them know the day before we are not meeting the deadline. And here's why. Not only here's why, but also here's what we did. Not in detail, but here's the effort that we did. Okay. You know, here's what we did. We didn't— we're not going to meet the deadline. Here's what we did. Here's what we want to do. Is that okay? You know, and kind of reset the clock. But generally speaking, one qualified, available, interested candidate that is accepted by the hiring manager within 5 days is reasonable to answer your question.

Okay. And if you're having to start from scratch, reinventing the wheel here, if you have to do the research, you should spend a good—

I'm going to get shot for this— you should spend a good 4 hours setting things up. And I'm talking about the research, the templates, the spreadsheet, or the the tracking or the CRM or the list or the whatever, the synonyms, some sample searches, sending a sample candidate, all of this stuff, you should spend a good solid 4 hours to get set up, possibly as much as 8 hours. It's not unheard of to literally put 8 hours into setting up, especially if it's gonna be a search that you know you're gonna use frequently. You might have to set up automation and other things like that. So 4 to 8 hours to get things set up. And then after that, I would, I think the amount of time diminishes. There's a chart that I presented once in a PowerPoint that is kind of like a diminishing, let's see here if I can find it. It's like a diminishing rate of return on the amount of time that you spend with a particular search. So, you know, 4 to 8 hours at the beginning, and then you might do an hour or two 2 a day, then you might do half an hour a day or half an hour every couple of days. And it goes down to by the 8th week, you're probably only doing about half an hour every week, right? Because you're still working on it, but it's not— the return on investment is not gonna be as great. So that's kind of how I scale it.

Okay. Makes sense. What else do you wanna talk about today?

I wish I could find that. That slide with the, with the, not the cadence, that's not the word I'm looking for, but with like the, the pattern of how much time you spend upfront versus later on. I'll find it and I'll put it up. It's, it's here somewhere.

All right.

I have a question for you.

Yeah.

So you just hired somebody that you're going to be training.

Yeah.

My, on my last show, I also had another friend of mine who's a consultant and runs his own search firm that does sourcing, outsourcing, and things like that. And he also hired some people with very little experience. And this is a question I'm asking you, but I've also been asked myself. How'd you pick them? That this person, okay. So they weren't a sourcer, I'm assuming, right? Right.

Yeah. So, so I picked, I picked 2 people. Right? Because what we do, we're not an agency. We go in and consult and like, and she, my junior recruiter, will be branded with my client, right? So like, I'm branded with Avio, she'll be branded with the other client. And so we're doing recruiting as a service there. So my sourcer, I needed somebody who was available part-time. That was a real hard thing. I have a real hard time with part-time searches because it's it's a whole different, you know, criteria of what you're looking for there. So with that one, I ended up finding someone who is a— like, just quit teaching, got really frustrated with teaching. As we know, teachers are pretty good writers, most of them. She's an English teacher and decent at research, and she's just inherently curious person. So for me, with that one, I was looking for someone who complements me in a lot of ways because I need to make up my own team. So I need to make sure that I'm making up for my own weaknesses, which would be like documentation, reporting, all those little detail things. Like, I like the big picture stuff. So, so for her, it was more about finding someone who is good at listening, good at taking notes, good at details, um, and, and just curious enough to be a good researcher. Um, for my junior recruiter, I found her, oddly enough, on one of the most vicious recruiting Facebook groups out there. She posted, and it just kind of like I saw her and was inspired, right? So she posted that she wanted to get into recruiting. She was tired of like dead-end jobs, but she was running into a lot of barriers for entry. So, you know, you— it's an entry-level job, but you have to have a bachelor's degree. It's an entry-level job, but you have to have 2 years of experience, right? So she was kind of ranting about that or complaining about that on this group. and she made a typo or a grammar mistake. I can't remember what. And so of course the first 5 people jump in there to, you know, tear, tear her down and tell her she needs to take a writing class before she can ever even consider a job in recruiting. And then like, and then there's, you know, like the next 5 people are in there to justify why you need a bachelor's degree to be a recruiter, which I have a master's degree and I can tell you probably didn't need any of that for, for this job. Um, you know, there are some business concepts and management things that help But, but yeah, like, you don't have to have a degree to be a recruiter. And she was just defending herself well. And like, I could feel the passion and the, the, that fire of just wanting something and being told no so many times and still wanting that thing. So going after it. And so that's what impressed me initially. So I, I sent her a message. I said, hey, let's have a chat. We had an interview and I asked her what she knew about recruiting. And instead of me explaining the process to her, she actually told me, well, I took a course online and this is what I understand about this, this, and this. And, you know, this is where I think that I could go. And so then I was able to say, well, okay, do you want to do high-volume recruiting or low-volume recruiting? Here's what your day looks like in both of those. And then, you know, do you want to work at a bigger company with a lot of structure and you have to be super specialized? Do you want to work at a smaller company where you get to wear a lot of hats? And so we talked through through some of that and it really got down to where she felt like her strengths were, where she felt like her goals should be going, and just helped her to clarify that. And, and it's a lot of gut instinct and a lot of just, just getting a good feeling about someone. But for me, when someone has no experience, when you do your homework, that just shows me— that shows me a lot about your character and who you are and your curiosity. And which I think is just especially for sourcing and recruiting, one of the most key characteristics.

Yeah, and you're great. You know, sourcing and recruiting, unless you are the type of sourcing that's doing research only where you're not going to do any outreach at all, which does exist, by the way, but yeah, when you're doing any kind of outreach, whether you're cold calling or doing phone screens or whatever, I, I agree with you that I would say the number one most important core competency is professionalism. Because no matter what, we, we are very frequently either the first or second point of contact type for a person representing the brand for which we're recruiting. So professionalism is very important. I mean, it's, it doesn't matter if you're not knowledgeable in the technology or there's a lot of other things that you're completely ignorant about, but if you're courteous and professional, that goes a huge way, right? So professionalism and personal values and that interpersonal skill is really, really important. And then the other one that you said, I completely agree with for the first part of it was the curiosity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think like a lot of people have used— I always back away from the word professional or professionalism to some degree because it's been used to attack a lot of groups of people. And so, yeah. And so I pull off of that one a little bit. But I understand you're talking about courtesy and people treating people well, things like that. Right. So I just call that sort of authenticity. Authenticity, right?

Like, okay, yeah, bringing yourself, but a polite version of yourself, communicating well however you communicate. Like, I'm not saying you have to have no accent or what. I totally— I did not think about that. Thank you for correcting me. No, I wasn't saying that you— that you— if you have an accent, you're totally—

understood your intention there. But I do want to like make sure that people watch their use of that word sometimes because, you know, listening. Yeah.

Focusing and listening, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, totally agree. Yeah. What's, you know, it's interesting that there is a distinct separation in the core competencies between what I would call a hunter or sourcer researcher versus what you just defined as a recruiter, which could be a cold caller, candidate developer, phone screener, account manager, talent professional, whatever, right? So the two different parts. It's the same— it's two sides of a coin. It's the same coin, but it is two different sides, I think. And I would say, probably in my experience, 25 years, for what it's worth, hunter-sorcerers tend to have a very high, above-average need for independence. Yeah. Um, versus teamwork. And independence and teamwork are both good, so I'm not saying one is better than the other, but sorcerers tend to more of an independence need, um, and also have a need to, to have more freedom to operate. So independence is, you know, being self, self-managed is one thing, but also freedom to operate is another. So, you know, they— if they're, if they're too restrictive, then the creativity kind of goes away. So creativity doesn't really even matter that much if you're you're telling them this is the way you do it, you do this, then this, then this, then this, then this, then, you know, might as well not have created— might as well have a robot, right?

Right.

Where on the recruiter side, the candidate developer or the, you know, the caller, whatever you want to call it, is they have a much higher need for social connection, which could be teamwork, which could be just simply social contact. They are much more patient, flexible, steady. Versus the sourcers. And, and recruiters also tend to be a lot more system process, um, not driven, but process knowledgeable. They, they like to follow up process. And let's face it, there's a lot of laws in recruiting that most people are not even aware of. So following the process can be very important, whereas with sourcing, it's almost like you don't want to follow the process because if you do, then you end up getting the same results as everybody else, right? Yeah. By the way, I did find that multiple searches thing that I was telling you about.

Oh, okay.

Let's see if we can figure out a way to share this here. Add. Oh, yep, I can do this. I can share screen. There's going to be one of those weird picture-in-picture-in-picture-in-picture things for just a second, so bear with me. I told you. Yeah, Infinity, don't get seasick. This is the one I was talking about. So notice that there's 28 days. It's because I was just kind of trying to squeeze everything in. Yes, there are some weekends in there. So, you know, imagine if this was not your— don't look at it as 28 days, but rather like, you know, 1 month, right? 4 weeks, right? There's weekends and there might be holiday, whatever. The point is that I have these 4 phases, the beginning phase, which needs to be done right away. That's, that's the first day. That's the pre-surge, the intake, uh, finding people in, in, you know, the low-hanging fruit. A lot of us call it that way.

Right.

Yeah. Phase 2, phase 3, phase 4. And here's that 7-day period that I was talking about. And so, um, I charted like how it might look. So if it takes you 4 hours to set up a new rep, well, that's half of your day. On day 1 and 2. If you have a new rec on days 3 or day 4, that's half of your day. The other half of your day you can spend on sourcing for A, B, and B, right? Exactly. Then you have on the 5th or 6th day another new rec. Now you have 3, so half of your day goes to rec C, and then most of your day, the rest of your day goes to B, and a little bit of your day goes to A. And you can see kind of how A slows down and eventually disappears. The same thing would be, I know it's messy, but I couldn't find another way to visualize this.

I can't even imagine running this many recs. Like, thankfully, most of our jobs are the same person, but I need 4 of them, or, you know, different levels of seniority within the same.

And I really, here's my rule. I won't onboard my sourcing team, an individual on that sourcing team, I will not permit them to onboard more than one rec per day. So if I'm giving them a new assignment, that is their new assignment for the day. I can give them another one the next day, but that's like my hard limit. And in fact, um, I would really, unless there's an emergency situation or something that is escalated above my level of authority, I would really prefer that there wouldn't be more than 3 new ones in a week. So it's not just one.

That's a lot.

Yeah, yeah, 3 new, okay, because that's 3, that's this, this, and this in one week, in 5 days, right? That's a lot. Then I really don't want them to be running more than 8 simultaneously because 2 or 3 of those are new, spending half of their day on it, right? Like here you say 48 hours on day— on phase 1, about 4 hours phase 2, about 2 hours phase 3, and so on. No more than 8 because some of those might be sort of tapering out, some of them might be coming in. That's, that's The sad reality is that I have somebody right now on my team that's running 12. Oh my God. Which is definitely a lot more than 8. However, there's a few of those that are so similar that they're not multiple openings to one rec, but they're, you know, they're, you know what a backend engineer is? Yeah. There are 4 different kinds of backend engineer for 4 different nuances. So really, the sourcing is primarily the same. The split or the difference comes in when they respond and they're interested in one or the other. So I, you know, that's kind of how I'm allowed— that's how I'm selling myself on permitting me. Yeah. Permitting me to give this workout 12 reps. Otherwise I would be screaming bloody murder. But yeah, that's— I wanted to share that with you because that's the—

Yeah, that's, that's, that's great. That's a nice visualization to kind of understand how you, how you run a scene because I've never done pure sourcing, like just sourcing, so I've never even seen a team that operates like that. So I can only imagine how that operation must be.

Yeah, happy to, you know, keep the conversation going. I know that you have to run and I've kept you for an hour, which is— that means we must be having fun.

Yes.

By the way, I don't think I've ever had this many people still watching an hour into it. Yay! We must have done something right. Yeah, well, thank you so much. Any parting words? I know you got to run, but yeah, you want to say goodbye or any parting thoughts?

Yeah, yeah, no, it was great to be here. I really appreciate this. I'm definitely going to have my team watch this. I got to go back and watch a recording of this so I can get all of these tools that you just told me about and try them out. Because, yeah, you know, you kind of get stuck in something that works for you once or twice and you forget sometimes like, hey, there's new stuff, I got to go look at that. So definitely will be— we'll be rewatching this to figure it out.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Glenn, for your obviously fantastic notes there.

Muchísimas gracias.

Gracias. Hasta luego. Ciao.