Leadership Talk With Michael Kascsak Head of SWE Sourcing, North America at Google on Shally's Alley

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All right, hello everybody, it's Friday at 1 PM Eastern time, so that means it's time for Shelly's Alley. At least one or two other people may be watching this show right now. We'd like to welcome our special guest, Erin Mathew. Say hi, Erin.

Hi, Erin.

Awesome. Erin is one of my absolute favorite people in the sourcing industry. Not only is Erin a rock star in her own right, and in her own mind. No, I'm just kidding. But also somebody who has taken the initiative to share and talk about the profession and be a role model and a mentor. And if that wasn't enough, Erin has recently— well, maybe not that recently— Erin has taken on the responsibility of leading a sourcing team. So how perfect, right? You just started, what, maybe 6 months ago or something?

It's actually been a year now, but it still feels very new because I'm still new to management in general.

That's great. Yeah, so I figured it was time to bring you on because, you know, of course I respect your sourcing know-how and we've shared the stage many a time. And now, you know, time for a new role. I'm in a new role as well. I haven't even been here a year yet. It'll be a year in like a month or something like that in November. So I'm still the new guy on this team here. So how did you find the transition from individual contributor sourcer to leader of sourcers? Because there's really not a lot. I mean, you know, you're among the first few people that are leading sourcing teams. This is not a very well-established role yet, right? Sourcing just came into its own and now we have sourcing managers and sourcing directors. How, what was that like?

So it was, uh, really overwhelming. I'm not gonna lie, because suddenly you go from being able to source all day to suddenly having your day packed with meetings. And then by the time you're done with those, you kind of feel like sourcing is your break at that point. And, you know, it's, it's just trying to find the time to do that among everything else and then planning strategically. And, you know, there's times when, you know, my team will say like, I'm so busy with sourcing. And I'm like, you think you're busy right now. But imagine having to source the same number of recs and having all these meetings in between.

You are carrying a full load of sourcing recs while you're managing this team.

At the moment, building now, because I'm unfortunately down to one sourcer instead of three. 3 at this time.

So it wasn't me. I didn't do it.

No, no. Um, yeah, our most recent sourcer just transitioned to a different role within Maxar, which, you know, happy for them, just sad for me. Okay.

So you, you're, you're way too nice and way too humble to do shameless plugs. So I will do a shameless plug. Anybody out there that's listening, if you want to work with a really good sourcer that knows their stuff, and someone who's really nice and will take care of you and be a good boss, this is the person that you need to contact. If Erin won't hire you, call me afterward, but I'm going to definitely endorse Erin. And so any sourcers out there that are looking for work or want to, you know, make a change, this is the place to go.

So absolutely.

Tell me, you know, it's, it's supposed to be a team of 4, uh, including yourself. And you guys are literally sourcing in outer space. And one of the things that I think you're well known for, I'm sure you have a lot more tricks than this, but is sourcing in very non-traditional channels such as Reddit and places that are certainly harder to penetrate. And by the way, for those of you who have no idea what Reddit is, Reddit is basically like an online chat and you have to get major street cred and respect in order to be able to play in Reddit. If you just jump in like a total noob, um, it's—

you're gonna get downvoted.

It's not gonna happen. Yeah. So, you know, Aaron has managed to get a very good reputation and figured out how to do sourcing and recruiting on Reddit, which is a very different world. So you've got, you know, you've got this innovation, you've got this, uh, space technology What do you— what's next? What are you working on now? What is in your laboratory, in your basement laboratory? What's the next evolution?

Yeah, so COVID-19 changed a lot for us in terms of strategy for being able to attract talent. Maxar used to rely quite a lot on in-person events, and obviously those kind of went away very quickly. And then over the last year, we have been offering quite a lot of virtual hiring events. And, you know, to make those happen, it takes a lot of time and effort to be able to find the right people to invite, promote them the right way, and then also getting the hiring managers actually involved in that so that they can be successful. And really, the next thing for us is getting, getting those events scaled up to a much bigger volume than we had this last year, because right now it's just the sourcing team that's doing that. We don't have any of our TABPs hosting virtual events. We don't have any of our TA managers hosting those. So it's something that we want to expand maybe more enterprise-wide so that we can reach more people. And, you know, we focus mostly on high-volume events for immediate needs for roles that are already open. But I want us to start thinking more long-term in terms of building relationships with people. Because what we're finding is that sourcing needs to be much more long-term. We oftentimes come across a lot of people that have great skill sets that I know that we'll need at Maxar at some point, but they're just not here right now. So it's a matter of maintaining those relationships long-term so we can finally get those things to come to fruition.

Are there any technical, technological— you know me, I'm always a geek, right? Any technology that you're discovering or adapting adapting for this that maybe is good for another industry that you're kind of either, you know, inventing or recreating or porting over? What are you hacking these days?

What am I hacking these days? I mean, the biggest technology we're using specifically for our events is Brazen. It's a fantastic platform to be able to, you know, connect with people one-on-one. But other than that, I guess there's not a whole bunch of new and cool technology that we're working with on the sourcing side. My team still very much relies on a lot of the old-school methods that are still very tried and true, you know, being really skilled in advanced search, having some basic web scraping skills with, you know, things like DataMiner, and a lot of that pretty much takes us a long way. So, um, I, I would like to explore some, uh, newer methods in the next year when, you know, things start slowing down, which they always be a whole new technology, right?

Like we're experimenting with, you know, scrapers have been around for a while. Maybe not a lot of our listeners or people that are watching are familiar with it, but the idea of going out there and capturing volumes of data and parsing it and putting into a spreadsheet, that's not new. What is new, though, is the automation that you put behind that, and that is becoming a lot easier, a lot more accessible. You could always, for many years, spider a website. I mean, the very first spider that I ever programmed was called Black Widow, and it was a diehard hacker tool. You know, it was like the kind of thing that you would use to literally replicate a website and, you know, pull down everything. And it was a very heavy-handed tool, and you had to know what you were doing. Nowadays, you've got instant data scrapers, like Chrome extension, hit a button, you know, capture everything. So not much has changed in what you do. It's just how you do it.

Yeah.

But what has changed is now I can take that spreadsheet and I can put it into an automation system like Microsoft Power Automate or UiPath and have workflows kick off on that. Add people to CRM, copy from CRM to, you know, ATS, send automated email, check email, Things like autoresponders, remember what a pain those were? Like my first autoresponder was literally an Outlook rule. You know, like when I get this reply with that, right? There was no if this, there was no subroutines. So I think maybe it's not necessarily new technology as much as like new ways to use technology.

Yep, exactly.

And refining it and putting it in, you know, and getting people to adopt it.

Yeah, and you know, Mike Vroman, who is on my team, is great about that. He is always the one on the team that discovers some new little feature in an old tool that's like, did you have any idea you could do this with that? And I'm like, I had no idea. You know, thank you for always digging into everything like that.

Yeah, like on a show with Mike Askins, who's a, you know, Microsoft cloud expert, he told me about something in Outlook calendar that I never knew existed, and I live in Outlook calendar. I mean, it's been I've been using Outlook calendar for, you know, since I can remember. And he told me that if you go into the box where you type in at the top of the calendar, you can actually type in natural language like next week or next Monday, and it'll take you there. I didn't, I never knew that. So it's, you know, little things like that. It sounds like this guy is, maybe you shouldn't have named his name, 'cause now he's gonna get recruited. No, I'm just kidding. I'm sure he's got a great thing going.

Oh yeah, definitely.

What would you say is the most important thing that you get out of a sourcing team? What makes having a sourcing team indispensable?

So a lot of people will disagree with me on this, and, you know, they'll say it's got to be hires. If you're not getting hires, then, then what's the point of a sourcing team? I say that influencing hires is what is crucial to a team. And that can happen a whole bunch of different ways. It can be something as simple as providing market intelligence during the intake. Because let me tell you, telling a hiring manager the reality of what is out there is often going to shape exactly what they do with those candidates that you submit. For example, all of the sourcers on my team are required to come to their intake with a Talent Neuron report. If you don't, know what Talent Neuron is, it's a program that it's definitely not free. It's very expensive, but if you have it, you know, it's, it's definitely a tool you should get the most out of, but it provides thousands of data points for any role that you type into it. And it gives salary data. It gives market availability, any of that. And because we bring that to our intake, I feel like hiring managers make quicker decisions. They have a much more realistic view that, you know, there aren't going to be 5 more people just like this that you just want to shop around for. So I think that that is one way that you can definitely influence a hire. Even let's say, let's say you get someone that makes it to interview and they totally bomb the interview. Maybe that forces the hiring manager to say, you know what, the person I interviewed yesterday that applied, They're not so bad, I'd better go with them. So there's a lot of ways that you can influence a hire versus getting fills. Obviously, it's great when we get a fill with a sourced candidate. But I think that the, the actual influence that a sourcing team has on TA often can't be measured by metrics.

And not by metrics of hires. I know that, right? I'm with you there 100%.

Yeah, but the influence that we have, I think, is an understated, you know, in terms of importance to TA.

I'm— look, I'm totally with you in that. It's been something that I've been talking about for 20 years. Sourcing is a solution. It's not the outcome, right? If you expect sourcers to have the same outcome as recruiters, then what's the difference?

Right.

So exactly. If the value of a sourcer is to do the same job a recruiter does, then that's not the value of it. Yeah. Then you're basically, then you have a recruiter. I mean, you just replaced the name with a different name and it's the same job. So what is so different about it and what is so valuable? And to me, I've always maintained that decision support is our number one value add, not just in sourcing, but in all of TA. I think all of TA's biggest contribution is decision support because ultimately, Erin, we don't get to decide who we hire. We influence.

Yes.

We provide the lead. We can provide you alternatives. We can provide you options. We can ensure diversity. We can all these other things. But at the end of the day or the week or the month or the year, you, the hiring manager, have to live with the choices that you make. Sure, we can help you make better choices, but you live with those choices. And even the organization, the entity, the company that is doing the hiring depends on the hiring manager making that decision. So the hire is really not where we add value. Where we add value in TA is to provide the ability for executives to make decisions, hiring managers to make better decisions, the right decisions. This could be competitive intelligence. This could be talent pool identification. Market mapping, or simply better leads or diversity leads or whatever, right? We can, we can work with them in all those ways. And I would say the same thing for a recruiter. The biggest value a recruiter provides is not in a hire, but in fulfilling the vision of the organization. So the organization says, we have a vision, we're going to grow by 10%. The value the recruiter has is in their direct contribution to that growth. That's the value, not the number of hires, because those hires could have happened with or without that recruiter.

Exactly.

So, you know, you're saying that your value is a commodity that can be done by anybody else. That's not the case. Good recruiters hire better candidates for, you know, so that's where I think the value is. I completely agree with you 100%. So what troubles you in, you know, what's bothering you frustrating you, keeping you up at night in this sourcing leadership role?

So I would say still a lot of lingering attitudes from hiring managers. We all have the frustration of he's just not the right fit, and it can mean so many things. And in a world where many of us in the sourcing world are trying to push forward to make a more diverse workplace, to make a more inclusive workplace, we still have the frustration that at the end of the day, we don't make those final decisions. And that's what really keeps me up at night is how do I convince someone you're unintentionally excluding this person because of this, or, you know, you don't realize what you're doing when you make this kind of decision. That's really what keeps me up at night.

But is that really our fault though?

It's not our fault, but I still think that we have a responsibility to do whatever we can that's in our power to—

we do. Absolutely. Absolutely. But we also need to be able to get the tools to be able to do that. So I'm hearing you, the hiring managers are giving you— what I heard was the hiring manager giving you kind of wishy-washy feedback, right? Like, I just don't know why, but they're not a fit. And they're not giving you any specifics. You may suspect that, you know, the reason why they're giving you that feedback, but if you don't have the tools to demonstrate that, prove that, or somehow counter that, then you're not being provided that by the organization. So it's not your fault, but you do have the responsibility. However, you also have the responsibility of going to figure out what those tools are. So that's when you go back to your manager, your leadership, and say, this is happening. I don't— I can't prove it, but I think this is happening. Let's spend some time and energy proving it so that we can solve it. Not because I want to be right or look good, but because it's the right thing for the organization and I need this tool in order to do my job better. Otherwise, you're always going to be fighting it. The hiring manager is going to win ultimately, you know. If it's a battle of will or if it's a battle of who's got the more influence and more power, whatever, it's going to be the hiring manager. You know, even if you're the head of TA, hiring manager, you're still going to carry a lot of weight. You know, there's, there's, there's things they can do. Right. So how do we combat that? We combat that with having the right information, the right tools.

Yes. And lucky for us, we're really good at research. So, you know, for example, I had, I had a manager at one point that during the intake, he said, I only want candidates that come from these schools. And I, my job pretty much dropped because, you know, for one thing, we're an OFCCP employer. So that alone is a compliance concern right there.

So right there, you can't do that.

Which honestly, you would be amazed at how many hiring managers are not knowledgeable on OFCCP. So being knowledgeable on that and being able to educate them is the first step, but then also saying, okay, you want people from all of these Ivy League schools. But you also are telling me that you're looking to build a more diverse team. Do you realize that by the general population and demographics of those that attend the Ivy League schools, you are excluding a whole lot of diverse candidates? And I don't think that they really—

here's the demographics. Let me show you, right? Population of graduates in each of the categories is such. And, and so how am I supposed to go here and get How am I supposed to get 10% of something that doesn't have 10% of it?

Right.

You know, exactly. So we can't just limit it to the schools. And I think it's— I want to say unconscious bias, but it's, it's more than unconscious bias because it's— they feel like that is helping them determine quality, not realizing that there's a bias. It's beyond unconscious bias. It's just completely being unaware that has. So for example, on LinkedIn, I've talked about this a couple of times in other environments. You probably remember I used to teach at Temple University and I had students that would, you know, I would, as part of the curriculum, I would help them improve their LinkedIn profile so they, when they graduated, they would have a better chance of getting a good job, right? A better job or whatever. Well, I was always recommending that people have a photo on their profile because research showed having a photo on your profile increases your ranking in search results. So when somebody searched for somebody with your skill set, you're more likely to come up first if you have a photo than someone else that has the exact same content as you but no photos. So the photo, you know, was, was one of the ways that you— is it an SEO trick, right, to improve your SEO for your profile? And I've been talking about that for years, but I had a student that challenged me, stood up and said, I took my photo down and I got more calls from recruiters. So literally the exact opposite of what I was professing, right? I'm saying put the photo on there so that you— and he's like, I took it down and I got more. Now his name was a very mainstream sounding Anglo-white name, but he's a Black candidate. Not only was he a Black candidate, but he also was at a really good school and had a military background. So, you know, a good military career, then went to school at a really good school, but was not getting any calls when he had a photo. Takes the photo down and all of a sudden, right? And so that woke me up to thinking about this. And I then started asking other people and I found out that People of Middle Eastern background, if they're female, they will not share their photo very much. Some do, but most don't because it's culturally unacceptable. People that are, uh, Asian, generally speaking, if they wear glasses, they're embarrassed by that because again, it's— so there's all these cultural biases that are, that are, that are native to that culture, right, that aren't even about us, that make people not include their photos. So now you have a system that will rank you higher if you have a photo. Think about it. Do the math.

LinkedIn has a built-in bias, right?

It's biased against diversity because diversity candidates, for various reasons, for their own cultural reasons, don't want to have a photo. Therefore, because you are required to have a photo in order to have higher search results, they're being left out or they're at the bottom of the, you know, if your policy is we will take a look at the top 50 results and they're 51, then they weren't included systemically by the system that, you know.

And we know that LinkedIn's got plenty of problems with diversity, justice, any of that. So that's really not surprising to me.

Yeah, but nobody talks about it, right? So it's the technology almost kind of like we would like to think we don't have any bias, but we go on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is doing the bias for us.

It's built right into the system, right into the system.

Yep. Yeah. So let me change tracks a little bit and talk about skills. If I understand correctly from the many conversations we've had in the past, you are very similar to me in that you're very much the, um, I'm gonna keep— there's gotta be a way. I'm gonna keep trying it until I figure it out. You'll spend hours doing something that should only take you 10 minutes because you want to figure out a way to do it so next time it only takes you 1 minute. And you experiment, so you're from the school of trial and error, right? But not everybody has that ability or mentality or panache or whatever you want to call it. So how do you keep your team's skills sharp, especially given the fact that, you know, they only have a handful of recs?

Yeah, so we have a Slack channel that's just for sourcing. And I always encourage people, you know, if you come across something cool, don't keep it to yourself, you know, share it with the rest of us so that we can go in there and play with that new tool as well. I also keep track of pretty much every webinar and virtual conference that comes across my desk. And, you know, I send reminders like, hey, this is coming up, if you have time, attend a few of these sessions. And, you know, obviously it can be difficult to take a whole day to attend a whole conference. But, you know, I can usually take—

3 of you can attend a third of the conference.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, I always take a look at who's on the speaker lineup. And, you know, if I think that there's a topic that I think they can benefit from, I'll be like, oh, I recommend that you try this. Or like, I know you've been looking for it. For these kind of people.

Now I know why you never show up to any of my chats, because you— I'm just kidding, you're always in all of them. So you send them off to, you know, kind of report back and summarize what did you find that was cool and share it. Can I get on your Slack channel?

Uh, unfortunately it's a proprietary Maxar channel.

I'm sure it is, but that's a really good idea though. Other teams should adopt some sort of, you know, Teams channel or whatever to encourage people to just openly share, like a water cooler. We have a water cooler channel that's, you know, it's a hub channel and it's like, just come in and post something fun, cool, interesting. It sounds like you've taken that to the specialty of sourcing and said anything that you discover, technique, tool, whatever, it doesn't matter if you think other people know it, just share it and we'll catalog it. Do you actually catalog stuff?

Oh yeah, we actually have a start page for our team with all of the tools that we found to be useful. And sometimes it's really helpful just to go to that page to get inspired.

Like a discovery page.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I go through the rabbit hole and I find all kinds of start me pages for sourcing, and I just, I just kind of get lost in it. And then I'm like, oh, I had no idea this existed. And that's where I found some of the best tools that I've ever used.

Me too, but you can definitely get lost in it. So there's a huge value in curating that content for your audience and saying, these are the things that I found worked really well, which is, you know, that's something that I, that I did for many years. Sometimes I discover it myself, sometimes I read about it and I, you know, rewrite it. A lot of times my ideas evolved from ideas somebody else had in a different channel, completely like unrelated to recruiting. You know, that's how I discovered LinkedIn. There was no recruiting on LinkedIn when I joined. I was, I think, number— I was among the first 500,000 people, which is not super early, but pretty early. And there was no— I had to beg them to like let me in. And, you know, there was no recruiting. And so, you know, you just kind of go to these other, other places. I don't know if you remember this. There was a social network called Six Degrees.

Oh, I'd never heard of that one.

Arguably, it's the first social network, online social— I mean, let me rephrase. It's the first online social network. Social networks have existed for a little bit longer than the internet, but it's the first online social network. And the concept was 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon. Like somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who knows Kevin Bacon, right?

Oh, yes.

I definitely heard of that. Yeah. It was that. And it didn't last very long. I think it lasted maybe a couple of years. It was the first— way too early to the market, right? People really weren't as comfortable being online as we are now. So, you know, I was already familiar with that concept from having been on Six Degrees. So when LinkedIn came out, I'm like, oh, it's like that. But, you know, so experimenting with those other, with those other things is a good use of your time. And I like that you're encouraging your team to do that because then you have more people experimenting with it and then you sort of curate it and share the best of the best, right? The greatest hits.

Yeah, and you know, and no matter how busy we are, I don't see anything wrong with occasionally getting lost in the sourcing rabbit hole. You know, that's sometimes where you learn the best things. And you know, you might lose a little bit of time during the day, but at the end of the day, you're, you're learning. And you know, I kind of feel like every so often you need that refresh where you remember why you get excited about sourcing. Because you can, you can easily lose that when everything's so busy and everything's important and everything is urgent. Um, but sometimes, you know what, it has to wait and you've got to remember why you do what you do.

Yeah, and I think that's a good, that's a good point going into the world of like experimentation to discover something and feel good that you— yeah, that you've tried something new and discovered something new. I like that. I never thought that that would be one of the reasons that would be motivated, but I just do it and it motivates me. So now you're connecting the dots for me. Yeah, pretty cool. I, I do have to say that while it can be pretty distracting, it's, it's also important to maintain a tenacity about it because if you start, you need to kind of see it through. It's very difficult to come back and pick up to an idea that you didn't quite finish. If you experiment with something. Like, I'm sure when you were first starting on Reddit, imagine if you had just abandoned it and came back, you almost have to kind of relearn it, right? And let me add this, I think you're an introvert like me, right?

It depends on the situation. I'm one of those weird combo people. I like to socialize every once in a while, but then I need to hibernate for a long time. You need your downtime.

Yeah, I definitely need my downtime. And so people always are like, oh no, Shelly, you give presentations. You can't be an introvert. Like, I don't like giving presentations. I don't like being on stage. I'm uncomfortable. But I tell you what, I do it for a very selfish reason. And it's not the reason a lot of people think. I don't do it for popularity or whatever. You know better than that. You know me. You know I definitely don't do it for that reason because I'm often the unpopular speaker because of what I have to say. But I'll tell you why, the real reason I do it. When I give a presentation, I learn that material more than I teach. So I force myself to make presentations as a learning tool. The other day I was working with an executive coach and they were giving me some tips on emotional intelligence, something that I completely lack. And I'm having a hard time absorbing it, right? So what did I do? I went and I did a PowerPoint on it. I created a PowerPoint. Maybe someday I'll share it with the world because I didn't do it for that. But I did it because I know that if I make a PowerPoint, I'll finally get it. And I did. So I literally taught myself a very small degree of emotional intelligence by creating a PowerPoint. And, you know, and then when I teach it again, I learn a little bit more. And every time I teach it, so it's like you're saying, you're, you're learning by discovering. And I feel like you're also learning by teaching.

It's, it's very true. And that's entirely why I developed methods for sourcing on Reddit. It was at my very first SourceCon that I went to a roundtable with Greg Hawks. And I thought, okay, if anybody knows how to source this platform, it's probably Greg. And to my surprise, he had never tried it. And I'm like, well, if Greg's never tried it, maybe this is a big opportunity for me to unlock a huge platform that nobody's really dove into that deep before. And so that's when I wrote a 3-part blog series about it. And as I was writing those 3 parts, I learned so much. And with every presentation that I do, I keep coming up with new content. It's pretty much endless because of that. Isn't that awesome?

So like every time you teach, people are like, oh, thank you for your knowledge. You're like, no, thank you, because I learned something. I'm the one that got the better end of the deal here. So it's getting close to time here. I think we're actually a couple of minutes over, but I'm enjoying this conversation so much. And I did want to give you a chance to— is there something you want to kind of get out there? What would be your closing remarks for our audience?

I still come across so many people that are very early in their sourcing career and they're always like, oh, I could never do what you do. I could never— you know, I could never write a blog, I could never do this, I could never do that. You absolutely can. And there's people in the industry that are willing and eager to help you. So that's one thing that I always try to get out to this community is that if, if you, you know, someday want to be on a stage, virtual or otherwise, people would be very eager to help you get there.

Okay. So basically what you're saying is people that are saying I can't do this are wrong.

Very wrong.

Cool. I like that. Well, I, for one, will raise my hand if you're out there and you feel like you can't do it. And I've done, you know, I've done this my entire career. If you know, you feel like you can't do it, reach out to me. If I can't, um, you know, figure it out, I'm sure I can put you in the right direction. It seems like Aaron might be a good person to reach out to if you have feelings of, "I don't think I can do this." But I would echo that. Really, I would. Sourcing is whatever you make of it. It's both art and science. So you can't say you can't do it— I know that's a double negative— until you tried it. And even then, because very frequently my most important discoveries came at the very frustrating end of 27 times not being able to do it, right? And then finally, one time it works, and that's like, oh, I can't believe that worked because that was like my last shot. I didn't expect it was going to work, but it worked. So if you feel like you can't do it, you haven't tried enough times, you know?

Yeah, keep troubleshooting.

Yep. Well, thank you so much for coming. I'd love to have you back at some point. I'm going to share some comments in, in the chat here. Especially your closing remarks. So, um, yeah, thanks, thanks a lot. Have a great weekend, everybody. Bye-bye.