Luke Doubler Live on Shally's Alley

The Ides of March are upon us, everybody. Happy Friday. March 1st, you're seeing this, which means it's Shelly's Alley, and it is the first Shelly's Alley of the month, month of March. Who is this shiny face that I have in front of me here? This is Luke Dubler, my buddy from many, many years back. I can't even remember, but we would go to conferences and— what was it, 2008?

Yeah, I saw you on the stage at SourceCon in New York City, and, uh, being young in my career, I saw you up there talking all this crazy sourcing things. And this was, you know, Twitter, uh, you had LinkedIn was in its infancy, uh, sourcing was just something to talk about, and you were up there saying all this stuff. I'm like, who in the heck is this guy? I want—

you're like, hey dude, hey, hey, you got some of that stuff you're smoking? Can I have some?

Oh, that was some good stuff you're smoking. Uh, college. And, uh, I'm like, what is this I just, I was just digging your groove, man. And you're talking about the sourcing stuff, and I've been hooked since then, and I've been following you since then. And, uh, I call you the OG of sourcing because that's truly who you are. You're the one that started talking about this from the very beginning.

Oh yeah, 1996, man. I was already doing it for a while. Crazy stuff. 2008, that was 2 years after, uh, so I, I started I started begging LinkedIn in 2005. Okay, I think they started in 2002. So this was maybe 3 years after they started. I started begging them, please, you guys have to open this platform up to recruiters. And I was, I was talking to one of the 2 co-founders, the one that doesn't talk much, Constantine, and Patrick, who was in charge of like, basically, all these are the OGs of LinkedIn, right? And I'm like, you guys got to get into this market. You got to— 2005, 2006. It wasn't until 2008 that they actually listened. Uh, Patrick had gone, but Constantine stayed, and he handed things over to another guy, and they actually created the recruiter product, the LinkedIn Recruiter product, based on, um, my original design in 2008. So that was that year. That's how early on it was.

Did you get some shares of that?

LinkedIn Recruiter was, was a baby. They paid me for a year of consulting.

Nice.

Yeah, it was a hired gig.

Worked out for them. Now Microsoft.

But, um, yeah, it worked out for that. I, I, you know, I never thought I was going to get this big. I, I thought it was going to be successful. But I also helped a little company called Jigsaw that became Data.com that was sold to Salesforce similarly, and a few other companies like that. And, you know, none of them became LinkedIn. But, um, I mean, so it's— there's more to it obviously than that. But that was 2008, man. That was super early on. And then, uh, you went off and you like, you quit corporate America after a while. You have, uh, RecruiterCentral.io, and it's a search firm, but you also train corporate recruiters. So you kind of, you kind of play on both sides of the fence a little bit there, huh?

Yeah. So, um, shout out to everybody listening today, uh, follow Shelly. The, the one thing that separates average recruiters from exceptional recruiters, and really any profession, is one's willingness to learn and constantly perfect your trade. And Shelly's been a big part of my life in doing that. I've been an avid follower, and I always learn from something from him. But, uh, worked at a company called Cargill for several years, one of the large agri-company giants. And then I worked at Target, Minneapolis-based Target, Tar-jay, the bullseye retailer. That's right. We developed in-house sourcing teams there. Went off on my own about 6 years ago, RecruiterCentral, RecruiterCentral.io. We are a search firm based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We search everything from executives, our bread and butter is engineers, but we certainly do everything from hard-to-fill niche roles to hourly roles. What makes us unique at RecruiterCentral is our sourcing strategies and how we inform our clients. And I'll be happy to show you what that looks like. But essentially we reverse engineer the recruiting process. We start the search with, here are our target companies, here's a list of people we're going to talk to. Uh, we basically show you the list first and then we kind of vet them out as we go.

So kind of like we do in corporate recruiting, or as a sourcer, I always talk about that, like, you know, vet your, vet your first few leads, all right, calibration or whatever. So, so you're talking about basically doing the sourcing gig externally, but then you're also going back in and you're telling the corporate recruiters how to do it How does that not compete with your business though?

So that is a big part of Recruiter Central. We, we're a search firm. And also throughout our existence, we've trained over 50 companies. And by we, I mean I. And by I training the companies, we've been in-house training corporate recruiting teams. Your teams that post the job and source. And so where I live is I like to call them the cutting edge of technology, learning the sourcing tactics, tricks, And so when I sit down and train these teams, they're 1 or 2-day training sessions. We're talking everything from basic Boolean and building search strings up to all the way to what AI is doing and how to find people. So it's all the tools and tactics a corporate recruiting team can use to find individuals and elevate their sourcing acumen. And so does it compete against what we do? I'd say it complements it in that I'm a Christian, I'm a Catholic, and I believe the true success in business is not only providing value but giving back as much as you possibly can. And so I used to blog a lot more, but—

So yeah, you're an abundance thinker. You know, there's enough for everybody. Okay, yeah, I get that now. We have that in common and we talked about that plenty. And so what you're thinking is the same thing I'm thinking. From the very beginning, I invented the sourcing cheat sheet.

And I've used many times, Shelly, right?

And it's like, hey, there's enough here for everybody. The internet is big enough for everybody. And recruiting— so, so you think that way, but, but then also at the same time though, you are also sharpening your skills, right? Because don't you think that, um, at least I do, that teaching is learning?

Former teacher, I taught high school for 2 years, um, and it's a cyclical thing. Um, you know what we're doing is, is fun and innovative, but it's not so complex that we're doing brain surgery. And so like, I know that it can be sometimes a tendency just to hold on to the little nuggets that you had, and that was my old mindset. And it wasn't until I truly experienced growth where I said, you know, and I experienced it in a number of ways, but I didn't really truly experience the growth until I let go of that, you know, hold it. You got to share. Yeah, you have to look at business and the business world as an opportunity, a community, a place to give back as much as you possibly can. I mean, really what we were learning in recruiting, even the most innovative things are little tidbits of data, and you know, you're going to get back way more if you give it out there versus just holding it to yourself.

Okay, so in In all your travels, you've encountered probably lots of different, different trends. And what's, so what's going on out there in, you know, in corporate? I'm sure you have an opinion around like what's trending, what keeps people up at night, what do you know, where are the worries? What does hiring look like?

Yeah. And so just to quantify that, I was most recently at SourceCon held in Minneapolis this fall. We had a couple of recruiting conferences here locally. I've been to a few larger recruiting conferences. So combine what they're saying at the recruiting conferences with a couple dozen in-house recruiting functions over the past 2 years. And I've been doing this training recruiting gig for since 2017. and I've been speaking before then a lot, a lot at SourceCon and various other conferences. And there's a big angst right now in corporate America. Certainly there's a lot of new innovations coming out, technology. When you say AI in front of a corporate recruiting team, it's like, oh my God, am I going to lose my job? How is that going to impact me? What does that mean from recruiting? Is the person obsolete? You can go to any recruiting conference and that's probably going to be the topic, if not one of the topics. And if you go to really any conference in general, any professional conference, AI is all the buzz. What does it mean? How is it going to impact things? So and so. And so, um, yeah, that, that's certainly discussed, you know. Uh, in my most recent trainings in corporate America, we're actually using AI. Well, how we're using AI is we're using it to SEO our LinkedIn profiles. We're using AI to make our face shots look great on our LinkedIn picture. We're using descriptions better, make job descriptions better. Um, I Yeah. And so we're doing a lot of the tactical things. And right now the theme is everybody's like, oh, you know, it's scary and it is scary. Like, am I going to lose my job? Okay. The consensus is certainly not.

So that—

so the worries are I'm going to lose my job big time in corporate America. I mean, if this machine comes out that can write a job description and it can speak and it can, it can make Boolean search strings and ChatGPT can make kick-ass search—

can't do any of that, by the way. But I will tell you this, there is a, not just in recruiting, there's an overall sentiment that people are afraid to, the fear and the uncertainty is that these automated systems will make decisions about their jobs. So it's not necessarily, I'm gonna lose my job. That's one of them, but there's also, it's gonna impact my job in other ways. So it's the fear of machines operating in a black box environment. And let me tell you, that's a legitimate fear because if you just take a job description that's lame and boring and you put it into one of these AIs and just say improve it, you have no idea what it's actually doing. And when it comes back, it's unrecognizable. It might look better, but you have no idea that you just inserted a whole nother level of bias that you didn't even know about. The bias that comes from the black box. So that fear is legitimate, and we need to, we need to address that. It's not the fear of everyone's going to lose their job, it's the fear of everyone's job is going to be impacted.

Yeah, I agree. But so I want to get into how we use AI to make search strings, and it's not going to be your typical search string. We use it certainly, you know, give me— maybe we'll readdress this, but like, give me 10 different job titles for this particular job or to develop keywords. It's not spitting out the full—

give me a list of companies, give me a list of companies.

Yeah, absolutely. And we can talk about that. And so it's using it as a tool, uh, to make better, um, search strings, certainly, but it's not spitting out the exact search strings. So I certainly agree with you, right? However, there is one thing I want to say. So if you talk about how people access that How people access that is still— people are largely accessing it through Google. Google is still the number one search engine by far. Certainly United States, 85-90% of people still use Google. And Sergey Brin and other leaders of Google have said that they favor AI-based content. For example—

wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hold on. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna debunk that for just a second.

Let's debunk it, baby.

80 to 95% of people who use search engines use Google, but not 80 to 95% of people use search engines. The number of people who use search engines is going down.

So again, thank you for clarifying that semantic. I'm getting ahead of myself.

It's not a semantic, it's the reality is that these search engine companies want you to think that there isn't abundance. They're not like you and I, they don't think about abundance. They want to capture all the eyeballs and they want people to go back to Google when the reality is Facebook took a lot of that market share away because people were going to Facebook and asking other people instead of asking the search engine. And now we're doing that with, um, you know, robots. And there's actually a problem with that too, because when you go and you ask ChatGPT, for example, to give me a list of companies, it'll give you a list of companies according to ChatGPT. Yeah, you're also leaving a lot on the table. At least with the search engines, you knew that you weren't finding the end of the internet. But now with ChatGPT, people think that they're getting the entire list.

Mm-hmm. Well, so let me continue on with my point.

Yeah.

And so when you use AI to create blog posts or job descriptions, as AI improves, it is going to take into consideration all the Google rules. And there's like 250, 300 things that as soon as you hit search, Google looks at. It looks at everything from character and font size. It looks at number of words. It looks at in-links, out-links. It looks at tags.

It also looks at the value of your eyeballs because remember, it's trying to sell you research.

Right. So it's amazing what it looks like. But as AI gets better and understands those rules, that content is going to probably be favored over human content. Now there's that argument about what that will lead like, but for example, on our, my wife and I blog, it's mainly her blog, Real Food RN, we always use AI to at least make the, um, the outline of what we're going to do. We used to have 4, 5, 6 ghostwriters, and that's reduced, uh, to 1 or 2. The copy industry has certainly been impacted by AI. I don't think that's going to be a debate to have there. And so, uh, as it gets better, uh, and search engines like Google favor AI-based content, and then as it filters into like AI-based job descriptions, uh, that's going to help SEO them versus, say, something that's person-created because it takes into account the rules that, uh, it's abiding by to be on that platform. What are your thoughts on that one?

No, I agree with that. I mean, the rules are changing, right? The rules are definitely changing constantly. I have— so my friend Kat Kibben gave me this kind of analogy She said that when you're— for generating content, right? When you're looking at these tools, any of them, and right now my favorite one for right now for generating content, specifically content, is Claude because it has the best grasp of summarization and ideation and creativity. Some of the other ones like Copilot, for example, has a good— you can set it, you can say be creative or be specific. But Copilot is excellent at crediting and attributing sources. Claude does not do that. However, if you have a piece of text that you wrote and you go to Claude, it's really good at manipulating it. So what Kat was saying is think of it as the beginning or the end. You can go to these tools and say, give me some ideas for what to write about and create the outline, and then you write it. Or you can go to them with something you wrote that's a lot of thoughts and messy and say clean this up. But what you cannot do is go from beginning to end. That doesn't work. It doesn't create the outline. And so you can say help me brainstorm, help me create, you know, and then come up with a bullet list. Or you can have a bullet list of write an article that covers these points and then it's good at filling in the blanks. But start to finish, that, that's going to be a while. And here's the problem that I have with that. If we stop producing content as humans, then these machines will stop evolving because they are based on our content. And just like Google search, same rules that Google won't be anything to find, right? Exactly. If there's no more web pages, there's nothing to search for. Yeah, exactly. That's right.

And so it's the whole conundrum that's going on with that. And so I think your average corporate recruiter is curious about what's going on there, a little bit concerned with, am I keeping up with all the tools and trends? They're certainly interested in innovating and trying to always be better and learn. And I think there's room for that. I think the fact is—

what does hiring look like today? I mean, you know, you're in the trenches. What does it look like today?

Well, I am going to just quantify what's today versus 2018, 2019.

Okay. So today versus— right. So in the last 2 years.

Yeah. So our recruiting cycles have doubled in hourly and skilled labor roles. Certainly we were getting 30 days to fill. We'll say, you know, skilled electrician, electrical engineer, maybe skilled assembly worker, compensations in the range of $50,000 to $150,000, cost of living area, upper Midwest, Minneapolis area. You know, we were doing that in 30 days, 2018, 2019, no sweat. Now, I would be thrilled if I could consistently do that in 30 days. Um, it's realistically taking double that, if not— well, we're doing it.

You're saying only that segment, so is it different in other segments?

So that's been the problem child in recruiting for us, is skilled labor. And a lot of my colleagues are saying the same thing. Now, one thing is a lot of these skilled laborers aren't— skilled laborers aren't participating in all the really cool tools that are out there. So They're not in the same pond that all of us other recruiters are fishing in. So they're not on LinkedIn and not participating in social media necessarily, or at the rate of other professionals are. And so all of our cool technology and abilities doesn't apply to them because they're not on it. And so a lot of the old-fashioned recruiting tactics apply. Furthermore, national trends certainly show that there's a massive shortage going to be in skilled labor. The trades, anybody who can work with their hands and build something. And the national trends are showing that's going to be a significant issue. I think it may be getting a little bit better, but there's going to be a massive labor shortage in the trades, as there is right now. You ask anybody who has a trade business, you're going to say one of their number one roadblocks to true growth is hiring. I think That's a pretty safe statement to say. Certainly it's been the case with my clients.

Interesting. So one of the biggest roadblocks is hiring, yet everybody's afraid of losing their job in recruiting. And recruiting is getting harder. But it's— this is a, this is a conundrum. I'm starting to get like my wires crossed here.

It is a conundrum. What's working? What we're seeing—

Getting harder. It's getting slower. It's getting harder, but I'm afraid of losing my job.

Yup. And so like the trade people, um, individuals, I don't think that there's really much of a concern there with losing your job. I mean, if you're wiring a house or if you're a skilled assembler reading CAD, putting together something, um, the candidates know that they can get a job about anywhere. So I'm going to delineate that group from, um, several other groups. And so, um, Ever since the Signature Bank collapse, which was funding a lot of private equity in this country, it sent shockwaves through our economy. If you're not familiar—

Tell me more about that. Yeah, no, I know about the VC, this VC bank basically, but what is that? I think a lot of folks were aware of it happening, but the media, so to speak, did a good job of saying it's not a big deal. So you're telling me that it's a lot. Tell me what that means.

So Signature Bank was a San Francisco-based bank, and it was kind of a— I don't want to offend anybody— it was kind of the who's who of VCs. If you've arrived in the VC place, you bank there. And furthermore, a lot of money flowed from there as seed money, ABC seed money, into various endeavors. And, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020, VCs were getting funding sometimes with just a PowerPoint, an awesome PowerPoint. When interest rates were so low, 2-3%, it was very easy to secure capital.

Uh, that's— I, I didn't, I didn't put those two together. So that sounds a lot like the mortgage industry collapse.

Well, that's where we're going with it, in my opinion.

And so we're certainly seeing it collapsing though, because in the mortgage industry, what collapsed were the mortgage lenders, especially the ones that were covering those dangerous areas that are now regulated. So in this case, it wasn't just Signature Bank. Is there more than one bank involved, and who's the one that's collapsing?

So the major driver was that they increased the interest rate and made money more difficult to obtain. Slowdown of economy. The economy, certainly you're hearing reports, but I'm a little bit more pessimistic than the reports are saying. And I want to talk about that next, about how companies are going through more steps to certainly get buy-in, and companies are a little bit more tight around spending. But getting back to the whole Signature Bank thing, when that collapsed, billions of dollars just went poof. And you combine that— lost, like they're gone, gone, absolutely gone. Tens of billions of dollars are absolutely gone overnight. You can just Google Signature Bank and, and how much liquidity was lost when the bank collapsed. Um, but it was gone, and that sent shockwaves. And so you combine—

so companies that said, hey, don't worry, we used to bank with Signature Bank, but it's okay, our money is safe, they were lying.

Well, the people— you don't want to blame the people who had their money there.

I mean, they thought it was sound, but no, no, no, the people Okay, right, back it up.

When the bank—

the people who did the banking said, don't worry, everything's fine. Maybe they weren't lying on purpose, but they— but it wasn't fine.

No, when the bank collapses, uh, if you know, banking is, is kind of a classic Ponzi scheme. If you give $100 to a bank, they're going to loan $10 back out to— they're going to keep $10 and then 90% of it goes back out. That's the FDIC rules. And banks don't really have the cash. Um, and when everybody calls in their money, this has happened.

And that's what happened.

Yeah, um, you know, this is the savings and loans and then mortgage.

And so this is another one of these, another bank collapse that we this time didn't know much about. But you're telling me that the impact is all companies are scrapping their spending. So that, that's a major, that's a major, you know, when, when savings and loan collapsed, it affected a big part of the, the economy, but it was contained to a segment. When the mortgage industry collapsed, it affected a lot, but then it was also, you know, so what you're saying is this, this, this collapse of this one bank has had impact way beyond just startups. It's going into large corporations.

So startups are going to be your true innovation of our economy. Your startups are your individuals, your mom and pops in their shops making a widget. Private equity funding is the spur of our, of our economy.

I mean, you're saying that's stopping, that's why there's no innovation now?

Yeah. And so the innovation isn't as organic as it certainly was because in order to obtain this funding, it's a lot more difficult. People are scared. Interest rates are certainly higher. It's a lot more expensive. To borrow money and the risk tolerance isn't there the way it was in 2018, 2019 is what I'm saying. And when that's there, everything slows way down. Thus, companies aren't willing to make that risky hire, are less willing to hire a recruiting agency like mine, are a little bit more constrictive on maybe hiring that second or third engineer. It can slow things down is what I'm saying.

Wow, it's like, uh, it's like everybody all of a sudden hit the mud, mud pit, and yeah, like stuck in the mud, or— yeah, I gotcha. Okay, yeah, so, so that's what you're seeing is the, uh, is the impact and the slowdown. And that actually speaks to some of the weird things that I'm finding, which are hiring managers dragging their feet for, you know, so you've got the right candidate, they've interviewed them, uh, multiple times, and they're just, they're just not coming coming back with an offer. So that's just one indicator. I'm also seeing companies post and repost the same jobs over and over again, seemingly unfilled. Um, so again, another, you know, indication of, of that. So there's all these little telltale signs of what you're talking about. Um, but what about the future? I mean, we don't have a crystal ball, right? So how do we get— we're stuck in the mud, or we're slowed down by the mud. How do we get out of the mud? There's a way out of the mud. Right? Or are we just gonna sink into it forever into oblivion?

What I'm seeing right now that companies are still hiring, and I'm going to maybe bland it out a little bit, but mid-level doers are still kind of the need that I'm seeing, certainly for manufacturing clients across the board, individuals that can come in and directly impact the bottom line through cost savings, through innovation.

I gotcha.

And these— the need still is the true STEM individuals.

So innovation and creativity still rules the roost?

Oh, 100%. Yeah, you can go—

it always has, but, but now it's very clear. Okay.

Yep. And so like, let's use the Facebook case study. They, uh, Twitter rather. Twitter laid off 80% of its employment workforce, and some will argue that it's worked better. Um, if you do a case study on the individuals that were laid off through Twitter I'm sure there was certainly some engineers, but I think that's something we're going to be talking about for quite some time is how can an organization truly lay off 80% and not only work, but, you know, arguably work better.

It might be working better, but I'm not on Twitter anymore. And I know a lot of people, other people that aren't.

So that's a bigger conversation to have, certainly. But there's that conversation to have and X or whatever the hell it's called. Yeah, yeah. And so, um, I know I'm kind of getting out there with what I'm seeing, but, uh, everybody's dragging their feet. So for example, what I mean by dragging my feet, uh, so let's say I come to a company and want to get an SLA signed. Generally speaking, my days to do that as an agency owner were about a week for a mid-sized company. What I call mid-size is about 1,000 to maybe 5,000.

And now it's taking months.

Oh, Forget about larger companies.

Yeah, I saw that.

It's a lot longer, the sales cycle, and keep it, I mean, what we do, you can call it a sales cycle.

I mean, there's different nuances to it, but yeah, but from pitching your solution to actually executing solution, you know, didn't used to be this. It's just taking a lot longer. There's a lot more hurdles. There's a lot more waiting around. There's a lot more people saying, I'm following up and not getting anywhere.

Yeah, and it only takes one to cancel the whole deal. And so, you know, our bread and butter clients are still smaller to mid-sized manufacturers that need those mid-level doors, if I can quantify what our client base looks like. And there's definitely still, still making products which are needed by individuals, but certainly longer sales cycles on getting the SLA signed, certainly getting offers. Are the owners concerned about this vendor, that spend? Those are, I mean, that's not the same everywhere, but I'm certainly, if there's certain themes, those are definite themes that I'm seeing across the industry. It's more profound in certain industries, but people are closer or holding on to the cash than they have been in 2020.

Right, 'cause they can't, you can't gamble with other people's money anymore.

No, it's more expensive. Money's more expensive now. Couple that with inflation, you couple that with the high interest rates, uh, uncertainty about AI taking your job. And yeah, errors are more expensive now than they were.

It's, it's more expensive to make a mistake, but yet the reward is still there.

The reward is certainly there. Yeah, absolutely. People still— our economy wants to go. It definitely wants to go. You can feel it going everywhere.

It just doesn't know where to go.

It doesn't know, and it's clear. There's, there's a comp, like you go to these every— I was at the, I was at SourceCon, everybody was there and happy, but like there was kind of like a deer in the headlights type feel if you ask me, if I want to be honest, like what's going on? What new tools are out there? And our presenters, like I love them and they did well, but I mean, think 2016, 2017, 2018, you go to a national conference and all the breakout sessions, it was a— there were some pretty heavy, good breakout sessions in every conference that were full of good content. The amount of quality new stuff to talk about, there's a deficit in my humble opinion. Our presenters are still doing well, but we're all grasping at— and there's a lot of tools out there, but a lot of them do the same thing if you really want to boil it down.

It's just— that's always been that way, dude. I'm telling you, it's always been a lot of the same stuff. There's always been people grasping at trying to innovate, especially in our industry. And I can tell you with absolute certainty, having been in this thing since— well, I don't even want to admit how long— that it's, it's been like that. The amount of true innovation in this space is dismal. Um, when you get something that is truly groundbreaking, 50 companies will copy it, and it becomes about— it really becomes about who can dial the most numbers and get to the buyers quicker, and that company, you know, inches ahead for a little bit. But what I think is not happening now that was happening before is that they would get acquired. These companies are not all getting acquired now because of all the other things that we were talking about. But the innovation is not there. The risk is not there. They're not, for example, I'll give you a, we've never talked about this before, so I'll just, I'll try to make it quick for you. But 4 or 5 years ago, 3 or 4 years ago, man, 4 years ago, I had this idea for something I've been evolving for many years, but finally got to the point where I'm going to do this, I'm going to build it. And I went out to try to find a company that would help me build this, which was an app that would essentially synthesize or coordinate all of the different channels of communication. Okay. Now, this existed in other platforms. For example, and the company that I found that was going to help me build this had a solution for telephony. So they had a product that they had sold to a company, a phone company that handled customer service. And I know that's inbound and what we do is outbound and most of it, right? Most of recruiting is outbound, although there are some inbound, but the inbound is not what the problems are, where the problems are, right? So I thought, all right, this platform is listening to Twitter, X, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp. You can communicate with the support staff in any one of 1,000 different ways, email, text, and they're all centralized and integrated. That was a big deal because before that, there was only the 1-800 number, right? That was it. So then they had the 1-800 number on the website and they weren't even connected. Now you have the website, the chat, the text, the Slack, the, you know, so this company had solved that and integrated all of it. And I figured, all right, let's take this and turn it upside down or inside out and say that we're gonna use this for outbound. It was a great idea, right? But nobody had ever tried to do that before. And you know why I was told that nobody ever tried to do that, or the people that had the ability to do it were not going to do it? Guess what the reason was?

Oh, too risky.

Nope. The vendors don't play nice. And the biggest one that I got quoted was LinkedIn. So for example, imagine a platform where you're sitting at your desk as a recruiter and you're able to send a message to Luke Dubler as Luke Dubler, not as his email address, his phone number, his Instagram, his— right? So if I want to get in touch with you and you don't use your email much and I email you, that doesn't happen. If I text you and you don't use your phone much, that doesn't happen. If I sent you a message on LinkedIn but you don't log into LinkedIn— you were talking about this just a minute ago, remember, when you were explaining about the, uh, frontline and skilled labor people— they're not on LinkedIn, right? So if I want to get in touch with them, what do I use? And that was the problem. The problem was that I was trying to recruit at this time commercial drivers, people with CDL licenses. Not only was this challenging because it's very difficult to recruit CDL drivers, it's also in Canada nationwide, and that is a very big country with lots of roads that are really long. And let's just face it, these people are not on a computer all day.

I hope not, they're driving.

And if they do stop somewhere, they're not stopping to go online, they're stopping to eat, shower, rest, and you know, and get back to work, right? You can say the same thing about pilots. You can say the same thing about x-ray technicians. There's a lot of jobs where people are not going to be next to their computer. Hell, not even next to their phone, right? The CDLs can't be next to their phone either. I mean, the phone might be there, but they can't— they can't text, okay? So this platform was going to help me do that. But everybody that talked to me said, we can't do this because we're afraid of LinkedIn. We can't violate LinkedIn's terms. So LinkedIn is the walled garden that didn't allow anybody to message through them. The same thing was happening with Facebook. So all these platforms are so protective of their users that they are essentially disavowing anybody that tries to connect them together. That was the problem.

And from their perspective, there's a business case behind that, certainly. And, um, not for me. Not for you, but for the companies.

Not for the user either.

Not for the user, but for the companies, the owners.

Like, here's a simple example, Luke. How many messages do you get on LinkedIn in a day? A typical day?

Yeah, I would say, just respond, I mean, I get solicited about 10 times a day for products or services or for roles.

Okay, so I easily get 7 or 800 emails a day and well over a dozen LinkedIn messages on one of my LinkedIn accounts a day.

You're a big deal though.

I cannot process my LinkedIn messages in any other platform other than LinkedIn, but my email, I can, I can process my email with Outlook or with a phone application or whatever. However, there's nowhere that I can log into my LinkedIn account and mass delete a bunch of spam messages or interact. I have to go on LinkedIn and use their antiquated web interface. Hello, Web 2.0, right? 1990 is calling and they want their interface back. I have to look at one message at a time, click on it, and God forbid I want to archive 3 of them. I've got to click on each one of them and the dotted line and archive it, go to the next one and archive it. I might as well be doing this with papers on my desk. That's how antiquated it is. They won't innovate because they don't have to. And that's what's prohibiting innovation of all these other things, because essentially all you want to do— you don't want to violate LinkedIn, you just want to be able to communicate with LinkedIn. Why isn't there this ability to do that? And it's not just— it's not just LinkedIn. I mean, it's all these applications. They, they have their own what did you call it, business case?

Yeah, they're, they're for-profit companies, obviously.

And of course they're for profit, so are you. But you and I just talked about abundance and how you're teaching, um, for-profit, teaching corporate recruiters how to do their job, which arguably could say— you could say that's against your own, you know, interests because you also do the job for them. So, you know, how does that not work? Well, it works for you, it would work the other way as well. If you allow people to integrate with your system, it doesn't eliminate your system.

Yes, don't get me wrong.

Greenhouse, for an example, Greenhouse has APIs that are so easy to use that everybody integrates with them. How is that killing Greenhouse? It hasn't so far.

I think, uh, you have a good business model. Take it to the market, make it— innovation is the necessity, is the motherhood of, uh, of innovation or something like that.

Right? Right. Laziness, I think it is the mother of laziness is the mother of invention, at least in my case anyway.

So you're absolutely right. And it's going to continue that way as long as there's a profit motive for them, and it will be. Do I, do I spend tens of thousands of dollars out of my own pocket on LinkedIn? I think what do I spend? 67? I spend about 75 grand alone on LinkedIn Recruiter.

But the reality is you don't need to, and you'll need to less and less. And that's, that's what the business case is. So besides the— so we got off track because this was about innovation, right? Um, there hasn't been a lot of innovation because I think this, the system itself, it doesn't allow that innovation. Because once they get to be a big player— I mean, this happened with Monster, this happened with CareerBuilder— once you get to be a big player you want to continue doing the thing that you're doing because changing is difficult, right? It's hard to steer the ship, but yet it happens. I mean, Indeed, for a while there, got pretty stagnant, and then they changed a bunch of things. People complained, but it started working again because they changed. Why did they change? Because they were getting their lunch eaten, so they had to, right? So eventually there will come a time when somebody eats LinkedIn's lunch. Not that this is about LinkedIn, this is about the innovation question that you were asking. About, right? So besides, besides, you know, you've talked about some really big ideas here— the trends, the worries, the lack of innovation, combined with the sort of collapse— maybe I don't want to use scare taxes, but, but the imp— you said implosion, I think is a better word— the implosion of the Signature Bank and, and the effect on interest rates. You know, these are all some pretty big ideas and big things that are, that are all converging. And my question, bringing us back to what I originally asked, is how do we get out of this, right? Where, where is the solve? Where do you think the solve is to move forward and, and get out of this stuck-in-the-mud situation?

And that's a big question. And so, um, my answer to that as a recruiter is the nature of our job adds ebbs and flows. There's wild times as recruiters and there's barren times.

It always has.

That's the nature of our role. And it's certainly the case with agency recruiters. Things are a little bit slow right now for us. I've had to lay off a couple of recruiters for the reasons I discussed. It's painful to have to do that. It's awful. I got to say these things to people I've managed or to my colleagues out there. In recruiting. And the one thing that I would say as a constant is you have to make yourself valuable, make yourself useful. Arnold Schwarzenegger just released a book called Be Useful. And to be useful means that you have to look at learning as your job. You have to wake up every day and decide, am I going to recommit myself to my profession? And what does that look like? That doesn't mean, you know, just filling jobs. That doesn't mean just doing the same thing. You have to be valuable as a parent, certainly add value, right?

So how do you add value as a father of 5?

You have to constantly learn. And so that part isn't, you know, it's not that hard. You just have to dedicate yourself to it. You have to listen, you have to follow the people. You are certainly helping their community by doing that, by having these discussions. And so recruiting, how I do it is I diversify my portfolio. So do I put all my bigs in the— my eggs in the one recruiting basket? Certainly not. I've invested in real estate. We have several blogs and other businesses. And so if you can, as a recruiter, diversify yourself in the agency world, knowing that there's going to be boom times and there's going to be bust times. How high they ebb and flow, that'll change, but you have to diversify yourself. Certainly always learn, always be sharing what you're, you're, you're picking up and sharing. From a business perspective, the only thing constant about our economy is that there's change. And the economic certainty is that things will go up and things will go down. If you look at the history of the United States, it follows an up and down curve line. We're at this point right now where it's been up and up and up for an unprecedented amount of time. It's gonna have to pull back eventually. We're doing quantitative easing from financial fiscal policy. We're jacking up the supply of money that's out there. I We can't keep the rate going up that it is going up for at the rate it is. It's eventually going to have to dip at some point. That's an economic certainty. And so what I could say is that, you know, learn all you can, be prepared with knowledge, and dedicate yourself to learning as much as you possibly can will be how I'm going to answer that.

Okay. And can we use the— I forgot. Nope, I have to go there. You know I had to go there. But yes, you can. So that's a good answer. I think that's a good answer. I think it gives folks a lot to process, a lot to think about. Innovation is hard. Innovation is hard because it's, first of all, it requires a couple of skills that—

Scary at the same time.

It's scary, right? It's scary and there's some risk.

You could look like a total fool.

You can, yep, you can innovate something that, and they're all gonna laugh at you. They're all gonna laugh at you, right? So there's that. But here's the thing, it also requires some skills that we forgot to teach, and we are teaching less and less. You and I are teaching it to our kids, but I don't think our schools are teaching it to our kids, and I don't think our corporations—

let me go on on that, man.

I don't think our corporations are doing it either. And that skill is critical thinking.

Less than half of Minnesota kids are reading or doing math at grade level, more like 40%.

That's a basic skill, which is scary as hell, but I'm talking about Even the ability to just think about something for a few minutes and not just respond to all the input, right?

Terrifying.

Yeah, trust but verify, that's a part of it as well.

Like, you have to know the basic things like reading and critical thought to form more abstract, innovative type things, and our schools are failing to do that at an unprecedented level.

And then those people go to jobs and then they just respond to the input. They say yes to everything. They don't question. Then so along with— so I'm going to piggyback on your answer, which is be curious, continue to innovate, continue to rest, but also take a break, stop, and, and, and ask why. You know, just get into the reasoning behind that, because without that we lose the ability to think critically about what's going on around us and we just start taking for granted the opinion of others. As much of an expert as I am, when I speak, even though I may speak like I'm speaking in fact and I do have a lot of knowledge, it's still an opinion. That's one of the biggest problems that I have with these automated large language models that people are using. They don't think that those are opinions. They are. Just like when you listen to me talk, this is my opinion and my opinions are my own. But if you go to ChatGPT and ask it a question, it's ChatGPT's opinion and its opinions are its own. There are of course opinions that are gathered from everybody else, but still it's an opinion. And folks, just because I said it doesn't mean it's the gospel. It may be based on my experience and it may be true, probably could be if it's about sourcing But again, verify it, like you said, right? Don't just take it for granted, even when it comes from ChatGPT.

All sorts of things. And I know that in corporate America, it can be— certainly in corporate America, all corporate America, there's some political aspect involved. There's politics involved with getting promotion. And, you know, thinking outside the box can often be very difficult, and that term is way overused. But certainly, if you're turning these things off sometimes and thinking for yourself can be certainly terrifying. But what I would say is that when it comes to education, there's a lot of mentors out there, there's a lot of leaders out there. The leaders that I follow are always ones that have built something amazing. Like, don't tell me— like, I don't care if you have a PhD in whatever, or a JD, or a MBA. Maybe you have an 8th grade education, but you built a multinational company. I'm listening to what you have to say. I'm going to read your book. I'm going to go to your conference. Okay, show me first. And those are the people that I'm going to follow. So like, maybe rethink your mentors. Is your mentor where you want to be? Is your mentor getting you to that place? Is your mentor have the value, net value that you're looking for? Maybe you have the wrong mentor. A lot of times mentors can be very unorthodox. One of my biggest mentors didn't, didn't make it through 8th grade but is worth almost a billion dollars that lives in the storage space. How did they do it? Like, I don't— this is my personal opinion, of course— I don't care about your education. Show me what you built. Show me what kind of a person you are. Show me what family you raised. Show me what church you go to. Those are the things that I look at mentors personally, and has done me well in my life.

So one of our listeners on YouTube here, listeners, viewers, and a previous multi, multi-time offender here on the show, Bob Beck told us, saying Be Useful is a great book. I don't know who wrote it, but check it out.

Isn't that Arnold? Isn't that Arnold?

He just posted that, so maybe he can tell us.

I think that's Arnold Schwarzenegger's book that he just came out—

and you look, let's not be used— let's be useful.

It's something like that. I wish I could do it, but look what Arnold's built. He— I don't think he even graduated college. College, and he was a kid from Austria that came to the United States with a dream. And, you know, he wasn't— he broke some eggs and probably offended some people, but you could certainly say that he was an innovator. Goodness sakes, he was the governor of California. He's made some of the biggest blockbuster movies, and the guy has one of the— you can hardly speak English when he was doing it. And so you have to refocus yourself every day to what that goal is. And so sometimes mentors maybe aren't going to be your typical corporate role. Get, get an edgy mentor, someone that's built something amazing to make.

All right. Yeah. So here on Shelley's Alley, we're going to pump you up.

I wish Saturday Night Live still had those good skits.

Hans and Franz. Pump you up.

Oh man, I grew up with that stuff. That was funny. Yeah, SNL, man, it was great, but it's kind of gone Well, comedy, comedy is so afraid to take chances now. And oh, that's probably what it is.

Yeah, I just stopped watching. I honestly don't know why.

Just, it's not funny anymore.

Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah.

Oh, and so, um, yeah, so like people, that's the one thing that I found when I went out of my own is that some people get offended when you do something or try things. And you can't worry about what everybody's saying about you. You have to know that what you're trying your best and that some people will try to pull you back unintentionally even. It's called Rich Dad Poor Dad. It's a great book by— I forget the gentleman who wrote it, but it talks about the wealth mindset and not worry about people who are saying negative things because there's always going to be that. You're going to make mistakes innovating, but at the end of the day—

Penalty of leadership.

That certainly is, yeah.

Yeah. You mentioned a little bit about messages being amplified and messages being suppressed, and I know we don't have a whole lot of time left, but can you give us a 30-second take on, you know, as educational as you can, what are the messages that are being amplified and what are the ones that are being suppressed? And, you know, by the— whatever you want to call it— general media, the general industry, government, the apparatus, right? Which ones are amplified and which ones are suppressed?

So what, piggybacking off what you said, when you see things on social media, it's an opinion. And that social media platform, mostly, mostly, mostly, and that social media platform is owned by a company or corporation. Their main goal is likely monetary, but they also probably have an agenda in mind, whether whether it be to have you use the platform more, have you be engaged more. And so we call it— it's called the world of disinformation. But you need to be aware that the world that you're pitched to on social media, certainly on Facebook, on Google, is not always the case. It's pitched up. It's made to reflect what you're interested in. It may not be truth. Certainly during—

Right, right, right, right. They're listening to you and talking to you the way you want to be talked to. Yeah, so what you're saying is that all these platforms have an owner.

They have it, maybe not the same owner, but they have some—

there's a few owners, right? And they're the ones that are controlling the message. So they're— I think I can understand what you're saying. They're suppressing what they don't want you to hear, and they're promoting what they do want you to hear. And there really isn't a whole lot of, uh, uh, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out and say there's not a whole lot of freedom of speech, because you can say whatever you want, but they're not going to publish it because they own the platform.

Yeah, and it's what is delineating— it's, it's put— it's, it's making extreme societies. We had the left and the right now, and even if you talk to an extreme person that you perceive as an extreme, you're gonna see that we're not that different if you actually talk to that person. Left or right, we're kind of pitched at each other with these platforms. There's really not a lot of moderates anymore like there used to be. Even if you just sit down, put the computers away, and talk to someone on the a complete different paradigm, you're gonna see that you still agree on 95% of the things. We're still America. This is still the greatest country on earth, in my humble opinion.

But also, what you're also saying— I mean, you're not saying, but you— which, behind what you're talking about is the fact that there's really no public access anymore because— here, Bob's piping up again— because these platforms are for-profit and they get to, they get to do whatever they want because it's They're private for-profit platforms. We don't really have the democratized broadcast anymore. Like, you know, people have canceled cable and they hardly ever have TV antennas anymore. So everything that you're consuming is owned by some kind of private platform is what you're saying. There's no public Twitter. Well, actually there is. It's called Mastodon, I think it is.

No one uses it.

Decentralized What's that?

No one uses it.

Well, yeah, but my point is there isn't one that's widely distributed. There's one that exists, but no one uses it. So the ones that are being used, you know, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, they're owned by private companies. That's what you're saying. And they have an agenda. They just are, they're just not required to tell you what it is, which also brings me to the point that when you see influencers, whatever it is that they're repping, Again, that's also their opinion, but consider whether or not that opinion is for sale, right? Like in my case, my opinion is now available for sale and you can purchase it at Shelley's Alley. I do want to thank our sponsors. We recently signed up with Gem to be a sponsor. You'll be seeing their logo coming up. They're not going to influence our content, but they're partnering to help me get the, uh, Shelley's Alley podcast out and distributed because right now, like you said, I am very much limited to the platforms that are owned by, you know, these companies. And so with a sponsor, I'll be able to actually get it out to more platforms and hopefully increase my reach. So thank you very much for Gem to, um, for being our sponsor and signing up. I always want to end the show with two questions if you've listened before. The first one of those is, Luke, you've given us a lot to think about. But you've also told us about a lot of things that, that are opening our eyes. Now I want you to give us something to think about that we're going to go away and think about. So something thought-provoking, right? What do you want people to chew on over the weekend and, and ideate for themselves?

Bob, thanks for putting that book in there. It's called Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I think you pronounce his last name. I read this book about 10 years ago and it changed my life. The mindset of a rich person, and it doesn't matter how you define rich person, follows a certain set of behaviors. And a lot of times those behaviors aren't modeled in corporate America or your mainstream. Being truly successful as a parent, as a Christian, in life is hard, and it often involves a lot of unique thought and outside-the-box thinking and a lot of self-reflection. And in my opinion, that's the only way to make it in business and in life. And so turning off the volume outside, certainly turning off the phones, sometimes that stuff isn't healthy at all. You have to recommit yourself to that goal every day and drive. And that book that I read by Rich Dad Poor Dad, I'm a father of 5, I have a beautiful wife that I absolutely love. That really started me on my journey. So the thought for us is success may not be what you think it is.

How do you define rich?

Okay, I define rich by—

no, I mean, I'm saying that you want us to go away and think about it over the weekend is how do we define rich? What does rich mean to us?

Rich means to me that when I die on my deathbed, my kids say my He was a good man. My dad was a good man. He, he gave more to the world than he took from it. That's what I define as rich.

All right. And I challenge everybody out there to think about that for yourselves. How do you define, um, rich? Maybe you can read the book, maybe you already have it, maybe you already read it, but you know, does it mean the accumulation of wealth? Does it mean the accumulation of love? Does it mean accumulation of family? It doesn't mean accumulation at all, or not accumulation, whatever. So define it for yourself. And the very last question is, who should be on our show next?

Oh, I love to follow the innovators. I know, I think you've had Kidder on a few times. He's one of the most prolific writers. I love him. There's a lot of recruiting leaders, but anybody who's willing to bend the needle a little bit and spur the stir the pot with some ideas is what I'll answer.

Be a name, I'll reach out and find out. I'm putting you on the spot. All right, Jonathan's already been here and I'll invite him again. Yeah, um, he's actually kind of been busy for a few minutes here, but we haven't— we'll have him back soon.

So it's like, so let's do a non-recruiter person. That's where I get all my information.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, perfect.

Uh, the SEO Champion, Neil Patel, uh, or, um, uh, yeah, Seth. Seth would be my my guy. He understands certainly Google SEO. Bring in someone who's certainly outside, bring in a digital marketing person. There's gonna be a lot of innovation there. Someone doesn't know anything about recruiting, Seth Godin is who I'm gonna say.

Great idea. Neil Patel, Seth Godin, all right.

Yeah, Neil Patel, he's the SEO king too.

Awesome, thank you very much, Luke.

Love you all. Thanks, Shelly, for everything.

Everybody have yourself a fantastic weekend. Think about what rich means to you and be kind to yourselves. See you here next Friday.