Marvin Smith | Sr Mgr TA @ BECU | Shally Alley

How is everybody doing today? You are live on Shelly's Alley. It is the last day of May, literally the last day of May, May 31st. Um, May showers bring whatever it is, flowers, something like that. With me today I have a very special guest, someone that you probably already many times around, Marvin. Marvin Smith is here with us today. Marvin and I actually met a long time ago, many, many, many, many, many, many years ago when we were both at Microsoft. Did we meet before Microsoft or was that when we—

That was first we met at Microsoft. I think it was the night before a big presentation that you were doing with talent sourcing. So there were a number of us, Jim Stroud and Glenn Gottmacher and people like that. All Cindy was there too. Cindy Davis. Yeah. So it was quite a who's who of people that ended up really branching out in talent sourcing.

Yeah. Jim and Glenn were actually part of my team. When I used to run global talent sourcing for Microsoft. But your career spans long before that. You were in recruiting similar to me in the '90s, and then you were at Microsoft for quite some time. Then you went to work at Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Lockheed, where you spent almost 10 years, I think. And now you're working for a bank, right? Is the ECU a bank?

A credit union. Yeah.

Okay. A little bit different than a bank. So Marvin lives in Seattle and is very well connected in the Seattle area, but he also travels a lot to do conferences in, well, I mean, all over the world at SourceCons and Town 42s. He's gonna be presenting up at Seattle Town 42 coming up here. Marvin's always been kind of my guru, my go-to person for the conversion side of what we do. So let me explain for those that are kind of tuning in here. The conversion side is where a lead becomes a candidate or a prospect becomes a candidate. So, you know, you've got this whole set of sourcing that is finding the right people. And there's an art and a science to that, identifying them and making sure that you're making the right, you know, you're reaching out to the right people. And then there's the communication, you know, outreach side of it, which is getting in touch with them. And that can be done via, you know, many ways, calling, emailing, texting, et cetera. But that point at which they no longer are a, I used to call them prospects or suspect or whatever you wanna call 'em, and they become interested in the role and they raise their hand, that is that conversion point of engagement. So it's getting them to, getting people to respond. So Marvin's always been a good writer and the messages and the messaging that he uses, but it's not just one single email. It's the whole combination, the whole cadence, the whole sequence, all of it. And I've learned a lot from him over the years. So I wanted to see what else has been brewing in that big brain of yours and what have you learned lately? Last time we talked, you told me a little bit about incrementing messages where each message has like a little piece of additional information to inform candidates. So you didn't just send them a giant paragraph, but like, let me tell you a little bit about the job and then follow up with a little bit more and a little bit more. So I learned that from you. Some time ago. I'm not sure if it was 3 or 4 years ago. Since then, what else have you— what other brilliant discoveries have you made in the realm of getting engagement from candidates?

It's, you know, I think that the work over the last, let's say, 15 years is really focused on better understanding our target talent audience and what makes them tick. It really is all about them and not so much about us. My biggest takeaways from working in building communities of talent that were segmented, I guess, is the best way to think about it, by different affinity groups, really taught me a lot about you know, how to relate to them, the story we want to tell about the job, and those kind of things. So for the first time in a long time, I'm in a leadership role. And I'm working with a small team of what we think of as talent engagement. BECU is one of the largest community-based credit unions in the U.S. We operate in 7 states, including Georgia. And part of our challenge is to be able to tell the story of the ECU and where we're going and connect with different talent audiences, whether it be tech or whether it be operations and finance, fintech, those kind of things. So a lot of it is about the messaging and about engaging people and connecting them to our story.

So really it's not what you say. Well, what you say is a good part of it, but it's not all about what you say. You can't just persuade someone with your words. It's also connecting to that individual and connecting that individual to your organization's story, as you call it, right? So it's more than the content. It's the content. The context and that person, the individual.

So let's imagine we're looking for a software developer and we have all this information out on Stack Overflow that has done all this survey information on what people want. I learned at Lockheed that we could take that information and combine it with or use it alongside the internal surveys of software engineers or software developers at Lockheed about what they really liked about Lockheed. So it really comes down to values and purpose and those kind of things. And the same thing is true at BECU. We're able to take the kinds of things that are valuable and purposeful here and try to identify the— use the story of those to attract the people, you know, regardless of whether it's tech or operations and so forth. So, you know, it's competing not so much on compensation but competing on the other aspects of the job. We have remote work. We have a lot of different things that drive people and attract people. So, it's telling those stories.

So, how do you connect an organization story with candidates at scale? You know, like you can't necessarily tell a different story to every single candidate. There would be a lot of candidates. So what's the secret to making the story be, I don't know if convincing enough is the right word, but be personal enough to where there really is, you know, something for that individual.

I think you— for us, it's diving into even getting as specific as what generation the person is. So a lot of times we're looking for a millennial person now because millennials are now 40 years old, so they may have 10 or 15 years of experience. So what kind of values did the older millennials What are they looking for? We're seeing it a lot in surveys of career growth or not so much advancement but different aspects of a job. We're seeing the remote work value. We're seeing all these different things. So we would tell the story about remote work at BECU, what it's like to do that. And we would tell it incrementally. You know, one of the things that I still remember from 15 or 20 years ago when you talked about, you know, how do you reach out to somebody? You may send an email, you may send an in-mail, you may make a phone call. So it's using the different mediums, I think, that are available to get somebody's attention.

So the story slightly varies based on the medium.

Right.

It also seems like you have really, you have to really segment your audience. So you're not sending the same message to older millennials that you do to younger millennials, or so, you know, your story or the part of your story that you tell is conditional on the segment of population you're telling it to.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. So, um, If I'm looking for an aerospace engineer or a, probably more likely, a software engineer that has clearances and so forth, that message is going to be distinct and unique to a group of people. So I try to pick a topic or something that would be important to them based on what I read about in the surveys that tell us what people value. So it's, it really worked. It was something we, there was a small team of us at Lockheed that did a lot of experimentation with that and it just worked really well.

So listen to surveys, like gather the intel on, you know, survey says, and then craft your story around that. I have a question that is, is starting to get really in the weeds here. You know me though, really tactical. How do you— it's easy to segment by job title, right? If you have software engineer in the job title, you know, they're definitely that segment of population. But what about the other intangibles like their generation, whether they're millennial or what? How do you track that? Do you have lists that you build based on when you source them and add them, or do you have tagging? Do you have—

well, we— well, you do it carefully.

Yeah.

So yes, say more about that. It's so I'm looking for somebody with 10 years of experience, you know, and kind of this ideal background. You know, it's pretty easy to generate a list. So I use SeekOut. I use LinkedIn Recruiter some. So, you know, you can look at the overview of somebody's profile. If you, you know, we spend quite a bit of time down-selecting from a larger group of people to find that target group. And once you find that target group, you don't want to lose them. It's not a one-and-done kind of thing. So, I've been, I've had CRMs available for years now. And so part of it is building the pipelines in those CRMs, ones that we can carry an ongoing relationship. I think it was Tracy Friend or somebody like that that said maybe in the '90s, you know, we want to keep people in orbit around our brand. And so, I think that's always been a mantra of mine is how do we keep people in orbit around our brand without using just job content? What kinds of career things are there that are useful? Keeping them informed on, you know, the market and that sort of thing. So, non-job-related content.

Not just about the job. It's about their— the candidate's industry, the market itself, the, Okay. Interesting.

When I was in the third-party world, I, it struck me at one point after a few years that I would have people that would call every once in a while and say, "How's the market?" Well, they aren't talking about the stock market. They're talking about the job market. And so I think I kept that in the back of my mind as I transitioned from the third-party world into the corporate world is is people want to know a little bit about what's available. And today, I mean, with all the different information sources we have available, it's pretty easy to curate information, other people's content, and keep people informed. Does that make sense? It does.

Yeah. I think so. At the risk of getting into tips or you don't necessarily want to write a newsletter or a nurturing campaign, that is talking down to people by giving them tips, but you definitely can give them insider knowledge of— not bad word, not insider, but like, you know, knowledge as an inside person in the business, knowledge about what's going on in the industry, especially if it's connection to your business, because that's valuable information. So you're not just saying, here's a job, here's a job, here's a job. You're also saying, You know, we have some career opportunities like these, but in addition to that, you're adding components of valuable information that is of use to them, at least, you know, some of it. And it's not just about your job openings, which literally, if you think about it, it's about you. If you're sending out information about job openings, that's about you, not about them. You don't necessarily know if they're looking for work, especially if they're passive candidates. So that's entirely about you and you filling your job. So this is a way to connect it to them. And it doesn't have to be— what you're saying is it doesn't have to be about the company either. It can be their industry, their career direction, their level, right? Whether they're management or leadership or— okay.

Yeah, I mean, I did a lot of work with creating communities of talent. I'm not talking about a database that you Spam email talking about, you know, a way that you engage people on a platform. And it began with LinkedIn groups back when I was at Microsoft and Facebook groups and then transitioned to different kinds of platforms. But what I learned there, it's really they're interested in me, me, me. And so I want to give them that kind of content. And every once in a while, I'll put something brand-related, you know, 1 out of 6 or 7 kind of communications, you give them something about brand or you ask them for a referral or something like that. But it's all about timing. I mean, you know, it's, you know, people are curious. They're, I mean, it's such a crazy world. In terms of jobs and professions and so forth that somehow if you build that trust relationship with them, it really works well.

So tell me a little bit about email. Is email still alive or is email dead as a way of contacting candidates? I'm sure you have many avenues to contact people. And how do you feel about email?

I love email. I mean, I think that's the, you know, we write a sequence of 4 or 5 different emails to tell the story of what we're up to. It's gentle. A lot of times, we'll use, you know, career kinds of messages, you know, at different times. Sometimes, we're provocative. At Lockheed, one of our competitors had changed their comp plan and they weren't paying bonuses anymore. And so, we reached out with a campaign that said, "Did you get the bonus you deserved?" Nobody does, right? No, no. And so, It's pretty interesting, the speed in which you can communicate with people. And if you run the campaigns over 10 or 12 days, you know, working days, you're in pretty good shape. Your sponsor, Jim, does a lot of— puts out a lot of great content on email messaging and shows you accurate information on how their clients, what kind of success they've enjoyed and you know, what time of day to send it and so forth. So if you're watching this, I suggest you get a hold of some of Gem's content because it's great.

Yeah, they actually have a good white paper or handout on effective email campaigns. It breaks down, you know, things like timing and subject line and stuff like that. And thank you for bringing that up. Gem is our sponsor. As many folks already know, I don't get paid to do this show. It's completely voluntary and free, but it does cost money to host this platform, Restream, which helps me produce the show. So I reached out to them and asked if they would mind supporting. And so they keep the lights on. So thank you to Gem for doing that and sponsoring us. But, you know, tools like that, like Gem, where you can get the analytics on the responses, what works, what doesn't work, that allows you to do things like A/B testing on subject lines. Are you still in— are you still— I don't know about you, but I will continuously evolve even when I have a subject line that I think works really well and has been working really well. I will still go ahead and make a mistake and try a subject line that doesn't work well because I don't want to ever just sit back and say this is the best subject line. You still doing that or have you kind of arrived at a stasis?

No, it's continually evolving. I mean, it's, you know, just as your audience evolves, I think you have to, you know, continue to look at the messages, you know, and with AI being so prevalent in helping you determine subject lines now that, you know, if you go to subjectline.com or some of those and look at, you know, what's working or even the words that work, you know, a few years ago, Back over Prolog did it. Part of their survey was what kind of words attract software engineers? What do they want? And what do they hate in terms of words that we would use to approach them? So it's really about— it's really empathy marketing, right? I mean, that's interesting.

Tell me more about that. What is empathy marketing?

Well, you step into their shoes. Okay. Okay. And say, okay, I'm a software developer. I am X. And what are they going to open? What are they going to be attracted to? And those kinds of things.

What do they need? What is the—

What do they need? Right. What keeps them up at night? You know, those kinds of things. So it works really well that way.

Okay. Honestly, that's empathy marketing is a new term, but I understand what you're talking about. So, okay. So I, you know, for me, I've always been, you know, and you may remember this from days gone by, the ABCs of subject lines, right? The action, benefit, and clarity for me has always been important to make sure that I include at least a subliminal component of each of those, if not a very overt component. Of each. Action being, you know, what are you asking them to do? Because if you don't ask them to do anything, then that's exactly what they'll do. Benefit is what's in it for them. So I think that's the— I'm connecting with what you're saying is the empathy. What's— why should this interest them? And then clarity is, in my opinion, is about removing skepticism. How do you make this something that is clear but doesn't first of all, doesn't give away the farm that makes people wanna not read the message or doesn't trick them into opening it and then they feel, you know, they feel fooled because they read a message that has nothing to do with the subject line. Do you still feel like that holds merit today or has generationally, has our marketing message for subject lines steered away from that action benefit clarity? Like for example, is personalization more important or emojis more important? Or is it still the basics: action, benefit, clarity?

I, I, it's, it's a, it's a variation of what you're talking about. Yeah. I, I mean, it's, so think about it. You, you have somewhere around 15 seconds, right? Somebody's skimming an email to get their attention, right? So it's, it's 3 or 4 seconds on the subject line itself. And then you want to be able to to tell your story, and that's probably 7 or 8 seconds, I think, is what they say. And then you have the call to action. What I see that's maybe wrong or could be improved with a lot of emails that I see is people start by introducing themselves and say, "Hi, I'm such and such, and I work for such and such," and so forth. Whereas we went completely away from that and we started with the storyline. Thinking about your career? And then, or if we want to be a little bit more provocative, we say, is your career a bestseller or is it on the bargain basement? And develop 4. So we think about it over 4 or 5 emails, all on some variation of that. And what we did at Lockheed was we invited people to have a conversation because You know, the top complaint of people looking for a job is no one will talk to me. They want to have me answer all these questionnaires. And so we went right to, you know, a calendar invite or access to our calendars. And so it really helped. You know, we're always testing, you know, different audiences have different customs and different industries and so forth. But We really put a lot of pride in thinking about the audience, you know, kind of what makes them tick and what do they value and then writing off that.

Okay. So let's take it into— we've got buckled in on the, you know, buckle down on the subject line and empathy recruiting relating to their needs, not just for the career, the job, but, you know, other things. How about segmenting? A long time ago, there was a lot of talk about personas, which is coming from marketing and sales. And this is— I'm probably delving into actual talent marketing, which is a whole nother space. You know, talent marketing, it means what goes on your career page, what goes on your job postings. You and I are talking about engagement, which is like, you know, day in the life, rubber meets the road. We're talking to candidates versus marketing is more, you know, ongoing concern, long-term, long tail. But still, when it comes to that, are the personas, like, for example, for diversity candidates, at the risk of, you know, inserting foot in mouth, Let's say that you are trying to attract, or you have a campaign to attract more Hispanic candidates. Would you tailor your messaging to the components of your benefit plan that are more— like if you did a survey of a Hispanic audience and found out that Hispanics are more attracted to certain benefits, like, I don't know, elder care or education reimbursement, would you market in your messaging? Would you include that highlight instead of, say, the other? Maybe for a different type of population, highlight career or mentorship or longevity, whatever. Do you go into that like psychological side or is it more professional related?

Oh, I think it's both. I think you try to do it, do it all. I mean, if I have 5 messages, I may feature one of those, you know, on on a specific benefit that would be, you know, be important to a group of people. You know, somewhere there's some data that said that it takes female candidates or prospects 17 days longer to apply for a position than it does a male. And so, one way I tested that was before I segmented the female candidates out and messaged them 20 days before I messaged the rest of the group of people. So, a lot of times, it's taking all this data that's out there and saying, well, if this is true, Right. Then let's do it this way.

And so, and so timeline, or perhaps the days that you send them email or the time of day based on what you learned from the, from the research or the demographics. Do you ever do your own market research for understanding your audience? You know?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Depending on whether I can get a statistically valid sampling, yes. One of the first things I did before I knew any better at Lockheed was to take a group of people that had clearances and survey them. I was curious about what their motivations were, and it served me well in No one had done that. So, you know, I was aiming at an audience and I was testing several assumptions that I was told going in the door. Not all of them were true.

Like what made you respond? What made you apply? What attracted you about this?

What do you, you know, what part of your career is more important? You know, why would you change badges from, and I know you were You did some work for Lockheed years ago. And so, I mean, you kind of get a sense of the culture and what it was like and some of the talent that was there. And so it was very useful to do that. But it's recruitment marketing to me is really about the talent brand. And it's always stuck with me that Talent brand is what your employees and what your job candidates say about you. You can't control it, right? You know, but you can influence it. And so, so the recruitment marketing person that is on my team, you know, that's really what he is concerned with is, is looking at this internal sentiment, looking at the external sentiment. What was that experience like and how can we make it better? How can we change our processes and how can we leverage automation? So it pulls automation in to think about the communication we have with people. And obviously, there's some limitations that we might have on on different ATS systems and so forth. But it's really part and integral to the talent engagement process. So that role really feeds a lot into what we're trying to better understand about the, you know, to be empathetic with the target audience.

So yeah, so we got survey data, you know, your ATS, your CRM could provide, there could be, you know, market data. There's your own kind of questions you could even ask candidates when you actually start talking.

Yeah.

You know, what interested you about this role and things like that. And then you have, you know, test assumptions about things that are maybe generational or demographic, geographic, you know, for example, you know, people might be more or less interested in the company because of its location. I know I've had some good and bad luck with regard to location. You know, back in the day at Microsoft when we had acquired Great Plains and I had to work on— my team was working on some positions for what later on became Dynamics. It was locations in South Dakota. Wait, South Dakota or North Dakota?

I think North Dakota.

That's right. Yeah. I'm glad I thought that. Yeah, it was locations in North Dakota, which is where the company that was acquired was based and reaching out to candidates nationally with an opportunity in North Dakota. I mean, you know, you talk to somebody in California, you're like, hey, you want to move to North Dakota? What? No. So we had to learn that there were certain people, certain demographics that were more inclined to be attracted to open spaces, skiing, you know, and it may still be in California, but it was certain people. That had exhibited this inclination to be in more of an outdoorsy versus kind of city folk that wanna live near the beach, for example. So that had an impact. How much of this, I wanna kind of tie this back to something else that I wanted to talk to you about. You said that you've been re-engineering your kickoff call. How much of this marketing is now in that kickoff call or Maybe a better question is, how have you been re-engineering that call?

So we bring talent intelligence into the call.

Okay.

So, so, which surveys the market, the market, the market, right? So population. So we know that. So I use, you know, to be transparent, use SeekOut for this. But one of the things that, that SeekOut allows me to do is to take a job description. And drop the job description into a matching algorithm they have, and it will give me a target audience of X amount of people. And so, we break it down by the different— so, there's 7 states that we recruit in. So, I can see how many people literally are direct matches for that job in those 7 states. So, think of it as a talent map. And literally, what we show them is a map of where the talent is. We show them the diversity mix of the target audience. We show them where the most of the people are that work for that industry or that segment of population. The competitive, you know, the competitor talent that we're trying to attract from. So that leads to conversations about, you know, maybe who's done well with what kinds of folks. And then, we tell them specifically about a timeline, how long it's going to take us to get that done. So, we bring sourcing and recruiting together and sometimes recruitment marketing into that call. And it really changed everything. I mean, from going from, having kind of a negative perception from talent acquisition, just in a short while, we really changed how we were perceived. Suddenly, we were strategic partners. We're bringing insight that they haven't seen before. And it really was valuable. That makes sense.

Absolutely. So you're coming to that meeting saying, you know, this is the size of the market, population of people that are qualified or potentially could be qualified for this job. This is their demographics, their, you know, their income. So we might need to adjust compensation. The market pressure, how many jobs are open versus how many people are there. So like, is it 10 jobs per person or 20 jobs per person? You know, how much competition is there for that candidate's attention, if you will. Maybe, I don't know, supply and demand, education. Do you also bring insights on like the composition of the resume? Like what are in this particular segment of the market? What are the skills that are listed on the resume that may not be in the job description so that the hiring manager, hiring committee could perhaps adjust their, you know, like it just then It may be better if I just give you an example. So, you know, I had a challenging position that I, that I was— a client had brought me in to advise on, and they were having a hard time finding people because of the particular skillset. It was a particular skillset that was— it's called Maximo, which is a facilities management software, but nobody called it that anymore. That was what the hiring manager knew it as when they got the job 10 years before. It had since then been acquired by Tivoli and acquired by IBM. So now it's actually called IBM Facilities Management. But everybody was looking for Maximo people and they just couldn't find them. It's like, oh, they don't exist. Well, they do. They— it's just anybody who's updated their resume in the last 10 years, right? So if you walk into that with this intel that says, well, the facilities management software that's on the market right now is IBM Facilities Management. Perhaps the hiring manager would have said, oh yeah, that's what we use now. It used to be called Maximo. And now you start out from a perspective of, okay, let's not look for this basically fictitious keyword. I mean, it existed back in the day, but nobody has it anymore. Does that make sense?

Or are you— Yeah, yeah, we pinpoint a little. We kind of touch on that, probably not as in-depth as you're doing, but— or suggesting, but we bring— we talk about the skills. And so when you see the talent map, the information we get back from the vendor says there are this many direct matches and there are this many partial matches. And so we springboard that. We use that to talk about the skills and the specifics of it. Two other things that I think deserve mentioning. One is we rewrite every job or turn it into a job ad. So we use AI to do that.

Rather than post the job as a job, you're actually making it a job ad.

So, you know, we— I remember Lou Adler years ago when I was at Microsoft was, you know, selling me the benefits of having a job profile. And I said, Lou, I love it. I believe it, but it doesn't scale. You know, with, you know, we had 274 openings for SDETs that all read the same way, and it was hard to do that. So anyway, now you can scale it, and it just takes a few minutes to do that.

Rewrite it for regionals.

Yeah, and that works really well. The second thing we're doing is we're bringing some of that target talent sentiment into the conversation. So we'll bring in survey information from McKinsey or whomever that talks about what people are looking for so that we can use that to tie back to the team. So if people are looking for these 4 or 5 things, We then, part of how we're gleaning that information to tell the story of the job is the, this is what will it mean to you if you take this job. This is how it's going to impact your career. So it's kind of a holistic, we've stretched the kickoff call to probably 45 minutes to an hour. Just to, to, to change the rhythm and so forth.

So it's becoming a little bit more of a partnership, more strategic, not an order-taking session, but like actually having a little bit of discourse around what may or may not be possible with the market. Yeah. Wow. Good, good, good. So, um, putting all of this together, Where do you feel like we, you know, there's AI, there's marketing and personas. We talked about subject line, we talked about segmenting. Where do you feel like we're headed as an industry when it comes to talent attraction? Are we headed towards like an automated, fully automated future, or are we just kind of, our roles are adapting to, blur the line between marketing and recruiting and sourcing. What do you think? What's your opinion on that? What's your crystal ball say?

I think sourcing and talent engagement have always been a little bit of marketing, or we call it recruitment marketing, I guess, but we don't always believe it. We keep it segmented. But I think with one of the things that's really struck me the other day is how fortunate those of us that have been in talent sourcing and talent engagement have been because we were the first really to leverage the internet in our recruiting. And then, we've moved on from that and we're involved in talent intelligence. And so, I fully expect that talent sourcing and talent engagement people will be at the forefront of AI and leveraging AI because for some reason, what makes a great sourcer, talent sourcer, is that curiosity and that desire to experiment and so forth.

That's prompt engineering right there.

Yeah. Will we see? Yeah, I don't see sourcing and the functions being replaced replaced yet by automation. I think there's— it's, uh, I probably land in the school that we need to learn how to use it, leverage it, and be pioneering it and getting and learning how to do—

and we'll be the ones that are running that behind the scenes, but it's not, it's not gonna shift the jobs. Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah, I mean, because at some point we still need that relationship, right? And And so, we're going to learn how to do things faster. You know, there's a lot of bottlenecks out there. You think about, you know, right now, the biggest challenges I think in recruiting, you know, for the people that are running ads is they're getting 3 to 4 times more ad respondents than they've ever gotten. And so, It's clogging up the system. And so, you know, automation needs to stack rank those people and be able to move, you know, disposition the people more quickly that aren't part of the, you know, aren't the best qualified for the job and communicate that and move on and spend the time building a relationship with the people that are the best fit. In talent sourcing, we, you know, so much of the technology is built on LinkedIn public profiles. And as people are more concerned about the lack of information that's going to be readily available for us, it's going to take a long while before AI is going to be able to parse that data. So I don't know that there's enough AI turned loose on resumes is great, but it turned loose on sparse data and profiles probably isn't that great.

It's going to be integrating or analyzing missing data. Yeah. Missing information. A lot of missing information, a lot of gaps left behind. That's a very good point. I've often thought about that with regard to LinkedIn profiles because from the very beginning, it's a great place to find people, but it's not really necessarily the best place to identify strengths and competencies. Like, for example, I've many times over the years tried to use the years of experience search, but it's just always off by huge margins. Like either you'll end up, you say someone that has at least 5 years of experience, but it turns out the first 4 years was before college and or during college, you know, and so they really have 1 year professional experience. Or the other one that I run into a lot is somebody that's only put their last 2 jobs on there. They have 10 years of experience, but it only shows as if they had 2 years because they put their last. So that missing information that wasn't even taken into consideration in the, um, gathering of that data. When you search for people with more than 5 years of experience, you're eliminating those that only have 1 but look like 5, or those that have 10 but look like 5. And so it's not really 5, is it? Right? Because the AI assume they have 5 just based on the text, because the text that's missing, so it has to somehow extrapolate, you know. There's—

it's gonna take a while, you know. And so that's still some mind-numbing work that some talent sourcers have to do to down-select. What has been worked in the teams that I've been on is to, once you do that work, then you've got people that you can pipeline and you can continue to have a relationship with. You can keep adding to them as you find more and more information. But boy, it's kind of precious when you've got it. So that's to me is really valuable in the teams that I've worked on. So.

Right. Well, we've covered a lot of ground. Thanks a lot, Martin, for making some time for us here on the show. I always end my show with asking 2 questions of my guests. So I'm not— even though we've known each other for a long time, I'm not making any excuses for you. You get the same treatment. The first of those questions is, who should be on the show next?

You are interviewing one of my teammates in a couple of weeks. Chris Carver.

Yep. Beat you to it.

Yeah. Yeah, you did. He's, he's the real deal. He's humble. He's curious. He's energetic. He's going to be quite remarkable. He's really a rising star in my opinion, talent sourcing. Who should be on your show?

It doesn't mean they'll accept the invitation, but at least I'll try. Right.

How about, have you spoken with Todd Davis lately?

It's been a while, but he was here. Yeah.

Okay, Adam Kovacs?

No, that's a good one.

Okay, um, right now he's, uh, Adam and, and has taken over something that, that I was a co-founder of called Sourcing Seven. Yeah, yeah, wearing the shirt today. Yeah, and so He and Todd reformed the nonprofit and are carrying it forward. So in Seattle, where this is the second event that's coming up in June, it's down at Madrona. And so what Sourcing 7 does is basically go to a business and they host this and, you know, we provide some light food, and we network, and we have presenters. So the presenters we're having this time is Carmen Hudson, who is quite remarkable in our space, obviously, and we're having two DeCostas, Jeremy and Dean, you know, so it's kind of a family affair. So we have no idea what Dean will present on, but But Carmen, I think, with her book out on recruiting, and I think really has some valuable things to say. So we're excited about that. It's still not the size it was pre-pandemic, but it's well organized. And we also added the digital piece to it. So it's being live streamed. And so we'll have, you know, probably 2 or 3 times the number of people in the audience because of the availability to watch it digitally. So anyway, yeah, Adam would be great. He's on it.

Thank you.

Yeah, Amazon Talent Intelligence. He's really got it going on.

Actually, I follow him on Talent Intelligence a lot. So That's good. Well, the last question is probably a bit of a doozy and I like popping it right at the end and really getting people thinking. Many of our listeners actually catch the shows recording on the weekends and things like that. So I want to give people something to think about. What would you have them ask themselves? So what do you, in other words, What would be something that they should mull on or deeply think about as they contemplate our conversation today?

I think our conversation today, the one thing that we didn't talk about is how you and I learned the fundamentals of recruiting at some point in time. We learned, you know, the metrics of success. We learned how many calls we had to make to find a candidate that was willing to talk with somebody. How many interviews did we set up? And I think those kinds of assumptions are built into us. And I don't know that there's any shortcuts to having that fundamental knowledge. What we've talked about in terms of email and empathy and all that. It's all governed by numbers. It's a numbers game on some level, right? We can— there's predictability that comes into it. And I think, as you think about the processes you're going through and thinking about where you can improve those processes with AI or the tools that are out there, what kinds of issues need to be solved, how it flows together, and at the same time, remembering that it's not so much about how to make yourself more convenient, but how can you impact your your target audience is thinking about. It's all about me, you know, how— okay, so in other words, how can you—

so think about how you can use this new technology to impact your audience, to make it about them, right?

So it really is truly about them and has been since, you know, 2005. I think that's what happened with one of the first aha moments on the internet was, you know, it, it was a place where we connected together and experimented and surfed it. And then suddenly it became communities and affinities of different groups. And then all of a sudden it became somewhere about 2010 or 20, it became all about what's in it for me. And that hasn't changed. So for the last 15 years, it's really been, you know, how do we crack through that?

So, okay, awesome. Thanks a lot, Marvin. Appreciate it.

It's good to see you again.

Yeah, yeah, good to see you too. Break a leg up there at Town 42.

Oh, theoretically, not literally.

Theoretically, yeah, definitely not. Um, all right, well, hey, thanks everybody. Uh, you heard it here, we're gonna have a very special guest coming up. That's actually on the 21st, Chris Carver. But up next week is Susie Tonini. You remember Susie?

I do, yeah.

Yeah, that's right. She, uh, made the transition from sourcing to something very similar but in corporate marketing, which is competitive intelligence. So we're talking about that. So tune back in next week. Until then, be kind to yourselves.