Nick Livingston Live on Shally's Alley

Been— it's been a year since we last chatted. Uh, seems like a, like a long time. If you felt like you missed a couple of, uh, episodes, that's, that's true, you did, because we didn't have anything, uh, for the, uh, week of Christmas and the week of New Year's since most people were out enjoying their, their time off or, you know, getting caught up or whatever. So welcome back. It is now 2023. It's Friday, January 6th. And roughly around 1 PM. So here we go, here's Shally's Alley. And today with me I have a guest, his name is Nick, Nick Livingston. And Nick and I met many, many, many years ago when he was at MTV, I believe.

That's right.

Is that right?

Yeah, New York.

And we, um, I think we met at an ERE conference in Florida. Yeah, it was a long time ago. My memory is starting to fade as I— after like a couple of hundred conferences, right?

How many conferences? Yeah, how many SourceCons? I think it might have even been one of the earlier SourceCons that you put on.

I think it was actually before SourceCon.

Wow, okay.

I think it was an ERE when that was still just ERE, right? But yeah, so Nick's got a lot of experience with social media marketing and recruiting. He led recruiting for MTV and a couple of other organizations. Organizations and worked with some technology companies. And most recently, he has his own company now. He started up an HR recruiting technology company called Honit. So somebody just posted—

who is that? Shelly, the GOAT. That's right.

Oh man. So there you go. So Nick, what, what the heck is Hone It?

So talking to people is a big part of recruiting. We're talking to candidates every day, we're talking to clients and hiring managers every day, and it's those conversations that matter the most, I think. And, and, um, for decades we've been talking over the telephone. The last couple of years we've been talking over Zoom. But I, in the back of my mind, it was still, what are we doing with all of these conversations, right? And the output of a phone interview or the output of a video conversation, you know, what is it? Is it still scribbled notes and opinions, or are we able to share data and evidence from an interview with other people to make that pretty much scribbled notes, or if you're lucky, typed up notes in your CRM?

But you know, a lot of people don't do that, right?

It's true. And yeah, putting it into where it's supposed to go and documentation, all that stuff. So yeah, it's a communication stack we built specifically for recruiters and talent partners. So phone calls, video calls, global VoIP calls, SMS.

It's a way to talk to candidates, call, text, do video interviews, do audio interviews. Okay, gotcha.

Yeah.

Now, um, you mentioned something about the 4 S's. What are the 4 S's?

Yeah, in recruitment, I mean, if you take a step back and, and kind of— let's not talk about the ATS, let's just talk about what it takes to get someone interested in a role and and a hiring manager interested in the candidate? Well, it's sourcing, right? How do you find that great candidate, which you know everything about, right? Sourcing's a big S. And after you find someone and they say, sure, let's talk, or I'd like to learn more, what do we do? Well, we gotta, let's schedule a call at a time that's convenient. Let's screen 'em, right? Let's talk to 'em and ask 'em great questions and hear what they have to say and listen to what's not on the resume. And then the fourth S is the submittal, right? How do we present that candidate in a compelling way to a client who wasn't on the call with us, right? Where a resume is no longer sufficient. How do we share insights to get that hiring manager to stop what they're doing and to say, yeah, let me reschedule tomorrow and I'll talk to the candidate, let's move forward, right? Not 2 weeks later, sure, maybe I'll have the same conversation you just did, right? Like, how do we— so sourcing, scheduling, screening, submitting, the 4 S's.

You got to find them. And get them to respond, get them to, you know, talk in some way, shape, or form to, you know, have a conversation, have the conversation, and then present them to the hiring manager. Okay, I got it. Those are the 4 S's. So, you know, I played around a little bit with Hone It, and to me, the biggest value that I got out of it is the ability to transcribe the notes of the phone call of the interview because, you know, I type really fast, but I don't type— when I'm typing really fast, I don't type very well. And, you know, I don't stop to do spell check or grammar. I just kind of write my notes as they pop into my head. So then I still have to kind of clean up those notes and put them into the CRM. And I know a lot of recruiters don't even do that. I know that hiring managers don't do that. They have scorecards, but they don't really, you know, put in their notes into the ATS. So to me, the big win, the big value was I can focus on listening to, paying attention to the conversation and let the speech-to-text system type up the notes. So essentially it's a virtual note-taker. Now the key is, at least from my perspective, you can have a scheduler like a lot of people use Calendly, for example. There's a bunch of other schedulers. Google has one built in now that's new, and Microsoft came out with one where it's like, here's a link to my calendar. Please book yourself on my calendar for everyone's convenience. So you got scheduling sort of kind of automated as a standalone tool. You got the screening part of it is, like you said, Google Meeting or Zoom meeting or what, you know, so the, the, all of the virtual interviews, or even actually formal virtual interviewing technology that has asynchronous questions and stuff like that. So you have that, but they're not, they're not tied together, right? Not necessarily. Some of them, some of those interviewing tools do have scheduling, but it's still a separate system than your ATS or whatever. So To me, what was cool is that this connects with— we use Greenhouse— it connects with Greenhouse and it adds your notes directly from the meeting. So you actually have a record of the conversation in the voice of the candidate, and you can play sound bites to the hiring manager, and you can choose what the hiring manager gets to hear by selecting like a few sound bites. But at the same time, there were some obstacles. As I try to introduce this to other people in the organization. What are some of the obstacles and objections that you encounter from people that are interested in using a technology like this speech-to-text video interviewing recording? Because nobody's going to object to the scheduling part of it, right? We all use it.

No, and that's like, yeah, I don't want an auto-schedule, right? Yeah, no, I think it's general. There's this, you know, it's not just the transcription, right? There are transcription tools that transcribe a call.

Would you share a 40-page transcript with the hiring manager?

Managers say, look what I did. Like, no, that's not going to provide value.

They're not going to read that.

You're not going to read it. Nor are they— yeah, I recorded my Zoom call. Listen to this 37-minute video call I had with this candidate. You want to re-listen to my entire call? No, nobody would want to re-listen to your entire video call. So the idea of the interview highlights or the interview soundbites is that, you know, you can take a 35-minute call where you're asking great technical questions to a candidate, and you can turn that into 2 minutes of highlights that someone else can quickly review, whether it's another recruiting partner, right, internally, whether it's an account manager, highlight reel, you know. And, and so how can we get 5 people to align and agree that Shelly's great from a single conversation, right, instead of—

and also so 5 people don't ask the same question.

Oh, there's so much redundancy and so much overlap. If you want to talk about candidate experience, let's, let's create a simple and seamless and non-repetitive interview process. Right? Let's not have the same conversation 6 times and then take 2 months to try to agree on should this—

Yeah. So the benefit of having it, you know, putting it all together is a tool that allows you to do the scheduling with your calendar so that you have, you know, just like Calendly basically. It connects to your CRM. It does the video interviewing. You can send text messages, all that. We know the benefits, but when it comes to recording the interview, what are some of the objections that you get?

Yeah, and I think it's interesting. There's hundreds of thousands of calls. We've got millions of minutes of interview data indexed in the system, but the friction isn't coming from the candidates, right? They recognize that interviews are business conversations and business conversations have been recorded for decades.

They know we're going to be taking notes. They know we're going to be recording.

So candidates aren't balking at calls being recorded. That's always an initial concern. Wait, recruiters are like, well, what about the candidate? What about the candidate? It's actually the recruiters who are a little more on edge on the calls being recorded for the first time ever.

Why?

Well, I don't know. In fear of them saying something or, you know, right. They think it's a legal thing. We're actually capturing your calls to protect your organization, right? If a candidate says you asked me about my religion on the phone interview, you can say, no, we didn't. Right. So the data there is actually quite defensible and in the company's favor, while as the recruiter typically thinks otherwise. So I think there's just that general idea of recording interviews. But when you take a step back and you look at all the other business conversations happening— support calls, sales calls, Zoom calls— many of those calls are already being recorded. So it's just a bit of a change of thought for the recruiter.

Yeah, I get that. So it's like, oh, I don't want to get— I don't want to be recorded and I don't want someone to like have access to the whole conversation. However, what you record is transcribed into text and you can mark it as like little sound bites and you can play back only, you know, little sound bites. You're not playing back the entire conversation. So yeah, that's the big one. Record all of your pitch, you know?

Yeah, none of that's included. None of that's shared, right, with the hiring manager. Your pitch, your opening, the icebreaker, the closing, the salary conversation. Like you're only sharing when you ask a Java engineer, hey, tell me about your ideal, your stack, and you know, what do you like? What do you—

that's the key to me is they just start rattling off all kinds of things, and I may be able to capture all of it, I may be able to capture some of it, but I know now I have the ability to play back that 1-minute explanation of what they just did in their project most recently and play that back to the hiring manager, and then the hiring manager can go, oh yeah, right, I know what all those things are, and I know that I know what he's talking about, right? Even though the recruiter may be, you know, a stranger to that particular, you know, type of technology, new technology, whatever. So that's a huge thing. The, the other thing that I ran into is the whole TL;DR, like too long; didn't read. So in, um, what I'm running into is that the recruiters basically have like this, I don't know, shortcut language where they've got 5 bullet points that they put in to the screening notes and they send it to the hiring manager. So all the hiring manager get is like these 5 bullet points and that's it. So the recruiters are pushing back saying the hiring managers don't want to read all this. They don't want to read a long transcript. And it's like, yeah, that's true. They don't want to read the whole transcript, but that's the whole, the whole point of the tool has an automated— if you add keywords, for example, like Java, then the tool will auto-index places where there is that mention, and you can actually just extract the text. So again, you're still only using bullet points, but still the pushback has been— a lot of it has been, I'd rather just write down the 4 bullet points than have to go through the entire speech-to-text and then summarize the 4 bullet points. It's— they claim that it's not as fast.

So, well, and, and that's what we've been doing for decades, right? Like, that's, that's what recruiters have been doing for for 35 years is sharing their interpretation or opinion of what someone just told them about a topic they're not an expert in. Like, that's the fundamental disconnect in our profession. We're the middle person between a QA engineer and a QA director who speak QA and we do not, or it's a marketing coordinator and a marketing VP and we are not marketing experts. So there's just this, yeah, for 30 years we've been sharing bullet points, but again, for 30 years that hiring manager has had to pick up the phone, have another 45-minute call to ask the very same questions that we may have already asked, to hear the very same answers that the candidate already gave us. So this idea of interview collaboration where, no, let me know the 6 technical questions to ask for this marketing role. Our recruiters will ask those said 6 questions on the very first call, hang up the phone and share those 6 answers with the 4 stakeholders involved in the hiring process. Zero. And they all see the same answer and zero, right?

Right.

Then a real huddle happens. I mean, I don't— you know, the post-interview huddle. You invite someone on site and you do 6 separate calls and 6 separate conversations, and then you get 6 people together and you go around and you're like, what do you think?

And they're like, yeah, that also happens. What did you talk about?

Like, what did they say? And like, there was no visibility into what actually was asked or what was answered. And then it's this very subjective, ambiguous thing. And it's like, wait a minute, we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's our most valuable asset. People are the main P&L, yet our interview conversations are a black box.

There's basically nowhere to be found. Yeah. Check this out. This sounds like a really good idea. I don't know if it's a practical idea or not, but using something like ChatGPT to summarize the interview transcription.

So here's, right, once you start to get data, like, Even just starting to think about data gets really exciting very quickly, right? We're quickly going from scribbled notes to interview intelligence, right? Interview questions were captured, interview answers are captured. We can index and sort the best answers from the worst answers. Like, all of this is now at the tip of our fingers, right? Well, it's quick to then lead to, okay, let's skip to AI. We're saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, you just for the first time ever captured interview data. Like, we can do a lot without—

right, well, the AI would just summarize that. I think that was just the idea, which gets companies into trouble.

HireVue went too far with facial recognition and all this AI. But it's like, whoa, whoa, let's slow down, guys.

Yeah, sure, right now we have a way to actually document what the person said, which we never had before, like, because we were relying on humans to type notes and stuff like that.

Leap, um, order of magnitude better in terms of Mr. Like we don't have to go to AI yet. Sure, that might happen, but the government's going to step in. They don't want robots.

Maybe you have to go to AI, right?

Yeah, I mean, so exactly, we're trying to be straight up. Like, let's just call it interview data that's human captured, right? That's human curated, not necessarily AI.

And I like the idea— what do you think about the idea of using your own interview data as a sourcing tool.

Interview sourcing, Shelley.

I mean, that's right, because I use our CRM as a sourcing tool, and I think a lot of people do, and you should go to your ATS and your CRM first because these are candidates that you've already had conversations with. Um, but in the, in the CRM data, all I have is the resume and whatever notes I managed to put in. So now if we have this text from the interview, we can also search that. So let's say you have a couple hundred interviews that have been textified— I don't know if that's the right word or not— um, and then you're looking for somebody that, that has experience with a particular type of technology. Well, the text search will actually search through the notes as well. I know Greenhouse will search through, through everything including the notes. So now I have the ability to find candidates that I spoke with based on what they said during an interview. I like that a lot.

To me, that's something on the phone screen, the video call with the hiring manager, a downstream interview with the panel, right? All of that can now be easily indexed and organized. So, and we're not even just searching the transcript, Shelly. You can search the questions, you can search the answers, you can search the skill tags, you can search the full call transcript, you can search the recruiter notes that might have been— like, it's a whole new data set. You're right, where you can search J2EE Or who was that candidate who talked about that, that thing? Oh, now Docker's all the rage. Who was the candidate talking to Doc about Docker 6 months before Docker was a thing? Now I want to know that candidate, right? So it's, it's, yeah, it's a new layer of interview data and talent intelligence that you can sort.

That's pretty cool. Yeah, I like it. So, um, here's a question from somebody. I don't know if it's— I'm gonna have to read it. Question I have, having written a free ebook and purchasable hardcover version, is is how in the interview experience and re-engineering going to look for someone who's neurodiverse. So he's himself an ML engineer. Let me see if I can— okay, so his question is how the interview experience is going to look for someone who is neurodiverse. In other words, with a video recorded call speech-to-text What changes or what's different or what does it look like if someone is neurodiverse?

I think it gives them a better shot, right? If we boil decisions down to just the hiring manager or just to the resume and just one person, let's call them the recruiter's interpretation or opinion of that, how that call went, right? We're now— it may not be the best representation of that particular candidate. So we're saying let's remove some of that personal opinion from the screening and submittal process or even the interview process. Let's, let's ask really good questions. Let's look for answers that can be shared with a few people. If you have 4 people listen to the same answer, someone's going to hear something great, right? Someone's going to hear something questionable. But we're now giving that candidate a chance to go beyond maybe the untuned ear of a non-technical recruiter. And I use that term very loosely. Whether it's a marketing role, a finance role, an accounting role.

Right. It doesn't have to be. And one thing to note is that you don't have to have video, right? So the video is just for the conference call itself because a lot of interviews are face-to-face via Zoom or whatever, but the video doesn't necessarily have to be recorded. You can choose to record it, but it's not part of the solution. It's the transcription of text which can be edited and redacted. So you're capturing the important bits and you're not archiving all of these hours of, you know, video and you're not putting the video in the ATS. I just want to make sure.

Yeah. And many folks love Honit just for the phone calls, like, right?

The phone screen. No video at all.

It's easier on candidates. Zero friction. Nothing to download or install. It's just a phone call with someone, right? We've been doing that for a long time.

You can actually pick up the phone and call them. Yeah, you can dial out from Honit.

You can cold call. Yeah, it's all about calls, right? Versus even more than interviews, it's just about calls. Um, yeah, we think audio— we think phone calls are more fair. We think audio is less biased. And then yeah, you can share the transcript to actually parse out even gender and things like that.

So, uh, we had a question: does it work with SuccessFactors?

Um, we have a bunch of integrations with, uh, ATS and CRMs after, but it also is very easy to use without integration. So after a Honit call You can download a PDF that has all the questions, the answers, the notes, and you can add that, you know, drag and drop it into SuccessFactors if you want. We also have an open API, Paul. So if you wanted to push data into another ATS, you can do that as well.

So yeah, if it isn't, it will be basically.

Yeah, it's just a matter of time. It's just integrations, just priority. Yeah. Yeah.

Gotcha. Okay. Now, we are— one of the things that we talked about is using the, um, the interview with hiring managers as a way to enhance our diversity hiring. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? So how, how is the interview itself something that we can use to improve diversity hiring?

Like the, the intake or kickoff call, right? Yeah. So Intake calls, I would argue, are probably the most important conversation in recruitment, right? It's that chance for a recruiter or a recruiting team to talk to the hiring manager about why the job's open, what's exciting, why the role's open today versus last year, right? Like all of these questions we're asking hiring managers in the kickoff call, that's an interview. So lots of recruiters are using HoneIt for those intake calls, whether it's a phone call or video.

So you're recording, they're recording the kickoff call with the hiring manager. Yeah. And the hiring manager's answers to these questions then become a recruiting tool.

Exactly. So just like you can share a couple of highlights from a candidate phone screen and share that with a hiring manager, if you ask the hiring manager, hey, what's the most exciting thing about this particular role? Oh my gosh, this candidate's going to be building out a new territory for us and go to market with— or whatever that pitch is. One, you just heard it from the the hiring manager. You can now share that with your recruiting team if you're an agency, or make sure the sourcers, recruiters, account managers, everybody are aligned with what the client wants. You've captured the call so you can hold hiring managers accountable and rewind the tape on what they told you, right? Oh, you didn't say you were looking for that. You told me you were looking— right? But furthermore, Charlie, you're right. If you've got a great diverse hiring manager, you can share a few highlights from that kickoff call in a job preview link, which we can show you, but you can post that on LinkedIn, you can share that with passive candidates when you're reaching out to them, and that candidate who's not super active can invest a minute to listen to a few of those highlights from the kickoff call and go, wow, I'd work for Shelly, oh my gosh, she sounds like an incredible boss. And that's what gets recruiters— helps sourcers and recruiters kind of increase response rates, attract passive or diverse candidates by showcasing great and amazing diverse hiring managers. So how do you widen that? How do you get more inbound? How do you get more response rates? It's by going beyond just a job description, sharing a link to— let's share what's exciting about the role. And that came right from the intake call, right?

So on— while, you know, obviously the first initial conversation, if it's a passive candidate, it's, I'm interested, okay, great, let's talk, tell me more about the role, okay, great, here's a link to the hiring manager explaining the role. I mean, you want to learn about the role, this is the hiring manager talking about the role. It doesn't get any better than that.

And when some people use it as prep, like you could use it prep to kind of, hey, you're gonna— you're scheduled to meet with the hiring manager, here's a link to learn a little bit more. Maybe you save that for later, or you can use it at the very top of the funnel sourcing to say, hey, we're hiring a director of sales at this amazing unicorn startup, here's a link to meet the hiring manager, book a call if you want to chat. If you like what you hear. So it's, it's that, it's that increasing transparency and conversion for candidates, right? We talk about posting salaries on jobs. That's like this like revolutionary thing is like putting the salary up. Like, let's be a little more transparent with the job. Let's actually share who the hiring manager is and use that to attract great A-players, right?

Yeah, I love that. On LinkedIn, there's a feature for hiring managers to attach themselves to a rec. Yeah, or I guess not a record job posting technically. And I love it when they do that. So, you know, we share the job posting, the LinkedIn job posting with the hiring manager and encourage them to do that, but they don't all do it. What happens is if they add themselves as the hiring manager in the job posting, it'll say, you know, this job was posted by Shelly. So Shelly, Shelly's your recruiter and Nick's your hiring manager, and both of them are linked on the rec. I keep saying rec, but you know what I mean. The top, the posting on LinkedIn. And I love that. So basically, yeah, it's the same kind of thing. You can put a link to the interview— not the, not the interview, the kickoff call. I like that. Um, yeah, another thing that, that we talked about, just kind of switching tracks a little bit because I did want to, uh, talk, touch on this subject, which is near and dear to me. Um, you know, I've got the, the Sourcing Foundation, nonprofit foundation to help people with disabilities and veterans getting to, you know, return to, um, the workforce. If you're interested in that, um, here's the, uh, the URL, Sourcing Foundation. But you also have, uh, do some work with returning veterans that are exiting the military service and are trying to bridge the gap to, you know, become employed. Now, one of the things that I found through my work with the foundation is There are certain skills that the military will provide to someone exiting the military that are very marketable, right? Just about anything in technology is a big one. People that have certain types of clearances when they come out of the military don't necessarily have a hard time. I mean, sometimes they do, but it's a little easier. However, that's a small portion. There's a whole there's a large population of people that just did their, you know, 4 years, 6 years, 8 years of service and just had regular, you know, everyday jobs that don't translate necessarily. So you have some tips on how to bridge the gap for people returning back into the workforce. In particular, what I found in my experience is female veterans have a very difficult time because, uh, there's the whole, you know, there's a whole discrimination against, uh, military in the first place, right? Like, oh, you're in the military, all you know how to do is, you know, shoot guns, right? Which is so— that they're so wrong. But that's— but that's the perception. Now, when it's a female, people get even more confused. Like, oh, you're a female and all you know how to do is shoot guns. Like, what am I going to do with you? You know, a lot of times people go, oh, you were in the military, why don't you go work for the post office? Why don't you go work for a security firm? Like, no, that's not all it was. But for women, it's even more, you know, twice or whatever as bad, because not only are they being pigeonholed into that, hey, all you know how to do is hold a gun, but they also have this other level of, you know, discrimination. So, um, do you have any, you know, in your, in your, I guess, your, your book of advice or tips or, um, sage wisdom around that that can help?

And it's not us. It's just we work with a number of amazing recruiting firms. Some have a focus on bridging the gap from DEI efforts, or some are bridging the gap on the veterans transitioning back to civilian work.

So what have you learned that helps?

Yeah, one from in particular, Tango Alpha, has done an incredible job where they recognize the resumes don't line up, right? Your resume, if you threw it into a parsing engine and tried to match military resume with a civilian job, right? You're not going to get that match, right? But yeah, when you talk to a vet, that's why they have all those crossovers and everything. Yeah, yeah. But when you talk to a veteran on that phone screen and you hear what they were working on and you discover that that Systems Analyst 3 on the submarine is basically like a NOC engineer and they're doing a lot of the same things, and you— oh, you're a NOC, you know, you're a systems admin. Oh, I, I Fantastic. Hearing some of those answers and hearing someone explain what they were working on and what they overcame and the obstacles, those soundbites are really easy for a hiring manager or hiring team to get beyond that resume mismatch, right? Oh my gosh, Shelly just told me about how he, you know, prevented attacks and managed all these different operating systems and rewired this thing. And you're a systems admin, like you keep things working, right? So I think they've realized that where the resume may fall short, soundbites or interview insights or interview highlights can help connect the dots and humanize that connection.

And so that veteran, you know, male, female, that female veteran is explaining whatever that was that sounds, you know, obscure and technical, but it's military jargon. She's explaining it as well. So what I did was I did this and this and then that. And then the hiring manager can go, oh yeah, okay, that's exactly what we did.

So you marketed, you were, you were in the journalism program and you did the whole newsletters and marketing, copywriting and copy editing, right? Where the job title wasn't a one-to-one match, the bullet points had a bunch of weird acronyms in it. The thing was the thing, this, it was the same role. And so that's pretty cool. You know, part of that comes out in human-to-human conversation, what's not on the resume, what's talked about on the phone screen, just like What's not on the job description, what's talked about or brought up in the intake call, and then you discover what's important.

So again, that gives me a good idea. I mean, it just, it's just popped into my head. So, you know, a lot of times on these, um, episodes, ideas just pop into my head and, um, you know, they're, they're not fully baked. Um, I guess they're half-baked, but this just came up. So, you know, there used to be all this, uh, talk and buzz about video resumes, and for some reason it just kind of fell off. But what if we— what if I pulled out what you just said and we, we essentially give the advice to people transitioning from the military to civilian jobs to actually have a video resume, uh, or video— I don't know, sound bite of them explaining what they did in layman's terms so that they can be. So it's almost like what you just talked about, but put it on your LinkedIn. Now, for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, in LinkedIn there's this thing called Creator Mode. So on your LinkedIn, and I believe you can, you can turn it on your PC, but I think you really should do it on your phone. The phone app makes it a little bit easier. It is accessible from the computer, but the phone app makes it easier. So you flip a switch that says, I want to be a creator, and then it allows you to essentially post kind of a video. Basically, think of it like TikTok or Twitter or Facebook, but on LinkedIn. And it goes on where your resume used to be, and it can be you explaining your job in, in a minute or 2 minutes, and it goes right into your, your profile. You can actually have it as— there's 2 places you can put it on as a video, or you can even have it as your, um, the disc icon. I don't know what that's called. You've got the hero image on top And then you've got the disc icon that has your photo in it. It can also go on the resume though.

You got your name, you got your LinkedIn URL, and then you've got your video intro, your video intro.

But actually that icon can be an animated icon that's you explaining. It's pretty cool. I don't know if you've seen that.

I think that's great. I think anything like that, a tool for the job seeker to help them communicate themselves or present themselves in a better way makes sense. But what had happened and what I don't necessarily agree with is companies adding that step to the interview process or the application process and making that a requirement. Oh, I see.

Making you create a video interview as part of it. Oh, gotcha. Yeah, I was just thinking about recording a 1-minute pitch that you can do multiple takes and you don't have to edit it. The other thing that I wanna say is guys and gals, you do not have to sweat the edit. Like, you, you just record it on your phone. If you want to, you can have a stand and some lights, but really you don't need to do the whole like, uh, production. And, you know, people don't— we're not looking at that anymore. Everybody's used to the raw, you know, video. So just record yourself talking about the job. That's enough, as long as you're explaining what you did, you know, and, and you're presentable. Right, that I would, I would advise that. Other than that, you don't have to worry about the production quality of the video, you know, you don't need video editing tools for this.

So yeah, and I think you're doing it once as a job seeker, you create something you're happy with, you got a link to showcase it, great. The idea of though requiring candidates to record themselves, answer 6 questions as a second step, like that, that's a, that's friction, that's, that's a terrible practice. People don't like being on camera. What am I looking like? I'm sweating. It's a very awkward experience if you're making that a requirement for your interview process. And I'll also say, when you add video like that, if you want, if you want to improve diversity and increase inclusion, get rid of video, right? Get rid of video. All of these one-way video tools that were supposedly a better candidate experience were the opposite. They were friction. They were pain. Most of those candidates never even got callbacks after they completed that extra step. Right. And we're pushing video and what someone looks like into the interview process, which I don't think.

Yeah. So to be clear, you're talking about these recorded one-way interviews, what they call asynchronous. Yeah. So they send you a link and they send you questions or, or it's live, but the, but the, it's not really live. It's the questions appear live, but it's not really live, stuff like that. You're not saying that we shouldn't do video interviews as part of the actual talking to people, talking to people on video versus telephone.

That's great. There's still talking to people.

But yeah, but it's a live conversation. Yeah.

And it's, and it's, and it's easy to just click a button and invite 100 candidates who you weren't going to hire and weren't going to interview to do an extra step to get their hopes up because you don't want to say no, or we got enough of that going on already.

Exactly. Yeah. I teach this class. So every, I don't know, a couple months or so, there's, there's a company that does outplacement. That you might know of. A lot of people know Lee Heck Harrison. Yeah. But there's also another one that is from Randstad called RiseSmart. It's a Randstad RiseSmart. RiseSmart is the name of the company, but it's part of Randstad. They acquired them. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a similar idea. So I teach this class. It's an hour-long class that is, by the way, if you're interested, it's available on their website. Just go to Randstad RiseSmart and you'll find it. It's free to job seekers. That, um, of course they're doing it to help people that have been displaced. So their, their job is to help, uh, companies that are, that are laying off individuals to, to find employment as part of their layoff package. Like, here, we're going to help you try and find another job, which is really nice. So what I do is I teach this class every couple of months, every other month or so, and one of the things that I talk about there, um, is the video interview and how to prepare for it. And, um, Probably the single most common question that I get that happens not every time, but almost every time, is the question about what should I wear. It's like, what should I wear? And it's interesting because people do ask me that about face-to-face interviews too, but not nearly as much, right? I mean, face-to-face as in like going in person, in person, on site, at the office. But these video, virtually, you know, Google Meeting or Zoom or whatever, People are like, "What should I wear?" And I do have some advice on that, believe it or not. There are a couple of things that you should be aware of, not because of how you look or your looks, but there are just some things that do better on video. For example, I'll just give you the top 3, and I don't know if this is something that might be useful for you guys. Number 1, jewel tones. Clothing that is jewel tone colored. Solid colors. So no stripes, no dots, no pins, no squares. Try to make it solid and jewel tones because they just do better on video. They show better, crisper, clear. They're not distracting. Stripes and other things have these weird, you know, visual effects that, that— yeah, and some colors just look horrible, or they, or they, you know, and with green screens, some people think, oh, I'm wearing a blue shirt and I'm gonna have the green screen, you know, virtual background, but all of a sudden their body's transparent because it's like, well, it's a green screen, this is blue, but there's green in the blue, stuff like that, right? It's wonky. So jewel tones don't have that problem. Number 2, for especially for the ladies, watch the neckline because anything that you would wear to an in-person interview that has a lower than average neckline wouldn't be a problem in an in-person interview, but when you're on a call and you do this, I was like, I'm leaning over as we're talking, it can be a little bit embarrassing. So watch the neckline. And number 3, sleeves. Wear sleeves, at least 3/4 sleeves if you can. Why? Because when you don't have sleeves, check this out, when you don't have sleeves and you're typing on your keyboard, right, it looks like you have monster hands. You have like these ginormous hands and this tiny little But when you put sleeves on, it minimizes that effect. So the V— watch the V-necks or the neckline. Uh, jewel tones and sleeves are the, you know, some of the best tips. Just, it doesn't matter what you wear, but these are just kind of some general advice that I always give candidates because they freak out about like, well, what am I going to wear? Aside from that, you know, check the lighting if it's too dark or if it's too bright, but usually that's not a problem. And check the background.

Shelly, about the, the outplacement though, that's, that's a really great— I mean, that's a great service to folks who are impacted. I think those firms could, could do one better, right? When you— if you talk to a candidate and interview them about what they're looking for and do that coaching session, that's a call with some great questions and answers that could be captured and curated, and that link could come right out of that call. That, that link that you're talking about highlights could be a service that these outplacement firms provide. Pretty cool. You're right, we're gonna talk to each of the impacted employees, we're gonna ask them about their ideal next role, we're gonna ask them about what— and that's a highlight reel right there, Shelley. Yeah, I mean, we've talked to some outplacement firms about, about that offering where it's like, now you're giving the, the person not only talk to them and coaching them, but they're getting to get that branded lead, that Terrelson link that they can put on their resume, add it to their—

I'll introduce you to my friend at RiseSmart that does these educational events. But I just thought it was a, you know, pulling together two different worlds. So hey, listen, I realized I told you it was only gonna be half an hour and I've kept you for 10 minutes past. So sorry about that. This happens a lot, by the way. I'm terrible at keeping time. On these, on these chats because they're just so much fun. And we, once you get rolling with that idea, you don't want to, you know, you don't want to kill the idea. So, um, thanks a lot for joining us today. And everybody out there, Happy New Year, happy 2023. Before we go, Nick, I always want people to have like one big takeaway. Is there one piece of advice or Nickism or wisdom that you would like everybody to have as a parting favor from you?

I just think fundamentally the recruiting profession and hiring people, it's a human, it's a human thing, and conversations are essential. So whatever we want to do to automate the process, we can do a lot of that. But let's not remove that human conversation, whether it's a phone call or a video call, talking to people. Let's, let's keep it human, right?

Keep it human. Human resources. Interesting. Human. Yeah, that seems cliché or something like that. I know, but that's true. It's like, keep it human, you know? You can't hear that enough. You hear it a lot, but you just can't hear it enough.

We've got all technology. I mean, even in the chat thread, everything was about, oh, let's use OpenAI and auto summarization. Like, we can quickly go there with technology, and some industries, some departments Some companies can do that, right? But, but I think we need to use technology for advantage without losing the human.

Automation versus, right, like automating the repetitive tasks that are trivial and menial. And yeah, use the machine for the— yeah, use the machine for the work that's boring and hard and time-consuming, and then let's, you know, focus on people. I love that. That's, that's, that's to me, probably the biggest takeaway of anything with automation. So yeah, I appreciate it. Use the automation to help you do your job, but not to eliminate human contact, the human element.

Yeah, exactly. Shelly, it's been a pleasure. Thanks again for the invite, and we'll see you at the next conference, I'm sure.

Happy New Year, everybody. Take care.