Patrick Moran Live on Shally's Alley

All right, what's up, party people? It is Friday, April 5th, and you are live on Shelly's Alley. Too bad it's not April 1st. Last year we had a Shelly's Alley episode on April 1st, and we played a pretty big prank on Ryan from Recruiting Daily where Brian Fink and I announced the big secret that Ryan had left Recruiting Daily and gone to work for SourceCon. And he was getting all these calls and messages and he's like, what's going on? April Fools, buddy. So too bad we don't have an April Fools, but happy April nonetheless. And thank you for joining us live on Shelly's Alley. You might notice something about me, something different. Yeah, no? I didn't get a haircut. I am actually hands-free. I no longer have this contraption tied to me, so I can get up and sit down and dance around. I probably won't, but I can. I'm using my studio microphone now. How cool is that? Some time ago, I paid a bunch of money for it, and I never really used it, so I figured, hey, it's time to do it. So welcome today to our special guest and also repeat offender, Patrick Moran. Patrick was on the show— oh my gosh, how long ago was that? Like 3 years ago, we determined.

Yeah, and then like COVID years, that's like 6, 7 years ago.

I know, decades, right? Yeah, yeah. So, um, Patrick is a longtime friend, contributor. He, he's started back in the day at, uh, Aerotech, for those of you that may even remember uh, the, the name Aerotech. They eventually became a lead part of Allegis. But back in the day, Aerotech had a big reputation for having a very strong training program, like, from, from the beginning. And so, like, they, you know, brought people in and they had this whole, whole curriculum and everything. And then so people usually got a good foundation in, um, recruiting and even sourcing back then. Um, then he went to go work for the government and working in the intelligence industry with the clandestine services and the military, working all kinds of secret government missions. And Patrick was one of my go-to people to ask questions about that. Um, as many of you know, I've worked in that space multiple times, but he was there for almost 12 years, I think, right, with BAE?

Yep.

And then what's that?

Uh, 13. Yeah, 13.

Wow, wow. Okay, a long time. Yeah, so, uh, definitely a whole nother universe of, uh, sourcing and recruiting with its own, its own challenges and all that. But we're not here to talk about the government. We are here to talk about talent in today's marketplace. And I wanted to ask Patrick some questions about building a sourcing team in the middle of all this— I don't even know what to call it— turmoil or whatever. So, uh, Patrick is now at Ford. That's right, the motor company, not the model— not the modeling agency— at Ford Motor Company. And he's been there a couple years now building a sourcing team. Patrick, what are— first of all, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it. This is always a treat to get to talk to you, so thank you.

My pleasure. Yeah, love the art back there, by the way. That lots of—

that is not my art. Yeah, I know.

I'm glad that— I'm glad that it's— you're showing off, um, you know, kids and family and spouse art. I, you know, I've been dying to ask you, so how— first of all, how awkward is it right now to build a sourcing team? In the middle of all this? I don't even know what to call it. Just, yeah, mess that we're in right now.

It's a, it's a scary time because in one moment you feel great and confident and everything is, is going well, and then all of a sudden you, you see a domino fall and a big company lays off, you know, their entire recruitment team, and then another one lays off half the team, and then a Silicon Valley company lays off 5,000 people. And so As a sourcer and a recruiter, you start to salivate and you go, all right, everybody, let's go get their candidates and let's go poach and let's go do all that. You get excited when you see layoffs, but then you start to get that also, that feeling of like, man, this one's falling, that one's falling. Or you watch in automotive, you know, we all look at each other and look at the industry and we all follow each other. And so you see a headline about this company is offering buyouts or this company is having a huge layoff and we all stampede. You know, this is great. There's a layoff at at Stellantis, or, oh my God, Tesla share price dropped and they're probably going to do some layoffs. Let's go get them. But then you're also in the back of your head thinking, okay, when are they— when's it coming for us?

And at the same time, I'm sure there's also higher— like, so, like, you know, layoffs over here and hiring over there. And how weird is that, right?

Yeah, the layoffs are almost concurrent with, with the hiring.

With hiring. Yeah. And then you hear, like, today, like, The jobs report came out and it's significantly ahead of expectation. Unemployment is, is down. But by the way, when I say the jobs report is ahead of expectations, what that means is it's a lot better than they thought it was going to be, but it's still not as good as it was last year. So, yeah, you know, we're still behind compared to last year, but we're ahead compared to what we thought we were going to be. And then unemployment's down. So, you know, like 3.9 or something like that. So it's just— so you hear about layoffs and then you hear about low unemployment and you hear about companies that are, that are having a hard time hiring. Oh, we can't find enough candidates. It's so weird. But, um, we can't solve that right now. What I, what I'm dying to know is what, what has it been like? Like, you got, you got there and they're like, build a sourcing team, and you were like, okay, wow. Uh, what was the first thing you did?

So, um, so I'll take you back in my mind. The first thing, I accepted my offer. I'm very excited. And it was on a Friday and we had a vacation. That was the first thing?

Yeah, we had a vacation.

I'll take you from step moment one, and this is the roller coaster. So this is the ticking up of the roller coaster, and I pretty much went right down within not too long. So accepted the offer on a Friday, um, and had a vacation planned for Monday. So on Monday, went on the vacation. I'm, I'm living high on the hog. Everything's great. I've got this new job, this great job offer. It was part of the great resignation period, you know. I, I kind of watched most of my, uh, long-term perform— higher performing team members go for other opportunities. You know, 4 or 5 years ago. And I eventually said, man, I'm kind of having to rebuild everything here anyway. Maybe it's time after 13 years to poke my head up. So I went on that vacation, and that Monday was the day that Ford announced, we're going to completely rethink Ford, and we're going to break up the organization and create this new Model E, which is all the electrification. We've got Ford Blue, and then, and then Ford Pro, and all the corporate sort of stuff. So, um, that day, uh, Joe Shanbaum, who hired me, who is an amazing, um, TA professional, um, and a great boss, said, hey Patrick, everything's fine, you're not affected, I'm not affected, but I don't know how long I'll be your boss for, and, you know, just buckle up. And this was, you know, uh, I've still probably—

except for I might not be your boss, which does affect you.

Yeah. So I'm telling my wife like, it's— I'm sure it'll be fine, it'll be fine. And And sure enough, 3, 4 months in, Joe and I were meeting often and building out the team and just sort of bouncing ideas off each other and had big plans. I came from a team that was a very similar size business to Ford in, in reps and in business size and revenue. Hey, Joe, I just thought he commented. And so I came from a very similar size and scope of a team, and we had anywhere between 8 to 16 sourcers. To fit in with a team of about 30 to 40 or so recruiters. And so I came here with big plans of a multifunctional, high-performing, you know, several layers of sourcing support aligned to the business, kind of floating, just-in-time sort of sourcing, and then a pretty heavy, you know, fill the top of the funnel, true like researcher sourcing. Type of role. And so we, about 3 months in, we had a huge layoff and about half of the team, including Joe, were swept up in that. And so I was, you know, just leaving the runway ready to fly. And then we were really in a dark moment there.

A couple of weeks ago, the runway.

Yeah. Yeah. So we slowly, very slowly picked myself off the mat and started to rebuild this team. And we had some large projects that came in. So we brought in some, some help and we're still at a very modest team of just 5 sourcers and myself to support a very large—

hire everybody. And when you— I mean, these are people you had to hire or were there? Yep. Sources already there. Oh, okay.

So yeah, I have one FTE that, that Joe and I talked to. So he's still here. Rob is here, Joe. Now I'm just going to talk to Joe the rest of this, this interview. All right. So Rob's my one FTE and then we've got some contract sourcers. Who are an amazing team. I really have a great team. When it's such a small team, it's so critical to hire the right people because 1 out of 5, if you have a dud for 20% of your team, is really hurtful.

Right?

Yeah.

So, um, you're going through what I did, you know, I, a couple years ago, 2000, 2001 or 2002, started building, um, a sourcing team from scratch, you know, from the ground up. And, uh, so you, you've been going through that. What, what has you— what has you— wow, where is my English? English hard. What has been your biggest headache, your biggest pain in the butt with building the team?

Just specifically to building the team, I think, um, you know, every organization, um, I think TA because a lot of people in the business think of TA as this is not a revenue-generating part of the business, right? Even though we are and even though what we do is fundamental to the people that are actually turning the widgets and building the cars and all that.

Making the sales and all that, right?

Right. But they think like you're, you know, you're a charge. You're not making us money. So I think the recruiters get fed first traditionally and then sourcers get the scraps, right? So I think every organization— this is not unique to Ford. I think usually the data people and the finance people get their say and get their whack when you get new systems and new tools and tech stack, and then HR and then TA gets in the fold, and then sourcing is like after everything's already been decided. So I think it's always a challenge for sourcers, for sourcing teams to affect the tech stack and to find dollars where, you know, you're in a cost-cutting environment. I've been in the industry 20 years. I don't ever know if I've ever been in an environment where they said like, we got more budget this year, let's go spend it. It's usually, hey, we got to find 5% somewhere. So the biggest frustration for me, and again, not unique to Ford, is I would always like more team members. I'd always like more time. I'd always like— I've got all the ideas, I've got the playbook, I've got every little button we could push from a sourcing standpoint, but with a modest you know, 5 members on my team, it's tough to spread all the sourcing love around and do every single thing I'd like to do. Okay, so the real challenge for me is that creativity exercise and that just thinking like, we want to do a robust competitive intel strategy, we want to do robust layoff outreach, we want to do diversity sourcing, we want to do every single evergreen skill set, we want to knock down the hot recs, we want to knock down the aging recs, we need to support all the high-volume projects, critical, critical, like high, high priority, and do that with 5 people supporting 1,200, you know, active recs and like 40 recruiters. So it's very daunting.

And executives in other countries.

Yes, yes, we're mostly US-based, but it's tech, you know, it's technical sourcing. These aren't like So we have a manufacturing side of the house that does their own thing. And then our roles are all technical and engineering. So they're not easy candidates to reel in either.

So let's dive into this a little bit. You know, there's, there's lots of different ways. There's organizational design theory around how to build, you know, robust teams, how to build teams that are, that are remote. You know, you've got all these different theories and practices about building teams, but in sourcing we have a particular challenge that is about alignment. Yeah, you don't usually have a— you don't usually have a debate or difficulty aligning your resources in an organization because it's typically done by whatever the, you know, either functional or the silo or the, you know. But in sourcing, we, we tend to run into this frequently. Um, how did you— if whatever you can share that's not proprietary— how did you decide to align your team? Is it based on verticals? Is it based on geography? Is it based on department or channels or skill set? What was the Determination.

So another great thing about accepting my job offer and then walking into a completely rethinking-itself company is that the alignment continues and realignments to this day. So every time we— it's like the Charlie Brown thing. Every time we think we've aligned our TA teams and I'm ready to go align a sourcer, we, you know, reshuffle the deck.

But generally speaking, maybe not necessarily exactly right now, but generally speaking, is the philosophy one of aligning based on function or territory or channel?

I don't think— yeah, I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. I think it depends on your business, on what you go after, what your evergreen skill sets are, um, you know, what your sourcing methodology is. If it's, if it's a researcher top of the funnel, then, um, you know, maybe you're just picking skill sets and you're saying, you go get these 20 skill sets, you go get those 20, you go get those 20. Where it becomes a real challenge and a resource exercise is I've got 4 main customer groups and 5 people, and a lot of the customer groups bleed into each other and a lot of the skill sets, even on the manufacturing side to our engineering side, a lot of that vehicle Engineering vehicle manufacturing stuff is very similar. So I definitely can't claim that we're perfect at it, but we're trying to do two things at once. We're, we're aligning sourcers to certain business verticals that have a lot of the same sort of skill sets so they can have those deep pipelines because you need that, you need that alignment. I think that's always The most important thing is that that sourcer, those recruiters that go to that sourcer, you know, feel comfortable, know that person knows the business, and it's just a much quicker—

so it's industry expertise. They're— source— you're aligning sources based on their industry knowledge.

Their pipelines are deeper and their pipelines can snap to quicker. They understand the reqs quicker. You don't have to keep, you know, going through an exercise of discovering the call or the rec parameters over and over. I've kind of kept it aligned to that extent. And then the evergreen stuff is where it's a real challenge. We're trying to do more of that currently. And that's where I've been trying to find sort of lower-hanging fruit, things that we can just weave into our day that are more proactive in nature. And also having a team that is connected with each other can share resumes quickly. And, and because you always have that fear when you do align people is, okay, you've got a developer here, you've got a developer there, developer there.

So no sharing. Yeah.

Yeah.

So aside from the, from the industry dimension, is there another dimension that you could use to, to resource the team? I mean, some companies it's territorial, and that's kind of an easy one, but that's not always possible, especially if you don't have enough resources for the territory. But you can align, you know, West Coast versus East Coast, however, and that, that's fairly straightforward. So if you don't have the ability to do that, then what's, what's the next dimension that you would use? Is it based on channel or based on the sorcerer's particular skill set?

That's the way I've always, I've always fought rigidity, fought alignment in anything I do, usually because I'm having to work with limited resources and sort of spread it around and move resources. So a lot of times, and when we started here at Ford and I had the 5, we kept it almost like agency where it's like, throw us a wreck, I'll approve it, sign off, we'll assign a sorcerer. And as they start going, you start realizing this one's great at development, or this person lives in Palo Alto, they know the lingo, they know all the players, go get it. Or this person came to us from Rivian and they— yep. So I think they naturally find their own alignments, or you pair a recruiter and a sourcer and they just have a great rapport. Things go well, they get it, they're like an active user. And so you just chase that as far as it'll go. I like to kind of set people in motion on things they like. I think if you're working something, being voluntold or doing something that doesn't jive with what, you know, excites you, or you can't quite talk to the technology piece, or you can't just quite get into, you know, the meat of the reqs, I think that makes it a challenge. So I try to find people, whether it's hiring people, with a certain pedigree or a certain background or just a certain personality type to match with the business. I try to find those alignments, let them find themselves normally. And, and rarely, you know, I think that that works well so long as you can— you have the right amount of people and the people in the right places. Got it.

Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, you know my philosophy, we've talked about this before, and I share my my structure on the sourcing pods. And I definitely feel like that adaptability is, is absolutely critical for sourcing because of the changes that we— the restrictions that we face and, you know, budget and all that. So it's, it's always been my, my philosophy to make sourcing teams rapidly deployable and fully ad hoc. So, you know, you've got to find a way to prioritize incoming reqs Gotta find a way to organize and strategize what you're gonna do so you have a plan and you have workflows. But whenever people ask me, how should I align them by function or by department or pair them up with a recruiter? I always say, it's really not, I think you should just create a pod of, you know, 2 or 3 or 4 sourcers that work together and let them figure out what's, what's best for them as a pod. And interestingly enough, you know, I've been talking about this for, um, geez, probably at least 15 years, if not more than that. And it came from, as, as I'm sure you know, the intelligence services, because that's how they organize their desks as far as like the way intelligence is collected throughout the world. You obviously can't have all of the world's intel reporting into one person, right? But it actually does come out to be like the, you know, President of the United States, POTUS, gets a 7:15 AM intel briefing every day, and it is the world's intelligence rolled up into one person. So how do they do that? Well, they do that by dividing things up into essentially these pods. Where they have specialists in each country that report to a desk. That country desk reports to the region, the region reports to the hemisphere, and so on. So I borrowed from that, and I borrowed from just-in-time inventory and just-in-time manufacturing, and came out with this structure. Well, lo and behold, a couple years back, probably 7 years or so, I was at this— attending this lecture from this general that in the military that had created a concept called teams of teams, where basically he was saying in order to, in order to operate in a world where, you know, you sometimes don't have any communication with your troops and where you have to make split decisions without that communication, they split up into these, into these teams that essentially line up exactly with the pods that I was talking about for years. So I was like, oh yeah, vindicated, right? And the way that he talks about it, it's a book you can find on Amazon called Teams of Teams or Team of Teams. Basically, he's like, you know, you need a small squad that, or pod in our case here, that can move or adjust with what's happening on the ground and operate within the broader parameters. So you have broader parameters that are like, all right, here's what we want you to do. What you actually do day to day may vary as long as it aligns with the old, right? And you might respond to, like you said, so-and-so's having a layoff. All right, well, we're gonna switch over and do some layoff sourcing right now because for the next 4 hours we have a competitive advantage. So things like that. Um, so I'm glad to hear that that's alive and well. And if anybody's interested, check out that Team of Teams. I wanna dig a little bit deeper on something that you said, which is finding people. Specifically finding sourcers. It wasn't that long ago where, you know, when I was starting to build my sourcing team at my prior engagement, it was really hard to find sourcers. I contacted everybody that I knew. I think I even called you up and I'm like, you know, do you know anyone? Do you know anyone? Nobody was looking. Everybody was engaged. The skyrocketing prices. And it was really hard to find anybody that can source. And then now, um, it's the other way around. It's— there's a lot of people looking, but it's really hard to, uh— how do I say this without being offensive? Oh, whatever, it doesn't matter. I'm not trying to be offensive, but you kind of have to separate the wheat from the chaff. You got a lot of applicants. You know, we— I posted a job for a sourcer and I got 2,000 applicants overnight. So what are you doing to determine which one's actually really good?

Yeah. So I personally look to the personality fit. I just, I treat my interviews, I don't do a super technical, like whiteboard, I don't do a ton of, you know, get here's a scenario, give me a behavioral you know, examples, who I should be, who are trained on those, right? Yeah. So I ask all the questions and I go through all the usual sort of stuff. But what I'm listening for is, can I work with this person? Can I— do I jive with this person? If we're in that foxhole and we get thrown in that pod to do this huge skunkworks project that is super demanding and super tough, Am I going to be able to trust that person? So, you know, it's hard to define, and it's definitely not in the job description. But I think, you know, I listen for the answers, I listen for all the usual stuff. I want someone that is passionate about what they do. Honest, accountable, detail-oriented, self-motivated. So I'm looking for a lot. And a lot of it is softer skills. The sourcing thing, I think if you can recruit, if you can source on anything, you know, I had an employee in my last role in the defense and intelligence community that came— her last role before that was at Tyson's, the chicken farming company. So she was hiring chicken farmers and chicken farm workers and was a great sourcer at sourcing intel community. So, and it was because of her personality, it was because of her type A, um, you know, go-getter sort of mentality. So I'm really looking for the qualities of a person. And some of the questions are soft skills.

Yeah. Okay.

And I think I listen for certain things. I listen for like— oh, because you get a lot of recruiters that will interview as sourcers, or you get a lot of recruiter candidates that are maybe making that transition, which I've hired and they do well as well. But I want to know like What motivates you about recruiting? What do you like best? If it's, I love, you know, the customer interaction, I love finding someone a job, I love the touchy-feely, like I'm happy about making people happy, that's fine. And that's a good answer. Some people answer like, I just can't get off a search once I get on it. I'm so like driven to just find that unfindable person. That's like, okay, there's, there's an aha. Moment in an interview.

Um, I don't know, a core— an aptitude or a, um, core strength, right? It's, it's just—

yeah, it's not, it's not, it's not a Boolean, it's not these list of tools. And I'll listen for like a methodical, some sort of methodology to how they source. And even some that maybe it's not that impressive of a list of tools or a list of places, but but how they have that mentality, they have that inquisitive nature, they have that, you know, that, that self-motivated thing. So I just, I think those are the folks that have worked best for me, regardless of the technical answers to questions they had, was that personality fit. Okay.

So once you, once you make a decision, and you've got somebody starting on your team, you know, you're building out a team, do you have a formal onboarding curriculum or structure specifically for sourcing? Not about onboarding to the company. Of course you have that. It's company onboarding, but I mean onboarding into sourcing, right? Do you have a list of things that— what do you have them do in the first couple of weeks?

Yeah, it's not a robust program. like that. I usually hire folks that come with a point of view, are mid-level to senior professionals. A lot of, a lot of them are, you know, 20 years plus in industry. Um, so I, I don't— I've never seen my sourcing teams as like, we take a recruiting coordinator. Used to be, right, 20 years ago, it was like your recruiting coordinators or the recruiter that couldn't do the salesy part of the job was the sourcer, and then they someday graduated to hopefully be a recruiter. I think we've gone way past those days, and it's, it's a specialty. So, um, I, I try to hire folks that are pretty self-sufficient and know what they, you know, know their stuff. So I don't really feel that burning need to do that. That said, uh, right now we are revamping our sourcing method methodology documentation to say this is every— this is our Bible, our source of truth. This is step 1, 2, 3, 4, 100 of the places you can go. Similarly, on the customer side of things, we're providing them with a menu, a dashboard to say, if you want sourcing support, you might have thought it was just Recruiter Lite, or you might have thought it was just a funnel, or you might have thought some crazy— God knows what they think we are at this point. It's funny when you hear And when you ask people, you tell them you're a sourcer, they have no clue, right? And even people that interact with sourcers half the time don't know what we do. So we don't— I don't have a real rigorous onboarding and training program because I usually hire folks that, that are pretty senior. But, and I also, that creative part of me that, that I want people to do things in the way that they like to do it best. I like to have this few parameters and guardrails.

You have workflows, you have like, you know, do this and that.

But as long as you can, very minimum, like, as long as you know how to do this and that, everything else you've got liberty to be creative. Yeah, the marketing we'll talk about, and, and I'm always open. That's the thing too, is like, I'm not a finished product. I don't know everything about recruiting sourcing. It changes constantly. The market changes. People's ideas change too. That novelty of you get a new person, that's the That's the great part about diversity is that diversity of thought, background, how you look at candidates, how you reach out to candidates. I want a diverse team. I want a diverse thinking team. And that way I can plug them in in ways that their diversity helps.

Yeah, well said. Absolutely. Yeah, I have a— I have an outline of things that I cover. That's it. I'm not going to say it's rigid. It's just well documented. That talks about the workflow, right? So here's what I'm expecting the outcomes to be, and then everything else in between is, you know, you're— you can run your desk the way you want to, but there are gates that they have to cross. So there are things that, you know, I do teach them how to do. We have a question from— actually two now. One of them from Ben Weber wants to know, how are you structuring research teams versus just-in-time? It sounds like Your answer is that they both do, the team members do both. But he goes on to ask, what does success look like for you in this and how is it measured? So let's take the research side, 'cause the other side is a little bit easier, even though a lot of people answer it differently. But with research only, or as you said, competitive intel, how is success measured?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And if you know the answer or know someone who does, let me know. I think it's more, it's obviously so much more qualitative than quantitative, and I think it's the storytelling. So it is, we had this big project, we put this researcher there, and you can give some high-level facts and figures, but I think telling the story of they went here, they went there, they found this many leads here, this many there. You're never gonna stand on your hires or even your offers or even your interviews for someone that's a researcher, right? Um, so I think it's more, um, those exciting moments for people that aren't into sourcing or don't quite know exactly what goes into what we do to say, well, they did this type of search and they did that, methods that people, you know, like the layperson, would have no clue a sourcer is capable of and can do. So I think it's doing the storytelling, you, you can have some, some great numbers to throw on a spreadsheet, but it's not going to be like a traditional funnel at all. It's not going to have to get comfortable with storytelling.

Like, what's the— what is the point of the story? I guess what I'm trying to say.

Yeah. It's that we went the places your recruiters didn't have the time to or the resources or the know-how, and we found stuff.

And whether the stuff was diamonds or whether the 10,000 people came out to 100 hires, you don't know what you're gonna find, but you know you're gonna find something.

So, and so many things can happen on the way to 'I sourced a bunch of candidates' to 'They got hired' that are way out of a researcher's control, right? You have to really value the process they took and, and what came out of it. You couldn't do an amazing bunch of process and have nothing to come out of it. So you have to have some wins. You have to go, okay, we got this data. And I think a part of the researching should be enriching the data. It's not just I pulled 100,000 leads off of the dark web or something and, and just good luck, go, go run with it. Like, I can't, I can't do anything with that. Business leader can't do anything with that. You got to be able to get it, enrich it, and actually in some cases reach out to the people, you know, campaign. You can't just give me— I've hired researcher sourcers that were true researchers and that's all they could do, and they just give you this like 5 terabyte file of gobbledygook and you're like, well, this was great, this took you 6 months, and you know, I'm out $100,000. Like, I need to actually be able to do something with it. So I think that's the—

that's a very good point. So yeah, I would, I would jump on that and say that I think that the difference between the just-in-time sourcing against RECs, where you clearly have candidates in the pipeline and you can measure however you wanna measure, but one of the things that I would look for in answering Laura's question here is measuring the success of the sourcers. I think that the most important metric to look at with just-in-time is the percentage of candidates candidates that make it to whatever the first interview is, which could be a phone screen with the hiring manager, it could be a tech screen, it could be an online questionnaire, whatever that first step is, but they pass application review and they move forward. So to me, it's the percentage of those that do versus don't and the number of those that do compared to previous, you know, previous comparable periods. So that to me is the number one metric, but for research, it gets a lot more difficult. Like we have someone asking about market mapping. Oh, that's Joe, there we go. And the pure list generation that you talked about, I think there not only is the enrichment important, but when you're looking at how to measure success, and this is your job as the manager, the team leader, is to be able to make it actionable. So whatever the numbers are, whatever the data is, it has to, like you were saying, tell a story, but tell a story that is an actionable story, right? Whatever that recommendation is, we should do this or we should do that, or, you know, and it's, and it's the difference between information and wisdom. It's the difference between analysis and visualization. And that's a really difficult, it's a challenging thing to do because in order for you to visualize or represent that research, you've gotta do it in such a way that the audience is going to understand it. You might have a really good way of telling the story of what the research outcome was, but that might not be a story that the audience understands. Part of it is synthesizing it into a story. Part of it is figuring out a way to make that be a recommendation. And then the other part of it, let's say it's a third, a third, and a third, is making it, visualizing it or representing it in a way that the audience, whether it's hiring managers or executive leadership, wants to see it or not, maybe not wants to see it, but can understand it, right? Like for example, we did all this research, blah, blah, blah. The outcome was we have— we now have a comprehensive list of every competitor, where they're located, their websites, their direct access phone numbers, a number of employees, you know, types of roles, etc. So we have a market map to answer the other question here about market mapping. We have a market map and we now are able to pinpoint target companies. Well, who cares? What's the point of that? Well, the point of that is that next time we get a weird wreck for something that we don't do very frequently, we can go into our market map and pinpoint the names of 5 target companies. And you know as well as I do that when you go out and you source for people from particular target companies, the results are faster and more accurate. Because if those are the companies that do the things that you need done, they don't need to be competitors, right? In the intelligence industry, they're frequently not going to be competitors, right? But as long as they're companies that hire the same people that you need to hire, then they can be a good target. So now your outcome is the story of we are able to go to market faster because we have this map. So to me, that's kind of the, the, the measure, um, And then the other question is, for you, how are you measuring success now? In other words, like, I, I shared my point of view on the just-in-time and the research, but what is success for, you know, a large manufacturing company?

Yeah, it's very similar for me. Um, well, I'd like to know the full funnel from how many leads you looked at to contacted to screened to Submitted, interviewed, offered, and hired. I really think right around— you want to make sure, you know, you've— everyone's seen that recruiter that submits a million candidates and throws crap against the wall and nothing sticks, and they're just sort of doing this pantomime. And, and then you've got folks that are like a sniper and they send one candidate, you really trust it, and that's the one that gets hired. And they're one for one. So I think you can have all the eye-popping numbers, um, on the front of the top of the funnel, um, or you could be doing well at the end of the funnel. But you could be doing well at the end of the funnel because you had a dialed-in consultative recruiter that was taking your submittals, selling them to the hiring manager, really working the hiring manager and getting those offers through and really knowing the market. Or you could have a dud recruiter and you could do all this great sourcing work you could send them over and they sit on it for a week or two weeks, or they haven't really fully qualified the rec, or they're giving you that.

If you have— what do you have the outcome that you want? What if you have the hires that you want, but, um, they're the ones that are the kind of recruiter that's doing the throw paper at the wall, right? They're doing that, but they still get the outcome. You know, how do you—

you're ruining your brand if you do that, right? Because if I'm reaching out to 100 candidates, yeah, I reach out to 100, I hear back from 60, I submit all 60, and 2 get hired, there's 58, you know, upset people. Especially when it comes to if you're dealing in volume, higher volume than you can manage, you're not giving people that personal touch, you're not giving them timely feedback, you're not giving them, you know, a good feeling and a good customer experience.

So that's the problem I have with using higher numbers, hires as a metric for sourcing. I get asked this question so much, and I'm— I am blue in the face from pounding my fist on the desk saying, no, do not measure sourcers by number of hires. Yeah, that is a department metric. That is the metric that you use as a manager to measure whether or not you're being successful in TA. But even that number by itself is absolutely pointless because the measure that you really want as a leader is what percentage of reqs are filled. It's the staffing rate. It's really not the number of hires. Because if I told you 12 hires, that means nothing. If I said 12 hires out of 12 openings, that's different. But if I said 12 hires and I said out of 100, then you'd be like, oh, that's not very good, right?

Easy recs versus one possible rec.

That number of hires is terrible measure, even more terrible for sourcers. But I think for sourcers, there are, um, you know, like I said, first of all, the number of people who actually make it to interview and, and the percentage that convert and also no matter what you look at, you wanna also compare that to time. So you wanna have improvement, which is what really a metric is. Otherwise it's not a metric, it's a measure. A point in time is a measure. A point in time over time or the same point over time is a metric. So let's stick to that. And I would say beyond that, you can use for both, situations, the research and the, and the, the just-in-time, as Ben was saying, you can use the quality measures that you were talking about before. So now whether the sourcer is to the recruiter, the sourcer is to the hiring manager, whether it's the sourcer's response rate, these are all ways to look at the quality of are you sourcing too many. If you source 100,000 and only get 20 responses, well, that you know, that's not good quality, right? So you want to look at the quality in the different steps as an aggregate. We had, um, a question on, uh, what about market mapping? How would you go about doing the market mapping? What tools do you suggest? So you're doing some of this right now. Are there any tools that you can point to without becoming an advertorial, uh, for market mapping?

Well, this won't be because I've, I've never had a huge tools budget for stuff like this. This is a luxury.

So how are you doing it? The question is, how are you doing it?

Yeah. So on the paid side, any of those business intelligence tools are no-brainer, easy ones. ZoomInfo and HubSpot, all the different sales sort of tools. I think also like some of those market mapping ones, whether it's LinkedIn Insights or Lightcast or some of the CRMs now are giving this sort of data too. So if you have paid tool, tools that you can access, great. Otherwise, I think it's, you know, AI is coming into the picture now where you can ask AI what the top, the top companies are in a certain skill set and then ask a new prompt and another prompt. So you can go around there. Now I've tried that to say, give me a list of the top 100, you know, battery electric vehicle manufacturers and it'll give you 10 and then you say, well, Give me all of them. And then you'll get in an argument with the AI and they'll say, well, I'm not really going to give you that many. So they've put guardrails around how much they'll give you. And I've tested that ground. Right.

Yeah, there's ways to do it. But I think some AIs are better than others at that. But yeah, so AI or generative AI, large language models is one, essentially searches, right? Going on Google and trying to find lists of companies that, you know, have already been put together.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. I think for, for me, it's always— I— a lot of what I do has been, you know, on a budget, um, everywhere I've been. And so a lot of it is Google search.

All alone there, man.

Yeah, really, really. It's a Google search. It's, okay, you know, electrification or what have you. And you'd be shocked at what you get. Or if you throw in a file type or you throw in a, you know, some keywords around speakers or professional organizations, you know, you start to go to, oh, here's a certifying authority for battery modules or something. And then all of a sudden you've got a list of the companies that want certification there, the sponsors, the attendees. So yeah, I think like just doing that, I call it pulling the thread. Like you get one little breadcrumb, it brings you to the next. You go down the dead end. Okay, nope, we're gonna tweak the search. So that's what I love, is like writing a search, tweaking the search 100 times until you found every little possible honey hole of data.

And then, yeah, well, I, I, I know myself, I, I said not to turn into an advertorial, but since the question was asked, two paid tools that I can point to that are relatively, um, you know, they're not super expensive like, like some of the ones that you mentioned, LinkedIn Analytics, for example, is prohibitively expensive in my opinion. But two that I would recommend, the first one is, it's called TalentView from, it's a company, let me see if I can pull up the webpage and put that up on the chat here. Public Insights is the name of the company. So the website, so the product is TalentView, but the website is PublicInsight, sorry, singular, publicinsight.io. And that TalentView is a very deep source of information that includes market movements, it includes demographics, it includes resumes, keyword, like what do resumes look like now, the shift in geographic locations. And also things like some sentiment analysis, you know, from a variety of not just Glassdoor but a variety of places. So TalentView is a really robust tool. And the other one would be Claro Analytics, which I think is one of the ones you were mentioning about the RPO. Or, um, so Claro has an on-demand product. And so, you know, Public Insights TalentView is a subscription and it's got very deep data including real-time compensation. Claro is a subscription-based and it has a different kind of data that's a little bit more around the, um, I would say it's, it revolves around instant access to, um, reporting that you could use to visualize to your leadership, right? Like talent supply and talent demand, you know what I mean? That kind of stuff. It reminds me a little bit of like that— I don't know if Indeed still does this, but indeed used to have that talent supply report. They probably don't do that as, as much anymore, but it used to be only for a particular job. Like, you do have to have a job function. Claro, you can do that for diversity, you know, Asian, Black, Latinx, and you can do it for geography, education. So it's like a talent demand map, which is pretty neat. So those are two tools that I would, um point people to.

I think AI is changing that, those companies too, for the better. I think it's making it way easier for them to scrape, analyze, get all the data, and then to analyze and visualize. I think like that's where AI is. I'm not a big fan of like the matching technology or the AI is gonna spit out a list of candidates. I still think myself, my sourcers can do that way better. But I think like data analytics, high-level stuff. And I do also wanna throw in an endorsement for your sourcer screens, your recruiter screens. Well, it's great, and you can give a directional slide deck that'll say, you know, these are the top 20 competitors, these are the schools, this is the market, this is what we think about salary. And, and it's, it's very impressive. I think it's like Mike Tyson said, once everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? So you can have this great plan, but once you start talking to the market, that's when you're really going to find out. And I think we grew up in an age where the data was very slow. The salary insights were slow. It was based on government, you know, census data or what have you. The skill sets were not specific. Now with AI and with scraping technology and all that, we can get much more timely, much more accurate, you know, scraping of job postings, scraping of resumes and things like that. So I think it's much better.

These models are really good at that. They're good at processing large volumes. That's what they are, large language models. So large volumes of information. And if it's homogeneous information, it can determine some patterns. In fact, that's one of the, to me, it's one of the gaps that I see in the ChatGPT model where like they're giving you some of these things for free. Gemini does this as well. But you can't really upload like a spreadsheet and say, tell me something about, you know, it's, it's still just text. Like, I'd love to be able to give it actual tables of data. You can do this if you pay the premium, but give it like tables of data and say, what are the top job titles here? You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. Um, we have a question about campaigns. What, what are you doing around the relationship building follow-up? This is for you and I, our language, this would be like the keeping them warm, right? The pipelining side of, right? So as opposed to you've got a rec, you got a candidate that applies for a rec, this is more like what are you doing to keep people interested over time so that they can be engaged when ready? Is that, do you have a plan for that? Do you have a tool for that? What is, What is the way to address that need?

Um, that's a good one. I think the tools can sometimes be lacking. You know, it's your, your tech stack is important and how you slice and dice your candidates.

ATSs aren't really good at pipelining or keeping warm, right? That's more of a CRM thing.

Um, you know, God, again, I sound like a broken record here, but with limited budgets throughout my career, I have come become deadly with Microsoft Office suite, right? So, um, and it's simple.

Did you ever use that spreadsheet that I published? Um, I'm not sure.

I don't, I don't know which one you're referring to.

Yeah, so it's, um, let me put it in the, in the, in the chat. Um, you might have. It's, it's just, it's at srcn.co/mc, and it is a Google Sheet. It's a spreadsheet, but it's a Google Sheet, and it has different tabs. One of the tabs is the contacts, right? First name, last name, email. And it also has some built-in reporting. And it's basically, if you, if you don't have any money but you can afford Google, which I mean, it's free, you can use this as an ad hoc CRM with the stages that are built in. So that like, all right, they got email 1, they got email 2, and that addresses the question It's a little bit harder to track large datasets. If you have 100,000 people with a Google Sheet, it gets really hard. So, you know, once you get to a certain size, you want a CRM. But like you said, if you don't have any money and you can use Google Sheets— you, by the way, this also can be saved as a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet. So either way, so that's something that you could do. Do you have, you know, something similar? And is it— do you divide up the Like Shelly does email and Patrick does calling, or does Shelly do email and calling for one team? Like, how is the nurturing separated out?

Um, it is one sourcer owning. It's, it's, again, they're working in a certain vertical and they're keeping— yeah. And, and I, I— you came out of this defense and intelligence community where you, you know, everybody is not only really tough to find technical skill sets, often as the U.S. government likes to do in the most wacky out there places in the country that nobody lives, nobody has no schools, no stores, one restaurant, one, you know, stoplight town. And there's like a 10,000-person data center there. So, and they have to have that top secret clearance. Yes, with a top secret grid and this and that, a bunch of caveats. So, you know, we, it's a very small community and you really have to have your Nurturing your pipeline, organized. You have to have a good way of remembering who is what, where they fit in, what the clearances are.

So they're using something like a spreadsheet?

A lot of it comes down to luck. And so that's where you have to have that rigorous way to keep yourself organized, whether it is a spreadsheet, whether it is, you know, you gotta make sure the time factor is a huge piece of it. So here's what I— Talk about that.

What is the time factor, right? Like, reach out every 3 months, reach out every 9 months, or does it vary?

Yeah, I think it varies on the skill set. I think it varies on the person. You're going to get feedback from them that, you know, they don't want to hear from you. And, um, I'm used to doing it one at a time, one by one, methodically, because we would usually do the purple squirrel sort of stuff. But of course, every company now has some sort of, um, you know, campaigning technology where you put people in a a certain bucket, however you want to define it, if it's skill set, if it's from an event, and then you can just turn on that drip campaign. Um, and yeah, I think quarterly doesn't sound so bad. You don't want to do it way too much. If you don't have anything worth saying, also don't just send an email because then you're—

an update just for the sake of it. Yeah, it's got to be—

you want to have, you want to have a point of view. You need to have a team and an organization that has the time to be able to put together a meaningful something.

I think that's what Ben was asking is how do you do that, right? Like, I think if you have one person that can create some content, um, you know, in advance, like maybe a few posts that can be updated with news, then, then everybody can use that. But if not, then you've got to do— you've got to have a little bit of every— everyone has to have their list of people that they keep in touch with, or you do it the old-fashioned way, you know, Rolodex style, with the new Rolodex being LinkedIn or whatever, you know.

We've got a content library where we have approved, you know, marketing approved stuff, imagery and blurbs, things like that. So if it's, if it's one, you know, one recruiter at a time, one sourcer at a time, if you're working in an environment like that, it's organize your people well, organize the time you spoke to them and the time you want to frequently reach in, uh, reach out to them and just be really good at that. If you start like losing track and your spreadsheet's ugly and it's not working, it's crashing, that's not going to work.

So, so you gotta— they have to organize themselves the way that— yeah, unless you provide—

unless you have a great CRM or— yeah, great tool.

Unless you have that, they have to kind of organize. But the last question I want to ask about this for Ben, uh, as a follow-up is how do you ensure that this is consistent, whatever the frequency is? Because one of the easiest things to do is to forget about your nurturing campaigns, you know? So how do you keep that? How do you, I guess, motivate them or ensure that they keep up with it? Because it's important but not urgent. You know how that goes, right?

Right. I think hopefully you have a technology or a methodology that allows you to say, All right, I know this is going to take 4 hours, but we're going to come up with this once a month, or it's going to take a day, but we're only doing it once a quarter. So you got to schedule it in.

If you don't, if you're not rigorous about your schedule, whether it's your work week as the manager, you say, all right, we're going to do this outreach, right?

Okay. But what happens a lot of time too is you can get, you know, you can schedule yourself to your blue in the face for the next 3 years and then all of a sudden something industry changing happens. Well, yeah, company changing, and then you got to go in different directions. So I think as much as you can, plan out as far as you can and be rigorous about this is going to be a standing thing. And then, you know, if you have to drop it or change— times change, you know, sentiments change. So you have to build in that flexibility too.

Right, right. But I think we gave a good answer too to Ben for that. Well, a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much. For coming on the show. I kept you a little bit past— it usually happens that I lose track of time and have fun with my friends and, uh, good conversations. But thank you for spending some time with us on a Friday. Your time is very valuable. I appreciate that. And to our listeners, thank you for listening in. Hopefully you found, uh, some good benefit in this conversation. You know, uh, you're, you're a second-time visitor, so I'm not going to ask you the who should be on our show next unless you have a recommendation for that.

That.

But I do want to ask you with, uh, ask you for the last thought. Um, you know, folks sometimes tune in, uh, and watch the recording, and I want them to have something to take away that is a thought-provoking idea. What would you like people to think about for themselves over the next few days?

For me, it's always been, I think AI is such a big buzzword and is so helpful in so many ways and is is really coming for all of us. Um, but I think the thing that AI cannot right now— and it will be able to, I think, eventually— but can't take your creativity away. It can definitely take your work ethic. It can definitely take your analytical mind away. But that creative component— and it is getting better minute by minute, right? But I'm— I got about 20 years left in this career if I'm lucky, and I'm just hoping I can ride this AI wave right out and say, and it's going to be on my creativity. So that's always been my special sauce as a sourcer, is how I think, how I, you know, game plan, how I try to solve a problem. So if you can do that well, I think that's the secret sauce in every industry. Forget recruiting or sourcing, is if you're a creative thinker, if you can think on your feet and think in all sorts of different ways and think about human beings, the personas, motivations. Robots aren't that good at that yet, right? So I think—

so the question is, how are you being— how are you using this to be creative, right?

It's, it's helping us. It's in almost everything we do now, whether we know it or not. There's AI behind most of what's happening in the world technically, but I think your creativity will serve you well for hopefully at least another 20 years for those of us.

Yeah, love that. Great way to close the show. Um, so thanks a lot, Patrick, for that. And with that, guys, it is the end of our Friday's Shally's Alley. Um, tune in next week. We are going to have John Kelly on April 12th. And, um, as usual, be kind to yourselves. Bye-bye, everybody.