Rebroadcast: Laura Mazzullo on Shally's Alley

All right, all right, it's almost like we are— we have a professional show now. Can you believe that? Oh man, so with me today as a special guest, I have Laura Mazzullo. Laura has been in the staffing industry for a long time, and for those of you that are new to the show, you know I like to bring on board people that are passionate about what they do. And of course, if you're not new to the show, you must have just been really impressed by that video. Thanks to Brooke for helping us set that up. You are live on Shelly's Alley. It is June 2nd, and you don't need to look at your watch because it's 1:03 PM, and we're going to be together for about 30 minutes, maybe a little bit longer if we have some stories to tell. Laura joins us today from Eastside Staff. Eastside! Awesome. Laura has been having this in, uh, 2003, right? Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you for being here. Absolutely. You've been, you've been around since 2003, is that right?

Yeah, 20 years of recruiting.

Yeah, that's right. I stopped counting at 25. Yeah, it's like after that, it's like everything else is just, you know, right? I'm not going to get any, any younger, so I'm just going to stop counting. And you— so you got into the business right, right when things were just starting to pick back up after, after 9/11, and you sort of stayed through it. And so you've been through a couple of the downsides. Yes, in the business.

Yeah, yes, the 2008 cycle, which, you know, was down for a few years there. And then of course 2020 was the second biggest dip that I've seen. And we're in kind of a funky market this year. So it's been, yeah, the roller coaster that everyone speaks of is real.

Yeah, it definitely is. And it doesn't feel like a, you know, it doesn't feel like a roller coaster that you want to be on, like one of those fun ones where, you know, you get to be super nice. It feels like one of those rickety wooden ones that you're wondering whether or not it's going to fall apart while you're on it. Yeah. That's more like what it feels like. We were talking about this pre-show, but you're saying that you're experiencing a bit of a different flavor this time around. And let me explain to the audience. Laura actually does HR for HR. So she recruits for HR and places people in the entire human resources spectrum, including TA, although you're focused mostly on HR executives, HR generalists. What's kind of your area?

Everything under the HR umbrella, which includes talent acquisition. But we all know talent acquisition is sort of its own, its own beautiful profession. And I'm sure in years from now, we'll be talking about there being a Chief Talent Acquisition Officer that's totally separate from HR. But for now, it's still kind of under that.

Yeah, well, isn't the CPO supposed to be that though, the Chief People Officer? Sort of like that's the, the hybrid of like the CHRO and this and the Chief Talent. Like, is it the CPO? Is the, is the both? I don't know.

Yes, ideally.

I was hoping that was the case.

Yeah, I know. But you still see kind of TA coming under HR, which is okay, but it kind of diminishes sometimes some of the worth that they receive in an organization.

It certainly does. Yeah, we've— many guests on the show have talked about how they I don't believe that TA should be reporting into HR. It should be reporting to somewhere else. My last guest was saying sales, and I'm like, yeah, I'm not really sure about that. But I proposed the CFO.

I think it's— I always say recruiting, you know, everyone says it's more like marketing. And I think recruiting lately is so much more like psychology.

Yeah, but we don't have a psychology department in corporate America.

Chief Psychology Officer. I guess we have organizational psychologists and organizational development.

Behavioral psychologist. That's right.

Yeah, that could be a whole new— you heard it here first, folks.

But is HR supposed to have, like, employee relations is part psych— I mean, it's more than part psych— almost social work in some cases.

I know.

Because you're dealing with, you know, human issues, right? So I don't know. That's, that's a tricky one. And we can dive into that a lot, but what we were, what we were talking about was this, this ripple effect and the, the sort of— I call it the downward spiral. So these companies have been, you know, cutting TA, and there's a lot of not just TA but HR in general, people in the market. And you were saying, because you have conversations with them every day, right? Some of us who maybe have hired recently um, have not had as many conversations as you have on any given day. And in your day-to-day, you're talking to people and you're feeling like they're kind of down and out. Yeah, tell me a little bit more about that.

Yeah, I think like in general, exactly, in talent acquisition, we all tend to be relatively positive and upbeat. And I think, you know, you and I were talking pre-show, like, let's just have a real talk about what's really going on. And it's not all so pretty and happy right now. I think that The space has been so massively affected by layoffs and reduction in forces, and everybody's working on lean teams, or they're feeling guilt if they're still there, or they're feeling depressed if they're gone. It's— I'm not having a lot of really joyful conversations in the TA space the last couple months, really, since the year started, if we want to be frank about it. And here we are in Q2, kind of in the same vibe of just disenchanted and frustrated TA pros. And I think what we might want to spend some time kind of analyzing together is just what— to your point— what spiral effect that has. So like, if the profession is feeling just beat down, what impact, what ripple does that have on candidates, on hiring managers, on just general hiring experiences for everybody? Because I often think of it in buckets, right? We have candidate experience, we have the hiring manager's experience, and we have the recruiter's experience or the TA's experience. And I think right now it's all kind of muddled and dark, and we need to find ways to get it elevated again.

Yeah, you're right.

It's gonna be the bearer of bad news, but I really don't—

I don't think that's bad news. I think that's, uh, maybe— and I, I was gonna say a warning, but I don't even think that's a warning. I think it's, it's a very legitimate concern because Everybody talks about how especially TA is the face of the company to new talent. So, you know, you've got the phrase candidate experience is thrown around a lot. And I know in some companies it's given nothing but lip service. It really isn't being taken seriously. But in other companies, it's been taken very seriously. There's a conference about it. There are awards about it. So, it's definitely a legitimate thing. And so, what you're saying is that a recruiter having a bad experience and being down and out and being treated poorly because they, they were just, you know, thrown out, you know, with, without much warning, and, and then they're being downtrodden in the market. And then when they finally get back in, what kind of self-sense are they going to have? And are they really going to be able to provide a good candidate experience having really just had a, a terrible candidate experience? I mean, I, I know people that have come to me and said I'm interviewing for jobs and I'm not getting calls back. I'm not getting rejection letters. I'm applying and I'm not getting notices. I'm seeing jobs that are posted at like dismal salaries, way below market. They're not even reasonable. I mean, they are unreasonable. The jobs at like, you know, $21 an hour.

Yeah.

And you can't even— you can't even make a living in this economy if you— if you're the sole provider of a family, you can't make a living with $21 an hour. That's a very much entry-level job. So these people that are gonna eventually come back, because you know they will, you've been there before, I've been there before, it's, you know, the market comes and goes. Then when they come back in, they're gonna have this like bad taste in their mouth.

Yeah.

And they're gonna pay it forward.

Totally. We have a great comment from Brian Fink saying, "Wait, recruiters have an experience?" I know he's being tongue-in-cheek, but like—

I've never experienced anything.

But they really do. And I don't think we talk about it enough. Like, you know, you hear heads of HR and CEOs CEOs talking about their employee experience and they want their employees to feel valued and heard and seen. And yet TA is sometimes— not sometimes, mostly ignored in that way. You know, we think about, does the TA team get development opportunities? Does the TA team have a really great balanced workload? Do they have all of those kind of perks and benefits and experiences that they deserve? Not really, because they're often considered an exception and just sort of left alone. And I think It's just this ripple effect we're talking about of, you know, we were joking beforehand, like, is there someone to blame? And we can play that card for a second. But part of it is like everyone is a little bit to blame, right? Like TA could do a better job of having stronger self-worth, of pushing up for their values, of managing upwards to say, this is what we need and want. But they're beaten down because their executives have kind of put them down. So now they're not able and confident enough to kind of get what they need. So it's a little bit of this, like, everyone has a part to play, everybody has a responsibility. We can't kind of get anybody off the hook here. It's, it's really like a complex system when you look at it. All the players have to be doing something to make it better.

Well, what's that? So, okay, you've been in the business of, um, Helping organizations hire HR people, right? And so, I'm sure if you're any good at your job, which I am certain that you are, you know, you've been in the business for a long time and you get repeat business, you get repeat customers, you have a reputation, you must know what you're doing. Then these customers of yours are probably asking you for advice.

Yes.

So, what advice do you give them that about this, right? So it's, it's almost like, uh, that there's a, you know, English is my second language, so I have this phrase in my mind that I'm trying to translate into English from Spanish that I grew up with. Um, it's something really— it's something similar to like, plumber's pipes always leak.

Yep, yep. Yes, we have the cobbler's shoe— who are cobbler's children who has no shoes.

The same idea, right?

Yes, we don't.

So HR has the worst experience for HR, basically. Like, you know, it's our business and therefore we do it the worst, right?

You're absolutely right. Exactly.

So no offense to Brian Fink, because I think Brian Fink for a short period of time there was doing, um, R4R, as he coined— I think it might have been Brian, you might have coined that term, R4R, recruiting for recruiters. Cool. I don't know if that was him or not, but Brian was doing that for a while. And then there's people that obviously that do it really well. But my point is that in general, what you're seeing and what you're telling me is that this sort of depressed feeling from the market of people that are, they're telling you, they're sharing with you that they feel defeated. And this is creating a ripple down the line. This burnout is going to lead to bad experiences in the future, which you also commented leads to hiring managers getting poor service. Down the line, the very same people that, that we're, you know, that we're trying to serve now, right? So what's the solution?

I mean, what you just said is like, it's massive because I don't think anybody's really said it. It's like recruiter burnout leads to bad hiring manager experience and bad candidate experience, and in turn leads to bad employer branding and bad hiring efforts. So actually Mistreating and blaming your recruiting team and not taking care of them leads to a very bad experience for all involved, and hiring becomes much more challenging down the road. To answer your question of the advice I'd give people, like, my favorite HR leaders to partner with, like the ones that are willing to break that cobbler stereotype, are the ones who bring a lot of humility to the plate. And they'll say, look, We hire pretty well. We want to hire better. We are willing to unlearn what we do. We are willing to try new things. We are willing to get advice, to get feedback, to hear criticism. Like, we want to do it right. So you can dismantle it, you can audit it, you can tell us where we can play. We want to hire well for our own team, and therefore hopefully we can teach the rest of the organization to do the same. But we want to start and lead here. That's the best possible scenario. But it's kind of a new concept because to your point, I think HR felt kind of unworthy of receiving external help. We don't have a budget for it. We do it all ourselves. We, you know, this is kind of a new idea that HR is willing to raise their hand and say, our team needs some support too.

Yeah, you're right about that. I've often experienced that sort of sense of disempowerment, right? Like HR tends to really only be able to say no. They can't really say yes because to say yes, they need approval from somewhere else. They're empowered to say no to things themselves. They can end something, but they can't start something without getting another level of approval for the most part. I mean, obviously, people refer to the seat at the table. If you have the seat at the table, then you can. But I think in some general sense, when that's not the case, you end up only really having the power to say no and not having the power to say yes, not having the power to start something.

But see, this is where the interesting cycle we're talking about comes, right? So I'll talk to a head of TA who's disgruntled and needs support, needs whatever, their own training and development, their own additional headcount. They don't go to the CEO because they assume the CEO is going to say no. Then I talk to the CEO and the CEO says, I absolutely have budget for TA. They never come to me. I had no idea they were struggling. So there's, there's not— when I say there's nobody to blame, I mean, it's not one party. It's, it's like literally each and every person. If I get them together— yeah, exactly. When you get them all in the same room and everybody's on the same page, it's like, let's go, let's get everybody upskilled, let's get everybody empowered. You know, this— we're getting a great comment here about how recruiting is really business development. But if that's true, think about how sales teams have so many resources. Sales teams have coaches, they have trainers, they have external headhunters, they have, they have, you know, little monthly, quarterly trips that bond them. I mean, they have everything. So if this is true, which it partly is, then how come we let recruiting just kind of live on an island?

Yeah, no rewards. No training, no, no monthly trips to anywhere, right? Yeah.

But then you wonder, do the salespeople feel empowered? Do they feel worthy? Do they feel confident? Do they— so therefore, you know, that helps them. And then if TA is feeling so disenchanted and burnt out, which of course makes so much sense right now, but that does have an effect. So it's kind of like everybody's got to do their part. Um, and I always remind TA Pros, like, take care of yourself. Again, it's a silly stereotype we hear over and over of put your own oxygen mask on first, But it's like, you have to, because if you're not taking care of yourself, the ripple effect is really toxic for everybody. Um, so yeah, it's, it's funny. The other thing I wanted just to like make sure we talk about, because I was saying this to you before the show started, and I don't— I've never really talked about this on a podcast, but on the agency recruiting side, we are taught that if internal recruiters are bad it's good for us, right? It's like, oh good, the internal team is struggling to hire this, they'll call a headhunter, they'll call a search firm, right?

Yeah, it makes our job easier, kind of.

Yes, or we get more business because they're not like doing a great job at it. And it occurred to me like in the last 5+ years of my career how dysfunctional that is. That actually if we make TA pros internally better, if we develop them, if we coach them, if we train them, if we upskill them, if we make sure they've got all the tricks of the trade that headhunters have on the outside, if they know how to source, if they know how to whatever, push back on managers, use data, etc., then it's better for everybody as a profession. External and internal recruiters can work better as a team. Hiring managers may have more respect for their internal recruiting team. Candidates don't have to feel like they're choosing between, oh, I prefer working with external, I prefer working with internal. Like, the TA profession actually becomes more unified And it's been so clear to me how much we've been taught to kind of fight each other. It's really dysfunctional.

That's, you know, that's true also in the inverse. If you're, if you're a good TA partner, you have strong relationships with the vendors and you maintain those relationships, you know, respectfully. Because they can help you do your job. So it's, it's a two-way street. Yeah, it's, it's something that, you know, I think many times in TA I've seen almost like an antagonistic relationship. Yeah, where they're trying to, air quotes, get rid of vendors or eliminate vendors. And I've, for a very long time, since early mid-career, I would say, around probably 2003, 2004, around that time, I've always maintained since then that the best way to partner with agencies is to know the company really well and know that you can trust them for specific types of jobs. And I've also maintained at the same time when I've asked as a consultant and as a trainer, when I've been asked about my opinion around staffing firm practices and people that have said, "Hey, if I was going to go into staffing myself, what would you recommend?" is to not be a generalist. You know, you're a perfect example of this. You have a very tight focus. You do TA for HR. You recruit HR people. That's a narrow focus. If you focus in a narrow niche, you can have— for those of you that don't know what a Rolodex is— the magic Rolodex or the, the, um, the, the magic contact card of, of the people that are the movers and shakers in the industry. And as a partner inside the organization, when I get stuck— because that's going to happen, there are going to be times when I can't fill the job because we don't have any applicants, it's a job that's different, that's, that's, you know, not mainstream, we're not working on it all the time, I'm gonna get stuck. And it's not worth my time to spend weeks trying to build the network for this one job where I'm only going to hire once. And at that, during that time, I could be hiring 20 other people, right? I might as well hire or retain or whatever a partner that is really good at that one job. Yeah, but what bothers me is when they say yes to everything. Of course. In other words, I'm the TA partner and I go out to an agency like, can you guys do this? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you do that? Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, we do all of that. We have this, we have that. That doesn't give me a good comfort level. I've, I've had the best experience when, um, that when I was at Coca-Cola, there was this type of job called category management, which is in retail Some folks might know it as the kind of quantitative analyst statistician data. They're the data people that determine and predict product placement and categories and SKUs, and it's really mathematical.

Yeah.

So it's not the kind of— it's not marketing, it's not sales, it's like statistics and psychology mixed together. Very weird kind of combination of skills. You don't go to school to get taught category management. So when occasionally these jobs would come open there, that was one of the times when I was like, immediately go to my Rolodex and, and call this, right, you know, that I knew that was in staffing, because they, they probably knew 3 people that were available right now, and, and I could get them interviewed and hired so much faster than if I tried to take it on myself, right? So it kind of cuts both ways, right?

You—

we can be really good partners to agencies, and agencies can be really good partners to us, but it has to be a mutually respectful relationship, not one where we're the client and you have to do whatever we tell you to do. You know, we're the customer, we're the ones that are always right. No, no, actually no. If you're hiring an agency for a particular reason, let them do their job. You know, that's their expertise. Likewise, when a hiring manager is talking to a recruiter and tries to tell them how to do their job, Right? It's the same thing.

It's so, you, I just, some of you know I'm a huge note taker when I'm chatting, 'cause you've said so many wise things that I just wanna make sure we don't forget to come back to. But the idea of it being a mutually respectful partnership is so key. And we have a viewer now who's saying, you know, how many healthy business relationships exist between in-house and agency? And the truth is that's work that both parties have to do. So we can get there. And we shouldn't just look at kind of past behavior as, oh, it's never been done well. Like, we always have an opportunity to make it better. And those of us in the profession now have a responsibility to do that. So I think it's just really important just to self-reflect and look at that, how we talk about each other. And I always say that when a CEO kind of bashes their internal recruiters to me, you know, oh, they're just not that good, or we don't trust them, we always go outside. I don't just take that info and let them get off the hook. I say, like, tell me more. Why haven't you upskilled them? Why haven't you trained them? Maybe there's areas they just don't know. Talk to me about where they're struggling. Like, let's not just kind of bash each other. I don't think that's productive. Yeah, it's not productive. It just doesn't help anyone. So yeah, I think if we can look at, you know, where can I improve my relationships with my partners? Where can I be doing a better job of communicating? You know, to your point too, Shelly, we have choices. So I always say that when I hear, oh, I don't like the external recruiter we chose to partner with, or You know, those are choices. You can choose who to partner with. You don't have to settle. You can make really wise choices. And kind of give people back that agency is really important. The other part that I think is like kind of coming up for me as we're talking about this, I don't think TA pros— I know they have it. TA and HR, just, we'll just call them, you know, the whole umbrella. Of the TA space, really. It's not been historically acceptable to ask for help. They've been like, we've all been kind of conditioned just to do it, to get it done, to be resourceful, to have the answers. So like, a lot of people say to me, I feel like it's defeat if I ask for help, or I feel like it's defeat if I go to my CEO and ask for something. And it's really, that's the big shift we're starting to see. Is that empowerment that the sales team has and other teams have just to say, we need this. This is what we need to have a better experience for our— you know, um, Brian's asking, why is TA mixed with HR? I'm including it because in the world of companies right now that I see in the last 20 years, TA still sits under a CHRO or— CHRO.

Yeah, that's right.

Um, until we have Chief Talent Acquisition Officers that, that report to the CEO, which if there are companies doing that, we should totally be talking to them. It's— that's still a new concept. So, um, but we of course on this show recognize how unique and special TA is. Yeah, I just— I think we need to kind of remind people it's okay to ask for help. It's okay to kind of speak up and say what you need and want. It doesn't make you bad at your job to like recognize what your team needs.

So, you know, that's a really— that's a really strong statement. And I've, I've actually, in my, in my role now, my capacity now, one of the things that is under my area or my purview is the vendors, the technology. So I've had a long time ago when I was at Google, I had the opportunity to— let me put it this way, I got a blank check. Larry Page came to me and said, whatever you need. And so literally just carte blanche. So much so that I could go to Career Builder at the time. I know that you're like, Career Builder, what's that?

No, Career Builder is great. Yahoo Hot Jobs is my favorite. That's right.

Yeah. I could go to Career Builder and be like, "All right, sign us up for the full package," and like, you know, here we go. So that was an experience with provisioning for my team, and, you know, I had a blank check. So that was not a very good example of what business is really like. It's unusual to have that. Very unusual. Later on, when I was at Microsoft, the experience was very different. It was, "You have a number. Here's your number." You know, here's a number with a bunch of zeros that you can't exceed that. It's been baked in. It's, you know, CFO approved and all that. Um, and so it was very finite, right? And it's, it's, it's either been that way. It's either been finite or it's been goose egg, right? It's either been, here's your budget, spend within it. You have no— there's no flexibility, right? You have this many dollars to spend however you want, but you can't spend any more than— or you have no budget. Those are the two experiences ever since.

I don't know why that is.

Ever since Google. Now, this is just me. I don't know if other people have had that, but it feels like it's wherever I go into an organization, it's either set budget fixed for, you know, permanently, and all you could ever do is lose the budget. It never increases, just lose it. Or you have no budget. But recently I learned that I can ask for things.

Right.

And I, in this environment, get to set the budget. But it's different because I have to be mindful of— there is a threshold, right? And I do have only a portion of the CPO's budget. And so my boss, the CPO, has the entire budget, and I only have an allocation of that. But I can ask for things that are outside of that if I can make the case. So That's a really powerful lesson that I think people really need to hear from you. You have to ask for it. Because if I hadn't done that, I would have just sat on my current budget. And it wouldn't work.

Right. The best example, as I said, is just how many CEOs I talk to say to me, if I had only known what TA or HR needed, Of course I would deliver. Nobody came to me, and they didn't come because of fear. They came, you know, they were nervous to, and it's, you know, whatever, Brené Brown, Oprah, all of these gurus that we love, and they all remind you, you can be scared and still do it. You can do both. And so it's of course a little scary to sometimes ask for things that are expensive or that you feel like is a big ask, but if you're—

It's not an admission of weakness.

Yes, it's not weakness.

It's not. You're not saying I can't do my job.

That's right.

It's, I would, I would like to have this in order to do my job better.

And so it's almost the opposite, right? It's almost a confident thing, right?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. You bring the data, you say, here's what I've been able to do with what I have. If I have this, I could do this much more. Yeah, you know, especially when they're coming to us time and time again over the last 20 years, more for me, but You know, do more with less, do more with less, do more with less. It's always been that way. It's always been that way. So technology, yeah, that's great. It can help us. Tools, yeah, that's right. We were having dinner last night, Brian and a bunch of us here in Atlanta, talking about how we can do this job without tools. It's not going to be as fast or as efficient. I mean, tools make it better and easier and faster, but it doesn't mean we have to have the tools. However, if you ask for them and you can show that there's a benefit to them and you can make the case, then it's your responsibility to do that. If you don't, you're kind of on, you're kind of doing it to yourself. Which brings me to—

That's it. They're doing it themselves. There's a little bit of that in the space that we hate to admit, but it's there.

It's there.

Yeah.

And that brings me to the other point you made about training. The same thing for training. It's the same thing. Yeah, I think I, I think I just— I'm putting the two together. Thank you for that, because I knew about the tools. I've always had to fight for the tools or try to squeeze them into the budget, or I got really good at talking to vendors about, well, listen, this is all I got. What can you do for, you know, like, give me whatever you can give me for this, but that's all I got. Um, and I just realized that I haven't done that for training, never in my entire career. And I could— the same thing, it's the same thing. Hey, if you give me some money for training, this is what I could do. Yeah, here's the problem though, Laura. How do you prove— how do you make the case? If you, if you have a tool, you can make the case that it'll make people more efficient. But if you buy training, how do you make that case?

Well, it's sort of easy because think of external agency spend. So if you're in a corporate talent acquisition team and you ask finance for the numbers, which I've had some— I've had some CEOs do for me recently when they're like, I don't know if we can afford to have you train our TA team. They'll come back to me and said, okay, we spent $500,000 last year on search fees. We paid, you know, they didn't even realize how much, hundreds of thousands in, in small companies even.

Why do they not realize that? You would think the CFO would know that.

Because it's like kind of monthly and they, yeah, they, they didn't pull it all in one chunk perhaps.

Oh, and it comes from different departments.

Yeah. So when I think pull it all, let's look at, it's like, whoa, I, you know, I saw it $80 grand a quarter, $30 grand here, $40 brand there, right? But they don't pull it all together. And they'll say— so I'll say to them, let's just say your internal recruiter, who's good— nobody's bad, they're good— but it's like learning an instrument or learning a skill. They want to get to the next level, they want to be elevated. Even if they don't partner with— like, let's say they partner every month with 2 search firms, so they pay 2 fees. What if they just save 1 fee per month because they've gotten a little bit better and they feel a little more confident and they've learned something that one fee per month over the course of 3 months, 6 months has saved your company $60 grand, $80 grand, $100 grand, whatever the numbers are. Suddenly it's such an easy decision for them to look at the math and say, wow, if I upskill this internal TA pro, I do save the company quite a bit of money because a better TA pro will naturally save us money. They're not going to need as many tools. Maybe they're not going to need as much external support because they're just—

or simply with the same tools and the same support, they can hire more people. I mean, there's—

right, it's a balance of looking at it all. And so to your point, why haven't they seen the numbers? Because it's— they're not pulling those numbers all the time. I've never—

so I've never made that case, right? I know about provisioning with tools, but I've never actually gone to provision for training. It's either— I've— and I know a lot of folks, especially in sourcing, do this. They become the trainer, right? I know people in multiple— you know, Brian Fink's done this, um, lots of people that I know, Glenn Guttmacher, when they get hired as the subject matter expert for sourcing, they essentially become the trainer. Now, Brian and Glenn happen to be excellent examples because they themselves are also good trainers. But just because you're a good sourcer doesn't mean you're a good trainer. The same as just because you're a good trainer doesn't mean you're a good sourcer. You know, it's not the same thing.

Exactly. There are tons of sourcing trainers because that's a big area that, to your point, is kind of an easier maybe sell, right? Because you can be like, they can teach you how to Yes. But the nuance of hiring in this market, back to my concept of hiring being so much more psychological now, getting into candidates' motivations and their goals and what's making them make a move and negotiation and working with hiring managers to push back and show them data and say no and not be an order taker. And, you know, we want internal recruiters to be less tactical and more strategic, and we want them to be consultative and advisory. Those don't just happen out of nowhere. And those skills can be honed. And that's the stuff I love working on. Right.

Either you get, either you get them beaten into you or— Right. Or you learn them somewhere, right? Yeah.

And so exactly. And so I've had clients even saying to me, this makes so much sense because even if we have our head of recruiting get some support, get some, then they can train their team and it trickles down. So there's so many ways to look at it. But yeah, I think we've never had to make a case on why executives need coaches or why the sales team needs training. But this is the first time in our TA history that we both can remember where TA is raising their hand now to say, what about us? We need some, we need a lot of help over here, as they, as they should.

Make the case. I think that's it. It's, but you gotta make the case. So two things, don't be afraid to ask. Yeah. And make the case. And, and the light bulb for me is the same thing goes for training. I mean, we, you know, we, yeah, we talk about how we never get any training in TA. Have we asked for it?

Right?

I know sometimes we have, but you just go, "Hey, I need some budget for training." No, that's not the way to do it. It's, it's more like, "If I get some budget for training, let me tell you what I could do." Yeah. I do want to go back to something that Daniel— I don't know if it's gonna fit. Oh, there we go. Okay. So Daniel Miller, I want to answer this, not that it was a question, but I do understand the point. What we were talking about with niche agencies. You, you know, you work in a very straightforward niche. It's, it's very well defined. Do you agree with the statement of you should be able to fill any role in any industry?

So what's coming up is like the word industry.

Okay, any role in any industry.

I mean, yes, exactly, you could, you could, but at what cost? So I specialize in HR in any industry, right? Because if I just did only HR in tech, it's too small of a niche, or if, right, And we made that—

that's your focus is HR.

Exactly.

Your focus can be construction and you could do HR or accounting, or your focus could be accounting and you can do construction or in— or tech.

That's it. Yeah, that's it. And I think both of those are totally okay. I happen to think the way I do it—

but any and any, I, I think that's a bit—

any and any is too hard. Exactly. And I think that when you— let's say you only recruit finance and accounting pros, you really do have an expertise in finance and accounting. Whether that's finance and accounting and construction or finance or whatever is— yeah, so I hear you. Of course, there are always— we're not making statements.

Could you do it? Yes, never.

But it's not—

but then there's the cost, right? And if— and I'll tell you what, what I've seen time and time again as a consultant is recruiters in an agency, in a— at the vendor, in a partner environment where the, the recruiters will abandon the rec And they won't tell you why. They'll abandon the wreck because it's just too hard to fill. Because in the same week that they would spend trying to fill this one wreck that they are not used to working on— sure, they could do it, but they're not used to doing it, and so it's going to take longer— in that same week, they can make two other placements and bring home higher commission checks. So as an agency recruiter myself, and a lot of the people that I've trained, I can tell you that we silently quit very frequently. We know some reqs are just not going to be worth our time. Yeah, we can fill them, but we are— the opportunity cost is too high sometimes. Sure, we could do it. The same thing happens in TA, and that was my point before, is as a corporate recruiter inside of the TA organization, sure, I could fill this job. It'll take me 6 months. Can we really afford to, you know, can we wait 6 months? Yeah, can we wait 3 months? I mean, we really don't have— so that's where going to a partner and saying, hey, I know I can trust you to fill this job in, in 6 weeks.

It goes back to my value of humility that we talked about. Like, the internal recruiter should be humble enough to be like, I can do this, I'm not going to, for whatever the reason.

It's hard, it takes a long time.

And the external recruiter needs to be able to say, thank you so much for reaching out to me, this is out of my bandwidth, this is not my expertise, I have a few other partners to recommend to you, best of luck. You know how many times a day I do that? It's like, my, my colleagues must think I'm crazy, but I'm not going to take on stuff that is not my expertise, is not my passion.

Opportunity cost.

Yes, that's right. So I, I agree completely. I think all of this is tying together though, that we as a profession in TA, corporate or agency, need to be more transparent, more humble, more willing to admit where our limits are. We can be less burned out if we actually do that. And that's back to our cycle of the, you know, burnout leads to all these negative effects. And so it's our responsibility as individuals to to self-soothe to a certain extent, to understand what our limits are.

And it's okay.

Yeah, exactly. I'm just hearing so much kind of disenchantment and it's depressing because we have to just start with ourselves first and say, okay, hold on, what can you do to make it better? And then of course, as you say, it's the enterprise. Of course, we'll talk to CEOs about what they can be doing better and heads of HR and everyone has a role, but we at least need to take care of ourselves and our own team. Especially right now.

Yeah, that's a really good point. And there's a lot of support out there. But even the people that are most well-intentioned have limits. And, you know, if you're trying to help somebody, if you're, if you're trying to boost somebody and they themselves are just intent on staying in that negative cycle, that negativity, is hard to overcome. Yeah, it shows up in the interview, it shows up, you know. So I think that's the, that's the vicious cycle that we need to break before—

this is the part that I hope people take away from today's chat is like, you know, nobody is to blame. We're not throwing anybody under the bus. We're just saying we all should just self-reflect and think about what we can be doing to elevate TA. And it really does start with like, how are we doing? Like if you are disenchanted and you're burnt out and you're tired and you're overwhelmed, like what can you do? Can you ask for help? Can you talk to your CEO? Can you take a day off? What is it? But don't just like accept it. It's like nothing actually changes.

Yeah, that's a good point. It's the boiled frog analogy. You know what I'm talking about?

Remind me.

It's this grotesque analogy of like you put a, if you put a frog in a pot of cold water, they'll swim around and be fine. And you just slowly turn up the heat, eventually the frog will just get cooked and won't even realize it. But if you put a frog in a pot of boiling hot water, they'll jump right out immediately. So, you know, you throw somebody into the, into the heat and they know it's hot, they're getting out. But you throw somebody into the, you know, the, the cool and eventually you slowly turn it up. Yeah, they don't feel it coming. It's, you know, you're just, you're boiling, you're boiling yourself.

Yes, exactly.

Build up.

Exactly.

It's a really good point. Yeah.

You know, I think our profession has had an easier time blaming each other for things. What's external blames agent, or internal, internal blames agency. We blame hiring managers, we blame CEOs, they blame us. It's instead of actually everybody just stopping for a second and saying, okay, what is my role in this dynamic and how can I improve it? And if we did a little more of that, even just a little bit more, it would just be incredibly elevating.

Let's blame the candidates now. It's time to start blaming the candidates. Because, you know, they've been blaming us forever. I know. Oh, that's funny. The whole— it used to be called the HR black hole. I don't know if it's— I may be completely out of date in this, but it's the concept of people would apply for a job and never hear back.

Right.

And it's, it's, I think it precedes the idea of candidate experience. And I think the idea of candidate experience was in part born from this horrible experience of applying for a job and never hearing back and applying for 200 jobs and never hearing back. So that HR black hole, that, that story has given people who apply for jobs this sense of, this, this, this sense of disgust for our industry because it seems like we're purposefully ignoring them, or, you know, and I wish they could see. Yeah, I wish there was a way for me to show people what it looks like on the inside. Yeah, we can't share this because it's private, but if you could, as a candidate, if you could look at the rec inside of the ATS and see that there are 3,000 applicants and there's really no logical way to sort through them. How— like, where is the— you tell me as an applicant. I've been an applicant and I know what's going to happen because I've also been on the other side. I know if my resume is in there, it's, it's, it's going to be in there with 3,000 other people, sometimes more than that. And there's the systems, the technology is really isn't going to solve that problem. And humans can't solve that problem either because you can't look at 3,000 resumes. So you read these articles in the paper about, well, you know, recruiters only look at your resume for 3 seconds. Yeah, they, they only look at some resumes for 3 seconds. There's lots of other resumes they don't even look at at all. Sure, you can blame the technology, or you can blame the algorithm, or you can blame the ATS, or you can try to hack it. And resume writers will say, well, if you do this and that, you'll get better. All these different all these different ideas do not overcome the fact that it is a giant pile of resumes. And I think that comes from a long, long time ago when we decided that it was better to broadcast widely than it was to focus and specialize. And so we essentially did this to ourselves is what I'm trying to say. At some point in time, we decided that posting a job to have the widest possible distribution was a smart idea. Yeah, maybe because we didn't get enough applicants, but that, that does— that no longer works. Now what it, what it does is it gives us too many applicants. And so the— what do you think is the, the appropriate response, right, for, for a candidate that applies to 10 jobs at your company What do you think is the appropriate response for the recruiter? What should they do about that?

Well, you've hit so many beautiful points, which is like this concept of— what do we call it— post and pray.

You just kind of pray and pay.

Yeah, so broadcast. It's an old school way to recruit that unfortunately a lot of recruiters were never taught to unlearn, and so that's just what happens. But to your point, if there's a specialized job, it's better to go source 10 or 20 candidates and talk to them and you have kind of a better understanding of, of the market there. Um, and they have a better experience.

Those candidates are advertising a specialized destination.

Yeah, those candidates will have a better experience, of course. I, I think, you know, I try to manage candidate expectations to your point about this, which is that, you know, I could email 50 HR leaders to introduce myself, to connect, to network, and I hear back from what, 10, 5, doesn't matter, not a lot. And I've learned over the years not to take it personally. It's usually not about my content or my message or my brand. It's just people don't reply. It's just they're busy, they don't want to, I don't know. And so candidates can't, can't beat themselves up when they're like, I applied for 40 jobs and I only heard back from 5. It's like, what data are you expecting? I don't know anybody who's applied to 40 and heard back from 39. Just like I don't know any recruiter who's emailed 50 candidates and heard back from 49.

You know, that's a really good point. So that is the adequate response, then you're right. And Daniel's point of, you know, it's a volume game, apply for a bunch of jobs. But I think there's a, there's a root cause for what Daniel just said. And that is, most of those jobs aren't even open anymore. They've been filled, or people have enough candidates. So one thing I've tried to implement recently is looking at I used to think that, I used to think that we would cut off a job when it reached, you know, a certain number of candidates. Let's just, I'm going to throw out a number. Once there's 1,000 applicants, we just unpost it because we can repost it. There's nothing wrong with that, but we need to unpost it when we have 1,000 applicants. Well, what I didn't realize is just how bad the problem really was. If we cut it off at 1,000, 999 of them were unqualified. So it doesn't— that, that cutoff didn't help anybody. I thought it was helping candidates who were expecting to hear back, and I thought it was helping recruiters who would have more time to sort, but it didn't help. So what I realized recently, and what I'm trying to do now, is look at how many active candidates are still in there that haven't been, um, dispositioned. In other words, inside of the— there might be 1,000 applicants total but there's only 5 active candidates that haven't been dispositioned, I'm going to leave that one there because that means the recruiter has been able to sift through and keep up. But if there's 1,000 applicants and 700 are active, we need to put the pause button on this one because somebody hasn't sifted through these candidates. So that's my determination now, is if we haven't, if we haven't been able to process the candidates, let's pause and process the candidates.

Yeah, absolutely.

Otherwise, we're just opening the door to more bad candidate experiences by allowing people to apply who will never be looked at, right? And that's Daniel's point. So he's, he's saying, I helped a friend by applying for hundreds of jobs. Yeah, well, you know what was happening, Daniel? You applied for hundreds of jobs, but only 3 of them were open.

I know.

And you didn't know which ones. You finally hit on those 3, and the person finally got considered because they actually landed on 3 recs that, that were being worked. These other recs have been abandoned. Or there's already somebody in offer process and somebody forgot to unpost it. Yeah, or whatever, right? That's the problem. Yeah, you actually make a very good coaching point for niche recruiting. That's exactly what I was trying to do, so thank you.

I was wondering like what specific point they're referring to because your whole, your whole, your whole discussion about that was great.

But, um, yeah, the point— I think the point there was that it's a matter of relationship speed and efficacy. You know, if you have a good relationship and it's going to be more efficient, less costly, it's going to be faster, then it makes sense. It's not, it's not, it's not wasted money. Yeah, where it's a problem is when you do waste money by going to agencies and you had no need to. In other words, this is a job you could fill in 3 days by posting it, but yet you went to an agency. That's where it doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, uh, it's such an interesting thing. The abandoned wreck point has not gone past me either. I think there are a lot of jobs out there that are abandoned for whatever the reason.

May not even be on purpose. I'm not saying it's on purpose.

I know, again, you know, but it's true. It's a good reminder. And sometimes, I don't know if it's still the case, like some of the Indeed of the world, I remember back in the day you'd post it, it was like you pay for the 30-day post. Let's say. And to your point, maybe by day 9 you've already had access or filled it, but it has to run. So then what?

I had Steve Rothberg on the show, okay, and he's like the guru of college recruiting. Yeah, absolutely my go-to person when I ever have any questions about college recruiting, university recruiting, internships, that kind of thing. And he made that point. He made the point of It used to be 30-day cycles because of the paper, the news, the magazine. There's no reason to have 30-day cycles now. Everything's digital. There's no point, right, in— it's not the Sunday paper anymore. You don't want to have it for 3 weeks so you can get 3 Sunday papers. There's absolutely no reason for it. So he made the point that it shouldn't be based on days, it should be based on something else. Now his alternative to days was applications. And my alternative to that was interviews. Yeah, I would love to say let's post this job until we have 7 interviews or whatever. Yeah, just throw out a number. Yeah, he was saying we at the very least need to not post it for 30 days but post it until we have a certain amount of applicants. And that, that's why I brought up the thing I just told you about before now, where it's like, yeah, but 1,000 applicants still may be 999 unqualified ones. So that's why I went to the next one, which would be we have X amount of interviews, then we can unpost the job. But still, that's an, that's an outcome-driven decision, not a time-driven decision. It doesn't make any sense. You're right, it just doesn't make any sense to have it open for 30 days.

And let's teach recruiters how to, how to source and how to network and how to pipeline and all of those pieces that like change the whole dynamic, that maybe it's not going to look like an application process in 5 years from now.

Oh yeah, that's what he was talking about as well.

You know, it may not look like this because you're right, it's getting too robust and too overwhelming, and it's not good for anybody. It's not good for the recruiter experience, not good for the hiring manager experience, not good for the candidate experience. And again, all three parties need to be doing things that make sense for, for all of them.

That's true. Yep. Well, that's a really good way to, I think, wrap up what we've been talking about today. Thank you so much for coming.

I loved it. My brain is totally like vibrating with ideas. I took a ton of notes, so I might, I might make them legible and share them with everyone. I just—

yeah, that'd be great if you do. Let me know and I'll make sure and promote that on, uh, on our social media. Um, yeah, you know, you haven't been on the show before, you probably don't know a whole lot about it, but I always like to do something at the end of the show, and that is to ask my guests to leave us with some kind of thought to chew on for the weekend. It doesn't have to be about what we talked about. It could be just something, something that you want to get the word out about and you want people to think about.

Yeah, okay. The first thing that's coming to my mind, so I'll stick with that, is the next time you're ready to blame somebody at work, stop for a second and think about self-reflecting instead, and what can you do to help the situation. I think that would help a lot. Have a great weekend, everybody. This was so fun to have all the comments and questions too. It was really— made it so much more interesting. And Shelly, you were great. It was fun brainstorming with you.

Yeah, my pleasure. Glad to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Yeah, well, that wraps up our show for this Friday, everybody. We will see you next Friday on Shelly's Alley, and be kind to each other.