Rebroadcast: The Psychology of Recruitment with Pete Radloff

Hey, hey, hey! All right everybody, it is Friday, 1 PM US Eastern Time. That means it's time for Shally's Alley. I need an echo chamber. Owie, owie, owie. I am so happy, and more than happy, whatever is happier than happy, ecstatic, to have Mr. Death Star himself, Pete Radloff. Hopefully I said that right.

Radloff, nailed it.

Friend of mine since, uh, 2011 or something like that. I think we met at a SourceCon, so we've been friends for nearly a dozen years or so. And super excited to have Pete on the show for a couple of reasons. One of them is he is a sharer like me and loves to get things out there. I was going to ask you a little bit about that as well. But to give you an idea, he's, he's a board member of HR.com. He's a contributor at Recruiting Daily and HRTX. He's, I think, a board member of Recruit DC or something like that, a founding member or something like that of Recruit DC.

Board member for a long time, yeah.

Are you in— you're in DC, right?

I am. I'm right outside DC in Northern Virginia.

So, you know, he's a contributor, right? He's somebody that openly shares and gives and gives and gives, and he gives for the reasons of giving, not for the reasons of curating his personality and popularity, right? Because to be honest, he shares the real stuff, and sometimes the real stuff doesn't make you popular. I'm living proof of that. But Pete has had a pretty diverse background in sourcing. I think we met when he was at a company called LivingSocial. And so if you think about it, 2011, that was like LivingSocial before social existed, really.

It was, it was.

It was the beginning of social.

Unique time for sure.

When was Twitter like, you know, a thing?

It was, I mean, live tweeting was a thing.

Is that, when did like Twitter become public knowledge or like, 'cause I know they were founded in 2006, but it wasn't until a while later they, it sort of took, you know, gained steam. So is that around 2010 or so?

Yeah, I think it was like around '09, '10, '09 or '10 I think is really when you started to see it. Sounds about right. You know, big, and I think really started to kind of take shape.

Hey, and you remember Tumblr?

I do remember Tumblr.

What happened to Tumblr?

Uh, they locked it down for a myriad different reasons, but like, it still exists though? Still there, yeah. But I mean, I can't tell you that it's on my phone.

I had a Tumblr blog, two of them actually. Um, a personal, like, Shally, and then, uh, like, you know, Shally and then sourcing, right? Like, I had a Shally blog and and a sourcing one. Um, and I completely forgot about it until just now, and I'm like, I wonder if I can still log into it. Been locked out for a while. But from LivingSocial, you then, um, worked at a couple of other places, and you were at Amazon for a while. I'm sure that was a super easy job.

Oh, tons.

Yes, of course. Yeah, I mean, I've heard from lots of people how easy it is there. And then you, uh, recently— by that I mean a year or so— ended up at a company called Datadog.

Good.

Those of you that have no idea what that is, it's like when you have a dog that eats data. I'm just kidding. I have no— what is Datadog?

So basically what they do is all the things that happen in your cloud environment, right, are all things that need to be monitored and be able to have sort of insight into that. And so they provide this observability monitoring structure, alerting, security events, things like that, all into these sort of one dashboard so everybody can see what's going on in their, in their environment simultaneously.

I see data monitoring, correct?

Yeah. So competitors with like Splunk, things like that, um, you know, really across the board. I know Splunk had some, some big news in the last 24 hours.

So, and so yeah, your job is leadership, uh, so technical technology leadership recruiting and sourcing, or what's—

yeah, so our team focuses on everything sort of engineering manager and above for Datadog. So all leadership roles, executive roles, things like that that are primary. And for us, that focus is really on the engineering and product management side.

Wow, that's tough.

Engineering management, that's no small, it's no small potatoes, especially product management.

I spent a good number of years, 5 years, at a company that was really big on product-first development. It was a tech, a fintech company, and I didn't really know. I thought I knew product management before I got there, but I knew what I knew, kind of like generic product management. And I had worked on some product management searches, but they were more like, maybe I would, I would say on the marketing side. And then when I joined this company, I really had to essentially take a class, a deep dive on technical product management that is not the same as technical project management. And one of the first things that I discovered for myself, and I'm sure other people already knew that, with product management was that the titles, the job titles are so way off. I mean, you cannot use product management as a search because you will get everything except the people you want.

Correct. You really need to drill down into some of the specificity around what you're looking for and then almost dial that back to that. And I think it was a couple of years back was the first time I'd ever heard sort of the term of like group product manager, right? You know, sort of managing product managers and That's a, that was a sort of a good lesson, right? You have to go and you gotta source out, you gotta search out like, what does this look like? Who are these people? Like, what is even going so far as to go to YouTube and like, you know, explain product management to idiots, right? And I think, you know, there's some, some of that that I had to do to really kind of understand what is this and what am I looking for?

Yeah. Yep. And I found the Pragmatic Institute. And they have the product management framework, the pragmatic product management, specifically for technology. And so that was a huge difference, right? And that whole pragmatic product management framework really solidified— I took, I took their framework and I printed it out and I had it on my, um, cubicle wall. We, we still had, you know, offices back then. Yeah. And it really helped me understand you, you could— it goes from like market big picture all the way to support, you know, basically the day-to-day. And then it goes strategic and tactical, sort of. But if you, if you can draw a circle and circle an area of it, you could do like market strategy over here, you could do enablement and execution over here, and it really kind of brings together the different areas of it. It was way better to look for those kinds of things than it was product management, because inevitably I would get people that were marketing And how ironic is it that a product manager doesn't manage a product and they don't manage people? They, they sometimes manage people if they're a group product manager, but product managers don't manage individuals. They manage projects, sort of, but not really.

I think it depends on the company, right? And I've seen angles of that, right? And I know that, you know, a lot of times for the stuff I'm looking for today, it involves like What does strategy and ideation look like? Then the go-to-market, roadmaps, you know, then sort of the customer sticky factor, right?

Making sure that you get adoption there and you then, to your point, what do they want? What are they paying for?

And also, you know, when you have an MVP, like giving it to a customer so you can figure out like what works and what doesn't work. So you can go back to the drawing board on some of those things before you go full GA on something.

It's a really broad definition of work, kind of like recruiting, you know.

Uh, no doubt.

Yeah, there's like, there's product management in recruiting because you're, you're managing projects, you're managing candidates, you're managing hiring managers, but you don't really manage anybody necessarily unless you're a manager of recruiters. But yeah, so that was, that was a huge learning lesson for me. And I definitely learned a lot about business because of the perspective of the product manager being sort of in the middle between engineering, marketing, sales, uh, you know, and and all that stuff. So it's a pretty neat field, but it's tough to search for.

It is. It's tough to search for. It's just, you know, I think that that's, you know, the front-end work that you do and figuring out what it is that we're actually looking for. That's, you know, that's why those meetings are important, man, is the intake.

It's like the kickoff and intake is super necessary in that. Yeah, that's right. So the reason I was super excited to get you on the show is I had a couple of questions I wanted to talk to you, and I want to let folks know So Pete has a degree in psychology, and we wanted to talk about the psychology of what we do, um, just because I wanted to finally give Pete a chance to actually use his degree. No, I'm just kidding.

Me too.

Um, so talking about the psychology of sourcing, do you feel like sometimes our job is— whether it's, you know, all-stack sourcing, or sourcing is part of our job as recruiters. But the whole, the whole mentality and psychology of sourcing is, um, rather peripatetic, unique. It's almost like defined by its own, by its own self. So what I mean is sourcing is a very different job, sure, but it's part of recruiting. However, it's like this other— it combines part science, part intuition, part art.

Yeah.

And I think, I think part psychology, like, do you— I guess the question I'm trying to ask is, do you feel like sourcers are armchair psychologists?

I think they have to be to a certain degree, right? Because you have a number of different personalities that you're trying to understand/manage, right? It's the candidate personality and who you're talking to and sort of what motivates them and what drives them as not just as a candidate, but as a human. In the same token, you're doing the same thing with a hiring manager, right? And if it's somebody you've worked with 100 times, that maybe that's a little bit easier for you. But that first time, it's really understanding, like, what are their— I hate to use hot buttons, but like, what are their hot buttons? What is the way they think? What are their sort of inherent biases that they may or may not know that they have? And then I think that there's also a third angle to that we don't talk about a lot is the psychology of self, right? As a recruiter, you have to, you have to think about from your own perspective, your self-awareness, your how do you communicate? Are you doing it in a way that sort of resonates with people? I think so. There's sort of this trinity that you have to sort of attend to from a psychological perspective to do what we do.

So you got the understanding of the hiring manager's psychology and predispositions. You got to— and if you're working with a recruiter, you have that psychology, then you have the candidate's perspective and something that you said, the candidate as a whole self. Explain that.

Yeah, I mean, I think you have to think about what it looks like for somebody that you're, you're, you're going after, not just a collection of keywords on a resume or their comp structure or things like that. Right. I think one of the things— this is, this is a sort of peripheral example of this, but I think it's an important one. When there's a big layoff at a company, you know, the chum is in the water. Everybody's out there. Google Sheet gets put out there, a layoff, you know, the emails and the contact information for people on a layoff. And the chum is in the water and people are approaching it. And what I wonder sometimes, and I take this into account when I do my own messaging to people who have been recently part of a layoff or a RIF or something like that, is there's a mindset that that person is in in a layoff. And that messaging can't be the standard message.

Mostly ugh. Mostly this mindset right here.

Empathy is an important part when you can craft that message to somebody who's just been hit in a round of 4,000 people laid off, right? Or when you're talking to somebody who's early on in their career and really understanding what they do or what they want to do. You know, I think that's something that we need to kind of take into account. But from our own perspective, it's about reading cues. It's about understanding tonality. It's about— and some of that's hard in email, right? So a lot of this plays into account when you're on the phone with somebody. I think in making sure that when— even when we get to the point where we talk about what's going to happen next, right? When they know what to expect at each stage of the process and we communicate that efficiently, like, yeah, there's some psychological comfort that puts people at ease. Yeah, it reduces fear of the unknown. You know, even something as simple as when I message them in my in my invite to them, it's, hey, I'm going to be calling from this number in case it goes into spam. Like, it—

oh no way, I do that! Oh my God, I thought I was the only one.

No, we all block spam on our phone.

No, no, I mean, I say that. I'm like, hey, this is the number I'm going to call you from. Yep. I, I message them with that just because of that, because I think sometimes they don't— well, you know, everybody plays caller ID, um, on their phone. I can't wait for caller ID on cellular to actually finally be a reality. But that's why I tell them that, because like, I'm— and sometimes I'm calling them from my, my VoIP line and not my cell phone. So that's— yeah, sorry, keep going.

No, that's okay. I think it's, you know, those kinds of things. It's, it's never easy to be from— we've all done it. We've been in a candidate's shoes, right, and interviewing for a job. And there's a, there's a lot of intensity in that whole process. And so the little things that we can do to sort of alleviate some of those stressors or some of those worries I think are really, really important. And I think we sort of overlook that because we're thinking about metrics and numbers and how do we contact and how do we get the person on the horn. Like, but even how you approach them and how, what's in that messaging and, you know, something as simple as, hey, I realize that you've been there for 9 years and Rome's probably not on fire, but here's why I want to talk to you. You know, rather than like, I have this job, like, that's great that you have this job, but like, here's why I want to talk to you is much more resonant than here's why you need to talk to me.

Yeah, understand the perspective and the empathy that you need to have, like you said, in order to— and by the way, this applies also to the recruiter, you know, as a sourcer. If you're at the beginning of that process, the front of the funnel, and bringing in candidates, the recruiters could feel threatened by that. So there's also a psychology of taking away or trying to, you know, trying to minimize the fear from the recruiter's point of view that you're a threat to them, minimize the fear from the candidate's point of view that is inherent in even, even thinking about a job change. Job change is like one of the top 3 most stressful, most fearsome activities that We do, you know, along with like public speaking and getting married or relocating your home and things like that. So understanding that and just simply being aware of it and being empathetic. So we are essentially playing armchair psychologist to the hiring manager, to the recruiter, to the candidate, but to ourself as well, right?

Sure. And I think part of that, too, is, you know, it's about— it's hard to— saying you have to develop your own communication style is very sort of carte blanche. It kind of captures everything. But I think we really need to think about like finding a voice when we, when we talk to people, because, you know, if they're very casual in their communications, we should be casual. Mirroring is a very important, you know, psychological component.

And you can do that electronically too.

You can totally do that electronically, but you have to really, instead of just reading it, you have to sort of interpret it. And I know that that's hard on text or email sometimes, but you have to take the best chance that you can to be able to do that in order to, you know, kind of get somebody in the mindset. And sometimes it's the basic stuff of like when you reach out and it's Friday, like starting out the email with Happy Friday, that shows a little bit of human, you know, a little bit of a human aspect to what we're doing rather than just like, I hope this email finds you well. Like, I don't know that an email has ever found me well. Like, I don't know what that means. You know, but I know what Happy Friday means, and that's a soft intro, you know, for that. And I think, you know, and again, this comes back to sort of really looking at profiles of people and resumes too, of, you know, looking at the little intricacies like what do they do in their spare time? Like, I love to connect with people who put those hobbies on the bottom and they're talking about playing guitar. And I've struggled with that, you know, myself. And or, you know, I see somebody who's got stuff about pizza on there. And in my profile is, I am always happy to talk about the intricacies of pizza.

Oh, so you don't work it into the message like, I'd like to talk to you about a slice of opportunity.

Yeah, no, I did. I gave up on the corny stuff years ago, unless there's something just so obvious that I can play that into it, you know, in a, what feels like a normal way. You know, there's a difference between trying to force fit it and to be able to, you know, kind of shape it in a way that makes sense.

Yeah, the messaging, the psychology of messaging definitely is part of, I think, and not just the psychology of messaging, but the adaptability of it and the flexibility of it, mirroring or understanding your audience. That's what— I wrote an article about the peripatetic recruiter and the peripatetic sourcer. And that means it's kind of in the Socratic school of philosophy. It's living amongst the people that you're observing and participating in the community. So rather than like the old-fashioned lurk before you post, it's more like lurk and hang out and, and, you know, understand the subculture before you get involved. And when you get involved, um, act like a native in that subculture, act like a resident in that, not just an observer. And I think there's a lot of psychology, um, involved in that that we probably didn't even realize.

Well, I mean, they call it reading the room for a reason, right? And that, that isn't always just in a physical location sense, right? That is just reading, reading into sort of what somebody is trying to convey, you know, through their profile or through a message back to you or whatever the case is. I think that that's important.

Tell me, tell me about imposter syndrome. I kind of, I kind of struggle with that. Myself in a couple of different ways. But we talked a little bit about that. Tell me more about imposter syndrome and how— what were your thoughts on it? How are you thinking about it?

So for all of the, for all of the talk out there about, you know, balancing your work life with your personal life and all that, and I know this doesn't attribute to everybody, but I think that there is, and I know it is for me, there is a definitive level of self-worth, a sense of self-worth, I think, that is wrapped up in who you are in your job and your career. Right. And whether that's, you know, you're trying to climb the ladder title-wise or what have you, it doesn't have to be like that. But it is difficult to get out of the mindset of like, well, how is what I'm contributing going to make a difference? Right. And when you do that, there's a lot of people putting out the same things. Out there and you're like, well, how is what I'm putting out there going to be any different? But I think that there's a level that we have to kind of self-actualize that, well, the way that I'm saying it or the way that I'm putting it out there might resonate with somebody that the other thing doesn't resonate with at all. Um, but it's, it's hard to, to get over the idea of like, wow, that was a really good article. I could never write anything like that. Um, But I think, you know, part of that is you have to—

isn't that kind of envy though?

Um, yes and yes and no. I think there's envy slash admiration.

Um, right, admiration.

I think envy can both be good and bad. Um, I think that there's something you take away from each thing that you read, right, whether that's good or bad or indifferent. Um, but I think, you know, there's a certain point where you have to— you just have to jump off the ledge. And if it lands, it lands. And if it doesn't, okay, maybe the next thing will land. You know, I think that there's a— I think there's a component to that that we fear is a fear is a crippling thing. And particularly.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Profession. I think everybody assumes that all recruiters are extroverts and that is so, so not the freaking case. Right.

Definitely not it.

But I think that there's a, there's a, there's a place for the extrovert and the introvert in that. Right. And but I think it's harder as maybe an introvert to get past the imposter syndrome. But I think I'm, I'm more or less an extrovert, but I suffer from it all the time, you know, like, am I going to be able to put something out there that actually resonates with people?

Yeah, especially when you have— so maybe at first if you're just getting started, there's not a whole lot of risk because you write something and it's new. But once you've gotten a reputation for your content being, you know, oh, funny or satirical or, you know, Charny and Smarmy, you know, or whatever. And then, you know, you're like, oh my God, am I going to be able to like, can I maintain this? Can I maintain the funny? Can I maintain the smart? Can I maintain the whatever? And so there's this, this fear of why bother putting it out there if there's so much other stuff. And a lot of this stuff is good and I wish I had written it. So maybe I just don't really want to write because I'm afraid that I don't have anything new, different, better to say that might be, you know, compete with what I already said or what other people are saying, you know?

Yeah. And I mean, you know, a fundamental component of cognitive behavioral therapy is self-talk, right? And the voice that you put into your head is the voice that's going to speak back to you in your head. And that can take years to reshape and to reframe as you, as you go throughout your career. Right. And I think it's, it's, it's probably easier in the beginning to get past it because you don't know what you don't know. I think as you've gone through the years and seen more and more things, some of that gets into your head and to think about like, what do you, what do you really know and what value are you contributing? Right. But I think part of that, too, is making sure you've got folks in your sphere that you can trust to say, hey, I'm thinking about putting this out there, read through it and blow it up for me. And fortunately, I've got a lot of those people that are willing to take some of that stuff and blow it up for me before I put it out there.

Okay. Some good advice there. But so why bother?

Go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, you— why do you share what you know? I guess is that why do you share?

So there's a couple of, there's a couple of reasons. One, not a single person that's watching this right now is sitting there with a bachelor's degree in recruiting. So there's no way for any of us to walk out and come out educated to say, oh, I already know more than somebody who's been doing this for 5 years. I think the other piece of it is I have over the course of 23, 24 years, I've had the chance to have some really spectacular mentors and people who have given me their time and their brainpower and their conversation over the years to sort of bring me to where I am. I have tried as best as I can to play that forward in my career and making sure I spend time with the folks who are coming up, spend time with the folks who are interested in knowing more because, you know, I've gone the management route a couple of times. Each time I've done it, I've gotten 6 months in and be like, I hate this crap. But I really enjoy mentoring folks. I really enjoy sharing what I know, sharing here's how you fall down, here's how you get back up, or hey, have you thought about this? Hey, have you thought about that? That's why I share. I don't give a crap about clicks, man. That doesn't like— that doesn't do anything for me. All that means is I'm just going to have to manage more crap in a LinkedIn inbox a week from now. It's nice to have eyeballs for sure, but like You know, for example, speaking at SourceCon, I think it was back in 2017 or 2018. I don't need to be on the stage. I'm very comfortable behind the curtain because behind the curtain is where the machine is, right?

I hate being on the stage. I get so nervous, butterflies, I get cottonmouth, the whole works, right?

It's the same reason I coach youth soccer, right? Like, my playing days are long behind me and my body is shot. But I can impart the critical pieces and the fun pieces and the life lessons that go into something like that. And I think, you know, what we do for a living isn't terribly different than that. You know, what we learn in this profession is so much by doing rather than, I would say, getting it out of a book. But now I sit here with like 5 books of really good friends of mine who have all, you know, present company included, with books here that I've read and gone, my God, that's brilliant. Like, how have I not thought about that?

Hold on, did you just compliment my book? Because I missed that. I did. It was like, oh wait, he's talking about my book. Appreciate that. Yeah, appreciate that. Well, so, um, I share a lot less these days, partly because I dedicate what, you know, what little time I had available to writing articles and creating content, um, and posting and, and things like that. Um, when I have that time available, I'm using it to create courses that go into my library, or I do the show. And the show is, uh, you know, it's, it's 2 or 3 hours a week of commitment. So this is kind of my way of sharing, is by highlighting people like you and bringing, you know, in some cases, I mean, you're a celebrity, so, you know, I'm not, I'm not doing you any favors, but there's people on the show that have been guests that were relatively unknown, and I love to be able to give them a stage to, to share their ideas and their philosophies and do exactly what you said, right? Um, show what they know so others can learn. So that's why I don't do it a lot. But I'll tell you that when I started, I, the, the I was the first to create a newsletter about sourcing. It was called Cyber Sleuthing in 1996, and it was an email newsletter. I had no idea how many eyeballs were on it because it was an email newsletter. All I knew was my email list grew, but that was just because people were subscribing to the newsletter. I didn't know if anybody read it, but years later, and I mean like 10 years, 15 years later, I still have folks that, you know, even today say, I remember your newsletter, or stuff like that. So I had no idea how many people I was reaching, but I was definitely reaching people because later on I found out about that. Then I transitioned to— I was myself and Levi and one other person were the first bloggers ever on the, you know, in sourcing and in recruiting, generally speaking. We were the first 3 bloggers on ERE, and I was blogging a lot. And then I did see the eyeballs in the comments, and there was only 3 of us, so the comments were focused on the 3 of us. And then there were 20, and then there were 100, and then the comments dwindled. But by then I'd already switched to another medium, and I wrote a book, and then I wrote another book, and then I wrote a third book. Um, and after writing the, the fourth book, which I think finally is the book that, that I meant to write, it was a book that I always wanted to write, I can honestly say I'm done writing books. I have no idea how many copies have sold. I have no idea how many people it's influenced. Influence. So what I'm trying to tell you is from the beginning, I didn't really care how many eyeballs were on the newsletter. And then with the blog, I wasn't blogging to get comments. It just happened because it was one of the first ones. And then later with LinkedIn and all that other stuff, I've never really been— it's never really been about people seeing it. It's never really been about getting popular. It's always been this urge, this underlying need, almost like a disease, like I have to get it out. Yeah, right. And so now that I have other outlets, the courses and this, I don't have that need to write as much anymore, the pathological need to write. Maybe I'm sick in that way, but do you feel like that? Do you feel like you have to get the word out? Is that part of the motivation?

I think there's a couple of different ways I can do that. I think, you know, contributing thoughtful comments to things that other people put out there or sort of resonating those things, I think is helpful. I've got a, you know, an arm's length list of stuff I want to put out there, and probably all of it is within, you know, all of it is 60 to 70% complete. It's not all done, but I think I don't feel the need to do it, but I think there are things I'm passionate about that I want to, that I really want to sort of convey. Right. And I think that the psychology of sourcing is one of those things like we, we've spent 10, 15 years on tactical and engagement and Boolean and all that. And that's great. But those are only one component of what we do. The other component at the end of the day And I know the AI haters are going to come for me for this, but like the end of the day, this is still a human-to-human connection, right? And I'm sure maybe that fades at some point. I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine. But I think until that moment comes, the human component and the sort of mindset and the psychological piece of this, of how we interact with people, how we engage people, how we treat people, is going to still be paramount until the day comes where the machine does it all, if that's going to ever happen.

Hmm.

And I don't know that we're necessarily talking about that as much. I still see a lot about— and, you know, some of this comes through, I think, a little bit. And there's threads of this that come through in employer branding. There's threads of this that come through like the DEI conversations. But I feel like a lot of the times they're talking about it and then they sort of go outside of the important psychological piece of this back to the tactical. It's this ideation. Skip the psychological, back to the tactical.

Back to the tactical. Well, sticking to the psychological then, um, the fear is— the psychological and the fear is that, uh, the robots will replace us, right? And so this, this goes back to probably even before Henry Ford, I'm sure. But then an example that I can think of, at least academically from, um, from my studies, was that there was this fear that the Ford method, the assembly line, would replace the skilled workers, and, you know, it would, it would, it would displace them, and they would then be unemployed and unemployable. What actually ended up happening was that the, the robots— back then they weren't the robots that we know today, but the, the machines were not, um, they didn't replace humans. Humans just had to learn how to use them. And so humans that were replaced were the humans that didn't learn how to use the the robot. So if you think about that, that is the same with any tool, right? If a tool is created and the artisan or whatever doesn't know how to use that tool, there's reason to fear it because they are not— they're not going to be able to keep up. The same thing is happening with AI. So there's this fear that AI is going to replace us, but it won't. It— what'll happen is it'll replace the people that aren't able to learn how to use this new tool, whatever it is, whether it's true AI or not. I don't want to even get into that, but you know what I mean.

Yeah, that's a whole different discussion. But a ChatGPT is only as good as the prompt that the human puts into it. Right.

The what? That the what puts into it?

Into it, right?

Yeah. The one that's being replaced? No, not quite.

So for all of the like, AI is going to replace us. And again, this is a whole nother diatribe we can go into, but like, For all the AI is going to replace us, as soon as somebody comes up with an ATS that can tell the difference between a word and a PDF document and parse it accurately, then I'll start worrying about my job. Until then, I'm not worried about that.

Didn't Resumix do that in 2001 or something?

Sure, but it's 2023 and I'm still going.

Now they don't do it.

You still can't do it.

We did it in 2001 and now we can't do it anymore.

I think again, it has its place, right? You can certainly drive your car, but you can still walk if you want to, right? There's still a place for that. And I think, again, with the AI piece is going to miss— and I don't want to make this a whole AI thing, so I'll stop after this. But like, I think that, you know, it's not going to be— it doesn't necessarily include empathy. It doesn't necessarily include sort of sense of understanding or reasoning when you're putting a messaging out there, you're having a conversation with somebody to understand, hey, I can't reload because I've got a 15-year-old kid in high school, and if I move right now, they won't talk to me till after college. Those kinds of things aren't going to be able to be replaced like that. Those are the things that only the machine of the human brain can really synthesize and think about right answer, wrong answer, good response, bad response. I think that that's something that we really need to to make sure we keep at the forefront of this.

That's really good.

It's a complement to the tactical, right? It's not one or the other, it's a complement to the tactical, right?

It's— yeah, I think somebody said human plus, right?

Yep.

Yeah, that's a good point. So, um, one thing machines can't do, or, you know, AI or language models or whatever, is the mirroring that you were talking about, right? And the reading and interpreting and things like that, they can interpret what's being said, but I'm not sure that sentiment analysis is quite at the point where, you know, you can really distinguish snark from irony or, you know, whether someone's happy writing it or whatever. So there's that. You had talked about the generalization bias or the dangers of generalization bias. And I think that's something that we, because it's definitely related to psychology, we need to touch on. In particular, you know, when we make overgeneralizations, like for example, you gave me an example of, you said, you know, last 2 or 3 candidates that we interviewed from XYZ company were terrible, therefore everybody from XYZ company is terrible, so we're going to avoid recruiting from there.

Right.

Tell me a little bit about that. How do we, how did we get there and how do we defeat that? Because it is, it is definitely damaging to everybody but the 3 people that didn't do well in interviews, you know? Yeah.

And I think, you know, there's some level of heuristics there that play into it. Right. And I think it's, you know, that heuristics bias, I think you can sort of almost intertwine the 2 of those. Right. And I think that You know, there is this sort of like, oh, well, we, you know, the last 3 people from AAA company, they were, they were bad. So like everybody there must be bad. Well, the company is still in business, so everybody can't be bad, right? Or, you know, Twitter had a layoff, tech market must be—

tech markets, right, right. Twitter and Google had layoffs, therefore the entire technology market is going under. But, but lots of companies are still hiring. So, right.

And I think, you know, I think what we need to keep in mind is that, you know, a company is a collection of people, right? People are not the company that necessarily— and I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, but I think you see where I'm going with that. And I think we have to sort of avoid some of this overlay of like, oh, well, one thing happens, so it's terrible. If we've learned anything in this industry is that, you know, it all comes back around. It's all cyclical and it all comes back around, right? Like Recruiter hot summer was 18 months ago and everybody was moving and everybody was getting paid and now it's down again. And then 18 months from now it will probably be very different again. And I think we have to sort of not just take the headline, but we have to really sort of read the whole article and understand, you know, that there is, there is more to this and what goes up comes down and vice versa. So, you know, to say that like Oh, talk to these two engineers and they're, they're terrible. I don't want to talk to anybody else. And they're like, well, what about the really friggin smart engineer who is just desperate to get out of that place because they're stifled? Right? Are we missing that person because we're looking at the title and not the article?

Right? Right. Or likewise, the, the attraction to hiring managers. So, you know, we're definitely missing out on people because we're leaving them behind because we're making these generalizations, but also we're missing out on other people because we're focusing on these companies. Like, how often do you go to a hiring manager and say, you know, what kind of candidates do you want, or what companies do you want us to target? And it's always Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, right? It's like, why? I mean, that's the first question. Why? Yeah, why? It's exactly, that's the question I ask. And it's hilarious sometimes the answers that I get. But the, the best example I can give you is I dug into this with a hiring manager, and I said, why? And they started telling me about the quality of their training program and their interview process. And, you know, how people who make the bar there are definitely, you know, it's a, it's a factor that designates a quality or, you know, whatever. And I let them just kind of keep going, and then I, and then I jumped in and I said— this was some time ago, so it doesn't apply anymore— but I jumped in and I said, okay, but you understand, um, the reason I'm having a— I'm hesitating here, and the reason I'm having a hard time kind of grasping this is because we develop in C++ and they develop in this other language, we're writing for Windows and they're writing for this other. So, like, there's no— are they even going to pass the interview? Are they, you know, are the skills the same? And the hiring manager was like, well, I mean, I don't know if they, if they can, you know, if they can program in this or they can learn it. I'm like, okay, so now we're making exceptions for people. Normally we would, we would make sure that they have to have 10 years of C++. But now if they come from this company, then they don't have to have 10 years of C++. How does that work?

Right. Well, and it, you know, I think part of that too is, you know, they say, oh, I don't want them from this company because if they, if they, if they worked at this company, it means they've hit the bar or it means they figured out how to game the system through the interview process. Right. I mean, it's not, it's not terribly different.

They were a good fit for that company. How about that? How about they just worked really well, you know, a culture fit. And whatever, you know, it's, it's not, it's an old, like you said, it's an overgeneralization that's going to hurt other candidates that are, that are more qualified, but they don't, they didn't work at that company.

And the same can be said of recruiters, like, oh, well, they haven't recruited for this before. All right. Well, at the end of the day, you know, the house is shaped the same, the walls may be painted differently.

Right?

You figure out how to do— you figure out how to do that. I had no experience recruiting lawyers and paralegals earlier in my career. Figured it out, though. You know, I didn't know what Kubernetes was 4 and a half years ago, but a stupid YouTube video that was a cartoon taught me everything I needed to know in 8 minutes.

Wow.

You know, so I think that it is, you know, part of that, I think, too, is— and we talked a little about mirroring with those hiring managers, like, Understand the things that motivate them when they look at a candidate. And when you're, when you're giving that information to them about the candidate, make sure you're including some of those things that they called, called out as far as, you know, wanting that. You know, I think that that's making sure we're— I don't want to say using playback, but almost kind of playing back the words. If I had somebody that did this, that would be great. And you give them somebody that did that and they're like, well, I don't really like how they did this, but you said if they had somebody that did this, that would be a good fit. So why does the company matter now?

Right.

You know, and I think that that'll help them think of, well, I did say that. Okay, you know what, let's have the conversation, right?

Right. Okay. So you have to push back. So what you're saying is that the way to reverse that or combat that when you know that you are doing the best job you can is to essentially, or one of the ways is to essentially kind of feedback what they said, right? So re—

Yes.

You know, recall the, the intake, the kickoff, um, as a way to remind them that we're looking for a specific thing that isn't that new thing that they just told us about.

Correct.

I like that. That's good feedback. I don't even know if I call that feedback. It's like playback is not it, feedback is that— there's a word for that somewhere.

There is a term for it. I've actually— I actually have a note because while I'm putting some of that together, I'm actually have a note to figure out what the term actually is for that.

We'll figure it out. We'll do it on the next show. Yep, definitely. Um, great. So we talked a lot about psychology in different ways. Um, and, uh, you know, just, I didn't want to let you go without asking you the, the couple of questions that I always ask. I'm sure you probably already heard. Yeah. Um, so my, my second to last question is, who should be on the show next?

So I, you know, anticipating this, I thought about Who have I worked with that, gosh, I would love to see them on a show or they haven't been out there, who's doing really interesting stuff.

And that's exactly what I want.

Yeah. There's a guy that I worked with at Amazon, Adam Kovach, might be one of 5 smartest people I've ever met in my life. Hell of a recruiter. I think sort of didn't want to do that anymore, but found like the analytical part of his brain. I think what, what what uses his brain best has now come to the forefront. Right. And that's talent intelligence and, you know, all of that information around sort of like, how do you know what to go and find before you have it on your desk? Right. And he's nailed this and he's been an integral part of like putting the Sourcing Seven back on the map out in the Pac Northwest. And I think just somebody that I can sit and watch and listen to that every time he says something, I'm like, gosh, that's okay. That's a really good idea. I come out with something, he's like, whoa, man, have you thought about this? And, you know, really, the people that make you think are the people that I want to hear from.

Yeah, absolutely. That's who I want to hear from. So definitely we're going to seek them out and invite them. Awesome. Yeah. So he's at Microsoft now?

No, he— well, he— when he left Amazon, he went out and started his own sort of consulting business. Um, right now. So he's been doing some of that. And again, he spent a lot of time in the last couple months like revamping and relaunching Sourcing 7 out there, um, which I think is great. I think these like local communities, like they— again, those go through ebb and flows too. So it's really nice to see the wheels turning with a new generation of folks doing that.

Okay, it's K-O-V-A-C-H?

K-O-V-A-C-S. Oh, ACS. Okay.

Got it. Thanks for clarifying that. Cool. All right. And then so the, the last question is, a lot of folks watch this replay over the weekend. So I like to give them something to sink their teeth into. Is there something you can leave them with to think about? A thought-provoker, right? To, to non over the weekend? What, what would you part the audience with that would make them think?

I think, um, you know, for those of us that are spending time actually talking to candidates— I know that that's not everybody's, uh, bailiwick— but I think for, for those that are talking to people, I think, um, the next time you get off that phone call, sort of reflect back on what the conversation you had, but like, what are the things that aren't in your notes that are going to go to the hiring manager that stick out to you about that person? You know, what were the things that they said or things that like the tonality of some of the things they said, like think about those things before you go and do that write-up. Think about what you could have said differently to make a different connection personally with that person. Or did you leave them with a sense of like, gosh, they know exactly what's coming next, right? Like some of those things, I think it's, it's, it's the, it's the 30-second or 90-second reflection after that call while it's still fresh in the mind. I would encourage people to think about that.

OK. Wow. Wonderful. Man, it's been great.

Awesome, man.

Really appreciate you being on the show.

Thanks for having me, dude. This has been super helpful.

Yeah, yeah, I would love to have you back. We're starting to, uh, we're starting to do some encores for sure, especially as we start looking into specific topics. I love talent analytics, and actually you called it talent intelligence. So yeah, that's— but analytics and intelligence, I think there's, there's a difference. It's a nuance, but there's a difference. However, that's kind of what I'm doing nowadays. I'm in my role, I'm I oversee all people analytics, and so very interesting topic for me personally. And I think a lot of folks that are in sourcing might find that an interesting topic to either, you know, transition into or also do or whatever. So I appreciate that. Well, thanks a lot for being here, everybody. It's Shelly's Alley. We will see you next Friday, same time. And be kind to each other. Take care.