Ronnie Bratcher Live on Shally's Alley

Hey, all right, you are live on Shally's Alley. It is Friday, November 22nd, at roughly 1 PM Shally time, which is give or take 10 minutes. Ronnie's like, yeah, I know what that means. And so one of the privileges of, or one of the benefits I guess, of having my own show is I get to pick my own guests. And that means that every once in a while, I can bring some of my friends on the show. And Ronnie is one of my closest friends who happens to also be in the industry of talent acquisition and sourcing and recruiting and all that. So you've seen him on the show a few times. He's a, he's a repeat offender. But don't be fooled. Just because he's my friend doesn't mean I go easy on him. And also, just because he's my friend doesn't mean that he doesn't have contributions to make. He is actually, for those of you who don't know Ronnie, one of the most curious intellectual minds in the art of sourcing, the art and the science of sourcing, because it's both an art and a science, right? Isn't it? And so Ronnie is one of those people that will just kind of push the boundaries, right? He likes to play the same what-if game that I like to play. So I'm going to try something like, what if I do this? What if I do that? Quite frankly, that's kind of the labor of love that goes into creating some of the more actionable techniques and innovating. It's really at the heart of innovation. So, you'll see him presenting at conferences and talking about some of the innovations that he's come up with. Doesn't get a lot of credit for inventing stuff because, you know, he shares it so openly and people often, you know, just kind of rip him off. But the truth is, He's one of the biggest innovators in the space, so that's why I wanted to bring him on. And secretly, I also wanted to get the skinny on SourceCon because he recently attended SourceCon. So Ronnie, let's talk about that. Did you just go to SourceCon?

Yeah, I was in San Diego a couple of weeks ago, and I actually presented there as well.

Ah, all right. What did you present on?

So I presented on AI tools using natural language search to find actual profiles on the web using AI, which is—

oh, not heard of, right? And so everybody else had AI in their presentation, probably, right?

Uh, no. Well, yeah, sort of. Um, yeah, it worked out pretty well because there was two other presenters, uh, you know, Greg Hawks that we all know, and then Brian Fink as well, and their presentations were perfect lead-ins to mine, as in I was actually challenging the bots to do what I wanted to do and/or showing how the bot will not do it yet, and then what can you do with the bot. Then as you probably have seen in the news lately, some of the bots are now becoming connected with the web and they're designing their own search engines, per se. Give you an example, Perplexity now has ads starting this week if you look at it. So we are now in the Google world phase of AI use and search and now getting a revenue model. But there was a few tools that I actually was wanting it to find actual profiles, not LinkedIn profiles, but actual websites of people. And they did work. Then there were a few that didn't work and I actually showed that as well. I really was just challenging.

That's awesome. What works and what doesn't work, that's always a good way to go.

The lead-in from Greg and Brian was perfect because Greg showed how to do some productivity things and Brian did some Medium searching and then I just went off the deep end, probably just bored everybody.

I don't think so. Somehow I doubt that. He's somebody saying— a fan of yours saying hi here. Met you in Minneapolis last year.

Yeah, yeah, Ryan's great. Ryan's awesome.

So, well, tell me, uh, what, what else did you learn from any of the other speakers? Or what were the other— oh yeah, there was some really good topics.

I'll tell you one of the most memorable ones, and this probably wasn't really around sourcing, I guess it could be depending how, how you define sourcing. Um, it was with, uh, Joe Each. Who is a legend in our industry. She had a presentation totally around bias.

Unconscious bias.

Yeah. She was very open about her situation in her personal life and what her challenge was with a certain generation of being biased towards. I've been taking personal training in the past year on bias training. Just because I do more outreach and engaging of candidates than I normally have done in the past decade.

Be biased.

Yeah, meaning that, you know, how you look at other people, and I do this in my personal life, you know, now that, you know, I had a certain situation in my medical world. Now I'm kind of looking differently at people and not making judgments so fast.

Yeah.

So it's, it's been really great. And Joe had a great What I learned from Joe is exactly that. Just, you can't judge somebody from the COVID of their book. Um, you have to accept and just be with what they want.

Yeah, you got to open the book a little bit, right? Read, read some of the— yeah, some of the content. Yeah, no kidding. So you had, uh, unconscious bias or bias. What, what other topics were there?

Uh, there was lots of topics.

Um, and like, how big was the event? How many people?

I have, you know, I think overall there was around 200 or so people there in person, and then I think 300 or 400 online. Uh, so it was pretty big. Uh, there was more vendors, which was great to see, uh, because vendors support our industry and introduce us to any vendor that, that you, you were like, oh, I've never seen that before. Yeah, pin.com.

Like a pen? P-E-N?

P-I-N. Oh, okay. Yeah, um, I'm gonna probably not remember the name. Stephen Liu, does that sound familiar?

Um, what do they do?

Uh, they actually, um, are an AI tool that actually searches the web. They say they can search the entire web, which I will always challenge that nothing in the world can search the entire web. Uh, and it can, you know, find data like Let's say you're looking for a data engineer in Minneapolis, it will pull the— it will search all the quote-unquote the entire web, pull that data back, and then do all the outreach and all that kind of stuff for you. I thought it was a pretty good tool. I haven't got to play with it yet. I think I have a 2-week introductory invitation, so I might take a look at it. Um, so I thought that was probably one of the most intriguing tools at the conference.

So a sourcing tool?

Sourcing tool, yeah. Um, it does like everything, like scheduling and all that other stuff, all the things that everybody's introducing in, in our, in our space right now.

Yeah, there's a lot of those companies.

Yeah, a lot of vendors like that. Um, I think overall SourceCon was very positive. Uh, I think the after hours was fun. Uh, we had an actual live—

you're not supposed to talk about after hours though. Like, you know, I thought—

I think it was really fun because, uh, Jim organized a karaoke live band actually, and they actually brought the songs that people wanted to sing.

And Jim is such a good MC too. He's like the—

yeah, and we have amazing singers, motivator, cheerleader. I felt like I was at a concert. It was fun. I had a good time because the singers were so good.

It was good. They were so good.

They were good.

Nice.

It was good. It was good. Yeah. Anyway, that's SourceCon. Yeah, it was kind of cool.

Yeah. So I actually, uh, have been to two events recently. Um, while you were doing that, I was at, uh, at a conference in Australia, in Sydney, Australia, and in Toronto. Um, and did you know that people actually do sourcing like outside of the United States, in other countries? Oh yeah, believe it or not, they do really well too. Yeah, they do. Both of these were really interesting. In Australia, it's a whole nother kind of buzz around, you know, sourcing is sort of, uh, not, not always like a dedicated function. It's, it's sometimes dedicated, sometimes it's part of recruiting. The people that were at that event though, they were kind of all over the place, from, you know, TA leaders to just every and it was pretty intimate setting, more of a, more of a one-day workshop really than a conference because it didn't, didn't have like a bunch of vendors or anything like that. Actually, I didn't have any vendors. It was, you know, multiple speakers and sessions and everything, but no vendors. Same thing with the one in Toronto. Both of these events were great though. I mean, the, to see kind of people talking about what's going on day to day, um, you know, it was really cool to see in Australia, for example, how they're integrating their, um, ATSs and their HRASs and their CRMs together because, you know, they, they kind of are a little bit more bootstrapped than, than you are here in the US with a more mature market, lots of other applications. You know, let's face it, most of the time these sourcing tools and, and these recruiting tools, they come out, they, they're like US-specific, right? You can't, you can't do searches outside of the US in some of them, um, or at least they start out that way. Well, anyway, It was interesting to see how they integrated stuff. And in Toronto, they really— there's a lot more transparency around things like pay transparency, for example, in the process. So it was interesting to see how they— what they believe should be the conversation with candidates. You know, like in the US, there's some controversy around pay transparency. Some states require it, others don't. There's no federal requirement, and there's kind of tension on both, both sides of that. But, um, in Canada, there's— the regulations are different. So it was interesting to learn about, you know, as, as a global sourcer, what— how do you deal with that, right? Like, in the US, you're required in some states to be transparent about Hey, but what if you're posting a position globally? Like, we're moving more towards that, right? We're having more and more and more positions are sort of global now with the ability to work remotely from anywhere. Well, in some other countries, you might be required to post, um, you know, pay and other things in different currencies and everything. It gets really complicated, you know. So it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, wow, we need to start thinking more globally about this, that, that perspective. From Toronto and from Sydney. It's a good lesson, good takeaway from that.

Yeah, I agree with that. Um, the company I currently work for is a worldwide organization as well, and I have been working in the European market primarily in the past 3 or 3 months or so, and it's a little different. You know, you have to think about how you search, how you acquire data, um, We don't do much posting per se, so I can't really explain on that a little bit. But from the search side and obtaining data, got to be transparent more than we would here in the United States.

That's what I was talking about.

Yeah. Yeah. And talent's all over the world. I work from 5:00 AM till 6:00 PM just because I want to So you only work half days then? Yeah, no, no, I work full days.

You know, there's 24 hours in a day.

So yeah, I know, I usually, I like to get up early and work a few hours with the team I'm working with in Europe, you know, because they're online, I can collaborate. You know, they're kind of in the middle of their day. So yeah, we just got to flex. That's just, I think that's the new world coming in. You know, and now we have automation. Well, you know, we have always had automation, but now we really got automation. Yeah. So it's kind of cool.

Oh, we have a question. Do you know if they— from Cassie on LinkedIn— if they had any additional sessions or resources related to using sites to find talent? Um, so resources. Okay, so there was Unlocking Academic and Scientific Talent for Data Science. Oh, okay. Uh, sorry, it gets cut off in the screen here, so I'll just continue reading. We're still trying to learn how to use places like ResearchGate, ScholarGPS, and arXiv. Did anybody talk about that? So specifically scientific, right? Like I use ResearchGate a lot, but are there any others that you saw from SourceCon?

I really did not see that during this moment, at least at the last one. It was really just a lot of upper-level kind of stuff. I think, like I mentioned, the more techie sessions were around Greg Hawks and Brian and I trying to—

But not specifically about scientific research.

Okay. Yeah. No, no, no. Ours were all different levels. I did primarily software engineering because that's just kind of my go-to. You know, the other two professionals did, you know, all over the board, you know. So, um, but yeah, we didn't really get into the science. I didn't see anybody really get into that space, unfortunately.

Yeah, it's not covered, um, a lot. It's kind of a niche area. But I do— I can definitely tell, uh, Cassie, I can tell you about a couple of things that, that, that I use. I definitely use ResearchGate. Um, but there's actually, uh, another I guess, complimentary website that you can sign up for if you have a, um, an email address at a company that does scientific research. They do, they do check it out. What it does, it creates a user ID for you to be able to log into some of the websites that have publications, and it allows you— it's kind of like a, like a single sign-on, um, let me look it up here and make sure that I've got the right place. That's something that— that SciJournal? No, that's not it. Let me, um, let me confirm and I'll put the URL on here. But I found, I found that, and it was easier to log into places with like single sign-on, so you don't have to like, you know, get approval in every one of them. It's almost like a universal ID for research papers. Um, let me, let me get that for you. But, um, What about, Ronnie, what about other tools? Like, have you ever used Vortimo, for example?

No, I have not.

No, V-O-R-T-I-M-O. Nothing like that. So I was talking about that at, um, both Toronto and, and Sydney. It's a browser extension, and kind of what it does is it's almost like a mapping tool. I would say it's an OSINT tool By the way, it's a Chrome extension. So if you just go to like the Chrome, um, what do you call it, the, uh, the store— thank you— the Chrome Store extension store and type it— type in Vortimo, V-O-R-T-I-M-O. Let me put that on here for everybody to see the, the URL here. There we go. Vortimo. So what it does is it, well, amongst many things, one of the things that it does is it tracks your searches. So you know how you go on Google, you type a search and you click on something and then you follow that lead. So you go to a page that then leads you to another page and another page. Well, Google does remember your search history and it remembers what you clicked on. So you can search your search history. That sounds funny. But this actually will track where you went and builds like a tree. So it'll tell you, you started here, and then it brings thumbnails into it so you can actually explore a map of like the path that you took from one click to the next. And it actually archives everything into a way that can be exported. So by the way, you can also turn that off. So you can turn it on when you're doing research and turn it off when you're not, because it does build an index on your computer and it takes up space. So you don't want to be doing that with everything. Um, but it does save it to a file that you can extract, which is pretty cool. So it's a URL and the screenshot and like timestamp and the like a web of where you went, what you clicked on. You can also bookmark the sites. What another thing that it does is it actually allows you to extract objects from pages. So you land on a, I don't know, Facebook profile It can— there's a right-click option on your, on your browser. You right-click and then you can extract like hashtag, email address, IP address, coordinates, uh, phone number, all these like elements from it from, from kind of an OSINT point of view. So, you know, these are all things that we normally would do, but they all require you to go to a different website or whatever. It sort of brings them all together and you can program it. That's, to me, that's the killer app right there is you can tell it which sites you want to right-click on, or which— sorry, when you right-click, which sites you wanted to look at. So if you want to use GitHub, for example, you can set that up. So it does all of that in this one integrated app. It tracks what you're doing, and it also helps you discover places to go from, um, the places that you land. It's pretty cool. It's called Vortimo.

Okay, cool. Um, so I've discovered a few things on the, in the bot area, then Some of these are examples at SourceCon. For example, Exa, E-X-A, is a developer bot where software developers go and do their thing. But it actually works really, really well with natural language search.

It's a search?

Yeah, you can search the web.

E-X-A dot what? Dot com?

It's probably dot AI. Just look for the agent. Yeah. For the examples I used at SourceCon was, show me profiles of software developers in Chicago, Illinois with Python, AWS, and Linux experience. Please do not show me examples, samples, and jobs. It did a really good job of pulling back people's websites with those profiles. So it worked, which was very interesting because it, you know, people, it's not really supposed to search the web, but it does. It did.

Um, the other one that worked really well, let me put it up on the— go ahead.

Yeah, the other one was Find, P-H-I-N-D, and, uh, it's, um I did, I did the same prompt and, um, it did really well as well.

So it's a search engine that you can use prompts on?

It's not really called a search engine because it's a bot, but they do— they're, they're crawling the web. They're, you know, like how Perplexity and— yeah, the new ChatGPT search— they're saying they have their search engines now.

They're so more like you ask it a question basically.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, and I'm probably training it, but you know, that's, that's fine. I want— yeah, I don't want to be able to— I guess the way I'm looking at sourcing in the future is like, I wanted to tell, like, I wanted to, like how we did Google before, I just want to talk to it and tell it to do this for me and pull back the data versus putting in a Boolean string or, or trying to—

yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's more like Conversational, which is, you know, that's what natural language search is. It's just the way that we use, the way that, that you and I apply natural language search is to identify the natural phrases, forced phrases that people use in conversation, and then you find that conversation in context. Uh, what's, what's changing now is that you can ask that question of a chatbot that is web-enabled, and then it does its own thing, how it finds stuff. Like, it's not— it's translating your question into whatever whatever it does in behind the scenes. You can skip the step of figuring out what people are saying, right? Like for the traditional natural language, if there's anything that such as traditional, I mean, I started talking about that only about 7 or 8 years ago, but let's just say the way that I started doing natural language, I had to first identify what people were saying.

Exactly. Right?

So figure out what they do to what they talk about, find that phrase, then use the phrase. But these chatbots now can kind of figure that out because they have so much content that they can map against. So I would say, um, I don't know if you remember that project for Flutter engineers that I worked on. Yeah, where, you know, Flutter engineer is this kind of odd combination of like, they're, they're, there's no such thing as a Flutter engineer degree or anything like that, so you don't go to school for it. But you can go to school for manufacturing engineering or aerospace engineering and then math and then like telemetry. And because they got to measure the vibration of wings in flight of airplanes. So it's tricky in a lot of ways, but they don't have traditional like job titles. You'd just be, you could just be an engineer and specialize in that. So the way I figured out how to find those people was eventually I learned kind of some of the vernacular that they use. To do this measurement, and then I use those phrases to search. Nowadays, if you just ask ChatGPT or whatever bot, you know, what are some things that Flutter engineers do, you'll kind of arrive at that quicker rather than having to like investigate. Or my favorite technique, ask people, right? I would actually ask a candidate, hey, what do you talk about when you're just kind of shooting the shit with your colleagues? You know, what are your professional casual conversations about. Like recruiters were like, yeah, I, I have 27 requisitions or reqs or whatever. If you're not a recruiter, you might not know what 27 reqs are. Say same thing with Flutter engineers, they have the, this language that they use. So you're finding that these two search engines, uh, Exa and Find, like, like fish, PH, right, right, they're good at sort of answering those questions for you.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're not perfect and they don't give you a lot of results, but it gives you pretty accurate results. And if you're looking for maybe that one or two extra things you didn't find on whatever platform you're using or web service, you know, you could do that.

So how else, how else are you using this technology? I mean, you're not, you're not using it to like find a candidate and contact them. Because these are bots, not databases. So what else are you doing with it? Like, for example, I do like searches for company names, lists, job title lists.

What do you do? Yeah, I did this yesterday. I did this exercise with my teammate. I've been kind of advising my team on just some hard searches that are very challenging for me as well. They're all new things. And It makes me go outside the box and create new ways of doing things. But I'll just take Gemini. We used Gemini yesterday as just the example and started the conversation with, like you said, what companies are there? What top 10 companies does this particular organization compete against? It only gave me 10. Well, I go, can you give me more? And that's how I— and it gave me more, and I was like, give me more.

You know, did you know you can just say give me 50 and it'll do that? But here's the problem that I found is if you tell it give me 50, it'll give you 50, and to get that number, it might make up some stuff, right?

And then how do we validate that?

Yeah, exactly. So now you got, you know, a mixture of good ones and bad ones. And yeah, you're better off like sort of, you know, starting with something like you know, what are all the companies that do this in this industry, in this state, or something? And then you get a little bit more of a list. And then make sure you confirm that, because otherwise you'll end up with like— like, that's how I learned the hard way. I said, give me 50 names, and they gave me 50 names.

And I was—

some of the names on that list of companies, I was like, wait a minute, that's not Coca-Cola, they're not an aerospace company, what?

Yeah, yeah. And I also like to do You know, I help out with a lot of— we do a lot of location-specific searches where I work at now. Um, and you know, instead of going like to Google Maps, you know, I just use the GPTs to, hey, what's the 25-mile radius of these cities? Spits it out there. Like, hey, put that in Excel spreadsheet. Cool, puts it in Excel spreadsheet. Then I can add that to whatever tool I'm using to build my sourcing strategy map. Um, it goes so much faster than doing it the old way on the search engines. Um, you know, I wanted to go back to that conversation, you know, like, you know, I, I read a lot of articles every day. I don't read a lot. I try to read 2 to 3 articles a day about the, the evolution of AI and in comparison to search engines. I mean, because as you know, that's kind of like my thing in sourcing was, was search engines. I think that's going to be obsolete soon. What are your thoughts? Since you're the one that kind of got me all interested in search engines and became a thing with me, was, you know, do you feel that search engines are going to totally go away? And how, how do we— what happens to like websites, you know, what is it? Is this something that's gonna happen in our lifetime? Or is this gonna be something futuristic, like the transition of how we're going to display data. Like, for instance, we both have our own websites, correct? Personal. Like, is that going to go away, or, and we're going to move to an AI kind of tool?

No, I don't think so, because it's sort of—

we're going to always have these parallels, or what do you think? I'm always—

this, this is something that I've thought about quite a bit, because it used to be you had to be somewhat technical to be able to publish a website. You know, you had to know how to like register a domain and do FTP to like upload. And then along came, you know, WordPress, which made it possible for anybody to literally have like a blog. And so, and there's been lots of other tools like that. Tumblr kind of came and went. So it became really easy to, to have an online presence. It's, it's free and it's easy. I think that we need to This is the direction that I go in is you have to take control of your online image. In other words, you need to be the one to control your image for two reasons. First of all, there's got to be some centralized place for people to find you online, that is. And secondly, you have to combat false positives or negative information, right? So, in this, we have a mutual friend, Steve Rath, who is the poster boy for exactly what I'm talking about here. So, Steve Rath, R-A-T-H, is not, it's not an exactly common name. I mean, Steve, there's lots of Steves, but Steve Rath, there's not a lot of Steve Raths, like, in the world, right? Well, there are two in Atlanta. There are two Steve Raths in Atlanta. and one of them is a felon, a criminal. So if you Google Steve Rath Atlanta, you might get the wrong person if you're trying to find our friend Steve Rath. Right now, this is in the past. Since then, he's done some things to correct that, but this can happen to anybody with, uh, uh, you know, I mean, it's possible there might be another Ronnie Bratcher out there.

Oh, there is any— that person's murdered somebody up in—

there you go. So you have to have a Arnie Bratcher webpage that has, you know, the correct information and has a lot of good information. And not everybody can have a Wikipedia page about them. Not everybody qualifies for their whatever strict requirements are. So, that's the one side. And then, the first that I was talking about is a central place to connect. Now, here's the thing. Before you jump to conclusions and think, "Well, isn't that what LinkedIn is?" My answer to that is a rotund and very clear, No, it is not. You do not own your LinkedIn page.

Right.

If you believe you own your LinkedIn page, you are sorely mistaken. And let me prove it to you. If anybody out there thinks that they own their LinkedIn page, I will buy it from you. Sell it to me. Sell me your LinkedIn page. And tell me that it belongs to you. If something belongs to you, you can sell it if you currently own it, if you are an actual owner, right? It doesn't. It belongs to LinkedIn. So you don't want your LinkedIn profile to be the only place people find you. You want to have a centralized location from where you can link to your LinkedIn profile, your blog, your current job, um, whatever, you know, if you have hobbies and interests, whatever. And you don't have to share what you don't want to share. I'm not saying you should have a website that points to all of private stuff, but you need to have a website where people who want to find you can find you. It used to be called the white pages. It doesn't work anymore, so we need that. So yes, search engines are not going to go away. I think we're going to see my, my, you know, 25-year projection is we're going to see a sort of full circle. Right now it's becoming more interesting for search engines to try and predict what people might want to be looking for. So they're becoming a little bit more intelligent, more predictive, but there's gonna be a point where that goes too far and we have stupefied search to the point where it's, it's just shitty. Okay, funny you should ask me, Ronnie, this because I literally, I'm in the middle of writing an article called De-Shitify Google. And it's— you and I have talked about this for years. You remember when we used to talk about like Google Dorks and all these cool things you could do with Google? Well, slowly Google, little by little, has quietly removed some of these commands.

Actually, a lot of them.

Yeah, a lot of them, right? And so it's gotten so dumbed down that it almost will only give you popular information. So the example that I like to use is Apple, okay? If you go to Google and you search for Apple, you're going to get, um, results that are tailored to whatever you're used to searching for, that are either going to be about the company Apple or the fruit apple, right? Well, you know what I'm talking about. So it depends. If you're somebody that does a lot of searches about, you know, fruit recipes, cooking, whatever, you might get the other one. But there are two apples. There's the Apple company and then there's the apple fruit. There's actually another apple, which is the label that the Beatles used, I should say.

That's right.

The Beatles label, apple, right? So if you don't have a way to distinguish this, if you just leave it to the chatbots, What are they going to interpret the wrong thing? So you don't want to have it. What I'm saying is we're going to continue to hone this, this natural language and machine learning stuff, but eventually it's going to come back full circle too. We're going to need to have some controls. So it's going to be a round trip there and back. It's not going to eliminate the need for websites. Yeah, it's not going to eliminate the need for you having control of your own content.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's, you know, we grew up with the web, you know, we didn't grow up, you know, we grew up with the web search. Now we're doing AI search, you know, and I just think it's, I knew it was coming. I didn't think it would, it's just kind of like AI. I never thought AI would be here in my lifetime, but here it is. But like, you know, with Perplexity introducing ads, I mean, here we go. Like here we're, you know, they gotta make money, right? So now we have to circumvent that now, right? Like if I wanted to go use Perplexity and I'm looking for, like you said, I was, you know, an Apple platter, you know, what is it going to give me the platter or is it going to direct me to the Apple Store, you know, to buy a computer, you know?

So exactly right.

Yeah. So I mean, we're going to, we're going to keep advertising and then how, You know, as Google did. Hopefully nobody's from Google's on here, but you know how Google's controlled our lives. I mean, I think Google is 50/50, right? 50% great. It changed my life. It made my career better. Uh, it's done great things for my brain cells, but it also has done worse things because it tracks you and doesn't know everything about you unless you know how to fix it. AI is going to do the same thing eventually. So We're just kind of repeating ourselves again.

Yeah. So I think it's going to kind of be an evolution to go along with that. And I realized I kept rambling on and forgot to go back to our Cassie's question. And because as we're talking, it came back, you know how our brain kind of works. It's ROR, R-O-R.org is the registry for what they call persistent identifiers for research organizations. Um, and so it's, it's kind of a way to have like a universal ID. There's another one that I, that I, that came to mind, but this is the one that I was thinking about. Oh, there's a question about the Wayback Machine. Oh, see, if these systems did go down permanently, how do you feel this may affect the sourcing community? Oh, you mean Wayback? Um, so two things— that, that's a two-part question, and, and I'll go first, Ronnie, and then you can answer that because I'm sure you have a different perspective. Um, it's very difficult to imagine archive.org— Wayback Machine is actually owned by— not owned, but it's, it's, it's a part of archive.org, which, if I'm not mistaken is a nonprofit that is tied in with the kind of Wikipedia, Wikimedia kind of community, right? It's designed to be a sort of a public library, if you will. It contains all kinds of items in it like audiobooks, poetry, so things that are part of like the universal human common experience. It's even got like app archives and software that you can download for free and things like that. So it's more than just an index of websites, and there's definitely a going concern about keeping that information much like you would any other historical archive. You know, the Internet Archive or archive.org is its own company, but its mission is to, is to protect— it's, it's a nonprofit foundation that is designed to protect the interest of humankind, basically. And it's funded by a lot of institutions that promote, um, you know, knowledge and education. And it's also a member of a bunch of institutions like library organizations and federations worldwide. So honestly, I don't— I just don't see how that's going to go down. Because it's an independent company, similar in a way to like what Wikipedia is. But that's only one part of the answer. The other part of the answer to your question is, um, does AI, or really do search engines for that matter, use any information from the Wayback Machine? And the answer to that is no. Search engines don't, and AI doesn't either. For a very simple reason, and that is in order to get content out of archive.org, you have to execute a query. So you are searching inside of a proprietary database. It's a publicly available, free-to-use database, but nonetheless a database. Google does not have the ability to type in a question or do something to execute that search, so it doesn't contain content. From inside of archive.org. You can only find that through searching archive.org. So the same thing happens with the, the chatbots and the AI tools. Most of them started with Common Crawl, which was the original sort of collection of archive data. And who made that? Remember who makes Common Crawl?

No.

I, I just know it's commoncrawl.org. It might be also a nonprofit as well. I believe actually it is. Um, so it's another kind of a web archive. So these bots started from this Common Crawl, and now they're crawling their own data, but they're only crawling data that is accessible by spiders, web spiders. Again, you cannot do that with archive.org information. So hopefully that answers the question. Now, what's, what's your take on that?

Yeah, that's going to be interesting. I think, I think it's going to— I think most, most— I'm going to— I'm probably speculating— most people in our world do not know what the Wayback Machine is. So only people that are researchers or sourcers or maybe recruiters know about it, and, you know, or historians or whoever. Um, so if they're going to use AI We're going to train it to start working to find that data. So like, I was thinking about that right now. Do we test it? Like, hey, I could go to, go to a bot right now and say, using the Wayback, using this website, can you search this and show me the original Microsoft website? You know, I don't know. I haven't— I've not tested that, but I just trained it to do something, to try to do something.

Happen.

So yeah, I think once we start putting that data out there, then it will start doing that. But yeah, and you're going back to like what happened, obviously, ChatGPT, you know, a couple of years ago, you only— it only would crawl the— pull the data up to 2021. Is that correct by saying that? Like, you can get anything last month, you know, it'd have to be all the data it was pulling, or you were asking for, was pre-2021. I think that has changed obviously now, but, uh, you know, that's how it kind of started. So yeah, I think we'll get there eventually. I think it'd be kind of cool if it could do that.

I don't know if it's going to be able to. I just actually—

that'd be a good— that's good.

I just did it, by the way. You gave me the idea and I went and I tried it. And the answer that I got was literally instructions on how to do it. It came back and said, visit the Wayback Machine on archive.org and type in this search. So it can't do it. It's telling me to go do it.

Yeah.

For this. Yeah. For the reason I was explaining.

I'm not going to say it will never not do it.

Right. You think it might? I don't think so. I don't think— I think there's limitations, but it's okay to disagree. Cassie, this is the ROR.org is is the, is the place I was talking about, um, earlier. That's the one I was— I mentioned. So anyway, Ronnie, I want to switch tracks a little bit here and talk about something that doesn't have to do with AI. Um, did they— did anybody talk about Slack at SourceCon?

No.

No. Have you used Slack for sourcing? I think you were one of the people that, that that actually did that?

No, I mean, I'm not an expert. Our friend Brian Fink is probably the originator of using Slack.

But it's not being talked about anymore. Oh, we might have lost Ronnie temporarily here. All right, while we wait for Ronnie to come back, uh, the reason I was asking is I, uh, I brought it up in, uh, Toronto, and now this could, this could just be people were just shy, but I, you know, I'm looking out at the audience and I asked the question. I was just about to introduce a, um, a technique for Slack and I was about to ask the question. Um, oh, here we go, he's back. Hey, welcome back.

Yeah, no, sorry about that. Um, no, no, I think, uh, back to the Slack thing. Um, it's a great communication tool, it's, it's widely, widely used, and there's, you know, there's definitely sourcing, there's, you know, archives and groups. Um, You know, personally, I have not dove in it in the last year or so. So maybe, you know, maybe we're— maybe you could go down the track you were talking about.

They weren't mentioning that. They bring it— didn't bring it up at SourceCon. You haven't heard?

No, no, no.

Interesting. I actually brought it up in Toronto. I was going to show them a technique for sourcing on Slack that I've used for a couple of years now that's actually really simple. But before I wanted to show the slide, I wanted to kind of ask the audience, and I said, hey, I was like, "Raise your hand here if you use Slack." And mind you, the audience had participated in other ways. I mean, speakers were asking them to raise their hands, stuff like that. So this wasn't like an audience that was not gonna answer the question, which is why I asked it to kind of keep everything going. And I'm like, "Hey, who here uses Slack?" And like 3 people raised their hand and I was like, "What?" So I paused, I'm like, "No, seriously, like raise your hand if you use Slack." It was the same 3 people. And I'm like, what about Microsoft Teams? And then like 70% of the audience raised their hand. So I, I, I just like, I, I was, I was a little shocked by that. I don't know if that it's a difference between Canada and, and the US or whatnot, or maybe Slack is just more common with developers or whatever. But the point I was trying to make is that Microsoft Teams seemed more prominent. And last week Teams released— I don't know if you know this, but Teams released Spaces.

I did read it, I read about it, I just have not explored it yet.

Well, like Slack, you can create a Slack channel. Teams is called a Space that is a public one, so you can invite people to this Slack channel that are not part of your organization. Teams used to be— until last week, you had a Teams account for your organization and you could only, you know, connect with, chat with people inside your company. So it was an enterprise corporate thing, or maybe not enterprise, but you had to have a Teams account and it was your business account. But now you can create a Hotmail account, or if you have a Hotmail account, create a Teams space that's public, uh, like Slack. So I'm wondering, you know, if that's gonna— it's gonna— if that's gonna be like a new sourcing tool. Slack definitely was a sourcing tool for for me. So I was wondering if you saw any of that, or if—

I saw the article and read about it, but I have not explored.

Hasn't been talked about?

Okay. Nobody talked about that. No.

Okay.

Yeah, it'd be interesting to— because Teams is the prominent, you know, tool being used, right?

But it's been— it's, it's, it's what do you call it? Walled garden. You know, in order to use Teams, you have to be literally invited to somebody's corporate Teams. Or you have to be part of an organization that uses Office M365 or something like that.

365, yeah.

Yeah. But now there's this new chat. Maybe by the time we get back on the show together, I'll have a Teams community or something like that.

Oh yeah.

And yeah, we can talk about our experience with that.

Yeah.

So Man, yeah, well, you know, every guest usually gets asked the same two questions, which is the first one is who should be our next guest? Oh yeah, you've been on the show a couple of times, so did you come prepared with an answer, or—

oh, I did not.

Um, was there somebody— let's put it this way— somebody that you met at SourceCon that, that you didn't— you and I didn't know before that you think I should invite on the show?

Yeah, I would think there's actually a gentleman we— I have not met yet. His name is Marcel. Do you know?

Oh, I invited him on the show before.

Yeah, I, I really enjoy reading his stuff. Um, one second.

Yeah, he's, he's on my list. I, I invited him. I sent him a message. Um, but thanks for the reminder. I'll I'll send him a message again.

Yeah, I think he would be great on this show. He's— he brings a lot to the table. He loves sourcing, which is what we love. And, um, you know, and he's— he would be great. I think it would be awesome. And I forget where he lives. Does he need to live in—

he's in Atlanta.

Yeah, what's up with that?

It's kind of like—

oh, I'll tell you what, we should have Seth Davis. You have not had Seth Davis.

Oh, Seth, no. Yeah, what's up with Seth? Let me invite him.

I'm not trying to be— not trying to be Atlanta-centric, but I'm just saying.

No, that's a good one. Hey, whatever, I asked, right? So yeah, I know who you're talking about. Definitely. I met him a few times.

Seth is, uh, kind of like me. He's very quiet, um, you know, laid back, and has a lot of knowledge. Um, and he's very, very good at puzzle solving, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah, he was a— last, last I spoke with him, a sourcing lead at— sourcing manager.

Yeah, yeah, he's— I think he's on a contract, I think, if I recall. Yeah, um, yeah, those are two individuals that I think would be great. Cool.

And then the other question, uh, as, as you might recall, is can you give us, uh, leave us with a question to ask ourselves over the weekend, something that we should ask ourselves introspectively? Food for thought, if you will.

Yeah, I think this is a good one. Because I question myself all the time on this one. Because it has happened to me, it still does happen. I kind of think I'm using historical data here, just because it happened to me in 2005. When, when the world of search engines came out, it just, just became this phenomenon of fast-paced, everything blown up. So it's just like, how do I stay up to date with all this? Same thing is going on in the AI generation. It is. I'm sure there's 5 new things that has happened while we were speaking and created. How do we keep up with that? That's one of my things I did present at SourceCon. How do you keep up with it? I just showed a couple of tools that I use personally just to read daily and say, oh, should I go down that path and use that tool? Because there's something for whatever. What I see the other day, oh, there's an AI for cancer now.

Oh yeah, yeah, actually that was the company. Well, I mean, this— the company that I was, um, hosted at, uh, in Sydney is, is an AI company in cancer research.

Yeah, so it's a— so the phenomenon is there. So yeah, the question I would say to our industry and our peers and our friends would be to take a step back ask the question, how do I keep up with this? And develop a plan and find the tools. Like, for instance, I'll give the example of— I'll give two examples. During the Google world, search world, keeping up with like SEO newsletters, right? They are in the search world. They know how to present the new tools all the time. Um, uh, there's a— I don't know the exact website. There's a newsletter that I follow, it's called There Is an AI for That. That's the actual— yeah, and I get it twice a week and it's so good, Shelly. It breaks down about 10 tools a week and it breaks down what's going on in the industry, has a community if you want to jump in there and talk all this fun stuff, and then they'll, they'll highlight a tool and how to use it. Very good. Very good. And I love it. It's just—

so what's the question that we ask ourselves though?

The question would be, how are you going to keep up with AI and not get overwhelmed?

Okay. I don't know.

Maybe most people are not overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed. It's, you know, I'm a different generation than my child, right? It's not overwhelming, right?

I think if there's like a tool a day being created, like, yeah, it's easy to be overwhelmed.

Oh, there's probably 5 that just got created while we're talking, right? Yeah, it's, it's, it's fun. And, and they're going to go away just like everything else, you know. Uh, things have already gone away, and, and it just, this is going to happen. So the question I say to ask yourself is, how are you going to do— how are you going to keep up with it, manage your time, and don't get overwhelmed? Overwhelmed, you know. Yeah, it's like a day by day.

Yeah.

And maybe that's just— that's maybe the older person.

No, I think, I think it's a very valid thing for everybody to think about is how are you going to keep up with all this stuff. Yeah.

And you don't have to keep up with them. Just find the things that's going to work for you, right? Um, you don't have to know everything because we all share. Hopefully our community will can you just share?

Absolutely. Yeah, Ryan, I'll take you up on that, definitely. Well, thanks, Ronnie. I appreciate it. Uh, thanks for making the time.

Oh yeah, Ryan would be good. Ryan would be great.

Yeah, I'm gonna reach out to him. Yeah, I appreciate you, you know, you, your busy travel schedule and your, and your, uh, pop star, uh, fame. And it's, it's good to see that you still join us here on Shelly's Alley.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, everybody, see you next week. Our guest next week is going to be, um, Jose Flores, a sorcerer and, uh, real estate entrepreneur that some of you might have seen, uh, speaking at some conferences and stuff. So come on back next week, and until then, be kind to yourselves. Take care, everybody.

Thank you. Bye-bye.