Rusty Rueff Live on Shally's Alley

Hey everybody, what is going on? I got my work shirt on and I've got a pretty special guest. I mean, not pretty, very special guest today for you. You are live on Shelly's Alley. It is July 18th at 1 PM US Eastern Time, and this is not scripted. This is not a recording. Today we have Rusty Roof. Rusty and I met once a very, very long time. He is the guy who's reimagined HR. When I met him, he was at EA, Electronic Arts, that gaming and, you know, entertainment studio. And he helped shape Glassdoor and a few other startups as, as an advisor, board of advisor member. Nowadays, he finds time to jam with both democracy and the arts. Very passionate about the arts. We'll touch a little bit upon that. Say hi to everybody, Rusty.

Hey, hi everybody. Thanks for having me, Shelly. Excited to be here.

Yeah, man, it's awesome to see you. It's been a long time. I want to say, gosh, when were you at EA? When did you leave EA? 2005?

Yeah, yeah, 2005. So we're talking like 20 years, more than 20 years ago. Wow.

And you still look like you did back then.

I mean, so, so I wish.

Is there a portrait in your bedroom covered up that's aging? And, and, you know, do I need to call you Dorian from now on?

Don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah, no, uh, hey, what a— you know, what, what a blessing to be able to be alive and, you know, to be able to do things like we're doing now and, uh, and, and to see the future show up. I mean, that's the most exciting thing about getting old.

I know, right? Exactly. That's, that's the best part. It's like all these things that we were thinking about back in the 2000s, the OOs.

Yeah.

And some of them are happening now, some of them not in the best ways, but some of them are. And yeah, you're right, isn't it? Isn't that the best, just be able to kind of see, put everything in fast forward and play it back and see times just sort of wind past you and, and everything that's happened? A lot has changed, but at the same time, I feel like a lot hasn't changed and we still need to do a little bit more growing up. In fact, I had this sort of strange conversation with my daughter last night. She's 17 going on 18. I mean, like, we're talking about months now. Drives herself, you know, goes to work, working full-time and finishing up her schooling. And she brought this— she was talking to me about history. She was like, Do you— she was like, do you, Dad, do you know about the 1800s and early 1900s, um, American, you know, automation revolution and like the, the industrial revolution? I don't think— I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know a little bit about that. And she goes, Dad, why are we— why are we still doing the same things? We haven't learned anything. Like, she's like, nothing's changed from then to now. Why, why haven't we figured out The same problems that they were having back then we're having now. And I was like, oh my God, a 17-year-old gets it and like the rest of the world just doesn't, doesn't catch on. So totally agree. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, catch me up a little. Oh yeah, go ahead.

I was gonna say, I was fortunate enough to know Steve Jobs and, um, you know, I think— I don't know what year he died, it's been, it's been a while, right? 2009, 10?

Somewhere around there. Yeah.

You think about a man who conceptualized and operationalized the future, you know, amazing, amazing. All that he didn't see that's happened since then. I mean, he would be just so amazed at what has happened. And I, you know, And you look at it and it reminds me sometimes, like, I'm a runner, so I get out and run and there's a place where I run and I run past the cemetery. And I look at a cemetery and I go, you know, there lies a whole bunch of people that thought they were indispensable.

Right.

Right. But the future moves on. And so this little moment that we have on this earth to capture and to, um, really do the best we can while we're here and to enjoy what the future is, is, is what a gift, man. You know, it's just what a gift. So the two and I, the two of us doing this now with everybody that's on right here, I mean, it's a moment in time that, yeah, we should treasure. We should absolutely treasure.

And what, you know, this is one of the things that motivates me about continuing to do the shows. I don't make any money. There's no advertising or anything like that on this show. I've had a couple of guest advertisers that donated, uh, you know, a couple hundred bucks. It cost me like $1,000 a year to run the platform. Um, so I've been fortunate to have a few donations basically, but it's not really supported by that. Um, but one of the things that keeps— two things that keep me going with this thing every— I mean, every Friday, 1 o'clock, we're at like 320 episodes now. Um, one of them is the legacy that it's leaving behind in YouTube, which I know doesn't seem like a lot, and it's not, I'm not doing it for likes or clicks, but there's this archival of these interviews, of raw interviews with people that I care about, that I think have something valuable to say, that may not have had another opportunity to do that, or may just not have had the motivation, or whatever the reason is, and I now have that memorialized and archived. So that's, part of it is just the history of that, and the other part of it is just for me to like, this gives me a reason to keep in touch with everything that's going on. Even if sometimes a whole week, Monday through Thursday will go by and I'm heads down solving the problems at work and just forget to like go out and check. I'm literally afraid to go on LinkedIn these days because it's so much, it's politicized, it's hype, it's all about AI and it's this mass hypnosis. So I like these moments where I talk to people who I know are not influenced by, you know, the hive mind, if you will.

Right.

Um, and it's really— it's kind of an important— it's an important thing for me.

It is.

First thing I wanted to ask you is to kind of reconnect with our bases, right? You were a CHRO back— you were a CHRO when I was like, uh, you know, basically just a recruiter. I mean, 2003, 2004, I called myself a sourcer. I was starting the Sourcing Revolution, but I hadn't even spoken at international conferences or anything yet. And I was basically a production person. I was out there, you know, sourcing candidates and talking to candidates. So you are already a CHRO, and I didn't even know what CHRO meant at the time, right? In that time when you were there, there was this sort of collision or merger or intersection of technology and creativity. You know, creativity and the arts, they're as long as humanity. They've been around since forever, right? Technology and, and this new form of entertainment that was maligned, and some people thought, you know, it was going to lead to all kinds of other stuff, and they, they got together, and Electronic Arts was a juxtaposition of those. When that collided, what did that— my question is, what did that environment teach you about building cultures that don't crush creators?

Yeah, yeah. It's a great question and it's a hard question to answer because I did learn a lot of things in the bigger, in the bigger answer of, you know, how do you create cultures that don't crush creativity?

The stakes were high. The talent was phenomenal. The talent was elite talent. In, you know, these were the top performers in their field. And, and this was groundbreaking. And if you tried to like put the IBM culture on top of this, it would have just imploded, right?

That's right. That's right. So here's what I learned. One, creative people are the most amazing people. Like people, we all have creativity, right? There's no doubt. Thank you. Thank you. You know, so, but those where their creativity is really their calling card are just amazing, amazing people. But with it comes a whole bunch of other things. Like my, so I grew up in a, my family, my father was a radio and television personality, extraordinarily creative. Also a theater guy, very involved in the arts.

[Speaker] Oh, I didn't know that.

And so I grew up and I also watched him take his creativity into the marketplace, being a guy that lived and died by rating points. And also, you know, having a father who had his picture on billboards around town and what that meant to be a, you know, small famous celebrity. Yes. Right. And with it comes a whole bunch of burdens. Right. So, and I'll get to your question, but, you know, I once sat in a room with Frank Stella, the artist, the visual artist, and someone asked him a question, says, you know, Mr. Stella, why do you do what you do? And he said, those of us who have the burden to emulate the masters. And the word in there was burden.

Burden.

Yeah. Right. Like if you're a creative person, and you feel the burden, which I think you do, if you're— if that's your calling card, your lead card, um, you must express it. You must have an environment.

It's a disease.

It's a disease. It, um, a positive disease, but a burden. It's not a choice. It's not a wish. It's not a passion.

You have to get it out.

That's what— that's why actors and, you know, and a lot of people, they're willing to starve for it. You know, musicians, they're willing to starve. To be able to do what they do. So you take an environment where you were bringing together creative people in a commercial enterprise to create something that was an output that had goals and expectations for the consumer and also for the company, and there's a whole bunch of factors that go into that. So now what you're asking is you're asking creative people to be channeled into an output against deadlines and milestones and goals and objectives. And that's not always how creative people work, right? Sometimes creative people will say, I just need my space. I need my time. I need that. And yet you're overlaying on top of it this sort of corporate structure that says, no, this video game has got to ship by October, right? We have a business to run, Thanksgiving, so that people can buy it for Christmas, right? So it has to— yep. Um, and you put those two things together and it becomes a management of, um, one size never fits all, but one size can't always fit one. Oh geez, you have to be—

oh my God, that's—

you have to be able to put those two things together. And, and what a creative person has to understand and feel is they have to feel aligned with the mission and the purpose. They have to feel like the sacrifice that they're making is appreciated and worth it. And they have to feel like on the backside of it they've accomplished something that was worth their time, their energy, their effort, and that sacrifice. And I'll give you an example. Okay, so I was fortunate enough to go to, um, the, um, premiere of— at Pixar— of Ratatouille, the movie Ratatouille.

Oh man, right?

So I'm sitting in there, um, in their theater, and in front of me is a young guy, and what I find out is his mother on one side and his father on the other, and they're talking. And the mother asks the question, says, so when will I know what you created? Oh, I'll tell you, I'll tell you. She goes, okay. So we're watching the movie, the movie's going on, the movie's going on, there's been no discussion, nothing. And all of a sudden he does this, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming, it's coming. Okay, and so, and now, now I'm paying attention to this versus the movie, but you know what's going on. And he goes, now, yeah, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good, it's good. That was it, that was it, that was it. And Dad leans over and goes, that was it?

Oh man.

And you know, my heart broke. Yeah, because he was so proud. It was this long, shall we of what he— that was his, his thing. But so it was, it was his. So you, you have to feel like the thing that you did is appreciated. And so that was our job. Our job was to try to bring all of those things together so that we could get the most out of our creative people, and that they would walk away from any project that they ever worked on, any game, anything they ever created, and say, you know what, in the scheme of my life, the scheme of my job, the scheme of my career, the time that I have, the bite of the apple I had there was worth it. Because if you build a video game, even worse today than it was back when I was doing it, you know, if you're a video game developer and it takes 3, 4, 5 years to develop a game, how many bites of the apple do you have? Oh my God, I'm gonna do it for 25 years. Let's think I'm gonna do it for the next 25 years. Maybe I'm gonna build 4 games, 5 games. It better feel like this is totally worth it. Wow. The sacrifice and the time I put in. So, you know, we were by no means great at doing this. In fact, you know, um, if you want to go back and, you know, recant history, you know, I mean, we were, we were tough. Like, you know, we had deadlines to meet and there were things that had to be happened. And I coined this phrase myself way back when I was in college, that the most productive days of our lives are those that are spent with our backs against the wall. And I think that it is true. Like, you know, you give somebody— I had a scriptwriting class in college where I showed up and the first day and the professor said, okay, everybody's gonna write a movie script. Here's a template, here's how you do it, I'll see you. I'll see you at the end of the semester.

Oh geez, that's a class. No way.

Yeah, think about that, right? So how many people waited until the last week or month? Pretty much everybody, right? And so you just can't do that when you have a commercial enterprise. You have to— there's a push and a march and all those things. And there were people who called the march the March of Death and all those things, um, that would happen. But, you know, I always felt like, you know, any of us who ever, you know, in business ever pulled all-nighters, you know, it's 2 o'clock in the morning, you're there working on a project and you're on the pizza for the second time. And, you know, you hate that you're there, but there's no place you'd rather be, right? Otherwise you'd go home and you wouldn't do it. And so I think in the creative world, trying to bring those things together. Um, I think you, you give people— and, and I'll come back to TA about this because I think, I think talent acquisition people are very creative people. Like, you know, one of the things that drives me crazy, and I've always said all my years in talent acquisition, is you can be two kinds of talent folks. You can be a shorter— you can be a short-order cook, or you can be a chef.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

All right. So the short-order cook gets the little green piece of paper that says, you know, 2 eggs, ham, you know, and a muffin, and they go out and you fill the order. And that's that. A chef looks at that and says, you know, I can, I, I can fulfill somebody's breakfast. How, how do I want to fulfill this breakfast in a way that satisfies them and satisfies everybody at the meal and brings them and brings them a full experience. Be willing to say to the person who's put the order in, "Hey, I've come up with something special for you." That's creativity. I think those creative people have to think just like creativity, whether you're a songwriter, or you write movies, or you're an editor, or a video game developer. You have to feel aligned to what you're trying to do, You have to feel safe in what you do, and you have to feel like you're assured at the end it was worth it.

That's what we tried to do. That's, that's really good advice. I'm, I'm a little shocked actually to, uh, to hear it in that context. I was thinking about George Orwell and I put, uh, I don't know if you can see it. I put a quote of his: writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Yeah.

And I feel like that's spot on. I, you know, I wrote, I've written 3 books. And I know you wrote a book.

Yeah.

I'm trying to segue into that right now yet. But you know, we can if you want to. And I just think like, it's, it was, it was a burden for sure. Um, and it was— it felt like I had to get it out, especially the first time. A lot harder than I thought it would be. The second time was— the second book that I wrote was a little bit easier because it was like an expansion, and eventually it became more of a desktop, you know, reference, uh, more of a tome than a book, if you will. Um, and then the third one was the book that I would admit that I meant to write because it had a story, and now I had all this life experience. And yeah, you know, and everything. And that's the third one that is really the one that I felt like when I finished that book, I finally got the monster out. The demon was out. I'm like, all right, the demon's out. People are like, are you going to write another one or whatever? And I'm like, you know, I never did it for commercial success. I never wrote the book because I was going to make a bunch of money. I mean, you don't get rich off of writing a book in TA. There's not that many people unless you're writing, you know, Pulp Fiction or whatever. But, um, it was, it was a feeling of, it was a feeling of like continuously giving birth to ideas and then having them assassinated in front of your eyes over and over and over again until you finally arrive at something that just was, was okay. Like, I, like, I'm okay with this book. I finished it.

Right.

It's not good enough. Yeah. But I finally got it out.

Yeah. You know, and I would encourage everybody who's watching and listening. Like, if you've got that little creative voice inside of you, that, that thing that's been bothering you, like, I should do this, I should do this, I know I should do this— go do it.

Go do it.

Go do it.

Like, don't worry about whether it's gonna sell copies or not.

No, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. And, you know, listen, if it's the painting that you've always thought I should go paint, go paint it. If it's the— if it's the crochet that you think you should always have made, you know Go make it. This life experience is too short for us to look over our shoulders and say, you know, well, if or but, if I just would have done those things, it's too short, you know? And I'll tell you this, I think releasing the creative spirit in yourself opens up all kinds of productivity in other parts of your life. It really does, it really does. It just—

So that's a good point, yeah.

It really, it does, it frees you, you know? And so yeah, let's, let's, let's all strive towards freeing ourselves.

You know, that's a good point.

Let's go do it.

It's like a, it's like a cathartic— that's what I was trying to explain. You really pinpointed that, a cathartic sort of release of, um, of this pent-up frustration.

Yeah.

For not getting it out. I used to blog too, and I stopped blogging when I started writing the book because it was too much.

Yeah.

Uh, you know, to do both. And then And now I'm starting to write again, but it's, you know, it's not quite the same. So, well, all right, so—

We'll move on, but the other thing I'll just say about this is that I'm spending a bunch of time now actually thinking about mind space. Like if I could, if there was a great, you know, AI agent that could go into your brain and go, okay, so where's all your mind space actually being taken up? Conscious and subconscious. Like, what's taking it? What's, you know, if, if it's a computer and it's processing, you know, what's running in there? And like, if you've got something that you feel like you ought to go do and don't do it, it just takes up mind space. Like, it's hanging there, just like, and it comes back. And even if it's just, oh, I only think about this once every other week or something, it's still that moment is something that could be freed up to process something else in our brains. And so, you know, I— yourself, it is. And I've been thinking about, you know, this was relationships and, you know, company relationships and boards and, you know, things that I spent time on that really, should I not? Should I, you know, and even if I stop and think about, should I not be doing this, you know, it's, it's taken up mind space. How do we clear those things?

Just get it done. Do it. At least do it and then you can always go back and edit it. That's what I did. I did it and then I was like, the editorial process took a whole year because we had— well, long story short, we hired a couple of editors. One, they just, they didn't all do a great job, but it took us a year to get this thing to print after I'd already put virtually down the pen. Not that I used the pen. So I did want to jump to another thing I was going to ask you about that I believe you're very passionate about and you definitely see it out in the media when you Google your— when I Google your name, you, you know, you were, uh, you worked with, with a couple of boards. Glassdoor was one of them, but also the Grammy Foundation. And, um, how do you approach boardroom influence? Something that I have absolutely no— the closest I've ever been to a board is I've been an advisor or board of advisors member, but never, you know, in a board the way I think of it as like a board of shareholders or whatever. How do you approach boardroom influence differently when the product is creative, uh, data, music, democracy, um, or is it different? I mean, no, let me just leave it there.

No, I, I don't, I don't think it's different, Shelley.

You've done tech, you've done art.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've had this spectrum. Um, what I, what I would say is, um, like a boardroom responsibility whether it's for-profit, nonprofit, creative, not creative, whatever, is very similar. It's very similar. Um, you carry a responsibility at that level because in, in, if it's for— if it's a for-profit organization, you carry a fiduciary responsibility. In a nonprofit, you actually carry a fiduciary responsibility as well. It's just a different kind of, um, a different kind of shareholder. Um, but where— what you carry and what is most important in that role is, is that you are affirming and influencing vision and direction and mission of the organization.

Okay.

And you are affirming, confirming, resourcing, and, and, and managing the talent that will get that mission done, right?

So let me dig into that one thing, and I'll let you continue. Sorry to interrupt you, but it— that one is like a brain zap to me. So I've been told— I've asked a couple of people that I trust about, you know, being a board member and things like that. I'm exploring, uh, looking into participating in that kind of thing. It's still pretty, you know, early, but I've asked some friends about it, and One thing sort of struck me as, as, um, well, I want to confirm this. Is it true that the board's most important, if not really their single job, is to, is to hire the right CEO? Is that really kind of what it comes down to? I know I'm boiling a lot of things down here, but that's what has been told to me.

Um, it's, it's, yeah. The leader. Yes, the leader. Right. Yes. And the CEO.

So, uh, whatever, you know, the leader of the actual enterprise that does the whatever it is.

That's right. And then, and then once that, that person is in place, they're the executive working with that, working that per— with that person to do all the other things that I talked about.

That you execute through them. So they go out and do whatever they're the best. So, so this, that is true then. Wow, that's, that's kind of a Yeah, that's kind of like the ultimate recruiting.

Yeah, it is. I mean, like some, like some boards of smaller organizations, they'll be, they'll be somewhat operational, like the, like, you know, like I might have a piece of the puzzle and say, hey, could you go do this, you know, on the sales channel?

Or so you run a committee of some kind?

Yes. And you, so, but, but the best functioning govern, um, boards are actually governance boards, and those are the ones that hire the CEO support the CEO, help them make sure that they've got the right team, all the things that I've just talked about. Yeah, so I'm with that. You boil it down, that's the person. That's the person. And if you look at examples of where companies go wrong and when they're big mistakes, they've either hired the wrong CEO or the CEO that they put in is now not performing the way they are supposed to, and the board takes no action.

Okay.

Yeah. Right. And we've watched companies fail and, you know, and the board sort of gets skates off. I mean, it's a, you know, listen, boards have insurance for a reason, right? It's called, um, officer and director or director and officer, uh, insurance, uh, D&O. And so they are insured against the things that might go wrong and a shareholder comes back and tries to get at them. You know, they've got personal insurance. I mean, but there's a lot of responsibility, but I will encourage you and others. So like, if someday you wanna run an organization, you should understand how a board works. And 'cause you're gonna have a board.

[Speaker] That's what I'm trying to learn.

[Speaker] Right? And, and if you can't get on a corporate board, get on a nonprofit board. It's the same.

Well, I ran a nonprofit for 7 years, the Sourcing Institute Foundation.

Yeah.

And we did have a small board, but the board was our, the 5 members of our board were very much, um, help helping the mission of the organization. Yeah. Um, yeah. In some way. I mean, they didn't, they didn't have jobs with the foundation. They had their own businesses, but, but it was definitely about helping us move the needle. Um, and we just kind of voted on things together. It wasn't really— yeah, it wasn't really a big— we didn't need to hire anybody because the nonprofit was all about working with other organizations' money. What we did, what the foundation did, is we worked with organizations that already vetted their clients. Um, like for example, Project Starfish, working with the blind. So we didn't have to worry about, um, fiduciary responsibility as much because all of us were volunteers and the foundation was really running on a very lean, you know, budget. So I didn't learn what you're saying.

I get—

that's what I'm I'm trying to get into that, which brings me to reinvention and reframing reinvention. And reframing reinvention as a strategy, not as a risk, which I think, especially nowadays in all of the— maybe a timely subject to connect things back to AI and the hype and all that. With all of the hype going on, there are people who are worried about their career and their future. Whether or not— I don't want to get into a discussion about whether or not AI is going to take your job. People who listen and know me, they know that I have a very strong opinion about that. But the point I'm asking about is reinvention. If you want to reinvent yourself because you think AI is going to take your job, still a good reason. But I want to take this as an opportunity to look at it as a strategy, which is what you've done, and pivot. You say— you've said career pivots are superpowers.

Yeah.

So you're taking kind of like a trans— reinventing yourself and transitioning into another sector, industry, etc. This may be a time in history where a lot of us in TA find ourselves making that change. What was a moment in your own journey where a left turn— and I mean that in a, like, a turn against the expected outcome— when you took a left turn, meaning like you did the thing that was different.

Yeah.

When was a moment in your career or your journey where a left turn led to the absolute most growth? And I want to use that as a way to say sometimes we got to take a left turn. I do have my own story, but you're the guest. I want you to kind of tell us about that.

Yeah, it was definitely when I left EA as the CHRO and became CEO of SnowCap.

So you left HR and went into—

became the chief executive officer, right? Right. You know, so I had been here, had been this HR guy you know, since I was a pup, uh, and, and I, and I've been fortunate enough to kind of move quickly into roles where, you know, I became consigliere and, um, you know, a trusted person with a CEO or with a line manager, right? You know, and, and what is that? That's kind of like, you know, you tell them how to do their jobs, you know, and I spent a lot of time telling them how to do their job as a consultant.

That's, that is, that's the advice. You're an advisor.

You're an advisor.

You don't have to do the job, but you—

right. And so, and so when the opportunity came to me to say, you should go do the job, you know, you should go do the job, I'm like, well, you know, for 20 years I've been telling other people how to do the job. Maybe I should go see if I could do it myself.

Okay, okay.

And guess, guess what? It's hard. It's a lot, it's a lot, it's a lot harder. Yeah, it's a lot harder than I advised people it was. Because what I didn't realize how is how lonely it is. It is very lonely at the top to be the CEO and, and the number of constituents that you have to serve because you serve your shareholders. Yeah, you serve your board, you serve your customers and your partners, you serve the people who report directly to you, and you support— and you serve all the employees in the business.

It also— sometimes you serve a community as well, and you might even though community outside. Yeah, even though it may not be a— yeah, but yeah, that's right. Okay, so you've got 5, 6, 7, you know, bodies of constituency that you have to serve.

And, and what do you do? Well, with all of that, you can't serve them all well.

You can't balance the needs of everybody together at the same time.

You can't. So you have to put trusted people in some roles to help you do that. So like at EA, I was very lucky. My boss Larry, he was like, Rusty, you deal with the board. Okay, right. You work with the board, right? And I was like, I can do that. So every day I would talk to a board member, you know, I would just keep a schedule, you know, and I would go through it. I'd make sure that I talked to board. And the number one thing he asked, he says, look, the only thing I ask is whatever you hear from a board member, I should be the next person to hear it. And I'm like, absolutely. So I would talk to, you know, Dick, and I would talk to Bob, and I would talk to Janine, and then I would walk down the hallway to his cubicle and say, hey Larry, you know, I just got off the phone with Dick, and here's what's going on.

Is that like nowadays turned into a chief of staff? Is that what that—

I, you know, I guess you could call it that today, you know. Um, I would say that, um, I think sometimes chief of staff is an inflated title, but, um, But, you know, yeah, but you know what I mean though, the strategic, uh, you know, year of the CEO kind of, right? Okay, right. So I was like, you know, I was lucky I learned how to do that. Now I'm running my— now I'm running my own company, and I don't know anybody to do that with.

And I'm like, you have to find the people.

Well, I gotta find good people or I'm just gonna be overwhelmed and I'm gonna— I'm gonna drown. So that was the biggest left-hand turn. I learned so much. I learned the whole venture cycle. I raised a bunch of money. At the time, we were the darlings and full-page ad, full-page story in the New York Times on a Sunday with me and Sean Fanning and Ali Aydar standing on a balcony in San Francisco, looking out over the bay, one of those exposés, because here we were, this music startup that was gonna change everything. Raised a bunch of money, spent a bunch of money, sold the company before it went out of business. I mean, I ran the whole cycle. Guess what? It's very helpful today when I work with startups.

I bet. Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

I mean, let me tell you, and I never would have gotten them. I never would have learned those if I would have stayed where I was. And now what I would also tell you quickly is I might have jumped off the curb a little too soon.

Okay. Yeah. You know, that's the risk.

Yeah. So I've been at EA for 7 years. Great things were happening. You know, all was good. Did I know everything? Did I— had I learned everything that I could have learned? Probably not. Like, if I look back at it now, if I'd stayed for another 3, 4 years, I would have probably been a much better executive. Much more mature executive. I was pretty young back then, you know, much, much more mature executive. So did I jump off the curb a little early? Yeah, I might have. But if I hadn't jumped off the curb then, would I ever jumped off the curb? So you don't know.

Oh, you know, well, that's the, that's the risk, right? And that, that was what I was getting at is don't look at it as the what if, but it's the strategy side of it was, you know, I got to do this and go in this other direction. And, you know, there may, there may be risks, maybe it was too early, but you did the right thing in making the change in that journey at that time. Even if you feel like later on, you could have stayed a little bit longer, um, because the outcome was better than expected. Yeah.

Yeah. And the voice inside of us, you know, I mean, it's the S-curve, you know, everybody knows the S-curve. You go off, you don't want to go over the top. You want it right before you get to the top. You got to take the dip and, you know, and start a new curve. Um, and I think, I think those— that voice inside of us, that rumbling, you know, that says, oh man, maybe it's time for change. Am I been doing this for too long? Am I really learning and growing? You know, am I too comfortable? If I feel a little uncomfortable, I know that I'm growing. You know, that's that moment that you got to stop and evaluate strategically and go, is it time?

Is it time? Is it worth it? And don't, don't think about guaranteed outcomes. No, no, that's, that's, that's what I've learned.

Yeah.

Well, that's great advice. Um, I think, you know, so my, my, my little story, not anywhere near as, as, um, epic as that, was when I was working at Fiserv and I'd been there, you know, I was at Fiserv for 5 years, big company. They ran, they run still. I mean, they're the biggest, you know, provider of like bank software and, um, most of the, a lot of the transactions, especially electronic checks and things like that. So you really huge company, very influential. I was there for a while, um, about the fourth year, it's somewhere in between the third and fourth year, I, I shifted into workforce planning and, um, forward-thinking pro forma style analytics of, you know, an organization from a talent acquisition and performance, you know, point of view. And I essentially departed from from the sourcing that I was known for and went into this other area that was very much by the numbers, looking at data, projecting data, cleaning data, learning about data hygiene and the risks of, you know, misinterpreting data and everything. So workforce planning, workforce intelligence, workforce analytics. It was a big transition, but it was worth it because when I left Fiserv, And ended up going into consultancy. I was then able to transition as a consultant. I now had several more cards in my deck that I didn't have before that I could put in play. Even they might have been low face cards. They might have been 5s and 6s and 7s because I'd just done it for a year and a half and I wasn't as expert as I was on the thing that I invented. But it was worth the risk because later on I've used it in enough projects as a consultant that I feel like the bad decision would have been to stay in TA, kind of like stay too long, right? Overstay my welcome. And, or even worse, fully move over into that and then stay on that side. So I kind of visited that planet for a year and a half. And then came back to the other planet and started colonizing a new civilization, you know, of like mental abilities and acuities. So, growth is what this is about and it definitely led to that. It was painful. It led to a year of not the best place in the world, which, you know, I'm not going to regret, but it was a learning experience.

So, yeah. Let me say this about talent acquisition though. Yeah, a lot of people jump out of talent acquisition, I think, way too early. And I'm not saying this about what you did because I think there's no—

there's like a 5 or 6 year tenure. That's right.

Yeah. One of the, one of the things that I, you know, that I, that I hope I've left behind is that I've— there's some really people that, that I was lucky enough to hire. They worked for me. We grew, we grew together and they've done phenomenal things and, and and they've created legacies of their own. I'm very proud to be a part of that tree. And one of those people is Cindy Nicola, okay? Cindy Nicola, who you'll get— used to be Cindy Houck when I hired her at EA. She was an HR generalist. I brought her over and I said, you know, I think you've got the stuff to run staffing and talent for me. I think you got the stuff. You go, what's the stuff? I said, you've got the drive, You've got the personality, you've got the smarts. I think your instincts are right. You could do this. And so she came in and didn't know anything. I taught her, she learned, she taught me things we did. And she turned out to be an amazing talent acquisition person. Rose up at EA, left EA, recruited to Apple to work with Steve Jobs. Recruited out of there by Elon Musk to go do talent at Tesla, recruited out of there by RJ at Rivian to go to Rivian, and now she's at Databricks, right? So what a career trajectory. There was a point in her career where we sat and she talked about it and said, there's a CHRO job available for me. And I said, you know, Cindy, you'd be a great head of HR. No doubt about it. I said, but there's a lot of heads of HR. There's a lot of heads of HR. How many people are there in industry, in technology, that have stayed in the talent space, who've become not only good at it, but they've, they've mastered it and they've become experts and they're thought leaders? How many of them are there? You can count them on one hand. Right? Because they go off and they do other things. They do it. I said, I think, I think, you know, if your passion and your drive— because listen, one of the toughest things about— one toughest job in the world is being a recruiter because you never turn it off. It's—

yeah, it's a very thankless job too.

When you do turn it off, you've got a hiring manager that says, where the heck are you? And you've got a candidate that's going saying, where the heck are you? Right? So you're, you're caught in the middle all the time. But if you've got the drive and the passion for it, it is a thing that can create an enormous successful career. I will also say that in business is one of the most— what's the right— not productive, but rewarding and fulfilling role you can have. Yeah, because you help people's professional dreams come true. And when you help people's professional dreams come true, their personal dreams come true. And so by putting the right person in the right job and being the engineer and the architect of making that happen, being the chef that can do that, you have an enormous influence on people and their full potential being reached in its societal I mean, you can look back at it and there are people who will remember the person who recruited them into that job that became their dream job. They never forget them. It's like elementary school teachers. You never forgot her name. It's the same thing because they can have such an impact. And so as we talk about, pivoting and, you know, and rethinking and all those things. You don't, you can actually do it in the lane you're in and grow and do all these things and still stay in a place that is so darn important. And I'll just, you know, I'll end my rant with this. We need more great talent acquisition people. We need people who care right, who don't cut corners, who care about great hiring, who, who feel, uh, um, that they feel like they've let themselves down when I— and others down when they make a bad hire.

If you do it right, that's how it is. But I just, I feel like it's— I'm not trying to pass judgment, I just feel like it's not done right in a lot of ways. And maybe that's what— I don't know why, but maybe that's why. Maybe it's because Sometimes people are in it for a job, and maybe— and there's nothing wrong with having a job, obviously, but sometimes people are in it because it's a paycheck rather than for the right reasons. And I think if you get both the paycheck and you're doing it for the right reasons and you do it that way, it makes a big difference. Otherwise, it's just a transaction and you're going to get the same results that everybody else gets. Yeah, with just a transaction.

Don't expect to You know, um, yeah, you know, but, but, you know, I think we should carry on our shoulders the burden— to go back to it— the burden of a good hire and also what happens with a bad hire. Like, if there's, if there's anything that in the business world that has more bad impact on somebody, I can't think what it is than a bad hire. Like, somebody's got a great job, we recruit them, right, from Buffalo to St. Louis. They got a great job. We, we take her out of her finance job, she's going to be a CFO in St. Louis. She gives up this great career, all this personal equity that she's built, you know, with her, with her company. Her family has to pick up and move. They get— they go and they're in St. Louis. And 6 months later, their kids ask their father, why is mommy crying at the kitchen table?

Wrong move.

Because it wasn't— because somebody didn't do their work, right? Didn't go hard enough into the understanding between what the person and the company both wanted. Like when a company says, oh, somebody's been there for 6 months, it wasn't a fit. Well, shame on the company. It wasn't the employee. It wasn't the employee. It was the, it was the company that didn't do their work to really find out if it was a fit or not, right? Or we tried to put a square, a square peg in a round hole because we needed to fill it, you know. Or, wow, this candidate is quick, I can get it done. You know, the impact is unbelievable because it's not only on this person who now has to, for the rest of their career, might have to sit across from a recruiter and go, so tell me about that. What happened? What happened? And you tell them the truth. You know, you say, well, it just wasn't, it didn't work out and I missed it. And they're questioning your judgment or they might think you're not being honest. You know, they're And you know, you see that look in their eyes. You're on your— on the defense for a long time in your career. Hopefully you get over it. It's not just the economic impact, it's the impact of picking up your family, moving the kids. The, the trailing spouse or the partner might have given up their job, and then you've got these children who are looking at it and going, hey, you know what, I'll never trust the company. Are you kidding me?

I remember what they did.

I remember what they did to my mom. So If we look the arc of millennials and Gen Z and we go, you know what, they're not like the boomers, they're not engaged, they're not committed. Well, let me tell you, I can trace back and show you layoffs or I can show you the Great Recession when we asked people to take pay cuts.

I remember that, I was there.

And they went home and they told their family, we can't go on vacation this year because if I'm not in the office, I might lose my job. And by the way, we can't afford it because I had to take a 10% pay cut. And some teenagers or 10-year-olds are sitting there going, huh, I don't think I want to work for companies.

Well, you got to find the right company or— yeah.

And guess what we got?

That's what we got.

We got people who are like, you know what? Yeah, I work. I work to get my paycheck to do the things that I want to do in life. I don't do— I don't work because that's the thing I do in life. Now, that may be good. That really may be good.

Yeah, the whole work to live versus live to work argument, right?

Yeah. But, uh, but I just— it is the long rant, and I apologize, but I, but I want to say it in a positive way, that if you're in talent acquisition and you have the responsibility, it is an awesome, great responsibility.

Take it. Take it.

Take it.

Do it. Because if you do it right, it really does impact. It has a long tail.

You could change somebody's life. Yep.

You could change someone's life who will change other people's lives, who will improve things down the line. So that is— we don't often have as people a lot of opportunity to make such a big impact. Not everybody can be a CEO or president, or not everybody wants to be or has the time or the resources or whatever. But this is something that you can— it's a job where you can have very lasting, um, positive outcomes for other people if you do it right, if you, if you give a shit, basically.

That's right. Thanks. The recruiter from Heidrick Struggles that called me at PepsiCo, that I told, that I told every recruiter for years and years and years, don't call me unless it's entertainment, media. And in 1994, I started saying, or our technology that enables entertainment or media. And the guy cared enough to dig below it and to see, oh, you know, and technology and entertainment.

That's smart.

I think I have it for you, you know. And it's an electronic artist. What's an electronic artist? What's an electronic artist? It's a video game. And I started to brush him off. I don't play video games. And he said, Rusty, Rusty, other people do.

This is the future, right? Other people play video games.

Yeah, this is the future.

Right.

And he, and he, that was a left-hand turn out of pet, you know, and I, and changed my life, changed my life. Wouldn't be sitting here talking to you. I doubt it.

Oh, I can, yeah, I can give you so many stories of people whose lives were changed directly. And just because of, you know, me making the push to introduce them and pushing the hiring manager. But we're getting pretty short on time. And normally on this show, I have 2 closing questions. You are such a unique and special guest that actually I'm going to waive both of those. The question that I always ask is who should be on our next show, but you already gave me Cindy Nicola. So I'm going to try to— unless you have another one, I'll take two. If you have another one, you can give me another one. But that's usually the hardest one for folks to think of someone. Do you have a second person? I'll take it down.

Otherwise, go with Cindy. Got it.

And then the other question was, was, uh, something related to, um, a thought that we can— a question that we can ask ourselves as we view this replay and think about it. So something we can answer for ourselves, but I have a better one specifically for you. Um, what, what do you believe, in your experience, most companies get wrong about chasing the perfect candidate? Is that, you know what I'm saying? Like hiring manager, this happens a lot. Hiring managers want the perfect candidate. Oh, that person's great, but I want to see what else is out there. Uh, it happens so often that I think that there's this false, this false belief, this false, um, thought that if we wait or if we look hard enough, we'll find the perfect candidate. Does that really exist? Is that the secret to hiring well, is being able to find perfect candidates? What do you think about that?

Um, there's no perfect candidates.

Are you kidding me?

Yeah.

So why does this happen?

Okay. Um, because not enough time and intellectual discipline has been spent on this— the, the spectrums of what is great and what, what is not great that, that's needed. Okay, right. So not enough time is spent going, all right, financial acumen, yes, it's got to be on top of it.

So there's not one line of the perfect candidate, there's zero to perfection in multiple lines, and if you hit some, yes, and we don't attenuate, right?

We just take them all to 10 And they got to be a 10 on everything.

On everything.

And then we miss, we miss these people who, like, um, if we, if we had, if we had waited, taken the spectrums and waited them and done all the hard work to do that, we would say, you know, they don't have this yet. Yeah, but they have all the indications that they're going to. And that feels good to me, right? And we can coach here. We can develop there. Now, companies say, I don't have time to coach and develop. We're not really good at coaching and develop. I just gotta have the perfect thing. Well, good luck with that.

Yeah, that's different though. I think that's another, that's a strategic question. Mine was more around the myth of the perfect candidate.

I don't think there's any such thing.

Even existing.

I don't think, I mean, look, if that was the case, You know, um, all the draft picks in sports, the top draft picks, would all be, uh, all-stars, right? I mean, you, you got the best information that you have, you, you make your pick, and you try to— and you think, well, they were first round, they're all going to be great. They're not all great. Only a few of them turn out to be great. But you do the best that you can. But I think with the, the myth of passing on people because they're not perfect. Like, I'm, I've been a long believer that, you know, how many times have we all been there where the first candidate was the candidate that really was the one that we should have hired?

Yeah, it's like, right. I mean, I don't know if you were, you, you were, uh, close with Steve Jobs during the time that, um, he hired Jony Ive.

But like, he was already there by the time I knew him.

He was? Okay. But that's the myth right there is, I mean, there's many examples of this myth, but the myth of like, let's hire the next Johnny Ive. We can't find Johnny Ive when he's Johnny Ive.

No.

We got to find him before he becomes Johnny Ive. So, you know, the person who becomes the designer of the iconic Apple iPhone didn't already design the iconic Apple iPhone before you hired them.

Oh, that's right.

They're going to do that. And so they weren't perfect.

Yeah.

But they had something. So I think that's kind of where the myth—

It is. It is. And I know we got to wrap it. I'll say this too. The perfect candidate might be the one that's already just sitting down the hall.

Oh, damn.

Right. Because, because we know them, we know them, we see their warts and we see their issues. And the grass over here looks like— I don't know any of that, man.

That is deep.

They've got the same issues, folks. They've got all the same problems. What we have right here is someone that we trust. If we— they can grow, they can be great. Why do we have to look to the outside?

Sometimes, yeah, that is—

sometimes you have to. But, you know, problem with corporations is, you know, we just— like everything else in life, we like the new shiny penny. Why do we— why do we need the new— I can't I can't even use that analogy anymore, the new shiny nickel, um, because there are no new shiny pennies anymore. But, um, you know, why do we, why do we feel like we have to do that? Why do we feel like when we've got this person here that, you know, with just a little bit of buffing, buffing them a little bit and a little of this, they're as shiny as anybody? It's a lower risk move.

We got a couple of seconds left, and I wanted to, and I wanted to plug I don't normally do this because this is not a commercial show, but I do want to plug your book, The Faith Code.

Yeah.

So can you give us a 30-second pitch on that?

Yeah. It's the intersection of faith, and you can define faith as you want to. I'm a Christian, so that's how I define it.

Yeah. Not religion, but faith.

Right. Faith. And it's the intersection of faith and your work and how those two things are really important. And how having a foundation of faith as a platform that you can build any life app on top of, in my estimation, just makes things work better. I think that we all have to have a strong platform. Platforms that aren't strong in technology, we know what happens to them when they crash, everything crashes. But sometimes we don't build our platforms, we spend a bunch of time building apps. In our lives, you know, and they become really important to us. Like our jobs— that is just not a foundation, it's an app. And when it gets— and when it gets pulled out from underneath you and crashes, you don't have a foundation. You have no foundation. You know, you don't have anything to fall back on. So it's just an encouragement to, to, to look at the platform of your life in relationship with all of the apps and make sure that that platform is strong.

So folks can just look it up, you know, probably on Amazon, whatever, but the faith code Yeah, thanks a lot, man.

It's right there. So thank you for the plug. I appreciate it.

Uh, yeah, not while we're here, but, um, now while we're here, not gonna make any money off it. Um, and you're not certainly not gonna get rich off of writing a book, you know. So, but I'm glad you did, and I'm glad it's out there. Thanks a lot for coming on the show. I will reach out to Cindy and see if I can get her on here, folks. Um, yeah, thank you. Really appreciate y'all being here. I know it's an hour off your Friday. But I hope you learned a lot. I certainly did. I know that for sure. Next week, we have Kevin Grossman, who made a big decision and took the CANDIES to a new place and has a new home. So both Kevin and the CANDIES have a new home. And he's the, you know, I guess, I don't know, the CEO, leader. I'm not sure exactly. We'll find out more next Friday. So come and talk about the CANDIES, the Candidate Experience Awards, and Kevin and other things like that next Friday. Hopefully we'll see you here. Until then, please be kind to yourselves. Thanks, Rusty. See ya, everybody.

Thanks.