Shally's Alley Leadership Series - Amanda Jonnala, Relationship Director, Aspirant

3, 2, 1. All right, everybody, it's 1 PM-ish and it's Friday, so this might be Shelly's Alley, maybe. I don't know if anybody can recognize the background over here. Um, let's see if I can move around a little bit so you can see. No, probably not. But one of my all-time favorite movies, especially the director's cut, is Blade Runner. And I found this little video loop that you can put on Zoom, which is kind of cool, so I put it in as my background. Anyway, welcome to Shelly's Alley. We have a very special guest today. Amanda, AJ, you go by AJ. Amanda Janala is a relationship director at my day job, Aspirant, and I wanted to bring her in today because she is terrified of public speaking.

Oh my gosh, what a great opener.

So I figured, what, what a better way to get over it than to do a live broadcast on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. And whatever else is out there, LinkedIn, etc. But no, kidding aside, AJ's got a really interesting role. She helps run operations for power sourcing and does a lot more than that, but she's also the point of contact for the customers. So in a, in a very short description, it's a unique position to be in because with one side of her operations. She's looking at the day-to-day, basically the, the running of sourcing, overseeing the day-to-day activities of sourcers and leads and quality of research and all that. And then on the other side, she's hearing what the customers want, what the clients want, and is the go-between between the two. So sometimes communicating the client's feedback, positive or negative, to the researchers, and sometimes the researchers feedback, positive or negative, back to the client and gets to see kind of both sides. So I think that that's a very interesting perspective and one that we haven't had here on the show yet. So, AJ, welcome to Shelly's Alley.

Thanks for having me. I guess we should throw in one additional thing. I report directly to you, so that also makes my role really interesting.

Yeah, I was going to keep that out because then, you know, people are going to feel really bad for you and I didn't want them to pity you.

You're funny. He made me do this. He's my boss. Right.

And this is completely unscripted, by the way.

Right.

We had a cancellation last, last week for Shelly's Alley. And it wasn't last minute, but it was cancellation. I thought, you know, let me, let me see if AJ would be even willing to do this because of your, you know, public speaking.

It's just not my favorite. You know, I think in high school, I did a lot of— I was in drama class and I would have a little freakout every time before I got onto the stage. But then once you're on the stage, it's fine. It also happens with powerlifting, my hobby, right? Before you go into the platform to try to lift some unliftable weight, typically you have like this mini nervous breakdown where your heart rate quickens and you're taking deep breaths. And then I tell myself— it's right, right. And I try to tell myself, this is my body's way of having me rise to the occasion. Right? Like, it's quickening my senses.

Right.

This is natural. But it's still something that I dread. Right? It's still the, the few moments before actually doing the thing is still a little bit— it can be a little nerve-wracking with the public speaking.

Still, yeah, every time I take the stage, but for the first, you know, 10, 15 minutes before I go on stage, I get cottonmouth and vertigo.

You never know it.

You hide it really well. Major stage fright. But you kind of— you don't get used to it. You just learn how to cope with it, right? Like, I always have to have a bottle of water, not cold water because then my throat gets even worse. Just a little bottle of water and I drink before the stage. And a couple of other things that I do, you know, some things I've learned to do to sort of center myself and not let that panic set in. But I did have some questions that I was going to ask you.

Not related to public speaking?

Not necessarily. In true Shelley Zaly fashion, Um, these are some woozies, you know, some, some whammies of questions.

All right.

Um, you know, just things that are burning in my mind about what's going on these days in the industry. Um, we get a lot of requests for sourcers in the sourcing method group on Facebook, a lot of posts. In fact, just today I saw a couple more that came in. Um, one was Are there any contract sourcers out there? I have 2 openings for 12-month contract remote. And these come in like every day. You know how hard it is to find sourcers. You know how hard it is to find good sourcers. And we get a lot of these requests on the group. What's your advice for these poor souls that are looking for sourcers in the market right now?

Yeah, I mean, in, in power sourcing, we, we call the role a researcher. I think what you're defining as a sourcer, we call a researcher. So someone who is skilled at searching the deep web, creating search engines, scraping data, finding people, reaching out to them, right? Finding the unfindable, not just going straight to LinkedIn Recruiter and typing in your keywords, right? That's what me as a former recruiter in my history, that was where my skill set lied with sourcing was LinkedIn Recruiter. This is a whole nother level as they would call it. So it's a really difficult skillset to find. I've talked to many people who call themselves researchers or sourcers. And then after 5 minutes with them, I could do better than a lot of them, right? I actually talked to someone who had a very high hourly rate and I was like, this is gonna be good. This guy's gonna really be very skilled. And the only tool he used was LinkedIn Recruiter. That was the only tool that he used to do any type of sourcing. I asked like 5 different ways, but you still use SeekOut, right? You still, no, you still search through Google, right? No, it's just LinkedIn Recruiter.

I wonder, did you ask him, so if you use LinkedIn Recruiter and anyone else can use LinkedIn Recruiter, what distinguishes you as a sourcer? Did you ask that question?

I didn't, I should have. I did say like, what happens if you don't find the candidate on LinkedIn Recruiter? What happens if you don't get a response or you're You're not able to submit a candidate that's not already been found by someone else. And he said, then I just don't fill it. Then it just doesn't get filled from me. Right. Okay.

Wow.

That's great.

So how do we— what advice do you have for our listeners that are running into that same thing? Right? Like, what do you do?

So I guess how to find the researchers. It's really a rat race right now. Anyone knows in talent acquisition, finding recruiters or sourcers or researchers, whatever you call them, it's really, really difficult. And I don't have the answer. I could solve the problems of the US if I did. We talk to people, we, we look at junior level versus senior level. We have an extensive test they take. And as you know, Shelly, internally we offer a lot of training to people to come on, and they have access to Shelly Steckel to train them on how to be a researcher. So I guess to answer that first question, if you're looking for a researcher and you're having a really difficult time doing it, look for talent you can develop. Look for folks that are really looking to have the basic skills. That's right.

But they can—

they can think of video gamers. We have some people on our team that like to play video games where they're digging in or whatever. They're still that kind of solitary, likes to really dive into the computer and find things. They seem to be a successful profile, but you have to teach them.

So, um, have to be ready to teach them.

Yeah, yeah.

So, and, and not just teach them, but also guide, right? So it's not like, hey, here's Shelly's book, you're done, like that, you got your piece. No, you have to actually work with them. Because, you know, a big part of sourcing is all of the changes, all the nuances, right? There's no formula. In recruiting, there's a lot more of a system because there are lots of rules, boundaries, you know, applicant flow, you're tracking, you've got submittals, you've got SLAs that you have to live up to. In sourcing, we have SLAs too, but in sourcing, sometimes the challenge is to figure out another way that hasn't already been done, and that's part of the job. So when you, you know, bring somebody into the industry, it's not just here's your training, whammy. It's, you know, here's your training, now go and hit some walls and go down some rabbit holes and, you know, fall into some traps and then come back when you've done a few of those.

Right. Our team, as you know, we use sprints of uninterrupted time where you are going down the rabbit hole to try to just find everyone you can find. And then we go— either we refine as we go, or we come back at the end and refine the search. Sometimes we have more people than we need. Sometimes we have to schedule another sprint because we didn't get enough. But it's, it's a lot of time management. And exactly what you're saying, it's— this is one field where continuous improvement is absolutely a needed function, right? Because things change so, so much.

Which is actually— that is a good— that's another question that I had for you that I wanted to ask is you've got— you're managing a team of very busy researchers. This market is just hot. Things are popping all over the place and, you know, your team is basically constantly under fire with requests. And you have a pretty large team, about what, 20, 25 people, something like that?

It, you know, it really depends on the projects we have going at the time because we're agile, but I would say somewhere around there is accurate.

So my question is, how do you— given they're so busy, how do you maintain the, the time, or how do you, um, allow for them to keep their skills sharp?

Well, you know, we have a once-a-week meeting where it's all of our team gets together on a call to start with. Sometimes if I've heard throughout the week people have questions about how to use a certain tool or how to refine, we'll ask you to start with that, Shelley, and show everyone how to use the tool. But one of the fun things that we recently started is a segment that we call Stump Shelley. It's been a huge amount of fun for our team as well. They all cannot— I mean, you don't even know this, but there are emails that go on behind your back where everyone is trying to say, like, do you think you could find this? Do you think you could find that? So Shelley will share his screen and someone on the team will say, Shelley, find me this purple squirrel. I'm trying to think of some examples that are appropriate for consumption.

We had a few. There was The last example was to find somebody who was a content analyst, which means basically the people that approve content like on Facebook when they do the fact-checking and things like that.

Right.

And they have— these are people that based on the fact that this is what they do, they really can't be publicly visible in that role. In other words, it's not like they go out there and say, hey everybody, I'm a Facebook censor, because then they're gonna get a lot of comments, right? So right there, they're particularly— yeah, exactly. At least the job that they do, right? So you can find the people, but they don't necessarily connect what they do. So that was a really good example. But what about when, you know, in their day-to-day? So not, not what we're talking about when we're, you know, getting them together, but what about in their day-to-day? How are you encouraging them and keeping them on track while they're still having, you know, to do the same amount of work and, and, and still, you know, and applying their, their improvement skills, right? So they're They're learning as they go, but how do you keep them on track to do the learning and also stay on track?

So I think, I think the learning and the continuous improvement, I have goals for them, right? I need for you to have learned this particular course by this date and examples of how to source. Were you able to successfully do this? What was your return ratio on it? And kind of just checking in on my one-on-ones with the team. I think with them being So busy the way that I'm able to kind of keep them on track. It's a tactic that I have been using recently. You may know me, I'm pretty, I'm pretty into the details usually, and I like to focus in and things to be absolutely perfect. And I expect excellence from myself and from my team. But I guess a new concept that I've been sharing with them is that excellence is sometimes efficiency. And so I have this comparison that I offer them. If you were going to make a peanut butter sandwich, you wouldn't spread peanut butter out on the bread all the way perfectly to the edges, and then make sure that the jelly is the same thickness as the peanut butter, and then place the top piece of bread exactly above it and then cut through it. Because that is not excellence, right? In this case, slapping some peanut butter and jelly on some bread and eating it is efficient. And that's where you get excellence. But sometimes if you are performing brain surgery, you do, you do need to have that extreme level of detail to apply. So I have them ask, is this a peanut butter sandwich or is this brain surgery? Where does excellence come from in this scenario?

On that spectrum. That's a very good point.

To try to help keep them maximizing their time. Like, is it just, is this something I can just do quickly and the minute details are really unimportant when all is said and done? Or is this something that requires like creating your search strings? That's pretty pretty important, right? So, um, those types of things.

Yeah, I get that. And, you know, as a, as a recovering sorcerer myself, that's a huge one. That's, that's— I remember in the early years going down that rabbit hole and spending too much time trying to dig up something at, at the expense of not getting results. You know, I learned other ways to handle that. One of the things that I do is called the sourcing set, which is a timer. And, you know, people have seen me present and speak, probably have heard that a few times. And that's one of the ways that I, you know, keep focused and have boundaries and limits so that I don't end up just continuously chasing that elusive perfect lead, which can be a huge distraction. In, in some ways, getting 50 good leads is excellent because it's efficient and it gets you on the phone with candidates and converting candidates. But if you had to find all of the candidates, then you would never have time to actually do the other part of the job, right? So sometimes being really, really good at something means you may have to not do such a good job or such a thorough job in order to get results, at least the first time around, right? So one of the other things that I do is I do this iterative process. So the first time around, I kind of do a quick pass. Some people call it low-hanging fruit, whether that's your job boards, your ATS, or whatever. For me, it's just a quick pass to just do some recon. Maybe I have enough leads, so let's try it. And I've learned more and more these days that, that, that's the way to go. And then if that doesn't bring back results, you can tweak it based on what you're getting from the client, from— you get it from the candidates. And it's a lot easier to get to excellence by trying to be efficient first. That's a really good point.

Right. You could search for a certain job title for years, honestly, if you— especially if it was remote anywhere in the US or the world. You don't need that many. You just need more— fewer of exactly what you're looking for.

So, and it really helps to know how many you actually need, right? So that's one of the other things is we track metrics. So that we— a lot of people ask me about metrics. How do you measure sourcers? How do you compare sourcers to recruiters? How do you measure productivity and all those things? And I, you know, there's a lot of debate about the one metric or etc. I've always tracked metrics for myself from the very, very beginning. I have this mission control that I've talked about many times on the show and I've shared with people. It's a spreadsheet. That tracks things like the keywords that you use and the sources that you use. I've always done that for myself to learn from my searches, to see what works, what doesn't work. It just so happens to be that because I was doing that kind of tracking, I accidentally fell into, uh, being compliant because my searches were tracked and I knew what I was doing and I knew where candidates came from exactly, what searches and what URLs and everything. And so that led to, wow, okay, so this is not just about me now. This is also about compliance. And then that led to learning about some of the sources that work better for these types of jobs and those types of jobs. And that led to efficiencies, which also helped me do my job. So for me, when people talk about the one metric, maybe to leadership you have to have that. But for me to learn from what I'm doing so I don't repeat mistakes and so that I do repeat successes. That kind of measurement is more valuable for myself, right? Like, as a learning technique, right? So that's another way people can keep their skills sharp is by watching what they're doing and tracking themselves. Yeah. Hey, on this project, I was a lot less efficient than on the other project. What was different? What did I do different? Was it me? Was it the tools? Was it the data? Was it the people? Right. Speaking of improvements, what improvements are you planning to work on for your team and your workflows, you know, the second half of the year? So what's, what's on your, what's on your sights? What, what the, what are the objective improvements that you're planning on working on?

Yeah, I know that's a great, a great question and something that's actually kind of relevant to what we started off talking about. We potentially have opportunities to do public speaking in our roles, even as researchers, if they're doing a presentation for the entire group to kind of show what they do, or perhaps in the future as we do more education, being able to present to groups of clients about different sourcing techniques, things like that. So public speaking is something that I think is important important to be able to do. I know I'm a terrible example of it because I was just telling you how nervous I get right before the curtain raises. But we are going to be doing a thing that we're calling Power Sourcing Toastmasters, where— and it's completely voluntary.

And I don't know anything about this, by the way. So this is very new. I think you came up with this idea and just put it in place, right?

That's right. That's right. So I would say on all of my one-on-ones with the team, First, someone said, I feel like I could use some improvement on public speaking and presenting. And then another person mentioned it. And then I started asking, because if we have 2 people that are interested, chances are there's more. So then I said, do you have interest in improving your public speaking skills? And so now we have the whole group together where once a week for 30 minutes, we are going to have people present 5-minute PowerPoint presentations. The content has yet to be determined. It will be something pretty quick, right? We don't want to spend a lot of time preparing content for an exercise. And they're going to present in front of everyone and get feedback on how to do it. And we're kicking it off with a lot of tips and tricks about public speaking and how to pivot and, and things like that.

That's right.

That's 2 weeks from today, actually. And you're on those meetings.

I got the invitation today and I didn't know much about the details, so that, that sounds really interesting. I'm, yeah, I'm impressed and I'm excited. You know what, coincidentally, I used to teach a recruiting course at Temple Fox School of Business, and it was, it was the first, and I still believe it's the only, full credit recruiting course where the entire course is, you know, it's about recruiting. It's not recruiting inside of an HR course. It's part of the HR program, but it was a course on just recruiting. And one of the things that I did in that course with students, because it was a way to help them practice and prepare for being recruiters, is I had them run a scenario where they sourced candidates that they were real candidates, but for not actual recs, using air quotes, right? So they They sourced real candidates, but they didn't contact them. And then they had to, as a group, teams of 3 pods, they had to come up with the best 3 candidates out of the group. So everybody would source some candidates and then they would get together, review the candidates, and then they would come up with the best 3. And then they would present them to the hiring manager, which was a classroom presentation, at first in person and later on we did it via WebEx or whatever. So they would present their top 3 choices. And it sounds boring because like, oh, here's my 3 resumes. But no, they actually would highlight like, we picked this person because we all agreed on this, that, and that. It was really cool. It gave them an opportunity to practice convincing a hiring manager, which was their peers, right? The audience. Convincing a hiring manager that these candidates were the best ones and competing for that. With each other in a friendly way. And then we would select the winning candidate that would receive the virtual offer, and that team would get the virtual reward, and they would all grade each other. So it was a way to do some peer grading, which is what they call flip the classroom. So that's really interesting because I never thought of that as public speaking. I thought of that as presenting candidates. But you know what? As a recruiter, you do a lot of public speaking. You're speaking to an audience of hiring managers. You're speaking to an audience of candidates. It may only be one candidate, but that is still an audience. You're still on.

Yeah, I guess that's true. A lot of people are really nervous before they get on the phone for the first time, right? When we bring in scouts or callers, it takes them a little while to get their phone legs to be able to talk on the phone. That's— I have never suffered talking on the phone. I guess it's— I've had the gift of gab in that way for a while, but I understand for other people.

So much for your fear of public speaking.

Well, it's on the phone, I guess, is different. I don't know. For whatever reason, my brain tells me it's different. But they— people have struggled to get on the phone and to talk to someone that's going to reject them, to cold call. But I love this course you were talking about. It reminds me of like debate class, right, where you're having to convince someone. And oh my gosh, there's never been a better debate than trying to advise— well, or trying to advise a hiring manager. Right? You have, you've done all of your research. You, you're not just an order taker. You have, you figured out what the team needs, what the balance is, what the hiring manager even said they want. And you come to them with 5 candidates that are exactly what they want, but they don't want any of them. So being able to have the analysis to break that down and to defend the points and to really, and if it's wrong, then to find out, oh, this is what you really meant. It's really all about debate. So it sounds like that course covers really key skills and the public speaking.

It's debate without the, without the arguments that you get, like, in, like, as in a court case where you argue opposite sides type of debate. Um, but there's definitely some persuasiveness there. The, the reason I introduced that into the, the course that I taught at Temple for a few years is because for the Foundation We have a capstone course, my nonprofit foundation, which tries to reintegrate people that have been displaced and unemployment for various reasons like disabilities or returning from service or, and so on. And we, we try to, you know, help them get jobs in the industry. So we train them, we teach them, we educate them, we provide them the space to be able to do this. And then there's a capstone course, and in that capstone course, we pair them up Each student is paired up with a real recruiter that's working on what I like to call a dead rec, kind of like a dead letter, right? It's this rec that's basically been abandoned. It's not going to go to an agency. We're not taking any bread off of anybody's table. Maybe it's already been to agencies and, you know, it's 300 days old. Given up on it, you know, the current— yeah, the recruiter is not even working on it. And we have companies that have volunteered to participate in this and they put a recruiter in the hiring manager seat, and the graduate from the Sourcing Institute Foundation is presenting these candidates much like in— that's where I learned what I learned from there. I applied at Temple, and they have to sell the candidate to the recruiter. And what's really almost cathartic for the recruiters is they get to be that hiring manager that is, you know what I'm talking about.

I know what you're talking about.

The hiring manager's like, but what about this or that? And so they love it because it's almost like a chance to kind of reverse the tables, and the graduates get some legit experience from somebody that is actually facing those hiring managers right then and there. But that's one-on-one, so I didn't connect that as public speaking until just kind of just now when I put those three things together. But it makes me think that maybe public speaking is something that more recruiters and more people in TA should think about as a competency. What do you think?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the ability to communicate with a public of 1 or a public of 5,000, you really have to be able to slow your heart rate, listen to what's being said, you know, use cognitive ability to analyze it and then respond and be an active listener. And so I think public speaking for everyone, right? There's no situation where it's not necessarily something that— I mean, I'm sure there are some jobs where it's not important, but it feels like a pretty important skill, like being able to type, almost like it's almost fundamental.

That's true. You also don't see being able to type on a job description. I was thinking, right? Yeah, that's true. So maybe, yeah, maybe it's just too fundamental. It just, I just, the light bulb went on for me. I just made the connection between public speaking and presenting candidates and talking to hiring managers because I never thought of it as a stage, but you definitely are in the spotlight when you're, when you're presenting candidates and defending your candidates to the hiring manager, if you're really being an advisor. So maybe this is something that, you know, TA leaders that are listening in can take back and think about how am I going to be able to I want to foment that skill in my team because it's not obvious, right? This is not a job where you're a journalist or where you are doing public speaking. When we interview candidates for sourcing, we don't ask them questions about public speaking, but it might help, right? Like, have you done any Toastmasters or have you ever given a presentation at a— have you ever done one of those speeches at a wedding or those kinds of things? I don't know what they're called. Um, there's a word—

toast.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, no, I think it should be definitely be a competency, and it's, it's not a given. I know I said it's fundamental, but it's not something I think that's typically looked at that way. But interviewing in a way is also public speaking, and gosh, you know, I mean, I've— I have— being a career recruiter, I've talked to people that have cried on the phone. I talked to one person who I think passed out. Like, it's, it's— I'm like, I'm not that scary. This is just an interview. I have a job. I had someone who said, I'm blowing this anyway, and hung up the phone on me, right? So you get people that are even nervous to talk to you on the phone, right, just to interview for a job. So it can be— I think interviewing is even more so in the spotlight. So we try to, as you know, as, as recruiters and in the industry, try to extend grace. To people on their interview. Like, they were nervous, they spoke a little too much, they didn't speak as much as they should have, they're an introvert.

Yeah, neurodiversity, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we've talked about that before.

Yeah, that's true. I didn't think of that. You know, I'm an introvert, which is why I still get completely twisted when I— before I go on stage. It's, it's very anti-my— it goes against my grain. And I'm not, I'm not someone that seeks the audience and wants to present. I've done it because I had a message that I wanted to say, and then I got okay at it, and now I'm, you know, capable of doing it. But it's still, it's still very scary and draining for an introvert. Sometimes one of the ways introvert represents itself is that when you're amongst other people, when you're in a group, when you're in social context, it drains your batteries as opposed to it charges your batteries. My wife, for example, she's an extrovert. She's— her batteries drain when she's at home alone. So, you know, spending a day by herself is like, oh, draining. And then she goes out with her friends or, you know, goes out even if it's just going to the store, and you can see her batteries visibly recharge. I'm the opposite. I go to the store, I come back, I'm like, oh, I want some privacy, I want some downtime. And there's many other ways to represent introversion. That's just happens to be mine and the way I represent it. But that's a good point.

So that's really well said too.

Are sourcers introverts? Is that— again, just totally out of— I'd never thought about this before. How often, how frequently are sourcers more commonly introverts? Or— because I know with, with our scouts, right, the scout is what we call the, the recruiter that's on the phone. I know our scouts are— they're pretty extroverted, right?

They're pretty extroverted.

But, but the research— a researcher could be extroverted too. They're just that— it's not— the job doesn't require you to be one way.

I don't know how satisfying a role would be if someone is truly doing deep web search all day long, um, how truly satisfying their job would be if they never contacted any of the candidates or talked to the hiring managers. We actually had And if they're an extrovert, switched like that, like I— they said, I really just— I'm looking at all these candidates, and I never know what happens. I want to talk to the candidates. I want to be able to influence hiring managers. Like, I think it's something that a good researcher typically is going to be an introvert, likely, and get fueled, be energized. You always want to get energy from your work. You don't want it to completely drain you. It's not— it does sometimes, but I think that I would say for a researcher, typically they're going to be introverts, not always, and that for the scouts, almost always extroverted.

Wow, that's two things.

Just my guess.

Yeah, no, you're probably right. That's two new thoughts, right? Public speaking and introversion that have now entered my mind space with regard to this profession that I've been shepherding for 25 years. 25 years, AJ. I've been doing this for 25 years.

Nuts. You must have started when you were 5.

Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah, flattery gets you nowhere with me. But yeah, people did not do this as a job. It was, it was something people did. It was recruiters did their own sourcing.

That's exactly right.

That's how I started out, right? And now there's 750,000 people that call themselves sourcers, so it's crazy, right? And I've never once thought about this as a, you know, introvert-extrovert role and as a public speaking role, so Wow, very, uh, mind-opening. So thank you so much for coming on and being such a good sport. Thanks for having me up here. But if you have any last words of wisdom for our audience, I'd love to hear you, um, say goodbye.

All right, well, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. If anyone out there has a need for sourcing help, don't hesitate to reach out to me. Um, I know a great company that can help with your sourcing needs.

Shameless plug. We do not pay for advertising on this show. Wait a minute. All right, thanks, AJ. Thanks, thanks for having me. Bye, everybody. Have a good weekend.