Shally's Alley Leadership Series - Glenn Gutmacher, Dir. Sourcing, Huron

3, 2, 1, and I think we're live. Yay! I hope we are anyway. Yes, it says we are. Well, it is Friday. It's 1 PM. That means it's time for Shelly's Alley. Woohoo! Welcome everybody to Shelly's Alley. We are continuing our leadership series, and today I am fortunate to be joined by my partner in crime from multiple endeavors over the past 20-some-odd years, Mr. Glenn Guttmacher, who is the director of talent sourcing, or just director of sourcing at Huron Consulting. Is that right? Welcome, Glenn.

Thank you. Yeah, I'm a little over a month into my new job. And, uh, as you might imagine, I had a lot of questions around how I might set up things properly. So I reached out to Shelly, and we had a great chat a little before today's Shelly's Alley that we thought, hmm, maybe we can use some of this material in today's presentation.

Yeah, and I said, hey, let's continue the conversation and go live. I was gonna present today some Outlook hacks that I learned from Mike Askins because You guys might remember I invited Mike Askins, one of my fellow day job practice leaders, to come over here and talk, talk about RPA, his, his area of expertise. And so he reciprocated and invited me to his show. Uh, and I learned a bunch of things about Outlook that I didn't even know, and I've been using Outlook for a long time. So don't worry, I will catch you up on that stuff next time. It can definitely wait. This is much more interesting, certainly to me and hopefully to, to some of you out there. So what we talked about, we talked about how to balance the requisition workload, particularly when assigning sourcers. How many sources do you need? How do you decide who gets the, the sourcing request? And I can imagine that assigning reqs to recruiters based on workload is also a challenge. So there's probably some overlap that can carry over from what we talked about. Another question that, that Glenn was asking about is how do we determine how many sourcers we need, or when do we ask for additional headcount to hire sourcers based on what criteria, for example. So those are the two big questions, right, Glenn, or did I miss something?

No, I think everything else kind of branched off from that, and you shared some really interesting systems that you've set up at your company and previous ones that I think you'll probably want to bring into this discussion as we go, right?

Yeah, so the first one of those really was load balancing, right? That was the big one.

Yeah, well, I think when you're in an environment that we have today where usually there's a rec spike and you've got higher attrition It's almost inevitable that you're going to have more sourcing requests, and usually the sourcer headcount is a little lagging. So how you figure that out until you've got the proper headcount. Sure. Let's talk about that.

Yeah. I mean, the question is, you know, you have more requests than you have sourcers, and there's more recruiters than there are sourcers. So how do you determine I guess who gets the request, which sourcer to assign it to, and when you might need to hire more sourcers, right? And when I started talking about that, there was something in particular that you picked up on that you really liked. What was that that you were like, oh, when you showed me that, the light bulb went on? Do you remember what that was?

Oh, I think that happened a few times for me, but— What?

There was only one time? No, just kidding.

I think the, the first one that jumped out at me was figuring out what wrecks merit how much time. And you had a lot of different factors that you used in your calculations to determine that. Some used some third-party data sources and some were just your own smart calculations based on experience. But I think all of that would be worth reviewing.

Right, right, right. That's true. Okay, so let's start, let's start out with what determines whether or not a rec gets approved for sourcing. And the first step in that is an escalation to the recruiter's direct report, their manager. So in other words, when there's a need for sourcing, that need is entered into a form. We have an internal form that gathers all the information that we need, and this is very similar to what an intake meeting would be, similar to an intake meeting between a sourcer and a recruiter, not between a recruiter and a hiring manager, which gathers a lot of other information that may not be necessary for sourcing. So it's a, it's an abbreviated intake meeting, albeit questions that are typically not asked from a recruiter's point of view. So the intake meeting essentially is virtual through this form. The recruiter fills out the form, provides all the information or as much of it as possible in there, and then hit submit through— this is an automated form through Microsoft Automate, what they call Flow. For those of you that are on Microsoft, if you go to flow.microsoft.com and you can access it, then that means that you have O365 and this provision for you. It is included in most of the packages. So that form then kicks off an approval, which is also a basically a widget built into Microsoft. That approval goes to that person's manager, and the approval says, here's the rec that was just requested, or this is a rec that was— that just got put into a request for sourcing. Do you approve? And then the manager approves. This gives the manager an opportunity to provide feedback to the recruiter if the recruiter is simply just opening, you know, frivolous requests and maybe could be doing some more on their own. It gives the manager an opportunity to do some coaching. More often than not, the manager already knows that it's going to be coming in or may have even suggested to the recruiter, hey, open a request. So there's not, there's not a lot of times when the hiring or the, sorry, the recruiter's manager says no, right? But it does happen. So once that's approved, then it goes to one of my delegates that is the relationship director, AJ, previously on the show, and AJ then assigns it. So a couple of things happen. Along the way. One of them is, is this a request that does merit sourcing? And we look at a few things. For example, if it's hourly, the position— in other words, it's an hourly role— we are not likely to accept it as a sourcing request because we can have a much higher impact on salary roles. I think we talked about this with— in a previous call about the prioritization and where sourcing adds the most value. If not, that may be a good topic for another one. But I think that there are some roles where sourcing adds an immense a lot of value. Some recruiting roles or recs where sourcing adds an immense a lot of value, and some where it adds some value but not to a critical factor where, um, I would say it's, it's required, right? Sourcing would be a luxury in those cases. It adds value to any rec, but in some cases it doesn't have to exist. So for some hourly positions there needs to be a compelling reason why sourcing is needed. Otherwise, we have a lot of other requests that would take priority. So that's the first test. Is it hourly? Is it salary? Another test is how many positions are open? Actually, no, before that, before we even decide to take it, aside from the fact whether it is, whether it is hourly or salaried, it also needs to be US-based because my team is operating in the US. If the source— the req requires international sourcing, we may not approve it, or, you know, they kind of— it gets escalated to me for case-by-case basis. It may still get approved, but it doesn't get put into the regular workflow. And then the other thing is whether or not the position has had any activity. So what we don't want to do is we don't want to get requests for sourcing for a rec that the recruiter has done nothing with. In other words, to translate that maybe more politically correctly, we're not going to do the recruiter's job, right? They need to work on this or have a really good reason why they're not going to work on it before bringing sourcing in, because sourcing is not a replacement for recruiting. Sourcing is an enhancement to, a partnership with. Think of it the same as whether or not you send your job to job posting distribution. You don't want to post all of your jobs to your distribution system where it gets bombarded throughout the internet and you end up paying thousands of dollars to advertise this rec with every rec. Some recs you, you don't advertise everywhere. You only advertise to specific niche sites, or you only advertise to your company page or whatever. It's the same thing. So the recruiter should be determining, is this a rec that we need to blast to the world? Is this a rec that needs sourcing? So that's it. Now it comes to us and we're determining its priority. We look at a few factors. The number of open positions. If there's one open position for this req, then it gets zero additional bonus points or priority points. But if there's more than one, then it gets a plus one. So this is a— it gets an additional score point in urgency or priority because it has multiple openings. The second condition that we look at is the active candidate count. If the req doesn't have any applicants, It's been open for a while, the recruiters worked on it, but there are no applicants. In other words, there's, there's low or no candidate flow, then it gets a +1. Otherwise, continue. The next one is the grade, and by that I mean grade levels, as in like staff and so on. So pretty much regular run-of-the-mill staff positions don't get a +1 priority, but if they're manager or Um, well, if they're manager level or lead supervisor level, they get a +1. If they are director level, they get a +2. If they're VP, they get a +3. Staff level positions can still get priority, but not just based on their grade. There's a criticality that gets involved in here. So we've got number of openings, the active candidate count, then we've got the grade, and then we've got the furthest stage of the rec. So if the rec is basically brand new, newly opened, and there's no applicants and there really hasn't been very much work done with it, again, we're not trying to replace the recruiter here, so it doesn't get a priority. But if the rec has gone to stage 1 where there's been sourcing and even submitting to the hiring manager, but the hiring manager hasn't accepted anybody, that increases the priority. So we get a +1. If the rec has gone to where we've presented candidates and there's been interviews, but none of the candidates have been selected, then, you know, it also gets a +1. But if it's gone to the point where there's been an offer and we have to— at that point, we have to then look at whether or not this was a one-and-done kind of situation. So to explain what I mean by that is sometimes, you know, how they had the perfect candidate, it was a referral, they, you know, the person applied to the job, they went all the way to the interview, they made an offer, and the person declined the offer, but they were the only candidate in the mix. At this point, essentially, this is now a brand new open rec because there's not been any activity done. But if we've gotten to the point of an offer and there's been multiple interviews and all that, this is now getting critical. So then it gets a +2. So that's the difference, right? If this is a one and done, it's basically a brand new rec. We never really had a chance to work on it. If this is where we've had multiple offers or multiple interviews and an offer to client, etc., then it gets that +2. So that's Number of openings, candidate count, grade, stage, um, aging. Aging depends on your time to fill. So if you have a 45-day time to fill or a 45-day SLA— keep in mind these could be different. I don't know, Glenn, if you've experienced this in the past, but if the average time to fill is 45 days That's not necessarily the same as the SLA, the hiring manager expectation, right? So with the hiring manager, the expectation may be that the job will be filled within 45 days, but our average time to fill may be 30. So you need to look at these two criteria and decide which one of them is the one that you want to use. For us, we are using the hiring manager SLA. So for us, it's 45 days. The position needs to have been filled within 45 days. Or else we're now in overtime. If the job has been open for 45 days or more, it gets a +1 priority. If it's been open for double that, that's basically 91 days, then it gets a +2. That's different than the average time to fill. If the average time to fill is 30 days, then we're not looking at 60, we're still looking at that other one. Is that what you were thinking about?

That's, uh, yeah, I think most employers probably do look at time to fill, and we need to push them to think about what a proper SLA would be, right?

Yeah, you don't want your, your SLA to be your time to fill necessarily, right? Your time to fill can vary, and if you look at a distribution chart and you plot it out, you might realize that there are some jobs that have an average time to fill of 120 days, and some jobs that have a 7-day average time to fill. So, you know, really what happens is you take the average of those and you're in the middle, but in the middle, no reqs get filled. In that middle point, they either get filled at 7 days or they get filled at 120 days. Very few get filled in the middle, yet that's the average time to fill, right? So that average number is not necessarily, um, a really good SLA. You might have 2 2 SLAs, one SLA for hourly roles, that's 7 days, and one SLA for salary roles, that's whatever, right? Something to think about.

And I think you mentioned in your request form that you ask things like, what have you done so far? What have the results been? Which sounds kind of qualitative, though it would point to some points that should be assigned or not. So is someone reading through that free text and figuring out points?

Yeah, they are. The way that the form works, these are form fields. There are dropdowns, so there are some areas where you don't need to do any typing, where essentially you can just, you know, very rapidly tab, tab, tab, right? But there are some fields like you just suggested that require some qualitative input. The way the form works is all of that information gets put into our project tracker, which is a SharePoint list, so that there's visibility to all the managers and the leadership on what's going on. But the, the free text form questions, like for example, um, you said what one of them was, what has been done before. Yes, that's actually one of the questions that we ask is what sourcing activity has been conducted, because this recruiter may have done their own sourcing They might have used a different solution for sourcing that we don't know about. So we're asking that, and we're reading that. If they say no sourcing has been conducted, then the person who's reading that could be the manager that says, well, wait a minute, if you haven't done any sourcing yet, I'm not going to approve this. So their manager may decide not to approve it based on that. Or when that goes to AJ, who's going to assign the requisition to the sourcer, AJ may look at that and go, "Oh, okay. Well, there's already been these 3 things done for sourcing. We're going to make sure we don't repeat that so we don't avoid work that's already— Oh, sorry. We avoid work that's already been done." But then the other question is, what have been the results? We ask them to briefly describe the outcome so that we get an idea. Say, for example, they try to source on LinkedIn. This happens a lot. What we get on the form is, "Well, I tried sourcing on LinkedIn and I found a bunch of people, but I Sent emails or in-mails and nobody's responded. Okay, now we know that there may be good leads on LinkedIn, but they haven't replied, so we'll get a little bit more aggressive with texting and emailing and calling and so on. It helps inform our strategy more than decide whether or not we want to assign it a priority. But if there's been no sourcing conducted and no activity, it could reduce the priority for the requirement, just being honest, because It's kind of like, okay, you haven't done any, you haven't helped yourself. Like, we're happy to help you, but you gotta lift your own bootstraps by yourself every once in a while. There also may be a reason. Now, that's another thing. We might have a really good reason why this recruiter is opening a request for this, even though they've done absolutely no sourcing for it. It could be that in the past, this rec has literally just not gotten filled. Through traditional means, and that's what they'll put in there. They'll say, well, we've had this rec before and it was open for a long time and we absolutely need sourcing. So that, that would override that sort of, I haven't done anything because last time we had this rec, it didn't work, right? We really, really need help. So that still would kind of pass that human filter. But all that is in the project tracker, and both their manager and the person who assigns the sourcing request actually do read that. So that's a good point.

The other thing I liked about your form is that you have this checkbox to say you are agreeing to adhere to the SLA. So that's every assignment, which I think most companies do not insist on.

That's right. At the end, before you hit the submit button or the request button, there is a button that you have to push that is essentially a digital signature, and it says, By checking this box, you are committing to adhere to the sourcing SLA, which they, you know, there's a link to it they can get to, and they should know what it is. And you're acknowledging that, so by checking this box, you're committing to adhere to the sourcing SLA, and you're acknowledging that failure to do so could mean a reduction or discontinuance of service. So in other words, you're committing to adhere to the SLA that we have between sourcing and recruiting. If we fail on the SLA, you're going to hold our feet to the fire, as you should. If we're not doing our job, call us out. If, you know, if we're not doing our job, we should be telling you before that happens, right? But if you're not doing your— you're not holding up your end of the bargain and you don't fix that, we don't really have the power to hold your feet to the fire. I do, but the sourcer doesn't, right? Um, so in that case, then our option is we will pause the project. And if we don't get— after that, you know, when we pause the project, they get a reminder that says, hey, we need your feedback or whatever. And if they don't respond within 24 hours after we've paused the project and they've been notified, then we discontinue it. And that is the consequence that they are subscribing to. The reason we put that in place, by the way, wasn't because we're trying to be lazy and not do our job. It's because we found that prior to me joining, that there were requests that had been created and had been ongoing and the sourcers were working on them, but the req had been filled and the recruiter never told the sourcer. So because of that, when we start seeing that there's no feedback and the SLA is not being adhered to, we pause it because it could possibly be that the recruiter filled the job and they're too busy to notify us. So we pause it and we ask them. All they need to do is say, oh yeah, we filled it, no problem, we closed the req, no big deal. But we don't want to continue to source on a req that's been filled because that's time that we could be sourcing on a req that really needs the help. That's why it went in there, not because We are trying to be, you know, avoiding work or whatever. Thanks for bringing that up though. That's a good point.

Well, I think we can probably pivot to another topic, which again is how you're doing these calculations around sourcing resource allocation.

The workload balancing.

Yeah.

Well, as you probably recall that the formula itself is proprietary. Unfortunately, it is something that I guess fortunately, or you could look at it both ways, the two sides of the coin, right? Fortunately, it's something that I've been working on for a very long time. Unfortunately, it's really good and I need to keep that one top secret, but I will tell you what's going into it so that you can build it, you know, yourself. Essentially what we have done is we've been able to determine the typical rate of research. So for a junior researcher versus a senior researcher versus a sourcing architect, and to clarify, a researcher is what most people think of when they think of a sourcer. They're doing the lead generation, they're finding people. We don't have sourcers, we have researchers and scouts. A researcher is what you would usually call a sourcer. A scout is what you would usually call the recruiter. The job is split into two. The researcher is bringing people in and engaging the automated outreach, and then the scout is the one that's having the conversations. They know about the rec, they know about the job, and so on. So we know how many calls a scout can make if they're a junior scout or a senior scout, and there's a whole bunch of, you know, requirements for what makes one junior or senior. We know how many leads per hour a senior researcher or a junior researcher can generate on average. Of course, this varies, but we adjust that based on 3 factors. The, let's say that the senior researcher can generate for a typical requirement for the, you know, for the, for the common requirement, not the easy one, but the average one, they can generate, let's say 40 leads per hour. Well, then we adjust that using some proprietary calculations that take into consideration the following 3 criteria. The first is a difficulty score. You can obtain a difficulty score from sources like TalentNeuron or MZ. Basically, it tells you how difficult this position is to fill compared to other positions that have been out there in the data. So TalentNeuron will give you a TalentNeuron number of 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or occasionally 10. So that's one criteria. We consider 7 to be normal because usually that may not be normal for the recruiters. Recruiters, you know, the range can be all over the place, but typically by the time we get something, it's because there needs to be some sourcing done. And so it's usually a little bit more difficult. So our average is 7, 8 is medium, 9 is high, and 10 is like extremely high. So second factor is the supply -to-population ratio. In other words, how many people in the region can do this job? Not how many job seekers there are or how many applicants there are or anything like that, but the actual population. So the population of people who work in that region is something that you can get from the census data. And the population of people who do this job, you can get from a number of places, Talent Neuron, seek out other places. So it's, it's an estimate. It's not an exact number, but let's say, for example, that there are 22 million people in the regions where this position is posted. We're taking into consideration the geographies that the position is, is, you know, posted or where, where people can be working. So this may be one state, one city, three states. It may be nationwide. It may be global. So for this region, it's 22 million people who are members of the, of the work community. They are of working age and are eligible for employment. That's 22 million. But for this type of role, this function, there are only about 3,000 people that actually do the job. Whether they're looking for work or not doesn't matter, simply population density. That gives us a population density of 0.01%, and then that is also rated on a scale similar to the difficulty That scale has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 echelons where anything that's 4% and higher is basically easy and anything that's 0.01% and lower is extremely difficult. So think of it as like a 10, right? So pretty much it goes from like 2 to 10. The third one is this a diversity project? If it is a diversity project, then that automatically increases the level of difficulty and the factors that multiply the leads per hour. So if we started out with us, a researcher, being able to generate 40 leads per hour on a 7, on a level 7 project with an average population density and not diversity, but this project is all of a sudden a 10 difficulty and the population density is the lowest possible and it's diversity that is a very large factor of difficulty, that senior researcher may only be able to generate 10 leads an hour. So we take that number and we have the same number for junior researchers and for architects. And depending on who's doing the work based on who's been assigned to, we can calculate how many hours it'll take. So a senior researcher with a level 10 diversity and 0.01% population is going to take 55 hours to complete the project. Why? Because we know how many leads we need in order to make an offer. Down to the literally fraction. So we know it's going to take us 588 leads to convert as many people as we need to reply interested, to screen, to submit, to accept, to be able to get that. So it's going to take us 55 hours of research. Now I know that in a 67 workday period, you know, let's, let's call that maybe, uh, 80 days or something like that, um, that that's going to take 10% of a researcher's time. But if the project needs to be done quicker, let's say that the project needs to be completed in, um, I don't know, 30 days, right? I'm actually putting this into the calculator right now. So 30 calendar days would actually be 23 network days. Then the same work is going to require 3/8 of a researcher or 43%. So during that 1 month, we will need to have 1 researcher dedicated 43% of their time. If we have 2 such projects, that's about all that 1 researcher can handle because of the level of difficulty, the diversity, and the population ratio, and because it's a senior researcher. But turn that into a junior researcher, then that's 56% of their time. For the same time period. Or turn that into a junior researcher and the level of difficulty is a 6 and the population ratio is middle ground and it's not diversity. Now all of a sudden it only takes 20% of their time, which is a calculation of hours. Now I know how many hours I have. Now the one thing I do remember telling you about, Glenn, was that we don't use a 2080-hour week— year— 2080 hours of work year. Although that's the accepted number, if you had a 40-hour work week for 52 weeks out of the year, we're not using that because, you know, people have 3 weeks vacation, and during the work week there are non-work-related, non-project-related meetings and so on. So we actually have a, a lower number. It's 1,800 hours during the year. So this calculation of percentage of bandwidth is based on 1,800 hours, not 2,080 hours. That's very, very precise, and it tells us exactly how many researchers we need. That way, when we're working on a couple of projects that come in and we have to assign workload and we can see that it's going to exceed the amount of hours that we have, we'll bring in a contractor or we'll reassign someone from another project or we'll have to hire somebody and so on. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. Oh, that was great. I think if everyone had that kind of calculator, it would make them much more confident when they need to tell a particular hiring manager how long a given project is going to take.

Hey, everyone has that calculator. They can call Shelly. I'll do the math for you.

Well, that's nice of you. I guess you should also mention what your invoice would be for that, but I'll tell you that after I do the math. The other piece I thought that was interesting that you might want to spend a minute or two on is knowing which types of tasks lend themselves to offshore teams versus onshore?

Oh man, that's a tricky one. So I originally was going to talk to you about that and ask you, because I know you've led offshore teams and built offshore teams, and, you know, so have I, but we had different, different perspectives on it, and I wanted to kind of hear, hear what you had to say about that. Um, in my experience— I'll, I'll go first, then you can— then you're gonna have to summarize yours— but in my experience, the type of work that that our offshore partners do best is when they have this intake form completed. It's a, it's a well-completed form. All the data is in there, and our relationship director that assigns that can very clearly understand the content without having to go back to the recruiter and ask questions. Then that type of request is something that we can feel comfortable sending to the offshore team because all that they would really need is in writing. If our relationship director can't quite understand or there's something missing and need clarification, then we know that that's probably not a good idea to send to the offshore team because it's probably going to be— the answer will probably be that the recruiter is going to say, "Well, I don't know that. That's why they didn't put it in. Otherwise, they would have put it in," or, "We're not sure," or whatever. And that kind of uncertainty doesn't do well with offshore teams. We find that very specific prescriptive methodologies where we can tell them what to do, is, is a lot more effective. So we send them those recs that are very clear. And then we also expect them to come back with full-on resumes, which is different than our onshore team, our in-house team. The, the offshore team will go and look at— by the way, when I say resumes, I also include a LinkedIn PDF, right? That's kind of accepted as a resume these days. So it's either an actual resume Word document or LinkedIn profile. But with us, we may find leads that are just a name, phone number, and email, and we don't actually have a full PDF or a full resume. So that's another one, right? If it's— if a resume is required, the recruiter is going to literally just take the resume and present to the hiring manager. Then we'll go with— let's call them active candidates, although I'm probably going to get a lot of tomatoes thrown at me for that. The offshore team does well because they may or may not be active candidates. I I mean, but they're resumes, right? However, if it's research that requires deep web or open web research or going outside of the traditional means, it doesn't work out. And then the other thing that we've tried multiple times is outreach, but we don't get good results when the outreach is initiated by the offshore team due to a number of technical issues, deliverability, the translation of the of the message. So even though they're fluent in English, the cultural nuances, like when you address someone by, "Hey, Glenn," versus, "Hey, Mr. Guttmacher," right? These kind of cultural nuances, our candidates pick up on the fact that it's offshore English. We've actually had replies back to that. And it's not grammatically mistaken. It's good quality. The quality, the writing is done well and we're providing them the templates, but they use sentence structures or words that kind of hint that they're an offshore team and it tends to turn people off. So those are the two things that we found does not work. What about you?

Well, I've had different situations. I mean, frankly, at my previous employer, State Street, I was required to use offshore sourcers exclusively. So they owned everything through first phone screen. And I'm not going to lie and say that that was optimal because there are issues that you pointed to, cultural nuances that not only can you detect it in writing, you can obviously detect it on the phone. And for xenophobic American candidates, frankly, they I think it does impact rapport in some cases when they're being called by offshore sourcers. It's too bad because I think they do a good job, but probably not getting the same yield as if a native US person did the same calls.

Strictly calls though, What about emails or texting?

Yeah, I, I agree with your feeling about that. I think texting is probably a little safer because the messages tend to be so short in nature. It's harder to introduce variants that would be perceived as odd. But certainly email templates, if they're not really strict, and don't allow too much variation, then, um, yeah, I think it's when they feel that they can edit them significantly, that's when those cultural variants start to creep in that could impact the response.

But on, on calling, you got good results?

Generally we did, but again, I would probably say we were very careful about the hiring process to make sure that we had very articulate India-based sourcers. Okay.

Outside of India, what other countries would you recommend one explore for offshoring recruiting and sourcing in particular, right? What other countries would an offshore sourcing team be well housed in?

So I think if it's purely online research, you have a wider range of countries. Um, at my company before that, Avanade, uh, we used a team mostly in mainland China, and they were very productive. Um, and it didn't matter that the time zones were so skewed because they could do that work overnight. Then the next morning, our onshore callers had leads to pursue.

Could they still access, you know, with censorship, or are there any corners of the internet that they couldn't get to, or was that not an issue?

That's a good question. I guess they're probably—

this is—

I'm talking a long time ago, so the restrictions that we've seen from the Chinese government around Google weren't really a factor back then. So yeah, I think you do want to look at countries in Eastern Europe, And perhaps South America, particularly if you have multilingual sourcing needs because you're a global company. Those countries tend to have more of that multilingual skill set at an affordable rate.

Okay, interesting. I'm gonna have to give that a try. You know, we're in the middle of figuring out if we want to do some or all of the activities with a centralized shared services team offshore or not. Our onshore team is very specialized, so, you know, we get those types of requests where, as I explained before, it's real research. We're not going to be able to find people off of places where they might have a resume, so we know we definitely need to do that here with, you know, high-octane sourcers. But as you said, there's a cost factor there I'm trying to explore. Curiously, that calculator that I shared with you When I run the math for an offshore team, because of the, the lower hourly rate, there also is a lower per-hour production rate. And given the lower hourly rate and the lower production rate, it still comes out to be very similar in cost. So in other words, an offshore team doing 6 leads an hour costs about the same as an onshore team doing 30 leads an hour, even though the cost of the onshore team is much higher. It just turns out it's less hours but more dollar per hour. Still, the actual total cost ends up being the same. That may not be the same for different configurations, but with what we have now, that's what we're finding. So we basically don't distinguish a request whether or not it should be offshore or onshore based on cost. But based on time. If we have the time, we'll send it offshore because it'll be slower and it'll pretty much cost about the same. But if the speed is a huge factor and we're going to need research, then we just keep it onshore. We'll pay more for it, but the pay per hour doesn't really matter because we're going to pay more for it offshore because it's going to take longer. You know what I mean? It's kind of like you end up paying the same is what I'm trying to say. Or at least the way it's set up now.

Yeah, I think the other thing around cost, and I will need to drop it a quarter of, um, that was interesting we were talking, is how much people who maybe are a bit intimidated about creating the kind of system you developed, which certainly requires some knowledge of Power BI and SharePoint and Teams, you know, are there vendor options that could be as good even though there might be a little more front-end cost, it might be easier to implement?

Gotcha. Yeah, and then we haven't talked about automation, which I'm really hot about. So, well, Glenn, thank you for coming. I really appreciate you jumping in last minute. I promise everybody I'll still do my Outlook stuff next time. We have some pretty interesting guests coming up, so don't be a stranger. If you're curious, I'll give you a little bit of a preview. We have someone from CDW who leads a large sourcing team there. We have one of the largest sourcing team leaders from Google, also one from Johnson Johnson and BASF. Those are our next 4 guests. I can't tell you who yet, but it's gonna be pretty big deal. So tune in and tell everybody about it. Thank you very much. Have a great weekend, everyone. Take care. Bye-bye.

It was fun. Thanks.

Thank you, Glenn.

Are we off record?

No, I'm hitting the button and it says no, we're stuck. We're stuck. Well, you can jump off. I'll figure out how to do this.

All right. Well, if any of those topics lend themselves to a part 2, I'm open.

Cool. Will do.

Thanks again.

Thank you. Bye.

Bye.