Shally's Alley Leadership Series - Julia Levy, Head of Talent, Commscope

live, it just— it's on. So when I see it show up on the feed, that's when I know I'll start talking. So hey everybody, it's Friday, it's 1 PM, so this must be Shelly's Alley. Today with me, I have a very special guest, my former leader at Fiserv, Julia Levy. Or do you say Levy? I say Levy. You say—

I say— I say— but most people say Levy. If you—

let's get it right— Julia Levy.

If you're a classic rock person, think of the song American Pie, and that'll probably be an earworm for people listening or watching. Now.

Got a lot of people driving to you.

Exactly.

Especially if they have Chevys.

Chevy Levy.

That's right. So Julia and I worked together at Pfizer for, I think, almost 3 years or something like that. And then Julia left to go to a company called CommScope, which I learned recently is a really big network infrastructure company. Really global actually in something like 200 countries or something like that. Is that right?

It's— we're, we're everywhere.

Everywhere.

If you, if you live stream, if you have a cable box, if you use Wi-Fi at a hotel or at a Starbucks or— well, Starbucks, I don't know if Starbucks is one of our customers actually, but a coffee shop. Um, Pretty much we power the internet of things.

Wow, that's, that's cool. Yeah, like I said, I just recently learned about like how, you know, how broadly spread, how massive the, the company is and how many things it touches. It's, it's always interesting, you know, when you're a recruiter, you get to experience these things. Like before I joined Fiserv, I really had no idea why Atlanta was such a a target for, you know, different things like cyber attacks and stuff like that. But then I joined Fiserv and I realized Atlanta basically is like the financial, you know, online financial quarter of the world with all these payment companies you just didn't know about. And then Fiserv itself is in so many different things. So it's, you know, what, you know, you join the company, then you start to realize what the company really does. And how big it is, it's astonishing how much you, you know, first of all, how much you learn as a recruiter working in an organization, and also how much you don't know from the outside.

Yeah, right.

Like, I would not know about CommScope until you joined there, and I wouldn't even have realized that the breadth of them unless I was in the industry, I guess, um, unless, you know, you had explained that to me. So, but tell me, what are the challenges that you guys have with regards to talent acquisition? You're there to solve some big challenges and You've told me a little bit about that. Share with the audience what, what are the major initiatives, roadblocks, obstacles that you have to overcome now?

I came in at a really interesting time. So I joined in October of 2019, and the company had just had an acquisition of another company of equal size, and they were in the process of harmonizing 2 ATSs, 2 managed service providers for temp staffing, lots of different systems and processes, different salary, you know, grades and pay bands and all sorts of stuff like that. So I came into that, we were in the process of decommissioning one of the 2 ATSs and doing an RFP around the managed service provider and vendor management software for temporary labor and harmonizing teams and processes and things like that. And then lo and behold, we had a pandemic. So definitely had to pivot quite a bit. And then fast forward to this year and during the pandemic. So we are, we are part software technology you know, really what I would consider high-tech. And then we're also part manufacturing. So we have manufacturing facilities. Like, I got a tour of, um, in North Carolina of two of our facilities where we take these like 6-foot spools of copper and turn it into that thin copper wiring that's in cables, or even the fiber optic cabling I saw how they had all the different spools of different color fiber, and then they combined it into a small fiber cable. Then I was in Mexico and I saw some of our manufacturing facilities there that were taking that wiring and putting— manually putting the connectors on. And they do that because the wires are so small that you need someone with dexterous hands to be able to attach the connectors wire by wire. And so we couldn't shut that all down during COVID because everyone needed connectivity, and the pressure and the demands on the networks were so extreme, going from about 4 hours worth of demand a day to almost a 24-hour cycle throughout the world. So we didn't slow down. We, we really kept hiring throughout COVID and trying to keep our manufacturing operations. You know, it's almost like, I don't want to say chasing COVID because we weren't chasing towards it, but just redistributing lines of manufacturing and things like that throughout the, just, you know, trying to stay ahead of where upticks were going in virus loads and virus counts and trying to keep our employees safe. So there was a lot of efforts around health, wellness, mental wellness, not just physical wellness, stress, real focus on employee engagement. And so we've had that. And then recently there was an announcement earlier this— oh, a change in CEO last year. And then we've had some changes in some of our leadership. And then we're selling off a business— or not selling off, I guess spinning off a business unit. And so it's— change is the big constant that we're dealing with, I feel like. And I, I always say doing things in talent acquisition, you're flying a plane and trying to switch out an engine mid-flight, right? The hiring is not stopping yet. We've got to do all these different system or process changes and things like that. So that's probably a, a long narrative of kind of what I've been up to lately, right?

So it sounds like you had to— well, first of all, I heard a couple things. One, it's the hiring is, well, even during the pandemic was considered essential workers, right? Because infrastructure and what you're saying is, if this didn't continue, you know, we wouldn't have internet and all the people working from home wouldn't have— I mean, I'm just imagining the kind of the cascade of, you know, failures that would occur if infrastructure went down. So it sounds like a lot.

We did a lot to support that, Shelly, as an organization. So Working with school systems to make sure that their network infrastructure was set up or upgraded to ensure students could, you know, have access. And then you have all these rural communities that don't have strong access. Also working with health systems and hospitals to make sure that the healthcare workers have the access that they need. So those were definitely some things that as a business we were doing, right?

Well, you know, I want to interject here. I want to say, folks, don't call Julia for support when your internet goes down, okay? That's not going to help. But so I'm hearing that you had to hire, and also it sounds like a lot of these roles were in that, in that really gray space where some folks didn't want to work because they were getting unemployment benefits. So you had to recruit even more aggressively. Tell me what kind of things you learned or were able to apply to overcome that resistance? I think some of that is alleviated now, and companies are starting to, um, you know, be able to hire a little bit more freely because the benefits, the government unemployment benefits, are starting to go away. But in the heat of that, how did you respond to that as an organization? What did you do to overcome the 'I would rather stay home than work right now' kind of objection?

We have two different populations, so we do have all of our A lot of our employees are salaried and are in roles where they can work remotely. There are some of those roles where certain, certain engineering teams need to be on site, but you have those teams on site, but then the rest working remotely. And then you have in our manufacturing facilities where we probably struggled the most, especially because we had some growth. An investment in a couple of our locations and, and some movement of things. Um, we were all hands on deck. I mean, we had some, a lot of brainstorming conversations as a team going back to things that are kind of basic. Um, a billboard in North Carolina near two of our facilities, some radio ads, um, looking at relocating people from You know, different areas for some of our manufacturing jobs, sign-on bonuses.

So mobility became a core competency.

Yeah, we really looked at, and we're working with some of the outplacement agencies to say, hey, if you have some of your clients that have people that were affected by job loss who want to work, we're open to relocating them and trying to partner with the different outplacement agencies. Looking into, I mean, all of my like core sourcing, just, you know, my, you know, I have a passion for sourcing and sourcing innovation. So we were just using competitive intelligence tools and just trying to use social media and networking and employee referrals and every lever that we could pull to try and help get the demand out. Some of it is also in the scripts and how we talk, the stories we tell candidates about how, you know, how the work they do impacts other people and helping bringing that emotional connection to people. We talk about some of the safety measures that we took and put in place for those that had to be on site.

Right. If you're going to work here, we're going to keep you safe.

Yep. And, and we care about your mental health, our EAP, you know, different things like that, that we tried to make that emotional connection. But listen, you know, women, women were affected because there are a lot of women who, you know, I think women usually have a majority of the kind of child raising experience, not in all cases, but you have families that have, might be on two incomes and you have one person that decides they're going to stay home and it's better to stay home and make 80% of what you might make with all of the extra money coming in than to go work and put yourself at risk.

And so, or your kids are now having to stay home and go to school from home.

So there's someone there.

Yeah.

So lots of different reasons. And we tried to come up with some speaking points for the recruiters to help overcome objections or concerns from people. But I think we struggled as much as, you know, everyone else is right now.

Right. I've seen some pretty creative solutions out there for things, you know, like sign-on bonuses and that, that you just would not expect for those types of jobs. Like, as you know, some sign-on bonuses for $20 an hour jobs. That's something that, you know, we saw sign-on bonuses in the dot-com days, but having that Haven't seen anything like that in these kinds of industries. So I wanted to ask you about something else. It sounds like you had a lot of challenges recently, but a lot of that is starting to look better. So we're looking to the future. What's the rest of this year or next year going to look like in terms of improvements? What are you planning to improve on? Now that, you know, what, what happened happened and we, we resolved it, or we're resolving it, it's now time to plan for what's coming next. So what's coming next and what are you going to be improving?

So I came on in this time of transition, and I'm definitely someone that likes to understand the current flow of things and not just come in and start making abrupt changes right away. I— we're doing right now, we've got an optimization project going on where we're looking at candidate experience, recruiter experience, and hiring manager experience and understanding the map of what they go through, the different touchpoints, their sentiments. And it's the technology and outside of the technology. So where can we optimize and streamline our processes to have a better experience for all of these different parties. So that's going on right now. We had wanted to do it sooner, but with everything going on, prioritization shifted. So that's one thing. We're also looking at talent mobility. So not just the job postings, but understanding. So at one point, I thought I might need some, some Java expertise to help solve a problem that we were having. And I was like, I know we have people in the organization that know Java, and how do I find someone that might be able to help me for 10 hours?

And how did you do that?

I mean, I haven't solved it yet. It's on— so that's something that's been on the agenda that's interesting, getting pushed a little bit.

But that's like an inventory of internal skills. So consulting firms are good at this because they already have it, right? They use software even for that. When I was working at Microsoft, there was a project that had a code name I can't remember that was specifically designed to solve that problem, and they were going to use Exchange or Active Directory in a way that was kind of like what later on happened with LinkedIn, almost like an internal LinkedIn that was based on Exchange. And the challenge that we faced there— this was a long time ago, 2003, so very, very long time ago— was adoption in that just people weren't filling it out, right?

Yeah.

And at Fiserv, I remember, I don't know if you were part of this or not, but there was a push to try to get Workday filled out for, again, the same thing, right? Where are our people? What do they do? What's their expertise? And again, it was like 30% completion. So, you know, to me, and I'm just brainstorming here, the obvious solution is why not take something that's already there, LinkedIn, and like You know, maybe it's not the most up to date, but at least it has a lot of information in it and it may not be the most accurate, but it's more than zero.

Yeah. So there's a way to take maybe your, your information in your, in your systems, marry it with LinkedIn or other— I hate to be big brother, but other public information that's out there to try and get a profile. Um, some we're looking, so I've done some like very high level look at some of the tools that are out there. And there are some really great technologies that can integrate with your HCM to help this. And it ties into not just the showing your internal employees the availability of jobs and, and have giving your internal employees the opportunity to say, hey, I, you know, I have an interest in project management. What do I need to do to get from where I am to there? And tie in with your learning systems. And it might be able to say, hey, you've got this project management certification available in your learning systems. Why don't you take those, those classes? Or if a recruiter sees someone and they're not quite ready to where the person needs to go, maybe there is some learning in the learning systems or conversations that can be had with the manager to help people with their career development. So that's a piece of it. And then the other piece is that kind of gig and project work and how do either people raise their hands or managers nominate people based on skills. And so part of those development conversations could be on some gig and project work to help people as well.

So, right, not switch jobs, just like, hey, we need 10 hours a week on this, you know, project for 3 months or whatever, and you can You know, with, with permission from your manager and everything, you can kind of get involved with that. That's good. I like that. That's a creative use of the combination of the gig economy and the social data. Yeah, interesting.

So that's on the, that's on the agenda. And then I think looking at hiring manager training again, as we're looking at this optimization, training hiring managers on how to, you know, give a good— it's some of the training we created at Fiserv, honestly. Those skills are needed anywhere. A LinkedIn profile. If I'm a hiring manager, I should have my picture on there. I should have a summary that talks about what kind of work my team does and that I'm hiring and, you know, what I'm looking for, or to do a video so that like social media training for managers on, you know, create a 30-second video saying, hi, I'm Julia, I'm hiring a recruiter. You need 3 years experience and I'm looking for someone that's tenacious and great at sourcing. Message me, you know, that kind of little video, which I've done over the years. And if you're in TA and you're looking for a job, I'm not hiring right now, but I know people that are, so, um, you can message me.

Yeah.

I was saying that as an example, not that I'm actively hiring.

So You can, you can name names here. It's totally okay because this is completely private and it's broadcast everywhere, but it's completely private. I find that we're a Microsoft shop and we're a Microsoft cloud consulting company. Are you guys Microsoft as well? You have Outlook, Exchange?

Okay.

So I find that there's a lot of tools, very typical of Microsoft. There's a lot of tools buried in the things that they give you as part of the bundle of what you get. Inside of Microsoft, there are actual video editing applications, and there's, with the M365, there's a video publishing platform called Stream where you can take a video with your, you can take a video on Teams and record a video or a webinar or whatever, then publish that in Steam and have that as a channel internally. So you almost, it's almost like a ready-made, what you just described, platform that's built right into Microsoft. And it's there, but they don't make a big deal out of it, like a lot of other things that they do. That's an example. If you're a Microsoft shop, you basically have that. It's built in already.

So I will just say that everyone that's watching or will watch in the future, Shelly is like one of my go-to people when I want to know like, what are the cool tools or what are you using now or what have you figured out? Because I've always asked Shelly, like, when you were a kid, did you take the television apart and then try and put it back together so you could see how it works? And he's like, yeah, I only took it apart.

I never put it back together. See, the people that take things apart, they're, they're basically the inventors. The ones that put them back together, they're the engineers.

Yeah, that is true. But I did not know a really good engineer.

Can put the TV back together again, and there's parts missing and it still works.

Yeah. But that— so I didn't know that. But one of the things that I knew that I've been looking for is like people use calendar tools all the time, but we can't use them. But now Cortana can set up meetings, but we haven't tried it en masse yet. So I've played around with it a little bit, but not at scale. And I don't know if at scale it would give the same kind of candidate experience that we want to give.

Go to bookings.microsoft.com on your intranet, and if that's enabled— again, it's part of Office 365— they just released an update, uh, maybe last week, and it's a lot slicker. It was a little clunky, it was a little kind of not very user-friendly, but it was version 1. The new version 2 is a lot slicker, and it has team calendars, and it also has a rotating calendar ability. So imagine you have a team of 10 recruiters the next incoming appointment can be assigned randomly, um, based on, you know, who's got the most appointments or least appointments. That's all, that's all new in this, uh, bookings.microsoft.com. That's a good one. Yeah, so, um, oh, go ahead.

No, so like, yeah, like there are so many little tools out there that, um, whether it's Microsoft and using Cortana for questions and things like that, or you're I won't say her name, but the Amazon lady, because my— I have a show on my desk and it will start talking to me, but she can help as well. So I, you know, I try and use those, but not as much as— not as well as I should or could.

But yeah, you can do all kinds of things. I actually had an episode on the show that was all about things you can do with— as a recruiter with your, with your digital assistants. But I wanted to ask you something. We sort of kind of touched on this before, you and I, on a conversation, but you don't actually have a sourcing team, do you?

Not yet. Not yet.

So are you planning on building one? Because I had some— another guest on my show who is a colleague and, you know, highly, highly regarded, well known in the industry, and I respect his opinion. And he made an argument that he's not going to create a sourcing team. I'm happy to relay the reason why, but his logic made a lot of sense. I wanted to see, before I tell you what your logic was, if you wanted or not wanted to have a sourcing team and why.

I am, I am strongly considering and evaluating it right now, um, on, uh, looking at— so where I struggle, and I feel like I always have, is recruiter workload. Because in many cases you just say, oh, recruiters should have between 20 and 25 recs at any time. And Shelley, we've talked about this even with sourcer workload, workload is how do you balance that? Because all recs are not created equal. If you have 10 inside sales entry-level roles, that's very different than 10 software engineers in Silicon Valley. Or recs with multiple openings or in multiple geographies or grade levels or EMEA recruiters. Have to know, you know, all the different laws around each country that they recruit in versus North America. Yeah, there's some state differences, but for the most part. So I'm trying to figure out a way to do either like a point system or some sort of like work effort on at least some critical roles. To make sure the team is right-sized. And as part of that, I'm looking at sourcing and building the business case for that. If anyone's built one recently and is open to sharing kind of what you put together, I'd be interested to hear. But I think that what we set up at FYSERV was relatively successful. I think people have to understand what roles the sourcing team is going to focus on. I do believe having the team segmented to either a certain job family group in a certain region and things like that work.

I—

part of me struggles. Do I, do I go after creating a sourcing function or do I build out a little more robust recruitment marketing function? Because right now we have a team of one. So I struggle between those, or can you find sourcers that also feel comfortable with some of the recruitment marketing piece? So I, I am thinking about it very seriously, but I haven't built out a structure, a full structure on it yet. So I'd be curious to hear the logic as to why not to do sourcing.

Jen's logic was this very simple. He said that he believes, and I believe this too, that recruiters should know how to source. So it sounds like you guys are in agreement in this area, and that is if the recruiter's workload is properly balanced, they ought to be able to source for the roles. If they are overworked and it's unbalanced, that's when sometimes there's the need to create a sourcing team. My argument is that That is, I support that as well as I say, well, there are environments where we really don't have much of a choice because of the organization, the way it came together. It could be acquisitions. It could be a lot of reasons where recruiters are simply overtasked and sourcing can provide relief for those critical jobs that are going unfilled that, that cause a lot of pain, right? The recruiters could be more productive filling 70%, 80% of the jobs that they can fill through their regular daily workflow. And these other 20% or 30% cause them so much anxiety and so much time that they are essentially putting aside some of those other roles that they could easily fill or more easily fill. So that's when I say, all right, in that situation, that's when you need a sourcing team. He has the benefit of being able to make that decision because he can build the recruiting team from scratch. He's hiring them now. So he can hire the right recruiters and he can load balance them. But if you go into an organization you just inherited and you have recruiters that are overtaxed, the solution may be to build a sourcing team and have that sourcing team solve some of these problems in the interim as you right balance the workload. Eventually, that sourcing team can evolve to instead of firefighting, do more proactive work, like, for example, social media, competitive intelligence.

Right.

So the sourcing team doesn't have to be a mirror of the recruiting team.

Right. And that's— listen, probably I'm dating myself with this reference. One of my biggest nails on a chalkboard is when somebody says, I've reached out to them on LinkedIn, I'm waiting to hear back from them. And I do feel like many recruiters, that's the way that they work. And I've always been a proactive, tenacious hustler. And I, the hunt was always my favorite. The hunt was always my favorite part of recruiting when I wore my recruiter hat. And I'm always looking for ways to work smarter, not harder. Right. And there are a lot of recruiters out there that are just very comfortable in their LinkedIn recruiter seat zone and don't. You know, and are better maybe at the account management aspect of the hiring manager piece. And you need all of that mixture on your team to be successful. But I think that if you have the right kinds of sourcers who are really out there proactively hunting for that talent, using competitive intelligence and, um, helping get your brand out there, there is a big value in that. Can you train recruiters? Sure. But there are some that just more innately feel more comfortable with the sourcing side of the game versus the more— I hate to say, you know, reactive side of things.

Yeah, and I think it's aptitude, it's interest, it's a lot of other things. Jim was making the point of that there's, there's also a knowledge gap, right? So talk about dating yourself. People that came up when we did are familiar with full desk, but the younger generation of recruiters that have started recruiting in the last 5 years that essentially were born into the age of LinkedIn Recruiter, you know, you and I didn't have that when we were in the business there. This is what they know. But if you wanna remember what that's like, go back 15 years ago and it was Monster. It was the same thing. You know, there were recruiters that were used to that. So Jim's point, and I'm repeating that 'cause I believe this too, is that these newer recruiters just never had the opportunity. They've never received the training. They just came into the job and were told, here's your toolset. Now we're starting to need to get creative because things are getting so hot. So I think there's also a gap in education.

Yes, for sure, for sure. And that's something that I know that you've— I think these streaming sessions are— and I haven't listened to as many as I should, but I'm not in the weeds on sourcing, I know. But, you know, like the automation, the, the Microsoft Power Automation that you've been doing some streams on, like, that's the kind of stuff that's just so cool on that. If someone can learn from you, and I know there's several others You know, between Brian and Steve Levy and, and, you know, other people out there that are just so willing to share the knowledge to help others be better at the craft, uh, it's really critical to help, you know, educate and train others.

Absolutely. Um, you and I once talked about how you were almost going to be an attorney. You wanted to go to school for law or something like that, right? So you have that kind of law mentality. In 1 minute or less, what is your recruiting SLA?

My— like, what I expect of team—

what you expect of your recruiters? Yeah, an SLA, you know, in a paragraph or so that's bilateral, like, we do this, you do that, right? Is— so do you have something like that, or is that your— are you building?

Not as— not— that's part of this project. I think we have some of it, but we were much more prescriptive if I think about it, if I serve that sourcing documentation. So the sourcing team kind of created in partnership with some of the recruiters, this, I don't want to say a Bible, but you know, we had SLAs, we had SLAs and RACIs around what should happen and what shouldn't. And the recruiters would as well. I came into an organization that doesn't have recruiter scorecards and we're building—

Shouldn't there be an SLA?

Yep. So we're building those out. So I, I don't at Commscope have— there are some that are kind of out there for the recruiters, but it's not based on the actual data. So we're in the process of really putting that together. Do I think that in the SLA could or should vary depending on either the type of role or the marketplace. Sure. I'm very much kind of a red, yellow, green, that you have a target to hit, but there's this window. So if you're below the target, wahoo, you know, we got it. But if you're a little within a certain percentage of it, then you're in that yellow zone. And then if you're well beyond, it's red. But I, and I look at those SLAs, there's SLAs and KPIs, but You know, if you're— you have one legal rec and that, and it took 300 days to fill, you're red in there. But then you look at your other aspects as well. So it's not this like hard, um, it's not all black and white when it comes to SLAs and KPIs. And it's the not just the what but the how. And you've got to mix a lot of that together.

Well, not a hard line, but what are the categories of things that should go into it, right?

Like, so I look at criteria So we look at some of the things that we're looking at as we're developing out our reporting, and we just hired a new TA analyst. So I'm super excited. She's a couple weeks in. So over the next few months, but I'm looking at things like our time to submit, the take rate of the hiring manager, the interview to offer ratios, the full cycle time. The time to find the quality candidate. We're in the process of redeploying a couple surveys. So one of those surveys is going to be anyone that a recruiter— well, we're going to probably do a sampling of anyone that a recruiter talked to through to hired, including all of the rejections, and do a subset of that group probably every other month to get a kind of recruiter satisfaction score. We have a hiring manager survey that will play into that. We'll also, on a long tail, look at quality of hire. And we'll look at that in a couple different dimensions. So one of them being turnover within— and we haven't figured it out if we'll look at 30 or 60 or 90 days— but percentage of turnover. And then also, then this is the long tail, is performance. So, and that probably will go more on the source than the individual recruiter, but looking at, did the people that we find on LinkedIn perform higher, but yet turnover faster versus what comes from direct recruiter contact? We're also looking at things like using LinkedIn as an example, because it's a very expensive, um, tool, as everyone knows who has to purchase it. Um, looking at things like your inmails and your searches and your inmail success rates and your logins and like that whole tool utilization. Well, not— you're not going to get scored on any one item because each role you might have different tools that you use, but we will look at things like that as a KPI for someone's performance. So there's a lot of variables that go into it. We're still working through some of it, but that's at least a little bit of an idea.

That's— no, it's great. That's what I wanted to get to because, you know, I've been doing this for 25 years, and, and for I don't know how many years I've been preaching about the, the benefits of metrics and measurements. I, I don't even want to get into the debate of measurement versus metric. People get that backwards all the time. But there's measurements and then there's metrics, and I've been preaching about the benefits of that as a way to measure the productivity of the individual to compare recruiter and sourcer productivity, but also improvement and also the source. So for me, it's not, it's not been just a way to say, hey, you know, you're not doing your job or you're not doing your job well enough. It's been where do we need to improve, what works, what doesn't work, and so on. And when I got to Fiserv, after years of talking about Tool utilization as one of the things to look at, that was the first time that I'd ever seen it actually measured, and you were the one that did that. I don't think that was there before you. It was your idea to add tool utilization to that, and that was the first time that I saw an actual scorecard that included that, even though I've been saying for years that we need to look at that for a number of reasons. First of all, it's also the recruiter's responsibility to utilize the tools that are available to them. So we want to look at that, but we also want to look at, is that tool producing? Because we don't want to necessarily keep buying it if it doesn't.

Yep.

So yeah, I just wanted to say yay for that. It was the first time I saw it, and I wanted the audience to know that that's a really good thing to include in, um, again, not measuring a person's contribution to the organization necessarily, but just a point of intelligence to decide and support decisions on where to spend money, where to train, where to etc. Yeah. Well, really appreciate you coming on the show. We're pretty much a little bit over time here. I wanted to give you a chance to give a, you know, one last— what do you want to share with the audience that I didn't ask? Something that you want to kind of— parting words, if you will. Hopefully we'll have you back. But, you know, one last hurrah. Do you have anything you want to share with everybody?

Well, you know, I'm so happy to be here to talk shop about something I'm so passionate about. And, you know, so anytime you want me back, I'll join. And I guess a word of wisdom— gosh, so many. Um, I would just say, as, um, as I've gone through my career and I've been in, you know, several different organizations of varying sizes, the problems are not so different or unique from one to another. Maybe different flavors, but all ice cream, right? So chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, whatever your you're dealing with, there are other people in the community that have gone through similar things and just keep sharing knowledge with each other and celebrate the successes. I think it's so important for us to, you know, I want to challenge people and raise the bar a little bit, but I want to celebrate every success and the failures because you can learn from those as well. And so I guess that would be my advice. Encouragement. And, um, you know, just hope everybody— we're still in the middle of COVID and, um, you know, whether you're vaccinated or not, or, you know, like, just stay healthy, stay safe, be kind to one another, and, uh, you know, let's be there for each other. Great.

Yeah, we have ways to go, but I think we, um, we definitely have turned a corner in a lot of ways. I see some I see a light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope it's not a train coming our way, you know. So, all right, I'm gonna write up some notes and, and push this out to, you know, social media, and we'll replay the show. But thank you so much, and yeah, I'm gonna put you on the calendar again. This is fun. Thanks, Julia. Bye.

Hi, everyone.