Shally's Alley Leadership Series - Michael Askins, CTO and Tech Leader

actually live, but I'll, I'll do my little intro. Nothing fancy. All right. It is 1 PM on Friday. So this must be Shelly's Alley. Welcome everybody to our new leadership series on all things related to leadership in talent acquisition. Today with me, I have a very special guest, Mike Askins. Mike, do you go by Mike or Michael? I see both. So would you rather be called on the show today?

So I'll give you the same answer I give everyone else. Uh, my given name is Michael. That's what I give you. I respond to Mike or Michael. So whatever makes you remind— remember me better by.

We'll go with Michael then. I like that. So Michael is joining us from a different podcast. He's got his own show, or multiple shows actually, um, called MAIT Pro, and the address for that is ma— itpro.com/podcast. Tell me a little bit about the podcast that you normally do. This is a pretty, pretty well distributed technology show, right?

Yeah, for sure. So, so we have two of them. One is more tech focused and one is professional development for business and IT pros. Uh, so MAIT Pro is— we're focusing on individuals who, uh, you know, are tangential to technology or run technology teams and technologists themselves. If you want to get a little bit of information about technology, like what's happening in the cloud, Power Automate, or things happening with Microsoft, the show that Aspirant sponsors is called The Show, is what we just refer to it as, and that's the technology architecture solution engineering show. So we try to service both sides of the brain, the technical and the creative. As well as covering up some business gaps that sometimes occur with technologists.

So what's the address for the show?

Yeah, so you can find the show if you go to Aspirants website. We will have links to the show, but also if you just go to your favorite podcast platform, Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, and search for Technology Architecture Solution Engineering Show, you'll find us there. It's also worth noting, Shelly, that we recently had Dean Campbell, who's Vice President of of digital and tech for Aspirant, uh, to discuss bridging the gap between technologists and non-technologists on the MAIT Pro Show. We also have representatives from Microsoft on the technical side talking about data and security. So we feel that, you know, amongst your listeners, there's probably one of those, uh, two areas will be a way to—

Definitely, definitely.

Yep, for sure.

Yeah, in the world of, you know, talent acquisition, there, there definitely are technical people that work in the technology of talent acquisition, as well as recruiters that operate in the technology space. So there's a big interest for that. In, in the form of a little bit of an intro for the folks that are listening and aren't familiar with, with Michael, he is— Michael is an architect and a CTO. He's been in the business for about 22 years doing budgeting, designing, configuring, implementing I mean, managing all kinds of hardware and software, but the primary focus for him has been business connectivity and productivity. And imagine my surprise when I joined Aspirant shortly after, or about the same time Michael joined Aspirant, and I had just essentially started discovering my passion for Microsoft Power Automate Desktop. Some of you might remember the, the show episodes that I did on that. And then I see Michael in one of our team meetings, and they talk about what he does, and I'm like, oh my God, here's the guru of all things, you know, Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, and I'm so getting into it right now. Uh, Michael actually had a company called Taste Group, and that company was merged into Aspirant, much like, you know, I had my own business. So there's a lot we have in common. We both had our own company, we both kind of had shows and, and everything. But Michael, you say you find the building and enablement of people and technology to be the most fulfilling part of your professional interests. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that means, the enablement of people and technology?

Yeah, for sure. So when you look at teams of people, sometimes it's transactional. And there's, in my opinion, what satisfies me, or as I say, scratches that part of my brain that makes me feel like I'm making a difference. You can enable a person by saying, oh, here's a laptop and here's some software, or you can enable a business by saying, here's some transformative RPA solution, robotic processing automation, or maybe let's move you to the cloud. To me, that's transactional and it's needed, right, for sure. What I find is building technologists who have that deep understanding and watching them flourish and grow and find answers and helping guiding them to find answers, is fulfilling to me. So I like to build businesses by building people and changing the philosophy of how technology used to be delivered. I've been around for a little bit a while. And so it's, you know, I look at the way old school was, is, you know, like we had server rooms and we had people sitting there in, you know, dark corners doing magical things with cables and code to now we are enabling people with technology by having citizen developers with Power BI, citizen report writers with citizen app developers, with Power Apps, and in your case, as you mentioned, citizen automators taking control of themselves. So enabling people with this technology and seeing the benefits and the positive outcomes is things that gets me up in the morning.

That's very Socratic, and I subscribe to a very similar principle as a professional developer of people and teams. You know, I've been consulting in the industry for quite some time, and I've helped build teams, and so have you. In my side of the world, the technology has almost always been kind of like this barrier for entry. You know, a lot of folks are like, oh, that's too technical for me, I don't want to do that. And yet they get mired down in spreadsheet upon spreadsheet. And so like, it's a, you know, Excel is their, is their baby, and they're in there all the time, but they don't realize that there's like this evolution of Excel that's Microsoft Lists and SharePoint and So many things you can do with your old-fashioned Excel that essentially has evolved, but yet they're still kind of in this, you know, they're stuck in this mentality of this flat— I like calling it a flat Excel because it's a document on your machine that's not connected to anything. You have to constantly edit it, you know. But even Excel itself, humble little, you know, Excel that put Microsoft on the map, what, 35 years ago, has evolved to the point where inside of it there's cloud applications that you can connect directly. So that's very Socratic of you to kind of think of it the same way I do of removing the barrier between people and technology and saying, you know what, this actually is a lot easier than you would think. And instead of saying do this, you're saying what do you want to do? And you told me a little bit about this. You called it benefits realization, and you were the first person that I ever heard that from. So you probably— if you didn't invent it, then, you know, my apologies to whoever invented it, but I heard it from you. What can recruiters, what can TA people learn from your benefits realization process? Tell me a little bit about that and how can our listeners apply benefits realization in their own world?

Absolutely. So benefits realization, I'll kind of give you the quick summary of how it works in my scary brain and then how it applies at multiple levels, right? So we are given tools by organizations, be it a laptop, a subscription to 365, And historically, when you were hired on, it's, can you run those tools effective enough to do your job? If you can and you meet all the requirements, go. The way I look at benefits realization is, is understanding what you have as an organization and maximizing all the capabilities that it has at multiple layers. So you're enabling from the standard tool sets that you might have out there for your people, be it Excel or Power Automate Desktop, which now comes with Windows 10. It's part of Windows 10 now. No special subscriptions required. A lot of people don't know that, and I'm sure you've probably guided your audience to that. But there's things beyond that, like you had mentioned SharePoint lists, and there's also some level of Power BI with most subscriptions, which is an analytics tool. Don't scare people with analytics tools, just a visual way of looking at data, right?

Yeah, take your Excel and make it pretty.

Make it pretty and make it— make your presentations more than inserting a pie chart inside of a janky workbook, right? So that's the very early end of a benefits realization, is understanding what you have and enabling people to be able to use and at first understand that you have this, because a lot of people don't know what you have. And then two, How do you make it better? So then we can extrapolate that out even further to at an org level where we see a lot of the times where organizations are buying all these discrete products to say, do business intelligence. They have maybe Tableau subscriptions or they have SAP and they have this big maintenance contract. Did you know that with your subscription you have some Power BI? Or did you know that there's Power Apps that allows you to interface with your data a little bit better and it's part of your subscription? Now, mind you, there's limits in what you can do. So at varying levels, from a benefits realization perspective, it's let's find out what you have and make sure you're maximizing what you're paying for. And then these hidden things that are out there from an individual and an org level, let's get that plugged in and let's see how useful it can be for you.

Okay, so here's something I get asked all the time. Well, actually, I have two questions for you. The first one is, How do I know what I have? And I know that you have a hack where you can tell me where to go to look up what my service pack includes. So where do I go if I'm a, you know, if my company uses Microsoft products? Is there a website I can go to or a URL I can type in that actually shows me the licenses that I have?

Yeah, so there's, there's two levels to that, right? As with everything, we have to put a little complexity in there. So what your organization gives you is what you will see as an end user. So if you go into office.com, that should be everybody's landing place when you want to figure out what's out there. So if you go to office.com and you click on either your picture or your initials in the upper right-hand corner and go to your account, you have abilities there to change your password, look at your security information, your MFA, but you also will see the entitlements you have.

Entitlements, okay.

Yeah, so entitlements are things that you get with your subscription from Microsoft. So for instance, there's different levels of Office 365. We're actually going to call it Microsoft 365 because that's kind of the path forward. So Microsoft 365, if you're on, like, say, a Business Premium, you might get the Office apps. You know, you'll get Teams, you'll get some Power Apps, a little bit of Power Automate, and, you know, a handful of other things. But as you progress up the subscriptions, you'll get more and more things from security features all the way through to maybe additional applications that are at a different level. Different tier. So when you log into office.com, you'll see those 9 little dots in the upper left-hand corner. That's referred to as the waffle, because if you think of it, it kind of looks like a waffle. So that's what we refer to it as, is the waffle.

It's like a waffle iron.

Exactly. So if you click on that waffle, you'll see all the apps that are available to you and you can feel free to explore them, right? So those apps that are in there, you can explore and you can use to what your IT team has allowed you to have. Now, as I mentioned, the complexity comes in when, uh, it's what you are allowed to have that your organization allows you to have, right? So if they don't want to—

varies from whatever subscription, you know, Enterprise to—

correct. Yep. So your organization might enable you to use Power Apps and Power Automate and, and Power BI. They might also not allow you to use those. So if there is something that you want to use, you know, maybe a help desk ticket, or maybe reach out. We often have engagements and with IT on how to control that and understand what they need is important, right? You gotta know what you need. So if you're in your organization and you need something and you have it, you can make that case. If not, you know, when we're in there and we're trying to help organizations get better and do more, we're going to say, did you know that you can enable your people by making sure Power Automate is turned on? Did you know that you can have you know, turn off, you know, certain types of applications.

Whatever you don't want exposing your data or whatever. Yeah, that's a good, you know, so one of the, one of the easy ones for, for me to recommend is, uh, Bookings because it's a way to share your calendar without having to connect. I, you know, a lot of enterprises have locked down their Outlook so that it can't connect to like a Calendly or ScheduleOnce or one of those scheduling apps. And how easy is it to send somebody a link that says, here's my calendar, let's coordinate a time. You can see when I'm available, or send me your link and I can see when you're available. But if you're within one of those companies where it's locked down and, you know, you can't use these third-party apps which are convenient, why not use Bookings? So you can go in there and look and see if you, you might already even have it because it's built into Microsoft. What about for people that— and forgive me if I'm offending anybody here, but what about for people that are on Macs? Can they still use any of this technology? Because there is Office for Mac, right?

Yep, yeah, Office for Mac is available. And as I mentioned earlier, when you're asking how do I see what I have, it's the same thing, right? You go to office.com, you can download the Mac version of it. Um, there are things out there for, for Mac that's coded, ported for Mac. The best—

unfortunately not Power Automate Desktop, right?

Yeah, not part— not yet, not yet. We're probably going to get there. I can't commit to that. But, you know, I see that on the horizon as, as this tool starts to compete with more and more, uh, more and more of the landscape that is crowded. It's rising. It's, you know, a Gartner upper right corner, which means, you know, it's one of the leaders. It's out there, it's doing its thing.

And they got rid of Otto the Automator on the Mac, so he's gone. He or she or whatever. They have Shortcuts, which, by the way, my daughter taught me how to use Shortcuts on my iPhone, and I use, you know, I program shortcuts all the time now, so I can kind of see how that went over to the Mac. But still, Power Automate Desktop, I mean, if that came over to the Mac, that would be super easy to use.

One of the things, one of the things around the Mac though I want to kind of call out is that, you know, a lot of the services that are out there on Microsoft 365, a lot of them are web-driven. So, you know, I point people a lot to go to microsoft.com. So like, for instance, you know, one of the things I try to encourage people to do is do automation, and not just on the RPA way, but maybe Maybe if you do need that flat Excel book, you go to the web version of Excel. And I think this might be a huge tip for some of your people if you haven't covered it in the past. There will be an option inside of there all the way to the right. It says Automate. And if you follow the on-screen wizard— this is built for your every user. This is not built for programmers, even though you can be a programmer because there is code if you want to see it. But if you don't want to see it, you hit that automate button and say you get a— and I'll use the recruiter, recruiter lane situation. So you get to say a file of candidates and you need to change the formatting or put it into a pivot table. You want to, you know, maybe break things out based upon how you see it. And you get this regularly. If you don't have Power Automate Desktop or Power Automate doing that for you, then you need to work in that Excel workbook. Click that Automate button and you can start recording those actions and save those for future use. And it saves to your cloud, so you can save and publish and share that. And I'm going to say code because it's actually code on the back end.

It's code in the back, right? You're doing it as an everyday activity, but behind the scenes it's— it turned into code. But you can repeat it. So, you know, what I always say is if you're going to do something a couple of times, it's worth automating it. You know, if it's a one-off thing, you're never going to do it again. Okay. But if you're going to be doing this a couple of times, and if you're going to be doing this a couple times a day, you're going to save yourself hours over, you know, over your, your work week of just repetitive tasks. And the automate button can do that on the desktop or on the Excel. So that's a really great tip. It just, it's literally built into Excel now.

Yep.

What else can recruiters do with, with, you know, M365?

Yeah, so one of the other things, and this has kind of been there for a little bit of time and it's a less known thing, and one of the things that stick— that stuck out, and I was looking at some, some show notes before here, and you know, the one thing I evangelize a lot about is natural language processing. So NLP, you hear all the time when— and I'm going to get really down in the, the really geeky level here for just a second.

I'm down with NLP, definitely.

So, so machine learning, AI, NLP, all these things are out there And it's available on your desktop right now for some simple tasks that you want to do. So what a lot of people don't understand is a good majority of the business world uses Outlook, right? And what people don't know is, is like when you say you're on the phone and you have a, you know, you want to make a meeting with a candidate and they say, you know what, I'm on vacation. Call me back in 2 weeks. What is the normal thing that, that you would do is you go to your calendar, count off the 2 weeks.

Right.

Kind of get an idea. Did you know where the date square is, where it says month/day/year? You can wipe that out and just type in the words in 2 weeks and it'll automatically take you there so you can schedule your meeting and your appointment. You're trying it now, aren't you?

I'm trying it now. That's great. So you can use 2 weeks, a month, 6 days. You could just naturally— that's natural language processing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's taking the way you would ask it and it's going to convert things to help you with it. One of the other things that like, you can even ask it, Next Christmas, it's going to go to next Christmas, next New Year's, next Halloween. Pick the holiday, it's going to take you there. And that, that's one of just the simple things that's built into the Office suite that helps you get there, right? And if you're into— again, to go back to Excel and data— you can automate some of the ways that pivot tables work. Without having to go through the whole making sure everything's listed as a table and making sure, you know, normally we would have to toss that to somebody that's a higher level power user or maybe IT. Definitely a way to handle that. There's also built-in lists inside of SharePoint. So if you go to Microsoft.com and you, or Office.com, and you click on your options and you see lists there, there are some pre-populated lists.

There's a candidate one. Yes, there's a candidate tracking. Like, I went in there and I played around with this, you know. Thankfully, we, we, we are, uh, we're well enough to do as a company that we can afford to buy our own software. But if, you know, if I didn't have one, if I didn't have a CRM, you can create a candidate tracking CRM right in, in SharePoint from Lists. It's ready-made. All you have to do is tweak the fields to call them whatever you want or add the fields. But it's pretty, it's got buttons, it's got And it automates workflows like send this candidate for review, and the next person has to click yes in order for the candidate to go on. This is already built into lists in SharePoint. I'm glad you brought that up.

Yep, absolutely. And the other thing that I thought was super useful is, is, you know, sometimes outreach, you have marketing campaigns or you have a particular— maybe as recruiters, you have a customer that has a specific need. You need to recruit so many positions over a certain amount of time. And how do you track what that outreach looks like? So some CRMs have that built in. There are lists in Power Apps built into the system for marketing and content management. So you can, you can put in there what your language needs to be for the post. You can put in where it's being posted at, and you can track that to find out which sources are hitting hot and which are not. Maybe LinkedIn is hot on this particular, particular—

maybe Twitter on the other one.

And exactly. And I brought up—

that's pretty cool.

I brought up a really strange one, which I think most recruiters might be missing, is like, oddly enough, Reddit. I was on an Azure Reddit forum, and inside of that forum, it was like every other day I'm scrolling through this forum looking at answer questions for people at large, and I saw, we have an opening, anybody know anybody who can do, uh, you know, stream analytics? And I'm thinking, well, this is a really, really great place to market because anybody that's into that space is there on that forum. So, you know, being able to track where that stuff's at is useful as you've got the rep right now.

Word of warning for all the noobs out there: if you're, you're thinking, oh, great idea, I'm gonna go post a job on Reddit, be careful. You got to have some rep before you do that. You got to make sure you check with the Reddit editor or whatever. Don't, don't just show up one day and post a job and expect you're going to get results. You might get blacklisted. So yeah, for sure, participate, engage. You know, there's a really great recruiter named Aaron Matthews who talks about Reddit recruiting and does a really good job of teaching people how to use it. Very good source for tech talent as long as you, you know, play by the same rules everybody else plays by on Reddit, which is don't go in there and start spamming and yelling and, you know, don't just assume stuff. You got to go in there, listen, and participate. But that's a really good tip. I like that.

And also giving back. That's the biggest— you, you'll get adoption if you're, like you had mentioned, participating. You need to give back in order for, for someone to be willing to let you take.

Tell me, what, what do you see as, as a, you know, technology leader and CTO and consultant, what do you see is a disruptive technology coming in the horizon that maybe most of us don't see yet, that isn't, you know, machine learning and RPA, because we already know those are here whether you use them or not. What's coming next? What do we need to be bracing for or learning about or getting aware of?

Yeah, so, so I'm going to kind of go to the edge of where my space normally is. And so like I cross over a little bit into development, like infrastructure as code, like everything's being changed. Like when you're looking for jobs, you're hearing an infrastructure person needs to understand, you know, PowerShell or Terraform, like insert all these technical It's all infrastructure as code, right? So when we start looking at deploying of things, that's been around for a while, right? We've scripted things since we were able to script things. One of the things we're seeing specifically with Microsoft is, is making it more agile and not in the framework and methodology, in the nimble sense, uh, with Project Bicep. That is one of the things that we see that is starting to change the landscape. We're seeing that where organizations were either investing a lot in Red Hat in their automation tool and Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, that whole space. We're seeing a lot of these tools now become part of native of the platform. So I wouldn't say it's necessarily disrupting. I think it's just changing the norm.

It's a sea change.

Yes, for sure. So we're seeing a lot of that and we're also seeing, you know, in our space, infrastructure space specifically, a lot of the monitoring tools on all clouds, not just the Microsoft clouds, are being more robust. And this is a response to viruses and malware. Cloud providers have found that we need to make sure that we're providing some level of security and visibility into things. So it's important to understand that that's coming. When we start talking about disrupting, and I don't want to say this like I'm beating a, you know, an overused term, but 5G coupled with the way some of the new code is, like some, some of the new.NET that's coming out where we're taking all these libraries and rolling them all up underneath one common platform, which is lean and mean. And then you have an ability to get data further away from towers. So you're going to see more and more people enabled. And I think you're going to start seeing where we had that pivot from people going from.NET to.NET Core, you're going to see them trying to go to this newer, leaner framework because of the mobile consumption of applications and data. If anything the pandemic has taught us is that we can work anywhere. We can do anything from those places. And we're seeing that being reflected in the ask of us to enable technologies in the cloud. But we're also seeing that in our tangential partners and app dev teams being, you know, making more mobile apps or mobile app friendly or tablet friendly apps.

Unlocking more services, allowing more of that functionality that was already there, but was used because of fear.

Yeah.

And yeah, that's right. I've heard that quite a bit. So for those of you that might not know, Azure has Azure Resource Manager, which is ARM or ARM, and Project Bicep. This is some of Microsoft's humor. ARM, Azure Resource Manager, ARM has Project Bicep, as in the bicep on your arm. So Bicep is basically a way to automate form building for Azure. It's, it's an easier, much more easier, visually friendly form builder for, for infrastructure as code. So for those of you that may not know what that is, that's really cool. I like that. I'm going to have to dig into that. So points for, points for creativity on that. Let me switch tracks just a little bit here. Put your hiring manager hat on and something that I've just been curious to ask. As a hiring manager, if a recruiter is working for you, so you've got a recruiter that, you know, is hiring for your team, is looking for people to add to your team. What do you think? How many times do you feel a recruiter should reach out to a passive candidate before moving on or before it's considered too much? How many outreach attempts?

Yeah. So if there's somebody that is of interest that like was presented to us, hey, here's a candidate and we were interested. I think it really depends on the position, right? So when we stop and we look at some of the harder to fill positions, those positions, if there's a candidate aside from taking it to the edge of annoyance, we want you guys to be really not hammering on them, super assertive to try to say, hey, here's why we need you there. Typically I've seen on some of the harder ones, you know, like 3, times, if it's more than 3 times, it's very unlikely you're going to, you're going to get someone to come to your team. The only time that I would say that it's beyond that is if you just have a miss. Like if you consider an outreach, like, oh yeah, I can't talk to you now as an outreach, like a touchpoint as an outreach, then I'd see it as an outreach.

Okay.

Exactly.

So unrequited, unresponsive outreach, you're saying as, as you're, you're the hiring manager, your recruiter is working hard for you and you got a really talented person you're trying to reach out to you, to— and you're saying the recruiter should make at least 3 attempts, unrequited attempts to reach out? Are you saying at least 3 or at most 3?

I would say I would go to 3. 3 would be because, you know, I've been personally recruited that way multiple times by people that are like, you're the perfect fit, and you're the per— I don't know if you got my email. And then it gets to the point where like You start swiping that. You don't even— you see their name and then you just start not paying attention.

And that point is 3, or is that a little bit past 3?

Usually 3, 4 is usually where—

okay, gotcha. Yeah, so, you know, I, I talk to recruiters all the time about this, and, you know, as I teach outreach cadence and things like that, um, and I talk about personalization, make it about the candidate, make sure you understand their background. You're not just sending a link saying, hey, I want you to apply for this job because it's about me and my company, we're hiring, but more about Hey, this might be a good fit for you. This might be a good fit because I see that you have this, and this may be a good fit. But oftentimes recruiters stop at one. They send out one outreach, and if they don't hear back, that's it. So I'm constantly pushing people to say, you got to do— you don't know if they even got the message. They may even get it. So why not reach out, you know, a few times, even, even if it's a LinkedIn InMail, send another one. Right. So you're, you're echoing that sentiment saying, if this is a hard-to-get person, sending out 3 outreach attempts is not outside of the limits.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

As a side note too, um, I— many years ago I actually had some LinkedIn in— emails, and I really didn't pay attention to them because my LinkedIn has exploded, right?

Right. Yeah.

But I did respond to the one that came into my email. So, so that multivectoring shows that, yeah, you're important and we're trying to get you, not just that I'm going to push the button and keep sending it to you again kind of a thing, you know.

So does the multivector count in the 3? Is LinkedIn 1 and in mail 1, you know, an email 1, or is it—

Great question. Um, I would say 3 around the same time period. So like, you know, day 1, if you hit them in a couple vectors, day 2, 3, whatever that is, if you hit them in a couple vectors, I, I would think that would not be an annoyance as a candidate. And as a hiring manager, that's where the challenge is. Like, if there's somebody you like really want, or like you see in their profile, you know, how much really depends—

how much is too much? How much is harassment, right?

Person's appetite for making a move. And, you know, are you going to really sully your rep and potentially the hiring firm's rep? You know, you don't want to do that.

We don't know because we haven't gotten a response. That's the thing is we don't even know if they got the message. That's my point is I would way rather get a no, no thank you than nothing. I mean, obviously I want you to say yes. Are you interested? Yes. That's, that's my dream. But if you say no, I'm happy with that too, because the worst possible thing that can happen is I send you a message. You don't respond. I send you another one. You don't respond. I send you another one. I still don't know. All it takes is, hey man, no thanks. I'm out. Like, you know, and even don't contact me again, sure, that's fine. I'll, I'll make a record of that, no problem. But if you don't answer, how am I supposed to know you're not interested, right? And now I get that they're getting a lot of messages, but like you said, if I'm reaching out on an email and an InMail and on Twitter, it's multivector. I'm a lot more serious than the average, you know, recruiter. So why are some jobs though in our field in technology, why are some jobs are so much more difficult to fill. I mean, they're all difficult, but there are some that are just— you've got positions on your team that are open.

Yeah.

Are they so much harder? What's the problem there?

Yeah, so there's a balance, especially if I'm looking for, say, an architect. So there's a balance of a person that you need to look at their history and exposure to certain technologies, and certain technologies are a little harder to get exposure to. So that kind of scopes the candidate pool, or I should say the acceptable candidate pool, down. Because, you know, the one thing we find with some of our open reqs after talking to some people is that, you know, people who say— candidates who say they have this experience, they don't have deep experience.

They've touched it, but they don't have the— exactly right. So would you say those are— that, that's a good point. Would you say those are, uh, emerging technologies, or they've emerged but people haven't had enough contact?

Yeah, so a lot of the emerging technologies are like that, uh, but some of the more specialty things that are not as often used, uh, so where our team is, is unique is that we need to be like— there's 700, 700+ SKUs in Azure. We need to be experts on 699 of them. So like finding someone that has that deep across them all is very difficult. So we have to make that trade-off on who can do what, where, and finding those people. And then because the pool is so, so low, they're generally employed. So we have to be compelling enough to try to pull somebody away. They're not actively looking. So it becomes a little harder to pull people away for those types of positions, which means when we put that effort in, we are going for the best of the best. We want the best of the best on our team so we can we can really rock it for our customers. We can really just crush projects well and be that expert. They're just harder to find.

They're harder to find because— not because they don't exist, but because it's harder to prove that they've had that depth of experience. Mentioning something on a resume— this is something that I talk about a lot— when you, when you use a keyword search on whatever, LinkedIn, GitHub, Stack Overflow, you know, Google, you'll match the keyword, but the keyword without the subtext is really meaningless, right? If someone has experience with Azure, it doesn't— just because Azure is on the resume doesn't say what they did with it. And if you have 700 SKUs, you can't do 700 keyword searches on one resume, right? So there's got to be a better way. And that's what I'm always talking about is look at the context as opposed to look at the keywords, right? Natural language is great for that. What does somebody do when they're doing this job? What are they What do they say they do that doesn't have a technology keyword attached to it, but that reveals the fact that they're a deep-level consultant? It's not going to be the 700 SKUs. There's no room for that on your resume. But what there's room for on your resume is a phrase like, you know, advise, can advise clients on benefits realization or something like that. Like that tells you, okay, this person's a knowledgeable person in that field. Right. So find that for your talent pool.

Yeah. My resume, not that I use it or have it going around, but never seen it. My resume, in order to be more prescriptive, I have key achievements underneath my job description so that whoever would be looking at it would say like, oh yeah, you architected a global communication system for, you know, insert company here, you know, or this, and that means means you have. Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing I like to kind of flip it and maybe ask you, you know, one of the things I get all the time and I kind of chuckle when I see them, but anymore I don't, is that like, I'll get 1,000, like certain times of the year, I'll get 1,000 requests from recruiters. Like, we have a help desk position for you. And it's like, they're doing the search the other way and not doing the diligence to say that because I have managed help desk teams and that is on my resume, it probably popped in a keyword search. What things would you recommend to the listeners and recruiters to help find those key achievements or anything that would help refine that down to make, to make a candidate take you serious? Because, you know, if this company were to message me again with a, you know, CTO, I'm like, you think I'm a help desk person? That's not what I have done for the past 22 years.

It's the same thing I was saying before, is it, you know, unfortunately they're stuck in this mentality of I got to match the keywords. So they pull the keyword off the rack, which says help desk, and they type it into this database, whatever the database is, whether it's a job board or social network. And then the results that they get include results like yours that have the word help desk on them. Keyword matching is just not— it used to be 20 years ago when there were only a million people on the internet, but now keyword matching is going to bring back way too many results. So you've got to get deeper than that, and that's the natural language. right? Put it in context. Managed a help desk, that would bring you up in a good positive way. Not that you'd be interested in that, but at least it would be a closer match versus we're looking for a help desk tech to, you know, join us for $20 an hour. But if they're using the phrases like managed the help desk, or, you know, if they want to find somebody that's an Azure expert, then they're, you know, conducting benefits realization or implementing global communications you know, those kinds of things. So recruiters can switch to using the phrases in the context as opposed to the keywords in the extracted sense. Keyword matching, essentially keyword matching is obsolete. By the time a keyword is on your resume, it's something you've already done. It's not something you're doing.

Yep.

So yeah, very cool. Yep. Well, thanks. This was fun. I think I'm gonna have to bring you on again.

Absolutely.

I appreciate it. Yeah.

Great conversation and appreciate you having me on the Alley.

That's right. Well, thanks everybody. That concludes Shelly's Alley for today. Be on the lookout for my summary and, and the repeat rebroadcast. Thanks a lot, Michael.

Thank you.

Bye.