Shally's Alley Live with Brian Fink

We are live on Shally's Alley, coming at you from a secret, top secret, undisclosed location— my garage. With me today live, we have the Finkster, the Finkinator, Ryan Fink.

Finkmeister, what's going on, Shally? Uh, for those of you, dude, all right, so real quick, I'm giddy because like I've gotten my Learn on today, like You know, if you— this is not a promo for Shally's webinar, his masterclass, but like, dude, when you went into the shit with Magical, yeah, that I was just like, I was like, so that's how he does the 7 points of personalization at scale.

Like, I just was like, yep, that's exactly it. It's all there. The information is there. Right? You're just personalizing with what's already on their profile.

Yeah. So, all right. So things that I learned this morning is I, and I'm going to go back and I'm going to adjust a few of my custom search engines that I've let into the wild is there's some things I'm going to be some changes that I make on those programmable search engines, particularly as the way that they either search the web or that they work on defined websites. So Shelly took us through CSEs. That was awesome. Magical. I didn't know what to expect. Like, I was like, I was like, this is just another.

And then I was like, had you seen Magical before or you just heard about it but didn't really?

So like, so like I thought that it was so like I'd heard about it and I thought I was like, okay, this is, this is neat. All right. So full disclosure, there are two, there are two envelopes for Brian is this is neat and holy shit.

Okay. Got it.

All right. And so this has definitely moved from the, oh, this is neat to the holy. I mean, like this is like, yeah. Like I know what, so next week I'm going on spring break, but I know what I'm going to be spending some time doing is this takes personalization to a completely different level because instead of me having to source say 20 candidates who all work at Google and then go and source 20 candidates that all work at AWS, that I'm looking for cloud engineers, I can say, hey, noticed your work at this company and at this company. That's really impressive, man. Like to have that kind of stature and be able to spend my time, not spend my time effectively personalizing. Yeah, I mean, So that would be—

Yeah, 'cause we're used to the old hack, right? Of like, in order to do hyper-personalization with LinkedIn Recruiter, you basically have to group them together and find 20 people from Google and then say, hey, I noticed you work at Google, 'cause there's no way to do any merges with fields in LinkedIn. But with this you can. And so, you know, you don't have to, like you said, narrow your field down to just a batch of people from one company. You can add stuff from everywhere.

Yeah, I mean, that was awesome. You know, Shelly, I feel like we could talk about this and that this isn't fair to people because they haven't, they're kind of, this is a paid class and they're not in it today. One of the things that I think we should talk about is the biggest development that I've heard of in the past 5 years in the talent acquisition space.

Oh, the big news.

The big news. If you listened earlier, Chad and Cheese alluded to it on their on their podcast, but I think that, uh, well, I'll just say it. Ryan Leary is leaving Recruiting Daily and is going to go be the, uh, majordomo for David Menaster over at SourceCon and ERE. I mean, it's, it's craziness.

Yeah, editor-in-chief of SourceCon. That's right.

Yeah, I mean, this is— yeah, I mean, the guy can barely write a sentence, and, uh, here it is that they're giving him The Keys to the Kingdom, you know, he's really kind of played in all these different, you know, I thought when, you know, I thought when Ryan was like, I'm going to make a career decision, he was going to come back to recruiting because he had been a recruiter before and he says how jealous he is of all the fun that we're having. But I just—

Especially in this market.

The left field. I was like, what is this? Right? So, if you're just joining us, Ryan Leary, hats off to you. I'm not wearing a hat, so like hair off to you.

Hair off, that's right.

Hair off to you.

Peel the hair off.

Yeah, just, this is really incredible. Like Facebook user, who is leaving whom? I can't see who the Facebook user is, but if you're just tuning in, breaking news in the world of talent acquisition and recruiting, Ryan Leary is leaving LinkedIn. Leaving Recruiting Daily and he is taking David Manaster's job over at SourceCon and ERE. Just, you know, something out of left field. I didn't expect to see this happen. This is just as unpredictable as Will Smith getting up in the middle of the Oscars and slapping the hell out of Chris Rock, right?

Which I thought was staged, but apparently it's not.

So about that is shout out to a member of my team, Shout out to a member of my team who actually crushed this quarter, got more hires than anybody else. He, I don't know if I'm allowed to say, I don't know if I'm allowed to say, you know, I don't know if I'm allowed to say Jeff Stewart's name, but like he crushed it. Anyhow, long story short.

No, you can't share an individual person's name. So don't say Jeff Stewart's name at all.

I will not say it again. So the, he crushed it and we were having a conversation about whether or not it was a hoax, as in the slap as an April Fool's Day joke, and like that Will Smith and Chris Rock were in on it and that they placated this event, or they placated Jada's, I can't remember, what is it called? I feel like—

Alopecia?

Alopecia, right? Like if they had, yeah, that this was some part of some kind of joke. That's right, if you're just tuning in, Ryan Leary is going to go be the head of ERE Media. This is news to a lot of people. It kind of, you know, I remember the first time I met Ryan was actually at SourceCon in Austin, Texas. Really? Yeah, that was the first time I'd met him. And I'm sure that they probably were having conversations then about what this was going to look like.

I don't remember meeting Ryan. It's been that long. Like, it's been so, so long. It's been such a long time. I can't even— it's been a long time. He was at IBM when I met him. So however long ago that was, like ancient times.

Yeah. I mean, like, you know, it was weird. Is it like the first person that I met from Recruiting Daily actually is Charney. Is that Matt Chorney was at the conference where apparently I really upset somebody by using the 4-letter word that rhymes with duck. My mother may be listening to this on Facebook. I don't want my mother to think that I use that language all the time. You know, that's only, you know, so. It is what it is. But like, this, this, I mean, this news, but let's, let's get back to this class, man, because this class— let's talk about—

yeah, let's talk about sourcing. You know, I remember having a conversation with you about this, and I thought it was something that would be interesting. In fact, that's what prompted me to say that you should come on the show, um, is how different things are in, in, um, your work environment and You don't know this. I haven't told you this yet, but you inspired me to make a very big decision in my life that I'd never told anybody. I never told you especially. You were talking about your new job, and I think you were giving a presentation, and you used the words compassionate employer. Do you remember that? Yeah. Okay. I don't remember where that was or when that was, but that like changed my life right there. It woke me up to realize that if you're going to work with or for a company in this age now today, where there are lots of choices, and in our market in recruiting where we're being heavily recruited by all kinds of organizations throwing crazy money, we talked about some of the offers that people are asking for salary. And it was like, what? And in this market, Why should you work for a company that doesn't appreciate you? Or even worse, a company that devalues you, disrespects you, or whatever. So, that was a huge thing for me. It's not like I never thought about I should work for a company that cares. It's just the way of thinking, the way that you explained it, and the things that you were talking about. So, I want you to kind of tell us a little bit more about what it means to be a compassionate employer and how that's changed your life because I know it's done that for you too.

Yeah, so for those of you who don't know, I currently am a senior sourcer with Twitter. I think when I think about— so here's the deal. Today is Friday, and on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I take an hour off to go pick up my daughter from school, take her to Starbucks. Yes, she's 5 years old. You all have seen the pictures. She likes to go to Starbucks and get a cookie and a cake pop. That's her MO. And the thing is, is that nobody expects me to do anything during that hour but to be a great dad, right? And when you think about the fact that we have employee resource groups at Twitter that put together care packages for dads and moms— I don't want to leave out the moms in the room. After all, I think moms have been greater, more impacted because of COVID and having to really do double duty. You know, being a parent is a full-time job, but being a parent during COVID— shout out to my wife, like, she was total boss mode, total leader. But I digress, and I want to kind of stick on this note as to an organization that cares about you, that gives a damn about their employees, right? You know, there are organizations that I've worked for like a cabbage that really provided for their employees, whether it was catered meals every day or 100% or, you know, 100% health insurance, which are great benefits. One of the things that I look to at Twitter is the fact that we have dynamic leadership that is not only saying we have these benefits, but it's leadership that's also taking advantage of these leaderships. Shout out to Parag. I don't know that he's listening because this is not being streamed on Twitter Spaces, but like we have—

It is. This goes live on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Twitch, and LinkedIn.

Yeah, so, you know, shout out to Parag. Parag's a new dad. Congratulations on that. He's taking paternity leave. I don't know, like, I think the last person in tech that took maternity leave was Marissa Mayer, and she got a lot of crud about it. She got a lot of garbage about it, right? And I think that we're in an age, a day and age when we can have a conversation about gender equality. And that means not only pay equality, but responsibility equality. And those are some of the things that shine through for me at Twitter. I also think about, you know, some of the great mentors that I've had that have been at some of the companies that I've been a member of, like Relitech with, With Mark, you know, Mark is a person who wanted to make sure that his people were empowered to do great things. And I think that's another thing, right? Like, you can take a lot of time from the office. You can take time to go pick up your daughter. Are you really empowered to do big things in your organization, to stretch across the, to stretch across the aisle and to make a, you know, we talk about talent having a seat at the table. Right? So like, just talent—

Contribute beyond what's in your rail of like your, you know, specialization to be able to—

Right.

Yeah. I get that. It's more than— I think what really struck me about what you were talking about was it's more than benefits, right? It's not benefits. It's not work-life balance. Those have been in the past just things people say at some companies. And at some companies, they've been taken seriously. To give an example, in my experience, 25 years being in this business, Microsoft, I have to say, had the best benefits I've ever seen and probably will likely ever see again. Their benefits are spectacular, right? But benefits aren't what you're talking about. Benefits are— that's something that you get in exchange for the time that you provide to your employer along with your compensation and your salary. What you're talking about is an organization that is, that understands individuals as an individual, respects the individual, and like you said, gives them time to be with their family because that's important. And a person who spends time with their family is a better person at work because they don't, not stressed out about, oh my God, I'm missing time with my family. So it benefits your family and it benefits your job. And it's done in a way that is designed to benefit both. And values your contribution rather than tries to put you into a box and say, this is what's expected of you, you can only do this and nothing more. And you have to do this during these times, right? Pull these levers at these times, you know. And I get, you know, there's shift work and there's people that have to work at a particular time and all that. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about even if you're at a company that is requiring you to work at a certain schedule, there are still compassionate employers that do things that are that recognize your uniqueness. And that, I think, is a much bigger step towards inclusion than anything else that we could do. It's actually recognizing individuals as individuals and respecting that individuality. To me, that was the biggest takeaway from that Compassionate Employer. Employers that actually get that.

Well, so, so as we're talking about inclusion, I just want to, I just want to point out, you know, today is the, is the first day of April. Yesterday, however, was Trans Day of Visibility, right? And I think that, I think that there's a lot of hate in this country that's bottled up. I guess I'm going to get political for a second. There's a lot of hate that's bottled up, and it's a, it's a dangerous time for employers to take dangerous stances against these social norms. And like, I'm glad that I work for an organization that isn't afraid to stand up for people whose voices are not heard, right? You know, this is the— it's a weird world that we live in, and I'm really glad that yesterday that Parag could take an hour of his time to be part of that initiative in our organization and for it to be broadcast to the world, for us to shine a light. And a compassionate organization, I think, is one that says, that doesn't just have values on a wall somewhere, but that actually lives those values and lets your heart shine.

Lives the values and gives you room to do what you want to do within the confines of what you have to do. There's what you have to do because it's your job, and what you want to do, and then there's what you, you know, wish you could do, right? Like you said, so for me, for example, I may not be— when I was at Fiserv, love my boss there, Holly. We're still in touch. She's such a great boss, a great manager, a great leader. And She gave me the, I don't know what amplitude or the freedom to go play in the space of analytics. And I learned a lot about, I mean, I basically took like a crash course on finance and analytics from the tasks that I had said, you know, I can do this. And she didn't just say, "No, that's not your job," because that would have been very easy to do, because my job was not that, you know. She said, "If you think you can do it, go ahead and do it. Let's try it and see how it works. Bring it back to me." And I did it, and I brought it back, and she was like, "This is great. Let's do more." And then she said, "Let's show this to my boss." And that is the difference. So, I, she could have just said, "This is great," and then showed it to somebody else and said, "Look what I did," or "Look what my team did." But she then said, "Hey, this is something one of my team members did, and then he wants to do more of this," and my job changed. And what I was doing became a lot more analytical, and it's had significant impact in my career because I can now do the things with spreadsheets and data that CFOs expect, right? That's a huge thing.

That's a huge thing to be able to talk CFO when you're in talent.

Um, sourcing doesn't usually have the access to the CFO, but when you're sourcing in analytics, you have that other door open. That's— that would never have happened had my and my boss and my employer recognize that there's a— I'm more than a one-dimensional character, right? That I have these other hidden skills maybe I didn't even know I had, right?

Exactly. And I think that's a trait of a good boss, right? Or like, okay, the word boss is like outmoded and manager's outmoded. Let's just use the term leader because I mean, some leaders have people responsibilities, some don't, but like, I think it's a good I think it's a good sign of a— I think it's a sign of a good leader when they help you stretch your professional capabilities in new and interesting ways and they give you the latitude to do so.

Love that. Totally love that. Yeah. That's a good definition of a compassionate employer. Yeah. So, how is sourcing different at Twitter? Tell me something about how sourcing is done that you can share that won't, you know, I don't want any confidential information. I don't want anybody chasing after you. After me with, you know, legal paths.

So I think that one of the things that makes sourcing different at Twitter is that Shelly— okay, so folks, real quick, Shelly and I, we do live in Atlanta. We do meet up for dinner. There is a picture from 5 years ago of Shelly holding my daughter and it says the godfather of sourcing. So like, we have, you know, we have deep conversations, but we also have conversations that are not as deep. But one of the conversations that we return to all the time is, what is a sourcer? What is a recruiter, right? And one of the things that I think that makes sourcing different at Twitter is that we're not just focused on, quote unquote, doing the research and getting the candidate in the door. We're making sure that the candidate is interested, educated, and qualified for the role before we ever make an introduction to a hiring manager. And once we make that introduction to the hiring manager, We're carrying the candidate through the process until we get them to our recruiter at that final step. And then we pull that recruiter in to make sure that we are prepping our candidates for success. I think that because of what we're doing, we're having an overall more success rate, more of a success rate at the top of the funnel and also at the bottom of the funnel when it comes to close. There's somebody who's asking how many of my prospects come from Twitter? Yeah, that's a great question.

100% because they all have to go to Twitter to apply. No, I'm just kidding.

No, no, no, no, that would be a— you know, it's funny. Most of my candidates do not come from Twitter. Most of my candidates actually come from GitHub or from conference lists. I try to find— so I don't think I'm telling the secret here. I think it's pretty well established is that Twitter is making a move to the public cloud. Using resources like AWS and GCP and Kubernetes, and we want to find the best. Who are the best? Well, you go to GitHub and you look at the people who are contributing to the Kubernetes API and you reach out to them and say, hey, are you open to a conversation? Or you go to speaker lists like Dev Nexus, which is coming up in Atlanta in a few weeks, or DevOps Days, which is going to be in Atlanta, I think the 18th, 19th, and 20th. And you see who the speakers are, you see who the presenters are, and you say, you know, you try to find, like, I spend a good amount of time on research, right? And these people teach me things. If I go to their talk or if I livestream their talk or if I watch their talk on YouTube, it provides me with a really clear, a clearer insight as to who they are, what they're about, what they feel is a challenge. I mean, I don't wanna reach out to somebody and say, hey, come be an SRE at Twitter when clearly they're way beyond SRE and they're kind of defining that role at Google. I wanna make sure that I'm quote unquote being, having appropriate. Tricia, any advice for someone setting up a new sourcing team? I've created the foundations yet want to, I have created the foundations, yeah, I wanna set the team up for success. Shelley, do you want to, you want to handle that one? Because you've built teams. I mean, I've done it. It's—

yeah, I have quite a bit, actually. Some of the most successful teams out there in the industry. Happy to help. Tricia, probably be a good idea for us to kind of touch base one-on-one individually so that I can gather a little bit more about what you're doing. But the best advice I can give you on starting a sourcing team and getting it the foundations is to really focus on removing friction in however way— different organizations have different ways of, you know, creating, I would even say, artificial friction. But when you start a sourcing team, there's a lot of not understanding what sourcers do. As a matter of fact, Brian and I were just talking about how there's not a very clear definition of what the difference between a sourcer and a recruiter, and Forget that, right? Forget defining the difference between a source and recruiter. Define what your team does. Don't worry about defining the role for others or for the industry. Define what it is that your team's going to do and put the boundaries on and say, this is how we're going to do it. And try to remove as much friction as possible because it is the hardest job, okay? I'm not saying recruiting is easy. I'm not saying that at all. Recruiting is also hard, but sourcing is harder and more challenging in a lot of ways because you don't have as much access to the hiring manager. You may have, but not as much. You don't have as much access to the, the brand name behind the company. You can't deal with applicants that are coming in usually unless you're allowed to, to do that. We have to sometimes operate in the dark in a lot of ways. We may even provide candidates and not get any feedback in many ways. So a lot of what we do is already very, um, what's the word I'm looking for, Brian, help me out. It's like hidden. It's like we're, yeah, exactly. A lot of what we do is very opaque. So creating friction, it just adds more suspicion to that. Try to remove that as much as possible. The only other thing I would say without knowing more about your team that you have to make sure, um, is don't get, don't fall in love with tools. I see this all the time with my with customers when I was a consultant, recruiters that like the organization will buy— I'm not even going to name a tool, you know, XYZ tool— and they'll use it for 6 months, and then the next one comes around and they get a call from a marketing person and they buy that tool, and then they switch over and they get the other one. And the other— listen, tools don't make a sourcer. In a sourcing team, quite frankly, sourcing can be done, as my friend Amanda used to say, with crayons and a notepad. Okay, yes, it's harder, and you all definitely can use tools, but if you make your, your team tool-dependent or force them to use certain specific tools, it creates more— it reduces the flexibility, reduces the creativity. Sourcing is very different in recruiting in one significant way, and that is recruiting is systemic. It's a system. Recruiters have to follow certain rules. There's applicant flow logs, there's EEOC, there's a ton of regulation, 7 different governing bodies. You may not even be aware of 7 different governing bodies that affect us, from the Privacy Act to Sarbanes-Oxley, that affect what we do. And sourcing has to have these boxes that are checked, things that need to be done, whether it's a background check or a reference check or an application, whatever. There are rules. Sourcing doesn't have any because we're trying to find what isn't already being found by recruiting. So, we have to invent it. And if we're told, this is how you do it and these are the tools that you use it, and 6 months later, these are the tools you use it, it doesn't really help us do our job. So, removing friction, number 1, and don't be a tools user. Use tools, but don't depend on them.

You know, I agree with Shelly. The only thing that I would add to that is teach the fundamentals, right? right? Like if you have the fundamentals, like when Shelly was showing, am I frozen?

I don't think so.

Okay, I was like, let it go. One of the things that, yeah, one of the things that Shelly did when he was showing people how to set up their own Google custom search engine is he leveraged in-title, in-text, and the site command. And when leveraging those tools, those are basics. Like I don't think Google is going to change how they do search, right? They may change the algorithm because for SEO purposes and for SEM purposes, but they're not, I mean, there are some standard operators that they're not going to change. They may retire them, but they're not gonna change the basic ones, right? And I think that if you set people up for success by showing them the basics, then they can put the building blocks together. It's like Maddie with Legos, right? Like she's building, She's building Yoda right now, right? Like she knows like how to snap bricks. She knows how to read the book, but she didn't start off building Yoda, right? So it's like Legos.

I can't build Yoda. Yeah, so real quick. Well, listen, Brian, thanks a lot for coming on the show. I really appreciate it, especially, you know, given how busy you are and everything. Let's do this again. Let's keep the conversation going and have another chat, you know, in a few weeks. Or month or so when you have some more time. I know you're going to be taking some well-deserved time off, so enjoy your vacation. Thank you for being here, and bye everybody. Appreciate it. Take care.

Bye.