Shally's Alley Live with guest Sylvia Dahlby

Hi, happy Friday everybody! It is a little bit after 1 PM on Friday, May 6th. Welcome to Shelly's Alley. Today I have a very special guest with me. Sylvia and I have been friends and colleagues and connections in this industry for more than 20 years. How much more? I don't think I want to admit, and I don't want to embarrass Sylvia with that. Either. But we, um, suffice to say, we met when we were both living in Arizona. Sylvia is originally from Hawaii, and since we met, she has moved back to Hawaii, has been happily living there for pretty much the last 20-some-odd years. And we have over the years kept in touch for a number of reasons. We've shared in some projects, some work together. I went to Hawaii and did a fundraising event with the University of Hawaii, and she was instrumental in helping get all that set up and bringing people into it for the foundation. It just, you know, we've been, we've been friends, good friends over the years, and always had good ideas to share with each other. And on a recent call with Sylvia, we were talking about a blog post that is based on— I think I might let Sylvia tell us a little bit about the background of it, but it's a blog post based on kind of what's going on with our industry right now and is this the golden age of opportunity? And Sylvia had some really good things to say about, you know, what technology can help us with or what technology is good for and not good for and so on. But before I get things started, Sylvia, I want to say congratulations on your retirement. I hear that you are coming up on retirement in about a year and you're planning on taken that seriously. So, um, must be, it must be exciting. How do you feel about that?

Well, uh, it's going to be exactly 349 days, 6 hours, and 10 minutes. And yes, I am very excited. I've been in this industry since God was a boy. I think I start— got my first recruitment advertising job in 1979. I know I'm dating myself now. And what's funny to me is how much has changed in the industry and then how much has not. Change. But yeah, so no, it's just on the advice of my financial planner and my husband and my sanity. I think next year is going to be my final year. And I'm very happy to be, to be here with you today, right? We do share a lot of history together. And what prompted this call was our conversation. I attended a webinar. This was on April 12th. It was presented by Yeah, it was actually presented by the California Staffing Professionals Association, but it featured a speaker from the, the Staffing Industry Analysts. Oh, yeah. Right. So they put up a bunch of astonishing statistics. And considering how long I've been in this industry, I'm not easily surprised. Right. But there were—

this is Adrian Nelson, right? And you're referring to the—

yes, yes.

SIA's Pulse survey.

Yeah, they— right. They do a big survey. They throw in some Bureau of Labor Statistics. They gather up a wealth of information throughout the industry and they compile a number of reports. And so Adrian gave a presentation which was an overview of some key things. You know, some of the emphasis was on California, but my biggest takeaway, and I'm sure you know this, Shelly, is there are 11 million unfilled jobs right now. And I'm like, 11 million? That's like the population of LA or New York, or like pick a big city. Yeah, that's a lot of open jobs. And it— we have never seen anything like this. And it was—

so you're saying this is the most open jobs that we've had in the United States?

Yeah, that we've had in the United States ever.

Wow.

So that, you know, and she talked, Adrienne touched on some of the drivers of that, like why that is. And, you know, she mentioned that there was the great resignation, right? Like a lot of people were changing, but that's more of a great reprioritization, right? Like people are, Rethinking what they want to do, right? Switching jobs, not necessarily quitting, right? But what's also driving it is retirement, right? Like folks like me that have just said, okay, I'm a boomer, I'm going to be out of here, right? Or people— He's out. Right, you're out. And there's been lower birth rates in the last generation. So there are definitely going to be some positions that are going to be harder to backfill. Because of that, as you know, and the skills crunch that comes with it. And then also tighter immigration policies, right? Because with the pandemic and everything, we ratcheted down, we tightened up on immigration. And so these things are contributing to that imbalance between the job orders and the available talent. In the US. So that to me was a really astonishing statistic. And the other thing that emerged from that part of the program was 55% of the employers in the US are hiring, right? They want to add staff this year. So sourcing, I'm sure, it's going to be a key part of what employers need to do to really find where the talent is.

So 51% of employers, is that, is that an unusual number? I'm kind of impressed by the number, but I'm not really sure. Is that, is that like how does that compare to other times in history?

You know, the hiring part, I think we've seen that before, right, where employers are definitely investing in personnel and expanding their markets and needing the talent to help them achieve whatever the business goal is. So, I don't think that number is unusual. But at this time, where we have the big talent crunch on, they're really feeling it. They're feeling the pain.

Okay.

Okay.

So, What, what, one other thing that I was, I was reading in the article, so it said, welcome to, well, yeah, I think this was your blog post, which was an article that you wrote about this. Welcome to Zoomtown. What are Zoomtowns?

Well, this was interesting to me as an early adopter of remote work. And, and you know this because when we met in Arizona, I was already working from home and dude, that was in the '90s. Okay. So we, you know, we used to sync up with those screechy modems that you pop dropped into the phone box, right? So times have changed a lot, right? But I've always been an advocate. I dusted off an article that I wrote 10 years ago. It was published in Hawaii News Now. And when I was doing some work with SHRM, the Hawaii chapter, on advocating remote work and telework. And my headline was, the future of work is not in a cubicle. And when I— And now I'm thinking, well, it just took— No, this was 10 years that I wrote this piece.

Oh, okay.

This is 10 years. But "The Future of Work's Not in a Cubicle." And then I was laughing because it took 10 years and a pandemic, right, for employers to adopt the content of what I was saying that they needed to do, right? That they need. So what the Zoomtown is, is a response to that. Like now that employers have embraced the idea of remote work and of telework and virtual work. A lot of workers that work on a PC all day, right? They figured out they don't need to stay in the city, right? They can move out to the country, right? They can get that cabin in the woods that they've always wanted or move into their cabin in the woods and, you know, get rid of their house in town and the parking and everything else or the crime. Like I was talking to a woman in Chicago, they're moving to someplace in Colorado. And there are a lot of these smaller to mid-sized cities now that are seeing a real boom in or a zoom, if you will, in people that are moving to their towns and buying up real estate and settling in because they can work from anywhere now. And so they're taking advantage of that, of that opportunity. And it's kind of a mixed blessing because, you know, it does create some problems for the town itself, like this influx of foreigners, if you will, like those big city folks moving into a town somewhere in rural or Arkansas that's kind of changing the tone of the place, as well as the brain drain that's going on in the cities themselves that they're leaving. So it's, uh, the population is shifting as this idea of work from anywhere is really taking hold. And I thought that was, uh, very fascinating. And I put a link in the article about like what, where those towns are.

Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah.

But it's all about the work-life balance. Like that great re-resignation, as we just mentioned, is more of a great reprioritization. And people are wanting a better work-life balance. They want a more fulfilling job. And it's less about money now and more about quality of life. So they're seeking out places where they can find that better quality of life for their kids, you know, for their own sanity, and getting out of the big city craziness that's been happening.

So what about like what's going on with, with Apple, with companies saying, oh, you've got to, you've got to come back into the office now? What is What do you see is happening with that? Is that going to stick around? Is it going to be a problem?

That's a great question because I think it's ultimately going to come down to hybrid work is where it's going to land, is that they're going to want people to be in the office some of the time. And that frequency, I think, is going to really depend on the position because the remote work, it's, it's never been for everybody. right? Like take a young person who's coming up in their career. They need mentorship and they need that interaction. They also need visibility if they want to get ahead. You can't really— you lose some of that when you work remotely. So I think hybrid is the way. And then there are some things that do need to be done as a team or times when you need to be together, especially for the creative process. I think that being in a room with people, you get a lot more creative juices flowing than you do in a Zoom. I think something is lost over digital communication. So you do need to be in the office some of the time, even if it's only a couple of times a year. But I think hybrid is where—

Right, right, I was going to say that.

Yeah. Yeah, but I think hybrid's where it's going to land, right? That, uh, a combination, right?

Like, not exclusive. You're saying not exclusively 100% remote all the time, but, right, um, mostly remote, or, or like, you know, where I'm working right now, it's work from where you're comfortable. So it's not necessarily remote. You can come to the office, you can work from home, you can work from a Starbucks. Just work from where, where you want to work, work from where you wanna be. I posted the, the, a little Bitly there to the link that is the one that you posted on your article that takes people to the list of Zoom towns. But I agree with that. I think, I think that's the way to go. I recently had an experience that, and like you, when we met, I was working remotely. I actually was working remotely all the way back to 1998, 1999 actually. My, you know, corporate job at Cisco was a remote job and I still had, you know, a DSL modem and everything back then, but they had an office in Phoenix that I could go to if I wanted to, just nobody there was actually in recruiting. So it was a place I could go to if I needed an office, but not really for what you were talking about as far as camaraderie. Fast forward to when I was at Fiserv, I was there for 5 years And it started out as a job where I had to go to the office every day, but there were days that I could stay home. And so I kind of, you know, I used that flexibility to stay home on Thursdays and Fridays, or sometimes I would do, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Friday from the office, and then, you know, it kind of skip a day like that. But as the pandemic started becoming, you know, a real issue, they switched to 100% work from home and now they're going back to, going back to the office. The problem is that in the meantime, people got used to it. Some people were hired in that situation where they were working from home exclusively. Now they don't want to go to the office. And some people were hired in locations where they can't go to an office. And so now they're being asked to go to an office, which means they're going to have to relocate for the job. So to me, it's, it's not a solution because If you're saying we hired you in, I don't know, Rochester, New York, we have no offices there, you can work remotely because of the pandemic, no more pandemic, now you can come to the office, but there's no office in Rochester, it's like a bait and switch, right? So what do we do then? I say that's where you have to, you've saved on the expense of having this person be in an office, which is a considerable expense, so just buy them a ticket to come into the company headquarters. A couple of times. I recently did that. I went to the company headquarters after being working at this company for 3 or 4 months. And during one week, we got a lot done as a team collaborating and having meetings, but it was all very well planned. So it wasn't just swing by the office and we'll see who's here. It was everybody's going to come in. We're going to do meetings. We have an agenda. We have— and we got much more done than we would in a series of Zoom meetings. But that doesn't replace the Zoom meetings. We're still going to have a lot of follow-ups on those action items that were created and everything. So we use it as an opportunity to have discussions and brainstorming in a room where we can focus. So that's the hybrid that I think you're talking about, right?

Yes. You know, it can take a couple of different forms, though. The one that you just described is really kind of my situation, like we get together a couple of times a year or maybe there's a trade show that we go to and I get flown out. For it. And I'll actually spend a week right there if it's in Southern California, which is where our headquarters are. Or when we get together for the holiday gathering, we wrap a bunch of meetings around that, like for year-end kind of thing. And I think you're— to your point of having a solid agenda for those gatherings is really important, right? Because this is an opportunity to get focused and be together on whatever it is that you need to accomplish or talk about or plan for. The other way to go, and I think you mentioned and you mentioned this too in your own experience, is where you do have a local office that you can drive to. And I find that a lot of people in HR like this way, right? They want to go into the office 3 or 4 days a week and have 1 or 2 days at home. And when you think about it, that still takes, you know, 20% of the cars off of the road every day, right? So that model where if you can go in. I've never experienced that, but I always thought that would be nice. Like, I didn't— we didn't have an office in Phoenix. Like, when I was with West Tech, I would go to town when they had the career fair in town, and that was a great opportunity to interact with my colleagues and help work the show, right? And then I would fly out to the headquarters, which was in Silicon Valley, just a few times a year, just like we're describing. So I've never had the luxury of an office that I could go to on Friday because there was going to be a birthday cake cake, you know, or something fun, right? That's right.

So the cool companies are sending you the birthday cake now, right? They'll send you a, you know, a gift certificate, or they'll ship you a—

wait, how come? No, wait, wait, nobody's sending me cake. Where's my cake?

That's what I'm saying, the cool company. No, I'm just kidding.

I'm sending a memo to HR right now.

We need to be sending out birthday— you got to send everybody cake, right? Cake. Send a cupcake by mail. That's all we need now.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. Cupcake by mail.

The other thing that I saw in, um, in your article was, um, about ghosting. And so to be specific, candidate ghosting, where, um, the, the, the, the— your blog post, and I don't know if this was this is that you got from the other one, the webinar, but it's estimated that 48% of candidates that are applying for technical jobs and 42% of administrative and customer service jobs are likely to ghost out of the hiring process. In other words, they apply, they perhaps maybe even have an interview or two and then they vanish. I'm experiencing that.

So what do you have a recipe to, Oh, if I had the, if I had the recipe, if only I had the recipe. I understand what the symptoms are though, and there's some of them that can be addressed. And the first point I want to make is I find it's a little ironic because historically it's been the candidate complaining about the employers ghosting them, right? And now the shoe is suddenly on the other foot, right? So I think that employers that want to be successful and reduce the amount of ghosting that occurs, you have to make it quicker and easier to apply than ever. And you have to be a lot more high-touch in your communications. Because the candidates today, especially, you know, today's worker, and with the internet and everything, you want everything to be immediate. Like when I'm shopping for an item online, if they make it hard for me to check out, I am very likely just to walk away from that and go to Amazon where I know I can check out with 2 clicks, right?

Check out, yeah, check out somewhere else basically.

So you're saying, yeah, I'll get this same item somewhere else, right?

You're saying the ghosting is happening because the application process is slow or tedious?

And too— well, part of it's the application process, right? So you got to make it real quick and easy for them to apply, and then once you've got them You have to be fully engaged. And this is where technology can come in handy, right? Because you can automate certain steps, like what I would call the keep them warm steps to say, you know, hey, you know, I talked to so-and-so, I'm going to be forwarding your application along or whatever. Like they want to know what's happening, right? So you have to have a much higher level of engagement, outbound communication. If you want the candidate to stay on the hook. And then the other thing is you have to speed up the process. If you talk to a candidate on Monday and they're a really highly qualified and skilled individual, and even if they're not, I mean, you know how hard it is to hire restaurant help right now in my town. It's—

I think that's a problem everywhere though.

It is a problem everywhere, right? So I'm saying, yeah, I'm saying if they walk in the door and you like them, You should just make them an offer on the spot because if they walk out of there, they're going to have 3 more offers by the end of the weekend, possibly even accept one. So, you have to move quickly if you feel good that you want to hire that candidate. None of this, "Oh, let me think about it," right? Don't try and stop second-guessing yourself. If you found someone that you think is going to be good, go for it. I understand there's a little bit more of a risk involved, but if you speed up that hiring process, that's the number one way that you're going to be able to reduce the amount of ghosting that occurs. They don't want to wait. They don't want to wait for you. You know, especially if you went to the trouble of bringing them in for an interview. Okay, so you told them it's like they want— they want to know right away, am I going to get this job or not, right? Make them a contingent offer, right?

I see. Okay, I see what you're saying.

Okay, like get them to buy into the process right away. Like, yeah, we really like you. We're going to make you an offer contingent on these things, right?

Right. We still have to do our background check, or we stop, right?

We have to do the thing.

Yeah.

And then the other piece of advice that I would advise with technology is go ahead and start the onboarding process, because the background check, they're going to need to sign some paperwork anyway. It's like, get the onboarding going at the time of the offer. If you wait for them to accept that offer, they have other offers that they might be thinking about accepting, whereas if you get them vested more vested in the process. Anything you can do to speed them along because they're, you know, nobody has any patience anymore.

Ain't nobody got time for that. So we have nobody got time for that. Actually, let me, let me back up. I think 3 kinds of ghosting. There's the applicant ghosting. So they— we've always had drop-off in applications. I mean, this is, you know, you being in the advertising industry, and in the technology industry for forever, you know better than most people that it doesn't matter what you do, people are always going to drop off between the point of I like this job and I'm going to apply for this job. There's always a drop-off there. That's just drop-off. That's not ghosting. What we're talking about here is they applied for the job, they completed the application, and then you reach out to them to set up an interview and they don't answer. So that's one type of ghosting is I applied. Oh, never mind, I'm not interested and I'm not even going to bother responding to tell you no thank you. I'm just going to basically disappear. Another type of ghosting is they applied and they interviewed and then you're trying to reach out to them for an offer or, you know, or final interview or something like that. And they're ghosting there, which is I was interested. I went through the interview. I told you I wanted the job, but then you took too long to get an offer to me and I got another offer. And I'm just not going to let you know. I'm just going to take the other job and walk away. And then there's a third kind of ghosting, which is you interviewed me, I like the job, you made me an offer, I verbally accepted, but I never show up to work or I never, you know, do the actual final onboarding. Those are three different kinds of ghosting that I'm hearing, right? That's— is that right? Or is there—

Yes. No, agreed, because they could fall off anywhere in that, anywhere along the way. But the point, I think the most important point is that once you, let's say you really do like them and they make it to that interview stage. Now you've invested time and energy in this person, right? And this candidate has also invested the time and energy. Those are the ones you really don't want to lose, right? The ones that ghost you right up front, well, okay, if you can't track them down or engage them, you don't know whether it's going to be worth it or not. Right? But the ones that make it to that interview stage, right? Like we've talked, we've had some discussions, we've set up an interview, you've talked to some people, the people liked you, right? We want to make you an offer. Get to that offer stage as quickly as you can and keep those people highly motivated and engaged to continue the process. I mean, you know, because they're the highest value.

Okay, gotcha. Send them the cake. Save the cake for that. So, okay, so the ghosting on the front end where, you know, I applied and it took you too long to respond, no big deal. All right, it's gonna happen. The ghosting after the initial interview or phone screen with the recruiter perhaps, where then, you know, you can't get them on the phone with the hiring manager. Okay, that's gonna happen. We can maybe fix that by being faster, being more transparent. But the one that's really costing us a lot on both sides is where they have an interview with a hiring manager and then don't get onboarded, or they have an offer and don't get onboarded. And you're saying that that's the one where we need to essentially start the onboarding at that time, give them a contingent offer or an offer pending, whatever, to try to solve for that. I like that because what you're saying is there's— you can, you can solve some problems, but you can't solve them all, right? And if you're going to spend time trying to figure this out, spend time on the highest return on investment, which is that very last step where it could have been a hire. I mean, you just— right, you know, the other—

well, they're, they're your, they're your silver medalists, you know, or the fish that got away, right?

Exactly.

Now, the other point I want to make, though—

okay, got it.

Yeah, agreed. And then one last point I want to make to that, um, Shelly, is that, um, the other thing that came out in this webinar is what's really important. You mentioned the word Transparency. I'm going to throw another one in there, and that's authenticity. Is that you can't misrepresent the job. It's like, you got to be— when that candidate walks in the door for the in-person interview, they have to see it and believe it, right? That, that some of these job descriptions really don't match the reality of the situation. And you've got to be authentic. In what it is that you're communicating to these people, because people are smart now. You know, they can get online, they can look at your reviews, they can talk to your other employees, they can see people how they talk to you about on Facebook and so forth. You need to be accurate. And even if you— however you represent yourself, it has to be real. It just has to be true, because people are starting to see through the curtain. And what's behind that curtain. And if they walk in the door and they don't see it, I think that's kind of a quiet reason why a lot of people decide to ghost, because they're not feeling it when they walk into that environment.

Okay, that's interesting. I wonder if there's a way to audit for that somehow. I'm just thinking about quality. How do you know? Yeah, that's happening.

How do you know? How do you know? That's a good question. Well, my first answer would be survey people. Because if you, if you, if people are saying things, they're not—

they ghosted you.

No, not though, not the people that ghosted you, your own, the people that accepted, right? Like what, uh, like what did they, what did they experience, right? And then people that rejected the offer, they might tell you. I mean, you could certainly send out like a post-interview question. They declined at that point.

Yeah, right.

No, not if they just disappeared.

So a good— I'm reading between the lines here— a good ATS ATS or a good configuration of an ATS is to have the ATS be capable of doing surveys, candidate surveys, on a regular basis in some sort of automated way so that, you know, yeah, well, it's about communication.

If you have a good talent network and a private talent pool, which that's what a good database is, it shouldn't be the black hole where resumes go to die, right? These are people that you want to engage with, those silver medalists, the people that ghosted you last time because, you know, maybe something happened with them, right? And they had to leave town or whatever, right? Their, their existing employer discovered they were leaving and gave them a raise. I mean, who knows what happened? We don't know. But if they're still in your database, continue to communicate with people. I think that communication and honesty and authenticity in that communication is what people value now. They want it in an employer. They want an employer to regard them as a person and treat them like a customer. Which, you know, I had this conversation with Jerry Crispin, right? That customers and candidates want the exact same thing because he's all about the candidate experience. And they still want the same thing. It's the 3 Rs. They want responsiveness. They want respect. And they want resolution. That's everything that everybody wants right there. And they want it right away. I guess that's the 4th R. Okay.

All right. So, um, I'm going to post the, uh, the link to the blog so people can kind of read, uh, read along. Hopefully this is the blog post that you, that you wrote. All right. So I think, I think I get it. I'm wrapping my head around it. Around the whole ghosting thing. The other one that— the other point that you made in the article that you wrote is about automated sourcing and I guess how do you outperform competition in this high-stakes, faster-paced environment? And one of the answers that you propose is automated sourcing. Obviously, that's something that is, um, you know, right up my alley. But tell me a little bit about what, what do you mean when you say automated sourcing? Because there's no way to make— I know, you know what I'm going to say, right?

I, I know just where you're going with this, and I think we're on the same page because, uh, it's any automation or any technology is a tool. It's a tool, right? Right.

It's the automatic part that I think confuses people. They think automated means it does it by itself. I think that you and I mean by automation is tools that assist us to speed up the process. So technology, like an automated assembly line, is not an assembly line that does everything autonomously. It's an assembly line that uses technology like robots to meet— to make things faster, but it's still supervised, it's still programmed by a person, right? Okay, right.

So the, uh, so the thing about automation, it's a tool, right? Like, let's say you're a really good carpenter and now you have the blueprint for the house. Like, this is the house you have to build. You can use a hammer and nails, right? It'd be better if you had a nail gun, right? And it would be better if you even had a few robots to do some of the, uh, the heavy lifting, as it were, right? So, the tools are not going to make you a better carpenter, right? If you're a bad carpenter, it's just going to help you build a crappy house faster, right? So, the tools have to come into play. You got to know what you're looking for. So, automation can do things like we have an AI tool, for example. It allows you to change the emphasis of what's important. Like when you— it searches through your database and you have certain metrics, you can say that the industry that this candidate works in is more important than their education. So if they're in automotive, right, maybe they don't need that degree because they have the background in automotive, right? Or if they have this skill is more important than that skill, you're allowed to weight and rank these things. So if you have a good database, The AI could uncover people that you have in there that you might otherwise overlook, right? Because you're kind of fine-tuning like what you mean by that, right? Like what is really important for this job. The flip side of that is that the, our AI tool anyway, will help find jobs. Like let's say a great looking candidate, and I mean skilled candidate comes in the door, right? And, and you think the person could be a great fit for the organization, but you've got, you know, 40 open reqs, which one of these jobs is going to be the best one, right? The AI will help determine which one of these jobs that candidate will be the happiest in, right, based on their background and the types of organizations perhaps, or the work that they've done in the past. So AI is one of several tools, right, that can be brought into play for helping you identify the best fit, if you will, and helping when you're sourcing, right, finding the people that would be the happiest in that role. So there are other— there, the word automation, what I meant by that is tools. Automation is any technology, it's just a tool.

And I mean, you know, faster, more accurately, easier, removes the tedium, removes the repetition.

Correct. And then we were back to communication, right? You can automate a lot of communications like those touch points, right, to keep the candidate engaged, like I had mentioned before. So you can set up, you know, sequences of emails and so forth. And then when you get a response, it'll actually stop or notify you that the candidate has responded, right, so that you can do whatever you want to do as a human rather than let the machinery do it. But the machinery can automate a lot of the tasks as well as help speed up the process, right, like press a button and send them the onboarding documents. Right? So it— that's really what is meant by that. It's that for engaging people, for finding them, for helping to— helping determine which candidates are going to be the best match, right?

Yeah.

I know that you preach a lot of that with some of the tools that you use, right? That when—

yeah, yeah. Technology has always been— since day one, technology has always been a way to help us It's always been a way to help us do more in less, more in less time, more with less cost. But also at the same time, also a way to help us be happier in our jobs because there are components of recruitment and sourcing that can be tedium and discouraging and cause burnout, right? So tools and technology can help us avoid that, can help us eliminate some of that, outsource it, if you will, to tasks that are more valuable and more important to the end result, to the outcome, closer to the outcome of the different steps. Every part of the process has a different expected outcome. Sourcing is not— the outcome of sourcing isn't a hire. The outcome of recruiting is a hire. The outcome of sourcing is the ability to make a decision so that we can make a hire. So in a lot of ways, sourcing doesn't necessarily have to provide the candidate that becomes the hire, but sourcing's job is to provide a slate that the hiring manager can then use to make a decision. One of those candidates could have been the one that was sourced, but if a hiring manager only sees one candidate and has no choice, then recruiting hasn't quite done their job yet. Sourcing can come in and provide 2 or 3 candidates so that the hiring manager can make a decision. The outcome of sourcing in that case then are candidates that get submitted to hiring managers that the hiring manager accepts. The outcome of recruiting are candidates that get interviewed and eventually hired. So it's different things, but we can automate parts of that that are very mind-numbing and sometimes allow us to— the best example that I can give you for for some automation is sequencing. Okay, so it's, it's been a long time since we've had these tools that allow you to send an email to somebody that hasn't responded to the previous email. So you have a sequence of 3, 4, 7 emails, whatever. Um, not having sequencing as part of your ATS, I think, is a really— your CRM is a really big fail because it's a very basic way to automate. If you don't have that, I'll give you a picture of what happens with sourcing with my team when I'm looking at what they have to do when they don't have sequencing available is they have to track everybody's most recent message and then have to be able to search against who received message 2 and hasn't replied so that they can message 3. If they can't track that, then they'll be sending message 3 to some people that already replied, which causes friction. And it's also very manual and tedious process. So now you've got sourcers that have to essentially figure out who gets message 3. Automation can solve that by simply having a process that allows you to send a message 3 to people that haven't responded. Basic stuff. There's no AI or magic to that. It's really a rule.

Yeah. A good CRM would have that capability, right?

That would have that. Exactly.

Right.

Yeah. Now a really good CRM will allow you to do that with texting. And mail drops and voicemail drops and other things like that. But that's a pipe dream right now. So what I want to go back to—

when you figure it out, you call us.

Okay. And we'll try to solve that. I tried to solve that before and we got about 90% of the way there and then the machine just went berserk. So that's the other part of automation is that you still have to supervise it. But what I was going to say is with regard to the concept of automation. One of my favorite, my guru, if you will, in automation, who's been on the show before, had a really good example. You used it already, which is the hammer and the nail. He said a robot can more accurately and more rapidly hammer a nail than any human ever will be able to. So if the robot is a nail hammering robot, robots can do it faster and more accurately than humans, period. But don't expect that robot to serve you a pizza. Don't expect that robot to determine which nail to hammer. It's good at hammering nails. So if you need nails hammered, you have a hiring, you know, you have a hammering robot. But if you have a hammering robot, don't use it to send out messages to candidates that have been declined. You know what I'm saying? So it's about the smartness of the workflow that you create. And here is the challenge there. As humans, we have a very difficult time in ideating how to create this workflow. That's the challenge that I see as a consultant when I talk to organizations about automation. They get it, but they don't know what to automate how and how to make the pieces work together. So it's almost like we have the technology today to do some of this automation, like sequencing, but some companies don't even use the sequencing because they feel like, well, what if it does this? What if it doesn't do that? How do I— where do I put the sequences? Are these— and so all these ifs, they literally just get stuck with that and then they don't do it. Technology's there, but they're not using it because of fear and misunderstanding.

So I think I agree. No, I, I agree that you need to have a well-mapped-out process, and you have to, uh, understand that the machinery will make a mistake, right? The machinery is not going to make a perfect pizza, so there will be some errors that slip through. That's just the human part. But for like, you know, let's say you go to a job fair, and you come back with a bunch of candidates that some of them you talk to, some of them just dropped a resume, you know, some of them are excellent, right? So when you put them into your database, and you set up for the follow-up, I think you need to— not everybody is a one-size-fits-all, right? Like right out of the gate, they need to be categorized, like these are the high-value candidates that we talked to that we think are good. Right. These are the ones that they just dropped a resume. We don't know. Right. And then these are some ones that we already know we don't want. So you could break them down into their respective buckets. Right. And categorize them. And then if you wanted to say create a sequence, it's going to be very different. Right.

Because if you send the different sequences for different people.

Yeah. So I see what you mean is that it it does stop people in their tracks right there because they don't want to think about it on the front end. Right? They don't want to think about it on the front end. And then, you know, when you take in my work, for example, being in sales, we have a lot of that automation. And frankly, we've had issues where, you know, maybe I've been working on something and then one of our marketing people initiates a sequence and ends up sending like a very generic message to the president of the company, right?

That he just replied to you, much less who just replied to me, right?

And I'm thinking, okay, that's a little embarrassing. Now we've just stepped on each other and it wasn't appropriate. Right now, a lot of times it doesn't—

by the way, that is called contact collision for those of you that are—

oh, contact collision. Thank you. I had no idea it had a name, but I know exactly That's perfect. Contact collision.

Okay.

So, so you gotta try and avoid that. But, but my point is there's no one size fits all. You can't have a generic thing that's gonna work for everybody, but you do have a group, right? That you can put into a, you know, whatever that segmentation is and say, say this group is going to receive this sequence. Right. And as soon as there's somebody responds, that sequence will stop. And alert a human that there has been a response.

And it'll stop other sequences that they may be on others. And this group should never receive that sequence because they're exempt from that sequence.

Yeah, that's correct.

That's the mapping. And that's the big picture. And that's called strategy.

Right. And that is the whole key that has long been the key to recruiting any, to anything, any business endeavor. If you don't have a strategy in place, you know, what is the old saying? If you don't know where you're going, you're never going to get there, right?

I like to say you can't get there from here if you don't know where here is.

Yeah, there you go. I like that one.

Unless you live in Hawaii, in which case you can keep driving and eventually you'll probably get there.

Yeah, I tell people it's really not possible to get lost unless you're like in the forest and fall into a hole, you know, because you could just eventually figure it out.

Hey, um, I wanted to keep on to the— go on to the next subject. But there was a quick question. So, John, one of our viewers was asking to confirm the 4 Rs. That was responsiveness, respect, resolution, and right away. Did I get that right?

And right away was just added today. I've always had them as the 3 Rs. Right away is just added to the list. But yes, it's response, right? It's like, think of yourself as a customer. You want respect, you want response, and you want resolution. And nowadays, everybody wants it right away. So, we created a 4th R And that is your candidate experience right there, right in a nutshell.

So shout out to Bridget for, for posting that answer. And then another one that came in from our viewers, there was a question around what AI tool were you referring to or do you use?

Yeah, the AI tool, we, we're Smart Search, the applicant tracking system, and we license The Sovereign AI is integrated into our system. And one reason we chose it is that we felt it did a better job of learning. It's— we were very sensitive to the whole diversity recruiting, the need for that and the de-biasing of the process. And a lot of the AI tools that we looked at Who does it learn from? It learns from the recruiter, right? It learns based on your— it learns from the human. And all of those unconscious or even conscious biases that are built in, it will learn that. So we felt that Sovrin did the best job of comparing the job requirement to the candidate without looking at things that would give it away, like when it presents the information, It might say that it was a top school. It wouldn't say that it would, you know, like what that school would be, right?

It wouldn't call out the bias, right?

Like a historically Black college or, you know, a community college or whatever. It really— when you use the tools, it's zeroing in on skills and the employment history depending on what the job description is. So it's looking for the— at the job description and then mapping the skills and the resume and the history, the work history of that person. And that's how it's doing it. So we— that's what we like most about it. And I was the major contributing factor to choosing that.

Right.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Because there's a lot of different ways to process information and bias, unfortunately, can be, how do I put it? This is one of the downsides of technology is that—

Oh, and it's Sovren, Shelley, in the text, it's S-O-V-R-E-N, not sovereign like the king, S-O-V-R-E-N. Yeah, for anyone that wants to check it out.

Right, okay. Yeah, and one of the other things on your blog post was about the positive and negative impact and I think we touched on several of those, both positive and negative impacts. This is one of those negative impacts, particularly in DEI. But what I was gonna say is that technology allows us to replicate our bias. And the problem with the negative impact of that is that technology is unaware of the bias. We as humans have unconscious bias. We may have our own bias and prejudice that we may not even be aware of. Although there's training and education and things that we can do to remediate that. But machines will always be completely oblivious to bias because they're learning from us. So we teach them how to stack rank recs or candidates, and they learn how to do that exactly the way we do it. And if there's bias in that already, they essentially will repeat that bias without bias. In other words, they will apply that bias unilaterally And that's a problem. So we have to make sure that we're constantly auditing what they're doing.

And then who was it that said, we really don't want the machines to get that much smarter now, do we? Like, who was it? It was either Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking or like one of these like super brain guys that said, if the machines get too smart, they will kill us. And all I can think about is like Skynet is coming.

Right. Yeah. I think we're a very long way from that. But what are the other negative impacts that you've seen of technology? You mentioned something about the gig work, temps, and some of that. I have had— I'll be honest, and I told you, I've explored several of those Uber for staffing types of platforms, and they seem to work best when they are for a very, very narrow vertical, like emergency room nurses or something like that. But what are— right, what are the downsides of that?

Um, well, I think the downside is reflected in pretty much all aspects of our, of our world as we become more digital, is that you really don't want to take out that human element. I'm on the cusp of writing a blog post that I think we need to stop calling it human resources. I've never felt comfortable with it, or the idea of the war for talent. It's not a war. You want war, go look at Ukraine. Okay, nobody's hiding in basements.

Nobody's getting hurt.

Yeah, right. So we need to not lose the human element in there. And one of our philosophies have always been like the idea of a stack. And that now is emerging as, of course, the preferred way, right, to have a platform that supports your stack of technology and that you can quickly and easily swap out the parts because the technology does evolve and change. But I think the big downside is you can't rely on it too much, right? You can't rely on the technology to do the work of the human or forget that human element. Like, that brings us back to the R's, right? It's like people want respect. The machinery does respects no one. Okay.

Everyone equally, which—

that's right, it disrespects everyone equally. But, but we can't, we can't lose sight of that, right? We can't lose sight of the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all. And a lot of automation, we're not there yet, it delivers the one-size-fits-all. The last conference that I attended live and in person, there was huge discussion around AI and someone told a story about like self-driving cars. And I'm sitting there thinking, you know, I don't really want a self-driving car. I want a self-parking car, right? So that my car is like a driverless Uber. So I hit my app and the car comes to me and it drops me off and then it either goes and parks itself somewhere or it goes home and then comes and picks me up. When I'm ready, right?

You would still need self-driving to get that, right?

Yeah, it can drive itself when I'm not present, right? Because, because I like to drive, right? What I don't like is cruising around downtown looking for a place to park.

Basically, you're saying you want Knight Rider. I mean, that's, that's pretty much what you're saying. You want—

yes, I do. Yes, I do.

Or you want, uh, oh man, I'm I'm drawing a blank here. Um, what was the name of— oh, the Lone Ranger. You want the Lone Ranger and his horse Silver, right?

Silver, yes.

Yeah, so all you had to do was whistle and Silver would come, right? The Silver Automobile, where like you whistle.

That's right, I want the Night Driver car and I'm gonna name it Silver.

Silver, yeah, that's perfect. Well, I want this— the Night Driver Silver Candidate system is what I want. Yeah, that's around. I want to be able to whistle and the candidates are available for interviews. That's what I want.

Absolutely. I think all my crews want that too. Yeah.

Well, yeah, everybody does.

I think right now you're dealing with humans, right? You're dealing with humans. And I think you can't— there's like the— like when you come to work, you're an iceberg. People only see the tip of your iceberg. Work, right? But the rest of you and your life and your family and your finances and whatever other demands are on you, they're all underneath the surface, but they're there. You bring them to work every day, right? So we need to go back to the idea of the personnel department and stop referring to people as resources. I am not a mineral, right?

To be mined. We will mine. So, so really what we're doing is we're borrowing your talent temporarily and using your talent to our advantage as a company. That's really what it comes down to. We're not mining it because we don't get to keep it. Yeah.

But ideally we're not—

Yeah.

You're not acquiring, you're not acquiring me. Right. I am not a tool to be acquired. Right.

You know, a resource to be had.

And I wouldn't even say you're so much using my skills as relying on them. Right.

You're too much for me to do my job and to to contribute, right?

The ideal worker, right? The ideal worker wants to be there and wants to do that work, right? And so to me, the war for talent, it's not a war. It's never been a war. It's always been— I have two analogies here. One is that it's like courtship, right? It's like a seduction, like let's make love, not war. You want them to be engaged with you. You want to wine them, dine them, and then ultimately you want them to marry you and be committed to that relationship. Right? And then you have to maintain that relationship like any good marriage, right? You have to nurture that and deliver that same respect, right, that, that you did in the beginning. So, in a way, recruiting has always been more like a courtship and a dating process. Ultimately, you want to lead them to the altar and get them to commit to, you know, contributing to the well-being of the family, which is your company. Right? So that's one analogy. The other analogy that I'm fond of is the Olympics. Like, you have an Olympic team, right? And you want to be the best at that particular thing. And so now you want your best of athletes, right?

It's a competition. It's a competition for talent. It's, it's who wins, not the war, but who wins the competition for who gets the talent, who gets to leverage, or, you know, or, or borrow the talent that is the best talent for the job. And right in that way, it is the Olympics. Yeah, I got you.

Right. So either one of those analogies work for me because there is competition, right? And you do have to, you know, engage with that individual to get them to join your team or to marry you, as the case may be. And that is a peaceful process, right? And a happy ending. War never really ends well, does it?

Okay, I would tell you that even more than that, it's actually a friendly. So, you know, one of the things that are, um, really to me have always been very impressive about the Olympics is the support between the athletes, where they even practice together, you know, in the, in the, in the Olympic Village. They, they do things to help each other, and, you know, when they get on On the field, they compete to their maximum possible potential, but off the field, there's a camaraderie of, you know, we all want the best outcome for each other. We all want to be the best that we can be, and we can do that by helping each other as opposed to by, um, you know, hiding our, our secret trade, or, you know, etc.

Yeah, you want everyone to, to get better, and I think everyone— that isn't that the goal? Is that we all want to do our best work, right? We want to come in and do our best work every day, you know?

Yeah, exactly. That, that's what I think is a big advantage of— for me, sourcing has always been that, like, I've always shared ideas with other people. And, and one of the things I think differentiates the sourcing job from the recruiting job is the fact that sourcing has a much more tight-knit community And it was at first just because it was smaller, but I've always tried to champion sharing of information so that all sourcers were better at what they did. And before that, the whole concept of recruiting, what I didn't like about recruiting when I started was it was so us versus them. My first job in recruiting as a staffing firm recruiter, I had my own little desk and I had my own candidates and nobody wanted to share candidates and nobody wanted to tell me how they found their candidates. And since I was the rookie, everybody else was doing things, you know, faster, better. They were making money and I had, I was, I was not gonna make it had I not figured out a way to do something different, which was internet recruiting. And it was like everybody hoards their candidates and candidate ownership and, and that's come full circle now. My sourcing team, we have, 2 or 3, sometimes 4 people working on the same rec, sharing candidates and doing different parts of the process because we're specialized. I have somebody who's really good on the phone who makes phone calls better than everybody else. So when we got a rec where it's really tough to get people on the phone, this person is our call, our go-to caller. And they'll call on my rec, they'll call on, you know, Elliot's rec, they'll call on Mike's rec because they're good at calling. Mike's not going to lose credit for that. That's very different than it used to be in recruiting back in the day. And even in recruiting today, there's still requisition ownership or this recruiter works with that business unit. And the only problem I see with that right now is that it limits the ability to shop a candidate around. And so with me, I would love to see a technology that, like you said, is able to match the candidate to the right job. But also is able to share the candidate to other recruiters, you would need a recruiting organization that's okay with that. And that's a cultural change. So in other words—

Yeah, I was going to say technology doesn't solve that problem.

It doesn't solve it, but it enables it.

It enables it. Yeah, it does enable it. It does enable it. So I agree with you.

This candidate's not good for this rep. Let me mark this candidate as shareable. Or whatever, you know, somehow make it available. And so other recruiters can, can pick it up and that makes it possible to do the sharing because otherwise if Recruiter A doesn't have access to Rec A, then Recruiter A can't see the other candidates there. And how often do you hear this from your customers? There are lots of candidates that you call them silver medalists. They were the second best for this particular job. They could be the first best for another job, but nobody goes back and looks at them because they're right.

Nobody goes back and look— oh well, this is something that we espouse in almost every single one of our training programs. It's like this, the idea of the silver medalists, right? You want to have special treatment for them because they were the people that rejected the offer, right? Or they were the second choice, right? Those are the people that they had time invested in you and didn't get the job, you need to be especially kind to them. Because you can absolutely find another opportunity for them. And they'll be the number one candidate, right? So especially if you're in that interview, and you realize that this might not be the best fit, right, then you need to immediately see if there is something else before they walk away and go somewhere else. But yeah, I love that Olympic Village content. Concept. I feel another blog post coming on.

Okay, all right, let's do it. I have kept you way past, uh, past our bedtime here, um, and although for those of you that are listening, you probably don't realize Sylvia is actually, um, in Hawaii, and so probably the time over there is still early in the morning for you.

No, it's not that early. It's, it's 8:20, 8:18, something like that. It's 8:20. But no, it's been a real pleasure. We didn't get to touch on my big thing, but I think we talked a little bit about diversity and recruiting, that when you have the automation, it really is important to choose tools that are going to help you identify the true, the best fit, and not carry over your own conscious or unconscious bias into that process.

How about this? Let's make that the topic of another call, um, and it'll just be specifically diversity and automate— like automation, recruitment automation and diversity. And we'll schedule that for a few weeks from now. We'll—

oh, would love to, would love to talk about that because that's, uh, that's been something that we've really been exploring. In fact, we have been looking at a tool, um, that we haven't quite narrowed in on yet, but it would be a quote-unquote resume debiasser. So that it— because this, again, like, this is what Sovrin does when it presents candidates. It kind of chunks them up into the various skills and the industries and the things of this nature that coincide with what it is that's on the job rec. What we want is the resume debiased or to reformat the resume in a similar way, right? So that it strips off, right, right. So that all of the resumes are now kind of homogenized, right, into the same way that would eliminate some of that unconscious bias as people just skim through them, right? Because that, you know, you look at it for 20 seconds, you come away with an impression, right? And people do write resumes in a way that personalizes and does reveal some information that maybe it shouldn't at that stage of the process. So we are always looking for ways to help level the playing field on that, like in that initial evaluation. But okay, thank you so much for having me today. Aloha, mahalo nui loa, and aloha kākou. Thank you to everyone who's attended today.

Alexa, stop. All right, thank you very much. We'll see you back here. Pick a Friday and let me know, and we'll get it going.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Shelly. Enjoy the rest of your day, and thank you everyone. Have a wonderful weekend, and happy Mother's Day to all you mothers out there.

Happy Mother's Day, everybody.

See ya.