Shally's Alley Live with Steve Rawlings

Hello everybody and welcome to Shally's Alley. It is Friday, April 16th at roughly around 1-ish PM, you know, speaking of Latin time there. My special guest today is Steve Rawlings, and this is Steve Rawlings' second defense coming on the show. Apparently we didn't get enough last time. Steve, welcome to the show. Thanks.

It's great to be here.

You had some interesting things to say that I wanted to talk to people about, and maybe a little controversial, and definitely impassioned controversial, but it's based on actual results. So I wanted to talk a little bit about that. You sent me a couple of ideas to discuss, but one of them was, what are the reasons that people change jobs? And right now in the middle of everything that's going on, there's, there's a lot going on. I mean, there's, there's stuff going on in New York, there's stuff going on in, in Europe, in the Ukraine and Shanghai. I mean, it's like all this turmoil everywhere. People are still moving around, changing jobs. So why did they do it? What's been your finding recently for the reasons people are switching jobs nowadays?

Well, you know, there's a lot of discussion around it. I discuss it a lot with peers. You and I have discussed it. I discuss it with people I've worked in the past and other leaders that I'm in touch with all the time. And we're always trying to figure out what the motivators are to get people to move. I was just doing some reading for today and the latest JOLTS report said 4.3 million Americans left their jobs in just January, a couple of months back. So that's the latest number. That's a huge—

Did they leave for another job or did they just leave and say, I'm done with this?

I think both. I think both. But I think clearly it was still due to kind of the same factors that that as things go back to normalization, people have learned that they kind of enjoyed being working at home. A lot of people are more productive working at home. I know that I am. I've been both in an office and in a home environment, mostly work-at-home environment for most of my career, and I've always felt more productive at home. But I think there's a lot of people that are looking beyond just the work-at-home thing. They're looking at if they're employer meets their needs. So there's a lot of reasons why people leave. I mean, you know, there's kind of a top 5, and really, if people don't feel like leadership is taking care of them, that's like one of the number one things. Managers can be like the number one reasons why people decide to look for other opportunities. And that kind of goes in line with some other things like Can I make an impact position I'm in? You know, people want to feel like what they're doing every day is important to the goals and the mission of a company. Am I stagnating or am I able to learn and grow in what I'm doing? Am I going to get siloed and stuck doing this forever, or is there opportunities to expand what my knowledge is or poke myself into other areas of my, of my area of expertise to learn more, become more valuable? And, you know, am I working for a company that's innovative and has a mission that I believe in and I feel good about? And then kind of last is like, is like really compensation and total rewards, which includes the flexibility to work at home. So we're finding there's a lot of motivating factors right now that, well, now that they know that there's opportunities out there, it's certainly a candidate-driven market that that if they're not happy, they have options.

So you're saying it's, it's a, it's a new thing. I mean, I always thought that people would switch jobs because of their leadership. As I mean, I don't know if that's necessarily post-pandemic or I don't know if we're still in the pandemic. I, you know, is that, is that really a new thing? I mean, it's always been about that, hasn't it been? I've always talked about—

current managers have always been the number one reason.

I was going to say, exactly. Yeah, people don't leave companies, they leave people. That's right. It's always been number one reason to see if you switch jobs. Yeah.

So I think there's maybe just more of a comfort in doing it now because people know that there's opportunities, right? I think a lot of people, uh, out there have realized that they have options. I mean, I know that in certain IT sectors that I work in, some of these, even if you're a newer graduate, you're getting 15 or 20 recruiter touches a week. You have opportunities for interviews. You can kind of pick and choose which company you want to go work for. And, and so that's what folks are being picky. And they, they realize that they can be, and, and they're looking for that, for that company that's going to fit what they need. Now, it doesn't mean that everybody should work at home. There are some people that thrive in an office environment, the Generation Z folks, so, you know, so to speak. Polls have shown that many of them tend to enjoy being in an office environment because they like the socialization and the synergy that comes out of that. So it really is up to the company to be able to meet the needs of a very— of a varying different kind of employee depending on what they bring to the table and figure out how they can adjust their culture and the way that they work to, to get the best talent they can. That makes sense.

Okay. All right. So is it— I guess, I guess my question is, what are you experiencing when you're talking to candidates that is more importantly for us as recruiters and, you know, boots on the ground doing the job that is motivating them to look at the job, right? So they have options, like you said, lots of options, and they may be more aware of those options now, or they simply be more motivated because they realize— a lot of people are beginning to realize that you don't have— that you have a choice. You don't have to stay with a, with a, an employer that doesn't treat you well, or, you know, whatever the reasons. But is it is when you're reaching out, what is the conversion factor? What is it that you feel is getting them to respond to our outreach more than anything else? You know what I mean? When you're making that first contact, what is the— you can't put all 5 of those in an outreach email on the first email. Hi Steve, I'm interested in talking with you. Let me tell you, we have great leadership, you can make an impact here, you're gonna learn, you're gonna grow, you're gonna have a great compensation package. I mean, yeah, like, so what is it?

Well, I, you know, I, I, I've been, I've been struggling with that myself in, in this market. It's been challenging, you know. I think that, that, um, um, what I've experienced is that a lot of companies, um, are very, are very prideful of their product, especially in the tech startup space. And they have the right to be. They've been innovators. They've grown from literally an idea to several hundred employees. But I think that what I realized anyway was that you're looking at the numbers. I think, believe it or not, last year was the largest number of unicorns ever. I think it was 480, if I'm remembering correctly. And the year before that was the largest number up until that point ever. And this was during COVID of like 250. And so right now—

So what you're saying is all that merger, all those mergers and acquisitions that are happening are being offset by the creation of these, you know, new companies. Like, I was thinking to myself, all these acquisitions, like, we're going to be left down— we're going to be left to like 3 companies, you know. Have you ever seen those movies? They make one of the mega corporations like Pepsi, Taco Bell, Microsoft, Oracle, Google.

Yeah, you know, corporations like Kraft Foods, right?

Yeah, Kraft, Pepsi, Motorola, uh, Dell, HP. Yeah, like whatever.

Yeah.

Um, so you're saying that that's— it's being offset?

It is. I think so, because I mean, there was an article in Forbes I was reading. There's over 1,000 unicorn companies now. And so unicorn companies, remember, are companies that are evaluated over $1 billion, you know, and, and, and in the startup phases and have a certain amount of funding, etc., etc. And there's 1,000 of those companies right now. So what does that mean? That means we've got 1,000 fantastic innovators with 1,000 new ideas of how to bring technology to the market. 1,000 visionary CEOs and 1,000 companies that quite honestly are cash flush. They've got hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, which means that they can afford to be very competitive in the offers that they make when they're hiring. So I think the shift I realized was to shift from, hey, we got a cool product, which a lot of companies do, to, hey, here's really the reasons you want to work here. You know, things like, you know, the Glassdoor score that's like a 4.7, you know, 100% of employees saying that they feel psychologically safe in a built-in article that's written about them. So citing those types of things that say, hey, this is what makes us special. What makes us special is we take care of our people, we value them, you know, opportunity here, not just I'm not just saying there's opportunity, but here's what our people say about the opportunity they've experienced here. Here's what people say about our CEO. Here's how people feel psychologically safe. And to really, you know, I kind of spoon-feed them in a cadence of outgoing messages. You know, a lot of people don't catch the first or the second. So I might mention one of these things in my first outgoing message and then another one of these special things in the second. And it starts to paint a picture. And you can, and And a lot of times people might not respond till the, to the third outgoing message, but now they've kind of got a real complete picture of just all the ways that, that, you know, we're different, you know, and that's what I'm trying to, to get across. And I think that that's what's effective in, in getting people, you know, on top of the cool product, we're a great place to be. Our people are great. We're, you know, here's some things that people say of why they love being here. And that really seems to be attracting folks more than adjustable product to the tech.

So good, good people. In other words, being surrounded by people. But how do you put that in an email, right? Like, you send out a message or a LinkedIn InMail or whatever, hey, we have great people. That's— that back in the '90s when recruiters would be like, oh, we have great benefits. Yeah, everybody has great benefits. I mean, benefits are table stakes, you know. So does that really— how do you say we have great people? What do you, what do you do to prove it?

Well, one of the things I did instead of trying to explain it was I just went on the Glassdoor and screen captured the 4.7-star rating and 100%, you know, the little graph that has 100% confidence in the CEO, 92% employee satisfaction, and stuck it in as my footer. So, uh, you know, it's hard to explain some things when a graphic can take it. One of the other things I went to was, was on our careers page and screen captured the part about how we take care of our people, the bullet points, the benefits, and unlimited PTO and things like that, and put that in as a footer for the second outgoing message. So, yeah, because some of these things are hard to explain, and you're better off with employee testimonial video. You know, there's been a couple of those on YouTube that I've used about, you know, engineers and what's the cool thing about working on this kind of, you know, in this department, and paste that in there. You know, here's what one of our, you know, here's what one of our employees had to say about working in the machine language, you know.

Yeah, testimonials have always been a good method, a good technique. There's actually a company called Spark Hire, and there's a few others like that that are really good at helping organizations create testimonials for themselves using user-generated content. So it's like, you know, you don't need a video department or a film crew. It's an app that goes on your mobile phone, and the hiring manager will literally just do a walkthrough of here's a day of my job. I saw a demo of that, of the tool once, and they had, uh, they showed a video which was an ad— it's not an ad, but it was created by this, this tool where it was a BOM tech, and the BOM tech's like, well, this is what my job is really like, you know. It's like the kind of things you're not going to see that on a, on a job posting. It doesn't really describe—

no, that's brilliant.

Get suited up in the big old, you know, heavy suit and, and have the, the robot. And it's kind of cool, and it's, it's a person doing the job. It's not an actor, it's not a film crew.

That's right. It's the same kind of stuff that people see a day in the life of, right?

You know. Yeah, so that's a really good one. Absolutely. Hey, you mentioned talking about things like learn— will I learn? Will I grow? Am I, you know, am I, am I not? Am I gonna just, um do a job or is it busywork? My question for you is this, and maybe playing a little bit of devil's advocate, is it really the employer's responsibility that you grow professionally?

I think it's to their advantage that they make sure their employees grow professionally.

No doubt to their advantage, but is it their responsibility? Like, is it— is their job to, to develop you?

I, you know, I can, I can see your devil's advocacy. I think that that, that is part of what any good employer should want to do. They should want to develop their talent so that they can become more valuable to the organization as time, as time goes by, or to their competitors when they leave. Well, but then it's up to them to find, to find ways to keep them, you know, to make sure that they are challenged. I think You know, again, one of the reasons that people leave is they feel like, you know, they're just doing, you know, busy work all day long and they don't feel challenged. After folks do that for a while, they start to feel like they may be falling behind their peers as far as their skill level. And I mean, you know how fast just this industry moves, Kelly. I mean, if we don't take a conscious effort to stay on top of the tech that's out there, on the trends that are out there, you know, 3 months goes by and all of a sudden all this stuff's happened, you know, when you're buried married, you know, in your work, you know, and you look up and all of a sudden, you know, wait, now you're digging into my livelihood here.

That's how I make a living. See, I want people to stay, you know, in the shadows and not learn anything because then they come meet— they come to me and say, hey, can I pay you to train me? So, uh, no, but I guess you're saying—

but I would say, but at the same time, you help a lot of people learn, man, and it keeps them feeling— it keeps them relevant and it keeps them competitive. And doing what they do. And I think—

absolutely. But those are people who are taking—

yeah, and companies hire you to help their people do this.

I think so. Here's, here's my take on that. My philosophy on that is I think the employer has a responsibility to provide the habitat for development, but I don't think it's their responsibility to conduct the development. In other words, what I'm saying is I would like for my employer to give me, um, the time to be able to do my own development. Some employers will pay for your degree, others will just, you know, pay for you to attend classes or, or just, you know, that kind of thing. But they're not the ones that are teaching it, right? Um, and they're not encouraging you to go get a degree. If you want to pursue education, you can, you can do that. So I think it's the employer's responsibility to make it possible or enable it or provide that habitat for me. But I don't necessarily think that my employer should be telling me where— like, I don't think they should be providing me career advice or direction or— right, sure. So I almost have to—

you're coming from—

take the— but if somebody asks, people should take responsibility for themselves.

Yeah, yeah, no, certainly people need to take the initiative and say, hey, you know, I'd be really interested in learning about this or getting more involved in the backend as opposed to the frontend. If you're a full-stack engineer or whatever, I'd really like to develop these skills more. Then I get on a project where there's both frontend and backend work required. I agree, it's up to the person to have that curiosity and make the learning tools available to them.

But then, you know, it's like the whole take a horse to water, but you can't force them to drink. You know what I mean?

And I think that that's part of the whole aspect of having a psychologically safe environment. You know, I've worked in environments where if you ask to do something different, it can be misconstrued as you're discontent with what you're doing and have negative effect. So I think that amplifies the importance of having a learning environment, a commitment to allow people to learn and grow and having that psychologically safe environment so people can express curiosity in other things without it being taken as malcontentment in what they're doing. Yeah. And that's important because then if you have that kind of environment, then people don't speak up and the learning and the development just doesn't take place. And people do tend to stagnate, which either they become content doing the same thing for a lot of their career and maybe never have the opportunities for advancement or growth, or feel the—

Because they feel like if they— I see what you're saying. Right. So that's what you mean by psychologically safe. I was wondering about that because You know, that could mean a lot of things from inclusion to, you know, and I'm sure they're all part of that. But I was curious about that statement for sure.

So I think a psychologically safe environment is someplace where, you know, there's a lot of companies that say, you know, we value transparency and we value new ideas and we value people that push back on the status quo. But do they?

And then they punch you in the teeth when you bring up a new idea, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's easy to say it, but to really embrace it, I think, is an altogether different thing. Um, and, and that doesn't mean that you have to follow every idea that everybody comes up with, not at all. There's still a strategic direction of the company, and leadership has to, has to make the decisions that they think are going to be to their best interest as an organization. But But to have a safe forum where you know that you're listened to and that, and that if you have a crazy idea, it'll at least be considered and maybe even, maybe even attempted or tried, you know. And regardless of its success or failure, you're encouraged to make those kinds of creative outbursts, so to speak, so that new things do get to the table.

With my, with my team, here's an idea. With my teams that I've led, built and led in the past, One of the things I like to do is in their, in their success metrics, one of the items, you know, how usually you'll have 3, 4, or 5 areas that, that you, how you rate your employees from meets to exceeds and so on. One of the areas that I like to include in there is contributions of new ideas. So I'm not just asking them to come up with new ideas, I'm actually putting it into into their key performance measures to encourage them to do it. It's not a requirement, okay? There's not a quota of new ideas, like you must have one new idea every week, because that's just, you know, that's just going to create busywork. But it's in there where it says you can actually increase your rating. You know, if you're at meets, you might get exceeds if you have provided So I'm allowing them the room to do that. I'm encouraging them to do that. And I'm even making room for a certain portion of their time to be dedicated to taking new initiatives that do not have a proven result, a proven outcome. So they can go out and experiment and they're not held back if they don't do it. And the other side of that is the actual hard numbers, because you have to have these in these, you know, if you don't have hard numbers, to reach, like if you say, you know, must improve your conversion rates or whatever, by how much? Like by 3%, by 10%? So what I'm doing in the hard numbers of, for example, candidates converted or candidates accepted, that kind of thing, I'm leaving, I'm reducing that appropriately to leave room for the other. So what I'm saying is, Steve, you know that you could, I'm making up a number here, you know that if you were all cylinders firing, full horsepower, If you were doing nothing but sourcing for 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, or whatever, however long your work week is, you know that you could produce, let's say, 20 qualified, interested candidates for these difficult positions per week. If that's what you were doing, right? But now if we expect you to take a little bit of a risk and try new things, I can't hold you to the same 20. So I reduce that a little bit, right? So I'm making room in my expectation of outcomes because one of those outcomes, a smaller portion of it, but one of those outcomes is these new ideas. So that's how I've done it because the other thing that I find is that organizations add all these, they look like benefits. Sure, we'll encourage you to take a course, we'll encourage you to experiment, but you still gotta do your regular job for, you know, like you still have to achieve everything else everybody achieves. So if I want to develop, if I want to move forward, I literally have to overperform by a huge factor. I have to overperform everybody else so that I have time to do these other things. That's what I'm saying is, you know, it's—

if you're putting it in and make the time to do those other things, right?

Exactly. You gotta, you gotta leave the room in there. Um, schedule a bi-weekly training call or a bi-weekly, you know, let's all gather, if you're onsite, let's all gather at the conference room, bring in sandwiches, and we're gonna dedicate that to, you know, quiet study or whatever. And just like make room for it and measure for it so you're not disincentivizing people. Because the other side of that, of course, is, hey, if I wanna exceed, if I wanna not just meet my goals, but I wanna exceed them, then I might have to actually work harder in order to do any of the things that are positive for my development.

Yeah, yeah, no, I, yeah, no, I totally agree with it.

Yeah, you know what I'm saying? It's, it's not, it's not about, um, like, I'm not saying that we have to coddle people, uh, or, or cut, cut their expectations in half because we gotta, you know, but you adjust for it appropriately. The, the problem is that you have to actually know what production looks like. You have to know, and in our industry it can be really tricky, especially in sourcing. I find a lot of organizations feel like sourcing needs to be measured by the number of hires, which is completely inappropriate. Not to get off topic. I know we're talking about other stuff, but—

No, no, but it is, it is, it is true.

Yeah, if you're measuring somebody by— it's economics. It's a whole concept of economics. If you're measuring somebody by a particular number, then you know what? That's what they're gonna work towards. That's because that's where the incentive is. If you're saying that in order for you to get your bonus, you have to make 27 widgets a week, then they're gonna do whatever it takes to make 27 widgets a week. And if they don't have time for anything else, that's, they're just gonna focus on that. So you're disincentivizing them from any of the other activities that might ultimately make them more productive to where they can actually achieve 30 widgets a week had they spent a couple of hours, you know, learning a new skill or trying a new technique or trying something that they've never done before. You see what I mean? The outcome kind of outweighs that, balances out.

Well, no, that's actually relevant to what we're talking about because I think that especially in sourcing and recruiting right now, you know, a lot of organizations are truly struggling with this candidate-driven market. It's unlike anything that really any of us have ever seen. I've seen candidate-driven markets before, but this is by far the strongest candidate-driven market I've ever seen. They really do—

It's bordering on ridiculous at this point.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the amount of outreaches that you have to do has gone up, and that's why we're trying to find more meaningful ways to engage them in those outreaches, because traditional outreach methods that are old school of, hey, I'm recruiting for this great design engineer position, you're a design engineer and you should check it out, they just don't work. You're going to get zero replies with those, or very few. I don't want to say zero, but very few replies.

So you've got to find the signal-to-noise ratio is just going to speak to the person.

And, and, and, and, and I mean, I, I mean, I don't know about you, but my emails and in-mails are so full that I don't have time to go through them every day. No, people don't. So when I want to go through them so quick, it's got to be something captivating. It's got to be something interesting that catches my attention, or it just whizzes by. And I think we're all in the same boat. We're all working hard. And even if we're in a job market, we're looking because we want to make that move. And it's up to us as sourcers to find— to speak to that. And I think that special something is really about the humanity of working, not the product of working or the process of working, but But the human factors are what people have found coming out of this COVID thing where everybody had to work at home for a while. People's names have shifted for good or for bad. I don't know. I don't think anybody knows yet.

Yeah. And right. Nobody knows yet because the studies or whatever haven't been concluded or whatever. Proper terminology is for that. But you actually mentioned something about a pre-pandemic study that found that fully remote workers were, even though they're, to quote the article, 13% more productive, they were only half as likely to get promoted as people who were—

that's right—

their equivalent, but who spent more time in the office or some time in the office or something like that. I gotta say, I'm gonna question the sanity of that. I would like, I get that that was pre-pandemic, but I would like to challenge that the pandemic has changed a lot of things in a very permanent way. And we don't, as you said, know the impact of that just yet. But I think that that's gonna be one of those things because companies that have figured out how to work online and in person together, have solved for that in their own way. Every culture is different, right? But they've solved for that. And if you're tracking anything about the metrics around developing your people or progression of your, you know, progression of your career, of people that you employ, and you realize the pattern is, well, nobody who, you know, is remote gets promoted or they don't get promoted nearly as much. I think that's a bit too obvious. I think the pandemic has made it a lot more difficult for people to hide that factor, right? If you have 20 or 30% of your population that works remotely, then it's okay to hide that 20 or 30% of your population never gets promoted. But if 70% of your population is working remotely, then how are you gonna hide that? You know what I mean? You're only gonna promote people who are in the office. It's gonna be way more obvious now. Now that, oh, well, they got promoted because they're in the office. It's— it's— I think that that's completely changed, and that pre-pandemic study is one of those things that you need to delete.

And, and I've experienced this firsthand. I mean, yeah, no, I've, I've lost opportunities, you know, or not been given opportunities because I was like, I, I work at home. And in the pre-pandemic— yeah, yeah, in the past. Yeah, what's wrong with this guy? Like, you know, he must not be a team player. And the article even talks about there just being unconscious bias, things that people can't necessarily even verbalize, but they just feel like something must not be quite right with this person if they have to work at home. This was pre-pandemic. Now, through the pandemic, we've proven to ourselves that people can be enormously productive at home. As a matter of fact, a lot of organizations have reported that their productivity was up during COVID Are yet are wanting to see people back in the office because they feel it's important for the cultural adhesion. But there's that balance, right?

I do like that, but that's a visit to the office, that's not living in the office. I like to work from home but then go to the office, you know, occasionally, maybe even frequently, but that's, that's different. I think the environment now of like requiring— that the whole word of require, requiring people to go back to the office, that's a little harsh. I think it should be more like hybrid, or, you know, if you have to have it. Now, there are obviously some jobs that absolutely have to be on site. That's not ever going to change. There are things that you must do from the factory, the office, the, the, the, the site, the location.

It's hard to be electrician at home, right?

Yeah, it's hard to be, uh, exactly. Now, now, we might, with robots, figure out a way to do that, or something, you know, remote control. Don't they have like remote control surgery now?

Yeah, yeah. I don't know if I would kind of trust that yet with my internet connection. I'd lose a liver or something.

But I think the point is that you're not going to do it from home. I think you still have to go to a sterile environment. Although maybe Amazon's going to get in the business of shipping you the, the robot for the surgery. Once, once Amazon and Uber merge, then, you know, Amazon, Uber, and the largest hospital will merge and they'll be like Amazon, Uber, hospital, like we were talking about at the beginning.

Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Get out of my head. You know exactly where my head is at.

Yeah, I don't know.

You could—

but yeah, going back to that whole, you know, so when you're sourcing, I actually don't— when, when my team does outreach, I don't, I don't encourage people to utilize the, you know, anything that's divisive. Basically in the outreach, I don't encourage them to do it.

I agree, I agree. I think it's impossible.

But you know, things that are unconsciously divisive, like for example, the whole vaccination thing or the whole, you know, working remotely. Well, I'm lucky that at the organization where I am right now, it's work from where you're comfortable, right? That's the philosophy. We have offices. You're more than welcome to come to them. As you said, some people like the social environment. And other people don't. You're welcome to visit the offices. Anybody can come, you know, so it's, it's a, it's an option, but it's not a defined— we don't say you have to, you know, unless it's a job where you actually, where you actually have to, as in you can't do the job remote. But I think it's the jury's still out. I think that would scare people away.

I'm looking at 4 different articles here, right? Um, one's from the Washington Post where that says 5 days a week in the office, it's better for everyone, you know, from Blue and from a Bloomberg.

How is 5 days a week in the office better for everyone?

Well, right next to it is a Fortune article written like a day later that says you only need to go to the office 1 or 2 days a week. It's a new Harvard Business School study. And then, and then NBC comes out on their Make It magazine about 50% of leaders are saying, yeah, that they want people to come back in, and, and, and 50% are saying that they, that they're going to let them stay at home. So it's still a big, a big mystery that's, that's, that's open to a lot of opinion being spliced with fact and, and data. Um, I don't think that you can ignore the data that there's a certain amount of product work at home. I know that that for me, I find the office environments to be distracting personally for me. You know, there's, you know, with people stopping by your office and, you know, when I get into focus time and doing what I do, I can get an awful lot of work done if I have a few hours where there's no phone ringing and there's no one knocking at the door. There's no office event that you have to go and stand and attend to because if not, you're not being a you know, team player or whatever, you know, no water chats, no yoga at 3:30 in the afternoon or whatever. And, and I find that I can get a lot more done. But then some people, some people enjoy those environments, and I can, and I can appreciate that. So I agree, I think that they really have to look at the— they have to balance the personal needs of somebody that they feel is going to be a valuable, productive member of the team, you know, versus the, you know, the perception of needing people in the office all the time and being able to keep that valuable productive member of the team. There's a balancing act that companies are going to have to achieve. And I think they're still looking for that equilibrium. You know, they're not quite sure what to do because like I said, 4.3 billion people lost their jobs in January. I heard it was one of the One of the people I work with that's out in the California area told me that like when Google started just recently saying, okay, everybody has to come back into the office, they started having people using sick days, PTO time, and saw an onslaught of people leaving. So they finally, they finally, and I didn't verify this before saying it. So if I'm misspeaking, I apologize. But my understanding was that they've committed to more hybrid model kind of along the lines of what you suggested, you know, coming into the office sometimes, you know, important events, you know, whatever, team meetings, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but not necessarily meaning that they have to be in there all the time.

Right.

And I've also heard from people out the Bay that rush hour is getting busier and busier as more companies are demanding.

I kind of enjoy rush hour not being busy here in Atlanta.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. People have to come back to work more and more. A 35-minute commute in the Bay Area is now a 55-minute commute, you know.

And by the way, that used to be a 2-hour commute, so, you know, it's not like—

right, well, and it's $6 a gallon in gas. That's going to be a pressure cooker test, right?

I mean, by the way, that used to be $12 again. I'm just kidding. Oh my God, you want to hear a little flashback from history? This is going to crack you up.

You're sure?

2013. Let me— tell me if this rings a bell. It's 2013 and the former vice president of Google gets recruited by Yahoo. So I was at Google early, early on, 2003, pre-IPO. And she was there. She was one of the first 20 or so people. I met her when I was there. Her name is Marissa Mayer. 2013, as in her first year as president and CEO of Yahoo, she— I kid you not— she bans working from home. She put a ban on remote working in February of 2013, 10 years ago. They actually— and this, this was, this was taunted as like the apocalypse of telecommuting, the death of telecommuting. 'If Yahoo can't make telecommuting work, then who can,' right? I mean, 2013, Yahoo was still relevant, basically. And it basically— it was like, it was a just a really bad decision, and it didn't work. It didn't work at all after that. It was a complete phase. And it was like, not just, uh, we're gonna discourage it. It was like, it was banned. It was was completely dead set against it, and there was a lot of other changes, but it just, it just, it was a complete failure.

Um, imagine either you had to come in or you had to, or, or you quit.

No, you were just like, you cannot not come in. You either have to come in or you can't work here, right?

Wow.

Yeah, probably don't even remember that.

Right? Yeah, no, I, I remember, I do remember something about it. It was, and, and if I recall, it had something to do with Yahoo becoming less relevant then.

Now they actually did have people working from home. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't successful as a ban. It's, they still had people working from home. So even though they banned it, um, and, you know, Yahoo was in trouble. And, you know, Marissa was hired to turn it around, but even she couldn't do it. It just wasn't, you know, the, the company was already— so what I'm trying to say is this was a desperate measure from a smart person who had been very successful before, um, but it was a desperate measure to try to save a company. There was a lot of other things that were wrong with it. It was a huge data breach, um, back, back when people actually cared about data breaches, when you know, 500 million users' accounts get stolen and it's front page of the Wall Street Journal. Nowadays, 1 million or 2 million or 5 million or 100 million user accounts get stolen and nobody even blinks. I don't know if you remember this conversation in the middle of the pandemic. LinkedIn, you and I talked about this, LinkedIn had 97% of all of their accounts stolen. And because of that, I don't know if you remember this, because of that, because of the breached on LinkedIn for about 2 hours, the people who had access to this had access to my Facebook account because my Facebook and LinkedIn were tied together. So I could authenticate into one with the other. So I get a message from Facebook saying, "Is this you trying to log in?" on my phone. Like literally about an hour after the breach, I get a message and I click, "No, that's not me." you know, lock, lock my account. But by then it was already too late. So all it took was, was, wow, maybe 1 or 2 hours between LinkedIn's data breach and my Facebook account getting stolen. And it's never ever been able to be recovered again. To this day, I have all of my Shelly's Alley, an entire library of courses, an entire everything, all my pictures for years and years from, you know, social and all that. It's all gone. Because I cannot recover my account because Facebook refuses to let me authenticate even though I've uploaded my passport, my utility bills, my driver's license, because the person who stole my account changed my cell phone number. That's all they did. They changed my cell phone number to theirs. So whenever I'm trying to authenticate it, it sends a text message to that account and I'm done. And that was LinkedIn, but nobody even sneezed at it. It was like no big deal. So 2014, 500 million accounts It was a big deal. So anyway, the point is, you know, the whole working from home thing and not working from home didn't save Yahoo. And it wasn't Marissa's fault.

Yeah.

Although I do wish that Marissa would change her profile picture because the profile picture on LinkedIn is the same Google ID profile picture from when she was at Google in 2012. It's the same picture. Wow. I remember because I was there, right? So I was like, oh my God. Updated, please.

Well, I mean, there's, you know, I mean, it's a changing terrain. About that time, um, I, I was taking my nephew out to San Francisco for his high school graduation present, and we were riding the, the train from the airport to downtown with these two guys that just came up with this really cool app, and it was to like be able to get like a car and a ride if you wanted one without using a taxi cab. And they were like showing me this on their phone And I'm like, well, how many cities are you in? And they're like, well, right now just San Francisco, but we're going to grow. We'll be across the country soon. And I swear to God, it was the two guys that started Uber right there on the train with us that we were riding. It was about 2012. They had just got Uber off the ground. And I was just laughing like, okay, yeah, sure. They have to go pick up a car. Okay. Yeah, there's taxis for that. That's where your mindset is. And now here we are. 10 years later and, and, you know, look at what, look at what Uber's accomplished, you know. And, and so I, I was just kind of giggling to myself. Oh yeah, okay, that's really cool. You can go get a, get a car in San Francisco. How, how cool. Oh, it shows you where you are on a map and, you know, where your car is. And I'm like, yeah, okay, that's interesting. It sure was, you know. You never, you just, you just never know, man. You just never know. Where this tech is taking us. And I think that that's why companies have to be open to understanding that right now productivity, building it, is where it's at. In that book that's behind me, Talent Wins, it talks about the 3 legs of a stool of a successful IT startup. One is the CEO and the vision and the product and the idea, which is important to be, you know, focused and relevant, you know. Two is the CFO and the ability to raise capital and manage finances so they have money to, to run and grow the company. But the third leg, which I think sometimes is underappreciated, is that talent leg. You can have the best idea in the world and all the money to fund it. If you don't have the people to build it, you don't have— you have nothing. And I think That's the challenge that companies are facing right now, is that third leg of the stool. We've got fantastic CEOs out there with amazing vision and incredible products and ideas, and there's an awful lot of money. There's 1,000 unicorn companies, and our challenge now is finding the people to build these things and competing for that talent and making sure that that vision can be actualized, because if not, all the money in the world won't build it.

Itself.

It's going to force companies to rethink.

Okay, that's a good point. Yeah, man, well, this, this has been fun. I just realized we're way over time, which happened last time, by the way. Every time you come on my show, yeah, we just get yapping, telling jokes. Yeah, but as usual, very fun, very informative. Uh, great job with the HRTX. Presentation that you gave, by the way. Bravo.

Cool.

Um, just some groundbreaking stuff.

I'm glad it was well received, man. I, I was hoping that it would be.

So, well, at least I was— I was— why, you had at least one person watching, I'll tell you that.

Well, you know, as long as no one liked it, we probably have at least two people watching this show because there's you and I.

Maybe— well, Glenn is making a comment, so they have three people watching the show. So I guess that's good.

Oh man, it's always a pleasure. Anytime, anytime that you want to, you want to spend an hour of your day rapping with me, I'll be here.

All right, thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Bye everybody, have a great weekend. Uh, happy Passover and happy Easter, uh, Friday, Good Friday, and you know, all those good things. So enjoy, take care.

Thanks, Shelly. It's good to see you as always.

Bye everybody.