SourceCon Fall 2022 Recap with Ronnie Bratcher live on Shally's Alley

Hey, hey, hey, it's Shally's Alley. You are live with Ronnie and Shally. Today is Friday, October 21st, and I think this is my— nope, this is my second to last October show. So we're gonna have a scary one next week, uh, for October 28th, right before Halloween. I'm not sure who I'm gonna have as a guest, but we'll think of something really spooky. Today, Ronnie and I wanted to do something special. We both just recently, I mean really recently, got back from Seattle, the apparently the most polluted city in the world. I had no idea, or at least that's what it felt like. We were gagging on some smoke there on the way to the airport. We had two beautiful days of great weather, and then just on the way back, it was like, whoa, where's that coming from? Um, and we had a good time at SourceCon, so I thought, you know, Ronnie, let's, let's get together and just talk about what happened, what went on, and, you know, what was, uh, what was the highlights and just everything about being back in person and everything. I actually posted some photos that I shared publicly on an album. Um, I think I can publish that here. Shared albums. Yep, put that in the chat in just a minute. But before that, let's just, uh, I mean, Ronnie, how did you feel about being in person? What was, what was your, your sense of like being back at an in-person conference? It's been a couple of years.

Yeah, yeah. So hello everybody, I'm Ronnie Bratcher. I sit here in Atlanta with Shelly. I had the opportunity to go to Seattle in person. My initial thoughts were, you know, like, what's gonna happen after 2 and a half years of just being online and you know, not seeing people's faces for 2 and a half years. And so, you know, I had low expectations of the event. You know, I didn't know if it's going to be, you know, highly good, you know, or is it going to be great, you know, what's going to be the content, uh, because I signed up before there was even an agenda. So, you know, definitely, you know, the outcome for me was it was totally opposite of what I thought it was going to be, and it was actually a very productive, uh, you know, 3 days for me. So, you know, we can go into a little bit more detail, but yeah, that's my overview, holistic view of it as, as the event came about.

So you kind of were— have— as I guess you had low expectations because the first time back in, in an in-person event, right?

Yep, first time back in the US.

And, uh, and you were happily, happily surprised?

I was really surprised, actually. It was it turned out way better than I thought it would be. So.

Good. Yeah, well, definitely me too. You know, interesting little side note, the last in-person event that I went before the pandemic, the last in-person conference that I attended before the pandemic was in New Orleans. And it was an organization that does, it's an international organization, the NPA, for those of you who know what NPA is. And they get together once a year and do an annual conference for people all over the world. And this was the day that the conference ended on the day that New Orleans shut down. That night, there were cop cars out all over the place telling people to go home, that the city was going to be under quarantine in 1 hour. And so, like, literally the day the pandemic started, I was at a live conference. And now fast forward gosh, I don't even know, like 3 years later, um, then we have this coming up. So I did find the link and actually check it out here. So photos of SourceCon, I don't have a whole lot, but for what it's worth, check it out right there in the captions, srcn.co/sc22 for SourceCon 22. Pics. And if you check that out, it's a photo album from my iPhone that I posted. You'll see a couple of pictures from the hackathon, and there's this pretty cool big tree that they had in the middle of the— by the way, the venue was a Seattle Art Museum, for those of you that didn't even— I should have talked about that first. So the Seattle Art Museum, and as a bonus, people were able to tour the entire museum after the event officially ended at 5:30, so you can actually go in and take a look at the museum. But follow that link and you'll see some photos that I took. Um, you might want to start from the bottom up. It's kind of the opposite, I guess. The, the newest picture is on top. Should have thought of that one too. But, um, I don't know, I, you know, as far as recap, Ronnie, what, what, what, uh, what kind of takeaways did you have? I'll do a quick kind of run-down of the speakers. So we started out with, well, of course, Tangie Pettis was the MC with the cheerleader, and she was such a presence on stage, kept everyone laughing and everybody smiling and just having a good time. So Tangie throughout was like the energy of the show. The first speakers on stage were the dynamic duo of Vanessa Rath and Baj. Perosi, who talked about diversity. Then, um, Maulam Naone, who talked about patterns of excellence in your sourcing career. Todd Davis, Matt Craven, and Shannon Tetnik were side by side talking about sourcing with industry insights, the talent acquisition approach to sourcing, so like flipping the approach. And, um, sourcing over the rainbow beyond the binary. Then Dean came on and talked about OSINT. And then after that, Priti Sahu, re-engineering talent pipelines for the future. Stephanie Clay, shoestring budget, how to scale with next to no budget basically. And then one of my favorites, Junius Currier, not to play favorites, but Junius had a really good presentation. Then after that, it was a split. There was Mike Cohen and Kevin Walters, and then the next day I came on and opened. I was the opening keynote for the next day. I talked about the 25 years of sourcing, you know, what's coming up in the future, you know, in the next 25 years. Then it was a split again, the art of candidate engagement with Amir Hakim Javadi. Really cool dude, loved hanging out with him. You know, I had a lot to say. Then Tiffany Balve had You Got Leads, Now What? Love that. And newcomer Lindsay DiCello, It's Not You, It's Me: How to Overcome Imposter Syndrome. Then we had another keynote by Rebecca Fouts that was Sourcing is a Verb, Not a Noun. She did fabulous, and she is also one of those really contagious personalities that just keeps you smiling and, you know, gets you excited about our industry. Wrapping up was Anna Stenbeck doing "Bye-bye transactional sourcer, hello strategic sourcing partner." Mike Cohen, automation for sourcers, and Dean DaCosta breaking down his sourcing links. And the whole thing was wrapped up at the very end with Jackie Clayton on the ultimate ally, what inclusion really looks like, and then of course the big announcement by TNG. So that's kind of the rundown. Ronnie, give us some highlights. What were some of your favorites that, you know, you really got a lot out of and kind of what did you get?

Yeah, yeah. It was 3, 3 main subjects that I got out of it. The main, one of the main topics, you know, not really a main topic, but a lot of OSINT talk. The second highlight for me was a lot about candidate engagement and contact and patterns. And I'll talk more about that in a second. And then thirdly was some creative stuff. And I think the biggest creative one that I had, the big takeaway, was with our friend Kevin Walters. And I would love to talk about that, but, uh, I want to go back to OSINT a little bit. And my big takeaway from OSINT, uh, was just one statement, and that was from Todd Davis. And basically he stated— and maybe not the audience, but maybe you not agree, I kind of agree— is Todd's statement of you shouldn't be saying you're an OSINT expert unless you've actually taken the entire course and got certified. Um, it's okay to say I know some OSINT techniques, but coming out on stage just to say, or coming into an environment and say you're the expert in OSINT, is not something that you should say you should, should be doing. Um, I thought that was pretty powerful coming from him, uh, just because I know he's an expert in that field. Um, and I actually had, uh, some downtime with him one-on-one And actually, it answered a lot of questions for me on a personal basis. So, you know, should I have a VirtualBox? You know, is that something that I should have in part of my sourcing toolkit? It's something I have not done and built yet, but it's something I want to do. And I think it'd be kind of fun to do some of that work. So secondly, going back to the candidate contact patterns, there's a lot of overlap here. Meaning that, yeah, yeah, so like, uh, you know, some old, old techniques, new techniques, and a lot of discussion about how much should we be contacting people. Should it be twice, 3 times, or 7 contacts, right? So, so the biggest highlight I got was out of your, your deck, Shelly, was that, uh, because you've been talking about this for a very long time about the 7 points of contact, that we were talking about the feature And you're able to bring back some of that content with the newer technology stacks in social media and how you can get that 7 points of contact versus just 3 emails, you know, hitting Twitter, you know, hit their text, you know, they're not probably going to pick up the phone nowadays. And I think that was a big, that was a big talk about that today. Everything's so, so social media driven that we can, there's so many ways to reach out to people, you know, hitting their GitHub or, you know, are hitting their Facebook, their Instagram, their TikTok, you know, that I thought that was a lot of, lot of challenging talks around that. I think that was really cool that that was actually brought up and, you know, is actually of interest for me because, you know, I, I did do the true sourcing process and this is something I want to bring back to my recruiting team that I'm probably contracting that.

Yeah, I think omnichannel is really more, it's really more like multichannel, right? Not omnichannel, but multichannel. Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.

And then lastly, you know, my— the coolest thing I saw at SourceCon that has never been talked about— it was a lot of diversity talk, but Kevin Walters, a good friend of mine that I've known for a long time, just as long as I've known Shelly, talked about how to use food to source people and recruit them. I thought it was very, very creative how he was able to search, you know, people's passion for food in the diverse workspace to find people that you normally wouldn't find. Like, he was using Boba and using those kind of things, finding people that are software engineers that love Boba, and he found these channels of them. And I thought it was just super, super, super cool that he brought that in. And something like— it's like my 5% rule. That's something I want to try in my 5% rule, just to find some more people that are talking more about food than their software engineering on their, maybe their LinkedIn profile. So I thought that was my, those are my key takeaways for the 3 days besides being able to see people's faces again and getting hugs and seeing all my friends and just getting to hang out. Being a non-speaker was just even better just to have my own nomad life and just do what I want to do.

So that's right. Nomadic lifestyle. So I want to, so Mike's presentation was like I'm sorry, Walter's presentation was really good. And there was a lot of creativity involved in there. It's not just recipes. It's also what I've been talking about for a while, and other people are starting to pick up on this, which is any ASCII character can be used as a search string. So I've mentioned you can use the telephone character, the mobile phone character, the email envelope character, Well, he was using an example of bubble tea. So let me share with you the example that he did. He searched for something like this. I'm not doing it justice, but it was something like, you know, it was on LinkedIn and then he did software engineer and then the boba icon. And that was pulling up profiles of people that are diverse because, you know, they're not all of them. I mean, I like boba, but apparently You know, this is kind of a cultural milk tea and boba kind of thing. So it wasn't just that, it was also he talked about like the, for example, the rainbow icon to find people from diverse backgrounds. And so there's the rainbow and the actual rainbow flag. So I mean, basically just substitute this for some other emoji and there you go. It's a really creative idea. Um, I've, I've used this for, you know, telephone numbers and, and for like Java, you know, the, the Java icon, those kinds of things. But he's using it in a completely different way. That was really brilliant.

I think I thought it was awesome. Yeah, that was really, yeah, really, really, it was really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what else did you see, Shelly, like when you were over?

Yeah, um, so Let's see.

Hmm, I thought you had the nicest—

they did. Yeah, one of the things I wasn't expecting was, uh, Lindsay DiCello talking about imposter syndrome, which was, um, refreshing and eye-opening. For those of you that might not know what that is, it's the feeling that, like, how did I get here? Do I really deserve to be here? Am I really you know, people are calling me, uh, the sourcing expert, and they're coming to me asking me questions about sourcing. Am I really the sourcing expert? And the point that she was making is that we all have imposter syndrome at one point or another and to some degree or another. So, um, you know, I encourage you to go back and watch the recording for that, which— what she said. But it's so true because it hit me. I was like, you know, I've had that. Like, I've, I've been in a job where I felt like, man, maybe I'm not qualified enough for this job. Uh, so it's It definitely affects everyone, and she had some strategy on how to, how to handle that and how to, you know, kind of— I, I don't, I don't know if get over it because that's not the right way to say it, but how to, you know, combat that and how to overcome that in yourself. So that was a big surprise for me, was that topic. I mean, it wasn't tactical sourcing, but it was definitely very much relevant to the career. Yeah, that was a good one. Let's see, the engagement stuff that Amir Hakim Javadi talked about, you know, Ronnie, you mentioned that, you know, the persistence and gentle persistence and multi-channel, omnichannel. That was also really good to see other people talking about more than one channel. And how he approached it. Let's see, what's another one? Well, Rebecca's presentation, Rebecca Fouts.

Yeah, I'd like to go back to Rebecca for a second. Yeah, please. I'm never going to win this battle and I know we've talked about it over the years as well, but I think of sourcing as a procurement, the procurement process. And I think sourcing and recruiting have a beginning and the end. You could build your recruiting model however you want to do it. But if you're measuring just sourcing, for me, it ends when you pick up the phone or send an email, you start engaging. That's the recruiting process. I know a lot of people disagree, but that's my point. But it was kind of funny that Rebecca stated, like, she asked everybody in the audience to stand up if you feel like sourcers do not talk to people. Lo and behold, only 2 people stood up, me and one other person from Chicago, and that was it. So I feel like we're still congealed and we're going to always have this debate. And, you know, obviously there's been white papers and Shelly wrote a white paper and then some metrics around it over the world standards as well. But yeah, I thought that was just kind of— I was kind of like, whoa, I'm still like fighting this battle. I mean, you know, I do some outreach as well, but that's, recruiting in my process. So I thought it was just an interesting statement. And, uh, she had a really good presentation. It was all over the place from, like, trying to describe that we all had different models. And that's kind of like she was trying to say. That was her endpoint.

So that's a really good point. And come to think of it, there, there were other different models in amongst the audience members, amongst the speakers. I led a discussion of roundtable on leading sourcing teams Unfortunately, it was way too short. It was like 15 minutes each. It was almost like speed dating for leadership. It was weird. But the point I'm trying to make is that as I was trying to collect the thoughts of the group, each of the groups, and figuring out what was on their, you know, what was on their mind, what was hot, what was urgent, one thing was pretty clear. There wasn't really any standard format. Even though for many years I've been talking about the pod structure, there were several pods, but there were also dedicated paired-up sourcers, a sourcer to a recruiter. There were centralized and decentralized. They were business-funded. They were non-business-funded. And the biggest one that I thought was, as far as from taking away from talking to people in the audience and the roundtable, that I thought was really revealing is the split or workload between pipeline and requisition-based. In other words, generally speaking, what percentage of their team's time is spent on pipelining against future need versus reacting to a wreck that's distressed or an urgent wreck or an open wreck? And I think generally speaking, the ones that had a split, it was usually about 80/20, 80% rec, 20% pipeline, sometimes 50/50. But I heard 80/20 most commonly. And there were a couple that were pure pipeline where it was 100% pipeline, but not many. And usually it was 1 or 2 people focused on that. So I think the big takeaway is generally speaking, it's about 80/20, which is actually something that I've been talking about for years. So I'm glad to see that that's taken root. However, the structure of the, you know, like the team, that was all over the place from centralized to decentralized. The point I was trying to make though about what you were saying with regard to whether or not sourcers talk to candidates, and by that to clarify, I mean like phone screens, right? I mean, that's— Perfect. Yeah, 'cause sourcers can talk to a candidate to get them scheduled for an interview or something. Something like you might talk to a candidate for, you know, so talking to a candidate isn't necessarily the point here. It's do you do a full phone screen? And like the different types of teams, there were also different handoffs. So one of the things I talked about with my recap of the next 25 years is for sourcing teams to begin, if they're not already, offering, um, a menu of services. 2 or 3 options, maybe 4 options. Here's the ones I propose. I would say research only, which, Ronnie, it's, you know, you're the grand poobah of that, and you've got researchers out there that they're just simply, uh, fabulous at finding that needle in a stack of needles, finding really hard-to-find candidates. Believe it or not, yes, there are still candidates that are hard to find. Anybody that says that the internet has made it easy to find people is crazy. It's easy to find people, but it isn't easy to find the right people. So there's so much information now that it's literally, you know, sifting and honing down. So research only is definitely a service. Then I would say research plus outreach, which can be done on behalf of their CRM systems. Ronnie, you do some of that. So you don't do the phone screens, but you actually do the initial outreach on behalf of, and then recruiter receives the response. So let's call that research plus initial contact, right?

Yeah.

Then there's sourcing and screening, which would be another service, right? And then a fourth one I would add would be simply update or append, right? So these are— recruiters have somebody that they worked with in the past, hiring managers know someone. It's like, find out where they are now, get their email address, get their— you know, we want to talk to them, get their phone number. And that's almost kind of like just essentially getting contact information, but like figuring out where they might be now. Those are the 4 services. Do you see a 5th one maybe?

Not really. I mean, if you're just talking from that initial, you know, concept, you know, after that it's just, you know, I'm a full lifecycle recruiter offering the entire gamut, you know. So, uh, yeah, just being specialized is, is still trying to catch on in the marketplace, in my opinion. You know, it's hard to find companies that really want to have that as a service. You know, they want the whole gamut, you know. So, you know, I'm just lucky to be— in the past 6 or 7 years, I've been on projects that are definitely, like you said, research and doing some initial outreach for on behalf of my recruiter. Because, you know, obviously I've been a recruiter before, I understand the process and how hard it is. So I'm not gonna— I'm not throwing shit at the wall, basically. You know, I'm giving you quality people and hopefully they're responding.

Highly targeted.

We're moving forward. Yeah, highly, highly did. So yeah, definitely.

So that's a really good point. I think the menu of services, as I refer to it, you know, it's— if you lead a team, it's a mix of different things that you can offer. Your team as a whole can cover the entire gamut potentially, but I think it's more like, you know, meeting the needs of the organization. If you have a lot more demand than you have sourcing support, there's a lot more, you know, need for passive candidate research and outreach. You may want to offer some self-service, for example, creating bookmarks, spreadsheets, um, and, and, you know, custom search engines that you can kind of— so the recruiters can go in there and plug in a couple of keywords and get the results. This is like sourcing light, right? So self-service sourcing light because you might not have enough resources to be able to dedicate. You might be able to do a list building, right? Here's 50 leads, go contact them. And that relieves some of the pressure. So you don't have to necessarily pigeonhole like the entire team is just doing research. You could do a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Depending on the criticality and the need and quite frankly the workload, right? I mean, if you've got one sourcer and they're fully engaged all out in, you know, 5 different searches, there's not a whole lot more they can do. So maybe they can spend 10 minutes building a search string for you and you can go, you know, do that. So don't forget that there's also that type of support. I, I used to think of it as a pod structure where you had channels and, um, and essentially like types of recruiting. So some, some sourcers could specialize on internet, some on phone, some on social media, or some can specialize, you know, horizontally on like just simply research, and others can do the calling. And, you know, my favorite example was when I was at Microsoft, we had a researcher and a caller and an account manager You know, so the pod was 3 people. One of them talked to the hiring managers and did the strategy. One of them did pure research and the other one did pure calling. And together, the 3 of them worked as a pod. So, that's a type of pod. Another type of pod could be instead of that, it could be one person that's on social media, Facebook, Twitter, etc. One person that's doing, you know, profiles, resumes, things like that. And then, one person that's doing, you know, deep web. For example. So that's another type of pod.

Yeah, we've actually built that together at a company. Yeah. And that worked out really well. You know, I thought it was amazing that we're able to take these recruiters and turn them into sourcers. And then we built those pods that they specialize in certain channels, but then they had their main channels that they all could work on. So AKA LinkedIn, the ATS, you know, the CRM, they were able to do that, but they had specialized channels, like one person was responsible for Twitter only. One is for Facebook only, etc., etc., etc. So yeah, there's so many models out there you can build, but you know, there's no proven stance that says this one works better than the other one. Just depends on what type of organization it is and how large it is.

I'd say number one, first step, identify the need, right? Survey. If you're a new leader starting out, or if you are just— this is a new job, maybe you're an experienced leader. I mean, survey your audience, right? What do they need? What do the recruiters need? Do they need Do they really need full service? Do some of them maybe just want lists? Do some of them just want research or shortcuts that they can use or plug-and-play shortcuts? And, and, you know, offer a variety of these options to see where you're able to leverage the most time and optimize the time that the sourcer has. There's really no formula to how many sourcers do I need, right? I've, I've heard people like, oh, I have one sourcer for every 3 recruiters. In your organization maybe, but that, that doesn't work in, in other organizations. It's really not about headcount, like one sourcer for 3 recruiters. Um, one of the people in the roundtable said for every 25 recs we have a sourcer. So I'm like, okay, I didn't even ask how many recruiters for every 25 recs. I didn't even think about like when they have 25, right? So, so then I'm thinking to myself, if you have 20 recs, do you fire the sourcer? I mean, what's— what happens then? Like, what if you don't have 25 regs? You know, so I was like, that doesn't really make a lot of sense because it's workload-based. What if when you don't have 20 regs and you only have 10, what if that is the time that the sourcer spends working on competitive intelligence? Like, one of the things that I showed, which was my list of target companies, it's massive. It's 600— yeah, sorry, 6,425. 6,425. Target companies by sector, by etc. So that's something that you can do in between sourcing projects. Um, and in my, in my opinion, it was the most important thing that I did. So I literally spent a bunch of time on that right off day one, because from now it's really easy for people to just plug in a bunch of companies and get a bunch of results for each one of the sectors. So it makes it faster. But that's competitive intelligence, and that's also part of what we do.

Yep, exactly. Yep. And I saw, you know, like, I feel like, you know, sourcing is super, super important because like, for instance, where I'm currently working at, you know, my recruiter on most of his recs has plenty of inbound and he gets his hires, but there's like 3 to 4 roles that there's not—

that doesn't happen. Doesn't happen.

No applications. I gotta go hunt. And then we have pipelining. So we're continually pipelining for this one role that's just going to be hired. Consistently on a consistent basis per quarter. So, so yeah, I'm, I'm there to help alleviate the pain and help the recruiter succeed and also the organization as well. So I just said that's your main responsibility. Yeah, I just kind of sit in the background and, you know, do my thing, you know, stay out of the way.

I think you have to always pipeline. I don't think that there should be 100% rec-based sourcing, you know, even, even with like, for example, a team that's young and trying to prove themselves and maybe you only have a couple of sourcers. It, you might feel like, you know, your instinct is to go rec-based so you can produce results. But there was actually a Matt Cravens presentation which was about that, and, um, the big takeaway there was never stop doing the pipeline because long term is where you get the most bang for your buck, the most value. So you might have 2 sourcers and you're the sourcing leader. Well, maybe your sources don't have time to do pipeline. But that's your job as a sourcing leader. At least you do that, right? Somebody's got to do the pipeline because there will always be that long-term goal. If all you do is react and, you know, react to the open reqs right now, then there's no long tail. There's no what I like to call, um, a discrete capital investment, right? A sustainable capital investment that stands aside from the, the on and off workflows of open rec, close rec, you know. Yeah, there's really that value.

Sorry, I was just saying that we just recently did this where I'm currently working at, you know, the organization is not very branded per se in the, in the typical market. It's in the healthcare space, uh, it's been growing for, you know, the past 2 years, 3 years, you know, because for obvious reasons, uh, but now people are understanding. So For instance, just an example of engineers, you know, our technology stack is just really not that sexy. It's just pretty basic, right? But what we're doing for the human race is way more valuable. So we approached our pipelining process of talking about to the engineers, if this is something you— if you're not— if you're looking for something to change the world and human race, then this is for you. But if you just want to build new toys, that are flashy, that are fun. That's not it. So, you know, we're reaching out because we are changing people's lives, we're saving lives, and we're making it easier for people to interact with doctors and nurses and their insurances and things like that. And that's the technology we're building. So it's, uh, to me, that's hot. You know, if I was an engineer, I'd be jumping all over that. But some engineers, they don't want to do that. They want to be in the, the big space, you know, doing like a working for Tesla or working for Google or each their own.

Exactly. That's part of it.

So yeah, we actually had a better response rate doing that. Like just saying, hey, this is what we do versus, hey, we got a job right here, right? So now we're having some, we're having some reciprocal things because we just opened up our engineering again. And those people are coming back and say, yeah, I'm now available after 2 months of, yeah, I'm looking to transition now. So pipelining works. It's just, it takes strategic time for the recruiter and the sourcer to do that. But in the long term, it's— it works. Just even to get the brand out.

It is the long term. You have to stay the course. Yeah, you really do. A question from the audience: How do you effectively approach recruiting leadership with these approaches of the menu? I mean, I can tackle that. The key is identify the need, right? So survey your audience and identify the need. As Ronnie said, that there's, there's a couple of recruiters he works with. That don't really need any sourcing because they fill their jobs with inbound applicants. Great. They might have occasionally a rec that they need support with. And then he's got some other team members that were, you know, their jobs are almost constantly in need of sourcing. So with the people that don't need as much sourcing, maybe you offer them a little bit more of a self-service. Here's a few ideas, here's some templates, here's some jumping off points for them. You might want to offer them perhaps the the research list, right? So you can go to the leadership and say that what you're doing is you're providing services as appropriate to the need. Because if you use up all of your cycle times working on a fully, you know, source and screen and present candidate for the one-off rec, it might take you more time to ramp up, learn that rec, learn the business. And here's another thing, there's not a lot of return on investment because What if that's a one-off wreck? Maybe that's why that recruiter's not getting a lot of applicants, and you just built a pipeline of nothing. I mean, you've got, you know, perfect example. When I was working at Coca-Cola, I had to hire the chief security officer for the entire organization, and the person that was in that role before had been in it for 25 years, was in charge of physical layer security, software layer security and, you know, employee security. So it was like physically securing cash, money, and facilities and technology and everything. The guy was a retired FBI agent and he was in the job for 25 years. I was never going to fill that job again, right? Even if I found somebody, um, that was— that had potential for, for other career mobility, the chances, the chances were really good that I was going to end up finding someone else with a similar background former FBI, that kind of thing. So the runner-ups and the silver medalists, they were never going to be of use to us in the future. So sometimes you really are wasting your time as a sourcer if you're doing too much of that other stuff because it's not going to be a return on investment where you could be spending the same time on a rec that will produce candidates that you'll be able to use for other recs. So I'll leave you with that. Well, Ronnie, I told you I was only going to keep you for 30 minutes. I know your time is really valuable, so I appreciate you coming by and hopping up on this SourceCon recap.

It was awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks everybody for listening in. Don't forget to check out the photos. If you're interested in connecting with Ronnie, he's open to connections. So here's a way to get in touch with him. It's essentially LinkedIn, Ronnie Bratcher, B-R-A-T-C-H-E-R-L, E-R, sorry, B-R-A-T-C-H-E-R. And he's a great guy, would love to help you with your searches. One of the great minds in our industry. Thank you very much for coming on the show, and we'll see you next Friday. Take care, everybody.

Take care, everyone.