Special Episode: Audience AMA at #HRTX!

All right, all right, welcome to Shelly's Alley. It's Thursday, June 15th. Yeah, don't try to adjust your radios because it's not Friday.

All right, so speaking of adjusting radios, Shelly, we're having a little bit of trouble hearing you. Can you test test for me?

Testing, checking. Oh, there we go. Mission control, I'm not Hunter, but I'm gonna try to beatbox like Hunter does.

Excellent. So, Shelly, you know, this is Thursday, it's not Friday.

I know, that's what I was saying. I was just saying, hey, welcome to Shelly's Alley, it's Thursday, not Friday. First Shelly's Alley ever done on a Thursday, tell you that.

This is, this is great. So, Shelly, I, I've got to wonder, do you have a guest today?

I do, yeah, but I didn't want to spoil the surprise earlier when you asked me, so My special guest today is the HRTX Camp attendees. Oh, wow, how are you turning things around?

Okay, all right, as you know, normally I interview a guest, right?

So this time I'm actually going to interview a guest, but it's everybody that's in the chat. So I'm gonna have some questions to ask folks to, um, answer in their chat. I wish I could bring them on stage, but from what Brooke tells me, there's quite a bit of onboarding necessary for that. So I changed my mind about that, but we definitely can keep up the chat.

This is great. This is exceptional.

All right.

So beyond people who think that Shelly was yelling into a well, this is an opportunity for you to take the stage at HRTX You know, I'm looking at David Marr. I'm thinking that he's probably the next person who wants to come up here and have a roundtable with us and be a guest on Shelly's Alley. David Marr, where are you? Where is he?

He was already on Shelly's Alley recently.

Yeah, he was, but I figured he'd come back, right?

Yeah. Okay, so ready to go? I've got some questions for y'all.

All right, fire away because we are ready.

OK, all right. Like I said, normally I'm interviewing someone, and we're just kind of bantering back and forth. So we're going to have to try to go fly by the seat of our pants. But here's— I've got a couple of questions from different areas. My first question is, folks, how many times should we reach out to a passive candidate before we move on? Thrice? 4 times, 5 times, 6 times, 7 times, 8 times, 12 times? Twice is once enough? That's what I wanna know. How many times should you reach out? And by the way, to clarify, how many times should you reach out without a response? Obviously, if they responded, you know, so if you were to set up a sequence or a campaign and, you know, you wanted to create however many messages, How many should there be? How many is, how many is too much? And minus 1, that's how many we should before we move, before we move on. Looks like a lot of 3 to 4s. We got 1 6, sometimes 9. Okay, now I'm gonna, I'm gonna add to that sometimes 9, um, until I find someone else that's better. That's exactly right, no doubt. Okay, so the real question here is how many times is too many times? And I'm getting a lot of 3s and 4s. I think 3 and 4 is basically table stakes. 7 is probably at the point where I would say it's getting to where it might actually be too much. And I did see somebody that put 9 in there, but they qualified it. Here's how they qualified it, and I really agree with this. You might have a sequence that starts out with 3 to 4 messages, the first one, and then, I don't know, wait a week, etc. And so by the time you've gone through the 4th one, they haven't responded, it's time to take a little bit of a break. So for the person that said 9, they're not doing that 9 messages in one day, right? They're spacing them out. And what they might be doing is they might be putting someone on a long-term nurturing list. So that's what I was gonna suggest is if you have, you know, a cadence of 3 or 4, that's a good starting point. You can add another one a month or 2 months later or 3 months later or 6 months later, and, you know, extend that out a little bit. Um, and so that way you can get to that 7 or 9 without being uncomfortable. But I think in a short span, let's just say we're trying to fill a job and we have maybe 2 weeks, I think 3 to 4 is minimum. I would, I would even say 4 is minimum in a short span of 2 weeks. That's my— those are my thoughts. Looks like somebody said 5 and then hold 6. All right, multichannel 9. Okay, I see what that means. So multichannel means maybe 4 or 5 emails and then a text. That's Number 6, uh, etc. Yep, I like that.

I want to come back to something that Kelly said. On the second time I reach out with a different opportunity, they're not responding, they must not be interested. You don't want to be annoying. Shifting the opportunity, renaming it, is that what we're implying here?

Because no, I think she's saying that the second time she reaches out is for a different job. Um, and, and of course that's a separate campaign, right? So I'm talking about 3 to 4 messages, and I think people are responding with, with the same 3 or 4 messages about the same job, not about another opportunity. Uh, but I actually don't think that it's correct to assume that they're not interested on just one message, because I can tell you for sure that we don't really know if they got it. So in other words, if you only sent them one message, there's no way for you to know that they received it. It's possible that your first message to them went to a spam filter, landed in the social updates box, or never got there. And even if you're saying it's in mail, believe me, I want to show you my LinkedIn inbox so you can see what I'm talking about. I get so many messages that if you sent me something 2 weeks ago, I'm not even— I can't even see it anymore. It's way down in my, uh, unread items. So what I'm saying is one message doesn't mean they're not interested. It may mean they're not interested, but it could also mean they never got it. They could be out on vacation. Imagine if you're out on vacation, Bryan, for 2 weeks. Are you really going to go back 2 weeks in your email unread messages? I mean, if you do, it's going to take you a while. So does that mean you're never interested in the opportunity? So I think that you should get something in response. But I, I, the question that I want to find out the answer to is, at what point do people think it's like, I don't know, excessive, right? So if I follow up with you 3 times over a span of 2 weeks, maybe you're like, all right, this is a little annoying, but No big deal. If I follow up with you 9 times over a span of 2 weeks, you're probably going to be annoyed. So what's the number where you're not— what's, what's more than 3 but less than 9? That's what I want to get to.

Okay, so, so real quick, um, you know, with the experiment that I ran with emails, I only, I only reached out 1 time asking for advice, right?

And by the way, I also am adding more information, so the second email is not a repeat of this first email. What I do with the first email, if it's an email, I do forward it as a second email, but I count that as still email number 1. If I'm following up, I'm sending different valuable information. Sorry to interrupt. I don't want people to think I'm sending the same email 9 times. That would just be ridiculous. Sorry. And so you're saying you only reached out once?

Only one time. I wanted to keep it the same. I kept it universal. I didn't go re— yeah, just one time. One, not 11. One.

Right. And then you got— that was the 8%?

Uh, well, that— the 24 was the total percentage of people who responded, but it was 8% was the people that responded to a 3, uh, to a, to a tri— uh, tri— tri— uh, what?

Triple? Yeah, triple.

Word score triple. Ding ding ding. Right. Um, yeah, so, so that's, that's, uh, yeah, that's where—

so most recently, um, I just, I just ran a short campaign with 70 prospects, very, very high-level VP-level prospects. And with, with this level, we don't usually— when I say we, my team— we don't usually send more than 3 messages because, um, it's just kind of at a higher level. We also space them out a little bit more. So over a period of like 14 days, they only received up to 3 messages. The first one, then, you know, about a week later the second one, then another week and a half, 2 weeks, we sent that third kind of like Hey, you know, just checking in. Here's some additional information. I assume you're not interested, so if you ever change your mind, you know, something like that. And out of those 70 people that we contacted, 84% of them opened the message and 32% of them replied. But that is a cumulative effect of all 3. So first, second, and by the time the third campaign finished. With other positions, we definitely have gone to up to 4. With the 5th and 6th one being either text or social, or maybe even a phone call. So I do like that omnichannel thing. Yep, just want to make sure that everybody knows that it's got to be good messaging, of course, it's got to be value-add, of course, and I'm not just, you know, spamming, I'm targeting people. I was just very curious to see what the tolerance was, because over the years the tolerance has varied. I was at a seminar once where, I think Brian, you were there, some Somebody said you should contact them 7 times because they borrowed it from sales and marketing or something like that, where like 7, it takes 7 impressions. I've actually, I've had 7 steps in my campaign, but the last ones were like email, sorry, like a text or a social message or something like that. I've never actually done 7 emails in one campaign.

Yeah, so that was—

Just take out their office.

So that was spam, spam, I love spam. David Marr, I wonder why LinkedIn Recruiter has a spam folder. I'm just saying, I mean, LinkedIn, uh, freemium has a spam folder. I, I wonder that. Um, Shelly, that, that's really, that's really interesting about the, about multi-frequency and the, the borrowing it from sales channel.

Yeah.

Um, the omnichannel. Do you find that text messages work better than email?

Um, so Number 1 on my list is still email, although it has the, it has a lower percentage of net total response rates than text. It does have a total percentage of people that convert to interviews. So I'm not tracking data just on the response rates. I'm actually looking at the data all the way through that to conversion to interview. And so here's what's really shocking that I showed at, at SourceCon. Is that of the 3 primary methods, in-mail, email, and text, email had the highest response rate in volume, and texting had the lowest response rate in volume, but texting had really high interview throughput. So most people who responded via text made it all the way through. Fewer people on email made it all the way through, and the worst one was in-mail. 2.9% of positive replies on InMail made it through interview. Lots of those people are just tire kicking and they're accepting appointments with anybody, accepting messages from everybody, and the quality is really low. So even though we got a 20% response rate instead of 32% for the email, um, LinkedIn InMails, we got 20%. Still, out of that 20%, very few of them actually survived all the way through the interview. So Like I said, it's not necessarily the reply rate. We get higher reply rate percentage from texting, but lower volume. And from email, we get lower percentage, if you will. I'm sorry, yeah, but higher volume net total. However, the volume on LinkedIn doesn't turn into anything. Well, I shouldn't say that. It doesn't turn into much. So, but you know what, let me follow that up with what is Off limits. What type of outreach is off limits? I saw someone say postcards. Okay, so we can call, we can text, we can send postcards, we can send in-mails. What would you say is off limits? Would Snapchat be off limits? Instagram? Pinterest? Facebook? What's off limits? Asking, asking the attendees. What would you say you should never contact a candidate Through what channel? Through what? Nobody? Nobody's taking this one? Yeah, I like the way you phrased that, Brooke. What type of outreach is off limits? It used to be, Brian, you remember when it used to be texting was like, if you texted somebody, you would get, you know, like threatened to get reported to the authorities or whatever, but it became a lot more, you know, commonplace now, so don't DM me on Instagram. Okay, so somebody's saying Instagram.

I love, I love Instagram DMs. I love Instagram DMs.

Tom's saying Pornhub is off limits depending on what you're recruiting for. I could see that. What's that? Showing up at the— yeah, definitely. Okay, I'm gonna agree with that one, which ironically we actually have the ability to do, right, since we can find information about where they live. So So we got postcards. I would be weirded out if someone— okay, so David, social media includes LinkedIn, so I'm assuming not LinkedIn. But what you mean by that would be like what, Facebook, Instagram? That's specifically what I'm trying to find out. Would Face— is Facebook okay but Instagram not okay, or are both of them not okay? Is Snapchat okay? What about WhatsApp? Is WhatsApp okay? Because technically it's almost like a call in a lot of ways. Anybody else?

Well, what about WhatsApp groups? Can you, can you post a message in a WhatsApp group to like— you're part of a developer group or a Bitcoin group? I may have just kind of outed myself saying I'm a member of a Bitcoin group.

Um, that looks like— anyway, gotta go. Bring back door knocking, knocking on doors. I'd love to see you try that one. Leaving notes on the— oh, wait a minute, is leaving notes on their cars off limits, or is that an idea you're suggesting?

That is off limits. That has got to be off limits.

Okay, okay, okay.

That's creepy. Um, yeah.

What about mentioning them on Twitter publicly?

You know, man, I did that like— I did that like years ago, and, uh, I got contacted by that person's boss.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, like I made a comment, like I couldn't get them to respond to my outreach on email. So I snapped a screenshot of their code from GitHub and I tagged them in the post and said, this is awesome, love what you're building to this individual. And their boss sent me a DM in response. Let me see if I can find that. That's actually funny. It's actually one of my favorite DMs. I probably have a copy of that, but—

Well, so it looks like— I just want to point out that there is a lot of diversity, not just in how many outreach attempts. It seems like some people go as low as saying 1 is enough, but the majority seems to be okay with 3, with some folks going into 4 or 5, and it starts to get a little bit less from there, but I'm also getting that there's a lot of channels that are not necessarily considered off-limits. There's some clear ones, like don't put a sticky note on their car, but I even, I'm even surprised to see that the knocking on their door, one person said definitely not, another person said they would try it. So there's a lot of variety. I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that it's different industries, right? Like I can imagine in some industries, like for example, you were saying before that you use Instagram a lot for nurses, It's just much more common for nurses to be on Instagram, so probably that's why it's more accepted, maybe, right? Whereas if it's an industry or if it's a group of people that are not very frequently on Instagram and they get a message there and it's the only message they've ever gotten, that may stand out a little bit more. So maybe that has something to do with it.

Well, to that point, you know, if you're looking for a UI or UX designer or developer, it may be— it may make more sense to go to Behance where their portfolio is showcased and you can send them a free message there. Rather than doing it on LinkedIn, where they're, where they're showcasing, where they're not showcasing their skills or their aptitude.

Right. Yeah, that's good. So there's a little bit of difference there. Okay. All right, I got another one. Here's an interesting one. Everybody on the call today, I want you to think back and tell me about a requisition, a job opening, a position that you worked on. In your entire career, think of what was the longest a job has been open that you worked on. Don't tell me about a job that you heard somebody had or that, you know, was at your company, whatever. I want to know from you, which is the longest job you've ever worked on, the longest opening. So like it was open for 100 days, 300 days, whatever, that you actually worked on. I want to see what the record is. I'm curious. I'll start with mine. The longest one that I worked on and filled, by the way, but that's not a requirement for the question, was, uh, 380 days. And it was— I, I believe me, actively worked in it. Now, I didn't work on it every single day, but it was open and I was sourcing and sending people in, and it took me— it Basically a year. Wow, 2 years. 1.5 years. Okay, can we get more than 2 years? Anybody got more than 2 years? I think we got a record here. Uh, no, how long you worked on it, I guess I should say. Because if it was open for 3 years and then you started working on it and you closed it in a month, then— yeah, I'm talking about a wreck that you worked on. I think the record might be 2 years. 2.5 years. Whoa. Oh my, I gotta hear about that one. Fahad, we need to bring you on the show, man. I want to hear about the 2.5 year, um, so 420— I can't count great— is that almost 2 years? Not quite. For what, 4 years, Donna? Is that 4 years?

No, 420 days is, is a year and a half. But, uh, Fahad, I, I do want to hear about this chief data— this chief scientist. Crazy.

Please somebody tell me Donna meant 4 months, not 4 years. 4 years, 9 months. Oh my, that's got to be a record. I've never heard of anything taking that long. I'm surprised you held the job that long. Most recruiters are only at the same company for 2 to 3 years. That's some— that's impressive. Amazing. I hope you still work there. Whoo. Some challenging jobs that are open again. And oh, okay, that's That's a good point. So same rec for 7 years, but it's been filled and re— yeah, so they— someone rotated in. I gotcha. Okay. Working on the same job for 7 years, but you filled it several times. Okay. Scientists. Yeah, that's true. I once worked on a position for finding the, the head of the, the, the lab. So like the chief technician of the lab. Their job wasn't to do any of the experiments. Their job was to manage all the equipment. So they were like the, I don't know, the administrator or ombudsman of the hardware in this very, very large chemistry lab. And man, it just, it was so slow to move. But I can't believe 4 and a half years. Wow. Whew. All right. So let me ask you this question. Why are some of these jobs, like chief scientist, disproportionately harder to fill than others, or slower to fill? Maybe, maybe, maybe slower doesn't mean harder. So maybe it's just a matter of it just moves slower, but it's not harder. But if it's harder, why are some jobs so much harder to fill? What is it about them? Because you're finding people, you're, you're submitting people You're moving on the position. But what's going on? What is the, what is the reason that they're open for that long?

My answer to that is I have one role that I worked on that was open for 14 months, and we had 2 different hiring managers on that role. And I think it was because we had to restart the process and kind of reevaluate things.

Recalibration. OK, that's good. OK, so basically, they changed the rec. It's almost like you, you might have closed it and opened a new rec, almost, right? Okay, spot on. Yeah, that's good. I'm getting a lot of unrealistic expectations, so that, that again, that may be back to like, let's just close the rec and reopen it. Lack of talent. Okay, I can see lack of talent being the reason that it's hard, but, um, you know, there's, there's talent. So it's like, if there is not no talent, then you'll never, never fill it. There's positions where there's lack of talent and people fill the positions fairly easily. So I'm looking for what is, what distinguishes one role where there's very sparse talent to another role that also has very sparse talent, but one position can be filled in, you know, 3 months, 6 months, a year, and the other one takes 4.5 years. Like, I'm looking for what is that, what is the essence of what makes that a horrible job to fill. It's not a priority for the hiring. Oh, Yes. OK. Has anybody ever encountered a hiring manager they didn't want to hire? Like secretly? They, they kept telling you that they wanted to see more candidates and their boss was putting pressure on them to fill the job, but really they didn't want to hire. So they were actually their own obstacle. That happened to me once. Anybody else had that experience?

Shelley, I want to play devil's advocate here. Why would somebody want— not want to fill a headcount they had requested?

I will tell you the reason in this case, and this is the only time it's ever happened in my career filling, you know, thousands of positions. And that's what I'm curious to see if this, this kind of thing has happened to somebody else. But in this particular case, the GM of this division had tapped this individual, a director-level person, for promotion into a higher-level role operating the entire division so that the GM could then focus on several divisions, because they were a GM of multiple divisions and they had too much time, spending too much time on this one division. So they wanted— they had tapped this director to get promoted to become a division director or a senior director. So they had to backfill their job. In other words, the rec was for this person's backfill. So he had to hire someone to replace himself so he could be promoted, but he didn't want the promotion and he didn't want to tell his boss that he didn't want the promotion because then he would appear like he's not interested or disloyal, and he was afraid he would get fired or whatever. So he basically kept the position open and kept interviewing hundreds of people because he just didn't want to hire, because that meant hiring someone would mean he would be moving on to this other job which he didn't really want. That was the reason. Okay. Oh, they didn't want to onboard someone. Oh my God. We want to hire somebody, but we don't want to teach them anything. Nice, that's a good one, man. We could write a book with all this. Where's, where's ChatGPT when you need it? Is somebody grabbing all this text so we can make a summary of it? Man, I almost want to do that.

Yeah, put it back into our word cloud. Why do hiring managers don't want to hire?

That's right, they never— yeah, candidates kept coming in So he wanted to take the whole team. Did he do it, Corey? Did he take the entire team? Obviously you don't have— you know, don't tell us who it was, but wow, that's crazy. So, and so he probably took the candidates too. He left with all the candidates and all the team. See ya. Oh, that's hilarious. Okay, all right, I hope you guys are enjoying this as much as I am because I'm just cracking up over here. Okay, so I have one other one. I've got a couple more, but I'm not sure how much time we have left. In regards to efficiency or effectiveness, depending on how you want to define it, in other words, getting more done with less, right? In your experience, what do you feel has remained the same throughout your entire career, but you know, that has never— essentially has never evolved. So what area of recruiting has just not evolved through your entire career? That you said LinkedIn.

LinkedIn and the fax machine. Those two things have not evolved since I've been a recruiter.

But I was gonna say that you still use those. So yeah, so let's, let's kick the fax machine out of here because, uh, I don't think I can still find mine. From Tales from Yeah, what do you still do that still works that has never evolved throughout your career with regard to, you know, efficient recruiting or— I'm looking for kind of, not really the secret sauce, but, you know, there's those little things that some of us do really well and we don't really think about it because we've just always done them. Like I have a colleague who's pretty manual about his processes, but he's just doggedly determined to always keep track of the steps of everyone, so he has a double spreadsheet. No matter what's in the ATS or the CRM, he's always copying it to a spreadsheet, and even though I've told him, you don't need to do that, he still does it anyway because it's always worked for him. And after about a year and a half, we actually needed to use it because there was one discrepancy in the ATS, and he was able to come up with the original data because he had made a copy of it. So there's these things that we just always do. Right? So something that you've done that doesn't change. Direct calling. OK, I like that. The phone, right? Relationships, personalization. Ooh, I like this one. Prepping both the interviewer and the interviewee. That's a good one. How many of us, I wonder, actually prep the candidate but not the hiring manager, or vice versa, right? We're really good at prepping the hiring manager, but we forget about the candidate. Prepping them both is definitely— that's, that's old school. That I don't think that's ever going to change. Templates. Okay, so relationships, templates, email. Okay, all right, I get that, I get that. But, uh, yeah, when I started recruiting, email wasn't that big, believe it or not. That's how long I've been doing it. Oh, my first recruiting job, we had Lotus Notes. and it only synchronized once a day. So it connected to the server and grabbed email once a day. We got faxes throughout the day, but we only got email once a day, and, and it only sent email once a day. So you could write all the emails you want, but it only sent them once a day because they had to dial up to the mothership through a dial-up modem. So yeah, when I started recruiting, email wasn't really even that big a thing, so But definitely calling. Yep. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Okay, now here's a doozy, and I want to close out with this one. Do we still have a few more minutes? We do. Okay, should sourcing and recruiting have the same SLA? Should sourcing and recruiting have the same SLA? And support your answer. Yes, why? No, why? Or I should say not— no. Yes, why? No, why not? Paper applications. Yeah, we had that too, paper applications and folders. Actually, I had an applicant flow log on a piece of paper where I had to handwrite the candidate and the disposition. Yep, believe it or not, most folks these days don't even know what an applicant flow log is because the ATS does it all automatically, but we had to manually keep that. Dang, we have a no, a resounding no, Brian, to the question, should sourcing and recruiting have the same SLA? And it looks like there is not a soul alive today that thinks that they should? Oh, well, that Amy Beck makes a very good point. If you don't know the difference between a sourcer and a recruiter, then, right, then it doesn't matter what the SLA is. Yeah, yeah, pretty much puts an end to that question. Thanks, Amy Beck. Okay, assuming that you have a defined role for recruiter and a defined role for sourcer, revising my question here, should they share an SLA? Yeah. That's all. That's good. All right, should we do one more or are we good?

Let's do one more question and then let's bring on the man, the myth, the legend, Marvin Booker, who is, uh, who is, who is ready poolside for us to make this happen.

All right, so here it is. Here's my last question. Of all the technology that we've seen evolving— AI, ChatGPT, chatbots, email automation, CRM systems, social networking, all of it— of all the technology that we have seen evolve, try to name one technology that has hurt you in recruiting more than it helped. One technology that did the opposite of what was supposed to do. Obviously something that you applied or put in practice, but as a piece of technology that you put in practice or you applied and you were like, oh, that was a bad idea, we need to roll that back because it hurt more than it helped. LinkedIn, LinkedIn. Oh man, I'm hoping that we get something other than LinkedIn.

Um, so, so one of the things that I put into play— Workday. One of the things that I tried to do is I tried to navigate recruiting on Twitter using a TweetDeck. And that just, that just absorbed way too much time. And I did not have the right methodology going forward on that. And I'm like an idiot. Yeah, I look like an idiot.

Well, this one-way interviews. This is coming up a couple of times here. I'm interested in finding out So as opposed to like the— so there's the synchronous, there's the synchronous, and then there's the asynchronous. You're not talking about asynchronous two-way interviewing, you're talking about the one where like they send you a link and you record yourself on the phone and you can— that one? Okay, yeah, so that's been actually— there's a lot of chatter about that being an unfair practice because from what I've read now, I'm not an expert in this field, But I'm very curious about this if anybody does have solid information about it. Because essentially, the data suggests that it's used only as a way to eliminate candidates, that it's not used as a way to select them. But basically, these one-way interviews are nothing more than mass rejection techniques that don't add any value to the process. I personally have never worked in an organization that had that. I've had the asynchronous interviewing, but that's That's different. That's kind of like, uh, like where you take an online test, a coder test, and you can see that what they're doing and everything. But yeah, not— none are diversity friendly, that's definitely for sure. But what they've actually said is, aside, aside from it not being diversity friendly, it actually is never used for selection. It's only used as a way to reject people. So if you even do the interview, you're just putting yourself at risk of being— so like, that's what I've heard. I wonder if that's true or not.

I, I guess that we will have to have another conversation about that ghosting. Yeah, well, maybe that, maybe that replaces our, our dinnertime conversation, Shelly, where we define what sourcing is specifically. Um, so everybody give it up for Shelly.

He is— thanks, y'all. Thanks for letting me interview you, our special guest at HRTX today.

Yeah. All right, so speaking of special guests, we have another Camp