Sreenivasa Raju Live on Shally's Alley

Today, August 5th, and you are on Shally's Alley. Today I have a very special guest that's coming to us actually from a very far away, at least for me anyway, uh, practically the other, the other side of the world. Um, and also he is a very, I should say, prolific, uh, constant contributor to The Talent Method group on Facebook. So for those of you that are on, on the group, I'm sure you've seen him post quite a bit. He's a strong contributor. And don't be fooled by the background picture though. It is— I know for sure it is not daytime where you are right now, Srini.

Yes, it is about 10:40 PM right now.

Yeah, definitely past your bedtime, I'm sure. Thanks for staying up late with us here and joining us on the sourcing.

It's a pleasure, Shelley. It's an absolute pleasure.

So for those of you that don't know about the group, Srinivas Raju— is Raju or Raju, right?

You can call me Srini, Shelley. In fact, that would be easy for everyone.

Srini is how he likes to be called, but he is a member of the Publicis Sapiens organization in India, and right now he is a senior talent acquisition manager working on UI/UX front-end projects, particularly at the senior leadership level, architect, and also works with accessibility projects, which is a passion of mine since I work with people that are blind and have other abilities. Formerly he was at IBM, I believe, before coming to— yeah, this is Sapien. His passions are diversity and niche recruiting leadership as well, and building center of excellence, personalization in outreach, and so on. I'm gonna publish your LinkedIn link here so folks can connect with you. I'll put that on the scroll bar. There we go. All right, so Welcome. Thank you for joining us.

It's a pleasure to share the same stage with you, Shelly. And it's basically really nice, basically talking to such a legend in the sourcing industry. You're the father of sourcing. And basically, I believe you had started even before LinkedIn.

Oh yeah. Not that I want to admit that, but yeah, definitely. '96, 1996. So there was something before LinkedIn that a lot of people don't know about. That was the first social network and it was called Six Degrees, but it was only for like a couple of years and it just really never went anywhere. I think it was done and gone by the year 2000 pretty much. I think it was only around for like '96, '97, maybe '98. Long, long time ago. But yeah, That's why I'm getting this gray right here. Yeah, there's not much I can do about it. I'm long in the tooth, gray in the beard for sure. But I really appreciate you coming on the show. I believe you're the first person from India that has been a guest on the show, and that's not been because of any oversight or anything. I've put out several invitations for people and you responded recently, so I jumped on the opportunity to get the perspective of somebody I've visited India a couple of times, particularly actually I was in Pune and in Bengaluru or Bangalore. So those are the two cities that I know in the two areas, very different from each other, but I, I did spend some time there. So I know a little bit about, you know, recruiting there and, and how things are. I wanted to really get much, much more of a stronger idea as to what goes on. One of the things you talked about was, um, kind of where the market is going, and, and you were telling me about there, there's, uh, not just a lot of layoffs, but it's kind of strange because there's, there's all these announcements about layoffs, and then at the same time there's all these announcements about low unemployment and, uh, the job market's really strong. So it's like, which one is true? Are there layoffs? Are there— is it— so it's like both at the same time. Um, and you had something interesting to share about that.

Yes, absolutely. Because, uh, all of a sudden, um, especially people, um, who who think twice or thrice about moving, jumping ships rather, because of these layoffs and because of the volatile kind of market. People are kind of thinking twice to change their current job, their present job, because they're also very concerned about security, job security, because they're not getting any younger, and that makes them think all that much. And I see a lot of— there's this shift in the way people kind of take up new roles, especially at the leadership level or at the senior level. And it's a little tricky sometimes, right? Like, unless even whatever selling that you do and how I have a strong pitch you come up with, still it kind of sometimes it doesn't materialize, which is, um, it can get demoralizing. And, um, it— I would say that like we need to build a strong pipeline and get at it and not to lose hope.

But you were actually— you were even saying that people are at the very last minute, um, after the offer, not, not showing up or like, you know, taking back after, after they've accepted the offer. Tell me more about that.

Yeah. In fact, recently I got a guy whom I had placed for an accessibility role at a senior manager level, which is at a senior architect level. And we spoke about the compensation, we spoke about the breakups and after, in fact, I happened to release the offer, the guy, and I actually happened to release an offer which was slightly more than what we had discussed. And to my astonishment, the guy didn't even open the DocuSign attachment.

So verbally accepted and then just disappeared, ghosted you.

Yes. No, no, I won't say that.

Yeah. And you're saying, you're saying that this is because of essentially fear of— so like, what are they worried about, that they're going to take this job, they're going to get laid off? What's, what's the worry?

Yeah. In fact, when it comes to the interview, the interview stage or the initial pre-interview stage, when I kind of talk to them and speak to them about the opportunity, they get, they get really excited. So they don't think about the move at that point of time. And when it comes to the crunch stage, people start really thinking about it. And okay, am I getting an onsite opportunity? Can I get more within the organization? So probably it also depends upon the kind of organization it is. And this guy is coming— was coming from Adobe. This guy was coming from a good product organization, so probably, um, and again, um, that's the challenge that we, um, have to live with because the expectations that we as an organization have, um, is pretty high because the stakes are pretty high because, um, we're not working with the small-timers in term— in terms of the end clients because we're only working with large-scale enterprise business partners. Absolutely. And we're not working on any support or maintenance projects as well, because these are pretty much into from scratch development, as well as a lot to do with solving unique and challenging problem statements. And you don't get these people quite easily. And that's some of the challenges that we have to live with. So there are the challenges.

The stakes are high. These people are accepting the job, you know, the, the client is waiting for the deliverable and then the person doesn't show up. And now you've already told the client that you're going to have a certain deadline and you even told the client that you have somebody coming on board and then they don't show up. So what's the solution for that? Do you have to have like 2 people for every job now? You have to have like a second offer pending just to make sure.

Yeah, in fact, what I have seen is take the difficult route because we're not talking about apples to apples here because from an organization perspective I was referring to. So we're not talking about similar type of organizations, but there's one thing for sure, the quality. There's no negotiation or no letting down on it. So having said that, the challenge really is to identify people who are following the brand and really keen and interested to join the organization, as well as somebody who has previously worked with the organization. We're also, we're also as an organization looking at ex-employees as well as others who have worked with Ubilicious Sapient, which is a French IT MNC, by the way. And we, we pretty much did about the highest revenue that we have done throughout, which is at 19.1% in the first half of the year, that is from Jan to June this year, which is pretty phenomenal. Hope that trend continues. But having said that, it's what really works is when people are really looking for an opportunity with us, to work with us. And the employee referrals is something which we as an organization drive. 30 to 35% of the hires that we do come from employee referrals.

So, um, by the way, that's a pretty normal number. I, you know, you hear 35 to 40% a lot in all the organizations that I've worked with and advised. And, and it's— it demonstrates that's a healthy number. In other words, Companies that have a good reputation and a good brand tend to have 35 to 40% employee referrals. Where you see that number going down into the 20s or teens, then that's a sign that there are some employment brand issues. And I rarely see much more than 50%, but I have seen it. So 35 to 40 is great. It's a good, healthy, strong referral rate.

Yeah, in fact, I also recommended a platform called employereference.com. Within the organization which got implemented. So this kind of gamifies the whole referral system within the organization. And also there will be automatic notifications which, which would be sent to the referrers as well as people like us who are in the talent acquisition team, which kind of like how we use Calendly for the interview scheduling, this kind of lets go of all the manual tasks and engages the referrers to do more referrals, and which kind of increases the number of people that we hire through the referral system on a normal basis without the implementation of a tool.

Interesting. I never heard of that tool before. Is it expensive?

I'm not sure of the costing.

You didn't, right? You didn't negotiate. Yeah, that sounds good. Does it work with non-employee referrals or just only employees?

Yeah, we had a system for non-employee referrals as well, but right now we're only considering employee referrals. Yeah, because that kind of encourages people to contribute more within the organization. Yeah, I also use a lot of bookmarks. Let's, uh, Shelley, in fact, um, there are about, uh, 210 or 215 bookmarks that I use.

Wow.

Yeah. Yes, yes. Uh, so hope you can see my screen, um, uh, or shall I share it?

You can share it. Yeah.

So if you see, um, in fact, you can let me know once you see the screen, Shelley.

I put it up. So here we go. On the left-hand side. Yeah, actually, I'll do it this way.

So, um, yeah, okay. Uh, yeah, great. So these are the bookmarklets, JavaScript bookmarklets that I have. Uh, so if I just go to scrapers, so there are multiple bookmarklets that I have for scrapers. A boatload of them. Then the browser book notepads which I use, there are highlighters on the web page, currency conversion, bookmarks, fonts and text, text to voice, table conversions, transpose, GitHub tools, background theme readability, as well as sharing content on the webpage, right? Like for example, if I have to share something, I found an interesting article and I want to share that on Facebook. Yeah. So as well as I use a lot of hashtags. In fact, I had recently posted on—

I saw that. Yeah, that was pretty cool.

Yeah. It got a ton of response as well, which made me a little happy. And so Scrolling, auto-scrolling, bookmarks, LinkedIn tools.

Well, how many of those do you need? You only need one auto-scroller. You can't auto-scroll the auto-scroll? Come on, man.

So there are different types of scroller, like there's a smooth scroller, there's a— Yeah, I can set the speed. So then LinkedIn tools, this is something which you might have seen that Andre Bradsch has a bookmarklet for the auto-see more. Um, this came, um, actually, um, I thought why can't we have a bookmarklet, um, because on LinkedIn profiles, um, we normally have to click on the See More to see more of the About information and then also to see more in the Experience category wherein people would have mentioned a lot of things on the experience. So this kind of, um, one of this, okay, this one works on LinkedIn Basic and this works on LinkedIn Recruiter. So based on this idea, in fact, I had shared with Andre. He actually built a tool which would do that. And I found that there was— I think he built the one on LIR, and I found this one which was previously working only on the about section. And when I came up with this with the AB, then he kind of added the functionality on to experiences as well. So we just have to click on the bookmarklet and it loads the whole page in just one click.

Nice.

So yeah.

Are these in a way that— would you mind sharing these or some of these? I know Glen has them in a library somewhere. It kind of reminds me of that. You have that in a way that you could share?

Yes, yes. In fact, what I could do is probably— I do not know of a way how I could share that. Probably I could export the bookmarks and then probably share that.

I know he puts them on like a zip file or something like that.

Yeah, there's a Chrome extension called Powerlet. Powerlet, rather. It's called Powerlet. Yeah, so this is a Chrome extension which we could use only to search bookmarks. This only works on JavaScript code bookmarks.

And there's something called, um, most of these are JavaScript though.

No, uh, these are proper Chrome extensions. There's something called as Page Notes, which I normally use. Like, we use, um, Smart Recruiters as an ATS, and what I do is like, um, uh, whenever I, uh, open, um, a particular page on the ATS, right? Like, um, what, um, because it takes the main URL smartrecruiters.com, and if I had set up some notes, so all those notes would kind of pop up, like how this one shows a number. When I go to that page which has that main domain URL, then it shows me all the links. For example, there's something that I, I don't want to remember those things. And when I go into a particular website, yeah, so it shows me which are all the things that I need to be doing or acting on when I'm on Smart Recruiters as an ATS. And it's also important, I believe, that we need to slice and dice data sets to be able to find more people. And that's one of the reasons why I built a custom search engine with about 84, in fact, refinements. So it doesn't have facets, it doesn't have facets, but it just has refinement. The way I look at it is we give a— we do a search query and So on the, on the all section, or the, yeah, on the all section, or on the non-images section, we get 100 results. And in the images section, we get 200 results. So if we have 80, 83, or 84 segments or refinements, so it is, so when we go to the last page and we change the page number to 6 or 11, then we're going to get some more results, which I learned from you actually, Shelley, and thanks for that. I actually learned how to build custom search engines from your videos.

And you got really good at it.

Yes, yes, yes. Thanks for you. Thanks for the YouTube videos. And so that's how, if we multiply that, we get about 25 to 26,000 results depending on the number of refinements that you have done. And whereas on LinkedIn you get only 1,000 results per search query. So that's— and we could— the other thing which I have noticed is people talk about present and using the around function, but what I've seen on LinkedIn is on certain pages of people's profiles The whole experience segment, like, even it is all a link. So if I, if I click on present, it's not text on all the profiles. It automatically goes into the company about section, and it's a link. So that when profiles have those type of links in, in and around present, so So we cannot use the around function and we are not going to find those particular web pages when we use around present tense, for example.

Okay.

Yeah, so I also use a lot of, in fact, I'm a fan. I like using shortcuts. Like, you spoke about Magical. In fact, it has come up with the transfer functionality as well the last time you spoke about Magical Shelley. So apart from working with that, yeah, so it's come up with an additional feature called transfer. We could transfer content, like basically You did show about the spreadsheets and it would, it would kind of scrape the information as long as we have the same, as long as we have the same, in fact, for example, we're looking at LinkedIn profiles or we're looking at ATS profiles or we're looking at something else, as long as the window has the same tabs, it becomes easy to get that information into a spreadsheet. So now we have something called transfer which makes it even easier. I have also been using Google Forms and Microsoft Forms. I would prefer Google Forms because it allows us to attach, attach certain documents, and this is not just within people within the organization, it could be anyone. Whereas in Microsoft Forms, only people people within the organization can attach documents or any type of files. So that's one of, that is one of the things which Google Forms is much better than Microsoft Forms that way. And we could use this when we post something on LinkedIn or even when we do a job posting on a job portal. So we would get a lot of profiles or people, and based on our questions and based on the different refinements or the options that we have kind of set up, it makes our life a little more easy. And I have been using Quick Forms as well, Quick Parts on Outlook. Funny thing about that is I stopped using it because Whenever we kind of restart the system, sometimes the saved Quick Parts kind of disappears. So I don't know what to do about it. Like, somebody mentioned some trick to that, but I have not really gone ahead and further experimented on that.

What is— tell me a little bit more about that. The Quick Parts disappear? Yeah, so like from one document to the other, or—

Yeah, Quick Parts are something which we use on Microsoft Outlook where it works like a shortcut, right? Like we could use a shortcut or by just using, if you're using a Windows system, we could just do a Windows+V and we can set up shortcuts right in the— we don't have to use Templify. It acts it acts like a clipboard. So everything that we copy, it automatically gets saved there. And we can pin 3 shortcuts using the Windows+V, which is the clipboard basically. That can be used. What I was talking about is Outlook Quick Parts. So basically what it does is we can we can basically save shortcuts. So we just type—

Yeah, I know what you're talking about. So in Outlook and in Word too, and it's like snippets of text or different things, but you're saying it disappears. That's what I was like wondering. Yeah, in fact, that happened.

I'm not sure. In fact, I need to just— I'm not sure why it happens because I So what happens whenever I restart the system? I don't normally restart my system, but I keep it on sleep mode. So when I restart the system, yeah, when I restart the system, what happens is it doesn't happen all the time, but when I do it a couple of times or 3 times, then the templates which I had saved kind of disappears. So a lot of work would have gone into that and So then I thought either using OneNote. I use OneNote as well. I'm a big fan of OneNote because it is easy to save things and compartmentalize things. Different templates. Templates are really useful because when we are sending any type of message, I'm a big fan of prepping candidates or technologists. And also debrief, doing a debrief to them as to what is the expectation and what are the things that they need to kind of brush up on. So that's something which people really appreciate, and it also helps them to clear the interviews as well.

Got it. So are you using automation to—

Yes.

To personalize, like data enrichment and stuff like that as well?

Yes, data enrichment. What I normally do is, yeah, we do have extensions, but apart from that, there are about 15 extensions that I am aware of. Probably there are more, but I have used about 15 contact finding tools.

Having said that, but what I do is like just one contact at a time. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you there.

Yeah. So I don't use any paid services. I've never used any paid services. I always like free content. So that way, basically, I have never done it at scale. So, but having said that—

That answers my question. Okay.

Yeah.

You are automating it, but in batches, not at scale. Got it.

Yeah. So what I also do is when I find somebody online, there are different things which I could do is initially I get their— try to get their email ID. So we could do it on Bitbucket. Many people are aware of how to get the email IDs on GitHub, but we can also do it on Bitbucket by just going into commits and going into the URL and just adding to the URL after we have clicked on a particular commit. We just need to mention /raw, R-A-W. Then it gives us the email ID.

Yeah, nice.

So we do a.patch on GitHub and we go to the commits of any Bitbucket user where we could use this really to— for DevOps profiles. So a lot of people who are working on DevOps tend to be on Bitbucket. So we could do that. We could do a simple search, like we could do an X-Ray search with looking for web pages, LinkedIn web pages, which has either the link bitbucket.org or the text bitbucket.org/*. So when we do either this or that, then it kind of captures all those LinkedIn profile web pages which has the Bitbucket, and then we could do this, use this hack, and then get their email IDs. So then what I do is then I cross-reference those email IDs on one of the job boards. Like in India, we use Naukri, most of them, most of us.

And then the monster, the monster of the career builder of India.

Yes. And then we have the second free, second free platform, that is the ATS. So People normally don't use ATS to its fullest extent, probably because most of them are not as robust as it should be. But we could also use that database to find contact information of people once we have their email IDs. And then the image hack as well, like we could do the image hack, do a right-click, or if it doesn't work, we just copy the URL and paste it.

Reverse image.

Yeah.

So that's, do you use TinEye for that?

Yeah, we could use TinEye for that. I use Google. I believe apart from Google, there's that Russian search engine which is really good as well.

For image search?

Yeah, for image search. So TinEye is absolutely, PimEyes is even better. PimEyes is really better than everything else, I believe. But we can't do more than 5 in the free, by using the free version.

I believe we need 5 a day or what? 5.

I think it is 5 a day. I'm not very sure, but PimEyes is the best that there is.

I'm adding it to the scroll bar here. Okay, cool. So another thing that you and I talked about a little bit is life outside of LinkedIn, right? So you're talking about GitHub, you're talking about Bitbucket. Well, David Marr recommended Bitbucket and a few of these others, but that's great. It's just for developers. It's just for people that are in technology. For UI, is it really— I mean, are you finding a lot of UI people that way, or—

No, I don't work on— I don't work on design.

Right. So where do you go for that?

So in fact, I've seen a lot of people on coffeemug.ai as well. A lot of sites which I have bookmarked. So there are about X-ray searches, different X-ray Google searches which I do, and every time I find something new, I keep on bookmarking it. So there are about 1,200 of them on my browser, on my Chrome extension. Not on my Chrome extension, but on my Chrome browser.

So 1,200 bookmarks. Ah, okay, that's a lot for UI specifically.

So in fact, for UI designers, I would say Dribbble, uh, uh, there's a, there's one for only Indian UI designers. Um, there's obviously Behance. Yeah. Um, so, uh, what I also do is, um, sometimes I never post jobs on LinkedIn. Uh, I just There's a saying, right? Like, I'm just deviating a little bit here. So relatives, everybody has relatives. So unless and until— wait, yeah, can you hear me, Shelley? Am I audible? Am I audible? Hello?

I can hear you.

Okay, great. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so I just thought about deviating a little bit because I normally try to bring different analogies to make people understand, or just for my own self, like I try to bring in different analogies. Why should I, why should a candidate or a technologist or any kind of person that we are trying to hire, our target audience, respond to our LinkedIn InMails or even just a post we do on LinkedIn? Or any other place. So, um, just for example, just for example, um, even if we just talk about our relatives, our own, uh, um, in fact, people whom, um, who are relatives, right? So if we do not go and see them in person, or we do not attend their events, so they're not going to come to our events as well.

So, uh, that's a good point. Reciprocity, right?

Yes, absolutely. Because it could be a marriage, it could be an event, it could be something else. Um, so it could be a birthday party or it could be something else. If, if we don't go to their events, why should they? So, um, yeah, so, uh, so, uh, what I've seen is, um, we, um, uh In fact, we should give even before we get— we expect something from others. So when we do that, I normally believe in sharing content which resonates with the target audience that we as talent acquisition professionals are looking to reach out to. So when we share content which resonates, which they actually are looking for, those type of things, and that immediately kind of bridges the gap. And when we do that, we get more of a response from people. It— I have done it many times wherein I don't even post jobs, I just post stuff that people are interested, my target audience, and use certain hashtags. And then I just update my LinkedIn profile saying I'm hiring for these roles. And I never post. People automatically come and connect on my LinkedIn profile and share their profile. So that is one way of doing it. The other way is obviously to like and share content which they are posting, people are writing about. And so it works both ways. So I would say these two hacks sometimes work better than your InMail. So when we're doing an in-mail, I normally use a salesperson kind of strategy, wherein the first email would be like, okay, it would be like, okay, I came across, okay, this is what we do as an organization, which is very unique.

A little bit about us.

Yeah, which is very unique. So not too much about the organization as such.

But what's different in the, in the particular division that we are hiring for? Yeah, not, not the brand of the company.

Yes. Um, so then basically second would be like, okay, this is what I saw on your LinkedIn profile which really caught my attention. This is precisely what we do and, um, would definitely like to talk to you based on your availability. Um, because these are the 2-3 things which I really liked about your profile, and you would be a great addition to our organization, and it would be a win-win situation. It's, it's not only about us, it's also about them and how we can make this engagement a win-win situation. So when that kind of— we do and personalization obviously takes time if you're working on scale, but writing 3 lines of personalization doesn't come. So the rest—

3 lines. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you open to a couple of questions? There was a question from somebody in the discussion that was asking if you have any tips for a 3D animator.

Yes, there's something called ArtStation if you have heard of it. There's a platform called ArtStation, you could use that. You see a lot of 3D animators there because the platform is for 3D people as well as designers.

So you would find users of it or—

Yes, just like how we have Behance or Dribbble. People would just offer their portfolios and their 3D kind of, yeah, their work in ArtStation. So again, if you are x-raying there, you could just use the profile ArtStation and then you could try to look for people who have either left their LinkedIn link or a Gmail or something else, or +91 or +1. Whatever you want to use, so which would give you more information. So you can use— I also like to use mail. I also like to use mail merges because when you have made a template and you insert certain fields, like, okay, when you want to do a personalized message, so you basically make a column for that in an Excel file and then add your personalization content in that column. And automatically that kind of aligns in the mail merge, and that would be sent to individual people based on the column if it's in the same line as in the name and the email ID of the person, if it's the same row item rather.

So I'm gonna put, uh, ArtStation in the ticker here so people who are listening can see the address. There it is. So that's, uh, that's our tip for 3D, 3D animators, 3D artists. Um, we have another question. Do you have any tips for MarTech, marketing technology?

In fact, I can, um, I don't have anything on me as of now, uh, but If, if I do a little bit of research, I will easily come across at least 2 to 3 platforms.

Yeah, okay, that's why we don't have a martech one for you. Uh, one that I know of is a platform called Braze, B-R-A-Z-E, but that's just something that we use. So, um, maybe check that out. But, um, let's see, what was the other question we had? I saw another one here that was Oh, right. So it was a clarification on the, um, on the Bitbucket, and it was actually about GitHub. Here's the other one: a channel video material to refer to that we can learn what you're talking about. Is there anything? It's just you, right? You're, you're inventing.

Yeah, in fact, um, I always, in fact, try to— basically, I do have a bone for it. But having said that, like, there was a time when in 2021, there was almost every day that I would find something new, and only then I would go to sleep. So otherwise, like, long nights, man. Yeah. And what I also try to do is like, okay, this is not for— I would not advise this to everybody. This is a little crazy. Sometimes even to have my lunch or even dinner or to go to my sleep. So I have to earn that at least by finding something or doing something substantial. Yeah. Earn your lunch and earn your dinner kind of a thing. That kind of works for me.

It's a way to reward yourself for innovation and creativity.

So everything starts from creativity because if someone doesn't have creativity and they just want, okay, A plus B is equal to C. Okay, I do a certain number of calls a day, then I get a certain number of people, then I get interest of certain number of people getting the get them interested in the opportunity, then I would get a certain number of interviews per day, and then I would get a certain number of interviews to happen over a week, and then I would ultimately—

what happens when that doesn't work?

One or two offers, right?

So what happens when the formula doesn't work? Yeah, so we got one last question. Yeah, we got one last question. If you have any tips for German-speaking functional resources in India?

Absolutely.

German speaking in India.

That's, uh, absolutely. Yeah, there is, um, uh, there, uh, I, I'm not remembering the name of the platform. Uh, yeah, we can do it on LinkedIn because, uh, there is a language speaking native bilingual, uh, bilingual, and also professional. Yeah, we could easily do an around there, um, around, uh, uh, yeah, around 2, I guess. Yeah, we could do a round 2 and we could alternate between either bilingual and native or with professional speaking. There are about 5 sections, if I remember properly, in terms of the language proficiency. There's another place called— it starts with C, I've forgotten. I was using it about nearly 1.5 years before. This is a place where people— okay, it's called Couchbase.

Yeah, say that again.

Couchbase. Couchbase. Yeah, C-O-U-C-H-B-A-S-E. This is a place where people travel. This is a place where people travel, um, and, um, basically they're, uh, they find like Airbnb. Yeah, yeah. So they find, uh, so when people are traveling, they're looking for a place where they can stay for about 2-3 days. And that's when I've seen a huge number of people in Couchbase who are language professionals. If you check with Lundgren, if you check with Lundgren, he had spoken about this about 2 years before, and he basically came across, went across this platform, and they have segregations even in the URL. You can actually search for the website and you can look for, for example, French national speaking people in a particular area as well. And then you could write them a message, you could directly send them a message as long as you are there on the platform as a user.

Okay, Couchbase. Yeah, Couchbase. I'm gonna look it up and see if I can place it in here.

Yeah, yeah, I think— like Airbnb for couches. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Couchbase.com. That's pretty easy. Okay, there we go.

All right, I'm glad that I remembered it. It's been ages since I used it.

Yeah, wow, that's pretty good. Great memory. Wow. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate you staying up late with us and hanging out and answering all these questions. I'm very glad that you were able to make it. Sorry I kept you a little bit more than the 30 minutes, but we are having so much fun. I didn't want to interrupt. Any last words in closing for our audience? Anything that you want to— any parting words?

Yes. Yeah, so there's— I've seen a lot of people, especially in the talent acquisition segment division, people say like, I have cleaned up or wiped out all the people that are there.

Oh, I got it. I found everybody. I found everybody.

I found everybody. So can you 'Can you tell me how I could— is there another job portal, or is there any other place that I could find more people?' So, uh, so, um, I would always suggest that we run multiple searches. Uh, it could— the first search that we do might be on the title. Um, probably, um, we could have 5 to 6 or 7 different types of titles which could be the low-hanging fruit for us. And then in the second search, what we could do is we could eliminate those sites which we did in the first search but include those, okay, the combination, the skill set combination. Here I'm talking about tech, so we could include those skill set combinations. And we, if we want to negate testers or designers or something else, oh, and eliminate the ones that We could do that, but what specifically we are doing here in the second search is we're eliminating the titles which we used in the first search. We're going to look at a different dataset altogether.

So like a Trunch number 1, then Trunch number 2 missing Trunch number 1. How far can you go before it's too long?

Yes, absolutely.

And then how far can you take that before it like becomes you know, unbearable to the search engine.

Yeah, we could take that methodology, the same exact methodology, location by location. So what it does is—

I see what you mean. Okay.

Yeah, for example, in the United States, so we do it state by state, and we could use that methodology. And the third one, what we could do is we could look for people, um, who, um, which is basically the last set of people which we want to look at, wherein, um, we look for, okay, either this or that in the skill set, um, but they're working with, um, certain organizations, which kind of tells us that if an organization is a Microsoft shop —or if an organization is— I gotcha.

Oh, find them because of their environment. Yeah, I see what you're saying, right? So they won't have the skillset on their resume or their profile or their bio, but because they work at this company and you know that that company runs that technology or does that work, then that's another way to expand your search. It's not by the keywords or the job titles or the geography, but by the company because the company uses that technology. And you might miss a little bit, —Yes, yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

Yeah. —But you also might find some people that you didn't find before. I like that. Yeah. Well, that's a really good tip on how to go beyond when you say, I'm done. I don't find anyone else, how to keep going beyond that. That was great. Appreciate it. Well, thanks everybody. I hope you have a great weekend and we'll see you on the next Shally's Alley. Take care, everybody. —Thank you so much, Shally.

Thanks for your time.

—You're welcome. Great to have you. Bye.