Stacey Broadwell live on Shally's Alley (Dueling Sourcers Part 2)

Welcome to Shelly's Alley. It is Friday, August 26th. It's our last Shelly's Alley for the month of August, and today we have a very special guest, Stacy Broadwell. I'm sure you've seen Stacy's name all over the place in our industry. She is a well-known contributor and content creator, but I don't know if you knew this— Stacy is a pro snowboarder, or rather was a pro snowboarder. She also founded her own staffing firm So she's a former CEO and founder, and nowadays she is, uh, not only a business owner but also a conference organizer. You might have heard of techrecruit.io. That is the event that Stacy organizes and promotes. So welcome, Stacy! It's gonna be a fun show.

Thank you so much for having me, Shelly. This is an absolute honor to be on your show. Thank you for all those wonderful things that you said about me, but certainly there is so much to say about your contributions to the industry. So I am honored to be part of your show and part of that contribution. Thanks for having me.

Oh man, it's, it's just fun to be here. And, uh, you know, I kind of, I, I kind of think of this as almost like part 2 because we had, uh, I don't want to say unfinished business, but we had a nice chat on our, um, Dueling Sorcerers. Did I get that right?

Yeah, Dueling Sorcerers. It's every first Tuesday of the month. Yes.

And so, and we had a couple of things that we didn't get to talk about that we were excited to talk about, so I hope you don't mind, I'll probably bring those up here as well. As everybody knows, we are live right now. If you are on Facebook and you want to have your name show up in the chat instead of just anonymous Facebook user, use this link right here that I just posted on Facebook and you should be able to connect your avatar to display proudly on the Restream here. There you go, that's it. We'll be listing, listing the chat on the, on the right-hand side of this here. So, um, TechRecruit.io, what, what is that? Is that, is that a conference, a virtual conference? Is it, is it a thing? Is it an event? What— tell me about that.

Yeah, TechRecruit.io, it started as a conference here in Los Angeles. So when I was in 2018, I was just coming out of momhood. Well, I have two young boys, so I took parental leave and maternity leave, and I was like, what are the hottest tools for recruiting and sourcing? What is the new ATS? What's the new sourcing tool? What are the Chrome extensions? And here in Los Angeles, most of the meetup groups or any of the events that were typically technical technology events had a little asterisk at the bottom that said no recruiters allowed. You know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, I do. I remember that. Yep, yep, yeah.

And so I thought, you know, there's nothing for recruiters or sourcers to learn from each other. And when I started in recruiting, I started an agency. I started at a global Fortune 500, best training ever, um, Robert Half International in Robert Half Technology. And, uh, there was very much like, this is mine, I don't want to share my process. And I thought, you know, we ought to really be open source like software engineers are, like GitHub is, like when you go to these Linux or mobile or any of these, um, you know, meetups for technology professionals, they're sharing their process. Yeah, why wasn't recruiting like that? So I launched in 2018 in Playa Vista, Silicon Beach, um, the first LAX Tech Recruit Conference, and not really kind of knowing how it'd be received, but I just really wanted to learn from everyone and we had 120 folks at our conference and we had phenomenal speakers. Lou Adler was our keynote at our very first conference. And I often say that Lou did for my conference what George Foreman did for the grill.

Yeah.

He cut the fat. Because, you know, he was a phenomenal speaker. Yeah. And so it just kind of grew from there. IBM asked if they could sponsor our next conference. And then 3 months later, we were doing one in Orange County. And then lo and behold, 5 conferences later, later, we were at LinkedIn's headquarters and they were sponsoring and hosting our pre-party with a bar and appetizers. And, you know, we were in Chicago, and then we had— it just kind of blew up with, uh, sponsorships and help from the community. So it was just, I believe, something that was needed, uh, so in such a way where we could elevate the industry and help each other out without it being such a like, hey, I got the secret sauce, no one knows what I'm doing. We're all doing the same thing. And I think the Dueling Sorcerers show is what we've pivoted to during, um, you know, during COVID And, uh, that just— I learned from every single show. Shelly, you were on our last show. I learned so much from just having you on the show. We, we had like 8 tools we were gonna go through and sites we're gonna do X-raying on. We got through 3 of them because We were just vibing, right? And that's the thing, you know, just bringing everybody together, being passionate about being a recruiter and a sourcer and sharing your process. And so that's what I love about what you do. And I believe that has what has opened doors for me with the TechRecruit Conference. It's a good vibe. Everybody's there to help each other out and it just feels intrinsically overall very rewarding. So that's the TechRecruit conference.

Um, awesome. So now it's a virtual event.

It's— well, we did one virtual event at— in 2020, um, Talent Congress, and it was a 3-day conference virtually from my bedroom. And Shelly, I was like, oh my gosh, I just went into a vortex of 3 days. And on the third day, we're having like a wine social. Like, it was not— it wasn't hopping, it was, uh, remote. And Jerry Crispin is in the, you know, in the social with me with like some other folks. And Jerry leans in and it's on a timer, right? It's the third day, very end of the conference. And he goes, Stacy, if I could give you just one piece of advice, you're doing so amazing. This is what I would say. And it timed out, it turned off and the conference shut down.

Oh no!

What is your advice?

Oh! No!

Yeah.

Wow, that's crazy. Did you ever ask him?

Yeah. So the later on I had him on a panel discussion, I was like, Jerry, remember you leaned in? And he goes, I don't remember. And I was like, no, it was going to be something life-changing. I know it. So we did the, the virtual conference in 2020 because you can't leave COVID 2020 without doing a virtual conference, without hosting one, right?

Yeah.

But we do Dueling Sorcerers. We were doing a talent intelligence show. And I was doing my Tech Recruit podcast where I was interviewing talent acquisition leaders who were elevated in the process, similar to you, Shelly, who are leading teams or setting strategy or talking about headcount, who are analyzing, you know, quality and they're, they're coaching and elevating their own teams in talent acquisition. So it was a lot to do. I was doing 3 shows a week and that just kind of snowballed into other stuff. I now have over a dozen sourcers, technical sourcers, who are full-time with our—

you offer a service. Okay, you've got it now. So you converted that into a— so wow, so, uh, you, you snowboard, you source, you run a company, you run a conference, uh, what do you not do?

I mean, and I have two children and a husband.

Wow, okay, so this is a Renaissance woman here, Shelley.

It doesn't feel like many hats at the same time if you love what you're doing.

Yeah, I get that, but it's still time and, you know, uh, effort, right? I mean, it's— I know I get the feeling of going to work every day and not, you know, and it'd be fun. That's, that's awesome, and that's where I am right now. But you still have, you know, there's still a limited amount of time that you can do things in the day. Um, so that's awesome. I saw a comment from, from LinkedIn about why, you know, people, um, in the industry just don't share their secrets. Honestly, if I had to guess where that comes from, it's back in the day, you know, when I started doing this 25, 26 years ago. Oh my God. Jeez, that's a long time. And I learned from people that had already been doing it for 30 years, okay? So this has been around for a while. But the people that taught me came from an era where there was candidate ownership. Where the recruiter was an agent of the candidate, and the recruiter essentially acted in agency of representing the candidate. And so that ownership, I think, gave birth to the concept of hoarding, you know, like it's your network. And later on, we've learned from people who learned from them, from like So I think it's been carried forward like this, like this, I don't know, vestigial tail that the recruiting industry has. Nowadays, it's very rare that we have candidate ownership. Even in staffing firms, they share candidates and share commissions. So there might be still a little bit of that. I think that's probably where it comes from is the concept of "this is mine," which was, you know, it was the job of a full desk recruiter. Work a long time ago. So somebody wants to know if you jump off helicopters and snowboard. That's a good question, actually. I want to know that too.

So now I go, I take my kids to the skate parks. I still skateboard. I jump in— I, I go in ramps and pools. Um, I have multiple, multiple injuries though. I'm 45 years old. I'm no spring chicken. I started snowboarding in the late '90s, and I got immediately sponsored. In my high school, there was 2 girls, 3 girls who snowboarded. It was like the only thing that trumped cheerleaders in high school, right? But no, I don't jump out of helicopters. No, I go up to Mammoth, I go up to Bear, I take my kids, they're in ski school, and I just hold the camera and do follow cams. That's all I do these days.

Right, right. GoPros, right? Well, that's cool.

But you know what, to piggyback on Shelley, to piggyback on your, um, thoughts on hoarding your data and stuff, you know, I would say there's a similar thought in— and if I may, I don't mean to go to gender, um, roles or what have you. I know we're talking about sourcing, but I had a conversation about this yesterday, so it stands top of mind. Women— and women, there was this idea that this woman said to me that women tend to be catty with each other. They tend to be very judgmental when a woman goes to an event or a party, they're dressing up for other women. They're not dressing up for the men. They want to look good for the other women because they know they're going to be judged. And she asked me if I felt that was true. And I thought about it. And the truth that I feel now, and maybe at some point that, that was a feeling I had, but ultimately now the people in my industry, in my life, especially recently, have been successful women who have opened doors for me. Women who are strong and who can elevate each other up. That has been number one, the, the reason for my success is other women saying, you know what, I, I'm strong and I'm gonna— I'm successful, I'm gonna open doors for you. And that has enabled me to open doors for other women. So to kind of go back to that mentality of like judging people and not sharing and you know, having secret sauce, that hoarding mentality, it kind of comes from a scarcity mentality too. And so getting over that and being someone who's strong, who wants to open doors to help other people be elevated, that mindset will change your life.

So anyway, that's a community mindset. Yeah, that's a community mindset, supporting each other in different ways, um, as part of a community. Well, yeah, that's an interesting take on that. There's probably a little bit of both in, in the reason people still hold on to that. But like I said, you know, it's, it's maybe evolving away because now we have ATSs and CRM systems and, you know, and people understand I might be acting as an agent for this company right now, but if I leave this company, some people that are, you know, my network might follow with me, and the people who don't follow with me will still be contacts of the company. That I was working with. So, you know, if I leave this company, the connection is still with the company and sometimes with me. So it's a much more evolved way of thinking. And I think we're, you know, we'll get there eventually. It's going to take a while. Things like that don't change quickly. So a question that I wanted to ask you, though, I don't know if we got a chance to even talk about this last time. You and I had talked about the economy and specifically layoffs and rate hikes. And you were a little apprehensive that you were like, well, we can't really predict. I get that. And I don't want you to make any predictions, but what are you hearing and feeling right now with regard to the economy? And let me give you a little bit of context so that I'm not asking you a totally open-ended question. My opinion is that a lot of people that are used to, um, you know, thinking for themselves are getting different conflicting information, and it's, it's more than usual. In other words, you know, those of us that go out there and we try to find out what's going on and we, and we search for the news so that we're not being spoon-fed somebody's opinion as news and we're a little bit more critical thinking are reading these conflicting stories. On the one hand, inflation, inflation, inflation. On the other hand, lowest job unemployment numbers in history, or whatever, you know. Companies are hiring, companies are laying off. So, it's this contradiction, and I think that contradiction is creating dissonance and is what's giving people pause. That's the context that I want to ask you about regarding kind of economy layoffs and rate hikes and also objections to moving from one job to another. It's coming up a lot. So sorry, I'll give you back the tennis ball.

I like that how you frame that because here in my center of being Stacy, and anybody who knows me knows this, I like to keep it light, bright, and polite. That's just always kind of my thing. So it's sometimes difficult for me to go into bad news, bad weather sort of forecasting. But to your point, I mean, you're not— it's more speculation, right? It's not predictive. It's speculating what the economy is going to be doing and what we're seeing. And I think on our last call on the Dueling Sorcerers show that you were on, you really hit the nail on the head. And it was something I didn't want to say because I had speculated it about 6 months earlier, and I put a post in our Facebook group that was pointing to inflated salaries as being one of the reasons why we were heading towards this collapse. And this is what I kind of saw like 6 months before that we got to this point. At the beginning of the year, there were so many professionals— I'm not naming any names, but we all know who you are— who were asking for these bloated, bloated salaries. And I just took pause and I thought, there's no way the economy can withstand these salaries.

And they were getting the hikes. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I believe that is a huge portion of this reshuffling that we're seeing is those who have the high salaries who are going to be especially contractors who are being let go. And, and I think to your point earlier, they will find new opportunities, but it's not probably not going to be at that. It will not be at that salary or that rate that they were asking for previously. And in fact, the majority of those who were asking for it, who are not looking or who got those positions are out of work now. And they're suddenly super open to hearing about what the market's paying. And I think that the salary and the compensation stuff is really starting to level off. And, you know, and then the home and the, the home and the mortgage hikes, you know, we're looking at another hike in November. You know, and I think as far as the communication around inflation, it was more of like a stagflation. And these are really kind of lagging indicators of the economy and what's going to happen. Because it's something when you see inflation, inflation is something that has already started. But by the time you get wind of it, it's like been 6 months. So So it's a lagging indicator. What I, what I usually like to look at is earnings reports. You know, I'll look at Yahoo Finance. Bloomberg's really kind of like my go-to, but the earnings report of companies, you know, and whether they're hitting their mark or not. And usually those are even like, as soon as you get that earnings report, if it's lower than what they had predicted or stated it would be, that's when you start to have the layoffs. And usually it's like 4 to 6 months layoffs.

Interesting. So something that I, um, I noticed, and I, and I think might be partially due to that apprehension or that kind of, uh, dissonance, is, um, there's not a lot of talk about what really is going on in the, you know, in the economy. It's more like I don't want to say speculation, but it's more opinion. So, for example, if you take a look at some of the hard numbers, the consumer price index stayed flat throughout a whole chunk of fluctuating economy and different sectors going up and down, and the consumer price index stayed flat. Why? Because companies didn't want to lose customers because it was the perfect time. You know, during the middle of the pandemic was the perfect time to lose customers. You know, that's when If you hike up your prices, people walk, you go somewhere else or whatever, right? So they held on. But the producer price index, which most people don't even— aren't even aware of, that's what the companies pay for the goods that they obtain in order to make the goods that they sell to you, right? So it's not the price of the Corn Flakes box, it's the price of the corn that Kellogg pays. The producer price index didn't hesitate. It went up as There were shortages of labor, shortages of fuel, delays in production, and then the Consumer Price Index had to catch up. So it's what you're talking about. Now that that's happening, that creates inflation, but it's really not inflation. It's a market adjustment in a free market system. So I think what happens is people forget about looking into what's really going on, and they just— they don't know what to think. And because they don't know what to think, The, the answer for smart people is, hold on a minute, stop, like, wait, I'm not sure. You know what I'm saying? It's, it's the hesitation, uh, and I think that's what's happening.

Paralysis.

Yeah, maybe, maybe that's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, right. So you're like, geez, normally I feel confident because the indicators are saying this, and but right now some indicators are saying this, some indicators are not, and the opinion is this, the news It's too much conflicting information. None of it really seems to have any kind of trend, so I'm just gonna wait. And that's what I'm getting a lot from candidates, or at least my recruiters and my sources are hearing from candidates. Timing isn't right. I don't want to move right now. Uh, it may be in 3 months, or— and I'm hearing mumblings like, you know, the economy isn't stable. That's not true. It's not unstable. It's just they just don't know, and, and they don't want to dig into it, right? And they're hesitating, right? I think that's what it is, you know, because they wanted to leave their jobs. What was that? What was that, uh, the great— the musical chairs, or what do they call it? Not the Great Recession, but the great— they had the great reshuffle, right? Everybody that was like holding on to their jobs through COVID and was abused and misused and underused or whatever is like, oh, finally I can leave. And so they all switch jobs. And they had no problem making a decision then. But now it's like, wait, wait, well, hold on a second. Let me think about it. It's not the money. It's not the, you know, and it's not even necessarily, I would say, the employer, because even with a good employer that's a compassionate employer, they're still hesitating. What do you think about that? That's my key. I'd rather know more about that than the actual economics, because that's really what hurts. Us in recruiting.

So interesting that I have— that you would say this because I feel like in my— a month ago I had several conversations with our recruiters in regards to them either being happy, unhappy, wanting to go someplace else. Amazon and Facebook, Meta keep blowing me up and I'm like, yeah, who doesn't have an interview at Meta and Facebook? Or Amazon. Every single person I know has like 5 interviews a day from them, right? So I'm going to go over there. And I'm not saying anything about those companies. Like, I think you can certainly do your research. But, but the question then becomes, as we're going into the next year, do you stay put? Do you kind of ride this out? There's uncertainty. That was actually my advice. What you just said was actually my conversations were like, oh, these, these, my employees are like, I'm going to leave, I'm going to go someplace else. Then I'm like, okay, I get that, you know, that there's a challenge here, but I feel like there's lots of uncertainty. You can go to another company and you can, you know, go through the whole process and ramp back up again. And it's going to be the same challenges at this company as it's going to be at that company. You're dealing with a recruiter who's not putting your candidates through. You're a sourcer who can't find the right candidates. You know, it's, it's always kind of the same challenge. So do you stay where you're stable and you've been here a year now and you're like, you know, everybody and you're doing amazing, or do you start over again? So actually, my advice was really more to kind of stay put. My feeling is Q1 of 2020— what year is this right now?

Yeah, right.

I think that— I think we're just going to be in this lull and I think things are going to start to ramp up. About quarter 4. And then I think Q1, people are going to be paying that money again for, for positions. So I think that's— I think this is— this recession is going to be a soft one if there is one. And I think it's going to be— I don't think it's going to be a little painful, but I don't think it's going to be all the hype that I think we're hearing about.

Right. It's more of an adjustment, maybe not even a recession. What are you saying to candidates now? Because if your companies, your clients, you're hiring, they need to hire somebody. And, you know, we can't, we can't just, oh yeah, so it's, um, it's August, sure, yeah, I can wait until January to fill this position. Not happening. So how are you handling that objection of, eh, I want to wait? What are you telling your recruiters or folks out there in the audience? Well, I'm interviewing, yeah, or your team is interviewing, or the people out in the, in the audience. How are you handling this uncertainty, I don't want to move right now hesitation?

I'm not, I'm actually not getting, I'm getting more candidates now, actually. So I guess the point was a month ago I was having these conversations because I believe that a month ago people were still in this mindset, especially sourcers, because sourcers were like gold. I don't know if you, like a year ago I posted this, I posted on I think Facebook or LinkedIn, I've never had so many hits on anything. It said, recruiters are the new engineers, right? And it just was like, it blew up. I've never had a post get so many hits. And then lo and behold, a year later, like, you know, recruiters are so high in demand after they got laid off for COVID. And this just hype just like went to everybody's head. And so I think a month ago, people are still coming down off that high of like, you know, they're being like, you know, so hot. And I think people are having a little bit more of a rational attitude towards compensation and recruiting. And either they're staying put, or they are more eager to make moves. Because I do believe a lot of folks got laid off, you know, people I spoke to a month ago, who were like, I'm gonna wait, you know, like, I'm getting old. They're, they're now more open. And I mentioned this earlier, they're now more open to that reasonable market price. I'm not saying for anybody to go low, but like, I think a traditional sourcer with 3 to 4 years of experience is going to get paid on a contractual basis $55 to $65 an hour. And then if you have 5 to 7 plus years more of experience, you're like $65 to $75. If you're like $80 more on a contract, I'm not talking about time with benefits and all that kind of—

I got you.

You're getting paid more than that. If you're like in the $80 plus range, you're kind of like, you know, on that higher range. Maybe you should consider going to that 1099, opening your own corporation and doing like, you know, recruiting as a as a service, right?

I got you.

Okay, those are, those are also not like just my, my— those aren't my numbers, those are— yeah, but you're here, Fang, those are Fang industry market numbers.

Yeah. So let's, let's talk a little bit about, you know, the, the business of sourcing, something that we're both pretty passionate about. I know you had asked me sometime ago about Meetup and SlideShare. Do you, do you remember what was it? What was the question that you had about Meetup specifically?

Yeah, so we, I think we started our Dueling Sourcers show with this. You know, you, we have a sourcer recruiter started a company and they don't have a LinkedIn seat for them yet. And oftentimes, you know, you have these conversations, you're vetting out your sourcers, and we have tons of training. We have a members vault that has like all of our training, all our Dueling Sourcers. I learn everything new from these shows and your show every single time I host them. So they have all this material to look for, but then all of a sudden they don't get a LinkedIn seat and they're like deer in headlights, like, what? I don't have a LinkedIn seat, so I'm just waiting till I get my LinkedIn seat and then I'll start working. I'm like, whoa, whoa, there's plenty you can do. You can do X-raying, you can go to like these sites. And so that was kind of spurring that opportunity to create a show where literally I just, I actually used it, Shelly. I used our show, took clips of it, and I put it in our members vault to train our recruiters and I make them watch. They know how. So yeah, so that's what this was. You don't have LinkedIn, what are you gonna do? You can use X-rays to, right, X-ray and find talent across any website.

For those of you that are not, uh, familiar, X-ray is really just, uh, our proprietary name that Ayers came up with, but it's using the site command, site: and then the website. It's a way of telling a search engine to focus only on the pages that are within that domain or top-level domain, or I'm sorry, it would not be a top-level domain, but within that particular domain. So a lot of people use that, you know, site:linkedin, site:facebook, and so on. But Meetup, yeah, I was going to say, so Meetup is a little bit different. You can actually do that with Meetup. You can do site: and Meetup, but there's some benefit to being a member, and it's free. It's free membership. You don't have to pay or anything like that to be registered, because if you're logged in, there's a little bit of extra that you can see, and you can search for profiles a little bit better. However, you can just log in with your Google account, log in with your Facebook account, whatever, and you can do the site command, so you can use site:meetup.com. The trick is that's going to bring back so much content that you need to narrow it down, otherwise it's— you don't have time to go through all the results. Meetup originally started as a Facebook face community for, as you can imagine, meeting up. So if you're looking for, for example, somebody that is, um, fluent in Python, and you do site:meetup.com and then just put in the keyword Python, you'll get again hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of groups. Because it's geographically based, you gotta use geographic keywords, and that may not work when you are using— when you're doing a search nationally, right? So the challenge is I've got a nationwide search. My company hires remote. It doesn't matter what United States state they're in as long as they're in the United States. I go to Meetup and do site:meetup.com Python, and there's a lot of results, but they're geographically distributed, right? So you kind of— my advice is Do some research on whatever analytics tools, whether you have LinkedIn Analytics or, uh, SeekOut or any of the others, and find out where there's a higher density of talent for that particular skill set that is also in your ATS, in your CRM, a higher source of hires. So you can have a report in your ATS that shows you where majority of people come from geographically once they get hired. So essentially it's a report of the locations from where candidates came from when they got started. Even though you might be hiring remotely, it still shows a concentration geographically. So let's say that you can overlay those two and you realize that there's a large population of Python users or programmers or whatever in Portland, Oregon, right? And your company has hired people from there. Then that's— you start with that. Go to the Portland Python Users Group. And that way you can start narrowing down, um, the, the pool. Otherwise, going to Meetup is, it's just too broad. Now, just that example, Python Users Group in Portland is 3,000 members. See what I mean?

Yep.

Yeah, you can actually do a search on just the Python, um, group itself. Again, it's site:meetup.com, but then the URL for the group, and that will search through the members. But once you're logged in, you just go to the group and there's a search box for members. That's what I was saying, there's an advantage to being logged in. Once you found the group, go to the group and you can actually search the members inside of Meetup. The other challenge that I get asked a lot about is, okay, so this is a giant list of names but there's no information about them. How do I, you know, get all 3,000 members? Well, there's a lot of tools out there you can use to, to scrape, you know, like DataMiner and things like that. But really the best option is to narrow the search down with some criteria because those 3,000 members may not all be, you know, some may be CEOs, some may be technical writers, and so on. Just because they're in the Python users group doesn't mean that they're a Python programmer, is what I'm saying. Does that make sense?

Yeah, questions, Shelley. So I have, um, when I, I remember thinking like, oh, Meetup is amazing. I mean, it groups a bunch of Linux developers. This is phenomenal, right? So you're just like, oh, it's like a group. Yes, I'm gonna hit that up. Um, you know, when you're doing searches, if I may add to your X-ray string, your Boolean string, you know, oftentimes the title, like you said, I think you said, uh, what was it, Portland users group or Portland, right?

That would be another example. Yep.

So sometimes if it has like in title, like you're doing an in title X-ray search and it has Portland, you know, mobile software engineers or something like that, then that's fantastic, right? But oftentimes it might just say mobile engineers. It doesn't say Portland, right? And in which case you can actually use in URL, right? And then do what is the colon member, member, or you can URL colon, you know, California, and that'll do all of California. I've done it that way, um, just, you know, playing around with it, right? Um, but the challenge was once you got in there and you found all those members, you're like, well, this plethora, right?

It's too much information.

Message them without— Meetup has like a spam blocker. You hit 3 people up with the same message and they're like, pardon me, it seems like you are spamming our, our members here, and they block you. And so then what do you— what, what's your process from there, Shelly?

That's why I mentioned the scraper, because then you can grab the, um, information and hopefully you can get first and last name and potentially location since they're mostly, you know, mostly organized by geography. If you don't have a location on the profile specifically, you can still guesstimate that they're perhaps in Portland. You open up the Python users group here. Let me show you what this looks like real quick. I think I can do this from here. Yeah, there we go. You end up on this person's profile. It does show you where they are. So you can search for, as you were talking about, the site:meetup.com, and then you can do inurl members, and then add Denver, for example, to that. Oh, look, asking me if I'm human. One of the challenges you're going to run into is this repeat the search with omitted results. So people will try this. I recommend the search and then they're like, "Shelly, it didn't work. It didn't bring up any results." Yeah, that's because of what they call site compression. Click on the repeat the search with omitted results included and there's your 700 results. Happens all the time. Everybody's like, "I only got 1 result," or "I got 0 results." You gotta set the filter to 0 and there you go. There's, there's everybody. Now these are not very well scraped or, or documented. But if you click on them, that's, um, I'm not seeing it very well.

Is it bringing up groups as well?

Uh, members. Yep. And then you can actually scrape this. Yeah, then you can use a scraper, and hopefully the, the results will be people's first, last, and location. So if you have that, if you have first, last, and location, then you can go into URL members. Yeah.

Or member. Perfect. I think that's the differentiator right there. Cool.

Then you can actually add here, I'll put it on the ticker. Here we go. I'm sorry, then you can scrape it and add the contact information from one of the data append services. There's lots of data append services.

You know what I would love to see you do a demo of? Because we did demos like, or of our Instant Data Scraper where we like scrape the data. What was the other one you mentioned? Click Scraper, or that you mentioned?

Um, there's Data Miner, Instant Data Scraper, ParseHub, um, wasn't it Clicks? Oh yeah, that was for LinkedIn profiles specifically.

Oh, it was just for LinkedIn profiles. Oh, okay, cool. All right, I, I had, I had written that down from our last one. I was like, I would love to I'd love to see a demo, but is that free? Is that a free tool?

Yeah, yeah. Uh, Doug, essentially Doug, the founder of, um, ZapInfo, when, when he sold ZapInfo to Indeed, they indeed made it into a tool for obviously Indeed customers, which obviously makes logical sense. But a lot of us out there were using ZapInfo to download, you know, LinkedIn profiles and stuff like that. And, and now that it only works on Indeed it, um, it wasn't allow— it wasn't allowing us to do that. So he was— he went out there and, you know, he was kind enough to, out of his own pocket, hire a couple of, uh, developers and create kind of a light version of it to replace what we used to be able to do. But it's just specifically for LinkedIn, it doesn't do anything else. It— don't expect it, you know, he doesn't sell it, so don't expect there to be a whole lot of support. It does work though, and it's open source, so if you know a little bit of JavaScript, you can go in there and edit the source. To, um, make it do some things that you want to do. It helps with just grabbing a bunch of URLs from LinkedIn, but here you need to use something that's a little bit more robust because it's going to have to parse data like, you know, text, text information, the first, last, and then the city and maybe the, the group name, things like that, so that you can use that later on.

So from here we have, we have a list that you pulled, um, with, you know, with a data scraper or what have you. It doesn't have a LinkedIn profile URL space.

Yeah.

So what do we do from here? What, what do you do?

Well, so if you have any of the aggregators like SeekOut, for example, you can take that list with first name, last name, and location. Hopefully you might have a job title or something like that, and you can upload that to a SeekOut type of tool which will add, uh, when it finds them. It doesn't always find them, and it has to find the exact match. The problem with that is if there's an Eric Smith in Portland, Oregon, and there's— well, if there's more than one Eric Smith in Portland, SeekOut is going to come back and not give you a result. But if there is an Eric Smith in Portland, Oregon, and it's the only one, then they'll bring back the LinkedIn URL. Now you have that. You can then also use SeekOut to get phone numbers and emails, or you use other websites for that. There's Swordfish, which I'm a really big fan of, Kendo app you can use, and there's some commercial ones as well that cost a lot more money, but you know, you can, you can use if you have massive amounts of data because now you have first name, last name, location, probably company name and title from LinkedIn, LinkedIn URL, and then getting the rest of it is, you know, a lot easier.

There's a train going by. I'm gonna mute real quick.

Can't hear it, not at all. Yeah, yeah. So you had also mentioned you like— uh, your turn now, right? You had mentioned that you liked SlideShare a lot. What do you do with SlideShare?

Uh, wait, before we go to SlideShare, because we— I think we brought— may I just, may I just plug something really quick? I'm not sponsored by this company. Have you used DuckDuckGo? Soup before for LinkedIn?

Um, I tried it, but I have a friend who created another tool that is, in my opinion, far superior. And the reason that I think it's far superior is because it has the ability of collating into teams. So let's say you got 12 team members, um, it will avoid repeating or outreach to you can set it to don't contact anyone that my team has contacted in the last week or month or 6 months. So because of that pooling, it allows all of us, all 12 of us, to grab profiles together, which increases our volume, but also not step on each other's messaging. And also, when you're sending out invitations to connect, we can all connect with different people, so collectively we'll have a bigger network. So I like that, really like that team approach. It does some of the same things, just I think the concept of being able to teaming up is, is a much significant improvement. And also operationally, I have not ever had any issues with it, you know, getting locking up LinkedIn, but that may also have to do with the settings that I use. I don't— I haven't used DuckDuckGo Duck Soup in a while. Maybe Duck Soup now has the ability to throttle. The throttling is also really good. You can throttle it so that it doesn't overwhelm the server, which causes some feedback errors.

Okay, well, for, for those of you who are watching, um, Duck Soup is a Chrome extension that you can use on LinkedIn. So if you have a project of candidates or a list of candidates from your query, you can actually go through and set up a message or a LinkedIn invite and it'll message like the entire page versus going one-on-one. You've got to be really careful that these are people you want to speak with as well. And you can change like in some of these tools where you can put like an HTML code that puts their first name or skill set or something like that to personalize it. But it will automate that process for you. But you do got to be careful with the throttling, throttling. One thing that they've added a layer to is they will now do drip sequence campaigns for you in LinkedIn. And I'm just like, what? Because I do drip campaigns via email and now I do them via email and LinkedIn. So when they accept your invite, it'll then send them a message. But you know, again, it's like you've got to temper these with— they're very, very strong tools. So don't like go out and spam people, but use them appropriately. But like the automation tools nowadays are amazing. And couple that with Zapier, you know, where you can like, you know, once you get the message in, it like goes to your database or what have you. You know, these are all just really good tools. So I just wanted to mention that to see, but what your tool that you mentioned, was this an Andre Bradshaw tool or is this a—

No, it's called, the Chrome extension is called My Robot Works. The website is actually myrobot.works.

Okay.

So myrobot.works, that's the program. I will check that out. Yeah. Which is, you know, more, I think more enterprise or team driven. So that's one of them. There are others out there that do the same thing. There's a LinkedIn Helper, LinkedIn Helper 2, I think it's called. And Job— sorry, Jobin— Jobin Cloud. Hold on a second. Jobin— yeah, jobin.cloud. Jobin.cloud also does some things like that, but none of these are free though.

Oh, Jonathan Kidder has one. I think it's called, um, Wizard Sourcer. It's a Chrome extension.

Ah, yes, that inserts the text, but it is manual. So that's very cool because if you keep all your all your templates in there. And when you're on a profile, you can click on a template and it inserts the variables. It's exactly the same thing that you could do with Magical, but he has a bunch of templates already built. So if you don't want to spend time on that, you can kind of, you know, use those. But the Magical app as well, uh, will, will do the same kind of thing. It'll grab variables. What I use something like Magical for is for the ability to, um, I don't want to say scrape, okay, because I'm not scraping, but it's extract words from like my greenhouse page. So in your ATS you might not have the ability to do mail merges to the degree that you want because there are certain restrictions on the— not restrictions, there's a limited amount of fields. So with Magical, it can grab whatever fields are visible on the screen and put them into a text that can then be input with the keystroke. So Magical does that, but it is one at a time, right? The difference is what you're talking about and My Robot Works is a set it and forget it. Well, well, you start and it just goes. Pros and cons to robots, guys. Hey guys and gals, the ones that where it's one at a time, you are on that person's profile, you know exactly what you're doing. And so there's— unless you are paying attention, there's no mistakes because you click, you know, go and it grabs and pastes and you send the message. But with the robots like Duck Soup and My Robot Works, got to make sure that your list is targeted. Otherwise you might be sending a message to somebody that you didn't intend to— a client, a partner, an employee— because it's not doing any checking. You can block profiles or preview profiles and add them to your not-to-your-not list, but just beware that when you have a robot, the robot does exactly what it wants— sorry, what you want. Even if you said drive straight for 500 miles, then there's a wall there, it's gonna go through the wall because you didn't say go around the wall.

So just be aware.

Yeah, and, and just know that with robots, they're going to do exactly what you said.

Grammarly— in the chat, somebody said Grammarly does it now. They do LinkedIn automation messaging or copy for your drip campaign.

I think templates, uh, that we were talking about.

Yeah, if you're not a good writer Where it has like—

it used to help you with your writing. Now it's actually got templates that can grab the text and put it into— I think that's what they were saying.

Here's one key thing to think about when you're writing messages. Keep it simple. It's like a social post now because people are like conditioned to social posts. Do one sentence at the very beginning, two sentences, drop down two spaces, two sentences, drop down two spaces, one sentence. Don't write 3 paragraphs. 1 sentence, 2 sentences, 1 3-letter word, 3, 3 words.

I get what you're saying. I get what you're saying, but I want to know where you got that from.

Oh, Jonathan Kidder and Brian Fink.

Okay, and I want to know where they got that from.

And I— and maybe someplace else where it's like keep maybe marketers to kind of confirm.

Yeah, so my skepticism is, do we know that that works? And Brian won't mind me challenging him on that because what I'm trying to tell you is, um, so yeah, we think it does, somebody thinks it does, somebody, you know, what I want to know is, did we try that side by side? Because I'm telling you this because, yes, I look at the analytics for our— I'm in charge of all the analytics for the company, and I looked at the analytics for LinkedIn in particular, and there is a segmentation of in-mails response rates. So they segment by seat, by company, by years of experience, a couple of other things. One of them, one of the segmentations is by length of message. And there are mainly only 4 groups, like 500+, so more than 500, around 400, around 300, and less than 300, which I think is the one that you're describing. And the response rates are highest for the short— the shorter it gets, the higher the response rate on LinkedIn. However, this is the interesting part, it doesn't correlate with the volume. So in other words, The shorter messages are lower volume. There were only, let's say, I'm going to make up a number here. There were only 100 messages under 300 characters with a 15% response rate. But with the 500+ characters, there were 70,000 messages with a 9% response rate. Now, the law of numbers says that 70,000 times 9 is a little bit more than 15 times 700.

Okay, Shelly, I didn't know there was going to be math on this show.

Just saying, don't just assume, right?

Yes, it's a volume game, right?

Like, I don't know if it is. I gotta go back and prove that now because I've heard what you're saying from the same people and other people, and I've tried it and it hasn't worked for me. So I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong. Am I not— my message is not short enough, etc. So I want to kind of dive into this. I'm gonna— this is gonna be a subject for another debate.

Do you read long? Have you heard of TL;DR?

Oh yeah, you know, actually I do. I put TL;DR in there. I actually put TL;DR, so it says TL;DR. Yeah, TL;DR, one sentence, and then the long message. I love you. That's what I do. It starts with TL;DR, I'm trying to recruit you for this job. Long message, explanation and all the other stuff. Like, if you got past that, now you're reading. If you got past the TL;DR, you're invested in reading it. If you don't get past the TL;DR, then it doesn't matter if it's long or short. You ain't reading it.

Okay, well, I'm going to stick with keep it like a social post, your outreach like a social post.

I'm going to try that. Yeah, I get it. One break, two, one sentence break, two sentences break. Wait, one sentence break, two sentences break, one sentence, sign, signature.

Right? Yeah, I also hate listening to voice messages. Don't leave me a voice message, text me.

I'm right there with you. I am so right there.

I'm checking my phone right now to see who don't like voice messages.

So right now on my mobile phone, I have 21, 21 unheard voicemails. You? Yeah, I just don't, I just don't I don't listen to them. Honestly, if I did, I would say probably 20 of them are my pharmacy letting me know that I've got a prescription or some insurance company or like, they're all like just transactional. None of my friends ever leave me voicemails. So I know if it's voicemail, it's not someone I know. Well, except for one person.

There's still those who, I was gonna leave, I tried to leave you a voicemail, but your voice message 'Your voicemail message box is full,' and I'm like, 'Oh, I should do that.

I should turn my voicemail message box off.' That way, more— my voicemail should say, 'Hey, uh, I don't check my voicemail. Please text me.' Yes, there's a, there's a certain— so that's right, um, you can have them transcribe, I think it's called, so the voicemails get emailed to you or texted to you. That's right, that, that is, that is correct. I actually don't pay for that, but that is true. I like in the chat Yeah, I think— oh, Gmail does. Oh, you— mail does. You mail is Yahoo Mail, I think.

Okay, one of my employees started— I remember the first time I got a voice, um, message as a text. Has anybody done this to you? They, they recorded their message and then they sent it to you as a recording.

Oh, it's an audio text. An audio? Yeah. No, they're talking about like it writes it out, so it's speech to text. No, no, it sends it to you. No, I'm sorry, the chat post is that. You're talking about another one. Yeah, it's just the audio.

So it comes through as a text message and it looks like a little audio thing and you play it and you listen to it. And at first I thought it was really cool, and then like this employee just continuously kept sending me and I was like, ah, I have to listen to it. And I was like, just text me.

Question, if Why don't they just do like Siri to do speech-to-text? I'm just asking. Maybe they want you to hear their voice. Oh, okay. Maybe they just want you to know that they're not feeling well. Yeah, I'm not coming into work today.

No, that time she called in sick, she actually texted me.

Okay, that is definitely not what I was thinking. So wow. That is funny. Oh wow, that's hilarious. Do we? Yeah, we do. We got— okay, 1 minute, 2 minutes. What do you do with SlideShare? I was really curious about that, by the way. Okay, so when I think we got bought—

I forgot who told me about SlideShare. I'm sure it was in one of the sharing of our community of open source holiness, but I gave it a try. And, um, so, you know, uh, SlideShare is now owned by LinkedIn, right? And so I would do a—

wait, no, no, I think LinkedIn sold it. That's what I was saying. I think LinkedIn sold it. They had it and they sold it. Yeah. Oh, they said no thanks. They sold it to somebody else.

Okay. I do an image search on it. I also do, I do presentation searches. If I'm doing research for a presentation I need to give, Or if I'm looking for speakers for my conference, the techrecruit.io, I-O in, out conference, I will find speakers via that. And because they give presentations, I've also done research on somebody I was looking to hire, and I found presentations that they gave, which I thought was stellar. But you could do a resume search on there as well. I mean, there's just so much you could do. I mean, like, these are one of these tools you got to be careful because you can dive in and just get lost in and you forgot why you even came there. Kind of like the Labor of— Bureau of Labor Statistics. Oh my gosh, the data.

Oh yeah. Yeah.

I will, I will go in for one thing and I'll be there for hours. Anyways, if you love data. Yes. So resume searches, you want to show us?

On SlideShare? Yeah, I can. That was— I was concerned about that not necessarily working because Scribd acquired it. And that's what I was putting on the ticker there. Scribd actually acquired SlideShare from LinkedIn. So I haven't done this in a little while.

Let me see. site:slideshare.net. And you know, that's interesting. I wonder if anything is up to date on it.

That's Perhaps that's what I was just about to do. Let's go live and find out.

If not, we can go to Reddit.

It's probably a better one. Let's see. Oh, right, wrong one. Okay, moving us down to the bottom there. Okay, here we go. So let's see. So it would be site colon— it's a site search essentially— slideshare.net.

I think, right?.NET. Yeah, you're right.

Okay. And then we're going to look for some resumes. So we'll do resume or CV or Vita or Vita A.

Are you doing an in-title resume?

I didn't. I just— can you see the screen? I just— yes, yes. I just added the old eyes, the, you know, words. But we can, we can definitely add to that. Uh, so this could be— now for in title, um, you have to add it each time. There's, there's not a, uh, you can't do what's called nesting with it. So you would just do like this. So do or, or, or inside of the, inside of parentheses. You can't do one nesting on the whole command. Now let's see. Okay, that's it.

Yeah, so I didn't know that, Shelly. You have to put— or for the in titles, you have to put in title, in title for all the— or—

oh yeah, you can't nest a lot of them in one, in one title like that. Um, now I— now I'm wondering, you know, like how recent this is. So let's see if we can add a keyword like, uh, 2022.

Um, like those companies who buy, uh, email data and then put it in their platform.

Last month. Okay, past month. Nope, not a whole lot. It's not a whole lot in the past 4 months. So, you know, there's still a lot there. I'm just, I just happen to do a search.

Then for folks to put their presentations on, because we need to go.

I think it's still SlideShare, but it's now owned by Scribd. And we're looking for resumes. I think it still works for everything else, right? Like what I I do a lot is I look for—

do an image search. Switch. I'm sorry, switch over, click images inside of SlideShare. No, underneath your— well, with that, what you have up there right now. Yeah, hit him. Just select images. That's what I do. I just then— yep. But there is a lot of not resumes that you've pulled.

So I used to do more on the PowerPoint side, like I'm thinking so let's say Contact Me, or like About Me. Let's do Systems. I'm like that because then you'll see in those, in those SlideShare PowerPoints, you'll see like, you know, the About Me page, and sometimes the Contact Me page. Oh, there it is. Right there. See, I love that.

I love that because you really see what somebody is focused in. If they're giving a presentation about it, then that— then they're the subject matter expert on that particular thing. That's why— that's what I like about it. If you have a really niche position or a high-level leadership role— I have the— I think I mentioned the top of the show, one of our, um, one of our fintech Fortune 500 30,000-employee company looking for a leadership development product manager. Right. And so this is somebody who obviously is not just like a PM but is like doing executive leadership training. But I've never had a role like this. And I was always like, sign me up. I was like, oh wait, I can't do that. But where do you find these folks? They're giving presentations, you know? You know, if you have those type of roles that—

like, here's a great presentation skills. PowerPoint and look for HTML, HTML5. Man, we are past 2 o'clock. I've kept you for more than an hour, Stacy. This is way too much for me.

You and I just vibe.

Very generous. Yeah, I'm telling you. How about we just, you know, sign up for another date and at this point I gotta say goodbye because folks are probably starting to bail out now. It was very nice to have you here again. Well, me on yours and you on Let's do this. Let's play tennis. All right, on yours next time.

Absolutely. We'd love to have you back because we still— we haven't gone through all of our stuff. We still have GitHub and Reddit and, you know, to do. So we'll do that. We'll get to it.

We'll get to it. Thank you, Stacy. Everybody have a great weekend. Thanks for being here, Stacy. Take care.