Steven Rawlings, LGBTQA+ Champion, Sourcing Leader, ThoughtSpot

3, 2, 1. It is Friday at 1 PM. Actually, technically it's 1:01 PM. So here we are live on Shelly's Alley. This week I would like to welcome our very special guest Steve, Steve Rawlings is an LGBTQIA+ inclusion champion that has more than 25 years of experience. How many more? I'm not going to tell you, but more than 25 years of experience leading all aspects of global talent acquisition. Started in contract recruiting as a consultant working on multiple projects. Many of you out there are familiar with that. You know how much you learn about businesses when you, when you're in a contract contract recruiting role, but he specialized over the years in talent sourcing, something that he calls strategic talent forecasting, which we're going to ask him about, and recruitment enablement. I love that phrase because there's a title called sales enablement, and I understand that role from some recruiting that I did. I really get the, the relation between sales enablement and recruitment enablement. So definitely going to talk to him about that as well. So today we're going to talk about recruiting operations, um, ATS, CRMs, technology trends, global diversity, international hiring metrics, whatever. So welcome today to Shelly's Alley. Steve, are you ready? Say hi.

Oh yeah, thanks. Thanks for having me, Shelly. This is awesome.

Oh, my pleasure. It's always fun to have good, interesting, uh, guests on the show. By the way, love the custom hat. That's, uh, there's got to be a story to that.

Yep. Yeah, my, my husband is an artist, so he, uh, I just had— we had this hat sitting around and, and he said, you know, I'm a hat type of guy, so he said I definitely needed a logo to match the shirt. So he—

yeah, is that painted or sewn or stitched? Looks painted.

It's painted. It's a paint markers. Yeah. Pretty cool.

It's not quite done yet, but if I need any logo design, I know who to call. So before we jump into the couple of ideas that you had for discussion today, I did, I did want to ask you about strategic talent forecasting and about recruitment enablement because I was very curious about that.

Sure.

Tell me in just a couple of sentences without going too much into the how of it, what is strategic talent forecasting? What does that mean?

Well, it, you know, there's this great book, Harvard Business Review, everybody I think in recruiting should read it, it's called Talent Wins. It's basically talking about how there's, in an organization, there's kind of like 3 legs of a stool. And one is the vision that is led by the CEO. One is the finance aspect led by the CFO. And then the third leg of the stool is talent. You can have a great idea and all the money in the world, but if you don't have the people to implement it, it's not going to get off the ground. So it's along the idea of hiring for today but also hiring for tomorrow, thinking about what the organization is going to look like, you know, 6 weeks down the road, 6 months down the road, 6 years down the road, and trying to find ways to prepare for that by building talent communities, planting seeds, employer branding, and maintaining strong alliances with the, you know, in partnerships with your hiring managers and executive teams so that you can stay on the same page and be ready to provide the talent to enable that vision.

It sounds like a pretty big deal, and maybe I'm being naive here, but forgive me for saying that seems like that should be the CHRO's world, not the recruiter's world, right?

Sure, sure. And, you know, we take orders from top down, but as leading sourcing, you know, I think the old idea of sourcing was, okay, I've got this need, run out and find somebody. But we all know how competitive the talent market is. So there's a lot of cultivating and a lot of nurturing that has to be involved. And I did this early on in my career. Early on, I was recruiting Private wealth folks, you know, these guys that have books of business with $100 million, you know, for wealthier clients. And these guys, those folks wouldn't move on a whim, so you really had to establish a relationship with them and wait for the timing. So, so early on, I learned that you had to kind of find your, your talent, your talent pool out there, figure out who's the best of the best, who you really want, and be talking with these people. And sometimes it would take years. But, you know, the result was we had some really huge wins. An example comes to mind was during the mortgage boom in the 2000s. Washington Mutual, I was the head of recruiting and sourcing for SunTrust Mortgage for the Mid-Atlantic region, which included all of like greater Washington, D.C. It's a huge market because of all of the transitions of politics. And of course, the cost of real estate. And I was talking to a guy that did tens of millions in profit for Washington Mutual in that market because he had a lot of diplomatic ties. And it wasn't until Washington Mutual decided to close all their East Coast offices that I got a call at like 6 o'clock in the morning one day when he got news that they were going to announce that. And wanted to know if we could take his whole team. So it's those kinds of planting those seeds, and I've been talking with the guy for over a year.

It's a big win for you and it's a big win for them because they have other business that, you know, caused them to shut down and you could pick up good people and they would take care of their people. And yeah, I mean, that's not what you traditionally think of when you think of recruiting. So that's— so the strategic talent forecasting is about what? It's about understanding where you're going to know. It's not workforce planning as much as it is understanding what kind of talent you're going to need in the future and starting to plan for whatever eventuality might happen. And in my mind, strategy is about finding different ways to do something so that when you encounter an obstacle, you have options for overcoming the obstacle, right? It's like, I don't know if it was Mike Tyson that said, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth, right? So you can have this plan, you go out there, and then all of a sudden you get punched in the mouth. If you don't have a plan B and a plan C, that's on you. And so that's what I think strategy is, is we have a vision for what we want to do, but what are You know what happens when that doesn't work? We do this. But so you're saying forecasting is about projecting what the talent is that we might need and what we could do, even if we don't know what those jobs are going to be, right?

Yeah. And partnering with your hiring managers to try to find talent to fill jobs now that they feel that they can groom and cultivate in, you know, into leadership roles in the future, staying in touch with, with your your silver medalist, so to speak, you know, when you have 3 great candidates for 1 job, making sure that the runners-up, you know, stay engaged. You know, all these things are really important so that you don't have to start all over every time, you know, a job opens.

I get that, I get that. And so, let me ask you about the other thing, the recruitment enablement. Now, sales enablement what I know about sales enablement, and I spent maybe about 2 years working on, on roles for that, uh, when I was at Fiserv. From what I know about that, essentially it's everything that has to do with the technology and the planning of, for example, obtaining data. So, you know, I can see how sourcing is part of that because in sales enablement there's the lead generation, then there's the the quality of that data, grooming it, there's segmenting it, there's planning campaigns. They also do the recruitment marketing for us. In sales enablement, it's these— they do the very tactical email that is not specifically directly related to a conversion, but it's related to like generating opportunities, right? So in my mind, sales enablement is all the things that get done before a salesperson is working on the account. So how does that translate to recruitment?

Well, sure. I mean, my very first— I got into recruiting in the mid-'90s. It kind of dates me, but I mean, I was a researcher for a retained search headhunter. So doing a lot of research for executive roles. I spent most of my day in the library um, with those things called books and, and, uh, digging through magazines. Yeah, no, seriously though, digging through magazines, just looking for articles, you know. And, you know, we're looking for, um, uh, you know, lead engineer or something like that, you know, digging through the magazines, you know, about, you know, that industry and trying to find names of mention and tracking them down the old-fashioned way, looking up the company in the phone book. And I remember playing with the voicemail systems at night, just punching numbers to see what numbers went where and mapping out the company. I was good old-fashioned org charting. Now all this stuff— I remember getting giddy when the, when the, uh, Dun Bradstreet directory came out on a CD-ROM. That was like, wow, this is great. And now everything's kind of at our fingertips, um, and, and so everything that we need to do— I, I always said, you know, that, that recruiting was the hardest sales job in the world. And because, because if you're— if you sell, if you sell a house or a car, you don't have to convince the car to go home with the buyer, right?

And the car doesn't get— the car doesn't get to the house.

That's right.

Well, wait a minute, I don't want to be here. No way.

I don't like this house. I can't park. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Well, I thought there was going to be a 2-car garage. What is this? You know, and, and leave. And, and so I always said that recruiting was the— it was the hardest sales job in the world because, you know, uh, it's really more like being a marriage, you know, a marriage counselor in a way. You know, you're trying to create a relationship here And, and, and there's so many opportunities for that relationship not to take, you know, not to, not to take fruition. And, and you don't have to worry about that if you're selling a car. You know, they want the car, take it home. So, so in a very real way, I've always looked at us as being salespeople. We carry, we carry the, the corporate brand to people that we want to have, uh, work for us, and that they have the talent, the skills that we need to be successful. So So there's a lot of selling that goes on, I think, with how we talk to candidates. We have to, you know, and at the same time be honest about challenges and about, you know, the market and things like that. And have the ability to take things that people might look at as being a negative and show the positive side of it. Yeah, we just went through a transition, but that means that, you know, we identified these problems and we're We're growing and being a consultant for 15 years, pretty much every company that I went into that was about that time, you know, when they were coming out of a fire or cleaning up a mess or going through some sort of merger or whatever and that's the hardest time to recruit when a company is making the news for not good reasons. And it's about the story and then it comes all the tools and then comes employer branding and then comes looking at diversity. So these are all— pieces of an overall puzzle that being in sourcing that we need to be in touch with, you know, we don't need to do all of it. We have— at ThoughtSpot, we have a great employer branding team. We have a great marketing team. But we need to partner with those people so that that message is consistent. And because in a real way, when we pick up the phone and talk to a candidate, you know, we're kind of— we're we're selling the company. And if we don't get them as a candidate and leave a bad impression, we won't get them as a customer either. So, so, so it's—

you're saying it's the connecting of all of that, it's the connective tissue around all that. So sales enablement does talk to marketing, but they're not marketing. They do talk to sales, but they're not sales. They talk to IT. They're the ones that manage the Salesforce account and, you know, groom the data. And, and they talk to statistical analysis people and big data people. So that's what you're saying is recruitment enablement. It's the same thing. Okay, I gotcha. And so how do you, how do you end up there? Like, is this someday you just said, I'm done with sourcing. I think, guys, sourcing is not enough of a challenge because it's too easy, so I'm gonna go do recruitment enablement now. How did that happen?

Well, it, it was— there's— I mean, it's, it's an evolution, right? You know, our jobs have changed. I mean, you and I both been doing this a long time. I mean, We've known each other a long time.

But not everybody made this change. A lot of us just sit in this job and don't really even know what the next— You know, something I get a lot from people in the sourcing community is, "What's my career progression?" Well, obviously, you know, senior sourcer, sourcing manager, sourcing director. We have global head of sourcing, we have vice president of sourcing, but there's these other things, right? So recruitment enablement.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Can kind of be a career path for us.

I think, I, I think that, you know, I, I look, I really enjoy, uh, uh, like the startup space because there's this— I've worked for, for banks a lot of my career, financial institutions, and they have their way of doing stuff that they've been doing since, you know, what, 1865. And, and so being innovative in those environments can be a challenge, but none But I was always known as kind of being the loudmouth and the one that would, you know, say what I thought we should do anyway. And sometimes it backfired and I was, you know, scolded. At other times it turned out really well. But I think that in the spirit of transparency, which is what we try to foster in today's model of an organization, that, you know, If we're going to say we're transparent and challenge your boss and speak your mind and, and share your ideas, then, then we need to do that. And I think that that has been one of the things that's helped sourcing grow. I mean, we used to be looked upon as like recruiting assistants when I started, like we're junior recruiters, right? Yeah. And now sourcing has taken on its own, you know, um, and, um, and that's because, uh, I think those of us like you and I that have been doing this a while, we realize that to do our jobs exceptionally well, we had to do more than just, you know, dig through lists of candidates. We had to understand the business. We had to understand the market. We had to have insights so that we could speak intelligently with the people that we're trying to recruit and offer real good, you know, meaningful, you know, strategy information and market information back to our hiring managers so that so that they know what's going on out there, you know, so they can find the right people, you know. The Goldilocks syndrome, you know, that we— my generation, we always, you know, joke about, you know, you present, you know, how many more candidates do you want to see? You've seen 10. Well, don't you have 10 more? Can I see everybody that applied? You know, this was too short, this was too tall, this was too big. But when you are able to establish that relationship where the hiring manager has confidence that you really do understand their business, what they're looking for and are on that target, they're less inclined to want to see 30 candidates. They trust you and that comes from being in retained search, you know, you don't want to send 20 people, you want to send 3 or 4 really good ones and you want their issue to be—

But it's not just retained search, Dave. I did the same thing. You know how many times I had hiring managers that said Show me all the resumes. I want to see all the resumes. One time I was just like, okay, sure, here, let me give you all the resumes. I brought them over in a big box and I said, here's all the resumes. And right on top there, that's the applicant flow log that you have to fill out. So every time you review a resume, you got to write down their name and the reason why you disposition that resume and didn't include them. You got to do that with every resume that's in there. That's your job now because you're going to review resumes. This is, this is required. And then I said, or you can take my word for it. I'll review the resumes and I'll send you the ones that are the best ones. And they, yeah, her manager looked at me and was like, uh, yeah, can you do that? I was like, yeah, sure, no problem. That's kind of my job.

I think, you know, for sure. And I think part of it is, is also our job to tell people what we do. I don't, my experience has been, um, you know, even, even coming to ThoughtSpot, um, They're growing quickly. They're preparing for an IPO sometime in the future, but they hadn't had like very experienced people in talent. And, you know, we've got a great VP of people that has a lot of experience, and that was the first time they ever had that. And we have recruiters that have a lot of experience. And so that transition of going from very junior kind of like order takers, like go fill this job, okay, I'll read the resumes. Set up interviews to being partners, you know, is still in process. And the only way that you do that is by performing, you know, and being able to deliver and asking meaningful questions, and that relationship builds. And it's an ongoing process, but we are making great progress here.

Okay, so here's something I picked up on our previous conversation and from what you're talking about now. And I want to connect the dots for people that are listening because I don't, I don't think we've talked about this yet. You treat every wreck with the assumption that sourcing is going to be needed. So in other words, you do an intake on every wreck assuming sourcing will be needed on every job. We know sometimes it's not, but you don't start the intake as a regular recruiting intake and then add sourcing if you think it's going to be needed. You actually do it as a sourcing intake every time. Now, I teach people how to do sourcing intakes, and they are very different than recruiting intakes. So how are you— first of all, how are you overcoming perhaps the resistance that may not be there of hiring managers saying, this is a lot of questions, right? Because as a sourcer, when I get involved and when my people get involved, they're asking a lot of questions because the recruiter didn't ask them before, and now the job's in trouble. But you're doing this from the very beginning. They may be thinking to themselves, well, why is— why are we getting the second degree when I can just push a button and the easy button and the next candidate pops out? Like, how are you overcoming that resistance?

Well, I mean, a couple ways. One, um, we've been able to get some great, really strong recruiters and kind of up the ante as far as the recruiting team. Like we've got some people that have been doing recruiting as long as I've been doing sourcing. So they do those very deep kinds of intakes anyway, you know. And so to be a part of that with these more experienced recruiters is kind of just like being just another voice in the room. So there's a couple ways that, that, and this is still evolving, so we haven't ironed out all the kinks, and I'm sure that there are challenges to come. But it used to be kind of old school where, you know, they open a rack and the recruiter would do a brief intake. And this is like when I first got here.

It was like perfunctory. You got this, this, this, and this. Right, right.

And sometimes, a lot of times, you wouldn't find out that there was a problem until 4 or 5 weeks out when they hadn't seen any great candidates. And then Then they're doing it again. And I found that I was sitting with the hiring managers doing the intake again, which is frustrating. You know, I've had 3 conversations with 3 different people. And that's when I kind of got the idea to, instead of going away, doing research and coming back and asking them to look at something, I said, well, here, let's get on Zoom. Let me show you what I got. And we use SeekOut and LinkedIn, but I'm a big SeekOut fan. I was a beta user way back. 2012 when they came out with their big AI release and whatever. And I've been a fan ever since. And just got on Zoom, shared my screen and said, okay, here, this is this tool we use. Showed them all the different sites it scrapes to find information and said, what are you looking for? And just started asking questions along the lines of these filters, showed them the power filters. Let me show you these power filters for software. Do any of these power filters around cloud apply to what you're looking for? Yeah, well, this one does. Check that one off. You know, go down the list of the filters, and they could see, you know, the candidate universe going from, what, 625 million people, whatever it is, you know, chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk every time they would make a selection, you know. And now you go from 620 million to 12. And, and they go, really?

During the intake, you're— wait a minute. Yeah, you're telling me that on the intake you're with the— I just want to pause here because I don't know if a lot of people are getting what you just said. You're on the intake with the hiring manager for the first time. Potentially you've never even spoken with the hiring manager before, and you are showing them live results on a screen share. Of your LinkedIn search or your—

that's where we've ended up.

And, and you're filtering it out and they're seeing their, as you said, their universe dropping from a million candidates to 200,000 candidates. Add a criteria, 50,000 candidates. Add a criteria, 10 candidates. And now they're like, oh, there's only 10 candidates that have all this criteria. No better argument for your requirements are—

no better argument.

Your requirements are insane. There's nobody that can do this because we just did the filter. Okay. So now what happens is that important?

Here are your 10. How are we going to— how are we going to get these 10? There they are.

And by the way, let's talk about these 10 people right now. Do you want this one or this one? Yeah, right now it's, it's the intake meeting and they're seeing their live candidates before they even That's brilliant. Yeah, that's brilliant.

My, my goal— I try to— now, I mean, when we get that restrictive, I think, well, is there anything here, you know, can we maybe have a little less experience, you know, or, or, you know, I try to open it up a little bit when it gets that realistic number. But around— I try to get a list between 100 and 200 people, and here's why. Because the next step is it's all around their, their the hiring manager's criteria. This is— they are controlling this. I'm the pilot, you know, but they're telling me the flight plan, right? And so once we get this list, SeekOut's got great analytics. So when we leave the meeting, I say, okay, I'm going to send you a link to this list. I'm going to give you the analytics so you can look at the overview because SeekOut breaks it down like what companies they're from, how much education they have, where they're located. So I give them the whole analytics report and the list and I ask them to look through it and just a high-level overview. Scroll through the list and anybody that for whatever reason that you just don't think that you'd really be that interested in talking to, use the tag hiring manager pass and we'll just not include them right now. We can go back to them if we want but we won't include them now. If you're interested, check interested and if you really— if you wish you had 10 of these people, if you wish you could staff, your department with 10 of this one person, mark them rock star, and we'll use those as our benchmarks. You know, and SeekOut has this cool little feature called clone, and it's using their AI technology. And sometimes it's on, sometimes a little off, but what it does do is kind of open your mind a little bit. And I do this right in front of the hiring manager. So let's hit this clone button and see what SeekOut thinks. And it kind of opens up the universe and looks at candidates that we hadn't even thought of. You know, using its AI, and, and the hiring manager goes, hey, that person— what about that one thing?

And you've expanded the criteria. Yeah, you've shown them a realistic action, what's out there, and you've expanded the criteria.

Yep, yep.

Okay. All right.

And so I can use those rock stars to build out the list. Um, so, so, so where we're heading now is they leave the intake with something tangible. That makes everybody feel good. It makes the hiring manager feel good that they feel that we're on the same page. That's huge. They also have a product that they can actually go and look through at the intake. And it also gives me the opportunity to kind of put the ball back in their court and make them take some accountability to follow through and say, look, I'm not going to reach out to 500 people because we have a finite number of outreach credits. I need you to pick the ones that you're really interested in.

That you've already pre-selected. Yeah. And then whatever comes back after that. Yeah.

Well, and yeah, and then when those people respond, I just forward them right to the hiring manager and tag the recruiter. And a lot of times the hiring manager reaches out to them themselves right then and there because this is a passive, a passive candidate that's shown interest that the hiring manager's already decided that they want to talk to, given the opportunity. So we can strike right then and there when the iron's hot. And it's working pretty good. I mean, I don't have numbers yet because we had to do some— we had to fix our greenhouse and it had been neglected for a while. But now that we have everything straightened out, we're going to be able to start running real-time metrics. But I'm seeing that we're able— if we're able— it used to be 2 or 3, sometimes 5 or 6 weeks before sourcing even began. And now we're able to do outreaches in the first week.

Seriously?

So that's got to be affecting cycle time.

No.

Well, I mean, because sometimes I wouldn't even know there was a problem. You know, applicants are coming in, they're coming in, right? You know, and I didn't even know the job was an issue. And also to help, it's been open for a month, can you help me find some people? So that's 30 days out. Now we do passive outreaches within a week, and I think that's in this talent market. I mean, we were just on that sourcing summit, that sourcing—

not only are you reducing that cycle time in the passive outreach is getting faster, but also you're reaching out to a lot fewer people, which, which is accelerating even further, right? So instead of reaching out to 100 people, you're reaching out to 20 because they've been sort of pre-filtered. Now, a lot of sources do that, but they do that by sending the profiles to the hiring manager, not by having this live, live intake. So I kind of, I feel like I need to end this call right now because I've been doing my job Yeah, I'm gonna go start doing what you just told me to do. Like, this is it. I'm done for the day. I'm gonna go back and do that because, you know, normally we send them the profiles that we sourced, then they give us feedback. You're saying you're not even doing that? You're too long live on the intake call with the hiring manager. Now, if you're, you know, 3 steps removed, that might be a little bit challenging, so I need to think about that a little bit, but So now you've got this list of a shortlist essentially that you're going to reach out to, and you can be really aggressive and you can write very personalized emails to each one of them.

Very personalized. Yeah.

All of them have been reviewed by— when you say, hey Bob, I'm interested in talking to you because our hiring manager looked at your profile, you're not making that up. You're actually like, Bob, really, your profile really was looked at, and I'm going to talk to you about what this hiring manager actually said about your profile. That's pretty good.

Exactly. And if the hiring manager, if you'd be open, he'd be willing to have a— he or she would be willing to have an exploratory conversation just to tell you what's going on over here, you know. And, and, um, and guess what? It actually happens. If they respond, we get them on the phone with the hiring manager.

With every company, Steve, because there are companies where—

not with every company, for sure, but I think that there's a lot of room for even the larger companies I've worked in to to do some version of this to— yeah, you know, to really make sure that there's that out-of-the-gate collaboration and understanding that, hey, we're on the same page. We've got the profile pinned. Here's some people. Let's start here. It's not— I mean, this is not the end. And I also leave an open invitation for hiring managers to, you know, hey, schedule some more time with me. And, hey, Hey, Skip, can we look at maybe this approach or can we target these specific companies? So I've got hiring managers calling me asking for more face time so that we can get on together and dig into these different wells that they think they have a brainstorm or they hear that this company is changing or whatever. And together we go and we mine that and reach out to them right then and there. So we make the list and create our outreach and boom, it's out the gate. Once we got this process right.

I love it, man. I'm gonna, I'm gonna be telling everybody about this. Well, hopefully they'll watch the recording. Um, I don't want to keep this up because I think this, what you've given us is, is just absolutely brilliant. But I did want to touch on one other thing because I touted you as a guest on the show as an LGBTQIA+ champion, and I know that that's something that's, that's close to you, but you actually elevated that for me when you said Global means global, and diversity global is a whole different, you know, I'm part of, I was formerly part of the International Standards Organization Committee on recruiting and sourcing and helped define the ISO definition for recruiting and for sourcing and for diversity. And I can tell you from the ISO's point of view, with 72 participating countries defining diversity, for 72 countries, including Germany and Italy and African countries and Asian countries, is not an easy thing. So what does global diversity look like? Talk to me about that.

Well, I mean, you know, it's— yeah, I mean, it's evolving really fast, and COVID sped us up. Like, I know that you and I both worked virtually for, you know, decades, right? You know, I mean, sourcing is one of those jobs that you could dig in at home and really focus and get the work done. But there's always been this apprehension about, you know, people working at home. Are they watching TV all day?

Sipping martinis on the beach.

And I think, I think, and there's always going to be those people that'll, you know, unfortunately take advantage of that. But, but for the most part, my experience has been that people that work at home, you know, work super hard, sometimes, sometimes put in more hours than people in an office where there's a finite, you know, hours of operation. I find myself working at midnight sometimes, you know, like I need to go to bed, I need to watch some TV or do something else, you know, but you really get in focus But, but more so than that, more so than that, it gives us the opportunity to, to be able to control our own schedule. I wrote an article for, for Recruiting Daily about a year ago when this whole COVID thing started about now that you're working at home, you kind of got to look at your personal schedule and your work-life schedule. It's not like work-life balance anymore. It's like integrating the two, right? So like right now, any moment the dogs might bark because the Sears guy is coming to fix my fridge that like is not working. And, and that has to be a part of my day, you know, and, and, and doctor's appointments and things. So all these things that we used to have to run out of the office to do, I put these on my calendar so that I— so that first of all, I don't have a hiring manager schedule something when, when I'm going to be at the doctor or something like that. It's all become like one big thing of time management, which also allows me to be in touch with our India team because I'll do training at midnight, 1 o'clock in the morning my time, by choice, because I want to be able to— when you have time, you know, that's when I have time and that's when they have time. And bosses are flexible with, hey man, it's not a matter of making sure you're in your seat. It's a matter of productivity and quality of work. And now that many people are working at home, companies are becoming more comfortable with— at first, even 6 months ago when I joined ThoughtSpot, it was kind of like, well, let's look for people in the San Francisco Bay Area because that's where their corporate headquarters were. Now we don't have a physical corporate headquarters. They closed the offices because we decided that in the US we're going to be a virtual company. And that made them comfortable. Well, how about California? Well, how about the West Coast? Well, it doesn't really matter. Nah, Dallas is good. I mean, Austin's got a huge tech market, you know. I mean, there's some good people in Chicago. Opened it up to the whole US. Now we just hired some people in Bucharest. We had no plans, to my knowledge anyway, of, of being over there because of relationships and opportunities. And opportunities and, and, and being able to find some skilled people, why not? These, you know, they— we hired according to skill set and experience, not location. And I think it's going to have huge ramifications because I can't tell you how much back in the old days doing retained search, how many times I had somebody have to turn down an offer because like their spouse's career would be affected if they had to relocate. You know, I love this job, but my wife's a doctor at the Cleveland Clinic. And we can't move. You know, it's a great opportunity, but I can't go. You know, so now for any— a lot of jobs, I mean, obviously a doctor's got to be there, but for jobs that are like professional-level coders, IT people, HR people, things like that, where we could be at home, it's going to open up the career— I mean, the talent pools all over the world, I think, in ways that companies are just now starting to realize. And global is going to mean global.

Right. Yeah. And I was going to circle back to that. Exactly that. So I hope I'm not misinterpreting what you're saying. Keep me honest here if this is what you're saying. This globalization, which we've seen happening for the last 20 years anyway— I mean, the internet has basically facilitated globalization, but now it's significantly accelerated. So there's a pivotal point that, you know, that the tragedy of COVID has brought about this acceleration of globalization. And maybe we didn't need this, as horrible as this virus is and devastating as it is, maybe we did need this to kind of give us a kick in the pants to make that next leap and leave behind the entrapments of congested cities and pollution through—

Yes.

Gasoline-powered cars and all that. So, looking at the silver lining in the horrible, you know, world of COVID it's put us into this other world where we're starting to see globalization as an advantage. But tying that to diversity, are you saying that through globalization, we don't have to worry about diversity as much because global means No, everybody. I mean, inclusion is going to—

I think we have to, I think we have to actually be more aware of diversity because now, okay, if we're really going to hire for skill and talent, that means we're going to have to learn to, to be tolerant of people's, you know, their cultural backgrounds, their cultures, you know, religions, whatever. You know, we could— we're going to have to learn to disagree, to agree to disagree. Not make judgments. So the idea of diversity and inclusion is to have environments where people of all of these different beliefs and backgrounds and ethnicities can work effectively together. As we globalize even more, it's going to be— truly diverse.

I mean, so you're not saying globalization is the answer to diversity. You're saying globalization is bringing a whole nother exponentially larger challenge because now we don't just need to be diverse in the definition that we have in our country, but we have to be diverse and aware of diversity in everybody else's definition, not just our own countries, every other country's definition. Which a lot of people—

the IMF published— the IMF did this article, and I can't remember the name of it, but I'm sure if you Googled IMF work workforce report or something like that, global workforce report, it was pre-COVID, but it's a meaty read. It's like one of their IMF, you know, like analytical things.

It's like 100 pages, but it was all about the International Monetary Fund, for those of you that I don't know why.

Right, exactly. They were looking at a global forecast of workforce, and it's a great report, and I learned a lot from it that, you know, I mean, it used to be either you're full-time or part-time, right? Now there's all these other shades of employment, contractors. I just heard— what did I hear? I heard that— is it LinkedIn? That's going to be opening like, like up for freelancers. I think it's LinkedIn.

It already did.

I can't remember.

There's definitely a LinkedIn for freelancers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, you're right, exactly. So I mean, but when before that, that wasn't a thing, you know. And, and so, um, and, and, and this report like breaks through and goes through all these different shades of employment, you know. You can be a contractor, you can be a temp, you can be a part-time, a full-time, a seasonal, you know. And and how there's such a talent shortage worldwide that companies are going to be forced to be flexible and looking at all these different ways to employ people because work is changing. Our definition of work is changing. How we do our work is changing. The technology is making our work, you know, how we do our work much different than it was 20 years ago. And we can— you and I can sit here, you know, hundreds of miles apart and have these conversations in real time and share ideas and strategize, or we can have 100 people on this call and do the same thing from all over the world. And that's a tremendous opportunity. And the businesses that are agile and can adapt and be comfortable with that are the ones that I think are going to be the most successful because they are the ones that are going to be able to find the get truly the best talent out there no matter where they are, what they do, what they believe, you know, and leverage that to be successful. Or you can be bound by, you know, still wanting people in the Bay Area and fighting over— I mean, that's where it's going to be.

They can drive 2.5 hours to cover 3 miles so they can come to the office and Right. I think I found the article, so I posted it on the LinkedIn feed here.

Yeah, it's really cool. It's, it's, it's chewy, you know, don't try to read it all at once. It's a lot, but it's got a lot of great data, great tables and charts and stuff. I think it took me a month to really digest it, but I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a really great insight. I mean, I think it took them— if you look at like the the preface or whatever of the article, it took them a couple of years to put this report together because it's something that, of course, the banks and the money holders, you know, this is a serious issue. You know, I mean, if companies can't get work done, they don't make money. And so, you know, as part of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, they're very serious about looking at how labor and work and employment is evolving, you know, uh, as we globalize.

Well, as much as I'd love to ramble on for a while, because two pretty big revelations— one that I can put, but one that I can put immediately to use, and the other one that I'm gonna have to think about more because it's just asked— I, I'm, I'm asking myself more questions now. Fortunately, on our next episode in Shelly's Alley our guest is going to be a diversity connoisseur that specifically works on consulting in the diversity space. So I might just segue this topic and ask her a couple of questions to try to dig into this.

I'd love to hear. These are things I've been thinking about. I've seen it, you know, I've seen these webinars where HR leaders are challenged with you know, global diversity, virtual employment, and where they should hire. And it's going to be an ongoing topic of discussion, uh, for a decade now.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, we think we're prejudiced in this country, and we have, uh, these defined versions of what's acceptable and what's not. And, you know, what, what we call people that have, um, you know, they're bigoted or, or that have these prejudices, right? We, we think that that's that that's something that's American, but believe me, I've been to other countries where their concept of prejudice and their racism, their, you know, I think a friend of mine posted on LinkedIn a few months ago that I don't want to say who, but the country that they are from and live in passed a law that made it illegal to talk about being queer or gay in schools in that country. So literally going backwards. I mean, that law did not exist. It was allowed, and now they are disallowing it legally in this country. Needless to say, he has left the country because, you know, that's his community, and he was just like, I can't.

So Again, that's tough because, you know, when you stop talking about things, when you stop talking about things is when things start to melt down and catch on fire, right?

You know, so, and that's going on in one country. Who knows? So when you look at global diversity, there are going to be some major hurdles to overcoming countries that don't even, they don't even think about diversity at all, right?

So, yeah, ready or not, here it comes. Right, exactly.

Yeah, no choice. The other thing I was going to say is, you know, I worked in Saudi Arabia for a while, and something that really struck me, because there's a lot of preconceived notions about the Saudi and people in the Kingdom, the KSA, and, you know, and how they treat others and so on. There's a lot of preconceived notions from the outside, but they're trying to, they're on a path to open things up. It's something that really struck me and it just woke me up to a fact that I knew about but just never really sat with. And that is that in their environment, because of the mixture of people, they have to provide allocations and make concessions and be able to provide for the ability for people that observe different holiday days and different holy days during the week. So for example, here in the United States, we think of Saturday and Sunday as the weekend. In some cultures, Sabbath, Saturday is the holy day. In some cultures, Sunday is the holy day where they go to church. Well, there they have people who worship on Friday, and for them, Friday and Saturday is the weekend. Sunday is the first day of the week and they go to work on Sunday. They have people who worship on Saturday. They have people who worship on Sunday. So their weekend is not Saturday and Sunday. Their weekend is basically Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, depending on what culture you're in. And so they have to provide— if they have a team member that has a weekend on Sunday and Monday, they need to cover for that person on Monday, and they need to provide someone that covers for that person that doesn't have their weekend on Monday. It's, it's way more complicated.

Like, think about the scheduling, and it does open a lot of doors, doesn't it? You know, it opens a lot of doors of complexity. But, but I think that everybody, you know, I mean, for so long, you know, we've been accustomed to just kind of having it, you know, the way it is, right? You know, uh, and, and I think that if we just open ourselves up a little bit to say, you know, hey, well, I want Christmas off. Why shouldn't someone of a different religion have their, their holy day off?

You know, I mean, to what's—

listen, at least it makes sense. It certainly is fair. It's certainly the humane and right thing to do. And now that we're globalizing, I mean, I think that if anything, hey, now we got somebody that works Sunday. Now we got somebody that could work Sundays, you know. And, you know, I mean, right, we could use that diversity to cover things where where we were hard-pressed to find people to work on Sunday before.

Certain people are not going to have a problem working on Sunday because it's the first day of the week for them. Exactly. And so other people won't have a problem working Friday because they've been working Friday their whole lives. So, you know, so in my mind, globalization has an advantage because the diversity should eventually handle itself. But of course, we have to do a lot of listening and a lot of adjusting to get there. And I'm not going to solve that today.

But I think if you just ask, if you just ask people, hey, what's your, you know, when can you work, and, and allow them to be honest and transparent. And, and, you know, I mean, hospitals, like, you know, I did healthcare recruiting for a while, and my husband's in the healthcare field. I mean, scheduling in a hospital is a great example. I mean, it's all over the place depending on who's there and what their needs are, and they have to be, you know, they have people on call. And I think companies kind of have to almost look at that as, as a model of, you know, hey, if you got a customer that wants a new product, you know, what are we going to do? You know, come on guys, we're going to work a lot now, but then be— but then give people time off. And, you know, we're going to have to adjust the load, we're going to have to adjust to the— right, yeah, I mean, we're going to have to— it's no longer 9 to 5 Monday through Friday, that's For sure.

It's true. Follow the sun, as they say in some of the companies. Yeah, follow the sun. There's always somebody working somewhere on the planet. Steve, I gotta say, thank you so much for being here. I think we have another episode we need to record, so I'll be bringing you back in later on. Any last words of wisdom for our listeners? Anything I didn't ask you about you want to talk about?

No, I would love to come back again. If anybody, you know, reach out to me on LinkedIn if you want to connect and learn a little a little bit more about the intake that we're still in the process of refining. But, you know, I'm more than happy to share, be collaborative, and I always like to hear great ideas.

Thank you so much. Well, that's it for Shelley's Alley this week. Have a great weekend, everybody, and take care of yourselves. Bye-bye.