Tasha Palino, Strategic Talent Sourcing Manager, J&J on Shally's Alley

Happy Friday, everybody! It is 1 PM, so that means it's time for Shelly's Alley. Those of you that are joining Sally, can you hear me?

I lost you on audio. Hold on one second. I don't know if it's me or you, but I definitely can't hear you. Um, can hear you.

Are you there?

Oh, yep, there you are.

Okay.

All right.

Sorry about that. All right. Welcome, everybody. It is Shelly's Alley, Friday, 1 PM. So it's time for Shelly's Alley. For those of you that are joining us live, we have a very special guest today, Tasha Polino. Unfortunately, Tasha cannot be on video due to some family commitments, so she is joining us on audio only, but that's okay. I do have a picture of her if you want to see, but this is all about, you know, the conversation and the content, so you're stuck with looking at my mug. Today. Tasha has been with J&J, also known as Johnson Johnson, for I think, uh, 7 years now. There was a small little period of time there when, when Tasha maybe left to go do something else for a bit and then came back. So, um, you know, she was brought back in. How long has it been, Tasha? 7 years?

That's about 7 years. Yep, they, uh, they pulled me back in. I left for a little bit and they, they pulled me back So, tried to go, but they wouldn't let you. Yeah, just about 7 total.

That's awesome. So, Tasha kind of grew up through executive search and, um, got to a point in her career where it was time for her to start leading a team, managing a team, building a team. And my very good friend Fernando Delgado introduced us because he wanted her to spend some time with me to talk about, you know, getting, getting together a sourcing team. She's been given the responsibility of establishing the sourcing function from the ground up. And I'm very excited to have her on the show. As I said, friend of a friend. Fernando and I go way back to like our first jobs in recruiting. I don't know how many, 20-some-odd years ago. And I know that You know, with his tutelage and with your experience, Tasha, you're going to do really, really well on this job. I can tell from the very beginning that we first spoke that you have a passion for what you're doing here, and sourcing is a really fun part of the industry. So how's it feel? You've been in the sourcing lead position for not quite a year yet, is that right?

That's about right, yeah. Just coming up on a year right after the break. So it's really nice, you know. Honored to be given such a challenge and a huge piece of, you know, what we're really trying to do at J&J and, you know, building a function, giving people different opportunities. So it's been wonderful so far. My team's great, the rest of the team is great, the company is of course, you know, wonderful. So I've really enjoyed the last year.

One of the first things that, um, when you, when you basically, you know, were put into this position, one of the first things you had to do is build a team. So you, did you, did you hire some folks or Were you able to pick some resources internally or how did that work?

Yeah, a combination of both actually. We've hired quite a few people externally, globally across the world. We have a presence in Asia Pacific as well as Europe. Hired 2 people total and 1 person in each of the regions. They're just wonderful folks, different backgrounds, some from corporate, some from in-house, some from agency. Right, the unique perspective is definitely necessary when you're talking about recruiting. And then we've got 4 people in North America, some of them that were existing on my team, some really strong sourcers and recruiters, and then some others that we've actually brought over internally. J&J does a really good job of internal, what we call like stretch assignments, right? So we're allowed to move people over into different departments for their own development for a period of time if they're, you know, 100% committed. And, you know, they then backfill those people internally. So we have a good mix of people on my team under both of those kind of criteria.

And it sounds like you were able to grow some people internally, move them around, and then also bring some external talent. What were you looking for? Because the reason I'm asking this, Tash, is, you know, you haven't led sourcing before. So, you know, you're new to, as a lot of people, by the way, are new to leading sourcing because sourcing is not exactly a position or a role that's been around for many, many years, you know, like recruiting. So you're new to being a sourcing lead, a sourcing manager. How did you— what were the things that you looked at when you were making determinations on who should be invited to, you know, like, I'm not saying tell me the secrets on how you made decisions to hire, but like, what were the things you were looking for? Core competencies or commonalities? Like, what were the things that you wanted to to make sure you had on your team to ensure success?

Yeah, I think for me, you know, number one is always passion and drive, right? And I know that sounds a little bit like, you know, passionate, but I really do think that, you know, at the source of sourcing is a passion that not a lot of people have. It's not, you know, we find someone, we fill the job, we do this, okay, great, move on to the next one. It's not that, right? For me, it was really looking for people that you know, understood the mission of what we're doing, right? We are on executive search for this team, at least for J&J, and it's a totally different ballgame, right? You have to understand the people that you're talking to that, you know, are maybe have a long career, they've had a lot of experience at the executive level, and you have to be passionate about what we're working on, because most of these roles, right, it's no secret, no, it's not confidential, we're working on things that are actually changing the world, right? Like in our, in our our pharmaceuticals or med devices, any piece of the business is going to be at this level and all of our levels, I should say, hiring people that are in a position to do better for humanity. And behind that, we need to have people that are looking for those people, right? Combing the earth and the lists and the internet that believe in that, right? So for me, passion was definitely number one in what I was looking for, the sourcing passion for people and the understanding of the mission. When we were out in the market and internally as well.

Okay. So how do you identify that? How do you identify that passion? Is there something that you ask or is there a question? Is there— there's no test for that that I know of.

No, no. I have a, you know, personally an old kind of inside joke with myself, right? Like when you know, you know, and I joke that most of us as, you know, sourcers, recruiters kind of just like get the vibe, right? Like we get the feeling, you kind of know right away when you talk to someone in person or on the phone if it's a good fit, usually, right? But we do have some processes in place, you know, assessment-wise to make sure people are a fit for the company. But I'm meaning more for my own self and how they would be successful in working with me and—

And specifically in sourcing, right? Like this particular function.

Yeah, exactly.

You've got all the regular instruments that you would normally use in hiring executives and hiring recruiters, but you got to add this other flavor. That's a, you know, as much as I would like to say a very well-defined role, there's still a lot of, there's still a lot of ambiguity about what sourcing exactly is. In fact, that's a big part of what we do here on Shelley's Alley is talk to leaders about how they define sourcing. And there's never really been two leaders that came on this call and said, I have the exact same definition as someone else.

Yeah.

Right. So what we do know is sourcing is the front end of the process. We do know that sourcing is about obtaining the raw materials, which is the same in any industry, you know, sourcing for steel and sourcing for talent. It's that front end of finding and, you know, procuring and getting things into the workflow to put them into production. So sourcing is definitely defined that way. But how we go about doing it, you know, we have— I've spoken with leaders that are doing sourcing for only critical roles and they're building a team around just critical function sourcing. In your case, it's around executives. And I've seen others where it's, you know, kind of a shared cost center where, you know, recs that have been troubled end up going to sourcing for like additional care. You know, so it's defined many different ways. Um, so what's your, what's your big picture philosophy around what your team— I know it's early on, but you must have, you know, a 2-year roadmap or, or some kind of roadmap. Without telling me anything secret here, what is your big picture vision for what this team needs to achieve in the next whatever timeline to have made this whole thing, you know, worthwhile, right? You're proving it. You've You've got management leadership buy-in. I know Fernando bought in and I know the company believes in you, but what is it that they're going to be looking for? And what are you going to be looking for to make this a success so that they can put a stake in the ground and say, this worked, we're going to keep doing it. What does that look like?

Yeah, it's a good question for me. I know first and foremost for me is always not so much the success of what the team does, like logistically, it's more about where my team is in 2 years. Are they happy? Are they growing? Are they challenged? Are they learning? Are they certified? Are they moving up? Are they moving sideways? Right. And moving down even if that's what it takes. So number one, right, that's the biggest benchmark for us in terms of, or for myself in terms of development of my team, whether they're full-time contract, part-time, whatever it is, to make sure that they're in a good place within 2 years where they've also been involved in the build of this organization in a smaller team, right, in executive search. And that is my assessment for them is, right, in the last, let's say year and a half since we've been together, and that'll be probably a year and a half from now because we just hired the last person on the team, but to say, How are you doing? What are— yeah, yeah, thank you. What are you doing? How are you feeling? Where are we? Where are you in your development? So that's number one. And then from, you know, just an overall perspective, we don't— and probably, you'll probably get to this later at some point in the call, but, you know, we're not looking for numbers, not looking for KPIs right now. What we're looking for is the quality of the slate. And we're doing that by understanding from our recruiting partners and from our hiring managers, from me checking in with our leads, you know, how is it going? And I think that when you're starting to, you're starting out in a lot of these like new, smaller kind of organizations, it's very hard to put, you know, an end number somewhere because it's not that easy. No one can predict what something should look like, especially at this level, or how many, or how few, or how, you know, what it should be. So to me, it's more about what is the feedback, continuously learning from our feedback and making sure that everyone feels supported, and then changing it as we go, right? And there's no set kind of number of candidates or anything like that at the moment. You know, we'll get there. But for us, success kind of looks like, you know, the value that we're adding to the business from our hiring manager feedback as well as, right, we're looking, of course, at how many viable candidates, how many people made it to manager review, and how many of those candidates made it past even recruiter review. Are we getting it? Are we, are we able to interact with people? In-mail responses. There's a lot, right? But overall, it is really just based around quality and feedback and Understanding that the team is in a good place where they're learning and growing as well.

It's a really progressive view. I appreciate that. So it's, it's about what the team has evolved into, continues to evolve into, how they're, how they're improving the quality of everything. And then maybe after you've had some trajectory on what the numbers looked like when you achieved that quality, then you can go back and say, okay, this is what we thought in the past. Now let's, let's put some numbers behind that goal, but you don't have that rigid, you know, you didn't just start with, we're going to have X amount of hires, which I see a lot of people do. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, we have no benchmark, right? And that's the thing is starting as a new group, there's, there's no benchmark. I mean, there's external benchmarking, but you think about how big of a company J&J is and how we're structured, there's really no company of what we do that is the size of what we're doing, right? So it's hard to even find an external benchmark that I would feel comfortable putting my team up against. And I, you know, I want them to learn and grow and be great recruiters and sourcers and not kind of be hung up on a number right away.

Right. Yeah, that makes sense. It's hard to, it's hard to compare sometimes. You know, I used to work at a company called Fiserv and, you know, they, they had competitors in various sectors, but there was really no company that did all of it. Right. There was no end-to-end competitor. There were definitely some best, best in the world kind of competitors for certain pieces, you know, where, where Fiserv might have not been number one. They were number one in many areas, but they were number two or number three in some. However, nobody else had all of it, right? Like you're talking about, like everything from medical devices to pharmaceutical to, um, you know, services and everything else. I probably don't even know everything that J&J does. Yeah, I'm sure that's a big learning curve. It took me 5 years at Fiserv to figure that out. How long did it take you to figure it out at Johnson Johnson?

Oh, please, I am still learning. I joke all the time with people when I, you know, when I'm interviewing them, I say, we, you know, I'm really focused on capability rather than immediate knowledge of the industry because there's still times I have a search and I'm like, wait, what? Can you explain that to me? I'm still learning, right? Our drug portfolios and, and all of the different amazing things that we're doing. So it's, uh, it's, I'm Still there.

How big is the company? I mean, however you measure it, you know, revenue or size of employees, is it— how big?

Recently, I believe we're at about 138,000 employees globally. And that's full-time employees, I believe. Yep.

That is pretty big. That's pretty big.

The Lawrence Company.

Yeah. And so I had another question. One of the things that you're responsible for, so, you know, for those of the listeners here, Tasha is leading in designing the sourcing function, but this, this for, for the executive ranks, but this also includes not only just the strategic component and the team, but there's also a market analysis and a talent intelligence component to that. And as you, many of you listeners know, those are areas, market analysis and talent intelligence are areas I'm very passionate about. So tell me a little bit about that. What does that look like? How are you defining talent intelligence within your function? Because it doesn't necessarily mean sourcing and talent intelligence are not the same thing, right? So how are you, how are you separating them out, defining them? What does that look like?

Yeah, my hope for my team is, you know, at the beginning of every search, we're kicking it off with at least our own basic knowledge of, of what the market looks like for the places where we can. And, you know, I'm without kind of disclosing the tools that we're using because Fernando always says you don't show them how the sausage is being made. It's not my favorite saying because I don't eat meat, but—

Yeah, we don't want to know, we don't know how you do the job, but we do want to know how you define, you know, talent, intelligence, like what does that universe look like?

Yeah, yeah. So we try and map the market, as I call it, or intel the market, look at the intel of the market before every single search. And we may not always bring like the physical market intelligence report to our kickoff calls, but we bring the knowledge. And it seems like, you know, when you've been sourcing for so long or doing this role for so long, it's like, well, duh, Tasha, like, of course you do that, right? The first thing you do is you under— you look and you see competitors, what's the size, who's doing what, what's the new— like, what's the news, right, in the space. I don't think that that's actually something that everybody thinks about, believe it or not, right? Everybody kind of learns. Yeah, everybody kind of learns in a different way and My, my ask to my team is to lead with the data when we can. There are obviously searches where we're hiring for super hard-to-fill roles, doctors, surgeons, things like that, where, you know, there's just not enough. But when you have enough data to lead with it to say, let's make an impactful strategic hiring decision, and that may be a lot of things, right? Here's a really good example. Like, you know, if we're posting the role and it's master's required, let's say we take away the master's degree. How many locations do we have? How many more female talent? How much How much more female talent does that give us or vice versa, right? What does it look like when we start to play around with some of these job qualifications and actually educate the business on what the market looks like instead of just coming to them and saying, here's our top competitors, here's this, let's make it different. Let's make it a different conversation that you're leading the conversation with a what-if scenario and giving them the ins and outs of where we can flex potentially, right? We do have, you know, job requirements, we have an ideal job profile, but what are the things that we can change in that market intelligence report to be able to bring back to the business, the best possible candidate and not put any bookends on it where possible. And a lot of that comes from that market intelligence, right, doing the research and understanding that maybe, you know, in marketing or sales and marketing, just using this hypothetically, it's a pretty normal example, but maybe in sales or marketing, we're more likely to find somebody at this level who has X experience in Switzerland. And, you know, maybe we're not going to be looking in Belgium for this right? So it's just more about being able to be the business advisor, even as early in the process. I'm asking my team to do that and partner with the recruiter to close the search that way, right? And you have, you have to have that data to be able to push back and say, actually, if you do this, this is what you get.

I see. So it might have an impact, it could have an impact on where the position ends up being located.

Yep.

And okay. So, yeah. So you're right. Like, where are these people? Where do they— where they potentially live? Where are we going to find this talent? But then also what companies and what types of decisions do they make? What functions? So you're looking at the universe of not just, you know, here's a job title, jump into some talent pooling software and type in the job title and get a map of that particular job title. But you're looking at the entire universe that affects that role to see, you know, where you might find some patterns that could essentially support decision-making, right, which is a very big part of our job, if not probably the most important part of our job, which is to support the decision-making. We don't hire people, you know, recruiters don't hire people. We may make offers, but we're not the ones that are making the ultimate hiring decision, but we are the ones that are providing all the necessary information to support that decision or we should be at least providing as much of that as possible. So you're doing the same, but at the front end of the process, as opposed to like, here's, here's the best available talent. You're saying, here's where the best available talent is, and, or maybe, or what they look like, or as far as, you know, what their profile looks like and things like that.

And can we open it up, right? And if there's not a lot of talent, which is a lot of the positions that we have, which are very hard to fill, how can we flex as a company to get better access to talent, especially at this level?

Right. So what does, what does good enough match look like? Because we're not going to find this exact thing since we're the leader in that space. That person's already here, right? How are we going to bring someone in from the, from the outside that can very easily do this job, move into the shop, develop into the shop, but doesn't necessarily have the exact matching, you know, so, so what is close enough? I had a good conversation with a former guest, Steve Rawlings, about that, about finding good enough, right? It's not like sometimes these, these job descriptions, these reqs are basically a big wish list of all the things that the hiring manager would like to have. That doesn't mean that all of those things exist in someone, right?

I also think it's like to have, but also somewhere— and I don't mean executive search, I mean overall sourcing— I think in the back of my head, it's that they think that they need. I think that that's the gap, right? I think it's that they think that they need it because they've done it that way before. And, you know, John had, or Shelly had 10 years of experience and he left his job. So now we need somebody with 10 years of experience. I think that that's, you know, the old school kind of way of thinking of, you know, this is the job description, but my way, more progressively probably than most, is this is just overall, right? Not J&J, not executive. My overall thoughts on sourcing are why? Right. Like, you tell me why, or you tell me, let's get down to what it really is that you're looking for. And then how can we find you the person who has the capability rather than the 10 years on their resume?

Yeah, I like that. Work with the hiring manager. So a definition for this, for this market analysis and talent intelligence, then just to recap, would be working with the hiring manager to the hiring committee or whatever to define what is really needed, not what they think they need. You know, especially when it's a role that is unique, that, you know, it's not the same position that you've hired for many times before or it's new. It's a new area. You get that a lot with mergers and acquisitions. You get that a lot with companies that do R&D and develop an entire new market. So that makes a lot of sense. Definitely. So turn things around a little bit. Let's talk about where, where you think the industry as a whole, you know, where talent acquisition, recruiting, sourcing, where are we going? What's your crystal ball as to what's the next evolution going to look like? Right. We just survived COVID, or at least we're hopefully on the other end of the worst of it. So now it's time to start thinking about what's, what's on the horizon, what's coming down the tubes.

Yeah, and this is again, right, I have to say, kind of just my own personal, not executive search, but overall personal Tasha belief. I really think that for anyone, not just recruiting, for anyone who was home, survived COVID, it's been a really, really tough time for a lot of people, which just breaks my heart, honestly, because I was lucky, right? But Merkur, a very solid, great company, and I was very lucky to have been, you know, working here and stayed employed the whole time. I know many people that weren't. I think people during this last couple, I guess, 2 years now, the realization I feel for a lot of people, including myself, when you went home and you're with your family, look around, you're like, what am I doing? Like, what am I doing? Right? Am I doing, am I doing the best I can for my family? Am I in my home now, you know, commuting 2 hours to work, whatever it is, I think personally, as I look at, you know, spot checking, looking at the market, looking at where things are going, I think things will continue to go remote. You look at some of the largest companies for talent acquisition and the recruiters they're hiring for, People have a choice, right? And I saw a funny, a really funny meme the other day. It was like, the candidate is now the hiring manager. They're not kidding. And that's for recruiting too, right? Like your candidates, I have them interviewing me and I'm happy that they are. I'm happy for them. I'm so happy that they, they're asking me questions about who's going to be my boss, who's going to be the person that, you know, I'm going to have to work with every single day when it used to be like, tell me about yourself and then I'll make a decision about you. I like that people are making decisions about what they're doing, especially recruiters, because What we do is hard work. What we do is, you know, and I always say it's kind of like the most underrated business. You can't be successful as a company without the people that get there, and you can't get the people without recruiting and sourcing. But I think as a whole, the industry, right, I think will continue to be remote where available, um, for sure. I definitely think that, um, I think that the automation of recruiting, in my personal opinion, is something that you just cannot continue to do. Not because, you know, it takes away recruiters' jobs, but because these these bots that screen the resumes are great. But like, how do you know, like, unless you talk to someone, how do you know? Maybe they're just not a great resume writer, right? Or the digital interviews, they're great. Of course, you know, it saves us some time, but since they take away the interaction from people, and, you know, some of the best work that we're doing to be able to say, you know, this is, this is the person I talked to, and I asked them a follow-up question, right? But I think we will continue to automate. My hope you know, as we move is that we'll continue to be flexible for people. We've learned a little bit about giving recruiters in the industry the time that they need to grow and develop and the resources for that, as well as being able to kind of put like what I call like the heart back into it, you know, and then using technology where it makes sense.

So you do see automation, as other guests have talked about before, as something that's coming down, but you see it as something that You know, I heard you on the remote work, but I want to focus on the automation. Yeah, you see, as the automation that we're going to grow into or that's coming on the horizon is going to be smarter, more flexible, and is, is more of an assistive technology as opposed to what a lot of people think automation is, which is a replacement, right? Like automation is going to do the job. You're saying automation is going to help us make smarter decisions. It's going to help us be more flexible, but it's adding to that ability as opposed to replacing some part of the job.

Yeah, that's what I hope, right? That's what I hope for that. I don't know if that'll be the case, but I do hope so. I hope that, that ends up being the case.

I like it. I'll get on that bandwagon with you as well.

Yeah.

We go a little bit deeper into some, some real, you know, day-to-day kind of practical stuff. I want to ask you about SLAs, and some people call them, you know, SLA, Service Level Agreement. Some people call it a Statement of Work. Whatever you call it, the idea is that it's a definition of, okay, here's what we do, this is what our team does, define what we do, and then define what you're going to do with what we do so that there's clarity around both sides of the equation, you know, what we're going to do and our expectations, what you should expect from us, but then also what we can expect from you in return. Have you, have you been able to put that in place? It's still pretty early, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't expect you to say, oh yeah, it's really well-defined. But have you started working on an SLA or do you feel like maybe that's too much definition? Where do you stand on that? Should we have an SLA? Are you working towards one or is that just narrowing things down too much?

Yeah, I have mixed feelings. I feel like early in the process, you should— it really has to be flexible. Like if you're doing candidate name generation, yes, there should be an SLA, right? Like I really honestly believe that, like if you're a good sourcer or researcher, like, or even if you're just learning, you know, it's 2021, we've got great access to great technology, there's definitely needs to be an SLA upfront for that, because the turnaround has has to be there. And there has to be some type of commitment in the very beginning. As you progress further into the process, especially when we're talking about hiring executive-level talent, it's very hard to track that down as well as time to fill, things like that, because it's so, so fluid at that point where, you know, somebody may be on vacation for 2 weeks, or they may not be able to connect because they're super busy, right, for like the next month, but we want them. So how do we keep that in place where it's fair to people and make it flexible? But I do have something that I'm working on, you know, in terms of upfront process, we're more of like an à la carte service where we sometimes doing name generation, sometimes doing full candidate development, sometimes we're doing market mapping, but there's a different number tied to each where it makes sense for the success of my team is not just based off of how fast they are, but rather, you know, how well they're doing the work and how difficult the search is.

Yeah, and what you didn't know going into it, right? So when you started out, you thought it was going to be like this, but then, yeah, so that I think that's part of a good SLA or whatever you want to call it. Statement of work is that there's some flexibility for what-ifs. You know, here's what we— here's what we plan to do. I think I may be misquoting this, but if it isn't Mike Tyson, somebody will correct me. I think it was Mike Tyson that said everybody has— everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. You know, like, we have a plan, and then you're like, whoops, what happened, right? You can't just say, well, now we got to go back to it. The plan may have to change, right? I think SLAs need to have that flexibility so that you can go with the flow, but definitely have some sort of definition of what your services are. So what I, what I heard and what I like about what you said is you've got like a menu of, okay, so we are not going to be the same. We're not going to do the same thing for every customer. This is not a cookie-cutter solution where you hire us and we're going to do we're going to present 5 candidates in 5 days or whatever. That's too rigid. What you're saying is we have a couple of different things we can do. Research, we can do the full service interviewing and all that, or we could do, you know, manage vendors or some combination of that. So maybe, maybe part of what the question really should be about is the services that you offer. So define, define the things that you do well and put that in writing as Here's, here's the menu of things we do and then how we go about doing it. That's up for some negotiation and some reality checks as we start doing it. Right.

Exactly. Exactly.

So what would be those services? Would be, you know, research, definitely, right? Like name generation. That's, that's, that's one. I do that all the time. And a lot of people, you know, that's a dedicated function. What else would be— it would be research. That would be what, like the initial kind of phone screen?

Yep, that as well. Yep, we do that. We do the initial phone screen conversation. We do the funneling, right? We have a large number of candidates, we get our top candidates, the recruiters in the business, our, all of our marketing, it's all kind of looped into all of those where it makes sense in conjunction with each of those different things. Then there's times where we're just, you know, doing some market mapping and, you know, some more long-term or shorter-term stuff that just needs to see maybe what the market looks like or you know, finding somebody's boss or something like that.

Okay, so that could also be a service, right? So you got your, your research of the candidate variety, then you've got your research of the market analysis and talent intel that maybe aids in making a decision but doesn't necessarily ultimately result in candidates, because part of what you might arrive at as a conclusion from that market analysis is that maybe you don't want to recruit for this job, or you want to acquire, or you want to you know, rent instead of buy kind of thing, right?

Yeah.

So you've got that, then you've got the phone screen, then you've got selection, and I'm assuming that selection has its own, you know, you've got selection tools, you've got interviewing, and so on. And then I guess, is there another one or does it kind of end with selection? Is there like a—

Right up front for us, ends right up front, right about when we get some people over and, you know, they're at the business interview, that's when my team is allowed to, you know, kind of set out greeting and let the process continue with the business. Yep.

So you present to the committee, they accept the candidate and essentially, you know, take it from there. And I guess either a recruiter takes over or, you know, whatever the rest of the process takes over.

Exactly.

Yeah, I like that. I like that. I think we— more of us need to really define the market analysis and talent intel service, right? Because, yeah, I'll give you an example of something that happened with me. I was asked to put together a feasibility. So essentially market analysis, right? Map the market. We have this position that we want to open in this location. Is it reasonable? Will we even be able to find people? Because we can't relocate at this time and it's a pretty big deal. It's, you know, it was an entire— pretty much the operations of an entire factory, right? One of three very large factories. but they didn't really want to bring somebody in. So can we open this position there? Is it even going to— is this even possible, or should we consider doing something else? So I went out and I did the research and I came back and in my conclusion, my presentation that I did with the GM and the SVP for that division was able to provide them enough information for them to make the determination that it was realistic to actually look for a person to do this job. And that resulted in this factory, again, a very big one, one of 3 factories that did this in the country. It resulted in this factory remaining open and receiving budget for 2 more years. Had they decided that this position was really not reasonable to fill, they would have had essentially to distribute the work to the other 2 factories or perhaps find a partner to outsource that to. Right. So this, this essentially was pre-job. I mean, there wasn't even— there was no job open. It was, do we even create a position for this? And, and the conclusion was we can and we can try and fill it. Now, we still may not fill it. And now there's all the other— now it's a rec. So now we have to go through all that. But this was pre-rec, right? So market analysis and talent intel can get involved, at least in my opinion, Even that early in the process, do we open a position? Do we need to hire for this or are there other alternatives? Can we, is it even realistic to hire at this position? Right.

Yeah, exactly. And it makes all the difference, right? It sets the whole tone for the search. So it's huge. Something we definitely didn't have, right. I think even just a couple of years back, it's a, it's a huge service and it's very, very important, you know, to kind of loop that in very early in the process.

Yeah, we absolutely didn't have, it was like, we just waited for the rec to open. Right. And sometimes we'd open recs and they were duds. It was a dead-end wreck. Well, we, you know, we have it open for so long, we never find anybody, not find the right person, and end up having to do something else because we opened the wreck and it was a miss. So now we're able to help make that decision on whether or not we should even try to hire for this position, if the talent is even out there, or are we better off finding someone internally and growing them because there's really not an external applicant or applicant pool that would be able to satisfy that, right? Or do we find another solution? Like in the case of this division, they were thinking about spreading the work out to other, to, you know, to the other two factories. So, yeah, I think that's a big part of sourcing and kind of business intelligence that rides that joint project line with between BI and marketing intel. And talent acquisition, right? It's almost not about recruiting anymore because it's pre-recruiting.

Exactly. Proactive.

Yeah, exactly. It's an omitted part of our, of our job description. I think we need to start including that. Definitely. Well, Tasha, I don't want to keep you any further because I know you're, you're on your own time, family vacation and everything. I really appreciate you coming out and visiting with us for 30 minutes. Really good insight. I'd love to have you back in, in a while and see how things progress between now and then.

I appreciate it. Yeah, I'd love to be back. Thank you so much for having me. It's been such a pleasure getting to know you and, you know, spending some time with you today. I've really enjoyed it. And I think, you know, the biggest takeaway for me is even for, for these types of things that you're doing, like, you know, lean on each other, keep, keep supporting each other, keep learning from each other, right? And I think it's really— everyone's been through a lot these last 2 years, right? How do we keep supporting people? And this is definitely one of those things, just to even, you know, take a break and listen to different perspectives. So I appreciate it, and I'm honored to be here.

Thanks, it's a pleasure. That's actually how this started. I mean, this started right at the beginning of COVID Oh great, a few of us getting together on Facebook because we didn't have, you know, there was no social outlet. And it was like, let's just get on a 30-minute call on Fridays and just talk. And, you know, it was, it was only on Facebook, but it started growing and growing, and now the Facebook The group has like 4,000 members. And so, yeah, you pretty much nailed it. That's exactly where it came from. And now it's just taking on a bigger role, but it's still the same idea. It's let's get together and talk about what's on our minds and think about it and talk about what we're thinking about because we don't have the answers for everything. And sometimes we can be, especially if you're the only sourcing manager at your company, where do you, you know, where do you go for inspiration? It's easier if you're the recruiting manager and there's a bunch of you. But if you're the only sourcing manager and you're inventing things as you go, how do you— where do you get support? Right. So that's the peer group of the greater industry at large. Thanks for coming.

Thank you so much, Shelly. It was nice to see you. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

You too. All right. Take care, everybody.

Have a good weekend.

Bye.