Thomas Licari Live on Shally's Alley

Hey, all right everybody, welcome to Shally's Alley. You are live in the alley. It is May 10th, in the middle of blooming spring for those of you that are in the upper hemisphere. I'm not really sure what spring is doing in the rest of the world, but, uh, happy sneezing and happy hay fever and seasonal allergies to everybody. For those of you whose kids are getting out of school, happy summer beginnings. And well, we are, we are live today to talk about the, the struggle is real, struggling to find a job, something I personally have experience with very recently, um, and I am continuing to experience, and something that my longtime friend Thomas Licari has been struggling with as well. And so rather than the two of us just kind of commiserating in silence, we thought, you know what, let's, let's have an open conversation about that. So I invited him to join us and tell us a little bit about what he's experiencing around ghosting, industry stylos, professional courtesy and lack thereof, building your network. And a very weird thing he's been noticing lately, um, of advertisements promoting people helping you get a job if you pay them, uh, which is— I'm, I'm— I can't wait to see this. So without further ado— actually, no, I do have further ado. The further ado is I'd like to very generously thank our very generous sponsors, Gem because without them I would be doing this in the dark. They are the ones who have very generously decided to pay for our rent. Basically, we have to pay for this Restream application, and you know, I, I don't really make any money off of the show, so them doing that is, is helping me keep this going. So thank you to them, my, my favorite CRM and, uh, and, you know, contact management application. So now, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Thomas. Thomas, uh, say hi to everybody. Hi everybody!

Hey everybody, how you doing? It's so nice to be on this show. Um, I am, uh, I'm a fan first and foremost, so, uh, I've been, uh, watching, uh, you know, the shows here and there, and I have a few of my favorite. I'm excited to be following one of my heroes though, Karl Kotzmode. And if you haven't seen that show that you did with him. It's fantastic. Carl's like, you know, he— I've worked with him on so many projects and he's so amazing. And I watched that, that whole thing and it's like an hour and 17 minutes, but it's, it's really good.

It's about job fraud. It's about what's going on. But yeah, so definitely very— if you're a job seeker, definitely a good show to watch too. Stay safe online, um, and, you know, not get— fall into scams. So anyway, go ahead.

And as we get into it, and since I'm kissing some butt, let me kiss yours a little bit, because I am— I'm a huge fan of yours. And I have to tell you, I mean, I don't know how many people— if you're, if you're out there and you're, you're listening, I'd love to see your comments in the stream. But, um, you know, your book that you wrote, right? So, um, that, that book, I don't know how many times I've referenced it at different positions that I've been in or looked back at it to try to spur thought or come up with ideas. Um, I'll tell you, in our discussion today, your book plays a pivotal part in that. I want to just kind of bring that out and flush it. It out because what I was trying to do was reverse engineer what a job search would be. So, so what, so what better, what better resource to use how to find a candidate, right? How to find one and bring it to your organization, that candidate to your organization. Reverse engineering your book was something that I kind of, I thought about a lot using sourcing techniques to source a job.

Exactly.

And I think, I think if, if you are, if you're not, um, if you're a candidate and you found this doing a Google search, this show, stick with this because I'm, I'm hoping at towards the end you and I could maybe riff the guy that wrote the book and then the guy that's kind of trying to reverse engineer. And we kind of maybe think of some ideas.

Cool stuff, cool stuff. Yeah, um, yeah, so for those of you that, uh, have not met, um, Thomas yet, he's, he's been in the business for quite some, some time. He lives in, uh, you're still in Arizona, right?

I am. I'm in, uh, beautiful downtown Scottsdale, Arizona, the nexus of the universe.

Yeah, a long, long time ago in a previous lifetime, I used to live there. Uh, that's where I met Stephanie. Um, Thomas has been in the business since, uh, before I got started, I think, in the, in the mid-'90s.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I got started doing that, um, way back then. Calling in the wild, man.

Yeah. And yeah, and you've worked in pharma, banking, um, Zurich. Let's see, what else? Healthcare.

Yeah, technology, very heavy in the beginning. That was my, my, my whole my whole costume was technology back in the day and the dot-com boom and all that kind of stuff and big into consulting, then into, you know, working in corporate and whether that be at pharma or insurance or banking, some of my favorites. So yeah. And then most recently, hospitals.

Right, right. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So that's a very, you know, broad experience, and you have been looking for a new opportunity now for how long?

Oh my God, well, so this is a— yeah, I would say, um, I would say better part of a year, and that's going to make it— this, you know, sound terrible, but yeah.

No, I, I think you're— there's a— I know a lot of people in a similar position where they, you know, they were either unemployed or underemployed for various reasons and have actually been struggling to find a role. I had my friend Greg here on the show, and, um, yeah, so the struggle is real. Can you tell us, like, I know it's a lot, but can you tell us kind of like what you've— why has it been so difficult for a very experienced professional recruiter who knows how to source?

Yes.

Why has it been so difficult to find a job? Shouldn't it be You know, I mean, you should be in high demand and easy.

Yeah. Yeah. That is an incredibly difficult conversation. And for those of you who are married and have talked about this with your better half, it's hard to explain. And it's, you know, my wife asked me the other day, she said, you know, you're so well networked, you know so many people. How is this, you know, how is this taking so long? How come you can't leverage your network? And I'm like, Right. It's, it's so interesting because back in the day, and I want to say back in the day, maybe even if you just turn the clocks back about 10 years, it, it was a lot easier to leverage your networking. But now I notice one of the things that I notice in industry is most people are— they're going to their jobs. And they're coloring within the lines and they don't deviate. They don't have any thoughts outside of how things are working or what's presented to them. It's very, I don't know if that's making any sense, but it's just fundamentally different. You just, people don't respond in the same way that they have in, in years past.

Okay, so yeah, so that's something that, you know, I, I got, I got told a lot when I first started, um, and I haven't been in the job search as long as you, but I got told a lot like, oh, don't worry, someone that's as networked as you, you'll find a job, no problem. Um, but it's, it's been a problem. I, yes, I am very well networked. In fact, I would argue that I am probably, um, the most connected person on LinkedIn in our industry.

I would support that.

Absolutely. I have, you know, and I have 200,000 followers. I have, you know, so many connections, and, and I've been using it. It's not like I've just been sitting in my world, but it's not working. The, the networking is not working, at least not the way— so either I'm not doing it right, or, uh, or I'm, or I'm not doing it enough. I don't know what it is, but it's just networking isn't working. So what have you, besides the old-fashioned, you know, networking, which has been reaching out to all my contacts, hey, who do you know? What have you been able to get any traction at all with? What has been working?

So I'll tell you a story, 'cause I think it's pretty relevant to this conversation. And I don't know if it necessarily answers your question, but I've been attacking this as you would any search, right? Now, a long time ago, I heard you talk about a shark circling and making smaller circles until it gets to its target. That was an analogy that you used.

Yeah, iterative approach, yep.

Yeah, I don't know if you remember that. I don't know where I even heard you say that at. Might've been at a conference or something, or—

Yeah.

Yeah, and so I kind of take that approach. So being in healthcare the last 10 years, hospital acute setting, I have a very rare skillset for recruiting, understanding doctors, nurses, specialties, these different things. And I've worked for some of the biggest hospitals standing up their, whether it be their CRM, their practice, the strategy, and then ultimately doing executive search. So there's one hospital in particular that I, that I targeted in my search where I reached out to the CHRO and we had an email dialogue about like 18 months ago where she said, hey, Thomas, I'm gonna refer this over to the VP of Talent Acquisition and she'll get back to you. Well, that never happened. So then I went back and, asked another follow-up question like, hey, can we talk? Can we get together? And she never replied to that message.

Someone you know, literally.

And somebody I know, and somebody that knows my work too, right? So, right, no, I was at, I was at a hospital across the street from their hospital. And, and even though they were in a much bigger system, you know, 28 sort of hospitals, which is pretty, pretty big, I know my recruiting efforts are pretty disruptive, right? Whereas, you know, I could take a whole pharmacy department out of a hospital because I'm good. You know, whereas you're saying, hey man, I'm the most networked. I would agree with that. But as in executive search, in dissecting a department and all that, man, I gotta tell you, I feel like I'm pretty darn good in that area and that space. I would point my efforts at supporting whatever organization or hospital system I was at, at finding the best and the brightest talent and bringing them. So I figured when I made these calls, these inquiries like, hey, I'm available, you know, you want, you know, essentially, you know, Michael Jordan to come and dunk for you. I'm here. You know what I mean? Right.

And I know what I've done. You know what I can do. Right.

And you guys have seen me take your talent from across the street. Right. You've seen it. And to replace— now you have to think about something too. In hospital, if you don't have a doctor billing, it's a lot of money you're missing. Right. So the longer that that doctor is not in practice, you're losing revenue. So you can apply that to anything, even, you know, like material sourcing or, you know, in a hospital, right? So you miss those people, you miss the revenue, you don't, you're not, you know, you're not hitting. So the funny thing is, is I always say that, you know, recruiting and sourcing is something that can pay for itself, right? In just your overall activities, you can put a quantitative number on cost avoidance in what we do. So you could say, yeah, you didn't go outside, you didn't use vendors, you didn't do this, you saved $8 million.

You didn't waste time, didn't leave a position open for too long that cost, you know, business deals, sales, other people being overworked. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, so that's, that's something that, you know, that, that I thought would resonate well with this hospital across the street. And essentially, you know, they just ghosted me and no one called me, no VP of Talent, no CHRO, no conversation whatsoever. No follow-up emails, no reject, the standard reject letter, nothing.

So what do you attribute that to?

You know, laziness, laziness and not understanding candidate, candidate experience. And I think that, you know, as I've led recruitment department sourcing and those types of things, it is always one of those things that I've harped on. Is making sure that you get back to dispositioning that candidate, right? If they took the time to sit down and apply to your job, you have it, or to reach out to you to talk about this, you have the ability to, you have the responsibility to get back to that person. So people, so basically got ghosted. And so what I decided to do was I said to myself, okay, let me see what happens if I swim upstream and I go above and beyond these people, right? Like if I, you know, not the CHRO, let me reach out to the president of the hospital. Let me reach out to the board members and see if I can jar them loose, right? In my old position, I talked a lot with the board members and all those types of things. So I sent them an email. Then I finally got a reply that said, I'm surprised you did this, right? And I'm surprised you reached out and went over, over my head. And I, and I did reply to you 18 months ago. Oh, so I was like, 18 months ago? I just sent you a note just the other day.

Anyway, so what, um, So is it they're too busy? Is it an oversight? Is it there's too many applicants?

So I think all of the above.

Are we lacking automation? Do we have, maybe don't have enough people doing the job?

Yeah, I think it's all of the above. I think there's a fundamental change in recruitment and sourcing as a whole. Recruitment and sourcing, I've seen just an ultimate downtrend in that, in the amount of people that they have in the departments, the amount of recs that recruiters carry. I see, you know, back when I was at this, a children's hospital here in Arizona that I worked at, I would notice that we would put up some jobs that, and we would have 200 applicants in 2 days, right? And it was just astounding. And I've just noticed this trend. And I just don't think that sourcing and recruiting how it's being put together these days. They have the— they don't have the bandwidth. They don't have the knowledge base. You know, I would also say like, you know, taking classes and teaching recruiters and sourcers how to interact with the candidate and what direction to take their searches and how do you resolve them, right? I talked about dispositioning candidates. But you should have a methodology for that. And I, I would tell you that most don't.

Well, so let me play devil's advocate here for a minute. I totally understand what you're saying, but let me just run this past you. Um, actually, two things. First of all, being on the— having observed as, as the person in charge of sourcing, top of the funnel, recruiter enablement, and everything, of having observed recruiters that are overwhelmed with applicants, right? Um, they're, you know, they post a job and overnight they get 500 applications. So that's, that's a very real, right? And there are, um, policies and requirements and, and, you know, legal responsibilities and oversight compliance responsibilities and all that to be able to get through to that. So that's kind of something that I've noticed is it's too much of a response to too many, you know, applicants basically is one thing. And then the other thing is the caliber of experience or the length of the tenure of experience. Sometimes these recruiters only have 1, 2, 3, 4 years and they've only been working in, in an environment that has had an abundance of candidates. In other words, they've been in a kind of candidate-rich, applicant-rich environment. So they're used to having an inbox full of applicants and nobody's ever told them how to kind of, you know, how to manage that. So playing devil's advocate, you know, you're sitting there with 500 applications. How in the world would you get through? Like, just put yourself in the seat of a recruiter that posted a job and overnight they have 500 applications. And they need to review them to disposition them because of compliance reasons, um, first of all, how are they going to get through all 500? And secondly, how could they possibly respond to everybody? So hold on, so my, my point, or my being devil's advocate, yeah, if they haven't gotten back to you, it's because you weren't selected.

Yeah, yeah. So that— I, I love everything you just said, and it's— you framed up the situation perfectly. And this is how In any situation in a big organization or a big hospital system, you're gonna be using some sort of an ATS or CRM. And all of them have the ability to process a resume based on keywords, right? So it's going to score your resume, but it also has the ability to do mass dispositions with a, templated rejects, right? Hey, your resume looked good, but we went with another candidate and you can do those in batches. So really, again, I think it comes down to how is, how is your recruiter and the recruiter that you framed up in your situation is exactly what I see everywhere. They just don't have the experience and they were never taught, so they don't know how to go through their batches and their files and, and then disposition those candidates.

So how beneficial would it be, though, as a job seeker, for you to simply receive a message saying, we reviewed your resume and selected another candidate, if that's happening time after time after time? So the same outcome, you still aren't getting a job, right? Getting an interview. And now instead of being ghosted, you're just getting canned messages that say, sorry, next time. How much is— how much better is that? Like, what, what do you get out of that?

Yeah, I don't know.

Or—

yeah, I've actually been thinking about that a lot, as you know. Hey, in my next stop, how do I create a candidate experience, right, with empathy, providing some sort of rationale for, for a disconnect or a reason why you haven't been selected? You know, one of the things that you see a lot if you go on to certain, like LinkedIn or whatnot, they will show you the amount of candidates that have at least clicked the apply button, right? What you'll notice is in what, like a few hours, there'll be 100 candidates that have at least clicked. Now you don't know, did they go all the way through the process and then finish and assume that they applied, right?

200 people, 300 people. 600 people applied, right? So here's— let me, let me tell you two things that I've seen happen in, in that kind of a scenario. So, um, first of all, I was responsible for, uh, the relationship with LinkedIn and setting up and configuring everything. And I, and I came to the realization that, uh, easy apply— the easy apply button on LinkedIn was extremely prejudicial and detrimental. What it was doing was it was, first of all, generating multiple, multiple copies of the same applicant because it did not dedupe them because it doesn't pass through the email address. And the ATS uses the email address as a unique identifier because every person's email address is unique. So what happens is if Thomas Licari applies for the same job twice, creates two different applications because it can't distinguish one Tom Szekard from the other because it doesn't pass through the email address. So we would end up with 500 applicants, 100 of which applied 5 times. Wow. Right? So that's not— that's one problem. So I got rid of the easy apply and forced people to actually apply to have to provide their email address so we can detect duplicates. And that cut applicant volume down by 97%.

Wow.

So 97% fewer applicants. But what was really fascinating was that while we reduced application volume by 97%, we increased pass-through rates by 3%. So much fewer applicants, but more— 3% more people made it through the process. Because that's reflective of the amount of time that was being wasted in just going through duplicates. That recruiter now has a little bit more time to actually look through more profiles instead of just deleting duplicates or merging duplicates or, you know, dealing with that. So that's one thing. And then the other thing that I noticed is they— the job posting is automatic and it's being auto-refreshed by the ATS. So it looks to LinkedIn or, you know, whatever the job board is, that this is a brand new job. So it keeps posting and reposting and reposting and reposting the same job, and that generates applications. And what's happening is the candidates very frequently are applying for whatever at that company because they want to work at that company. So you have people that are applying for jobs indiscriminately. In other words, someone that has experience in accounting is applying for a digital media job. Someone who is a salesperson is applying for an account management job, you know, nurture versus, right? Like they're just not even right. And what I saw happening as a job seeker when I was looking for jobs is on LinkedIn, I would click on a job that was a really good fit for me. Very good fit. And they would show me, oh, you only have 40% of the qualifications. You shouldn't apply for this job. Yeah, but I am a really— I mean, I know the job description and I know it just wouldn't match me. And they would just say, oh, you're a really bad fit. And then I would think, well, no, I'm not. I'm a perfect fit. Likewise, the opposite of that happens when I see a job that I'm kind of like, eh, and I apply for it. It doesn't tell me I'm not a good fit. So who's deciding that and what's going on there? It sort of explains why you have 500 applicants in 24 hours. How many of those are actually qualified? Now, I'll wrap this up by saying this, and I know you have a lot to say about this. My answer to all of this is get rid of recruiting completely and replace it with sourcing. Because if you're sourcing candidates, you are looking for people that you're interested in talking to. You will respond. You will engage. When I source candidates, I don't blow them off. I don't ghost them because I source them. However, I'm not sourcing 500 people for one job in 24 hours, and I'll just leave it at that.

So I like where you were headed with that, because one of the things that I've, I've thought of when you're talking about, especially in hospital and you're talking about a volume situation, those folks sitting in those desks They are not recruiters because you talked about when I got started in this business in, in, you know, in the early '90s, man, you had to hustle, you had to sell, you had to like, you know, cold call.

That's great. Yeah.

Yeah. And cold call and work them and bring them all the way through. You're essentially what those folks are is they're sitting in a desk and they're, they're an administrator and they're passing a widget through a system. A series.

Sure, but they're getting 999 unqualified widgets, right? That's not their fault, right?

No, and it's not. It's how you set the— it's how you set up the, the recruiting process. And you do have to have somebody that knows what they're doing, that's a strategist like yourself, sitting there and building that process out for those larger companies.

Because right now But we are required by law to advertise the jobs openly for compliance reasons. So we have to broadly distribute the job posting for compliance reasons, which opens up the opportunity for indiscriminate applicants. And in addition to that, I will argue that the, the spam of jobs. So when companies, when employers spam the internet with lots of copies of the same job, 27 versions of the same job in 27 different job boards. It's all the same job. If you know that there's a position out there and you go and Google that exact position, you'll see that it's posted in 50 different places, right? So the, the adequate commensurate response from candidates being spammed with job postings is candidates spamming employers with applications. It's only fair.

So what— so you brought up something that is vexes me. Why in the world? And I noticed this. Why, why in the world are employers spamming their, their job, their position briefs all over the internet? They post like, they'll say, we're looking for so-and-so in Arizona and then the same position in New York. And they just change the state and move it around. You know they're not hiring in each one of those spots. What is the deal with that? I, I don't even understand that, that logic.

There's, there's two big mechanisms that are going on there. First of all is the, um, the resource constraint mentality, or the fact that they feel like if we're not covering a big enough ground, we're not going to get enough applicants. Right? So, we have to advertise broadly to get enough applicants. And that leads to the too many applications. And then, there's the other side that leadership doesn't have the either doesn't know or doesn't have the ability to measure the throughput stages. So, the only thing that they can report to leadership is how many people applied for the job. And how many people, you know, got interviewed and hired. But all the stuff in between sometimes is, you know, a mystery. So if you go to your executives and say, we have a 10% increase in applicants, the executives go, yay, good job. But that doesn't really translate into quality. When I reduced 97% of applications for a couple of weeks, I had all of the recruiters complaining that they weren't getting enough applications.

Right.

They want more applicants. They want more applicants. And then they stopped complaining when they were converting more of the fewer applicants, and then that went away. So it's like, it's, it's like you're taking the crack pipe away from the addicted crack baby. They just, you know, they, they, they're used to this high volume and they think, if I don't have 10,000 applications, I'm not going to be able to make a hire, not realizing that if they only had 100 applications, they'd actually be able to make a hire faster. And a better hire because they're now able to look at the candidates that are actually qualified and take the time to have conversations, email exchanges with them and everything. So compliance is requiring us to broadcast, right? Scarcity mentality is requiring us to, you know, continue reposting and renewing. And that's why a lot of recruiters will not unpost a job even though they have people in final stages of interview. They still leave it open because they're afraid that if something doesn't work and the candidate doesn't accept the job or doesn't pass background check, they're worried that they won't have enough backup. Again, not realizing that amongst the 10,000 applicants, they probably do. They just don't shut down the job. So now you have 10,000 people that you got to say sorry to. And how many times do you hear Sorry, we went with someone else. Sorry, we went with someone else before you basically don't accept that anymore and it stops losing meaning, right? I mean, it starts losing meaning. Sorry.

So you pose a very interesting question. So you say, hey, okay, there's 10,000 applicants. So now if you're, you're sitting there and you're an applicant and you're a candidate, you're looking for a job, how do you cut through that noise? Right. So I've been looking at a lot of different methods and thinking about this. You said you had some material about that.

Is that true?

Yeah, I did. Um, but, um, yeah, let's, let's see if I, if I can pull it up. Okay, so yeah, perfect. Um, so basically, um, I, I— let me find the slide here exactly. I, I, I kind of talked a lot about this already. We talked about your book a little bit. I don't know if these slides will stay in here. Um, I did want to bring up this saying as we kind of move through here, you know, uh, Homer Simpson saying, uh, nothing is hurt but feeling except for feelings. Because I think that's so true, right? When you're talking about like, you know, being, uh, 53 years old and you're trying to find a job and you're really struggling, you don't mind the rejection as much as that feeling of like, oh, oh yeah, you're like, hey, look, I mean, I'm applying for jobs and I really feel like, hey, I'm— I, I know that I'm, uh, a fantastic candidate and I could do an amazing job. And then you see, uh, one, one, one day ago, 100 applicants. 18 hours, 100 applicants. 22 hours, 100 applicants. You know, it's just like you said, there's an algorithm to, to how that that works and if you can, you know, some of these are not easy applies. These are taking them to the website to apply. So I don't know. I thought maybe, I thought that was pretty interesting and I wanted to, we kind of flushed that out. I did talk about my situation where I reached out to a competing hospital trying to target myself into a particular job. And I did write, I have written 4 different stories and I haven't published them. I was thinking about doing it and that was mainly because it's embarrassing, right? Like it's really kind of my tale of like looking for a job and I've written some detailed stuff about that. I'm looking to— I think I'm gonna, you know, after this, I think I am gonna post them.

And if it's anything like me, I— it's like I feel this sense of shame that how could I possibly be looking for a job at, you know, being at the peak of my profession and, you know, being highly networked, highly connected, highly visible? What's wrong with me? Am I you know, am I ugly? Am I— what's— why am I not, you know, getting any nibbles? So it's like you have it. I don't know if that's what you're feeling, but I feel like, yeah, what's wrong with me that nobody's interested in talking to me? So is it that you're talking about a guilty kind of like you just feel yucky about it?

Yeah, just I feel, uh, yeah, exactly. I mean, shame is the best word for it because, you know, I, I, I've said to my wife, you know, like, uh, You know, how am I, how am I, I can say, like I said, I think I'm one of the best at what I do. And my career trajectory has shown that because everywhere I've gone, I've saved, you know, millions and millions of dollars in cost avoidance and building tracks and mechanisms for volumes of hires. And I've said to my wife a million times, I'm like, how am I in this situation? Like, I just don't, I don't understand what I'm missing. And thinking, well, maybe she could see it as an outsider not knowing anything. Maybe she could, like you said, like, hey, is my hair out of place? Or, you know, did I part it on the wrong side? What is it that I'm missing, right?

So anyway, I mean, like, for example, if somebody, my friends ask, I say, hey, how you doing? How's work? Um, actually, I'm, uh, I'm unemployed. I mean, just like you hang your head like, I can't believe I'm saying this, but I mean, it's like you feel like you're not a full human because you're not employed.

Yeah. And, and, and it's, it's, uh, it's really— there are times where, you know, I'm, I'm sitting and I'm trying to think outside the box, like, how could I change? Or— because I've always been able to kind of, you know, take, take a strategic look at things and, and figure it out. And so, except now, except for now. And, you know, the things that have helped me is talking to somebody like yourself and others that are, you know, I had somebody reach out to me that I worked with in the past and I'm not gonna say her name, but she's fantastic and just, she's a smart, smart person. She managed a whole group of recruiters and her and I were talking and she just basically had been overlooked, overlooked, overlooked in every job she's applied for. And she's after like 22 years or something like that in the same role. They let, they let her go for, for no reason whatsoever. And, you know, she— it's not like she did all of a sudden after 22 years she decided to do bad work. They just moved on, right? So I've had some conversations with her, uh, and her and I trying to— and it's so funny how— not funny, but tragic or sad— like how, like There's really, really smart people that I know that are just, you know, on the outside looking in, can't figure out, and I consider myself one of them. So, and that was, you know, what I was getting to with that slide about lessons learned and when to pivot. Like, when do you, when do you, when do you say to yourself, hey man, like, I gotta think of something else here?

Right? Yeah, right. So what do you— I don't know. That's a— yeah, that's a good question. Do you, do you give up after a year? Or like, yeah, what— when do you know how to pivot?

So I've been thinking about that, and I'm like, hey, do I, do I take my skills and, and try to apply them to something else? Um, I mean, I love working in healthcare. I got an immense sense of pride for hiring a doctor that would go on to, you know, I couldn't go in and do a surgery and save somebody's life, but I could hire the person that would do that, right? So I had a lot of pride in that, in being able to do that, right? And helping build or stand up a healthcare practice and have them go on to help somebody resolve cancer issues or something along those lines. And now I don't have that. So we talked a lot about the candidate experience. And I do, you know, when you're in corporate and you're working and people say this a lot and they say candidate experience, candidate experience, but I don't think they really truly understand how important this is. And if you're in an industry, you're sitting here and you're watching Shelly and I talk about our tales. Whoa. And you're in an industry where you've got— you're competing for talent, or you're an industry where you get, you know, 10,000 applicants to one position. This is something that you definitely— my advice to you is don't overlook this because this will make or break you as a recruiter or a sourcer, understanding what the candidates are going through and also how it applies to your business. Like in healthcare, right? A patient wouldn't tolerate being ghosted. They wouldn't, like a candidate would be, right? Could you imagine a doctor going into the patient's examining room and then, you know, going in there?

Yeah, no, I—

And then bailing out and then you'd never hear from that doc again? You wouldn't stand for that. But candidates, at some point, you know, if you're in an industry where there's a dearth of candidates and it's really a struggle, try adjusting your candidate experience because even if that candidate rejects you, they could go out and say, what a great experience I had talking to the recruiters, the leadership, this, that, right? And it just, you know, to me, it's one of those things that people totally overlook. Oh, yeah. So we talked a lot about that. And then this is, this is my, this is my phone. So I went and looked at We were talking about this a little bit, and this is my Instagram ads. I went and pulled them.

Oh, right, yeah, you told me about this.

Yeah, so, you know, obviously, you know, sit down with your wife, you have lunch, and you're talking about your job search, your phone's listening if you haven't turned the mic off. You go back, you look at your Instagram page, and there's this recruiter will find you a job if you pay this amount of money And I have 3 secrets that are this or that. But I will tell you, if you're a candidate out there and you're looking, just read Shelly's book and re-engineer that because that's what they're talking about. They're talking about targeting an employer, targeting a network, direct messaging, reworking emails to reach out to those. That's all in Shelly's book. So you, if you just sat down and thought to yourself, like, how do I reverse engineer this and put these practices into play, then you don't have to pay one of these people. And I have had discussions because I wanted to do a little bit of research.

And I was going to ask, yeah, so are these legit? Is it legit?

No, no. And the funny thing about it is if you go and you put stuff into an AI, right, like, do ask an AI, whatever your AI of choice is, ask them to do research about one of these. And the funniest one was the AI came back to me and said, this seems to be, you know, you pay for somebody to find you a job and they have 3 pillars and this, that. And then it says, it said, the AI says, the reviews of this seems staged. And positioned, and I cannot find anything independent of you, right? So you're thinking to yourself, you know, this is— to me, it's just people preying on, uh, this is my opinion, preying on folks that are in my position, right, where they're looking for a job, they've been looking for a while, they're getting, they're getting frustrated. And let me, let me let me try something now. Hey, look, that it might work. Who knows?

You know, for, for, right, it's worth a shot. Let's give it a try.

Let's give it a try. But it's all about changing your thinking, right? It's like, hey, what are the steps to try to find a job? And, and look at what those, those are. And am I executing on those appropriately, right? So I, it does, it did cause me to kind of look at the whole job search thing and as a— from a candidate's perspective and say, hey, like, am I doing this right? And am I putting myself in the best position to be seen?

Right.

So I thought this was interesting. And if you— it's also interesting just to kind of go through your phone and see what ads are you know, are out there. Um, this—

okay, public service warning, huh?

Yeah, yeah. So it is pretty interesting. But this is, um, you know, um, I talked about, um— excuse me. So this was a slide that I kind of put together just around, um, for a job seeker, just, you know, Getting found and the secret strategies, which I don't think are really that, if you can see, I'll try to go through this pretty fast. I would say I put Google Doc organization, but just knowing where all your stuff is, right? Where's your resume? How can I get to it quickly? How can I send it to somebody so that they could read it, right? A lot of times if you send an attachment, I mean, You know, depending on what securities are on there. Yeah, you get— you're like, hey, didn't you get— no, they never got it. Especially if— especially you got to look at the industry as well, like healthcare. They've got so— their securities are so ratcheted up, it's crazy. Nothing gets through. So you basically have to send text and links. And I think the Google platform works pretty well. I like it. I use it a lot. Then the keyword optimization. This is something that I think, you know, you could spend a lot of time on, right? There's, there's AIs now that people are selling these services where you could take your resume and then take the position description and match them. And then they put all the keywords in, pump you up through. So we talked a lot about like, hey, there's 10,000 candidates here. Right in this file folder, how do you get through that? Right. How do you look? You know, how do you put— how do you separate yourself and put yourself up to the top? And so I've been— each job that I've been interested in, I've rewritten my resume. And it's maddening. It is. It is. It's quite consuming.

Yeah. Frustrating.

It's time-consuming. It's frustrating. And then when you, you know, I've had some, you know, people get back to me and then ghost me from there, you know. So it is. But I will tell you that you don't necessarily need to pay for an AI service.

No, you can do your resume and job search, job posting comparison. Yeah. On, on Claude or whatever, for sure.

Right. But I think that there's a lot of services out there right now that are trying to stand themselves up in that space. And I think it I think it's pretty interesting for a candidate, you know, and for a recruiter because, you know, with the advent of the AI and being able to— I mean, like, even if you were to write up your candidate summaries, to me, I think it's, you know, presenting to a hiring manager, I think gives you a huge advantage.

But yeah, I talk about that actually in my— believe it or not, I have a course Oh, yeah. Yeah. Check it out here. Yeah, it's a, it's a course I talked about exactly that using the GPTs to summarize resumes into intros for when you're submitting them to the hiring managers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And to me, I think that that's, you know, such a valuable thing. But you can use that technique to do your, to do your same thing to present yourself.

Yeah, right. In my application, and I customize the COVID letter or the email. Yeah, yeah.

And then, I mean, not to just, you know, read each one of these, but, you know, searching, you know, your niche sites and communities, um, you know, proactive company research. Now I've done a lot of that, you know, looking at, uh, stuff that's local here in Arizona, trying to figure out, you know, hey, if I presented myself. I did mention like how I went directly to the top and solicited them and tried to craft myself into to see if I could work myself into a position that they haven't even posted yet, right? And trying, trying that avenue, which is, by the way, I want to go back to something that is, that technique has always worked for me in the past wherever I've like being able to reach out to somebody and say, hey, I'm available, I have these skills, this is what I'm looking to do. Do you guys— can you fit me into your company somewhere? In the past, that has always worked for me. That's how I got my, my probably the last 3 jobs I had. So yeah, you know, these, these last ones, these are all explained, you know, in your, in your book, you know, you're doing the Boolean searches. I always tell people, if you don't wanna learn how to do Boolean strings, then you should try to find a website to do it for you 'cause there's a ton of them out there. You could just cheat and do it that way. And then the social media stuff, X-raying social media to see who's talking about the types of jobs that you're searching for. I think is also, I think that, you know, who's out there, you know, discussing that, whether it's a technology they're searching for or what have you. You know, one of the skill sets that I have is CRMs. And one of the, I love Zoho as a CRM for, and I've built a couple of those for various companies where, to have, you know, instead of that, you have your ATS, but you also have the candidate CRM, um, tool that— and, and so I would do, uh, my searches based on who's talking about Zoho and, um, who's talking about, you know, standing up, you know, candidate databases and try to see if I could, um, make connections that way.

So, oh, okay.

Yeah, those are all—

it says uncovering hidden referrals there. What's that?

So really just going through and seeing, like, you go in, a good example is everybody's on LinkedIn. So you can go in and try to find out, you know, who is, who you're networked with at that particular company. But you, you can also try to build your own network connection into that specific company. So there are some areas where I haven't known anybody and I've built my inroads in there trying to reach out to have a conversation with somebody about a particular search that they might be working on, seeing if I can help them or offer them any advice and uncover networks that way by listening to what they're saying and people in their explanation and how they've done their searches. So it's all about active listening, and reaching out to people that you don't know. And it's a— it's really kind of a cold call technique, right? Like, you have to be comfortable in talking with people that you may not have, you know, messaging or warming up your messages.

What about this? I'm curious, is red flags in career accelerator ads— have you, have you learned what some of those are?

Yeah. So that's all of those ads that I was showing you before that pop up onto your phone, right? And the sell is really weird. It reminds me of the slap, slap, chop, or, or those, those gimmicks. Hey, we could do this, we could do that for you. We could do, you know, and but they're not telling you how they're going to do it. Right. And I would tell you that anywhere, anywhere where they're, they're making these promises in how they're going to find you a job, they're going to do, but they're not telling you that the snake oil.

Yeah, it cures all ailments, it cures everything.

And, and some of the stuff that I, I looked into, and, uh, I found that when you really— if you look into their techniques and then you start to say, you know, you could use an AI for this because it's really good to kind of bounce back and forth, you take, take their, their text and what they're saying and ask AI to interpret it, and it will start to unravel some of the stuff for you. But you have to, you have to have that conversational chat between yourself and the AI, and you can see it. You can, and it will develop those red flags for you. So if you've got this feeling like it's too good to be true, it probably is, and you can prove it to yourself by going through the text and really looking at it line by line. Does that make sense what I'm saying?

Yeah, yeah, it's almost like you gotta peel back to, are, you know, are these promises too good to be true? Kind of like, say, like the snake oil of old where, you know, yeah, this will cure your headache and your arthritis and your— yeah, obviously that's— it can't do all of that. Yeah, yeah.

If somebody had a— if somebody had a, a magic prescription for me that would, you know, cure my, my, uh, my, my job search, you know, and help me, uh, I would, I would do it in a second if the— if it worked, right?

I mean, what you're saying is it doesn't really—

yeah, yeah, I would, I would do it. And, and what I think is funny, or funny sad, is, is that I know so many people, I know so many people in the business that are awesome at what they do right? But yet, when I talk with them, it's, you know, we— I can't figure out what is the piece that I'm missing. And I think that a lot of people probably feel the same exact way that I do, and maybe aren't out there, you know, as visible as you and I are about it right now, Shelly. But they're not comfortable because they feel that shame in telling their story and where they're at and asking for help. And, you know, I have always— I always pride myself on the fact that whether I was in a big-time job, you know, with lots of recruiters reporting to me and I was, you know, in this really great position, I always tried to help people. When they would reach out to me.

Yeah, yeah, that's— I mean, that's a whole nother— that's, that's a— yeah, you know, some people pay a forward and so on. Um, yeah, I wanna— I wish, I wish I didn't have to do this, but I do have to kind of cut you off a little bit because we're at past 2 o'clock. And, uh, yeah, kind of over time. But before I let you go, I, I can't— you, you can't be a Shelly's Alley survivor unless you've been put through the two questions. Okay, first of those questions is, who should be on the show next?

Um, have you had Chris White on?

Chris White? Nope.

Okay.

Um, all right, I'll— that doesn't mean they're gonna accept the invitation, but I'll invite.

Okay.

Uh, all right, and then the other question is— you don't have to give me more than one, that's it. You can if you want to. Okay, um, but I'll reach out. The other question is this: a lot of folks watch, listen over the weekend and the recording because not everybody's, you know, available at this time. So I want to always leave them with a provoking thought. Um, what, what question do you want them to ask themselves? Really something that for them to chew on, to mull over, to think about. I'm not— not something— not a word of wisdom You know, this is not a lecture or pulpit, but more like, what do you want them to think about deeply after they watch this?

Yeah, I would, I would want them to ask themselves the question, have I helped anybody in my, my job? Do I have the ability to help somebody? And have I, have I done so? Right. And if you can't immediately answer that question, like, yeah, you know what, I helped Mike Smith you know, get into this, this job, or Sarah Jones, get into that job. If that doesn't immediately pop into your head, whereas you help them— not that they applied for the job, not that they—

no, but yeah, I know what you mean, right? Exactly. Who have you helped, or have you helped anybody today? Okay, yeah, yeah, give, give someone a— okay, cool. Uh, good, good one to think about. Thank you so much. I appreciate putting all the, uh, effort into even— you know, we don't usually have slides on the show, so Appreciate all the effort you put into that. I respect that. And thank you so much for coming on board. You know, people, folks can connect with you on LinkedIn here, just basically LinkedIn/Lakari, unusual last name. So there you have it. Thanks again for coming. Everybody out there, you know, have a great, wonderful week. We are hoping to have Megan Whittington on the show next Friday, but there's some scheduling, so we may or may not have her. I do have a backup guest, so there actually will be either Megan or someone else will be on here next week. So we will see you back here. Until then, please be kind to yourselves, and who have you helped today? Awesome. Thanks, everybody.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Bye.