Mastering Sourcing: Glen Cathey’s Guide to Building a Winning Playbook

80% or more of your roles are probably going to be filled by like the first five steps in your playbook. And that's why your playbook's important. Otherwise you have a whole team and everybody has a different playbook. Whether it's conscious or unconscious, documented or not, you're going to have inconsistent results if you don't have people following the same general process and there being an underlying logic for why you follow that process.

Hi and welcome to the show. I'm Johnny Campbell, CEO and co founder of Social Talent. And this week on the podcast we're speaking with world renowned Glen Cathy and talking about what makes a world class sourcer. Glenn, you're very welcome to the podcast. Our listeners might not know this, but you are and are one of my heroes in sourcing. I started my sourcing career through trying to just consume everything on your Boolean Black Belt blog. This is probably back in 2009, 2010 maybe. And you know, watching your early YouTube videos as well and just fascinated and just in love with your mind and the way that you thought about it because I found somebody who thought like me. I learned so much from you and still learn so much for you. So it's an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast. Some of our listeners maybe haven't had the pleasure of, of knowing your content, your background. So for those, if you wouldn't mind introducing yourself, telling us a little bit about your professional career, where you are today, maybe something personal as well, if that's okay.

Sure, yeah. Well, it's an honor to be here. I always love chatting with you. So I'm now in Tampa, Florida, but I actually grew up in Maryland and my first job in recruiting that I stumbled into was quite a while ago, so I'll date myself. But I also feel like it's important because everyone is a product of their journey. So it was January of 97 that I stumbled into, like many people do, within HR and recruiting and sourcing into a small privately held staffing company in Northern Virginia. And I, I almost quit actually within the first three months. That's a fun story. But I decided to stick to it. And then things just really clicked for me and I did really well from a performance perspective. I got promoted to management and I've had a long career since then, you know, building, leading and managing large centralized sourcing recruiting teams and then moving into digital strategy. How can we leverage data technology, AI, et cetera, to better enable talent acquisition and talent management? And my current role, I've been at Ronstadt now for about seven and a half years. And I work in the talent advisory function.

So, Glenn, you know, in the early days of sourcing, I remember hearing you speak about this. You coined this phrase for me. You coined this phrase, exotic sourcing. But, you know, it used to come up with conversations with me when people would say, hey, Johnny, where else can we find great talent? And, and to a lot of people, next level sourcing or excellence in sourcing was really about knowing the next place that no one had found. And it used to frustrate me because, you know, in the early days, you know, it was just, well, where else apart from LinkedIn? And it was easy enough to find a couple of places. And then, you know, I certainly realized or begun to realize that maybe the return on doing that wasn't, you know, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. And I heard you in a talk, you know, use that phrase, exotic sourcing, and I loved it because it really captured, you know, what people were doing. Exotic meaning, probably. It's not the good thing. Every day I wonder if you could just dig into that a little bit and give me your thoughts on where that came from and when you think about sourcing and maybe begin to talk to me about what does make a world class sourcer, because I think we both agree it's not where you source per se. Maybe it's something different.

Well, that one opens up a big topic, very meaty and something I'm still super passionate about. So again, I told you before briefly about my origin story, and I think that also is why I feel the way I do around the exotic sourcing element. It's that when I started and I received very little training, was using an internal database and I think it had maybe 80,000 people in it. And it was a Lotus Notes based solution and it accepted Boolean logic. And even though I'd learned that in school, it's not something that I was like saying, hey, I was already a search geek at that time, received minimal training, but as I said when I, when things started to click, I was able to make a record number of hires on a monthly basis just using this internal database. So fast forward many years, I missed the first sourcecon because I found out after the fact. And then I attended the second sourcecon and then everybody was talking about doing these things on the Internet to find people. And I'm gonna be, I'm just gonna be unfiltered and honest. Like, my reaction at the time was like, I don't. Okay, I understand what they're doing. But why are they doing this? Why is no one talking about leveraging the internal database? And there were things that I had been doing with this internal database that I would, I would actually argue are more sophisticated from a thought process than some of the things I was seeing at the time around the Internet. And then I was thinking also, man, this seems like such a waste of time. I'm so fast at finding people that are highly likely to be qualified, interested and available in, in my database. And I started to break down the why I never really thought about it before and that's actually what inspired me to start writing Bullying Black Belt was that experience and saying, oh, I think I, I think I have some things to share with people. That's not about where you search. It kind of ties into the return on, on the time you invest. Which is something that we talk about with regard to like sourcing playbooks. But you, you really nail it when it comes to people like what is a world class sourcer? It's not about how crazy and interesting and unique and innovative you can be with regard to doing wild and exotic sourcing things on the Internet. Although those things do have value, I'd say it act the real value is the way somebody actually thinks about problem solving. You know, if I have a need for a certain type of person or people on a regular basis, what are the most effective ways for me to go about regularly finding people who are highly likely to be the best talent for my organization? And when you look at the totality of things that you could do from a sourcing perspective, I think anyone would recognize that there's certain things you should probably do first that give you a higher probability and that would probably be your internal database first. First because there's structured data, because people have applied to your company in the past, people have been sourced for that company in the past. So there's many reasons for that. But on the world class side, in addition to thinking critically, it starts with fully understanding what it is that you're looking for. Because if you don't have that, then you're highly unlikely to be able to produce the right result. Um, I also think there's some degree of what is known as deliberate practice, which is a really interesting process with very, a number of pillars, I think seven to eight pillars and some of them are around, you know, high repetition, metacognition, thinking about what you're doing while you're doing it. And within sourcing, a really quick example of that is, you know, if I run a search and I look at the results. And I'm not really happy with the relevance. I'm thinking about why is, why is this happening? Where are some these people that don't look like fits? Why are they there? What can I do to reduce their relevance or have them just not show up? Am I finding all of the best people in this database? Maybe I'll re ask the question or rerun a search and then I rerun the search and you start analyzing the results again. And that's that metacognition element and the repetition element. And also not just running a search and going, you know, there's the element of digging a little bit deeper, asking the tough questions for sure.

So we had the pleasure of filming you earlier this year in some new courses for the social talent platform where you deep dive into this what makes a world class sorcerer. And it may surprise many people that, you know, it's less about how do you write a Boolean search string, it's less about how you use the syntax in LinkedIn, et cetera, and more about these broader principles in terms of repetition, in terms of critical thinking, in terms of getting feedback, metacognition, et cetera. And I just found it fascinating. I think it's phenomenal for a brand new sourcer, but really good for a very experienced sourcer to go back to these basics and kind of look at how you're approaching this, because it is that style, that technique, I think that brings out the best results. One of the things that you talked about when you're building out the curriculum was this concept of sourcing playbooks. And I had the pleasure to hear you talk briefly on this about couple of years ago, but can you explain to me, or explain to our audience what do you mean by sourcing playbooks? Who are they for? What's the advantage? And what does the sourcing playbook potentially look like?

Sure. Well, I, I'd like to go back to the origin of all of these things. Many things that I just was doing unconsciously. And until I had to either start training other people or explain to other people, you know, what they should be doing. It really kind of brought it to my consciousness. I was in a meeting one time where somebody just asked, well, where do you, when you get a job, where do you start first and why? And if that doesn't work, what do you then do? And I told that person, like, wow, that's interesting. As I thought about it, like I actually do have, there's a process that I have, I just haven't really documented it. And so I decided to start thinking about, okay, what where do I start first and why? Explain the reasoning and then just basically work it all the way through from there. And you've probably heard from what I said before, I'm kind of wired to focus on probability of outcome. Like I need to focus on where I get the highest return on time invested and some of the things that again, I did unconsciously. But then when I explained it to other people, I had to say, wow. Well, some of it comes down to, well, let's focus on the internal database first. Why would you not do that? There's the high level logic of that. But then there's also things like, well, there's a depth of data to someone's cv, their resume, and that's better data than maybe a name and a list of conference attendees. Right? One is more predictive than the other, one has more information for you to analyze and say this person has a higher likelihood of being a good match. Like, well, why wouldn't I search for people that are actively looking now? Of course that increases the probability that I can convert them. But if I run out of good looking people for my job that have applied recently or have been updated in the past 30 days, well then I'm going to go back and look at all people, including people whose resumes haven't been updated for four or five, six years, depending where you are in the world. You can still do those things. And we've made placements with people who hadn't updated their resume in that long. And by the way, there's people on LinkedIn that haven't updated their profile in a long time either. But it's, it's like there is a logical order, I think, to going through what you should do on a return on time invested. Because why would you spend any more time doing something than you should to produce the desired outcome? But if your first thing doesn't work, you have to have a second, you have to have a third, you have to have a fourth, and then you also need to split your playbook. Basically it's like what you should do as soon as you receive a position. Where do I start? Well, there's two angles there. One is an inbound, one is an outbound. So you have to think about what is my inbound sourcing strategy. And that's around how am I going to post this job? What am I going to say about this job on social? How am I even going to leverage this in like my referral talks? Maybe there's opportunities for me to Gain stories that I can build, that I can use in my outreach messaging. Right. So that's outbound, but you can also use it in your inbound. So you can actually post something on social, not just about the job details, but maybe someone who's been recently hired or somebody who was hired in a similar role years ago, has a really good story that can emotionally connect with people and increase people's likelihood to respond. And you can use the same stories when you're reaching out to people to make them more likely to respond, even if they are only passive talent and wouldn't normally respond to recruiter outreach. But that's a high level overview saying you have to have like an A through Z process and you should probably follow that process for a reason because there's probability behind it and you shouldn't. Goes back to your question around exotic sourcing. You would never jump to Z to start. You could do it and maybe that fills a role a year, I'm not sure. But 80% or more of your roles are probably going to be filled by like the first five steps in your playbook. And that's why your playbook's important. Otherwise you have a whole team and everybody has a different playbook, whether it's conscious or unconscious, documented or not. You're going to have inconsistent results if you don't have people following the same general process and there being an underlying logic for why you follow that process.

Then you talked about stories there, you've talked about outreach messages. One thing I noticed, particularly when you were developing the curriculum, was there was a lot more of what you might call soft skills in the curriculum versus hard skills. A lot less, as I said, about the technicalities of writing a Boolean search string and the syntax, and a lot more about the human side, so to speak. And I'm going to quote some things here, if you don't mind, Glenn. The topics included neuroscience, also things like go ugly, early preloading, metacognition, influence psychology. These are things that haven't been in traditional sourcing curriculums. Can you walk us through some of those ideas and what you mean by them?

Absolutely. Again, I want to stick with my theme of the origin story that, you know, when I, when I first started blogging, it was literally all about finding people. And I ended up speaking at lots of conferences talking about finding people. And then I wasn't the only one talking about finding. But it got to the point where, not that I ever get tired of that, but I said, I feel like I'm kind of repeating myself what are some other things that I find, feel that I know that could be valuable? And you know, I try to tell people that if you were to summarize me, like what, what makes me good at what I do, it's that I'm really good at finding people. And of course there's underlying skills beneath that. Then there's also just the understanding element, the human element, the empathy element, the fact that I take time to think about, you know, why would somebody that's not looking for a job respond to me when they're being reached out to by five, ten recruiters a day? Asking those questions is huge. And then the third one would be the, the time management element, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But back to the human element, the psychology. These are things that I was doing when I was recruiting and then training people, but I probably wasn't, I wasn't framing them up in a way that was easily explainable to other folks until I started to, you know, put together some of this curriculum. And you start to realize, wow, things that I kind of did naturally with people that influenced higher levels of response rates, you know, or being able to elicit more referrals out of people that normally wouldn't give a referral. There's actual like science behind why people take action. There's a science behind influence. And I kind of went down that rabbit hole and did research. And when I, the more I would read, the more I realized, wow, that's why that worked. That's why this worked, that's why that worked. And then it gave me a whole new way to frame it up for people to say, these are things that you can do as well. These are just principles that you need to understand in terms of the psychology of influence. Or for example, you know, I wouldn't say I'm anywhere as funny as other people are, but I think I have a little bit of a sense of humor. And I would often use humor in my outreach or even in my intro calls to people who I could tell we're not immediately excited that they answered a call from a recruiter. And what's funny is you're like, oh, well, I can turn these conversations that are probably feel like they're going to go poorly and turn them around into really productive conversations that end very positively. And there's part. The reason for that in terms of the use of humor is that studies have shown that even making someone smile has the same like brain level response as winning a large amount of money or eating a lot of Chocolate, which is kind of strange to say, right? But when you read those things you're like, oh well, it wasn't just. Glenn thinks it's a good idea to try to put a smile on someone's face with a non standard subject line. Like there's real reasons why they would pick my email or my InMail over somebody else's. And so I just started to break things down to here's the things that I did and let's frame it up with the science elements of here's actually why it works. So that's how, that's where all of that content came from. There's things that I just did. And I don't know if I was unconsciously using my education because a lot of people probably don't know that the degree I received at university was in psychology. So I don't know if it was just latent and always in there and was coming out. But I think that's where some of it comes from.

I love that same research you mentioned the smiling piece. And you probably see the same research that says if you put a pencil in someone's mouth which forces their facial, facial, facial expression to be a smile when they're not feeling happy, they are happier. So even just the act of changing the muscles in your face to be in a smiling mode will make you happier, more predispositioned to influence and all these things. It's actually remarkably fascinating when you dig into it. Glenn, I'd love you to explain if you don't mind just a kind of high level. What are some of those concepts? Because I love the phrasing go ugly early, for example.

Yeah, what is that? So where did that come from? Right. And I, I put a phrase to it. But this all comes from, and I think this goes back to deliberate practice, which again, I didn't even know that there was a concept when I started recruiting. But what happens is you, you learn by doing and you typically learn best by either making mistakes or having outcomes not go the way you want. Right. So early in my career I would have conversations with people and I would, for whatever reason, probably unconsciously leave some of the more difficult elements of, of a job requirements or anything in terms of that might be less attractive. Let's say I know that it's a below market compensation. In my early days I would save those towards the end of the conversation and it didn't work out in my favor because I would have this fantastic conversation and I would save this thing that I was, I guess unconsciously nervous about. Sharing towards the end and like, oh, that just tanked the whole conversation. It's like, that was. And I, I actually wasted their time and wasted my time. And so as a result, and I don't think I sat around and just reflected. It may have happened more at an unconscious level, but I was like, you know, I'm actually going to start talking about the ugly, less desirable elements of anything around, around the job or employer, you know, with people up front. And, and when you say that, there's probably a logical nervousness around, like, wow, you're going to, you're going to have this conversation go south, so to speak, it's not going to go positively because you're really going into the undesirable elements first. I found that it was fantastic to get it out of the way because if it was a conversation killer, I could pivot the conversation to getting referrals. Right? It wasn't about me recruiting them anymore. I don't waste time getting them excited about something ultimately they're not interested in. And so I just kind of use that phrase to explain it. But I have some fantastic stories around how I had like one job where I had three undesirable things. And literally before we even got into talking about the job, I talked about all three of the undesirable elements and the person literally countered each one of them. And I was like, okay, this is fantastic. Now we can actually go. And when somebody already says no, that's okay. I'm okay with that. It's. It's downhill, so to speak, from there. The rest of the conversation goes really well. And you've already gotten them to say, I've looked ugly in the face and I'm accepting this, it's okay that compensation is okay, or that location, or the fact that I have to go into the office, or maybe that I'm doing more production support than, you know, development on a weekly basis. That's okay. And once they've accepted it, it's not going to come back to haunt you later, either in the conversation or even in the process, I've found. So for me, it's again, all about controlling outcomes and it's about increasing the probability of. Of. But again, I wasn't, I don't know if I was unconsciously figuring this stuff out, but I just, I like to share with people. Like, I've learned this probably the hard way by having bad conversations to figure out how do I make them more positive conversations and have more, more positive outcomes.

I feel like Ernest Shackleton got this himself over 100 years ago in what is arguably the most famous job ad in history, which is men wanted for hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return, doubtful honor and recognition in case of success. It's, it's almost. There's your go. Ugly.

Early classic, probably. Yeah. As ugly as you can go as early as possible. And. And it worked. You recruited people.

Yeah, it worked brilliantly. Still quoted today. Glenn, you touched on the third principle. Just remind people of those three things you mentioned. One is when you were first out there educating recruiters like me, it was really around how to find people. And as you say, you wanted to think, what else can I bring? And it was more at the engagement. The psychology, how do you influence. And then the third piece, you did mention it very briefly, but I'd love you to dig in further, which is time management, because that's certainly something people wouldn't expect as part of a sourcing curriculum. But why is it so important? Why is it that third leg on the stool?

Yeah. So that, that is something that it didn't even occur to me that other people might be interested in it other than I do credit my time management with. It is a third leg to the stool of how I was as productive as I was. If you took that away from me, there's no way I could have done what I did in terms of a consistent volume. So another element, right. So I started in a small private held staffing company. And if anybody has been through this experience before, you know what it's like. You know, you're like, hey, you have to make 80 calls a day. Right. And this, this wasn't where I currently work. This is a small company that doesn't exist anymore. You know, 80 calls. Some people are like, oh, that's brutal. And I know, Donna, you might be familiar with that type of volume as well. I will tell you though, that that goes back to deliberate practice. And I don't think that the leaders of that company were as sophisticated as, as I would like to think they were. It was just a numbers game to them. But you know what that means. I was getting tons of reps in and I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I guarantee you it accelerated my learning. There's just no way. If somebody makes 10 calls a day, somebody makes 80, somebody's learning eight times faster in terms of more problems, how do I figure out how to solve them, et cetera. And they wanted us to have a daily plan, like, what are you going to do and that's obviously, you know, fail to plan, plan to fail, you probably heard that. But when I got into leadership and I had to to onboard people typically with no prior experience. And I love to train people that have never done sourcing recruiting before because you can kind of get their mind right from the get go. They don't have to unlearn anything that needs to be unlearned. One of the things that I had them do is here's how you structure your day, here's how you approach your work. And I explained this is how I worked. And again, similar to the theme of many of things you talked about here I was doing something that through research I realized, well, there's a science behind why this works. Like, you don't realize that sourcing and recruiting can sometimes be a very chaotic job in terms of how the day unfolds. You may have a lot of meetings that are structured, then you have some unexpected meetings, then you have people getting back to you asking you to do things. And you're like, how do I structure my day so that I can be as productive as possible? Ultimately, you know, people in sourcing recruiting. And there's a whole interesting debate on what are the appropriate KPIs for sourcers and recruiters. But I still feel like it's a good conversation to talk about the, the lagging indicators, the output like hires. And then of course you're leading, like how many people are you talking to and engaging and submitting per day? Again, whole nother conversation. But what I wanted to do early in my career is I wanted to be literally the number one recruiter in terms of my productivity. I wanted to make the most hires. I wanted and I realized to make the most hires, I have to have the most interviews and I have to most have the most candidate submittals. How do I make the most candidate submittals? Well, I wanted to structure my day. That made that a foregone conclusion. So maybe these numbers are different for other people. But you know, we had a quota of we wanted to submit to, you know, qualified, interested and available candidates to managers every day. I said I'm going to do three at least. So then I'm like, how do I do that? So I started to say I'm going to work two to three jobs and I'm going to find a minimum of 20 people per job and I'm going to reach out to them. And then I started to segment what I did. So I'd say, okay, when I'm finding, I'm just finding I wasn't finding a person and then reaching out to them, and then finding a person and reaching out to them. I would just heads down, just find people. And then when I was reaching out to them, I would do that activity. Only I didn't know it at the time, but essentially I was monotasking, which is the opposite of multitasking, which is where you might say, well, I'm going to have a sourcing block between 8 to 10am the reality is most time blocks don't ever get executed properly. Things come up and you don't end up doing what you want to do. Whereas in this process, there's a number involved, there's a goal in mind in terms of activities. And I stick to that activity only until I get it done 98% of the time without fail. So if somebody's like, hey, can you do something? No, let me get these out, let me do this. I have to get this done. And it's essentially even though we call it time management and that's how people talk about it and that's how most people understand it, so I have to use that term. What I was doing and what I proposed to other people to do as a best practice is to really think more about activity management. It's not about what you're doing with time, it's what you're doing in time. And it's actually not about setting a block, it's about setting a goal for activities and sticking to that activity until you hit that goal. Because once you, once you have that type of discipline, it is almost impossible to not meet or exceed your targets, whatever they are. So actually, time management is a misnomer. No one can manage time. All you can do is manage your activities in time. And it is interesting because I haven't really seen anybody else, at least in our circle, you know, within sourcing, recruiting, put that on a pedestal. But that's the key to productivity. Like, people talk about quality all the time and they say, hey, I'm not about quantity, I'm about both. And I am unapologetic. And it starts some debates sometimes with people and say, oh, if you're all about numbers and quantity, that you're sacrificing quality, quality. And I'm like, you can be. I use, I think I talk about this in the content as well. So your three cues, right? You have, you have your quality and your quantity and then your quickness. So there's the speed element too. And you know, I would rather be tens in all right, rather than say, I'M really high in quality, but, you know, I'm not about my output. So I'm a five because I'm all about quality. Like there's people that can do eights, nines, tens across the board and you're going to outperform. And, you know, I still feel like this is a performance oriented role, so you should take pride in your performance. And if you're able to squeeze more productivity out of a day and what I mean by that is not working any extra minutes, just being so much more smarter and deliberate about how you attack your, your tasks throughout the day. I think most people are sitting on at least 50% capacity. That can be unlocked through better time. But I would say, really activity management, I love that.

Glenn, I'm going to shift gears a bit. We're recording this interview in the second half of 2024 and the elephant in the room these days around recruiting and most things is artificial intelligence, particularly the version that we know today being generative AI. You recently wrote an article or you were interviewed by LinkedIn discussing the role of AI in sourcing. And if I can summarize and then comment, the summary that I got from this was that the question posed was something that I've heard from others as well, a sense out there that sourcing is dead because AI does this for you, because you can verbally, you know, give a request to ChatGPT and ChatGPT will write a Boolean search and in a word, and the syntax is going to be perfect. So therefore we don't need sources anymore. And you responded largely dismissing that idea as in certainty, the black and white nature of that comment, and you focus instead on the skill of critical thinking, which you mentioned at the beginning of this interview. Already I had the same observation and I actually only did a workshop with a group of recruiters yesterday and we asked ChatGPT to help us build this Boolean search string. And if the syntax was perfect, it was lovely. It is not the Boolean searching I would use for a search, you know, for being an experienced sourcer and I was talking to somebody about this today and the example I want to use maybe to open up this conversation with you, Glenn, because this is the one I've used for so, so long and so few people get this. I asked somebody, if you're looking to hire somebody from tech, a tech background, and you're doing a search, what's your, what are your synonyms? And they're like tech, technology, software. And they gave me all the synonyms that Google would give Me or chatgpt would give me my observation, which, you know, I discovered early in my career through observing and pattern matching was that the word on a CV or resume that indicated somebody was in tech was almost never the word tech or technology or software. It was their employer name. And again, it's thinking about the data you're actually observing and what's usually going to go in there is that the person worked for Google, the person worked for intel, the person worked for Adobe, you know, they named their employer who writes I work in tech? Almost nobody. And particularly as you mentioned, when you get to data quality that is down to just job title like attendee list, etc. You ain't ever getting any of that. And all these talented candidates were being missed by the average sourcer and they're still being missed by ChatGPT. Similarly, location and last example I give to an Irish person today was how do you find someone who has, who's Irish or has an Irish connection based on their CV or resume? And like Ireland, Irish, maybe Dublin, Cork, some city names. And I was like, well, what's in a resume? Think about what's in there that might indicate someone's origin or where they're from or where they've lived. It could be the name of unique employers. That's not bad, you know, company names, rare. But to me it was educational details. And for example, you won't know this Glenn, but in Ireland most schools are written in Gaelic and it's the word skull and you'll have the word skull. Or in Ireland we complete exams called the Leaving Certificate, the Junior certificate. In the UK it's going to be GCSEs, A levels, O levels. In the US going to be GMAT. You know, these are particularly, these are things unique to a certain educational upbringing which has a correlation to where the person grew up and probably lives or has lived. And that's what you'll find on a resume. In fact, you might not find the word Ireland because people don't necessarily put their address anymore on a resume and stuff. So I was. Sorry, it's a long commented question for you Glenn, but I was interested in digging into these skills because my observation is that there's a combination of strong observation, so really understanding that what you're doing is trying to find a quality answer, an answer being a correct resume profile, person for a job and then looking at saying, usually you're just using words, what are the words that make this person accurate? And then trying to create repetition. So that's pattern matching in terms of what's making this person look correct in words. And can I repeat that in a search? And then I think you mentioned the point earlier. Remove noise from that. So I'd love your thoughts on that because I just reflected, reflecting on what did make a good source. I was a good sourcer. I was really good sour sorcerer. But I, you know, writing Boolean search strings wasn't my angle and I think it's, it's, you made the same point. So I love, love your thoughts on that in terms of, you know, just breaking down this higher concept of critical thinking into some of those, those points and more. You know, how can, how can folks learn from this big concept of critical thinking to what does that mean? You know, day to day, hour by hour, resume by resume in terms of the skills you need to actually be a world class sourcer? And then I'd ask you to comment upon, back again eventually on that AI piece in terms of what's AI's role there.

Okay, so I'll do my best. I'll start with the, the patterns. And I would also say seeing potential. It was very interesting. Whenever I would train someone and you know, I would have them focus on a job and I would ask them to source candidates and we would just review them because I wanted to see how are you looking, how are you understanding the job and how are you seeing people? And I found that it seems like it's human nature to want to exclude and to look for the most obvious things. And I would definitely say a world class sorcerer, which is something that it would be difficult today. I will never say it's impossible because there's rapid advancements in technology and AI. But I would argue that AI can't do what a really good sorcerer would do in this case, which is read between the lines, right? It's actually not even so much about the words that are mentioned. It's seeing the potential. And that is something I talk about in the content, which is I learned through experience that some of the people that don't look like particularly strong candidates are. And that made me think, you know, that's metacognition. I'm like, why? Why? How can I find more people like this that don't look like strong fits, but they are. And it's difficult even today for me to even explain how you can look at a resume and say this person's going to interview well, I guarantee you this is going to be a good screen. And you know, I and other people who are good at what we do, we can do that. It's fantastic. We're like, this person's going to get hired and it happens. How do you just look at a resume and see that? And it's usually not the obvious things because we would often do trainings where I would show people a resume that was like full of the right buzzwords, right? And of course everyone's like, well, of course I would consider that person and then I would show another resume of a person who actually got the job. And it's not that the first resume was a bad resume, but I like to show people that what good looks like is not necessarily something that even fits a pattern of, hey, these all look good because they say all the right words. Sometimes it's actually saying fewer words. And that's why I try to train people to say that you need to be more inclusive. I was Saying this over 20 years ago, you know, if you can't rule someone out within 10 seconds of review, you should rule them in. And some people will say, oh, he should spend more than like, actually, I'm actually giving people chances. I'm not ruling them out. I'm recognizing that as human beings that are imperfect and they're never going to write a perfect resume, by the way, even if they use AI to write their resume, it doesn't mean it's going to accurately represent them. I would much rather get in touch with someone and find out more about them and make a decision that rather than rule them out on the resume alone. And that's a really interesting way of looking at the pattern. It's not just these are the obvious, it's also saying and recognizing the human element and saying, there's a lot of non obvious people. I feel that's what separates world class sourcers from average sorcerers because average sorcerers can identify the obvious, the world class can also identify the non obvious. And it's not necessarily easy to even search for those people because they often don't say the words that you think they should. And again, I'm not even sure how we'll get AI to do that. But I think under expert human guidance you might be able to fine tune. But I think we're a long ways from that.

Although you actually reminded me of, I used to be searching for candidates and I'd find folks who were mentioned in publications and they'd have their name, they might have their job title, employer, and they'd have a quote ref referencing the article. And I just like you said, I'd see that and go, they're the person and it wasn't even professional information more than the job title. It was like whatever they'd said in the context of the article, go, that's the person. And then when I find the LinkedIn profile or resume, eventually it would be such a different profile to what I would have looked like, look for it, but they would have ended up getting the job or being the top candidate for the. That and you. Yeah, it's a really interesting piece. It's a nuanced. It's hard to put your finger on. Probably the same way if someone says that's going to be next year's fashion, you go, what are you seeing? They're kind of like, I can't put it into words. But that's it. That's the look. You know, I imagine that's. No, not that I'm trying to equate us to people who pick fashion for next season. And maybe, you know, it's a whole leap in its entirety, but I do love the point in terms of sourcing is not dead. I think a lot of what people have maybe been doing for the last 15, 20 years isn't that level of sourcing. It's maybe sifting, volume sifting. Maybe they've. And if you've had a whole team who are just using generic searches with generic synonyms to filter down, there's probably a tool out there that's better than that today for some of that. Would that be fair to say that some sourcing is easily replaced because it was never in depth sourcing in the first place?

I would totally agree. And generative AI has changed the game in terms of really understanding semantics at the word and the sentence level, which is something that I've always geeked out about when it comes to search, talk about proximity, search so that I can target nouns and verbs in the same sentence. I can find people talking about doing the right thing. So they're not just mentioning Python, they're talking about doing something very specific with Python, which is very predictive. Right. It helps you identify the true positives and helps you limit the false positives. But I think one thing we have to talk about when it comes to trying to automate sourcing is what is the basis of the query that's used to inform AI to go look for people? It's usually the job. Jobs, as we know, are probably just as flawed as people's resumes in terms of how accurately they represent the job. And I know that we have to have them, but I feel that you're. You're more Often than not going to run into automated matches. And I'm not saying you won't find some good people, but I feel like that's a flawed process unless you have a human in the loop, which you should have to make sure that. Why would I use this job description as the basis of a search without a perfect person, including the hiring manager, having some kind of input and like yeah, this is the job description as we have it published, but these are really the three things that are critical when I'm adding a new person to my team. You have to get that you can use a person. A good sourcer is going to do an intake, discover that and figure out how to look for those people. If you use AI to just match off the job HR tech providers, no disrespect, we just have to be aware of that's a flawed process. I'm not saying it can't work in some cases and it may be a lower cost because maybe you don't need people to do it, but there's a consequence for taking that approach and you're going to miss very good people and you may not be finding all of the best people in any particular source when you take that approach. And that really goes just. It's not even the AI part, it's the data quality. What are you starting with in terms of your understanding of the job? And it's not AI's fault if it doesn't understand the job well if you haven't provided that information to it in the first place.

Glenn, your latest and your only complete kind of course and training on how to be a world class sorcerer is now live on the socialtown platform. But do you plan to blog? Is a Boolean black belt dead? Would it be resurfaced with something else? Where can people find your writings, your musings, your thoughts? Outside of course, the training platform itself.

Yes, I apologize. Well, first I want to say thank you to everybody who read my blog over the years. I was very consistent for about 10 years and then know my some of my children got older and they got into activities and I just didn't have the free time. I recognize when I say that that's also an excuse. I really like sharing with people. I like making people think things that I've figured out. I want to help other people kind of jump to that point or help them think through and solve their own challenges. I've often told myself that I want to do some like video content because it's easier for me than writing. I like writing it's incredibly slow and painful for me though. Even though the outcome is good, it just takes me forever. So so maybe just speaking would be better. But I do tend to now consistently post on LinkedIn, you know, kind of in short form, but usually things that are around, you know what's happening in the sourcing space or AI always related to talent acquisition. And usually I focus it on asking questions too, because I'm not just here to tell people things. I want people to think things through. They don't have to come up with the same answers I do, but I want to make people think about the topics that are timely today and also things that are timeless about sourcing and recruiting.

Glenn, it's been a pleasure having you join us today. I'm hoping maybe over the next few months and year we can pick your mind for more of your insights in terms of what our recruiters actually using AI for. What are the benefits across the board as I know it's something you're passionate about and I can't wait to hear more.

Thanks Glenn. Thank you very much.

Tune in next week when we're talking to Paril Singh about adhd, autism and inclusive hiring.