Stemming the tide of the Great Resignation with Steve Mair

Welcome everybody to the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm your host for this live show and podcast and this is episode number 65. Are you thinking of quitting your job? Well, apparently half the world, if not more, is quitting, thinking about quitting their jobs and it's being coined by the Great Resignation. And today we're going to be talking about that. Stemming the tide of the Great Resignation. We want to hopefully get everyone talking about this. We want to hear your thoughts on this. Are you feeling this from different parts of the world? And for those of you listening live on LinkedIn or YouTube, please jump in to the conversation. Join us by adding your comments, questions, whatever you want to put into your chat box on YouTube or LinkedIn and myself and our guest, we'll take those questions and comments on board today. Those listening on the podcast, welcome. Hope you really enjoy the show. If you haven't hit the subscribe button yet, you should. We're a weekly podcast that goes out usually every Wednesday evening, Thursday morning on Apple, on Spotify and wherever you find your good podcast. If you want to find out more about the show, our previous episodes, want to find some of the live stuff, find out where we broadcast live links to the podcast, anything like that, go to socialtalent.com the shortlist so let's get into this week's show. Stemming the tide of the Great Resignation. So millions of US Workers are resigning from their jobs in a phenomenon that's being called the Great Resignation. And there's other names for it are similar to it that have been bandied around by different CEOs and journalists that we'll discuss. But a variety of reasons have been cited from this, from this great exodus, ranging from the effects of long term lockdown, which gives people more clarity on their future, has made them think about what's important to them, disgruntlement over poor working conditions, lack of flexibility that they're now seeing as perhaps the economy opens up and there's a return to the office. And whilst it's largely been a very US centric issue over the summer 2021, the trend looks to be spreading globally. I received a white paper on this only yesterday talking about the great resignations coming to Australia and New Zealand in January 2022. So if it hasn't hit your economy, it certainly is heading that way and organizations are going to need to get ahead of the problems if they don't experience mass attrition and massive increase in costs of hiring. But how do you plan for this? So joining us on Today's show is Steve Mary. He's the vice president of Talent Acquisition a Procore, a construction software company that's currently in a phase of rapid, and I mean massive rapid growth. And Steve's going to be giving us a temperature check on what the great resignation means, what what he's seen as an employer and as a lead of a massive recruiting team and growing recruiting team, what the different issues are, what the challenge of hiring recruiters is right now, what the implications of this for the industry and how do we stem the tide. Steve, welcome to the show. I'd love you to perhaps introduce yourself your organization and maybe just tell us where you're joining us from this morning with that office block with some crazy outdoor lift going up the outside.

Yeah, I actually timed that perfectly. I got them to do the lift at the right time for the video. Thanks, Johnny. So, Steve Mayer, I work at Procore Technologies. We're a construction management software company, a global company. We are expanding rapidly which has made this issue front and center for me because there's nothing like higher attrition and the great resignation going on while you're trying to go through massive growth because that doesn't make it any harder. So definitely seeing this challenge in my face every day. Originally I'm from Canada and moved down to the US over 15 years ago and been in tech that whole time and in recruitment. But I've never seen a market or a place like this. I've never been in a place or a time where on LinkedIn you see more openings for recruiters than you do software engineers. That to me, what if you had said that a year ago or two years ago I would have said that's unfair, unfathomable. It's not even something we would joke about because it just seems so silly. That's our reality today. I, when I look at where the market is today, we're seeing more and more that the only way we're seeing that we can attack this in a somewhat reactive way. And I loved your point on Australia, New Zealand because there is a chance to be a bit proactive and strategic there. But reactively what I'm seeing in the US market is people are reacting through, for lack of a better term, a brute force model. They're basically adding to their recruitment teams and recruiters are grow, that role is just growing in importance across every organization, especially in tech. But I'm seeing it across all industries right now.

Well, let want to dig in first of all to the causes and perhaps some of the opinions out there and there's tons of news articles. So I think it's right about time for us to cue the news. Steve, it's not hard to find news about this topic. Right. So we're going to jump into a Gallup poll on the Great Resignation that argues this is really the Great Discontent. And this data is a bit old, a few months old, because things are moving super fast right now in this. And at the time that Gallup published this based on a May survey, they were saying that the May record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showed that a record number of Americans resigning. And I contrasted that with the previous 12 months, which was one of the lowest ever, you know, when people were afraid of their lives. Pandemic was rolling around the world. People wanted to hold on to their jobs. But 3.6 million Americans resigned in May, just gone summer of 2021. And at the time they were saying a record number of job openings in all categories. And this article by Gallup called the Great Resignation is really the Great Discontent. If anybody wants to check it out, we'll share links on the live channels and we'll put it in the show Notes. If you're listening to the podcast, this kind of really argument, argument argues that this is about people being generally pissed off about their jobs and kind of giving a bit of a middle finger up to their employees in some respect as to having gone through a year, year and a half of a pandemic. And this is the reaction that they had time to reconsider their lives. They've, you know, been working from home, spending time with the family, etc. You know, what's your take on this data and perhaps what's the updated data since May that you've seen?

Yeah, so definitely on the updated. I saw PWC recently, last week actually released their most recent data that actually showed it's up to 65% right now in the US workforce are looking for a new job now and between now and the end of the year. So for one, I'm getting bolder, I think I can't get grayer, so I'm getting bolder. So it's a lot, it's a lot to take on. The reason I think it's called the Great Discontent. The great. And there goes my phone. Great timing. It would also be more along the lines of I'm seeing the Great Reshuffle is another name. And the reason being is what you nailed, Johnny. People have had time and in that time they've reprioritized. We've never had this in any of our careers. Anyone that's in the workforce today has never had this kind of gap where you really got a chance to pause and reprioritize what's important to you. And so why the great reshuffle also works is because you're seeing people not go from job A to B. That might have been the normal path. And all of our hiring models and all of our HR models are built around, well, these people are moving to their. So this is how we work with it. People are going from A to L, they're jumping steps, they're changing careers, they're changing paths because they figured out, I don't want to do this anymore, I want to do that. And it is, that happens a lot at the beginning of people's career and it sometimes happens at the end when people do consulting. But in our models in Europe and in the US and Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, that doesn't happen in the middle, it just hasn't ever before and now it is. And that's what's causing a ton of challenge in our models and just how we're used to building teams. And then the other piece to that is you're seeing a lot of people reevaluate their own life. The US the most, the other, most recent data showed that and it was actually on LinkedIn, I think just last week. The Great Resignation or the Great Retirement, sorry, where we missed our estimates and over 2 million extra people are, have retired in July of 21. So that's 2 million people that are at that 55 age plus have pretty good nest eggs.

They're.

If you think of the market, the market didn't go. The market dropped dramatically when the mark, when Everything closed in Q2 of 2020, but it's actually risen well above where it was prior to that. And so people's portfolios have gotten bigger, giving them a bigger nest egg and you're seeing more people retire earlier and that is causing a vacuum at senior leadership. That is really hard when you're in our roles to, to figure out and fix. Because all of a sudden people are taking someone that might have been two steps away from a role and putting them up two steps because they have a gap and that's just causing knock on effects. So I think the Great Resignation is a nice title for it because it covers all of it. But the reality is there's all these different factors happening all at once. And then the other challenge is, I think in the US why the US is seeing it first is just because of how the pandemic was managed, the US dramatically was going down, having a hard time dealing with it, but then dramatically did well with the vaccine. So it's a V shaped recovery you're seeing in other countries. It's more of a U where it was managed a little differently and the vaccine was managed a little differently. So it's more of a gradual return. But we're already seeing an impact. Germany's now seeing it, they're starting to see that challenge where their workforce and the roles they used to get, lots of applications are starting to deteriorate and that's changing how they're going to hire and you're going to see it as a knock on effect. And I think you mentioned other countries are seeing it where they can't get lorry drivers anymore. And so all of a sudden it becomes really challenging because that has knock on effects on the rest of the market as well as inflation. So it's this double edged sword at the same time because inflation will put more pressure on wages too.

I'm going to put a shout out to our audience who are listening live, anyone who's maybe outside the US or even in the US Is this what you're feeling? You see this in your market? There's no way you're, you're listening in from and share that data with us. It's funny, there's tons of things you mentioned there that really make my ears kind of prick up and they're bigger as it is. Steve, for anyone watching the video cast. But yeah, the UK you mentioned that I saw last week that grocery stores can't get groceries on their shelves not because of Brexit, which has been an issue in the last year and a half, but because they can't hire Larry drivers anywhere. And we talked about this being one of the early signs of this in terms of the areas. But you reminded me and a comment you made at the start of your response there, Steve, I used to teach folks about, you know, job advertising. I was saying use the data to kind of reach the market, reach the candidates when they're going to be most likely to look to seek for seek jobs. And Google AdWords data, when you look at the research would indicate that for anyone who's gone away for a break at the end of a weekend, you'd have folks come back on a Monday morning and their job search activity would go up. But also on holidays, right? Different, different national holidays. A long weekend in a country would see a rise. And the real one that tested this was Easter because Easter falls on different dates every year. And so therefore you kind of remove the potential kind of seasonality by looking at specific dates where, you know, people shut down or went off for a four day weekend, five day weekend if you're in Europe or two months off if you live in Europe in the summer and you see them after taking that brief time to contemplate, they typically increase their job seeking activity. We just had folks at home for a year and a half, right? So what did we expect? You know, you see this when they take a long weekend. So you take a 40 weekend. You, you guys have Labor Day coming up this weekend. So you know you're going to see it next Tuesday. Like you would always see it after a Labor Day weekend. But you're going to see it amplified. It's like every single day, every hour is like the Tuesday after a Labor Day weekend or after Thanksgiving or whatever, because that is the market. Every hour, every day. Right now it's gone crazy. Tell me how you're feeling on the ground. Like, you know, running a team that's growing, it can be difficult. You'd imagine just retaining your talent and trying to keep up with typical growth. But Procore is a hyper growth organization. You floated on the stock exchange this year. The business is going strength to strength, doing more international. Like, how do your team feel this on the ground? Like, what does it mean to a TA team to have this kind of market?

Great question. And you're right. We are like if we were just in sustenance mode, it would be tough, but we'd be all right. But, but when you're trying to grow 30% at the same time, it's really challenging. Where we're seeing the most is roles that we would consistently depend on pipeline for. So you think of our sales development roles, our customer success roles, the roles that we would just tend to have large pipelines. And we had a great process for how we made sure people aligned to our values and got them through. And we're not seeing anyone. The applications have fallen off a cliff and I've seen it now and I've talked to other TA leaders around the US and it's consistent across every TA leader and every industry now too. It hit some tech sooner than later. You're definitely seeing a bigger impact. And it's forced more companies like us who were not remote at all prior to Covid to be pretty thoughtful about where our strategy is going to lie. Because if we're not, it is actually a knockout question now for so many candidates. And it's not if we want to. It's if we want to grow. We have to be open. We have, we have to change our perspective. Fortunately, we're in a good spot as a company. We were already doing it, so it was great. But I am on calls every week with leaders who are. Their leadership teams are still fighting it. They're still holding on to. But when we get back to normal, not realizing there is no such thing as back to normal. To your point, like what did we expect? I don't know what we expected coming out of this. We've never seen it before. We've never had a long weekend that lasted a year and a half. It was an amazing time. And I think 10 years from now we're going to look back at this and go, wow, that reshuffled and changed our whole paradigm. It's going to change how people evaluate work. I think you're going to see people evaluate vacations differently. I think you're going to see the mindset of how workers think about it. Probably hope I. My hope is just maybe out of laziness to make my job a little easier. You're going to see more of a normalization because I think in Europe there's a better balance for how people think about vacation in their own time versus the US sometimes. And I think you're going to see that rebalance a little bit better. But it's going to take some time. And it's definitely. I'm seeing a lot of businesses getting dragged kicking and screaming to the how do we be more actual people centric.

Yeah, I've heard a good analogy that compares 911 and travel to the pandemic and the workplace. It's like things didn't go back to normal in travel after the pandemic. After 9 11, I should say, you know, flying on a plane was never the same again. Going through an airport was never the same again. And work will never be the same again. It's just different. Right. You become very used to it. No one really questions the security checks in an airport now because most of us don't actually remember what it was like before 911 because it's been around so long. Hope, hopefully. Fast forward 20 years ago, do people actually go to the office five days a week? Was that a thing like dad or mom, you know? Is that what you did when you were older?

Yeah. And did you just go to the office because your manager wanted to see you doing your work? Even though they didn't Mike. They didn't add any value, but they just needed to see you typing on a keyboard and that was how they evaluated you. Because that's the whole thing that changes here is actually our capabilities as managers and leaders because you, this is harder. This is not easier work. This is going to be harder. You have to get a better understanding of how do you evaluate your workers, how do you get make sure that they're doing what is like in your mind, a fair amount of work without micromanaging them, without trying to use tools and, but actually trusting them. And how do you build that trust and how does you make it a two way street? That's a much higher lift or harder lift for managers.

That leadership point is really important. It was in the article we just mentioned, the got up article, right, where they teased out that it takes more than a 20% pay rise to lure most employees away from a manager who engages them, but almost nothing to lure somebody away from if they're disengaged from the manager. And to your point, knowing that, that you know there's a 20% differential required if you've got them engaged, you can save a fortune by just engaging them. That's normal times. Managers, as you said, are already struggling with this new skill set they have to develop. And then you added the other point where I think it's really interesting about the great retirement. There is less of them because a whole bunch of them lost that knowledge, that experience, you know, and we're probably going to keep losing it. So you look at where the opportunity is. Right. I think, you know, I've seen strategies in organizations where they're kind of saying, right, okay, we, we're going to have to, and I've heard the phrase a lot recently, we're going to have to hire for skills rather than hire for experience. This is in all different types of roles and it's typical of a market like the one we're in at the moment, particularly mentioned the US and other markets. But there is a challenge, an extra management challenge. Not as if they weren't already overwhelmed with having to do their job. God love them. You're likely now to have to bring in a workforce that's less experienced than what you are used to bringing in. A lot of managers just can't cope with that, can they?

Well, no, and it's not just that they have to develop the talent, they have to develop it remotely.

Yeah, yeah.

And so layering on top of what is already a hard role, it is going to make it harder. You are going to see like coming out of this, when I was trying to think of themes I'm really focused on is a much better focus on leadership development and management skills because those are the companies that are going to succeed in the long run. Like when you look at how you're going to attack this in the reactive state is what I started with. You build out your recruiting function. You have to right now for our roles, we're not getting people applying. You have to build out sourcing. You have to look at different ways for, for attracting talent. You have to be a bit more creative. You're seeing companies now, advertising. I've seen it actually, I saw it myself on this weekend looking on Amazon while I'm shopping. I'm seeing job ads now and that's crazy. It's crazy, but I get it because they're trying to go after the market differently. So you have to be a little more creative. That's the reactive answer. How do we make sure, like if I'm in Australia and New Zealand right now and I'm trying to be ahead of this because to your point, it's coming in 2020 or the beginning of 2020, I'm building on my recruiting team now. Get that team humming, get that machine running. That's how you at least put yourself in a good situation. But strategically, how do you deal with this long term? You have to start building and investing your leaders, your managers. You have to that leadership development and that how do you build good remote skills? How do you develop talent when you can't be there with them? And how do you measure success? All of those pieces have to be at the forefront for the companies that are, I think are going to really succeed coming out of this in the next five years.

You're so right. You got to think bigger than just talent acquisition to solve this problem. You know, I speak to leaders on this topic. As you know, Steve, all the time. I spoke to a good friend of mine recently who told me half our team were decimated in TA at the start of the pandemic, under pressure from the private equity firm who kind of bought into their business and now they've just released more wrecks than they've ever had in their history. And she's struggling to ramp up the team. And she'd gone to 99% direct. She's told the business that's gone. I'm using RPOs and agencies because I cannot get the team back up to the speed we want it to be fast enough because there aren't enough recruiters out there. And I was telling you before we went on Air. I spoke to a friend who works for one of the big tech companies we all know who's been tasked with hiring an additional. An additional 1,000 recruiters, not for their current business, but for a business they're planning to grow and build from scratch. 1000 recruiters to then go hire all the STEM talent that they require for that business. It's unreal. Like they're building an RPO business just to basically run an extra part of the business and sucking more of this TA talent out. But you're right. And it comes to.

Now you're just trying to scare me. I know, but no.

Are they in the same markets as your staff? That's. That's the big question. The thing is, everybody's in the same markets. I got a call from our head of engineering, he's based in Poland over the summer and saying, I gotta. I gotta, you know, shoot up everyone's salaries. Like what? He goes, it's a big, huge, huge jump all at once. I was kind of quite surprised. And he said, listen, we've never had this problem because our team are based in a smaller city that most of the big multinationals don't go near. He said, that was always the case. He goes, but now they don't care where they are because they embraced flexible working. So they're going, well, they don't have to be in the typical cities we hire from. They can be absolutely anywhere. And so everywhere, everyone's fair game to be poached for jobs that aren't even in your city. You used to think, I can compete with folks who earn the same. You know, the salary in ta, let's say, in this city. But it's like, well, they could just work in a cheaper city or more expensive city. You don't know where you're competing with. It's such a challenge. But I'm going to bring it on to our second article to come back to your leadership piece because. Because we'll never get done right. And this is from Fast Company, and the Fast Company article is called this is the New Battleground in the Fight to Retain Employees. And this article takes the same challenge that we just discussed, but leans on the point you made, which is that if you didn't lose your employees at the same rate, and I'd argue and go one step further, if you had better internal mobility, you could reduce some of the needs, which reduces the pressure on the TA team. And this is back to your comment around the role of a manager and how leadership needs to step up and really Basically stem the flow because if you're hiring right at a 30, 40% growth rate, you don't want to be backfilling. 20% attrition, that's like, that's hell. As a teenager in the current market, keep attrition down and just leave me with growth, which is still challenging, but I'll go for it. But don't hit me with growth and attrition at the same time. You're doubling my workload. So, so like, what is your, what have you seen that's interesting? What companies are doing interesting things? What are your thoughts on leadership development even down to the leaders you work with? Well, describe to me the good leaders you work with and how they are being better leaders to reduce retention and really work and partner with ta.

So for one, as we've always seen with good leaders that partner with ta, it's, they own their own hiring, they own their team, they own the development of their team. And, and so, and what I mean by that is they're fully engaged, they're as accountable as I am for hiring and they truly demonstrate that to their team. And that's always the case when, you know, we're in a lead up to this. It's hard to Even remember what 2019 was like, but it was a war for talent. We've been in a war for talent for almost, I guess, 10 years then. And we thought that talent had the edge. At that time, I think we weren't real. I think we were kind of selling ourselves on that. Because the reality is the company still could get talent when they needed it. That has shifted now to where the relationship actually to me feels the most equal it's ever felt in over 20 years where talent has as much if not more say. And so good leaders understand that and they're, they're leaning into their people and trying to help them develop and find their new role. Whether it's on their team and giving them opportunities, whether it's project based, they're actually spending time in and they focus on doing more one on ones, not less. Now that you're going to be remote, they engage more with people. They're figuring out ways to stay creative with their team. They're not leaning back on what was their comfort zone. And the comfort zone, that's where I'm seeing the teams that are struggling the most are the ones that want to go back to. Well, when I could see everyone working, I knew I was getting a job done that's gone and you have to let go of it and embrace how am I going to understand what good looks like and how am I going to describe to people what good looks like to the individual one on one and to the team and hold people accountable to it? So that's one piece of it. The other piece I'm seeing that really has resonated and grown recently is you're seeing people really value the relationship they have with the company and what the company and how the company is treating them in the ups and the downs. Like the companies that are struggling with whether it's remote first, whether it's how they even dealt with the pandemic. To your friend's point, when the PE firm got her to get rid of half their team, good luck getting recruiters now because anyone that knows that you are last on the list, I don't mean to make that harder on. On her, it's. But that is the reality. How you dealt with people is really going to come back to bite you right now and how you deal with people. And the other piece we're seeing is managers that are good at managing burnout. And we're seeing this and Europe's getting it too. And all over the world, you're seeing this because you're not leaving your office anymore. I'm actually in my office for once, but you're not leaving it anymore. And so because of that, it's easy to work later, it's easy to work earlier. You don't have a commute, but you are working more. And the leaders that are doing a really good job are the ones that are understanding. How do I define that? How do I help you understand how to define it and take an active role in it. Don't put it on your shoulders like Johnny. It's on you figure out what works best for you. Work life balance is good for you. The reality is they're taking an active role. Like, hey, I don't think you are balancing it enough right now. And I'm going to let you know how to prioritize. And that is another key piece is that helping people understand how to prioritize and what they don't need to do today. And so the leaders that are leaning into that are the ones that are getting the higher engagement. From what I've seen on our teams, at least.

Yeah, I 100% agree. You know, the last year we commissioned a whole bunch of new content for leaders that are hopefully trying to teach them the skills that we believe will complement great hiring, which is retaining your staff, engaging your staff, onboarding your staff, listening, empathy, you know, Showing up, encourage them to get, you know, more opportunities in their own company and so on, so forth. They're considered modern ideas, which is kind of scary to most leaders because, you know, I think we still have the issue. We had several conversations on leadership on this show, but we're still never going to resolve it fully. But the leadership. The biggest challenge, I think, with leadership is that no one ever trained you to be a leader. And most companies don't train you to be a leader. They just, you know, take an individual contributor is doing well and promoter up, and that's it. You figured out on the fly. It's such. Such a responsibility. I wasn't a good leader, I don't think, until the pandemic, and maybe I'm still not, but I'm better. I know that for sure, because I had to. I had to have to actually do my job. Because when you have a bunch of folks all working remotely and they need communication, they need guidance, they need strategy, they need support, you have to show up, whereas you kind of didn't have to do it. Whenever it was in the office, it was like the family would raise the child. The parent could be absent because the community was going to look after that. The colleagues, the other teams. The manager beside you who looked in and said, oh, he's crap. I'll give him a hand, I'll look after his team.

Meet this peer pressure. Peer pressure. Help, too, because you're just in an office, you're surrounded by 50 people and my, you know, my manager might be crap, but that's okay because I got 12 other people working around me. I got to do my job.

Yeah, yeah.

There's no one around you anymore.

And the great. We didn't mention it, but, like, the visual image I really got from the great resignation was first mentioned to me was somebody saying to me, it's never been so easy to resign because you just close your laptop, send it back and wait for a new laptop arrive to arrive and off you go. When you think about that, the emotional, you know, difficulty of resigning is gone, you know, because you're like, oh, I missed the place. My community. I'm so used to that. And the people. It's like, shut down my laptop. New people are going to be on a teams or Zoom call next week, but it's fine. I'm doing similar work and they're just nicer and they treat me well and I actually get paid more. Whoa. Who wouldn't do that? You'd be crazy not to. It's becoming as easy as changing, changing your mobile provider, it's like, well, it's the same basic.

I would say it's almost easier because you get the box sent to you from your new job, you take out the computer, put the old one in it, repackage it, change the label and you're done.

It's, you're actually like, well, you gotta resign. You're not like put on hold for two hours waiting in a queue to talk to your boss to resign. It's like I can't even quit.

Yeah, it's, it's never, it, it's never been more important to focus on leadership. I think you nailed it when you said like are you a good leader or not? Like, I think the more you start to realize none of us are very good at it and you just have to keep investing time and effort into trying to get to know your people, help your people understand what's blocking them, what help them prioritize, give them cover when they need cover. I think the recruiting function, the talent acquisition function is arguably one of the worst in the world at doing exactly what you said. We promote a good recruiter into a manager and then we're like, okay, you know what to do, Godspeed, good luck. And it's not how you develop talent, it's not how you develop leadership skills. And so I think, you know, it's like a full circle back to when we were talking earlier. That is going to be the differentiator. The people that invest on how do you build out managers, supervisors, managers or even start with leads, start to invest in building out how you build a lead program into a supervisor, into a manager and invest the time and effort it takes because the more we do that, the more you're going to see your team and your engagement rise. And you're going to see this, I believe, because you're seeing in the US like companies that used to see single digit attrition are seeing 20% right now. And I think that's the piece that people don't fully grasp. If you're not in the heat of it is it's that hot where if you were at 8% attrition because you are that good a company, let's say one of the big tech companies out there, the big tech companies that are not used to ever having to lose people when unless they wanted to, are now seeing 20, 22% like that. That's a game changing position.

And so you got people resigning because, oh, I've got great stock options, but I don't like the company's ethics anymore. I was like, what? It's like, do you have a job to go to? No. And it's like, whoa, this never happened before. It's never happened.

Well, you're seeing two rises. People take breaks, big gaps. You know, used to do that in college, right? You take a year, now people are doing it in career. And the other thing you're seeing is the. I just saw another stat that was really interesting is self employment has risen dramatically over the last five months in.

The U.S. wow, that's interesting.

So that was interesting too. I think it was Quantum Workplace that did this stat. And it's gone up dramatically. Like, it's way off the chart. The mean had it going at like a pretty steady increase, but still it was like 15%. It's now like into the 20s. And it's like, whoa, what's going on? Like, that is insane because that is people deciding, like, I don't like. To your point, I don't like your ethics, or I don't like having a boss, or I don't like having to feel like I'm reporting hours to somebody. I'm going to go do this on my own. And I can. And the other thing people have learned is I can live with a lot less. Over the last year and a half, I had a lot less. And you know what? There were some times I was pretty happy having a lot less. Like, I'm biased myself. I have two college kids. I got to spend more time with my college kids than I usually would have because they would never come home that long. But you learn to really cherish some of this too. There's a lot of, like, out of hard times, a lot of great things come. Just like all great invention and humankind comes from constraints.

I want to come back to the challenge. Right. So if I can get your wisdom or advice on this, Steve. Right. So if you're a leader of TA in an organization right now, facing the challenges we discussed of the great resignation, and you're either growing crazy fast, having attrition, or both. What works and what doesn't work. Maybe start. Let's start with what doesn't work.

Boy. What doesn't work is just opening up a ton more jobs and trying to push people through the machine that you have and hoping that it works and overload and the other piece even worse than that. And I've seen this across different. Some friends of mine who are in similar roles not staying true to what you know is some of the north stars of recruitment, like, as a recruiter I can handle X workload and they're not able to find or they don't feel they can go find another recruiter. So they're doubling the workload on their current team. You are guaranteeing more attrition and you're also just burning out your team. And it's not just the recruiter. You're burning out your sorcerer, your coordinator, your whole team function is going to burn out out with that kind of process. And so you have to figure out either work with your business and partner on how do we be more strategic about how we do our workload, how do we balance out, how do we start to pull headcount forward if we're seeing like, wow, we have a bit of a slowdown, like we go recruiting on a good day is a wave type business where you go through and you have good, good months, bad months, high months, low months. If that's the case, you need to pull things forward, you need to try and balance that as much as possible. But that is why you're seeing across your friend at the other tech company and every tech company I've seen amplify your recruitment function right now. This is the opportunity time to build out your team and expand it. Whether it's through some mix of contract, full time, whatever way works for you, this is the time to build it up and stay true to your model. And if you don't have a capacity model, learn how to build a capacity model because this is the time to do it. Because you're going to burn out your people rapidly.

That's wisdom. It's wisdom that's not found often. Steve and I, I hear it from companies that some companies we engage with, thankfully not the most. Where they've paused learning, they paused development because they're underwater and their teams are up 30, 40%. And you have to wonder about that because, you know, I ask myself, how can they continue if you're up 30? You know, if you're underwater and you're having so much volume go through and you're making folks work weekends and evenings, you're never going to get out of that. You're always, you're going to have attrition in the team, you're going to have folks leave your organization, then you're going to have less people doing it and more overwork which causes this flywheel of people trying to resign because you've just too much going on, you know. But so many TA leaders are just going, they're going, we're going to soak it up, do you think it requires strength from the leadership in TA to kind of push the business and go, I need more resources if I'm a TA professional, right? I want my leaders to go fight for me to go get me the resources, get me the tools, get me three colleagues now get me an outside agency to support me. I think that's the challenge where you need to really. It pushes on. We talked about leadership, a TA leadership to go. I'm the person between you and the business. I'll go get you what we need because to your point, I know the capacity, I know where we're at or I'm going to develop you or bring in new tools and resources. But I not going to make you work 20 hours extra a week because then when you burn out and you and your five colleagues quit, your next colleagues have to do 65 hours a week. It's never ending.

Well, Johnny, one thing I'm sure of is after this, if I'm not balancing on my team, I'm going to get about 10 slacks going asking where am I? With more headcount it is. This is where you have to have a backbone. This is where you have to go in. And you've never had better leverage. To be honest, as a TA leader, you've never been in this kind of position before and to assume it's the same. You understand more than anyone in your organization that we're going through a massive upheaval right now. The rest of your org so spend time, you have to invest time to educate your leaders. Use some of the stats, use the articles you had, like share those on a regular basis. Like I started drilling this home, I attempted anyway with my executive team and definitely I have a great partner who's my chief people officer and we've been drilling this home consistently like this is what A, it's coming and B, now we're in it. So they are prepared for it. So when you come to the table, they understand the why behind it. It's not just you trying to make it easier in your team or your. The reality is this is a business driver and if we don't react and get ahead of it, we're going to pay a massive price for it. And you're never going to be in a better position as a recruitment leader than today to build this out and to make the argument because I've never seen it. It's, you know, I've been doing this too long, I guess. But the reality is I've never seen a market like this and I've Never seen us have this kind of opportune time to build out our function in a healthy, healthier way in what will be a very challenging market. And it's going to be challenging across the globe. And it's not short term. I don't see this ending this year. I don't know when it ends. Obviously if I did, I'd be, you know, you and I would be talking, I'd be on my own island. But I, I can't see it going away in the next 912 months.

It's, it, to me it's, it's at least an 18 month thing. It's an end of 2022 with a bare minimum just based on how long these things typically last as a minimum. But I think there's a, there's a flip side to the story that we just discussed, which is I was on a call with a group of TA leaders about four weeks ago and we discussed this and half the team were in the, yeah, I'm going to battle to the business and battle for the business to fund this. The other half are like, I got the funding, I got loads of funding but I can't hire the recruiters. I have money to spend, I have a headcount approved. Where the heck are they? And this is the, the other challenge, it's not just, it is certainly starts with the funding and the resourcing and convincing the business of the business case. But this is where, I don't know if you've heard this, Steve. I've so many phone calls, you know, coming to me and others I know saying how do we build recruiter academy, sourcer academies and opening it up, taking that skills based hiring logic and applying it to ta, saying maybe we don't need folks with TA experience, maybe we can hire a firefighter and retrain her or we can take a doctor and retrain her and maybe not a doctor. TA salaries might not be enough for.

Them but, but we're not there yet.

Not there yet. But someone in retail, there's great folks from retail and hospitality who come into the sector, you know, I was one of them to a degree that came in and did that. So, you know, have you seen that yourself? Are you seeing it with colleagues, you know, and peers in the business? They're kind of opening their minds. The type of people who could come into TA and kind of going for, not necessarily graduate as in just out of college or early in career, but folks who maybe have different experience, they have maturity and maybe business acumen. But this never works in Our sector.

I, so I, I am seeing it a little bit. We're definitely trying to double down on that ourselves because I do truly believe in that model of developing your own talent. So I, we're trying to do it. I'm still seeing the vast majority of people are reacting with just trying to go out and pay a higher salary. So you're seeing escalations right now in salary go up rapidly and you're seeing crazy things happen. When there's a company in San Francisco that just bought a search firm not long ago and you know, and they bought, I think it was a 50 person search firm, private search firm, they went and purchased and that was the way they scaled their recruitment function. Most of us can't and wouldn't want to do that. But it's an interesting approach. If you're ever looking for a data point to tell you how messed up the market is, that's probably it. But no, I think that is where we have to invest right now. Like if you look long term that's the sustainable answer and you, you're asking for like how do we strategically get ahead of it? That's the long term play is building out your function and building out a real development plan. It's not just leadership development, but it is that recruitment academy or you know, how you train great coordinators, great sourcers, great recruiters and have great why opportunities for their career for them so they can go up into leadership, they can go up into skill based and accelerate into becoming senior staff level. Like really build that out. Don't stop yourself at having recruiter, source or coordinator that in the long run will really bite you Right now if you're not thinking about having that job family approach that you really need to have and having people that can develop and stay in sourcing. Too many times we're pulling from sourcing and oh, you'll be a recruiter now. The skill set of sourcing is never going to be more important than it is today. It's growing in importance and we need to keep developing that skill.

I think it's back to the point of we too often look to hiring managers and say they should be like this and they should be better managers and develop their people people and retain them. We've got to have the same opportunity and as you say, mindset. How am I creating not just opportunities for new folks but my current folks to develop on, to move and maybe even lead the TA team, maybe go into the wider HR business, maybe go into a sales role, go into somewhere else in our business and reward them for that, encourage them to do that. You know, we got to live that value ourselves and be great leaders. Think of the retention of our own team. You certainly don't want your attrition in your TA team right now if you've got high attrition in the rest of the business. So sense of purpose, good management, self care. Self, self care in terms of, are you demonstrating that and hard to do as a TA leader that's growing and you know, in a market where you have this great resignation, not working crazy hours, you got to demonstrate you are on top of it and you're also looking after your health. As you say, we're not keeping our hair that much, Steve, these days. But, you know, keep it, keep it on. You know, you make sure that you're, you're living that value as well and saying, listen, I got this and we've got this and we're not going to do 90 hours a week to try and fix it. We're going to actually build sustainable TA organizations and processes and teams and org structures to deliver on this. Because it's not just for now. No company who's going through 30, 40% growth is saying, oh, we're going to stop in a couple of years. Our aim is to level off. No one wants to level off. Keep building that capacity in ta. Steve, I'm very conscious that you've got an important call to go to and you've given enormous amount of your time now and the team is busy and they need your support and I want you to go back, go back to them. But I'd love you to perhaps leave us with one tip to add to our shortlist. From your experience and tons of fantastic businesses with lots of different TA folks and leaders in different industries over the last few years, what have you learned? If you're going to share one tip with our audience, a tip perhaps that was shared with you or one that you've come up with by yourself from your experience, what would that be?

Definitely I'm not bright enough to come up with anything on my own. I'm well aware of that. I think the biggest I'm trying to nail down one, because I was going to say one thing and now I want to change it.

You can give me two. It's no problem.

I think the first is what the pandemic has definitely taught me as a leader is truly be open to your own errors, mistakes and learnings along the way. Make sure your team sees that vulnerability because I haven't done this well. We went from 0 to 60 way too quickly as we accelerated out of this. And so learning from that and being open to the fact that, hey, I've got to hit pause for a second, reassess as to how I want to build this in a better way and be okay with the fact that that's not perfect and that you shouldn't have done it that way. Yes, 100%. I didn't see that this was going to be a crazy great resignation market. I didn't foresee it and I didn't plan for it appropriately. I didn't have that playbook or that play in my playbook ready to go. So be open to that vulnerability. And then the second piece is when we hit on I've seen too many TA orgs that don't actually capacity plan. Like actually understand what by funnel or by work group, by business unit, however you want to do it. Actually build thorough capacity planning for how you're going to make a sustainable model for your team so you don't burn people out. Because we are still growing. We're hiring recruiters. We've hired some great recruiters this year. More often than not we're getting them from companies where they have 30, 35, 40 recs. And that's not trying to say it's like it's you. There are easy answers, but you can't allow your team to get to that point point. And if you are, you're going to burn them out and some jerk like me is going to be waiting on the other end to try and pick them up because. Or your other friend at the bigger tech company. Because we, we need the help, we need the talent. So don't allow yourself to be put in that position if you can avoid it.

So that is your health warning as a TA leader. Steve Mayer has budget. He has the willingness and desire to kind of capacity to take on more TA folk. If you don't look after TA folk, Steve and his team are going to look after them. Steve, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. Lovely having on the show. We'll have you back again to see how this plays out. Good luck and the growth that I know Crowcore is experiencing and the brilliant stuff you're doing there and we'll have you on again soon. Take care, Steve.

Appreciate it, Johnny. Thanks. Great to see you.

Thanks everyone and thank you for listening or watching here today. We always appreciate your time and hopefully you've learned something perhaps to bring back to your leadership group, your team as well, to share about what else is going on the market. What are the great TA leaders doing in growth organizations internationally as well? Do come back next week. We've got a great show lined up for you next week. Show number 66, I believe it is. When we're going to be getting into how do you expect the unexpected? Steve mentioned many of us didn't see this play in the playbook, but how can you perhaps see around corners? How can you expect the unexpected? How can you future proof your TA team, yourself, your organization? And our guest next week is going to be Kevin Mulcahy. Kevin is an Irishman who's living in the US in Boston for the last maybe 20 years. And Kevin lectures out of Boston and has written several books on business and future proof of the organization and people. And he's a fascinating guy. And when I spoke with him recently about this topic, we talked about how all of us have gone through the last year and a half wondering how can we predict the next day? Big thing. And Kevin's going to share with us some of his insights on next week's show. So that's going to go out live. If you want to join us, we'd love to have you. And you can put your questions directly to Kevin on the 8th of September. That's at Wednesday, 8th of September at 4pm UK Irish time, which is 11am in the east coast US and 8am on the west coast. Do join us. Or if you prefer to listen to the podcast as you go for your walk or run, you can absolutely do that on Apple or Spotify. And usually that's live by Wednesday evening. So don't forget to subscribe there. And again, if you'd love to have a voice, come join the live show. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, the advice from Steve is you got to look after your people. You got to be a great leader. Otherwise he's coming after your team. Take care.