Weathering a storm of uncertainty in TA | with Jeff Moore

Sam, You're very welcome. I'm Johnny Campbell. I'm going to be your host for the next 40 or 45 minutes. I'm the CEO and co founder of Social Talent and the host of today's podcast. Today we're going to be talking about how to weather a storm of uncertainty in TA in talent acquisition. It's episode 119. If you haven't heard our back catalog of episodes, you can do so@socialtalent.com the shortlist. But I'm joining you today from my, my home city, Dublin. It's the 19th of October. We're deep into fall or autumn, depending on where you are in the Northern hemisphere. It's stormy outside in Dublin today with pouring rain, howling wind. I've just come from a tech conference where people have been talking about uncertainty and the changes that are, that are out there, right. And talent acquisition is often one of the first functions in a workplace to feel change, right. Whether it's positive change. Here we're growing like crazy. Post pandemic. Let's get all the hiring done are negative, right? And it's easy for talent acquisition to get maybe overwhelmed, get nervous within this atmosphere. Organizations post Pandemic were looking to rebuild, reframe and we dealt with that massive explosion of hiring, the lack of recruiters. But since then, so much has come since, right? You've got the war in Europe, you've got social uncertainty, you've got what is probably a recession in most parts of the Western world. Tough times are on the horizon for businesses and probably for ta. Right, we're going to explore that today. We're joined today by a good friend, someone whose opinion I must respect in this industry and that's Jeff Moore, the VP of Talent Acquisition at toast. If you don't know Toast, Jeff's going to tell you all about Toast as a company that you should know more about. And Jeff has plenty of years experience in this industry. I don't mean he's old, I mean he's done a lot because he's worked for years in companies like Google where you work in dog years. So one year, the equivalent of seven years in other less innovative companies. And Jeff's weathered many of storm and has tons of insights to share. So we're going to dig into the importance of networking, building communities, how great talent will always have top demands on how to better operate in challenging conditions. Jeff, you're very welcome to the show. You might share with our audience. Where are you joining us from? Bit of background as to your TA Career. What, what brought you to toast? And please tell the world about toast. I think it's an awesome company. Many of our listeners may have already experienced TOAST just don't even know it. And if not, they're about to, as the company begins to dominate the world. Tell us more.

Thanks, Johnny. I have to say, when you were talking about the dog years at Google, I used to describe my hair as Google gray. So that was a very appropriate reference, like you said. I'm Jeff. I'm the VP of TA at toast. I'm coming to you live from my house outside of Boston. I'm originally from the east coast and moved back here about a year ago after about eight years on the west coast living in San Jose, working at Google. I joined TOAST because it's a super cool technology company, helping restaurants. And when I looked at the opportunity to join sort of on the backside of the pandemic, helping small businesses that really got impacted by the pandemic was just sort of one of those things that pulled to my heartstrings and really got me excited about the opportunity and I've been loving it ever since.

So. So it's a kind of crazy time at the moment, right? When you joined toast. Tell us about the economy, tell us the market, tell us about the growth that businesses was, that your business was experiencing, your customers were experiencing. Maybe contrast that a little bit to what it is today in October 2022.

Yeah, I mean, I think the macro environment situation was on fire. I mean, I think even six months ago, the macro environment was on fire. But I joined Toast in March of 21 and everyone was sort of on that, oh, there's vaccines, we're coming out of this pandemic. So everybody was hiring. I mean, when I left Google, we were trying to have the biggest hiring year we'd ever had. And then, you know, you join a place like Toast, and we're trying to hire a lot of folks too at the time. And so there's a, there was definitely a vibe of sort of the roaring twenties, if you will. That analogy that seems kind of lame now was very real. I think even just 18 months ago now I think there's a lot of uncertainty in the market. I mean, Toast, they're still doing fine, we're doing great, we're growing, we're hiring, which I think a lot of folks are, but it's different, right? There's that different aura out there around what's happening in three months or six months or 12 months that a lot of companies, when you see it with big Tech, if you look at the hiring patterns of Facebook or Google or those places, they're definitely battening down the hatches. And so it's just a little different than it was even 18 months ago.

It's a stranger because big tech's down in terms of valuations on Most indices, around 60% stock market from the peak maybe a year ago. Yet if you look at earnings and forecasts are maybe down 10 to 20%. Right. So there's this big gap between, you know, the performance of the business, which tons of businesses such as Toast with really, you know, you know, strong earnings reports, really like amazing quarter on quarter growth, like insane versus the, the kind of capital market saying, hang on a second, maybe there was this massive overvaluation, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a strange time because the recession isn't caused necessarily by a pullback in demand. Right. That's not necessarily what we're seeing. It's a kind of a capital issue. Right. There's been literally zero IPOs in the SaaS space. Right. Compared to billions worth of IPOs last year. Right. So this kind of, the lack of capital flowing into businesses, growth tech businesses, is probably what's driving this. Right. So, so how do you, how do you. Let's just talk tech companies for a second and we'll broaden out into the wider economy in just a minute. How does a tech company like Toast and tons of others reconcile the challenge that business is booming. Right. Again, relative to what it could be? Business is still on fire, growing like crazy. Talent is needed, yet you do have to rein in, you have to get fit, get healthy. This isn't a spend any money to acquire great talent. This has to be. What does it have to be? What does it look like inside a tech company right now with those computing challenges?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a lot of, a lot of focus on the core business plan for companies and you know, what are you doing against the maybe a 6 or 12 month roadmap with an eye towards the longer term investments that will help you keep that growth engine going. And so I think there's a lot of that right now. And you're right, there's a lot of places that are still hiring a ton of people. And you wouldn't know it when you turn on the evening news. Right. Turn the evening news and you think the sky has completely fallen. And so I do think there's a little bit of the, the external narrative. I think inflation is also something that we just haven't experienced in 40 years. And so I think people are just trying to figure out whatever it is you're doing, is it core to the business or is it nice to have? If it's nice to have, maybe you don't do it right away. But if it's core to the business, whatever that is, maybe those are the things you really lean in and focus on.

So a lot of folks I've talked to in the last little while, it's called the last three months, they've talked to me about how when it comes to their TA team, they're perhaps releasing contractors. So temp staff there, they're kind of going, yeah, no, we're going to release those folks. We're not going to basically plan to hire as much maybe next year. We've maybe cut a third quarter, 50% of the hiring plan for next year, which, hey, we couldn't have delivered upon anyway. But thankfully that's been cut a bit. Is that it? Is it just a little bit of trimming around the edges or, you know, and again, let's talk more broadly in the economy as we face into what a lot of people believe might be a six quarter recession. Right. God knows, right. We're not economists. We have no idea how long it's going to last. I'm definitely not an economist.

I'm definitely not an economist.

No, actually I'll be guaranteed to get it wrong. But what do you think it means more broadly for TA teams?

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think when you think broadly across companies, even if you're, you know, whatever, pick a random 10,000 person organization that's not growing well, not grown or they're trimming around the edges, they're going to grow a little bit slower. There's still a huge volume of attrition that's happening at companies. Right. I still think there's a lot of people changing roles and for TA teams that's going to be a little bit of a different angle.

Right.

That's like I was talking to a candidate this week that mentioned that the organization, she was at the, they saw like a doubling of attrition for people hired in the first six months of the pandemic when everyone went to video interviewing because they weren't good at it. And so yeah, like that's something. And she was telling me the story. I was like, wow, that's really interesting. I hadn't seen that in my career but like thinking about it as a TA practitioner, I'm like, that's a really interesting challenge of how do you quickly upskill the team to do something different? So I think there's gonna be a lot of that, Johnny, where you think about maybe this group that used to be in the office is remote and you've got to figure out how do you get them hiring in a way that's collaborative but distributed. And you know, when you think about backfills and attrition and those kinds of things that people have to fill, a lot of that is about building future looking capabilities, right? So like, do you have an opportunity to bring in really great talent? I think it's easy as a TA person to think about a backfill as like, oh, I've got to do a backfill. It's actually an opportunity to really upgrade and hire an amazing person. And not to say that the person who left wasn't amazing, but I think there's a little bit of the like in ta, we get excited when we're growing and we don't get as excited when it's not growth, but it's actually still the same job. And so it's easy to sort of get yourself caught up in that.

I steal an analogy from a speaker this morning at a conference. I was at SaaSDoc here in Dublin, SAS software conference, tech founders, tech companies, VC season, all kind of panicked and kind of sharing stories and insights. And one of my favorite speakers, Dave Kellogg in the kind of SaaS technology space in Baldwin Capital was talking about how, you know, this is from a sales perspective. Let's talk about sales and revenue. He's talking about how you need to look at rather than just net new ARR. So net new revenue for a software company, which there's a kind of an obsession in the tech world at net new ARR, it's like just it's ARR, it's revenue, right? And then you look at, you look at your churn. You know the analogy between churn and attrition in talent, you know, he looked at what's the cost of acquiring a customer. Multiply that by your, by your, by your churn revenue. That's the real cost. In a similar way from a talent perspective, you talk about backfills. What's the cost of kind of backfilling, upskilling by the amount you're losing. It's like, well, you should spend at least that to try and fix the original problem. I think just don't churn. I think you're right. The point is it's more of an opportunity, like hang on a second, something's causing this attrition, this churn and talent, now the opportunity to fix it. Just don't do what we did last time because obviously, obviously isn't working to your point. Maybe it's how we interviewed, how we assessed, and we don't want this back on our desk again a third time. So why don't we look at, well, let's work with the organization. Like RTA teams set up to do that. Do you think, like a lot of TA teams, my experience, you know, we had to hire a bunch of new folks into the industry in the last two years. Right. They may not have ever worked in TA before. Two years ago, one year ago. Are they set up for success to do this? And if not, what's the gap?

Yeah, I mean, I think it, you know, sort of. The short answer is probably no, because that's one of those skills that you don't just learn it overnight.

Right.

You've got to have relationships with the business leaders. You've got to understand the business problems that they're trying to solve. You've got to understand the external talent market and how your candidates fit into that puzzle. I think if you're really new, which is fine. I was new once to this industry. You are new to it once. You're learning a lot. And a lot of that learning is just, how do I pick up the phone 50 times a day and talk to candidates and find great people? What are the questions that I need to ask to figure out the skills I'm looking for? Or even just what's my voice? Right? Like, who am I when I'm talking to candidates? Am I, you know, fun, outgoing Jeff, or am I, like, super serious Jeff? You're still figuring that out. Whereas, you know, the skills that are needed now are really those deep business relationships. What are we solving for? What is this person going to do? Where do you see this role in 18 months? Do you have a successor on your team? Those are the kinds of questions that are. They're hard. I mean, they're hard for me. And I've been doing this for 25 years, so I would say probably not. But, you know, you can't. Just because you're uncomfortable, you're not good at it, doesn't mean you can't do it. And you've got to just learn it. The only way you learn it is by asking those questions when you're talking to your hiring managers or business leaders about, what are we solving for here? Not just like, here's a seat, let's put a button in it. Now let's, let's have a conversation for what we're trying to do.

We haven't talked yet about the talent market. Right. This has been so I've driven the questions one sided for the last 10 minutes. Jack. All right. What is TA doing? The business, the recruiters. Right. So, so, so, you know, those who maybe aren't as deeply involved in TA or maybe haven't been on the ground recruiting might go. Hang on a second. With all this kind of high inflation, the economy's changing. Isn't it just going to be easy to recruit anyway? Like you know, and you know, that's even broad nightside tech isn't this is going to be so much easier to hire for the next six to 12 months that this isn't really an issue anyway. What would you say to that?

Yeah, I would definitely say no. And I think there's two parts to that equation. As to the no. 1 is I think just the external, the macro environment. I think you have the situation where like baby boomers are aging out of the market. We don't have as many workers coming into the market as we had. If you look at just in the U.S. labor participation rates are sort of historical lows. So the pool's getting smaller even though the general size of the economy, the number of companies hiring is getting bigger. And so it's more competitive. And you see it everywhere. Everybody's having a hard time hitting hiring targets. Doesn't matter if you're a tech company or a manufacturing company.

Doesn't matter.

Hitting hiring targets is getting harder. And I think there's sort of a macro situation happening and that's not even to go down the rabbit hole of immigration laws and mobility and all these things that really make it even more complicated because sometimes you can find the talent but you can't hire them, which is the real bummer. I think you have that going on, Johnny. And then I think you, you have the. I remember I worked at an organization a million years ago that were made nameless and they had eliminated some roles. And then about six months later we sort of repurposed all those roles and figured out what to do with them. And then we went to hire and we had let about half the recruiting team go. So it was a pretty small crew of us, like four or five of us. And I remember all the hiring managers like, oh, must be so easy now with the economy down and you guys aren't that busy. And I remember thinking to myself like, I am busier than I've ever been because Every hiring manager thinks it's easy first. And then all of my online job postings are getting 2 or 3 or 4x the number of postings that they got before. I'm getting twice as many employee referrals. And it's people's friends or family members that are looking for jobs, not because they're unhappy at their current job because they were laid off. And so they're on me for updates. I get all these candidates applying and you think it's easy right now? It's actually harder than it's ever been because you've got to sort of go through that huge pile. And so I think you have this weird double whammy of like a tightening of the macro environment with maybe not yet depends on where you're at. I think the internal flow starts to go up, which is good, but it's a little bit of a different skill set than when you're in that scarce candidate market.

It's still more work. As we saw as the pandemic hit, folks were dealing with this huge challenge of scale of application. How do you maintain a great candidate experience with forex, the volume of applications and still get back to everyone? Some folks put technology in, they put better processes in to try and handle that. Again, we talked about the candidate market. Let's talk about non tech for a second. Because toast customers are brick and mortar restaurants, bars, folks hiring, probably folks who are on lower wages. It's not the tech area. Is it the same or different in that kind of an environment to hire, do you think?

Yeah, I think it's harder for those non tech type organizations, whether it's a restaurant or brick and mortar retail shop in your town. I think it's the same problem. You've got a much smaller pool of candidates. You've got a lot of folks that either dropped out of the labor force because of the pandemic or maybe they're hesitant to get back into the labor market and that's a good spot for them to go back into. And then you've got, you know, the wages aren't always the best wages. It's not a tech wage, but so you sort of have this Again, it's a different flavor of the same problem where, I mean, I don't know, I walk around my town and I think every single company or shop or restaurant or store is hiring. I think to myself, boy, what a time to be a teenager. You could probably walk in and get four job offers by the end of the day if you were looking for their job. But I think it's that tight. I think it's that hard, for sure.

We've a LinkedIn user listening live to the. To the broadcast. And for those listening to the podcast, we do broadcast live every Wednesday afternoon at European time, morning US time. LinkedIn users saying that is spot on, Jeff, which is your comment about when you had the team of four or five and you're back hiring this user experienced both of those scenarios in 2020 and 2021. I think a lot of you will be familiar with that situation. It was only a year or two ago that we were in this situation and lots of teams lost half their colleagues. So is that likely to happen? Are we likely to see. Is it possible to see the culling of TA teams? And if that is a scenario that could be out there for some teams, what should TA folks be doing to make sure that they're not out of an employment opportunity? Perhaps they're doing something different. But how do you kind of future proof yourself as a TA professional?

Yeah, I mean, I think you, you know, you want to be as valuable to the organization as you possibly can be. Before I. That was 2021, was that like, my example was 20 years old. So I'm like, just dated myself in my head. But, you know, I think it really goes back to being as valuable as you can. Like, are you actually a recruiter or are you a TA partner? Are you helping build a team or are you helping just put a body in a seat? Because anybody can put a body in a seat. Not anybody, not everybody can build a team. Are you flexible? Do you consider yourself. Oh, I only do exact search for R and D. I only do exact search for sales. It's probably not the world that we're probably heading into where you're going to want people that are willing to do whatever needs to get done. Does that mean, you know, hey, Jeff, you've done XYZ before. Maybe we need you to, I don't know, whatever, do some lead this function that you've never even heard of.

Probably.

I would imagine that those are the kinds of things where companies are going to want to maximize their talent. And the thing about ta, which is super cool, is we've got a pretty, pretty fungible, flexible skill set. Right. There's a lot of us that are former sales folks or used to be in, like, teaching careers. I mean, you know, TA is like this cornucopia of skills for folks. And so just being really open and really flexible, just adding value, whatever that is, that may be very different than what it was five years ago. But just really focus on adding as much value as you possibly can.

I love you mentioned this, we saw this to our LinkedIn listener live mentioned in 20202021 TA team April, May 2020 around the world were asked to help in different areas. A lot of those teams built brand new virtual onboarding processes they helped redesign to your point, online interviews and other HR related tasks that weren't necessarily in the typical TA teams wheelhouse. And some of those teams never lost those responsibilities. They did a great job and the business went, you know what, you keep that. You know, maybe the, the VP of TA was, was told you're going to be VP of Talent now. We're going to give you a whole bunch of stuff that we never thought we'd give you, but your team didn. Amazing job. I heard a speaker today talk about how in a big tech company he was in a few years ago when they, they got tight and recruiting slowed down. They were moving recruiters into AE roles, into BDR roles kind of going, you're amazing. Be versatile. Do this now for the business. Some folks came back to recruiting, some folks stayed in sales and went, hey, this is my new career. Right. I've got this flexibility. It's easy to focus on the now. Jeff. Right. And kind of say what do we need to do for this trend? But you made the point of you're in this business 25 years, I'm in this business 25 years or the old ones here maybe. Right. This isn't the first, this isn't our first rodeo. It's not our first downturn, won't be our last unless we retire rich in the next two years. Right. But let's assume that's not going to happen. Okay. You mentioned something to me before about becoming economy agnostic. Talk to me about that in the context of a TA team.

Yeah, I mean I think it's, you know, when you think of the best TA person they are solving business problems, not filling jobs. And that is where we probably all need to be heading is how do you get that skill set that it doesn't matter if the market's booming or it doesn't matter if the market's really slow, the company's gonna need to hire.

Right.

Maybe not all companies, but like there's back, like we talked about, there's backfills, there's attrition, there's some growth, all of these things and the recruiters that can really separate themselves and really think strategically about how talent fits into the puzzle are the ones that companies are gonna really value. I think it's, it's easy to fall into the trap of the only thing that matters is my numbers. But sort of how you get those numbers is really, for me the thing that just jumps off the page. Because, you know, just because you have a team of 10 doesn't mean it's great. You might have a team of eight that's just as good as a team of 10 because you hired better people. And I think that the TA teams and the TA folks that can really, really drill in and focus on how do I hire the best, doesn't matter what the best is. The best for that role, for that company of that situation. They're the ones that are going to be agnostic because they bring more value than just your standard, standard hire.

Do you think there's a future or even a present where it is even beyond hiring that again, you look at your point around, solve the business problem that it's not just a hiring solution, it might be an upskilling solution, it might be a technology solution, it might be a mobility solution, it may not be acquisition and certainly not acquisition from external. Is that where TA might be heading?

I think it's already there, personally. You know, I mean, I, I do ta, obviously, but I think a lot about rotational programs or internal mobility or different kinds of things that maybe they're not acquisition, but there are ways for the organization to maximize the talent that we have. Because if you can maximize the talent you have, it gets easier to bring in other talent because you're maximizing the talent you have. So it becomes a flywheel, right? Where candidates look at it go, wow, look this place. They create great talent and that great talent moves on to do other things. No one likes the attrition angle to that, but that's good for business if you're able to create an environment where the best in breed come to work there. And so I think that's really the mindset shift. Johnny is getting to that. Like how do you maximize the folks you have? And then also when you are acquiring, you're acquiring the best you possibly can.

Yet you're a Googler, an ex Googler, right? And that's one of those companies that perhaps has done it well because folks are proud to put up their LinkedIn profile. I'm an ex Googler, right? You don't put that in your profile if it's a bad experience, right? So it seems to me that companies like Google, there's a handful of others where people put this on Proudly, they're proud to be ex employees. It's not a, that failed or didn't work out for me or they weren't, they were a bad employer. It's a badge of honor that I serve my time. It's an amazing experience. And now I've gone on to do this other thing, right? How, how did Google do it? How do others, how do you solve that? How do you make that the thing?

Well, that is, that is a great question. You know, I, I like to, I joke around a lot about my, my time at Google was like a, a real world mba because some of the problems we were trying to solve were not normal problems. Right. You know, how do you hire a thousand software engineers in three months? It's like default answer is like, you don't. But that's not actually the answer.

Right.

You've got to go figure it out. And so I think Google, I mean obviously the environment is created for people to come in and really have impact and think. One of the things, I mean, I'm sure you've read Laszlo's book. Laszlo's book is like the, it's like the. Read that and then you'll have most of the answers to these questions. But there's also the, the way that they evaluate talent is not for the job you're going to do, it's for your next job. Right. We're evaluating, can Johnny join? And then, yeah, sure, he can do this job, but what are the other jobs that Johnny can do? And those are the little things that are subtle, right. But they're cultural, they're ingrained in the way the business thinks. Then when you look at Google and you know, I mean, there's other places like that. A lot of the big consulting firms have that same same thing. It's funny you mentioned that I always enjoy looking at you ex Googler X this xx. I'm like, well, what are you doing now? But I do think there's a sort of a cultural element that's woven into the way those companies think about talent. That people leave and they have a little bit of a seal that says, okay, this person can deal with ambiguity, they can deal with scope and they can deal with scale and they can move on to do more than just I check this box and that's what I do. And so there's a little bit of that to it. I think.

It's not just tech. There's folks who are ex McKinsey x Bain, totally, yes, BCG. There's I'm a big four qualified CPA or ACA in Europe. It's, you know, every badge. Yeah. And it's like it's accepted that of course you'll move on. That's, of course you will. You're going to be an ex employee at one point. It's not like. But you know, we're not going to keep you forever. So, so, so talk to me then about networks and communities. I know you're a big fan of networks and communities. So how does that play into all this?

Yeah, I think it's, I think it's actually sort of p zeroed all this. I actually will tell you a story which you, you're, you have a small part in the story, Johnny, but you don't know it. Actually, this is a great, this is a great story. In 2008, I was at an organization that got rid of half the recruiting team and I was home on my Pat leave with my daughter and my boss called me and said, oh, you're fine. Half the team is not fine, but you're fine. Just wanted to call you and let you know and sort of hung up the phone. And I remember I'm sitting on the couch and I've got a mortgage, I've got a two week old daughter. I was like, oh my God, if this call went left instead of right, I have no plan, I have no nothing. And I sort of made a commitment to myself that I was going to have a cup of coffee or do a phone call with someone I didn't know at least once a week for the rest of that year. So I got into the recruiting community, I started getting on the Twitter, I started getting to know people, I met people at conferences, I went to the, you know, the UN conferences, all this stuff, and just sort of built out this network. I ended up doing it for about six years, which was just if I was, you know, going through some town, I'd go on LinkedIn and see who in TA was in that town that I might have known or maybe didn't even know that well and just reached out and grabbed a drink or grabbed a coffee and you know, later, a few years later in my career when I had left Google, it was at another place. Before I went back to Google. I needed my network. I really, I was looking for a job and I needed that network. And I'm a little bit of a crazy person. So I had like a spreadsheet going of all the people that I had talked to and all the people that I had, you know, like, oh yeah, I bought Johnny a drink Here. And I, you know, oh, this person was here and that person was there. But then I sort of went back. I was like, all right, now I gotta call in a favor and just ask folks if they're hiring, because I'm looking for a job now. And after about a week, I had to stop doing that because I was so overwhelmed. Because all these people that, you know, they want to pay it forward, right? Like, that's the thing with networking is when you network, when you need it, people don't know you. They don't know what your intentions are. And it's hard to do when you're networking just organically, naturally, because it's part of who you are, which is the way I think of myself as I'm just talking to people all the time. Maybe it never turns into anything that's okay. Hopefully I learned something. Maybe they learned something from me. That ends up being the value in those networks. It's not like the. Well, I talked to 37 people this year. Maybe it's actually, what did you learn? What did they learn from you? And then when things change on either side of the equation, you've got a relationship. Because at the end of the day, TA is a relationship business. And so using networking to build real, authentic relationships is how you then turn that thing into a real asset for you. And so, yeah, I live it, breathe it. My wife probably wants to kill me about it because I'm constantly like, I'm going to meet this person for coffee. I've got to hop on a call. Hey, I'm going to be in London. I'm going to go meet this person for a drink. Hey, we're going to a family vacation here. I'm going to call this person to meet them for a drink. She's like, do you stop? But I mean, it's just sort of part of who I am now.

I love that because. Sorry. I follow the same philosophy. I'd like to see my network growing as I get older. I have friends I grew up with, and their networks have shrunk and keep shrinking. As they get into their 40s, into their 50s, it gets smaller and smaller. I'm trying to make my bigger and bigger, but I think there's a key thing, is that you're not going into it necessarily looking for anything to come out of it. It's more of a philosophy. As I get to know lots of people, I'll help as many as I can, and I'll probably be helped if I need to. I don't need to have Have a quid pro quo with everybody. It's just a case of, you know, you find the time. So. It's funny you mentioned the deliberateness of it. I am, I try never to refuse a meeting with somebody who asks for business advice or growing a company. And, you know, I get more, more of that than I get of recruiting. And I, Yeah, I'll take it every time. Even though your agenda might be packed, you know, it's. It's just a good thing to do. And some people call these things like karma or there's other words people use different religions and parts of the world. But it's kind of a, you know, you do this because a line of people have maybe helped you in the past and, and they never asked for anything in return. She go, I maybe can't help that person, but I can help somebody else. Yeah. And people do this. They do this on scale. If you're somebody who doesn't do this for whom this doesn't come naturally, maybe. I don't know what your Myers Briggs personal Myers Briggs personality is, Jeff, if you're on the extrovert or not, but let's say you're more naturally an introvert. Introvert. And the idea of doing this scares you. Oh, how does you. Okay, if you're an introvert, yet, how did you force yourself out of that, perhaps to know that lack of comfort in doing this.

Yeah. So, yeah, I'm intj. I started it where I was comfortable. So I started it with. Oh, you worked at this company. I worked at this company. Oh, you went to the same school I went to.

To.

Oh, I went to school with you. I haven't talked to you in five years. Oh, we worked together X years ago. So I went to where it was comfortable first and foremost, which was really easy. And a lot of times that led to other conversations, like, so that we're warm. Because I think where folks get uncomfortable is it feels like it's cold. Like it's a cold. You know, I don't want to cold call people to network. I mean, if you're doing this constantly, you sort of.