[Sales] Hot takes on recruiting and how to stand out with Lexie Stratford and Taahir Patel

There's two ways of looking at recruitment, isn't there? There's the bit from like a personal aspect of, you know, people themselves using a recruiter to find a new job and then obviously the company aspect. One of the topics that really comes up at the moment is the new, like, TikTok hype. And like, everyone's an expert in everything on TikTok and Tahir is the same age as me, but in some ways much, much older than me and will not jump on the TikTok hype. But TikTok basically is telling people at the moment with recruiters that they should be keeping secrets, advising them on sort of how to handle recruiters in a process. And it's hilarious. It's like, don't tell them what money you're earning. Don't do that. Don't tell them what you want. Just tell them to tell you what they're doing. And really, it's like, it's a two way street, isn't it? You know, we're all on the same team ultimately in terms of finding. Finding new roles, finding. Finding people like positive matches and that they're basically advising people on working with nothing.

Hey, we got another great episode for you here today. This time we have two guests on the show. We have Lexi Stratford and Tahir Patel, and they are both recruiters and they've come on and they're going to share a lot of really hot takes. We're going to debunk some TikTok myths. So it's going to be pretty exciting. I think there's some good stuff, a lot of good learnings. Nick, what do you want to take away?

Yeah, I really enjoyed this one. Learn lots. Even learn a bit about some of the silly mistakes I made when working with recruiters. When I first started hiring as a hiring manager, I wished I'd heard some of this in advance. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to others getting that experience early.

Yeah, it's going to be a good one. All right, let's dive in. Hey, guys. Welcome to the show. We're pumped to have you both here.

Thanks for having us, Harrison. It's really good to be here.

Yeah.

Great to be here.

Yeah. And I think we have a special session here today where we have two of you on as guests. So it's four of us in total on the show.

We have.

Which means that we get to hear two funny stories that have happened in somebody's career. So, Lexi, you want to kick us off and give us yours?

Yeah, sure. So my. It was early on in sort of the recruitment. Recruitment game. And I had a particular instance where a client rang us and was like, you know, this person's not turned up for our interview. It was meant to be over Zoom. I was like, oh, God, need to fix this, need to sort it. Rang the candidate. You've got an interview now. Meant to be on a Zoom call. And he was like, completely forgot. I'll go on it now. Gets on the Zoom call. I can see that they'd both entered the Zoom. So I'm like, great, it's happening. And then get a call from the client five minutes after I've left the Zoom call. And I was like, okay. He had some light shining in behind him and so he got up to close the curtains and he was wearing a T shirt and just a pair of Y fronts. And it was a good lesson in never. You can never under prep someone. You do have to tell them to wear a full outfit like a normal interview because apparently there's no. There's no obvious things. Is that you should always wear trousers.

That is. That is. I mean, this happened, I think a lot early Covid for people, I mean. But yeah, that is just. Yeah, that's wild.

I think we're talking like 20, 21. So we were hopefully quite used to the zoom calls at that point. But yeah, definitely a lesson for me and never assuming that people are going to do anything you should have.

I took from that was to wear nice underwear. If you're going to do it, not do that.

You wear your Batman underwear. That's a good one. All right, Tier, what do you got for us? Do you know what?

I haven't been written down. I've drawn a punk. Do you know what mine was?

Yours was. It was about assuming something. But what was it?

Oh, yes, yes, it was. So I. I had many, but I had to choose the right one because there's just so many to choose from. But this one was quite interesting where I was working on a position and there was a candidate who had the green banner on, you know, open to work, looked great for the position. I knew what his previous company paid, so I knew I was going to give him this opportunity. Was offered by pay rise, looked great. I sent him a message saying, you know, literally, I'm looking for you. Basically, he sent me an article which was, this is why you shouldn't work with Indian recruiters, and then just blocked me.

Wait, what is wild?

It was absolutely. It was one of those days where there's very few moments in our lives where I Think we are genuinely speechless when we both just sat there and were like I can't believe it. And the guy, it was like a company that is like direct competitor in the space, all of that. And it's like assuming there that whatever he's assumed from the name has done himself out of things. But also.

Yeah, well one, I can't believe this guy did that. But then two, I can't believe somebody wrote an article about that. Like that is just like.

Yeah, it's on Google if anyone wants to have a read.

Yeah, genuinely like a huge article. I can't remember what the website was. And he just sent me and I was like all right, great, thank you.

That's how he kicked off our Wednesday.

He should have done is then gone to another recruiter with a English sounding name, told him what the job was, how much pay rise it was and when he said I'm interested, he goes, sorry, we're not.

It's, it's, it's funny you say that. When I first started recruitment my, my first manager told me to have a, a different Persona when talking to gamekeepers and other people. So I had a, I had a different Persona which was Raj Khan with.

A really considered slow boy.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is the complete opposite to me.

But, but hey, that's funny, that's bad. All right, well let's dig into what we wanted to talk about today and we're going to dig into hot takes around recruiting. So I know you've got a few that you gotta, you wanna hit us with. So once you kick it off, pick one of them.

Yeah, I think, you know there's two ways of looking at recruitment, isn't there? There's the bit from like a personal aspect of you know, people themselves using a recruiter to find a new job and then obviously the company aspect when we were, we were discussing what we were going to talk about, I think one of the topics that really comes up at the moment is the new like TikTok hype and like everyone's an expert in everything on TikTok and to here is the same age as me but in some ways much, much older than me. And while not jump on the TikTok hype, but TikTok basically is telling people at the moment with recruiters that they should be keeping secrets, advising them on sort of how to handle recruiters in a process. And it's hilarious. It's like don't tell them what money you're earning, don't do that, don't tell them what you want Just tell them to tell you what they're doing. And really it's like it's a two way street, isn't it? You know, we're all on the same team ultimately in terms of finding, finding new roles, finding, finding people like positive matches and they're basically advising people on working with nothing.

Do you know why? Do you like where it's coming from or kind of what's prompting it?

Well, I think it is like it stems a little bit from like, I think people think that we're like going to try and push the salaries down.

So we're looking like you're the person on the hiring side that's trying to drive different mentality. Yeah, yeah.

So like if I tell you that I want X amount, they're not going to offer me a role that pays higher than that because I've already told them I want this amount. But in actual fact, it sort of does the reverse where we can't send our clients a person that we don't know what money they earn and hope for the best. So we just can't tell you anything about what we're working on because we can't sort of shoot in the dark and be like, do you want this role? Maybe it pays this, maybe.

But also your job is to actually like, if you're going to be callous and cold about it.

Right.

You guys work on commission, so the better salary you get for a candidate, you're not going to overprice them because that's bad business for the client. The better you get for them within that scale that they're willing to pay, the more you guys can make too. Right. So it's just, it's counterintuitive.

Yeah. We're on the same team.

Yeah.

Do you think it's a difference between recruiters that are external to the company and maybe like internal recruiters? Like if you're at a big company and you've got an army of internal recruiters or like talent acquisition folks, you know, maybe. Do you think that's kind of where the stigma's coming from? And so it's more about how do you educate on the differences between those two?

Yeah, I think a little bit. I think, you know, that it's, it's like the, there's a difference in the role, isn't there, between talent acquisition, you're acquiring talent and a recruitment consultant where we're, you know, actively advising and consulting with businesses on what their recruitment should be like and how to do it in the best way possible. So talent acquisition Maybe have like a salary banding that they have to work with and like these are the parameters around it. But actually a lot of what we do is, is going to companies and saying this sparkly person that you would like, that fits your job bill. Guess what? They're out of budget. They're out of budget by X amount. And you know, really actually feeding that back to them to make them realize, you know, maybe we, we haven't got the salary right or maybe we need to change our expectations.

Yeah, it's like I remember going through this same process and we were hiring people. It's the, you have your expectations of what you think is like the market rate and I don't know, you can pull these off of the Internet. You know, a lot of people just go Google it, figure it out and like, oh yeah, I think this is right. But then when you actually go out into the job search, you determine that, oh, actually, you know, this person, these people are not as experienced as we need. And so not only do we need to like change our job description or who we're going after from an experience perspective, we also have to now change the pay band and expectations. But then like the downstream impacts that on the company are, hey, we budgeted for, you know, these roles at this price. So now if you're telling me it's going to be, I don't know, 10% more. Right. Okay, now you lose a headcount or something. Right. So there's this like weird like push a pull that you have to, to play with that game.

Yeah. And I think it's especially, it's especially strange in like the post Covid world. Like we went through like a weird phase in like 2021 where like post Covid everyone was hiring and no one wanted to move. So then the people that were moving were getting crazy pay rises. So for one role, you can speak to someone who's on one salary and then you can literally speak to someone with the same experience but moved at the right time, who is on an exponentially more. And that then changes it even more when saying one person's definition of market rate is not the same as another. Especially in sort of these times where it is just. It's gone crazy a little bit over the last past couple of years.

Yeah. And I think I talk about this a lot with people I've mentored and trained in sales and it's the same for scientists and they talk about how they want their projects to go. The ethos now of fail fast, you have a limited amount of resource. If you fail fast in the ones that are not right, that gives you more time to put into the resource that ones are right. So the more I tell you, the more you can triage to the ones that are in that sweet spot and essentially foul with the ones that don't hit my budget needs, don't hit my experience needs needs. So all of these kind of things. Whereas otherwise you could just be sending me stuff that's half the salary I'm expecting or in an industry I never want to touch. You know, like it seems completely counterintuitive, but this is coming from someone that I just don't apply for jobs direct. I just, I would take it and give it to a recruiter rather than apply.

Yeah, yeah, I think it is. It's a very strange thing. There's definitely reasoning behind it that they like go into on these little tick tocks that clearly are coming up on people's things because it's more and more of a thing that we're encountering where people are just saying market rate or like I shouldn't have to tell you, but it is definitely a, a thing at the moment where there's reasoning behind it. But the reasoning definitely isn't, isn't totally sound.

I think logically it makes sense. The TikToks and obviously the creators are making it because they want to get views or maybe educate. Maybe they think that, you know, that they're doing the right thing. But the reality is, you know, if you choose a trusted recruiter that you know, that you believe understands what you're looking for, the market, the industry, you know, if you trust them, they're given the information they need to help you.

Thanks for listening to the podcast. It would mean the world to us if you could help spread the word by sharing it with someone you know. Succession is a Life science sales membership that includes on demand courses to up level your sales skills, resources to plan and execute your sales process, community for peer to peer networking and learning, and live workshops delivered twice a month, you can get access to all of this as an individual for just $79 a month or up level your entire team with customized learning paths built for each individual rep. Come join us at Succession Bio. Well, that's it. I think that's a good point as well. Which leads me into another thought which, or maybe even a hot take, which is the easy apply button on LinkedIn. Like I think that that is horrible and not only for like companies that like it's making it so easy for any random person to apply for these jobs. So you have hiring recruiters that are just bombarded with all of these resumes and you know, I don't know, maybe well intentioned people that are good, they're not able to shine through in that process. And so you mentioned about trying to like work with good recruiters. Well, recruiters have those connections at the company and can get you directly in the door. So do you actually recommend if you're an individual and you're trying to get a new job, instead of going and hitting easy apply on like a thousand different companies that you're just hoping to get, you know, one of them to look at your resume, you recommend, reach out proactively to recruiters to work with them and find the ones that you can trust where you feel comfortable giving them that information.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the other points of me and actually discussed, I guess when we were prepping, which was, you know, when you are first on the job market, your resume is sparkly and special and it's unseen, it's rare, it's new. The moment you start easy apply or maybe sending it to recruiters that you haven't vetted properly and it ends up in everyone's, you know, I guess inbox or files or whatever. It's no longer sparkly, it's no longer new. Even if you're right for the position, the, the almost immediate thought is this guy again.

Yeah, your personal brand can get ruined really quickly. I've seen people that like click that easy apply because they just want to get like their profile in front of a company rather than because they're right for the role. But like it's that age old thing. Like desperation does stink and like it is the mo. The more people see your thing around, the more it's like you could be an incredible salesperson. Absolutely incredible. Have this resume that is chock full of you, beating your number, building territories all the like the whole nine yards. But actually you now are not as good as you think because people think, why is this guy not got a job yet? Why am I seeing this guy's resume? Every corner I turn, every email I open from a recruiter is this guy like, because it's quite easy to dilute that personal brand and that easy apply is like it's the easiest way to dilute that brand, basically.

Cool. That's quite similar to the housing. I've been looking for a house recently and that's exactly what an estate agent told me about houses. You need your house to be sold within six weeks otherwise you're in that non new section I'm just scrolling through right move. That's quite a similar thing. The other thing I'd say is is that if you're hitting that easy apply. I don't think a lot of people realize that many of these companies now don't have resource to scroll through them and they actually have platforms that do it for them looking for keywords. So you could be the best but if you're like me and dyslexic and probably use language of an 8 year old, you're not going to shine even though you could be decent at what you do.

Yeah, you're using language as an 8 year old has nothing to do with being disliked.

Stupid, right?

Yeah.

I'll speak to a real estate.

Turn it up.

It's genuinely terrifying. I think the amount of companies that we speak to who just post a role because they have to post the role. And so like I have worked with companies who who have posted the role because like it's a legal requirement that they have to post the role or they have to like be seen to be hiring for the role even though it's with the recruiter exclusively. And actually if you're just applying on LinkedIn sometimes you will be missing out on them because they're just not looking in that inbox or they'll look in the inbox like you say for the keywords and if you haven't got the sparkling keywords on your resume even though you've maybe done it for 20 years, it just doesn't matter.

Yeah, I think too the it can also be internal hires. If somebody wants to hire somebody internally they may be legally obligated to put that job posting out there but I have no intention of actually going through with it. Makes a lot of sense. So like have you seen I guess what have you guys seen be most successful for like sales reps or business development where your your job is to go out and actively like find prospects of your prospect to them to get meetings. Do you see that working well for sales from a hiring perspective as well?

Yeah, definitely. I think, I think the bit that the people on their front in terms of how they can prospect themselves the best it is to pick a few people recruiters that you really trust and to go through it in that process and actually like make sure that you know you're absolutely fine to better recruiter like who do they work with like LinkedIn is great for recruiters in terms of like at the bottom of everyone's page there's like, recommendations and stuff. A red flag to me is if no one's got. If someone's not got any recommendations, like, how have you not got anyone to give you any?

But is that. But that's a. Almost. You have to, like, click the button to, like, send out these recommendations. Like, hey, will you recommend me for these things? But, like, but why? Like, I don't know why that would be a red flag. Because. Just because I don't decide, I want to, you know, reach, like, have random. I don't want to have these people right on my LinkedIn. Why would that be a red flag?

No, not for a candidate, but for you picking a recruiter. So.

Oh, were you picking a recruiter? Got it. Okay.

So then they're picking at, like, who they've placed, what sort of people they've placed, what sort of companies they've placed into. And, like, those recommendations give you a really good idea of that. And actually, then they're the people you should be trusting and prospecting you out. Do they know the space that you want to work in? Do they know the key players within the space that you're working in? And like, I think befriending people on LinkedIn, it's like a really good, like, tool to use because point one, loads of them share news. So actually you see what all your competitors are doing without even having to try. But also point to you're going to start building out a sort of idea of the person before you have to work with them, of, you know, who do they speak to on LinkedIn, who do they converse with and what, what are they up to? Are they actively involved within the industry?

And I imagine you should probably start building these relationships even if you're comfortable in your current role. Like, you might be happy, but, you know, something could change at some point in time. You're better off, I think, having these relationships ahead of time, building those relationships with the recruiters to figure out the ones that you can trust. So then when the time comes to say, okay, I'm ready to look, which is inevitable. Right. I mean, I don't think we're living in a world where we work at the same company for 50 years, you know, like our parents. So, yeah, I think, I think that's also, you know, probably a really good strategy for people to deploy. It's just like, always kind of be, you know, looking, but it's more about, like, relationships with recruiters.

Yeah, I think it's about having an eye out there. Like, it's, it's not no one's committed to the same role like they used to be. There's not that. You see sort of an older generation that like you said, had like 20 years at a company, 30 years, did their whole career there and actually it's just not like that anymore. And if anything, like I would say for sort of people nowadays, if you're going to stay with a company for like probably more than like eight years, you're probably actually doing yourself a disservice more than anything because you're missing out on pay rises, you're missing out on progression. And if you then look for jobs after that point, you sort of look like something must have gone wrong there. That's why you must be looking rather than because you're great and you want something better.

Yeah. I think the only caveat I would put around that is that if you're still like a high growth company, right. I mean it could take a long time for these companies to go public. So if you're starting early, like an early stage company and you are growing with them throughout your time at that company, you know, just because you're there for eight years, like you guys might be on the precipice of like an IPO, you might have just IPO'd, who knows? I think there's like a little bit of nuance. But I think to your point, if you're at maybe a more established company for an extended period of time and maybe there isn't much career progression going on there, I would absolutely agree with what you're.

Yeah, if you're seeing the progression within the business and you're going from sort of, you know, one role to the next to the next over those years, that it definitely is very different. But the people that we see that have maybe are those larger, more, you know, established brands that have been there for a longer time, you're definitely doing yourself. You know, in terms of the, the hiring managers we talk to, there is like a certain uncertainty and uneasiness around, around people who have stayed for maybe too long.

Yeah, yeah.

I think I was at, as an example of that, I was at AstraZeneca, slash Metamune, slash Cat as it went for its acquisitions. But I was there for nine years and looking back, I stayed for probably four to four and a half years. Too long. Right. I was just there too long and it just like that. If I'd have moved on, I think things would have. Yeah. When you move on, you saw that progression quicker and I noticed it and I moved around a bit. To get that experience. And I agree with that completely.

I think a part of the reason for that is as well is, you know, the question that I've had a hired manager post me as well is when someone's done really well in one company for a long time, take them out of the system, out of that environment, out of that brand, that product, can they still succeed?

Is.

And it's a bit like, you know, I don't know if you guys watch soccer, but Raheem Sterling and Pep Body on the system. Amazing. Take him out of our system, not so much.

I agree. I own. I only object to any of that. Is that you said soccer. I'm not. Not accepting that it's football.

I said I'm the only one here that can say soccer.

Yeah, I said it for Harrison.

To be honest.

Harrison played American football.

Harrison played American football, but he's the only person that probably in the team that is allowed to go football because he kicked it. The rest of them throw. Ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's good. So one thing that we did mention is that if you're an individual looking for a job, it's good to have multiple recruiters. But what if we flip that and we say, hey, you're the hiring manager. Is it a good idea to have multiple recruiters and get a bunch of them to go after a particular role?

So I've got a. Another analogy for that. I think it's something I haven't used yet in a, you know, as an objection handle because I think maybe it's a bit too direct. But my analogy is, if you were on trial for murder, hypothetically, would you want a public defender to represent you where their attention is split across 5, 10 different cases and they're not incentivized to find you the best solution? Or would you want to retain recruiter that is incentivized to find you the best solution no matter what, and is their sole focus is you and your problem.

That's a really good analogy. I don't know that many people would make that one. That's good. I like it a lot. Hot take.

I think if you're the first time I ever tried to.

Objection.

Handle using multiple recruiters. I mean, I was very early in my sales career, but I said. I said, you don't cut your own hair or do your own taxes, so why do you do your own recruitment? And then I quickly realized that's probably not the way to handle our.

Public defender. 1. It's not too direct. I'm very. My objection handling so maybe not the best person to call, but I think it's not. It's too softer.

You're already guilty. Yeah.

You're sitting in the chair. Who do you want to defend?

You, me or him?

Study.

Come on.

No, I think it is. It is a weird nuance of recruitment where companies do think that if they have multiple recruiters, it's all going to happen quicker. They're like, well, now I've got four people working on it, so I'm going to get four times the amount of candidates. Everyone's going to be in process really quick and it'll be fine. I'll sort it in a month. And it just doesn't happen because like Tahir said, you've got attention split. Because if I'm working against three other people, I can't give you my undivided attention because, you know, much like Salespeople, we've got KPIs to hit, we've got targets to hit. But then also, it is ultimately a race to the finish line if you've got multiple recruiters working on one role. So you're going to get the people that are easiest to find, which are probably the ones that are open to work, actively applying, and there's nothing wrong with those people. But you're maybe not going to find the people that are those unicorn candidates that are, you know, maybe not looking, that have to be pursued to get to actually speak to them about a role.

Which most of those, which most of the time in sales, those people have jobs, right? Most of the time the best reps have jobs because they are the best. And, you know, even if you're going to go through a reduction in force, most of the time, most of the time there are exceptions, but most of the time, you know, the best reps stay around.

Yeah, exactly. So you're not going to get the people that are, you know, setting the world on fire most of the time, because you're going to get the people who the recruiters, you know, maybe got actively available that they can send right there right now, not the person that fits the job brief because they're probably not going to do a full extensive search specifically for you. And I think that that's something that people get maybe a little bit confused by is the fact that it just doesn't make sense for people to give that much time to it. The people that get our undivided attention and the people that are exclusive or the people that are retained. Definitely. Because we know that we can sort of count on that business coming in you're not going to, you know, no one's going and pitching for the same role and hoping that they're all going to get it. It is one of those things where you have to sort of spread your yourself sensibly almost.

And like you said about the best reps, the best reps don't leave without another position because the best reps have a pipeline that's going to give them bonuses. Yeah, they stick around till the end of each of those bonuses and you get halfway through a quarter, they're not leaving again because they've already started their bonus process. So you need to actively recruit these people and you guys obviously have the network to do that. I've made the mistake in hiring of thinking I want multiple recruiters. And it's because I. Not because I thought I had more people working on it, but one of the things I thought is I have a bigger network because each of you have a network, therefore you have access to a network. And that was my tool. But I've also come round to the, I should use one person that is dedicated and driving for this and then assess them, and if they're not good, you switch to the next dedicated person. I think that's the better approach.

And I think that that bigger network idea as well is sometimes also counterintuitive in that a bigger network doesn't necessarily mean a better network because actually you would rather have a small network that is really dedicated to that one area. And the way I say it to clients quite often is working with one recruiter, you know exactly who is spreading your brand to market. And so if there's something weird that comes around where someone contacts you and is like, I've heard this about your company, you know exactly who it's come from because you're working with one recruiter. So you really have that, you know, control over your brand image. And so your brand image is only going to a small part of the network that is relevant and it's not getting diluted by multiple recruiters trying to sort of race to the finish line and get the candidate first or, whereas.

Which you know, they're going to send the same message to the same person. Like, you know, like if you have five recruiters, like the same person might get all five, because you probably have the same search filters and, you know, LinkedIn recruiting, that's going to, you know, reach out to those people, which is not. Not going to be a good candidate experience. When you then jump on a call with all five of these people and like, Hey, I want to put you on this role for, you know, Company X and it's the same one.

What was really weird the other day is I had someone contact me and go, nick, someone's just contacted me about a role that you're advertising for. I, I, this looks like it's you, is it? Because it, it must be the company. And it was a recruiter that wasn't working for me. We have an exclusive agreement with a different recruiter and they'd gone out proactively trying to look for a job that they've heard about and sell it to somebody else.

That is, that is, you know, you do get that. I actually encountered the opposite of that not that long ago in that I'm an exclusive recruiter for a company and I contacted someone and they went, I've already spoken to the recruiter about this. And I went, no, you haven't. That's me.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And he was like, no, no, I have, I've submitted my resume. And I was like, you definitely haven't.

Recruiters families have anonymized it and sending through as a teaser.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is, it's, yeah. There definitely is some people out there that are recruiting wise looking for some quick wins. And I think that's why, like both on a personal note, but also like, if you're recruiting for your own company, you shouldn't be afraid to actually be vetting the people you're working with and really being, making sure that the people you're working with are the people you want to work with, not just who you found to work with.

Because on that carry on Alexis note and go back as well, I actually believe that this today, it doesn't matter how big your network is or how big a recruiter's network is because if you type in the right keywords and LinkedIn, everyone's got a great network. So the reality is my network's just as big as yours. And even, even though you've got much more experience in the market, you know, the guy who just started recruiting yesterday probably has got the same, same size network as me. But what actually matters is can you get that person on the phone and when you get him on the phone, can you get them interested in your, in your opportunity? And so I actually, actually said this to a new client of mine and they said, okay, then pitch me my company. And it was, it was a bit daunting at first, but luckily I prepped well and I knew exactly how to pitch the company and I did and I managed to win the. The. The retainer because of that. Because I said, you know, because I genuinely believe it's not about, you know, who's got the best network, but who can represent your brand the best? Who do you trust to get the right people on the phone, and who do you trust that can actually sell your company the opportunity and get the right people to the table? Because that's my job. My job isn't to really help, you know, get. Get you someone to hire, but is to get you a totem pool of people interested in your company and then for you and then to help you close them. That's my. That's our job.

Really?

Yeah. It was incredible when he had to pitch this company to themselves. We had a few dress rehearsals. It was it. But genuinely, I think it is. It's one of the best tactics I think I've seen from a client in terms of making sure you're happy with the person that's going to market, because not. What better way to sort of understand what's going out there than to be like, show me.

Yeah, great, great tip. Great technique. We're running up here on time, but I think you guys have shared, like, so many awesome tips and tricks for everybody, both on the company side and on the individual side. I think we busted a couple of these TikTok myths as well. But, yeah, we really appreciate you both coming on here. If people want to get in touch, maybe they're looking to make a change in their career. How should they reach you guys?

Yeah, so we're. We're both at CSG talent. We both on LinkedIn. I'm Lexi Stratford and that's Tahir Patel, and our emails are literally our first name.surname sgtalent.com.

Thank you. Twitter as well.

I'm not.

I'm not the most social media savvy, but I'm trying.

All right, that's good. Awesome. Well, appreciate you both coming on today and sharing your wisdom with everybody. It.