the last 8 months - what the torc.dev community team has been up to

Taylor.

Yo.

So Ronstadt just announced on LinkedIn about requiring Torf a year ago.

Yeah.

What's up with that?

I mean, it's pretty huge, right? So they— Ronstadt went all in on this community thing. And I think that's what a lot of people don't realize. I got in, I got in a Twitter conversation yesterday with another recruiter. Let me see if I can find it real quick. So this recruiter goes, tech platforms don't serve you, they sell you. Job boards equal glorified sellable databases. LinkedIn equals optimized for endless scrolling and premium upgrades. We chase tech for speed, but that fail— that false promise keeps us stuck when results don't come. Real results happen with people. And then I reposted, I said, which is why I'm so thankful Ronstad, the world's largest staffing company, is going all in on community with Torque. And I think like, you know, I've watched a few other like founder-led vlogs and they're all— there's this huge groundswell which I called late last year that the community is going to be like the hottest role in 3 to 5 years. I mean, Ronstad's a $30 billion global staffing company, like, and they chose that—

they—

Sander, the global CEO, like made a realization that to separate themselves and to not be a commodity and to see it staffing, they needed to go all in on community. So I'm grateful that Torque was purchased, you know, Mike Morse and Dave Messinger, you know, thank you guys for kind of leading that charge. And just, just really grateful to be here.

You're coming up at 1 year at Torque, right?

Yeah.

Close. What are some of the things you're most proud of that you built?

Yeah, I mean, we're, we're getting pretty close to 1 year. I think technically it's 8 months. I started out as a contractor in August, so May, June, July, August. So yeah, 3 months from 1 year. I mean, it's been pretty drastic what we've been able to do. I would say first off, the thing I'm most proud about is really getting the engagement of the Discord really where it needs to be. So, when we took over, there was no one in the Discord. They had segmented Discord and Slack and it was just a ghost town. And so, we combined the communities and went all in on Discord and I can't even keep up now. I mean, it's absolutely crazy and it's a ton of fun. I was actually thinking about today, As, as we were wandering the streets of Barcelona, like, I truly think that we have already created an ecosystem at Torque to where if you are on the job search and if you truly got invested in our community, you got in the Discord, you engaged with people, you showed up to our live streams, you engaged with people, became an ambassador, or you became a mentor. Like, I really truly feel like we can lay the groundwork or foundation for you. to be successful in your job search, right?

Yeah.

So that's, I'll say probably the communication Discord's the most thing I'm proud about. I'll say the second thing I'm most proud about is, you know, really the launch of our ambassador program. I mean, we've had 70 acceptances from around the globe and the groundswell's just been tremendous. I think another thing that I'm super pumped about is, and this is the type of stuff that you just don't see behind the scenes or you don't see because it's behind the scenes, We've completely kind of transformed what our LATAM community is. So, I mean, we have, when I started, our goal was adding 1,500 candidate, like job seekers a quarter, okay? We are now averaging 1,500 job seekers Oh, that's a lot of people. A week in LATAM. And on top of that, what I'm most proud about is our engagement rate, which is how many people sign up to Torque and then complete their profile. So kind of one of the key signals that indicates that a person is engaged and when we reach out to them, they'll get back to us is having their profile filled out to at least 70%. What we've seen numbers-wise of a non-engaged community is anywhere between 20 to 40%. We are almost at 70% engagement in the LATAM community. So that's, that's just incredible in and of itself. And then I would say just overall brand awareness. Like, I've never in my career been a part of an organization where I have people who I don't know reach out to me and just want to get involved because they see us all over social media. So I would say brand awareness. You know, engagement within LATAM and the new additions to the platform. And then also our Discord and ambassador program.

So how are you feeling? You've been doing a lot of traveling this year. You have this, Render, New York City coming up.

Yeah.

You dealing with any burnout?

Yeah. I mean, listen, I haven't said this publicly. You know, I told you that I'd want to talk about this on the vlog. Like, I mean, I'm dealing with a pretty tremendous amount of burnout right now. You know, I have really started to feel like a lot of brain fog, brain fatigue the week leading up to this trip. And, you know, to be totally frank, like I'm probably not pushing as hard on this trip to just give myself like a little bit of rest because we're about to go into MCN Render and because, you know, I'll be speaking at Amplify Allyship in New York City.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah, it's definitely dealing with some burnout. I mean, it's, we, I have been going heavy on travel, heavy on building brand and building community last 8 months and it's paid off. Um, but I think it's definitely taken its toll a little bit.

I know you've been pretty heavy on LatAm travel and you have a bunch of US travel coming. Has there been a shift in the business?

Yeah, I mean, yeah. So a little peel behind the onion here for a second. Um, so when I started in, in August of last year, the focus was to build community in LatAm right now. There is different ways we view community internally at Ronstadt. There's kind of 3 layers that are starting to form pretty well. The first, like, thing that is lumped in under community is customizable hiring pipelines. I know we talked about a little bit in the, in JFK Airport about how, like, we're doing this project to find Guidewire people across the globe for Guidewire-specific projects. So that's creating customizable hiring pipeline. I'll get to your question here in a second. I want to give a little peel behind the onion. And then, so that, so, you know, basically our goal is to get people on our platform, they fill out their profiles, and that's kind of about it. If they want to take an assessment, we create an assessment for them. Pretty simple. The next level of community is more of like mass amount of folks in a certain skill set, right? So it's like, you know, we've added 50,000 backend engineers, right? So then the focus is, okay, We have 50,000 backend engineers, then how many of those have completed their profile? How many of those have taken assessment? Are they in the Discord, right? That's kind of the second level. And then the third level is really like a truly active community is what our Discord is, which is 4,000 members now. That being said, when I was hired, our focus was LATAM. So internally, we have had a goal to get all the folks in our platform to that certain match-ready profile. So when I came in back in August, we were adding 1,500 LATAM engineers a quarter. We are now averaging that a week. So that's huge. And then on top of that, we are staying steady at pretty close to 70% of those thousands of people, let's say, that sign on, that add on to our platform in a week. 70% of them fill out their profile, at least 70%, which is a signal indicator for us internally that they're going to get back to us. when we reach out to them for a job. So LATAM is doing great, all-time high signups. I think even this quarter we're going to break another quarterly signup. So shout out, uh, Luca and Luan on my team for doing that, heading that up. Um, and then obviously like our, uh, engagement in terms of signing people up is great. Now other parts of the business in Ronstadt have been like, hey, we need to start replicating that for the US. So when, uh, I dug into some numbers actually recently this week before I Before we left for Barcelona, and engagement for the U.S. for the platform is like I think I think like a few months ago was like thirty percent. Now with some of our efforts, we've gotten up to I think forty-four percent, which is which is heading in the right direction for sure. But the ultimate goal is to get up to that seventy percent. So what that looks like for the rest of the year for U.S. conferences, meetups, being very vocal obviously through social, through content like this. So yeah, we're definitely doubling down on U.S.-related activities. But that doesn't mean we're not going to go to Latam. We have Jimena and Mexico. She's going to represent Torque at all these events, and we're still going to talk to our partners down in Mexico and LATAM. It's just we won't be sending the full team as much because we have to shift our focus to the US. Why do you keep going to these conferences, especially if you're dealing with burnout? First off, it's just part of the job. I mean, at the end of the day, I signed up for this. I kind of created this swim lane for myself. And part of building community is you have to do this. Do I think you can build community behind a keyboard? And we do. But if you're only behind a keyboard, maybe. But I don't think, I don't think it'll be near as impactful. So I think going to these things is incredibly important. You know, in full transparency, kind of dealing with burnout this week going to this conference, like I didn't, I'm not going 1,000 miles an hour, right? So in that, like I didn't schedule multiple dinners or multiple meetups. Like I'm just going to the events that the conference is throwing, which is normal, right? I would say that's going 100%. So just knowing myself and pulling back a little bit is something I focus on with this. It just wears on us because, I mean, you're kind of the closest thing to a professional mascot.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, there's a reason why there's like, you know, at University of South Carolina, there's a reason why 4 or 5 people are cocky, the mascot, 'cause it takes a lot outta you. And so, you know, I think it's a constant balance. You know, one of the ways I definitely deal with it is sleep. You know, you'll very rarely find me out past 8 o'clock at an event. I mean, last night was a party night. We were eating tapas at 9, but we were back in the hotel room by 9:30, and I got like 8, 9 hours last night. I feel great today. So, I think sleep is the biggest thing for me. You know, also don't really do alcohol anymore because it just puts a strain. Just trying to stay as healthy as I feasibly can has been a way to deal with burnout, but it still catches up to me.

I've seen your DMs.

How do I stay in touch with everyone? What I realized when I was at Vayco is that I knew I needed to scale myself somehow. And so I started experimenting with like creating a Discord at Vayco and that like, that started to help because what I basically, what I've realized over the last 4 years is if I can put people around me that I trust who think like I do, not groupthink per se, but just can give good information, I can scale myself to where I can help more people, right? Which is why I'm so passionate about the people I hire and how I love my team with like Jason and Ximena, Luca, Luana, Brianna, Angelo, right?

Yes.

Like, I hope I'm not forgetting anybody, but like, you know, those individuals, like they embody me. Like, they, like, I trust them to like give career advice and give networking advice 'cause I've seen what they do and it works. And so for me, you know, I'm pretty delayed on a lot of messages. Like if you DM me on LinkedIn, I only respond back to people once a month on LinkedIn. I think that's why it's so important to build community. Like, I could not do everything. And so I needed and want to continue to hire people who can give really good advice and that I trust, which is why we started the ambassador program too. Like, there's a lot of ambassadors that are like giving really good tactical advice, like shout out Jordan, Roxy, Dan, you know, some of our ambassadors, like Jeff, Jesse, like In the Discord, like, they're out here giving a ton of advice. And if, if it was all on me, we wouldn't have community because I can only be in so many places at once. So shout out to the ambassadors, shout out to the Torque Discord. Maybe we can do like a, like a thing where it's like torque.dev/discord.

I saw that Jason's starting to do a vlog.

Yeah.

Why are you so big on like documentary style content?

There's been kind of some evolutions of video content over the last, like, I would say 6 years. So like pre-COVID, like people, of course, in the B2B space were doing video content, but it wasn't really good, you know? And then COVID hit and then everybody was doing webinars and Zoom calls and streams. But it's kind of all the same content. It's like a person that sits in front of a computer screen, in front of their video camera. But then you have, you know, 2 people that really stick out to me that are doing really different content is like the Terminal guys, like the coffee guys. And then you also have Jason Lengstorf, right, with his like game shows and stuff. So for me, like, I have always loved Netflix documentaries. I grew up watching documentaries. One of the earliest documentaries I remember watching was my dad got me the 1994 Road to the Stanley Cup, New York Rangers. So literally, actually, I've never said this to video or publicly before, but I would say that's probably like where and when I fell in love with documentaries. I watched The Mighty Ducks obviously a ton, but my dad bought me this VHS and I wore it out. And it was just documenting the New York Rangers' march to the Stanley Cup in '94, the last time they won it. And I just think with us building community, I want us to be in the public and being the leader in building community. Well, the only way to do that is to document it. Right? Like, literally building community is just documenting what we're doing. And so, yeah, I'm super proud of Jason for starting up his vlog. He just dropped one recently when we did this recording with his trip to Atlanta for DevOps Days. People want to watch shows, and this is our show, right? You can watch Jason's show or my show. So, it's incredibly important, and I'm pretty pumped for the future and kind of this documentary-style content.