In this interview segment, the speaker discusses the pitfalls of relying on familiarity and referrals when hiring, noting that such practices can limit diversity. They trace the evolution of unconventional hiring sources, from athletes traditionally favored for their discipline, to newer pools that emerged after COVID‑19—retail workers, teachers, and others whose careers were disrupted. The conversation also hints at the upcoming relevance of Generation Alpha as a future talent source. Overall, the speaker emphasizes the need to broaden hiring criteria beyond familiar networks to capture diverse skill sets and adapt to shifting labor market dynamics.
So let's unwrap that and go beneath and say, tell me from your experience, tell me about some of the unconventional hires that you've made and what have you learned from it?
Yeah. So, oh, big topic. What I would say is that people are very used to familiarity. So when you think about leadership and you think about who you work with, often, you know, you're going to go to places where you've seen that success or you're aware of that success. So, a couple of ideas could be, you know, you're an athlete yourself, you've had a successful athlete come into your team, an athlete applies, whether it's football, cricket, running, whatever that may be, that discipline. So, you're already feeling good about this person coming through. So, I think I just wanted to sort of highlight familiarity is one thing. I think the second thing is that a lot of companies, you know, benefit from, but also create risk in, is referrals. So, In my background at Salesforce and at Procore, that was definitely a huge thing. Talent acquisition was keen to get referrals because you'd be looking for like-minded people, but before you realize it, you've got people in the same circles living very similar lives that don't offer that diversity. So I think it's really important to highlight that. I think when it comes to looking at unconventional profiles, we spoke about athletes. I think the world of SDR today is that we're in a different phase. So if you go back a number of years, uh, athletes were good profiles, uh, recruiters, uh, you had probably real estate, you had people who'd done some form of selling. That was kind of your, your bread and butter. I think you've started to see, you know, a change. Um, certainly, you know, after COVID, we'd see people who were sort of reconsidering their career, um, because overnight their roles were shut down. So you think about retail, you think about Teachers, who all of a sudden are doing something completely different, running a classroom through video versus interacting with children. So, I think you started to see that unpack. Now, I think we're in a completely different phase. I was reading about it last night, Gen Alpha. Pri, are you familiar with Gen Alpha?
Yeah.
So, we're talking about the demographic of kids who are brought up with iPads, and they're going to be reaching that sort of phase of 16. I think in New South Wales, for example, 16 is the legal age that you can work full-time. So, we're gonna start seeing a completely different market of candidates that aren't like those traditional backgrounds I've just spoke about. So, if you think about some roles I've had, it was quite enjoyable kind of making a list of the different profiles. I wonder if they listen to this and they'll hear themselves, but I had a comedian, Awesome comedian who did very well and has now moved into cybersecurity sales, running teams. Go back to COVID, I had a pilot. So someone who was a second officer, and obviously overnight, suddenly, no routes, nowhere to fly, and started to reconsider their career. I mean, other ones I talk about, we talked about retail managers,
