The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
Welcome to The Breakthrough Hiring Show! We are on a mission to help leaders make hiring a competitive advantage.
Join our host, James Mackey, and guests as they discuss various topics, with episodes ranging from high-level thought leadership to the tactical implementation of process and technology.
You will learn how to:
- Shift your team’s culture to a talent-first organization.
- Develop a step-by-step guide to hiring and empowering top talent.
- Leverage data, process, and technology to achieve hiring success.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
The Breakthrough Hiring Show: Recruiting and Talent Acquisition Conversations
EP 179: How a Global TA Ops Leader Thinks About Hiring
Everett Chaffin, Director of Global TA Operations at Zendesk, joins us to explore how recruiting operations can become a true force multiplier for people. He shares his journey from starting his career at his dad's agency to running TA Ops for Zendesk. He unpacks how AI, standardization, and storytelling empower recruiters to act as trusted talent advisors rather than just process owners.
Thank you to our sponsor, SecureVision, for making this show possible!
Follow us:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/82436841/
SecureVision: #1 Rated Embedded Recruitment Firm on G2!
https://www.g2.com/products/securevision/reviews
Thanks for listening!
Hey, today we have Everett Chaffin on the show. He is the director of global TA operations and programs for Zendesk, and we have really exciting things to talk about. So, Everett, thanks for joining me on the show.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, thanks for having me, James. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, of course. To start us off, we want to learn more about you, uh a little bit about just who you are. Could you share a little bit?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, sure. So um, father of five, live in Texas currently, and uh I think what makes me kind of unique in the recruiting space is that I've actually known I was gonna be a recruiter since I was a young kid, right? My my dad started owning an agency back in 1998, and I grew up going to work with my dad. He owned video stores before that. So I grew up going to work with him, and then when he moved into recruiting, um kind of the same thing was going to work with him before school, coming over after school, and really seeing how you know how he did his job and what that entailed. And at a young age, I'm like, I think I can do this. And my dad would actually give me tasks to do at a young age to try to like source candidates. Of course, this is 98. There is no LinkedIn. You're looking at company lists or you know, trying to just find companies online in any way possible using old search companies. And at one point, he actually gave me a CFO search and he was just trying to keep me entertained and you know, not bothering him essentially. I was like, look, if you can find me three candidates, I'll talk with them if any of them make sense. And if you know somebody gets hired, I'll give them or I'll buy you a go-kart. Thinking, of course, that I would never have any kind of shot at actually accomplishing that. I ended up finding three candidates, presented to my dad these candidates. He liked one of the candidates, reaches out, and no joke, this guy turned out to be the guy who married the CFO at his wedding like five years prior. They were like best friends and they had fallen out of contact and were like, oh my gosh, like I love this guy. Like, I can't believe I didn't think about him for the role. And it got all the way through this through the whole interview process. He got an offer, and then it turned out this guy tried to double dip on a bonus and his friend found out, and so they ended up taking away the offer. But I was hooked. I was like, okay, like if I if I could do this at 12, I can do this for a career. And so at that early age of 12, I knew I was going to be a recruiter and it really kind of shaped the way that I was moving forward in my life because I'm like, this is what I want to do. And so I was always trying to learn from my dad and always trying to listen to conversations and really understand what made him successful. And I think that really helped catapult me into uh into my career.
SPEAKER_00:You might be the only guest that I've had that knew they wanted to get into recruitment when they were a kid. I think like everybody was just like, like most people, I didn't realize I was gonna end up in recruiting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, most people just fall into it. Like I don't think it's not normally like a family business. It's actually kind of funny because I have other parts of my family outside of my dad's side who are also recruiters and have owned recruiting agencies for you know 20 plus years. So just for whatever reason, my family has a a lot of recruiters in it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's great. That's great. So when you became an adult, right, and you grew up, was your first full-time recruiting job at your family's company?
SPEAKER_01:It was, yeah. Yeah. So I did um executive retained search for three and a half years and I cut my teeth in the renewable, renewable energy industry. So working on, you know, solar manufacturers, a large uh EPC, so engineering procurement, construction companies that were building massive wind farms and solar farms and things like that. And you know, was working, like I said, at an executive level very early on. And I think that kind of helped me understand that recruiting is about people, not intimidation. And you can build strong relationships with really high-level executives, and you don't have to be afraid of, oh, this person's a CEO or this person's a you know VP somewhere. Everyone's just people at the end of the day. And if you know you do good work, like you'll be you'll be just fine. You don't need to have that like intimidation factor.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, for sure, for sure. And so now fast forward, you're over at Zendesk and you're based in uh Austin, is that right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm a little little town outside of Austin.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, cool.
SPEAKER_01:So are you from Austin for about 20 years?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, okay. Where are you from initially?
SPEAKER_01:Uh Sacramento.
SPEAKER_00:Sacramento?
SPEAKER_01:Yes. I spent about the first 20 years in Sacramento and then the the last 20 years uh in and around Austin, essentially.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. All right. So you move out to Austin for work or yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um well, I wanted to kind of change things up. I was living in California and it's just so expensive in California. And you know, Austin's kind of having a tech scene that was starting to emerge, and I felt like a good chance to come out and check out something different. My mom's family is in Texas, and so I wanted to just kind of have a change of scenery and came out here and actually joined a recruiting agency called the HT Group. I was there for about a year, and that's kind of my first jump into tech. And it was tech manufacturing was a little bit different, and uh did that for a year, and then luckily actually Indeed reached out to me at the time. They had a recruiting role, and uh they were based here in Austin, and so I ended up interviewing with them and joining Indeed, and Indeed at that time was about maybe 800 globally. When I left Indeed, there was about 12,000 employees. So I got in at a very early time and was there for seven years and really saw that grow and turn into just a massive company, which was just an amazing experience in general.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And now you're at Zendesk and you're balancing uh working at a category defining leading tech company, and you have five kids at the same time. I don't I don't know how you you pull that off.
SPEAKER_01:That's uh I have an amazing wife and it definitely helps. And my kids are great too. Like I really do have good kids. I'm pretty blessed. That's awesome.
SPEAKER_00:What's what's the age range in in your kids?
SPEAKER_01:Like, yeah, so I have um almost two-year-old, and then I have a nine-year-old, a ten-year-old, a thirteen-year-old, and a fifteen-year-old.
SPEAKER_00:That's a pretty good spread right there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And it's nice because the older ones, you know, help the younger ones. And so it's not just like my wife and I, right? Like, we do have the extra the help and support. And luckily, my parents moved from California and just live right down the street from me as well. So it's, you know, we have that extra um kind of built-in babysitting as well.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's nice. That is nice. That helps a lot. Um so hey, so at Zendesk right now, so director of global TA operations programs and executive recruiting sounds like funnels up into you as well. Could you just give us an overview on exactly what your role is and maybe how the talent acquisition team is uh built within the company so we just we can understand your point of impact a little better?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So essentially I own like all tools, systems, vendors, enablement, global coordination, early careers, executive recruiting, internal mobility, um, essentially kind of everything that helps make the talent acquisition team operate. And then outside of like the actual delivery, I have a uh a boss, a leader who owns kind of all the that that delivery side of things, and then I own everything else to essentially help make sure that our teams are as efficient as possible. My real goal and the thing that I'm working on is how do I or how do we get more out of what we have, right? And how do we make people more efficient? How do we make them better recruiters and really elevate them to talent advisors, right? Because that's I think the key, right? Anybody can be a recruiter, but you know, not everybody can be a talent advisor. And so how do we give them the opportunity and the space to do that? And so part of that from my side of things is how do we make them more efficient? So it's looking at different tools, essentially artificial intelligence, right, AI, and understanding how we can incorporate that into our day-to-day to free up time for the things that are more important that allow us to have a better hiring manager experience, a better candidate experience. So I'll give you an example. So one of the things that I think was pretty impactful recently that um we incorporated was actually a inbound applicant review, like scoring system. And so essentially, if you think about it, we have over a thousand people that we're hiring on a yearly basis. We have hundreds of recs open at kind of any one time, and we're getting a very large qual or quantity of candidates that are coming in inbound to our recs. The best recruiter on a good day might be taking 15 to 30 seconds to review a resume, in some cases, maybe as much as a minute, right? We had 140,000 resumes that came through this tool that we were able to rank and rate and basically sort based on you know fit according to the job description. And then the must-haves and nice haves that we even put into the large language model. And so when you think about the time savings for something like that, 140,000 resumes, even 30 seconds, that's you know 70,000 minutes. How many months of time is that? And things like that, and trying to understand what are the use cases for AI within recruiting and how do I continue to increase the efficiency of our team because budgets aren't necessarily changing, right? So how do we increase what our teams can do without majorly changing the budget? And that's kind of where my main focus is right now, and trying to understand holistically where else we can use AI.
SPEAKER_00:So that's interesting because also, I mean, uh that coupled with executive recruiting, how did that Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So right now, the way that we are doing executive recruiting is more of a program. So it's more of like a white glove approach. We do heavily use vendors and agencies at this time. Um, and so it's managing those agencies and making sure that things are going well, kind of coupled also with like scheduling and candidate experience. And so we've built out a program that essentially allows not only candidates that are coming through an agency, but also candidates that are coming through our own internal teams to have the same experience that executives can always know that they're gonna have the same standardized experience and really allow us to make sure that for everything is moving very smoothly for all parties involved. And so that's kind of where it is right now, and that is continuing to evolve, and I could see that going a couple different ways. But the main thing was just making sure that we standardized stuff for kind of everybody and had a really great experience, all the information, smooth process, quick responses, and things like that.
SPEAKER_00:So, how do you go about identifying the biggest pain points in terms of optimizing through tech? I mean, is it like are you constantly having conversations with I suppose it's on the town acquisition side, but probably also on the hiring manager side. What's your process of essentially analyzing and figuring out what to move forward with, what type of tech to move forward with?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, the recruiting team is my customer, right? It's not what I think is the most effective or efficient or you know, what I think would be the best tool. It's really, you know, I really want the recruiters to drive the things that have value and what they're trying to do. And so it's having a lot of conversations with the recruiters, with the recruiting managers and understanding like, what are the things that are taking the most amount of time for you? Where are the opportunities to be more effective? You know, what can we do to elevate the team and really get them in the spot where they can do more with what they have and not lose any of that candidate experience or really even increase the candidate experience because they do have more time to spend with candidates or to spend with hiring managers. And so that's kind of from the recruiting side of things. And then when I first joined first joined the company, there wasn't really any standardization from the hiring manager side of things. And so the processes were not I'm saying disready or something like that, but there wasn't a standardized process. There was really nothing but standardized. Reporting wasn't standardized or any of that. And so working with the business to understand what their pain points were, where they saw the biggest opportunities for success and to come in. And there's a lot of low-hanging fruit, essentially. And so the first kind of let's say eight to ten months or so was standardizing interviews, standardizing reporting, going and working with all the different finance groups, with the different leaders, understanding what views they wanted to see. Because I also have built out like all the reporting and everything. Essentially, like all everything that I'm trying to do is for the business or for the recruiters. And so I work very heavily with whatever group that I'm supporting to make sure that whatever a tool or situation I'm doing that the outcome is going to meet their needs.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, so you've had a really interesting career, right? And I I think it's pretty cool that it started when you were 12 also. So you actually got like your lot more experience than most people your age, right? You started off on the agency side, but what's cool is like you start off in very early, it sounded like more executive search, and then you've been at really hyper growth uh organizations, like Indeed sounds like it was scaling to an insane extent while you were there. And now you're at Zendesk, right? Which most folks, particularly tech, are very familiar with, and you're on the kind of systems side, right? Um so you have a really interesting, I think, perspective and and uh experience that I'd say a lot of TA leaders haven't been exposed to. So I'm I'm curious, are there any top kind of like principles or takeaways or things that you've learned throughout your career that you've when it comes to building like TA programs that you're saying, hey, this is the most important thing, or what is always top of mind for you and what are the top kind of takeaways from your career thus far?
SPEAKER_01:Is yeah, so I would say it's okay to fail, but you want to fail fast and you want to learn from that failure as quickly as possible. And like in, you know, if you're not failing, you're not learning, kind of a thing, right? Like you got to try different things, you gotta be willing to take some chances, but also understand that not everything is gonna work. And so if you do need to pivot and make an adjustment, then that's totally okay, right? Um, I would say another thing too is that feedback is a gift, right? You want to have feedback. If you're not getting feedback, then you're not gonna truly understand where your opportunities for growth are or how to operationalize better. And so I'm always asking for feedback, always wanting to know what I can do better, how can I adjust something to make myself more effective. And I think that's something that's really done well in my career. And then I would say for the recruiters out there, become a storyteller. Don't just be some that's pitching something. Like being a storyteller will really help sell opportunity and really tie together the opportunity and the experience. And so you can really increase your ability to attract top-level candidates and have really great conversations and truly understand what people are about and not just checking some boxes on a paper and hoping that the person's interested. Because if the person is not bought into you and bought into the company, you're just another person. But if they feel connected to you and they feel like you've built this connection, like they're less likely to ghost you, they're less likely to probably turn down your your offer. And historically, like my teams have had in the high 90s offer acceptance rates. And when I was a recruiter, I was in like the 99% acceptance rate because people felt like we were friends, right? And it wasn't that it was disingenuous. Like I was friends with a lot of these candidates, but you know, I built a relationship with them and I I understood who they were and where they were coming from and really tied that to the opportunity at hand and how that could really tie into the things like maybe they didn't have a good work-life balance and they wanted to spend more time with their family, or maybe they were struggling and they needed more money, and that would really kind of help their quality of life. And so it was understanding the pain points of candidates, I think, really um and how that ties into what you're offering them, really will help you be successful as a recruiter.
SPEAKER_00:I think storytelling is incredibly important. And I'm curious, I think the way what you're saying is that understanding their pain points and the storytelling is also like essentially it's part of telling the story, right? Because you want to be able to highlight essentially what's really important to the candidate. So let me just I'm gonna explain and see if you could tell me if I'm thinking about this the right way. Okay. Um, or like for instance, if they're focused on work-life balance, then you would probably focus more on the cultural aspects of potentially boundaries or scope or the communication style uh of like leadership about communicating, what's expected within what timeline. And um, and that's more of the story that you tell. It's just like deciding what to emphasize and focus on when you're is that what you're yeah, I think you know I think you hit the nail on the head, right?
SPEAKER_01:It's yeah, understanding how what your value prop is to their problem, right? And so how can you best sell or how can you best alleviate whatever issue that they had with what you're selling? Because at the end of the day, recruiting itself. You're selling an opportunity, you're selling a hiring manager, you're selling a team, and everything is like it's like 360 sells, is what I used to say, right? And so it's understanding, overcoming objectives and understanding where the problems are and how you can alleviate those problems essentially with whatever it is that you're packaging up and giving to them. That's kind of how how I looked at it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:And where did you was that like experience you started to gain from the very beginning working on uh working with you You know, I think I think I actually got that from my like face-to-face sales for I worked for T-Mobile when I was real young, um selling smartphones, like right when phones and smartphones like or like a smartphones came out, that was what I was doing. And I was at a mall and it was like high touch point, and people were trying to leave and they weren't really trying to buy something right then. So it was like constantly overcoming objectives and trying to get them to that like acceptance place, right? And I think that really actually helped shape my ability to sell opportunities within recruiting. It really helped me. Like finding people was great. I understood how to do that. I did that a lot. I was basically like a sorcerer for my dad growing up, right? But actually selling opportunities and having those conversations, I think a lot of that experience came from my face-to-face sales within T-Mobile. And one thing I think too that also helped kind of when I was thinking about getting people to accept offers, you're not always gonna have an offer that is going to excite the candidate, right? Maybe they wanted a hundred and you're coming in with 95 or whatever that situation may be. I learned very quickly that if I came in and told them, hey, first thing is you know, bad news, oh, you're getting 95, like they're gonna be turned off, they're not gonna be excited about the opportunity, and they're probably not gonna listen to anything or having to say after. And you may have a lot of value prop outside of just the base salary. Maybe there's unlimited time off, maybe there's food, or whatever that may be. And so I learned very quickly on offers where the best or the thing that I wanted to give this person wasn't necessarily gonna happen. I would start with all the other things first. So they would have to listen to my entire pitch, and then I would deliver like the day salary. But at that point, they would already be so jazzed about all the other benefits and perks and things that the business and the team that they're gonna be working on by the time I got to oh, you're gonna be making 95, not 100. They didn't even care. They were already gonna accept the role. And so I think it's to how you position information to recruiters or how you position information to the business or your team or whatever, and that really can change the way that that information is received. And so it's important to have a positive attitude and relay that information in a positive way and really think about the way that you're giving it because it can really greatly change the outcome.
SPEAKER_00:So you feel like the like starting off in on the sales path to like even back in the days we were doing T Mobile was pretty formative experience that potentially enabled you to be able to see things the way that you you do now, right?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. 100%. And yeah. And to even expand on that, I hired people with zero recruiting experience on my team. Like I met a guy selling furniture who sold me my furniture, and he just gave me this fantastic experience. I'm like, I think you would be a great recruiter. I ended up hiring him at indeed, and he absolutely crushed it. The guy was you know, 30 years, like literally like 30 years sales experience, never done recruiting, and came in and just absolutely blew it out of the water. And I did that with a few different individuals, kind of similar backgrounds. And so personally, my own experience and just what I've seen, like people that have that kind of sales background coming into recruiting typically are pretty successful.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think so. It's like the huge behavioral element, yeah. Right, which is, I mean, I I think I see that well, it's in every industry, but it's something we talk about a lot in tech, particularly as fast paced as it is, and you have to be super adaptable with recruiting. You have to be able to connect with people and really uncover quickly what matters to them, right?
SPEAKER_01:You can't be afraid to talk to people. I think you know, picking up the phone, I think is almost a lost art nowadays. I'm not saying that people don't pick up the phone anymore, but it's much easier and safer to send a text message or send an email. But there's I think something lost just picking up the phone and having a conversation with somebody, delivering news in that way, or just trying to get a hold of them. It's a lost art in some ways. And I think that people that are not afraid to pick up the phone and call someone will have a lot of success and maybe nothing more than something that's not, but I don't know. I think there's just there's something to it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, so when you think about building systems, right, and tech stacks and working with your recruiters, how do you help them find that balance, right? Because your part of your role is like optimization, automation, but from the lens, I'm assuming from enabling your recruiters to have more impactful conversations. But is there any like guidance that you give them in terms of how to think navigating that or where it makes sense to slow down and making sure that whatever process and motion you're building out still gives lots of space and opportunity for your recruiters to create those relationships? I'm sure that that probably goes into how you think about building a tech stack, right? Is optimizing for relationships in a sense like allowing your recruiters to invest in those, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So yeah, to your point, I'm trying to find tools and build systems that, again, are increasing the capacity of our recruiters to allow them to spend time on things like building relationships with the hiring managers, spend more time on an intake, truly understand the roles, spend some time with the team. Like if it's a team that you're gonna be working a ton with, like go spend some time with them, listen to what they're doing, understand their roles, go to their stand-ups that they're within engineering, really embrace those positions and what their roles are and what they're doing, and become a subject matter expert on it so that you can ask the right questions. And also you can start to learn how to talk with the hiring manager, how to push on different things because of experiences that you've had or things that you've heard. And so you start to have this deeper understanding and you become a true industry expert on these different things. And I think that allows you to ask the right questions with candidates and make Sure, that you're really doing your due diligence, and that's what's going to elevate you, right? Like anybody can ask, oh, do you know this or do you know that? But then being able to ask the follow-up question and the follow-up question and really be able to like pull that onion layer back and understand what a good answer looks like, what a bad answer looks like, that's what's going to elevate you. And then you can influence the business, being like, hey, I talked to this individual, like maybe they don't have this, or maybe they don't quite have this. But as I dug into XYZ, I really had a great understanding of their background and what they've done. And they definitely know what they're talking about because and you can start to relate all these different things together and pull from here and pull from there. And it shows one that you're you are an expert to the hiring manager, two, you're giving the candidate a better opportunity to win. Because if you're spending the time with the candidate and you're having these conversations, like you don't want to just send your notes and be done with it and not push back, right? If you truly know what you're talking about and understand your positions, you can push back and you can make the most of every conversation and make yourself more effective from that standpoint as well. And I think that can also elevate recruiters quite a bit.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. I think that I think it's really important, probably a very important part of like who you are now in terms of NTA ops, coming from a background where you did so much hands-on recruiting. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Because I understand how you think about like building systems, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And it's crazy too, because I mean, man, if I had the things that recruiters have nowadays, when I was a recruiter back in the day, it would be such a great time because there's so many amazing tools. I mean, so much right now that just elevates recruiters and the amount of time they get to spend on all those administrative tasks, like it's been reduced by, gosh, I don't even know how much. But you know, it's crazy to me to think like the opportunity that these recruiters have nowadays and how they can really elevate themselves and spend the time doing the fun things, in my opinion. Like spending the time with the candidates, spending the time of the higher managers, like that's the fun piece. You can automate sourcing and inbound applicant review and even initial round of interviews and things that nowadays. And I think that really allows recruiters to immerse themselves into the other pieces, and that's what's the fun part to me.
SPEAKER_00:But yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, it's super important. I think too, just uh having done like executive search and a sales-bent kind of background and really understanding storytelling and uncovering pain points and understanding how to present value propositions and communicating at that level of nuance, right? And then bringing that into a TA ops motion. Like another huge part of your life, right? Like you said, you're a father of five. Uh you know, uh, you got teenagers now. So, how do you think that that's influenced who you've become as a uh professional right now in your prime? Lots of experience. You've been through ups and downs, I'm sure, in in tech. And I'm curious just how that's impacted or maybe shifted your perspective on building teams and hiring.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think it probably impacts some of the ways that I manage, right? Like family is extremely important to me. It's number one. I always try to give my people space. Like if they need to take some time for something or they have something come up. Like I'm always, you know, obviously, I understand, right? Like I understand what they're going through, understand those needs. I'm very empathetic to that and want people to take their time and focus on the things that matter most. And because if you're worrying about your family and you're worrying about the things at home, it's gonna affect your work life when you have that level of stress because you can take care of the things that you need to take care of at home. I think it actually allows you to do a better job in your day-to-day because you don't have that in the back of your mind. So I think for me, just having that empathy and that understanding and knowing that things come up or people need to go do this or go and do that, that's totally fine. For me, it's like as long as you're doing your job, I don't care how necessarily you're doing it. If you need to leave for a few hours every day and come back and do some stuff at night, as long as it's getting done and it's getting done well, like that's that's what matters at the end of the day. And obviously, that's maybe a little different for recruiters versus like someone in operations versus somebody in coordination, but as much flexibility that I can give, I think, is key to making sure that people are happy. And I think it's worked well too, because looking at my teams, I've had a team of like 55 and other places I've had teams of 10, 15 or whatever plus. And I don't really have people that leave my team. People typically are trying to like get on my team. And I think it's the way that I lead, and people understand that I'm an empathetic leader and I'm somebody that leads by example. And I do try to truly give people as much opportunity for success. And I I'm not scared of other people's success. I value growing other people and seeing them be successful. And that's it what excites me. Now, I've had success as an individual contributor, I've been there, done that, and so I want to see how I can help other people and how I can elevate other people, and that's really what brings me the most joy and I see the most value. And that's what kind of keeps me getting up every day. Is like, how can I elevate these other people and make their lives a little better? And how can I see their careers grow? And that's I don't know, that's just what excites me now.
SPEAKER_00:So as a leader, it's like essentially part of your value system, is it's like helping your team elevate uh become the best versions of themselves professionally and and personally, you're talking about the whole person, and so providing that level of flexibility and trust, right?
SPEAKER_01:Like to recruit recruiting is an art form too, right? Like sure people have different ways of doing it, and you know, I don't want to ever stifle somebody's way of doing something. And so when I was a recruiting manager or director, I would always tell people, like, look, you can try to do things your way. And if you have a certain way you like to do things, that's totally great. And we can go and you can do that as long as you want, as long as it's working. But if things start to change and maybe it's not working, then y'all need to step in a little bit and kind of maybe give some advice and guide you a little bit more. But I want to give you that freedom to go out and do things the way that you see fit within the guidelines that we've built. And I think that helps because you don't want to like pigeonhole people into a box of how to do things or how to operate because not everybody's the same, right? And so I think giving that flexibility is really important.
SPEAKER_00:I think so. I I think flexibility is important in terms of in terms of how folks operate in their roles. Sometimes it's a tough balance to find, I think. Um, even for me at this point, I've been leading managing for a decade. So I've been doing it a while, and I think over time, like you start to dial in on it. Definitely, but I think the main reason for that is buy-in to the extent that I I feel like I've been able to be flexible as a leader allows people more ownership of like work product and outcomes. Because what I want to avoid is folks feeling like, well, I I couldn't have produced this outcome because I wasn't able to do it. And I think it's like 100%. I might have experience in the role, but I also like they're hands-on in it in the moment, and things evolve and things change, and maybe I don't understand 100%. And there's some things every once in a while where I'm like, no, like I just know that this is the way that we have to do it. But generally, more times than not, I I try to give that space. And I've worked with leaders that they want everything very uniform and just on the recruiting side incredibly metric driven. Uh for me, for instance, just like on recruiters, I've seen recruiters that do very low volume, they don't do a lot of outreach, they have great numbers in terms of hires and quality of hire. I got other recruiters that make crush at volume and they're doing high volume and they do a great job and get great outcomes. I'm usually less concerned. Where I also align with you is if there's a challenge, if something's not going well, then I step in and it's like, okay, well, now we need process, we need to kind of be a little bit more regimented and this approach, at least until we can get back on track. I would say like leveraging people's creative side too, leveraging their own experiences and differences. I think it's overall a good thing. And it just I think folks are just generally more passionate and excited about. And I don't want to be that boss where somebody doesn't, frankly, somebody doesn't hit a goal and they're like, Well, if my my freaking boss had me doing it. Now I was like, Well, hey, if you don't hit your goal, that's on you. It's not on me.
SPEAKER_01:Like, hey, we'll we'll try your way for as long as we can until we have to do something different, right?
SPEAKER_00:Right. Yeah, yeah, it's messed around. But um, well, okay, like on the on the leadership side though, because I mean, yeah, you've been now, well, first off, you had your your dad as a mentor who was a leader at his own company, so you got to see that at a very early age, which is like I think a great formative experience. Maybe we go back there. What else did you learn about leadership and just ownership, right? If he's a business owner, there's a high level of personal accountability there. What what else did you learn about like just leadership and management and personal accountability, that kind of thing, just growing up with your dad as a as a business owner in the recruiting space. And I'm just curious to see how else that impacts how you lead and think about your job today.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I'm gonna think about that. So I mean, I think seeing my dad own his own business, it was if you're not being successful like eat on eat, right? I think I learned very quickly of it's like it's up to me to be successful and make sure that I'm doing the things I need to do to provide for my family. And there's no excuses, you just get it done, right? And so for me, like failure was never an option. It's like I'm gonna go in and I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna figure out how to do it well, I'm gonna overcome whatever it is that I'm facing and I'm gonna be successful. And I've kind of taken that mindset into every job that I've had. One thing my dad used to always tell me too is like always do the job that you have really well to get to the job that you want, right? And so if you're thinking about the next job and you're trying to like you're thinking too much about that, and you're maybe not doing the current job that you have as well, like you're not gonna get to that next job. So crush what you have, look ahead to the future, understand what are things that you can start to do to get you ready for that next job and start to do those regardless of having that role or not. And I think that's also helped me in my career because I've always um been able to do what I've done really well, kind of hone that, and then start to say, okay, where can I take on more? Like, how can I be better? How can I bring more value to the organization? And also to, I think um, one thing that he kind of taught me early on was try to bring value to an organization as a whole, not just to your own self or your own team, right? So it's like, okay, if I'm thinking of a problem that I'm having as like a recruiter, for example, how do I solve that problem for the organization company wide versus just myself or just my team, right? And so thinking bigger and thinking broader, um, I think has helped me grow and expedite my career because I'm not thinking my vision is much more widespread, I guess, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's like the whole seeing the forest through the tree. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's I think that can be really challenging for people. I've even worked with like great recruiters that sometimes folks just have uh they're I think it's it's there's like two things, right? It's like self-awareness is really important, and then just I don't know what you want to call it, like organizational awareness, or um yeah, you really need to understand what the company's trying to accomplish. Exactly. What you know, what is your CEO trying to accomplish, the board, the investors, like what is and it's interesting. A lot of folks out there don't really know what the company they work for, like what their north star is.
SPEAKER_01:That's very true. Like that's you hit the null. That is very true. It's surprising sometimes.
SPEAKER_00:Right. So I mean, I uh my girlfriend actually recently started a new job. And of course, I'm a business owner, and I've always thinking of just different kind of questions, and my lens of interview questions is usually very different than a lot of people. Like, I really okay. What is the president trying to accomplish? What are they doing, and what's their goal? What are the challenges? What are the gaps? How does your role play into that? Right? And what can you do to help them? I mean, not even thinking about it in terms of a JD, uh, it's just like like how can you come in and solve for that? Like, how can you help the president accomplish that goal?
SPEAKER_01:Right? Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00:And I think just like she had a conversation with the president on her first or second day, just saying, Hey, I just want to make sure I have a really clear understanding of what you're looking to accomplish what the company is, and then what your point of impact is within that plan to make that happen, just so I I can operate as effectively as possible in my role. And of course, the guy, yeah, he loved that. Yeah, of course.
SPEAKER_01:You're trying to help me solve my problems, right?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, like, wow, it's a really great. So, I mean, I think like just yeah, being able to see the bigger picture and I mean, there was like there's been times in my career, particularly in the earlier days of Secure Vision, which my company, it's an embedded recruiting firm for the tech industry. And uh, I've been doing it for a decade and worked with hundreds of tech companies, right? And in the earlier days when I was more hands-on and building myself out, there would be engagements where my initial point of impact was as a recruiter, if it was like a growth stage SaaS company, but in three to six months, I mean, I was really part of the strategic leadership team. Yeah, uh driving even go-to-market decisions and strategy and contract strategies and all these different things, just because you're i I always fortunately, I suppose, just had the mindset of going in and figuring out, look, well, how do I just I just want to make this company successful? You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_01:Like, and I think that that mindset is just it's so you know, it's funny too you said that because I think that's also kind of helped me having that mindset, like similar mindset to what you just described, and coming into companies like Indeed and Zendesk and Activision. How do I think outside of my role and bring value at a much larger level? I was constantly thinking about different things. Like even at Indeed, for example, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to help launch multiple products because Indeed was a recruiting company, right? And they were building tools and products for recruiters outside of, you know, and not just candidates. And so that was really exciting to me. It was like, how can I bring value and working with product managers and being like, hey, like we could do this or we could do that, and thinking about how they could go to market with the tool. And I did some proof of concepts for some different things and helped launch products. And and I just love that aspect of it. It was a ton of fun. But it's like you said elevating your thinking to that company level and understanding where can I bring more value outside of just my role or how do I be more of a strategic thought partner than just doing what I'm doing right now? Or not that you're not a thought thought or that I'm not a thought partner, but you know, how do I continue to elevate myself essentially?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think it's like for moving up and being a good leader and being able to be even in a position to lead, it's executing on your core responsibilities, right? Yeah. And it's leveling up in terms of can I always add more value than what's expected, right? Like exactly. 100%. Are those the most important things when it comes to professional growth and success? Or anything.
SPEAKER_01:I feel I mean, yeah, they're definitely up there. If not, if not one of the most important, or if not the most important, one of the most important, because I think that's that's what elevates people from being good to great, right? There's a lot of good people out there, but how do you become great? How do you become a difference maker? And that's where you really want to be is it's some that this person's involved with the project, like they're gonna make a difference, they're gonna elevate it, they're gonna think of things that everyone else isn't thinking of. That's how you want other people to perceive you and help you personally grow and things like that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I'm curious too, when you look at your career now and where you're at, how do you think about the future and uh breakthroughs you want to make? Like, how do you think about elevating your own game to the next level and continuously adding more value to the organization as an operator for such a successful company and somebody who's grown a lot professionally and a very impactful role, right? Um what's the next level look like for you? Because other operators are tuning in, right? Folks in similar roles. And I think it'd be really valuable to get a sense for how you think about your own professional development and progression and how you're gonna continue to evolve.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think for me, and thinking about where I'm at now, where things are going, where the future of town acquisition is going, I really think understanding how to use AI and use AI effectively is really one of the most important skills. I think companies are gonna start to move to more skills-based hiring versus where they're at now. And I'm not saying that you know they're gonna have like skills marketplaces within companies, but you know, AI and understanding how to prompt well and things like that is gonna level the playing field quite a bit, right? And so once you start to level that playing field, it's like, how do I learn, A, position myself, be able to do that, and then where can I grow and add value kind of outside of that? And so I think understanding AI, understanding out how to use it effectively, how to elevate your teams to use it effectively, like that's gonna be the difference maker moving forward because people that understand how to use AI are gonna replace people that don't understand how to use AI. And companies are gonna be looking for that skill set moving forward. And somebody that has the same level of skill, but one understands AI deeply and knows how to build agents. My team's building agents, for example. One of the associates on my team, really fantastic. Like she's she's great. She built an AI agent to not only build job descriptions with the Zendesk feel to it, but then also creates interview questions that are tied into skills and experience-based questions. And so the hiring manager comes in, they can build the job description, they can get all the questions for interviews, standardize it, have it built out, and so things like that, right? And and that's gonna be the difference maker, um, I think moving forward is really understanding how to use AI. I'm doing everything I can to be a prompt expert and understand how to leverage it and really continue my learning in that segment because that's where I see the most opportunity to move the meter and the people that you know that aren't adapting are gonna be left behind. Like I'm just it just is what it is, you know?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. That's um and and this kind of leads into our rapid fire questions, the very first one, which I already feel like I have a sense for your thoughts on the first one. But curious to probably there's some nuance here. Um, but I'd be curious to get your thoughts on. Um will AI replace recruiters?
SPEAKER_01:No. I think again, kind of to what I just said, recruiters that understand how to use AI effectively will start to replace recruiters who don't. And that will be the people that are going to be elevated and do the best jobs, are gonna be the ones that understand how to get more out of their day with doing less work. And I think it kind of goes back to the moniker of work smarter, not harder, right? I want you to be as effective as possible without having to kill yourself trying to do it. For sure.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And maybe this also what we were just talking about feeds into your next answer. But um, to this next question, what's a skill every recruiter will need five years from now?
SPEAKER_01:Prompt engineering, AI literacy.
SPEAKER_00:Got it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:What's the biggest bottleneck in hiring today?
SPEAKER_01:I would say hiring manager capacity, honestly. Nowadays it's so much easier to find candidates, source candidates, have conversations. There's even AI interviewing products nowadays. And the ability to find, identify, and speak to candidates is much easier. But what we don't necessarily have more of is hiring managers or hiring manager time. A lot of companies have these massive goals and they want to make all these hires, but when it comes down to it, it's just simple math. It's like, okay, if it's five interviews or three interviews to a hire and you got to make 10 hires, I mean we have to have time for 50 interviews. These interviews are an hour apiece. Do your hiring managers have 50 hours to do these interviews to make these hires in by the X amount of allotted time? And a lot of times an answer is no. So I think uh hiring manager capacity would be my answer.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's probably one of the biggest mistakes I see companies make when they're defining their hiring point.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, 100%.
SPEAKER_00:What's one change that would instantly improve candidate experience?
SPEAKER_01:So this might be controversial, but I think I actually think the uh AI automated interview tools is going to help quite a bit. And I'll tell you why. Right now we only have so much time in the day. It's hard to review a ton of resumes. And so having the ability to give more people an opportunity for success and a chance at the role, I think will improve candidate experience because a lot of people are getting ghosted nowadays. They don't necessarily get a response from a recruiter, they don't get a response from the team, or maybe they do, but they don't actually talk to anybody. And so, at least with an AI interview tool, they're at least getting an opportunity to speak their experience, to talk about what they've done and give them at least a shot for success. And so I think for me, if I was a candidate, I would much rather have an AI interview than have no interview at all. And so I think as companies start to adopt that and tech companies start to adopt that, we'll see a higher candidate experience from that.
SPEAKER_00:What's the best piece of career or leadership advice you've ever received?
SPEAKER_01:I would say um you can never go wrong hiring great people. And I think that's very true. And there's definitely been times in my career where I've hired people with more experience with really strong backgrounds, and instead of being intimidated by that, I'm excited by it, right? And it gives me an opportunity to potentially learn from them and allows them to elevate other people on the team. And I think that's why my teams have had success because I'm not intimidated. I want to hire great people, and that's okay if you have more experience than me or more, you know, whatever. Welcome that and I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_00:I love it. Awesome. Well, Everett, we're uh running out of time. It's been great to be able to host you on the show. This has been really enjoyable. Um, and I I think uh it's gonna be a hit. I think people are really gonna enjoy this one. Um, thank you so much to contributing to the show and our community.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here and glad to share my experience. And uh, this has been fun. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's been a great time.
