00:00 Rob: Okay, welcome back, everyone. Rob here at the outset of another classic installment of your favorite recruiting podcast. And I am as ever thrilled to be bringing you this sweet, delicious content goodness from the cozy confines of a conference room here at Hired HQ in San Francisco, California. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. I cannot tell you how happy I am you’re here. My entire livelihood literally depends on it. But my rent not withstanding, here’s all you really need to know about the show.

00:33 Rob: Every week, I’m going to be bringing in my favorite people in the recruitment space, directors of recruitment, heads of talent, VPs of TA, you name it. I’ll get them in here at some point and they’re all going to do primarily one thing: Talk talent to me. And this week I have a real swell guest for all y’all. He has been all over the show when it comes to talent roles. He was the Director of Operations and Talent Acquisition at Starbucks, the Head of Talent at Freshii, Director of TA and Branch Metrics, and now he serves as the Director of Talent Acquisition at Tanium, where he heads up a team of 25 recruiters.

01:07 Rob: Jeff Schlosser is his name and he and I had a great chat all about building that team of 25 recruiters, all about his favorite metrics, and the importance of building a recruitment capacity model, constantly updating it and using it to benchmark your own performance as well as set expectations with the rest of the team. It’s a goodie. And just real quick, I want to call myself out. Right out of the gate, you’ll notice that I put my foot all the way in my mouth by saying that Tanium had hired money. Hired money, what does that mean? Nothing Rob. It means nothing, they raised money is what I meant to say.

01:41 Rob: It’s bothering me, but it’s too late to fix it now, the show must go on. But I want you all to know that I know I’m better than that and I shall continue holding myself to that standard for you, my darling, loyal listeners, for you. Okay, enough self-indulgent nonsense. Without further ado, I give you the Director of Talent Acquisition for Tanium, Jeff Schlosser.

[music]

02:30 Rob: Jeff Schlosser is in the building. Jeff, welcome, how are you?

02:44 Jeff Schlosser: Thanks, Rob. Good, how are you?

02:45 Rob: Doing really well, thank you. I got my set up here, I got… Not my normal rig, so I was a little flustered getting it all together. But now we’re doing it, we’re rocking and rolling, we both got our coconut water, so that’s… We’re rearing to go here.

02:56 JS: Good to go.

02:57 Rob: So, big news out of Tanium. Y’all hired some money, I understand.

03:01 JS: Yeah, it was announced on Tuesday. We raised another $200 million with some really quality investors. So I think our company’s been very thoughtful. It’s not that we necessarily needed the cash, but we’re very strategic about the investors that we’re bringing in and this will certainly continue us on that really high growth trajectory.

03:19 Rob: Got it, of course. So often, whenever you read a press release about funding, usually they will use this money to grow and hire, right? So that’s gonna fall to you, certainly all the hiring managers are licking their chops, they’re probably been thinking about head account, they’re firing up new job recs. How do you manage their expectations or go about head count planning?

03:39 JS: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So I think it’s definitely a team effort. So working with our finance partners and stakeholders, as well as the leadership, you have to look at the strategic plan of the organization, what our goals for the next year to three years, and how that flows down to manpower and workforce planning. So I think when we look at it in detail, we’ve already had some kind of hiring orders delivered in the past 48 hours, which is really focused, for me at least, a lot on the tech side, which is pretty exciting.

04:06 Rob: They’re wasting no time then.

04:08 JS: Wasting no time.

04:08 Rob: They really are licking their chops.

04:10 JS: Yeah, this company is really well thought out. It goes back to when they were founded in 2007, they were in stealth mode for five years. So they were very thoughtful about how they built up the platform, started building up the products, and who they asked to join the team. So I think they’re very calculated about the decision that they make.

04:26 Rob: Got it. And so they were in stealth mode for quite a while and you were the first town acquisition person brought on, correct?

04:34 JS: Yeah, so on the tech side, as you know there was a VP of Talent who actually was on the agency side of the business that helped vendors for a couple of years. But in terms of the tech idea, I was the first recruiter in.

04:43 Rob: Okay. And so how many people worked at the company when you were running?

04:46 JS: It was close to 200 back in May of 2016.

04:49 Rob: Okay. I feel like I see a couple of different schools of thought when it comes to when should you bring in that first tech recruiter or even this talent person? And some people will say, “Do it immediately.” Get a recruiting coordinator as fast as possible so that your office manager is isn’t the recruiting coordinator or that your CEO isn’t the recruiting coordinator. But then there’s also the school of thought that says, “Well in the beginning, you’re gonna be hiring a lot through referrals. Everyone… You should cultivate a recruiting culture at your company, everyone should consider themselves part recruiter.” Where do you land in that debate?

05:25 JS: Yeah, I think you brought up a great point. The whole team, especially leadership, needs to be behind talent acquisition. And recruiting always has to be a priority for everybody in the company. Regardless if you’re a hiring manager, [05:34] ____ contributor, or a recruiter on the team or a recruiting leader. I think for me, the sooner you bring a recruiter in, the better. I really believe that when you think about how you develop people, how you develop teams, how you build out a company, it’s much easier to create a new behavior, rather than to tear out a bad one or rebuild a bad one. So I think that goes not only for the people and how you hire, but it also goes for the technology, the type of recruiting stack they may or may not be using. So I think you really have to be thoughtful, but the earlier the better.

06:07 JS: And I think the other piece of that is understanding and building a consistent process. The process is so key in how you recruit. And building those expectations with the team and giving them that transparency of an effective and an efficient process, really alleviates a lot of anxiety around hiring.

06:24 Rob: Of course, yeah. So were some of those processes in place when you arrived 200 people later?

[chuckle]

06:31 JS: There were multiple processes in place, I would say, depending on the organization and the business department, and then it depended on the leader and what the current need was. And so I think you have to corral those kittens and figure out exactly the best way to at least have a skeleton. Even if it’s just, “Hey, we’re gonna do a recruiter screen, a hiring team screen, and then an on-site.”, even if it’s that simple. And then you can piece together the specific skills, challenges, or other technical aptitude tests that you might need to incorporate, as well as cultural or value-add interviews.

07:03 Rob: Got it. Three things: One, thank you for the episode title, “Corral Those Kittens”.

[chuckle]

07:08 Rob: Two, I much prefer corralling kittens to herding cats. I think the alliteration sort of… Makes a big difference there. And three, what were some of those processes that existed that maybe you were surprised or happy that it already existed? Because when you got in, you’re were already 200 people to the good, that would probably stress me out. If I were the first marketer of 200, “Oh my God, where do I start?” So, they had been thoughtful about recruiting clearly. What were some of the processes that were in place? And I guess if you’re in the audience, you’re thinking “I’m in a smaller company. What are some of the things I can put into place now so that down the line, we don’t have this technical recruiting debt?”

07:46 JS: Yeah, I think some of the things that they were very thoughtful about was how do you incorporate the right people in the process. So even if you don’t have necessarily the right scripts or behavioral interviews or you haven’t vented out the value competencies or the technical competencies, if you don’t have those things in place, but you are allowing their peers to be involved in that kind of interview process, you’re allowing obviously the hiring manager to be involved in that process. You’re involving somebody from a different business partner in that process, as well as key leadership. Even at 800 strong, our chairman and founder is still doing those culture add interviews, when everybody comes on-site [08:23] ____. So they’re really bought into that process, but I think some of those key things about the people that were involved was already in place, and so that really helped out.

08:32 Rob: Definitely. So there was that buy-in, you didn’t have to convince people that recruiting was important.

08:35 JS: Exactly. And you think about it, the first customer sign in 2012, I came on four years later, there were about 200 people to hire that many people with really an augmented recruiting staff. Wherever they came from, the agencies that were used is pretty impressive. I think when I came in there were certain parts of the organization where the referrals were up to 60%.

08:57 Rob: That’s incredible.

08:58 JS: Yeah.

08:58 Rob: Usually, 50 is best case scenario.

09:00 JS: Yeah, we still… Our team organization, which is one of the largest departments in the company, actually still to this day, has 50% referral rate.

09:09 Rob: That’s great.

09:09 JS: Yeah, absolutely.

09:11 Rob: So it makes your job easier.

09:13 JS: A lot easier, of course.

09:14 Rob: So on the flip side of that coin, when you started, what were the processes that were not in place that you’re like, “Okay, now that I’m here, we need to sort these things out. It’s been too long, here’s where we begin.”

09:27 JS: We had some technical tools that weren’t working. Our ATS wasn’t really best-in-class, so feedback and scorecards were tough to get. You talk about corralling those kittens, after every interview or on-site, you had to track those people down. I remember sometimes where you’re just getting a verbal scorecard and then you’re putting in words for them. So… Which is an ideal, but to get that feedback and understand how they felt about a candidate and asking them the right questions, that’s pretty difficult. So I think sharing that feedback and that consistency, obviously, is the ante to be able to hire great talent.

10:04 Rob: Definitely. Just… Even getting feedback from people, getting them to fill our scorecards right first hurdle. But then, say, all they give you is a thumbs up or a series of hyphens and bullet point notes, not good enough. And in terms of process, the more information you get, the more data you get, the more you can be certain that your interview process is holistic, that it’s not prone to bias, and you just don’t know if people aren’t putting proper feedback in scorecards, you have no idea where you stand. So, did you do some kind of training to be like, “Here’s what… Here’s a scope of your interview. And in light of the scope of your interview, here’s what good, actionable feedback looks like.”

10:43 JS: Yeah, I mentioned the recruiting leadership is just so bought in. I remember just on a side note when I started, obviously, the first two to three weeks were about discovery, setting those cadences with those hiring managers and business partners to really understand the pain points and the goals and what they’ve been doing and what they needed to do. And one of my biggest allies to this day, we used to get together at 5 o’clock every Friday and just sit as his desk for a couple of hours. We would source and we would talk about family and talk about the business and the products and it was really a great relationship. And even to this day, as I mentioned, he’s our biggest ally. So, getting their buy-in was there.

11:21 JS: And that’s so important because when they’re behind it and they’re setting the example by putting very specific scorecards, that was a great start. And then I think it was more just some up leveling. So, you’re really making the connection for, let’s say engineers for example, what does it look like to have a specific technical competency? And then what does a derailer behavior look like? What does a meeting expectation behavior look like? What does an exceeding expectation behavior look like? And being able to look at, “Okay, here are your notes. What did you pull out in your signal that equates to one of those behaviors? And is it a derailer, is it meets expectation or are they a strong hire?” So I think just making, connecting some of those dots and what that should look like, and then specifically what they should be interviewing for.

12:10 JS: And we’re evolving to where now it’s more of a behavioral interviewing playbook like, “Hey, here’s the value or here’s the technical competency or here’s the core competency.” And these are a set of questions you could ask, behavioral questions, and then here’s ways or rubric or matrix that you can use to figure out exactly how to score. So really making it easier and really more linear in terms of how they think about the process and the scorecards.

12:36 Rob: Yeah, definitely. Real quick, what’s a “derailer behavior”? Is that what you call it?

12:40 JS: Yeah.

12:40 Rob: What is that?

12:42 JS: So a derailer is just something that’s “hard no”, something that they do. I think that’s old Starbucks jargon from my eight years there. So we classified them in different buckets and derailers were simply like “absolutely not”.

12:56 Rob: And is that… A “hard no”, usually that’s not an ability-related issue, right? Usually, that’s like, they say something way off the rails, I suppose, right?

13:07 JS: Yeah, it could be. It could be, right? It could be somebody that you bring in for a coding challenge and they can’t, they can’t do it, they don’t have the skills. But typically it absolutely is something that’s more of a softer skill, that you see come through. Our engineers are highly collaborative, so they work in really small agile teams, they build these products from end-to-end. So, that collaboration, that relationship is critical, and most of them, if not all of them, are all customer-facing, they have interaction with our customers. We’re a big customer-facing company. So, if they don’t have the ability to have those conversations, and those soft skills, it’s gonna most likely be a derailer.

13:42 Rob: Yeah, yeah of course, especially in the event that they’re outward facing.

13:46 JS: Absolutely.

13:46 Rob: Well, at some point, we should probably talk about the things we said we’re gonna talk about, right? I’m happy not to but I have all these notes, and it’s like, “What are we doing here?” No, I actually, I do prefer it when we just kinda go for it.

13:57 JS: Yeah.

13:58 Rob: Back to the whole being the first tech recruiter at 200 people. You said there was a lot of process involved already in place when you got there, more that you wanted to build out in terms of, especially around interviewing. Do you wish that they’d made the investment sooner?

14:13 JS: I do, I do for them. Meaning if you look at, let’s say, for instance, the quarter before I joined, I believe that they’d hired one software engineer, which is like I mentioned, the pipeline wreck. Always building products, and hiring top-tier talent. So, the first quarter that I was there, we are able to hire eight. So, I think about the products we were building, and I looked at some of those teams and two or three people building a product that should have probably seven or eight. So, I think building it up earlier would have gotten that expertise. It was…

14:43 Rob: Just from like a business…

14:43 JS: Yeah. When I mentioned those sourcing meetings with my Director of Engineering, he showed me some of his outreach, and I think his response rate was around 2% for a senior director of engineering at a highly technical company, which just blew my mind. So, I think, and opening his eyes up to some of the things we can do to build that type-of funnel, I think if for no other reason to have that person in there to give that support, direction, and kind of professional guidance on recruiting, and how to do it.

15:07 Rob: That shouldn’t be overlooked. Any event that you can get your hiring managers really invested in recruiting to the point where they’re doing some of the sourcing, and outreach, great. Step one, step two, what are they saying to these people? Because the theory goes, yes, a candidate is more likely to respond to their eventual boss, than they would be to a recruiter, but not if they’re messaging is nonsense.

15:33 JS: Yeah, right. I mean messaging… It was okay. It wasn’t great.

15:37 Rob: 2%.

15:37 JS: But I think part of it was just too worry.

15:39 Rob: Oh, it was too much, yeah.

15:40 JS: When you’re doing outreach, you wanna kinda be short blurb, like, “Here’s who I am, here’s what I do. Profile caught my eye. Let’s just chat, let’s have coffee.” Something just to… You just wanna open up that dialogue with that first email, right? It’s not about I’m gonna close you in this first email. Let’s just have a conversation.

15:55 Rob: Right, right, and don’t hit him with a wall of text that they’re gonna pull out their phones, and be like, “Oops, still scrolling. Still scrolling.”

16:01 JS: Exactly. Exactly.

16:03 Rob: Got it. So then you said about you made eight hires your first quarter, and then around that time, or maybe at the same time, I imagine you started building out your own talent team, correct?

16:13 JS: Yes.

16:14 Rob: So what did that look like?

16:15 JS: Yeah, building it out. I think I remember my first month, and I put all the high priority recs that were assigned to me in that first 30 days, maybe the first two weeks, the last two weeks in May, and I had 19 high priority recs, all over the organization. So obviously, as you’re building that process, building those relationships, doing your discovery, figuring out what the products are, all of those things, and then obviously, sourcing, which is a full-time job, and end-to-end, doing my own coordination, that’s brutal. And then to be expected to hire 19 people is not really attainable.

16:48 JS: So, obviously I needed horse power. That was my first kind of decision. So, the first thing I did was hire a sourcer. Bridgette was my first one in, and she was just like heads down, crushed it, and that just pulled so much away for me that allowed me to focus on some more strategic initiatives, as well as some of the tactical things that we needed to build out in the process, in the recruit tech stack, and all of those things.

17:10 JS: Then the second high was an RC. I needed someone to take away the scheduling for me. It didn’t make sense for me to do a lot of scheduling, although it’s great experience to really understand your stack from end-to-end as a recruiter. And then from there, it got very strategic. So, we have our largest development office in North Carolina. I mentioned the TAM organization, which is one of the largest departments in the company. They service all of our customers so everything from pre-sales, to deploying our products, and platform, to service. So, it’s such an important organization. So in…

17:42 Rob: A lot of different kinds of talent there that…

17:44 JS: Yeah, it is, and it really needed its own person, for sure, if not a team. And so, and then the VP of Engineering sat in North Carolina. So, I had to figure out really, to have people, and boots on the ground that I could trust to be embedded with these teams, and the TAM org is very remote, but leadership is all over the place. So, Emeryville is fine, in terms of a hub. So the next role was, or job for me was, really to figure out, can I find two senior technical recruiters that have letter the ability to lead teams. They needed to be able to mentor, they needed to be able to have those people skills, and soft skills that we spoke to earlier.

18:22 JS: So I hired a manager in North Carolina, and Stacy’s been unbelievable. We’ve since hired I think three or four other people behind her in that market just because it’s so critical. And then you look at our TAM organization, and I hired a guy named Brian who has been awesome. He had great experience recruiting technical recruiters. He was at MapR and really built and developed a lot of his sourcing strategies and talent, and developed them, and he came on board, and those were two really critical hires that really allowed me to narrow my focus on the areas that needed to be improved. And then from there, it was about building out our entire team, right? So, we’ve gone from me being number one, after the VP, we’re up to about 25 now. So, then it was just strategically, how do we build around it, and then, even what’s more important is, how do you figure out capacity at a company that’s never had a recruiting team? And then how do you sell that capacity amount to the leadership?

19:16 Rob: Right, exactly. So, when you say capacity, you mean, assuming previous performance, assuming they hit these numbers, here’s how many people we can hire.

19:26 JS: Yeah.

19:26 Rob: And so then the expectation… That hasn’t come in a long time in the podcast, but it used to a lot. I hope that means because recruiters are doing it and I know what it means, but in terms of just expressing your bandwidth and saying, “Look you wanna hire this many people, great. We raised a bunch of money, we can afford to pay them, you have a head count, here’s the thing. This is what the talent team looks like we can’t fill this in this time period. You need more horse power, as you said.

19:53 JS: Exactly.

19:54 Rob: So has that been… Are you gonna go out and do that again, now that you’re out to get a whole bunch more…

19:58 JS: It never stops. It never stops. You have to understand, too, that some things evolve, right? So when you look at… When I was there my first six months, we really didn’t have a lot of data points. I couldn’t really logically tell you what our funnel looks like. Like, “Hey, I’m gonna need this much activity from a sourcer and this much outreach to get me one hire”. I didn’t really know that math, I knew from my experience what I though that math to be. But our process is a little different at Tanium and the bar, and I know every talent leader says this, but our bar truly is very high for developers. So as you get those data points, it evolves. So, obviously, let’s just say, arbitrarily, my first year, it took a recruiter to do 35 calls which translated to 20 hiring team calls, would eventually get through the funnel, translate to one hire.

20:48 JS: Now, let’s just say over the evolution of two years, I was recently doing this data last week, and it shows that we’ve definitely increased our efficiencies by at least 15%. So those numbers have come down. So it doesn’t take quite as much work and our capacities increased, and I attribute that… Obviously, because we talked about building a tech team. Once we have this two strategic senior leaders, it was really about people that were smart, driven, passionate about the company, the products, the leadership and highly collaborative. And we thought that through, and we had a lot of junior people. So, people that maybe had a year of agency experience, and brought them in.

21:23 JS: We augmented with contractors that most of them have moved on to full-time roles with us. So thinking about building that staff, their experience over the last two years, because all of them now have been with me almost two years. Obviously, we should get better at our job, but that capacity planning has to always be happening, and you have to always understand the way candidates convert through your funnel at each and every role in your kind of world or area of influence.

21:48 Rob: And then also… Being able to benchmark for every stage of the funnel and understand “If we hit all our goals, this is how many we can make”. Capturing all that data and that also allows you to get better, right?

22:01 JS: Yup.

22:01 Rob: You have went to be able to look at parts of the funnel where there are bottlenecks and blow that bottleneck open.

22:06 JS: Yes.

22:07 Rob: So being that hyper-aware of your expected performance and re-calculating as time goes on, have you be able to identify some of these bottlenecks?

22:16 JS: Yeah. I don’t know that I would go so far as to say a bottleneck. I’ll tell you the problem that I’m trying to solve, is that because of just the sheer volume of interviews that we’re doing, it’s taking up… The second call after the recruiter is a hiring team call. And that’s done by a manager if not a director level engineer. So then, they kinda get past that and they go into the coding challenges, which we typically have about four for each engineer that goes through the process.

22:42 JS: So the problem that I wanna solve is how can I automate some of that upfront? How can I find a tool where a recruiter can do a screen, we can automate some type of coding challenge that’s effective? Have a non-biased bar, in terms of evaluating what their technical competencies are, and then move them to the hiring team. So even if you could filter out 25% of those calls for the hiring team, that’s gonna increase their capacity to do what’s important, and that’s obviously, build our products and develop their team.

23:11 Rob: Right, right. I shouldn’t have beat up your process by saying bottleneck, but it’s more of… It’s the same in marketing and sales, it’s just iterating, right?

23:17 JS: Yes. Yeah.

23:19 Rob: If we can get better by two, three, 5% this month, this quarter, over time that compounds. I get asked this a lot, like “What is a good… What’s a benchmark open rate for an email blast or what’s good, what’s a benchmark performance for ad copy?” And it’s a bit of a cobbly answer is, “It depends” because there’s no apples to apples, there’s no way that… Depending on your audience and your previous brand equity and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, what I tell people is, a good conversion rate is 10% better than you converted last quarter, right? Is keep improving.

23:53 JS: That’s a great way to think about it.

23:54 Rob: Don’t worry about your competitors, or you can only impact what happens inside your office building.

24:01 JS: Yeah.

24:02 Rob: So focusing on that. So in your case, yeah, if you can be a little more efficient in the phone screen, have your recruiters calling 25 less people who aren’t good fits and filter that out at the beginning, then that compounds over time. Now, you’re getting more qualified people in and just close rate is gonna go up, right?

24:16 JS: Yeah. Absolutely. I like the way that you think about that. I think when you’re looking at what you do in terms of talent organization and the processes that you’re building and your efficiencies, most people that are leading a talent team have experience or exposure to other companies ‘ systems and processes. I think one of the biggest mistakes is thinking, “Hey, I can take this from what I did and what I learned and just drop it in here and it’s gonna be effective and efficient,” and it just doesn’t work that way.

24:42 Rob: So on the topic of close rates in phone screen to on-site, what are some of your favorite recruiting metrics to look at?

24:48 JS: Yeah, I look at all of them. I feel like I need to know all of them, if that’s possible, I guess, to know all of the data. But we’re really effective with close rate so I like looking at that because to me, it’s just fascinating. I remember I’ve been at a past life where I had one quarter where I closed 33% of my engineers and just that still sticks in my mind because it just makes me sick to my stomach.

25:10 Rob: Yup.

25:11 JS: And then I look at Tanium, and once we get people in the process, they don’t leave. Our close rate is somewhere in the 88%-92% rate over the organization. So, I like… That’s a fun metric for me. It’s not one we necessarily have everybody track, but we do discuss it, everybody’s aware.

25:25 Rob: Yeah, so close rate, would you consider that offer…

25:28 JS: Offer acceptance.

25:30 Rob: That’s a tricky one for recruitment because at that stage, a lot of it is out of your hands, right? You’ve provided your customer, whatever the department is, with a lead who did well at the phone screen, who the team liked, who made it all the way through the process to the point where like, “Yes, come work for us”. And if they don’t, that’s not a recruiters fault, right? Or is it? Is there some objection handling that you can do earlier to suss out who’s likely to not accept an offer?

25:57 JS: I think it is on the recruiter. So we look at our business leaders as partners, we’re an advisor to them. So when you think about… And I’ll give you an example, we talked a lot about process. One of the things that we implemented in terms of a recruiter score card, there are a few key components that they need to identify in that first call. One of them is motivations. Why do they wanna go? Where do they wanna go? And what motivates them? Most people know, for engineers, it’s not typically they don’t lead with comp, but you wanna know exactly what it is. You wanna find out things like are they in process at other places? So doing that discovery, and figuring out, and knowing your candidate is important. And then the recruiter is responsible for weekly touches, whatever that looks like.

26:38 JS: A candidate may go on vacation for three weeks to Brazil. We’ll send him an email and say, “I hope you’re enjoying vacation. Look forward to seeing you in a couple of weeks.” They need to touch everybody on a weekly basis. When you think about that relationship that they build and they shepherd them through that process, and they’re communicating expectations on each interview that they’re going to go through, by the time they get to the finish line, there should be really an expert on that specific person, what motivates them and exactly what it’s going to take to get them to join the team. Do we rely on the hiring managers to call them and maybe offer them the welcome and, “Hey, come on to the team.”? Absolutely, but recruiters are at that finish line right next to them.

27:15 Rob: Yeah, and it starts even earlier in the process. When you’re on phone screens, there’s a certain amount of things that come up pretty regularly in terms of rejecting an offer. It’s like “Well, I talked it over with my partner and we just decided it wasn’t… ” Earlier in the process, being… Have you discussed it with your partner? Don’t wait until we give you an offer and… Or what’s your commute going to be like? Right, if they buzz “You know what, I realized I don’t want to drive an hour and a half, two times a day.” And I’m like, “Alright, maybe this isn’t a good fit for you.”

27:44 JS: And then, stop it there and that you… You’ve done them a favor. You’ve proved that you’re thoughtful about their experience, that you want them to be happy and succeed, that you’re not just trying to shuffle them in the door, and then you know. That will pay dividends over time. But anyway, it’s, I like to call it anti-recruiting where it’s like, “What are the reasons you say no? Let’s service them right now so I can either, A, object to them, or B, we can stop this right here, and not spend all these interview cycles on someone who’s just gonna say no down the line.

28:13 JS: Can I steal that? The anti-recruiting?

28:15 Rob: I’d love for you to steal that, yeah.

28:16 JS: I like that, that’s good. No, I’m with you. You need to get to those things sooner rather than later. And I think good recruiters, really good recruiters understand that this has to be mutual. It’s gotta be a great fit for them, and it’s gotta be a great fit for us. And if you’re trying to board somebody just to board them, or even selfishly just because it’s a fit for you, but not really for them. If you’re hiring somebody that you know is gonna have a two-hour commute and you know it’s gonna be rough and they know they can do it. You really have to think through that. I think really having those discussions and being more of an advisor for the candidate. It doesn’t have to be me against you and I’m gonna win this and I’m gonna sell you and I’m gonna close you. It’s gonna be, let’s partner here. Let’s figure out if this is really a great place for you, cause I don’t want you to be here for nine months. I want you to be here for nine years.

28:56 Rob: Yeah, exactly, yeah. You don’t need to have the coffee is for closers mentality, but treat them like a person, and think of their happiness down the line. And I believe that recruiters wouldn’t have got into recruiting if they didn’t have that muscle, of that heart for people.

29:13 JS: Yeah, you have to have that service type of DNA and you have to have that sense of empathy.

29:22 Rob: Definitely. We have seven minutes left. But I feel like it’s a really good bookend to… [laughter] Is there anything else you wanted to cover? Do you wanna plug Tanium…

29:31 JS: Yeah.

29:31 Rob: Are you hiring for any recruitment roles right now? I wanted to ask you that. Are you…

29:35 JS: Yes.

29:35 Rob: In light of this couple of hundred million bucks, and all this hiring. Is anybody gonna be on your team?

29:41 JS: Let me tell you this, we got the funding announcement on Tuesday and by Wednesday morning, I had a role posted for a Senior Technical Recruiter.

29:49 Rob: Love it.

29:49 JS: And that’s not gonna stop. Q4… Our Q1 starts February 1, so we’re just now, we’ll be approaching Q4 next month, so we’re thinking through the strategic hiring plans, but I guarantee, there are gonna be opportunities on our talent team and anybody that’s interested. I’m active on LinkedIn, I do respond to all my messages, and so, feel free to reach out to me.

30:11 Rob: If you like what Jeff had to say and you want to work for Tanium and be his best friend, then [chuckle] please reach out.

30:18 JS: Be an anti-recruiter.

30:19 Rob: Yeah, [chuckle] be an anti-recruiter, exactly. Well, again, Jeff, I feel like we could keep chatting, but I’m gonna get urgently bundled out of this room at some point here. And also, I just love that we ended on that high note of recruiters caring about people. At this point, I just say thank you so much for being here. This has been fascinating and I definitely have to have you back in here, because I feel like we have a lot more ground we could cover.

30:39 JS: Yeah. No, Rob, it’s been great. We will have series two coming soon, hopefully.

30:42 Rob: I love it. Thanks again, Jeff, and thanks to all you out there in Podcast land. I’ve been Rob Stevenson, Jeff Schlosser has been Jeff Schlosser and you’ve an amazing, wonderful, talented recruiters. Have a spectacular week and happy hunting.

[music]

31:06 Rob: Talk Talent to Me is brought to you by Hired, a double opt-in global marketplace connecting the best fit active talent to the most exciting recruiting organizations. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you find your next great hire, head to hired.com/employers and we’ll get started.