60: Recruiting (Christina Vidauri)

[Music]

Welcome everybody to episode 60 of the Coffee and Codecast,

the tech podcast where we talk about neither coffee or code.

I'm Kyle Johnson.

Hey Kyle, I'm Mike Sheehan here.

Today we're going to be talking about,

that's some interesting topics, some strange foods discussions.

Good, I'm glad I like talking about strange foods.

Strange food, the frozen yule log.

That sounds fun.

Coffee and Codecast also referred to as the Seinfeld of Cast,

the show about nothing.

Nothing and everything.

Nothing and everything.

That's a wonderful combination.

I thought it was a great description.

I like that.

It's very accurate actually.

Very accurate.

Thanks.

Sorry about that a little bit.

Thanks to Kim, right?

That was Kim.

Yeah.

Big shout out to Kim.

That's amazing.

That is amazing.

And our main topic for today.

Very excited about this.

Main topic today is technical recruiting and who better to have on the show than senior

technical recruiter, Christina Vardari is on the show today.

Welcome, Christina.

Hi.

Thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.

This is awesome.

I was hoping that we could get Christina on and we weren't

planning on it today, but it happened to work out very well.

The weather forced her hand.

Yeah, the weather.

The bus never came.

I was cold.

Oh, the bus didn't come.

Oh, why?

I don't understand that down here.

There's not a lot of action.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know if it's like outlying areas or preventing

buses from getting into town, but.

The bus stop was naming telling you when buses were coming.

So that's really helpful, especially when it's nasty outside.

Yeah, it's very windy right now.

It's 39 and windy.

Yeah, I heard that there was supposed to be gusts up to 60 miles an hour.

Yeah, I believe it.

Wow, that's crazy.

So it's great to have a recruiter on the show.

I've been wanting to get you on the show for a long time because I talk to you all the time about recruiting things.

You're the only person that thinks this is great.

It is great.

Oh, I think it's great too.

By the way, you didn't wish Mike a happy number one.

She's being friendly today.

(laughing)

So much better in person.

It feels very personalized.

I like that.

We have a lot of fun banter on the show for you tonight too.

Yeah, it should be good.

Just a really hard time.

Yeah, it should be wonderful.

What do you mean?

He's the only one that's excited about it.

Are you not excited about it?

- No, I feel like the public really isn't as excited

to hear about recruiting as y'all.

Yeah, you know, we get into interesting conversations,

but I've done plenty of panels and other things

where you think there's gonna be a lot of questions

and then there's just like crickets.

- Nothing.

- I think oftentimes the problem is you don't know

what to ask though, 'cause I don't think until

these things come up, like I'm like,

oh, I never thought about that.

But like once they actually come up in real life experience,

then it's much more interesting.

I just wouldn't know what the questions to ask you

on a panel would be.

- Yeah, I mean, I think that's fair,

but mostly people only want me to look at a resume

or tell them if they're getting paid enough,

and then that's kind of the end of the conversation.

- Just the tip of the iceberg stuff.

- But I think that's fair from an outsider's perspective,

like that's what they see as a recruiting function.

Like that's the only pieces of recruiting

that they kind of interact with.

- Yeah, like once people actually start having

to hire their own team, which a lot of people in our life

getting to that stage of their career, then they start to have, you know, a lot more questions

in terms of best practices or what I've seen in my career and what they can expect or what's

appropriate. Based on maybe some types of roles don't have the best social skills and whatnot.

We may have some anecdotal examples later that we could cite out, do's and don'ts of

of the interview process, Anko.

- I think there might be some of that coming up.

- That'll be fun.

We'll talk about that in a little bit later too

on the show based on our own experience.

But I do agree with you.

It's very interesting.

The more I've gotten to know,

I think I have been pretty ignorant.

I am recently in management,

so I didn't have to deal with this before on this level.

And so the more we've had conversations about it,

I've learned, I feel like I've learned a lot

from your talks.

So I'm very excited for this today.

And we have a lot to cover.

We didn't, we didn't formally put the questions together because, you know,

that's how we roll on the show here unprepared.

Shocker. Yeah. Shocker. Yeah.

We didn't know we were having a special guest till about 15 minutes ago.

That's a fair point too.

I've never seen any show notes. So I'm super prepared.

Yeah. The format is really awesome. The show note format is great.

I mean, we have a nice structure.

We just tend to not to fill it up with anything before the show. So,

I mean, if we did, it would be amazing.

- Yeah.

- Right, Kim?

That's amazing.

- Oh, sorry.

(laughing)

- That's amazing.

- That's right, there you go.

I think a good way to start here maybe is like,

'cause I think before, you got into recruiting,

and before I was exposed to it,

like my idea of recruiting was kind of just like,

typical guy that's gonna just like slam people down

a pipeline and throw as many people at you

as he possibly could without much screening at all.

And like, you've kind of opened my eyes

to a different type of recruiter, which I think you are.

So I think maybe a good way to start would be just

kind of describe your process and how it is that you differ

from maybe like a big agency that's just gonna slam

as many people at home as they can.

- Sure, so I'm an in-house recruiter at Big Fish.

So I work for the company.

I think a lot of people's exposure to recruiters

is typically through agencies.

So you feel like cattle in those situations.

I have a much more personalized approach to recruiting.

I want to screen resumes,

I want to do recruiting screens via phone,

focusing on technical.

I try to really leverage my social EQ

and make sure that I'm a gatekeeper

for the business as a whole,

because you can't necessarily rely on engineers

to always evaluate the soft skills.

And if you're not evaluating soft skills,

I can definitely come back to hurt you down the line.

So yeah, I wanna review resumes.

I wanna talk to every candidate

before I hand them off to a hiring manager.

It doesn't always work out.

When I have a rec load of 15 different roles

with multiple heads for some of those roles,

I don't have the capacity to phone screen everyone.

But I still want to review resumes,

and I still want to assist hiring managers.

Because at the end of the day, if I get to present an offer,

I need to have some sort of relationship with that candidate,

or it's kind of really awkward.

There's also two schools of thought

with recruiting offering positions to a candidate.

Some companies, it falls on the hiring manager,

and the hiring managers want to own it.

They're like, I'm managing this person,

And so I want to offer them the job.

My school of thought and another school of thought out there is recruiting handles the

offers.

And this is, I think, a little bit more strategic in terms of like, okay, now it's a business

conversation.

If this candidate counters, it's not going to be like personally held against them by

a manager that is now like, oh, you were too good for my offer.

And then there's like a weird dynamic once the person actually joins.

So I like to be that buffer.

I like to just absorb, say, you know, here's the max we're going to go up to, but I can

offer anything up to that amount, whatever I think is necessary to get the person in

the door.

How soon do you have that conversation?

Do you have it up front usually pretty early on in the process or?

So yeah, I have two different conversations.

I definitely try and have on the front end like give me a range.

On the front end, I'm happy with a range.

I don't need to know your exact number.

I'm going to guess your aiming high.

But I want to know your range

just so that I can make sure like some software engineers

are gonna ask for $250,000.

That's not a number I will ever remotely come close to

in the companies that I have worked at.

Go work at Oracle, go work at Microsoft,

that's great, good for you.

If you're looking for work-life balance

or you're looking for a challenge, let's talk.

if you're just okay with making less than that, then, you know, let's talk.

So I just like to save that conversation time on the front end and get that out of the way.

And then at the end, you know, I want to say, okay, we're happy.

You know, the interviews went really well.

I hope you like us.

Now let's get down to brass tacks.

You know, we have different levers we can pull in the recruiting land bonuses, sign on equity,

all that kind of stuff.

So tell me what it's going to take to get you in the door.

I like that approach just because in my limited experience with hiring

I think I just jumped the gun a bit and got really excited to meet the candidate and then get on a phone screen and

Had a great phone screen and then found out afterward because they brought it up like oh, yeah, and by the way

I'm looking for acts and it's like we're not even in the same ballpark

And we just wasted a lot of time that happened to us as well recently

So yeah, I think it's a valuable thing to have the recruiter do that on the front end before they've even been passed off

So at least we know we're talking the same thing.

- And I'll still, like, even if I think they're expensive,

if I like them, let the hiring manager know

and let them make the call.

You know, like maybe that person's like,

"Well, weirdly, we could up level it.

"You know, we could make it a senior

"and then we would be within band."

You know, I let them make that decision a lot of times,

but if it's just worlds apart, then it's like,

"It's been nice, call me in 10 years."

- Best of luck.

Good for you.

Yeah, because otherwise you're wasting everybody's time and it's not, there's no point in moving

forward.

How did you get into recruiting?

So I was in like accounting and bookkeeping before and I wanted to get into startup land.

So I had a friend on Facebook who was in startup land, he'd been at Swipe, which was acquired,

or no, went public and then was later acquired by Apple.

So he did really well obviously in that scenario

and he posted, hey, a former swipe employee

is looking for a part-time like office manager.

And I was so desperate to get out of bookkeeping

that I was like, I'll take part-time

just to get into the startup land.

And it was a female VP.

And she'd been at several successful startups.

And so I was like, I obviously wanna be connected

to that person in general.

And so I asked him if I could talk to her and I went in and I met the team and they ended up actually offering me a full-time role

doing

Accounts payable office management and like whatever I backed up the executive assistant to the CEO

all that kind of stuff

Few weeks in they're like hey, you still have capacity right? I'm like sure

Do you want to start coordinating for Dave the recruiter? Okay

So I start scheduling because you know being the backup to the EA you would do that a lot anyway, and then

It came down to it. Okay, we're growing

We need to hire a full-time accountant which can be you or we need to hire someone to help Dave full-time which can be you

So I looked at my boss and I said I'm really liking this recruiting thing

but like what if I'm bad at it and

She said you're not gonna be bad at it

But if you are do you want to try sales? Do you want to try marketing like wow figure it out?

Yeah, I got really lucky

So yeah, I went and worked for day full-time which Kyle still likes to tease me that day was a very intimidating

Interview for me in the beginning and I like walked away and I was like well

I don't know if I want to work for this company and then I ended up working for him and like having a really good personal

relationship with him and even toward me. So

You know it all works out man. And at some point you hired him. Yeah, I brought him on as a vendor at one point

Oh, that's cool

I suppose that's what we all run into though a little bit of that imposter syndrome, right? We've talked about that before

Yeah

Yeah, big time

What about like the the thing that I think is most interesting to me because it's very applicable right now to me especially is like the

Relationships that you cultivate with the hiring manager themselves

Like you don't just kind of throw candidates over the wall

You do a lot of fact-finding ahead of time so talk a little bit about that and how you approach that

Yeah, so I'll do an intake session with any hiring manager that I'm going to be working with

I want to know about your team.

I want to know about the role that's empty.

You know, is it new?

Is it a backfill?

Is it different?

Is there anyone on the team currently doing it?

What is the sell for the role?

All that kind of stuff.

Because again, these are the things that people want to know.

Who am I working for?

How many people are on my team?

What am I going to do day to day?

If I can't answer those questions,

then I look like an idiot, which a lot of recruiters

don't do that and then they end up being like, I don't know. And then it's a waste of a conversation.

So I want to answer all those questions on the front end and save my hiring manager time.

I'm not an engineer, so I obviously can't get into the weeds with like the day to day,

but I can get pretty far, right? You're going to be using this tech stack,

you know, we're transitioning to the cloud. This is the cloud that we're using,

all that kind of stuff. So you have that information on the front end.

And a lot of my hiring managers have either done it for a long time or they've not done it at all.

And the ones that have done it for a long time, some of the challenges I run into are

the really kind of what society has deemed like outdated practice of whiteboarding.

Write me an algorithm. When was the last time you came up with an algorithm from scratch?

Like you never do that. Right. Um, stand in front of this room of people and do this. Like,

do you as an engineer program in front of other people on the regular?

Nope. Not with the marker either.

So I'm trying to educate them and then I'm trying to educate new hiring managers as well

because they just don't know. Yeah. Um, and so I'll be like, Hey, you know, there's other ways to do

this, there's project-based interviewing, come up with something that should take two

to three hours.

Bring someone on site to sit in the pod with your team and do this work and ask questions

and do a code review.

All of those things that an engineer does in a day, but they still have their own time

to write their code, to use Google.

All of the things that you would do.

The practical things that would happen on a day to day.

No, you have no resources at your disposal while you do normal code day to day.

I'm like, do we use Git?

Give them access to Git.

Like, why are we making this so archaic?

So I just try to educate them,

make sure that hiring managers know

they're a gatekeeper for their team.

So they're expected to also evaluate the dynamic

this person will bring in.

Leave it to your director reports

to evaluate the technical ability,

'cause that's something that they can do.

Not all of them can evaluate the social implications

of hiring this person.

And so it's more educating them

on what I need from them as well

as what I can provide them

that they've maybe not gotten with other recruiters.

- I wanna go back to the technical interview

and as looking at the industry as a whole,

like where do you think that shift is starting to happen?

Is it like are the big three still embracing that?

It's kind of a litmus test,

see it right from a baseline knowledge.

Yeah.

Well, I think they see it as more of like, they're trying to find your critical thinking

skills, right?

That's the way they're looking at it, as opposed to like doing day to day work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Microsoft does project-based interviewing.

They do.

Oh, that's interesting.

Okay.

Google has always been really like, I don't know what you would call what they do.

It's not normal.

Nothing at Google.

How many ping pong balls can you fit on a bus?

Nobody cares.

Yeah.

Supposedly it tells you who's creative.

Creative thinking.

I call bull.

You know, so it is evolving.

It is changing.

It, you know, you can still have a need for someone to be able to come

up with algorithms on the spot.

That could be something a company needs.

It's just probably one percent of the companies out there.

Yeah.

And so, you know, be realistic.

I've asked a hiring manager, "When's the last time you whiteboarded in front of a person at work?"

Yeah, right, exactly.

Because if that's a skill that you legitimately need, sometimes you're an architect or a designer

and you literally need to explain what you want done to a group of engineers.

Okay, fine.

I am totally on board with you asking that candidate to do that.

But if they can be heads down, cranking out code at their desk, why would you put them in that situation?

And I thought there was a very interesting kind of thing you put out on Facebook for a while ago

And I don't know if you're prepared to talk about it, but like it was kind of is basically whiteboarding kind of a sexist

Practice, which I thought was kind of fascinating. I don't remember all the details, but yeah, I had put out the

Call to my recruiting network that I needed data to support the pivot to project based interviewing from whiteboarding

because it sounds great in

and in qualitative examples, right?

Like, it's changing more now, but back in the day,

like when we were in school,

there was kind of this like force people

to go up to the front of the room

and write an answer on the chalkboard.

And it didn't really matter if you were a shy kid

or if you were a boy or a girl,

like they made everyone do it.

But there was social implications to that.

And there's, you know, boys are encouraged

to be boisterous and it's okay for them to be wrong

and make mistakes and little girls are taught

to be prim and proper and perfect.

So you just have these different social implications

of making someone do something in front of a group

of other people.

So I wanted data though, to like talk about this pivot.

All of the qualitative stories make sense,

but Microsoft would probably be one of the only places

that would have that data on a large enough scale, right?

like probably find people who have like,

I've done five whiteboarding and I've done five project.

Like, okay, that doesn't scale.

But I wanted to know if there was any studies out there

that actually proved this.

And unfortunately, no, there are some in academia

'cause they've proven that forcing children to go up

and write on the board, especially now with like,

there's a lot more education around,

I guess various levels of being on the spectrum.

And so you could really create permanent damage in a child

if you forced them to do these things.

So there's a lot more educational data around it,

but nothing really in the workplace.

- That's interesting.

- Yeah, it was fascinating to see,

predominantly I think it was white males

come out of the woodwork to defend whiteboarding, right?

Like you had a lot of back and forth

with a number of people where you were just kind of

getting attacked and you would say,

"Well, I'm looking for data.

I'm not really looking for opinions here."

And they would just continually reach back

and be like, "No, well, I've done this for years."

And she's like, "This is not what I'm looking for.

I'm looking for data."

- Yeah, several times, I had her like,

"For 20 years, I've done it this way."

And I just responded and was like, "Good for you.

I'm glad that that has worked for you in your career.

I'm not interested in your data."

- Right, you're one off answer here.

- Yeah, you know.

Women tried to support my ask and defend me,

but they often used qualitative personal examples.

And like, I understand that and I relate to that.

But again, I'm trying to make a data-driven decision.

And so I actually had a mentor of mine,

like I don't really know him personally,

but he goes, I go to conferences that he speaks at

and he's definitely someone I follow, call me.

seven in the morning and say,

"I'm sorry for what happened on that thread."

Like there was one particular person who was just like,

unbearable and he's like,

"Unfortunately I know I'm not that person."

So it was really funny.

He's like, "We'll see how that goes."

But yeah, it was really interesting how like you just

even make the suggestion of change.

And it was like I lit a fire.

wasn't looking what I was looking to do at all,

but is what it is.

- It's not surprising there's a bias there,

because yeah, if you've been doing it for 20 years,

then you know the system now.

And so that's like, that's your way in, right?

And it suggests that that's gonna change,

or we're gonna look at a different set of criteria now.

Probably scares the hell out of a lot of people that,

I don't know, maybe do really well at that,

but suck at other ways of interviewing,

or the soft skills or whatever it is.

- And it's funny that it hasn't been evaluated

a little bit more, because right,

like engineers, myself included,

are all are mostly introverted. So like, yeah, it's probably, it's a ton of pressure and

it's a very uncomfortable place to put somebody who's an introvert in front of potentially

a panel of people and all those people watching you do something up on the board. I mean,

I hate doing it personally. Everybody I know, yeah, pretty much hates it. So yeah, why do

we continue to subject people to that? And the other thing is like the candidate, especially

well, in the current market, the candidate is interviewing your company. No one is in

desperate need of a job right now in the tech industry. So you have to impress

this person as well. And if you're asking them to do something like come up with

some algorithm and they're like, "I'm a bill engineer." Yeah, well they... What? Do I

have to do that here? Because if I do, I don't want to work here, right? So I have

to like make sure that we're providing the candidate with a reasonable

experience and reflection of what they'll do day to day.

Because we have to we have to sell ourselves as well right

now. Obviously the economy changes, things change, you

end up getting 15 people applying to one role and all of them

want it really bad and all of them are overly qualified. That's

a different scenario, but that's not the current market.

Wow. I would imagine then like places like Amazon are still

the traditional they're they're doing the all the way right?

Yeah. But they can throw money at you. So yeah,

Exactly. And they have what they call a bar razor, which is someone that really comes in to really just grind you.

Wow.

In what in what way just kind of continue to reach out over and over and over until you kind of cave or what?

No, the bar razors in the interview and they basically want to find your edges. They want to know it's going to be probably someone super senior and better than the candidate hypothetically.

But they're really going to make sure that technically what Amazon says that they do is they hire people better than they already are there.

So obviously this cannot go on infinitely, but that's hypothetically they're bringing in a barraiser to make sure that you would be better than 50% of the company.

Really?

Yeah.

And so it's that's where the pressure really gets put on in an Amazon interview.

Damn.

So in theory, like it should have been I should have been trying to apply there like a 99 or something.

- Yes.

(laughing)

- Before you graduate.

- It keeps getting harder and harder and harder.

Wow, love learning about that though,

just because, well, it's been a few years

since I was subjected to even a phone screen from them.

I mean, I've been here for what, six years almost now.

- Well, and back then, didn't they make you verbally say,

I would type backslash, backslash, print?

- Have you ever been on that kind of an interview

where you have to literally code over the phone?

So with them, with that particular screen,

the first time with Amazon, yes.

And it was, but I guess it wasn't exclusively phone.

They did have some kind of whiteboard thing

on the computer screen.

Literally like tell them the code over the phone.

No way.

Yeah.

It was so painful.

I can't even imagine these days

like asking anyone to do remotely, anything like that.

But yeah, the resources didn't exist

even less than 10 years ago to share a screen

with a random candidate, right?

You can share a screen with someone on your network

or something like that.

But at the time, the thought of sharing a screen

with someone outside of your network

that you don't know was unheard of.

- You didn't do that.

- And I think to get back to the whiteboard and comment,

I think that explains a little bit too why

there's a sudden pivot away from that

because that's all you had before.

There was nothing else.

There weren't these online tools available.

I mean, you could bring them in

and make them work on a laptop for hours

or something like that.

I mean, there was no coder pad or all these new

screen sharing tools that you can use

in interview scenarios.

So I think it makes sense that it's slowly starting to turn,

but people are somewhat resistant.

- Yeah, I encourage my hiring managers.

I will provide you with, we use coder pad

where I'm currently at, I will provide you

with a coder pad link to share with the candidate,

but I would like you to use it for examples or reference

or to let a candidate process,

'cause maybe sometimes people need to start typing something

out to understand where they're gonna end up.

But please don't be like, here's Fizzbuzz go

and just sit there and watch them type.

It doesn't really add any value or collect relevant data.

- Yeah.

I mean, not recent, this has been year,

I don't know how many years ago,

but anyway, similar type of experience

that gave me just like an open coding share screen.

And he's like, do this.

And then like in the background, all I hear is typing,

you know, like him talking to other people.

Yeah, I'm just like, why the hell am I even here?

- Should have muted it at least.

Come on, be an A-hole like that.

- Yeah.

- That bastard.

- Yep.

- It worked out fine.

We got here instead.

(laughing)

- Yeah.

- I wanna shift it a little bit.

- I had to do the show with this dickhead.

- Well, no, that's your, that's your penance, man.

You have to be 60 episodes later.

- You're doing great.

- Hey, thanks, Slayer.

(laughing)

Slayer's at Motsy right now.

That wasn't really him.

That had to be a recording.

- Well, we need to get a real one.

- I wanted to, you were gonna mention a little bit

just about our scenario here because we're bringing,

we have a technical recruiter coming in from Charlotte.

- We do, I'm very excited about this.

So he, at least in the brief conversations

that I've talked to him, he has very similar views

to what Christina does in terms of how interviews

should be done, how you collect feedback,

how you collect data, which is another thing

I think we should get into.

because that was part of my recent interview processes

in where we're collecting feedback.

In this case, I think it was feedback on

the take-home test that we gave.

And in this case, it was coming back to me

in kind of a group email format.

So like everybody was getting the feedback.

And when I talked to Christina about that,

she's like, by the way, you shouldn't do that.

You should collect it privately

because effectively like you're biasing the entire review pool.

And I was like, well, exact point.

Like I would not have thought of that.

I need somebody who has technical expertise in this.

And so that's another point.

And when I relayed that to a couple of the people

on the team, they were like, oh yeah,

that makes a lot of sense.

But like we probably would not have come

to that conclusion, at least not quickly.

- Yeah. And, you know, I always get from hiring managers,

well, my team has too much to do.

They can't put their feedback in the system.

And I'm like, okay, one,

You need to make time to do things properly,

to document things, there's a legal requirement,

things are discoverable.

Seattle's too small to not document who we've talked to

and what we've talked to them about.

So I need you to know or write down what you asked

in that interview and how you evaluated the answer.

Ultimately as a recruiter, my dream would be

for every candidate I've ever screened

to come find me again in the future

when they want to work for me at a later time,

whether I'm at a new company or not.

But I need to know what we've talked about.

I need to know what their answer was last time.

Have they grown in the last two years?

If we ask them the same question,

do we get a different result?

Can we collect new data and not revisit everything

we've already asked them?

All of these things are very important

and make a lot of sense once you hear it.

Like once I have that conversation

with hiring manager, like, oh, okay, fair.

Yeah, like, I know that we've interviewed one person

two or three times and so, yeah, we should document

what we've asked and what we wanna ask next time

and those sorts of things and so they get it.

And then, you know, bias, there's all these bias trainings

that I highly recommend for any company, any person

because it's unconscious bias mostly

that we need to try and be aware of.

You won't fix it.

You won't be aware of everything,

but whatever you can make yourself informed about,

the better.

- Yes.

Makes a lot of sense.

Some of those points that our guy brought up as well,

I thought were really,

hadn't thought about before.

So I'm glad that we're starting to evolve a little bit

in our process here and take it a little more seriously.

- Yeah, I think that's important.

I mean, to your point about the questions,

the interview questions, like would you,

in an ideal world, would you,

would every candidate be asked the same questions,

in other words, so that you can kind of compare

candidate to candidate to candidate

and get a good feeling on one versus the other?

- Technical questions, yes.

I would like you to ask the same coding question,

but I mean, conversations evolve organically

and I would hate for you to be like, nope.

(laughing)

I'm going back going over here. Don't go that path

You know, so I want you to have organic conversation

But you know if you're going to ask one candidate to delete a binary tree and you're gonna ask another candidate, you know

Just something like fizz buzz

It's apples and oranges. Yeah, that's not really fair. You can't evaluate no each candidate against each other

So I do want the same technical questions. It's fine to obviously

See like especially in the beginning you're like, oh, I didn't get what I wanted when I asked that question

Okay, fine ask a different question, but once you kind of find one that you feel is

Getting you the information that you want and I would like you to ask it to all candidates going forward in a perfect world

I would have a question bank

That people could use throughout the company for any team

Any role all that kind of stuff, but that's how we operate and I think that served us well

I noticed like over time as we bring in more candidates

It's been interesting to see how they approach it and you get a wide variety as many people you get that many different answers

Different approaches and so it's been fun to see you know, we let them choose their own

Stack to answer it and just say look, you know, here's the question

Here's and it's more of the project base that you're talking about a couple hour project throw it and get and let's take a look at it

And we've had some people come in and like one, you know,

one command automates everything.

It builds, runs, deploys, and then, you know, others that don't do anything.

I just been interesting to see how everyone approaches it that way.

And you wouldn't get that perspective if you had different questions.

Yeah.

Um, shout out.

Hey, uh, I think we have a new listener, Jill is joining us today.

That's my aunt.

Oh, cool.

Hi, Jill.

Awesome show.

Great info.

Thanks for checking it out.

Zach, thanks Zach.

- Yeah.

- Hey, we are on Twitch by the way.

- We are on Twitch, is there a problem?

Are we not?

- Would you like us to put up a software question?

- Just don't put any eggplant and splash emojis up on your

- Apparently that's a frowned upon.

When you're submitting a technical interview,

code on git.

Somebody would have said that, you know,

like ahead of time in the notes.

- Yeah.

- Poor guy.

- Like.

- We had somebody do that today.

- Yeah, Kyle told me last night, like,

"Oh, the candidate I was really impressed with

"on the phone just submitted his code review,

"and it's got an eggplant and splash emoji in it."

And I was like, "What?"

Like, okay, obviously maturity, maybe a factor here.

It's a junior-ish role, so okay,

I'm willing to overlook some things, but--

- Little NSFW there.

Yeah, like I get that society has evolved

(laughing)

and these emojis are what they are,

but yeah, I said, you know,

I would give him the benefit of the doubt right now

in terms of maybe he has code that he reuses,

which I don't hold against anybody

in an engineering position

and he just didn't really proofread it.

- Yeah.

- Okay.

- Possibly.

- Maybe ask him about it when you talk to him

and see if he kind of, it's a mea culpa thing

or he's like, "Ha ha, wasn't that funny?"

Like then I think you get a lot of information.

- We have to have the emoji discussion.

We really like you as a candidate.

We'd like to bring you in,

but we need to talk about the proper use of emojis at work.

What the hell are we doing?

What kind of world do we live in now?

(laughing)

- Emoji training.

- Emoji training.

- Day one training, you have to have emoji training.

- That's right.

- Make sure you watch all those sexual harassment videos.

- Oh yeah, we got a special stack

in the HR library for you here, sir.

(laughing)

I'm gonna need you to like sign on the line here

that you watched all these videos.

Oh boy.

- I think though, another thing to bring up too,

like a couple of things that we've touched on

that is important, I think from your perspective

in terms of recruiting is you're like a relationship builder,

right?

Not only with the candidate, but with the engineering

or hiring managers that you deal with.

And a lot of times that's benefited to you

because these people, what was the term we use?

Boomerang, right?

They come, maybe you're at a different company or whatever,

but they come back around and return to you to find a new job

or get advice for the next job or whatever, right?

- Yeah, yeah, I mean, again, like I said, as a recruiter,

I want to have a pool of people

that a hiring manager comes to me and says,

"We need a senior web dev."

I can be like, "Okay, let me make some phone calls."

Obviously we'll post the job and see,

make sure we're hiring the best that we can

within our budget, but it would be,

It would certainly make my life easier

if I could just go make three, four phone calls

and see if I can find someone that we can hire

rather than go through 100 resumes

and have engineers spend 20 hours a pop interviewing them.

So yeah, I want to have a network

when I let someone down that it was a really close call

or it came down to something subject matter expertise

in like one specific area, I will make the call

and let them know specifically like, this is not a no,

it's a not right now.

Please keep in touch with me, please follow up with me.

I will keep you in mind.

And I try to always reiterate to any candidate

that doesn't work out, it's not a personal decision.

We have to put the business needs first

and find what's best for the business.

And you're still a good person,

you're still a good dev or PM or whatever.

So let's stay connected.

- Let's jump down into the nitty gritty here

and maybe like Zach and Rain I think are listening.

So earmuffs, but when you are trying to like source

for a candidate, you use LinkedIn primarily, right?

Like what kind of tips, tricks,

things that you would like advise people to do,

not to do, like obviously you have a lot of stuff.

- Covered one.

- Yeah, no emojis.

Preferably, but there's a lot of things that you see obviously so like what are like good things to do and bad things to do sure

You know I I understand there's a lot of engineers completely content in the role that they're in and

Don't want all the spam that comes

With their profession

But I would encourage them

to

actually evaluate the company that's reaching out. If they have the time, I understand there's plenty that get hundreds of messages or

look at their recruiter's message and say, does this person actually know what they're talking about and they understand what I do every day?

Because the bigger picture is maybe you want to be connected to that recruiter for when you are ready to make a transition.

It's much easier for you as a candidate to know a recruiter and say I'm looking,

Even if they can't hire to their company, they have a network

So yeah, I encourage anyone who gets

Outreach from a recruiter to at least

Look into it, right? Don't get aggressive and say I told you I'm not looking because the other thing is we have a network

you get all around with me and

Every every recruiter I know is gonna know that you're not a great person to work with

I think you can look at those messages because I get a lot of those too, right?

And some of them you can tell are like legitimate and they're people like you that are actually like trying to like find

Specific things and then there's other people that are like very clearly template-generated

Messages that are oftentimes wrong

Like hey Bill. Yeah, I'm not Bill. Sorry, dude

Yeah, you'd be a great like C++ engineer and you're like what? I don't have that anywhere

Great buddy. Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean, I would just say like be open-minded and think longer term than your immediate needs

You know be mindful that

So a lot of the tools that I will use to find your personal contact information

Essentially what it does is it connects me to all of your social media

So if I find your LinkedIn page, it's going to show me your Twitter. It's going to show me your Facebook

It's going to show me literally like your twitch like if you have an account on a large social media platform

My tools will show me what your account looks like on those platforms. How often is that a disqualifier?

so

I will find you recently

Recently I had a candidate in process

that

Their github they had a note with some code that they'd published they had done some work for a local company

To help the consumer of that brand and the company basically didn't

Benefit from this work this technical work

And so they fired him. I'm not saying it was their right or that was right what they did

It is within their right or an at-will state

But he went out there and he put all their business in this note on this code in get well boy

So my one of my hiring managers was doing his due diligence and looking at this candidates code in get which I encourage them to do

Because I think you can get a really good understanding of somebody's skill level by looking at their side projects

And he was like this makes me uncomfortable

And I said okay, I fair

Can you please still talk to the candidate and you know, obviously you're going to heavily focus on the soft skills

conversation with this candidate because you know they have a tendency to

put their employer on blast and

you would hate for that to happen in this situation if you feel like you know, this was a one-off situation and

They've learned from it and they've grown from it and you wouldn't be worried about it again

We can still readily evaluate this candidate for their

their

Qualifications for the role

So yeah, we'll see things that

May or may not be in your favor and just be aware of that

You know, we have personal stories and experience where we had personal contact with the AWS hacker

Remember we talked about that. It was crazy these things happen

She got caught because she put her resume with her full legal name on her github account. Yeah, well it was a yeah

She had her CV. Yeah, like actually loaded into github as a commit. Oh, yeah, okay, and also the data she'd stolen

Yep, right there with it. Yeah

So very convenient. Yeah

Yeah, I really had to work hard to track her down

Yeah, so just remember all of these things are connected and

Anyone doing due diligence on their candidate before a screen may or may not come across it. Yeah, that's a great point

What about resumes like we've had some talks about resume formatting and stuff like that like there's been some pretty elaborate ones

That you showed me and I'm just like whoa like are you a designer? What's going on here?

So at my last job, I would always turn around and ask the engineer behind me. What's rule number one of resumes?

I think be like no profile pictures

I don't want a picture. I don't want to know what you look like a picture tells me your gender

Yep, it tells me your ethnicity sometimes it often gives me an age range

All of these things I do not want to make an evaluation of your abilities for the job

So take a photo if you haven't on your resume take it off

Just designs anyway versus like the standard one page it really depends on the role

Yeah, I am I really don't mind a creative resume if it's for a creative role

Right now I'm hiring art designers and graphic designers and their resumes tend to be much

different from a technical resume and I really don't mind.

Obviously the design's bad.

Not going to help you.

But, you know, for the most part, I really want one page if you have less than 10 years

of experience, two pages if you have more.

You can get into a CV if you have a PhD and you've been published in multiple publications.

If you do not have a PhD, do not ever get me more than a two-page resume.

I want the nitty-gritty.

Quantify what you've done.

How many people are accessing the webpage that you've made?

How much data is being transferred through your APIs?

What size of data pipeline are you using to pull your analytics?

all of these things. How many people are you managing? How many people are in your org

if you're a leader? All of these things help me understand, right? Because you can be a

VP from Bank of America and have zero direct reports and they gave you that title so that

you could approve a purchase of $100. Oh, wow. Or you can be a VP at Bank of America and

have a hundred people in your organization. So I need to know numbers.

- Something you brought up there a lot of times,

what did you do, right?

Like that's something that you've impressed upon me

a lot of times, it's like, don't use the team.

This is like, what did you do, right?

- Which culturally can be really hard.

- Yep.

- Women in particular cultural backgrounds say we.

We did and they mean I.

(laughing)

But they're taught to not take credit.

These are meant to get you in front of the right people

in the door. So people are like, oh, I don't want to oversell. You're not going to oversell

most likely. So yeah, keep it short, keep it simple, keep it to the point, tailor it.

I know it's a lot of work. But if one company is like we're looking for angular 2.6 and you've

used all of these things, like do it, put it on there. Because any recruiter is going

to be like low hanging fruit. Yes. Right. Or if you apply to somewhere else and they're

like we want, um, JS or whatever, right?

Like give them what they want if you have it.

Don't lie.

(laughing)

- Yeah.

- You see the resumes where they're like,

I know .NET and HTML and CSS and C++.

- Really?

- Do you really?

- Are you ready to start talking about pointers

or something like this?

(laughing)

- Sounds like you're pretty heavy on the front end.

You dabble in your fun time and C++.

Yeah

What do you what do you feel about like the the big thing that I see now in resumes all the time is like the the gauges

I guess for lack of a better word, right? Like oh, I have you know

We'll say in our terms dotnet experience and you know, I'm a three and a half out of five stars in that and on

CSS I'm a five star out of five, you know that kind of thing first of all everybody's at least four stars of everything of course

So they're a waste of space on a resume you could make your

Text about your work history wider and leave off that column on the side of the page

Because literally if I pulled all of my resumes that had these like self ratings

Everyone who'd be a four and five star at everything they list. That's all bullshit anyway, right?

I had an engineer years ago that used to ask every candidate

About like on a scale of one to ten

evaluate your C++ abilities and everyone was a seven or an eight.

And if they said nine or 10, he would say, oh, so you're on like the C++

like committee.

And one guy was like, yeah, I am.

And he was like, I'm never asking that a question again.

I was like, good, cause it's a waste of time.

That's, I mean, that's what I've always understood is that if you're going to

list it on there, you better be prepared to get into it in some detail.

You can't just say, oh yeah, I took a course on plural site and now I know CSS.

like you have to have enough experience with it

that you can go into depth on that or don't even--

- Yeah, and I get a lot of resumes

that under education they'll have like every Coursera

that they've ever taken.

- Oh boy.

- And I'm like, okay, look, I know you're trying to pivot

and you're trying to show that you've done

all these side projects and stuff,

but like I don't need to know every single Coursera course

you've ever taken, it's not a college credit,

it doesn't go towards a degree, like it's a waste of--

- Doesn't matter.

- Of valuable real estate on your one page resume.

I took the Bob Ross course in CSS on YouTube.

- I got that.

Paint a happy tree hoard.

- Yeah, right.

- Very nice.

I like that.

- Yeah.

- Hey, that's great.

- We should like that.

- Hey, come on in.

Let's have a chat.

- There's no mistakes.

- Right.

- Happy little accidents.

- I do think that's telling though,

like just when you, like the,

not all the time, but it seems like

the more you're gonna put on there,

the more you're trying to like polish it up

and put some bullshit in there.

It's like, okay,

people that really know their shit are just gonna put what's important, what

matters, the numbers, and then and leave it off and you can have a simple one

page or maybe a two-pager but the ones that come in there are just a laundry

list. Oh yeah like back in 99 like here's the 18-point list of what I did in

this HTML project. Yeah. Who gives a shit anymore? Yeah like it's a little bit

different when you're at the beginning of a career right? You're an intern trying

to get a full-time job. Okay sure, list every technology you've touched. Yeah. But

But yeah, you're 20 years into your career,

you're probably not pivoting a whole lot between C++

and JavaScript and you're probably going down one path

or another and have an area of emphasis.

So emphasize it.

If you can show me depth when we're talking

about these higher level languages, great.

That's to your benefit.

But I don't want to mistakenly put you in

front of our server engineer who's a C++ expert

when you're a front end guy.

- Yep, man.

Trying to get us complete a picture

you use your can on this person.

- Yeah.

- Going back to like LinkedIn recruiter,

like, 'cause that's what you use, right?

Is called LinkedIn recruiter,

which is the recruiting side of LinkedIn,

which has all kinds of crazy things that it can do

that maybe you're not aware of.

But when you're trying to like hunt for candidates,

I know there's stuff that kind of bubbles them up

to the top a little bit, right?

I don't know if this affects actually LinkedIn recruiter,

if this is just other folks

that don't have the recruiter accounts,

but if I make a change to my profile, right?

I think that bumps you up to the top of the listings

because they assume, oh, now you're looking, right?

- Yeah, so Microsoft bought LinkedIn.

So there's definitely algorithms on their side

that have nothing to do with me

that will propagate a list of people

who are more active towards the top.

So even that even includes logging in.

So you don't necessarily have to make a change.

But if you haven't logged in to LinkedIn in 10 years,

they're probably not gonna show me your profile.

- Jim's dead, but we'll show him anyway.

- And that's unfortunate.

I've definitely seen people who are like,

oh, that person's not alive anymore.

And I'm like, oh.

So yeah, you make changes, expect an influx of spam.

You can delete everything,

but basically when it comes down to it,

Microsoft will sell your soul for an amount and they will give your email to someone for a dollar

So don't get mad at the recruiter that they have your contact information

They just paid for a product that gives it to him

Yeah, I think that's been a fascinating thing to see is like yeah, you can you can mark yourself as you don't want to be

Contacted you're not available yada yada yada, but like

Some level deeper you can you can be contacted if you pay enough money

I don't understand the mad response.

In most cases, I just don't respond.

I have responded before though.

In some cases, like you say, when they're legitimate and they look interesting, I'll

say, "Hey, listen, I'm really happy right now, but I'd like to keep your information

around and maybe we can talk if things change a little."

To me, to come back with some smart remark or like, "I screwed you for God's add to me."

Well, I think you used to work with data scientists, which are like, I mean, if you can name your

price if you're those people right now. Everybody needs them. Everybody wants them. Everybody

will pay them a bajillion dollars. So like, yeah, if you reach out to one of those people,

they're like, I got 15 bajillion emails today, like leave me the hell alone. Right?

Yeah. But like, to Mike's point, you know, if you respond, you say, look, the sound's

interesting, but I want to hang out here for at least 18 more months or whatever. I will

say, I usually will respond and say, thank you for letting me know. Please feel free

to connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't ever send the request because some

engineers get really touchy about their network. So I give them the option.

Like if you want to connect to me, please feel free. I will certainly accept your

connection. If you don't and you, you know, carefully monitor your network, I

understand. But I will put a reminder to reach out to you in 18 months.

That's cool. Doing a good job there. That's how you got to do it.

Well, I even had a very limited experience, I think through you.

Remember it was Chameleon, right?

Wasn't that your setup?

That's who, yeah, when I, the job before this, that's who I got recruited through, excuse

me, it was an agency.

And they placed me at Prep Sportswear.

Right, right.

And so, the girls there that I, two of them that I had worked with were great.

They moved on to other things now.

But, yeah, I mean, it didn't take much and we had a pretty good, they did a really good

job but try and understand where I was at in my career at the time and what

would be a good fit and they did a great match. Yeah I always tell Kyle a job is

a place and a time. You can want to work at a startup but if you're 25 and have a

new baby and another one on the way you know maybe you want a little more

stability. Right. Maybe you shouldn't be at an early stage startup that could run

out of funding. That's a great point. But call me in five years. I like that.

It's a time and a play.

Would you say a place and a time place and a time? Yeah, that's great. It's very cool. It's a good way to look at it for sure

Yeah, and it just yeah, you never know

Hopefully I never have to go through any recruiter again

I've done two different ones. So like I've done an independent which I mean everybody I think in the field

You say you'll kind of wants to go and do their independent thing, right or a lot of them do

So I've gone to him. That's where I got place. I think at ground speak way back in the day

And then yeah, I went through chameleon chameleon and and that worked out pretty well

Like I said, I had pretty good experience with that too. They kind of did a technical

Interview ish type thing with with with with one of their recruiters

Yeah, and he kind of gauged where he thought I should go and like what my my abilities were and then they kind of placed me based on that

Whereas the other guy was much more of a

He came back around because I think after I left ground speak he wanted to place me again

And so, I mean, he was trying to build that relationship as well, very similarly, but

was unsuccessful in that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I've had good experiences with the creators and I'm very excited for the one coming to

Quote Wizard from Letting Tree.

I told Christine I'd like to introduce him because I think that, you know, he's moving

from Charlotte, so we'll need to meet some people.

Why not me?

But he took my job.

I mean, Zach wants me here.

Everybody wanted you.

To be fair, everybody wanted me here.

Everybody did want you here, actually.

There was F bombs being thrown about.

Yeah.

I heard Kyle's fucking wife or something like that.

That was something.

I think your boss might have said that.

Yeah, I heard that.

It's exactly what happened.

Really true story.

Yep.

But yeah, I mean, that'd be a great connection to make there.

I guess on that note, because we're kind of getting close to the hour.

But the one thing that I wanted to bring up about our meeting with him

that I thought was interesting, you might have some information to add to this,

the data that he was using. So they were compiling like market data on each of our locations.

And so he kind of shared that deck a little bit. And I think it was CBRE maybe that had

that really amazing information on like cost of living and like we're in the tech talent

and that ranking and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, can you talk a little bit to that?

Yeah, so, you know, I've mostly been at earlier stage companies as a recruiter.

And so, unfortunately, I've had pretty limited data and information on that

scale. You can easily pay for a salary survey. But, you know, they're expensive

and they're typically pretty narrow because they want you to buy other salary

surveys. But yeah, I mean, it truly matters. Like, you know, I've used things

like pay scale as well.

You know, I'm trying to hire someone from Florida.

Well, the cost of living is 40% less, you know?

So they're making, you know, 120 there,

but that's like making 160 here, you know?

Like how do we do the math and make it work

and those sorts of things.

You know, the talent pool is definitely something

to keep in mind.

You know, Seattle's obviously very popular

and a lot of the big companies are here now

that weren't before. You got Apple here now, you got Uber and Facebook and you know, it's

no longer just Amazon and Microsoft. So, you know, I've seen crazy things in terms of the

offers and counter offers I've seen from candidates and the data that the company has doesn't

support, you know, going that direction and competing with those offers. But yeah, I have

Right now a strategy I'm working on for a marketing role out of Oakland where Oakland is very, it's part of the Bay Area.

So it's very, very high salaries.

And basically we've come to the conclusion that we should be looking for talent willing to relocate to the Bay Area.

You know, Big Fish has a specific studio in Oakland that focuses on slot machines.

So maybe we can focus on a marketing person who has slots experience, land-based slots experience,

or we can focus on someone willing to relocate that has mobile marketing experience, and then we

can build them up on either side because we're not finding this unicorn that we need.

So yeah, I mean it plays a factor for sure. I don't envy recruiters in the Bay Area at all.

the counters I see down there and the, you know, the craziness that I see, I don't, I don't envy them at all.

Because even with all of the, like, what I would say, like the decentralization of tech and you're starting to see offices in New York City now,

another Austin are, but I mean, the Bay is still number one. It's still ridiculous.

Yeah. And in the Bay, it's not unusual to see people training jobs after less than a year.

Really?

a lot, right? Seattle's getting that way. I'd say Seattle's still 18 to 24 months,

but in the Bay Area, it's really not unusual to see people go 10, 11 months and then hop.

And it's because a company will be willing to pay your sign-on back at that other company.

And that's-- Oh, that's crazy. Okay. So, yeah, there's a lot of craziness that happens in the Bay.

I know there's companies specifically looking at, you know, the Midwest. Can we start an

office there and encourage some of our people from the Bay Area to relocate

there. Sure. And attract talent to these lower cost of living places. It's

definitely something that large organizations are doing. Well to your

point about time and place I feel like it maybe you know there's a lot people

that have families there like okay I'm ready to leave the Bay now because it's

on it's I can't afford a house or whatever. Yeah I need to buy a house for less than a

million dollars. Really high bar there. Because that's not going to be a great

house. Sad but true. Talk a little bit one more thing we can and then we can

wrap up here like talk a little bit about like negotiation and in that process

because like there's been a number of times I've seen you kind of go through

negotiations with people and like you have the ability to kind of having been

in the space for a while like kind of understand when when you're kind of

getting bullshitted, I guess, for lack of a better word,

or getting used to be compared to somebody else.

So like, do you have any advice to people going through

that kind of process to help them navigate those waters?

- Yeah, so I had a candidate who was like,

here's what I'm looking for.

And then I exceeded their offer expectations

and they still countered on me.

- Oh, wow.

- I was very angry on a personal level.

But that's something too, like, before you move on is like,

you are very explicit with the candidate, right?

Like, have I met your expectations?

Have I made you happy?

Like, you ask these questions very directly.

- Yeah.

And we specifically exceeded the candidate's expectations

to show our excitement about the candidate

and really hope that like this will close the deal.

So getting a counter just really was frustrating at the time.

But, you know, I just had the conversation.

I said, look, you gave me a range.

I exceeded the entire range.

- Yeah.

- And now you're asking me to counter.

Like, I can't present that to the business

and expect them to sign off on it.

- Wasn't our agreement, that's not what we were.

- Yeah, like I already told the business

we're exceeding your expectations.

I cannot go back now and tell them

that we need to increase this offer.

- And what happened?

- They understood.

- They walked.

- No, they took it.

- They took it.

Oh, interesting.

- They signed.

- Yeah, I mean, some candidates just have to counter

and to counter in this one.

- It's been ingrained in everybody, right?

Like you must counter.

- You gotta ask for more?

- Yep.

- Which, yeah, as a recruiter, screw you.

On a personal level, I get it,

as a recruiter, you make my life hard.

So yeah, the other part is be real.

You know, if you're actively interviewing, that's fine.

I actually hope that you are doing your due diligence,

but give me a realistic timeline

of when you're going to make a decision.

- Yeah.

- I will do everything that I can to meet that timeline.

And then the worst thing that happens is like,

I bust my butt, I get you on site, I get you an offer.

And then you're like, thanks,

I'll get back to you in a week.

I'm like, really?

(laughs)

Like I just did all of this work.

I literally like, you know,

working extra hours to get you this offer.

And then you don't even respect me enough

to give me an answer.

You know, I understand things happen and whatnot,

but keep me informed throughout the process.

Hey, I'm actually not gonna get on site

with this other company until after next week.

So don't feel obligated to meet the timeline

we had talked about earlier.

Those sorts of things. - Seems fair.

- Goes a long way.

You know, my advice, a lot of people always wanna know,

like, well, when do I know to move on

or how much more should I be asking for?

I'm not gonna leave a perfectly good job

for anything less than 20% more.

- 20% more.

- If I'm miserable, obviously that number's much lower.

(laughing)

- I'm willing to negotiate, getting the hell out of here.

- But yeah, I mean, if I have a perfectly good job

and I'm not looking to go anywhere,

I'm gonna give you a high number

and it's gonna be at least 20% more.

- And I suppose I've seen other people fall into this trap

where they will offer that information up.

Well, here's where I'm at right now.

- Which legally I cannot ask you.

- Okay, so that's a good point.

You can't ask that.

And I don't know, I think the answer would be,

they should just really provide the range

that they wanna be in,

not necessarily where they're at right now.

- Yeah, and do your homework.

Go look out online, what you can see.

If you're like, I want 150K,

and the average salary is 100,

like you're just delusional in wasting everyone's time.

be realistic. And then yeah, I personally will ask you what is it going to take?

At the end of the day, if we're happy, you're happy and I need to go to the business and say,

here's what we need to present. Tell me what that is. And that's what I will do.

I'm a very different recruiter though that I'm not a sales type recruiter. There's definitely the

the type of recruiter that will low ball you and drive for you to verbally accept on the

phone and all these things.

Cut throat recruiter.

Yeah, I don't play that game.

I don't like that style.

Yeah.

It is not in my best interest to pay you less.

I want you to be happy and comfortable working here.

So if I low ball you, you'll probably look sooner.

Yeah, you're not helping yourself.

No.

That's a short play that doesn't really work for anyone.

to get back to the relationships thing like you want them to come back around.

So if you lobal them, they're not going to come back to you.

- Do it when I'm done. - Yeah.

And if I'm really at the upper end of my budget and I can't get what you need

to be where I'm at, I will let you know that I've done everything that I can.

And, you know, let you know the conversations I've had with the hiring manager

and be realistic about like, look, this is what we can do now.

But in six to 12 months, you could expect an increase or you could expect a title

change. I mean we understand that we have to give you a reason to be here. And so

you know I will be very transparent with Candidates. I don't understand why you

wouldn't be. Like these are decisions that change people's lives, can make or

break, you know, a family. And so I don't understand the the point of trying to get

someone to accept the lowest amount possible. I have definitely presented

people with offers that far exceeded their expectations because they were

not asking market rate.

Wow.

Um, I honestly, if I, in a perfect world, you know, we would have accurate salary

surveys that I could just offer you mid.

It would be more than you're currently making.

And I wouldn't even know what you're currently making.

It wouldn't matter to be easy and.

Yeah.

No haggle formulas.

I would love a formula.

Compensation, I think is like something else that we could do a whole

another, whole another show on if we wanted to.

There's like so much to unpack there in different types of ways of doing compensation and bonuses and all that kind of silly stuff

But we're gonna ignore rain's last comment there. He's wondering something. I'm not gonna repeat on all right

But really really appreciate the conversation good good cover saw me rain. Yeah, it was quick. No, don't call

All right, thanks for everybody for listening. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show

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