We’re all busy. You’re never going to have time. It’s never going to be a good time – to go get your master’s degree, to expand your knowledge… there’s never a good time and we all struggle with that, not just recruiters or sourcers. There’s too much that’s expected of us out of the day and not enough time or hours in the day, and we have families, kids, hobbies, etc. You have to make time, as a break, to invest in yourself. You also need to be great at your craft and in order to do that you need to invest in yourself and stay up to date on the latest trends. Not only does this episode talk about improving yourself and your craft, but it also highlights some key trends such as the differences between Gen Z and Millennials, and ways that the recruiting process needs to change to become more human and ultra-personalized.
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Dave Webb 0:03 "I'm Dave Webb, and you're listening to Recruitercast." William Tincup 0:09 "Then you look at the technology providers like Hire Tool, Brightmove, etcetera, and you look at all of those vendors, they typically all try to tackle these topics and make our lives better. You know, they're not always, that's the thing I try to convince practitioners, but they aren't always selling you know some of the times what they're trying to do is just convey what's going on in the market and then you take it from there and do with it as you wish." Dave Webb 0:37 "That's William Tincup, President of Recruiting Daily. William is a writer, speaker, adviser, consultant, (big sigh) investor, story teller, and teacher. Wow. Having written over two hundred HR articles, spoken at over one hundred and fifty HR and recruiting conferences and conducted over one thousand HR podcasts." Background voice 0:58 One thousand and one with this one! Dave Webb 1:00 "One Thousand and one it is, I stand corrected. It's safe to say though that William is an expert on how to stay current and relevant as a recruiter. So, how do you stay current in the industry? Is it even possible to turn your phone off these days? William is here to give us some advice." William Tincup 1:15 "Okay, you know what I need a break. I just had a bad candidate call, I need a break, and instead of going and looking at ESPN, or you know finding a break in a different way, invest in yourself, and look at it that way like, 'I'm going to reward myself periodically during the day, I'm just going to give myself ten minutes and I'm going to go and read a couple things and see you know if there's something new that I should know'. And what a lot of articles do and provide for the practitioning community, is a different perspective. It's usually practitioners, the best articles I think come from practitioners that are doing something and they've solved a problem or they've taken on a challenge and looked at it in a different way, turned it on it's head, etcetera. And so you don't have to read the eight hundred words, you need to scan it and basically see, okay, what can I learn from that, what can I steal from that or I mean if you really want to kind of use street language, what can I steal from that and use for myself?" Dave Webb 2:17 "It's a crazy busy world out there and we're all in the middle of it. We're going to help you cut through and make the most of your precious time, from time-boxing to productive reading and aspiring to be what we all think we are: thought leaders." William Tincup 2:30 "As a thought leader, you put yourself out on a plane where you're going to make people uncomfortable, because you're essentially going to say on some level and in some way, what you're doing it wrong (laughs). And not only does that take moxy and all that other hutzpah, you also have to be pretty self assured, and you've got to be in a place where you A) have that idea and then you have the wherewithal to then say, 'Yeah, we're doing this incorrectly, we should look at it this way and here's the case for logic'. Tear the logic down. Like hey it's okay, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm actually okay with being wrong, here's the logic. We don't have that many people in our industry that do that." Dave Webb 3:17 "Okay, so I'm super excited for this episode, and I'm glad that you've decided to join us. So buckle up and get ready as William and I discuss all of these topics and much more on this episode of RecruiterCast." Dave Webb 3:30 "I'm Dave Webb, CEO and co-founder of Brightmove. For over twenty-five years, my job has been to learn all of the ins and outs of the recruiting industry and then write the software that makes it all happen. I know who to talk to and what to ask them. We have the information that you cannot get anywhere else. So get ready to learn the secrets that will give you an advantage as a recruiter, job-seeker, or business owner. It's time for RecruiterCast." Advertisement 3:57 "RecruiterCast is brought to you by Brightmove, the most innovative applicant tracking system built with the recruiter and candidate in mind. Learn more at Brightmove.com" Dave Webb 4:08 "My name is David Webb and I am your host today for recruitercast and we're joined by William Tincup of RecruitingDaily.com. William welcome to the show, we really appreciate you joining us today." William Tincup 4:18 "Well, I appreciate the invitation, David, and looking forward to kind of talking with you and talking with your audience." Dave Webb 4:26 "Excellent. So just in case some of our audience members aren't familiar with you or what you do, could you give a brief kind of history of yourself and the recruiting industry and what you have going on right now?" William Tincup 4:35 "You bet. And I'm assuming most of them don't know who I am so let's start there. Yeah, I came up through retail and grocery and I opened a lot of stores for Wal-Mart, so I did a lot of hiring, made a lot of mistakes (laughs). Then later in my career I owned an ad agency and it focused on the vendors assault of recruiters and HR and I fell in love, I know this is going to sound odd, but I fell in love with HR and recruiting and fell out of love with marketing per say, and so I kind of sold my agency, kind of full on into recruiting and HR. I've been on the speaking circuit for awhile, I've been all around the world, really my focus is kind of HR technology, if you will, and that's everything from sourcing to out placement. So all the technologies that are kind of in between, you would kind of call it TA tech stack, or an HR tech stack. I like a lot of technologies, and so you know, I write with Recruiting Daily I joined Recruiting Daily because I had bought or purchased a bunch of media for clients but I'd never worked in media. And even though I'd been you know on the talk shows and all of that stuff, I'd never really kind of seen how the sausage was made, so I wanted to do that because I've done market research, I've owned a consulting firm, I've owned an ad agency, I really wanted to kind of see how media works. I think we're coming up on my fourth anniversary at Recruiting Daily, and I serve as the president, you know it's a small firm, so really everybody does everything, so I kind of am seen as the spokesman, so I do a lot of interviews and quotes for newspapers and things like that." Dave Webb 6:24 "Recruiting Daily, I have no idea how many people are there, but I can tell you that your market reach, and the information that you provide to recruiters and those of us in the recruiting industry and the technology of recruiting industry is very valuable and you guys sure do a great job of getting a lot of relevant content out and getting it to the masses in a very efficient and great way, so you're doing good stuff there. I commend you on getting into the media, that's something that scares the hell out of me to be honest with you. I like to put on headphones and type on a computer screen that doesn't talk back to me. But that's because I'm a nerd and you're not. I think that's a great segway that you have all this knowledge in your head and you write about it, and if I'm a recruiter and I don't have enough time in the day already to get my job done, to contact all my candidates, you know, kind of make the case to the jury why it's important to read the things that people like you write on these recruiting blogs." William Tincup 7:19 "I think on one level, you'll never have time, so like, is it ever a good time to go back and get that masters degree? Is it ever a good time to kind of expand your knowledge however you want to do that? There's never a good time. And all of us struggle with that, I would say that's not just recruiters, or sourcers, or people in the staffing industry, or RPO. We all suffer from this because there's just too much that's expected out of us a day and not enough time or hours in the day, and, oh by the way, we have families and kids and all this other stuff, hobbies, etcetera. So I think the case is on one level what I would use Recruiting Daily and other sites, I think ERE and Undercover Recruiter, and there's a couple other sites, Recruiting Brainfood, Hunley's, a curated newsletter. I think there's a couple places where I think as a break, like almost like you say, 'okay you know what I need a break, I just had a bad candidate call, I need a break', and instead of going and looking at ESPN, or you know finding a break in a different way, invest in yourself, and look at it that way like, 'I'm going to reward myself periodically during the day, I'm just going to give myself ten minutes and I'm going to go and read a couple things and see you know if there's something new that I should know'. And what a lot of articles do and provide for the practitioning community, is a different perspective. It's usually practitioners, like the best articles I think come from practitioners that are doing something, and they've solved a problem, or they've taken on a challenge and looked at it in a different way, turned it on it's head, etcetera. And so you don't have to read the eight hundred words, you need to scan it and basically see, okay, what can I learn from that? What can I steal from that or I mean if you really want to kind of use street language, what can I steal from that and use for myself? " William Tincup 9:23 "So why would you invest in yourself the answer is simple: You just want to be better, you want to get better at your craft, and the craft of being a great recruiter, the craft of being a great sourcer, or hiring manager, etcetera, is you're constantly improving yourself in your craft. You're just getting better. Like if we were blacksmiths, we would always be trying to figure out different ways to do you know things with heating and cooling and hammering metal. That's what we would do if we were blacksmiths. Well, we're not blacksmiths, we're in the recruiting industry and so there's all these new technologies, not to be overwhelmed by them, there's always new processes, not to be overwhelmed by them, and there's always new tricks that people are coming up with, not to be overwhelmed with them, but to learn from them. And I think that on one level, if you don't invest in yourself, whose going to invest in you? (laughs) Which is a great question. (laughs) Nobody, let me go ahead and answer that. Too, I think it's just in your best interests, like if for no other reason, Benjamin Franklin 101, if for no other reason, do it cause it's in your own interest. And just invest in yourself, whether or not that's through a vehicle like Recruiting Daily or a couple of the other good ones that are out there." Dave Webb 10:47 "Now that's great advice and there are a bunch of great ones out there and you know you make a great point about investing in yourself. And all other trades really do, they practice, or they should practice what it is that they do everyday to get better at it and to stay abreast of the changes in that industry. It sounds like what you're saying is what we call time-boxing, you know, set aside some time, do it the same time everyday, make it a habit and before you know it it'll just be part of your routine and you won't even have to think about it." William Tincup 11:14 "Well, great writers talk about the different processes they've used, you know, like John Updike, or Hemmingway, or any of these types of folks, they all kind of did it a little different, but they all had a process. And some of them it was: I wake up, I drink three or four cups of coffee, I read three newspapers and then I write whatever's there, I'll stare at the paper, I'll literally stare at the you know typewriter, or stare at the computer or stare at the paper if they're handwriting, before I do anything and at one o'clock I'll walk away." Dave Webb 11:49 Yep. William Tincup 11:50 "(laughs) And that's it. They go and do something else. They experience life because they want to pull those stories back into what they're building. And so, I think the thing for us in our industry is like, okay what is your process? Okay, you get your kids off to school, it's eight-thirty and you know what? Before you know, before it gets too crazy, it's almost like exercise on some little crazy level, like when's a good time to exercise? Like there's never (laughs) there's never a good time to exercise." Dave Webb 12:21 It's never fun either. William Tincup 12:22 "No! And if people talk about this high that comes from it, I think that's a lie! I think we've been lied to, we've been hoodwinked, I don't believe in it at all. You know, there's never a good time, but like my business partner, one of my business partners, Ryan Leary, he gets up at like four, goes to the gym for two hours, comes back, helps with the family, boom! Does all this stuff and he's into work, and it's done. Like it's over, he doesn't have to think about it, he's already drank the water for the day, he's already gotten his workout in and now his body's in recovery and he didn't, it didn't effect you know any of the other things he has going on. And some people do it at night, like I have a dear friend that she does yoga at night and she does her cardio at night, literally, like at ten o'clock at night and it makes her tired and then she goes to bed, you know because she's kind of drained emotionally and intellectually, but also physically, and she just takes a shower and goes to bed and is done. No good time. But I think to your point, you figure out what works for you and then you build it into the day and you just say, 'okay from this period I'm just going to shut out all the other things that are screaming at me.' Which could be anything from clients to, you know, the hiring manager, candidates, we get hammered from every direction, so we don't suffer like all the different people and the interruptions, we don't suffer from interruptions, we have plenty of interruptions, but what we have to do is kind of give to ourselves cause I don't think, I think it's unreasonable expectation to think that the corporations are going to train us. They might train us to a point or within their interests, but that's it." Dave Webb 14:16 "And that's a good point, great, I'll say great recruiters, because we are RecruiterCast, but I would say great employees or just great craftsmen, and great craftswomen of the world do not turn off at five o'clock. I know that you read whenever you see something that looks good and interesting, you think about stuff all the time, so don't be ashamed if you can't turn it off at five o'clock, and embrace it because once you take on the challenge that your mind and your body are presenting to you, then you can move on to the next thing." William Tincup 14:45 "You're feeding your, you know, it's like we've said for years you are what you eat, right? Well, to some degree you are what you consume, which is a bit broader and it also deals with information. So it's just as important to shut out some things, turn off some things, you know, those things that distract you, it's okay, like first of all, don't have any guilt. Like my wife, she grew up kind of in a culture of guilt, or in a family of guilt, and every time she gets sick, which isn't that often, but every time she gets sick, she feels guilty for being sick, I'm like, (laughs) you're already sick, you really don't need to be or feel guilty for being sick, like that's a double whammy, you know you don't have to do that. And I think we punish ourselves in much the same way where we take all these inputs and we can shut some of those inputs down and not deal with, if it's a negative influence or an input, we can shut those down and nourish ourselves. Like let's use the language that nutritionists use, let's nourish ourselves with things that make us better. And again, that's all forms of content, like we're here, you and I are talking and you are going to create an audio file of this, a podcast, well that's just a great as watching or listening to a webinar, it's just as great as going and attending a conference, and going to a session, it's just as good as you know, meeting people locally and networking or reading a blogpost, like content comes in many forms, it's all nourishment. Until it's not nourishment, and the moment that it's not nourishment, close it off. Like just shut it down and be ruthless with your time about those things." Dave Webb 16:28 "Yeah, getting good at filtering out what's good information and what's distracting or what's just trying to get your eyes and your clicks, yeah that's the hard part. Once you read something that just grabs you, it becomes easy from there." Advertisement 16:43 "RecruiterCast is brought to you by Brightmove, the most innovative applicant tracking system built with the recruiter and candidate in mind. Be sure to check out Brightmove on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn @Brightmove. Visit us on the web at Brightmove.com." Dave Webb 16:59 "I'd like to take this moment to ask you about industry trends and recruiting. You know there's the nourishment for yourself but then there's also some aspects of it where you kind of have to stay up to speed on things like legal and compliance issues. Maybe what is the last big legal or compliance issue that affected a recruiters daily life and you know, how could that information have been given to them in a timely manner, if not by a recruiting blog or something like that." William Tincup 17:27 "I think GDPR would be one of them I'd like to point to just because we've always kind of crossed boundaries with ease. You know, even though we have canned spam and so there are some email limits of what we can and can't do but we've not had something like GDPR that says basically you're data is yours, it's not okay if someone contacts you if you don't want that contact. Which is completely unfamiliar to us as Americans, like that's just not normal, like if we want to contact somebody and have their phone number from wherever or however, we just contact them. So I think that compliance, of you know international recruiting, which we all kind of now are global recruiters, we're always looking for talent wherever it is, you know, be it in Ireland or India, we're looking for that talent. And so when you have something like GDPR, the associations do a pretty good job, and I'll broaden this out to an HR, SHRM did a pretty good job, HCI did a pretty good job, I think, Atap as an organization did a pretty good job of putting information in front of the recruiting community. Oddly enough, and I think this is something that we should all think about, vendors, you know, vendors also do a great job with these types of topics as a, 'hey here's what you need to know', the ten things you need to know about GDPR, ebooks, and webinars and different forms of content, but basically you know, if you're a global recruiter, which is everybody, here's the things that you should know about this new law. " William Tincup 19:06 " I think on the compliance side, I think that you look at your kind of your associations, both national, international, national will you know Say What and locally like we have in Dallas we have DFWTRN which is a staffing association, they did a bunch of GDPR kind of sessions and things like that, so you look for that stuff, but also you look at the recruiting and vendor community, so it's service providers like Kelly Services, or an RPO like Kinetics, or Wilson ACG and then you look at the technology providers like Hire Tool, Brightmove, etcetera, and you look at all of those figures, they typically all try to tackle these topics and make our lives better. You know they're not always, that's the thing I try to convince practitioners, but they aren't always selling you know some of the times what they're trying to do is just convey what's going on in the market and then you take it from there and do with it as you wish. But that content, that GDPR content I think came from a lot of different places and made us smarter. Helped us adapt to a new law." Dave Webb 20:18 "Yeah, I know we're used to it in America, but I sure welcome the spirit of it, I kind of think why did it take so long for it to hit? The telemarketing days of the eighties I mean if you think about how many times your phone rang during dinner and how you heard your parents say words you didn't think they knew you know, it's like it's long overdue in my opinion. To your point, of service provider, I'll just, I'll speak to Brightmove, because I'm the CEO and I was involved in the GDPR implementation. We spent a lot of money having international lawyers go over the law, make sure the software was compliant, and that we wouldn't do anything that would harm our customers by using our software in international recruiting. Any recruiting firm can just piggyback off of that by choosing a good technology or a vendor whose already done their homework and has the process in place. So, I think that's great advice regardless of your industry, that's a pretty good practice, we try to do it with our software vendors you know, when we buy stuff." William Tincup 21:13 "They have to, so take, you know you've got a couple thousand clients, you've got all these different inputs and outputs and now this new law, you're going to figure out the new law. You kind of have to, you're going to figure out the new law and then you're going to do that for not only just the company's benefit, or the technology's benefit, but all the customers, both current and future, all of those folks are going to do well because of that. But it's, I look at the education part and I think you know first of all, good education can come from anywhere, it can come from any source. So, instead of us thinking like okay all the best information comes from this one source, this other source, eh, good information, even great information can come from anybody. So we need to kind of open up our aperture on that a bit cause I think that we've gotten jaded as a community that you know practitioners are somehow you know, always being sold to, well that's not necessarily true, they have to purchase things, you know because they have budgets and needs and initiatives, etcetera, but the vendor community is not your enemy, it's your collaborator, if done well it's your collaborating partner. And we should look at it like that (laughs) rather than.... Exactly.. " 22:36 Dead AirÖ William Tincup 22:41 "That's the worst part of it is if they don't then you ultimately as a practitioner then you leave when the contracts up. So it's in their best interest to be a great collaborator with you and most of them are, like, (laughs) that's the deep irony, like push comes to shove, most of them are pretty good at collaboration." Dave Webb 23:05 "In addition to the legal and compliance, what kind of information does Recruiting Daily like to write about? And why is it a really valuable resource to recruiters and sourcers and account managers in the staffing industry?" William Tincup 23:16 "You've got like layers of news, so on one level you've got opinion pieces, and it's you know, Jaimie has and opinion about so and so, and so she'll take you through her kind of logic and how she feels about it. And you've got news news, like so and so got acquired, and so and so moved from this job to a new job, uh left Wayfair and went to Facebook you know, there's that type of news. The money that's flowing into recruiting and recruiting technology, there's a lot of investment, which is good for us there's a lot of acquisition which is also good for us. Practitioners need to understand and be aware of those things. Also, new technologies, people talking about new technologies that are coming available, that type of content is useful for practitioners. Probably lastly I think that practitioner-centric. So a practitioner at Facebook writing a technical recruiting kind of manifesto is good content for other technical recruiters to read. Not to actually implement all the things on the manifesto, but just to look at it and go okay, I think just like this, I'm going to take one through eight (laughs) and now those are mine. So I think, when I look at content, you never know what's going to really do well until you put it in front of an audience, you know, you just put it in front of an audience, and we try to actually put, kind of balance it out with tips and tricks and cheats and hacks and stuff like that, it's a more resource guide approach and balance that with editorial, straight opinion and news and stuff like that." Dave Webb 25:02 "You made me think of something, and it's come up as a topic a couple of times with some guests, and that's what information should be open and what is open and what's worth sharing? And I'll share an experience and ask you your thoughts on it. You know, we're a software company, for someone to start writing an applicant tracking system from scratch; let's just call it reasonably impossible for the average person. We asked for some opinions on you know, what is the top thing that you would like to see added to an applicant tracking system, not just ours, any in the entire industry, and so many practitioners held their ideas close to their chest instead of sharing them with someone who might actually be able to implement them and benefit the community. So, you know as someone thinking about sharing an opinion or sharing an experience that would help the community as a whole and maybe come back to them in some other way. What would you say about the open sharing of information versus you know, keeping it to yourself? " William Tincup 25:55 "Well, there you've really scratched a neat itch there. I've been asked no less than a thousand times, who does this the best? Like, you know, I've got to hire a thousand engineers in 2020, who does this the best? And the sad truth is we don't know. And there's a good reason for it though, so hear me out. We don't know, because if you do recruiting at the one percent level, okay, it becomes a competitive advantage, it actually becomes a firm wide company advantage, so think of it like this: If you're at Facebook and you solve the riddle of how to hire software engineers, why in the world would you tell anyone else?" Dave Webb 26:48 "I agree, if you're sitting in Facebook, yes." William Tincup 26:51 "Right. So why would you, and again, that's if you've nailed it. I'm not talking about if you have an idea, or I have a problem and I'm thinking about doing it this way, I'm talking about you've now got the formula for coco-cola. And you know why would you share that, you wouldn't. You wouldn't and those folks I would say will never share that information. Now, let's put that aside, those folks that have actually figured out the riddle, they've figured out the formula and are not going to share it, they actually can't share it in a lot of ways because their companies preclude them from sharing because they figured out that it's a competitive advantage, so why would they do that? Put that aside. The folks that actually share stories in general are right below that level. That will go either you know on webinars, at conferences, on podcasts, write articles, etcetera where they'll share how they've solved a problem. So we were having a problem onboarding Gen Z, and they'll say, you know we didn't understand the difference between millennials as candidates and Gen Z as candidates and once we converted them we didn't understand that they had different needs in onboarding, and they do by the way which is off topic, (laughs) but they do. Anyhow, we didn't know that and then all the sudden a practitioner says here's how we solve that. Now that's not necessarily a competitive advantage, it's, they figured out a little micro experience and how to make that micro experience better. And that's worth share. And so I think that if you look at it from a recruiter's or company's perspective, if you've got a secret formula, you're not going to share it, nor should you. But if you've figured out how to do something in an innovative way that's not necessarily a competitive advantage than that's okay to share, and you should share." Dave Webb 28:45 "And then there's people like you, William, who can listen to everybody's stories and without doing any harm to anybody, kind of generalize and then share the information, so I think that service is one that's needed and I guess that's kind of like the consultant's jambalaya of everything that you've just kind of thrown into the pot that your brain over the last twenty years and then can make a deduction that you know, maybe you should do Gen Z a little bit different than millennials and Gen X." William Tincup 29:13 "Yeah, let's not get blindsided like we did with millennials, let's (laughs) spend a couple moments thinking differently about this. And you know the thing is about generations, is they all at the end of the day they're all the same, but at the beginning they're not all the same. You know, when you take a millennial and they're in their sixties, they're going to be just like Gen X, it's going to be very similar. And it's just going to be just like boomers, it's going to be just like the greatest generation, you can keep going back and keep going forward, but it's you take Gen Z who's never not had the internet, okay, that's basically age eight to twenty-three if you want to kind of have some numbers to it. They've never, these are true people like the older millennials can remember a point where there wasn't an internet and then all the sudden there was an internet. Whereas Gen Z, there was never a moment where there wasn't the internet, or Siri, or Alexa, or google earth, like whatever, all of that stuff... " Alexa 30:17 "Answer your question, google earthÖ." William Tincup 30:21 Isn't that great? Dave Webb 30:22 YeahÖ (Laughs) William Tincup 30:25 "Alexa, they're always listening! " Dave Webb 30:26 Yes. William Tincup 30:27 " Thank you Alexa. (laughs) Ah, that's so genius." Dave Webb 30:31 "I think I have a perfect example, I have a niece who's Gen Z. One day, someone, maybe her mom told her that not everybody had the internet and her response was, ""well how do they get clothes?"" And if you think about how disconnected those two statements are for Gen X or before, but that really encapsulates how different the generations think and it's all based on experience." William Tincup 30:56 "We watched, as a family we watched National Lampoons Vacation last night. " Dave Webb 31:00 What a great movie. William Tincup 31:01 "My kids were amazed at the trip tics and them printing out maps, neither of my boys, fourteen and ten has ever seen a map (laughs), like a folded map, they've like that was a foreign concept, they're like what is that? I'm like (laughs) that's a map! " Dave Webb 31:20 That's a back-up plan. William Tincup 31:21 "They're like, why wouldn't you just use your phone? I'm like, yeah, okay, here we go." Dave Webb 31:27 Yep. William Tincup 31:28 "But you know, the truth is that Gen Z is different than millennials, so on one level you look at the practitioning community it's like okay, we got completely blindsided by millennials, because we thought they were just like Gen X and we wanted them to behave just like Gen X, and they didn't, and nor should they. When you really think about it, but we got completely blindsided by that. And we won't be as blindsided by Gen Z because I think we've learned, to some degree we've learned our lesson. And there's another reason like, if you're recruiting, if you're doing a bunch of campus recruiting today, you already know that the world has changed, because there aren't resumes, there isn't anything paper, you know, like all of that stuff we used to do in campus recruiting, all that stuff's done. That's totally different. Completely different because the candidates have changed and I think that's one of the things that makes content interesting is that even if you don't want to get better, like even if it's like kind of a choice that, you know what, there's just not enough hours in the day and really just I'm tired, I just don't feel like nourishing myself, I don't want to necessarily get better, I'll get better but I'll do it on my own terms. The problem I guess, is the candidate is always changing. That's the thing that's the real kind of like why would you do this outside of just learning for learning's sake, is if you don't understand the candidate you're not going to be great at your job. And if you're not great at your job, you're not going to be able to do any of the things that you want to do in life. " Advertisement 33:12 "Be sure to check out RecruiterCast on twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. @Recruitercast." Dave Webb 33:19 "You obviously write a lot of things and you steer a lot of practitioners in the industry. How do you stay up to speed, and I guess to make it a little more personal, outside of the recruiting industry, you know, what do you like to read and where do you get your information from, William?" William Tincup 33:35 "Well, you know, I'll start within, there's two places of great inputs, one is practitioners, I'm constantly on the phone with practitioners that are evaluating different types of service providers, either technology or straight service providers, and so they're trying to figure out how to buy. Because there's really no great models on buying, or selecting, doing great vendor selection and stuff like that. Nobody has a great model, they all kind of fumble through it. And so on one side I get a lot of inputs like you know I'm struggling with how to connect recruitment marketing to the ATS that we have. Like should we do it? Do we need to do it? And you know all this stuff, and if we do it does it need to be connected or can it be disparate? Okay, so the practitioners are probably half the inputs and the other half are from technology vendors showing me kind of their new wares, like here's what we're doing here's how we're doing it and on some level it's like they're seeking advice on are we on the right path, the other is that they're giving me a window into what they're doing and why, like what problem are you really solving as you're solving that? Outside of the industry, honestly, I think that my favorite kind of distraction is probably Instagram, the people I follow in Instagram are in my kind of in my wheel house of sarcastic, inappropriate, witty, you know down this dark humor, like I get a lot of joy there, and it wouldn't seem like that would be information, but it actually is and what it does for me, is it releases a tension that I have with not wanting to choke out you know people that I talk to. I don't really read business books, I mean I know this is going to sound blasphemous, I think most business books are crap and they're derivative, and so I don't subscribe to the theory that you have to read business books. Now, I can say that on one level, A) I worked for Sam Walton for about six years of my life, B) I worked with Ed Bass for about two years of my life, so I worked for two really really innovative billionaires, B) I have two masters degree, one being an MBA and I read every Harvard business review ever written prior to business school. " William Tincup 36:01 " So at one point I kind of read all that stuff and consumed it you know, like a type A personality would, and now I read the classics and I apply business concepts to 'A Catcher in the Rye' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird' or you know 'A Hundred Years of Solitude'. So I can go and read something that's of classic nature but then kind of think of it in a business context or in a creative way, but most of the business books, if you go and actually look at what's, when you read it it actually makes you dumber, because (laughs) you know, people actually ask me when I write, well who do you read and I'm like I don't read anybody. I write because it's inside of me and I want to get it out. But to look at somebody else's stuff is, well why would I do that? Like why would I read somebody else. If I'm a writer, why would I do that. Now, if I'm a consumer, I think you get to a certain point in your career, it's not that you know everything, that's not true, it's a diminished return. I could go and read a hundred more business books, but how much would I get out of them as opposed to reading more books about you know, not business, so pick anything else, for me it's the arts, but pick anything else, and I would get more out of that professionally." Dave Webb 37:32 "Now I know what you're saying, a lot of them are just the same information reorganized over, and over, and over, again to get an extra nineteen ninety-nine out of the buyer. And then at least in the technology and programming industry where I've spent most of my career, by the time it hits the printing press it's outdated, and I would say recruiting technology would fall into that category as well." William Tincup 37:56 It's already outdated. No doubt. Dave Webb 37:56 "Same thing with SEO, anything with the internet in the title of the book is probably outdated if you see it on the book shelf at the book store." William Tincup 38:03 "Yeah, and you almost question why they printed it, like, why did you print, like back in the day we would read nutshell books, I don't know if you ever read the nutshell books. Like some of the they'd publish the C++ or you know Java script, they pub.. PHP, I remember actually reading that book. Like that was actually good cause there wasn't a great places, they didn't have GitHub or stack overflow. Like I couldn't just go into a place and go and look at somebody else's thing and go and build upon that, I had to actually read it and understand it. Now we have that stuff. So why like I look at and this is a harsh take, actually, especially for me to take, because what I'm essentially telling people is thought leadership is words that we kick around really loosely in our industry. The idea of thought leadership, the concept of thought leadership and the tough part about thought leadership is you actually have to have a thought, which is leading." Dave Webb 39:08 Yes. William Tincup 39:09 "Not following the market, not derivative of the market, not an idea that you've twisted and made it look like something else, but an actual thought. And I can probably on two hands, tell you the people in our industry that actually are thought leaders versus all the other people that are in our industry. And it's a short list." Dave Webb 39:29 "You have to have it and then you have to have the guts to share it and let it get beat up, soÖ" William Tincup 39:34 "You nailed it. You nailed it. You nailed it because you're going to be vulnerable. As a thought leader, you put yourself out on a plane where you're going to make people uncomfortable, because you're essentially going to say on some level and in some way, what you're doing is wrong (laughs). And not only does that take moxy and all that other hutzpah, you also have to be pretty self assured, and you've got to be in a place where you A) have that idea, and then you have the wherewithal to then say, 'Yeah, we're doing this incorrectly, we should look at it this way and here's the case for logic'. Tear the logic down. Like hey it's okay, if I'm wrong, I'm wrong, I'm actually okay with being wrong, here's the logic. We don't have that many people in our industry that do that." Dave Webb 40:29 "I know in the software technology field, and I think it's like this everywhere, and um I know even if you release the greatest feature in the world, at least half the people are going to be mad the day that you release it. So you " William Tincup 40:40 No doubt. Dave Webb 40:41 You can never make more than fifty percent happy. William Tincup 40:43 No. No. Dave Webb 40:45 "You know, if you spend all your, I love how you say that you get a lot of your information from listening to the problems of both the consumer and the producer in the recruitingÖ" William Tincup 40:54 Right. Dave Webb 40:55 "In the recruiting space, and that's just a unique position that you're in that you know you can't just go listen to something and get that information. " William Tincup 41:04 Right Dave Webb 41:05 "So, when you're trying to understand these problems, how often do you actually go sit with a recruiter or really get into the trenches of the recruiting industry at this point in your career to see what their struggles are daily?" William Tincup 41:17 "I, I, a lot actually. And the reason is is I've been pulled into kind of a service of vendor selection. So one of the things that I make painfully clear to people, practitioners when I talk to them is like hey, there's no judgement here, so if you think on any level, in any way I'm going to judge you, just stop. I'm not. Cause none of this stuff's easy and no one's got it nailed, like there's just, that's not my role, and I don't view myself that way, so just don't view me that way. And so once people kind of let their, let that vulnerability, or let their guard down a little bit, then they'll tell you the truth, of where they're really struggling and so, and that's from sourcing all the way to onboarding. There's, the struggle is real. And you know, you guys see it from a really interesting perspective as well, because you know you guys work on the back end of RPO's or staffing agencies, so kind of a one to many where somebody like a Wilson HCGL just to use them as an example can come in and have a thousand or you know a couple hundred clients on one solution. Whereas most of the corporate solutions like a grain house or a lever, they don't have that ability. Like there's one client and that client is usually a corporate client, etcetera. And the problems are broad and deep at the same time so you can talk to a hiring manager and an hourly workforce and their problems are totally unique. And you can talk to somebody you know, that's basically like a deloit, and they're trying to bring in you know, junior partners and that's a completely different challenge. And again, what's interesting, is I always start, cause you know I came up through marketing, I always start with the backwards, I always start with the end in mind. Like okay, whose the audience? Who are we solving for? And then it's just algebra at that point. Like if I know who we're solving for now, if I don't know that now we have a different problem, but if I know that, it's solvable." Dave Webb 43:30 "Now that's a great technique, cause usually the first thing that someone asks for isn't really the root cause of why their asking for it and if you can help them walk back a couple of steps, they could have taken a wrong turn somewhere and made things more difficult for everybody or being able to apply different experiences that you've had as a selection assistant." William Tincup 43:49 "Questions that practitioners ask usually are pretty benign, it's like here's a challenge that I have right now. And you know usually I'll kind of like say, It's challenges plural, but let's start with the challenge first (laughs). And it's like, okay my communication with my hiring managers is difficult because they don't know what they don't know or they don't know how to define or describe what they want. So they tell us that they need this, we go out and we get it and we bring it back and it's all wrong. I'm like, okay, alright, so let me explain that in the sales world, that's called just cranking out proposals, and proposals for, you know, with the person doesn't have the intent to buy, you're just cranking out proposals. So the first thing you do is you put a hard stop on that and you say let's define it together, let's actually, it doesn't matter if you're virtual or not, let's define what we want. What you want. Well I can't define it. Yeah? Actually if you can't define it I can't go get it. So, now let's try that again, let's define it together, we'll both work on it, we'll come to an agreement, this is what we want and then we'll go find it. It's things like that, that it seems simple, (laughs) but you'd be amazed at how much of our brethren are just tripping over, you know, a hiring manager or an executive, which is worse, that will just say I need this or we need this, before we need this we should be able to describe what is the actual need and are we replacing Johnny, or are we replacing these capabilities and can we describe those capabilities. Because if you can't describe it, then you can't define it, and if you can't define it you can't find it, and if you find it it's a crap shoot. And Recruiting shouldn't be a crap shoot." Dave Webb 45:47 "I can tell you from experience, you know, when we onboard new customers, you'd be surprised, or maybe you wouldn't, but maybe our listeners would be surprised at how large of a percentage don't know the process that they use in finding and hiring talent, which is their core competency and just getting them to write it down on a piece of paper is sometimes the hardest challenge of onboarding new customers for us. And once we get that though, you know, everything starts to kind of make sense because they can visualize it and we can implement it and then everybody starts getting better." William Tincup 46:17 "I think process doesn't get enough attention. By everybody, so actually I think we all have our hands a little bit bloody. Then you know, you've got the three P's of people, your team, the process, or processes plural, and then you've got the products you use, the technology that you use etcetera. That process, if we're not kind of constantly reinventing the process or at least auditing the process, we're probably not doing our companies a favor or even ourselves a favor. We should always kind of be looking at those skeptically, and saying is there anything that we need to change here? Is there anything that we should be doing different here? And the answer will always be inevitably probably a tweak here and a tweak there, yes, something should be done differently. And again, if they can't describe the process, then (laughs) then you run the error or you run the risk that they don't have a process, which is like the wild west, which you know, again recruiting as you said it should be intentional, if it's intentional it should have a process. " Dave Webb 47:28 "I sure learned a lot in this interview with William and I've known William for a long time, I've known about him even longer because he's such a good marketer in the HR tech space. The things that I got out of this that I would really like for you to take with you today is that you know I am a software vendor in the HR tech space and William is right, vendors are not the enemy. Pick good vendors we've talked about that before on the podcast, but pick a good one that's going to help you and really partner with you and if you're not sure what something like that looks like, find a guy like William who is an expert and you can hire him to make you know large buying decisions for your organization and he's evaluated all the tech out there. He's like the unboxer of HR tech and he knows what's in the box and he can compare that with what you need and really put you in touch with the right vendor. The other thing that really caught my attention was that speed isn't everything when it comes to measuring how effective your recruiting process is or how good a hire you got, so time to hire, great, a long time ago, maybe still relevant to your organization today but focus on that scale of hyper-personalization. Giving the candidate a unique experience that they're not going to get anywhere else, because let's face it, most of our job descriptions aren't that much different from the company down the street who's hiring somebody for the same position. And finally, one I really am a big believer in is making time to educate yourself. You have to invest in yourself. I invest in myself, I find time to read even though I have a million other things to do so no one's going to do it for you. If you're lucky enough to have an employer that does like tuition reimbursement and buys books for you to make you better for your job, take advantage of it that's a great place to work." Dave Webb 49:07 Can you tell us what was your most awkward interview and why? And you can tell us as the interviewer or the interviewee. William Tincup 49:14 "Oh, no, and I'll do a quick version of this but it's basically I was interviewing a project manager. I owned an ad agency, we had about a hundred people at the time. She had been through all of our team, and everyone had greenlit her. So I always, kind of the last interview if you will as the owner and I am and esoteric interviewer, so I don't ask normal interview questions. I've never asked a normal interview question. I'm asking you know what is your favorite Beatles song? You know I'm asking esoteric things just to see how you think. And how you process and how you kind of create an answer and sort of defend an answer. (laughs) So I'm not a normal interviewer to begin with." Dave Webb 50:03 Okay William Tincup 50:03 "So I was the last interviewer and we were in this office space where we had these kind of cosco chairs and a concrete floor and this project manager, she really wanted me to look at her work. Cause she thought, A) she was proud of her work, she had this, if you can imagine a four inch black binder with pages of her work inside of it and she really wanted me to look at her work. So she pushed her notebook over to me and I asked her one esoteric question about the Rolling Stones and you know and I pushed her notebook off to the side, whatever. And she pushed it back to me and she said I really want you to look at my work and I'm like yes, yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, if you're a football team... (laughs) You know I'm asking her esoteric questions because my people have already made the decision. I don't, I'm not going to make this decision, I'm just here you know, just to see, so anyhow, on the third time with of she's already getting frustrated with me. And rightfully so. She comes across the table again to push the notebook in front of me to show me a specific project, and unbeknownst to me, and to her, her chair had slid out from behind her. So she goes to sit back down and the chair squirts out and she hits her nose and her face, straight on the table, as hard as you could hit it. Blood everywhere, like squirting out of all kinds of different places and I totally froze. Like I totally froze, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know should I go run and get something, should I get a towel, should I give her a hug, should I get her a Kleenex, call a doctor? So, in freezing, I grabbed her binder and then I just started looking at her (laughs) projects because I froze! I was, I mean I've chastised myself enough about this and I've learned from it, so I'm not proud of my behavior, however I literally froze, I didn't know what to do. She finally got up, ran out, went to the bathroom, put Kleenex in her nose, came back, we cleaned up the area. And we didn't hire her (laughing), cause like I couldn't get that image out of my mind and you know, it was just one of those things. That was a bad experience, and it was a bad experience for me and her. " Dave Webb 52:43 "Yeah, I think she would give the same interview, if I asked her the same question." Dave Webb 52:49 "And this is our hotseat where we're going to give you a real job description that we pulled from the internet and you try to guess what the job title is. Okay? This one should be easy for you. Okay, the job description is: make people feel bad about their work." William Tincup 53:04 Make people feel bad about their workÖ I'm going to go with a product manager at Despair.com. Dave Webb 53:14 (laughs) It's a quality assurance tester. William Tincup 53:18 Nice! Dave Webb 53:19 "Right?!? And that's what they do, they get bonused on telling you what's wrong with what you've done." William Tincup 53:25 "That's right, they're job is to break it." Dave Webb 53:28 "You know, maybe share three pieces of knowledge that you would like the listeners to know." William Tincup 53:32 "So on one level, we've always looked at speed, you know time to fill which is a horrible kind of a metric that we've kind of had forever, but I want people to look at that differently now as speed is now based on the candidate, not necessarily us. Like we used to look at it as like how long does it take us to put somebody into this position? Candidates are making decisions faster. So once we define what we want and we go on the hunt, and we go and try and find those people, if we're not fast, you know, and we'll think in seconds, minutes, and hours, and we're still thinking in hours, days, months and years, we're going to lose those candidates. Cause they'll have already made other decisions. So, I want people to think about speed differently, not necessarily from the old way of time to fill, you know, butts in chairs type of stuff, but the candidates are moving faster than we are. (laughs) So, there's a good reason to get fast, and it doesn't necessarily have to do with time to fill, it's if you want those candidates, you've got to be coming fast, like your response time, stuff like that like someone just responded to a tweet about a job, your response should be in seconds, if not minutes. So, how do you build yourself around that? How do you build yourself around being quick to respond to the candidates becoming quick? Second is the candidate experience, which we've talked about for a decade, which is phenomenal that we actually are talking about it, but I think now what we need to do is kind of that next level of micro experiences. You know, how do we get good or great at micro experiences, so you take something like an offer letter..." Dave Webb & Co. 55:20 "AHÖ, AH..., AH...! You got the job; You got the Job; You got the job; Dear Bob; Please report; to our company on Monday morning at eight; You'll be sitting on the second floor next to; Clarence; and; Tricia; No fish in the microwave; Restrooms are key coded for security; So, find your buddy; And there is no lunch break; but; But, you got the job; you got the job; you got the job" William Tincup 55:54 "Okay, and this offer letter, if we send them a DocuSign or .pdf, that's probably one of the most the most inhumane ways of actually giving someone an offer letter, ever. Like ever. Like would you propose to your spouse through via DocuSign, no you wouldn't, of course you wouldn't. Well somebody would, but I wouldn't. And most candidates look at it as a very sterile way of this culmination of this relationship. So, how can we personalize that? How can we make that micro experience better for our candidates? And so you can look at candidate experience as a big umbrella, but then you break it down by all these tiny little micro experiences. And then how do we make those better? So first of all, we have to think like that break it down, deconstruct, and then get good at it, and then constantly audit. And the third is how do we do hyper-personalization at scale. and I think this is where we look at brands like Bentley, or Ritz Carlton, or Cartier, and you say to yourself, these people sell to consumers, but each consumer has a unique experience that they love. So, how do they do that? And we have to figure out how to do that with candidates. So we have to figure out how to dazzle, okay, that's one thing, how do we dazzle candidates. But then how do we dazzle them and meet them where they are? And give them what they need in a truly personal, hyper-personal way, at scale? So it's not, none of those is easy. Hyper-personalization: check, not easy. At scale: check, not easy. Meeting people where they are: check, not easy. Like none of these things are easy, but if we don't do it, we're not going to get the candidates. And it's kind of becomes a game like speed, those that figure it out faster, get the better candidates." Dave Webb 57:59 "If people want to contact you and find out more about you or Recruitingdaily.com, what's the best way to do that?" William Tincup 58:06 "Well, I'll give it to you straight, William Tincup in Google." Dave Webb 58:11 Okay. William Tincup 58:12 "And if you can't find me from there, it's a, you probably shouldn't contact me." Dave Webb 58:20 (Laughs) Fair enough. William Tincup 58:22 "It's almost like an IQ test, I'm not saying it's an IQ test, but I'm literally everywhere on the internet, so it's pretty easy to find me." Dave Webb 58:32 "Yeah, you've been branding yourself for over a decade, I'll just say that." William Tincup 58:37 "Yeah, (laughs) pretty long time and so you know, if you can't find me at this point like okay, that's probably an indicator (laughs) that we probably shouldn't talk." Dave Webb 58:51 "Okay, that does it today for Episode four of RecruiterCast. Whoa, we've got four of these in the can. A lot of great information today and it was a real pleasure talking to William Tincup, I hope that you got as much out of this as I did. What's sticking with me at this point is the thought leader part of the interview. Have some moxy, have a thought, stick with it, put it out there, have some guts. Don't be afraid of making mistakes. And more importantly, don't be afraid of people jumping on you for making mistakes or putting your thought out there. That's how you're going to get feedback and that's how you're going to get better. So, do what you think is right and be persistent, don't give up and everything might fall into place, and if it doesn't, well I just told you not to give up so try again, right? Alright so remember to hit us up on twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Our handle is @RecruiterCast. And check out the website too, Recruitercast.com, you can submit questions, request guests, suggest topics for the show and, you know, leave us a personal note if you like. Maybe you like the way the show is produced, you can give Andrew an attaboy, or you like the guest, you can say good job Heidi. And uh, we've had enough requests for a new host, so there's no need for anymore of those. " Dave Webb 1:00:01 You can also give us a call Robotic Voice 1:00:02 904-525-8134 Dave Webb 1:00:06 "As always we are very grateful to our listeners, you make the podcast possible, we love doing it and we'll keep doing it, just let us know what's useful to you and we will see you next week. Until then, Happy Recruiting." Dave Webb 1:00:19 "RecruiterCast is an original production produced and recorded in St Augustine Beach Florida and is hosted by me, Dave Webb. Our executive producers are Andrew Seward and Heidi Green. Original music by Dave Webb and Andrew Seward."
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