The Final Rant

The 10 Minute Talent Rant is live. I’m James Hornick, joined by Jeff Smith and we are on the clock. The 10 Minute Talent Rant is our ongoing series of breakdown. Things are broken in the talent acquisition space, may even pitch a hiring solution or two. Before we dig in, all our content we found at TalentInsights.Hirewell.com.
This week’s topic, Jeff, I think it’s episode 117. I think we missed numbered at some point in time. I don’t know. That sounds about right. I trust your bookkeeping implicitly. So we might have missed one. I don’t know. Maybe it’s 116. The last rant. This is it guys. I have news, I have an announcement.
By the time you see this, you might have already heard ’cause I’m probably gonna be, this might take two days to come out anyway. I am leaving Hirewell. I am leaving the recruiting industry entirely. So Jeff and I are just gonna burn this whole thing down in this episode. You’re holding the match.
I don’t wanna hold ’cause I gotta, I gotta keep going in this thing. But look, I [00:01:00] am by all accounts, an interested observer. I, on a personal note, being serious, I appreciate everyone out there who was tuned in to The Ten Minute Talent Rant, who’s followed me around on LinkedIn of all my nonsense.
I’m not exactly giving that up. But everyone who’s worked with me and worked with Hirewell the past 20 years, it’s been great. It’s been, this all started as something to do at the beginning of the pandemic. Yeah. And now, that was it. Yeah. We went a hundred and it’s, that’s a good run. And to your point, 20 years.
Yeah. So congrats to that. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. We’ve been doing this show for basically every, almost every other week. Consistently for like five years now. Yeah. Yeah, so I’ll give everyone just a, kind of a blip of what I’m going, why I’m leaving, actually ties into today’s topic. So
i’ll do a takeaway first. Professional development takeaway is never stop learning. I am a huge proponent of compound learning, meaning the more you learn, even stuff that you [00:02:00] don’t think is related to your job will benefit you in unexpected ways. Kind of a snowball effect. Like for example. I started writing comedy blog, which is long deceased.
We took that down, 15 years ago. I just enjoyed writing. Some of you guys know I write fiction also had a few things published, but that’s what actually set me up to be able to do this type of content. I was writing stuff first before we were doing start a video, and that’s actually what helped grow Hirewell. So just by having an interest in doing certain things allowed us to kind of do more, you know, whatever. Um. Kind of going beyond that,
the other thing I’d say when I was talking about kind of learning, about 10 years ago, a little more than that, I started options trading.
I was messing around, spending way too much time on Facebook and other crappy social sites, realized if I’m gonna have any time where I’m just wasting time, might as well learn how to make money doing it. And, I found some different online places where I can learn how to trade options and I’m now going into full-time options trading.
As you said, so, yeah, and I’m potentially starting a quantitative hedge fund in six to nine [00:03:00] months or so is probably the timeframe there. So that’s what I’m doing. So the biggest two career shifts I’ve made have come from not mastering my craft of recruiting, but actually stuff I enjoy doing outside of my day job, which got me better at what I do for my day job.
So enough of that, let’s go out and style. Jeff, what do we got? We’re into reruns. We like reruns, and honestly, as we were prepping for this, we were like, well, this is the best montage opportunity that we have, so why not tread back through our greatest hits? Yeah, I mean, it’s not like this hasn’t been the case every single time we’ve done prep for this, but.
We are seeing the same mistakes that we saw pre pandemic, way before the pandemic, like years and decades ago. All of this stuff kind of picking back up. You know, especially since the market kind of reignited in 2021, and it’s not, everyone wants to frame it around AI. It’s not just [00:04:00] AI. AI has something to do with it, of course.
We’re gonna talk about AI and how it’s slowing down and potentially changing hiring. You have thoughts? It’s funny, I have like thoughts as well, but I think it’s just subjective in the sense that you’re exiting, I’m staying and so I like, wanna fight the fact that AI isn’t gonna take my job, but you know, we’ll see.
Committing to using AI isn’t an excuse to take shortcuts and not hire well, pun intended. So with all of that framework, we’re gonna. Rerun a few hits. We’re gonna talk about some current trends. Maybe give a parting, gift or two out of this. And we’re gonna sunset this thing. So fire away.
Yeah. So, it’s actually been harder. We’ve missed a few weeks of the rant here because, when we started this five years ago, we thought, hey, we might have 10 episodes for us before we start saying the same things over and over again. In fact, we got well over a hundred. But here we are. We did finally hit a point regardless that that’s where we were.
First thing, guarantee periods that are [00:05:00] extensively long. Someone wanted a two year guarantee period recently, Jeff, two year. But even short of that, people asking for six months, nine months, whatever. Just, it’s absurd and unsustainable, but more importantly, like, expecting it’s retention is a company issue if you’re not able to retain talent.
That’s not, the correct candidate wasn’t found. It’s that whatever you ask them to do, or whatever you presented them in the interview process probably didn’t match what you actually offer them in reality and vice versa. There’s, it’s more of a vetting type thing and the things you need to be able to make sure are getting good talent.
If you want to try before you buy, there’s nothing wrong with that. Yeah. Hire a contractor that’s called contract to hire. Just throwing it out there. Honestly, the market is probably most open to it. The most open to that particular thing it has ever been. Everybody like is into the gig economy, whether you like it or not it’s kind of a fact of life. The idea that, you know, what you get from that phenomenon too. Screw the time. I don’t care how long this [00:06:00] goes. Yeah. What you get from attach it. Let’s say I agree to a year long guarantee. You know what I’m gonna do as a recruiter. I’m gonna bug the living shit out of that candidate every month on end.
Yeah. To ensure that they’re happy. And if they’re not, I’m gonna probably manipulate it to get to the point where I get my secured fee. No one wants that. Yeah. The candidate doesn’t want that. You as the customer shouldn’t want that. I don’t want that. Like, let’s keep the guarantees at a respectable, compromised rate of roughly 60 to 90 days.
There’s your time period. Guarantees are meant to prevent a, oh crap, right away, made a bad hire decision. Not, we didn’t find the perfect candidate five years from now. Anyways. Digress. Yeah, continue. Or we stink at onboarding or we didn’t set like all that stuff. Yeah. Flat fees are on the rise.
We love it. Many our best recruiters are using this right now. There’s growing client interest, especially in kind of the [00:07:00] trades industrial construction, you know, consumer goods, all that stuff. Tying fees to like either a midpoint or a low end of a range, 50 to 90 K, let’s say it, companies like the predictability of saying, alright, for a 50 K hire, I’m just, I’m gonna spend 10 grand.
Right? But that candidate might end up needing 70 k. Guess what? The fee’s still 10 grand. Yep. And your percentage goes down. The hiring manager likes it if they have a cost center. The CFOs love it because it, you know, puts things into a predictable cost structure and everyone kind of walks away feeling like the recruiter isn’t trying to push the salary up just to get a little bit of a higher fee win-win.
I have yet to meet a company that didn’t love that idea. And from a recruiting firm perspective, it should be a wash at the end of the year. Yeah. It’s not necessarily a higher or lower fee, it’s just a more predictable fee. Anyways, speaking of retainers [00:08:00] versus contingent. I’ve said it. One of our bangers upset this since before we had the show.
Contingent search is the dumbest business model in the history of business models. No other services industry would ever work for free with zero commitments upfront, and that’s ultimately the kind of service you’re gonna get if someone who would work for free without commitments upfront is probably not someone you wanna work with.
Moving away from contingent search eliminates low integrity behavior and builds stronger client relationships. It’s as simple as that. Bar none, for both sides. Yeah, there’s nothing else that needs to be said. It’s just a fact. Yeah. Another thing, brand perception problems. Lots of these going on right now is probably the biggest thing.
Candidate attraction has sunk, in my estimation, to the pandemic posts. People still look at Glassdoor, they still look at your company. Reviews are still scaring candidates. I haven’t looked at them in forever. People do because we hear about it all the damn time. There’s a lot of situations where early stage companies make mistakes.
It’s a black mark, it’s hard to get rid [00:09:00] of. You have to own your narrative. You have to make sure you’ve got a good explanation. If you have changed things for the better, what that is. But that’s bigger to the point. So we’ll say you’ve gotten tanked on Glassdoor. You’ve got a bad perception out there.
You’ve made all the right changes. If that’s actually true, you have to make sure you’re communicating those changes to the market. But even short of that, you just, you always have to be selling candidates a why they should wanna work there. a lot of founders fail to do that. Yep. I think a lot of founders, they’re passionate about their product and they like doing sales.
So they’re either a tech person or a salesperson. Vice versa. They don’t realize that. The third key thing to grow a company is attracting talent. That is the people you need to actually execute on your vision. Companies assume brand recognition is enough. They assume, maybe the industry they’re in that’s kind of cool is enough.
Or like the biggest thing is though, why wouldn’t someone work here? Like, I love it here. Everyone should be able to see that right away. But it’s not obvious to people unless you tell them. That sounds obvious, but it’s not. You’re losing [00:10:00] great people every time you fail to articulate why you’re a great place to work.
Yes. Assuming you’re a great place to work.
The amount of times that I have spoken with companies that think they’re the NFL or speaking of the NFL, we spoke to the NFL today and pretty cool, right? Yeah. That’s brand recognition, like you’re not that. Yeah. Like I don’t. And you should aspire to be that. But it’s, yeah, it’s all time and place stuff anyway.
Hiring trends, process, pain points, tons and tons of roles getting put on hold or held up mid-process due tothe catchall is in internal misalignment and the the deeper, no one’s on the same page. No one. You can tell immediately as a recruiter, in some cases, it becomes very obvious very quickly that one or a handful of folks on the panel, [00:11:00] like they don’t even want the role to get filled.
Like we’re talking like mutiny, active sabotage sorts of things. For a variety of reasons. Right. They’re hiding, you know, they’ve got a nice job. They don’t, anyway, it all begs the question like, why are they in the panel? Why are we doing this? And it’s just frustrating as a recruiter. Yeah.
You’ve got these critical rules that sit open for 8 to 12 months. Everyone keeps banging the drum. Oh, It’s so critical. It’s so critical. How is it critical if it’s been open for 8 to 12 months? Yeah. Like what, what are we doing here? How are you making it from point A to point B without the role?
Yeah. You’ve got over reliance on assessments. You’ve, you know, cultural indexes and all of these things are back, and we’ve covered this at nauseum. I don’t wanna shit on it totally because it can be good to inform the way in which you interface with a new team member from a managerial or supervisory perspective and onboarding.
It’s an onboarding tool and a training [00:12:00] tool, and a mentoring tool, not a hiring tool. Tons of shady disqualifications, unnecessary, you know, narrowing of pools because a candidate,clicked integrity versus grit. Yeah, in the, it’s just like, what are we doing here? There’s these themes that we’ve mentioned before from prior to the pandemic, you just said it.
Branding, interview readiness, like punctuality, these unlimited PTO debates, immature founder mistakes. It’s all there in the kind of cherry on top is. The return to office debacle, like it’s a mess. Yeah. The bottom line is we’re in the cyclical power structure shift. The companies have the power as hiring markets soften, you know,
candidate friendly practices get cut for reasons unknown. Honestly, in Q3 of 2023, only 5% of Fortune five hundred’s mandated full office return. Now it’s [00:13:00] 54%. Like why? Like the whole, it’s just this whole thing is so tiresome at this point. Yeah. Another one at you work trials assignments, seeing these come back.
I have mixed thoughts on this. I know, I have mixed thoughts on this. We did have a client do this successfully. So this is not universally bad. The problem is, is that when people hear a success story around this, they think, oh, anyone could do this. We should do it. And they don’t actually have a plan to do it.
Yep. So the good story where this actually worked, and when I say worked. That means candidates were actually excited about it, pleased with it, and accepted the offer afterward. That’s what work looks like. They had a three day paid work trial, so candidates were actually paid what the salary would’ve been for three days, actually, I think it was more than that.
For actually, doing some kind of work. A lot of them kind of did this over the weekend. But it was a positive experience, went outta the way to explain things. They explained the why, explained the work vibe, and people actually did the assignment, felt good about it, realized this is the company I wanna work for, and they [00:14:00] accepted.
There were other people who didn’t want to do it because they just didn’t have the time. Company was okay with that. It just happened. Now the problem is that I say this, I almost hesitate to say this because for every one of those situations we’ve come across companies that want to do it. Like first off,
they ask for free work, which is the worst and scummiest thing you can possibly do. Two, the work is unreasonable and not something someone can do an amount of time. Or they want to do a combination of trying to do it for free, but it’s also stuff that could improve the company’s operations. So it actually is trying to get free consulting work out of it.
Yep. But also if it’s just kind of half-assed and if it’s not like well articulated what the reason is and the people involved in the other side aren’t able to answer questions and it’s just not, people don’t have a good feeling that you actually know what you’re doing. So you’re also getting a genuine work product.
Again, if it’s well articulated and even better paid, of course you’re gonna get a genuine swing from the candidate. Yeah, you are. I have to say though, with all these things though, you are going to whittle away the amount [00:15:00] of candidates who’re interested. So we’re gonna talk about more than a minute, I think.
Yeah, I might be jumping the gun on that, but continue. You have to, whatever. Who cares? Yeah. Expansion of advisory services, it’s great for us. Like, I’m not complaining. Internal talent management and development teams are gutted, you know, all of the processes for experience on both in the hiring side internally, as well as the candidates
are gone with it. There’s all these tools that are in demand that we just kind of reference. Interview guides are a mess. Nobody’s following any sort of structure. Equity explanations, benefits, all, all of that collateral is kind of like a wash in this, sea of no humans doing it right now.
The flip side though is companies are willing to pay for the services to clean this up that they just got rid of 8, 12, 18 months ago, which again, [00:16:00] fine by us, it’s in our work and we do it really well. But it begs the question like, why Yeah. Why are we doing this? I really want anyone who sees it to really think about that. Until corporate America
values the human side of recruiting, nothing about any, nothing that we just reference is gonna change. Like you’re gonna jump into the AI side, but like we both agree that there’s this human element to talent that hopefully never goes away. I mean, if it does, I don’t know where we’re going, but companies will jump on this AI hype without investing in the human side of attracting talent, which ultimately.
You know, it is what matters in the end, and the AI should facilitate that process, right? Yeah. Again, it’s something we both agree on and. Something a lot of companies get stuck on is, well, if it filters, you know, out a candidate, it filters out the bad [00:17:00] candidates. It’s like that’s, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
You’re just narrowing your pool. Yeah. Stop saying you want the best talent and say you’re willing to just look at the talent that is going to say yes to your job. That is a big difference. Yeah. The irony of all of this is if firms refuse to value recruiting by these actions, not by saying it,
they’re validating it they’re refusing it by the action oriented stuff. They’ll just keep paying the 25% fees and the problem will continue to sustain itself and recruiting as a profession, seemingly, at least internally, never really learns from any of these past mistakes, the same bad practices keep repeating, which is why external recruiting is primed to have a couple of really, really good years coming up.
And it’s gonna reignite this entire conversation about how recruiters are [00:18:00] vultures and it this big trope and restart this, you know, make this build of internal TA teams again. And so we go round and around on the hamster wheel. Again, much respect for you. I’m off, getting off hamster wheel.
Stepping aside. I did wanna interject. It would be funny if, hiring managers, execs, you know, whoever could see the same view on LinkedIn recruiter we did and every time they added a filter on, I only wanna look at this and this, and they saw exactly how much the candidate pull shrank, I think they might get it.
Maybe this is what I should pitch now. Like screw the,. You know, talking about what hirewell is, I’m just gonna pull up LinkedIn recruiter and be like, here’s what happens when we filter, enhance, enhance, enhance. I finally saw the sequel, Blade runner sql. They pretty good. It’s like 10 years old at this point.
I never watched it, but I enjoyed it anyways. Beautiful. Final thought, speaking of which, that’s good dovetail into AI. So one of the reasons I decided I wanted to make a move besides It’s just something I’ve been wanting to [00:19:00] for a long time. Getting into full-time trading is also a little bit because of AI.
So, I don’t want go down too much of a nerdy tangent on trading, but there’s better back testing software, betting trade execution software than there was for regular people like, like you and I, if you wanted to do it than there was two, three years ago. But more importantly, you can now just build your own straight up and if you have tools or things you need help with or processing data, and I say that because because of AI, I mentioned trading and writing are my hobbies that boosted my career.
But you know what wasn’t a hobby? Coding, never could learn how to code Python. I don’t need to. Cloud code. You have these tools that like, you could sit down, make an app, make a website, make whatever you wanted to, and not very much time. I know people who have actually, created like a MVP for an app they wanted to launch by themselves.
They’re just maybe a product or project manager. No coding skills. We were able to do it in three to six months. That would’ve cost you hundreds of thousand dollars to hire software developers to do. And for someone who [00:20:00] needs to create like simple tools like myself, that nothing I’m doing is even from a coding perspective is terribly complex.
But you know, the fact that you can do it yourself now is pretty amazing. Now, I think that the biggest growth areas right now for services. When I say services, I mean like talking about like there’s recruiting services, web services, like all these types of things. Sure. It’s change management, AI.
It’s teaching people who can help companies optimize all their back office, all their systems. Taking it outta the hands of every single end user to figure out how to use ai, but making a centralized process, I think that’s gonna be enormous. I know a few people kind of in that space. There’s not many people that know how to do it.
It’s something that someone who’s, if they’re so inclined, can figure out how to do right now. A lot of companies are trying to figure that out now. Hirewell’s, trying to figure that out right now. Yeah. We’ve got people internally working on that. I think it’s an enormous growth area. But I say that with a caveat.
It’s enormous growth there of people doing it, but it also replaces jobs inherently. Like [00:21:00] you need less people to manage all these systems when there’s less manual work being done. And that’s also part of why we’re in reruns right now, of the changing. It’s another, this is another iteration of the changing power dynamic of companies.
We’ve come out of this cost cutting mode, right? Maybe we’re still in the cost cutting mode after the last few years. Everyone’s trying to be tighten the belt and whatever. But now people before they wanna start hiring again, they wanna see if robots can do the job first. And streamlining operations with AI makes sense.
You have to do it. It’s unavoidable. Unfortunately. It’s just where we are right now. It’s the next iteration of progress. But what’s disheartening to me is that there is like a renewed devaluation of people in the candidate attraction process. So even when companies realize, okay, we do need people for this now, they still haven’t realized, okay, that is gonna take human effort.
Yep. So well said. Alright, our takeaways are simple. They’re your takeaways. Yeah. Take it home. Do what you love. [00:22:00] Work with people you love working with. Learn new things always, because at some point your job’s gonna get replaced by a robot. Might not be today or tomorrow, but you always have to have a backup plan.
And the more skills you know how to do, the better off you are. We couldn’t end with a, with a guarantee. A James guarantee at the end. Like the robots are coming to get us. Yes, we are short on clock. That is a wrap for ever. Thanks for tuning in The 10 Minute Talent Rant, part of the Talent Insights series, which is always available for replay on TalentInsights.Hirewell.com, as well as YouTube, Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, and Amazon.
Jeff, thanks again as always, everyone out there. I will see you when I see you.