Welcome back to the Hirewell Hot Corner, where sports and recruitment meet. I am your host, Dan Spittel, joined as always by my Ironman co-host, Louie Morici. Louie, great to see you again. Let’s jump right in. What’s going on in your world and the world of sports today?
Kind of stemming back to our last episode, things are heating up over here, picking up. A lot of jobs coming onto our plate over here on the go-to-market team. More specifically from a sports standpoint, you know, MLB full swing right now, early stages of the season. Cubs, Pirates, both looking pretty decent. More importantly, NFL draft coming up. And then my favorite time of year, NHL playoffs are starting in a few days here. Don’t really want to talk about the NHL playoffs, but that’s okay. The Penguins didn’t-
They deserve to play in the playoffs given how they ended the season, but not how they played for most of the season. And that’s how it goes. Nothing but props to Sidney Crosby for single handedly putting that team on his back for the last month or two and just doing everything he can to get them towards the playoffs.
NFL draft is exciting, especially for you holding the number one pick and the number nine pick. Bears are on the clock a lot early on, on the first day. And of course, you have baseball, love baseball. Early in the season Pirates look pretty okay. You know, going to hit their stride, hit some slumps long season.
Got a lot of time for that, but. 162 games to be exact. Yeah. When we’re like, what, 20, into them? Plenty of time to see, you know, more young guys come up. Guys do well guys to flop, whatever. Absolutely. But on my end, you know, you talked about the influx of roles in the go-to-market side. I’m also seeing that, you know, I think we’re seeing more of the roles on the growth end that are coming in are very sales focused, account management.
I feel like a lot of the conversations I’m having recently are about your team. So it’s pretty good place to be. And then, you know, from a personal standpoint, my wife’s family has decided that they are running the air force half marathon in September. And so I have been signed up to do that with them, because I couldn’t be the only one out, you know?
And I have never even run a 5k before, at like at a race. I mean, I’ve run, I physically run a 5k, but like not in an organized race. So this will be a new challenge for me. Absolutely. I mean, I’m right there with you. Never did a marathon or anything. Have ran a 5k on the treadmill, but, you know, it’s about getting in a mindset, training, putting your body in a position where it’s not going to shut down during a half marathon.
And I think, like always, that’s kind of where we’re going to transition today. Yeah, you know, especially for running such a long distance training plan is everything. You know, I have a good amount of runway for the time before we start to do this. So, I got a lot of opportunity to kind of ramp it up.
And I’ve never really run consistently in my life, so, you know, this week I think I’ve run four times already, which is probably a record in a week for me. But you know, it’s really helpful for me from a goal setting standpoint to have this in front of me. You know, the last time I lost a good amount of weight was right before my wedding. And this is just another, you know, timestamp.
You have to be in this position by this date, and that tends to really help me out. So, pretty easy to talk training plans as far as sports go. You’ve got the NFL draft next week. These guys, these prospects have been training literally their entire lives for this exact moment. Their goal from a very young age has probably been to play in college and play in the NFL. They’ve achieved one of those. And as of next Thursday, they will probably achieve the second. So very exciting for all of those guys. And talk playoffs, I mean, you train all off season all year with the idea, the goal in mind being to make the playoffs and then compete for a championship.
You’ve hit the second phase of that. Now it’s on to the all out sprint all the way to the end. Absolutely. And, you know, it’s kind of that recalibrate between the regular season and the playoffs. It’s some refreshers, you know, you’re playing this team. This is what they like to do, or, you know, this is how we’re going to succeed.
It’s kind of that recalibration, setting up a plan for the next couple of months. As you compete for a championship, you’ve gotten to that second phase. And, you know, to segue that into recruiting, you know, we do a lot of that here at Hirewell. Whether it’s a refresher. Whether it’s a new training, we’re doing these weekly ones now with sales assembly.
I know personally, we do a lot of business development training meetings as well, mock calls and whatnot. So, you know, there’s this ongoing education and training and constantly improving yourself or refreshing your skills and abilities that I think is important for recruiters. Obviously, we do it very well here at Hirewell. I think we’ve talked a lot in the last few episodes about all the changes that have happened in the market and how Hirewell as a company and as our teams have adapted. I think with all this change in the adaptation to different roles, different responsibilities, different positions we’re recruiting for, there’s been a call out for additional clarity, additional training, just so we’re all kind of on the same page and Hirewell has really, you know, committed to that piece of it.
From a personal professional development standpoint, with these weekly trainings that they’re offering and just getting more transparency about the work we’re trying to do goal setting. Goal setting in the agency side has always been very prevalent, but now it’s a little different with the additional responsibilities we’re taking on. So, it’s really great to see, you know, top down, they are committed to training, committed to, you know, constantly improving what we’re trying to do and trying to improve the business and then seeing it unfold by bringing in a lot of these different trainings on a week to week basis.
Yeah, and they’re being ran by peers. It’s not like they’re being run by folks that we’ve never heard of. We see the success they have and the experience they bring to the table, and they’re sharing it with folks who maybe don’t have as much experience. I mean, on agency side, I’ve been in agency for 3 years, my 3 years with Hirewell. You know, and before that, I was an internal recruiter.
So, you know, learning kind of the nuances between them. And I know there’s folks who are new to just recruiting in general, like, it’s always going to help someone in a different way. Whether it’s teaching you something that maybe you’ve never taught and you’re a 10 year veteran. Or if you’re brand new, it’s a whole new way of thinking when it comes to recruiting and approaching this type of role, you know, it’s useful up and down, there’s a lot of collaboration, a lot of open communication, talking, sharing experiences, examples.
And again, it, it helps everyone in some way, whether it’s tweaking their approach, whether it’s just learning a new skill. It’s vital to growth in any organization, in any kind of industry. And something you touched on that I think is so important is it’s not just very high level leaders or people with really extensive titles and backgrounds leading these presentation style things.
You know, it’s not one way, talking at a screen with slides that are going along, we are getting training from all levels of employees here at Hirewell. A lot of it is by our peers. We do have some really great leaders who have a lot of experience and they are utilizing their knowledge and helping us by tapping into that.
But otherwise, it’s people who have been here a year, two years, three years, you know, we’ve kind of walked along with them, and oftentimes it’ll really come down to, wow, I tried something new in this scenario. This worked really well. Let me tell other people about it. Let’s talk about this.
Let’s talk about why I think this worked. Let’s see if we can do it again and see if we get similar results. So it’s a lot more collaborative, open concept, open source than just here’s a standard protocol. We need to train everybody on X, Y, and Z. Yeah, and it’s not just this one you train at the start of your job, and that’s the only training you get.
It’s continuous growth. It’s training folks at different levels of their experience and taking folks from one skill set, and bringing it to the next level, if you will. And obviously, with our show, we’d like to talk to it from the candidate and from the client side. From the candidate side, I guess that’s kind of similar to you and I. We’re obviously speaking of it from a point of Hirewell, and being recruiters at Hirewell you know, if you’re a candidate kind of in the general market, you know, you want to set three short, three long term goals, whether you’re employed or not. Keep them in sight. This is something I was taught at a pretty young age in my career, put it in sight because every time you pick up a call or you take on a task, know that there’s that bigger picture. The short term, if you want to take a trip in the next year, you want to earn the money to afford that, have a picture of the place you want to go. And every day it’s going to be that reminder.
It’s going to help you in training. It’s going to help you advance your skillset because everything’s going towards this bigger picture. And whether you’re taking on new responsibilities, taking on new things, new skills, it’s going to all push towards the end goal here. Like you said, we’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss the candidate and client side of every topic we touched, seems to be a recurring part of our show.
And so we of course have to do it. Candidate side, I think, you know, career progression. I think everyone’s thinking about how do I go from this step to the next one? What’s the next goal in my career timeline and what do I do to get there? If your company is really good about training programs and they do continuous education stuff like that, that’s fantastic. If not, you know, there’s a couple avenues.
It’s not like you’re just stuck, you know, there are so many online resources that exist at this point Udemy, Linkedin Learning, online courses through like AWS, Microsoft so many different avenues for continued education and expanding skill sets that maybe you’re not Getting where you’re not utilizing in your current role.
Client side I mean, we’re touching on it from the Hirewell side, both as employees and as a company, but companies that offer continuous education and training programs to their employees tend to have higher retention rates, better employee engagement rates, better success. Career planning for their employees and keeping people growing them from within.
It’s a no brainer why as a company, you wouldn’t have some sort of training protocol in place. And the vast majority do. One thing that I do like on top of training programs is a mentorship program. I think those companies who identify people who have a lot of wealth of experience, who can then help those younger in their career to achieve similar results.
Those pairings tend to help people succeed a lot. I think everyone, when you’re working in a professional setting and you have a career trajectory, you’re looking for a mentor. You’re looking for people to look up to and learn from. So having more of a kind of set guidance in place just makes that even easier.
And then, of course, you can touch on performance reviews. Goal setting in a corporate setting is, it’s natural. It happens. We have performance reviews every 3, 6, 12 months, whatever it is. Everyone’s got goals, parameters, metrics that you’re looking to hit, regardless of the type of industry you’re in. It’s all about understanding how realistic those are, how relevant they are, and having those conversations with your direct supervisor, usually in these scenarios, as to, you know, where am I at, how can I improve, what can I do to make myself better?
Maybe that is outside trainings, maybe it’s internal trainings. Maybe I need to spend more time shadowing someone who’s been doing this longer and kind of serve as a pseudo mentor, so. 100% and speaking back to the mentorship, it’s 1 of the biggest positives I’ve taken from both companies that I’ve now worked at in my career, learning from someone who’s been there with that kind of big brother, big sister type, you know, platform or, program.
It’s so vital, because you have that 1 on 1, it’s a free kind of open dialogue, you can ask questions, and I’ve taken so many bits of advice and have really grown in the short amount of time I’ve been working with my mentor. So I can’t say enough about that program. Love that. Two minute drill to take us home, Louie.
We’re not talking about training anymore, we’re not talking about a half marathon anymore. I’m going to hear enough about that for the next five months. Let’s talk about the NFL Draft again. What do you know, you have two top ten picks, including the first overall draft. What are you hoping for? What are you expecting out of the Bears?
Well, since they traded Justin Fields to your Steelers, I’m going to go obviously one Caleb Williams. That has to happen. I’d like to see us package that ninth pick, with future picks, and really try and get Marvin Harrison Jr. at the third or fourth pick overall and move up in the draft.
That would make your offense extremely exciting between that and all the off season additions would be electric. And would hope they would emulate what the Texans are trying to do right now in having a very potent, probably top five offense, would be the end goal, I would imagine. So Steelers, on the other hand, have a few glaring needs.
Wide receiver room is a little scarce. You know, offensive line is always a question. You look to like, you know, linebackers, corners, whatnot. And they’re picking at 20, as per usual. It seems to be where we end up in the last, like, five years, so, I don’t know what they’ll do at 20. I’ve heard a couple rumblings that they’re looking to make a trade for a wide receiver.
Maybe that’ll happen during the draft. So I’m just here for it. You know, I think Omar Khan has been doing a great job. They brought in Russell Wilson, they brought in Justin Fields, both of which for just about nothing. So I’m eager to see what else he’s got up his sleeve. Absolutely. I mean, lots to be excited about.
A lot of room to work, I guess, and obtain some new assets. So definitely a little bit of a Steelers fan now that you got Justin. Get the Justin Fields Steeler jersey. Don’t threaten me. Well, on behalf of Louie and myself, thank you once again for tuning into the Hirewell Hot Corner. Please do join us again in two weeks for our next installment. And as always stay classy LinkedIn.
